Cardboard Gods (35 page)

 

One of my tasks as a clerk was to periodically go behind the counter and retrieve the milk crate filled with customer returns and reshelve them. I met the cashier with the lock of pink hair during this task. If it had been up to me I would have said nothing and skulked by her to get the crate of books, then maybe thought about the moment later, revising the part where I let the pitch sail by. Luckily, she had a more direct approach to life. She shoved her hand at me.

“Hi, I'm Abby,” she said.

 

By then, all my gods were gone except one, heaven eroded but for Rickey Henderson, who persisted into the new millennium, on a new team every season or every half-season. You began to assume that you could always pick up a page with box scores and find his name somewhere. You began to assume that since he'd been around so long, he'd be around forever.

How long can anything last? My brother and I still saw each other occasionally, and if I was slumping he'd always make me feel better, but the halts and pauses in our conversations kept growing.

“Rickey Henderson is still kicking,” I told him one day. We'd been sitting on a park bench, drinking Budweiser tall boys out of paper bags. We hadn't said anything for a while. I'd started gazing at the box scores in the newspaper that had been poking out of the bulging satchel he always lugged everywhere.

“Rickey Henderson,” Ian said. “You don't say.”

“Seattle, of all places,” I said. Ian raised his bag of beer.

“To Rickey Henderson,” he said. I tapped my bag of beer against his and we drank.

 

Abby and I spent a day together just walking around. It was nothing special. It was one of the best days of my life. We went into an aquarium store and looked at the fish and petted a black cat that was sleeping on one of the tanks. We went to a couple shoe stores looking for and not finding a pair of the kind of suede sneakers I like to wear because they remind me of the 1970s. She bought some cheap sunglasses at an outdoor bazaar. We got something to eat at an Italian place, then sat and drank coffee in a narrow, empty space in the back of a small café. We walked to the subway, and she kissed me good-bye as her train to Queens was rolling into the station.

Bake McBride is one of those names that I'll never be able to say without feeling a flicker of happiness. There are others. Oscar Gamble, Jim Bibby. Dick Pole, Pete LaCock. Mario Mendoza, Mario Guerrero, Bob Apodaca, Biff Pocoroba. César Cedeño and Sixto Lezcano and Omar Moreno and Mark Lemongello. The Penguin, the Hammer, Toy Cannon, Quiz. You say the name and a door opens wide. You remember that world. You remember that time. You say Bake McBride and he's there, faster than any human could ever be, fast as you need him to be.

 

I had always been afraid I'd say my brother's name and find I'd been left behind. I had always been pulling on him, clinging to him, allowing absences in my own life to be filled by presences in his, day after day threading my life so intricately into his that eventually it got to the point that when either of us moved so much as a muscle the other felt it as a ripping of internal threads.

 

I can tell you what Bake McBride hit as a rookie and in what round he was drafted and how much he weighs and with what arm he throws. I can even tell you that my brother, like me, always loved Bake McBride, the player, the name, the way the two things match: the line drive contact of a .300 hitter in the hard consonants, smooth, effortless gliding in the long-vowel finish.
Bake McBride
. But I can't tell you if my brother might have had fears similar to my own about being left behind. All I have ever really known for sure is the kind of thing you could put on the back of a baseball card. Numbers. Places. Years. Season after season, we lived together. Through childhood,
through most of our twenties. Even when I went away for brief periods, I always circled back. It never occurred to me that it wasn't only my weakness and uncertainty that might have maintained this circle, and that I wasn't the only one who worried that someday that circle might get broken.

 

On the rare occasions in my life when I'd had a girlfriend, my brother had gotten a slightly stricken look on his face, as if he were watching someone bicycle through a red light into the path of a speeding truck. I can't fault him for that, considering not only how my relationships usually ended but also the hesitant, uncertain, awkward way I entered into them in the first place. After all, the look on his face might have been a reflection of my own.

Still, as my life began to intertwine with Abby's, I resented Ian's careful tight-faced hints that I slow down and think about what I was doing. I wanted to tell him about how good it felt to simply walk around an aquarium store with Abby, but I couldn't find the words, partly because we'd never talked about things like that, and partly because I resented that I needed to defend my decisions. At that time, my brother, who for years had been struggling far more than I'd been willing to notice, was working hard at discovering why his life was the way it was, and a shaky evangelical zeal for this work colored our interactions. One evening, as we were sitting on a park bench, he sensed my resistance to his hints to slow down and began nudging the conversation in a more general direction, toward the whole big box of cards of our lives, from birth on up.

“We
have
to figure this shit out,” he finally said. But the word
we
, the very thing I had clung to from my first conscious moments long into adulthood, felt suffocating.

“I don't have to figure out anything,” I said.

 

Eventually the hinting and denying of hints led to my brother asking that I meet him at a place called Mullins. We sat at the bar. A baseball game was on.

“So look,” he finally said. “I'm going through some things right now. Some really rough water. And I just can't be around you and her right now.”

We finished our beers and walked together to the subway. When I got home I would be unable to sleep. I would stare at the ceiling all
night thinking that what my brother said, however it was intended, amounted in my mind to an ultimatum:
me or her
.

But as we waited for the train, I only wanted there to still be something between us, something to say. I remembered the fantasy basketball league that we were both in. The draft was coming up soon.

“So who'd you rank first?” I asked.

“Hm? Oh, Tracy McGrady,” Ian said. “Big year.”

“I got him one, too,” I said. “He can give you something in every category.”

We weren't making eye contact.

“Yup, Tracy McGrady,” he mumbled. He leaned over to see if a train was coming.

“Tracy McGrady,” I said. My stomach started to hurt in the ensuing silence.
Is this it?

“Troy O'Leary,” I said, like casting a line into the water. My brother checked his watch.

“Ed O'Bannon,” I said, trying again. The tunnel started rumbling, the train on its way. The light got brighter. My brother said something, but it was lost in the clattering arrival.

“What?” I yelled. He waited for the brakes to stop screeching.

“Willie McCovey?”

I nodded.

“Willie McCovey,” I said. We were both looking at the doors. They opened and we got on. The train started moving. There was just enough space for us to sit down but we remained standing. I only had two stops until I transferred.

“Donovan McNabb,” I said.

“Shaquille O'Neal,” he said. We pulled into a station and the doors came open. Nobody got on or off. The doors closed. The train started moving again.

“Lynn McGlothen,” I said. My brother held on to a pole with one hand and tapped his chin with the other, looking down at the grimy floor. He had a big satchel full of undone work around his shoulder. I had a feeling we were missing something obvious. The train arrived at my stop. The doors opened. I got off and turned back toward my brother. Our eyes met. The doors closed and the train pulled away, the best one forgotten, the best one left unsaid. So say it now, two voices in tune, two voices as one. Say it and he's here: Bake McBride.

I moved out of New York with Abby, to somewhere else altogether, attracted to the idea that it was unfamiliar, a place beyond the reach, so I tried to believe, of any personal echoes.

And yet in this new place, Chicago, I started almost immediately to dig deeper into my childhood baseball card collection, as if I'd finally de cided I had to figure this shit out. I taped the card I loved most to the wall by my writing desk. Yaz at bat.

The statistics on the back of the card provided further instruction. The tiny type, the many seasons, the stunning number of hits, the even more stunning number, hidden but revealed by simple subtraction, of outs.
You've got to fail. No way around it. You fail and fail. You keep trying.

The deeper I dug, the more I noticed strange, inexplicable absences and other strange, inexplicable presences. Team checklists that I'd filled in thirty years earlier no longer seemed capable of accuracy. I didn't have some cards that the checklists said I should and had other cards that according to blank checklist boxes should not have been in my shoebox at all. Just whose cards were these, exactly?

Unpacking another box, which had been taped shut since before I'd gone away to be an adjunct professor, I discovered Ian's Yaz cap.

 

At my brother's request, I got on a plane to fly to a family therapy session. I sat in a small white room with a therapist, my mother, my brother, and Kelsey. Dad had opted not to come, citing his age and his hatred of air travel. I don't think Tom had been asked to come,
maybe out of deference to my mom, who had burst into tears the last time she'd seen him, some years earlier, at a reading of one of my pile of unpublished short stories.

The therapist used a whiteboard and a black marker to map out a family tree that included the unusual configuration of our family during the early 1970s, while we were living in the experimental three-parent house in New Jersey. There my brother and I were, on the same branch, below the unusually augmented parental branch, three names above us instead of two. All of us except the therapist sat as if we were bracing for a blow to the head.

“What was life like for these two?” the therapist asked. She pointed at the lowest branch.

“Painful,” Ian said.

She asked other questions. She had to raise her voice at times above the sound of a lawn mower outside. The grass must have been wet because the mower kept clogging and almost stalling, but then whoever was pushing it eased off, and it sputtered and spat back to life. It made me think of our house in East Randolph. I mowed the front yard and part of the side yard, and Ian did the back and part of the side. It also made me think of Tom. When I'd lived in the cabin, I'd gone over to his house once in a while and helped him mow his lawn, and after that whenever I went back to visit in the summer I'd always try to fit in a couple hours with the mower.