In poleaxed, stunned-still shock, I looked down at my blue jeans. I’d hit a home run in these pants. They were part of the legend’s uniform! But there it was—the accusing white slip of my underpants beaming out through my fly. Not much. Not enough to really be seen unless you looked hard or someone drew your attention to it, but there nevertheless. The apex of my life—and my zipper was open!
I honestly don’t remember if I got over it quickly or if that moment’s brain-blasting embarrassment lasted a long time. Until I told the story to Lily, it had been a fond smile from way in my past, the kind of childhood memory you like to tell your partner so they can share a piece of your past few others know. I finished telling her the story with a smile and a shrug. “Max hits a homer.”
“That’s despicable. Your father is a real asshole sometimes.”
“Why?”
“Why? Why’d he tell you that? What was the point? You had your home run. It was yours, nothing could take it away from you. But he did—he spoiled it forever by telling you about your zipper. Listen to the way you tell it now—like it’s only a funny little amusing story. Right? ‘Max hits a homer.’ You should have heard your voice. It wasn’t only that, it was one of the supreme moments of your childhood. A home run! So what if your stupid zipper was down? So what if the whole world knew, so long as you didn’t? He’s an insensitive jerk.”
Call me blind. Or only in love with my father, whatever, I never thought of it like that. I knew the man loved me and wasn’t trying to ruin my moment. But like a hammer thrown across four decades, the wrongness of what he did hit me square in the head for the first time.
Looking down from the airplane at the empty, lit baseball stadium, I remembered my wife’s indignant voice as she spoke of him.
How many times had we done exactly the same thing with Lincoln? Was that what caused him to turn out so disastrously? Were there hundreds or thousands of things we’d done out of pure love that were nonetheless so flat-out wrong an enemy couldn’t have devised a more effective means of destroying our boy?
This is what I thought about while crossing America that night. Pity the man who is not sure of his sins. Beware of the child who is his responsibility.
Halfway through the trip, I thought if only I could stay up here in the air for the rest of my life. As in a children’s story, it would have made things so much simpler: Once upon a time there was a man who had made so many mistakes in his life that he decided to leave the earth and never return.
It was raining in New York when we landed. Water rolled down the windows in strange patterns as we taxied to the gate. Since it was such a late flight, there wasn’t the usual rush of passengers to leave their seats and then the plane itself. People rose slowly and shuffled forward to the exits like tired zombies.
Because I had only a carry-on bag, I walked straight to a telephone and called the Meiers again. It was seven-thirty in the morning. No luck. Next stop was a car rental desk. Within minutes I was behind the wheel of a new-smelling yellow Ford. I figured it would take about two hours to drive from Kennedy Airport to Somerset, New Jersey, but once on the road, morning traffic was beginning. It would take more time.
In the years since we’d met, I had thought very little about the Meiers. The only time I put life aside and concentrated on them was in a dentist’s office one morning. Sitting there waiting my turn, I picked up an architecture magazine and started giving it the quick shuffle-through. I passed something, ignored it, and only seconds later did it register. Leafing back fast, I found the large two-page spread on the house I had visited one depressing afternoon in the middle of that first crisis. There it was! Anwen and Gregory Meier’s remarkable home. A cockeyed cupola and what looked like a kind of giant bat wing had been added on to the original building, but it was such a memorable place that no matter what, it couldn’t be disguised. The text said Anwen Meier’s Brendan House, one of the most famous examples of the Corvallis School of architecture, had received yet another prestigious award, this time from a European architectural organization. It spoke of the house as if everyone knew about it and wouldn’t be surprised by this latest tribute. I tore the article out and showed it to Lily. Shaking her head, she began to cry. The memory of her face reddening and the glistening tears on her cheeks stayed with me many miles.
Somewhere along those miles was the rest stop where Lincoln bought his supplies. It was the only place he could have gotten them in the middle of the night on the New Jersey Turnpike. He bought big bottles of Coca-Cola. I would guess four of them. Four would do the trick if he was clever and careful about it. Gasoline was no problem. Pull into a station, fill ‘er up, and ask the attendant if they sold those jerry cans you keep a couple of gallons of extra gas in for the lawn mower. Gallons of gasoline make quite a fire. What did he use for a wick? Probably underpants or a T-shirt. Maybe he took off his “Fuck Dancing—Let’s Fuck!” shirt, tore it to pieces, and stuck them into the tops of the bottles. That would have been appropriate: Coke bottles full of golden gasoline and “Fuck” shirt scraps. That’s all you need. Anyone who watches television knows how to make a Molotov cocktail, the poor man’s hand grenade.
I knew he was bad, capable of things I had never wanted to think about. But even later, after retracing his steps and grasping his motives, I was appalled by what he did that night. If only he had stopped a few minutes to listen, to ask questions and hear the truth, terrible as it was. None of it would have happened. Other things would have, certainly, but not that and not to them.
He was a fast driver and had his three-hour head start on me. He also had a great sense of direction and would have no trouble finding the house. When he was young one of his hobbies had been studying maps, particularly exotic ones—Cambodia, Mali, Bhutan—and finding the shortest routes from one heroic or otherworldly-sounding point to another. Timbuktu to Nouakchott. Bu Phlok to Snuol. One birthday we gave him a beautiful brass calipers to measure his distances exactly. He still had those calipers in a desk drawer, along with the bullet and the picture of Little White.
I envisioned him driving eighty miles an hour down the New Jersey Turnpike, stopping only to get gas and the supplies he needed for the job. What went through his head in those hours? At home he always drove with the radio on loud, impatiently turning the dial whenever a song came on he didn’t like. Add that to the picture. Add clicking on the overhead light while steering with one hand, looking quickly from his map to road signs approaching, then to the map again to make sure he was going the right way.
Lily had made this same drive sixteen years before, fleeing New York in a car she’d bought with money stolen from a drug dealer/pimp. She was only five years older than Lincoln was now. All three of us had made this same drive south, all for such different desperate reasons.
I got off at the New Brunswick exit and remembered certain landmarks from my last trip, although the town itself had been cleaned up since then in the typical ways—homogenized, mallified. Morning traffic was heavy. Stuck in a long line at a red light, I felt weariness creep up the back of my head and spread. The people around me had had their good night’s sleep, hot morning showers, breakfasts to get them up and out and going. Not me. As the light turned green and I was off again, I hated every one of them; resented them their stomachs full of savory coffee, the safe tedium of their jobs. They had children. Their children were not like mine.
New Jersey farm country, the sun only just up. Cows far off in fields, dogs running around free in backyards. Kids standing by the side of the road waiting for the school bus. The closer I got, the tighter the knot in my stomach grew. One last left turn and I was on their road. There’s where I pulled over last time because I had to pee so badly. Some of the ticky-tacky houses had been torn down and replaced with attractive, much more expensive-looking places. The invasion of the middle class.