Shame-5

Morning Time

Although B. W. remained tight-lipped, after a few days—unlike Michael—he at least returned to speaking to me, and I got the sense that although he was upset about something, whatever that something was, it wasn’t primarily me. Maybe a truly good parent would have rooted out the cause of his melancholy like a terrier burrowing after a gopher. I have to admit I was willing to let things ride for a bit rather than take the risk of sending him back into silence.

We conversed at the breakfast table again, at least when Michael didn’t join us, which anyway was about every morning. We talked about practice. B. W. shrugged when I asked how he thought it was going.

“Okay, I guess. You’re the coach.”

While Michelle bustled around getting ready to leave, we talked about colleges, and he got a gleam in his eye when we talked about forestry. He had spent part of the last few summers after we’d finished harvest with other FFA kids at the Cimarron camp in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in New Mexico, and he hoped to work as a ranger this next summer, taking groups out into the wilderness for two-week backpacking trips. While it looked like he would probably go to Oklahoma State, which had a good reputation for forestry, he really had his heart set on the high-powered program at the University of Montana in Missoula, and he said so again this morning.

“Well,” I said, “let’s hope you have another good season.” There had been some interest from college scouts the previous year. “Maybe you’ll get a basketball scholarship or get some help if you keep your grades up.”

“Maybe.” He sighed, and I sensed a danger spot, an open pit looming ahead, and eased cautiously around the edges of it. Instead, I asked him about Jennifer, his current girl, and he smiled big before catching himself. “Oh, she’s good, she’s fine,” he said, filling his smile with a spoonful of cereal.

“Which one? They’re not interchangeable, are they?” asked Michelle, dashing back into the kitchen to scoop her keys off the counter with an exasperated I’m-running-late groan.

“Yup,” he said, and took another bite so he wouldn’t have to say anything else.

“Okay,” Michelle said, “I’m off to save Western culture. Any encouragement?”

“All memorable events transpire in morning time,” I called after her, and was answered by a laugh and a slamming door. Henry David Thoreau said something of the sort, I believe, in Walden, and since Michelle annually taught him to her seniors and implored them to listen to his advice on life, I had sought out a few pungent quotations to employ on appropriate occasions—which is to say, when they worked to my benefit, which is the only reason anyone ever quotes anything.

B. W. and I were the only members of the family who happily followed Thoreau’s admonitions to rise early and greet the dawn, unless you count Michael, who sometimes greeted it coming home, which I don’t think was exactly what the bard of Walden Pond had in mind.

“Got to go, Dad,” B. W. said, rising from the table with his bowl and juice glass.

“I’ll see you at practice,” I said, patting his shoulder as he went past.

He grunted, put his dishes in the sink, and departed, leaving me to bask in the auroral glow of morning by myself. Actually, I’d already been outside and it was brisk out there, wind out of the north, mid-forties according to the thermometer outside the kitchen window, which was probably about right for a low temperature in October. I was content to remain inside for awhile, and was thinking about going into the den and pulling Henry David off the bookshelf instead of driving into town for coffee when the phone rang.

I figured it was probably one of my coffee buddies wondering where I was, so I picked it off the cradle and said, “Yeah.”

“Since when do the only two men in my life conspire behind my back?” Samantha Mathis Cobb purred in my ear. I knew that voice in the same way I knew the contours of the face I shaved every morning, but knowing that voice and being prepared to hear it were entirely separate matters. My breath left me like a covey of quail exploding out of a stand of tall grass, and my insides, whether straining to follow or exposed to the partial vacuum thereby created, knotted.

“S-Sam?” I stammered.

“The very same,” she said. “Surprised?”

“Uhmn,” I said, not yet trusting words. At least I was breathing again.

“What is this thing that you’ve talked Bill into doing at Christmas? A basketball game? What kind of middle-aged macho nonsense is that?”

“It’s not my middle-aged macho nonsense.” I felt I should point that out.

“Well,” she said. “I thought not. So do you, uhm, like the idea?”

“No,” I said.

“I don’t either,” she said. “So. What are we going to do about it?” We were planning the future again. Her voice was still soft, conspiratorial, and it sent a thrill shivering up my spine; it made me want to promise that we would stop the game somehow, that I would chain myself to the doors of the gymnasium, that at the homecoming dance the night before the game I would spike the punch and disable the team with food poisoning.

But what I said was, “It’s a done deal. They changed our reunion to December because of the game. You should have already gotten something in the mail. Oz and Michelle sent things out a week or two back.”

“Yes, I got something about that,” she said. She paused for a moment, emitted a sound like a low hum, and finally said, “Well, a dance. I suppose something good could come out of this.” She hummed again. “Save a dance for me, Johnny? I loved our dance at the last reunion. Do you remember?”

Oh, dear God. She would have to bring that up.

Did I remember?

Of course I did.

It had been one of the last dances at our tenth anniversary get-together. The Cars’ “Drive” was playing, and as they sang, “Who’s gonna drive you home tonight?” and I held her close, the years melted away, and it might almost have been that younger me, that younger her. While my hands stayed respectfully above the curve of her hips, my fingertips remembered and rememorized the small of her back, and I discovered that the smell of her hair still made me stupid, still made my heart catch in its steady progress toward middle age.

“Right. I remember it.” I paused, spoke when my voice seemed steady. “I think I can set aside one dance, seeing as how we’ve been friends forever.”

“Forever,” she said with a sigh. “Has it been that long? Sometimes it seems like just yesterday. But I look at the girls, and they’re fifteen and thirteen, and I’ve seen them grow, so it’s not like the record skipped somewhere, jumped ahead. Oh, John, how did we get so old?”

“Two ways,” I said, cribbing from Hemingway. “Gradually, then suddenly.”

“No, it was all gradual. It’s just the recognition that’s been sudden,” Sam murmured.

It was my turn to sigh. Before I could say anything else, she leapt in again, and the tone of her voice had gone from sharing secrets to making plans. “Johnny, one of these days we really need to talk about some things.”

“We’re talking right now,” I said, although the hollowness in my chest told me she was speaking of something different, something considerably more involved than what we were presently doing.

“In person,” she said firmly. “I think some things can only be said face-to-face.”

The severity or importance of such talks is almost always directly proportional to the pause between “We need to talk” and the eventual conversation. So is the level of anxiety of the person so warned. Want to make someone sweat? Say, “We really need to talk. See you in a few months.”

But I couldn’t let myself think about any of that. “I’ve got to go, Sam,” I said, and I seized on the first excuse I could conjure. “I’ve got to haul a dead calf off to the canyon.”

“Well, that’s a fine way to end a conversation,” she said, but she was laughing, and the sound of Samantha Mathis Cobb’s laughter was still as beautiful as the sound of my waterfall dropping musically into the pond. “We’ll talk soon. Take care of yourself, Johnny.”

“You, too,” I said. “So long.” I hung up the phone, stood up, then dropped my hands back onto the top of the cabinet to steady myself and shook my head so hard I thought I could hear something rattle. A nocturnal presence—Michael—passed on the way to pour himself a glass of orange juice and disappear again into his inner sanctum.

He glanced in my general direction and then back at the ground as he passed me on the way out. “Who died?” he muttered, although he didn’t stop for any answer.

If even Michael saw how shaken I was, it must be pretty bad. “Come on, man,” I whispered. “Shake it off.”

Or, maybe, more properly, “Walk it off,” which was what my coach Von Parker used to say, his remedy for any disaster that might conceivably befall a human being.

Twisted ankle coming down with a rebound?

Walk it off.

Your heart broken?

Walk it off.

Mysterious phone call from your old flame?

Walk it off.

So I walked. Out to the barn, where I pulled on a pair of battered gloves. Into a pen at the back of the barn, where the ex-calf, dead from pneumonia, lay on its side in its own sickly yellow manure. Out to my pickup, dragging the calf, which weighed at least what I did, by his legs, my own legs straining, boot heels slipping as I backed to the tailgate where I half lifted, half wrestled it into the truck bed, my old dog, Frank, snuffling delightedly around behind me. Out to the canyon, where my father and his father before him used to dump trash—there is no curbside pickup for farmers, let me assure you—where I backed the truck to the rim, climbed into the back, and pushed the body out unceremoniously. The deceased calf hit once, rolled partway over, and caught on some debris halfway down the canyon wall.

Maybe Lauren was onto something when she talked about bailing out of the beef conspiracy. I had just provided a meal for a coyote, a worthy project, maybe, but still the sight of the calf’s stiff limbs sticking out into cold, empty air was enough to complete the job of ruining my morning.

And I’d had such high hopes for it, too, because I knew the afternoon was going to be ridiculously hard. Oz and I—Bobby Ray completely washed his hands of it—had agreed to meet at McBee’s for lunch and then drive out to Phillip’s place before practice to talk with him about playing in December.

“Think he’ll shoot us?” Oz wondered when we decided to do this, and although he had called me from home, I had a vision of him hunkered down behind the pharmacist’s counter at the drug store while bullets flew.

“He wouldn’t shoot us,” I said, with a confidence I did not feel. “We’re old friends.”

“No, we’re not,” Oz said. “Never were. Certainly aren’t now.”

He was right. I had been closer to Phillip than any of the other guys, been out drinking and driving with him, even tried to help him, but I didn’t know what demons drove him, didn’t know what had sparked him down the trail that eventually led to armed robbery and the penitentiary.

And yet we were going out to talk to him, to trespass on his turf, and as much as my body told me it wanted to put things off—or at least wanted more time to recuperate from my morning shock—the clock on the dash of my Chevy said 11:00, and we were supposed to meet in town at noon.

I went back and changed clothes, threw the ones I’d been wearing into the washer. I didn’t want Phillip to think I was putting on any airs, so I wore another faded pair of Wranglers, another pair of work boots, and an old blue T-shirt under my jacket. Oz must have had a similar idea, because underneath his pharmacist’s smock, which he untied before he climbed into my truck and then wadded between us on the seat, he was wearing an old pair of Converse high-tops, Levis, and an ancient gray sweatshirt, arms tugged up to the elbow, with “Watonga Eagles” across the chest.

“Couldn’t hurt,” he said when he saw me glance at his shirt and smile.

“Might help,” I replied.

After lunch, we drove in silence out of town, past the entrance to Roman Nose State Park, and then down the dusty section roads toward Phillip’s place. I had directions that my closest neighbor, Michael Graywolf, had given me. When I’d asked him if he wanted to guide us personally into his cousin’s house, he said, “No way am I setting foot on his property.”

“Why not?” I had asked him.

He pulled off his black Stevie Ray Vaughan hat and rubbed his forehead. “Man, that Indian’s in a world of hurt. I think our Grandma Ellen is the only person he hasn’t shot at.”

“Thanks for that encouragement,” I said.

“Good luck, John,” he said. “But you may be all right. He’s not as good a shot if he’s been drinking. Of course, he’s more likely to want to shoot you then.” He stopped and looked at me in what I hoped was mock seriousness. “You did tell Michelle to rent me your pasture if anything ever happened to you, right?”

“Thanks,” I said again. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

It hadn’t rained in town for what seemed like weeks, although I knew it couldn’t have been that long. The dust billowed out from behind and under the truck, and once, when we passed another pickup, we drove in his dust for a quarter of a mile, the fine white powder coating hood and windshield and settling finally to earth again in the fullness of time.

Up ahead and to the left was the barbed-wire gap, and once we crossed it, we would be in Phillip’s territory. I stopped in front of the gap. Oz looked at me, took a deep breath, let it out, and got out of the truck to let us in. He pulled the gate post out of its upper and lower barbed-wire loops, carried it back and in, and when I’d pulled the truck far enough inside, walked back to the loops, dragging the gap across the dry grass behind him and raising a miniature cloud of dust. Then he seated the post back in its lower wire loop, and with a slight nudge from his shoulder, eased the gap tight until the upper loop would fit back over the post.

“Bad fence,” was all Oz had to say when he climbed back in. I had seen it too. The strands of barbed wire as far as we could see were loose and sagging, and some of the posts had broken or were rotting. No self-respecting farmer would present such a face to the world.

We followed a twin-rutted track through the dead grass, down a rise, and into a stand of cottonwoods. In amongst them nestled Phillip’s small mobile home: white corrugated tin siding with aqua trim, old tires arrayed on the tin roof to hold it on during high winds, a protective grouping of junk cars guarding any approach with the assistance of some old appliances, a century-old plow, a pile of bottles, and a big black half-Brahma who raised her tail and delivered a powerful yellow stream of urine to commemorate our arrival.

We sat for a moment in the truck after I shut off the engine, and not, I assure you, because we were afraid of the big black half-Brahma heifer. But then I saw a curtain pull aside slightly in the front window, and I opened my door and got out, hands wide of my body so he could see that I came in peace.

Oz reluctantly followed my lead, and even from the far side of the truck I could see his huge Adam’s apple rise and fall as he gulped.

Then the door opened with a screech of ill-fitting metal on metal, and the barrel of a .30-30 slowly emerged, rose, and looked me right in the eyes. I may have gulped then as well, although I don’t remember it. All I remember was looking into the dark opening of that rifle and thinking that if Phillip One Horse was crazy or drunk enough to put eight pounds of pressure on the trigger, I was a dead man.

“Phillip, it’s Oz and John,” I heard Oz call, a catch in his voice. “Can we talk with you for a bit?”

The rifle did not move. I saw the bluish sheen of the barrel and observed that while everything else on the farm might be falling down around him, Phillip was still taking good care of this rifle. He always did love to hunt. He was a good shot, too, when he was sober.

These were the thoughts that finally propelled me to join Oz in hailing the castle. “Hey, Phillip, we just want to talk to you for a second. Can we come up to the porch?”

The porch was actually just four steps leading up to the door, but I wasn’t willing to stand on formalities at that moment.

The rifle dropped, the door screeched open wider, and Phillip One Horse filled the doorway, as tall and broad-shouldered as I remembered him, and despite the passage of years, no bigger around the waist. The only real difference I could detect was that his long black hair was streaked liberally with gray.

“What do you want?” he asked softly, and his voice was not angry, but it was colored with sadness and weariness.

“Long time no see,” I heard myself babbling, and in that moment wished he hadn’t taken the gun off me; the resulting relief had pushed rational thought from my head.

“Yes,” he said. “What do you want?” He seemed pretty sober to me.

“I don’t guess you’d believe we just dropped by to say howdy,” I said.

“You haven’t been to see me once since I got out of prison,” he said. “Why start now?”

“We’ve come with a proposition,” Oz said, which may not have been an improvement, but then again you didn’t have to be God in heaven to see that I wasn’t getting anywhere. “We’re getting our old team together to play a fund-raiser for the school. Against John’s high school team. In December, during the holidays. Our twentieth reunion.” The strain of talking so much wore on Oz; if he’d had to utter one more sentence it would have been about one word long.

Phillip turned to me. We were about ten feet apart—the height of a basketball goal—and his eyes looked out of a face that I could now see was worn and lined beyond his—our—years. We held each other’s gaze for a long moment. I could feel his questions, feel his sadness, and I was ashamed that I had come.

What was a stupid game compared to this kind of sadness?

At last, he looked down at the top step. “No,” he said. He turned to go inside, and Oz turned to go back to the truck.

“Phillip,” I called, and I stepped forward to the base of the stairs. “Do you remember that Comanche game? Remember those rebounds? Seventeen of them. Maybe Oz made that last crazy shot, but he wouldn’t have had the ball if you hadn’t pulled it down and passed it out to him.”

“That’s right,” Oz said, as though he had just remembered, and maybe he had, although I doubt it; when a man is renowned all his life for one exploit, he tends to know it inside and out, although it may be embellished, polished up, as the years pass. “When my man put up that jumper, I peeled off and headed down court.”

“That’s right,” Phillip repeated. He turned around, and there was something new in his face as he groped for that memory. He raised the first two fingers and thumb of his right hand to his lips as though he were getting ready to insert a pinch between his cheek and gum, but he just left them there, tapping gently. “Guy shot from the top of the key. It hit the front right of the rim and I outjumped their center for it. It came off the rim funny. Cleared it out over half-court to you with a baseball pass.” And as the light of remembrance took over his face, something that was almost a smile flickered across it.

“Right to me,” Oz said excitedly. “A great pass with something on it, or I never would have got the shot up to beat the buzzer.”

“But you did get him the ball,” I said, stepping forward. “We won that game and went on to the finals that year because of you. Couldn’t have done it without you. And it won’t be the same playing again without you. What do you say?”

He looked at me and then across at Oz, and in the process, his gaze took in deceased washing machines and the broken-windowed carcass of a ’66 Chevy Impala. The light across his face flickered and then went out.

“It’s not the same, John,” he said quietly. “Playing a game is exactly what it would be. It’s just pretending.” He took a deep breath, shook his head, and turned to go again.

“Wait,” I said. “Phillip, let me say one more thing.” And to my surprise he stayed where he was, although he did not turn around. “It must seem silly to you, and you’ve got no reason to want to come. I know that, and I don’t blame you. It seems pretty silly to me, too.” The shame was deep, washing over me as I spoke the truth: “But this isn’t silly—we didn’t stand by you. I didn’t stand by you.” I raised my hands, palms up. Mea culpa. “We weren’t good friends. You’re right. But if you want to come to the gym Sunday afternoon at three to shoot around with us, we’d be proud to have you. No matter what’s happened in between, no matter how we let you down.”

It was a pretty good speech, certainly heartfelt, and I guess maybe I expected him to turn around and smile and maybe we would all have driven into town together for a celebratory chocolate shake at the Sonic or something. But when he looked back, his face was even graver, and what he repeated was, “You were not good friends.”

“No,” I said, and I bit my lip, and then went on. “We were not. I hope you can forgive us. That maybe we can start over.”

He didn’t say anything, make any gesture, answer in any way that I could see except to step back inside his trailer and pull the door shut with a screech. Oz and I stood there for a moment, the only sound the snorting breath of the Brahma heifer. After a time, the two of us got back in the truck and returned to town.

We didn’t talk until we reached the city limits, and all I said was, “Well, Bobby Ray’ll say ‘I told you so.’”

“Maybe,” Oz said, some moments later, as I pulled back into the parking lot. “But anyway, I’m glad we went.”

We shook hands, and he tied his smock back on and walked down the street toward what remained of downtown, toward his polished counter, his orderly plastic bottles, although I sensed that he’d find little satisfaction in them today.

Basketball practice wouldn’t start until 2:20, but I drove to the gym, changed into practice clothes, and played full speed by myself for an hour, rebounding my misses, chasing down errant shots, driving, juking, jumping, pushing myself until my shirt was heavy with sweat and my eyes stung, until weariness crept pleasantly into my legs and shoulders and upper arms. Finally I draped myself across the first row of bleachers while my players filed in from their last class of the day.

And that’s where I sat for the remainder of practice. “Full court scrimmage,” I called. They’d earned a day just to play; they had worked hard. So for an hour, I let them run the floor, let them execute the plays we’d drilled over and over, let B. W. find the open man, as he could do better than anyone I had ever seen, far better than I could on the best day of my life, and while I had the whistle in my teeth and was supposed to be calling fouls, what I ended up doing was watching B. W. and realizing for the first time—even though I’d coached him for three years, even though I’d watched every game he’d played since junior high, even though I’d played him myself hundreds of times since he was old enough to loft the ball as high as the basket—that he was the real thing. He had the physical gifts, but there was more to it than that; he had the intelligence to know he’d have a cutter coming back door, to loft a pass to Micheal Wilkes when Micheal’s defender shifted around to front him and left the path to the basket open, to penetrate the lane and dish the ball off to Bird for an easy jumper when the defense collapsed to cut off his drive.

It was more than intelligence; basketball intelligence can be learned, but instincts are something you can’t teach, and that’s what he had.

So maybe I fell down on my duty as referee. It was not a huge failing; they called their own fouls, mostly, and I caught the most flagrant that went uncalled. What was important, what stayed with me, was what I saw that day, what I learned.

I learned that my son was something special, the basketball player I always wanted to be and never was, and I don’t think he realized it any more than I had.

So when B. W. popped a jumper from the top of the key with Albert Heap of Birds right in his face, his arms raised, when that beautiful high arc passed through the net like a diver cleanly knifing into the water, I whistled practice to an end. I wanted to keep that image, and so I exercised the power I possessed to preserve it unsullied. “Take your laps,” I called. “Then hit the showers. You played hard. Tomorrow we’ll go back to drills.”

They took off like the tired but happy kids they were. But before B. W. could hit his stride, I dropped my hand to his shoulder to detain him, patted him awkwardly a couple of times, and said, finally, “It’s a joy to watch you play.”

He smiled—almost sadly, then said, simply, “Thanks, Dad.” And he sprinted off to catch up to the others.

I watched, shaking my head and smiling. It was a day when I learned much, not the least of which was that not all memorable events transpire in morning time.