Thomas McGuane - Crow Fair - Stories

The low autumn light left barely enough time for a few innings after school. The chalk on the base paths had faded into the underlying dirt, and a ring of weeds had formed around third base. Horse chestnuts were strewn across the road between the Kershaws’ house and the diamond. Somehow, partial teams were fielded, though even the meagerest grounders ended up in the outfield, to be run down by Stanley Ayotte, who was proud of his arm and managed to rifle them back. Shortstop had been eliminated for lack of candidates. The score ran up quickly.

Owen’s father appeared and boomed that an umpire was needed. He hung his suit coat on the backstop, tugged his tie to one side, stepped behind the catcher, folded his arms behind him, and bent forward for the next pitch. There was no next pitch. The players saw his condition, and the game dissolved. As Owen started to walk home with his father, Mr. Kershaw, observant, came out his front door and gave them a curt wave. Owen tried to think of hubcaps he didn’t have yet while his father strode along, looking far ahead into some empty place toward home.

On the school bus the next day, Owen fielded questions about “the ump” and sat quietly, sensing the small movements of the turtles in the bottom of his lunch box, which was otherwise filled with the random sorts of things his mother put in there — Hostess Twinkies, not particularly fresh fruit, packaged peanut butter and crackers. Ben was sitting on the broad bench seat at the back, between the twins, who tied things in his hair and pretended to help him with his homework while enjoying his incomprehension. He must have begun to feel rewarded by his limitations. The twins whispered to each other and to Ben and made his face red with the things they said. Then Ben told the twins about Owen’s turtles, and the twins told the safety patrol, who towered over Owen’s seat and asked to see his lunch box.

“Why do you want to see it?”

“Give it to me.”

“No.”

The safety patrol worked his way forward to the driver and said something, then returned. “Give it to me or I’m putting you off the bus.”

Owen slowly handed the lunch box to him. The safety patrol undid the catch, opened the lid, and dumped the food. Then he pried out the false bottom and looked in. “You know the rules,” he said. He gingerly lifted the turtles out of the box, leaned toward an open window, and threw them out. Owen jumped up to see them burst on the pavement. He fell back into his seat and pulled his coat over his head.

“You knew the rules,” the safety patrol said.

Life went on as though nothing had happened, and nothing really had happened. Ben was the twins’ plaything for several months, and then something occurred that no one wanted to talk about — if one twin was asked about it, the question was referred to the other — and Ben had to transfer to a special school, one where he couldn’t come and go as he pleased, or maybe it was worse than that, since he was never seen at home again or in town or on the football field with his water tray. Owen continued to attend the football games, not to watch but to wander the darkened parking lot, building his hubcap collection. As time went on, it wasn’t only the games: any public event would do.

I’d have thought we would have met the Jewells sooner, since we all had the same commute down the long dirt road to the interstate and thence to town and jobs; to say they never reached out would be an understatement. The first year they didn’t so much as wave to either Ann or me, a courtesy conspicuously hard to avoid given that passing on our road is virtually a windshield-to-windshield affair, and an even slightly averted gaze is a very strong bit of semaphore. That we could see their faces in extraordinary detail, his round and pink with rimless glasses, hers an old Bohemian look with stringy hair parted in the middle, hardly seemed to matter. He looked sharply toward us while she just stared away.

“It’s just fine with me,” Ann said. “We don’t spend nearly enough time with the friends we already have.”

“Oh, baby, we need new ones.”

“No, not really. We’ve got good friends.”

“Like the vaunted Clearys?” I was egging her on.

“That wasn’t great, I’ll admit,” she said. “Maybe they need another chance.” This was a reference to a dinner celebrating the Clearys’ seventeenth wedding anniversary. The big party on an odd year was their idea of a joke. They had us wearing paper hats and twirling noisemakers, all part of their bullying cheer, which made us feel they were making fun of us. I wouldn’t have put it past a guy like Craig Cleary, regional super-salesman and fireworks mogul, with a Saddam Hussein mustache that somehow matched the black bangs his dour wife wore down to her eyebrows. Before we even went, I had told Ann that I’d rather go to town and watch haircuts, but she pronounced the whole thing clever. “Cleary’s an oxygen thief,” I pleaded. “You can hardly breathe around him.”

Unneighborly though they were, the Jewells had the fascination of mystery, but that was likely due to the extent of their remodeling project. For half a year, tradesmen were parked all around their house, the familiar plumber and electrician, but also the wildly expensive Prairie Kitchens people must have been there for two months, with those long slabs of polished black granite in the front yard lying under a tarp that blew off regularly and was just as regularly replaced. “It’s granite,” I said. “Stop worrying about it.”

Ann said, “Could they be building a restaurant?”

The Jewells would keep us wondering, and I thought we agreed about the Clearys. So after a perfectly pleasant ride home through the tunnel of cottonwood one night, I met Ann’s announcement of the Clearys’ invitation that we meet them at Rascal’s for pizza with regrettable thoughtlessness: “No fucking way,” I think is what I said. Or “Fuck no.” Or, “Is this a fucking joke?” Something like that. As I say, thoughtless. Ann didn’t take it well.

“If memory serves, you were the one clamoring to get out more.”

“I wasn’t ‘clamoring.’ What’s more, these people aren’t promising.” All I wanted was my chair and the six o’clock news, not pizza peppered with Craig Cleary’s rapid-fire hints as to how I might turn my career around.

“You’re not even a little tempted?”

“No.”

“But I accepted!” I was thunderstruck and all too mindful of how lovely she looked as she primped for this pizza outing in town, a wholly inauspicious occasion to which she seemed excitedly committed. She wore the flowered silk skirt with the delicate uneven hem that she knew to be my favorite and the linen shirt with pleats, another of my favorites, both of which had been hibernating in her closet. All these preparations for pizza with two boors? When I caught her taking a final glance in the hall mirror, I detected distinct approval. As she left, she chortled, “I hope you don’t feel stuck!”

“We have two cars,” I said cheerfully.

I admit that I was aware of our isolation and in a way glad to see her take the lead in freshening things up. But we’d been through at least one so-called social occasion with the Clearys, and I thought our disapproval was solid. I remember asking Ann on the way home, “How about the ‘Moroccan cuisine’? We should have called them on it: ‘Moroccan? Moroccan how?’ ”

Ann had said, “But exactly.” At that time.

So finding myself at loose ends because of the Clearys of all people came as a surprise. I pulled open the door to the refrigerator hoping to ignite my appetite, but I got no farther than lifting a piece of Black Diamond cheddar to my scrutiny before returning it and closing the door. I went into the mudroom and looked at my car through the window, trying to think of something I could do with it. I really wasn’t used to Ann going off like this on her own. I have a way of extolling peace and quiet in theory without enjoying it in practice and end up fending off the idea that I’ve been abandoned. As I’ve grown older, I’ve begun listing my more regrettable traits, and this one has always made the cut. I think the list was supposed to help me improve myself, but it’s turned out to be just another list alongside yard chores, oil changes, and storm windows.