First, he got talking sports with a bunch of guys while their wives were putting out fried chicken, potato salad, baked beans, and green bean casseroles. He’d always loved baseball. Five or six of the guys were pitching horseshoes and talking about the season that was about to start. It all seemed friendly enough, just men talking. Next thing Mick knew, he had promised to sign up Ben and Toad for Little League ball, and somehow—he never did figure out quite how it happened—he managed to get roped into coaching a team. They were short of coaches. It would be fun, they said. His guard was down. They caught him in a moment of weakness.
Then when he was helping Layne fix plates for the kids, Mick looked over at what she was doing. She was dabbing half-spoons of baked beans and potato salad onto a paper plate.
“Is that for Dylan?” he asked.
She nodded.
“He won’t touch it.”
“Well, he’s got to eat something, Mick.”
“But the potato salad has celery in it. He hates celery.”
“All right, then he doesn’t have to eat the potato salad.”
“You don’t understand, Layne. He won’t eat anything on the plate if there’s celery on it, he hates it that bad. It’s the texture.”
She scraped the potato salad off of Dylan’s plate onto her own and didn’t say anything else about it, but he could tell it upset her a little. It was tricky sometimes, working around her feelings. More than once she had told him she felt like she was missing out on her kids’ lives. Her husband wasn’t supposed to know more about her own children than she did.
After lunch, while everybody was enjoying a wide array of desserts, they fell to talking about a food and clothing drive that had been going on at the church. Mick was an outsider; he didn’t know anything about it. It was just a drive the youth at church had organized for a homeless mission in Atlanta, so he minded his own business and paid loving attention to a Styrofoam bowl of Lois Freeman’s renowned banana pudding. On the edge of the conversation, Mick was only vaguely aware there was a problem.
“Closed down?” Layne said. “Why would the homeless mission close down?”
“Dooley got sick,” Tom Herman said, shoveling the last of a giant piece of strawberry pie into his mouth. Tom was the big bald-headed guy who had conned Mick into coaching a Little League team. “Roy Dooley’s been running the place pretty much by himself for the last ten years, and now he’s got lymphoma. He’s doing okay, I guess, but he doesn’t have the energy to run the mission anymore and nobody else has stepped up.”
“That’s a shame,” Lois Freeman said. Lois had actual blue hair, all glued into a hard, swirling sculpture. Not a hair would dare move. “What will we tell the young people? They were so looking forward to the trip to the mission.”
Tom shrugged. “Yeah, it’s a shame. They’ve got a whole big truckload of stuff piled in the storeroom at the church. They worked hard. I hate to just give it to the Salvation Army, but Beal Street Mission is the only homeless place I know.”
“You don’t have to go to a mission to find homeless people,” Mick said. He wasn’t even thinking about it, he was just scraping his bowl.
“That’s right, I hadn’t thought of that,” Layne said. “Mick has a friend in a homeless community downtown.”
Tom chuckled. “A homeless community? Isn’t that an oxymoron?”
Mick shook his head, wiped a little pudding from the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand. “It’s just a couple bridges, but there’s like a whole little city under there. They live there, all the time.”
He was just volunteering information, or so he thought. Turned out he was volunteering to head up a mercy mission to Overpass Plantation. There were times when he really wished he could learn to keep his mouth shut.
They were all writing down phone numbers and plans and finalizing a caravan for the following weekend when Layne’s head went up and she looked around to see where the kids were. It was a mommy thing; she did it every few minutes, as if she was on a timer. Mick knew there was going to be trouble when her gaze locked on something and her eyes went wide.
“DYLAN!” she screamed. Everybody at the picnic table looked up.
Mick whipped around expecting to see his youngest son impaled on a fencepost or something, but he was just peeing on a pine tree. The problem was, there were two little girls, one on either side of him, watching in wide-eyed amazement while he demonstrated what a boy can do and how high up on the tree he could do it. Dylan was reared back and grinning. Proud.
Mick tried to explain on the way home.
“It wasn’t really his fault,” he said. “We spend a lot of time out in the woods—you know, just me and him and Andy. How was he supposed to know the difference? To a four-year-old, a tree is a tree.”
“You’re right,” she said. “It’s not his fault.”
She didn’t say anything else. She didn’t need to.
22
* * *
Toad’s backpack.
MICK went down to Overpass Plantation a couple days ahead of time and told the Man With No Hands what the church group was planning. Word spread, so when they pulled off next to the bridge that Saturday morning with Mick’s truck, two vans and a car loaded with food and clothes, a crowd started gathering right away.
Mick had never put much stock in giveaways because his own experience had taught him that giving somebody a handout rarely changed their life for the better. He’d always belonged to the “Teach ’em to fish” school—if a man wanted a job Mick was more than willing to let him prove himself. Not only that, but it always seemed to Mick that the real reason people organized charity drives like this one was so they could pat themselves on the back. That Saturday at Overpass Plantation it was one of his kids who showed him another side to the equation. By the end of the day he was just glad he had the foresight to bring his camera.
There were ten of them in all—Mick, Tom and Joanie Herman, plus four teenagers and three kids. Two of the kids were Mick’s. Dylan and Toad came with him—Ben was home sick with his mother.
The Man With No Hands met the group and took over. He let the little kids hand out loaves of bread and canned goods to whoever wanted it, but he told them only two cans to a customer, and watch out for repeat customers. Mick noticed Joanie Herman was keeping a really close eye on the little ones, and he figured it was out of fear. Dylan stayed right up under him the whole time, usually holding onto him one way or another.
“Clowns,” he whispered once, and Mick knew what he meant. He didn’t mean they looked like clowns, but they gave him the same feeling. Dylan wasn’t sure the outside of them was real, as if somebody might be hiding inside that exterior. It was definitely a rough neighborhood. Mick had only seen homeless people in the context of other homeless people, or mixed with construction workers. But now he was seeing them next to Tom and Joanie Herman—Mr. and Mrs. Straight-laced Clean-cut Churchpeople. Most of the people coming up the hill hadn’t had a bath in recent memory; there was dirt ground into the creases on their faces and black lines across the backs of their necks. They smelled foul, and most of them hadn’t had a haircut in years. Some of them were stoned, some of them were mentally or physically handicapped one way or another, and some were just plain crazy. One wild-haired guy with an eye-patch squatted down behind Mick’s truck and kept peeking around it like he was scared of something. Mick tried to talk him out into the open but he just put a finger to his lips and motioned him away, muttering something about the KGB.
“That’s Bond,” the Man With No Hands said. “James Bond. He’s harmless. He’ll forget after a while, and then he’ll come out. This is one of his bad days. Come around tomorrow and he’ll have the patch on his other eye.”
Homeless people wandered up the hill one at a time and went first, always, to the food van. Some of them carried bags—everything from a grimy Saks Fifth Avenue shopping bag to a black plastic garbage bag, but the garbage bag seemed to be the standard. They’d get a loaf of brea
d, some canned goods and maybe some peanut butter from the kids, stuff it all in their bag and move on to the clothes truck, where the teenagers would try to fit them with a pair of jeans. Dylan spent the first hour hanging onto Mick, one arm wrapped around his thigh, but after a while he decided these clowns were just people after all and he started getting into the spirit of the thing. Mick got a couple really good pictures of Dylan handing out canned goods. He noticed quite a few of them hit Dylan up for seconds. He was an easy mark.
Mick learned from Tom and Joanie that the teenagers from the church—most of whom were the mop-haired, ragged-jeans-and-T-shirts variety—had collected about five hundred dollars and used it to fill up a van with jeans and shirts and coats they bought dirt cheap at a thrift store. The clothes they were handing out looked a lot like what they were wearing, and it wasn’t until later Mick found out that the teenagers bought their own clothes at the same thrift store, not because they were cheap but because it was fashionable. Go figure.
A couple times a whole family came up the hill together—a mother and father and a child or two. Little kids. Mick hurt for the kids, though for the most part the little ones seemed happy enough. He figured they just weren’t old enough to know how poor they were. Most of the parents seemed a little ashamed of taking a handout, but they were also the most grateful for it. The teenagers treated them well, playing with the kids and joking around. Mick talked to a couple of the parents, and the stories were remarkably similar. They had used their last dime getting to Atlanta for a job and then lost it somehow, couldn’t find another job and didn’t have enough money to go someplace else and start over. They seemed decent enough. More than anything else they seemed surprised to find themselves in such a fix.
One of the teenagers, a gangly kid named Rob, with black hair down in his eyes, was handing out backpacks. They were brand new backpacks made for carrying books and school supplies, but they would be handy for a homeless guy who needed a way to carry his stuff around. They even came with a little water bottle. According to Tom, Rob found them on clearance someplace, and after he told the store manager what he planned to do with them the manager let him have the whole stock at wholesale. He must have brought fifteen of them in the trunk of his car and was doling them out to anybody who asked for one. They went pretty fast once word got around. After the backpacks were all gone a doe-eyed little black kid came up the hill by himself and stood there at the back of Rob’s car peeking into the trunk, wringing his hands. This kid was wearing a dirty T-shirt four sizes too big and two left tennis shoes, one black and one white. He mumbled something when Rob walked by, but he was very timid and Rob had to get down on his knees to hear.
Rob shook his head, slung his hair out of his eyes and put his hand on the kid’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, man, you got here too late. They’re all gone.”
The kid just nodded and started to turn away. His head hung and his shoulders drooped. He hadn’t even looked at the clothes or the groceries in the other vans.
Toad was standing on Rob’s back bumper, holding onto the open trunk lid and bouncing, making his shocks squeak. Mick didn’t think she even heard what was being said until she turned around, jumped down and called out to the kid.
“Wait a minute,” Toad said. “We got one more.” She ran around to the passenger side of Mick’s truck, yanked the door open and leaned in. Mick went and peeked over her shoulder to see what she was up to. His daughter was cleaning out a really nice, nearly new Nike backpack on the front seat, dumping out pencils and pens, a pile of waddedup papers, a couple of books and folders, an old sandwich, some rocks, and a headless, naked Barbie doll. She snatched a water bottle from the cup holder on the console and stuck it in the little webbed pocket on the side of the backpack, then closed the door and ran—literally ran—back over to Rob’s car and shoved the thing into the kid’s hands. She didn’t say a word, just gave it to him.
Mick shot a close-up of that kid’s face. The kid never saw the camera. He hugged that backpack to his chest like it was the finest thing he’d ever owned, and then turned and took off down the hill as fast as he could run. Mick, for whom the joy on the boy’s face had seemed as close and clear as his own hands, watched him go and understood something that perhaps no one else even thought about. In his growing up, lost among all the million things that would happen to that kid in his life, he would forget this. It was just a backpack. Ten years later maybe that kid wouldn’t even remember it. It was entirely possible that Toad wouldn’t remember it, either. But Mick would. And judging from the look on his face, he figured Rob would, too.
The Man With No Hands saw what happened. He watched Mick shoot the picture, saw the look on his face. Mick didn’t even know he was standing there until he spoke up.
“Children. They know how to preach,” he said.
Mick just nodded. He was astonished, sometimes, at the things he saw in his kids. Toad was just a simple, straightforward girl with a straightforward heart. It struck him that he must have had a heart himself at some point, and he wondered what happened to it. He figured it was one of the many things that got beaten out of a man one way or another before he grew up, but at the moment his daughter had him wondering if there was any way to get it back.
When they were loading up to leave, the Man With No Hands came up to say thanks for about the tenth time.
Mick said, “Listen, is there anything else I can do for you?” He didn’t know why he said it. Or maybe he did.
“No. Thanks, but you’ve done quite a lot already. It was kind of you to bring these people down here. It makes a difference, you know.”
“Well, that’s nice, but what I meant was, is there anything I can do for you, personally. It must be tough sometimes, living here and all.”
He chuckled. “It’s not that hard once you get used to it. There’s a shelter I can get to when the weather’s too cold, or sometimes just for a hot meal and a shower. There is one thing, though . . .”
“Name it,” Mick said, and he meant it. He actually wanted to do something to help this man.
“Well, you can see I have no transportation. Once in a while I need to go someplace too far to walk, and it’s not always easy to arrange a ride.”
Mick dug in his pocket and came up with a grocery store receipt. He scribbled his number on the back and handed it to the Man.
“You got a way to call me?”
The old man nodded, tucking the paper into his shirt pocket. “There’s a pay phone.”
“Good. You need a ride, anytime, day or night, you call me, okay?”
Mick figured he’d never hear from him again, but at least he made the offer.
23
* * *
Ick’s Fish.
THE WEEK before the Little League season started up, Tom Herman called about the preseason planning meeting. On Mick’s list of fun things to do, a planning meeting was right up there with a vasectomy.
There must have been fifty men gathered in the new county annex building, and listening to the talk Mick knew he was in over his head even before the meeting started. He was the only rookie there—the rest were seasoned coaches who talked about kids by their first names as if they were big league stars. These people were serious. The first order of business was to find fresh meat to coach teams. Mick thought about laying low and slipping out the back door, but Tom canceled that plan right away.
“Mick wants to coach a team,” the big man said, his folding chair complaining as he stood. “He’s not working, so he’s got lots of time.”
Mick didn’t let it get to him. The kids’ school had already taught him that anybody who wasn’t working was a prime target for everybody’s projects.
Ben and Toad both landed in the seven-eight age bracket, so that’s where Mick coached. He didn’t know enough to take advantage of the draft, nor did he understand just how dead serious all the other coaches were, so Mick went into it with the naïve notion that Little League baseball wasn’t so much about winning trophies as
letting the kids have a good time and earn some memories. He didn’t scout or recruit like the other coaches, so he ended up with a team full of kids who had never played before. This drew snickers from the hard-core set because it was common knowledge that a kid needed to start playing two seasons a year at the age of four if he was ever going to amount to anything.
Ben was the only eight-year-old on the Marlins—the rest were all seven—so they were always playing kids a head taller. Most of the teams in their bracket were hard-driven, winning-is-everything, semi-pro, two-uniform, twice-a-week-at-the-batting-cage, double-play-turning, custom-bat-toting, chewing, spitting testosterone rockets. They had blazing fast base runners who stole every base at every opportunity, including home, even when the pitcher was holding the ball and the Marlins were down by seventeen runs.
Other teams had kids who brought their own monogrammed equipment bags, complete with batting gloves, and could hit with power from either side of the plate. Eight years old, and they would dig in, keep their head down, focus on the ball with cat-like intensity and smash line drives off the fences.
The Marlins had kids—two of them—who would drop the bat as soon as the pitcher started his windup, turn on their heels and bolt from the batter’s box grabbing their head with both hands, and by the time the ball crossed the plate they were crouching, whimpering, by the backstop.
Mick was getting ready for a game one afternoon when he noticed the M was peeling off the back of his team jersey where it said COACH MICK. He figured they just didn’t iron it on well enough, so he turned the iron to High and spread the shirt over the ironing board. By then Mick was an old hand with an iron. He knew better than to put a hot iron directly on top of one of those stick-on letters, so he grabbed a pair of boxers from the laundry basket and spread them on top, between the jersey and the iron. Turned out the reason the letter didn’t stick in the first place was that they originally applied it with the sticky side out. He did a really thorough job of ironing the initial onto his shorts, so he ended up with a jersey that said COACH ICK and a pair of red boxers with a big white M on the front.
Summer of Light Page 17
