Seventh Heaven (26 page)

The sky was bluer once the bus passed through New Jersey, and it grew wider and bluer with every mile. In Washington the azaleas were starting to bloom. Danny had two seats to himself, until some guy in his late twenties got on in Richmond and folded himself into the seat next to Danny's. The guy lit up a cigarette and took out a deck of cards.

“You play poker?” the guy asked Danny, and when Danny shook his head, he asked, “Twenty-one?”

“I don't play cards.”

“Yeah?” the guy said. He had a thick accent and Danny had to strain to understand him. “What do you play?”

“Baseball,” Danny said.

“Shit. Baseball's for kids.”

“Not where I'm headed.”

“Where's that?” the guy asked, and he put out his cigarette in the ashtray between them so that smoke spiraled up into Danny's face.

“Spring training,” Danny said. “Yankees.”

“No shit? And you travel on a Greyhound bus?”

“Sure,” Danny said. “Get to see the country that way.”

Right then all they could see was the dark highway and a line of shacks beyond a metal fence.

The guy's name was Willie and he was going to Clearwater, Florida, to visit his mother, whom he hadn't seen in something like seven years. “She won't recognize me,” he kept saying to Danny. “I was a baby when I left. Younger than you.”

They slept just a little and in the morning they got off together when the bus stopped south of Greensboro for breakfast. The sky was so wide open Danny felt dizzy with joy. He had almost been swallowed up by his hometown and now he was ready for the world, not some safe, constricted suburb, or even a protected campus, like Cornell, his second choice. When he got to St. Petersburg he'd buy himself some new clothes, maybe even some cowboy boots, like Willie's. But what he wanted now was the biggest breakfast he'd ever had, pancakes and eggs and two glasses of orange juice.

“We'd better get washed up first,” Willie told him. “Otherwise the waitresses will run in the other direction.”

Danny laughed and while the other passengers headed for the restaurant, he went over to the outside restroom.

“Hey, not there,” Willie called to him. He came and got Danny, grinning. “You really are one of the Yankees. That toilet's for niggers.”

A black man came out of the restroom and looked straight at Danny, and Danny wanted to explain that he wasn't really with the moron by his side in the cowboy boots, but he didn't. He followed Willie into the restaurant and went to the restroom behind the counter. He washed up and peed and combed his hair and he realized he was feeling sick. Willie ordered breakfast for them both and Danny couldn't even force himself to eat his platter of biscuits and eggs, and when they got back on the bus he didn't feel like talking anymore. The air grew sweeter as the bus drove on, and after a while Willie found an empty seat where he could stretch out and take a nap and later he found some sucker to play poker with and that was fine with Danny. Willie didn't know shit about baseball or anything else, and all Danny wanted was to get to Florida.

He had the sinking feeling that he should have thought more carefully about leaving home. He looked out the window and felt as if he were hurtling through space, weightless and completely at the mercy of gravity. When they crossed the Florida state line a whoop went up in the bus and the driver banged on the horn, but Danny felt sicker than ever. He'd been to Miami with his parents several times, but this didn't feel like the same state, or even the same country. Everything looked washed out, the fronds of the palm trees were brown instead of green, the earth looked like plain old dirt. He didn't have any luggage, so he went looking for a place to stay as soon as he got off the bus, and he found a motel two blocks down from the bus station. It had been a long time since Danny had eaten. After he washed up he went to a little market and bought some Scooter Pies and a bottle of Coke and had them standing out in the street, starving and wired and wishing he had a pair of sunglasses because the glare out here nearly blinded him. The air was warm and wet and pushed down on you and made you sweat even when you weren't doing anything but standing still. When he went back to the motel it was even hotter in his room, and he couldn't sleep all night; he didn't even bother to try.

The first day at training camp he just watched through the fence. He'd bought three new T-shirts and a pair of dark glasses, and after seeing some of the rookies he felt so pumped up he did three hundred sit-ups before he went to bed, and all that night he saw pitches the way he'd seen headlights whenever he'd fallen asleep on the bus. In the morning he did more sit-ups to get loose, then went back to training camp, early, when the heat wasn't yet grinding him down. He realized then that he wasn't the only one waiting for the office to open; there was a group of hopefuls by the fence, junior-high kids and grown men, some of whom had brought their own bats. Danny Shapiro figured he had to make his move. The skin on his nose was sunburned and if he stayed down here much longer his hair would turn platinum. He headed for the office as soon as he saw the lights go on, but he was stopped just outside the gate by a guard, a middle-aged black man in a blue uniform.

“I have an appointment for a job interview,” Danny told him.

“Come on,” the guard said. “You expect me to believe that?”

“I'm a CPA,” Danny said. “Certified public accountant.”

“Prove it,” the guard said.

“What do you want?” Danny said. “For me to do your taxes?”

The guard laughed and motioned for Danny to come inside the gates. He walked him to the front office, then said, “Wait here.”

The dust from the field went up Danny's nose as he stood outside the office. His hands were sweating, so he wiped them on his dirty blue jeans and looked up at the sky and tried not to breathe too fast. The guard brought out an older guy who wore a black wool suit that was much too heavy for Florida in any season.

“This the accountant?” the guy said.

“That's him,” the guard said.

“What's your name?” the guy asked.

“Danny Shapiro.” Out here the sun could blind you even if you wore sunglasses.

“Of Hebrew extraction?”

“Look,” Danny said. “I play ball.”

“What a fucking surprise,” the guy said. “Who doesn't?”

“Yeah,” Danny said, “but I'm good.”

“Who told you that? Your high-school coach?”

Danny swallowed hard and wiped his hands on his pants.

“CPA.” The guy laughed. “That's a hot one. That's one I never heard before.”

He nodded and Danny stood stunned, realizing that he was meant to follow. Over by a bench near the batter's cage three rookies who had shown up early for practice were leaning back against a wooden wall. The guy yelled out a name and a tall kid, not more than nineteen, with long, nervous arms, immediately stood up.

“How about pitching a few to my accountant,” the guy said.

“Sure, Mr. Reardon,” the rookie said.

When the rookie nearly bowed to Mr. Reardon, Danny realized that the guy was on the coaching staff. But the rookie looked Danny over only once, disinterested, as if Danny didn't mean more than a piece of pie.

Danny slipped off his sunglasses and put them in his pocket, then grabbed a bat and went up to the plate. The sky looked white now, and amazingly close to the earth. Out in the field, the rookie was winding up his long, jerky arms. Danny closed his eyes and imagined Ace out on the pitcher's mound. He heard the crickets the way they always sang in summer, and the groaning sound Ace made whenever he started to pitch. Danny missed the first two pitches completely. He started to think about the way the garbage cans were lined up on Hemlock Street and the way lawns turned green at this time of year, and he hit the next ball as hard as he could and he felt as if his heart were going right up with it. He kept on hitting them, and on the last pitch he knocked a sparrow out of the sky, and it fell to second base with a thud. Danny walked back and handed the bat to Mr. Reardon. He was shaking so hard that if he had tried to run the bases he would have fallen on his face.

Mr. Reardon lit a Pall Mall and studied the field. “You're good,” he said to Danny. “But I see a dozen boys as good as you every week”

“You just saw me once,” Danny said.

“Look,” Mr. Reardon said, “just thank me for giving you the chance and get off the field.”

Danny got out of there as fast as he could, but once he passed the guard at the gate he had to double over just to breathe. Then he went to stand in the shade of a gumbo-limbo tree and he could see through the fence that the rookie who had pitched to him was now pitching to another rookie, a real joker who stuck his tongue out at the pitcher. And as soon as the rookie threw a curveball Danny could see that the pitcher had gone easy on him, because now the ball went faster than seemed imaginable and the kid up at bat hit it farther than Danny Shapiro could have if he had hit balls for the rest of his life. The rookie batter was a nothing, a nobody, he probably wouldn't even make the final cut, but as soon as he hit the curveball Danny knew he didn't have a chance. Not now. Not ever.

He used almost all that was left of his money to buy a one-way plane ticket to La Guardia and a box of oranges for his mother. He never had the chance to buy a pair of cowboy boots and he left the sunglasses on the shelf above the sink in his motel. When he got back to New York he took a cab home and he told his mother it was nothing, he just had to get away, and he told the same thing to Mr. Hennessy, who came over to talk to him because Gloria Shapiro had filed a missing persons report. He wasn't missing at all, he told Hennessy as they sat across from each other in the Shapiros' living room, and Hennessy assured Gloria that all boys had a wild week in them, it was natural, it was better for them to let it out and take off than to end up like Raymond Niles. They had oranges all through April, cut into quarters and made into thick, pulpy juice. On garbage nights Danny always took the silver cans out without having to be asked, and he listened to the sound of the Southern State as he lined them up on the curb, and when he got into both Columbia and Cornell, he sent back his acceptance to Cornell without thinking twice.

9

WHEN THE LILACS GREW

J
ACKIE
M
C
C
ARTHY DIDN'T SEE
his friends much anymore. He worked down at the station until closing, he avoided bowling alleys and movie theaters, he never took joy rides. He washed the kitchen floor for his mother on Saturday mornings and he watched TV every evening, sometimes falling asleep to it, and he was devastated when Lucy and Desi's divorce became final.

“Ma!” he called when he heard it on the six o'clock news, and Marie had come rushing in from the kitchen, waving a wooden spoon, afraid he'd fallen off the couch and hurt himself. He even sent a present for Little Ricky to the TV studio in Hollywood, a model of a race car he'd put together and painted on Saturday nights. Marie urged him to go out at night. Go to a movie, she suggested. Get yourself a date. Jackie smiled and insisted he had better things to do, but the truth was he was afraid of the dark. He was afraid of more things than he'd ever thought possible, including his brother's dog, who was now full grown and huge, a hundred and twenty pounds. Whenever Jackie and the dog were alone in the house the dog bared his teeth and made a horrible sound, as if he had swallowed a chain saw. If anyone else in the family was home, Rudy kept his head on his paws, but the ruff around his neck stood straight up and his eyes never left Jackie. Sometimes, late at night, Jackie would hear a rapping at the window.

“It's no one, man,” Jackie would whisper to himself, but then he'd look and see that the dog was staring at the dark window, his head tilted to one side, listening.

Jackie vowed to be even better, purer. When anyone left a car to be worked on he'd drive the customer to his job and pick him up again in the evening, and he'd deliver every car with the ashtray cleaned out and the front and back windshields washed. In that first week of May, when the buds of the maples looked yellow and then green, depending on the angle of light, Jackie hung up his black leather jacket in the basement and went to Robert Hall's to buy a blue suit, just like the one the Saint wore every Easter. He went to the barber, and the Saint nodded, surprised and pleased, when he came home with his hair cut short. They didn't talk much while working side by side at the station, but they didn't have to. Every morning, Jackie would make coffee in the aluminum percolator. Every evening, at closing, he'd sweep the garage and the office. They had a calm, wordless routine, disrupted only on Saturdays, when Ace came to work. Most of the time Ace just pumped gas and came into the office to make change, but whenever he ventured into the garage, Jackie couldn't work. He'd feel Ace staring at him, he'd start thinking about ghosts and bad blood and he'd get clumsy and screw up his jobs, and he'd find himself cursing under his breath, which wasn't like him at all anymore.

One Saturday in May, when the wisteria was blooming and the lilacs in the backyards were filled with tight buds, Jackie couldn't stand it anymore. Ace's eyes were burning into his back, and when he got up from the dolly he'd been sitting on he shouted, “Cut it out.”

Ace just kept staring at him, so Jackie got up, grabbed his brother, and pushed him up against the wall.

“Stop looking at me!” Jackie shouted.

Ace kept right on looking, a satisfied grin on his face, as though Jackie had just proved him right in his opinion of him. Ace didn't fight back, but the dog rushed in from the shadows of the gas pumps with all his hair on end, stopping in front of Jackie and barking like a dog from hell.

“Get out of here,” Jackie told him, but Rudy circled around the brothers, getting closer all the time. Jackie let go of Ace and backed off, but the dog kept circling, catching the leg of Jackie's uniform pants in his teeth.