Flights (2 page)

A commercial appeared and they shifted together, the spell half broken by the intrusion of giant hands and Spray 'n Wash.

“Look at this cast,” his father said. The pages of the
TV Guide
flapped like layers of wings. “Attenborough, Kennedy, Borgnine. Peter Finch. What do we got now? Now it's sex or you gotta lop somebody's head off.”

The movie returned. The crew strained against huge silver slabs of metal in the sunlight. Borgnine grunted and pulled, ropes around his shoulders. Stewart lifted and pushed, his sad eyes strained and desperate. Hardy Kruger rigged up a pulley system. They struggled on, overcoming problem after problem, spanning two commercial breaks.

The plane, finished, was christened “Phoenix” by the men. They circled it, unable to speak, and Biddy was moved by what they'd accomplished. “It's such a good story,” his father murmured, and the plane, with a surge and sweep of music, took off, bumping clumsily over the flat, hard sand and just clearing a dune ridge, its wings flexing and swaying dangerously. The men were whooping and cheering. Stewart was grinning. “They got it,” his father said, eyes on the plane as it lifted high over the barren slopes. “Just take off. You don't like it, change it. Make it possible, like he said. I'll be a son of a bitch if I wouldn't've been better off listening to stuff like that.”

He recrossed his feet on the hassock. They could hear the crickets outside, musical and distant. “I feel sorry for you kids,” he said. “You don't get stuff like this anymore. Now what do you get? Psychos with masks. People's heads exploding. What do we expect? We show kids that and we expect them to grow up like Bobby Kennedy.”

The plane continued to rise, an oasis now in sight. Stewart hunched against the wind behind his tiny windshield, eyes slits, hair buffeted. They were going to land safely, an even greater accomplishment, and Biddy stayed on the sofa, wanting to share their release and achievement, watching the credits, and waiting for more long after the commercial break.

He played Wiffle ball the next morning in the backyard and called for them to hurry, as he waited in the outfield, the grass smell fresh in his nostrils. His back was to the bushes. The sun warmed his hair and his foot itched near the heel. His father whizzed in a drooping curve and his sister swung her bright yellow bat and the ball arced high above them, slowing fast, curling in the air as it spun, and he edged back and turned and lunged, the weightless ball slapping into his hand as he came down into the prickly support of the hedges.

While he lay sagging close to the ground, his father and sister laughing, the branches moved. The face of a kitten emerged, mottled in tan and gray, its green eyes alert. Somewhere a bird twittered. For a moment the kitten and Biddy and the space between them remained as silent and still as a photograph. He waited, wondering at a kitten at home in the middle of a bush, but it refused to stir. He waited, and his hand, as if approaching an extraterrestrial object, opened and moved cautiously through the hedges toward it. At the intrusion, the kitten slipped away with a single movement, sinuous, disappearing with an impossible hop into the shadowy tangle. The leaves of the bush shook and whispered in the breeze. His hand remained where the kitten had been, evidence of the ghost.

“Listen, whenever you're ready,” his father called. “Or is this your way of saying you'd like to quit?”

He struggled forward, Wiffle ball still clutched in his other hand, and steadied himself before rising to toss the ball back in.

In a three-month-old essay on an assigned theme accepted on the twenty-third of May by Sister Mary of Mercy, sixth-grade teacher at Our Lady of Peace School, Biddy had written:

MY FAMILY

My family is not a big one. There is my father, my mother, and Kristi, my sister. My father works at United Technologies (Sikorsky) where they make helicopters. We have a dog, Lady, who is white and part Dalmatian and does some tricks. My father and I taught her the tricks when she was a puppy. My mother says our family is a big one, because of all our cousins and uncles. I have twenty-seven cousins. They are all Italian. But I don't think they count. I'm twelve and Kristi is seven. My father says he is forty-four and my mother says she is as old as the hills.

Sister Mary of Mercy had given the paper a B-minus and had added a note, scrawled across the top right corner: “Good, Biddy, but could you have said more?”

Creeping around the outside of the paper in the margins were dark double rows of box scores. Along the top an extra-inning game had been played between Balt. and N.Y., the extra innings spilling across comments and grade. New York had won, 13–9, with four runs in the top of the sixteenth.

Biddy was playing bent forward over the desk, the high-intensity lamp cutting a yellow arc from the gloom. He rested his cheek on his fist, rolling and scooping up dice with his right hand. Baltimore was ahead in this, the fifth game of the series, 7–3.

His hair drifted into the light over the supporting hand on his cheek. It had just been washed and seemed finer than his mother claimed it to be. It was brown under the high-intensity lamp's harsh attempt to lighten it, and where the strands separated—at many places, since his mother had been able to comb it out only once before he had bolted—it appeared so fine as to be indistinct. It was long for a boy with his neck, and his father occasionally told him across the supper table that he looked like the wrath of God.

His mother insisted his eyes were his dominant feature. They had been at his birth, she liked to continue, at which point he had looked like nothing so much as a little frog. The image did not flatter him. His father, mixing a whiskey and water, would glance up occasionally and say, “Good God. Look at the eyes, will you?” Or his sister, slamming a door or slapping the dog's nose, would hold up a hand, as if to block his vision, and protest he shouldn't look at her like that.

He focused on the green dice, translucent, glowing under the Tensor light and casting mint shadows on the white paper. The game he played he had learned from an eighth-grader the year before, after school, when he was cleaning blackboards and the eighth-grader was being kept after. It had been explained systematically: six and six was a home run, six and five a sacrifice fly, six and four an out, and so on. He'd written it down and brought it all home.

It could be for him, he soon discovered, soothing, mesmerizing, and endless, spooling out into a perpetual string of games that absorbed time painlessly and unobtrusively. One quick game would become a doubleheader, a three-game series, five, seven, or an entire season, to be continued at another time. Box scores filled pages and pads, and appeared in odd places on scrap paper or essays from school. He'd play after dinner, after homework, right before bedtime. He'd play in the morning lying in the sand at the beach or in his backyard, his legs damp and warm on the cushion of grass. The games never seemed like an end in themselves, but a stopgap, a prelude. He had a very clear sense that he was biding his time, waiting for something to happen, and until something did he would be playing dice baseball. Refinements were developed, and outs divided into categories. Six and four and one and one, both simply outs in the eighth-grader's version, became long outs to center field and strikeouts, respectively. Six and three became a lined shot turned into a spectacular out by the infield. Five and five became a double play if any runners were on base. He began to keep track of individual performances and arrange his lineups accordingly. The games became more real, more visualized, but could not advance much farther, he knew. And his father, pausing motionless by the stairs to listen, could hear the rhythmic rattle of the dice sprawling across the pad of paper, day and night, he told his wife, day and night.

Lady lay on the floor near the bed, chin on her paws, listening to the dice with no apparent interest. White hairs were filagreed across the coverlet where she'd brushed against it. Kristi lay next to her, teasing her ears with a straw.

“Lisa's brother plays with dice, too,” she said.

Biddy stopped rolling. “Don't do that to the dog,” he said.

She rolled onto her back and looked up at him. Her hair swept away from her face and spread along the floor near the dog's, catching light. My beautiful blonde, her mother called her. She did not look like his sister. He wondered at times if some elaborate and complex deception had been at work. She was beautiful, he knew, sister or not. One front tooth was crooked, slightly overlapping the other. Thank God, his mother would say when it came up; imagine me with a perfect child?

She lay on her back with the straw in her nose and smiled. She was beautiful, and as mean as anyone he had ever known. The reason at times seemed clear, at times escaped him. She kicked a leg experimentally upward and held it aloft, sighting along it to the ceiling. She said, “Lisa's gonna get a cat.”

“Good for Lisa.”

“We oughta get a cat.”

“We don't need a cat. We got Lady.”

She made a face. “Lady's old.” He resumed rolling dice, and she clicked her tongue. “Lady's no fun,” she said. She was listening to her parents downstairs.

“Leave the dog alone,” he said. “She's not bothering you.” The game ended 10–3 Baltimore. Downstairs there was the splintering sound of a glass coming apart in the sink.

“They fight all the time,” his sister said. She looked at the dog sadly.

“Hey,” he said. “Lisa coming over for the Air Show?”

She didn't know. She got up abruptly and went into her room. Lady's ear twitched, the straw resting lightly on it like an aerialist's balance pole.

He leaned over and cleared it away. “Why's she do that to you?” he asked. He picked up the dice, the plastic sweaty and smooth in his hand. “Yeah, you got a case,” he heard his father say.

His knees flexed and his torso bobbed expectantly with the pitch, and Bucky Dent topped it, beating it into the ground, the ball bounding past Scott McGregor, who twisted out of his delivery but was unable to reach it. Everything happened at once as Biddy broke to cover second: Dave Winfield thundered in toward him from first, the noise dropping away like a dream as the Yankee Stadium crowd anticipated the double play. Dauer fielded it and flipped it to him and he caught the ball as Winfield went into his slide. He tried to get a good push off second, getting his knees up as he threw, but Winfield caught them as he swept by, upending him and crashing him onto his face and shoulder, arm still out from the throw.

DeCinces and Dauer stood over him while he sat in the dirt, his nose bleeding and snuffling, his lip stinging. Dent was standing on first and the crowd was whistling and stamping so that it seemed the upper deck might come down.

And that, DeCinces told him, is how you break up a double play.

He put the dice away, turned off the lamp, and walked across the hall to look in on his sister. She was reading a coloring book, her bare toes curling and uncurling. She looked up at him. “I was talking to you before,” she said.

He touched her leg apologetically. “I was thinking.”

“You didn't say anything.”

He said he was sorry, and asked if she wanted anything. She shook her head and picked at something on her back. He heard a voice and went into the hall and stood at the top of the stairs. His father was a gray shadow, barely visible in the dark at the bottom, telling them to get ready for bed.

Kristi was pulling off her top. He returned to his room and kicked off his sneakers. Directly below him his mother broke something in the den. He pulled off his tank top, shivering at the breeze through the window, turned off the light, and lay back, listening to the crickets.

“If it's such a goddamn effort, call him and tell him to stay home,” his father said, and Biddy sank a little into the pillow. He decided to go swimming the next morning before Dom arrived.

They stood in a rough line in the hot sun, hair sticking to their foreheads. Biddy's Orioles hat was on backward to allow for the catcher's mask, and the sweat on his temples was sticky with dust. The dust invaded his mouth, sometimes chalky, sometimes gritty. He was vaguely reminded of Jimmy Stewart, so long without water, his eyes on the forming fuselage. They were working out with his father and Uncle Dom, and their grasp of fundamentals, according to Dom, was piss poor. Louis and Mickey, Dom's children, were having as much trouble as he was. Which was not encouraging: Mickey was not very bright and a year younger, and Louis was slightly retarded.

“Biddy, if you don't block the plate, they go around you. Do you understand?” Dom said. “You have to block the plate.”

Biddy adjusted his chest protector, sullenly stepping nearer the plate.

“Here,” Dom said with some exasperation, positioning him with his arms. “Here, right here. And spread your legs.” He mimicked Biddy standing before the plate, erect, arms drooping, looking hypnotized. Mickey and Louis laughed. “You're standing here like you're in outer space. Some
mulignon
'll go right by you if you're standing around like a lost soul.”

“I don't want to catch anyway,” Biddy said, somewhat in his own defense.

“I don't care. That's not the point. You said you wanted to learn how to play the game.” Biddy scuffed the dirt on home plate. “Hey, it's up to you. You want to play for Lordship next year, it might be nice to handle more than one position.”

Across the field the gulls were circling over the dump, Long Island Sound a blue line beyond.

“Want to try it again?”

Part of him did not. His father despaired of his ever excelling at this game, he knew: a lot of people had long since decided Biddy just did not have the instincts for baseball. He squinted, defiant, and scratched his thigh with his glove and nodded. Louis trotted back to right field and Mickey to third. They were practicing the play at the plate on a sacrifice fly. Dom lifted the bat and ball and turned to face Louis, and Biddy adjusted the catcher's mask, the thick padding comforting against his cheeks. A bee swirled low across the infield, its drone distracting in the heat. His father stood on the mound, wiping sweat from his eyebrows with the back of his hand. The cool blue Sound beyond was soothing, and Biddy flexed back and forth in his catcher's crouch to relieve the stiffness. His knees ached. He wanted to salvage a tail boom and fly out of this dust bowl, letting his relaxed legs flap in the jetstream. His father lobbed the ball in and Dom swung under it, sending it off into the sun.