Onward Toward What We're Going Toward (11 page)

Lomax looked at him, confused.

“For catching baseballs.”

“What if I don't want to catch baseballs?”

“Every boy wants to catch baseballs. You just don't know how yet. Come on.”

Chic led his son to the backyard. He walked about ten paces from Lomax and underhanded a baseball to him. The ball fell short and rolled up to Lomax's feet.

“Throw it back.”

Lomax picked up the ball and looked at it, admiring the stitching on the seams. He shook off the glove and, with both hands, turned the ball over and over, studying it. “What are these?”

“The seams. Now, throw it back. Come on. Right here.”

Lomax didn't throw it back. Instead, he walked inside the house, into the kitchen where his mother was making mashed potatoes and green beans. He reached up and took the paring knife she'd been using to peel potatoes off the counter.

When Chic came into the house a moment later, he found Lomax sitting on the kitchen floor using the paring knife, like a surgeon, to cut open the baseball.

“What's he doing?” Chic said.

Diane shrugged.

At dinner, Diane, Chic, and Lomax sat around the dining room table, a plate of mashed potatoes, green beans, and pot roast in front of each of them. The family dog, Cody, a one-year-old golden retriever, sat on the floor, nudging Chic's thigh, looking for table scraps. By this time, Lomax had removed the leather cover of the baseball—it was sitting next to his plate—and was unraveling the string that had been hidden underneath the cover. Every so often, he stopped unraveling the string and wrote something down in his notebook. When dinner was over, Diane picked up the plates and took them to the kitchen. Chic continued to watch Lomax, the string pile getting bigger and bigger; pretty soon, he had unraveled all the string and gotten to the core—a hard, gray ball.

“Hey-hey,” Lomax said.

Chic smiled. “Hey-hey.”

Lomax smelled the ball. “It's a seed.”

“Not exactly.”

“It's not a seed?”

“It's the center.”

“A center?”

“The middle.”

Lomax turned the ball over in his hands.

“Without that gray ball, there can't be a baseball.”

Lomax was intrigued. “Do you have a center?”

Chic thought about this. “You and Mommy are my center.”

“Do I have a center?”

“Me and Mommy are your center.”

“The string needs its center back.”

“Yes, it does.”

Lomax began to re-wrap the string around the ball.

The morning after Green booked his first bet, he woke up with a splitting headache that felt like someone was stabbing a chopstick into his left eye. He and Mary had gotten horrible Chinese takeout from Ming Shee the night before (which was probably why he thought his headache felt like he was being stabbed in the eye by a chopstick). Ming Shee was the third Chinese takeout place they'd tried since they got to Peoria, and all three had served the shittiest Chinese he'd ever put in his mouth. Back in Las Vegas, he could get good Kung Pao chicken from three, actually four . . . no, six different takeout restaurants. One in particular, in North Las Vegas, by Sunrise Manor, across the street from Lemming's Car Wash—Happy Wok was its name—had chicken
strips of mouth-popping, juicy goodness with enough spice to make your forehead bead up. Green dreamed about the Kung Pao from Happy Wok, even though there was no point in dreaming about good Chinese takeout from Las Vegas when you lived in Peoria, Illinois, the world's worst city for Chinese takeout. And, to put a big cherry on top of this Chinese food mess, Green had a splitting headache, and the more he thought about the terrible takeout, the worse his headache got. Jesus Christ. Not to mention, the pain was affecting his vision. When he covered his right eye—which he was doing right now as he looked at the ceiling—everything became blurry. He rolled over and tried to read the digital clock on the nightstand, but the numbers were fuzzy.

“Mary.” He shook her. “I can't see out of my left eye.”

She moaned, shifted her weight, and pulled the comforter over her head.

Maybe he just needed some coffee and a couple of Tylenol. He got out of bed and, not bothering with his slippers, felt his way out of the bedroom and made it to the front porch and brought in the
Journal Star.
In the kitchen, he spread the sports page on the counter. He covered his left eye, opened to the box scores, and ran his finger down the page. The Jazz had won by eleven. Damn! That little preppie sonofabitch had made a hundred bucks off of him. “Goddamn it,” he mumbled.

He opened the cabinet with the Tylenol just as Mary came into the kitchen. “Any coffee?” she asked.

“No. There's no goddamn coffee.”

“Geez. What's the matter with you?”

“My eye. My frickin' eye . . . can you pop out your eyeball? Is that possible?” Green shook three Tylenol out of the bottle and dry-swallowed them.

“You should lay off those Tylenol. What are you taking, ten a day?”

Green grunted. “I have a headache, and I can't see out of my left eye. And it smells like oranges in here. Doesn't it?”

“It smells like horrible Chinese food. But I'll take an orange for breakfast. Do we have any?”

“No, we don't have any goddamn oranges. Oranges in Peoria? Are you kidding me?” He covered his right eye, then his left. “We're going to the Brazen Bull this afternoon. The bar I told you about.”

“You know I don't want to hustle pool. That life is behind me.”

“It's gotta be better than waitressing. All you do is complain about that.”

“Yeah, well, the only thing bad about waitressing—other than waitressing—is that I gotta wear that horrible uniform. I feel like . . . like a . . . I don't even know if there's a word to describe it.”

“Cheap slut.”

“That's two words. And aren't you supposed to tell me I look good?”

“I like cheap sluts.”

“Well, I don't like looking like one.”

Green smacked Mary's ass, and she playfully slapped at his hand and gave him a don't-be-making-no-sexual-advances-this-morning look. “Take the garbage out, will ya,” she said. “And get yourself established already. So far, this ain't playing in Peoria.”

After taking a shower, Mary went to the kitchen looking for Green, but he wasn't there. She glanced out the window. Green was sprawled facedown in the driveway, not moving. A young girl was kneeling beside him, checking for a pulse on his neck. Across the street, Bradley students who had been on their way to class were forming a crowd. One girl had a hand up to her mouth, while her companion, a boy wearing a backward baseball cap, sipped from a to-go cup of coffee.

Mary thought about Green saying he smelled oranges. Wasn't smelling citrus a sign of something? She'd heard that, but couldn't remember what it was a sign of. The girl kneeling next to Green rolled him onto his back. He looked dead. Oh my God.
Don't be dead. Jesus. Please don't be dead. Mary heard herself whimper:
Green
. She reached out and touched the window. She took a deep breath.
Green
. His head rolled to look at the girl who was kneeling over him. He's not dead. He's alive.
He's alive!
But he was so pale, and his lips were almost blue. The girl shouted across the street for someone to get help, and the boy with the backward baseball cap handed his to-go coffee to the girl with her hand to her mouth and tore off down the sidewalk.

In the ambulance, the paramedic leaned over. “Can you hear me, sir?”

Green didn't move. He was looking at a cabinet in the front corner of the ambulance; there was a sticker on the door that said, DANGER, in red lettering.

“Sir?”

Green blinked.

“Can you talk, sir?”

Green grunted.

Mary had a wadded-up Kleenex in her hand. She dabbed at her eyes.

“Ma'am. Is he normally responsive?”

She nodded and sniffed. “Green, honey, it's going to be okay. Answer the man's questions.”

Green turned his head to look at her—the fear in her eyes nearly broke his heart. He hadn't told Mary about Jane—or Sue or Leigh Ann, for that matter. The thing about Green was that when he fell for a woman, he fell hard. He fell hard for everything, and anything. Case in point: a move to Peoria at the age of sixty-four. Green didn't wear his heart on his sleeve; he pinned it to his forehead. He'd been married three times before he met Mary. The first one had been Sue Morris, a girl in his high school class, Lakeville High School, Lakeville, Montana. Three days after graduation in 1953, they were married by the justice of the peace in Bozeman and didn't tell a soul, not even Mort Morris, Sue's father, or Green's parents, church do-gooders Betty and
Bob Geneseo. Actually, Sue was supposed to tell her father, the young couple's hope being that Mort would reach out a hand and get Green a job in the silver mines outside of Lakeville, maybe help set them up in a little one-bedroom house by the railroad tracks. But each time Green asked Sue if she'd told her father, she hemmed, stuttered, tried to change the subject, and touched her nose a lot. Green knew why she was stalling. He saw the way Mort looked at him. The last thing he wanted was his daughter marrying some Lakeville townie destined to work the silver mines. Such was Mort's idea to improve his daughter's life—keep her away from guys like Green.

Green met his second wife not long after he had gotten out of the air force. He went in thinking he was going to fly planes but learned that he had a knack for numbers—“tracking” them, as his squadron commander liked to say. “Geneseo, what you can do with numbers is what them fighter pilots can do with riveted-together hunks of metal. It's a goddamn thing of beauty.” Green earned the nickname Counter and was a finance clerk stationed at Clark Air Base during the Korean War. He liked the routine of the air force; he liked the chain of command; he liked shining his boots; he liked knowing what was going to happen every single day—the same as the day before, over and over and over. After Korea, he was stationed at Nellis AFB in Vegas, and when he was discharged (honorably) in 1961 after eight years of service, he got himself an apartment in town because he enjoyed the desert and the sunshine, and didn't want to go back to Montana. There wasn't anything but silver mines and snow in Montana anyway, and he didn't want any of that.

One night after imbibing his share of beer at Binion's Horseshoe Casino, he stumbled into the Glitter Gulch, a bottom-tier Vegas strip club (a “juicy joint”, as the air force guys liked to call it). He didn't marry a stripper, but that night, he bellied up to the bar next to Leigh Ann Rogers, a roommate of one. Green was so smitten with Leigh Ann—the way she held her martini glass and
wore a suede vest and kept saying “groovy” and threw her head back and laughed, showing a piece of pink chewing gum—that he married her two weeks after they met. The sex was amazing.

Then there was Jane. The night he met her in 1965, they went to a diner on Cypress Boulevard and drank coffee until three in the morning. She wore turquoise earrings, and Green liked the way the conversation sometimes got to the point that night where neither of them knew what to say so they didn't say anything but instead looked at each other, locking eyes, both knowing that they should be talking because you talk on first dates, even though neither would admit they were on a first date, they were simply getting coffee at a diner. In the parking lot, after she unlocked her car, Jane turned to him, and he kissed her on the forehead, and she wrapped her arms around him and hugged him,
really
hugged him, and he smelled her shampoo, which smelled fresh like a pile of just-out-of-the-dryer laundry. From the moment of that forehead kiss, their futures converged, and they walked the same path, helping each other, loving each other, connecting with each other, for thirty years. All he really wanted was another person like her. He hadn't seen this coming—a hospital bed in Peoria, Illinois. He couldn't wiggle the toes on his left foot. The left side of his body felt tingly. It made him want to scratch, and he did. He scratched the hell out of the left side of his face and head and his left ass cheek.

Mary sat next to his bed. The television was on—a edited-for-television version of
Pretty Woman
, the scene where Edward (Richard Gere) takes Vivian (Julia Roberts) to San Francisco by private jet to see
La Traviata
. Mary had seen the movie nearly a hundred times, and here she was watching it again in a hospital room in Peoria, Illinois. Green scratched at his face again as the opera character Violetta Valéry from the movie sang:
Gran Dio! morir sì giovane
—“O, God! To die so young.” Mary looked at Green and forced a smile.