But the baseball didn't change. The ball still found my glove. There were the old rituals at home. I rubbed my hands in the dirt, then wiped them on my pants, took the bat and rapped it on the plate. The pitch that followed always took me by surprise — hard and high, breaking away. The pitcher spun the ball like a dial on a safe. And trains still sound the same when they run through this town. At night, one will shake our house (we live near an overpass) and I can't go back to sleep. I'll count the men who walked up that gangway to the ship. The train wheels squeal and sing. It might as well be hauling the cargo of my dreams.
DISH NIGHT
Every Wednesday was Dish Night at the Wells Theatre. And it worked, because she was there week in and week out. She sat through the movie to get her white bone china. A saucer. A cup. The ushers stood on chairs by the doors and reached into the big wooden crates. There was straw all over the floor of the lobby and balls of newspaper from strange cities. I knew she was the girl for me. I'd walk her home. She'd hug the dish to her chest. The streetlights would be on and the moon behind the trees. She'd talk about collecting enough pieces for our family of eight. “Oh, it's everyday and I know it,“ she'd say, holding it at arm's length. “They're so modern and simple and something we'll have a long time after we forget about the movies.“
I forget just what happened then. She heard about Pearl Harbor at a Sunday matinee. They stopped the movie, and a man came out on stage. The blue stage lights flooded the gold curtain. It was dark in there, but outside it was bright and cold. They didn't finish the show. Business would pick up then, and the Wells Theatre wouldn't need a Dish Night to bring the people in. The one we had gone to the week before was the last one ever, and we hadn't known it. The gravy boat looked like a slipper. I went to the war, to Europe, where she wrote to me on lined school paper and never failed to mention we were a few pieces shy of the full set.
This would be the movie of my life, this walking home under the moon from a movie with a girl holding a dinner plate under her arm like a book. I believed this is what I was fighting for. Everywhere in Europe I saw broken pieces of crockery. In the farmhouses, the cafés. Along the roads were drifts of smashed china. On a beach, in the sand where I was crawling, I found a shard of it the sea washed in, all smooth with blue veins of a pattern.
I came home and washed the dishes every night, and she stacked them away, bowls nesting on bowls as if we were moving the next day.
The green field is covered with tables. The sky is huge and spread with clouds. The pickup trucks and wagons are backed in close to each table so that people can sit on the lowered tailgates. On the tables are thousands of dishes. She walks ahead of me. Picks up a cup, then sets it down again. A plate. She runs her finger around a rim. The green field rises slightly as we walk, all the places set at the tables. She hopes she will find someone else who saw the movies she saw on Dish Night. The theater was filled with people. I was there. We do this every Sunday after church.
WHAT I SEE
I was killing time at the ranger station in West Glacier, twirling the postcard racks by the door. There was an old one of some teenagers around a campfire near Swift Current Lake. They have on dude ranch clothes, indigo jeans with the legs rolled into wide cuffs. The boys have flattops. There is a ukulele. One girl, staring into the fire, wears saddle shoes. The colors are old colors, from the time women all wore red lipstick. Beyond the steel blue lake the white glaciers are smearing down the mountainsides. I saw the glaciers even though it was night in the card. They gave off their own light. No one ever bought this card, not even as a joke. I was looking at this card when a woman walked in with her son. They mounted the stair above the model of the park. The models of the mountains were like piles of green and brown laundry, the glaciers sheets. The lakes were blue plastic. A red ribbon stood for the Going to the Sun Highway. It all looked manageable. The mother pointed. In the corner was the little house. You are here. She said to me then: Is there any place we can go to overlook the grizzlies?
This year the wolves have moved back into the park. And number 23 had mauled a camper, his third this year, but didn't kill her. Children walk through the station with bells on their feet. When the wind is right you can hear the songs drifting in from the higher trails. We were told more people would be here this season because of the way the world has turned. There are too many people here for this place ever to be wild wild.
The cable's come as far as Cutbank. I rent a room in town my days off and watch the old movies they've juiced up with color. But the colors are as pale as an old rug, like they've already faded from old age. Now the blue sky outside looks manufactured, transported here from the other side of the mountain, its own conveyer belt. A bolt of dyed cloth. It drips with color. And my shorts here are khaki, which is Urdu for the word dirt. Sometimes my eyes hurt from seeing the situation so clearly. Every ten minutes or so I hear the ice tumble in the machine out on the breezeway. Then the condenser kicks on. Beyond the hot tableland I can see the five white fingers of the glacier.
All of what I know about the world worms its way to me from Atlanta. The message is to stay put. They have a park in Atlanta. In it is the Cyclorama, a huge picture with no edges. The battle of Atlanta is everywhere. The painting keeps wrapping around me so that even out of the corner of my eyes I see nothing but the smoke and the smoky bodies falling about me. Atlanta is a mustard yellow in the distance. Sherman rides up in front of me. The battle ends and it begins again. I climb out of the painting through a hole in the floor. There is no place to overlook it. In the basement of the building is the famous steam locomotive The General. I see Ted Turner has just painted that movie.
And it strikes me now that I looked like Buster Keaton, my campaign hat tilted like his hat, as I stood next to King on the memorial steps. The monument behind us was white, even its shadows. King's suit had a sheen like feathers or skin. The white shirts glowed. Everyone wore white shirts except for my khaki, because color hadn't been invented yet. The Muslims wore white. Their caps were white. And the crowd spilling down the steps looked like marble in white to stay cool. It was swampy near the river. They showed the speech around his birthday. I am always there, a ghost over his left shoulder. I was so young. I look as if nothing could surprise me. A ranger look. It always surprises me now. Now I know how it all came out, what happened to that man. I look like a statue. King flickers. I kept him in the corner of my eye. I watched the crowd. What I see is me seeing. I don't see what is coming. When they color it they will get the color of my eyes wrong.
In the window of the motel, I watch the day move. I have made a career with Interior. The range is being painted over by a deep blue sky. The glacier grips the mountaintop and then lets go to form a cloud. Then everything just goes.
THE TEAK WOOD DECK OF THE USS Indiana
I stabbed a man in Zulu. It had to do with a woman. I remember it was a pearled penknife I'd got from a garage. I'd used it for whittling, and the letters were wearing off. It broke off in his thigh and nicked the bone. It must have hurt like hell.
I did the time in Michigan City in the metal shop where I would brush on flux and other men would solder. Smoke would be going up all over the room. They made the denim clothes right there in the prison. The pants were as sharp as the sheet metal we were folding into dustpans and flour scoops. It was like I was a paper doll and they'd put the jacket on me by creasing the tabs over my shoulders. And the stuff never seemed to soften up but came back from the laundry shrunk and rumpled and just as stiff, until the one time when all the starch would be gone and your clothes were rags and you got some new.