Want to hear? Okay, here goes:
When I looked toward the door, I saw a very chastened, very downcast Peoria Smith standing there. ‘I guess I treated you pretty bad the last time I saw you, Mr. Umney,’ he said. ‘I came to say I’m sorry.’ It had been over six months, but he looked the same as ever. And I do mean the same.
‘You’re still wearing your cheaters,’ I said.
‘Yeah. We tried the operation, but it didn’t work.’ He sighed, then grinned and shrugged. In that moment he looked like the Peoria I’d always known. ‘What the hey, Mr. Umney — bein blind ain’t so bad.’
It isn’t perfect; sure, I know that. I started out as a detective, not a writer. But I believe you can do just about anything, if you want to bad enough, and when you get right down to where the cheese binds, this is a kind of keyhole-peeping, too. The size and shape of the word-processor keyhole are a little different, but it’s still looking into other people’s lives and then reporting back to the client on what you saw.
I’m teaching myself for one very simple reason: I don’t want to be here. You can call it LA in 1994 if you want to; I call it hell. It’s awful frozen dinners you cook in a box called a
‘microwave,’ it’s sneakers that look like Frankenstein shoes, it’s music that comes out of the radio sounding like crows being steamed alive in a pressure-cooker, it’s —
Well, it’s everything.
I want my life back, I want things the way they were, and I think I know how to make that happen.
You’re one sad, thieving bastard, Sam — may I still call you that? — and I feel sorry for you .
. . but sorry only stretches so far, because the operant word here is thieving. My original opinion on the subject hasn’t changed at all, you see — I still don’t believe that the ability to create conveys the right to steal.
What are you doing right this minute, you thief? Eating dinner at that Petit Déjeuner restaurant you made up? Sleeping beside some gorgeous honey with perfect no-sag breasts and murder up the sleeve of her negligee? Driving down to Malibu with carefree abandon? Or just kicking back in the old office chair, enjoying your painless, odorless, shitless life? What are you doing?
I’ve been teaching myself to write, that’s what I’ve been doing, and now that I’ve found my way in, I think I’ll get better in a hurry. Already I can almost see you.
Tomorrow morning, Clyde and Peoria are going to go down to Blondie’s, which has re-opened for business. This time Peoria’s going to take Clyde up on that breakfast offer. That will be step two.
Yes, I can almost see you, Sam, and pretty soon I will. But I don’t think you’ll see me. Not until I step out from behind my office door and wrap my hands around your throat.
This time nobody goes home.
Head Down
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I am breaking in here, Constant Reader, to make you aware that this is not a story but an essay — almost a diary. It originally appeared in The New Yorker in the spring of 1990.
S.K.
Head down! Keep your head down!’
It is far from the most difficult feat in sports, but anyone who has ever tried to do it will tell you that it’s tough enough: using a round bat to hit a round ball squarely on the button. Tough enough so that the handful of men who do it well become rich, famous, and idolized: the Jose Cansecos, the Mike Greenwells, the Kevin Mitchells. For thousands of boys (and not a few girls), their faces, not the face of Axl Rose or Bobby Brown, are the ones that matter; their posters hold the positions of honor on bedroom walls and locker doors. Today Ron St. Pierre is teaching some of these boys — boys who will represent Bangor West Side in District 3 Little League tournament play — how to put the round bat on the round ball. Right now he’s working with a kid named Fred Moore while my son, Owen, stands nearby, watching closely. He’s due in St. Pierre’s hot seat next. Owen is broad-shouldered and heavily built, like his old man; Fred looks almost painfully slim in his bright green jersey. And he is not making good contact.
‘Head down, Fred!’ St. Pierre shouts. He is halfway between the mound and home plate at one of the two Little League fields behind the Coke plant in Bangor; Fred is almost all the way to the backstop. The day is a hot one, but if the heat bothers either Fred or St. Pierre it does not show.
They are intent on what they are doing.
‘Keep it down!’ St. Pierre shouts again, and unloads a fat pitch.
Fred chips under it. There is that chinky aluminum-on-cowhide sound — the sound of someone hitting a tin cup with a spoon. The ball hits the backstop, rebounds, almost bonks him on the helmet. Both of them laugh, and then St. Pierre gets another ball from the red plastic bucket beside him.
‘Get ready, Freddy!’ he yells. ‘Head down!’
Maine’s District 3 is so large that it is split in two. The Penobscot County teams make up half the division; the teams from Aroostook and Washington counties make up the other half. Ail-Star kids are selected by merit and drawn from all existing district Little League teams. The dozen teams in District 3 play in simultaneous tournaments. Near the end of July, the two teams left will play off, best two out of three, to decide the district champ. That team represents District 3
in State Championship play, and it has been a long time — eighteen years — since a Bangor team made it into the state tourney.
This year, the State Championship games will be played in Old Town, where they make the canoes. Four of the five teams that play there will go back home. The fifth will go on to represent Maine in the Eastern Regional Tournament, this year to be held in Bristol, Connecticut. Beyond that, of course, is Williamsport, Pennsylvania, where the Little League World Series happens.
The Bangor West players rarely seem to think of such dizzy heights; they will be happy just to beat Millinocket, their first-round opponent in the Penobscot County race. Coaches, however, are allowed to dream — are, in fact, almost obligated to dream.
This time Fred, who is the team joker, does get his head down. He hits a weak grounder on the wrong side of the first-base line, foul by about six feet.
‘Look,’ St. Pierre says, taking another ball. He holds it up. It J is scuffed, dirty, and grass-stained. It is nevertheless a baseball, and Fred eyes it respectfully. ‘I’m going to show you a-trick.
Where’s the ball?’
‘In your hand,’ Fred says.
Saint, as Dave Mansfield, the team’s head coach, calls him, drops it into his glove. ‘Now?’
‘In your glove.’
Saint turns sideways; his pitching hand creeps into his glove. ‘Now?’
‘In your hand. I think.’
‘You’re right. So watch my hand. Watch my hand, Fred Moore, and wait for the ball to come out in it. You’re looking for the ball. Nothing else. Just the ball. I should just be a blur to you.
Why would you want to see me, anyway? Do you care if I’m smiling? No. You’re waiting to see how I’ll come — sidearm or three-quarters or over the top. Are you waiting?”
Fred nods.
‘Are you watching?’
Fred nods again.
‘O.K.,’ St. Pierre says, and goes into his short-arm batting-practice motion again.
This time Fred drives the ball with real authority: a hard sinking liner to right field.
‘All right!’ Saint cries. ‘That’s all right, Fred Moore!’ He wipes sweat off his forehead. ‘Next batter!’
Dave Mansfield, a heavy, bearded man who comes to the park wearing aviator sunglasses and an open-neck College World Series shirt (it’s a good-luck charm), brings a paper sack to the Bangor West-Millinocket game. It contains sixteen pennants, in various colors. bangor, each one says, the word flanked by a lobster on one side and a pine tree on the other. As each Bangor West player is announced on loudspeakers that have been wired to the chain-link backstop, he takes a pennant from the bag Dave holds out, runs across the infield, and hands it to his opposite number.
Dave is a loud, restless man who happens to love baseball and the kids who play it at this level. He believes there are two purposes to All-Star Little League: to have fun and to win. Both are important, he says, but the most important thing is to keep them in the right order. The pennants are not a sly gambit to unnerve the opposition but just for fun. Dave knows that the boys on both teams will remember this game, and he wants each of the Millinocket kids to have a souvenir. It’s as simple as that.