"Do you have a car?"
"What?"
"Do you have a car?"
"What do you want to know about if I have a car?"
"Fifty dollars and what I've got here for my Dodge."
"What?"
"Just keep ringing up the Swanson's."
There were about ten in all. Ten Swanson's. Salisbury steak and fried chicken and turkey with gravy and nuggets. She gave me strange looks as she rung them up.
"Ring them up and we'll go outside and I'll show it to you."
It was my Dodge all right. Won it in Reno, drove it here and made it just fine, about fifteen hours of driving. It didn't stall once. She just kept shaking the freezer burn off and ringing them up and giving me this look. I cleaned her out on them. It was a little place with a little freezer. A lot of these places in this town. I needed towns like this.
"OK," she said. "$27.50. Now let's see this fifty dollar job."
I grabbed the bags and we headed out front to the Dodge. It was rusted over good, but, like I said, it runs great.
"It's a pile of junk," she said.
"It's fifty dollars and it runs like a Lexus. This ain't junk, it's a saint. A Mother Teresa. Get in. I'll show you how she prays."
"I can't get in," she says. "I've got a store to run."
"Listen lady," I say. "You can take your $27.50 and forget about this here Mother Teresa and go back into that store and never know what you passed up. I just need the money right now, and, shit, it kills me, but I'm willing to let this baby go."
She got in.
I started her up and she took it just fine. Hummed, didn't shake.
The woman nodded.
I said, "Look here lady," and I zipped her down and shook her my winky.
She got out.
I pulled into traffic.
It worked pretty well actually. It was either of two things. The lady would freak out and I'd have a weeks worth of food, or they'd be so husband sick that we'd work it out together and they'd forget about the money. I'm not out to get into their pants. Most of them have bikini lined stretch marks. But I am out to feed myself and I can't do that off of umpiring three peewee games a wee at fifty dollars a game.
I headed towards Mario's to see if Shelly was working. I met her at a grocery last weekend. She was looking over Campbell's soups and I was taking some. She was twenty-eight and I was twenty-five, and she was different. And she looked good and was almost intimidating, almost. She told me I could stop by Mario's and watch her do tables and that maybe she could get me a pasta dish. I stopped by once, watched her do tables, and she couldn't get me anything. She told me I could come back. I was headed back.
Mario said she was in the back. She'd be out in a few minutes and she had a few tables, but she'd be on break soon. He was a good man, round and polite and didn't seem to mind if I hung around. I didn't want the patrons to see me so I stepped outside, stood at the corner and lit a cigarette. I watched her serve on the patio. She noticed me and waved and gave me the five minute signal. I waved back and gave her an OK.
For five minutes I smoked and tried to keep my face out of the afternoon traffic. I had done about eight or nine groceries so far and I didn't want anyone to catch a look at me. I'd been in Moab about two months already and it was going to be either I move on or start stiffing restaurants. I thought moving on may be better. I thought, maybe Flagstaff.
Five minutes. I stepped out my cigarette and went back into Mario's. We sat inside in the party room. She had twenty minutes and a dish of pasta and a few meatballs. We were alone.
"How's it been?" I asked.
"OK. Not any good tips, but nobody's complained or anything. I forgot a drink and they were nice about it."
Shelly dug in and twisted her fork through a pile of pasta. Sucked it in and left a bit of red on her chin. I got it with a napkin.
"What'd you do with your day?"
I beat around it a bit. Told her I did some shopping, not much, that I woke late. I read a little bit and took a walk.
I said, "Listen. I'm doing a game at four, but I should be done by seven. I could use company tonight. No sex. Just maybe we could listen to the radio and have a few drinks."
She gave me a look of half interest.
"I've got a decent sized place and sometimes staring at the walls just doesn't do the trick. We could drink some. I could read to you." I could read to you? I felt young.
She said OK. She was covering an extra four hour shift and would be out at nine. She had to get back to tables. She pushed the plate towards me and said that Mario wouldn't mind if I sat there a while. I finished the whole plate and licked the sauce. It was real food, not a frozen dinner or Chinese noodles. I left the plate there. I'd be back at nine.
The game went quick. An 11-0 forfeit. Dodgers over Twins. Eighth graders. Both coaches came out, handed me twenty-five dollars each and told me I was the best ump the league had.
"Jack, I'm gonna try and get you more games," the Dodger coach said. "These kids need a read eye. They need a pro."
I didn't know if this was a blessing or bad luck.
I hoped I still had some luck.
I kept the face mask on until I reached the Dodge. A few Dodger parents shook my hand and offered to take me for a beer. I told them I was busy, thanked them, got into the Dodge, took the mask off, lit a cigarette and decided to spend a few hours at my place before heading to Mario's.
She brought out a paper bag with a big fat red pizza on it and a bottle and got in. Her hair was short and seemed more disheveled than before. She put the bag in the back seat and took her shoes off.
She gave me a kiss.
"The bottle," I said. What else could I say? It caught me off guard. Intimidating.
"It's a cheap bottle of wine I swiped when Mario wasn't looking."
"White or red?" I asked before I realized I didn't know a goddamned thing about wine and even if I did it wouldn't make any difference.
"Does it matter?" she asked.
We could really use that bottle.
I pulled out and drove down the main street. It was dark but the stores were all lit up and people were walking by and window shopping, and the street was full of cars. It was a fairly small town, but it had life.
We stopped for a red.
"Shit," I said and slammed my face into her lap.
"What?" Shelly asked. "What?"
I could feel her looking around. Her legs shifted as her head jerked back and forth. A grocery woman was in a car at the other side of the intersection with a fat man in the driver's seat. The last thing I needed was to be seen, not to mention a street fight with a four hundred pounder.
"Go," Shelly said.
I gave it the gas.
We took the Dodge all the way back to my place with her steering and my foot on the gas and brake. All the way down the main road, twelve lights, all red, a right on Rivington and a right on Moab Drive.
"Christ, Jack. What was that all about?"
I needed that bottle.
I told her I didn't have a radio. I didn't. So I read to her. I began reading Dostoyevsky. Dostoyevsky? Dostoyevsky. And she sat with it and we ate and drank and ate and drank some more. And soon after, Dostoyevsky was watching us dance from the kitchen table. He watched us dance around and sing, both of us full up on pasta and wine.
And she sang, "I am the pasta queen. I can serve anything." And she picked up plates and paraded around the apartment holding them, empty, on her hands and wrists and forearms. While she did this, I stripped down to my jeans and put on my pads and face mask and stumbled around her and watched her dance. She'd drop a plate here and there, and we'd dance around the pieces.
Two goddamned freaks shouting like fat ladies, not worried about the Moab cops or the landlady.
We went to sleep together, and she asked about the driving game. Somehow I knew, and I told her the whole thing in detail. When I was done I even flashed her the payment plan for effect.
She laughed and said I was brilliant.
She kept on at Mario's and I kept on doing games and running to the Dodge wearing my mask. I was up to about five games a week. Two hundred and fifty dollars. She was bringing in big bags every night, and she'd swipe a bottle once a week. We were doing better than OK. I hadn't done a grocery in weeks. We bought a radio, and I was doing almost all of the games for the league. Pretty soon she told Mario she didn't need to do tables anymore, and she settled in at my place and had her own recipe pasta dishes waiting after I got off games.
We talked about where we'd been and where we started out. She was from Vegas, a show girl at nineteen and for four more years, and then she split with the cash she'd saved. She moved around the midwest a bit and was on a bus to L.A. when it busted down in Moab, so she stayed. She'd been here two more weeks than I had and didn't know many people. She called most of them fat racists. She said they gave White Trash a bad name.
They did.
If there was one thing we'd both learned along our way, it was don't fuck with something that was working.
I wasn't planning to.
She was spending more and more time at home, cooking pasta dishes and listening to the radio, while I was off handling parents and little screaming children with bats and helmets. I was getting many more games and these little things were starting to get on my goddamned nerves. If something didn't go their way, they were all man about it.
"Where's your fucking eyes, Ump?
"Keep your head on the game, son. You're too young to be saying shit like that!"
But the fathers had the little bastards going.
"You tell him, little Bobby. You tell him who he's calling this game for!"
It seemed like things were beginning to get out of hand, but they were still giving me more games just to squat for a few hours and make petty decisions. I was the god in their world. I called the shots. I dictated them. Hell, I created them.
The weeks were rolling by. The end of the season was nearing and I was going to have to figure out what I was going to do after the series. I knew I had some extra money coming in during the series. They paid a twenty-five dollar bonus for each series game ump'd.
I was scheduled to do all of them.
I thought maybe I could do some basketball games during the winter, but the peewee coaches were telling me that the kids didn't show much of an interest. There wouldn't be all the many games.
Maybe Mario would hire Shelly back.
I came in limping.
"Christ, honey. What happened?"
"A goddamned little shit caught me with a bat."
"You mean he hit you?"
"Yes. Yes. He threw the bat and it caught my knee."
"Well, did he do it intentionally?"
I didn't answer. I couldn't care less if the little prick did it intentionally or not. The fact was it happened and I left the game without pay. She understood. She didn't ask anymore, and she brought me a drink. She was cooking a dish and it smelled good. I needed it. I was scared about the season coming to an end.
"Honey, let's do something," she said. "All I do is read or listen to the radio. I used to think that I liked the radio, but it's making me sick. It's like I'm becoming allergic to the static, like I'm going to vomit."
"Go window shopping?"
"No. Something different."
"Different. Do you forget where we live?"
We spoke a bit more about what we could do, finished up on the pasta and drank some.
When we were done we opened another bottle. I got a call from someone off the committee who was running the games. She said I was becoming too loud with the kids and that I could finish out the series but would be losing my bonus. I hung up.
Shelly was sitting in a chair across the room with her legs spread out under her dress, hanging over the arms. She hit off the bottle.
"I've got an idea," she said.
Pretty soon we were in the Dodge driving through town looking for a new grocery store. She had the bottle and was on it hard. It impressed me. This wasn't a very good idea, I thought. We should be headed somewhere else. But it wasn't just about that-sooner or later we'd need to eat. It was that she wanted this experience and somehow I just couldn't deny her.
We found one.
I parked the car around the corner, and we went in.
We hadn't planned this. We were both very drunk. We walked around the store picking up cans and bags, things we wouldn't even need. I put a six pack in. She grabbed two of those twisted plastic straws. We filled up and took it to the counter. We were the only ones in the place, us and the woman behind the counter. She looked at us through her pimpled middle aged face. The Dodge routine wasn't going to work. She could have heard about the scam from the other grocery women.
The woman began ringing the items up and put them into paper sacks. Shelly looked at me and giggled a bit, then turned back to the woman with a straight face.
"Do you have a car?" Shelly asked.
I panicked.
I zipped down and flashed the lady my winky. Shelly was hysterical. She grabbed the sacks and ran out laughing the whole way.
I couldn't help it.
I stood there shaking my winky at her pimpled face. I just kept shaking it until she just fell down behind the counter and I ran out without even putting him away.
Shelly was in the driver's seat. I got in. She pulled out. I tucked it back into my pants and we headed home.
She said she was going back to Mario to see if he had anything for her. She thought if she could pick something up we might be able to get by on the few basketball games I could do, the food and wine she could bring home and any cash she made. I had a game later that day and was hoping that maybe one of the coaches could overlook the past few weeks and find some generosity. I'd see her after the game.
It was the third game out of the last series. Hopefully there would be two more to go. Dodgers against Rangers. I thought I was OK. The Dodger coach had always liked me and always offered me a beer after the games. I thought luck had taken a better turn and decided to settle down this game, maybe call things a little his way.
The kids were into it, playing like men. Furious. The coaches were screaming, the kids were screaming back and every once in a while a Dodger would run down to first on a base on balls. Generosity. The give and take.
The kids were looking at me hard. Again, if things weren't going their way, they'd turn to the god and try to spit on my legs or they'd give me the finger. I just kept trying to think about keeping myself in this and how the cash was needed.
About halfway through the fourth, a Ranger made it to second on a steal. I called it for the Dodgers.
I screamed long and hard. "Out!"
"What the fuck is wrong with you, you goddamned jackass! He didn't even tag me!"
I couldn't take the whining. "Out!"
"I'm not movin'. I was clearly safe!"
A few parents began letting me have it from behind the backstop. The Dodger coach looked at me, shaking his head, and all the little pricks in the Ranger's dugout were screaming for a new ump. I threw my mask off.
"Listen you little shit. I'm calling the shots here. I'll take you out of the game, you obnoxious bastard."
I was all too vulgar. Parents were complaining. A tall man came running around the fence at third base.
A woman screamed from the stand, "That's him. That's the guy who shook it at me." The pimpled lady was standing there shaking her fists and screaming.
I knocked a kid over and grabbed his bat. I ran out past first and across center field. I looked back. Parents were clearing out of the bleachers and were running out into the field. The guy was right behind me. I stopped, smacked his legs with the bat and ran for the Dodge.
I got in and started her up. Parents pounded the windows as I pulled out. I knew I could never sell the thing.
"Shit, Shelly," I screamed. "Grab what you need and let's go!"
"But I got the job," she said. "Mario's taking me back with an extra dollar."
"Shit," I said. "I can't explain now. Just grab what you need, grab a bottle and let's go."
She ran into the bedroom.
I went outside and looked around. The Dodge was still running. I stepped down the walkway lighting a cigarette and got into the Dodge. I heard her throwing things around in the kitchen. The she came out, her arms filled with clothes, hers and mine. She had a bottle and a map on the top of the pile, and she balanced it all like a goddamned pro. She threw the stuff into the backseat and got in.
"Where are we going?" she asked.
I grabbed the bottle and put it in her lap. She began on the cap.
I pulled out.