by Jabari Asim
“Thanks, man,” Guts said. He shook hands with Crenshaw. “No one’s ever given me a bat before.”
“I bet you’ve taken a swing a time or two. Just not at a ball.”
“Why you being so generous?”
“That conversation with Slick Daddy had me thinking about how I should carry myself. People do shit for me, I act like I’m the one doing them a favor. I could do better about that.”
“One conversation with a Negro Leaguer was all it took to make you straighten up?”
“Not really. Next week I’ll probably be back to my usual jackass self.”
Both men laughed.
Crenshaw turned serious, if only for a moment. “I know you were probably just trying to take my mind off my ring,” he said. “But still, you know, it did get me thinking for real. I’m glad you and Mr. Logan did that for me. ’Preciate it.”
“Not a problem,” Guts said. He unlocked his trunk and put the bat inside. “It helped me take my mind off some things too.”
“So, Guts, what do you do when you come out here? Work out? Watch the females?”
“Something better,” Guts said with a smile. “Come on, I guess I’ll let you in on it. Just let me get my crumbs.”
Crenshaw followed Guts to a nearby bench. The ducks, nearly as brown and mottled as the grass surrounding the pond, eased gracefully across the water. They kept the same pace even when the first crumbs appeared. Majestic and sure, they gathered near the bank and dipped their bills.
Guts looked at Crenshaw and grinned. He held out the bag. “You want to toss in a few?”
Crenshaw shook his head. “No, thanks. Really? This is what you do? You sit and feed the ducks?”
“Don’t knock it til you’ve tried it.”
Guts and the ducks fell into their natural rhythm. He tossed. They nibbled. The sun glistened on the water.
Crenshaw stood up suddenly. “Man, this is driving me nuts. I’m going to take a walk.”
Guts barely acknowledged his departure. The ducks’ serene motions, the circles emanating from their soft fluttering, was always mesmerizing. He envied the slow, inevitable certainty of their lives. Being a duck was beautifully simple. You were born a duck, had ducklings, and, no matter how you raised them, they would grow up to be ducks. With people it was different, painfully different. You could be a chauffeur, for example, and your son could grow up to be a leg-breaker. You could welcome an orphaned teenager into your home, take him to church and to the library, and he could grow up to become someone who kills an innocent man with a shoelace.
Guts fed the ducks until he was out of bread. He stood up. Crenshaw was nowhere in sight. Guts turned gradually, sweeping his gaze past the vigilant fisherwoman, past Mrs. Means and Mrs. Tichenor, past Crusher Boudreau, who was now bounding up and down the softball bleachers, until he spotted Crenshaw on a distant ball field playing with two young boys. Guts strolled toward them until he reached the cyclone-fence backstop behind home plate. He recognized the boys as the younger sons of Reuben Jones. Crenshaw stood at the plate with the younger boy, a wispy youngster in a baseball cap. They both gripped the bat while the older boy, curly-haired and dimpled, wound up and delivered the pitch. With Crenshaw’s guidance, the smaller boy made solid contact and sent the ball into center field.
“See?” Crenshaw said. “Keep your eye on the ball, not the pitcher. Follow it all the way out of his glove. See it turning, floating toward you in slow motion, big as the world. You’re all set, you’re just waiting for it. Then boom!
“Now give me five,” Crenshaw said, extending his palm. The boy slapped it and Crenshaw turned his palm over. “On the black-hand side.” They slapped five again. Crenshaw saw Guts behind the backstop. “Hey, fellas, I’ll be right back.”
He smiled at Guts through the fencing. The diamond-shaped holes reminded Guts of the lines on the glass windows in the visitor’s boxes in prison.
“Hey Guts, want to play some ball?”
“I’ll pass. I wouldn’t want to upstage an All-Star.”
Crenshaw pointed at the boys with his thumb. “These boys play Little League over here. I told them I might come see them one day.”
Guts nodded. “I know their father.”
“This is how it used to be for me,” Crenshaw said. “Just me and my brothers in a field. We had a sawed-off broomstick for a bat and a ball made out of rags. We played until it was too dark to see. No fans, no press, no pressure. Just some boys in a field. That’s when I fell in love with the game.”
Guts tried to recall a moment when he fell in love with beating people to a pulp. Maybe he’d loved it all along but could never admit it to himself. In contrast, he could clearly recall the first time he knew he was in love with Pearl. It was when he told her he’d been locked up.
Ten years before, police raided an after-hours gambling spot that Guts and Carmel Green had been running. Usually, Goode was tipped beforehand and could get his men away clean. But something had gone wrong, resulting in a snarl-up not even Goode and Grimes could untangle. Guts and Carmel were sent to Joliet for two years. He had Goode’s protection, even in jail, and who would have been stupid enough to fuck with Guts Tolliver anyway? His name rang out long before he strolled into the prison yard for the first time. He did his bid like a good soldier and returned to find his spot in the organization waiting for him, along with a small house with the deed in his name, a reward for his loyalty and silence.
“So you’ve been a prisoner,” Pearl said. He had been sitting at her kitchen table eating banana pudding. She was sitting on his lap naked, feeding it to him. “Well, now you’re my prisoner. A prisoner of love, baby, and I’m sentencing you to life.” She stuck her finger into the meringue and sucked it off.
Guts was relieved, but skeptical. “That’s all you have to say?”
“What else is there? I know there are lots of bad men in prison. I also know there are men in there who’ve never done any harm in their lives. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time, or they were forced to defend themselves, or they were mistaken for somebody else, or they were just plain black. My father was one of those—that’s right, my father. I can’t tell you which men behind bars are bad and which ones don’t belong there. But I can tell that you’re a good man, even if you’ve done some bad things.” At first Guts had thought the glow he felt came from a belly full of good pudding and a lap full of warm woman. Then he realized it was something much more.
“Big Man, you’re not even listening,” Crenshaw chided.
Guts came back to reality. “Hmm?”
“I was saying that tonight I choose what we do for fun. You can bring your lady friend.” Crenshaw turned and jogged back toward the boys.
Watching the athlete approach, the younger boy spoke to his brother. “We’re playing ball with Rip Crenshaw. Think anyone will believe us?”
“Nope,” his brother said, “not even Mom and Pop.”
While Crenshaw played catch, Guts went looking for LaRue Drinkwater. He hadn’t had much on his mind lately besides Pearl, but LaRue had managed to squeeze in at inconvenient moments. Guts had concluded that if he was going to think about someone all the time, that someone should be Pearl. Somehow, he had to nudge LaRue aside and create the space he needed.
“LaRue? Ain’t you done enough to her?”
“Come on,” Guts protested. “It’s not like that.”
Kevin Hawkins was better known as Hot Link. He sold hot pork sandwiches from a pair of tubs straddling the back wheel of a bicycle he rode all over the North Side. Like Playfair, Hot Link was one of the street-savvy operators who served as eyes and ears for Guts.
“She’s about to go to work, never misses it,” Hot Link reported. “She catches the bus at Leffingwell and Cass.” Guts thanked him and he pedaled away.
Guts had kept his eye on LaRue and her two kids over the years. He’d seen her move from one rundown flat to another, noticed her waiting for buses in the early dawn, looking exhausted as she shuffled t
o some dead-end job. One blistering day, he saw her appeal unsuccessfully to her able-bodied teenage son before shouldering a heavy sack of dirty clothes down the street to the coin laundry. Later, when Playfair got hold of some washers and dryers, Guts arranged to have a pair of the appliances delivered to the woman’s address. And he convinced Gabe Patterson to meet her son and give him a guided tour of the boys club. Periodically, he ordered Nifty to leave sacks of groceries and the occasional bag of cash on her back porch.
Cecil Drinkwater, her husband, had been a loudmouth, an idiot, a drunk. He owed Goode no money and hadn’t interfered in the operation in any way; his only mistake had been to tease Guts in public on a day when Guts was off his game. It was the anniversary of his father’s death, and Guts was chatting with Roscoe, the shine parlor proprietor. Roscoe had known Chauncey Tolliver since both men were boys.
Already juiced at 11 a.m., Drinkwater had compared Guts to Hayseed the Magnificent, a huge bearded wrestler whose resemblance to Guts could not be denied. Guts interrupted his conversation just long enough to unlace his boot and strangle Drinkwater with the string. Roscoe pleaded with him as he dragged the dying man across the floor, told him the man was only kidding. But it was too late. Guts had broken his code, such as it was. Until then, killing had only been what he did on the job.
Guts parked across the street from the bus stop. He walked over to LaRue. She was small, tired, and looked much older than her years. She leaned against the wall behind her, under the shade of a shuttered drugstore’s faded canopy. LaRue was wrapped up tighter than an Arab in the desert, but Guts was still able to see the thick, horrible rash splattered across her fingers and the backs of her hands.
Guts tipped his hat. “Afternoon,” he said. LaRue looked straight ahead. “I’m worn out, mister,” she said. “You come here to say something or do something, best get it over with.”
Guts looked down and saw the knife poking from her sleeve. It was a dull butter knife, couldn’t slice toast.
“I knew your husband,” he said.
“You mean you killed him.”
Guts said nothing.
“You’re the one that leaves us things,” she continued. “Groceries. Money.”
“How come you didn’t say anything?” Guts asked. “How come you didn’t tell the police?”
“Everybody in there was scared you’d come after them. I wasn’t no different. I had two kids to raise.”
Guts waited. A lazy-looking mutt ambled out of the alley bordering the bus stop. It crossed the street, lifted its leg, and pissed on Guts’s tire. A slight breeze carried the whimsical notes of an ice-cream truck from two blocks away.
“Just so you know,” Guts began again, “your husband didn’t have a beef with me. I barely knew him. I didn’t want you to think—”
“Never thought about you at all, mister. I just thought about my husband. I was mad at myself because I had just been wishing he was dead. And then it happened. I had already taken my wish back. I knew it was wrong. But I was too late.”
“I’m sorry,” Guts said. “I wish there was something I could—”
“He beat me. He was mean to the kids and he didn’t take care of them. He was drunk all the time. I know it didn’t make sense to love him. But I did. I did anyway.”
She turned to Guts. “You want to do something for me? Try leaving. Stop bothering me.” With that, LaRue stepped out from under the awning and peered down the street, as if willing the bus to come.
Guts scratched his nose with his index finger, tried to think of something to say. But there was nothing. He returned to his car and drove off.
Still shy about doing more club-hopping, Crenshaw decided to test his luck at Mound City Downs, the racetrack across the river. He joked that he needed Guts to be his bodyguard and help him take home all the earnings he was sure to win. When they met up that evening, he was again dressed in plain, nondescript clothes, dark glasses, and a cap pulled down low. “Looks like you’re hiding,” Guts teased.
“I am,” Crenshaw replied. “If Washburn finds out I’m over here betting the ponies, he’ll start wondering if I bet on baseball. That’s how you get banned for life.”
Guts wasn’t a fan of the races, but he knew his way around. Goode owned a few horses in a stable run by Simon Hughes, the first of two black men licensed to train thoroughbreds in the area. He also shared an owner’s box in the clubhouse with Levander Watts, the Citizen’s publisher. Guts seldom indulged in gambling. But he often accompanied Goode and was dispatched to the ticket window to handle the boss’s bets. He hated walking through the grandstand, watching the desolate losers sift through discarded tickets on the ground, hoping to strike gold—or, at least, get enough for bus fare back across the river to Gateway City.
Because he knew Hughes, Guts was able to park behind the scenes, where the owners, trainers, and stable hands had their own lot. When Hughes gave them a brisk tour of his stable, Crenshaw was as excited as Guts had ever seen him. He had no fear of the horses and they seemed to take to him readily. The one exception was a horse that shrunk away from them as soon as they approached. He whinnied and almost reared up on his hind legs before Hughes soothed him.
“What’s wrong with him?” Guts asked.
“He’s been drugged,” Hughes explained. “He’s been skittish ever since and certainly can’t run. I can’t even get a saddle on him.”
“What do you mean drugged?”
“He was our best horse, a three-year-old. Mr. G. owns him. A stakes winner. But somebody injected something in him, all but killed him.”
“Shit,” Crenshaw said. To Guts’s surprise, Crenshaw pulled off his aviators and wiped his eyes. Guts wouldn’t have guessed that Crenshaw had a soft spot for animals. “They’re doing this because they don’t want to see a black man beat them at their own game,” Crenshaw said.
“Not that simple,” Hughes said. “Whoever’s doing it is messing with white men’s horses too.”
As the night progressed, Crenshaw lost more than he won. But he didn’t seem to mind. To Guts, the ballplayer seemed fascinated with everything: the blare of the bugle announcing the start of another race, the jockeys in their bright silks, the dull rumbling that grew greater as the horses rounded the far turn and thundered toward the home stretch. He even seemed to enjoy the awful hot dogs that Guts had no problem resisting.
After just missing the seventh-race quinella, Crenshaw suggested they call it a night. They each bought a cup of beer and strolled back toward the stables. The two men leaned on a fence rail and sipped their suds. Nearby, grooms and stable hands hosed down horses and went about their tasks.
“I always wanted a horse when I was coming up,” Crenshaw said. “How about you?”
Guts grunted. “Where would I have put a horse?”
“Okay, I see your point. Lots of room for a horse in Wigwam, though. Plenty of people had ’em, too. The whole town didn’t have but one stoplight.”
“I didn’t even know they had black people in West Virginia until I met you,” Guts said.
“We’re there all right. Half a dozen families where I’m from. ‘Our coloreds,’ they called us. They thought we were all related—and my old man did his damnedest to make it so. They didn’t treat us too bad. They made jokes about not being able to see us at night, stuff like that. Hell, my high school wouldn’t have had nothing like a football or basketball team without their ‘coloreds.’ Now, you want to know where the crazy crackers are? That would be Arkansas.”
“Mr. Logan’s from there,” Guts said. “What were you doing there?”
“Minor leagues. That’s where I played Triple A. They hated me. Hated. I played the outfield then. Nigger, coon, monkey, jungle bunny—I heard it all. They threw shit at me all the time, and I was the best player on the team they were supposed to be rooting for. The manager started bringing me in to first base in the late evenings because that’s when the fans got really rowdy.”
Crenshaw took off his hat and pointed
to a spot behind his ear. “Look at that,” he said.
Guts looked and saw a rectangular dent in Crenshaw’s skull. Purple against his dark brown skin, it looked as if still hurt.
“A battery did that,” Crenshaw said. “Caught me when I was paying attention to the pitch, knocked me unconscious. Went down face first and chipped my tooth on a rock. Missed two weeks with a concussion. 1963.”
“Son of a bitch,” Guts said. He sipped his beer. A horse whinnied in the background. “Me, I always wanted a bike.”
“A bike? I’m guessing you had room for that,” Crenshaw said.
“Yeah, but my folks never had much after the bills were paid. We talked about it but it never happened. I’m about to tell you something that I’ve never told anyone else. You got to keep it to yourself.”
Crenshaw leaned in. “Scout’s honor,” he promised.
“I never learned,” Guts said softly.
“Never learned what?”
“To ride a bike. I got older and bigger and I just never got around to it. Probably won’t.”
“Bullshit,” Crenshaw declared. “It’s never too late, Big Man. It’s not too late for me to get a horse and it’s not too late for you to get a bike and ride it all over the motherfuckin’ place.”
“I hear you talking,” Guts said.
Crenshaw raised his cup. “Let’s drink to it. You in?”
Guts touched his cup to Crenshaw’s. “In,” he agreed.
The bugle blared, announcing the start of another race. It sounded just as clearly back in the stables.
“Guts, you got any brothers or sisters?”
Guts shook his head. “Nope. It’s just me.”
“What about grandparents?”
“All dead.”
“No family at all?”
“As far as I know.”
Crenshaw clapped Guts on the shoulder. “Don’t feel bad. You might have a leg up on a lot of folks.”
“How you figure?”
“Well, most people don’t have a choice when it comes to family. Look at me. I’m number six out of eight. Some of my brothers and sisters would steal my shirt off my back. Others would take theirs off and give it to me. My mama, she worked and worked until the day I could tell her she didn’t have to. I got her in a nice house. My daddy, well, he had almost as many kids by another woman not far up the road. He didn’t have time for any of us, from what I could see. When word got around about my signing bonus, he showed up sure as shit. Talking about ‘son, this’ and ‘son, that’ like I had even half a mind to listen to him. You could say I’m stuck. But you? You get to make your own family. Mr. Logan, he’s like your daddy—okay, stepdaddy. Mr. G.? He’s the rich uncle who helped you get your start. That lady friend of yours? Well, she can be your wife and carry your babies. If I’m in town, I’ll stand up with you at the altar.”
