todd of tacoma

Men have cried out to me in sincere and despairing appeal: “Doctor, I cannot go on like this! I have everything to live for! I must stop, but I cannot! You must help me!”

—The Doctor’s Opinion, Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book

I tell you what, she don’t look fourteen.

The fat man was talking to the old man quietly, so the doctor couldn’t hear. Everyone in Churchill knew that even three rows up and ten seats to the left of this family practitioner, you had to talk like you were telling a secret.

The old man didn’t care for secrets.

The fat man told a lot.

You know why they got her playing second base, inexplickedly? It’s for the other girls. Heck, the other team. To give them a fighting chance.

When he turned around the bleacher joints creaked and the whole assemblage leaned, made you worry it might collapse. I got up and stood behind home plate, where I could still hear. But I could hear everything, anywhere, thanks to my special abilities.

Yeah, make it a ball game. Coach T clocked a practice pitch at sixty! You and me could barely throw sixty-five, I bet. And with my rotator cuff…

The old man could not care less. Pretending to listen was not a talent he’d inculcated, you could tell. I think his name was J?

They waste her God-given abilities in the name of equal opportunity. Ain’t allowed to pitch, catch, play third. They even try to constrict her at the bat. She’s last in the order. Last!

J reached into an overlarge man purse that looked so out of place next to him he might have stolen it, or was lugging it around for someone. Might have been a gift from his daughter. She was always trying to outfit him.

I can’t figure why winning don’t factor into a coach’s decisions, no matter what age.

He might have been looking for his phone, or even better, trying to look like he was looking for it. Something to do while the fat man bloviated his face off. But you look closer? It was more than that. His digging smacked of panic. He was sweating.

I should explain my special abilities. I was two months sober and four days into a relapse, so I could see, hear, feel, hell, taste and smell like no one else. No one here, anyway. I was sharp and sensitive and keenly aware.

J’s sweat was cold.

The doctor looked back, maybe catching the scent, too. I was glad to be opposite his gaze. Didn’t want scorn and suspicion heaped on me.

If you want to watch a game in Churchill, Montana, be warned that bat cracks echo loud in this Christian hamlet, on wet spring mornings especially, every surface for miles all dewy and slick. Bats crack.

Although he lived here, J had forgotten this. He straightened up in a seizure when the big girl cracked one to center. He was doing breathing exercises while the home team applauded.

And right on the heels of this report, he went into rigor mortis. The phone he’d been looking for vibrated suddenly beside his huge bag, like a coiled snake it shook, or an angry badger.

Everyone’s asshole on the bleachers could feel it shiver. The stern doctor even giggled, he was so tickled up there.

You getting that?

The doctor and the fat man exchanged smiles, and I finally, just then, I finally wanted to punch them both. Old reflex, that froth.

I heckled the umpire to release some pressure.

J stood up, finally. Good for him.

It’s my daughter.

But he didn’t answer the phone. Instead, he pocketed it and swung his purse over his shoulder. He traversed the bleacher seats and bee-lined to a portapotty that had been standing by right field for five years, inexplickedly.

Quick aside about your bladder and sphincter. They have a special relationship with space and time, like they’re all buddies. Get near a restroom when you have to go, one or two, and they get all nervous and titillated. Withdrawal tremors? The same.

A naive person will say the body knows. The alcoholic’s body knows even better.

J’s shakes went from dashboard rattle to Richter scale as he closed in on this sun-faded portal, his retreat. Boy, does he have to go, spectators were thinking. But I knew the truth, he just had to go in.

He reached for the door hold and his fingers rattled in its groove. His mom had shakes like this. MS. She relied on his dad for every jar and doorknob, until she stopped relying on anyone for anything. J’s failing heart still pitied her to this day, and resented her. Even long dead she reminded him the world is a terrible place to grow old in.

The body knows.

The portapotty’s interior latch hadn’t been abused by a half decade in the sun, wind, and rain, but J was still worried he’d snap it off when he occupied himself in. Excitement had got the better of him. But it subsided at the thought of urine-splashed fingers touching everything around. There were ghosts in this house. Nose-pickers and dehydrated dads dribbling all over their hands and shoes. Smearing the walls with coffee poops and peeing on the floor.

It was heating up, too. Coming on mid-morning. No human power could save him in this foul sauna. Particulates ascended to his nostrils like saints to heaven. His boots peeled off and picked at some unearthly splashback on the floor. Hell lay before him covered by a flimsy lid. Don’t forget, one slip-up and you’re in the shit.

He had to compose himself. Set this all aside and get busy ripping up his satchel. This he could do. He was a worker.

Mask, receipt, receipt, bookmark, receipt, worn prescription pages. He had high blood pressure. Handkerchief, empty lisinopril bottle, another one with two pills left. He would need to call for his next bottle today if he…

There! Yes, finally, three airplane bottles of Tito’s vodka! Holy water.

He ripped the cap off the first one he touched and cut his pointer finger. It would bleed and he’d have to suck his blood. He cut it all the time. Brambles, envelopes, nicked-up tools. A hazard of consigning yourself to alcoholism is that your blood thins and is desperate to leave your body.

He brought the glass bottle to his lips and nearly sucked a dent in it. He held it up, examined it. An ant couldn’t find another drop. His shakes dissolved into a memory of another world as he dug for bottle two.

Did cheers erupt outside? Sure.

He used to ride off hangovers on a Suzuki dirt bike, the first Japanese motorcycle to roll out of Churchill Equipment. He had to special order it. Suzuki PE250. Everyone thought he was taking up motocross, but he wasn’t interested in that. No, he just wanted to ride, off-road and on, that simple. The highway never interested him after mile five or six, but he wasn’t solely riding trails, either. And hell if he ever wanted to jump anything. Just wanted a machine that could take him everywhere.

And it did. He took it into irrigated alfalfa fields, autumn-tilled stubble, disced wheat, ditch banks, potato rows, River Road, and once, only once, a mountain trail. The lower Bitterroots.

Summers in his late twenties he moved wheel line and hand line for a seed potato farmer off the Highline. Stayed in an old shed on the man’s property and woke up at five a.m. to work for his breakfast. Which he’d need badly every day. In Livingston, you could drink into the night, each night. His workweek was six days and each day ended at the Murray and the Owl, where he’d made his first friends since high school. You couldn’t drink or talk or laugh like this where he’d grown up, here in Churchill and Manhattan. You couldn’t drink in bars at all. There were none. When he went over the pass to work for the summer, he might as well have been in Czechoslovakia.

On Sundays he’d ride along the Yellowstone River with W, who would become his wife. She would hold onto him by his armpits, chest, abdomen. Her fingers were constantly moving, too. She didn’t hold still like other girls. She wasn’t a mannequin. She drank with him every evening after they’d met. She could hold her liquor, too, and she’d come home with him on his bike.

While he was out working he let her stay in his shack, to listen to records and drink tea with honey. She’d wait out her hangovers there while J sweat his off in the fields. They’d eat breakfast with the farmer’s family once the pipe was moved and the sprinklers were running for the day, or the time being. You could hear them tisk, tisk, tisk outside their kitchen window.

J’s legs began to wobble when he opened the second Tito’s. At detox he had been declared a fall risk. He felt old twice there. First time when he heard a nurse mumble his age and weight over a clipboard. Second time when that second nurse said fall risk.

Fall risk. Is that like death imminent?

His knee knocked against the toilet seat lid. Once, twice. Again. He’d have to get home and sit soon. But what was the inning? Had to be approaching seven or eight. He didn’t know the score and prayed to God, for the first time in fifteen years, this game wouldn’t go to extra innings.

He never drove drunk, not anymore. But he always got right before driving. It would be irresponsible not to. What he was doing now was getting right. There would come a day when he could no longer drive at all, and he’d know what’s right then, too. He knew how to take a hard look at himself.

He gave up motorcycling at sixty-three, for example, when he became a ditch rider. Had to outfit a rig with a weed sprayer and a pitchfork and .22. Only a four-wheeler would fit the bill.

At sixty-eight he took a summer off from ditch riding. He’d lost W to a stroke and was forced to begin drinking in earnest. Around the clock. He was a worker. He developed shakes and his voice warbled and he began to blame every one of his bodily ailments on getting old. You couldn’t help him with that excuse. There was no use changing anything in him because there was no hope, anyway. Can’t stop time.

His only daughter, though, moved him back to Churchill to provide care, despite his refusals. She tricked him into looking after himself, like his mom once did. She planned his days and assigned him tasks. Get this from the store, can you change the oil, the mower blade’s dull, windows haven’t been cleaned in months, can you wash the carrots? She tried covertly to regulate his drinking, but he was devious and he didn’t have a reason to stop until an hour before he picked up his granddaughter from school. At least he had to hide it from her.

In the summers he snuck Tito’s in his coffee and took his granddaughter with him to the head gates, where they would direct irrigation water together. He’d let her turn the cranks she could turn. The rest he’d take care of. He’d change boards and clear debris while listening to her play along the grassy banks. That sound of rushing water and one child laughing.

Riding home from the ditches she could never sit still. She’d clutch his Carhartt in seven or eight places in just two miles. And she’d sometimes trot her fingers up his back like a walking man. He’d have to yell into the wind.

Hold on!

Then she wanted to play softball. Despite himself, he agreed with her mother that the spring and summer softball league would be good for her. Get some friends. Learn teamwork. Shake the lonely streak so dominant in their bloodline. He wanted that for her, too, but he didn’t want to let her go. It was a sacrifice greater than the motorcycle. He didn’t need her to be with him every day, no. But he needed her to be there for the days. You know the days. No telling when they come.

He cried in a culvert on Spring Creek when her first season started.

He took his third and final bottle out of the bag. He wanted to set it down, this heavy tote, but where? Not here. Not on this floor. He’d have loved to hang it up but there was no hook. A simple change of shoulder would have to do.

But the procedure was not so simple. With one hand holding the bottle and both arms weak from shaking all morning he couldn’t seem to lift the shoulder strap off his body, like it was taped to him. He kept picking at it with his thumb until something finally gave. That something was his grip on the Tito’s. It rolled down the strap and bounced off a jacket pleat into the urinal. It rolled over the drain hole, back and forth, back and forth, like a pendulum swinging, like a metronome dying. He watched it till it stopped. Took a minute, he was surprised.

He finally gave his legs a rest and sat on top of the toilet seat lid, admiring the little bottle in the urinal beside him. Lying there in caked piss. Still irresistible. Still loved. Like a friend, like family. They sat together in the green light and laughed.

He was still laughing when the big hand knocked against the door. Laughing until he seized up again. Upon hearing his name, and a rap and a couple more thuds.

Are you all right in there? Need any help?

He was mute. He couldn’t go out and couldn’t let anyone in. But the doctor was approaching and he had to stop him. He couldn’t be his patient.

I’m good. I’m good.

Like everyone else, he didn’t believe it. 

Somebody gonna drive him home?

He grabbed his Tito’s from the urinal. He wanted to wash it clean, but you couldn’t wish for water where he was. He tried to pump hand sanitizer, but nothing came out. There was a wad of rubbery goo on the bottom of the dispenser and he peeled that off. He balled it up in his bloody fingers and rolled it over the airplane bottle’s cap. Around and around.

I’m good, just got dizzy.

He twisted his bottle open and shook it like hot sauce into his mouth.

Group of us were suspiring to tip you over!

The fat man loved his pranks and jokes.

The home team took the field while more than half their spectators crowded around the portapotty.

I, however, continued to grip the chain link fence behind home. I thought I could spot J’s granddaughter, but I wasn’t sure it was her. She took short stop but she played too deep.

I yelled something at the umpire, again. He was a cousin of mine and a feckless roommate. A twenty-something kid I’m one-hundred-percent certain had a shower beer before suiting up to call this game. I could have used a drink myself. I checked my phone for the nearest state liquor store, and for what time it was.

The big girl sat on the bench drinking orange juice. Game was pretty much over.