The Stories of Richard Bausch

by Richard Bausch

  “We were all upset,” Dalton said. “We’re past it now.”

  “I think she’s right to cry,” Georgia said. Then she sipped the white wine that had been brought to her. “She wanted us to stop arguing. It’s upsetting, hearing adults argue that way. That’s normal enough for all of them at that age.”

  THE LAST DAY OF SUMMER

  Fairly often, that year, the boy would find himself lying awake after a dream he could not quite remember—though he was always certain it was one of those kind where ordinary minutes in the day were shown with the pall of nightmare on them. Such ordinary-living dreams, as he thought of them, were common for him: he would see himself, while at the same time being himself, bending in a hallway to pick up a fallen sock, or a baseball glove or a ball, and abruptly something about the action and the place, the hallway, the house he lived in, which was and was not his house—something about it, without changing in any physical or visible aspect—would become horrible. And he would wake up, heart thrumming in his ear on the pillow. Invariably after such wakings, he had trouble going back to sleep, and he would try to reconstruct in his mind every minute of a movie he had watched on television, or every moment of a good time—a recent vacation at the beach, a cookout, a trip into Washington to look at the moon rocks; a Softball game at one of the family reunions on the Fourth of July, when he had hit the ball over his uncle’s head in center field and cleared the bases, a stand-up triple. Something that happened back when he was nine years old, and no one in the family had any serious trouble. He saw the brown field, the trees surrounding it, and heard the shouts of the other children, the talk of the adults, the chatter, everyone’s face gleaming with the sun and heat of that bright afternoon, his mother wearing a red bandanna and a white blouse that accentuated the lovely tan of her arms. Of course, all this began to dissolve on the instant of construction; there was the constant necessity of attempting to put it back together, keep it from drifting into something else. This required effort, which often kept him wakeful, too. He did not know when sleep settled over him at last. Waking in light was a shock.

  This morning, after a mostly sleepless night, he dressed and went down to the kitchen, feeling groggy and wanting not to show it. His parents were already up, sitting at the table by the big window, talking low. They stopped when he entered.

  “Hey,” his father said. “Andre. You’re up.”

  “Hey.”

  “You look like something the cat dragged in.” “Warren,” said Andre’s mother. “Tell him.”

  Mr. Bledsoe smiled. “I’ve got two tickets for Father and Son Day at Camden Yards. I’ve had them since early March.”

  “He kept the secret from me, too,” the boy’s mother told him.

  “Think of it,” Mr. Bledsoe said with an enthusiasm that seemed faintly rehearsed. “The first day of summer. You and me at the ballpark. And they didn’t cost a cent. Have I got connections or what?”

  “Where did you get them?” Andre asked.

  “Oh, question not my means.”

  “It’s rude to ask such things,” said his mother.

  Her husband touched her wrist, patted the bone there, nodding at his son. “Actually, my boss, Mr. Gray, at work. He won a trip to Italy, and he can’t use them, so he gave them to me. The best luck all around.”

  Andre took his seat at the table.

  “What can I fix you?” his mother asked.

  “I’ll pour myself some milk.”

  “You feel all right, honey?”

  “Sure.”

  “You look puffy-eyed.”

  “I’m fine.” Andre yawned.

  Out the window was a view of the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Shenandoah Valley off through the wide break in the trees of the backyard. It was all furled in mist and grayness, the sky above it heavy with ash-colored swollen clouds. Rain came straight down.

  Mr. Bledsoe said, “Hey, don’t you want to go?”

  “Oh,” Andre told him. “Yes. Of course I want to go.”

  “Just the two of you,” said his mother. “That’ll be so nice. I hope the weather gets better.” She looked out the window at the rain.

  “It’ll be a beautiful sunny June day,” Mr. Bledsoe said. “You’ll see.”

  “It’s a long drive to Baltimore. You’ll have to leave pretty early.”

  “We’ll give ourselves a couple of hours to get there.”

  “You’ll be gone all day.”

  They were quiet a moment.

  “A whole day together, just the two of you. And you guys deserve it.”

  “Don’t be silly, Clara. Deserving doesn’t enter into it.”

  “Well, but you do.” She sighed, lifted her arms lazily, gazing out the window. “Right now it’s hard to imagine the sun being out.”

  “Oh, it’s out there. Isn’t it, Andre?”

  “Somewhere up there,” Clara Bledsoe mused, “a jet is screeching along in perfect sunlight. I like to think of that, and the people looking out the windows at the endless field of clouds, as far as they can see, like the arctic snowcap. Think of all those places in the world that no one can ever get to. No one ever walked there. And all the places where it’s raining and there’s no people to see it.”

  “Well,” said Andre’s father. “It’s sure raining on us, right now.”

  Over the next four days, they kept checking the Weather Channel, attending to the erratic animations of swirling cloud cover sweeping across the map—receiving the predictions as if they were oracles from on high. It rained steadily, and predictions about the twenty-first were for heavy showers and thunderstorms, continuing unseasonably cold temperatures. Andre’s mother said maybe they could get tickets for another game. Her anxiousness over the weather was a matter about which the boy and his father felt confident enough to tease. “No dark predictions,” Mr. Bledsoe told her, turning off the television. “It’s gonna be sunny and cool. A perfect day for baseball. I have faith.”

  “That’s right,” Andre said, doubting it. “Me, too. Faith.”

  “Yes, but I have a feeling,” she told them. Though she smiled, lighthearted.

  Andre’s father had once remarked that she was like a kind of radar, always circling in her mind, looking for trouble, something to torture herself with, imagined terrors or real: “If there’s an earthquake in Thailand,” he’d say, “she feels directly responsible.” And it was true that she had a way of knowing when something was bothering either of them. She almost never talked about her own troubles.

  “I love looking forward to something,” she said, now. “Don’t you?”

  She had addressed them both. Andre nodded as his father said, “Anticipation is half the fun.”

  “I always have trouble sleeping the day before something good.” She smiled. One of the manifestations of her illness had been insomnia.

  “I think I’m like that, too,” Andre said.

  “Maybe everybody is,” said his father.

  Andre’s mother clasped her hands in her lap and sighed, then yawned. “I slept last night like the dead. And I didn’t need a sleeping pill either. Just laid down and closed my eyes and gone. A lovely blissful nothing.”

  Andre, who had experienced more nightmares, said, “I woke up a few times,” and then felt momentarily confused. He saw his father give him a look.

  “You’re excited,” Clara Bledsoe said. “You’re like me.”

  He said nothing, could think of nothing. It was only a baseball game, after all. Continually now, on the edge of his memory, loomed the image of her in the long nights of her trouble: wakeful, sad, fearful of everything, muttering aloud the terms of her distress, the most appallingly trivial fixations: “God’s punishing me. I know it. Because I hid the cashews. I wanted them for myself and I hid them.” His father trying to reason with her, calm her. The doctors explained that it was chemicals in the brain and that a balance had to be achieved. Andre saw the faith everyone else had in the medicines. And indeed she was on the mend. The latest adjustment to
the dosage had leveled something in her, without taking too much away. She could still laugh now and then, and she had no trouble focusing. Yet it was difficult not to seem watchful with her, and he knew it hurt her feelings. Everything any of them said seemed always to have been said in the light of double meaning.

  “If the game’s canceled,” she offered now, “what will you do? Will they let you have a rain check?”

  “Sure,” Mr. Bledsoe said. “But it won’t be canceled, Clara. You’ll see.”

  “It’s a small thing, of course. And there’ll be other days. They’d just have another Father and Son Day. I mean it won’t rain forever. You feel like it will sometimes. But that’s subjective. It’s important to keep that in mind. It just will not rain forever.”

  “No, Clara. It won’t rain forever.”

  She smiled. “I’m just kidding, you know.”

  “You watch that sun shine,” Andre’s father said.

  When the day arrived, it was as perfect as any summer day ever is: not a single trace of a cloud anywhere in the limitless blue, and a soft cool breeze lazing down out of the north. A clean, clear, fair, excellent day, like a sign from God.

  Because Andre had just turned sixteen, and had his learner’s permit, his father let him drive—more for Clara to worry about, and they felt confident enough to rib her about that, too. They drove away from the house, and Andre’s father leaned out the window to wave. “Relax, today,” he called. “Have fun.” Andre saw his mother lift her arm, smiling, walking on toward the house.

  “Watch the road,” Warren said to him. “You trying to kill us?”

  “I’ve got it,” said Andre.

  “I’ve put my life in your hands.”

  “It’s safe.”

  They talked about the way to Baltimore, what highways Andre would take, and then his father opened the newspaper and began to comment about the players they would see, who was scheduled to pitch, and what the lineups might be. There wasn’t much traffic. Life felt simple. It occurred to Andre, driving the car with his father at his side and his hands tight and firm on the wheel, that he was happy.

  At the stadium, they moved through the crowded parking lot amid other fathers and sons, some wearing baseball caps and shirts, and carrying pennants, noisemakers, baseball gloves. The visiting team was the Detroit Tigers, and a few people were in those insignia and colors. A tall, long-faced man wearing a white sack full of programs held one out to them, addressing the crowd. “Get ya programs heah. Free programs.” Warren stopped and took one. The man thanked him and then went on calling. “Get ya programs.”

  Warren handed Andre the program. “A souvenir.”

  Andre followed him through a turnstile and on into the concrete-smelling dimness, where there were several other vendors selling pennants, balloons, noisemakers, and baseball caps.

  “You don’t want any of this, do you?” Andre’s father asked him.

  “No, sir.”

  They trudged steadily along the incline, the wide ramp that took them partway around the stadium, leading steeply up. The thickness of the crowd made everything slow going, and they were bumped and jostled as they went on. When they came out into the stadium itself, Andre saw the amazing unreal green of the field, and the combed brown infield, where a water tractor made slow circles, giving off a light spray. A voice over the loudspeaker was saying the names of groups that had come to the game that day. Andre and his father made their way up to the seventeenth row. There were a few places that were unoccupied. They took their seats, about halfway in, and looked out at the field, the rows of seats slowly filling across the way and on either side. The flags on the roof fluttered wonderfully in the breeze.

  “Good seats,” Warren said. “Let me see that program.” He paged through it while the boy looked on. He pointed to a page of lined boxes. “This is for scoring the game. I used to know how. My dad had games going back to the thirties and forties that he and his dad had done. You can look at it and replay the entire game. I have the all-star game from 1937, somewhere.”

  “Show me how,” said Andre.

  “I can’t remember.”

  “Maybe there’s an explanation somewhere in the program.”

  They looked through it, first Warren and then his son. In the row before them were four young men, who had a vinyl cooler at their feet, from which they were surreptitiously taking cans of beer and guzzling them. Andre watched this for a time, and heard their talk, which was sprinkled with obscenity. Beyond them and on either side of them were several groups of boys, Little Leaguers, in uniform. The four young men drank the beer and ragged one another. It was an unpleasantness nagging at the edge of Andre’s consciousness as the game got under way, these voices uttering oaths and talking too loud, and the smell of the beer. The players trotted out and took their places, to applause and a low cheer, only the slightest indication of how loud it could get, that number of human voices. A light breeze blew across the surface of the crowd and sighed away in the rising heat. The smell of the beer was only going to grow stronger. Andre looked at the field and tried to block everything out but the players there. In the next instant, the young man just in front of him spilled his beer and uttered a loud curse, bending to sop it up with some napkins from the cooler. Andre glanced at his father, who turned to him and smiled. So it was going to be all right; you could ignore behavior like this in so large a crowd; you just attended to the event and left them alone. He watched the game, content, happy to be in the moment, thinking of it that way. The shadow of worry had passed off. How wonderful if it would last for years—the unmixed gladness of this very afternoon.

  When things began to go bad for the Orioles in the second inning, the four young men began shouting. Andre looked around at the others nearby, and they were all yelling, too. The whole crowd was angry. But these young men were giving forth a stream of filth and it went on for some time. Finally Andre’s father asked the nearest one, a tall burly man with a ponytail, if they couldn’t please curb it a little, for the sake of the other fathers and sons.

  The man looked at Andre and then at Andre’s father. “Stuff it, okay?”

  “There are family men here with their sons,” Mr. Bledsoe said.

  “Hey, eat me.”

  It was true that none of the other fathers and sons seemed to be paying much attention. Everyone was fixed on the game being played so disastrously out on the field. The four young men drank their beer and punched at one another, and shouted the words. Andre’s father grew agitated.

  “Try not to listen to that, son,” he said.

  Andre, who had heard all of it before, and had believed for some time that he was keeping the knowledge of it from his parents, was simply thinking that he hated the smell of beer. He said, “I don’t care about it, Dad. Really. It’s nothing.”

  “But there are little boys in this crowd.”

  The game slowed, with a lot of walks and strategy, a lot of waiting around while the manager talked to the pitcher, who kept walking batters and allowing hits. It took an hour for the first three innings and Detroit was already ahead by nine runs. The four men kept up, shouting at the players on the field, now. But they were a part of the general roar.

  Finally Warren moved to the end of the row and flagged down an usher. The usher was a big man with a bad look about him, a scarred face and narrow deep-set eyes, who looked at him with impatience, and then walked down and across the knees of several other men to where the young men were sitting, and said, “Hey, you guys. Tone it down for the families, okay?” Warren remained where he was, and the usher went back to him. They exchanged a few more words. The usher seemed annoyed, and gestured for him to leave it alone, take his seat. Warren came back along the row just as something happened in the game: a cheer went up, confusion and celebration, everyone standing. Someone on the Orioles had hit a double and driven in a run. There were a lot of derisive shouts, as if one run would make any difference now.

  For a time, things seemed to have been smoot
hed out. The young men talked among themselves, and drank the beer, but they were less raucous. Andre watched them, and lost track of the game. The smell of the beer came from them. They had run out of their stash and were buying it now from the vendors who roamed the aisles, calling “Cold beer.”

  Andre saw that his father was watching them, too, so he tried to pay attention to the game, and to draw his father into it. But things had slowed again, the Detroit pitcher trying to pick off a man who had got to first base, and failing to throw strikes when he did come to the plate. He walked two more men, and the bases were loaded. The manager walked out to the mound. The catcher joined them, and then the third baseman walked over.

  “Hey, pal,” the man with the ponytail said to Andre’s father. “Why don’t you go see what’s going on—report back to us.”

  “Yeah,” said another. “Let’s get him in on the meeting.”

  “Just calm it down, guys,” Warren said.

  The one with the ponytail said, “He wants us to calm it down.” He turned and smiled crookedly. “Why don’t you go get the usher, man.”

  Andre’s father kept watching the field.

  “Hey, I’m talking to you.”

  “You’ve had too much to drink,” Warren said.

  “You mean, like, I’m past some limit you’ve set? Is that it? I’ve had too much to drink.”

  Again, Warren was silent.

  The one with the ponytail stood up, and Andre felt himself draw back. “I’ve had too much to drink, is that right? Is that what you said?”

  “I’m not going to dignify this,” Warren said.

  “Dignify.”

  “You’re missing the game,” said Andre.

  The other looked at him. “Oh, I’m not missing the game. This is the game, right now. This is the funny part right now. How old are you? Are you too young?”

  “Look,” Warren said. “That’s enough. If you have something to say, say it to me.”

  “And you’ll either dignify it or not, is that right?”

  Warren said nothing.