Ride Around Shining

by Chris Leslie-Hynan

  At the entrance to the makeshift lot, the yawning attendant looked at me strangely. “Game ain’t till five! We just stakin’ out now.”

  “Can I park all day?”

  “I guess,” he said, but his laugh was like a cackle at something people had never stooped to doing, and I reversed and drove on.

  From Broadway it was an easy trip northward, past the barred shops advertising phone cards to the gleaming new blocks of Alberta. Stopped at a long light, I sent Antonia a message about the game. She’d been hinting at wanting to meet up, and while it seemed an odd venue for a talk, what with the cheering and the children, the spilled concessions, I did have the tickets; they were a valuable commodity. She didn’t get back to me, though—she was always quick or not at all, and again the day stretched out ahead of me, aimless, perilous, and much too long. I was so near her neighborhood already, I thought I could park just a minute and take a look.

  I’d expected her house to be bursting with life, with flowers and odd metal sculptures and the sharp smells of new herbs. Yet it wasn’t much changed. She’d painted the porch rails a more muted color, but the place still had a spare look. The porch was empty save a thick welcome mat and a table with a single chair, and though the shades were up I could see no plants or decorations—no life, nor anything to suggest it. Her scooter was gone, and I sat ten minutes and saw no movement. I rolled down the window and a set of wind chimes tolled softly in the absence of human voices.

  I got out and strode up to the porch with my head down and knocked before I could unnerve myself. Without waiting for a reply, I went around the side of the house where I couldn’t be spied from any window. No one came to the door.

  There was a handsome wooden fence in back, too high to see over, enclosing the small yard. Twice I tried to scrabble over, but each time fell back defeated. I walked round to the other side of the house, and there let myself in by the open gate.

  The yard was barren, just weak old grass and a small, unimproved concrete patio. Three bags of soil lay neatly stacked next to a bright tin can holding a few cigarette butts. I tried the sliding door, telling myself I only wanted to know if it was locked. It opened without a sound. I stood a moment on the threshold, letting the stale house air seep outward.

  I don’t claim to know all the ways people live when they live alone, but even if I’ve learned nothing from loneliness, I can at least identify it with the expertise of long experience, and as I walked through the small, sparse rooms, I knew that whatever it meant for Antonia to buy that house, and for Calyph to make her go live in it, she was deeply alone there. Our fear that she had another fell away a little more with each new room: the kitchen with its counter strewn with takeout menus and shelves of still-packed boxes; the hallway, empty of all decoration save for some dusty rubber mice kicked up against the wall; the tiny, dark bathroom, where a value-sized box of tampons sat open beneath the sink like an oblique feminist gesture.

  In the living room I sat in an antebellum rocking chair and stared at one of the few accumulations of life in the house. It was her record player, and she’d bought every album I’d recommended to her and more—even the early releases I’d never managed much interest in. I put on something in a sleeve with an empty blue highway and went and cracked the bedroom door.

  The room was a mess. A kerchief hung askew from an ugly ceiling fixture like it’d given up trying to do anything about it. A cereal bowl sat on the nightstand, giving off the sweet smell of stale grain. There were little socks everyplace. I’d cleared off a spot on the bed and was considering a nap when I felt the strangeness of how much space I had. The bed took up most of the room; I stretched out my arms in both directions and met no edges. Putting my hand beneath the spread, I felt the extremely fine sheets. I felt myself lying over the hollow her body would make, obscuring it, blotting out the faint traces of the tiny curl of her limbs in the soft immensity. I got up and took a step back and studied the bed anew. Without any thought in my head, I brought out my phone and took a grainy and uneven picture of the thing. This was not a bed for lying alone, nor even for lying with another of normal size—the caption would read second home. I was trying to send it to myself when I heard a soft jangling noise, and then a bounding shape appeared from nowhere and with a triumphant hork the serval bit me on the thigh.

  In the Rose Garden, Calyph was everywhere. I turned down the program and the stat sheet only to see his face beaming out from the wall along the escalator, airbrushed of every complicated emotion. In the gift shops you could buy a little stuffed bear wearing his number at a discount price. I saw a Native kid with beaded, braided hair wearing his jersey and wanted to run after him and ask if he knew what number eight had done.

  It was my first live ticket in years, and the game felt unreal. Tiny in the wide arena, the players looked somehow semiprofessional. They all ran so fluidly, but their moves seemed basic and unremarkable, and even when Oden took a rebound and threw it down so the stanchion shook, it looked like there must be a hundred other guys from Indiana who could do it just as well.

  I looked for Goat and he wasn’t there. There was a lanky guy stretching in warm-ups in the corner off the end of the bench, obscured by the third-string center. I could just see his bony wrists when he touched his toes. For a quarter I assumed it was Lucas, like he was so new they couldn’t find a chair for him, but then he got up and jogged back to the locker room and it was just an injured Spaniard everyone knew was headed back to Europe.

  For the first time in days I felt the pocket buzz. “Already here,” the phone said.

  I stood and excused myself into the nachos of the family next to me.

  “Quarter just started,” the husband complained.

  On the concourse I went for a binocular kiosk. The woman was pulling the vendor’s umbrella out of its stand but her wares were still displayed.

  “We’re all out of ‘Better,’” she said.

  There was a “Good” for twenty that looked like a toy and a “Best” so bulky and complicated it must have had real scientific value, for fifty-five. Going back to my seat, I felt like I had a microscope around my neck.

  “Nice specs,” the man of the house said.

  “Hey, mister, whose cheese is this?” his son asked, pointing down at their food. His mother smiled in silent pride. In her lap she held a handmade sign: ODEN FOR MVP.

  Being in an open place brought back my paranoia, and all game I watched the screen whenever they showed crowd signs, prepared to drop something and look for it if they showed her.

  Even with the binoculars, it took me until the fourth to find Antonia. She was in a private box, and until the game grew close she must have been behind glass, doing whatever they did there—sitting on a leather couch, eating rarefied appetizers, and drinking cocktails shaken with ice. From out of the blur I caught her leaning over the rail. She’d cut her hair short, and when I adjusted the one useful knob I could even see the fuzz at the back of her neck. She stood with her face turned away, but I knew—no one I’d seen all game looked so aloof in an arena. I saw her fragile-looking wrists as her hands grasped the rail, and her attentive chin, and I wondered what she saw, how much of the game she’d ever wanted to learn. She might’ve seen the pattern of it all, the lob coming before the pin-down was set, or it might’ve all been sweat and noise, a dull pageant of exertion she’d long treated as something to escape from.

  “I see you,” I texted.

  “Meet at 216 entrance. I’ll come down.”

  By the four-minute mark, our lead had stretched to fifteen. With the game in hand, I looked into the box in time to see Goat come out with two drinks and hand one to Antonia. I focused the lenses until the stubble on his smiling jaw leapt out.

  “This guy’s got ants in his pants,” the cheese boy said solemnly as I scraped past his dad’s khaki knees.

  Coming down from the cheap seats, I circled the concourse until I found the number. There was a narrow red stair there that led up to the box level, car
peted to suggest opulence and guarded by a bald guy with a velvet cordon.

  “Box ticket holders only, sir,” he said in a worn-down voice.

  “Why’s it velvet?” I asked. “I never got that.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The rope. Why’s it made out of that?”

  I bumped up against his rope a little, to illustrate, like I was some kind of poor little boat drifting around, and the rope was helpfully redirecting me away from the rich boats and back into the main channel. I guess I was light-headed, but I really thought he’d understand.

  He put his hand up then. He put it right under my chin and made contact. He pushed me back a little ways.

  “Please step away from the rope, sir,” he said. “There’s no loitering here.”

  I gathered myself. I could feel myself brushing my shirt front and going up on my toes like some affronted fop.

  “I’m waiting for my employer,” I said.

  It felt a long time since I’d adopted the proper servant manner. It came out stiff, and of course he didn’t believe me. He stared at me with his beef-rimmed, unfeeling eyes, and then he reached for the two-way on his belt.

  “Security,” he said.

  “You’re security,” I told him.

  Just then I saw her little shoes coming down the stairs. She stopped with her hand on the rail. “That’s her,” I told him disgustedly.

  The security man’s belt jingled importantly as he turned to her.

  “Can he come up?” Antonia asked.

  “This man works for you, ma’am?” He didn’t even have the decency to sound incredulous.

  “Very hard,” she said.

  The man’s neck wrinkled and the cordon lifted grudgingly away. I wanted to give him a stare, to put my hands up as I slid by him, but she was there. I had to be reasonable again.

  And then I slowed, under her long-lost gaze. I felt like some albatross of hard science was hanging around my neck, and my thigh throbbed suddenly where her cat had bit me. “I brought you these binoculars,” I said.

  “Thanks so much,” she said faintly. She was familiar as a sister after so long away. Her hair was mussed a little, and it was like something I’d been around all my life, like it’d gotten in my face when we’d slept together in our narrow summer beds. Whatever trouble and tension we’d had seemed a chance mistake. Even that night with the sheets felt like just some minor role-play, devoid of permanent consequence. We knew each other, we mostly got along, and here we were again, in this stairwell of thin, unconvincing luxury. In my brief life of service, her wary face and inscrutable jokes were some of the oldest living things.

  She put out her cool hand, and when we shook it felt listless and rote. I sensed she was in a bad way, but could only guess at how she’d stand up to the latest, worst news. I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to tell her about Odette, whether it would spark the fight that would bring her back to him or turn her further away into the furtive dwindle of her new life.

  “I didn’t know you went to games,” she said as we went up along the inner hall, hung with old framed jerseys.

  “I didn’t know you did.”

  “Lucas insisted.”

  “You know him?”

  “From his stint here last year. I kind of liked his old girl. I guess she’s gone now.”

  “We were at the Pharaoh’s together.”

  Her pace slowed just slightly. “I’d always hear about that place. Did you go cliff diving?”

  “I wasn’t that kind of guest.”

  She asked about my work and I put on a faraway smile, as though in reminiscence of the nice quiet time Calyph and I were having together. I found myself wishing she would ask after him. Had his brother come and found him yet? It was his day off, so it wasn’t certain—he might still be huddled there, shivering, his white suit growing heavy with dew. I wanted to tell her all of it, to confess and compel her return—and then Goat’s face appeared down the hall.

  “We await you,” I said. I tried to say these strange words clearly, without any slant, and then he was on us. He took us both by an arm and led us inside, the self-congratulatory good cheer coming off him in waves. His smile was large and fixed—he dared us not to like him as though it were a dare at all. There was a wet spot on his jacket that smelled faintly of tonic.

  “A great day,” he kept saying. “A great day.”

  “Why didn’t you play?” I asked.

  “I wasn’t gonna get any minutes tonight. Why play when you got a box? We got this box as long as we want it, people!”

  “Just till nine,” laughed the attendant. I could hear the public-address announcer doing his postgame wrap through the glass.

  A half ring of cushion-backed stools had been pulled around opposite a black leather couch, where Goat sat center. There was some X Games–looking guy on his left, and on his right he’d left room for Antonia. The table in the center was a mess of sad and basic snacks in gleaming glass bowls.

  The rest of the crowd was split between those trying to look like the money and those trying to look like the talent. Some were older, in business clothes, and they ranged up in age far enough that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see Goat’s parents there, huddling proudly. The rest were familiar counterculture—there was even a white girl who made blond dreadlocks look acceptable. She ushered Antonia over next to Goat and made her drink something fizzing with a lime in it, and as she settled in the room’s open gaiety felt suddenly forced.

  All I remember of our time in the box was Goat’s advance. I never can believe in people who have love for everyone, but his main problem was his love always coming back to Antonia. “Sweet times are here again,” he’d say in a singsong voice, and she’d nod back doubtfully. He sprang up from the couch in order to get her a glass of water and six people had to move out of his way. He touched her knee relating an unfunny story, and when she laughed politely back at him I resented his draining her social energy.

  Abruptly he turned to me. “I’m back in the palace,” he said, in a voice taken by its own myth-making.

  If there was anything sympathetic to find in him anymore, it was there in his desperation to let everyone know he could roll high once more. It was clear he knew how tenuous it all was. A little of that old hospital fragility clung to him in his forced happiness, and you could see he sensed how rarely the horn sounded for the twelfth man, how often they sat there waiting to be evaluated solely on the enthusiasm of their cheering, vying only for the team spirit award, until they were sent away again, to some obscure hinterland.

  The Cali punk next to him laughed into his sleeve tattoo. “Some palace,” he said.

  “This place should have a Jacuzzi,” said the dreadlocked girl.

  “Look at it,” Goat said, insisting at the emptying arena with a thick-jointed finger. “That’s the most famous building in the city right there. Blimps fly over it. The whole country knows Portland from this place.”

  “I used to like to stay in and watch the games,” Antonia said suddenly. “If it was a national broadcast, they’d always show the river and the bridges and the city lights. I’d be all alone in the house, and look across at the trees on the far bank, and it was hard to think it was the same water. It was hard to think it was the same lights, from just up the bend, that seemed so close.”

  “That’s right,” Goat said, turning to her intimately, as though she were the only one who understood. He picked up a little carrot from the crudités on the table and held it out as though to feed it to her. With deft fingers she took it and held it in a closed fist.

  I saw a looming managerial type put his head in the doorway. Ignored there, he stepped in. He looked like he might have been an old player, but I couldn’t place him. “Fifteen minutes, folks,” he said.

  “Anybody want to go to the bathroom?” X Games asked, pulling out a showy lighter. “Last chance.”

  I went out beyond the glass to the real seats and stood watching the janitors work. The most famous b
uilding in the city had the look of an empty festival-ground, getting swept for popcorn and soda cups. The scoreboard still showed the Blazers’ victory, but the digital ads beneath the scorer’s table had been turned off. All the hokey signs of allegiance remained, presiding over the empty rows: there was a group of seats marked Przybilla’s Posse, and the Aldridge Army, awaiting the return of the departed host. There was even one for Calyph, a small swath in the corner under the banner of West’s Warriors. I wondered if I could sneak away a second, and call somebody anonymously from a pay phone and get them to go bring him inside, so he wouldn’t go and catch the flu if it rained. It might be bad for his knee to be out there. There might be an exercise he couldn’t do or some meds he was missing.

  I heard the door slide open and Goat came and stood alongside me.

  “We’re going to the Gaucho. You know you’re coming.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Antonia says you have to. She won’t come without you.”

  I turned on him. The fuzz of his new mustache gave him the look of a stretched-out undergraduate looking for a score. “Make this one memorable with somebody else,” I said.

  He put his hand on my shoulder and gave me his tired, inexhaustible smile. “It isn’t like that,” he assured me. “We’ve been through a lot together, right? You and me both. Just one drink, Jess.”

  In the lounges of El Gaucho it was happy hour all night. Half-drunk already on arena rail liquor, even Goat’s parental stand-ins clamored for top-shelf. When I tried to get a coffee, Goat shouted me down and I was given a Spanish. Behind us a guitarist played placidly on, as though it would be his pleasure to ignore all behaviors at all volumes.

  Goat kept bringing over spare chairs. “Some of the guys are coming,” he’d say, as though we’d all fixed our hopes on this and he didn’t want anyone to lose faith. “My new brothers!”