The Sportswriter (41 page)

“I had a blood syndrome that made a doctor think I was dying of cancer. I wasn’t, but nobody figured it out for a while.”

“You were lucky, then, weren’t you?” Lynette is thinking of poor dead Beany again, cold in the Catholic section of the Fort Dix cemetery. Life is never fair.

“I was headed over in six more months, so I guess so. Yes ma’am.”

“You don’t have to ma’am me, Frank,” Lynette says and bats her eyes all around. She smiles dreamily down the table at Wade, who smiles back at her in his best old southern gent manner. “My former husband was in Vietnam in the Coast Guard,” Lynette says. “Not many knew the Guard was even there. But I have letters postmarked the Mekong Delta and Saigon.”

“Where’ve you got ’em hid?” Vicki smirks at everyone.

“Past is past, sweetheart. I threw them out when I met that man right there.” Lynette nods and smiles at Wade. “We don’t need to pretend, do we. Everybody’s been married here except Cade.”

Cade blinks his dark eyes like a puzzled bull.

“Those guys saw some real tough action,” Wade says. “Stan told me, Lynette’s ex-husband, that he probably killed two hundred people he never saw, just riding along shooting the jungle day after day, night after night.” Wade shakes his head.

“That’s really something,” I say.

“Right,” Cade grunts sarcastically.

“Are you sorry not to have seen real action,” Lynette says, turning to me.

“He sees enough,” Vicki says and smirks again. “That’s my department.”

Lynette smiles dimly at her. “Be nice, sweetheart. Try to be, anyway.”

“I’m perfect,” Vicki says. “Don’t I
look
perfect?”

“I’d have some more of that lamb,” I say. “Cade, can I pass some your way?” Cade gives me a devious look as I catch a slab of gray lamb and pass him the platter. For some reason, my mind cannot come up with a good sports topic, though it’s trying like a computer. All I can think is facts. Batting averages. Dates. Seating capacities. Third-down ratios of last year’s Super Bowl opponents (though I can’t remember which teams actually played). Sometimes sports are no help.

“Frank, I’d be interested to hear you out on this one,” Wade says, swallowing a big wedge of lamb. “Just in your journalist’s opinion, are we, would you say, in a prewar or a postwar situation in this country right now?” Wade shakes his head in earnest dismay. “I guess I get sour about things sometimes. I wish I didn’t.”

“I haven’t paid much attention to politics the last few years, to tell the truth, Wade. My opinion never seemed worth much.”

“I hope there’s a world war before I’m too old to be in it. That’s all I know,” Cade says.

“That’s what Beany thought, Cade.” Lynette frowns at Cade.

“Well,” he says to his plate after a moment’s numbed silence.

“Now seriously, Frank,” Wade says. “How can you stay isolated from events on a grand scale, is my question.” Wade isn’t badgering me. It is just the earnest way of his mind.

“I write sports, Wade. If I can write a piece for the magazine on, say, what’s happening to the team concept here in America, and do a good job there, I feel pretty good about things. Pretty patriotic, like I’m not isolating myself.”

“That makes sense.” Wade nods at me thoughtfully. He is leaning on his elbows, over his plate, hands clasped. “I can buy that.”

“What
has
happened to the team concept,” Lynette asks, and looks at everyone by turns. “I’m not sure I know even what that is.”

“That’s pretty complicated,” Wade says, “wouldn’t you say so, Frank?”

“If you talk to athletes and coaches the way I do, that’s all you hear, from the pros especially. Baseball, football. The line is, everybody has a role to play, and if anybody isn’t willing to play his role, then he doesn’t fit into the team’s plans.”

“It sounds all right to me, Frank,” Lynette says.

“It’s all a crocka shit’s what it is.” Cade scowls miserably at his own two hands, which are on the table. “They’re just all assholes. They wouldn’t know a team if it bit ’em on the ass. They’re all prima donnas. Half of ’em are queers, too.”

“That’s certainly intelligent, Cade,” Vicki says. “Thanks very much for your brilliant comment. Why don’t you tell us some more of your philosophies.”

“That wasn’t too nice, Cade,” Lynette says. “Frank had the floor then.”

“Ppptttt,” Cade gives a Bronx cheer and rolls his eyes.

“Is that some new language you learned working on boats?” Vicki says.

“Okay, seriously, Frank.” Wade is still leaning up on his elbows like a jurist. He’s hit a subject with some meat on its bones, and he’s ready to saw right in. “I think Lynette’s got a pretty valid point in what she says here.” (Forgetting for the moment Cade’s opinion.) “I mean, what’s the matter with following your assignment on the team? When I was working oil rigs, that’s exactly how we did it. And I’ll tell you, too, it worked.”

“Well, maybe it’s too small a point. Only the way these guys use team concept is too much like a machine to me, Wade. Too much like one of those oil wells. It leaves out the player’s part—to play or not play; to play well or not so well. To give his all. What all these guys mean by team concept is just cogs in the machine. It forgets a guy has to decide to do it again every day, and that men don’t work like machines. I don’t think that’s a crazy point, Wade. It’s just the nineteenth-century idea—dynamos and all that baloney—and I don’t much like it.”

“But in the end, the result’s the same, isn’t it?” Wade says seriously. “Our team wins.” He blinks hard at me.

“If everybody decides that’s what they want, it is. If they can perform well enough and long enough. It’s just the
if
I’m concerned about, Wade. I worry about the
decide
part, too, I guess. We take too much for granted. What if I just don’t want to win that bad, or can’t?”

“Then you shouldn’t be on the team.” Wade seems utterly puzzled (and I can’t blame him). “Maybe we agree and I don’t know it, Frank?”

“It’s all niggers with big salaries shootin dope, if you ask me,” Cade says. “I think if everybody carried a gun, everything’d work a lot better.”

“Oh, Christ.” Vicki throws down her napkin and stares away into the living room.

“Who’s he?” Cade gapes.

“You can just be excused, Cade Arcenault,” Lynette says crisply, with utter certainty. “You can leave and live with the other cavemen. Tell Cade, Wade. He can leave the table.”

“Cade.” Wade beams an unmistakable look of unmentionable violence Cade’s way. “Put the lock on that, mister.” But Cade cannot stop smirking and lurks back in his chair like a criminal, folding his big arms and balling his fists in hatred. Wade balls his own fists and butts them together softly in front of him, while his eyes return to a point two inches out onto the white field of linen tablecloth. He is cogitating about teams still, about what makes one and what doesn’t. I could jawbone about this till it’s time to start home again, though I admit the whole subject has begun to make me vaguely uneasy.

“What you’re telling me then, Frank, and I may have this all bum-fuzzled up. But it seems to me you’re saying this idea—” Wade arches his eyebrows and smiles up at me in a beatific way “—leaves out our human element. Am I right?”

“That says it well, Wade.” I nod in complete agreement. Wade has got this in terms he likes now (and a pretty versatile sports cliché at that). And I am pleased as a good son to go along with him. “A team is really intriguing to me, Wade. It’s an event, not a thing. It’s time but not a watch. You can’t reduce it to mechanics and roles.”

Wade nods, holding his chin between his thumbs and index fingers. “All right, all right, I guess I understand.”

“The way the guys are talking about it now, Wade, leaves out the whole idea of the hero, something I’m personally not willing to give up on yet. Ty Cobb wouldn’t have been a role-player.” I give Cade a hopeful look, but his eyes are drowsy and suffused with loathing. My knee begins to twitch under the table.

“I’m not either,” Lynette says, her eyes alarmed.

“It also leaves out why the greatest players, Ty Cobb or Babe Ruth, sometimes don’t perform as greatly as they should. And why the best teams lose, and teams that shouldn’t win, do. That’s team play of another kind, I think, Wade. It’s not role-playing and machines like a lot of these guy s’ll tell you.”

“I think I understand, Wade,” Lynette says, nodding. “He’s saying athletes and all these sports people are just not too smart.”

“I guess it’s giving a good accounting, sweetheart, is what it comes down to,” Wade says somberly. “Sometimes it’ll be enough. Some times it isn’t going to be.” He purses his lips and stares at my idea like a crystal vase suspended in his mind’s rare ether.

I stare at my own plateful of second helping I haven’t touched and won’t, the pallid lamb congealed and hard as a wood chip, and the untouched peas and brocoli flower alongside it cold as Christmas. “When I can make that point in one of our Our Editors Think’ columns, Wade, that half a million people’ll read, then I figure I’ve addressed the big picture. What you said: events on a grand scale. I don’t know what else I really can do after that.”

“That’s everything in life right there, is my belief,” Lynette says, though she’s thinking of another subject, and her bright green eyes scout the table for anyone who hasn’t finished his or hers yet.

In the kitchen an electric coffeemaker clicks, then spurts, then sighs like an iron lung, and I get an unexpected whiff of Cade who smells of lube jobs and postadolescent fury. He cannot help himself here. His short life—Dallas to Barnegat Pines—has not been especially wonderful up to now, and he knows it. Though to my small regret, there’s nothing on God’s green earth I can do to make it better for him. My future letter-of-recommendation and fishing excursions with just the three men cut no ice with him. Perhaps one day he will stop me for speeding, and we can have the talk we can’t have now, see eye-to-eye on crucial issues—patriotism and the final rankings in the American League East, subjects that would bring us to blows in a second this afternoon. Life will work out better for Cade once he buttons on a uniform and gets comfortable in his black-and-white machine. He is an enforcer, natural born, and it’s possible he has a good heart. If there are better things in the world to be, there are worse, too. Far worse.

Vicki is staring down at her full plate, but glances up once out the tops of her eyes and gives me a disheartened sour-mouth of disgust. There is trouble, as I’ve suspected, on the horizon. I have talked too much to suit her and, worse, said the wrong things. And worse yet, jabbered on like a drunk old uncle in a voice she’s never heard, a secular Norman Vincent Pealeish tone I use for the speaker’s bureau and that even makes
me
squeamish sometimes when I hear it on tape. This may have amounted to a betrayal, a devalued intimacy, an illusion torn, causing doubt to bloom into dislike. Our own talk is always of the jokey-quippy-irony style and lets us leap happily over “certain things” to other “certain things”—cozy intimacy, sex and rapture, ours in a heartbeat. But now I may have stepped out of what she thinks she knows and feels safe about, and become some Gildersleeve she doesn’t know, yet instinctively distrusts. There is no betrayal like voice betrayal, I can tell you that. Women hate it. Sometimes X would hear me say something—something as innocent as saying “Wis-sconsin” when I usually said “Wisconsin”—and turn hawk-eyed with suspicion, wander around the house for twenty minutes in a brown brood. “Something you said didn’t sound like you,” she’d say after a while. “I can’t remember what it was, but it wasn’t the way you talk.” I, of course, would be stumped for what to answer, other than to say that if I said it, it must be me.

Though I should know it’s a bad idea to accompany anyone but yourself home for the holidays. Holidays with strangers never turn out right, except in remote train stations, Vermont ski lodges or the Bahamas.

“Who’ll have coffee?” Lynette says brightly. “I’ve got decaf.” She is clearing dishes smartly.

“Knicks,” Cade mutters, pounding to his feet and slumping off.

“Nix to you too, Cade,” Lynette says, pushing through the kitchen door, arms laden. She turns to frown, then cuts her eyes at Wade who is sitting with a pleasant, distracted look on his square face, palms flat on the tablecloth thinking about team concept and the grand scale of things. She widely mouths words to the effect of getting a point across to this Cade Arcenault outfit, or there’ll be hell to pay, then vanishes out the door, letting back in a new scent of strong coffee.

Wade is galvanized, and gives Vicki and me a put-on smile, rising from the head of the table, looking small and uncomfortable in the loose-fitting sports jacket and ugly tie—unquestionably a joke present from the family or the men at the toll plaza. He has worn it as a token of good spirits, but they have temporarily abandoned him. “I guess I’ve got a couple things to do,” he says miserably.

“Don’t you rough up on that boy now,” Vicki threatens in a whisper. Her eyes are savage slits. “Life ain’t peaches-and-milk for him either.”

Wade looks at me and smiles helplessly, and once again I imagine him peeping into an empty hospital room from which he’ll never return.

“Cade’s fine, sister,” he says with a smile, then wanders off to find Cade, already deep in some squarish room of his down a hallway on another level.