Ride Around Shining (18 page)

When I sat, the booth felt too warm under me. “Who was that?”

Calyph shrugged and started going at his plate with a bottle of Mrs. Dash he'd pulled from somewhere. “Guy was like, ‘Hey, you pitch?'”

“He thought you were MLB?”

Again he laughed.

I made some noise with which I pretended to understand. “Where'd you get that Dash?”

“Brought it,” he said. “I knew we'd wanna eat.” This was such a minor idiosyncrasy, I thought it must've come forward from his early days. I saw him at twelve, stepping off a bus in a waffle house parking lot with his AAU team, grasping the bottle of seasoning in his pocket with homesick satisfaction.

The kid was over at the bar, looking back at us like he had the wrong idea.

Calyph had taken off about half a biscuit in his first bite, and a bit of gravy was hanging in his beard. “Watch this,” I said.

“What?”

Taking my napkin, I reached over and wiped his chin clean. It was just a quick swipe, but I was careful to get it all.

He gave me a slow sort of evaluative look that made me drop the napkin back to the table like evidence. “Thanks,” he said, dry as my whitest friend.

I looked back to the bar. The guy was still staring, and for a second I held his gaze. I can't put to words what I was asserting. It was some kind of possessiveness, sure. I knew how it looked, to run this angel face off, to touch the man near his mouth with a soft napkin. I'd gone through a lot to sit at that table in a tenuous brotherhood that was at once disingenuous and the truest feeling I knew. You couldn't come in while I was away two minutes with a knit hat and some excessive body heat and take my place.

“Can I get that Dash?” I asked, and we ate in silence.

When we were through, I lifted my glass and through the ice I saw him, head bowed, turning his ring of simple gold like a cereal-box trinket. His eyes were shut, and they twitched a little behind the lids.

“Can't believe I forgot to take this shit off,” he said.

“What?”

“You ain't heard anything from her, right? Nothing at all?”

“No.” I didn't want to tell him about some little text. I wanted something substantial to give him, something impressive.

“What kind of baller am I, kick my wife out can't even fuck around?”

“You have a great love,” I heard myself say.

He looked up at me wearily, so wearily. The declaration had probably seemed like a taunt, but I couldn't deny it, theirs was the greatest love I knew. He lived in a rarefied world where fealty was an almost embarrassing aberration, and she'd meant to leave him almost from the beginning, but still I trusted him and Antonia to live in a world of stronger and longer-lasting love than the world that was tangible to me, and I was going to persist in this faith, bound up as it was in what first drew me to them, until they let me down.

“You think she loves me? With that house?” he scoffed. “Half the team got some type of city place like that. They get the same man to put the pole and the ceiling mirrors in the bedroom. I know that house.”

“I don't think there's any pole,” I said, and I said it like I was sure.

“Oh,
you
been there?” His anger came and went like the pain of a falling iron, felt only after it passed. He was composing himself again before I knew what had happened. “'Course you have,” he said, soothing himself. “'Course you have.”

“I can tell you where.”

“I saw that paper. I don't want to know any more,” he said.

“It's just a bright little cottage-type—”

“Boy, I do not want to
know anything
.” His eyes were on me, overwhelming, huge and choked and impossibly white.

I picked up my glass and put it down again. My fingers didn't look right holding the liquor. They looked like fingers for holding small glasses of bitter beer.

“You should take her back,” I said. “That's all I'm saying.”

“How could I?” It seemed only a blast of drunken pride, and then he said, “Ask her old girl. Ask her family, everyone she ever know. Once you let A go, she gone.”

“That can't be true. Not in this.”

“One-way A!” he cried, and all of a sudden he was plainly drunk and his head was between his hands at the edge of the table. “Fuck, man. I came here to get one back on her. Why you think I'm here? With my ring on and a ticket for a girl I stood up 'cause I ain't want to say two words to her? I can't do it, J. You got to help me.”

“Help you,” I said softly. I looked at the bowed head between the wide, powerful shoulders in disbelief. All night, all those days I'd been waiting to be shown that he was not really as isolated as he seemed, that there was some community supporting him beside his teammates and his family. And yet here he was, resting his forehead now on the backs of his crossed wrists as though he might any moment go to sleep, doing an excellent impression of being just as much the brotherless loner as I.

“I got you,” I said, and reached for my phone, and sent off the message to Antonia that had been waiting saved since the afternoon. “Always,” it read. It'd seemed so plain, and I'd wanted to elaborate, but now it felt just right. Then I reached out my hand to touch him, to comfort him, and saw it stop. I wanted, as you know, to love him, to kill him, to be him. How do you touch someone with that in your hands?

“I got you,” I said again, and cupped him a moment on the back of the head.

When we pulled up to the bachelor's house, he looked asleep. I had to jerk to a stop to rouse him.

“Where we at?” he asked, his tongue thicker than before.

“This is where I live,” I said. “Come see.”

He looked up at the dark house dully, and for an instant his fine, almost manicured eyebrows rose up. He must've thought I lived in some anonymous warren, a place with an antique buzzer system and a name like an old flophouse hotel. Then he leaned back again against the window and shut his eyes.

“I can't feel my face,” he announced.

I let the belt slip, trying to think of a way to make him get up and go on with the night. I was lightly buzzed and full of energy, and he looked so shamelessly asleep.

And then I felt the urge to wake him in just the wrong way, just because. So I leaned over and tapped him. I'd heard of this tapping as a bro thing, a thing done among athletes and teen assholes. It made me glad I'd got out of high school before it was popularized. I never had the slightest thought of doing it to anyone else, and I think I did it wrong. I went forehand, like a slap or a harsh cupping, as if I were stripping a football from a quarterback. In hindsight, backhand was the way.

Still, he felt it.

His knees shot up, good and bad together. He didn't go fetal quite, but he was protecting his essence. He made a long
oh
sound. Then he took a nursing silence, wincing, gathering himself. When he looked at me again I didn't want to be in the car anymore.

I jumped out and ran up the steps a bit, laughing, feeling ridiculous and fine, as if through one sack tap I'd transformed myself into one of those mischievous figures from antiquity. I imagined myself with a rakish three-cornered hat.

“Boy, I will choke you out,” he shouted through the painfully peaceful neighborhood. I glanced back and he was limping like five different ways.

On the porch I got the key out and the cat beneath the grandfather clock lifted its head angrily, like it was enforcing quiet hours. I could have kept him out if I really had to, but it was too simple just to bar him and be safe. I went up the narrow stair with this cacophony of wounded athletic struggle behind me, the cat running up between my legs.

I got to my door and it was cracked open. I thought I must have left it unlocked. I went up and there were too many lights on, and again I thought it my own oversight. I stopped a second in the kitchen and it was all quiet but for the off-kilter stomping beneath.

Then a man with white hair came out of the bedroom, my bedroom, wearing a string of dull beads around his neck, holding a book. We'd never met, and I'd not have recognized him but for the pencil sketch on the wall behind the television. In the sketch he was sitting in a garden, with an empty book and a pen on the table beside him, the expression on his face of such corny and exalted contemplation that I thought of it as his musing picture. Book or no book, the man before me didn't seem to be doing any musing. He looked angry and fearful and half-mad, and the sketch was a far better likeness than I'd imagined.

I felt Calyph come up the stairs and stop beside me. The presence of this oldster stilled us both.

“The fuck is this?” Calyph asked, breathing hard.

“I got kicked out,” the man said. “I got kicked out of Alaska.”

“You're the bachelor,” I said.

“Bachelor nothin'! I'm just married.” He turned to Calyph and his hoop earring glittered a little in the dull light. “I heard you got injured.”

“Yes sir,” he said. “Is this your house?”

“Of course it's my house. They run me off the reservation, you think I'm gonna come back where it's not my house?”

I stared at him a moment helplessly, this soft residue of old posters and silly ties turning into a force of nature in front of me. “I thought—”

“There's no thought to have. Whose beads are these? Whose life is on these walls? The walls know whose house it is up here.”

“He rents,” I interpreted.

“It's my life up here,” he almost shouted. “But now I got to move. I been waiting for this all my life. I got a new native bride to prepare for. She can't live up here. This is where I lived when I was preparing for her. I've got to find someplace new to prepare for us together. So here's the deal. You two can stay here as long as you want. Inn-definite sublet. I just want my cut.”

“He doesn't live here,” I said. “He's got his own house.”

“You think I don't know that? He's a god-damned professional basketball player! I can't believe I rented my house to a man who thinks on such a basic level.”

“You got a great place here,” Calyph said.

“Thank you,” the bachelor said. “I hope you enjoy it. I'll be in and out of here, getting my valuables, but I'll clear out at night so you guys can do your thing.”

There was a silence. The bachelor leaned back on his heels contentedly. He understood everything; he had defined everything. I looked at Calyph uncomfortably, almost forgetting to check if he still wanted to give me a beating.

“He's got a wife, too,” I said.

“I'm sure he does. Every player needs a wife. How else are you going to get any love in your life, just going city to city fucking everything nice? You do it that way, you only learn how to love other men.
Philía
, I mean, the brotherly love. Excuse me.”

“I lost her,” Calyph said. “I sent her away.”

“What'd she do?” the bachelor demanded. I don't think I'd ever heard anyone ask him so plainly.

“She bought a house. She bought another house and she didn't tell me.”

The bachelor chuckled for a long, slow time, and it was the only sound. “You kids!” he said. “All those vows and that's what it takes? My wife tried to run off with a bootleg pilot two days after the wedding, and tomorrow I'll be picking out curtains. Don't get me wrong. All lives are different. You're a public figure, I can't presume to know. But you've got to have some faith, Mr. West. Faith is what takes you from that kind of pride that says you have to send her away to that kind of pride that lets you let her come back.”

“Your mom called the other day,” I said. I felt Calyph must be fed up at this speechifying man and his book-sale wisdom. I'd rather have been wrestled to the ground than to stand there silent any longer before that reedy ersatz oracle.

“Nah,” Calyph said. “You right. You exactly right.”

“I know it,” the bachelor said. “I know it and you know it. We've been through things. Different things, but things. This kid, I don't know, he can't even keep my plants alive.”

“Your father's birthday is the twenty-fourth,” I said dully. “Your mom was thinking socks. Your fucking plants are fine.”

“Fine! This kid couldn't keep a stick alive. He couldn't grow popcorn.” He looked at me sharply. “You been jackin' off in the shower,” he said. “I can tell.”

Calyph began to laugh uncontrollably. It started as just air going in and out, but soon his whole frame, which that night should have been in Texas setting picks on Tracy McGrady, was shaking wildly, his voice cracking like a teenager's.

“Maybe if you jacked off on those plants they'd have some nourishment and we wouldn't have a problem,” the bachelor said. Calyph just got worse; his shrieking laughs filled the whole attic. The bachelor looked on proudly, like someone had laid the scepter of the king of comedy in his age-spotted hand.

He took Calyph by the shoulder. “Come see my library,” he said. “You might borrow one or two things.” Calyph went with him, without so much as a look at me, and there were tears of laughter streaming out his eyes, and they left me there, in the kitchen, which felt then like a dreary antechamber where boys with small, dry hearts who knew nothing must sit and wait until they are needed again, for any trivial purpose at all.

The next morning I woke
to the sound of the bachelor pouring condiments down the sink. If the place had ever been mine in any sense, it had been mine in sound, the sound of silence when I wanted it, and when I came out of the bedroom to see him thumping a bottle of cocktail sauce and listening to his Mayan jams on a dusty boom box, I knew I'd be spending my day off somewhere else.

I was walking downtown through the lunch-hour crowd when I saw the old Pontiac. Parked with the top down among a row of Civics and Hyundais, it didn't look out of place so much as it imposed its own style on the block. The license plate read “PH4R40,” and it transformed a whole length of Alder into a street scene from a seventies film in which all the modern cars were only so many errors of continuity. The driver's seat was empty, but Goat was riding shotgun. His hair had grown out a little, and his fragile outpatient look had swelled into health. He looked stronger and even less sensible than before. I was on course to pass right by him, and before I'd decided whether to duck away he put his hand up, and I felt the unpleasant suction of greeting an outgoing person of theoretical importance whom one dislikes.