by Jim Shepard
She rolled onto her back and looked up at him. Her hair swept away from her face and spread along the floor near the dog’s, catching light. My beautiful blonde, her mother called her. She did not look like his sister. He wondered at times if some elaborate and complex deception had been at work. She was beautiful, he knew, sister or not. One front tooth was crooked, slightly overlapping the other. Thank God, his mother would say when it came up; imagine me with a perfect child?
She lay on her back with the straw in her nose and smiled. She was beautiful, and as mean as anyone he had ever known. The reason at times seemed clear, at times escaped him. She kicked a leg experimentally upward and held it aloft, sighting along it to the ceiling. She said, “Lisa’s gonna get a cat.”
“Good for Lisa.”
“We oughta get a cat.”
“We don’t need a cat. We got Lady.”
She made a face. “Lady’s old.” He resumed rolling dice, and she clicked her tongue. “Lady’s no fun,” she said. She was listening to her parents downstairs.
“Leave the dog alone,” he said. “She’s not bothering you.” The game ended 10–3 Baltimore. Downstairs there was the splintering sound of a glass coming apart in the sink.
“They fight all the time,” his sister said. She looked at the dog sadly.
“Hey,” he said. “Lisa coming over for the Air Show?”
She didn’t know. She got up abruptly and went into her room. Lady’s ear twitched, the straw resting lightly on it like an aerialist’s balance pole.
He leaned over and cleared it away. “Why’s she do that to you?” he asked. He picked up the dice, the plastic sweaty and smooth in his hand. “Yeah, you got a case,” he heard his father say.
His knees flexed and his torso bobbed expectantly with the pitch, and Bucky Dent topped it, beating it into the ground, the ball bounding past Scott McGregor, who twisted out of his delivery but was unable to reach it. Everything happened at once as Biddy broke to cover second: Dave Winfield thundered in toward him from first, the noise dropping away like a dream as the Yankee Stadium crowd anticipated the double play. Dauer fielded it and flipped it to him and he caught the ball as Winfield went into his slide. He tried to get a good push off second, getting his knees up as he threw, but Winfield caught them as he swept by, upending him and crashing him onto his face and shoulder, arm still out from the throw.
DeCinces and Dauer stood over him while he sat in the dirt, his nose bleeding and snuffling, his lip stinging. Dent was standing on first and the crowd was whistling and stamping so that it seemed the upper deck might come down.
And that, DeCinces told him, is how you break up a double play.
He put the dice away, turned off the lamp, and walked across the hall to look in on his sister. She was reading a coloring book, her bare toes curling and uncurling. She looked up at him. “I was talking to you before,” she said.
He touched her leg apologetically. “I was thinking.”
“You didn’t say anything.”
He said he was sorry, and asked if she wanted anything. She shook her head and picked at something on her back. He heard a voice and went into the hall and stood at the top of the stairs. His father was a gray shadow, barely visible in the dark at the bottom, telling them to get ready for bed.
Kristi was pulling off her top. He returned to his room and kicked off his sneakers. Directly below him his mother broke something in the den. He pulled off his tank top, shivering at the breeze through the window, turned off the light, and lay back, listening to the crickets.
“If it’s such a goddamn effort, call him and tell him to stay home,” his father said, and Biddy sank a little into the pillow. He decided to go swimming the next morning before Dom arrived.
They stood in a rough line in the hot sun, hair sticking to their foreheads. Biddy’s Orioles hat was on backward to allow for the catcher’s mask, and the sweat on his temples was sticky with dust. The dust invaded his mouth, sometimes chalky, sometimes gritty. He was vaguely reminded of Jimmy Stewart, so long without water, his eyes on the forming fuselage. They were working out with his father and Uncle Dom, and their grasp of fundamentals, according to Dom, was piss poor. Louis and Mickey, Dom’s children, were having as much trouble as he was. Which was not encouraging: Mickey was not very bright and a year younger, and Louis was slightly retarded.
“Biddy, if you don’t block the plate, they go around you. Do you understand?” Dom said. “You have to block the plate.”
Biddy adjusted his chest protector, sullenly stepping nearer the plate.
“Here,” Dom said with some exasperation, positioning him with his arms. “Here, right here. And spread your legs.” He mimicked Biddy standing before the plate, erect, arms drooping, looking hypnotized. Mickey and Louis laughed. “You’re standing here like you’re in outer space. Some mulignon’ll go right by you if you’re standing around like a lost soul.”
“I don’t want to catch anyway,” Biddy said, somewhat in his own defense.
“I don’t care. That’s not the point. You said you wanted to learn how to play the game.” Biddy scuffed the dirt on home plate. “Hey, it’s up to you. You want to play for Lordship next year, it might be nice to handle more than one position.”
Across the field the gulls were circling over the dump, Long Island Sound a blue line beyond.
“Want to try it again?”
Part of him did not. His father despaired of his ever excelling at this game, he knew: a lot of people had long since decided Biddy just did not have the instincts for baseball. He squinted, defiant, and scratched his thigh with his glove and nodded. Louis trotted back to right field and Mickey to third. They were practicing the play at the plate on a sacrifice fly. Dom lifted the bat and ball and turned to face Louis, and Biddy adjusted the catcher’s mask, the thick padding comforting against his cheeks. A bee swirled low across the infield, its drone distracting in the heat. His father stood on the mound, wiping sweat from his eyebrows with the back of his hand. The cool blue Sound beyond was soothing, and Biddy flexed back and forth in his catcher’s crouch to relieve the stiffness. His knees ached. He wanted to salvage a tail boom and fly out of this dust bowl, letting his relaxed legs flap in the jetstream. His father lobbed the ball in and Dom swung under it, sending it off into the sun.
Out in right Louis took a step back, two forward, and pulled the ball in. As he did Mickey exploded from third, his breath whooshing down the line at Biddy, and Louis’s throw came in high and hard and to the left, bouncing once, and Biddy lunged for it feeling it sock into his glove and tumbled into Mickey’s slide, catching him on the chest and face with the tag before being jarred onto his shoulder in the dust.
He rose to all fours, one foot still tangled in Mickey’s sprawl, sweat stinging his left eye, the ball tight in his glove and the dirt dry beneath his hand. Dom, standing over him, called the out as flamboyantly as any umpire ever had, and he rose from the plate happy to have made people happy, and tired and ready to go home.
They thumped into the house hot and dirty and wearing their gloves to find everyone sitting around the kitchen table as if they’d never left. Louis and Mickey trooped into the TV room.
“Had enough of a workout?” his mother asked. He shrugged.
“It’s not the kids’ workout, it’s theirs,” Ginnie said, nodding toward the men.
Biddy slipped onto the counter, his back against the cabinets. There was some leftover tortellini on the stove.
“Get off the counter,” his mother said. “Sit at the table.” Her arm glided past coffee cups, a dessert tray, and a bottle of anisette. She’d arranged the apricot cookies in a mound and sat beside them, her brown hair cut short and her tan pronounced. She was not completely enjoying herself, he could see, not completely allowing herself to relax. Dom and Ginnie they always seemed to have time for, she often told him, but his father never seemed ready to visit any of her sisters. Dom and Ginnie had no idea how much it bothered her, Biddy guessed, watching her
as hostess. He’d told her once he never would have known, and she’d said simply, “You have people over, you don’t treat them like that. I’m not a cavone.” He watched her, wondering at her control, at the impenetrability of those around him.
Dom sat opposite her, eating black olives. He was Biddy’s godfather, his father’s closest friend. He worked in a sporting-goods store. He dressed like it, Biddy’s father used to say. He ate a good deal and afterward made squeaking noises between his teeth with his tongue. Biddy remembered a picture he’d glimpsed of Dom’s high-school football team: someone had written across the top “Roger Ludlowe Football 1952 8–0 Go Lions.” In the corner he’d found Dom, number 77, his heavy black hair combed to the side, big gap in his front teeth. He’d had dirt on his nose and a comically tiny leather helmet perched uselessly on his head. Someone had circled the head and had written “Ginzo” in the margin.
“You have to sit up there?” his father said. “Get a folding chair from the porch.”
He said it was okay.
“I wish he wouldn’t sit on the counter,” his mother said.
“What’s wrong with sitting on the counter?” he asked.
“You like it? Fine. Sit on the counter. I don’t care where you sit,” his father said. “Sit on the refrigerator.”
“Sit on the refrigerator, Biddy,” Dom said.
“They just sit up there because they know it bothers you,” Ginnie said. “Right, Biddy?”
Biddy shrugged at her. Turkey, he thought.
Dom was talking about his encephalogram. “This guy’s putting the needles in, you know, like he’s getting a commission. He’s putting ’em in here, and he’s putting ’em in here, and he’s putting ’em in here, and all the while he’s humming ‘O beautiful for spacious skies’—you know, ‘America, the Beautiful.’ I’m sitting there with this guy sticking these things in humming ‘America, the Beautiful.’”
There was general laughter, his mother laughing more quietly than the rest, and he caught her eyes and smiled.
“So I go, ‘Look, Doc, whenever you’re ready here, you know,’ and he goes, ‘What, are they bothering you, Mr. Liriano,’ and I go, ‘Shit no, you know, just point me north and maybe we can pick up Hartford.’”
Everyone laughed and Biddy clumped his heels on the cabinet doors beneath him for no reason, through the noise. Cindy was smiling up at him and he looked away quickly. This was an engagement party of a sort for her, and she was being teased again about the way she looked. Milanese, Dom speculated. Fiorentino. A big shot, from the north. But not Napolitan. Her hair was too blonde, her complexion too light. “My mother used to say, ‘Whose bambin is this, eh? Tedesc?’”
She blushed. She wore light colors and delicate fabrics in summer, with two thin gold chains from her fiancé always around her neck, rich and subdued at the base of her throat.
“Too pretty for a Liriano,” Dom said. “Liriano women look like they play for the Bears. You—I’ll tell you what happened. Princess Grace came to me, she was retiring, she had a problem. You and Caroline didn’t get along in the bassinet.”
“You never told me your mother looked like she played for the Bears,” Ginnie said.
“She did play for the Bears,” Dom said. “Under the name Joe Fortunato. Look it up.”
Biddy continued to watch Cindy’s eyes moving swiftly from speaker to speaker.
“Look at the Head of Covert Operations over there,” his father said. Everyone looked at him. “The watcher. We’re going to call him the watcher.”
He smiled, embarrassed and unhappy, and Dom suggested he was getting psyched for the Air Show. Biddy’s mother asked not to be reminded.
“Don’t you think you can handle it, Jude?” Dom had three olives in one cheek and looked like a squirrel. “You only invited the immediate family. What’s that, six hundred thousand?”
“Every one of them ready to put away twice his own weight in pasta,” Biddy’s father said.
“Well, what do you think, those chibonies are interested in the Air Show? Uh-huh. Locusts. It’s like having locusts over. The only way your Uncle Tony’s gonna see the Air Show is if something crashes into the gnocchi.” He poured some beer. “Oh, they’re gonna see the Air Show, all right. They’ll be through the homemade stuff and into the Gallo before the Blue Whatevers take off.”
“Angels,” Biddy said.
“Yeah, Angels. They’ll be so snockered it might as well be.”
His parents fought after the Lirianos left. He’d heard it coming just in the sharpness with which they put things away, and he hesitated, stupidly, before coming upstairs from the cellar. Dom was fine, the kids were fine, all of his father’s friends were fine, his mother said. Everybody was fine except Judy and her family. Judy and her family got treated like shit. When he came upstairs, his mother was gone. His father sat looking at the coffee cups, food trays, and beer glasses.
Biddy came into the kitchen quietly and sat down at the other end of the table, stacked some coffee cups, and asked what happened.
“Your mother’s upset,” his father said. He picked up a slice of green pepper and tinged it off a wineglass.
“What’s she upset about?”
“She doesn’t need anything to be upset about.”
“Must be something,” he said quietly.
His father shrugged. “Leave all this for tomorrow.”
“I’ll get it.”
“No. Leave it.” He looked over at the pot on the stove. “Want some coffee?”
Biddy shook his head. “Where’d she go?”
His father raised his shoulders, and drooped them again. “What difference does it make?”
“It makes a lot of difference,” Biddy said. “Don’t say that.”
“Yeah, you’re right.” His father rattled an empty cup. “I don’t know. Probably over her sister’s.”
“Now? It’s so late.”
“I don’t know. Jesus Christ.”
Biddy stood up and went into the den. Someone was shooting at an apartment building on the news and Kristi was still up. “What’s wrong?” she said.
“I don’t know.” He put his hand under her armpit, lifting. “C’mon. Let’s go to bed. I think she’s over Aunt Sandy’s.”
“I wish I was over Aunt Sandy’s,” she said.
“No you don’t,” he said. “Come on.”
Later, studying the color of his feet in the bright moonlight, he heard a noise in the living room, and then another, a clinking, and he got up and tiptoed down the stairs. His father was sitting in the dark. “What’re you doing up?” he said. “Go to bed.”
“What’re you doing,” Biddy said, not knowing what to say.
His father took his foot down from the sill of the picture window. “I wish I knew, guy,” he said. “I wish I knew. Sittin’ in the dark.” They looked out the window together at the quiet street under the moon. A small animal crossed the street under the light.
“You don’t have to worry,” Biddy said.
“Nobody has to worry,” his father said. “C’mon, champ. Bed.”
A car turned down the street and continued past the house.
Biddy stopped halfway up the stairs. “Dad,” he said. “You can go to bed.”
“Don’t worry about me,” his father said, and some ice clinked in the dark.
He lay under the covering sheet, straining to hear, his eyes on the ceiling. His father’s voice drifted up from below. He was talking to himself, his words muffled, faint. Biddy lay motionless for a short time, but the silence was filled with distant noise now that he concentrated, and he could make out nothing. He got up and crept into Kristi’s room. He knelt by the bed, and she turned and made a noise, asleep. Her hair smelled of straw and the sun on a hot day.
“I love you, Kristi,” he whispered, and got out of her room before she woke up.
That morning he rose early, everything cold and quiet, the house making small sounds and Lady still asleep in the hall. He got into his
bathing suit shivering a little and put on his old sneakers and a sweat shirt and went downstairs, yawning, trailing a towel on the rug. He opened the cellar door and eased the dog’s leash off the hook so it wouldn’t rattle. He let her outside, following with the towel draped around his neck. He let her urinate in selected spots and then stooped and put her on the leash. The foghorn sounded down by the beach.
It was four blocks away and she strained against the leash all the way there. When they got down the bluffs onto the sand he released her to run back and forth from driftwood to shore, from kelp to old shoe.
He squatted by the water, keeping an eye on her, his fingers poking around for smooth, skippable stones. He was already too late: the sun was above the horizon and the fog was burning off as things warmed up. It wasn’t as he’d pictured it the night before, when he’d conceived of being at the edge of the Sound in the extreme early morning; he’d imagined it as long and low and empty, everything gray and smooth, the two of them away from the land, on a sandbar, perhaps, connected to the beach by a narrow spit that disappeared as the tide came in. The possibility of being away from the land, released, lost in the fog, attracted him. Or on the beach itself, gently sloping into the chilled water and damp with sand that had the granular clumpiness of brown sugar. The fog would have misted in from the sea, obscuring everything but the closest birds, standing dully along the waterline.
He’d imagined a sanctuary and had tried to find its equivalent in Lordship. He’d imagined dozing and waking to the foghorn and not knowing where he was; he’d imagined a rose color mixing with the gray in the east as the sun began to assert itself. He’d imagined the foghorn coming back like God the Father to reorient him in the silence.
The wind coursed along the sand behind him, very low, dipping smoothly through depressions and lifting and twirling the cockleburs and sea grass. This was a nice beach, and in places a beautiful beach, but not the one he’d imagined.
A gull came in, skimming, and swooped away. Lady followed it with her eyes.
“This beach isn’t right either,” he said. She watched the gull, wheeling in the distance. He stared out to sea. “Sometimes I don’t think I can do anything right,” he said finally.