Life's Work

by Jonathan Valin

  “A girl I met at the Waterhole.”

  He gawked at me in disbelief. “You gave a girl you met at that bar my private number?”

  “I didn’t know how long it would be before I could get to a phone,” I said. “And I thought you’d want to know that one of your players was in trouble.”

  “He’s not one of my players anymore,” Petrie said. “Not after tonight. We’re going to get him released from custody. But he’s not welcome back at camp. When you get out of here, take him home, Stoner.”

  “Why me?”

  “You brought him to this dance. You dance with him.”

  I stared at him for a moment. “Where’s home?”

  “Somewhere in Clifton. Ask him.”

  Petrie turned to go.

  “Can I ask you something?” I said.

  He nodded at me over his shoulder.

  “Why’d you cut him?”

  “Because he’s twenty pounds overweight, he’s had three knee operations, and he’s got a bad attitude,” Petrie said bluntly. “The man’s almost thirty-five years old, Stoner. If he plays another year, he’s going to get hurt and he’s going to hurt the team. The plain fact is, he’s through.”

  ******

  Petrie’s lawyer—a fat, pompous man with cheeks like dewlaps and the black, bulging eyes of a Chihuahua—sprung me at seven in the morning. I caught a cab to the Waterhole, picked up the Pinto, and drove to the hospital on Goodman Street. The lawyer had said that Bluerock would be released from custody at eight. I was waiting in the downstairs lobby when he stepped off the elevator. He had a white bandage on his head and his shirt was a little worse for wear, but on the whole he looked as if he’d been enjoying himself.

  “Hey, sport!” he said in his croaking bass. “Where’d you spend the night?”

  “In Station X,” I said sourly.

  Bluerock slapped me on the shoulder so hard he almost knocked me over. “You could be all right, Stoner.”

  We walked out to the Burnet Avenue lot. The sun was early-morning bright, a flat, blazing disc in the eastern sky. Bluerock glared at it as if he wanted to punch it out.

  “My fucking head hurts,” he growled.

  “You probably have a concussion.”

  “That’s what they tell me.” He touched the bandage on his head and winced. “What did that son-of-a-bitch hit me with? Lead pipe?”

  “Billy club,” I said. “What happened, anyway?”

  “Some guy gave me some lip, so I popped him one,” he said.

  “Lip about what?”

  Bluerock grunted. “You ask a lot of questions, you know that?”

  “And I get damn few answers,” I said. “Are you planning to talk to me about Parks or do we have to get drunk again first?”

  He ducked his head and sucked some breath in through his front teeth. “Look, I know I owe you something, sport. But this is a funny situation. You spend four years in the trenches with a guy, four years rooming with him, it’s kind of like a partnership. You don’t piss on something like that without thinking it over.” He gave me an abashed grin. “What were you planning to do if you did find Bill?”

  “Tell Petrie,” I said.

  “That asshole,” Bluerock said.

  “That asshole got you out of a lot of trouble last night.”

  “He got me in a lot of trouble, too.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I don’t know,” Bluerock said, squinting up at the morning sky. “Maybe it is time to get on with my life’s work.” He looked down at the pavement, as if the thought weren’t a bit comforting.

  “You want to get some coffee?” I said.

  He nodded. “Then I got to get some sleep. I feel like I could sleep for a week.” He laughed grimly. “Maybe I will.”

  ******

  We drove to Newport to the Anchor Café and had eggs, goetta, and coffee in one of the spare wooden booths in the back room. Bluerock scarcely fit into the seat. With the bandage on his head and a day’s growth of beard on his fierce, bulldog face, he awed the teenage waitress who’d brought us our menus. She eyed him closely as we gave her our orders and kept staring at him after we were done, as if she were afraid to turn her back on him.

  “Quit looking at me, will you?” Bluerock said testily. “You’re making me nervous.”

  The girl laughed giddily and practically ran out of the room.

  “Women,” Bluerock said with disgust. “You can’t find one decent one in a thousand. And even if you do, she’ll change. Everything fucking changes for the worse.”

  “You’re a cheerful guy, aren’t you, Otto?”

  He frowned at the old-fashioned jukebox on the wall. “Fuck you, too,” he said.

  A few minutes later the teenager came back with the food and arranged it carefully on the table. She smiled shyly at Bluerock when she was through.

  “You’re Otto Bluerock, aren’t you?” she said in a tiny voice.

  “I used to be,” Bluerock said, picking up his fork.

  “Man, you’re good,” she said.

  Bluerock put down the fork and smiled at her. “I was good, wasn’t I?”

  “The best,” the girl said. She held out a piece of paper and a pencil. “Do you mind?”

  “I guess not,” he said.

  He gave the girl his autograph. She tucked it in her breast pocket, patted it, and walked away.

  “Nice kid,” Bluerock said, bending to his plate.

  I laughed.

  Bluerock looked up, egg hanging from his mouth. “Do I contradict myself?” he intoned. “Okay. I contradict myself. Or however the hell it goes.”

  ******

  After breakfast, Bluerock ran out of steam. The concussion was catching up with him, along with everything else that had happened in the last twenty-four hours. He was a tough guy, but he wasn’t Superman.

  “I’ve had it,” he said, as we walked out to the car. “Better take me back to camp. It’s a helluva way to spend my last day as a Cougar—sleeping.”

  There was no easy way to put it, so I said it outright. “They told me not to take you back to camp. They told me to take you home.”

  Bluerock’s jaw knotted up and his face went gray, but he didn’t say a word. When we got in the car, he huddled by the door and stared darkly at the bleak Newport streets.

  I started the Pinto and pulled out into the sparse morning traffic. Bluerock sat silently by the door. I took the suspension bridge over the Ohio and headed north toward Vine and the downtown blocks.

  When we got to Fountain Square—or what passes for it nowadays—I asked Otto where he lived.

  “Wheeler Street,” he said sullenly, and gave me an address in Clifton.

  I drove up Vine to the parkway, past the red brick facade of Music Hall and through the Over-the-Rhine wasteland to Ravine Street and then east on Warner. He was almost asleep when we got to Wheeler, head drooping against the car window, eyelids squeezed shut like a sleeping dog’s. I coasted up Wheeler until I came to the address he’d given me. It wasn’t much of a house for a football player—a two-story frame Victorian with a porch like a sprung cushion and two narrow strips of burned-out grass for a yard. It was the house of a man who didn’t really think of it as home.

  “We’re here,” I said.

  He opened one eye and squinted at the dilapidated building.

  “Jesus,” he said mournfully.

  Bluerock pulled himself upright with a groan, opened the door and got out.

  “I’ll be in touch, Stoner,” he said over his shoulder, and trudged wearily up to the door.

  6

  I WENT home.

  The day’s heat had already filled the apartment, and I began to sweat as soon as I stepped through the door. I stripped off my shirt, got a beer out of the refrigerator, flipped on the Globemaster, and collapsed on the couch. Appropriately enough, the man being interviewed on NPR was talking sports. I pressed the cold beer can to my forehead and listened sleepily to his familiar spiel. Athl
etes, he said, were in the entertainment business. They were show folk, like actors and singers, and because their careers onstage were so short and risky, they deserved to make as much money as they could get, even if that meant the renegotiation of contracts.

  I had the gut feeling that no actor would last very long if he constantly demanded the renegotiations of his contracts in the middle of films. In fact, I wasn’t sure I bought the show-business analogy at anything but the most superficial level. Otto Bluerock certainly wouldn’t have. According to him, neither would Bill Parks. Otto didn’t think of himself as an entertainer. True, he demonstrated his talents before a crowd, but that was because that was where the game was played on Sunday afternoons. During the rest of the week it went on outside the white lines. According to Otto, it never stopped.

  Bluerock’s philosophy may or may not have been so much macho bullshit, although I’d seen him live some of it out in the Waterhole parking lot. But even if it was bullshit, it was appealing bullshit. It was principled bullshit. It was a couple of steps above the greedy, self-serving crap that the man on the radio was handing out. Of course, it hadn’t done much to prepare Otto for that long, lonely walk up to his front porch. What fact or fiction would have? But it could pull him through later on, I thought—if there was a later on for Otto. If he didn’t turn his machismo inside out and destroy himself with it.

  And that could happen, too. I’d seen it happen to other hard men—to cops and soldiers, tough guys who’d suddenly found themselves on the outside, armed with a code and a sense of loyalty that only worked for them on the beat. Nights like the one we’d just gone through might even end up being Bluerock’s life’s work, and that fierce, combative pride of his might degenerate into ordinary paranoia, into a ceaseless conjuring up of enemies to fight. It all depended on him—for the first time, really. Up until then, it had depended on men like Petrie, men who had their own macho fantasies to live out, their own tough philosophies to preach. In a way they were the same guy, Bluerock and Petrie. The guy that Otto said Parks was—the one who played the game for keeps, on the field and off.

  Bill Parks was the last thing on my mind as I wandered off to bed. But that was because he didn’t exist for me yet. He was just a name and a picture. But I knew instinctively that he wasn’t the kind of man that Otto had made him into. And I also knew that somewhere down the road I’d find out who he really was, and that I wouldn’t like what I found.

  ******

  The telephone woke me around eleven, two hours after I’d gone to sleep. I opened one eye and stared bitterly at the black box gabbling on the nightstand. When it didn’t shut up, I snatched the receiver from the cradle and gave it a good hard squeeze before putting it to my ear.

  “Who the hell is it?” I barked.

  “Glad I caught you in a good mood,” a man with a deep voice replied amiably. “This is Harry Stoner, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. So what?”

  The man laughed tunelessly, as if he were practicing laughing before a mirror. “My name’s Walt Kaplan, Mr. Stoner. Perhaps you’ve heard of me?”

  “Can’t say that I have, Walt.”

  “I’m calling because I understand that you’re looking for a client of mine.”

  “And who would that be?”

  “Bill, of course. Bill Parks.”

  That woke me up a little. “You’re Parks’s agent?”

  “Not exactly his agent,” Kaplan said in his deep, pally voice. “I’m his advisor and his friend.”

  “And just who told you I was looking for your advisee?”

  He went on as if he hadn’t heard the question. “I’d like to have a little chat with you, Harry, if you’ve got the time.”

  “You going to tell me where Billy-boy is?”

  “I’m going to explain his situation,” he said demurely. “After all, you’ve only heard one side of it. Then perhaps we can talk about the right thing to do—for everyone involved.”

  Walt Kaplan sounded very much like a lawyer, and a smooth one, at that. But then some agents were lawyers. And some were second cousins. It was a weird business. I picked a pencil up off the nightstand and dug a scrap of paper out of the drawer. With all-pros for clients, I figured Walt for a suite in the DuBois Tower.

  “When do we meet?” I said.

  “Well, you sound as if you could use a few more hours of sleep. And I have a doctor’s appointment at one. I’ve got this bowel problem.”

  Tell me about it, I said to myself.

  “Let’s say three thirty,” Kaplan said. “Is that all right with you?”

  “Where?”

  “My place, I guess. It would be more convenient for me. I’ve got another appointment at five.”

  I scratched an X through the square I’d drawn on the scrap sheet. “What’s the address?”

  “Eighty-eight hundred Winton Road. Kaplan’s Club. Right across from the Sohio station.”

  “You run a bar?” I said with surprise.

  “A gym, Mr. Stoner,” Kaplan said. “You have a nice day.”

  ******

  I went back to sleep after Kaplan called and didn’t wake up again until the alarm went off at two thirty. The afternoon sun had made kindling out of the bedroom furniture, and as soon as I got my ground sense back, I bolted for the bathroom and took a quick shower.

  I plunged back into the bedroom and guided a handful of clothes out safely. As soon as I’d dressed, I sat down at the rolltop desk by the living room window, picked up the phone, dialed Information, and got Otto Bluerock’s number. I hated to be the one to call him to reveille—he had a bad day ahead. But I wanted some information about Walt Kaplan before I met with him. It was either Otto or Petrie, and I was pretty sure that the Cougar management wouldn’t approve of me conferring with Parks’s agent. I went ahead and made the call to Otto.

  He answered on the seventh ring, in the same mood that I’d been in earlier that day.

  “What?” he bellowed into the phone.

  “Hi, Otto,” I said. “How’s the head?”

  “Who is this?” he said darkly. “No. Don’t tell me. I’d recognize that limp-wristed voice anywhere. I already told you, Stoner—don’t call us, we’ll call you. Got it?”

  “I got it,” I said. “I just thought you’d like to know that Walt Kaplan called me.”

  “Did he, now?” Bluerock said with interest. “And what did the cocksucker want?”

  “He knows I’m looking for Bill.”

  “That’s my fault,” Bluerock said. “When Petrie told me you’d be coming out to Bloomington, I mentioned your name to a couple of guys. And there isn’t much around camp that Walt doesn’t pick up on.”

  “He claims he’s Parks’s agent,” I said.

  Bluerock grunted. “He’s a fucking subculture, that’s what Professor Walt is.”

  “You don’t like him, do you?”

  “No, I don’t like him,” Bluerock said coldly.

  “Can I ask why?”

  “I don’t fit into his game plan, sport,” Bluerock said. “We’re not on the same mailing lists.”

  “What’s his angle?”

  “Professor Walt? He’s into what you might call health, the whole person game. Walt’s guru to a bunch of local bodybuilders and football players. The guys worship at his feet—work out together, eat right, sleep right, do each other’s hair. Kind of like Moonies with muscles. Fred is one of the Professor’s boys. Remember Fred?”

  I remembered Fred from the Bloomington bar. Bluerock had implied that Fred’s guru, the Professor, had sent him to spy on us. At the time, I thought nothing of it, since I didn’t know who the Professor was. Now that I’d gotten that phone call and knew that “Professor Walt” was also Parks’s agent, Bluerock’s accusation didn’t seem quite so far-fetched.

  “Why do you call him ‘Professor’ Walt?” I asked Otto.

  “He’s got a Ph.D. in exercise physiology,” Bluerock said. “Or so he claims. He got the nickname when he won the Nationals in
power lifting a couple of years ago. The muscle mags dubbed him the ‘Professor of Press.’”

  “He’s a power lifter?” I said. “Over the phone, the son-of-a-bitch sounded like a corporate lawyer.”

  “Oh, Walt’s a class act, all right. If you’re impressed, just think how he comes across to guys like Fred—guys whose entire life’s reading consists of back issues of Joe Weider magazines.”

  “Fred’s a protégé?”

  “A star pupil.”

  “What about Parks?”

  “It’s different with Bill,” he said, without explanation.

  I started to ask him what he meant, but I knew I wouldn’t get an answer. The sense of loyalty that had kept him from talking to me the night before hadn’t evaporated overnight. And nagging him about Parks wasn’t going to change that. Instead, I asked him how Kaplan had gotten involved in the agency business.

  “How do you think?” Bluerock said. “You tell somebody how to spend his time, pretty soon you’re telling him how to spend his money. And how much money he should make. It’s a very sweet racket.”

  “Okay, Otto,” I said. “Thanks for the help.”

  “Stoner,” Bluerock said. “Give me a call after you get done with the Prof.”

  “All right.”

  “And Stoner?”

  “Yes.”

  “Quit calling me Otto. I hate that fucking name.”

  “What do you want me to call you?” I said.

  “Mr. Bluerock would be nice. But friends call me Blue.” He laughed. “You know, I’m setting a precedent here.”

  “You afraid you’re going to regret it?”

  “I think I already do,” he said, and hung up.

  7

  AS HOLY shrines go, Kaplan’s Health and Fitness Club was no Taj Mahal—just a long, low concrete building with a plate glass door and window and a flat asphalt roof. It was located right where Kaplan had said it would be, across from the Sohio station on Winton Road, in one of those little shopping plazas that used to be the rage before the big malls were built. The club was on the south side of the plaza, across from a bakery and a drugstore. I couldn’t see into the gym from where I’d parked in the lot out front—the window was blinded and the plate glass door to its right had been painted over—but it looked identical to the bakery and the drugstore, except for the parade of men and boys who kept trailing in and out.