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Authors: John Burnham Schwartz
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hadn’t they come for me? Box Corner was not so far from the rest of the world that it couldn’t be found. The police could easily have passed through here in their cruisers and spotted the car sitting in the driveway, facing the road. They would have seen the piece of the dead boy’s jacket stuck in the broken headlight, the last thing anybody took from him while he was alive.
I’d gone back inside the house, last night, to sit on the couch, to drink more beer and smoke more cigarettes, to wait for them to realize who I was and what I’d done. I’d made it in time for the end of the eleven o’clock news. In time for sports, baseball and Fenway Park and hot dogs. I’d watched a replay of Mo Vaughn slugging a grand slam in the bottom of the sixteenth to win it for the Sox. The camera took in the crowd surging to its feet at the crack of the bat, a sea of heads rising as if synchronized to follow the ball’s flight across the green field and over the monster leftfield wall. Then the cheer exploding upward through bright rings of raucousness—a war cry, a fertility rite, a dance for rain.
And there the videotape had ended, the news ended. Good night. In just a few minutes we’d witnessed the deaths of teenagers, a lottery winner, a life-altering home run. And I had remembered my son’s hands bunched into fists during the game; then released, happy, loose, and trusting. Mine for a minute.
I went down the hall now. Pale-blue synthetic carpeting thick and feisty under my feet, like walking on foam rubber. The realtor had referred to my bedroom as the Master Suite. All the furniture here had come with the lease. The bed was round. The bureau and bedside tables were made of a white wood-laminate that spoke of cheap hair salons and big-chested women in pussycat pajamas. Most of the things I valued I kept in this room, tucked away in furniture I couldn’t stand the sight of. My treasure chest of memories, my Ode to Life. Sam’s letters I kept in the top drawer of the left bedside table, where I could reach for them while lying awake at night, while remembering, while trying to explain to myself, like a shock victim, the how and why of things. I found them now, took out the bundle and peeled off the rubber band. I pulled one out at random and sat down on the bed to read:
DaD
i aM LeRNiNG To pLay TRuMpiT at sCooL. MoM WaNTs Me To pLay peaNo LiKe HeR BuT i DoNT WaNT To. i LiKe TRuMpiT BeTeR. oK?
My sTepDaD says To CaLL HiM THaT BuT i DoNT WaNT To, He TRys To pLay BaLL BuT Hes NoT GooD LiKe you. i ToLD HiM aND MoM GoT MaD. sHe sTaRTeD To yeLL aND say sTuFF aBouT you. soRRy.
BoGGs GoT FoR HiTs. i Mis you. SaM.
MoM DiDNT ReeD THis.
There was no date, but I didn’t need one. He’d been eight years old when he’d written that. Ruth was married to Norris by then. Norris, in fact, was living in my house. (For some reason, Ruth had been anxious about our coverage, and had gone to the offices of Wheldon and Peterson Insurance to get more information about the vast array of protections available to the American family unit. What was most available, it turned out, was Norris.)
I read the letter over again. The spelling was worrisome. Sam had since been diagnosed with dyslexia. He was getting some extra tutoring at school, and spelling a little better these days. Still, he was behind the normal rate of development for boys his age.
In other respects, though, the letter stood out as a happy bulletin. I even smiled once: Norris would not be much of a ballplayer, no. Mr. Stepdad. Sam knew what was what, all right. He would never call a nickel a dime. He would not settle. Ruth had wanted him to play the piano. That was natural enough— teaching it to children was what she did for a living. But being part of a phalanx of piano-tinkling upstarts was not Sam’s dream. He was an individual, and individuals played the trumpet.
I had written him back, of course. To tell him I was proud of his decision to learn the trumpet. To say
I’d gone back inside the house, last night, to sit on the couch, to drink more beer and smoke more cigarettes, to wait for them to realize who I was and what I’d done. I’d made it in time for the end of the eleven o’clock news. In time for sports, baseball and Fenway Park and hot dogs. I’d watched a replay of Mo Vaughn slugging a grand slam in the bottom of the sixteenth to win it for the Sox. The camera took in the crowd surging to its feet at the crack of the bat, a sea of heads rising as if synchronized to follow the ball’s flight across the green field and over the monster leftfield wall. Then the cheer exploding upward through bright rings of raucousness—a war cry, a fertility rite, a dance for rain.
And there the videotape had ended, the news ended. Good night. In just a few minutes we’d witnessed the deaths of teenagers, a lottery winner, a life-altering home run. And I had remembered my son’s hands bunched into fists during the game; then released, happy, loose, and trusting. Mine for a minute.
I went down the hall now. Pale-blue synthetic carpeting thick and feisty under my feet, like walking on foam rubber. The realtor had referred to my bedroom as the Master Suite. All the furniture here had come with the lease. The bed was round. The bureau and bedside tables were made of a white wood-laminate that spoke of cheap hair salons and big-chested women in pussycat pajamas. Most of the things I valued I kept in this room, tucked away in furniture I couldn’t stand the sight of. My treasure chest of memories, my Ode to Life. Sam’s letters I kept in the top drawer of the left bedside table, where I could reach for them while lying awake at night, while remembering, while trying to explain to myself, like a shock victim, the how and why of things. I found them now, took out the bundle and peeled off the rubber band. I pulled one out at random and sat down on the bed to read:
DaD
i aM LeRNiNG To pLay TRuMpiT at sCooL. MoM WaNTs Me To pLay peaNo LiKe HeR BuT i DoNT WaNT To. i LiKe TRuMpiT BeTeR. oK?
My sTepDaD says To CaLL HiM THaT BuT i DoNT WaNT To, He TRys To pLay BaLL BuT Hes NoT GooD LiKe you. i ToLD HiM aND MoM GoT MaD. sHe sTaRTeD To yeLL aND say sTuFF aBouT you. soRRy.
BoGGs GoT FoR HiTs. i Mis you. SaM.
MoM DiDNT ReeD THis.
There was no date, but I didn’t need one. He’d been eight years old when he’d written that. Ruth was married to Norris by then. Norris, in fact, was living in my house. (For some reason, Ruth had been anxious about our coverage, and had gone to the offices of Wheldon and Peterson Insurance to get more information about the vast array of protections available to the American family unit. What was most available, it turned out, was Norris.)
I read the letter over again. The spelling was worrisome. Sam had since been diagnosed with dyslexia. He was getting some extra tutoring at school, and spelling a little better these days. Still, he was behind the normal rate of development for boys his age.
In other respects, though, the letter stood out as a happy bulletin. I even smiled once: Norris would not be much of a ballplayer, no. Mr. Stepdad. Sam knew what was what, all right. He would never call a nickel a dime. He would not settle. Ruth had wanted him to play the piano. That was natural enough— teaching it to children was what she did for a living. But being part of a phalanx of piano-tinkling upstarts was not Sam’s dream. He was an individual, and individuals played the trumpet.
I had written him back, of course. To tell him I was proud of his decision to learn the trumpet. To say
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