FSF, September-October 2010

by Spilogale, Inc

  Sluggo heard what he thought was a sob after she said this and he pressed himself against her. He felt her trembling but she didn't push him away.

  "It's getting colder.” Her voice was hoarse and even cracked a little. “Let's go."

  She walked back to the house, Sluggo at her side. Axel tried to follow but kept staring up at the early stars, at once infinitely far and remarkably close, like lights stretched across a huge ceiling under which everything fit, and to move from one place to another under them really wasn't like leaving at all.

  "Maybe I can't make a time ship. Maybe time dies too, like Agnes said. Maybe—"

  "Come on!” Agnes shouted.

  He hurried for the house again and stopped. He felt...someone.

  Someone was behind him. He could almost hear the big feet against the grass. But when he stopped the sound of the footsteps stopped too.

  Axel shut his eyes. “Dio?"

  He didn't hear an answer, but Dio never said much anyway. He imagined Dio, standing out here, alone, as if banished, wanting to be back inside with his friends and with the books.

  Axel wanted to swing back around and see him, but he remembered the Orfy Guy and his wife—and how important it was not to look back.

  "It's okay, Dio.” Axel opened his eyes, but he looked at the house, the lights in the windows, Sluggo and Agnes on the porch steps, Tom in the doorway, waiting.

  "It's okay. I won't look back! I promise!"

  He understood, in his way, that he had taken on a serious responsibility. More important than the time ship. More important than the Exo-Cyborg. As long as he remembered not to turn back and look, Dio would be there, always, just as he felt him there now.

  A big responsibility. But yes—yes! He could do it! He had to do it.

  "Come on,” he said and headed for the house once more. “It's almost time for supper!"

  * * * *

  "I think the whole Moon jump was faked."

  * * * *

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Short Story: BLIND SPOT by Rick Wilber and Nick DiChario

  Rick Wilber is the author of The Cold Road and most recently, Rum Point. Nick DiChario's novels include Valley of Day-Glo and A Small and Remarkable Life. They teamed up to write this story for 108 Magazine, a slick mag that was aimed at baseball fans. “Blind Spot” appeared in the final issue, which came out as the magazine was going out of business. We figure the average F&SF reader is more likely to have been in attendance for Roy Halladay's perfect game this year than to have read this story already, so we happily reprint it for your enjoyment.

  Buffalo to Rochester can be either a long drive or a short one, depending on how you play it. If you steer your rented Ford onto the New York State Thruway to I-490, you can get downtown to downtown in little over an hour. If you take the scenic route, you can wander around for half a day, driving up past Niagara Falls to Youngstown, where you catch Route 18, a two-lane road that winds along the south shore of Lake Ontario through small towns like Wilson and Olcott and Jones Beach.

  If you're like me and you've flown in from Seattle to bury your father in Rochester, you take your time and go the back roads. Along the way you stop in Wilson at the Boathouse Restaurant, right there on the harbor, and watch the sailboats come and go as you think about the old man and baseball and the Rochester Red Wings and that one game—that one perfect game your dad threw back in ‘68—and what might have been.

  And you think, too, about things you thought you'd sealed up for good a long time ago. Like how it felt when your dad hit you, his open hand slapping you hard across the backside until you got into sixth grade, when he decided your head made a better target. Like how it felt to watch him knock your brother Tommy across the room for bouncing his basketball on the kitchen floor or playing his radio too loud. Like how it was between the old man and your mom, not just a slap for her when she got under his skin, but the full, blind fury of his tortured soul.

  If you're at all like me, you remember the day the four of you sat at this very table in this very restaurant and you were, for that day, at peace. No baseball, no anger, no alcohol, no problems whatsoever—nothing but fish sandwiches and root beer and fries for everybody, four people looking like a perfectly normal family.

  When the waitress returns she snaps you back to reality; but all you can do is stare at the food, drop a twenty on the table, get back in your car and start driving again, over to Lakeside where you catch the Ontario Parkway and pick up speed.

  You listen to your tires sing along the pavement. You smell the summer grass in the air and the faint odor of the lake, and then eventually the road becomes crowded as you sweep around the big curve of the 390 and down into Rochester, driving to your hotel, driving to the funeral home, driving to see Dad, like you swore you'd never do.

  The Broadway Hotel was built in 1839, and on the outside it looked it, crumbling red brick, flaking mortar, cornice work half gone, and three worn-out stone steps leading up to the main door.

  Looks can be deceiving, though, and so it was with the Broadway. The inside had plenty of gleaming antique brass, high ceilings and chandeliers, ornate furniture, and slim Euro-style rooms made to trick account execs into feeling important.

  It was a lot classier place than I expected. Chucker and Dad had always been Motel 6 kind of guys, even after they got out of the game. So when Chucker called to tell me Dad had died and that he'd bought me an airline ticket and a hotel room, I figured I'd fly into the cheaper airport, drive the cheaper rental car, stay in the cheaper motel. Chucker was used to cutting corners.

  I'd tried to beg off. I said I didn't think I could get away from Seattle on such short notice, that I had family commitments and job commitments and all that. But Chucker told me it was all written up in Dad's will and he was just following through with his wishes. Mom had divorced him a long time ago and said she had no interest in coming to the funeral. Dad didn't have any other family to speak of and wouldn't it be a shame if I didn't get there when no one else would come.

  "All right, all right,” I told him. “I'll be there."

  "Great, kid. Sorry you gotta fly into Buffalo, but the ticket was a hundred bucks less that way."

  I smiled to myself when he called me kid. They all used to call me that when Dad brought me to the clubhouse.

  "I'll rent a car when I land,” I told him.

  "Already taken care of,” Chucker said, and then he gave me the details and added, “Sorry about your pop."

  I didn't know what to say to that. Dad and I hadn't spoken in thirty years, I'd left dozens of his letters unanswered, and Chucker certainly knew all of that and more. So I'd mumbled a good-bye, hung up, and started packing before I could change my mind.

  * * * *

  He had some heat.

  Johnny William McCabe had a fastball that got there in a hurry. It wasn't easy in those days to measure the speed of a pitch, but in May of 1968 a physics professor from the Rochester Institute of Technology came with his equipment to the ballpark, spent two full hours setting it up, and had Dad throw fifteen pitches. The average speed was 93.5 miles an hour and the top pitch was 96. That's enough to get you a big-league career if you can get the ball over the plate.

  But control was always Dad's problem. He'd strike out one batter on three or four pitches, then he'd get rattled about the ump missing a call on a slider down low or he'd get mad about the way a hitter crowded the plate or took too much time getting into the box.

  And once he got mad Dad couldn't find the plate. It never took much. One inning he'd be fine, the next he wouldn't; he'd be in the dirt, or behind the hitter's back, or ten feet high and into the backstop.

  The other teams always tried to get to him, of course, and sooner or later they'd succeed. I once saw a hitter step out of the batter's box six times before he'd let Dad throw. Dad was so riled he laid the guy out with a ball that ricocheted off his helmet and into the backstop on the very next pitch. Dad got himself tossed from that game an
d six more for that one flash of anger.

  Chucker, to his credit, could calm Dad down sometimes and get him back into the game. This helped keep both of them in the high minors a few years longer than they probably deserved. But Dad's other teammates learned to hate him, or maybe just pity him, for his lack of control. A lot of us, in fact, hated Dad for that in one way or another.

  But he had his day. On August 21, 1968, in a home game against the Buffalo Bisons, Dad found the strike zone for one entire night, pitch after pitch after pitch. No hits, no runs, no errors, no walks. On that hot summer night in August, Dad struck out twelve and threw a perfect game for the Rochester Red Wings, and I was there to see it.

  I'd turned ten years old that day and Dad, stone-cold sober for a full month after the big blowup at home, had been throwing great in the bullpen between starts. He was feeling pretty good about himself and his family and his future. He was going to make things better and so he promised me a birthday present if I came to the park to watch.

  "I'll throw the best game of the season, Danny, I swear it, just for you,” he said as we played catch in the front yard before a lunch of chicken pot pies and root beer, “and then I'll give you the game ball and autograph it. I'll do it just for you, Danny, I promise."

  It was my joy, on Dad's sober days, to play catch with him like that before he left for the ballpark. He'd toss me my glove, a hand-me-down from Luis Buenos, the Wings shortstop, and we'd throw an old, beat-up ball back and forth on the front lawn, easy at first, and then harder as he loosened up a bit. He wouldn't back off until I begged him to, which was how he was about most things.

  But there was something bigger about him that afternoon before he threw his perfect game. His chest swelled and his legs looked as strong and stout as cast iron. As he stood in the sun he seemed to radiate heat. He could have been Superman. He took it easy on me for some reason, getting the ball to me with some zip but never so hard that I couldn't handle it. And his movements were effortless, like a horse flicking its ears. I barely noticed him throw until the ball was in my glove.

  I've wondered what kind of a life Dad might have led if he could have been like that a lot more often and stayed off the sauce. J.W. Heat McCabe, big-league pitcher, Cy Young Award winner, Hall-of-Famer. Family man. He could have been all those things, maybe. I've wondered, too, about the kind of a life we all might have had—me, Mom, and Tommy—if Dad could have straightened himself out.

  That day, I heard the screen door slam and then Mom called outside and said it was time to eat. Dad laughed, scooped me up in one arm, and carried me inside the house. “Lois!” he shouted. “Danny wants to go to the game with me tonight. What do you say?"

  I remember my mom smiling and I knew even then how special that was. I could count on one hand the number of times I'd seen her smile during those years, but this was one of them. She sauntered up to her husband and kissed him smack on the lips. “J. W. McCabe,” she said warmly, “what are you up to?"

  "I'm going to give Danny a birthday present he'll never forget. I'm going to win for him tonight and give him the game ball. Matter of fact, I'm not only going to win, I'm going to throw all nine innings. My arm feels like a million bucks! How does that sound?"

  "Sounds perfect,” she said. “You boys go and have a good time.” Then she turned around and went back to the oven.

  "What about you?” Dad said to my brother. Tommy was sitting completely still at the table. “You want to come along, too?"

  But my brother was three years older than I and he'd been the target of Dad's anger way too often. He'd found his own way out of the craziness with angry stares, some cussing under his breath. He'd been smoking cigarettes for a while by then, and had started in on smoking dope now, too. He was getting into fights in school and hanging out with a gang of guys who saw the world his way. A real tough guy. He hated Dad. He hated baseball, which he blamed for his troubles. So he got up from the table and left the room without answering.

  "Looks like just you and me, boy,” Dad said.

  And on that particular afternoon, in that one moment in time that proved impossible to hold onto, that was just fine by me.

  * * * *

  When I guest lecture to the college kids I tell them to search for the truth, though that sounds pretty tame to them in the age of Fox News and public relations. I warn them to play fair, keep their eyes open, look for the whole picture. I tell them to recognize that we all have a blind spot on certain things and we need to learn to overcome it.

  Have you tried to find your blind spot? Everyone, every single human on Earth, has a blind spot in each eye. The optic nerve starts in the center of the retina and there are no photoreceptors in that one small spot in each eye. Your brain lies to you about what you're seeing, mixing information from one eye to cover the blind spot of the other eye. Take a look at this:

  Get about a foot away from the page, close your right eye, and then take a look at the cross on the right. If you focus there you'll still see the dot on the left. Keep looking at the cross and start moving closer to the page and the dot will disappear. Move still closer and it will reappear. You've just discovered you have a blind spot. It will probably never matter to you. I know it never mattered for me until Dad.

  In the hotel room, I unpacked the letters Dad had sent me over the years, a small suitcase full of them. I hadn't answered a one, although I'd read each as it arrived. I wasn't sure why I'd brought them with me except that they'd never really seemed as if they belonged to me. They were Dad's letters and it seemed like a good idea to bring them back to bury them with him.

  He started sending them to me after Tommy's funeral, where he showed up drunk and weeping, his face an Irish, beet-red. He went up to the coffin, closed casket thank God, and threw his arms around it and sobbed. By then my mother was remarried and the funeral home wasn't exactly filled with J. W. Heat fans. A couple of men pulled him away, and Dad started swinging. Things might have gotten much worse if I hadn't stepped in.

  I ran up to him, grabbed him by the lapels of his jacket, and shouted at him to stop. Although he'd been out of pitching for a while by then, he was still twice my size and solid as a stone chimney.

  He looked at me with his fists clenched and his arm cocked back, ready to strike. I flinched, ready to take the blow and answer with one of my own. I wanted him to punch me. I wanted to hit him back.

  But he stood like that for what seemed an eternity, panting like a dog, the sweat trapped in the creases of his brow. And then he dropped his right arm and started crying again like the sloppy drunk he was.

  "Get out,” I finally said.

  And he did. The last thing I saw of him was his back as he pushed open the door of the chapel and stumbled out.

  I received his first letter exactly one year later, apologizing for his behavior, asking me to forgive him. He asked me to forgive him for a lot of things in that letter. He'd come a long way in recovering, he told me. AA, support groups, the works. Tommy's death had changed him, had made him see his own life in a different way. He wanted me to write him back and let him know how I was doing. “Maybe we could meet,” he wrote, “and talk."

  I picked up that letter now and looked at the jagged handwriting, the tortured words and clumsy sentences, and his name scrawled across the bottom. The pen marks put me in mind of sword strokes. I thought about how, if I had answered that first letter, things might be different today. Maybe I would have gotten to know Dad. Maybe I would have grown to forgive him. I might even be sad and grieving right now instead of feeling sorry for myself.

  But I didn't answer it, and once I started down that road I couldn't make myself turn back, no matter how hard I tried. Even if his letters would soften me up, I'd look at his hard signature and all the bad times would come rushing back. I'd remember the beatings. I'd remember the smell of bad bourbon and vomit. I'd remember the phone call from Mom after the police had called her to say they'd found Tommy in an alley; a rubber strap, a needle, a spoon. He died
happy, I suppose.

  I'd remember those things and I'd fold up the letter, stuff it in its envelope, and try to put Dad out of my mind until the next letter came along.

  I found the final letter, the one I got about two months ago. Most of it was the usual nonsense about forgiveness and families sticking together and all that. Then the last sentence said this:

  "Son, there's something very important that I have for you,” he wrote. “I'd like to see you face-to-face to give this to you and talk about what it means to us both. Could you please write back or call me, just this one time? I'll take care of getting you here if you're willing to come. I'd like to see you just this one time. Will you come, son? It's important. Please."

  And he signed it, “Love, Dad."

  I never wrote back.

  * * * *

  Chucker met me at the Broadway Hotel at seven o'clock for a burger and a beer. You'd think that having lived through all that I'd lived through with my family I'd never set foot in a bar, but I was inexplicably neutral about drinking and always had been. I didn't drink alcohol much. I didn't have a need for it like Dad.

  "Here's to J. W. Heat McCabe,” Chucker said, hoisting his Guinness.

  I nodded to be polite and took a sip of my ice water. After an uncomfortable pause, I gave politeness a try: “I'd like to thank you for arranging things and taking care of Dad. I know you guys were close. I know you stayed friends all these years. I appreciate that. Dad wasn't an easy man to..."

  "To get along with,” Chucker finished, smiling. His face was old and weathered, but his smile was still as wide and youthful as I remembered it. I'd always liked Chucker.

  "Right."

  "Why didn't you answer his last letter?” Chucker asked. “You know, your old man changed a lot over the years, kid. He got involved in Little League ball, helped with coaching, volunteered as an organizer. He helped a whole lot of kids. A lot of people think pretty well of him around here now."

  The calm in his voice, the near complete innocence, surprised me. There was no accusation in it, only curiosity.