Flights

DAD. Turning Two

A few things to clear up before we get started here: this great worry that everyone has that Biddy will go all to pieces at the drop of a hat does more harm than good. If we keep treating him like a head case we’ll turn him into one. He is not one now. He keeps to himself. Big deal. He’s quiet. He goes around the house with a long face sometimes. Does that mean we should lock up the sharp objects? He’s a kid. Kids do weird things. If he wants to roll dice all night, let him roll dice all night. If he wants to stare out windows, let him stare out windows. Whatever makes him happy. Of course you work with the kid, keep an eye on him, try to keep him on a reasonably even keel. But how much more can you do? And after some of the things Kristi has done, we’re going to sit around and worry about Biddy?

On one point his father was pretty well convinced, and not accepting arguments: for a bright kid, Biddy sometimes had the brains of a squirrel.

Two weeks earlier on a vacation in Beaufort, North Carolina, he had stood on a dock overlooking a narrow channel, struggling with a can of tuna fish. There was a thin strip of land called Carrot Island opposite him, and the sun was high and the air clear and the sky blue in the distance. Wavelets lapped at the wood pilings. His parents had decided to have lunch on the dock and his job had been to open the tuna fish. They sat with legs dangling over the water and arranged bread and lettuce and cans of soda on a small blanket. His sister was unwrapping the individually sliced cheese. Golden oil leaked from one of the initial punctures and the can was slippery. A menhaden boat passed by, huge and filthy, easing into the small channel like some sort of visual trick, with its cranes and nets in exotic disarray. The men aboard lounged and slumped motionless, not so much exhausted as dispirited, and the can gave a jerk and ratcheted its bladed open top along his index finger like an application of fire. The can flew from his hand and rattled on the pale wood at his feet, freeing tuna chunks and oil. He screamed, his parents turned, and the blood swelled into the cut the way the ocean swelled into depressions dug in the waterline at the beach. Blood ran down his arm into the crook of his elbow. He gripped his finger as though holding it together and felt dizzy. His parents were around him in a panic. He was laid down and his finger held high above him. The clouds beyond it were edged with liquid white where they faced the sun. His sister had crouched near the tuna, her hair fanning across her cheeks in the breeze, her finger delicately touching the blood rimming the edge of the can.

They’d wrapped his finger in gauze in the emergency room, and after a wait he’d been given a table. He lay back on it and they cleaned his arm and then the doctor arrived. The gauze had been pulled away, separating into stubborn strands dried to the wound that ran along the center of his middle joint and veered across his fingerprint to the nail. The cut was purple, maroon, and brown, a river on a map. They cleaned it. They gave him a shot, the pain jerking his head from the headrest. After a short wait the doctor returned with a tiny needle and began to sew him up. There was no longer any pain but he could feel the needle penetrate and emerge and he had to look away. He could feel the two halves of his skin being pulled together like the sides of a sneaker. His parents talked in low tones with the nurse. Another nurse appeared, looking on. She was blonde and pretty and heavy and wore a St. Christopher medal around her neck. He could make out the stooped man with the child on his shoulders on its face. She had a bag of potato chips upright against her chest and was eating them in small bunches, intent on his finger. They crackled loudly. A yellow piece of chip remained above her upper lip, like an unexplained blemish in a photograph. It surprised him, he remembered, his parents’ voices low and dull behind the partition, that she could eat looking into his wound, and that the closing of his finger was so unremarkable to everyone present.

He had not been allowed to go swimming for the rest of the trip, wading carefully into the water with his finger aloft like a boy with a sudden thought in the baking heat. His father had remarked, paddling by, that only he, of everyone his father knew, could incapacitate himself on a can of tuna fish.

He dreamed of the Orioles. Take ’em down, Doug DeCinces told him when he returned to the dugout. He flopped against the wall. His father had mouthed the same words to him from the stands. He shifted on the bench, half a head shorter than the third baseman and fundamentally ashamed he hadn’t broken up the double play. The night air was cool and the breeze lifted dust from the on-deck circle, easing it toward the outfield. Rich Dauer was on deck and Guidry on the mound, shaking off the sign with a quick, economical twitch. Biddy could see all of this, could feel it. A few moments earlier, he had slid wide of second base, ducking a throw from the Yankees’ Willie Randolph that seemed about to decapitate him. He felt the dust on his hands. He’d gone into his slide too soon, had done nothing to upset Randolph’s throw, and had never reached the bag. When he hadn’t gotten up immediately, immobilized by the awfulness of his slide, the crowd had roared: it had become evident to even the least perceptive that they had just witnessed one of the worst slides in Yankee Stadium history. He had looked into their faces, into the left-field stands, hearing the derision in their cheers, his toe still pointed at second base, white and implacable and more than a foot away.

You’ve got to challenge him on those, DeCinces said. Go after him and try and break up that throw. Do something to protect the runner behind you.

Rich Dauer was leaning over his bat in the on-deck circle, rubbing the wood. Beyond him Eddie Murray waited at the plate, bat cocked, legs spread. Guidry went into his stretch.

Biddy was a member of the Baltimore Orioles and yet not a member. He touched the piping on his pants and fingered his stirrup socks for reassurance. He scraped his spikes on the top step of the dugout, grateful for the chance, subdued by the color and grace of the uniforms and athletes around him. He was sitting alongside heroes and wearing colors that had been magic for him from an early age: black, white, and orange on a field of gray. He was down the bench from Jim Palmer and Ken Singleton. They joked nearby and shared a bag of sunflower seeds with him. He was part of an important game between the New York Yankees and the Baltimore Orioles in front of tens of thousands of people in Yankee Stadium. It was a successful act of will, just as a successful slide into second, a positive contribution to the team, would have to be. His father was watching. His teammates were expecting him to perform. Eddie Murray lined the ball over first base as he watched, as if providing instruction on the importance of will, and the Orioles were cheering now, encouraged, always optimists, seeing the game about to turn around. DeCinces laughed with them and slapped his oversized limp glove on Biddy’s thigh, the big red “R” for Rawlings sticking with Biddy stubbornly as an afterimage.

He sat curled against his father in the den in the dark, the television providing the only light in the room. His mother was out late, visiting one of her sisters, and his father was unhappy about it. Biddy had just showered and was wrapped snugly in his robe, the terrycloth warm and damp. He had his feet tucked between the cushion and the armrest. His head was on a pillow propped against his father’s shoulder. They were watching the eleven-thirty movie, and because it was a Saturday he hadn’t been sent to bed.

They returned to an aerial shot of a desert, with the wreckage of a plane strewn across a gully of some sort. Some figures were moving around it. Jimmy Stewart stood in the sun, with George Kennedy nearby. They looked terrible. Stewart’s cheeks were covered with a white stubble and his lips were cracked. Kennedy looked dazed and grim. They were arguing with Ernest Borgnine, who was sitting against a torn piece of fuselage in the shade. The plane had had a twin boom tail assembly, and one of the booms with its accompanying engine seemed intact. Jimmy Stewart wanted to build an entirely new plane from that, with their help, and try to fly out of the desert. It was all up to a young German engineer with wire-rimmed glasses and filthy blond hair.

“Who’s that?” Biddy asked. He could feel the men’s suffering and imagined going so long without water.

“Hardy Kruger,” his father said. “I’m trying to watch.”

Hardy Kruger said Stewart’s idea was possible, that anything was possible. Stewart, arguing for the attempt, said that Kruger had built planes before.

He built model airplanes before, Borgnine raged. He’s a model airplane builder!

Hardy Kruger shrugged, his glasses dusty in close-up. The principles are the same, he said.

Stewart stood in the sun, wiping his hand on his lower lip, and began to speak so eloquently, as he paced and the sun beat down on the dust around them, that Biddy wanted to help, to search the cellar for tools.

It was impossible. All right, it was impossible. And they had a choice: try the impossible or stay in the desert. And I don’t know about you, he said, but I’ve had enough of the desert. He explained: one choice was doing what you thought you couldn’t, the other was giving up. George Kennedy swayed slightly in the heated air behind him. They couldn’t do more than was possible, someone said. They’d have to change what was possible, Stewart said.

The group gazed at the wreckage. Biddy shivered under the terrycloth. Where would they get a tail, an undercarriage, the other wing? His father looked on, absorbed.

A commercial appeared and they shifted together, the spell half broken by the intrusion of giant hands and Spray ’n Wash.

“Look at this cast,” his father said. The pages of the TV Guide flapped like layers of wings. “Attenborough, Kennedy, Borgnine. Peter Finch. What do we got now? Now it’s sex or you gotta lop somebody’s head off.”

The movie returned. The crew strained against huge silver slabs of metal in the sunlight. Borgnine grunted and pulled, ropes around his shoulders. Stewart lifted and pushed, his sad eyes strained and desperate. Hardy Kruger rigged up a pulley system. They struggled on, overcoming problem after problem, spanning two commercial breaks.

The plane, finished, was christened “Phoenix” by the men. They circled it, unable to speak, and Biddy was moved by what they’d accomplished. “It’s such a good story,” his father murmured, and the plane, with a surge and sweep of music, took off, bumping clumsily over the flat, hard sand and just clearing a dune ridge, its wings flexing and swaying dangerously. The men were whooping and cheering. Stewart was grinning. “They got it,” his father said, eyes on the plane as it lifted high over the barren slopes. “Just take off. You don’t like it, change it. Make it possible, like he said. I’ll be a son of a bitch if I wouldn’t’ve been better off listening to stuff like that.”

He recrossed his feet on the hassock. They could hear the crickets outside, musical and distant. “I feel sorry for you kids,” he said. “You don’t get stuff like this anymore. Now what do you get? Psychos with masks. People’s heads exploding. What do we expect? We show kids that and we expect them to grow up like Bobby Kennedy.”

The plane continued to rise, an oasis now in sight. Stewart hunched against the wind behind his tiny windshield, eyes slits, hair buffeted. They were going to land safely, an even greater accomplishment, and Biddy stayed on the sofa, wanting to share their release and achievement, watching the credits, and waiting for more long after the commercial break.

He played Wiffle ball the next morning in the backyard and called for them to hurry, as he waited in the outfield, the grass smell fresh in his nostrils. His back was to the bushes. The sun warmed his hair and his foot itched near the heel. His father whizzed in a drooping curve and his sister swung her bright yellow bat and the ball arced high above them, slowing fast, curling in the air as it spun, and he edged back and turned and lunged, the weightless ball slapping into his hand as he came down into the prickly support of the hedges.

While he lay sagging close to the ground, his father and sister laughing, the branches moved. The face of a kitten emerged, mottled in tan and gray, its green eyes alert. Somewhere a bird twittered. For a moment the kitten and Biddy and the space between them remained as silent and still as a photograph. He waited, wondering at a kitten at home in the middle of a bush, but it refused to stir. He waited, and his hand, as if approaching an extraterrestrial object, opened and moved cautiously through the hedges toward it. At the intrusion, the kitten slipped away with a single movement, sinuous, disappearing with an impossible hop into the shadowy tangle. The leaves of the bush shook and whispered in the breeze. His hand remained where the kitten had been, evidence of the ghost.

“Listen, whenever you’re ready,” his father called. “Or is this your way of saying you’d like to quit?”

He struggled forward, Wiffle ball still clutched in his other hand, and steadied himself before rising to toss the ball back in.

In a three-month-old essay on an assigned theme accepted on the twenty-third of May by Sister Mary of Mercy, sixth-grade teacher at Our Lady of Peace School, Biddy had written:

MY FAMILY

My family is not a big one. There is my father, my mother, and Kristi, my sister. My father works at United Technologies (Sikorsky) where they make helicopters. We have a dog, Lady, who is white and part Dalmatian and does some tricks. My father and I taught her the tricks when she was a puppy. My mother says our family is a big one, because of all our cousins and uncles. I have twenty-seven cousins. They are all Italian. But I don’t think they count. I’m twelve and Kristi is seven. My father says he is forty-four and my mother says she is as old as the hills.

Sister Mary of Mercy had given the paper a B-minus and had added a note, scrawled across the top right corner: “Good, Biddy, but could you have said more?”

Creeping around the outside of the paper in the margins were dark double rows of box scores. Along the top an extra-inning game had been played between Balt. and N.Y., the extra innings spilling across comments and grade. New York had won, 13–9, with four runs in the top of the sixteenth.

Biddy was playing bent forward over the desk, the high-intensity lamp cutting a yellow arc from the gloom. He rested his cheek on his fist, rolling and scooping up dice with his right hand. Baltimore was ahead in this, the fifth game of the series, 7–3.

His hair drifted into the light over the supporting hand on his cheek. It had just been washed and seemed finer than his mother claimed it to be. It was brown under the high-intensity lamp’s harsh attempt to lighten it, and where the strands separated — at many places, since his mother had been able to comb it out only once before he had bolted — it appeared so fine as to be indistinct. It was long for a boy with his neck, and his father occasionally told him across the supper table that he looked like the wrath of God.

His mother insisted his eyes were his dominant feature. They had been at his birth, she liked to continue, at which point he had looked like nothing so much as a little frog. The image did not flatter him. His father, mixing a whiskey and water, would glance up occasionally and say, “Good God. Look at the eyes, will you?” Or his sister, slamming a door or slapping the dog’s nose, would hold up a hand, as if to block his vision, and protest he shouldn’t look at her like that.

He focused on the green dice, translucent, glowing under the Tensor light and casting mint shadows on the white paper. The game he played he had learned from an eighth-grader the year before, after school, when he was cleaning blackboards and the eighth-grader was being kept after. It had been explained systematically: six and six was a home run, six and five a sacrifice fly, six and four an out, and so on. He’d written it down and brought it all home.

It could be for him, he soon discovered, soothing, mesmerizing, and endless, spooling out into a perpetual string of games that absorbed time painlessly and unobtrusively. One quick game would become a doubleheader, a three-game series, five, seven, or an entire season, to be continued at another time. Box scores filled pages and pads, and appeared in odd places on scrap paper or essays from school. He’d play after dinner, after homework, right before bedtime. He’d play in the morning lying in the sand at the beach or in his backyard, his legs damp and warm on the cushion of grass. The games never seemed like an end in themselves, but a stopgap, a prelude. He had a very clear sense that he was biding his time, waiting for something to happen, and until something did he would be playing dice baseball. Refinements were developed, and outs divided into categories. Six and four and one and one, both simply outs in the eighth-grader’s version, became long outs to center field and strikeouts, respectively. Six and three became a lined shot turned into a spectacular out by the infield. Five and five became a double play if any runners were on base. He began to keep track of individual performances and arrange his lineups accordingly. The games became more real, more visualized, but could not advance much farther, he knew. And his father, pausing motionless by the stairs to listen, could hear the rhythmic rattle of the dice sprawling across the pad of paper, day and night, he told his wife, day and night.

Lady lay on the floor near the bed, chin on her paws, listening to the dice with no apparent interest. White hairs were filagreed across the coverlet where she’d brushed against it. Kristi lay next to her, teasing her ears with a straw.

“Lisa’s brother plays with dice, too,” she said.

Biddy stopped rolling. “Don’t do that to the dog,” he said.

She rolled onto her back and looked up at him. Her hair swept away from her face and spread along the floor near the dog’s, catching light. My beautiful blonde, her mother called her. She did not look like his sister. He wondered at times if some elaborate and complex deception had been at work. She was beautiful, he knew, sister or not. One front tooth was crooked, slightly overlapping the other. Thank God, his mother would say when it came up; imagine me with a perfect child?

She lay on her back with the straw in her nose and smiled. She was beautiful, and as mean as anyone he had ever known. The reason at times seemed clear, at times escaped him. She kicked a leg experimentally upward and held it aloft, sighting along it to the ceiling. She said, “Lisa’s gonna get a cat.”

“Good for Lisa.”

“We oughta get a cat.”

“We don’t need a cat. We got Lady.”

She made a face. “Lady’s old.” He resumed rolling dice, and she clicked her tongue. “Lady’s no fun,” she said. She was listening to her parents downstairs.

“Leave the dog alone,” he said. “She’s not bothering you.” The game ended 10–3 Baltimore. Downstairs there was the splintering sound of a glass coming apart in the sink.

“They fight all the time,” his sister said. She looked at the dog sadly.

“Hey,” he said. “Lisa coming over for the Air Show?”

She didn’t know. She got up abruptly and went into her room. Lady’s ear twitched, the straw resting lightly on it like an aerialist’s balance pole.

He leaned over and cleared it away. “Why’s she do that to you?” he asked. He picked up the dice, the plastic sweaty and smooth in his hand. “Yeah, you got a case,” he heard his father say.

His knees flexed and his torso bobbed expectantly with the pitch, and Bucky Dent topped it, beating it into the ground, the ball bounding past Scott McGregor, who twisted out of his delivery but was unable to reach it. Everything happened at once as Biddy broke to cover second: Dave Winfield thundered in toward him from first, the noise dropping away like a dream as the Yankee Stadium crowd anticipated the double play. Dauer fielded it and flipped it to him and he caught the ball as Winfield went into his slide. He tried to get a good push off second, getting his knees up as he threw, but Winfield caught them as he swept by, upending him and crashing him onto his face and shoulder, arm still out from the throw.

DeCinces and Dauer stood over him while he sat in the dirt, his nose bleeding and snuffling, his lip stinging. Dent was standing on first and the crowd was whistling and stamping so that it seemed the upper deck might come down.

And that, DeCinces told him, is how you break up a double play.

He put the dice away, turned off the lamp, and walked across the hall to look in on his sister. She was reading a coloring book, her bare toes curling and uncurling. She looked up at him. “I was talking to you before,” she said.

He touched her leg apologetically. “I was thinking.”

“You didn’t say anything.”

He said he was sorry, and asked if she wanted anything. She shook her head and picked at something on her back. He heard a voice and went into the hall and stood at the top of the stairs. His father was a gray shadow, barely visible in the dark at the bottom, telling them to get ready for bed.

Kristi was pulling off her top. He returned to his room and kicked off his sneakers. Directly below him his mother broke something in the den. He pulled off his tank top, shivering at the breeze through the window, turned off the light, and lay back, listening to the crickets.

“If it’s such a goddamn effort, call him and tell him to stay home,” his father said, and Biddy sank a little into the pillow. He decided to go swimming the next morning before Dom arrived.

They stood in a rough line in the hot sun, hair sticking to their foreheads. Biddy’s Orioles hat was on backward to allow for the catcher’s mask, and the sweat on his temples was sticky with dust. The dust invaded his mouth, sometimes chalky, sometimes gritty. He was vaguely reminded of Jimmy Stewart, so long without water, his eyes on the forming fuselage. They were working out with his father and Uncle Dom, and their grasp of fundamentals, according to Dom, was piss poor. Louis and Mickey, Dom’s children, were having as much trouble as he was. Which was not encouraging: Mickey was not very bright and a year younger, and Louis was slightly retarded.

“Biddy, if you don’t block the plate, they go around you. Do you understand?” Dom said. “You have to block the plate.”

Biddy adjusted his chest protector, sullenly stepping nearer the plate.

“Here,” Dom said with some exasperation, positioning him with his arms. “Here, right here. And spread your legs.” He mimicked Biddy standing before the plate, erect, arms drooping, looking hypnotized. Mickey and Louis laughed. “You’re standing here like you’re in outer space. Some mulignon’ll go right by you if you’re standing around like a lost soul.”

“I don’t want to catch anyway,” Biddy said, somewhat in his own defense.

“I don’t care. That’s not the point. You said you wanted to learn how to play the game.” Biddy scuffed the dirt on home plate. “Hey, it’s up to you. You want to play for Lordship next year, it might be nice to handle more than one position.”

Across the field the gulls were circling over the dump, Long Island Sound a blue line beyond.

“Want to try it again?”

Part of him did not. His father despaired of his ever excelling at this game, he knew: a lot of people had long since decided Biddy just did not have the instincts for baseball. He squinted, defiant, and scratched his thigh with his glove and nodded. Louis trotted back to right field and Mickey to third. They were practicing the play at the plate on a sacrifice fly. Dom lifted the bat and ball and turned to face Louis, and Biddy adjusted the catcher’s mask, the thick padding comforting against his cheeks. A bee swirled low across the infield, its drone distracting in the heat. His father stood on the mound, wiping sweat from his eyebrows with the back of his hand. The cool blue Sound beyond was soothing, and Biddy flexed back and forth in his catcher’s crouch to relieve the stiffness. His knees ached. He wanted to salvage a tail boom and fly out of this dust bowl, letting his relaxed legs flap in the jetstream. His father lobbed the ball in and Dom swung under it, sending it off into the sun.

Out in right Louis took a step back, two forward, and pulled the ball in. As he did Mickey exploded from third, his breath whooshing down the line at Biddy, and Louis’s throw came in high and hard and to the left, bouncing once, and Biddy lunged for it feeling it sock into his glove and tumbled into Mickey’s slide, catching him on the chest and face with the tag before being jarred onto his shoulder in the dust.

He rose to all fours, one foot still tangled in Mickey’s sprawl, sweat stinging his left eye, the ball tight in his glove and the dirt dry beneath his hand. Dom, standing over him, called the out as flamboyantly as any umpire ever had, and he rose from the plate happy to have made people happy, and tired and ready to go home.

They thumped into the house hot and dirty and wearing their gloves to find everyone sitting around the kitchen table as if they’d never left. Louis and Mickey trooped into the TV room.

“Had enough of a workout?” his mother asked. He shrugged.

“It’s not the kids’ workout, it’s theirs,” Ginnie said, nodding toward the men.

Biddy slipped onto the counter, his back against the cabinets. There was some leftover tortellini on the stove.

“Get off the counter,” his mother said. “Sit at the table.” Her arm glided past coffee cups, a dessert tray, and a bottle of anisette. She’d arranged the apricot cookies in a mound and sat beside them, her brown hair cut short and her tan pronounced. She was not completely enjoying herself, he could see, not completely allowing herself to relax. Dom and Ginnie they always seemed to have time for, she often told him, but his father never seemed ready to visit any of her sisters. Dom and Ginnie had no idea how much it bothered her, Biddy guessed, watching her as hostess. He’d told her once he never would have known, and she’d said simply, “You have people over, you don’t treat them like that. I’m not a cavone.” He watched her, wondering at her control, at the impenetrability of those around him.

Dom sat opposite her, eating black olives. He was Biddy’s godfather, his father’s closest friend. He worked in a sporting-goods store. He dressed like it, Biddy’s father used to say. He ate a good deal and afterward made squeaking noises between his teeth with his tongue. Biddy remembered a picture he’d glimpsed of Dom’s high-school football team: someone had written across the top “Roger Ludlowe Football 1952 8–0 Go Lions.” In the corner he’d found Dom, number 77, his heavy black hair combed to the side, big gap in his front teeth. He’d had dirt on his nose and a comically tiny leather helmet perched uselessly on his head. Someone had circled the head and had written “Ginzo” in the margin.

“You have to sit up there?” his father said. “Get a folding chair from the porch.”

He said it was okay.

“I wish he wouldn’t sit on the counter,” his mother said.

“What’s wrong with sitting on the counter?” he asked.

“You like it? Fine. Sit on the counter. I don’t care where you sit,” his father said. “Sit on the refrigerator.”

“Sit on the refrigerator, Biddy,” Dom said.

“They just sit up there because they know it bothers you,” Ginnie said. “Right, Biddy?”

Biddy shrugged at her. Turkey, he thought.

Dom was talking about his encephalogram. “This guy’s putting the needles in, you know, like he’s getting a commission. He’s putting ’em in here, and he’s putting ’em in here, and he’s putting ’em in here, and all the while he’s humming ‘O beautiful for spacious skies’—you know, ‘America, the Beautiful.’ I’m sitting there with this guy sticking these things in humming ‘America, the Beautiful.’”

There was general laughter, his mother laughing more quietly than the rest, and he caught her eyes and smiled.

“So I go, ‘Look, Doc, whenever you’re ready here, you know,’ and he goes, ‘What, are they bothering you, Mr. Liriano,’ and I go, ‘Shit no, you know, just point me north and maybe we can pick up Hartford.’”

Everyone laughed and Biddy clumped his heels on the cabinet doors beneath him for no reason, through the noise. Cindy was smiling up at him and he looked away quickly. This was an engagement party of a sort for her, and she was being teased again about the way she looked. Milanese, Dom speculated. Fiorentino. A big shot, from the north. But not Napolitan. Her hair was too blonde, her complexion too light. “My mother used to say, ‘Whose bambin is this, eh? Tedesc?’”

She blushed. She wore light colors and delicate fabrics in summer, with two thin gold chains from her fiancé always around her neck, rich and subdued at the base of her throat.

“Too pretty for a Liriano,” Dom said. “Liriano women look like they play for the Bears. You — I’ll tell you what happened. Princess Grace came to me, she was retiring, she had a problem. You and Caroline didn’t get along in the bassinet.”

“You never told me your mother looked like she played for the Bears,” Ginnie said.

“She did play for the Bears,” Dom said. “Under the name Joe Fortunato. Look it up.”

Biddy continued to watch Cindy’s eyes moving swiftly from speaker to speaker.

“Look at the Head of Covert Operations over there,” his father said. Everyone looked at him. “The watcher. We’re going to call him the watcher.”

He smiled, embarrassed and unhappy, and Dom suggested he was getting psyched for the Air Show. Biddy’s mother asked not to be reminded.

“Don’t you think you can handle it, Jude?” Dom had three olives in one cheek and looked like a squirrel. “You only invited the immediate family. What’s that, six hundred thousand?”

“Every one of them ready to put away twice his own weight in pasta,” Biddy’s father said.

“Well, what do you think, those chibonies are interested in the Air Show? Uh-huh. Locusts. It’s like having locusts over. The only way your Uncle Tony’s gonna see the Air Show is if something crashes into the gnocchi.” He poured some beer. “Oh, they’re gonna see the Air Show, all right. They’ll be through the homemade stuff and into the Gallo before the Blue Whatevers take off.”

“Angels,” Biddy said.

“Yeah, Angels. They’ll be so snockered it might as well be.”

His parents fought after the Lirianos left. He’d heard it coming just in the sharpness with which they put things away, and he hesitated, stupidly, before coming upstairs from the cellar. Dom was fine, the kids were fine, all of his father’s friends were fine, his mother said. Everybody was fine except Judy and her family. Judy and her family got treated like shit. When he came upstairs, his mother was gone. His father sat looking at the coffee cups, food trays, and beer glasses.

Biddy came into the kitchen quietly and sat down at the other end of the table, stacked some coffee cups, and asked what happened.

“Your mother’s upset,” his father said. He picked up a slice of green pepper and tinged it off a wineglass.

“What’s she upset about?”

“She doesn’t need anything to be upset about.”

“Must be something,” he said quietly.

His father shrugged. “Leave all this for tomorrow.”

“I’ll get it.”

“No. Leave it.” He looked over at the pot on the stove. “Want some coffee?”

Biddy shook his head. “Where’d she go?”

His father raised his shoulders, and drooped them again. “What difference does it make?”

“It makes a lot of difference,” Biddy said. “Don’t say that.”

“Yeah, you’re right.” His father rattled an empty cup. “I don’t know. Probably over her sister’s.”

“Now? It’s so late.”

“I don’t know. Jesus Christ.”

Biddy stood up and went into the den. Someone was shooting at an apartment building on the news and Kristi was still up. “What’s wrong?” she said.

“I don’t know.” He put his hand under her armpit, lifting. “C’mon. Let’s go to bed. I think she’s over Aunt Sandy’s.”

“I wish I was over Aunt Sandy’s,” she said.

“No you don’t,” he said. “Come on.”

Later, studying the color of his feet in the bright moonlight, he heard a noise in the living room, and then another, a clinking, and he got up and tiptoed down the stairs. His father was sitting in the dark. “What’re you doing up?” he said. “Go to bed.”

“What’re you doing,” Biddy said, not knowing what to say.

His father took his foot down from the sill of the picture window. “I wish I knew, guy,” he said. “I wish I knew. Sittin’ in the dark.” They looked out the window together at the quiet street under the moon. A small animal crossed the street under the light.

“You don’t have to worry,” Biddy said.

“Nobody has to worry,” his father said. “C’mon, champ. Bed.”

A car turned down the street and continued past the house.

Biddy stopped halfway up the stairs. “Dad,” he said. “You can go to bed.”

“Don’t worry about me,” his father said, and some ice clinked in the dark.

He lay under the covering sheet, straining to hear, his eyes on the ceiling. His father’s voice drifted up from below. He was talking to himself, his words muffled, faint. Biddy lay motionless for a short time, but the silence was filled with distant noise now that he concentrated, and he could make out nothing. He got up and crept into Kristi’s room. He knelt by the bed, and she turned and made a noise, asleep. Her hair smelled of straw and the sun on a hot day.

“I love you, Kristi,” he whispered, and got out of her room before she woke up.

That morning he rose early, everything cold and quiet, the house making small sounds and Lady still asleep in the hall. He got into his bathing suit shivering a little and put on his old sneakers and a sweat shirt and went downstairs, yawning, trailing a towel on the rug. He opened the cellar door and eased the dog’s leash off the hook so it wouldn’t rattle. He let her outside, following with the towel draped around his neck. He let her urinate in selected spots and then stooped and put her on the leash. The foghorn sounded down by the beach.

It was four blocks away and she strained against the leash all the way there. When they got down the bluffs onto the sand he released her to run back and forth from driftwood to shore, from kelp to old shoe.

He squatted by the water, keeping an eye on her, his fingers poking around for smooth, skippable stones. He was already too late: the sun was above the horizon and the fog was burning off as things warmed up. It wasn’t as he’d pictured it the night before, when he’d conceived of being at the edge of the Sound in the extreme early morning; he’d imagined it as long and low and empty, everything gray and smooth, the two of them away from the land, on a sandbar, perhaps, connected to the beach by a narrow spit that disappeared as the tide came in. The possibility of being away from the land, released, lost in the fog, attracted him. Or on the beach itself, gently sloping into the chilled water and damp with sand that had the granular clumpiness of brown sugar. The fog would have misted in from the sea, obscuring everything but the closest birds, standing dully along the waterline.

He’d imagined a sanctuary and had tried to find its equivalent in Lordship. He’d imagined dozing and waking to the foghorn and not knowing where he was; he’d imagined a rose color mixing with the gray in the east as the sun began to assert itself. He’d imagined the foghorn coming back like God the Father to reorient him in the silence.

The wind coursed along the sand behind him, very low, dipping smoothly through depressions and lifting and twirling the cockleburs and sea grass. This was a nice beach, and in places a beautiful beach, but not the one he’d imagined.

A gull came in, skimming, and swooped away. Lady followed it with her eyes.

“This beach isn’t right either,” he said. She watched the gull, wheeling in the distance. He stared out to sea. “Sometimes I don’t think I can do anything right,” he said finally.

Dent topped it again, and again McGregor missed it, falling, perhaps, or leaning the wrong way, and DeCinces yelled Turn two! and with a man on third and one out Biddy knew he had to prevent the run from scoring and he broke to cover second and took Dauer’s flip, and bobbled it, his fingers frantically pulling it in and controlling it in time to have Winfield catch him low sliding in hard, but he couldn’t accept that, and through sheer force of will his mind’s eye got it right, his hand caught it firmly, and he spun and threw, pulling his legs up, but his throw was wild, too much across his body, skipping once in the dirt and into the dugout, and he said No no no and did it again, taking the flip, releasing the ball, his eyes watching its flight, too low, and again, too wide, and again.

Lady came back, circling; he’d scared her. He reached out a hand and she lowered her head to it. He pulled her in and stuck his face in her muzzle, feeling her whiskers.

“I can’t even imagine it right,” he said. “Oh God, Lady, I can’t even imagine it right.”

When he got back his mother was home, crawling around the garden and ripping at weeds with a little three-pronged weeder. Dom was there for the second day in a row, sitting with Biddy’s father, Mickey, and Louis on the steps to the back porch. He let Lady go as he came up the driveway. His father said, “Here he is. The early bird.”

“Grab your glove, pal,” Dom said. “We’re going to the field.”

Upstairs he put on his better sneakers and found his glove, and when he came down they were all gone, waiting for him in the car out front. He crossed the backyard to the garden.

His mother dug a neat row, creeping forward on her knees.

“Hey, Mom,” he said.

“Good morning. You were up early.”

He nodded but she didn’t see him.

“Something to do?”

“Uh-huh.” The car honked in the front and he put his glove on. “Cindy or Ginnie didn’t come?”

“No.” She caught part of a tomato plant with the weeder. “Where you going now? You have breakfast?”

“I’ll get something when I get back.” He stepped toward the driveway. “You want me to stay around?”

She looked up, surprised, and shook her head. He popped his fist into his glove and jogged around front.

They got into a game with others at the field and played late into the afternoon. He played badly. While someone was retrieving a foul ball that had gone into the street, Dom left his position and walked over to him at second base.

“You won’t play second next year if you can’t turn two,” he said. He kept his voice down. Biddy moved away, wishing he hadn’t come home from the beach. His father watched them from the pitcher’s mound. Biddy wanted to play better. He wanted to handle himself competently, even if only momentarily. His father was frequently of the opinion that he couldn’t piss straight without a ruler.

Dom followed him in a circle around second base. “Look, I’m not trying to make you feel bad. You told me you wanted to learn this game.”

Biddy nodded.

“Well, you’re going to have to start listening. You let that last one play you instead of playing it. Now don’t rush yourself. Are you listening?” Biddy nodded again. “Get to the bag and concentrate on the throw. And get your legs up if the runner’s coming in high.”

He returned to third. “Now Mickey’s on first, so be ready for it if it’s on the ground.”

And the next batter hit one on the ground to third as if on cue, and Dom said, “All right, Biddy,” and crouched for it, and Biddy came across and took the throw on the bag and started to pivot for the relay to first but Mickey hadn’t gone into his slide yet and only at the last moment was he able to get the throw up higher, to clear Mickey’s head. It pulled Louis, playing first, high off the bag.

He stood where the throw had left him, hating the ball. His father and Dom were looking at him, he knew. No one spoke. What was he doing this for? Why was he always somewhere he didn’t want to be?

“I didn’t want to hit Mickey,” he said.

“Don’t worry about Mickey,” Dom said. “Worry about your throw. They’ll do that all day if you let them. Throw it where you’re supposed to throw it. Throw right through the runner. Believe me, he’ll get out of the way.”

His father said something about bearing down. A boy he didn’t know stood on first. He looked at the batter. Hit it to me, he thought miserably. Hit it to me and I’ll throw it into the street. The batter dribbled it back to his father, who twirled and threw it to second, the ball and Biddy converging on the base from different angles, and he stomped on the bag and spun, whipping his arm around and rifling the ball low, and the boy coming into second jerked back and sprawled hard into the dirt as the ball went by his face on a line into Louis’s glove.

“There’s the double play,” his father called, and Dom said, “That’s turning two,” and they slapped each other five and trotted off the field together, Biddy following, stopping to help the boy still on his elbows in the base path up as he went by.

He returned to the beach, unsure of his reason why. It was a Saturday afternoon and blankets spotted the slope to the water but an advancing wall of clouds, high up and reaching infinitely higher, black and gray and darkening the expanse of sound beneath, was approaching from the west, from Bridgeport or New York.

To the east and above them the sky remained clear, the sun warm, as if collaborating in the deception. One or two sailboats rested nose forward on the beach, their masts stripped and topped by multicolored floats, their sails heaped onto the hulls like covering sheets. Other boats cruised smoothly into shore, gently racing the oncoming storm. As they pulled onto the beach, dagger boards were slid up and the hulls made pleasant grinding noises on the sand.

He sat watching the boats, towel still rolled beneath his arm. The metal fittings on the lines clanged against the hollow, swaying masts, and trailers, squeaky and toylike, were rolled to the water’s edge.

The wind was sweeping around him, audible in the sea grass and sand. People rose from the blankets with the wariness of birds, gauging the speed of the incoming storm. Bridgeport was dark and vague with a distant scrim of rain.

Boats rolled by him toward the boat ramp, disassembled masts clanking on the tops of the hulls and wheels rolling heavily through the deeper sand. Bathers, too, were joining the exodus, with lawn chairs and blankets, coolers and small children, falling into line alongside or behind the boats, all streaming past Biddy like tanned and sandy refugees.

His eye caught one boat, still quite a way out, its red-and-white sail sweeping and flapping as it came about. He knew simply from its inept turn, the sail going limp, the motion jagged and wasteful, that it would not beat the oncoming storm. The darkness was rolling in like a curtain and birds swooped and dove past him, fleeing before the gathering violence.

It was noticeably cooler. He shivered, and dug a deep hole, leaning forward on his knees and scooping sand with both hands. A last bather went by. “I don’t think you’re gonna finish that, son,” he said. “That’s a helluva storm coming.” Biddy smiled an acknowledgment and the man trundled off, newspaper flapping against a folded sand chair. With the hole a foot deep he dropped his towel into it and covered it over. He found two large stones, and marked the place.

He was alone on the beach. Bridgeport was gone. A lone gull skimmed by, a shadow along the waterline. His hair lifted from his head. His skin prickled, the tiny hairs on his arm waving.

He was moving the tips of his fingers along the hairs, absorbed, when the storm hit. The rain came down the beach and along the water toward him in an audible track, the shimmering sound on the water and sea grass gaining in intensity until it swept over him and he was shocked by its iciness and power, drenched in seconds. In the half darkness he could see the boat, buffeted, sweeping high over crests, much closer now, struggling in, the two boys on it frantic. The rain swept wet hair across his cheek and eyes and the side facing the wind grew more and more chilled, and he curled lower into the sand, following the boat’s progress. It crested a whitecap and plunged toward the beach at full speed, the boy in back lying across the rudder to hold it steady, the boy in the bow trying to control the flapping, angry sail, both hands on the boom. It surged onto the shore with the dagger board being lifted out at the last possible moment and ground up onto the slope and the boys were jumping out and pulling it up farther, the sail collapsing and the mast teetering dangerously from side to side. Off in the distance to the right, where the sky was the blackest, white flashes lit the lighthouse marking the midpoint of the Sound.

“Leave it,” one of the boys shouted. “We’ll come back and get it,” and there was another flash, and they pulled the boat still farther up the beach, the hull’s slide an overamplified sweep of sandpaper, and they dropped the mast and turned and ran for the boat ramp. They were not dressed for the rain. One stopped and called over, asking if Biddy was all right. “I wouldn’t stick around, kid,” he called, and they looked at each other when he didn’t respond, and shrugged, and were soon gone.

The storm drove the waves before it, the crests surging through the high-water mark, and they crashed and rolled toward the tilted stern of the beached boat, edging the detached rudder backward. With a third great wave it began to slide, and Biddy got up, opening still-warm areas of his body to the cold and wet, and jogged down to the water’s edge, the water foaming no colder than the rain around his toes, the darkness otherworldly. He pulled the rudder across the hull and slipped it under the mast. The hull was a slick, light blue, wider than either a Sunfish or a Sailfish. On a fold in the sail he could make out a circle with an SK-8 inscribed in the center, and a plate near the mast explained the wordplay: “Skate.” He had never heard of one. Lightning flowered high above him, the thunder rolling softly in behind. The Sound was a deep green flecked with white in the darkness, and the boat was fully rigged, all the lines relaxed but still figure-eighted in the stanchions. The darkness seemed to cloak the soft edge of Long Island beyond.

He put two hands on the bow and pulled sideways, dragging it around, and faced the nose to the water. He slipped the rudder into the locking pins. He had never sailed a sailboat before and he lifted the mast, staggering under its weight, and guided it into its hole, the metal on metal making a sliding, secure, locking sound. He experimented with the sail, lifting it a bit. The wind felt smoother but still strong. There was only a single line, running along the boom, to manipulate, its operation easy to understand — pulling on it lifted the sail. He eased out the rudder extension. He waded into the water, his legs disappearing in the surging green, debris tickling his thighs, and pulled. The rain spattered the surface into a kind of electric life. The boat resisted, then relented, sliding forward to hit the waves with a slap, the bow buoyed high, the stern lifting free of the land and spinning with the wind. He remained alongside, waist-deep, then chest-deep, and lifted himself aboard, the boat sweeping rapidly along the shore while he scrabbled around freeing the boom and hoisting the sail line, turning the rudder. With the sail halfway up, the rudder found the right angle and the boat jumped away from the shore, rocking him backward.

The rapidity of his progress unnerved him, as did the receding, darkening shoreline. He was cutting a swift diagonal away from the beach, the spray from the bow distinguishable in its warmth and saltiness from the rain. A motorboat, its canvas covers down, turtled by, waves lashing at its sides. The possible power of the storm began to frighten him, and he felt uncertain of his ability to bring the boat about but knew he could not pursue a diagonal course the whole way across. He paused, amazed at himself, wondering what he really hoped to do. He had to bring the boat about one way or the other, he realized, and he held the sail, jerked the rudder, and the boat spun right, cutting a wide arc through the water, and the sail collapsed with a ruffle and a bang on his head. It bounced to his shoulders and then to the hull, slipping off into the swell. The shroud filled with dark Sound and he was suddenly dead in the water, waves breaking over the hull in sheets and draping seaweed across his knees, and the faint drone of the motorboat was returning, and the boat showed on his stern, chuffing through the waves as if on a watery treadmill. It turned, its side bumping his long hull gently, and its engines idled down, still fighting the current. A bit of canvas flap unsnapped, water splaying and dancing from its corner, and a hand and face appeared.

“You all right, son?” a voice called. “We’ll get you a towline.”

The shore was visible. The wind was beating them onto the beach.

“I’m okay,” he called. “I live right here. We’re almost on the beach.” He pointed.

There was some rapid movement under the canvas, and the engines throttled up. They shouted something he couldn’t make out. The boat slipped away, farther out, and turned and edged back in. Its bow rose against the side of the sailboat, the prow leaning out of the rain alongside him over the sailboat’s hull, and the engine roared briefly, surging them forward. They were giving him a push. He pulled the rudder around, spinning the nose into the shore, and waved. The little motorboat gave a blast of its air horn and disappeared into the darkness.

He was off the hull, shoulder-deep in the warm water, wading in. The boat was hard to control, his feet braced against barnacled rocks. He struggled and pulled, and when the hull slipped onto shore the water rushed from the downed sails with a torrential noise. He pulled the boat higher and higher and sat down after the final pull exhausted and wet, shaking. Lightning illuminated the sky to the east now, having passed without coming very near. The mast stood outlined against the sky and the sail flapped resolutely as it lost water, flapped as if in response to what had just occurred, and continued to flap, behind him, as he walked up the beach, heavy-legged, and stooped to dig up his towel, water-soaked and sandy, before continuing up the stone steps for home.

Drawing the Walk

He’s a good kid: there’s no reason to foam at the mouth over all of this. We have to keep some kind of perspective.

You watch this kid day to day and you’ll see what I mean. He gets up, he enjoys things, he gets along with his sister, he’s got lots of friends, he does well in school. We’re talking about a kid who’s got a lot going for him here. Sure he’s quiet; he’s sensitive. Okay, he’s sensitive. You don’t have to be Kreskin to figure that out. Maybe he gets hurt easier than most kids. But the thing to remember here is not to overreact. If the kid doesn’t have a serious problem we may give him one before we’re through.

Most of the time we don’t even know what’s going on. We can’t protect him from everything that might upset him. Things stay with him. Whether it’s one thing or another. Everything at home might be all smiles and he might spot a dog outside dragging by on three legs. What are you going to do? How much can you insulate him? For instance: we drove to Florida a few years ago and got off 95 in Georgia because of construction. We took a back road and in the middle of it in front of a gas station we came across this wolfhound or something. It was a big white dog, like a sled dog, really a beautiful animal — dead, on its back, twisted around with its paws in the air. Stiff. Cars were going around it. The guys in the gas station just left it out there. Well, that was it for Biddy’s vacation. We might as well have taken the dog to the beach with us. And I had to go back that way, on the way home, to show him the goddamn thing wasn’t still out there, paws in the air.

I’m not trying to gloss over anything or say there’s no cause for concern. I’m just saying let’s look at the whole picture here; let’s try and put these things into some kind of context.

Kristi sat in the bright sunlight by an anthill, scraping a spoon on the pavement, back and forth, back and forth. The sound produced was not in any way musical or pleasant.

Biddy was at her bedroom window, looking down at her in the middle of the driveway. He looked down without opening the screen, his forehead bumping it a bit. “What’re you doing?” he finally said.

“Nothing.”

The sky was bright blue over the houses opposite him and he could feel the heat and smell the morning through the screen. “Listen. I’m going to take some paper from your desk, okay?”

“No. Get outta there.”

“I need it.”

“No.”

“I’m going to take some old homework, okay?”

His sister scraped, legs facing the sun. The pavement was cracked and dry around her.

“Okay?”

“Don’t take any of my pictures.”

“I won’t.” He opened the bottom drawer stuffed with dittoed sheets filled with Kristi’s handwriting. She made blocky, different-sized letters, an “a” bigger than the “t” next to it, an occasional letter capitalized, the words and sentences climbing or descending heedless of any lines provided.

He was looking for something with ample margin so that he could use the front as well as the back; he preferred not to scatter games in a series over different pieces of paper.

He stopped at a folded piece of brown scrap paper with a drawing of a crying flower on it. Over the flower Kristi had written, “Now This is a Story you’ll never For Get.” He opened it. Inside was a drawing of a huge rabbit, expressionless, seemingly without any legs. “Ones there was a Bunny and the Bunny was so happy That He fell and hurt Him self, But he got Back up and hurt Him self agen and when he got in the house The Mother lookt at Him and He had a fefer and that was the end of the Bunny and that is the end of my Story.”

He continued to leaf through the pile. After a series of similar drawings he came upon a ditto that said “I don’t like to do things because …” His sister had listed five things, numbered:

1. I don’t like to go to the beach because there’s see weed.

2. But I don’t like to play with little kids because they jump on you.

3. I don’t like to show my pictures because I don’t like them.

4. I don’t like to get lost in a crowd because some one could take you.

5. I don’t like my dog.

He made a face and turned it over, sitting forward in her chair. He pulled out “Things I Like About Myself”:

I like the way I swim with Lisa.

I like the way I do wheelies.

And I feed the dog.

I like when I play socker.

Halfway down the page, “Things I Don’t Like About Myself”:

I don’t like the way I eat.

My closit is a disaster.

I hate the way my brother looks.

He sat back and shut the drawer, taking the page with him. He got out into the sun in just his shorts, with the page, his dice, and a pencil. He squinted. The leaves on the trees were bright and blinding and the white of the garage forced him to avert his eyes.

His sister was still scraping. Every so often she’d hold the spoon up and examine it critically before resuming. It struck him that she was no happier than he was, and no one would ever know. She volunteered nothing.

“What’re you doing?” he asked, shading his eyes.

“I’m getting it sharper.” She held it up, testing the edge with her thumb.

“Wait’ll they see what you’re doing with the spoon,” he said, sitting down himself a few feet away and spreading the paper out in front of him. Ants were following an invisible track nearby.

“That’s nice,” his father said from the kitchen window. “I got a beautiful yard and my kids play in the driveway.”

“It’s nice and warm,” Biddy said, rolling the dice.

“You can’t sit in the sun in the grass?”

“The grass is wet.”

There was a rattling and a grinding sound from around the house and Simon labored into view, his bicycle wobbling up the driveway as he stood all of his weight on the pedals, one after the other. Something was wrong with the chain and had been wrong with it for weeks, and no one had fixed it for him. He lived a few houses down and was Kristi’s age.

Biddy said hello. Simon ground to a halt, perched high on the pedals, tipping to one side. He just got his foot out to catch his balance, legs spread wide, as the bicycle came down with a little crash on the pavement.

“Hi,” he said.

He stood beside Kristi, watching her. They looked like brother and sister except his hair was still lighter than hers — white, in bright sun — and as fine as Biddy’s. Most people’s blue eyes, Biddy had noticed, were predominantly gray, but Simon’s, like Kristi’s, were blue.

“Get out of the way,” Kristi said. “You’re in the sun.”

Simon moved. He moved when she told him to move. He moved when nearly anyone told him to move. He was a nice kid, and got beat up a good deal.

“Don’t leave your bike all over the driveway,” Kristi said. “My father’ll run it over.”

Simon picked it up and wheeled it onto the grass.

Biddy called him over. “Want to play dice?” he asked.

Simon said no.

“He doesn’t know how,” Kristi said.

Simon looked at him as though he had no excuse.

His father came outside carrying a bucket with an oversized sponge in it. “Hey, Simon. What’s up?”

“Hi,” Simon said.

“Kristi, what are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“Well, get out of the driveway. You too, Biddy. I’m going to back the car out.”

Simon wandered back to his bike and hunched over it, poking at the chain. Biddy followed. Simon’s fingers edged in on the teeth of the gear sprocket, slipping along black grease. “It sticks or something,” he said in explanation, gazing at it as if it had always stuck and would always stick.

“Want to put some oil on it?” Biddy asked.

“No, my father’ll fix it.” He stood the bike up and got on the seat, wavering. His parents were divorced and he lived with his mother, rarely seeing his father.

“Bye,” he said. “Bye, Kristi.” He pushed, rocking forward toward the handlebars in the effort, grinding his way back down the driveway, and turned out into the street. The front wheel wove its way along from side to side like a dog’s exploring nose.

Biddy’s father paused to watch, slopping soapy water on the vinyl roof of the car. “That poor little son of a bitch,” he said. “All he does is ride up and down the street on that bike.”

“Are we going out tonight, by the way?” his mother called from the house. She was not visible.

“Going out?” His father paused, sweeping the sponge in a dark track across the vinyl. “No. The Game of the Week is on.”

“Wonderful.” Biddy could not place his mother’s voice at all; it might well have been coming from any room on that side of the house. “Terrific. Baseball.”

His father whistled the beginning of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

“All summer I get baseball. We watch baseball. We go to see baseball. We play baseball. We’re in our second childhood here.”

“I realize one game a week is unbearable,” his father said.

His mother appeared at the screen on the porch. “It’s not one game a week. I wish it was. We talk baseball. That’s how we get through to each other. When we do. When do you talk with him anymore?” She flashed a hand at Biddy. “And what do you talk about when you do? ‘Oh, the Orioles pissed that one away.’ He does the same thing now. He doesn’t talk about things when he’s upset. He talks baseball. You’re getting him as crazy as you are.”

“Well, we’re all emotional cripples here.”

His mother turned away from the screen.

His father’s arms had stopped, soap drying in streaks on the car. “And it’s baseball that did it. It’s not normal. Who ever heard of a father and son talking baseball? I think he should learn Sanskrit instead,” he said to the house. “And we should hold weekly discussion groups to go over everything and make sure nothing’s wrong.” He resumed soaping, the only other sound the scraping of Kristi’s spoon on the pavement, the house quiet and giving no indication that anyone inside had heard.

Later that night they watched The Game of the Week. Biddy and his sister were sprawled on the floor with the dog; their parents were in the two big chairs with the lamp between them. It was a small den. His feet went under his father’s chair and his head, his mother complained, was much too close to the television.

The Orioles were leading the Royals in the third inning. Doug DeCinces led off with a long, looping double to right center, and as he slid into second Biddy’s father got up and changed the channel. A young woman hitched up her dress and ran across a railroad yard covered with the bodies of men in gray uniforms. He looked back over his shoulder at his father, waiting for an explanation. But his father only turned to his mother and remarked that it had been a good thing they hadn’t gone out. His mother didn’t respond.

Biddy gave it a few minutes before he finally said, “What is this?”

“Gone With the Wind,” his father said. “Good movie.”

At the commercial Biddy rose to all fours and reached out, awkwardly, and flipped the dial.

“What’re you doing, Biddy?” his mother asked.

“I’ll switch it back,” he said. Dauer was standing on third and Kansas City had a new pitcher. He waited but nothing happened; the pitcher was warming up, so he turned back.

“You know,” his mother said, and at first he was unsure whom she was addressing, “it’s not like we go anywhere at all. And that’s not even the point. The point is that it doesn’t seem to matter anymore, what I want, what I’d like. It’s like if that fits into the plans, fine.”

“It does matter,” Biddy’s father said.

His mother returned her attention to the movie.

Biddy watched with her, the air humid and unmoving with the window open. Armies marched and cities burned. Men and women gazed at each other like starving animals or religious zealots. Kristi yawned and squashed a tiny spider creeping by on the rug.

His father went into the kitchen during a commercial and returned with a big glass noisy with ice.

“What’s that?” his mother asked. “You didn’t get me one?”

“You want one? I’ll get you one. Collins?” His father gestured with the glass. She nodded.

They were quiet with their drinks for two or three scenes. His mother moved her chair closer and his father put an arm around her. The movie boomed on. There was some whispering and Kristi said, “I’m trying to hear.”

At the commercial his mother went into the bathroom. When she came out, they both said good night and went to bed, shutting the bedroom door lightly.

Biddy looked at Kristi.

“I guess they made up,” she said. “See what else is on.”

Two days later, they drove to Yankee Stadium. Eight of them, the Sieberts and Lirianos: Biddy, his mother, father, Kristi, Louis, Mickey, Ginnie, and Dom, for a game with the Brewers. Only Cindy remained home, preferring to watch The Band Wagon on television with her fiancé.

They sat in the United Technologies box and his father felt lucky to have the seats. The Lirianos were in the front four, Louis at eighteen taller than his parents. He ate popcorn one piece at a time, gazing serenely out toward Gorman Thomas in center field and the scoreboard above him even as plays were made in the infield. Mickey, next to him, squirmed or groaned according to events on the field, banging his hands on the rail in front of him when Robin Yount ranged behind second only to have a ground ball carom up over his shoulder into center field. Lou Piniella drove one into right field and the lead runner came around to score when Ben Oglivie of the Brewers slipped fielding the ball. The box was quiet. His father had no particular favorite and Dom felt that rooting for the Yankees was like rooting for IBM. Biddy was an Orioles fan and they were two games behind New York in the pennant race. Louis cheered decorously. Dave Winfield stepped to the plate. The sky was blue and clear and tracked by birds in the distance. The Milwaukee outfield was spread pleasingly against the green of the grass and wall beyond. Thomas arched his back in center, legs spread, and Oglivie stood relaxed and poised, despite his error, waiting for the pitch.

Over his shoulder Dom suggested beers, and insisted he had it and that Biddy’s father could pay for the next round. After searching briefly for one of the wandering vendors, he stuffed some bills into Biddy’s hand and told him two beers and to take Louis with him, since he was eighteen, and to have him do the ordering.

Biddy walked up the steps, looking back every so often at Winfield’s cuts, with Louis following, crunching popcorn.

“What do they want?” Louis said, standing in line.

Biddy shrugged, hearing a roar, and craned his head around to try and see back out onto the field.

The line moved up. “Two beers,” Louis said loudly. The man across the counter flicked the taps back and filled two yellow paper cups with foamy beer. “Two-fifty,” he said. Louis laid two of the singles Biddy had given him on the counter and fished in his pocket for change. He set a quarter on the glass.

The man stared at him evenly. “One more, pal,” he said. Louis blinked, out of bills.

Biddy stepped closer. “A quarter,” he said. “He needs another quarter, Louis.”

“A quarter?” Louis said.

“What is he, retarded?” someone said from the back of the line.

Biddy pulled him out of line. Louis told the story back at the box. Dom left, Biddy’s father calling after him, asking what he was going to do. Winfield was on second. After Dom disappeared, Biddy asked what had happened.

His father returned his attention to the field. “Oh, Oglivie again. The son of a bitch looks like he’s on skates out there. They better get him some new shoes or new feet or something.”

Dom came back down the aisle escorted by two policemen. He stabbed the air with his finger, looking back over his shoulder and saying, “And I’ll tell you what. If that yim-yam says something like that again, I’ll kill him. You tell him that.”

“Awright, siddown,” the policeman said. “And thank Christ you’re still here.”

Ginnie and Judy were too embarrassed for anything but anger, and they didn’t move or speak the rest of the game.

“Son of a bitch,” Dom said to himself.

The game limped on, the box quiet. In the seventh with the score 3–0 New York, Ben Oglivie blasted a home run into deep center field with two Brewers on base. Dom stood to applaud and sat back down. Biddy watched Oglivie round third, struck by the efficiency with which he had redeemed himself.

In the ninth Willie Randolph homered for the Yankees and they all got up to go, collecting bags and hats while everyone was still cheering.

“Those poor bastards aren’t going anywhere,” Dom said, looking back at the disconsolate Brewer dugout. “No pitching.”

At the top of the aisle Biddy turned and saw the scoreboard in center blink and change, proclaiming a final in Cleveland: CLEVE 5, BALT 4, dropping the Orioles three back, and he turned to follow his family and friends down the exit ramp.

Kristi had two turtles, Foofer and Kid, and killed them both. Foofer had crawled onto a small stone she had put in the clear plastic terrarium where the turtles were kept and had gotten out, flopping onto his chin with a distinctly wooden noise as she watched. She had done nothing, allowing him to creep across the desk top until he came to the edge, and then had opened the drawer underneath and toppled him in, shutting it with a bang.

Biddy, who’d been in her room collecting more paper, had said, “Kristi, don’t leave him in the drawer.”

“He always gets out,” she said.

“You can’t punish a turtle,” he said. “Take the rock out of there and he won’t get out.”

She’d replaced the turtle, but days later, seeing only Kid, he’d opened the drawer to find the dried Foofer, half buried under pens and small plastic rulers in his search for moisture or an exit.

Kid had disappeared a few days later.

Kristi, her father said, was erratic. Her mother worried about her. She had more trouble at Our Lady of Peace than her brother did, although he seemed to be rapidly closing the gap. Sister Theresa had long since decided and informed the Siebert family by letter and consultation that neither her conduct nor her effort was all it could be. In fact, she did not, ever, behave like a little lady. Biddy had at least been a very good student at her age.

She despised the nuns and disliked school generally. At times he would be called down from his classroom to help discipline his sister, although how he was expected to help he was never able to fathom. He would at those times look into her defiant eyes with embarrassment, irritation, and pride. She seemed beyond him then, the intensity of her anger and unhappiness revealing itself in fleeting words or gestures that seemed unnoticed or ignored by the others around her. He was never much help. To the Sisters she was as unpredictably ferocious as a cornered raccoon or a small, angry cat. At one point while he looked on she had wrenched herself free from Sister Mary of Mercy, tearing the sleeve of her habit, and had been slapped for her trouble. A kind of horrified and fascinated silence had ensued while they all stared at the black sleeve hanging loose and ragged away from Sister’s arm, even the slap forgotten in the strange blasphemous image before them. Nuns were rarely touched and Kristi’s assault on the taboo had made her famous throughout the school; to an extent it was as if they’d seen God bleed.

Lady, too, seemed edgy, unprepared, around her, and Kristi was the only human being Lady had ever bitten. Biddy had been present for that bit of history as well: she’d been nipped across the tips of her fingers one hot day after sitting on the dog as she lay in the shade. Lady had growled and Kristi had slapped her nose and she had spun around and snapped. She’d slapped back fiercely, the force of her hand spraying saliva from the dog’s mouth, before erupting into tears. Lady had lain in the shade throughout all the following chaos, unrepentant. His father had yelled at Lady so loudly that her ears had flattened, but she had remained bristling and stubborn, as though she could not be blamed for an altercation with Kristi. When Biddy had seen the size of the needle at the doctor’s, he’d thought it was some kind of awful joke, but his sister had remained grim and silent until the needle had gone in; then she had screamed.

“How’d Louis get retarded?” she asked. She was flipping cards, bored with diamonds and spades.

They sat at the redwood table in the backyard, swishing their bare feet back and forth through the grass, slapping mosquitoes, scratching bites. Biddy was looking back over the Brewers-Yankees scorecard.

“He was born that way,” he said.

“So he’s never going to get better?”

“No.”

“Do you like having him around?”

He looked up. “Why? You don’t like him?”

“It’s funny,” she said, squinting. “I feel bad for him, but it’s kind of creepy.”

“Louis is nice.”

She didn’t reply. “I remember him looking down at me when I was little and honking and scaring me,” she finally said. Biddy made a face and she added, “He honks when he talks.”

His father came out and sat next to them, drink in hand.

“What’s that?” Biddy asked.

“Milk of Magnesia,” his father said. “What’re you, a cop?”

They were quiet as it got darker, and Kristi slapped at another mosquito. Her father said, “You guys’re going to get eaten alive out here. Why don’t you sit in the porch?”

“How come Louis plays with little kids?” Kristi asked.

“Are you a little kid?” her father teased. She ignored the comment and he cleared his throat. “Well, you know Louis doesn’t always get along that great with kids his own age.”

“He’s retarded,” she said.

“Now I don’t want you throwing those words around. Either of you. Do you say that to him? Are you mean to him?” He looked at Biddy. “Is she mean to him?”

“No,” Biddy said.

“I don’t want you being mean to him, now. The poor son of a bitch’s got enough problems. He’s a good kid.”

“Does everybody make fun of him?”

“It isn’t easy for him. You should feel sorry for him.”

Kristi collected her cards into a pile. She’d gotten a little sun at the game and her nose and cheeks were pink.

“There’s nothing wrong with him playing with you guys. Or with all of us.”

The house was becoming simply a shape in the gloom. Biddy sat staring into the darkness beyond it, trying to imagine what it would be like to be Louis.

“He’s a good kid,” his father repeated, getting up to go. “That Mickey’s harder to take than he is. I don’t want you kids bothering him.”

Biddy shook his head to agree not to, his eyes still focused out into the distance, but in the gloom all but the most emphatic gestures were lost.

The next few days were spent in preparation for school as much as for the Air Show. Biddy was fitting into a new uniform, Kristi had outgrown her shoes, and they both needed school supplies and enough other shit to choke a horse, as his father put it. So the announcement that they were flying to the Hamptons for the weekend, getting a free ride with a friend who commuted to Sikorsky by Cessna, surprised everyone, and excited only Biddy.

“What’re we going to do in the Hamptons,” his mother said, spooning out peas.

“Nothing. Hold our hand on our ass,” his father said. “The vacation spot of the East, and she wants to know what we’re going to do there.”

“Where’re we going to stay?”

“We’ll stay with the Carvers. Look, if you don’t want to go—”

“I’d love to go. I have my heart set on going. Your friends are my friends,” his mother said.

His father took the spoon from her hand and piled more peas onto his plate. “You bring a lot to the party, you know it?” he said.

“I know it,” his mother said. “Sometimes I’m not all I’m supposed to be. I know that, too.”

Late that Friday afternoon they drove around Lordship to Bridgeport Airport. It took, he thought as they drove through the main gate, longer than it would have had they just walked to the end of their street and gone under the hurricane fence.

Mr. Carver pulled up in a little Datsun and hurried over, a short heavy man in a white shirt with a dirty collar. He switched hands with his briefcase and gave Biddy’s hand a firm single shake. He did not look like Biddy’s idea of a pilot, but the very idea of that much spatial freedom — the ability to go, almost literally, in any direction one wanted, to be free of the confining limits of even roads or tracks — excited Biddy so that he could not keep back his desire to want to admire this man, peering at his physical exterior as if searching for evidence of the marvelous skill underneath. Carver was introduced to everyone and seemed polite and noticeably impatient. He was visibly unhappy about Kristi, and Biddy wondered guiltily if his father had even mentioned her. She’d sit in her mother’s lap, next to Biddy in the back.

The Cessna seemed a tiny car with wings. The cockpit was cramped. Biddy pressed his face to the glass, unable to completely believe this machine and that man would take them off the face of the earth.

From the back seat he asked a series of questions. Because of the weather they’d be flying VFR, navigating visually, Mr. Carver related. What he was doing at this point was the preflight checklist. It was no more difficult than it seemed, he said. Biddy sat back, bewildered by the simplicity of the process. Carver went on explaining, but his words were lost in the roar as the engine kicked over.

They took off slowly, banking sharply around to the left toward the Sound, Biddy feeling a shock and excitement as the wheels left the ground and his neighborhood and street swept away and below. Everyone looked out windows, and he waited for the plane to sideslip abruptly and smash into the ground after a fluttering spin. The reeds of the salt marsh flashed by below and then the thin stretch of beach, and then they were over the ocean, blue and choppy. No one spoke. Mr. Carver said something to his father now and then.

Biddy watched the man’s hands on the controls. It seemed inexpressibly marvelous that a human being could do this. Carver seemed to be paying no more attention than his father did when he drove. Like the car, the Cessna seemed to need only an occasional gentle correction.

The diminutive East Hampton Airport was in the middle of nowhere, a flat tan strip surrounded by the dark green of a pine forest. As they banked around to their approach pattern he could make out a path through the pines leading away from the runway they’d be coming in on. He could see children on bicycles riding along it toward a connecting road before the gray of the runway abruptly swung up to meet them and he had a sense of hurtling onto a paved strip with only Mr. Carver to deliver them. The gray swept past them and they touched down, Carver steady and unperturbed at the controls, the pavement reeling past the wing hypnotically as he watched.

They drove to a house off the road and hidden by bushes and trees, a big yellow irregular box that looked as if they could work on it for weeks, painting, fixing screen doors, and refastening gutters, and still have much to do. The Carvers had no children, so Biddy and Kristi would sleep on cots in the spare room upstairs. From the window he could see the farmland bordering the backyard, neatly arranged in huge mosaics almost all the way down to the water, a half mile away.

Everything went well. They drove up to Sag Harbor Saturday morning, following the black two-lane road to the end of the North Haven peninsula and taking the short ferry ride to Shelter Island. They played golf at Gardiners Bay, Biddy and Kristi trooping along behind the adults over the beautiful misty fairways, hacking away at their golf balls, delighting in the springy feel of the greens beneath their feet. Afterward, they drove along Ram Island Drive with the windows open, the sea smell filling the car and the bay quiet and wide and huge to the west. They stopped along docks at the water’s edge, nosing around dingy small boats tied nearby. Mr. Carver talked of the islands to the east, Plum Island and Great Gull Island and others, and of their beauty and solitude. The quality of the light conferred a special clarity on the land and sea in the distance, making the water fresh and blue. Gulls’ cries echoed over the surface and the boats quietly thumped one another with the arrival of an occasional wave from a far-off speedboat. They bought dinner in a seafood restaurant with nets hanging over the tables. On Sunday they lay in the hot sun and crested and splashed in tumbling breakers at the beach when it got too hot. That evening they showered and sat in lounge chairs in the back, cool and relaxed in the breezy darkness, unbothered by mosquitoes. He slept luxuriously on the cot, a hand or foot draped over the sharp-cornered edges.

They flew back early Monday morning. Carver pumped Biddy’s hand goodbye and Biddy found it difficult finally to lift his other hand from the smooth metal of the fuselage. His parents saw their host off in his Datsun, thanking him repeatedly and insisting they get together soon, and then exploded into argument once he’d left. Something his father had done or not done or gotten or not gotten was the cause of it all. His mother had said nothing until safely in Stratford. She was, his father said as they crossed behind the Sikorsky hangar to their car, an Italian land mine.

Later in the week, Biddy and Louis were picked up by the yellow security jeep at the airport for playing too close to the runway. Biddy had been drawn back to the Cessnas and they’d strayed too far from the edge of the salt marsh, daring each other onto the tarmac. Louis had been staying over for the day and his father had expressed the hope that they’d find something sedate to do.

They were kept out in the driveway after being dropped off with a warning, his father pacing in front of them.

“It’s not your fault, Louis,” he said. “This bonzo should’ve known better.”

“We were only on the runway for a second,” Biddy said. “The rest of the time we were in the reeds.”

“What, that’s better? There’re rats and all sorts of shit in there. You were asked to stay around, do something a little sedate, but no. It’s like talking to a wall. You can’t find your ass with both hands and you’re wandering around those paths back there. And dragging this poor soul with you.” Louis looked up, embarrassed. “What has to happen? What does it take to get through? Does one of those planes have to take your head off? Does a rat have to bite you on the ass?”

Six and three: Singleton lines out; runners hold. Six and one: Murray reaches on an error. Two and four: Roenicke pops up. One and one: Dauer strikes out. No runs, three left on base.

Preparations for the Air Show: his father stood in the sunny area of the driveway, washing chaise longues and lawn chairs with a hose. His mother and Kristi edged around the bushes bordering the yard, trimming and cleaning out odd piles of debris, his mother snipping and pulling efficiently, Kristi raking with the three-pronged hand rake listlessly, uselessly. He sat at the redwood table, rolling dice.

“Get a rake,” his father said, splashing water. “Give your mother a hand.”

With Randolph and Mumphrey on base in the ninth, Winfield homered. He rolled a few more times and then carefully wrote, “Balt. 5, N.Y. 6.”

“Biddy, are you deaf?”

“No sense getting excited,” his mother said from across the yard without turning. “He doesn’t listen to me, either.”

“Keep playing with those dice.” His father returned his attention to a chair. “That’s a good thing to do with your time. Useful.”

Biddy looked at the dice in his hand.

“You could be reading, it’s a beautiful day, you could’ve gone to the beach. … Who was that kid from school? Teddy? Why doesn’t he come around anymore? You could’ve done a lot today, instead of sitting around bored. But sit around,” he said. “Improve your mind.”

He could’ve done a lot of things. He could do a lot of things. Lying in bed that night, he realized that: like sliding belly up onto the roof with Teddy’s BB gun, edging off the ladder just before dawn. The spaniel next door would bark when the shingles crunched and popped as he put his full weight on them, swinging his legs up. He’d creep to the peak of the roof, rest the barrel lightly between the top of the basketball backboard and its two-by-four support, and wait.

He liked this one, he mused, turning in bed. He pumped up the gun, increasing the tension on the firing mechanism until he felt it would explode in his hands if he handled it roughly.

And the sun came out red and weak, and Lady was let out. She ran around the yard sniffing and urinating and went back in without seeing him.

And his mother and sister set up for the Air Show.

And when Dom arrived and edged from the car with two trays of rolled prosciutto and ham and a bottle of cherry peppers held lightly by his chin against his chest, he sighted down the barrel and fired quickly, thonk thonk thonk, at the hunched figure, and the jar made a musical plish and dropped away magically from beneath the cap, peppers and juice streaming and tumbling down his dark blue chest. And he swung his rifle, thonk, and Lady yelped, splaying out a hind leg, and swung it back, thonk, and Dom yelped and sent two trays of meats cascading up and over, the meats fluttering pink and the trays spinning silver. And down along the TV trays in a crooked line: pling plang plung, the sound to mix with Dom’s silver trays coming down on the driveway.

And they all rushed him at once, Lady, Dom, his father, his mother, with scaling ladders and needle-sharp bayonets, with bright blue tunics and long white sabers, or dark blue police suits and long brown clubs, or sweaty red bodies and painted, feathered faces, and he stood and fired from the hip, levered Teddy’s Winchester up and down, kicked away tomahawks and sabers, nightsticks and savage hands.

The sun seemed bright and cold the morning of the Air Show. Biddy had been awake and outside with his mother before seven, while it was still clear and chilly. He lay on his belly on the warming pavement of the driveway, gazing vacantly down the street at Simon’s yard. Kristi was playing with Simon, Simon in the wagon, the wagon at the top of the driveway, the driveway a long coast to the street. Simon rattled the handle. Cindy’s car turned onto the street and with a shove Kristi sent him out and down the incline, the red wagon gaining speed all the way down the driveway and it occurred to Biddy that it wasn’t going to stop. It bounced once, jiggling Simon and making him puppetlike, and swept out in front of Cindy’s car, which jerked and bucked and turned aside. The wagon continued across the street and onto the lawn opposite, pitching over and tumbling Simon out. Cindy got out of her car and stood surveying the scene, looking tiny and ineffectual in the distance. She said something to both Simon and Kristi, and got back in and continued to Biddy’s driveway. The car grew as it cruised up the pavement toward him. He didn’t move and the bumper stopped above him.

Later, in the chaise longue, Cindy said, “Biddy, you’re going to have to watch that kid. His mother obviously isn’t going to.”

“Can I taste that?” he asked, pointing to her drink.

“It’s too early in the morning for you to be drinking.” She had on a white bathing suit with light brown straps. One leg tapered along the length of the chaise longue; the other had slipped off and lay on a diagonal between grass and chair.

“Why isn’t it too early for you?”

“I’m engaged,” she said, turning on the chaise longue without opening her eyes.

“Where’s Ronnie?”

“He’s coming. He’s getting some stuff at the bakery.” Her arm dangled vaguely at a plastic bottle in the grass. “Put some lotion on me?”

“What’s he getting?”

She took a sip of her drink, her glass intricately beaded with condensation. “Don’t you want to put some lotion on me? Want me to fry?”

He knelt in the grass near her, the plastic bottle hot and soft in his hands, and she said, “Get my legs first. I’m beginning to feel it on my legs.” He dabbed lotion on the top of her thigh.

The screen door slammed and his father went by. “When you’re finished there help me with the grill,” he said.

Her skin was hot under the sun and dry, wrinkling to his touch. She was peeling and he eased a flake away from the surface of her leg with his fingernail. The lotion glazed as it spread, moistening it and deepening the brown color. He did both legs and his hands were sticky.

“Put some more up by the suit,” she said, eyes still closed. “I always get burned there.” He put some dabs farther up and heard Ronnie’s car pull in behind hers down the driveway. “Rub it in, Biddy,” she said. “Want it to dry on me?” His middle finger touched the dab, broke the bubble, pressed further to the skin underneath.

“Isn’t this nice,” Ronnie said. “The Queen of Sheba.” Biddy turned, lotion on his fingers. “She’ll have you out here with a fan next.”

She didn’t open her eyes. “Finish up, Biddy,” she said.

“Aren’t you helping Judy?” Ronnie asked.

“I’ve been here for a while,” she said. “Everything’s ready. You’re in the sun.” Ronnie went into the house. “Grab a chair and come on out,” she called. She opened her eyes, hand cupped over them. “That’s enough, Biddy,” she said. “Thanks.”

He washed his hands twice, the stickiness elusive between his fingers. “What time is Uncle Dom coming?” he asked Ronnie, stacking plates in the kitchen.

“Few hours,” he said. “He’s getting some provolone and prosciutto and that place is a nuthouse today.” He handed a full glass to Biddy. “You going back out? Take this out to her. It might as well be you as me.”

“I’m thinking about cutting my hair, Biddy,” she said. “What do you think?”

“Don’t,” he said. She opened her eyes. “I mean — it’s beautiful.”

“Well, thank you.”

He fumbled with a sneaker. “Who wants you to change it? Ronnie?” She continued to gaze at him. “For the wedding?”

“No. I don’t know, just for something different. But you like it, huh?”

He nodded, glad the embarrassment was over.

“Then I’ll keep it. C’mere.”

He reddened as he leaned forward and she kissed him, half on the mouth, half on the cheek.

“Go help your father with the grill,” she said softly.

An hour later they were starting to arrive, the Lirianos, the Pierces, the Sheas, the Terentieffs, the Cartenellis, and more.

The Air Show was about to begin.

The yard included a patio, a redwood table and some benches beside the clusters of lawn chairs and lounges, a large maple tree, a small maple tree, a gray cellar door adjacent to the house, a vegetable garden, and a fair number of bare spots. It was a small residential tract just barely suitable for a cramped game of Wiffle ball, bordered by the Frasers’ garage on one side and their own on the other. The garden was small and weedy, and the dog’s urine had browned the grass near the knee-high fence bordering it. A red tomato showed here and there, unpicked.

The backyard, with the garages and trees allowing some privacy, was where the Sieberts entertained. The front yard was a bare, flawless expanse boasting two dogwoods flanking a sidewalk leading to the front door, and that was all. On those rare occasions he played there Biddy felt as though he were onstage.

The backyard as well had an unencumbered upward view of the north, over the airport, perfect for the Air Show.

The Air Show included the U.S. Navy Blue Angels, an R.A.F. Harrier VSTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) jet, a World War II P-51 Mustang, a Bell Huey helicopter, a Sikorsky HH-52 helicopter, some skywriters, a U.S. Army parachute team, and a smallish orange plane that stood on its tail and cut its engine and flew acrobatically. Biddy’s job was to keep the soda moving, run for beers, and change empty cheese and meat platters for full ones. Everything wavered on TV trays on uneven ground, under the shadows of the leaves. People began to fill the backyard. The meat and cheese platters, as his father had predicted, began to take a beating.

The party was not a gathering for children, and Mickey Liriano was the only child present besides Biddy, hustling back and forth with empty or full trays, and Kristi, jealously guarding a chair in a prime viewing location. Mickey dealt with his isolation principally by throwing a rubber ball off the side of the garage with a relentless energy and fielding it, pausing only to retrieve a bad hop from the garden or let someone with drink in hand pass by.

His father called out at one point, “Listen, Cy Young, you want to give that a rest?” but gave up soon after.

Mickey was bored, Biddy knew. Kristi bored him and Biddy bored him and his older brother especially bored him, with his excessive patience and kindness and lack of speed in everything he did. The dog bored him, and didn’t like him, besides. The food bored him. Throwing a ball against the side of the garage bored him, and when the Blue Angels came over they’d bore him as well. He brought and wore his Reggie Smith glove in the futile hope he could talk someone — his father, Biddy, anyone — away from the Air Show for a catch at least. He’d already asked more than once and was bored with asking. The rubber ball made almost no noise in his glove, and he threw it against the garage as though it were a hard ball.

Cindy and Ronnie stood under the big maple, talking and accepting congratulations on the engagement. She was wearing a gauzy light blue dress and he was in shorts and a tennis shirt. Biddy watched them for a short time before Ronnie called him over.

“How’s tricks, champ,” Ronnie said, sitting down. He was very close to his fiancée’s knee and her dress drifted against his shoulder. “I hear you’re finally getting the hang of second base.”

Biddy winced, thinking of the game at the field. “Have you set a date?” he said.

Ronnie made a face. “This May. Memorial Day. Which is perfect.”

“Why?”

He shook his head. “Just a joke. Where’s your glove? Want to throw the ball around?”

“I’m gonna go down and see the Blue Angels come over from Long Island.”

“How do you know they’re going to do that?”

“My father told me. They’re filling up at the Grumman plant over there. Doesn’t Cindy want you to hang around?”

Ronnie shrugged and looked up at her. “I’m like you. I’m not too good at this social stuff.”

Biddy looked at his watch. The possibility of Phantom jets, in formation, at Lordship was making him impatient with everything else. “I should go. Mickey’d want to play.”

“I believe it,” Ronnie said. “I surely do believe it.” He leaned around the tree. “Hey psycho. You want to throw it around?” Mickey waved and nodded. “That’s a surprise,” he said, and Biddy left, hurrying toward the blue Sound he could glimpse between the houses.

He didn’t wait long at the bluffs: six black specks spread themselves along the horizon over Long Island, exciting and precise against the broad blue sky, growing in size and detail until he realized the center of the V formation would be coming right over him, and he waited as long as he could, taking in the royal-blue and yellow markings, the underwing detail, the hint of clear orange behind the exhaust, before running up the bluffs and down the street as they flashed over him, huge, seemingly only a few feet above the houses, the sound following behind like an invisible trailer as he ran, trying not to be left behind. He stopped, panting, to watch the six jets, all glowing orange, huge and powerful, commanding the skies, sweep over his house in the distance and drop into the basin of the airport beyond; he ran again only when they disappeared below the trees.

The Blue Angels streaked in low in close formation and flip-flopped and tore the sky apart with their roars, making huge bows in the sky with their vapor trails as they flew upside down. They came together from all directions, so close at the converging point that everyone below swore they were going to collide, and stood on their tails and climbed out of sight, or dove with a gradual building scream until below the houses and trees, and everyone half waited for the crash. The Mustang did loops and spins and participated in a mock dogfight. The helicopters skimmed the tree-tops. The small orange plane trailed orange and blue smoke and cut its engine frequently. And finally, when Dom mentioned while looking for his drink that he didn’t know what they could do to top this, distant brown planes appeared, going over with a far-off buzz, with tiny figures falling away from them. “There’re the parachutists!” his father said, and Biddy watched them spinning away and the chutes spilling out and up, filling square and bright.

“They’re square,” he said to no one in particular.

“All the new chutes are square,” Dom said behind him. “Better control.”

“Look at that guy,” Mickey said. One was floating the opposite way, as if delivering a message. Biddy could smell the hot dogs overcooking. The lone parachutist continued to grow larger, the four others gliding in a diamond pattern down toward the airport tower. They could see the parachutist pulling on one side, the top of the canopy dipping on that side, bobbing. Something there was hanging the wrong way, ragged.

“He ain’t real good, is he?” Dom said, and then added, “You know, Walt, he could be coming here,” and in the general excitement Biddy saw that he could and was, coming in low and hard, still pulling, not floating at all, swooping, and Biddy could see the frustration on his face and the shine on his boots.

“Jesus Christ,” his father said suddenly, and began to herd the women out of the way, and the parachutist dipped lower and swung in fast, on top of them suddenly, and hit the roof, bam, with his big jumping boots and then was pulled off by his chute, his feet dragging and scraping over the TV antenna, snapping it as the canopy caught in the trees and he swung down, twisting to avoid people, catching a TV tray with watermelon on it and kicking it up over the clothesline in a rain of pink chunks and seeds. Some of the women screamed and the men ducked in and out trying to get a grip on the parachutist as he swung by shouting for them to watch out. He swept back and forth in front of Kristi, still in her chair, amazed and grinning.

On a backswing they managed to intercept him and hold on, dragging him back and forth to a stop.

Everyone spoke at once, including the parachutist; Biddy watched his sister, still staring, still grinning, and the only one still silent. Above her on the roof of the Frasers’ garage the scattered pieces of watermelon glinted, wet and ridiculous in the sun.

And that night he thought about the parachutist with all the patches and pockets and buckles and harnesses, and how neat it would be to jump out of a plane and open up your parachute and come down, smash, on somebody’s watermelon and sweep right through their lawn party.

The next morning he stood in the kitchen excited despite himself by the prospect of the first day of school. He was wearing a new white shirt which choked in a pleasant way, new gray pants, and a plaid tie. He was restless and ate little, leaving the table and drifting around the kitchen while his sister pushed a spoon back and forth through her oatmeal. His father bustled by. His mother put together two lunches. He went to the screen door to let Lady out, appreciating the morning light for its clarity.

In class Sister Theresa called the roll, calling the same names she had the year before, calling only the first names, twenty-seven of them. Our Lady of Peace was a small school, of a nice, manageable, personal size, Sister liked to say, serving a small parish. There was little turnover and no growth in the size of the student body. This year one boy had moved away and a new girl, Kathy, was added to the class. She was big and quiet and reminded Biddy vaguely of a horse. Their instructor would be Sister Theresa, the principal, for the second year in a row. They did not consider themselves fortunate.

Books were handed out, new lessons begun, sides for kickball chosen, Mass and milk-money schedules announced, and the day went quickly. He trailed home behind his sister and a friend, who were banging lunch boxes in rhythm as they walked.

In the backyard he found his father hanging half on, half off a ladder.

“Dad!” he called. “Are you all right?”

His father didn’t turn around, spread against the house. “Yes, I’m all right. I know what I’m doing here.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m trying to fix the aerial our paratrooper kicked over.”

“Why don’t you just move the ladder?”

His father stopped and closed his eyes, exasperated. “Because I’m trying to keep a hand on this wire, too.”

“You want help?”

“Not unless you’re taller than you look.”

He went into the house, threw his book bag on the dog’s chair and his lunch box on the counter, and went down the cellar for an ice-cream sandwich. With the freezer open he heard the rattling metallic crash of the ladder.

He bolted up the stairs two at a time and rushed past his sister, who was eating an apple at the kitchen table, and out into the driveway.

His father was high above him swaying back and forth, slowly bending the lateral supports for the antenna downward.

“Dad!” he said. “What happened?”

“What the hell do you think happened? Where is everybody? Didn’t anybody hear me yell?”

“I was down in the cellar.”

“You got a good view of this? What are you standing there for? Get the ladder!”

He ran to the ladder. It was stuck in the thick hedges near the garden.

“What did you, lose interest? What’re you doing?”

“It’s stuck in the hedges. I’m trying not to wreck them.”

“You’re trying not to wreck them.”

Mr. Fraser appeared near his garage. “You all right, Walt?”

“Fine, Bill. Can’t you tell? Biddy! Where’d he go now?”

Mr. Fraser bustled over and took hold of the ladder and yanked it free. He swung it back toward the house, suggesting they put it up next to him.

“No, Bill, put it up on the other side of the house, and I’ll crawl around.”

Kristi came to the screen. “Biddy, Mom wants you. Is Dad down yet? Hi, Mr. Fraser.”

“Hello, Kristi. Your father’s in a bit of trouble here.”

“Could we hurry with the ladder?”

“All right, Walt, don’t get excited. Got your foot in it? Get your foot in it.”

Biddy’s mother screamed. “Walt! What happened? Get down from there!”

“Isn’t this something? Everyone’s gone nuts,” his father said. He swung sideways and hooked his leg around the ladder.

It began to slip on Biddy’s side and he looked down to see it scraping across the cement and sliding away. He shot a look up and his father was tipping, the huge spiny antenna caught in his sleeve, the final twisted strip of metal holding it giving way with a tiny sharp sighing sound, and the ladder wrenched from his hands and spun away from him and up, his father arcing by overhead and clearing the driveway completely, coming down with a crash that neighbors three full blocks away later claimed to have heard.

And three days after that, when his father was just beginning to lose his limp and Biddy was sitting in the front yard playing dice baseball, he sent Lady out into the street, just because she was bothering him, and got her killed.

He had just rolled into a double play and Lady in her exuberance had run right across the page, demanding attention, and he’d yelled and shoved her rear, splaying it out to the side as she went by, and, spooked, she’d continued into the street and he’d seen it as he’d see it again and again, the dog trying to turn out of the way and ducking, her eyes closed and muzzle turned from the impact. There was the inanimate sound of someone dropping a large bag of flour to the pavement and she’d flown forward and rolled, finishing on her side in some gravel.

She was quiet, twitching, when he reached her. He squatted near disbelieving, touching her, thinking he should get her tongue out of the sand. He started crying and Mr. Fraser crouched beside him with a stick, prodding her with it until, satisfied, he took her by the loose skin of her neck and rear and dragged her out of the road and into the grass. Biddy followed, dimly aware of the occupants of the car, a young girl and her boyfriend. “I feel just awful,” the girl said.

Mr. Fraser disappeared and returned with his pickup. He lowered the tailgate and dropped Lady in like a sack.

When he’d driven away Biddy had sprinted back to the house, past his mother running the opposite way, ignoring her questions. He’d run up the stairs and had climbed into the bathtub and pulled the shower curtain closed behind him and lay, face down, crying into the hard surface of the porcelain.

They didn’t find him. No one looked. There was an uproar when his father came home, slammed doors, a glass smashed against the back of the garage. His father had gone up and down the street barefoot and talking to himself. He’d finally gone into the garage and rolled the door shut to sit in the dark. And until very late that night that was the way the Sieberts had remained, Kristi and Judy in the kitchen, Walter in the garage, and Biddy upstairs in the bathroom.

He was hapless, an unspoken embarrassment. He was batting 1000. He had not reached base. And yet he was still there, still digging in, still unwilling to give up. He leaned in against Goose Gossage, clearly hearing over the crowd DeCinces’s admonition to wait him out. Gossage stood erect and slit-eyed on the mound. Behind him Bumbry edged crablike off second, alert. Protect the plate, he thought. But don’t go for a bad pitch. Gossage reared, growing larger as he uncoiled toward Biddy, and the ball was on him and he lashed at it way too late and struck out, staying where his swing had left him, the roar of the crowd filling his ears. Gossage walked free from the mound in one direction, Bumbry from second in another.

On the bench he was given undeserved support and encouragement. Don’t go for anything on the corners, DeCinces told him. Make him work for it. What’re you going to do with Gossage out there? Know what you can and can’t do. In this situation the best you can hope for is to draw the walk. They shifted, watching Murray bat. Patience. That ball was tailing away even before it broke in on you.

Biddy relived it and closed his eyes, trying to learn.

Ah, it’s easy for me to talk, DeCinces said. You’re scared. It’s a lot to face. Yankee Stadium, Goose Gossage, and the whole bit. But you’re gonna have to hang on because you’re not going to hit him. Not now anyway. You’re going to have to hang on because things don’t always work out that easy.

In the ninth Bumbry tripled and Singleton was intentionally walked and DeCinces, batting in front of Biddy, worked the count to 3 and 2 and fouled off three straight pitches before drawing a walk to load the bases. There were two outs and the Orioles were down by one run, and all he could think as he advanced from the on-deck circle, swinging his bat in tight little circles, was: Why don’t they pinch-hit for me?

The scoreboard flashed his batting average. The crowd roared. He could see his parents in the stands, having to look at those bright yellow numbers.

He hoped the first pitch would miss and it didn’t. The crowd’s roar intensified. The second was belt-high. He was down no balls and two strikes. The stadium shook with the anticipated strikeout. He couldn’t look out toward first and DeCinces. Gossage reared, teetered, and lunged and the ball curved in and he swung, even as it dipped out of the strike zone.

He crouched beside the plate, head down. His ears filled with sound. Cerone and Gossage and the other Yankees crowded into the dugout accepting congratulations. The fans danced and gesticulated in their seats. DeCinces tapped the plate with a bat. C’mon, he said. This is just one time. You can feel as bad as you want but it’s not going to change anything.

Every year there was a spirited debate about whether walks should be allowed at the Sikorsky father-son baseball game. A compromise was finally settled upon: the fathers would alternate pitching each inning with their sons. When the fathers pitched, they’d just lob it over and walks would be disallowed. When the sons pitched, things could get a little more serious.

Biddy’s father stood on first base after getting a hit, looking hopefully at his son, who was up next. Biddy, he’d been telling people, was still wandering around like he was on Queer Street — like a punch-drunk fighter — and it had been a week and a half. He had stopped crying that same night in the bathtub. He’d shown no interest in the upcoming father-son game. He hadn’t shown any interest in anything. It had been hoped that the game would help, so they had gone. As Dom had added, how could it hurt? Biddy had played so far as though he were in a coma.

The first time up he had taken three called strikes; the second, he’d been hit by a pitch and then picked off first. Now it was his third and final at bat, with men on first and third and the score tied, and he looked for all the world, stepping up to the plate bat in hand, as though he didn’t care. The pitcher, a big kid, reared back and fired one in for a strike.

“Time!” Biddy’s father called, and trotted in from first.

“Time?” the pitcher said.

“Time,” he repeated. He stood close to Biddy. “You’re not going to hit this kid,” he whispered. “This kid could go bear-hunting with a switch. Try and draw the walk. Okay?”

Biddy nodded, bat on shoulder.

He worked the count to 3 and 2, and took a sixth pitch that was almost in the dirt.

“Strike three,” the umpire called.

His father rushed in from first to argue the call but stopped and looked at Biddy, uncertain whether to let it go or to argue all the more fiercely. Biddy closed his eyes and swung the bat gently to the ground, the noises and smells and feel of an unusually hot day in September on a baseball diamond dropping away, to be replaced by Lady’s eyes, averted from the car bumper at the last instant, and her tongue, in the gravel by the side of the road.