“Yeah,” Ben said. “Yeah, I’m ready to go home.”
Billy nodded. “Then let’s get you on that bus, kid.”
Chuck left them at that point, heading off to work with an autograph and a promise from Billy to send him tickets to an Atlantics home game, complete with airfare. The skinny man hugged them both. Ben accepted the gesture politely, but Billy thumped Chuck on the back so hard that Chuck drew away coughing and bowing, slightly, like a servant withdrawing from his master.
The bus slid into the depot and exhaled as if relieved to have stopped. The door opened, but no one got off. The driver eyed Ben and his single suitcase, then jerked his head toward the interior of the bus. Ben turned to Billy and surprised himself by hugging his friend. Billy didn’t thump him, but patted him with a tender gentleness.
“See ya at home, kid.”
“Yep,” Ben said, and withdrew to the steps of the bus.
“Have a great ride, son,” Billy called as the doors closed and Ben stepped into the humming aisle of the Greyhound. “Have a great ride.”
Deposited
1998
Up until the night we returned from cleaning out my father’s house, I had never seen my sister drunk. We had put a few back on occasion, but until the moment I rolled over on her pristinely white wool living room carpet and saw that she had tears in her eyes, I really hadn’t ever been with Lee when she was stinking. She sniffed dramatically and took a long sip of her drink, sloshing around the ice in a futile attempt to water it down.
“I shouldn’t be telling you any of this,” she said and then she spread her arms out and crossed her feet at the ankle so that she looked like a little Gucci Christ.
I couldn’t disagree with that, I thought.
“I’m glad you are, though,” I said, which wasn’t the truth, but then, who cared, right? Certainly not Lee. “We never really talk, you know?”
“We never did,” she affirmed. Rolling over, she propped herself up on her elbow and stared at me. “It’s not like I never needed you, you know. I mean, did you ever stop to think what it might mean to me when you decided to go to college in Seattle?”
The truth was, I never had. Why would I have? In the seventeen years I had spent on earth up to that point, my sister had never once expressed any need for a sibling, much less for me in particular. What happened to me that year, when I made up my mind to screw my family, my friends, my entire limited world, had no room for someone else. To have let her in on my secret would have, by virtue of the shaky design, knocked the entire rickety structure of my rationalization down on its ass.
“I was seventeen years-old,” I pointed out.
She rolled over onto her back, expertly taking the glass with her. “Well, it doesn’t matter now, does it?” she said. “What’s done is done, right?”
We lapsed into the clichés of too much liquor and depression. I nodded in agreement.
Lee probably had no intention of getting drunk when we went to clean out my father’s place and pick up the contents of his safe deposit box. She probably thought she could handle it, just as I did; that nothing from his life would shake us. But we were wrong, both of us. Perhaps he had known us better than I always thought, or maybe it was just luck.
We managed the house without too much unpleasant grieving. After opening a few drawers and running her hands over the top of all the best pieces of furniture, Lee simply turned and asked me what I wanted. None of my mother’s frou-frou Louis antiques appealed to me, so in the end I claimed only the things that reminded me most of my father: an overstuffed, striped recliner he had sat in each night in what he referred to as “the den;” an entire shelf of books on baseball; his golf clubs and the matching bowling balls he and my mother had used; and a battered, yellow baseball with an autograph from the Babe just before he died. Lee said she’d box the small stuff up and send it to me, then asked what I wanted to do with that “ugly old chair.” In a moment of brilliance, I also claimed my father’s 1957 Chevy pick-up from the garage, only to realize as Lee shrugged that she hadn’t wanted it anyway.
“Well, at least you’ll have to come back and visit in order to get that truck,” she said as she locked the door behind us, sealing any feelings we might have dared show back inside with the drawers of my father’s clothing, all of which would smell, I knew, like Old Spice, the only fragrance my mother said she could still smell when the chemo had muffled her senses. “I’m not sure the damn thing would make it to Seattle, but you’re welcome to try.”
In the car on the way to the bank, I rolled the window down again and this time Lee didn’t bother to complain. Standing in the air-conditioned lobby, waiting for one of the managers to let us into the vault, she shivered and pulled her sheer over-blouse closed across her chest. The manager opened the box and handed it to Lee before leaving us alone. Inside were two manila envelopes, one addressed to each of us in my father’s messy handwriting.
Lee lifted hers out and turned it over several times before stepping away from me toward the door.
“I’ll open mine in the office,” she said. “You can stay here to open yours.”
I wasn’t sure why she felt we needed to be so private about the whole thing, but didn’t argue. Her envelope was her own and I wasn’t about to demand to see the contents, though I might have liked some help dealing with whatever was in mine.
“Okay,” I said, pondering the fat lump in my envelope. “Are you alright?”
“Fine,” she barked, her envelope pressed to her chest. “I’ll see you outside, right?”
For a long ticking moment, I just sat there. The bank had provided soft, overstuffed chairs in the ante-room to the vault. I could have slept there comfortably, or wept, or crowed in secret delight. Instead I turned that damn brown envelope over in my hands, trying to figure out how much it would hurt me to open it before I did anything as concrete as breaking the seal. What could it be, this secret lump? I was reminded of Shylock and his pound of flesh. At last, feeling the stuffiness of the airless room, I slid one finger under the edge of the flap and gave myself a monstrous paper cut as I opened it.
Sucking the wound, I shook the package and watched as a paper-wrapped something tumbled out, followed by a legal document that was, as I suspected, a will. Reading the will informed me that my sister and I were my father’s sole heirs, and that she would receive his house and half a million dollars in a trust fund for the grandchildren. I would receive a check from the executor for half a million as well, plus all of his baseball memorabilia. His life insurance policy was to be divided between the two of us. I would have to contact the executer to find out how much that policy was currently worth. So that was that. I was rich enough to buy a nice house in Seattle, and fund my retirement accounts afterward. And since I’d already claimed all the memorabilia, I knew that wouldn’t upset Lee. For a moment, I sat and absorbed my new-found prosperity. It wasn’t upsetting, as I’d worried it might be, like blood-money. Nor was it a relief. I was glad for it, but not overjoyed.
I turned my attention to the lump. My father had written me a note, then crumpled it and several sheets of paper around something. As I uncurled them, a ring slipped onto my lap and then hit the floor with a sharp, jingling finality.
I bent down to retrieve it, rising off the chair and sliding one hand underneath the seat till I found it, resting near the wall. It was pleasantly gratifying to note that the bank didn’t move the chair to dust.
I waited to look at the ring, to confirm what I suspected it must be, until I was seated again. Turning it over, I read the date on the front. World Series Champions, 1976. It was not nearly as shocking to finally hold it in my hand as I had thought it might be. My father had never worn that ring, nor had he ever explained to me why he hadn’t. I had always assumed it was because of Ben, and though I suppose I’d known he would keep it, I wasn’t prepared to have it fall into my hands, so to speak. Why he had given it to me was a mystery, so after weighing the heavy metal in my hand for value, I
spread the two pages out on my lap.
My father’s team had won that year, obviously. The second time in a row. You might think that he would have carried the ring with pride, preferred it to the first one as evidence of promise fulfilled. But like most everything that awful year, it had been banished from our house to this vault, probably the day he received it. It was the year he had retired. It was also the year Ben McDunnough’s baseball career had ended, because his arm had exploded like a grenade and in the process, broken my father’s heart.
I could still remember the first flurry of hospital visits, Ben’s face pale and his arm swollen and purple. My father making bad “third leg” jokes. The surgeries, all the experimenting by the doctors... Nothing worked. As an adult, I understood the descent that followed: the fighting with my father, the drinking, and Ben’s eventual flight to California. As a teenager, I only saw that the man I had adored, had worshiped as a perfect amalgamation of my father and an object of sexual desire, had disappeared, had abandoned me. I mourned him for several months before I even began to acknowledge how angry I was at him. It would be several years before I understood that my father was beyond furious: he was inconsolable.
It would be almost five years before I would see Ben McDunnough again, five years before I would hear his name from my father. My mother would die, my sister would go off to college (or rather, stay home for it), I would give up my dreams of baseball and grow to accept my body for what it could offer. I received my first kiss, and Lee lost her virginity to the pitcher from the local farm team in a rather sordid incident beneath the bleachers on a hot Saturday afternoon. I discovered that I really could write, and that it made things a little bit better, somehow. All this would happen and yet in some fundamental way, nothing would change at all.
But it didn’t matter now, did it? That seemed to be the theme of the day. The first piece of paper, crinkled and yellow, turned out to be a note. “Dear Casey,” it read in my father’s cramped writing, as if he were a child shoving the pencil forward inch by agonizing inch, “I have never wanted to disappoint anyone, especially you. I love you, Dad.” Short and sweet, a riddle, a little enigma. I picked up the other pieces of paper and my entire world fell, not apart, exactly, but into a new shape: from whole to scattered; from square to round.
I was holding three receipts. For bets placed in Las Vegas, early August, 1976. The name on each receipt was Benjamin William McDunnough. Sent from my childhood address, and signed in my father’s chicken-scratch handwriting. Even if I hadn’t recognized the handwriting, I would have known this: William was my father’s name. Ben’s middle name was Ronald, after his grandfather. You don’t have a sixty-three page handmade scrapbook of clippings about someone hidden under your bed for six years without knowing their middle name. The bets concerned the point spread of the second, third and fourth games of the 1976 World Series. The games before Ben broke his arm. Each one favored the other team by more than 4 points. Together, they totaled more than a quarter million dollars. I knew, without even having to call the numbers forth from my memory, that all the bets had won.
So ok, when Lee offered me a little glass of whisky with some ice, I didn’t turn it down. And when she offered me a second, and then a third, and maybe more than that, I didn’t turn those down either, despite the acidic way the liqueur had begun to taste on my burned tongue.
We collapsed onto the sofa, accepting its embrace like weary travelers. Lee swished the amber liquid of her first shot around and around, coating everything in fermentation.
“We’re broke,” she said, after her second shot.
“What?” I asked, incredulous. “You’re kidding.”
She shook her head and licked her lips like a cat, chasing traces of alcohol. “Nope, ‘fraid not. In fact,” she enunciated, stretching the last two letters till they cracked, “we’re in debt.”
“But,” I sputtered, “Jake must make, what, five million a year?”
“Three and a bit,” she said, glaring at me, as if this explained everything.
“I don’t understand...” I began, pouring myself another shot.
“Of course not,” she said bitterly. “No one does. How, they ask, can you have gotten yourselves into this situation? You make more in a year than most Americans do in a lifetime... blah, blah blah, blah blah.” She set her drink down and stood up, which was a mistake. She was already weaving, my lightweight sister. “I’ve heard it all, Case. And I can’t explain it to you so you’d sympathize with me. Not that I’m asking for sympathy, you understand.”
I nodded furiously, and instantly regretted it.
“This house... do you know how much this house is worth?”
I shook my head, more carefully.
“Three million dollars,” she said. “Do you know how much we owe on it? One million.”
“But Lee,” I blurted out, “why not just sell?”
“Our debts are more than the value of the entire house,” she said quietly and I sat, breathless. It was so incomprehensible, that kind of money.
“I have a 1988 Toyota Corolla,” I said, by way of explanation. “I make less than forty thousand dollars a year.”
“I realize you don’t understand,” she said coldly and poured another burning glass. “The school we send the boys to? Twenty thousand a year. The cars... the clothes, the travel. It just adds and adds and adds and Jake has no comprehension of it, no ability to slow down, to live with economy. And frankly...” She was sitting down now, crossing her legs with ease. So limber, she could still be a teenager. “... Neither do I.”
“Wow,” I said, feeling the drink reach my bladder in a momentary ache. I didn’t drink the hard stuff, much.
She was staring at her feet; black stockinged feet with manicured toes just barely visible beneath the hose.
“He left me the house,” she said suddenly.
“I know. That’s great,” I said. And it was. She gets the house, money for her children, and I get money and a nightmare. Fuck him, I thought, and slid down the couch to sit with my legs under the coffee table.
“It helps,” she admitted. “I’m sorry, though. Do you want any of it?”
This was typical Lee. Tell me all about her problems, show me the solution and then offer to share it with me at her own expense.
“No,” I said and wiggled my toes to see if they were still there.
“Thanks,” she said quietly and I realized what an effort this was for her. No wonder she needed the alcohol. “Are you okay with what you got?”
I couldn’t even begin to know how to answer that question.
“I guess I’m satisfied with what he left me, yeah.”
“Well, at least it was worth something more than just cash,” she said.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“It’s not what I’m going to do,” she said. “Jake’s contract ends this year. He’s nearly thirty-five years-old. Do you know how hard it will be for him to get picked up again after the surgery? Hell, we don’t even know if he’ll be able to play again. Oh sure, if he heals up well, he’s probably got a good five years left. But no one worth playing for is going to pay for a lame first baseman. If he does get signed, it’ll be by some penny-ante team like the Expos because they need seasoned talent and can’t afford to buy anyone really good. A farm team for the rest of the Major Leagues. Can you imagine? An experienced player like Jake on a crap team full of rookies? I won’t let him do it. Fading away on no pay in Canada.”
She said Canada like it was the black hole of Calcutta.
“What about announcing?” I asked.
She groaned and pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. “Don’t even remind me.”
“I didn’t realize he had...” I began.
She interrupted me with a loud exhalation.
“Let’s just say he won’t be on air any time soon,” she said.
“I hesitate to ask what happened.”
Lifting her glass and examining the contents
very carefully, she said, “It’s such a long story. You don’t want to hear it.”
I didn’t have to reply.
She set the glass down on the coffee table and leaned forward, the sharp ends of her hair almost brushing the top of my head, she sat so close. “You know I tutored him in college, in his ethics class. That’s how we met. The most honest man in the world, and he couldn’t pass his ethics class. Can you imagine?”
I remembered that she had called me in Seattle, shortly after I moved there. “I’m dating Jake Munsey,” she’d said. “I know you won’t mind. I’m just telling you.” She wasn’t interested in my opinion at the time, any more than she was interested in my response now. I said nothing and she continued.
“The first time he kissed me, we were sitting on the bleachers and I was trying to get him to understand the nature of the Good Samaritan law and he just leaned over and planted one on me. Then do you know what he said?”
I shook my head, unable to imagine.
“He said, ‘You talk too much. You’re so pretty, Lee. Let’s go back to my room.’”
God help me, I laughed. Lee snorted and took another swig of her drink.
“No one ever accused Jake of being obtuse,” I said.
“Daddy couldn’t stand him, which really hurt Jake, since they’d been so close when Daddy was his coach. Jake could never figure out why, if the man liked him as a player, he didn’t like him when he was dating his daughter. But you know what I figured out?”
“No,” I answered, carefully. “What?”
“I had realized that no one would ever love me as unconditionally as Jake Munsey, because anyone smarter or more perceptive would have seen my true personality and run like hell.”
“Lee…”
She saw right through me and plowed ahead.
“In a few weeks, that team is going to fuck him and leave him out to dry and we have no way of maintaining this lifestyle. And I know,” she cut me off as I began to offer my advice on her “lifestyle”, “that I could just live some other way, but damnit, I don’t want to. I want this. It almost makes all the press and the traveling and the loneliness and the crap bearable.”
Casey's Home Page 8