We were at Aristotle’s, waiting for our to-go order, when the woman spotted my father. She was standing on the other side of the restaurant’s main dining room, chatting with two men who looked young enough to be students at the university, and sipping beer from a plastic cup emblazoned with the Aristotle’s logo: a muscular cartoon Greek god, sawing into a steaming slice of pizza with an exaggeratedly large steak knife. Just then one of the prep cooks behind the front counter twirled a disc of dough so high it nearly skimmed the pressed tin ceiling, drawing hoots and whistles from the mostly college-aged crowd, and when the woman turned toward this commotion, her eyes—which I could tell even from a distance were much, much bluer than my mother’s—settled not on the pie-hurler in question but directly upon my father.
The woman slid one of her suitors aside and began threading her way through the clots of customers bunched near the main entrance. “Hey there, Professor,” she said when she reached us. “Long time no see.” Her voice was low and cool amidst the racket of chatter bouncing off the brick walls, which were the same buff gold color as the building on campus where my father had taught English for nearly two decades.
“Yes,” my father croaked, a bewildered expression passing across his face as the woman playfully pinched the elbow patch of his corduroy jacket with her red-tipped fingernails. She opened her mouth to say something else, but before she could speak she was interrupted by a loud cheer that rippled through the restaurant. The Cardinals were playing the Astros on several TVs mounted high from the ceiling. John Tudor, the Cards’ ace during the previous year’s World Series run, had been scuffling all season, but on this late August night he’d not only managed to out-duel the legendary Nolan Ryan, he was even contributing at the plate; the instant replay now showed several different angles of Tudor legging out a bases-loaded single. The woman tucked her beer cup under one armpit and clapped her hands vigorously, the golden liquid inside sloshing but never spilling.
“Been following their fortunes this year?” my father asked, the knot in his voice loosening slightly.
The woman gave him a wry smile. “You know me,” she said, moving the beer out from under her armpit. Her body was hard and rounded beneath her white cherry-print dress, and she wobbled a little in her tan heels, flexing her softball-sized calf muscles. Two clumps of pastel-painted toenails peeked through the openings at the tips of her shoes.
“Still listen to Jack Buck call every game on KMOX?” my father asked.
“Best background music there is,” the woman replied. She blew a loose strand of bright blonde hair off her cheek and locked her startling blue eyes onto his.
They stared at each other like this for several more seconds. Then the two of them turned to look at me.
“This yours?” the woman asked my father, like it wasn’t patently obvious. Same egg-shaped head, same baby face, same part in our hair, although his had more grey.
“Definitely mine,” my father said.
The woman hunched down to my level, leaning in so close that I could see the spots where the thickly-applied coat of red lipstick went outside the natural boundaries of her lips. “Does he have a name?”
“Gaylord,” I told her flatly. The name did not embarrass me yet. The official line was that I had been named after a beloved relative of my father’s—a long-dead uncle that just happened to share a name with his all-time favorite baseball player.
The woman beamed as she raised up out of her crouch. “After Perry, right?”
“Bingo,” my father nodded.
“The knuckleballer,” she said, with delighted recognition.
The Spitballer, I wanted to correct her. Phil and Joe Niekro, the other old farts still kicking around the majors, those were the knuckleballers.
“Hardest pitch to learn,” said my father, one side of his mouth twisting upward. He knew she was wrong, too, but he was making himself believe her.
“But once you figure out how to throw a knuckleball,” the woman said, “it’s the hardest pitch to hit.”
Their conversation was exhausting to follow, slipping in and out of hidden codes and charged glances. My parents communicated this way sometimes, but only in the midst of an argument; instead of screaming at one another, they would flash small signals of disgust and aggravation, postponing the real fight because I happened to be standing there, bearing witness. But whatever was going on now between my father and the woman was different. I could feel myself fading in and out, present one minute, completely invisible the next.
“Can I have my quarters?” I asked my father.
He did not remove his eyes from the woman’s. “May I.”
“May I have my quarters?”
My father heaved out an exasperated sigh. “As I told you on the ride over, whatever loose change was in the cup holder you could have.”
“There was just pennies in there.”
“Were just.”
“What’s he need quarters for?” the woman cut in.
“He wants to play arcade games,” my father told her. “That’s the only reason he comes here with me.”
“Well, I don’t have any change,” the woman said as she reached down into the top part of her dress and extracted a dollar bill. “But you can hand this to the nice man behind the bar in the other room and he’ll give you something shiny in return.”
The bill had been folded over four times, with a faint indentation from where it had nestled in the warm curve of her cleavage.
“What do we say?” my father prompted. But his cheeks were flushed, and his voice had been drained of all authority.
Dollar in hand, I hurried away from my father and the woman and approached the mahogany-trimmed bar, wedging myself in between two coeds sharing a medium sausage-and-onion, twirling hot gooey mozzarella around their forks like pasta. My mother hated the way Aristotle’s legitimized eating pizza with utensils, but my father believed this was the way it was meant to be consumed, cheese and toppings sliding off sirloin-thick dough like molten lava. He always had to have a slice there, at the restaurant; he claimed it just didn’t taste the same once you brought your cooled pie home. My mother remained dubious. “You only go there to drink beer and hit on college girls,” she had declared one night earlier that summer, as my father and I were leaving the house to pick up our extra large black-olive-and-pepperoni. At first, I thought she was serious. But her eyes, the color of an old pair of blue jeans, were playful and mocking as she looked him up and down in ruthless appraisal. For all the grief she gave my father, my mother never stopped us from schlepping off to pick up our pizza, because she couldn’t refuse the nearly two hours of blissful solitude that a trip to Aristotle’s always involved.
The bartender took my offered bill without a word. While he worked the register, I eavesdropped on the two college girls seated on either side of me. Neither one of them noticed me; the TV above the bar occupied their full and undivided attention. John Tudor was back on the mound to start the fifth.
“Tudor hasn’t been the same since he sliced up his hand,” the first girl said, between mouthfuls. She was referring to an incident that had occurred after the final game of the World Series the year before, when Tudor, despondent and furious about his poor performance in the loss, had punched an electrical box fan in the clubhouse, badly maiming his pitching hand in the process.
“I read somewhere that one of his old teammates called him up after a game in May,” the second girl said, scraping all the toppings off her slice, then nudging them into a steaming pile with her fork. “He had noticed something in Tudor’s pitching motion—Tudor used to let his leg hang in the air for half a second, but now he’d started dropping it immediately.” Her golden-brown leg made a soft ripping noise on the stool’s cushion as she pantomimed the wind-up. “Tudor never even realized he’d changed his mechanics. So he let his leg hang again, and he won the next twenty games in a row.”
The first girl got a sour look on her face, as though this information—not the pizza—had given her heartburn. “Okay. Then what’s his excuse this year?”
The second girl shrugged. “Maybe something else he shouldn’t be doing?”
“Maybe,” said the first girl. “Or maybe he shouldn’t have punched that motherfucking fan.”
These were the women my father should’ve been flirting with, I thought, not some dolled-up ninny who couldn’t tell the difference between Gaylord Perry and the Niekro brothers.
The bartender reappeared and sprinkled four quarters into my palm. “Here you go,” he told me with an affronted frown before shuffling off to take another customer’s order.
There was a bank of arcade games along the opposite wall—a shoot-‘em-up, a driving game, and two pinball machines—all surrounded by a pack of preppies who were laughing and toasting one another with cups of beer as they rotated turns on the coin-ops. I had no trouble picturing these Joe Colleges in my father’s classes, skimming used textbooks that someone else had already underlined and turning in papers with tweaked font sizes to meet his page count requirements. But the woman in the cherry-print dress was a different story. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t form an image of her in any kind of academic setting. But my father spent his every waking moment up on campus, so the woman had to be involved with the university somehow. She must’ve been support staff, I finally decided, one of those happy worker bees who brought donuts on Fridays and made sure that all those absent-minded humanities professors got their pay stubs twice a month.
I gave up on waiting for a turn at the arcade machines and set off wandering aimlessly past rows and rows of crowded booths. In the summers, Aristotle’s became a faculty hangout, a place for professors to buy pizza for their kids and bottomless pitchers of beer for themselves. Now, with fall classes starting up, all family units had been exiled to this back room, where parents and children huddled around narrow, graffiti-bombed tables, hacking away at their slices with forks and knives, holding conversations that would’ve registered as shouting matches in virtually any other setting.
At the end of the long line of booths was pair of flaking, crooked saloon doors with a letterboard sign bearing the message WE COME TO THE AFTƐRTHOUG T ROOM propped next to them. Pushing the doors open, I entered yet another dining area, this one gloomy and badly-lit, with no knick knacks lining the walls, just industrial shelves buckling under the weight of cardboard boxes gone fuzzy with dust and neglect. Somewhere in the darkened room, a crackling radio had been imprecisely tuned to KMOX. Jack Buck’s warm, belchy voice bobbed in and out of the static.
At first I thought the hulking black box at the far end of the room was a busted piece of kitchen equipment, an oven or a fridge, some unwieldy slab of an appliance that had been put out to pasture, its warranty long expired, until I spotted the faded Galaga logo on the side of the cabinet. A secret arcade machine, positioned with its screen facing away from the entrance—Aristotle’s staff members probably snuck back here to blow up space aliens on their smoke breaks. Perhaps they treated the Afterthought Room like a secret club, and you had to toss a thousand flat circles of dough into the air before they told you about it.
I zigzagged through the haphazardly arranged tables, which were crammed so close together I could’ve walked straight across if not for all the chairs stacked on top of them. But as I rounded the corner of the machine, I nearly bumped right into a black boy who was hunched over the controls, slapping the fire button with the palm of his hand. I stopped in my tracks, my sneakers making a high-pitched squeaking noise on the bare concrete floor. The boy turned to face me and the game continued behind him, the spaceship darting and shooting on its own.
“The hell are you?” the boy demanded. His voice was a gravelly gurgle, as though this was the first time he’d spoken out loud in a while. Bulldog jowls bracketed his mouth, which was set in a grim pucker. His ears were tiny twists of skin, little balloon knots on each side of his round head, and his hair was shaved so close he was practically bald. He wore greasy-looking high tops, jean shorts, and a plain white t-shirt with a large hole in the shape of a smiling mouth on the collar. There was a sour odor coming off of him, undercut with a faint aroma of mothballs.
“Me?” I plunged my hand into my pocket and gathered the quarters together into a tight disc.
“Don’t see nobody else around,” the boy said. “What’s your name?”
I told him.
“Gay Lore?” he repeated, a puzzled look on his pudgy face. “What kinda name is Gay Lore?”
“Lord.”.
The boy chuckled savagely. “Lord is right. Lord, I ain’t never heard a name like that.” He nodded at my pocket. “What you gripping so hard, Gay Lore?”
I took out my clenched fist and reluctantly displayed the four quarters. The boy peered at the coins in my palm. His lips split open in a crooked grin. “We can play for real now!” he exclaimed.
“It’s my money,” I said, yanking my hand away.
The boy’s face clouded with fury for a moment before settling back into a sneer. “Then I guess you going first, Gay Lore,” he told me, “but soon as you lose, I’m playing.”
I brushed past the boy and fed a quarter into the slot. The game snapped to attention with a bright burst of digital fanfare and a tiny, jagged spacecraft materialized at the bottom of the screen. The boy took up a position just over my left shoulder, his hot, stale breath fogging the back of my neck as brightly-colored alien insects began their attack.
I hammered the fire button, spraying out a barrage of shots. Soon all of my enemies had vaporized into little pixelated plumes.
The machine issued a peppy chime.
“Shit,” the boy muttered. I couldn’t tell if he was impressed, or angry.
In stage two, a half-dozen stray bugs managed to avoid my errant gunfire. They regathered in rows at the top of the screen and began to float down as if they’d been winged. One made a swooping maneuver and slammed into me from behind.
The machine blurted out a sound of computerized annihilation.
“Next man up,” said the boy, jostling me aside with a hip-check. Something hard and knobby in his pants-pocket jabbed into my pelvis.
“I’ve still got one life,” I grunted, holding on to the joystick and fire button as his hands smothered mine. His rough palms scuffed at my knuckles like sandpaper. My ship—our ship, now—had magically repaired itself after the backdoor kamikaze attack and was wobbling back and forth as we battled for the controls.
Almost instantly, a big blue alien horsefly zoomed in and sucked our rudderless spacecraft into its deadly tractor beam.
“Goddamn!” the boy bellowed. “We just lost because of your dumb ass!” He took his hands off mine and shoved me so hard that I tumbled to the floor.
“It was my game,” I said, pain swirling through the part of my hip where I’d been poked by the object in his pocket.
Right then, a bomb of distant applause went off in the main restaurant, and Jack Buck’s voice broke through the fuzz on the hidden boombox. “Another nifty bit of hitting,” Buck exclaimed, “by John Tudor, of all people!” The game, which I hadn’t exactly been following all that closely outside, now seemed to be taking place on another planet, a feeling that only grew stronger as the radio’s ambient ballpark sounds—the crowd’s rhythmic applause, the jaunty organ music, the hum and pulse of the stadium—were reabsorbed, one by one, into the sizzling static.
The boy thrust his hand into his pocket, where it began grinding away like a small rodent at whatever was inside. “You still got three quarters left,” he said, gesturing toward me with a bent elbow.
“No,” I said, my voice firm.
The boy took a step closer, leering above me. “What’d you say to me?” he snarled, eyes bulging.
“No,” I repeated, but less emphatically this time, just quoting myself.
The boy withdrew the object from his pocket, displaying the serrated blade of one of the restaurant’s plastic-handled steak knives. He started moving in my direction, his bulldog face cold and stubborn. I sat there frozen to the spot on the concrete floor, watching the knife drift toward me until it was almost level with my neck, so close I could make out a blot of dried dishwater on the silver.
That’s when my father came bursting through the saloon doors.
He looked strangely rumpled, grey-brown hair askew, shirttail hanging out, corduroy jacket loose around his shoulders. The boy dove behind the arcade machine, dropping the knife on the floor between us with a clatter. My father squinted into the darkness, but he couldn’t see the two of us through the thicket of upturned chair legs.
The saloon doors swung open again and the woman in the cherry-print dress entered the room. Within seconds, she and my father began kissing, not in the brisk, official way that my parents kissed, but hungrily, greedily, furiously. Then my father hoisted the woman onto one of the tables, wobbling a pair of overturned barstools like struck bowling pins, and the hem of her skirt peeled up, her bare thigh kneading against the tabletop as she wrapped her legs around his hips.
I couldn’t blink or move or even breathe. All I could do was watch my father’s back, grateful that the hem of his corduroy jacket went far enough below his waistline to partially obscure the strange business that his hind parts were engaged in.
And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the encounter was over, and my father, his back still facing me, was tucking himself back into his khakis and the woman was smoothing her dress over her hips. They embraced once more, and the woman clasped her hands around my father’s neck, standing on tiptoe as if to whisper a secret to him. Instead, she bit his earlobe and giggled. Then the woman smiled and blew my father a quick kiss over her shoulder, her blue eyes flashing like ice as she stepped through the saloon doors.
My father fished out his pocket watch and stared at it, mouthing off the seconds. I counted with him, silently breathing out the numbers, my heart romping in my ears. When he got to fifteen, he slipped the watch back into his jacket and left the Afterthought Room.
“You see that?” said the boy in a hoarse whisper after what seemed like forever. “They just fucked.” He crept out from behind the arcade machine and hopped up onto one of the nearby tables, idly dangling his legs in mid-air. For the first time it dawned on me that he was just a child—he might have even been younger than me.
“You ain’t never seen fucking before, have you, Gay Lore?” he asked me, more observation than question.
I didn’t say anything. The inside of my head was howling like the static on the radio. I stared at the spot on the floor where the boy had dropped the knife. If I lunged, there was a good chance I would be able to grab it before he could.
“This girl came in here one time,” the boy was saying, “she had on these little short-shorts.” His once-gruff voice was suddenly full of warmth and fondness, like he was speaking to a younger brother, or like he was in love. “The dude she was with had her bent over that table, right there.” He pointed out the exact spot with his index finger. “The girl, she pushed them shorts to the side and that old boy just went after it.” He shook his head, marveling at the memory. “Pussy got lips, like a mouth. Bet you never even thought about pussy before, have you, Gay Lore?”
The boy slid down off the table, walked up to the knife, and sent it skittering across the floor with a swift kick, burying it beneath one of the shelves with a sharp metallic clang. “You post up in here long enough,” he told me as he made his way back toward the arcade machine, “you gonna catch somebody fucking. Trust me, I’m here every day. So stay and chill awhile. Play some more Galaga with me. Hell, you ain’t even need money. I figured out how to play for free. Wanna see, Gay Lore?”
I got up off the floor and tried to brush the grit off my arms, but my hands felt heavy and clumsy, like I was wearing gloves. I had no absolutely no desire to see whatever the boy wanted to show me, but I also didn’t want to go back outside—not yet, because for all I knew my father was lingering just beyond the saloon doors, dawdling at the bar or chatting with a colleague he’d recognized at one of the tables in the back. I needed to give my father time to return to the main dining room, so that when I went looking I would find him waiting in his customary spot beneath the TV by the front entrance, with a piping hot pizza box—extra-large black-olive-and-pepperoni, one slice missing, like always—balanced on his fingertips as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
“When it’s in demo mode,” the boy was saying as I stood beside him, “you not supposed to play. You supposed to just watch. But the fire button still works.” He tapped his finger on the button. Sure enough, the ship fired. “Whoever made this game left that mistake in there by accident. You can shoot all you want to during the demo.” He blew up a few bugs to demonstrate, not even bothering with the joystick; the spaceship handled all the movements on its own, swerving gracefully to avoid enemy fire.
“That ain’t even the best part,” said the boy. “Watch what happens when the big blue fly tries to suck you up.”
After about half of the enemies had been cleared, the blue horsefly banked down toward the craft and unleashed its tractor beam. “When he does that,” the boy said, “you start shooting like crazy.” He launched a frantic volley of shots and the fly exploded into smithereens before it could ensnare the spaceship. The boy’s hand flew to the joystick and the craft responded—when he moved left, it moved left; when he went right, it followed.
“See?” he said excitedly. “Blow that bitch up, and you get to play for free.”
But he was only able to play for a short time before the images on the screen jittered and then exploded into neon hieroglyphics, before going completely dark.
“Don’t worry,” the boy assured me, hooking his thumbs into the stretched-out belt loops of his jean shorts. “It does that every time. Sometimes the game lets me play a real long while, other times it crashes after a couple seconds. But it always starts back up again. Just gotta give it a minute.”
The boy stood there with his chest puffed out, and a goofy, snaggle-toothed smile plastered across his face. Who knew how many hours he had spent in the Afterthought Room to gain this useless bit of knowledge, this hollow feeling of outsmarting the world. Stealing steak knives from the silverware bins and catching random adults in the act might have helped him pass the time, sure, but the real reason he camped out in here, day after day, was to play a broken-down old video game, to see how far its glitch would let him go. And suddenly I knew that the longer I stayed in that room, the harder the boy was going to try to make me his disciple—he needed someone he could share this lonely, lethal boredom with.
“I have to go now,” I said, breaking into a run.
“You can’t leave,” the boy shouted after me as I stumbled through the dark maze of tables and chairs. But he made no move to chase me down. By the time I reached the saloon doors, he was still parked at the game’s controls, leaning his bulldog face around the corner of the machine and yelling at the top of his lungs, his voice harsh with desperation and menace. But his raspy screams now fought for purchase amid cross-currents of outside noise from the restaurant: peals of laughter, clinking utensils, garbled PA announcements, and the reverberating echo of half a dozen televisions all playing the same Anheuser-Busch commercial at once.
I was halfway through the doors when I glanced down and realized I’d been unconsciously balling my right fist in my pocket. I took out my hand and unpeeled my fingers; the three remaining quarters had embedded themselves so deeply into my skin that I had to pry each one off with a fingernail. I pinched the coins together into small stack between my thumb and forefinger. Then I turned and flung them back into the Afterthought Room, like I was tossing them down a wishing well.
My father and I drove home in silence, the Cards game murmuring on the radio, our pizza cooling in the back seat. As he steered our Volvo down Jacomo Boulevard, a wide, blighted strip of cracked pavement and faded lane lines, I stared out the window at all the downtrodden homes, their dead grey lawns studded with children’s toys, car parts, and office furniture. I wondered whether the boy lived in this neighborhood. I tried to imagine his life. Would his house be clean, or grimy? Would the showers have curtains? Would the doors have knobs? Would the lamps have shades? And what about the boy’s family? Did he have a mother, a father? Did he have brothers, sisters, cousins? Did he have anyone that cared about him? I didn’t know the answers, couldn’t fathom them. Maybe it was better that way.
My father brought the car to a stop at a red light, pulling alongside a bus shelter where an old black man, his hair as white and fluffy as cotton, sat on a bench, gripping the leash of a dog that looked part coyote. The man stared at us bitterly. So did his dog.
You’re here now, their eyes seemed to be saying. Don’t pretend otherwise.
After a moment, the man stood up and tugged on the dog’s leash, and the two of them hobbled down the buckled sidewalk going in the opposite direction.
The driver’s seat squeaked as my father relaxed. The light had been green for a while, but he hadn’t seen it change. I turned to him to catch his attention, so we could get moving again.
That’s when I noticed the smudge of red lipstick on his right earlobe.
“Dad?” I said. “You’ve got something on your ear.”
My father glanced up at the rearview mirror. “Ah,” he said, as if lipstick was exactly what he’d been expecting to see there. He licked his fingertips and patted the stain away. “Thank you, son,” he told me, smiling flimsily.
He goosed the accelerator and we continued down Jacomo, through a pitiful-looking commercial district full of salvage yards set back behind high razor-wire fences. Dusk was settling in, and as lampposts began to flicker tentatively up and down the street, my father leaned over to boost the volume on the car radio. Todd Worrell had come on to start the eighth, and Jack Buck was going on about how John Tudor had derailed the Ryan Express on the mound and at the plate, throwing seven strikeouts and notching two RBI singles. Now Tudor sat on the bench, with a hump of ice strapped to his shoulder.
“Tudor’s hand got all the coverage in the offseason,” my father said, “but that shoulder’s been giving him trouble all year. Bet you anything his pitching adjustment is what caused it. Cards might have to shut him down soon.”
“Yeah,” I mumbled.
My father chuckled abruptly, a sudden spurt of friendly laughter. “Maybe Tudor should learn to throw a knuckleball,” he said. He fiddled with his seat belt, adjusting it with his thumb. There was a dark slash of sweat across his shirt where the shoulder strap had been.
“Maybe,” I said, after a moment. “Or maybe he shouldn’t have punched that motherfucking fan.”
While I waited to find out whether I had said that last part out loud, I reached down into the cup holder and grabbed a handful of pennies. All that time spent beneath sweating sodas and steaming coffee mugs had left them slick and scummy. I nudged the coins around my palm with my index finger, and as the car passed beneath a streetlight, in the brief gleam I noticed that one of the pennies had an Indian head engraved on it, next to a date that read “1903”. That had to be worth something, I thought.
-RJ-
John Waddy Bullion’s fiction has appeared previously in the Texas Review, Five Quarterly, and Cowboy Jamboree. He lives in Fort Worth, Texas, with his wife and daughters.
REVOLUTION JOHN 