Shame (20 page)

And it's a sadder thing still for a man's vision to be directed not to curing the sick or working for peace or even to building a better mousetrap but to pursuing a boy's game.

“Things'll get better,” Michelle said when I tried to tell her all this that night, because, of course, a wife can never tell her husband otherwise. “Oh, Carl Vanderkirk called from the
Republican
.” Carl was the sports editor as well as the news editor, the obituary editor, the society editor, and the entertainment editor. In fact, he was responsible for every word in the paper except the jokes that a local insurance man had been running in his weekly ads since before I was born—knock-knock jokes and riddles and endless variations on the dumb-blonde joke, which was his stock-in-trade.

“Tell Carl we sucked,” B. W. said. “Tell him we were awful. Tell him we should have stayed home and baked cookies.”

“You're not supposed to say
sucked,
” Lauren said, sleepy in her nightgown but trying valiantly to stay awake long enough to get the news. “It's vulgar.”

“Why don't you go save the world and leave my vocabulary alone,” B. W. said as he poured himself a tall glass of milk and drank it down, his Adam's apple glugging.

“Why don't you—” Lauren began, but then she saw my face.

“Why don't you both be still,” I said. “Let me get my clichés in order.” I tapped my forehead meaningfully a couple of times, then picked up the phone and dialed Carl's number.

“How'd you do?” he asked, once I'd identified myself. “Tell me everything.”

“Lost sixty-seven to sixty,” I said. “Our top scorer was Larry Burke. He had sixteen points.”

“Give me a meaningful quote, pithy yet succinct.”

I spoke without thinking. “They outplayed, -pointed, and -talented us.”

He was
tsking
before I even finished my sentence. “John, that's way too negative this early in the season. We're trying to keep people interested in basketball. We want them to come to the games, cheer your players, buy my papers.”

“Okay,” I said. “Hold onto that one for later.” I thought for a bit while Carl crunched away at an apple or something on his end of the line. “Okay. There were some fine individual performances tonight. What I'm looking forward to is the boys coming together as a team. Then we'll really accomplish some things.”

“Good,” he said. “That'll fly.”

I gave him the individual stats. Everybody wanted to read about their kids, grandkids, or neighbor kids.

“Got it. If you don't see me at the game tomorrow, call me when it's over.”

“Sure thing, Carl,” I said. “Good night.”

And so went my life, or at least my basketball routine, into and through the month of December: interminable bumpy rides down country highways on a cold, rattling school bus, suiting up in chilly visiting dressing rooms filled with the ancient smell of sweaty boys who by now had grown old, the repetitive chants of the cheerleaders, the groans of disappointment from our loyal supporters, the occasional bright spot—a steal and breakaway layup by Micheal Wilkes, the beautiful trajectory of a three-pointer when the other team left Bird unguarded, a no-look pass from B. W. to a waiting Jimmy under the basket, and even a couple of notches in the win column.

The rest of my December routine? Feeding cattle in the cold pre-dawn, breaking ice in the stock tanks so they could drink, climbing onto the tractor to haul huge round bales of hay the height of a man over from the Old Place, coffee in town every morning, Lauren playing on the seventh-grade girls' team two nights a week, church twice on Sunday and once on Wednesday night, almost daily trips by Phillip's trailer, where I watched bottles with shiny new labels accumulating in a pile of their own just off the steps until the day when I arrived to find a shiny new padlock on the gate and could no longer keep tabs.

“We should have expected it,” Bobby Ray, a man not completely unacquainted with the bottle, said one morning at coffee. “The man's an alcoholic. An ex-con. He couldn't ever be trusted.” He didn't look at me as he said this. I was willing to trust Phillip more than Bobby Ray most of the time. “I'm just glad he pulled this now, and not the night before the game or something.” He set his empty cup down on the table with a thud. “You remember that time he got drunk before the Thomas game?”

“I remember,” I said. “I was supposed to be watching after him. And I also remember that after Coach Von suspended him, he still came back and helped us win state.” I looked around the room and then back at Bobby Ray. “We gave up on him before. I'm not going to make that mistake again.”

“Well then,” he said, rising dispiritedly and dispensing some change onto the table for his coffee and tip, “you're a better man than I am.”

Maybe. But deep down I figured I was just bad in different ways.

Shortly afterward on a cold and foggy night, I found myself with my head full of thoughts. I had stayed up trying to write letters beside the dying fire, but I couldn't seem to be honest with anyone, and I couldn't see the point of writing otherwise. I had consigned three letters to my sister to the fire and written and rewritten a letter to Samantha in my head until my head throbbed. I had been at it so long that even Michelle yawned, gave me a peck on top of the head, and went to bed.

After my fourth bad letter to my sister, I went into the kitchen, put the teapot on the burner, lighted it. I could hear the water begin to boil.

Then the phone rang, loud as a church bell in the quiet night.

I plucked the receiver off the cradle before the first ring was finished, held it for a second listening to the house's reaction, my heart pounding.

Nothing.

“Hello,” I said.

“I would have hung up if anyone else had answered,” Samantha said, her voice low and happy. “Why haven't you called me, Johnny? Or written? I haven't heard from you since Thanksgiving.”

“I was trying to write you a letter tonight,” I said. “But it's not going so well.” The teapot was starting to breathe steam, and I turned off the flame before the pot began to whistle.

“Still, what have you been doing all this time?”

“I've been thinking.” I put my teabag in a cup, poured the water.

“So have I,” she said. “I love the way you feel for other people. That empathy is a real gift. In my business, it would help you sell a lot of real estate. It's a good thing, being able to understand other people's needs and desires.” She seemed to become unnecessarily breathy on “desires,” like a Hollywood vamp, but I didn't mind.

“Needs and desires,” I repeated.

“We all have them, Johnny,” she said.

I dipped the teabag once, twice, lowered it to the side of the saucer.

“You know,” she said, “I told you once that I thought you could do anything you set your mind to.”

“I remember,” I said, stirring in sugar. “But it was more than once.”

“I still believe it,” she went on as though she hadn't heard me. She paused for a moment, and the only sound was my spoon, clinking quietly as I stirred. “Do you imagine that coaching and farming are going to be enough to make you happy? That they're the most fitting use of your gifts?”

I thought I heard a noise from deep within the house—movement.

Or the house shifting.

Nothing.

“Are you still coming up for the dance?” I asked.

“Of course I am,” she said. “People will talk. But people are talking now.”

“Yes,” I said. “I guess they are.”

“I never miss a chance to dance,” she said. There was a longer pause, and I could feel her sadness in it. “Do you know that in all the years we were married, Bill never once asked me to dance?”

“Well,” I said. “He
was
raised Baptist.”

“I didn't expect you to take his side,” she said, although I could tell she was smiling.

“Believe me,” I said. “I'm not.” I had the vision of our last dance in my head again, the smell of her perfume, the proximity of her body making me dizzy.

I must have been remembering things longer than I thought, because her voice, when it came, had a tinge of impatience to it. “So what's going to happen next?”

I took a deep breath. “I'm still thinking,” I said.

“I know,” she said, and I could hear her take her own deep breath. “Well, so am I, honey. So am I.”

There was a gentle click, then the buzz of disconnection, and I gently replaced the phone on its receiver, as though I were tucking her into bed.

I walked out into the driveway and turned in a slow circle there.

It was a still night, a little mist mixed in with the fog, and there was not a sound to be heard through the thick moist air. The cottonwoods and windmill stood like ghosts in the light shining from the pole, ethereal, gray-white, translucent. The world felt close and closed in, like I was the only creature on a dead planet.

I listened intently, my hearing growing more and more acute in the silence as I concentrated. But I couldn't hear anything—nothing but my breath blowing out in a solid cloud to join the rest of the fog surrounding me.

I couldn't hear anything, but I desperately wanted to.

I stood looking, listening, hoping, for something.

“I guess I'm asking for a sign,” I said at last, looking toward the sky I could not see. “For help. Maybe I haven't done that often enough.” I listened intently, turning my head slowly back and forth. Even the sound of my own voice seemed to vanish the moment it left my lips. “If You could just let me know that this is where I'm supposed to be, I'll stay put. Haven't I always?”

The universe seemed to hold its breath, and I couldn't tell at that moment if it was the loneliest I'd ever felt or the most aware. And then I did hear something, an unexpected noise out of the nothingness.

I swung around, and then it came again: a chicken or chickens clucking in their shack just back of the herb garden.

In the moment before I recognized the noise, I could have sworn it was somebody chuckling.

During the night, the weather broke, and the next day dawned sunny and bright. The thermometer outside the back window, which had been content to loiter in the forties, made a slow ascent throughout the morning into the sixties, which is where it was when the phone rang midmorning and my neighbor Michael Graywolf announced that a fence was down between us and that a dozen of his cattle had made a break for it and were now wandering aimlessly across my hills.

I wasn't surprised by this news; this is what cattle do. Cows are senseless creatures who do not understand the concept of home.

“Well, let's go get 'em,” I said. “Ride on over when you've a mind to.” I went out to the barn and saddled up Patches, a black-and-white pinto who held the distinction of being the world's oldest living cowhorse, rubbed my hand over his silken muzzle, and marveled at how the world had changed since the first time I rode him as a young married man, riding the hills, counting cattle, and listening as my dad carried on a running monologue in his low and gentle voice about how to run a farm.

Michael rode down my driveway about eleven on his dun horse, Pancho. He was wearing that same wide-brimmed black felt hat he said made him look like Stevie Ray Vaughan. I grabbed a Wheeler Brothers Feed cap from the hat rack, pushed it down on my head, and sauntered out to meet him.

“Johnny,” he said, raising his right hand.

“Howdy,” I said, returning the gesture. “This'd be a lot more fun if we were tracking some cattle rustlers back to their hideouts. Any chance of that?”

Michael and I used to play cowboys and Indians together when we were kids, each of us wanting to be what we were not. I had a plastic feather headdress and a tomahawk with a plastic head, and Michael had a great black cowboy hat and matching cap guns. Thirty years earlier, we chased each other across those selfsame hills on foot and on horseback.

He shook his head sadly. “Sorry, man. I'd say we're talking bovine stupidity here, pure and simple.”

I slid up onto Patches, and we rode back to the first gap behind my house and then through it into the big pasture. Frank made his snuffling, meandering hound dog way in front, alongside, behind us. The sun was bright, the wind calm, and we faced the unusual spectacle of sweat in late December as we rode toward the pond, which was where we both suspected we would go if we were cows on the run. Patches moved sure-footedly down the side of a hill almost too washed out to drive down in the pickup; B. W. and I would have to come back here and dump a couple loads of dirt to make it navigable.

At the top of a rise, we paused for a moment and looked around. To our left, the Canadian River Valley; to our right, my winter wheat, sprouting green across hundreds of acres; ahead of us, the dense cedars that surrounded and masked the pond.

“We looking for some of those white-faced critters you like so much?” I asked, the first words either of us had spoken in some ten minutes.

Michael nodded, and we made our slow way down the twin pickup tracks leading to the pond. Pebbles rolled from beneath the horses' feet, dry grass rustled, and a jet soared soundlessly overhead on its way from Oklahoma City to somewhere else as the water came in sight, the sun reflecting madly off it like someone had given the world a liberal dusting of diamonds.

“When do your folks get in?” Michael asked as he followed the plane northwest across the sky.

“Day after tomorrow,” I said. “They'll be here ten days, fly back the second.”

“You going down to the City to get them?”

I nodded, then said, “Yup,” since he was still looking up.

Michael pulled back on the reins, shifted slightly in his saddle to face me better. “You know, we appreciate what you've tried to do with Phillip. Everybody from my grandmother on down. Don't feel bad. Nobody's ever been able to help him.”