by James King
10-10. Gate 8. 2 p.m. June 17.
It was a beautiful clue, he thought. But he also knew it was perhaps the riskiest one, since the only person who’d be able to figure out the clue was the one least likely to care. Still, may as well take the bull by the horns.
Bill kept his attention on Gate 8. He had parked at Gate 5 so that he could drive away if just one or two of them showed up. If they wanted April back, they had to play by the rules. There were plenty of cars parked near the gate—probably summer session commuters—but there wasn’t anybody out walking about, looking around the way people do when they’re meeting someone. He opened his window all the way now. There wasn’t much of a breeze.
The small, tinny sounds suddenly grew louder as April removed the earbuds. “I know I promised I wouldn’t ask too many questions,” she said. “But why are we spending so much time in Lansing or East Lansing or whatever this city is? And why are we staring at that?” She pointed at the stadium.
“That is where the greatest game in the history of college football took place,” Bill answered. “November 19, 1966.”
April turned to look at him. “Football is stupid,” she said.
Bill laughed. “Exactly what I would tell Manny, just to get his goat.”
“Manny?”
Bill hesitated. What could he tell a fifteen-year-old about a war buddy? How would she be able to understand, sitting in a hot car on a warm summer day, the winter of ’52? A hole somewhere near the 38th parallel. Dig or die: That was the rule. He and Manny dug. They dug with a crappy little shovel and, at times, frozen hands with broken and bloodied nails. And there they’d sit, wrapping and rewrapping horse blankets around themselves. Between mortar rounds, when all they could do was tighten their sphincters and hope that a shell wouldn’t land in their laps, they talked. Swapping lies, as they liked to call it. Manny talked about growing up poor in East Lansing. About how he worked hard to get through high school and then through Michigan State. How proud he was to enlist after graduation. How stupid he realized he’d been.
Mostly, though, Manny talked football. The Spartans, specifically. How when—if—he ever made it back home, he’d get season tickets and watch the Spartans kick ass all season long. Especially Notre Dame’s ass.
When Bill found out that Manny hated Notre Dame, he became an immediate Fighting Irish fan. A subway alum. He told Manny that if he, Bill Warrington, ever had a son, that son would someday be a Domer. Getting his goat was the best way to keep Manny from saying things like if we ever get out of this goddamn foxhole.
Manny did get out of the foxhole, but he never made it back to East Lansing. As he shook Bill’s hand the day he shipped out, he told Bill that he was going to live in California. Or Arizona. Anywhere snow wasn’t.
They’d kept in touch for a while. Manny settled in Los Angeles and became a cop. They exchanged letters, replaced later by Christmas cards, later nothing. Until one day Bill received in the mail two tickets to the Michigan State-Notre Dame game—the game all the newspapers were touting as the Game of the Century.
The tickets were sent by Manny’s widow. Used his old service revolver, she wrote. Couldn’t leave Korea.
“A buddy of mine from the war,” Bill said to April now. “He gave me tickets to the game. Notre Dame was ranked number one, Michigan number two. They were both killing their opponents all season. The national championship was on the line.”
April nodded, but Bill could tell she wasn’t really paying attention.
“Your uncle Mike and I went.”
April turned. “Uncle Mike? Was he even born then?”
Bill laughed. “He was ten or eleven at the time. And he was a diehard Notre Dame fan.”
It was true. Bill didn’t know how it happened. Mike didn’t get it from him. The only time Bill ever even mentioned Notre Dame was when he talked about the war and Manny, and he never talked about the war. But somehow, Mike had fallen in love with the Fighting Irish. He even had a poster on his bedroom wall of Ara Parseghian, his image superimposed against pictures of the Golden Dome and Notre Dame Stadium.
Bill remembered how Mike thought his father was teasing him when he told him he had tickets to the game. Then, when he realized it was true, he hugged his father. Every night before he went to bed, Mike told Bill how many more days there were until November 19.
And then, suddenly for Bill but not for Mike, it was November 19 and they were in the stands with seventy-six thousand other people, screaming and cheering and laughing.
Bill spent more time watching Mike than he did the action on the field. Mike grimaced when Regis Cavender scored for MSU. He groaned out loud when Bubba Smith knocked Terry Hanratty out of the game. Bill thought Mike might start crying when All-American Nick Eddy left with a shoulder injury.
But then, early in the fourth quarter, Mike was jumping up and down and hugging his father when the Irish kicker tied the game at 10 with a field goal. And he actually grabbed his father’s hand when, with a minute and ten seconds left in the game, the Irish had possession of the ball on their own 30-yard line.
“Here we go, Dad,” Mike called up to him. Bill had never seen his son so happy. “Here come the Irish!”
But the Irish stayed where they were. Parseghian decided to run out the clock.
On the way home, Mike kept asking Bill how he could do that. “How could he settle for a tie, Dad? Why didn’t he go for it?”
Bill explained, as Parseghian himself later did, that a tie would still keep Notre Dame in the running for a national championship. That he couldn’t risk a turnover. That he had to do what was best for the team.
“But he should have still gone for it, right, Dad? You would have gone for it, right?”
Bill couldn’t answer. The words rang loud in his ears. You would have gone for it. All he could do at that moment was reach over and pat his son’s knee.
The following week, the Fighting Irish stomped on USC, 51-0. But Mike didn’t watch the game. Nor did he comment when the Irish were, after all, named national champions. Parseghian’s strategy had worked. But a few weeks later, Bill noticed that the poster of Parseghian was no longer on Mike’s bedroom wall.
“Never settle,” Bill said to the smoke that rose up before him. “Never.”
April had put her earbuds back in and was writing away in her composition book. A diary? Bill wondered. Was she writing about football? Old stories? Pipe smoke and farts?
Why hadn’t he kept a diary, a journal? How many adventures and people had he forgotten over the years? A journal could bring them all back. The stories he’d be able to tell! In the end, he figured, that’s all you had.
They sat for another half hour. He looked one more time at Gate 8 before starting the car.
He and April were quiet as he drove to the hotel Bill had picked for their first night on the road.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
April didn’t mind waiting for her grandfather. Any amount of time behind the wheel was cool with her, even at rundown gas stations in the middle of nowhere. At the moment, nowhere was on some back road in Illinois, a few hours west of Chicago.
She made a vow to return someday to Chicago. They had only driven through it, but her grandfather had insisted she at least see it since they were so close. April was glad they did. She couldn’t decide what to look at: the long expanse of beach and blue waters of Lake Michigan to her right, or the forest of skyscrapers to her left. It dawned on her that she’d never seen real skyscrapers, at least not like this, all lined up against the ocean-lake, as if to say, “This isn’t just land, baby. This is Chicago.”
“This is so cool,” she’d said to him, but her grandfather, who had taken over the driving in Indiana, hadn’t responded. April saw that he was hunched over the steering wheel, gripping it as if he might otherwise be pulled up through the roof and tossed onto the congested highway. She’d never seen him so tense. Usually, he seemed more relaxed in the car than out of it, smoothly executing the handover- hand turn, demon
strating the proper way to check the rearview and side mirrors, checking the blind spot without moving into the next lane prematurely. But as she turned to try to find the Sears Tower, he seemed to be looking only at the car directly in front of them. April doubted he had even noticed he was driving practically on top of one of the Great Freakin’ Lakes. When she asked him if he was okay, he nearly bit her head off, telling her to zip it so he could concentrate on keeping them from getting killed.
They survived, although judging from her grandfather’s swearing, just barely. He drove another couple hours before turning into this gas station, telling her he needed to take a leak and for her to “take over.” So she’d gotten in the driver’s seat while he hit the bathroom.
April decided that she’d definitely need a signature look before they got to California. Riding around in a Chevy Impala wasn’t a great start, but whatever. She gripped the top of the steering wheel with her right hand and rested her left arm on the window so that her elbow stuck out. Too butch. She tried the ten-and-two grip. Too old lady. She tried the hand at the top again, but this time with her left elbow inside, resting on the leather enclosure for the door handle. She gripped the wheel with the top of her fingers, and extended her thumb along the inside part for easier steering. Bingo. People would see that she was driving, but the driving was secondary to whatever thoughts—lyrics—she had on her mind. That was the difference between the elbow in and elbow out. Elbow in: thoughtful, skilled, important. Elbow out: pretentious, amateurish, lame.
She belched. She and her grandfather were eating at too many greasy fast-food joints. Her mother would have a cow if she knew all the crap they were taking in: burgers, French fries, home fries, Pepsi with scrambled eggs. Wasn’t her fault, though; Grandpa chose all the restaurants. And he was a million years old, so this stuff couldn’t be all that bad for you. She felt a slight twinge in her stomach. She belched again—a nice, loud boomer—and felt better.
She looked into the rearview mirror to get another look at her sunglasses. She couldn’t decide if they said “driver” or “dweeb.” She had picked them up a few weeks earlier, bored to death while Heather shopped for shoes. April couldn’t understand her friend’s obsession with shoes. Boys never looked at a girl’s shoes. Not that April made fashion decisions based on what boys wanted. If she did that, she’d end up looking like Kelly Honaker. That slut.
Something caught her eye. She looked away from the mirror and saw that the man behind the cash register was staring at her. She squinted to see if he was really looking at her. Maybe he was just reading something, the book or magazine—porn, probably—at an angle that made it seem like he was looking at her.
No. He was staring at her. Definitely. And he didn’t turn away when he could obviously see that she had caught him staring.
Or had he? Maybe he couldn’t tell because of her sunglasses.
April caught her breath. He was definitely staring at her. She started to look away but then decided that wouldn’t be right. She wasn’t the one staring. She wasn’t the perv. And she wasn’t some kid. She was on her own. Pretty much. She was driving across the whole goddamned country. No skinny, probably toothless gas station attendant was going to stare her down.
Just as she set her jaw in anticipation of a stare-down battle, she won. She saw the attendant pick up the phone and turn away from her. She laughed quietly. He was faking it, she was sure. The phone probably hadn’t even rung. He had sensed something about her, something strong, and backed off.
Her victory was short-lived. The man hung up the phone and resumed his creepy staring.
Where was her grandfather? Normally, she didn’t mind that he took his time in public bathrooms. Better to take care of all possible business there than in their motel bathroom. But he’d been in there longer than usual and the freak was still staring. It looked like he was smiling: a gross, up-skirt kind of grin. April wished Keith Spinelli was with her. All she’d have to do was casually mention that the gas station guy was staring at her, and he’d go in and kick the crap of out him.
Actually, no: Keith was too nice a guy. Too mature. He’d tell her to ignore him. She tried to take the imagined advice, but the perv’s eyes were starting to freak her out.
Where the hell was her grandfather? She thought for a split second that he wasn’t in the bathroom, after all. That this was some sort of setup. Her mother liked to say that he always had something up his sleeve, a hidden agenda. Was he setting her up in some way? Was her mother about to appear from around the corner of the gas station?
“Ridiculous,” April said out loud. She decided he was just having the kind of trouble described in disgusting detail on those TV commercials for stuff to help old men piss better.
She considered moving the car. Her heart was beating faster now. Her hands were sweaty. What if they slipped on the steering wheel as she started to move the car and she drove into one of the gas pumps? Explosion. Yellow and red and orange shooting toward the sky.
I should write that down, April thought. Sweaty hands, balls of fire. As soon as the perv stops staring.
Her grandfather finally appeared from around the corner of the gas station. He was squinting even though he was in the shade, looking as if he were trying to locate the car. Strange. But, as she was learning, old people did a lot of strange things. She took a breath. Her hands were steadier now. She was about to turn the key and drive over to him when he walked to the car.
“Took you long enough,” she said, annoyed but hugely relieved. She glanced over to see if the perv was still staring. Her grandfather was sweating profusely.
“Grandpa, what’s wrong?”
“Little warm,” he said, out of breath.
“It’s not that hot,” she said, not wanting to argue but needing to talk. “Especially for June. It’s usually way hotter.”
“Well, it is for me,” her grandfather said, sharply.
Maybe it was another old-person thing, April thought, although she had always assumed that old people preferred the heat. Otherwise, why did they all haul ass down to Florida?
“Whatever,” she said. She turned the key in the ignition. The car, thank god, started.
“Do me a favor, willya, Clare?” Bill said. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a bill, and handed it to her. “Get me some water. Poland Spring or whatever they got.”
“It’s April,” she said, correcting him for about the hundredth time. She wasn’t really angry about his mixing up her name with her grandmother’s or maybe her first cousin’s. She just wanted to get the hell away from that gas station. “What happened to ‘good old tap water’?” she asked. When they had first started out, her grandfather made fun of her frequent requests to buy bottled water, saying that he’d been drinking good old tap water all his life and it hadn’t hurt him—or his wallet. “Why didn’t you have some good old tap water when you were in the john?”
“Came out rusty,” he answered, still huffing a bit. “I’m a little thirsty, is all. Get one for yourself, too.”
From the way he seemed to be having trouble catching his breath, April saw that her grandfather was more than a little thirsty. Not a good sign. They hadn’t been on the road that long, and already her worst fear was coming true: The old man would have a stroke or die or something and the ambulance and the cops would come and ask all sorts of questions and find out about her and suddenly she’d be back home, getting nagged to death when her mother wasn’t laughing hysterically at one of Hank Johnson’s embarrassingly corny jokes. Hank and his jokes were making a slow but steady climb up her TITS list.
“Before I pass out?” her grandfather said.
April switched off the ignition.
The air inside was cool but clammy. A radio was blaring a ball game.
“Hi there,” the attendant said.
April decided she needed to pay close attention in case she would later have to describe the scene to the cops. He was old—probably in his thirties. Skinny, black hair. No glasses. She wo
uld check for eye color when she paid for the waters.
She grabbed two bottles from the cooler. Heart pounding, she tried to appear nonchalant as she put them on the counter. The attendant didn’t move. He didn’t even look up from the newspaper spread out before him. This gave April the opportunity to take in more details. She forgot to check his eyes, as she was distracted by the tattoo on the right side of his neck of a heavily fanged dragon whose tail disappeared beneath his dirty blue work shirt. No name patch, officer.
He turned the page with a snap and looked up suddenly, acting all surprised. “Oh, I’m sorry. You’re still here?”
April wasn’t sure if she should smile or what.
“Um, yeah,” she said. A nervous little laugh forced its way out of her.
“See, I’m surprised because when I said hi to you a few seconds ago, you didn’t say anything. I assumed you left.”
April felt her face start to burn. “Oh,” she said. “Hi.”
“There! That wasn’t so hard, now, was it?”
No missing teeth that April could see. Actually, a nice-looking man, she had to admit, if you were into tats. His smile seemed warm, genuine. She pushed the bottles toward him.
“Anything else I can do for you?” he asked. He sat with his arms crossed. He didn’t move in his chair. He was, suddenly, no longer smiling. He was staring.
The skin on the back of April’s neck prickled. “That’s it,” she said. She tried to sound cool, in control. She slid the bill that her grandfather had given her onto the counter.
The attendant glanced down at it, barely moving his head. Maybe, April thought hopefully, he’s a paraplegic.
“Can’t change that,” he said.
April saw now that it was a hundred-dollar bill. Shit. She’d have to go back out to the car, ask her grandfather for something smaller, and then come back in and deal with this creep again. But then she knew, somehow—beyond all shadow of a doubt, as her mother liked to say—that there was plenty of money in the register.
