“What’s your name again?”
“32.”
“That’s not a name. What did your mother call you?”
“Silas.”
“I remember you, Silas. You were Larry’s friend.”
“Yes, ma’am, I was.”
For a long time she watched him and he saw himself come and go in her eyes, she knew him then she didn’t. Then, for a moment, she did again.
“Silas?”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“I’m frightened.”
“Of what?”
Shaking her head. “I can’t remember.”
They sat. The other old woman in the bed by the window shifted in her sleep and made a low noise.
He watched Mrs. Ott’s good eye brim, a tear collect and fall and fill one of her deep wrinkles and never emerge at the bottom. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Ott,” he said and saw he’d lost her, she was looking at him as if she’d never seen him.
“Clyde?” she said.
“No, ma’am. It’s Silas.”
“Who?”
He sat for a while longer, finally admitting that yes, he was Clyde. He let her ask about her chickens and he began to tell her how Eleanor Roosevelt kept trying to lay with no success and how Rosalynn Carter was getting fatter and Barbara Bush had lain two eggs in one night, and finally, as the chickens moved in their pen, smudges in her memory, she closed her eyes and began to sleep. He turned his fingers to free them of her brittle grip and took, from the sheets where it had fallen, the photograph. He fitted it in her good hand and rose and left her in the light from the door and went down the hall and outside to his Jeep.
HE WAS LATE for dinner with Angie, her turning her cheek to catch his kiss there and leaving him standing by her open apartment door as she descended the stairs toward her car. He wore jeans and a white button-down shirt. He’d left his hat, which she only liked if it came with the uniform.
She drove, unusual for them, a sign she was peeved. Ten minutes later, he sat across from her in a booth in the Fulsom Pizza Hut while the Braves lost on the television on the far wall.
“Baby,” he finally said over their medium supreme, “what is wrong?”
“What you mean?”
“You know what I mean. You all quiet.”
“Maybe cause I ain’t see you all week and you late and don’t even call? I put on my best jeans and you ain’t even say I look nice?”
“You look nice.”
She shook her head. “I know I do, you ain’t got to tell
“I’m tired’s all.”
She lifted her pizza and took a bite and chewed slowly. “You know how I can tell when you lying, 32?”
He met her eyes. “How?”
“You start messing with that hat.”
He looked to the table, where the hat would’ve been, and saw his fingers, fiddling with air. He put his hand in his lap and had to smile. “When else did I lie?”
“Last week at the diner. When I asked if you ever dated that girl.”
Cindy Walker.
He glanced at the television. Braves changing pitchers. He was suddenly on the Fulsom City Park infield as Coach Hytower stood talking to his pitcher, and Silas, at short, was looking past them into the stands, where she always sat.
Angie put her pizza down. “Well?”
“Would you stay here a minute,” he said, starting to rise. “I got to get my hat.”
“Sit your lying ass down, 32, and talk to me.”
WHEN SILAS PLAYED baseball, Cindy had come to games, smoking cigarettes and sitting in a miniskirt with her legs crossed on the high bleachers, her hair in a scrunchie. Sunglasses on. He knew she watched him and at some point he realized he was playing for her, swiping impossible line drives out of the air and short-hopping bullet grounders to flip to M &M on second or fling over to first for the out. Sometimes he felt invincible on the diamond, white people and black both watching him, taller now, up to six feet by the eleventh grade, growing so fast he still had stretch marks on his lower back. Daring that baseball to come anywhere near, willing it to, seeing it big as a basketball when he crouched at the plate, hitting for power to all fields so everybody played back, and then he’d bunt and most times there wouldn’t even be a throw, him standing on first before the third baseman or catcher barehanded the ball.
On the infield tapping his cleats with his glove to knock off dirt, he’d watch Cindy leave after the eighth inning, walk off away from town, but always look back.
Then the time where he went five for five (including a triple) and dove and caught a liner up the middle to end the game. His teammates swarmed him and carried him off the field and from his perch he saw Cindy at her usual spot, smoking, and smiled at her. She smiled back.
She’d stayed till the end.
He skipped his shower and slipped away and followed her still in his dirty uniform and caught up and walked along the rural road with her, carrying his cap and glove, a few houses back against the trees, the two of them stepping around mailboxes in the weeds and hurrying when dogs boiled out from beneath a porch to bark at them.
“You see that catch?”
“You seen me there, didn’t you?”
“You like baseball?”
“No.”
“For a girl don’t like baseball, you sure come to a lot of games.”
“Maybe it ain’t the games I come to see.”
He looked down. Grass stains on his pants, infield dirt. “They put me at short even though I’m a leftie. Coach say I got a chance for a scholarship to Ole Miss.”
“You lucky.”
“Might go all the way, he say. Say if I focus. Keep my mind off distractions.”
“That what I am?”
Yeah, he wanted to say. She was thin with small bright blue eyes that had a kind of beaming intensity, especially when she frowned at him. She had freckles tiny as sand on her nose and throat and bare shoulders, her hair blond and curly and cinched back. Even sweaty she smelled good. Her breasts were little things under her top; he kept trying not to look at them. She had a concave figure, walking with a little hook to her, her belly in, as if waiting to absorb a blow. Today she wore sandals, and he liked her white freckled feet and red toenails.
“You from Chicago?”
He said he was.
“What’s it like up there?”
“It’s cool.” He told her about Wrigley Field, the Cubs, Bull Durham on first, Ryno on second, Bowa at short, and the Penguin, Ron Cey, on third. Bobby Dernier in center. Silas and his friends skipping school to catch home runs on the street outside the stadium, the time he’d nearly got hit by a cab going after a bouncing ball, and then his fantastic catch on the sidewalk, dodging parking meters and diving and landing in the grassy median with a group of white people watching from Murphy’s Bar, the old man who came out and traded him four tickets for the ball. They’d gone the next day, him and three buddies, sitting in the sun in the bleachers. They got a drunk man to buy them beer, buying him one in return, Silas knowing as he watched the acrobatics on the field that he’d found his calling.
