The Sportswriter (35 page)

Leaving the motor on, I duck in a side door at the back. Ushers are milling, holding sheafs of special deckle-edged vanilla Easter Service bulletins. They are local businessmen, in brown suits and tie clasps, ready to whisper a “gladjerhere” as if they’d known you all your life and had your pew picked out. No seating during prayers, doxologies and Holy Communion. Slip in during hymns, announcements and, of course, collection.

This is my favorite place in church, the very farthest back door. This is where my mother used to stand with me the few times we ever went in Biloxi. I cannot sit still in a pew, and always have to leave early, disturbing people and feeling embarrassed.

The fellow who greets me has on a name tag that says “Al.” Someone has written “Big” before it in a red marker. I recognize him from the hardware store and The Coffee Spot. He is in fact a big man in his fifties, who wears big clothes and smells of Aqua Velva and cigarettes. When I edge in close to his door, which is open revealing rows of praying heads, he eases over by me, puts a giant hand on my shoulder and whispers, “We’ll put you right in there in a minute. Plenty of good seats in front.” Aqua Velva washes over me. Big Al wears a big purple and gold Masonic knucklebuster, and his hairy hand is as wide as a stirrup. He slips me a bulletin and I hear him breathe down deep in his troubled lungs. The other ushers are all praying, staring ferociously at their toes and the bright red carpet, their eyes resolutely open.

“I’ll just stand a minute, if it’s all right,” I whisper. We are old friends after all, both lifelong Presbyterians.

“Sure-you-bet, Jim. Stay right there.” Big Al nods in complete assurance, then eases back with the other ushers and bows his head dramatically. (It is not surprising that he thinks of me as someone else, since nothing here could matter less than my own identity.)

The sanctuary is swimming in permanent, churchy light and jam-packed with heads and flowered hats bowed in beseechment. The minister, who seems a half-mile away, is a hale and serious barrel-chested, rambling-Jack type with a bushy beard and an Episcopal bib—without any doubt a seminary prof. He gives in to the old bafflement in a loud actor’s voice, his arms raised so his gown makes great black bat wings over the lilied altar. “And we take, Oh Lord, this day as a great, great gift. A promise that life begins again. Here we are on this earth … our day to day comings….” Predictably on and on. I listen wide-eyed, as if hearing a great new secret revealed, a promised message I must deliver to a faraway city. And I feel … what, exactly?

A good ecumenist’s question, for a well-grounded fellow like me. Though the answer is plain and simple, or I wouldn’t be here at all.

I feel just as I wanted to feel, and knew I would when I made that hard left and came barreling back to the parking lot—a sweet and expanding hieratic ardor and free elevation above low spirits, a swoony, hot tingle right down to my toe tips, something akin to what sailors in the brig must feel when the president visits their ship. Suddenly I’m home, without fear, anxiety, or for that matter even any burdensome reverence. I’m not even in jeopardy of being bested at religion here—it’s not that kind of place—and can feel damn pleased with both myself and my fellow man. A rare immanence is mine, things falling back and away in the promise that more’s around here than meets the eye, even though it is of course a sham and will last only as far as my car. Better this than nothing, though. Or worse. To have hollow sorrow. Or regret. Or to be derailed by the spiky fact of being alone.

Then suddenly: “Rise my soul and stretch thy wings, thy better portion trace; Rise from transitory things toward heaven, thy destined place….” My voice springs forth strong and unequivocal, with Big Al’s baritone behind me in the chorus of confident, repentant suburbanites. (I can never think what the words mean or even imply.) The organ rattles the windows, raises the roof, tickles the ribs, sends a stirring through all our bellies—Jim’s, the ushers’, the preacher’s.

And then I’m gone.

A secret high sign to big Al, who understands me and everything perfectly and clasps his big stirrupy hands in front of him in a Masonic one-man handshake. It is time for the “Race to the Tomb,” and I am in no need of messages, having taken in all I want and can use, am “saved” in the only way I can be
(pro tempore)
, and am ready to march on toward dark temporality, my banners all aflutter.

10

Under the visor I have a Johnny Horizon Let’s-Clean-Up-America map, printed for the Bicentennial, and taped to the dash a page of directions in Vicki’s own hand on the “smart way” to get to Barnegat Pines. 206-A to 530-E to 70-S and (swerving briefly north) to an unnumbered county road referred to only as Double Trouble Road, which supposedly delivers you neat as a whistle to where you’re going.

Her directions route me past the most ordinary but satisfying New Jersey vistas, those parts that remind you of the other places you’ve been in your life, but in New Jersey are grouped like squares in a puzzle. It is a good time to put the top down and let in the winds.

Much of what I pass, of course, looks precisely like everyplace else
in
the state, and the dog-leg boundaries make it tricky to keep cardinal points aligned. The effect of driving south and east is to make you feel you’re going south and west and that you’re lost, or sometimes that you’re headed nowhere. Clean industry abounds. Valve plants. A Congoleum factory. U-Haul sheds. A sand and gravel pit close by a glass works. An Airedale kennel. The Quaker Home for Confused Friends. A mall with a nautical theme. Several signs that say HERE! Suddenly it is a high pale sky and a feeling like Florida, but a mile farther on, it is the Mississippi Delta—civilized life flattened below high power lines, the earth laid out in great vegetative tracts where Negroes fish from low bridges, and Mount Holly lumps on the far horizon just before the Delaware. Beyond that lies Maine.

I stop in the town of Pemberton near Fort Dix, and put in another call to X to express Easter greetings. Her recording talks in the same brassy business voice, and this time I leave a number—the Arcenaults’—where she can reach me. I also put in a call to Walter. He is on my mind today, although no one answers at his house.

In Bamber—a town that is no more than a post office and small lake across Route 530—I stop for a drink in a cozy rough-pine roadhouse with yellow lowlights and log tables. Sweet Lou’s Sportsman’s B’ar, owned—the signs inside all say—by a famous ex-center on the ’56 Giants, Sweet Lou Calcagno. Jack Dempsey, Spike Jones, Lou Costello, Ike and a host of others have all been close friends of Sweet Lou’s and contributed pictures to the walls, showing themselves embracing a smiling, crewcut bruiser in an open collar shirt who looks like he could eat a football.

Sweet Lou isn’t around at the moment, but when I sit down at the bar, a heavy pale-skinned woman in her fifties with beehive hair and elastic slacks comes out from a swinging door to the back and begins to clean an ashtray.

“Where’s Lou today,” I ask after I’ve ordered a whiskey. I would, in fact, like to meet him, maybe set up a
Where Are They Now
feature: “Former Giant lugnut Lou Calcagno once had a dream. Not to run a fumble in for a touchdown or to play in a league championship or to enter the Hall of Fame, but to own a little watering trough in his downstate Jersey home of Bamber, a quiet, traditional place where friends and fans could come and reminisce about the old glory days….”

“Lou who?” the woman says, lighting a cigarette and blowing smoke away from me out the corner of her mouth.

I widen my grin.
“Sweet
Lou.”

“He’s where he is. How long since you been in?”

“A while, I guess it’s been.”

“I guess too.” She narrows her eyes. “Maybe in your other life.”

“I used to be a big fan of his,” I say, though this isn’t true. I’m not even sure I ever heard of him. To be honest, I feel like an idiot.

“He’s dead. He’s
been
dead maybe, thirty years? That’s approximately where he is.”

“I’m sorry to know that,” I say.

“Right. Lou was a real nunce,” the woman says, finishing wiping out the ashtray. “And he was a big nunce. I was married to him.” She pours herself a cup of coffee and stares at me. “I don’t wanna ruin your dreams. But. You know?”

“What happened?”

“Well,” she says, “some gangsters drove over here from Mount Holly and walked him into the parking lot out there like it was friends and shot him twenty or thirty times. That did it.”

“What the hell had he done to
them?”

She shakes her head. “No idea. I was right here where I am behind this bar. They came in, three of them, all little rats. They said they wanted Lou to come out and talk, and when he did, boom. Nobody came back in to explain.”

“Did they catch the people?”

“Nope. They did not. Not one was caught. Lou and I were getting divorced anyway. But I was working for him afternoons.”

I look around the dark bar where Sweet Lou stares down at me from long ago and life, surrounded by his smiling friends and fans, an athlete who left sports a success to achieve a prosperous life in Bamber, which was no doubt his home, or near it, yet came to a bad end. Not the way these things usually turn out and not exactly what you’d want to read about before dinner behind a chilled martini.

Someone else, I see, is in the bar, an older gray-haired man in an expensive-looking silverish suit sitting talking to a young woman in red slacks. They are in the corner by the window. Above them is a huge somber-looking bear’s head.

I cluck my tongue and look at Lou’s widow. “It’s nice you keep the place this way.”

“He had it in his will that all these had to be left up, or I’d have changed it, what, a hundred years ago? It has to stay a B’ar, too, and buy from his distributorship. Otherwise I lose it to his guinea cousins in Teaneck. So I ignore him. I forget whose picture it is, really. He wanted to run everybody’s life.”

“Do you still own the distributorship?”

“My son by my second marriage. It fell in his lap.” She sniffs, smokes, stares out the small front door glass which casts a pale inward light.

“That’s not so bad.”

“It was the best thing he ever did, I guess. After he was in the ground he did it. Which figures.”

“My name’s Frank Bascombe, by the way. I’m a sportswriter.” I put my dollar on the bar and drink up my whiskey.

“Mrs. Phillips,” she says and shakes my hand. “My other husband’s dead, too.” She stares at me without interest and opens a saltine packet from a basket of them on the bar. “I haven’t seen one of you guys in years. They used to come all the time to interview Fatso. From Philly. He kept ’em in stitches. He knew jokes by the hundreds.” She drops the little red saltine ribbon into the clean ashtray and breaks the cracker in two.

“I’m sorry I didn’t know him.” I’m on my feet now, smiling, sympathetic, but ready to go.

“Well, I’m sorry I did. So we’re even.” Mrs. Phillips stubs out her cigarette before biting the saltine. She looks at it curiously as if considering Lou Calcagno all over again. “No, I take it back,” she says. “He wasn’t so awful
all
the time.” She gives me a sour smile. “Quote me. How’s that. Not all the time.” She turns and walks stoutly down the bar toward a TV that is dark. The other two patrons are getting up to go, and I am left with my own smile and nothing to say but, “Okay. Thanks. I’ll do it.”

 
    Outside in the white-shell parking lot there is the promise of approaching new weather—Detroit weather—though the sun is shining. A wet wind has arrived over Bamber Lake, unsettling the dust, bending the pines along the row of empty lake cottages, sending the Sportsman’s B’ar sign wagging. The older man and the young woman in slacks climb into a red Cadillac and drive away toward the west, where a bank of quilty clouds has lowered the sky. I stand beside my car and think first of Lou Calcagno coming to his sad end where I am parked, and that this is exactly the place for such things, a place that was something once. I think about the balloonists I saw this morning, and if they will get down and moored before the stiff blow comes. I am glad to be away from home today, to be off in the heart of a landscape that is unknown to me, glad to be bumping up against a world that is not mine or of my devising. There are times when life seems not so great but better than anything else, and when you’re happy to be alive, though not exactly ecstatic.

I run the top up now against a chill. In a minute’s time I’m fast down the road out of scrubby Bamber, headed for my own rendezvous on Double Trouble Road.

 
    Vicki’s directions, it turns out, are perfect. Straight through the seaside townlet of Barnegat Pines, cross a drawbridge spanning a tarnished arm of a metallic-looking bay, loop through some beachy rental bungalows and turn right onto a man-made peninsula and a pleasant, meandering curbless street of new pastel split-levels with green lawns, underground utilities and attached garages. Sherri-Lyn Woods, the area is named, and there are streets like it along other parallel peninsulas nearby, though there are no woods in sight. Most of the houses have boat docks out back with a boat of some kind tied up—a boxy cabin-fisherman or a sleek-hulled outboard. All in all it is a vaguely nautical-feeling community, though all the houses down the street look Californiaish and casual.

The Arcenaults’ house at 1411 Arctic Spruce is vaguely similar to the others, though hanging on its front at the place where the two levels join behind beige siding there is a near life-size figure of Jesus-crucified that makes it immediately distinctive. Jesus in his suburban agony. Bloody eyes. Flimsy body. Feet already beginning to sag and give up the ghost. A look of redoubtable woe and calm. He is painted a lighter shade of beige than the siding and looks distinctly Mediterranean.