by Billy Coffey
“Keep asking questions. Do my job. So I guess to make this whole trip up here to the cold North worth it, you got anything you want off your chest? Some folk in town talking about how you and that girl were around each other some when it all started. That day in front of the grocery. Simpson’s field.”
“Simpson’s field?”
“You’d be surprised what might help.” There was no grandfatherly way about him. Across the table there sat a man of the law, and nothing less. “Sometimes putting a finger to the start of a thing can lead a body to its end. I ain’t gone sit here and bust your chops on what happened at that party after the prom. It’s too much water under that bridge. But you saved her that night. Michaela.”
“That a bad thing?”
“I’d never say it. But she said she seen something. Said you did too.”
“I got nothing for you, Sheriff. Wish I did. And I’m sorry you had to come all the way up here. Truth is I don’t know what happened to her. I don’t know where she is. And the only thing I saw that night was my own death comin’ for me.”
I spoke those words with all the calm and surety a liar could, then broke only at the end.
“I will say this,” I told him. “Never once have I thought saving her was the wrong thing. But there’s times since I wished she’d of saved me right back.”
-5-
Mussina settles in to get Segui on a strikeout and Mora and Gibbons on two lazy fly balls that calm the restless crowd. It’s three batters, no more, and yet a tremor unheard but felt works its way down our dugout. What momentum had carried us through the top inning is wavering now.
“We up five,” I hear someone say, “let’s go shut’m down,” and that’s true. But this is still the Bronx and it’s still the Yanks and forty thousand strong behind them, and a five-run lead in the bottom of the third is nothing.
It’s nothing, and I know that’s what Mike Singleton is thinking over there by the dugout steps. Gonna need all hands on this one. Gotta keep those starters in.
Bottom 3
-1-
Johnson goes out to throw his tosses knowing he’ll face the nine-hole batter and the top two in the order. The stands buzz. They’re good fans here, and to a person they seem to sense this is the time to crawl back into this game. Three runs, two, even a threat, is all their Yanks will need. A game is never over in this stadium. Few leads are safe. Those ghosts rise up, and perhaps in expectation of that very thing, over the loudspeaker comes a piano’s play and the first keys of a song I have not heard in ten long years, a voice soft and smooth speaking of oceans apart and drifting away. I chuckle to myself, not believing it, Richard Marx singing to me again. And then that smile fades, fades . . .
-2-
We could not go to prom together. Dad didn’t want me going at all, deeming the event an invitation to fornication. He only relented when Mom set her foot down. Never once did he bother asking whether I was taking a girl. It would have been a rare opportunity for me to be honest with him and say I wasn’t. Earl Dullahan would never abide his daughter dating a boy, likely for fear Micky would end up chained forever to a drunkard of a husband as did her momma. My mother alone saw the 1990 Camden High School for what it was supposed to be—one final night for us all to be the kids we were before having to transition into whatever adults we would become. She could not bring herself to speak what was surely in her heart—it didn’t matter what folk thought. Shantie, townie, the Pines or Camden, those were mere words used as walls we all built around one another. I believe all she wanted for her son was a single night spent without the judging eyes of a people who wouldn’t matter to me a bit when I went off to college.
But Micky would not budge from her assertion that prom night should be no different for us than any other. How would it look, a boy still lauded for hitting the homer that won Camden its first state championship, walking into the high school cafeteria with a Shantie girl on his arm?
“It’d be even worse than us going separate,” she said. “They’d make you feel so awful.”
So it was settled. But as I drove to town that Saturday morning on the nineteenth of May to pick up my tux, I found myself slipping a quarter into one of the pay phones at the 7–11. No special occasion, no dire need beyond merely wanting to hear Micky’s voice and to pretend we were together in more than our own eyes. It was a risk calling the Dullahan house, yet I found the threat to our secrecy well worth the price of hearing the day had found her bright and well. If Micky answered, I would keep her only a short while. If Earl, I would simply cut the line. It seemed a plan without flaw until an electronic voice informed me the number had been disconnected. I had forgotten Earl’s inclination to drink the money that should’ve paid his bills.
-3-
I arrived at school that night to find the cafeteria windows open to the cool air, rendering the slender wedge of night beyond them in the pale whites and yellows of evening. People arrived from every direction. Clumps of them, four and six and eight, all dressed in what amounted to the finest clothing they had ever put on. Music thumped from speakers placed near the locked side door, Poison singing of every rose having its thorn.
Travis and Jeffrey met me on the walk with their dates. Even in high heels, Jen Hamrick stood nearly a foot shorter than our star pitcher.
“Where’s your mitt?” Travis asked.
“Shove it. Weren’t for me, you’d’ve gone down as the guy cost us the state championship.”
Stephanie Sebolt pulled at the neck of her dress, unaccustomed to such an amount of skin left open to the air. Jeffrey fidgeted in his tux and pronounced wonderment at the lengths to which he would go in order to get his girlfriend alone at a party.
Jen turned to me. “Come on, you can walk in with us.”
“Think I’ll stay out here a little while. Get some air.”
Travis wouldn’t allow it. “Ain’t gone let you stand out here like some retard. Come on.”
I looked out toward the lot and realized I had no idea how Micky would get there unless she’d manage to take Earl’s truck. Travis dragged me on. We made our way inside to where the music faded and swelled again. Light flooded the hall to our left, bright and hot. We moved off toward the cafeteria like five souls reaching far into that long tunnel leading to the afterlife.
The cafeteria lights had been extinguished in favor of hundreds of stringed bulbs hung in swooping arcs from the ceiling and wound about the three support columns near the kitchen. The sort of lights that looked borrowed from untold proms before. They dangled above us by a series of hooks and carefully placed strips of tape, enjoying some use before being boxed once more until time to ring a pine or spruce next Christmas. Balloons of maroon and white, Camden High’s official colors, were fastened to the sides of a leaning archway near the doors. Beside the arch sat a weary-looking photographer leafing through a copy of Rip magazine.
Flowers everywhere. Large arrangements stood at attention in the corners and on a center table where the punch bowl lay in full view of chaperoning teachers. Smaller vases were placed next to flickering candles atop the lunch tables, each of which had been draped in white cloth to hide the stains beneath and pushed to the cafeteria’s side, leaving a wide space to dance beneath a glowing disco ball.
Glitter covered the floor in patches. Napkins were stamped Camden High School Prom 1990—A Night in Paris. And at the far end of the room stood our prom committee’s crowning achievement: a seven-foot likeness of the Eiffel Tower shaped by pounds of papier–mâché, all the Paris any of us could want.
Stephanie took Jeffrey’s arm. “Isn’t it wonderful? It looks so pretty in the dark.”
I managed, “In the dark,” nothing more. I only saw spotlights that shifted color on a pile of confetti Dad would have to sweep and one fragile-looking statue. The place smelled of the previous day’s pizza and body odor.
We moved through the crowd gathered at the doors to find an empty table. All those smiling faces, those hearts filled with fancy a
nd sureness, and yet I knew everything of that night was a lie we could all tell ourselves. That was the only magic our senior prom offered. Our clothes were borrowed, worn to hide the hollow bones beneath. The decorations and flickering lights were merely a sham to banish to the shadows what was worn and stained, kept from sight so we could think of them as nonexistent. They were there to make the ugly look beautiful, if only on the surface and only for a while.
It was plastic, our prom, in the same way that most of our lives were doomed to become. The final week of school for us meant freedom, though with conditions. Few of us could hope for true deliverance from the weight of living in a place with attitudes unchanged since before the Civil War. For most, college was a dream not worth chasing. What my friends embraced was more a commutation of the life sentence handed down when you were born here, which meant graduation on Sunday afternoon followed by a Monday that marked the beginning of your adult life in whatever work you’d arranged, if any—a death from one world through a violent birth into another.
That was why I could only sit in numbed quiet while the room roiled in cheer around me. I pitied these people and feared them the same, because I realized that were it not for baseball I would share their fate. Marking my days according to what meaning had been lost inside them rather than gained. Never had I loved my father so much for pushing me. Never was I more thankful for the gifts given me. Never had I wanted away from Camden more.
The DJ moved through songs voted on by the senior class, “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” begetting “Sweet Child o’ Mine” begetting Chicago’s “Look Away,” each rolling to the next without introduction. We moved to the center of the crowded room and took our place among classmates the years had made so familiar as to be kin. Travis held Jen close as Stephanie ensured there was enough room between her and Jeffrey for the Holy Spirit to mingle. I drifted away to a table alone. Waited.
It wasn’t long. My friends had joined me from the dance floor when a shadow danced near the hallway steps. Micky entered without notice except for our own. Her dress was a pale satin that reached to her thighs, yellowed with age. No sequins, no ruffles, merely a bit of lace along the sleeves that ended short of her wrists. She had made her own corsage of flowers that looked like those that grew on the lower slopes of our hill in the dry summer months when all else had gone to browns and grays. Her hair, loose off her shoulders, was brushed to a shine but unsprayed. Makeup covered the bruise Earl had given her.
Jen said, “God, wonder where she found that dress.”
“Goodwill,” I whispered.
Travis snorted.
Stephanie punched me in the arm. “That’s so mean.”
Micky’s eyes roamed about the room in open awe but never settled upon my own. She offered a shy wave to a group of Shanties clustered in the dark and made her way to them. Twice she stumbled over her shoes, so unaccustomed was she to walking in heels. In the warmer months when she came to the hill, Micky preferred nothing covering her feet at all.
There we both remained for most of that whole night, watching one another and everyone else, not dancing once even as a few Shantie boys asked Micky, and I turned down Jen and Stephanie both. Toward the end of the dance, the DJ paused to announce Camden High’s king and queen for 1990. A cheer rose when Stephanie’s name was called. It was a roar at Travis’s. Then came the song, good old Richard Marx singing in that moldy backwoods cafeteria then as he sings from the rafters of Yankee Stadium now, “Right Here Waiting.”
Jen and Jeffrey joined them at the end of the first chorus, followed by the rest. I looked across the dim room to where Micky sat. In so many ways, that prom felt like an ending to our last bit of adolescence, the final days of which we would all look back upon as a freedom truer than any we believed waited, and in that freedom I found I no longer cared what would be said of me or her.
I cut through the center of all those tangled bodies, aiming for Micky’s table. There came a softness to her eyes when they met my own.
“Dance with me,” I said. “I don’t care if anyone sees. All of that is over now. And besides, everybody’ll get so drunk tonight none of them will remember a thing by church in the morning.”
I held out my hand. Micky took it without a word and kicked off her shoes as though she’d been waiting for my invitation all night. We kept to the dim light near her table and let darkness shield us from the prying eyes of others. My hand holding hers, our free arms around one another. There was no unease in the way our bodies pressed and turned; the two of us moved as one.
Micky asked, “Isn’t it amazing? All those lights and candles. That statue thing. It’s all about the most beautiful thing I ever seen. Never even dreamed I’d be in a place so fancy. I feel like a princess in a fairy tale.”
The words were spoken in veneration almost, which broke my heart and convicted me the same.
I said, “It’s pretty. You’re prettier.”
“And you’re sweet. Our first dance.” Her hand let go of mine. It joined the arm wrapped around my middle and pulled me into an embrace that spoke more than passion and love and friendship. “I can hear your heart beating.”
There we moved as a single thread stretched through all time, the two of us as near in body as we could ever be again. Letting the world slip away from us silent and unseen. Even when the music ended, we danced. And in my deepest longing I sometimes believe that were it not for the bright cafeteria lights turning on and a raucous Jeffrey Davis leaping atop the nearest table to shout, “Let’s party,” Micky and I would be dancing still.
-4-
It looks like Alfonso Soriano is holding a telephone pole, so big is the bat in his hands. But he can wield it with a blur you wouldn’t believe, especially for a nine-hitter, and Johnson gets him to fly out to right. I barely see it, though. Can hardly hear the crowd roar when the ball goes out there and then moan when it settles into Richard’s glove. I’m still dancing with Micky at the prom, feeling her next to me, letting my thoughts travel on to after, where I don’t want to go. Because the sheriff was right that day he came all the way up to Youngstown so many years ago. There at Brutal Simpson’s field—that’s where it started. Right on those railroad tracks.
She wouldn’t let me drive her back out to the edge of Shantytown where the party waited. Micky said whoever didn’t see us dance at the prom would surely see us arriving together, so she took Earl’s old truck instead. We didn’t even walk out together. Micky left for the house and said she would change there and leave the truck. Wasn’t but a little ways through the woods from there to Brutal’s, she said, if you knew the way.
Leaving alone didn’t stop me from pulling out of the school parking lot knowing the world had never felt so fine. Air cool enough to keep you awake but so warm you had to keep the windows down. The wind licking at the warm spot at my neck where my bow tie had sat. The feel of cotton and denim and my fingers on the wheel, guiding the truck around the sharp turns of the back roads that wound toward Shantytown. Easing into those curves and catching the crickets in half a chirp as I rolled by. Earth and trees filling my nose, making me feel alive.
I followed Jeffrey’s truck and tried to keep close. I knew the Simpson farm to be nearby, but in Shantytown nearby was just enough information to get you lost.
Brutal Simpson was one of many farmers whose fields and pastures lay at the borderlands between Camden and Shantytown. Like most of those farmers, he looked as old as the dirt he plowed. The two hundred or so acres that made up Sunny View Farm scattered out in all directions to encompass timber and pasture and what looked to be miles of cropland. But in those days Brutal kept mostly to the fifty or so acres close to his house and let hired help (Shanties, mostly) tend what remained. Included among this modern form of sharecropping was the wide swath of pastureland set at the southernmost border of Sunny View, which ended at a lonely place along the railroad. All of which is to say that bit of lonely earth was just about a perfect spot for the sort of party people throw when they realize
they’re about to grow up in a hurry.
A bonfire fed by scraps of wood, dried cow chips, and what looked like a dozen large pallets raged at the field’s edge. There girls danced with glass bottles in one hand and abandon in the other as though calling on ancient spirits. Boys looked on with hunger. Clumps of bodies made up of little more than flickering shadows huddled beyond the flames, where the air felt cooler. Tubs of ice. Cheap beer and cheaper wine—all anyone could afford after giving a cut to an older brother or sister willing to purchase it at the IGA or the 7–11. Music blaring from boom boxes leaning against primer-painted hoods, guitars thundering, voices wailing in anger and angst.
The fire’s heat came at me like a wall. Far at the field’s edge, the railroad tracks glimmered like two silver threads stretching onward in the moonlight. A new Camaro sporting dealer tags, a convertible top, and cherry-red paint so glowing it looked like hell’s hearse sat by itself. In front were Travis and Jen. He lay in her lap, one leg cocked in a lazy upside-down V. Stacked beside them was a small pyramid of empty beer cans.
I reached for a beer from one of the tubs and shook off the ice before popping the tab, drinking deep until I loosened. Someone yelled for the music to be turned higher. There came a yelp from the darkened circle of vehicles, and I saw Stephanie scampering from Jeffrey’s truck, face red from anger or embarrassment, a wave of laughter rolling over the field as she announced, “I am not like that.” She clamored toward the bonfire while buttoning her shirt (and missing one, leaving herself lopsided) as Jeffrey followed. Panic sprouted over his face.
“Seen you strike out plenty of times,” I said. “Never that bad, though.”
A contingent of Shantie kids had broken off to the edges between the fire and the tracks. They drank and judged us in their own way. Atop a shabby blanket strewn across the dirt sat Micky. In her hand rested an unopened beer. I had never known her to drink, knowing what drink had cost her family. She stared at the label as it glinted in orange firelight as though pondering the dark powers held within that thin sheet of aluminum, then set it down beside her and stared at me. I raised my beer to her in an ill toast of social lines that separated poor from poorer.