by Howard Owen
Kate asked me how my opus on the ’64 Vees was coming. I looked to see if she was being a smart-ass, calling it an opus. I couldn’t tell. I filled her in on the team’s diminishing numbers.
“Weird,” she said. “Well, athletes tend to live closer to the edge than most of us.”
Yeah, I said. Maybe that’s it.
I promised her I’d check in with her after I got back from my trip.
“What trip?”
I told her about my just-hatched plan to fly to Tallahassee, Florida, and see if I could find some Whitestones.
Getting reacquainted with Cindy Peroni was better than a winning lottery ticket. It turns out that Cindy’s brother flies for one of our more-maligned airlines. It further develops that Cindy “and a friend” can fly places for a very reasonable price—like, zero—if there’s a seat. So, when I mentioned that I needed to fly some places and see some people, she made me an offer. If the gods are kind, we’ll be flying down to Florida tomorrow, then driving over to south Alabama the next day.
“Can’t I pay you something?” I asked her when she made the offer.
“I’ll take it out in trade,” she said. I said it might take me a long time to pay her back “that way” for a last-minute airline ticket. At my age, I’m more into comfort than speed.
“Well,” she said, patting my arm, “just do the best you can.”
Kate listened to my plans for tomorrow with what looked suspiciously like a smirk.
“Well,” she said, “at least this one’s age appropriate.”
“I’ve never broken the law,” I remind her.
“Not quite.” Kate always has to have the last word.
I HAD time to look in on Les before the game. Peggy was still there. Awesome, never comfortable in one place for long, had disappeared someplace. I offered to take my mother home, but she said she was going to stay awhile longer.
“Want me to bring you anything?”
She looked up at me, giving me that wry smile she always was able to summon when we were being evicted or she’d lost another job.
“A joint would be nice.”
We both laughed. I kissed the top of her head and left before guilt made me miss the season opener.
JUMPIN’ JIMMY’S still on the payroll, like he has been for more than half a century, but he’s mostly taking care of the field, getting it ready for the next home stand, recruiting kids to help roll the tarp out if it rains. In actuality, Jimmy mostly just sits on a riding lawn mower and tells everybody else what to do. I guess age has its privileges.
So, unless we have a rain delay, Jimmy’s free to watch the game with us.
Cindy’s deeper into baseball than I ever was, which is saying something. She and Jimmy get into a long, philosophical discussion over why pitchers are such “wusses,” to use Cindy’s description.
“I mean, those guys in the seventies were pitching, like 300 innings a year. I don’t think I’d even heard of a middle reliever back then. How come these guys can’t start but every fifth game? What would Bob Gibson say?”
“I love it when you talk baseball,” I tell Cindy, then remind her that she was eight years old in 1975, and not many eight-year-old girls would have heard of middle relievers.
“Well,” she says, “I was precocious. And I had older brothers.”
Jimmy’s definitely old, old school. But he tries to defend modern strategy, pointing out how they’re throwing more exotic pitches now, and how much longer the games last.
“So,” Cindy says, “they get tired standing out there on the mound? Hell, the games last so long because they’ve got to make so many pitching changes.”
Jimmy sighs.
“They just go at it so much harder now, like every pitch is the World Series.”
He’s not buying into Cindy’s other theory, that there are so many injuries now because the players are too muscle-bound.
“They got to stay in shape,” Jimmy says. “Although I do think this yogi shit—pardon my French—is taking it a little too far.”
“Yoga.”
“Whatever.”
There’s a good crowd. They changed the grease in the corn dogs, just like they do before almost every season. And there’ll be fireworks afterward.
The game itself is no prize. Through seven innings, nobody hits anything more impressive than a double into the right-center-field gap. There are too many walks and, yes, too many pitching changes. But it’s still baseball. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate a game where you can catch your breath and analyze the situation between plays. Watching football, it’s so intense your pants could be on fire and you wouldn’t notice.
As we stand for the seventh-inning stretch, orchestrated by the demented tree rat mascot, Jimmy nudges me.
“I almost forgot. I gotcha something.”
I put down my lukewarm beer and take the photograph Jimmy’s handing me.
I know right away who it is. Frances Flynn.
“I found it, going through some old files,” Jimmy says. Jimmy’s files are legendary and notorious. He supposedly has two bedrooms of a three-bedroom apartment crammed with material about every Richmond minor leaguer since 1960. When he dies, they’ll have to bring in a dump truck to haul it away.
“She was very pretty,” I say, truthfully. She’s squinting into the sun, with a big guy standing with his arm around her, low enough that he seems to be fondling her butt.
“That’s Whitestone,” Jimmy says, not pleasantly. “Must of been late in the 1964 season.
“I found this, too.”
It’s a letter.
“She wanted me to have it, so I could see how mean her mother was. I never gave it back. Hadn’t looked at it in thirty years I bet, but talking about her the other day made me think of it.”
The envelope was postmarked July 28, 1964. Jimmy says it wasn’t long after Frannie Fling’s parents found out where she was and what she was doing.
It’s a pretty grim note. They gave her a deadline: September 1. If you aren’t home by then, the note said, you do not have a home. There was enough chill in it to cool my beer.
“You have been a great disappointment to us,” is how it concluded. It was signed by her mother.
The return address gave me her parents’ names: William and Eleanor.
I already know she didn’t go back until late fall or early winter, and I guess they relented, at least until they realized she was pregnant and kicked her out.
Andi’s done some dumb things. I don’t believe, though, that there’s anything she could do that would make me toss her out the front door in the middle of a Vermont winter. I wonder how Mr. and Mrs. Flynn felt in April, when they were headed down to Tennessee to retrieve their daughter’s body.
Cindy’s been keeping score. They don’t even want you to keep score at the ballpark any more, apparently. If they did, they wouldn’t give you this tiny-ass scorecard and the kind of pencil you get at Putt-Putt.
There’s something kind of endearing about the way she concentrates on the game and tries to make all the right marks in those too-small boxes. I take over for her when she goes to the bathroom.
The Squirrels pull it out when their fifth pitcher strikes out the Curve catcher with runners on first and third. The crowd has grown during the game, because of the fireworks. I note that this gives us a chance to get out quick, but Cindy says, “Oh, I love fireworks. Let’s stay.” So we do.
By the time I drop Jimmy off, it’s after eleven. Our flight leaves at nine thirty in the morning.
“Maybe,” Cindy says, “you ought to just come stay at my place. Might make it easier to get up and go in the morning.”
I ask her if she has an extra bedroom. She looks at me like I’m an idiot and says she could make up the extra bed for me, if that’s what I’d like.
I tell her that’s definitely not what I’d like.
“Good,” she says. “I don’t have any extra clean sheets anyhow.”
I stop by the P
restwould long enough to do some light packing while Cindy waits in the car.
Custalow looks up at me as I head out the door.
“Slut,” he says. I give him the finger.
Chapter Nine
FRIDAY
We’re a little bedraggled this morning. My big brain, proponent of the benefits of a good night’s sleep, didn’t have much of a chance once we got in the front door of Cindy’s place and she laid about a five-minute kiss on me. About two, though, I did have to beg for mercy, since the alarm was set for six thirty. “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” is a great song, but the older I get, the less it seems like an intelligent life plan.
We are able to get on the flight to Atlanta, and we’re able to get on the next one to Tallahassee. Apparently, when you have the kind of deal Cindy has through her brother, you spend a lot of time sitting in airport lounges holding your breath, hoping that you don’t get bumped by a paying customer.
THE AIRPORT in Tallahassee is smaller even than Richmond’s, and it doesn’t take us long to rent a car and be on our way. Still, it’s pushing one o’clock.
I have arranged an interview with Lucky Whitestone’s son today at two, which gives us time to wolf down a couple of quarter-pounders. I promise Cindy that dinner will be an improvement.
“It’d almost have to be,” she says, trying to restrain a ladylike burp.
The plan is to learn all I can about the late Mr. Whitestone today, then drive to south Alabama tomorrow, former home of the equally late Phil Holt.
Randall Whitestone Jr., age forty-two, lives on the north side of town. His home backs out onto a lake. He apologizes for the mess. Even by the low bar Custalow and I have set for bachelor living, the place is a wreck. Maybe Randy Whitestone isn’t renting from his ex-wife, who, he informs us, took off last year. The Chinese take-out cartons on the dining-room table definitely need to be taken out.
He’s not quite sure what I’m there about. I fill him in, trying to make it sound like a sensible mission rather than a fool’s errand.
“Don’t know why you’d want to do that,” he says, shaking his head.
But he fills me in as best he can. Cindy, who has a knack for going from stranger to old friend in about two seconds flat, is in the kitchen, cleaning. Whitestone doesn’t seem to mind.
He’s kind of a classic example of the curse of the athlete’s son. (OK, let’s be PC and say athlete’s child, but, I’m telling you, it really falls on the sons. Just the way it is.) He’s built like his dad, or probably was before he started putting on a couple of pounds a year. He was, I found out on Google, a pretty good college baseball player at Florida State. He even had a year in Rookie League before giving up professional baseball for the exciting world of pharmaceutical sales.
But there was some little thing missing. Maybe he didn’t quite have the reflexes his dad did. Or he was just a quarter step slower or didn’t have a naturally perfect swing. Or maybe he had it a little bit easier growing up than Lucky Whitestone did. Maybe he didn’t spend quite as much time outdoors in the summer, because who needs that crap when you have air conditioning?
At any rate, it really ought to be against the law for professional athletes to name their kids “Junior.” I’m thinking Randall Whitestone Jr. has had to answer a whole shitload of questions in his life along the lines of, “How come you aren’t a big-leaguer, like your daddy?”
“I was eighteen,” he says. “It changed everything. I mean, he wasn’t anybody’s nominee for father of the year, but he was here. He didn’t beat us. Well, maybe once or twice, but we deserved it. He taught me what he knew, even if I wasn’t ever going to be as good as him.”
Lucky Whitestone had gone out hunting that October day.
“The guys he hunted with, they were real careful. I don’t think any of them ever would have mistook a man for a deer. They said they didn’t, and I believe ’em. But the cops, they never found anything else. Might’ve been some asshole a quarter-mile away, maybe didn’t even know what he’d done ’til he read it in the paper the next day. And those woods were full of shotgun shells.”
Nobody ever came forward.
“It just kind of leaves a hole.”
He says his father’s old hunting buddies are still around, most of them.
“Some of ’em would come by, take me to football games and such, for a while, but it just, you know, got kind of awkward.”
I ask him if he has kids. He says he has a girl, sixteen, and a boy, fourteen, both living with their mother most of the time.
“Is the boy going to be a baseball player?”
“Yeah,” Whitestone says. “He’s pretty good. Maybe it skips a generation.”
I note that the fact that he played any pro baseball at all put him ahead of all the rest of us who topped out at Little League.
He grimaces.
“Well,” he says, “it isn’t quite up to what was expected around here.”
Randall brings in a scrapbook, showing me the highlights of his father’s baseball life, along with a few photos that were taken after he retired.
He shows me a ball autographed by all the Indians in 1975, Lucky’s last year. There’s a picture of young Randall posing with Frank Robinson, their player-manager that year.
“There’s not really a whole lot I can tell you,” he says. “He liked to hunt and fish and drink. He wasn’t much for telling war stories.”
I ask him if Lucky ever mentioned any of his old teammates on the Richmond Vees.
“To tell you the truth,” he says, “I didn’t even know he played in Richmond. I only knew him as a big leaguer, and by the time I was in preschool, his days were just about over.”
We talk for a while longer, and then I collect Cindy, who’s just about salvaged the place.
“She can stay,” Randall Whitestone says. “I like her.”
“Me, too,” I tell him.
My other tasks for the day are taking Ms. Cindy Peroni out for a meal we don’t have to eat in the rental car and making a call to Folsom, California, to one Brenda Haas.
I let Cindy pick a restaurant. She says her brother, the bon vivant airline pilot who’s always flying to exotic places like Tallahassee, recommends a place called A La Provence. He probably recommended it because he didn’t have to pick up the tab.
OK. It was a good meal. I had the grouper; she had the duck breast. I made her grimace when I ordered the onion “soupe” and asked the waitress if it was French. And we did have the best crème brûlée I’ve had in my admittedly short experience with desserts that have little umbrellas over their names. And the wine, while it cost multiple times what I can get the same bottle for at Kroger’s, was more than passable.
We get back to the Marriott Courtyard by nine, making it six Pacific time, when I’ve told Brenda Haas, via e-mail, that I’d call her. Roy Haas’s widow, who probably is in her early seventies by now, answers on the third ring.
I explain what I’m doing, and she seems a little more on board with it than Randall Whitestone Jr. did.
She and Roy met during his brief stint in college and were “together” on and off for four years. They didn’t get married until after he hurt his knee in spring training in 1965 and saw his big-league career die before it was even born.
“He seemed like he knew he had to grow up then,” Brenda Haas says. “He really started applying himself.”
Roy Haas went to work for a builder and eventually started borrowing money to buy up rentals all around Sacramento. By the time he died, his widow says, he had fourteen different properties.
“He was good at fixing things. He probably saved a million dollars over the years doing his own plumbing work and even some of the electrical stuff. He was still working like a dog, right up to the end, and he’d just turned seventy.
“But, you know,” she says, “I think he was always a ballplayer, in his heart. We’d go to a game now and then, and he’d get this look like some kid standing outside a candy store, with his nose up again
st the window. After a while, we just didn’t go anymore.”
He’d had a minor heart attack a few years earlier, but he seemed to be in good health, she says, before his sudden demise.
“But you never know. I guess this was the big one.”
The “big one” hit Roy Haas while he was inside one of his rental units, replacing carpet in the bathroom after the last tenant had apparently let the stopped-up toilet overflow instead of calling Haas to get it fixed.
“They found him there, on the floor. He’d been there they figured for a couple of hours at least. Wasn’t any reason to use a defibrillator.”
She says there was nothing suspicious about Roy Haas’s death, no need for any autopsy.
“Roy didn’t have an enemy in the world, other than maybe a few tenants he’d evicted when they wouldn’t pay the rent, and most of them didn’t have enough gumption to kill anybody.”
The Haases didn’t have children. Brenda Haas says, though, that Roy has left her “pretty well fixed.” It has been four years now, and she’s thinking about moving in with her sister down in Orange County, if she can sell all those rental properties.
“I just don’t have the backbone Roy did,” she says. “I hate throwing people out in the street, and sometimes you have to.”
She seems happy to reminisce about his days in baseball. Unlike Lucky Whitestone’s son, she does remember Richmond and 1964.
“I stayed with him for a week that summer,” she says. “That humidity just about killed me. How do you people live with that stuff?”
I ask her if she remembers any of the other players or if Roy stayed in touch with any of them.
“Oh, no,” she says. “I don’t believe Roy ever kept in touch with anybody, after he left baseball.”
“I know it was a long time ago,” I say, taking a stab in the dark, “but do you remember a girl named Frannie Fling, from that summer in Richmond?”
She’s quiet for a few seconds.
“Oh, my gosh,” she says finally. “Yes. I haven’t heard that name since, I guess, 1965. Roy said the players used to joke about her, that she was some kind of groupie. I think I met her one time, so it would have been 1964. She killed herself the next spring, I think. Roy was in Toledo then, trying to rehab his knee, not that it did any good, and he wrote and told me about what happened to her. Frannie Fling. Boy, that’s going back a long way.”
