There There(22)

    He got hired at the coliseum in 1989, after doing five years at San Quentin for stabbing a guy outside a biker bar on Fruitvale down by the railroad tracks. It wasn’t even Bill’s knife. The stabbing was coincidental, it was self-defense. He didn’t know how the knife ended up in his hand. Sometimes you just did things, you acted or reacted the way you needed to. The problem had been that Bill couldn’t get his own story straight. The other guy had been less drunk. Had a more consistent story. So Bill took the fall. It was his knife somehow in the end. He was the one with a history of violence. The crazy AWOL Vietnam vet.

But jail had been good to Bill. He read almost the whole time he was in. He read all the Hunter S. Thompson he could get his hands on. He read Hunter’s lawyer, Oscar Zeta Acosta. He loved The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo and The Revolt of the Cockroach People. He read Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Carver and Faulkner. All the drunks. He read Ken Kesey. He loved One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He was pissed when they made the movie and the Native guy, who was the narrator of the whole book, just played the crazy silent stoic Indian who threw the sink through the window at the end. He read Richard Brautigan. Jack London. He read history books, biographies, books about the prison system. Books about baseball, football. California Native history. He read Stephen King and Elmore Leonard. He read and kept his head down. Let the years dissolve the way they could when you were somewhere else inside them, in a book, on the block, in a dream.

    Another good year that came out of bad times for Bill was 1989, when the A’s swept the San Francisco Giants. When, in the middle of the World Series, just before the start of Game 3, the earth slipped. Dropped. Quaked. The Loma Prieta earthquake killed sixty-three people, or sixty-three people died because of it. The Cypress freeway collapsed, and someone drove right off the Bay Bridge, where a section had collapsed in the middle. That was the day baseball saved lives in Oakland and in the greater Bay Area. If more people hadn’t been at home, sitting around the TV, watching the game, they would have been on freeways, they would have been out in the world, where it was collapsing, just falling apart.



* * *



—

Bill looks back to the outfield. And right in front of him, floating down to his eye level, out there in the bleachers with him, is a tiny plane. Or hadn’t Bill seen one before? He has, it’s a drone. A drone plane like they’d been flying into terrorist hideouts and caves in the Middle East. Bill swats at the drone with his trash-grabber. The thing floats back, then turns around and floats down to where he can’t see it. “Hey!” Bill finds he’s yelling at the drone. And then he turns to walk up the stairs, up to the corridor that’ll get him to the stairs that lead down to the field.

When he gets to the top of the stairs at the first deck, plaza infield, he pulls out his binoculars, scans the field for the drone, and finds it. He walks down the stairs, tries to keep it in his scope, but it’s hard while walking, the binoculars shake, and the thing keeps moving. Bill sees that it’s headed for home plate. He skips down the stairs. He hasn’t gotten moving this fast in years. Maybe decades.

    Bill can see it with his eyes now. He’s running, trash-grabber in hand. He’ll destroy the thing. Bill still has fight, grit, hot blood running—he can still move. He steps onto the brown-red dirt. The drone is at home base, it’s turning toward Bill as he runs toward it. He readies his trash-grabber, raises it in the air behind him. But the drone sees him just as he gets in range. It flies back. Bill gets a hit in and sets the thing wobbly for a moment. He lifts his trash-grabber again, comes down hard, and misses entirely. The drone flies straight up, quick, ten and twenty, fifty feet in seconds. Bill gets his binoculars back out, watches the drone fly out over the rim of the coliseum.





Calvin Johnson





WHEN I GOT HOME from work I found Sonny and Maggie waiting for me at the kitchen table with dinner made and set. Maggie’s my sister. I’m just living here until I can save enough. But I like being around her and her daughter. It’s like being back at home. Home like we can’t have it anymore. Since our dad left, just disappeared. Really he hadn’t been there all along. But our mom acted like he had. Like him leaving was the end. It wasn’t really about him or any of us. She’d been undiagnosed for too long. That’s what Maggie said.

Being bipolar is like having an ax to grind with an ax you need to split the wood to keep you warm in a cold dark forest you only might eventually realize you’ll never make your way out of. That’s the way Maggie put it. She got it like me and my brother didn’t. But she’s medicated. Managed. Maggie, she’s like the key to the history of our lives. Me and my brother, Charles, we hate and love her like you end up feeling about anyone nearest to you who’s got it.

    Maggie made meat loaf and mashed potatoes, broccoli—the usual. We ate in silence for a while, then Sonny kicked me in the shin under the table, hard, then played it straight, kept eating her dinner. I played it straight too.

“This is good, Maggie, tastes like Mom’s. Isn’t this good, Sonny?” I said, then smiled at Sonny. Sonny didn’t smile back. I leaned into a bite, held it over my plate, then tapped Sonny in the shin with my foot.

Sonny broke a smile, then laughed because she’d broken a smile. She kicked me again.