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  Mal reappeared and they began anew arguing about baseball because they could. Because she could, rather. She knew more about the sport than anyone either one of them had met. She even started her own fantasy baseball league on their newly-purchased computer and walked around spitting a lot. He realized that she had always done this, he had just never noticed. It was one of those quirks that people have born out of their surroundings that they carry with them forever. The one and only time he’d met Maggie Mechaine’s father he noticed the same free play of saliva jutting out from his angular chin.

  She went to local minor league games without him, usually, when he was on duty and she wasn’t working. She almost always went alone. He couldn’t abide the sport, was both puzzled and confused at her love of the game. The All-American game, she’d call it, protesting. Just as Americans as guns, she’d smirk, and tap his holster.

  “That’s my job.”

  She spat between his feet. “This is mine. Now, should I trade—“

  She even played baseball. Alone. She was at the batting cages at least a few nights a week, even in winter. She looked like a lithe flamingo or something in her cage there, snow drifting down around her as she cut through it with her wooden rapier—tock!—she’d toss the guys working there a couple hundred bucks if they wanted to close. Eventually, they just started leaving her the keys. One employee, with the impolitic name of Dave the Eel, told him once when he came to fetch her that she was the best hitter that came to their cages.

  He discovered this caginess of hers only as he could’ve, through a concatenation of crucially stupid circumstances and misunderstandings. “Crucially stupid.” Her words, he remembered now with a sick smile. It was this Randy guy, this one she spoke of when she thought he wasn’t listening or, as it turned out, when he thought he wasn’t listening and she thought he was; the Randy who she spoke of with fragility and tenderness over the course of that year, that year after they were married when her father died, and they decided to mob her floodgates with his white assassins and make babies; the Randy that he now learned she slipped out of the house to see several evenings a week; the Randy that devoured her attentions and inadvertently divulged her intentions—Randy? What kind of name was Randy? Randy invoked images of moustaches and denim, paunches and low-slung guitars—she had taken a lover?! Sickly, he saw this as merely his own purview, though it’d be some time yet before he acted on it with any vigor. How unfair is that, he cried out in anger to no one but himself. In the end, he confronted her as she never would him:

  “Alright, dammit—who’s Randy?” Why was she laughing at him? He looked around the night-lit cage, butt-end of his own unintended joke, punchline, foolscap and all. She was bent forward with her gloved hands on her knees, laughing her silent, airless laugh, that dark side of the moon laugh. “What the hell? What’s so fucking funny?” He’d followed her here to her assignation with her paramour. Batting cages? Ha! Of course! Her lover must be a fellow fan, maybe from her fantasy league. It would shortly be his fantasy league.

  She wouldn’t stop laughing. Randy was probably nearby, watching with his moustache. He was. Randy was a tripedal cannonade construction that spat balls at Maggie Mechaine. “Randy,” she said hoarsely. She patted it and then him. “Instant idiot! He shoots white lies at me, too,” she told the machine, jerking a thumb at her husband. She excelled at making him recognize himself for the fool he was, he admitted now, with a crack of laughter.

  Little Randy’d go with them to Alaska but he’d never be used again. It was that poof! she said, that did it all in for her. Did she mean the bird hitting the bat or the plane hitting the building? The feathers or the falling people? He could never tell. Both?

  For a while, he and Mal had tried to get her to play on the intra-precinct softball team, painful yet obligatory for him but she just maligned him for it. He was hurt by her rejection via bark-laugh of his suggestion that she play. “We have to consider the female cops, too.”

  “Well, I’m a woman and I think it’s just damn dumb. I can play baseball.” There was soft to her, but it was percussive, nocturnal, and genital: it took no truck with the denigration of sport to these levels.

  “Okay—well, do you want me to come and throw to you? Instead of the machine?”

  She snorted. “Throw to me? You mean pitch? No, if you came and ‘pitched’ I won’t know if I can hit it. If I do it myself, I always know. I’ll always know if I will or not.” And this was how she lived her life.

  When he did go to the occasional game with her, they were weekend trips to Pittsburgh to see the Pirates play. Their city had no major league baseball team and the closest ones were the Pirates, Phillies, and the Yankees. “So if it’s between piracy, whores, and people losing a tug-of-war, I’m goin’ with the boys in black.”

  “What about the Mets?” He was met with an emasculating, bombardier glare.

  The Pirates it was. “These guys are awful, right?” He heard tell from colleagues when he’d describe Maggie’s endearments to them, they’d just laugh. What’d a woman know?

  “Not this season. And with the lowest payroll. They’re called the ‘Freak Show’, did you know that?” She eyed the field. She was almost right. And she went to every game of the division title, dishing out hundreds and hundreds of dollars for tickets.

  There were two Randies, he’d eventually discovered, a machine and a man, the latter the eponym, a pitcher, her arch-enemy. “Oh, that’s Randy,” she casually tossed at him from where she squatted before the television eating popcorn. She spat a wad of half-chewed kernels onto his shoe. “Sorry.”

  “That dude’s a menace,” he squinted at the screen. “He’s huge!” This was who she wrote all those letters to?

  “Two inches taller than you,” she said. I could hit off of him, too, she boasted, I’m certain of it.

  “So you’d take a pitch from him and not me.” He was trying to start an argument, they both knew. “Off—what’s-his-name?”

  “Johnson,” she said quietly, “Yes. Yes, I could. I know—I know him.”

  “But not me.”

  “No one ever knows anyone. Not like that. The closer you are the stronger this is.” She nodded at the television. She could hit off him. He even believed her until the day she saw the Man Randy kill a dove with a pitch. She had trouble watching baseball after that. How many feathers? Could you imagine having to rebuild that thing? Sticking them all back together? Could you even gather up all the pieces? I wonder if Johnson kept it? He should’ve kept it. Man, just that great big white bird going poof! right into the side of that thing. Later that year, she’d say the same white thing with the same white words. Rain to her now was feathers and not-quite-corpses. “I want to be rain, too, I do,” she wept. That was when they decided to move. There were too many gentlewhites being smashed into things. “Fuck, can’t we leave? Please?” She pulled on his mood like a child. He didn’t like her like this, this Maggie Mechaine of fears and the ends of loves.

  He kept catching her weeping. The frames were getting all wet. So were the bats.

  When she decided to sell her shop, they still had the matter of the entire surplus inventory, especially the clutter cluttering their apartment. This was graciously eased by the appearance of a crotchety old painter and his young assistant who bought the lot.

  “I couldn’t help but notice your name,” the younger man said to Maggie, “your family name?”

  “Uh-huh?” She smiled a little. When was the last time he’d seen that? And how could this little homo dredge that up out of her when he, her husband, was unable to even get the time of day out of her.

  “Mechaine? I think we’re distant relatives,” he told her with a sideways laugh.

  “Really?” She liked this gentle fellow almost immediately. “How do you figure?” Almost ‘figger’, but her tone had softened over time and the slender seductions of that ‘yoo’ sound in words had finally won her over.

  There was a common ancestor between his branch of the f
amily-writ-large and hers. “Really?” She brightened for a moment. They both recognized his name Secord. “Wow!” The Secords were the by-word for wealth around town.

  “Yeah, weird, huh?” He looked around. “Are you guys moving or something?”

  “We’re going to Alaska to die,” she explained with feral silliness and hooked her arm through her husband’s.

  (28 Across) I am in the Willows.

  We must flee, Maggie’s face said. And they had. But even before that he had been desperate to find her something to anchor her down. Maggie had no affinity for animals. They could not conceive a child, but—

  “We could borrow Mal’s baby,” she suggested, only half a jest. His best friend had been abandoned by the mother with their newborn son, never to return again, dead somewhere else. Maggie Mechaine had never trusted this woman and had never tried to befriend her, would avoid Mal, whom she enjoyed, to avoid her. “She’s weird.” “She’s a musician.” “Is that an excuse or a reason?” “She’s just quiet.” She was so quiet that one day she just up and didn’t exist anymore. All her quiet had swallowed her up.

  He remembered her saying this about the baby, remembered staring down at her downturned face and he sensed a passing shadow over her that betokened that she’d be death before mother by him. Was there no serum in him for her desolation? What had he been doing wrong all these years? He shook her by the shoulders, but even those obvious waters stayed in her eyes: she was a bad student of woe and this maddened him.

  She wanted to see Mal’s little washed-ashore baby. She was surprised at how little sand there was on the bottom of the cradle, how dry its swaddles. Mal took it up like a deck of cards, as if it were the most natural wager in the world, which, of course, it was. She walked around him while he held the baby, peering into its little face and his, conscious of strength and the cardinal and ordinal about the pair of them.

  “Do you want to hold him?” Mal laughed, “you’re like a damn vulture!”

  Vultures, he told himself later, feed on pieces. Had he looked vulture in the snow when he’d been picking up Maggie Mechaine’s afterdeath? “No,” she laughed nervously, “I’d be afraid I’d drop him or something. Can I smell him?”

  Of course she could. She didn’t cry the whole way home. That was the day, he guessed, that she decided they had to run.

  ⧜

  She looked different when she came to him this day. Sleep had still given her the slip and her eyes were all hollow and dark, made her lean into a half-topple, slack-shouldered stoop.

  I pretended, she explained from the threshold she refused to cross, I was your wife for a few nights. I wanted to apologize for those weddings, you remember? It seemed to—upset you. It was clear it was difficult, as it always had been for Maggie Mechaine to speak to him this way. I wanted to—this was different than the Tournament, can’t you see that? They—the weddings were alive, not grave-bent. I thought this would please you. When you became angry, I left and I pretended I was your wife, since I can see you miss her terribly. Her voice cracked. And I made something for you. She held up something, a jumble of mechanical parts. Upon closer inspection, he saw with horror that she’d cannibalized the anatomies of some kind of little cars—

  Look, she whispered, see the child I made. She has your eyes. They were headlights, he saw. She reached down as if to tickle its cheek but instead flipped an invisible switch and the eyes went on and off again and again and again. Isn’t she beautiful?

  Were his memories causing all this? There was too much of a coincidence here—now—

  He looked up from the blasphemous bundle and blurted, You killed yourself. Did you know that? Did you?

  Her reaction surprised him. Instead of lashing out at him in anger for daring to question her seeming invincibility or incorruptible menace, she started giggling, then laughing. She pawed and scrabbled at her sides and knees for a moment before straightening up and telling him, Life is practicing being human. Death is the game itself. Maybe, he thought, this was why she had spent so much time in her batting cages.

  ⧜

  She’d either been smoking or sucking on sleep. It was two in the morning. She was stacking up old VHS tapes of games around her. The TV was on, the sound was not, but she knew this movie by heart. He watched her for a while without making his presence known, with that guilt we feel when we accidentally happen upon someone we think we know when they’re by themselves. He saw her fingers flutter and forage in the nearby ashtray. He saw her use her palms to perfect the edges of her stacks. He saw her draw her knees up to her chin and mouth the dialogue to this, her only favorite film. A Maggie Mechaine who was nothing like a smoking brand on his side. A Maggie Mechaine who was not only dead but reborn outside the clot of rotting stars that constituted the rest of the world.

  Suddenly, it came to her favorite part and she stunned him by waving at him without averting her eyes from the screen. She’d known he was there all along. Not a little unsettled by this, he made his was softly over and sat down cross-legged next to her.

  This was the only movie she ever watched more than once. Why, he asked? “Because they’re all on a journey that no one wants to be on but they go along anyway. ‘Cause they have to.”

  They very rarely watched movies together. He’d cultivated a particular taste over the years that she kept distant from, and she couldn’t watch a thing without stripping it to pieces, reality was fused, she insisted, neckties and things don’t loosen and tie themselves. She was a nitpicker. She was also infamously incapable of following more than the simplest plots. “Wait, what war is this?” “Vietnam?” “Who’s the bald guy? Mister Mumbles?” “Kurtz—“ although half the time he thought she was joking, just high, or both. But she did the same thing with reality.

  They rarely went out to movies. “I like guessing. I hate choosing,” she told him on countless occasions. “It should be like a kind of roulette. Russian.” She grabbed his gun off his dresser and he yelped. “Where the films spin around and around and around between the theaters and you run in and cross your fingers when you buy your ticket to maybe get in to that one you really, really want to see.” She sighted along its length, aiming at the television. “Or, maybe you’ll be pleasantly surprised. I would always be pleasantly surprised. Like radio. The way it used to be. I miss MTV.”

  He patted her hand. “Me too.”

  It came down to one simple thing for her: “I’m not really very interested in other people doing things.” He’d even tried to get her into baseball movies with only poor results. The only one she really reacted to was the one with the guy from Psycho about the mentally-disturbed baseball player. The film profoundly disturbed her, he could see. Another one he tried on her, she’d already seen. She watched it quietly, even laughed here and there. “Why aren’t there women baseball players?” he dug at her, “oh, right, because we have softball!”

  “I’ll give you a soft ball.” She made a fist. Still, she didn’t seem to enjoy it as much as he would’ve thought. Sappy, she said.

  Mostly, though, she couldn’t get past her own hazy delineations of narrative structure. She had a weird kind of dyslexia of events he noticed the first few years they were together. It shone through when she was dealing with fixed, boxed realities such as films. “Whaddya mean? How’d he know the ghosts would come?” “Something told him to build it.” “It did? Who? Why? What’s in the corn?” “Heaven, I guess.” “Won’t they have to get rid of the old black dude’s body somehow?” “I—“ or “He didn’t know that the bad guy was his dad?” “No—that’s the point.” “He can read thoughts, right? They said that before. The Muppet—he doesn’t know his own dad?” “It’s called dramatic—“ “The bad guy sounds like the old black guy from the baseball ghost movies.”

  “DVD,” she said after him. “It looks like a CD. How do they get all the motion into it? From the motion picture?”

  He couldn’t say. “We don’t know how anything works, do we?” She didn’t say anything then for
he was right.

  ⧜

  Saith Maggie Mechaine: “Fuck that, you don't wanna go that way. You gonna go all the way down about half a block and you'll see a Torino with no wheels on it. Now inside that Torino is my cousin Jack, now you tell him you're my boy and you're lost and he'll make sure you get to where you’re goin’ ‘cause you don't want to know from me man, this ain't even my neighborhood.” She rocked back and forth with her molasses tongue as she drawled this sermon and then, fattened with laughter, she slaughtered herself, stretched out across the floor, now a princess who grew towers for her rivals in the patch of dirt under her castle window: never to be beaten. A stack of VHS tapes fell across her chest. He scrambled to uncover her.

  (29 Down) I am Never Very Far from Nowhere.

  So that meant she was still about. She’d vanished again, he couldn’t find her anywhere. He didn’t think to look at nowhere. It had been nearly a week since he’d seen her. He believed she was hiding from him after the nuptial atrocities, the mockery of a child she’d tried to leave at his doorstep, his half-confession to her as to her true fate.