ONE
Needles, California
Benny Rhodes loved his own bald head more than anything else in the world he could think of. He loved to run his hands over it, loved seeing its reflection in the shiny aluminum walls of his weary and somewhat out-at-elbow mobile home. It was the first thing he looked at in the morning and last thing he considered at night. It, like the rest of him, was tanned to a golden brown and, like the phrenologists of old, he considered it the very mirror of his soul. He was frankly and simply delighted with it. Some thought him eccentric.
"How about this new kid with the A's everybody's talking about?" Benny's neighbor Al Bartholomeo asked.
Benny looked up from the two-day-old newspaper he was reading. He was seated in a homemade Adirondack chair under the aluminum awning that stretched across the front of his rented house trailer. The awning, like the trailer to which it was attached, had long since thrown in the towel in its ill-fated struggle against the elements of the Mojave Desert. Whatever paint or decals it had once proudly borne were now no more than a vague memory, removed pigment by pigment by sand, wind, and sun. It was nine-thirty in the morning on the second day of April and the big Coors thermometer screwed onto the side of the trailer read 93 degrees Fahrenheit Benny wore a faded pair of cutoff blue jeans, huarache sandals, and nothing else. He shook his head in response to his neighbor's question.
"Every spring it's the same thing. I've seen a hundred just like this kid break hearts all over New England when the Red Sox tried to rush them into the lineup." Benny shook his head again, appalled at the very thought. "Wait'll June or July and if he's still on the roster, much less playing every day, well, that'll be something to talk about, believe me."
Benny knew whereof he spoke. For his entire life he had been a Red Sox fan and now, at the age of sixty-three, he knew in his heart of hearts that he would be long dead before they won a World Championship.
The neighbor, Al Bartholomeo, sat down next to Benny and waved a copy of the Sporting News. "This kid's different. He's batting almost .450 and holding base runners at first base, for God's sake." Al had to pause for a second to wipe the spittle from his lips. In his eagerness to share the news of the rookie they were calling the Soldier with Benny, he had rushed over without putting his teeth in and so tended to dribble a little when he spoke too quickly. "They say there's never been anyone like him."
Benny laughed. "Where's he from?"
"Some small town in North Carolina. The paper says he never played Organized Ball as a kid. Took it up in the army, if you can believe that."
"I can't." Like all New Englanders Benny, despite his many years of education and extraordinarily high IQ, harbored a deep-seated suspicion that anyone from the South was, by definition, a congenital liar and probable natural-born deviate. He wasn't necessarily proud of this belief, but neither could he entirely shake it. "If Oakland is counting on a rookie behind the plate you can be sure that every other team in the American League, particularly the Western division, is celebrating even as we speak."
A sudden zephyr from out of the desert rattled the sagging awning and reminded Benny of how far from Boston he had come in a very short time. He unconsciously ran a hand over his slick brown head and smiled. Baldness was a relatively new phenomenon with Benny. Although sixty-three years old he had, until just weeks earlier, sported a luxuriantly full head of hair. Snowy white hair, to be sure, but nonetheless thick, and rich, and fine to look at, just what one would expect to see adorning the head of a distinguished professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Bernard Archibald Rhodes, Ph.D., LL.M., Litt.D., head of the physics department, president of the faculty senate, husband, father, mathematician, and scientist. Dr. Rhodes had testified before committees of the United States Congress and had dined on two separate occasions at the White House. If they could see me now, he thought.
Death, of course, had changed everything. It wonderfully focuses the mind, Dr. Rhodes realized, to watch a perfectly delightful young man sicken and die within the space of three months. Arthur Hodges, the decedent in question, was just a few weeks short of his fortieth birthday when he breathed his last in a hospice just off the MIT campus. Although separated in age by more than twenty years, Arthur Hodges and Bernard Archibald Rhodes had been close intellectual companions who had spent countless afternoons and evenings discussing questions of time and space, searching always for the arcane clues that might lead to the unification of Einstein's general theory of relativity with the theory of quantum mechanics. Holder of an endowed chair in mathematics at MIT, Arthur Hodges was frequently spoken of as the next logical candidate for the position of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, a chair once held by Sir Isaac Newton himself. The only thing the Drs. Rhodes and Hodges disagreed on was baseball. Bernard Archibald Rhodes loved it and Arthur Hodges did not, for all intents and purposes, know it existed. Rhodes had owned two season tickets to Fenway Park for the entire time Arthur Hodges had been at MIT, first as Rhodes's student and then as a colleague and friend, and not once, not a single time, had he been able to lure Hodges to a game. Arthur Hodges was a creature of intellect, so completely so that he died a stone virgin and, what's more, had he thought about it, which of course he had not, he would not have considered for an instant that he had missed anything.
The death of Arthur Hodges was something of an epiphany for Bernard Archibald Rhodes. Shortly after the memorial ceremony (Hodges's remains were cremated and his ashes spread over the James River) Professor Rhodes drove into Boston and consulted an attorney. The morning following said consultation he smiled at his wife across the breakfast table and handed her a large manila envelope.
"What's this?" she asked, none too pleasantly. The daughter of a wealthy New England industrialist, she had never considered herself a morning person.
"That, my dear, is a legal document giving you ownership of all of our remaining joint assets, together with a quitclaim whereby I renounce any interest in the estate you inherited some years ago from your father. I say ‘remaining joint assets' because yesterday I took the liberty of withdrawing the sum of six hundred thousand dollars from one of our money market funds, an amount which, together with my several pension funds, should be more than sufficient to support me for the rest of my life." He reached across the table and patted his wife's hand. "What with the two houses and the various other family investment funds I estimate that I'm leaving you with an estate well in excess of four million dollars."
"Leaving me?"
"I'm afraid so. At the memorial service for Art Hodges I realized that I could not for the life of me remember why on earth we got married forty years ago. I also realized that I'm tired of teaching and that the Red Sox are never, in my lifetime, going to win a World Series." He stood up from the table. "I've packed a few personal belongings. Everything else of mine you may either give to charity or have destroyed. Good-bye."
There was brief talk of a sanity hearing, but the parties advocating such a procedure were strongly advised against doing so by legal counsel and Dr. Rhodes left Boston, MIT, and his wife on a miserably cold and wet day in late November, bound for God only knew where.
Benny realized that Al had asked a question. "What's that?"
"I said, how about a cup of coffee?"
"Sure thing." Benny twisted in his chair so he could yell into the trailer's open door. "Hey, Becky, Al's here. Bring us out a cup of coffee, will you?"
Becky Morgan had just had her third abortion in eighteen months when she met Benny in the parking lot of a Super Saver drugstore on the outskirts of Norman, Oklahoma. Benny was slowly noodling his way across country, going nowhere in particular, and had stopped in Norman to visit an old colleague on the faculty of the University of Oklahoma. Becky was, at the age of thirty-one, a desperately unhappy albeit extraordinarily fecund elementary school teacher and three-time loser in love who had gotten to know the abortion clinic staff on a first name basis. She backed into Benny's car while leaving a parking space and the minor accident, on top of her already stretched thin nerves, had caused her to start crying. Benny calmed her down, bought her a nice lunch, and left the city of Norman that evening with a new friend and traveling companion.
"I'd say you're on a treadmill," Benny observed after hearing her story over lunch. He told her about the recent death of his friend Arthur Hodges and how it had opened a door in his life. "My advice is to do what I did: cut your losses and start over somewhere else."
Becky saw the wisdom of what Benny was saying and, although it wasn't exactly what he had had in mind, she asked if she could tag along with him. He thought about it for several seconds and concluded that he liked the idea. Some weeks after leaving Oklahoma they crossed the once mighty Colorado River at Needles, California, and paused for a time to ponder the mystery that was the Mojave Desert.
The kid at the radiator shop in downtown Needles where Benny had his engine's thermostat replaced was impressed to learn that they weren't on their way to any place in particular.
"Bitchin'," was all he said, but Becky knew that he would tell his friends about the old man (to the kid and his friends anyone over the age of forty was old) and the young woman with nothing but time on their hands. Thinking about it pleased her to no end.
Where you heading? the kid had asked when the job was done, wiping his hands on a green rag. He was a good-looking young man, eighteen or nineteen, all gonads and white teeth. Los Angeles?
Benny had smiled and said, No, we're just on the road.
The kid's eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch and he couldn't help looking at Becky and smiling. Bitchin'.
Benny decided he wanted to dip his feet in the Colorado River and the kid directed them to a dirt road north of town. Within sight of the river they came upon a weather-beaten, out-at-elbow trailer park and encountered an encampment of ancient Germans, their gleaming Airstream trailers circled like Conestoga wagons.
"I can see that you are an educated man," one of them said to Benny. "And that you are lost."
Benny smiled and nodded. "Aren't we all?"
"You are welcome to stay und have dinner mit uns," the old German invited. A gibbous moon began to rise in the eastern sky and then seemed to stop, hunkering down over the laagered Airstreams and the muddy water of the Colorado River just beyond. "We," the old man swept his arm in an arc that encompassed his entire group, "believe that this place, this Needles, is a special place in the universe, ja?"
"How do you mean ‘special'?" Benny asked.
"We believe that something is going to happen here. What will happen or when it will happen we do not yet know." The old German looked up at the moon and smiled. "Perhaps it is only that we will all die here in this place of extraordinary beauty."
They ate at three large picnic tables placed together to form a triangle. Leathery-skinned old women brought the food out of the Airstreams in large, steaming crocks. The two guests were given a place of honor next to the leader of the encampment, the man who had invited them to stay and eat. After dinner the Milky Way could be clearly seen pulsating in the relatively unpolluted night sky of the desert. Wrapped in a light cotton blanket Benny and Becky made love that night on top of one of the picnic tables. Before falling asleep Benny watched a scorpion attack and devour a large beetle that had blundered into its path. When he told the group the next morning at breakfast what he had seen they all nodded silently, as if one of their own had fallen during the night. "Gut is gut und besser ist besser," one of them murmured enigmatically.
"This is the place," Benny said.
"Brigham Young," Becky responded.
"Brigham Young?"
"Although the story may be apocryphal, Brigham Young supposedly said, This is the place, when first he saw the Great Salt Lake."
* * *
"Only a fool would live in this miserable place that didn't have to," the proprietress of the trailer park informed them when Benny expressed just such an interest. "I don't know what these crazy goddamned Germans are thinking of," she waved an arm in the general direction of the polished Airstreams, "but their money's good and they mind their own business." A mule of a woman, Ruth Pierpont had run the marina and trailer park by herself since her husband died in 1978 and probably hadn't made a thousand dollars in net profit the entire time. She feared neither man nor beast and smoked a pack of Camels a day. "They've been here about three months now, waiting for the Apocalypse, or some such nonsense." She grunted derisively. "Assuming it doesn't materialize, I fully expect that come the end of July they'll all be dead or gone. Believe me when I tell you that neither you nor they know what heat is until you've spent a summer in the Mojave."
"I suspect that's the truth, but, to be honest, something here attracts me," Benny told her, running a hand through his hair.
Ruth nodded and lit a Camel with her Zippo, expertly clicking it shut and tucking it back into her overalls. "I probably shouldn't call you a fool since I'm still here myself, but I'll be damned if I know why. Morgan, my late husband, was too shiftless to work and too lazy to steal, so here I am. Besides, where the hell would I go?" She pointed with her cigarette toward an obviously vacant trailer. "Old man Robertson died in there two months ago and the county has taken it for back taxes. I'm guessing the county tax assessor would be tickled to death to deed it over to anyone willing to bring the taxes current." She paused and rather indelicately scratched her stomach. "The pad it's sitting on rents for a hundred dollars a month, not counting utilities."
"What did he die of?" Becky asked.
"Jesus Christ, the heat, what'd you think?" Ruth laughed, an odd, braying sound. "That and a good case of the DTs." The smile left her face. "Okay, down to business. I own this place lock, stock, and barrel, and I don't generally rent to transients or young people—it's been my experience that they're almost always more trouble than they're worth. I like the looks of you two, so you're welcome as long as you don't annoy me, your relatively few neighbors, or Jericho."
"Jericho?"
Ruth pointed to a large brown cat lounging in the shade of her trailer's patio awning. "Jericho."
Benny and Becky moved in the next day. One month later, on the first day of March, Benny, in an inspired moment, had Becky shave his head. The next day, the second day of March, she informed Benny that she was with child.
* * *
"I just put a fresh pot on," Becky called out of the trailer in response to Benny's call for a cup of coffee for their neighbor Al. Her voice was the happy, cheerful voice of a woman in love. "I'll bring it out as soon as it's ready."
Al put down his copy of the Sporting News with a sigh of envy. A postal clerk from the Bronx who had recently taken early retirement, he was the same age as Benny. His wife, Margaret, was a short, ill-tempered woman with porcine eyes and a quick New York tongue. He couldn't imagine asking her to get him a cup of coffee, much less a cup for a friend who had stopped by for a visit.
Benny gave him a sidelong glance and smiled. "Becky and I are giving a little get-together tonight," he said. "We'd like you and the ball-and-chain," as he referred to Al's missus, "to join us for a celebration."
"What are you celebrating?"
"Well, believe it or not, Becky's gravid."
"She's what?"
"She's pregnant. Gravid is a reproductive term normally reserved for the insect kingdom, but I happen to like the way it sounds. I find it far more euphonious than pregnant," Benny explained, laughing at Al's expression of astonishment. "I know it's hard to believe, but by God there's juice left in the old bull yet." Before he could say anything further Becky came out of the trailer with a pot of coffee and a plate of cinnamon toast. "Put that coffee down," Benny ordered good-naturedly, "and let Al feel your stomach."
Becky laughed. "Hush, you old fool; you're embarrassing him."
Indeed, Al looked thunderstruck.
"Besides," she continued, "I'm not even three months gone, so there's nothing to feel." She held up the plate she was carrying in her left hand. "Who wants cinnamon toast with their coffee?"
Copyright © 2003 by John A. Miller