War and Watermelon

My dad is up every morning by five thirty, eating stale cake and strong coffee and using the bathroom in the cellar three or four times. He listens to Rambling with Gambling on the radio and reads the New York Times before heading out the door to catch the 6:25 bus at the corner.

For eleven and a half years I was basically unaware of his early morning routine, but midway through the last school year I began spending a couple of minutes with him before he left for the city. Right after his father died. It’s important to spend that time together, just the two of us, even though we hardly say a thing.

“Gideon?” Dad says as I walk into the kitchen, pretending that he’s surprised to see me. (He calls me a different name every morning.) He’s got his dress shoes and pants on, but up top he’s just wearing a guinea T. There’s a tiny square of bloody toilet paper on his jaw where he nicked himself shaving.

“I heard it. They’re like eight games behind already.” They suck again, like every year.

Two weeks ago it looked like the Mets would be taking over first place. Nobody thought they’d do anything this season, but they stayed close to the Cubs for most of the summer. Now they’re falling apart.

I shrug. There’s a box of doughnuts on the counter, but they’re those white powdered ones that I can’t stand. “Maybe toast,” I say.

“How’s Ferrante’s arm looking?” he asks. Tommy Ferrante is our quarterback. We know him from when I was in Cub Scouts, but he quit that in fourth grade and became a borderline crook. The only real use of his arm that I know of is when he and Magrini got caught throwing rocks off the cliff to bust windows at a warehouse.

“It’s okay, I guess. We never pass anyway. Ninety-nine plays out of a hundred are handoffs.”

“Nah. They mostly put me at linebacker.” I’ve carried twice in scrimmages so far. Both times I got nailed for lost yardage.

Dad pours another cup of coffee, looks at the clock, and chugs it. The empty cup is still steaming when he sets it down.

He told me once that he drinks at least twenty-five cups of coffee a day, virtually nonstop, at the office.

He goes upstairs to finish dressing and I move into his seat at the counter. The Times headline says, “Enemy Attacks 100 Vietnam Sites.”

I’m eating a doughnut anyway when he comes back in his suit jacket and a blue tie. He combed his hair, basically pasting the few long strands from one side over his scalp with Vitalis. He kisses the top of my head, then hesitates. “Make sure your brother sees that Vietnam headline,” he says. “This isn’t Little League. He can’t just take the pitch and hope for the best.”

He picks up his briefcase and heads out the door. I go to the window and watch him walk very upright and swiftly along the sidewalk. I feel sad for a minute every morning when he slips out of sight for the next twelve hours. Mom says his health has never been too good, that he might need a pacemaker in a few years.

I can’t believe he brought up the Little League thing again. Ryan swears Dad’s obituary will read that his only regret was that his son struck out looking.

Here’s how I’ve heard it explained over the years. I was three when it happened, so I have no recollection.

Dad’s coaching. Ryan is up to bat in an important game. It’s the classic baseball situation: bottom of the last inning, two outs, bases loaded, his team down by a run. A single wins the game, but even a walk brings in a run and sets things up for the next guy.

So the count is three balls and two strikes, or maybe two balls and two strikes. Either way, you have to swing at a strike, no matter how hard you’re praying it’ll be called a ball. The pitch is straight over the plate, waist-high, but Ryan freezes. He doesn’t swing.

Allegedly, the bitter aftermath of all that is why Mom wouldn’t let Dad coach my Little League teams. And why Ryan opted out of every sport except basketball, with the stipulation that Dad not attend any of the games.

In my first baseball game, I struck out three times. But I swung at all nine pitches. Dad made a big point of saying how proud he was that I went down swinging. That I “showed some heart out there.”

He said that in front of Ryan, of course. He still brings it up every once in a while, thinking he’s being subtle.

I watch a Bugs Bunny cartoon—the one where Elmer Fudd’s uncle Louie died—then a Daffy Duck and another Bugs. When my mother wakes up, she fries some Taylor Ham, and I eat that and a bowl of Cocoa Krispies.

“Brody, you don’t have to go to this concert with your brother on Friday if you don’t want to,” she says. “We’ll let him use the car even if you stay home.”

“Well,” she says, pouring coffee into Dad’s cup for herself, “you do get carsick.”

“Ryan says a lot of things.” She sips the coffee, then sets down the cup and sweeps powdered sugar off the counter with one hand, catching it in the other. “He’s a sweet boy, but he’s as naive as they come. And they don’t give you any breaks for being sweet in the army.”

My knee’s bleeding, just a trickle below the cap where it jabbed into a stone as I tried to tackle Kenny Esposito. I was on my knees at the time, not exactly the best tackling posture, and when I reached for him I twisted sideways and was knocked farther back by his knee hitting my shoulder.

“You gotta put your weight into that tackle,” an assistant coach said to me with a snarl. “You can’t do that from your knees, man.”

My weight: 87 pounds. Esposito weighs at least 120. He scored on the next play, barreling through the line and virtually carrying Tony and another guy with him as they tried to bring him down.

That was an hour ago, before I made a couple of actual tackles and before the wind sprints and the long laps around the field at the end of practice.

Despite all that, I made the team. First time trying out, too. They sent Johnny Rivera home for good, which surprised the heck out of me. He’s fast and he played hard, but he’s new in town and Puerto Rican, so in the coaches’ eyes he’s suspect.

So I’m in. I don’t think I’ll get a lot of playing time, but the point is that I made it. I’m basically lost in that crowd, hanging on as one of the least important players.

Now me and Tony are walking home, carrying our helmets by the face masks with our cleats stuffed inside.

“That field is a killer,” Tony says, examining the bloody spot on his elbow. He’s no bigger than I am.

“It’s like the Sea of Tranquility,” I say. The astronauts landed on that area of the moon a couple of weeks ago. We watched it in the family room with all the shades drawn and the air conditioner on high. “One small step for man . . .”

I was in the bathroom when Neil Armstrong actually stepped onto the lunar surface. Diarrhea.

I can’t move from this spot, I thought. Maybe I actually said it, but not loud enough that anybody but me could have heard. Especially through the bathroom door.

So is this food poisoning, I hope. Mom had made chicken salad for the occasion. It sat on the picnic table all afternoon before I ate it.

“In here?” Tony asks, jutting his thumb toward the doorway at Fisher’s. We usually grab a can of soda on the long walk home from practice. Plus it’s air-conditioned in there, so we get to cool off for a minute.

I set my helmet on the sidewalk and wriggle a finger into my sneaker, but I can’t reach the two quarters I stashed there. So I step on the heel with my other sneaker and pry my foot out. The quarters are wedged up by the toes.

“That’s why I took them out here. They probably wouldn’t accept them if they saw where I kept ’em.”

We grab drinks and stare at the magazine rack for a few seconds. Tony looks around, then carefully peels back the upper corner of a Playboy cover, trying to get a peek inside.

“Just looking,” says Tony, quickly stepping away. He gives me an embarrassed grin. We’ve seen pictures like that before.