Nobody Bats a Thousand (37 page)

Danny toyed with the contents of his plate. The mashed potatoes were bland and thin. On his list of beans limas ranked as his least favorite and, still untouched, lay the dry, hard, brown major cause of his displeasure. The meatloaf was always the same, always tough to take an almost metallic flavor accompanied every bite, and it had a suspicious grainy texture, which made chewing a painstaking, fearful chore.

“Darn.
” Helen shook out the last few drops from a bottle of sweet vermouth. She tossed the empty into the garbage as she came through the kitchen in route to the pantry to secure a replacement.

Danny quickly decided to rid himself of at least a portion of his troubles. He could not give it all to
Bo, that
would be too much after Peter had endowed his entire share, so he broke the angular lump in half and handed the piece down to his dog.

“DANNY!”

Danny jumped, jerked, and froze.

“Well, isn’t this great. I make the effort to make sure you kids get a good meal, and you give your food away to that overweight dog.” Hands on hips, Helen stood next to Danny looking down at him. “Well thank you mister. Don’t worry about my feelings and don’t worry about anybody but yourself.  If you don’t want to eat, don’t eat.” She looked over at Peter. “At least it’s good enough for your brother.”

“Great as
always.
”
Peter looked down as he brought a single lima bean up to his lips.

Danny’s father came peacefully strolling down the hallway still fusing with the knot of his tie. Short and stout, perhaps an inch shorter than Danny, the heritable link between the two was obvious.

As Helen sat down across from Danny, her speculative gaze quickly manifested into a baneful, doubtful, burning stare.
“And while we’re at it, why don’t you tell your father what you were doing earlier outside?”

“I wasn’t doing
nothing
.”

“Double negative, Danny.
Actually, we should ground you and not let you go to that meeting tonight.” Helen folded her arms across her chest.

“Fine with me.
It’s just a bunch of high school fraternity BS. I don’t really want to go anyway.”

Helen lurched forward, bracing her palms against the table. “You’ve got to go.” She looked at her husband for encouragement, then back at Danny. “This is the start of your senior year, the most important year of your life, just like it will be next year for Peter. Joining organizations like this help to prepare you for college, for adulthood. You have to be grown up enough this year to make a lot of important decisions that will help you eventually go out and make something of yourself. The contacts that your father made at his fraternity in college still help him today, don’t they, Dick?”

“That’s true son, in fact just the other
day

”

“See?” Helen stood up from the table. “Now hurry up and eat, your brother can give you a ride to town.”

“I’ve got a ride. Troy’s coming to get me.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes ma’am.”

After his parents were gone, Danny went outside and reclaimed the cigarette he had butted out and stored a half-hour before. He smoked in silence and stared at the horizon while he waited for his stepbrother to leave. The night had grown suddenly. The sky was black but clear. The moon was low but
uncaged
and full, and the stars gleamed independent and bright in the chilly darkness.

He looked at Chet’s place across the way. Set in the middle of five acres, out away from a corner created by the meeting of two different orchards, it was a tall, reddish-brown, one-room insulated barn, sitting less than one hundred yards away from the parking lot of the Baptist church. Against the black back-drop of the trees, with only his huge, old-fashioned satellite dish apparent in the outermost reaches of the tall glossy parking lot lights, the barn would have been invisible in the night except for the bright Christmas lights strung along the upper outline of
its
A-frame.

Chet left the lights up and shinning twelve months a year. “I just want to remind those religious assholes next-door that I’ve got the Christmas spirit all year ‘ro
und, not just a couple of months a year
,” Chet had once explained to Danny.

As Danny looked at the red, blue and green lights, hovering and alternately flashing on and off, he
wondered just exactly how he was going to approach Chet. He practiced a few different versions of the question, fumbling aloud, finally settling on the right delivery just before Peter appeared.

“Sure you don’t need a ride?”

“Nay.
Troy’s coming.”

“Okay.” Peter started his ten-year-old
Camaro
, put it in gear, and Danny watched the car’s taillights slowly shrink as they bounced down the length of the long dirt driveway until the tiny red lights were the only thing visible as the car carefully drifted to the end of the property line, where the lights floated to the left and disappeared. The car’s headlights focused on Grover Road as Peter tore off toward town.

Danny held his tie against his chest as he ducked under the top rail of the white corral fence that lined his driveway. He slipped his hands into his trouser pockets as he followed a crooked path of broken down weeds across the field to Chet’s. Stepping up on a small, square, cement porch under a somber red light, Danny paused, looked up; then looked straightforward and forced his thumb against a black button mounted next to the door. This set off a resounding set of chimes that rang out a slow, almost pious version of the first eight bars of some old
Beatles’
song,
Good Day Sunshine
he thought it was.  As the song finished vibrating throughout the broad reaches of the barn, through the door Danny could hear Chet’s pit-bull excitedly breathing and sniffing.

Danny pictured the brown and white brute shaking his body and furiously wagging his tail, the compact hulk of muscle painted with a thin coat of fur, about to go crazy with joy. A few moments later two dead bolts were snapped, the dog flew out through the opening door, and there stood Chet; six-feet-two, thinning hair cut short, full beard, wire-rimmed glasses. All two hundred and fifty pounds of him stuffed into a faded pair of overalls, which had about two dozen political and message buttons from the 60’s pinned across his chest like prized medals from the past.

“I knew it was you,” Chet said. “You’re the only person alive that Morrison doesn’t bark at.”

Danny was now kneeling on the porch, rubbing the ears and neck of
the excited pooch. “Ya busy?” H
e could hear the
Rolling Stones
loudly playing
Wild Horses
from the other side of the two steel-framed cloth partitions that formed a small entry hall.

“Nope, just doing what every other red-blooded American is doing right now, watching
Monday Night Football
. 49ers against the
Bears,
come on in.”

Danny closed the door, and he and the dog followed Chet out of the small alcove into the one big room.

Danny liked the layout, which was bare and spacious, but practical and always somewhat neat. A big-screen TV and a decent stereo-CD setup sat against one wall facing three large stuffed chairs arranged around a large, short round table. From there, looking at slight diagonal across the width of the room, across fifty feet of brown carpet, sat a computer, a printer, and a three-drawer filing cabinet. A single long florescent fixture hung just above them all, and the workstation was flanked by, on the left, a huge waterbed surrounded by short stacks of books and magazines; on the right, a weight bench and weights, all painted with thin cobwebs and dust. At the far end of the room was a small kitchen and, in the opposite corner, a toilet and a big turquoise spa rigged with a shower attachment. 

“It’s still the first quarter.
” Chet sat directly in front of the television.  “Here, take the number two chair, right next to the command center.”

Without taking his eyes off the dog Danny sat, trying to calm, pet and keep the beast at bay.

“You’re looking sharp kid. What’s the occasion?”

“A meeting at school.
The Exchange Club.”

“Everybody wears coats and ties?”

“Yeah, Mr. Pearl wants everybody to be businesslike. It’s sort of a future businessman’s thing.”

“Oh, I get it. It’s like the Hitler Youth but with ties instead of armbands.”

“Yeah, it’ll probably be pretty boring. Mr. Pearl is usually pretty boring anyway, plus he doesn’t like me. Last year he threatened to flunk me in History even though I had all B’s and C’s. He said I daydreamed too much.”

“You ought to tell the tight-assed bastard that dreaming enhances your life, and see what he says.”

“I don’t think I better.”

Chet smiled. He reached for a quart jar on the table in front of him and looked at the jar, empty except for a few small ice cubes. He pulled his bulk from the chair and walked across the room to the kitchen area.

“Me, I’m celebrating. I just wrapped up a piece for
National Magazine
.” H
e packed the jar with ice cubes, took a gallon of white wine from the refrigerator, filled the jar to the brim and returned to his seat.

“Those two weeks you were sneaking over here to feed Morrison, I was hanging out in the worst ghettos i
n Oakland and L.A., researching.
” Chet shook his head and took a drink. “Ya know, you always hear people bitching about welfare mothers, and I admit those chicks shouldn’t be popping out all those kids, but those people live a hard life, and nobody can convince me that anyone would live that way if they
really had a choice.” H
e took another big drink. “It’s fucking tragic, man. It really is…ALL RIGHT!” Terrell Owens made a nice catch for a long gain.

“But
that’s probably why you’re here.
” Chet pulled a twenty from his wallet and handed it to Danny. “I really do appreciate you looking after the little maniac. I hate to kennel him, and you’re about the only person who can get near him when I’m not around.”

“It’s no problem. He’s a good dog.” The beast was now leaning back and relaxing. Lounging on his left hip with his body against Danny’s leg and his head on Danny’s thigh; panting softly, relishing an endless supply of head scratches.

“I know your mom doesn’t want you over here.”

“Step-mom.”

“How is the old bitch? Aren’t you afraid she might have used an infrared scope to track you coming across the field?”

“No, they went to a dinner for Assemblyman Richards.”

“Your step-mom didn’t happen to read my piece on that old swine Richards in
West Coast
magazine
did
she
?”

“Not all of it. She read about half a page, then she got pissed off, and the next day she called up and cancelled our subscripti
on.
”

“
And I just wrote about the graft, greed and abuse of power, and I could d
ocument it all.
” Chet stopped to watch Jeff Garcia throw an incompletion on a third down.

“You should have seen the stuff I had to leave out. That lecherous old bastard, he’d leave his wife at home while he was out with some young chick, pumping cocaine up her nose to make sure he got in her pants. The very next day the old hypocrite would show up, smiling and shaking hands to headline some anti-drug thing at some grammar school. I had a lot of good dirt on him from good sources, but the magazine didn’t wan
t to risk it.
” Chet smiled just enough to slightly widen his face and beard. “Which is just as well, if you wrote the whole truth about the old rat the story would be so wild the public’s natural disbelief would protect him, and he’d still walk round acting like a fucking saint. Such
is poli
tics, lad, such is life.
” Chet took another big gulp of wine.  “Hey, I’m not being rude on purpose if you want a Pepsi or something you know where it is.”

“No thanks, I gotta go. Troy should be here pretty soon.” The dog had now calmed and moved and was lying on the floor next to Chet. Danny began to nervously wave the twenty-dollar bill. “I was just,
ahh
…Troy and I, um.” The slick, cogent set of words he had developed and practiced under the stars would not come.

His stuttering and fumbling ca
ught Chet’s a
ttention. “What?” H
e stared at Danny.

“Oh…nothing.
”
Danny shook his head. 
“Nothing.”

“Hey, come on kid if you got something to sa
y, say it. You’re among friends,
” Chet leaned over and stroked his dog. “Don’t be afraid to ask anybody anything. That’s one of my cardinal rules.”

“Well...Troy and I, we were
, ah wondering
if, …if
we might.
” Danny looked down at his freshly shined shoes.
“If
we might buy a couple of joints from you.”