A Man's Game

by Newton Thornburg

  Though he took his briefcase with him, Baird had no calls to make. He was wearing cotton slacks, an open, blue-striped shirt, and his brown-suede sportcoat, which even after a decade of casual wear, was still stiff and tough, probably made from the hide of an old bull. Which was the reason he had chosen it this day, because he knew he could carry the small automatic in one of its side pockets without the gun showing and without the coat drooping suspiciously.

  When he got to Leo’s, however, he left the gun in the car, still inside his briefcase. It was only the middle of the afternoon and he didn’t expect to be in West Seattle until five or six. So there was time to kill, also a certain hard edge of sobriety to lose. Only Leo and few of the regulars were there, indifferently watching a Mariners game on television. Leo, the ex-football player, had little patience with baseball, shaking his head in boredom and disgust every time a side was retired with players languishing on the bases.

  “Worse than goddamn bowling,” he said now. “I’ve seen church services more exciting than this.”

  “Well, sure,” old Wyatt said, “with Jimmy Swaggart smiting his chest and bawling, ‘I have sinned against you, my Lord!’ You can’t beat that no how. But baseball, Leo—baseball’s a thinking man’s game. Which of course is why you don’t like it much.” Wyatt was a diehard Mariners fan.

  “Thank God it’s almost August,” Leo said. “Time for the M’s to do their annual El Foldo.” He pushed a vodka-tonic in front of Baird. “What brings you here on a Saturday?”

  “I come here on Saturday all the time.”

  “Sure you do.”

  Wyatt affirmed this. “Of course he does. Every Saturday, like clockwork.”

  Leo regarded his small gathering of afternoon tipplers. “You guys are trying to drive me crazy, right?”

  “Now why would we do a thing like that?” Wyatt asked. “If you don’t remember, you don’t remember. When a man begins to fail, he’s the last to know.”

  Leo frowned. “Hey, I know you. You’re that Amtrak conductor, right?”

  Wyatt made a clucking sound. “Sad case. A real sad case.”

  Ralston was busy reading the morning paper, spread out on the bar next to his beer. Shaking his head, he tapped the paper with his index finger, which looked like three knuckles welded together. “Another skeleton up in Snohomish. They say it’s a girl who disappeared about six years ago. Her old man, a cop, committed suicide over it. And the guy they think done it, he’s already in prison. All they gotta do is try him for murder and then hang him.”

  “Yeah, twenty years from now, if ever,” Leo said. “First we gotta pony up a couple million for his appeals.”

  Wyatt was in fervent agreement. “Welfare for lawyers, that’s all it is. Why not some welfare for dentists, for a change, huh?”

  “Cuz everybody hates dentists,” Ralston told him.

  Another patron, Tibbs, was nodding sagely. “You ask me, I say the Green River killer’s still at work. He’s just moved his operation up to the north end, that’s all. Christ, they’re finding bones up there every couple days, it seems. It’s getting to be like a sport.”

  Baird said nothing. Of course it was a subject much on his mind these days: the relentless slaughter of females of every age and race and description. In fact the problem had become so pervasive in the area, so constantly a part of the evening news, that until recently Baird had barely taken notice of it, much as if a sportscaster were running through the day’s scores. So he had no trouble seeing Tibbs’ point. The killing of females did indeed seem to have become a kind of gruesome national blood sport, a form of recreation for the hordes of twisted males America seemed so adept at producing.

  But Baird didn’t care to add his two cents to the discussion. All he knew for sure was that as long as there was a breath of life left in him, his Kathy would not join that appalling cavalcade of victims.

  Suddenly he became aware that the bar was silent, that the others were all looking at him.

  “Well?” Leo said.

  “Well, what?”

  “I axed you where your lady-cop friend is today,” said Wyatt, the only man in the place with a doctorate.

  Since the black dentist had already been worked over many times for his pronunciation of “ask,” Baird felt he couldn’t use that as a diversionary movement. So he met him head-on.

  “Wyatt, why are you such a nosy old bastard?”

  “My patients want gossip.”

  “Patients!” Ralston scoffed. “Which one of the three you talkin about?”

  “Let’s not get off the subject—” the dentist said “—which is Baird’s sexy new friend—with flat feet and a touch of color, I might add.”

  “What do you mean, color?” Leo said. “She’s whiter than he is.”

  “Don’t matter. I can tell. A touch of the tar brush, you fine people used to call it. And so it is. The lady is just too sexy to be white.”

  “The man’s a racist,” Ralston declared.

  Wyatt ignored him. “I still want to know if we’re gonna see her tonight or not.”

  “You better tell him,” Leo said to Baird. “Otherwise he’ll have his dentures in your ass all night long.”

  “Dentures, my foot!” Wyatt said. “I’ve got the teeth of a twenty-year-old.”

  “Then you better give ’em back—you’re wearing ’em out.” Leo was not above borrowing a good line.

  Baird pushed his empty glass toward him. “There ain’t gonna be any all night long,” he said. “One more and I’m on my way.”

  “And just where would that be?” Wyatt asked.

  Baird forced a smile. “Nothing very exciting, I’m afraid. Just business, you old gossip.”

  The dentist had a loud, cackling laugh, and he let it fly now. “Old gossip, my arse!” he said. “Just keeping up is all. And I’ll just bet you gonna be doing business, Jackson. The kind of business I wouldn’t mind doing a bit of myself tonight. Only I get the feeling the lady prefers her fellas more on the pale side.”

  “Well, that sure ain’t you,” Ralston said.

  “Or maybe she prefers ’em on the under-eighty side,” Tibbs put in, and again Wyatt cackled.

  Smiling, Leo brought Baird his refill. “She ever comes in here again,” he said, “you might as well put it in the paper.”

  Later Baird sat in his car looking down the street at the one-time motel where Slade rented a room. It was after seven in the evening, still hours away from nightfall, yet he felt as if he had been waiting days for the creep to show up. There were other low-rent apartment buildings on both sides of the street, eight- and twelve-unit affairs with insufficient off-street parking. As a result, Baird’s Buick was only one of dozens of cars parked along the street, virtually bumper to bumper. So he did not feel particularly exposed or noticeable.

  Fifty yards ahead, across the street, was the entrance to Slade’s motel. Next to it was a weedy empty lot that gave Baird a clear view of room twelve. Since he’d arrived, no one had gone into or out of the room, nor was there any sign of Slade’s car. So Baird had grown less sanguine about his chances of running into Jimbo this way, confronting him and putting him on warning. But he had no idea of how else to go about it. He didn’t know where Slade worked, and he didn’t know what his hours were. Other than Baird’s own house and Bond’s Department Store, this was the one place he could be figured to turn up.

  Still, Baird couldn’t help feeling restless and stupid, sitting there hour after hour munching service-station corn chips and incessantly checking his right pocket to see if the gun was still there, still on safety. And every time he touched it, a breath of panic would blow through him. What on earth was he doing, parked in a strange neighborhood with a loaded gun in his pocket, waiting for some kind of showdown with a brutal young criminal? After all, wasn’t he still just himself—nice, easygoing Jack Hanley Baird, middle-aged, middle-class family man and seller of paper supplies, the man who couldn’t even shoot a deer when he had one in his gunsight, years
before?

  Even as he was thinking this, he saw the rattletrap Impala coming down the street toward him, dragging behind it a rooster tail of exhaust gases. The car swerved into the motel parking lot and skidded to a stop in the gravel, in front of room twelve. This time Slade didn’t check his mailbox, just jumped out of the car and practically kicked down his door when it proved slow to open. As he slammed the door shut behind him, Baird started the Buick and pulled into the street, then into the motel’s parking lot, moving slowly, reminding himself to take it easy and at least appear calm, since he didn’t want Slade thinking he was in any danger.

  He turned off the engine, pocketed the keys, and got out. He stepped up onto the foot-high porch that ran in front of the rooms and started toward Slade’s door—when it suddenly flew open and the creep came hurrying out, head down, sliding a half-pint of whiskey into a pocket of his buckskin vest. At the point of running straight into Baird, he jumped back, looking startled and scared. But he quickly caught himself and like an actor assuming a role, was suddenly Mister Cool again, the pale eyes growing heavy with boredom as his upper lip arched in contempt.

  “What the fuck is this?” he said. “What the fuck you want?”

  “I want to talk to you.”

  Slade pulled the door closed and headed for his car. “Well, I don’t wanna talk to you, Pops. I got your fuckin restrainin order and I ain’t been within a fuckin hunnerd feet of your precious baby—so get lost.”

  He jumped into his car and slammed the door so hard one of the back cardboard “windows” slipped down. Baird tried to speak to him through the driver’s-side window.

  “You forget about her, you hear me! Don’t come near our house! Don’t—”

  But Slade had started the car by then, and now he revved the engine so high that an explosion of dust and gravel choked off Baird’s words. Coughing and rubbing his eyes, Baird stumbled over to his car and got in. Slade meanwhile had backed around, skidding in the gravel again and spinning his wheels in his haste to get away. Baird started the Buick and followed, blinking still as he backed around and accelerated.

  He knew it wouldn’t be too difficult following the old Chevy, something on the order of trailing a buffalo herd over dusty ground. Minutes later, crossing the freeway bridge that connected West Seattle to the main part of the city, he saw the Impala far up ahead, or at least the miasma that trailed it. So he pushed the Buick well above the speed limit and held it there until he had reeled Slade in to a more acceptable interval. Still, because of the traffic lights, he temporarily lost him in the downtown area, and found him again only because of the unusual figure he presented—the ponytail and buckskin vest and half-bare torso—striding across the parking lot of a strip club near the freeway. Baird was driving past at the time and caught him in his peripheral vision, turning to look just as the creep was entering the low-slung building. Baird circled back and parked. Before getting out, he checked his gun again, making sure the safety was on and that it was properly hidden, with the jacket pocket flap hanging out. Then he went inside.

  Harold’s was one of the best-known strip clubs in the metropolitan area. In perpetual conflict with the local bluenoses, the clubs had been reduced from serving liquor to beer and wine, and now no alcoholic beverages at all, just soft drinks and coffee. The bluenoses were also trying to abolish “table dances” and “couch dances,” which had come to be the clubs’ main attractions: nude dances performed for high-tipping individuals sitting at tiny cocktail tables or in the easy chairs and couches scattered along the perimeter of the room. In the couch dance, the girl would finally straddle the seated man and erotically gyrate just inches from his face and body. But he was not allowed to touch her, or at least that was what the signs said.

  It had been three or four years since Baird last set foot in Harold’s, but the place seemed the same as ever: dark, smoky, quaking with the heavy beat of rock music. A glitter-dome reflected multicolored lights off the walls and ceiling, while a lone dancer occupied the stage, largely ignored in the heat of the many table and couch dances proceeding at the same time.

  In the dim light, Baird took the first empty table he could find, looking around for Slade as he sat down. And finally he located him along the back wall, sharing a couch with a lean young black man in an expensive three-piece suit, a white-on-white shirt, and a tie that seemed to glow in the dark. The black’s nose also gleamed, and it took Baird a few seconds to realize that what he saw was not a bead of sweat but a tiny gold ring running through the man’s left nostril. The two men apparently knew each other, for the black leaned over so Slade could say something directly into his ear, either for privacy or to be heard above the din. As they conversed, a dancer in a see-through leotard came over to Baird’s table and asked him what he wanted to drink.

  “A Coke,” he said.

  “A Coke it is.” She smiled suggestively. “And how about a personal dance? Real close.”

  Baird shook his head. “I’m too shy.”

  Her smile withered. “Yeah, I’ll bet.”

  As she walked away, she put a good deal of motion into the roll of her buttocks, as if to impress upon him what he was missing. Reluctantly, he returned his attention to Slade’s couch, where another dancer was now serving drinks to the two men. Slade paid, tossing a number of bills on the coffee table in front of them. The girl took only one of the bills, made change, and left. Curiously, the black man picked up all the remaining bills, folded them neatly, and tucked them into an inside pocket of his suitcoat. Then, leaning over to speak to Slade again, he unobtrusively dropped something into Slade’s open hand. Slade glanced down at the hand, closed it, then casually slipped it into a side pocket of his vest.

  Given the appearance of the two men, and considering the furtiveness of the transaction, Baird assumed that he had just witnessed a drug deal: Slade buying either for resale or for his own use. As though to confirm this, Slade now looked about him, pretending a great casualness as his gaze swept from one end of the large, dark room almost to the other—stopping when his eyes met Baird’s. Again there was that momentary rattled look, more surprise than fear, and once more his eyes and mouth flowed into their customary ruts: weariness above, contempt below.

  He leaned toward his black friend and, nodding in Baird’s direction, said something that elicited a bored smile from the black, no more than that. Slade put out his hand to be slapped, but the black dismissed the gesture with an almost foppish wave of his hand, as if to say that he was now above such juvenile ceremonies of camaraderie. Slade shrugged and got up. As in Bond’s, he licked the air salaciously, close to the back of a couch-dancing girl. No one laughed or smiled, but he didn’t seem to notice. His walk and expression conveyed the idea that he considered himself a man of great charm and popularity, a star moving through his fans toward the stage, where he was about to perform. But those who noticed him immediately looked away, much as the people at Bond’s had done.

  When he reached Baird’s table, he spun a chair around and straddled it. “Well, if it ain’t old Pops,” he said. “Funny, I got this weird feeling I seen you someplace before.”

  Baird’s mouth was dry and his heart seemed to be keeping time with the music, a steady whomp, whomp. “You didn’t let me finish,” he told him.

  “Well, Jesus,” Slade said, “I sure am fuckin sorry about that. But I’m here now, Pops, so why don’t you just speak your piece and get it over with?”

  “I intend to.”

  But the dancer in the leotard had come over to the table again. Before she could say anything, Slade waved her off.

  “Forget the spiel, babe. I just bought a drink—left it over there where Henry’s sittin. You know Henry, don’tcha? So why not be a good little girl and go fetch it for me? Who knows—I might even be nice to you later.” Then he gave her a smile or sneer; Baird couldn’t tell which. And judging by the girl’s indifferent look, she wasn’t sure either.

  “Money-grubbing cunts,” Slade said as she went for t
he drink. “In here, that’s the only kind you get.” He fished out a pack of cigarettes and offered one to Baird, who declined it. Slade sucked one out of the pack and lit it with a kitchen match that he ignited with his thumbnail. Then he snuffed the match between two fingers, as if he liked charring his skin.

  “Okay, I’m listenin,” he said.

  “Stay away from my daughter,” Baird told him. “And I mean more than a hundred feet. I mean out of her life. Out of her sight.”

  Grinning, Slade wagged his head. “Jesus, talk about overreacting. I see this girl I like, this beautiful doll, and I never even touch her. I walk her home from work a couple times. I visit her at her job and blow an innocent kiss or two. And what happens? Her daddy gets a restrainin order, and now I get the feelin he’s threatenin me—am I right?”

  “Could be.” Baird kept looking at him, but Slade seemed more interested in the dancer up on the stage.

  “Because you love your daughter, huh?” he said, sneering as he watched the girl. “Well, maybe I do too—you ever thought of that?”

  Baird didn’t answer. The waitress returned with Slade’s drink, and Slade regarded her with the same amused sneer. When she was gone, he turned back to Baird.

  “So, because I dig your daughter, you’re gonna—what? You gonna have me beat up or somethin?”

  “It could happen, I suppose,” Baird said. “I’ve got this friend who knows some Samoan kids, gang members. You know how big they are, Samoans. Well, he says they’ll cripple anybody you want for a couple hundred dollars.”

  Slade was still sneering. “Cripple, huh? But I could still get around, huh? I could still park a hunnerd-and-one feet from, like, say, your place?”

  Listening to Slade, hearing himself, Baird could hardly believe this conversation was actually taking place. But he pushed on. “Yeah, I see your point,” he said. “Things would just get heavier, that’s all. I used to do a lot of hunting, and I’ve still got the guns—shotguns and rifles. Of course I’m probably not the kind of guy who could just shoot another man—not unless I went off my rocker. Which I don’t think I’d ever do—unless something happened to my daughter.”