“It’s the soldiers, honey. Just like Daddy said.” Her mother woke her up by leaning over her bed and blowing a strand of hair off her daughter’s forehead.
“Am I dreaming?” Sharis (Cheryl) asked, but she knew she wasn’t because she was hungry. Except when she was sound asleep, she was always hungry.
“It’s the middle of the night. Just like Daddy said.” Her mother’s uncombed hair stuck up from the back of her head.
Sharis’s mother touched her cheek. “Just remember, honey, there’s never hunger in heaven.”
“Is Howie up?”
“Your father’s with him. Come on”—her mother coaxed Sharis to her feet.
“Let me get my shoes.”
“Cheryl Mae! You don’t need your shoes.”
“But she let you get them, right?” Chad said. “And your robe?”
Sharis walked into her closet, slipped on her shoes. She took her robe off the hanger. “They’re going house to house? The soldiers?”
“Just like he said.”
They would all sit on the sofa in the living room. They each would have a wineglass, although the parents in the family didn’t drink. A festive occasion. The best glasses.
The helicopters passed and still the pitcher stood frozen, the ball rolled to the edge of the pitching mound. The catcher walked up and talked to him, handed him the ball. The pitcher nodded. His next pitch hit the batter in the elbow. The batter fell to the ground writhing, holding up his elbow for the umpire. A lot of that was dramatics, but still.
Howie, small and blinking, was huddled against the arm of the sofa. Sharis’s father was still standing, waiting for his wife and daughter. He held out his arms. Bastard, Chad always called him in his mind. Murderer.
Through the chinks in the living room curtains Sharis could see lights; outside she heard the murmur of motors and voices. She’d imagined it noisier.
“Let’s sit down,” her mother said.
Her father sat next to Howie, then Sharis, then her mother. Her mother reached around and touched Howie’s hair with her fingers. “I love you, little buddy,” she said.
“I don’t want to drink it,” Howie said.
“Come on, Howie. It’s your favorite. Look at this”—the father sloshed the liquid—“grape.” The father stuck a finger in the liquid and held it out. “Lick it off my finger.”
Chad looked to the bullpen and made out the Dragons’ manager pointing at a scrawny kid. Apparently this guy was supposed to take over on the pitcher’s mound. “Who’s that, Daddy?” Howard asked.
Hard knocks at the front door. Sharis’s parents exchanged glances. “Hold him down,” her father said. Her mother lifted Howie from the cushion and placed him in her lap, her arms tight around him. Her father made a hole of Howie’s mouth and poured the purple liquid in.
Chad couldn’t find the new pitcher’s number on the roster. That was the minors: players came and went. “Good God,” he said, looking closer at the kid. “He looks like he’s about fourteen.”
“Come on, people,” a man’s voice said from the door. “All your neighbors are out here. We can’t wait forever.”
Her mother swallowed the last of her own drink and gave Sharis an anguished glance. “Pick up your glass, honey.”
“She didn’t say ‘Swallow it,’ did she?” Chad said to Sharis. “She planned for you to live.”
“Come on, people. You won’t be hurt.”
“Give me liberty or give me death,” her father whispered, downing his drink in one gulp—a line that made Sharis giggle because it was so corny.
“Unto you, Lord, I commend my spirit!” That was her mother, surprisingly loud.
“Come on, people!” There was a low babble of voices, then the buzz of a drill. Sharis stood, dropping her glass onto the table. She ran out through the kitchen to the back door, glancing back at her heap of family. Her glass had toppled, purple liquid spreading on the wood.
“I know she wanted you to run away,” Chad told Sharis. “She had a plan for you.”
“I wanted to live,” Sharis said. “I’m not insane.”
“Koogie,” Howard said. That was a new word to Chad, but from Howard’s tone he took it as an affirmation.
“Jesus,” Chad said after a few moments watching the new pitcher. “He can throw.”
Everyone who attended that game remembered it, not just for the helicopters but for its other phenomenon: Joe Mateus pitching for the first time. Later, Mateus said the helicopters were an inspiration. He wanted to throw hard enough the pilots couldn’t see the ball. The attendance that evening was just over a thousand, although later maybe a hundred thousand people said they’d been there. Chad remembered it as the day he started locking his car, the night he realized bondad was not enough.
true believers
JOHN PATTERSON, DAYTON’S flood-time hero, made his fortune in cash registers. Cash registers are—think about it, Chad said—an open admission that money is a temptation and people steal. The early National Cash Register sales literature stated this fact quite freely. Why should a merchant spend big money on a machine to tally sales and issue receipts? So an employee couldn’t charge nothing. So an employee couldn’t slip a friend two dollars of change instead of one, or pocket a customer’s payment, or miscalculate a sale. So a customer couldn’t return a sales item and say he’d paid full price. The cash register business was founded on the propositions that employer and employee have inherently different interests, that transactions benefit from daylight, that money is a powerful lure. None of the cash register’s suppositions about human behavior is positive. It is, in its essence, a surveillance machine.
The other invention associated with Dayton—Chad went on—is more uplifting. Wilbur and Orville Wright were the bottom half of four brothers; their father, with whom they lived his entire life, was a United Brethren bishop known for his devotion to his family and his obstinate, often divisive, theological convictions. Their mother died of TB before Wilbur and Orville reached adulthood, and Wilbur nursed her in her final days. Their sister, Katharine, who also lived with their father, was the rare woman of that time who sought and obtained a college degree. The Wright brothers were not college-educated; in fact, neither of them finished high school. They were bright enough—the family had hopes of sending Wilbur to Yale, and Orville in seventh grade won an award as the best math student in the city—but for years they bounced around, the sort of young people that in a higher social stratum might be labeled dilettantes. When Orville tried to date a young woman from a prominent local family, her mother said, “You stay away from that boy. He’s crazy.” As a youth, Wilbur, after a hockey injury, was laid up for years with heart palpitations, writing later, with some passion, of how a man can become “blue.” He worked as a clerk in a grocery store, as a printer, and briefly published a local newspaper. Eventually he and Orville opened (Chad winked at this moment, said, “this is the famous part”) a bicycle shop, where they built the bicycles they sold. The Wright Brothers were slight, neat, slim-hipped men—birdlike, you might say. They always wore business suits, Orville’s much nattier than his brother’s. Shy and awkward, they never courted or married. Wilbur wrote to a relative: “I entirely agree that the boys of the Wright family are lacking in determination and push.”
And yet. “For some years,” Wilbur wrote in 1900, “I have been afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man.”
“Afflicted,” Chad said. “Isn’t that an interesting word?”
“EDUARDO, MI