Gods of Wood and Stone

by Mark Di Ionno

  “The Germans and Japs are kicking my ass. It’s like we never won the Big One. When my father built this business, the only luxury cars worth a turd in the whole world were American cars, except for Rolls and Bentley. Now we’re scrambling for market share in our own country. I need to restore American pride. Something’s gotta change. I need a little red, white, and blue. That’s where you come in.”

  He made a name-in-lights motion with his hand. “Joe Grudeck, local sports icon, as American as baseball and Cadillac.”

  Jimmy Mac spelled out the deal. The cash, off the books, and use of a new, fully insured car, for a couple of TV spots and newspaper ads, and a little glad-handing at dealership parties in the off-season. No more than an hour at the Christmas Sales Event and Presidents’ Day. Only an hour, Jimmy Mac promised, to meet preferred customers.

  “One or the other, each season,” Grudeck countered. “And the car is good. I don’t endorse anything I don’t use.”

  This was Sal’s rule. He always said, “First, you don’t want to look like a hypocrite. Second, you don’t want to come cheap.”

  “I wouldn’t want it any other way,” Jimmy Mac said as he stuck out his fat hand. “Welcome to the MacIntosh family, buddy.”

  * * *

  AND NOW HERE HE WAS, fifteen years later, still in the deal, endorsing Jimmy Mac’s wife.

  “Joanie. Wake up. Time to go.”

  She turned toward him and started to grab. Grudeck turned and headed to the bathroom. He pissed, took another Viagra, then tugged at himself until the blood flowed. Joe GRRR-ewww, he thought. A man like him had appearances to keep up. Men got the bone-crushing handshake, women got this.

  In the full-wall mirror under unforgiving halogen vanity lights, Grudeck saw himself. Still big and broad-shouldered, still strong and sinewy in the forearms and calves. But a thickening layer of soft flesh covered his shoulders and arms and thighs. Gravity tugged his chest, and time stole some muscle density in his biceps, quads, and abdomen. His gut was settling, his hips getting wide. Fat fuck, Grudeck said to himself. He grabbed a handful of belly and saw cellulite. All that club food. Time to seriously get back in the gym, maybe go back on andro, to trim up quick.

  Grudeck reached for the giant-sized bottle of Advil and threw down three.

  Now he stood before Joanie in his full Joe Grudeckness and gently shook her shoulder.

  “Baby . . . Joanie, baby . . . you got to go.”

  Her eyelids opened and closed, and she looked him up and down with a sleepy gin-and-vermouth hangover smile.

  “Omigod, look at you. Uummm. Just the way I remember. Were you like that all night?” Her voice was husky and she came up, mouth first.

  He backed away.

  “Baby, not now, you got to go. You got to go before the neighbors start talking.”

  “Oh, shit ’em. Let ’em talk. Serves Little Jimmy right.”

  Grudeck didn’t want to hear it: trophy friend of husband becomes revenge fuck for wife. Not that he was a victim. He just didn’t want to hear it.

  She grabbed at him, open mouth closing in.

  “No, no, no, you don’t,” he said as he caught her head. “Joanie, I got to get going here. Please.”

  The Hall news was coming in by mid-morning.

  He put on a robe and went to the kitchen and pressed the button on the automatic coffeemaker. The thing roared to life and began to steam and spit. Grudeck looked out the window overlooking the fairway on this cold January morning. The course was empty, the trees around it naked and shivering in the wind. God, Jersey was gray in winter. And barren.

  Joanie came out dressed and they had coffee.

  “Call me,” she said over her shoulder as she left.

  Grudeck stayed in his kitchen, looking out the window. Maybe he should call Sal? No, Sal was on top of it.

  He turned on the TV. Maybe there was news.

  On SportsCenter they were talking about him, the same over on Fox. Joe Grudeck, first time on the ballot. Let him in or make him wait? Our baseball analysts decide.

  Analysts. Like baseball needed to be analyzed. Like it was the world financial markets, or action in Congress.

  “Anal-ysts. More like asshole-ysts,” Grudeck said out loud, pretty proud of himself for thinking it up.

  The first guy—a former Globe writer who always acted like a friend—said first-year entry was reserved for only the greatest of the greats. Cobb. Ruth. Williams. DiMaggio.

  Look, Joe Grudeck is a Hall of Famer, no doubt about it. But a first-timer? No way. That’s the tradition. I know Joe Grudeck, I covered him for years, and if there’s one thing Joe Grudeck respects, it’s tradition.

  The second guy—a TV guy Grudeck knew never left the studio—went the other way.

  You just said he’s a Famer, no doubt, right? So if he deserves it, he deserves it. First year, second year. What is the difference? Why make him wait?

  The serious, combative tone embarrassed Grudeck. Terrorists were beheading people, the country was going back to war, the world was fucked up, but here on SportsCenter, Grudeck was the urgent issue. Grudeck knew what was coming next: the online poll and the tweets, so anonymous assholes could give their worthless opinions on Grudeck’s career. Tweets. Stupid word.

  Grudeck shut it off. The only thing that mattered was the actual vote, and Grudeck would know soon enough. He sat in the quiet, massaging his hands.

  Chapter Three

  Immortality came at 10:37. So said the digital clock on the convection oven Grudeck had never once used. His cell phone rang.

  It was Sal.

  “Joey. You’re in . . .”

  “By how much?”

  Joe Competitive, right to the end.

  “Almost unanimous, Joey. Eighty-five percent. And wait, it gets better. No one else made it. You’re alone. Jenks and Struby just fell short. No veterans, either. The whole party’s gonna be for you.”

  A few seconds passed. Grudeck didn’t know what to say. In his head, “I’m in the Hall” was not shouted with dream-come-true disbelief, but said in quiet matter-of-fact reflection. Expected. Anticlimactic. But real. Like death after a long illness.

  “You there?” Sal said.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I’m here.”

  More silence.

  “Hey, kid, you know how proud your father would be?” Sal finally said. “He would’ve never dreamed of this . . . I mean, he dreamed, but you surpassed his wildest expectations.”

  “I know, Sal, thanks.”

  “Back when you started, he was happy you just got drafted. When he asked if I could look at that first contract, he was hoping you’d earn enough to buy yourself a little house in Union, before you went to work in a real job . . . like high school coach. That’s what he was hoping for. When he got sick and came up to my office to fix his will, the last thing he said was, ‘Sal, make sure Joey takes care of what he earns, and make sure he takes care of his mother.’ Then you became a star, then a bigger star. Now look at you.”

  “Thanks, Sallie. Thanks. I couldn’t have done it without you.”

  “Ah, bullshit,” Sal said. “But, hell, I did my best, for a small-town lawyer.”

  “You did great by me, Sal, I have no complaints. Look at my life.”

  * * *

  GRUDECK LIVED AT FAR HILLS national, on a Tom Fazio–designed golf course in a free townhouse, which he got in exchange for a little glad-handing and playing with members once in a while. Sal got him the deal with Dom Iosso, a billionaire developer, who built the course on the former estate of the car designer John DeLorean, “in the rolling hillsides of New Jersey’s estate region,” the brochures said. “The equestrian country where Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Malcolm Forbes, Doris Duke, Joe Grudeck, and many other ‘rich and famous’ made their homes.”

  Joey Grudeck, son of a Polack sheet metal fabricator and his Italian housewife from down in blue-collar Union, was now one of them. Iosso added him to the brochure when their deal was done.

  Rich. A millio
naire a few times over. His last contract paid him $8 mil a year for three seasons, all deferred because he was still living off deferments from his previous contract, a six-year deal at $9 mil per. In all, his deferments would pay him at least half a mil per year until the day he died.

  And famous. A big name, bigger than any of the CEOs or CFOs he met at the club, the kind of guy his father would have hated. But they weren’t household names like Jackie O, Forbes, and Duke, who were all dead anyway. These guys weren’t personalities; they were just finest-school corporate game-winners. Guys who got rewarded by their boards for skimming quality, reducing work force, and outsourcing jobs, until they couldn’t cut it anymore and the boards found new blood. Some were retired, golden parachute guys who failed at places like AT&T and Merrill Lynch. But who knew them? Joe Grudeck, everybody knew.

  * * *

  “CALL YOUR MOTHER,” Sal said, “before she hears it somewhere else.”

  “Sal. Do me a favor. Call her for me. Tell her I’ll ride down in a little while. I just want to, you know, absorb it, for a little while.”

  “No, you should do it, Joe. She should hear it from you. I mean, I’ll do it if you really want, but . . .”

  “Yeah, you’re right, Sal. I’ll go.”

  “Okay. What about the media? I’ll write a statement, for now, but do you want to do a presser? Your contract with the club says you got to do it there, but screw that. Do it where you want. Commissioner said you could do it on Park Avenue. Whatever you want.”

  “I’ll go into the city. But I should do one here.”

  “Like, what, three or four? They’ll all want it for the five o’clock news.”

  “Whatever.”

  “I’ll call Dom and let him know we’ll set something up at the club for tomorrow. He’ll want his face in there.”

  “Fine. Good idea.”

  “And you know, your stock just went up. All the deals we have in place, and the merchandising . . .”

  “Another time, Sal. Just give me a few minutes now.”

  Grudeck put the phone down and thought of a schoolboy joke.

  What do you do after you climb Mount Everest?

  You climb down.

  He was going into the Hall of Fame.

  Now what?

  This wasn’t what he’d expected. He’d expected to be thrilled, elated, choking back tears, all that other stuff. Instead, he felt uneasy. Part of it was what happened in Syracuse. His name would be back in the news, the target on his back. Maybe one of them would sell her story. But probably not.

  The bigger part was this:

  Now what?

  The question he feared most.

  He saw it coming a few years ago, playing golf and glad-handing for a living; living off his name. So now what? Five years retired, and still no clue. He’d used the Hall vote as yet another excuse not to answer that question, but here it was.

  He shut the ringer off on his phone, and just sat there awhile.

  Chapter Four

  Horace was in Pompey, sixty-eight miles west of Cooperstown, loading the museum’s beat Ford Econoline with some dead farmer’s junk: a moldy cider press, a dried and torn leather harness, and a plow so rusted the blades were flaking.

  This was a growing pain-in-the-ass of his job. Every time some old farmer or farmer’s widow died, the children wanted to donate the “antique” tools forgotten on the property. Horace knew the deal; it was a cleanout before barns, sheds, and farmhouses were razed and land sold to developers. And it helped assuage the guilt for selling Pap’s land. His old tools were kept for posterity, they reasoned. At least we did that.

  Because of cuts in government arts funding, the museum laid off most of the maintenance staff, so while they were home collecting unemployment, reenactors and craftsmen were asked to do the donkey work. They could choose one of their off days—the museum was closed on Mondays and Tuesdays—for straight time, or do it on regular workdays. Horace took the sixth day. First, he needed the money. Second, if he missed a day, they might find a part-time blacksmith to do his job while he was out collecting junk, and might decide a part-timer was all they really needed. Horace resented this, a double-dagger to the spectrum of the middle class. Not only did he have to work a six-day week to make ends meet, but as a historian with a master’s degree, he was taking the job of a Cooperstown townie with (maybe) a high school GED.

  Not only that, but these trips never yielded artifacts of value. Anything discovered in these barns, the museum already had in triplicate, at least, and the stuff went from one forgotten corner to another—from some decrepit barn to the museum’s huge storage sheds in Cooperstown.

  When he made this observation, the bosses countered: “We can’t purport to keep farm tradition alive, and then tell well-meaning country folk they should haul Grandpap’s cider press to the landfill.”

  So here was Horace, layered up in Carhartt, hauling junk out of a sagging barn more gray than red, where the surface inches of exposed, weathered wood well outnumbered the chips of remaining paint. The farm was vacant, the barn empty. Everything of value had been sold at auction, the animals sent to slaughter. Inside, the smell of matted, unpitched hay and the acrid residual stench of cow manure was ingrained in the rafters and hung in the damp winter air. It stung Horace’s nostrils and his eyes watered. He was alone, on 300-some acres, the sole pallbearer for yet another farm funeral, mourning the dying simplicity of his grandfather’s time. This one hit home; Pompey was in Onondaga County, where Horace was from. He tripped on a pitchfork covered by a clump of hay, and stumbled enough to flame his temper. “God damn it,” he said under his breath, even though no one was around to hear him.

  * * *

  HORACE GREW UP IN LAFAYETTE, a town off Interstate 81, just a thirty-minute commute north to Syracuse. It had been one of a dozen farm hamlets off Highway 20’s east-west route through New York State’s rural midsection, but when the north-south interstate came through, the city spilled out. Factory workers, looking for yards and driveways, wanted cheap housing off I-81, and developers found a new market for old farmland. The town went from burg to ’burb, just like that. The Muellers lived in a plain split-level on a 75-by-150 lot, surrounded by houses built in the 1950s, with the same property dimensions, and the only evidence of their agricultural ancestry were stories Horace’s grandfather told and a backyard hops patch where the old man grew just enough to brew his own beer.

  The grandfather, Helmut Mueller, Horace’s “Opa,” was the last of the German hops growers who worked for the Busch family in Otsego County. His great-great-uncles brought the know-how with them from the Hallertau region of Bavaria in the 1820s, and transplanted their crops to supply America’s growing lager industry. Opa grew up in Germany, but came to the United States as a young man at the turn of the century. But in 1909, a “blue mold” wiped out most of the Hallertau variety, by far the most common in New York State. What the blue mold didn’t kill, Prohibition finished off. By the time the taps reopened, the hops industry became entrenched out West. New, disease-resistant varieties were blossoming in the Sonoma Valley, and the long California growing season made West Coast hops cheaper for even East Coast brewers. Helmut Mueller was barely out of his thirties when his livelihood became extinct. He moved out of Otsego County and found orchard work in Cortland. After World War II, those jobs, too, began to disappear as mechanized farming and the new Interstate Highway System made it impossible for local growers to compete with conglomerates. Washington State apples came East faster, and were genetically engineered to be warehoused longer.

  When Horace was a boy, Opa taught him to build a hops arbor, and how to tie and nurture the plants, and pick the buds. But the old man’s enthusiasm for it was a shallow last gasp, and at night, Helmut Mueller would sit on the back deck, looking lost and detached, like a nursing home patient staring out a picture window into a world he no longer recognized. He would sit, still, with his hands folded in his lap, and look down at the fireflies settled in his hop
s patch. Next to him would be his homemade beer in a tall glass, covered in running sweat beads, as the contents grew warm and undrinkable.

  Horace’s father, Hans Mueller, who fought against his ancestral homeland in World War II, came home to technical school on the GI bill, then got work as a tool-and-die machinist at the bank-safe plant in Syracuse. The family moved again, this time to LaFayette. When Hans was laid off in the 1980s, he rented a dormant apple orchard from a grower’s widow. With old Helmut’s help, he tried to return to agriculture. Horace remembered stacking bushels as a young teen, listening to his father and grandfather grunt to each other in German. But the Macoun apples the dead guy had grown were old-fashioned by then, replaced by sweeter and prettier varieties like Jonagold, Jonamac, and Empire, all developed by Cornell’s ag school. Hans Mueller gave it ten years, then quit. Early retirement, he called it, and Horace saw the same resignation on his face that he’d seen on his grandfather’s. When Opa died, Horace’s father inherited that complete look of the lost; the generation between a man and mortality was erased. He measured his life differently; no longer day-to-day, but in sum total. And so Hans Mueller, like Helmut Mueller, left no legacy of land, or handed-down craft: just a house in LaFayette owned by a distant bank, and a tool-and-die skill for which there was no factory home.

  * * *

  TO UNDERSTAND WHAT HAPPENED, and why it happened, Horace chose history. It came to him one day, thirty years before as a teenager, while he sat under a tree overlooking the valley and snuck a few of his father’s cigarettes. It was a late-September twilight, and cloud breaks in the western sky looked lit by torches. Sun rays shot heavenward from the ridge lines on the horizon, like spokes of dusty orange and gold. The beauty of it moved Horace, then a high school senior, to never leave. It was a sign from God, a call to vocation. A revelation.