“Lee,” I coaxed her gently. “The broadcasting?”
“Well, of course I looked into it. And I got him a spot, you understand, commentating on batting. Just for the night. On hitting the ball, which is his goddamned specialty,” she said, drawing out the word: spec-i-al-ity. “And he goes, and we’re feted around the studio, given jackets and plates of cold cuts and told how great he is and how honored they are. They keep reminding us, saying to us: this is live TV. Just relax, you know, and be yourself, but this is live. Live, live, live, on national TV. And I can see Jake nodding and taking it in and it’s scaring him, and I know it is, but there’s nothing I can say. I don’t know how to comfort someone. I have two kids and yet I don’t have a single word of comfort to offer to him.
“And then they take him away, and I’m in the green room, watching, nibbling on those stupid cold cuts and the cameras start rolling and the regular announcers are joking and doing their thing and they get to the part about hitting and Jake freezes. Just like a big idiot, live, on national TV, he freezes.
“The announcers work through it, you know, they’re so slick. And I’m sitting there in the green room, and my assistant leaves and goes off to ‘do some stuff, Ma’am, I’m sorry’ and I’m all alone there, feeling horribly embarrassed and ashamed of feeling that way. And then I step out into the hall and all those people who were there before, giving us gifts and patting on powder – they’ve all disappeared into all these doors I never noticed before and all I can think is: why don’t I have a door to disappear into?”
She was crying, in a Lee sort of way, watering up and fiercely swiping the tears away before they could ever fall.
“It’s strange, isn’t it, how you can live with someone for fifteen years, and there can still be moments where they dissolve into someone you don’t recognize? That’s what it was like. Jake’s face was this combination of sadness and anger and fear. I think it was the fear that upset me the most. And the assistant behind him said chirpily: ‘Oh look, there’s your wife,’ and just retreated down the hall, probably trying to avoid a scene.
“And I just stared at my husband, at the man I had chosen above all others. This giant, bumbling, miserable man. And from somewhere I felt this love rising, this unbearable love, so intense it threatened to knock me onto my knees. And I opened up my arms and he came to me, and I stood there in the hallway and I held my husband as he cried and I hated those goddamned broadcasters so much I could have killed them, live, on national TV.”
She ended her story with a ferocity that both startled and somehow reassured me. It was good to know that my corpse-like sister lived and burned beneath all that black shrouding. We sat silently for a moment, listening to the grandfather clock ticking in the hallway, to the whoosh and tick and purr of the air conditioner, to anything but one another.
“Anyway,” she said finally, “we can’t do broadcasting, and I won’t let him get traded or sent down.”
“Well...” I answered, searching for something to say to her and failing. “What about coaching?”
She leaned back further into the sofa.
“I saw Ben this morning,” she said and my head rolled back of its own accord, till I was staring at her ceiling, at the fan spinning. “He asked about you.”
“God,” I said, hardly able to breathe all of a sudden. I could feel the weight of that damn ring in my pocket, wrapped in my father’s new-found guilt.
“You should go out there and see him, talk to him,” she continued, oblivious. “Before you leave. Tie things up between you, you know?”
“Right,” I groaned. “Tie things up.”
Sliding away from the coffee table and into the embrace of Lee’s sweet carpet, I balanced my glass on my breastbone and stared at the watery patterns of sunlight filtering onto the ceiling from the pool out on the patio. Lee watched me for a moment, then came to join me, still sniffling. It was then that she informed me that she shouldn’t have told me any of what she had just said.
I wasn’t aware when she fell asleep. Perhaps I did too, just for a moment. At any rate, that was where we still were when Jake came home from the airport. He was shuttling to games until the funeral was over and then it would be back to the road again for the rest of the season. Lee was snoring lightly, her empty glass balanced on her chest.
“Jesus,” he said, setting a bag down by the couch and staring at us. “What the hell happened here?”
I struggled to sit up, my head pounding. I had long since stopped drinking, especially since the entire bottle was now somewhere divided between Lee and I, but it didn’t matter. I was still drunk as a proverbial skunk.
“We went to the bank,” I said vaguely and Jake just raised an eyebrow. “Dad left you guys the house.”
He bent down and retrieved the glass from Lee’s limp fingers. “That’s good,” he whispered. “I mean, no offense.”
I nodded. The couch seemed very far away.
“Let me make you some coffee,” Jake said and headed into the kitchen. I rose and managed to follow him there. Sitting carefully on a bar stool at the counter, resting my head on my elbows, I tried not to notice the whisky moving through my gullet. “So she told you,” he said, slipping a milky-white filter into the machine and scooping out something dark and comforting. I could smell it from where I sat and it was heaven.
“Yes,” I said, sounding slurred to myself.
He nodded and started the machine. “I know she thinks I’ve got no idea...” he faded off and we both watched the pot fill for a moment. “Well, I’m just glad she could talk to someone, you know? Someone family.”
“Yeah,” I said. So who was I going to talk to? Someone family sounded like the worst possible plan. “I hear your contract is up soon.”
Jake and Lee owned a fancy coffee machine, of course, the sort that allowed him to slip the pot out halfway through the brewing while it paused politely until he replaced it. He poured me a mug-full and handed it across the counter.
“Yes,” he said. “End of this year.”
“So what are you going to do if your knee is blown?” I asked.
He shrugged and leaned back against the counter. Jake was a very big man, about five times my size, I realized again suddenly as the coffee cleared some of the fog.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m no good on TV.”
“So Lee says.”
“Well, it’s true, unfortunately. I freeze up. I turn into an idiot.”
My mind, still jogging around in circles after the coffee, stopped and shouted a warning. I ignored it.
“So, what else have you considered?” I said.
“I’ve kind of thought about coaching,” he answered, and I could hear that he was treading carefully. “I’ve been great with the younger guys on the team. Clubhouse leader and all that, but I don’t know... I’ve been thinking about you dad’s old job, but…”
“But?” I asked, ignoring the frantic thoughts trying to flag me down. Jake watched me for a moment. “What?” I said, indignant.
“What about Ben?” he said at last. The sentence I had been waiting all afternoon to say myself.
“What about him?” Now I was nonchalant. I was a disinterested observer, stamping down my guilt in one drunken, wobbling step.
“I don’t know…” he said slowly, narrowing his eyes. He poured himself a mug and then leaned over toward me, looming into my limited field of vision. “You really think I should?”
“Uh, sure...” I gestured widely, trying to move him back somewhere safer. “Like you said, clubhouse leader. You’d be a great coach.” And he would. So would Ben. So is Ben, I corrected myself.
He nodded and then withdrew. “Thanks, Case. I wouldn’t have thought you’d have said that.”
“Why not?” I said, all innocence.
“Well, we have history...” he said. Jesus, not that. All I could think was: Is there anyone here I don’t have history with? Because I’d like to see that person right now.
“No we
don’t,” I told him. “We have one night, and it was just a couple kisses.”
“I know,” he said. “And I love Lee. I’m just saying.”
“I hear ya,” I agreed. “I don’t hate you, Jake. It was years and years ago.”
Seventeen years, to be exact. That was such a popular number when I related to people. I was sick of it.
“I know. And I thought, after what happened that night between you and Ben...”
“Nothing happened.”
He looked at me and raised his eyebrows. I hated it when men did that.
“Right,” he said. “And it was years and years ago.”
“Yes,” I affirmed. “Yes, it was. It certainly doesn’t matter anymore.”
Getting Lucky
1981
The sun, so gentle to the sweet shores of Southern California, was merciless on the long drive across Arizona and New Mexico. Ben found he had to stop frequently, pulling over just in time to prevent the Datsun, eating its way through coolant like a child with a plate full of cupcakes, from overheating completely. The interior of the car, normally a dull, dusty blue, began to swelter after days in the intense heat and Ben could swear that the dash was actually melting off into a puddle of gooey blue liquid on the powder blue shag carpet floor. He had never consumed so much soda in his life, finding it the only reliable liquid to be had at most of the rinky-dink gas stations along the 10. The highway snaked its way across the desert toward Texas, the ultimate in American deserts, and Ben sweated miserably, but in his mind felt that he was finally, maybe approaching happiness head-on.
If anyone had asked, which they never did, he wouldn’t have talked about the last five years, not in any detail. It was like recovering from a death: the pain eased little by little until at last it was nothing but a long, slow ache. Every now and then, without warning, the grief would rise up in his mind and replay it all for him, mercilessly. Then it felt exactly as awful as it had when it was fresh. Ben ground his teeth against sorrow and turned up the radio. Salsa music, bright and foreign, skittered through the car and synchronized with his weary nerves.
In El Paso he paused briefly before diving into the Lone Star State, like sticking a cautious toe into the pool, and called his mother. Trucks screamed by on the interstate as he explained to her that he didn’t, in fact, know the exact day when he would arrive, but that he would get there eventually, following the southern roads through to the north of Florida and from there, sinking down into Tampa.
It was in San Antonio that he wished he were still drinking. The lack of alcohol, so new to his tender system, seemed to pulse through him as surely as the perpetual buzz he’d been on for months, maybe years, who knew? He’d left Carla behind in Los Angeles. The only meaningful relationship he’d had in years, stretching through the worst of his binges, and there she was, stroking the hair back from his forehead and telling him to just let it out. Of course, it was only when he’d stopped drinking and decided to accept the job offer that she left him. He had become boring so quickly, and Carla was the sort of woman who had to have a crisis. It fed her, like oxygen, revving up her muscles and powering her brain cells into overdrive. She said trauma made her more artistic. It certainly made her more willing. Truthfully, he wasn’t all that disappointed. It would have seemed odd, dragging her clear across the country. He hadn’t reflected much on why that was. At the moment, he was looking forward to the new.
Pulling over at a small, dirty gas station at the edge of San Antonio, he stretched briefly before stepping out of the low car onto the smoldering tarmac. Everything here was gray with dust and oil, he thought, pumping the cheapest possible gas into the Datsun. Inside, he selected a Coke and two candy bars to help him make it through to Baton Rouge by nightfall.
“That’ll be eight-oh-seven,” the man behind the counter said as Ben rooted in his wallet for change.
“Here,” he handed the man a ten and then he felt it, someone tugging at the edge of his t-shirt.
“Excuse me,” a voice said and he looked over. A teenage boy, his voice much too deep for his body, stood next to Ben. “Excuse me,” the boy said again. “Aren’t you somebody famous?”
Ben hadn’t been recognized much since the accident. Hell, he had never been recognized much at all.
“Well, I used to play baseball.”
“Hey, yeah,” the boy said. “Yeah, I know you. You’re that guy with the arm, right? You were the guy who broke his arm in the Series, right? Boy, that must have stunk.”
Ben nodded, unsure how to answer that.
“Yeah,” the kid continued. “I remember you breaking your arm. My dad and I watched it on TV. That horrible sound it made when the bone broke… you don’t forget something like that.”
“Right,” Ben said.
“Is your arm better now?” the boy asked, eying the wrong bicep. Ben nodded.
“All fixed,” he said.
“That’s cool,” the boy said. “Too bad you couldn’t still play. Guess that must stink. Well, see ya. It was cool to meet you. Wait until I tell my dad about it.”
Ben turned back to the counter. The man behind it smiled weakly at him and handed him back his money.
“Keep it,” he said. “Sounds like you could use it.”
Jesus, it had come that far, receiving charity from a gas station clerk. Ben simply nodded and pocketed the money. It took several minutes of driving before he regained his sense of equilibrium. But the joy that had been there, the hope for something better, had gone, leaving him feeling bleak and desolate in the Texas desert. Misery and self-reproach gnawed at him, worrying his frayed edges like a terrier with a deflated toy.
He drove right through Baton Rouge before finally stopping at a dingy little motel on the outskirts of town. Built in the Fifties, its sign was a watery blue with two neon-outlined bathing beauties diving into the words below. Ben parked the Datsun next to the only other car in the lot and stepped out into the sticky night. The hotel clerk seemed quite pleased to see him.
“Don’t get many folks driving through anymore,” he said. The freeway hummed a few blocks away, just far enough to make a motel built on the two-lane highway obsolete. The place clearly hadn’t seen much of an update since it was built, which didn’t help. Ben gratefully accepted the key to his room anyway, glad to slow his own momentum, if only for the night.
“Is there somewhere to eat around here?” he asked and was pointed down the street to a sign that read “Crazy Eddy’s Cajun Bar and Grill.” Outside, the air seemed to hum with moisture and insects. Great flying beetles and gnats and every sort of buzzing, creeping thing hovered around the streetlights, being snapped up by bats, black against the midnight blue sky. It was like a scene from a Hitchcock movie. “The Bugs.” The thought made him chuckle. It was only a slight puff of air from his dry lungs, but it was enough to make a man waiting at a bus stop in front of the hotel stare at him and back away toward the street. Ben smiled at him and the old man squinted tentatively toward something resembling a smile. At the end of the street, Ben pushed open the door to the small diner and settled into a red vinyl booth.
Sidling by as if she were vaguely frightened of him, a waitress tossed over a laminated menu and moved on. Ben stared after her, her wide ass squeezed into an impossibly tight pair of culottes that then splayed out around her knees like a shorter version of bell bottoms. This place really might be the end of the road, he thought, if it attracted women like that.
“What’ll ya have?” a pleasant voice said and Ben looked up to a vision guaranteed to change his mind about Baton Rouge entirely. This waitress was thin and pale, even delicate, with her waist-length red hair braided into a heavy plait that swung when she nodded her head. The skin on her face was as translucent as fine linen paper, and she had bright blue eyes, the color of paint on china.
“Cheeseburger,” he said, “and a Coke.”
“Great, that’ll fill ya right up,” she said. Her voice held a slight Louisiana accent, like pepper, and her fu
ll lips twisted the words so that she sounded as if she were smiling. Ben was transfixed and moved that something so lovely could exist here, in this small, dirty place. It was like finding a blooming garden in the middle of a swamp.
When she returned ten minutes later, he was unaccountably nervous. He’d been watching her; her lithe body as she moved between the seats, the way her breasts rose when she lifted her arms to tack his order onto the metal carousel behind the counter. “Here you go, sweetie,” she said, setting the steaming burger in front of him with a flourish. God, but she was beautiful. Ethereal, trembling, a fairy.
Ben ate ravenously, his exhaustion pushed from his belly to infect his head. He longed to fold his arms on the table like a pillow and rest there, watching her. Instead, he left her the ten dollars he hadn’t spent on gas that afternoon as a tip and walked through the buzzing darkness to his room, his head spinning with sleep and arousal.
The room was small and a bit shabby, but it smelled clean. There were no real amenities, just a bed and a battered Seventies television so curved it distorted the picture like a funhouse mirror. Ben scrubbed at his weary face, staring at himself in the mirror. It didn’t seem possible that he could look so old, since he was only twenty-eight. The soft planes beneath his eyes had hardened and become defined, as if he were carved rather than born. For a brief moment, he longed for a beer, or six. Something to take the edge off this trip, off this long day. He opted for yet another soda, feeling tentatively for sleep in the recesses of his body and finding none. In his shirt pocket he discovered a quarter and a dime and carried them, jingling, out into the sticky night.
The waitress from the diner was waiting at the bus stop, shifting from one foot to the other so that her braid swung sweetly against the small of her back. She had changed her clothes since he’d last seen her, from her uniform to a pair of tight black jeans and a baggy green shirt, but her hair was like a badge, immediately identifiable. He supposed that was the point, really. At her feet was a duffel bag; in her left hand she held a cigarette she wasn’t really smoking. After a moment, she dropped it and tapped it out. Ben stood under the shadowed overhang of the motel’s second story and debated the wisdom of what he badly wanted to do. The tinny clink of his change decided it for him, as she turned and peered at the darkened walkway. Not wanting to frighten her, he stepped out beneath the street lamp.
Casey's Home Page 9
