Breaking the Fall

by Michael Cadnum

  I moved back and sat on an overturned wheelbarrow so I wouldn’t inhale the yellow poison, but he wasn’t even wearing a respirator. “Chinese elm,” he called. “Nothing but problems.”

  Sky wanted to know what her father and I had talked about.

  “It was pretty profound,” I said.

  “He’s very serious.”

  We were both eating pattimelts on Piedmont Avenue. It was the first time we had ever eaten anything together, and I was eating very slowly.

  She added, “He believes in me, Stanley.”

  She said this so solemnly that I needed to make a joke of some kind. “Is there some question? Do some people say you don’t exist?”

  Having said that, I didn’t like the sound of it. Sky’s family was not to be joked about.

  Her eyes were downcast, and she was no longer eating. “He worries all the time.”

  “He looks calm.”

  “He’s slow, but he’s not calm, Stanley.”

  I ate the crust of my pattimelt, which was crunchy and flavored with cheesy grease.

  “He remembers some stuff about you.”

  “I’m an all-right person.” The statement sprang out of me, and I grabbed a paper napkin.

  “But you remember when the school blew up.”

  This made me crumple my napkin into a wad. “That’s ridiculous,” I said, feeling small and futile.

  The school had blown up before I had even gone there, before I was even a freshman. I had slept through it, but it blew out windows from Trestle Glen to Chinatown. Dozens of students had been questioned, past, present, and future high school students, and I had been dragged into the investigation because I used to smoke cigarettes behind the auto-shop building.

  “He would hate it if I got in any kind of trouble, Stanley.”

  “Does knowing me automatically mean you’re in trouble?” I really can’t stand the way words spit out of me.

  Sky took my hand from across the table and opened it up, actually turned it over and parted my fingers with hers without looking at it, looking right into my eyes all the time.

  “Tu likes you a lot,” she said.

  “But you don’t,” I heard myself say.

  Sky doesn’t strike poses, and she doesn’t flirt. She considered my words. “I like you, too,” she said.

  I thought: but. She’s going to say, “but …”

  She didn’t. She glanced down, and kept her hand where it was.

  “Who is this other guy?” I said, and wanted to put my hands over my mouth.

  She withdrew her hand. “He’s not important.”

  But she said this regretfully, as though the other guy was a large, churchgoing, nonsmoking person her father adored.

  Careful, I told myself.

  Be very careful.

  20

  I swung hard, and missed.

  The pitching machine was a gun, a cannon, and it fired so hard the pitches were streaks. The machine made a high, musical note, clicked, and then whipped another pitch to the back of the cage.

  Afternoon: that second chance in the day, that chance to do something right.

  I fouled one off, and the velocity spun the pitch up, into the sagging chain-link above. I didn’t belong here anymore. But the other players let me take a turn, remembering the days when I used to belong there. Surely I would do so well this afternoon that the coach would see me and change his mind. Surely I had a right to a second chance. Everyone knew how hard I tried.

  I wasn’t doing too badly. Not well, but not a disaster, either. I loved the smell of grass under my cleats, the blades squashed and releasing that scent of newness. I knocked the damp earth out of my cleats. I had been wrong, I saw this now. I should have been here every afternoon, where I belonged.

  Jared had dragged me away, convinced me that sports were for losers, and the best sport of all was his own secret game. He had been right. His sport was better, but I was happy to be back in this diminished—duller but more real, and safer—game.

  The aluminum bat made that sour boink. The machine was set for eighty miles an hour and finally I was lining into the cage, making the steel poles hum. But too many of the pitches still kissed the bat and sprang upward, or spun at my feet.

  The label on the bat said that it was made of aircraft-quality aluminum. The machine made that whine, that tick, and fired another ball out of its cannon. Eighty miles an hour. Fast, but not incredible.

  Far away, Jared was sitting on the stands, a tiny figure. I let the head of the bat drop to the dirt. I flexed my shoulders. Let him watch, I thought.

  Let him sit there watching all he wants. I don’t care anymore.

  A ball hummed past me, unchallenged.

  I opened my stance just a little, whipped my bat out to meet the cannon fire, and the next couple of pitches sang on a straight line.

  Other players were waiting, and Tu was there, hands on his hips, too big for baseball, too easygoing to play any sport, but right where he belonged.

  “Hit it with the bat, Stanley,” called Tu, and none of the other players joined Tu in mocking me. They all understood that something had changed. I belonged, somehow, to Tu, and he had the right, in a subtle way that cost me no further effort, to tease me and at the same time would step in to protest any catcall from anyone else. “Hit the ball with the bat,” he called.

  The scuffed grass was covered with old baseballs, scratched, gouged. Too many of them lay behind me, untouched. The aluminum shaft had grown heavy, and my grip was clammy. I could feel the cigarettes, too, a tightness in my chest.

  The coach arrived and hung on the chain-link the way a gibbon might, all arm and torso. I could tell by the way he watched that my swing was not what it should be.

  I chopped at a pitch from the machine and the ball hummed, springing against the cage behind me.

  I knew it was coming. “North,” the coach said. “Get out of there.” But only after he had assessed me for a while, only after I had done well with some pitches, and not so well with others.

  The coach and I walked into center field. Jared was a speck, unmoving. Looking on.

  “Eat more, North. Jesus. You’re getting skinnier every day.”

  I knew this was impossible, but I did not respond.

  “It’s not a matter of desire.” He stuffed his hands into his pockets. He wouldn’t look at me. “Desire is not the issue.”

  “A lot of shortstops aren’t that muscular.” I said this in a rotten little voice, with a catch in it. I gritted my teeth.

  He looked at the ground, at the toe of his shoe. He looked out at the stands, where no one was sitting this late in the day, except for one distant figure. “Sure,” he said at last, as though answering a question that had taken all his powers of memory and calculation. Then he looked at me. “Heart,” he said. “You used to have a lot of that, before you got hurt. I think that torn ligament took more out of you than you think.”

  I stared at him, and had one of those moments when you really see someone. Beloved Coach Peoples, who had been on television when he retired, had left the baseball program with the best record in northern California. A combination of weird weather—it never rained this late in the spring—and beginner’s bad luck had shaken this new coach, who was really a biology teacher.

  He continued, “Some people, the first time they get hurt, it really changes them. Sometimes the change isn’t to the good.”

  He got extra money for standing here like this, but he had dandruff in his black hair and wrinkles under his eyes, just a little puffiness, as though he drank or couldn’t sleep or both. Every racial and ethnic group on campus had wanted a coach who would represent their own group. Coach O’Brien was interesting ethnically, with a grandfather who had come from Mexico, but whose ancestors had emigrated from Ireland. He was sort of Hispanic and sort of Anglo, and had his own way of smiling down at the ground as though a grown man should be ashamed in front of his students.

  His ballplayers almost never spoke to
him directly. They liked him, in an unspoken way, but I think everyone was embarrassed for him because he wasn’t Peoples.

  I waited.

  “I can’t,” said Coach O’Brien. “Bolt is too good. Shows up every day. And we’ve got Chau on the bench.”

  “I don’t mind being a utility man,” I said, although I felt my bones turn to iron. A voice in me said: Never. I’ll never be third-string. I used to stop the ball with my eye socket, my teeth.

  Coach O’Brien exhaled through his nostrils, a sad, quiet laugh. Someone had reset the machine and it was firing faster and harder, and a bat was snapping the ball straight ahead every time.

  He laid a hand on my shoulder, and I knew that whatever he was saying, it wasn’t yes.

  21

  I slept badly, and could console myself only with the thought that Tu would tell Sky and their father that I was swinging the bat again.

  My father’s chair had been removed from the breakfast table, and was far off, by a wall. He had left, as usual, very early, the groan of the garage door briefly waking me in the dark. His dishes had long since been put into the dishwasher, but there was a faint outline of toast crumbs on his placemat.

  “Was Boston okay?” I asked.

  “Boston,” she echoed, like the word was a bad joke. “I can’t remember.

  But her phone had been trilling, and her answering machine had a dozen calls on it whenever I happened to look. She was wearing a new bathrobe, with wide shoulders and a narrow waist. It was dark purple, and made a light, airy noise when she moved.

  Maybe she was waiting for me to ask more questions, but I didn’t.

  I thought our conversation was over, and had stopped wishing that the news was on, when she said, “It was too much to expect you to be deaf and blind.” She said this looking out of the window over the sink.

  There was a cactus growing there, a green, spiky rock that just happened to be alive. It was not like either of my parents to have a plant. A gardener named Nolo came once a week to attack the hedge and mow the lawn, and when I was younger, I had thrilled at the chance to massacre some Bermuda hybrid with a Weed Whacker as Nolo took a cigarette break and looked on, chuckling.

  We had always lived in this house, as far back as I could remember. But that wasn’t true, I realized, sitting there shaping my toast into a modified jelly roll. There had been a long series of outside steps, sunny and made of crushed rock stuck together, slabs of glued-together gravel. This was all I could remember of another home, an apartment building. I had sat there, maybe three years old, as my mother ascended the steps, carrying groceries, the paper bag crackling, my mother laughing and nearly shrieking, a kind of jokey terror in her voice, because she thought my father was behind her, imitating a bear. He used to do that—pretend to be a big carnivore. But that had been a long time ago.

  Besides, in this memory my father hadn’t been chasing her after all, and she had stopped and looked back, waiting for him.

  “I’ve been stalling,” she said.

  I pushed my plate away, unable to eat my toast and jelly.

  “I’m not going to make it ugly for you and your father,” she said. “That’s how it is, I know that. You and your father.”

  I knew I was supposed to say something, but I shouldered silence toward her.

  She was looking at me, really looking.

  I looked back, and then my throat squeezed shut and I had to look away.

  She turned and batted at the sink with a dishtowel, snapped at crumbs the way guys do in a locker room, a couple of snaps with the towel, as if for fun. Then she dropped the towel, and the terry cloth pooled at her feet.

  Even when she left the kitchen, the length of towel kept the impression of her foot, arching over the place where it had been.

  22

  Sky was a strong walker.

  “They’d be all gone, Stanley, if people still hunted them.”

  “Maybe not,” I heard myself chirping. “There are still plenty of deer, and people hunt deer.”

  We were in Redwood Park, near where I had taken the wheel with Mr. Milliken for the first time. She had invited me to go exploring. I was panting to keep up, and nearly ran into her. She had stopped. “The passenger pigeon, Stanley. The American bison,” she said in an even, low voice.

  “Some people think people are a disease.” I was delighted to agree, hating myself for speaking up so stupidly.

  “I don’t think we are a disease,” she said. She hit me on the shoulder. “At least, not you, Stanley.”

  “I love the way you give compliments,” I said.

  She smiled. People smile all the time. But I had never seen anything like this. This was an expression that warmed and chilled me through my bones.

  When we reached the top of the ridge, the hills fell away from us, tawny and shaggy-blue where there were trees. She unsnapped the binocular case, her hands careful, sure, and she pried the protective caps off the lenses.

  “You can always see them here,” she said.

  I knew very little about birds, although I knew that the Romans had prized the eagle about as much as Americans did. I knew that Romans were superstitious about owls. I knew that falconry used to be an important sport.

  But aside from history, I knew very little. The actual creatures were unknown to me. Sky, though, was comfortable with animals, and had even stopped to caress the muzzle of a horse tethered to a fence post while its rider wandered off somewhere. The horse had nickered at her as we walked on, already missing her.

  Jared had this way with animals, too. A barking dog always fell silent or made its bark an I’m-only-kidding yelp when Jared strode by.

  But Jared would never have scanned the scattered clouds like this, looking upward.

  “They breed in the trees,” she said. “In the tops of the redwoods.”

  It was all emptiness to me, but a good emptiness—promise. Then I saw one. Two, circling high up, tilting gracefully. I grabbed her arm.

  Touching her like this stunned me. My hands leaped back. The strength of my feeling was surprising. I realized how little we had touched each other, and there I was, shaking her shoulder.

  “Turkey vultures, Stanley.”

  My hands felt clumsy, foreign. I picked at a blister on my palm, a remnant of my batting practice.

  “They are so pretty when you see them flying.” She watched my vultures through the binoculars.

  I thought that it was typical of me to pick a dead-meat-eater.

  “They can float like that forever, on the thermals,” said Sky, watching my carrion birds drift.

  Then there was a voice, a curling, spinning voice, a word that was not human. Sky turned to it at once, and reached her hand to me without removing her eyes from the binoculars. She touched my cheek.

  She will take her hand away, I thought, when she knows that she has touched you.

  But she turned and smiled at me, and before I could smile back or even think, she kissed me, and put her arms around me, her hair closing in around both of us with the wind for a moment, and the scent of her, like cinnamon, quickened me.

  The binocular strap tickled the back of my neck. Stay like this, I thought. Forever.

  Then she was apart from me, laughing. She handed me the binoculars, and I fumbled with the strap.

  The bird sounded its cry again. It did seem amazing to me, as it never really had before, that a hawk could make such a high, science-fiction announcement to all the mice and bugs that it was up there in the sky.

  We found a place where we could lie down and gaze upward. The ground was only a little pebbly, and there was grass, and foxtails that were still green. Young eucalyptus trees bent over us, and the shadows of the long, slender leaves spun and danced.

  When we stopped waiting for another hawk to skim over us, we held each other, and Sky let me explore her, smiling into me and letting my hand find where it could begin to give her pleasure, although through her clothes, and only for a little while.

  I wa
s afraid, really, to do more, or even want more, because even though my body was all over Sky, I was almost disturbed at my good luck, at the way the day had gone, at the way my life had turned and become right.

  I was afraid, and yet I wasn’t afraid, because I trusted Sky. I knew she would give me what she wanted to give, and what I felt wasn’t gratitude and hope so much as ignorance.

  She knew everything, and I was just a beginner.

  But it was working. I was doing the right things. Tu had told Sky that I was playing baseball again, and I hadn’t talked to Jared in what seemed like months.

  I actually believed that everything was fine.

  And I thought it could last.

  23

  In my father’s world there are great spaces that cannot be visited. Sex is one.

  He doesn’t like to talk about it, and if there is a real sweat-and-grunt scene in a movie you can sense his embarrassment and feel embarrassed yourself. I think, even though it’s awkward to consider, that he loved my mother, and that they were happy together in that physical way. But talking about it is to walk off the trail into the woods, and my father will not do that.

  He cannot talk about his dead parents, either, although when he does, it is always dignified and beautiful because he talks about them like someone making a speech before serious, quiet people. “My father loved football,” he will say. Or “Mom used to love that song,” and the statements have a frame around them, a silence that sets them off from conversation.

  He cannot talk about many things, and this is strange, because he is easy with words. I have been proud of him when I overhear him on the phone, persuading a tax collector that the factory’s tax rates are too high or consoling a man he has had to fire, and doing it so well you know that he has not made an enemy.

  I knew there was a conversation coming, a speech he would have to make, and I was embarrassed for him, for both of us, and I did not want to hear it.

  I knew what was coming because my mother had taken me to San Francisco, in her new car that smelled of vinyl and adhesive resin, a Japanese sports car she kept stalling on the Bay Bridge.