Independence Day

by Richard Ford

  “Strike five, you’re history,” Paul says, and I glare back at him as he snaps my picture with my camera, disdainful concentration on his plummy lips. (I can’t help seeing what I’ll look like: bat slumped to the side, my cheeks sprouting sweat, my hair awry, face distressed by a frown of failure endured in a dopey cause.) “The Sultan of Squat,” Paul says, snapping another picture.

  “Since you’re the expert, you need to try it,” I say. Bees are burning my hands.

  “Right.” Paul shakes his head as though I’d spoken the most preposterous of words. We are completely alone here, though more ersatz players and their real-life wives and kids are strolling carefree and happy across the hot parking lot, their voices crooning praise and good motives. Balls still rise above and arc down upon Doubleday Field. This is the small, consoling music of baseball. For a man to entice his son into a few swings would not be mistreatment.

  “What’s the matter?” I say, letting myself out of the cage. “If you miss it you can say you meant to miss it. Didn’t you say that was the best trick?” (He has already denied this, of course, but for some reason I don’t mean to let him.) “Don’t you eat stress for lunch?”

  Paul holds my camera at belly level below “Clergy” and takes another picture, with an evil smile.

  “You’re the daredevil tightrope walker, aren’t you?” I say, leaning the bat back against the fence, the big green machine now silent behind me. A warm breeze kicks up a skiff of parking lot grit and sweeps it by my sweaty arms. “I think you’re walking way too narrow a line here, you need to find a new trick. You have to swing if you’re going to hit.” I’m wiping sweat off my forearms.

  “Like you said.” His smile becomes a smirk of dislike. He is still snapping my camera at me, one picture after the next—the same picture.

  “What was that? I don’t remember.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Oh. Fuck me. Sorry, I did forget that.” I come toward him suddenly, pity and murder and love each crying for a time at bat. It is not so rare a fatherly lineup. Children, who sometimes may be angels of self-discovery, are other times the worst people in the world.

  When I get in reach of him, I don’t know why but I grapple him behind his head, my fingers achy from squeezing my bat, my shoulders weightless as if my arms were nothing. “I just thought,” I say, strenuously holding him, “you and me could experience a common humiliation and go off with our arms draped over our shoulders and I’d buy you a beer. We could bond.”

  “Fuck you! I can’t drink. I’m fifteen,” Paul says savagely into my chest, where I’m still clutching him.

  “Oh, of course, I forgot that too. I’d probably be abusing you.” I pull him in even more harshly, finding his rough buzzed hairline, his Walkman earphones and his neck tendons, forcing his face into my shirtfront so his nose pokes my breastbone and his warty fingers and even my camera push and dig my ribs in rejection. I don’t entirely know what I’m doing, or what I want him to do: change, promise, concede, guarantee me something important will be better or pan out, all expressed in language for which there are no words. “And why are you such a little prick?” I say with difficulty. I may be hurting him, but it’s a father’s right not to be pushed, so that I squeeze him even harder, intent on keeping him till he gives up the demon, renounces all, collapses into hot tears only I can minister to. Dad. His.

  But that is not what happens. The two of us begin awkwardly scuffling on the pavement beside the batting cages, and almost immediately, I realize, to attract the interest of tourists and churchgoers out for a Sunday stroll, plus lovers of baseball on their way, as we should be, to the famous shrine—except that we’re struggling here. I can almost hear them murmur, “Well, hey now, what’s all this about? This can’t be good and wholesome. We need to call somebody. Better call. Go ahead and call. The cops. 911. What’s the goddamned country coming to?” Though of course they don’t speak. They only stop and gaze. Abuse can be mesmerizing.

  I loose my grip on my son’s neck and let him break away, his fleshy face gray with anger and disgust and shame. My grip has ridden into his cut ear and got it bleeding again, its little bandage rucked off. When I see it, I look in my hand and there is beet-red blood down my middle finger and smeared in my palm.

  Paul gapes at me, his left hand—the other’s still holding my camera, with which he has gored me in the ribs—gone fiercely into the pocket of his baggy maroon shorts as if he is trying to look casual about being furious. His eyes grow narrow and shiny, though his pupils widen with me in their sight.

  “All in fun. No big deal,” I say. I flash him a lame, hopeless grin. “High fives.” One hand is up for a slap, the other, bloody, one finding my own pocket. Sunglassed tourists continue observing us from forty yards out in the parking lot.

  “Gimme the cocksucking bat,” Paul seethes and, ignoring my high fives, goes tromping past me, grabbing the blue bat off the fence, kicking the gate open and entering the cage like a man come to a task he’s put off for a lifetime. (His Walkman earphones are still on his neck, my camera now lumped in his shorts pocket.)

  Inside the “Dyno-Express” cage he stalks to the plate, the bat slung back over his shoulder, and peers down as if into a puddle of water. He suddenly turns back to me with a face of bright hatred, then looks at his toes again as though aligning them with something, the bat still sagging in spite of one attempt to keep it up. He is not a hitter to inspire fear. “Put in the fucking money, Frank,” he shouts.

  “Bat left, son,” I say. “You’re a southpaw, remember? And back off a little bit so you can get a swing at it.”

  Paul gives me a second look, this time with an expression of darkest betrayal, almost a smile. “Just put the money in,” he says. And I do. I drop two quarters in the hollow black box.

  This time the green machine comes alive much more readily, as if I had previously wakened it, its red top light beaming dully in the sun. The whirring commences and again the whole assembly shudders, the plastic hopper vibrates and the rubber tires start instantly spinning at a high speed. The first white pill exits its bin, tumbles down the metal chute, disappears then at once reappears, blistering across the plate and smacking the screen precisely where I’m standing so that I inch back, thoughtful of my fingers, though they’re stuffed in my pockets.

  Paul, of course, does not swing. He merely stands staring at the machine, his back to me, his bat still slung behind his head, heavy as a hoe. He is batting right-handed.

  “Step back a bit, son,” I say again as the machine goes into its girdering second windup, humming and shuddering, and emits another blue darter just past Paul’s belly, again thrashing the fence I’m now well back of. (He has, I believe, actually inched in closer.) “Get your bat up to the hitting position,” I say. We have performed hitting rituals since he was five, in our yard, on playgrounds, at the Revolutionary War battlefield, in parks, on Cleveland Street (though not recently).

  “How fast is it coming?” He says this not to me but to anyone, the machine, the fates that might assist him.

  “Seventy-five,” I say. “Ryne Duren threw a hundred. Spahn threw ninety. You can get a swing. Don’t close your eyes” (like I did). I hear the steam organ playing: “No use in sit-ting a-lone on the shelf, life is a hol-i-day.”

  The machine goes again into its Rube Goldberg conniption. Paul leans over the plate this time, his bat still on his shoulder, gazing, I assume, at the crease where the ball will originate. Though just as it does, he sways an inch back and lets it thunder past and whop the screen again. “Too close, Paul,” I say. “That’s too close, son. You’re gonna brain yourself.”

  “It’s not that fast,” he says, and makes a little eeeck and a grimace. The machine circuits then into its next-to-last motion. Paul, his bat on his shoulder, watches a moment, and then, to my surprise, takes a short ungainly step forward onto the plate and turns his face to the machine, which, having no brain, or heart, or forbearance, or fear, no exp
erience but throwing, squeezes another ball through its dark warp, out through the sprightly air, and hits my son full in the face and knocks him flat down on his back with a terrible, loud thwock. After which everything changes.

  In time that does not register as time but as humming motor noise solid in my ear, I am past the metal gate onto the turf and beside him; it is as if I had begun before he was hit. Dropped to my knees, I grab his shoulder, which is squeezed tight, his elbows into his sides, both his hands at his face—covering his eyes, his nose, his cheek, his jaw, his chin—underneath all of which there is a long and almost continuous wheeee sound, a sound he makes bunched on the plate, a hard, knees-contracted bundle of fright and lightning pain centered where I can’t see, though I want to, my hands busy but helpless and my heart sounding in my ears like a cannon, my scalp prickly, damp, airy with fear.

  “Let’s see it, Paul”—my voice a half octave too high, trying to say it calmly. “Are you all right?” I am hit by ball number five, a sharp blow like a punch off the back of my neck and scalp, skipping smartly on into the netting.

  “Wheeee, wheeee, wheeee.”

  “Let’s see, Paul,” I say, the air between him and me oddly red-tinted. “Are you all right? Let’s see, Paul, are you all right?”

  “Wheeee, wheeee, wheeeeee.”

  People. I hear their footsteps on the concrete. “Just call right now,” someone says. “I could hear it halfway to Albany.” “Oh boy.” “Ohhh boy.” The cage door clanks. Shoes. Breathing. Trouser cuffs. Someone’s hands. An oiled-leather ball-glove smell. Chanel No. 5.

  “Ohhhh!” Paul says in a profound exhalation conceding hurt, and writhes sideways, his elbows still pinned to his sides, his face still covered by his hands, his ear still bleeding from my having grabbed him too hard.

  “Paul,” I say, all the air still reddish, “let me see, son,” my voice giving way slightly, and I am tapping his shoulder with my fingers as if I could wake him up and something else could happen, something not nearly as bad.

  “Frank, there’s an ambulance coming,” someone says from among the legs, hands, breaths all around me, someone who knows me as Frank (other than my son). A man. I hear other footsteps and look up and around, frightened. Braves and A’s are outside the fence, gawking in, their wives beside them, their faces dark, troubled. “Wasn’t he wearing his helmet?” I hear one inquiry. “No, he wasn’t,” I say out loud to anyone. “He wasn’t wearing anything.”

  “Wheeee, wheeee,” Paul cries out again, his face covered with his hands, his brown head of hair resting squarely on the filthy white plate. These are cries I don’t know, cries he has never cried in my hearing.

  “Paul,” I say. “Paul. Just be still, son.” Nothing feels like it’s happening to bring help. Though not very far away I hear two sharp bwoop-bwoops, then a heavy engine roar, then bwoop-bwoop-bwoop. Someone says, “Okay, great.” I’m aware of more feet scuffling. I have my hands pressed tight into Paul’s shoulder—his back is to me—feeling how hard his body has become, how unambiguously concentrated on injury it is. Someone says, “Frank, let’s let these people try to help. They’ll help him. Let them get where you are.”

  This. This is the worst thing ever.

  I stand dizzily and step backward among many others. Someone has my upper arm in his big hand, assisting me gently back, while a stumpy white woman in a white shirt, tight blue shorts, with a huge butt, and then a thinner man in the same clothes but with a stethoscope on his neck, slip past and get onto their hands and knees on the AstroTurf and begin to practice on my son procedures I can’t see but that make Paul scream out “Nooooo!” and then “Wheeee” again. I push forward and find myself saying to the people who are here now all around, “Let me talk to him, let me talk to him. It’ll be all right,” as if he could be persuaded out of being hurt.

  But whoever it is here who knows me—a large man—says, “Just stay here a second, Frank, stay still. They’ll help. It’ll be better if you just stand back and let them.”

  And so I do. I stand in the crowd as my son is avidly worked on and helped, my heart battering its walls, right to the top of my belly, my fingers cold and sweating. The man who has called me Frank holds onto my arm even yet, says nothing, though I suddenly turn to him and look at his long, smooth-jawed Jewish face, large black eyes with specs and a slick tanned cranium, and say as if I had a right to know, “Who are you?” (Though the words do not actually sound.)

  “I’m Irv, Frank. Irv Ornstein. Jake’s son.” He smiles apologetically and squeezes my arm more tightly.

  Whatever has turned the air red now ceases. Here is a name—Irv—and a face (changed) from far away and past. Skokie, 1964. Irv—the good son of my mother’s good husband #2, my stepbrother—gone after my mother’s death, with his father in tow, to Phoenix.

  I do not know what to say to Irv, and simply stare back at him like a specter.

  “This is not the best time to meet, I know,” Irv says to my voiceless face. “We just saw you on the street this morning, over by the fire station, and I said to Erma: ‘I know that guy.’ This must be your son who got hurt.” Irv is actually whispering and casts a fretful eye now at the medics kneeling over Paul, who screams “Noooo!” again from beneath their efforts.

  “That’s my son,” I say, and move toward his cry, but Irv reins me in once more.

  “Just give ’em a couple minutes more, Frank. They know what they’re doin’.” I look to my other side, and here is a dishy, tiny, wheat-haired woman in her thirties, wearing a tight yellow-and-peach plastic-looking single-piece outfit that resembles a space suit. She has a grip on my other elbow as if she knows me as well as Irv does and the two of them have agreed to prop me up. Possibly she’s a weight lifter or an aerobics instructor.

  “I’m Erma,” she says, and blinks at me like a hatcheck girl. “I’m Irv’s friend. I’m sure he’s going to be fine. He’s just scared, poor thing.” She too looks down at the two medics huddled over my son, and her face goes doubtful and her lower lip discreetly extends sympathy. Hers is the Chanel I whiffed.

  “It’s the left eye,” I hear one of the medics say. Then Paul says, “Ohhhh!”

  Then I hear someone behind me say, “Oh, ugh.” Some of the Braves and A’s are already starting to back away. I hear a woman say, “They said it’s his eye,” and someone else say, “Probably wasn’t wearing protective eye covering.” Then someone says, “It says ‘Clergy.’ Maybe he’s a minister.”

  “Where are you now, Frank?” Irv says, still whispering confidentially. His hand seems to encircle my upper arm, his hold on me firm. He is a big, tanned, hairy-looking engineer type, wearing blue designer sweatpants with red piping and a gold cardigan with no shirt under. He is much bigger than I remember him when we were college age, me at Michigan, he at Purdue.

  “What?” I hear my own voice sounding calmer than I feel. “New Jersey. Haddam, New Jersey.”

  “Whaddaya do down there?” Irv whispers.

  “Real estate,” I say, then look at him again suddenly, at his broad forehead and full, liver-lipped but sympathetic mouth. I remember him absolutely and at the same time have no idea who in the hell he is. I look at his hairy-fingered hand on my arm and see that it has a diamond pinkie ring on its appointed finger.

  “We were just coming over to speak to you when your boy got hit,” Irv says, giving Erma an approving nod.

  “That’s good,” I say, staring down at the wide, maxi-brassiered back of the fireplug female medic, as if this part of her would be the first to indicate something significant. She struggles to her feet at this very moment and turns to search among us and the two or three others who are still gathered around.

  “Anybody responsible for this young man?” she says in a wiry, south Boston nyak accent, and extracts a large black walkie-talkie out of her belt holster.

  “I’m his father,” I say, breathless, and pull away from Irv. She holds her walkie-talkie up toward me as if she expects me
to want to speak into it, her finger on the red Talk button.

  “Yeah, well,” she says in her tough-broad voice. She is a woman of forty, though perhaps younger. Her belt has a blizzard of medical supplies and heavy gear fastened on. “Okay, here’s the thing,” she says, gone totally businesslike. “We need to get him down to Oneonta pretty fast.”

  “What’s wrong with him?” I say this too loudly, terrified she’s about to say his brain has been rendered useless.

  “Well, what—did he like get hit with a baseball?” She clicks her walkie-talkie trigger, making it produce a scratchy static sound.

  “Yes,” I say. “He forgot his helmet.”

  “Well, he got hit in the eye. Okay? And I can’t really tell you if he’s got much vision in it, because it’s swollen already and got blood all in it, and he won’t open it. But he needs to see somebody pretty quick. We take eye injuries down to Oneonta. They’ve got the staff.”

  “I’ll drive him.” My heart makes a bump-a-bump. Cooperstown: not a real town for real injuries.

  “I’d have to get you to sign a form if you take him now,” she says. “We can get him down in twenty minutes—it’d take you longer—and we can get him stabilized and monitored.” I see her name on her silver nameplate: Oustalette (something I need to remember).

  “Okay, great. Then I’ll just ride with you.” I lean to the side to see Paul, but can see only his bare legs and his lightning-bolt shoes and orange socks and the hem of his maroon shorts behind the other paramedic, who’s still kneeling beside him.

  “Our insurance won’t permit that,” she says, even more all-business. “You’ll have to travel by separate vehicle.” She clicks her red Talk button again. She is itchy to go.