The Slide: A Novel (20 page)

The waitress had gone to my high school. Or not. Everybody in this city was beginning to look the same. Half a mile from here was the field where I had been a three-year varsity starter at second base. Batted leadoff, was given a full-time green light on the base paths. District cochamps my junior year, third in state my senior. Named all-district junior and senior years, POTTER MAYS listed in the
Post-Dispatch
with other regional standouts. The clippings went from paper to fridge to framed and hanging on a wall of my father’s office downtown. Days when I wore the distinct tan of a ballplayer, arms and neck charred a crispy walnut, one hand pallid. Dad was there almost every game, home or away. In college, I quit during preseason workouts when the prospect of nightly practices and Saturday doubleheaders threatened my drinking and devotion to Audrey. My father had reacted to this decision with a mixture of concurrence and extreme disappointment, a thickness in his voice that had slowly, over the past four years, thinned.

“You’ve got to jump on this Ortiz early,” he said. “Take a strike and he’s got you. That slider is vicious.”

There was comfort to be found in the alternative time of a ball game. However many seconds and minutes our silences, it all remained relative. A pitch, a foul ball, a brief mound conference before the umpire breaks it up. The formal absence of schedule, something I missed horribly. Even a seven-inning game could drag into darkness, somewhere from two to four hours. Sun setting beyond left field, we held up bullhorn fingers, two down. Play’s to first.

I watched my father out of the corner of my eye. He rested one foot on the extra chair, both hands on his elevated knee. His beer was already empty. The color guy said,
Sometimes as a pitcher
you’ll do that, step off the rubber and give that base runner something to
think about.
Richard ordered us two more, even though I hadn’t yet finished my first.

“You’ve got to guess first-pitch heater. Don’t let him settle into a groove.”

The waitress pretended not to know who I was. My father was drinking at three times his normal rate. My mother had denied it, but I knew some sort of conversation was supposed to happen. Here we were, an occasion, and there was no reason this had to be so difficult. Again I glanced sideways at the primary genetic source of whoever I was, not three feet away. Piece of cake. Here’s how it would go.
Dad?
Son.
I could use some answers, Dad
. Of course you could, son.

“You ever have a beard, Pop?”

“Beard? No. Never.”

“Were you in Vietnam?”

“I can’t tell if this is one of your jokes. Your mother and I are always saying how funny you are.”

“Sadly, no. Sort of wish it was.”

“My son doesn’t know if I was in Vietnam. I can’t decide whether to blame you or myself. Probably more my fault than yours.”

“We could always blame Mom.”

“Your mother.” He sipped from his beer, so I quickly sipped from my own. After a few pitches of silence, he continued. “Conscientious objector. As a Mennonite, I never registered. The government never came after me.”

“Wait. We’re Mennonite?”

“Currently we can’t claim to be much of anything. Your grandparents were. So were their parents.”

I waited for three pitches to be thrown on-screen. “But you were born in 1948. Please tell me I have that much right.”

“I turn fifty-three this year. Fifty-three. Your mother is fiftythe one. We’ve been married thirty-three years. We were twenty and eighteen. You’re twenty-two.”

Richard leaned back and finished his second beer. Atlanta’s second baseman missed a drag-bunt attempt.

“That’s actually not true, sport.”

“Mennonite.”

“About the beard. It’s important to understand that a lot of things changed after your brother passed away. Your mother and I struggled. Neither of us slept. We argued. I stopped shaving, I suppose in a sort of protest of the world. Your mother hated it. I ended up making two major concessions that year. One was moving from the city to the county, the other was shaving off my beard. I don’t think there are any pictures of me with it. Any pictures we took during that period were of you alone. We would sit you on the couch or in the grass and move away. It was one of the few things we agreed on, back then. She and I had no business in front of a camera.”

My dad held up an empty bottle to the waitress. She raised two fingers and he nodded. It was amazing to see this, such cool disaffection, so minimal and right.

“There’s no reason to lie about the beard. I don’t know why I did that. I’m sorry. There are things I’m supposed to say tonight, Potter. I’m having a hard time.”

That morning on the Las Vegas strip, after Carmel had pulled away from our kiss and walked in one direction and I reflexively began in the opposite, I ended up in the MGM Grand at a craps table I could not in any way afford, dropping come bets and hard eights with abandon, bleeding my parents’ cash and drowning in a river’s flood of white Russians. When my ATM cut me off, I had no choice but to return to our shared room. There I found friends slouched in chairs and curled onto blankets in the bathroom, piled like some denim ad in one of the double beds while Audrey slept alone in the other, curled around one pillow in her stomach while the other was behind her, fresh and new, waiting for me. I lay down onto my back. She rolled over and nestled her head into my shoulder. Whispered,
babes
.

The waitress brought our beers. Richard picked one up and repeated himself. “I’m sorry.”

Two words echoing over the restaurant’s other voices, overpowering the voices of the broadcast announcers. I couldn’t recall my father ever having cause to apologize to me. Surely he must have, at least once, but for what? And now—for what now? I dropped my eyes from the screen to the table in front of me. The game appeared in tiny warped reflection of an empty water glass. Dirty restaurant table right immediately here.

“Your grandfather would be good at this. I wish you could have met him. Of course that’s ridiculous. People of his generation always had advice to spare, even when you didn’t ask. I remember him sitting me down and talking about love. Only about a month before he died. I was thirteen, and there was this young girl, Angela McIntyre, driving me crazy. He asked whether I was in love with her and I said yes, because I believed I was. The old man nodded and looked me in the eye. He said,
Always make sure
you love her more than she loves you, and she will love you even more.
”

The table began to rotate slowly. I watched plates and napkins and empty bottles of beer. Things pulled back, the view grew larger, out now to the table’s edges.

“I have always tried to love your mother more.”

The hand around the bottle was my hand, it was my Budweiser. I moved my fingers and watched them move.

“We are going through some tough times, son. All marriages do, of course. This is what it means to be married. But recently things have taken a turn for the worse. There are no new problems, nothing beyond two people with conflicting ideas of what constitutes happiness. Anyway, right now, for the past few years, we’ve been in the middle of something difficult. I’m trying to say this clearly. There has been difficulty, and it’s not going away. So there will continue to be difficulty. For everyone. I’m being honest with you. I knew this would be hard. I’ve been dreading it. But here we are. You and me.”

There was my head, and my dad’s head, that full head of silver hair. My father’s shoulders and arms and hands resting on the edge of the table.

“You’re an adult, so I’m not sure how much I have to make clear. Whatever changes, nothing is going to change. This sounds ridiculous, but you know what I mean. I don’t have to say that none of this is your fault. Of course you know that much. This is a child’s concern, the guilt that drives young people into lives of therapy. You know all of this. What happens is you get to a point when you have to let the past go. To let go. This is one of the things we all know but few of us ever manage to actually do.”

Rapt. I saw Richard leaning forward on his elbows, empty bottle beneath interlocked fingers. His knit collared shirt bunched at the shoulders.

“I’m sure you’ve picked up on feelings around the house. You’ve seen your mother and me, how we have become. Of course you have. It’s difficult to know when to share, and how much. You can’t share all of it. But there’s a line somewhere. We haven’t ever hidden anything from you, but we could have been more up front. You deserve that much.”

The scene had been branded, indelibly, into my consciousness. Sportsman’s Park, the tasteless burger, more empty bottles than I would have predicted. The news had been shared. Marriage. Trouble. I listened. What other details of note? Table? Hands around beer? I imagined my mother hunched over a fund-raising centerpiece or candle fixture. I doubted there had been much controversy over who was to give me the news. Of course my father. When I looked back at the screen, the ball game had returned. The Braves were switching pitchers. Some time passed. My father was apparently finished speaking.

“Should we get the check?”

“I love your mother very much.”

“Me too.”

“And I have never, ever in the course of thirty-three years committed any real indiscretion. Not one single indiscreet moment in all those years. Moments. And things are going to be okay. You have to remember that. I have to remember that. We are all going to come out of this thing okay.” He spun the dregs of his beer around in the bottle. “I have to use the john.”

He stood from the table and I felt two overwhelming desires. The first was to pay for this meal with money I had earned delivering water. The second was to get myself immediately and carelessly laid.

“This is going to sound horrible,” I said when the waitress brought the bill. “I don’t say this sort of thing ever.”

“Right.” She stuck both hands into her apron.

“Do I know you? You went to my high school.”

“Don’t think so. You go to Kirkwood?” She chewed gum, snapped it.

“You have a sister, then. She’s my age and went to Ladue.”

“I have a brother named Andrew.”

“Andrew,” I said.

“Unless you’re calling Andrew a girl, which is enough to get you messed up pretty good.”

I sat at the table and looked upward into the eyes of this young woman in the waiter’s apron. I did not know her, nor would I ever.

“My parents are getting a divorce,” I said.

“Oh. Sorry. Do you need change?”

I left her twenty-five percent and met my father by the front door. Outside, stars dim and cicadas deafening, we walked silently to the car. I caught myself patting jeans for cigarettes. When he didn’t go immediately for keys, we stood on opposite sides of the Datsun.

“You sure you don’t want me to drive?”

“I’m fine to drive.”

We were both looking at the dent.

“I haven’t driven the Z in years,” I said. “I’d be happy to.”

“We had the same number of beers, you and I. Me.”

He ducked into the car and reached over to unlock my door. The Datsun growled as it accelerated back toward home. I turned on the radio and scanned the AM band. The old, beloved radio broadcaster mumbled,
There was one out, now there are two.

july

five

h
ow even to respond when so natural a fact, a truth thus far assumed and treated as obvious, is exposed as a fake. When the fact becomes fragile, suddenly from out of the sky contingent? I changed subjects and made myself creatively scarce. Days were covered; I developed new appreciation for the morning’s stack of papers, rich with instruction. Go
here,
do
this
. No matter that the stack came from Dennis, that bitch of a man with his pockmarks and bitter distaste for any and all people of color. I went down the list, completing the tasks at hand.

When I got there, Ian Worpley was watering the yard with a garden hose. Thumb over the spout to make a spray, he was shirtless and barefoot, standing on the path and turning a slow circle, waving the hose as he spun. When he completed the rotation he set the hose down and approached the van. I met him on the sidewalk.

“Finished early today,” I said. “Thought maybe you’d want to go on an adventure.”

“Adventure?”

“In the van.”

“Where?”

I hadn’t thought this through. It was too hot for the batting cage, too hot to stand and water dead grass. Too hot for stasis. Ian began to circle the van and I followed him.

“The airport,” I said. “We’ll go watch airplanes take off and land.”

Because airplanes are massive and they fly and basically blow childish minds. I was confident about this.

“I’m not convinced this van is safe,” he said. “My dad always says that by the time you see rust, there’s so much going on underneath you don’t even want to know.”

“Rust is the common name for an extremely common chemical compound. Iron oxide. Ef-ee-two-oh-three.”

He nodded and continued around the van. He ran his hand along a dent in the van’s sliding door. “Yeah, you got rust like this, something’s wrong.”