Doc extricated himself and got off the stool. “I’ll think about it. I’m not sure I want to tie myself down just yet with a business.”
“Makes a difference when you do it with a golden rope.” But Ance looked surprised and a little disappointed.
Doc told him again he’d call him in the morning and let himself out.
He slept that night at his brother’s. He was a long time drifting off, the events of the day skidding through his head on an adrenaline slick like the details of a tough game, and later he couldn’t pinpoint the spot where thinking ended and dreaming started.
Miller. Miller! Boy, you listening? Get your head out of your ass!
He looked at the long parchment features of Charlie Steiner: cap square over his large luminous eyes, a lump of tobacco jammed so far back in his right cheek it raised a knot under his ear, pale spotty skin hanging in pleats from his neck. His Louisville Lagoons uniform was too big around the waist as always, the trousers in tucks, belt snugged so tight the end swung loose like an extension of his manhood.
You ever ask yourself why them fellers in the Show are always standing around scratching their eggs on national tee-vee, boy? It’s ’cause they didn’t have time to do it on their way there. You don’t get to the Show on just two good pitches and a shitload of wish-I-wuzzes. It takes harder work than you ever done in your whole masturbating young life.
Doc said, Charlie, is it really you? I heard you died.
Not hardly, boy. Didn’t I say I’d be on your butt like a boil till you got where you’re going?
But I got there, Charlie. I got to the Show.
Like hell. You just dreamed it. Fellers in the Show don’t sleep in their nephews’ beds between sheets their brothers paid for. Pay attention, now. In my day the pitcher just closed his eyes and let fly and the batter just closed his eyes and swung and both of ’em hoped the other’s luck was worse than his. These days you need brains. Brains to read the signals. Brains to know when to go to first when there’s a runner on board. Brains to know whether that boy in the box jumps all over the first pitch or waits for the one that’s low and inside. And brains—he leaned forward, close enough for Doc to detect the spoiled-fruit smell of tobacco on his breath—to know when to just close your eyes and let fly. Brains like that take time to grow. I’ll be right here until they do.
Wait a minute, Doc said. You are too dead. I went to a memorial service. Your widow was there and your daughter and two grandsons. A utility infielder who knew you on the Toledo team read a poem about running it out He was in a wheelchair. Your picture was there in a wreath. They said you were found lying on the floor of the shower with the water running.
He was afraid then he’d insulted the old man, who straightened to his full height, hitched up his trousers in that way he had even though he kept them cinched tight enough to cut off circulation, turned, and left. Only he didn’t walk away, but just kind of faded into the pattern on the wallpaper in Sean’s room. That was when Doc realized he was awake, lying with his head propped on the pillow and his eyes open.
He was still thinking about it when the clock radio on the nightstand clicked on. It had been a gift from his sister-in-law after he’d overslept one morning and reported late for work at the John Deere dealership. He recognized the mock-cheerful voice of the morning man at Talk Radio 1270.
“… Okay, you’ve got the number and you know my name. Call me up with your thoughts on the death of cop-killing drug lord Starkweather Hall at three-ten this ayem in of-all-places Birmingham. Justifiable death, or did the police execute him? Talk to me, I’m all ears.”
GRANNY AT THE BAT
By Leon “Bud” Arsenault
(continued)
There are those who would look at the naked statistics of Loyola MacGryff’s life and draw the conclusion that it has been tragic.
Her brother Paul was run over at age seven by a streetcar and lost both his legs. Later, while recovering at home, he developed a blood clot that went to his heart and killed him before the ambulance could get him to the hospital.
Her husband Horace was beaten to death by strikebreakers during the labor unrest of the 1930s. He was given a pauper’s burial because there wasn’t enough money in the Depression fund for a funeral.
She has been robbed twice at gunpoint. Burglars have struck her home three times, cleaning her out once.
A grandson, Horace MacGryff III, has been missing in action in Vietnam since 1972. His grandmother was paged at Tiger Stadium during the American League Eastern Division play-offs to receive the news. She returned to her seat to watch the final two innings.
A freak accident at Tigers spring training camp six years ago has resulted in thousands of dollars of reconstructive surgery to Mrs. MacGryff’s jaw, part of which was underwritten by the ball club, but requests for more money have brought no response from attorneys employed by Tigers owner Tom Monaghan.
Despite speech difficulties and an inability to chew on the right side of her mouth, Mrs. MacGryff has resisted family urgings to take her case to court. Says she, “I’d sooner sue King Jesus.”
A great-granddaughter, Coral Louise Scyznyck, overdosed on crack cocaine at a high school dance in 1989. In the police car on the way to the hospital, Mrs. MacGryff persuaded the officers to tune in to the bottom half of a twi-night doubleheader between Detroit and Kansas City. The girl remains in a coma today.
But even though this white-haired native Detroiter has spent almost as many hours in emergency rooms and cemeteries as she has in her preferred upper deck, she would not agree that her life has been hounded by ill fortune.
She met Hughie Jennings, overheard Mickey Cochrane chewing out Goose Goslin for trying to field a grounder to first without assistance, had her picture taken with Mayo Smith, egged on Billy Martin during an altercation with an umpire, and sent an expensive necktie to Sparky Anderson on the occasion of his 60th birthday. No Tigers manager in this century has remained unaware of Mrs. MacGryff for long.
Tomorrow, in recognition of eighty-four years of unwavering support, Loyola MacGryff—housewife, retiree, great-grandmother—has been invited by the Detroit Tigers to throw out the opening ball of the 1990 season at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull.
The diminutive senior pooh-poohs comments by friends and family that the front office hopes by this token to forestall a lawsuit for medical damages.
“This makes up for that rude ticket clerk who wouldn’t honor my raincheck in 1958.”
PART FIVE
Slider
Chapter 28
“I’LL SPEAK TO HIM, TRUMAN.” Doc hadn’t been surprised to encounter Beatrice Blackwood’s bodyguard at the door of Alcina Lilley’s house, nor to be denied entrance by him. Deaths, funerals, and releases from hospitals brought out that aging Twelfth Street crowd in protective herds. The elderly madam was wearing what looked like the same tailored suit she had worn to Wilson McCoy’s send-off. It was definitely the same flowered hat. She wasn’t wearing the eye patch and he could see the difference in the pupils. The one that had been operated on lacked the milky opacity of its mate, glittering like one of the jewels that had covered it.
She let him into the entryway, a shallow room furnished with carved wooden benches that hadn’t been sat on in this century and what might have been an original Rivera in a simple frame on the wall facing the door. Truman had withdrawn silently through a door at the back.
“Alcina isn’t seeing anyone,” Beatrice said. “You least of all.”
“I didn’t tell anyone he was here.”
“I know. You couldn’t have collected the reward if you did.”
“What happened?”
“Alcina went to run some errands after she left my place yesterday. She didn’t get home until late. Gordon wasn’t here.”
“Did he leave voluntarily?”
“There wasn’t any note, but he wasn’t the kind to write one. Nobody broke in and nothing was disturbed. The neighbors didn’t see anything. They’re
quick to call the law here, not like in my neighborhood. He left his things, what there was of them. He was traveling light when he came.”
“They said on the news that two plainclothes detectives on their way somewhere else caught him breaking into a car parked in a driveway on Brownell. He pulled a gun and one of them shot him. That’s not far from here.”
“Gordon wouldn’t have gone quietly,” she said. “But I don’t believe the car story. Alcina could have gotten him a car if that’s what he wanted.”
“Could he have found out about our arrangement and panicked?”
“Not from Alcina or me. Truman didn’t know anything. I have to get back to her now.” She waited for him to leave.
He didn’t move. “Who else knew he was here?”
“Truman.”
At first he thought she was answering his question, but when Truman re-entered the room he knew the bodyguard had been hovering within earshot. Taking it as a dismissal, Doc turned and opened the front door. Looking back: “I wasn’t after the reward. I had an agreement with Sergeant Battle to split it between Maynard Ance for the use of his restaurant and Mrs. Lilley to be applied to Hall’s legal expenses. You can ask Battle. All I wanted was a break on my parole.”
Beatrice said nothing. She and Truman might have been wildly mismatched carvings chosen to go with the painting on the wall. Doc went out. The door chunked into its frame behind him like an axe biting into a stump.
*
He had the driver drop him at the corner of Neal’s street and tipped him a dollar. It was a few minutes after seven on a moist Saturday morning; perfect globes of dew on the grass in the ballfield refracted the early sunlight into primary colors like the jewels in Beatrice Blackwood’s abandoned eye patch. Two days earlier, Doc had clipped the grass within two ruthless inches, and with a proper pitcher’s mound and a home plate and bases acquired from Dunham’s downtown, the lot couldn’t be mistaken for anything but a baseball diamond. Neal had surprised him that day with a lime spreader borrowed from work. Now the base paths and foul lines stood out crisp and white like fresh chalk on slate.
Nobody was up yet at the house. Even Billie had been out late Friday night cooking for an event at the school and was sleeping in. Doc used his key, went upstairs, changed into his ballplaying clothes, and went back out with his glove and the ball and a six-foot plank he kept in the garage. He had asked for a green one with plenty of spring at Builders Square, but the clerk had explained they didn’t carry green lumber and sold him a wolmanized plank instead. It had proven more than satisfactory on its first tryout.
He prised up home plate and drove the narrow end of the plank into the soft earth beneath, pounding it with a rock that had belonged to the foundation of one of the houses that had stood there. Just as he made the last blow a window squeaked open on the second floor of a house across the street and a phlegmy male voice shouted at him to knock it off.
Doc didn’t spend much time admiring the result. It looked like a headstone erected over the grave of his freedom. He’d marked out a strike zone on the board with chalk, hit it square in the middle with his first three pitches, then missed the plank entirely with the next four and had to chase the ball before it rolled into the street. When he hit, the ball came back off the resilient wood with a crack like a bat connecting, returning to him with identical or superior velocity, providing him with practice in both pitching and fielding. After the first dozen or so pitches he ceased to miss the plank, although he hit outside the strike zone with some regularity, usually on purpose, especially when he threw his slider. The return was more predictable than if the board had been an actual batter with his varying swings, and so he fielded better than he would have in a real game; but that wasn’t the point, nor if he chose to admit it to himself was the pitching. The rhythm—kick, deal, catch, kick, deal, catch—was mindless, a kind of sensory-deprivation tank of the spirit in which he went through a series of movements as natural as breathing, acting and reacting in a vacuum of pure physical activity, aware of neither the raw stinging of his palm nor the cracking of the tendons in his arm, the whack of the board and the thud of the glove heard only dimly through layers of sentient callus. The sheer mechanistic repetition of the chain of motions wore down the bumps and whorls that retained thought like puddles in a rutted riverbed so that when he stopped—if he stopped, for there was a seductive rapturous self-fueling perpetuity to the thing—the intelligence would come rushing in all of a unit in a reverse climax of shattering clarity. Using, respectively, B & O boxcars, the wall of the barn behind the house in Louisville, a Lagooner named Archie Oliphant, and Tiger catcher Lance Parrish, Doc had resorted to this method four times in his life when he needed direction, and it hadn’t failed him yet. Most recently it had helped him decide to face the authorities on the manslaughter charge when he was out on bail and considering flight to Canada.
This time was no exception.
He didn’t know how long he’d been throwing when he stopped. He’d left his wristwatch at the house. The light had broadened and hardened and the last of the dew was rising from the grass in gray vapor like spools of thread uncoiling. He was mopping his forehead with his sleeve, sorting out the impressions now filling his skull, when he saw Charlie Battle coming his way across the lot.
“I don’t remember you throwing that hard when you were with Detroit,” he called. “Training for a comeback?”
The sergeant was wearing cutoff jeans and a summer-weight yellow sport shirt that showed his physique through perforations in the material. His legs were lean and hairless. Muscles jumped in the thighs and calves as he walked.
“Just breaking a sweat,” Doc said. “Is it that late? Where’s your glove?”
“I’m not playing today. They want me to come down and fork over my paperwork on the Starkweather Hall case. I’m on my way in. Had a hunch I’d find you here.”
“That the summer dress code at Thirteen Hundred?”
“Fuck ’em. I was going out for a run when I got the call.” He stopped in front of Doc. “I left a message at Kubitski’s office. I’ll follow it up Monday. Your parole’s off the hook. It never was on, really. Tough talk, that’s the job.”
“Bullshit, Sergeant. But thanks.”
“The Hall I’ve been chasing was too smart to throw down on two cops at once. What spooked him, the deal?”
“He never knew about it. He hiked before anyone could tell him.”
“Jesus. I guess when a lucky son of a bitch loses his luck it goes all at once.”
“Did those detectives belong to your squad?”
“No, they were narcs. Good ones, too. First he knew they were on the other side was when they identified themselves. Could be that’s why he didn’t think it through.”
“He knew them?”
“The drug world’s small. Everybody knows everybody.”
“Internal Affairs got separate jackets on them too?”
Battle stuck his hands in his pockets. “They aren’t all Sergeant Melvin. That’s an extreme case.” He shook his head. “I don’t know how dirty they are. Hell, maybe they’re clean. It happens, even on that detail. You’re barking down the wrong hole there. The shooting team cleared them an hour ago.”
“Lengthy investigation.”
“It’s only lengthy when something smells. This one was textbook. Any idea what Hall was doing in a place like Birmingham?” He was studying Doc’s face.
“Maybe he was house-hunting.”
“Or he’d been hiding there right along and just broke cover. This is Detroit. When you’re hot and you don’t have wheels, you boost them as quick as you can. You don’t walk clear past Eight Mile Road looking. I don’t suppose you’d care to tell me who had him socked away?”
Doc gave him the blank owl-eyed stare. “You going to shake my parole in my face if I don’t?”
“No,” he said after a beat. “Doesn’t matter. There are too many more Starkweather Halls out there to waste time poking at this one’s c
orpse. Sorry I had to kick you around. I don’t enjoy doing that to a friend.”
“It’s the job.” Doc had been flipping the ball back and forth between his glove and his bare hand. Now he took off the glove and stuck the hand out.
Battle gripped it. When they broke contact he glanced down at his palm and rubbed it against its mate. “Hey, you know your hand is bloody?”
Doc said, “Yeah, I know.” He had rubbed it against his bleeding left.
After Battle left, Doc went back to the house for a shower and a change of clothes and a late breakfast of cereal and coffee. Neal was putting in his half-day at work and Sean was in the living room watching the Ninja Turtles. Billie, wearing the baggy shorts and old blouse she tied in front to work in her flower garden, refilled Doc’s cup. “That Joyce called again this morning. I didn’t know what to tell her.”
“I’ll call her.”
“Are you two dating?” His sister-in-law’s tones were incapable of innuendo.
“We must be. I told her my whole story the first time we went out.”
“I hope she’s not just using you.”
“Everybody uses everybody,” he said.
Sean came in with his glove. His sweatshirt and jeans had grown soft from wearing and washing. The pants were starting to bag in the seat. “Doc, let’s go.”
His uncle showed him his raw palm. “Can you pitch a couple of innings? Just until it stops bleeding.”
“Kevin!” Billie was pale.
“Wow!”
“Just building callus,” Doc said. “I got used to too many rest days in Jackson. It’s not as bad as it looks.”
King of the Corner Page 22
