The Sportswriter

by Richard Ford

  “How long did you play pro ball, Herb?”

  “Eleven years,” Herb says moodily. “One in Canada. One in Chicago. Then they traded me over here. And I stayed. You know I’ve been reading Ulysses Grant, Frank.” He nods profoundly. “When Grant was dying, you know, he said, ‘I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb signifies to be; to do; to suffer. I signify all three.’” Herb takes off his glasses and holds them in his big linesman’s fingers, examining their frames. His eyes are red. “That has some truth to it, Frank. But what the hell do you think he meant by that? A verb?” Herb looks up at me with a face full of worry. “I’ve been worried about that for weeks.”

  “I couldn’t begin to say, Herb. Maybe he was taking stock. Sometimes we think things are more important than they are.”

  “That doesn’t sound good, though, does it?” Herb looks back at his glasses.

  “It’s hard to say.”

  “Your halo’s gone now, Frank. You know it? You’ve become like the rest of the people.”

  “That’s okay, isn’t it? I don’t mind.” It’s pretty clear to me that Herb suffers from some damned serious mood swings and in all probability has missed out on a stabilizing pill. Possibly this is his gesture of straight-talk and soul-baring, but I don’t think it will make for a very good interview. Interviews always go better when athletes feel fairly certain about the world and are ready to comment on it.

  “I’ll just tell you what I think it means,” Herb says, narrowing his weakened eyes. “I think he thought he’d just become an act. You understand that, Frank? And that act was dying.”

  “I see.”

  “And that’s terrible to see things that way. Not to be but just to do.”

  “Well, that was just how Grant saw things, Herb. He had some other wrong ideas, too. Plenty of them.”

  “This is goddamn real life here, Frank. Get serious!” Herb’s face struggles with the fiercest intensity, then just as promptly goes blank. “I was just reading the other day that Americans always feel like the real life is somewhere else. Down the road, around the bend. But this is it right here.” Herb cracks his palms on his armrests again. “You know what I’m getting at Frank?”

  “I think so, Herb. I’m trying.”

  “God damn it!” Herb breathes a savage sigh. “You haven’t even taken any notes yet.”

  “I keep it up here, Herb,” I say and give my head a poke.

  Herb stares up at me darkly. “You know what it’s like to lose the use of your legs, Frank?”

  “No I don’t, Herb. I guess that’s pretty obvious.”

  “Have you ever had someone close to you die?”

  “Yes.” I could actually see myself getting angry at Herb before this is over.

  “Okay,” Herb says. “Your legs go silent, Frank. I can’t hear mine anymore.” Herb smiles a wild smile at me meant to indicate there might be a hell of a lot more I don’t know about the world. People, of course, are always getting you all wrong. Because you come to interview them, they automatically think you’re just using them to confirm the store of what’s already known in the world. But where I’m concerned, that couldn’t be wronger. It’s true I have expected a different Herb Wallagher from the Herb Wallagher I’ve found, a stouter, chin-out, better tempered kind of guy, a guy who’d pick up the back of a compact car to help you out of a jam if he could. And what I found is someone who seems as dreamy as a barn owl. But the lesson is not new to me. You can’t go into these things thinking you know what can’t be known. That ought to be rule one in every journalism class and textbook; too much of life, even the life you think you should know, the life of athletes, can’t be foreseen.

  There is major silence now that Herb has told me what it’s like not to have his legs to use. It is not an empty moment, not for me anyway, and I am not discouraged. I would still like to think there’s the possibility for a story here. Maybe by going off his medicine Herb will finally come back to his senses with some unexpected and interesting ideas to bring up and end up talking a blue streak. That happens every day.

  “Do you ever miss playing football, Herb?” I say, and smile hopefully.

  “What?” Herb is drawn back from a muse the glassy lake has momentarily fostered. He looks at me as though he had never seen me before. I hear trucks pounding the interstate corridor to Lansing. The wind has wandered back now and a chill picks up off the black water.

  “Do you ever miss athletics?”

  Herb stares at me reproachfully. “You’re an asshole, Frank, you know that?”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You don’t know me.”

  “That’s what I’m doing here, Herb. I’d like to get to know you and write a damn good story about you. Paint you as you are. Because I think that’s pretty interesting and complex in itself.”

  “You’re just an asshole, Frank, yep, and you’re not going to get any inspiration out of me. I dropped all that. I don’t have to do for anybody, and that means you. Especially you, you asshole. I don’t play ball anymore.” Herb plucks a piece of the toilet paper off his cheek and peers at it for blood.

  “I’m ready to give up on inspiration, Herb. It was just a place to start.”

  “Do you want to hear the dream I have over and over?” Herb rolls the paper between his fingers, then pushes himself out toward the end of the dock. I sit on the pipe bannister, looking at his back. Herb’s bony shoulders are like wings, his neck thin and rucked, his head yellowish and balding. I do not know if he knows where I am or not, or even where he is.

  “I’d be glad to hear a dream,” I say.

  Herb stares off toward the lake as if it contained all his hopes gone cold. “I have a dream about these three old women in a stalled car on a dark road. Two of them are taking their grandmother, who’s old, really old, back to a nursing home. Just someplace. Say New York state, or Pennsylvania. I come along in my Jeep—I had a Jeep once—and I stop and ask if I can help them. And they say yes. No one’s come by in a long time. And I can tell they’re worried about me. One woman has her money out to pay me before I even start. And they’ve got this flat tire. I shine my Jeep lights on their car and I can see this worried old grandmother, her face low in the front seat. A chicken-wattle neck. The two other women stand with me while I change the tire. And as I’m doing it I think about killing all three of them. Just strangling them with my hands, then driving off because no one would ever know who did it, since I wasn’t a killer or even known to be there. But I look around then, and I see these deer staring at me out of the trees. These yellow eyes. And that’s it. I wake up.” Herb twists his wheelchair and faces me. “How’s that for a dream? Whaddaya think, Frank? You’ve got a halo again, by the way. It just came back. You look idiotic.” Herb suddenly breaks out in laughter, his whole body rumbling and his mouth wide as a canyon. Herb, I see, is as crazy as a betsey bug, and I want nothing in the world more than to get as far away from him as I can. Interview or no interview. Inspiration or no inspiration. Interviewing a crazy man is a waste of anybody’s time who’s not crazy himself. And I’m glad, in fact, that Herb is in his chair at the moment since it’s possible he would strangle me if he could.

  “It’s probably time we head back, Herb.”

  He has taken his glasses off and begun wiping them on his BIONIC shirt. But he is really still laughing. “Sure, okay.”

  “I’ve got all I need for a good story. And it’s getting pretty chilly out here.”

  “You’re full of shit, Frank,” Herb says, smiling across the empty boat dock. On the lake a pair of ducks flies low across the surface, fast and slicing. They make an abrupt turn, then skin into the shiny water and become invisible. “Oh Frank, you’re really full of shit.” Herb shakes his head in complete amazement.

  Herb pushes along beside me in his silver chair while we make our way back up Glacier Way in silence. Everything has become confused, though why, exactly, I don’t know. It’s possible
I’ve had a bad effect on him. Sometimes when people realize sportswriters are just men or women they become resentful. (People often want others to be better than they are themselves.) But under these circumstances it is all but impossible to make a contribution, or to give an honest effort of any kind. It is, in fact, enough to make you want to hit the road for a pharmaceuticals house, of which New Jersey has plenty.

  “We didn’t talk much about football,” Herb says thoughtfully. He is now as sane and reflective as an old sextant.

  “I guess it didn’t seem it was much on your mind, Herb.”

  “It really seems insignificant now, Frank. It’s really a pretty crummy preparation for life, I’ve come to believe.”

  “But I’d still think it had some lessons to teach to the people who played it. Perseverance. Team work. Comradeship. That kind of thing.”

  “Forget all that crap, Frank. I’ve got the rest of my life handed to me if I can figure it out. I’ve got some pretty big plans. Sports is just a memory to me.”

  “You mean law school and all that.”

  Herb nods at me like an undertaker. “That’s it.”

  “You’ve got a lot of courage, Herb. It takes courage to be you, I think.”

  “Maybe,” Herb says, considering that idea. “Sometimes I’m afraid, though, Frank. I’ll tell ya. Scared to death.” We’re just two guys jawing now. Just the way I’d hoped. Maybe a straightforward old-fashioned interview could still be worked out. I feel for my tape recorder.

  “Sometimes I’m afraid, Herb. It’s natural to the breed, I’d say.”

  “All right,” Herb says and chuckles, nodding in forced agreement.

  I see Mr. Small wood’s yellow Checker waiting out front of Herb’s house as we round the curve, his visit to Wixom apparently gone awry. It has grown colder since we’ve been outside, and the sky has lowered. By nighttime it will be snowing to beat the band, and Vicki and I will be glad to be far from here. It is a strange turn of events, not what I would’ve expected, but I, on the other hand, am still not surprised.

  As we pass by, a man wearing a brown car coat comes out of his house, holding a can of motor oil. His is a house in the same architectural order as Herb’s, though with a room added on where the driveway once went into the back. The man stands beside his car—a new Olds with its hood up—and gives Herb a wave and a “howzitgoin.”

  “Primo. Numero uno,” Herb calls back with a grin and waves his arm as if he’s waving to a crowd. “This guy’s interviewing me. I’m giving him a helluva time.”

  “Don’t take nobody’s crap,” the man shouts, and bends his short trunk under the murky hood of the Olds.

  “The neighbors still think I play on the team,” Herb says in a hushed voice, pushing himself up Glacier Way toward his wife and home.

  “How’s that?”

  “Well, I keep my injury pretty well a secret. Another guy plays in my place. With my number. I hope you won’t write about that and ruin it.”

  “No way, Herb. You’ve got my word on that.”

  Herb looks up at me as we approach Mr. Smallwood’s cab, and gives me a look full of wonder. “How come you do it, Frank. Tell the truth.”

  “How come I do what, Herb?” Though I know what’s coming.

  For some reason Herb seems to be having a hard time making his head be still. It’s wandering all around. “You couldn’t really like sports, Frank,” he says. “You don’t look like a guy who likes sports.”

  “I like some better than others.” It is not that uncommon a question, really.

  “But wouldn’t you rather talk about something else?” Herb shakes his big head, still wondrous. “What about Winslow Homer?”

  “I’d talk to you about him, Herb. Any time. Writing about something is a lot different from doing the thing itself. Does that clear anything up?” For some reason my diaphragm, or its vicinity, feels like it is quaking again.

  “Pretty interesting, Frank.” Herb nods at me with genuine admiration. “I’m not sure it explains a goddamn thing, but it’s interesting. I’ll give you that.”

  “It’s pretty hard to explain your own life, Herb.” I’m sure my quaking is visible, though maybe not to Herb, for whom the whole world might quake all the time. He’s still having trouble keeping his head stationary. “I think I’ve said enough. I’m supposed to be asking you questions.”

  “I’m a verb, Frank. Verbs don’t answer questions.”

  “Don’t think that way, Herb.” My diaphragm is crackling. Herb and I have not been together an hour, but there is a strong sense around him that he would like to strangle someone, and not be choosy whose neck he got his hands on. When you have spent so much of your life whamming into people and hurting them, it must be hard just to call a halt to it and sit down. It must be hard to do anything else, it seems to me, but keep oil whamming. In any case, I’m always most at ease when I know the way out. There is something to be avoided here, and I intend to avoid it. “I’m going to try to write a good story, Herb,” I say, inching toward the back of Smallwood’s Checker.

  Clarice Wallagher has stepped out onto the front stoop and stands watching us. She calls Herb’s name and smiles wearily. This must happen to everyone: meetings ending in stunned silences out front; a waiting cab; Herb proclaiming himself a verb. My greatest admiration is her’s. I’d hoped to have a word with her on the subject of Herb’s heroism-in-life, but that has gone past us. I simply hope there is a consolation for her late on dark nights.

  “Herb,” Clarice says in a pretty voice that cracks on the cold Michigan wind.

  “Okay!” Herb shouts heroically. “Gotta go, Frank, gotta go. You oughta write my life story. You’d make six figures.” We shake hands, and once again Herb tries to jerk me to my knees. There is an odd smell on Herb now, a metallic smell that is the odor of his chair. His cheek is bleeding from where he peeled off the paper. “I wanted you to see some old game films before you left. I could put the kebosh on ’em, Frank. Don’t let this chair fool ya.”

  “We’ll do it next time, Herb, that’s a promise.”

  Mr. Smallwood starts his cab with a loud whooshing and drops it into drive so that the body bucks half a foot forward.

  “I don’t know what happens sometimes, Frank.” Herb’s sad blue eyes suddenly fill with hot tears, and he shakes his big head to dash them away. It is the sadness of elusive life glimpsed and unfairly lost, and the following, lifelong contest with bitter facts. Pity, in other words, for himself, and as justly earned as a game ball. Only I do not want to feel it and won’t. It is too close to regret to play fast and loose with. And the only thing worse than terrible regret is unearned terrible regret. And for that reason I will not bend to it, will, in fact, go on to the bottom with my own ship.

  I take four quick steps back. “I’m glad I met you, Herb.”

  Herb stares at me, his face distorted by unhappiness. “Yeah sure,” he says.

  And I am into the boxy, musty backseat of Mr. Smallwood’s Checker, and we shush off down Glacier Way without even so much as a goodbye to Clarice, leaving Herb sitting in the empty street, in his chair, waving goodbye to our tail lights, his sad face astream with helpless and literal tears.

  7

  Mr. Smallwood is the best possible confederate for my circumstances.

  “You look like you could use a pick-me-up,” he says, once we are going, and hands back a bottle half out of its flimsy paper bag. I drink down a good gulp that makes me flubber my lips—it is peppermint and sweet as cough syrup, but I’m happy to have it in me, and take a second big gulp. “You musta had you a time,” Mr. Smallwood says as we hiss past the remnants of a long, charred building on the landward side of the lakefront road. A dismembered line of cabins stands opposite. The big building was once a Quonset hut with a barn built on behind, though snow is piled on its blackened interior timbers, one of which is a long bar. Grass has grown up. No one, apparently, has thought to find a new use for the land. My pa
st in decomposition and trivial disarray.

  “These peoples out here’re crazy,” Mr. Smallwood announces widely, steering chauffer-style with one huge hand on the plastic steering knob, the other stretched over the seat back. “Sur-burban peoples, I’m tellin you. Houses full of guns, everybody mad all the time. Oughta cool out, if you ask me. I ain’t been out here in years, couldn’t even figure out which street was which. I used to come out here all the time.” We pull up onto the expressway back toward Big D, invisible now in mossy green clouds that tell of snow and possibly a marooning storm. “Look here now.” Mr. Smallwood catches my eye in the rearview and leans backwards in his driver’s seat for a speculative stretch. “How much money you got?”

  “Why?”

  “Well, for a hundred dollars I could make a phone call up here at a gas station and the first thing you know, somebody be done made you feel a whole lot better.” Mr. Smallwood grins a big happy grin at the back seat, and I think for a moment about a hundred dollar whore, the kindness she might bring, like the pharmacy sending over an expensive prescription to get you through a rough night. A trip to the hot springs. Something wordless to patch the tissue of innocent words that holds life in its most positive attitude. Too much serious talk and self-explanation and you’re a goner.

  What Herb needs, of course, and can’t have, is to strap on a set of pads and beat the daylights out of somebody and quit worrying about theories of art. He is a man without a sport, when a sport is exactly what he needs. With better luck we might’ve summoned up a vi vider memory of his playing days, seen the game films. Herb could get back within himself, shake off alienation and dreary doubt, and play through pain—be the inspiration he was put on earth to be.

  I tell Mr. Smallwood no thanks, and he chuckles in a mirthful-derisive way. Then for a while we wind back toward town without speaking, taking the Lodge this time since the snow is off and the traffic gone north, leaving the expressway gray and wintry.

  Across from Tiger Stadium, Mr. Smallwood stops at a liquor store owned, he says, by his brother-in-law, a little Fort Knox of steel mesh and heavy bullet-proof glass. Across the avenue the big stadium hulks up white and lifeless. A message on its marquee says simply, “Sorry Folks. Have a Good One.”