Gods of Wood and Stone

by Mark Di Ionno

  “Enough!” Horace yelled. He slammed down the handle and gripped Sally by the shoulders. His hands surrounded them, and she felt his fingers digging into her shoulder blades.

  “Let go of me! . . . What the hell are you doing?”

  In all the disagreements and fights over the years, Horace had never manhandled her and she couldn’t control the fear on her face. “Jesus, you’re hurting me.”

  Horace didn’t loosen his grip. He was looking at her with a concentrated anger, one that had been building for years, and now came exploding and spewing out.

  “Now you listen to me, goddamnit,” he said, shaking her to punctuate his sentences. “I’m sick of you making me out to be some kind of monster. I’m the man of this house, goddamnit. I’m going to say what I want, and voice my opinion on how my son should be raised and not be ridiculed or admonished for it. You think you have all the answers. What the hell do you know about raising a boy that I don’t? When the hell were you a boy? What makes your way right and my way wrong?”

  He let go of her abruptly, and only then did she begin to cry.

  “I’m just afraid for him,” she said.

  “Of what? That he’s going to get a blister on his hand? That he’s going to learn something about his own ancestry besides all the crap they teach him in school? That he’s going to learn to look at our garbage culture with a skeptical eye rather than become just another fat pig consumer? I want him to pull those fucking plugs out of his ears, to tear himself away from those fucking video games, to not kill whole weekends watching fucking sports on TV . . . to think, for fuck’s sake! Tell me, once and for all, what the fucking hell is wrong with that? What in fuck’s name, for fuck’s sake, is fucking wrong with that!”

  “It’s the way you do it . . . just like you are right now. You’re so harsh, you’re so angry,” she said, wiping the tears off her face.

  “It’s called courage,” Horace yelled. “I’m facing this head-on, in my own house . . . I’d like to hear you say that you admire my courage, or you value my individuality. Just once! Just one fucking time!”

  He picked up the handle, knowing it would menace her, then hurled it into the woodpile.

  “You know something, Sally?” he said, now quietly. “I’m afraid for him, too. I’m afraid he’ll grow up to be just another guy who thinks work means skimming as much money as they can, and then hides in all the idiotic diversions this once-great country now calls its culture.”

  “You’re afraid of more than that, Horace,” Sally said dryly. “You’re afraid of a lot more than that. You’re the one who is running away. You’ve buried yourself in this bizarre philosophy . . . this bizarre character . . . because you’re afraid.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You . . . you hide . . . you’re in this safe place where you can snipe and criticize but not take the risks of trying to really make it in life. You have your little shop, and your little costume and your little salary, and you’re nice and safe, tucked away to tell everybody else what’s wrong with them. Well, I don’t want to be like that and neither does Michael. I don’t want to live like this and neither does Michael.”

  “Speak for yourself. Don’t speak for him.”

  “He speaks for himself all the time . . . you just don’t listen.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “It’s true. You don’t really know anything about him. You think you do, but you don’t. Everything he says or does, you twist around—”

  “That’s not true. Don’t tell me I don’t know my own son.”

  “Okay. Who’s his best friend? Who’s his favorite teacher? What girl does he like? Who’s his favorite band? His favorite ballplayer? Who’s the coach of his baseball team?”

  Horace stared at her for a beat or two.

  “Look, just because I don’t keep up with my son’s social life doesn’t mean I don’t understand him—”

  “Then what does it mean? What does it mean that you can’t answer these questions?”

  “This is the kind of shit I won’t stand for,” Horace said. “You say I’m scared? What about all the people out there—like you—who hide behind their kids? You gave up being yourself, being my wife, because it was easier to go around being Michael’s baseball-bag carrier than to face your own grown-up life. So you dote on him, kill your weekends watching him play sports. All we talk about is him. Do you even know who I am?”

  It was a question that, as soon as it came out of his mouth, he wished he hadn’t asked. Sally turned her back on him.

  “I thought I did. Now I’m not so sure.” She waited for him to come to her, to put his arms around her. She wanted to sink into him, like she used to, and feel safe. She even let herself sway toward him, but Horace missed it. He stood his ground, and in that instant, Sally had a moment of clarity.

  They were through.

  “What is there to be unsure about? I constantly tell you who I am,” Horace said. “It’s all out there, in the great wide open.”

  “No, Horace, it’s not. You, the real Horace Mueller, is in there hiding. You disappeared somewhere inside the blacksmith. You’re right. I don’t know who you are anymore, and I . . . I can’t . . .”

  She turned toward him and looked out at the sun going down over the ridge beyond Otsego Lake. It could be so beautiful up here, she thought.

  “What are you saying, Sally?”

  “I’m saying I’ve had enough. And I think you have, too. I’m saying I’m scared. I think you need help. I think you need to be alone for a while and figure out what is happening to you. I think you need to figure out what you’re afraid of. I think you need to figure out who you want to be for the rest of your life. If you’re going to be this man, this man so out of touch with me, Michael, and everything, I can’t stay with you.”

  He walked past her without saying a word, and she looked straight ahead at the torch-lit western sky. She heard his heavy footsteps on the crying floorboards of the porch and waited for the violent slam of the door. Instead, Horace shut it quietly, and it closed with a gentle click.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Induction Day was eight weeks away, and Stacy agreed to meet Grudeck in his place or hers every week to hear his stories. Grudeck warned her he was lost—he didn’t really know what he wanted to say—and was afraid it might be a waste of time.

  “Don’t try to figure it all out,” she advised him. “Just talk. The more you talk, the more you’ll figure it all out. That’s why women have girlfriends.”

  “So you’ll be my girlfriend?” Grudeck asked.

  “More like . . . we’ll be girlfriends.” Stacy laughed.

  God, she was still so cute, Grudeck thought.

  On the first night, Stacy was struck by how antiseptic his place was. Spotless, without clutter, without anything.

  She looked at the few plaques on the wall, a few pictures of him in action or posing in uniform.

  “Where’s all your stuff?” she asked.

  “The rest is all in storage.”

  “You planning on moving?”

  “No. Why?”

  She started to say, but checked herself because she couldn’t avoid using the word empty.

  “No reason.”

  Grudeck gave her a quick tour. It was show-model stock: various shades of earth tones on the walls and floors and, since this was equestrian country, the hunter-green and foxhunt-red window treatments. His bedding matched, and once again Stacy got a glimpse of him as an unfinished man. A boy in a puffy-faced, middle-aged body.

  “Okay . . . let’s get started,” she said.

  They sat at the glass-top dining table and Stacy took out a folder and two legal pads. She pushed one toward him.

  “I’ll take notes, but if something else comes to your mind while we’re talking, just write a word or two to remind yourself later,” she said. “It will help unclutter your mind.”

  “Okay.”

  “So where do you want to begin?”

  �
��It begins with you.”

  “With me?”

  “Yes. You said something to me in high school that stuck with me. It was something like, ‘I’m just as good an artist as you are an athlete.’ Remember?”

  “Yeah. I was trying to knock you off your high horse,” Stacy said, but the fact that he remembered touched her like an unexpected gift of flowers. “I was saying athletes get so much attention, but there’s millions of talented people who are just as good at their jobs.”

  “I got that,” Grudeck said. “I’m not stupid. But here’s my point. For years, I used that as a relaxation technique. Every time I would come to the plate, I would look up at all those faces in the crowd and think, ‘Some of these people are real pros, too,’ and for some reason it took the pressure off. It made me feel, like, regular. Does that sound crazy?”

  “No,” Stacy said. “Not at all.”

  “But then, that started to change. A few years in, when I scanned the crowd, I didn’t see that in people anymore. I only saw the drunks and fools. Fat guys wearing my jersey really bothered me. Here I was busting my ass to stay in playing shape, working my whole life to earn it, and these slobs can buy the same shirt in Walmart.”

  Stacy first wanted to say he should have been honored but, the way he explained it, she got his point, and made her first note.

  He told her a story about the first time he heard the chant “Grudeck sucks.” It was in Yankee Stadium, so early in his career he was surprised that he inspired hatred from the enemy. But after a couple of clutch hits in a three-game series, there it was, loud and clear. “Grudeck sucks.”

  “My mother was at that game. And to her suck was a dirty word. I was embarrassed. I wanted to climb up in the stands and kick somebody’s ass. It was like, to them, I wasn’t a real person, like . . .”

  “. . . you were a man without a mother,” Stacy said.

  “Exactly. This is one of the things I want to get to. Athletes always lie and say the fans don’t bother them, but when it gets personal . . . well, you want to kill somebody.”

  There was a particular night in Comiskey later that season, he told her, when he thought he figured out why crowds had changed.

  “One thing I always loved about baseball when I started was this restless quiet that settled over a ballpark when nothing was happening,” Grudeck said. “You could hear people moving around, vendors hawking, a conversation here, a lone clapper there, the voice of maybe one egomaniac yelling down. But mostly it was quiet. I’d look into the stands and see people checking their scorecards, talking baseball with the people around them.”

  It gave the game dignity, Grudeck always thought. Not like the forced hush of tennis or golf, because nothing rocked like a baseball stadium when there was something worth cheering about. But the sounds of 35,000, or 40,000, or 45,000 people waiting quietly for something to happen was always kind of . . . civilized.

  “It wasn’t like football. Nobody painted their faces or wore costumes to baseball,” Grudeck said. “Baseball—and those old-fashioned organ riffs—had class.”

  But then it changed. It was as if the game itself wasn’t good enough anymore. Fans had to be entertained constantly. Music raged between innings, now even between pitches. The electronic scoreboards exploded with graphics and horse-race games and Three Stooges bits. It told people when to clap. When to cheer. When to boo. In between innings there were fuzzy mascots running around or riding three-wheeled motorcycles, teasing the opposing players, busting the umpires’ chops. Some of it was funny, Grudeck had to admit, but most of it was stupid. The towels, the thundersticks, all the gimmicks. It all felt cheap to him.

  “Here’s the point,” he told Stacy. “All that noise let the assholes up there hide behind it and become more abusive. They could scream down at you and know you couldn’t figure out who it was coming from. Unless they were drunk, then they’d stare and point at you, knowing damn well you couldn’t climb over fifteen, twenty rows to pound the living shit out of them. Just once, I wanted to catch one in the parking lot or the hotel lobby.”

  “Then what?” Stacy asked.

  “Then . . . I don’t know. Maybe just . . . There was this time at Comiskey, when this pimply, stringy-haired skank started screaming at me after I hit a home run. ‘You suck, Grudeck. You suck, you suck job. You fucking suck!’ On and on. The guys with her, these three college-aged mutts, were laughing along . . . ‘You suck, you suck job’ . . . and high-fived her and each other. They were only ten rows in, and I really wanted to go over the wall and backhand her. Instead, I just put my head down and I felt the anger burn in my gut. She started again when I got up a couple of innings later, and when I struck out, she started, ‘Siddown, Grudeck. You suck job. Siddown! Hey, Grudeck! Hey, up here. You suck, Grudeck, you hear me. You fuckin’ suck!’

  “And I remember thinking that somehow, all these assholes, they won. And I lost.”

  “Joe, that’s crazy . . .”

  “But it gets worse. It was at that moment I saw I was just a ballplayer to millions of people. That’s all. A ballplayer. Someone to be loved, or hated, depending only on what hat you wore. All these people, like this little foul-mouthed cunt . . . sorry . . .”

  “It’s okay,” Stacy said, but winced inside.

  “To them, I was either just . . .” Grudeck got stuck.

  “An ‘object of affection’ or ‘target of their ire’?” Stacy offered.

  “Exactly. Even though they didn’t really know the first fucking thing about me. That night, in the hotel, I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I was lying there, in this air-conditioned room, but felt like I was smothering. I felt claustrophobic. It was one o’clock in the morning when I got up and started walking. I stopped at every bar in the Loop, looking for them. I played the scene out in my mind. If I found her, I swear to Christ I would have grabbed her by her skinny throat and shook her till she pissed herself. And if one of the boys wanted to play hero, well then . . . I could almost feel their noses crunching under my fist and see their blood splattering the bar.”

  Stacy squirmed a little in her seat, inside and out. She could see the anger roiling up in him, even now, and looked down to see both his fists clenched. She looked down at the notepad, and scribbled a few words.

  “But here’s the worst part. I knew that even if I found them I couldn’t do anything. I’d get arrested. Then the headlines. Then the commissioner’s office. Then the lawsuits. Here I was, six-three, two twenty-five, young and all muscle, and I knew I had to take whatever shit the fans threw at me. All of them. I was powerless and they knew it. They could boo you, throw beer on you—they used to throw batteries at Yankee Stadium; darts, seriously, darts in Chicago—curse you and your mother, treat you like you weren’t even human, like you were made of stone or something, and there wasn’t a fucking thing you could do about it because you were you and they were nobody. And then there was sports radio, and now they blog, tweet, whatever, and sports TV shows post them and they get attention for their outrageous, anonymous opinions. And we have to take it.”

  Grudeck got up and limped a few steps. “Got to move a little. Getting too creaky,” he said wearily. “I’m really breaking down. If I was a horse, they’d shoot me.”

  Seeing his physical pain, her alarm over his anger dissipated immediately, replaced by some maternal instinct, or something close. His vulnerability, in bones and soul, made her a little sad for him. Big Joey Grudeck, hurt, because he wasn’t liked by everyone.

  “Is that what bothers you? That the fans are jerks?” she said, but it came out in a “poor baby” way, and, once again, she wished she could take it back.

  The dismissive tone chafed Grudeck.

  “I don’t think you get it. How could you? You ever feel hatred from complete strangers? No. Nobody does.”

  “So is that what you want the speech to be about?” she asked, injecting a little more sincere empathy into her voice.

  “That, and so much other stuff,” Grudeck said. “Like the
media. When I started, it wasn’t so bad. There were the guys from the Globe and the Herald, a few from the suburban papers allowed in the locker room. The sportscasters from TV would come around once in a while. But then the media tripled, quadrupled—how do you say five, six, seven times? Soon there were more of them than us. Microphones and cameras, everywhere. I’d be sitting there, drying off my nuts, and suddenly there’s five cameras on me. You have any idea what that’s like?”

  “No,” Stacy said. “Especially the ‘drying off my nuts’ part.”

  Grudeck rolled through. “The TV guys always clipped what you said to fit their story and some of the stuff I supposedly said in the papers didn’t sound like me at all. As if I were a fictional character. Sometimes, that’s exactly what I felt like. All that coverage, nobody ever gets to what’s wrong. Seriously, flip the channels someday. There’s more talk about sports than war. And the way they whip up controversy, football players kneeling during the anthem . . . I mean, really, who cares? That much? Sports reporters are like those little tick-eating birds that ride on the back of the rhinoceros. They’re parasites, living off the backs of stars. That’s why, as much as I tried to get along and be accessible, I really couldn’t stand them. Still don’t.”

  He told her how the media “whipped up a controversy” over a kid named Dre Motley, who had a noisy holdout against the team several years back.

  The kid had a big year and suddenly thought he was worth twice the many millions the team was paying him. No question, he was a good ballplayer, but he choked in the playoffs and the Red Sox were eliminated again. Most everybody was disgusted with themselves and couldn’t wait for the next season to start. Grudeck, then—what, thirty-five or thirty-six?—hit the gym harder than ever, and started taking andro to help his aging body repair between workouts.

  “A few weeks before spring training, I’m flipping the channels, there’s Motley in front of his house up in Holmby Hills outside of L.A. It’s like Beverly Hills. Big money. Motley used to say, ‘We party so much up there in the off-season, the neighbors call it Homeboy Hills.’ ”