Roy was thinking about Memo. If not for her he wouldn’t be here trying to make himself at ease with this one. She hadn’t treated him right. For a while things had looked good between them but no sooner had he gone into a slump when she began again to avoid him. Had she been nice to him instead, he’d have got out of his trouble sooner. However, he wasn’t bitter, because Memo was remote, even unreal. Strange how quick he forgot what she was like, though he couldn’t what she looked like. Yet with that thought even her image went up in smoke. Iris, a stranger, had done for him what the other wouldn’t, in public view what’s more. He felt for her a gratitude it was hard to hold in.
“When you get to know me better you will like me more.” He surprised himself with that—the hoarse remark echoed within him—and she, sure she had misjudged him, felt a catch in her throat as she replied, “I like you now.”
He stepped on the starter and they drove off in the lilac dusk. Where to? he had asked and she had said it made no difference, she liked to ride. He felt, once they started, as if he had been sprung from the coop, and only now, as the white moon popped into the sky, did he begin to appreciate how bad it had been with him during the time of his slump.
They drove so they could almost always see the lake. The new moon climbed higher in the blue night, shedding light like rain. They drove along the lit highway to where the lake turned up into Indiana and they could see the lumpy yellow dunes along the shore. Elsewhere the land was shadowless and flat except for a few trees here and there. Roy turned into a winding dirt road and before long they came to this deserted beach, enclosed in a broken arc of white birches. The wind here was balmy and the water lit on its surface.
He shut off the motor. In the silence—everything but the lapping of the lake water—they too were silent. He hesitated at what next move to make and she prayed it would be the right one although she was not quite sure what she meant.
Roy asked did she want to get out. She understood he wanted her to so she said yes. But she surprised him by saying she had been here before.
“How’s the water?” he asked.
“Cold. The whole lake is, but you get used to it soon.”
They walked along the shore and then to a cluster of birches. Iris sat on the ground under one of the trees and slipped off her shoes. Her movements were graceful, she made her big feet seem small.
He sat nearby, his eyes on her. She sensed he wanted to talk but now felt curiously unconcerned with his problems. She had not expected the night to be this beautiful. Since it was, she asked no more than to be allowed to enjoy it.
But Roy impatiently asked her why she had stood up for him the other night.
She did not immediately reply.
After a minute he asked again.
“I don’t know,” Iris sighed.
That was not the answer he had expected.
“How come?”
“I’ve been trying to explain it to myself.” She lit a cigarette.
He was now a little in awe of her, something he had not foreseen, though he pretended not to be.
“You’re a Knights fan, ain’t you?”
“No.”
“Then how come—I don’t get it.”
“I’m not a baseball fan but I like to read about the different players. That’s how I became interested in you—your career.”
“You read about my slump?” His throat tightened at the word.
“Yes, and before that of your triumphs.”
“Ever see me play—before the other night?”
She shook her head. “Once then and again yesterday.”
“Why’d you come—the first time?”
She rubbed her cigarette into the dirt. “Because I hate to see a hero fail. There are so few of them.”
She said it seriously and he felt she meant it.
“Without heroes we’re all plain people and don’t know how far we can go.”
“You mean the big guys set the records and the little buggers try and bust them?”
“Yes, it’s their function to be the best and for the rest of us to understand what they represent and guide ourselves accordingly.”
He hadn’t thought of it that way but it sounded all right.
“There are so many young boys you influence.”
“That’s right,” said Roy.
“You’ve got to give them your best.”
“I try to do that.”
“I mean as a man too.”
He nodded.
“I felt that if you knew people believed in you, you’d regain your power. That’s why I stood up in the grandstand. I hadn’t meant to before I came. It happened naturally. Of course I was embarrassed but I don’t think you can do anything for anyone without giving up something of your own. What I gave up was my privacy among all those people. I hope you weren’t ashamed of me?”
He shook his head. “Were you praying for me to smack one over the roof?”
“I hoped you might become yourself again.”
“I was jinxed,” Roy explained to her. “Something was keeping me out of my true form. Up at the plate I was blind as a bat and Wonderboy had the heebie jeebies. But when you stood up and I saw you with that red dress on and thought to myself she is with me even if nobody else is, it broke the whammy.”
Iris laughed.
Roy crawled over to her and laid his head in her lap. She let him. Her dress was scented with lilac and clean laundry smell. Her thighs were firm under his head. He got a cigar out of his pocket and lit it but it stank up the night so he flung it away.
“I sure am glad you didn’t stand me up,” he sighed.
“Who would?” she smiled.
“You don’t know the half of it.”
She softly said she was willing to.
Roy struggled with himself. The urge to tell her was strong. On the other hand, talk about his inner self was always like plowing up a graveyard.
She saw the sweat gleaming on his brow. “Don’t if you don’t feel like it.”
“Everything came out different than I thought.” His eyes were clouded.
“In what sense?”
“Different.”
“I don’t understand.”
He coughed, tore his voice clear and blurted, “My goddamn life didn’t turn out like I wanted it to.”
“Whose does?” she said cruelly. He looked up. Her expression was tender.
The sweat oozed out of him. “I wanted everything.” His voice boomed out in the silence.
She waited.
“I had a lot to give to this game.”
“Life?”
“Baseball. If I had started out fifteen years ago like I tried to, I’da been the king of them all by now.”
“The king of what?”
“The best in the game,” he said impatiently.
She sighed deeply. “You’re so good now.”
“I’da been better. I’da broke most every record there was.”
“Does that mean so much to you?”
“Sure,” he answered. “It’s like what you said before. You break the records and everybody else tries to catch up with you if they can.”
“Couldn’t you be satisfied with just breaking a few?”
Her pinpricking was beginning to annoy him. “Not if I could break most of them,” he insisted.
“But I don’t understand why you should make so much of that. Are your values so—”
He heard a train hoot and went freezing cold.
“Where’s that train?” he cried, jumping to his feet.
“What train?”
He stared into the night.
“The one I just heard.”
“It must have been a bird cry. There are no trains here.”
He gazed at her suspiciously but then relaxed and sat down.
“That way,” he continued with what he had been saying, “if you leave all those records that nobody else can beat—they’ll always remember you. You sorta never die.”
“Are you afraid of death?”
Roy stared at her listening face. “Now what has that got to do with it?”
She didn’t answer. Finally he laid his head back on her lap, his eyes shut.
She stroked his brow slowly with her fingers.
“What happened fifteen years ago, Roy?”
Roy felt like crying, yet he told her—the first one he ever had. “I was just a kid and I got shot by this batty dame on the night before my tryout, and after that I just couldn’t get started again. I lost my confidence and everything I did flopped.”
He said this was the shame in his life, that his fate, somehow, had always been the same (on the train going nowhere)—defeat in sight of his goal.
“Always?”
“Always the same.”
“Always with a woman?”
He laughed harshly. “I sure met some honeys in my time. They burned me good.”
“Why do you pick that type?”
“It’s like I say—they picked me. It’s the breaks.”
“You could say no, couldn’t you?”
“Not to that type dame I always fell for—they weren’t like you.”
She smiled.
“I mean you are a different kind.”
“Does that finish me?”
“No,” he said seriously.
“I won’t ever hurt you, Roy.”
“No.”
“Don’t ever hurt me.”
“No.”
“What beats me,” he said with a trembling voice, “is why did it always have to happen to me? What did I do to deserve it?”
“Being stopped before you started?”
He nodded.
“Perhaps it was because you were a good person?”
“How’s that?”
“Experience makes good people better.”
She was staring at the lake.
“How does it do that?”
“Through their suffering.”
“I had enough of that,” he said in disgust.
“We have two lives, Roy, the life we learn with and the life we live with after that. Suffering is what brings us toward happiness.”
“I had it up to here.” He ran a finger across his windpipe.
“Had what?”
“What I suffered—and I don’t want any more.”
“It teaches us to want the right things.”
“All it taught me is to stay away from it. I am sick of all I have suffered.”
She shrank away a little.
He shut his eyes.
Afterwards, sighing, she began to rub his brow, and then his lips.
“And is that the mystery about you, Roy?”
“What mystery?”
“I don’t know. Everyone seems to think there is one.”
“I told you everything.”
“Then there really isn’t?”
“Nope.”
Her cool fingers touched his eyelids. It was unaccountably sweet to him.
“You broke my jinx,” he muttered.
“I’m thirty-three,” she said, looking at the moonlit water.
He whistled but said, “I am no spring chicken either, honey.”
“Iris.”
“Iris, honey.”
“That won’t come between us?”
“What?”
“My age?”
“No.”
“Nothing?”
“If you are not married?”
“No.”
“Divorced?”
“No.”
“A widow?”
“No,” said Iris.
He opened his eyes. “How come with all your sex appeal that you never got hitched?”
She gazed away.
Roy suddenly sat up and bounced to his feet. “Jesus, will you look at that water. What are we waiting for?” He tore at his tie.
Iris was saying that she had, however, brought a child into the world, a girl now grown, but Roy seemed not to hear, he was so busy getting out of his clothes. In no time to speak of he stood before her stripped to his shorts.
“Get undressed.”
The thought of standing naked before him frightened her. She told herself not to be—she was no longer a child about the naked body. But she couldn’t bring herself to remove her clothes in front of him so she went back to the car and undressed there. He waited impatiently, then before he expected her, she stepped out without a thing on and ran in the moonlight straight into the water, through the shallow part, and dived where it was deep.
Hopping high through the cold water, Roy plunged in after her. He dived neatly, kicked hard underwater and came up almost under her. Iris fell back out of his reach and swam away. He pursued her with less skill than she had but more strength. At first he damn near froze but as he swam his blood warmed. She would not stop and before long the white birches near the beach looked to be the size of match sticks.
Though they were only a dozen strokes apart she wouldn’t let him gain, and after another fifty tiring yards he wondered how long this would go on. He called to her but she didn’t answer and wouldn’t stop. He was beginning to be winded and considered quitting, only he didn’t want to give up. Then just about when his lungs were frying in live coals, she stopped swimming. As she trod water, the light on the surface hid all but her head from him.
He caught up with her at last and attempted to get his arms around her waist. “Give us a kiss, honey.”
She was repelled and shoved him away.
He saw she meant it, realized he had made a mistake, and felt terrible.
Roy turned tail, kicking himself down into the dark water. As he sank lower it got darker and colder but he kept going down. Before long the water turned murky yet there was no bottom he could feel with his hands. Though his legs and arms were numb he continued to work his way down, filled with icy apprehensions and weird thoughts.
Iris couldn’t believe it when he did not quickly rise. Before long she felt frightened. She looked everywhere but he was still under water. A sense of abandonment gripped her. She remembered standing up in the crowd that night, and said to herself that she had really stood up because he was a man whose life she wanted to share … a man who had suffered. She thought distractedly of a home, children, and him coming home every night to supper. But he had already left her …
… At last in the murk he touched the liquid mud at the bottom. He dimly thought he ought to feel proud to have done that but his mind was crammed with old memories flitting back and forth like ghostly sardines, and there wasn’t a one of them that roused his pride or gave him any comfort.
So he forced himself, though sleepily, to somersault up and begin the slow task of climbing through all the iron bars of the currents … too slow, too tasteless, and he wondered was it worth it.
Opening his bloodshot eyes he was surprised how far down the moonlight had filtered. It dripped down like oil in the black water, and then, unexpectedly, there came into his sight this pair of golden arms searching, and a golden head with a frantic face. Even her hair sought him.
He felt relieved no end.
I am a lucky bastard.
He was climbing a long, slow ladder, broad at the base and narrowing on top, and she, trailing clusters of white bubbles, was weaving her way to him. She had golden breasts and when he looked to see, the hair between her legs was golden too.
With a watery howl bubbling from his blistered lungs he shot past her inverted eyes and bobbed up on the surface, inhaling the soothing coolness of the whole sky.
She rose beside him, gasping, her hair plastered to her naked skull, and kissed him full on the lips. He tore off his shorts and held her tight. She stayed in his arms.
“Why did you do it?” she wept.
“To see if I could touch the bottom.”
They swam in together, taking their time. As they dragged themselves out of the water, she said, “Go make a fire, otherwise we will have nothing to dry ourselves with.”
He cover
ed her shoulders with his shirt and went hunting for wood. Under the trees he collected an armload of branches. Near the dunes he located some heavy boxwood. Then he came back to where she was sitting and began to build a fire. He set an even row of birch sticks down flat and with his knife shaved up a thick branch till he had a pile of dry shavings. These he lit with the only match he had. When they were burning he added some dry birch pieces he had cut up. He split the boxwood against a rock and when the fire was crackling added that, hunk by hunk, to the flames. Before long he had a roaring blaze going. The fire reddened the water and the lacy birches.
It reddened her naked body. Her thighs and rump were broad but her waist was narrow and virginal. Her breasts were hard, shapely. From above her hips she looked like a girl but the lower half of her looked like a woman.
Watching her, he thought he would wait for the fire to die down, when she was warm and dry and felt not rushed.
She was sitting close to the fire with her hair pulled over her head so the inside would dry first. She was thinking why did he go down? Did he touch the bottom of the lake out of pride, because he wants to make records, or did he do it in disappointment, because I wouldn’t let him kiss me?
Roy was rubbing his hands before the fire. She looked up and said in a tremulous voice, “Roy, I have a confession to you. I was never married, but I am the mother of a grown girl.”
He said he had heard her the first time.
She brushed her hair back with her fingers. “I don’t often talk about it, but I want to tell you I made a mistake long ago and had a hard time afterwards. Anyway, the child meant everything to me and made me happy. I gave her a good upbringing and now she is grown and on her own, and I am free to think of myself and young enough to want to.”
That was the end of it because Roy asked no questions.
He watched the fire. The flames sank low. When they had just about been sucked into the ashes he crept toward her and took her in his arms. Her breasts beat like hearts against him.
“You are really the first,” she whispered.
He smiled, never so relaxed in sex.
But while he was in the middle of loving her she spoke: “I forgot to tell you I am a grandmother.”
The Natural Page 15
