Slide - Kyle Beachy [100]
“These angels keep on spitting,” she said.
“Today's a big day,” I said.
No solution. Not then and not soon afterward, and not now, still. I'd given her not a single word for how many months? And why not? The phone was right here in front of me. The potential of her voice, right this second. How long? Despicable silence.
I lifted the phone from its cradle on the wall and ran my thumb lightly over the sequence of long-known numbers. This was presuming she'd returned from Europe. Presuming she'd gone home. Presuming she wasn't living in Vermont or Boulder or God could only say where else. Presuming she wasn't with Carmel or someone else, some new foreign person. You can feel panic's arrival; it descends like heat. Where was Audrey? I could have written. Asked. The phone became extremely heavy in my hand and I let it fall to the counter.
What I had seen in my mother at the mall was what I had seen in the courtyard, in Audrey, the physical expression of tremendous disappointment. Ian's sluggish steps.
There was a beeping, some pulsing noise I didn't understand. A powerful and terrible squawking. I saw the phone off the hook and realized this was the old alert to warn us that if we didn't do something soon, the house would be cut off from the outside world. In other words, the alarm.
Anger was sharp.
Lonely was hollow.
Sad was the giant, the cloud or earth or ocean, the elemental force.
The beeping eventually stopped. I went back into the junk drawer with a hand. Most likely it would be my mother, or would they clean together? My father scooping the whole stinking mess into a garbage bag and carrying it out to the curb. Dispose, discard, rid the house of things.
My hand came across the extra set of keys to my father's car. Which I clenched tight in my fist. I removed my cell phone from my pocket and tossed it into the drawer. Which I shut.
The injustice was that it only worked one way. The past reached forward and meddled, played its stained fingers across the present. But the present had no such dominion. An old complaint, fine, but made new by the specifics of what had been lost: love, marriage, dear friend, innocence, status as law-abiding non-rapist. Brother.
So the present. Yes. The boy could still be saved. I knew the route, not thirteen miles from here. I had been there only yesterday. I could return and fix. Had the route memorized. Knew the solution. I took the Audrey photograph and an old Cardinals magnet and stuck them to the fridge on my way to the garage.
Together we flew, me and the car my same age. Work had opened this city to me, folded back flaps to expose the depths within. I had been into these homes, stepped over piles of dirty laundry. Into the bare back halls of these businesses, the gloomy cubicles previously known to me only in movie satire. Never had I been more aware of the peopling of a place. Pulses throbbing below the veneer of society's inanimates.
Ian's house was how it always was: dirty and dark, lit by syndicated programming and daylight through the screen door. I knocked. No answer. I called out and the television went mute.
“Go away.”
I spoke into quiet darkness: “I never told you about baseball camp. Every summer from sixth grade until sophomore year. Down at Mizzou. We stayed in the dorms and ate in the cafeterias, and each day felt like it was part of something special. We ran drills and scrimmaged and worked on bunting technique. They filmed us swinging, and we sat in the coaches’ office and analyzed the video. They call it the trigger, some thing each of us does to start a swing. Me, I lifted my left foot just barely before setting it back down again. Of course, before the video I had no idea. But there it was on the screen in slow motion. Then you'd see the hips shift as shoulders open slightly. Hands coming downward through the zone. ‘Down the slide,’ they called it. Down the slide. Keep your back shoulder up. Down the slide. Come