by J. G Hayes
“For shame at trying to break up God’s Holy Union!” the faux priest finger-pointed at my quaking grandparents, as he hustled my mother and oldest sister out the door and back to my father, who was waiting in the car down the street, laughing and smoking a Chesterfield cigarette, his feet up on the dashboard.
We fanned out through the jungle, wrapped in camouflage. Somehow I got separated from the others. I fell into this pit, about twelve feet deep—I guess it was kind of a booby trap. I broke my leg when I landed. I couldn’t get out. By day we owned the jungle, with support from the artillery. But at night it was a different story. That night the enemy came, checking on their traps. And so they found me.
My father kept his vow. He put his children to bed each night, mesmerizing us with his impromptu stories that kicked down the borders of our imaginations. He washed the dishes after every meal, and cooked when my mother was too tired. And while other women in our neighborhood grew wrinkled and bitter with endless children and chores, our mother stayed young and smiling, warmed by the notes Dad would leave for her on the kitchen table each morning, notes that always began, “To My Beautiful Queen, Heaven-sent from above, the answer to My Prayer …”
They had nothing in common. In forty-nine years of marriage, it was never established who ruled the roost—not for a lack of trying. They fought over money and my father’s monthly drinking binges or his refusal to ever wear a necktie, my mother’s exorbitant phone bills, the in-laws that Dad called insufferable snobs, and Mom deemed Wild Irish Rebels.
But their love for each other—instant, inexplicable, wild—never waned. And even in the midst of a fight, they couldn’t pass each other without stopping, snarling, and then a look, a linger, and soon they would retreat to the bedroom.
I think there was only one of them who came that first night. There was a shadow above me at the roof of the pit, and then there was a noise, and another shadow passed over the first one, darker. I was waiting for him, but still he surprised me, getting me with his knife. No one’d dare use a gun; both sides were too close. Jungle fighting’s always done with a knife.
He’d look at his hands, the deft fingers, maybe wondering how these instruments that had been finely tuned to excel at a pastime had been transformed into instruments of killing. He’d shove them behind his back, always, and look at us with eyes that made us wish we never asked. Then he’d always have to touch us, rumpling our hair, pulling us into the hushed stadium of his arms, as if renewing some pledge that his hands would kill no more, but only soothe from now on, only play.
He’d gather us up summer nights and Sundays and we’d half-walk/half-run the several blocks to the park, the August ground so dusty clouds of powder would sift up when we ran across the infield, filling our hand-me-down sneakers as if we were trudging along the ocean floor down at City Point Beach. Dad couldn’t do much more than pitch, and as we got older we took even that chore away from him. Then he’d stand on the sidelines orchestrating scenarios (man on second nobody out bottom of the sixth, bases loaded last of the ninth), pulling from his back pocket the wire kitchen strainer he’d pilfered from Mom against her wishes. He’d hold it up to his mouth as if it was a microphone, then introduce each one of us as we stepped up to the plate to an imagined throng filling the moth-skimmed summer air.
“Now batting for Boston,” he’d intone in an affected voice booming with urgency, “now batting for Boston, the center fielder, Hayes …”
Some days I’d be good. Some days I’d be unstoppable, flowing like electricity, vaulted up into a high blue place where fantasy and reality blended, then exploded, and there was nothing I couldn’t do. But other days there would be purple clover growing between my tattered sneakers, and I’d have to pick a bunch for Mom; or maybe I’d see a cloud in the sky that needed only a turret here and a drawbridge there to turn it back into a castle; or sometimes there’d be a butterfly between first and second, sipping nectar with an exquisite salmon tongue the size of a pinhead, its body pulsing in delight, and a ball would scoot between my surprised scraped legs, or jiggle just beyond my desperate reach. And I’d look up at Dad, half in defiance, half in shame. And as my brothers and I grew stronger, taller, leaner, and the sweat of our bodies took on a surprising, goaty tang, baseball became more than a game, and the prize nothing less than my Dad’s affection and interest.
Compared to my older brothers, I was good, but not the best. And with the prize being my father’s love, there was no room, in my mind anyway, for anything less.
You’re the best hitter in the bunch, Joey, when you concentrate. Why won’t you concentrate?
I don’t want to, I’d say, kicking up the dust with a sneaker. How the fuck do I know? I wanted to say, it’s your gene pool. I wasn’t like the others. There were whole weeks when I was Normal, then something would click and I’d be off painting whole walls with murals, filling frenzied notebooks with my stories, wandering the abandoned railroad tracks, or climbing the piles of rubbish down at the junkyard, in search of something I couldn’t name.
The summer between my thirteenth and fourteenth years, I grew to my adult height in two explosive months, and the following school year I began pitching. In two years I never lost a game, and scouts began to come to watch not only me but one of my older brothers as well. But still the wildness within me grew along with my body—the belief, the hope, that there was an entire other world beyond the confines of baseball, beyond the borders of South Boston.
I quit baseball in the middle of a game at sixteen, in a bat-throwing, explosive rage that shocked everyone there—myself and my father included. We walked home along the buckling sidewalks in silence, my father grim-eyed and sorrowful, reliving his own sorry separation from baseball; and me, two steps behind him, defiantly popping the buttons from my dirty uniform. I had a passion for baseball my siblings, adept as they were, did not possess. But I was declaring my independence from a world in which a father’s affection was doled out in proportion to a son’s ability to play ball. It wasn’t right, and like so many others before me, I sank my own ship, colors waving high. Our walk home was a funeral march, and we both knew it.
We couldn’t help who we were, and what had happened to us.
AS A YOUNG MAN, I would go up to the roof of the housing project we lived in, and stare out at the lights of the nearby city. Life was out there, something separate and Other from what I was living then. Like my father before me, I dreamed of the life I might find in those lights. I would recall my father’s mother’s words, that I was the only one among his children that resembled him in his youth. And also like my father, I had a love for the game of baseball that was more than idle pleasure: it was poetry, beauty, symmetry, a swirl of green and white and youth and summer forever frozen into a transcending perfection …
But unlike my father, it wasn’t only Life I hoped to jump into during my long light-gazing vigils on the roof. In particular it was a particular bar in a particular part of town, a bar whose blacked-out front windows were lit up like Christmas every day of the year. It was a bar for people like me. For although I may have looked like my father, and loved baseball like my father, I was not heterosexual like my father. And all the prayers to Saint Anthony in the world hadn’t changed that.
I GOT THE BAR’S ADDRESS from a newspaper clipping, torn and yellowed after being under my mattress for three years. Each Christmas Eve I would try to go, but always chicken out at the last minute, sometimes vomiting from nervousness as I watched outside from my pickup truck, engine running.
I’d explode at my friends at the cavalier way they’d take their girlfriends or young wives for granted—lying, cheating, sometimes slapping. They didn’t know how lucky they were, how privileged, to not only walk down the street holding someone’s hand, take someone out on a date, and enjoy what would follow after, but to have someone, to look into someone’s eyes without faking or hiding their true feelings. For I, too, like my father before me, had taken a vow, that if I was sent someone, I would nev
er forget the gift I’d been given. And at eighteen I knew that if I ever got the courage to go into that bar, that bar for people like me, I would quickly find the one I’d been waiting for all my life, someone with whom I could share my life. Maybe on the first night, perhaps the second, but certainly by the third or fourth visit at the latest.
I really believed that.
I had to. There was nothing else to hold on to during those years.
IT WAS A CHRISTMAS EVE two years later when I found him. The place wasn’t crowded, which is why I had the nerve to stay there once I got inside. Like me, he had marooned himself into a shadowed corner. He looked scared, unsure, gazing down at his large work boots. We quick-stared at each other through three label-peeled beers until we finally got the nerve to edge closer to each other; closer; closer still. When we finally began to talk, I became lost in the light of his eyes, and for once didn’t have to worry about what my own eyes might be saying.
WHEN THEY FOUND my father at the bottom of the jungle pit five days after he’d fallen into it, his body was riddled with knife wounds. Five dead Japanese soldiers were lying with him, like silent attendants. Second-degree burns covered 80 percent of Dad’s body. He told us he kept himself sane and alive by replaying in his head favorite ball games from his youth, play by play, batter by batter, crowd-roar by crowd-roar.
But what happened, Dad? What happened? How’d them Japs get there? Did you kill them all? How did you get burned?
He’d never give us any details. The glib facade would fade for a moment, the hazel eyes shuttering open for once. They hurt me, he’d say. Nothing more.
They hurt me.
I BROUGHT THE YOUNG MAN home to my apartment that first night because I knew he was the one, the one I’d been dreaming about all my life. Sometimes you just know. Two years older than I, he was a football coach for a suburban high school south of Boston, and the loneliness and hope that I thought I saw in his river-blue eyes were an invitation to try to heal his wounds, and my own at the same time. Sister Louisa in third grade had told us “You get into heaven two at a time; you’ve got to take someone with you.” I thought I finally understood what she meant.
I found Life in the bed that night, Life in all its glory and madness, in tangled passion I never knew I could feel. And when the morning light found him sleeping in my arms, I had to go downstairs to the kitchen so he wouldn’t see me crying.
I decided I’d make us Christmas breakfast. The kitchen clock was the same; the wallpaper too. But everything was entirely different, for upstairs in my bed, waiting for me with sleeping intention, was someone of my own, someone I could share my life with, someone I’d grow with. And we’d both be better for it, learning as much about ourselves as we’d learn about each other.
I practiced the words I would say to him as I ascended the stairs, how I would let him know I’d been waiting all my life for this. Tricky but truthful words that would indicate, but not scare oil. We are never content with just the experiences of our lives; we must talk about them too.
When I pushed open the bedroom door with a bare foot, the breakfast tray in my hands, he was pulling on his rumpled clothes. He avoided my eyes as he dressed, a modest stranger in a locker room.
“I ahh … made us some breakfast.”
“Oh … thanks, but I gotta go.” His sweater covered up the smooth mounds of his shoulders.
“Oh. Ahh … where?”
“Christmas dinner. I gotta be somewhere by noontime.” He made eye contact at last, smiled weakly, then began extracting his socks and shoes, mixed up with mine, from the foot of the bed.
“What … what time will you be back?” I asked. People didn’t do what we had done the night before without some tacit understanding that they were now a couple, did they?
“Back?” he asked, his voice sincere with curiosity.
Something cold began squirting inside my stomach.
“Back … here,” I said.
He cocked his head to the side, the way a dog will when you say an unfamiliar word to it.
“Ahh, look … John, I—”
“It’s Joe.”
“Oh—sorry, Joe. Look, I gotta get back home. My lover’ll be back from his parents soon and I need to be home before he is.”
“Your … lover?”
“Yeah,” he answered, beads of annoyance strung along the thread of his voice.
“Well, I… I mean, if you have a lover, how come we… . I mean, why did you—”
“You were just too good to resist, hot stuff,” he said, smiling tightly, like this was a line he’d grown tired of repeating. He put one foot, then the other, up on the rumpled sheets to tie his boots.
“Thanks for everything,” he said, grabbing his coat. “See you out and about, probably.” He snatched a piece of toast from the tray I still held as he left the bedroom. A minute later, still holding the tray, I heard his car start up and rumble out of the driveway.
WHEN MY FATHER DIED some years later, I was at the gym. I inexplicably stopped in the middle of my workout, didn’t even change, and drove directly to my parents’ house. I passed through their kitchen, my breeze fluttering a morning note on the table from Dad to Mom which began, “To my honey …” I climbed the stairs to my father’s bedroom with a baby-grand lump of dread upon my back. He had been in good health, but somehow I knew. I think he must have called me to his house that day.
I knocked on the closed bedroom door. I knew I’d get no answer, and I didn’t. I opened the door. He was half-in and half-out of his bed. Dad? Dad? It looked like he had tried to get out of the bed, then fallen back. Dad? I walked over to him, reached out a shaking hand. I touched him. He was dead. Dad! Dad! Oh, God—Dad!
IT’S NOT CHRISTMAS MORNING but it’s close enough. I awake to find a younger man sleeping next to me in my bed. I think hard, trying to dredge up his name from the landfill of last night. At length I do. But what of that? What it’s really time for now is a glass of water, a pause, a pondering of that elusive truth that still lies elsewhere, beyond this rumpled bed. I do this so seldom—and now I remember why.
Suddenly, elbow propped, he’s staring at me in rapt appraisal something else I vaguely remember (or disremember, as they say down South) in his oddly familiar eyes.
“Good morning,” he coos sleepily. Ever alert for such trivialities (my Early Warning Defense System, as it were), I notice his breath smells swampy, and he’s got a tiny blackhead in his right ear. “The first of many, I hope,” he continues, coming in too close. Something in his tone sets me on edge. You don’t even know me, I think. Or maybe you know me too well. I look at my watch.
“Well, I gotta get going,” I lie.
His face blurs into another mood, a portrait someone’s thrown water on.
“Oh. Where … wha—”
“I’ve got a lot of stuff to do today,” I explain. I jump out of bed and pull on a pair of plaid boxers that I paid eighteen dollars for, just for occasions like this.
“Oh.”
I say nothing. I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“Do you… . Maybe we can get together someti—”
“Look, Ken,” I say. “We had a great night. Really, it was … great. But I’m not really … I’m not really looking to get involved right now. With … anyone. I got a lot going on in my life right now.”
“It’s Kent,” he mumbles.
I WATCH HIM from my bedroom window exactly three minutes later. He brushes the snow off his blue, generic car in red-handed, gloveless chops. Then he hops in, starts it up, and pulls away.
“Welcome to the big leagues, kid,” I mutter, pulling down my shade.
LATER IN THE DAY I visit Dad’s grave. We have these little talks, you see: I can tell him everything, now that he’s gone. I tell him what a shitty year the Red Sox had, again, but how brilliantly they broke our hearts this time. We engage in small talk for a bit. Then he looks right through me.
“Another one-nighter last night, huh Joe?” he asks
. “Quo vadis, kiddo? Where’s all this getting you?”
I fidget, make a face, fold my arms across my chest.
“You writing a book?” I ask.
He doesn’t laugh.
“Still the wise guy, huh Joe?”
“I learned from the master,” I reply. Silence.
“Well? Tell me,” he says. “I’m still your father, even if I am dead.”
“So what if I did?” I finally blurt. “It’s a free country.”
“I always hated it when you’d say that as a kid.”
“Well, it’s true, Dad.”
“Maybe,” he says. “But there’s no such thing as a free lunch.”
There’s a long pause. The wind curls around the cement-colored branches of the bare trees, making an empty sound. Dad looks right through me again, seeing my insides, which feel vacant except for the residue of something long broken, like solidified egg yolk, yellowed and dried now—sterile, useless, but clinging still.
What happened to you, Joe? he asks. The boy who was gonna be president? The one who dreamed of just one person in his life, forever? My boy. My son. What happened to you?
I sigh. A long one.
You wouldn’t understand, Dad.
Of course I would. C’mon, tell me, Joe. What happened to you?
I close my eyes, stare him in the face. I lie down on his grave, stretch my arms out.
They hurt me, Dad, I whisper, the snow cold against my mouth.
They hurt me.
Once on Christmas Eve
Christmas Eve, and five of us were in a bar—separately. Christmas can unify, they say, but not on this night, not for us anyway. We must have been the equal and opposite effect for all the red-and-white happiness that glittered elsewhere, beyond these walls.
