Death, defeat, futility, that’s what the greenhouse said to me. I turned my back on it. Like a magic lantern — magnetic, irresistible — the flashlight pulled me across the junk-strewn morass of the lot and on up to the door of the Toyota. I dropped the flashlight in the high grass, dug for my keys and fired up the car with a roar. A moment later I was yawing through the undergrowth and heaving down the gutted road to the highway. The headlights grabbed at the darkness like pincers, trees rocked over me, a deer sprang up and vanished like an illusion. I thought of my apartment. Of movie theaters and Thai food and color TV. Of my stereo, my drip coffee maker, of daily newspapers, books, magazines, of the society of men — and women. Branches swiped at the windshield, a rock exploded against the under-surface of the car, ruts and gullies grabbed the wheel from me and flung it back again. Carefully, carefully, I told myself. I was on my way home.
By the time I reached the blacktop, I was thinking of baseball. I don’t know how or why — free association, I suppose. It began with a vision of the players emerging from the dugout against a green that ached, and the feel of the cold salt air of Candlestick Park. I could smell the sour scent of beer in wax cups, flat before it’s been tapped, and then I panned across the crowd: men in T-shirts, women in print dresses, the legions of kids in the bleachers waving their outsized gloves. I thought of balls wrapped in black electrician’s tape and bats that shudder in your hands, and then finally of Little League and my own eleven-year-old self. The memory was like a splinter under the nail.
Small for my age and late to develop, I’d devoted my life to baseball with the passion of an apostle: baseball was the be-all and end-all, the highest expression and fundamental raison for life in the cosmos. Regrettably, my skills were incommensurate with my enthusiasm, and I’d been shunted to right field the previous season — right field, the least dynamic, least significant position on the team, the venue of hacks and losers — and through the winter I burned to prove myself capable of playing closer to the action. That summer I tried out for third base. The hot corner. Where Brooks Robinson and the Boyer brothers routinely dove for scorching liners, leapt to rob batters of extra base hits, scooped up bunts as if they were gathering flowers, and in general demonstrated more skill, guts and panache than anyone on the field. All winter I’d shoveled snow and scrubbed dishes, hoarding nickels, dimes, quarters, the big flat shining half dollars I got for clearing the neighbors’ sidewalks, saving for the ne plus ultra — a new Wilson’s pro-style Big League infielder’s mitt endorsed by and stamped with the signature of Brooks Robinson himself. Eventually, a twenty-five-pound sack of change in hand, I trundled into the sporting-goods store and bought the glove. I worked it and oiled it, and when the snow was gone I was out till dark every day, fielding grounders. I practiced continually, obsessively, practiced till I could handle anything — bad hops, skimmers, liners, dribblers and worm-burners. I was ready.
We tried out on a sweet sunny day in June. The field was new, freshly bulldozed and totally barren. There were stones and pebbles everywhere. Five of us competed for third base while the coach, a laconic veteran of the Korean War whose son was the star pitcher, hammered grounders at us. The first kid handled every ball with fluid ease; the next two flubbed them miserably. Then it was my turn. Thirty-thousand ground balls had been hit to me over the course of the past three months; I was practiced and assured, ready for anything. The first ball came slamming at me over the rocky hardpan of the infield, I bent for it and it took a bad bounce, careening over my shoulder and into the outfield. All right, I thought, the field is like a gravel pit, don’t let it get to you. The same thing happened with the two succeeding chances. Humiliated, raging, I charged the next ball as soon as it came off the bat, pounced on it as if I were killing something for the pot, and heaved it six feet over the first baseman’s head. The coach looked disgusted. He spat in the dirt. Two more, he said. And then, before I’d even set up, the next ball came rocketing at me. I moved back, adjusting as it skipped over the stones in its path, and at the last instant I lifted my glove for the inevitable hop. No hop. The ball went right through my legs and on out to the left-field fence, where a bored-looking kid with an underslung jaw shagged it back.
Object, movement, the elusive patterns of fate: I had never in my life been so stung with despair and self-hatred. Even before the coach could bring the bat to his shoulder for my final chance, I came out of my crouch and flung my new Wilson’s pro-style Big League infielder’s glove into the parking lot. Then I ran. Ran through a gale of shouts and laughter, mounted my bike and pedaled up the street as if the Furies were shrieking in my ears. My breath came in sobs. At home, I found my mother sitting at the kitchen table with a crossword puzzle. It wasn’t fair, I told her, choking on the bitterness of it. I tried, I did. She pushed back her chair, got up from the table and looked down at me from her five feet and eight inches, sleeves rolled up, earrings dangling. Quitter, she said.
The memory arrested me. A moment before I’d been doing seventy, outracing the headlights, intent on San Francisco, and now I found myself slowing. Degree by degree, almost unconsciously, my foot eased up on the gas pedal. Signs, trees, fenceposts drifted up and trickled by, forty, thirty, twenty-five: I nearly pulled over. I was thinking of Phil and Gesh back in the cabin, sitting down to their fatty, starchy, tasteless meal, cracking jokes and dreaming the dream. Then the car rounded a bend and two dim spots of neon emerged from the darkness, soft and alluring, beacons in the night. I swung the wheel, and for the second time in my life pulled into the pitted parking lot of Shirelle’s Bum Steer.
Chapter 8
I sat in the car debating with myself. The threat of Jerpbak and the desolation of the greenhouse tugged me in one direction, undifferentiated needs and personal loyalty in the other. Was I walking out, or was I going to see this thing through? A pithy question. I sat there chewing on it as the night settled in around me and the jukebox thumped seductively from behind the yellowed windows of the tavern. At first, I had no intention whatever of going in — I’d stopped in the parking lot solely to think things out — but then I began to feel that what I needed was a drink. Just a single drink, something comforting and calming — a warm cognac, for instance. But no, it was too risky. I’d been burned once — the thought of the previous debacle at Shirelle’s made me wince — and it would be foolish to tempt the Fates yet again. No: a drink was out. Absolutely and positively.
After a while, though, I found myself casually examining the other cars in the lot, as if they could somehow give me a clue to their owners’ personalities, mores and penchants for unprovoked violence. There were three of them, all American-made, all beat. I recognized the sagging Duster with the I’M MORAL bumper sticker, but the others made no impression on me. The Duster, I realized, must have belonged either to Shirelle herself, one of the Indians or the wasted old character who’d restrained George Pete Turner on the unfortunate and only occasion I’d encountered him. But George Pete, as I vividly recalled (and here I unconsciously reached down to rub my calf in the vicinity of his dog’s initial assault), drove a pickup, as did Sapers. The chances, then, were that neither was present. Of course, all this was purely speculative in any case, as I had no intention whatever of passing through that redwood door.