The Journey Prize Stories 24 (13 page)

She screamed and all the grown men in the store looked up from their comic books. How dare Rudy try to take advantage of a destitute and heartbroken widow who was selling her beloved husband’s beloved collection to afford to take care of her ailing, beloved son, who had contracted AIDS – that’s right! Goddamned fucking AIDS, Rudy! – from the blood transfusion he needed after the car crash that had killed her beloved husband? “Fuck you, Rudy!” Mom yelled, as if her and Rudy went way, way back, and she stormed out. She sat out in the car and left me, goddamned fucking AIDS and all, to lug the twenty-nine boxes from Rudy’s counter back out to the car.

She didn’t say it, but I could tell that Mom, in her heart of hearts – yes, the heart that she has inside of her heart – I could
tell that in there she actually believed that after one look at all those boxes, Rudy would open his register and count out one million dollars for her, bill by bill. Like Rudy would take the top off the first box, and this golden glow would bathe him. The heart inside of your heart is always the dumbest. Ask around.

As he stacked the last few boxes into my arms, Rudy, a bit jittery from having been screamed at, gave me a message to give to my mom. The economy of baseball cards, he said, is just like any other economy: it depends on lack. Not many people collected cards in the ’50s, say, or their moms threw all the cards in the trash. The harder a card from the ’50s is to come by, the more some guy who’s stiff for that stuff is willing to cough up for it. When everyone realized how much some people were willing to pay for these useless things, they started holding on to their cards, dreaming of their own million-dollar payoff. But because everyone is collecting now, nothing is rare, and so a collection like Pop’s is barely worth the cardboard it was printed on.

I said thanks to Randy and assured him that I really didn’t have AIDS. “Yet,” I added, and winked, and the look that he gave me said that being nice time was over and now it was time to get the fuck out of his store and leave him to surf online undisturbed for that rare pair denim underwear he needed to complete his look.

I imparted Rudy’s wisdom to my mom on the drive home, but telling my mom anything she doesn’t want to hear is like trying to give a cat a vitamin. Her fuckbag husband’s cards were worth a million dollars and that’s all. The next weekend we had a booth at the weird-looking dick-rink. And that was what? A year or so ago?

This book I’m reading right now was written by this guy who killed himself after no one wanted to read his book. His mom found the manuscript in a drawer after this guy hooked a hose to the ass of his car and she started insisting that it was the best thing anyone had ever written. Luck had it that the book was awesome, but I wonder if this guy’s crazy old mom ever actually read the thing, like whether or not she just took the thing out of his drawer and hung it up on the fridge with an A+ on it. Whatever it was that was his, it was the best thing ever because her dead son had written it. You can never tell with crazy women what the value of anything they’re trying to sell you is. But I kind of get the feeling that it’s the crazy women that always get left to man the things that men leave behind, whatever the things are worth.

From out of twenty-nine boxes and from out of who knows how many cards, the human pile, with his baby penis fingers, plucks out just this one card.

“I’ll take this,” the pile says, and holds up the card like he’s a magician who’s just found my card in the deck.

“Okay,” I say, and I fix my stare on his deep snowman eyes, but only because I’m trying to ignore the way that his claw has something like a slimy sheen to it.

“So how much?” the pile says. He makes for his fanny pack, which is a NASA fanny pack.

“I don’t know.” But I’m not thinking about the card, I’m thinking about an astronaut, done up in all his expensive hubbub, wearing one of those crappy fanny packs.

“I’ll tell you what: I’ll give you five dollars for it. It’s not even worth a buck, frankly, but I don’t like breaking bills.”

“Let’s see it,” I say, and take the card from him. It’s some guy named Rance Davis, a player for Seattle. His baseball card action shot has him in mid-swing. “Who is this guy?”

“He’s nobody.”

“Nobody’s nobody,” I say into the pile’s eyes, but even against all my best trying, I steal a glance at this sheeny, shiny claw.

“Davis played, like, two games in the majors before f’ing his knee for good trying to steal home. He might have been somebody before, but now he’s nobody.”

The pile’s good hand is out, his baby penis fingers are squirming, eager to take the card back. He’s getting nervous, you can tell. The pile’s starting to quiver like there’s something alive inside of him that’s moving around in there, trying to fit in him better.

“If this kid’s nobody then why do you want the card?”

“I couldn’t give a crap about Davis. He’s just the last card I need to finish the ’03 Upper Deck season.” The pile actually makes a little lunge to reclaim the card but I rear back because I’m not done with it.

As much as I think professional athletes are overpaid and just plain old unnecessary, I can still appreciate that what they do’s not easy. A guy doesn’t just fall into playing major league baseball. The majors are no chainsaw factory. From before you can make decisions about what you like or don’t, you’ve got to be irrevocably committed to this stupid, silly lifestyle. I know these majors-bound kids in school, and they’re just as weird and destroyed as the military-bound ones. You live your life with blinders on, and you work so foolishly hard against the foolish odds that all that foolish work will just lead up to nothing because hardly any-fucking-body makes it to the
major leagues, and even most of the guys who do make it all the way there end up being these anonymous henchman types like this Rance Davis guy the pile is so hard over.

Maybe the picture on the card is of Rance’s first game ever, of his first time at bat. Maybe this is the picture of the first pitch that was ever thrown to Rance, and he’s swinging at it. You give all your dumb life to do this one thing, who are you not to swing? And here in the picture, there’s no telling what will happen. He might swing and miss, or he might knock the scalp right off that first pitch. But, whatever happens, something will happen. That’s what Rance has decided.

T-ball was as far as I played baseball. Hitting a ball in T-ball is just about as easy as punching the air, but there are those kids I remember who just wouldn’t or couldn’t swing the bat. The ball was elevated and still and unmistakably orange for them to do whatever with, in a choice position for them to be marvellous champions, but so many of those kids would just stand there stock still, their bat on their shoulder, not quite ready to swing. Not quite ready for anything to happen because of something they did.

To know that not long after this first swing Rance will screw up his leg and bring to a halt everything he has been building is just a bit too much. And it’s amazing. All of that is here in this card. So I tell the pile it’s not for sale.

“Fuck you it’s not for sale,” the pile screams a little. There’s just a glimmer of cry in his snowman eyes. “Fuck you it’s not for sale!”

A smile comes up like a burp, and I try to allay the thing by wrapping it up, by curling my bottom lip over my top, but the look you make trying to keep yourself from smiling is a million
dollars worse than an actual smile. Red flowers bloom all over the pile’s pear face until it’s just one big field of crimson. Little toots of angry breath fart out of his dilated nostrils and he’s wobbling and vibrating.

The men that crowd The Arena are basically boys, guarding the crap they have and conniving to steal the crap they want. The crap that they’re here after is all that matters in the world. They bicker and they bitch. It’s all squirrelly greed and mean loneliness. Sometimes I’ll watch them milling and waddling around the rink and imagine their bellies as hatches that open up to reveal some petty, pouting child at the controls of a man. The world that these goons live in is so damned fragile, patched together mostly with opinion, so they’re extra careful and possessive of it. I haven’t heard the phrase “See with your eyes and not with your hands” so often since I can’t even remember when.

The pile tries to collect his huffiness, arrange it into something big and threatening. His little claw looks as if it’s trying to grip air while his baby-penis-laden other hand keeps adjusting the hang of his shoulder bag. Some sort of panicked dew has settled onto his moustache and makes it glisten.

“I don’t know what the hell your deal is, kid. I don’t know what kind of crap you’re trying to pull, but trust me, I’m not the guy you want to be pulling it with.” The pile sputters this out and all I can think of is shit being pulled on one of those taffy-pulling machines.

“I’m not pulling any crap. There’s no deal. The card’s just not for sale.”

“Well, why the hell isn’t it?”

I take another look at the card, at the mid-swing of Rance Davis.

“Because I want it,” I tell the pile without looking at him. I don’t know how much more I can stand to look at him. “I like this one.”

The pile opens his mouth a few times, like he’s imitating someone talking. He stops gulping and puts his good hand into one of the boxes and takes out a wad of cards. “Well, what about these ones, smartass? Huh? You like these ones? Are these ones for sale? Huh?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t had a look at those ones. Maybe they are.”

“Well, here: have a look,” the pile says, and he winds up and chucks the wad of cards at me.

For an impossible instant, this wad of maybe a hundred or so cards about the thickness of a junior hamburger holds its shape, coming at me like one complete block ready to hit my face like I hit it first. But right in front of me each card catches its own influence of air and they pull apart and go their separate ways. All the cards fall, and flutter, and spin, and swoop down, each of them with some heavy moment on it.

We stare at each other, the pile and me, like we can’t believe that what just happened just happened. As if two other people were doing this, and we were just two guys that watched it. My eyes flit back to the pile’s claw, and whatever pause button got pushed gets pushed again to make things play. “You’re cleaning that up,” I say, which I guess presses the pile’s own play button, because his mouth opens to say something and his baby penis hand goes to readjust his bag, but before he can say anything, my mom does.

“Pickle!” she yells, and my mom drops to her hands and knees to gather up the scattered cards. They may as well be
hundred-dollar bills all over the ground. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” she’s mumbling.

What can anybody do but watch something like that? The pile and me set our differences aside like soldiers on Christmas and watch my mom scramble around on the ground. But then I get a glimpse down her shirt and that’s enough of that.

“Mom,” I say. “Get up. Jesus.”

She wobbles onto one knee and reaches to the pile for help up. Her hand grabs at the empty air where a person without a deformed hand’s hand would be. She looks up and she sees the claw, in all its shine and sheen, so she gets up just fine on her own. Once she’s standing, she has that dizzy, frazzled look of someone just spun ceaselessly in a chair.

“So who wants to tell me what the fuck this is?” she says. I can smell on her the cigarettes she doesn’t smoke anymore. “Pickle?”

“This is your kid?” the pile wants to know. “These are your cards? This is your table?”

Mom looks at the pile, and then at the mess of cards that she didn’t even begin to clean up, and then at the pile’s sweaty claw, and then at me, and she seems unsure of whether anything here is actually hers. “And you are?” she asks the pile, maybe to bide some time while she figures out who all this stuff belongs to exactly.

“I’m the guy your kid is trying to screw.”

“Pickle?”

“I didn’t lay a hand on him, Mom, I swear,” I say, and though she doesn’t, I can tell that my mom wants to smile at that one.

“Listen. Are these cards for sale or aren’t they?”

“What? Of course they’re for sale.”

“Then why won’t this kid of yours sell me this card?”

“What card?”

“That one.” The pile makes a motion in my direction with his claw, to Rance Davis. “He says it’s not for sale because he likes it.”

I shoot the pile one hell of a look, as if he’s betrayed some confidence.

Mom takes the card and I let her take it. She takes a pointless look at it, stares seriously at it, like someone staring at the engine of a broken-down car they have no idea about, as if seriousness will fix the car.

“I don’t get it,” she says. She turns to me. “What is there to like about it?”

Not knowing what to say it, I shrug my shoulders. With my face, I do my best to explain about the card, but trying to say anything on purpose with your face is like trying to perform the song you hear in your head on an instrument you just barely know how to play. So who knows what I actually communicate.

It goes to show that you never know what anybody is ever thinking. But you can guess, if you know the person. For all I know, my mom isn’t thinking about the card right now at all, but is thinking about whether or not this pile of human being uses his damp claw to cuff his duke or not. But I don’t think she’s thinking that. It is probably only me who’s thinking that. What I think she’s thinking about, seeing the way her face gets full and soft from looking at however my face is looking, has to do with Pop. I bet dimes to dollars that she’s suspecting that I don’t want to sell the pile this card, or any of these cards, because they’re Pop’s. Like this is all I’ve got left of that bag of
dicks, and so to let go of his cards would be to let go of him. I think that’s the way the mind of someone who watches too much TV tends to work. So she nods at me, having gleaned all she’s gleaned from whatever my face had to say.

My mom turns dramatically to the pile. “I’m sorry,” she says, with this weird, fluffy confidence. “The card,” she pauses, “is not for sale.”

“I’ll give you one hundred dollars for the card,” the pile says.