Tumbledown (28 page)

Her father had taught her to love baseball, but it hadn’t entirely taken. She recalled fondly going to major league games with him in St. Louis and twice in Kansas City and once at Wrigley Field in Chicago, where Sammy Sosa hammered one off the scoreboard in right center. But her father had failed in his efforts to make her love the sport, and his work had merely made her love him. She hadn’t followed baseball since leaving Missouri, but it was easy to revive her interest after watching Candler study the box scores with a scrutiny usually reserved for the dark spots on X-rays or mysterious passages of scripture. He and Billy slouched on the ugly gray couch in Candler’s living room and watched games together, talking to the players on the screen. “Come on, Hairston,” Candler would say. “How ’bout a clutch hit for a change?” She had squeezed between them on that gruesome couch for a couple of games, and when the opposing team had the opportunity to score, Billy Atlas would start chanting and Candler would join in: “Hey batta batta batter, hey batta,
swing.
” She got the tickets online. A present.

It was a Saturday, a fine June evening, the Padres already out of the pennant race, impossibly far behind the Dodgers, twelve games out in the loss column, and Lolly Powell, that exotic frilly creature from the photograph, would arrive at San Diego International Airport in less than forty-eight hours. There was Lise’s loss column: forty-eight and counting down.

They drank scotch from Coke cups. Scotch was Candler’s favorite, and she was developing a taste for it. He was talking to her—to her and Billy both—saying that the shortstop for the Padres, formerly their star but now struggling, suffered from nervous attacks and was having a terrible season. Candler explained that social anxiety disorder was a disaster for anyone habitually scrutinized by others.

“Like strippers,” Lise said without thinking, the scotch and the balmy night making her tongue too quick. Candler and Billy laughed, and she asked them what a shortstop’s scrutiny was compared to a woman who six times a night took off every shred of her clothing and squatted before the audience like a catcher but without even a mitt?

“At least there’s no box score for strippers in the paper,” Billy pointed out. “Nothing saying she went oh for five or whatever a stripper would go oh for. Not the paper we get, anyway. Maybe we subscribe to the wrong paper.”

“I used to do that, you know, dance in a club,” she said, terrified by her own boldness, but with only forty-eight—forty-seven now—hours left, what did she have to lose? “This was when I was kid, of course. A dumb kid.”

“I had no idea,” Candler said at the same moment Billy Atlas said, “Marry me.”

There was no point now in not being brave. “I moved to California after high school. It wasn’t the only work I could get, but it paid more than anything else, and . . . I don’t look back on it with pride, but I don’t blame that stupid girl I was for doing it.” She was making it sound like it was ages ago, but otherwise she was telling the truth. “You think I’m some skank now?”

“Of course not,” Candler said.

“No wisecracks?”

“I could come up with some if you want, but—”

“No,” she said, and took his arm. She added scotch to their cups. “I like this better.”

“I always wanted to date a stripper,” Billy said. “Or any other woman.”

“Some men get ugly about it,” she said, “and I keep it a secret. But sooner or later, it feels like there’s this dark patch that I have to avoid, have to work my way around. Unless I fess up about it. And the timing, you know. If I mention it right off, that sends the wrong signal too.”

Candler put his arm around her and pointed to the Astros’ right fielder. “That guy throws like a girl,” he said. “I mean, he can throw farther and with more accuracy than nine out of ten men, but watch him warm up. It’s like his arms are webbed and he can’t fully extend.”

“Some girls throw perfectly well,” she said slapping at his chest.

“And he’s one of them. He’s a helluva player or will be. In a year or two.”

“Remember that game,” Billy began.

“You know I do,” Candler replied. “I was just thinking of it.”

“What game?” Lise asked.

“Just a ballgame played in a dirt lot,” Candler said. “Maybe twenty years ago.”

“For some reason we both remember it perfectly,” Billy said, “as if it happened last week.”

“Did something bad go on?”

The both shook their heads. “It was a good game, close score, a few nice plays, though nothing spectacular.”

“We both had hits,” Billy said. “Just singles, but still.”

“We played after school, and it was fall weather, dusk by the late innings.”

“I was the first baseman,” Billy said. “Jimmy was shortstop. It was just a pickup game but we managed to get seventeen kids to play, eight on a team, and this kid Pumper caught for both teams.”

“Any girls playing?”

“Three or four girls,” Candler said. “Vi played, my sister.”

“Three girls.” Billy counted with his fingers. “Vi, Bobby Orton’s little sister Meg, and that beautiful Mexican girl you dated in junior high.”

“Delia Almadova,” Candler said. “Isn’t that the most musical name?”

“She was a terrible left fielder.”

“Not in that game.”

Billy shrugged and nodded simultaneously. “Caught that fly all the way out by the mesquite bush. I remember.”

“I don’t get it,” Lise said. “Why do you guys always think about this one game?”

“Hard to say,” Candler said. “It was just one of those days when you loved playing ball.”

“When there wasn’t any fight,” Billy said, “or argument over a call, and no sad plays.”

“
Sad
plays?” Lise asked. “What are sad plays?”

“Sometimes even if you hit the ball hard, the way it’s caught makes you happy,” Billy said. “Other times there’s a collision, bleeding elbows, and temper. Or the game’s so sloppy it’s no fun. You know, we lost that game—Jimmy and I were on the same team. We lost by a run on a ninth-inning rally, but it’s still the game we always think about.”

“That’s why you remember it, because you were teammates.”

“We almost always were,” Candler said. “We didn’t like competing against each other.”

“Too intense,” Billy agreed.

A foul ball lifted from the bat of the Padres’ center fielder and came flying their way. They all three stood, but it fell several seats short of them. The person who retrieved the ball—after it bounced off several hands—waved it grandly above his head, and he was cheered. He had spilled beer down his shirt.

“My dad used to take me to the ballpark,” Lise said. “We listened to games together on the radio when I was really young, and he had these funny things he’d say.”

“Like what?” one of them asked.

“A player would get a hit against a good pitcher, and he’d shake his head and say,
You could shoot that ball out of a cannon and some of these boys’d hit it.
”

Her boys laughed.

“I remember the shortstop for the Cubs,” she said, “Sean something.”

“Shawon Dunston,” Billy said, spelling his name. “Arm like a catapult.”

“He fell down going after a grounder, and my dad said,
He fields ’bout like a pig on ice.
”

Her boys laughed again.

“Bobby Orton was the shortstop on the other team,” Billy said, and she understood they were talking again about the sandlot game. “I hit a grounder past the third baseman, and Bobby ran over, gloved it, spun around, and threw without bracing himself. I wasn’t super fast or anything, but I could not believe that wasn’t a hit. It was amazing.”

“It doesn’t exactly sound
amazing,
” Lise said.

“Bobby Orton wasn’t all that good,” Candler explained. “It was one of those times when you play better than you’re capable of playing.”

“I would’ve had a rare multi hit game,” Billy said. “Rare for me, anyway, but for that play.”

“Bobby wasn’t even close to being good enough to make that play.”

“It was the third out,” Billy said, “and I shook his hand when he ran in.”

An Astros batter connected, making that distinctive sound, bat and ball in perfect alignment, an almost metallic snap, and the ball arced into the bleachers in left-center. They all watched the flight.
He

hit that one so hard, it put a dent in the sky,
her father would have said.
By the time that one comes down, it’ll have a white beard.
She could hear his voice so clearly it brought tears to her eyes.

“I love baseball,” Candler said, his arm around her, his breath rich with the decaying sweetness of scotch, and she could almost believe he was saying that he loved her. “I don’t know why. It’s the only sport I watch anymore.”

“We could get season tickets,” she said.

And then no one said anything for a long while.

DAY 14:

Frederick Candler set up an easel for Pook in the yard, and Pook, to everyone’s surprise, decided to paint. The Candler children had all grown up painting, but Pook had not picked up a brush in years. After a week or so of dilatory work, he painted five canvases in a single day, one after another. He would not look at a painting after he finished it. The capacity for revision never had any place in his personality.

Pook’s interest in painting marked the end of the comic book, though Jimmy and Billy failed to understand this. At first Jimmy thought his brother could simply paint the images they needed, but the paintings were stranger than the drawings, and Pook didn’t seem capable of doing the scenes they requested, as if this new work was beyond his control. The boys approached Violet, and she drew a few panels for them. But her people all looked different from one another, and they didn’t have the same authority as Pook’s characters, and the comic book project drifted away. Yet Same Man was not gone. He appeared now on canvas.

The paintings were hard to describe. They were not good, but they were undeniably great. Pook’s sense of perspective was funny, as if there was a ripple in his vision that skewed the relationship of one thing to another. His colors were bold, and he covered every inch of the canvas with several coats of paint, creating shapes by adding new colors to define the old: he’d paint over a brown background except for a section in the center, and the brown would turn out to be shaped like a man’s pants. These uneven coats contributed to the weirdness, the earliest layers evident in the gaps like something that flashes by when you’re not quite looking.

His subject matter was always the same: they were all self-portraits. He would set up the easel outside, sometimes facing the house and other times facing the yard, but he was always painting himself. Frederick propped up a mirror for him, but Pook turned his back to it. His paintings were about representing not the exterior world but his interior vision—and it was this that made the paintings great. Even Jimmy understood that Pook’s paintings were better than his drawings, and he speculated that this had to do with the size of the canvas. The more space he had, the more extraordinary the paintings would become. That was just logical. Jimmy discussed this insight with Billy, which led them to stretch a canvas themselves—Jimmy had known how to stretch a canvas since he was ten—three times the size of the canvases their father supplied.

“Can’t leave well enough alone,” Mr. Candler said when he saw it. “You’re just like your mother.” He and Pook had set up in the shade of a mesquite tree at the far end of the property. Frederick was painting the living ocotillo fence. Pook had painted a canvas entirely green, except for one oddly shaped patch where the previous coat of pink showed through. The pink, Jimmy understood, was the sun, an oddly shaped blister in the green sky. Frederick sent the boys away, and when they thought to look in on the painters again, the big, blank canvas was gone.

Like his drawings for the comic book, Pook’s paintings had strange shadows. Often the shadows were up to something slightly at odds with the figures casting them, and sometimes the shadows seemed to have volition while the humans were merely attached at the heel. One of Frederick Candler’s most famous paintings was a portrait in which the shadow and figure traded places, set in the backyard near the cistern, and Jimmy understood that this idea had come from Pook’s work, and perhaps that was why the figure in the painting was Pook himself—not Pook as he appeared in his own paintings and not Pook as he appeared in real life, but a version of the real Pook, in which he looked much the same but with squared shoulders and an expression one might associate with ordinary life, the way Pook might look if he were just anybody. When Pook saw the painting, he gave no indication of recognition, but he never saw himself in Frederick’s or May’s paintings or even in photographs, though once he had pointed at himself in a family picture and said, “My shirt.” Only in his own drawings and paintings did he seem to recognize himself, and these, while clearly of him, did not exactly look like him but rather captured something about him—they captured precisely what Frederick’s painting missed, the utterly unique quality of being Pook.

By noon Pook had moved his easel to the front porch, and Jimmy understood, at last, why his brother did not like to venture out at midday. At noon, the blister cast no shadows, making the earth, for his big brother, unbearable.

Besides his own image, Pook’s paintings included two recurring elements: flowers and cats. The flowers sometimes resembled a daisy but no petal was the same size or quite the same shape and the parts had no visible center, as if the pieces were a flower in the process of being rebuilt or reborn and the receptacle that might hold them did not yet exist. The cats had heads like deflating soccer balls, and their features were not feline but almost human, insane heads of no recognizable creature and yet identifiably cats. Their bodies were large, sometime stretching across the canvas. Their bodies were nations, hemispheres, worlds. Along the continents of their bodies, the cats were often missing territory, fur scraped loose or ripped out in fights, which Pook represented by some previous coat of paint—and this process amazed Jimmy.