False Light
Josh Mayfield has retired from professional baseball, and now my half-brother is older than every player in the major leagues. As a kid, he tells me, he didn’t believe he’d ever grow as old as Pete Rose or Lou Brock. At thirty, he tells me, he still saw a handful of warhorses as old men—Hershiser, Gwynn, Ripken. Now Josh Mayfield has retired, and James isn’t a kid anymore.
I remember July afternoons when he was on break from Kent State, my mother filling prescriptions at Prairie Pharmacy, our father filling cavities at the health center. James would toss wiffle balls over a home plate of splintered plywood while I swung a yellow plastic bat with all the grace of a wounded mule, my naked toes twisting around the stems of dandelions. Mom and Dad would come home within an hour of one another, and we’d eat a supper of corn or salad or grilled tilapia. Between mouthfuls of asparagus, James imparted the outcomes of his new education. Actually, he’d say, Foucault believed that Marxist thought belonged solely to the eighteen-hundreds. In the evenings we watched baseball in the garage, our father tinkering with the lawnmower engine, and James, beginning that one summer, draining a six-pack of National Bohemian over the course of nine innings.
Now, three weeks before his divorce, James smokes a pipe on his back patio. A new habit, he says, and he can’t seem to keep the tobacco lit, burns through match after match. My fiancée and I sip coffee from identical green mugs: we are visiting from our apartment in Champaign, two biologists in love. The yard is broad and flat—a nice, country yard. An early snow has fallen, and through a threadbare string of maples at the edge of the property, I see the neck and antlers of a young buck rising from the earth. The sky paints the air gray. James lights another match against the striker of a matchbook, dips the flame into the bowl of his pipe. Charring light, he says. False light. Just drying the strands.
We talk for a while about pipesmoking, about cheesemaking and pottery. I lay my arm across Angela’s thighs, and she traces circles on my palm with her fingernail. James asks about her dissertation, and she straightens in her seat, offers a few words about biofilm and aromatic degradation pathways. I watch leaves descend from the trees, somersault like gymnasts through the air. James and Angela talk, and I think about autumn. This autumn, last autumn, my first autumn in Illinois, when I toasted the Alma Mater and drank wine from a paper cup. I think about future autumns, when Angela and I land VAPs in the Northeast, when some Research-I bio department takes me on just so they can have her, when we marry in her Iowa hometown, beneath a crown cover of orange and red leaves. (Sometimes, scrutinizing a peach at the Urbana Saturday market, she bites her bottom lip hard enough to break skin, and I could kiss her for millennia.)
Let’s replenish our cups, James says. He taps his cashed tobacco into an empty coffee tin. Inside, a few cardboard boxes sit next to the refrigerator—his wife’s china, inherited from her grandmother, Virginian stoneware, the toaster. James fills our mugs from a carafe of French roast, says he’ll brew some more. We sit on barstools at the island and nibble from a bowl of cashews. You still into model trains? he asks.
I don’t have the space, I say. For a moment I remember detailing boxcars with dirt gathered from our mother’s garden, adding graffiti tags with a gel pen. I remember James, home from his postdoctoral residency, walking down to our father’s basement, nodding at the display, saying, Not too shabby. I envied him then, his life in the classroom, in books and in bars. I envy him still.
My half-brother pours two shots of whiskey into his coffee, apologizes. It’s eleven-thirty in the morning. He loves us, he says. I hold Angela’s hand in my lap, and she touches her shoulder to mine, traces her fingertip around the rim of her coffee mug. James looks through the bay window above the sink, out over the cold, wet lawn. He jangles the keys in his pocket. Otherwise, the sound of this room could put you to sleep—a sloshing dishwasher, a gurgling percolator, the purr of a furnace through baseboard registers. I watch James, whose eyes don’t move from his backyard. His thin, grim mouth and the flecks of silver in his stubble.
Your house is gorgeous, Angela says. With a paper napkin, she daubs droplets of coffee from the countertop. She looks down as speaks, uncrosses her legs. I wonder if he’ll live here much longer.
James sets his mug in the sink, takes a moment to tuck the hem of his shirt into wrinkled khakis. He sighs, and the sigh sounds affected, almost theatrical. Put on your coats, he says.
He wants to take us to the model train show at Second Presbyterian, held the third Saturday of each month, a little display in the basement, a few lonely enthusiasts who ache to share stories of watching diesel engines on the Ohio Southern thirty years ago, covering their ears at the brassy horns. A short Saturday afternoon jaunt, he says, and then we’ll return home for a venison roast (courtesy of a neighbor down the lane), for wine and duck pâté. I scratch the skin beneath the wool cuff of my sweater.
In the driveway, James and I wait for Angela to finish in the bathroom. He examines the chamber of his pipe, holds the device with two hands. Leaves are snow-pasted to the front windows of his house, to the dark shingles of the roof. He slips the pipe into the front pocket of his coat—a corduroy coat with a furry collar that reminds me of our father. Got damn cold, he says, and I nod into the wind. A blue Ford Explorer passes on the street, which winds past sloped lawns and maples and small firs, past houses of brick and broad windows. After a minute, Angela opens the front door and lowers her head to the cold air; she shoves her hands into the pockets of a dark pea coat. Through wind-flustered hair, she smiles at us, and for the first time, her smile seems crooked, maybe a little beguiling.
She takes the front passenger seat, and I sit behind her, studying the long strands of her dark hair, the flush surface of her cheek. James waves to a neighbor and a bullmastiff that pulls on its leash and sniffs at the roots of young elm. I rest my temple against the window and look upward, try to focus on a single leaf above me, one orange or yellow appendage on the boughs stretching over the road. But the car moves too fast, and they run together like spilled paint.
PHIL ORTMANN lives and writes in Pittsburgh. He holds a B.A. in English from the University of Pittsburgh and an M.F.A. from Penn State, where he cofounded the university’s first literary yearbook. His work has appeared in numerous publications and has been awarded an AWP Intro Journals Project award.