My father tells me to make a turn and drive down a narrow alley, and there, in the town a few miles north of Pittsburgh where I lived until I was seven, is an entire neighborhood I never knew existed. “What’s all this?” I say.
“Tomashek’s,” my father says. “It’s down this way.”
I remember the name. “Hell itself,” my mother called it.
“I never told your mother this,” my father says. “After a game down this way, her father was sitting on the curb outside Tomashek’s. He was a character by then. My friends asked him to sing. You know, because he was feeling good. I had just started dating your mother. I never went back to Tomashek’s.”
I anticipate that this story will open into one more illustration of how public humiliation is a close friend of drinking, but this time my father simply relates it and then tells me to turn into an alley of decrepit houses. He shows me three houses from his Meals-on-Wheels route, one where a man has just lost a leg to diabetes. At the dead end of the last street, a freeway designed to bypass this town looms over our heads.
Miraculously, the field my father played softball and semi-pro football on is still here. “Millvale, Arsenal—the fields were used so much and baked so hard that the grass only grew over by the sidelines,” my father says. “You knew you’d played a game when you came off a field like that. Fats Skertich was our coach.”
I stop and get out. My father, well past eighty, sits in the car. “You go on,” he says, meaning for me to believe he isn’t going to follow. I walk, listening for the click of the car door latch, and when I hear it, I make myself keep walking so he can get out in his own good time. I don’t have to look back to know how he puts his hands to both sides, how he swings both legs outside and pushes off slowly with his arms, gritting his teeth until the short, tight lift of his head means the pain is running through the bone-on-bone contact in both knees.
It’s level here. After a few breaths to settle things down, he’s able to shuffle. I give him a minute, and he manages twenty feet or so, far enough that, when I turn, he can stop right there, along the third base line, as if he’s decided that patch of hard-packed earth is the perfect spot, that he can look around as well from there as I can from the outfield. “Fats Skertich,” he says, “was a man you listened to.”
I nod and walk until I can stare up at the bypass from underneath, remembering when traffic backed up the entire six miles to Pittsburgh during rush hour because tens of thousands of people who worked in the city had moved to its northern suburbs after World War II. By the time this bypass had been built, Etna, a small, steel-mill town, was a bottleneck. A year after the new highway was opened, the mill closed and Etna’s decline accelerated toward ghostly.
“You know, I always thought there were reasons your mother’s father had problems,” my father says. A man gets married and moves into his wife’s house. It’s a hard thing. He and your grandmother sleeping in a room between her parents and two uncles, all four of them still there when they were starting out.”
I remember the layout of the rooms in that house, how there were doors that connected those bedrooms, how you’d have to lock them if you wanted privacy. Or leave them unlocked as a sign of trust. “Enough about that,” my father says. “I just wanted you to see the field.”
Tomashek’s, when we finally reach where it’s set back off the alley, is closed, its beer and whiskey signs replaced by boarded windows and a padlocked door. The building is three times larger than the ones that house the other local bars. That size would doom any sort of reopening in this decaying neighborhood.
“Fats Skertich got himself killed in there,” my father says. “Drinking and money.”
I look again at the shut-down building and the deserted street. “Fats made a bet, and there were words spoken about paying. Fats slapped a man, and that man went home, got a gun, came back, and killed him right there in Tomashek’s.” My father stares at the door as if he expects to see Fats Skertich walk out with his arm over the shoulders of my grandfather. “A baseball bet. It was summer.” He shakes his head and seems to concentrate, listening for what might come next.