Nobody Bats a Thousand (30 page)

“That’s right. It’s fate that decides what going to happen.”

“And it makes no difference whether I go out
every day
and bust my ass to make a living or sit home and eat tacos and watch TV all day, you’re saying it’s all going to turn out the same?”

“That’s right. It’s all fate. What you decide doesn’t matter. Those decisions were made long ago, probably before you were born. You can’t decide your destiny.”

“So whether the Briggs kid took a plane to Phoenix or took a different road he couldn’t avoid what happened?”

“You can’t avoid your destiny. That’s what fate is all about.”

“Gleason, you know you are full of shit.”

“If I am you know why?”

“Why?”

“Fate.”

McHale shook his head with disgust.

“Seems like I’ve pissed you off
Jimbo
.
I’d say I was sorry but once ag
ain it just couldn’t be avoided.” M
y old man shrugged his shoulders.  “Fate, it was destined to happen.”

McHale downed his drink, picked up all his money except for the coins and left without another word.

My old man turned to me, smiling. He looked as happy as I’d ever seen him. It was then I realized he was pretty messed up.

“The birthday boy and his
old man are cleaning up tonight.” H
e took one of the shots in front of me, slid the other towards me, and held his up ready for a toast. “To fate,” he said.  We
clinked
glasses, and I tried to shoot down the whiskey but most of it stuck about chest high, and then came back up onto the bar and the floor.

           “I think it’s time we leave,” my old man said. He left a couple of bucks on the bar, and we started for the door.

I knew I was feeling pretty drunk, but watching him sort of weave his way outside made me feel almost sober. We made it to the car and plopped down on the front seat. The twilight was
sweeping
across the valley. The sun had lowered itself behind the short mountains that bordered the western horizon.

“You sure pissed off that McHale dude.”

“Fuck him, Mr. Big Shot. I hope I pissed him off. Without his old man he’d be starving to death. Or he’d be dead. His old man has covered his ass his whole life. Got him some bullshit deferment to keep him out of the army during the war, some trick knee bullshit, so they both stayed here making sacks of money selling cheap mattresses to all the military bases in Southern California while guys like Chipper and me were getting our asses sh
ot at
for no good reason at all.” H
e gripped the steering wheel with both hands and tried to focus out at the desert. “Whoa, we better get a little sobered up before we go home, or your mother will kill us. Or at least kill me.”

“I’ve never heard her even yell at you.”

“No, she goes for the silent treatment when she gets mad. That can be worse than your old lady beating you on the head with a frying
pan,
a lot worse, believe me.”

It was probably somewhere around nine o’clock, the last of the summer daylight was fading fast as we started out. First we stopped to get coffee at the 7/11 where Rita and I had stopped the night before. I stayed in the car waiting, thinking about Rita, her mystic stare, her long slender body, and wondered if the rubber I’d used might have been defective and if my dick would start dripping pus anytime soon. When my old man came out carrying a small brown sack under his arm, I noticed that he was already walking more steadily, but he had lost his smile and no longer seemed in the best of moods.

He sat down behind the wheel and pulled a sixteen-ounc
e Budweiser from the bag. “
Here.
” H
e handed the beer to me then wrapped the sack tight around his own beer and opened it. “The coffee looked a y
ear old and the doughnuts worse.” H
e took a long drink from his can then secured it between his legs, started the car and tuned his torso so his arm hung over the back seat as he navigated in reverse. “We’ll take a little drive out in the
desert,
give us time to sober up.”

In less than five minutes we were outside the town lights where the stars seemed to suddenly brighten, covering every inch of the sky like a black sheet covered with sparkling jewels. I was just starting
to enjoy the air
coming through the window, cupping my hand to direct the artificial breeze towards my face, when my old man suddenly slowed and abruptly made a left turn off the road. With his headlights weakly pleading against the darkness of the desert he somehow found a clearing amid the desert scrub as easily as if he were pulling into his own driveway. He killed the engine and the lights, sat for just a moment, then I followed his lead, and we
got
out, stretched, and made it around to the front of his Chevy where we leaned our butts against the warmth of the hood.

Something he had said twenty minutes before now prompted my curiosity. “So who—”

“
Shhh
…. Hear that?”

I held still for probably thirty seconds. “What?  I don’t hear anything.”

“Exactly, the calm and quiet of the desert.
But sometimes if you stay real still and focused you can
almost hear the snakes crawling and the lizards moving, it’s like…like you’re part of the peacefulness of it
all.
”
H
e took a drink and looked out towards the steep mountains
a hundred miles away
t
o the north, springing up from
the flat ground, their silhouettes created by the light from the stars and moon. “Growing up here you never notice the silence, or if you do notice you just don’t appreciate it. I didn’t appreciate it until I was about your age.”

I took a small sip of beer, just enough to remind me that at this point it tasted like hell, then I returned to the question I’d tried to get out earlier. “So who exactly was Chipper?  I’ve heard his name my whole life. I know he was your friend and he died in Vietnam, but who was he?”

“Who was he? My best friend, my second baseman from little league on…what can you say about someone who dies before they’re twenty?”

“Do you remember the last time you saw him?”

“Oh yeah, at my bachelor party, we both got drunker than sin. Two days later I got married to your mom. Five days after that I was on a bus to Fort Ord. Chipper got drafted about a month later. We really didn’t stay in touch…I guess we just naturally figured we’d pick up the friendship again after we got out.”

“Did you ever find out how he got killed?”

“A jeep accident, he rolled a jeep a few days befo
re he was supposed to come home.” H
e looked up at th
e sky.
“A Goddamn jeep accident.”
M
y old man paused and was still. When I stared at his face he seemed to be looking into himself. “That’s the part that’s so fucking weird. Chipper went through some heavy shit, and I was in the middle of a bunch of heavy shit most of my whole tour, but we both came through all of it with nothing more than a bunch of shit-stained skivvies, and then Chipper gets it in a car wreck two d
ays before he gets on the plane.” H
e paused and looked out at the desert. “
It don’t make
no
sense. There ain’t
no
logic or laws of f
aith or
karmac
that can explain
shit like that.”

“Karma, dad, laws of Karma,
Karmac
is from Johnnie Carson.”

“Well, whatever…the only thing that can explain crap like that is fate, destiny, whatever you want to call
it.
There’s nothing anybody can do ‘
cause
it all boils down to fate.”

Just then a bright light from behind swept onto us and stopped. We both turned, bathed in the light. “Shit, a cop.” I quickly leaned over and set my beer on the sand under the car.

The black and white crept to a halt just behind my old man’s car as we stared into the blinding li
ght. Then there was a voice,
“Scooter? Is that you?”

My old man smiled. Still holding his beer wrapped in the crinkled sack, he started towards the cop.

“Melvin, what brings you out here to God’s country? You finally run out of skateboarders to bust?”

The cop killed the spotlight, and my old man walked up to within a few feet of the police car. “I should be asking the questions, Scooter.
You been
drinking?”

My old man cocked his head back as he took a long pull, killed off his beer, crushed the can and threw the empty
fifteen feet with an underhand toss
through his car’s open window onto the back seat.
“Just got done.”

“Scooter, why you got to do that right in front of me?”

“Hey, it’s my kid’s twenty-first birthday. We’re doing a l
ittle celebrating, no big
deal
,
actually
, we’re out here getting sobered up so the old lady doesn’t kill me when I get home.” 

The cop sat still and silent.

“How’s
your
old lady Melvin? Everything okay at home?”

“Damn you Scooter.”

“Oh, come on Melvin, you know I can drive better a little buzzed than most people can sober.”

“Damn you, Scooter. Don’t get me in trouble,” the cop said. He shook his head, put his car in gear and drove away.

My old man was still smiling as he walked back to me.

“Jesus,
dad that
scared the shit out of me.”

“Well, I guess there are some good things about growing up in a small town, especially if you grow up going to school with some of the cops, and they still owe you a few favors. As slowly as this town grows it’ll probably be the same for you, and probably the same for
your
kids.”

“That’s the thing. I don’t want to have kids.”

“That’s okay.”

“No, I don’t want to have kids because I don’t want to marry Gina, and I don’t want to work at some boring job at the irrigation district for the next forty years.”

“Who cares what you want? You got to do something. You don’t like school. You don’t want to work, and you’re getting too old for this bullshit, Billy. It comes to a point
where
it doesn’t matter what you
want
. It just becomes what you have to do.”

“That’s easy for you to say, you got a job you
like

”

“What are you talking about? I hate that job! I hate having to get up at four-thirty every morning to do the
same boring crap over and over.” H
e stood and looked out into the night. Then
he
turned to me. “
You going
to finish that beer or what?”

“I don’t feel too good.”

“Well don’t let it go to waste.”

I handed him my warm tallboy, which had been sitting in the dirt. He finished it with two long pulls, he almost seemed to be gargling with the beer, before crinkling the can and tossing it out into the darkness of the desert. “Come on, let’s go.”

We got in his car and began a slow drive back towards town. The radio in his car had quit working years before. He had never bothered to fix it, so all we had for the drive was the engine noise accompanying the headlights centered on the dark road.

“It’s just,” m
y old man broke the silence, “I guess I don’t want you ending up like I would have ended up if it hadn’t been for your mother.”

“Which is?”

“A bum, a bum on the streets i
f I didn’t have your sister and your mother to take care of that’s where I would have ended up.”

“Sure.”

“And I almost went that way anyway. Your mom had to drag me out of bed to go take the post office test. And even then, without my veteran’s points I never would have got the job.”

Two cars, their headlights pointing in our direction, passed us just before we hit the sparse lights on the outskirts of town.

“It’s not like I don’t worry about things. I worry about the future and all that. I worry about it all the time,” I said.

“You worry?” He smiled. “I always thought you didn’t worry about anything.”

“Really?”
I was surprised he had ever given such a matter any thought.

“Yeah, but what bothered me was not that you didn’t worry about anything, in fact that might be great, but I always figured that you just didn’t give a damn about anything. There’s a huge difference between that and not letting life bother you.”

“No, I’m just the opposite. I worry about everything, about being on time, about what people think of me, about all kinds of stupid stuff. In f
act I worry a lot about dying.
I know it’s dumb, but there were times when I’d be sitting in class, nervous about whether the teacher was going to call on me, and my chest would feel tight and right away I’d figure I was going have a heart attack, like my heart was going to burst, and I’d
picture myself lying there on the floor, and the paramedics coming, and I’d think about how embarrassing the whole thing would be. Maybe I was more afraid of how foolish I would look but the thought of dying, the thought of having my heart pop like a balloon really worried me.”