Silent Retreats (11 page)

I sat back and tried to think: Is this how the world works? How many ordinary people have secret dilemmas behind their workaday and social facades, all these liberated sexual choices keeping them awake in their beds at night, the bedside clock humming real low like a conscience, their mate stone-cold asleep at their backs? How many let time pass in lieu of making big moves and enduring big embarrassments, turn in earnest to their reports and the payments on the car, to activities of the Chiefs and the Little League, and, with the drums of social pressure setting their petty pace, eventually mature to a gray blur?

I missed a lot of work after the farmhouse ordeal, and I knew there were rumors I'd had a breakdown. I tried to take up a fervent interest in flowers, botany.

One afternoon I was at the library studying up on impatiens (I forget why) when I noticed in my peripheral vision someone moving among the card files. I sensed it was Martha before I actually looked up to confirm it.

"Are you okay?" she whispered. She was wearing a tan skirt, and when she walked down the aisle between the stacks toward me, each stride of her left leg gave a flash of warm, tanned skin. She was in tall heels, graceful, her hair parted at the side and partially covering one eye—she would brush it back, there would be the flash of her diamond, the flash of her gold bracelets and earrings.

"I'm okay," I told her.

"We had something going there for a while," she said.

"Almost."

"Those notes. Pretty funny."

"Thanks," I said. "You burned them, right?"

"Right," she said. "This whole thing—it was a crazy idea."

"I know," I said, and I tried to smile. "How's Bill?"

"He's busy," she said. "You know, we—you and I—we almost ruined a beautiful friendship."

"Just about."

"I guess we were willing to risk it," she said, and she laughed shyly.

"I was." I looked away from her, out a small portal between the stacks which revealed a park across the street. There was a softball game being played by children. It was a Saturday. "I still am," I said.

"We're moving away," she said. "Did you know that?"

"What?" I was conscious of my greasy hair and my broken nose and the way my gut hung over my belt. I never dreamed I'd run into her at the library. "Leaving? Don't tell me that."

"I've resigned."

"Is it Bill? We need you—the company, that is. Needs you. What's happened? Bill was transferred or something?" This news really unnerved me.

"Something." She smiled.

"Well, let's intervene. People can't just move." She wouldn't say why it was happening. Maybe it was a secret, or maybe people like me, at the edge of another person's life but not in it, don't deserve answers to such questions.

"Did you break your nose?"

"Does it show?"

"Are you sure you're okay?"

I stared at her for a few moments. My eyes started watering. "Martha, if you're really leaving, there's something I don't understand—never have. I have to ask."

"I know." As she said it, she half laughed.

"Be serious," I said. "Look at me. I'm a mess."

"I know what you don't understand," she said.

I waited, hoping she would just tell me. But she wasn't going to. "Martha. Why me?"

She smiled. This was a beautiful woman.

"I understand most of it. I'm not a kid. It's just this one thing that escapes me. It's completely over my head."

"I know," she said, and she leaned forward and quickly kissed me just forward of my left ear. She wore a certain perfume, a very light scent but unforgettable. I could feel, only inches away, the heat from her luscious white neck. I could hear her breath deep down inside of her, feel it warm on the side of my face. Her arm brushed me as she came near, the silky fabric of her white blouse sliding across my shoulder. Just as quickly then, she was gone, back down the long aisle of stacks. She had no business at the library; she'd followed me there to say goodbye.

Confession time: I never did shack up with Martha. And the ERA never passed, it just laid there. But so what? With the ERA crusade, she did, I guess, manage to summon visions of being liberated and having passion again. For me she was a precious girl, forever vivid in my dreams—at least I've had the dreams. But we didn't shack up. And so what if I never quit my job. I have to live, for chrissake.

I have a flash of Skidmore, playing first base, whose father had played first base before him. He's stretching to take a throw from me at shortstop, and the throw goes over his head, mainly because it's thrown too high but also because he stretched out real fancy before he knew where the ball was going, then couldn't get up to reach the ball, which turned out to be high and not in need of one of his goddamned fancy first baseman's stretches.

I can still feel the pop in the glove when a grounder is snagged, the jerk in the shoulder from an overhand baseball throw, hard, from deep short and on the run, the rhythm of the footwork, the whip of the arm crossing the body in the follow-through. These were great feelings, yet there was pain in it too, for me anyway. Later I learned there was pain in almost all good feelings.

"What kind of throw was that?" Skidmore's making a scene, yelling at me to get the heat off himself.

The runner rounds first, tears for second. Skidmore's standing next to the bag, his arms out. "Seriously, what kind of throw was that?"

The right fielder sees that Skidmore won't be chasing the ball, gets it himself, and manages to stop the runner from scoring. Skidmore comes to the middle of the field, still looking at me. He's fourteen. This is Pony League, and in those days we played in Levi's with T-shirts colored to differentiate the teams.

"I need an explanation for what kind of goddamned throw that was just now," he says.

I stand out at deep shortstop staring at him.

"Let's have it. What kind of throw was that?"

He's brilliant, and can be very funny. His movements are gawky with a rough adolescence. For some reason I even liked him back then, but he had a terrible mean streak that used to rise up out of him like a second personality—lying, evil, angry, driven.

In adult life, I've accused him of this in letters. I forget when, but it's been just a couple of years ago he wrote me that none of that in the old days was meanness at all. He said it was all irony and I just failed to catch it.

But it was Cliff Webb and Junior Guthrie who got me thinking about baseball, plus the fact that this was opening day for the Cubs up at Wrigley. Like Skidmore, Cliff was an old baseball pal of mine when we were all growing up in this town, and he and I had run into each other in a bar the night before, after all these years.

On this particular morning I had decided to make a tour of our rental properties, to catalogue the repairs that were needed. My wife had been nagging me to get this done for two months—it was tax time. And of course on the day I finally got to it, because of Cliff, I had a headache, so I'd gone to the IGA to get some Extra Strength Anacin, even though it was too late (in order to avoid a hangover, you have to have the presence of mind to take the aspirin at the time you have no presence of mind—one of those little Zen perplexities).

Incredibly, on the way back to my car on my aspirin run I encountered Junior Guthrie, another old baseball crony, now with a big beer belly, meandering around out in the IGA parking lot wearing a yellow American Legion bowling shirt and a Chicago Cubs cap.

"Hey, pal, can you jump me?" he was saying. Amazingly, something about the eyes, the old Junior was still down in there somewhere. "Wha'd'ya say? Can you jump me?"

I had the headache and really didn't want to.

"Sure," I said. "You have cables?"

"Pal, you got a car like mine, you carry jumper cables. Over here." He was already heading back to his car, gesturing to me. The gravelly asphalt lot was depressing in my condition. I spotted his rusted-out tan and brown Cordoba, the vinyl roof fried off by the sun, because it was the only car in the lot with the hood up. I drove around to him and popped my hood, then let him hook us up while I chased the aspirin with coffee from home, then switched on the radio to see if I could catch Paul Harvey.

I think I was staying in the car for fear Junior'd recognize me and I'd get blasted with another round of nostalgia, this while the effects of the first round were still with me. Suddenly I noticed that there was a little raisin of a woman sitting behind the wheel of his car, looking over at me. She had small, brown, nervous eyes, like a squirrel. He'd shout directions to her.

"Okay, crank her." "Okay, shut her off." "Okay, give her a try." "Okay, stop pumpin' her." "Okay, pump her." "Okay, goddamn it, lay off pumpin' her, lay off it."

She huddled behind the wheel following directions. He was shouting through the crack that appears between the motor and the hood when the hood's open.

Watching Junior was difficult for me. I remembered clearly an eleven-year-old second baseman with big white teeth and floppy hair. I remembered his almost ponylike run and unending hubbah-hubbah chatter. The optimism of a child. This is what it had come to?

Finally he looked toward me and said, "Okay, don't rev her. Let her be. Needs to store it up a minute." He enjoyed my obedience.

Then, too quickly, he said, "Okay, now rev her," and then he said to the woman, "PUMP that son of a bitch, Mama—that's it. Okay, hit it!"

He had the distributor completely loosened and no air filter over the carb. When she'd hit the starter to turn it over, he'd go halfway into the dying thing's gaping mouth and wrench back and forth on the distributor like it was a whale's wisdom tooth and he was the dentist. His feet were clear off the ground. He had a stub of a cigar all chewed and sweated on, which he would light between rounds.

"Ain't gettin' no good contact," he said to me, "—yur battery's one of them goddamned sidewinders, never can get no contact from 'em. I'll find somebody else, she'll fire right up."

Translated, this meant his car troubles were my fault.

"Get this goddamned thing goin', I'll take it to the junk yard, head back to Kentucky, get me another one. Got this one down there, cost me one-fifty. Put sixty thousand miles on her. Guy I play softball with—out at Cabot—he's from Kentucky, told me about it. Lot of stolen cars down there, he says. Stop pumpin' her so much, Mama, like I goddamned told ya."

"I wasn't pumpin' her!" the woman crackled back at him.

"What?" He hurried around to her window. "Wha'd'ya say?" She sank down in her seat like he was going to belt her. "You was pumpin' her, honey. I know that much."

Her face was real wrinkled, resembled the cracked vinyl of the Cordoba's dashboard. She was dirty, desperate looking, bent down in that old seat like she was ashamed. For all I know I might have gone to school with her, too, but she was beyond recognition now.

"Okay, crank her up," he says to her, back in front of the car, and she tries, the motor making a terrible grinding noise. Never jump somebody when you've got a headache. I was not optimistic that the car would ever start again.

"Goddamned starter's the problem. Get this thing started, I'll head over to the parts shop—there's a parts shop around here somewhere—head over there and get me another starter. And some starter fluid. If she's gonna start, she'll start with starter fluid. NOW, MAMA! HIT IT! That's it—PUMP the son of a bitch. Hold it, you're floodin' her. Damn. Flooded."

He comes around to my window, bends down so our noses, or rather my nose and the end of his cigar, are eight inches apart. "That there's my girlfriend," he says so she can't hear. "She loves me—hard to figure, I know. You'd think my brother could buy me a car. I gave him a kidney and he ain't rejected it yet. Doc says most of 'em are rejected by now, but not mine. Never paid me nothin', some brother."

I got out of my running car and went with him up beside the front end. I watched him climb in and out of the motor.

"Now wait," I said. "You gave your brother a kidney?"

"Damn straight," he says. He pulls up his dirty bowling shirt and there's the scar. It starts just above the tip of his pelvis on the right, and heads northeast most of the way to the opposite shoulder. Half of an X, right up his body, pink and angry looking like my hernia scar, only two feet longer, I swear, and heading across tender territory, the white and light-blue flabby sticking-out human frog abdomen. "Yeah, worked all his life and he never knew he had a bad heart, eighteen hours a day without givin' it a thought."

I was trying to remember Junior Guthrie's brother. Couldn't.

"Then they tell him his heart's givin' out and he gets all these bypasses, and then his kidney gives out 'cause of his heart gave out, and he gets a kidney from me, two hundred bucks a week on drugs to keep him from rejecting it, you know that new stuff they got now? Well, my brother's fadin' fast after all this help he's gettin' from doctors, but the kidney's cooking along like nothin' ever happened, shit."

Again he dives down into the motor, his feet kicking in the air. Over his shoulder, he yells above the grinding of the car, "Doc says if he dies they'll get it back for me."

His whole body is pivoting on his beer belly, which is pressed down over the fender into the area where the containers for windshield-wiper fluid and coolant used to be.

"Hit it, honey, that's it," he says to the woman, and wrenches the distributor for all it's worth. And, incredibly, the car starts. "Yup, my brother's in the garbage business and the trucks is always breakin' down. We got a couple of 'em on their ass in the garage all the time, all spread out all over everywhere gettin' rebuilt. Don't tell me about distributors, I tell 'em, it's just the timing's off and the chain has to come around, and you gotta hit it just right. Good work, Mama," he says, as I climb back in my car.

He unhooks the cables and thanks me, latches down my hood with appreciated reverence for my car, and comes around to my window again.

"This is a fine automobile."

He is bending down, squinting at me, smiling. He turns his head and spits a piece of his cigar.