Independence Day

by Richard Ford

  “What’d the bartender say to the mule when he ordered a beer?” I say, coming down the row of seats. I feel I have to break new ground again.

  He turns his eyes to me disparagingly without moving his chin off the pipe rail. This won’t be funny, his look indicates. His “insect” tattoo is visible. An insult. “Clueless,” he says again to be rude.

  “‘I’m sorry, sir, what seems to be bothering you?’” I sit beside him, wanted or unwanted, and muse off down the first-base line in silence. A tiny, antique man in a bright white shirt, shoes and trousers is pushing a chalk wheel down the base path. He stops midway and looks where he’s been in estimation of his trueness, then resumes toward the sack. I raise my camera and take his picture, then squeeze one off at the field and the players seemingly readying themselves to play, and finally one of the sky with the flag raised but motionless above the “390” sign in center.

  “What good is it to come to some beautiful place?” Paul says broodily, his chin still resting on the green pipe, his heavy, downy-haired legs splayed so as to reveal a scar on his knee, a long and pink and still scabby thing of unknown origin.

  “The basic idea, I guess, is you’ll remember it later and be a lot happier.” I could add, “So if you’ve got some useless or bad memories this’d be a great place to start off-loading them.” But what I mean is obvious.

  Paul gives me the old dead-eye and shuffles his Reeboks. The hatless ballplayers who have been running sprints and stretching in the outfield are walking in together now, some with their caps on backward, some with arms on each other’s shoulders, a couple actually walking backward and clowning it up. “Come ahnnn, Joe Louis!” one of the wives shouts, getting her sports and heroes confused. The other wives all laugh. “Don’t yell like that at Fred,” one says, “you’ll scare him to death.”

  “I’m sick of not liking stuff,” Paul says, seeming not to care. “I’m ready for a big change.”

  News not unwelcome, since a move to Haddam may be on his horizon. “You’re just getting started,” I say. “You’ll find a lot of things to like.”

  “That’s not what Dr. Stopler says.” He stares out at the wide, mostly vacant ballyard.

  “Well, fuck Dr. Stopler, then. He’s an asshole.”

  “You don’t even know him.”

  I fleetingly consider telling Paul I’m moving to New Mexico and opening an FM station for the blind. Or that I’m getting married. Or that I have cancer.

  “I know him well enough,” I say. “Shrinks are all alike.” Then I sit silent, resentful of Dr. Stopler for being an authority on all of life—mine included.

  “What is it I’m supposed to do again if I’m not supposed to be a critic of my age?” He’s been studying this subject since last night. The thought of a whole new leash on life might in fact have inspired his short-lived euphorics.

  “Well,” I say, watching the players coalesce into two rival but friendly “teams,” as a hugely fat man with a tripod and box camera emerges slowly out of the runway, his one leg stiff. The cameraman appraises the sun, then starts to set up in accordance. “I’d like you to come live with me a while, maybe learn to play the trumpet, later go to Bowdoin and study marine biology; and not be so sly and inward while you’re there. I’d like you to stay a little gullible and not worry too much about standardized tests. Eventually I’d like you to get married and be as monogamous as possible. Maybe buy a house near the water in Washington State, so I could come visit. I’ll be more specific when I have time to direct your every waking movement.”

  “What’s monogamous?”

  “It’s something like the old math. It’s a cumbersome theory nobody practices anymore but that still works.”

  “Do you think I was ever abused?”

  “Nothing I was personally involved in. Maybe you can remember a few minor cruelties. Your memory’s pretty good.” I stare at him, unwilling to be amused, since his mother and I love him more than he (of all people) will ever know. “Do you want to file a complaint? Maybe talk to your ombudsman about it on Tuesday?”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “You know, you shouldn’t think you’re not supposed to be happy, Paul. You understand that? You shouldn’t get used to not being happy just because you can’t make everything fit down right. Everything doesn’t fit down right. You have to let some things go, finally.” Now would be the moment to bring to light what a quirky old duck Jefferson was—the practical idealist qua grammarian—his whole life spent gadgeting out the mysteries of the status quo in quest of a firmer foothold on the future. Or possibly I could borrow a baseball metaphor having to do with some things that happen inside the white lines and those that happen out.

  Only I am suddenly stopped cold. Not what I’d planned.

  The A’s and Braves have formed two team-photo groups down the third-base line, taller men behind, shorter men kneeling (Messrs. Begtzos and Bergman are shorter). The kneeling men have their gloves and a fan of wooden bats arranged prettily on the grassy foreground. A low, portable signboard has been wheeled out and placed in front of them. O’MALLEY’S FAN-TASY BASEBALL CAMP, it says in red block letters, and below it, in temporary lettering: “Braves vs. ’67 Red Sox—July 3, 1988.” The sign makes all the Braves laugh. None of the Red Sox seem to be present.

  Pictures are quickly snapped. The man who has chalked the base paths supervises wheeling the sign over to the canary-suited A’s, where he jiggers the letters to read O’MALLEY’S FANTASY BASEBALL CAMP: “Athletics vs. ’67 Red Sox—July 3, 1988.”

  All clap when the pictures are done, and players begin straying toward the dugout and down the baselines, or just wandering out onto the infield in their too-tight uniforms, looking as if something wonderfully memorable had just happened but they’d missed it or it wasn’t enough, this even though the big game with the BoSox, the whole megillah, what it’s all about, is still to come. “You look great, Nigel,” a husky-voiced wife shouts out from the stands in a yawky Aussie accent. Nigel, who’s a big, long-armed and bearded “Brave,” with a thick middle and turned-in toes that make him seem shy, pauses on the dugout steps and lifts his blue Atlanta cap like ole Hank on his glory day. “You look damn good,” she shouts out. “Damn good on you.” Nigel smiles introspectively, nods his head, then ducks into the shadows along the bench with his mates. I should’ve taken his picture.

  For, how else to seize such an instant? How to shout out into the empty air just the right words, and on cue? Frame a moment to last a lifetime?

  A dead spot now seems to be where these two days have delivered us—not even inside the Hall of Fame yet, but to an unspectacular moment in a not exactly bona fide ballpark, where two spiritually wrong-footed “clubs” make ready to play a real team whose glories are all behind them, and where by some system of inner weights and measures I have just run out of important words, but before I’ve said enough, before I’ve achieved a desired effect, before the momentum of a shared physical act—strolling the hallowed halls, viewing the gloves, license plates, strike zones—can take us up and carry us to a good end. Before I’ve made of this day a memory worth preserving.

  I’d have done better to have us wait with the crowd until the doors were cleared, instead of seeking one more chance at quality time and risking this flat-footed feeling of nothing doing, with our last point of significant agreement being that I had probably not abused my son. (My trust has always been that words can make most things better and there’s nothing that can’t be improved on. But words are required.)

  “People my age are on a six-month cycle,” Paul says in a reflective adult voice. The “A’s” and the “Braves” mill the sidelines, wanting something to happen, something they’ve paid good money for. I still wouldn’t mind joining them. “Probably the way I am now will be different by Christmas. Adults don’t have that problem.”

  “We have other problems,” I say.

  “Like what?” He looks around at me.

  �
��Our cycles last a lot longer.”

  “Right,” he says. “Then you croak.”

  I almost say, “Or worse.” Which would send his mind off inventorying Mr. Toby, his dead brother, the electric chair, being fed arsenic, the gas chamber—on the hunt for something new and terrible in the world to be obsessed by and later make jokes about. And so I say nothing. My face, I suspect, bears promise of some drollery about death and its too, too little sting. But as I said, I’ve said all I know.

  I hear the steam organ begin tootling away on “Way down upon the Swanee River.” Our little ballpark has a lazy, melancholy carnival fruitiness afloat within it now. Paul looks at me shrewdly when I don’t answer as expected, the corners of his mouth flickering as if he knows a secret, though I know he doesn’t.

  “Why don’t we head back now?” I say, leaving death unchallenged.

  “What are those guys doing down there?” he says, looking quickly to the level playing field, as if he’d just now seen it.

  “They’re having a great time,” I say. “Doesn’t it look like fun?”

  “It looks like they’re not doing anything.”

  “That’s how adults have fun. They’re really having the time of their lives. It’s just so easy they don’t even have to try.”

  And then we go. Paul first, down the aisle behind the wives, then struggling over the stumpy steps to the runway; and I, having a last fond look at the peaceful field, the men at loose ends but still two teams with games on tap.

  We walk through the tunnel’s shadows and out into the sunny parking lot, where the steam-organ music seems farther away. Up on Main Street cars are moving. I’m certain the Hall of Fame is open, its morning crises resolved.

  The batting cage boys have now shoved off, their metal bats leaned outside the fence, all three cages empty and inviting.

  “I believe we have to take a few chops, whatta you think?” I say to Paul. I am not at full strength but am ready, suddenly, for something.

  Paul estimates the cages from a distance, his clumsy feet turned out now, as slew-footed as the least athletic of boys, heavy and uninspirable.

  “Come on,” I say, “you can coach.” Possibly he makes a tiny double eeeck or a fugitive bark; I’m not certain. Though he comes.

  Like a militant camp counselor, I lead us straight across to the fenced cages, which are fitted out with fifty-cent coin boxes and draped inside with green netting to keep careening balls from maiming people and injuring the pitching machines, which are themselves big, dark-green, boxy, industrial-looking contraptions that work by feeding balls from a plastic hopper through a chain-drive circuitry that ends with two rubber car tires spinning in opposite tangency at a high rate of speed and from between which each “pitch” is actually expelled. Signs posted all around remind you to wear a helmet, protective glasses and gloves, to keep the gates closed, to enter the cage alone, to keep small children, pets, bottles, anything breakable including wheelchair occupants out—and if none of these warnings is convincing, all risk is yours anyway (as if anybody thought different).

  The three metal bats leaning on the fence are identically too short, too light, their taped grips much too thin. I tell Paul to stand clear while I “test” one bat, holding it up in front of me like a knight’s sword, sighting down its blue aluminum shaft (as I used to do long ago when I played in military school) and for some reason waggling it. I turn sideways of Paul—my camera still on my shoulder—cock the bat behind my ear in a natural-feeling Stan Musial knees-in stance and peer straight at him as though he were Jim Lonborg, the old BoSox righty, ready to rare, kick and fire.

  “This is how Stan the Man used to stand in there,” I say over my left elbow, my eyes hooded. I trigger a wicked swing, which feels clumsy and ridiculous. Some necessary leverage between my wrists and shoulders feels sprung now, so that my swing could only possibly contact the ball with a slapping motion that wouldn’t drive a fruit fly out of the phone booth but would absolutely make me look like a girl.

  “Is that how Stan the Man swung?” Paul says.

  “Yeah, and it went a fuckin’ mile,” I say. I hear shouts, a chorus of “I got it, I got it,” from inside Doubleday Field. I look around and above the grandstand where we were five minutes ago; white balls arch through the sky, two and three at once, all to be caught but invisible to us here.

  Each cage has a title to colorfully reflect the speed of its pitches: “Dyno-Express” (75 mph). “The Minors” (65 mph). “Hot Stove League” (55 mph). I have no reservations about trying my skills in the “Dyno-Express” and so give Paul my camera and two quarters, leaving the batting helmets on their fence hook. I step right inside, close the gate, walk to the batter’s box and look out toward the mean green machine as I seek out solid footing a bat’s length from the outside corner of the regulation rubber plate that’s planted between two scruffy rectangular AstroTurf pads put there to make things look authentic. I once again assume my Musial stance, make a slow, measuring pass of the bat barrel through my putative strike zone, square my knuckles on the handle, rotate the trademark back and line my deck-shoe toes with the center-field flag (though of course there is no flag, only the pitching machine itself and the protective netting, behind which is a sign that says “Home Run?”). I take and release a breath, once more deliberately extend the bat over the plate, then slowly bring it back.

  “What time is it?” Paul says.

  “Ten. There’s no clock in baseball.” I glimpse him over my shoulder through the diamond fence wires. He is looking up at the sky and back at the grandstand entrance, where a few fantasy players and their young-looking wives are strolling happy-go-lucky into the sunshine, gloved hands draped over soft shoulders, ball caps turned sideways, everyone ready for a beer, a bratwurst and a few yucks before the big game with Boston.

  “Weren’t we supposed to do something else?” he says, and looks at me. “Something about a hall of fame?”

  “You’ll get there,” I say. “Trust me.”

  I again have to establish my stance and settle on a proper balance and repose. But once I’m fixed I say loudly to Paul, “Slap the money in the box,” and he does, after which and for a long moment there is calm as the machine radiates a kind of patient human immanence, though this is broken after several seconds by a deep mechanical humming during which a heretofore unnoticed red bulb begins to brighten on top, after which the plastic hopper full of balls begins to vibrate. The machine gives no other sign it means business, but I stare riveted at the black confluence of rubber tires, which have not moved.

  “Those greaseballs fucked it up,” Paul says behind me. “You wasted your money.”

  “I don’t think so,” I say, keeping my balance and stance, my calm intact, bat back, eyes to the machine. My palms and fingers squeeze the bat tape, my shoulders stiffen, though I feel my wrists begin to bend back in a way Stan would deplore but that feels necessary for the raised bat barrel to descend quickly enough to the plane of the ball for me to avoid the girlish slap motion I don’t want to be “my swing.” I hear someone shout out, “Look at that asshole,” and can’t resist a quick look to see who’s being referred to but see no one, then quickly return my gaze to the machine and the two tires, where there’s still nothing happening to indicate a “pitch.” Until I slightly relax my shoulders to avoid “binding,” and it’s then the machine makes a more portentous, metallic whirring noise. The black tires start to spin at an instantly great rate. A single ball teeters in full view down a previously unremarked metal channel, then goes “underground” into a smaller slot, after which it or one just like it is viciously spit from between the spinning rubber rings and crosses the plate at a speed so fast and at a distance so easily reachable that I don’t even swing, merely let the ball whang the fence behind me and bound back through my legs and out toward an unobserved concrete bunker in front of me whose duty is to route balls back to the hopper. (The basketball version was much jazzier.)

  Paul is si
lent. I do not even turn his way, refixing instead like a sniper on what is my opponent, the slit between the spinning tires. Another interior whirring sound becomes audible. I watch as another ball wobbles down the metal track, disappears and then is shot through space, hissing across the plate directly under my fists and again whanging the fence behind me, untouched and unswung at.

  Paul again says nothing. Not “Strike two” or “It sounded high” or “Just try and make contact, Dad.” No chuckle or raspberry or fart noise. Not even a bark of encouragement. Only adjudicating silence.

  “How many do I get?” I say, merely to hear a sound.

  “I just got here,” he says.

  Though just as I’m picturing the numeral five as the likeliest number, another orange-stitched ball comes rocketing across the plate and rattles the screen, suggesting the machine has possibly quick-pitched me.

  Sweat has now appeared upward of my hairline. For ball number four, I extend the stubby bat barrel like a gate barrier straight out into my strike zone and hold it there stiff until the machine generates another pitch, which hits the bat and ricochets off the metal sweet spot with a dink-poink, and fouls off against one of the warning signs, finally bouncing back and actually striking me on the heel.

  “Bunt,” Paul says.

  “Fuck you, bunt. Bunt when it’s your turn. I’m up here to hit.” I’m not looking at him.

  “You should be wearing your windbreaker,” he says. “You’re a windbreaker.”

  I frown out into the now sinister black crease, twist my fists into the tape, straighten my wrists into a properer Stan-like trigger cock, shift my balance to the ball of my right foot, and ready my left to rise and stride toward contact. The machine whirs, the red light glows, the ball teeters down its metal chase, drops from view, then spanks out from between the rings fast and in full view, at which instant I lunge, flail the blue barrel down into the ordained space, hear my wrists “snap,” actually see my arms extend, my elbows nearly meet, feel my weight shift as my breath gushes—all just as my eyes squeeze tightly shut. Only this time the ball (unseen, of course) squalls off the bat straight up into the netting, pinballs off two rankled fence surfaces, then falls back to the asphalt in front of me and drains off toward the bunker, leaving me with a ferocious handful of bees I’m determined not to acknowledge.