Magic Time, page 12
The inside of the house was immaculate. There was too much furniture, but it was relatively new and color-coordinated, in pastel blue and pink. Mrs. McNee had a married daughter in Cedar Rapids, and it was her former room that was proposed for my father.
I almost laughed aloud when I saw it. It was decorated in pink and white, with ruffled white curtains, and a pink and white canopy over the bed. There were satin pillows everywhere, a rocking chair with a knitted cushion, and crocheted and tatted doilies covered the chest of drawers, the table, and nightstand. Stuffed animals and dolls in formal dresses were strewn about with planned casualness.
“Do you think this will be all right, Mike?” Marge asked.
“My dad’s a real nice man, but honestly this isn’t his style. Mrs. McNee, how would you feel if someone dragged an automobile transmission into this room? My dad’s likely to arrive wearing his work clothes, and well, I think he’d feel like a bull in a china shop.”
“My late husband worked for Grand Mound Motors for many years,” Mrs. McNee said. “I know all about automobile transmissions.”
“It was a figure of speech,” I said.
“It has a roof, a floor, and a bed,” said Marge. “It will do fine.”
My father rolled in at suppertime on Friday.
“I took a sick day,” he said, hugging me and pounding my back heartily. “I was sick and tired of servicing and repairing fork lifts.” He was wearing a jacket and slacks, his tie loose. He smelled of fresh-cut lumber and lime cologne.
“I haven’t taken a sick day in seven years. And I told the lumberyard I was going to be sick on Monday, too. Monday is your day off, isn’t it?”
“After noon. I have to work in the insurance office in the morning.”
“Good enough.”
Just by being himself my father charmed the Powells completely. He ate everything put in front of him and accepted seconds and thirds without complaint, which endeared him to Marge and Tracy Ellen.
When Emmett complimented him on raising two very young sons alone, Dad simply said, “I’ve been lucky. The boys have seldom given me a minute’s grief.”
“I’m sure luck had nothing to do with it,” said Emmett.
“If we’d known you were arriving so early we’d have invited Peggy McNee to have dinner with us. We’ve arranged for you to use her guest room.”
I’d told Dad on the phone that he would be staying next door, and that he was expected to pay regular motel rates. I also warned him that it was fancy.
“I don’t want to put anybody out,” Dad said.
Marge must have been busy on the phone, because Peggy McNee arrived shortly after dinner to accompany us to the baseball game, something she had never done before.
She was a beautiful woman. Her hair was a deep strawberry blonde, which accentuated sparkling blue eyes. She wore a long brown and yellow dress and a matching sun bonnet, which on some women would have looked ridiculous, but the outfit suited her, just as my dad’s permanently rumpled look suited him.
They sat directly behind our dugout. As I came off the field at the end of the third, Dad stood to applaud a particularly good play I’d made to end the inning. He had to disengage his hand from Peggy McNee’s. By the seventh they were much more interested in each other than the game.
My guess would be that Dad never even got to see the inside of the guest room at Peggy McNee’s.
The next morning Dad was smiling so much it looked like his teeth had grown overnight.
On Saturday Peggy drove my dad all around the Grand Mound area; they took a picnic lunch and barely made it back in time for the game. Shortly after the game began, a cloud bank that had been assembling on the western horizon rolled in over Grand Mound and unleashed a deluge. The wind was huge, thrashing through the trees and rattling windows. Lightning created brilliant silver zippers across the clouds, which were several shades of black on black. The rain bedevilled roofs and overflowed gutters.
A good old-fashioned gully-washer, Emmett called it.
The game was canceled. Marge and Tracy Ellen baked cinnamon buns, and the six of us sat around the kitchen table drinking coffee and laughing as the rain tattooed on the windows.
If there is anything in the way of food more wonderful than fresh-baked cinnamon buns, I have yet to find it. The brown sugar, cinnamon, and butter had melded to the perfect consistency, the bread was light as an angel. As the rain abated, I imagined the smell of cooked cinnamon and sugar traveling across town through the rain-fresh air, attracting, like the Pied Piper, a crowd, a following, a mob anxious to share.
“The secret,” Marge admitted, “is adding a few drops of vinegar to the bread dough.”
I made a mental note of vinegar as secret ingredient in the world’s best cinnamon buns. I planned to try the secret myself, and would certainly pass it along to my bride, when and if …
Dad and Peggy McNee didn’t need two seats for the Sunday afternoon game. They cuddled like teenagers, feeding each other hot dogs, sharing sodas.
“I’d say your dad has found himself a girlfriend,” Emmett said, looking for all the world like the proud matchmaker.
4
Barry McMartin
SEVENTEEN
Every Wednesday after the game we Powells — to Grand Mound it seems I am a Powell — stop at the Grand Mound Bowling Alley and Starlite Café for a few lines.
“We have to do what we can for the businesses in Grand Mound,” said Emmett. “That’s why we buy groceries at the Grand Mound Co-op, and why all the local people buy their insurance from me. By the way, Mike, do you know what it took for the young man to invest in long-term bonds? Maturity.” We all groan appropriately while Emmett beams.
“I know you enjoy bowling, Mike,” says Emmett.
“How would you know that?”
“Oh, I guess your agent must have mentioned it.”
“I’ve never met my agent. We’ve never discussed anything but baseball and money.”
I do like bowling. Dad dragged us to the lanes as soon as we were grown enough to bowl with both hands. I am about to try to pin Emmett down, find out where he is getting his information, when Tracy Ellen interrupts.
“Maybe you could help me,” says Tracy Ellen. She is wearing a rose-colored blouse with a matching ribbon in her hair. “I seem to turn my wrist when I let go of the ball.”
I want to say, ‘Why don’t you get a lesson from Shag Wilson? He gets to teach you about everything else.” But that would be churlish and reflect more on my state of mind than on Shag Wilson’s inappropriateness as a boyfriend for Tracy Ellen. I am jealous.
“I’d be happy to do what I can,” I say. At least it’s a chance to be close to Tracy Ellen. I show her how to keep her wrist straight. I line her up on the lanes, adjust her hips before each shot, straighten or slacken her posture. I want to turn her around to face me and kiss her ever so gently. Tracy Ellen seems oblivious to anything but bowling instruction, though Emmett is beaming, and makes a couple of, for him, mildly suggestive comments about the way I am handling his daughter. Tracy Ellen is a quick learner, and her score of 152 is, I’m told, her best ever.
Many of the bowlers had been at the baseball game, and I got ribbed good-naturedly about a slide I took to break up a double play in the eighth inning. I started my slide too soon, came up ten feet short of the bag, and was left there in a cloud of dust as the Green team completed the play and trotted off the field.
This is the night I get my first good look at Shag Wilson. Just as we’re finishing up, he arrives to pick up Tracy Ellen. Even over the thunder of the bowling balls and pins I can hear the rumble of Shag’s truck as he parks it in front of the glass doors to the bowling alley. He is short. He swaggers. He looks like something from a traveling company of West Side Story. He wears a tight white T-shirt, jeans, and motorcycle boots. He has full lips, short arms, and stubby hands. His tin of chew has worn a circle into the back right pocket of his jeans.
How can Tracy Ellen see anything in this guy? Maybe it’s just that he is as unlike Emmett as it is possible to be. Probably that’s it. In my experience, teenage girls are attracted to men the exact opposite of their fathers. Tracy Ellen gives us all a quick wave, and she’s gone.
“Ah, young people,” says Emmett. Then, “Say, Mike, you know what the loser of a lawsuit experiences? Lien times. Ha!”
There was a really ugly happening at the game last night. Bad sportsmanship has not been a problem in the days I’ve been here. The umpires, there are three of them, are the owner of the feed store, a farmer from west of town, and the baseball and football coach at Grand Mound High School.
In any baseball games there are close plays, there are plays where the call could go either way. There have been plays where it certainly looked to me as if the umpires were wrong. But there has been very little argument. Players question a called strike. The first-base coach disputes a bang-bang play at the bag. The manager or acting manager disputes a close play at the plate. The umpires allow a certain amount of protest, then signal firmly that the game is to continue, and players and management comply.
Suicide Walston gets in his two-cents worth when the occasion requires, in fact he managed to get thrown out of one game for protesting a third-strike call on Stanley Wood. The pitch was high and hard and Stanley ducked back, though his bat did approach the strike zone. The plate umpire, the farmer from west of town, called strike three, and the brouhaha was on.
It was apparent from where we were sitting that Stanley had not gone around. Since managers aren’t allowed to protest ball or strike calls, Walston was thumbed from the game as soon as he charged toward the plate. He bellowed into the umpire’s face for a minute or two, then left the field, stalking away angrily like a bantam rooster, snarling over his shoulder.
But what happened last night was entirely different.
The score was 3-1 in the eighth for the Green team. There was a man on first when Barry McMartin came to the plate. He slammed the first pitch deep into right-center field where neither outfielder could get to it; the ball rolled to the wall as the runners steamed around the bases. The right fielder did not pick the ball up cleanly, and the first runner scored easily.
I had one eye on Barry McMartin as I watched the throw from the outfield coming toward me. The third-base coach was trying to hold him up, but I could see McMartin planned on scoring, and it looked like he had a good chance. My throw to the catcher, who was blocking the plate, would have to be perfect.
I took the cut-off and threw a strike to the catcher, who tagged the sliding McMartin in a play that could have gone either way.
The umpire called McMartin out.
As the dust was still rising, McMartin came up roaring and flailing, his cheeks scarlet, his eyes bugging from his head. The runner who had scored in front of him, an outfielder named Lee Harwood, had been just off home plate, crouching, signalling McMartin to slide. Lee virtually leapt on McMartin’s shoulders as he backed the somewhat surprised umpire toward the backstop.
Like slapping a mosquito, McMartin smashed Lee off his back, the surprised outfielder landing like a bag full of bats, stunned, his cheek already swelling where McMartin had struck him.
Gene Walston, who was coaching the Green team, and Vince Singletary, who was coaching us, both sprinted toward the plate, arriving about the time McMartin, screaming like a banshee, bumped solidly into the umpire, not knocking him off his feet, but sending him staggering into the screen, which allowed him to keep his balance.
Walston was screaming at McMartin to cool down, while Singletary was trying to get hold of McMartin; but McMartin was agile, and Singletary, even at close to three hundred pounds, couldn’t quite hold him.
McMartin was now completely berserk. Walston jumped on his back, and was tossed off as if he’d been riding a bucking bronco. The catcher threw a rolling block, hitting McMartin behind the knees and sending him sprawling in the dirt. Singletary dived for him but missed. McMartin was crawling on his hands and knees, still screaming, dragging the catcher, who had a solid grip on his left leg.
McMartin finally shook free, raced to his own dugout and hurled seven or eight bats in a shower of white ash toward the playing field. Then he used another bat to hold his own team, the managers, and the umpires at bay, swinging it in a wide, sweeping motion with his left hand, while with his right he would pitch a bat, rearing back like a spear chucker, sending it into the midst of those trying to reach him.
He tossed at least five bats, then turned his attention to the dugout. He went for the water cooler, swinging like he was trying to hit a home run. Fortunately, the water cooler was made of flexible plastic. All he managed to do was knock it off its stand. He whacked at the leaking cooler a few times, then picked it up over his head and tossed it all the way to third base.
He again armed himself with a bat, but we never found out what his intentions were, for Vince Singletary and Roger Cash had circled around and gotten on top of the dugout while McMartin was inside. Just as he emerged, he was hit by over five hundred pounds of assistant coach and groundskeeper. Several other players joined in and McMartin was pinned solidly to the earth.
As the Green team rallied in the ninth to win the game 4-3, McMartin was locked in the back of the town’s only patrol car, where he raged ineffectually for a good ten minutes before coming to his senses.
“I’ve never seen anything like that,” said Emmett later, as we sat at the kitchen table eating pie. “I saw the films of Chuck Cottier, when he was managing Seattle, tossing bats and a water cooler on the field. But he was just displaying his anger. I’m sure he wasn’t trying to kill anybody. What do you think, Mike? Was he trying to kill somebody?”
“He was completely out of control. If he hadn’t been stopped, he certainly would have hurt someone.”
“He has a history of this kind of thing,” said Emmett. “We thought we knew how to handle him. That’s why we decided to give him a final chance here in Grand Mound. But he hasn’t responded the way we hoped. A snag in our plans.”
“What plans?”
“Nothing to concern yourself with, Mike.”
“No. Wait a minute. Am I responding the way you’d hoped?”
“An unfortunate choice of words, Mike,” said Emmett. “We don’t have any plans for anyone, other than seeing them play good baseball and enjoy their time in Grand Mound.”
We didn’t see Barry McMartin for the next two days. There were a lot of rumors making the rounds. Someone said he’d been driven to the Cedar Rapids Airport right after the game and put on the first available flight back to his home town in Oklahoma. Someone else said he’d been hauled off to the psych ward at the University of Iowa Hospital in Iowa City. Another rumor had it that he was under a sort of house arrest at the home of his family, the Millers, where a deputy sheriff was watching him twenty-four hours a day.
And those were the least bizarre rumors. Another player said he’d heard that Barry had beaten up Mr. Miller, stolen his car, and was last seen careening down Highway 30 at about a hundred miles an hour.
Suicide Walston and Vince Singletary weren’t talking. It was as if Barry McMartin had disappeared from the face of the earth.
It was another inaccurate rumor that allowed me to hear the whole story. Two nights after the incident at Fred Noonan Field, as I was sitting in the living room with Emmett and Marge — Tracy Ellen was out with Shag Wilson — there was a knock at the front door.
Emmett, assuming it was a local wanting to insure something, answered, talked briefly, then signalled it was for me. He looked puzzled and somewhat dubious as he waved me toward the door.
Barry McMartin was standing on the front porch.
“What can I do for you?” I said.
“Mike, I’ve got to talk. You may be the only one who can help me.”
“Help you? How?”
“One of the guys said you were a psych major, and I gotta talk to someone about my weird behavior. The only reason the Millers let me out of the house was I told them I was coming to talk with a guy who was going to be a psychiatrist.”
“You got it all wrong,” I said. “Business. I’m a business major. I can give you lots of advice if you want to open a Dairy Queen, or start a chinchilla farm in your basement. But I get all my psychology from watching Oprah.”
I could see the disappointment on his face.
“Goddamn! I’ve got to talk to somebody. Are business majors good listeners?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s go for a walk. Please, I want to hear my own voice for a while. Maybe if I talk some of this shit out, I’ll be able to get a handle on my fife.”
“Give me a minute,” I said, and went back inside.
“I’m going for a walk with Barry McMartin,” I said.
“Are you sure it’s safe?” asked Emmett.
“I’m not gonna disagree with anything he says. I’m just gonna listen. The guy’s obviously disturbed.”
“That’s what I worry about.”
“I’ll be okay”
EIGHTEEN
Barry and I walked down the hill toward the heart of town. The moon was full, a glorious illuminated grapefruit in the center of the sky.
“Sorry about the psych rumor,” I said.
“You read a lot. Guess some of the guys mistook what you were studying.”
“Where did you go to school?”
“Oklahoma,” said Barry.
“What did you major in?”
“Dingers and broads, man. Half the time I didn’t even know what courses I was in. Every course was pass/fail, which meant if you attended a couple of times a semester and didn’t shit on the prof’s desk, you got a pass.
“I took this course on Navajo pottery. The only thing we did other than look at picture books was we went to this museum, and the prof says, ‘These are Navajo pots and everything else isn’t.’ And that was it, a pass. Five credits toward an interdisciplinary degree with an undeclared major. How about that! You know what the Arts grad said to the Business grad? ‘Want fries with your burger?’ That’s why I’ve got to play baseball, Mike.”
