XXIII – When Bruce Left the Trail (and Another Breakup Happened at Waffle House)
Randy leaned in, putting thick forearms on the table and clasping his hands together around his coffee mug.
“It all comes down to the Cross, Jesse.”
This wasn’t a rehearsed speech. As many people as Randy had shared the Gospel with, he’d never driven across state lines to help a son unearth the past sins and felonies of his dead father underneath the crawlspace an abandoned farmhouse. This was off the map of his experience. He only knew he loved Jesus and he loved Jesse, in that order, and that only the one could save the other, and this cup of coffee was his last chance.
“That’s the only place sin can be paid for. The Cross. And it has to be paid for if you want to be right with your maker.”
Jesse just stared at him, that same fluttering feeling in his head and on the back of his neck, making this conversation seem like the one where a boy finds out he’s adopted. For the sixteenth time since he’d met Randy he wondered if he might be dreaming all of this.
“Our God is good, Jesse. We’re not. We’ve done wrong to Him over and over and over and over again. So we need those wrongs paid for and we need to be given a rightness we can’t ever earn.” The sunglasses hanging from the neck of Randy’s shirt stared back at him. Jesse chose to think about them for a second because it was easier.
“That happened at His Cross. That’s the only place it can happen.”
Jesse stared at his own hands, now. They looked thinner than he remembered. Had he lost weight? Then he closed his eyes and breathed deep. This wasn’t supposed to be how this goodbye went. He was getting frustrated.
“Somewhere in Jakarta this conversation is happening between a Muslim Imam and a skeptic he’s trying to convert to Islam.”
Randy didn’t miss a beat. “The fact that other men claim to know God falsely doesn’t mean there’s no God to know, Jesse. And come on, you already know that. We’ve been through the ringer together at this point. I know you know He’s there. The actual God, the God Jesus claims to be.”
“What do you think actually happened to my dad in that hospital room?” He was surprised by his own question. It wasn’t a sentence he’d expected from himself.
“I think God saved your dad.” Randy clenched his jaw because thinking about Bruce had become harder over the last few days than it had been on Wednesday or Thursday night, when he was just a sick man in a hospital who had turned to Jesus. By now Randy knew more about Bruce Henderson than his children (aside from Jesse) did, now, and it seemed to eat away at that memory, like acid. But he still believed what happened that night was real. So he clenched his jaw and then powered through.
“I think He saved him, Jesse. He does it every day to people all over the world. He uses numbskulls like me to speak the message of what He’s done and who He is and then He gives people faith to believe that message. And through that faith He adopts them and remakes them and begins to live inside them.” Randy took a sip of coffee and looked down at the white ceramic mug, pleasantly surprised. “That’s actually really good. I normally don’t like Waffle House coffee.”
“I don’t buy it, Randy.” Jesse looked up at him with something like hatred in his eyes. It was fiercer than fear. And it shook Randy for a second.
Jesse thought about saying something more, but decided to stir his coffee with a spoon instead.
They both sat in silence, the first mutually uncomfortable silence they’d ever had. There were no other customers in the Waffle House right now, and the quiet made the tension heavier. After looking out the window to his right for fourteen seconds, Randy asked him, “So what do you think happened?”
Jesse looked back up at him, and the hatred left his eyes a little, but what was left behind was still more than fear. “I think my dad needed to feel like he wasn’t the man he really was. He would’ve believed anything that let him think he was forgiven. My guess? You threw him what looked like a rope and he grabbed it. But I don’t think any of it was real.”
Jesse stood up, not caring that his lower back hurt all of a sudden or that he felt dizzy as his tired blood readjusted in his body. “I’m going to the bathroom.” He passed Randy and walked back to the Waffle House bathroom, bearing the sudden impression that he was even farther away from his father than he had ever been.
He threw up.
Randy prayed.
A
The day Bruce Henderson left home in 1966 he made it four miles on foot to Belmont, just across the Ohio River from nothing but a million acres of trees and the Beech Grove United Brethren Cemetery. Right there on the West Virginia side, across from that quiet wilderness, was where he left the wallet, setting it underneath a stone about a hundred yards back, just on the right side (heading west) of Riverview Drive. It was underneath a thirty-foot maple tree, and he stayed in the shade for about five minutes, looking out at that thick brown stripe halving the hills, wondering how he was going to get across it when the time came. But he had a long way to go before that.
After he left the wallet there he walked across the road to the gas station he’d seen when he’d come over the rise about a quarter of a mile back, and he only looked back once. He felt that tight thing in his chest when he saw it, something about its being out of his reach now but very visible and very real made him feel like an animal caught in a trap. But then he turned back towards the gas station.
Once inside he avoided eye contact with the attendant to his right and made his way to the bathroom.
He was able to get some of the blood off of his back and shoulder blades, but the mirror was cracked and foggy. It was hard.
B
He caught a lift from a truck driver six miles west of Belmont. The driver dropped him off in Parkersburg, West Virginia, since from there he was headed south. Bruce said, “Thank you,” and stepped out of the big freight truck and onto the sidewalk of St. Marys Avenue, which gave him chills. But then he made his way over to the 5th Street Bridge. He was nervous about stepping up onto it, never having been over the Ohio River before, and also not wanting to draw any attention to himself. But he stuck to the right of the road with his head down and made himself get all the way out over the water. Then he looked out over it for a whole minute before he reached into the right pocket of his slacks and pulled out the picture.
It was all of them. The only one he had. He shouldn’t have it, actually. It was from his mother’s dresser drawer. But he’d taken it for the same reason most young men do the last risky thing they do before running away from home: They have nothing left to lose.
There was a crack in the concrete wall between him and the river, and he folded the picture once and slipped it into that crack. And when he turned around he saw the police officer.
The officer was a nice man; his name was Gerald Jenkins. Bruce only remembered that because of the relief pitcher for the Phillies, Ferguson Jenkins (this was before he was traded to the Cubs). But nice man or not, Bruce Henderson was trying to hide a lifetime of evil secrets, and a police officer is the last person you want to see when you’ve left the biggest clue you own in the crack of a bridge. But luckily, or unluckily, I suppose, the officer asked Bruce six questions that he found easy enough to answer with just enough eye contact to make Gerald Jenkins nod and pat him on the shoulder and head back to the station and eat his roast beef sandwich and call his wife Sandra and tell her he’d be home late because there was an impromptu deacons’ meeting at church that night. And Bruce walked back down the 5th Street Bridge thinking about four people, though not in equal measure, the last of whom was June, whom his son Jesse would find out on a Monday forty-five years later was long dead.
C
It’s hard to explain what Bill Mazeroski meant to a kid who grew up in West Virginia in the 60s and who had to wipe the blood of his back in the first gas station bathroom he could find after walking away from the things he could never forget. But it was like this: The 1960 World Series was the greatest World Series ever played, and in the bottom of the ninth inning of Game 7 a first baseman with a name and a face like your local high school custodian’s and who was born in West Virginia hit a walk-off home run to lift the Pittsburgh Pirates over the New York Yankees. And so Bruce Henderson would have dyed his blood black and gold if it were possible, but since it wasn’t he wore the same Pittsburgh Pirates ball cap every day from 1961 through 1966, when he left it hanging on a fence post at a house in Canaan Township, Ohio, just over the river from a state he would never set foot in again.
Bruce had listened to the 1960 World Series on the radio in his living room, his belly warm against the burlap feel of the rough fibers of the rug that covered the middle of their hardwood farmhouse living room floor. When Mazeroski hit the game winning home run, the crowd sounded like a thunderstorm, and Bruce had stared at the brown wood of their old radio and imagined a thousand people cheering for the swing he himself just took that put Ralph Terry’s pitch over the left-center field wall. Maybe a mom and a dad were out there in the stands, watching their boy throw his hat up into the air and coming around third and looking at home, crowded with a hundred screaming hearts.
Bruce never looked back at the hat.
D
There were some fairgrounds in Albany, Ohio. It was his third day on the road, and he was more tired than ever. No one was around, and so he slept in one of the stables where they kept horses during the fair. All of the stalls were empty now, and it was dark and quiet, and he didn’t mind the smell of hay and horse. He slept for five hours in the stall furthest to the left, spending the hottest part of the afternoon unconscious. When he woke up he wasn’t sure what time it was, but he knew he wasn’t at home because of the smell. And then he remembered everything, including where he was and why. And somehow that sudden rush of memory, that gave him the idea, that and the smell. He sat up and put his back against the wall of the horse stall and thought about where he would do it.
The stall itself didn’t seem right. No one would ever see it, and that was the point, wasn’t it? But his heart was too wounded to think much about the point of things, instead he knew that this was what he was doing because he had to, because some muscle and bone part of him needed to leave a trail, a way to be found. So he felt instead of reasoned, and he went up to the front door of the stable, where anyone would see when the place was filled with all the bustle of a county fair. He pulled out his pocket knife. Some high schooler doing her equestrian competition would wonder why a name was carved there, what it meant. And maybe that would end it. Maybe not.
He carved the real name. The one that mattered.
Not Bruce.
Jesse’s mouth still tasted like vomit when he sat back down in the booth across from Randy, so he didn’t pick up his coffee.
Jesse’s isn’t the first conversion story that involves the taste of vomit, and it won’t be the last. The God who exists loves to save shattered, frightened men, and vomit’s just a part of that equation. But Randy didn’t look at Jesse as though he were one step away from knowing God; he looked at him like he’d failed him, like everything he’d hoped for his terrified friend had just been spent on a few lousy appeals over a cup of coffee he’d just remembered he couldn’t even pay for.
“I’m sorry.”
Jesse didn’t mean it, but he loved Randy enough to fake it.
“I just don’t have it in me, Randy. I can’t do the whole happy ending thing right now. I hate him, and I want to figure out why I hate him, and then I want to forget him.”
Randy felt a cold brick land in the center of his chest, because he knew he had reached the limit of himself. There was no smile, no love, no charm he could throw his new friend that would mean anything substantial. And he hated it. So he grabbed Jesse’s right hand and grabbed it tight, and he looked into his eyes for seven seconds, and then he patted it and breathed out.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Go home.”
Randy nodded, and smiled sadly, and got out of the booth.
“Listen-”
“I’ve got the check.”
Randy smiled much bigger, and when Jesse stood up they actually hugged.
“Go.”
And so he did.
Randy went back out to the pickup truck as Jesse paid for two cups of coffee.
Neither one of them knew, but that’s how it always is.
And if he had known, Randy would have been good with Jesse having the last word.