The Slide: A Novel Read online

  One of Ian’s throws bounced short, but before it did I watched it change from a short throw to a blooped single knocked out to me in left field, and I saw a runner circling third, his coach maniacally waving home the potential tying run. I charged and scooped just as I was supposed to, crow-hopped, and fired.

  Ian screamed JESUS and fell to the ground. The ball hit the van with a hollow crunk and rebounded back into the yard. Ian glared at me from his knees. My shoulder twinged with pain as I made my way slowly to the ball.

  “Ow,” I said.

  “Oh, poor you,” Ian said. “You could have killed me, but your arm hurts so I guess that’s more important.”

  “Yeah, sorry about that. I got a little carried away on the last one.”

  “I think you literally could have killed me.” Ian looked at his palms, then looked up the street. “My dad’ll be home soon. Give me your glove.”

  “That was a mistake,” I said. “I’m sorry. Let’s throw a little more. A few short ones to keep a good thing going.”

  “I’m going inside. Give it. Give it here.”

  I handed him the glove. He stuck it in his armpit and began walking back to the house. I was sure something more was expected of me.

  “I wasn’t trying to hurt you.”

  He kept walking and said, “It’s fine.”

  “Hey, you’re not following through enough,” I yelled, and saw him stop and turn around. “You’re short-arming it a little. Your motion, it’s good and natural but a little bit off. Nothing that can’t be fixed, but if you let it go on you might run into trouble later.”

  “You threw that ball really hard,” he said.

  “I know. And I’m sorry. Look, maybe I could come back sometime. Check on your motion.”

  “I guess, as long as you promise to never do that again.”

  “I promise,” I said. “I do.”

  “I’m saying ever. You coulda took off my head, you know. Pop. Me on the ground bleeding from my neck because my head is gone. Blood all over the place. I saw a show once about this guy who accidentally killed a kid with his car. You’d go to jail for like ever. Nobody cares if it’s an accident or anything.”

  I drove away wishing I had a baseball of my own to hold and spin. Pinch between thumb and middle fingers, send it spinning upward with a snap, catch without looking. Repeating as needed.

  june

  eight

  i walked through the pool-house door to find an even larger version of Edsel Denk fingering a deck of cards at the table. His neck looked like a very hardworking straw. When our eyes met I thought of that children’s song where the other day (the other day) I saw a bear (I saw a bear) and the bear sees me and then something happens I forget what. Except here was a thuggish beast lacking a bear’s anthropomorphic cuteness, more ogre than bear. While Edsel continued to shuffle the deck, I stood very very still and located my primary exits. He wore a ribbed tank top, a visor from the Bellagio casino, and God only knew what under the table. His beard was thick and uniform and a frankly awesome accessory to an already imposing face. Sweat moved from my right armpit downward.

  “Potty boom botty.”

  I turned to see one of Stuart’s hands shoot upward from the couch. I moved quickly past the table to join him. My friend was horizontal with one arm hanging lazy to the floor, watching baseball.

  “Game’s on,” he said.

  I rubbed my still-sore shoulder and, even though I knew the answer, asked when was the last time Stuart had thrown a baseball.

  “Years,” he said. “I watch and cheer and wear lots of red. I am a supporter. I avoid any form of play that might detract from this role.”

  We watched the Cardinals struggle against the Rockies, whose leadoff hitter was walked, opening the door to a series of base hits, then a homer, then a walk, a pitching change, a walk, a wild pitch, and a base-clearing double. The runs piled up against us. Stuart reached for the remote and turned off the volume. I found myself drifting into and out of brief but madly satisfying naps before awaking to Edsel’s voice rolling as if downhill from the table.

  “Believe me when I say you ain’t seen baseball until you’ve seen it played in other countries. They’ve taken our game and made it into something else. The Thai people have a version of baseball to make your head spin. It’s fast over there. Fast and wicked.” I hadn’t recalled his voice being so rough.

  Stuart had caught me up on the basics of Edsel’s life after high school, how he attended the University of Missouri and sold lots and lots of drugs. How after graduation he took his drug money and embarked on a two-year journey: first to New York, where he shuffled among various friends slash clients from college, filthed about the Lower East Side and failed resoundingly at stand-up comedy, then to Southeast Asia, where he grew the beard and took digital photos of Angkor Wat, rode elephants in Chiang Rai, hired multiple prostitutes in Bangkok. Stuart swore that something profound had happened to Edsel while abroad, an Eastern shift in the way he understood the universe. How upon his return he began lifting weights with regularity, how he started growing. The cards sat in two stacks on the table in front of him, horrified, I imagined, at the prospect of returning to his hands.

  “Wiry little gookers slapping singles and running like hell. Playing for hours on the beach with a bat made out of driftwood.”

  Stuart stepped in front of me and went to the kitchen for his Tupperware, then joined Edsel at the table. I watched our scrappy leadoff hitter lace a double into the right-field corner and get thrown out at third.

  “Tiny men push around carts stacked with mountains of insects. Old Buddhist men with wrinkled faces shiny with sweat. You look down an alleyway and you see rows of the carts all lined up. Some carts got wheels, others just sit there. At night the lights shine on the carts and the bugs look like donuts if you don’t know any better. And I’ll tell you something about these wrinkled little brown men, they love to see a white man struggle with a grasshopper. They smile and stare into your eyes and wait for you to retch. Happy bastards.”

  “Did you retch?” I asked.

  “Shit no I ain’t retch.”

  Joint hanging from one corner of his mouth, Stuart caught my eye and twisted the other into something sly and knowing. Behold the ogre, and bask. Edsel’s accent was that of a cross-legged whittler sitting somewhere up near Twain’s Hannibal, so thoroughly aligned with the beard that even if it was affected there was no point objecting.

  “The women got their own carts. They mix whatever the boatmen caught that morning with simple noodles. Talking about old women who look like they never had teeth to begin with. They smile and chatter away in their bird language, then nod and ask for a dollar fifty. Daughters charge ten times that in the massage parlor around the corner. And another thing—the Thai don’t use chopsticks. I don’t know who’s behind that myth, but fact is those bastards love a fork.”

  A buzzing encircled my head, a high-pitched wail like a tiny lobster dropped into a thimble of boiling water. I watched a mosquito land on and dig himself into my forearm. Couldn’t believe his drive and desire to dig into my skin. Her. Stuart stood up to answer his cell phone. A finger onto the skeeter left an oval of my blood on my skin, dead skeeter on my finger.

  I watched Stuart’s mouth, I saw laughter and facial expressions, I saw him lean against the counter; then he hung up.

  “I do believe tonight’s the night,” he said. “So far she has refused to sleep with me, a refusal I greet with thorough respect. We have made it to genital fondling, naked tumbling on the bed, but no sex. I admire her for this. I think I even admire her parents for this. Ed, she insists on meeting you. Insists. Poot, she says you’re fine.”

  With its added length of beard, Edsel’s nod was a force. Such affirmation.

  “What does that mean, I’m fine? Fine how?”

  “She says she already knows whatever it is she needs to know about you.”

  “That’s absurd. This is the girl with the breasts?”


  “The beautiful breasts, yes.” Stuart closed the Tupperware and took it away. “Perfect breasts are among her long list of total or near perfections. You two met the other day.”

  “We didn’t share a single syllable,” I said. “You never introduced us.”

  Edsel stopped shuffling. “You always like this?”

  “Sometimes you imagine things, Poot. But doesn’t matter because she says she gets it. You’re fine. Now I need to prepare myself for what’s to come. You two enjoy your dinner.”

  Then Stuart was gone, back into the bedroom, and I was left at the table with the ogre with the playing cards, and on TV the Cards losing and defeat silently mounting, the central air churning, and somewhere in Europe Audrey was laughing and laughing and moving and bald and laughing and twirling. I couldn’t tell who was supposed to make the first move. Edsel was older and much bigger. I was the one with the car.

  “I guess I should drive.”

  “Then lessgo.”

  The sky was gray-blue-green and lower than usual. A group of rabbits sat like dander in the big patch of yard between the pool house and the driveway. I half expected the ogre to lunge for one of them, a ferocious and not necessarily graceful show of predatory will.

  Once we reached the driveway he stopped moving and raised one arm, pointing at the ad.

  “Eventually Stuart’s going to let me behind the wheel of that thing.”

  “I don’t know. I think there’s a system in place.”

  “System or not, he’ll get bored. You guys are always getting bored.”

  I took us westward, away from the river and the Arch, into the very depths of the county. The ogre next to me bit his fingernails, his thick sausage fingers disappearing into the forest of his beard. And this man, I thought, procures for himself women in abundance. I wondered what Stuart had told Edsel about this proposed internship. I eased the gas pedal, the speedometer revolved clockwise, seventy, then eighty, passing and merging and flowing deeper into the current westward leg of an ancient American dream. I felt sleazy by association, and it wasn’t entirely bad.

  I exited on Manchester Boulevard and continued west. Five miles later, Edsel grunted, “There.”

  Yes. I signaled and turned into a sprawling parking lot divided by stand-alone restaurants and landscaped partitions. Supermarket, discount shoe outlet, big and tall clothing store, DMV, another shoe outlet, and baked sub sandwich shop. Twenty-screen cinema. People sat outside each of the four floating restaurants, waiting to be told their table was ready. There was Crazy Sticks, California Cocina, Bighorn Steakhouse, and Beneath the Sea.

  “I know a tiny girl who bartends at one of these places. Forget which one. Short girl, tits like this.”

  “People make a point of coming here,” I said. “It’s a destination.”

  At California Cocina we were handed a translucent black disc that would buzz and glow when our table was ready.

  “Emily,” Edsel said. “Keep your eyes out for a short girl with hairy arms.”

  Eventually a skinny brunette led us to a small booth squished between two larger booths, each filled with a chewing sipping talking family. I focused my attention squarely on Edsel. He occupied his half of the booth with aplomb both physical and psychological, the remorseless ogre, and I began to think that perhaps Stuart had been right, that perhaps here was someone whose stark deviance from whatever flimsy morals I possessed could serve as education. I watched him read the menu, eyes narrow and intent.

  I said, “How do these places manage to feel both crowded and empty at the same time?”

  “Pesto chicken pizza. Grilled tilapia in mango salsa. I wonder what they offer that’s encrusted.”

  He liked it here. Hence that aplomb, the palpable contentment oozing from his side of the booth. In a setting so rife with flaws—and it was, surely, just look—he either didn’t see them or didn’t care about them. How this contentment was related to physical stature, I wasn’t sure. But the ogre could have been anywhere and it wouldn’t have made a difference. And I had to wonder if this approach—this ambivalent comfort and brute ogre stoicism—was one of, perhaps, love? Wasn’t Casanova’s conflict one of loving too widely? Love not unlike sprawl, far-reaching and nondiscriminatory. Or Don Juan? The hostess made another pass by our table, smiling like a child’s toy.

  “Let’s order,” he said. “Sooner we order, sooner we can get on with this.”

  “This. On with this.”

  He set the menu down. “The slaughter, Potter. The destruction of every little she-girl we can get our hands on. Isn’t that what we’re here for? Stuart said you were looking to get laid.”

  I left the booth and maneuvered into the back of the restaurant. If I happened upon a restroom I would use it. I stopped at the giant fish tank and watched helpless little fish swim into and quickly back out of miniature castles. There were eyes everywhere. I turned and found a father and mother glaring up at me from their booth. When I found myself back at the booth I sat down, relieved to see the menus had been taken away.

  “I ordered you fajitas because I figure even you probably like fajitas. The surprise is gonna be chicken or beef.”

  Edsel broke off a section of bread pole and shoved it into the hole in his beard. I would have given damn near anything to grow a beard like the ogre’s. He had become a monstrous individual, and the divergence of this monstrosity from the present of middle-American kinfolk should have been stark. The bearded ogre among scores of timid men, women, and children. Instead, somehow, he managed to fit into the picture, to slide himself into their realm. And to thrive.

  “You pick up very heavy weights over and over again,” I said. “And you do it for women. That’s the motivating factor.”

  “Let me explain something very simple about this world, this shithole of ours. Whatever they say about the universe, our puny little globe is only getting smaller. The bigger I become, the more of this world I get to claim as my own.” Here the food was set in front of us. Edsel added, “Which is the whole damn point.”

  We ate without discussion and stood once the ogre declared the restaurant devoid of prospects. Outside, there was a brief moment of aimlessness before Edsel led us determinedly toward another of the restaurants, presumably in search of Emily the short bartender. I appreciated the return to movement, the sense of journey. Our paths momentarily diverged in the parking lot and we spoke over car roofs.

  “You go in there to burn things off,” I said. “So there’s got to be some level of catharsis. You go into this smelly old South City gym and direct yourself inward, testing the limits of your body. It’s got to be at least somewhat about discipline, controlled masochism.”

  “Simple math. I get bigger, world gets smaller.”

  At Crazy Sticks we ordered beers and sat at the bar, facing outward. Here, too, the clientele was dominated by families. And no Emily. Edsel appeared undaunted, silent and faithful for what the near future would hold. I was less sure.

  “Then why not just get fat? If volume is the thing, why not just eat yourself into fatness? Think about the water displacement of a fat man lowering into a tub. If it’s size you want.”

  “Fat men lack confidence. Lookit this guy here, blue shirt. Lookit his shoulders. Fat slouch.”

  “And you need confidence,” I said. “For women.”

  “For the slaughter,” he said, standing.

  Nor did Emily the bartender appear during our beer at Bighorn Steakhouse. We drank in silence until I asked what he thought Stuart had meant about Marianne, how she wanted to meet him but not me.

  “Don’t know or really care. Is she beautiful, this girl?”

  “Maybe beautiful inside,” I said.

  “And this is really bothering you, is it?”

  “A little. Yes.”

  “Must be exhausting as hell.”

  “So confidence is everything,” I said.

  “Wrong. Confidence is something, alright, but without technique it’s nothing. Lessgo.”

/>   In the car he grunted directions to a place he knew, somewhere he promised would be fruitful. I remained resoundingly unsure how I would react if confronted by a legitimately available woman. We continued quietly westward, straying deeper into the county along roads that became residential, following curves alongside enormous new-construction houses. Then back into a commercial district, car dealerships and fast-food chains and bright colorful signage. He directed me into a strip mall and I parked facing something called the Baja Beach Club. What followed would prove to be his longest and most horrifying lesson.

  “Forget the specifics of women. Sooner you stop differentiating, the sooner you realize that the women are not the point. A man’s got to start somewhere. There’s one thing I learned in Thailand it’s that the world is full of people waiting to be overpowered. Passive smiling Buddhists or bored married women or barely legal teenage girls. You get wrapped up in differences, but the point is there isn’t any difference because the techniques are the same across the board. The point is the techniques, learning the behaviors people expect. Intimidation. Physical mastery of your surroundings. False flattery as a technique, showering praise when you know praise is what someone wants. People crave praise, they feed off it. Using silence and dead air to create an awkward situation that you secretly control. There’s one thing I learned it’s that people fear silence, forces them to say something they don’t always mean. Pounce on this. Slaughter them. The technique of the wince, using your body to react to something said. Bigger body, bigger wince. You wince so they begin to doubt whatever they just said. These things work, these gestures. You get them to agree to something big, then add little things onto that something. Nibbling away. God bless the nibble. Create false deadlines. Say take it or leave it. You gotta learn the gestures and learn how people react. After that it’s simple as matching the gesture to the situation. Easy as anything in the whole world.”