Stephen Dixon - Late Stories

And, to end it, something like this: He gets off the bench and walks the rest of the way to his house. The cat’s waiting for him by the kitchen door. He wants to be let in and fed. He’ll want to be let out after, but he won’t let him. It’s already getting dark. He gets the opened can of cat food out of the refrigerator, gets the cat’s empty plate off the floor, washes it and spoons the rest of the food in the can on it and puts it back on the floor. The cat starts eating. He’s about to make himself a drink — something with rum tonight, he thinks; he’s been drinking vodka every night for a week — when he realizes he forgot the Gorky book on the bench. Leave it till tomorrow. No, it’ll be gone, or if it rains, wet. Get it now.

He goes back to the bench. The book’s gone. Who’d want to take it? Nobody was around; no cars were in the lot, so nobody was in the church. And really, no one but a Russian literary scholar or maybe a serious fiction writer would be interested in it. Maybe someone who lives around here was out for a walk and saw it. He wants to look at the good side of things. So it’s possible a passerby got it and will bring it to the church office tomorrow and say he or she found it on one of the benches outside and thought it might belong to someone connected to the church. Ah, just forget it, he thinks. He’s never going to read anymore of it. If his wife were alive, he’d go to the church the next day — midafternoon, though; he’d give the person who might have taken it time to bring it to the church — and ask if anyone turned in a book about the Russian writer, Maxim Gorky. He goes home, carefully opens the kitchen door so the cat doesn’t run out, and gets some ice out of the freezer and puts it in his glass. Rum it is, with a sliver of lime.

Summer, 1952. He’d just turned sixteen and was a waiter for two months at a co-ed sleepaway camp. He and the other waiters — there were about fifteen of them, all boys — went to another camp to play a softball game against its waiters. He was his team’s best hitter. He often hit balls fifty to a hundred feet farther than anyone else on the team. He wasn’t that big a kid, but for some reason — his strong arms and maybe something to do with the wrists — he could hit a ball hard and far. He also had a good eye for the ball. He rarely struck out and he got his share of walks.

Their camp was in Flatbrookville, New Jersey. He thinks the town is underwater now because of a lake that was created when a dam was built there about twenty years after he worked at the camp. The camp they were playing was also on the Delaware River, near Bushkill, Pennsylvania. They were driven there in an old World War II army truck, with an open flat bed large enough to seat the entire waiter staff and all their sports equipment. One of the camp directors and the head of the waiters sat up front with the driver. It took about an hour to get there, which was as long as it took to get to the Bushkill public landing the one time he paddled to it in a canoe with another waiter. His first time in Pennsylvania, he thought then. They didn’t do much once they reached the landing. Ate the lunch they brought with them and then paddled back to camp.

This other camp had a softball diamond much better taken care of than their camp’s and with real bases, not pieces of cardboard and linoleum their camp used. They were there only a couple of minutes when the camp director told the team to take batting practice and make it fast. “I want to get the game going so you kids can be back in camp to set up and serve dinner.” Everyone lined up to swing at three pitches each. The camp director lobbed in balls. He hit two of them over the heads of the outfielders, who were from his camp and playing him far. “That a way to go, slugger,” one of them yelled. “Show ‘em where you live.”

“Do that for real when you come up to bat,” the camp director said. “I want to announce in the mess hall tonight that you brought pride to our camp and helped win the game.”

There were about a hundred people from the other camp, kids and adults, sitting in the stands along the first- and third-base lines. One of them, on the third-base side, was a very pretty girl. She was around his age, so he assumed she was a C.I.T., or maybe they had some girl waiters in this camp. Long blond hair brushed back, slim, a good figure, and calm and collected expressions and a bright face. She had the look of some of the brainier girls he knew, but was much prettier than any of them. She was wearing shorts, cut well above her knees, and seemed to have nice strong legs. When she laughed with the girls her age she was sitting with, she laughed modestly, quietly, not loudly or uproariously as the rest of them did. And her face didn’t get distorted when she laughed as theirs did. He liked her face. In fact there wasn’t anything about her he didn’t like. She seemed like the perfect girl for him. He had a hard time taking his eyes off her and wished he could meet her. But what were the chances of that? He wasn’t the type of guy to just go over to her after the game and introduce himself and say he hasn’t got much time to talk, his camp director will want to get them back on the truck soon and out of here, but can he have her name and does she think he could maybe write her? The camp director had told them before they left for this camp that it was a kosher one like theirs, though not as strictly religious, and that almost all the campers and staff came from Pennsylvania, and most of those from Philadelphia. “Just thought you should know a little history about who you’ll be playing and whipping the butts off of today, and that if they offer you snacks after the game, you can eat them.” Anyway: Pennsylvania. So what good would it be in getting to know her? But who knows.

After he took batting practice, he looked over to her to see if she might be looking at him. One of her friends may have told her that he had looked a lot of times at her. If she was, and she smiled to his smile, or even if she didn’t smile, it might give him enough courage to make a move on her later. But she was listening, with her hand holding her chin and with a serious expression, to one of the other girls talking.

The umpire, who was some kid’s father from the other camp, said “Okay, visiting team; batter up.” His side went down one-two-three. The pitcher was good; hard to hit. Struck out the first two batters and got the third on a pop-up. He was on deck, batting clean-up, flexing his biceps as he swung two bats, even though she didn’t seem the sort of girl to be impressed by them.

The other team got a run the first inning. Three straight singles. He played third base, and because of that fielding position and he always played close to the bag, he got a closer look at her. She was even prettier than he first thought. Beautiful, he’d say. And so mature looking and with a nice even tan on her arms and legs but not her face. Smart. For even her eyebrows were blond. If she wasn’t sitting in the shade — a couple of her friends were in the sun — he was sure she’d be wearing a hat. He fielded one grounder that inning and threw a perfect peg to first. Made the play look easy. After they got the third out, he trotted to his team’s bench on the third-base side and sat with his back to her. She didn’t look at him when he came off the field. None of the girls she was with did. They were too busy talking and barely looking at the game, even when their waiters were up. To him that was a good sign. That she didn’t have a boyfriend on the team. If she did, she’d be looking and smiling at him every now and then and maybe cheering their team on a little. So why were they there then? Maybe they were told to by their counselor or someone of authority, at least, to be there at the start of the game.