The Slide: A Novel (37 page)

But before I said anything, Stuart began detailing a fight he and Marianne had had during the night. He said that at one point their voices got so loud they became tangible. He’d been awake since. He shifted his hands in the ice and described taking the ad to a church parking lot at daybreak, dousing it with gasoline, and setting it on fire. An hour later he’d stumbled upon a newspaper with an article on today’s event and decided to walk here. I had never seen him like this, skin hanging from his face, eyes the red of new brick, voice whispery and thin.

And would it be too much to say that my heart opened to my old friend and that I found myself forgiving him for everything? As he handed me a bottle of Evian from the tub, I tried again to thank him. I said I appreciated what he had done for me, the car the money the generosity, and that I could never repay him. I spoke slowly and clearly and looked straight into his eyes. Before I finished, he grabbed me around the arm.

“My God, Potsky. The blackmail. I’m sorry, man. I should have helped but I didn’t really. When he came over and asked for the Explorer it was just like he’d asked a thousand times before. To be honest I forgot all about the blackmail. He said something about he’d gotten a job in New York and that he needed the car to get there. So I thought,
Take the fucking car.
What’s a car? I was sick of hearing him ask. You know, he’s really an asshole, that guy. Some job in an investment banking firm. Hoedecker and Cohen. No idea how he managed that. North tower south tower, who knows. Potsky, I’m sorry. I shit the bed on this. I really did. I didn’t help you.”

I could see him there, Edsel, in dark slacks and a white button-down shirt, a tie, they would require a tie. He would be man of the times, lewd and powerful, built like an oak. In the morning he would board his train, groggy-eyed and swaying, one hand on the head-high railing for support, among the writers and designers, students and teachers, the lonely and strung out, the nervous and confident cheats and priests and lawmen in blue, lawyers and lawyers and bankers. A downtown train that would sift passengers as it rumbled on ancient tracks, growing more financial, more singularly aimed with each stop, until those who disembarked were near uniform in their devotion to capital. Edsel among his rightful kith, exuberant and insatiable.

We began walking to the bridge. You could still smell the paint they’d used to cover the old rusty I-beams, bright blue, and the new plastic of safety railing and fence. We stopped at the back end of the rows of folding chairs, facing a temporary stage just beyond the bridge’s halfway mark. A woman at the microphone was speaking about the value of recreational trails for a thriving city body. A red ribbon stretched between two metal poles in front of her. Stuart and I stood along the southern railing at the bridge’s defining quirk, a twenty-two-degree kink designed to help boats align themselves on their way downriver.

I turned to Stuart and said that it was going to be okay. He squinted back at me.

“With Marianne, I mean.”

“You’re right. Thank you. Her thing is—Jesus, man, what happened to your face?”

The official record would show that I had been beaten by a crazed, anonymous batting-cage patron. One broken nose and much bruising, deep bruising. Swelling and overwhelming tenderness across my face and chest. I saw my friend’s hand on the railing, gap of bright blue where a finger was missing. Living through the trials that defined who we were, my face and its fragile smile. I said I’d tell him about it some other time, and he nodded.

The seats were full, at least a hundred people here along with a small press corps. Richard sat on stage, flanked by several men I recognized for their demeanor of local power. I spotted my mother along the aisle in the front row. She had gotten a haircut, so now instead of bushy it looked darker, straighter, harder. I loved her for diving so brazenly into this realm of bodily control. My father was as I would remember him: forceful and static, a man forever occupying the middle of his element.

He was looking at me, my father, up there among these round-faced men of local celebrity, these powerhouses of law and finance and regional clout. The mayor and the current district attorney. Each with his own narrative of ascension. Former Senator Dunleavy stood at the microphone, bald and iconic, philanthropist and heir to massive old wealth. The man sitting to my father’s left was a St. Louis native, Washington University Business School grad. Mark, I thought, Mark something, who had spent much of his career in New York before returning here to the Midwest as
St. Louis Hooray!
’s chief financial officer. These men on stage. Mark leaning now to say something into my father’s ear while my father held our eye contact. Mark who had been convinced to come here, at least partially, by a hearty meal around my family’s smudgeless glass dining-room table. To leave his position at Hoedecker and Cohen, a serious handshake upon agreement. A hearty slow-motion smile from them both now. Hoedecker and Cohen. My father’s gaze still fixed, sailing over the audience to where his son stood at the blue railing over the brown river. And
thank you
alone wouldn’t do a thing.

Richard Potter Mays, risen to a certain level of influence and a certain kind of might. A good man who loved his sons enough, and loved his wife enough, and loved himself enough, to do whatever he could to protect the one son who didn’t drown.

I thought of Audrey’s island, and her spear, and knew without doubt that if there was to be love in this world—and there was—it had shed all name and could only be considered and spoken of as gifts. Here was a bridge, gift from the city to the city. Two baseball gloves sat in my car. There was a starfish. Crippled, yes, and gone forever, but a gift.

Stuart said, “Man, this morning, after the ad, on the walk over here, you know what I kept thinking about?
Go crazy, folks.
”

“Nineteen eighty-five,” I said. “Ozzie and his miracle to beat the Dodgers. To this day I hear Jack Buck’s call and shiver. Six years old, and I remember sitting in front of the TV with my dad. Ozzie hangs over the plate. He’s not the long-ball threat from the left side.”

“Trying to handle the smoking Tom Niedenfuer. Big man from the North Country. Minnesota. First baseman and the third baseman guard the lines.”

“Smith corks one into right, down the line. It may go. Go crazy, folks, go crazy. It’s a home run. And the Cardinals have won the game. By the score of three to two. On a home run by the Wizard.”

“Sixteen years,” Stuart said.

“Go crazy, folks, go crazy.”

I heard polite applause from the chairs, then a male voice requesting a warm welcome for the man without whom none of this would have been possible, St. Louis’s own Mr. Richard Mays. I began to clap. As did Stuart. And at this point the polite applause grew, and stacked, and evolved into something loud and powerful and hearty enough that we all seemed impressed by the applause, everyone in the small crowd clapping, hands chest-level or higher, including my mother, who wasn’t
the
but was among the first to stand before others joined, and still others, until every single person on the bridge was standing and clapping for my father. And also for themselves, clapping for the success of the clapping, an ascending spiral. Stuart and I watched and clapped. We didn’t stop, and soon enough my father began clapping back, seated at first and then standing, moving to the lectern, his hands in front of him, completing the circle. Those standing from chairs turned to either side and seemed to clap for their neighbors. This was the beauty of applause, its lack of defined object. It was sound alone, a celebration, a noise that would continue for as long as we made it. Sound of human percussion. I continued clapping.

acknowledgments

To . . .

Roger and Terry Beachy, Noah Eaker, Susan Kamil, Jennifer de la Fuente, Carol Anshaw, Janet Desaulniers, Sara Levine, Margaret Chapman, Odie Lindsay, Thomas King, Jake Cosden, Tommy, Todd Rovak, Kathryn Corrine, Violet Brown, David Cohn (I may be a writer, but I’m no Serengeti), Janie Porche, Robert Fulstone, Liz Cross, Cait, Andrew Yawitz, Eric Nenninger, Tracy Marie, Sarah Aloe, Eden Laurin, Pomonans, skateboarders, and the magicians from whom I thief. The St. Louis Cardinals and the greatest defensive shortstop to ever play the game. And then back to Roger and Terry Beachy, Roger and Terry Beachy, repeated to the point that I can no longer speak.

. . . Thank you.

about the author

Kyle Beachy lives in Chicago. This is his first novel.

THE SLIDE
A Dial Press Book / February 2009

Published by The Dial Press
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved
Copyright © 2009 by Kyle Beachy

The Dial Press is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Beachy, Kyle.
The slide : a novel / Kyle Beachy.
p.   cm.
eISBN: 978-0-440-33821-5
1. College graduates—Fiction. 2. Self-actualization (Psychology)—Fiction. 3. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3602.E235S65.     2009
813'.6—dc22.     2008029631

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