by Carlson, Ron
It was a page from my book, and I jumped right in. “We could go to the game,” I told her. “The Gulls aren’t very good, but I’ve got an old classmate who’s coach, and the park organist is worth the price of admission.”
At this she smiled so that just the tips of her front teeth showed and stood on one leg so that her shape in those Levi’s cut a hard curve against the door behind her. I heard myself saying, “And the beer is cold and it’s not going to rain.” I explained that I didn’t have a car and gave her my address. As a rule I try not to view women as their parts, but—as I said—my moaning had been interrupted and the whole era has me in a hammerlock, and as Lynn turned, her backside involuntarily brought to mind a raw word from some corner of my youth: tail.
THAT NIGHT as I eased into her car I realized that this was the first time I had been in a car alone with a woman for four weeks. For a moment, nine or ten seconds, it actually felt like a date. Ten tops. Though I hadn’t accomplished anything with my life so far, I was showered and shined and the water in my hair was evaporating in a promising way, and we were going to the ball game.
I looked over at Lynn in her black silky skirt and plum sweater. She looked like a lot of women today: good. I couldn’t tell if this was the outfit of a woman in deep physical need or not. The outfit didn’t look overtly sexual, or maybe it did but so did everything else. And then I realized that in the muggy backwash late in this sour month, I felt the faint but unmistakable physical stir of desire. I’ve got to admit, it was a relief. I took it as a sign of well-being, possibly good health. It was a feeling that well-directed could get me somewhere.
As we arrived, turning onto Thirteenth South under the jutting cement bleachers of Derks Field, I smiled at myself for being so simple. I glanced again at Lynn’s wardrobe. You can’t tell a thing anymore by the way people dress; it only helps in court. No one dresses like a prostitute these days, not even the prostitutes. And besides, in my eight-year-old Sears khakis and blanched blue Oxford-cloth shirt from an era so far bygone only the Everly Brothers would have remembered it, I looked like the person in trouble, the person in deep, inarticulate need.
IN THE ambiguity in which American ballparks exist, and they are a ragtag bunch, Derks Field is it. It is simply the loveliest garden of a small ballpark in the western United States. The stadium itself is primarily crumbling concrete poured the year I was born and named after John C. Derks, the sports editor at the Tribune who helped found the Pacific Coast League, Triple A Baseball, years ago. Though it could seat just over ten thousand, the average crowd these days was a scattered four hundred or so. This little Eden is situated, like most ballparks, in a kind of tough low-rent district spotted with small warehouses and storage yards for rusting heavy equipment.
As a boy I had come here and seen Dick Stuart play first base for the Bees; it was said he could hit the ball to Sugarhouse, which was about six miles into deep center. And my college team had played several games here my senior year while the campus field was being moved from behind the Medical School to Fort Douglas, and I mean Derks was a field that made you just want to take a few slides in the rich clay, dive for a liner in the lush grass.
Lynn and I parked in the back of the nearby All-Oil gas station and walked through a moderately threatening bevy of ten-year-old street kids milling outside the ticket office. When the game started, they would fan out across the street and wait to fight over foul balls, worth a buck apiece at the gate.
I love the moment of emerging into a baseball stadium, seeing all the new distance across the expanse of green grass made magical by the field lights bright in the incipient twilight. The bright cartoon colors on the ads of the home-run fence make a little carnival of their own, and above the “401 Feet” sign in straightaway center, the purple mountains of the Wasatch Front strike the sky, holding their stashes of snow like pink secrets in the last daylight.
I felt right at home. There was Midgely, the only guy who stayed with baseball from our college squad, standing on the dugout steps just like a coach is supposed to look; there were all the teenage baseball wives sitting in the box behind the dugout, their blond hair buoyant in the fresh air, their babies struggling in the lap blankets; there was the empty box that our firm bought for the season and which no one ever used; there beyond first in the general admission were Benito Antenna’s fans, a grouping of eight or nine of the largest women in the state come to cheer their true love; and there riding the summer air like the aroma of peanuts and popcorn and cut grass were the strains of Steiner Brightenbeeker’s organ cutting a quirky and satanic version of “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” I could see the Phantom of the Ballpark himself pounding out the melody in his little green cell, way up at the top of the bleachers next to the press box.
“What?” Lynn said, returning from a solo venture underneath the bleachers. She handed me a beer and a bag of peanuts. She had insisted on buying the tickets, too. Evidently I was being hosted at the home park tonight.
“Nothing. That guy’s an old friend of mine.” I pointed up at Steiner. Lynn was being real nice, I guess, but I felt a little screwy. Seeing Steiner and being in a ballpark made me think for a minute the world might want me back. He had played at our parties.
And it is my custom with people I don’t know to pay my own way, at least, but as she had handed me the plastic cup, I had accepted it without protest. My financial picture precluded many old customs, even those grounded on common sense. I would keep track and pay her back sometime. Besides, early in the game, so to speak, I didn’t have the sense not to become indebted to this woman.
“Don’t you want a beer?” I asked her. She demurred, and retrieved a flask of what turned out to be brandy from her purse along with a silver thimble. I don’t have the official word on this, but I don’t think you drink brandy at the ballpark. Certain beverages are married to their sports, and I still doubt whether baseball, even the raw, imprecise nature of Triple A, had anything to do with brandy. Brandy, I thought, taking another look at my date as we stood for Steiner’s version of “The Star Spangled Banner,” which he sprinkled with “Yellow Submarine,” brandy is the drink for quoits.
I don’t know; I was being a jerk. It wasn’t a first. Blame it this time on the eternal unrest that witnessing baseball creates in my breast. There you are ten yards from the field where these guys are playing. So close to the fun. I loved baseball. The thing I regretted most was that I hadn’t pressed on and played a little minor-league ball. Midgely himself and Snyder, the coach, talked to me that last May, but I was already lost. Nixon was in the White House and baseball just didn’t seem relevant activity.
That isn’t my greatest regret. I regretted ten other things with equal vigor—well, twelve say. Twelve tops. One in particular. Things that I wanted not to have happened. I wanted Lily back. I wanted to locate the little gumption in my heart that would allow me to step up and go on with my life. I wanted to be fine and strong and quit the law and reach deep and write a big book that some woman on a train would crush to her breast halfway through and sigh. But I could see myself on the table at the autopsy, the doctor turning to the class and looking up from my chest cavity a little puzzled and saying, “I’m glad you’re all here for this medical first. He didn’t have any. There’s no gumption here at all.”
I took a big sip of the beer and tried to relax. Brandy’s okay in a ballpark, a peccadillo; it was me that was wrong. Lynn rooting around in her big leather purse for her silver flask and smiling so sweetly under the big lights, her face that mysterious thing, varnished with red and amber and the little blue above the eyes, Lynn was just being nice. I thought that: she’s just being nice. Then I had the real thought: it’s a tough thing to take, this niceness, good luck.
The most prominent feature of any game at Derks is the approximate quality of the pitching. By the third inning we had seen just over a thousand pitches. These kids could throw hard, but it
was the catcher who was doing all the work. The wind-up, the pitch, the catcher’s violent leap and stab to prevent the ball from imbedding itself in the wire backstop. Just watching him spearing all those wild pitches hurt my knees: up down up down.
I started in, as I always do, explaining the game to Lynn, the fine points. What the different stances indicated about the batters; why the outfielders shifted; how the third baseman is supposed to move to cover the return throw after a move to first. Being a frustrated player, like every other man in America, I wanted to show my skill.
After a few more beers, I settled down. The air cooled, the mountains dimmed, the bright infield rose in the light. I leaned back and just tried to unravel. I listened to Steiner’s music, now the theme song from Exodus, and I could faintly hear his fans singing, “This land is mine, God gave this land to me . . .” Steiner made me smile. He played what he wanted, when he wanted. In nine innings you could hear lots of Chopin and Liszt, Beethoven, Bartok, and Lennon. He’d play show tunes and commercial jingles. He played lots of rock and roll, and I once heard his version of An American in Paris that lasted an inning and a half. He refused to look out and witness the sport that transpired below him. He had met complaints that he didn’t get into the spirit of the thing by playing the heady five-note preamble to “Charge!” one night seventy times in a row, until not only was no one calling “Charge!” at the punch line, but the riff had acquired a tangible repulsion in the ears of the management (next door in the press box), and they were quick to have it banished forever. As long as the air was full of organ music, they were happy.
When Steiner did condescend and play “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” he did it in a medley with “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” by Iron Butterfly and “Sympathy for the Devil” by the Rolling Stones. The result, obviously, was an incantation for demon worship which his fans loved. And his fans, a group of ten or twelve young kids, done punk, sat below the organ loft with their backs to the game, bobbing their orange heads to Steiner’s urgent melodies. This also mollified the management’s attitude toward Steiner: the dozen general admission tickets he sold to his groupies alone.
As the game progressed through a series of walks, steals, overthrows, and passed balls, Lynn sipped her brandy and chattered about being out, how fresh it was, how her husband had only taken her to stockholders’ meetings, how she didn’t really know what to say (that got me a little; shades of actual dating), how being divorced was so different from what she supposed, not really any fun, and how grateful she was that I had agreed to come.
I held it all off. “Come on, this is great. This is baseball.”
“Phyllis said you liked baseball.”
I didn’t lie: “Phyllis is a shrewd cookie.”
“She’s a good lawyer, but her husband is a shit too.” Lynn tossed back her drink. “You know, Jack, I honestly didn’t know anything about marriage when I married my husband. I mean anything.” Lynn sipped her brandy. “Clark came back from his mission and he seemed so ready, we just did it. What a deal. He told me later, this is much later, in counseling that he’d spent a lot of time on his mission planning, you know, our sex life. I mean, planning it out. It was awful.” She lifted her tiny cup again, tossing back the rest of the drink.
“But,” she began again, extending the word to two syllables, “divorce is worse. I don’t like being alone. At all. But it’s more than that.” She looked into my face. “It’s just . . . different. Hard.” I saw her put her teeth in her lip on the last word, and she closed her eyes. When they opened again, she printed up a smile and showed me the flask. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like any?”
“No,” I said, kicking back my chair and standing. “I’ll get another beer. Be right back.”
Under the grandstand, I stood in the beer line and tried to pretend she hadn’t shown me her cards. A friend of mine who has had more than his share of difficulty with women not his wife, especially young women not his wife, real young women, called each episode a “scrape.” That’s a good call. I’d had scrapes too. My second year in law school I took Lisa Krinkel (now Lisa Krink, media person) on a day trip to the mountains. We had a picnic on the Provo River, and I used my skills as a fire-tender and picnic host, along with the accessories of sunshine and red wine, to lull us both into a nifty last-couple-on-earth reverie as we boarded my old car in the brief twilight and headed for home. As always, I hadn’t really done anything, except some woody wooing, ten kisses and fingers run along her arm; after all—though I might pretend differently for a day—I was going with Lily by then. Lisa and I pretended differently all the way home. I remember thinking: What are you doing, Jack? But Lisa Krinkel against me in the front seat kept running her fingernails across my chest in a chilling wave down to my belt buckle, untucking my shirt in the dark and using those fingernails lightly on my stomach, her mouth on my neck, warm, wet, warm, wet, until my eyes began to rattle. Finally, I pulled into the wide gravel turnout by the Mountain Meadow Café and told her either to stop it or deliver.
I wish I could remember exactly how I’d said that. It was probably something like: “Listen, we’d better not keep that up because it could lead to something really terrible which we both would regret forever and ever.” But as a man, you can say that in such an anguished way, twisting in the seat obviously in the agonizing throes of acute arousal, a thing—you want her to know—so fully consuming and omnivorous that no woman (even the one who created this monstrous lust) could understand. You writhe, breathing melodramatic plumes of air. You roll your eyes and adjust your trousers like an animal that would be better off in every way put out of its misery. And, as I had hoped, Lisa Krinkel did put me out of my misery with a sudden startling thrust of her hand and then another minute of those electric fingernails and some heavy suction on my neck.
Then the strangest thing happened. When she was finished with my handkerchief, she asked me if we could pray. Well, that took me by surprise. I was just clasping my belt, but I clasped my hands humble as a schoolboy while she prayed aloud primarily to be delivered from evil, which was something I too hoped to be delivered from, but I sensed the prayer wasn’t wholly for me as she sprinkled it liberally with her boyfriend’s name: Tod. She went on there in the front seat for twenty minutes. I mean if prayers work, then this one was adequate. That little “Tod” every minute or so kept me alert right to the amen. We mounted the roadway and drove on in the dark. It had all changed. Now it seemed real late and it seemed a lot like driving my sister home from her date with Tod. Later I started seeing her on television, where she was a reporter for Channel 3, and it was real strange. Her hair was different, of course, blond, a professional requirement, and her name was different, Krink, for some reason, and I could barely remember if I had once had a scrape with this woman (including a couple of four-day nail scratches), if she was a part of my history at all. I mean, watching the news some nights it seemed impossible that I had ever prayed with Lisa Krink.
One of the primary cowardly acts of the late twentieth century is standing beneath the bleachers finishing a new beer before buying another and joining your date. I stood there in the archway, smacking my shoes in a little puddle of water on the cement floor, and tossed back the last of my beer. How lost can you be? The water was from an evaporative cooler mounted up in the locker-room window. It had been dripping steadily onto the floor for a decade. Amazing. I could fix that float seal in ten minutes. I’d done it at our house when Lily and I first moved in. And yet, I stood out of sight wondering how I was going to fix anything else. I bought another beer and went out to join Lynn. Just because you’re born into the open world doesn’t mean you’re not going to have to hide sometimes.
Lynn looked at me with frank relief. I could read it. She thought I had left. I probably should have, but you can’t leave a woman alone on this side of town, regardless of how bad the baseball gets.
The quality of Triple A baseball is always strained. I co
uld try to explain all the reasons, but there are too many to mention. It is not just a factor of skill or experience, because some of the most dextrous nineteen-year-olds in the universe took the field at the top of every inning along with two or three seasoned vets, guys about to be thirty who had seen action a year or two in the majors. No, it wasn’t ability. The problem came most aptly under the title “attitude,” and that attitude is best defined as “not giving a shit.” It’s exacerbated by the fact that not one game in a dozen got a headline and three paragraphs in the Register and none of the games were televised. And who—given the times—is going to leave his feet to stop a hot grounder down the line if his efforts are not going to be on TV?
Night fell softly over the lighted ballpark, unlike the dozens of flies that pelted into the outfield. The game bore on and on, both squads using every pitcher in the inventory, and Midgely and the other coach getting as much exercise as anyone by lifting their right and then their left arms to indicate which hurler should file forward next. The pitchers themselves marched quietly from the bull pen to the mound and then twenty pitches later to the dugout and then (we supposed) to the showers. By the time the game ended, after eleven (final score 21 to 16), there were at least four relievers who had showered, shaved, and dressed and were already home in bed.
In an economy measure, the ballpark lights were switched off the minute the last out, a force at second, was completed, and as the afterimage of the field burned out on our eyeballs, we could hear the players swearing as they bumbled around trying to pick their ways into the dugout. Lynn and I fell together and she took my arm so I could lead us stumbling out of the darkened stadium. It was kind of nice right there, a woman on my arm for a purpose, the whole world dark, and through it all the organ music, Steiner Brightenbeeker’s mournful version of “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” Outside, under the streetlights, the three dozen other souls who had stuck it out all nine innings dispersed, and Lynn and I crossed the street to her car. I looked back at the park. Above the parapet I could see Steiner’s cigarette glowing up there in space. I pointed him out to Lynn and started to tell her that I had learned a lot from him, but it didn’t come out right. He had always been adamant about his art. He was the one who told me to do something on purpose for art; to go without for it. To skip a date and write a story. That if I did, by two A.M. I’d have fifteen pages and be flying. I couldn’t exactly explain it to her, so I just mentioned that he had done the music for the one play I’d ever written a thousand years ago and let it go at that.
