Striking Out (2 page)

T.C. appeared while we were unpacking the groceries. He does that a lot, treating us as an extension of his family, and our apartment as an extension of his.

T.C.’s parents have been separated for years. His father, a charming man who was once a member of parliament, is, to put it mildly, a negligent jerk when it comes to his son.

It used to break the boy’s heart when Roger cancelled a long-promised treat at the last minute, forgot a birthday, or simply didn’t show up. For a while, the boy resented Sally for the marriage breakup. Later, he turned the anger towards his father. Now he just laughs it off. Sally, to her great credit, left him alone to figure it out for himself, and never involved him in her battles over bouncing support cheques.

Now T.C. has adopted Andy as an honorary father-figure. It’s a mutually agreeable relationship since Andy’s own children, a boy and a girl, live in Halifax with their mother and her new partner. Since T.C. and I have always been buddies, the arrangement suits us all. Andy and I have just taken to locking the door when we want privacy.

His arrival was, as usual, signalled by a simultaneous knock and enter on our front door, followed by a shouted greeting. Most recently, that’s been “Yo.”

“Yo, yourself,” I said. “We’re in the kitchen.”

He shuffled in, looking gloomy, feet in unlaced running shoes of a stunning hugeness. He grows daily, it seems. He was wearing baggy shorts and an oversized T-shirt to complete his up-to-the-minute ensemble, and had a baseball cap backwards over his silky blond hair. It had recently been cut in a new style, shaved on the sides and longish on top. It made him look like a dork, so I’d refrained from comment. He carried his baseball glove and a ball.

“’S up?”

“Not a lot,” I said. “’S up wit’ you?”

“Bad news about the strike, eh?” Andy added.

“Bummer,” he said. “I was supposed to go to the game with Anthony and his dad today.”

“Whose side are you on?” Andy asked.

“I don’t know. And I don’t get it. The players make lots of money. So do the owners. They should have been able to settle this. Like, they’ve had years, right?”

“Right,” I said.

“Whose side are you on, Kate?”

“Yours, T.C. Baseball has three interested parties, or maybe four. The owners, the players, the fans, and those who make their living off the game in other ways. The ticket sellers and popcorn vendors. Even the sportswriters. But the first three are the holy trinity of the religion of baseball, as Annie Savoy would have it, and the ones who are hurting most are the fans.”

“But they say we’re important to them. Like in the pennant race last year, Joe Kelsey said we were the twenty-sixth man.”

“He said it, he meant it, and you are,” I said. “But the roster’s only twenty-five. That’s the reality, chum.”

“It’s not fair.”

“No. But life’s not fair. You know that.”

“Yeah, I guess. But I’m only a kid. Don’t ask me to understand it.”

“Maybe the strike won’t last long.”

“You think?”

“Not really, but we can always hope.”

T.C. took the ball out of his glove, tossed it into the air, and caught it.

“In the meantime,” Andy said, “how about a game of catch?”

“Sure,” he said, as if he was doing Andy a favour.

“After I have another coffee. Sit down for a minute.”

T.C. slumped into a chair at the kitchen table.

“Want a juice or something?” I asked.

“Got any pop?”

“Sorry, all we’ve got is over-priced, fresh-squeezed O.J.”

“Okay,” he shrugged.

“Where’s your mum?”

“Reading or something. I think she’s hung over.”

“I’ll get her to help me with gardening later,” I said. “What’s new in your life?”

“Me and Anthony were talking to Maggie yesterday.”

“Anthony and I,” I said, automatically.

“Whatever. She was in one of her strange moods. She just seemed sort of sad. Anthony and I were goofing around, and she said it reminded her of her kids. And it made her miss them. She asked us to leave her alone. I felt kind of bad about it.”

“Kids?” Andy said. “I didn’t know she had kids.”

“Four of them, I think. Is that right, T.C?”

“A girl and three boys. She says they’re grown up now.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Andy said. “What happened to make her just abandon her family? How did she end up living out of a bunch of boxes in a carport?”

“She likes living that way,” T.C. said. “I think it’s pretty cool.”

“It’ll be more than cool in a few months,” Andy said. “What’s she going to do when winter comes?”

“She’ll probably go to a shelter,” I said.

“No. She says she’ll just stay there,” T.C. said. “She says she doesn’t get cold.”

“That’s crazy.”

“I’ve seen crazier,” Andy said.

“I’m going to talk to her about it. Maybe we can find some place for her to go,” I said.

“I know someone you could ask,” Andy said.

“Who?”

“An old friend of mine, Moira Bell, runs a women’s drop-in centre.”

“A friend? Like what kind of a friend? An old flame, maybe?”

Andy is discreet about his past loves, probably because he knows it drives me crazy.

“We dated once or twice,” he admitted, with a smug smile.

“Once or twice?”

“Maybe more, but that’s not the point. The point is, she knows about homeless women, and could give you advice about how to help Maggie. Want me to call her?”

“Why not?”

“I think I’ve got her number at work. I’ll call Monday.”

He put down his coffee cup and got up.

“I’m ready if you are, T.C. It’s probably safer for me to get out of range of this madly jealous woman. I just have to find my glove.”

“The tidying fairy put it in the hall closet,” I said.

“Thank the tidying fairy, next time you see her,” he said.

Once the boys were out of the way, I decided to call my friend Christopher Morris in New York for his take on the baseball strike. He’s been covering the game with intelligence and grace since Mickey Mantle was a rookie, and can usually be relied upon for solace and wisdom. He would have a sane overview of the crisis, I was sure.

I was wrong.

“I’m really depressed about this thing,” he said, sounding it, and sounding angry, too. “These guys are going to just throw the season away, and God knows what will happen after that.”

“Which guys do you mean, Christopher?”

“The owners. I’ve got to be on the players’ side. Historically, they have no reason to believe anything the owners say. Neither do I.”

“You’re not cheering me up.”

“Are you coming down for the meetings?”

“Only if I have to. Do you think it’s worth it?”

“Not really. They’re just putting on a show. If they really wanted to resolve anything, they would have done it by now.”

“So what’s going on? Straight old-fashioned union-busting?”

“Or a pretty reasonable facsimile.”

“So you’re telling me it’s not going to be settled quickly.”

“There’s so much bad feeling on both sides I can’t see how it can be. I’ve been on the phone for the last two days, to owners and players, and I’m not hearing a lot of good will.”

“They should make you the arbitrator,” I said. “You could represent the best interests of the game.”

“You flatter me. But I don’t think they give a damn for the good of the game at the moment.”

“Christopher, this isn’t like you. You’re always so positive. I called you for shining rays of hope.”

“The only hope I can see, and it’s more like a glimmer than a ray, is that some of the newer, younger, owners will dig their heels in and take power out of the old ones’ hands. There’s no hope at all if all those old guys keep control. They hate the players. They’ll never forgive them for not being grateful serfs.”

“But they can’t turn the clock back to before free agency.”

“That doesn’t mean they won’t keep on trying.”

“Well, thanks a whole heck of a lot for putting this all into perspective.”

He laughed.

“You’ve caught me in a particularly foul mood. I was supposed to be sailing with my son. Instead, I have to go to a press conference and listen to a bunch of self-serving crap from the acting commissioner and lies from his hired hands.”

“Let me know if anything happens, okay?”

“If something happens, which would be a miracle, you won’t need me to tell you about it. You’re smart not to come down here. Take some time off. How’s that nice cop of yours?”

“Knee-deep in murder and mayhem, as usual.”

“Give him my best.”

“I will.”

“Got to run. Good to talk to you.”

“As always, a pleasure. Don’t be too hard on those guys, okay?”

“Only as hard as they deserve.”

“I’ll be listening to the press conference on all-sports radio. While sitting in my garden sipping a gin and tonic.”

“You’re a cruel woman,” he said.

Next, I called my editor, Jake Watson, who agreed that I could cover the strike just as well from Toronto.

“Imagine saving the paper money,” he said. “We’re setting a bad precedent.”

“I’ll make up for it in phone bills,” I said.

“Fine. And be on standby to fly down if necessary.”

“Sure. Why not? And if it drags on, I’ll figure out something else to do. Maybe a grand tour of the farm system.”

“I’ll put you on the cricket beat.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“Attitude, Kate, attitude. Cricket’s got bats and balls and innings. What’s the difference?”

Before he disgraced his Fine Old Ontario Family by running away to join the journalistic circus, Jake was educated at the kind of snobby private school where they played cricket. As a consequence, the
Planet
is the only paper in Toronto to provide coverage of both international test matches and local club-level games.

“The difference is that cricket is much more dangerous to spectators,” I said. “They could die of boredom between outs.”

“Now, now. Try not to sound too completely like a blinkered jock yobbo, please.”

“We’ll talk about it. And I’ll take the rest of the weekend off unless the press conference this afternoon is worth commenting upon.”

“I liked the column you sent in, by the way. I’m putting it on the section page tomorrow.”

“I’m honoured.”

“There’s nothing else going on, and it filled the hole,” he said. “See you Monday. Make the most of the weekend.”

“Just the usual mad social whirl. I’ve got a hot night of pizza and videos ahead of me.”

“If I remember the schedule rightly, you could have been packing to go to Cleveland tomorrow.”

“Finally,” I said. “The bright side of the strike.”

After getting my life figured out for the next few days, I decided to wash my car. It’s a funky little maroon Citroën Deux Cheveux, and I’m madly in love with it.

As I left the house, I saw that all was not peaceful on my block. On the way to the lane where my garage is, I had to pass a dozen people walking in a circle outside a house three down from mine. It’s owned by a woman doctor who runs an abortion clinic in the east end. So periodically the street is invaded by right-wing loonies who call her a murderer and frighten her children, all in the name of family values.

I recognized one of the group—Reverend Ken Mackenzie, founder of God’s Law, as they called themselves. He was carrying a sign with a blow-up of a photograph of a fetus. He broke away from the circle of marchers and offered me a pamphlet.

“I don’t want your pamphlet. I want to complain about this demonstration. Why don’t you stop harassing Dr. Sachs?”

“You like having a murderer in your neighbourhood?”

“I prefer her to you lot any day.”

“How many babies have you murdered?” he hissed.

“None in my terms,” I said. “In your terms, one. And haven’t you thought about her children? What about their well-being?”

“Maybe she should have thought of that before she opened that abattoir she calls a clinic.”

I stifled the urge to give tongue to my devout wish that there had been abortion clinics around when his mother was pregnant, and went into the laneway.

I have a thing for back lanes. They’re romantic, like country roads in the middle of the city. There’s no order to a laneway, the rules are all broken. Weeds grow through cracks in the concrete, everything’s in a jumble. Chaos reigns. The front of the house is our public face, conventional, neat and tamed, windows veiled with curtains, gardens tended, lawns mowed. But the back is another story. This is where our secrets lie.

For some, the secrets are tawdry: garbage and weeds; dirt tracks left by sad mutts pacing the perimeter of their chains all day long; a few scraggly petunias struggling to bloom in planters made of old white-painted tires.

For others, it’s a pretentious story, with closely clipped patches of lawn, formal perennial borders and patios of interlocking stones, glimpsed through high privacy fences. The garden furniture in those places costs more than the stuff in my living room.

But here and there are delightful surprises, the corners of whimsy that make the laneways such fun: a raspberry patch in the back of one yard; a fish pond in another, with silly statuary and a makeshift waterfall; one garden planted entirely in corn; a garage with a mural painted on the laneway door of vistas from a Greek island to trick the eye.

I had to move Andy’s car to get at mine. It’s a tight squeeze in the lane, but we’re on a waiting list for a permit for street parking, and he got tired of paying for tickets. I moved his Volkswagen down the lane a bit.

“Watch it there, watch my boxes,” a voice called. It was Maggie, the homeless woman, coming down the lane behind me, pulling her rusty bundle buggy.

She’s quite a sight. Her face, round and apple-cheeked like a Russian nesting doll, is quite lovely when she smiles, which she did when she realized it was me. Her clothes hang in haphazard layers, even in the heat of August, and she is never without a hat. The summer model is straw, a battered old thing with a wobbly brim which wouldn’t look out of place on an old milkman’s horse. She’d pinned a tatty plastic hot pink rose to the brim, to match the scrunchy sweat socks she wore with her once-white running shoes.

“It’s only me,” I called, just to reassure her. “I’m just going to park here for a sec.”

“Just be careful of my things. Watch out for the chair.”

I hadn’t noticed it until she pointed it out sitting crookedly against the fence. It was an armchair, with bits of stuffing coming out of the pea-green tweed upholstery.

“Very grand,” I said.

“Yes, it’s quite a throne,” she said. “The boys found it for me. They liberated it from someone’s garbage, they said.”

“Beats the ground, I guess.”

“Easier on the tailbone,” she agreed.

“Well, I’ll be out of your way in a minute,” I said, then went and backed my car out of the garage and into the laneway next to my garden gate. I got the bucket, sponge, detergent and chamois from the garage, then went to the garden for the hose.

“Did you see those hateful people?” Maggie called to me.

“Which hateful people?”

“Out front, bothering the doctor.”

“Oh, those. Yes, they’re pretty hateful, all right.”

I finished spraying the car and started scrubbing the roof.

“They were trying to get in back here,” she said. “I chased them away.”

Maggie has good reason to be protective of Dr. Sachs. It’s her carport Maggie camps out in, since the doctor doesn’t drive a car. She uses a bicycle to get to her clinic except for the worst days in winter.

“What were they trying to do?”

“Get into her yard. Someone should set the police on them.”

“I think they’ve tried, Maggie, but it didn’t do any good. We have this little something called freedom of expression in the Charter of Rights.”

“No one has the right to bother good people like that.”

I moved around to start soaping the other side of the car, my back to Maggie.

“They’ll move on soon,” I said. “They have before. You just be careful.”

“I’m always careful. I have to watch out for the bad ones.”

I scrubbed at the tires in silence.

“They want to take my things. Or make me go back.”

I ignored her.

“But they can’t make me. I’ll kill them first.”

I looked at her over my shoulder. She was rummaging through one of the boxes she had stacked against the rear wall of the carport.

I rinsed off my car and dried it with the chamois, which I then hung on the fence in the sun. It was such a nice day I decided to get brownie points by washing Andy’s too. After all, between the two small cars, I was only washing the equivalent of, say, one of the mini-vans or Saabs my neighbours drive.

I drove the Citroën back into the garage and went to get the Volks. Maggie had brought her chair into the sun and was eating cherries and reading, her feet in their old running shoes propped on one of her boxes.

“What are you reading?”

She held up the book, an old paperback, swollen with age, so I could see the title. A biography of Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor.

“Too much history and not enough gossip,” she said.

“Too bad. Gossip’s the best part.”

“I met her once. Her and the duke.”

“You’re kidding. Where?”

“Paris. I was dancing at the Café de Paris. They came in one night and all the girls got introduced.”

Hey, it could be true.

“My, you’ve had an interesting life,” I said.

“Now you want to know how I ended up in the gutter, right?”

“I wasn’t . . .”

She flapped her hand dismissively.

“You all want to know that. But I don’t need your sympathy. My life is still interesting. Just different.”

“I suppose, but what are you going to do when winter comes? Freezing to death isn’t very interesting.”

“I just put on more clothes,” she said. “If it gets real bad, I go to a shelter for the night.”

“Why don’t you just stay in one all season?”

“I don’t like shelters. People steal things. I don’t like rules. And I don’t like to give up my privacy.”

I took the warning as implied and changed the subject.

“Do you read a lot?”

“I do,” she said. “Now that I have time.”

“Where do you get the books?”

“Here and there,” she said. “I find them. People give them to me. People throw them away. There was a guy with a beard came by yesterday and gave me these. He lives around here somewhere.”

She fished around in a bag and came up with a handful of magazines called
Brick
.

“Never heard of it.”

“It’s kind of highbrow.”

A rake-thin man dressed in jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt came down the lane on a beat-up pink girl’s bike with balloon tires and a clanking cardboard box on a wagon trailing behind. He propelled himself with his right foot, as if he was on a scooter. He wore dusty cowboy boots with run-down heels.

“Howdy, Maggie,” he said, touching the brim of his dusty black cowboy hat. He had a handlebar moustache and sideburns. Maggie turned her head and ignored him.

“Horrible man,” she said, as soon as he had passed.

“Why?”

“He bothers me. He used to be my friend, but he was just pretending. I caught him looking through my boxes. Now I don’t talk to him, but he still pretends.”

He looked harmless enough to me. I went back to the original subject.

“I could bring you some books,” I said. “What do you like?”

“Whatever comes my way. That’s how I learn things. They’re my university.”

“I’m not sure I’ve got anything to further your education,” I said, getting back into the car. “But I’ve got a lot of escape stuff I read on the road. Novels, mysteries, things like that.”

“Escape’s good,” she said.

“Okay, well, maybe I’ll send T.C. back with some for you.”

I started the car and moved it to its place in front of our garage.

“T.C. is a good boy,” Maggie called to me, as I opened the garden gate. “He and his friend. The black one. They bring me things sometimes. And they look out for me. That’s what they think.”

“I’m sure you look after yourself just fine,” I said.

“No one else is going to,” she said.