Salon | Andre Dubus

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A Zen archer does not try to hit the target. With intense concentration he draws the bow and waits; the target releases the arrow, and draws it to itself. A few summers ago, during an All-Star Game, retired pitcher Steve Carlton visited the television broadcasting booth. One of the announcers asked him if hitters had ever intimidated him. He said he had ignored the hitters and played an advanced game of catch with his catcher. "It's an elevated form of pitching," he said. I have told this many times to young writers, and have also told them that Wade Boggs watching a pitch come to the plate, starting his stride and swing, probably does not know his own name, for his whole being is concentrating on that moving white ball. I could have said this about any good hitter, or fielder, or pitcher: men whose intense focus on a baseball burns their consciousness of the past and future into ashes blown quickly up and away from the field. This happens over and over in a game, and these moments are so pure they may be sacred; and they are not ephemeral; they seem so, because they exist in Time; but so did my friend Jim Valhoul; a river took his life, but it did not take the life he lived.
After that first Opening Day, we went to every one for 12 more years, the four of us becoming a crowd of sometimes 40 men, and women, writers, editors, teachers, publishers, booksellers, husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends. In late fall, when the Red Sox ticket office opened, I would drive to Boston and buy tickets: two for me, 10 for the Spitzer brothers, some for my publisher, David Godine, and people who worked for him, and always we had rows of good seats behind third or first base, and everyone sent me checks for their tickets. Cold weather postponed one game, and always we wore coats, hats, gloves, scarves. I wore a Red Sox jacket and cap. There must have been days with warm sun, our coats on our laps. In my memory I see them all as warm days, weather for throwing and hitting and catching a baseball, for sitting and watching a game. The last year we went was 1986, my last spring as a biped, and in the late fall of that year I was in a hospital bed in my home, my right leg in a full cast that would be on it till June, my left leg amputated above the knee, and none of us bought tickets for Opening Day.
I was thin and weak and in pain and could do very little for myself. I could eat, but not much; talk, read a book, try to write, but I could not lift my 4-year-old daughter, who weighed 35 pounds. In March, walking to the bathroom with crutches and an artificial leg, with two strong women -- a physical therapist and a home health aid -- I took my first shower since a car hit me in July of 1986. I wore loose-fitting gym shorts. When I reached the tub, I slowly turned my back to it and the shower bench I would sit on, and held a grab bar on the wall as the women took the crutches; they squatted, held my leg and the artificial one, gripped my arms at the shoulders; then, as I held my breath, they rose, pulling up my leg and the other one, and eased me onto the bench. Now I could release my breath. They pulled off the leg, and unrolled onto mine a rubber sheath like a condom that covered the cast, and we laughed. I closed the curtain, pulled off my shorts, handed them to a woman whose hand was in the water from the faucet; when it was very warm, she pushed the lever to divert it, and out of the shower nozzle it came, spraying my face, my hair, my chest, hot joy on my body that for eight months had felt unclean, and I closed my eyes to it, lifted my face to it, then washed my body, my hair, and stayed a long time in the shower, with a window at my right; out the window were poplars on the steep hill behind my house, a hill I had loved to climb; at its top, near the electrical fence of the dairy farmer whose hill rises from mine till it peaks and descends to the Merrimack River, I had hung two rope hammocks. Sitting on the shower bench, in the blessing of hot water, I believed I would climb that short hill again. It would only take time. Then my right knee would bend, the damaged muscles and nerves would be again and for all my life sound, and wearing jeans and boots I would climb that hill, with my golden retriever, and I would lie on a shaded and swinging hammock, and while the dog lay on the grass chewing a fallen branch, I would look up through the poplars at a summer sky. In 1987 I watched Opening Day on television, sitting on the couch I transferred to from my wheelchair while my wife held the leg I could not lift in its cast.
So the Spitzer brothers and I saw 13 baseball games, 40 hours or so, with 20 or 30 or 40 other people, some I only saw on Opening Day. Jim Valhouli did not go to all the games. He left the college where we taught, and moved to Exeter to teach at Phillips Academy. Probably in the third year some of us began meeting for lunch before the game, at a Japanese restaurant someone discovered on Newbury Street: the chef performing on the grill at our table, while some of us drank hot sake. In 1977 eight of us sat at a table, and the Spitzers, married but without their wives; I was with mine, and our friends George and Tom were with theirs. A year later the Spitzers and George and Tom and I sat in the same restaurant, smelling and eating shrimp, filet mignon, chicken and vegetables and rice, talking about baseball, checking our watches, timing our pleasures so we could walk to Fenway Park and see the first pitch of the game. George was talking, then he stopped, chopsticks in hand; he blushed, looking at the rest of us, his mouth open. Then he said: "Last year we were all married."
We stopped eating, looked at each other: We were all divorced. Then we laughed, not at the dismal pain of divorce, not at the loss of hope, of faith, of love that divorce is; we laughed because it was Opening Day and during the year since the last one we had each lost, each suffered, some less than others; as our wives had, then they had moved strongly, it seemed, onto new courses; and here we were, perhaps with invisible limps and aches and longings, eating Japanese food with wooden sticks, sitting as if poised in Time waiting for the excitement of being with over 30,000 people and watching a game that does not employ a clock.
I do not remember any of the games, only moments, and the one I remember with most love was in the early 80s. I had a wife again. The weather was good. Probably we wore jackets, but the sky was blue, the sun warm, and the Red Sox won. I happily left the game, walking with my wife and Philip and Michel, and other friends, slowly with the talking crowd, down the steps and the ramp, to the paler light and coolness beneath the grandstands, the smells of steamed hot dogs, beer, hamburgers, tobacco smoke, a faint scent of urine from the restrooms and the smells of people, of their clothes, hair, skin, make-up and that indefinable smell in a crowd, as if you are smelling the fact of being alive. We moved slowly still, with thousands of others going to the sidewalks and streets that would be filled with people who, for now, were happy.
We reached an exit and walked into the sun again. About 10 yards ahead I saw eight or so white teenagers beating three black ones who lay on their backs on the ground, their arms covering their bleeding faces. I ran to them, jerked collars, necks, shoulders; pulled and pushed white boys, and grabbed the black ones, pulled them as they stood; I pushed them against a car to protect their backs, then turned to face the white boys. I raised my fists. "Police!" I yelled. I was both afraid and sad. I said to the white boys: "It's Opening Day. It's Opening Day!" That is all I said, between cries for police. The white boys edged toward me, their fists ready; the one closest to me lunged, feigned punches and hissed through his teeth. Not one of these boys was bleeding. "It's Opening Day," I said, waiting for the attack that would hurt. Then I felt a touch on my right shoulder, and then one on my left, and I looked, and Philip stood on one side of me, Michel on the other, their fists raised, and we stood like that, our shoulders touching, with the three bleeding boys behind us, until my wife came with police officers, who dispersed the white boys, then looked at the black boys' cuts, and sent them on their way.
As we went on ours, to drinks and dinner, then to drive to our homes in the night. Jim Valhouli was not with us that day; he would have joined us in front of the boys. Michel would marry again, then, nearly a year after my crippling, Philip would, and a few months after that I would not have a wife. All of it happened in our lives: walking and running, the love of wives that was good and still is, with the pain of its loss outside of Time; the baseball games I cannot remember that still exist not only because they are recorded but because of what men brought to them and received from them, on the field, in the dugouts and bullpens; and what women and children and men brought to them and received in Fenway Park and at home with a television set or a radio; what athletic and passionate Jim Valhouli and his wife and two sons gave and received till the ice broke; and on that April afternoon, lit by the sun, those moments of violence, injustice, fear and love, when my two friends came to my side and stood with me, waiting.
SALON | Oct. 8, 1997
Andre Dubus is the author of many works of fiction, including "The Last Worthless Evening," "Broken Vessels" and his latest, "Dancing After Hours" (Vintage Contemporaries).