No Way Home (19 page)

“I should’ve brought some too,” he said, watching her rise. “Ethel’s got some nice petunias. I could’ve brought those.”

“Mine can be from both of us,” she said with more understanding than he had realized, which touched him deeply.

“I’m not trying to slight Earl, but it’s Flo I came to see.”

“We both loved her.”

“How did you know I did?” he asked, and she nudged him with an elbow.

“Hell, Fred, everybody’s known that since high school. Flo once said to me if she hadn’t married Earl she’d have married you.”

The last part was a white lie that darkened as soon as she said it, but he appreciated it all the same. With emotion he looked down at Flo’s marker, from which emanated a mournful indifference. He said, by the way, “Old Mrs. Dugdale died last night.”

“Good Lord in heaven, I didn’t know she was still alive. Who told you?”

“Ethel. She calls Drinkwater every morning to find out who’s come in. That way she doesn’t have to wait for the paper.”

“God almighty, I wondered how she found out those things so fast.”

“You take the telephone from Ethel’s ear, you’ll find she doesn’t have a head, just pure Bensington air.”

“That’s not nice, Fred.”

“You don’t know the things I have to put up with.”

“A major part of life is putting up with things, don’t you know that?” Her elbow brushed him. “Could you move away for a while? I want to talk to my friend alone.”

“I was just going anyway,” he said, though he shuffled off reluctantly. On his way to his car, he passed the stones of Vietnam War veterans, whose battles, home and abroad, were over and whose ailments, physical and mental, were part of the soil. He also noted those who needed new flags.

Nearing his car, he glimpsed on the ground a flag honoring one of the World War II boys, and he detoured to tend to it. Respectfully he returned it to the plastic holder and stepped back to read the name on the stone, which seemed to stand taller now as if it had risen a little out of the sod. The grave was that of Chief Morgan’s father.

Taking another step back, he snapped off a little salute. From the maple a cardinal trilled, a jay squawked.

• • •

It was only a little after seven when crows woke Lydia Lapham with hysterical throat-clearing caws, as if a murderer were among them. She rose from her bed with too little sleep. Morgan, who had had less, was gone. Where was he? Her head couldn’t tell her, and her nerves didn’t want to know. A robe made her decent.

With the uncoordinated movements of broken sleep she stumbled past the dresser and knocked over a wicker wastebasket that contained the foil from a condom used twice and forsaken the third time.

The bathroom mirror showed her the state of her eyes and echoed the raggedness inside her head. A smile would have brought a small explosion to her face. Brushing her teeth, she remembered he had entered her with a sense of trespass and proceeded cautiously until she urged, “You can go harder than that, I won’t break.” After that, he had the snort of a bull, she the low of a cow. That was the way it was, the way she wanted it. Inadvertently, with his voice tangled in her hair, he called her Elizabeth, which didn’t bother her in the least. Indeed, she relished being two sides of a spinning disk, flesh and spirit drawing on a common muscle the way darkness and light swing off the same hinge.

She brushed her hair and tightened her robe. She descended the stairs, expecting to see him in the kitchen, embarrassed by the prospect. Would his mouth fly open for a kiss? She hoped not. Would the healing qualities of his voice translate to the morning? She suspected not.

The old coffee thrown out, a fresh pot awaited her, along with a note written in his hurried hand with her father’s pen.
See you soon.

There should have been more than that, much more. She crumpled the note. With bitter anger she sailed to a window. His car was gone.

With her robe wrapped tighter than ever around her, she sat in the breakfast nook with her coffee and watched birds assault the feeder that dangled outside the bow window. The feeder was a plastic tube with a short perch and a hole that accommodated only smaller birds. A finch was at it now. The finch ignored her and fed.

The coffee gradually brought her back into existence, but she was still groggy. Her hands trembled. Her legs were not all that steady when she moved to the living room and let in light. With her head on one of her mother’s fancy toss pillows, she stretched out on the sofa, where she napped an hour and woke partially restored. The telephone rang moments later. She scurried to it. It was he.

“Damn you,” she said with joyful anger. “Damn you twice.”

• • •

Eschewing the buffet, which reminded him of the military, Clement Rayball breakfasted in the formal dining room at the motor inn. The waitress gave him a dish of strawberries and a pitcher of cream for his cornflakes. His newspaper was opened to a story in the sports section. The Sox were back from a long road trip. Last night they had beaten Cleveland, Clemens the winning pitcher, three hits by Boggs. The only mention of Crack Alexander was that he was benched. A twisted ankle, it claimed.

At the next table a businessman was smothering himself in pancakes, his lips glittering. Clement glanced at him and flipped pages to the foreign section, where he read a lengthy article about Central America. He was halfway into another article when the businessman rose, billowing from his breakfast and tongue-lashing the waitress, little more than a child, for delaying his check. Closing the paper, Clement caught the man’s eye. “It takes only a little effort to be good to people.”

“I pay for service,” the man snapped back.

“No,” Clement said. “You pay for the privilege of being served.”

The waitress, red-faced, scooted off, and the man said with satisfaction, “She knows she’s not getting a tip.”

“That’s all right, I’ll double mine,” Clement said.

The man wheeled by him, then turned back from a safe distance. “What are you, a communist?”

“A Boy Scout of America,” Clement replied with irony that flew over the fellow’s head.

Several minutes later he left the dining room and stepped into the growing heat of the morning. The sun had much color. The sky might have been Florida’s. Before slipping into his rental car, which was squatting in the heat, he opened all the windows. By the time he crossed the line into Bensington, the windows were shut and the air conditioner was heaving a chill breath.

In Oakcrest Heights he drove past the Bowmans’ house and several others and cruised between stone lions into a curving driveway. The house was magnificently pretentious, quite suitable for a millionaire ball player. Two of the three stalls were open in the garage, exhibiting a Rolls Royce and a Jeep Cherokee. He stopped when he spotted a husky, bare-legged man jogging the perimeters of the extended front lawn. He climbed out, waited awhile, then walked toward him. They met on the grass.

“Something you want?”

“I’ve been a fan of yours for years,” Clement said. “I was worried. I read in the paper you got benched, bad ankle.”

“It’s OK, just sore.” In the heat Crack Alexander’s thinning hair lay misdirected on his head, like spill from a bottle. He looked older than his pictures, and bigger. He stood well over six feet, superlative in voice and manner. He lifted his T-shirt with a huge hand and mopped his face.

“We’re all pulling for you,” Clement said.

“I ain’t worried. No reason you should be.”

Inside the man’s bluster, Clement had heard, was an ulcer that wouldn’t heal. “You’ve been having some tough luck lately.”

“Everybody has that.”

“Especially on the road, I mean.”

“I’m home now. It’ll make a difference.”

Clement toed the grass, which was unnaturally bright, alien under his feet. “You must have one of those chemical trucks doing your lawn.”

“Yeah, a guy comes, but we’re not gonna have it done anymore. The wife says it turns the worms purple, gives ‘em cancer.”

“Yes,” said Clement, “those road trips can be grueling. More ways than one.”

“What d’you mean by that?”

“You know.”

“No, you tell me.”

Clement gazed toward the house, and Crack did too. Clement shrugged sympathetically. “While the cat’s away, the mouse plays.”

Something bad and big came over Crack’s face. Clement stood his ground.

“You want to know the guy’s name?”

• • •

Sissy Alexander, who seldom used much makeup, sat at her dressing table and tried to paint happy thoughts on her face. It was an old trick performed in high school when she had been the subject of little ditties flattering only in disrespectful ways. Always, no different now, she gave too much and received in return too little.

She rose in one of her favorite dresses, white, flouncy, and ruffed, in which she was a magnolia blossom, not a little unlike herself at age seventeen, when she had married Crack and traveled the bush leagues with him, at times believing in him more than he believed in himself, knowing from the first time he laid hands on her that stardom was built into his body. That was when she was all puppy fat and baby talk, when baby talk was the lingua franca of their life together.

At the high window overlooking the front grounds she saw him jogging along the far edge, competing against himself and the growing heat of the morning. Gone was the long, loping stride with which, with such splendor, he had made it to the bigs. The bigs: that was a world apart from any other. There he had joined deities in form-fitting livery and dug his silver cleats into turf as shiny as brand-new money. And there, from her privileged box seat at Fenway, she had felt a part of the play, certainly part of Crack’s graceful pursuit of a ball in center field, his glove big enough to snare an owl. So too, with Crack at bat, was she aware of the sex symbols of the opposing catcher, who, armored and masked, squatting, wiggled insinuating fingers in his spread crotch. She joined the ecstasy of the crowds rising into screams from a single swing of the bat. The fair youth trotting the bases like a god and doffing his cap to the multitudes was Crack. She felt on her own bottom the congratulatory slaps he received on his.

The umpires were priests with the power to send players to heaven or hell, except for Crack, whom they could merely relegate to purgatory, where he stayed no more than a day. He was in his prime, he was at the glorious beginning of his career and almost at the zenith. Already his agent was bargaining for super dollars, no amount too outrageous to ask for.

She bathed and bubbled in the thrilling backwash of his success. She knew all his teammates and called them by nickname. Dewey, whose glove was golden, she had a crush on and blushed whenever he spoke to her. Yaz was a prima donna, though so was Crack, even more so. She was a little afraid of Pudge Fisk but never took her eyes off him when it was his turn to hit. She adored the way he always stepped back a moment from the plate to size up his wood. Everything was sexual, and she had to admit that, especially the way Crack went for his crotch when behind on the count.

Some players she had been uncomfortable with. Oilcan Boyd was one, a poor black youth overwhelmed by potential stardom that never came. She had avoided him, but that was because she had been stupid then and hadn’t known that blacks were people, which was something that Crack had to learn too, though he was slower to do so. She misunderstood the moodiness of Jim Rice, another black, until she realized that his home runs roused only half the reaction of Crack’s.

It was a time of her life — and eventually Crack’s — never to be repeated. She stopped accompanying him on road trips when he decreed that her job was at home, though they had no children and apparently never would have any. This house in Bensington was meant to mollify her over what she was reading in the papers, especially Norma Nathan’s column in the
Herald
: colorful anecdotes about his carousing.

His slide came gradually, inexorably, and preyed upon him. Too many young new faces on the field. Pudge was long gone, laboring in Chicago, where Crack had two girlfriends. Yaz, whose stubble was gray, was in his last year. Jim Rice, either striking out or tapping into double plays, was on his way to oblivion. Crack, who expected to inherit Yaz’s mantle of team captain, found himself increasingly frustrated by young pitchers who suckered him with sliders. That was when he began taking his slumps out on her.

She could tell by his face when she was in for it. Nothing pleased him, not his breakfast, not his shirts from the laundry, and especially not the condition of his scrapbooks, for which she was responsible. When he lost his temper, he used his hands, though only once had he hit her with his fist. Something must have told him that he could kill her with that.

She still stood at the window, though he had jogged out of her view several minutes before. Her nose pressed the glass until he reappeared, jogging with a heavier step and less grit, as though he were caught between two seasons, his body adjusted to neither.

She was about to step away when she saw a car curve up the drive and come to a stop. A man got out. She had no idea who he was, but she watched carefully as he met her husband on the grass, which he scuffed as if he too were a ball player, though she knew he wasn’t. Her animal senses at work, she knew something wasn’t right. When the man swung his eyes toward the house, she pulled back.

She went down the stairs on slow feet, one burdened by a blister. In their young days Crack would have kissed it better. He would have given her flowers stolen from a neighbor’s scant garden, and each would have taken pleasure in the undoing of the other’s buttons. But all that was gone, and all that was left was her helplessness and his rage and impotence.

She hiked through the house, paused for a moment at one of the cupboards in the gleaming kitchen, and then went out a back door, into the sunshine, and onto a carpet of grass, where each day she bought the friendship of birds with scattered bits of bread, which in her childhood she would have mushed up in milk for breakfast.