The mall was busy with shoppers and buy-nothings, but it was still well past noon before I had my first climber. Bad sign. Yet another slow day for me and Monkey Mountain.
It was Theo Corrigan, my redheaded shortstop — strongest bat on the team, but ugly as a mud fence and sort of a kiss-ass. The boy approached, waving a five-dollar bill like it was on fire. “What’s up, Coach?” he squeaked.
“Hey, boy,” I said.
Theo was a regular customer, one of ten or so, most of them players on my ball club. We had our last game of the year a full week back — but maybe I’d said something to them all about climbing being a good way to stay in shape during the off-season. Business is business.
I took Theo’s money and then looked around for Simon, my one and only employee. Monkey Mountain sat at the dead-center crossroads of the Pecanland Mall, and that worthless, dropout cousin of mine had disappeared to somewhere. Finally I gave up on him and helped Theo into a climbing harness. Once he was all set I patted the side of my fiberglass tower. “Well,” I said, “what do you think?”
Theo circled the base of the thirty-foot tower like some kind of expert, and I waited, hands jammed into the pockets of my jeans. Monkey Mountain had three sides — red, yellow, and green — and at last Theo decided on red. I snapped a carabineer onto the front of his harness. “Knock yourself out,” I told him. “Ten minutes.” Theo began to climb and the automatic belay system kept his line tight. The grinning little monster was a puppet on a string.
While Theo climbed, I settled into a lawn chair and fiddled with my satellite radio. After a while the game came in clear as CD music, and I smiled. Chicago versus St. Louis, beamed live to Monroe, Louisiana. I don’t remember exactly when or why I started pulling for the Cubs; it’s just one of those things that is.
Theo hollered, “Watch this!” but I ignored him. I was listening to Alfonso Soriano work the count, gazing at the radio like I might make some difference in the outcome. Another pitch was fouled off when Simon came strutting over in his too-big clothes and his crooked hat. He folded himself into my other lawn chair, and I shook my head at him. “Remind me again what I’m paying you for?” I asked.
Theo was moving up the tower, and I watched Simon raise his skinny arms and begin tracking him with an imaginary shotgun. “Oh yeah,” he said, “you really got your hands full here, cousin.”
“That’s not the point,” I said.
Simon pulled a half-frozen bottle of water from the small ice chest that was resting between us. A drunken fan was on the field at Wrigley, and the announcers were flat disgusted. “Just imagine,” said Ron Santo, “that could be somebody’s father.”
Simon pointed at the radio. “Cubs?”
“Yup.”
He cracked the cap of his bottle and took a long pull. “Losers,” he said.
Soriano singled, and we were betting on whether Lou Piniella would have him try to steal second when I spotted Connie about fifty yards away, looking over at us from a table in the food court. Her son Kevin was standing off behind her, at the end of a long line for the ice cream place. Simon caught me staring at her. “There’s your trouble,” he said.
Connie smiled back at me. She was sitting with her brown legs crossed under a smooth cotton skirt. Her tank top was the color of lemons.
Simon whistled between his teeth. “You’re a lucky dude,” he said. “Lucky, lucky, lucky.”
“Mind your business.”
“Lucky,” said Simon.
Connie flashed two fingers low and I nodded. Two o’clock sounded good to me. Real good. She winked and I smiled even as Soriano took second base. Simon said pay me, and I handed over Theo’s sweaty five. Just then a bell rang from above, and I looked up. Theo had reached the summit, rung my cheap brass bell. “All right,” I hollered, “but time for you to come on down now.”
* * *
Three weeks after my twenty-fourth birthday, five years out of community college and in a hell of a tailspin, I’d somehow convinced a loan agent that a climbing tower in the Pecanland Mall would swing a profit. Eventually I would be proven wrong on that point — very wrong — but none of that was on the horizon that day five months ago when, clean and sober for the first time in a long time, I encountered my synthetic mountain spread out across the floor of a bankrupt climbing gym in Denver. On that crisp morning, as I loaded ten-foot sections of tower onto a borrowed gooseneck trailer, I finally convinced myself that it was possible for me to turn my life around. The next day, driving back to North Louisiana in my battered F-150, I raced freight trains across the high plains, watched in real time as a tired trucker jackknifed his Peterbilt. In the midnight parking lot of an Amarillo motel, I fought three drunken cowboys who were trying to climb the ass-end of my mountain. I was beaten badly, of course, but this, all of this, made me feel very much alive. A week later I cut my shaggy hair and — though I don’t like being around kids all that much — I got back into baseball, my first true love. I started coaching Dixie Youth 9 & 10, and it was at Biedenharn Park that I ran into Connie Hawkins. Her team ten-run ruled my Cubs, and she sought me out in the dugout afterwards to ask if I was the same Joe Spain who used to pitch for West Monroe. “I was a senior when you threw that no-hitter,” she said. “You were a hell of a player.”
I’d been a freshman back then, and in fact a man once told me that I was the youngest player to ever throw a no-hitter in a Louisiana 5A baseball game. That was a long, long time ago, but I remembered Connie Hawkins all right. She was the girl with the Sebring convertible, the tan skin and the gold hair. The one standing on the fifty-yard line during halftime of the homecoming game, a bouquet of roses cradled in her arms.
“I think I remember you,” I said to her. “You dated Brad Simms, maybe?” Watermelons. I couldn’t believe that she still smelled like watermelons. I used to follow her in the hallway, sniffing, hoping to God that big Brad wouldn’t come upon me trailing after his girl.
“I married Brad Simms,” she said.
“Yeah?”
She smiled and then patted her flat stomach. “Didn’t have much of a choice.” She wasn’t wearing a wedding band and must have seen me searching. “Didn’t stick,” she added. “The marriage, I mean.”
Over by third base a lanky boy was throwing his glove high into the air and then catching it. Connie pointed at him. “That’s Kevin,” she said. “Our son.”
In the name of sportsmanship and no hard feelings both of our teams were headed to Johnny’s Pizza, and in a corner booth Connie and I shared a pitcher of root beer and talked baseball. She knew about my scholarship to the Mississippi JuCo, but not about my injury. I showed her the scar on my right shoulder and she said, Oh, you poor thing. I was letting my foot brush up against hers when her shy son Kevin told her that he was tired and ready to go home now.
In May our teams played again with the same result. The game was called at the end of the fourth inning, and as the kids shook hands Connie met me on the pitcher’s mound. She punched me in my good shoulder. “Man,” she said, “how can such a great ballplayer be such a bad coach?”
I shrugged and Connie smirked. It was an evening game, and so this time around the players would all be going home. Kevin asked Connie if he could spend the night over at friend’s, and she said, Sure Kev, you bet, without ever taking her eyes off me. The boy kissed his mama and then left us standing there alone. Connie leaned in closer to me. “You know,” she said, “I’ve got this DVD I’ve been meaning to watch. Maybe you wanna come over and watch it with me?”
She drove east in her minivan, and of course I followed close behind.
Part Two
At a quarter till two I left Simon in charge of Monkey Mountain and went off to meet Connie. I was cutting through Dillard’s when a flock of cosmetologists sauntered by in white lab coats. “Afternoon, doctors,” I said to them. “See y’all on the golf course.”
I’d been making variations of that dumb joke since setting up shop back in March, but the girls broke into makeup-cracking smiles all the same. “Hey, Joe,” they all sang to me. A tall and feathered brunette pulled at the bill of my Cubs hat. “So when you gonna let us make you over?” she asked.
I grinned and went on my way. Failing business or not, I loved the mall. The attention. Having so many people know my name again, even if most of them were annoying kids. For the first time in a long time I was feeling like I was back on the map — in the lineup, so to speak. Maybe I was just a joke to those pretty girls, the loser with the fake mountain and the have-fun-in-surgery clownings, but at least I wasn’t invisible anymore.
Of course the fact that someone like Connie would notice me was the biggest miracle of all, but I suppose that probably had a lot more to do with my teenage no-hitter than whatever she saw when she looked at me in 2009.
* * *
I ducked inside the unlocked Caravan, and Connie told me to hurry on up, slide the door closed before I let all the cool air out. For privacy she had spread an LSU sunscreen across the dashboard and — between that thin piece of cardboard and the tinted windows — the interior of the Dodge reminded me of that movie-theater moment after the houselights dim, the twilight before the film rolls. I blinked until Connie came into focus. She wasn’t wearing anything but her tight yellow tank top, and she had her blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail. The air condition was blasting, but it was still pretty hot. There was a smell like watermelons cooking.
“Hey there,” said Connie. “Making any money?”
I situated myself next to her on the bench seat. “Millions,” I said.
She kissed at my neck. “Things will turn, baby.”
I nodded and watched an old lady unload shopping bags into an ancient Cadillac parked in the next space over. Spying on that woman reminded me of one of Connie’s stranger pleasures — how she liked to straddle me when we made love, press her hands against the dark windows of the minivan and moan as clueless folks shuffled on by. I peeled off my Meridian Community College T-shirt and then struggled out of my Levi’s. We were kissing like Friday-night teenagers when Connie pushed me away. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but let’s give the AC a few more minutes.”
“All right,” I said. “I guess I can wait.”
Connie arched an eyebrow. “You guess?”
She stretched across me for her purse, removing the small box of Kotex where she hid cigarettes and condoms from her son’s prying eyes. Connie was on the pill, but she always insisted that we be extra careful. She placed a Trojan on my thigh before leaning forward to light herself a menthol, and then she hit some button that cracked open the sunroof above us just a few inches. That tank top was plastered against her back, and her spine ran like a mountain range beneath it. She smoked her thin cigarette while I fumbled with the condom wrapper.
“You told him yet?” I asked.
Connie sighed. “Come on, not now.”
“We’ve been at this for almost two months.”
“It’s complicated,” she said. “Kids are complicated.”
“But we can’t sneak around forever, right?”
Connie tapped the ashes from her cigarette into an empty can of Diet Sprite, then traced her fingers across the thick pink scar that snaked along my shoulder. Smoke ran in a diagonal stream from her hand to the narrow gap in the sunroof. “I need for you to be patient with me,” she said. “Cool?”
“I hear you.”
“I like you a lot,” said Connie. “I really do.”
“I like you too,” I said.
A bead of sweat rolled off the tip of my nose, and I caught it in my hand. Outside the whole world was baking, and I couldn’t help but wonder whether that minivan of hers would ever reach a comfortable 75 degrees.
Part Three
After we had finished up, Connie lagged back to let the coast clear, and I walked alone across the parking lot to Applebee’s, figuring I would sip a Coke and watch the Cubs before heading over to relieve Simon. Lately I’d been hanging out in bars on occasion just to test myself. I hadn’t slipped yet, but there wasn’t a day that went by when I didn’t miss the bottle.
As usual, WGN was showing the game, and I sat down on a barstool as the camera panned across the skyline of Chicago, a city that I have never even visited. The bartender brought me my Coke, and we watched the last few innings of the game together. Finally Derrek Lee struck out to end things, and I slapped my hand down hard on the surface of the bar. A soccer-mom regular looked up from her margarita, and the smiling bartender told me to settle on down. “What’d you expect to happen?” he asked. “It’s the Cubs, remember?”
* * *
I returned to the mall only to discover Monkey Mountain deserted, a handwritten Back in Five Minutes sign taped to its north face. I cursed and then found Simon where I expected to find him — towering like some freak scarecrow over the pre-teens in the arcade, pounding on the controls of an old wrestling game. I snuck up behind him and whispered in his ear. “Hey,” I said. “Aren’t you supposed to be working?”
I’d tried to make my words hiss, but Simon answered back without ever taking his eyes off the screen. “Had to take a short break, boss.” He grabbed at his crotch. “Needed to drain the snake.”
“What’s that got to do with you playing video games?” I asked.
“Just the one go,” said Simon. “Help me out. I’m getting killed here.”
I peered over his shoulder. Playing as the Undertaker, he was facing a pack of computer wrestlers in a winner-take-all Royal Rumble. I told Simon to hurry up and die, but when he offered me a couple of tokens I couldn’t resist. I took them and then joined his brawl as the wrestler Mankind.
The Undertaker was cornered in the ring, and I directed Mankind into the mass of wrestlers, distracting them just long enough for Simon to locate a folding chair. Rallying, the Undertaker laid waste to them all, turning the tide of the match until just the two of us remained, Mankind and the Undertaker.
“That’s your ass now,” Simon chirped.
I danced at the controls as he chased me around the ring. Cornered, I attempted a scissor kick but was brained with the chair. Mankind lay bloody and twitching on the mat as the Undertaker climbed the turnbuckle to finish me off. He came falling down on top of me, and Simon laughed. “And that,” he announced, “is all she wrote.”
Simon puffed out his sunken chest, and I swatted at the back of his head. Suddenly I couldn’t face the idea of another afternoon staring at a deserted mountain, thirsting for a beer, wondering if this would be the day that Connie finally told me we could stop playing this game of our own and try at being a couple. “Go again?” I asked.
“Really?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Really.”
We were feeding tokens when Theo Corrigan ran into the arcade. Frog Face doubled over in front of us, exhausted. “Coach,” he gasped, “Kevin Simms is stuck on top of Monkey Mountain.”
Kevin Simms. Connie’s boy. I closed my eyes as Simon draped his arm over my shoulders. “Well,” he said, “I guess I’d better go and find us a ladder.”
Part Four
Theo Corrigan had it right — Kevin was indeed stranded on top of my mountain. He’d free-styled his way to the summit, and now, perched like a gargoyle three stories high, he refused to budge. I scanned the crowd that had gathered and spotted Connie at the foot of the tower, urging Kevin to be calm. The onlookers had formed a semicircle around her, like this was some sort of play that Pecanland was staging for them.
I pushed my way through and could see that Connie was trying her hardest not to cry. Her chin was quivering, and I wondered for a second whether this would be our moment at last — if now she would let me pull her close, let me hold her right there in front of Kevin and all those gawkers. I would kiss her on her forehead and tell her that I’d fix this.
But no. When I was almost to her Connie threw her arms up as if halting a hell-bent runner at third. “Stop,” she said. “Just stop.”
“Don’t worry,” I told her. “Simon went to fetch a ladder.”
I backed off and Connie hollered up to her boy. “Help is coming,” she said to him. “Okay, Kev?”
Kevin nodded slightly and then called back to her. “I’m sorry, Mama,” he said. “They dared me.”
“I understand,” said Connie. “Just don’t move.” One of those tears she’d been fighting went streaking down her cheek, and she spoke without looking at me. “Where is that goddamn ladder, Joe?”
“It’s coming,” I said. “I promise.”
She wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist. “I can’t believe you leave this stupid thing unattended.”
Though it wasn’t really true, I tried to explain that this was all Simon’s fault, that he went to the arcade without unscrewing the lower handholds to childproof the mountain. I told her this but could see that she wasn’t listening. Her attention was focused on Kevin, and so finally I just shut my mouth.
“Will you climb up there and be with him at least?” she asked. “Will you do that for me?”
I put my hand to my ruined shoulder. It would sometimes throb in stressful situations, and it was hurting me badly right then. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but actually I can’t.”
“You mean you can’t even climb your own mountain?” Connie shook her head. “Incredible.”
We were still waiting for Simon to show when Kevin made his move. “I’m coming down,” he said. “I can do this by myself.” Connie yelled at him to keep still, but he lay flat on his belly and began to inch himself off the edge of the tower. His small foot found a rough lip of fiberglass, and then he reached over and grabbed a handhold. He lowered himself further, and for a brief moment it seemed to me like the kid had it, that he’d be safe in no time — and maybe Kevin started thinking the same thing, because just then he looked down. Mistake. His knees betrayed him, bouncing like sewing needles as he struggled to keep firm purchase with slippery fingers and rundown Nikes. Rejecting the mountain, his body collapsed all at once. Connie screamed, and I felt my chest heave as that boy tumbled toward me.
Part Five
“Former Prep Star Makes Lifesaving Catch” — that was the below-the-fold headline of the News Star two days later. My high school coach called the hospital to tell me good job, nice grab, and not long after that I went viral, became an Internet celebrity.
The video was shot with a camera phone by some morbid bastard. Kevin is falling headfirst to the ground when I enter the frame. I grab hold of his collar and flip him midair. There is contact not unlike a home-plate collision, and I stumble backwards, cradling Kevin to me as I fall. My head bounces hard against the shiny tile, and I go limp as a dead man. Kevin scrambles into Connie’s arms, and I’ve just started vomiting on myself when the video ends.
All told, I spent the better part of two weeks laid up in Glenwood Regional, wracking up medical bills that I’ll never be able to pay. My head turned out to be mostly fine, but grabbing hold of Kevin destroyed my bum shoulder, and believe it or not, I damn near lost the arm. They said I’d get better with rehab, but that it would be a long and painful and expensive road — and so I was already in a dark mood when the mall manager left a message on my cell saying, I’m really sorry, Mr. Spain, but we’ve canceled your lease. We just can’t have this kind of thing happening in Pecanland.
I was still in the hospital when Simon broke Monkey Mountain down and moved it to a storage shed somewhere by the interstate. Connie never called, never came by, and that told me everything I needed to know about us. I was discharged home to my dim apartment, and I spent a week popping Vicodin and watching soap operas before, late one Sunday afternoon, Simon came for me. He’d been trying to get me to start drinking again ever since I quit, but now when he saw the bottle of Old Crow on the coffee table, the empty beer cans clustered here and there, he just shook his head.
“Clean yourself up and get dressed, cousin,” he said. “We’re taking a ride.”
“The hell we are.”
Simon shrugged and sat down next to me on the couch. “I ain’t leaving,” he said.
“That’s up to you.” I looked over at him. “Where is it you wanna go anyways?”
“Connie asked to see you,” he said. “I told her I’d deliver you to her.”
“Since when do you talk to Connie?”
“Since now.” He stood up and killed the television. “We going or not?”
* * *
My arm was still in a sling, and so Simon drove me in his rattletrap Volkswagen to the batting cages out in the pinewoods west of town. He waited by the car as I walked out across the dusty parking lot. Connie was sitting by herself on the top row of the aluminum bleachers, and I was climbing to her when she glanced up from her paperback and saw me. I could tell by the look on her face that Simon had conned me. Nothing about her was saying, Joe, wow, I’m so happy to see you, baby.
“Hey there,” she said.
“Hey, Connie.”
She stood and we hugged in a half-assed and awkward sort of way — partly because of my sling, and partly because she obviously wasn’t too keen on touching me. “How are you feeling?” she asked, but her eyes were looking off behind me so I didn’t bother answering. I turned and saw Kevin penned up in one of the batting cages, swinging away.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll get going in a second.”
Connie tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear. “What are you doing here?”
“Simon said you wanted me to meet you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“There’s nothing to understand. He lied and I’m an idiot, that’s all.”
“I could have sworn I saw him this afternoon. I think he might have been following me.”
“Yeah, well, sorry for the hassle. When my shoulder gets a little better I’ll straighten him out.” I made to leave, expecting her to tell me to hold on, but she let me get halfway down the clanging bleachers without calling out, and so I climbed back on up to her. “Really?” I said. “There’s nothing you wanna say to me?”
“Take it easy,” she said. “Are you drunk?”
A few other parents were scattered across the bleachers, watching their children hit under the lights, and a blocky woman I recognized from the ballpark kept peeking back at us. I looked away and saw Kevin swing and miss at a pitch. A couple of boys were standing outside the cage and teasing him, saying he should try a slower machine.
Connie moved over and motioned for me to sit down with her. “Please sit,” she said. “Sit before you fall.”
“God forbid.” I heard the sharp plink-ping of an aluminum bat. Kevin had corrected his swing, and his friends were clapping for him now. The green batting helmet was huge on his head, and he looked like an evil Martian. Finally I sat down.
“He could have died,” whispered Connie.
“But then I saved him,” I told her. “What came before all that was an accident.”
“That’s not really true,” she said. We were both watching Kevin. He hit a line drive back to the pitching machine, and Connie clucked with approval. She couldn’t help herself. Her boy had his timing down.
“That’s really what you think?” I asked. “That I brought this on?”
She locked eyes with me. “Yeah, I guess that I do think that.”
“So that’s it?”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s gotta be.”
Connie started to say something more, but then instead she squeezed my knee and began to pick her way down the bleachers to retrieve Kevin from the batting cage. They left together in a hurry, and eventually all of the batting cages had emptied. For a long time I stayed there, alone on the top row, listening as car after car crunched out of the gravel parking lot and onto the blacktop highway. Simon honked his horn let’s go, but I wouldn’t leave. I sat there and I waited, and then finally some invisible hand shut off the lights.
