Broken Vessels

by Andre Dubus

  I believed Billy Joe Barrett’s name would be part of baseball for years. I believed he would go from us to Flint, then to double and finally triple A, and would have a career there, at the top of the garden wall. And, with the hope that is the essence of belief, I told myself that he would play in the major leagues; that one season, or over several of them, he would discover and claim that instant of timing, or that sharper concentration, or whatever it was that he so slightly lacked, and that flawed his harmony at the plate. In the field he was what we called then a Fancy Dan. He was right-handed and tall, fast and graceful and lithe. He leaped high and caught line drives as smoothly as an acrobat, as though the hard-hit ball and his catching it were a performance he and the batter had practiced for years. On very close plays at first, stretching for a throw from an infielder, he did a split, the bottom of one leg and the top of the other pressed against the earth; then quickly and smoothly, without using his hands, he stood. He stole a lot of bases. He often ended his slide by rising to his feet, on the bag. He batted left-handed and was a line drive hitter, and a good one; but not a great one.

  I have never seen a first baseman whose grace thrilled me as Barrett’s did; and one night in Lafayette he hit a baseball in a way I have never seen again. He batted lead-off or second and every season hit a few home runs, but they were not what we or other teams and fans or Barrett himself considered either a hope or a threat when he was at the plate. But that night he hit a fast ball coming just above his knees. It started as a line drive over the second baseman, who leaped for it, his gloved hand reaching up then arcing down without the ball that had cleared by inches, maybe twelve of them, the glove’s leather fingers. Then in short right field the ball’s trajectory sharply rose, as though deflected higher and faster by angled air, and the right fielder stopped his motion toward it and simply stood and watched while the ball rose higher and higher and was still rising and tiny as it went over the lights in right field. Billy Joe Barrett’s career ended in Lafayette.

  How could I forget DiMaggio’s sentence? Before I got out of high school, the Bulls’ park was vacant, its playing field growing weeds. The Strohms had moved on, looking for another ball club; and Norm Litzinger and Billy Joe Barrett and their wives had gone to whatever places they found, after Lafayette, and after baseball. I was driving my family’s old Chevrolet and smoking Lucky Strikes and falling in love with girls whose red lips marked their cigarettes and who, with painted fingernails, removed bits of tobacco from their tongues; and, with that immortal vision of mortality that youth holds in its heart, I waited for manhood.

  DiMaggio was wrong. I know that now, over forty years after I read his sentence. Or, because I was a boy whose hope was to be a different boy with a new body growing tall and fast and graceful and strong, a boy who one morning would wake, by some miracle of desire, in motion on the path to the garden, I gave to DiMaggio too much credence; and his sentence lost, for me, all proportion, and insidiously became a heresy. Which I am renouncing now, as I see Billy Joe Barrett on the night when his whole body and his whole mind and his whole heart were for one moment in absolute harmony with a speeding baseball and he hit it harder and farther that he could at any other instant in his life. We never saw the ball start its descent, its downward arc to earth. For me, it never has. It is rising white over the lights high above the right field fence, a bright and vanishing sphere of human possibility soaring into the darkness beyond our vision.

  1989

  THE END OF A SEASON

  ON A SUMMER Wednesday they came in, the carpenter and the plumber, to install a shower. The plumber is short and white-haired, the carpenter tall and white-haired. In winter the plumber had gone to Texas, to a job that was waiting. It was his first move from New England. When he got there the job wasn’t, so he came back to work for the college.

  “Thought I’d got rid of you,” the carpenter said. He was standing in the bathtub. “Then I goes to work one morning, and there’s that Goddamn plumber.”

  “I missed you,” the plumber said.

  “I bet you did. You’ll miss me when I’m gone too.”

  “You going somewhere?” I said.

  “You bet I’m going somewhere,” the carpenter said.

  “Happy hunting ground,” the plumber said. “That’s where he’s going.”

  The carpenter planned to finish his work on Friday, and the plumber his on Monday, but the parts didn’t come that week. Monday morning the carpenter came up the stairs, three flights of them. He went into the bathroom and started working.

  “Damndest thing about that plumber,” he said. “I come to work Friday and all day I’m looking around for him. Where’s that plumber? I say. Nobody’s seen him. So I figure he’s working down to the other end, or something. So I come in this morning, and no plumber. Where’s that plumber? I say. Turns out he had a heart attack. He’s in the hospital. Last week he’s climbing these stairs and puffing and he says, Jesus I got to quit them Goddamn cigarettes. Sure, I say, you and me both. Thursday he’s at lunch and his arm goes numb but he works the rest of the afternoon anyways, then I guess that night his wife got him down to the hospital. I guess he’ll quit the butts now.”

  “Maybe. Most people don’t.”

  “That’s true. But you put a guy in the hospital for a while, he’s feeling sick, he don’t want to smoke; then after a while he goes home and he can quit. When it’s gradual like that. It’s cold turkey that guys can’t do.”

  “My father had a heart attack. Next day I went to see him, he was in the oxygen tent, and I said: Is there anything you want? He said: A highball and a cigarette.”

  “Fix him right up.”

  “Sure. They told him to quit, so he switched from Luckies to Marlboros.”

  “Jesus, them’s worse. That’s what I smoke. So is he all right now?”

  “No, he died. Cancer of the colon.”

  “No fooling. They get you one way or the other, don’t they?”

  I went to the college and talked to a woman who cleans the place.

  “How’s Art?” I said.

  “You mean Merton,” she said.

  Merton was her husband. He used to clean the place too, but then he had a heart attack. They told him he couldn’t smoke anymore; he was a Red Sox fan, and they told him he couldn’t watch the games on television either, he’d get too excited.

  “I mean the plumber,” I said. “He had a heart attack last week.”

  “Oh my Gawd. I’ll call his wife.”

  “How you going to keep your man away from the tube, with the Yankees playing?”

  “Oh, that poor man: he watched maybe one or two innings this weekend, with Seattle. I just go with what I got, one day at a time.”

  A few days later, Merton was in the college bookstore, talking with the woman who runs it. He was short, and very thin.

  “I can’t even eat bread,” he said to her.

  “You should try that salt-free bread.”

  “You ever taste bread without salt in it?”

  “I hear you can’t watch the games,” I said.

  “Sure. The doctor said, you’ve got a weak heart, you can’t watch baseball; I said, yeah, well you’ve got a weak head, and I’m watching the Sox.” He grinned at the woman. “It’s crazy: every time I hear a knock on the door I figure it’s St. Peter come calling.”

  “Oh, you,” she said.

  “I tell you, when I find out I’m going down the Glory Road I’m buying me a case of beer and a carton of cigarettes.”

  “Oh, I’m not even going to listen to you,” she said, and she squeezed his hand on the counter between them.

  Within a week he was dead. The day before his funeral I ran across the campus. The carpenter was working on the footbridge over the pond, and I stopped. He said the plumber had angina and had to stay home and rest.

  “Old Merton’s getting himself buried out in the boondocks,” he said.

  “I don’t know where it is.”

  “Me neither.
Kenny’ll know.”

  We went to the other end of the bridge where Kenny was clipping brush. He told us where the cemetery was.

  “Kenny’s bought his plot already,” the carpenter said. “Tombstone and all.”

  “The stone too?”

  “Sure,” Kenny said. “I got it cheap, up in New Hampshire. Went up there in my truck and brought it back.”

  “And it’s out there?” I said. “With your name on it?”

  “Is it out there,” the carpenter said. “Memorial Day, Kenny went and took a look at it. Veterans had it all decorated. They figured he was down there, see.”

  “Oh, it looked pretty,” Kenny said. “Flags, flowers, the whole works.”

  “You do plan ahead,” I said.

  “It’s the one thing you can count on,” Kenny said.

  “I’ll see you guys later,” I said, and ran away from the campus, and down the road.

  1978

  RAILROAD SKETCHES

  TRAVEL BY AIR is not travel at all, but simply a change of location; so my wife and daughter and I went to San Francisco by train, leaving Boston on a Wednesday morning in June then, after lunch in New York, boarding Amtrak’s Broadway to Chicago. My daughter had a roomette, my wife and I a bedroom: the couch, facing the front of the train, becomes a bed; above it is a bunk, locked into the wall, lowered at night; a narrow shoe locker has hangers for shirts; there is a bathroom with a lavatory latched into the wall above the toilet; you lower it to wash and when you lift it into the wall again, it drains; the room has a wide window and is air-conditioned, and a small fan over the door stirs the air above the couch, the bunks.

  We go to the club car as the train gets underway, and are sitting with our first drinks when the porter who showed us aboard comes in and sits at the table across the aisle. He looks at me and says: “You’re in the wrong car.”

  “This one?”

  “No. The bedroom. Room A is right, but it’s Room A in the next car.”

  I follow him out and we move the luggage and I go back to my drink and watch the backward rush of late spring green, while a boy with a transistor radio plays rock music so loudly that no table or booth is free of it, and I wonder if we need an amendment to the First Amendment, or thousands of violated Americans willing to break the portable radios of those people whose sonic selfishness disturbs the sound of breakers and breeze at beaches, the quiet of parks, and even the sounds of baseball and fans and vendors at Fenway Park where I’ve often heard the play-by-play from nearby fans with strange needs, and once heard a basketball game from the row behind me.

  My wife asks him to turn it lower and he does, and we pass trees interrupted by parking lots and factories and stores and houses of small towns, and I remember the cities our trains have crept through since morning, where the tall bleak monuments stood, walls of indefinable color, not brown or grey or black: the color of hopes slowly constricted through the years, and I look out at lovely farms and grazing dairy cattle in green pastures in maligned New Jersey. In a light rain we cross the Delaware into Trenton; on the river a man stands in an outboard, under a sheltering bridge. West of Trenton are suburbs, with softball diamonds and supermarkets and pastel houses, small and built close to each other, those little homes where people paid for a piece of the country, and to judge them from the distance of a train, with an eye for size and space, to judge them from anywhere, is foolish; for finally you know that, as with the train compartment, one could disappear nightly and happily into those houses. But somehow they seem sad, perhaps because I believe that anyone who wants to own one of them would also want to own a bigger one with more lawn and trees, so the house becomes another burial place of surrendered hope. Maybe it means that, along the tracks, America is sad.

  Philadelphia is the saddest, so far, of all: looking as though it has been defeated after a long siege, ending in house-to-house combat, and then abandoned, leaving the brick factories and mills with their broken windows, and the dwellings built together without yards or even a glimpse of light between them, all these buildings looking vacated months ago by the wounded and dead. But leaving Philadelphia we go through Bryn Mawr where, for a short distance, there is not only light between homes but wide lawns with trees, dark green in the grey light of the wet sky. The hope for a piece of the country is realized here: a piece of it far enough away from neighbors so you cannot smell, hear, or even see them; and again the train’s sleeping compartment comes to mind, its sealed-in privacy paid for more dearly than the coach seats, where you smell and hear and see everyone; so that the train becomes a mobile microcosm of the land.

  It is cocktail hour in the club car, and the citizenry are reading bad books. I am sipping a vodka and tonic when, not three feet from my window, which is wider than the table where we sit, an eastbound train rushes past, adding to the stimulation of liquor: I feel I can reach out and touch speeding steel. At six o’clock the sun breaks through, trees and meadows are lighter green and, far from the tracks, white houses are nestled at the edge of forested hills. Then we are in farm country: long wide fields east of Lancaster, some separated by trees growing in line; large houses and barns, and the sky here is touched by trees and silos. Now the outskirts of cities are as something seen long ago, memory of them muted by this landscape, and I know I have not lost touch with the land but, reared in towns and suburbs, was already removed from it at birth. People’s love of the country is simple and profound: out here one lives on real earth, not a measured and manicured replica of it, or in an apartment whose seclusion consists of steel and concrete rising above the streets, and high up there, one can have colored walls and the smells of toiletry and cooking. We pass trees so dense that we cannot see between them, our vision narrowed to our window and the green trees in the late sunlight, and the sky patched with blue. Then we leave the trees and, in the open, the sky is slashed by tall grey turrets and we pass Three Mile Island. Then we go along the tree-grown banks of the Susquehanna, into Harrisburg. By dinner the sun is out, the sky blue, and as we are seated we cross the Susquehanna, broad, with tiny grassy islands.

  The steward comes for our drink orders: a vodka and tonic, and a half bottle of burgundy with two glasses. He assumes the two glasses are for my wife and daughter, and says: “I’ll bring it and you pour it. I know they’re not twenty-one, and I won’t touch it.”

  I tell him one glass is for me, the other for my young wife. When he brings the wine, he pours it and says: “Pennsylvania, Iowa, Texas, Arkansas are the bad states. We know them. They come aboard and arrest the bartender. In Oklahoma you can only sell beer with an Oklahoma stamp on it.”

  Still we are following the Susquehanna, trees along the banks, the earth rising in ridges to the horizon. I go to the club car so I can smoke with my drink, and sit with a black man with white hair and moustache. He is from New Jersey, and he and his wife are going to St. Louis to visit a niece.

  “I was supposed to be born in New Orleans,” he says. “But my daddy got on a moving van and didn’t have the sense to get off. He just couldn’t stay settled. Started in Georgia, got to Louisiana, ended in Trenton.”

  “Are you still working?”

  “I own a garage, knock out a few dents. Something to do while I’m retired. But it’s hard to keep help.”

  “They don’t show?”

  “They don’t show, or when they do, they want all the money.”

  He tells me to watch for the horseshoe turn later that night.

  “You see a train moving and you think it’s another train, then you realize it’s the same one you’re riding.”

  “Maybe I’ll see you here for that, after dinner.”

  “Maybe. My wife’s up in the car. I came back to smoke. She worries about our stuff, wants to watch it all the time. I try not to worry. This year I’ll be seventy-two. How much can I take with me?”

  “Six feet of the country.”

  “They probably won’t give me all of that.”

  I go back to the dining car; the s
un is setting behind trees, peering through as though perched on the fork of bough and trunk; then it is on the crest of a blue ridge, beyond the river and trees.

  After dinner I drink a beer in the club car and talk with Doris, a black woman tending bar. She asks where I am going, then says: “You’ll love the Zephyr: two decks, and the scenery from Denver on west is beautiful. My husband is a retired veteran, and he flew a lot in the service, but hadn’t hardly been on trains. So we were going to L.A. and I said Let’s go by train. He fell in love with it. He loved it so much that he took the train back from L.A. I’m telling you, honey, he left before me, and I flew back.”

  “You married an older man too. You don’t look over twenty-five.”

  “I’m past twenty-five, but my husband’s forty-five.”

  “My wife’s twenty-three.”

  “There you go. Nothing wrong with that. I’d never marry a young man again: too many hassles. You got to get somebody settled. This man that works for Amtrak asked me about a friend of his that was forty-seven and wanted to marry a girl that was twenty. But I knew he was talking about himself. I told him: Listen: don’t worry about age. It don’t mean nothing. You need a woman that understands your work and loves you. Some can and some can’t and don’t matter how old they are. He said he wanted some children. I said Go ahead and have children. Then he said he was worried because she was going to go to college. I said She’s not worried about you not having an education, so don’t worry about her having one.”