FIVE
Why'd you choose Iowa, Jack?
(Laughs) It probably sounds hokey, but in a way Iowa chose me. I mean, I think my old man was half-bluffing when we turned down the Cardinals, and I don't remember that we had any applications in, you know (laughs) at colleges, I mean, other than maybe this Regents scholarship they had in New York.
So they recruited you?
Well, we had a lot of colleges in this big packet my father set aside. I mean, you win a Legion championship like that and the word gets around. So my father flips through the packet one night, he and my momma--uh, my mom, I mean--and it's like my father is looking at mail order ads, you know, to see who has the best deal. (Laughs loudly) They didn't really say anything, those letters. There's all these NCAA requirements and you know... baseball coaches are a far piece from basketball coaches, in recruiting I mean...(a great smile crosses his face) I think my father wanted to have our cake and eat it too, you know. I mean we had just turned down twenty plus thousand bucks.
Did the Cardinals suggest Iowa?
Hell, no. They take care of their own. They wanted us to think about somewhere in Missouri, and they mentioned Arizona and a community college down there in the southwest. They really didn't have a lock on me, you know.
So...Iowa?
There was a river there (he is speaking softly now). Honest to God. That and my father got the idea that I would definitely be playing in the mid-West. It's hot as hell there in the summer, he said, corn's as high as your eye, and all that... Plus there were two minor league teams in the state, and that impressed him, why god knows. Also he liked the Hawkeye...Herkie.
Pardon.
Herkie the Hawkeye. He's the little mascot, like the Chicken. On the letterhead they had this Herkie figure smacking a baseball glove. My father was a very simple man, he was easily swayed by advertising. My father (he pauses here, unable to find the words) you don't see that kind of man much anymore. Oh, there's dudes playing in the majors still something like him, simple farm boys, despite the fact that they're hyped that way. Catfish was supposed to be that, you know. I never really knowed him.
(Flynn seems able to lapse into this regionless dialect at will. It is not an affectation so much as what one imagines to be the speech of baseball fields, a bit of Indiana and South Carolina--or better, Georgia!--combined. The dialect does not unsuit him, it is just unconvincing. Jack Flynn is clearly one of life's true aristocrats, a graduate of the Communications and Media program at the University of Iowa, a man destined for life beyond baseball. The effect is rather like Bill Bradley talking jive. You are disconcerted. You look for some mockery in him when he speaks so. There is none. It is as if he always longed to be one of the boys and knew he would never be.)
My father... (Flynn pauses and shakes his head. He is clearly having trouble getting this out. For a moment it looks like his eyes are glazing over, but then the Flynn control reasserts itself.)
Talk about him, Jack.
I'm trying to (laughs) seems like I'm always trying to. You know what a shore dinner is?
In restaurants, you mean? The seafood platter?
Yes and no. Those things're named after what the guides do, you know, when you have a fishing party? My father...my father, he prepared the best goddamn shore dinner you ever tasted. I mean he loved making shore dinners! He was as careful as my Aunt Bertie baking a pie... First there'd be this big deep skillet full of fat back, cooked right over the fire til it crisped.
Cracklings?
Yeah, that's the idea. Me and Wolfman Hunt, sometimes we'd chow down on cracklings in a bag, you know, like chips. Gave the rednecks shit fits... Can I say that?
It's a transcription, you can say anything. Hell, I can print almost anything.
Anyway, my father, he'd take those crispy pieces of fat back and put em up on bread with some onions, and that'd be your appetizer you know. Heaven really, on the river. The twilight coming down and this big, careful man leaning over the fire, watching to see that the whole party ate just like some big surly lady waitress. (He quickly makes himself clear, his voice raising.) Now don't get this wrong, goddamn it, my father was a man, one helluva man. Tougher than shit. My brother come back from running the Rangers basic training, back in the Nam days, and my father decked him, clean out... (pauses, considering) Can you leave that out? That's real private and will hurt certain people. My brother died--not in the fight, I mean, later--but it was one of those things. Say that when I grew up, I always confused my father with Paul Bunyan. For awhile I even got the idea he had a blue ox! (Laughs)
So, where were we?
Onion and fat back. There was this story I read for a class in college. It was mostly bullshit, but with some real beautiful stuff about hiking in the pine forests, and about the river. Anyway, the guy in the story takes an onion sandwich with him when he goes out to fish. I knew when I read that, that that was right. I sorta sat up and paid attention if you know what I mean.
Hemingway.
What?
Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway.
Yeah, whatever. Anyway, while people's eating this sandwich, you set the water boiling on the fire, and you set that rendered fat boiling with it. Two iron pans. Sometimes you get em too close and the steam will settle on the fat--or you'll splash them--and the fat roars like a railroad train, or thunder or something. Real boily noise, all crack-crack-crack! So...you set your corn boiling and your boiled whole potatoes, little sweet things (laughs) You can tell I'm Irish, huh? Irish caviar, my father called mashed potatoes! (laughs) Then you put in your fish. Doesn't matter what it is: pike, bass, anything, it tastes wonderful, you know. Dropped in that hot fat, fried in it. The air smells of it, it mixes with the river smell.
Batter?
Huh?
You put some batter on the fish?
(Laughs loudly) Jeez, I thought you wanted to get back to talking about baseball.
Well, (laughing), I do eventually, unless we can sell this to House and Garden.
Field and Stream! (Flynn laughs again. Finally the laugh is becoming comfortable, not the wary punctuation it was earlier. You begin to think Flynn would be fun to know, a good friend, behind the priggishness, the awkward quality he carries around with him like his lifetime ERA and his bad arm.) No they don't put batter on it! That's for Arthur Treacher's, Brit shit. This is the real thing... After the fish comes steak if they order it as an option. I could never tell my father's position on steak, but I think he just went along with it. Oh, I mean, he liked his steak at home or a restaurant, but I think he thought it was treachery, you know, a lack of loyalty to the river, to have steak with the shore dinner. But...business types liked it and the mark-up was good (laughs). My father had to have an eye for the mark-up, we were always right on the edge, you know, until I signed.
What about your signing? There are stories...
(Laughs) Let me finish the dinner! (Laughs) My father'd kill you if you didn't tell about the dessert--I mean he would of, if he was alive, you know--just like he'd like to kill you if you didn't eat it when he made it.
Well, I wouldn't want to kill anybody...
(Flynn pauses strangely, not catching the joke. He has a wary quality.) So, where was I?
Dessert.
Oh yeah. French toast, these big slabs of bread, you know, cut them from the loaves in blocks. Soak them in batter--Dad used a little nutmeg in his, said a Frenchy guide taught him that, and it makes all the difference--and then plop em in the same fat.
The same fat?
Yessir! I know you'd think it would stink with fish, but you got to imagine how hot this grease is I'm talking about. (Laughs) Once the old man somehow kicked the pot over, this great big iron fryer, you know. A whole gale of flame struck out! Leaping tongues of fire! (laughs) You can imagine the loss there, the whole dinner depends on your grease.
Somehow he made it through... (He seems to lapse into memory here, just dipping in for a moment and swimming right out.) somehow...so you slide these French toast slabs into the grease and it seals em right up, instant-like, crisp as a carnival waffle. You serve em up and put on butter, some maple syrup--the real thing, Dad tapped his own--and then a tablespoon of heavy cream, a spoon of brandy. You'd think you had died and gone to heaven or someplace like it...
Sounds like you wouldn't mind doing it yourself. Do you get up there often, to the Thousand Islands?
(Flynn is in thought and he does not answer immediately.) I just might do that someday. I really might. You can't just be a guide though, not the kind my father was... (Thinking again) No...no, not much anymore... there's really no one up there except Bertie and... (again he sinks in thought).
And?
And so we went to the college world series (laughs) but of course we didn't make it through. It's unusual for a Big Ten School to do that. (Laughs again, almost devilishly; the sense was that he had gone so far and then retreated, it was a feeling something like what hitters must have felt when Flynn worked against them.)
I take it you want to get back on track.
Want to? (laughs) no, have to, right?
So...
(Flynn interrupts.) It's important to say...I mean what got me started on all this horsecrap was how my father was easily swayed. It's strange, isn't it, a big man like that, you know, the rough-tough, wise river guide, that you'd feel you had to protect him? He was a very simple man, with simple needs and simple joys, if I can say that...I...I remember, when I started playing ball serious, that was my mother's doing, but my father got into it, you know. He'd warm me up or just play catch every day. I can remember the light slipping, the sun going down in a haze like it does by the river, and we'd try to use as much of the light as we could...Fish would be rising and maybe a ship would be making its way down the channel, something romantic you know? A ship from Panama...Liberia. We'd throw til the mosquitoes chased us in, hardly talking, maybe Red Barber or somebody on the radio, the ball going back and forth, smacking in the gloves. I'd watch the rotation of the stitches when he threw it to me, you know (laughs), maybe I was still thinking I could have been a slugger, and two homeruns careerwise aint half bad! (Laughs, then pauses in thought again, very pensive and almost sad.) My father (sighs), he was something, yes sir. Hell, you'll end up writing the whole piece about this, won't you? (Makes a gesture as if setting out a headline) Flynn: His Father Was His Secret Source of Strength! (Smiles oddly.) Maybe that's all I really wanted to say about him. I mean, I remember when we first started playing catch--when he first offered--I was worried about him, worried that I'd hurt him, or show him up, or, really, that he couldn't do it. He threw like a woman, sort-of, he threw like he casted a rod really, but he had a hell of an arm. He could whip it in there, keep you lively, you know? And he had an old, big-fingered glove he drug up from somewhere, a strange thing he greased up with mink oil and polished again and again with oxblood shoe wax. He was always careful with his gear...and he surprised me, you know? The way he played catch? I guess I learned something about him in those summers... He thought the world was lovely, my father did, bad with the good, for him it was all a holiday until the end...
"What about your mother?"
Flynn drove with a blank and resolute quality, a wholesome caution she found quite annoying. They crossed the Indian River into Theresa.
"Aren't you making too much of that white knight quality?" she asked.
"What?"
He did not waver.
"All that crap about a natural aristocracy of pitchers...the white young men with destiny upon them?"
"You make it sound like the Ku Klux Klan," he said.
He negotiated the village streets with care, looking for something. He is coming around.
She smiled and asked him to forgive her.
"But really," she said, "isn't it all too goopy?"
She got through. Flynn slowed and parked carefully, stared at her.
She saw it dawn he knew she thought.
"My mother is buried here. Here in Theresa."
She looked at him.
"You knew," he said. "Didn't you? Why did you use that word?"
"Goopy?"
It hurt not to know her. He tried.
"I knew--I saw--great black pitchers. Gibson, Ellis...Fergie Jenkins strung five twenty game seasons in a row. They had a certain quality, I...I just mean that I..."
He began to cry and she was sorry but it had to be done. She had felt the same way when he struck her.
"Don't you see...," he cried, "I can't remember!"
"I know that," she said sharply. "You've told me that before."
He wiped at the tears with one knuckle. Men were dear.
"It's something," he said, "a natural state...I tried to speak it so I could get out from under it. It's not just pitchers. You see it in other sports, in life... Senators, teevee anchormen...goalies, there's a scrubbed quality about them, a state of grace..."
He studied her with a glazed understanding.
"You're putting some things together, right?" she asked.
"You're from Canada," he said. "You know about goalies."
She nodded happily.
"Guy LeFleur," he said. "He has it too, the goopiness..."
She nodded again. Yes, yes, Flynn, it is coming back.
Emma LaChance, she thought.
He started the car again and maneuvered through the village to the hill where she lay.
"You want me to tell you everything, Jack, and it's the worst thing I could do. Amnesia, if that's what it is, isn't any virus. Nor is it a knock on the skull, at least not usually, and then it's almost always retrograde. You know too much... What you have is a block, no? You're familiar with that phenomenon, much more familiar than I."
"I suppose so," he said, "but there's more than you, more I can't get straight..."
"I know that too," she said. "Shall we go up?"
She let herself out the door and stood, unfazed, crisp, coolly pastel, waiting for him in the shade by the gate. Stones in an arch like the woods outside Normandy, spike iron fence and a mossy, damp smell like the old hospital in Ogdensburg.
The car door had the curve and fit and weight of the hatchdoor to a jet cockpit. Wolfman Hunt was a pilot and they wrote it into his contract that he could not fly. This was long before Munson went down, before Clemente. Wolfman ignored them and they suspended him; he ignored them again after they reinstated him.
Flynn still held the door open, and he looked at the wood inlay on the dash, the rows of black dials with lime green numerals.
"Considering the other expenses you are likely to undertake in the coming weeks, I have to advise you that a Maserati is not a prudent investment," Lenny had smiled then. "Besides, where will you get it fixed up there, the corner garage?"
"I didn't expect it to be the kind of Maserati which breaks down in the first two weeks," Flynn said.
"Touche," Lenny said, and then he had signed the purchase order.
He walked to her at the gate.
"What am I supposed to do?" he said.
"Keep remembering."
"And?"
"Do what you have to do. You're the white knight, Jack."
It was not easy. Inside the gate, up the slope of green where the markers made uncertain rows like chess pieces against the shaded turf, a man stared down at them, coiling hose into a black doughnut at his feet. He wore pressed, crisp, work clothes, the forest green gaberdine Flynn's father favored, alone among the guides not wearing flannel shirts or khaki. The gravedigger bent at the waist to coil the hose and he peered at the two of them with interest but no suspicion. It was hot and he was working, and there was an attractive woman entering the grounds. He brought the hose in slow circles, the nozzle slithering through the grass toward him as he coiled it. Flynn climbed the gentle hill toward the Coghlan plot where Nell lay, a Flynn in death, and like the Flynns, dead by water.
Pneumonia was a kind of water death. Cancer too. Six years before she had not survived the annual onset of vapors: the spring bronchitis thickening, a flu following upon it, the pneumonia setting in. She had drowned in herself, just as Jim had drown in the river, just as her only daughter had begun to drown in the womb, the water setting in upon the skull, making it bloom but pressing the brain into something like an ill-formed chestnut, a shriveled thing, a constant childhood.
Flynn had received the news in spring training. He was in the outfield with the other pitchers, after running, taking turns at taking lofty fly balls in gentle sunlight, neither pushing nor holding back, just feeling his body come back to him, slowly in April, but sure it would be there.
This would be his year. He was coming off a 20-10 year on a last place team. In any other year it would have been enough to get you in the record books. It was enough, that and a no-hitter; even if Carlton had won 27 with a team that finished a percentage point back, even if it was with the Cards, where Flynn was supposed to have made a lifetime, before Carlton came up.
He felt good. They were kidding out there and stretching their legs, and the boys were talking to him, joking at him. It was what happened when you had a good year under your belt, it gave people a license to razz you. It felt good.
"Look alive, Flynnie!"
The ball pokked off the fungo bat and rose in a looping arc, high in the sun. Flynn turned his back to it and the boys hooted and made like to faint. He jogged out after it, gauging where he thought it would drop, turned and saw it there, like a polaroid snapshot, the red stitches grinning at him like a clownface. It was like the ball had just stopped in the air, the bottom falling out. He stuck his glove out under it and felt it thud off the hard ridge of the heel.
As he chased after it, he could hear the boys squeal.
"Ooooh-eeeee! No-hit Flynn bobbles the catch!"
"Take the spring out of there, Flynn!"
"Steve Carlton goes to the wall and snatches 'em, Flynn!"
He laughed and threw it in, lobbing it to preserve the arm. Karen sat in the wooden stands in a yellow bikini, her face buried in her hands, laughing with the other wives. Another flyball pokked out toward the group of laughers. Someone was waving toward him and shouting, "Come in, Flynn! Come in..."
The boys were still laughing when he jogged in to the infield.
"Told you, boys, no-hit, no-glove, he's gone!"
There was still some hooting in the outfield when he made his way into the clubhouse.
"Said it was important, Jack," the clubhouse boy said.
Two reporters nodded to him as he took the phone.
"She's bad, Jackie," his father said.
The way he wept sounded like the boys hooting. It was a yipping sound, it made Flynn afraid to hear his father yipping like that.
Pneumonia is a backwash, like when the bottoms flood over after spring rains, the soil so saturated it becomes a swamp, too wet to drain, rich and dark and skimmed with algae and mosquito larvae. Only the sun could dry the shallows again, only the sun could retrieve it from the marsh grass. It was sunny in Arizona, sunny and dry and eighty; snow and thirty degrees in Massena.
"She just can't get her breath, Jackie," he yelped again. "They're trying, but it's bad enough to come, son."
Flynn lying in the outfield grass, the sun so good upon his face and chest. Just can't get my breath yet, Skipper, need to stretch out some and soak the rays.
The Skipper laughing. This would be his year.
Karen didn't take the plane then. Flynn had told her not to, but he hadn't really thought she would listen to him. He had wanted her to come.
"You can stay with the girls here, I'll call you to come up if there's anything serious."
"You sure, Jack?"
"Sure I'm sure."
He wasn't. He thought she would say that Mama Nell needed her. He hated when she called her Mama Nell, but he wanted to hear her say it now.
"I'll come back and pack for you," she said.
The girls were watching him, he hated them now for the same reasons that he loved them usually. How they hung together, all these wives. They were like sorority girls--hell, most of them were sorority girls. They took care of their own. Death was bad, but so was being traded. They were watching to see what he would say.
Karen ran a finger under the elastic at her waist. The tan line. She was looking to see how her goddamn tan was coming while Momma was dying in the snow and shitty slush.
"No need to do that, hon. I'm used to packing..."
The girls smiled. He had shown the right stuff.
"Anyway," he said, "you'll be better here with the girls. I won't worry about you so much..."
"Autograph, Jack?"
"Screw it!" Flynn said.
It was an old codger in a Hawaiian shirt, grinning through a leather tan, liver spots all over the hand that pushed the Holiday Inn placemat forward to be signed. The old codger's face turned yellow with the shock of rejection.
"I'm sorry...I'm..." Flynn tried to tell him.
"Jack's had some bad news," Karen explained.
"I don't need that," Flynn snapped at her, as he signed the placemat. "Sorry," he told the man.
"No, I'm sorry," the man said, "Hope it works out, Jack, this is gonna be your year."
The old man tipped his terrycloth fishing hat to the girls. They were all staring at Flynn. He had snapped at Karen when she was standing by him.
He kissed her and she smelled like coconuts from the lotion all over her body. The lipstick had that strawberry, waxy taste. She wiped at her lip with a finger.
"Call me, hon?" she whispered, baby-like.
"Yeah."
Yeah. Karen was there for the funeral, tan and in a Saks white linen suit. Wolfman, too, wore white linen, carried a black walnut stick with an ivory and gold handle. It was formal wear. Wolfman didn't have permission to leave training camp; he came anyway, bringing his own jet into Ogdensburg, a voodoo pilot.
At the funeral breakfast, Flynn's father commented on the cane. He appreciated good work. Wolfman gave him the walking stick, wouldn't hear of him turning it down. Flynn's father had seemed touched, he muttered thank you through watery eyes.
Yes! The same man, the gravedigger in gaberdine, was working that morning high on the farthest corner of the slope, uphill of the funeral party.
Flynn remembered the loop of water in the sunlight, like a spray of diamonds. The beauty of the air, spring setting in on Theresa.
He had gotten his mother a hand-rubbed cherry wood box with brass fittings, the best they had in Massena. It too shone in the spring sun. Everyone shone. Karen in white, her tanned arms gilt with soft, bleached hair. His father wearing a black wool suit and tie, polished English boots Flynn made him buy because the black utility shoes wouldn't shine up right.
It was like some festival under the tent on the hill, all of them there. The traveling secretary from the club stood within inches of the white and violet arrangement the club had sent, the Padres' SD in dark roses near the center like a bow.
Wolfman had tiny white roses in his arms, a bouquet of hundreds he had brought on the plane with him. Aunt Bertie edged near him when the priest began to talk, and Wolfman took her arm.
There were people everywhere around the green gape of the grave, the mat of thin astroturf covering the hole and the mound of wet clay.
People everywhere. Theresans took care of their own.
Guides Flynn hadn't seen in years, standing in an awkward row like an honor guard, nodding back and waving fingers in salute when Joe Flynn acknowledged them.
The cherry wood of the coffin burnished with an auburn fire in the wood. The brass handles softly gleaming.
The priest in white, singing the words of the "Our Father."
Joe Flynn crying, bent near the casket as they left.
It was all so beautiful, a spring morning and Wolfman's walking stick, the priest in white and the man in grey gaberdine spraying diamonds through the sun sparkle.
And Emma there, on the fringe, with a dark, beautiful child. And Esther's broad forehead and hair ribbons and blue silk dress; a thirty-three year old child, with wise eyes and violets crushed in her fingers, violets she had picked on her way in through the horseshoe stone arch of the cemetery.
Emma was there.
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