Lovelight Out at Home

Lovelight Out at Home

By Jon Fain

Bucky Dee, awakened from his doze, blinks at the nurse as she works to slide out the bedpan he’s riding. When he croaks out a confused question about where he is, he gets the cheerful, “Visiting Time!”

After the girl leaves—an empty-panned prospector—he digs under his pillow for his hidden cigar. He gets the stub lit, blows out a plume of pungent smoke, and sits up higher in the bed. He belches up a taste of hospital lunch. And then, recalling the eyebrows-raised look on the young nurse’s face, he straightens out his glass eye.

An elevated trolley rattles the window as it bangs past. Bucky has a glimpse of Boston’s gritty brick buildings from his fifth floor perch; he moves his head so that the afternoon sun strikes his face without blinding him more than he already is. Although it’s September, the warmth flashes Bucky with a reminder of spring. Spring, Florida, pretty girls, old gents without shirts sunning themselves and swatting flies while watching younger men run them down.

Only one of the three other beds is occupied in the far-from-private room, by a boy with a broken leg. The boy’s mother is through the door the instant the visiting hour begins, a nag out of the gate, working the nurse for this and that. She wears a tailored, navy blue suit and a pair of strapless pumps that show off some prime leg. Bucky is tempted to greet the woman (he isn’t dead yet) but the boy is a whiner, always ringing for the nurse, and from her visits previous, Bucky knows where the kid gets it from.

He picks up the newspaper on his side table. Bucky has been feuding with the Record-American photographers, rubbing his lordly status over the competition for over a decade, and knows this is the reason the rag doesn’t see fit to consider him news. It’s their loss. After all, there were over five thousand witnesses who saw the legendary pic-man bowled over by the rookie catcher chasing a high and twisting foul ball.

Knowing it was out of play, Bucky took advantage of the approaching pause. At his post on the field by the home on-deck circle, he’d bent to pick up his loaded, back-up Brownie when the kid came crashing into him and put his lens cap on. He came to with Jensen, the home plate ump that day, yelling in his face. Some players carried him out under the stands to the first-aid station, their spikes clacking on the runway concrete.

Time drags like a dull uncle. Bucky dozes off again for most of the visiting hour. When he starts awake, he grimaces at the flowers the Red Sox sent, a pitiful fistful of flowering weeds. He laments the long-gone Braves, the team he preferred. The drag of time again. He begins to softly curse—prompting the mother nearby to snap her head up, like a horse sniffing subterranean streams.

“Well as I livven breathe. The half-pint, squint-eye, sorry-ass shutterbug got his comeuppance at last!”

With a still-throbbing head, Bucky is not functioning at peak efficiency. The stout, bull-necked creature in a dark blue windbreaker and khakis standing in the doorway to the room, holding a matching blue cap? Who the hell is this? The man is utterly bald, and even more disturbing, the top of his head seems to glow white. It’s such a stark contrast to the lined, deeply tanned face that Bucky Dee, seeing the halo, looks for the wings.

“Ain’t you gonna let an old stand-up into yer boodrawer?”

The man ambles into the room, his black brogans yelping across the squeaky-clean floor.

“Cap!” Bucky realizes.

The baseball coach Cap McGinnity shows his teeth like a hungry monkey to the woman sitting beside the boy’s bed across the way; like Bucky, she also seems to be wondering what manner of inbreeding or miscegenation has let loose such a two-toned monstrosity on the world. For Bucky, as Cap hustles over to pump his paw, this is a much more historic moment. It is the first time, since Jake Lester’s wake and then only for an instant, that he has seen the man without a hat.

“How ya doin’ Buck?” McGinnity goes on, squeezing the other man’s shoulder, too hard.

“I’m doing all right Cap, doing all right.” Bucky remains too engrossed with the head looming over him to be his usual sarcastic self.

Cap slides a chair closer to Bucky’s bed. He sits down with a big grin.

“Do me a favor,” Bucky says after a moment, finally snapping out of it. “I appreciate the sentiment of the doffed hat, but put it back on. I ain’t quite cold enough for the dirt nap.”

“Want me to get a blanket?” Cap asks.

“Cap! Put yours on.”

McGinnity, a man used to taking orders, covers his head. When they were both much younger, and Cap was going prematurely light on top, he had gotten into the stubborn habit of never being without headwear in public, be it baseball cap or felt fedora. To the challenge of a legend, players and other coaches, and even a fan or two, had tried to trick him out from under it. Year by year, the schemes grew more elaborate. But now, popping the challenge of it, the bastard has served up the long-awaited dome with all the casualness of a short order cook bringing on a soft boiled egg.

Cap’s right cheek bulges with a large chaw of tobacco that draws the skin tight on that side of his face. The other side remains the ruddy and wrinkled profile of a man who has spent another long summer out in the sun, wind, and grit of the first base box. He has more contradictions above his neck than most families have through three generations.

“Woulda brought the kid with me, Bucky, ‘cept he ain’t so socialbull, you gettin’ that snap a him out in Chi, strikin’ out with the ducks on the pond like you did.”

“Screw that bush leaguer. He’ll be hearing from my lawyer.”

“Well,” Cap says, hawking a bit, “he pulled a groin or two goin’ after that ball… looks like he’s done for the year.”

Cap is dribbling brown spittle down the front of his team-issue jacket. There is an empty drinking glass on Bucky’s bed stand and he picks it up and delivers a dirty deposit.

The mother across the room jumps out of her chair like a schoolmarm catching a peashooter on the inhale. No doubt she’s been wary of this Cro-Magnon since his appearance at the mouth of the cave.

“I’m going for the nurse! Of all the unsanitary, trashy, disgusting—”

“What’s her problem?” Cap asks earnestly, as she rushes from the room. “The kid ain’t gonna make it?”

Bucky realizes the woman has bumped into someone. Black hair, gray suit. Head tilted, wary blue eyes. A ballplayer, Bucky knows instinctively, but he’s seen so many through his viewfinder….

The man steps back into the hall to let the woman pass, and Bucky begins to think, that like the top of his first visitor’s head, he may well have imagined it. Then, coming back into the room like a shy boy steeling himself to meet his date’s parents—he looks at Bucky with a quick smile.

Cap turns away from the window with a sleepy look; it’s as if he’s been slumped on the bench watching his team nurse a ten-run lead.

“Well now. I’ll be good and god-damned.”

“Hello,” the newcomer says, his voice soft. His hands are clasped like an ice skater’s behind his back as he glides into the room. Another trolley shakes the window and a tingle rises at the back of Bucky’s neck.

“George?” he croaks, sitting up straight, renewing the throb in his head. “George Wyatt?”

This new visitor glances around the room. Bucky, still reeling with sudden recognition, reaches out for the offered hand. At the damp, warm touch he begins shaking it like a grateful beggar.

“George! Georgie Wyatt!”

“That’s right, Mister Dee.”

His eye tears; it’s like Bucky hoped, spring again. The snow at the mountain tops is melting and sparkling icy water is running through.

“George how come you… where you been all this time?”

“I’ll fill ya.” Cap shoots more brown spit into the no-longer water glass.  “Old Lovelight here…”

“I don’t go by that anymore.”

“Lovey Dovey Light?”

“What I say?”

“Lissen just cuz ya had it all handed to ya when the real men—”

“You ignorant bastard!” Bucky shouts. “What the kid ever do to you! He was damn well good enough and you know it!”

Bucky clenches his teeth so he won’t go on. Cap shifts the wad in his mouth, higher in his cheek.

“It’s all right,” says George Wyatt.

“All right,” Cap goes. “Always was yer fair-haired boy.”

Until now, the boy in the other bed has been silently watching; now he begins to shout for his mother—alternates it with cries for the nurse.

Bucky and Cap watch as Wyatt goes across the room. At the boy’s bedside he leans over and says something the other men can’t hear.

Then there is silence.

Cap hops his chair closer, and Bucky looks into the weathered face.

“They say he’s been hittin’ the sauce pretty good, old Lovelight. Don’t know where he’s been all this time. But he’s been comin’ around the yard. Probably wantin’ to get on the payroll, take some buddy’s job again.”

The sun slips behind a low-lying bank of clouds; a trolley has stopped on the tracks above the hospital parking lot, then begins to inch forward. As it passes, Bucky sees the riders looking out. Though what Cap will say next is part of a story Bucky knows well, he can’t help but listen to it again.

“Course, ya got yer ‘pinion, I got mine,” says Cap, relishing the roll of gossip he’s going to unravel. “He weren’t much of a player, spite of what you say. Oh I grant ya… fer the war-time he was all right. Addyquit. But hell we even had that one-arm Gray… and a bunch another nobodies.”

Bits of the past fly into Bucky’s mind’s-eye like frantic moths searching for something bright. He watches Lovelight—he can’t think of him as anything but—watches Lovelight as he moves away from the boy. He’s older, but still can’t be too far north of thirty.

But instead of coming back over to where the other men are waiting, George goes and stands at the window on the opposite side of the room.

And Bucky sees him on the field.

At the plate.

Through his camera.

Of course back then it was the long slog of preparing electroplates, of photoengraving. There was no next day anything, neither sports nor news—most of the photos in ‘40s dailies were bathing beauties. A lot of Bucky’s sports work was set shots and posed action, done before games, that appeared or didn’t, days, sometimes weeks later on some editor’s whim, intended to remind all and sundry that throughout the war, there were the fortunate few who had been allowed to keep playing games.

Still—those train riders that keep passing by? If they travel back far enough, they’ll find those newspapers where they’ll be reading about Lovelight. Maybe on their way to the park, paying their money, walking in and cheering Lovelight. Maybe somebody on that train still had the first and best shot that Bucky did of the kid, in some drawer or closet, or pasted into a scrapbook even—Georgie leaping up, glove outstretched for the long high fly, legs kicked out like an exuberant colt in the field. Accompanying the story, “They Call Him ‘Lovelight’.”

An older nurse returns along with the boy’s mother. In her starched white dress, matching white hat, hose, and shoes, she stands at the foot of Bucky’s bed and puts her hands on her hips. The look she gives him lets him know she knows he’s responsible for every disaster, natural or otherwise, that occurs within the boundaries of the room.

“Beloved Nightingale… is it duty or pleasure that brings you back to me so soon?”

“I’ve told you Mr. Dee, we can’t provide proper care for you or anyone else if you continue to be uncooperative. And we can’t have you, or any of your visitors, bothering the other patients, or their visitors. Or smoking cigars for that matter. Sir… please come away from there.”

Wyatt drifts from the window near the boy’s bed. It reminds Bucky of Lovelight, creeping off second base.

“Visiting Hour is over in fifteen minutes, gentlemen,” announces the head nurse.

After she leaves, the mother goes back to her boy, sits down and moves her chair so that her back is to the rest of them.

Beyond that, what is obvious is that George Wyatt and Cap McGinnity are as comfortable together as lion and tiger in the same cage. Bucky doesn’t need this; he’s no kind of big top, big cat-taming pretty boy; he would need much more than a blanks-firing gun and cracking whip to get these two to be civil to one another, let alone jump through hoops.

“Grab that other chair Georgie… I know we ain’t got much time to come clean on… shove on over there Cap and let the kid sit!”

The other man stands, scratches the underside of his rounded belly. He snaps his jacket closed with stubby fingers that wander up with deliberate care.

“Got to go, Buck. Comin’ New York-ward with us?”

“Might follow after I get sprung,” Bucky admits, watching Wyatt steal another glance out the far-away window. “But I’ll be at Ebbetts. Dodgers are still in the hunt.”

Cap moves off, but then stops and makes a show of scratching his chin. Like he was thinking and something got caught in the brain-pipe.

“Say… that reminds me. How I always figgered Lovelight here to be one for them Dodgers. Playin’ for those draft dodgers, huh? Whadda ya think?”

“What are you, ten years old?” Bucky says, but words are like a dribble of water on Cap’s rock-like head—it would take centuries to make an impression. With a final snort of derision, Cap shuffles out, hands flashing nonsense signs.

Bucky is startled to see George in the chair just vacated, right beside the bed. He shakes his head; there is a fleeting pain behind his right ear, a stiff neck that is insistent.

Another train passes by the window, riding close to empty. No doubt around the city and outskirts, supper tables are being set. Bucky, a man who has spent all of his adult years in hotel rooms and SRO flops, grows nostalgic yet again, this time for something he’s never had.

Outside, the frail trees near the hospital’s entrance have colored in early surrender to the next season. Pigeons descend in formation to the ground, and then suddenly flap their wings and flutter away.

Both men watch as the mother kisses the son. Bucky wishes that George would have shown up sooner.

“You don’t like hospitals much… is that it?” he says. “Not that anybody does… hey, bet that’s why you went over to the boy, help him settle down. What did you say?”

“I told him if he didn’t shut up, I’d wring his neck.”

The pain that’s been riding Bucky goes to the whip, surges again. Maybe this man here is some sort of imposter, from someone else’s dreams.

“How’s… Elizabeth, right?” he tests, “and your little girl? Heck, she must be how old now?”

“They live in New Jersey.”

“Oh?”

“I was living in Medford with my sister. But she kicked me out too. I ended up at the game. You know? Saw you get wiped out. You remember my sister probably. From the wedding. My wedding.”

“That was awhile back,” Bucky says.

He can’t remember a sister; he can’t re-draw many faces from that afternoon except young George Wyatt, well-groomed as groom in black and white—in the ceremony, in the receiving line, having the first dance, cutting the cake, and most vividly, talking with a young flirtatious woman not his short, buxom bride, halfway up the staircase of his new in-laws’ house. Was he actually headed upstairs with this girl on his wedding day?

Everyone was getting loose by then, and maybe it was only the drink that had done it to George, the mix of alcohol and adrenaline, the mix of toast with boast. After all, Georgie was playing and playing well by that Saturday night after a day game in August, not bad for the kid who had his left leg twisted half backwards in a childhood farm equipment misadventure. Yes, Bucky was sure of another thing, it was August ’45, a few days before they dropped Fat Boy on Japan.

“You know why they call me ‘Lovelight’?” Bucky heard as he passed by. Bucky smiled. This ought to be good.

“No, why?” the girl asked, and Bucky—before ducking into the water closet under the stairs he’d had the good fortune to discover unoccupied—paused to consider the electricity in her laugh.

“Some of the writers are all right, but they all got it wrong. It isn’t my middle name. I don’t know which of them started that. Truth of it is—”

“I’d love to hear it.”

“The God’s honest truth is, when I was a baby, my mother used to come into the room where I was sleeping, each and every night. She carried a candle, a real special candle that she chose just for me, that she called her lovelight. She would pass the candle over me as I slept and think what she called her best thoughts.”

“Oh my,” the girl said, “is there anything in the world like a mother’s love for her child?”

“I happened to mention it to a writer once,” George went on. “And don’t you know but he bent it all around. He started calling and writing about me that way and I couldn’t make them stop. But just so you know? It isn’t my middle name like maybe you heard. It’s much more than that.”

Bucky couldn’t hold it anymore and shut the door to the water closet and began to relieve himself. He didn’t think the kid had it in him; here he had brought it out on his wedding day no less. He really had become a ball-player. They’d say or do anything to get what they wanted because heck, they were men who mattered, who thought they were the best.

Bucky had been in the clubhouse after George’s first major league game. A nice catch, a double down the line, a stolen base, and a run scored on a squeeze play home. Bucky could still see it as if he had gotten a pic—the kid sliding under the catcher’s tag, the ump with arms spread like he was taking off, calling him safe. After the game, in the press of the press, George announced to all and sundry, like a rookie whaler: “Call me Lovelight.”

The bunch of them gave voice to a good-humored guffaw.

“Why’s that, Wyatt?” someone piped up.

“It’s my middle name, believe it or not.”

The beat reporters looked at each other. They’d write anything once. Anyway, soon enough, with the Germans beaten and the Japs next, Joe D., Williams and all the rest of the real heroes would be back. In the meantime, with nothing else to do, they would humor the 4-F farm boy. Because someday, if not today, but soon, someone would ask:

“Gee Lovelight… all right to call you that? The way you churn it up going around second… you know, we’re kind of curious why you weren’t there at Normandy (or Guadalcanal, or Iwo)?”

In Bucky’s hospital room, his visitor clears his throat. A nurse Bucky has never seen before comes in, turns on the overhead lights; she glances in the direction of George Wyatt lingering on watch, but it’s as if she doesn’t see him, leaves the room without shooing him out.

“You ever stick your key in the front door, but it won’t open? You say to yourself, ‘this is my key, I know this is my key. And this is my house.’”

“What’s that, George? They change the locks on you? Your sister?”

“Then you jiggle the key, try it a little different, twist it… take it out and stick it back in again. You turn the key and this time the door opens and you can’t figure out what was going on… why something that always has, doesn’t work?”

“It’s like golf,” Bucky tries. “I’ve been playing it some you can believe that. If that old goat Ike can do it, I thought. What nobody tells you is you hit the ball good once and it seems easy as pie. But then just try to do it again.”

“Was I any good, Mister Dee?”

“You were one of the good ones, kid.”

The younger man stands, and shakes down the legs of his trousers. He adjusts the knot of his shiny blue tie tight at his collar, flips the lapels of his gray jacket, and puts his hands into the pockets of his gray pants.

“You got a scrapbook?” Bucky asks. “I could round up some of the pictures I—”

“Get some sleep now.”

“George… are you short, is it money? Or is it some new broad put you this way? Hey, Georgie it’s been ten years, don’t leave yet! At least promise you’ll take a swing by tomorrow.”

“Can’t do it,” George Wyatt says, and Bucky, speechless, helpless, hurt now in another way, watches him go.

Later, when he jerks awake from the night nurse’s gentle prod, Bucky shivers in the dark room. He shakes off the close-quarters chill of something not quite forgotten. The light in the hallway is tinged deep yellow. He struggles up to have his temperature taken, and swallows a pill with a tepid shot of water.

The nurse leaves, never having spoken.

Like a fog burning off, Bucky remembers—a day in Detroit, Sox down 2-1, top of the ninth.

Bucky was there to shoot some of the Tigers for their baseball cards and stayed around for the game. He noticed—how could you not—that all the third shift war plant girls were enamored with the boy. He looked good as he swung a trio of bats on-deck.

Once up, Lovelight takes four balls for a walk, and then easily steals second on the first pitch. Lancaster is up next; fair stick, but unreliable under pressure, left on the home front because of nerves. But this day the freckle-faced outfielder gets around on one and sends it deep. In centerfield—the mist of Bucky’s memories doesn’t lift completely, he fails to remember the player’s name—makes a great catch. Lovelight, as if possessed of second sight, has waited patiently at second to tag, somehow knowing that the ball will be caught. The roar of the home crowd, as the ball finds the far-away mitt, is choked off as they see the runner off safely to third.

He charges over the bag without sliding, making a wide turn. Bucky happens to be right nearby, as always, a moon in the boy’s orbit, in a seat by the Tiger dugout. The centerfielder twirls out of his catch like a discus thrower, and hurls the ball in. As the shortstop takes the relay and spins back to throw into the infield, Bucky rises out of his seat with the roar of everyone else as they see that Lovelight, raising his bet, is going through the third base coach’s frantic rein, toward home.

By instinct, though out of position, Bucky raises up the camera that’s always in his hands. He sees it then—something he’s never seen before. Gone is the confidence, the brashness, the hard shell against the world.

Lovelight looks over his shoulder—and sees what’s ahead.

Bucky Dee lets gravity sag the camera in his hands.

Even so, as Lovelight staggers and falls into the catcher’s waiting arms, something like a shutter closes.

Creating a picture of a world tumbled back into a more familiar pose.

Jon Fain has worked as a silk-screen printer, warehouse worker, resume writer, corporate documentation and training consultant, and freelance editor. His recent publications include short stories in A Thin Slice of Anxiety and The Argyle Literary Magazine, flash fictions in The Broadkill Review and Midsummer Dream House, and micro fictions in Blink-Ink and ScribesMICRO. His chapbook of flash fiction Pass the Panpharmacon! is available from Greying Ghost Press. He lives in Massachusetts. X @jonsfain

Jeff Brain is a retired public school teacher. You can find more of his art on his website or on Instagram.

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