The Sportswriter (39 page)

It is a big box-safe of a car with fat whitewalls, ballistic bumpers, and an air of postwar styling-with-substance that makes my Malibu only a sad reminder.

“They don’t make these anymore, Frank.” Wade pauses to let these words hold sway. “I restored it myself. Cade helped me some, but he got bored soon as the motor work was over. Bought this off a soapstone Greek in Little Egg, and you should’ve seen it. Brown. Full of holes. Chrome half gone. Just a Swiss cheese, is what it was.” Wade looks at the finish as if it might have murmured. It’s chilly in the basement, and the Chrysler seems as cold and hard as a black diamond. “The roll-pleat inside still needs work,” Wade admits.

“How’d you get it in here?”

Wade grins. He’s been waiting for this one. “One Bilco door, back around there where you can’t see it. The tow truck just slid it down. Cade and I had a ramp rigged out of channel irons. I had to relearn welding. You know anything about arc welding, Frank?”

“Not a damn thing,” I say. “I should, though.” I look at the photo of the earth again. It is a good thing to have, I think, for maintaining a sense of perspective, though in its homely surroundings the globe seems as exotic as a tapestry.

“Not necessary,” Wade says soberly. “The principles are all pretty straightforward. Resistance is the whole thing. You’d pick it up in a minute.” Wade smiles at the thought that I might someday own a marketable skill.

“What’re you going to do with it, Wade?” I say, a question that just came to me.

“I haven’t thought about that,” Wade says.

“Do you ever drive it?”

“Oh, I do. Yes. I start it up and drive it a foot one way and a foot or two back. There isn’t much room down here.” He stuffs his hands in his pockets and leans sideways on the fender, looking up and around at the low rafters into the dark cinder block crawl space. Above us I hear muffled voices, the sound of footsteps squeezing from kitchen to dining room. I hear Cade’s clomping off in another direction, no doubt upstairs to change clothes. I hear Elvis Presley’s paws tick the kitchen floor. Then nothing. Wade and I are silent in the presence of his Chrysler and each other.

This situation could, of course, result in disaster, as many such situations do. A fear of what he may innocently ask me now, or a greater fear that I may have nothing special to say in answer and be left standing here as mute as a rocker panel—these make me wish I were back upstairs seeing the Knicks whip tar out of the Cavaliers, cheek-by-jowl with my old friend Cade. Sports is a first-rate safety valve when you and your whole value system are brought under friendly but unexpected scrutiny.

“Just what kind of fellow are you?” would be a perfectly natural curiosity. “What are your intentions regarding my daughter?” (“I’m not at all sure” would not be much of an answer.) “Who in the world do you think you are?” (I’d be stumped.) Suddenly I feel cold, though Wade doesn’t seem to have any tricks up his sleeve. He is someone with codes I respect and that I would like to like me. All the best signs, in other words, are not so different from all the worst. Wade puts his fingertips to the porcelain-black fender and stares at them. I’m sure if I were closer every feature of me would be spelled out clear as a mirror.

“Frank,” Wade says, “do you like fish?” He looks up at me almost imploringly.

“You bet I do.”

“You do, huh?”

“I sure do.”

Wade peers down at the shiny black surface again. “I was just thinking maybe you and me could go eat at the Red Lobster some night, get away from these women. Really have us a talk. You ever been there?”

“I sure have. Plenty of times.” In fact, when X and I were first divorced, I went practically no place else. All the waitresses got to know me, knew I liked the broiled bluefish not overcooked and went out of their way to cheer me up, which is exactly what they’re paid to do but usually don’t.

“I go just for the haddock,” Wade says. “It’s a meal in itself. I call it the poor man’s lobster.”

“We ought to go. It’d be great.” I slip my cold hands in my jacket pockets. All in all I would still jump at the chance to get back upstairs.

“Frank, where’re your parents?” Wade looks gravely at me.

“They’re both dead, Wade,” I say. “A long time now.”

“Mine, too.” He nods. “Both of ’em gone. We all come from nowhere in the end, right?”

“I guess I don’t really mind that part,” I say.

“Right, right, right, right.” Wade has crossed his arms and backed up against the Chrysler fender. He gives me a right-angles glance, then stares off into the crawl space again. “What brought you to New Jersey? You’re a writer, is that right?”

“It’s a pretty long story, Wade. I was married before. I’ve got two kids up in Haddam. It would take some time to explain all that.” I smile in a way I hope will head him off, though I know Wade probably doesn’t give a damn about it. He’s just trying to be friendly.

“Frank, I like women. How about you?” Wade swivels his crewcut head toward me and grins, a straightforward grin of amusement, founded on the old anticipation of pleasure, the source of eighty percent of all happiness. It is the same to him as liking haddock, though more interesting because it might turn out to be a little dirty.

“I guess I do too, Wade.” And I smile broadly back.

Wade raises his chin in an “I-knew-it” way, and puts his tongue against his cheek. “I’ve never wanted a night out with the boys in my life, Frank. What fun that is, I don’t know,”

“Not much,” I say. And I think of my doleful nights in the “Back in Action” course, and with the Divorced Men, floating higgledy-piggledy on the chilly waters off Mantoloking like an army planning its renewed attack upon the beaches of lived life. I silently pledge never again to be in their number. I am finished with that and them. Life’s ashore, after all (though God love them).

“Now don’t get me wrong, Frank,” Wade says warily, still staring off, as if I was standing somewhere else. “I’m not into your and Vicki’s business. You two’ll just have to fight that out.”

“It gets complicated.”

“You bet it does. It’s hard to know what to want at your age. How old are you, anyway, Frank?”

“Thirty-eight,” I say. “How old are you?”

“Fifty-six. I was forty-nine when my wife died of cancer.”

“That’s young, Wade.”

“We were living in Irving, Texas, then. I was a petroleum engineer for Beutler Oil, worked a mile from a house I owned outright. I had a daughter married. I took my son to Cowboys’ games. We lived what we thought was a good life. And then, bang, we suffered a heckuva terrible loss. Just overnight, it seemed like. Vicki and Cade just were wrecked by it. So you bet I know what complicated is.” He nods toward his own private miseries.

“I know it was a hard time,” I say.

“Divorce must be something like that, Frank. Lynette’s divorced from a pretty decent guy, you know. Her second husband—her first died, too—I’ve met him. He’s a decent guy, though we’re not friends. But they couldn’t make it together. It’s no reflection. She’s had a son killed in Oklahoma, herself.”

Vicki has apparently mentioned Ralph, which is all right with me. He is, after all, part of my permanent public record. His lost life serves to further explain and punctuate mine. Wade, I’m happy to say, is doing his best here to “take me on as an individual,” to speak in his own voice, and let me speak in mine, to be as within himself as it’s possible to be with someone he doesn’t know and could just as easily hate on sight. He could be giving me the third-degree down here, and I’d like to let him know I appreciate it that he isn’t—though I’m not sure how to. By being direct and unambiguous and nothing like what I expected, he has left me nothing to say.

“Wade, what part of Texas did you grow up in?” I say, and grin hopefully.

“I’m from northeast Nebraska, Frank. Oakland, Nebraska.” He scratches the back of his hand, perhaps thinking of wheat fields. “I went to
school
in Texas, now. Started in 1953 at A&M. Already married. Vicki was on the way, I think. It took me forever to graduate, and I worked in the oil fields all that time. But what I was saying about women, though, was that when my first wife, Esther, died, I was afraid I wouldn’t be interested in women anymore. You know? You can just lose interest in women, Frank. I don’t mean in a lead-in-your-pencil sense. But up here.” Wade looks at me and points a finger right at the middle of his forehead. “You lose touch with
you
,” he says. “With your own needs. And I did that. Vicki can tell you about it, ’cause she took care of me.” Wade rolls his eyes in a way that is ridiculously outside his character, though I’ve seen Vicki do it plenty of times, and it is entirely possible that he learned it from her. It is a woman’s gesture and makes Wade seem womanly, as if life had taught him some harder lessons than he was man enough to suffer. “I did some crazy, crazy things along in there, Frank,” Wade says and smiles in a self-forgiving way (he is no New-Ager, I can tell you that). “I kidnaped a baby out of a shopping mall. Now is that crazy?” Wade looks at me in amazement. “A little colored baby girl. I can’t even tell you why now. At the time I would’ve said it was reaching out for commitment, I guess. Crying in the wilderness. I’d have been doing my crying on death row if they’d caught me, I can tell you that. And I damn well would’ve deserved it.” Wade nods solemnly into the shadows as if all his darkest motives were imprisoned there now and could not reach him anymore.

“That’s a helluva thing to do, Wade. What’d you do about it?”

“It was one
hell
of a pickle, Frank. Fortunately I returned that little baby to its stroller. But I’d already had it in the car with me. God knows what I would’ve done with it. That’s when you hit the twilight zone.”

“Maybe you didn’t want to do it. That you didn’t follow up on that is a pretty good argument, if you ask me.”

“I know that theory all right, Frank. But I’ll tell you what happened. I bumped into this Aggie classmate, Buck Larsen. It was at a reunion in College Station. We hadn’t seen each other in probably twenty-six years. And it so happens he was with the Turnpike Authority. And we just started jabbering like you do. I told him that Esther had died, on and on, kids, women, tears, and that I had to get out of Dallas. I didn’t even know it myself, you understand? You know how that is. You’re the writer.”

“Pretty well, I guess.” (At least he and Buck didn’t go to a motel.)

“It’s pretty hard to tell where your intentions lie exactly, isn’t it?” Wade offers me a pitiful smile.

“It’s a lot easier in books. I know that.”

“Damn right it is. We read some books at A&M. Not
that
many, I guess.” Now we can both grin together. “Where’d you attend, Frank?”

“Michigan.”

“East Lansing, right?”

“Ann Arbor.”

“Well. You read more books there than I did at College Station, I know that.”

“Just looking at everything around here now, it looks like you made the right choices, Wade.”

“Frank, I guess so.” With his toe Wade pokes at a scuff of dry concrete on the floor. He pressures it until it’s clear it won’t budge, then he shakes his head. “Your life can change a hundred ways, I’ll tell you that.”

“I know it, Wade.”

“I took a job with the Turnpike Authority. I left Cade with Esther’s folks in Irving and came up and lived a bachelor’s life for a year. As far away from my other life as I could get. I went from being an engineer in Texas to being a toll-taker in New Jersey in a week’s time. With help of course. It was a step down. With a big cut in pay. But I didn’t care because I was a total wreck, Frank. You don’t think you’re a total wreck, but you are, and I had to start over again, get taken up by a new place, as crazy a place as this is, it didn’t matter. I’m a problem-solver by nature, Frank. Engineers always are. And this was my problem. If you ask me, Americans are too sensitive to moving down in rank. It isn’t so bad.”

“It doesn’t sound easy though. It makes my problems seem pretty small in comparison.”

“I can’t tell you if it was easy or not.” His forehead ravels as if he wished he could, would like to be able to talk about that too, only it is lost to him now—a mercy. “You know, son. There’s a fellow works for us up at Exit 9. I won’t say his name. Except in 1959, he was living out west near Yellowstone. Had a wife and three children, a house and a mortgage. A job, a life. One night he’d been to a bar and was on his way home. And just after he left, a whole side of a mountain collapsed down on the bar. He stopped in the middle of the highway, he told me, and he could see back in the moonlight to where a lot of lights had been that were all gone because this huge landslide had taken place. Killed everybody but him. And do you know what he did?” Wade raises his eyebrows and squints, both at the same time.

“I’ve got a pretty good idea.” (Who in a modern world wouldn’t?)

“Well, and you’d be right. He got in his car and drove east. He said he felt like somebody’d just said, ‘Here, Nick, here’s your whole life being handed to you again. See if you can’t do better this time.’ And he’s reported dead right now out in Idaho or Wyoming, or one of those states. Insurance paid. Who knows where his family is? His kids? And he works right beside me on the Turnpike, happy as a man can be. I’d never tell it, of course. And I’m a lot luckier than he is. We both just had new lives served to us, and a conviction to do something with them.” Wade looks at me seriously, rubs his palms delicately on the chrome door handle beside him. He wants me to know that he’s discovered something important late in life, something worth knowing when very few people ever discover any thing by just living. He’d like to pass some wisdom along from the for-what-it’s-worth department, though I can’t help wondering what his friend’s wife would think if she ever came through Exit 9 at just the right moment. It could happen. “Do you want to get married again, Frank?”