Rats Saw God (25 page)

“I wanted to ask your permission to enter one of your essays in a writing contest the
Houston Chronicle
is sponsoring for high school and college students,” he said, scratching his goatee and looking at my paper in his hands.

“Is it good?” I asked.

“One of the best I've ever had the pleasure of reading.”

“Yeah, go ahead, then. They won't print it, will they?”

“Only if you win.”

I thought about it for a minute. “That's fine. Oh, and thanks.” Then I ran out of the room to catch up with Dub. I caught up with her just outside the cafeteria, still savoring victory with Mr. Sunglasses.

“Hey, guess what,” I said elatedly.

“What?” Dub said. Doug continued walking.

“Sky wants to enter my story—the one about my Little League days—in this contest the
Houston Chronicle
is having.”

“Baby, that's great. I told you it was good.” She hugged me. “Did he say anything about any of the others? Was he going to enter anyone else's?”

“Uh, he didn't say.”

Dub looked downcast. I had forgotten how long she had worked on her essay. She had even typed it, though she can't type. I couldn't come over for two nights in a row while she worked. In fact, I even dined at home with Al and Jackie one
of those evenings. Dub sighed. I told myself to start being more sensitive to other people's feelings.

•   •   •

I see little through the windows of the projection booth, not only because of the distortion the thick glass produces, but because I am little interested in what goes on out there in Usherland. I've got too much to worry about, what with films starting every ten minutes, up here on my own. So it was surprising that I spotted the fairly nondescript backside of the astronaut. It wasn't him, so much, that I recognized, as it was his walk: his mastery of locomotive efficiency. Not a wasted twitch in that thirty-six-inch stride. Jacqueline was with him. The astronaut carried both drinks and the tub of popcorn, ungreased, I'm sure. Such a gentleman.

Outside of televised sports, I had never known the astronaut to sit still for passive entertainment. Mom had taken Sarah and me to plays and movies. She had watched Saturday morning cartoons with us, slurping sugary cereal in front of the television right beside us. The astronaut must be pretty interested in Jackie. Who else had gotten him to stray, even for a couple hours, from the Protestant work ethic? I had just started the previews when the two of them entered. I carefully monitored their progress to see if the astronaut had any moves, but in doing so, I neglected my duties. The jeers and shouts of “focus” surprised and unnerved me. I made some quick adjustments, then peeked at the couple below. They hadn't turned around, but I'm sure the astronaut knew it was me bungling this up. He had once said I could screw up a steel ball. I took ironic pride in that.

I hadn't been happy about working this night, anyway. Pseudo-SunDial recording artists, The Grippe, were playing the Vatican, and Dub, Missy, and Rhonda were going. I didn't mind missing the band, but Dub was in jeopardy of becoming a fan. I wanted to be sitting next to her to make sardonic comments throughout the show, to repeat especially insipid lyrics to her.

Plus, Doug had lobbied all week for Sky to come out for the show. That would be a blast. Sky, I was sure, would reach similar conclusions regarding the artistic merits of The Grippe.

•   •   •

Had there been a window in Sky's classroomette, I would have stared out of it. Sky was in the middle of one of his few lectures: this one stressing a reliance on hardy nouns and verbs over clunky adjectives and adverbs. I didn't jump in when he asked us to replace the weak verb/adverb combination “walked slowly” with a single descriptive verb. My enthusiastic classmates offered “plodded,” “slogged,” “trudged,” “limped,” “ambled,” “strutted,” “sauntered,” “strolled,” “wandered.” I kept “moseyed” to myself. I wasn't uninterested in the lecture, just distracted. Sarah was arriving later that evening for the Thanksgiving holidays. After we picked her up, she, Dub, and I were going straight to a Rice party. I was concurrently excited about seeing Sarah and nervous about taking her to a college party. Sarah might think like an adult, but she still looked no older than her fifteen years.

I continued to let Sky's light southern drawl wash over me. Though I had lived most of my life in the South, I still equated the dialect with either A) stupidity, or B) dishonesty. But in
Sky's case, I sensed a roots-consciousness, a southern heritage, a William Faulkner nobility. I barely caught the words, “…has named Steve York their top high school creative writer.”

I felt Dub's arms wrap around me. The rest of the class, including Doug, clapped. One of their own had succeeded. Sky stood and walked across the circle. He handed me an embossed certificate that featured the
Houston Chronicle
's mod, sans serif masthead across the top. My name, Steven Richard York, was engraved in calligraphic script below. Sky shook my hand.

“They're having an awards luncheon next Friday, very coat and tie. They expect you and your father to attend,” Sky said.

After class I waited for everyone but Sky to clear out.

“Sky, I was wondering if maybe you could go to the banquet with me?”

“What about your father?”

“NASA's sending him out of town next week,” I lied.

Sky looked at me for a moment, and I was afraid I was snagged. “I think they'll give me a sub for this. Yeah, we can go.”

“Thanks,” I said and ran off to catch Dub.

The prettiest waitress at Cap's, the one who looks like Patricia Arquette, mistook me for some guy named Corliss from her poli-sci class at UCSD. She sat down with me in the booth and asked me about the German parliament before realizing her mistake.

“God, I'm sorry. You look just like him.”

“I wish I could help,” I said sincerely.

“I wish you could too. What
is
your major?”

I took a long, black, grimaceless sip. “Psychology.” Could I have said anything further from the truth? I've never correctly divined anyone's thoughts in my life.

“Well, maybe I'll see you around campus.” She stood up and nodded yes to some unspoken question, then stuffed her fists into the coffee-stained pockets of her apron before leaving. She turned to serve a neighboring booth. I noticed the flawless lines created by her snug jeans. I remembered Doug writing me about art classes in college that hired students to model nude. Is there anyone on planet Earth more ready to be out of high school?

The astronaut insisted on picking up Sarah from the airport; it was an errand neither of us would bow out of. He whistled along to the Muzak he located on the Lincoln's radio. Our conversation on the way to the airport was limited.

“How's school?”

“Fine,” I said.

“How's work?”

“Fine,” I said.

Sarah's plane was delayed for twenty minutes, so the astronaut and I each grabbed a section of a
Chronicle
that had been left on a row of seats. We read without speaking for the duration: he the news, me the entertainment. We stood as the plane pulled into the gate. Sarah was one of the last off, but when she spotted us, she weaved through the lame, infant, and elderly between us. She gave the
astronaut a huge hug, and he hugged her back with at least equal affection. The two yammered on and on for the entire trip back to the house. I grabbed Sarah's bags out of the trunk.

“Pick a guest room… any guest room,” I said.

“I'll take what's behind door number three,” she said. I lugged her bags up the stairs.

When I came back down, I glimpsed that mysterious expression on the astronaut's face again. It looked something like a smile. Yep, definitely at least a cousin of a smile. Corners of the mouth turned up. Eyebrows slightly raised in amusement. He lost points for showing zero teeth. His lips were, in fact, vacuum sealed. For him, though, it was as close as one got.

Sarah and I left an hour later to pick up Dub for the party at Rice.

“You sure seem to make the old man happy.”

“So do you. You just can't tell.”

Right.

•   •   •

The most embarrassing part of the awards luncheon was when they read my essay out loud. Sky hadn't warned me that they would do it, so imagine my shock when the editor in chief of the
Houston Chronicle
took out her reading glasses and unfolded the lavender typing paper Dub had lent me.

 

LAZY HAZY DAZE

BY
S
TEVE
Y
ORK

 

I was obliged at ten to go somewhere I'd never
been; a soldier venturing to unknown lands to fulfill his American duty. And I was prepared, armed with a deadly dose of bubble gum and a Mike Schmidt autographed mitt. A boy pulled from the ranks of sandlot ball and trading cards finally getting his shot in the bigs.

It was a steamy day at the Cocoa Beach Little League fields. The sun's rays, interrupted only by dragonflies, blanketed the well-tended green that surrounded the dirt diamond, and I stood forefront in the line of other boys my age being sized and tested for talent in baseball's cattle auction.

I wasn't much to look at, actually: a skinny, no-shouldered kid possessing the reflexive speed of a traffic jam, with baseball fundamentals that would have landed me a second-string position on a girls' softball squad.

Or, as it happened, a one-way ticket to right field.

Outfield in Little League is a camp out, a resting place for those who never needed a rest. We were the guys who stared down the three strikes and sat back on the bench aimlessly, always wondering how we underestimated the ball's velocity, though the thing usually crept by at no more than forty-five miles per hour. We were a common breed in the league, but at least I was finely woven into the American fabric.

I was taken in that year by a Giants club who
either felt sympathetic or whose prior successes had earned them the last pick. Either way, weeks into my rookie season, I had taken a firm position in the dugout, then eventually staked out my territory near the advertisements that made up the back fence.

So this is what it was all about—the red, white, and blue, apple pie and a cloudless spring afternoon spent enjoying hot dogs and a Coke at the ballpark.

And it was happening all over America. I had become one with the freshly-mowed-lawn-and-whatever-was-cooking-at-the-concession-stand scent. It seemed a bit too trivial to worry about the game or chant “batter, batter, batter.” This was it; all I needed was to stand out among the weeds of left field and stare up at the bright stadium lights that watched over me and told everyone that I existed.

There were players there with the natural swing of Will Clark or the infield wizardry of Ozzie Smith. Players you had no doubt in ten years would wind up on the NBC G
AME OF THE
W
EEK.
They were cut from that just-a-little-pinch-between-your-cheek-and-gum mold. The kind who would judge a bat on its size and weight, instead of just picking one up and swinging.

I, on the other hand, suited in a jersey that drooped out in all directions, picked up a bat and
basked in the limelight for the time it took for three more strikes.

Which was long enough to be entwined in the American dream.

 

Apparently my experience had some universality to it. The assembled civic leaders and reporters responded warmly when the reader concluded by exhaling and placing a hand over her heart.

Sky leaned into me and whispered, “If you're not careful, boy, you're going to lose your iconoclast membership card.”

I smirked and whispered back, “Keep clapping, fools. One day all this will be mine!”