A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories (22 page)

“Right,” he said to Blazo. “I’m coming. One more minute.” He caught Blazo’s look and added, “Don’t worry. I’ll get up.”

“You and me,” Blazo said. “We’ve been gone a long time already.” Blazo’s face disappeared, and Burns felt himself again sink into the snow. It was pleasant here, lonely and floating, and Burns stopped trying to sort his thoughts. He was hungry, and pleased to be hungry again. He could feel his feet. His blood seemed very busy. Something had a grip on him. He thought, the world has got ahold of me again. He drew a breath, the air aching in his chest, and he said, “Alec.” His voice sounded sure of something. “I’ve been in the snow here, Alec,” he said into the sky. “I’ve lain on my back in the snow.”

ON THE
U.S.S. FORTITUDE

S
OME NIGHTS
it gets lonely here on the U.S.S. Fortitude. I wipe everything down and sweep the passageways, I polish all the brass and check the turbines, and I stand up here on the bridge charting the course and watching the stars appear. This is a big ship for a single-parent family, and it’s certainly better than our one small room in the Hotel Atlantis, on West Twenty-second Street. There the door wouldn’t close and the window wouldn’t open. Here the kids have room to move around, fresh sea air, and their own F/A-18 Hornets.

I can see Dennis now on the radar screen. He’s out two hundred miles and closing, and it looks like he’s with a couple of friends. I’ll be able to identify them in a moment. I worry when Cherry doesn’t come right home when it starts to get dark. She’s only twelve. She’s still out tonight, and here it is almost twenty-one hundred hours. If she’s gotten vertigo or had to eject into the South China Sea, I’ll just be sick. Even though it’s summer, that water is cold.

There’s Dennis. I can see his wing lights blinking in the distance. There are two planes with him, and I’ll wait for his flyby. No sign of Cherry. I check the radar: nothing. Dennis’s two friends are modified MIGs, ugly little planes that roar by like the A train, but the boys in them smile and I wave thumbs up.

These kids, they don’t have any respect for the equipment. They land so hard and in such a hurry—one, two, three. Before I can get below, they’ve climbed out of their jets, throwing their helmets on the deck, and are going down to Dennis’s quarters. “Hold it right there!” I call. It’s the same old story. “Pick up your gear, boys.” Dennis brings his friends over—two nice Chinese boys, who smile and bow. “Now, I’m glad you’re here,” I tell them. “But we do things a certain way on the U.S.S. Fortitude. I don’t know what they do where you come from, but we pick up our helmets and we don’t leave our aircraft scattered like that on the end of the flight deck.”

“Oh, Mom,” Dennis groans.

“Don’t ‘Oh, Mom’ me,” I tell him. “Cherry isn’t home yet, and she needs plenty of room to land. Before you go to your quarters, park these jets below. When Cherry gets here, we’ll have some chow. I’ve got a roast on.”

I watch them drag their feet over to their planes, hop in, and begin to move them over to the elevator. It’s not as if I asked him to clean the engine room. He can take care of his own aircraft. As a mother, I’ve learned that doing the right thing sometimes means getting cursed by your kids. It’s okay by me. They can love me later. Dennis is not a bad kid; he’d just rather fly than clean up.

Cherry still isn’t on the screen. I’ll give her fifteen minutes and then get on the horn. I can’t remember who else is out here. Two weeks ago, there was a family from Newark on the U.S.S. Tenth Amendment, but they were headed for Perth. We talked for hours on the radio, and the skipper, a nice woman, told me how to get stubborn skid marks off the flight deck. If you’re not watching, they can build up in a hurry and make a tarry mess.

I still hope to run across Beth, my neighbor from the Hotel Atlantis. She was one of the first to get a carrier, the U.S.S. Domestic Tranquillity, and she’s somewhere in the Indian Ocean. Her four girls would just be learning to fly now. That’s such a special time. We’d have so much to talk about. I could tell her to make sure the girls always aim for the third arresting wire, so they won’t hit low or overshoot into the drink. I’d tell her about how mad Dennis was the first time I hoisted him back up, dripping like a puppy, after he’d come in high and skidded off the bow. Beth and I could laugh about that—about Dennis scowling at his dear mother as I picked him up. He was wet and humiliated, but he knew I’d be there. A mother’s job is to be in the rescue chopper and still get the frown.

I FROWNED
at my mother plenty. There wasn’t much time for anything else. She and Dad had a little store and I ran orders and errands, and I mean ran—time was important. I remember cutting through the Park, some little bag of medicine in my hand, and watching people at play. What a thing. I’d be taking two bottles of Pepto-Bismol up to Ninety-first Street, cutting through the Park, and there would be people playing tennis. I didn’t have time to stop and figure it out. My mother would be waiting back at the store with a bag of crackers and cough medicine for me to run over to Murray Hill. But I looked. Tennis. Four people in short pants standing inside that fence, playing a game. Later, I read about tennis in the paper. But tennis is a hard game to read about at first, and it seemed a code, like so many things in my life back then, and what did it matter, anyway? I was dreaming, as my mother was happy to let me know.

But I made myself a little promise then, and I thought about it as the years passed. There was something about tennis—playing inside that fence, between those lines. I think at first I liked the idea of limits. Later, when Dennis was six or so and he started going down the block by himself, I’d watch from in front of the Atlantis, a hotel without a stoop—without an entryway or a lobby, really—and I could see him weave in and out of the sidewalk traffic for a while, and then he’d be out of sight amid the parked cars and the shopping carts and the cardboard tables of jewelry for sale. Cherry would be pulling at my hand. I had to let him go, explore on his own. But the tension in my neck wouldn’t release until I’d see his red suspenders coming back. His expression then would be that of a pro, a tour guide—someone who had been around this block before.

If a person could see and understand the way one thing leads to another in this life, a person could make some plans. As it was, I’d hardly even seen the stars before, and now here, in the ocean, they lie above us in sheets. I know the names of thirty constellations, and so do my children. Sometimes I think of my life in the city, and it seems like someone else’s history, someone I kind of knew but didn’t understand. But these are the days: a woman gets a carrier and two kids in their Hornets and the ocean night and day, and she’s got her hands full. It’s a life.

And now, since we’ve been out here, I’ve been playing a little tennis with the kids. Why not? We striped a beautiful court onto the deck, and we’ve set up stanchions and a net. I picked up some rackets three months ago in Madagascar, vintage T-2000s, which is what Jimmy Connors used. When the wind is calm we go out there and practice, and Cherry is getting quite good. I’ve developed a fair backhand, and I can keep the ball in play. Dennis hits it too hard, but what can you do—he’s a growing boy. At some point, we’ll come across Beth, on the Tranquillity, and maybe all of us will play tennis. With her four girls, we could have a tournament. Or maybe we’ll hop over to her carrier and just visit. The kids don’t know it yet, but I’m learning to fly high-performance aircraft. Sometimes when they’re gone in the afternoons, I set the Fortitude into the wind at thirty knots and practice touch and go’s. There is going to be something on Dennis’s face when he sees his mother take off in a Hornet.

CHERRY SUDDENLY
appears at the edge of the radar screen. A mother always wants her children somewhere on that screen. The radio crackles. “Mom. Mom. Come in, Mom.” Your daughter’s voice, always a sweet thing to hear. But I’m not going to pick up right away. She can’t fly around all night and get her old mom just like that.

“Mom, on the Fortitude. Come in, Mom. This is Cherry. Over.”

“Cherry, this is your mother. Over.”

“Ah, don’t be mad.” She’s out there seventy-five, a hundred miles, and she can tell I’m mad.

“Cherry, this is your mother on the Fortitude. You’re grounded. Over.”

“Ah, Mom! Come on. I can explain.”

“Cherry, I know you couldn’t see it getting dark from ten thousand feet, but I also know you’re wearing your Swatch. You just get your tail over here right now. Don’t bother flying by. Just come on in and stow your plane. The roast has been done an hour. I’m going below now to steam the broccoli.”

Tomorrow, I’ll have her start painting the superstructure. There’s a lot of painting on a ship this size. That’ll teach her to watch what time it is.

As I climb below, I catch a glimpse of her lights and stop to watch her land. It’s typical Cherry. She makes a short, shallow turn, rather than circling and doing it right, and she comes in fast, slapping hard and screeching in the cable, leaving two yards of rubber on the deck. Kids.

I take a deep breath. It’s dark now here on the U.S.S. Fortitude. The running lights glow in the sea air. The wake brims behind us. As Cherry turns to park on the elevator, I see that her starboard Sidewinder is missing. Sometimes you feel that you’re wasting your breath. How many times have we gone over this? If she’s old enough to fly, she’s old enough to keep track of her missiles. But she’s been warned, so it’s okay by me. We’ve got plenty of paint. And, as I said, this is a big ship.

SUNNY BILLY DAY

T
HE VERY
first time it happened with Sunny Billy Day was in Bradenton, Florida, spring training, a thick cloudy day on the Gulf, and I was there in the old wooden bleachers, having been released only the week before after going 0 for 4 in Winter Park against the Red Sox, and our manager, Ketchum, saw that my troubles were not over at all. So, not wanting to go back to Texas so soon and face my family, the disappointment and my father’s expectation that I’d go to work in his Allstate office, and not wanting to leave Polly alone in Florida in March, a woman who tended toward ball players, I was hanging out, feeling bad, and I was there when it happened.

My own career had been derailed by what they called “stage fright.” I was scared. Not in the field—I won a Golden Glove two years in college and in my rookie year with the Pirates. I love the field, but I had a little trouble at the plate. I could hit in the cage, in fact there were times when batting practice stopped so all the guys playing pepper could come over and bet how many I was going to put in the seats. It wasn’t the skill. In a game I’d walk from the on-deck circle to the batter’s box and I could feel my heart go through my throat. All those people focusing on one person in the park: me. I could feel my heart drumming in my face. I was tighter than a ten-cent watch—all strikeouts and pop-ups. I went .102 for the season—the lowest official average of any starting-lineup player in the history of baseball.

Ketchum sent me to see the team psychiatrist, but that turned out to be no good, too. I saw him twice. His name was Krick and he was a small man who was losing hair, but his little office and plaid couch felt to me like the batter’s box. What I’m saying is: Krick was no help—I was afraid of him, too.

Sometimes just watching others go to bat can start my heart jangling like a rock in a box, and that was how I felt that cloudy day in Bradenton as Sunny Billy Day went to the plate. We (once you play for a team, you say “we” ever after) were playing the White Sox, who were down from Sarasota, and it was a weird day, windy and dark, with those great loads of low clouds and the warm Gulf air rolling through. I mean it was a day that didn’t feel like baseball.

Billy came up in the first inning, and the Chicago pitcher, a rookie named Gleason, had him 0 and 2, when the thing happened for the first time. Polly had ahold of my arm and was being extra sweet when Billy came up, to let me know that she didn’t care for him at all and was with me now, but—everybody knows—when a woman acts that way it makes you nervous. The kid Gleason was a sharpshooter, a sidearm fastballer who could have struck me out with two pitches, and he had shaved Billy with two laser beams that cut the inside corner.

Gleason’s third pitch was the smoking clone of the first two and Sunny Billy Day, my old friend, my former roommate, lifted his elbows off the table just like he had done twice before and took the third strike.

It
was
a strike. We all knew this. We’d seen the two previous pitches and everybody who was paying attention knew that Gleason had nailed Billy to the barn door. There was no question. Eldon Finney was behind the plate, a major league veteran, who was known as Yank because of the way he yanked a fistful of air to indicate a strike. His gesture was unmistakable, and on that dark day last March, I did not mistake it. But as soon as the ump straightened up, Sunny Billy, my old teammate, and the most promising rookie the Pirates had seen for thirty years, tapped his cleats one more time and stayed in the box.

“What’s the big jerk doing?” Polly asked me. You hate to hear a girl use a phrase like that, “big jerk,” when she could have said something like “rotten bastard,” but when you’re in the stands, instead of running wind sprints in the outfield, you take what you can get.

On the mound in Bradenton, Gleason was confused. Then I saw Billy shrug at the ump in a move I’d seen a hundred times as roommates when he was accused of
anything
or asked to pay his share of the check at the Castaway. A dust devil skated around the home dugout and out to first, carrying an ugly litter of old sno-cone papers and cigarette butts in its brown vortex, but when the wind died down and play resumed, there was Sunny Billy Day standing in the box. I checked the scoreboard and watched the count shift to 1 and 2.

Eldon “the Yank” Finney had changed his call.

So that was the beginning, and as I said, only a few people saw it and knew this season was going to be a little different. Billy and I weren’t speaking—I mean, Polly was with me now, and so I couldn’t ask him what was up—but I ran into Ketchum at the Castaway that night and he came over to our table. Polly had wanted to go back there for dinner—for old times’ sake; it was in the Castaway where we’d met one year ago. She was having dinner with Billy that night, the Bushel o’ Shrimp, and they asked me to join them. Billy had a lot of girls and he was always good about introducing them around. Come on, a guy like Billy had nothing to worry about from other guys, especially me. He could light up a whole room, no kidding, and by the end of an hour there’d be ten people sitting at his table and every chair in the room would be turned his way. He was a guy, and anybody will back me up on this, who had the magic.

Billy loved the Castaway. “This is exotic,” he’d say. “Right? Is this a South Sea island or what?” And he meant it. You had to love him. Some dim dive pins an old fishing net on the wall and he’d be in paradise.

Anyway, Polly had ordered the Bushel o’ Shrimp again and we were having a couple of Mutineers, the daiquiri deal that comes in a skull, when Ketchum came over and asked me—as he does every time we meet—“How you feeling, kid?” which means have I still got the crippling heebie-jeebies. He has told me all winter that if I want another shot, just say so. Well, who doesn’t want another shot? In baseball—no matter what you hear—there are no ex-players, just guys waiting for the right moment for a comeback.

I told Ketchum that if anything changed, he’d be the first to know. Then I asked him what he thought of today’s game and he said, “The White Sox are young.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Especially that pitcher.”

“I wouldn’t make too much out of that mix-up at the plate today. You know Billy. He’s a kind that can change the weather.” Ketchum was referring to the gray preseason game a year before. Billy came up in a light rain when a slice of sunlight opened on the field like a beacon, just long enough for everyone to see my roommate golf a low fastball into the right-field seats for a round trip. It was the at-bat that clinched his place on the roster, and that gave him his nickname.

“Billy Day is a guy who gets the breaks.” Ketchum reached into the wicker bushel and sampled one of Polly’s shrimp. “And you know what they say about guys who get a lot of breaks.” Here he gave Polly a quick look. “They keep getting them.” He stood up and started to walk off. “Call me if you want to hit a few. We don’t head north until April Fools’ Day.”

“I don’t like that guy,” Polly said when he’d left. “I never liked him.” She pushed her load of shrimp away. “Let’s go.” I was going to defend the coach there, a guy who was fair with his men and kept the signals (steal, take, hit-and-run) simple, but the evening had gone a little flat for me too. There we were out to celebrate, but as always the room was full of Billy Day. He was everywhere. He was in the car on the way back to the hotel; he was in the elevator; he was in the room; and—if you want to know it—he was in the bed too. I knew that he was in Polly’s dreams and there he was in my head, turning back to the umpire, changing a strike to a ball.

The papers got ahold of what was going on during the last week of March. It was a home game against the Yankees and it was the kind of day that if there were no baseball, you’d invent it to go with the weather. The old Bradenton stands were packed and the whole place smelled of popcorn and coconut oil. Polly was wearing a yellow sundress covered with black polka dots, the kind of dress you wear in a crowded ballpark if you might want one of the players to pick you out while he played first. By this time I was writing a friendly little column for the
Pittsburgh Dispatch
twice a week on “Lifestyles at Spring Training,” but I had not done much with Billy. He was getting plenty of legitimate ink, and besides—as I said—we weren’t really talking. I liked the writing, even though this was a weird time all around. I kind of
had
to do it, just so I felt useful. I wasn’t ready to go home.

It was a good game, two-two in the ninth. Then Billy made a mistake. With one down, he had walked and stolen second. That’s a wonderful feeling being on second with one out. There’s all that room and you can lead the extra two yards and generally you feel pretty free and cocky out there. I could see Billy was enjoying this feeling, leaving cleat marks in the clay, when they threw him out. The pitcher flipped the ball backhand to the shortstop, and they tagged Billy. Ralph “the Hammer” Fox was umping out there, and he jumped onto one knee in his famous out gesture and wheeled his arm around and he brought the hammer down:
OUT
! After the tag, Billy stood up and went over and planted both feet on the base.

“What?” Polly took my arm.

Ralph Fox went over and I could see Billy smiling while he spoke. He patted Ralph’s shoulder. Then Fox turned and gave the arms-out gesture for safe—twice—and hollered, “Play ball.” It was strange, the kind of thing that makes you sure you’re going to get an explanation later.

But the ballpark changed in a way I was to see twenty times during the season: a low quiet descended, not a silence, but an eerie even sound like two thousand people talking to themselves. And the field, too, was stunned, the players standing straight up, their gloves hanging down like their open mouths during the next pitch, which like everything else was now half-speed, a high hanging curve which Red Sorrows blasted over the scoreboard to win the game.

Well, it was no way to win a ballgame, but that wasn’t exactly what the papers would say. Ralph Fox, of course, wasn’t speaking to the press (none of the umpires would), and smiling Sunny Billy Day only said one thing that went out on the wire from coast to coast: “Hey guys, come on. You saw that Mickey Mouse move. I was safe.” Most writers looked the other way, noting the magnitude of Red Sorrows’s homer, a “towering blast,” and going on to speculate whether the hit signaled Sorrows’s return from a two-year slump. So, the writers avoided it, and in a way I understand. Now I have become a kind of sportswriter and I know it is not always easy to say what you mean. Sometimes if the truth is hard, typing it can hurt again.

There were so many moments that summer when some poor ump would stand in the glare of Billy’s smile and toe the dirt, adjust his cap, and change the call. Most of the scenes were blips, glitches: a last swing called a foul ticker; a close play called Billy’s way; but some were big, bad, and ugly—so blatant that they had the fans looking at their shoes. Billy had poor judgment. In fact, as I think about it, he had no judgment at all. He was a guy with the gift who had spent his whole life going forward from one thing to the next. People liked him and things came his way. When you first met Billy, it clicked: who is this guy? Why do I want to talk to him? Ketchum assigned us to room together and in a season of hotel rooms, I found out that it had always been that way for him. He had come out of college with a major in American Studies, and he could not name a single president. “My teachers liked me,” he said. “Everybody likes me.”

He had that right. But he had no judgment. I’d seen him with women. They’d come along, one, two, three, and he’d take them as they came. He didn’t have to choose. If he’d had any judgment, he never would have let any woman sit between him and Polly.

Oh, that season I saw him ground to short and get thrown out at first. He’d trot past, look back, and head for the dugout, taking it, but you got the impression it was simply easier to keep on going than stop to change the call. And those times he took it, lying there a foot from third dead out and then trotting off the field, or taking the third strike and then turning for the dugout, you could feel the waves of gratitude from the stands. Those times I know you could feel it, because there weren’t many times when Billy Day took it, and as the season wore on, and the Pirates rose to first place, they became increasingly rare.

Sunny Billy Day made the All-Stars, of course. He played a fair first base and he was the guy you couldn’t get out. But he was put on the five-day disabled list, “to rest a hamstring,” the release said. But I think it was Ketchum being cagey. He wasn’t going to gain anything by having a kid who was developing a reputation for spoiling ball games go in and ruin a nice July night in Fenway for fans of both leagues.

By August, it was all out: Billy Day could have his way. You never saw so much written about the state of umping. Billy was being walked most of the time now. Every once in a while some pitcher would throw to him, just to test the water. They were thinking Ketchum was going to pull the plug, tell Billy to face the music, to swallow it if he went down swinging, but it never happened. The best anybody got out of it was a flyout, Billy never contested a flyout. And Ketchum, who had thirty-four good years in the majors and the good reputation to go with them, didn’t care. A good reputation is one thing; not having been in the Series is another. He would be seventy by Christmas and he wanted to win it all once, even if it meant letting Billy have his way. Ketchum, it was written, had lost his judgment too.