The Sportswriter (45 page)

“I don’t think so,” I say.

“You oughta call the cops on that little boogie,” she says in a nasty voice meant to portray hatred, but failing. “I seen what he didja. I use to live with his brother, Floyd Emerson. He isn’t that way.”

“Maybe he didn’t mean to do it.”

“Uh-huh,” she says, blinking over at the shattered telephone booth and the crumpled cart, then back at me. “You don’t already look too sharp. Your knee’s bleedin. I think you banged your mouth. I’d call the cops.”

“I hurt my mouth before,” I say, looking at my knee, where the seersucker has been razored and blood has soaked through the blue stripes. “I didn’t think I got hurt.”

“You better siddown before you fall down then,” she says. “You look like you’re gonna die.”

I squint at the orange awnings of the Ground Zero, fluttering like pennants in the breeze, and feel weak. The girl, the broken phone booth, the bent shopping cart suddenly seem a far distance from where I am. Inexplicably far. A gull shouts in the high white sky, and I have to stand against my car fender for balance. “I don’t see why that should be true,” I say with a smile, though I’m not quite sure I know what I mean. And for a little while then, I do not remember anything.

 
    The girl has gone and come back. She stands by the door of my car, holding out a tall brown and white Humdinger cup. I am in the driver’s seat, but with my feet sticking out on the pavement like a dazed accident victim.

I try to smile. She’s smoking a cigarette, the hard pack stuck in her jeans pocket so the outline shows. A thick diesely smell is in the air. “What’s that,” I ask.

“A float. Wayne made it for you. Drink it.”

“Okay.” I take the foamy cup and drink. The root beer is sweet and creamy and hurts my teeth with goodness. “Wonderful,” I say, and reach in my pocket for money.

“Naa, ya can’t, it’s free,” she says, and looks away. “Where’re you going?”

I drink some more of my float. “Haddam.”

“Where’s that at?”

“West of here, over by the river.”

“Ahnnnn, the river,” she says and glances skeptically out at the wide street. She is maybe sixteen, but you can’t really tell. I would hate to have Clary looking like her, though now that is pretty much out of my hands. I wouldn’t mind, however, if Clary were as kind as she seems to be.

“What’s your name?”

“Debra. Spanelis. Your knee’s quit.” She looks at my torn knee with revulsion. “A good cleaner’d fix that.”

“Thanks. Spanelis is a Greek name, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. So how’d you know?” She looks away and draws on her cigarette.

“I met some Greek people the other night on a boat. They were named Spanelis. They were wonderful people.”

“It’s, like a common, a real common Greek name.” She depresses the door lock button then pulls it back up, taking a flickering look at me as if I were the rarest of exotic bird. “I tried to get you a band-aid, but Wayne doesn’t keep ’em anymore.” I say nothing as she stares at me. “So, like. Whaddaya do?” She has adopted a new sleepy way of talking, as if nothing could bore her more than I do. Again I hear a gull cry. My lip, where Vicki socked me, throbs like a goddamn boil.

“I’m a sportswriter.”

“Uh-huh.” She parks one hip against the door molding and leans into it. “Whaddaya write about?”

“Well. I write about football and baseball, and players.” I take a sip of my sweet, cold float. I actually feel better. Who would’ve thought a root-beer float could restore both faith and health, or that I would find it in as half-caste a town as this, a place wizened to a few car lots, an adult book store, a shut-down drive-in movie up the road—remnants of a boom that never boomed. From this emerges a Samaritan. A Debra.

“So,” she says, scanning the highway again, her little gray eyes squinting as if she expects to see someone she doesn’t know drive by. “Do you have a favorite team and all?” She smirks as if the whole idea embarrassed her.

“I like the Detroit Tigers for baseball. Some sports I don’t like at all.”

“Like what?”

“Hockey.”

“Right. Forget it. They had a fight and a game broke out.”

“That’s my feeling.”

“So, were you, like, a pretty great jock sometime when you were young?”

“I liked baseball then, too, except I couldn’t hit or run.”

“Uh-huh. Same here.” She takes a preposterous puff on her cigarette and exhales all the smoke out her mouth and into the shopping center air. “So. How’d you get interested in it? Did you read about it someplace?”

“I went to college. Then when I got older, I failed at everything else, and that’s all I could do.”

Debra looks down at me, worry hooding her eyes. Her idea of a big success has a different story line, one that doesn’t confess any start-up problems. I can teach her a damned useful lesson in life about that. “That doesn’t sound so great,” she says.

“It
is
pretty great, though. Successful life doesn’t always follow a straight course to the top. Sometimes things don’t work out and you have to change the way you look at things. But you don’t want to stop and get discouraged when the chips are all down. That’d be the worst time. If I’d stopped when things went the wrong way, I’d be a goner.”

Debra sighs. Her eyes fall from my face to my torn and bloody knee, to my scuffed wingtips and back up to the damp, soft Flum-dinger I’m holding in both hands. I’m not what she had in mind for a great success, but I hope she won’t ignore what I’ve said. A little of the real truth can make a big impression.

“Have you got any plans,” I ask.

Debra takes a cigarette drag that requires her to lift her chin in the air. “Whadda y a mean?”

“College. Not that that’s necessary. It’s just an idea of what to do next.”

“I’d like to go out and work in Yellowstone Park,” she says. “I heard about that.” She looks down at her BLOODCOUNTS T-shirt.

But I’m immediately enthusiastic. “That’s a great idea. I wanted to do that myself once.” In fact, I actually considered it while I was poring over life choices after my divorce. A blue plastic name tag that said: FRANK:NEWJERSEY seemed good at the time. I thought I could manage the gift shop in the Old Faithful Inn. “About how old are you, Debra?”

“Eighteen.” She stares studiously at the barrel of her cigarette as if she’d noticed some defect in it. “Like in July.”

“Well, that’s the perfect age for Yellowstone. You’re probably graduating this spring, right?”

“I quit.” She drops the cigarette on the blacktop and mashes out the hot end with her sneaker.

“Well, that probably doesn’t even matter to the people out there. They’re interested in everybody.”

“Yeah …”

“Listen, I think it’s a good idea. It’ll sure widen some horizons for you.” I’d be happy to write a recommendation for her on magazine letterhead:
Debra Spanelis is not at all the kind of girl you meet every day
. They would take her in a heartbeat.

“I’ve got a baby,” Debra says and sighs. “I doubt if the Yellowstone people would let him come.” She looks at me, flat-eyed, her mouth hard and womanish, then glances away at the Ground Zero, earless, awning flaps aflutter.

She has lost all interest in me, and I can’t blame her. I might as well have been speaking French from the planet Pluto. I am not an answer man of any kind.

“I guess not,” I say dimly.

Debra’s eyes come back round to me, and she is unexpectedly loose-limbed. My Humdinger is soft and waxy, and there’s no longer much for us to say. Some meetings don’t lead anyone anywhere better—an unassailable fact of life. Some small empty moments cannot be avoided, no matter how hard good will and expectations for the best try to make it so.

“So how do you feel now?” Like a lawyer, she touches her chin with her index finger.

“Better. A lot better. This made a lot of difference.” I smile hopefully at my Humdinger.

“It used to be medicine, I guess.” She throws her hip to one side and holds onto the window glass with her fingertips. “Do you think it’s bad if I don’t have any of my plans set yet?” She squints at me, trying to guess my real answer in case I decide to lie.

“Not one bit,” I say. “You’ll have plans. And they won’t be long in coming, either. You’ll see.” I blink at her uncertainly. “Your life’ll change fifty ways before you’re twenty-five.”

“Cause I’m gettin older, okay? I don’t wanna piss away my whole life.” She drums her fingernails on the window glass, then leaves off. I can’t help thinking of Herb Wallagher’s dream of death and hatred. Everybody has the most perfect right to be happy, but sometimes there’s nothing you can do to help yourself.

“You won’t,” I say. “It’s all ahead of you.” I give her a big encouraging grin, though I don’t think it can do the trick for either of us.

“Yeah, okay.” She smiles for the first time, a shy-girl’s smile of politeness and misgiving. “I gotta go.” She glances over at the Ground Zero, where a yellow Corvette has slid in under the awning, its red blinker blinking.

“Can I give you a ride?”

“Naa, I can walk.”

“Thanks a million.” She looks at the phone booth where the shopping cart is resting against the frame, and the receiver has fallen off its hook. It’s a bleak-looking place. I would hate to make a phone call from it now.

“Did you ever like write about skiing?” she says, and shakes her head at me as if she knows my answer before I say it. The breeze blows up dust and sprinkles our faces with it.

“No. I don’t even know how to ski.”

“Me neither,” she says and smiles again, then sighs. “So. Okay. Have a nice day. What’s your name, what’d you say it was?” She is already leaving.

“Frank.” For some reason I do not say my last name.

“Frank,” she says.

As I watch her walk out into the lot toward the Ground Zero, her hands fishing in her pocket for a new cigarette, shoulders hunched against a cold breeze that isn’t blowing, her hopes for a nice day, I could guess, are as good as mine, both of us out in the wind, expectant, available for an improvement. And my hopes are that a little luck will come both our ways. Life is not always ascendant.

12

It is the bottom of the day, the deep well of shadows and springy half-light when late afternoon becomes early evening and we all want to sit down in a leather chair by an open window, have a drink near someone we love or like, read the sports and possibly doze for a while, then wake before the day is gone all the way, walk our cool yards and hear the birds chirp in the trees their sweet eventide songs. It is for such dewy interludes that our suburbs were built. And entered cautiously, they can serve us well no matter what our stations in life, no matter we have the aforementioned liberty or don’t. At times I can long so for that simple measure of day and place—when, say, I’m alone in misty Spokane or chilly Boston—that an unreasonable tear nearly comes to my eye. It is a pastoral kind of longing, of course, but we can all have it.

Things seem to move faster now.

I buzz through Freehold, turn east at the trotter track, then wrangle toward Route 1, past Pheasant Run & Meadow. A Good Life Is Affordable Here, reads the other side of the sign.

On the Trenton station the announcer has a sports quiz going to which I do not know one answer, though I take educated guesses. Whose record did Babe Ruth break when he hit sixty in 1921? Harry Heilmann is my guess, though the answer was, “His own.” Who was the MVP in the Junior Circuit in ’41? George Kell, the Newport Flash, is my choice. Phil Rizutto, the Glendale Spaghetti, is the answer. In most ways I am content not to know such information, and to think of sportswriting not as a real profession but more as an agreeable frame of mind, a
way
of going about things rather than things you exactly do or know. A reasonable guess is a source of pleasure, since it makes me feel like one of the crowd rather than a human FORTRAN spitting our stats and reducing sports to unsavory accountancy. When sports stops being a matter for speculation, even idle, aimless, misinformed speculation, something’s gone haywire—no matter what Mutt Greene thinks—and it’ll be time to get out of the business and for the cliometricians and computer whizzes from Price Waterhouse to take over the show.

At the intersection of Routes 1 and 533, I head south toward Mrs. Miller’s. I would like the consultation I missed on Thursday, possibly even a full reading. If, for instance, Mrs. Miller were to tell me I was risking a severe emotional breakdown if I identified Walter in the morgue and would possibly never see my children as long as I lived, I’d start thinking about Alaska king crab and a night of HBO in a Philadelphia-area Travel-Lodge, and a new look at things in the morning. Why sneer in the face of unhappy prophecy?

Unfortunately, however, Mrs. Miller’s little brick-and-asphalt ranchette looks locked up tighter than Dick’s hatband. No dusty Buicks sit in the drive. No sign of the usual snarling Doberman in the fenced-in back. The Millers (what could their name really be?) are gone for the holiday, and I have now missed consultations two times running—not a good sign in itself.

I pull into the drive and sit as I did three nights ago, staring at an opening in the heavy drawdrapes as if I could will someone to be there. I give my horn an “accidental” toot. I’d be happy to see the opening widen, a door inched back behind the dusty metal screen, as it did the last time. A nice niece would do. I’d pay ten bucks to make small talk with a dark-skinned female in-law. She wouldn’t need divining powers. I’d still come away better.