Casey's Home (6 page)

1998

Three
days after Billy Wells had his heart attack in the dugout of the University
ball field, Ben got his wish for his own office, but by then, he no longer
wanted it. It was horrifying, he mused, watching Lee pack her father’s personal
belongings into a large cardboard box, how quickly over twenty years of
habitation could be erased from a space.

“I’ll
just leave all this stuff,” she said, addressing the filing cabinets. She
seemed to be refusing to look at him. He wasn’t sure if this was a recent thing
or something she had always done and he had simply never needed her to speak
directly to his face before.

“Ok,”
Ben said, realizing he was not even sure what the cabinets contained. In the
seventeen years he had worked with Billy Wells, he had never had occasion to
open one of the dark green metal drawers. It bothered him to know now that he
could just jerk one open and see what was inside. Lee stared for a moment at
the small cactus in a brown plastic pot sitting at the edge of Billy’s desk.

“You
want this?” she asked and handed it to him without waiting for an answer.

Ben
had never particularly cared for the eldest Wells daughter. She was haughty and
distant, like cheerleaders in high school. But in this moment, as she scraped
up a small pile of paperclips and deposited them back in the drawer, he was
almost overwhelmed with the urge to comfort her, if only because it would
comfort him as well. Grown men weren’t supposed to grieve openly, but to suck
it up manfully by finding the nearest bar and downing just enough beer to avoid
poisoning themselves. This left Ben, who had stopped drinking entirely when he
was twenty-eight, with very little to fall back on.

It
had genuinely never occurred to Ben that Billy might die. The morning of their
last game, Ben had walked out onto his porch at precisely seven o’clock and
seen Billy chugging up his drive, sweat coloring his stomach and back in dark
stains against his blue DeSoto t-shirt. The weekday morning jog was a ritual
for Billy, and Ben had never known him to miss a single day in fourteen years
unless they were under hurricane watch. Seven miles, from Billy’s house in the
suburbs to Ben’s home in the back country, and then a tumbler of room
temperature water and a clean towel later, Billy would turn and make his way
back down the gravel drive, puffing and grunting like a pug. Ben had watched
his friend’s red face and lean body as he approached that morning and been a
bit envious of Billy’s enduring health.

“Woo!”
Billy had shouted across the silent lawn. “Gonna be a goddamned scorcher.”

“Probably,”
Ben had replied, handing him the towel before the water. “It’s May, after all.”

Billy
rubbed his sweat from his hair to his face to the towel in great sweeps.
Exchanging the slick towel for the water, he drank it all in one long, gulping
attempt.

“So,”
Ben had said. “Ready for tonight’s game?”

“Damn
ready,” Billy had replied, straightening up and stretching his muscles. “Don’t
know about the boys, though.”

“They’re
fine,” Ben had said gently. “You want to come in for a minute? I’m scrambling
eggs, if you want some.”

“God,”
Billy had laughed, “you’re so fucking domestic, McDunnough. You’d make someone
a fine wife.”

Later
that night in the dugout, with their boys winning easily and the soft sun
touching the outfield wall, Billy had turned to him and whispered: “Damn,
McDunnough, my heart’s pounding.” Ben, in a brief second of clarity, had looked
at their boys out on the field, their uniforms glowing like angels, and told
Billy it was the glory of his life that caused his heart to leap. And perhaps
it was.

Billy’s
daughter closed the desk door with a solid push of her palm and turned to look
at him, finally. She had black eyes and hair, which Ben knew were just like her
mother’s, but she lacked Edie’s kindness, her generosity. Billy’s gruffness had
rubbed off in unintended ways on his eldest daughter, so much so that the two
had rarely spoken as she grew older. Billy had always favored Casey anyway, and
not just because she shared her father’s stocky build and thick brown hair. Her
father had favored her, Ben knew, because despite how she looked, it was she
who had gained her mother’s personality and strength. “So,” he said, leaning
against his own desk and picking at the vinyl blotter hanging rakishly over the
edge, “is Casey back in town?”

Lee
looked up and he immediately regretted asking. She had such a knowing look, as
if she had expected him to say something about Casey and he had somehow lived
up to her small expectations.

“She
is,” she said, pondering the stapler for a moment before putting it down on top
of a filing cabinet. Her face had regained its studied composure, but he knew
better than to believe the calm.

He
nodded and went back to picking at the blotter, waiting for Lee to strike. It
didn’t take long.

“Would
you like me to tell her something?” Lee asked, her voice deceptively light.

“No,
that’s all right,” Ben replied, feeling annoyed and patronized and wondering when
it became a big problem to just want to know how someone was. He was so tired
of talking around things, he just wanted to ask and be answered.

She
nodded and finished packing by jamming a three-ring binder down on top of
everything else with a dramatic push.

“So...
” she said, drawing the word out. Leaning against her father’s desk, she
mirrored his position and smiled. He wondered if she ever wore anything but
black. She looked, he thought, like a rock star, or maybe a very thin Italian
actress. “…What are you going to do now?”

It
was such a loaded question. For the last three days, Ben had been rolling those
seven words over in his own head like a religious chant. Slipping into bed at
night, filled with a dull mourning that occasionally broke over him like a
wave, he had tried to avoid hearing it. It just seemed so selfish, to be
concerned with his own future when the one man he had grown to value over all
others lay waiting for burial in a satin-lined coffin fit for a former head of
state. His own needs, in times like this, became so petty, didn’t they? But he
was still annoyed, and couldn’t help it, that she was asking. What did anyone
do after the death of a friend, a family member? He grieved.

In
the last few hours of the evening, before sleep finally knocked him cold, he
remembered how it had been back in ‘76, when he had realized that his pitching
career was over. He had been twenty-two years-old, uneducated, and injured so
badly that his left arm seemed more like lead than an appendage he had been
born with. And yet, in one brief moment of his hospital stay, he had
experienced an epiphany, like realizing that he would die. The future, he saw,
was not the straight line he had been led to believe, but existed as a vast
hemisphere. He could travel in an infinite number of directions from his
starting point, with the only restriction being that he could not, no matter
how much he wished it, go back. That second of unlimited freedom had floored
him. Of course, over the next few months, even years, it had not seemed so
perfectly clear, but wasn’t one moment of clarity better than none at all? And
what to make of that same future now? Tethered by years of living, he was no
longer sure that his life could be maneuvered in any direction he chose. He
wasn’t even young enough to believe he couldn’t escape, somehow, into his past.

What
was he going to do? He knew, though it hadn’t happened yet, that the university
would have to approach him with options. He had his retirement fund, he could
buy out of that. However, what he would do financially wasn’t the question.
Would they keep him? Would they make him an offer? Would they slide someone new
in right over his head as if he didn’t exist? Right now, he would put his money
on dismissal. But Ben had been putting his money on dismissal for years, and it
hadn’t happened yet, so who knew? Tomorrow he could find that fate, often so
argumentative and tricky, had decided to deal him the one lucky hand he’d never
had. It was a possibility, the way death was a possibility, the way rain was a
possibility.

What
was he going to do? Run away, perhaps. Pick himself up from the banality of
this small chosen slice of life and go adventuring. Find a new route. Pack a
brown paper grocery bag full of clothing and head out on the road. Of course,
at forty-four years-old, with a house he owned outright and a hatchback that
had seen better days, all of this became as unlikely as say, suddenly
restarting his career in pro ball. The injury that had ended his career, that
had sent him into a brief and yet powerfully personal Hall of Blame, might as
well have crippled him physically. He could no more just pick up and leave than
he could throw a ninety mile-an-hour fastball right at the batter’s weak spot.

So
he answered truthfully, as had become his nature. Why lie anymore?

“I
don’t know,” he said. “Guess I’ll just have to wait and see.”

Lee
nodded. This answer seemed to please her, as if his uncertainty was deserved in
the face of her father’s death. He didn’t dare make assumptions, he didn’t dare
move up to take over for a man so great that no one, not even today, could talk
pitching without talking about “Wild” Billy Wells. Best of the best, cream of
the crop, top of the line. And Ben McDunnough, who had played a mere two and a
half years before his arm had given way, who had gone out not in a blaze of
glory but in a quick burst of agony, could no more claim the dead man’s place
than he could have out-thrown him while he lived.

“Well,
good luck,” she said, picking up the box and tucking it under her arm the way
she might carry a baby.

“Do
you want me to...?” He gestured to the box and she shook her head.

“It’s
not heavy,” she said and with a nod, opened the door to the office and slipped
dramatically away, leaving a trail of vanilla and gloom. Ben sat for a moment,
staring after her, half expecting her to reappear to claim something else of
Billy’s, the grim reaper of the small office. His chair, perhaps. The stapler.
But in the end, he had to come to the uncomfortable conclusion that the office
was, for the moment, his. Wandering over to the file cabinet, he jerked open a
drawer. It held only a few dark green hanging folders with nothing in them. The
next drawer yielded an empty manila folder labeled “Expense Reports.” Ben
smiled and gently pushed it shut.

What
was he going to do?

The
knock on the door was not completely unexpected. He had been sitting at his
desk for the last half hour, turning a pencil over and over between his
fingers, rolling it down his hands and then drawing it back up. Of course
someone would knock, he knew suddenly. That was what he was down here waiting
for.

“Ben?”
Sandy Miller from Human Resources poked her head around the door and smiled at
him. He could practically feel the ax swing above his head.

“Sandy,”
he said and motioned her in.

“Ben,”
she began, steering Billy’s old chair over to face him across his desk. “I know
you’re wondering where you stand.”

He
thought, oddly, that he knew exactly where he stood. It was where he was going
that puzzled him. But there was no point in trying to explain this to someone
like Sandy, with her little self-made career in academia. Should she be fired
tomorrow, she would know at least the direction in which the rest of her life
lay, like being able to see the path through the woods, even if the destination
is miles off.

“I
suppose so,” he answered.

“We
would like to offer you an opportunity to be heard, if you’d like one.”

“I
would,” he said, but wasn’t entirely sure what they expected him to say.

“Well
then, the Board...” she hesitated, as people always did when bringing up the
Board, “... will agree to hold a hearing to determine your fitness as a
candidate for head coach.”

Though
he would have thought seventeen years of assistant coaching, two College World
Series and multiple awards would have been far more informative than a few
hours of debate, he simply nodded. Of course they did.

“And
they want to open Bill’s position up to other candidates.”

Ah,
the ax slipped down and paused a hair’s breadth from the back of his neck,
hovering there and shuddering with its own weight.

“I
understand,” he said. And he did. You don’t go from Billy Wells, the most
respected and glorious coach in the entire collegiate system, to that nobody,
Ben McDunnough, without making sure first that’s all you’ve got. And of course,
with the school as big as it was, as popular as it was, as successful and
wealthy as it was... they would be booting him out within the week – as soon as
a new coach could be found and courted and toasted and given a car.

“You
know that if it were up to me...” she said suddenly and then stopped, because
they both knew if it were up to her, he’d have been out long ago. Sandy Miller
needed to attract big name talent. That was her job.

“That’s
all right,” he told her gently. “This isn’t exactly unexpected.”

“No,”
she agreed, smoothing out some imaginary wrinkle in her chinos, “I imagine it’s
not. For now, Ben, we’d all like you to consider acting as interim coach, for
the sake of the team. The boys need to know there’s continuity, you understand.
And you know, that if it does come down to it, you can count on a sterling
reference from the school.”