the time until it was too late to call her trying to translate the dialogue back into English. Two days went by with her leaving him messages and his not calling her back, then three. Then a day came when there was no message from her, and a second day on which she didn’t call, and a third and a fourth and then he lost count.
The evening the traveling secretary called him, he was dozing in his room, dreaming: riding with his father in a Studebaker he had owned before Edward Everett was in kindergarten; although it was just his father and himself, Edward Everett sat in the backseat. His father was smoking, although Edward Everett had never seen him do so in life, but when he tried to open the window, the crank was missing. They were on a dirt road, racing past a line of barbed-wire fencing that seemed to serve no purpose, as the land bordering the road was overgrown with tall weeds that whipped the car’s windows as they sped past. Edward Everett was trying to say Slow down, slow down but, for some reason, couldn’t speak, and they hurtled onward.
After he got off the phone with the traveling secretary, he went into the bathroom. At first, he thought he would splash water on his face to wake himself a bit more but, standing at the sink, he realized he needed to shower, that he hadn’t shaved for days and his hair was unkempt, much longer than he usually kept it. A beatnik, his mother would say. He wondered if the team would be angry he had charged so many hamburgers and grapefruit to the room. With chagrin, he remembered that one day he had signed for a ten-dollar tip on a three-dollar check for a waitress who told him he was her last table before she moved back to Manitoba to care for her ill mother. He wondered if they would punish him for it. The owner was wealthy; would he even miss the money? But he didn’t get wealthy letting his injured, marginal players live extravagantly.
The plane ticket the traveling secretary couriered to the hotel was for a flight to St. Louis at ten the next morning; from there, he would have to make his own arrangements. It occurred to him he had no place to go. He had given up his room in Springfield, had no home in St. Louis; he had no idea what his future was going to be. He would have to go back to the town where he’d been raised, where he hadn’t been in years save for brief visits in the off-seasons. He phoned the front desk, asked for long-distance and gave the operator his mother’s number. He wasn’t sure what she’d make of his calling her, telling her that he would need someone to pick him up at the Columbus airport—a hundred miles away—but the phone just rang and rang at her house until he hung up.
He thought again of calling Julie, but what would he say? What a shit he was for not calling her, he thought. Not long ago telling her—in a Catholic church, of all places—that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her, but now, sitting on the edge of the bed they’d shared, he had a hard time conjuring her face. He remembered her eyes were blue, but what he recalled was the fact of it, a detail she might list on her driver’s license, not an image of her eyes themselves. Her hair was, what? She was how tall?
Outside, the sky was darkening, perhaps rain moving in. Indeed, after a moment, sporadic drops were splashing against his windows and then a full-blown storm was lashing the glass. Lightning brightened the sky and seconds later thunder cracked. He stripped off his clothes, turned on the shower and, after he finished, dressed and went downstairs for his last dinner in another country.
Chapter Six
The lobby swarmed with men in dark suits and women in formal dresses: a wedding party crowding into the hotel, drenched from the rain, shaking out umbrellas that sprayed everyone, their shoes leaving dark spots on the carpet. The men and women were giddy: the storm would become a story the bride and groom would tell for long thereafter. Twenty years from then, with the way stories grew, maybe they would describe their reception as a party in the midst of God’s fury.