We lost three in a row at home to Ontario and then two out of three to Washington. Hitsui Takahashi took it better than anyone. Muddy Alvarado and Howard Beechy (who never even played) found it impossible to maintain the vaguest approximation of sobriety. You couldn’t really call what Engelmann did “taking it well,” because Engelmann didn’t take it at all. He just plodded along, leaning on his statistics, batting an even .250 and calling for all the right pitches, even when Tommy and John and Muddy (and even the Penobscots) failed to properly execute them. Happy Truman went back to compulsively munching oyster crackers, carefully cracking them in half with his incisors and mashing them up with his tongue. Fans began to boo. And in the hours following yet another loss, on a Tuesday night, having been once again prodded with unforgiving microphones while his genitals shriveled, Pudge Morrison experienced his first fully realized nervous breakdown.
If his teammates had misstepped by permitting themselves unwise optimism, Pudge had fallen from the roof. Now, doubled over on the floor, he shook his head as though trying to rid himself of a batting helmet without using his hands. He banged his knees and elbows against the wall. He dry-heaved and spat and cursed. A giant worm of doubt had burrowed deep into him, and no contortion or spasm would expel it. Near dawn of the next day, raw-throated and five pounds lighter, he finally exhausted himself and slipped into feverish stillness.
Pudge had banked his entire psychic solvency on the winning of a championship. Monumental success was supposed to excuse and underwrite his ensuing retirement, afford him some dignity when life shifted from fifth gear to first. Now he faced down the prospect of a life’s second half filled with memories of prolonged failure at the one thing he’d ever tried to do. None of the myriad joys he’d experienced would travel those final miles alongside him. The obvious solution was to pull himself together and believe they could win without the girl. The easier solution was unthinkable and tempting.
The first week of October saw the Barons maintaining a slim one-game lead in their division with a single game left to play. Their hot streak had been so hot that even the late-season collapse following the girl’s disappearance hadn’t completely ruined their record. If they won the final game against Portland, they would at least advance to the play-offs. If they lost, it was time to go home, throw away all those phone numbers with strange area codes, and dig out the swimming trunks and golf clubs.
Baseball is a game of momentum, and on the day of the face-off with Portland, the Barons had none. Happy Truman needed a crowbar to get his players up off the clubhouse seats and onto the field. Batting practice was drudgery. The infield trio of Ratigan, O’Malley, and Hodge fielded warm-up ground balls with the enthusiasm of men convicted to hang for petty crimes. At times, they didn’t bother to field the ground balls at all but just stood there dejected with their mitts on their hips, watching them roll by, no longer seeing the point of it.
In the clubhouse after warm-ups, Happy Truman told Lenny Penobscot he was pitching, even though it wasn’t his turn in the rotation and he was shitfaced drunk from mixing white wine with lunch. Lenny slouched down next to Engelmann, and Engelmann did something I’d never seen him do before. He pointed. With his finger. Unmistakably. At the tiny bit of skin protruding from Lenny’s left elbow. Lenny frowned, puzzled. Engelmann then used that same finger, which had never meant anything but “Throw a fastball,” to describe an arc that began at his left knee and finished, unmistakably, with a swipe across the exposed part of his throat. Then he returned to the universe of himself.
The message was clear: lose the nub.
Lenny continued to nod, understanding, terrified, not the least bit wise looking. I handed him a pair of toenail clippers and he carried them toward the bathroom stalls, where he could be alone. Lenny, like all of us, was willing to do whatever it took. What nobody knew was whether Engelmann had made the call based on cold fronts and batting averages and the migration patterns of a local butterfly or if even he had succumbed to the last-ditch and desperate. We all heard a snip, the sharp exhalation of breath, then a sigh. Delilah found a Band-Aid, but Engelmann shook his head no and she stuffed it back into her purse. We pretended not to hear Lenny’s vomit slapping against the tile floor of the shower room. None of us knew what to say to him. He only bled for a second.
I hadn’t slept, shaved, or showered in the previous twenty-four hours. The night terrors had plagued me all week, so grisly that I figured I was paying the entire team’s psychic debt to the little brat in the red dress. Screeching bottle rockets and hydraulic pistons tortured my skull. I didn’t know whether I could drag myself out there. If you’d seen me, you would have said, “Pudge, you’re a mess.”
I don’t believe I’ll ever get that low again. I’ve been through hard times and good, but that was easily the worst. Some nights, I still find comfort in believing that everything since has been an improvement. Which isn’t to say that Lenny’s amputation sparked a rally and we won that day against Portland. Or that we went on to win a championship and I caught a flight back to Franny and the kids and the rodents in San Diego to put myself out to stud, or that I lived a long and prosperous retirement. Then again, it’s also not to say that those things didn’t happen. What I mean to describe is a shifting of focus, a realization that in the relationship between high and low there’s a little of each in the other. Regardless of what came next, my lowness of spirit that day couldn’t possibly have gotten any lower, and that’s something you can’t understand until you’ve felt it. But did it resolve? Did I rise up and achieve grand heights or simply a less low lowness? The answer is: it depends on how you view it.
Following the impromptu surgery, in the minutes before we took the field for the do-or-die showdown with Portland, we sat around the clubhouse quietly fearing a crushing disappointment. We forced ourselves not to hope that Lenny would return to form after clipping his bump. We prayed that we might unshoulder this burden and undo the entire season, return to bland mediocrity, link off to address our own private nauseas. After watching Lenny mime a few inconclusive warm-up tosses in front of the mirror, I turned to see all six feet eight inches of Hitsui Takahashi glaring down at me, silent, as though he were marveling at the smallness of an ant.
I said, “How do you do it, Takahashi-san? How do you keep so cool?”
Hitsui’s was a stony demeanor, though not without its compassionate edges. Before he’d heard the full translation, I could in his face see that he understood me, even cared about me. The notion that he and I and the rest of the Barons were somehow related, brothers not just in arms but in spirit or blood, didn’t seem too far-fetched. It was very moving. Then he spoke.
“Yesterday she was here,” Delilah translated. “Today she is gone. It is the same thing.”
I let that sink in for a moment. I said, “Could you maybe elucidate?”
I’ve seen lots of baseball players make the sign of the cross when they hit a home run. Hitsui was the first I’d ever known to make a yin-yang with his hands, curling the fingers of one into the fingers of the other with one palm facing toward the ground and one toward the sky. He did this now and spoke for a long time, calmly, but with flecks of spittle escaping his mouth. When he’d finished, Delilah thought for a moment. Then she translated.
“Yesterday she was here,” she said. “Today she is gone. It is the same thing.”
I made eyebrows at her. She shrugged.
“In Japanese, there are many ways to say this.”
Hitsui grinned and spoke again. Delilah watched him carefully and once more began to translate.
“Yesterday she was here—”
“Alright, enough,” I said. “I got it.” But I didn’t. I didn’t get it at all. “Can’t you ask him to say something else? Something Buddhist? This isn’t helping.”
Delilah reached out and touched me very softly on the shoulder. I felt a shock run through me. It was as though she’d translated Hitsui Takahashi’s words into physical contact. I immediately felt ashamed
for not at first understanding. Then I lightened and forgot the ache in my knees. The day made sense in a way that I couldn’t explain.
“What you have to do,” Delilah said, cutting off Hitsui before he had a chance to respond, “is tell yourself the right kind of story. In English, there’s no good way to explain this. The story was a cakewalk when she was here. The one for today will be harder. Tomorrow’s is going to be the worst. But the girl means nothing. She never did. And so she means everything.”
With a nurse’s tenderness she tapped me on the head, as though that was where the stories came from. We nodded together like three wise people who understood they didn’t know anything. Then Hitsui Takahashi smacked me hard on the rump and barked like a dog, which he took to be an American jock thing even though it wasn’t. Happy Truman clapped his hands twice. The team stood up, and we all headed through the tunnel to the field.
During the first inning, it appeared that Lenny’s nub-ectomy had brought him back to life. He retired the side one-two-three. In the second, he gave up a hit and a walk but didn’t surrender any runs. But by the fifth, Portland started doing damage, and it was clear that we were all on our own out there. Maybe Engelmann had been wrong. Or maybe things would have been even worse if he hadn’t taken action. There was no way to know. I guess that’s always the case.
We didn’t beat Portland that day and we didn’t go to the play-offs and we didn’t win a championship. But I also didn’t disgrace myself. We didn’t disgrace ourselves. In the end, Lenny pitched pretty well but not his best and we all quit thinking about the girl with the pigtail. I went one for four and got robbed of a double when Portland’s third baseman made a leaping grab. We lost 4–2, but we played pretty good. I no longer worried about making an error in left field at the worst possible moment or striking out swinging or returning to a lame existence with a disappointed family in San Diego. I took it one pitch at a time, drank in every burble and swell of applause, paid attention to the gorgeous crack of a leather ball against a wooden bat that had supplied my life’s soundtrack for so many years, and in just a few hours, would cease to.
For the first time in years, I didn’t feel stretched out wider than myself. I was free from dread, and the next moment arrived untainted and neutral, fresh as a new lover. I never failed to live my way through it. And then I lived through another one. Some moments pleased me more than others. Some moments stank wretchedly. The moment when I poked a single into shallow right that scored our only two runs was an especially nice one. The moment when I got ahead on a three-and-one count but swung over the top of a juicy fastball and grounded out instead of flinging one into the left-center gap was a bummer. But I refused to succumb to the belief that a streak of bummers was coming down the pipe. I reset to zero. I told myself that fear of failure was worse than failure. Which might have been what Delilah was talking about. Or maybe not. Regardless, it worked.
So there it is. Probably not the tale you were after, but it’s the only one I know. And like I said, this is not the kind of story where a crime gets solved or Engelmann learns to love. It’s not even the kind where you find out exactly who that little girl in the red dress was, or where she came from, though that would be a reasonable expectation. And it definitely isn’t the kind of story where good old Pudge Morrison returns home surprised to find that his wife and children have strung up a “Welcome Home, Daddy. You’re a Hero!” banner.
The truth is that mine will be a life of plodding through a one-legged marriage with waves of regret crashing frequently over me, devastating at high tide but less so at low. It will depress and be brutal with the occasional reprieve at my daughters’ dance recitals and weddings. I’ll drink more than I want to and spend time fixing unbroken things in the basement to avoid saying awkward things to my wife. But like Takahashi-san would tell you, none of that stuff is the end of the world. You just do it. Head down. Shoulder to the plow. Like preseason push-ups and suicide wind sprints. You have to be careful not to drop your guard—don’t start thinking about everything at once. Remember not to get ahead of yourself. Watch the ball. Forget about swinging for the fences. Let a pitch go by now and then, to see how they’re breaking. Another one will always follow. And then another. And another. And then one day they’ll stop.
It’s really not so terrible.
About the Author
CHAD BENSON grew up outside of Detroit, Michigan, and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he recently completed his first novel. His short stories have appeared in Portland Review, the South Carolina Review, and the Collagist. He received his MFA from New York University.
Brooke Weeber © 2014
OF EQUAL OR LESSER VALUE
* * *
KEVIN SKIENA
Tracy is late, again, so far by thirteen minutes. Jeff recognizes the ugliness of his feelings—how he wishes that when she did come in late, she were more ashamed of it. What she’ll do is fast-walk past the counter to the break room to put away her purse and get her red CVS vest, look at Jeff, smile in her sweet way (it really is a sweet smile, the kind that makes most people forget their bitterness), mouth an apology, and then she’s done. How much penance Jeff would like from her he is not sure. On the few occasions when he, himself, is late, he feels a flutter in his heart, something like a hand closing on his heart. He will sweat a little, apologize to everyone, one by one, like a child before a classroom, and feel low for an hour or two.
The door to the manager’s office opens, and Alice, the assistant manager, appears with a freshly counted till. She maneuvers between Jeff and the cigarettes to get to Register 1, keys it open, inserts the till.
“Has she called?” Jeff asks, ringing and bagging a box of Kotex pads.
“Nope,” Alice says. She opens Register 2’s cash drop, the coupon drop, and then the register drawer.
“Have we called her?” he asks.
Alice pretends not to hear him above the jangle of coins. She sighs. “I’ll give you a break in forty,” she says as the counter door swings closed behind her.
Saying thank you feels too generous, so he says, “Okay.” What he thinks is, Other people get away with things for which I would be more sternly punished.
It’s not that the work is hard. The work is ridiculously easy, and this is part of the problem. It’s so easy that he has time to think these things as he goes, about the inadequacy and disappointment of the work itself. (He nudges open a plastic bag, rings up shampoo, mascara, lipstick, and totals them.) They’ve had part-timers who’ve struggled with manually entering ten-digit UPC codes. It’s an important and rudimentary skill, the ability to accurately type ten digits into a keypad when a bar code fails to scan, and yet . . .
Jeff can even argue the finer points of a coupon’s terms with an unhappy customer, which seems like a judo master skill compared to what some of his coworkers do, which is punch in the discount manually to avoid any disagreement. Though there are few things as degrading to Jeff as arguing with a customer about a dollar or fifty cents as if he wants it.
What happens often are things like: Register makes angry beep at coupon. Jeff reads coupon. Before he has even finished, Customer says, “That’s for the paper towels,” as if Jeff can’t read the print or doesn’t understand the prominent, glossy picture of paper towels. He continues reading. Customer, who had been standing sort of at ease, comes to attention somewhat, cocking a hip, as if about to argue with someone very dim.
“This is one per customer,” Jeff says.
“I have three of them.” This is said like it’s an argument in support of. Jeff thinks, Do not engage.
“The first one went through, but I can’t accept more than one.”
Customer slouches, mouth agape. Posture says either Come on or Are you serious? Sometimes, these things are said aloud. “Are you serious?”
This question never fails to sink Jeff’s mood, because he is both completely serious and so far removed from his own value-appraisal apparatus that he doesn’t recognize wha
t’s driving his actions. He cannot say, “Yes, I am serious,” which would come across as sarcastic (read, combative), so he softens further.
“It’s our policy. I’m sorry.”
Customer either folds here or, more often, says, “I could leave right now and come back in a half hour or tomorrow and use the same damn coupon over and over as many times as I want, right? So, save me the trip. It’s fifty cents.”
Customer is right. It’s a logistical and logical fault in the system, but there’s no way around it. Manually entering three fifty-cent discounts would trigger follow-ups from the store’s manager, Ron, which happened the first time Jeff was won over by such logic. Jeff couldn’t say to Ron, “I don’t remember,” because who wouldn’t remember the monotony of manually typing in a fifty-cent discount three times? Ron would surely point to the abundance of paper-towel coupons in the coupon drop as well as the single transaction consisting of three paper-towel rolls and the discounts in question. Jeff had explained the customer’s argument to Ron, which was awkward—justifying someone else’s dollar-fifty policy violation as if the cause were his own.
“The coupon says,” Ron had started, pausing to read the coupon. “A coupon is a contract. We’ve got to go by what the contract says. Someone could walk in with a hundred of these.”
“How effective can these paper towels be if you need to buy a hundred of them?” Jeff asked.
Ron guffawed so hard and loud that Jeff nixed the delivery of future one-liners.
So, to Customer, Jeff cannot point again at the coupon language, which, because it would be repetition, could be interpreted as condescension. He cannot say, “You are right, but . . .” because it is both a concession and a denial. He can only stick to the blank, the vacuous. “I’m very sorry.”
Sometimes Customer will ask for a manager, which is a relief. Always, Customer, their brow knit in frustration, will take a moment to glare at Jeff with a look that indicates how beneath them he is.
Day One, Year One: Best New Stories and Poems, 2014 Page 24