Authors: Jessica Minier
Ben snorted and spoke without
considering his words. “Haven’t you shared hotel rooms with a billion guys over
the years?”
Billy’s laughter was rich and
full in the darkness. “Kid, if anyone else asked me that, I’d belt the shit out
of them.”
Ben was briefly completely awake.
“I didn’t mean it that way,” he said, aware that Billy already knew this.
They were both quiet for a
moment, and Ben felt sleep creeping slowly over his body in the darkness.
“I’m really sorry, kid,” Billy
said suddenly, softly.
“I know,” Ben said. “Don’t worry
about it.” He was gritting his teeth now against the stealthy seduction of
exhaustion.
“Yeah, but won’t you be
disappointed? I mean, no chili dogs, no score card, no sneaking sips of my beer…
I used to go to games all the time with my dad, and we had this ritual: I would
get a new hat, and a pennant. I don’t even know if they sell pennants anymore,
but I was going to buy you one, if they did.”
The weak light slipping around
the door was briefly eclipsed by someone passing in the hall. Ben tried to
focus on Billy’s words, feeling that something was being said that he ought to
hear.
“Yeah, I know. I really
appreciate it, but I’m okay,” he said.
“Of course you are,” Billy said.
“I know that. I’m just saying, if you’re disappointed, I understand. Hell, I
was looking forward to it, myself.”
“I know, so was I. It would have
been fun to do all that stuff. We can go some other time, I’m sure.” Ben pulled
the words out of a molasses-thick portion of his thoughts. “Besides, you go all
the time with Casey, right?”
Billy was quiet, then he said:
“Yeah, but it’s not quite the same, is it?”
“I guess not,” Ben said, unsure
what they were talking about.
“Sleep,” Billy said. “Go to
sleep, and I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Yeah.” Ben’s brain was already
slipping images in front of his eyelids with the efficiency of a slide
projector. He collapsed into his dreams: vivid, startling plots that he
couldn’t remember even moments after starting awake in the unfamiliar bed.
He woke late; he could tell from
the bright heat of the sun through the window, from the muffled sounds of a
house awake. After changing into a new t-shirt, he made his way down the hall
to find Billy and Chuck sitting at the breakfast table, drinking coffee like
old buddies. Betty was scrambling eggs in a cast-iron pan on the stove, wearing
a different, but equally unrevealing housecoat. This one featured strawberries
and watermelon slices and buttoned from her calves to her throat. Chuck was dressed
in exactly the same uniform as the day before, but with a new tie. Billy looked
as clean and fresh as an ad for soap-on-a-rope. He’d even trimmed his mustache.
He was all bristly-clean virility, cocky and self-assured.
“Good morning, merry sunshine,”
he said to Ben. “You look like you could use a shower, kid.”
Ben didn’t know what to say to
that, so he just slid into the chair beside Billy. Chuck offered him toast from
a platter and he took several pieces. The bread was cool, but the butter had
fully melted into it while it was still warm. Chuck poured him another glass of
weak orange liquid, in what appeared to be the same tumbler, cleaned. In the
light of morning and some sleep, Ben recognized the watery orange beverage for
what it was: Tang.
“Chuck here tells me there’s a
Greyhound station in the next town over. He’s pretty sure we can pop you on a
bus back to Tampa.” Billy was tapping his foot beneath the table, and Ben
understood the gesture. No doubt Billy was anxious to get started on his car. He
tried to reign in his refreshed and strengthened sense of disappointment, which
had burst in upon him this morning with the vigor of a freshly rested friend.
So that was the unglamorous end, he thought: a bus ride back to Florida. Ben
nodded around his toast. He had no real choice.
“Eggs?” Betty asked, holding the
skillet in one hand and a spatula in the other.
“Please,” Billy said, offering up
a plate. Ben nodded and was rewarded with a fat scoopful. They were perfectly
cooked and upon closer inspection, contained nibbles of bacon. Chuck seemed to
be sticking to coffee.
“It’s my heart,” he offered by
way of explanation. “Can’t eat anything with grease.” Chuck didn’t appear to
have consumed a single mouthful of grease in his entire life.
“Now that’s a real shame,” Billy
said, shoveling a forkful of golden fluff into his mouth and smacking his lips.
“Grease is what keeps a man strong.” He poked Ben with his elbow. “Puts hair on
your chest, eh boy?”
Ben rolled his eyes.
After breakfast, Billy and Chuck
loaded the suitcases back into the wagon and they drove into the next town, a
tree-lined hamlet called Porter, which at least had a main street stocked with
the usual small-town shops. Ben waited in the car while Billy arranged for a
tow and bargained with the local mechanic. Even with all the windows down, the
September heat seemed to coat him in sweat. Chuck fanned himself in the front
seat with some sort of music pamphlet. Ben watched the rows of notes, back and
forth, back and forth, until they blurred into neat lines. “You still in high
school?” Chuck asked.
“That’s right,” Ben said.
“Billy tells me you’re a real
fine pitcher all ready.”
Ben shrugged.
“You should go to college,” Chuck
said. “Study something interesting. Baseball doesn’t happen for most people.
Get yourself something to fall back on.”
Ben had heard this a thousand
times, from every relative and family friend and teacher and counselor, even
those who operated on the mere periphery of his decisions. But he knew, with
total certainty, that if the Pros called, he’d give up a kidney, much less
college. He knew everyone else knew this, too.
“I’m not sure what I’m going to
do yet,” he replied.
Billy trotted back, bristling
with annoyance. “Six days,” he said, slamming the door as he slid into the
front seat. “Can you believe that? Six fu… six damn days.”
Ben stifled a laugh.
“Porter got any motels?” Billy
asked. “I can’t impose on you good folks for six days.”
Porter did have a motel. One
run-down, Fifties-era motel on the edge of town, its gray paint peeling,
baskets of faded red plastic geraniums hanging limply from the eaves. Billy
checked in, and then returned looking considerably more pleased. “I got quite a
deal, there,” he told them. “Jewed ‘em down to less than ten a night.”
The bus station was near the
motel, but was really just a few plastic benches bolted to the concrete under
an overhang on the side of a greasy spoon called “Berts Eats,” with no
apostrophe. Billy treated them all to lunch, no doubt because of the money he’d
just saved at the motel, Ben thought. Chuck had relaxed enough to show Billy
off a bit, introducing him to the waitress and the owner, Bert, of course.
Billy charmed them all by posing for a photo to post on the restaurant wall, an
arm around each of his new fans, his teeth gleaming Colgate-white in the
camera’s flash.
By this point, Ben was done with
road trips. He stared out the window at the concrete benches and experienced a
longing for home so strong it made him want to weep into his burger and fries.
He felt disconnected, already on the bus. In his imagination, he could feel the
vibrations of the wheels beneath his feet, could smell the musty puff of air
from the seat each time he shifted, could see the trees sliding by beside him
as he rode at branch-level. For a year after his father had left, Ben had taken
a Greyhound out to his father’s apartment in Orlando. Most of the hour and a
half had been spent sleeping, but he still remembered the sensations of the
ride; a deep memory, further than he liked to access. He could still smell his
father, sometimes, when a man passed him on the street or stood close to him in
a grocery line, wearing a cologne for which Ben had no name. Then his stomach
would tighten in a strange sort of momentary agony, and he would have to move further
away to avoid burying himself in the scent like a child.
“Ready to head home?” Billy
asked, and some of what he was feeling must have shown on Ben’s face as he
looked up, because Billy put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. Billy had a
scent, too, as familiar as his father’s had ever been: Old Spice. He knew
that’s what it was now, from seeing the bottle in Billy’s suitcase. Trust Billy
to wear the cheapest cologne on the market, despite his salary. Underneath the
sweet fragrance lay the essence of Billy, which was completely indefinable.
“Yeah,” Ben said. “Yeah, I’m
ready to go home.”
Billy nodded. “Then let’s get you
on that bus, kid.”
Chuck left them at that point,
heading off to work with an autograph and a promise from Billy to send him
tickets to an Atlantics home game, complete with airfare. The skinny man hugged
them both. Ben accepted the gesture politely, but Billy thumped Chuck on the
back so hard that Chuck drew away coughing and bowing, slightly, like a servant
withdrawing from his master.
The bus slid into the depot and
exhaled as if relieved to have stopped. The door opened, but no one got off.
The driver eyed Ben and his single suitcase, then jerked his head toward the
interior of the bus. Ben turned to Billy and surprised himself by hugging his
friend. Billy didn’t thump him, but patted him with a tender gentleness.
“See ya at home, kid.”
“Yep,” Ben said, and withdrew to
the steps of the bus.
“Have a great ride, son,” Billy
called as the doors closed and Ben stepped into the humming aisle of the
Greyhound. “Have a great ride.”
1998
Up until the night we returned from cleaning out my
father’s house, I had never seen my sister drunk. We had put a few back on
occasion, but until the moment I rolled over on her pristinely white wool
living room carpet and saw that she had tears in her eyes, I really hadn’t ever
been with Lee when she was stinking. She sniffed dramatically and took a long
sip of her drink, sloshing around the ice in a futile attempt to water it down.
“I shouldn’t be telling you any
of this,” she said and then she spread her arms out and crossed her feet at the
ankle so that she looked like a little Gucci Christ.
I couldn’t disagree with that, I
thought.
“I’m glad you are, though,” I
said, which wasn’t the truth, but then, who cared, right? Certainly not Lee.
“We never really talk, you know?”
“We never did,” she affirmed.
Rolling over, she propped herself up on her elbow and stared at me. “It’s not
like I never needed you, you know. I mean, did you ever stop to think what it
might mean to me when you decided to go to college in Seattle?”
The truth was, I never had. Why
would I have? In the seventeen years I had spent on earth up to that point, my
sister had never once expressed any need for a sibling, much less for me in
particular. What happened to me that year, when I made up my mind to screw my
family, my friends, my entire limited world, had no room for someone else. To
have let her in on my secret would have, by virtue of the shaky design, knocked
the entire rickety structure of my rationalization down on its ass.
“I was seventeen years-old,” I
pointed out.
She rolled over onto her back,
expertly taking the glass with her. “Well, it doesn’t matter now, does it?” she
said. “What’s done is done, right?”
We lapsed into the clichés of too
much liquor and depression. I nodded in agreement.
Lee probably had no intention of
getting drunk when we went to clean out my father’s place and pick up the
contents of his safe deposit box. She probably thought she could handle it,
just as I did; that nothing from his life would shake us. But we were wrong,
both of us. Perhaps he had known us better than I always thought, or maybe it
was just luck.
We managed the house without too
much unpleasant grieving. After opening a few drawers and running her hands
over the top of all the best pieces of furniture, Lee simply turned and asked
me what I wanted. None of my mother’s frou-frou Louis antiques appealed to me,
so in the end I claimed only the things that reminded me most of my father: an
overstuffed, striped recliner he had sat in each night in what he referred to
as “the den;” an entire shelf of books on baseball; his golf clubs and the
matching bowling balls he and my mother had used; and a battered, yellow
baseball with an autograph from the Babe just before he died. Lee said she’d
box the small stuff up and send it to me, then asked what I wanted to do with
that “ugly old chair.” In a moment of brilliance, I also claimed my father’s
1957 Chevy pick-up from the garage, only to realize as Lee shrugged that she
hadn’t wanted it anyway.
“Well, at least you’ll have to
come back and visit in order to get that truck,” she said as she locked the
door behind us, sealing any feelings we might have dared show back inside with
the drawers of my father’s clothing, all of which would smell, I knew, like Old
Spice, the only fragrance my mother said she could still smell when the chemo
had muffled her senses. “I’m not sure the damn thing would make it to Seattle,
but you’re welcome to try.”
In the car on the way to the
bank, I rolled the window down again and this time Lee didn’t bother to
complain. Standing in the air-conditioned lobby, waiting for one of the
managers to let us into the vault, she shivered and pulled her sheer
over-blouse closed across her chest. The manager opened the box and handed it
to Lee before leaving us alone. Inside were two manila envelopes, one addressed
to each of us in my father’s messy handwriting.
Lee lifted hers out and turned it
over several times before stepping away from me toward the door.
“I’ll open mine in the office,”
she said. “You can stay here to open yours.”
I wasn’t sure why she felt we
needed to be so private about the whole thing, but didn’t argue. Her envelope
was her own and I wasn’t about to demand to see the contents, though I might
have liked some help dealing with whatever was in mine.
“Okay,” I said, pondering the fat
lump in my envelope. “Are you alright?”
“Fine,” she barked, her envelope
pressed to her chest. “I’ll see you outside, right?”
For a long ticking moment, I just
sat there. The bank had provided soft, overstuffed chairs in the ante-room to
the vault. I could have slept there comfortably, or wept, or crowed in secret
delight. Instead I turned that damn brown envelope over in my hands, trying to
figure out how much it would hurt me to open it before I did anything as
concrete as breaking the seal. What could it be, this secret lump? I was
reminded of Shylock and his pound of flesh. At last, feeling the stuffiness of
the airless room, I slid one finger under the edge of the flap and gave myself
a monstrous paper cut as I opened it.
Sucking the wound, I shook the
package and watched as a paper-wrapped something tumbled out, followed by a
legal document that was, as I suspected, a will. Reading the will informed me
that my sister and I were my father’s sole heirs, and that she would receive
his house and half a million dollars in a trust fund for the grandchildren. I
would receive a check from the executor for half a million as well, plus all of
his baseball memorabilia. His life insurance policy was to be divided between
the two of us. I would have to contact the executer to find out how much that
policy was currently worth. So that was that. I was rich enough to buy a nice
house in Seattle, and fund my retirement accounts afterward. And since I’d
already claimed all the memorabilia, I knew that wouldn’t upset Lee. For a
moment, I sat and absorbed my new-found prosperity. It wasn’t upsetting, as I’d
worried it might be, like blood-money. Nor was it a relief. I was glad for it,
but not overjoyed.
I turned my attention to the
lump. My father had written me a note, then crumpled it and several sheets of
paper around something. As I uncurled them, a ring slipped onto my lap and then
hit the floor with a sharp, jingling finality.
I bent down to retrieve it,
rising off the chair and sliding one hand underneath the seat till I found it,
resting near the wall. It was pleasantly gratifying to note that the bank
didn’t move the chair to dust.
I waited to look at the ring, to
confirm what I suspected it must be, until I was seated again. Turning it over,
I read the date on the front. World Series Champions, 1976. It was not nearly
as shocking to finally hold it in my hand as I had thought it might be. My father
had never worn that ring, nor had he ever explained to me why he hadn’t. I had
always assumed it was because of Ben, and though I suppose I’d known he would
keep it, I wasn’t prepared to have it fall into my hands, so to speak. Why he
had given it to me was a mystery, so after weighing the heavy metal in my hand
for value, I spread the two pages out on my lap.
My father’s team had won that
year, obviously. The second time in a row. You might think that he would have
carried the ring with pride, preferred it to the first one as evidence of
promise fulfilled. But like most everything that awful year, it had been
banished from our house to this vault, probably the day he received it. It was
the year he had retired. It was also the year Ben McDunnough’s baseball career
had ended, because his arm had exploded like a grenade and in the process,
broken my father’s heart.
I could still remember the first
flurry of hospital visits, Ben’s face pale and his arm swollen and purple. My
father making bad “third leg” jokes. The surgeries, all the experimenting by
the doctors... Nothing worked. As an adult, I understood the descent that
followed: the fighting with my father, the drinking, and Ben’s eventual flight
to California. As a teenager, I only saw that the man I had adored, had
worshiped as a perfect amalgamation of my father and an object of sexual
desire, had disappeared, had abandoned me. I mourned him for several months
before I even began to acknowledge how angry I was at him. It would be several
years before I understood that my father was beyond furious: he was
inconsolable.
It would be almost five years
before I would see Ben McDunnough again, five years before I would hear his
name from my father. My mother would die, my sister would go off to college (or
rather, stay home for it), I would give up my dreams of baseball and grow to
accept my body for what it could offer. I received my first kiss, and Lee lost
her virginity to the pitcher from the local farm team in a rather sordid
incident beneath the bleachers on a hot Saturday afternoon. I discovered that I
really could write, and that it made things a little bit better, somehow. All
this would happen and yet in some fundamental way, nothing would change at all.
But it didn’t matter now, did it?
That seemed to be the theme of the day. The first piece of paper, crinkled and
yellow, turned out to be a note. “Dear Casey,” it read in my father’s cramped
writing, as if he were a child shoving the pencil forward inch by agonizing
inch, “I have never wanted to disappoint anyone, especially you. I love you,
Dad.” Short and sweet, a riddle, a little enigma. I picked up the other pieces
of paper and my entire world fell, not apart, exactly, but into a new shape:
from whole to scattered; from square to round.
I was holding three receipts. For
bets placed in Las Vegas, early August, 1976. The name on each receipt was
Benjamin William McDunnough. Sent from my childhood address, and signed in my
father’s chicken-scratch handwriting. Even if I hadn’t recognized the handwriting,
I would have known this: William was my father’s name. Ben’s middle name was
Ronald, after his grandfather. You don’t have a sixty-three page handmade
scrapbook of clippings about someone hidden under your bed for six years
without knowing their middle name. The bets concerned the point spread of the
second, third and fourth games of the 1976 World Series. The games before Ben
broke his arm. Each one favored the other team by more than 4 points. Together,
they totaled more than a quarter million dollars. I knew, without even having
to call the numbers forth from my memory, that all the bets had won.
So ok, when Lee offered me a
little glass of whisky with some ice, I didn’t turn it down. And when she
offered me a second, and then a third, and maybe more than that, I didn’t turn
those down either, despite the acidic way the liqueur had begun to taste on my
burned tongue.
We collapsed onto the sofa,
accepting its embrace like weary travelers. Lee swished the amber liquid of her
first shot around and around, coating everything in fermentation.
“We’re broke,” she said, after
her second shot.
“What?” I asked, incredulous.
“You’re kidding.”
She shook her head and licked her
lips like a cat, chasing traces of alcohol. “Nope, ‘fraid not. In fact,” she
enunciated, stretching the last two letters till they cracked, “we’re in debt.”
“But,” I sputtered, “Jake must
make, what, five million a year?”
“Three and a bit,” she said,
glaring at me, as if this explained everything.
“I don’t understand...” I began,
pouring myself another shot.
“Of course not,” she said
bitterly. “No one does. How, they ask, can you have gotten yourselves into this
situation? You make more in a year than most Americans do in a lifetime...
blah, blah blah, blah blah.” She set her drink down and stood up, which was a
mistake. She was already weaving, my lightweight sister. “I’ve heard it all,
Case. And I can’t explain it to you so you’d sympathize with me. Not that I’m
asking for sympathy, you understand.”
I nodded furiously, and instantly
regretted it.
“This house... do you know how
much this house is worth?”
I shook my head, more carefully.
“Three million dollars,” she
said. “Do you know how much we owe on it? One million.”
“But Lee,” I blurted out, “why
not just sell?”
“Our debts are more than the
value of the entire house,” she said quietly and I sat, breathless. It was so
incomprehensible, that kind of money.
“I have a 1988 Toyota Corolla,” I
said, by way of explanation. “I make less than forty thousand dollars a year.”
“I realize you don’t understand,”
she said coldly and poured another burning glass. “The school we send the boys
to? Twenty thousand a year. The cars... the clothes, the travel. It just adds
and adds and adds and Jake has no comprehension of it, no ability to slow down,
to live with economy. And frankly...” She was sitting down now, crossing her
legs with ease. So limber, she could still be a teenager. “... Neither do I.”
“Wow,” I said, feeling the drink
reach my bladder in a momentary ache. I didn’t drink the hard stuff, much.
She was staring at her feet;
black stockinged feet with manicured toes just barely visible beneath the hose.