The Slide: A Novel

by Kyle Beachy

  Ian teed a ball, lined up his stance, checked the progress of the cart, and swung calmly.

  “And of course it goes without saying that you have to call your mother.”

  I watched the ball shoot skyward, hang for a second, then fall. Ian leaned left. Breeze blew and a bird chirped. The ball came down squarely in the middle of the wire mesh protecting the driver’s head. Ian gave a tiny hop, then turned to face us on the bench. He held out the club and smiled hugely.

  “Your turn, son.”

  I took the club and stepped onto the turf, teed a ball of my own. Ian sat on the bench next to my father. I loosened with practice swings and tried not to think about my arms or shoulders. I lined up my shot, inhaled deeply. I was going to OBLITERATE this ball.

  My swing came in too low, caught more of the turf than it should have. The ball barely moved, trickling less than ten feet into the range. The club’s head went much, much farther. In strobe motion I watched it detach from the shaft and soar end over end out into the grass, spinning in a way that could have even been beautiful if it wasn’t my father’s ancient seven iron. I stood for a second with the suddenly lightened club in my hands, then began after the club head, into the range. I walked off the turf, stepped over and through the initial batch of mis-hit balls, then continued deeper into the field. Beginning my passage into the void. The first sign of opposition was the kid driving the cart, who had shut down the engine and was waving his arms in the tight pattern allowed by the protective cage. He was screaming. And here was something new: the balls made noise as they flew, a steady whiz buzz whistle. Now there were screams behind me too, screams of whoa and hey as people noticed the young middle-class adult white male taking large, determined steps into the range.

  “Man on range! Man on range!”

  I reached the approximate area I thought the club had landed and began to circle. This was a land of palpable neglect, untrimmed and lumpy, the antilawn. There was no telling how fast the club had been going, what kind of bounce it had taken. I was standing in a plot of grass that had been deemed RECEPTACLE. The kid in the cart continued screaming, and I thought about grass as its own kind of medium, a venue for such varied goodness in the world. Now I looked from clumpy green driving range to fat smooth seamless sky. I spun to the tees and saw a wall of people moving toward me, everyone converging from their partitioned bits of turf. Three football players and the couple to their right and a horde of single men in shorts and belts.

  “Turn around,” I told them. “There is no problem. It’s here somewhere and I’m going to find it. Seriously, leave me alone.”

  But still they came, moving in a scattered line toward where I was standing. Behind them I saw Ian standing next to my father on the small square of turf, watching as the crowd of would-be golfers formed a giant circle around me and tried to help.

  The buggy found it. The club’s head had churned through the ball-retrieval system and came out chopped and dented to shit. My father stood by his car, holding the headless shaft between two fingers. In a few hours he was boarding a flight to Baltimore to examine their waterfront urban-reclamation project. His eyes looked like ashtrays and I knew: he had seen the photographs and they had reminded him of his own erstwhile desires and the restraint he had exercised without fail, every single time. The plot had spread itself outward and was implicating those around me. This man of virtue who shook Ian’s hand and told him to keep swinging, then shook my own hand quickly before driving away.

  Standing in the parking lot, we were so very close to the batting cages. They were right there and yet could have been somewhere in the Dakotas, so removed were we from their effect. The kid leaned against a Buick and ran one shoe across the top of the other.

  “Let me see the letter, Ian.”

  “No.”

  “I can help.”

  “It doesn’t even say anything! She doesn’t say when she’s coming back. It’s so stupid! Everyone always runs away but nobody explains why. Or, or if they do say why, the reason is always so dumb there’s no way it’s the real reason.”

  “It can be hard, sometimes, for people to find the words to fit the reason. Even when it feels obvious, things get jumbled between your head and mouth. It’s language. Sometimes language is insufficient.”

  “Like what happened to your girlfriend? Why did she go away?”

  “For that there are branches and lists, diagrams. It’s. It’s a big complicated issue.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Audrey,” I said, and it was the first taste of the word on my lips all summer. “Audrey. Audrey needed evidence that I still loved her.”

  “But that’s so easy!” the boy said. “Even when my parents would throw things at each other, I could tell my dad wasn’t throwing as hard as he could. That’s how come I knew he loved her.”

  I had to sit down for a minute.

  “What are you doing?”

  “You should give me the letter, Ian.”

  “Get up!”

  I turned my head and saw the grille of a Chevy Cavalier staring me down, turn signal going, and I knew I had sat down in the middle of the lot. But still the car did not honk, oh no, no, not in this town. Too rude.

  Ian yelled, “Fine! Fine, here, just get up.”

  I stood and took the envelope from his hand.

  He moved back into the grass in front of the parked cars and I followed. I did not remove the letter from inside and read it. I did not do anything except notice the absence of a return address and the absence of a stamp or any official postmark, just a single word typed across the envelope’s back, single tiny word saying Irenia, right before the kid grabbed the letter back.

  “And if hard work is gonna save us all like she says it is, why couldn’t she work hard to be with my dad?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why wouldn’t she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t want to do any of this. I want to go home right now.”

  The sun on the drive back was blinding. I lowered both of my car’s visors and also held up a hand to my eyes. Ian played with the radio until he found a local sports call-in show, then fell immediately asleep.

  He awoke as I made the turn onto Waldwick Drive. On the radio, the Cardinals center fielder said, At this point you don’t ask why. See the ball, hit the ball. That’s all we’re doing out there.We sat at the curb for a minute before he turned to face me.

  “I don’t think you should come over anymore.”

  He dropped out of the car and I watched him walk the path to his house and I saw a weight to each of his steps, a sluggishness, and knew at least some of that weight was compliments of me.

  august

  five

  at home the next day, I stood facing the kitchen phone, flipping through my mother’s day-calendar on the counter. Perhaps the progression could be tracked in these pages: her anger, her loneliness, and finally sadness, her sorrow. In today’s calendar box were the words Lunch w/ Nancy. Potential explosion of my plot nestled within bland but crucial peer support for my mother. If not now then soon.

  I opened the junk drawer directly below the calendar. It had not always been this way, junked. Over time mess had trounced order, the frenzy of collected objects. I reached a hand inside and rummaged through the assortment of clothespins, scissors, batteries, old photographs, markers, and safety pins. How in the world would they decide to apportion all this shit? I came upon a photograph and lifted it from the drawer. Warped, corners bent and peeling, it retained its central image, which was me standing next to Audrey. Tough to discern our condition by looking. My arm was around her waist. We were smiling, standing next to a fountain in an obscure courtyard among the school’s academic buildings. Our school and its myriad fountains. My mother out for a visit during sophomore year. Or was it junior? Frame the couple, press the button. The fountain was four cupid angels spitting streams that crisscrossed as they arced into the pool.

  Anger comes fir
st, but only in bursts because anger is exhausting. Loneliness, though, is effortless, a passive state. And from lonely, the slide to true sorrow is polished smooth, all but automatic.

  Who were these two people in the picture? My only memory of this fountain was from a few months prior. February: a point in the saga when both Audrey and I worried openly, abandoning completely our pretext of joy derived from fortitude and longevity. It was almost eight o’clock, that hour when the desert chill settled down for the night and the campus burbled with quiet activity: the genius Asian and Indian premeds living up to their parents’ rigid expectations; the broad-shouldered basketball players, like Zeuses among our bespectacled and scrawny majority, walking sorely from practice to private, late-hour meals in the dining hall; the light-skinned alcoholic sons and daughters of outrageous privilege, rolling bocce and pounding cans of Busch; the shy, bookish lovers tangled atop blankets in the quad. The future somethings of our great nation.

  Valentine’s Day, and we had plans for dinner in a few hours at the cramped Italian joint we defaulted to for most occasions. Our paths happened to meet in this courtyard. Which made no sense whatsoever; we both lived on the opposite side of campus. But there we were, facing each other by the spitting cupids, arm’s length apart, eyes dodging then settling into each other as the bell tower chimed.

  “These angels keep on spitting,” she said.

  “Today’s a big day,” I said.

  No solution. Not then and not soon afterward, and not now, still. I’d given her not a single word for how many months? And why not? The phone was right here in front of me. The potential of her voice, right this second. How long? Despicable silence.

  I lifted the phone from its cradle on the wall and ran my thumb lightly over the sequence of long-known numbers. This was presuming she’d returned from Europe. Presuming she’d gone home. Presuming she wasn’t living in Vermont or Boulder or God could only say where else. Presuming she wasn’t with Carmel or someone else, some new foreign person. You can feel panic’s arrival; it descends like heat. Where was Audrey? I could have written. Asked. The phone became extremely heavy in my hand and I let it fall to the counter.

  What I had seen in my mother at the mall was what I had seen in the courtyard, in Audrey, the physical expression of tremendous disappointment. Ian’s sluggish steps.

  There was a beeping, some pulsing noise I didn’t understand. A powerful and terrible squawking. I saw the phone off the hook and realized this was the old alert to warn us that if we didn’t do something soon, the house would be cut off from the outside world. In other words, the alarm.

  Anger was sharp.

  Lonely was hollow.

  Sad was the giant, the cloud or earth or ocean, the elemental force.

  The beeping eventually stopped. I went back into the junk drawer with a hand. Most likely it would be my mother, or would they clean together? My father scooping the whole stinking mess into a garbage bag and carrying it out to the curb. Dispose, discard, rid the house of things.

  My hand came across the extra set of keys to my father’s car. Which I clenched tight in my fist. I removed my cell phone from my pocket and tossed it into the drawer. Which I shut.

  The injustice was that it only worked one way. The past reached forward and meddled, played its stained fingers across the present. But the present had no such dominion. An old complaint, fine, but made new by the specifics of what had been lost: love, marriage, dear friend, innocence, status as law-abiding non-rapist. Brother.

  So the present. Yes. The boy could still be saved. I knew the route, not thirteen miles from here. I had been there only yesterday. I could return and fix. Had the route memorized. Knew the solution. I took the Audrey photograph and an old Cardinals magnet and stuck them to the fridge on my way to the garage.

  Together we flew, me and the car my same age. Work had opened this city to me, folded back flaps to expose the depths within. I had been into these homes, stepped over piles of dirty laundry. Into the bare back halls of these businesses, the gloomy cubicles previously known to me only in movie satire. Never had I been more aware of the peopling of a place. Pulses throbbing below the veneer of society’s inanimates.

  Ian’s house was how it always was: dirty and dark, lit by syndicated programming and daylight through the screen door. I knocked. No answer. I called out and the television went mute.

  “Go away.”

  I spoke into quiet darkness: “I never told you about baseball camp. Every summer from sixth grade until sophomore year. Down at Mizzou. We stayed in the dorms and ate in the cafeterias, and each day felt like it was part of something special. We ran drills and scrimmaged and worked on bunting technique. They filmed us swinging, and we sat in the coaches’ office and analyzed the video. They call it the trigger, some thing each of us does to start a swing. Me, I lifted my left foot just barely before setting it back down again. Of course, before the video I had no idea. But there it was on the screen in slow motion. Then you’d see the hips shift as shoulders open slightly. Hands coming downward through the zone. ‘Down the slide,’ they called it. Down the slide. Keep your back shoulder up. Down the slide. Come on. Let’s go to the batting cage.”

  “My dad’s in the back working on something. You should go. I told him about you taking me to Tower Tee and he got real mad. Hurry and go before he comes back inside.”

  “Your dad is at work. His car isn’t here.”

  “He had to leave for a minute, but he’ll be right back any second now.”

  “Wait. Is that true? Are you saying to me what you’re supposed to say to a stranger?”

  “Just ’cause they took away your van doesn’t mean you’re not a kidnapper.”

  “Come see the car I’m driving. It’s a 1978 Datsun 280Z. It’s before your time. Nissan used to be Datsun. Istanbul was Constantinople.”

  I heard the television come back to life. I turned and saw the hyena kids emerge from their home and begin playing in the yard up the street. Their mother sat in a lawn chair in the shade of the house. I knew I had role models growing up—I must have. I needed to think who they were. My father, of course, and an old instructional VHS tape of Ozzie Smith saying stay down, don’t let the ball play you.

  I called back into the house over the volume of the TV: “I don’t see the problem here.”

  “That’s because you’re crazy! It’s like you think I can’t tell!”

  “Hold on a second. Sometimes we say things we don’t fully believe.” The lock was a thin metal rod extending from the frame, hooking into a loop in the door. “It’s easy sometimes to get carried away. The heat doesn’t help. But we don’t want to say anything that could ruin our friendship.”

  “If anyone’s ruined anything,” he said, “it’s you. And it’s everything.”

  Like tossing unsharpened darts into an endless black void. How many times did I tell her love? Her name spoken in my sleep, unconsciously, chanted like some reenactment of an ancient tribal rite, actors in face paint. Skeptics all of us, there were times we all needed proof.

  I yelled through the door that I would be right back.

  My feet and hands could have belonged to somebody else; they worked clutch and gas and steered and shifted in reflexive concert. Passing and merging, decelerating off Highway 40, turning onto the thinner, curvier country road and going south. It was Saturday, early afternoon, and the Datsun on 94 was like a warm razor through butter. In Defiance, the two bars with outdoor decks were packed with people in red hats. Families: goddamn miraculous and fragile and absurd.

  I took comfort in having a plan. Back under the canopy now, the road was dense with winery-bound traffic. Gradually the pack broke apart, until finally I was beyond Mount Pleasant, and alone, me and my spear and this landlocked beach, ocean of countryside stretching straight and endless in front of me. Reaching the sign for Irenia Winery.

  The plan was to find Ian’s mom. The plan was to locate Ian Worpley’s mother and convince her to return to her family. To i
solate the semi-former Mrs. Worpley, sit her down, palpate and find the pulse of motherhood thumping beneath whatever was keeping her from her family, stare fiercely into her eyes and say you are being selfish. Whatever she was doing out here, working or living or both or whatever it was, Ian was locked inside that dark house with only a television to raise him, and motherhood has no expiration date. I was going to find her, sit her down, and speak words that appealed to her most human ingredients. Hope my words might still have meaning.

  At the door to the main building, a thin hairless man whom I did not recognize from my last visit examined my driver’s license. He wore the pale-blue collared shirt tucked into flat-front khakis.

  “Hello there. Welcome. It’s good to have you.”

  Inside the front door was typical retail outlet built around a central, circular counter. A few customers sat at stools as men and women wearing pale-blue collared shirts poured tastes of wine. The plan was to scope the place out, case the joint, and form a general feeling, then get busy finding Mrs. Worpley. I moved nonchalantly through the store, stopping occasionally to pick up an item and examine it. In this manner I would infiltrate the winery without arousing even the slightest fractional suspicion.

  “Good afternoon.”

  A woman stood before me, wearing the same pale-blue sexless collared shirt and flat-front khaki pants. I nodded hello and set down whatever bottle I was holding. Smiling, I backed out of the aisle and moved quickly across the store, through a door, onto a brick patio where tables huddled in the shade of large pale-blue umbrellas. I took a seat at an empty table overlooking the vineyard below. Do this thing for the boy, call on the love of a mother lion for her cubs, jaws that could demolish fragile skulls. That was maternity.