A Man's Game

by Newton Thornburg

  It was not easy to make it out. In fact it was almost impossible to see because of the way the noontime sun played on the water. Yet he was positive he saw it. Certainly he was not so frightened that he would invent the damned thing, convince himself that it was there when it really wasn’t. It occurred to him that he might have been able to see it not in spite of the sun playing on the water but because of it, because the sun’s angle was such that its rays bounced off the car’s silvery roof and ran straight up to him, as they would do for anyone standing in the right place at the right time.

  He turned away from the edge and walked back to his car, feeling as if he might vomit. He closed his eyes and waited for a short while, then opened them and went back to the edge. He took off his sunglasses as he looked down at the water again—and this time he could not see the car at all. It simply was not there. The sunlight spangling on the water was no brighter than before, and certainly the sun’s angle could not have changed appreciably in the few moments that had elapsed. Yet the ghostly, rectangular underwater shape had disappeared.

  Baird dragged deeply on his cigarette and flipped it out over the water, watched as it fell in a trajectory almost identical to that of the car. He put his sunglasses back on and again stared down at the water. For a few seconds he thought he was able to make out the silvery shape again, but then it disappeared. So now he was not sure of anything: whether he had seen the shape in the first place, or whether he was not seeing it now. Feeling stupid and scared, he went back to his car again, this time edging dejectedly behind the wheel. He lit another cigarette, started the engine and moved slowly downhill, going all the way around the curve. Ahead of him he saw the last house on the lane, a white-stucco Mediterranean affair with three separate levels built into the slope of the bluff. The house was large and luxurious, with a three-car garage fronted by a blacktop pad that was not quite wide enough for Baird to U-turn on. So he pulled up to the garage and backed around, braking, about to start back up the lane just as an elderly black woman in a maid’s uniform came out of a gate next to the garage. Baird almost stopped to explain that he was out looking for properties, but then he realized how reckless that would be, giving the woman a good look at him and letting her hear his voice. So he put his foot on the accelerator and got out of there.

  At four-thirty that afternoon, Baird had been sitting at Leo’s bar for almost an hour, nursing a vodka-tonic and promising himself not to get drunk again, at least not that night. Since Wyatt Earp was the only other regular in the place, the usual joshing and raillery had been minimal. Eventually even Sally had given up on Baird, leaving him to his vodka and worries. Finally, though, she again wandered over to him.

  “I think your blessed solitude is about over,” she said.

  “Really?”

  Her response was to tip her head in the direction of the front door. Looking there, Baird saw Lee coming in with Sergeant Lucca, trailing him slightly, either in deference to his senior grade or because she didn’t want anyone thinking she was his date, which Baird could understand. As before, the man walked like a weary duck. He was wearing shiny polyester pants belted below his pot gut, a loosened tie, and a sportcoat that hung on him like an old shawl. He held his mouth slightly pursed, in contempt and suspicion. Behind the horn-rims, his eyes were red and sleepy.

  He came straight to Baird. “We’d like to have a word with you.” He motioned with his head toward the pool-table area, but Lee had a different idea.

  “Let’s sit down and have a Coke,” she said. “I’m parched.”

  Lucca grimaced but turned back and joined her in one of the bar booths. “Okay, two Cokes,” he said, looking over at Sally. “With glasses and ice.” Then he turned back to Baird. “Come on. Sit.”

  It was more an order than a suggestion, the sort of order one gave to a dog. But Baird did not quibble. His heart was already pounding hard, and in his head he was screaming at himself. Was it even possible that the car and body could have been found and identified in the few hours since he’d left the scene? He would have felt no different if Lucca had pressed a gun to his head and spun the chamber.

  As he sat down, Lee smiled at him. “I told Sergeant Lucca I bumped into you here once,” she said by way of explanation.

  Watching Lucca light a cigarette, Baird wanted to do the same but was afraid his hand would tremble and the detective would notice.

  Exhaling, Lucca put an end to Baird’s anxiety. “Slade’s missing. Bastard seems to have disappeared.”

  “Well, that’s good news,” Baird said as Sally served the Cokes, for a change without commentary.

  Lucca took a long drink, practically draining his glass. Then he got back to business.

  “We’ve had this light surveillance on Slade,” he said. “Usually in the evening, just a short tail after he leaves his kitchen job.”

  “But all of a sudden he’s gone,” Lee added. “His car too. We figure he didn’t leave town, though. His stuff’s still in his rented room and he hasn’t collected his pay on the kitchen job.”

  “So where is he?” Baird asked.

  Lucca regarded him coldly. “We were hoping you could tell us.”

  Baird tried to look baffled. “Me? How would I know? I’m not the one who’s been tailing him.”

  “Well, it’s kind of hard to be sure,” Lucca went on. “I mean, you did try to play policeman for a while there, didn’t you?”

  Baird shrugged. “You warned me off, remember?”

  “And you always do what you’re told, is that it?”

  Baird looked at Lee. “What is this? Have I missed something? Am I the criminal here?”

  “No, of course not.” Lee smiled uneasily. “We just—”

  Lucca cut her off. “Look, no one’s accusing you of anything. We just know Slade isn’t easily discouraged. So we figured he’d keep on stalking your daughter, and you might have seen him at it—you know, parked on your street or maybe at your daughter’s work. Maybe she’s seen him.”

  Baird shook his head. “No, he hasn’t been around. We’ve been lucky. But why this sudden interest?”

  Finishing his Coke, Lucca took some ice in his mouth and began to chew on it. “Maybe you’ve noticed in the paper—there’s been a couple of new rape cases, one of them a rape-murder. My partner here thinks they might have been Slade’s handiwork.”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me,” Baird said.

  “And one other reason,” Lee put in. “You remember Sergeant Lucca told you about that other young woman Slade stalked—the bank loan officer who subsequently was raped? Well, we thought the hospital had lost the rapist’s hair and semen samples, but now they’ve found them. So we need to do some testing on Slade.”

  “So naturally you can’t find him.”

  “That’s the way it goes,” Lucca said.

  Baird was trying hard to look casual, even indifferent. “Well, as far as I’m concerned, I hope he stays lost. If I ever see him again, it’ll be too soon.”

  Lucca put out his cigarette and got to his feet, grunting and sighing in a kind of private language of disaffection, wordlessly telling everybody just what he thought of them. “Well, I guess we’ve wasted enough time here,” he said, adding, “Oh yeah, thanks for the Coke.” He was looking not at Baird but out at the street, squinting against the brightness.

  Lee gave Baird a fleeting smile, as if to say, “Yes, the man’s a slob—but what can I do?” Following Lucca out of the booth, she touched Baird’s wrist and ran a finger down his hand so lightly he shivered. He watched as she trailed the sergeant out the door. Then he looked over at the bar, straight into Sally’s mocking eyes. As he got up and slipped back onto his stool, she shook her head in comic reproval. He pushed his empty glass toward her.

  “One more,” he said. “A double.”

  “Need to cool off, huh?”

  Later, at a seafood bar, Baird picked up some fried oysters, jo-jo potatoes, and cole slaw and drove to Shilshole Bay, where he parked in the long lot faci
ng the water. As he ate the food and drank a cup of coffee, he gazed out at the still-crowded beach and the boats on the Sound. In time, across the water, the sun edged behind the jagged line of the Olympics, setting the range briefly afire. When the light was gone altogether, he started the car and drove to Lee Jeffers’ house. This time she heard him coming and opened the door even before he reached it. Inside, he stood there for a few moments looking at her in the soft light from a single table lamp. Again, despite the warmth of the evening, she was wearing the floor-length blue robe, tightly belted.

  “Has it been a week already?” she said.

  He took her in his arms. “More, I think. Much more.”

  As he kissed her, he undid the sash on her robe and his hands moved on her skin, running down her flanks onto her buttocks. She slipped the robe off her shoulders and he lifted her onto his body. She pushed her mouth into his and he felt her legs tightening around him. He carried her that way to the sofa and lowered her onto it. While he struggled out of his clothes, he moved down her body, kissing her breasts and belly and pubis. Naked, he moved on top of her and entered her, and she rolled them off the sofa onto the soft shag carpet, and then rolled again, wanting him on top. And he felt her passion as strongly as his own, a rage suddenly shared.

  Still, even as he dug his toes into the shag and his fingers into her buttocks, even as his body pounded into hers and his breath came in ragged gasps, he felt as if a part of him were standing off to the side, clucking and shaking its head, wondering if he would ever again be himself, ever again know exactly who he was.

  Thirteen

  As the weeks went by, Baird got the feeling that he was undergoing a life change as sweeping as puberty. An easygoing man all his life, he now was almost constantly full of anger and belligerence, which he concealed under a veneer of casualness that bordered on the reckless. He smoked two packs of cigarettes a day, he had at least a half-dozen vodkas each night, and if he could believe Ellen, he even moved differently.

  “Lately you walk like a lout,” she told him. “Like you might kick anything that gets in your way.”

  At work he began skipping his small accounts, the mom-and-pop stores and bars like Leo’s, which took up at least half his working hours yet produced no more than fifteen percent of his income. He knew it was an article of faith for old man Norsten that the salesmen service all their accounts, since they all lined his pockets. So Baird accepted it that he and the old man would eventually cross swords over the problem. But like so many other things now, it seemed a matter of total unimportance.

  It was at night in the Norsten parking lot that Baird learned just how reckless he had become. He had stopped at Leo’s for drinks and supper while he priced the last of his orders, so it was almost eleven when he pulled into the lot and parked, about to go inside and deliver the orders to the night crew. He had opened the Buick’s door and placed one foot outside, on the blacktop, while reaching to the right, inside his briefcase, for the loose stack of invoices—when suddenly there was a gun quivering in his face and behind it a thin young black man with bulging, bloodshot eyes and a missing front tooth.

  “Money!” he hissed, spraying Baird with spit. “You watch and ring! And you car!”

  “All right, all right,” Baird said. Holding the orders in his right hand, and with his left hand raised, he got out of the car.

  “Money! Gimme money!” the kid sputtered.

  Instead Baird gave him the invoices, tossing them into his face, at the same time grasping the barrel of his gun and forcing it away from them.

  “Motherfuck!” the youth yelled, swiping at the cascade of paper as if it were a swarm of bees.

  Baird kicked him in the knee and the kid dropped the gun and lurched sideways, his hands reaching for the asphalt in a kind of cartwheel movement to keep from falling. Then he ran, gimping rapidly across the parking lot and into the alley, where he disappeared. Baird sagged back against the car, his mouth powdery and his heart pounding. Yet he smiled, more in bafflement than anything else. Why would he do such a thing? Why would he take such a chance? He had no idea.

  Nor was he sure why he picked up the gun, a lightweight .22 revolver, and put it in his briefcase. Then he retrieved the scattered invoices and took them into the warehouse. When the night foreman commented on how dirty and wrinkled some of the sheets were, Baird said that he had dropped them.

  The foreman shook his head. “You better get ahold of yourself, Jacko. You’re losing it for sure.”

  “Could be,” Baird said.

  If he was in fact “losing it,” he knew most of the loss was taking place at home. For some reason, he found it increasingly impossible to even try to cover up his affair with Lee Jeffers. He began to see her almost every night, seldom leaving her place before midnight. And on three occasions he stayed the night with her, going home only when he was sure Ellen and Kathy had left for work. So he was not surprised when his daughter stopped speaking to him altogether and began to use the bus again. Occasionally he still drove to Bond’s to pick her up, but the last time he tried it, she walked right past his parked car, pretending she didn’t see him or hear the car horn.

  Unlike her daughter, Ellen would occasionally speak to him, usually in sarcasm.

  “Well, there he is—Mister Nightlife himself.”

  Often, at the sight of him, she would shake her head as if in sorrow at what a pitiful figure he had become. Once she suggested that he ought to ask his “new bimbo” to take it a little easier on him, evidently because he was looking so awful. Sometimes she would mention her coming studies at law school, as if she’d already been accepted by the university, which as yet was not the case. And every now and then she would bring up her plans to sell the house, as if the divorce court had already awarded her sole possession of it.

  “Once I get rid of this monstrosity,” she said, “I’ll breathe a lot easier.”

  On that occasion Baird wasn’t sure whether she was referring to him or to the house. One day, in desperation, Kathy tried to get the two of them to sit down with her and discuss “our problems.”

  “It’s not as if we don’t have enough of them,” she said.

  But Ellen would have none of it. “Actions speak louder than words,” she said.

  Baird knew that he and Ellen eventually were going to have to talk like rational human beings and try to decide whether or not their marriage was over, and if it was, what they were going to do about it. But he hadn’t reached that point himself yet, and he was relieved that Ellen evidently felt the same way. At the moment, they were like a couple in the midst of an automobile accident, not even sure yet that they would survive. So other matters, such as who was to blame and who would lose and who would win—those things would have to wait.

  One of the most uncomfortable times for Baird was the Labor Day weekend, when Kevin came home for four days, a vacation not from college so much as from his job as night manager at a Bellingham motel. While the boy looked like a clone of Baird, he had his mother’s temperament, the same toughness and impatience and ambition. Kathy evidently had expected him to join her in trying to bring about a rapprochement between their parents, and when he declined, informing her that he was not in the marriage-counseling business, she lumped him in with his father as a person to whom one did not speak.

  Though Baird and Kevin had always been close, on this weekend he found the boy maddeningly difficult to talk with. Their few times together were spent mostly in silence, usually watching television. Only once, when the two of them drove down to Ivar’s deck for oysters and beer, did they touch upon the forbidden subject.

  “You know, I’m not all that surprised,” Kevin said. “I mean, well, Mom’s been kind of unhappy for years, right? I mean frustrated, you know? I figure she just wants to be something other than a housewife, you know? Not her fault, and not yours either—that’s the way I see it.”

  Baird sat there looking at his son, a tall, lean kid with a nice strong smile and eyes no less blue tha
n the sky beyond his sun-bleached hair. He was wearing denim shorts and a school sweatshirt, and he looked as if he had the world aced, as if he knew for a certainty that there was nothing ahead of him but success. Baird wondered how the boy would have reacted if his old man had told him what was really on his mind.

  “I just can’t think about Mom and the family now, Kev, because there’s this guy I killed and dumped in the lake, in the trunk of his car, over near Juanita. If you look hard you can see the jalopy right there underwater, where the fish are really tiny arms and legs swimming around and the best way not to think about it all is to stay half drunk and keep fucking a sexy young detective who’s looking for the guy I shot. You got all that?”

  But of course he said nothing of the kind. Instead he lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out toward the water. Kevin wagged his head.

  “Now that I can’t figure—you smoking again,” he said. “That ain’t too smart, you know?”

  Baird smiled bleakly. “Yeah, I know.”

  Six hours after Kevin left for Bellingham, Baird again found himself at Lee’s house, sitting with her in an old-fashioned porch swing on the covered redwood deck at the back of her house. It was after ten at night. They had dined on cold salmon and fruit salad, and their lovemaking afterward had not been any warmer. Midway, she had gone dead under him, finally pushing him off and complaining that there was never any sense of fun in their lovemaking, that he went after her as if he were trying to beat her to death.

  “Your cock isn’t a weapon, you know,” she told him. “And you squeeze me so fucking hard I think my bones are going to break.”

  “It’s called passion,” he said, without conviction.