Bucky F*cking Dent (6 page)

Father and son hadn't talked in years, but they could do this—watch a game miles and boroughs away from each other, sit in a silence marked by the occasional grunt or “You see that?” inspired by the play. It was like some sort of elaborate, wordless ritual dance handed down from man to man, generation to generation. It stood in for actual communication, of which there was none, but implied the possibility of conversation, or at least the validation of conversation as a concept. It was empty and strangely hopeful.

The Yankee shortstop, Russell Earl “Bucky” Dent (né O'Dey), came to the plate. Marty made a derisive sound. “Bucky Dent. Inning's over. Automatic out. I wish they had nine Bucky Dents. Chump couldn't hit a piñata you hung it from his johnson.”

“I like Bucky Dent,” Ted defended. “Good glove. Shortstop's a glove position, I don't care about the stick at short.”

Bucky Dent tapped a slow roller back to the pitcher. Ted listened to the labored inhaling of his father, and it scared him more than he cared to feel. Ted reached for a Frisbee on top of the TV that he used to shake the seeds from his bud, grabbed his Big Bambú papers, and began rolling a joint with one hand. If he were a craftsman, you would admire his skill and dexterity. He rolled a tight pinner. Fired it up.

“Good game,” Ted said.

“Yeah.”

“You eat yet?”

“Yeah.”

The Red Sox came to bat and the men were quiet, but they could hear each other breathe. “Rizzuto's the only Yankee I ever liked.”

“What about Catfish?”

“He's really an Oakland A. He's a mercenary.”

The Sox put a couple of men on. “You smoking the pot?” Marty asked. The pot. The. Pot. Ted loved the “the” of the pot that squares employed.

“No.”

“Hey, friend, I don't give a fuck. I'm not your father.”

Ted acknowledged the wit of that one with a silent nod. He cupped the bottom of the receiver to mute his next pulls on the joint and their luxurious exhalations.

“You eat yet?”

“Yeah, I said.”

“You did?”

“Yeah.”

“You got the munchies?”

“Cut it out.”

Somebody tried to steal second and got thrown out. Ted exulted, “The Sox'll choke again this year, like every year. Come September, the leaves and the Sox will turn color, die, and fall back to earth.”

Marty began coughing while trying to say, “Fuck you.” He kept coughing and kept trying unsuccessfully to say, “Fuck you.” Ted giggled like a stoner, but as the hacking continued, he grew alarmed.

“Fuck me, I get it. Marty, Marty, take it easy, you're still in first place.”

Marty caught enough breath to speak again. “Why're they running with two out? There's hubris in that. My chest, I feel like Thurman Munson's sitting on my chest dipping his balls into my mouth like a tea bag, that moody sperm whale clutch fat-assed fuck.” And coughed some more.

“Vermin Thurman,” Ted said, but he feared inciting his father more, so he shut up. Eventually the coughing subsided into a kind of painful wheezing. The only man talking in either room was Philip Rizzuto, who was wishing someone with an Italian name a happy birthday while Reggie Jackson tried to hit.

“You got someone there with you?” Ted asked.

“You mean like that foxy nurse?”

“No.”

“No, no one, ow, ow, ow…” Marty trailed off. Ted looked at Mariana's card again. Grief counselor. Mortality consultant? Aide de camp to the Grim Reaper? Styx and Stones Inc.? Cerberus and Co.? Ted could do this shit all day. I should do this for a living, Ted thought, write. Funny. A commercial for Budweiser played, the king of beers. Ted didn't know that the country of beer was a monarchy. A German monarchy by the sound of it. He bet that the Budweiser Plantagenets sat uneasy on the throne. Because it seemed to make more sense that the Kingdom of Beer would be destined eventually for fucking drunken chaos, no? John Barleycorn was definitely an anarchist at heart.

“Maybe I should come and stay with you,” Ted wondered aloud before he even had a chance to think about it. It must be the pot. “Just for a couple of days, till you feel a little better.” Feel better? That was a stupid thing to say; the old man had terminal lung cancer. Sorry about the gunshot wound, Mr. Lincoln; take the weekend off, stay off your feet, and you'll be right as rain on Monday.

“Marty?”

“Yeah?”

“Whaddyou think?”

“I said yeah, goddammit.”

And the dying man hung up without saying goodbye.

 

11.

A young man cradles a listless infant of about nine months to his shoulder. The child's head lolls from side to side. The man looks at his young wife, so pretty, but genuine worry puts creases in her brow. She is free diving into the blackest fear. So is he. He is performing the dread calculus of the rest of his days if this infant dies. He does the math. There is no coming back from this. If the boy dies, all of life dies. Days will be simulacra of days. He will never make love to his wife again. He will laugh, but it will be hollow. He holds the boy out in front of him. He looks into the boy's eyes and detaches. He doesn't mean to. But he might have to. If the boy dies, life must go on. He can't follow the boy into death. Shouldn't. That is not the way.

But wait. This is just the first cold. Maybe they are overreacting. First child, first-time parents, first cold. He looks back into the boy's eyes and reattaches. Intends to. He inhales. It feels good. But it's not like before. It's not like just a couple of minutes before. Something fundamental and heavy has shifted. Something tectonic. The infant senses it, and it makes him weaker, fills his tiny heart with a lifetime of loneliness and a sense of impermanence. The boy looks at his father. Like he's accusing him. Like he knows his father was momentarily inhabiting a world without him and now, that imagined world, once imagined, will never quite go away, that even if the boy lived, the two worlds will always coexist side by side for both of them—the world with the boy in it and the world without the boy. And they will have to travel between those two worlds forever. There could be no solid ground anymore. Always half the world is lit by sun and half is night. Something like that. But that can't be, the father thinks. A baby can't think like that, can't see, can't perceive, can't know. But what was it Wordsworth said? Trailing “clouds of immortality”? Or was it “glory”? “The child is father to the man”?

The baby coughs. There's something in his chest. A virus. Like a demon or a devil. The father has not wanted to take the boy to the doctor. He doesn't want to be one of those parents who rush to the doctor every time his son gets a scrape. He doesn't want his son to be weak and dependent. To start learning so young that it's okay not to be self-reliant. A world war just ended, millions of men died without complaint. Death still stalks the earth today, probably bored, unemployed, not working full-time anyway, just doing side projects. Like killing babies. This is fruitless imagining. There is only science.

So the father waited a couple of days with the boy like this, demanding that he beat this thing on his own. It's just a cold, a first cold, it's got to be nothing. A test. Odds are it's nothing. The boy coughs. The demon announcing itself proudly. Death being proud. The boy coughs hard, fighting to bring the darkness forth, but the demon only comes halfway up, and then settles back down deep within him, his devil claws like rappelling hooks digging into and holding to the soft feathery insides of the little lungs. In between coughs the boy is motionless now. The baby hasn't smiled in a couple of days. The father doesn't know. He hasn't read books on it. He figured he would just naturally know, and what he didn't know, his wife would. Fill in gaps for each other. That's a marriage. She had the mother knowledge. Don't they all?

The man involuntarily does that calculus again, molds a hypothetical world minus his son. He curses himself and his avoidance of pain, the need for his mind to forecast the worst in order to save itself the future shock. How selfish, he thinks. But maybe natural, maybe human nature. The instinct for survival, self-preservation trumps all. He has read about animals in books, male lions eating their young. Maybe they do it out of love. They swallow their own pain and the child's pain with the child, no more suffering. The cub is in a better place, a place without worry and pain. Inside the father. Dad will swallow all. Broad-shouldered Dad. Nature is a bastard.

But maybe not. He is not a lion. He is a man. Maybe he's unnatural and cold. His wife looks at him, into him. Is she seeing his world without the boy? Is she seeing that he has killed his son? Is she seeing that she is not in that world either? That there is now a world where he has killed her, too? Does she see me, he wonders, inside me, and that I have too many worlds to trust? He detaches from her, too. Is the marriage over just like that? Yes and no. He doesn't know. What does he know? He's sorry, sure, but goddamn her. He doesn't need the accusations. He hasn't done anything, he's just thinking, doing his best. The boy coughs, weaker this time. Giving up? He can hear the demon exulting. Sadistic. Its claws well dug in. The mother grabs the infant from her new husband. The child is unresponsive. His head lolls on a slack neck. “Please,” she pleads like she's asked before. “Please let's get him to the hospital.”

OCTOBER 15, 1946

Pesky also hesitated and the Boston Red Sox lost the World Series to the St. Louis Cardinals in seven games.

 

12.

Ted hadn't been to Brooklyn since his mom died. He had never once made the drive from the Bronx to Brooklyn, had never traced backward the flow of his life till now—Brooklyn to the Bronx, the Bronx to Brooklyn. Didn't matter to the Cololla, he meant Corolla. Bertha didn't like to go anywhere. Ted slid the Dead into his car stereo. “Friend of the Devil,” the second track off
American Beauty
, released in 1970. He laughed at the thought that his car was a homebody. An old Japanese guy who had just had enough of this fucking country and wasn't gonna come out of his small backyard garden.

He had never been able to tell if the Dead were singing “Said, I'm runnin' but I'm takin' my time” or “Set out runnin'.” Wasn't that big a difference, but he rewound the song to that part and listened closely. Still couldn't tell. Rewound again. Nope. A tiny mystery that shall remain, he thought. He was okay with that. As a writer, he aspired to abide some ambiguity, live in the gray. Keats had famously staked out such negative capability for Shakespeare, and Ted wished to claim a morsel of that generous capacity for himself. But the problem was that while negative capability for an author was genius, for an actual person, it was more often than not the cause of Hamlet-like hesitation, Oblomovian laziness, Bartlebyesque paralysis. Could he make a trade-off? A compromise? Be both? A slate of negative capability at the typewriter leavened with a healthy dose of sprezzatura and derring-do in the field? Both proclivities and talents were still as yet unproven, however. Gray. The color of Ted's eyes.

He had no idea what he'd do once he got to his father's house. He knew nothing about medicine, hated needles, didn't like the sight of blood. What good could he be? What if something went wrong while he was there? He could drive his dad to the hospital. He could call 911. He could call that nurse. He popped in another cassette,
Blues for Allah
. The Dead sang “Franklin's Tower”: “If you plant ice, you're gonna harvest wind / Roll away the dew…”

The old block, on Garfield Place, looked almost exactly the same as back when he was a kid, which just reinforced his own feeling of oddness and stuntedness. He kept his foot poised above the gas pedal to drive off and never come back again. But how far could he really get in the Corolla? He pulled into an open parking spot. On closer inspection, the neighborhood was certainly a bit better than he remembered, having gone through the sporadic “gentrification” process that New York endures in its American cycles of boom and bust. Ted hated this change, he even hated the word
gentrification
; it offended his Communist leanings and sounded medieval to him. Where the fuck was this “gentry”? He grabbed a couple of plastic bags of clothes and toiletries, and looked around to see if he recognized any indentured servants or serfs walking by.