Bells Above Greens (23 page)

“Naturally.  It’s sneaky of me to put everyone all in a fright about me.  I crave the attention,” he said.  “Do you know my sister?”

“Yes.  Her name is Elle.  She’s my brother’s…”  Then I corrected myself.  “Was my brother’s.  She was the first person I spoke to off the bus.  She’s become a very good friend.”

“And now what?” Myles asked.

“And now I’m in love with her.”

I heard him sigh, and when I looked he was rubbing his hands on his pant legs.  “She’s not one of these other girls on campus.  You can’t lie to her.”

“I just told you what I thought of her.”

“If you’ve learned anything from me…don’t hold anything from her.”

“I wouldn’t.”

A thought crossed his features.  “Don’t tell her about me.  Don’t tell her about tonight, Sam, please.”

“About your photos?”

He smiled then and we sat with the bells between us, listening to the rain.

“I’m glad it’s you,” he said at last.  “You haven’t been searching for God, Sam.  You’ve been searching for yourself, fighting your brother’s shadow.”

I looked at him. 

“I’m guilty of little lies too.  I knew who you were when I first saw you, Sam.  Peter was the biggest name on campus.  You look just like him.” 

Chapter Twenty-Five

The ducks were back to bobbing in St Joseph’s Lake, tail feathers in the air, little black dots in the yellow glare.  They move on instinct, they pick up and go without a specific destination in mind, but a direction in which they are absolutely positive of.  It’s built within them, a compass that they summon when another instinctive reaction under their feathers tells them the seasons have changed. 

God may be around, if I was to believe what Myles did.  And if I did believe that, then I should believe that Peter was here too.  I always did feel his presence, just not in the way I had when he was living, the way I had become accustomed to and expected would last forever.  He was always the protector, the guiding light.  With that silenced in death, he was now the golden cloud above I could put my hand in but never grab anything from.  He was the jersey on the wall and the blank space next to it.  He was standing next to God, larger than God. 

I watched as one plump duck waddled the banks and marshaled several sunny brown ducklings back to the water’s edge.  I tossed the crust of my sandwich to them before I left, one duckling breaking the ranks for a quick sprint at a meal. 

The manicured practice field near the stadium was empty, the grass growing slightly longer in the offseason, the early leafhoppers crossing the slanted sunrays like floating dust.  The team would be starting summer drills within a month.  In the distance I could hear the cracks from the final days of baseball practice. 

I went to Blarney’s.  Emery was sitting in the only quiet booth in the tavern.

“We’re moving the wedding date up,” he said.  “Three weeks from today.”

He held himself there, not looking for a chance to explain why.  I nodded and kept my questions to myself.  There was no need for an explanation.

“We’ll have to rent you a suit.  You’ll be my best man?”

“Of course.  Thanks, Emery.”

“You understand my rush?  I’ll need you on the rooftops, Sam.  As many hours as you can give me this summer.”

“All right.”

“And during the school year.  Claire will want a house with a nursery.”

“I’ll do what I can.  I want to finish school.  I was thinking of switching to an English degree.”

“What for?”

“I might want to write.”

“You’ll be pushing your graduation another semester or two away.  Are you sure that’s what you want to do?”

“No,” I said.  “But I don’t need a destination.  Some people count on that clarity.  They need a target, an endpoint.  As long as I’m headed toward finishing school, I’ll be fine.  I just need a direction.  Like a duck.”

“Like a what?”  He had to shout over the noise. 

“A duck.  I’ll make a move when I’m ready.  Until then I’ll stay in the pond and learn how to swim.”

I read his furrowed expression and saw the question mark escape his lips. 

I said, “Guess what I’ve come to realize?  Just now I thought of it.  Nobody has anything figured out yet.  What a boring world that would be.  It takes all the fun out of life if you have all your choices made up before it happens.  So, I have my direction.  I’ll cross the goal line when I’m ready.”

He nodded.  “Just as much time as you can give me, okay?  The rooftops?  Do what you can.”

Emery turned in the booth and raised his hand for another round.  Higgins was pouring beers from the tap as fast as he could and, from behind the foothills of backs at the bar, he did not see any hands beyond the fists on the bar top.  Emery stood and pushed his way to the counter, muscling his way through a loud circle of drinkers. 

“Let’s have these and go,” he said when he came back.  Then he looked at me.  “Boy, I’m already becoming a boring married guy.  Once the ring goes on the finger the late nights go away.”

“Here’s to late nights,” I said, raising my glass.

“Here’s to a direction.” 

“Here’s to Hollywood and squinty movie roles.”

Emery gave me a challenging grin.  “Here’s to not knowing a single damn thing about anything.” 

“Here’s to hammer shoes.”

I could hardly handle a sip after that, and Emery was laughing so hard with his mouth full that he had to put both his palms flat on the table and concentrate on forcing his gulp down before it erupted in a geyser from his nose.  He held himself rigid with hysterical but very serious focus, and I practically saw the beer go down his throat in a jolting lump. 

Our futures were a mix of best guesses and complete mysteries, neither of them developing in the way we envisioned, if we were lucky to have ever had a vision at all.  That was life and it came at me fully as an understanding that had always escaped before.  There was just one detail that made a splotched watermark on the blank page of my life.  It was Elle.  She was Peter’s.  I would have to write over her.

Emery turned to the wall.  “Here’s to Peter.”

“To Peter.”  I touched my pint to the glass on the jersey frame. 

A bouncy fellow with a slicked-down cowlick hanging over the center of his forehead noticed my gesture, turned from his spot at the bar, and slid over to our booth with a beer in his raised hand.  “To Peter!”

He threw down a swallow, the Guinness flooding the corners of his mouth.  He seemed unaware of who he was toasting, he was just a student with enough drink in him to make him want to be a part of something, and he found us.  He clinked his mug into mine.

Another guy jumped over from the bar and repeated the toast. 

The circle of bar drinkers opened and Pat Carragher emerged from the center of it, a dark pint in his fist.  He walked over with a few beers in his legs.

He stood over us without saying a word, looking from me to Emery and back again.  Then he looked at the jersey on the wall, tipped his glass back, and finished the stout without taking a breath.  He exhaled in open-mouth satisfaction.

“I’d toast to you too,” he said.  “But I’m out of beer.  Have one on me.”

A few of his pals had gathered behind him, peeking over each other’s shoulders.  The crowd of Saturday night drinkers carried on in the background.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said.  “We were just leaving.”

“Well, now hold on.  Sit right there, Sammy-wonder.  You and me got off on the wrong foot.  It seems a little hostile of you to cut and run when I was just about to buy you a drink.”

He leaned forward on the table, his short sleeves moving up on his thick, freckled arms.

“I’ve already had a drink,” I told him.  “But thanks.  And you and I are fine.”

“Chummy pals you and me, huh?”  He stood and pulled a bent cigarette from behind his ear and let it hang in his lips.  He did not move to find a matchbox.  “Gosh Sam, I just don’t think you’re being level with me.”

Pat Carragher looked at Peter’s jersey and read the white name card.  “You know, I used to come to the games when your brother played.  He was an inspiration to me.  I was a senior in high school and I was running over pimple-faced linebackers every Friday night.  I told myself I’d never get hit by anyone, especially a hard-hitting strong safety like Peter Conry, without them getting their bell rung by me first.  I like your brother, Sam.”

“I do too.”

“Why don’t you play, Sam?”

“Because I don’t care to.”

“Why not?  Are you afraid of getting hurt or are you afraid Higgins won’t put your jersey on the wall?”

“Have a good night, Pat.” 

Emery and I stood to leave, finding ourselves in the standing beer-breath of Pat Carragher.  I went for the door and he grabbed my arm and pulled me around.

“
Now, you wait a minute
.”

He stepped forward with a suddenly red face and breathed down on me with the flared nostrils of a bull.  I could see the whites of his eyes and I again noted that I was looking up at them from about two inches below.  His neck and shoulders might have grown over the school’s off-season fitness program.

“You keep that little puff away from me,” he said.  “You keep him the hell away, hear me?”

“Takes a big man to hit a little guy like that.”

“He pushed me.  He was asking for it, begging for it.  I had enough,” he took a step forward and jabbed his finger into my chest.  “You keep him away.”

Emery moved forward and one of Pat’s friends barred him back with an arm.

“He’s done,” I said.  “He’s going home.  You won’t hear from him again.”

Disappointment might have been what crawled into his features then.  He said, “That’s good for you.  The next time I might have come looking for you instead.  You were ready to take his lumps before.  Now, let’s get a drink and put all this behind us like a couple of men.”

One of the floating heads disappeared to the bar.  Pat Carragher seemed to relax a bit.  He put his hand, a big bear mitt, on my shoulder. 

“I didn’t want to hit him, Sam.  I hate that I did it.  He’s a nice enough kid.  But he pushed me until I snapped.  He just wouldn’t leave well enough alone.”

“I know that.  He told me so.  But you’re wrong about one thing.”  I closed the space between us a little more by taking a half step.  “You would not have had to come looking for me.”

I was feeling good.  I wasn’t especially hateful of Pat Carragher or insulted by him.  He wasn’t a bad guy.  He was rough around the edges and he hadn’t met someone who could cut him back yet.  He was just a big guy who knew he would one day be the largest thing stomping around the Notre Dame grass.  But he wasn’t there yet, and I was beginning to feel a surge of what had not yet been determined by our first meeting.  That crash on the pep rally field.

Pat Carragher grinned just a little.  A smirk that lifted the corner of his mouth and made the tiniest crease in his cheeks of baby fat.  The floating head came back with two fists of Guinness.  Pat and I lifted them between us and put them down our throats in equal time. 

What happened next was a mutual desire to settle our toughness off the field.  We were face to face with each other, neither of us blinking, both knowing what would happen here, just not knowing how to start it.  It was the group of lookers around us, including Emery, who were standing there like they were watching a flame inch closer to a barrel of gasoline.  A few students who had been watching stood behind me to even out the numbers, and a few students left the bar entirely.

Pat’s forehead came against mine then, slippery with sweat from both us, and we pushed against each other like a couple of bulls looking to scare the other down but knowing there was only one way to settle who was the dominant figure. 

Higgins was a mere voice in the crowd after that.  He didn’t even try to intervene when things grew beyond control.  He simply backed himself to the bar wall and put his wingspan out to guard the bottles from flying objects. 

Emery had to buy a new pair of glasses.  He told Claire that a door opened into him.  It explained the bruises on his forehead and the cut on his nose.  If he had shown Claire his shattered lenses and snapped frame, he might have had to explain further that the door had fists.  He was very proud of surviving a bar brawl, saying later that “college isn’t college unless you’ve been in a fight and had a beer afterward.”

Pat Carragher probably didn’t feel a thing, that big manchild, but he had a black eye which I claimed credit for, although it could have been from a number of thrown fists.  He was a strong bastard but I managed to throw him as many times as he threw me. 

Higgins spent the month’s earnings on replacing the booths and chairs.  The tables only tipped over and didn’t need fixing.  When the police showed up to break it up, Higgins put out the lights and locked the door until they left.  There were only smiles in the darkness and not another punch thrown.  He didn’t press charges on anybody, and had much the same idea of bar brawls as Emery had.  He was almost proud of it happening at his place than at a competitor’s. 

Peter’s jersey came off the wall when Pat and I went hurling into it with equal force, locked together in what had to be some sort of wrestling hold.  It sat there on the floor, covered in bits of glass and stepped on by several scrambling shoes.  Peter never needed to be on the wall, though.  Higgins never put him back up, and I would rather raise beers to him in the sky than to his jersey on the wall.

I went to his gravestone many times after that and Peter never once mentioned his jersey.  Elle came too.  She always picked the flowers and I would pay for them.  I dressed his headstone in my army coat one day and gave him a final salute.  He would always be there for me. 

So would Elle.  Somewhere in the bar brawl, somewhere in the hammer strokes on rooftops, the rung of the bells, the pigeons of the Basilica flying overhead, somewhere I had figured out that I would never have it all figured out.  I had figured out that Elle needed me and I needed her.  It took a shattering of Peter’s presence on the wall to confirm it.

Nothing was proven that night between Pat Carragher and me.  Neither of us overpowered the other without having it come right back to him in doubles.  We agreed with a simple nod, smiling across from each other in the darkness, again fighting for the same air, that it was a matter to be settled later.  If the time every came up.