Gods of Wood and Stone

by Mark Di Ionno

  Horace Mueller’s hands weren’t always black. He had a double master’s in history and rural sociology from the ag school at Cornell, but the degree certificates were merely paper extensions of what he learned at home. His grandfather was the last of the New York State hops farmers, and his father tried running an Empire apple orchard, but eventually went to work in tool-and-die for a Syracuse company that made intricate locking mechanisms for bank safes. Competition from Asia drove the company to the brink, saved only by defense contracts. But hatch molds for Navy ships did not require the art of tool-and-die, and Horace’s father was let go, into early retirement. Now here was Horace, the next chapter in a family narrative of changing American economy: rural to industrial to information, though Horace was proud he delivered his the old-fashioned way, not through the Internet. Face to face. Americans should know where they came from, he sang out to visitors over the ringing echo of hammers. And know how to grow their own food and make their own goods. Self-sufficiency is a lost art, but you never know when we’ll have to go back, he said with wry humor. Not with these days of killer storms and tidal floods, and a financial industry that could come crashing down at any moment, like some hollowed-out, termite-infested oak. Cash could dry up. Food distribution could come to a halt. Then what?

  * * *

  NOW HORACE LET THE HEAT from the stove all but scorch his hands and melt the stiffness. This was the most peaceful moment of his day, and his own excuse for not making Michael get up. Alone, with the glow, in a silent room still dark but now warm. He pulled up a chair and sat, his feet stretched toward the stove, and closed his eyes. This was the life he wanted: simple, with quiet time to pause and reflect. Contemplate. Dream. Be in touch with his spirit, not run from it. He took a few deep breaths, letting his chest expand with air touched by a hint of smoke.

  The abrupt sound of the TV from Michael’s bedroom killed it. All the years Sally muzzled their sex and now he was over there, TV cranked loud enough to drown out a Roman orgy. It was the morning all-sports highlight show, high-pitched, high-drama, high-volume.

  Horace walked away from the fire and down the cold bare floor to Michael’s room.

  “Michael, hey,” he said, knocking gently on the door.

  “Michael, hey, Mikey,” he said louder a few seconds later. “Mikey, lower that thing.”

  “COME IN,” Michael yelled.

  In one step through the doorjamb, he entered the world he’d wanted to escape.

  The covers were up to Michael’s chin. Only the arm holding the remote was exposed, aimed at his entertainment center with the high-def, flat-screen TV and DVD player, his laptop, and a tangle of phone chargers and iPod earplugs, or whatever they call them. There was the Xbox and Wii, and the gadgets and guns to play them. All of which necessitated a 220-volt line being wired into the house to replace the 110, a few years back. Horace protested the excess, from an intellectual and environmental standpoint, but Sally gave Michael his way. And here, Horace saw, in his own family, the latest chapter of economy: diversion. Disconnection from self and earth through the chronic, electronic connection to entertainment and sports, sometimes disguised as “communication.” On Michael’s walls were posters of his favorite athletes, captured in some moment of glory. Modern pagan gods, Horace always thought, as he looked around the room.

  Michael’s shelves held more trophies than books, by far. Every season, every sport, memorialized in stick-on wood veneer, faux marble, and gold-plated-plastic baseball, football, and basketball players. Michael was a good player, and some larger trophies were for more than run-of-the-mill participation. He made all-star teams and travel teams and went to off-season camps. Horace wanted nothing to do with it; it was Sally’s thing. When Horace questioned the expense, Sally said they could afford it, but he knew a sucker’s game when he saw it. All these private coaches and clinics were a new industry, a modern twist on the old baby-model scams inflicted on the parents of the Baby Boom. Now, instead of dangling Gerber commercials, they dangled college scholarships for sports. And parents paid for the long shot, because everybody thinks their kid is something special.

  “Dad, what up?” Michael said, not taking his eyes off the TV.

  “Could you turn it down? Your mom is still sleeping.”

  Michael lowered the TV.

  “Want to get up and help me bring in some wood?”

  “Nah . . .”

  “It’s good exercise . . . it’ll put some meat on them bones,” Horace said, hating his own placating tone, and meek attempt at humor.

  “Nah, Dad . . . that’s okay.”

  “C’mon. Help out your old man.’’ Horace reached down and shook his covered toe.

  “Dad, no. It’s too f’en cold.”

  Horace let it drop. He stood for a few seconds, frozen by colliding emotions, watching Michael watch the TV. Part of Horace boiled up to want to force the issue. But part of him was deflated. He wanted a boy who wanted to help—to be with—his dad. Michael was no longer that boy.

  “So how’s school going?” Horace finally just asked.

  “You know, all right,” Michael said.

  “What are they teaching you these days?” Horace said.

  “You know, the usual,” Michael said.

  On the TV, in dated blurry color, was a baseball player, clearly from the early 1990s with his longish hair and tight polyester uniform. He was trotting down the first-base line pumping his fist in the air, as his teammates ran out of the dugout, jumping up and down like little boys.

  The announcer was all but hyperventilating, . . . and who can forget this HISTORIC shot . . . tenth inning . . . Game Six, World Series. Joe Grewww jacks one. GET OUT OF TOWN! Red Sox Nation goes WILD . . . Joe Grewww directing “Bedlam in Beantown” with the fist pump . . . an IMMORTAL moment . . . Of course, the Sox lost the Series, but what the hey, Joe Grudeck’s going into the Shrine . . .

  Historic shot, immortal moment. A home run in a baseball game, for Christ sakes, and they’re making it sound like the Surrender at Appomattox, Horace thought. The hyperbole in this day and age was getting increasingly meaningless. The Shrine . . . a baseball museum. He was about to say so, when Michael disarmed him.

  “Hey, Dad, you remember that guy, Joe Grudeck?”

  “Yeah, a little,” Horace said, suddenly thankful his son had initiated any conversation at all. “I was never big into sports, but I remember him a little. I guess he’s an old-timer now. Like me.”

  Chapter Two

  February in Jersey was dismal, year in, year out. Back when he was playing, Grudeck never bitched about pitchers and catchers reporting by the fifteenth, two weeks before everybody else. He couldn’t wait to trade the dull gray of Jersey for the calypso colors of Florida. Now that he was retired, he didn’t go until the last week of March. They called him “hitting instructor,” but he knew the truth. He was a glad-hander. Just like here, at the club.

  On these heavy, damp winter mornings, Grudeck woke in more pain than usual. It woke him, circulating in his body like renegade cancer cells. But not silent. Screaming. Waking each day for Grudeck was like coming out of surgery. One minute, you were deeply and comfortably unconscious, helped there by a four-dose of Advil. The next, your nerve endings were on fire. When Grudeck came to, he felt every piece of worn tendon and torn cartilage, all the places where joints now scraped bone-on-bone, hinges weakened by years of overuse. Rotator cuff in his throwing shoulder, shot. Elbow bumped out like Popeye’s. Ball joints of hips worn down like struts on a junker. He slowly flexed his stiff hands, trying to bring blood back. He looked at his left hand, his glove hand, the humped back where the metacarpal bones had snapped and sown themselves back together around a couple of surgical pins. His right hand wasn’t as ugly, but looked curved even when relaxed, rounded from all those years of gripping baseballs. A hot tingle burned his palms during sleep. Carpal tunnel, they told him. A practice golf swing or drying off with a towel or reaching for a coffee cup could rip a shot of paralysis throu
gh his arm, or a buzz of pain muted only by the pins and needles of dulled nerves. His hips, especially the left, his catching side, seized up when he sat too long, ached when he stood too long. Same with each knee. Humidity, or the tail end of eighteen holes, made him limp a little. The Red Sox orthopedist told him he was looking at double replacement somewhere down the line.

  “Hips or knees?” Grudeck asked.

  The doc laughed. “Both.”

  And that was before Grudeck retired.

  “Don’t wait too long past sixty, if you make it that far,” the doc said. Now he was forty-six. Sixty was coming.

  But his hands, he had to live with. No robot parts for them. They were battered after thirty-some years behind the plate, from Little League to the Bigs. Thirty-some years, hundreds of thousands of pitches hammering his left palm, hundreds of foul tips hitting his unprotected throwing hand. Want to know pain? Split a fingertip.

  All that punishment, and Joe Grudeck kept coming.

  That’s why Boston fans loved him, all-time.

  First was Ted Williams, then Yaz. But lumped in the next pack, with Foxx and Doerr and Pesky, was Grudeck.

  They serenaded him each time he stepped to the plate or threw out a runner or made a tag at home. Joe GRRR-eww, Joe GRRR-eww, the “grrr” sounding like a growl because of his pit-bull tenacity.

  They loved him for that toughness. They loved him for being white. They loved him for the extra-inning walk-off homer that gave them life in the only World Series he played in. He was just a kid then, a boy hero.

  Mostly, they loved him because he stayed. A Red Sock till he tipped his cap good-bye. He was a Jersey boy, and moved back to Jersey when he was done, but Boston still called him its own.

  Now he was up for the Hall. First time on the ballot. He knew he deserved it. The fans, and most sportswriters, were for him, because he was a throwback, old Joe Grrreww. Not only in the way he played, but because he never ran off with a big-market owner throwing big bucks at him. Sal called him “the last of the Mohicans,” whatever that meant. Other big stars sold themselves, three, four, five times to the highest bidder, but Grudeck stayed. To the end. Just like Williams, Yaz, and the rest, Joe Grrreww was old-school. Last of the company men.

  But you get old quickly when you play a young man’s game. He held on longer than most, especially for a catcher. Still, he was only forty-one, an age when most men hit their best years, when Grudeck knew he was done. Yesterday’s news, except for today. The Hall vote.

  Five years since he retired. It went by slowly, slower than all the years he was playing. Five years, waiting for this day. The last big go ’round for Joe Grrreww. His hands hurt more than regularly. What were they trying to tell him? In, or out?

  Grudeck ran the numbers through his head: 2,796 hits; 301 home runs; 1,924 RBIs; .289 career batting average.

  That was the bottom line. The numbers. Unless you got caught cheating, and Grudeck only used stuff that was legal at the time.

  Grudeck was a shoo-in. Wasn’t he? The only bad thing was long in his past. Buried by time. Things were different then. The girls were probably ashamed, thought nobody would believe them. Small-town, International League groupies, Grudeck figured. Probably did every guy on the Syracuse Chiefs. But then, they didn’t act that way. A little timid. Delicate, too. Either way, the cops never came that morning in Syracuse, or ever, even when his name got big. Joe Lucky.

  He looked at the clock . . . 9:00 a.m. Still too early to know.

  He was alone with his thoughts, on the edge of his own bed, an arm’s length away from a sleeping woman. Janine? Janie? No, Joanie. Joanie MacIntosh. The Cadillac guy’s wife. Ex-wife. Soon-to-be ex-wife. Whatever.

  He had to get rid of her. When the Hall news came—one way or the other—he wanted to take it alone. He slowly opened and closed his hands, feeling all the moving parts: joints and knuckles resisting, tendons pulling, veins flattening out. He closed his eyes and listened to his hands creak. Like someone walking down wooden steps to a basement. He rolled toward Joanie and shook her, his left hand feeling like a meat hook on her smooth, naked shoulder. The bed smelled like sex and perfume. He was still musky down there, but dead.

  “Joanie . . . Joanie, baby, you got to go.”

  * * *

  TED WILLIAMS. For some reason, his hand pain always made Grudeck think of Ted Williams. Those were the days, Grudeck always thought. No lockouts, no agent negotiations, no “baseball is a business” talk, even though it was. No constant SportsCenter analysis. No national media types in the locker room, watching like vultures, twisting words. Just a handful of friendly newspaper guys. No fans up your ass every minute. Grudeck knew guys from Williams’s day had off-season jobs and lived in regular middle-class neighborhoods. He remembered his dad taking him past Phil Rizzuto’s house over in Hillside, the town next to Union. Nice place, but in a neighborhood. It was Chuck Grudeck’s way of saying, “See. It can happen to you, too.”

  Man, Grudeck wished he’d played in Ted Williams’s day.

  Baseball then seemed . . . sunnier.

  Grudeck remembered the last time he saw Ted Williams, wheelchair-bound with slurred speech, but at Fenway for the opener in ’97 or ’98.

  “There he is, Mr. Red Sox,” Williams said to Grudeck through a crooked smile. Williams, a legendary prick, had softened over the years. Got sentimental, even.

  Grudeck remembered shaking Williams’s cold, clawed hand, a hook of wooden flesh. The “Splendid Two by Four,” he thought. It reminded him of dead people’s hands, wrapped up in the Rosary, laid eternally on their chest. His dad . . . Coach Rillo . . . his grandparents.

  Now, on this cold winter morning, in his luxury condo alongside a world-championship golf course, Joe Grudeck looked at his hands as if they weren’t really attached to him, and saw mortality coming for him, too. He would go in the Hall, if not this year, then the next, or the next, and then he would be trotted out once a season for old-timers’ day, decaying a little more each year, until.

  * * *

  HE LOOKED AT JOANIE. In the morning light, he saw the dark and gray undersides of her blond-streaked hair. The sheets clung from her shoulder to hip line. She wiggled her ass a little in her sleep. Any other time . . . but right now, somebody was counting the baseball writers’ votes, and soon it would be over. He had to get her out of there.

  Grudeck sidled up to her, under the sheet. “Joanie . . . Joanie, baby . . .”

  “Hmmm . . .” She rubbed that ass of hers up against him. Joanie MacIntosh, with the apple-shaped ass, Grudeck thought.

  “Joanie . . . C’mon. You got to go.”

  He shook her shoulder, then ran his hands down the curve of her hip and gave her a light slap on the rear end.

  She fell into his lap at the club bar the night before, and after she threw back a few martinis, they drove to his townhouse overlooking the sixth fairway. Grudeck liked them younger, but there was nothing like a recent divorcée spreading her wings. Especially nowadays, when there’s Viagra in the medicine cabinet bull pen.

  When they got inside, Grudeck peeled Joanie off him long enough to sneak the little blue pills. “I’ve got to piss,” he said.

  “Say pee,” she said. “Piss is such an ugly word.”

  As he locked the bathroom door behind him, he thought about all the girls who used the same ruse to slip in the diaphragms they hid from their mothers back in the day, or took those morning-after pills now. Mighty Joe Grudeck, hiding like a schoolgirl.

  Now here he was in the morning, numb and rubbery down there, while so much of the rest of his body throbbed with daily aches and pains.

  She pushed up against him, harder and with more wiggle.

  “No, baby. Not now. Another time. You got to go.”

  But Grudeck knew there would be no other time. This was a one-nighter, like most. A way to kill boredom, to kill the time between last night and this morning. A way to not be alone. Besides, she was a sponsor’s wife, and a club member, to boot.
r />   Grudeck met Joanie a handful of times at the club, usually at some pricey charity fund-raiser where Grudeck glad-handed and signed autographs. Grudeck remembered her because she was a nice-looking bottle blonde, health-club maintained. She was the wife of Jimmy MacIntosh, a local Cadillac dealer. She was tall and elegant and Waspish, and clearly married for money. Her husband was the third-generation owner. What do they say? The first generation builds, the second expands, the third fucks it all up. That was Jimmy Mac. Pudgy and short-fingered, with a monkey face like one of those old-time Irish caricatures from the rag sheets. He spent his days playing golf in Jersey and Florida, while managers ran his business into the ground. The chain his dad built retracted to the original dealership his grandfather started. When Grudeck first met Joanie, he remembered thinking this was the kind of woman—the doctor’s wife type—that men like Jimmy Mac married to prove they were making it in life.

  Grudeck met Jimmy Mac fifteen years earlier, after he invited Grudeck, through Sal, to play a round at Baltusrol one late October.

  “There might be a deal,” Sal said.

  Grudeck agreed only because he would be home anyway, and was new to golf. He’d never played Baltusrol, but knew it was fancy and challenging enough to host the U.S. Open once in a while. Besides, it would help him take his mind off another World Series without him. On the ninth hole, Jimmy Mac made his pitch. Grudeck never forgot the sight. Jimmy Mac was dressed in a shamrock-colored sweater and sun-yellow pants, and swung a one-iron like a friggin’ shillelagh, face blazing red, frustrated by Baltusrol’s wicked fast greens as much as failing in the global car market.