A Man's Game

by Newton Thornburg

  “Understood,” Baird said.

  They were heading down the front steps, in the cool shadow of the massive building, which was located across the street from the police station, on the same steep hill. It was a bright morning, with a strong wind blowing. Like Kathy, Jeffers did not bother to hold her hair in place.

  “We know you went out of your way on this,” Baird said to her. “And we do appreciate it.”

  The detective smiled coolly. “Don’t forget—nine-one-one.” Turning away, she walked hurriedly toward the police station.

  Kathy smiled at her father. “I think she likes you,” she said.

  “How can you tell? If she was any cooler, I’d have frostbite.”

  “I can tell, that’s all.”

  “A gal sort of thing, huh?”

  “Of course.”

  “It’s so limiting, being a man.”

  Kathy patted him on the shoulder. “I know. Poor thing.”

  From the corner, the two of them walked downhill, toward the parking lot where Baird had left his car.

  “Why not drop me at home instead of work?” Kathy suggested. “The day’s half gone, and I’m feeling lazy.”

  “Your mother won’t be there till four,” Baird reminded her. Ellen had insisted that she could not take time off for the hearing.

  “So?”

  “So I don’t want you home alone. Not yet.”

  Kathy put her hand in his. “You treat me like I’m still your little girl,” she said.

  “Sorry.”

  She looked up at him and smiled. “I’m not.”

  That evening, checking on Kathy, Baird went into the back hallway behind the kitchen, where she was repainting a small wicker rocker that her favorite teddy bear—the one she called Freddy Bear—sat in all day, every day, as if he were waiting patiently for a return of the good old days when he had been admitted to her bed, along with the rest of her menagerie.

  “Slade probably has the restraining order by now,” Baird said. “From now on, he stays a hundred feet away.”

  “Unless he chooses not to.”

  The comment surprised Baird, for Kathy at the moment looked anything but thoughtful and pessimistic, with spots of white paint on her nose and cheek and bare legs.

  “That’s true,” he admitted. “And maybe that’s reason enough you should visit Uncle Ralph and Aunt Dollie.”

  She went on painting. “I’m sorry, Daddy. I just can’t do that. I don’t want to go there or anyplace else. I feel safer here.”

  “Slade is here.”

  “And he’d be here when I got back. Do you want me to leave for good?”

  “Of course not.”

  “So I’ll stay then.”

  “As you wish.” He touched her cheek. “You missed a spot here.”

  She laughed and pretended to go after him with the paint brush as he scooted out of the kitchen.

  He still had not told Kathy the full truth about Detective Jeffers’ visit to Leo’s. He judged that would only terrify the girl needlessly, learning that Slade was a suspect in a murder as well as in the rape of the Ravenna woman, not to mention the rape of the jogger only days before, only blocks away. For that matter, Baird hadn’t given Ellen the full story either, knowing from experience that she would disagree with his decision not to tell Kathy and would promptly give the girl the whole story.

  All Baird told them was that Jeffers felt they had been shortchanged by Sergeant Lucca and had a right to know about Slade’s juvenile record. Minimizing that record, Baird said that the creep had been convicted of child molestation and had served time in various juvenile facilities. He made no mention of Slade’s brutal rape of his foster mother.

  Now he went on through the dining room and the living room and into the den, where Ellen was curled up in her favorite chair, reading a book titled Introduction to Contract Law. Feeling at loose ends, he simply repeated what he had just said to Kathy.

  “I imagine Slade’s been served the restraining order by now.”

  “Good,” his wife said.

  He waited for a few moments, wondering whether she would say anything else. “Must be fascinating reading,” he said.

  She looked up at him. “What would you prefer I read, some soft-core romance?”

  “What you read is your business.”

  “That’s for sure.”

  She was giving him her laser look, the unblinking blue gaze he once had loved so much, and now only admired.

  “Well, I’ll see you later,” he said. “I’m going to watch some TV.”

  She did not respond.

  Later, after she and Kathy had gone to bed, Baird stayed up and watched the late news, then started Jay Leno. Like water, though, his mind kept trickling to the lowest spot, the deepest rut. For the first time in his life he was beginning to wonder if his marriage was not only unhappy but doomed. In recent years he had become so accustomed to Ellen’s coldness that he had barely noticed the recent difference in her. But there was a difference, and he could not ignore it any longer. In the past, her coldness had seemed only a manifestation of her unhappiness, another way of telling him how dissatisfied and miserable she was. But no matter how cold she had been, he had never felt that she no longer loved him. Always there had been moments, even days, when they would find each other again, as the lovers they once had been. And he had assumed that when she made it through these early years of menopause, things would return to normal and the two of them would be happy together again.

  Now he was not so sure, for lately there was this new thing in her attitude toward him, as if she had reached the point where she not only had ceased to love him, but actually disliked him. And Baird did not understand. It made no sense, not for two people who had been so much in love, for so long a time. Still, he couldn’t deny that it was there, no more than he could claim that it broke his heart, for Ellen had been unloving for so long now that he seemed to have lost the gift himself. At most, what he felt was a vague sense of dread: fear of change, fear of starting over. Yet when he thought of the alternative—the two of them living together alone after Kathy finally went out on her own—that was the scariest prospect of all.

  Using the remote, he turned off the TV and sat there for a while in the family room, which he had added onto the house three years earlier in order to have a comfortable place to watch television, Ellen having insisted more and more that the den be used exclusively for reading and listening to music. Of course there was still the living room—the “museum,” as Baird called it—but then and now it was a useless repository for Ellen’s haphazard collection of antiques and oddities, including a pair of Empire settees so long-legged and uncomfortable that Baird could understand why Napoleon had never stayed at home for long. The other chairs were wooden rockers in which no one rocked and wooden straight-backed chairs in which no one sat. There was also a baby grand piano without strings, in effect a very expensive table for the display of family photographs.

  And finally there was Ellen’s collection of antique wicker doll buggies, each of which contained a potted fern of one kind or other. It was a room that the family merely passed through on their way to and from the den or family room. And it was Kathy’s ace in the hole whenever her mother started railing about the “baby-girl shit” in her bedroom.

  “Well, what about the living room?” Kathy would shoot back. “Ferns in baby buggies!”

  Getting up, Baird went out onto the deck, which also was new, having been added to the house at the same time as the family room. In front of him was the best feature of the house and the reason for its recent swift appreciation: a view encompassing the lights of the university district and Laurelhurst, with Lake Washington beyond, wide and black, its far shore corruscating with the lights of the Eastside, which gradually grew dimmer as they rose into the foothills of the Cascades. The mountains themselves of course were not visible now, in the darkness.

  Turning from the railing, he looked out at the street, gazing absently at a
car parked just around the curve, on Alton, facing his house. For a few moments he looked straight at the car without even realizing what he was seeing. Then it struck him, that shape he knew only too well, the old car much too wide and high for a current model. Even in the dim glow of the streetlight he could see its cardboard window and primer-colored door—and now its driver too, leaning back, smoking, gazing up at Baird’s house, the front corner room, Kathy’s room.

  Baird felt his heart begin to sprint. For a moment he thought of calling the police, but he judged that Slade was safely over the hundred-foot limit and anyway would probably drive on long before a police car could arrive. Still, Baird knew he had to do something, simply could not let the man continue to go unchallenged, so smugly convinced that he could do whatever the hell he wanted to whomever he wanted to do it.

  Baird thought of jumping over the railing and running out to the street to confront him. But he knew that Slade, in his car, would probably have more than just a knife at his disposal—if not a gun, then at least a club of some kind. So he wheeled and ran back into the house, snatching his briefcase off the desk in the den. By the time he reached the front door he had the .25 automatic in hand and had let the case drop. Rushing out onto the front porch, he was just in time to see the old Impala coming around the corner, moving slowly, its ponytailed driver raising his hand in a mocking salute. Baird just stood there and watched as the car went rattling and smoking around the next corner.

  After he went back into the house, he put the gun inside his briefcase and returned the case to the den. He closed and locked all the doors and windows downstairs, then went into the kitchen and poured himself a double vodka on ice. Sleep, he knew, would be a long time coming.

  In the morning Baird told Kathy and Ellen about their late-night visitor, and Ellen seemed to take it harder than Kathy, evidently disappointed that Slade wasn’t as innocuous as she had imagined, someone who would cut and run at the sight of a restraining order.

  “I think it’s time you went to Ralph and Dollie’s,” she said to Kathy. “For a couple of months anyway.”

  The three of them were at the breakfast table. Kathy had finished her juice and toast.

  “No, I don’t want to go there,” she said, getting up from the table.

  “It would be for your own good,” Ellen persisted.

  “I’m not going anywhere.” Leaving the kitchen, Kathy went upstairs and they heard her bedroom door bang shut.

  “Well, I guess that’s that,” Ellen said. “She’d miss her daddy too much.”

  By four in the afternoon Baird had finished work for the day, and he decided that he wouldn’t pick Kathy up as he’d done the last few days, waiting till four-forty-five and pulling up at Bond’s Vine Street entrance, hoping she would already be there, waiting for him. When she wasn’t, he would then have to circle the block, which could take three minutes or fifteen, depending on the traffic. And that left the girl much too vulnerable, he’d decided. In a worst-case scenario, he could imagine her having to wait there on the sidewalk for ten minutes or more in Slade’s company, listening to his filth, fearing for her life.

  So on this day Baird came a quarter hour early and parked in Bond’s garage, then crossed over to the department store and went inside. As usual, he couldn’t help being impressed with the work that had gone into making the first floor an enticing place to shop. Everywhere the designer’s art was in evidence, with little gatherings of mannequins displaying this and that: beachwear, cocktail dresses, jeans, pullovers. And the counters were not just counters anymore, but minor showrooms in themselves, heavily decorated redoubts where attractive clerks sold everything from cosmetics to luggage.

  At the center of them all, as far as Baird was concerned, was the costume-jewelry counter, where Kathy at the moment was hard at work, smiling warmly as she demonstrated a pair of large, yellow earrings for an elderly lady who was smiling herself, though a touch wistfully. Watching from a distance, Baird felt a rush of love and pride. He realized that the girl was only doing her job, trying to sell the earrings, but that didn’t explain the sweetness of her smile or the fact that she truly appeared to be enjoying herself with the old woman. These days it seemed to Baird that most people like Kathy, those who were both young and beautiful, tended to share their bounty mostly with their peers, barely managing to even notice the dowdy rest of mankind. So he felt doubly proud of his daughter: proud that she had so much, and prouder still that she so obviously loved to share it.

  In this buoyant mood, he looked away from her, aimlessly letting his gaze play across the immense room with its kaleidoscopic abundance of merchandise, the bright colors of summer already giving way to those of autumn. He saw clerks he’d met through Kathy, and there were floorwalkers and customers and a trio of swimsuited mannequins that looked so real and sexy that he thought of driftwood fires on the beach, passion in the sand. Almost smiling now, he let his eyes travel perhaps a centimeter farther—and there he was again, looking at Kathy from across the great room, near the Clive Street entrance, again a good, legal hundred feet away from her.

  And in that vast welter of merchandise and mannequins and people—clerks and customers—Slade stood out like a panther in a sheep pen. He was just standing there, leaning nonchalantly against a pillar, and it was as if there were some kind of force field around him, a perimeter that others dared not breach. A floorwalker stood watching him from a distance; clerks glanced furtively at him; customers gave him a wide berth. And Baird could see that he loved it, that intimidating straight folk was probably the most fun he got out of life. On this day he was wearing another vest, this one a fringed buckskin type decorated with obscure Indian symbols drawn with a Magic Marker. Everything else was the same: the bare, muscular arms, the hard, hairy torso, the greasy ponytail, the Indian jewelry. But Baird figured it was his face more than anything else that made the force field work: the lifeless gray eyes and the mouth arched in its permanent sneer.

  And suddenly this man was looking straight at Baird. The sneer broadened into a kind of smile, and Slade motioned with his head in Kathy’s direction. Then his tongue curled out and he lewdly licked the air, twice, as if to make sure that Baird did not miss his intent. Immediately Baird started after him, moving as fast as he could without breaking into a run. But he had to go around the escalators and past a luggage display, which caused him to lose sight of Slade for a vital four or five seconds before he hit a walkway that led in Slade’s direction. But even the walkway was not a straight shot, not since some fiendish young merchandising genius had hit upon the idea of laying out the store like a maze, the better to trap the unwary shopper.

  Baird saw Slade go out the Clive Street entrance, moving casually, advertising his total lack of concern. And though Baird followed him through the same revolving doors just seconds later, when he hit the sidewalk the creep was nowhere to be seen, swallowed up in the horde of pedestrians moving past the store in both directions. Clive was a one-way street, tree-lined and busy, running sharply downhill past Bond’s to the waterfront. In that direction, between two rows of buildings, Baird saw a large Japanese automobile freighter easing soundlessly toward shore, as if it were on a military mission. But he did not see Slade.

  When he went back inside, he was aware that a number of people, customers as well as clerks, were watching him as he headed toward Kathy. She had come out from behind her counter, and though she was smiling at him, or trying to anyway, her eyes were bright with tears. At home, he would have taken her in his arms without a thought, and that was what he imagined she expected him to do now. But this was her place of work, and he didn’t want her co-workers thinking of her as a daddy’s girl. So he only put his arm around her, turning her, and walked her back to her counter.

  “He just disappeared,” he said. “Like he took some other life form. I probably should have checked out the dogs.”

  She smiled, but he could feel her trembling.

  “I suppose Illinois is still out of the que
stion.”

  She nodded, and it pained him to realize that she was afraid to speak, afraid to trust her voice.

  “He was probably a hundred feet away,” Baird told her.

  The girl finally spoke. “Do you think he’ll ever quit?”

  Baird was wondering the same thing. “You bet I do,” he said.

  Because the next day was a Saturday, all three of them were at home. Kathy, as usual, had an opera playing on her stereo while she cleaned her bedroom and bathroom. Ellen meanwhile was rooting out every mote of dust and dirt in the museum. Later, once their individual holy of holies was immaculate, they would move on to the rest of the house, giving it a desultory cleaning at best. Baird told Ellen that he had some accounts to call on that afternoon and that he also had a shot at the Gordon Fisheries account, a shot that might entail his playing poker with the purchasing agent, among others. He told her that he would be late and that she shouldn’t wait dinner for him.

  She smiled wryly. “Are you having an affair?”

  “Yes,” he admitted. “Me and Sergeant Lucca. We just seem to hit it off.”

  Ellen grew serious. “You’re not going to do something stupid, are you?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like confront our friend Slade. Like threaten him.”

  Baird looked at her, trying not to blink. “Don’t be silly.”

  “I hope I am being silly. It’s just that I know how you are about Kathy.”

  He put his hand on her shoulder. “Now I want you to listen to me,” he said. “And I’m serious about this.”

  “About what?”

  “About today. This afternoon and evening. You two are going to be alone here, and we already know this guy is crazy. So I want you to keep the doors locked. And it would be a good idea to get the gun out of the nightstand and keep it down here. Keep it handy.”

  Ellen was shaking her head in amusement. “What do you expect him to do—break down our door?”

  Baird picked up his briefcase. “Just be careful, all right? You may think all this is a joke, but I’m not sure Jimbo Slade does.”