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As I came closer I saw that there was a bright red spot, like the center of a Japanese flag, on the white gauze at the end of the damaged finger. My stomach lurched like it did when Dad and I went over the top on the carnival ferris wheel. I climbed into his lap and burrowed, trembling, into his warmth, soaking up the comfortable odors of grease, tangy sawdust, and Dad’s sweat.
‘What’s the matter, Son?’
‘You’re not gonna die, are you?’
‘Of course not. It takes more than a saw to do in an old warhorse like me. Doc says I’ll be back to work in a week. In the meantime, the Cubs are in town, so I’ll pick up tickets for you and me. Maybe we’ll even take Byron to the Sunday afternoon game, though you have to take your turn ferrying him to the bathroom.’ Byron was in play school at the time.
I hugged Dad as hard as I could, burying my face in the comfort of his plaid flannel shirt, and held on until my arms hurt.
‘You don’t have to worry, Mike. Your dad’s never gonna leave you.’ And he rocked me in his arms.
I pulled myself up and kissed his blue-whiskered cheek. Dad always knew the right thing to say. Neither of us mentioned Mom, but we both knew what caused me to get all scared and shaky.
Though I claim to remember my mom, who died when I was four, I think what I remember are Dad’s stories of her. What I remember is sitting on Dad’s lap, him holding their wedding picture, an eight-by-ten that still sits on his bedside table, Mom younger than I am now, and beautiful, and Dad telling me about how they began dating, and how thrilled he was when Mom said she’d marry him.
‘Look at that, Mike, I look like a gorilla in a tuxedo. What do you suppose your mom ever saw in me?’
Or else he’d hold the family portrait one of those door-to-door photographers took not long after Byron was born. I’m sitting on Dad’s knee, dressed in yellow shorts, with a white shirt and yellow bow tie, while Mom is holding Byron wrapped in a blue blanket, all that’s visible of him a little pink circle of face. Dad would talk about the day the portrait was taken, how I was so hyper that, though you can’t see it in the picture, he had a firm grip on the back of my shorts in order to keep me from leaping off his knee.
‘Your mom had just washed your face for the third time since the photographer got there. She wiped it again, tossed the washcloth over her shoulder in the general direction of the kitchen, and said to the photographer, who looked like he’d slept in his car with a bottle of cheap wine, “Shoot us quick before any more dirt gravitates to that boy’s face!”’
Other times we’d look at dog-eared photographs from the chocolate box of photos that always sat on the mantel of the pretend fireplace in the living room. There were pictures of Mom next to a half-washed car; in jeans, shirttails flapping, as she ran laughing from a spray of water. Dad said that photo was taken before they were married, and he was on the other end of the hose. There was a color Polaroid of Mom in a yellow waitress uniform, her name, Gracie, in brown lettering above her pocket, her red hair spilling over her shoulders, smiling like she’d just received a ten-dollar tip. Her hair was so pretty in that photograph, and the photo was so clear I could see the freckles on her cheeks and the back of the hand that’s visible.
‘You boys got the best of both of us,’ Dad would say, holding up a picture of Mom smiling over a birthday cake flaming with twenty-three candles, Dad behind her chair, crouched in order to get into the picture, grinning like a fool, his fingers in a V above Mom’s head, making her look like she has rabbit ears.
‘You’re both built strong like me, with big bones, but you’re good lookin’ like your mom.’
Byron is stocky, but he has Mom’s red hair and green eyes. I’m tall and slim like Mom, but I’m strong-boned and have huge hands like Dad. My hair is reddish-brown, and has a cowlick that refuses to submit to a comb, my eyes a greeny-hazel.
Mom’s name before she married Dad was Grace Palichuk. Her grandfather had emigrated from Ukraine to work in the packing plants in Chicago. My grandfather, Dmetro Palichuk, followed in his father’s footsteps at the packing plant, but chose an Irish girl to marry, Margaret Emily O’Day, with dark rose-colored hair, green eyes, and freckles.
Our family name is Houle. My father’s name is Gilbert. Dad claimed the original Houle was a smuggler and privateer, a crewman on Jean Lafitte’s pirate ship.
‘Lafitte and his men fought for the Americans in the Battle of New Orleans and were pardoned by President Madison. I saw the pardon, or at least a copy of it, when I was a boy. That original Houle settled on Galveston Island after the Civil War, but who knows how one of his descendants got to Chicago?’
Sometimes Dad tells of a descendant of that first American Houle, a Wells Fargo driver and buffalo hunter in the Dakota Territory, who married a Black Hawk Indian woman (or Nez Perce, depending on his mood) and later became a livestock dealer before being wiped out by the great Chicago fire.
‘Your great-grandfather got mistaken for Billy the Kid. This was in some wild Colorado mining town. He was a skinny little guy with a big mustache. The town folks spotted your great-grandfather riding into town, and some young bucks tried to force him into a gunfight. He moved real careful and unbuckled his guns, let them fall to the ground. “You wouldn’t shoot an unarmed man would you?”
‘They didn’t shoot him, but they flung him in jail and decided to have a public hanging in three days. And it would have gone ahead except the real Billy the Kid rode into town. It was said he had a look about him, a rock hardness, a death-like stare. Nobody tried to provoke him into a gunfight. He made it clear he was Billy the Kid, and dared anybody to do anything about it. He even visited your great-grandfather in jail. He laughed when he saw him. “You look like a gunfighter Ned Buntline might have invented. You don’t look nothin’ like me,” Billy said.
‘“Send this little cowboy on his way,’ Billy told the sheriff, and the sheriff did as he was told. It’s said your great-grandfather never again wore a gun on his hip, and skedaddled out of Colorado like he was being chased.
‘It was one of his boys that got fleeced out of his socks in a gold-stock scam. I did see a photo of him, and he resembled your cousin Verdell in California; you know, a boy so dumb he’d sell his car for gas money.’
* * *
Mom died after being hit by a car right in front of our house. We lived in this quiet, working-class suburb of Chicago, in a wartime house, one of thousands of almost identical box-like structures built right after the Second World War to house returning servicemen and their families. The house was already twenty-five years old when my parents acquired it, just a year before Mom was killed.
Schiffert Box and Lumber, where Dad worked, was an old-fashioned company that had been founded in 1890. They hadn’t manufactured wooden boxes since the 1960s, but retained that part of the name. Dad got paid every Friday, in cash. It’s only within the last five years that Schiffert has paid by check and at two-week intervals.
Every Saturday morning Mom would do the weekly grocery shopping. On Friday evenings she would circle the loss leaders in each grocery ad or flyer, then we’d tour the supermarkets buying only the items on sale.
I was holding Byron’s hand, walking from the house, across the lawn, which Dad kept smooth as a golf green, toward our Ford Maverick, parked at the curb. The car was a shade of gold that Dad laughingly said the used-car salesman had referred to as Freudian Gilt.
The day was hot and breezy, with a few sheep-sized white clouds floating across the sky. Mom was wearing a white dress with red anchors patterned on it, white shoes, and a wide-brimmed straw hat with a red ribbon around the crown. Her family had been over for dinner the previous Sunday and Mom had borrowed some folding chairs from Grandma Palichuk, which we were going to return after shopping.
Mom had the trunk of the car open, had one chair inside and was reaching for a second when a gust of wind whipped her hat off. The hat hit the pavement beside the car, turned on edge, and rolled like a plate into the street. Mom moved instinctively to chase it.
She only took about three steps, the street was narrow and three steps was far enough for her to move right into the path of an oncoming car, driven by George Franklin, who lived only a block down the street. George Franklin didn’t even have time to apply the brakes. The car hit Mom, carried her about twenty feet down the street and deposited her on the pavement. I can still hear the sound of her head hitting the street. She died instantly, the doctor who arrived with the ambulance said.
Dad was mowing the back yard with a gas lawnmower, so he didn’t know anything unusual was going on. Someone had to go to the back yard and get him. The neighbors didn’t think to keep Byron and me away from the scene. I was sobbing because I knew what had happened was not play. Byron and I looked down at Mom, and Byron said, ‘Mama sleeping?’ and through my tears I said, ‘Yes, Mama’s sleeping.’
Then a woman in a swirling gray housedress took us each by the hand and hurried us into her house. Even though the doctor pronounced Mom dead at the scene, Dad insisted on riding with the ambulance to the hospital.
Mr. Franklin was not at fault. He wasn’t speeding. He was in the correct lane. His car was in good mechanical condition. Between the accident and the funeral, Dad walked us down the block to Mr. Franklin’s house. I held onto his right hand, and he carried Byron in the crook of his left arm.
Mr. Franklin was a tall, gaunt man with a hairline that went back like a horseshoe, a crooked nose, and sad blue eyes that protruded slightly.
‘I just want you to know I realize what happened was an accident,’ Dad said to him. ‘There was nothing you could do. Gracie should have looked before she ran into the street after her hat. You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. It could have happened to anyone.’ Dad held out his hand to Mr. Franklin.
Mr. Franklin’s hand was trembling violently as he reached to shake my dad’s extended hand. He spoke very softly. He said he hadn’t slept since the accident, didn’t know if he’d ever sleep again.
‘Don’t be hard on yourself,’ Dad said. ‘It could have been your wife. It could have been me driving home from the hardware store on a Saturday morning.’
There was no way Dad could have done more – I don’t know if I could be so generous in similar circumstances – but what he did wasn’t enough. Mr. Franklin had a nervous breakdown, lost his job as an accountant with the Grain Exchange. He stopped driving. His family left him. He stayed home alone and drank all day. On the first anniversary of my mother’s death Mr. Franklin put a gun to his head and ended his pain.
Dad had a married sister in Kansas City; my mother had one in Chicago and one in Milwaukee; and Grandma Palichuk lived only a ten-minute drive from us. Each of them volunteered to take Byron and me, to care for us and to raise us as their own.
And some good cases were made, the best by my dad’s sister in Kansas City, my Aunt Noreen, who was married to a lawyer, lived in a five-bedroom house with a swimming pool, had only one child, a girl, Phoebe, and was desperate for a son, but unable to bear any more children. No one considered for a moment that Dad might want to raise his own sons.
But my dad, big awkward rough diamond that he was, refused all their offers, even ignored Aunt Noreen, who, after being turned down, threatened to sue for custody on the grounds that Dad lacked the ability to care for us properly. It was about ten years before Dad forgave his sister for that threat. He intended to look after us himself, he said. And when Dad says something, he means it.
It wasn’t easy. There were housekeepers, play schools, and day-care centers. There were babysitters who did exactly that – sat – often having friends over who ate everything not locked up. There were housekeepers who drank, who entertained boyfriends, who quit on a moment’s notice, stealing whatever they were able to carry.
There were also some wonderful women who tried to be mothers to Byron and me, some hoping Dad would take a fancy to them if they were nice enough to us and kept the house spotless. Others simply loved children. One was a middle-aged lady named Mrs. Watts, a black woman whose family had a cottage on a lake some fifty miles out of Chicago. She took us to the lake for two weeks when I was eight and Byron was six. Dad came down on the weekends and slept in a hammock on the porch of the cabin, and we went fishing and boating and collected rocks and shells. But Mrs. Watts’ mother became ill and she had to go look after her instead of us.
It was Dad who enrolled me in Little League, where I immediately showed skill and power beyond my years.
‘Did you ever play ball?’ I asked him.
‘I used to play in a commercial league when I was a teenager. I played third base with all the grace of King Kong. The thing I did best was get hit by the pitcher. The ball didn’t hurt so much because I have big bones. I’d lean over the plate and dare the pitcher to hit me, and often enough he would.’
We muddled through. By the time 1 was in first grade I’d mastered the washer and dryer, the vacuum cleaner and the dishwasher. We went to school in clean if unironed clothes. I did the dishes as soon as I got home from school. Byron learned to cook, first out of necessity then for pleasure. I can see him standing on a chair in front of the stove, five years old, frying pork chops, boiling carrots that I had cut up, salting, peppering, shooing me away if I tried to help. We got our share of burns and scrapes and cuts, but we were truly scared only once. When I was six, I reached up and put my finger under the knife as Dad was slicing bread for Sunday morning toast. I still have the scar. There was blood everywhere, and Byron kept a washcloth pressed tightly about my finger as Dad hurried us to Emergency, the cloth turning raspberry colored in spite of the pressure Byron put on it.
‘How long will he be on the disabled list?’ Dad asked the doctor after he had stitched me up. ‘This boy’s the star of his Little League team and he’s only six.’ I was pale and still snuffling a little. My knees were like water, and I didn’t feel the least like a star baseball player.
The hand recovered, and I roared through every league I played in. Our high-school team won twenty-seven games in a row my freshman year and, though we lost in the first round of the Illinois State Championships, I was voted outstanding player.
Afterward, my coach told me a scout from the White Sox had been in the stands for a couple of games.
‘Didn’t want to put any pressure on you, Son, so I didn’t tell you. You’ve got a big-league future in front of you, or I don’t know my baseball players. You’ve got all the tools. Speed, a strong arm, and a good eye will make up for your lack of power. You’re gonna be a great one.’
Had he not told me about the scout because he knew I didn’t play well under pressure? Or hadn’t he noticed? I’d gone 0–5 in our tournament loss, and made an error.
TWO (#u9afc7937-e2db-503b-becf-7193880db645)
I was in my second year of high school the day a Cadillac the color of thick, rich cream pulled up in front of Mrs. Grover’s Springtime Café and Ice Cream Parlor. Our main street was paved but narrow, with six feet of gravel between the edge of the pavement and the sidewalk. Dust from the gravel whooshed past the car and oozed through the screen door of the café.
Byron and I were seated at a glass-topped table, our feet hooked on the insect-legged chairs. We were sharing a dish of vanilla ice cream, savoring each bite, trying to make it outlast the heat of high July.
It was easy to tell the Cadillac owner was a man who cared about his car. He checked his rear view carefully before opening the driver’s door. After he got out – ‘unwound’ would be a better description, for he was six foot five if he was an inch – he closed the door gently but firmly, then wiped something off the side-view mirror with his thumb. On the way around the Caddy, he picked something off the grille and flicked it onto the road.
He took a seat in a corner of the café where he could watch his car and everyone else in the café which was me, Byron, and Mrs. Grover.
The stranger looked to be in his mid-thirties. He had rusty hair combed into a high pompadour that accentuated his tall front teeth and made his face look longer than it really was. Across his upper lip was a wide coppery-red mustache with the corners turned up and waxed, the kind worn by 1890s baseball players.
Though everything about him was expensive, down to the diamond ring on his left baby finger, he looked like the type who didn’t like to conform. I guessed he had grown his hair down past his shoulders when he was a teenager. His hair was now combed back, hiding the top half of his ears and the back of his collar. He was wearing a black suit with fine gray pinstripes, a white-on-white shirt, and shoes that must have cost three hundred dollars.
‘I’d like something tall and cool,’ he said.
‘I have pink lemonade,’ Mrs. Grover said in a tiny voice that belied her 250 pounds. She had waddled halfway from the counter to his table, but stopped when the stranger spoke.
‘I’ll have the largest one you’ve got,’ he said.
Mrs. Grover delivered the lemonade in a sweaty, opaque glass. He took a long drink, stretched his legs, and looked around the room.
‘What do you figure he does?’ whispered Byron.
When I didn’t answer quickly enough he went on. ‘A banker, I bet – or an undertaker, maybe.’
‘He’s suntanned,’ I said, ‘and bankers have short hair.’ The big brother pointing out the obvious to the little brother. ‘And look at his hands.’
The knuckles were scarred, the fingers callused.
‘What then?’
‘Howdy, boys,’ the stranger said, and raised his glass to us. His voice was deep and soft.
‘Hi,’ we said.
‘I see you’re ballplayers.’ He nodded toward our gloves, which rested on the floor by the chair legs. ‘Is there much baseball played in these parts?’
The question was like opening a floodgate. We told him about everything from Little League to the high-school team I played for, to the commercial leagues where the little towns, subdivisions, and bedroom communities competed, to the Cubs and White Sox in nearby Chicago.
1 ended the baseball lecture saying, ‘My brother doesn’t play much baseball, at least not the way I do. I’m gonna play pro some day.’
‘How did your team do this year?’ he asked me, not in the patronizing way most adults have, but speaking with a genuine interest.
‘Well,’ I said, a little embarrassed, ‘last year we went to the State Championships, but this season we were two and nineteen. But we’re really a lot better ball club than that,’ I rushed on before he could interrupt – or laugh, as most adults did when I announced our dismal record.
‘I keep statistics,’ I said. ‘We scored more runs than any team in the league. We’re good hitters and average fielders, but we didn’t have anyone who could pitch. A bad team gets beat seventeen to two. We’d get beat seventeen to fourteen, nineteen to twelve, eighteen to sixteen.’
‘They’re really good hitters, especially Mike here,’ Byron broke in. ‘Mike’s gonna make it to the Bigs.’
‘I practice three hours a day all year round,’ I said. ‘I’m a singles hitter. A second-base man. I walk a lot and steal a lot.’
‘If you’re good you’ll make it,’ the stranger said.
‘You look like you might be a player yourself,’ I said.
‘I’ve pitched a few innings in my day,’ he said, with what I recognized as understatement, and he made his way, in two long strides, to our table.
‘The thought struck me that you boys might like another dish of ice cream. Since you’re sharing I assume your budget is tight.’
‘You’ve had a good thought,’ said Byron.
‘I notice my lemonade cost seventy-five cents, as does a dish of ice cream. I might be willing to make a small wager.’
‘What kind?’ we both asked, staring up at him.
‘Well now, I’m willing to bet I can tell you the exact distance in miles between any two major American cities.’
‘How far is it from Algonquin to Peoria?’ Byron asked quickly.
‘Algonquin, at least, is not a major American city,’ said the stranger gently, ‘but I did notice as I was driving that the distance from DeKalb to Peoria was 118 miles, so you just add the distance from DeKalb to Algonquin.’ Byron looked disappointed.
‘What I had in mind, though, were large cities. Chicago, of course, would qualify, so would Des Moines, St. Louis, Kansas City, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Seattle, Dallas, and, if you insist,’ and he smiled in a quick and disarming manner at Byron, ‘I’ll throw in Peoria.’
‘How far from New York to Chicago?’ I asked.
‘Exactly 809 miles,’ said the stranger.
‘How do we know you’re not making that up?’ I said.
‘A good question. Out in my car I have a road atlas, and inside it is a United States mileage chart. If one of you boys would like to get it …’
As he spoke he reached a large hand into a side pocket and withdrew his keys. I had grabbed them and was halfway across the room before Byron could untangle his feet from the chair legs.
The interior of the car was still cool from the air conditioning. It smelled of leather and of lime after-shave. There was nothing in sight except a State Farm road atlas on the front seat. The very neatness of the car told a lot about its owner, I thought: methodical, the type of man who would care about distances.
I carried the atlas into the café, where the stranger was now seated across the table from Byron.
‘Let’s just check out New York to Chicago,’ he said. ‘There’s always a chance I’m wrong.’
He turned to the United States mileage chart, and all three of us studied it. There were eighty cities listed down the side of the chart, and sixty names across the top. Where the two names intersected on the chart was the mileage between them.
‘Yes, sir, 809 miles, just as I said.’
