When the Nines Roll Over (15 page)

I parked the Eldorado and walked over to the baseball diamond. I found Tommy in the outfield, shagging fly balls. He played baseball, basketball, and football, he wasn't much good at any of them, but he never missed a practice. He saw me coming and threw down his glove. I walked up to him, waiting for him to swing. I knew I deserved it but I also knew that if Tommy punched me I would have to punch him back, that once I started on him it would take the whole baseball team to tear me off, that Tommy would get hurt and I would be labeled a bully. He never swung. I handed him the keys and started to speak but Tommy turned away from me and walked off the field, leaving his mitt behind. A baseball hit the grass a few feet from me and I picked it up and threw it back to the batting cage, where the coach was hitting fun-goes with an aluminum bat.

Maureen and Hershey Park seemed very far behind me, very distant, as if they were another boy's memories, stolen with the Eldorado, returned now to their rightful owner. I sat in the grass and watched the baseballs fall from the blue sky into the outfielders' waiting gloves.

Fourteen years later I was at home by myself, watching a rental movie on the VCR, an old James Cagney gangster flick. Midway through came a few seconds of static and then two sweating black men, one of them on his knees giving the other a blow job. For almost a minute I stared at the screen, trying to figure out what all this had to do with bank heists, fedoras, Tommy guns. The man getting sucked off had the most amazing smile on his face—the gates of paradise were opened wide and he was marching through, saints by his side. I've never smiled like that, I said to myself; I never will smile like that. What am I doing with this life?

It's not what you're thinking. I didn't decide that what I really needed was a blow job from a black man. Maybe that's exactly what I need, maybe that's the cure for all that ails me, but that's not where my mind was going. I thought: this is
me
, this is how it goes, not one movie with logical plot progression but a wild medley of every genre: porno and screw-ball comedy and teen romance and horror. No cowboys, not yet, and no starships, but give it time.

I pushed the stop button and imagined the laughter of some bored prankster, rubbing his palms with glee as he hatched this scheme weeks or months before. Whoever he was, he knocked me for a loop. I sat on the sofa for an hour with the lights and television off, with no beer in my hand, with no sounds at all to disturb me except the occasional car passing on Rickover Street.

I had always expected to be famous. I figured I'd play professional football and there would be a room in Mahlus High devoted to my memorabilia; I would appear with my model wife in television commercials for the United Way; in the postgame interviews my quarterback would never forget to thank me for saving his ass. Things didn't work out. Senior year of college I broke my neck blocking on a halfback sweep; I was paralyzed for sixteen hours and the doctors thought it might be for life. The surgeons fused two vertebrae and a month later I was relearning how to walk.

My father sat with me in the hospital room day after day. One morning I started crying and could not stop. I told him how sorry I was, because I knew how much he loved watching me play. I told him that it felt like I had lost a fight,
the
fight, that I wasn't tough enough, and my father shook his head and said there never was a fight. It was just an accident. I said it
was
a fight and I lost. My father could not look at me. He watched the floor and repeated that it was just an accident, and even if it was a fight, there was no shame in losing a fight—everyone but Rocky Marciano did.

When graduation came I sat with the rest of my class in our black gowns and mortarboards. I had lost eighty pounds since the accident. My old shirts flopped around my shoulders, mocking me with the memory of when I was huge. When my name was called over the loudspeaker, I stood up and walked very deliberately to the platform, climbed the four steps—left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot—and accepted my diploma from the beaming university president. She stood on her tiptoes to kiss me on the forehead and everybody there—the seniors, their parents, the alumni, the faculty—stood up and cheered for a minute straight.
Le-on! Le-on! Le-on!

At the end of that summer dad took me into his office and began teaching me the insurance business. It turned out I was made for it. People around Mahlus knew who I was, they remembered what had happened to me, and that was always good for starting conversations. “We were rooting for you,” they would tell me. “We prayed for you.”

After seven years my father decided I had figured the racket out. When he turned sixty he announced that he was sick to death of winter. He bought a house in Jupiter, Florida, and moved down there with my mother and little brother, leaving me to run the business, and I've done all right so far. I work hard. Some nights I go drinking with friends, other nights I stay home and watch the sitcoms or a rented movie.

On that night, the night of the Cagney/blow job prank, I couldn't get the porn actor's smile out of my mind. He was happiness. He was exactly where he wanted to be. Only two things ever made me that happy, football and women, but these days I'm not much of a football fan. I only loved the sport because I was good at it; I was made for the game. I'm too goddamn big for anything else.

Football couldn't make me happy anymore, so I thought about women. Ex-girlfriends, one-night stands, insurance brokers I knew from work, friends from college who had married and disappeared from my life, women I saw at the gym, my buddies' wives. I got them all partying in the same nightclub in my mind, and I looked at them from every angle—their smiles, their thighs, their ankles—and I listened to bits of conversation, snippets of dialogue I remembered from various encounters. They were all there, looking as good as they ever had, speaking their most memorable lines. And I was happy keeping them in that imagined nightclub. I didn't have any desire to yank them into my reality—the dark living room, the sofa, me.

A new girl walked into this party and I studied her face. She was familiar but I could not place her until my mind's camera panned down and recorded her paint-splattered T-shirt, her denim cutoffs, her bare and dirty feet.

After fourteen years Maureen's face had blurred and finally disappeared from memory. Now, though, in my empty living room, I could see her again perfectly: her brown eyes, her chipped front teeth, her home-cut dirty-blond hair.

In college I loved telling people about the stolen Eldorado. First, because it's a true story, and second, because it made it sound as if my adolescence were impossibly dramatic, as if my life would be made into a road movie starring a brooding teenager who flicks his cigarette butts into the gutter and wins fistfights started by big men with tattoos. Except I was the big man with tattoos and nobody wanted to film my life.

After remembering Maureen's face and how comfortable I had felt with her, how happy we had been for five hours, I wondered where she was and if she had already found her man. For some reason I doubted it; for some reason I was positive that she was sitting in the dark somewhere, alone, remembering faces.

The next morning, a Monday, I called my secretary and told her I would be in Pennsylvania for the day, scouting a few leads. I couldn't remember if Maureen had ever told me her last name. She had given me her number, she had written it on the back of a Hershey wrapper, but I had lost it years before. The first few weeks after we met I was too nervous to call, and then I got scared that she had already forgotten me, and then came junior year and a spectacular season and I grew cocky. If I could chance upon girls like her in a no-account town, what beauties waited for me in the big city?

By the time I got to college, Maureen was just a story I told. The thing about breaking your neck is it humbles you in a hurry. It's hard staying arrogant when you have a halo brace screwed into your skull, when a nurse comes each morning to empty your catheter bag, when your father pulls your lip down so he can brush the bottom teeth. By the time I realized that I might have missed a real catch in Maureen, I didn't want to interfere with my favorite memory.

That Monday morning I decided such hesitation was cowardice. I was going to find her. All I knew was her Christian name and her teenage face, but I had a plan.

It was October and only one cloud stretched across the morning sky, a fish-skeleton floating toward the western horizon. I drove to the supermarket in my new Toyota Land Cruiser and bought a bag of Hershey's Kisses as good-luck charms. Returning to my car I saw a record store in the same strip mall, so I went in and bought
London Calling
on compact disk. Joe Strummer's guitar still sounded good and I thumped the steering wheel with the palms of my hands as I got on Route 202 and headed west. After crossing the Delaware I stopped in New Hope and tracked down Thomas Sweet's. I paid for my ice cream with cash this time and ate it while staring through the windows of the ubiquitous antiques shops. Antiques still bored me, I was relieved to note.

North Wales was as I remembered it, except that the hardware store and the ninety-nine-cent store were gone, replaced by a Sam's Club. I drove out of town to where the farmland began, hoping to see the exact spot where I had first met Maureen on her bicycle. It took me five minutes to realize there was no chance I would find it. And what if I did? What was I expecting to discover there, a bronze marker commemorating the meeting?

I drove back into town and stopped at the barbershop. Inside the barber sat alone on his swivel chair, reading the newspaper. He stood up when I entered and gestured for me to sit. I wished that I needed a cut, the barber could have used the business, but I'd had one a few days before.

“I'm just looking for the high school,” I told him. “You know where the high school is?”

“Which high school you want? Kulpsville?”

“Isn't this North Wales?”

“Sure is,” said the barber. “But there's no high school here. Nearest one's in Kulpsville. Just hit the 202 north a couple miles. You'll see the clock tower from the road.”

When I got to Kulpsville High the day had gotten warm enough for me to leave my coat in the car. The football field lay adjacent to the parking lot, the cheerleaders were practicing, and I thought, hey, cheerleaders. I walked over to watch. The way I walk these days, most people can't tell I ever had a bad accident. My strides are shorter than they used to be, and my back gets stiff when I'm tired, forcing me to shuffle along like an old man, but for the most part I make my way without much trouble.

A few lanky boys were sprawled in the bleachers, drinking Yoo-Hoo, flicking the bottle caps with their thumbs and catching them. They watched me approach.

“How's it going?” I asked, sitting down in the front row.

The boy sitting closest to me wore sunglasses and a beaded necklace and had bleached-blond hair. He wasn't planning on saying anything but I stared at him until he mumbled, “What's up?”

I realized that I was being an asshole, that I didn't belong here, that I had been a cool kid once but that didn't matter at all to the new cool kids. So I waved good-bye to the boys and could feel them watching me, wondering what that had been about. I walked onto the football field. The cheerleaders, pha lanxed on the cinder track, stared at me suspiciously. The smell of cut grass, the painted yard markers, the cleat marks in the turf—it had been a long time since I stood on a grid-iron. The scoreboard still recorded last week's game: Marauders 17, Visitors 0. The local boys played good defense.

Inside the school building was the old familiar smell: sweating adolescents, ammonia, drying paint, coffee, chalk dust, and chewing gum. The entry hall served as a large trophy room, glass cases filled with tarnished bowls and statuettes, plaques on the walls commemorating athletes now dead or middle-aged. Carved pumpkins grinned at me from the window ledges and the doorways were trimmed with orange-and-black crepe paper. I walked down carpeted corridors and up narrow staircases, the wooden banisters burnished by thousands of children's palms. The walls on the second floor were festooned with old photographs: team pictures, class pictures, ornately framed portraits of dead teachers. There were hooks for hanging book bags, red exit signs, ancient water fountains.

At last I found the library, a cramped room featuring a short row of bookshelves and lead-glass windows that hadn't been washed in years. Students pretending to read squirmed in plastic chairs that lined the walls. The librarian sat at her desk, inserting new magazines into plastic covers. She was young and clean-looking, her black bangs cut straight across her forehead like the hairstyle of Chinese girls you see in old pictures. She smiled up at me.

“Could you tell me where to find the old yearbooks?” I asked her.

“Of course,” she said, standing up. “Alumnus?”

“Excuse me?”

“Did you graduate from Kulpsville? I was a '90.”

I wanted to tell her that I knew what alumnus meant, that her one-word question had confused me as it might have confused many intelligent men, but I just said, “No, I'm looking for a friend.”

She nodded as if people constantly came to her looking for old friends, as if that were her real job and the Dewey decimal system and snot-nosed kids were just a cover. I followed her to the back of the library where she unlocked a door and led me into a dusty inventory room. Cardboard boxes sat on metal shelves. She knelt down beside a stack of yearbooks.

“
The Kulpsville Marauder
, 1959 through 1998. What year did your friend graduate?”

“Around 1987 or 1988, I guess.”

She pulled out four yearbooks and handed them to me. “He'll probably be in one of these, then. What's his last name?”