The Sportswriter (23 page)

“I thought
you’d
be smaller, Herb,” I say, though this is a lie. He is much smaller than I thought. His legs have shrunk and his shoulders are bony. Only his head and arms are good-sized, giving him a gaping, storkish appearance behind his thick horn-rims. He has twice cut himself shaving and doctored it with toilet paper, and is wearing a T-shirt that says BIONIC on the front, and a pair of glen-plaid Bermudas below which a brand new pair of red tennis shoes peek out. It is hard to think of Herb as an athlete.

“I like to be outside on a day like this, Frank. It’s a wonderful day, isn’t it?” Herb looks all around at the sky like a caged man, making his head go loose on its stem.

“It’s a great day, Herb.” We both, for the moment, affect the corny accents of Kansas hay farmers, though Herb is dead wrong about the weather. It looks like it may snow again and go nasty before the morning is over.

“Every year it got to be spring, ya know, I’d start thinking about motorcycles or some kind of hot car to buy. I had four or five cars and two or three bikes.” Herb sits looking away toward a spot above the coping of the house across the street, a house exactly like his except for the pale-blue roof. Beyond it several streets away Walled Lake shines through the yard gaps like metal. I am sorry to hear Herb referring to his life in the past tense. It is not an optimistic sign. “Well, Frank, how do you wanna get this over with,” Herb almost shouts at me in his put-on Kansas brogue. He smiles another big fierce smile, then pops both his hands on the black, plastic armrests of his chair as though he’d like nothing better than to spring up and strangle me. “You wanna go in the house or walk to the lake or what? It’s your choice.”

“Let’s try the lake, Herb,” I say. “I used to come over here when I was in college. I’d be happy to see it again.”

“Clarice!” Herb bellows, frowning up toward the little front door, squirming in his chair and muling it to face the way he wants. He is not interested in my past, though that’s no crime since I am not much interested myself. “Clar-eeeece!”

The door opens behind the storm-glass and a slender, pretty black woman with extremely short hair and wearing jeans steps half out onto the step. She gives me a watery half-smile. “Clarice, this is old Frank Bascombe. He’s gonna try to make a monkey outa me, but I’m going to kick his keister for him. We’re going to the lake. You better bring us a coupla bathing suits, cause we might take a swim.” Herb grins back at me in mockery.

“I’m keeping my distance from him, Mrs. Wallagher.” I give her a friendly smile to match the frail one she has given me.

“Herb’ll talk too much to swim,” Clarice says, shaking her head patiently at Herb the perennial bad boy.

“Okay, okay, don’t let’s get her started,” Herb growls, then grins. It is their little burlesque, though it’s an odd thing to see in people of two different races, and so young. Herb couldn’t be thirty-four yet, though he looks fifty. And Clarice has entered that long, pale, uncertain middle existence in which years behind you is not a faithful measure of life. Possibly she is thirty, but she is Herb’s wife, and that fact has made everything else—race, age, hopes—fade. They are like retirees, and neither has gotten what he or she bargained for.

When I look around, Herb has wheeled himself down the walk and is already out in the street, I offer his pretty little wife a little wave which she answers with a wave, and I go off hauling up the rear after Herb.

“Okay now, Frank, what’s this bunch of lies supposed be about,” Herb says gruffly as we whirl along. There is one more street of lined Capes—some with campers and boat trailers out front—then a wider artery road that leads back to the expressway, and beyond that is the lake, lined with small cottages owned mostly, I’m sure, by people from the city—policemen, successful car salesmen, retired teachers. All are closed and shuttered for the winter. It is not a particularly nice place, a shabby summer community of unattractive bungalows. Not the neighborhood I’d expected for an ex-all-pro.

“I’ve got my mind on an update on Herb Wallagher, Herb. How he’s doing, what’re his plans, how life’s treating him. Maybe a little inspirational business on the subject of character for people with their own worries. Maybe a touch of optimism in the soup.”

“All
right,”
Herb says. “Super. Super.”

“I know readers would be interested in hearing about your job as spirit coach. Guys you played with taking their cue from you on going the extra half-mile. That kind of thing.”

“I’m not going to be doing that anymore, Frank,” Herb says grimly, pushing harder on his wheels. “I’m planning to retire.”

“Why so, Herb?” (Not the best news for starters.)

“I just wasn’t getting the job done down there, Frank. Too much bullshit involved.”

An uneasy silence descends as we cross the road to Walled Lake. Most of the snow has melted here and only a gray crust remains on the shoulder where passersby have tossed their refuse. A hundred years ago, this country would’ve been wooded and the lake splendid and beautiful. A perfect place for a picnic. But now it has all been ruined by houses and cars.

Herb coasts on down the concrete boat ramp in between two boarded-up and fenced-in cottages, and wheels furiously up onto the plank dock. Across Walled Lake is the expressway, and up the lakeside beyond the cottages a roller coaster track curves above the tree line. The Casino must’ve been nearby, though I see no sign of it.

“It’s funny,” Herb says, where he can see the lake from an elevation. “When I first saw you, you had a halo around your head. A big gold halo. Do you ever notice that, Frank?” Herb whips his big head around and grins at me, then looks back at the empty lake.

“I never have, Herb.” I take a seat on the pipe bannister that runs the length of the dock at the end of which two aluminum boats ride in the shallow water.

“No?” Herb says. “Well.” He pauses a moment in a reverie. “I’m glad you came, Frank,” he says, but does not look at me.

“I’m glad to be here, Herb.”

“I get mad sometimes, Frank, you know? God
damn
it. I just get boiling.” Herb suddenly whacks both his big open hands on the black armrests, and shakes his head.

“What makes you mad, Herb?” I have not taken a note yet, of course, nor have I touched my recorder, something I will need to do since I have a terrible memory. I am always too involved with things to pay strict attention. Though I feel like the interview has yet to get started. Herb and I are still getting to know each other on a personal level, and I’ve found you can rush an interview and come away with such a distorted sense of a person that he couldn’t recognize himself in print—the first sign of a badly written story.

“Do you have theories about art, Frank?” Herb says, setting his jaw firmly in one fist. “I mean do you, uh, have any fully developed concepts of, say, how what the artist sees relates to what is finally put on the canvas?”

“I guess not,” I say. “I like Winslow Homer a lot.”

“All right. He’s a good one. He’s plenty good,” Herb says, and smiles a helpless smile up at me.

“He’d paint Walled Lake here, and it’d feel and look pretty much like this, I think.”

“Maybe he would.” Herb looks away at the lake.

“How long did you play pro ball, Herb?”

“Eleven years,” Herb says moodily. “One in Canada. One in Chicago. Then they traded me over here. And I stayed. You know I’ve been reading Ulysses Grant, Frank.” He nods profoundly. “When Grant was dying, you know, he said, ‘I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb signifies to be; to do; to suffer. I signify all three.’” Herb takes off his glasses and holds them in his big linesman’s fingers, examining their frames. His eyes are red. “That has some truth to it, Frank. But what the hell do you think he meant by that? A verb?” Herb looks up at me with a face full of worry. “I’ve been worried about that for weeks.”

“I couldn’t begin to say, Herb. Maybe he was taking stock. Sometimes we think things are more important than they are.”

“That doesn’t sound good, though, does it?” Herb looks back at his glasses.

“It’s hard to say.”

“Your halo’s gone now, Frank. You know it? You’ve become like the rest of the people.”

“That’s okay, isn’t it? I don’t mind.” It’s pretty clear to me that Herb suffers from some damned serious mood swings and in all probability has missed out on a stabilizing pill. Possibly this is his gesture of straight-talk and soul-baring, but I don’t think it will make for a very good interview. Interviews always go better when athletes feel fairly certain about the world and are ready to comment on it.

“I’ll just tell you what I think it means,” Herb says, narrowing his weakened eyes. “I think he thought he’d just become an act. You understand that, Frank? And that act was dying.”

“I see.”

“And that’s terrible to see things that way. Not to
be
but just to do.”

“Well, that was just how Grant saw things, Herb. He had some other wrong ideas, too. Plenty of them.”

“This is goddamn real life here, Frank. Get serious!” Herb’s face struggles with the fiercest intensity, then just as promptly goes blank. “I was just reading the other day that Americans always feel like the real life is somewhere else. Down the road, around the bend. But this is it right here.” Herb cracks his palms on his armrests again. “You know what I’m getting at Frank?”

“I think so, Herb. I’m trying.”

“God damn it!” Herb breathes a savage sigh. “You haven’t even taken any notes yet.”

“I keep it up here, Herb,” I say and give my head a poke.

Herb stares up at me darkly. “You know what it’s like to lose the use of your legs, Frank?”

“No I don’t, Herb. I guess that’s pretty obvious.”

“Have you ever had someone close to you die?”

“Yes.” I could actually see myself getting angry at Herb before this is over.

“Okay,” Herb says. “Your legs go silent, Frank. I can’t hear mine anymore.” Herb smiles a wild smile at me meant to indicate there might be a hell of a lot more I don’t know about the world. People, of course, are always getting you all wrong. Because you come to interview them, they automatically think you’re just using them to confirm the store of what’s already known in the world. But where I’m concerned, that couldn’t be wronger. It’s true I have expected a different Herb Wallagher from the Herb Wallagher I’ve found, a stouter, chin-out, better tempered kind of guy, a guy who’d pick up the back of a compact car to help you out of a jam if he could. And what I found is someone who seems as dreamy as a barn owl. But the lesson is not new to me. You can’t go into these things thinking you know what can’t be known. That ought to be rule one in every journalism class and textbook; too much of life, even the life you think you should know, the life of athletes, can’t be foreseen.

There is major silence now that Herb has told me what it’s like not to have his legs to use. It is not an empty moment, not for me anyway, and I am not discouraged. I would still like to think there’s the possibility for a story here. Maybe by going off his medicine Herb will finally come back to his senses with some unexpected and interesting ideas to bring up and end up talking a blue streak. That happens every day.

“Do you ever miss playing football, Herb?” I say, and smile hopefully.

“What?” Herb is drawn back from a muse the glassy lake has momentarily fostered. He looks at me as though he had never seen me before. I hear trucks pounding the interstate corridor to Lansing. The wind has wandered back now and a chill picks up off the black water.

“Do you ever miss athletics?”

Herb stares at me reproachfully. “You’re an asshole, Frank, you know that?”

“Why do you say that?”

“You don’t know me.”

“That’s what I’m
doing
here, Herb. I’d
like
to get to know you and write a damn good story about you. Paint you as you are. Because I think that’s pretty interesting and complex in itself.”

“You’re just an asshole, Frank, yep, and you’re not going to get any inspiration out of me. I dropped all that. I don’t have to do for anybody, and that means you. Especially you, you asshole. I don’t play ball anymore.” Herb plucks a piece of the toilet paper off his cheek and peers at it for blood.

“I’m ready to give up on inspiration, Herb. It was just a place to start.”

“Do you want to hear the dream I have over and over?” Herb rolls the paper between his fingers, then pushes himself out toward the end of the dock. I sit on the pipe bannister, looking at his back. Herb’s bony shoulders are like wings, his neck thin and rucked, his head yellowish and balding. I do not know if he knows where I am or not, or even where
he
is.

“I’d be glad to hear a dream,” I say.

Herb stares off toward the lake as if it contained all his hopes gone cold. “I have a dream about these three old women in a stalled car on a dark road. Two of them are taking their grandmother, who’s old, really old, back to a nursing home. Just someplace. Say New York state, or Pennsylvania. I come along in my Jeep—I
had
a Jeep once—and I stop and ask if I can help them. And they say yes. No one’s come by in a long time. And I can tell they’re worried about me. One woman has her money out to pay me before I even start. And they’ve got this flat tire. I shine my Jeep lights on their car and I can see this worried old grandmother, her face low in the front seat. A chicken-wattle neck. The two other women stand with me while I change the tire. And as I’m doing it I think about killing all three of them. Just strangling them with my hands, then driving off because no one would ever know who did it, since I wasn’t a killer or even known to be there. But I look around then, and I see these deer staring at me out of the trees. These yellow eyes. And that’s it. I wake up.” Herb twists his wheelchair and faces me. “How’s that for a dream? Whaddaya think, Frank? You’ve got a halo again, by the way. It just came back. You look idiotic.” Herb suddenly breaks out in laughter, his whole body rumbling and his mouth wide as a canyon. Herb, I see, is as crazy as a betsey bug, and I want nothing in the world more than to get as far away from him as I can. Interview or no interview. Inspiration or no inspiration. Interviewing a crazy man is a waste of anybody’s time who’s not crazy himself. And I’m glad, in fact, that Herb is in his chair at the moment since it’s possible he would strangle
me
if he could.