“Doesn’t matter. This is a slow season. People don’t think of T-shirts in the winter,” his father said. Evelyn placed her hand on Dave’s shoulder; she might have heard a note in her husband’s voice that required calming.
“Where have you looked?” she asked Robert.
“The college. I thought I might teach a course in sportswriting. Tell them to steer clear of the field. Some stores here in town. The post office. A couple of gas stations. A couple of restaurants.”
“And they all said no?”
“Most. Some are pending. I’m a sportswriter, for God’s sake! What good am I to them?”
Evelyn said, “I saw Al Gasconade’s mother the other day.”
“How’s Al?”
“He’s being courted by the Tribune,” she said.
“Good for Al.”
Evelyn squeezed Dave’s shoulders but could not hold in the expected remark: “You’re twice the writer Al is,” her husband said. “He reads like a primer on clichés.”
“He’s pushy,” Robert said. “He’s not afraid to ask questions. I always doubted it was any of my business.”
“Work for us and you’ll learn the T-shirt biz,” Dave said.
Robert shook his head. His father’s eyes held genuine hope; he seemed to believe it truly was a good idea.
“We’d have a homicide here inside of two weeks,” Robert predicted. He stretched out his arms and touched the walls of stacked shirts with the palms of his hands. “The three of us in this little space? We’d go nuts.”
“Your mother—Evie has been talking about getting out of the business,” Dave said, looking up and behind at his wife. Robert saw that Dave didn’t believe it.
“I’m surprised,” Robert said.
“I’d like to be a homemaker for once in my life,” Evelyn said. “Your father doesn’t need me here.”
“I do,” Dave contended, anguish in his voice, his eyes; he expected trouble.
“It still wouldn’t work,” Robert said. “Even just the two of us.”
But Dave was still intent on his wife. “You know I couldn’t run this place without you.”
“Hush. I probably won’t leave anyhow.” She winked at Robert. “I should never have brought it up,” she said.
Dave closed his eyes and tipped back his head until it pressed against her belly. She wiped a sheen of moisture off the curve of his high forehead, and he touched her hand.
Robert, embarrassed, looked into his cup. His parents were always coiling into each other in front of him, touching, kissing, running their hands across the other’s shoulders, as if in disbelief at their good fortune, smiling when they thought Robert wasn’t looking.
“I’ve got to go,” Robert said. He finished the coffee they had made for him; it was cool and oily.
“Where are you off to?”
“SportsHeaven. Buzz was in there yesterday and said they were looking for seasonal help.”
“There you go,” Dave said. “Sales. Sports gear you know inside out.”
“It’s only until Christmas.”
“Don’t be so negative,” his father admonished. “Don’t look toward the end of something even before it starts. You could do so well they’ll keep you on. Maybe put you in charge.”
Robert laughed. “Why not just make me owner right away?” he teased.
In the spring before he shot the jay, Dave had asked Robert to sell light bulbs door to door to raise money for one of the organizations he ran. The bulbs came in three colors—white, yellow, and red. Dave advised Robert that the best way to sell the bulbs was to talk his way inside the house and get the bulb into a lamp socket.
“Let them see the light,” Dave said. “That’s your only objective. Once they see that bulb at work you’ll sell more than we can supply.”
Dave dropped Robert at the end of a block with his carton of sample bulbs. He went from house to house, trying to talk his way inside, finagle the bulb into a lamp socket, and clinch the deal. But few people were curious about how their rooms would appear drenched in red light; and the bulbs were obscenely overpriced, a third higher than the supermarket. Women usually answered the door, and they were brutally polite asking for the price, then sending him on with a closing of their doors. One house, whose bell he never pushed, had a personalized doormat: GO AWAY.
“You’re taking no for an answer,” Dave said in the car, where he spent the time perusing the Scale.
“It’s the only answer I’m getting,” Robert said.
“Don’t give them the chance to say no. Give ’em the impression a sale is a foregone conclusion. The only question is how many bulbs.”
But he never sold a single bulb, except for the dozen Evelyn bought, the dozen he sold to Dave, and the dozen he paid for with his own money.
SportsHeaven was around the corner and took up an entire block. A building fronted by tall wide sheets of glass kept immaculately clean, these windows threw a customer’s advancing image back at him. There was a foyer, and more polished glass, and then the store, a deep space of high blue walls and paler blue ceiling, the air made bright by banks of lights in yellow casings.
A flat-faced girl chewed gum and read a fitness magazine at the one cash register open of the half dozen at the front of the store. Her chewing sounded like a soft bone being pulled repeatedly from its socket. She was dressed in the black pants and striped shirt of a referee.
Robert asked for the manager and the girl jerked a thumb behind her toward the long, towering shelves chock-a-block with sporting goods, but telling him nothing; she might have been pointing him into the enchanted forest. The room was so large the shelves nearly funneled to a vanishing point.
He ventured down one aisle and stopped in front of a wall of fielders’ mitts hung on pegs. He took a glove down and put it on. Stiff as wood, the leather stitching pronounced as surgery, he loved the smell and the ritual of oil and play that would turn the glove soft and reliable. He felt himself smiling. There were catchers’ mitts big as plates, first basemen’s mitts like vases, infielders’ gloves, mitts made of black leather; but also there were mitts of blue and red leather, with white stitching, which he thought clownish.
Next to the mitts were baseballs. The best were in boxes. The cheaper balls felt mushy in his fingers, as if they would become misshapen or explode on their first contact with the bat.
Next came the bats, long bins divided by weight and length. Pale wood, names of stars burned into the business end, the bat length impressed on the knob. There were more metal bats than he would have expected; they nearly outnumbered the wood. They were like tubes of metallic gas.
Down another aisle were soccer balls whose black patches somehow reminded Robert of globes; there were footballs and basketballs, handballs in cans. Another aisle held camping equipment: sleeping bags hanging from racks like the flags of nations; lamps whose white net wicks reminded Robert of tiny socks; portable stoves and weightless backpacks. At the end of this aisle tents were erected on the concrete floor, inviolable, skins within a skin. There were compasses and knives locked in one case, shotguns, handguns, and rifles in another. It was where he had rented the crow record and record player. Returning them, he had complained to the ex-basketball star in the bandoleer about the juiceless battery, and had been refunded the entire rental cost.
In his wandering Robert came upon a kid with harsh bursts of acne on his face and neck. He was wheeling bicycles out of the back and into a line on the floor, each front wheel tilted just so. Robert asked again for the manager.
“He’s in back,” the kid said.
In a moment, Joe Marsh appeared. He was four inches taller than Robert, light hair cut short, wide-spaced blue eyes filled with a kind of uneasiness; he was dressed in the uniform of the place: black trousers and black-and-white striped referee’s shirt. He also wore his ba
ndoleer.
“Hey, it’s Bob Cigar.”
“Robert.”
They shook hands. The bandoleer leather creaked.
“You know,” Joe Marsh said, “after I talked to you that one time, I went home and looked through my clippings. Your name was on almost all of them.”
“Yeah?” Robert said, though he knew.
“It was strange reading them. I’d forgotten about a lot of that stuff. The little details.”
“You were good.”
The man shrugged, pleased. The creaking bandoleer leather had an insane note; what had happened there?
“You were drafted, weren’t you?”
“Tenth round by the Bucks.” Joe Marsh spread his large hands. “A six-four white guard out of a small college in Wisconsin. What a joke. I lasted through two cuts. Then it was back to Mozart.” He looked into the distance, then returned. “I had fun. I still play a little. It’s not an obsession. I was able to put it down and move on. Now I dress like the enemy.”
“That’s good,” Robert said. He remembered Joe Marsh as quite fast, with a deadly shooting eye; he had been the best player on a mediocre team, and the stories Robert wrote about the games were filled with his name. His hair had been longer then, his frame leaner, and something determined and indomitable had existed in his blue eyes that had departed in the intervening time.
Joe Marsh asked, “So what can I help you with?”
“I heard you were looking for seasonal help.”
“You? You got your degree, didn’t you?”
Robert nodded.
“Why don’t you get a job writing sports? You don’t hit your peak at thirty. You’re not long gone at forty.”
Robert said, “I was long gone long ago.”
“The pay here’s shit,” Joe Marsh said.
“What did you graduate in?” Robert asked.
“I was a few hours short when I got out,” Joe said directly. “I figured I’d play in the NBA for fifteen years, then buy a restaurant. Then the Bucks cut me.” He touched a roll of mints in the bandoleer. “Lately I’ve thought of going back and finishing, but I’ve got a wife now, and a kid, and by the end of the day I’m just beat.”
He said, “A guy who went to M.C. years and years ago gave me this job. He’d seen me play, called me the Great White Hope. The next Larry Bird. He owns four of these stores: one here, one in Madison, one in Milwaukee, one in La Crosse. You work here, you’ll meet him. Kind of a pompous asshole, but I can’t complain.”
He took a cigarette from a loop of the bandoleer and lit it with a match from a tin he also kept there. “Bullets,” he said. “You wear a fifteen, sixteen neck?”
“Fifteen and a half,” Robert said.
“I think we can fit you into some shirts,” Joe Marsh said. “You gotta supply your own black pants, OK? No jeans, no cords. Herm wants us to look like real refs. When can you start?”
“Just like that?”
“Sure. I know you know sports. I know you. No need for all that other rigmarole. I’ll start you at $4.25 an hour, which is dandy compared to what these other twerps make. Can you start tomorrow?”
“Sure.”
“OK. Let me get you some shirts. I’ll take a buck a week out of your check to pay for them. Then when you quit you’ll have your own set of zebra hides.”
“I can’t just borrow them?” Robert asked. “If I’m seasonal I won’t be here long enough to pay for them.”
“We’ll see,” Joe Marsh said. “Buy the shirts, though. They’re nice shirts, I wear mine all the time.”
ROBERT CAME HOME tired from his first day of work. He lounged in the kitchen while Ethel made a meat loaf of three pounds of ground beef he had provided. He drank beer and ate an apple, which he’d also bought on his way home. He liked the feeling of working after all that time. In losing jobs before, he had felt released, as a child is turned loose at the end of school into summer’s fields. But at SportsHeaven he felt the safety of work after all those idle days under Ethel’s disapproving eyes. He felt his life filling; he had a job, and he had his search for Ben. Ethel had kissed him on the cheek when he told her he had found a job, Olive had welcomed him into her bed.
He liked the strangeness of the huge blue room and the people he worked with and the people who came into the store. He liked the softness of the shirt, the authoritative look of the black and white stripes running away just under the rim of his eye.
“Mostly what we do is shepherd people,” he told Ethel and Olive. “Joe says it gets worse as Christmas approaches. People just drifting up and down. No idea what they want. Joe thinks it’s TV. People have been taught to want everything. And when they realize they can’t have everything, they haven’t learned to be selective of what they can have. Our job is to get them into a position where they’ll see something and that ‘buy light’ will go on in their head.”
“That’s so cynical,” Olive said.
“That’s the world, O. It’s commerce. Buy and sell. It’s advertising and consumption. I saw people spend $50 for a basketball. A basketball! Old widows bought tents that slept eight. Why? Joe said it was the buy light going on in their heads. Something touched them. Fantasy or memory, I don’t know. But that’s what I do all day: Stock shelves and shepherd people around hoping the buy light goes on.”
“You want to do that for a living?” Ethel asked.
“You told me to find work,” he said with a pleasant overlay of anger. “I was content helping around here. Don’t start putting down what I do.”
She turned her back to him. He smiled at Olive. She had been correct that cynicism did permeate Joe Marsh’s attitude toward what they did at SportsHeaven. The blue cage of balls and bats Joe perceived himself trapped within was almost palpable.
But Robert had enjoyed the first day. The first item he sold was a strap for athletes to keep their glasses on their heads during a game. The kid who bought it had thick pieces of white tape wound like casts around the temples of his glasses. He had a deep scratch over the bridge of his nose.
Robert found the straps in Aisle 4 and gave one to the kid. “You’re a little late, aren’t you?” Robert asked.
The boy blinked. Then he smiled; and not, Robert guessed, because he understood the remark but because he judged Robert an adult and he had found it easier to smile and slip past when confronted with adults. He tried to pay Robert for the glasses strap, and Robert pointed him to the front.
“Just follow the sound of the popping gum,” he said, but the kid missed this, too, and was gone.
Joe Marsh went home for lunch at noon. For the hour, he put Robert in charge of the store.
“Already?” Robert asked, as Joe hung his bandoleer on a peg in the back room and got his jacket from his locker. He still wore his M.C. letter jacket with tarnished gold basketball pins on the block M.
“You can handle it,” Joe Marsh said. His jacket was raveled at the tube cuffs. He put on a Packers knit cap. “I visit my wife every lunch hour. It is one of life’s little pleasures. Be good. Watch the place. Don’t get ambitious.”
Robert, in charge, had no idea what to do. He trusted in the momentum of the store to keep it running. He did not tell the other employees that Joe had put him in charge. He kept moving and tried to be helpful.
For some time he polished the glass on a counter full of scuba equipment: floating knives, underwater watches, depth gauges, waterproof sacs for cameras. Along the wall behind the counter, mannequins modeled wet suits. One such suit had head and foot coverings and a rich blue skin that was warm even to the touch of air. Robert checked the price and it was not outlandish, now that he was employed. He could dive for Ben year round with a suit like that.
A half hour into Joe’s lunch hour Robert went into the back room. Employees had lockers there, narrow compartments for a coat and a purse or a pair of
boots. A kid named Dick knelt before his locker deflating a new basketball. The air rushing out the needle hole had a rhythmic hiss like a charmed snake as Dick pushed on the ball to hurry it along. He glanced at Robert, said, “Hi,” and went on with the deflation. Now and then he stopped to see how close he was to being able to fold the ball inside his locker.
“What are you doing?” Robert asked.
Dick looked up. He appeared flabbergasted by the question. The hissing stopped.
“I’m letting the air out of this ball,” he said.
“Why?”
“So it will fit in my locker.” He stood. He was a big kid, red-faced from the exertion of deflating the ball, which lay at his feet like a small dome, a half sphere.
“Did you pay for it?” Robert asked.
Dick, getting the idea, replied in a voice that was dead, “No.”
“You going to pay for it?”
“It’s a perk,” Dick said. “They pay us shit, we take a little extra in merchandise.”
“Refill it with air,” Robert said. “Then put it back on the shelf.”
“Hey! Why?”
“Because even though the pay is shit, you want to keep your job.”
Dick slammed his locker shut and carried the ball past Robert. An air hose was built into the wall and the kid put the valve over the needle head and with a quick push shot the ball full of air again. He rolled it deftly once around in his fingers. He looked in Robert’s eyes for some message of condemnation or pardon. There was neither, he decided, and left the room. He told the other employees in the store about his confrontation with Robert. A subtle cooling took place; he had worked less than a day and in that time a distance between himself and every employee but Joe Marsh had grown.
Joe was gone two hours. When he returned his hair was wet beneath his Packers cap. His eyes were softened, some mischief conducted successfully.
“How’d it go?” he asked.
“It went OK,” Robert said. He did not want to mention Dick, but the incident was on his mind so he said, instead, “You have much theft here?”
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