Lewis Shiner - Match.pdf - Lewis Shiner - allforjesus2001

MATCH

BY LEWIS SHINER

T WAS A GOOD SUMMER for tennis, hot and clear. I was newly

divorced and working at home and had my mornings free. My partner was a

radiologist from St. David’s on the second shift. We played two sets a day,

three if we could take the heat.

Afternoons I cranked up the headphones and sat down at the drawing table.

I had discovered heavy metal. The louder the better—it kept my mind on my

work instead of my marriage. This week work was one of those new fruit-

juice-and-fizzy-water drinks called Tropical Blizzards. I started sketching a

layout with a sweating tennis player. Right arm straight overhead, wrist

cocked, body lunging forward. Face knotted in concentration. I worked on

the face until I could see the heat in it. Brutal heat, murderous heat.

Suddenly it was my father’s face.

I saw him clutch his chest and go down. My hand started to shake and the

pencil lead snapped off.

DIDN’T SLEEP MUCH that night. In the morning I called my parents in

Houston and my father answered.

“It’s me,” I said.

“Me who?”

“It’s the goddamn Easter bunny, who do you think it is?”

“My only begotten son. Big deal.” From his tone of voice I was supposed

to figure he was kidding.

“I’m driving up for a meeting on Saturday. Thought I’d stay through the

weekend if that’s okay.”

“I don’t care. Talk to your mother.” The phone clunked on the table.

Distantly I heard him say, “It’s your son.”

“Hi darling,” my mother said. “How are you?”

“I’m fine, Mom. Just thought I’d come up for the weekend.”

“Of course. Your room’s made up and ready.”

I was thirty-six. I hadn’t lived with my parents in nineteen years. “I’ll be in

Friday afternoon. I don’t know what time, so don’t panic if I’m not there for

dinner, okay?”

“Yes, dear,” my mother said.

INNER AT MY PARENTS’ HOUSE was five PM sharp, in time for

the evening news. I walked in as my mother set the TV tray in front of

my father. Leftover pot roast, potatoes and gravy, canned green beans boiled

for hours with hunks of bacon fat. I had a gray canvas bag in my left hand,

with the handle of my racket sticking out.

My mother hugged me and said, “So, you’re just going to let your hair

grow now, is that it?” She was short, with a small pot belly and short hair dyed

L E W I S S H I N E R

an odd sandy color. I got my gray hair from her. I already had more of it than

my father did at sixty-eight.

“Nice to see you too, Mom.”

My father squinted at me from his recliner. He wore a napkin tucked in

over his shirt when he ate. He would have been six foot one, half an inch taller

than me, if he ever stood up straight. He seemed to be devolving into some

prototypical Texan ancestor, with long sideburns and hair combed straight

back off his forehead. It made his nose seem to reach out toward his chin.

“Can you believe this crap? Thirty-two stations and not a goddamn thing

worth watching.”

“Great to see you too,” I said.

“There’s the same shitty stations you get without cable. Then there’s three

stations of niggers shouting at each other. Two stations of messkins. Two

movie channels showing the same three movies over and over again. Rock and

roll and country western on the rest. If it wasn’t for sports I don’t know why

anybody would bother.”

“Try some crack,” I said. “That’s how the rest of us manage.”

He looked at the bag. My left hand clenched reflexively. “What’s that?

You’re not trying to play tennis again, are you?”

“I’ve got a client here who plays.”

“I wouldn’t think it was good business to look like a jerk in front of

somebody wants to give you money.”

“Maybe I’ve been practicing.”

“There’s not enough practice in the world.” He took a dainty bit of meat,

then held the remote control out at arm’s length. He switched through the

channels, giving them no more than a couple of seconds each. His entire

attention was on the screen.

“Is that all you brought?” my mother said, finally noticing the bag.

“I’m just staying the weekend.”

“Could you two keep it down to a dull roar?” my father said. “I’m trying to

watch a program here.”

MAY NOT have given much of a presentation the next morning, but I was

hell on the tennis court. My client took me out to River Oaks and I

slaughtered him 6-1, 6-0. As a career move, it was not exactly brilliant. I didn’t

care. I kept hearing my father say there wasn’t enough practice in the world.

I came back to my parents’ house drenched in sweat and flushed from the

sun. “How’d it go?” my mother asked, meaning the presentation, of course.

I pretended to misunderstand. “Okay. My serve’s a little off and I can’t seem

to get enough power out of my backhand.”

“You’re probably not swinging through,” my father said, not looking up

from the TV. “You always did chop your backhand.”

My father had his first heart attack the summer after my junior year in high

school. He was playing tennis with one of his students in 100-degree heat. My

father won the first and third sets, and then he lit up a Roi-Tan cigarillo and

sucked in a big lungful of smoke. He said he felt something then, like a hunger

pain, so he went home and had a banana and a glass of milk. Finally he went to

bed and my mother called the doctor. I remember him lying there, white and

Match

shaking. Scared, I guess. Another half hour, the doctor said, and he would have

died. I used to think about that a lot.

I looked at my father and said, “Maybe I need a lesson.”

“Maybe you do.”

My mother said to him, “You can’t go on a tennis court. It would kill

you.”

“Says who?”

“Says Dr. Clarendon.”

“It’s not going to kill me to go out and look at his backhand.”

My mother turned to me. The look said don’t let him do this. If you let

him do this I’ll never forgive you.

I thought about the time I ran away from home. It was the year after his

heart attack. My mother promised we’d get counseling, talked me into coming

back. The counselor turned out to be Dr. Clarendon. Mom took my father’s

side, and lied to protect him. Funny how things like that can still jerk your

emotions around, even after twenty years.

I looked at my father. “Great,” I said. “We’ll go out tomorrow morning.”

LAY AWAKE past midnight in the tiny twin bed. Finally I told myself I

wouldn’t go through with it. I’d let the old man coach me a little and we’d

come home. It bought me a few hours’ sleep.

My father looked ten years younger Sunday morning. He wore his plain

white tennis shorts and T-shirt to the breakfast table. Only queers, of course,

wore all those bright colored outfits. He leaned forward and slurped loudly at

his Shredded Wheat. “You’re not dressed yet,” he said.

“My stuff is in the wash.” I’d brought blue shorts and a red T-shirt, just to

stimulate his blood pressure.

“I thought we were playing this morning .” My father had been compulsively

early all his life. If I said nine o’clock, he was impatient and angry by eight-

thirty.

“Let your breakfast settle,” I said. I couldn’t eat. I choked down some

orange juice and felt it eat through my stomach lining.

I kept him waiting until ten. The temperature was already in the 80s and

the air was like wet cotton. I drove us out to the courts we’d used when I was

at Rice. They had fabric nets and a good composite surface, green inside the

baselines and brick red outside. Pine trees grew right up to the fence and

dropped their needles on the backcourt. I could smell pine sap baking in the

heat.

I got a bucket of tennis balls out of the trunk. “Haven’t you got anything

but those goddamn green balls?” My father was headed for the far court,

working his arm in a circle. He had an ancient Jack Kramer wood racket, still

in the press.

I carried the bucket to the other baseline. “They don’t make white balls

anymore. They haven’t for ten years. You might as well forget about it.”

“TV made them do that. You can’t see a green ball as well as a white one.”

He threw the racket press aside, slashed the air with the racket. “You’ve got

no depth perception on it. All it does is show up better on a TV screen.”

L E W I S S H I N E R

“The players like them better. The human eye sees green better than any

other color. Scientific fact.”

“Bullshit. Don’t tell me about science. What do you know about science?”

My father was a structural engineer. He worked on survey teams all through

high school in the 30s. He laid the course for I-35 all the way from Dilley,

where his mother grew up, to the Mexican border. He joined the corps to get

free tuition at A&M’s engineering school, and when the beatings and hazing

got too bad he convinced a maiden aunt to send him to UCLA. He was a self-

made man, the son of dirt-poor Texas farmers, and he’d fought his way up to a

tenured professorship at Rice University. He tended to not let anyone forget

it.

REMEMBERED PLAYING CANASTA with my father as a child, his

smearing the cards together on the table because I was beating him, the

cards bending and tearing, me starting to cry in helpless rage.

I tried to serve like a precision robot, hating myself because I didn’t just

walk away. My father crouched inside his baseline, leaning theatrically from

side to side, swatting my serves long or into the net, not trying for the ones

that were out of reach. After every serve he would point out what I did

wrong, over and over, in a bored voice.

The bucket was empty. I started to gather up the balls. My father could

have helped, but instead he watched, smiling sarcastically. I was painfully aware

of my ass sticking out as I bent over. We traded sides and I picked up the rest

of the balls. I stood on the baseline with the bucket next to my feet.

We’d played doubles with his students here, every playable Sunday, no

matter how tired or hung over I was. I’d learned to pray for rain. My father

had recovered from the heart attack and promised my mother he wouldn’t

overdo. I remembered the way he gloated over every point we won, and rode

home in brooding silence if we lost.

“Waiting for something?” my father asked.

I bounced the ball with my left hand. It was the same motion as the toss,

except the opposite direction. The idea was to focus on it. I couldn’t focus. All

I could hear was my heart, beating like crazy. I want it, I thought. I want it

now.

“How about a game?” I said.

“Don’t make me laugh. I can still kick your ass, on or off the court.”

Twenty years ago, just out of the hospital, he’d said the same thing. He

hadn’t even made it into the house yet. He stood wobbling in the driveway,

weak, gray-skinned, barely able to walk, threatening to kick my ass. Just the

memory of it made my breath come fast.

I rubbed sunscreen on my arms and legs, then put sweatbands on my head

and wrists. My father wolf-whistled. “Hey, bathing beauty. Any time you want

to play some tennis.”

I took two balls out of the bucket. I shoved one in my left pocket and

squinted across the court. I was so pissed off I could feel it like something sharp

stuck in my throat. I served at my father as hard as I could.

He stepped out of the way and said, “You still serve like a girl. Get that toss

higher.”

Match

“Prove it, old man.”

I’d never said anything like it before, not to anybody. I felt the racket shiver

in my hand.

“Serve ‘em up,” my father said. The look in his eyes was final. I’d done

something that couldn’t be undone. I felt like I was on a deserted stretch of

interstate with the pedal all the way to the floor.

I picked out three balls and carried the bucket to the side of the court. I

rolled one ball back to the chain link fence, put one in my left hand pocket. I

leaned forward, bouncing the third in front of me.

I tossed the ball for the serve. My hand shook and the ball curved back over

my head. I swung at it anyway and hit it into the net.

My father took one step closer.

I tried to get my breathing to even out. I couldn’t get my breath at all. I

took the second ball out of my pocket and bounced it, thinking, relax, relax. I

pressed the ball into the racket head as I started my backswing. It felt all

wrong. The toss was too low and I hit into the net again.

Double fault. My father straightened up and walked over to the ad court. I

went to the net and picked the balls up, slapping the second with the racket so

I could snag it out of the air. It got away from me. I chased after it, feeling my

father’s eyes on me the whole time.

“Love fifteen,” I said. I pictured the serve in my mind and took a practice

swing. I tossed the ball and hit it long.

“Back,” my father said.

I was a little kid again, ugly, clumsy, with patches on my jeans and silver

caps on my front teeth. I hated that little kid with everything I had. I got out

the second ball and made a perfect, unselfconscious swing. The ball hit inside

the line on my father’s backhand. He jumped at it, took a stiff swing, and

knocked it into the fence behind me.

I collected the balls and moved to the deuce court. “Fifteen all,” I said. The

first serve went in and my father hit it sharply down the backhand line. I got to

and hit it crosscourt, thinking, run, you bastard, run. He stretched to make it,

his shoes squealing as he turned. The ball floated back to me like a wounded

bird. I hit it deep to his forehand. He chased it and didn’t get there in time.

The knot in my guts loosened and the piney air tasted sweet and cool. I

aced the next point and on the next my father hit into the net. It was my

game. We changed sides and I put the balls on my father’s outstretched racket.

The sun started to bear down. There were only a couple of dry places on

my father’s shirt, high on his chest. “Think you can serve?” I asked. The

doctors took a lump out of his lung five years ago and he still complained

about the pain in his shoulder muscles.

“Good enough for you,” he said.

He took a few practices. His backswing had a hitch in it and he couldn’t get

any height or power. The few balls that got over had no pace. My father saw

where the serves hit and got a look in his eyes that I’d only seen once before.

It was after his second heart attack, when they brought him into the ICU. He

had an oxygen tube up one nostril and a catheter coming out from under the

sheet. My mother said, “Well, dear, you’re just going to have to take it a little

easier.” My father looked like a dying shark, hanging from the scales, eyes

bitter and black and empty.

Lewis Shiner - Match.pdf

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