Sunset Park

Who ever would have thought?

Miles Heller
    On Saturday, May second, he reads in the morning paper that Jack Lohrke is dead at the age of eighty-five. The short obituary recounts the three miraculous escapes from certain death—the felled comrades in the Battle of the Bulge, the crashed airplane after the war, the bus that toppled into the ravine—but it is a skimpy article, a perfunctory article, which glides over Lucky’s undistinguished major league career with the Giants and Phillies and mentions only one detail Miles was not aware of: in the most celebrated game of the twentieth century, the final round of the National League championship play-off between the Giants and the Dodgers in 1951, Don Mueller, the Giants’ right fielder, broke his ankle sliding into third base in the last inning, and if the Giants had tied the score rather than win the game with a walk-off home run, Lohrke would have taken over for Mueller in the next inning, but Branca threw the pitch, Thomson hit the pitch, and the game ended before Lucky could get his name in the box score. The young Willie Mays on deck, Lucky Lohrke warming up to replace Mueller in right field, and then Thomson clobbered the final pitch of the season over the left-field wall, and the Giantswon the pennant, the Giants won the pennant. The obituary says nothing about Jack “Lucky” Lohrke’s private life, not a single word about marriage or children or grandchildren, no information about the people he might have loved or the people who might have loved him, simply the dull and insignificant fact that the patron saint of good fortune worked in security at Lockheed after he retired from baseball.
    The instant he finishes reading the obituary, he calls the apartment on Downing Street to commiserate with his father over the death of the man they discussed so often during the years of their own good fortune, the years before anyone knew about roads in the Berkshires, the years before anyone was buried or anyone else ran away, and his father has of course read the paper over his morning coffee and knows about Lucky’s departure from this world. A bad stretch, his father says. First Herb Score in November, then Mark Fidrych in April, and now this. Miles says he regrets they never wrote a letter to Jack Lohrke to tell him what an important figure he was in their family, and his father says, yes, that was a stupid oversight, why didn’t they think of that years ago? Miles answers that maybe it was because they assumed their man would live forever, and his father laughs, saying that Jack Lohrke wasn’t immortal, just lucky, and even if they considered him their patron saint, he mustn’t forget that saints die too.
    The worst of it is behind him now. Just twenty daysbefore he is released from prison, then back to Florida until Pilar finishes school, and after that New York again, where they will spend the early part of the summer looking for a place to live uptown. In an astounding act of generosity, his father has offered to let them stay with him on Downing Street until they find their own apartment, which means that Pilar will never have to spend another night in the house in Sunset Park, which scared her even before the eviction notices started coming and now puts her in a full-blown panic. How much longer before the cops come to throw them out? Alice and Ellen have already made up their minds to decamp, and even though Bing went into a rage when they announced their decision at dinner two nights ago, they both held their ground, and Miles believes their position is the only sensible one to take anymore. They will be moving out the minute Ellen manages to find Alice an affordable replacement, which is likely to happen by the middle of next week, and if his circumstances were similar to theirs, he would be on his way out as well. Just twenty days, however, and in the meantime he must not abandon Bing, not when the venture is falling apart, not when Bing so desperately needs him to be here, and therefore he intends to stay put until the twenty-second and prays that no cops show up before then.
    He wants those twenty days, but he does not get them. He gets the day and the night of the second, the day and the night of the third, and early in the morning on thefourth, there is a loud knock on the front door. Miles is fast asleep in his downstairs bedroom behind the kitchen, and by the time he wakes up and slips into his clothes, the house has already been invaded. He