A Man's Game

by Newton Thornburg

  As Baird sat, the other man smiled and thrust out his hand. “Lester Wall,” he said. “I must say, I’ve never seen you in here before. One of Jimbo’s little secrets, huh?”

  Baird shook the man’s hand. “Jack Baird. I’ve never been here before.”

  Slade laughed. “Just calm down, Lester. Old Pops ain’t got a queer bone in his body, right, Pops?”

  Baird looked at him. “Jack,” he said.

  “You got it, man.” Slade looked at Lester. “Me and old Jack here, we’re drinkin buddies from way back.”

  Lester wasn’t buying. “Jimbo, you yourself don’t even go way back. What are you, twenty-four?”

  “Whatever. The important thing is how me and old Jack feel about each other.”

  Lester smiled uneasily. “Do I detect a degree of, well, tension here?”

  “Naa,” Slade assured him. “We just got a thing for the same chick, that’s all. And Jack says if I don’t mind my P’s and Q’s, he’s gonna blow my ass off with a shotgun.”

  Lester laughed. “Hey, this sounds serious.”

  “Well, it isn’t,” Baird said. “Jimbo’s just got a sick sense of humor. Truth is, I’ve got some extra money to spend, and he’s gonna show me how.”

  “Now that is interesting,” Lester said.

  Slade was watching Baird intently, trying to divine just what he was doing there, without at the same time losing for an instant his look of cool indifference.

  “Yeah, you could say that,” he said.

  At that point another man came up to the booth, having worked his way through the crowd. He was at least Baird’s age, heavy, with wavy yellow-dyed hair, a scary smile, and very small, very even teeth. He was wearing pink sunglasses and an expensive off-white suit.

  “Well now, what have we here, Jimbo?” he cried. “Have you been rummaging through the closet again?”

  Slade sneered at him. “Get lost, you old fag.”

  The man clucked his tongue and looked at Lester. “Whores are so tedious,” he said.

  Slade brought his arm down from the back of the booth and sat up straight. “Get the fuck out of here,” he said, not looking at the man. “And you too, Lester. Me and Jack, we got business to discuss.”

  The man shrugged, put his nose in the air, and left.

  Lester gave Baird an apologetic smile. “Jimbo’s manners still aren’t the best, but we’re working on him.”

  Wall left the booth then and joined some other friends nearby. Slade got a cigarette out of a pack on the table and lit it. Baird signaled to a waiter and ordered a vodka-tonic.

  “Now what’s this about money?” Slade asked. “I’m always interested in money.”

  “You mean, am I here to pay you off? Give you money to stop hassling us?”

  Slade grinned. “Hasslin? Is that what I’m doin—hasslin you people?”

  Baird hated having to listen to this kind of raillery from the creep, hated it even more that he had to participate in it. But he felt he had no choice.

  “Yeah, that’s what you’re doing, all right,” he said. “But don’t get all excited about the money. I don’t pay people off.”

  “And I ain’t hasslin nobody. The court says I stay a hunnerd feet away from your daughter, and that’s what I’m doin.”

  Baird said nothing for a few moments, wondering if the break-in had been a joke more than anything else, Slade demonstrating that he could violate Kathy’s home and bedroom and still not come within one hundred feet of her.

  “How about breaking and entering?” Baird said. “How about burglary?”

  Slade frowned in puzzlement. “Burglary? What burglary?”

  A waiter brought the vodka-tonic, and Baird paid cash for it. “The one at my house,” he said. “The one where you smashed my gun cabinet and stuck a knife through my daughter’s teddy bear.”

  Baird knew it sounded stupid and funny, so he wasn’t surprised now as Slade laughed out loud, displaying a number of missing molars.

  “Teddy bear!” he bawled. “Now you got me stabbin teddy bears?”

  Baird took down a good part of his drink. “Look, I didn’t come here to talk about that. I know the cops didn’t find anything and you’ve got an alibi. So that’s not why I’m here.”

  Blowing smoke out of his nose and mouth, Slade shook his head in comic exasperation. “Jesus, if only I had some idea what you’re talkin about, Jack, it sure would be a help.”

  “Well, I might as well be up front,” Baird said. “I know you’ll get a good laugh out of it. But it’s the truth nevertheless.”

  Slade pounded the table with mock impatience. “So let’s hear it, Pops! Come on, this a workday for me.”

  “Well, it’s simple enough. It’s kind of like you said last week about hitting a few bars together and getting to know each other. I have this feeling that if you got to know me, and found out what kind of a girl Kathy is, you’d decide to leave us alone.”

  Slade was slouched back in the booth again, this time with both arms stretched out along the top, displaying his muscles as well as tattoos, among them a snake coiling around a dagger.

  “Jesus, Jack,” he said, “are you for fuckin real? Is this really you? Tell me it ain’t so.”

  “Well, it’s what you said, wasn’t it? Hit some more bars together, get to know each other?”

  Slade shrugged. “I don’t know—it just don’t sound like me, man. And then that part about your daughter—I think we’re in trouble there. I mean, when I’m in love, Jack, I’m in love.”

  “You know a lot about love, do you?”

  “I’d say about as much as the next guy. Just ask old Lester over there.”

  “No thanks.”

  As Slade refilled his glass of beer, Baird drained the last of his drink and signaled for another. Hoping he wouldn’t vomit, he pressed on. “I just think there’s some good in everybody. And when you get to know someone—really know them—it’s not so easy to do them harm.”

  Slade was shaking his head and sputtering with laughter. And Baird had no trouble understanding why. Yet this whole approach, this orgy of naivete, was something he felt he had to get out of the way, much as the Seahawks’ previous coach would almost always run the ball on first down: to reassure the other team, lull it into complacency. It was not a role Baird liked. Still, he played it out, sitting there and waiting for old Jimbo’s laughter to subside.

  “You don’t agree with that?” he said finally.

  Slade put out his cigarette. “Not so’s you’d notice, Pops.”

  “Well, then too, there is another reason. A reason I find hard to talk about.”

  “Reason for what?”

  “For being here. For getting to know each other.”

  Slade gave him a look, knowing and weary. “Don’t tell me Fatso was right. You coming out of the old closet, Pops?”

  “Not the way you think.”

  “How then?”

  The waiter brought Baird’s drink, and again Baird paid him. Before answering Slade, he drank deeply.

  Slade sneered. “Must be quite a closet.”

  “You could say that. But I hate to talk about it here—all these people.”

  “Go on. No one’s listenin, for fuck’s sake. They’re all on the make.”

  “All right then. You remember last time, I mentioned that woman in the Ravenna area, the one Detective Jeffers said you raped?”

  Slade’s pale eyes grew wintry. “Jeffers is a lyin cunt. I told you that.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Baird said. “It’s just that, well, I think about it a lot—I mean, you know, the way it must’ve happened and all. The way Jeffers described it. I—” His voice trailed off and he lowered his eyes, had no choice because of the way Slade was looking at him, sneering still, but also beginning to wonder.

  Baird took another drink and plunged on, haltingly. “I mean, you know, every man thinks about such things. They may say they don’t, but they do. I know they do…you know, wonder what it would be
like to…you know. To—”

  “To do it!” Slade snapped.

  Baird looked away again. “Oh no, not me! Not me actually doing it,” he stammered. “But maybe to…to see it done. I guess I’ve always wondered what it would be like, that’s all. I mean, I’m too chicken myself. But all my life I’ve thought…you know…how easy it would be. I mean, they stand there and sass you and give you all kinds of shit, like they were our equals, you know? Like we couldn’t just reach out…”

  And Baird at that point actually lifted his hand and extended it, saw it tremble for a moment in front of Slade. Then he caught himself and pulled it back.

  “It would be so easy,” he finished. “I can imagine it would be so very easy.”

  Slade was grinning now. “What do you take me for?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, you think I’d actually buy this shit? That we’re some kind of brothers under the skin? That you’re some kind of closet rapist or something?”

  Baird was shaking his head. “No, I didn’t say that. I know what I am. I’m a middle-class, straight-arrow family man. That’s all I’ve ever been or ever will be. Hell, I don’t even get parking tickets. And I’m not saying I know what you are, because I don’t know. Like you said, your police record here is clean. I’m just saying that I do have this one little weakness in me—this sickness, I guess some people might call it. But I can’t shake it. And I can’t deny it’s there. I think about such things and how it would be. And I guess, most of all, I…well, I think about seeing it, you know? Watching it. Especially if the woman was some bitch with a big mouth, you know? The kind who likes to tease you and get you interested and then pull it away and make you feel like a fool. I’ll admit, I could just stand and watch it happen to someone like that. Just stand and watch, you know?”

  Slade lit another cigarette. He was studying Baird carefully, sneering as he did so.

  “So you’d like that, huh? Just to stand and watch?”

  Again Baird lowered his eyes. He nodded. “Yes, it would be…”

  “It would be what?”

  “Satisfying,” Baird said.

  Slade did not respond for a time, and Baird had no doubt that the creep was still studying him, sneering at him. But Baird could not look back at him, for some reason could not meet his mocking gaze. Baird felt very warm. His body was slick with sweat. He drained his second drink and looked toward the bar, past the milling, frenetic clusters of yapping males, all seemingly indifferent to the big-screen TV and the images on it: a tangle of nude young men engaged in anal and oral intercourse. And it occurred to Baird that in an ironic way, this was the quintessential male environment, with sex as the end-all and be-all, sex as the very content of life. Here there were none of the conventions and civilizing restraints that women brought to the sexual table. And Baird didn’t doubt that if women had been more like men, a bar like Leo’s would have been much like this one, like Gide’s, with booze and drugs and porno mere props for the feverish sexuality, the random touching, kissing, fondling, propositioning—and the making out too, the sucking and buggering probably taking place even then in the toilets and the back rooms.

  At the moment, though, Baird was only trying to get the attention of the waiter, so he could order another drink, hoping that more alcohol would make all this a little easier, especially the fact that he was finding it so difficult to meet Slade’s sneer, even though he knew why, and knew that it was a good thing. Still, he was sickened by it all. It was as if he had gone into his backyard to dig for night crawlers and instead had broken through a sewer line.

  He caught the waiter’s attention and signaled for another drink. Then he forced himself to look at Slade.

  “You seem kind of thirsty,” Slade said.

  “Yeah, I guess I am.”

  “Baring the old soul—must be thirsty work.”

  “You’ve got a point.”

  Slade sat up and lit another cigarette. “What you said—this deal about gettin to know each other, doin a little boozin together—I got nothin against that. But it would cost me money, because I ain’t just fuckin around here, Jack. I’m at work. Some of these old fags, like Lester, they give me money just to hang with me, you know?”

  “No kidding.” Baird was trying not to sneer himself.

  “Yeah, I guess it makes them feel butch. Then too, I sell stuff, little goodies and such. So this deal you’re talking about, it would cost me money.”

  Baird shrugged. “That’s what I meant earlier, about having money to spend. The evening would be on me—food, liquor, whatever.”

  Blowing smoke at the ceiling, Slade frowned judiciously. “Yeah, but what about my income? Lost wages, so to speak.”

  “I’m not Lester,” Baird said.

  “Lucky you.”

  “I think so.”

  “So this would just be your treat, huh?”

  “Right.”

  “And I call the shots?”

  The waiter brought another vodka-tonic, and Baird paid him off, told him to keep the change. “We’ll be leaving,” he added.

  Slade drank the last of his beer and belched. “What’s the matter?” he said. “You don’t like it here?”

  Baird smiled coldly. “I hate it here.”

  In the hours that followed, Slade spent Baird’s money with enthusiasm. They went into one of the state liquor stores and bought fifths of rum and Scotch and Russian vodka, as well as two half-pints of rum, for the bottles more than the contents, Slade said—containers that could be refilled and smuggled into places like strip clubs, where they would be needed to spike the soft drinks.

  Next, with Baird driving, Slade directed them to a fried-chicken house in the central district, a seedy little restaurant run by an elderly black couple, both of them enormous and dour. And despite the number of drinks he’d already had, Baird had no trouble seeing what Slade evidently could not see: that the couple detested him, even though he called them Ma and Pa and slapped the man’s hand and patted the old lady on the bottom and in general behaved as if he were their favorite white person in all the world. They mustered uneasy smiles in front of him, then shook their heads in bewilderment when he wasn’t looking.

  Though there were only three other patrons in the place, it took almost forty-five minutes to be served: time in which Slade poured down rum and Coke, while Baird took his time with a tall vodka and 7UP. They were each served half a chicken with jo-jo potatoes, both deep-fat-fried and abundantly greasy, as were the green beans and biscuits, an anomaly Baird didn’t even try to comprehend. Slade cleaned his plate and finished off Baird’s chicken and biscuits, evidently feeling that the beans were not sufficiently greasy. All the while, the two men barely talked. Slade did ask him what kind of work he did, and Baird told him, even mentioned the company he worked for, hoping to build the creep’s trust. Meanwhile Ma and Pa watched them as if they were undercover cops, and when Slade effusively complimented the couple on the food, they looked as if they thought he was making fun of them and their tiny establishment.

  Afterward, Slade led Baird to two lowlife bars near the Pike Place Market. They were both dark, downstairs joints that served only beer and wine, which apparently was more than adequate for their few patrons, most of whom looked as if they had just washed ashore. In the second bar, there was even one old man with an eyepatch and a crutch, which Baird halfway expected him to start banging against the floor as he growled for a pint of grog. Not surprisingly, Slade acted as if he were one of the regulars there, and a favorite one at that, again an opinion no one else seemed to share.

  He told Baird improbable stories about the various patrons, usually how he had outsmarted them or insulted them or punched them out. One he even claimed to have thrown down the concrete stairs that led up to the street.

  “Broke a few of his bones,” he said. “But what the fuck—he was askin for it. A man asks for somethin, I try to give it to him.”

  Throughout this litany of triumph, Baird sat and l
istened, by now drunk enough to not even try to hide his skepticism. And finally Slade seemed to notice. He said nothing for a few moments, then broke out his sneer again.

  “Okay, Pops,” he said, “I guess we been playin this game long enough. I’d say it’s about time we laid our cards on the table.”

  “I thought I already had.”

  Slade shook his head. “Naa, I don’t think so. I guess you must figure I got an I.Q. about forty, not to know what you’re up to.”

  “And what is that?”

  Slade slipped one of the refilled half-pints out of his vest pocket and emptied it into a glass of Coke. “Simple enough. I figure you’re wearin a fuckin wire. I figure you’re tryin to draw me out, get me to admit somethin on tape—somethin that cunt Jeffers can use against me in court.”

  Baird was not surprised to hear this, since it was an idea he had thought of himself, and might even have tried if he’d thought he could have gotten Jeffers and Lucca’s approval and assistance. Still, he laughed at the idea now.

  “Are you serious? What do you think I am, a part-time cop or something? You want to pat me down? You want me to strip in the men’s room?”

  Slade sneered. “Big thrill,” he said.

  Baird started to get up. “I’m serious.”

  Slade waved him back down. “Naaa—stay where you are. I’ll take your word.” He lit another cigarette and shook his head in futility. “But where the fuck does that leave us, then? Number one, you figure if I get to know you, then I won’t do anything to your daughter—which I wouldn’t of done anyway of course, cuz I don’t do that kinda shit. Or number two, you’re this weird kinda twisted fan who figures I might let him tag along and watch me do some cunt sometime—which of course I don’t do.”

  Baird was shaking his head. “No, that’s not what I said. I said I might have a weakness in that direction. But I didn’t say I’d ever actually do it—you know, watch. I’m not that sick. Or maybe I should say I’m not that brave.”

  Slade drank the last of his rum-and-Coke. “So what’re we doing here? What the fuck’s going on?”

  Baird shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I figured that you, with your background—you know, having been in juvenile hall with rapists and such—that you’d, well, know things. And maybe tell me about them. You know, satisfy my curiosity. Or…oh, I don’t know. It’s so goddamn hard to explain.”