1979

by Ray Robertson

  Him, because it wasn’t supposed to be this way. He was supposed to know better.

  ~

  I hoped that the radio reception at our new house was the same or better than on William Street. The new building was only a ten-minute walk from the old one, but radio signals were unpredictable—sometimes on a late summer night, a Cleveland or Cincinnati or New York station would inexplicably crackle into existence on my transistor radio before just as mysteriously vanishing the same way—and I worried that maybe all of those century-old trees in Tecumseh Park might somehow mess up the electrical recipe that allowed me to hear, however buzzy and briefly, what Dave from Toledo thought of that night’s 7-6 Indians loss to the Red Sox, or what the overnight low in Central Park was going to be. It was only sports talk and weather reports, but it also wasn’t, was what people who spoke with funny accents had to say to each other and what the temperature was going to be in places I’d never been.

  The on-the-hour big news stories were pretty much the same in the south as they were in the north. Margaret Thatcher elected as the new British prime minister. The nuclear power plant accident at Three Mile Island. Ronald Reagan nominated as the Republican presidential candidate. Mr. Brown said it was important to be informed about the world, that we were all global citizens. The world was definitely out there, but we weren’t the world. We were Chatham, Ontario, Canada, population approximately 33,000. We had our own headlines.

  What I liked best were baseball games on the radio, the farther away the broadcast the better. Hockey was fast, so play-by-play guys on the radio had to stick to the game, could only try to keep up with the action. Baseball was slow and there were plenty of interruptions and delays, so baseball broadcasters told stories and jokes to help keep you interested. Sometimes the stories and jokes were the best part.

  Better than lucking into a baseball game on the radio, though, was a baseball game taking place on the West Coast, the Cleveland Indians, say, on the road against the California Angels, the ten p.m. first pitch meaning I’d be cozy under the covers by the third inning with my teeth brushed and the alarm set so that I could fall asleep with the transistor radio turned low and resting on my chest and the game going on and on without me but with me still right here. And in the morning the radio was always switched off and sitting on my nightstand. I knew Dad put it there, and I knew that he knew that I knew, but he never said anything about it and neither did I. When I was little my mother would read to me before bed and I’d fall asleep and she’d turn off the light and we never talked about that either.

  But best of all was a Detroit Tigers’ game on the West Coast, for all of the usual late-night reasons plus the number one reason to listen to any of the team’s broadcasts— whether early, late, or on weekend afternoons—Ernie Harwell, the Tigers’ play-by-play radio announcer. I wasn’t even much of a baseball fan. Fergie Jenkins and Bill Atkinson were from Chatham, but other than Mr. Allan, our gym teacher at school who’d played a couple of years in the minor leagues, that was about it for homegrown professional baseball players. Being born into hockey, I didn’t have a choice what my favourite sport was, the just-across-the-border Detroit Red Wings, my dad’s team, my team too. I played it until I was twelve, we watched it most Saturday nights on TV (even if it was always only the Toronto Maple Leafs), I read about it in The Hockey News, Hockey Digest, and wherever else I could. But that didn’t matter because I wasn’t really a baseball fan or even a Tigers fan. I was an Ernie Harwell fan.

  Ernie had his Ernieisms that we all wanted to hear at least once per game. When Detroit turned a double play, it was “two for the price of one for the Tigers.” When an opposition batter was out on a called third strike, “he stood there like a house by the side of the road and watched it go by.” When a Tiger belted a home run, the ball was “looong gone.” When someone fouled a ball into the stands at Tiger Stadium, we heard how “a man from Wallowa will take that one home” or how “a young woman from Ypsilanti has got herself a souvenir.” Until I was older and Dad told me that Ernie just picked places at random, I thought Ernie Harwell must have been the wisest man who ever lived.

  But amusing catchphrases weren’t why anyone listened to Ernie Harwell. Ernie Harwell’s voice sounded like life. Life the way it was supposed to be, not the way it ordinarily was. It was smooth and sweet—pancake-syrup smooth and sweet—but never sickly sugary like eating a whole bag of cotton candy at the fair, there was a gravelly rumble at its heart that reminded you that everything delightful is full of everything else too, that’s how you can tell it’s the real thing. Life was boredom then fear then excitement then uncertainty then funny then sad then confusing then scary then predictable then… A baseball game called by Ernie Harwell made sense. Some parts were better than others, sometimes you won and sometimes you lost, but that same sane, honeyed voice was always reminding you that it’s a long season, 162 games, and even if it’s unlikely that it’ll all work out in the end, that’s okay, today’s game is all we can really know, so sit back, friends, enjoy, and let’s see what happens.

  Former Star Baseball Prospect Ends Up Teaching Gym

  “Games. It’s All About Playing Games, Isn’t It?”

  IT WAS ALWAYS only a game. Baseball was fun. A thirteen-pitch at-bat battle resulting in a hard-earned passed-ball truce; the smack of a grounder safe in the pocket of the glove and a lazy laser to first base and Out!; that rare thing, the thing no hitter ever hears enough: sweet-spot crack of bat to ball and bye-bye and touch all the bases on your way home. But hockey was fun too; so was basketball, football, even track and field. He played them all and he played them well and if he hadn’t been such a damn good line-drive hitter and a hit-thieving fielder he would have just kept playing them all until… Well, why would he ever stop? They were fun. And wasn’t that the way it was supposed to be?

  But he was good—very, very good. Could hit a curve ball when most other kids his age were glad to just get it out of the infield; was a skinny-legged vacuum cleaner sucking up fly balls in left-field; sometimes it seemed like he could steal a base whenever he felt like it. His coaches and his father and his conscience convinced him to funnel his time and talent and choose baseball as it had so clearly chosen him. He thought it might have been fun to try university—you heard stories about fraternities and keggers and girls who had their own apartments—but his coach knew someone who scouted part-time for the Phillies, and with his parents’ blessing, arranged for him to complete high school in Windsor, where the competition was better and where American scouts were known to visit. It was only an hour away, and his parents rarely skipped a home game, but he missed his friends and his sisters and Chatham. Ended up batting .487, though, and earned a reputation as an outfielder that you simply didn’t run on.

  He wasn’t drafted, but the Yankees inked him to a rookie contract that included a $1,000 signing bonus. He wanted to buy a car, but he didn’t know how to drive. His parents convinced him to put the money in the bank and his father assured him that when he was a major leaguer he could buy the best sports car around. Hell, he said, he wouldn’t need a car, could have his own limousine and driver if he wanted. He received a one-way bus ticket in the mail and rode the Greyhound for nineteen hours to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, home of the Yankees single-A affiliate. The home of him now, too. He moved into a duplex that wasn’t near the ocean with three other teenaged prospects. The guy from Alabama was hard to understand and chewed tobacco and left used-up, dried-up chaw all over the apartment. The black guy from New York, his roommate, was a good guy but snored so loudly he took to sleeping on the living-room couch which was two inches too short. The other guy, a Puerto Rican, didn’t speak any English.

  But he wasn’t there to make friends, he was there to bust his tail, as his dad advised, and to force the Yankees to notice him and promote him to their Manchester, New Hampshire double-A team. He was too embarrassed to ask anyone, so he went to the public library to get a map to see whe
re New Hampshire was. Wherever it was, it had to be better than Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. Everyone back home asked about orange trees and the ocean and girls in bikinis, but all he saw was the highway to the ballpark and the inside of the duplex and the crappy school bus they rode for five, ten, sometimes twelve hours at a time. And whoever thought you could grow tired of sunshine? Like a twenty-four hour snowstorm back home, but in reverse. And the humidity, God, the humidity, you couldn’t take enough showers in a day to feel clean for longer than fifteen minutes.

  But as his dad reminded him in a letter he wrote to buck up his homesick son’s spirits, he wasn’t there for the weather or to see the sights or to enjoy the scenery—he was there to put his nose to the grindstone, to put his shoulder to the wheel, to get his name in the newspaper. By the end of the year, he’d broken his nose in a home-plate collision (he was called out) sprained his right shoulder swinging and missing at a nasty sinker (he struck out), and by season’s end his statistics, as published in the Ft. Lauderdale Times, read: Batting Average .209, RBI 11, Home Runs 1, Strike-Outs 89, Stolen Bases 4. He didn’t embarrass himself in the field, but he didn’t distinguish himself either, which at baseball’s lowest minor-league level is almost the same thing. Show us something special or show yourself the door, son, there are plenty more hometown heroes where you came from.

  He stuck it out for another season before his sore shoulder and aching ego sent him back home on another Greyhound, another one-way ticket. His father kept on him to stay in shape and keep his spirits up and not to give up on his dream. He also got him a job at Webster and Sons Roofing where he’d worked for 23 years and where everyone was a big baseball fan and had lots of questions about what it was like to play for the Yankees. “The Ft. Lauderdale Yankees,” he’d remind them, and hammer in another nail. It wasn’t Florida hot and humid, but laying down shingle on a tar roof at two o’clock in the afternoon in August sure as hell felt close to it. He might not have known what his dream was anymore, but he was pretty sure what his nightmare was: 23 more years of this shit. He still had his banked bonus money and used it to enroll in the University of Western Ontario.

  Where he discovered that he liked school. He stuck to intramural sports—the shoulder had healed up okay, but he limited himself to beery touch football on Saturday afternoons and a bit of golf with some of the guys from his residence—and focused on his studies. He majored in political science, but what he really wanted was to one day teach physical education in high school. Of course. It was obvious. Why hadn’t he thought of it before? Games: he could play games all day again, play games and pass on to others just how much fun it was to play games. After all, wasn’t that the way it was supposed to be?

  ~

  “Where’s the towel?”

  “I didn’t take it,” I said. I lifted my hands from the half-full sink of soapy dish water to confirm my innocence. “I’m doing the dishes.”

  “No shit, Sherlock,” Julie said. “The dish towel. You know—to dry the dishes.”

  The evening dishes—washing and drying—were my responsibility, and I never volunteered to help Julie when it was her turn in the morning. People usually only did nice things for you when they wanted something even nicer in return.

  “Goof,” she said, taking the towel from my shoulder and lightly flicking me in the chest with it, locker-room style, “You’d forget your head if it wasn’t screwed on.” I moved over a few inches to make room at the counter.

  You’d forget your head if it wasn’t screwed on was something Mom used to say, and in the same gentle poking, joking way. Not bothering with the white plastic drying rack anymore, handing her the heavy crock pot to dry directly, I noticed how much Julie looked like Mom. She’d always had the same longish, thin face and high cheekbones and alert, blue eyes, but now, now that she was as tall or taller than Mom, I really saw it. My sister was beautiful. I felt sort of proud.

  “Hey, remember last winter when you wanted to go to Toronto and you told Dad you might ask Mom if you could stay with her? Would you have really done it?” I said it like the question had just occurred to me between the clean crock pot and the dirty mashed-potato bowl and wasn’t something I’d always wanted to know but never knew how to ask or when to ask it.

  “Sure,” she said. But her sure wasn’t what it sounded like; too casual, too chirpily off-the-cuff to be either.

  The kitchen radio was on, I must have turned it on, although I didn’t remember doing it and couldn’t give a good reason why. Who cared about the latest update on what was happening in Iran and who could be bothered with the kind of crappy music CFCO played? There was a dial, and it didn’t have to stay stuck on Chatham’s only station, there were others, better ones, like CKLW. There was even an FM switch that could be flicked and FM stations like the ones Julie listened to. But we left it on CFCO. CFCO was what always got played in the kitchen.

  I kept washing and Julie kept drying, and I thought I caught her humming along to Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler,” which was playing on the radio while she wiped. She noticed me noticing her. Instead of pretending she’d been humming something else, she laughed and sang along with the song, the part about knowing when to hold ’em, knowing when to fold ’em, knowing when to walk away, knowing when to run.

  “What a lame song,” I said.

  “Yeah, and you know all the words to it, too.”

  “No I don’t.”

  “Right.” When the chorus came around again, she sang along again, this time singing at me, holding the potato masher in front of her face like a microphone.

  “Cut it out,” I said, but smiling, scrubbing the potato pot.

  She closed her eyes and sang louder, the end of the song giving her a convenient chance to belt out the chorus twice. The song ended and the disc jockey started talking and she opened her eyes and we both laughed and she dried the masher. A commercial for a furnace company came on next reminding listeners that winter was just around the corner and now was the time to replace that old unreliable furnace or take advantage of their fall furnace check-up special.

  “What was your initiation like?” I said. “When you started at CCI, I mean.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The grade nines. They get initiated, right?” I let the water from the tap fill up Dad’s coffee cup and then did it again. It was important to get the coffee stains out, but you didn’t want it to taste like soap the next time you used it, either.

  “Who told you that?”

  “I don’t care,” I said. “I’m not worried. I just figure if I can find out what it’s about, why wouldn’t I want to know?”

  Julie shook her head while she wiped. “Whoever told you CCI still had freshman initiation is full of it. Probably someone who never even went there, right?”

  I shrugged. Dale had told me, back when we still told each other things. I really hadn’t been worried—not like math-exam worried—but couldn’t help feeling better. The commercial break was over and another song came on, “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” It hadn’t been a hit long enough for us to know the words without wanting to. “Remember those hymn tapes Mom brought home and played all the time?” I said.

  “You remember that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You were so young, I mean.”

  “I remember.”

  All that was left was the silverware, which I had already washed and put in the drying rack before Julie showed up. She started in on the forks. “You’ve got Mom on the brain today,” she said.

  I was rinsing the sink, directing all of the little pieces of leftover food into the drain catcher. “Do you ever think… I don’t know… that maybe we should have tried harder to get her to stay?”

  Julie stopped wiping; looked at me. “You weren’t old enough to know what it was like, Tom, not really. God, God, God, day and night, every day, all day. Did you know she wanted Dad to
tithe twenty-percent of his income to that stupid church she belonged to?”

  “I know, I remember.”

  “You couldn’t have, you were too young.”

  “I said I remember.”

  “Do you also remember she was having an affair with Reverend Bob? Yeah, her and Holy Joe.”

  I removed the catcher from the drain and emptied it in the garage pail underneath the sink. It had seemed like one day there was Mom and Dad, the next day there was Mom and Reverend Bob, where and when the one started and the other began as unclear as why it happened. I crossed my arms and leaned against the kitchen counter, looked at my running shoes. The song was still on and it made me mad that although it was a dumb song, I was starting to memorize it. How come you knew things you didn’t want to know, but things that you wished you did, like the name of all the provincial capitals, you didn’t?

  “She left us, Tom, not the other way around.”

  “She said Dad told her to leave.”

  “Maybe he did, but that’s not what I meant. And you know what I mean.”

  I kept looking at my shoes.

  “Look, she’s Mom and I love her too, the same as you do, but she’s happier this way. And so are we.”

  “How do you know if she’s happy?”

  “When you talk to her on the phone, does she sound like she’s sad?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yeah, you do. She sounds like somebody she’s supposed to be. Just… love her and be happy for her. That’s all you can do.”

  I’d finished scrutinizing my running shoes. “We haven’t seen her in, like, three years.”

  “Love her and be happy for her.” Julie hung the dish towel over the oven door handle. She went into her room and I went into mine.

  Sometimes we’d sit on the grass for a few minutes after we were done our jog. There were acres of thick green lawn and plenty of tall shade tress and more chirping birds and fluttering butterflies than even in Tecumseh Park, but if you thought too much about where you were it could get in the way of having a good time while you were there. The blade of grass I was chewing while lying on my back looking at a cloud resemble a three-legged sheep got its extra-grassy greenness from the daily deposited dearly departed, the A-1 fertilizer otherwise known as fresh funerals. Funerals that provided rotting corpses that, in turn, provided nutritionally rich soil for, say, the blade of lip-hanging grass I was looking at with slight difficulty over my nose. Life, death, fertilizer, repeat. I spit the piece of grass out, but it landed on my bare thigh. I flicked it back where it came from, where it would begin being whatever it was going to be next.