by Otto Penzler
Keller had a Swiss Army knife in his carry-on and a nail clipper in his pocket, attached to his key ring. Since he hadn’t flown anywhere, he’d had no problem. As for the other, well, he had never minded a bazooka in his life, and saw no reason to start now.
“Now let’s get you squared away,” the man said. He was around forty, and lean, except for an incongruous potbelly, as if he’d swallowed a small watermelon. “Quick orientation, drive you around, show you where he lives. We’ll take my car, and when we’re done, you can drop me off and keep it.”
The airport was at the southwest corner of Indianapolis, and the man (who’d flipped the John Deere cap into the back-seat of his Hyundai squareback, alongside Keller’s carry-on) drove to Carmel, an upscale suburb north of the I-465 beltway. He made a few efforts at conversation, which Keller let wither on the vine, whereupon he gave up and switched on the radio. He kept it tuned to an all-talk station, and right now two opinionated fellows were arguing about the outsourcing of jobs.
Keller thought about turning it off. You’re a hit man, brought in at great expense from out of town, and some gofer picks you up and plays the radio, and you turn it off, what’s he gonna do? Be impressed and a little intimidated, he thought, but decided it wasn’t worth the trouble.
The driver killed the radio himself when they left the interstate and drove through the treelined streets of Carmel. Keller paid close attention now, noting street names and landmarks and taking a good look at the house that was pointed out to him. It was a Dutch Colonial with a mansard roof, he noted, and that tugged at his memory until he remembered a real estate agent in Roseburg, Oregon, who’d shown him through a similar house years ago. Keller had wanted to buy it, to move there. For a few days, anyway, until he came to his senses.
When they were done, the man asked him if there was anything else he wanted to see, and Keller said there wasn’t. “Then I’ll drive you to my house,” the man said, “and you can drop me off.”
Keller shook his head. “Drop me at the airport,” he said.
“Oh, Jesus,” the man said. “Is something wrong? Did I say the wrong thing?”
Keller looked at him.
“’Cause if you’re backing out, I’m gonna get blamed for it. They’ll have a goddamn fit. Is it the location? Because, you know, it doesn’t have to be at his house. It could be anywhere.”
Oh. Keller explained that he didn’t want to use the Hyundai, that he’d pick up a car at the airport. He preferred it that way, he said.
Driving back to the airport, the man obviously wanted to ask why Keller wanted his own car, and just as obviously was afraid to say a word. Nor did he play the radio. The silence was a heavy one, but that was okay with Keller.
When they got there, the fellow said he supposed Keller wanted to rent a car. Keller shook his head and directed him to the lot where he’d already stowed the Ford. “Keep going,” he said. “Maybe that one… no, that’s the one I want. Stop here.”
“What are you gonna do?”
“Borrow a car,” Keller said.
He’d added the key to his key ring, and now he stood alongside the car and made a show of flipping through keys, finally selecting the one they’d given him. He tried it in the door and, unsurprisingly, it worked. He tried it in the ignition, and it worked there, too. He switched off the ignition and went back to the Hyundai for his carry-on, where the driver, wide-eyed, asked him if he was really going to steal that car.
“I’m just borrowing it,” he said.
“But if the owner reports it—”
“I’ll be done with it by then.” He smiled. “Relax. I do this all the time.”
The fellow started to say something, then changed his mind. “Well,” he said instead. “Look, do you want a piece?”
Was the man offering him a woman? Or, God forbid, offering to supply sexual favors personally? Keller frowned and then realized the piece in question was a gun. Keller, relieved, shook his head and said he had everything he needed in his carry-on. Amazing the damage you could inflict with a Swiss Army knife and a nail clipper.
“Well,” the man said again. “Well, here’s something.” He reached into his breast pocket and came out with a pair of tickets. “To the Pacers game,” he said. “They’re playing the Knicks, so I guess you’ll be rooting for your homies, huh? Tonight, eight sharp. They’re not courtside, but they’re damn good seats. You want, I could dig up somebody to go with you, keep you company.”
Keller said he’d take care of that himself, and the man didn’t seem surprised to hear it.
“He’s a witness,” Dot had said, “but apparently nobody’s thought of sticking him in the Federal Witness Protection Program, but maybe that’s because the situation’s not federal. Do you have to be involved in a federal case in order to be protected by the federal government?”
Keller wasn’t sure, and Dot said it didn’t really matter. What mattered was that the witness wasn’t in the program, and wasn’t hidden at all, and that made it a job for Keller, because the client really didn’t want the witness to stand up and testify.
“Or sit down and testify,” she said, “which is what they usually do, at least on the television programs I watch. The lawyers stand up, and even walk around some, but the witnesses just sit there.”
“What did he witness, do you happen to know?”
“You know,” she said, “they were pretty vague on that point. The guy I talked to wasn’t a principal. He was more like a booking agent. I’ve worked with him before, when his clients were O.C. guys.”
“Huh?”
“Organized crime. So he’s connected, but this isn’t O.C., and my sense is it’s not violent.”
“But it’s going to get that way.”
“Well, you’re not going all the way to Indiana to talk sense into him, are you? What he witnessed, I think it was like corporate shenanigans. What’s the matter?”
“Shenanigans,” he said.
“It’s a perfectly good word. What’s the matter with shenanigans?”
“I just didn’t think anybody said it anymore,” he said. “That’s all.”
“Well, maybe they should. God knows they’ve got occasion to.”
“If it’s corporate fiddle-faddle,” he began, and stopped when she held up a hand.
“Fiddle-faddle? This from a man who has a problem with shenanigans?”
“If it’s that sort of thing,” he said, “then it actually could be federal, couldn’t it?”
“I suppose so.”
“But he’s not in the witness program because they don’t think he’s in danger.”
She nodded. “Stands to reason.”
“So they probably haven’t assigned people to guard him,” he said, “and he’s probably not taking precautions.”
“Probably not.”
“Should be easy.”
“It should,” she agreed. “So why are you disappointed?”
“Disappointed?”
“That’s the vibe I’m getting. Are you picking up on something? Like it’s really going to be a lot more complicated than it sounds?”
He shook his head. “I think it’s going to be easy,” he said, “and I hope it is, and I’m not picking up any vibe. And I certainly didn’t mean to sound disappointed, because I don’t feel disappointed. I can use the money, and besides that, I can use the work. I don’t want to go stale.”
“So there’s no problem.”
“No. As far as your vibe is concerned, well, I spent the morning at the dentist.”
“Say no more. That’s enough to depress anybody.”
“It wasn’t, really. But then I was watching some guys play basketball. The Indian food helped, but the mood lingered.”
“You’re just one big non sequitur, aren’t you, Keller?” She held up a hand. “No, don’t explain. You’ll go to Indianapolis, you lucky man, and your actions will get to speak for themselves.”
Keller’s motel was a Rodeway Inn at the junction of Inter-
states 465 and 69, close enough to Carmel but not too close. He signed in with a name that matched his credit card and made up a license plate number for the registration card. In his room, he ran the channels on the TV, then switched off the set. He took a shower, got dressed, turned the TV on, turned it off again.
Then he went to the car and found his way to the Conseco Fieldhouse, where the Indiana Pacers were playing host to the New York Knicks.
The stadium was in the center of the city, but the signage made it easy to get there. A man in a porkpie hat asked him in an undertone if he had any extra tickets, and Keller realized that he did. He took a good look at his tickets for the first time and saw that he had a pair of $96 seats in section 117, wherever that was. He could sell one, but wouldn’t that be awkward if the man he sold it to sat beside him? He’d probably be a talker, and Keller didn’t want that.
But a moment’s observation clarified the situation. The man in the porkpie hat—who had, Keller noted, a face straight out of an OTB parlor, a coulda-woulda-shoulda gambler’s face—was doing a little business, buying tickets from people who had too many, selling them to people who had too few. So he wouldn’t be sitting next to Keller. Someone else would, but it would be someone he hadn’t met, so it would be easy to keep an intimacy barrier in place.
Keller went up to the man in the hat, showed him one of the tickets. The man said, “Fifty bucks,” and Keller pointed out that it was a $96 ticket. The man gave him a look, and Keller took the ticket back.
“Jesus,” the man said. “What do you want for it, anyway?”
“Eighty-five,” Keller said, picking the number out of the air.
“That’s crazy.”
“The Pacers and the Knicks? Section 117? I bet I can find somebody who wants it eighty-five dollars’ worth.”
They settled on $75, and Keller pocketed the money and used his other ticket to enter the arena. Then it struck him that he could have unloaded both tickets and had $150 to show for it, and gone straight home, spared the ordeal of a basketball game. But he was already through the turnstile when the thought came to him, and by that point he no longer had a ticket to sell.
He found his seat and sat down to watch the game.
Keller, an only child, was raised by his mother, who he had come to realize in later years was probably mentally ill. He never suspected this at the time, although he was aware that she was different from other people.
She kept a picture of Keller’s father in a frame in the living room. The photograph showed a young man in a military uniform, and Keller grew up knowing that his father had been a soldier, a casualty of the war. As a teenager, he’d been employed cleaning out a stockroom, and one of the boxes of obsolete merchandise he’d hauled out had contained picture frames, half of them containing the familiar photograph of his putative father.
It occurred to him that he ought to mention this to his mother. On further thought, he decided not to say anything. He went home and looked at the photo and wondered who his father was. A soldier, he decided, though not this one. Someone passing through, who’d fathered a son and never knew it.
And died in battle? Well, a lot of soldiers did. His father might very well have been one of them.
Growing up in a fatherless home with a mother who didn’t seem to have any friends or acquaintances was something Keller had been on the point of addressing in therapy, until a problem with his therapist put an end to that experiment. He’d had trouble deciding just how he felt about his mother, but had ultimately come to the conclusion that she was a good woman who’d done a good job of raising him, given her limitations. She was a serviceable cook if not an imaginative one, and he had a hot breakfast every morning and a hot dinner every night. She kept their house clean and taught Keller to be clean about his person. She was detached, and talked more to herself than to him—and, in the afternoons, talked to the characters in her TV soap operas.
She bought him presents at Christmas and on his birthday, usually clothing to replace garments he’d outgrown, but occasionally something more interesting. One year she bought him an Erector set, and he’d proved quite hopeless at following the diagrams in an effort to produce a flatbed railcar or, indeed, anything else. Another year’s present was a beginner’s stamp collecting kit—a stamp album, a packet of stamps, a pair of tongs to pick them up with, and a supply of hinges for mounting them in the album. The Erector set wound up in the closet, gathering dust, but the stamp album turned out to be the foundation of a lifelong hobby. He’d abandoned it after high school, of course, and the original album was long gone, but Keller had taken up the hobby again as an adult and cheerfully poured much of his spare time and extra cash into it.
Would he have become a stamp collector if not for his mother’s gift? Possibly, he thought, but probably not. It was one more reason to thank her.
The Erector set was a good thought that failed, the stamp album an inspiration. The biggest surprise, though, of all the gifts she gave him was neither of these.
That would have to be the basketball backboard.
Keller hadn’t bothered to note the seat number of the ticket he sold to the man in the porkpie hat. His own seat was 117, situated unsurprisingly enough between seats 116 and 118, both of them unoccupied when he sat down between them. Then two men came along and sat down in 115 and 116. One was substantially older than the other, and Keller found himself wondering if they were father and son, boss and employee, uncle and nephew, or gay lovers. He didn’t really care, but he couldn’t keep from wondering, and he kept changing his mind.
The game had already started by the time a man turned up and sat down in 118. He was wearing a dark suit with a subtle pinstripe and looked as though he’d come straight from the office, an office where he spent his days doing something no one, least of all the man himself, would describe as interesting.
The man in the porkpie hat had paid Keller $75 for that seat, which suggested that the man in the suit must have paid at least $100 for it, and perhaps as much as $125. But, of course, the fellow had no idea that Keller was the source of his ticket, and in fact paid no attention to Keller, devoting the full measure of his attention to the action on the court, where the Pacers had jumped off to an early lead.
Keller, with some reluctance, turned his attention to the game.
Across the street and two doors up from Keller’s house, a family named Breitbart filled a large frame house to overflowing. Mr. Breitbart owned and ran a furniture store on Euclid Avenue, and Mrs. Breitbart stayed home and, for a while at least, had a baby every year. The year Keller was born she gave birth to two—twin sons, Andrew and Randall, the names no doubt selected so that their nicknames could rhyme. The twins were the family’s only boys; the other five little Breitbarts, some older than the twins, the rest younger, were all girls.
Every afternoon, weather permitting, boys gathered in the Breitbart backyard to play basketball. Sometimes they divided into teams, and one side took off their shirts, and they played the sort of half-court game you could play with a single garage-mounted backboard. Other times, when fewer boys showed up or for some other reason, they found other ways to compete—playing Horse, say, where each player had to duplicate the particular shot of the first player. There were other games as well, but Keller, watching idly from across the street, was less clear on their rules and objectives.
One night at dinner, Keller’s mother told him he should go across the street and join the game. “You watch all the time,” she said—inaccurately, as he only occasionally let himself loll on the sidewalk watching the action in the Breitbart yard. “I bet they’d love it if you joined in. I bet you’d be good at it.”
As it turned out, she lost both bets.
Keller, a quiet boy, always felt more at ease with grown-ups than with his contemporaries. On his own, he moved with an easy grace; in group sports, self-consciousness turned him awkward and made him ill at ease. Nonetheless, later that week he crossed the street and presented himself in the Breitb
art backyard. “It’s Keller,” Andy or Randy said. “From across the street.” Someone tossed him the ball, and he bounced it twice and tossed it unsuccessfully at the basket.
They chose up sides, and he, the unknown quantity, was picked last, which struck him as reasonable enough. He was on the Skins team, and shucked his shirt, which made him feel a little self-conscious, but that was nothing compared to the self-consciousness that ensued when the game began.
Because he didn’t know how to play. He was ineffectual at guarding, and more obviously inept when someone tossed him the ball and he didn’t know what to do with it. “Shoot,” someone yelled, and he shot and missed. “Here, here!” someone called out, and his pass was intercepted. He just didn’t know what he was doing, and before long his teammates figured out as much and stopped passing him the ball.
After fifteen or twenty minutes, the Shirts were a little more than halfway to the number of points that would end the game when a boy a grade ahead of Keller showed up. “Hey, it’s Lass-man,” Randy or Andy said. “Lassman, take over for Keller.”
And just like that, Lassman, suddenly shirtless, was in and Keller was out. This, too, struck him as reasonable enough. He went to the sidelines and put his shirt on, relief and disappointment settling over him in equal parts. For a few minutes, he stood there watching the others play, and relief faded while disappointment swelled. Well, I better be getting home now, he planned to say, and he rehearsed the line, rephrasing it in his mind, giving it different inflections. But nobody was paying any attention to him, so why say anything? He turned around and went home.
When his mother asked him about it, he said it had turned out okay, but he wouldn’t be going over there anymore. They had regular teams, he said, and he didn’t really fit in. She looked at him for a moment, then let it go.
A few days later he came home from school to see two workmen mounting a backboard and basket on the Keller garage. At dinner he wanted to ask her about it, but didn’t know how to start. She didn’t say anything either at first, and years later, when he heard the expression “the elephant in the living room that nobody talks about,” he thought of that basketball backboard.
