"A little. My mother's twig broom. Our dog, with only one eye. The market. The smell of certain fruit. Dr. Kraft, how come they all have those big lumps on the side of their mouths?"
"Right. Those are plugs of chewing tobacco. You win if you can spit yours over one of those '330' signs while nobody's looking. The smell of fruit," he prompts her. "Durian? Mangosteen? Luk ngoh? "
She pulls her eyes from the all-fascinating field and stares at him. He receives it full in the face, this awful, searching look that would conceal itself even while flagging down the impossible rescue. It shoots out at him, both oblique and dead on, a summons and a bolt. How much do you know? And in the next instant, she relaxes. Not enough to worry about. Nothing of the atrocity's specifics, no real hold on the nightmare locale. Harmless superficial, she decides, because her look goes congenial, her ready-to-run bite loosens into a smile. "You ate a durian once?"
"Many." And to prove it, he does an imitation, reasonably good, given the intervening years, of a street vendor's call. The peanut peddlers flash him a dirty look: What's yer racket, jerk-off? A couple of militantly fecund families at the end of the row overcome their good breeding long enough to stare at the motley child band and their howling leader. No, Kraft decides, listening to his residual, perfectly pitched cries drift down to the nearer bullpen. It is too far, too incommensurate, too implausibly split. The gap between here and there will kill him just to gaze out over.
Linda practically falls out of her wooden folding slats. "Where in the world did that come from?"
How is he supposed to tell her? From a place called Angel City, Land of the Free.
Joy examines him again, fear creeping back into her instruments. "Say that again, please, Dr. Kraft." He repeats his strophe of fruit names, softly now, so as not to violate the national pastime. Then, in a tonal dialect he can almost understand, she says, "That is almost what we call them."
They must step no nearer. They already wander too near the shared, partitioned province. Neither wants to come any closer to where their paths cross, the tangents to earlier extraditions. Suddenly, it's all baseball between them, furious Twenty Questions about runs, hits, errors, pick-offs, sign stealings — the whole semiotic flood. They scatter from any suggestion of common childhood geography, the one from guilt, the other shame. They backpedal from overlap like a fielder badly misjudging a deep fly to center.
"Can they both win?" she frets out loud.
"Uh, Linda?"
"Well, in a word, no."
"No?" Kraft echoes. "There's your answer, then. Peculiarly American, wouldn't you say? Better to fight on forever than to tie, apparently."
Joy smiles at the diction, his goofing for her benefit. This man will never be capable of wrong, no matter what he might choose to do. He is the one adult on earth who does not talk down to her. She takes his hand, a gesture universally understood among old fellow durian catcl "How long does one game last?"
"Easy one. Until it's over. Kind of a nineteenth-century, determinist thing."
"Where's the Mighty Casey?"
Bits of Cracker Jack explode from both choking adults. The girl is devastated by her gaffe. She clearly has no idea what she's said. The recitation, out of one of her pauperized school district's obsolete, nineteenth-century, determinist texts that she has blindly committed to memory, could mean anything to her, passed through the filters of continuous dislocation. Mighty Casey as position name, like shortstop or first base? Mighty Casey as deciding machinery, deus ex apparatus rolled to the plate at the all-important juncture? Honorary tide, rank, life achievement? In any event, to her, as essential to each staging of the genre as a sailor to the epic or a floozy to the lawsuit.
"Dr. Kraft, I don't understand this stupid game." This soul that did not flinch when the ER physician shattered her ankle, that awoke from the agony of excision to write the surgeon a thank-you note, now begins soundlessly to cry. A hundred ministrations and apologies from Kraft and Linda cannot convince her that she's done no wrong.
"I don't understand it either," he says, taking her hand back after she wiggles it free. "It's apparently some kind of ritual drama," he explains to her. "National salve. Expectation. History, allegory, fable, dream." He could be bluffing his way through the Chiefs latest unread book assignment, those opaque, impenetrable predictions of the upheavals and reverses in store as we go guttering into the dark.
"It's a twigging ball game," Nico yells through a megaphone he has made of his rolled-up scorecard. "What the hell are you guys blathering about?" Now how did he hear them, above this crowd, from the other end of this screaming murderers' row?
The boy is taking his own emotional plunge, as a result of the Dodgers' deliberate, malicious betrayal. "Pitiful," he says, shaking his balding braincase, hiding it in his hands. "These guys couldn't reach base on an error even if they'd publicly promised homers to a dozen dying kids." The Hernandez brothers emit wicked, appreciative snorts in stereo. In fact, the local boys give it their best but go down twice in splendid paralysis to the normally hapless Second City conscripts, who this day look like world beaters,
Everybody is pretty bummed, but fandom's remorse cannot completely doom this day of reprieve and freedom. Kyle, who has brought along his Walkman, keeps repeating for the others, in astonished tones, "The kids from Carver are here today," exactly the way the beery announcer said it, between rollcall mentions of Rotary chapters and nursing home brigade minuses. The Hernandez brothers light out for the territory on the way back to the bus, but Kraft is still fit enough to chase down and snag their lazy, city-vitiated pop-foul arc across the parking lot.
He sees the girl board the bus and tries to help her up the awkward steps. He is mortified when she shrugs him off. She swings along determinedly, keeping up an impressive clip down the constricted aisle. She sheds the struts in the back of the bus and lowers herself into the seat behind the two old-timers with the L.A. caps pulled down over their wasted beaks.
" 'There is no joy in Mudville,' "Joy recites in ingenue singsong for no one, the words she once performed in front of a now-forgotten class, on a twin bill with the Gettysburg Address.
"Shut yer face," Nico manages.
"Please," Chuck adds.
Kraft pulls Linda down into the seat next to him, before she can slip away to join the children. He holds her hand, ribboning the fingers of the nearest girl, the only available one. He whispers to her what he's just seen — the small-arms exchange of first flirtation. Linda steals a look over one shoulder to see this stabbing thing for herself. But all she can make out is the boys in the back, already scheming the details of the next expedition.
When the next one is launched, it's the last thing in the world any adult could have anticipated. Weeks of dilated child life pass; years click off Nico's accelerated body clock. That is to say a day, maybe a day and a half, real time. Nico shows up at his next scheduled Doll-face session and demands, "You gotta teach us to dance."
"Dance! You mean—?"
"What do you think I mean?" He is surly with compromise. "Dancing. Dancing. You've heard the word, haven't you? 'Blue Danube.' Shake yer bootie. Get up and get down. What do you want from me?"
"Is this a dare? Somebody's put you up to this."
"Nobody puts me up to nothing."
"Okay, all right. Calm down. Just tell me how in the world you came up with…"
"I don't know," he says, as preoccupied as she's ever seen him. He takes off the ball cap and runs a hand over his parchment-papered crown. The gesture is perfect, something he must have seen bald men do in some ancient cartoon. "I just have this… feeling we gotta learn some steps. That we'll need it if…"