Wolf at the Table, page 43
“I have a sister, asshole.”
“How old?”
“Seven.”
“Seven,” Alec says. “Nice.”
Something shifts in Nash’s face. A surprising bitterness turns his mouth small, like he’s just swallowed a spoonful of lemon juice.
Alec releases his nostrils. The bleeding has ceased. He wipes his hand on his cargo shorts. “Does your sister come watch you play baseball?” he says. “After you jack a thunderous home run, does she give a standing O while her big bro is rounding the bases?”
“Stop it. Seriously, man.”
“Does she do a little homer dance for her big studmuffin brother?”
“Fucking don’t.”
Alec is amused by the kid’s familial valor. He’s definitely poked the bear. He reaches into the pocket of his cargo shorts, fingers out another oxy from the pill bottle, pops it in his mouth, and then takes the final three as well, because why the hell not, and washes them all down with the beer.
“I’m just trying to picture her,” Alec says. “What’s her name? Paige? Little blond-haired cutie-pie?”
Nash grips the bat handle, left fist over right. The veins in his hands are thick. The tendons in his forearms come alive like snakes.
“You can sleep with the thing,” Alec says, tipping his head toward the bat. “Hang it on the wall, put it in Plexiglas. It’ll be your little lightning rod. Your good-luck charm. Sure, you’re a bona fide talent, but you’re gonna need more than your average rowboatful of luck to make it to the show. Even the best players at the major D-Ones need that.”
“Are you really a scout?”
“Yes,” Alec replies. “And I can assure you that an accurate and very favorable assessment of your talents has already been written up and sent to a certain member of the Marlins organization who will likely invite you to an upcoming free agent camp.”
“Single or Double A?” Nash asks.
“Triple A,” Alec says. “Only one set of monkey bars removed from the show.” I am the world’s greatest liar, he thinks. I’m like a villain in a movie. I’m like Darth Vader meets Willie Fucking Wonka.
Then the kid starts talking about his sister again. “She has Down’s, okay?” Nash says, as if trying to appeal to some shred of decency in Alec, to ward off any further conversation.
“Little Paige?” Alec says. “As in the syndrome?”
“Yes, as in the fucking syndrome. Down’s syndrome.”
“Even better,” Alec says, imagining the bucktoothed, sleepy-eyed brat. “A little blond retard girl. Hey, no shame, I got a retard sister, too.”
Nash snaps his head toward Alec. The kid’s piercing blue eyes are sickled now, reptilian.
“Does Paige have a middle name? What’s her favorite color? Does she like Jell-O Pudding Pops?”
“Fucking pervert,” Nash says.
Alec produces the aforementioned blue medical gloves, tosses them across the table. “Put ’em on,” he says.
Nash stares at the gloves with an almost sickening intensity, as if putting them on will somehow make things irreversible.
“Look, I can promise you two things,” Alec says. “One, you definitely got what it takes to make it to the show, and two, no one will ever know this happened. After you do the deed, just calmly walk out of here—take the back staircase—and head back to the bar. Don’t take a cab. Pull your hoodie up over your pretty blond hair and walk there—it’s only about a mile and a half. Strike up a conversation with the prettiest girl in the place, go home with her, fuck her brains out. Make her fall in love with you. She’ll follow you around to all your games. She’ll start packing your lunch and wax her pussy and get really good at giving you head. She might even turn you over and stick her tongue in your doody hole. It’ll take about eight years before she gets fat and boring, but there are like umpteen thousand exercise programs to help her tighten things up again, and you can always find a little piece on the side.”
The kid stares at the bat, its cling wrap glistening.
“Put the fucking gloves on,” Alec says. “Blow into ’em first.”
The kid does exactly that, blowing into each glove and working his big blond paws into them.
From his cargo shorts Alec then produces a pair of handcuffs, rises, teeters a bit, pushes off the wall to balance himself, and comes around to the other side of the card table.
“Wait, what are you doing?” Nash says.
“You’re gonna cuff me,” Alec says, setting the cuffs on the table and joining his fists behind his back, facing the door now. He can practically feel the kid staring at the handcuffs. “Just do it, it’ll make it easier, give you a cleaner shot. I won’t be able to wave my arms around.”
Nash takes the cuffs and manacles Alec’s wrists behind his back, the left first, then the right. Alec drops to his knees. The blessed oxy has made things considerably more forgiving. He normally wouldn’t be able to kneel without a cushion.
“I’m gonna close my eyes,” Alec slurs, his dentures all but loose inside his mouth now. “Three good shwings should do the trick.”
Nash stands behind him, clutching the bat, Alec hopes.
“The better the shwings, the shooner this ends,” Alec slurs. “You have elite bat shpeed, I’ve sheen it firsht-hand.”
Alec giggles. He inhales and exhales through his nostrils, trying to luxuriate in the heavenly high of the pain pills, whose effect has seemingly doubled during the past thirty seconds. What’s the word? “Elysian”? It’s the one stupid thing he recalls from his high school English class. The Elysian Fields was like the afterlife, the place where all the Greek gods went to rest after they got sad or punished or lost their mojo.
“I thought you were gonna stuff that gauze in your mouth,” Nash says.
“You’re gonna have to do that for me,” Alec says.
The kid reaches over, grabs the blob of bloody gauze and stuffs it into Alec’s mouth. Alec can taste the metal of his own blood, the powdery latex of the rubber gloves. And then Nash grabs the bat and disappears behind him. Alec imagines him assuming a good batting stance, his feet shoulder-width apart, his hips lowered into a quarter squat.
“Jusht like Jimmy Jack taught you,” he says through the gauze, high as a fucking kite now, giggling. He can feel himself grinning like a moron and has to stop for fear of losing the gauze. “Meashure it up real good now,” he adds, knowing in his grisly, arthritic bones that Nash LaMore is doing exactly that. He can tell, just by the way the molecules are shifting behind his head, flooding the space around his ears. He can practically see the kid lining up the barrel with the sweet spot in back of his skull, where the brain stem meets the top of the spine.
Then Alec lifts his chin proudly and begins to count aloud, backwards from seventeen. He has no relationship to this number, it’s a random integer, plucked from nothingness, like reaching your hand outside the window of a speeding car and catching a bug. It’s a nowhere number perfectly assigned to the culmination of his nowhere life.
“Shixteen,” he slurs, “fifteen, fourteen…”
He knows that this kid will respond to a countdown. After all, any athlete worth his salt will rise to the moment when time is on the line.
“Thirteen, twelve, eleven…”
Alec imagines his mother’s nurse handing her the little burlap pouch from the mailbox.
“Ten, nine, eight…”
Ava Larkin opens the pouch to discover her son’s rotten, discolored, foul-smelling teeth.
“Sheven, shix, five…”
Teeth befitting a catfish, or some bottom-feeding, half-decayed carp.
“Four, three, two…”
He is picturing her holding his teeth in her long, cupped pterodactyl hand when the barrel of the bat strikes the floor-to-ceiling heating pipe.
“Yeah, get warmed up, shlugger!” Alec cries through the gauze. He snorts and laughs. What a way to go! What a fucking joke on the world!
But what’s weird is that the kid just keeps hitting the pipe, over and over, and he’s creating quite a racket. Alec twists around on his knees to face Nash. The cling wrap has freed itself from the bat’s barrel and vectors of cheap yellow spray paint score the pipe.
“Hey!” Alec shouts. “Me! Hit me!”
But then Nash slings open the front door—the little doorstopper catches in the carpet—and starts screaming for help.
“Hey, fucktard!” Alec shouts again through the gauze, which muffles every word, making him sound like he’s trapped in the trunk of a car.
A bolt of rage cuts through the oxy fogging his brain, and by sheer will, despite his hands being cuffed behind his back, he manages to get to his feet. His center of gravity seems to be stuck in his armpits. He wobbles, pushes off the closet with his shoulder, and accidentally kicks out a leg of the card table, which crashes to the floor. His collection of postcards tumbles toward the window.
And then, just as Alec is preparing to ram the kid with his head, Nash LaMore of Manteno, Illinois, wheels around and swings for the fences, striking him squarely across the jaw with the yellow bat. Alec’s chin goes loose and his brain fills with lightning. His dentures shoot out of his mouth and ricochet off the wall, and the wad of bloody gauze plops to the carpet beside him. He centers his mind on the letter in his pocket, the letter from his sister Myra. This was the document of all documents, the passport to his salvation. Those six important words.
Now his center of gravity has dropped into his shins, his ankles, and he can’t quite make sense of his arms or legs, of how his hands are connected to his wrists. He emits a sound like some half-forgotten kitchen appliance going faulty and his right cheek becomes one with the carpeting. His hips are somehow jacked up way over his shoulders. He’s gone ass over teakettle. He has been in his share of car crashes and this is way worse than any of those. He can smell all the years trapped in the carpet’s short, dense pile: men’s feet and spilled beer and cheap cigars and sex lubricants and clove cigarettes and third-rate Mexican food… One of his eyes is emptying out now, its humors dribbling down his cheek, filling his toothless mouth.
Alec manages to flip himself onto his back, the handcuffs cutting into his wrists. His body continues making that odd sound. He can still see through the other eye… If he could only reach the kid to make him stop screaming for help… He tries to wriggle onto his side but fails, thudding squarely onto his shoulder blades at the precise moment the security guard bursts through the half-opened door with his gun extended before him.
And though he engineered it himself, though he took such care and dealt with every detail, all Alec can think is: It wasn’t supposed to end this way, it wasn’t supposed to end this way, it wasn’t supposed to end this way…
18
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
MAY 8, 2010
RONAN
AT THE CLINK OF the bat, Bruce Happ-Woods, Ronan’s eleven-year-old son, explodes out of the batter’s box and sprints toward first base without even taking a breath. Ronan can practically feel his son’s cleats digging into the dirt. The boy’s feet are quick, his strides somehow effortless, his natural speed almost breathtaking. The ball, receding like a tiny thought sent out into the universe, is sailing over the center fielder’s head. It’s the bottom of the final inning of a tied game, with two outs, and the bleachers rumble with the sudden verticality of parents. Popcorn flies. Drinks in plastic cups slop across wrists. Fists are in the air. It was a hell of a hit and Ronan couldn’t be prouder. There is no fence, and he knows instantly this will be an easy homer. It’ll be his son’s eighth dinger of the season, a mark that leads the team and ranks second in the Eagle Rock Little League. The one he hit two games ago was a nasty grounder that scooted over the third base bag and kept going, and going, and going, taking a crazy “El Segundo hop,” as his coach described it, evading the left fielder, who didn’t catch up to it until it rolled into a long strip of Johnson grass designating the threshold of a tall, steep slope that rises fifty feet or so up above the ball field and gives way to several local hiking trails. Occasionally Ronan has seen the emaciated figure of a coyote peering down from the top of the escarpment, as if homing in on prey, so still it looks like an effigy.
That third-base foul-line hugger with the fortunate hop was a cheap homer, but the one Bruce just jacked is still sailing and the parents in the bleachers are squawking like mallards in heat. Henny, who makes a completely different noise—something akin to a teenage girl shrieking in a horror movie when she’s fleeing from the invincible killer and the car won’t start—is the loudest by far. Ronan remembers from his early baseball days that when you hit one like Bruce just did, when you really go center cut on it, it feels like nothing; it’s just this perfect, inevitable absence. The fat part of the aluminum bat does all the work. The sound of contact is a separate musical note altogether, and Ronan is so glad for his son to have heard it today.
At eleven, Bruce is tall for his age, already five-six, but also surprisingly coordinated. He has inherited his father’s raw speed and is the fastest kid in Little League, even faster than all the twelve-year-olds. Rounding first base, he finally takes a breath—Ronan can see it, the anaerobic instinct of the sprinter at work—and his long thin legs seem to have an intelligence all their own.
But suddenly Bruce slows and comes to a full stop, simply staring up at the sky.
“What’s he doing?” Henny says. “Why’d he stop?”
“Run!” one of the parents yells.
It’s as if Bruce was mesmerized by the final flight of the ball, watching as it dropped into the outfield. He’s never stopped running like this before. More parents are yelling now—“Run! Run! Run!”—but Bruce is stuck there, partway to second base, gazing skyward.
“Bruce!” his coach hollers from the dugout, to no avail.
Ronan can relate to the look on his son’s face all too well. Is he having some sort of vision? This has been Ronan’s growing concern lately, given his own mental health history. He looks for the coyote at the top of the slope, but it’s not there.
For the past six months or so Ronan and Henny have seen subtle signs emerging in their son. Occasionally he’ll just stare out the back patio window of their house as if he’s witnessing something materializing in the glass. Once he raised his hand like he was acknowledging someone or something in the backyard, but nothing was there. Other times it’s subtler. He’ll pause while eating dinner and stop blinking and his eyes will glaze over. “What is it?” they’ll ask him, but he’ll just shake his head and say, “It’s nothing,” and continue eating. Ronan has always felt that there is more to these moments than Bruce lets on. Before his correct drug therapy was administered—it took almost a year to get things calibrated correctly—Ronan felt during his own breaks with reality as if something in his head was dilating, like a portal was expanding behind his eyes, a gateway to some terrible, inevitable infinity.
At last Bruce returns from his reverie, taking off toward second, but now the ball comes sailing in from the outfield, and by the time he is nearing third the opposing shortstop has caught the ball and begun striding aggressively onto the infield dirt.
Bruce’s third base coach has no choice but to hold him there. “You were the winning run,” he says, shaking his head.
Bruce can only nod. He appears to be confused, and a little scared, as if he tried to hold his breath too long underwater and swallowed some of the ocean.
The other parents are beside themselves. A few of them glance at Ronan and Henny admonishingly, shaking their heads. It’s as if Bruce has just pulled a fire alarm to disrupt the final performance of the spring play and they’re to blame.
“What the heck happened?” the third base coach asks, a little too loudly, as if playing to the angry mob in the bleachers.
But Bruce can’t answer. He seems utterly bewildered, if not stunned.
“Look at his face,” Henny says. “Poor thing.”
To make matters worse, in the team’s final at-bat, a teammate fouls out to the catcher, stranding Bruce at third base and ending the game in a tie.
LATER, AT CALIFORNIA PIZZA Kitchen, Henny asks Bruce why he stopped running. “Were you hurt?” she says.
“I saw something,” Bruce says.
It’s the first time he’s revealed anything like this to his parents, and Ronan and Henny share a charged look.
“On the field?” Henny asks.
“In the sky,” he says.
“What was it?” Ronan says.
“Coagulation,” Bruce says. Off his mother’s perplexed expression, he continues: “Today in biology class we talked about how the body changes blood from liquid to solid to protect itself from a fatal hemorrhaging. It was a lot of stuff about blood clots and activated platelets and vascular spasms and fibrin.”
“Tell me about fibrin,” says Henny, who is clearly disturbed and is trying to keep the conversation in a more scientific, practical vein.
“It’s a protein that forms a mesh in order to stop the flow of blood,” he says.
Bruce is in an advanced curriculum, with fewer than ten kids in each class. He is often bored by school, so this eruption of classroom knowledge is surprising, to say the least.
“The clouds were coagulating,” he adds.
“They were red?” Ronan asks.
“Yeah,” he says. “Mr. Prisby showed us a video.”
Henny is wearing her 2008 Obama HOPE shirt, which is going a little loose in the collar. She has been teaching in UCLA’s theater department since they moved to Los Angeles three years ago, when Ronan was offered a TV-writing job that he simply couldn’t refuse. He was going to make more money than the royalties for all of his plays combined, and Henny was able to swap her post at Columbia for UCLA. The television gig allowed them to have some space—a California ranch-style house in Los Feliz—and to live like normal people. It had been nearly impossible for three humans to coexist in Henny’s one-bedroom apartment, where they’d been living together since Henny returned from her professorship in Chicago. While the endless string of sunny days was a little strange at first—Ronan does miss New York City’s surprising thunderstorms and heavy snowfalls and the changing leaves in the fall—he’s come to appreciate the beautiful West Coast weather. They’re only an hour from the Pacific Ocean, after all.
