Just then the inning ended and the Cleveland Indians came jogging out onto the field. Their first baseman—copper-skinned, with Popeye-grade arms and an ornate black goatee—had a thick sinister shape to him, a streetfighter’s physique crammed into the temperate uniform of a ballplayer. From the rows above and behind him Talmadge heard people yelling something to the first baseman. Something scraggly and bitter-sounding, the word hurled like a shotput. It sounded like herpes.
“Does he have herpes?” Talmadge asked Matty.
“No, man. That’s his name.”
“His name’s Herpes?”
“His name’s Hermes, dude. Hermes Ortiz.”
At this point Matty joined in, cupping his mouth and shouting, “Hey, Herpes! Herpes!” Matty seemed pleased with himself, devouring a nacho as reward, but at this near distance, so close to the field and thereby to Herpes/Hermes, something felt off to Talmadge, as though at this point-blank range the partisan became personal. Evidently he wasn’t alone. With a sharp crank of her head the woman beside Talmadge shot them a glare, withering upon impact, and her husband leaned forward in his seat and pointing a rolled-up program at them said, “Come on, boys.” Even Hermes himself took notice, flashing them a quick but meaningful scowl. From what Talmadge could gather an unwritten code had been violated, and he found himself slinking down into his seat even as the fans in the higher seats, emboldened by Matty’s breach, broke into a caustic mob-chant of Herpes Herpes Herpes. Talmadge was reminded of the way he’d felt when his Uncle Lenord, regrettably introduced to the open bar at his cousin’s son’s wedding reception, commandeered the microphone and concluded his toast by saying of the bride, “I’d slide buck-nekkid down a rusty razor blade into a pool of rubbing alcohol just to hear her fart over a walkie talkie.” The bride’s father chased Lenord out into the parking lot but ultimately it didn’t matter because the marriage failed to survive a year; the investment had been bad from the start.
Not wanting to see Matty chased into the parking lot, Talmadge diverted him by asking, “Are the Yankees any good this year?”
Matty snorted. “You really don’t follow, do you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Baseball. You don’t follow baseball.”
“I guess not.”
“Well, they’re in first. The Sox are three games back.”
“What about Cleveland?”
“In third. Four and a half back.”
“Okay.”
“But Cleveland’s on a big fucking streak right now. They’ve won seven road games.”
“Gotcha.”
“And the Yankees, man—injuries out the ass. It’s tight.”
“Okay.”
After a moment Matty said, “So it matters.”
“The game, you mean?”
“Yeah. The game.”
With a perfect-sounding crack a Yankee batter hit a pitch high out to left field and Matty rose from his seat to watch it, lips parted in expectation. When it dropped into the outfielder’s glove Matty dropped himself back down, lips resealed. “Thought he had the goods on that one,” he muttered.
“I guess we’re more like football people,” said Talmadge. “In the South, I mean.”
Matty’s face clouded. “Yo, space dude, you forgetting who I am?”
“I’m just sayin.”
What he was saying, he thought afterwards, as the teams switched fields and shouts of Bye Herpes chased Ortiz across the diamond, was that this—the game itself, the field box seats, his extravagantly rude and siliconized seatmate—was all foreign and exotic and vaguely incomprehensible to him, and not just because Micah (who at one time and maybe still was foreign and exotic and incomprehensible to him) had rewired his thinking so that every component of his life needed to jibe with their all-encompassing moral vision, all these square pegs needing to be rammed into impossible round holes. But then no, scratch that. He took a long swig of beer to flush out the confusion. Truth was, he didn’t know what he was saying because he didn’t even know what he was thinking—not lately, anyway. All his thoughts were clipped short, like the grass on the field. Maybe it was that he shouldn’t have come here in the first place, maybe just that—that something was wrong about this, though precisely what he couldn’t say. Where he should’ve been, he knew, was home with Micah—especially now. Because of. Except that—he cut the thought short with a sigh, revisiting his beer. But the thought unspooled anyway: Except that he couldn’t stand to be home with Micah right now. Because of: again.
“Gentlemen?” Someone was calling to them from Talmadge’s right. Looking over he saw a stadium guard leaning across the sweaty husband who seemed oddly okay with having his view of the field blocked. “Can I see your tickets, gentlemen?”
“Fuck,” Matty whispered. “Be cool.”
“What’s going on? We are squatting, aren’t we? It’s no big deal.”
“Just be cool,” Matty hissed, passing the ticket stubs to Talmadge who had to awkwardly angle his arm in order to pass them to the guard without brushing his seatmate’s inflations.
The guard checked the tickets and returning them said, “Enjoy the game.”
“What was that?” Talmadge asked Matty.
“What was what?”
“Why’d you freak?”
“I didn’t freak. Shut up, man. Jeter’s up.”
“You freaked, dude.”
“Just shut up. I’ll tell you later.”
So something was wrong about all this: Talmadge’s Spidey-sense stood confirmed. How much had these tickets cost, anyway? In his chivalrous effort to avoid boob contact he’d missed an opportunity to note the price when conveying the tickets back and forth. He rewound his memory to an argument with Micah that he’d had about a month ago: Matty had come home one evening with roughly thirty boxes of Ho Hos which he’d claimed to have found in a trash bag outside the Gristedes on Mercer Street. Alone with Talmadge later she’d called bullshit. “No one throws Ho Hos out,” she fumed. “That shit’s got the shelf life of chainsaw oil.” Talmadge’s response was along the lines of so what. “We’re not running a hostel, man,” she said. “If Matty wants to join forces, or even just show some goddamn respect for what we believe in, then it’s cool, but otherwise . . .”
“Join forces?” Talmadge interrupted. “Since when are we at war?”
With a sadness that seemed to him terribly and even mysteriously overwrought, considering they were fighting about Ho Hos, she put a hand to his chest and said, “You just don’t get it, man,” and by walking away left him smoldering and confused. He didn’t get it. She was right.
But then he also didn’t get where Matty had scored the cash to buy thirty boxes of Ho Hos unless he contemplated the obvious answer which Talmadge didn’t want to do. So as the fresh Ho Hos continued to pile up in the cabinets and a new longboard appeared in the outside hallway and Matty’s creased-up old Doc Martens were replaced with crisp new waffle-soled Vans, Talmadge willfully ignored it all, allowing Matty his charade (“Yeah, there must be, like, a recall on Ho Hos or someshit”) while avoiding the topic with Micah with the same twisty exertion he’d just applied to dodging his seatmate’s breasts. But now, as the theme from Rocky came raining from the loudspeakers above them: What the hell, man? Five hundred bucks for these seats? Maybe more? He took an anxious sip of beer as the Yankees orchestrated a double play to retire the inning and Matty rose up cheering.
“Something’s up,” Talmadge finally said to him. “You’re back to dealing again, aren’t you?”
Scrunching his face, Matty blew out a fat derisive pshaw sound. “I’m not dealing, okay? Will you just enjoy the fucking game? Did you even see that play?”
“I don’t like it. It feels weird, dude. Like I’m sitting in a stolen seat.”
Noting a beer vendor, Matty waved him over and signaled for two. He peeled off a twenty for Talmadge to pass down. As Talmadge stood to retrieve the beers he heard Matty say, “Watch out for those tits,” and was this time
relieved at the woman’s deafness act. He did, however, sneak a glance down the engineered crevice of her cleavage which was gleaming with sweat droplets, a water slide to paradise or if not paradise then a reasonable imitation. He’d never fiddled with anything like them, he realized. Becky Annandale’s, back in college, were reputed to be fake, but at the time he’d touched them he hadn’t had enough experience to tell the difference; but then Becky’s certainly weren’t like these, mere pints to these gallon-plus jugs. When Hermes Ortiz took the field Matty waved to him like someone trying to catch a date’s attention in a crowded restaurant. “Yoo hoo, Herpes,” he called, and Talmadge noted a sharp hissing from his right, from the husband. Then in a low conspiratorial voice Matty said to Talmadge, “So what if you are?”
“Are, what?”
“Sitting in a stolen seat.”
“Am I?”
“Keep your voice down.”
Talmadge’s voice twanged in anger, “What the fuck, dude?”
Matty shifted his attention to the field. A strike. Two balls. A softly popped foul that went arcing into the stands behind them, which Matty didn’t crane his neck or even raise his head to watch pass. It was like he was watching the game without watching it. Another strike, followed by another. The batter punished the dirt with a sharp kick before heaving the bat to the batboy. One out.
“This stays between us, right? No exemption for the chick.”
“Right,” Talmadge agreed.
Matty paused to watch the next batter, some inner conflict torquing his face; he looked indigestive, licking his lips, his Adam’s apple throbbing from his frequent swallowing. “Now batting for the Yankees,” came the announcement, “Johnny Damon.” Matty clapped, so Talmadge did too. One strike, then another, then a crack that sent the ball skittering past the second baseman out into center field, a ground-ball single that landed Damon on first base. “Way to play it, Johnny!’ Matty shouted, as the loudspeakers blared some godawful techno song that Talmadge associated with amusement parks and other manufactured fun, like his other seatmate perhaps. Adjusting his helmet as he headed back to the base, Damon turned to give Matty a wink.
“You see that?” Matty bubbled.
He was stalling.
“Come on, dude,” Talmadge urged.
“Okay.” Rolling his shoulders like an on-deck batter, Matty cleared his throat and said, “I’m kinda doing this, like, entrepreneur thing.”
“What’re you talking about?”
He leaned in. “You know that dumpster, at the nursing home?”
“The one on Henry Street?”
“Yeah, that one. There was some valuable shit in there. And I’m not talking rice.”
“What kind of shit?”
“Keep your voice down, man.”
“What kind of shit?”
“Credit card statements. Bank statements. Social security papers. Motherfucking treasure trove.”
“Dude,” Talmadge said, with a burn in his chest. “Tell me you’re lying.”
“It’s so freaking easy, man.” Matty lifted his head at the sound of bat striking ball—but it was just a foul, shanked into the netting. “This guy I did time with, my cellie back in Oregon?” he continued. “He hooked me up with his, like, cousin or something, I dunno, this dude out in Brighton Beach. He can fucking do anything with that info, man. He’s got this machine, right? In his basement. That basement’s so fucked up, dude, it’s like Satan’s playroom. Anyway, there’s this rad machine down there, and you just plug in the numbers and it spits out a credit card. With the little name and everything.”
“Holy shit,” Talmadge said, not sure what was impressing him, if anything. Probably the machine.
“I mean, it’s not that easy. He don’t pay me that much. It’s mostly meth-heads bringing him shit so he just pays ’em with some tweak. But I’m going light on that shit, dude. Monya, he kinda respects that. We’re on, like, cash and credit terms.”
“Who’s Monya?”
“That’s the dude in Brighton Beach. Fucking Russian mafia, man. Face tats and all that. Honestly? He kinda scares the shit outta me.” Matty unloosed an intensely uncomfortable laugh, like that of someone tickled to the point of pain. “But it’s cool. It’s cool, Tal. It ain’t nothing to freak out over. It’s petty, dude. It’s just another angle.”
Talmadge’s face reddened, and shifting away from Matty he said, “Man, Micah would . . .”
“Micah’s not gonna do anything, dude.” There was menace at the bottom of Matty’s voice: an unfamiliar substrate, to Talmadge’s ears, despite all their years of friendship. “Okay? You follow?”
They sat in silence, only lightly clapping, while the Yankees chalked up another hit: a line drive by Matsui that bounced off the center-field wall and put Damon on third. Talmadge sipped his Miller Lite, which had a sour tinge to it—possibly the effect of its newly revealed status as contraband. None of this was really surprising, he concluded, just as it hadn’t been a surprise two years ago when Matty called to say he’d been busted in a Portland sting operation, or two years before that, when Matty informed him he’d been booted off the Ole Miss soccer team for failing a drug test even though he’d chugged seventeen cups of goldenseal tea to cleanse the urine sample. If anything, Matty was the consistent one in their friendship, the steady control—his desires never deviating, their outcomes measured and predictable. Talmadge was the wildcard, the one with all the surprises.
“So who are we today?” he asked Matty.
“What do you mean?”
“Like, who comped our tickets?”
“Oh, yeah. Him. That’d be Dr. Elwin Cross Sr.”
With equal doses sarcasm and earnestness Talmadge mumbled, “Sorry, Elwin.”
“Dude, fuck Elwin.” Matty’s eyes flared, but after a quick survey of the field they came back softer. “Elwin’s fine, okay? The banks eat up all this shit anyway. Bank of America, that’s who’s treating us today. People see the weird charges, they call the bank, the bank freezes the card and wipes the charges clean. It’s, like, an operating expense. Monya explained it all to me. They don’t even investigate it.”
Talmadge mulled this for a while, as Matsui stole second and the stadium quaked with the sudden stomp of forty thousand people springing to their feet (Talmadge excepted), the slippery chords of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” overpowering the speakers and blowing sonic fuzz throughout the stands, Matty hoisting his beer to the sky and whooping and even Talmadge’s other seatmate up on her heels now, rocking her knees up and down as though gathering the kinetic force necessary to launch herself skyward. Or was she dancing? Talmadge caught himself staring at her ass, which was respectable so far as asses went though he’d never been an ass man so he didn’t really understand why his eyes felt suddenly locked to the thin blue satin clinging so faithfully to her buttocks. He had to remind himself that from all available evidence (the brusqueness, the store-bought tits, the tanning-booth patina, the sugar-daddy husband) she was flatly despicable—the tri-state equivalent of Sherilyn, his stepmom in technicality only, who’d transformed his father into a puddle of what he supposed was lust (though the idea skeeved him out) and in doing so sliced his family down the middle. He was both disappointed and relieved when the woman sat back down.
“Funny thing about Elwin, though,” Matty said thoughtfully.
“What’s that?”
“This card’s been hot for, like, two months now. Normally you get a few days, max. I’m not even supposed to be using it like this. Mail-order only, that’s Monya’s rule. But fuck. The thing’s hot. Elwin must have some serious bank.”
Talmadge felt his face go hot. “Dude, are you insane? What’re you, missing prison or something?”
“It’s cool, man. I told you.”
“Naw, it’s bullshit.” Matty always had to push it. That was the thing with him: Whatever it was, he pushed it till it broke. “I’m not digging this.”
“Fuck you, dude. It’s from the same trash you�
�re scrounging through.” He was misinterpreting Talmadge’s objection as being on ethical grounds, though Talmadge hadn’t even broached that yet, to Matty or himself. “I’m just, like, recycling the information. It’s all the same.”
“Whatever. It’s a felony, man.”
“Would you keep it down?”
“This explains the Ho Hos, too.”
“The what?”
“All the Ho Hos you’ve been dragging in. You don’t never see Ho Hos in the trash. They’ve got the shelf life of, like, chainsaw oil.”
“Chainsaw oil?”
“Whatever. A ten-thousand-year shelf life.”
“Awright, fine. Busted. Maybe I was trying to make your chick happy.”
“She doesn’t eat Ho Hos.”
“So what if I was trying to make me happy, okay?” Cheering went rippling through the stands, which they both ignored. “They’re fucking Ho Hos. I’m supposed to tell her, what, some old dude in a nursing home bought ’em for us? I can’t believe you’re busting my balls over Ho Hos. I tried bringing steaks back once and you saw how that turned out. What a fucking party that was. Micah, man.” Talmadge caught a note of personal grievance in Matty’s voice. “She’s so, like—hardcore, man. Chick doesn’t bend. I’m sorry, dude, but I don’t know how you put up with her shit sometimes—”
“She’s pregnant, you know.”
The paralyzed expression on Matty’s face mirrored Talmadge’s own. He hadn’t intended to tell Matty—not yet, at least. And God knows not like this. It was like he hadn’t spoken it so much as allowed it to escape, had left the gate unlocked on this news that’d been fermenting inside him for three weeks now, this bubbling acid burning holes in his gut. He felt a panic beginning to swirl within him, second only to the panic he’d felt when Micah told him because now he’d just loosed it, brought it to life outside the narrow confines of their relationship, and in doing so had made it real. The weirdest thing was: He’d felt her getting pregnant, he’d actually felt the moment of conception as they’d exploded that night into some paranormal whoosh of synchronized climax, intertwined orgasms squared to the nth degree, as though right there, at the porthole tip of his dick, he’d sensed the sperm meeting the egg and doing whatever it was they did to begin construction on a microscopic head and heart, and when he’d rolled off her—Micah still quivering and spaced out, because her orgasms often resembled epileptic seizures, thrashy and prolonged—he’d felt strangely heavy, almost despondent really, despite having just experienced perhaps the deepest and most spectacular sex of his life. She’d fallen straight to sleep—which was also odd, because usually sex threw Micah into a talkative whir—and after a long dark while Talmadge found himself climbing to the roof and staring at the skyline as if somewhere in all those constellations of trembling yellow windows was the answer to a hard and essential question, if only he knew what it was, or how to ask it.
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