1. Baseball

Ken Griffey Jr. was my hero in the fourth grade when he played minor leagues for the Bellingham Mariners. He hit homeruns over the fence at least once a game and we all worshipped him. Sometimes he came out and made dirty jokes with all of the kids who hung around outside the lockers after the games. At some point that season I paid five dollars for a complete set of the 1987 Bellingham Mariners within which was Ken Griffey Jr.'s rookie card- his real rookie card- before he moved on to Seattle the following year and became a superstar.

I think I was about eleven when Ken Griffey Jr. was supposed to show up at a little-league summer camp down somewhere in King County. By then my family had moved to Seattle. All week I'd bragged that I'd known him from when he played for Bellingham. I almost expected him to remember me. Then, on the big day, some other player came in his place. I don't remember who it was. Some shortstop or something. The Shortstop apologized that Griffey couldn't make it.

After that I stopped collecting Griffey cards. I spent my lawn mowing money on Don Mattingly instead. After a year or so I had a collection of over fifty Don Mattinglys. I have no idea where the Don Mattingly obsession came from other than that Ken Griffey Jr. had let me down. That much is obvious. Life went on.

There was a kid named Billy Cho in my middle school who collected cards like the rest of us and we would all gather in our homeroom classes and lay out our plastic-sheeted cardbooks- carefully handling the cards and trading this for that and flipping through the pricing guides like stockbrokers. Billy Cho, who was new to the school, for some reason had about a hundred Don Mattinglys. He had a bible full of Don Mattinglys. He had Don Mattinglys from Canadian card companies I'd never heard of. He even had a rookie (Fleer, I think? '81?) before Mattingly had his moustache. I tried to trade for a few of them but Billy Cho wouldn't do it. He knew what he wanted. He told me that he would trade me the entire book of Mattinglys for the 1987 Bellingham Mariners set with the priceless Griffey in it. I'd bragged about owning the set but had never actually dared bring it to school- it was too precious. Still in the wrapper. Maybe he didn't even believe I had it. But Billy Cho wanted it, and I wanted his Bible full of Mattinglys and so I brought the unopened set of cards in and we traded. Clean over. After that I was the richest Mattingly-baron in town and for a while I felt good about the trade. But not really.

Some time later Mattingly hurt himself and never won a ring. Griffey never won a ring either. So I guess none of it really matters. I lost all of my baseball cards after I went to college. Or maybe I sold them. Anyway they're gone and I haven't followed baseball in years. I could care less.

The point is this: I'm thirty years old now and my wife tells me that she wants a divorce. I think she's serious this time. She's tired of waiting for me to come around. I don't know how to talk to her about it. She yells and I yell and then I come out on the porch and smoke cigarettes and watch the dark come on. I'm going to lose her. I know it. And while I'm sitting here- and I should be upset about her, about us, about fixing my life, there's just this one scene replaying through my mind- the moment I handed Billy Cho the unopened set of 1987 Bellingham Mariners with the Griffey in it. I can still feel the unopened plastic wrapper slipping through my fingers. And I wonder- what the hell was I thinking? What the hell was wrong with me? Why can't I go back in time? Why didn't I understand how precious the thing was that I was letting go?

 

2. Golf

1.

Clarence and Matt were old friends from college who lived in the same small Western Washington town. Clarence had made it rich buying foreclosed houses and selling them at a profit and Matt worked as a cement layer, a job which paid more than he would have made with his English degree, even as a teacher. Clarence knew that Matt's wife had filed for divorce and was seeing someone else, but they hadn't talked about it. Clarence was the one who was seeing Matt's wife. He was married also. The situation was messy but the mess hadn't gotten out yet and Clarence felt all kinds of perfectly human guilt for the perfectly human things he'd done.

Meanwhile Matt hated golf. He hated rich people. He purposefully wore bluejeans to the course. He only agreed to come because Clarence had lied about having free passes and noone to golf with. He promised beer.

The two men were in their young thirties. Clarence was tall and movie-star handsome with a tan face and a clean gleaming non-smoker's smile while Matt had once been in good shape once but had now let his college-rugby muscles turn into flab. He had a habit of pinching the double chin that hung newly beneath his jaw. He didn't care about his looks anymore. He wanted to be a writer. It was a passing dream to help him forget about where he actually was. When he wasn't laying cement or fighting with his wife he hid himself in his office trying to write a novel that he had started and quit and started again five times.

The novel was about a man in a war but Matt had never been in a war and therefore the novel wasn't true, except that Matt felt every day of his five year marriage what constant conflict was like and had all that time craved relief.

They came to the first tee. The heat of the afternoon took them both by surprise. Clarence offered Matt a warm beer and the both of them drank warm beers to get going. Clarence stuck his tee in the soft earth and took some practice swings with his driver and then swung a strong fluid swing and rocketed the ball three hundred yards. He watched it land far off down the course with his hand shielding his eyes.

“I'll take that,” he said.

Then it was Matt's turn. He stepped up to the mound without much knowledge on where to put his clumsy feet or how to hold a club. He plugged the wooden tee in the earth and didn't bother to take a practice swing. He lifted and swung and was amazed when the club hit the ball and sounded the same as if he had struck it as far as Clarence. But he had not. The ball sliced high to the left, curving as though driven by a drunken pilot and fell somewhere in the rough.

“We'll find it,” said Clarence, jovially. “Have another beer.”

They found the ball. Matt was six or seven shots behind Clarence before the ball finally sunk like a stubborn bastard in the hole. Clarence had made par. Matt felt a sunburn beginning on his neck.

“I don't know what's wrong with me,” he said.

“Have another beer,” said Clarence. “We'll talk about it.”

They didn't talk about it. After the third hole Clarence tried to make light of the fact that his wife had lost her figure after having the twins. “Look at Angelina Jolie,” he said. “What the fuck?” And then he said, like a man-to-man joke, “Julia still looks great though. Be careful you don't get her pregnant. She'll lose her figure.”

They were golfing slow. Drinking as they went. At the fifth hole a group of three Japanese and an American host appeared in electric carts and asked to play through.

“Wait your goddamn turn,” said Clarence, somewhat crudely. “We reserved this tee time.”

Clarence approached the tee and once again swung high and mighty and smashed the ball three hundred yards. Matt sliced off into the trees. Clarence followed Matt to search for the ball he'd lost and they found it together. The ball had fallen like a lost stone deep in the rough. Matt almost wanted to cry. But he would never do that. Not in front of Clarence.

Which is when Clarence offered his word of advice: his Zen of golf.

“The beauty of golf,” he said, “is that it isn't really a physical sport. It's a mental sport. Before I hit, I look at the ball, then I look at where I want it to go, and then I raise my club and I completely empty my mind of everything. I just let go of all my pain and misery. A tree falls in the forest- you know the drill. Then the hammer comes down and somehow hits the ball and it almost always goes where I want it to go. That's golf. Poor golfers are the ones who overthink it.”

“Alright Clarence,” Matt said. “Let me try this.”

Matt took a six-iron from his rented bag of clubs and tried to find an angle at which to hit the fucking thing. He wanted it to get up to the green at least. He lifted his club, tried to find his nothingness place, but couldn't swing.

“Come on Matt,” Clarence said, “What's the matter now?”

Matt said, “When I lift the club, I don't feel peace- I feel pissed off. All I feel is like I want to smash the stupid ball to pieces with this goddamn stupid piece of iron.”

“That's not the way the game is played,” said Clarence.

“Did you know that Julia wants a divorce?” Matt said. “No,” Clarence told him.“What's going on?”

“She's seeing someone. I don't know who. She say's she's tired of waiting around for me to become a famous writer. She has a lawyer and everything.”

“It doesn't happen overnight,” said Clarence.

“Yeah well I'm thirty with a college degree and I pour concrete for a living. I know damn well she could do better than me. And you know the truth- I want her to. I want her to have someone who can just let her be a housewife and keep a clean house and have children to raise. That's what I want. I don't want to lose her, but I can't stand to see her stay with what I have to offer. Honest to god- I give her everything I have. And I feel like it's nothing.”

“Why the fuck do you feel so sorry for yourself?” said Clarence.

“Because I feel like I'm fighting a war that nobody is ever going to win because we're both human and human beings hurt each other worse than animals in nature do because with animals it's not personal. In nature it doesn't mean anything. With a man and a wife it's personal. Believe me. We hurt each other worse than you would think possible.”

“Listen, Matt,” said Clarence. “You've been my friend for a long time. Marriage is hard. If it's any consolation, Beth and I are having troubles of our own.”

“Like what?” said Matt. “Hot tub on the fritz?”

“Things are more complicated than I can explain,” said Clarence, and that was the last thing Matt heard before said before he was knocked out by an errant golf ball that came screaming down from heaven and struck him square in the temple. Matt dropped sideways, like a man hit headwise by a bullet.

2.

Matt, who failed as a husband, woke up in the hospital. He'd been in a coma for two months. His wife, who had filed for divorce before the accident, had received the divorce and married Clarence. The lawyer told Matt about it but the news didn't bother him like you think it would because he had a morphine drip. Funny how that works. Truth be told, Matt had known perfectly well that his wife and Clarence were better matched than he and her ever were and not only had he assumed the affair he'd sometimes wished for it in a complicated way that made him happy to think that she would be happier than he could make her.

A day following his wake-up a legal representative of a Japanese businessman named Yukio Yamashito entered the hospital room and spoke of his employer's most sincere pain at having been the one who'd teed off early and struck Matt in the temple. Matt took his condolences in the best of grace. Not only had Yukio Yamashito been paying all of Matt's medical bills (and promised to continue until his recovery was complete), the visitor handed over a certified check for one million American dollars as an apology and a promise not to sue. Matt never would have sued anyway. Matt knew that the money was little to a Japanese Billionaire but to him it meant that he could quit his job and focus on the things in his life that work and a struggling relationship had prevented him from doing.

Struggling relationships, he'd long thought, were the same as full-time jobs.

The big surprise came when Clarence and Julia came to see him in the hospital. Together. They didn't hold hands and seemed to stand apart. Matt had a bandage around his head like a turban. He'd been in intensive care for twenty-one days.

Clarence said, “I'm sorry Matt.”

“You didn't hit the ball,” Matt said.

“I mean about Julia and I.” Matt said,

“It's okay, I don't care. I hope you and Julia are happy.”

Julia looked at the bandage on his head like it hurt. Matt said, “Did you know that I am a millionaire now? Tax free?”

And Julia said, “I heard that.”

What Matt had meant to say had been a backhanded way of saying, “fuck you.” Because she couldn't touch the money. But when she answered so softly it occurred to him that Julia had in fact loved him all of that time. Money or not. He'd been wrong and that was the moment that a certain unredeemable guilt hit him in a way he would never forget. She was still beautiful and he still loved her but she stood next to Clarence and he couldn't say a word except to mumble, beneath the affects of the anesthesia, “I'm going to learn how to play golf.”

“You've got to get back on that horse,” said Clarence.

“And I'm going to finish my novel, I mean, with the time I have now.”

Julia had read all of the drafts of the novel. She'd been his editor the whole time. “So how does it end?” she asked.

“I don't think it ends with an event but a realization. I think they the soldiers fight back and forth and hurt each other in unimaginable ways and then it gets to the point where nobody stands a chance and it ends with the line...” he drifted off.

“What's the line?” said Julia.

Matt came to. He said, “There are no winners or losers in a war. There are only survivors.”

“That's a good line,” said Clarence. “Sounds like Hemmingway.”

“Sounds like a bumpersticker on a VW Bus,” said Julia

“Thanks.”

“Sorry,” she said, then to be kind she told him, “I think we're all survivors here.”

“Some in better shape than other,” said Clarence. He meant the bandage on Matt's head. It was a terrible joke.

“I hope you heal well,” Julia said.” Matt thanked her as a nurse walked in and he shut his eyes and felt the cool morphine drip came down through his arm and by the time he opened his eyes again Julia was gone. Two months later he was out of the hospital. Life went on. He heard a thing now and about her and met other women and lived other places but she never entirely left his thoughts. He always wondered if he had been the survivor or if it had been her.

 

3. Ice Fishing

I think my father worried that he had no soul. It was something that both his first and second wives had told him. Maybe I had said it too, when I was a kid. Maybe we were all correct. Or maybe that the fact that he worried that he had no soul proved that he actually did, while most of us didn't consider our souls one way or the other- we just existed and tried to do what's right but usually did what worked best for ourselves.

My father was a surgeon, well respected in town, and he spent more at the hospital than he did at home- his second home that is, with his second wife. Sometime during his second marriage I found out that he took antidepressants which affected his ability to make love to his wife. It had been three months, maybe more. I knew this because his second wife drunkenly brought it up at a family (“family?”) dinner. Everyone was embarrassed. While he was a very good doctor with a long, successful practice, I knew from enough times talking to him that there had been too many times that he'd lost patients in surgery and I knew that it haunted him that his own sad bearded face had been the last thing a human being had seen or spoken to before closing their eyes to the anesthesia and then dying on the table.

His eyes. His face. His voice telling them that it would be okay.

Then one night it happened that a patient, her aged body ridden with cancer, had died, and as he drove home he found for the first time that he felt nothing. In his heart was nothingness where there had used to be some sort of need to reach out. He pulled into the lavish mansion his second wife had made him buy.

Not realizing that he had missed a promised dinner date without calling, his second wife threw a fit and told him he was compassionless and didn't know how to love. Maybe he didn't know how to love.

Maybe he threw a fit and yelled back at her. I don't know what happened that night. But I'll tell you the truth that I never hugged my father once in all his life.

Maybe, the night she told him that he couldn't love he thought, my god, you're right. I don't know how to love. I doubt he mentioned the four hour surgery or the seventy-one year old woman who was not living anymore or her inconsolable husband- the husband who my father knew from experience wouldn't last much longer without the woman who had loved him. So I know he knew that love wasn't unreal. The lonely man's body would invent a disease. He knew that it wasn't his fault. Nobody would have ever thought it was his fault. He was an excellent surgeon and even if he wasn't the best father I respected him for being a surgeon.

It was a small town we lived in and I found out through common gossip that a year or two after his second marriage had begun my dad had had some sort of fling with a nurse named Celeste. Celeste I'd met at some sort of benefit where my father had won an award. I remember liking her immensely. I didn't understand as a thirteen year old but I understand now as a thirty year old man that he slept with her because he was lonely. People get lonely, that's a fact. I know he felt terrible about doing what he'd done and it must have been after that that he started with the antidepressants. At least that's the way I put the whole thing together. I can't imagine that he'd ever had the courage or idiocy to tell his second wife about his mistake with Celeste because he knew how spiteful she could be and because the first divorce had been so painful and because he knew that she would take everything he had. Which of course she eventually did.

Besides, he must have thought- I have no soul. Why should I have to tell her?

I know my father wrestled with things like this. His face was always brooding, staring down the road with a furrowed brow.

Maybe he shouldn't have married the second one. Maybe that was it. That was it. I know it and he knew it. On the night before his death he was driving back to the hospital on the same ice-covered eastern Washington road he'd driven every day for twenty years. I bet his second wife had told him something awful again and that he was thinking that he should have gone into business, or law, where you didn't need a soul and in fact fared better without one. Maybe if he'd had a soul and hadn't seen so many people die he would have been more understanding to that goddamn second wife when he came home late at night after sixteen hours at the hospital and she wanted to complain that something or another was broken or needed buying or updating or fixing or that a necklace he'd paid for was tacky or that he was just like his own father, whom she'd never known and neither had I, but was still my grandfather, and who she claimed didn't have a soul either. She told me that herself one time. On this night my father drove past a frozen lake where he and his father had gone ice-fishing in earlier days, back in the winters after his father had come home from his war and before my father went off to his generation's own. Those were good times, my father thought. Ice fishing. Just him and his dad.

So the next morning he called me to see if he wanted to go ice-fishing. I was born, of course, from the first marriage, and I had sided openly with my mother during the divorce, and in my teenage years I'd hated him openly and refused to speak to him for months at a time. There were times I'd hung up on him. It was childish to think like that and I regret it now. Now, as an adult, I understand what selfishness is and I understand better what happened between my father and mother. To be honest, I couldn't have lived with her either. My mother was nuts but that's a whole other story. I moved out at sixteen. Nonetheless I was thirty years old the last time I spoke to my father and nowhere near as successful- financial wise anyway. I wrestled with the soullessness thing too. When he called I didn't hide the spite that I resented that he'd called so early in the morning. I drank. That was how I dealt with those problems. He told me that he wanted to go ice fishing. Ice fishing was about the last thing in the world that I wanted to do. I said, “Sorry Dad,” and hung up and fell back asleep next to my girlfriend.

There was a sign posted on the lake warning against ice-fishing due to thin patches of ice. But it must have looked thick enough. I know about the sign but I'm imagining the rest of it: I'm picturing him lifting a heavy stone and chucking it on the frozen lake and the stone hitting hard without so much as cracking the ice. Then he goes on his way. Careful at first, then freely. He carries an electric saw and his pole and minnows for bait, a lunch of hot soup in one thermos and a second thermos of liquored coffee. He wears a thick parka, wool pants, boots and heavy gloves. The cold doesn't bother him so much. He likes the crisp air in his lungs. A flock of Canadian Geese flies in V formation overhead. He imagines the big-mouth bass in that lake. Deep as deep. My father determined to catch three of them. If I had been with him that day and caught one as well there would have been the rest of my life a framed photograph of the two of us smiling, holding our big-mouth bass.

He came to the center of the lake, which was about half a mile from the shore. The lake was nameless and was just another frozen lake in that part of the State. He was all alone out there, just a man standing on the ice with snowfall drifting slowly down while occasionally a car blurred past on the highway. He took a ball-peen hammer and chipped a gouge in the ice so that he could slide the electric saw in the hole. The ice should have been two feet thick. Good enough to sit and fish and drink his liquored coffee and soup on. Good enough for two or three hours of fishing.

Instead the saw whirred erratic and plunged through six inches or less of ice. He'd hit a shallow patch. The ice cracked around him. The ice split the way thick frosted glass breaks, held for a moment, and then broke clean through below his feet. I'm imagining this: remember that. When this really happened I was at home sleeping with my girlfriend. Without so much as a cry for help my father dropped in the water down to his armpits. Freezing water is heavier than cement and too cold to kick upward in. It stuns you.

He managed to use his pole laid across the hole to hold his shoulders and head above the broken hole. But the ice continued cracking, splintering off. A car passed by on the highway without stopping. Then another.

I don't know if any of this it true. But I imagine he lost all feeling in his legs and torso and began feeling his arms slipping from the pole and hearing the ice crack further around him. He was going to die, he thought. And so maybe he thought of his father, who would have warned him against making the hole where he did, and maybe he thought of his second wife, who he had failed somehow, and maybe he thought of his first wife, but only her as his son's mother, which is to think that maybe also he thought of me.

Once, when I was young and upset over something important at the time and I'd tried to tell him my feelings of helplessness he'd tried to explain to me somehow that misery was a part of life and that it was necessary because misery and misery alone would lead you to a palace of wisdom.

“A palace of wisdom”. I remember those words. Could he have possibly believed that? Do I believe that now?

There was a highway beside the lake in plain view and soon enough someone would stop and pull him out of the water. Please god, he thought, please god hurry. All I have to do is to get back on my feet. Nobody is going to fix my mistakes but myself. I will not let gravity pull me down. Gravity pulls us all down, he thought. Gravity takes the soulless to the bottom, he thought. I have love in my heart but that love has been frozen too long. Then he thought: when the car from the highway stops and saves him wouldn't even go home to the wife who made him feel like he wasn't worth loving but would go instead to the bank and withdraw everything and let her have the property be gone from her and the son he'd let down and he would rename himself and live somewhere on the beach in Mexico where he would fish and grow strong again and tan and meet a beautiful woman with whom he would not make the same mistakes he'd made before, and he would love her every time he saw her eyes.

And just as the fantasy came clear to him a highway patrol car passed on the highway and slowed down beside my father's Ranger. My god, he thought, my god. I'm saved. He lifted one arm from the pole to wave to the highway patrolman, who might have seen him crying for help, but when he waved with the one arm he lost his strength with the other and his body dropped. He went down. Gravity had him in its grip; he could not so much as struggle. His dream of the woman he would love in Mexico blinked away and he remembered instead the people he'd failed and the mistakes he'd made and the n came the self-pity of dying- of knowing he was dying- which was incredible to him, almost orgasmic, and then he swallowed a mouth full of freezing water and felt his lungs fill with its stunning freeze and he did not take a second breath. His pole and thermoses and pack fell into the water after him and the patrolman who had stopped didn't notice the broken ice out in the center of the lake or the boot tracks leading to it. The patrolman contacted dispatch to find out if a Ford Ranger had been reported missing.

My father sank down to the bottom, slowing before soft hit- silent as a moon landing, with his arms over his head and his legs pointed downward. He was new to the bottom. The big-mouths were down there. They investigated him. Carpie and Steelhead too. His pole landed gently across his chest.

Once the ice thawed they dragged the lake and found him remarkably preserved- due to the cold. His second wife got everything and I've spent the years since wondering how things would have turned out if I'd agreed to go ice-fishing with his father that day. When I get down about thinking about him, I remind myself that up in heaven my father doesn't have to worry if he has a soul anymore. Up in heaven he is dead.