A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories (41 page)

She told me all this while making my bed in the little outbuilding by the barn, and when she finished, she said, “Now I’m glad you’re here, Ray. And I hope tomorrow you could help me repair the culvert.”

I had thought it would be painting the barn, which was a grand building, faded but not peeling, or mowing the acres and acres of weeds, which I could see were full of rabbits. But no, it was replacing the culvert in the road to the house. It was generally collapsed along its length and rusted through in two big places. It was a hard crossing for any vehicle. Looking at it, I didn’t really know where to start. I’d hid in plenty of culverts, mostly larger than this one, which was a thirty-inch corrugated-steel tube, but I’d never replaced one. The first thing, I started her old tractor, an International, and chained up to the ruined culvert and ripped it out of the ground like I don’t know what. I mean, it was a satisfying start, and I’ll just tell you right out, I was involved.

I trenched the throughway with a shovel, good work that took two days, and then I laid her shiny new culvert in there pretty as a piece of jewelry. I set it solid and then buried the thing and packed the road again so that there wasn’t a hump, there wasn’t a bump, there wasn’t a ripple as you crossed. I spent an extra day dredging the ditch, but that was gilding the lily, and I was just showing off.

And you know what: she paid me with a pie. I’m not joking. I parked the tractor and hung up the shovel and on the way back to my room, she met me in the dooryard like some picture out of the
Farmer’s Almanac
, which there were plenty of lying around, and she handed me an apple pie in a glass dish. It was warm and swollen up so the seams on the crosshatch piecrust were steaming.

Well, I don’t know, but this was a little different period for old Ray. I already had this good feather bed in the old tack room and the smell of leather and the summer evenings, and now I had had six days of good work where I had been the boss and I had a glass pie dish in my hands in the open air of Idaho. What I’m saying here is that I was affected. All of this had affected me.

To tell the truth, kindness was a new thing. My father was a crude man who never hesitated to push a child to the ground. As a cop in the town of Brown River he was not amused to have a son who was a thief. And my mother had more than she could handle with five kids and preferred to travel with the Red Cross from flood to fire across the plains. And so, all these years, I’ve been a loner and happy at it I thought, until Mrs. McKay showed me her apple pie. Such a surprise, that tenderness. I had heard of such things before, but I honestly didn’t think I was the type.

I ate the pie and that affected me, two warm pieces, and then I ate a piece cool in the morning for breakfast along with Mrs. McKay’s coffee sitting over her checked tablecloth in the main house as another day came up to get the world, and I was affected further. I’m not making excuses, these are facts. When I stood up to go out and commence the mowing, Mrs. McKay said it could wait a couple of days. How’d she say it? Like this: “Ray, I believe that could wait a day or two.”

And that was that. It was three days when I came out of that house again; it didn’t really make any difference to those weeds. I moved into the main house. I can barely talk about it except to say these were decent days to me. I rode a tractor through the sunny fields of Idaho, mowing, slowing from time to time to let the rabbits run ahead of the blades. And in the evenings there was washing up and hot meals and Mrs. McKay. The whole time, I mean every minute of every day of all five weeks, I never made a
Ray.
And this is a place with all that barnwood and a metal silo. I didn’t scratch a letter big or small, and there were plenty of good places. Do you hear me? I’d lost the desire.

But, in the meantime I was a farmer, I guess, or a hired hand, something. I did take an interest in Mrs. McKay’s paintings, which were portraits, I suppose, portraits of farmers in shirtsleeves and overalls, that kind of thing. They were good paintings in my opinion, I mean, you could tell what they were, and she had some twenty of the things on her sunporch, where she painted. She didn’t paint any of the farmers’ wives or animals or like that, but I could see her orange tractor in the back of three or four of the pictures. I like that, the real touches. A tractor way out behind some guy in a painting, say only three inches tall, adds a lot to it for me, especially when it is a tractor I know pretty well.

Mrs. McKay showed some of these portraits at the fair each year and had ribbons in her book. At night on that screen porch listening to the crickets and hearing the moths bump against the screens, I’d be sitting side by side with her looking at the scrapbook. I’d be tired and she would smell nice. I see now that I was in a kind of spell, as I said, I was affected. Times I sensed I was far gone, but could do nothing about it.

One night, for example, she turned to me in the bed and asked, “What is it you were in jail for, Ray? Were you a car thief?”

I wasn’t even surprised by this and I answered with the truth, which is the way I’ve always answered questions. “Yes,” I said. “I took a lot of cars. And I was caught for it.”

“Why did you?”

“I took the first one to run away. I was young, a boy, and I liked having it, and as soon as I could I took another. And it became a habit for me. I’ve taken a lot of cars I didn’t especially want or need. It’s been my life in a way, right until the other week when I took your car, though I would have been just as pleased to walk or hitchhike.” I had already told her that first day that I had been headed for Yellowstone National Park, though I didn’t tell her I was planning on making
Ray
s all over the damn place.

After a while that night in the bed she just said, “I see.” And she said it sweetly, sleepily, and I took it for what it was.

WELL, THIS
dream doesn’t last long. Five weeks is just a minute, really, and things began to shift in the final days. For one thing I came to understand that I was the person Mrs. McKay was painting now by the fact of the cut fields in the background. The face wasn’t right, but maybe that’s okay, because my face isn’t right. In real life it’s a little thin, off-center. She’d corrected that, which is her privilege as an artist, and further she’d put a dreamy look on the guy’s face, which I suppose is a real nod toward accuracy.

“Are these your other men?” I asked her one night after supper. We’d spoken frankly from the outset and there was no need to change now, even though I had uncomfortable feelings about her artwork; it affected me now by making me sad. And I knew what was going on though I could not help myself. I could not go out in the yard and steal her car again and pick up my plans where I’d dropped them. I’ll say it because I know it was true, I was beyond affected, I was in love with Mrs. McKay. I could tell because I was just full of hard wonder, a feeling I understood was jealously. I mean there were almost two dozen paintings out there on the porch.

But my question hit a wrong note. Mrs. McKay looked at me while she figured out what I was asking and then her face kind of folded and she went up to bed. I didn’t think as it was happening to say I was sorry, though I was sorry in a second, sorrier really for that remark than for any of the two hundred forty or so vehicles I had taken, the inconvenience and damage that had often accompanied their disappearance. What followed was my worst night, I’d say. I’m a car thief and I am not used to hurting people’s feelings. If I hurt their feelings, I’m not usually there to be part of it. And I cared for Mrs. McKay in a way that was strange to me too. I sat there until sunrise when I printed a little apology on a piece of paper, squaring the letters in a way that felt quite odd, but they were legible, which is what I was after: “I’m sorry for being a fool. Please forgive me. Love, Ray.” I made the Ray in cursive, something I’ve done only three or four times in my whole life. Then I went out to paint the barn.

It was midmorning when I turned from where I stood high on that ladder painting the barn and saw the sheriff’s two vehicles where they were parked below me. I hadn’t heard them because cars didn’t make any whump-whump crossing that new culvert. When I saw those two Fords, I thought it would come back to me like a lost dog—the need to run and run, and make a
Ray
around the first hard corner. But it didn’t. I looked down and saw the sheriff. There were two kids in the other car, county deputies, and I descended the ladder and didn’t spill a drop of that paint. The sheriff greeted me by name and I greeted him back. The men allowed me to seal the gallon of barn red and to put my tools away. One of the kids helped me with the ladder. None of them drew their sidearms and I appreciated that.

It was as they were cuffing me that Mrs. McKay came out. She came right up and took my arm and the men stepped back for a moment. I will always remember her face there, so serious and pure. She said, “They were friends, Ray. Other men who have helped me keep this place together. I never gave any other man an apple pie, not even Mr. McKay.” I loved her for saying that. She didn’t have to. You have a woman make that kind of statement in broad daylight in front of the county officials and it’s a bracing experience; it certainly braced me. I smiled there as happy as I’d been in this life. As the deputy helped me into the car, I realized that for the first time
ever
I was leaving home. I’d never really had one before.

“Save that paint,” I said to Mrs. McKay. “I’ll be back and finish the job.” I saw her face and it has sustained me.

THEY HAD
found me because I’d mowed. Think about it, you drive County Road 216 twice a week for a few years and then one day a hundred acres of milkweed, goldenrod, and what-have-you are trimmed like a city park. You’d make a phone call, which is what the sheriff had done. That’s what change is, a clue.

SO, HERE
I am in Windchime once again. I work at this second series of Ray Bold an hour or two a day. I can feel it evolving, that is, the font is a little more vertical than it was when I was on the outside and I’m thickening the stems. And I’m thinking it would look good with a spur serif—there’s time. It doesn’t have all the energy of Ray Bold I, but it’s an alphabet with staying power, and it has a different purpose: it has to keep me busy for fifteen months, when I’ll be going home to paint a barn and mow the fields. My days as a font maker are numbered.

My new cellmate, Victor Lee Peterson, the semi-famous archer and survivalist who extorted all that money from Harrah’s in Reno recently and then put arrows in the radiators of so many state vehicles during his botched escape on horseback, has no time for my work. He leafs through the notebooks and shakes his head. He’s spent three weeks now etching a target, five concentric circles on the wall, and I’ll say this, he’s got a steady hand and he’s got a good understanding of symmetry. But, a target? He says the same thing about my letters. “The ABC’s?” he said when he first saw my work. I smile at him. I kind of like him. He’s an anarchist, but I think I can get through. As I said today: “Victor. You’ve got to treat it right. It’s just the alphabet but sometimes it’s all we’ve got.”

NIGHTCAP

I
WAS
filing deeds, or rather, I had been filing deeds all day, and now I was taking a break to rest my head on the corner of my walnut desk and moan, when there was a knock at my door. My heart kicked in. People don’t come to my office. From time to time folders are slipped under my door, but my clients don’t come here. They call me and I copy something and send it to them. I’m an attorney.

Still and all, I hadn’t been much of anything since Lily, the woman I loved, had—justifiably—asked me to move out three months ago. Simply, there were days of filing. I didn’t moan that often, but I sat still for hours—hours I couldn’t bill to anyone. I wanted Lily back, and the short of it is that I’m not going to get her back in this story. She’s not even
in
this story. There’s another woman in this story, and I wish I could say there’s another man. But there isn’t. It’s me.

And now the heavy golden doorknob turned, and the woman entered. She wore a red print cowboy shirt and tight Levi’s and under one arm she held a tiny maroon purse.

“Wrong room,” I said. I had about four wrong rooms a week.

“Jack,” she said, stepping forward. It was either not the wrong room or really the wrong room. “I’m Lynn LaMoine. Phyllis told me that if I came over there was a good chance I could talk you into going to the ball game tonight.”

Well. She had me sitting down, half embarrassed about having my moaning interrupted, overheard, and her sister, Phyllis, Madame Cause-Effect, the most feared wrongful death attorney in the state, somehow knew that I was in limbo. I steered the middle road; it would be the last time. “I like baseball,” I said. “But don’t you have a husband?”

She nodded for a while, her mouth set. “Yeah,” she said “I was married, but . . . maybe you remember Clark Dewar?”

“Sure,” I said, “He’s at Stover-Reynolds.”

She kept nodding. “A lawyer.” Then she said the thing that sealed this small chapter of my cheap fate. “Look, I just thought it might be fun to sit outside in the night and watch the game. I’m not good at being lonely. And I don’t like the lessons.”

It was a page from my book, and I jumped right in. “We could go to the game,” I told her. “The Gulls aren’t very good, but I’ve got an old classmate who’s coach, and the park organist is worth the price of admission.”

At this she smiled so that just the tips of her front teeth showed and stood on one leg so that her shape in those Levi’s cut a hard curve against the door behind her. I heard myself saying, “And the beer is cold and it’s not going to rain.” I explained that I didn’t have a car and gave her my address. As a rule I try not to view women as their parts, but—as I said—my moaning had been interrupted and the whole era has me in a hammerlock, and as Lynn turned, her backside involuntarily brought to mind a raw word from some corner of my youth: tail.

THAT NIGHT
as I eased into her car I realized that this was the first time I had been in a car alone with a woman for four weeks. For a moment, nine or ten seconds, it actually felt like a date. Ten tops. Though I hadn’t accomplished anything with my life so far, I was showered and shined and the water in my hair was evaporating in a promising way, and we were going to the ball game.

I looked over at Lynn in her black silky skirt and plum sweater. She looked like a lot of women today: good. I couldn’t tell if this was the outfit of a woman in deep physical need or not. The outfit didn’t look overtly sexual, or maybe it did but so did everything else. And then I realized that in the muggy backwash late in this sour month, I felt the faint but unmistakable physical stir of desire. I’ve got to admit, it was a relief. I took it as a sign of well-being, possibly good health. It was a feeling that well-directed could get me somewhere.

As we arrived, turning onto Thirteenth South under the jutting cement bleachers of Derks Field, I smiled at myself for being so simple. I glanced again at Lynn’s wardrobe. You can’t tell a thing anymore by the way people dress; it only helps in court. No one dresses like a prostitute these days, not even the prostitutes. And besides, in my eight-year-old Sears khakis and blanched blue Oxford-cloth shirt from an era so far bygone only the Everly Brothers would have remembered it, I looked like the person in trouble, the person in deep, inarticulate need.

IN THE
ambiguity in which American ballparks exist, and they are a ragtag bunch, Derks Field is it. It is simply the loveliest garden of a small ballpark in the western United States. The stadium itself is primarily crumbling concrete poured the year I was born and named after John C. Derks, the sports editor at the
Tribune
who helped found the Pacific Coast League, Triple A Baseball, years ago. Though it could seat just over ten thousand, the average crowd these days was a scattered four hundred or so. This little Eden is situated, like most ballparks, in a kind of tough low-rent district spotted with small warehouses and storage yards for rusting heavy equipment.

As a boy I had come here and seen Dick Stuart play first base for the Bees; it was said he could hit the ball to Sugarhouse, which was about six miles into deep center. And my college team had played several games here my senior year while the campus field was being moved from behind the Medical School to Fort Douglas, and I mean Derks was a field that made you just want to take a few slides in the rich clay, dive for a liner in the lush grass.

Lynn and I parked in the back of the nearby All-Oil gas station and walked through a moderately threatening bevy of ten-year-old street kids milling outside the ticket office. When the game started, they would fan out across the street and wait to fight over foul balls, worth a buck apiece at the gate.

I love the moment of emerging into a baseball stadium, seeing all the new distance across the expanse of green grass made magical by the field lights bright in the incipient twilight. The bright cartoon colors on the ads of the home-run fence make a little carnival of their own, and above the “401 Feet” sign in straightaway center, the purple mountains of the Wasatch Front strike the sky, holding their stashes of snow like pink secrets in the last daylight.

I felt right at home. There was Midgely, the only guy who stayed with baseball from our college squad, standing on the dugout steps just like a coach is supposed to look; there were all the teenage baseball wives sitting in the box behind the dugout, their blond hair buoyant in the fresh air, their babies struggling in the lap blankets; there was the empty box that our firm bought for the season and which no one
ever
used; there beyond first in the general admission were Benito Antenna’s fans, a grouping of eight or nine of the largest women in the state come to cheer their true love; and there riding the summer air like the aroma of peanuts and popcorn and cut grass were the strains of Steiner Brightenbeeker’s organ cutting a quirky and satanic version of “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” I could see the Phantom of the Ballpark himself pounding out the melody in his little green cell, way up at the top of the bleachers next to the press box.

“What?” Lynn said, returning from a solo venture underneath the bleachers. She handed me a beer and a bag of peanuts. She had insisted on buying the tickets, too. Evidently I was being hosted at the home park tonight.

“Nothing. That guy’s an old friend of mine.” I pointed up at Steiner. Lynn was being real nice, I guess, but I felt a little screwy. Seeing Steiner and being in a ballpark made me think for a minute the world might want me back. He had played at our parties.

And it is my custom with people I don’t know to pay my own way, at least, but as she had handed me the plastic cup, I had accepted it without protest. My financial picture precluded many old customs, even those grounded on common sense. I would keep track and pay her back sometime. Besides, early in the game, so to speak, I didn’t have the sense not to become indebted to this woman.

“Don’t you want a beer?” I asked her. She demurred, and retrieved a flask of what turned out to be brandy from her purse along with a silver thimble. I don’t have the official word on this, but I don’t think you drink brandy at the ballpark. Certain beverages are married to their sports, and I still doubt whether baseball, even the raw, imprecise nature of Triple A, had anything to do with brandy. Brandy, I thought, taking another look at my date as we stood for Steiner’s version of “The Star Spangled Banner,” which he sprinkled with “Yellow Submarine,” brandy is the drink for quoits.

I don’t know; I was being a jerk. It wasn’t a first. Blame it this time on the eternal unrest that witnessing baseball creates in my breast. There you are ten yards from the field where these guys are
playing.
So close to the fun. I loved baseball. The thing I regretted most was that I hadn’t pressed on and played a little minor-league ball. Midgely himself and Snyder, the coach, talked to me that last May, but I was already lost. Nixon was in the White House and baseball just didn’t seem relevant activity.

That isn’t my greatest regret. I regretted ten other things with equal vigor—well, twelve say. Twelve tops. One in particular. Things that I wanted not to have happened. I wanted Lily back. I wanted to locate the little gumption in my heart that would allow me to step up and go on with my life. I wanted to be fine and strong and quit the law and reach deep and write a big book that some woman on a train would crush to her breast halfway through and sigh. But I could see myself on the table at the autopsy, the doctor turning to the class and looking up from my chest cavity a little puzzled and saying, “I’m glad you’re all here for this medical first. He didn’t have any. There’s no gumption here at all.”

I took a big sip of the beer and tried to relax. Brandy’s okay in a ballpark, a peccadillo; it was me that was wrong. Lynn rooting around in her big leather purse for her silver flask and smiling so sweetly under the big lights, her face that mysterious thing, varnished with red and amber and the little blue above the eyes, Lynn was just being nice. I thought that: she’s just being nice. Then I had the real thought: it’s a tough thing to take, this niceness, good luck.

The most prominent feature of any game at Derks is the approximate quality of the pitching. By the third inning we had seen just over a thousand pitches. These kids could throw hard, but it was the catcher who was doing all the work. The wind-up, the pitch, the catcher’s violent leap and stab to prevent the ball from imbedding itself in the wire backstop. Just watching him spearing all those wild pitches hurt my knees: up down up down.

I started in, as I always do, explaining the game to Lynn, the fine points. What the different stances indicated about the batters; why the outfielders shifted; how the third baseman is supposed to move to cover the return throw after a move to first. Being a frustrated player, like every other man in America, I wanted to show my skill.

After a few more beers, I settled down. The air cooled, the mountains dimmed, the bright infield rose in the light. I leaned back and just tried to unravel. I listened to Steiner’s music, now the theme song from
Exodus
, and I could faintly hear his fans singing, “This land is mine, God gave this land to me . . .” Steiner made me smile. He played what he wanted, when he wanted. In nine innings you could hear lots of Chopin and Liszt, Beethoven, Bartok, and Lennon. He’d play show tunes and commercial jingles. He played lots of rock and roll, and I once heard his version of
An American in Paris
that lasted an inning and a half. He refused to look out and witness the sport that transpired below him. He had met complaints that he didn’t get into the spirit of the thing by playing the heady five-note preamble to “Charge!” one night seventy times in a row, until not only was no one calling “Charge!” at the punch line, but the riff had acquired a tangible repulsion in the ears of the management (next door in the press box), and they were quick to have it banished forever. As long as the air was full of organ music, they were happy.

When Steiner did condescend and play “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” he did it in a medley with “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” by Iron Butterfly and “Sympathy for the Devil” by the Rolling Stones. The result, obviously, was an incantation for demon worship which his fans loved. And his fans, a group of ten or twelve young kids, done punk, sat below the organ loft with their backs to the game, bobbing their orange heads to Steiner’s urgent melodies. This also mollified the management’s attitude toward Steiner: the dozen general admission tickets he sold to his groupies alone.

As the game progressed through a series of walks, steals, overthrows, and passed balls, Lynn sipped her brandy and chattered about being out, how fresh it was, how her husband had only taken her to stockholders’ meetings, how she didn’t really know what to say (that got me a little; shades of actual dating), how being divorced was so different from what she supposed, not really any fun, and how grateful she was that I had agreed to come.

I held it all off. “Come on, this is great. This is baseball.”

“Phyllis said you liked baseball.”