“That’s a good point.”
“So the thing isn’t that we’ve been losing, but that we’ve been losing by so little. That we’ve managed to keep from being blown away.”
“You’ve really got a handle on this thing, Mike,” Druff ventured feelingly.
And then Mike asked him to use his influence with the St. Louis Commissioner of Streets either to dissuade the owner of the Blues from selling or to see to it that the St. Louis consortium of businessmen that was seeking to buy the team was successful in its efforts.
Because what Druff hadn’t understood was that all this talk about the Blues, however distant, however remote from Druff’s full blebs, precarious as blown bubble gum, however wide of the mark of his marked heart, was finally concerned with Druff’s existence, the flawed ramparts and bulwarks where Mikey crouched, his son’s magic, superstitious circle of well-being.
He couldn’t even blame him, couldn’t cut bait or pare his losses.
Because how old could M. have been during Druff’s deathbed speech, nine, ten, eleven?
Dick had come around and opened the door for him.
Druff must have looked surprised, possibly threatened. He may even have thrown his hands up defensively.
“You startled me.”
“I thought you were asleep,” Dick said.
“Lost in thought.”
“You’ve got nothing to think about, Commissioner.” Druff didn’t take it personally but the driver thought he had. Dick lowered his voice. “Oh, Christ,” he said, “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I’m sorry. I got this bug up my ass. Trouble at home. Shit with the wife. Like someone said, we go back, you and me. Thick and thin, long and short. I know it don’t always seem that way, but I got no complaints. It ain’t anything personal. Hell, you’ve been good to me. I know I sounded off, but we both said some stuff. Here, let me help you. You can stiffen up pretty good on those jump seats. They’re more trouble than they’re worth, you ask me. Hey, sit where you want. Sit where you can keep an eye on me. The way I’ve been at you? I just wanted to let you know. You don’t have anything to think about. Not from this quarter. Mum’s the word. Mrs. D. don’t hear boo from this quarter. Not a peep. Hellfire, Commissioner, if you could just find it in your heart to let the past forty minutes’ worth of bygones be bygones, you have nothing to fear from me.
“And I’ll tell you something else. Old Doug isn’t going to hear anything about it either.”
“Get away from me.”
“What did I do?”
“Hey,” Druff said, changing his tune, “nothing. It’s how I tell people good night.”
And let himself into his darkened house, though before he went upstairs for what little remained of the night, he made, in the dark, his way to the kitchen where, still in the dark, not bothering with the light switch, he fumbled about for a few seconds around the kitchen table where, near the unwashed cereal bowl, the glass in which perhaps an inch or inch and a half of milk lay souring, hard by the crumbs of toast and drying smears of jelly, he found, propped against the toaster, where the thirty-year-old man-child couldn’t miss it, the note Rose Helen had left for him and which, because it had been laid in so cheery a place as a kitchen, so redolent of his mom’s home cooking, against an appliance designed not to reheat the bread she did not bother to bake but to receive fresh slices of the packaged white bread he preferred, he would not even remove, reading the signs of the message instead of the message itself, and which Druff, the adventurer/philanderer neither of them had bargained for, did not bother to read either, that would undoubtedly say (there in the dark, so why even bother with a light, which just might wake him, draw him, concerned, who was always concerned, who lived in the depths of concern as a fish lives in water and who, even if he didn’t clear tables, had made of himself this safety-first sentinel, this factless, better-safe-than-sorry son who pulled space heaters from their wall sockets, standing lamps, radios, anything electric which, at least in the estimation of his concerned imagination, could reach the critical mass to draw energy, ignition flame, into the kitchen to check, to make sure their house hadn’t been broken into and his parents left for dead in their beds): “Michael sweetheart, I’m upstairs in bed. Dad’s not home yet, but called to say that he’s with some men arranging about that Marathon he’s been trying to get for the city, and not to wait up. I hope you had a good evening at school, or in the gym working out. If you’re going to have something to eat, please rinse out the dishes before you go to bed. They’re hard to wash when food is left standing in them too long, and they attract bugs. See you in the morning. Love, Mother.”
But it was too late, had already been too late when Druff had let himself into the darkened house and, ever so quietly, and with as much care as if there had been a real MacGuffin in his life, made his way into the kitchen to confirm what he should have taken for granted in the first place, which he did take for granted. It would have been too late even if he hadn’t fumbled about at the kitchen table for those few seconds, even if he hadn’t clinked the spoon in the cereal bowl or brushed his arm against the box and shaken the cornflakes in it.
“Dad?” his son stage-whispered from the stairs. “Dad, is that you down there, Dad?”
“I’m all right, Mikey,” Druff said.
Down came the boy the rest of the way and switched on the light in the kitchen.
“Why didn’t you turn a light on? You could have fallen.”
“I didn’t fall. I’m fine. What are you doing up so late? And if you’re so worried about people falling in the dark, why’d you turn off that hall light Mother leaves on all night?”
Now, in their bright kitchen, Mikey performed his strange, blind tic. He shut his eyes. Druff, who’d picked the tic up from his son, shut his eyes. They watched the tinted darkness of their squeezed lids, passed through the waves and breakers of their mutual resentments. Mikey went first.
“So,” he said, “how’d it go, Dad?”
Druff didn’t realize at first what his son meant, answering, “Fine. I said I’m all right.”
“No,” the kid said, “I meant with Scouffas. I meant with that other guy.”
Hurriedly, Druff glanced down at the note Rose Helen had left.
(So you can imagine how he felt. You can just imagine.)
But Mikey was already speaking. “Jeez,” said their man-child, making his queer symbolic associations, working his own ritualized actuarials, factlessly, baselessly, adding years to his father’s life, extending by decades the frontiers of his own boundless childhood, “you could have knocked me over and over with a feather. Any city can have a baseball team. Seattle has one, unlikely towns like Minneapolis and Milwaukee. And all those places in the Sunbelt? Come on. San Diego? Give me a break. They’re jokes, they’re just jokes. I don’t care how many times they win their division, or the pennant. Or the World Series, even. They’re just jokes. Or can you imagine a state like Texas having two teams? In the Lone Star State? That’s just got to be graft. Somebody must have had their hand out big time. You know how that works. I mean I don’t have to tell you! If it ever came out, the people responsible could get years. Years! They’d be put away so fast for so long their kids would never see them again. And how long do you think they’d survive locked up like that? People like that? Privileged people. People accustomed to giving the orders. Just the shame and disgrace would kill them if the hardened cons and the bread and water didn’t get to them first.