The Slide: A Novel (15 page)

“My dad works on Saturday,” Ian said. “On Saturdays Mom used to let me cook my own waffles so she could sleep in.”

In his little hands was an erector set that looked circa 1960s, old enough to be worth something maybe. All chipped metal and straight lines. For me it had been Lincoln Logs and Legos and then Capsela. This was old and metal and rigid, unforgiving, from a time long before my own. Had toys returned to some golden era without my knowing it?

“What kind of building?” I asked.

“I think a courthouse or a shopping mall. Something important. My dad brought this home for me yesterday. You can help if you want. Here. Put this piece on the top. Feels good.”

And it did feel good, oddly therapeutic. I attached a second piece onto the first. Ian nodded.

“My dad likes me to have things to do when he’s at work, because he doesn’t want me to be one of those kids raised by TV.”

A cartoony soundtrack came from inside the dark house, the jingles and crashes and raccoon voices of characters I didn’t recognize. I remembered the Snorks—just Smurfs that lived underwater. Gummi Bears, bouncing here and there and . . . Good Lord, how I used to
adore
Saturday morning cartoons.

The boy had stopped building and was looking at me. “How come you’re here?”

“Just to say hello.”

This was sufficient. Ian nodded and returned to the building. I watched his face distort in concentration, then straighten when a piece fit the way he wanted. As soon as one piece was attached he reached for another. I looked through the open front door at the squalor inside. The little hands that reached for another building piece were browned with dust and covered in boyhood abrasions, tipped with the black of fingernail grime. And not a single care in this kid’s countenance. Just the repeated nod: approval, comprehension, confirmation.

“Enjoy this,” I said. “More, enjoy how much you enjoy this. This might be hard, but that’s my advice. Right now everything for you is singular.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Look. You’re sitting on the porch, playing with this erector set. And you enjoy it, right? Sure you do. It’s simple. What I’m saying is, don’t take this simplicity for granted. Enjoy it.”

“Are you smart?”

“I mean. Technically.”

“How do you know?” he asked.

I brought my fingertips together in a chin-level steeple, like maybe the physical posturing of thought would aid the real thing. I could hear the hyena children at their ongoing game of tag on the corner.

“It’s not always easy,” I said. “There are gray regions.”

“Dad says if you can’t say something smart you should just do everyone a favor and shut up. What’s your last name?”

“Mays,” I said. “Like Willie.”

“Willie who?”

“Willie Mays, the old ballplayer. Twenty-something-time all-star. Six-hundred-and-something career home runs. Lifetime average somewhere north of three hundred.”

“Was he white or black?”

“It doesn’t matter. He made that catch you always see in deep center field. Sprinting toward the wall and catching over his shoulder. Then firing sidearm back to the infield.”

“Oh yeah. Black.”

I picked up one of the pieces and snapped it onto the building’s side. Then another, and then several more. Soon Ian moved away from the building and let me take over.

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-two.”

“Wait here.”

He got up and carried the unfinished building inside, then returned with the cheap baseball gloves and ball. Once we moved into position, I made sure this time to ground myself in the immediate surroundings so I wouldn’t lose composure. My feet scuffed through the dirt of the lawn as I stepped for Ian’s throws. After a few catches, I dropped the glove to the burned ground. I wanted to feel the ecstatic slap of old ball against bare palm. I caught left-handed, one-handed. Ian shook his head and threw harder. Simple old ball, simple bare palm. Each sting was a little gift, amazing.

We stepped toward each other as the catch wound down. I asked if he liked ice cream.

“See, that’s a stupid question.”

“Yes. And we could get some. I feel like ice cream, I’m saying, and you could come with me. If you want.”

Ian held the ball. He looked at his house and then the ground. “I’m going to need some shoes.”

Ian fastened his seat belt without being told to. He ran a hand over the dashboard and fiddled with the electronic windows. He dipped his seat back and brought it back up. He turned the air conditioner on high. I’d never been more sensitive to the silly opulence of my car.

I said, “The difference between frozen custard and ice cream is you don’t put custard in a cone. And it has more butter, or cream, I think. Or eggs. Ted Drewes is custard.”

“Is that where we’re going? Awesome. I haven’t been to Ted Drewes since I was a kid.”

“What are you, eleven? Twelve?”

“I’m going into fifth grade, which is almost junior high. I like to round up.”

There is a sort of history you can reach for and touch, the official chapters. Since the early forties, a shingle-roofed white house in the South County region of St. Louis has stood as the city’s premier source of frozen custard. Forever averse to franchising, Ted Drewes endured populace migrations, regional development, countless diet crazes. In summer, herds of people amass in amorphous queues outside the stand’s three service windows. Parents wait and study the hand-painted menu while children spastically circle their legs, chasing and fleeing. I parked between two SUVs that made mine look like a Matchbox toy and followed Ian to the back of the lines.

“Shit,” he said.

At what age do kids start to cuss?

“Pardon?”

“That girl. Shit. Shit.”

I wanted to hear him say
fuck, asshole, bitch, bastard
. He stepped around so that my body hid him from the girl. He ducked his head and his hair hung over his eyes. I looked at the girl, who was too busy with her parents to notice Ian.

“Who is she?”

“She used to live up the street from me until last year her parents got rich and moved to those big houses over by school. We used to go to the woods by the creek. We had two chairs. Then she moved and took her chair, and I stopped going there because what fun is one chair in the woods.”

“Do you still talk to her?”

“Are you crazy? No way. She won’t even talk to my friend Tyler, and Tyler was all she could say when we’d go to the creek. Tyler is so cute I’m gonna marry him and have his kids, Tyler this and that and Tyler everything else. She called him Ty-Ty.”

Ian stared mainly at the ground, stealing occasional furtive glances at the girl.

“She probably misses you too,” I said. “Don’t get wrapped up in the mythos of the female. I can’t tell you how much it would have helped if someone would have explained this to me.”

“Are you serious?”

“I’m trying to destroy the mystique before you commit to it.”

“Do you even have a girlfriend?”

“Yes,” I said. “Do you know your order? You should decide what you want before we get to the window.”

Ian asked for an elaborate mixture of cinnamon custard and apple chunks and pie crust, cinnamon powder and a viscous brown topping. He was explicit, clear with his order. I, on the other hand, had no idea. The girl behind the counter tapped her nails on the counter. I asked for plain.

“We don’t got plain. You mean vanilla.”

We sat on the hood of the car my parents bought for me and spooned frozen dessert into our mouths. I heard a woman yell to get Lindsay’s shoes from the backseat. Two teenagers on what looked like a date passed by, laughing. Children scurried about while Ian methodically worked through his custard.

“My girlfriend left for Europe,” I said. “It was supposed to last three weeks but now I have no idea when she’ll be back.”

“My mom left.”

I thought about this for a second and spooned more dessert into my mouth. Yogurt had plain. There was also vanilla, but it was a flavor.

“I say girlfriend only out of habit, by the way.”

“How do you know if she is or not?” he asked.

“I think it has to do with the way two people talk to each other.”

“Maybe you have a picture of her in your wallet? That’s another way to tell.”

I didn’t think I did, but I found one wedged behind my driver’s license from a hike we took one spring at Lake Tahoe. Corners torn, colors slightly faded, Audrey with a boot up on a stump, leaning over to tie her laces. I had gone
psst
and taken the picture before she looked all the way up, so her eyes were focused on a spot just below the camera. Ian took it and held it at arm’s length in front of him.

“She’s pointy,” he said.

“Pointy.”

“Well, she’s not fuzzy.”

I thought about this. “I suppose if those are the two options, then no. She’s not fuzzy.”

I glanced down at Audrey’s picture. Those green eyes, tiny circular fields of grass, and the subtle galaxy of freckle just below. Her hair up, I loved it up, exposing that seamless path from chin to ear, elliptical curve of neck. Here they were, Exhibits A through like F, immortalized in handy carry-along dimensions.

“Dad says I have to stop talking about Mom. That talking about her won’t bring her back so why bother.”

I was not qualified for this. One at a time the enormous SUVs on either side of my own backed out of their spots, immediately replaced by more enormous SUVs. Ian held the paper cup of custard in one hand, little plastic spoon in the other. Tiny spoon.

He’d grabbed one of the mini taster spoons from somewhere, potentially the ground.

“It’s not your fault,” I said.

“Never
said
it was my fault. I know it’s not my fault.”

A parade of silent moments while we finished the custard.

Surely there was more I should have said. Families arrived and departed: white families dressed in every color of the spectrum. A van, a lot like mine from work except with windows, parked nearby,
Hope Eternal Church
painted across its side.

Ian said, “It’s not permanent. It’s just right now we don’t know when she’ll come back. But not knowing when, I mean, doesn’t mean it won’t happen. Sometimes I forget when a TV show comes on and when it does I’m like, oh yeah! This show.”

My custard had melted into a pool of off-white goo. Ian scraped the last bits of apple syrup from the bottom of his cup. I threw both cups away and we got into my car.

“Shit! Why are the seats so hot?”

“That’s the downside of leather.”

We drove back to Waldwick Drive listening to one of St. Louis’s four classic-rock stations, songs filling what would otherwise have been a nauseating silence. Time was running out. I racked my brain for a fact, some niblet of wisdom to share with this kid whose mother had disappeared. One hundred twenty thousand dollars spent on my education—I should have had facts to spare, wheelbarrows full of excess knowledge.

“I never met a problem frozen custard couldn’t fix.”

I heard the kid’s laughter like a bag of popcorn, lighter than you expect. He laughed through the better part of the instrumental intro to Boston’s “Foreplay/Longtime,” then stopped abruptly and told me I was crazy.

When we pulled up to the end of the dirt path to his short house with peeling paint, Ian pushed open his door and hopped to the ground.

“I can hit too,” he said.

“Good. Hitting is important.”

“I have a line-drive swing. I go with the pitch. I pull the ball, I go the other way. I don’t have a power swing.”

“The second you start to overswing, you know what you’re going to have?”

“Yeah.”

“A handful of pop-outs. Power comes from technique. Good. I’m glad to hear that.”

He had closed the door and was standing now on the running-board step, elbows on the window. Time passed. I wasn’t sure what was supposed to happen.

“So next time you go to a batting cage, maybe you could come by here and I’ll go with you.”

I was shocked and elated that he would see me again. There was the cage out Highway 44 with the go-kart track, another one by the water slides. The indoor place out by Westport Plaza. Reigning over all of these was the clear king of area batting facilities, Tower Tee.

“Alright. It’s a plan.”

I sat at the stop sign on the corner, waiting for a break in traffic. I looked over and saw the hyena kids at rest, sitting in a loose circle, watching me. I held a hand out the window, a sort of wave, and they stared back, completely still.

july

two

l
ate one night I came home to find a figure alone in the darkness. It was my mother, seated with legs folded beneath her so they disappeared within her purple robe. With no legs and her arms close to her side, she looked like a chess piece set there on the couch.

“Mom? Jesus. I almost peed myself.”