Fear Itself

by Duffy Prendergast

  We moved out of the way so that their car could pass us and pull into their driveway whose curb served as third base. We went back to our game only a little curious about the bonnet on the bobbing head in the backseat of their car. Someone hit a tall fly ball to me as Albert was opening the rear door of his car, and out stepped the bonnet, the bobbing head, and the angel in a white summer dress that was hiding beneath it. As I recall the ball landed on the sidewalk in front of me and bounced up and hit me in the forehead as my Beautiful Catherine glanced back at me and gave me a warm and pleasant smile. She had auburn hair draped in loose curls down her back with shoulder length wisps framing her narrow face. Her eyes were a mischievous shade of blue guarded by dark eyelashes that were long even then and eyebrows that matched her hair. Her nose, a small pink button perched above a pair of perfect pouting lips and a childishly weak chin, flared ever so slightly when she smiled at me. She was skinny and hardly curvaceous, but the summer dress she wore betrayed the budding breasts blooming beneath what I imagined to be a dainty training bra. Her complexion was smooth and tan; the opposite of my own. She was perhaps a little over five feet tall but she wore a pair of white clogs which was the fashion of the time and they added a few inches to her stature and brought her close to my height.

  My teammates were hollering for me to throw the ball to them, but by the time I acknowledged their chants the base-runner had rounded home and everyone on my team was screaming at me, and Tommy asked me if I was “retarded or something”.

  I don’t think it was love at first sight, but Catherine’s image warmed me like hot water to a mug of cocoa. She filled me instantly with her steeping glow and I felt so faint that my knees grew weak and I slumped to the ground. Fortunately, there lay the plastic whiffle ball that had struck me in the bean. I picked up the ball and nimbly tossed it in the direction of my teammates without looking, and then I took my time rising to my feet as my eyes gazed upon my future wife.

  We continued to play whiffle ball but my mind wasn’t on the game. Up until the time I first saw Catherine I had no interest in girls.

  They couldn’t catch a line drive. They couldn’t throw a baseball from third to first base; and if they could throw at all the ball would not travel anywhere near its intended destination. Girls were useless creatures.

  When, eventually, everyone grew tired of our plastic baseball game I begged them to continue to play. I wanted an excuse to hang out in front of Teresa and Albert’s house so that I could find an opportunity to meet the young bonnet-covered creature that they had imported. Of course I could have used the excuse of tossing a baseball with Albert, but I was as afraid of Catherine as I was enchanted by her and I feared too close an encounter at that point. But alas the game did end without another glimpse of my sweet flower.

  What amazed me more than my own obsession was that no one else in my company seemed to have seen what I had seen. No one else had appreciated the beauty that I had discovered. How could they have missed the glow that enveloped her? The foreign way that she walked with the wiggle of her hips or the way that here cheeks rose like round radishes when she smiled?

  I talked Tommy, begrudgingly, into retrieving his baseball glove and ball, while I grabbed my own, to play a little catch with Albert. I knocked on Albert’s side door and watched through the window half hoping that Catherine would answer the door and half petrified that she would. So I was both relieved and disappointed when Albert came trundling down the steps toward the side door which divided the living quarters from his unfinished basement.

  When Albert came to the door I pointed to my glove, “Do you want to toss the ball around Albert?” I said, perhaps a little too excitedly.

  Albert raked his fingers through his thinning hair, “Oh…no… I can’t. Teresa wants me to spend some time with my niece.” Albert had spoken as if he were punchy ever since I knew him. He turned as if to be looking for Teresa to offer support to his story, or to release him, like a mother to a child, to go out and play with his friends even though he had not completed his chores.

  “I’ll play… Uncle Albert, if you have an extra glove.” My angel stood at the entryway to the kitchen, having changed into a pair of dungarees and a pink t-shirt, atop the steps behind Albert. She was smiling and looking at me. I felt a feverish rush come over as my knees grew weak once again.

  “Well, I only have the one glove.” Albert said.

  Albert had a confused look on his face when Catherine, having noticed the old worn faded brown first-basemen’s mitt lying on the floor at Albert’s feet by the door, swooped down the steps grabbed the glove and said “I’ll play.” as if I hadn’t heard her the first time, leaving Albert out of the mix. Albert was such a grown kid that I think it actually hurt his feelings to be excluded. I noticed as we played that Albert kept peeking out through the front curtains of his living room and watching us laughing and talking and soft-tossing in his front yard. And to my surprise, Catherine had quite an arm. She could throw as hard as I could even if not as straight.

  After that Catherine came to the ball field nearly every day and played baseball with us. As it turned out she could also hit a baseball as well as she could throw and catch.

  Once the other kids’ saw that she could play they accepted her as one of the guys. As the summer wore on, though, my competition grew as the boys on the team, including Tommy, began to pursue her. I knew that it wouldn’t be long before someone made a move on her so one day after playing ball until just after dark I asked her to take a walk with me.

  “Sure.” She smiled. “Where do you want to walk to?” her southern accent made her words sound like song.

  “Yeah, where do you want to walk to?”

  Tommy chimed in.

  I gave Tommy a dirty look, “Didn’t you say you had to get home to watch your little sister?”

  Tommy gave me a knowing look and conceded us our privacy disappearing as he did like a ghost. After Catherine and I rounded the corner of our street, out of sight of Teresa’s watchful eye, I gathered the courage to reach down and interlock my fingers with hers. Catherine looked at me and smiled and we walked and talked until we found our selves back near the ball-field. Catherine stopped as I continued to walk until our arms reached their elastic limits and I was unexpectedly jerked backwards into Catherine’s arms. There, before I could even gather my bearings, she pressed her soft pink lips to mine and she held me and kissed me, both our hands clasped to one-another’s. Catherine slipped the tip of her tongue into my mouth and when our tongues touched a continuous electric current passed through my body until I grew faint; floating in a world of blissful euphoria, a wave of endorphins swimming laps along the crevices of my brain. My palms and fingers soon found Catherine’s bare back and her hands slid up my shirt to my shoulders, our pelvis’s locked together at the hips, and we made out for what may have been days or hours or minutes. Her lips, like plump wet orange sections, became soft barriers which kept us from accidentally swallowing each other’s faces; our tongues soft sensual tangled tentacles which shared a common desire: cohabitation.

  When at last Catherine broke off our kiss, for I would have lived in that moment for eternity, she looked back at me with smiling eyes and said “Wow!”—an expression of extreme underestimation—and yet it lifted me so high that it carried me to her doorstep without allowing my feet to touch the ground. When she turned back to me after walking through the side door to say goodnight she spoke only with her eyes which I could have held with my own for as long as my first kiss. Hers were the only lips mine had known in such a way.

  My lips, despite some prodding by prissy Peggy Banister, remained loyal to hers even during the long nine months before I would see her again. She left for home unexpectedly the next morning to be with her brother who had been severely injured from a fall from his barn roof while helping his father install a fresh layer of shingles.

  I hardly thought of anything but

  Catherine for the following three seasons that we were apart
. I made excuses to go across the street to visit with Teresa and Albert just to ask about Catherine: How was she doing? How was her brother? When would Catherine return?

  I finally weaseled Catherine’s home address from Albert (while Teresa was out shopping) on the pretext of sending a get well card to Catherine’s brother and I wrote her a sterile carefully worded letter, a precaution taken in case her parents pried. In return I received a perfumed letter on pink and white stationary in which she described the hum- drum of her country life, and not a single word of endearment save for her endorsement: Love Catherine. Perfume and love; the rest was nothing but words. I scoured that letter at least one-hundred times looking for a hint of her betrothal, but I settled for perfume and love.

  I unfolded that letter so many times a day until I received her next dispatch that the stationary started to tear at the creases. In return I wrote long embarrassing love letters. I managed to get a few of them into sealed envelopes but I would lose the temerity to send them before I could reach a mailbox.

  Ultimately we exchanged innocuous letters to each other every few weeks; both hers and mine were endorsed with love.

  When Catherine finally arrived the next year I hardly recognized her. She had developed a whole new set of curves. Her chest was swollen, her buds having bloomed and born ripe rounded citrus shaped breasts, and she had sprouted a round derriere where once her scrawny cheeks had left a vacancy in her slacks. She sported long athletic calves attached to voluptuous thighs that vanished beneath the hoop of her skirt. She wore a little make-up, a touch of rouge on her cheeks, a pout of pink lipstick on her lips and a trace of eye-shadow on her lids. When I first laid eyes on her I blushed, embarrassed, because I had hardly changed in any way that I could recognize other than having sprouted a few new white-heads. I was still a gangly pimple-faced teenager in jeans, a t-shirt and worn-out tennis- shoes.

  Before I could get across the street to greet Catherine, a handsome athletic Italian kid by the name of Tony Artino almost fell over himself to get to her first. By the time I reached Catherine Tony was in full flirt with Catherine, and Teresa towered behind them beaming at Tony’s charm as though he were

  James Dean.

  Catherine glanced at me and smiled before averting her eyes toward the ground, “Hello Mathew.”

  She lifted me off of the ground with her smile and I mumbled a shy “Hello.” And charming Tony nodded at me as though I were a toad and then continued with his full court press on Catherine.

  “Come on now Catherine let’s get you settled in before you go off with your friends.”

  Teresa interrupted and Catherine disappeared into the house so quickly that I wasn’t sure that I had actually seen her. When after supper I stopped by to ask Catherine to go for a walk

  Teresa said me, with too much glee in her voice, “Oh, she just left for a walk with Tony. Perhaps you can catch up with them. I think they were headed for the baseball field.”

  My heart was broken. Catherine, love of my life, was a fickle trollop! I fought off the tears that were welling up under my eyes and prevented them from dripping until I had turned away as cheerfully and as casually as I could “No problem, I’ll stop by some other time.” I said, and then I crawled home like an injured possum dragging the dead weight of my limbs as if they were numbed by Novocain.

  I didn’t dare go over to Teresa and

  Albert’s house after that and apparently

  Catherine had lost interest in baseball (as had Tony) because neither of them showed up at the ball field the next morning or any other morning after that. In fact I didn’t see either of them for almost two weeks. I spent my time sulking in my room or going through the motions playing ball with Tommy and the guys but all I could think about was Catherine. Alone in my room I imagined her pressing her lips to Tony’s, his tongue touching hers, their hands on each other’s backs, or worse, groping those Beautiful new breasts that Catherine made no effort to conceal and I would cry angrily the redness of my hate seeping through the pores of my face. I would write letters to Catherine telling her how disappointed I was in the fact that she had become a whore and that I knew that she was Fucking Tony as only a whore would do, and then I would shred the paper with the pointed weight of my pen, slashing my hateful words to pieces because no matter how disturbing were the images that passed through my tortured mind I still loved Catherine with all of my heart and soul. I would still make love to her in my imagination, as I had all autumn, winter and spring, with my eyes closed in the privacy of my bedroom.

  When after a few weeks I saw Albert out pacing in his front yard early one morning I asked him if he wanted to play catch.

  “Have you seen that Tony-son-of-a- bitch?!” Albert Said, a thick vein throbbing like a nasty scar across his temple.

  “No. Why? What happened?” I tried to suppress the joy I felt at Albert’s mispronunciation of Tony’s last name.

  “That little fucker,” Albert gasped and sucked the angry spittle that sprayed from his lips, “that fucker hurt Catherine! If I see him I’ll tear his arms off!”

  “What did he do to her?” I heard a voice inside of me growl with a rage that I didn’t even know I was capable of.

  “That fucker molested her! She came home last night crying with her blouse torn!” Albert’s face grew purple his blood boiling to his cheeks, “I’ll kill that fucker.” He said leaning down and spraying a thick mist of spit in my direction.

  I turned and pounded my feet across the pavement storming toward the park across from the ball-field where Tony and most of his friends hung out. My fists clenched and unclenched and the muscles in my face caused a twitch to ripple my left cheek. I heard Tommy ask as I passed him near the ball-field, “What’s the matter with you?” but I ignored him and marched right by him. I kept picturing Tony tearing at Catherine’s blouse trying to molest the innocent flower of my heart until I found myself standing across from Tony who was sitting on a bench with another girl, Tina Lehatski (or Tina-the-slut as they would often chide in the school yard). I didn’t even notice that Tony’s cronies, wimpy Jim Mann and big- nosed Mike Worthman and that big dark curly- haired Dan Gardipee, were loitering about. I walked up to Tony and I started flailing at his face like a windmill to the air, as Tony fell from the bench and then stood with his arms about his face. My blows missed the fast retreating thug who had molested my Catherine. When at last, my arms heavy from labor, I towered over the maggot of a man who had stumbled and fallen to the ground, where he lay on his back, I having never landed a single blow, I pointed my finger into his face and quaked a deep guttural growl, “If you ever go near her again I will kill you.” And I walked away with my back turned to him.

  When Tony leaped upon my back from behind, his arm wrapped around my neck in a choke hold, the embarrassment of cowering in front of his cronies too much for him to stand, I learned a very valuable lesson: never turn your back on you enemies. I learned a second valuable lesson as well when from out of nowhere Tommy struck a blow to Tony’s chin toppling Tony to the ground and me with him:

  it was good to have Tommy for a friend. Tommy proceeded to whale on Tony’s pretty face until he was bloody and unconscious. None of Tony’s friends dared to interfere.

  Finally Tommy stood over Tony’s motionless body and he kicked him in the groin with a ferocious thrust. That ended the fight.

  The next evening I walked hand-in- hand, the hero to Catherine, the slayer of the dragon to Albert (despite the fact that Tommy had landed the only blows struck), and still, to Teresa, I was the pathetic poor kid who had no business pursuing Catherine. The love of my life was back in my arms and all was forgiven when at the end of our walk Catherine kissed me for the second time, her tongue dancing with my soul, and she whispered in my ear, “I love you.” I knew that she would be my wife someday and I knew that she would love only me forever.

  Which is why, as I passed a slow moving Plymouth Voyager while still heading south on Interstate sixty-five just outside

&n
bsp; Columbus Indiana, the flame of Catherine’s betrayal branded my cheeks with searing tears no less painful than when Catherine had abandoned me for Tony Artino over twenty years earlier.

  “Why are you crying daddy?” Sarah had awoken and reached out and grasped my hand, “Were you thinking about mommy again?”

  “Yes honey I was.”

  Sarah and I played games to pass the time. We played “I spy” where we named a color and the other person would have to guess what it was that we had spied of that color. We also played “Beetle” in which we had to count as many Volks Wagon Bugs as we passed on the road to see who could spot the most. I drove just a few miles above the speed limit to avoid any unwanted attention. Sarah fell asleep after we stopped for gas and she continued to sleep as I got back on the highway and plodded along. Driving the speed limit was not something I was used to doing. I normally tended to have a heavy foot and driving so slowly made it seem as though we were cruising through a school zone but I knew that the least mistake might permanently end my journey.

  * * *

  We pulled off of the highway just before the Kentucky border for gas and for lunch. As I chewed my french-fries I looked down at my Beautiful Sarah and wondered what sort of life I would have had without her. Certainly I would not have been running from the law because she would not have been there to take Catherine’s life. But would I have been happy had Catherine and I never had a child? I just couldn’t imagine a life without Sarah, misery and all.

  Teresa and Albert were choicelessly childless, a situation I, in hindsight, came to sympathize with as Catherine and I strived to impregnate her womb. During the first few years after we got married we fucked like field- mice at every opportunity just because we wanted to screw, but after failing to fertilize her eggs after so many trips to the well our concern grew. We desperately wanted a family. We started timing Catherine’s ovulations to coordinate our sexual encounters to optimize the chances of pregnancy. Sex became a labor, of love most times, but of tiresome weariness when it interfered with our work or sleep schedules. Eventually we tried fertility drugs and finally we were both tested and it was determined that my sperm count was too low to likely result in a child. In-vitro-fertilization was new and very expensive and really wasn’t an option.