Classes were out for the day and most of the kids long gone. Those who remained, on their knees in the hall lettering posters or talking in intimate two-way knots in the tiny alcoves of open lockers or shouting into an echo to a friend not three feet away, reminded Robert of those students who made him nervous with their willingness to remain at school after the point they were required to be there. He had always sought the stillness of his room, to read, to draw, to make things up, to release himself. He had been out the door of Mozart High at the earliest opportunity. His parents’ house, the only house he had ever lived in before he met Ben, was two blocks from the high school. He knew by heart the topography of the sidewalk from one to the other. From his old room he could hear the band practicing so loud they might have been out in the hall, encouraging him to open his door.
A booming came from inside the gym. It was a sound without pattern. The doors to the gym were locked. He climbed the stairs to the balcony. Through a narrow pane of webbed glass set in the door he saw Buzz throwing. He wore green gym shorts over gray sweat pants, a sweat shirt with an oval of dark wet at the center of his back, and a baseball cap turned backwards on his head. He was in a long net cage hung from parallel cables that ran from one end of the balcony to the other. Another boy, a batter, waited at the far end of the tunnel. He wore a green batting helmet and as Buzz’s easy pitches were released he tensed and leaned into them, giving them a fat look, but each time failing to hit more than the merest skin of the ball.
Between pitches, Robert knocked on the window. Buzz came to the door and opened it. His eyes admitted to a faint curiosity. He was not arrogant, he was not rude or overbearing. He was in a place, maybe the only place, where he was in charge of his life, and this sureness of himself flowed out in a way that made Robert sad by its rarity.
“Why are you here?”
“I wanted to see you pitch.”
“This isn’t pitching. It’s just looseness.” He rolled the baseball in his long fingers. In a small yellow block on a leg of his shorts was printed, in black marker, LADYSMITH. The school colors were green and gold, the colors of a forest tipping from summer to fall. The name of the school’s teams: the Wolfgang.
Buzz let him through the door. Robert could not find a way into the net cage, but Buzz pulled at the hanging web of strings and passed like a ghost fish through.
There were baseballs all over the floor of the cage. They cast squat rounded shadows. Buzz picked one up and pitched it to the batter, who ticked it back with a crack off the wall.
“This guy’s a pussy,” Buzz said in an aside to Robert, bending to retrieve another ball. He threw a pitch, then asked, “Why are you here?” He turned away as if to shield his heart from the answer.
“I had some time to kill,” Robert said. “I wondered how you were doing.”
“Mom send you?”
“No. Why?”
“Dad used to send friends of his—other teachers—around to talk to me. Buddy up,” Buzz said. “That sort of thing. Ben couldn’t be bothered talking to me, except to praise me blindly. He thought these friends of his would break through and report back to him. Never happened.”
He wound and threw hard, a pitch with anger in it, and at the last instant he backed off and let his arm come slowly to the end of its throwing arc. Robert saw him wince.
“You hurt?”
“A little soreness,” Buzz said. “I’m just stiff. The cold. Dry air. I’ll work it out.”
“Don’t throw if it hurts.”
Buzzard made a face and threw an easy pitch. The batter fouled it off with a mighty swing. Buzz called down the net tunnel to him, “I’m done,” and tucked his glove under his arm.
But he did not come out of the cage.
He picked three balls up off the floor and dropped them into a canvas ball bag in the corner. He took other baseballs and shot them like basketballs, some landing in the bag, some missing and bouncing away. Robert thought it looked like fun, but he was not welcome in the cage, it seemed to him, or the entrance to it would be more apparent. The batter had disappeared from the other end through some hidden exit.
Buzz came to the net wall. He asked, “Was Ben a good teacher?”
“Didn’t you ever go watch him?”
“No. I had enough problems with my own schoolwork. I couldn’t see spending my free time in another schoolroom.”
“Do you think about him a lot?”
“More than I used to,” Buzz admitted. “At first, it was all the time. Then I sort of forgot about him. I’d go two or three days without him crossing my mind. Now, lately—he’s in my mind more. How about you?”
“I think about him less in the winter,” Robert said. “I know I can’t get to him, so I put him out of my mind.”
“Why do you look for him?” Buzz asked. “Nobody wants you to find him.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
“He’d be a mess,” Buzzard said. His eyes were fixed on the light falling on Robert’s striped shirt. Buzz’s skin was slick and to Robert’s eye faintly marked like a leopard with the shadows of the squares of the netting.
“Do you think Mom will marry that Steve guy?”
“She might. She’s still young. And pretty.”
“What does she see in the guy?”
“I can’t speak for her. Ask her yourself.”
“She never got along with Dad too well,” Buzz said. He came through the opening in the cage, carrying the bag of baseballs. “I don’t see why she’d be in a hurry to get married again.”
“Why didn’t they get along?” Robert asked.
“I thought it was just part of being married. All my friends’ parents fought. I thought it was part of the deal. He wasn’t home too much. I don’t think she minded.”
Buzz put the ball bag in an equipment room among a jumble of aluminum bats, scuffed footballs, and stacked bases.
“Then he died,” Buzz said, “and suddenly he’s a saint.” The boy’s anger flared. Outside the net cage he was more the Buzzard Robert knew. “And you hang around like Death itself reminding everybody of him.”
COLD AIR RUSHED up and down the stairs like a cranky child in bare feet; it hung in slabs just inside the windows, caught and parceled out by drawn curtains; it came in as if the front door was left open a welcoming inch.
They were all in the kitchen again. Ethel mentioned selling the house. Olive made a show of checking her watch.
“Let’s see,” she said. “December eleven, at eight-twenty-five p.m., Ethel made her first mention of the winter of selling the house. A bit ahead of schedule, but then so is the subzero cold.”
Ethel playfully snapped a dish towel at her daughter. “This time I mean it,” she claimed, laughing.
“No, you don’t. You’ll never sell this house.”
“I would,” she said. “It’s bad news. We’re all—one or the other—sick from September until May. It costs a fortune to heat. We don’t need all the room.”
Robert said nothing. He was beating Duke at checkers. The conquered disks were stacked at the side of the board. He looked at Duke, who met his eyes with that stubborn set expression that reminded Robert of Ben. Neither Duke nor Robert believed in the possibility of Ethel’s selling the house and therefore their comments were not required.
But Ethel said with forced offhandedness, “I saw a little brick house a block from the lake. It’s only eight years old, tight, well constructed. There’s plenty of room without all these high ceilings and worthless space eating up heat.” She shivered within the calf-length sweater robe she wore in the house all winter; the robe was dark green with stitched white deer across the front running over a field of spiky snow.
“How do you know so much about it?” Robert asked.
“You sound like a realtor,” Olive said nervously.
“
I walked through it the other day with Stephen,” Ethel said. She seemed embarrassed, caught in a bad light.
“What’s going on here?” Duke asked.
“Nothing is going on here,” Ethel said, relieved by the general tack of the question. “We were driving around one day—a little bored—and saw this house for sale. The owner’s trying to sell it, so we called him and went and looked at it. That’s all.”
“Is Steve buying it?” Buzzard asked.
“Not that I know of,” Ethel said. “It was cold, as usual. I had a sore throat. This house was freezing, as usual. It just seemed like an appealing idea to stand in a house without a cold wind down your neck.”
“How was the house?” Olive asked.
“Toasty,” Ethel replied, savoring the sound and feel of the word. She drew her sweater robe tight around her. The others felt the cold she was holding out. Duke sneezed, and for one reason or another everyone but Buzzard laughed.
“Are you going to marry that loser?” he asked.
She thrust a finger at her son and cautioned, “Don’t ever say anything like that about him again. I enjoy his company and I’ve gone out of my way to spare your feelings—all of you—about this. But I won’t stand for you calling him names.” She pulled her finger back within the cocoon of knitted green she wore. “Marriage has not been discussed. We enjoy each other. Let’s leave it at that. If the subject does come up, you in this room will be the first to know.”
She looked at each of them in turn, even Robert, who felt something looming and uneasy in the affection Ethel admitted for this man Stephen; another soul to charm, to convince of the necessity of his staying. In looking at the “toasty” house, Ethel probably had not included Robert when she counted bedrooms.
“Are we getting a tree this year?” Ethel asked.
“Of course,” Olive said; for a moment she seemed like the mother, Ethel the daughter seeking approval of the idea.
The previous year they had bought a tree small enough to fit on the table in the kitchen, where it was warm and they could enjoy the colored lights. Needles began to fall from it almost at once. Ben was still in the air, too, and long sad silences were the hub of the season’s emotional content. They swept the needles into a pile every morning, but stray ones survived to stab them through the weave of their socks. Duke told Robert the needles were Ben punishing them for trying to have fun without him.
“We’ll get a tree,” Ethel said.
“I’ll pay for it,” Robert offered.
“Thank you,” Ethel said. “But save your money. You’ll need it when the holidays end and you’re out of a job.”
“They won’t let me go. Joe likes me. I can stay at SportsHeaven forever.”
“Is that official?”
Robert smiled at her; he knew her brain would be at work looking for ways to get him out; making room for Stephen?
“Not official,” Robert said. “Just a feeling.”
She said nothing to that, and later she allowed Robert to pay for the Christmas tree.
JOE MARSH CARRIED six darts with genuine bird feathers in the loops of his bandoleer. He took them out one at a time, smoothed the feathers until they all leaned in a perfect row of stiff stalks like a snow fence in the wind, and tossed them at the dart board hanging in the back room.
It was after closing on another subzero night, still a week from Christmas. Robert sat on the edge of the desk; he was eager to get home. All day at work he had been unable to get warm. The store was busy and the front doors seemed open to the bitter cold more often than closed. He wore a long-sleeved black sweat shirt beneath his stripes, and ran up and down the long blue room on the slightest pretext, and still he was cold.
Now, he had his jacket on, his hat on, and he softly, impatiently slapped his gloves against his palm. Joe Marsh drank from a can of beer, smoked, and threw darts. He had told Robert earlier in the evening that he wanted to talk to him after work. But now that the time had come Robert wondered if the request was no more than a desire for someone to keep Joe company.
“We really had the buy light lit today, didn’t we?” Joe Marsh said, getting the darts from the board. They had landed with a soft punk! that Robert guessed could be heard all the way at the front of the dark and empty store.
“We had a good day,” Robert said.
“You like this job?”
Robert touched the stripes of his shirt; they were somehow precious to him, a sign that he possessed for the time being something beyond his tenuous place in Ben’s house. “Yes, I like this job a lot,” he said.
“Come on! Level with me,” Joe said. “We’re both sports hounds. You don’t like this job any more than I do.”
“You don’t like this job?” Robert asked, pretending surprise.
Joe Marsh fired a dart. “No, I don’t,” he said, a snarl in his voice for Robert, for having this admission torn from him.
That day, Robert had seen the two kids he had earlier caught playing basketball come into the store. He did not follow them, though they seemed to expect him to, the way they scurried down an aisle and out of his sight. They might have been more relieved that Dave wasn’t around.
Robert was putting price tags on boxes of golf balls and he told himself he would finish that job before he tracked down the two kids. The price gun in his hand unrolled small square orange stickers, the price printed in blue ink, onto the covers of the boxes of golf balls. On each price tag, in printing almost too small to read: SportsHeaven. The gun made a soft, mechanical racket like a turnstile counter. Robert liked the sound; it seemed to be recording the bits of work he was performing, and would total out at the end of the day to tell him what he had accomplished that shift.
From a distant aisle he thought he heard a basketball being dribbled. He stopped working. The store could be a noisy place, with calls going over the PA, the milling customers, talking, cash registers beeping, the electric hum of lights, and the deeper throbbing of the building itself—but when Robert stopped the sound of the price gun, several moments of absolute silence followed. Then into the silence obtruded the rubbery twang of a bouncing basketball, then a young man’s shout of triumph abruptly terminated.
Robert sought out these sounds. He felt unaccountably like his father at that moment, about to squash some kids’ harmless good time. At the mouth of Aisle 7 he took his whistle from his pocket. He had not used it in weeks. A puff of lint lay across the air slot like a tiny footbridge.
The kids were playing again at the low basket. But Robert did not blow his whistle because Joe Marsh was playing with them. He did not see Robert. He was backing in toward the basket, dribbling the ball inches off the floor, his free hand holding off the defenders who chopped and hacked at him, laughing. All at once Joe whirled around the kids and stuffed the ball through the low hoop. The backboard shuddered but held, swinging as if caught in a storm. Joe Marsh adjusted his bandoleer; later he boasted of the moment, the way his skills remained so close to the surface and so simple to call forth.
Now he stood and took the darts from the board.
“Fucking winter,” he muttered. He lit a cigarette from his bandoleer, then took ten cigarettes from a pack in his desk and reloaded the empty slots.
“It’s not even Christmas yet and already winter’s got me down,” he said.
Robert felt a kinship there. He said, “It’s cold everywhere I go lately. At work, at home, at my parents’ store. I just can’t get warm.”
“My wife keeps the heat way up,” Joe said. “It was eighty-four degrees in there when I got home. Then she wouldn’t kiss me because her lips were so dry they had cracked. What does she expect? It’s fucking eighty-four degrees in the house.”
He fired a dart. Robert looked longingly at the door, beyond which was cold night, a quick run, then home.
“I told her it’s been two days since I h
ad any,” Joe Marsh complained, “and the head of my dick has dried up and cracked.”
Robert produced a painful laugh of bogus camaraderie. He pulled on his gloves.
“Winter. Wife,” Joe mused, as if some connection was coming clear to him. “Both begin with W. Maybe I’ve got the W blues. Maybe that’s my problem. Winter. Wife. What else?”
“I’ve got to go, Joe.”
“All right. Leave me here all sad and blue. You working tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“Herm is expected,” Joe Marsh said. He touched a smoked sausage link in his bandoleer. “This little getup is retired when Herm’s around. He’s been good to me. I don’t know why I’m so intimidated by him. He thinks I’m a god because I played college basketball.” Joe shook his head. He seemed sad, that a man could be so easily deceived. “If you’re ever working and someone says over the PA, ‘Foul-weather gear on one,’ make sure you get busy pronto because that’s our code for Herm being in the store unexpectedly. He likes to drop in. It’s not a malicious thing. He just gets the urge to see his store, so he’ll drive over in the middle of the day and just appear. That’s the prerogative of a millionaire. He drives a steel blue BMW and his plates say MR SPTS. Mr. Sports, get it? Mr. Spits we call him, behind his back. I like him, though. He’s done a lot for me.”
“I’m looking forward to meeting him,” Robert said.
“I told him about you,” Joe Marsh said. “His eyes lit up when he heard you used to be a sportswriter.”
“Yeah? Great. I’ll bet he’d rather be a sportswriter more than anything.”
“Not in those words. But let’s say that if you handle Herm right you, too, can be a minor god, like me.”
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