The Ninth Inning Read online

He tilted his head ever so slowly until he was facing me.

  “My name is Miami Jones.”

  “Ah, Miami,” said Dr. Castle. I had expected, if not a Stephen Hawking voice box sound, then at least a gravelly cough. But neither thing was true. Dr. Castle wasn’t going to project to the rear of Carnegie Hall anytime soon, but his voice was clear and precise despite the fact that it seemed to emanate from one side of his mouth.

  “You’re Danielle’s fellow.”

  I nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “This isn’t my classroom,” he said. “You don’t have to call me sir.”

  “Of course, Dr. Castle.”

  “Shall I call you Mr. Jones?”

  “No,” I said. “Mr. Jones was my dad. People call me Miami.”

  “People who know me call me Ryan.”

  I nodded once more and glanced toward the end of the bed, where I expected to see Nurse Gabriela. But she was gone. I figured she had left to collect Danielle and Jane. I looked back to their father and said, “Ryan.”

  “It’s a hell of a time to meet, don’t you think?”

  “I do.”

  “Danielle told me something about you being a sportsman, is that right?”

  “A long time ago,” I said. “I played football and baseball at college, and then baseball professionally for a few years.”

  “Major league?”

  “For a very short time. But mostly it was the minors.”

  He seemed to take this information in and think about it for a moment. “Did you enjoy it?”

  “It was very hard work.”

  “That wasn’t my question, son.”

  “Yes, I enjoyed it as much as I’ve enjoyed anything in my life. For a long time it was the only goal I had, and while I was doing it, it was the center of everything. Not so much now. How about you?”

  “No, I never played professional baseball.”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  “Imprecision with language is the forbearer of disagreement.”

  “Who said that?”

  “I did.” He didn’t look proud of it. It seemed no more than a statement of fact.

  “Danielle said you were an English teacher.”

  Ryan gave a slight nod. It didn’t seem to cause him any pain, and I wondered if during the times when he was lucid he had any more physical ability. Muscle memory could be an amazing thing.

  “Yes,” he said. “I guess you could say that.”

  “But you’re doctor?”

  “I have a PhD.”

  “In what?”

  “That very subject. English literature.”

  “How long did you teach for?”

  “All my life, it seems.”

  “Did you enjoy it?” I asked, repeating his question back to him.

  He looked at me through Danielle’s eyes, holding an expression that I’d seen many times before. Law enforcement types liked to analyze people when they met them. I supposed it was an occupational hazard. After all, they had a job where the next person they met might pull a gun, so analyzing people immediately and with some level of accuracy was important, if you wanted any kind of longevity. Danielle did it instinctively, and even after having been together all these years, she still did it to me on a regular basis. As if she were reading my mind. It was spooky how often she got it right. Ryan Castle, her dad, was doing it to me now. I had nowhere else to go and nothing better to do, so I let him try his magic trick.

  “I loved it,” he said. He didn’t say it with a smile or any sense of joy. If anything, there was a tinge of sadness to it, as if his love of his occupation had come at a cost. I had heard Danielle’s side of the story, or at least part thereof, throughout the years. From her end, Ryan Castle had been a man who lived his life for his work. A man who spent more time in his own mind than was probably healthy. A man who enjoyed the to-and-fro of intellectual debate and rigor but found it difficult to connect on a purely human level with the three women who made up the rest of his family.

  “Do you miss your baseball?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “I believe you.”

  “Good, because it’s true,” I said. “It was everything, and it ended more suddenly than I thought it would, but when it did, I knew it was time. I won’t say I didn’t miss it, or that I wasn’t at some kind of a loose end for a while, but I had people around to show me that life wasn’t just a one-inning adventure. I guess, from an English literature point of view, I was taught that life was less like a novel and more like a book full of short stories. Sometimes the stories were interconnected, and sometimes the next one had nothing to do with the one that came before. Doesn’t mean they’re not all good stories.”

  Ryan smiled with half of his mouth. This expression was not the same as his daughter’s. Her version of a half smile was intended to be just that, and it did all kinds of things to the butterflies in my stomach. Ryan’s version was clearly the result of the muscles on one half of his mouth not working the way they should.

  “I like that,” he said. “I think a lot of people miss that. Maybe even myself. You must’ve had a very wise teacher.”

  “I did.”

  “Your father?”

  “No. I guess you would call Lenny a mentor.”

  “And you and he are close?”

  “We were. He died.”

  I suddenly felt bad about mentioning Lenny’s death. Not that it hadn’t happened and not that it could be changed, but it just felt out of place, bad juju, like mentioning the Scottish play in a theater. If Ryan even noticed, he didn’t mention it.

  “Some people stay with us always. Don’t you think?”

  “I do.”

  “And sometimes our mentors are people we don’t even have the good fortune to meet.”

  I thought about the long line of baseball heroes that I had. I guessed they had inspired me to follow my passion, to work hard in order to play the game at the highest level. But in my experience, the real mentors had always been able to lay a hand on my shoulder, or a foot up my butt, when it was required.

  Ryan glanced at the bedside table, and I took stock of the books stacked high. I wondered if his mentors lay within the pages and if he ever got to meet with them anymore. Each book was large and sturdy, the kind of thing that a man with ALS might find difficult to hold up. I couldn’t help but think a computer screen would be an altogether more useful tool.

  “Mentors?” I asked.

  “Indeed. Some taught me about life, and others taught me about the beauty of language. Some taught me about the importance of knowledge over ignorance, and others showed me how vital it was to be open to the arguments of others. Others still helped me escape.”

  For a moment we both looked at the stack of books as if analyzing a group of people at a cocktail party.

  “Are you familiar with any of these?” he asked.

  I looked along the spines of the books on the table. There was one by René Descartes, and another called The Great Conversations, with no author noted. There was a Jane Austen, and a Steinbeck, and Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman. There was a collection of stories by John Updike, and a copy of Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison. There was a startlingly thin volume of the works of William Shakespeare, and Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell.

  None of them were my idea of a good time. A handful I had come across during my college years and mostly failed to comprehend. Only one had struck any kind of chord.

  “I took a course in Walt Whitman,” I said. “Back in college.”

  Ryan nodded. “And what did you think of Mr. Whitman?”

  “He was a good poet.”

  “So you got nothing from the course, then?”

  “I don’t know. I’m sure I got something.”

  “And yet the best you can come up with was he was a good poet. Can I ask what made you take this course?”

  “The truth? There may have been a girl.”

  “You were trying to impress a lady?” Ryan smacked hi
s dry lips together. “Not overly original, but some of my best students started in such a way.”

  I shrugged.

  “Would you agree or disagree with the notion that Walt Whitman was our greatest-ever poet?”

  I felt like I was back in school. All those important words associated with English literature courses flashed through my mind. Words like explain, compare, contrast. I wondered if Ryan Castle would make me take a test later, or if he had a book on his bedside table for just such a purpose. But as I looked at him, I realized that it wasn’t a question of a teacher trying to elicit a response from a student. It was nothing more than a learned man attempting to have one last meaningful conversation about a topic that meant so much to him. It didn’t matter that it meant little to me, or that I barely remembered either the subject matter of the course in question or even the name of the girl who had caused me to take it. I figured if the roles were reversed and Ryan Castle had the opportunity to take me, in one of my final lucid moments, for a hot dog and a beer at a baseball game, I wouldn’t quibble about whether he was a true fan or even about what level of game we happened to see.

  “Are you asking from a technical point of view?” I said.

  “Do you believe that technical ability is a factor in importance?”

  “I think there have been great pitchers in baseball who never really changed the game despite their technical capability, but no one who did change the game lacked skill.”

  “Let’s explore that train of thought. Who was more important: Babe Ruth or Jackie Robinson?”

  I looked in Ryan Castle’s eyes but not for long because they made me think of someone else, so I turned my gaze at his pile of books and considered his question. I hadn’t posed a query like that to myself before because it had never felt important. Baseball was a game, a pastime, something to be enjoyed by both those who played it and those who watched. I never really considered it a vessel for importance. Even the great players were just that: great players. They weren’t necessarily stand-up guys or important in the grand scheme of things. Except, of course, for the fact that they were.

  “Babe Ruth changed baseball,” I said.

  “How?”

  “Because he was a great player, but he was a bigger personality. He was the kind of larger-than-life figure that could unite a town like New York City.”

  “So?”

  “But Jackie Robinson changed the world. I don’t necessarily mean the entire planet, but he certainly changed a lot of people’s lives, broke down barriers. So I guess you would argue one was great, but the other one was great and important.”

  Ryan nodded and gave me his broken smile. “So in that context, what of Mr. Whitman?”

  “Well, I seem to remember a bit about his unconventional style. He wasn’t so much into the meter and rhyme of things, more a free verse kind of guy. So I guess you could argue he had technical skill. But I don’t know, would you call it zeitgeist? The right man for the time? Because I can’t help feeling that his importance was driven as much by when he wrote as what he wrote. The United States was a new country, a growing country. And Whitman was one of the first to really give us a sense of our own identity, our own poetry. It probably wasn’t important for the average man on the street, and maybe it still isn’t. But he was an unconventional guy for an unconventional country, a bold personality for a bold nation.”

  I flicked my eyes back to find Ryan staring at me. He was doing the analysis thing once more. It was like I had just run into my fifth grade English teacher and been made to feel small and incomplete all over again. I expected him to tell me that those were a bunch of mighty fine words that I put together that didn’t amount to a hill of beans.

  “I suspect you are more articulate on the subject than you give yourself credit for,” he said. “So tell me, then, which of his poems is most important.”

  I had an answer for this one. I actually remembered thinking about it back in college, having been asked a similar question. I remembered the professor of the course being less than enamored with my response, but I decided I didn’t have a grade point average to keep up, so I went with my gut.

  “I think that question is a load of horse manure.”

  “Horse manure? Explain.”

  “It’s not like any of them became the national anthem or anything. So which one is more important? That’s a personal judgment call. It’s like asking which of Jackie Robinson’s at bats was most important. It’s not about any singular game, it’s about the full body of work.”

  I half puffed out my chest in defiance, ready for the same sort of comeback I recalled getting at school.

  “That’s a fine defense,” he said. “So in that case, which is most important to you?”

  I wasn’t sure if this was where he had been heading the whole time, leading me down a path with nothing but a cliff at the end. Suspecting all along that I couldn’t differentiate my Whitman from my Keats. Truth was, I could remember some Whitman. It was Keats and Shelley that I always mixed up.

  Ryan shifted his weight across his shoulders. “Surely you recall something, if it’s that important. Not ‘Song of Myself,’ or ‘Calamus’? Not ‘A Noiseless Patient Spider,’ or ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’?”

  “No,” I said. “Remembering verses for the sake of remembering them was never something I cared to do. You’re right, they were never that important to me. What was important to me was my curve, and my heater. The strength of my arm, understanding the weaknesses of the batter standing sixty feet and six inches away. It wasn’t important to a lot of other people, but it was important to me. And that’s the thing about importance, I guess. I don’t get to decide for you, and you don’t get to decide for me.”

  Ryan nodded gently again. “Well put. But isn’t it fair to say that if we cannot remember the words, then they held no importance at all?”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t remember any words. I just said I didn’t remember for the sake of remembering. There was one of his works that stuck with me. I can’t remember it line for line, because it wasn’t about all of it. It was really just about part.”

  “In which of his works was that?” asked Ryan.

  “I think it was called ‘O Me! O Life!’”

  Ryan took a long, deliberate breath. “‘Oh me! Oh life! Of the questions of these recurring, of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities filled with the foolish, of myself forever reproaching myself, for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless? Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renewed, of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me, of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined, the question, O me! So sad, recurring—What good amid these, o me, o life?’”

  Ryan stopped speaking and smacked his dry lips together again. I could hear his tongue sticking to the dry roof of his mouth. But I got the sense that wasn’t why he had stopped. He looked at me and raised an eyebrow in a way that once again reminded me of the most important person in my life, so I continued the poem.

  “‘Answer,” I said. “‘That you are here—that life exists and identity, that the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute verse.’”

  For a while Ryan lay fixed in his position, watching me watching him. I had recalled the end of that particular poem through the years and distance, having not known it was sitting in the back of my brain all that time. I told the truth: the piece in its entirety escaped me. But the end had spoken to me as a college junior in a way that it did even more now.

  When Ryan spoke it was barely a whisper. “That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute verse.” He smiled his half smile once more, and I got the sense that at a push, I might have earned as much as a C grade.

  He smacked his lips again. “May I ask a favor of you?”

  “Of course.”

  “I really need a drink.”

  Chapter Six

  For a moment I thought he was asking if
I could grab him a beer, or maybe he had a secret stash of bourbon in the bottom of his bedside table. But he cast his eyes toward the chest of drawers where the vase full of flowers sat. Next to the flowers was a tray with a plastic jug of water on it. I nodded and stepped over to it. There was a sippy cup next to the jug—the kind of thing a parent would give to a small child—with a lid and a straw to prevent them from spilling it all over the back seat of the car. I peeled the lid off and poured some water and then snapped the lid back on and carried the cup to the bed.

  Ryan was able to lift his arm enough to wave away a mosquito but not enough to hold the cup for an extended period of time, so I held the cup to him so that he could suck up some water through the straw. As he did I glanced toward the door and wondered where Nurse Gabriela had gotten to.

  “I should go and find Danielle and Jane,” I said. “I’m sure they’d like to visit with you.”

  Ryan let the straw drop from his lips and shook his head ever so slowly. He licked his lips and said, “Just give us a few more minutes.”

  It was like the plea of a child who had been told it was bedtime.

  As I sat the sippy cup back on the bedside table, I wondered about the inevitable rise and fall of life. It seemed to move like a bell curve, in the beginning young and helpless, needing assistance with everything in order to learn and grow; as we moved toward the middle of the bell curve, we became the population, we the people, the producers, the consumers, the spectators. For a time we got to revel in the center of the curve, strong and fit and healthy. And then without notice or fanfare, the bell curve grabbed us by the lapels and dragged us back down to the point where I found myself now, holding a child’s sippy cup to enable an old man to drink water.

  I nodded at his request and sat back down. Ryan readjusted his position in the bed as best he could, and I wondered if I should offer some help. I wasn’t convinced that I would want it if I were in his position, and I figured this wasn’t a new state of affairs for him. If he needed help, he knew how to ask. He didn’t ask, and slowly he settled down and turned his head toward me once more.

  “So, Miami,” he said. “Do you have children?”