Читать книгу Standpipe - David Hardin - Страница 19

ELEVEN

This neighborhood west of Dort Highway near Dewey Park is new to me, forlorn and desperate-looking even on a brilliant, sunny afternoon. I park in front of a modest ranch on a deserted residential street. Note a few boarded-up houses, parked cars in various states of disrepair, yards returning to meadow, baking planes of puckered shingles, cracked tongues of driveways speckled with empty water bottles. A street at once depopulated in aspect, but alive with flickers of life—a green hanging plant, a small pink bicycle tipped on its side, hum of window AC. Pock. Pock. Pock. Across the street sits a sprawling, well-kept ranch. Behind the house, dominating the backyard, a full-size tennis court simmers behind a high fence. An empty referee’s chair hovers above a net post. A dignified older man in blinding tennis whites practices his serve, anti-freeze-colored balls glowing like pushpins on the large campaign map of the opposing court. The Sport of Kings, clinging to life in this post-industrial hinterland. Pock. Pock.

My father paid no attention to professional sports. Zero. Unlike other dads on the block, he didn’t putter around the house on weekends with a cold Stroh’s in his hand, listening to the Tigers on WJR. We never attended a game together. He installed a backboard on the garage, but I don’t think I ever saw him shoot a free throw or recall him dunking on me. We made a half-hearted attempt once at a round of golf. I won’t say we never played catch, but I don’t think he owned a glove. The little I learned about the arcane rules of baseball … well, let’s just say the finer points of the game still elude me. Therefore, it’s difficult to imagine us playing something so intimate, so intensively competitive as singles tennis. Hard to picture us sharing so intentional a space as the green and red rectangles of a public court on a hot July afternoon, facing off across the eleventh commandment of the net. Impossible to see him, in my mind’s eye, run.

The man has a relaxed, easy serve. I wave as I exit the ERV. He salutes me with a tip of his racket, dips into a wire ball caddy, form flawless, his spirit seeming to soar with every smash. I hope he finds a worthy opponent. Game, set, match.