Northwest Corner (11 page)

I’ve heard it said, and am here to affirm it myself, that if you turn yourself in for a crime you will earn yourself a shot at redemption. But there’s a statute of limitations on that one, I believe, though it’s not much mentioned by the moral philosophers of the day. Wait too long to speak up and you might just miss your shot. You may do your time, but you will never really get out.

“You guys doing all right?”

Our blond waitress, half my age, with the surfer’s wide shoulders and the blazing California smile: a veritable fun house of sun and salt packed into tight chinos and a blue oxford. My jack-o’-lantern grin seems to startle her, leading her to rear back slightly.

“Doing great, thanks,” I answer, meaning possibly the opposite. It’s hard to tell anymore, so beset am I by memory, and now suddenly, incongruously wistful for all the waitresses I ever knew in the Northwest Corner, never as young as here but undiscovered stars every one of them, with their dark-polish nails and winter-colored hair and crow’s-feet around their eyes, and those lived-in smiles that draw you closer.

“Just let me know if I can get you anything else?” This directed meaningfully at my son, whose handsome slouched fury she can’t take her eyes from.

“Will do.” I grin tiredly at her again as she walks away. “Keep ignoring her like that,” I say to Sam, winking, “and she just might follow you home.”

“Whatever.”

We fall silent.

At the start of the evening—with the sun still lingering in the sky and the dinner still just an idea in the making—it had been my sincere intention to try to persuade my son to return to school.
Get your diploma first
, I’d been going to exhort him,
just get the goddamn thing and stick it in your pocket and that, at least, no matter what else comes to pass, they’ll never be able to take from you
.…

But the right time to have that pep talk somehow never seemed to arise; or maybe, rather, I just didn’t have the stomach to send him back East once he was finally here.

I follow Sam’s gaze to the wide-screen above the bar. The game is in the eighth inning and the Sox, with a runner on second, are trying to fight their way out of a two-run hole. The base runner is Coco Crisp, I see, and in the batter’s box Big Papi’s stamping around, bat handle propped against his crotch, spitting into his massive palms and clapping like a circus strongman let loose from his cage.

“Here we go!” cheers the Boston announcer, practically pissing himself with excitement. “All right, folks, here we go!”

I turn back to my son, who’s no longer watching the game, or anything. A muscle twitching in his jaw, biting down furiously on all the words he’ll never say.

I reach out and squeeze his arm. My voice thick and unfamiliar to us both. “Whatever the situation is, Sam, whatever happens with this, we’ll face it together.”

His expression then declares that he can’t, or won’t, believe me.

And in this, at least, we are the same.

PENNY

L
ETTING GO IS EASIEST
. It would be by far the easier thing to do, and the smarter thing. She likes to think of herself as an intelligent woman of independent mind. She could just let Dwight Arno go back to wherever it is he came from. She could do that.

The door to her office is closed. It is three-fifty in the afternoon, which leaves ten minutes before the start of office hours. In this circumscribed shelter she sits. Her box of Kleenex ready, next to her dog-eared copy of
The Rattle Bag
.

Ten minutes: she could pick up the phone now and call him.

Her office phone is black and old-fashioned. Bought at an antiques store, it is not retro but original; it refuses to indulge in the idea of change for change’s sake. It weighs about three pounds. With it, she likes to think, she could sink a dinghy; or call the president of the United States (no thanks); or, with a modicum of chutzpah, knock a broad-shouldered man unconscious.

DWIGHT

T
ONY
L
OPEZ
, avowed family man and shrewd small-business operator, has offered my son the stockroom and cashiering duties previously performed by his nephew. Despite his misdemeanors, Evander will continue to receive his more than generous paycheck, but will henceforth be ghosted out of the store, made an employee in name only, free to skate and smoke his days into contented oblivion. Sam, on the other hand, not being family, will be paid a buck above minimum wage and embark on a trial period until Tony’s comfortable with the situation on a long-term basis, at which point opportunities for promotion may be explored.

“Maybe take your old man’s job,” Tony says to him with a grin that can only be described as sly.

The three of us are gathered at Mama’s Taqueria on a Tuesday evening. The workday done, the oiled-cheese scent of nachos in the air. I sip my Dos Equis and think about how all this might appear to Ruth—the paltry back-room starter job for our messed-up son—and feel a stirring of shame at not being able to do more for him. And yet, simultaneously, I am guiltily heartened by the prospect of commuting to work with him each morning, returning home each evening, the wordless camaraderie this would seem to promise, the intimate, meaningless chatter. The truth is I can hardly wait for it to begin.

Tony sets down his mineral water with lime and leans across the table. “One thing we gotta get clear, Sam, okay? Whatever problems you had at school? Your dad here”—reaching out and pincer-gripping my forearm—“he’ll tell you straight out, I don’t put up with no shit
in my business. You understand what I’m saying to you? Not in my business.”

“He understands, Tony,” I say.

Tony frowns at me without taking his eyes off Sam.

“I understand, Mr. Lopez.”

Tony sits contemplating the young man. What he reads there is anyone’s guess. Finished, he checks his gold Rolex, pushes back his chair, and stands up. It’s seven past seven, which makes him seven minutes late for his regular sit-down dinner with Jodi and the girls. He is a family man, by God, and there are demands.

“We got ourselves a little weekend softball league,” he says. “Hear you play some real ball—varsity third base?”

“Till a couple weeks ago.” Sam’s face has begun to flush.

“Me, I was center field, way back. Brother Jorge played catcher—like Posada with the Yankees. Man, I tell you? Jorge could swing the fucking lumber. Made it to Cape Cod summer league ’fore he blew out his knee.”

“You should see Sam hit. The kid can smack it.”

Sam turns and stares at me, the color vanished from his cheeks and his eyes dimmed by some internal judgment that I’ve just failed.

“All right …” Tony’s already on his way to the door. “Just make sure you come out to the park with your old man this Sunday. We could use some pop in the lineup.” He pauses to grin over his shoulder at us, then he’s gone.

Outside, the evening has turned California cool. Sam and I stand like tourists at an auto show, watching Tony guide his Mercedes out of the lot. Then we climb into my own car, the treated canvas top raised against the surprising springtime chill, and start for home.

Neither of us speaks. Sam tries out a couple of my CDs, dismisses them with grimaces as geriatric bluegrass crap, and punches off the stereo. We make our way in silence through the night-shadowed, seemingly abandoned town, as if it isn’t the right town but some
other. My son beside me yet miles distant, I have little choice at this moment but to acknowledge that I might be lacking some of the necessary tools for what I hope to do in the here and now. To build a solid, lasting bridge between two people, let alone a father and son with a history like ours, is a mighty human endeavor, and to sit here and think I might be able to accomplish it alone, with no previous success to my credit (indeed, failures too numerous to catalog), a tube of glue, a few pickup sticks, and a dollop of spit, is nothing short of hubris. And hubris, the Greeks tell us, will see you dead. The robed chorus chanting your name until, in the last act, they bury and forget you.

I lower my window, suddenly needing to smell the ocean, to know where the hell I am. But the ocean is not to be located. What I get instead, crossing the 101, is the vehicular exhaust of other capsuled, weary dreamers shooting up and down the coast, their passage sounding to my estranged ears like blood rushing through a tunnel.

Five minutes later, I pull into my driveway and cut the engine.

“Work tomorrow,” I say. “Might as well turn in early.”

Sam doesn’t respond. We enter the house and I go to the kitchen for a glass of water. I can feel a headache coming on. When I come out, he’s already in his room with the door closed. I sit down on a chair facing the TV. But I don’t turn the set on, or drink the water, or do anything but think about the fact that, as my son so clearly registered—though admirably didn’t say aloud to a third party—I have never really seen him play ball. For three years, while he was between the ages of seven and a half and ten and a half, we occasionally played catch together on my rented lawn in Box Corner. Which at the time meant a lot to me; I won’t say it didn’t. My sense of things then was of an extended warm-up between two teammates old and young, the sweet early innings of what would eventually become a long, meaningful game stretching through the afternoon hours and into the starlit evening of our lives. A game whose memory we would both always cherish.

Of course, for many reasons, things did not turn out that way.

RUTH

W
HEN THE CALL COMES
, late afternoon on a Friday in May, she is sitting at the upright piano in her living room, a mug of steaming green tea on a coaster, playing a song that Sam loved as a baby, before he ever had language. Her memory not so much the proverbial sieve as an increasingly rusty grater, shredding little shards and slivers from the original whole. Sometimes you can tell where a piece came from, but often not. Giggling at dust in a sunbeam? A suddenly curled fist? A squeak like a rubbed balloon? Sam’s infant joy might have shown in anything. In lieu of being certain, she can just sit here and play the song, an American classic older than her grandparents, that gives rise, for her, to nostalgic images of wheat fields and haystacks, clean rivers and log fires. All of which, without lyrics to accompany the notes, maybe makes no sense, yet isn’t meaningless. It doesn’t matter that she never grew up with any of these iconic things herself. A loss of memory she can live with, but not a loss of feeling.

She plays three successive chords and breathes. She plays three more. She begins to hum, remembering her baby in her own way.

The cordless phone rings, and she reaches for it.

On the line, an official-sounding man introduces himself as Sam’s dean.

Correction. What he actually says is:

“Mrs. Wheldon, my name is Chas Burris. I’m dean of students at the University of Connecticut. Is Sam there?”

“No, Sam’s not here.”

Her voice eminently reasonable, she believes. But her hands have
already fled the piano keys, become fists in her lap. She scrapes the bench away from the instrument, distancing herself: there is hot tea there to be spilled, there is music.

“Do you know where he is, Mrs. Wheldon? It’s very important that I speak with him.”

“Has something happened?”

“Mrs. Wheldon, do you have a cellphone number for your son? Any way of reaching him immediately?”

The man’s insistent use of her name, she understands, is the most dangerous thing about him.

“Not until you tell me what this is about.”

“Mrs. Wheldon, we would have contacted you sooner, but the facts were slow in reaching my office. Your son’s roommate has not been cooperative.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Mrs. Wheldon, your son, Sam Arno, has officially been expelled from the University of Connecticut. He won’t be receiving his diploma, now or ever. In fact, that may be the least of his problems.”

Ruth tries to speak, but fear constricts her throat.

“There was a violent incident in a bar off campus. You may know about that already. Immediately afterward Sam seems to have disappeared from campus, leaving behind many of his belongings. He’s been absent from his classes for nine days. You may be aware of that, too. Unfortunately, as I’ve said, the cumulative facts were slow to reach me. So I must ask you again, Mrs. Wheldon, with urgency: Do you know where your son is at this time?”

“No, I do not.”

“Very well. But, Mrs. Wheldon, you should be aware that the situation has progressed. As we speak, a young man is lying in the hospital in very critical condition. Legally, your son is an adult. It’s important that you and your family understand this and prepare accordingly. I imagine you’ll want to hire a lawyer, if you haven’t already. And wherever Sam is now, he should remain in the state of Connecticut.”

“Legally?”

She can hear herself, faintly, over the phone, in the empty house, holding their lives together with a single question mark; but it is borrowed dialogue. The whole day, suddenly, cut off from the time within it. The music dead. The wheat fields burned.

DWIGHT

I
’LL SAY HERE STRAIGHT OUT
that I believe there’s a legitimate case to be made for softball as the true American pastime. The dowdy, smaller-than-regulation, always a little unkempt plots of dirt and sparse grass tucked away in city parks and derelict sandlot zones all across this land of ours: these are the fields of dreams for your average citizen.

Dirty-faced kids wearing their older brothers’ hand-me-downs; divorced dads with abdominal six-packs more pale ale than muscle. The ball swollen yet embarrassingly unhefty; the bat light as a wand yet boasting an extra-large aluminum sweet spot. The pitching tends to be fat city, a perpetual home-run derby set up to make the hoi polloi feel like Barry Bonds. You gaze at that huge ball arcing toward you, tossed by friend or colleague or crazy-ass uncle, and it can only seem like the best moment of your week.

My son, quite naturally, doesn’t see it this way. When Sunday rolls around and I venture into his cave den—covered in dirty sweats and T-shirts and jeans, the guest bedroom has become a rogue state in the act of seceding from the rest of the house—to wake him at nine, he expresses in foul terms his disinclination to join me. It’s only when I explain that in all likelihood he’ll get his ass fired if he doesn’t play ball—he’s only worked three days so far, earning a whopping $146 after taxes—that he grudgingly pulls on some rank UConn athletic clothing and an old pair of sneakers, sucks down the mug of coffee I stick in his hand, and follows me out to the car.