Sky of Stone (25 page)

Bobby waited for me in the infield as I trotted in. “Pretty good,” he said. “Now smile. That’s it. Show off a little.”

“Attaboy,” Mr. Dubonnet said as I came trotting in.

Mr. Likens took me aside. “Let me see your batting stance,” he said. I showed him what I remembered from our weekend of practice, and he adjusted me. “Hold the bat up a little higher, feet apart, that’s it, knees bent a little.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “Just keep your eye on the ball, then let instinct take over. You’ll be fine.”

I went back to sit on the bench with the team. Rita didn’t let up a bit. The audience was starting to fall silent at her every pitch. It was like watching an artist at work. Our next two batters went down swinging. Then it was my turn. She turned her back to me.

“Ease up a little,” Jake yelled at her, then sighed heavily, threw off his face mask, and trotted out to the mound. She kicked the dirt and he did, too. Then Mr. Cox trotted out to the mound and sent Jake back in. “She’s wearing her arm out,” he griped to Dad. “I’m nearly sorry I talked her into doing this.”

“Looks like she’s doing fine, Jake,” he said.

I turned to look at them. How could Dad talk so friendly to Jake? Jake caught me looking at him. “What?” he asked.

“Is this what you had to talk to Rita about? Playing softball?”

“Sure. What else would I talk to her about?” He peered at me. “Did I make you jealous?”

“You make me jealous?” I laughed. “A drunk like you?”

I didn’t know where that had come from. I colored, and Dad called a time-out. He pointed at me, then took me aside. Jake stayed in his squat, looking down at the ground.

“I’m sorry,” I said before Dad could say anything.

“That’s your answer for just about everything, isn’t it?” he demanded. “You figure if you say it, then everything will be all right. Look, Sonny, Jake is your friend. He took up for you in this town when everybody got down on you about your rockets. Have you forgotten that?”

“No, sir. But he’s here now to destroy you. He’s not my friend anymore.”

Dad put his face nearer to mine. “I’m not going to tell you this another time. That’s my business. If Jake and me have a problem, I’ll deal with it.”

“You always said he was a drunk,” I replied, looking to defend myself. “If you can do it, why can’t I?”

“Because it isn’t right for you to do it. I was his boss. He was your friend, but more to the point, you were his. Or doesn’t friendship mean anything to you?”

“Play ball!” somebody in the stands yelled.

“Come on,” Dad said.

I tried to shrug away Dad’s indictment, even though I knew he was completely right. I reentered the batter’s box and dug in, but I was having trouble concentrating. Rita wound up, gave me a look, then—
zoop!
I only had a fraction of a second to look at the ball, and then it was in Jake’s mitt.

“Strike one!” Dad called.

Jake threw the ball back to Rita. I had to get my focus. “I apologize, Jake,” I said. “I was way out of line.”

“No, you weren’t,” he said. “You were right on target.”

I felt a small dose of absolution and planted my feet, just as Mr. Likens had said, and raised my bat. The next pitch came flying. You could almost hear it sizzle. Jake yelled, “Swing batter!”

I did, swatting nothing but air. “Strike two!” Dad called.

“Neat trick,” I said. I heard Jake slap his catcher’s mitt with his fist. Now I was mad at him again.

The next pitch seemed slower. I watched it hum in, mesmerized by its flight. I thought it was high and let it go. “Swing batter!” Jake yelled.

“Ball one!” Dad called.

I looked back at Dad, but, in the way of all umpires, he ignored me, keeping a studied nonchalance.

I dug in, unlocked my knees, waved the bat, and Rita let go. It was another hummer, straight on. Then, just as happened when I’d caught the fly ball, time seemed to slow down. I tracked the ball, noted its stitched seams turning as it roared toward me. I uncocked my bat and started my swing. The ball and the bat had their own trajectory. I was just applying the muscle power. I felt the collision, a sharp
snap
. Then I unleashed and kept swinging.

Then time sped back up. I heard people cheering. The ball was accelerating over Rita’s head, moving out, almost like one of my rockets. Victor watched it soar over him. Out in center field, Mr. Nordman reached up under his cap and scratched his head.

I’d hit the blame thing clean up on the highway!

“I knew it!” Jake griped. “Threw her arm out!”

I just stood there and gaped. I couldn’t believe it. Jake finally broke my reverie. “Go on, Sonny. Take a lap. You’ve earned it.”

I looked at Jake, then at Dad behind him. Dad looked back, eye to eye. “Take your lap, son,” he said.

“Yes, sir!”

I trotted around the bases, then touched home plate. Floretta broke from the cheering crowd and hugged my neck. Little Richard came out, too. “Good boy!” he said, patting me on my shoulder.

As all such moments tend to do, my personal glory passed and we kept playing. It was a hard-fought contest, but in the end, Rita murdered us, 10 to 3. Despite Jake’s concern, her arm stayed strong all the way through the last inning. On that Fourth of July in the summer of 1961, there was no beating Rita Walicki.

33

DANDY

M
INERS
’
VACATION
began with the rumbling sounds of a general evacuation as cars and trucks loaded with people and supplies headed out of town toward destinations in every direction. Some folks were headed for Myrtle Beach, others for the Smoky Mountains. Another favorite was Hungry Mother State Park just across the Virginia state line. I rose from my bunk, savored for a moment my home run in the Fourth of July softball game, then remembered that we’d lost the game and that I was stuck in Coalwood with nothing to do for nearly two whole weeks. My spirits sank, then rose again. I would at least get plenty of sleep and not have to lay track.

The first thing I did was to see if there was anything I could do for Mrs. Dooley. I found her sitting on her porch swing with the mister. He was watching a cardinal singing on a limb and took no note of me. “Heard you almost pulled it out for the union yesterday,” she said. “But your girlfriend was too tough for you.”

“She’s not my girlfriend, but I guess Coalwood’s never seen a better pitcher,” I replied. “Mrs. Dooley, anything I can do for you?”

“Tomorrow, I’d like to give Nate another bath,” she said. “The grass needs mowing. I’d appreciate it if you gave the garden another good weeding. Otherwise, things are going along good.”

“I’ll come up in the morning for the bath,” I said. “Looks like the grass could wait a day or two for the mowing. I’ll go take care of the garden right now.” Then I tried again. “Mrs. Dooley, how did Nate bust his wrist?”

She rocked in the swing. “He did it to himself,” she said.

“How?”

“He fell,” she said.

“What made him fall? Did someone push him?”

“He fell, that’s all,” she said, and by the set of her jaw, I knew she was through answering that particular question to me forever.

I
HELPED
with Mr. Dooley’s bath the next day and mowed the grass a few days later. The Dooleys were about the only people I saw. Floretta was gone off to visit relatives in Kentucky, the junior engineers to Panama City, Florida. The tick-tock of the grandfather clock in the Club House parlor sounded like it was in an echo chamber.

Since the Sharitzes were also on vacation, it was my job to feed the dogs. After a stop at the Dooleys each day, I walked on up to the house. Dandy seemed to have adjusted to his blindness. When Poteet made her daily excursion of the yard, he trotted behind her, sniffing her air, stopping when she stopped, then lumbering on. He even managed a few weak barks in the direction of a passing car or two. Poteet seemed to pace herself to let him keep up.

Dad had left the house unlocked, and I wandered through its rooms. I admired once more Mom’s beach painting in the kitchen. It was really a work of art, better, in my opinion, than anything hanging on Doc Hale’s apartment walls. I had nearly forgotten Mom’s addition to her mural, her pet fox, Parkyacarcass. I examined it anew, wondering what Dad thought of it.

The dining-room table was still stacked with mail. I poked through it, finding unpaid bills and unopened letters. My grades were exactly where Dad had tossed them when we’d had our argument. I walked into the foyer, looked at my old piano. I even sat down and played from some sheet music: “All I Have to Do Is Dream” by the Everly Brothers. It was what we rocket boys had called the song of the Cape, an anthem to the power of dreams. I had also sat down to a duet with Ginger Dantzler two Christmases past and we’d played that same song. My eyes became a bit damp at both memories.

I peered into the living room. The family Bible sat on the coffee table. I took note of its well-chewed pages. Chipper had shredded generations of Hickams inscribed on the family-tree pages. Mom had forgiven him for it, of course. I walked out on the enclosed porch. It was called the Captain’s porch. Captain Laird had directed its original construction so that he could sit on it and rock in a rocking chair and contemplate the tipple he’d designed.

Upstairs, I naturally gravitated to my room. I looked at it from the hall, but I couldn’t go inside. I didn’t feel like I belonged in it anymore. I was no longer that boy of hope and passion and dreams. I wasn’t certain who I was anymore, but I sure wasn’t that boy.

Back in the yard, I saw that Poteet had finished her excursions and Dandy had drifted off to sleep, a golden curl on the green grass. I picked him up and held him while I sat on the back steps. I thought of the day I’d first seen Dandy. He’d come into Coalwood aboard a freight train all the way from a kennel in Pennsylvania. As far as I knew, he was the first purebred dog to ever arrive in town. I had been distressed the instant I saw him because somebody had cut off his tail. Mom said that was what Yankees did to cocker spaniels to make them win dog contests. I couldn’t fathom such a thing. I told her thank goodness human beings weren’t so foolish to do that to themselves. Mom said yes they were. Up north, she claimed, women punched holes in their earlobes to hang their earrings rather than clamp them on like the women in Coalwood did. And over in some countries, she said, people stuck bones and sticks through their noses, their lips, and even their tongues. It made me sick just to think about it, and I was sure glad Americans, even the ones up north, were smarter than that.

On the fifth day of miners’ vacation, I found Poteet sitting regally on the picnic table in the backyard. She looked like she was standing guard. When I approached her, she whined but kept her position. I went down in the basement to check on Dandy, but he wasn’t there. I looked all around the yard and still couldn’t find him. “Where is he, girl?” I asked, and, with a snort, Poteet jumped off the table and led me to a place along the fence behind the garage where there was a hole. She slithered through it.

I climbed over the fence and followed Poteet into the alley behind the house. I called Dandy’s name, then listened, hoping to hear him blundering through the brush up on the mountain. All I heard was the cawing of some crows and the insistent chirp of a cardinal. Poteet stopped and looked over her shoulder. I kept following her until we went between the garages that lined the alley and then down to the narrow little gurgling creek.

It was there I found Dandy, lying on his side, his snout near the water. By the lay of his fur and the way his legs were splayed, I knew he was dead. Poteet sat down beside him and cocked her head. I reached down and closed his great brown liquid eyes, then picked him up.

When I got back to the alley, I saw Jim’s car, a blue-and-white Ford Fairlane, parked behind our house. Jim stood by the gate. He didn’t say anything, just looked at me and Dandy. Poteet trotted up to him and he patted her on her head. When I got closer, Jim put out his arms. “I’ll take him,” he said. “There’s a place up on Water Tank Mountain I have in mind.”

“What are you doing here?” I asked my brother.

“I got up this morning and knew I needed to go home. Now I know why.”

I gave Dandy to my big brother and went into the basement and got a shovel and a cardboard box. “I can’t get over how big you are,” Jim said as he placed Dandy in the box. “And look at your arms. You been lifting weights?”

“I’d say I have,” I answered, thinking of the hundreds of ties and posts I’d hefted over the past month.

Jim carried Dandy and I followed with the shovel. We crossed the road and climbed up Water Tank Mountain. Jim kept going until we reached a stand of pine trees. “You can see the house from here,” Jim said. “Dandy would like that.”

I started digging. I had become an expert at using a shovel. Jim sat down beside Dandy’s box and let me have at it. “I wish I’d paid more attention to Dandy,” he admitted, his hand on the box. “Seems like I was always too busy to give him much more than a pat in passing.”

“Dandy surely loved you,” I said. “He loved all of us. I hope we gave him a good life.”

“Did he suffer, do you think? At the end?”

“I saw him yesterday. He seemed pretty spry.”

Jim smiled a sad smile. “I wonder how I knew to come home. I hadn’t thought a thing about Coalwood all summer. Just trying to get through summer school.”

I climbed out of the hole I’d dug. “Jim, I’ve come to believe there are things in life we’ll never figure out. I mean, just being alive is a miracle when you stop to think about it. Lately, I’ve tried not to think about it. I’m afraid if I figure everything out, it’ll drive me crazy.”

He laughed. “You don’t have far to go, boy. You never have.”

“You’re still an idiot,” I said, happy to trade insults with my older brother.

“You’re still a little sister,” he said. “But, dammit, you’re a big little sister these days. I’d hate to arm-wrestle you.”

“‘One fist of iron, the other one of steel,’ ” I said, quoting Tennessee Ernie Ford, “‘if the left one don’t get you, then the right one will.’ ”

He laughed. We sat together, not too close. “Why did we always fight so much growing up?” I asked.

He tossed a rock, watched it roll downhill. “You did things to aggravate me.”

“Oh, I see. It was my fault. Like what kind of things?”

“You’d take my coloring books and color them all the wrong colors before I got to them,” he said. “And you’d take my puzzles and solve them before I’d halfway figured out what they were even about. I never could spell a hoot and you could spell everything even before you started to school. That really bugged me. Mom would go around spelling things like ‘Let’s give Jimmie his
m-e-d-i-c-i-n,
’ and I wouldn’t have a clue what they were talking about, but you’d go, ‘His medicine! Ewwww!’ I mean you weren’t even in the first grade and you could already spell big words!”

I could have pointed out that he still couldn’t spell medicine, at least not out loud, but I held my tongue. Instead, I considered his accusations, and then gave him one of my own. “I hated that you gave me every disease in the world. You’d catch the measles and Mom would make me go in and hang around your bed until I got it, too. Same thing for the mumps and nearly everything else.”

“That wasn’t my fault,” he said. “That was Mom’s. It made it easier on her if we both got sick at the same time. That way she’d only have to deal one time with that particular disease.”

“I didn’t like wearing your hand-me-down clothes, either. They were always too big.”

“Still not my fault,” he said. “Boy, you were just resentful, that’s all. I ought to knock you upside the head right now for it, straighten you out.”

I laughed. Then I looked at the forlorn cardboard box. “Guess we need to see to our little boy here,” I said.

Jim nodded, and together we lowered Dandy into the place I’d made for him. The dirt smelled fresh and clean like the good turned West Virginia loam that it was. I shoveled until the box was covered, and then Jim and I hunted around the mountain for loose rocks to make a border. Jim fashioned a cross from two limbs using birch bark to tie them together, then stuck it at the head of the grave. We stood over it. “Do you remember how we got Dandy?”

“Mom bought him, didn’t she?”

Jim shook his head. “It was you and me. I came up with the idea to have a cocker spaniel and Mom showed me where we could buy a puppy through some magazine. I got you excited about it and we saved up, you and me together. We begged and borrowed pennies from everybody we knew. We made ourselves true nuisances all up and down the row. Every time we got a hundred pennies, we traded them in for a silver dollar at the Little Store. When we had enough dollars, Mom mailed our order in and when the railroad man called, said we had a C.O.D. that was barking, we walked down to the station at Coalwood Main and handed over our bag of coins. Dandy was about dead in that old wooden crate he came in, not even any water to drink, and he was covered with fleas. But I knew I loved him with all my heart the first time I saw him.”

I remembered now. It was the only thing that my brother and I had ever done together, but it was a good thing. Dandy had become the one link between us during all those years whether I realized it or not. Tears started to leak down my face, and when I looked over, I saw Jim was brushing something from his eyes, too. “Got to get back to school,” he said.

“Stay, Jim,” I told him.

He shook his head. “Can’t,” he said, and then gave Dandy’s grave a final pat and led the way back down to the house. He climbed into his Fairlane. “This place seems so strange now,” he said of Coalwood. “I remember everything about it, but it’s like I wasn’t ever really here. It’s hard to put into words.”

I knew what he felt. I felt the same way. We’d always been aimed out of Coalwood. High school was supposed to be the end of it. When we came back, we didn’t fit, somehow.

He closed the car door, rolled down his window. “You want me to call the folks, tell them about Dandy?”

“Yes.”

He nodded. “What’s going to happen to Dad?”

“I don’t know. He doesn’t seem to care if they fire him or not. He just keeps going like there’s no problem, one way or the other. It’s really strange.”

“I think Mom’s up to something,” he said.

“What makes you think that?”

“Because she’s always up to something.” He stuck out his hand. I took it and we both squeezed hard before letting go. He looked up on Water Tank Mountain. “Dandy was sure a good old dog.”

“He sure was.”

Jim drove his Fairlane out of the back alley, then turned left onto Highway 16, heading back to the outside world. I stood quietly for a while, listening to the trees on the mountains whispering to themselves, then went through the gate to feed Poteet. She greeted me, her tennis ball in her mouth.