Field of Fantasies

by Rick Wilber

  She comes back from the dead, and why? To complain. And to do it on the goddamn iPhone I paidfor.

  He thought of an old saying and wished he’d quoted it to Ellie while he still had the chance: “Money can’t buy happiness, but it allows one to endure unhappiness in relative comfort.”

  That might have shut her up.

  The more he considered their life together—and there was nothing like talking to your dead spouse while you looked at her in a club seat to make you consider such things—the more he thought that while he hadn’t been perfect, he’d still been all right. He did love her and Patrick, and had always tried to be kind to them. He’d worked hard to give them everything he never had, thinking he was doing the right thing. If it wasn’t enough, there was nothing he could do about it now. As for the thing with Martha . . . some kinds of fucking were meaningless. Men understood that—Kaz certainly would have understood it— but women did not.

  In bed, dropping into a blissful oblivion that was three parts Ambien and two parts scotch, it came to him that Ellie’s rant was strangely freeing. Who else could they (whoever they were) send to bedevil him? Who could make him feel any worse? His mother? His father? He’d loved them, but not as he’d loved Ellie. Miss Pritchett? His uncle Elmer who used to tickle him till he wet his pants?

  Snuggling deeper into the covers, Evers actually snickered at that. No, the worst had happened. And although there would be another great match-up tomorrow night at the Trop—-Josh Beckett squaring off against James Shields— he didn’t have to watch. His last thought was that from now on, he’d have more time to read. Lee Child, maybe. He’d been meaning to get to those Lee Child books.

  But first he had the Harlan Coben to finish. He spent the afternoon lost in the green, pitiless suburbs. As the sun went down on another St. Petersburg Sunday, he was into the last fifty pages or so, and racing along. That was when his phone buzzed. He picked it up gingerly—the way a man might pick up a loaded mousetrap—and looked at the readout. What he saw there was a relief. The call was from Kaz, and unless his old pal had suffered a fatal heart attack (not entirely out of the question; he was a good thirty pounds overweight), he was calling from Punta Gorda rather than the afterlife.

  Still, Evers was cautious; given recent events, he had every reason to be. “Kaz, is that you?”

  “Who the hell else would it be?” Kaz boomed. Evers winced and held the phone away from his ear “Barack fucking Obama?”

  Evers laughed feebly. “No, I just—”

  “Fuckin’ Dino Martino! You suck, buddy! Front-row seats, and you didn’t even call me?”

  From far away, Evers heard himself say: “I only had one ticket.” He looked at his watch. Twenty past eight. It should have been the second inning by now— unless the Rays and Red Sox were the 8:00 Sunday-night game on ESPN.

  He reached for the remote.

  Kaz, meanwhile, was laughing. The way he’d laughed that day in the school-yard. It had been higher-pitched then, but otherwise it was just the same. He was just the same. It was a depressing thought. “Yeah, yeah, I’m just yankin’ your ballsack. How’s the view from there?”

  “Great,” Evers said, pushing the power button on the remote. Fox 13 was showing some old movie with Bruce Willis blowing things up. He punched 29 and ESPN came on. Shields was dealing to Dustin Pedroia, second in the Sox lineup. The game had just started.

  I’m doomed to baseball. Evers thought.

  “Dino? Earth to Dino Martino! You still there?”

  “I’m here,” he said, and turned up the volume. Pedroia flailed and missed. The crowd roared; those irritating cowbells the Rays fans favored clanged with maniacal fervor, “Pedie just struck out.”

  “No shit. I ain’t blind, Stevie Wonder. The Rays Rooters are pumped up, huh?”

  “Totally pumped,” Evers said hollowly. “Great night for a ball game.”

  Now Adrian Gonzalez was stepping in. And there, sitting in the first row right behind the screen, doing a fair impersonation of a craggy old snowbird playing out his golden years in the Sunshine State, was Dean Patrick Evers.

  He was wearing a ridiculous foam finger, and although he couldn’t read it, not even in HD, he knew what it said: RAYS ARE #1. Evers at home stared at Evers behind home with the phone against his ear. Evers at the park stared back, holding the selfsame phone in the hand that wasn’t wearing the foam finger. With a sense of outrage that not even his stunned amazement could completely smother, he saw that Ballpark Evers was wearing a Rays jersey. Never, he thought. Those are traitor colors.

  “There you are!” Kaz shouted exultantly, “Shake me a wave, buddy!”

  Evers at the ballpark raised the foam finger and waved it solemnly like an oversize windshield wiper. Evers at home, on autopilot, did the same with his free hand.

  “Love the shirt, Dino,” Kaz said. “Seeing you in Rays colors is like seeing Doris Day topless.” He snickered.

  “I had to wear it,” Evers said. “The guy who gave me the ticket insisted. Listen. I’ve gotta go. Want to grab a beer and a d—ohmygod, there it goes!”

  Gonzo had launched a long drive, high and deep.

  “Drink one for me!” Kaz shouted.

  On Evers’s expensive TV, Gonzalez was lumbering around the bases. As he watched, Evers suddenly understood what he had to do. There was only one way to put an end to this cosmic joke. On a Sunday night, downtown St. Pete would be deserted. If he took a taxi, he could be at the Trop by the end of the second inning. Maybe even sooner.

  “Kaz?”

  “Yeah, buddy?”

  “We should either have been nicer to Lester Embree, or left him alone.”

  He pushed END before Kaz could reply. He turned off the TV. Then he went into his bedroom, rooted through the folded shirts in his bureau, and found his beloved Curt Schilling jersey, the one with the bloody sock on the front and WHY NOT US? on the back. Schilling had been The Man, afraid of nothing. When the Evers in the Rays shirt saw him in this one, he’d fade away like the bad dream he was and all of this would end.

  Evers yanked the shirt on and called a cab. There was one nearby that had just dropped off a fare, and the streets were as deserted as Evers had expected. The cabbie had the game on the radio. The Sox were still batting in the top half of the second when he pulled up to the main gate.

  “You’ll have to settled for nosebleeds,” the cabbie said. “Sox-Rays, that’s a hot ticket.”

  “I’ve got one right behind home plate,” Evers said. “Stop somewhere they’ve got the game on, you might see me. Look for the shirt with the bloody sock on it.”

  “I heard that fuckin’ hoser’s video game business went broke,” the cabbie said as Evers handed him a ten. He looked, saw Evers still sitting in the backseat with the door open, and reluctantly made change. From it, Evers handed him a single rumpled simoleon.

  “Guy with a front-row seat should be able to do bettedn that for a tip,” the cabbie grumbled.

  “Guy with half a brain in his head should keep his mouth shut about the Big Schill,” Evers said. “If he wants a better tip, that is.” He slipped out, slammed the door and headed for the entrance.

  “Fuckyou, Boston!” the cabbie shouted.

  Without turning around, Evers hoisted a middle finger—real, not foam.

  The concourse with its palm trees lit like Christmas in Hawaii was all but empty, the sound of the crowd inside the stadium a hollow surf-boom. It was a sellout, the LED signs above the shuttered ticket windows bragged. There was only one window still open, all the way down at the end, the WILL CALL.

  Yes, Evers thought, because they will call, won’t they? He headed for it like a man on rails.

  “Help you, sir?” the pretty ticket agent asked, and was that Juicy Couture she was wearing? Surely not. He remembered Martha saying, It’s my slut perfume. I only wear itfor you. She’d been willing to do things Ellie wouldn’t dream of, things he remembered at all the wrong times.

  “Help you, sir?”
r />   “Sorry,” Evers said. “Had a little senior moment there.”

  She smiled dutifully.

  “Do you happen to have a ticket for Evers? Dean Evers?”

  There was no hesitation, no thumbing through a whole box of envelopes, because there was only one left. It had his name on it. She slid it through the gap in the glass. “Enjoy the game.”

  “We’ll see,” Evers said.

  He made for Gate A, openingthe envelope and takingout the ticket. Apiece of paper was clipped to it, just four words below the Rays logo: COMPLIMENTS OF THE MANAGEMENT. He strode briskly up the ramp and handed the ticket to a crusty usher who was standing there and watching as Elliot Johnson dug in against Josh Beckett. At the very least, the geezer was a good half century older than his employers. Like so many of his kind, he was in no hurry. It was one reason Evers no longer drove.

  “Nice seat,” the usher said, raising his eyebrows. “Just about the best in the house. And you show up late.” He gave a disapproving head shake.

  “I would have been here sooner,” Evers said, ‘Tut my wife died.”

  The usher froze in the act of turning away, Evers’s ticket in hand.

  “Gotcha,” Evers said, smiling and pointing a playful finger-gun. “That one never fails.”

  The usher didn’t look amused. “Follow me, sir.”

  Down and down the steep steps they went. The usher was in worse shape than Evers, all wattle and liver spots, and by the time they reached the front row, Johnson was headed back to the dugout, a strikeout victim. Evers’s seat was the only empty one—or not quite empty. Leaning against the back was a large blue foam finger that blasphemed: RAYS ARE #1.

  My seat, Evers thought, and as he picked the offending finger up and sat down he saw, with only the slightest surprise, that he was no longer wearing his treasured Schilling jersey. Somewhere between the cab and this ridiculous, padded Captain Kirk perch, it had been replaced by a turquoise Rays shirt. And although he couldn’t see the back, he knew what it said: MATT YOUNG.

  ‘Young Matt Young,” he said, a crack that his neighbors—neither of whom he recognized—pointedly ignored. He craned around, searching the section for Ellie and Soupy Embree and Lennie Wheeler, but it was just a mix of anonymous Rays and Sox fans. He didn’t even see the sparkly-top lady

  Between pitches, as he was twisted around trying to see behind him, the guy on his right tapped Evers’s arm and pointed to the JumboTron just in time for him to catch a grotesquely magnified version of himself turning around.

  “You missed yourself,” the guy said.

  “That’s all right,” Evers said. “I’ve been on TV enough lately.”

  Before Beckett could decide between his fastball and his slider, Evers’s phone buzzed in his pocket.

  Can’t even watch the game in peace.

  “Yello,” he said.

  “Who’m I talkin’ to?” The voice of Chuckie Kazmierski was high and truculent, his I’m-ready-to-fight voice. Evers knew it well, had heard it often over the long arc of years stretching between Fairlawn Grammar and this seat at Tropicana Field, where the light was always dingy and the stars were never seen. “That you, Dino?”

  “Who else? Bruce Willis?” Beckett missed low and away. The crowd rang their idiotic cowbells.

  “Dino Martino, right?”

  Jesus, Eve rs thought, next he 11 be saying mho’s on first and I ’ll be saying what’s on second.

  “Yes, Kaz, the artist formerly known as Dean Patrick Evers. We ate paste together in the second grade, remember? Probably too much.”

  “It is you!” Kaz shouted, making Evers jerk the phone away from his ear. “I told that cop he was full of shit! Detective Kelly, my ass.”

  “What in hell are you talking about?”

  “Some ass-knot pretending to be a cop’s what I’m talkin’ about. I knew it couldn’t be real, he sounded too fuckin’ official.”

  “Huh,” Evers said, “An official official, imagine that.”

  “Guy tells me you’re dead, so I go, if he’s dead, how come I just talked to him on the phone? And the cop—the so-called cop—he goes, I think you’re mistaken, sir. You must have talked to someone else. And I go, how come I just now saw him on TV at the Rays game? And this so-called cop goes, either you saw someone who looked like him or someone who looks like him is dead in his apartment. You believe this shit?”

  Beckett bounced one off the plate. He was all over the place. The crowd was loving it. “If it wasn’t a prank, I guess someone made a big mistake.”

  “Ya think?’ Kaz gave his trademark laugh, low and raspy. “Especially since I’m talkin’ to you right fuckin’ now.”

  “You called to make sure I was still alive, huh?”

  “Yeah.” Now that he was settling down, Kaz seemed puzzled by this.

  “Tell me something—if I’d turned out to be dead after all, would you have left a voice mail?”

  “What? Jesus, I don’t know.” Kaz seemed more puzzled than ever, but that was nothing new. He’d always been puzzled. By events, by other people, probably by his own beating heart. Evers supposed that was part of why he’d so often been angry. Even when he wasn’t angry, he was ready to be angry.

  I’m speaking of him in the past tense, Evers realized.

  “The guy I talked to said they found you at your place. Said you’d been dead for a while too.”

  The guy next to Evers nudged him again. “Lookin’ good, buddy,” he said.

  On the JumboTron, shocking in its homely familiarity, was Evers’s darkened bedroom. In the middle of the bed he’d shared with Ellie, the pillowtop king that was now too big for him, Evers lay still and pale, his eyes half-lidded, his lips purplish, his mouth a stiff rictus. Foam had dried like old spiderwebs on his chin.

  When Evers turned to his seatmate, wanting to confirm what he was seeing, the seat beside him—the row, the section, the whole Tropicana Dome—was empty. And yet the players kept playing.

  “They said you killed yourself.”

  “I didn’t kill myself,” Evers replied, and thought: That damn expired Ambien. And maybe putting it with the scotch wasn’t such a great idea. How long has it been? Since Friday night?

  “I know, it didn’t sound like you.”

  “So, are you watching the game?”

  “I turned it off. Fuckin’ cop—that fuckin’ ass-knot—upset me.”

  “Turn it on again,” Evers said.

  “Okay,” Kaz said. “Lemme grab the remote.”

  “You know, we should have been nicer to Lester Embree.”

  “Water over the dam, old buddy. Or under the bridge. Or whatever the fuck it is.”

  “Maybe not. From now on, don’t be so angry. Try to be nicer to people. Try to be nicer to everyone. Do that for me, will you, Kaz?”

  “What the Christ is wrong with you? You sound like a fuckin’ Hallmark card on Mother’s Day.”

  “I suppose I do,” Evers said. He found this a very sad idea, somehow. On the mound, Beckett was peering in for the sign.

  “Hey, Dino! There you are! You sure don’t look dead.” Kaz gave out his old rusty cackle.

  “I don’t feel it.”

  “I was scared there for a minute,” Kaz said. “Fuckin’ crank yanker. Wonder how he got my number.”

  “Dunno,” Evers said, surveying the empty park. Though of course he knew. After Ellie died, of the nine million people in Tampa-St. Pete, Kaz was the only person he could put down as an emergency contact. And thatidea was sadder still.

  “All right, buddy, I’ll let you get back to the game. Maybe golf next week if it doesn’t rain.”

  “We’ll see,” Evers said. “Stay cool, Kazzie, and—”

  Kaz joined him then, and they chanted the last line together as they had many, many times before: “Don’t let the bastards get you down!"

  That was it, it was over. He sensed things moving again, a flurry behind him, at the periphery of his vision. He looked around, phone in hand, and saw the s
potted usher creakily leading Uncle Elmer and Aunt June down the stairs, and several girls he’d dated in high school, including the one who’d been sort of semiconscious—or maybe unconscious would be closer to the truth—when he’d had her. Behind them came Miss Pritchett with her hair down for once, and Mrs. Carlisle from the drugstore, and the Jansens, the elderly neighbors whose deposit bottles he’d stolen off their back porch. From the other side, as if it were a company outing, a second, equally ancient usher was filling in the rows at the top of the section with former Speedy employees, a number of them in their blue uniforms. He recognized Don Blanton, who’d been questioned during a child pornography investigation in the mid-nineties and had hung himself in his Malden garage. Evers remembered how shocked he’d been, both by the idea of someone he knew possibly being involved in kiddie pom and by Don’s final action. He’d always liked the man, and hadn’t wanted to let him go, but with that kind of accusation hanging over his head, what else could he do? The reputation of a company’s employees was part of its bottom line.

  He still had some battery left. What the hell, he thought. It was a big game. They were probably watching on the Cape.

  “Hey, Dad,” Pat answered.

  “You watching the game?”

  “The kids are. The grown-ups are playing cards.”

  Next to the first usher stood Lennie Wheeler’s daughter, still in her black crepe and veil. She pointed like a dark spectre at Evers. She’d lost all her baby fat, and Evers wondered if that had happened before she died, or after.

  “Go look at the game, son.”

  “Hang on,” Pat said, followed by the screek of a chair. “Okay, I’m watching.”

  “Right behind home, in the front row.”

  “What am I looking at?”

  Evers stood up behind the netting and waved his blue foam finger. “Do you see me?”

  “No, where are you?”

  Young Dr. Young hobbled down the steep stairs on his bad leg, using the seat backs to steady himself. On his smock, like a medal, was a coffee-colored splotch of dried blood.

  “Do you see me now?” Evers took the phone from his ear and waved both arms over his head as if he was flagging a train. The grotesque finger nodded back and forth.