Flights (3 page)

Out in right Louis took a step back, two forward, and pulled the ball in. As he did Mickey exploded from third, his breath whooshing down the line at Biddy, and Louis's throw came in high and hard and to the left, bouncing once, and Biddy lunged for it feeling it sock into his glove and tumbled into Mickey's slide, catching him on the chest and face with the tag before being jarred onto his shoulder in the dust.

He rose to all fours, one foot still tangled in Mickey's sprawl, sweat stinging his left eye, the ball tight in his glove and the dirt dry beneath his hand. Dom, standing over him, called the out as flamboyantly as any umpire ever had, and he rose from the plate happy to have made people happy, and tired and ready to go home.

They thumped into the house hot and dirty and wearing their gloves to find everyone sitting around the kitchen table as if they'd never left. Louis and Mickey trooped into the TV room.

“Had enough of a workout?” his mother asked. He shrugged.

“It's not the kids' workout, it's theirs,” Ginnie said, nodding toward the men.

Biddy slipped onto the counter, his back against the cabinets. There was some leftover tortellini on the stove.

“Get off the counter,” his mother said. “Sit at the table.” Her arm glided past coffee cups, a dessert tray, and a bottle of anisette. She'd arranged the apricot cookies in a mound and sat beside them, her brown hair cut short and her tan pronounced. She was not completely enjoying herself, he could see, not completely allowing herself to relax. Dom and Ginnie they always seemed to have time for, she often told him, but his father never seemed ready to visit any of her sisters. Dom and Ginnie had no idea how much it bothered her, Biddy guessed, watching her as hostess. He'd told her once he never would have known, and she'd said simply, “You have people over, you don't treat them like that. I'm not a
cavone
.” He watched her, wondering at her control, at the impenetrability of those around him.

Dom sat opposite her, eating black olives. He was Biddy's godfather, his father's closest friend. He worked in a sporting-goods store. He dressed like it, Biddy's father used to say. He ate a good deal and afterward made squeaking noises between his teeth with his tongue. Biddy remembered a picture he'd glimpsed of Dom's high-school football team: someone had written across the top “Roger Ludlowe Football 1952 8–0 Go Lions.” In the corner he'd found Dom, number 77, his heavy black hair combed to the side, big gap in his front teeth. He'd had dirt on his nose and a comically tiny leather helmet perched uselessly on his head. Someone had circled the head and had written “Ginzo” in the margin.

“You have to sit up there?” his father said. “Get a folding chair from the porch.”

He said it was okay.

“I wish he wouldn't sit on the counter,” his mother said.

“What's wrong with sitting on the counter?” he asked.

“You like it? Fine. Sit on the counter. I don't care where you sit,” his father said. “Sit on the refrigerator.”

“Sit on the refrigerator, Biddy,” Dom said.

“They just sit up there because they know it bothers you,” Ginnie said. “Right, Biddy?”

Biddy shrugged at her. Turkey, he thought.

Dom was talking about his encephalogram. “This guy's putting the needles in, you know, like he's getting a commission. He's putting 'em in here, and he's putting 'em in here, and he's putting 'em in here, and all the while he's humming ‘O beautiful for spacious skies'—you know, ‘America, the Beautiful.' I'm sitting there with this guy sticking these things in humming ‘America, the Beautiful.'”

There was general laughter, his mother laughing more quietly than the rest, and he caught her eyes and smiled.

“So I go, ‘Look, Doc, whenever you're ready here, you know,' and he goes, ‘What, are they bothering you, Mr. Liriano,' and I go, ‘Shit no, you know, just point me north and maybe we can pick up Hartford.'”

Everyone laughed and Biddy clumped his heels on the cabinet doors beneath him for no reason, through the noise. Cindy was smiling up at him and he looked away quickly. This was an engagement party of a sort for her, and she was being teased again about the way she looked.
Milanese,
Dom speculated.
Fiorentino
. A big shot, from the north. But not
Napolitan.
Her hair was too blonde, her complexion too light. “My mother used to say, ‘Whose
bambin
is this, eh?
Tedesc?
'”

She blushed. She wore light colors and delicate fabrics in summer, with two thin gold chains from her fiancé always around her neck, rich and subdued at the base of her throat.

“Too pretty for a Liriano,” Dom said. “Liriano women look like they play for the Bears. You—I'll tell you what happened. Princess Grace came to me, she was retiring, she had a problem. You and Caroline didn't get along in the bassinet.”

“You never told me your mother looked like she played for the Bears,” Ginnie said.

“She did play for the Bears,” Dom said. “Under the name Joe Fortunato. Look it up.”

Biddy continued to watch Cindy's eyes moving swiftly from speaker to speaker.

“Look at the Head of Covert Operations over there,” his father said. Everyone looked at him. “The watcher. We're going to call him the watcher.”

He smiled, embarrassed and unhappy, and Dom suggested he was getting psyched for the Air Show. Biddy's mother asked not to be reminded.

“Don't you think you can handle it, Jude?” Dom had three olives in one cheek and looked like a squirrel. “You only invited the immediate family. What's that, six hundred thousand?”

“Every one of them ready to put away twice his own weight in pasta,” Biddy's father said.

“Well, what do you think, those
chibonies
are interested in the Air Show? Uh-huh. Locusts. It's like having locusts over. The only way your Uncle Tony's gonna see the Air Show is if something crashes into the gnocchi.” He poured some beer. “Oh, they're gonna see the Air Show, all right. They'll be through the homemade stuff and into the Gallo before the Blue Whatevers take off.”

“Angels,” Biddy said.

“Yeah, Angels. They'll be so snockered it might as well be.”

His parents fought after the Lirianos left. He'd heard it coming just in the sharpness with which they put things away, and he hesitated, stupidly, before coming upstairs from the cellar. Dom was fine, the kids were fine, all of his father's friends were fine, his mother said. Everybody was fine except Judy and her family. Judy and her family got treated like shit. When he came upstairs, his mother was gone. His father sat looking at the coffee cups, food trays, and beer glasses.

Biddy came into the kitchen quietly and sat down at the other end of the table, stacked some coffee cups, and asked what happened.

“Your mother's upset,” his father said. He picked up a slice of green pepper and tinged it off a wineglass.

“What's she upset about?”

“She doesn't need anything to be upset about.”

“Must be something,” he said quietly.

His father shrugged. “Leave all this for tomorrow.”

“I'll get it.”

“No. Leave it.” He looked over at the pot on the stove. “Want some coffee?”

Biddy shook his head. “Where'd she go?”

His father raised his shoulders, and drooped them again. “What difference does it make?”

“It makes a lot of difference,” Biddy said. “Don't say that.”

“Yeah, you're right.” His father rattled an empty cup. “I don't know. Probably over her sister's.”

“Now? It's so late.”

“I don't
know
. Jesus Christ.”

Biddy stood up and went into the den. Someone was shooting at an apartment building on the news and Kristi was still up. “What's wrong?” she said.

“I don't know.” He put his hand under her armpit, lifting. “C'mon. Let's go to bed. I think she's over Aunt Sandy's.”

“I wish I was over Aunt Sandy's,” she said.

“No you don't,” he said. “Come on.”

Later, studying the color of his feet in the bright moonlight, he heard a noise in the living room, and then another, a clinking, and he got up and tiptoed down the stairs. His father was sitting in the dark. “What're you doing up?” he said. “Go to bed.”

“What're you doing,” Biddy said, not knowing what to say.

His father took his foot down from the sill of the picture window. “I wish I knew, guy,” he said. “I wish I knew. Sittin' in the dark.” They looked out the window together at the quiet street under the moon. A small animal crossed the street under the light.

“You don't have to worry,” Biddy said.

“Nobody has to worry,” his father said. “C'mon, champ. Bed.”

A car turned down the street and continued past the house.

Biddy stopped halfway up the stairs. “Dad,” he said. “You can go to bed.”

“Don't worry about me,” his father said, and some ice clinked in the dark.

He lay under the covering sheet, straining to hear, his eyes on the ceiling. His father's voice drifted up from below. He was talking to himself, his words muffled, faint. Biddy lay motionless for a short time, but the silence was filled with distant noise now that he concentrated, and he could make out nothing. He got up and crept into Kristi's room. He knelt by the bed, and she turned and made a noise, asleep. Her hair smelled of straw and the sun on a hot day.

“I love you, Kristi,” he whispered, and got out of her room before she woke up.

That morning he rose early, everything cold and quiet, the house making small sounds and Lady still asleep in the hall. He got into his bathing suit shivering a little and put on his old sneakers and a sweat shirt and went downstairs, yawning, trailing a towel on the rug. He opened the cellar door and eased the dog's leash off the hook so it wouldn't rattle. He let her outside, following with the towel draped around his neck. He let her urinate in selected spots and then stooped and put her on the leash. The foghorn sounded down by the beach.

It was four blocks away and she strained against the leash all the way there. When they got down the bluffs onto the sand he released her to run back and forth from driftwood to shore, from kelp to old shoe.

He squatted by the water, keeping an eye on her, his fingers poking around for smooth, skippable stones. He was already too late: the sun was above the horizon and the fog was burning off as things warmed up. It wasn't as he'd pictured it the night before, when he'd conceived of being at the edge of the Sound in the extreme early morning; he'd imagined it as long and low and empty, everything gray and smooth, the two of them away from the land, on a sandbar, perhaps, connected to the beach by a narrow spit that disappeared as the tide came in. The possibility of being away from the land, released, lost in the fog, attracted him. Or on the beach itself, gently sloping into the chilled water and damp with sand that had the granular clumpiness of brown sugar. The fog would have misted in from the sea, obscuring everything but the closest birds, standing dully along the waterline.

He'd imagined a sanctuary and had tried to find its equivalent in Lordship. He'd imagined dozing and waking to the foghorn and not knowing where he was; he'd imagined a rose color mixing with the gray in the east as the sun began to assert itself. He'd imagined the foghorn coming back like God the Father to reorient him in the silence.

The wind coursed along the sand behind him, very low, dipping smoothly through depressions and lifting and twirling the cockleburs and sea grass. This was a nice beach, and in places a beautiful beach, but not the one he'd imagined.

A gull came in, skimming, and swooped away. Lady followed it with her eyes.

“This beach isn't right either,” he said. She watched the gull, wheeling in the distance. He stared out to sea. “Sometimes I don't think I can do anything right,” he said finally.

Dent topped it again, and again McGregor missed it, falling, perhaps, or leaning the wrong way, and DeCinces yelled Turn two! and with a man on third and one out Biddy knew he had to prevent the run from scoring and he broke to cover second and took Dauer's flip, and bobbled it, his fingers frantically pulling it in and controlling it in time to have Winfield catch him low sliding in hard, but he couldn't accept that, and through sheer force of will his mind's eye got it right, his hand caught it firmly, and he spun and threw, pulling his legs up, but his throw was wild, too much across his body, skipping once in the dirt and into the dugout, and he said No no no and did it again, taking the flip, releasing the ball, his eyes watching its flight, too low, and again, too wide, and again.

Lady came back, circling; he'd scared her. He reached out a hand and she lowered her head to it. He pulled her in and stuck his face in her muzzle, feeling her whiskers.

“I can't even imagine it right,” he said. “Oh God, Lady, I can't even imagine it right.”

When he got back his mother was home, crawling around the garden and ripping at weeds with a little three-pronged weeder. Dom was there for the second day in a row, sitting with Biddy's father, Mickey, and Louis on the steps to the back porch. He let Lady go as he came up the driveway. His father said, “Here he is. The early bird.”

“Grab your glove, pal,” Dom said. “We're going to the field.”

Upstairs he put on his better sneakers and found his glove, and when he came down they were all gone, waiting for him in the car out front. He crossed the backyard to the garden.

His mother dug a neat row, creeping forward on her knees.

“Hey, Mom,” he said.

“Good morning. You were up early.”

He nodded but she didn't see him.

“Something to do?”

“Uh-huh.” The car honked in the front and he put his glove on. “Cindy or Ginnie didn't come?”