Parker Field

by Howard Owen

  It turns out that Buck McRae, even in his seventies, drinks a bit “even though Lydia thinks I’m goin’ to hell for it. And I have cut down some, since the shooting.”

  He says he went, as was his custom, to his favorite nip joint that night, a few miles up the road.

  “The kind of place where, you know, like in that 'Cheers’ show, everybody knows your name.”

  He says he remembers coming back to his car sometime after three.

  “The place doesn’t exactly have any closing hours,” Buck explains. “Buddy just opens up when somebody wants a taste. But he doesn’t allow no drugs or anything like that.

  “I got in my truck, and while I’m sitting there, trying to remember where I hid my keys, this fella comes up and taps on my window. Like to have scared me to death. He had a mask on, but I could see his hands. He was white.”

  Buck stops walking and leans back against the Buick.

  “He told me to get out of the truck. He had a big old pistol, stuck right in my face. I thought about blowing the horn, but there wasn’t many people left inside by that time, and there wasn’t any outside.”

  Buck says the man walked him over toward “the ditch,” which turns out to be a drainage ditch, all that keeps the area around where Buck lives from turning into a swamp.

  “He walked me maybe a hundred feet behind Buddy’s, and then he told me to stop. He didn’t even ask for money,” Buck says, “although I sure was offering him some. He didn’t say much, other than to tell me to shut the fuck up every now and then.

  “I remember looking up there at this quarter moon goin’ down off across the field, and thinking it might be the last thing I was ever gonna see.”

  What saved him, he says, was the ditch.

  “It ain’t but about five feet wide, but I guess that fella thought an old geezer like me couldn’t jump across it. Maybe, if I didn’t think I had to do it or die, I couldn’t have. Amazin’ what you can do when you have to.”

  Buck figures the man meant to back him up to the ditch, shoot him and leave him there for the buzzards to find in the next day or two.

  “I figure he thought, with him and his big old gun behind me and the ditch in front of me, my options were kind of limited. He must of dropped his pistol for a second or two. If he’d had it trained on me, there ain’t no way he could have missed.”

  Buck says he took three steps, screaming like a banshee, and leaped.

  “I ain’t one to go down easy.”

  He heard the first shot while he was in midair. The second one got him in the back.

  “Just missed my spine, the doctor said.”

  There was a cornfield on the other side, and the farmer who owned it had never bothered to plow it under or burn it off that fall.

  “I got in that corn, and there wasn’t no way he was going to catch me,” Buck says. “I don’t think that fella could have jumped that ditch anyhow. He sounded like he was way past grown. And he was white. No offense.”

  He looks at me a little funny when he says that.

  “I bet you could of jumped it, though.”

  I nod and he laughs, then continues.

  “Of course, I was bleeding right much by then, and I reckon I passed out for a little bit. When I come to, it was quiet. I couldn’t see my watch, but the moon was down, so I know it must have been sometime after five.”

  He managed to crawl back to the edge of the clearing, down near the building where he’d been drinking. By then, his eyes had adjusted enough to the dark that he could see across the ditch and could tell that there weren’t any cars or trucks left in the parking lot.

  “I yelled as loud as I could, but I was pretty weak by then. Finally, I got the dogs roused up, and then Buddy come out the front door, and he saw me across the ditch. The ditch was too wide for them to get a stretcher and me across it, and it took ’em to almost dawn to get an ambulance over there in that cornfield.”

  He had a punctured lung and had lost a lot of blood.

  “Still paying off those hospital bills.”

  They never found the shooter. A man who’d left the nip joint twenty minutes before Buck came out said he’d seen a big truck, red, maybe a Ford, over in the corner of the parking lot, and a couple of men inside said they heard a truck drive off. From the time they gave, it was not long after Buck was shot.

  “With the music and all, I don’t reckon they heard the gun or me screaming.”

  They found a slug from a .45 and some footprints in the mud, but that was all they ever found.

  “The NAACP wanted to get on it as a hate crime,” Buck says. “I wouldn’t have none of that. That fella was just out to kill somebody, regardless of race, creed or national origin.”

  He stops and lifts his shirt and undershirt. There’s a star-shaped scar on his right side, purple against the backdrop of his light brown skin.

  “Went right through,” he says. “That fella wasn’t into injuring or sending a message. He meant to kill me.”

  He pauses.

  “And now, I guess I know what it was all about. Except I don’t.”

  Me either, I tell him, but I intend to find out.

  I ask him about the cards.

  “Like with numbers and all?” he says. “Yeah. I got one not long after the accident, like what you’re talking about, with numbers crossed out on it. It kind of rung a bell, because I’d got some other ones like that, years before. And then I got another one, maybe four years ago.”

  “Do you remember what the one after the accident looked like? I mean, what numbers were crossed out?”

  “Hell, I don’t remember that far back,” he says. Then, after a pause, he says, “But I do have the one from four years ago.”

  I ask him if he thinks he could find it. He turns and walks toward the house, with me in tow.

  Lydia and Cindy are chatting away like old friends on the big back porch. Buck tells me to sit and disappears into the old farmhouse. I accept Lydia’s offer of sweet tea. She likes to cut to the chase, I soon discover.

  “Where’d you get that nice tan?” It’s clear she’s not talking about anything I picked up at the beach or a salon. I give her the short version of my family history, including my long-gone, never-there father, Artie Lee.

  “Well,” she says, “you probably can pass with most folks. That’s a blessing.”

  Buck comes out in five minutes with the card.

  There are, as I would have guessed, nine numbers, with seven of them scratched off.

  “The one I got in the hospital,” he says, “I think it was like this one, but I think there was a question mark by the nine. The earlier ones, I can’t remember much about them.”

  “If you hadn’t of been drinking, none of this would of happened,” Lydia reminds him, not, I’m sure, for the first time.

  Buck laughs.

  “I read the other day where a fella was walking along the beach somewhere up in Maryland, and this cliff alongside the beach just collapsed. Buried him alive on the spot. Maybe we oughta stop goin’ to the beach, too.”

  “Maybe we ought to,” Lydia says, getting up to refill our glasses.

  I look at the card’s postmark. El Dorado Hills, California.

  I can tell that Buck doesn’t want to talk about this any more in front of his wife. He motions for me to follow him back outside. I tell Cindy we won’t be long. She tells me not to worry, that she’s having a great time, as long as we’re not taking Lydia and Buck away from something they need to do.

  “That’s the beauty of bein’ old,” Lydia says. “I don’t need to do much. The kids and grandkids keep the house clean and the yard mowed. All we have to do is eat, sleep and watch the TV. The rest is optional.”

  We go back to the garage.

  “So Les Hacker and me are the only ones still alive, and somebody’s tried to get rid of both of us?”

  I tell him that’s the way it looks.

  He nods his head.

  “Two and nine,” he says. “Catc
her and right field. Don’t know why I didn’t figure that out before.”

  I tell him there wasn’t much reason to suspect anything until now.

  “You always have to expect stuff,” he says. “Nothing is an accident. If I’m a little more careful, or a little less drunk, that fella doesn’t sneak up on me in the parking lot. If he’s a little more careful, I don’t get a chance to jump that ditch.

  “If somebody you don’t know sends you a postcard with a bunch of numbers on it, they mean something. If you get careless and ignore ’em, you got nobody to blame but yourself.”

  I have the impression that Buck McRae is the kind of man who takes responsibility for whatever happens, even if he can’t stop it from happening.

  “Satchel Paige was my hero, my idol, when I was growing up,” he says. “He was forty-some years old when they finally let his black ass play in the big leagues, and he still stuck it up their butts.

  “Satchel said not to look back, that something might be gaining on you. Well, I have to disagree with him on that one. You want to look back, because if you don’t, whatever’s gaining on you is gonna catch you and eat you.”

  I shake Buck McRae’s hand, which is as tough and weathered as Les Hacker’s old catcher’s mitt that he keeps in the attic.

  “You tell Les to hang in there,” he says. “Tell him I’d like to see him again sometime. And, for God’s sake, don’t mention any of this to Lydia.”

  I tell Buck that I’ll let him do the worrying for both of them. I also tell him that I doubt that whoever came after him eight years ago will try again. We both know that might be wishful thinking, though.

  IT’S LATER than I’d planned by the time we leave the McRaes’ home, almost six thirty. Cindy accepts my suggestion that we get a hotel room and then some dinner.

  We find a hotel for less than seventy bucks that doesn’t seem to have bedbugs. The clerk suggests a place to get dinner a couple of miles toward town with an all-you-can-eat buffet.

  I call Peggy on her cell.

  “He won’t eat, and he doesn’t even try to talk anymore,” she says. “Even Awesome can’t get him to smile.”

  I tell her I’ll be back tomorrow.

  At the buffet, everything’s been fried in the same grease, and the patrons look as if they’ve been coming here a long time. Some of them are so big that it’s hard for two of them to pass each other in the buffet line.

  I suggest a bar, and we find one in Fayetteville’s downtown. Like a lot of towns, it’s trying to bring back the fifties, before the department stores, movie theaters, clothing stores and every damn thing else fled to the suburbs. What you get, when you do that, is a lot of chi-chi restaurants, second-hand stores and government offices with apartments overhead. I wish them well, but it looks to me like the big spending still goes on out there in Bubbaland.

  We have a couple of beers at a place with exposed brick and a small but enthusiastic crowd. After “a couple” turns into four or five, Cindy says she’s tired. Hell, I say, I’m not tired, and I’m just getting into a very interesting conversation with a guy who looks like he spent a few years in the army about whether we should have invaded Iraq. I’m about to order another beer when I look at Cindy and can see the message, big as life, in her eyes. Last call. As in last call for this fine, sweet woman to make my life appreciably better.

  You might think it’s an easy enough thing to say, “Check, please,” to a bartender. Maybe it is, for you.

  On the way back to our room, not much is said.

  When we get inside, Cindy pulls my head down and kisses me for a long time.

  “Thank you,” she says. “I appreciate the effort.”

  What I’m thinking, though, and maybe what she’s thinking too, is: How many times will I be able to say “check, please”?

  “What now?” she asks me later, as we’re lying in a twist of sheets and bedspread. I’m not sure whether she’s talking about me and her or about the 1964 Vees.

  Because it’s easier to talk about the second issue than the first, I tell her what’s been on my mind for a few days now. “It’s time to go find Frannie Fling.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  WEDNESDAY

  Peggy’s spending a lot of her time on the cot in Les’s room. I drive over as soon we get back and I have time to drop Cindy off with a promise to call her in a few hours. I take Awesome Dude with me to the hospital. He’s been more or less fending for himself and hasn’t burned the house down yet, although the strong scent of burned popcorn indicates that perhaps Awesome hasn’t had too much experience with microwaves.

  “He’s gonna pull through,” Awesome says when we’re getting out of the car. “I know he is. Les, he’s tough.”

  I give Awesome a little squeeze, which makes him jump a little. Even after being taken in by Peggy like a stray mutt and treated like family, he’s still not cool with people invading his space. In the Dude’s life, most people who have touched him have not meant him well.

  Jumpin’ Jimmy Deacon is there. I was hoping he would be. I need some information.

  Les looks like he’s lost twenty pounds in the last thirteen days. I sit beside him for a few minutes and try to engage him. When I tell him I’ve just been to see Buck McRae, his eyes light up, and I know he understands what I’m saying. Despite being shot and then having a stroke, and despite the fact that he wasn’t clicking on all cylinders mentally before all this happened, Les is still with us. He can still pull 1964 out of his memory bank.

  When I tell him Buck wants to come see him sometime soon, his mouth twists into something resembling a smile, and he shakes his head.

  Peggy pulls me into the hallway to tell me that the hospital, having somehow let him have a major stroke on their watch and not noticing it in time to reverse its effects, now wants to kick Les out.

  “They said they can’t do anything else for him,” my mother says, sniffling a little. “They say we need to find a nursing home or 'assisted care facility’ or some damn thing.”

  I can tell she’s overwhelmed. Hell, I’m overwhelmed. Most people don’t deal with the inevitable until it’s, well, inevitable. Who wants to sit down after dinner one night and come up with a plan for what to do when you’re so bad off that the hospital says they can’t help you?

  I tell her we’ll work through this. My first job will be to find out who exactly gave her Les’s eviction notice. We need to talk.

  After an hour or so, Jumpin’ Jimmy says he’s going outside. I say I’ll go with him. On the trip to North Carolina, I tried to keep my nicotine intake to a minimum. I have this feeling that I’m running up a few demerits with the lovely Ms. Peroni, and she, like so many others in our intolerant world, has a bias against tobacco.

  I need a smoke.

  I also need to pump Jimmy Deacon.

  “Jumpin’ Jimmy’s not feeling so good about old Les,” he says when we’re far enough away from the room. “Les, he was always a fighter, but …”

  “Yeah.”

  When we get far enough away from the smoke police that I can fetch a Camel from my shirt pocket, I get to what’s on my mind.

  “I need to get in touch with Frannie Fling’s family.”

  Jimmy frowns. He’s thinking. I can smell something burning.

  “She didn’t have much family,” he says. “By the time I got up there, when I went looking for her grave, they had moved.”

  “You say you thought they went to Massachusetts?”

  “Something like that. What’re you so interested for now?”

  I tell him that, if I’m going to do the story I want to do about the 1964 Vees, I need to find out more about Frannie Fling.

  “Well,” he says, “just don’t go making her look like she was some kind of whore or something. Jimmy would not like that.”

  His eyes are kind of red, and his fists are clenched.

  I promise Jimmy that I will do right by Frances Flynn.

  SARAH GOODNIGHT answers on the first ring. She says t
he latest rumor at the paper is that we won’t be getting any raises again this year. Quelle surprise. I think this makes it four years in a row.

  The newsroom has its own half-ass union that is about as worthless as a broke-dick dog when you really get down to dollars and cents. Being a union, and a pissant one at that, in a right-to-work state entitles you to complain a lot. When times were good, our management did not stint on paying the help. But we got spoiled, and when the big stores went out of business or just quit buying print ads, and the geniuses above us decided to give it away online, we found out an obvious (to everyone but us) fact of life: When rich people have to decide between taking care of their families or taking care of the help, the help bites the big one.

  “Too bad my landlord decided to give himself a raise this year,” Sarah says. “I’m losing money, Willie.”

  “Maybe they can dip into my pension fund and give you a taste.”

  She snorts.

  “Pension! Like I’ll ever see one.”

  I sympathize. Not enough to give up my pension until they tear it from my cold, dead hands, but I do wonder what’s going to happen to Sarah and to Andi and everyone else who came up in this benighted century, when pensions are but a fond memory and the 401(k) plans that were supposed to replace them aren’t being funded any more.

  Changing the subject, I ask her how things are going on night cops.

  “I hope to hell you’re through playing sportswriter soon,” she says.

  I tell her that it won’t be long, especially since now I’m dipping into my paid vacation time to fund my little junket.

  “Last night,” she says, “I had to go to your old neighborhood.”

  “Oregon Hill?”

  “Yeah. It was a real mess. Somebody tried to jack a guy’s car, right there on Pine Street.”

  I’m a little surprised. Crime in Richmond tends to restrict itself to certain neighborhoods: Poor sides of town (there’s more than one), places where bars empty their little feuds into the street, the area around VCU, because students don’t know enough to be scared and not walk their dogs at four a.m. Oregon Hill, though, usually doesn’t have many dots on the crime map.