Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [144]
But I had a bank card in my wallet, and I knew there were bank machines in Harvard Square across from where men played chess under the trees in front of Au Bon Pain. An hour later, after a long walk, I had money and was eating a croissant at a small table there. The orange juice was cold and freshly squeezed and I began to feel grateful for these gifts, small as they were. The despair from the night before hadn’t completely lifted, but was it wrong to feel grateful for the small gifts in my life? Wasn’t I fortunate to have something in the bank? Wasn’t I fortunate to have a plastic card I could push into a machine to get it? Now I was eating in the sunshine, watching men play chess in the shade. I’d played it once but wasn’t good at it. With chess, you had to think ahead and weigh the probability of your opponent’s countermoves. You had to be cool and rational and clear-headed, three qualities I just did not seem to possess.
I stood and brushed the crumbs off my pants. There was still grit there from sleeping under the overpass, and I slapped off as much as I could. On the sidewalk I stopped two guys my age, both of them in jeans and T-shirts. The taller one held a grocery bag under his arm, and I asked them where the Red Sox play.
“Today?” the shorter one said. “Home.”
“Fenway Park, right?”
He narrowed his eyes at me, trying to decide whether I was fucking with him or not. “Where do they play when they’re at home?”
“Yeah, I’m supposed to meet someone there.”
“That’s right, Fenway,” the taller one said, and he started walking again. “It’s right off Kenmore Square.”
The short one shook his head and kept walking too, and so did I, back in the direction from which I’d come.
MY BEER was cold and the sun was hot on my face. It was the first baseball game I’d ever watched with my father, and the second I’d ever seen. He sat two seats away from me in the crowd, this living, breathing quilt I felt sewn into. He wore a red short-sleeve shirt and a baseball cap, its visor shadowing the sun, his thick beard lit by it. In one hand he held a plastic cup of beer, in the other a smoking pipe. He’d draw from his pipe, then sip his beer, his eyes intently on the men playing down in the field. Between him and me was Richard. He was a poet who ran the bookstore at Bradford College, and I’d always liked him because he was thoughtful and kind and quiet. I sat beside him in my dusty black pants and white shirt, my black vest stuffed under my seat, my pocket full of cash.
Then Pop and Richard and I were standing with all the others under the sun, cheering for a player who’d just hit the ball past another player out in the field. It was clear to me the runner was on our side and that’s why we were rooting him on as he made it to the last base before home. We sat back down and Richard and Pop were talking about that player, something about his record for the season, a good word, I thought, though I associated it with falling leaves or snow or rain or heat. Every now and then Pop would glance over at me and take in my face and hair, my whiskers and wrinkled bartending clothes, and I’d catch the concern in his eyes before he winked at me; he must’ve told Richard something, too, because they were both treating me with the gentle reverence reserved for someone in trouble.
But that afternoon, drinking too much beer and sitting in the sun with my father and his friend, trouble was momentarily out there in the streets, away from the thousands of men, women, and kids watching these famous men play this famous game. Maybe the trick was to turn it all off sometimes. To concentrate on something comprehensible, though I knew it would take me years to understand this sport