TWO
Flynn.
John "Jack" Flynn, b. Massena, NY 11/8/43, p. rh.
The Selena Marie, Panamanian Registry, rose slowly up toward him, her cargo chemicals. She came up from the concrete canyon of the locks, weightless and huge in the rising water. Gulls squabbled over bits of popcorn and hot dog buns dropped to them on the walk below. Flynn squinted behind mirrored sun glasses, watching a sailor with huge brown arms leaning back against a bulkhead and gazing wryly up at the legs and tits and lonely faces, the cameras and children above him. The children tottered in their parent's arms, held upon the rails of the observation deck despite the warnings of the public address announcer. According to the chalkboard in the snack bar below, the Selena Marie was bound for Duluth.
The sailor waved to someone on the observation deck. Flynn looked to see if he could tell who it was. Along the rail the tourists watched the ship rise toward them. They were impatient for something to happen, but nothing would happen.
Flynn was not unlike them in appearance. Khaki pants, blue oxfordcloth, summerweave shirt, topsiders, no socks; a well conditioned thirty-six year old man, alone now.
He could remember many things, even the first time he had seen these locks in operation. The Eisenhower Locks, St. Lawrence Seaway. His father brought him up to them in the boat. It was in July, the day after the dedication and they passed the Britania, Queen Elizabeth's yacht, big as a freighter.
"The bloody fucking queen!" his father said, and spat in the water, the gob turning to a silver swirl. "Would have come down myself for the dedication," he said, "but for that bitch. All her damned lah-de-dah battleships tied up the river. Ike wouldn't of had it, Jackie! No sir, there's a democracy for you..."
Flynn was sixteen then and the locks were not called the Eisenhower Locks. He didn't understand his father's vehemence, except that it had something to do with the war and a USO in England. He had not much cared, there was a ballgame that afternoon, Flynn remembered. You grew up around events like this.
He remembered. The length of the Selena Marie, seven hundred and eighty-five feet, according to the lady who read the spiel on the public address system. Remembered leaving Chicago, meeting with Lenny to go over the schedule for the coming months' engagements. A golf tournament in Moline, Illinois; a series of meetings in Pittsburgh; a quick trip to Wheeling, to Cincinnati, to St. Louis. He had asked Lenny to call for tickets at Riverfront.
"Are you sure?"
"Of course, I'm sure. Whatta ya think I'll stay away from the game forever? Anyway, it's business. People expect that."
Flynn had taken care of himself. He would "never have to work" said Lenny. Lenny did not consider it work to be a manufacturer's representative, which was what he had arranged for Flynn to be. Yet Lenny argued over the amount of money Flynn had drawn for the vacation trip east. Flynn smiled. He paid Lenny to do that, to manage his affairs.
"I want to buy a new car for the trip, Leonard. Consider it a sentimental purpose. Something sporty but stylish."
Lenny had laughed. He did not look like someone called Lenny--or Leonard for that matter. Lenny was plumpish and handsome, the sort of man who never sweat, whose shirts never wilted. Lenny was a white anglo-saxon accountant, a careful man with an uncareful name, grey suits, gold at the wrist, a Samsonite briefcase, a wife and children. A good partner to have, a manager.
Flynn could remember everything except her. And yet he sensed the knowledge there. It was like looking at a page of print where a single line is smudged. It was like trying to find your slider on a night when you didn't have your stuff. Someone had run a finger over the memory of her, yet left the gap in place. It was maddening, it made you want to blink.
The boy stood respectfully behind him. How long he had been there Flynn did not know. He had a plastic Detroit Tigers batting helmet on his head, a shirt that said, "My Parents Went To Florida And All They Brought Me Was This Lousy Teeshirt."
The boy's father stood behind him, looking down at his son in that wistful, almost apologetic way you saw fathers do. He was proud of the boy and he didn't want to show how proud. It was beautiful.
"Mr. Flynn--Jack--could I have your autograph?"
Flynn wanted to do something different for the boy with a father so proud of him, but there was nothing to do but take the paper and the pen--a skipping ballpoint, he had to shake it between letters--and write the boy's name on it, "To Brian, all best always, Jack Flynn."
The great swooping loop of the "y" in Flynn dwindled off into a series of smaller loops, the two "n's" and a modest arabesque decoration. Flynn had taught himself to draw his name like this after too many boys were disappointed with his accustomed schoolboyish scrawl.
They'd eat you up sometimes, the autograph kids. Tell you you shit and slug your bicep, spit on you and toss the paper away. There were fathers who'd demand that you sign every page in a scorecard. Even so Flynn always signed. There were too many fathers with sons like this smiling boy.
She stood behind the boy's father, looking as proud as he did, the two of them smiling upon the pitcher and the boy. She could have been the man's wife.
"Sorry you aren't still out there," the father said softly and touched the boy's shoulder.
"Thanks, I miss it," Flynn said. It was as unsurprising as the autograph, he had said this before.
"Should we go, Jack?" she asked. "Your aunt is probably waiting."
Yes. He nodded, used to being managed so. The deck of the Selena Marie was at their level now. The sailor absentmindedly rubbed at his crotch, walked toward where the men coiled the cable on the deck. It was sunny and clean on the deck. Jack Flynn signed more autographs as he and Emma made their way down the stairs and to the parking lot.
"Good to see you home again, kid," an older man said.
"Yeah," Flynn said.
"I seen you pitch back in the Legion ball championship," the man said.
Flynn nodded and waited. Often a man like this would say that he had once fished with Flynn's father.
"You could still get em out in the bigs," the man said. "You seen the kind of ball they played last night."
"Afraid not," Flynn said. It was an ambiguous answer.
Instead of driving into Massena, to his aunt's house, he drove back toward Ogdensburg. Emma sat beside him in silence, the same smile on her face that she had had when he signed the autograph on the deck. It was annoying, he wished she would say something, he wished she would ask why they weren't going on into Massena. At Ogdensburg, past the exit for the Psychiatric Center and the bridge approach, there was a cluster of relatively new buildings. A MacDonald's with a kiddy park, a motel or two. He exited.
Here is nowhere, he thought, she nodded.
She had waited while he went in to register, sat still silent while he drove around the back of the cinder block building to the spot the clerk had shown him on the mimeographed chart. Flynn took their bags and went up the outside stairs to the room, holding her overnight bag under his arm while he juggled with the key to open the door. The room stank of mildew and plastic. He sat on the bed in the dim room and watched the television, forgetting about her. It was a good hard bed, the air conditioner pumped in coils of damp air. The last major leaguer to prefer motels, he thought.
The television was tuned to the cable station, the screen cut into blue, red, and green bands with advertising on the upper band, Reuter's newswire and the temperature and windspeed and time on the middle band, stock market figures running across the bottom.
Eighty-seven degrees, 2:38 EDT, thunderstorms by evening, small craft warnings will be posted on the river. 2:00 p.m. and 5 p.m. and eleven at night were the long times. He heard her footsteps along the concrete balcony, the scruff of her sandals. She stood in the doorway and looked at him. Her legs were bare and brown and she wore no slip under the sundress. He looked dully at the outline of her thighs. She entered the room quietly.
"Forget about me?" she asked.
"That's a funny question under the circumstances."
She stayed at the door. The cool air from the machine in the window surrounded him.
"Do you sing?" he said.
"What?"
"Songs. Do you sing songs?"
"Are you alright, Jack?"
She sat on the bed next to him, gripped his shoulder and kneaded the flesh there, pressing the muscle with the expert grip of a masseuse. She worked along the bicep, not imposing on him, not saying anything.
"Take your clothes off," he said.
She inhaled deeply, continued to probe and push against his bicep.
"I don't think that would be good," she said quietly.
The slap glanced off the loose flesh just below her cheekbone. Yet his fingers had caught just under her eye, he could see that when she stopped crying, when she came back to the bed with the washcloth. Her face was already swelling, a puffing bright contusion with pale white sparks at the center where his fingers had caught. She looked grotesque after this assault. He was terribly ashamed and very sick to his stomach. He wished she would leave him alone so he could try to sleep and forget what he had done.
That's it, he thought. I've lost it.
Already the flesh under her eye began to grow smooth and purple. She would have a shiner. She could call the cops. He would just sit there and wait for them to come, try to explain, drive back with them a half-mile to the Psychiatric Center.
The bruise was already so tender that she winced as she pressed the cold washcloth to it. She dipped the cloth into the ice bucket. He tried to remember her going to get the ice. It could not have been there in this room, yet he could not for the life of him recall her going. He could not even say exactly where the ice machine was. Sometimes all you could do was to pack your arm in ice until the weariness fled.
Despite himself he could not help looking at the flower of bruised flesh. It was oddly beautiful, pale lavender, moist looking, plump and soft. It was terrible to think this. In the awful light from the television screen it appeared to be some grand and delicate tattoo, a tropical moth, a lilac web.
"You do that again, Flynn, and I'll cut your balls off, I swear."
He nodded and fell weeping into his own lap.
"I swear," she said.
Both times she had spoken softly, very sure of what she was saying, yet very soft. He remembered this in his dreams.
He woke at night, no one was there, no overnight bag, no scent of perfume. Even the ice bucket was drained and dry, overturned on the formica ledge next to the sink. The nerves in his arm screamed with a deep and subtle pain, throbbing there like a serpent under the knotted muscles. It made him grate his teeth and flee into the night, the river air, the promise of whiskey. He left the key behind on the dresser, the television on and still shining dreamy information across the triple stream.
"You're Flynn, right? Jack Flynn? Fished with your Dad once."
The bartender wore a red vest over a stiff white shirt and black bow tie, a red garter on his arm. It was a Gay Nineties idea, although nothing else here suggested that. It was cool and black dark within the bar, riverbottom cool. The bartender was toothy and narrow jawed with dark little eyes behind rimless spectacles. A muskellunge sort of fellow, very fishlike in all. It made Flynn laugh.
The bartender grinned with Flynn's laugh, preferring to act as if they shared a private joke. His grin showed needly teeth, and he leaned confidentially toward the pitcher.
"What really happened, Jack? Were you washed up or did they force you out?"
Why either? Why not a taste for perfection? a preference for the game perfectly played with at least enough strength left to accompany the guile necessary to compensate for lost power. Why settle for three seasons of fifteen and eight or thirteen and ten?
"To tell the truth friend..." Flynn sipped the last pool of Wild Turkey from the glass, felt it enter his blood as the bartender leaned still closer to hear this confidence. "Got so's I was making too much money, I swear to God. You're the first soul I've told the truth to, since I retired."
Flynn sipped at the ice to see if it would yield, but then cupped his hand over the glass when the bartender moved to refresh it.
"Manufacturer's rep," he said, "Sumnabitchs'll pay more to play golf with you than you can make pitching baseballs."
"But you were losing it too, weren't you?"
Flynn looked him dead in the eye. Nice man. People always want to know the inside of everything. Can't blame him, an honest guy, you could see it in the eye, behind the watery shallows of the rimless lenses.
"That too, pal," Flynn said and hopped off the stool. "I'm not the kind to settle for a nine and seven season."
The bartender called after him. "Hell no, Jack, you're just right. You could walk to Cooperstown on what you got already."
Flynn tipped an imaginary hat and went out into the cool, thick air. Across the river the distant light of Brockville appeared as a smear, giving way to the discrete Canadian lights of Prescott and Johnstown beyond the bridge. He thought of going North, off down the MacDonald-Cartier to Cornwall and Coteau-du-Lac and Montreal where the world turned French and crazy.
Had the bastard leaning in on the two and two, he thought, and he fouled them off until I fed him one. Muskellunge were that way too, tease you and tease you and jaw right through the cable and the steel leader both. Flynn had to laugh, it was something to do, laughing along Route 37 downriver toward Aunt Bertie and her scrapbooks and talk of Joey, Flynn's father, and her talk of children and how they were disappearing from the world, and why didn't Flynn do something about that, make a family like Joey and Nell had, make a family and live forever, do something with your life.
"I married at an early age and we did not want children."
That was a sad thing to say and Flynn wondered about Emma. It hurt to think about her. I have never hit a woman, he said, meaning before this she thought. It was an awful thing to be, ugly, to have done this thing with the world so beautiful and all the lights along the river and all.
A whole lot of being going on tonight, boys, Flynn thought. It was turning out to be the theme for the night. What to be? Leonard favored manufacturer's rep, Bertie husband and father.
Emma?
Why do I have to be anything? I was not prepared for a life in which you had to be.
Hah. Be on the black, be on the best, be on the river.
Flynn chose the black, the very edge of the pancake universe, the pitchers' name for the corner of the plate, the shadowy stripe where the rubber gripped the brickdust, the clay, the sand.
On the whole it's been a good life so far I have to say. No complaints about playing a game for a living, let alone doing damn well at it. Nossir. No sir.
Cooperstown could be reached in a long night. Down along 56 into the forests. And then what? 3 and 30 and twenty and down some highway he didn't know the number of. Pretty good memory for so long away from home.
He pulled into a rest area and checked against the map under the dome light. He was right. US 20 and then 80 into Cooperstown. Miles of forests first: 30 twisting among the lakes through the Adirondacks. Babe Ruth's bat and all that crap. John Samuel (Johnny) "The Dutch Master" Vander Meer, not enshrined, also known as "Double No-Hit," because he did that back-to-back and on the black, one more than Flynn, and then, like Flynn, never again, ending up unlike Flynn, on the short side of .500 lifetime--maybe 119 and 121, Flynn would have to check it.
I've lived my life in numbers. Joe Flynn knew the charts in his head, the scholls and reefs, the depths. But he was no fool, no old fashioned guide all greasy and plopping French toast into the boiling fatback. Nossir, Joe Flynn was among the first to use fishfinders and sonar and all those number machines. His eldest son Jim died at 30-- Flynn's age when, later, their mother died-- drowned in his car in the river in four feet of water. Jack, of course, became a well-known major league pitcher.
Flynn sat in the car and looked at the row of sleepers, the semi-drivers in their cabs, their running lights like boats on the river. It was time to sleep and he would drive to a motel in Massena, unwilling to wake Aunt Bertie.
Frightened, he wondered was Emma someone of Jim's? Someone who had known his brother. No, it was silly. Unlikely. She was thirty tops, which would have made her ten years younger than Jim.
I've lived my life in numbers.
Was Jim in the boat with you then? When the silver gop boiled on the hot surface of the river and your father damned the Queen of England.
No. Jim was twenty, twenty-one then, already going bad, or so they said. Jim was never much of a one to go out on the river after he grew. Thus Flynn was now about to buy a charter business.
That was it. He would call Leonard in the morning and begin to have him work up figures on a boat and business. An investment merely, Flynn would never--could never--run it. Although maybe the thing to do would be to buy some cottages too, a whole damned resort. See then if a film of sweat forms along Leonard's ivory accountant's forehead. We're into extra innings, Lenny.
Hah. Flynn drove on, leaving the stream of cab lights behind him. Like boats on the river, he remembered, boats on the wooden river.
Emma, she went into Canada early, vaguely sailing, mildly hurt. At the bridge they asked her if she had a revolver in the car. Bien Venue au Canada, and yet the green-clad custom's officer was not smiling. No joke, no gun, no citrus fruit. I plan to stay a day or two. Au Canada, O Canada, my home and native land.
I am the very model of a model English gentlewoman.
The custom's officer stared a little long and grim, at the bruise no doubt, which he must have thought a butterfly, something dark and deep and faintly mysterious. Likely, really, he thought she was running away from home, from a husband who beat her, which Flynn was not, she did not suppose. Something in how clean the custom's man was made her think of Grannie Smith, the globe apples which Flynn had brought for breakfast, like the apple of deChirico which fills a house and John Cheever made the cover of a book of lovely, sad stories, fathers and sons.
Emma remembered the faint, faint perfume of the apples. The smell of linament which had taken her the longest time to figure out. And now the custom's man seemed to pause at the astringent smell, the perfume odor of 10-06, Emma's healall and cleanser, antiseptic and balm, but then he waved her off, diffident and wholesome, into Canada where she soon found a cottage, a bed and breakfast, unlike Flynn the motel man, with a little woman who served tea and said to come out after and look on the river, her nose wrinkling briefly, mouselike, as she surveyed Emma's fragrant injury.
She slept, thinking the episode ended. In his dreams she rose toward Flynn, the Selena Marie, mother moon, young and lovely the girl from Ipanema. She just doesn't see.
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