The Convict and Other Stories

“They won’t have time. They’re going to be busy investigating Klaus.”

I set her down on the bed. Her face was quiet, motionless on the pillow.

“What do you mean?” she said.

“I wrote a letter to the president of the United States and signed Klaus’s name.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“It goes: ‘Dear Gipper, I liked that film you and Errol Flynn played Nazis in. I was one myself. I’d like to get together with you and have a chat about the Russians and those UFOs that have been flying around the White House.’”

“You did that?”

“The feds will go through his life with a garden rake. And wait till he tries to explain some of the phone calls he made today.”

“You really did that?”

“You don’t need to believe me, Amanda. But I don’t think we’ll be seeing Klaus around New Iberia for a while. In the meantime your mainline daddy’s meter is running.”

I slipped my arms under her cowboy shirt, up her back, and leaned my face close to hers. Her blue eyes, like a schoolgirl’s, looked unblinkingly into mine. Then I felt her slender fingers slide across my shoulders and rest on my neck.

We made love on the bed, on the floor, in the porch hammock behind the bamboo shades while the rain sluiced off the roof and danced on the bayou. I started to go to the icebox for the Cold Duck.

“Don’t you dare move, you bad ole alligator man,” she said.

And I lay with my head on her breast, her heart beating under the tattooed flag of my reclaimed country.

TAKING A SECOND LOOK

He looked out the bar window at the lighted baseball diamond in the park across the street while he waited for the bartender to bring him another manhattan. He didn’t know if it was the alcohol working in his head or his present mood of reverie that made him see for the first time the similarity between this baseball field and Cherryhurst Park, where he had played ball as a boy in Fort Worth. Just a minute ago he had been telling the bartender about the Cheerio and Duncan yo-yo contests that were held on street corners all over the country during the 1940s. He hadn’t thought about them in years. Why now? The bartender was old enough to remember them but said he didn’t. However, that wasn’t surprising. Few people today invested much in memory.

In fact, he often felt that he was the only person he knew who cared about remembering things. It was a self-indulgent attitude, he realized, but then again sometimes there were instances when he truly knew that he was an anachronism, alone, and surrounded by people who had no conception of history, even the most casual form of it. That afternoon at the English department meeting he had done a stupid thing: broken his own rule, yielded to his vitriol, confusing the younger members of the faculty and boring the others. The discussion had gone on interminably about “meeting the needs of the community” until finally he had said, “The people who would let the community plan a college curriculum probably would also think that the finest form of government in world history was the French general assembly under Robespierre.”

Then he had left the meeting early and had gone to the bar, disgusted with his cynical vanity. The bar was his Friday-afternoon place, but it was no longer afternoon and he had been there two other nights during the week, each time sifting out his anger and discontent, chasing each thought down like a snapping dog that he had to bludgeon to death. Yet he wondered if his unhappiness with his job at the city college, his tilting with the educational behaviorists and the administration, wasn’t just a means to avoid the feeling of loss that would overcome him suddenly and leave him so weak that he couldn’t put sentences together, focus on the change of a light at an intersection, or remember what he was reading on an examination paper.

He had devised several ways of disguising or explaining those moments when they happened in front of other people, but sometimes the numbness was so thick, so devastating to his mind, that he didn’t care whether he appeared the fool or not. His son had been killed at Khe Sanh three years ago, and although he knew that his loss was not unique, the grief that it brought seemed to be, because it did not obey its own nature and cauterize itself with time, and he was not sure that it ever would. He thought possibly he had come to understand the axiom You just live with it. Yes, he thought, you don’t confront and overcome it; you don’t accept it stoically; you just carry it around like a tumor and ignore the black lines that spread along the veins.

“Oh, here, Doc, I’ll fix you another one. I shouldn’t have set the glass so close to the edge,” the bartender said.

“That’s all right, Harold. I’ll take you up on it the next time in.”

He left the bar and cut across the park toward his apartment building. The field lights were off now, but the moon was full over the mountains, and the rounded details of the ball diamond had the soft half-lighted quality of memory. It was just like Cherryhurst Park: the chicken-wire backstop, the thin infield grass, the wood bleachers that were weathered gray and sagging in the center. The trees on the edge of the field were elms and maples instead of pin oaks, but the dusty black-green leaves moved with the same summer breeze, made the same cove of shadow where high school girls once waited to be held and kissed after a game.

He tapped the leather sole of his shoe on home plate, then began running toward first base, his necktie and starched collar like a metal band around his throat. He pivoted on the bag and turned away from the infield, breathing deeply and pulling off his coat. That was a single, he thought. Now for the steal against an overconfident left-handed pitcher. He led off the bag, one arm pointed deceptively back to it, then dug out for second, his head low, his thighs pumping, while the ball sped from the catcher’s extended-crouch throw and came in too high for the tag. He stood up from the slide in an explosion of dust and headed for third. The infield was in a panic and the throw to the third baseman was in the dirt. He never slowed down. He rounded the bag, the coach’s arm swinging in a circle in the corner of his vision, and sprinted for home. Why not? Jackie Robinson had done it and won the pennant. His leather sole clacked across the rubber plate, and he collided into the chicken-wire backstop, his chest heaving, his head thundering with whiskey and his own blood.

His heart was clicking inside him and his breath rasped uncontrollably in his throat as he walked over to pick up his coat. He thought he was going to throw up. His pants knee was torn, and he flinched when he touched the dirty red scrape through the cloth. He wondered if forty-six was a sufficient age for one to pare away the confines of reason from his life.

The next morning he made breakfast, which he had enjoyed doing on Saturday mornings even when he was married, and put on a pair of old slacks, a sweatshirt, and his tennis shoes, and headed for the park. The spring weather was wonderful. The mountains were blue west of town and the air was clear and bright and every detail of the park seemed etched in the sunlight. He jogged around the circumference of the park, breaking his stride when he went through the trees by the ball diamond, and watched a junior high team in gold-and-green shirts taking batting practice. His wind wasn’t as bad as he had thought it would be. He made two laps before he had to sit for a moment on the bleachers, the sweat drying on his face in the cool air. Then he started around the backstop again, increasing his speed all the way around the park until finally each breath came like a sliver of glass in the lungs and he had to walk with his head held back as though he had a bloody nose. But that’s all right, he thought. Each gasp is a piece of smoke gone from the chest and some measure of converted alcohol out of the liver and brain. In two weeks it could all be gone. Why not? The body of his youth was buried in him somewhere. It was only a matter of burning away the softness until he found it.

He sat on the grass behind third base and watched the batting practice. The kids on the team were Mexican, black, and working-class white, and they talked and played rough and broke up double plays with elbows and knees. Pete Rose wouldn’t have anything on this bunch, he thought. When the regular pitcher went in to take his turn at bat, a crippled boy took his place on the mound. The boy’s left leg was wasted as though he had had polio, and although he had a strong arm he threw flat-footed from the rubber like an infielder. Come over with your arm and put your weight into it, the professor thought. Get it down, too. Don’t float them by the

letters. Oh, good Lord, duck!

The batter crashed a high outside pitch behind the first-base line and made the professor tumble over backward in the grass. As he sat up laughing he saw a police car pull to the curb under the shade of an elm tree. An enormous policeman in sunglasses, with a freshly lit cigar, filled the driver’s window.

With no warning the first baseman casually turned toward the squad car, shot the finger, and said, “Hey, Pork Butt. Stuff this.”

The policeman opened the door and raised his massive weight out of the car. The butt of his revolver and the brass bullets on his belt glinted in the sun as he walked toward the diamond. The first baseman had turned back to the game and was hitting his glove as though nothing had happened.