by Billy Coffey
As he stood to shake the hand of the thankful man in front of him, I was struck with a sense of envy so strong it left my feet stuck to the waxed floor. I could not reckon my jealousy. This was no more than a spoiled rich kid whose aspirations reached no higher than the corner office of Bubba’s Auto World in Camden, Virginia. I was the one going off to play ball. I would get drafted someday, reach the majors. But that was someday, not today, and today I could not dismiss the fact that Travis had found a thing I had yet not: his place in the world.
Travis Clements would sit in that little office until Bubba either retired or died and then take over the business, just as Jeffrey would the IGA. For years I had viewed my friends as chained to their futures, but as I watched Bubba lead Travis’s customer out and Travis bend to answer his phone, none of their futures seemed like chains at all. For Travis and Jeffrey, their journeys had all ended. And though I held my own future as something greater than small lives set in a small town, I could not help but feel they had claimed something of exceeding value and I had not.
Travis saw me. He pointed my way, wanting me to wait. Head nodding. He hung up and stuck his head out of the doorway. “You doing anything?”
“Washing all those cars you’re getting ready to sell.”
“Take a break. Jeffrey said something’s going on down at the IGA.”
“Something like what?”
“It’s Michaela.”
My face grew hot.
“Jeffrey said she’s standing on the street corner with that queer. Said it’s a show we won’t believe.”
-3-
Johnson makes his first mistake of the night when Paul O’Neill comes up for the Yanks in the bottom of the fifth and crushes a flat curveball over the right field fence. For the first time I hear the storied Yankee Stadium noise. We’re still up five, but the game feels closer.
Country nudges me. “Don’t worry ’bout it. We get that one back, still might find ourselves out there.”
-4-
Downtown Camden looked less a square than broken spokes of a bent wheel. The town center comprised the oldest buildings, some dating to the early 1800s. From there the streets moved in more or less straight lines, some of which fizzled to little more than empty wooden buildings and overgrown lots—victims of one economic downturn after another—while others had grown from two lanes to three. Anchored there were the bulwarks of the IGA, flower shop, hardware store, and town government building. As Travis and I walked the quarter mile west from the car lot toward the IGA, one thought consumed me: that would be the best and worst place for somebody to make a scene.
“Jeffrey say what she’s doing?”
“Nope, just we had to come see. He was laughing pretty hard, though, so it must be good.” Travis’s suit jacket was unbuttoned. His tie caught a little in the breeze so that it fluttered up and over his shoulder, giving him the appearance of Superman rushing in to save the day. “Tell you what, that girl says one thing about me being up on those rails, I’ll kill her. You see me with that old farmer in there? Sold my first car. I mean I didn’t really, Dad did all the signing and stuff, but I did all the talking. That used F-150 out in the back lot? Guy just wanted something to beat around in.”
I didn’t care. “That’s cool.”
“It’s complicated, man. Not just the sales stuff. There’s people I got to deal with, that’s the main thing. Selling’s easy, that’s what I’ll be doing for a while, but Dad won’t be around forever, you know? Shoot, I’ll be running things soon. The whole lot. I’ll be the boss man—you believe that? Just me and some salesmen and a bunch of Shanties for secretaries and mechanics. Dad says they’ll steal you blind. You believe that? You’re the one gives them a living, then they turn around and think you owe ’em even more.”
We were coming up on the bridge where the trains crossed. I could see the outline of the library and the sun glinting off the front glass of the IGA. People crowded the walks and skittered from one side of the street to the other. I couldn’t see her from that far out, couldn’t spot the corner where Jeffrey had said Micky was standing. Standing—what did that even mean?
The scales done fell from our eyes, Owen. Everything we ever thought turned out to be not so, and I ain’t never been so glad to be wrong. It’s so wonderful. And I got to tell everybody.
Nothing looked different. Just cars and folk, the occasional horn and wave. Maybe Jeffrey lied, one of his tricks. Maybe Jeffrey hadn’t seen Micky at all, or Micky was already gone. But then out of the noise of all that human motion came her voice carried by the breeze. It felt like someone had set a candle under my shirt.
Rupert Davis’s IGA grocery took up most of the block where Pine Avenue intersected with Main Street. It was an ugly relic of the early forties, nothing but a white cinder-block square and a parking lot of fading lines and weeds sprouting from the cracked pavement. Customers streamed in and out through electric doors. More than a few had paused, their backs to me as they watched, women whose purses hung by a mere finger and men who stood with their weight on one leg. An abandoned shopping cart sat near the road. Across the street at the hardware store, old men with nothing better to do gawped. Faces appeared in storefront windows, their lips moving as though they were ghosts trying to impart some message through the veil between worlds. All of them staring at the same strange person who had claimed the corner sidewalk in front of signs reading Watermelon 12c/lb and Choice Ground Beef $1.56!!, man and woman and child all bewildered at what Michaela Dullahan was up to.
She stood near the crosswalk atop an old milk crate turned on its side, blond hair twisting in the breeze each time a truck turned left when the light went from red to green. Her tennis shoes wobbled on her doddery makeshift stage. Todd Foster stood behind her in silence. The cords in Micky’s neck strained with the words she spoke as she raised her voice over mufflers and horns. I heard, “This is wrong, what you’re doing. It’s all wrong . . .” and saw a pleading in her eyes.
“Freaks,” Travis grumbled.
Some crossed the street to hear her, driven less by interest than by curiosity. More than a few of Rupert’s customers clustered where a line of cars was trying to turn into the lot. A horn blew. Someone yelled.
I settled into the back of the growing crowd as Micky talked on.
“. . . what I seen. I seen the truth of things, and the truth is every single one of you is more than you think. You think you’re people, but you ain’t. You think you’re bodies, but you ain’t. You were made for more than what all you’re doing and saying and believing, that’s what I’m wanting to tell you . . .”
Hands outstretched, head high. Long legs encased in denim shorts and bronzed arms reaching from the sleeves of a plain white T-shirt. Micky looked like a countrified Statue of Liberty calling for our tired and poor, our huddled masses that yearned to breathe free, talking of souls and worth and a dignity common to all.
“Quit giving yourselves over to things that don’t matter one bit. I’m sorry I don’t know how to say it, it’s just so big in my head.”
The line of cars now lay a dozen deep. One tried to turn but was stopped by a wall of flesh that refused to move, which only served to tie up traffic in two directions rather than one. Micky kept on as a look of terror crept across Todd’s face. Men streamed across the road from the hardware store to gawk or help. A flicker of blue and gray—my father, carrying a lawn mower part in a brown paper bag. I ducked before he could see me.
The glass doors of the grocery slid open. Out came Jeffrey in a pair of khaki pants and a chambray shirt (his own uniform now, no different from my father’s) and both Harper boys. Jeffrey’s hands shot out, palms up, making a What the world? gesture. Travis answered with a shrug.
Micky was deep into the “I saw everybody as they truly are, and in greater eyes than mine own” portion of her sermon when her sight fell on the future proprietor of the Camden branch of the Independent Grocers Alliance.
He said, “What the world y’all doing out
here?”
I thought he’d stumped her, because Micky fell quiet. But then I saw her silence as a way of looking, of seeing, rather than confusion. Micky held her back straight and her shoulders square. Her eyes carried the glint of something I could not figure.
“Todd’s helping me. I’m just trying to say something is all.”
“Well, you done blocked up all this traffic,” Jeffrey said. “People trying to get their groceries.”
Down the block and across the street, my mother appeared from the library doors.
Micky said, “I don’t have long.”
“I know you don’t, ’cause my daddy’s done called Clancy over here.”
“You don’t understand,” Micky said. “None of you understand,” her words carrying over all the ones screaming and chuckling and shaking their heads. “I know who you all are, but you don’t. You don’t know it yet.” She settled on the Harpers and pointed. “Gary Harper, I know what you are. Barry, you too. Do you know how precious a thing you were born to be? Do you know you are loved?”
The Shantie twins looked upon her as we all did, like this was a girl in the midst of losing her mind.
A siren called in the distance. Horns blaring. It sounded as though every law enforcement officer in four counties was on its way, even though it was but one old Crown Vic traveling a little over two blocks from the sheriff’s office. Clancy stopped the car at an angle to the sidewalk. He parted the crowd like Moses, calling each man and woman he passed by name.
It was of course not Clancy’s first introduction to the Dullahan family. He said to her, “M’chaela Dullahan, what fool thing you think you’re doing upsetting the whole of downtown this way? I oughta haul . . .” What steam and bluster our sheriff wanted to sputter faded as Micky looked down at him. In that moment I believe Clancy knew himself as seen and seen truly, and I believe he had not an idea what that meant.
“I’m sorry, Sheriff. I am. We didn’t really plan all of this out, Todd and me. I just had to come down here and . . . talk, but nobody’s . . . I’m the one stood in front of that train Saturday night.”
All went quiet. Travis took a step forward.
“I’m sorry for all that trouble. But I was saved, you see, and now there ain’t no scales over my eyes. I seen everything. The truth of everything, and . . .”
Micky looked out over the snarl she’d created, all those vehicles and grimacing people, ones mocking and disgusted. My heart broke for her until she saw me cowering.
Words unsaid passed between us, a pleading in our eyes for each to help the other. But what I needed from her just then was silence, to keep me out of things, while all Micky needed was a friend. All the years and rules between us, having to keep silent on what we felt and knew. So many times I’d wished we wouldn’t have to hide anymore. Now all I wanted was for the two of us to stay hidden.
“Owen.”
I saw my father inch closer, spotted Mom coming across the street and cutting in front of Clancy’s car.
“Owen, you were there. You saved me. Tell them. Tell them what you saw.”
Clancy looked over his shoulder. “Owen, you know any of this that’s going on?”
And I said, “No. Maybe she got in Earl’s drink is all.”
Chuckles rose. Clancy shook his head. Rupert Davis came out to say the milk crate upon which Micky stood was one kept on the loading dock out back of the grocery, which amounted to theft, and he demanded charges be filed.
Clancy silenced him with a simple “Shut up, Rupert.”
The crowd was thinning, yielding to the turning cars. Old men shook their heads and went about their business. The women looked on with a measure of pity, as they will when happening upon a child lost through lack of care. Shame filled me.
Clancy took Micky’s hand and eased her down off the crate, then motioned for Todd. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get you two home.”
He placed them in the cruiser’s backseat. Travis walked past and clapped me on the shoulder, saying he’d see me back at the car lot, his Camaro needed cleaned. Over his shoulder, my mother walked off toward the library and stared over her shoulder.
Clancy started the car and left the siren off. He came alongside me as he pulled away. Micky stared through the glass. Beneath her expression I withered. Not because she offered me hurt or betrayal, but because her eyes carried a look of forgiveness, Micky’s blue eyes soft against my own.
I followed those eyes until the car cut through the last of the onlookers, a man wearing a pair of blue work pants and a gray shirt. That man turned and walked on as though the boy before him was a stranger.
-5-
It’s a single bump in a single game, Country says, nothing more. Johnson, he still looks good out there. And as this is a man who’s seen more pitchers than I ever will, I can’t disagree. O’Neill is barely in the dugout after rounding the bases when Johnson gets Brosius on a ground ball to first. Ethan moans from the other end of the dugout. One down.
-6-
I’d have given about anything to get out of supper that night given what was bound to happen, but eating together was Mom’s rule. Didn’t matter if I had a game or Dad had to stay late to get the football field in shape or Mom got held up at the library, supper came only once we were all home. Though I’d grown to loathe those thirty minutes or so—what teenager in his right mind wants to have dinner with his parents?—I endured them as best I could. Not for the company (which was minimal) or the lively conversation (which was nonexistent), but for the look of contentment on my mother’s face. From the time I’d signed my scholarship, that sense of ease inside Greta Cross seemed limited to whenever she pulled a roast or an apple pie from the oven and laid it upon a table bearing three plates.
It was near to six that evening when I got home. Three cars that day, Bubba’s and Travis’s and one off the lot. My shoes and socks were soaked through with water. The skin on my hands was a bright red that promised to crack in the following days. My pores oozed soap and tire polish. I wasn’t about to worsen Dad’s anger by saying supper would have to sit until I walked around in the woods awhile. Micky would have to wait, if she showed up at the hill at all.
Dad sat at the head of the table, newspaper spread before him like a curtain. The kitchen smelled of brown beans and ham and buttered corn bread from the skillet—my favorite meal, made for Momma’s little working man. She kissed my head as I sat. Dad moved the edge of the paper and cast me a grin through two knowing eyes, as though they said, Ain’t much fun, is it, having to spend all your day in thankless toil?
We prayed.
Mom passed the corn bread. “How was work, Owen?”
“Wet. Boring. Felt more like Bubba’s personal assistant than anything else.”
Dad grunted. Mom sighed. I could fill a book talking of my parents, but those few words are a good enough summary.
She said, “Well, it’s money well earned and money you’ll need.”
“Yes’m.”
“Got that blasted mower fixed,” Dad said.
He ignored me. Mom did not. I could talk to her of Micky. Mom would maybe understand. Would be thankful, at least, that I’d climbed atop those rails and saved the girl I loved. She would wait. Would listen. But before then I would have to get through supper, and I would have to get through my practice with Dad in the backyard after.
He suggested soft toss once the food was gone and the table cleared. That’s when I knew I wasn’t getting off easy. Whenever Dad was serious about practicing, we went through pitch calls and game scenarios. When he wanted to see some real work, he’d stand in the yard and have me block balls in the dirt. But when Dad wanted to talk, it was always soft toss.
He grabbed a bucket of balls and a bat from the shed and walked both to the net strung between two spruces in the backyard. Dad made me use a wooden Louisville Slugger for soft toss, thirty-three inches and thirty-four ounces. Planning ahead, as was his way, for that someday when I reached the minors and aluminum bats were n
o longer allowed.
I took my stance. Dad poured the baseballs out and turned the bucket over. He sat directly to my side and lobbed the first ball in underhand. I waited until it reached the zone and swung, sending a liner into the net in front of us.
“Weight back,” he said.
I adjusted and garnered a “That’s it” on my next swing.
“Dad?”
“No,” he said, and tossed another. I swung. “Don’t want to hear it. Knew you was up at Brutal’s. Knew it soon as Clancy told me on those porch steps. You’re a fool boy just as all boys is. Thinking they invincible.”
Another ball.
“I didn’t mean for any of that to happen. She went up there playing chicken.”
“So you decided you was gone run up there and get her away?”
That felt like a trap. I said, “No one else was gonna.”
Another ball and then another. It was like neither of us would have to say anything more so long as Dad kept tossing. Or maybe he only wanted a hard talk made softer by the sound of my hitting. I think of the wind upon our hill, how it always sang. Micky’s voice and Mom laughing and that one time my father said he was proud. None of those sounds ever brought so much comfort as solid contact of ball meeting barrel. It resonates. You feel it deep.
“My job’s protect this family. It’s my only job, and I do it well. Don’t you think?”
“Yessir.”
“No fool boy can think for hisself. Doubt a woman can neither. So it’s to me. My responsibility.”