Country Hardball (3 page)

“So you still working for the county? Government work? Nice office job?”

I said I wasn’t. “Kinda went downhill quick,” I said. She nodded like she knew. Like she was fine with whatever happened. I said I was planning to look for something down in Springhill, up in Magnolia.

She didn’t talk about the letters on her kitchen table behind me. The ones that said she was in default. Past due. She didn’t talk about the reverse mortgage, the bad investments. The man at the bank.

She tossed some purple shells my way. “You got to get to them before they go full purple or they’re too tough,” she said. “Don’t let them dry up on the vine. Snap ’em right off.”

I said okay.

“There’s a sweet spot,” she said. “Couple days when they’re just right. Keep at it. You’ll learn.”

But I wouldn’t. That’s not the way things work out.

She turned on the radio, and we listened to a replay of a show at the Louisiana Hayride. They were talking about a guitar player. A retrospective. Local boy made good. James Burton. I didn’t recognize the name.

“That Burton boy,” my grandmother said. “Had a talent. Played with Elvis Presley. That Ricky Nelson, too.”

I was running out of peas, so I pulled some from her basket.

“Made music with his hands,” she said. “Work with your hands, Roy. Best thing for a ying into his own house.”">“mavoung man like you. Make something. Make something of yourself.”

She wasn’t talking to me anymore. She was just talking.

I stood up and got us some sweet tea from a heavy pitcher. Boiled the water until it had soaked up all the sugar, all the sweetness it could handle. The hotter it gets, the more sweet it holds. Up to a point. Then it all falls apart.

I looked at a framed picture she’d nailed to the wall. A faded, square Kodak photograph from the early ’70s. Me and my mom and dad, all covered in sweat and pasted with dirt from cleaning up the storage barn in the back. I was five or six in the picture and I remembered the pants, how they didn’t come down far enough. They had a patch on the knee, a yellow piece of cloth my mom had used to cover the hole I’d made flipping a bicycle down a flight of sidewalk steps in Magnolia. Little pieces of thread holding it all together, so many years ago.

I pulled back the curtains and watched an oil truck drive toward someone else’s property.

In back of the house were things that were boxed up after my parents died. I looked up through the door. Someday I’d have to sort through everything.

The show ended, and the news people talked before they changed to jazz. My grandmother talked about the news. A smash and grab. Breaking and entering. House fire in Minden. “Why don’t they ever tell you about the good news? Always negative. What is this place coming to?”

I said I didn’t know. She hummed along to some big band tune and leaned her head back.

I pulled the sheet outside and cleaned up the hulls, put the peas away for her while she fell asleep in the chair. I sorted her mail, shut the window to keep her safe. I put one of the bank letters in my pocket.

I made a little noise moving a chair to wake her up, then walked across the room to kiss her goodbye. She pressed a button and the chair my cousins paid for lifted her a little so that I caught her on the eyeball instead of the forehead. I told her I’d see her next weekend and left.

• • •

That Wednesday I met Cleovis in the old Magic Mart parking lot and got into his truck. I asked if he was still cool with the plan. He said he was.

“But you know this won’t fix anything,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said, looking across the empty lot. “Nothing ever does.”

On the way to the man’s house, I looked at my face in the side mirror. Like watching someone on a television show you weren’t used to.

Cleo turned the radio to a pop country station and smacked his palms on the steering wheel, drumming along.

We got to the man’s house and walked around, making sure he was alone. He was wearing sweatpants and a robe when he opened the door.

“Can I help you?” he asked, looking at Cleo, then at me.

I told him who we were looking for, and he asked again whether he could help us. So I showed him the letter from the bank.

“Look,” he said, “I don’t know what this is about, but I am no longer affiliated with that establishment, so if you have business to conduct, please contact my replacement.”

He talked to us like he was writing us another letter.

When he tried to close the door, I stepped into his house and brokes stayed close to home. ming out his nose with the heel of my hand. He reached up to cover his face and I put the toe of my work boot into his balls.

Cleo closed the door behind us as the man hit the floor and tried crawling backward. He wasn’t fast enough. Cleo locked the door and turned off the porch light.

I talked to the man for a few minutes about his job, about how it was wrong of him to deal with people the way he was. How people can only take so much until they have to do something. He said something about the entire industry being in turmoil. Derivatives. Regulations. Cash flow. I thought about what my grandmother had said about James Burton, about making something with your hands.

I put the man’s forehead into his granite counter a few times until he almost passed out.

The man sat on his kitchen floor, sniffling blood up his nose, then coughing it out. Then shaking, crying. He asked why we were there. He said his brother was an army captain and would be back soon. He said he had a safe upstairs with money. He said a lot of stuff just trying to hold things together.

I told him how my grandmother worked for years after my grandfather died just to pay for the house. I told him how she knitted caps for every newborn in the hospital. I told him how she jarred pickles each year so that the needy at her church pantry had something besides just canned soups.

Then I thought about what this man had done to my grandmother. About what had happened to my parents. About how that was my fault. About how I think about that every day. About how nothing I will ever do will make it right. How you make one mistake when you’re not even thinking and everything falls apart. And nothing can patch that. Nothing can make that right. Nothing "http://www.w

“The stars,” she said. “See how close together they are? Almost touching? Look.” She took his fingers, pressed them together to hold a star. “You can almost touch one to another. Feel the light, one against the other. The fire.”

He said okay. Sure.

She rolled back into the dark field.

“But then you get close,” she said, “and it turns out they’re millions and millions of miles away. Did you know that?”

He said he didn’t.

“The closest star, I mean one to another, the closest one is like a hundred million light years from the next one, like in the whole universe. And the closer you get to a star, like they look close together now, but if you were to fly up there, all that way, the closer you get to the stars, the further away you are from the next one. The further away everything is.”

He said he didn’t know that, either. He closed his eyes, thought about the tips of her fingers on his, pressing
Trade Paperback ISBN 1, should have been together. The flat of her thumb against the knuckle of his. The tip of her index finger guiding his. He’d seen a movie, maybe a documentary, and a soldier had stepped on a land mine in the desert darkness. Had both his legs blown off. And he woke up, still feeling the legs. Still feeling the weight. It was called a “phantom” something. Feeling it pressed against you. He wondered how long that could last.

He heard something. Something deep. Something throbbing. Then a little light in the distance. Like stars on the ground. Only not stars. Not stars, at all. He looked across to see wavy shadows moving in and out of the light as people were coming toward them, getting bigger the closer they came.

“Staci,” one of the guys said. They were all wearing their red football jerseys, jeans, boots. “You all right?”

“Yeah,” she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “I think … ” She swallowed. “I think those Jello shots put me over the edge. Somebody oughta check those.”

Rusty sat watching. No one said anything to him.

One of them reached a hand down for Staci. Then they walked away, toward the house, their football jerseys shining in the moonlight, the stars, the house lights. Everything reflecting off them.

Alone in the field, he watched everything move further away.

• • •

Jake found Rusty sitting on the steps to the house, back turned to the party.

“Hey, man, you been out here all this time? Thought you were going to take a piss.”

Rusty rocked back and forth a little, legs pulled close. “Tripped over Staci out in the field.”

“No kidding? What was she doing out there? Taking a piss, too?”

“Yeah,” Rusty said. “I guess she was.” He stood up, moved his head from side to side, couldn’t get his neck to crack. “You see the stars?”

Jake smushed his lips together, raised an eyebrow. “The stars?” He looked up. “Uh, yeah. Stars.”

“I wonder who names them all.”

“Hell if I know,” Jake said, shaking his head. “Imagine they’re all named by now. Hey, remember when Boone Crawford said his daddy went to the moon, came back with a moon rock?”

Rusty laughed. “Oh, yeah. What was that? Second grade?”

“No. I didn’t move over until third, so it had to be third or fourth, I guess.”

“Man, that was some funny shit. He was so damn proud of that. Remember when he brought it to school?”

“And Robbie and Moe and those guys busted it into tiny pieces and Boone goes crying to Coach Womack?”

Rusty laughed along with Jake, but it all seemed less funny than it had at the time. Rusty hadn’t thought about that in years. Now he felt a little guilty for laughing. “Still can’t believe about him and his mom.”

“Who?”

“Boone.”

“Oh,” Jake said, stopped laughing. “Yeah. Well his daddy was always a crazy fucker, you know?”

“Yeah.”

“I mean, what are you gonna(s that. do, right?”

Right, Rusty thought. What are you gonna do?

• • •

When they got back to the house, Jake said he was going to look for some beer. Rusty said fine.

The house had a screened-in porch. Your basic four-room farmhouse, emptied when the Campbells left a couple of months before. Behind the four rooms, a mud porch and the bathroom, which didn’t work. On the door, Rusty had seen before, someone had written “out of order” in marker on the door. Added below, in pen, “so’s your momma.”

Jake was probably in the mud porch now, where the kegs were. Living room to the right. Dining to the left. Behind those rooms, kitchen and bedroom. Your basic four-room farmhouse. Only the farm gone, fields given over to weeds and hay and scrub pines and, a half mile from the house, near the road, a couple of roadkill deer he’d noticed when he and Jake had driven up an hour before. Then he’d walked around, wondering when they could leave. Then he saw Staci walking out the back door and he waited for some idiot to follow after her.

After a minute, he told himself he was just worried about her. Nothing weird about that. He wanted to make sure she was all right. She was his friend, after all. They’d grown up together. Same school. Same church. They’d talked a thousand times. Maybe they could be more than friends. Not now, of course. But some day. After the awkward stage. He and his mom were watching one of those “Before They Were Stars” shows the other day. He saw how they were when they were his age. He knew. Like his mom said whenever something went wrong, “This too shall pass.”

Jake came back with a red plastic cup of foamy beer in each hand. “You just going to stand around here all night?” He handed Rusty a beer, then elbowed him. “We gotta mingle with the chickies.”

• • •

Rusty was standing in the doorway, watching Staci McMahen look out the window as though she were waiting for something.

“Nice night,” he thought about saying.

Then what would she say? “Yes, it is.” Then he’d be stuck, again.

What if he just walked up to her and said something real. Something like, “Don’t you ever get tired of all this fake stuff?”

And maybe she’d say “What fake stuff?” and he’d be able to tell her. Or maybe he wouldn’t.

Or maybe she’d say she was tired of it, too. Of everyone trying to act like everyone else. Copying the pack leader. He’d seen a movie at school about that. Mimicking behavior. And maybe they could talk about that. How wouldn’t it be better just to go out, lie down under the stars, and talk about, well, what? What did he have to talk about with her? He couldn’t stand the music she listened to, but maybe she couldn’t, either. Maybe if she would just walk out to the field with him again, he could tell her about the songs he liked. About the words. About how real they were. About how real everything could be if they could just have that moment back, let it carry on, staring at the stars until they blurred across the darkness, edging into each other.

He took a deep breath, then a step forward. Then he moved back to the doorway. He took another breath and was waiting to move when Loriella walked across the room, grabbed Staci by the arm, and pulled. “C’mon, we’re heading out to the spooklight.”s. In this box.” ming out

• • •

The story had been there before any of them. Long ago, on a night just like this one, the Georgia Southern bound for Texarkana had stopped near the Walkerville Cemetery to let another train pass. The young brakeman, about to be married, walked around the cars, checking the couplings and reading a letter from his sweetheart. The wind kicked up a little, just the thought of a breeze, and blew one of the sheets under the back car. He looked under, but couldn’t find it. The day was getting dark quickly, much like today, and he lit a lantern, then looked back under the car for the letter. He found it between the tracks, wedged under part of a tie. He reached across and the car rolled back, slicing through his neck, sending his body down the hill, the letter into the wind. When the night comes up quickly, like tonight, you can see the brakeman, lighting his lantern and walking along the train line down near Walkerville, looking for the lost page of the letter.