Richard Ford - The Sportswriter

“The way the guys are talking about it now, Wade, leaves out the whole idea of the hero, something I’m personally not willing to give up on yet. Ty Cobb wouldn’t have been a role-player.” I give Cade a hopeful look, but his eyes are drowsy and suffused with loathing. My knee begins to twitch under the table.

“I’m not either,” Lynette says, her eyes alarmed.

“It also leaves out why the greatest players, Ty Cobb or Babe Ruth, sometimes don’t perform as greatly as they should. And why the best teams lose, and teams that shouldn’t win, do. That’s team play of another kind, I think, Wade. It’s not role-playing and machines like a lot of these guy s’ll tell you.”

“I think I understand, Wade,” Lynette says, nodding. “He’s saying athletes and all these sports people are just not too smart.”

“I guess it’s giving a good accounting, sweetheart, is what it comes down to,” Wade says somberly. “Sometimes it’ll be enough. Some times it isn’t going to be.” He purses his lips and stares at my idea like a crystal vase suspended in his mind’s rare ether.

I stare at my own plateful of second helping I haven’t touched and won’t, the pallid lamb congealed and hard as a wood chip, and the untouched peas and brocoli flower alongside it cold as Christmas. “When I can make that point in one of our Our Editors Think’ columns, Wade, that half a million people’ll read, then I figure I’ve addressed the big picture. What you said: events on a grand scale. I don’t know what else I really can do after that.”

“That’s everything in life right there, is my belief,” Lynette says, though she’s thinking of another subject, and her bright green eyes scout the table for anyone who hasn’t finished his or hers yet.

In the kitchen an electric coffeemaker clicks, then spurts, then sighs like an iron lung, and I get an unexpected whiff of Cade who smells of lube jobs and postadolescent fury. He cannot help himself here. His short life — Dallas to Barnegat Pines — has not been especially wonderful up to now, and he knows it. Though to my small regret, there’s nothing on God’s green earth I can do to make it better for him. My future letter-of-recommendation and fishing excursions with just the three men cut no ice with him. Perhaps one day he will stop me for speeding, and we can have the talk we can’t have now, see eye-to-eye on crucial issues — patriotism and the final rankings in the American League East, subjects that would bring us to blows in a second this afternoon. Life will work out better for Cade once he buttons on a uniform and gets comfortable in his black-and-white machine. He is an enforcer, natural born, and it’s possible he has a good heart. If there are better things in the world to be, there are worse, too. Far worse.

Vicki is staring down at her full plate, but glances up once out the tops of her eyes and gives me a disheartened sour-mouth of disgust. There is trouble, as I’ve suspected, on the horizon. I have talked too much to suit her and, worse, said the wrong things. And worse yet, jabbered on like a drunk old uncle in a voice she’s never heard, a secular Norman Vincent Pealeish tone I use for the speaker’s bureau and that even makes me squeamish sometimes when I hear it on tape. This may have amounted to a betrayal, a devalued intimacy, an illusion torn, causing doubt to bloom into dislike. Our own talk is always of the jokey-quippy-irony style and lets us leap happily over “certain things” to other “certain things”—cozy intimacy, sex and rapture, ours in a heartbeat. But now I may have stepped out of what she thinks she knows and feels safe about, and become some Gildersleeve she doesn’t know, yet instinctively distrusts. There is no betrayal like voice betrayal, I can tell you that. Women hate it. Sometimes X would hear me say something — something as innocent as saying “Wis-sconsin” when I usually said “Wisconsin”—and turn hawk-eyed with suspicion, wander around the house for twenty minutes in a brown brood. “Something you said didn’t sound like you,” she’d say after a while. “I can’t remember what it was, but it wasn’t the way you talk.” I, of course, would be stumped for what to answer, other than to say that if I said it, it must be me.

Though I should know it’s a bad idea to accompany anyone but yourself home for the holidays. Holidays with strangers never turn out right, except in remote train stations, Vermont ski lodges or the Bahamas.

“Who’ll have coffee?” Lynette says brightly. “I’ve got decaf.” She is clearing dishes smartly.

“Knicks,” Cade mutters, pounding to his feet and slumping off.

“Nix to you too, Cade,” Lynette says, pushing through the kitchen door, arms laden. She turns to frown, then cuts her eyes at Wade who is sitting with a pleasant, distracted look on his square face, palms flat on the tablecloth thinking about team concept and the grand scale of things. She widely mouths words to the effect of getting a point across to this Cade Arcenault outfit, or there’ll be hell to pay, then vanishes out the door, letting back in a new scent of strong coffee.

Wade is galvanized, and gives Vicki and me a put-on smile, rising from the head of the table, looking small and uncomfortable in the loose-fitting sports jacket and ugly tie — unquestionably a joke present from the family or the men at the toll plaza. He has worn it as a token of good spirits, but they have temporarily abandoned him. “I guess I’ve got a couple things to do,” he says miserably.

“Don’t you rough up on that boy now,” Vicki threatens in a whisper. Her eyes are savage slits. “Life ain’t peaches-and-milk for him either.”

Wade looks at me and smiles helplessly, and once again I imagine him peeping into an empty hospital room from which he’ll never return.

“Cade’s fine, sister,” he says with a smile, then wanders off to find Cade, already deep in some squarish room of his down a hallway on another level.

“It’ll be all right,” I say, soft and sober-voiced now, meant to start me back on the road to intimacy. “There’s just too many new people in Cade’s life. I wouldn’t be any good at it either.” I smile and nod in one fell motion.

Vicki raises an eyebrow — I am a strange man with inexpert opinions concerning her family life, something she needs like a new navel. She turns a dinner spoon over and over in her fingers like a rosary. The boat collar of her pink jersey has slid a fraction off-center exposing a patch of starkly white brassiere strap. It is inspiring, and I wish this were the important business we were up to instead of old dismal-serious — though I have only myself to blame. Sic transit gloria mundi . When is that ever not true?

“Your father’s a great guy,” I say, my voice becoming softer with each word. I should be silent, portray a different fellow entirely, affect some hidden antagonism of my own to balance hers. Only I’m simply not able to. “He reminds me of a great athlete. I’m sure he’ll never have a nervous breakdown.”

Lynette clatters dessert plates and coffee cups in the kitchen. She’s listening to us, and Vicki knows it. Anything said now will be for a wider consumption.

“Daddy and Cade oughta be living here by theirselves,” Vicki says scornfully. “He oughtn’t to be hooked up with this ole gal. They oughta be both big bachelors havin the time of their lives.”

“He seems pretty happy to me.”

“Don’t start on me ’bout my own daddy, if you please. I know you well enough, don’t I? I ought to know him!” Her eyes grow sparkly with dislike. “What’s all that guff you were spewin about. Patriotism. Team concept. You sounded like a preacher. I just about mortified.”