knowledge that baseball players were as much flesh and blood as I was. The
knowledge came when Roy Campanella’s car overturned and the papers screamed
mortal news from the front pages: his career was done, he was going to sit in a
wheelchair for the rest of his life. How that came back to me, with that same
sickening mortal thud, when I sat down to this typewriter one morning two years ago,
turned on the radio, and heard that Thurman Munson had died while trying to land his
airplane. There were movies to go see at the Gem, which has long since been torn
down; science fiction movies like Gog with Richard Egan and westerns with Audie
Murphy (Teddy saw every movie Audie Murphy made at least three times; he
believed Murphy was almost a god) and war movies with John Wayne. There were
games and endless bolted meals, lawns to mow, places to run to, walls to pitch
pennies against, people to clap you on the back. And now I sit here trying to look
through an IBM keyboard and see that time, trying to recall the best and worst of that green and brown summer, and I can almost feel the skinny, scabbed boy still buried in
this advancing body and hear those sounds. But the apotheosis of the memory and the
time is Gordon Lachance running down the road to the Florida Market with change in
his pockets and sweat running down his back. I asked for three pounds of hamburger
and got some hamburger rolls, four bottles of Coke and a two-cent churchkey to open
them with. The owner, a man named George Dusset, got the meat and then leaned by
his cash register, one hammy hand planted on the counter by the big bottle of
hardcooked eggs, a toothpick in his mouth, his huge beer belly rounding his white T-
shirt like a sail filled with a good wind. He stood right there as I shopped, making sure I didn’t try to hawk anything. He didn’t say a word until he was weighing up the
hamburger.
‘I know you. You’re Denny Lachance’s brother. Ain’t you?’ The toothpick journeyed from one corner of his mouth to the other, as if on ball bearings. He
reached behind the cash register, picked up a bottle of S’OK cream soda, and chugged
it.
‘Yes, sir. But Denny, he -‘
‘Yeah, I know. That’s a sad thing, kid. The Bible says: “In the midst of life, we are in death.” Did you know that… Yuh. I lost a brother in Korea. You look just like Denny, people ever tell you that? Yuh. Spitting image.’
‘Yes, sir, sometimes,’ I said glumly.
‘I remember the year he was All Conference. Halfback, he played. Yuh. Could
he run? Father God and Sonny Jesus! You’re probably too young to remember.’ He
was looking over my head, out through the screen door and into the blasting heat, as if he were having a beautiful vision of my brother.
‘I remember. Uh, Mr. Dusset?’
‘What, kid?’ His eyes were still misty with memory; the toothpick trembled a
little between his lips.
‘Your thumb is on that scales.’
‘What?’ He looked down, astounded, to where the ball of his thumb was
pressed firmly on the white enamel. If I hadn’t moved away from him a little bit when
he started talking about Dennis, the ground meat would have hidden it. ‘Why, so it is.
Yuh. I guess I just got thinkin’ about your brother, God love him.’ George Dusset
signed a cross on himself.
When he took his thumb off the scales, the needle sprang back six ounces. He
patted a little more meat on top and then did the package up with white butcher’s
paper.
‘Okay,’ he said past the toothpick. ‘Let’s see what we got here. Three pounds of
hamburg, that’s a dollar forty-four. Hamburg rolls, that’s twenty-seven. Four tonics,
forty cents. One churchkey, two pence. Come to…’ He added it up on the bag he was
going to put the stuff in. ‘Two-twenty-nine.’
‘Thirteen,’ I said.
He looked up at me very slowly, frowning. ‘Huh?’
‘Two-thirteen. You added it wrong.’
‘Kid, are you-‘
‘You added it wrong,’ I said. ‘First you put your thumb on the scales and then