The Sportswriter

6

Snow. By the time I leave my bed, a blanket of the gently falling white stuff has covered the concrete river banks from Cobo to the Ren-Cen, the river sliding by brackish and coffee-colored under a quilted Michigan sky. So much for a game under the lights. Spring has suddenly disappeared and winter stepped in. I am certain by tomorrow the same weather will have reached New Jersey (we are a day behind the midwest in weather matters), though by then, here will have thawed and grown mild again. If you don’t like the weather, wait ten minutes.

Vicki is still deep asleep in her black crepe de Chine, and though I would like to wake her and have a good heart-to-heart, last night feels otherwordly, and optimism about “us two” is what’s in need of emphasizing. A talk can always wait till later.

I shower and dress in a hurry, pockets loaded with note pads and a small recorder, and head off to breakfast and my trip to Walled Lake. I leave a note on the bed table saying I’ll be back by noon, and she should watch a movie on HBO and have a big breakfast sent up.

The Pontchartrain lobby has a nice languorous-sensuous Saturday feel despite the new snow, which the bellhops all agree is “freakish” and can’t last past noon, though a number of guests are lining up to check out for the airport. The black newsstand girl sells me a Free Press with a big smile and a yawn. “I’m bout shoulda stayed in bed,” she laughs in a put-on accent. On the rack there is an issue of my magazine with a story I wrote about the surge in synchronized swimming in Mexico — all the digging work was done by staff. I’m tempted to make some mention of it just in passing, but I wander off to breakfast instead.

In the La Mediterranée Room I order two poached, dry toast and juice, and ask the waiter to hurry, while I check on the early leaders in the AL East — who’s been sent down, who’s up for a cup of coffee. The Free Press sports section has always been my favorite. Photographs galore. A crisp wide-eyed layout with big, readable coldtype print and a hometown writing style anyone could feel at home with. There is a place for literature, but a bigger one for sentences that are meant to be read, not mused over: “Former Brother Rice standout, Phil Staransky, who picked up a couple timely hits in Wednesday’s twi-nighter, on the way to going three-for-four, already has plenty of experts around Michigan and Trumbull betting he’ll see more time at third before the club starts its first swing west. Pitching Coach Eddie Gonzalez says there’s no doubt the Hamtramck native ‘figures in the big club’s plans, especially,’ Gonzalez notes, ‘since the young man left off trying to pull everything and began swinging with his head.’” When I was in college I had a pledge bring it right to my bed every morning, and was even a mail subscriber when we first moved to Haddam. From time to time I think of quitting the magazine and coming back out to do a column. Though I’m sure it’s too late for that now. (The local sports boys never take kindly to the national magazine writers because we make more money. And in fact, I’ve been given haywire information from a few old beat writers, which, if I’d used it, would’ve made me look stupid in print.)

It has the feeling of an odd morning, despite the friendly anonymity of the hotel. A distinct buzzing has begun in the pit of my stomach, a feeling that is not unpleasant but insistent. Several people I saw in the lobby have reminded me of other people I know, an indicator that something exceptional’s afoot. A man in the checkout line reminded me of — of all people — Walter Luckett. Even the black shop girl put me in mind of Peggy Connover, the woman I used to write in Kansas and whose letters caused X to leave me. Peggy, in fact, was Swedish and would laugh to think she looked a bit Negroid. Like all signs, these can be good or bad, and I choose to infer from them that life, anyone’s life, is not as disconnected and random as it might feel, and that down deep we’re all reaching out for a decent rewarding contact every chance we get.

Last night, after Vicki went to sleep, I experienced the strangest dream, a dream I’ve never had before and one I would rather not have again. I am not much of a dreamer to begin with, and almost never remember them past the moment just before my eyes open. When I do, I can usually ascribe everything to something I’ve eaten in the afternoon, or to a book I’d been reading. And for the most part there’s never much that’s familiar in them anyway.

But in this dream I was confronted by someone I knew — a man — but had forgotten — though not completely, because there were flashes of recollection I couldn’t quite organize into a firm picture-memory. This man mentions to me — so obliquely that now I can’t even remember what he said — something shameful about me, clearly shameful, and it scares me that he might know more and that I’ve forgotten it, but shouldn’t have. The effect of all this was to shock me roundly, though not to wake me up. When I did wake up at eight, I remembered the entire dream clear as a bell, though I could not fill in names or faces or the shame I might’ve incurred.

Besides not being a good collector of my dreams, I am not much a believer in them either or their supposed significance. Everyone I’ve ever talked to about dreams — and Mrs. Miller, I’m happy to say, feels exactly as I do, and will not listen to anyone’s dreams — everyone always interprets their dreams to mean something unpleasant, some lurid intention or ungenerous, guilty desire crammed back into the subconscious cave where its only chance is to cause trouble at a later time.

Whereas what I ama proponent of is forgetting. Forgetting dreams, grievances, old flaws in character — mine and others’. To me there is no hope unless we can forget what’s said and gone before, and forgive it.

Which is exactly why this particular dream is bothersome. It is about forgetting, and yet there seems to be a distinct thread of unforgiving in it, which is the source of the shock I felt even deep in sleep, in an old town where I feel as comfortable as a Cossack in Kiev, and where I want nothing more than that the present be happy and for the future — as it always does — to look after itself. I would prefer to think of all signs as good signs, or else to pay no attention to them at all. There are enough bad signs all around (read the New York Times) not to pick out any particular one for attention. In the case of my dream, I can’t even think of what I ought to be anxious about, since I am eager — even ascendant. And if it is that I’m anxious in the old mossy existential sense, it will have to stay news to me.

It is, of course, an irony of ironies that X should’ve left me because of Peggy Connover’s letters, since Peggy and I had never committed the least indiscretion.

She was a woman I met on a plane from Kansas City to Minneapolis, and whom in the space of an afternoon, a dinner, and an evening, I came to know as much about as you could know in that length of time. She was thirty-two and not at all an appealing woman. She was plump with large, white teeth and a perfectly pie-shaped face. She was leaving her family with four children, back in the town of Blanding, Kansas, where her husband sold insulation, to go live with her sister in northern Minnesota and become a poet. She was a good-natured woman, with a nice dimpled smile, and on the plane she began to tell me about her life — how she had gone to Antioch, studied history, played field hockey, marched in peace marches, written poems. She told me about her parents who were Swedish immigrants — a fact that had always embarrassed her; that she dreamed sometimes of huge trucks going over cliffs and woke up terrified; about writing poems that she showed to her husband, Van, then hearing him laugh at them, though he later told her he was proud of her. She told me she had been a sexpot in college, and had married Van, who was from Miami of Ohio, because she loved him, but that they weren’t on the same level educationally, which hadn’t mattered then, but did now, which was why she felt she was leaving him.

When we got off the plane she asked me, standing in the concourse, where I was staying, and when I told her the Ramada, she said she could just as easily stay there and that maybe we could have dinner together because she liked talking to me. And since I had nothing else to do, I said okay.

In the next five hours we had a buffet dinner, then after that went down to my room to drink a bottle of German wine she had bought for her sister, and she talked some more, with me just adding a word here and there. She told me about her break with Lutheranism, about her philosophy of child-rearing, about her theories of Abstract Expressionism, the global village, and a Great Books course she’d built up to teach somewhere if the chance ever came along.

At eleven-fifteen, she stopped talking, looked down at her pudgy hands and smiled. “Frank,” she said, “I just want to tell you that I’ve been thinking about sleeping with you this whole time. But I don’t really think I should.” She shook her head. “I know we’re supposed to do what our senses dictate, and I’m very attracted to you, but I just don’t think it would be right, do you?”

Her face looked troubled by this, but when she looked at me a big hopeful smile came on her lips. And what I felt for her then was a great and comprehending nostalgia, because for some reason I thought I knew just exactly how she felt, alone and at the world’s mercy, the same way I’d felt when I’d been in the Marines, suffering from an unknown disease with no one but unfriendly nurses and doctors to check on me, and I had had to think about dying when I didn’t want to. And what it made me feel about Peggy Connover was that I wanted to make love to her — more, in fact, than I’d wanted to do that in a long time. It’s possible, let me tell you, to become suddenly attracted to a woman you don’t really find attractive; a woman you’d never want to take to dinner, or pick up at a cocktail party, or look twice at in an elevator, only just suddenly it happens, which was the case with Peggy.

Though what I said was, “No, Peggy, I don’t think it would be right. I think it’d cause a lot of trouble.” I don’t know why I said this or said it in this way, since it wasn’t what my senses were dictating.

Peggy’s face lit up with pleasure, and also, I think, surprise. (This is always the most vulnerable time in such encounters. At the very moment you absolve yourself of any intention to do wrong, you often roll right into each other’s arms. Though we didn’t.) What happened was that Peggy came over to the bed where I was sitting, sat beside me, took my hand and squeezed it, gave me a big damp kiss on the cheek and sat smiling at me as if I were a man like no other. She told me how lucky she felt to meet me and not some “other type,” since she was vulnerable that night, she said, and probably “fair game.” We talked for a while about how she was probably going to feel in the morning after having drunk all that wine, and that we would probably want a lot of coffee. Then she said that if it was all right she’d like to find something I’d written and read it and write me about it. And I said I’d like that. Then as if by some secret signal she came around the bed, pulled back the covers, climbed in beside me and went immediately to snoring sleep. I slept beside her the rest of the night fully clothed, on top of the covers, and never touched her once. And in the morning I left before she woke up, to go interview a football coach, and never saw her again.

After about a month, a fat letter — the first of several from Peggy Connover — arrived at the house, full of talk about her kids, humorous remarks about her welfare, her weight, her ailments, about Van, whom she’d decided to go back to live with, what plans she was making for their life; but also about stories of mine she’d read in the magazine and had comments on (she liked some but not every one), all of it in the same chatty voice as when we’d talked, closing each time with “Well, Frank, hope to see you again real soon. Love, Peg.” All of which I was happy to hear about, and even answer a time or two, since it pleased me that, as we had never been more than friends, we could still be, with everything hunky-dory. And it pleased me that somewhere out in the remote world someone was thinking of me for no bad reason at all, and even wishing me well.

These, of course, were the letters X found in the drawer of my desk when she was looking for the sack of silver dollars she feared might’ve been stolen. And it was these letters that in some way made our life seem to break apart for her, and made continuing somehow seem impossible (I found it likewise impossible to explain anything then, since much else was wrong already). X believed, I think, when she read Peggy Connover’s letters, that if these chatty, normal over-the-fence-sounding sentiments were hidden there in my drawer (they weren’t hidden, of course), in all probability more letters full of similar good sense and breezy humor were going out (she was right). And that there was none of that around the house for her. And she began to think, then, that love was simply a transferable commodity for me — which may even be true — and she didn’t like that. And what she suddenly concluded was that she didn’t want to, or have to, be married to someone like me a second longer — which is exactly how it happened.

Outside, it is no longer snowing, but the streets impress me as too icy to risk a rental car. Our time in town feels already much too short, and in bad weather even the idea of the botanical garden begins to sink into the unlikely zone — though for Vicki, my guess is, it will make no difference.

I’m sorry, however, to miss a renter. There is nothing quite like the first moments inside a big, strapping fleet-clean LTD or Montego — mileage checked, tank full, seat adjusted, the heavy door closed tight, the stirring “new” smell in your nostrils — the confidence that here is a car better even than the one you own (and even better than that, since you have only to ask for another one if this one craps out). To me, there is no feeling of freedom-within-sensible-limits quite like that. New today. New tomorrow. Eternal renewal on a manageable scale.

I walk down to the snowy cab queue at Larned Street, but as I reach the icy corner I am stopped short and for a moment by a sound. On the chill Saturday morning airs, a faint hsss murmurs up the city streets from the sewers and alleyways, as if a cold wind was thrashing ditch grass somewhere nearby and, out here near the river, on the edge of things, I was in danger. Of what I have no idea. Though what I know, of course, is that I am running a tricky race now with my spirits, trusting my enthusiasm will outstrip the perils of usual, mid western literalness which can gang up against you quick and do you in like a doomed prisoner.

My cab driver is a giant Negro named Lorenzo Small wood, who reminds me of the actor Sydney Greenstreet, and who drives with both arms straight out in front of him. On the dashboard he has an assortment of small framed pictures of babies, two pairs of baby shoes and a mat of white fringe, though he is not much for talking, and we get quickly out into the snowy traffic, weaving around dingy warehouse blocks and old hotels to Grand River, then head for the northwest suburbs. It is faster today, Mr. Smallwood says with humming uninterest, to stay on the “real streets,” and avoid “the Lodge,” where it’s already wall-to-wall assholes heading for their cabins up north.

Strathmore, Brightmoor, Redford, Livonia, another Miracle Mile. We speed through the little connected burgs and townlets beyond the interior city, along white-frame dormered-Cape streets, into solider red-brick Jewish sections until we emerge onto a wide boulevard with shopping malls and thick clusters of traffic lights, the houses newer and settled in squared-off tracts. Outside everyone is “dressed for it,” a point of traditional pride among Michiganders. A freak spring snowstorm means nothing. Everyone still has “snows” on his Plymouth, and a winter face of workmanlike weather how-to. Michigan is a place where every man is handy with a jumper cable, a metal lathe and a snow blower. The mechanical nuts-and-bolts of anything is never a problem here. It’s what’s reliable and appealing in such an otherwise gray and unprepossessing panorama.

Far out crowded Grand River I am struck by what seems like thousands of restaurants, and by how dedicated the population is to going out to eat. As much as cars, meals are what’s on people’s minds. Though there is a small and heart-swelling glory to these places — chop houses, hofbraus, rathskellers, rib joints, cafés of all good quality. Part of life’s essence is here. And on a brooding spring eve, a fast foray out to any one of them can be just enough to make any out-of-the-way loneliness bearable another nighttime through. In most ways, I can promise you, Michigan knows exactly what it’s doing. It knows the enemy and the odds.

Mr. Smallwood pulls into a white enamel drive-in called The Squatter, and asks if I want a sinker. I am full to the gills from breakfast, but while he is inside I step out and give a call back to the Pontchartrain. I have briefly won back some enthusiam for the day — the buzzing in my stomach having subsided — and I want to share it all with Vicki, since there is no telling what new world and circumstances she has waked to, given the night’s shenanigans and the strange, whitened landscape confronting her in the daylight.

“I was just lay in here watching the television,” she says in a bright voice. “Just like you said for me to do in your cute note. I already ordered up a Virgin Mary and a honey pull-apart. There’s nothing on TV yet, though. A movie’s next, supposedly.”

“I’m sorry about last night,” I say softly, my voice taking a sudden decibel dive, so that I can barely make it out myself in the traffic noise on Grand River.

“What happened last night, lessee?” I can hear the TV and the sound of ice cubes in her Virgin Mary tinking against the glass. It is a reassuring sound, and I wish I could be there to snuggle up under the warm covers with her and wait for the movie.

“I wasn’t at my best, but I’ll do better,” I say almost soundlessly. I smell warm hash browns, a waffle, an order of French toast humming out of The Squatter’s exhaust fan, and I am suddenly starving.

“This hotel’s a good place to spend your money,” she says, ignoring me completely.

“Well then, go spend some.”

“I’m watching something real cerebral right now,” she says, distracted. “It’s about how the government takes back fifteen tons of old money every week. Mostly just ones. That’s the work-horse bill. A hundred-dollar bill lasts for years, though it dudn’t in my pocket, I’ll tell you that. They are trying to figure out how to make shingles out of them. But right now all they can make is note pads.”

“Are you having a swell time?”

“So far.” She laughs a happy girlish laugh. I see Mr. Smallwood come rolling out the front of The Squatter, a small white paper bag in one huge hand and a sinker half in his mouth. The snow has already begun to melt to slush in the curb gutters.

“I love you, okay,” I say, and suddenly feel terribly feeble. My heart pounds down on itself like an anvil, and I have that old ague-sense that my next breath will bring down a curtain of bright red over my eyes, and I will slump to the phone booth glass and cease altogether. “I love you,” I hear myself murmur again.

“It’s okay with me. But you’re a nut, I’ll tell you that.” She is gay now. “A real Brazil nut. But I like you. Is that all you called up here to say?”

“You just wait’ll I get back,” I say, “I’ll….” But for some reason I do not finish the sentence.

“Do you miss your wife?” she says as gay as can be.

“Are you crazy?” It is clear she has not gotten my point.

“Oh boy. You’re some kind of something,” she says. I hear silverware clink against plates, the sound of the receiver getting far away from her. “Now you hurry back and let me go and watch this.” Clickety-click.

Ten minutes later we are into the rolling landscape of snowy farmettes and wide cottage-bound lakes beyond the perimeter of true Detroit suburbia, the white-flight areas stretching clear to Lansing. It is here that Mr. Smallwood suggests we turn off the meter and arrange a flat rate, which, when I agree, starts him whistling and suggesting he could hang around till I’m ready to go back. He has friends, he says, in nearby Wixom, and we agree that I’ll be ready to roll by noon. I remember, briefly, a boy I knew in college from Wixom, Eddy Loukinen, and I enjoy a fond wonder as to where Eddy might be — running a car dealership in his hometown, or down in Royal Oak with his own construction firm. Possibly an insulated window frame outlet in the UP — trading cars every year, checking his market shares, quitting smoking, flying to the islands, slipping around on his wife. These were the futures we all had looking at us in 1967. Good choices. We were not all radicals and wild-eyes. And most of my bunch would tell you they’re glad to have a good thirty years left to see what surprises life brings. The possibility of a happy ending. It is not unique to me.

It takes two gas station stops to find Herb’s. Both owners claim to know him and to work on his cars exclusively. And both give me a suspicious, bill-collector look, as if I might be looking for big Herb to do him harm or steal his fame. And in each instance Mr. Smallwood and I drive off feeling that phone calls are being made, a protective community rising to a misconstrued threat against its fallen hero. All of which makes me realize just how often I am with people I don’t know and who don’t know me, and who come to know me — Frank Bascombe — only as a sportswriter. It is possibly not the best way to go into the world, as I explained to Walter two nights ago; with no confidants, with no real allies except ex-allies; no lovers except a Vicki Arcenault or her ilk. Though maybe this is the best for me, given my character and past, which at most are inconclusive. I could have things much worse. At least as a stranger to almost everyone and a sportswriter to boot, I have a clean slate almost every day of my life, a chance not to be negative, to give someone unknown a pat on the back, to recognize courage and improvement, to take the battle with cynicism head-on and win.

Out front of Herb’s house, I’m greeted from around the side by a loud “Hey now!” before I can even see who’s talking. Mr. Smallwood stares out his closed cab window. He has heard of Herb, he’s said, though he has the story of Herb’s life wrong and thinks Herb is a Negro. In any case he wants to see him before he cuts out for Wixom.

Herb’s house is on curvey little Glacier Way, a hundred yards from Walled Lake itself and not far from the amusement park that operates summers only. I came here long ago, when I was in college, to a dense, festering old barrely dancehall called the Walled Lake Casino. It was at the time when line dances were popular in Michigan, and my two friends and I drove over from Ann Arbor with the thought of picking up some women, though of course we knew no one for forty miles and ended up standing against the firred, scarred old walls being wry and sarcastic about everyone and drinking Cokes spiked with whiskey. Since then, Mr. Smallwood has informed me, the Casino has burned down.

Herb’s house is like the other houses around it — a little white Cape showing a lot of dormered roof and with a small picture window on one side of the front door. The kind of house a tool-and-dye maker would own — a sober Fifties structure with a small yard, a two-car garage in back and a van in the drive with HERB’S on its blue Michigan plates.

Herb wheels into view from around the corner of the house, making tire tracks in the melting snow. The moment he is visible, Mr. Smallwood puts his cab in gear and goes whooshing off down the street and around the corner, leaving me alone in the front yard with Herb Wallagher, stranded like a prowler.

“I thought you’d be bigger,” Herb shouts with a big gap-toothed grin. He shoots a great hand out at me, and when I embrace it he nearly hauls me down to the ground.

“I thought you’d be smaller, Herb,” I say, though this is a lie. He is much smaller than I thought. His legs have shrunk and his shoulders are bony. Only his head and arms are good-sized, giving him a gaping, storkish appearance behind his thick horn-rims. He has twice cut himself shaving and doctored it with toilet paper, and is wearing a T-shirt that says BIONIC on the front, and a pair of glen-plaid Bermudas below which a brand new pair of red tennis shoes peek out. It is hard to think of Herb as an athlete.

“I like to be outside on a day like this, Frank. It’s a wonderful day, isn’t it?” Herb looks all around at the sky like a caged man, making his head go loose on its stem.

“It’s a great day, Herb.” We both, for the moment, affect the corny accents of Kansas hay farmers, though Herb is dead wrong about the weather. It looks like it may snow again and go nasty before the morning is over.

“Every year it got to be spring, ya know, I’d start thinking about motorcycles or some kind of hot car to buy. I had four or five cars and two or three bikes.” Herb sits looking away toward a spot above the coping of the house across the street, a house exactly like his except for the pale-blue roof. Beyond it several streets away Walled Lake shines through the yard gaps like metal. I am sorry to hear Herb referring to his life in the past tense. It is not an optimistic sign. “Well, Frank, how do you wanna get this over with,” Herb almost shouts at me in his put-on Kansas brogue. He smiles another big fierce smile, then pops both his hands on the black, plastic armrests of his chair as though he’d like nothing better than to spring up and strangle me. “You wanna go in the house or walk to the lake or what? It’s your choice.”

“Let’s try the lake, Herb,” I say. “I used to come over here when I was in college. I’d be happy to see it again.”

“Clarice!” Herb bellows, frowning up toward the little front door, squirming in his chair and muling it to face the way he wants. He is not interested in my past, though that’s no crime since I am not much interested myself. “Clar-eeeece!”

The door opens behind the storm-glass and a slender, pretty black woman with extremely short hair and wearing jeans steps half out onto the step. She gives me a watery half-smile. “Clarice, this is old Frank Bascombe. He’s gonna try to make a monkey outa me, but I’m going to kick his keister for him. We’re going to the lake. You better bring us a coupla bathing suits, cause we might take a swim.” Herb grins back at me in mockery.

“I’m keeping my distance from him, Mrs. Wallagher.” I give her a friendly smile to match the frail one she has given me.

“Herb’ll talk too much to swim,” Clarice says, shaking her head patiently at Herb the perennial bad boy.

“Okay, okay, don’t let’s get her started,” Herb growls, then grins. It is their little burlesque, though it’s an odd thing to see in people of two different races, and so young. Herb couldn’t be thirty-four yet, though he looks fifty. And Clarice has entered that long, pale, uncertain middle existence in which years behind you is not a faithful measure of life. Possibly she is thirty, but she is Herb’s wife, and that fact has made everything else — race, age, hopes — fade. They are like retirees, and neither has gotten what he or she bargained for.

When I look around, Herb has wheeled himself down the walk and is already out in the street, I offer his pretty little wife a little wave which she answers with a wave, and I go off hauling up the rear after Herb.

“Okay now, Frank, what’s this bunch of lies supposed be about,” Herb says gruffly as we whirl along. There is one more street of lined Capes — some with campers and boat trailers out front — then a wider artery road that leads back to the expressway, and beyond that is the lake, lined with small cottages owned mostly, I’m sure, by people from the city — policemen, successful car salesmen, retired teachers. All are closed and shuttered for the winter. It is not a particularly nice place, a shabby summer community of unattractive bungalows. Not the neighborhood I’d expected for an ex-all-pro.

“I’ve got my mind on an update on Herb Wallagher, Herb. How he’s doing, what’re his plans, how life’s treating him. Maybe a little inspirational business on the subject of character for people with their own worries. Maybe a touch of optimism in the soup.”

“All right,” Herb says. “Super. Super.”

“I know readers would be interested in hearing about your job as spirit coach. Guys you played with taking their cue from you on going the extra half-mile. That kind of thing.”

“I’m not going to be doing that anymore, Frank,” Herb says grimly, pushing harder on his wheels. “I’m planning to retire.”

“Why so, Herb?” (Not the best news for starters.)

“I just wasn’t getting the job done down there, Frank. Too much bullshit involved.”

An uneasy silence descends as we cross the road to Walled Lake. Most of the snow has melted here and only a gray crust remains on the shoulder where passersby have tossed their refuse. A hundred years ago, this country would’ve been wooded and the lake splendid and beautiful. A perfect place for a picnic. But now it has all been ruined by houses and cars.

Herb coasts on down the concrete boat ramp in between two boarded-up and fenced-in cottages, and wheels furiously up onto the plank dock. Across Walled Lake is the expressway, and up the lakeside beyond the cottages a roller coaster track curves above the tree line. The Casino must’ve been nearby, though I see no sign of it.

“It’s funny,” Herb says, where he can see the lake from an elevation. “When I first saw you, you had a halo around your head. A big gold halo. Do you ever notice that, Frank?” Herb whips his big head around and grins at me, then looks back at the empty lake.

“I never have, Herb.” I take a seat on the pipe bannister that runs the length of the dock at the end of which two aluminum boats ride in the shallow water.

“No?” Herb says. “Well.” He pauses a moment in a reverie. “I’m glad you came, Frank,” he says, but does not look at me.

“I’m glad to be here, Herb.”

“I get mad sometimes, Frank, you know? God damn it. I just get boiling.” Herb suddenly whacks both his big open hands on the black armrests, and shakes his head.

“What makes you mad, Herb?” I have not taken a note yet, of course, nor have I touched my recorder, something I will need to do since I have a terrible memory. I am always too involved with things to pay strict attention. Though I feel like the interview has yet to get started. Herb and I are still getting to know each other on a personal level, and I’ve found you can rush an interview and come away with such a distorted sense of a person that he couldn’t recognize himself in print — the first sign of a badly written story.

“Do you have theories about art, Frank?” Herb says, setting his jaw firmly in one fist. “I mean do you, uh, have any fully developed concepts of, say, how what the artist sees relates to what is finally put on the canvas?”

“I guess not,” I say. “I like Winslow Homer a lot.”

“All right. He’s a good one. He’s plenty good,” Herb says, and smiles a helpless smile up at me.

“He’d paint Walled Lake here, and it’d feel and look pretty much like this, I think.”

“Maybe he would.” Herb looks away at the lake.

“How long did you play pro ball, Herb?”

“Eleven years,” Herb says moodily. “One in Canada. One in Chicago. Then they traded me over here. And I stayed. You know I’ve been reading Ulysses Grant, Frank.” He nods profoundly. “When Grant was dying, you know, he said, ‘I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb signifies to be; to do; to suffer. I signify all three.’” Herb takes off his glasses and holds them in his big linesman’s fingers, examining their frames. His eyes are red. “That has some truth to it, Frank. But what the hell do you think he meant by that? A verb?” Herb looks up at me with a face full of worry. “I’ve been worried about that for weeks.”

“I couldn’t begin to say, Herb. Maybe he was taking stock. Sometimes we think things are more important than they are.”

“That doesn’t sound good, though, does it?” Herb looks back at his glasses.

“It’s hard to say.”

“Your halo’s gone now, Frank. You know it? You’ve become like the rest of the people.”

“That’s okay, isn’t it? I don’t mind.” It’s pretty clear to me that Herb suffers from some damned serious mood swings and in all probability has missed out on a stabilizing pill. Possibly this is his gesture of straight-talk and soul-baring, but I don’t think it will make for a very good interview. Interviews always go better when athletes feel fairly certain about the world and are ready to comment on it.

“I’ll just tell you what I think it means,” Herb says, narrowing his weakened eyes. “I think he thought he’d just become an act. You understand that, Frank? And that act was dying.”

“I see.”

“And that’s terrible to see things that way. Not to be but just to do.”

“Well, that was just how Grant saw things, Herb. He had some other wrong ideas, too. Plenty of them.”

“This is goddamn real life here, Frank. Get serious!” Herb’s face struggles with the fiercest intensity, then just as promptly goes blank. “I was just reading the other day that Americans always feel like the real life is somewhere else. Down the road, around the bend. But this is it right here.” Herb cracks his palms on his armrests again. “You know what I’m getting at Frank?”

“I think so, Herb. I’m trying.”

“God damn it!” Herb breathes a savage sigh. “You haven’t even taken any notes yet.”

“I keep it up here, Herb,” I say and give my head a poke.

Herb stares up at me darkly. “You know what it’s like to lose the use of your legs, Frank?”

“No I don’t, Herb. I guess that’s pretty obvious.”

“Have you ever had someone close to you die?”

“Yes.” I could actually see myself getting angry at Herb before this is over.

“Okay,” Herb says. “Your legs go silent, Frank. I can’t hear mine anymore.” Herb smiles a wild smile at me meant to indicate there might be a hell of a lot more I don’t know about the world. People, of course, are always getting you all wrong. Because you come to interview them, they automatically think you’re just using them to confirm the store of what’s already known in the world. But where I’m concerned, that couldn’t be wronger. It’s true I have expected a different Herb Wallagher from the Herb Wallagher I’ve found, a stouter, chin-out, better tempered kind of guy, a guy who’d pick up the back of a compact car to help you out of a jam if he could. And what I found is someone who seems as dreamy as a barn owl. But the lesson is not new to me. You can’t go into these things thinking you know what can’t be known. That ought to be rule one in every journalism class and textbook; too much of life, even the life you think you should know, the life of athletes, can’t be foreseen.

There is major silence now that Herb has told me what it’s like not to have his legs to use. It is not an empty moment, not for me anyway, and I am not discouraged. I would still like to think there’s the possibility for a story here. Maybe by going off his medicine Herb will finally come back to his senses with some unexpected and interesting ideas to bring up and end up talking a blue streak. That happens every day.

“Do you ever miss playing football, Herb?” I say, and smile hopefully.

“What?” Herb is drawn back from a muse the glassy lake has momentarily fostered. He looks at me as though he had never seen me before. I hear trucks pounding the interstate corridor to Lansing. The wind has wandered back now and a chill picks up off the black water.

“Do you ever miss athletics?”

Herb stares at me reproachfully. “You’re an asshole, Frank, you know that?”

“Why do you say that?”

“You don’t know me.”

“That’s what I’m doing here, Herb. I’d like to get to know you and write a damn good story about you. Paint you as you are. Because I think that’s pretty interesting and complex in itself.”

“You’re just an asshole, Frank, yep, and you’re not going to get any inspiration out of me. I dropped all that. I don’t have to do for anybody, and that means you. Especially you, you asshole. I don’t play ball anymore.” Herb plucks a piece of the toilet paper off his cheek and peers at it for blood.

“I’m ready to give up on inspiration, Herb. It was just a place to start.”

“Do you want to hear the dream I have over and over?” Herb rolls the paper between his fingers, then pushes himself out toward the end of the dock. I sit on the pipe bannister, looking at his back. Herb’s bony shoulders are like wings, his neck thin and rucked, his head yellowish and balding. I do not know if he knows where I am or not, or even where he is.

“I’d be glad to hear a dream,” I say.

Herb stares off toward the lake as if it contained all his hopes gone cold. “I have a dream about these three old women in a stalled car on a dark road. Two of them are taking their grandmother, who’s old, really old, back to a nursing home. Just someplace. Say New York state, or Pennsylvania. I come along in my Jeep — I had a Jeep once — and I stop and ask if I can help them. And they say yes. No one’s come by in a long time. And I can tell they’re worried about me. One woman has her money out to pay me before I even start. And they’ve got this flat tire. I shine my Jeep lights on their car and I can see this worried old grandmother, her face low in the front seat. A chicken-wattle neck. The two other women stand with me while I change the tire. And as I’m doing it I think about killing all three of them. Just strangling them with my hands, then driving off because no one would ever know who did it, since I wasn’t a killer or even known to be there. But I look around then, and I see these deer staring at me out of the trees. These yellow eyes. And that’s it. I wake up.” Herb twists his wheelchair and faces me. “How’s that for a dream? Whaddaya think, Frank? You’ve got a halo again, by the way. It just came back. You look idiotic.” Herb suddenly breaks out in laughter, his whole body rumbling and his mouth wide as a canyon. Herb, I see, is as crazy as a betsey bug, and I want nothing in the world more than to get as far away from him as I can. Interview or no interview. Inspiration or no inspiration. Interviewing a crazy man is a waste of anybody’s time who’s not crazy himself. And I’m glad, in fact, that Herb is in his chair at the moment since it’s possible he would strangle me if he could.

“It’s probably time we head back, Herb.”

He has taken his glasses off and begun wiping them on his BIONIC shirt. But he is really still laughing. “Sure, okay.”

“I’ve got all I need for a good story. And it’s getting pretty chilly out here.”

“You’re full of shit, Frank,” Herb says, smiling across the empty boat dock. On the lake a pair of ducks flies low across the surface, fast and slicing. They make an abrupt turn, then skin into the shiny water and become invisible. “Oh Frank, you’re really full of shit.” Herb shakes his head in complete amazement.

Herb pushes along beside me in his silver chair while we make our way back up Glacier Way in silence. Everything has become confused, though why, exactly, I don’t know. It’s possible I’ve had a bad effect on him. Sometimes when people realize sportswriters are just men or women they become resentful. (People often want others to be better than they are themselves.) But under these circumstances it is all but impossible to make a contribution, or to give an honest effort of any kind. It is, in fact, enough to make you want to hit the road for a pharmaceuticals house, of which New Jersey has plenty.

“We didn’t talk much about football,” Herb says thoughtfully. He is now as sane and reflective as an old sextant.

“I guess it didn’t seem it was much on your mind, Herb.”

“It really seems insignificant now, Frank. It’s really a pretty crummy preparation for life, I’ve come to believe.”

“But I’d still think it had some lessons to teach to the people who played it. Perseverance. Team work. Comradeship. That kind of thing.”

“Forget all that crap, Frank. I’ve got the rest of my life handed to me if I can figure it out. I’ve got some pretty big plans. Sports is just a memory to me.”

“You mean law school and all that.”

Herb nods at me like an undertaker. “That’s it.”

“You’ve got a lot of courage, Herb. It takes courage to be you, I think.”

“Maybe,” Herb says, considering that idea. “Sometimes I’m afraid, though, Frank. I’ll tell ya. Scared to death.” We’re just two guys jawing now. Just the way I’d hoped. Maybe a straightforward old-fashioned interview could still be worked out. I feel for my tape recorder.

“Sometimes I’m afraid, Herb. It’s natural to the breed, I’d say.”

“All right,” Herb says and chuckles, nodding in forced agreement.

I see Mr. Small wood’s yellow Checker waiting out front of Herb’s house as we round the curve, his visit to Wixom apparently gone awry. It has grown colder since we’ve been outside, and the sky has lowered. By nighttime it will be snowing to beat the band, and Vicki and I will be glad to be far from here. It is a strange turn of events, not what I would’ve expected, but I, on the other hand, am still not surprised.

As we pass by, a man wearing a brown car coat comes out of his house, holding a can of motor oil. His is a house in the same architectural order as Herb’s, though with a room added on where the driveway once went into the back. The man stands beside his car — a new Olds with its hood up — and gives Herb a wave and a “howzitgoin.”

“Primo. Numero uno,” Herb calls back with a grin and waves his arm as if he’s waving to a crowd. “This guy’s interviewing me. I’m giving him a helluva time.”

“Don’t take nobody’s crap,” the man shouts, and bends his short trunk under the murky hood of the Olds.

“The neighbors still think I play on the team,” Herb says in a hushed voice, pushing himself up Glacier Way toward his wife and home.

“How’s that?”

“Well, I keep my injury pretty well a secret. Another guy plays in my place. With my number. I hope you won’t write about that and ruin it.”

“No way, Herb. You’ve got my word on that.”

Herb looks up at me as we approach Mr. Smallwood’s cab, and gives me a look full of wonder. “How come you do it, Frank. Tell the truth.”

“How come I do what, Herb?” Though I know what’s coming.

For some reason Herb seems to be having a hard time making his head be still. It’s wandering all around. “You couldn’t really like sports, Frank,” he says. “You don’t look like a guy who likes sports.”

“I like some better than others.” It is not that uncommon a question, really.

“But wouldn’t you rather talk about something else?” Herb shakes his big head, still wondrous. “What about Winslow Homer?”

“I’d talk to you about him, Herb. Any time. Writing about something is a lot different from doing the thing itself. Does that clear anything up?” For some reason my diaphragm, or its vicinity, feels like it is quaking again.

“Pretty interesting, Frank.” Herb nods at me with genuine admiration. “I’m not sure it explains a goddamn thing, but it’s interesting. I’ll give you that.”

“It’s pretty hard to explain your own life, Herb.” I’m sure my quaking is visible, though maybe not to Herb, for whom the whole world might quake all the time. He’s still having trouble keeping his head stationary. “I think I’ve said enough. I’m supposed to be asking you questions.”

“I’m a verb, Frank. Verbs don’t answer questions.”

“Don’t think that way, Herb.” My diaphragm is crackling. Herb and I have not been together an hour, but there is a strong sense around him that he would like to strangle someone, and not be choosy whose neck he got his hands on. When you have spent so much of your life whamming into people and hurting them, it must be hard just to call a halt to it and sit down. It must be hard to do anything else, it seems to me, but keep oil whamming. In any case, I’m always most at ease when I know the way out. There is something to be avoided here, and I intend to avoid it. “I’m going to try to write a good story, Herb,” I say, inching toward the back of Smallwood’s Checker.

Clarice Wallagher has stepped out onto the front stoop and stands watching us. She calls Herb’s name and smiles wearily. This must happen to everyone: meetings ending in stunned silences out front; a waiting cab; Herb proclaiming himself a verb. My greatest admiration is her’s. I’d hoped to have a word with her on the subject of Herb’s heroism-in-life, but that has gone past us. I simply hope there is a consolation for her late on dark nights.

“Herb,” Clarice says in a pretty voice that cracks on the cold Michigan wind.

“Okay!” Herb shouts heroically. “Gotta go, Frank, gotta go. You oughta write my life story. You’d make six figures.” We shake hands, and once again Herb tries to jerk me to my knees. There is an odd smell on Herb now, a metallic smell that is the odor of his chair. His cheek is bleeding from where he peeled off the paper. “I wanted you to see some old game films before you left. I could put the kebosh on ’em, Frank. Don’t let this chair fool ya.”

“We’ll do it next time, Herb, that’s a promise.”

Mr. Smallwood starts his cab with a loud whooshing and drops it into drive so that the body bucks half a foot forward.

“I don’t know what happens sometimes, Frank.” Herb’s sad blue eyes suddenly fill with hot tears, and he shakes his big head to dash them away. It is the sadness of elusive life glimpsed and unfairly lost, and the following, lifelong contest with bitter facts. Pity, in other words, for himself, and as justly earned as a game ball. Only I do not want to feel it and won’t. It is too close to regret to play fast and loose with. And the only thing worse than terrible regret is unearned terrible regret. And for that reason I will not bend to it, will, in fact, go on to the bottom with my own ship.

I take four quick steps back. “I’m glad I met you, Herb.”

Herb stares at me, his face distorted by unhappiness. “Yeah sure,” he says.

And I am into the boxy, musty backseat of Mr. Smallwood’s Checker, and we shush off down Glacier Way without even so much as a goodbye to Clarice, leaving Herb sitting in the empty street, in his chair, waving goodbye to our tail lights, his sad face astream with helpless and literal tears.