Chapter Fifteen
1.
The stupidest thing Tony Joyce had ever said to another person also happened to be the truest thing: “You don’t understand the life of an athlete.”
It was a stupid thing to say because he had offered it, self-pityingly, as explanation for an action for which there was no real justification. He was twenty years old, nine months into his first real relationship with a woman, and that woman, Stefany, had discovered he had cheated. The time she knew about was not the only time, but it was the time he was trying to answer for, and it—the betrayal—had happened while he was on the road with the Bluefield Orioles, just as all of the other unacknowledged betrayals had.
“I don’t. Understand. The life. Of an athlete.” Stefany had repeated it back to him like that, slow and pissed off, eyes cut in a way that made Tony a trifle fearful that she would try to hit him. “Oh, poor you. Poor Tony with his great job and his girlfriend and his trips all over the country. Poor Tony with dinner fucking waiting for him every time his bus pulls into town from a game. Poor Tony, who gets to do exactly what he loves while the rest of us are just struggling for a paycheck.” She was standing, he remembered, across the kitchen peninsula from him, hands on her hips, head cocked sharply to the side. “No, how on earth could I understand that? Of course you had to get some bitch on your jock the minute you got out of Bluefield.”
He had felt bad. He had. But the explanation, as inadequate and audacious as it sounded, was real. She didn’t understand the life of an athlete. She didn’t understand what it was to be him. And though Tony didn’t grasp it all himself—his was a life, up to this point, mostly unexamined—he knew intuitively that there was no life of the mind and heart for him that wasn’t intimately connected to his physical self. His joys, his sorrows, his sexuality, his cobbled-together spirituality: he experienced these sensations through his long, strong, talented limbs. Later, when Tony was no longer at the mercy, in all of those bad ways and glorious ways, of his physical self, he would realize that he had possessed, at his peak, a kind of genius. The occasional pains he’d known—a sprained wrist, bruising, one slash along his shin deep enough to require stitches—were specific and ephemeral and only made him appreciate more his body’s default status: its utter painlessness, its ease. At bat, he saw a ball coming and his body knew the stance to adopt, the way to hold the bat, the degree to which he needed to shift his weight to his left leg. He could, machinelike, compute from the moment of contact whether the hit was good or not, if his intention had been made manifest or if some uncalculated factor—a gust of wind, a movement in the grit under his cleat, an uncaught trickle of sweat loosening his grip on the bat—had subverted him.
So this, the unearthly physical genius, was part of it. But the life of an athlete, for a young man of his gifts, extended beyond the field. Sure, some of it was power, the power of living in a culture that valued his talents as much as he personally valued them—and this wasn’t true, certainly, of his artistic abilities. That power, though Stefany would deny it, was what had helped him land her. Oh, she could (and did) say that she loved him for him, that she would want him no matter what, but she, like most of the girlfriends among his teammates, had started as an Annie, a groupie—a Bluefield townie who knew that the minor leaguers always turned up by the end of the night at Ramsey’s, where the owner fronted them free pitchers and pool after a game. She, like most of the girlfriends, had enough knowledge of the sport to spot the potential shining stars; Stefany had even, he later learned, started reading the industry rags, so that she could follow firsthand the statistics and rumors, the bold claims such as the one by a journalist who wrote in a minor-league seasonal roundup that “Tony Joyce may well prove to be the Orioles’ next Cal Ripken Jr.” The players went through the groupies like they did pitchers of beer and treated them poorly, swapping one woman for the next, breaking promises, throwing punches, taking cruel advantage—Tony had once seen Kyle Barberie, who ascended the next season to the majors, throw an unconscious woman over his shoulder and carry her to a bedroom—but they knew that they, too, were being used, being sized up as some woman’s ticket out of the backwater, and even a relationship like Tony and Stefany’s, long by anyone’s standards, couldn’t emerge from the shadow of its beginnings.
What Stefany could perhaps grasp least about the life of an athlete was how important that fraternity became to you. Tony had grown up an outsider—black in a white town and a white sport—and though he had been popular at RHS, it was a popularity that did not always hold up out of school or off the field. Tony could feel comfortable around his white teammates and their white girlfriends, but the minute he showed up at one of their houses, sat down at the dinner table with their white mothers and fathers, he could sense a static charge in the air between them. It wasn’t always rudeness, though sometimes it was; and once, unforgettably, a father had instructed him in a low, steady voice, “Get the fuck off of my property.” But in some instances, Tony sensed, if anything, that his white hosts were treating him with more care than they did the other young men at the table—passing him food first, agreeing too emphatically with his opinions. And while this was certainly preferable to the rudeness or the outright menace of those other situations, he could not escape the belief that what he was witnessing was a careful staging, after which, in his absence, his hosts’ real selves would emerge. Why else would Jake, whose mother had insisted so enthusiastically that Tony “come back soon, dear,” never invite Tony over again?
The team was different. He was one of only two black men playing that season, but Tony felt he had more in common with the lot of them, black and white, than he’d ever had with anyone back home—even his own family. How could his father, with his stoop and his soft middle and his job as a custodian at the nursing home, ever know what Tony knew? Who but Tony’s teammates would understand, not laugh, if Tony admitted that he sometimes felt a spiritual connection with the ball? They played together—not always harmoniously, often in the face of petty jealousies, but even those jealousies were welcome to Tony. It seemed to him only natural that a man could resent his swing, though he still could not fathom why a man would resent his skin color.
A lot of them were poor kids from nowhere, like Tony. Like Tony, they had their heads filled up with major league dreams of money and fame and women (though there was never, even in the minors, any shortage of those). Was it a wonder that they were all bad boyfriends and husbands? They gave their best, truest selves to the game and to each other, and so the women, in the wake of that, were interchangeable: objects toward which to direct their pent-up sexual energy, the occasional reminder of softer domestic pleasures. And though Tony had tried hard with Stefany, had stayed with her long after one of his teammates would have moved on to the next girl, he had to admit to himself, watching her cry and rage that day in the kitchen, that his only true allegiance was to his team, and what he was getting from Stefany he could get, and had gotten, from a dozen other girls. He could see in her face that she knew it. This was the irony: she was angry, and she wanted to go through the motions of punishing him, but she needed him more than he needed her. She would not be the one to leave, Tony realized, and so she could mock him all she wanted for saying that thing about the life of an athlete, but her every action only proved him right.
“I need to know that this won’t happen again,” she said finally, breathless. She had halted her zigzagging progression behind the kitchen peninsula, and she uncrossed her arms and put the palms flat on the countertop. “Tell me this won’t happen again, Tony.”
“It won’t,” he said. The necessary lie. He wasn’t even sure why he said it, since he found that it didn’t matter much to him if his relationship with Stefany continued. But she was a habit, effortless, and it was better to tell her what she wanted to hear than to force her to acknowledge the obvious: that this thing between them was temporary, that she would not be following him to the majors, that he wouldn’t be her ticket out of Bluefield. A
s it turned out, he wasn’t even his own ticket—he blew out his back moving a big-screen television, his first major adult purchase. It had taken him another two years to pay off that TV, time enough to weather two surgeries, a year of physical therapy, and the realization that he’d never be well enough, or young enough, to play again. The TV still sat in his living room. The picture hadn’t been right since he dropped it that fateful day ten years ago, but he’d be damned if he didn’t get his money’s worth out of it.
2.
Now, here he was: Tony Joyce, detective in a town of ten thousand people. He was thirty years old and renting a one-bedroom apartment in a complex on the edge of town. He thought occasionally about buying a nice little house—he could afford a ranch in one of the town’s middle-grade subdivisions, or he could get an older home near the library and start putting some work and money into it—but buying here in Roma would be the final admission of defeat, the final acknowledgment that he’d given up not only on all of those major league dreams but on the minor league ones, too: the dream of living somewhere other than this town, of making a name among people who didn’t know his previous glory and couldn’t measure him by it. In towns like Lexington or Louisville or Nashville, he knew he could ascend quickly among the ranks. He was educated—one thing he did do right was return to college part-time to finish his degree—and capable, articulate. His two years in Bluefield would be interesting trivia, the kind you wanted your low-level politicians and car salesmen and fast-food franchise owners to have. Here, if he were to run for sheriff—and he thought about it a lot; Timothy Coe had all but promised to step down after finishing out his current term—he would be fighting a battle against his blackness as much as any opponent, and it would be high school all over again, the smiling, tense faces and worried murmuring the minute his back was turned. He didn’t know if he could do it. If it could be done.
But there were certain inescapable facts to consider, like his mother and father, who still lived in Roma and who were both in poor health and who would, he suspected, live with gaping holes in the walls of their house if he didn’t happen to see and fix them. It wasn’t as if his brother and sister were any help. Or perhaps it was just the fact of his own cowardly heart—for he’d once felt certain of his prospects, had seen them as his due, and what he had learned was that nothing was his due.
He was on his second cup of coffee and his fourth ibuprofen, trying to watch a Saturday-morning cartoon (something jerky and neon-colored with screechy, obnoxious characters—this is what kids liked?), when he realized that it was going to be a Darvocet day, after all. He tried to lay off it, especially when he had real detective’s work to do, and he usually succeeded. But the pain, which never receded entirely, liked to step forward occasionally and announce itself. Tony! Here I am! Did you think you were rid of me finally? Yes, the pain had become sentient: it was a character, an arch-nemesis, with a voice not unlike that of the characters on this cartoon he was trying to watch on his damaged big-screen TV. Yes, he thought, just like that fellow with the huge pink eyes and ears and the mouthful of jagged teeth; the pain was gnawing, that was the right word for it. On the good days, it annoyed him—made it hard for him to find a comfortable position in bed, protested when he leaned over to pick something up. On the Darvocet days, it would not be ignored; it put sharp fingers into his lower back, sent tremors even into his hips and shoulders. The scar from his surgery felt as if it were glowing with heat, and indeed, each time Tony checked it in the mirror, he was surprised anew by the shiny vein of it: a darker black on the normal days, an itchy red on the ones like this. He downed one pill, thought about it, and swallowed another.
They were starting to take hold a half hour later, as he was pulling his unmarked cruiser in at the Fill-Up and scanning the lot for Susanna’s car. The pain was calling at him from such a distance now as to not even be audible, and a beautiful calm had settled over everything. It was like wading hip-deep through clear, still water. He backed into a parking spot—a habit so ingrained that he never even registered doing it anymore, or remembered the reason he started—and felt a tremor, a ripple in the calm, as he realized that Susanna was there already, standing in front of the gas station and waving to him. He lifted a hand back. She was wearing jeans today, and her long hair, not held in place with a band or barrettes, was lifted in a gust of cold wind. She kept trying to comb it into place with her fingers, and he could see through the windshield and even through the fog of his medication that she was nervous, a nervousness that had as much to do with him, he knew, as with the information they hoped to gather today. He grabbed his satchel from the passenger floorboard and started across the parking lot.
“Good morning,” she said. Her smile was broad despite the nature of their outing, her cheeks bright with cold.
“Hi there. Ready for this?”
“As I’m going to be.”
“OK,” Tony said. He unzipped his satchel and removed a notebook and pencil. “Having you here with me isn’t quite protocol, so hang back and let me do the talking, even if there’s something you really want to say. Just save it up and tell me later.”
“Got it,” Susanna said. She was close enough to him that he could smell her clean scent: not perfume, nothing strong, but soap, maybe shampoo. Her dark hair was tucked behind a small, round ear. He could remember the day he’d drawn that ear, the feel of the rough paper beneath his fingertip as he had smudged a shadow, softening the curve. It had occurred to him over the years, when he chanced to think about that semester and his misguided, misplaced affections, that he had thought it love because he had drawn her, and to draw a person that way was intimate, almost a transgression.
The convenience mart inside was like most of them, smelling of burned coffee and old frying grease, the fluorescent lights overhead harsh and unforgiving. He approached a woman at the food counter and put on the serious but reassuring expression that he’d found was most effective in these situations, especially with potential witnesses. People could be guarded around cops—suspicious. They thought that you were out to get them. At least this woman wasn’t white; Tony hated trying to win over the old, poor white folks.
“Ma’am, I’m Tony Joyce, with the police department. I let your manager know I’d be coming by.”
“That’s right,” she said. She glanced between him and Susanna, who was waiting by a rack of snack crackers, and transferred a handful of fried chicken from a stainless steel pan to a warming tray. She was a very small woman with her graying hair in a net, and she looked like she was probably in her late sixties—an age when a woman ought to be able to retire, Tony thought, not work the night shift at a gas station.
“You’re Patricia Williams? You were here on late evening of October twenty-third, morning of the twenty-fourth?”
“That’s what Mr. Highland say. What the timesheets say, he tells me.” She turned the pan over and dumped the crumbs on top of the pile of chicken.
Well, this was off to a promising start. “Do you have any recollection of that night at all? Anything that would set it apart from another?”
“I guess it was the evening I worked midnights. I only work midnights when Lana has her grandbabies for the weekend.”
“OK, great,” Tony said. He flipped the cover on his notebook over. “I’m going to show you a photograph. What I want you to do is think about whether or not you recognize the person, that’s all. And if you do, tell me how you think you know her.” He slipped Ronnie’s photo out of the pocket on his notebook cover and handed it across the counter. Mrs. Williams took her plastic glove off and pinched the photo by the very corner, as if she was afraid of smudging it.
“Yeah, I saw them that night.”
Tony sensed Susanna stiffening behind him. “Now, take your time,” he said, pencil poised. “What do you remember?”
“I’d seen her before. I think she works at the sewing factory—they come over here at shift changes.”
“But you said ‘them’?”
The old woman nodded. “She had some man with her. Some older white man. They bought food and beer.”
Tony scribbled all of this down. “This man. What can you tell me about him?”
Mrs. Williams shrugged. “I hardly looked at him.”
“But you could see he was older. How much older?”
“His fifties, maybe,” she said. “He kind of hung back, like she’s doing.” She nodded toward Susanna. “I didn’t get a good look at him.”
“What kind of build did he have?” Susanna blurted out. She glanced apologetically at Tony, then bulldozed forward. “Thin, fat? Tall or short?”
Tony had to restrain himself from hissing at her. He waved Susanna back and patted the counter, trying to get the old woman’s eyes on him. “Mrs. Williams,” he said. “Back to me, ma’am. We’re not trying to rush you. I just want you to take your time. Don’t push yourself to remember something you don’t.”
“He was overweight,” she said decisively. “I remember that much. And taller than the woman by a good bit. She was a little-bitty thing.”
Tony glanced at Susanna. “Ronnie’s two inches shorter than I am,” she said sheepishly. “Five foot.”
The Next Time You See Me Page 18
