Free Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas Page B

smoke.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œNothing.”
    He pushed at the doorbell again and heard it ring in his head. I’d never seen a picture of my grandfather, but it had been said that he looked nothing like my old man. He never said much about his people at all except that they were
“hard people . . . mean people
. . .” That they used to own a town but were swindled out of it and had to move to northern Florida. The only one in his family he ever really loved was his maternal grandmother. She was the daughter of a medicine man. He only saw her once. My mother would roll her eyes or leave the room when he talked about her or how he thought that his father, who one day disappeared, was alive somewhere in the swamps.
    â€œWhen the war came, they let him practice upstairs.”
    â€œThen he got sick?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œNothing.”
    â€œHow are you—you keeping your chin up?”
    Marco’s just taken out the trash. He’s on the stoop wearing a T-shirt, baggy shorts, and flip-flops. He sees me and waves. When I get closer, he points at my coffee.
    â€œStaying up tonight?”
    â€œJust a prop.”
    He thumbs at the doorway. “Sox are on replay.”
    Inside, the foyer lights are on low—halogen, recessed. They make the hall seem to curve where the walls meet the floor and ceiling—and it lengthens—a tube of soft light rimmed by shadow.
    â€œCome on. Take a break.”
    I sip the coffee. It’s weak and bitter. I haven’t watched a game all summer; perhaps out of self-punishment, perhaps because the game is no longer the game of my childhood, or perhaps it is and I’m no longer a boy. Somehow baseball lost its charm. I found it hard to root for corporate-sponsored mercenaries. From boy to man my feelings have turned from awe to envy to spite.
    My father took me to Fenway. He’d watched the Braves as a boy. He’d seen Ruth’s last at bats. Then the Braves left and he became a Sox fan. He told me about the old park and the tradition: Young, Foxx, Doerr, Pesky, Williams, and what Yaz was like as a rookie.
“He won the triple crown the year you were born
—
what a year.”
He’d tell me stories—the curse, the Impossible Dream team—in that baritone crooner, Lucky Strike voice. Finally, one day he put me on his shoulders and walked us along the Charles to Kenmore Square, up Brookline Avenue, the bridge over the Mass Pike. We looked down at the cars speeding inbound and out. And then up to Lansdowne Street and the Monster with the net above. I got dizzy looking up at it in the vendor yells and smells. It seemed as though he knew, so we didn’t go in right away. He put me down among the legs and cart wheels and then disappeared up into the bodies and heads. When he returned, he handed me a sausage in a bun, flicking the peppers and onions off for me as he knelt. I ate it as we walked around the ballpark, east, behind the right-field bleachers, and then down the line toward home. I haven’t taken C yet. He hasn’t shown much interest—the Brooklyn boy. It was all I could do to keep Yankee paraphernalia out of the house—banners, hats, balls with imprints, bobble-head dolls, goodie bags from birthday parties. Once we burned a hat on the roof of our building and then tuned into the game on the radio. He fell asleep in his chair, the game he’d never played, the grandfather he barely knew, the field he’d never seen; all abstractions to him.
    â€œCome on. They haven’t tanked yet,” Marco says while repositioning a garbage can. They haven’t, but they will. They always do in amanner so predictable that I can’t see it coming—the implosion. It’s late night. They’ll show a compressed version of the earlier live broadcast. I’ve heard some compare baseball to opera. Some have said that the Red Sox’s story is tragic. This replay then—only the