Shame (6 page)

“Any luck?” Michelle swung around the corner to check the refrigerator.

“Nada,” I said. “Nobody home. Hey, how was school today?”

She turned and gave me a floodlit smile. “Wonderful. The seniors are getting ready to start bringing in their music. I played ‘Tomorrow's World' and talked about what I want them to do with their reports.” “Tomorrow's World” was a song by Joe Jackson, one of the only songs about the future, Michelle said, that saw it as something worth looking forward to. “I still get choked up when I listen to it.”

Her enthusiasm was always contagious, at least for me. “Do the kids get choked up?”

She scarfed a carrot out of the crisper. “Who cares?” she said as she exited, the commercial break timed to perfection. Michelle's classroom philosophy was that, as long as mama was happy, the rest would follow, and she was generally right.

As she got settled back in front of the television, I could hear laughter—Michelle, B. W., Lauren, and a simulated studio audience. The din from down the hall, the direction of Michael's room, was Guns ‘n' Roses,
Appetite for Destruction.
I guess all of us have a golden age, and for Michael, maybe it was 1987; maybe this music reminded him of better times.

Maybe, or maybe it reminded him of satanic rituals. Lately Michael's behavior was making me believe in the possibility of demonic possession.

I toyed with the idea of going in to tell him to turn it down, but I'd heard it louder, and it seemed wise to save such an interruption for something more serious, since the “while you're under my roof, young man” gig was never one I played very well. It must be God's judgment on rebellious children that they almost always become the parents of even more rebellious children.

So I closed the door in the hallway, walked back to the living room, poked the fire, settled into my chair, and picked up Scott Turow's
Pleading Guilty
where I'd left off.

Practice the next day got off to a slow start. The kids had been hearing rumors about some kind of exhibition game over Christmas, and they had a zillion questions.

“So we gonna play some old guys?” Tyrel Sparks asked, one eyebrow arched skeptically.

Martel Sparks elbowed him and hissed in his ear.

“I mean,” Tyrel said, his eyebrow dropping and a cheesy grin spreading across his face, “four old guys and you, Coach?”

“That's about the size of it,” I said, laughing. “If it ever comes off. Red team—get in here.” I passed the ball in my hands to B. W., who was going to run a new play I'd drawn up.

“If we're gonna have to play an extra game, I think we should go on strike for more money,” Micheal Wilkes said as they were walking onto the court; God help us, they were already thinking like the pros.

“C'mon, you guys,” B. W. called, bouncing the basketball once for emphasis. “Less talk, more action.” And at that, the five on the court got serious. B. W. passed from the top of the key to Micheal posted low and to the left of the basket. Micheal could either take the shot, pass off to Martel coming back door, or whiz the ball back out to B. W., who looped on around to the baseline for what we hoped would be an open jumper if he could shed his man on Bird's screen.

They ran it again and again while I shouted off instructions: “Roll and shoot. Hit B. W. Back door. Set it up out front.” Then after they'd gotten some feel for all the different ways the play could flow, I called the second five onto the court to run it and pulled the first five to the side to watch. It looked different, of course; Albert Heap of Birds didn't have B. W.'s graceful jump shot or keen passer's eye, but still it was a decent play.

Then I put the two squads out there together and had them try to defend against what they'd just learned to run. The second five had a rough time of it, both ways. Except for Jimmy Bad Heart Bull, still playing football, this was all I had, and it wasn't encouraging to see what was actually out there once you got past the first four or five boys. One time, though, Albert Heap of Birds actually succeeded in shaking B. W.—Ramiro Garza managed to successfully set his screen by stepping in front of B. W. at the last second (illegal, last time I checked)—and Albert popped a fifteen-footer and raised his fist in triumph.

B. W., meanwhile, shoved Ramiro Garza so hard that he tumbled backward and down onto one knee. Before Ramiro could get up—one of the few times I was grateful for his slothlike speed—I was in between the two of them.

“Step back,” I said to B. W., planting a hand firmly in his chest to stop his forward progress. “What's wrong with you? Have a seat.”

He dropped his head and walked off the court. I checked my watch, sighed, and shouted, “Okay. Do your laps. I want to see you running, every last one of you.” And before B. W. could get up, I raised one finger to stay in place.

“I'm sorry, Coach,” he said, eyes down. “I don't know what got into me.” When we were on the court together, he said I wasn't his dad anymore, and I should treat him the same as anyone else. Well, here was my chance.

“A ref might have called a moving screen there,” I said, my voice barely carrying over the trample of feet as the pack passed in front of us. “And he might not. You have to keep playing. You know that. Remember how mad you and I used to get when Scottie Pippen was standing under the Bulls basket arguing with the ref while his man was scoring at the other end?”

“Yes, sir.” Apparently Lauren was the only child still willing to look me in the eyes; I hoped she'd keep that ability, although I didn't have much hope, given my experience with the other two. If we didn't resolve the homecoming double-date controversy soon, she'd probably run off and join a circus or whatever it is kids from unhappy homes do these days.

“Okay. Hit the floor,” I said. “And I want ten extra laps for your display of temper. This whole team looks to you to see how to act. You can't lose control out there. Ever.” As the words came out of my mouth, I realized that this kind of leadership was a lot of responsibility for a seventeen-year-old, but he had to shoulder it, both for his sake and for the team's. There was no way around it.

“Yes, sir,” he said, and he joined the thundering herd without a look backward.

I wondered what he was thinking as he ran.

He didn't talk to me at dinner or afterward, although I couldn't tell whether that was from embarrassment or anger. Michelle tried after supper and at bedtime reported that she couldn't crack him either. “Not a word. It's like we suddenly grew another Michael. Perish the thought.”

“I've got to get out of this house and away from Lauren before it's too late,” I said with a sigh as I pulled off my jeans. “She's the only one I haven't screwed up yet.”

Without warning, Michelle wound up and slugged me in the stomach—hard—and I doubled over and fell backward on the bed, my feet tangled in my Levis.

Then Michelle—a Baptist deacon's wife, another deacon's daughter—cursed and said, “Don't you ever say something like that again. Ever. Do you hear me?”

“I was just kidding,” I gasped, quickly, since she had her fist raised again.

“I don't care,” she said. “You're a good father, John. A very good father. And what's more, you are not responsible for everything that happens on this planet. Do you hear me?”

I heard, if only distantly; my breath was starting to whistle back into my lungs again. “Ugh,” I muttered, experimentally. I tried a groan. “Why did you do that?”

Her fists unclenched, and although I flinched, she dropped her hand softly onto my stomach. “You made me mad,” she said, patting gently the site she'd just excavated. “I'm sorry. But that was a terrible thing to say.”

“I was just kidding,” I repeated.

“Some things aren't to kid about,” she said as she sat next to me on the bed, and then she sighed, and I could see that she wasn't angry anymore, only sad and sorry. “You've made some mistakes, sure. We both have. But Lauren really loves you. No, she
adores
you. And I think they all want your approval, in their own ways, but Lauren really wants you to be proud of her.”

“Lauren thinks our cattle are contributing to some worldwide ecological catastrophe. Maybe I should check into her emu idea. Although it would change our whole way of life.” I felt the corners of my mouth threatening to turn upward. “Imagine the rodeos. Those birds could peck some poor cowboy to death.”

She snorted, and a wisp of a smile began to spread across her face. “Emu wrestling,” she suggested.

“Emu roping.”

“Hot emu action,” she said, doing an echoing voice like the tractor pull announcer. “Vicious Mexican fighting emu, bucking cowboys to their doom.” She wasn't mad anymore, and her face bore a sad smile. “I love you,” she said. “I'm sorry I got so mad.”

“Punching people bad,” I said in my best
Hulk smash
voice.

“I know,” she said, and then her smile turned into something that wasn't the least bit sad. Frisky, maybe. “Shall I kiss it and make it better?”

“Oh, by all means,” I said.

And for once, she let me have the last word.

Bass Fishing

Michael and B. W. were both sitting at the breakfast table when I stepped into the kitchen after feeding the calves the next morning. I thought at first that this togetherness boded well, that it might be an omen of something good for the family, but then I walked into an atmosphere so thick you had to push your way through it, something like wading thigh-deep in the pond, and I knew my hope was futile. B. W. was at the opposite end of the table from Michael; both had taken refuge behind cereal boxes.

I sat down between them, asked for the Raisin Bran, in front of B. W., and the sugar, closest to Michael. They passed these requested articles across to me without looking up from their bowls, without even varying the upward and downward rhythm of their spoons.

“It's going to be a beautiful day,” I murmured as I poured an untidy heap of flakes into my bowl, “just beautiful,” and instantly regretted having opened my mouth. The glance I got from B. W. was indecipherable and could have gone either way, but the look from Michael was pure scorn: a beautiful day. What Sesame Street reality, exactly, was I stepping out of?

I might just as well have launched into “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” and done a snappy dance with trained emu. He would not have found me more ridiculous.

So we sat, nothing but the sound of our crunching—and, eventually, our spoons clattering against the bottom of our bowls—to break the silence. Then each of them rose without another word to go in their different directions: B. W. to school, where he would be arriving early, Michael to bed, where he would be arriving late.

And I just sat there in the silence they left, looking for some sort of key to unlock it and not finding one.

When I got up from the table, rinsed out our bowls, and put them into the dishwasher, I stood for a long time looking at those three lonely bowls in the bottom rack, and I decided that I needed to do something to get some perspective.

I thought I knew where to go.

There was a place down at the pond I always liked to go, down in a hidden valley where the sun warmed the red sandstone bluff in the winter and a breeze could find me beneath the big red cedar in summer. Everybody has favorite places, and this was mine: With the sun sparkling off the water and the smell of cedar in my nostrils, I would drop my line over the bluff, five feet to the water and sometimes thirty feet under it, where descendants of the largemouth bass stocked long ago by the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife lounged in tangles of brush, waiting for something edible to drift down their way.

Ours was not a beautiful pond. The water was greenish brown (except after a rain, when it was tinged red with the runoff from the sandstone), and the gray gaunt tips of cottonwoods that once grew along the now dammed-up creek still stuck through the surface in places. The fish were mostly gone, since relatives and freeloaders had been sneaking down there without permission for years. But all the same, that bluff on that pond had been my special place for almost—good God, could it be true?—forty years. This is where I always went when I felt life crowding in around me, and after I had the calves settled, the ones on cows suckling, and the ones on feed happily chomping, I tossed my rod and tackle into the truck, drove the short distance to the dam, and climbed over a hill and down to reach my bluff.

There I sat at the edge, a heel braced against a protruding root, just in case. I'd almost been pulled in more than once by a fast-escaping bass, even if it was more surprise than anything else. Still, it was best to be prepared. Wouldn't do for me to fall in, whatever the season. My boots would fill with water and I'd probably sink like a stone, down through the layers of warm and cold that varied by season—during summer, hot as bathwater at the surface, chillingly cold four feet beneath; during winter, cold through the first five feet and warm enough beneath to support life all through the winter.

On that morning, I tossed my line into the water, baited with a pink wriggling earthworm from the washtub full of earth I kept in the old chicken house, where the worms fed on coffee grounds. Leaning back against the red rock, which over the years had either in reality or in my fancy conformed itself to my shape—or maybe vice versa—I let my line float, red and white bobber drifting about ten feet above the hook.

A hundred yards away, out of sight but not out of my hearing, the creek that fed the pond fell over the red rock into the standing water beneath. Wherever I went on the farm, I liked to think that I was within range of the waterfall, and sometimes, on spring nights when we slept with the windows open, the sound floated to us through the screens, borne on the wind, soothing, calming, the silky sound of magic waters. On those nights, I slept like a baby.

But now there was a slight tug on my line, my bobber dancing a little jig, and I set the hook, or would have, if there'd been anything there. Something had been nibbling at Mr. Worm—actually it's not a good idea to anthropomorphize your bait—and I had a pretty good idea what that something was. I cast again and lay back, one tiny piece of my mind on the bobber, the rest drifting. It wasn't that important to me whether I caught anything; I often threw back the perch or sunfish I hooked and even the occasional bass or catfish. The fish I caught were often simply the punctuation at the end of a beautiful sentence.

Someday, I thought, I'd like to reach the point of Zen-like harmony where I could be like one of those fly fishermen who catch and release, the experience of fishing amidst the burbling waters being the only purpose, but at that time, I didn't see much hope for it. The previous winter Michelle and I had watched
A River Runs Through It
—the tape rented from the Four Corners convenience store where Michael's Gloria worked, in fact—and I had felt the waters pulsing in my veins as I watched it. When the movie was over, Michelle turned to me and said, “Someday, we'll go there.”

“Where?”

“Montana.”

“Sure,” I said, although I didn't have the slightest faith that such a thing would ever happen. Bass fishing would have to do.

There was a stronger tug on my line, and this time I set the hook with a jerk and felt a tangible presence on the end, could almost see the flash of tail and the line trailing downward. The rod bent only slightly as I alternately reeled and raised it skyward, so it wasn't any monster down there, but all the same he was a fish of some substance.

I wanted to get him to the surface before he had a chance to play any games with the sunken brush, and I thought I was reeling him in with sufficient speed to do that, but I guess my thoughts had been drifting a little too far, because with a sudden alarming curve of the rod, my reeling stopped and the solid feel of fish had been replaced by the even more solid feel of tree trunk.

I whipped the rod side to side a few times experimentally, gave it some slack and tried again, but nothing happened.

“Oh man,” I muttered, and I could feel disgust bubbling in my stomach. It wasn't the loss of hook or worm, or even the loss of fish. It was just a further symptom of my recent inefficiency; if I'd been a car, I could have been taken in for a tune-up, but people usually just go on idling rough until they stop running completely.

I hoped that at least the fish had gotten free, that after winding my line around and through a branch or two he had taken off for the deep to tell some fish stories of his own. But I feared that he, my line, my hook, and my worm were still intimately connected, snarled through his natural actions in trying to escape his fate, feared that his last moments would be the realization that his universe had collapsed to limits he could not thrash his way out of.

Like I said, it's dangerous to start assigning human qualities to things when you're out fishing.

I cut my line and my losses, trudged back up the hill, down the other side and around the bank to my truck, and then I drove on into Watonga, although practice wouldn't start for hours. On the way, a Harley passed me, bearing an old man in ostrich boots and a Levi jacket and a woman I presumed was his wife, who certainly was the largest old woman I'd ever seen on the back of a hog, wearing an electric blue jumpsuit. They looked like they were having a great time, off on some kind of adventure. I wondered where they were going, when they would get there, and if I would ever be bound someplace like Montana—someplace besides church, school, the pond.

I couldn't imagine what it would feel like. But I guessed it would make you feel like wearing electric blue.

I pulled into the parking lot behind the gym as the sun went behind a cloud. When I got out of the truck there was a noticeable chill in the air, and I rolled down the sleeves of my denim shirt and buttoned them at the wrists. I thought I might wander by Michelle's classroom to see if she could get away for lunch, so I crossed into the main building and down the long hallway, empty except for the echoes from my boots on the tile.

Outside Michelle's partially opened door I heard her voice and paused to listen. “This next poem is a prayer.” A communal groan followed. “Now, don't lose your cool. You know I'm not here to preach to you. But this is beautiful and should make you think. And I'll bet you can't guess where it comes from.”

“I'll bet you're right about that,” a girl muttered, and everyone laughed.

I heard Michelle walk back to her desk, and without seeing her, I knew she was sliding up onto her desk, crossing her legs at the ankles, looking out at her kids, and preparing to declaim. “New Hymn,” she said, cleared her throat, and began to recite.

Halfway through, when wild men were clawing at the gates for bread, a male voice said, “That's dark, man. It don't sound like no prayer I ever heard.”

“Hush up, Tyrone,” said a female voice, not Michelle, and then Michelle said, “Give it a chance. There's more,” and she went on, ending with an invocation to whatever Presence and Maker there might be to be here—now.

There was a hush as she finished. I felt the moment too, and there was some kind of wetness in the corner of my eye through the last eight lines; the woman could recite a poem, and this was a fine one.

She let the silence last as long as it would, and then when some rustling and shuffling began to surface, she asked, “Anybody want to guess who wrote this?”

“U2?”

“Amy Grant?” asked a sweet voice.

That suggestion was hooted down.

“Reynolds Price,” I said quietly into the silence. But it was loud enough to be heard inside, if just barely, and then there was the sound of footfalls proceeding purposefully toward the doorway, the sight of Michelle's smiling face, and the tug of her hand urging me to follow her back into the classroom.

“The ultimate result of a life lived in close proximity to poetry,” she said, presenting me to her class. “This, ladies and gentlemen, is an educated man.”

“One of my many skills,” I said, while inside, I winced.
Uneducated, you mean
. “How is everybody?”

A chorus of replies drifted back, ranging from “Okay” to “Cool” to “Hey, Coach!”

I looked around, saw some kids I knew. “I thought maybe I could drag your teacher off to lunch. When is lunch, anyway?”

“Now,” Michelle said, looking at the clock with a rueful expression. She turned back to the class. “I wanted to talk about the song. Tell you what: I'll play the James Taylor recording for you tomorrow and we'll get back into it that way. Okay?”

If there was acquiescence, it was granted en masse and in motion as the bell rang and within seconds the room was empty, leaving just the echoes of their departure, the smell of chalk dust, Michelle, and me.

I gave her what I hoped would come out as a smile. “You have time to go downtown?”

“Sure,” she said, pulling out her keys to lock up and beckoning with her head toward the door. “A choice between lunch with you and grading papers on my planning period? I'll take you any day.”

“You say the nicest things,” I said, and she slipped her hand into mine as we worked our way down the hall against the flow of boisterous kids. “How did poetry go today?”

“They liked Don Henley,” she said. “I had them write short response papers to ‘Dirty Laundry.'”

“Ah, the planning period papers,” I said, and she nodded. “Was this an all-male day then? What happened to gender equity?”

She punched me—but gently. “We did Indigo Girls yesterday. And Shanezia Wylie brought in something from one of those female rap groups about black men not giving black women any respect. The women were hooting and the guys all picked out floor tiles to stare at.”

We got into the truck and headed for the Hi-De-Ho diner, which we'd frequented since we were kids, the kind of place that calls cut-up iceberg lettuce and Thousand Island a salad, where the gum-snapping waitress pours endless glasses of tea into colored plastic glasses full of ice that looks like rabbit pellets, where the jukebox is stocked with songs that haven't been on the charts for decades, yet nobody complains, or should.

Once Eileen, an angular woman with peroxide hair teased skyward, took our orders—the daily special, which on this wonderful day was chicken fried steak with cream gravy—Michelle took a sip of her tea, folded one hand over the other, and sat looking at me.

“What?” I said after about fifteen seconds of this.

“You didn't call Bill this morning, did you?”

I slapped my forehead in exasperation and hoped it would look like a genuine symptom of consternation.

It didn't. “You never take me to lunch unless you're feeling bad about something. You're transparent.” She speared a chunk of lettuce. “Work on that.”

“I'll call this afternoon,” I said.

“Maybe you think you're going to put this off until someone else does it for you,” she said, smiling. Actually, I did sort of think that. “It's not going to happen. He made the offer to you, and only you.”