The Evening News (12 page)

She said hold me honey, hey, and she touched me and I touched her and she was wet and smelled like strawberries and her mouth nipped my neck as I held her. She said Mike, do you like me I mean really do you like me, and I said yes, Suzy, that's a crazy question I really like you, and she held me and made me stop and we sat up when we heard her mother coming up from the basement.

The next weekend I bought some Trojans, and Ronny lent me his car for the night. But before I went to pick her up the two of us got a little drunk in his garage. Ronny said I'd better try one first to make sure they weren't defective. He said people in those places prick them with pins all the time just for laughs, and I said yeah, I sure hope this thing'll hold, and Ronny said there's seventeen years of it built up inside of you, remember, and I said damn, maybe she'll explode, and he said she'd better not on my upholstery, and we laughed and he threw a punch at me and we drank another beer and then blew one up and it held good and we let it fly outside in the alley.

The back seat was cold and cramped, and Suzy cried when it was over, and we wiped up the blood with a rag. It meant something, I thought, and I started taking going steady a little more serious after that.

It must have been the next month that her mother started in on me. She was young then and still very pretty for a woman who'd had three kids, and she began out of nowhere saying little things like here, Mike, take a chair, and did you really hurt your back or is there some other reason why you quit the
team? I had always tried to be polite to her. Then Suzy started to get on me, asking me sometimes exactly what was I doing when I pulled my back, how was I standing, and couldn't I maybe try out for track or baseball or something in the spring? I couldn't figure where they were coming from, and I tried to explain that even before I got hurt I hadn't been that good a football player, that I'd been on the team simply because I'd liked to run and play catch with my father on fall afternoons. Suzy's father seemed to understand, and he'd tell me stories about his old high school team, funny stories about crazy plays and the stuff the players wore that was supposed to be their equipment, and then sometimes he'd get serious and say it wasn't a sport anymore at all now, that it was a real butcher shop, a game for the biggest sides of beef, and if he had a son he'd let the boy play if he wanted to but he'd hope his kid would have the good sense to know when to quit. Because all athletes have to quit sooner or later, he said. Everyone quits everything sooner or later. The trick is knowing how and when. Toward the end I got to know him a little. I'd go over there sometimes even when I didn't feel like seeing Suzy but when I knew there was a game or something else good on TV, and once the three of them came over to my house in the city and the three of us, me and my father and Suzy's father, sat around and shot the breeze and had ourselves a good time, and we must have drunk a whole case of beer, and Suzy and her mother ended up out by themselves talking in the kitchen.

Suzy's father asked me how I quit the team, and told me once he had worked for a guy and after a while he realized he was getting nowhere. He said even though they already had Suzy and needed every penny they could get, one day he sat down with his boss and told him that he simply couldn't work there any longer. He said Mike, there are things sometimes that you just have to do, but you need to learn that it's almost as important to go about doing them in a decent way. I told him that maybe I had been a little hotheaded with the coaches.

He said he respected me for what I did, on account of it showed that things mattered to me, but maybe staying on the team and picking up a few splinters on the sidelines might have been a better way to go about doing it.

I knew even back then that me and Suzy weren't going to last long, and then I started realizing that what we were doing was serious business, especially if Suzy got pregnant. I was cool toward her then. It was around this time that I found out from the guys at school that she had gone out on the sly with another guy. This guy, she told me when I asked her about it, was her second cousin who was having some temporary trouble finding himself a date. I laughed good at that and said damn it, at least if you would've told me I wouldn't have had to hear it from the guys, and we both found out then that I really didn't much care. We had a long talk then, and then for a while things went O.K.

For a while. Until May, until I was walking down the second-floor corridor at school and I got wind from Larry Souza, a guy who was dating one of Suzy's friends, about a surprise six months' happy-going-steady party Suzy was going to throw for me, with all the girls from Scholastica and the guys from Saint George invited too and even some kind of a cake, with
MIKE
&
SUZY
in bright red icing written on the top, and me and Ronny were sitting in his garage late one night drinking some beer and talking, and then we were thinking wouldn't it be something if I didn't show, wouldn't that be a real kicker, and then the night of the big party comes along, with me expected to drop by at around nine, just another date, Mike, maybe we'll stay home, sit around and watch a movie on TV or maybe if the folks aren't home we can sneak downstairs after the little ones go to bed and you know what, and at eight me and Ronny are in his garage scraping spark plugs and still talking about it and laughing, and at eight-thirty we need just a drop more of beer so we drive out, and by nine we're stopping by the lake because Ronny thinks he sees an old girlfriend racing down Pratt Street on her bicycle and
I'm saying damn, Ronny, that girl must be thirty-five years old but we drive there anyway and end up sitting on the trunk of his old Chevy sharing another six-pack, still laughing, and then we meet some kids who've got a football and Jesus it's a beautiful night, a gorgeous night in May, and we pick sides and then some girls come along and we ask if they want to play, it's only touch, and below the waist and not in the front, honest, and we've got some beer left in the car if you're thirsty first hey come on, and I'm guarding this goon who couldn't even tie his own shoes by himself let alone run in a straight line and on the very first play Ronny is throwing to him high and hard and the clown falls down and I move up and over him and make the interception, easy, and I'm laughing so hard I stop right where I catch it and let the boob tag me, here, tag me, I'm going nowhere, I'll tag myself, hey everybody, please tag me, laughing so hard and we play until past eleven when a police Park Control car comes crunching up the cinder track and this big cop gets out and says all right kids, the park is closed, and one of the girls says please officer please, have a heart, why don't you take off your gun and stick around and play, and the big cop says sorry, wish to Christ I could, and we all laugh at that, and then Ronny and I say hey who wants to go for a ride and two of the girls say sure, where, and Ronny looks at me and shrugs and I say damn, anywhere is O.K. by me, so we all get in and we drive and drive and drive, nearly all the way up to Wisconsin, the four of us drinking what beer is left and stopping here and there along the road to see if we can buy some more, I'm sorry, come back in three years, they say, and I'm telling this girl who looks like the Statue of Liberty holding up her cigarette the way girls do in the dark car with the tip of it all glowing all about what I did that night, and she says can you picture them all waiting and then you don't show, surprise, and then we have ourselves a contest to see who can guess what kind of cake it was and Ronny says chocolate and his girl guesses pineapple but my girl comes up with angel food and we laugh and say she wins, I give her her
prize, a kiss, and damn she kisses back, hard, and then Ronny stops on this quiet road in the middle of the blackness and says hey, where do you want to go now, and I say Canada, and my girl says take a left, and Ronny turns and says what's left, and his girl says we're left and I want to stay right here, and damn that is funny and we drive and drive and drive, and it's long past three and silent like a church when I finally get to my house.

My dad is awake and angry, worried that I'd been in an accident. They called here four times, Mike, he says, and what can I tell them I don't even know where my own son is. When I tell him what happened he says that was a downright shitty thing to do, then he shakes his head and says what would your mother have thought? I think of Suzy's father, how I never thought that he might have been worried, and my father says you should call them right now and apologize. I say it's late, too late to bother them, and he says you're old enough now to think for yourself, do what you do, I'm going to bed.

I didn't call there for a couple of days and by then Suzy had found out what happened. The first thing she said was when can you pick up your ring? I said hey Suzy, I don't want you to give me my ring back, and she said that ring must've cost you forty dollars, and we start to argue.

Her youngest sister answered the door, looking like Suzy must have when she was that young, and you know I bet like her mother too, clean-faced, eyes all shining, with freckles across the bridge of her nose. She tells me to come in. I try to smile to make her smile, but then her father comes down the stairs coughing into a handkerchief and holding my ring in an envelope. I tried to talk to him, to explain, but I didn't know what to say.

Now I drive for Cook County. A GMC truck and mostly light construction materials for building projects. It's not a bad job. A year or so after I finished high school Suzy's mother died, some kind of crazy disease that I guess she knew all about before but didn't tell anyone about, and when I heard I
drove out to the house. Her father came to the door and told me Suzy was out. I said I came to see you. He nodded then, looking at me. Then instead of inviting me in he told me that he was busy packing to move to his sister's out East, and then he said he'd tell Suzy I stopped by and that I should be sure to thank my father for the sympathy card he'd sent.

When we'd kiss she'd close her eyes and keep them closed, tight, and I'd look at her sometimes in the back seat of Ronny's old Chevy going up the street with the bands of light moving across her face. And once when we were at the lake she took my hand and said Mike, do you ever just think about it? I asked what, and she said oh nothing, Mike, I guess I just mean about things.

The coaches hollered at me after that interception, like I was a damn rookie sophomore. They said I caught the ball and stood still. But they were wrong—as sure as I know my own name I know I ran. My body moved up and toward the ball, it struck my hands and then my numbers, I squeezed it and went for the goal line. I think about that sometimes when I'm hauling, and sometimes I pull over on Central Avenue and look at the red bricks and striped awnings. I think of Suzy and her father. I grip the truck's wheel, my engine idling.

The forsythia yellowed the northern city's spring, and Luke wanted to get drunk as he lay in bed and once again began to read Melissa's letter. The smoke from his cigarette curled golden in the room. The coffee in the mug next to him grew cool. At the foot of the bed sprawled Peaches, the mongrel retriever, sleeping atop a pair of Janet's dirty blue jeans. Janet was Luke's wife. She'd left in her usual rush of open dresser drawers and dripping faucets—her hair dryer, still plugged in, perched precariously on the lip of the bathroom sink—a half hour before Peaches's sharp barks at the mailman brought Luke out of his dream and to his feet, fumbling for his robe, wincing as he stepped on one of Janet's barrettes hiding open in the bedroom carpet. When he finally stumbled to the apartment's back door to let the dog into the tiny yard he smelled the warm promise of the changing season, and then he saw a jay light at the no-longer-frozen birdbath, and he heard the jay sing its name. Luke thought to put out seed for the jay and for the brown thrashers and the towhees that sometimes came to scratch and the two male cardinals that fought now and then near the clothesline, but then he remembered that this wasn't Virginia, even though he was looking at a jay. This was—Then the forsythia's bright gaze distracted him. He caught his breath. Wagging her tail, Peaches chased the jay away.

In the hesitant sunlight the forsythia stood, a golden shock. It had lived, Luke realized. And now it blossomed. Luke smiled, scratching the hair on his chest. Wait until he told Forrest and Gambino. And Janet, even Janet hadn't been sure. Standing with arms folded, back in Virginia, where they lived two blocks from the Elizabeth River and two miles from the Chesapeake Bay. Paradise. “What are you doing, Luke, will you look at me, are you crazy?” Luke on his knees in the black mud. The U-Haul backed up to the front porch. Her fault they had to move: her life, her career. Opportunity. But Luke said he understood. He went along with it. Dawn, and while Janet packed what was left in the refrigerator and then remembered to prop open the door with a stick he took the shovel and an old sheet from out of the truck and began digging. “Janet, can't you see?” The root ball nearly unearthed. “But it'll die up north, Luke.” Writhing worms, the smell of rotting leaves. The dirt dark-green beneath the tips of his fingernails. “No it won't, Janet.” Peaches playing, trying to steal the sheet. Ignoring the gray squirrel that stole the last of the birds' seed. “I sure hope not, Luke, but I still say you're crazy.” Luke bound the root ball in the muddy sheet, then walked for the last time through the now-empty house, smudging all the doors he closed. Below, the U-Haul's impatient exhaust whitened the air around the front porch.

Luke stared from the back porch at the forsythia. The new landlord said he didn't mind just as long as the dog didn't dig holes. She ain't a digger, is she? No, Luke said. He laughed. I'm the digger. Well, I don't want no holes. Chicago wasn't that bad once you got used to the traffic and the crowds and the gray winter sky. The trees with no leaves. The wind and the cold and the snow. Luke watched Peaches run the narrow width of the yard. At first the snow fell as beautifully as the snow on that beer commercial with the Clydesdales on TV. But then it turned to filthy slush and froze. Nothing like a stretch of wet slush to put the old bounce in your step. Joking
with Gambino and Forrest at the new agency. Janet was tearing up the ladder, and Luke tried to make new friends. Her working days growing longer as the winter days grew short. Why go home after work to an empty house? The two men introduced him to Rush Street. Warm enough there in the crowded, steamy bars, and after a few drinks—well, you could almost think you were back in Norfolk at a little place along the Bay, the freckled waitress bringing you a plateful of oysters, Janet squeezing your arms as she filled your ear with the news of her new show. How she had most of the funny lines. How she was born to play Noel Coward. How even the assistant director cracked up during the confrontation scene, and wouldn't he come to a rehearsal to give her notes? She needed his raw, untrained reaction. Oysters clean and cold, sweet taste of shell. Janet's high cheeks always flushed when she talked about theater. Her full lips, long hair. Luke's blood thinned as she gradually began to outgrow the town next to the river and the Bay, but when he saw her on the stage— He stared hard at the forsythia. When the curtain rose on Janet she'd be bigger than the theater. Her voice would fill the house. The applause would crack like pistol shots whenever she made her exit, and she never played to them or milked them, and when she was blocked upstage she played upstage. All of it made Luke happy. He had his job at the modest agency, and Janet's popularity helped his sales. After a successful run new clients would call in, asking the receptionist for Janet's husband. And when she was in rehearsal he had the dog and the large yard, his tools and his bags of peat moss in the shed, and throughout the spring and summer there was hardly a day when at least one flower was not in bloom. Luke loved his flowers and each opening night heaped them on Janet. Their life in Virginia had been as full as the ripe figs he let swell and burst on the drooping tree for the hungry mockingbirds who ate the insects that swarmed on the bursting figs.