Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [85]
One Sunday back on Lime Street, Pop had picked us up and was driving us north to the beach. Suzanne sat in the front, Jeb, Nicole, and I in the back, the windows down as we passed trailer homes in the pine trees, the smell of sap in the air. Pop turned on the radio to listen to the end of the game he said he’d been watching. His exact words were the game.
“What game?”
He glanced at me in the rearview mirror, his face only eyes. “The Red Sox.”
“Who’s that?”
He smiled as if I’d just told a joke, and he turned up the radio. But I wasn’t joking. I was almost thirteen years old. It was like listening to TV newscasters talk about politics or the economy, a larger world I couldn’t even begin to understand. Pop’s eyes were on the road, but he was listening intently to these men, to this game, which at that moment, sitting in the back of his car, I began to understand was baseball.
When we got to our parking spot at the beach, Pop took a while to turn off the radio, and as we walked over the hot sand together he still seemed to be back there in that car and whatever it was those men were describing, their voices calm and soothing, using terms I did not know: balls and strikes and fouls. Fastball, splitter, sinker. Double play.
Now Sam and I were driving into Boston with Pop’s tickets to a place called Fenway Park. It was a cool September night, and soon Sam and I were sitting up in the stands with thousands of other people—men, women, and kids, almost all of them wearing a Red Sox hat or jacket or sweatshirt or all three. The air smelled like mustard and popcorn and beer, and as I drank mine, I still couldn’t get over how many people had come to this game. Over thirty-three thousand, Sam said, and this was the smallest park in baseball, though it looked pretty big to me, the towering banks of blinding lights that lit up the field, wide and deep green, only three players standing out in it, and there were the other men on this diamond, what Sam called the infield, the dirt path from home plate to first to second to third then back home. There was the mound the pitcher worked from, and I couldn’t believe how hard and fast these men threw the ball past the batter into the catcher’s mitt, another new word Sam taught me. He sat next to me, sipping his beer and patiently explaining everything: what a strike was and a ball and a foul; how the first two foul balls count as strikes, that there are different kinds of pitches and different kinds of pitchers, on and on, and as he did, he leaned close and kept his voice low, as if he didn’t want to draw attention to how little I knew, that this was, in fact, the first baseball game I had ever watched.
There was a crack in the air and I watched the ball fly over the field and hit what Sam told me was “the Green Monster,” a massive wall the baseball bounced off of into the glove of a Yankee who threw it to another Yankee who threw it to one at second base though our runner was safe, Sam said. That’s how I felt too, safe, my best friend and me sitting deep in the stands with thousands of other people all rooting for the same team. It was like being admitted into one huge, loud and happy family you hadn’t even known about.
After a while, it was the Yankees’ turn to hit. Every time one of them walked up to home plate with his bat, hundreds of men and boys would yell insults at him I couldn’t quite make out, just the tone, which I knew well, but it wasn’t directed at me or anyone I would have to try to protect, and I felt relieved of everything, part of something far larger than I was, just one of thousands and thousands of people united in wanting the same thing, for these men from