Brett Elwell
Debt
I.
October was the last month I took care of my dead brother's mail. I usually sat at the kitchen table, my father in the living room behind me. He watched the Yankee games with the television on mute and his headphones on, listening to Neil Diamond albums.
This first week of the month, my brother Rich had received an offer from USAA. I didn't even know he was a member. They offered him a Discover Card with an introductory rate of 0% APR for up to twelve months on balance transfers and convenience checks. After that, he would have 9.15% variable APR on purchases and cash advances.
I kept a large collection of coupons from Smith's Grocers that I cut out from the Sunday newspaper. The coupons were for produce, detergent, school supplies, salad dressings, kitchenware, almost anything. But I stuffed them into the prepaid envelopes that came with the credit card applications.
The way credit card companies operate is this: the prepaid envelopes are paid for by the credit card company, but only for the weight of standard business reply mail. The envelopes are weighed -- just like any other piece of mail -- but the companies get charged extra when the envelope exceeds the standard weight. So I stuffed them. I jammed as much shit as I could into each envelope: coupons, pinto beans, rolls of pennies, bottle caps, tabs from coke cans, old spare keys and costume jewelry. Sometimes I just filled them with rocks.
I started to fill the envelopes in August, the month Rich passed. It was one of those things no one pays attention to. The mail, I mean. The companies send these applications when teenagers graduate from high school, and it would have been Rich's first college semester. The applications were a constant reminder. But the fact that the card programs were intended to scam young college students out of money was just as bad. I couldn't decide which was worse.
But still, the mail doesn't stop coming when someone dies.
And I wanted to pretend Rich still appreciated me.
I jammed the USAA envelope full of coupons. I knew it wouldn't tear the company apart; they had plenty of money to pay the overage fee. But I did it to send them a message, to maybe hint that something had happened.
I sealed the USAA envelope and popped the cap off a black felt-tipped marker. On the front of the envelope, I wrote: USAA, Please send cash for book money. I flattened out the bulging envelope so it would fit through the mail slot. Behind me, my father heard the crinkle of the envelope paper and took his headphones off.
“Would you knock that off?” he said, and put his headphones back on.
Two months ago when Rich was buried, family and friends had crowded every inch of our living room. The air was damp; there were so many people squeezed into the house, the buzz of conversation made it feel like the whole thing was moving. Everyone brought us food: fruit trays, enchiladas, casseroles, those huge deli platters with four types of cold cuts and four different cheeses.
I sat in a chair in the corner of the living room next to a window and looked out into the backyard where the batting cage still stood. I wondered if my father was going to take it down. He had built it when Rich started high school. It was just a bunch of aluminum rods that look like tent poles stuck into the ground. He draped a blue netting over the top and bought a pitching machine for the opposite end to simulate actual at-bats.
That afternoon the net was off-center. The night before, the wind had beaten on the cage and tossed and twisted the blue netting. One side of the net was hiked up too high and didn't touch the ground. On the opposite side, it piled on the yellowing lawn, like when covers are unevenly distributed on a bed.
My grandmother pulled up a chair and sat next to me. She smelled of musty perfume and hand-sanitizer.
“How are you, Christopher?” she asked.
“I'm hot,” I said. “That's why I'm sitting near the window.”
“I know,” she said. “But, how are you?”
I turned and explained to her how much fun it was having two rooms; I finally had space for all of my things. I told her how I was thinking about cleaning out all of my brother's junk from his room, then pitching a tent in the middle. This way, on even numbered nights, I could open both the windows in his room, sleep in the tent for the night and it would feel like the two of us were camping. The other nights, I explained -- the odd numbered ones -- I'd set up a TV in his room, leave it on, sleep in my bed, and listen to the noise coming through the wall so it would feel like Rich was just down the hall.
My grandmother got up and walked away when I said this.
These things I thought about at the time, I probably didn't mean to say. But my brother was dead -- wasn't I liable to say anything?
Rich and I had spent that previous summer together. We wanted to spend as much time as possible before he would have had to leave for Kansas in the fall. While our parents were at work during the day, Rich would ask me to feed balls to him from the pitching machine in the batting cage so he could prepare for tryouts. He hit for hours, cracking balls into the net with his wooden bat. I would stand behind a metal screen wearing a helmet. After a few hours, we would take a break.
“You tired of standing there yet?” Rich would ask, and I would say yes.
“Get your bat,” he'd say. “We're going to the park.”
We would walk two blocks to local Little League fields; they were always empty in the summer. We walked with a bucket of old baseballs and a bat Rich got me for my birthday. I laid the bat over my shoulder while I walked, and Rich taught me things. “Keep your elbow level and your head down,” he would say. “You have to see the pitch to hit it.”
I would repeat his advice over and over in my head until we reached the field.
“Remember your hands are the most important part of your swing. Throw your hands at the baseball and follow through with both arms.”
We would stop at the smaller field, the one between the pitching machine league, and the league with a Major League sized field. Rich would set up a protective screen, stand behind it, and lob baseballs so I could try to hit them over the fence. I usually hit four or five homeruns, but I hit almost every single ball. Sometimes Rich would get frustrated and yell at me.
“Dammit, Chris,” he'd say. “Keep your head down.”
I sometimes wondered if he got frustrated because I wasn't as good as he was. But I did and still do reject that; he just wanted me to try my hardest. I would get frustrated, too, when Rich swung and missed in the batting cage. I knew what he was capable of, and that's what I always expected.
It was toward the end of July when my mother told me Rich's pancreas was the problem. I didn't even know what one was. I kept asking her, “Why can't they just take it out?” I kept trying to tell her my friend Johnny just had his removed a few months back, and he was fine; he just had a small scar on his stomach.
She told me I was thinking of an appendix.
“Yeah,” I said to her. “So why can't they just take it out?”
I realized my brother was going to die when I saw the gifts people were giving him. The people who visited gave him boxes of popsicles, ice cream sandwiches and candy. These things would melt if you left them on the counter long enough.
Some brought movies -- mostly comedies -- that you couldn't watch more than once because the jokes would already be old the second time around. No one brought, say, a one thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, or a book over three-hundred pages. They brought magazines instead. Words like “one-thousand,” and “three-hundred” were too uncertain, too far into the future.
Around that time, I got a lot of grief from family and friends. They wanted to know why I never played baseball on my own, for myself. They thought I could be good enough to make the high school team, the same team Rich played for. “Maybe”, they said, “you could carry on what he started.”
I might have tried, but Rich did it so well before me.
The way I saw it, my job was to make Rich better at whatever he did, and I was good at that. But after he was gone, the only person I could help was myself, and I was confused.
When my family or friends asked me those questions, why I didn't play baseball like Rich did, I said, “Because.” And, “How would that accomplish anything?”
II.
One afternoon in early October, I had sat at the kitchen table and sifted through the mail when Mom walked by with bags in her hands and underneath her arms.
After the gathering at our house, Mom didn't talk much. She spent a lot of time in Rich's room, staring at the walls. She stood with her arms at her sides and sobbed. And after she sobbed long enough, she started to clean. She went into the room with fifty-gallon black trash bags and came out hours later. The bags were stuffed full of Rich's old things. “Goodwill,” she said as she passed.
She caught me staring at her when she was on her way back to Rich's room.
“Or Salvation Army,” she said, and continued on her way.
I followed Mom into Rich's room. She had finished stripping away his old things, and now pulled all of his old furniture into the center of his room. She took all of the clothes from his dresser and stripped the sheets from his bed. Rich, at one time, had posters of baseball stars, awards, and pretty girls tacked onto his walls. But the walls were bare. I think Mom threw them all out. There were pictures of me and Rich, too, and I wondered if she also got rid of these.
I walked into the room as Mom tugged Rich's oak bed frame into the center. She was only going an inch every pull.
“If you're just going to stand there,” she said, “then why not just help me.”
This was the first time I had heard her say a full sentence in weeks, so I helped her. We dragged the bed frame, a dresser, two bookshelves and a television stand into the center. Then Mom covered all of them in a large white cloth that looked like a bed spread.
“Alright. All done,” she said. “Looks good.”
With the stripped white walls and the furniture piled up in the middle, it looked like a garage sale. There were indentions of where the furniture once stood -- little matted squares of white carpet were scattered around the room. The furniture had stood there for eighteen years, and I wondered if the little squares of carpet would ever return to normal, blend in.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked.
She took a good look around the room, then sniffled a little bit and turned to me.
“I'm decorating,” she said.
III.
By the second week of October, the New Mexico Federal Credit Union had mailed Rich four checks. The letter said that if he used the checks that fall, and spent over three-hundred dollars with each check, the check numbers would be entered into a drawing for a trip to the Bahamas.
The letter had also said these four checks were a perfect opportunity to: write a check for a high school graduation gift, take care of emergencies or unexpected injuries, pay outstanding medical bills, build an addition to a house, or pay off student loans.
If he chose, he could even re-tile his bathroom.
I emptied rolls of pennies into the envelope and sealed it, then pulled the cap off my marker and wrote on the front, Credit Union, can you write checks for accounts that don't exist?
That same week, I had gone into Rich's room to look for some of his old Sports Illustrated magazines, for articles I could stuff into envelopes. Mom had the white carpet covered in a massive grey canvass drop cloth splattered with white paint.
“What are you doing now?” I asked. The walls were primed white, but there were two mats of paint on one of the far walls directly parallel from one another. One was a dark green; the other was more of a mint.
She stood with her arms folded in front of the two mats. “I can't decide,” she said, and stretched her arms in front of her chest and made a rectangle with her hands. “Sea Foam, or Forest?”
“Does it matter?” I asked.
“Maybe I should paint a thicker swatch.”
“Mom,” I said. “Maybe you just shouldn't.”
She dropped her arms and turned to me. “Christopher,” she said, “if you're going to be negative and depress me, just leave.”
I turned and walked down the hall and into the family room. My father was watching a Braves game. When he saw me walk by, he pulled off his headphones.
“What's she doing, Chris?” he asked.
“Painting.”
He put his headphones on the coffee table. “Painting what?”
“The walls,” I said. “She's painting the walls.”
He exhaled, got up from the couch, and put his headphones back on.
“I'll go talk to her.”
I followed Dad down the hall; I wanted to hear them talk to each other. He walked into Rich's room and paused his CD player, but didn't take off his headphones. “You really think you're going somewhere with this?” he said.
“The colors are always more bold when they hit the wall,” Mom said. “That's my biggest problem right now.”
“That's not the problem here.”
“There's also the problem with the colors in general,” she said. “One looks more manly, the other too girly.”
“Maybe we should put this off for awhile,” said Dad.
“John,” Mom said.
“The room will be here.”
“It's not just the color.”
“I know.”
“Then,” Mom said, and turned around to face my father, “let me paint.”
Dad walked out and started to press play on his CD player, but he stopped and turned to me, standing beside the doorway where I listened.
“If she asks for help,” he said, “just tell her you have homework.”
IV.
During third week of that month, Albuquerque's Bank of America had offered Rich a Visa card with a 1% fixed introductory rate for balance transfers and cash advance checks until October of 2009. After October, his APR would shoot to 11.99%. His credit limit, they said, would be fifteen-thousand dollars or more.
I wondered for the first time: what would Rich use the credit for? Maybe he would have bought more baseball equipment or supplies for school or books or groceries. Or maybe he would have met a girl at college and taken her out to an expensive restaurant. These are the things I'd never know.
Next to the mail, my homework was piled into my backpack. I had about a month's worth of work to do. While Rich was in the hospital, I let it stack on my desk. I never looked at it, never thought it was important. And there were still two more years of high school left.
I opened my geometry book, tore out page after page of practice problems, wadded them up, and jammed them into the envelope.
Dad watched the Yankee game behind me in the living room, and I went to go sit with him. He wore his headphones and reclined in his chair. I sat on the couch next to his and watched.
“Why does the pitcher stick his pointer finger outside of his glove?” I asked, not looking up from the television. “Do you think it's something he's done since he was little, like a habit? Or do you think it's something his coaches told him to do?”
The pitcher wound and delivered a strike.
“Low,” I said. “I think if the umpires call the strike real high at the letters of the batter's jersey, then they should call the low pitches above the knees.”
Dad's CD player probably skipped; he thumped his index finger on the lid and mumbled “shit.”
The pitcher wound and delivered again, the batter watching the pitch go by, and the umpire yelling strike three. The batter turned to argue.
“I don't know why they argue with the umpires when it comes to balls and strikes,” I said. “It gets them nowhere. Have you ever seen a strikeout call turned over?”
Dad skipped ahead a few songs.
“Do you think the coaches get mad at the players if they don't argue? If they just accept that they're out?”
He paused his music and turned to me.
“Who are you talking to?” he asked. “Me?”
“Never mind.”
Mom walked into the room just then; there were white paint streaks on her forearms and pant legs. She had a roller in her hand, but it was just the metal frame -- the roller was missing. “Where are the refills?” she said.
Dad kept his headphones on. “For what?”
“This one is done,” Mom said. “I need a new roller; the paint isn't rolling on even.”
“Probably somewhere in the garage,” Dad said, and he started to hit the play button.
“In the garage where,” said Mom.
Dad looked from the TV screen. “The game's on,” he said.
Mom let one of her hands fall and slap against her thigh. “It's always been baseball,” she said.
Dad just stared at the screen.
“That's all you guys ever cared about. It's still all you care about. Even when I'm trying to paint,” she said. Mom walked over to the TV and jerked the plug from the socket, and the game disappeared.
“This family,” she said, “doesn't read enough books.” And she went to look for the extra rollers.
Dad's eyes followed her until she disappeared into the garage. “Good thing,” he said, “that this doubles as a radio.” He flipped a switch on the side and dialed in to what I assume was another baseball game. He leaned back into his chair and settled in.
That same week, I had found Rich's old equipment in a big white chest in the corner of the garage. Probably, Dad hid it there. I unzipped the bag; all of his catcher's gear was ready to go, probably packed for college. No one touched it since. The shin guards were strapped together by their own straps, and his chest protector was rolled around his shin guards and bundled together like a bale of hay. I un-strapped the chest protector from the shin guard buckles.
I put on the shin guards first, criss-crossing the straps behind my legs like I saw Rich do when he geared up for an inning. I was wearing shorts, and the plastic on the inside scraped my knees when I bent in them. Then I pulled the chest protector over my head and buckled it.
His catcher's mask came in two pieces: one was a small, black helmet worn backwards; the second was simply the mask with back straps that fit around the helmet. I wedged the helmet on my head, and pulled on the mask.
His mitt was buried in the bag. I pulled it out and put it on my left hand, looked around the garage, and squatted in place. I held my left arm out in front of me as if about to receive a pitch. My legs burned. As I stood up, the shin guards flexed and squeaked with my jerky movements.
I squatted again.
For a second, I almost believed the things my family had said about my playing on my own. Rich's gear almost felt comfortable, like something I could get used to.
But just as I held my arm out to receive another pitch, Dad -- dressed in his work clothes -- walked into the garage. He stared at me for a moment, and I didn't take off the mask. From our outside refrigerator, he grabbed a beer.
I stood, suited up in Rich's gear.
Before he left the garage, he turned to me. “Put it back when you're done.”
As soon as he was gone, I squatted again.
V.
In that final week of October, Wells Fargo had sent an application for a Citibank card. They claimed it offered extra savings, and a security program that protected against fraudulent card users. The package, they said, was free. They offered 0% APR until December of 2009. But they also offered a free on-line banking and rewards program.
I reached for the cup of small rocks I had collected from our front yard, and dumped them. After sealing the envelope, I took out my marker and thought of Rich's face. His blue eyes, a close buzz cut and a neatly trimmed brown goatee; his burly body, beefy legs, and the way that, during baseball games, his forearms bulged tan and strong from underneath the white tape around his wrists.
I saw him lumbering around the bases after he belted a homer.
On the envelope, I wrote: Please, just leave us alone.
On her second week of painting, Mom had stood in front of one of the far walls with her arms at her sides and her head cocked to the left. The wall where she stood was painted a bright red; the far wall was muddy in color.
“Matador,” she said. “Matador Red.”
Her face was flushed and some of her mascara had clumped underneath her green eyes. “What happened with the greens?” I asked.
“Combined them.”
I went to get Dad. He was cleaning shelves in our garage, and I told him he needed to see something. He paused his CD player and followed me into Rich's room.
The far wall was a muddy brown from the combined greens Mom used. The brush strokes were uneven, making a sloppy swirl of paint. The two newer sections of wall, the ones closest to the door, were painted a bright, even red; the grey drop cloth was splattered with muddy shades of green, white and red. White primer accumulated in splotches that turned a pale grey. Dried paint on the floor was beginning to crack and peel.
Dad took off his headphones, and joined Mom in the center of the room, both now staring at the walls. I shut the door behind me as I left them in there together, making my way into the garage.
Where my father was cleaning, a box of a dozen brand new baseballs gave me the idea. All of the balls were still wrapped in their cellophane wrappers. I rifled through Rich's old equipment until I found the bat he had gotten me; it sat right next to his wooden one, the one he used when we practiced in the batting cage. I chose Rich's bat, tucked the box underneath my arm, laid the bat over my right shoulder and started toward the Little League.
I headed toward the smaller field. I planned to belt every one of the baseballs into the street behind the outfield fence. But I stopped. To my left was the big field, the one with ninety-foot bases and foul poles three hundred feet from the plate. Center field was three hundred and seventy-five feet away and loomed in the distance.
I walked left.
Kneeling at home plate, I opened the box of baseballs, unwrapped each from their wrappers and laid them in a pile behind me. I took one ball in my left hand, held my right choked up a little on the wooden bat, tossed the ball up and laced into it with a sharp crack. Rich's bat was long and heavy; I swung in slow motion. The ball skipped a few times and bounced into the middle of the outfield.
Rich hit a homerun in almost every game, and his teammates would swarm the batter's box. When he crossed the plate, there would be a flurry of high fives and slaps on the back. “Great shot, Rich,” they would say. I always got excited when he hit a homerun; but I never acted surprised when he did, like I expected it.
I belted another baseball into the outfield.
My brother taught me the rules of the game: there were four balls to a walk, three strikes to a strikeout and nine innings in a full game. Only first basemen, pitchers, and outfielders could be left-handed. There was something called the “infield-fly rule” that prevented triple plays.
I belted six more, my forearms burning from swinging the heavy piece of wood.
I tried to imagine myself in the uniform Rich once wore.
Wrestling matches on the living room floor used to leave strawberry rug-burns on my knees and elbows. I used to eat orange popsicles in the summer while feeding the pitching machine. Baseball games on television. Foot races from the park to the house. Movies. Hot dogs.
Down to my last ball, I tossed it in the air and swung as hard as I could. The bat head connected with a crack, and the ball lobbed into the outfield, bouncing a few times, and finally rolling onto the warning track just shy of the outfield fence.
Behind me the sun was setting. It reflected off the mountains in the outfield and turned them a watermelon pink, the far away trees looking like black seeds in the ripe fruit. A shadow was cast over the field, and turned the colors to rich pastels. The grass turned a deep, even green and the red infield clay turned a rich maroon. The twelve brand-new baseballs scattered across the outfield, glimmering like pearls. My forearms glistened with sweat, little slivers of muscle twitching under my light skin from the weight of Rich's bat.
It was the last week of October, and baseball season was ending.
With the bat over my shoulder I started the walk back home, leaving the baseballs scattered across the field.
When I got back, Mom sat in a chair in the center of Rich's room, prying a lid off more white primer. Dad had started to paint the far muddy walls. His roller layered even blankets of white, covering the brown mess. His CD player and headphones were in the corner of the room.
“I'm starting over,” Mom said, still staring into the can. “I'm going to try out some yellows. They seem more gender neutral, you know? So if we have guests.”
I went and stood next to Dad while he painted. “What are you doing this for?” I asked him. The brown glop on the walls slowly began to disappear. He stopped for a moment, his roller resting on the wall.
“It's a start,” he said.
I started for the door, but Mom cut me off before I could get all the way out. “Where are you going?” she asked.
I stopped and stared at my feet; I didn't turn to look at her.
“To check the mail,” I said.
“Christopher,” Mom said, “I called the credit companies.”
Living without Rich felt like missing a high-five, my hand hitting nothing but air. I had known there would be times ahead when I'd have to pat myself on the back, tell myself I did a good job even though, most of the time, I probably wouldn't.
“They said they'd take care of it,” she said. “No more mail.”
I heard that when someone got a limb removed, the person still feels like it's intact for years afterward. A phantom limb I think is what it's called. I felt I'd always have a phantom swing, swing at pitches I'd never be able to hit. I'd constantly wear catcher's gear that wouldn't fit me.
“They apologized, Chris,” Mom said.
For me, it was a problem going from second to first in the matter of months. Rich was supposed to go to college first, supposed to pave my way. It was him I was supposed to question about girls, studying, clubs and friends. He would have taught me how to read a syllabus, stay on track and make shitty meals on an old stove, where to find things for free, how to get through.
No one will ever ask me, say, those questions.
And even if they did, I wouldn't know how to answer.
“Help me,” Mom said.
She finished prying the lid off the white primer, and motioned for me to squat next to her. She handed me a paintbrush. The bristles were clean, stiff, and stood straight in a perfect row. The walls of the room were beginning to come together; the muddy glop, the uneven brushstrokes that once seemed to only slide the paint across the wall, the layers caked upon more layers -- deeper mixing everything that needed to be uncovered. All of this was stripped, being covered with a new layer of white.
I leaned across Mom and dipped my brush into the white paint.
©2009 by Brett Elwell
