I sped up. It was a long time before my plane left but I needed to be at the airport. Needed those clean long boring halls and plastic chairs where you sat looking at nothing, waiting for the time to pass until you could get on a plane and continue looking at nothing for a few more hours.
Before you see L.A. Airport, you see the planes gliding in over the highway to land. They are enormous there, eighty feet above the ground and sinking. Larger even than when they are parked at the terminal. They dwarf everything as they drop slowly in toward earth; you love their size and the fact they’re tame, that you can ride in one anytime you want.
I left the car in long-term parking and walked quickly to the terminal. It was an evening in the middle of the week and traffic was light.
So much emotion at the doors of an airport. Hugs and tears, the joy on the faces of those who’ve just landed and are coming out into the real air after so many hours on the plane. Cars pull up, pull away. Above all else, everything is rushed. A rush to get there, to get out of here. The world on fast forward. Where was Lincoln now? Rushing across the country toward two people—
“Call them! Just call them up!” Whatever is most obvious hides when you’re stressed. Two steps into the building, the idea to call and give them some kind of warning came to me. I looked around wildly for a telephone. Over there! I’d taken a load of change when I left the house, which was good because this was going to be one expensive call. I dialed New Jersey information and for the second time that night asked for Gregory Meier’s number. Those blessed push-button telephones. How long it took when you were in a hurry but had to twist and twist the wheel of the old machines. Now stab stab stab… and you’re through. It was ridiculous feeling so pressed for time when Lincoln was still four hours away from landing, but I did. The connection was made and their phone began to ring thirty-five hundred miles away.
“Hi. You’ve reached the Meiers, but no one’s home now. Please leave your name and message and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can. Thanks for calling.”
There was a peep and the demanding silence that expects you to talk. I couldn’t think of what to say. In one minute? If I had told them, “Be careful of a boy who’s coming. He thinks you’re his parents and could be dangerous,” they might have called the police or gotten scared enough to make things even more confusing and difficult. What if someone I didn’t know called and told me that? I’d think either that it was a bizarre prank or that the speaker was a sadist. I tried calling four more times before taking off, but their machine always answered. What did that mean in terms of Lincoln? Would they be home by the time he reached them? If not, if they were out of town and not due back for days, how would that affect him? What would he do? Wait? Take his anger and frustration, get back on a plane with it, and fly somewhere else? Knowing our son, he’d wait a short time and then return home. I didn’t know which was worse.
Although the plane was half empty, I got stuck next to a woman who began talking the instant I sat down and didn’t stop until I got up again, told her I had a great deal of work to do, and changed seats. I wasn’t in the mood to be civil. There were only so many hours before New York and I wanted to try to figure out as much as I could. After we landed, there wouldn’t be time for thought.
Once we were airborne, the stewardess came round asking for drink orders. I would have killed for a double anything, but bit my tongue and asked for a ginger ale instead. I was exhausted and a drink would put me right to sleep. Sitting by a window, I watched as the plane tipped and banked, then found its way and leveled out over the black and yellow twinkling below. I remembered driving over tonight and seeing planes coming in. How romantic and heart-lifting the sight. Yet how lonesome and small I felt now, climbing up into that same sky.
We passed over a baseball stadium with all its lights still on after a night game. Seeing the field reminded me of an unsettling discussion Lily and I had had a few weeks before.
Like Lincoln, I had always loved baseball. Until I was fifteen or so, the nucleus of every summer was the game, whether that meant watching it on television, playing catch with my friends, talking about it with the barber when I went in for a ballplayer’s crew cut, trading Topps baseball cards with others…
The minute I was old enough to play in Little League, I begged my parents to sign me up. They did, and one of the proudest memories of my young life was walking into the living room after dinner one night wearing for the first time my robin’s-egg-blue baseball cap and T-shirt that said the name of our sponsor, “Nick’s Shell Station,” on the front. My team was named the Yankees, thank God, which made life even better because this was in one of the periodic heydays of the New York Yankees and all of the men who played on that great team were my heroes. Mom put down her crossword puzzle and said I looked “very nice.” But Dad paid me the supreme compliment. Giving me a careful once-over, he said I looked just like Moose Skowron, Yankee first baseman and my favorite player.
Our first game was also opening day of the season that year and many people came out to watch. I was assigned to right field, the equivalent of Siberia in Little League because no child ever hits a ball there. However, our coach thought it was a good place for me because I couldn’t catch for beans and would do the least damage there. Which didn’t bother me a bit because hitting was my dream, not fielding. Nothing felt better than whipping that Louisville Slugger bat around and once in a spectacular while feeling the great “clunk” of wood connecting with the ball. That’s what I lived for, not putting a huge leather glove up in the air to stop a ball from sailing by. Batting was heroic, fielding was only necessary.
Our opponents that first game were the Dodgers, a good team, but fearsome too because their star pitcher was none other than Jeffrey Alan Sapsford. His fastball, even then, would have struck out Moose Skowron.
By the fifth inning we were losing nine to nothing. I’d batted twice and struck out both times. Besides that, I’d dropped an easy fly ball and been yelled at by half my team. I knew I deserved their hatred. I was a bum, we were losing, the world was doom. Worse, my parents were there witnessing the debacle. I knew my father had skipped meeting the seven o’clock train (his biggest haul of tired customers) so he could be on hand for my debut. Some debut. I’d failed him, my team, the name Yankees.
The last time I got up to hit, Jeffrey Alan Sapsford looked at me with gleeful disdain. Unforgettably, his second baseman yelled, “Easy out!” and he was talking about me. The whole world had heard. I, the heir to Moose Skowron’s throne, was fixed in everyone’s mind as an “easy out.” Try erasing that kind of mark from your record when you’re that age.
Sapsford threw his first pitch and, without thinking, I swung and knocked the ball five hundred and forty miles into deep center field. I hit it so hard and far that the other team froze as one watching the ball soar off into that deep green infinity. The people in the grandstand got up and started applauding before I had even rounded first base. When I came in to home plate, my team stood there waiting for me and cheering as if this were the last game of the World Series and I had saved the day. Pure glory.
We still lost ten to one, but in the car riding home afterward, I was a hundred percent hero and no one could take that away from me, ever.
My parents chattered on about how great it had been, while I sat in the back seat basking in fresh memories and their praise. As we turned the corner of Main Street and Broadway, my father said with a loving chuckle, “And did you know your fly was open the whole way round?”
“What?”
“Your fly was down.”
“Oh, Stan, you said you weren’t going to tell him that.” Mom shook her head and smiled sympathetically at me over her shoulder.