Cloudbursts

by Thomas McGuane

  Owen would walk home, reflecting on the game, his hits, if he’d had any, his errors and fielding accomplishments. His parents dined late and by candlelight, in an atmosphere that was disquieting to Owen and at odds with thoughts about baseball. He eventually gave up on family dinners altogether and fed himself on cold cereal. Sometimes he arrived home in time for an argument, his father booming over his mother’s more penetrating vehemence. There were times when his parents seemed to be entertaining themselves this way, and times when they seemed to draw blood. Owen would flip his glove onto the hall bench and slip upstairs to his room and his growing collection of hubcaps. He’d still never been caught. He had once been on probation with the Kershaws, though: Doug, hiding in the bushes with a flashlight, had caught him soaping their windows on Halloween, but winter had absolved him, and by baseball season he was back in their good graces. He still didn’t know why he had done it. The Kershaws’ was the only house he’d pranked, and it was the home of people he cherished. He’d wanted contact with them, but it had come out wrong.

  * * *

  —

  Owen sat with Ben on the school bus every morning. Half asleep, his lunch box on his lap, he listened to Ben ramble on in his disjointed way about the baseball standings, his mouth falling open between assertions—“If Jerry Priddy didn’t hold the bat so high, he could hit the ball farther”—and his crooked arms mimicking the moves he described: George Kell’s signature scoop at third or Phil Rizzuto’s stretch to loosen his sleeve after throwing someone out. Only Ben, whose bed was like a pass between two mountains of Baseball Digest back issues, would have remembered that Priddy had torn up Rizzuto’s fan letters. Yet in almost every other way, he was slow and easily influenced by anyone who took the trouble: Chick Terrell lost a year of Kershaw baseball for sending Ben on a snipe hunt.

  The MacIlhatten twins, Janet and Janice, sat at the back of the bus, two horsey, scheming freshmen who dressed alike, enjoyed pretending to be each other, and amused themselves by playing tricks on Ben, hiding his hat or talking him out of the Mars bar in his lunch box. They laughed at his blank stare or repeated everything he said until he sat silent in defeat. Idle malice was their game, and, because they were superior students, they got little resistance from adults. Not entirely pretty themselves, they were brutal to Patty Seitz and Sandy Collins, two unattractive girls unlucky enough to ride the same bus, who quietly absorbed the twins’ commentary on their skin, their hair, their Mary Jane shoes, and their Mickey Mouse lunch boxes. Only Stanley Ayotte, who was often suspended, except during football season, when he was a star, stood up to the twins, and to their intervening mother, actually calling them bitches. They flirted with Stanley anyway, though he ignored it.

  Owen felt the twins’ contemplation of his friendship with Ben: they were watching. At school, they disappeared down the corridor and forgot about him, but on the bus at the end of the day they resumed their focus. His rapt absorption in Ben’s recitation of baseball statistics seemed to annoy them, but, because they understood nothing about the subject, he had been safe so far.

  The school knew about Ben’s love of sports. His schoolwork was managed with compassion, but water boy for the football team was the best the teachers could come up with on the field. Still, it was a job he loved, running out in front of the crowded bleachers with a tray of water-filled paper cups.

  * * *

  —

  Church. Owen hated church and fidgeted his way from beginning to end. Or maybe not all of it, not the part where he stared at some girl like Cathy Hansen, the plumber’s beautiful daughter. The moment when Cathy turned from the Communion rail, her hands clasped in front of her face in spiritual rapture, took Owen to a dazed and elevated place. He wondered how such a girl could stand to listen to a priest drone on about how to get to heaven. Cathy must have registered his attention. After Mass, she sometimes tried to exchange a pleasantry, but Owen could only impersonate disdain from his reddening face, his agony noticed with amusement by his mother, when she wasn’t gazing down the sidewalk in search of a good spot for a cigarette. After contemplating the suffering of Christ, she needed a bit of relief. Owen’s father had slipped an Ellery Queen novel into the covers of a daily missal; he kept his eye on the page, presenting a picture of piety. He saw his presence at the weekly service as an expression of his solidarity with the community, sitting, standing, or kneeling following cues provided by the parishioners around him.

  The slow drive home after church was a trial for Owen, who could picture the game already under way on the Kershaws’ diamond. Slow because they had to creep past the Ingrams’ driveway. Old Bradley Ingram had married the much-younger Julie, who claimed to have been a Radio City dancer but was suspected of having been a stripper at the downtown Gaiety Burlesque House. Now they were separated. Bradley had moved into the Sheraton, and Julie was still in their home, receiving, it was said, all-night visitors. Julie did not mingle locally, and so no information could be gotten from her. The best Owen’s parents could do was check out her driveway on the way home from church.

  His father stopped the car so that they could peer between the now-unkempt box hedges. His mother said, “It’s a Buick Roadmaster.”

  “I can’t see the plates. I don’t have my glasses.”

  “They’re Monroe.”

  “That tells us nothing.”

  “Really?” His mother blew smoke at the ceiling of their Studebaker. “Last week it was a Cadillac.”

  “She’s coming down in the world.”

  “Not by much,” his mother said, and they drove on.

  Owen was required to stay at the table for Sunday lunch, which went on until the middle of the afternoon. Usually, he missed the game.

  * * *

  —

  In the hardwood forest, a shallow swamp immersed the trunks and roots of the trees near the lake. Owen and Ben hunted turtles among the waterweeds and pale aquatic flowers. The turtles sunned themselves on low branches hanging over the water, in shafts of light spotted with dancing dragonflies. Ever alert, the creatures tumbled into the swamp at the first sound, as though wiped from the branches by an unseen hand. The wild surroundings made Ben exuberant. He bent saplings to watch them recoil or shinnied up trees, and he returned home carrying things that interested him—strands of waterweed, bleached muskrat skulls, or the jack-in-the-pulpits he brought to his mother to fend off her irritation at having to wash another load of muddy clothes. Once, Owen caught two of the less vigilant turtles, the size of fifty-cent pieces, with poignant little feet constantly trying to get somewhere that only they knew. Owen loved their tiny perfection, the flexible undersides of their shells, the ridges down their topside that he could detect with his thumbnail. Their necks were striped yellow, and they stretched them upward in their striving. Owen made a false bottom for his lunch box with ventilation holes so that he could always have them with him, despite the rule against taking pets to school or on the school bus. He fed them flies from a bottle cap. Only Ben knew where they were.

  One afternoon, Owen came back from the swamp to find the flashing beacon of the town’s fire truck illuminating the faces of curious neighbors outside his house. He ran up the short length of his driveway in time to see his mother addressing a small crowd as she stood beside two firemen in obsolete leather helmets with brass eagles fixed to their fronts. She looked slightly disheveled in a housedress and golf-club windbreaker, and she spoke in the lofty voice she used when she had been drinking, the one meant to fend off all questions: “Let he who has never had a kitchen grease fire cast the first stone!” She laughed. “Blame the television. Watching The Guiding Light. Mea culpa. A soufflé.” Owen felt the complete bafflement of the neighborhood as he listened. Then her tone flattened. “Look, the fire’s gone. Good night, one and all.”

  Owen’s father’s car nosed up to the group. His father jumped out, tie loosened, radiating authority. He pushed straight through to the firefighters without glancing at his wife. “Handled?” The s
horter of the two nodded quickly. His father spoke to the neighbors: “Looks like not much. I’ll get the details, I’m sure.” Most had wandered off toward their own homes by then, the Kershaws among the last to go. Owen’s father turned to his wife, who was staring listlessly at the ground, placed his broad hand on the small of her back, and moved her through the front door, which he closed behind him, leaving Owen alone in the yard.

  When Owen went in, his parents were sitting at opposite sides of the kitchen table, the Free Press spread out in front of them. The brown plastic Philco murmured a Van Patrick interview with Birdie Tebbetts: it was the seventh-inning stretch in the Indians game. Owen’s father motioned to him to have a seat, which he did while trying to get the drift of the interview. His mother didn’t look up, except to access the flip lid on her silver ashtray. She held a Parliament between her thumb and middle finger, delicately tapping the ash free with her forefinger. His father flicked the ash from his Old Gold with his thumbnail at the butt of the cigarette and made no particular effort to see that it landed in the heavy glass ashtray by his wrist. Commenting on what he had just read, his father said, “Let’s blow ’em up before they blow us up!”

  “Who’s this?” his mother said, but got no answer. Instead, she turned to Owen. “Your father and I are going to take a break from each other.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “We thought you’d want to know.”

  “Sure.”

  His father lifted his head to glance at Owen, then returned to the paper. Owen knew better than to say a single word, unless it was about the weather. He wanted his parents to be distracted, so that he could fit in more baseball and get any kind of haircut he liked, but he worried about things falling apart entirely. He was unable to picture what might lie beyond that. School, of course, out there like a black cloud.

  His mother said, “Ma said she’d take me in.”

  At this, his father raised his head from the paper. “For God’s sake, Alice, no one is ‘taking you in.’ You’re not homeless.”

  “Why don’t you go someplace, and I’ll stay here? Maybe someone will take you in.”

  “I’ll tell you why: I’ve got a business to run.” His business, which dispatched plumbers and electricians to emergencies, was called Don’t Get Mad, Get Egan and made the sort of living known as decent. With tradesmen on retainer, he worked from an office, a hole-in-the-wall above a florist’s shop. An answering service gave the impression that it was a bigger operation than it was.

  “Ma will think you’ve failed.”

  “Well, you tell Ma I haven’t failed.”

  “No, you tell her, sport.”

  “I’m not calling your mother to tell her that I haven’t failed. That doesn’t make sense. Owen, where have you been? You look like you’ve been in the swamp.”

  “I’ve been in the swamp.”

  “Would you like to add anything to that?”

  “No.”

  His mother stubbed out her cigarette and said, “I think you owe your father a more complete answer, young man.”

  “It’s nothing more than a little old swamp,” Owen said. “Mind turning that up? It’s the top of the eighth.”

  Nobody was going anywhere except back to the newspaper.

  * * *

  —

  Mr. Kershaw was an agricultural chemist for the state—a white-collar position that was much respected locally—but, despite his sophisticated education and job, he was a country boy through and through, with all the practical and improvisatory skills he’d acquired growing up on a subsistence farm. He wore bib overalls on the weekends and had a passion for Native American history. He was interested in anything from the remote past. He had a closet full of Civil War muskets that had been passed down through his family and a cutlass given by a slave on the Underground Railroad to a forebear who had run a safe house on the route to Canada. This same forebear, by family legend, while pretending to help find a runaway, had pushed a Virginia slave hunter out of a rowboat and held him off with an oar until he drowned.

  When baseball was rained out one Saturday, Mr. Kershaw took Owen aside. “How’s everything at your house?”

  “Great,” Owen said suspiciously, assuming he was being asked about the grease fire in the kitchen.

  Mr. Kershaw looked at him closely and said, “Now, Owen, after it rains I hunt arrowheads. The rain washes away the soil around them, and if you’re lucky you can see them. My boys don’t care, but maybe you’d like to come along.”

  * * *

  —

  They drove a few miles to a farm that belonged to a friend of Mr. Kershaw’s. The long plowed rows in front of the farmhouse stretched to a line of trees that shielded the fields from wind off the lake. A depression, not quite plowed in, ran diagonally across the main field, from corner to corner.

  “That was a creek, Owen. The Potawatomi hunted and camped along it. Their palisades were right over there, where you see the stacks of the electric plant. So you go down the left side of the old creek, and I’ll go down the right. If you have anything at all on your mind, you will never find an arrowhead.”

  The two walked in close sight of each other, staring at the ground. From time to time, Mr. Kershaw stooped to examine something, while Owen strained to catch sight of an arrowhead among the stones. At length, Mr. Kershaw summoned him to look at a broken point. Owen was amazed to see how its symmetrical flakes distinguished it from an ordinary stone. When Mr. Kershaw called him over again, he had an arrowhead in his hand, perfect as a jewel. “Bird point,” Mr. Kershaw said, and Owen stared in possessive longing. Mr. Kershaw dropped it into his shirt pocket with a smile. “Don’t think and you’ll find one,” he said.

  Owen resumed the search with greater intensity as they approached the row of trees, whose tops were ignited by lake light. Sticking out of a clod was a pale-white object that Owen picked up and gazed at without recognition. “What’ve you got there?” Mr. Kershaw called. “Bring it here.” Owen crossed the depression and handed it to Mr. Kershaw. “Oh, you lucky boy. It’s a”—he shook dirt from it—“French trade pipe. Indians got them from the trappers such a long time ago. Want to swap for my arrowhead?”

  “Which is worth more?”

  Mr. Kershaw laughed. “Probably your trade pipe, but that’s a good question. So good, in fact, that I’ll give you my arrowhead. Perhaps I’ll find another.” He reached into his shirt pocket, removed the arrowhead, and dropped it, warm, into Owen’s palm, where its glittering perfection nearly overwhelmed him.

  The ground had dried, and by the time Owen got back to the diamond the other boys were choosing up sides. Mike Stallings was captain of one team and Bobby Waldron captain of the other. Owen wanted to put his finds in a safe place; he ran toward his house, a hand pressed over the lumps of arrowhead and clay pipe in his shirt pocket, the late sun starting to flash from the windows of the neighborhood, a lake freighter moaning as it passed to the east.

  * * *

  —

  The early football game with Flat Rock a week later was played under lights and in the mud from another afternoon rain. It was a bloody affair from the start, with poorly understood game plans and pent-up, random excitement among the players. At the end of the first quarter, Ben dashed out with his tray of water, tripped, and fell in a melee of paper cups. The stands erupted in laughter. Owen ran onto the field and squatted beside Ben to pick up the mess, stacking wet cups while Ben stood by, helpless and ashamed. The players waited, hands on hips, while Ben and Owen carried the remains back to the sidelines. The game resumed, and Owen wandered behind the bleachers, hoping that Flat Rock would kick the home team’s asses and give the handful of visitors something to cheer about. He headed over to the parking lot, thinking he might spot some Oldsmobile spinner hubcaps to steal for his collection but settled for a set of Pontiac baby moons, which he stashed in the bushes to be picked up later. The car didn’t look quite the same with its greasy wheel studs exposed, and he really wanted to stop there,
but then he saw Bradley Ingram’s Thunderbird and soon had all four of its dog-dish ten-inch caps.

  On the bus the next morning, the twins were arguing with each other, a welcome change, as it kept their attention away from others. Ben watched them with delight, despite all their teasing. The twins were as knowledgeable about radio hits as Ben was about baseball, and he was drawn to their statistical world. Also, he had begun to notice girls. These days he often sat at the back of the bus by the twins, who seemed to regard him as a trophy stolen from Owen. They sensed that Owen’s popularity was falling, and they enjoyed seeing him sitting by himself. On good days now, Ben was their playmate, their mascot. They alone—thanks to their status—could make liking Ben fashionable. Owen used his new privacy to peek into the false bottom of his lunch box and check on the well-being of his turtles. He liked finding his bottle cap empty of flies. The safety patrol, an unsmiling senior with angry acne and an attitude that went with the official white belt across his chest, had been steadily expanding his list of prohibitions from standing while the bus was in motion to eating from lunch boxes and arm wrestling. He had never bothered Owen but appeared to watch him in expectation of an infraction. Owen watched him back.

  The low autumn light left barely enough time for a few innings after school. The chalk on the base paths had faded into the underlying dirt, and a ring of weeds had formed around third base. Horse chestnuts were strewn across the road between the Kershaws’ house and the diamond. Somehow, partial teams were fielded, though even the meagerest grounders ended up in the outfield, to be run down by Stanley Ayotte, who was proud of his arm and managed to rifle them back. Shortstop had been eliminated for lack of candidates. The score ran up quickly.