“Did you like that today?” I ask.
He nods and then takes another bite of brownie.
“Do you think you’d like to do it for a while?”
He shrugs. “Everday?” he manages, brown spittle flecking his chest.
“Maybe not every day. I mean, some days you’d go over to Meg’s house, and other days you’d stay with Mrs. Grafton.”
“I like all the balls.”
“Yeah, I know you do. You never saw that many in one place, huh?”
He shakes his head. Sitting up, he tries to climb off, but his hand slips through the rope webbing.
“Where are you going?”
“I wanna get another brownie, before I lose my ap’tite.”
I lift him across my lap, holding his dirty hands close to his belt buckle, so they won’t wipe off on anything else.
“Hang on a second. I want to talk to you about something. Do you know what I was doing today?”
“Uh-uh.”
“I was coaching basketball—or at least trying.”
“Are you gonna still have your office?”
“Oh, sure. I’m just doing this to help out.”
“Help who?”
“To help Mr. Miller, the regular basketball coach. To help the school. And to help the kids, I suppose.”
“I liked the kids.”
I smile and brush brownie from his chin. “They liked you, too.” At times, it is difficult to know exactly what to say to a little boy, what he’s equipped to understand.
Calvin knots up the corner of his mouth and shrugs.
“You know what I was just telling you, about coaching basketball? About being a basketball coach? Well, that’s what my own father used to do. That was his job.”
“He’s from Kansas?”
“No, he wasn’t from Kansas. He coached at a school in Ohio. You once visited him there when you were a baby.”
“A long time ago.”
“Not so long,” I say, loosening my grip on his hands. “About four years.” I lower Calvin to the ground and tell him to be careful not to tip the plate over and spill the brownies. I also tell him to take only one.
When he returns, he sits on the chafed wooden floorboards in front of me, his legs pressed flat.
“You didn’t bring me any?” I ask, furrowing my eyebrows and pretending to look angry. But Calvin is not fooled. He has seen this act before. “No milk, either?”
“It’s too high.”
“Too high, huh? How come I’ve seen you pull a chair over to get cookies down from the cupboard, but you don’t do it for the milk?”
“It’s ’cuz …” He stops, looking around for something to occupy my attention, to take my mind off the question. “Well, ‘cuz the floor is slippery by the milk and I don’t wanna fall.”
“That’s good,” I say. “But I don’t think you should chance it anywhere in there, okay? No more standing on chairs to get things down.”
He drops his head, stuffing the last corner of brownie into his mouth.
“Hey, Cal. Do we understand each other here?”
Reluctantly, he nods and lets out a brownie-muffled “Uh-huh.” And then, “Did I see all the balls in Ohio?”
It is a peculiar question, but I know exactly what he’s talking about. “I’m not sure. I know they were there—more even. But you were so tiny that I’m not sure we brought you into the gym. We didn’t want you to get hurt.”
“Oh.”
Everything is still, so quiet that I can hear the din of the refrigerator through the screen door. Calvin lies back and begins to make mock snow angels against the wood. “I bet I did see the balls,” he says. And then he stops.
Chapter Six
It is simply another small piece of my life, I tell myself, thinking now of these newfound duties as basketball coach. It’s just a piece whose shape I’m not sure of yet. Sitting in the cramped, boxy office of Tarent High’s physical-education staff, I wipe the sweat from my face and the back of my neck, using a nubby orange towel. Noah Ward is standing akimbo in the doorway, eagerly shifting his weight from one leg to the other. He wants his earring, which I made him remove during practice and surrender to me. It was his third warning, and as I explained to him earlier, I am not opposed to ear wear on men, I just don’t want it getting caught on someone else’s shirt and ripping open his earlobe. Today, it is a petite diamond stud and I take it from my breast pocket and flip it to him.
“The backing’s gone,” he says.
“What?”
He holds the earring up to the light, turning it by the face so that I can only see the slender gold stem sticking out.
“See, the back part’s missing. That’s what holds it onto my ear.”
Pressing my shirt breast flat, I can feel the tiny backing clinging to the stitching at the bottom of my pocket. I dangle two fingers down and retrieve it, handing Noah the butterfly-shaped piece of metal.
“Thanks,” he says, sarcastically, and then turns to leave.
“Hey!”
Noah stops in the hallway, but does not look back.
“In case you hadn’t noticed, you’re starting to piss me off. I won’t cut anybody from this team for not being good enough. But I will cut someone for being an asshole.”
As he leaves, the bulb in the table lamp flickers and then, with a wispy pop, burns out. I sit in the dark, my hands spread out like enormous spiders over my kneecaps.
“What do you think about someone who won’t listen?” I ask aloud, to myself. In a moment, the words are gone, as swiftly and trail-less as they came. Like something my father would have said, maybe to one of his own players or maybe to me, not really expecting an answer.
More than he needs basketball or permissive girlfriends or diamond earrings, big ones, this boy, Noah, wants to leave Tarent; he wants to abandon his family and Kansas and the Middle West. In ways, some ways, he is like me at that age. Nothing in his life, now, will fit. It is time to move on, to find other people with whom to connect. Twice, when I was young, I ran away from home—once for six hours and another time for almost three days. It is difficult for those around you to know, exactly, how to repair what, to them, doesn’t seem broken. For Noah, and perhaps Calvin one day, I jab blindly at commonalities: something that will not cause him to cringe, something that will not create distance. But maybe, with Noah, I’m just not so good. Finally, ultimately, I don’t understand—as my father didn’t understand with me.
Carl Miller has left half a pack of cigarettes in his desk drawer and I feel around for matches. The cigarettes are unfiltered and they burn my lungs as I take a draw. Someone has turned out the light in the hallway, leaving only the tack-sized glow of the cigarette to break the darkness. Holding to an independent, bottomless timbre, I can hear the boys’ voices echo from within the showers. There is a leathery slapping sound and then a loud voice warns everyone to watch out for flying soap. In six days we will play our first game, against nearby Carbon Springs, and I wonder how a coach is supposed to know when (and if) his team is ready. Certainly, it will become apparent after the game begins. But what about before then? Although I have told them on several occasions that it really doesn’t matter to me whether or not we win, I am not sure they believe it. We underestimate the minds of youth, fresh and steady as rain.
The end of the cigarette has grown soggy with saliva, sticking to a crease in my lower lip. Yesterday Calvin received a postcard from Kate, who is still in Bali, but I haven’t read it to him yet. I will wait. The postcard depicts a green lizard flicking its shiny tongue, with the words Greetings from Bali written in light gray cursive across the top. She apologizes (to both of us) for not calling before she left, but says she had last-minute trouble with her passport. She tells Calvin that there are lizards and chameleons everywhere and people have to look down when they walk so they won’t step on them. Calvin will love this, she imagines. He will ask me if we can go there, too. And if I were a father with money, lots of it, I would take him and
let him collect as many lizards and chameleons as his spindly arms could carry.
There is so much I don’t know; so many things are not easy. Often, I wonder how this life found me. What I had wanted was to be a trial attorney, a litigator. To practice law, really practice it. Perform in courtrooms with slippery maple banisters and marble walkways and people, lots of people, weighted down with documents and urgency. And to live someplace with contemporary art galleries and Thai restaurants and public transportation. Someplace un-Kansas.
But here I am, settling a homestead on the grainy, wind-burned soil of the Great Plains. And last week I sat out behind our porch, cutting hemp rope into sections for a winter storm fence and wrapping the ends with twine so it wouldn’t unravel. Whipping is what they call it—whipping the end of a rope.
Who is there to talk to about such things? The “fellas” at Duritz Hardware? Afterwards, the rope bound and stored like garden hose, I walked into the kitchen, swollen with the fuzzy pride of accomplishment. Look what I did, I wanted to announce to someone with whom I could share a six-pack. Instead, I found Calvin rocking his knuckles against the refrigerator, leaving fine dimples of blackberry jam. He appeared bewildered, listening to the scraping sound of the seeds against the smooth door. Troubled. Like a little fucking retard-boy. He knew his actions were wrong. My anger came quick, prickling along the elastic skin of my throat. I grabbed the first thing I could, whatever was close. Chewing half a paper napkin, I blew spit wads at Calvin—small, white amoebas that filled his face like sores.
Later, I closed the door to my room and pressed my lower back against the bottom—sort of a human door-jamb. Calvin stayed in the hall, gurgling, kicking. Sometimes—many times—I simply want to be alone. Son-less and alone. Let me figure this life out by myself.
Now the office smells of cigarette smoke. There is something soothing, almost cathartic about sitting in the dark. Like you belong among the desks and chairs and bookshelves; you are no longer simply surrounded by objects, but you become part of them. Even if someone else were to enter the room, you would remain hidden, a piece of living, breathing furniture to be passed over with a flashlight.
Shortly after Calvin and I first moved to Tarent, the two of us were sitting Indian-style on the floor of what is now Calvin’s bedroom—me refolding clothes that had been disturbed along the trip, and Calvin watching, rolling a toy race car back and forth over his shin. Suddenly, one of the town’s generators stopped working, although we didn’t know this at the time, and the electricity in our house shut off. The two of us were quiet for a few moments and then, very matter-of-factly, Calvin said, “So this is Kansas.” I thought it a very profound statement for someone his age and I told him so, though he did not understand. And later, when I leaned over him at bedside, a candle flickering brick-colored hues onto his face, he asked if it would always be this way, without lights. I said no, that they would be up again in the morning. “We need them more at night,” he said, blowing the candle so hard that the milky wax pooled around the wick jumped, splattering his night table with flecks that hardened before I left the room.
A loud smacking noise breaks my train of thought—the thumping as a ball is kicked into the hallway walls, followed by Charlotte’s voice telling Calvin to come back and hold her hand because she cannot see anything.
“There’s a row of light switches right outside the door,” I say, rising and stepping into the hall.
“Oh, good,” Charlotte says, with a start. “That’s better.”
Briefly, Calvin has disappeared. But as I prepare to yell for him, he rounds the corner, his shirt halfuntucked, banded with a large stripe of black grease rising nearly to his chest.
“What happened to you?” I ask.
“Nuthin’.”
“What do you mean, ‘nuthin’’? How did that get on your shirt?”
“From underneath.”
“Underneath what?”
“That,” he says, pointing at an enormous steel dolly used to roll wrestling mats into the gymnasium. “I was tryin’ to get the ball out.”
“How’d the ball get there in the first place?”
Calvin shrugs.
“Did you kick it there?”
“Maybe. I’m not really sure. See, I kicked it first … and then … well—”
“Okay. Sit down in there”—I gesture toward Coach Miller’s office—“and we’ll try to clean.”
After I have wiped as much of the grease from Calvin’s shirt as will come off without the aid of a washing machine, we say our goodbyes to Charlotte and leave for the supermarket. Once there, we don’t take long to fill our cart, for now we have the routine down to a science. The science of a single father and his son buying only those things that they truly need to survive the week: milk, skinless chicken parts, bottled tomato sauce, elbow-shaped pasta, cans of soup, baked beans, and corn, apples, bananas to be sliced onto cereal. Then the tradeoff: the son grimacing as the father takes iceberg lettuce, celery stalks, mushrooms, and fresh green beans; the son pointing to animal-shaped cookies, ice cream, and, not to forget, chocolate-flavored sauce. The total is not expensive, for in Tarent, Kansas, it does not cost much to feed one and a half people.
We sit in the parking lot behind the Stop ’n’ Shop, Calvin holding the can of chocolate sauce against his thigh, for fear of losing it among the six bags lining the backseat. Suddenly, a small brown pebble-shaped object lands on the hood of the car with a ping. Then, slowly, another and another, until finally, in a rush, an avalanche of the objects slams down in a heap with such force that it causes the car to sway slightly forward. It also causes Calvin to jerk back, as if a victim of whiplash, and scream out in terror. The car is parked in a slot directly beside an eight-foot-high ramp leading into the back of the store, and as I get out, I can see a woman leaning over the rail, still clinging to a once-swollen green-and-red bag.
“Oh, gosh,” she says, smoothing out the bag against her stomach and chest. “I’m so sorry. I kinda lost my grip and as it slipped I tried to catch it on the railing, but it split open at the bottom.”
She is talking about the bag, which, as it turns out, was filled with Purina Dog Chow.
“You want to feed your dog from the hood of my car?” I ask.
She straightens, at first not sure if I am serious or not. But we both smile at the same time and then she quickly starts down the ramp, toward the front end of my car. Her hair is a light, buttery red, cut blunt above the slope of her shoulders. She is wearing a black turtleneck and oversized, faded jeans that are frayed white at the knees and back pockets. They are cinched loosely around her waist by a wide belt with an oblong, silver Western buckle.
“Look at this,” she says, staring at the mound of dog food. “I’m so sorry. Really.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Oh, Jesus! I’ve scared him to death.”
She is looking through the windshield at Calvin, who is still pale and squeezing the can of syrup with both hands.
“Come on out here, Cal.”
I walk over to his side of the car and unfasten his safety belt, pulling him free. But he has not removed his eyes from the pile, mesmerized by its unfamiliarity.
“It’s dog food, Cal,” I say, taking a kernel that managed to lodge itself under the windshield wiper and handing it to him. “See?”
He taps at it with his fingernail, and then releases a long sigh that practically forces his rib cage in upon itself. “Dog food,” he says, as if he knew all along. As if that is the only possible thing it could be.
“Well,” she says, cocking her head and walking a few steps closer. “I guess what we need is a giant Dustbuster.”
Calvin climbs on the bumper and shoves his face toward the pile, taking several sniffs.
“How ’bout this?” I remove a box of plastic trash bags from our groceries. “We could fill a couple of these and then you can still use the food.”
“Oh, wow. That would be great.”
Her eyes
are a slate-blue with tiny, precise pupils that seem nearly to explode when she reaches for a trash bag.
“Here you go, Cal,” I say, handing him a bag, too. “Fill ‘er up.”
He looks puzzled, so I grab two palmfuls of dog food and dump them into his bag.
“With hands?” he asks, for I am constantly telling him not to use his hands, to use a fork or spoon or shovel instead. How can adults be trusted? he must wonder.
“Yep. With hands.”
He smiles and then digs in, balancing the dog food against the insides of his wrists and forearms. As he tips the food into the bag, a few pieces drop on the asphalt lot.
“Careful. See if you can keep any from falling on the ground.”
He is concentrating now, his tongue folded between his teeth and lips at the corner of his mouth. Every few seconds he turns to look at me or at the woman, as if to let us know that he’s doing it right, making a contribution.
The dog food will fit into one bag, but we use three, not wanting the plastic to tear when lifted. The woman has tight, closely carved muscles and I can see those in the back of her thighs flex, pulling up the slack in her jeans as she bends over. We dump the sacks into the back of her truck, which is dark blue and dirty and familiar. Hanging from the rearview mirror are a pair of red-and-black-and-white miniature sneakers, the same sneakers that belong to Noah Ward. When I ask her if this is Noah’s truck she says it is not, that it is hers but she lets him drive it most days, while she is working. She says Noah is her younger brother, and from the way she speaks of him, the tone of her voice, I get the sense I’m not the first person to have had trouble with him. She is a veterinarian-in-training, but she also tends bar three nights a week at Cale’s, which is two blocks from my office. Sometimes Harper and I eat lunch there. She also tells me her name is Zoe.
Calvin has been uninterested in Zoe and my conversation and he is hoisting himself onto the truck’s running board to peer into the window at a quite excited dog. Zoe walks over and opens the door, setting loose a large golden retriever who begins running around in a panic, not sure what to smell first.
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