“Faygelehs…” the intruder muttered under his breath as he walked away. Marty and Ted held on.
32.
The Doublemint Man is shiny with sweat and slumming it up in Spanish Harlem. He is not alone. Maria lies next to him. Maria. He just met a girl named Maria. And suddenly it’s summer. The curtains flutter. He strokes the fine forest of dark hairs on her arms and above her knee. He can’t get enough of her. Her smell, her feel, her her. He’s a goner. He takes a swig off a can of Budweiser and puts it to Maria’s lips. She sips. Even the way she sips turns him on and leaves him on. Maria takes an ice cube from the cooler by the bed and puts it on his forehead, where it melts as quickly as if on a stove.
“I love you, Maria,” he says. “Your flesh feels like home to me. Su casa es mi casa.”
“That doesn’t sound so good as you think, Gringo.” But she smiles. They kiss. Their tongues move over each other so fast and deep, as if having given up on words to express the intensity of their feeling. Thank God for a language barrier. There is too much to tell and nothing to say. Their mouths will show from now on and not tell. Cerveza never tasted better. Woman never tasted better. Life never tasted better. He whispers in her ear as he eases easily inside her. They begin to sway, side by side, and make love for the third or fourth time today.
“Nothing exists outside this room. No wrld [sic] no people no sun no moon no time.”
“Tell me that story again, Grigo [sic].”
“Just you and me. The Russians dropped the bomb. Everyone is dead and everything is gone. Only this room survived. It’s only us left.”
“Just you and me?”
“Just me and you, baby.”
33.
A whimpering woke Ted up. At first, he thought it was him doing the whimpering. He sat up and wondered what he might be whimpering at, slowly becoming aware that the noise was coming from another room. He got up to investigate. Marty was asleep on the couch, lying on his side, dreaming like a dog, huffing and sleep running. He did not look happy. Ted sat down next to him and shook him gently. “Dad? Dad? Wake up. Dad?” Marty stopped twitching and opened his eyes, childlike and blurry from another world. “What’s wrong, Dad?”
“It was horrible, Teddy, horrible.”
“What was?”
“I dreamt we had to give it all back. What we had in August, we had to give back in September.”
“What was that?”
“Everything. Oh, everything.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Sox. Gave away our lead to the Yankees. They gave it all away and I had to die. Billy Martin came to collect my soul like in Damn Yankees.”
“Just a dream, Dad. Sox got a, what, like a six-game lead?”
“Six and a half.”
“You’re safe. You got a cushion.”
“Don’t let it happen to me, Teddy. Don’t let them take it all away.”
“I won’t.” Ted reached out to a table, grabbed the bottle of prescription pills, and put one in Marty’s mouth.
“Go back to sleep, Dad.”
Marty was still drowsy and spent; now drugged, he started to drift off again.
“Perchance to dream, there’s the fuckin’ rub. Promise me you won’t let me die.”
How could Ted promise that? What was the best thing to do, the kindest? Ted honestly didn’t know. He wished Mariana were there; she would have an opinion, she would know, she would take responsibility. The Dead counted off to begin “Sugar Magnolia” again, making it hard for Ted to concentrate.
“Ted?”
“I promise, Dad, I promise.”
34.
As his dreaming dog of a dad slept in, Ted walked alone down to the gray panthers at Benny’s kiosk. He had an idea. He had a vague shadow of a plan. He would try to keep his promise. As he left home, he picked up the delivered New York Times and turned to the sports pages to see if the Sox had lost. They had. He carried the paper with him, and when he got near the old men, he tossed it in the trash. Here came the first of the gray wave, Tango Sam. “Ted, you look tremendous, so handsome, do you feel handsome? You must feel handsome. Loan me fifty.”
Ted saw the top of Benny’s head move just above the stacked papers. “Where’s Marty?”
“Sox lost,” Ivan said.
“QED.”
“Ipse hoc propter hoc.”
“Sine qua non.”
“Not really. That’s inaccurate.”
“You’re inaccurate.”
“Guys! Guys, listen, guys, I was thinking about the whole Sox thing, how a loss takes it out of him.”
“This is what we’re debating.”
“There is no debate.”
“Right, right,” Ted cut off this next riff. “So I was thinking, why do the Sox ever have to lose?”
“’Cause they suck and they’re from Boston, that’s why.”
“’Cause they call a hero a submarine, and a liquor store a Packy.”
“Boston is not a hub.”
“’Cause it’s the way of the world.”
“It is the Way, the Tao.”
“What Papa Hemingway calls a ‘good thing.’”
“What the gods want.”
“What God wants.”
“Fuckin’ monotheist.”
“Fuckin’ polytheist.”
“No, I’m a Hindjew.”
“Gentlemen, please let me explain.” Ted finally saw a rare spot of dead air in which to jump. “Benny, you got any back issues?”
“Some, sure.”
“He’s half a hoarder, Benny is.”
“It’s a sickness.”
“A psychological malady.”
“Something happened in Benny’s toilet training.”
“What didn’t happen in Benny’s toilet training?”
Ted jumped in again. “If you can find box scores from when the Sox won or the Yankees lost and pull those pages, the double pages, on days when the Sox actually do lose, we can replace those reports with the bogus, old wins that we stash away now.”
The old men fell silent. A first. Tango Sam broke the silence. “You mean you want us to lie?”
“Well, not lie exactly. Well, yes, lie. Lie for the better good.”
“We did it once as an experiment, but to make it a way of life, a modus operandi, is another matter.”
“What would Immanuel Kant do?”
“Probably tell you to suck his German schmeckel.”
“I couldn’t. ‘I Kant, Immanuel,’ I would say.”
“Rollo May, though.”
“What about the television?”
“The boob tube.”
“The television caveat.”
Ted was prepared for the television caveat. “Have you seen those VCRs?” The old men murmured words like video and Casio and RCA, getting anything technological after 1950 about 80 percent wrong. Ted continued, “They use them to tape games, then go over games with players, to see if they can see anything, a tendency, or whatever. They have, like, five VCRs at the stadium and I took one, I doubt they’ll notice, along with a bunch of tapes that I can slip in when Boston is losing or the Yankees are winning. I have, like, ten tapes of Sox wins from this year. A couple of them beating the Yankees.”
They fell unnaturally silent, the hive mind buzzing.
“I know it sounds crazy, but it breaks my heart to see him every time the Sox lose.”
Ivan spoke first: “I’m appalled at your mendacity, but moved by your empathy.”
“It seems doomed to failure.”
“Like Carter’s whole administration.”
“Naysayer.”
“Republican.”
“Pansy.”
“Ted is in the lead. Ted has the reins.”
The hive went quiet again. A silent vote was being held among them. Tango Sam did a two-step. Schtikker spoke for the hive: “It seems, young Theodore, that we are in like the proverbial Flynn.”