“It’s what I’ve always wanted,” Robert said.
“Don’t laugh. He has money to burn. Let him burn some your way. He pays me more than the managers at his other stores just because I once made jump shots regularly. I treat him to a basketball story or two when he’s here, he loves it. Give him some juicy inside locker room stuff. He’ll eat it up. He might build you your own store if your stories are really good.”
HERM BRANCH ARRIVED a little past noon the following day, when Joe Marsh was home for lunch. Robert had been left in charge; this had become their routine and the other employees deferred to Robert as an unofficial assistant manager. His pay had risen two dollars an hour. He was in the back room loading boxes of running shoes on a cart for stocking when the PA announced, “Foul-weather gear on one.”
Almost at once a short man in a fur coat and Russian hat appeared. He wiped his glasses with a plaid rag. His eyes were wide and vague, giving the impression of blindness as he took in the back room. The skin on his cheeks was scorched with cold. His gaze slipped over Robert and moved on.
He said, “Where’s Joey?”
“At lunch.”
“Lunch. That boy’s always at lunch.” He stood in the room as though he did not belong. His hat was held with both hands in front of him, as if he had come to ask a favor.
“With Joe at lunch, you’re in charge?”
“He told me I was,” Robert said.
“You giving a hundred and ten percent?” Herm asked, evidently serious. “Do the workers know you are in charge?”
“It hasn’t come up. There hasn’t been a crisis.”
“What do you mean? I’m a crisis. When I arrive, it’s a crisis. They let you handle me, they must consider you to be in charge.”
Robert smiled.
“You are Robert Cigar?”
“Yes.”
“My name is Herm Branch. Joey told me you were a sportswriter.”
“Long ago,” Robert said.
“A great field,” Herm said. “Why do you think I sell balls for a living? It’s as close as I can get to the arena. I’ve got a house just outside Milwaukee and I go see the Brewers, the Bucks, the Pack, Marquette, the Badgers, my beloved M.C. I see ’em all. Sometimes one of the guys from one of those teams will come into my Milwaukee store. I keep pictures—glossies—of every team in the state. You can order them. People know me. I keep them on file in my office. Any time one of them comes in I run and get his picture out of the file and ask him to sign it. Then I put their autographed picture up on the wall of fame—it’s the first thing you see when you come into the store. I’ve got Warren Spahn, Lew Burdette, Henry Aaron, Eddie Mathews, almost all the old Braves. Bill Bruton. Quite a few of the younger guys, the Brewers. The newer autographs look like little boys signed them. No weight behind them. Like they aren’t sure. Or is that me getting old?”
He pushed a finger up behind his lens to scratch near his eye. He took off his coat and hung it on a peg, balancing the Russian hat atop it.
From one of the boxes on the cart he took a silver shoe with a slash of maroon down the sides. The soles resembled some material that would hold a bar of soap to a shower wall.
“Like paper,” Herm said. “Like dust. I can’t believe people pay what we charge for these.” He tucked the laces inside the shoe and set it back in the box. “How’s business been here?”
“Good. We’ve been busy.”
“You have? My Madison store, I don’t know, it’s been dead. Like everybody in town has back problems. We aren’t even selling skis.”
“I sold a pair of skis this morning,” Robert said, though in fact the girl had said she wanted to look around.
“Downhill or cross-country?” Herm asked.
“Downhill.”
Herm nodded. His hands sought a diversion now that the Russian hat had been hung up, and they at last took up a closed combination lock off Joe’s desk. This lock put Herm at his ease; he smiled expansively at Robert, having found a pastime that might occupy him theoretically for days. He twirled the dial; just picking at it, waiting.
“It’s too cold, I think,” he observed. “People don’t want to venture out into subzero cold to get physically fit. We’re a hardy people in Wisconsin, but it’s no fun being hardy when it’s ten below. You play any sports, or just write about them?”
“I don’t write about them,” Robert said. “I’ve been playing a lot of checkers lately.”
“Checkers,” Herm said.
“I go diving in the summer.”
“Off a board?” Herm asked. He seemed unable to get a feel for Robert. He kept running into odd textures of interest and habit.
“No,” Robert said. “In the lake.”
“You must not smoke, then.”
“No.”
“Good. Joe smokes. Probably having one now to cap his meal. It just breaks my heart to see a kid who used to run like a gazelle and jump like a kangaroo and shoot the ball like a guided missile—to be filling himself with smoke.”
Robert said, “You’ve got potential as a sportswriter.”
“Nah!” Herm said, grinning at the notion. “Why?”
“You talk in an active voice,” Robert said. “The best sportswriters always convey action, motion in their words. Every story—the good ones—move at you off the page. The reader is carried along. He’s out of breath when the story is finished. He has played the game.” Robert added, “Those stories are rare.”
Herm said, “You’ve got an insight that bespeaks careful thought about the field. Why did you quit?”
“I just lost interest. My paper folded.”
Herm took the answer, but gave his mouth a twist of skepticism.
Robert said, “Take that phrase you used earlier. One hundred ten percent. Giving one hundred ten percent. That is sports in a nutshell. There can only be one hundred percent of anything. One hundred percent is everything; all. There can be no more than all. You can only give all you have. One hundred percent. But sports—the writers, the athletes, the coaches—had to come up with a phrase to exemplify a concept that can never happen. The athlete who gives more than his all. One hundred ten percent. One twenty. One forty. It’s a way to make players of a game more than they are. Sports isn’t happy with someone giving all they have to give. And if somebody does—seems to be—giving one hundred ten percent, something extra, then they weren’t giving one hundred percent in the first place. Maybe eight-five percent or ninety percent, and the increased effort brought them up to where they were truly giving their all. Sports does that all the time. It ignores the rules the rest of the world has to live by in order to appear more important than it really is.”
Herm Branch listened to all this and was disappointed. He had hoped to find a sports aficionado in Robert Cigar, someone who could talk sports on a rarefied level. Joe Marsh’s basketball tales were getting stale. Herm had heard most of them more than once and had to pretend even mild interest when Joe launched a story for the third time. Herm did not come to the Mozart store as often as he should for that reason. And now Robert had his vague objections to a phrase and an idea hallowed throughout the world of sports.
“I think you’re taking it a little too seriously,” Herm remarked, twirling the lock’s dial.
“I did,” Robert said. “That was my problem. That was at the root of my crisis in faith in sportswriting. Fortunately, my paper folded before I was forced to do anything about it.”
“The Scale,” Herm said. He dropped the lock, still locked, on the desk.
Robert took a deep, quiet breath to settle himself; his mouth was dry from his speech, which rang in his memory as abrasive, self-aggrandizing, and a little boring. Herm was, according to Joe Marsh, a man with money to burn and Robert had alienated him on their first meeting.
“People underestimate
the importance of our entertainments,” Herm said. He did not look at Robert, but down at his fingers as they spun the lock on its face knob, reminding Robert of a child tormenting a turtle, setting it a-spin on its shell.
“If I did,” Herm continued, “I’d be in another business. This store, the others I own, nothing more nor less than temples to games.” He snapped his arm up to check his watch. “Mrs. Marsh must’ve made something extra good,” he said. He put on his coat, then his Russian hat, whose tight weave reminded Robert of packed black worms.
“Joe will be sorry he missed you.”
“No, he won’t,” Herm said. “He’s a good kid, but we don’t see eye-to-eye much anymore. He tell you his story?”
“That you gave him a job?”
“I admired his basketball playing. All his life that’s all he ever learned to do,” Herm said. “That is the extent of his marketable skills. Basketball. And fornication, to hear him crow. So I wanted to repay him for the pleasure he gave me when he played at M.C. I thought I could cut him loose from the dimension basketball had frozen him in. He had a pretty wife, a squawling baby. Where was he going to go? I gave him this job. Now he has grown beyond his devotion to me. He has forgotten his previous straits. Now he resents me because I put him in a field he thinks is beneath him. He forgets,” Herm said, giving the lock a spin. “It’s good, in a way, this feeling better than a place. Maybe he’ll move on. Once he was just a basketball player. Now he’s just a sporting goods store manager. Perhaps in the future he’ll be just something else.”
Joe Marsh returned from lunch then, winded from the run through the cold and the fear put in him by the sight of Herm’s BMW parked out front before it was expected. He had on a sport coat and a tie, with a silk handkerchief stuffed like a sock in the coat pocket. Robert could see through Joe Marsh’s white shirt the black stripes of his ref’s shirt.
“Herm!” Joe exclaimed. “You’re early. You fooled me.” He shook the owner’s hand. He turned a look on Robert, as if to ask if Herm was coming, which was fine, or going, which was not.
“So I see,” Herm said dryly. He removed his Russian hat, a grudging gesture of politeness. With careful fingers he tapped strands of gray hair into order.
“You guys met?” Joe asked, swinging a hand from Robert to Herm.
“Yes.”
“I disappointed him,” Robert revealed. He felt Joe Marsh’s anguish and was willing to put himself on the spot to free Joe; he had less to lose, and he sensed also that he had carried Herm into his favor.
“He expected a little more sports gung-honess,” Robert said, glancing at the owner for corroboration. Herm turned down a corner of his mouth, half an admission.
“Don’t disappoint Herm,” Joe Marsh said. “He’s done amazing things for me.” His obsequiousness made Robert wince, and was heightened by the remarks Herm Branch had made just before Joe returned. Joe Marsh was throwing flowers down a well, and from the blushing, embarrassed look on his face he seemed to understand his words’ futility.
“You have your reports for the first half of December, Joe?” Herm asked.
Joe Marsh made a point of going through his desk, pulling open drawers with the rapid carefulness of a burglar. He said finally, “I’m still getting those together, Herm.”
Herm blinked. He looked at Robert as he said, “Maybe these long lunches are cutting into your work time, Joey.”
“Mrs. Marsh really laid out a spread today,” Joe said, winks all around.
“Regardless,” Herm said with grand imperiousness. “I needed those figures today. Put them in the mail today.”
The Russian hat went back on. Joe Marsh picked up the combination lock and held the knob between his thumb and finger. It reminded him somewhat of the hardened nipple of his wife’s breast, which he had grasped just that way, barely fifteen minutes before. But the day had gone bad. Herm had been at the store for some length of time and Joe had been out to lunch. No basketball story could save him.
Herm thanked them for their time and shook hands with them both.
“Stay a little longer, Herm. We don’t see you that much anymore.”
“Spend more time in the store and you will,” Herm said, and when he stepped out the back door into the cold he had readied the room for the icy blast he let in.
JOE MARSH SHED his coat and tie and white shirt. He draped his bandoleer across his chest. He had hung it out of sight of Herm in his locker. He lit a cigarette.
Robert had returned to the shoes. For the first time since coming to SportsHeaven he was uncomfortable in Joe’s presence. He felt poisoned by additional information he had not sought. The power Joe had to set him adrift back outside the store hung like a stone in the air between them.
“What did you talk about?” Joe Marsh finally asked, his voice shrunken and hard with distrust.
“Sports, mostly. Checkers. Sportswriting. The fallacy of giving a hundred and ten percent.”
“Why didn’t you call me?” Joe asked with a whine. “Jesus!”
“He was only here a half hour,” Robert said. “I couldn’t get away to call you. It’s not your fault he was early.”
“Shit, you’ll have your own store in a couple months.”
“No. I don’t think he liked me.”
“You don’t know that. He’s cagey. He used to idolize me but now I think it’s slipping the other way.”
“He said you’re doing a good job,” Robert said, he didn’t know why.
“Yeah?” Joe Marsh perked up. He inflated his chest against the bandoleer until the dried leather squeaked. “If you had called, I don’t know if Mrs. Marsh would’ve let me go, anyway.”
And with a wink he returned to work.
Chapter Ten
Noel
ETHEL HAD NEWS: her friend Stephen would be spending Christmas at Ben’s house.
“He lives alone on the other side of the lake,” she said. They were as always in the kitchen; outside it was colder from day to day as winter deepened, found its rhythm, and they drank hot tea and hot chocolate and wore sweaters and wrapped themselves in blankets. “He spent last Christmas with his daughter in Pennsylvania. This year he is spending Christmas with us.”
“Why doesn’t he go back to his daughter?” Buzzard asked.
“He was invited here,” she said evenly.
“She didn’t want him back,” Buzz cried. “He bored his own daughter to death. Now we’re going to be stuck with him.”
“You may spend the holidays in your room if you wish, Buzzard.”
“Will he be here first thing in the morning?” Olive asked innocently.
“I told him to get here as early as he wished.”
“I thought he might just spend the night,” Olive said.
“We don’t want to have to wait to open our presents,” Duke said.
“It might do you good,” Ethel replied. “All of you need to develop some restraint. You only think about yourselves.”
Robert drank cocoa and kept silent. He had earlier promised Buzz and Duke he would take them ice fishing, and now he hoped they had forgotten, that their early enthusiasm had been blunted by the cold. Olive kept a small thermometer on her desk and that morning it had been 50˚ in her bedroom, –12˚ just outside her window. For long minutes after Ethel shouted up that breakfast was ready Robert would not let Olive get out of bed. He held her against him, and though she protested and laughed and kicked to get free he would not release her. Getting out of bed would crack the fragile pod of warmth they shared. When he finally turned her loose and she kicked away the blankets he nearly screamed.
Robert had worked until noon on Christmas Eve. The season for which he had been hired was at an end. The store was closed Christmas, and Joe Marsh had not told him to come in on the twenty-sixth.
But when he punched out, the chunk! of the time clock s
eemed to be a signal, for Joe appeared at Robert’s side at once. He was draped in his bandoleer; he had put a sprig of holly in one bullet loop.
“Merry Christmas,” he said to Robert.
“Merry Christmas.” Since Herm’s visit the feeling between Robert and Joe Marsh had changed. Joe no longer took extended lunch hours, only “quickies,” as he told Robert. Herm’s visit had made them competitors in an odd way that Robert had no use for.
“What do you have planned?” Robert asked.
“I haven’t bought a tree yet,” Joe said. “Buy a tree, trim it, bounce the kid on my knee, roll around with the Mrs.”
Robert smiled. He never knew what to say to these remarks.
“What about you?”
“Visit my folks. The kids want me to take them ice fishing.”
Joe Marsh told Robert he had just what they would need. He went deep into the store and returned with a long red tool that reminded Robert of a posthole digger.
“This is an ice auger,” Joe Marsh said. “The lake ice is a foot thick. This will bore right through it. You got a shelter? A stove?”
“We have the shelter, I know. A stove, I don’t know,” Robert said. “It’s their project.”
“It’s cold out there.”
“Thanks,” Robert said. He leaned against the auger, the shined point pressing into the floor tile. “What’s the story with me now?” he asked politely.
“What do you mean?”
“Every kid I’ve talked to has a long face because the season’s over and they’ve been let go,” Robert said. “Do I still have a job?”
“Hey, of course,” Joe Marsh said. “I thought that was understood.” He took a yellow envelope from his pocket. “Herm’s a good boss. But he’s tight with his money, so this is doubly impressive, that he thought enough of your work to give you this.” He handed the envelope to Robert. “Don’t open it here. Don’t tell me how much it is. Just enjoy it. I’ll see you the day after tomorrow. Merry Christmas.”
Robert walked home with the ice auger over his shoulder. Everything was gray with cold; the greenness that was ordinarily the heart of the place wore a gray overcoat of cold and ice. The red auger gleamed in this like a beam of warm light frozen solid and made transportable. The wind hit him like a wall; at times he thought he would have to bore through the frozen air, a pipe to slide home through.
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