News from Heaven (15 page)

Luke orders a pepperoni pie and a pitcher. He eats six slices to Agnes's two.

“We should do this every week,” he says between mouthfuls.

“I'd like that,” Agnes says.

Favorite Son

F
or a certain kind of teenager, a small town is a prison. For another kind, it is a stage.

At sixteen I was one of the prisoners. Bakerton High was, to me, the world itself: an arena where great events were decided; a theater only in the sense that Vietnam had been, to American generals, a theater of war. The actors were boys and girls who'd grown up alongside me, the athletes and beauty queens who'd blossomed early and fierce. I worked evenings and weekends at Keener's Diner, and on Friday nights after football games, they filled every booth: the girls I envied and the boys I crushed on, coupling and recoupling like square dancers. Having none of my own, I marveled at their inexplicable self-confidence, these playmates who'd finger-painted with me in kindergarten, now inhabiting new adult bodies with effortless aplomb.

There was, in the school corridors, a protocol for making eye contact, for nodding and smiling and saying hello. Boys could get away with sullenness, or lose themselves in rowdy horseplay, but girls were bound by certain conventions. Ignore them and you'd be viewed as a misfit. If you happened to be the principal's daughter, you'd be branded as stuck-up or worse. My own face and body; other faces and bodies; all that compulsory nodding and smiling. These so absorbed my attention that I didn't see what was happening around me, outside the theater. Somehow I failed to notice that my hometown was starting to disappear.

Bakerton was a company town, always had been. In my grandparents' day, the Baker Brothers coal company built hundreds of company houses, and the mines employed nearly every man in town. Things continued this way, more or less, throughout my childhood. Then, the spring of my sophomore year, Baker Eleven closed—
mined out
was the expression used. It meant that no coal was left in the ground, at least none that could be gotten to easily. The Eleven was Baker's largest mine, and suddenly nine hundred men were cashing unemployment checks, confidently at first. They'd seen slowdowns before, and their union had looked after them. They owned houses and trucks, snowmobiles and motorboats. Certainly they were better off than my own family. It said something about our town that the high school principal earned less than a miner did.

But by autumn, the men had grown desperate. Their unemployment ran out, a sobering development. That fall was wet and windy. Leaves turned, leaves fell.

B
uck season opened—still does—on the Monday after Thanksgiving. In Bakerton it is a holiday of sorts. School was closed for the day, and I reported to Keener's at four
A.M.
to serve eggs and sausages and countless cups of coffee to men in orange vests. Every table was full despite heavy competition, the annual pancake breakfasts at the Amvets, the Elks, and the Moose.

On opening day the woods rang with gunshot. Deer were hit, dragged, and hefted into pickup trucks. Taxidermy shops did a brisk business, and enterprising freelancers competed for the overflow, advertising with homemade yard signs:
DEER PROCESSED FAST AND CHEAP
. The biggest kills were photographed for the
Bakerton
Herald.
The Monday after opening day, the front page ran a jubilant headline:
New Record for Opening Week.
No one said, but everyone knew, that it was a question of simple mathematics, the nine hundred men who now had plenty of free time to hunt deer.

At the center of the page, just above the fold, was a photo of Mitch Stanek in his backyard. Beside him a massive ten-pointer—a magnificent male specimen—hung upside down from a tree. Even in the grainy photo Mitch was handsome, his blond hair shaggy, his cheeks smudged with two-day beard. A woman named Charlene Dodd had been sent to take his picture, and she had flirted a little, asked him to take off his vest and cap. Mitch had a certain way of standing, head and shoulders back, left fist pressed to his upper thigh. He'd been photographed many times in this stance, for the
Herald
and for his high school yearbook, some fifteen years before.

Back in Mitch's heyday, my father had advised the yearbook staff. In our basement was a full set of the
Banner
dating to before I was born. As a teenager, I studied them like lost scriptures. I laughed at the outdated hairstyles, but really I was looking for wisdom, some secret to navigating a world where I felt misplaced, ridiculous, and shunned. Mitch Stanek was all over his yearbook, dressed usually in a numbered jersey. As a senior he'd captained teams in football, basketball, and baseball. For Bakerton it had been a winning season. Fifteen years later, the trophies were still on display, filling an entire glass case at school.

He was going to set the world on fire,
my mother said, looking over my shoulder as I read.
Now he's out of work like everyone else.
Mitch Stanek had been her student in sophomore English, a job she'd abandoned, as female teachers used to, when she had her own children. Now she spent her days nursing my brother Teddy, who had cystic fibrosis and was in and out of hospitals. When she spoke of school sports or those who watched or played them, a sourness crept into her voice.

My father remembered Mitch differently.
That kid, now. He was something.
He spoke softly, though we were alone in his car and my mother couldn't possibly hear. On Saturday mornings Dad gave me driving lessons. The car's ashtray was always full, its radio set to the local AM station, which had broadcast Bakerton High football the night before. (Each Friday night he visited his mother in a nursing home two towns over. I imagined him kissing her goodbye at five minutes to eight, just before kickoff time.) He was the sort of father who'd have attended every game and most of the practices, if his own son were able to play.

We sat idling in the high school parking lot, Dad lost in memory, my driving lesson temporarily forgotten.

Mitch Stanek could have made it. He was the real deal. Best thing ever to come out of Bakerton.

My father was a gentle soul and meant nothing by it. I didn't point out that Bakerton had also produced me.

W
hen Mitch was first laid off, he put in his name at Beth Steel for a job that would also prove expendable but at the time seemed as solid as the stuff the mills turned out. Beth Steel never called. This baffled him at first, when bad luck was new to him. “We'll wait it out,” he told his wife. Unemployment would carry them through the summer. At the time he believed what everyone believed: that his old job would return, that Baker would break ground on a new mine, bigger and better than the Eleven.

His wife knew better, Deena who stretched the unemployment checks to cover the mortgage, the car and boat payments, everything their four boys ate and played with and wore. She worked for a time sweeping up hair at Ruth Rizzo Beauty, then got her own license and opened a salon in their basement. While Mitch waited for the phone to ring, she worked six days a week, shag cuts and highlights and permanent waves. (This was the eighties, remember.) But no hairdresser could earn what a miner had.

By August she'd had enough and sent him away. She got the idea from Cheryl Berks, whose husband had found a construction job in the Virginia suburbs. Lou Berks shared a cheap apartment with two other laid-off miners, and there was room for a fourth. Every weekend the men piled into somebody's car and drove the four hours back to Pennsylvania, where their kids, at least, seemed happy to see them again.

A temporary arrangement,
Deena called it, but after a few months Mitch began to wonder. He suggested moving the whole family to Virginia, but Deena seemed not to hear him. He knew the reason. The goddamned house.

So every Friday night—exhausted, his back aching—he got behind the wheel and drove home to Bakerton, two hundred miles north and west. Though his truck burned gas at a sickening rate, he allowed himself this one extravagance. After a week in the crowded apartment, he couldn't face sharing a ride with the guys.

It was on one of these visits—the first Saturday in December—that Mitch snagged his ten-pointer. Afterward he stopped at the Vets for a few beers to celebrate.

“How many?” Deena demanded when he made his way home.

“Five,” Mitch lied: he'd had twice that many, but beers were cheaper here than in Virginia, so he felt justified.

Deena frowned.

“Whatsa matter?” he demanded, smelling a fight and ready for it, but Deena didn't have time to argue. Mrs. Hauser—the principal's wife—was waiting in the basement, ten minutes early for her perm.

“Mitch was livid,” my mother reported later, by phone, to her friend the school nurse. His move to Virginia had revived old gossip: that Deena was ready to divorce him, that he'd hit her with a closed hand. It wasn't hard to picture. Mitch was a big man, Deena so petite she wore shoes from the girls' department. Even after four babies, she was tiny as a doll. Though no fan of Mitch Stanek, my mother called the rumors baseless. True, Deena was once seen with a bruise on her shoulder, but no one
had
to wear a sundress. No one would, my mother maintained, if she had something shameful to hide.

My mother went to Deena's every Saturday for her wash and set. The beauty shop had its own entrance, so she never got a look at the rest of the house, a handsome split-level on the outskirts of town. My mother admired it, though she allowed that it was bigger than any family needed, with a three-car garage to hold Mitch's snowmobiles and as many bathrooms as children. She was not alone in this opinion. Most of Bakerton still lived in company houses, bought from the mines and disguised with porches and aluminum siding but easy to spot by the familiar floor plan, three rooms upstairs and three rooms down.

“Mitch thinks we should sell,” Deena confessed as she rinsed my mother's hair at the sink. And sure enough, a few weeks later the house was listed in the
Herald,
at a price the town found insulting. No buyer could be found—which, according to my mother, was what Deena had intended. She wasn't about to lose that house.

She came from poor people. We all did, I later learned, though at the time I thought we had rich and poor like any other place. Even by local standards, the Vances lived meanly, in a duplex behind the gas company, a dark street loud with fuel trucks. Deena's mother worked in the dress factory, and the United Mine Workers sent her a monthly check from the widows' fund. With half as many children, she might have lived in reasonable comfort.

Deena was the oldest of six, a little beauty. As a girl, she resembled the actress Kim Novak, except that Kim dyed her hair and Deena was a natural blonde. She met Mitch her freshman year in high school. Mitch was a junior then, busy with his various sports. In the summers he worked as a lifeguard. At the town swimming pool, in pairs or threes, girls in bikinis flocked around his chair, keeping him company during his shift. As they spoke, Mitch's eyes wandered, alert for swimmers in distress. He never showed the slightest interest in dating until Deena Vance.

My mother and the school nurse, who followed student romances with an interest that now seems peculiar, shared in the general astonishment when Mitch took Deena to the winter ball. “For heaven's sake,” my mother huffed. “Why
her
?” The Staneks were a solid family, Mitch's father a lector in our church. (Even now, when I read the letters of Saint Paul, I hear them in Herk Stanek's gruff voice.) Mitch was that rare thing in Bakerton, a boy with a future. When he played in the state basketball championships, scouts were spotted in the stands. In bars and barbershops, speculation was rampant: basketball or football? Penn State or Pitt? The question wasn't whether he'd go to college, but which one.

At Bakerton High the matter was debated in the faculty lounge, in a cloud of cigarette smoke. Like the crowd at a junior high dance, the teachers split along gender lines, women at the long tables near the window, men standing around the coffee machine. They spoke of many things—local affairs, movies, and politics—but were most animated when discussing their students. The men knew how far Mitch could throw a football. The women were more interested in Deena Vance.

“It won't last,” my mother told the school nurse. “He's got bigger fish to fry.”

My mother was wrong.

Mitch and Deena became inseparable. They walked hand in hand through the school corridors. In the summer she rode with him to work. Girls no longer approached the lifeguard chair, not with Deena stretched out on a towel a few yards away, eyes closed, working on her tan. Every hour Mitch took a break. To empty the pool, he blew two long blasts on his whistle. He approached Deena's towel and knelt at her feet. She was fifteen years old, beautiful and naked but for two bright strips of nylon. Mitch Stanek was a giant fallen to his knees.

“You wait,” my mother told the school nurse. “Wait until school starts.”

By
school
she meant football. The first home game was the last weekend in August, a sultry night; the spectators wore shorts and tank tops. A few bare chests were painted in the team's colors, black and gold like the Steelers'. In that crowd, the two men in suits were as conspicuous as drag queens. More scouts were spotted a week later, and again in October. In November Mitch made his decision: not Pitt or Penn State but
Florida
State, a choice that blinded the town with its sheer exoticism.

Could Mitch play in hot weather?

And what about poor Deena?

I imagine her grim face as they walked the halls of Bakerton High, Mitch stopping to receive hearty handshakes, the squeals of disbelief and delight. The cattier girls congratulating Deena—
You'll be down there every month to visit!—
knowing she couldn't afford bus fare to Altoona, never mind a plane ticket.

Florida State gave Mitch the hero treatment, flying his parents down to have a look at the campus, paying for their meals and airfare and Mitch's new clothes. The
Herald
ran a story on page one with a picture of Mitch in a jacket and tie. It was the first time he'd been photographed out of uniform.