Chapter FOURTEEN
Bill thought he’d gotten away with breaking wind, but a few moments after the silent event, April rolled her window down.
“Hot in here,” she said.
Generous, Bill thought; more so than he would have been. And it was hot. But it was mid-June and this was the Midwest, after all. Without turning, he watched her adjust the earbuds of her gizmo. He patted his shirt pocket, then his pants pockets. Where’d that damn pipe go?
“How long are we going to sit here looking at this ugly thing?” April asked.
The ugly thing was Spartan Stadium. They had been sitting there—specifically, near Gate 5—for an hour.
“Not much longer,” Bill said.
He wasn’t sure yet how much of his plan, if any, he wanted to share with April. Fact was, he was making it up as he went along, ever since she’d shown up on his doorstep more than a week ago, yellow duffel bag in hand, asking if she could “crash” for a while. Bill had made her call her mother to let her know where she was and that she was safe. But when April handed him the phone, apparently at her mother’s insistence, and he tried to reassure Marcy that everything would be okay and that everyone just needed a little time to cool off, Marcy had just two words for him before slamming the phone down: Keep her.
“You want to tell me what this is all about?” he’d asked April as he threw her a clean pillowcase. He’d put clean sheets on his bed and insisted on bunking out on the living room couch.
“No,” April said, punching the pillow—pretty hard, Bill noticed—into the pillowcase. “Yeah. It’s all about me getting as far away from that bitch as possible.”
Bill stopped smoothing the top sheet and looked at her. “That’s your mother and my daughter,” he said. “Never call her that again.”
He waited until April nodded.
“This your first stop? Seeing as how you want to get as far away as possible and all.”
He’d been down this particular road before. Nick had once come into the kitchen one evening when he was half April’s age, lugging a suitcase nearly bigger than he was, and announced that he was running away from home and nothing they could say would change his mind. He and Clare had exchanged glances. Clare was signaling that he should not laugh. “You all set with bus fare?” he’d asked Nick, who stared at both of them for a moment, then stomped back upstairs, the suitcase banging against each step as he did.
“You know what ‘far away as possible’ is for me, Grandpa?” April asked.
“Shoot.”
“California.”
“Makes sense,” Bill said as he put the top cover back on the bed. “Can’t get much farther without getting wet.”
“I’m serious, Grandpa. This singer I know? With this band? Well, I don’t actually know her—she got her start in San Francisco. There are lots of bands out there looking for singers and songwriters.”
Bill nodded. He remembered Clare’s admonition against laughing.
“Sounds like a plan,” Bill said, not knowing what else to say that wouldn’t sound like a smart remark.
“I wish it were,” April said. “I got no money, no way to get there. I’m pretty much stuck with this pathetic existence in Loserville until I’m old enough to get a job, get a car, and get the hell—heck, sorry—out of here.”
By morning, however, there was indeed a plan firmly in place, thanks to a lumpy couch and Bill’s inability to shake from his mind the dual problems of an unhappy granddaughter and three children who couldn’t seem to find a good reason to visit him.
Well before dawn, he’d gotten off the couch, found some paper, envelopes, and a pen, and written letters to his children. In the letters he assured them, especially Marcy, that April was safe. But—and he wrote the “but” in all capital letters—if they wanted to reunite mother and child, it was going to have to be a family effort. Sometime soon, he wrote, one of them would receive a clue about a location that he and April would soon be visiting. Chances were, he advised them, that the person who received the clue would not understand it; however, one of the others would. They’d actually have to TALK TO EACH OTHER to figure it out. And then all three of them would have to travel to the specified destination, where Bill would “deliver” April to them. But ONLY if all three were present. Mike. Nick. Marcy.
The arrangement he presented to April, however, was a bit different. He told her he’d get her to San Francisco—even resume teaching her how to drive along the way—if and only if she agreed to make some stops—at least three of them. She also had to promise that she wouldn’t try to talk to her mother again until he gave the okay.
April agreed almost before he finished his first sentence.
To allow time for the letters to reach all three of his kids, he told April she needed to spend a few days brushing up on her driving skills—in parking lots, this time, so as not to risk being discovered or cause injury to any local mailboxes. But today, the seventeenth, they’d set out for Spartan Stadium.
Bill found his pipe, filled it, and lit up. He wondered how the conversation between Nick and Mike had gone. His first clue—10-10. Gate 8. 2 p.m. June 17—had been included on a small, blank postcard that he sent along with the letter to Nick. Seemed that those two had the most trouble talking to each other.
He could understand why they’d stopped talking to him, but he had never figured out what had driven a wedge between the three of them, or at least between Mike and the others. Didn’t they realize how lucky they were? Bill thought of Jack, his only sibling, ten years older, who had been killed in the final days of the Second World War. Bill never got to know his older brother as an adult, the way his own kids could know each other now. For Bill, Jack was always—even now—the older, heroic brother. He was the reason Bill joined the marines, the reason he wanted at least two boys. When Clare wanted to try for a girl, Bill readily agreed but secretly hoped for a third son. If something should happen, god forbid, to one of the boys, the remaining two would still have a brother.
Hearing a scratching sound, he looked over to see April hunched over a small notebook of some sort, scribbling away furiously.
“What are you writing there?” he asked.
She didn’t hear him. She still had those damned earbuds in. It seemed as though they’d been in her ears since they’d left Woodlake and arrived in East Lansing.
10-10. Gate 8. 2 p.m. June 17.
It was a beautiful clue, he thought. But he also knew it was perhaps the riskiest one, since the only person who’d be able to figure out the clue was the one least likely to care. Still, may as well take the bull by the horns.
Bill kept his attention on Gate 8. He had parked at Gate 5 so that he could drive away if just one or two of them showed up. If they wanted April back, they had to play by the rules. There were plenty of cars parked near the gate—probably summer session commuters—but there wasn’t anybody out walking about, looking around the way people do when they’re meeting someone. He opened his window all the way now. There wasn’t much of a breeze.
The small, tinny sounds suddenly grew louder as April removed the earbuds. “I know I promised I wouldn’t ask too many questions,” she said. “But why are we spending so much time in Lansing or East Lansing or whatever this city is? And why are we staring at that?” She pointed at the stadium.
“That is where the greatest game in the history of college football took place,” Bill answered. “November 19, 1966.”
April turned to look at him. “Football is stupid,” she said.
Bill laughed. “Exactly what I would tell Manny, just to get his goat.”
“Manny?”
Bill hesitated. What could he tell a fifteen-year-old about a war buddy? How would she be able to understand, sitting in a hot car on a warm summer day, the winter of ’52? A hole somewhere near the 38th parallel. Dig or die: That was the rule. He and Manny dug. They dug with a crappy little shovel and, at times, frozen hands with broken and bloodied nails. And there they’d sit, wrapping and rewrapping horse blankets around themselves. Between mortar rounds, when all they could do was tighten their sphincters and hope that a shell wouldn’t land in their laps, they talked. Swapping lies, as they liked to call it. Manny talked about growing up poor in East Lansing. About how he worked hard to get through high school and then through Michigan State. How proud he was to enlist after graduation. How stupid he realized he’d been.
Mostly, though, Manny talked football. The Spartans, specifically. How when—if—he ever made it back home, he’d get season tickets and watch the Spartans kick ass all season long. Especially Notre Dame’s ass.
When Bill found out that Manny hated Notre Dame, he became an immediate Fighting Irish fan. A subway alum. He told Manny that if he, Bill Warrington, ever had a son, that son would someday be a Domer. Getting his goat was the best way to keep Manny from saying things like if we ever get out of this goddamn foxhole.
Manny did get out of the foxhole, but he never made it back to East Lansing. As he shook Bill’s hand the day he shipped out, he told Bill that he was going to live in California. Or Arizona. Anywhere snow wasn’t.
They’d kept in touch for a while. Manny settled in Los Angeles and became a cop. They exchanged letters, replaced later by Christmas cards, later nothing. Until one day Bill received in the mail two tickets to the Michigan State-Notre Dame game—the game all the newspapers were touting as the Game of the Century.
The tickets were sent by Manny’s widow. Used his old service revolver, she wrote. Couldn’t leave Korea.
“A buddy of mine from the war,” Bill said to April now. “He gave me tickets to the game. Notre Dame was ranked number one, Michigan number two. They were both killing their opponents all season. The national championship was on the line.”
April nodded, but Bill could tell she wasn’t really paying attention.
“Your uncle Mike and I went.”
April turned. “Uncle Mike? Was he even born then?”
Bill laughed. “He was ten or eleven at the time. And he was a diehard Notre Dame fan.”
It was true. Bill didn’t know how it happened. Mike didn’t get it from him. The only time Bill ever even mentioned Notre Dame was when he talked about the war and Manny, and he never talked about the war. But somehow, Mike had fallen in love with the Fighting Irish. He even had a poster on his bedroom wall of Ara Parseghian, his image superimposed against pictures of the Golden Dome and Notre Dame Stadium.
Bill remembered how Mike thought his father was teasing him when he told him he had tickets to the game. Then, when he realized it was true, he hugged his father. Every night before he went to bed, Mike told Bill how many more days there were until November 19.
And then, suddenly for Bill but not for Mike, it was November 19 and they were in the stands with seventy-six thousand other people, screaming and cheering and laughing.
Bill spent more time watching Mike than he did the action on the field. Mike grimaced when Regis Cavender scored for MSU. He groaned out loud when Bubba Smith knocked Terry Hanratty out of the game. Bill thought Mike might start crying when All-American Nick Eddy left with a shoulder injury.
But then, early in the fourth quarter, Mike was jumping up and down and hugging his father when the Irish kicker tied the game at 10 with a field goal. And he actually grabbed his father’s hand when, with a minute and ten seconds left in the game, the Irish had possession of the ball on their own 30-yard line.
“Here we go, Dad,” Mike called up to him. Bill had never seen his son so happy. “Here come the Irish!”
But the Irish stayed where they were. Parseghian decided to run out the clock.
On the way home, Mike kept asking Bill how he could do that. “How could he settle for a tie, Dad? Why didn’t he go for it?”
Bill explained, as Parseghian himself later did, that a tie would still keep Notre Dame in the running for a national championship. That he couldn’t risk a turnover. That he had to do what was best for the team.
“But he should have still gone for it, right, Dad? You would have gone for it, right?”
Bill couldn’t answer. The words rang loud in his ears. You would have gone for it. All he could do at that moment was reach over and pat his son’s knee.
The following week, the Fighting Irish stomped on USC, 51-0. But Mike didn’t watch the game. Nor did he comment when the Irish were, after all, named national champions. Parseghian’s strategy had worked. But a few weeks later, Bill noticed that the poster of Parseghian was no longer on Mike’s bedroom wall.
“Never settle,” Bill said to the smoke that rose up before him. “Never.”
April had put her earbuds back in and was writing away in her composition book. A diary? Bill wondered. Was she writing about football? Old stories? Pipe smoke and farts?
Why hadn’t he kept a diary, a journal? How many adventures and people had he forgotten over the years? A journal could bring them all back. The stories he’d be able to tell! In the end, he figured, that’s all you had.
They sat for another half hour. He looked one more time at Gate 8 before starting the car.
He and April were quiet as he drove to the hotel Bill had picked for their first night on the road.