Closer to his face, the smell of the glove was both intoxicating and irresistible. Sully slipped it onto his hand, and when he did something crackled beneath his little finger — a piece of paper shoved in there. He paid no attention. Instead he put the glove over his face, closed his eyes, and inhaled. Leather and neat’s-foot oil and sweat and grass. All the summers that were. The summer of 1960, for instance, when he had come back from his week at camp to find everything changed — Bobby sullen, Carol distant and palely thoughtful (at least for awhile), and the cool old guy who’d lived on the third floor of Bobby’s building — Ted —
gone. Everything had changed . . . but it was still summer, he had still been eleven, and everything had still seemed . . .
‘Eternal,’ he murmured into the glove, and inhaled deeply of its aroma again as, nearby, a glass case filled with butterflies shattered on the roof of a bread-van and a stop-sign stuck, quivering, into the breakdown lane like a thrown spear. Sully remembered his Bo-lo Bouncer and his black Keds and the taste of Fez straight out of the gun, how the pieces of candy would hit the roof of your mouth and then ricochet onto your tongue; he remembered the way his catcher’s mask felt when it sat on his face just right and the hisha-hisha-hisha of the lawn-sprinklers on Broad Street and how mad Mrs Conlan got if you walked too close to her precious flowers and Mrs Godlow at the Asher Empire wanting to see your birth certificate if she thought you were too big to be still under twelve and the poster of Brigitte Bardot (if she’s trash I’d love to be the trashman)
in her towel and playing guns and playing pass and playing Careers and making arm-farts in the back of Mrs Sweetser’s fourth-grade classroom and—
‘Hey, American.’ Only she said it Amellican and Sully knew who he was going to see even before he raised his head from Bobby’s Ah/in Dark-model glove. It was old mamasan, standing there between the crotchrocket, which had been crushed by a freezer (wrapped meat was spilling out of its shattered door in frosty blocks), and a Subaru with a lawn-flamingo
punched through its roof. Old mamasan in her green pants and orange smock and red sneakers, old mamasan lit up like a bar-sign in hell.
‘Hey American, you come me, I keep safe.’ And she held out her arms.
Sully walked toward her through the noisy hail of falling televisions and backyard pools and cartons of cigarettes and high-heeled shoes and a great big pole hairdryer and a pay telephone that hit and vomited a jackpot of quarters. He walked toward her with a feeling of relief, that feeling you get only when you are coming home.
‘I keep safe.’ Holding out her arms now. ‘Poor boy, I keep safe.’ Sully stepped into the dead circle of her embrace as people screamed and ran and all things American fell out of the sky, blitzing I-95 north of Bridgeport with their falling glitter. She put her arms around him.
‘I keep safe,’ she said, and Sully was in his car. Traffic was stopped all around him, four lanes of it. The radio was on, tuned to WKND. The Platters were singing ‘Twilight Time’ and Sully couldn’t breathe. Nothing appeared to have fallen out of the sky, except for the traffic tie-up everything seemed to be in good order, but how could that be? How could it be when he still had Bobby Garneld’s old baseball glove on his hand?
.
‘I keep safe,’ old mamasan was saying. ‘Poor boy, poor American boy, I keep safe.’
Sully wanted to smile at her. He wanted to tell her he was sorry, that some of them had at least meant well, but he had no air and he was very tired. He closed his eyes and tried to raise Bobby’s glove one final time, get one final shallow whiff of that oily, summery smell, but it was too heavy.
Dieffenbaker was standing at the kitchen counter the next morning, wearing a pair of jeans and nothing else, pouring himself a cup of coffee, when Mary came in from the living room.