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Chili Fries and Shakes |
| Written by Brent Pfaff | |
| Sunday, 27 January 2008 | |
 CHILI FRIES & SHAKES I remember vividly those early mornings Dad used to sit himself down on my bed. “You ready, Walnut?” he would obnoxiously ask, cracking an actual nut with his fingers. Thinking back, I’ll bet he didn’t like the fruit nearly as he liked cracking the shell. He always seemed poised, on the verge of springing into some physical activity. I guess that’s why he was a policeman. “Dad… it’s too early…” I would moan, rolling over and covering my head “It’s never too early, Walut. Chili fries and a shake when we’re done.” He’d slap my behind through the covers. I can’t remember when or how chili fries and shakes became his tool of enticement. I wasn’t even particularly fond of them until I got older. He was a tall, lean, gristly man and while he never pushed sports on me, he had some mysterious compulsion for baseball. When I signed out of high school to play outfield for the minors you couldn’t have bought him. And of course it was cause for chili fries and a shake. “You did it, Bobby! Heading for the big time!” He smiled long, white false teeth (his naturals gone from the kicks of hard life). He must have picked up on my apprehension… “Little anxious are you?” “Ahhh… I just hope I don’t hope I don’t let anybody done is all.” He stood up, went to the fridge, pulled out a can of beer, “You ain’t gonna let nobody down, son. Long as you go out there and give it your best, give it your best shot… you don’t worry bout lettin nobody down.” He snapped open the aluminum can, for emphasis. He’d told me more than once, “It’s not how many duties you can perform that counts, but how well you can perform at least any damn one of them.” He was a very good police officer. His half dozen commendations for actions above and beyond the call of duty were a testament to that --such as the time he traded places with a hostage during our small town’s big bank robbery. Or the time he literally walked through flames after victims caught in the big hotel fire. Any mishap was a large event in a town this size, but none was larger than my Dad’s will to combat it. He was fearless in his quest for law and order and on a police force of about a dozen he stood out eminently. I remember as a small boy my classmates revering me as the boy whose dad was a kind of local hero. Policing was at least that one duty Dad could perform better than anyone else. I’m not sure if the townspeople knew of his drinking habit, but I am sure that if there was a disturbance anywhere around town, you could bet the victim hoped my dad was on duty, and the perpetrator did not. Before she died, when I was just a small boy, I can vaguely remember my other making reference to Dad’s drinking during their fierce debates. -- It was Dad pulled her shattered body out of another man’s demolished pickup one night outside of town.. Heading yet farther out. It had missed the mouth of the Brokenstraw bridge and caromed into the gorge below. Until I graduated from high school, early each spring we’d go down to the hardware store and Dad would buy a couple of wooden bats, a large, new baseball mitt, and as many baseballs as would fit into it. Then we’d go to the ball fields in the early mornings and he’d fungo me out balls for about two hours straight. It always amazed me how much power was packed into that tightly wrapped, sinewy body of his. He hit them hard as hell in all directions, towering pop flies, line drives, grounders, shallow ones, long ones, to my right, to my left. Every so often he’d yell out instructions, “Stay down on the ball!!--Bring your arm up over top!--Charge everything!--Use both hands!--Don’t take your eye off it! Look the ball into your glove and squeeze!” That last one was when I dove after balls, as was expected, and my collisions with the ground would knock them out from my mitt. Every twenty minutes or so he’d holler, “Take a break!” I’d flop down on the outfield grass, or if not completely exhausted, walk to the water fountain while he’d sit on a dugout bench. Sometimes I’d discretely watch him as he’d pull that little flask of his out of his pocket and take a swig. He had to have been almost as exhausted as myself after slamming ball after ball in my direction. Again, thinking back on it… I don’t know if he was pulverizing a baseball as much as he was pulverizing some long lost dream. After a couple of hours we would head on over to the batting cages and Dad would feed quarters into the machines while I hit. “Keep your back elbow up! Head down! Watch it come right in offa that bat!” he would instruct. After a few hundred pitches he’d yell, “Chili fries and shakes!” and our practice was over. Rarely would he indulge in these delights himself but would more often order a coke, empty the contents of the flask into it and sit and watch me eat. Aside from police work Dad was never one to involve himself in community affairs. Like, for all his knowledge of baseball, he never coached the sport, not even a little league team. Only once in a while would he even come to watch me play, and then he’d stand or sit in the most inconspicuous places, as if not wanting to be noticed. He was highly inquisitive though as to how I did after an event, and then of course there were the inevitable chili fries and shakes. He was funny to be such an accountable public servant yet not want to fraternize with that same public. In my forth year of professional ball I was ready to be transferred to a triple A club, one step from the majors. That’s when I slammed into the center field wall in Sarasota, knocking me out with a major concussion, but more than that, tearing up both my knees. As if it mattered, I looked the ball right into my glove, squeezed and held onto it. When I got off the bus I couldn’t help, despite myself, but have tears in my eyes, not in commiseration for myself, but for how I must have let Dad down. We both knew I would have made it into the big leagues. There were just too many fungoed early mornings, too many rounds in the batting cage, too many chili fries and shakes for either one of us not to have expected as much. -- It would never be now, though. I’ll never forget that toothy smile he greeted me with, or the first words out of his mouth (not that I hadn’t seen and heard them thousands of times before) the second I stepped from the bus, still on crutches, “Chili fries and a shake?” A few sips into my shake I retched in my lap from the long trip, the medication… the guilt. I broke down and sobbed uncontrollably, embarrassingly, right in front of him. Dad scooted round the booth and held me for the next fifteen minutes. He had many consoling words as I sat there blubbering into his shoulder, but all that really stuck in my mind were: “You gave it the best shot you knew how. You done the best any boy could ever do, Bobby. I couldn’t be more damn proud of ya” I remember him taking a quick swig from his coke (and bourbon) and saying: “Hell, was I told you never to take your eye off the ball.” We laughed. If he was ever disappointed in me for not making the big leagues, I could never tell. I was in bed with Dehlia, my girlfriend, getting ready to rise and go on patrol when the call came. Dad had been in pursuit of a stolen vehicle just outside of town, heading towards the Brokenstraw Bridge. That old steel girdled structure he’d crossed a good ten-thousand times, that he’d dragged his own mangled, dead wife out from under. He missed its narrow entrance and plunged into its murky depths. It was officially recorded as killed in the line of duty--the perpetrator never apprehended. Those of us on the force at least knew there never was one. You see, policing was the one duty everyone knew Dad was truly the best at. We knew he would never have made that kind of mistake nearing that bridge. What we didn’t know, yet, was that a fourteen year old girl in town had recently obtained an abortion in a somewhat nefarious manner. My only guess was that Dad couldn’t bear the thought of being stripped of the one duty he had heretofore been so great at… the best at.
Several months after Dad’s death Dahlia announces to me that she is pregnant. I want to take her out fancy to celebrate--but she craves only, chili fries and a shake. Copyright 2008 Brent Pfaff |
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