6

THINKING

When I woke up I wiggled my foot around but Pablo had already crawled out the bottom of the bed and tiptoed out of the room. I left the bedroom door open so he could escape and pee. Yesterday I had kept the door closed and he peed on a pair of Grandma’s terry-cloth slippers she had left in the closet. I didn’t tell her about the slippers, and when she was at the front door getting another oxygen tank delivery, I stuffed them into the bottom of the kitchen trash then washed my hands.

I rolled out of bed, landed on my feet and hands, and hopped up. I walked over to my dresser. Dad and I now had a system where if he went to work early he’d leave a patch for me in a glass ashtray

But this morning there was no patch in the ashtray, just a couple of Grandma’s cigarette butts, so I knew she had been snooping around my stuff. And I figured Dad must not be up yet.

I pulled on my jeans and went looking for Pablo. When I entered the kitchen Grandma was sucking the air out of her tank so loudly it sounded like someone pumping up a bicycle tire.

“Hello, Sleeping Beauty,” she said with a voice that sounded like a board dragged across gravel. “I’ve been waiting for over two hours for you to get up.”

“Is Dad up? He didn’t leave me a patch.”

“I’m outta cigs,” she cackled. “And I’m broke. And your dad’s out. Said he had to do some big thinking.”

“I only have my emergency cash,” I said.

“That’ll do.”

“I don’t think I should give it to you,” I said. “Not until you tell me where Dad is.”

“He’s gone,” she said. “Everything that man does is a binge and now he’s on a thinking binge and he’s in love with each and every one of his big thoughts. But forget about him for now and think about this, mister.” She stopped and sucked in a crackling breath. “No cash for me, then no dog for you.”

“Pablo!” I shouted, looking left and right and ducking down to peek under the table. “Pablo!” I turned to face Grandma. “Where’d you put him?”

“He’s fine,” she said. “Five bucks and I’ll tell you where he is,” she said, and snapped her hand out toward me like a music-box monkey.

“Okay,” I agreed. I went into the bedroom and reached into my pillowcase, where I hid the money Mom gave me. I had a twenty-dollar bill and my quarters. When I returned to the kitchen I blurted out, “You can only have five.”

“Settle down,” she said. “I’ll give you change.”

I held out the twenty and she snatched it with her quick fingers.

“Where’s Pablo?”

“Check the TV cabinet,” she said with her voice grinding to a halt as a spasm of coughing left her bent over. She turned and spit something into a matted handkerchief, then leaned back against the counter and closed her eyes.

I ran out to the living room. The TV was tuned to a Sunday church show. I turned down the volume and could hear Pablo whimpering and scratching behind the cabinet door.

I yanked it open and there he was along with the slippers that he had peed in.

“You can’t hide a thing from Grandma,” she said, inching up on me. “So don’t try. If that dog pees on my shoes again I’ll put a stamp on his butt and mail him to the Oscar Mayer factory.”

“Pablo baby,” I cooed, and held him against my chest so that he could look up and lick my chin. His fur smelled as nasty as the slippers.

“Come on,” Grandma said. “Enough of this love fest. You have to get me to the corner store ’cause they won’t sell you cigs on account of your age.”

“One minute,” I said. I got Pablo rinsed off in the kitchen sink and met Grandma on the front porch. The grocery cart with the old couch cushion still in it was on the sidewalk. I helped her climb up the stepladder and got her oxygen tank in place. Then I strapped Pablo in his baby seat and we were off. I went down the street to avoid the broken sidewalk. I wasn’t worried about cars because with the way we looked I figured the drivers would be plenty worried about us.

“So,” she said, “Have you met Carter’s girlfriend yet?”

“Do you mean Leezy?”

“Who else?” she said.

“Yeah.”

“I think she’s a bad influence on him,” she said. “Every time your father gets a girlfriend he forgets he’s a born mess, so it doesn’t take him long before he loses control of his senses and goes down the drain.”

“I thought she was pretty nice,” I said. “Every time Dad got crazy at the game she settled him down.”

“Well, you haven’t seen him unravel like I have,” she said. “And I can tell you his downfall always starts with getting a new girlfriend. Just don’t tell your mom about her. If you have any hope of getting them back together again, you can’t tell her about Leezy. I guarantee you, once Leezy gets wind of how nuts he is she’ll head for the hills. You can bet on that!”

I could feel myself being pulled apart between Mom and Dad as I kept pushing the rattling cart down the street. I was wondering if when you got married you always told the other person the truth all the time. Because it seemed to me that I could only tell Mom some of the things about Dad, and I could only tell him some of the things about her. Then I thought, maybe that’s why their marriage broke up, because they couldn’t tell the whole truth to each other.

When we got to the store there wasn’t a curb ramp, so Grandma said to park her out front.

“Tell the cashier—either Betty or Claire—to come out here and speak to me if they need proof that the cigs aren’t for you.”

I lifted Pablo and brought him with me. I didn’t want her to dog-nap him for the rest of my twenty dollars.

When I asked the cashier for two packs of generic menthols she gave them to me without blinking an eyelash. “They’re for my grandma,” I explained. “She’s outside in a shopping cart.”

“Better her than you,” she said dryly. Before I could get out of the store I grabbed a can of dog food and a shoe-shaped chew toy for Pablo. He was already up to his old peeing tricks, and I didn’t want him chewing too. Next time Grandma might hide him in the freezer. I also got some new batteries for my tape player.

When I returned with the cigarettes Grandma ripped a pack open like they were the only medicine in the world to save her from a rattlesnake bite. She got one started and puffed so much that all the way home I kept thinking we were like an old train.

By the time I made it back to our sidewalk Dad was home and I was half wilted.

“Hey,” he hollered from the front porch. “Don’t wear yourself out pushing Mom. She can get around just fine if she wants and we got an important game today. If we ace this one we’ll be back in second place and breathing down the necks of that bogus O-Men Tire team.”

“Then help me get her out of here,” I said. “Last time I tried she almost fell over.”

Dad reached in and disconnected her hose. Then he picked her up with his arms under her knees and bony back. Suddenly he got a mischievous look on his face and began to spin her around and around in circles until she was dizzy, then he stood her up on the porch and she staggered over to the wall. While he slapped his leg and laughed she moaned and wheezed and inched her way toward the door.

“Hey, Dad,” I said, and reached out to steady Grandma before she fell over. “Can I call Mom?”

“Sure,” he said, still laughing at what he’d done.

I led Grandma into the house and set her on the couch.

“My oxygen,” she begged.

I ran back out to the cart and brought it to her. She smiled and gave my hand a squeeze and I looked down at her and couldn’t feel anything else about her except for how sorry I felt that she was in such bad shape.

“You okay?” I asked, as she began to breathe more evenly.

She just nodded. Then between breaths she said, “Mark my words … I’m gonna get … that son-of-a-gun. He’s been sneak-drinkin’ again and all I got to do is call your mom and”—she snapped her fingers—“she’ll be here in a second.”

I turned and ran for the telephone. I wanted to get there first. Mom answered right away and I was so happy to hear her voice I started talking like a switch had been flicked on.

“I pitched in a game and it was great and I have another game today,” I blurted out, full of happiness. “I like baseball and I didn’t even know it.”

“I used to love baseball,” she said. “Get your dad to show you the Roberto Clemente ball I gave him a million years ago. It should be worth a bundle by now.”

Whoops, I thought. I didn’t want to tell her I had skinned that ball all up so you could hardly find the signature. “I didn’t know you liked baseball,” I said.

“There are a lot of things about me you don’t know,” she replied, suddenly sounding like a stranger, as if I had always lived with Dad and she was the one I didn’t know.

“Dad likes baseball too,” I said. “Maybe you could come down and the three of us could go to a game together.”

“Don’t go there, Joey,” she said with the same cold voice she had used on me in the car. “Ask your dad to show you the scar over his eye where I bounced Roberto Clemente off his thick head.”

But I wasn’t listening to her. I just had a picture in my mind of Mom, Dad, and me and Pablo at a Pirates baseball game. The four of us in a row, or in a circle, or a square, or standing on top of each other’s shoulders like a nutty circus act, all eating those foot-long hot dogs and sharing a bucket of soda. It didn’t matter how we were—as long as we were four. “Hey, Dad,” I yelled across the room, “do you want to talk with Mom?”

As I waited for his answer I could hear Mom saying, “No. No. Joey, no. Joey, do you hear me?”

I heard her, but I wasn’t listening.

“Sure,” Dad said. “I’d love to speak with her.” As he came toward the phone he passed a mirror and for a moment he paused and ran his hand through his hair as if Mom was at the front door and he was trying to look handsome for her.

I handed him the phone. “Hi, Fran,” he said, and then turned away and hunched his shoulders over for some privacy.

“Tell her she can come visit,” I said, and circled round to see his face, but he kept circling away from me until the cord had him wrapped up like Houdini.

“Tell her to visit!” I yelled, and danced from foot to foot. “Visit! Visit!”

He turned to me and snapped angrily, “Stop it. She doesn’t want to visit.”

“Make her,” I said. “Tell her you want her to come.”

Dad jammed his finger in his free ear as he listened, and spoke. “Yeah, I’ve been keeping up with his medicine. Yeah, I think he’s changed it today. Yeah, I know it’s important. Yeah, I’m living up to my responsibilities. No, I don’t think I need your advice. Yeah, here’s Joey.”

He handed me the phone like it was something smelly.

“Have you been changing your patch?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Well—not today yet.”

“You sound just like your dad,” she said.

“We’re guys,” I replied. “This is how guys sound.”

I glanced over at Dad. He winked at me and I winked back. “Hey, Dad,” I yelled so Mom could hear over the phone, “when can we go back to the tattoo parlor?”

Dad’s eyes bugged out and he put his finger over his lips.

“Joey,” Mom said, “listen to me. I want you to hang up this phone and immediately change your patch. You got that? Or do I have to come get you?”

“I got it,” I said miserably, knowing I had gone too far. “I was just joking.”

“How come I’m not laughing?” she said. “You know why? Because you scare me when you get carried away and I’m not around to know if you are joking or gyrating. You know what I mean?”

“I know,” I said, while suddenly wanting to get off the phone as desperately as I had a few minutes ago wanted to get on it. “I’ll let you know how the game goes,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “Do an official score sheet and mail it to me. I like stats.”

As soon as I put down the phone Dad had his hand on my shoulder. “Come on,” he said. “You seem fine to me, but we better get that patch changed before your mom shows up with a lawyer.”

“Hey, Dad,” I asked, “let me see the scar over your eye.”

He squatted down and pointed to a red line that looked like a tiny railroad track. “This is where she beaned me,” he said. “And now that I think of it, I bet you got your good arm from her.”

 

As soon as we were in the car Dad started talking. It was like he couldn’t stand to have anything moving faster than his mouth. “You know, Joey, all morning I been over at Storybook Land,” Dad said as he lit up a cigarette. “I went over to see ol’ Humpty Dumpty and do some solid thinking. Humpty didn’t let me down. Here’s what I came up with. In life you gotta have a goal. Big ones or small ones, I don’t care what size. Just have a goal and right now we have the same goal—Joey, I know you want to know me better and I want to know you better. This is the whole reason why you are here this summer. But, we can’t share my past. And when you leave here and return to your mom, I won’t be there to share your future. But right now—this summer—you and me—this is the time for us. We can win this baseball championship and long after you are gone I can think of this time and how my boy and me were the biggest winners on the field. This is our goal, Joey—to be champions together. This is what I’ve been thinking about all morning. And who knows, maybe next year you can come back and we can do it all over again. But one thing at a time. Let’s be winners now. What do you say?”

I just looked over at him and I had tears in my eyes because it was something I wanted to hear in the worst way. And as I stared at him he reached out and put his hand on mine and I could feel it shaking and before long mine began to shake too.

“Let’s do it,” I said. “Let’s be the champs.”

“Right on,” he said.

“But I’m gonna need help,” I said. “I really don’t know what I’m doing.”

“Don’t sweat it,” he said. “Remember, you are the caveman with the rock. That’s all you need to know. Now listen to this. Leezy and I were working on the lineup and we both decided you were our number-one pitcher. We were talking strategy. First we gotta beat Ritter’s Diner tonight. Then we gotta beat Emerson Real Estate, then take the semifinals, then knock off whoever is in the other PAL field for the North Side Championship.”

“Do I have to pitch every game?” I asked.

“Yeah, Joey,” he said. “Otherwise we don’t stand a chance. But I’m excusing you from practices. I don’t want you wearing out your arm.”

“Hey, Dad,” I said, “can you make sure Grandma and Pablo come to the game and that Pablo wears his jersey? He’s my good-luck charm.”

“Will it make you pitch better?” Dad asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“No problem,” he promised. “When you take the mound they’ll be in the stands. Scout’s honor. I’ll have Leezy get them.”

I smiled. I wanted Pablo to watch me win.