Slide - Kyle Beachy [60]
Carla left the house humming and, as if choreographed, Richard arrived seconds later. A flash of charred gray suit through the side door, vanishing into the bedroom, then reappearing in jeans and a polo, spinning the car keys around his finger. His shirt was tucked neatly into jeans held up by a needlepoint belt: a series of red birds and yellow bats against a navy blue background, a single black stitch border around each color, giving the whole thing a vaguely digitized look. Needlepointed by Carla sometime in the eighties.
“You get behind the count to Ortiz and you're in trouble. Throws that slider that breaks in the last eight feet.”
On these rare nights of nonwork activity my father would drive his second car, a silver 1979 Datsun 280Z. The body showed minor signs of wear, enough flaws to save it from the boring sterility of a too-prized thing. These included a rather noticeable dent in the roof that both was and completely was not my fault. The black leather bundled around the base of the stick shift was cracked but clean, Armor All-ed to a semireflective sheen. I always wondered if it was morbid to think, even abstractly, about the day I would inherit the Z.
He drove us to Sportsman's Park, a small restaurant in Ladue named after the former stadium of the St. Louis Cardinals. It was a single-story cottagelike building, split through the middle into a bar on one side, dining area on the other. All walls but one were layered with St. Louis sports memorabilia: baseballs and jerseys and pennants and black-and-white photos of local heroes posing with the restaurant's owners. The sixth wall was dominated by a big-screen projection TV circa not recently. Sportsman's succeeded at being both cozy and pretentious, with a typical bar menu highlighted by the Heavy Hitter, a pound of wings served with a chilled bottle of Dom. Printed along the bottom of each menu page was the tagline Where the Elite Meet to Eat. This was not ironic. This was Ladue, home to the Hursts, meaning wealth, and, tonight, us.
In public, my father was frequently recognized and expected to say hello. People I had never seen. I ducked into the dining side and found an empty table. In a minute he joined me, turning his chair to face the blurry television, and sat. The network wun-derkind and former-player color man called the action.
“Have you read what they're saying about this catching prospect? This Brosky Bresky Beesk”
“Brandt,” I said. “Derril Brandt.”
We watched the screen. A waitress appeared who I could have sworn I knew in some old and unspectacular way, and my father ordered two beers.
“People are calling him the next Johnny Bench.”
“Except I guess he can't block a pitch in Triple-A to save his life,” I said.
The game would triangulate our discussion, a satellite to bounce statements off, replacing eye contact. Mainly I expected we would sit silently, chewing and watching the birds.
The color guy said, In a situation like this, you're thinking, move the runner over and set the table for the big guns. The network wun-derkind said, A one-one changeup comes in high.
The waitress had gone to my high school. Or not. Everybody in this city was beginning to look the same. Half a mile from here was the field