“Looks like a big old piece of hamburger,” Sean said.
“If that’s what throwing a ball around does to you, I’m not sure I want Sean to pitch.”
“Aw, Mom!”
“Don’t worry. I’ll spell him the minute the ball starts to turn pink.”
“It’s not funny, Kevin.” She was holding the coffee pot like some kind of talisman of domesticity.
Doc got up and pushed in his chair. “You had him all to yourself eight years. All I’m asking is to borrow him Saturdays. I’ll bring him back in one piece.”
“All I know is no video game ever made him bleed.”
You have to be alive first. Aloud he said, “We’ll be back by suppertime.”
Charlie Battle Junior was there when they got to the field. He’d brought his own ball and was playing catch with himself, looping the ball up over the neck of the corner streetlamp and trapping it in his glove when it came down. Doc had replaced home plate and taken the practice plank back with him to the house.
“Sorry your dad’s working,” he told the youth, who snapped the ball his way. Doc caught it over his head.
“I’m used to it. What’s happenin’, Sean?”
Sean slapped Junior’s open palm. “I’m pitching today.”
“No shit? Must be the chromosomes.”
Jeff Dolan pulled up to the curb at the wheel of a silver Mercedes and got out, tugging on his Tigers cap. The big Irishman looked bigger than ever in a faded maize-and-blue University of Michigan T-shirt and sweatpants that hung dangerously low on his hips, the elastic waistband shot. Doc asked him why rich accountants always dressed so badly come the weekend.
“How we get to be rich, Koufax,” he said, booming a little like his shanty ancestors. “We let you poor folk blow all your dough on snazzy jogging clothes. What the hell!”
The last comment was hurled over his shoulder. Needles Lewis, leaning out the open window of his old Dodge club cab, grimaced at the blow he’d delivered to the rear bumper of the Mercedes. “Hey, man, I’m sorry,” he shouted over the percussion from the pickup’s radio. “I been meaning to fix them brakes.”
Creed leaped out of the truck box and bent to examine the car’s bumper, holding his dreadlocks back from his face with both hands. Dolan was there already. He rubbed a scrape in the vinyl with his thumb.
“Fix that right up with a Magic Marker,” said Yarnell, who had been riding up front with Needles. He was carrying the equipment
Dolan straightened, shaking his head gravely. “Six hundred-dollar job if it’s a penny. It means yanking the bumper and recovering it.”
Needles, who had climbed out and slammed the door, reached back through the open window, took out a satin jacket, and groped in one of the slash pockets. He counted the bills he found there and stuck them at Dolan. “Fifty short. I’ll owe you the rest”
“Forget it. The lease is up in another month. Let’s play ball.” As he walked past Doc, the Irishman muttered: “Drug Enforcement marks all its bills.”
“Who’s watching the wardrobe?” Doc gave Needles the five-finger handshake.
Needles looked puzzled, men uncorked his barndoor grin. “Old Sylvanus. He never leaves the store.”
Doc said he guessed he’d heard about Starkweather Hall. Needles shrugged and started walking toward the diamond.
“Were you friends?” Doc asked.
“Friendly. Old Starkweather was too serious for friends. I would of thought he was too old for that Billy the Kid shit.”
“He was twenty-three.”
“I guess being old ain’t being smart.”
Walking with the kid in the wild checkerboard haircut Doc felt his spirits lifting like the dew from the grass. He hadn’t realized how much he enjoyed the young drug dealer’s company.
Sean pitched better than Doc had feared he might, although it was clear he’d never make a living from it When Needles and Yarnell and Charlie Junior all blasted home runs back to back, his uncle, who had been catching for him, knew the boy’s arm was tiring. Doc handed the mitt to Needles and took the mound. Sean drooped, then lit up all over when Doc told him to spell Creed at first base. Doc’s hand burned when he grasped the ball, but he imagined he could feel it repairing itself, rebuilding the damaged tissue thicker and more resilient. That evening he would soak it in salts to advance the process. In the old days he could shove a needle a third of its length into his palm before it drew blood. He told people that if his arm went he could always support himself making sails.
Baseball was like that, too; healing soul-deep abrasions through activity and repetition, stretching a fresh better skin over the old, deadening the pain and making him stronger for the next trial. It was a salt-bath for the heart.
Neal arrived while his brother was warming up, still wearing the pocket T-shirt and old patched Levi’s he had worn to work, and took his official stance behind the plate. His big face was burned a deep cherry color from working outdoors on the heavy equipment. With his huge arms and slight stoop from too much lifting—there was a breed of mechanic that scorned the chainfall for raising any engine smaller than 200 horsepower—he was starting to look like their father had at his age, thought Doc as he prepared to face his first batter.
It was an odd version of the game the seven played. Everyone except Doc, who knew his own shortcomings at the plate, took his turn playing on both sides, and all opposed Doc at least once. He could see that some enthusiastic recruiting would have to be done in order to form proper teams if he wasn’t going to burn himself out his first season on the outside. By which time, he supposed, the City of Dearborn would probably decide it wanted the two adjacent lots and send them all to the showers. He wondered if Charlie Battle had forgotten his promise to look into that.
Despite the lack of rest and the condition of his hand, Doc had a personal one-hitter going into his third inning, with two walks, four strikeouts, and a high fly from Sean—he got good wood on it, pleasing Doc, who had given him a little edge but not much—that dropped into Creed’s glove in left field, when Jeff Dolan stepped into the box, snorting like a breed bull and pounding the plate with his bat. It was he who had gotten the hit off Doc with a vicious two-bag drive between first and second in the second inning. Doc figured he was taking it out on that dent in his bumper.
After two balls and a foul that nearly tore the cover off the ball, Doc called time out Needles trotted out to the mound.
“He likes ’em down and outside,” Needles said, wiping his sleeve across his forehead. “I say brush him back.”
Doc studied the stitching on the ball. “That’s not what I wanted to talk about.”
“My fly open?”
“Why’d you bust in on that Mahomet dinner that day?”
“What, you couldn’t wait till the game was over to ask that?” When he saw Doc was waiting he said, “Shit, man, I don’t know. A bunch of us was shootin’ hoops downtown and somebody says why don’t we bust the banquet, teach ’em to invite the M-and-M’s next time. Hell, we didn’t have nothing better to do.”
“Whose idea was it?”
“I don’t remember. Wait. Shit, it was that Antonio guy.”
“Antonio who?”
“Lewis. No relation.” Grinning, he added, “Leastwise, not that my daddy ever told me. We deal off him sometimes.”
“Is he a Marshal?”
“No, he’s indy.”
“He wasn’t on that list of names I bailed out for Ance.”
“He didn’t go. Ain’t that a laugh? We got busted and the guy whose idea it was stood behind. Well, some dudes does and some dudes talks. Think he set us up?”
“I don’t know. I had to ask. It was fucking up my concentration.”
“Let’s go, girls,” called Neal from in back of the batter’s box. “We lose the light in six hours.”
“Throw strikes.” Needles patted Doc on the butt and started back.
Doc bent to scoop up the resin bag and froze. A dusty gold Chevy Nova, fif
teen years old with a cracked vinyl top and angry rust creeping up its side like a rash, had turned the corner behind home plate and was coming along the left foul line, all four of its windows down. These were the details he remembered later, but what caught his attention was the way it moved, not as if it were rolling on tires in contact with the earth but floating, the way a vehicle topping a distant hill on a blazing hot day seemed to float on a visible wave of heat. He could never be sure later but that he was already moving when the black rectangle came over the sill of the window in back like a charred stump of tongue lolling out of a gaping mouth. The clattering sounded a long way off when his arms closed around Needles from behind and the two of them went down in a tangle of limbs.
He landed on his elbow beneath their combined weight in a white blaze of pure pain. Beyond it, sounding farther away even than the shots, he heard shouting and tires shrieking and the wail of an engine turning up and then tailing off into the red distance throbbing at the outer edge of the first shock.
“Needles?” He tried to push himself up with his throwing arm, collapsed under a breaker of fresh pain, and struggled on to his knees, gripping his left arm with his right hand and straddling Needles, who lay on his side. “Needles?”
The checkerboard head turned his way. The face scrunched up against the sun. Doc shifted a little, creating shade. “That you, Doc? I can’t make you out too good.”
“It’s me. You okay?” The ribbed green tank top Needles had on was stained dark with sweat In three places, maybe more, it was darker yet.
“You see it?”
Doc nodded, then said, “Yeah, I saw it.”
Needles grinned, or it might have been a wince. His eyes had the luminous look of an old man’s. They reminded Doc of old Charlie Steiner’s eyes in his dream. “I didn’t see nothing.”
“Doc.”
He glanced up in irritation at the sound of the new voice. Jeff Dolan stood over them, still holding the bat But Dolan wasn’t looking at either of them. Doc followed his gaze to what he thought was someone’s discarded shirt lying near first base, and felt a flash of resentment that it should have been left in the field of play. It was a moment before he realized it wasn’t an empty shirt, and another, accompanied by the sight of his brother running in that direction, before he remembered who was playing first base.
Chapter 29
THE GRAVESIDE CEREMONY WAS NO better than the one in the chapel. The minister, a mild thirty with a creaseless face and one of those heads of tightly curled hair that looked inflated with a bicycle pump, didn’t know Sean or the family and read the oratory and prayer directly from the book. The mourners sat in folding wooden chairs in front of the gray casket on its hydraulic rollers under a sky swept clear of clouds. Funerals on nice days had always depressed Doc, even when he didn’t know the deceased and happened to pass by the cemetery with its burial tent rippling in a warm breeze. The casket was shorter than he’d expected. It had never occurred to him how much smaller the dead seemed than they had in life.
Creed and Yarnell weren’t present. The Second Baptist Church, which had overseen most of the predominately black funerals in town for 150 years and all of the Marshals’, had scheduled the Epithelial Lewis services for the same time as Sean’s. The guests here included Jeff Dolan, enormous in a black suit with an almost nonexistent gray pinstripe, Charlie Battle in blue serge, Charlie Junior, a number of Neal’s friends from the dealership looking like dressed-up mechanics, the inevitable faces Doc couldn’t place, and the family, among them Doc and Neal’s father in his wheelchair wearing a white shirt buttoned to the throat, turquoise bola tie, and new slacks, and two aunts or cousins whom Doc only saw at funerals. The party had left behind three local television news crews at the chapel. Innocent children killed in drive-by shootings were a staple on the Six and Eleven O’Clock reports.
Someone, perhaps the minister, had brought along the yellow floral display mounted on an easel with a card signed by Alcina Lilley and Beatrice Blackwood. Doc hadn’t bothered to look around for them. They had seen Starkweather Hall buried under that name the day before and Doc had sent flowers.
In the chapel before the ceremony, he had sought out Battle, accepted his handshake distractedly, and asked him the names of the two undercover narcotics officers who had shot and killed Hall. The sergeant had looked at him as if he thought his mind had collapsed under the strain of grief.
“That’s confidential. These guys go by their own names on the street We don’t even give them to the media off the record.”
“It’s important You owe me one,” Doc added.
“What do you want with them?”
“First give them to me.”
“I can’t. It’s their lives. Hall wasn’t the only dealer they put out of business. The only reason I know their names is this case was mine.” And he had moved off to pay his respects to Neal and Billie.
Doc hadn’t approached the casket before or after the service. He knew the boy was wearing the gray suit his mother had bought him to wear to church for Easter, and that he would be lying there with his hair combed by someone else as if waiting to pose for a school picture.
When the procession was about to start, Doc escorted Joyce Stefanik to her car. She wore what was probably her only one-piece dress, a blue cotton shift with a single decorative pearl button at the throat. “Get in with me and I’ll drive to the cemetery,” she said in the parking lot. “I can miss one deadline.”
He opened the door of the Trans Am. “One graveside’s like all the others. I don’t think this sky pilot’s going to become inspired on his way to the cemetery.”
“Are you going to be all right?” She touched the cast on his left arm, which rested in a black sling around his neck. The plaster went almost to his shoulder to prevent him from trying to use the shattered elbow.
“Billie probably won’t try to break the other one in the car,” he said.
In fact she had attacked him physically at Detroit Receiving Hospital when he was recovering from surgery to pin together the fragments of his arm. One second she was silent, exhausted emotionally, wearing the face of a woman a generation older than her thirty-four years; the next she was lunging across the side rail of the bed, screaming and clawing for his face. Neal had gotten his arms around her and dragged her back before she could make contact with her nails. Later she’d apologized, but the words were vacant. She had called him a child-killer in a voice loud enough to carry two floors.
Joyce glanced around, then reached up and brought Doc’s head down and kissed him quickly. She left her hand on the back of his neck. “Call me later?”
“I might have a story for you when I do.”
“Story?”
“Only hitch is if everything works out okay you won’t be able to use it.”
“Doc, what are you doing?”
“I’ll call you.” He kissed her again and left to get into the limousine with Neal and Billie.
The 1975 Nova used in the shooting had been reported stolen from the driveway of a house on Baines. It was found abandoned on Riopelle in the warehouse district. The police had questioned and released two members of the Pony Down gang, aged eighteen and seventeen, who had exchanged loud words and occasional gunfire with the M-and-M’s in the past. Both had alibis for the time of the shooting and their prints matched none of those found in the car. The incident was being investigated as a battle over turf.
Maynard Ance left a cab waiting by the cemetery and joined the graveside service in progress. He wore one of his heavy-duty suits and a black knitted tie that looked new. Doc, seated in the front row between Neal and the old man in the wheelchair, turned to acknowledge him. The bail bondsman stood sweating in the sun with his hands folded in front of him. There was no room for him under the tent.
Afterward, Doc found even the minister’s handshake listless and uninspired. He thanked him anyway and went back to greet Ance while the other mourners filed past to commiserate with the rest of the family. Bi
llie sat at the end of the front row in a black dress and felt hat with a brief veil. The shadows formed by the patterned lace scored fresh lines in her features.
“Sorry as hell I’m late.” Ance grasped Doc’s hand. “My third wife picks today to sic the cops on me for back payments. Cost me a hundred apiece to make sure they missed me.”
“Thanks for coming.”
“Kids, shit, it ain’t hard enough to survive all that running into traffic and climbing on things and crap. Your brother need anything? Cash?”
“There was a college fund.”
“Christ. I never saw them bury an eight-year-old.”
Someone was crying in the direction of the grave. Doc didn’t think it was Billie. She hadn’t cried or said ten words in his hearing since the hospital. “I’ve been thinking about that partnership offer,” he said.
“Forget it. This ain’t the time.”
“I’m turning it down.”
“You’re not thinking right. There’s no hurry. I don’t figure to kick off in the next month or so.”
“I made the decision before—well, before,” Doc said. “I didn’t get the chance to tell you. I’m no bail man. My skin isn’t thick enough. I’d break us both in six months.”
“Hey, I wasn’t born like this. You got to give it time.”
“That’s my biggest fault, giving things time. A lot of things would be different now if I didn’t just sit back and watch.”
“You didn’t just sit back on the Hall deal. It wasn’t your fault it went sour.”
“By then it was too late. For a lot of people.”
“Well, we’ll talk,” Ance said. “Take a week off. I won’t need you in the office for a while.”
“That’s the other thing I wanted to talk to you about before. I’m quitting.”
“Fuck that. Now I know you’re fucked up. Maybe I can get along without a partner, but I sure as hell need a driver. Fucking cabs are killing me. I’ll raise you a bill a week.”
Doc reached in his pocket and handed him a roll of fifties bound with a rubber band.
King of the Corner Page 23
