In the Crook of the River

Twelve one-hundred word scenes about two teammates in love and the inevitability of ruin.

1.

Detroit, Motor City! Crackling in old pictures in all its silver glory, climbing to the great Haudenosaunee skies on the limestone ladders of Wirt C. Rowland and Albert Kahn.
In the crook of the river Patrick Kubacki falls asleep with his back to his wife and his face to tomorrow.

When the sun rises over Lake St Clair and starts its arc above the scraping spires of the waterfront he will ride in Paulie Kallmeyer’s car and watch the odd dissolute remains of the age of marble and gold glitter in the morning light in a thousand tiny mirrored windows.

2.

They meet on a backfield, pinned to the strange green of a desert ballpark. The sun hits off Paul’s Michigan palor in a blinding halo and catches on the bright blonde ends of his shabby hair.

“So there you are. The first-round pick.”

It’s a handshake with a livewire: Pat goes blind and never truly regains his sight. He’s reborn clean out of Phoenix, Arizona.

Over the years the numbers will confirm what he already knows: watching Paul play baseball is like looking into the face of God. But he learns something else that day. Something he can’t repeat.

3.

Pat trods through his trailer-park childhood in disintegrating sneakers, burning with the fierce American belief that faith and hard work beget riches and success.
Just to be safe he crosses himself three times before holy communion, taps his foot four times before each at-bat. His blessings are counted in outs and bases, batters and balls, the numbers of baseball skewering him in fours and threes and sixes and nines.

The first time he kisses Paul, over NHL 98, he makes it last twenty-seven seconds of perfect guilt and delight and waits for a punch that never comes.

4.

The city starts with a murmur, cardboard houses sagging like broken teeth, tarred and ruined from the whip of the Lake Erie winds and the desperate snuff of arson. Then it swells, an orchestra of stone, rising hammer blows along the waters as they swivel to their twisted strait.

Pat’s heart jitters like a Motown beat. He’s not in love — love is not something he gives to cities and stadiums. But down the line his taxi traces up the avenues of Detroit is a spot on a lineup : down that line is the triumphant dot for the i of his life.

5.

Toast in coffee and thimbleberry jam out at Paul’s cabin, one perfect white winter in the cupriferous expanse of the Upper Peninsula. They stumble and sink in the snowbanks shagging baseballs, Paulie’s pink face like a blooming peony held in the soft fur of his tied-down ushanka.

Oh, when Pat looks at him he sees all the agate layers of the earth, outcrops of glittering mica, stars in his eyes. Paulie’s a mountain, sanded down to soft angles by ancient glaciers of iridescent ice. He makes Pat’s heart thaw over in wonder, watching him swing with the abandon of endless winters.

6.

For three grandiose years they achieve a kind of perfection generally accepted to be impossible or else kinsellian. They reach an apex, have their cake and eat it, hit three hundred and eighty each and find three thousand ways to make eachother laugh.

Inseparable was a word made for them, created from whole cloth the day Pat decided that Paulie’s bed was more comfortable than his own. From the bench to the planes to their bachelor pad, it’s just so plain to see: they complete each other, two pieces of a synchronous jigsaw, gracefully left-handed and gloriously successful.

7.

The baseball press, the gossip pages, the Sports Illustrated cover: everybody has designs for Paulie Kallmeyer. The measure to which these include Pat starts at teammates and stops at best friends.

They can see the writing on the wall: the future is knocking at the door and the dark corners of who they are are walking into the light.

Looking back he won’t be able to tell what possessed either of them to get married to their wives, but he’ll put it down to the same thing that drove every great homosexual innovation from McCarthyism to Polari.

Simple, stupid fear.

8.

In every way he’s a made-up person, an elaborate fantasy. He’s an action figure, sexless and polished, a superhero smiling on bubblegum cardboard and ballpark jumbotrons. Every day he plays out a script for young boys in backyards and college girls in love: the man of flesh and blood and sweat and come that lives between the lines of his name is a secret for finished basements and hotel rooms to keep.

Yes, all public people are false, but he’s something more; crosses that line every night like a warzone commute. There are no words for him; there may never be.

9.

Their teammates must suspect: it’s there for the taking. They sit too close together, they touch too tender. Whenever Paul gets hit by a pitch Pat starts to get violent.

Pat can see it already, blood down the shower drain, both of their heads bashed in; slurs from across the field, a beanball long past warning. Sometimes he wakes up, frigid and drowning in bed, feeling like Dolly the sheep, a freak of nature on borrowed time. Next to him Paulie burns like a branding iron: the air will hiss if he touches him. Together, they’re a ticking time bomb.

10.

At times Detroit terrifies him. It’s like seeing his future. Everything breaks down eventually. Everything falls from grace.

He sidelines himself on the bases one day, pays for his recklessness with two months out. Paul gets another double play partner as Pat stews on the bench, watching the world pass him by.

On his first game back he walks it off and smashes his face into Paulie’s at home plate, so hard that his tooth cuts an indelible notch into his forehead. Blood sprays from his lip and pours down the bridge of Paulie’s nose.

Pat’s chin is dripping scarlet.

11.

What they’ve got is precious and rare and dirty like a blood diamond. Love that’s whole and cruel in invisible ways, love that never hurts you, content to hurt others instead.

When Pat looks into his children’s eyes he sees nothing. He raises them like collateral damage, which is to say he doesn’t raise them at all. He doesn’t tell Paul this. He doesn’t tell anyone. He runs from all his duties as a man and everybody cheers him on.

Carressing Paulie’s big face he wonders when their luck will end. But you wouldn’t want to jinx a perfect game.

12.
“Christ, Patsy, I’ve been ringing your room for ten minutes. What are you doing at Paul’s? You know what, it doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Skip? It’s five AM — ”

Next to him, Paulie nuzzles his shoulder softly, stirring from adorable slumber.

“No shit. Look, kid, I’m sorry. Get back to your room and pack your bags. I hate to even say it, but you’re traded to LA.”

He doesn’t know if he ever expected to get a happy ending. Paul kisses the tender fat skin of his throwing arm, beckoning him back to sleep. Pat’s whole world tilts, and collapses in on itself.