“I like it out there,” I say. “Sometimes you can imagine you’re in Egypt. Sometimes you can even see the World Trade Center.”
She gives my leg a friendly pinch and turns me loose to sit up straight. “Egypt, huh? You probably would like that. You’re in from the nut department, too. Tell me what that little boy of yours died of?”
“Reye’s.”
She shakes her head as though mystified. “Boy-shoot. What’d you do when he died?”
This is a question I’m not interested in exploring, though I know she wouldn’t ask if she weren’t concerned about me and felt some good could come out of it. She is as much a literalist in these matters as I am, and much more savvy about men than I am about women.
“We were both sitting beside his bed. It was early in the morning. Before light. We may have been asleep, really. But a nurse camé in and said, ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Bascombe, Ralph has expired.’ We both just sat there a few minutes, stunned, though we knew it was going to happen. And then she cried a while and I did, too. And then I went home and cooked up some bacon and toast, and ended up watching television. I had a tape of great NBA championships, and I watched that until it got light.”
“Death’ll make you nutty, won’t it?” Vicki rests her head on the seat back, pulls her feet up, and hugs her shiny black knees. Far ahead I see a plane — a great jet — floating earthward where I know Newark airport to be; it is a promising sign. “You know what we did when my Mama died?” She glances up, as if to see if I’m still here.
“No.”
“We all went out and ate Polynesian. It wasn’t a big surprise or anything, either. She had everything you can have and I was working right in Texas Shriners and knew everything from talking to the doctors, which I don’t think is really that good. Everett and Daddy, Cade and me, though, went out to the Garland Mall in the middle of the hot afternoon and ate poo-poo pork. We just wanted to eat. I think you want to eat when someone dies. Then we just went and spent money. I bought a gold add-a-bead necklace I didn’t need. Daddy bought a three-piece suit at Dillards’ and a new wristwatch. Cade bought something. And Everett bought a new-used red Corvette he probably still owns, I guess. He did have it.” She extends her lower lip over the other one and focuses down beetle-browed on the visible memory of Everett’s Corvette, which stands out now more than death. Her nature is to put her faith in objects more than essences. And in most ways that makes her the perfect companion.
Her story, however, has left me with an unexpected gloominess. Some aspects of hidden-life-revealed have a certain bedrock factuality I don’t like. I’d be a braver soldier if the story had someone discovering they had Lou Gehrig’s disease or a brain tumor on the eve of his last track meet, and deciding to run anyway. But in this I am unprotected from the emotions — vivid ones — of true death, and I suddenly feel, whipping along the girdered Turnpike, exactly as I did that morning I described: bereaved and in jeopardy of greater bereavement sweeping me up.
Women have always lightened my burdens, picked up my faltering spirits and exhilarated me with the old anything-goes feeling, though anything doesn’t go, of course, and never did.
Only this time the solace-spirit has been sucked out of the car by a vagrant boxcar wind, leaving my stomach twitching and my mouth grimmed as though the worst were happening. I have slipped for a moment out onto that plane where women can’t help in the age-old ways (this, of course, is something X said this morning and I passed off). Not that I’ve lost the old yen, just that the old yen seems suddenly defeatable by facts, the kind you can’t sidestep — the essence of a small empty moment.
Vicki eyes me in little threatening glances, her brows arched. “What’s the matter, did a bug bite you?”
If we were as far north as the Vince Lombardi Rest Area, I’d pull in and spend a half-hour admiring Vince’s memorabilia — the bronze bust, the picture of the Five Blocks of Granite, the famous gabardine overcoat. We have plenty of time today. But Vince’s Area is all the way past Giant’s Stadium, and we are here down among the flaming refineries, without a haven.
“Would you just give me a big hug,” I say. “You’re a wonderful girl.”
And instantly she throws an armlock around me with a neck-crunching ferocity. “Oh, oh, oh,” she sighs into my ear, and as easy as that (I was not wrong) rapture rises in me. “Does it make you happy to have me here?” She is patting my cheek softly and staring straight at it.
“We’re going to have us some fun, you better believe what I say.”
“Oh, boy blue,” she murmurs, “boy, boy blue.” She kisses my ear until my legs tingle, and I want to squeeze my eyes shut and give up control. This is enough to bring us back up to ground level, and send us to the airport with all my old hopes ascendant.
I am easily rescued, it’s true.
At this moment it may be of interest to say a word about athletes, whom I have always admired without feeling the need to be one or to take them at all seriously, and yet who seem to me as literal and within themselves as the ancient Greeks (though with their enterprises always hopeful).
Athletes, by and large, are people who are happy to let their actions speak for them, happy to be what they do. As a result, when you talk to an athlete, as I do all the time in locker rooms, in hotel coffee shops and hallways, standing beside expensive automobiles — even if he’s paying no attention to you at all, which is very often the case — he’s never likely to feel the least bit divided, or alienated, or one ounce of existential dread. He may be thinking about a case of beer, or a barbecue, or some man-made lake in Oklahoma he wishes he was waterskiing on, or some girl or a new Chevy shortbed, or a discothèque he owns as a tax shelter, or just simply himself. But you can bet he isn’t worried one bit about you and what you’re thinking. His is a rare selfishness that means he isn’t looking around the sides of his emotions to wonder about alternatives for what he’s saying or thinking about. In fact, athletes at the height of their powers make literalness into a mystery all its own simply by becoming absorbed in what they’re doing.
Years of athletic training teach this; the necessity of relinquishing doubt and ambiguity and self-inquiry in favor of a pleasant, self-championing one-dimensionality which has instant rewards in sports. You can even ruin everything with athletes simply by speaking to them in your own everyday voice, a voice possibly full of contingency and speculation. It will scare them to death by demonstrating that the world — where they often don’t do too well and sometimes fall into depressions and financial imbroglios and worse once their careers are over — is complexer than what their training has prepared them for. As a result, they much prefer their own voices and questions or the jabber of their teammates (even if it’s in Spanish), And if you are a sportswriter you have to tailor yourself to their voices and answers: “How are you going to beat this team, Stu?” Truth, of course, can still be the result—“We’re just going out and play our kind of game, Frank, since that’s what’s got us this far”—but it will be their simpler truth, not your complex one — unless, of course, you agree with them, which I often do. (Athletes, of course, are not always the dummies they’re sometimes portrayed as being, and will often talk intelligently about whatever interests them until your ears turn to cement.)
An athlete, for example, would never let a story like the one Vicki just told me get to him, even though the same feelings might strike him in the heart. He is trained not to let it bother him too much or, if it bothers him more than he can stand, to go outside and hit five hundred balls off the practice tee or run till he drops, or bash himself head-on into a piece of complicated machinery. I admire that quality more than almost any other I can think of. He knows what makes him happy, what makes him mad, and what to do about each. In this way he is a true adult. (Though for that, it’s all but impossible for him to be your friend.)