Bells Above Greens
Page 19
Pat Carragher grinned just a little. A smirk that lifted the corner of his mouth and made the tiniest crease in his cheeks of baby fat. The floating head came back with two fists of Guinness. Pat and I lifted them between us and put them down our throats in equal time.
What happened next was a mutual desire to settle our toughness off the field. We were face to face with each other, neither of us blinking, both knowing what would happen here, just not knowing how to start it. It was the group of lookers around us, including Emery, who were standing there like they were watching a flame inch closer to a barrel of gasoline. A few students who had been watching stood behind me to even out the numbers, and a few students left the bar entirely.
Pat’s forehead came against mine then, slippery with sweat from both us, and we pushed against each other like a couple of bulls looking to scare the other down but knowing there was only one way to settle who was the dominant figure.
Higgins was a mere voice in the crowd after that. He didn’t even try to intervene when things grew beyond control. He simply backed himself to the bar wall and put his wingspan out to guard the bottles from flying objects.
Emery had to buy a new pair of glasses. He told Claire that a door opened into him. It explained the bruises on his forehead and the cut on his nose. If he had shown Claire his shattered lenses and snapped frame, he might have had to explain further that the door had fists. He was very proud of surviving a bar brawl, saying later that “college isn’t college unless you’ve been in a fight and had a beer afterward.”
Pat Carragher probably didn’t feel a thing, that big manchild, but he had a black eye which I claimed credit for, although it could have been from a number of thrown fists. He was a strong bastard but I managed to throw him as many times as he threw me.
Higgins spent the month’s earnings on replacing the booths and chairs. The tables only tipped over and didn’t need fixing. When the police showed up to break it up, Higgins put out the lights and locked the door until they left. There were only smiles in the darkness and not another punch thrown. He didn’t press charges on anybody, and had much the same idea of bar brawls as Emery had. He was almost proud of it happening at his place than at a competitor’s.
Peter’s jersey came off the wall when Pat and I went hurling into it with equal force, locked together in what had to be some sort of wrestling hold. It sat there on the floor, covered in bits of glass and stepped on by several scrambling shoes. Peter never needed to be on the wall, though. Higgins never put him back up, and I would rather raise beers to him in the sky than to his jersey on the wall.
I went to his gravestone many times after that and Peter never once mentioned his jersey. Elle came too. She always picked the flowers and I would pay for them. I dressed his headstone in my army coat one day and gave him a final salute. He would always be there for me.
So would Elle. Somewhere in the bar brawl, somewhere in the hammer strokes on rooftops, the rung of the bells, the pigeons of the Basilica flying overhead, somewhere I had figured out that I would never have it all figured out. I had figured out that Elle needed me and I needed her. It took a shattering of Peter’s presence on the wall to confirm it.
Nothing was proven that night between Pat Carragher and me. Neither of us overpowered the other without having it come right back to him in doubles. We agreed with a simple nod, smiling across from each other in the darkness, again fighting for the same air, that it was a matter to be settled later. If the time every came up.
It was with a huge smile that I paid Higgins my bill and folded Peter’s jersey on the bar.
“Sorry, Sam,” Higgins said. “You can keep the jersey if you want to.”
“Sure,” I said. “I know a few kids in the park who’ll get some good wear out of it. And don’t be sorry. I like it better this way.”
I caught a quick glimpse of myself in the door glass, and it was with a bruised chin and a small cut over my eyebrow, but a relieved smile on my face and unstrapped shoulders, that I ran across the soft campus lawns to the tree behind Elle’s dorm room.
She stood on her balcony with hesitation all over her features when I told her I loved her. She broke into a teary smile and I stepped across the curved branch to stand next to her and hold her.
“You’re going to fall,” she said with her hands to her face.
But I had never been so sure of my footing, and I pulled her close to me, her body flush against mine all the way down to our feet. With her head cradled in the crook of my elbow I kissed her gently there, just as I had seen done by many returning soldiers stepping off the bus to greet their girls after long absences, just as I had seen done in the movies and on magazine pages and advertisements. She whimpered a small sigh and wrapped her fingers in the hair on the back of my head. She had the softest lips, as if there were no strength in them to move or twist them if she tried, just the warm fullness of lips that were meant to be kissed at all hours of the day, I imagined just as soft in the morning as they would be at night.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The lanes crisscrossing South Bend warmed again, old trucks sputtered at intersections and the click of bicycle wheels rose and faded below. Hammer strokes were once again full in noise, dispersing quickly in the green cushion of summer heat. The bells of Notre Dame hummed and brought my smile out of sweat. I stood and gave my shadow to South Bend, the Basilica of the Sacred Heart in the distance, and shook my hands out.
A coughing Chevrolet, baby-blue with fins, came out from under the branches down the way, rolling up the lane, the leaves and branches playing their nets of shade upon the windshield. It grew larger beneath me and stopped in front of the house with a single honk of the horn. The driver’s window unrolled and Elle waved to me, shading her eyes from the sun, as small as a child behind the wheel.
Myles climbed halfway out the passenger window and waved. “Hey, Sam!”
“Good to see you around,” I said.
He held his camera up in his arm. “Yeah. I figure I still have some things I want to do around here.”
Elle leaned out the window, her arm slung out like a trucker.
“That car’s too big for you,” I said.
“I think it fits me.”
I dropped my head and laughed at her insistence. “Did you steal it?”
“I paid four hundred for it. My entire savings.”
“You did steal it.”
“I figured it made it to Chicago once, it can make it again.”
The words caught me in a stagger. I was happy to hear it.
“They hired you?” I asked. “You’re the writer?”
Her smile was the answer. “I’ll be covering Notre Dame sports.”
“I knew it. They’d have been foolish not to hire you.”
Myles pounded his hand on the roof. “And I’ll be taking photos of the games for her articles.” He ducked back in the window, disappearing in an excitement that I had not seen in him before. His smile was back.
“That’s right,” Elle told me. “He put in a portfolio of his work and they hired him on the spot. How do you like that?”
“I guess you’ll be spending a lot of time in Chicago then?” I said.
“A couple days a week. I’ll be here more than there.”
“Will you be needing an inexpensive chauffeur?”
“The least expensive.”
We laughed with each other, the engine of the Chevrolet still chugging, neither of us knowing quite what to say next or what the summer would hold. That was the excitement of it all, taking each day at a time, making each decision as it came. There would be plenty of time to sit by the lake, many afternoon drives to the city, time to live in the present, and there would be plenty of time to look forward too.
“What about you?” she asked.
I looked around at the rooftop. “There’s plenty of work for me to do here this summer, and I can see the highway from here. I’ll watch for you.”
“And next year?”
�
��Next year,” I said. “Next year I might take a shot at playing ball and getting in the papers.”
“Playing ball? Should I look for you on the football field or the baseball diamond?”
“Some guys play both, you know.”
“I’ll have to wait and see.”
“I’ll give you the exclusive scoop,” I said. “I’ll be the first player out of the locker room.”
Copyright 2013 by David Xavier Pico
All names and characters are a work of fiction.
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Table of Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Copyright
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