Rooster (5 page)

Then, “We're to meet them at four fifteen down there,” said Mrs. Nixon. “The four people you'll be most involved with have prepared an interview for you.”

Rooster shifted his gaze from a small spot on Mrs. Nixon's desk, which he had been staring at absently, to her face. “An interview?”

“That's right.”

“What for?”

“I'm not sure. I think it's to determine whether or not they want to work with you.”

“Whether or not
they
want to work with
me
?”

“That's right.”

A small amount of life returned to his features. “You mean they have a choice?”

“Apparently, yes, they do.”

He straightened himself in his chair. The deep crease in his forehead from frowning began to disappear. “So, if they don't take me, I'm out of this?”

Mrs. Nixon shook her head. “It's not that easy, Rooster.”

“You can't force them to take me.”

“No.”

“And if the majority votes against me….We live in a democratic society, Mrs. Nixon. You can't go against the majority.”

Mrs. Nixon sat back in her chair and crossed her arms. “So you actually did learn something in social studies.”

“Of course.”

“I wonder if your teacher, Mr. Standford, knows that.”

“He never asks the right questions on the exams.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But it's true though, right? If three of the four say
forget it
, there's nothing you or Mrs. Helmsley or anyone else can do about it.”

“I would not go there today with the intent of blowing off the interview, Rooster.”

“It's a personality thing. Sometimes you click, sometimes you don't. Look at you and Bernie.”

“Leave it alone, Rooster.”

“I know you guys clicked, but I'm sure there were lots of other girls looking his way. Maybe he liked a few of them too, but obviously not as much as you. Unless … ”

“You've gone far enough,” said Mrs. Nixon.

“Hey, I didn't mean to bring up something you don't want to talk about.”

“Drop it, now.”

“You always seem happy talking about him. I guess I thought that was really how you felt.”

“I will see you at four o'clock at the front doors of Common House. Be there on time. Look presentable. Be prepared to show them the best possible version of you.”

Rooster stood up. He could barely restrain his glee. “It may not be enough. That's all I'm saying.”

“Goodbye, Rooster.” Mrs. Nixon remained seated in her chair.

“I'm sorry if I upset you. I had no idea there were problems in your relationship with Bernie.”

“There are no problems in my relationship with my husband.”

“All right. If you say so.”

“I say so.”

“Well, that's good then. That's the way it should be.”

“Goodbye, Rooster,” she said again.

“My point is, if there was a panel of four people voting on whether you should marry Bernie, and three of the four said no, then you'd be sitting here with pictures of you and someone else having all this fun. Right?” He motioned toward the photographs on her walls and desk.

Mrs. Nixon held his stare evenly. She did not move her head side to side or up and down. She waited until Rooster finally left, then she relaxed. How would she have fared had Bernie's mother and father and his younger sister been given a chance to vote on their decision to marry? She contemplated that question for a moment. Then, when the answer became clear, she dropped it and prepared to go teach her ten o'clock class.

4

R
ooster's mother, Eunice, was an excitable type. She drank copious amounts of coffee, or Coke if she wanted a change. “Omigod!” was how she frequently started a conversation or, depending on the situation, added to an existing one. She knew something about everyone in their neighborhood.

Her favorite spot in their small cluttered house was next to the large window by the kitchen table, where she would sit for long stretches at a time, especially on the weekends, and either watch the world go by or think. Her forehead was creased down the middle from constant worry.

During the week, she was a receptionist at a small, locally owned insurance company — Smith Insurance. She worked from eight thirty to four thirty, five days a week, with an hour off for lunch, during which she and a colleague would put on their running shoes, when the weather was nice, and go for a lengthy talk-filled walk.

Eunice had long dark hair that fell straight to her shoulders. She was medium height and thin. Like her son, she was a smoker, and in spite of her best efforts, she always found that quitting was much harder than it looked.

Across from her at the table, on a typical weekend morning, reading the sports pages while he ate, or looking out the window with her when he was done reading, was Irving, her second husband. Irving was a big man, with forearms the diameter of small trees, and shoulders that were powerfully round and thick. He stood six feet five inches tall and tipped the scales at 260. In his day, his playing weight had been around 215 or 225 at the start of spring training.

Irving had been a pitcher. He'd had a so-so fast-ball, a decent curveball and a slider that never quite fulfilled itself the way he had hoped. “I was one more decent pitch away from making my mark in the bigs,” he would say to Rooster and his friends whenever he had the chance. “You need three pitches to survive up there, or one terrific one, like a Roger Clemens fastball, or a Niekro knuckleball, but them knuckleballers are a breed apart anyway, so they don't count. But even the Rocket had other stuff he could throw if his fastball wasn't working. You need a setup pitch, y'know. You gotta get that guy standing up there with a stick in his hands to think, ‘Now what's he gonna throw at me this time?' If he's not thinkin' that, if he's up there sittin' on the only pitch you got, unless it's one helluva pitch, you're not gonna be up there very long.”

“Is that why you weren't up there very long?” said Rooster one day.

“That is precisely the reason,” said Irving, who spoke honestly about himself and others. “I had a good fastball, a decent curveball, but my slider didn't slide for me the way I wanted her to.” He also repeated himself a lot. “And unless you've got three special pitches, or one terrific one, forget it. You'll be there long enough to have a cuppa coffee, and then it's goodbye.”

Irving's career ran from 1971, when he was twenty years old, until 1984, when he finally hung up his glove for good. He was, in baseball parlance, a career minor leaguer, with one brief, unforgettable exception, in 1979, when he was called up by the then woeful Minnesota Twins to bolster their injury-depleted and inept pitching staff.

His record was one win and three losses, with a total of nine appearances in thirty-one games.

He met Eunice in the fall of 2000, three years after the death of her first husband, Rooster's father, Michael Cobb. They met through a mutual friend. Eunice knew nothing about baseball. She had played softball at school because she had to, and by the time she met Irving, she had not held a bat in her hands, or watched even an inning of a game, in well over a decade.

By that time, however, Irving was well into the post-baseball phase of his life, which, like his pitching career, had not gone quite the way he had planned it. He'd been married and divorced. He'd tried his hand at coaching, but the relentless travel and poor pay wore him down. He'd gone back to school to complete the college degree that he had set aside to pursue his baseball career, but left again when he discovered the level of commitment and work that was required. He'd started a small business with a friend from high school and then went bankrupt. He'd worked construction but hurt his back when he lost his balance one day and fell off a roof he was framing.

Irving was not one to mope when such endeavors failed to go his way, though, or to shake his fist at the world for treating him unfairly. For Eunice, that was all she needed to see to fall for him.

“He's what I need,” she told a friend during the relatively peaceful days of courtship. “He's a good, honest man. He has a sense of humor.”

Her friend, Dolores, from the office, did not agree. “He's bringing nothing to the relationship, Eunice. He has no job. No money. Does he even have a fixed address?”

“He loves to read and go for walks.”

“That's because he doesn't work. He has nothing else to do. And the sports pages do not count as reading. I'm sorry.”

“He's been through a lot, and he doesn't talk about it the way other people would. He's not bitter or disappointed. He sees there's more to life than just making money.”

“He's a loser, Eunice. I hate to say it, but don't you dare marry that man.”

“I don't think Rooster likes him very much, though. They haven't bonded the way I'd hoped.”

“I won't even comment on that.”

Eunice was twelve years younger than Irving. On their wedding day, he was fifty and she was thirty-eight. Puffs, Jayson and Rooster had all been in the wedding party, along with a couple of the boys from Irving's playing days.

After the short, informal ceremony, they had gone to the local baseball diamond for pictures. Eunice put on a baseball cap (the Chicago Cubs, Irving's favorite team) for the first time in her life, and Irving scooped her up in his arms and carried her around the bases.

Jayson thought it was the coolest wedding he'd ever been to, but Rooster expressed a different opinion. “I have to call this clown my dad now?”

“Call him Irving,” said Puffs. “He's not your dad.” Rooster nodded in agreement. “You got that right.”

Unexpectedly, Rooster's mom was standing in the kitchen when he arrived home after school. Usually she was still at work.

Sensing trouble, Rooster went immediately on the offensive. “Well, thanks a lot for getting me into this mess,” he said, kicking his shoes off. “Instead of studying tonight, I get to go bowling. No, first I get to meet my new friends. Then I get to go bowling.”

“I got you into this mess?” said his mom, her arms crossed firmly in front of her chest.

“You agreed to it. That's what Mrs. Nixon said.”

“Listen, bub. No one got you into anything but yourself. You've been dogging it all year.”

“That's not true.”

“It is true.”

“No it's not.”

“I got off the phone with your teacher and I looked over at Dolores and said, ‘Omigod. Rooster's failing every class he's in. He's not going to graduate this year.'”

“Let me guess. She said, ‘Go easy on the poor kid, Eunice. He's a sweetheart. Don't worry about him so much.'”

“Dolores said what she always says whenever your name comes up. ‘Get rid of him. You don't need that worry in your life. Let him see what it's really like out there.'”

Rooster moved toward the refrigerator. “Dolores is a hag, Mom. You should really stop talking to her. And I'm not failing every course. I'm passing English.”

“She's not a hag. She's my friend and she's right.”

“She's a hag.” He opened the fridge door. “Where's that leftover pizza from last night?”

From his post by the window, with the most recent edition of
Baseball Today
spread out before him, Irving cleared his throat and patted his thick stomach. “It's right down here, young fella. I had it for lunch about two, three hours ago.”

Rooster's shoulders sagged. “All of it?”

“Every bit. Those boys down there at Little Tony's know how to put one together. Make yourself a sandwich if you want. There's cold cuts there in the meat drawer. Bread's right behind you on the counter.”

“I don't want a sandwich,” said Rooster, still staring into the fridge. “I wanted pizza.”

“Well, there's cheese in there. Put a little of that on a piece of bread. Put it in the microwave for a minute. There you go. Poor man's pizza. Good as gold. You can slice some onion on it too, if you want. Put a little ham on the top.”

“Why didn't you have the poor man's pizza and leave the real pizza for me?”

“It's not that good,” said Irving, turning the page of his paper. “It's good in a pinch, but it's not as good as the real thing.”

Rooster shook his head. It was not the first time that all the good leftovers had disappeared before he returned home from school. “How come I'm always the guy in a pinch? I worked hard at school all day. I should be coming home to a real pizza.”

“Excuse me?” said his mom, getting back into the action.

“What?”

“Did you say you worked hard at school all day?”

“Yes.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“Hey, I work hard.” He closed the fridge door.

“Not according to your teacher you don't. She said you haven't done much at all lately.”