Although the plane was half empty, I got stuck next to a woman who began talking the instant I sat down and didn’t stop until I got up again, told her I had a great deal of work to do, and changed seats. I wasn’t in the mood to be civil. There were only so many hours before New York and I wanted to try to figure out as much as I could. After we landed, there wouldn’t be time for thought.
Once we were airborne, the stewardess came round asking for drink orders. I would have killed for a double anything, but bit my tongue and asked for a ginger ale instead. I was exhausted and a drink would put me right to sleep. Sitting by a window, I watched as the plane tipped and banked, then found its way and leveled out over the black and yellow twinkling below. I remembered driving over tonight and seeing planes coming in. How romantic and heart-lifting the sight. Yet how lonesome and small I felt now, climbing up into that same sky.
We passed over a baseball stadium with all its lights still on after a night game. Seeing the field reminded me of an unsettling discussion Lily and I had had a few weeks before.
Like Lincoln, I had always loved baseball. Until I was fifteen or so, the nucleus of every summer was the game, whether that meant watching it on television, playing catch with my friends, talking about it with the barber when I went in for a ballplayer’s crew cut, trading Topps baseball cards with others…
The minute I was old enough to play in Little League, I begged my parents to sign me up. They did, and one of the proudest memories of my young life was walking into the living room after dinner one night wearing for the first time my robin’s-egg-blue baseball cap and T-shirt that said the name of our sponsor, “Nick’s Shell Station,” on the front. My team was named the Yankees, thank God, which made life even better because this was in one of the periodic heydays of the New York Yankees and all of the men who played on that great team were my heroes. Mom put down her crossword puzzle and said I looked “very nice.” But Dad paid me the supreme compliment. Giving me a careful once-over, he said I looked just like Moose Skowron, Yankee first baseman and my favorite player.
Our first game was also opening day of the season that year and many people came out to watch. I was assigned to right field, the equivalent of Siberia in Little League because no child ever hits a ball there. However, our coach thought it was a good place for me because I couldn’t catch for beans and would do the least damage there. Which didn’t bother me a bit because hitting was my dream, not fielding. Nothing felt better than whipping that Louisville Slugger bat around and once in a spectacular while feeling the great “clunk” of wood connecting with the ball. That’s what I lived for, not putting a huge leather glove up in the air to stop a ball from sailing by. Batting was heroic, fielding was only necessary.
Our opponents that first game were the Dodgers, a good team, but fearsome too because their star pitcher was none other than Jeffrey Alan Sapsford. His fastball, even then, would have struck out Moose Skowron.
By the fifth inning we were losing nine to nothing. I’d batted twice and struck out both times. Besides that, I’d dropped an easy fly ball and been yelled at by half my team. I knew I deserved their hatred. I was a bum, we were losing, the world was doom. Worse, my parents were there witnessing the debacle. I knew my father had skipped meeting the seven o’clock train (his biggest haul of tired customers) so he could be on hand for my debut. Some debut. I’d failed him, my team, the name Yankees.
The last time I got up to hit, Jeffrey Alan Sapsford looked at me with gleeful disdain. Unforgettably, his second baseman yelled, “Easy out!” and he was talking about me. The whole world had heard. I, the heir to Moose Skowron’s throne, was fixed in everyone’s mind as an “easy out.” Try erasing that kind of mark from your record when you’re that age.
Sapsford threw his first pitch and, without thinking, I swung and knocked the ball five hundred and forty miles into deep center field. I hit it so hard and far that the other team froze as one watching the ball soar off into that deep green infinity. The people in the grandstand got up and started applauding before I had even rounded first base. When I came in to home plate, my team stood there waiting for me and cheering as if this were the last game of the World Series and I had saved the day. Pure glory.
We still lost ten to one, but in the car riding home afterward, I was a hundred percent hero and no one could take that away from me, ever.
My parents chattered on about how great it had been, while I sat in the back seat basking in fresh memories and their praise. As we turned the corner of Main Street and Broadway, my father said with a loving chuckle, “And did you know your fly was open the whole way round?”
“What?”
“Your fly was down.”
“Oh, Stan, you said you weren’t going to tell him that.” Mom shook her head and smiled sympathetically at me over her shoulder.
In poleaxed, stunned-still shock, I looked down at my blue jeans. I’d hit a home run in these pants. They were part of the legend’s uniform! But there it was—the accusing white slip of my underpants beaming out through my fly. Not much. Not enough to really be seen unless you looked hard or someone drew your attention to it, but there nevertheless. The apex of my life—and my zipper was open!
I honestly don’t remember if I got over it quickly or if that moment’s brain-blasting embarrassment lasted a long time. Until I told the story to Lily, it had been a fond smile from way in my past, the kind of childhood memory you like to tell your partner so they can share a piece of your past few others know. I finished telling her the story with a smile and a shrug. “Max hits a homer.”
“That’s despicable. Your father is a real asshole sometimes.”
“Why?”
“Why? Why’d he tell you that? What was the point? You had your home run. It was yours, nothing could take it away from you. But he did—he spoiled it forever by telling you about your zipper. Listen to the way you tell it now—like it’s only a funny little amusing story. Right? ‘Max hits a homer.’ You should have heard your voice. It wasn’t only that, it was one of the supreme moments of your childhood. A home run! So what if your stupid zipper was down? So what if the whole world knew, so long as you didn’t? He’s an insensitive jerk.”
Call me blind. Or only in love with my father, whatever, I never thought of it like that. I knew the man loved me and wasn’t trying to ruin my moment. But like a hammer thrown across four decades, the wrongness of what he did hit me square in the head for the first time.
Looking down from the airplane at the empty, lit baseball stadium, I remembered my wife’s indignant voice as she spoke of him.
How many times had we done exactly the same thing with Lincoln? Was that what caused him to turn out so disastrously? Were there hundreds or thousands of things we’d done out of pure love that were nonetheless so flat-out wrong an enemy couldn’t have devised a more effective means of destroying our boy?
This is what I thought about while crossing America that night. Pity the man who is not sure of his sins. Beware of the child who is his responsibility.
Halfway through the trip, I thought if only I could stay up here in the air for the rest of my life. As in a children’s story, it would have made things so much simpler: Once upon a time there was a man who had made so many mistakes in his life that he decided to leave the earth and never return.
It was raining in New York when we landed. Water rolled down the windows in strange patterns as we taxied to the gate. Since it was such a late flight, there wasn’t the usual rush of passengers to leave their seats and then the plane itself. People rose slowly and shuffled forward to the exits like tired zombies.
Because I had only a carry-on bag, I walked straight to a telephone and called the Meiers again. It was seven-thirty in the morning. No luck. Next stop was a car rental desk. Within minutes I was behind the wheel of a new-smelling yellow Ford. I figured it would take about two hours to drive from Kennedy Airport to Somerset, New Jersey, but once on the road, morning traffic was beginning. It would take more ti
me.
In the years since we’d met, I had thought very little about the Meiers. The only time I put life aside and concentrated on them was in a dentist’s office one morning. Sitting there waiting my turn, I picked up an architecture magazine and started giving it the quick shuffle-through. I passed something, ignored it, and only seconds later did it register. Leafing back fast, I found the large two-page spread on the house I had visited one depressing afternoon in the middle of that first crisis. There it was! Anwen and Gregory Meier’s remarkable home. A cockeyed cupola and what looked like a kind of giant bat wing had been added on to the original building, but it was such a memorable place that no matter what, it couldn’t be disguised. The text said Anwen Meier’s Brendan House, one of the most famous examples of the Corvallis School of architecture, had received yet another prestigious award, this time from a European architectural organization. It spoke of the house as if everyone knew about it and wouldn’t be surprised by this latest tribute. I tore the article out and showed it to Lily. Shaking her head, she began to cry. The memory of her face reddening and the glistening tears on her cheeks stayed with me many miles.
Somewhere along those miles was the rest stop where Lincoln bought his supplies. It was the only place he could have gotten them in the middle of the night on the New Jersey Turnpike. He bought big bottles of Coca-Cola. I would guess four of them. Four would do the trick if he was clever and careful about it. Gasoline was no problem. Pull into a station, fill ‘er up, and ask the attendant if they sold those jerry cans you keep a couple of gallons of extra gas in for the lawn mower. Gallons of gasoline make quite a fire. What did he use for a wick? Probably underpants or a T-shirt. Maybe he took off his “Fuck Dancing—Let’s Fuck!” shirt, tore it to pieces, and stuck them into the tops of the bottles. That would have been appropriate: Coke bottles full of golden gasoline and “Fuck” shirt scraps. That’s all you need. Anyone who watches television knows how to make a Molotov cocktail, the poor man’s hand grenade.
I knew he was bad, capable of things I had never wanted to think about. But even later, after retracing his steps and grasping his motives, I was appalled by what he did that night. If only he had stopped a few minutes to listen, to ask questions and hear the truth, terrible as it was. None of it would have happened. Other things would have, certainly, but not that and not to them.
He was a fast driver and had his three-hour head start on me. He also had a great sense of direction and would have no trouble finding the house. When he was young one of his hobbies had been studying maps, particularly exotic ones—Cambodia, Mali, Bhutan—and finding the shortest routes from one heroic or otherworldly-sounding point to another. Timbuktu to Nouakchott. Bu Phlok to Snuol. One birthday we gave him a beautiful brass calipers to measure his distances exactly. He still had those calipers in a desk drawer, along with the bullet and the picture of Little White.
I envisioned him driving eighty miles an hour down the New Jersey Turnpike, stopping only to get gas and the supplies he needed for the job. What went through his head in those hours? At home he always drove with the radio on loud, impatiently turning the dial whenever a song came on he didn’t like. Add that to the picture. Add clicking on the overhead light while steering with one hand, looking quickly from his map to road signs approaching, then to the map again to make sure he was going the right way.
Lily had made this same drive sixteen years before, fleeing New York in a car she’d bought with money stolen from a drug dealer/pimp. She was only five years older than Lincoln was now. All three of us had made this same drive south, all for such different desperate reasons.
I got off at the New Brunswick exit and remembered certain landmarks from my last trip, although the town itself had been cleaned up since then in the typical ways—homogenized, mallified. Morning traffic was heavy. Stuck in a long line at a red light, I felt weariness creep up the back of my head and spread. The people around me had had their good night’s sleep, hot morning showers, breakfasts to get them up and out and going. Not me. As the light turned green and I was off again, I hated every one of them; resented them their stomachs full of savory coffee, the safe tedium of their jobs. They had children. Their children were not like mine.
New Jersey farm country, the sun only just up. Cows far off in fields, dogs running around free in backyards. Kids standing by the side of the road waiting for the school bus. The closer I got, the tighter the knot in my stomach grew. One last left turn and I was on their road. There’s where I pulled over last time because I had to pee so badly. Some of the ticky-tacky houses had been torn down and replaced with attractive, much more expensive-looking places. The invasion of the middle class.
The road dipped, rose, dipped again, and that’s when I saw the first fire truck. It was a long hook and ladder coming slowly down toward me. On such a narrow road out in the middle of that nowhere, the red truck looked twice as large as it was. Wherever it was going, it was in no hurry to get there. Up in the open cabin, the driver and another man sat with their helmets off, smiling. The passenger was smoking a cigarette. We made eye contact and he lifted his cigarette hand in a small half-wave. Another two men stood on the ledge at the back of the truck holding on to silver handles. Both of them were in full uniform and one leaned his head against the truck, looking either exhausted or asleep standing up. I kept driving, only faster now. Why was that truck out here? Where had it been so early in the morning? I saw the smoke about a quarter of a mile further down the road. A police car passed going in the other direction.
Smoke tells the whole story. When it’s slow and spirally, aimless, you know a fire has lost its fury or its energy. Without seeing the flame itself, you can be sure its back is broken and will go out soon. If the smoke is hard and fast and billows straight up into the sky, the fire is a bad one, still very alive and dangerous.
A wispy brown pillow of smoke hung unmoving in the pale pink morning sky over the Meiers’ house. Some was still rising off the burned part of the building, but it was more an afterthought than anything else. Two fire trucks and a police car were parked on the road in front. Firemen were curling thick gray hoses back into form and generally wrapping up their work before leaving. Three policemen stood close together, comparing notes. People stood around on the street and the edges of the Meiers’ lawn watching the goings-on. I parked my car back from the mass of other vehicles and got out slowly. The house was unmistakable except for one thing. Standing there looking at it, I realized the bat wing was gone. The vaguely asymmetrical addition I’d seen pictured in the architecture magazine was no longer there. In its place was a black, scorched, collapsed mess of burnt pieces of things scattered across a wide area, standing, piled, smoking: the metal frame of a butterfly chair, a wooden table that had oddly been burned on only one side, leaving it two legs to stand on, books strewn across the ground. Had the bat wing been their library?
“Tar.” An old woman came walking toward me and slowed a few feet away. It was clear she wanted to tell someone what she had heard. “One of the firemen says he thinks it was the tar. They’ve been working on that kooky roof for weeks and he says the gasoline must’ve hit right on the tar for the whole thing to’ve gone up so fast. Who on God’s green earth would want to burn their house down?” She thought her question over and suddenly stared at me with new, suspicious eyes. “You from around here, sir?”
Despite a hole as deep as hell in my heart and growing, I thought fast and managed to come up with “I’m from the newspaper. They sent me out to see what’s going on.”
“You’re from the Spectator? Well, my name is Sandra Hagen, in case you want to use me as your source.”
I could tell she loved being able to use that word. “Thank you, Mrs. Hagen. Listen, I just got here. Could you tell me what happened?”
Clearing her throat, she threw back her head as if the television cameras were already rolling. “Anwen wasn’t around last night. She had to be up in New York for some thing or other. Brendan was here by himself and wa
s the one who saw the guy who did it.”
“Brendan? Excuse me, did you say Brendan?”
“Yes, Brendan Meier, that’s her son. Don’t you know about him? That’s a story too! You ought to write that one up first. Do one of those two-part series on them. It’s a family that’s had more troubles than Job.”
“Brendan was kidnapped as a child.”
“Right. And they searched till they found him. Rumor has it the Meiers spent a couple hundred thousand dollars looking. Then her husband, Greg, died right after they found the boy.”
“I don’t believe it! They found him? I’ve never heard of that happening.”
“It’s amazing. But anyway, Brendan was home last night when this guy threw these bottles full of gas at their house. He heard something outside, which must have been the glass breaking, and ran out. Whoever did it was still standing there on their lawn, watching the whole thing go up. Can you imagine? Nedda Lintschinger, who lives in that house there, the blue one? She woke up at the sound and looked out the window too. Said she saw two men on the lawn and recognized Brendan in his pajamas ‘cause he’s such a tall boy, you know? Their house was on fire but the strangest thing was, these two guys were just standing there talking! Nedda said it looked like they were having a nice chat.
“Suddenly out of nowhere, the other guy starts screaming, ‘What? What? What?’ Just like that, then kicked Brendan you-know-where. The poor boy fell down but the other wouldn’t stop. Stood right there kicking and kicking him. Now that’s what Nedda said. I can only tell you what I heard, but she swears it’s what she told the police, so I guess it’s true.
“Whatever, the crazy man kept on kicking poor Brendan. Then he lit up another bottle and threw it against the house. Finally Nedda ran for the phone to call for help and didn’t see what else happened. All we know is the nut was gone by the time she got back to look. Brendan’s lying on the ground, not moving. She thought for sure he was dead. Thank God he wasn’t. He’s in the hospital with some broken ribs and a cut-up face, but they say he’ll be all right.”
After Silence Page 21