Life's Work

by Jonathan Valin

  “We’re not here for skiing,” I said to him.

  “We’re hunters,” Bluerock said over my shoulder.

  “Not the game season,” the old man said. “You might do you some fishing, though. Good trout fishing on Clark Fork.”

  “We’ll check it out,” I said.

  The motel room was clean and comfortable—better than I’d expected. While I took a shower, Bluerock arranged with the desk clerk to rent a car. By the time I’d finished showering, Otto had the car, a red Dodge Colt, waiting in the lot. Otto came back up to the room while I got dressed. It was close to nine, Cincinnati time, but we’d gained two hours on the flight, so the sun was still playing brightly on the worn brick buildings outside the motel window.

  Bluerock reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a jagged page that he’d torn from a phone book. “Bill’s folks live out on Route Ninety-three. The clerk gave me instructions on how to get there.”

  “We’ve got a stop to make first,” I said.

  “Where?”

  “Sporting goods store,” I said to him. “There’s one open until nine on Brooks. At least, that’s what the Yellow Pages said.” I stared into his bulldog face. “You ever handled a weapon, Blue?”

  “I’ve done some deer hunting,” he said. “I’m no crack shot, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Well, at least one of them is.”

  “So what do we do about it?”

  “We try to get to Bill before they do,” I said.

  “And if we don’t? If they try to stop us?”

  It was a question I wasn’t prepared to answer—at least, not at that moment and not at Bluerock’s behest. Around Otto it was just too easy to act rashly and to think about it later, to follow the impulse wherever it led, whatever the consequences. I’d already found myself doing it—playing up to him, trying to fulfill the demands he made on himself and on his friends, acting the macho in spite of myself and enjoying it. But the time for recklessness, even Bluerock’s vaguely principled brand of recklessness, was past. Kaplan, Mickey, and Habib weren’t playing a scrimmage. Neither was Clayton. Or Parks.

  I put it to him bluntly. “Are you prepared to get yourself killed over Bill?”

  “Are you prepared to forget about what they did to the girl?” he replied.

  I didn’t have to think about that one. “No,” I said.

  “Then what are we going to do?” he said, giving me a sidelong, slit-eyed look. “Why the hell are we talking about guns, if we’re not planning on using them?”

  “I’m hoping we won’t have to use them,” I said.

  He shrugged and sat down heavily in a chair by the motel room window. “If you say so, sport,” he said. “But you know as well as I do what it’s going to come down to.”

  Bluerock stared out the window at the street. The brick shops were ablaze in the sunset, a white shimmer of light like sun on chrome. He closed his eyes against the glare and put his head back against the seat cushion. I pulled a fresh shirt from my duffel and put it on.

  Bluerock laughed suddenly, a single bark of contented amusement.

  “What’s so funny?” I said over my shoulder, thinking vaguely that he was laughing at me, at my scruples.

  He opened his eyes and looked up at me. “I was thinking about something that happened to me a few years back. It just popped into my head. Christ knows why.”

  “What was it?” I said, sitting down across from him on the edge of the bed.

  “We were playing in Phoenix,” he said. “It was a late fall day, and the sun was setting over the rim of the stadium like it is out there now, just a big white glare like a spotlight. We’d gotten our asses kicked for three quarters, and the game was out of hand. Everybody knew it. We were just running out the clock, trying to hold the humiliation level down to a minimum. But one of our guys fumbled on our own thirty and out came the Stars again, with a good nine minutes left to play. They were already up by twenty points. With any less time on the clock they probably would have run it out. But nine minutes—hell, that’s an eternity. They had to go for it. And they did. They moved the ball down to our three, then we stopped them for two downs for no gain. And it was third and one. We figured they’d throw one into the end zone and settle for a field goal if they missed connections. So Coach called a blitz. I was lined up on the weak side, playing down, like a lineman. Instead of passing, they ran a sweep to the strong side, their guards and tackles pulling. It was just one of those lucky plays. The blocking back was supposed to cut me, but he got tangled up with Bill instead, and I came in clean on the quarterback. I got to him just as he was handing the ball off. In fact he practically handed it to me. I hit him square in the numbers and managed to corral the running back too. Both of them went down hard, and the ball just skittered around in the backfield like a puck on ice.”

  Bluerock laughed again at the memory. “It was just right,” he said with satisfaction. “My old lady was in the stands. Her fucking family was from Phoenix. My Dad was still alive then, and he’d come down from Milwaukee. All day long I’d wanted to show them something. And there it was. When I got up at the end of that play, I felt like life couldn’t get any better. I tell you, sport, at that moment my bags were packed and I was ready to board the train.”

  I smiled at him, enjoying his enjoyment of the moment. “Who recovered the fumble?” I said.

  Bluerock grinned lazily. “They did,” he said. “One of our linemen kicked it into the end zone and one of their linemen fell on it in for a TD.”

  He laughed, and I laughed too.

  “Hey,” he said, holding out his hands in apology. “It’s never perfect. It just gets close. And sometimes it gets closer than other times. You keep lining up and making contact.”

  He got up from the chair.

  “You ready?” he said.

  I got up from the bed and tucked the shirt into my pants. “I guess so.”

  Bluerock started for the door. “Let’s go get ‘em, then,” he said.

  32

  IT WASN’T until after we’d bought shotguns, ammunition, and a pistol at the sporting goods store that I got a full sense of the absurdity of the situation. Driving along a twilit Montana highway with purpling mountains on either side of us and a back seat full of death. And for what? For Frankenstein and his bride? For a girl whom I’d liked but hadn’t loved?

  If you think too deeply about your loyalties, you can think yourself out of them. It was Bluerock’s kind of logic; but it was shaping up as a Bluerock kind of night—like the night we’d spent a few days before, drinking and carousing and making thin, adolescent fun while we searched for Bill Parks. That fun had landed me in jail and sent Bluerock to the hospital. This time, I knew full well that Otto’s kind of fun could get both of us killed. It could end in madness, what we were doing—boyish, spirited, high-minded madness, like the honorable dares of adolescence or the reflex heroics of the playing field. Only this time we could end up dead.

  I tried to size up the situation reasonably, to tote odds like a paramutual, to be sane and cautious and professional about what we were doing. And all the while, I could hear Bluerock beside me, saying, “Odds are for losers. For pussies. For wimps. Real men do what they have to do—and the hell with odds.” To Bluerock, we were in it for the glory, for the sheer principle of the thing. It was third and goal all over again. The game was already lost, but his friend was in trouble and my friend had been killed. Never mind that his friend was a madman and that Laurel had been a charming but treacherous tramp. We owed it to both of them to make things right, to shed justice like paladins or to die trying. To make contact. It could end in madness, all right. And in spite of my toting up, I could feel a part of me warm to the silly, dangerous notion. We hadn’t become friends for nothing, Bluerock and I. And we were friends. There was that, if there was nothing else unequivocal about the whole crazy enterprise.

  So I didn’t do any more thinking about the reasons, good or bad, for what I was doing there. I
thought only about what lay ahead. About how to get to Parks, if I could. About how to survive Kaplan and his pals, if I couldn’t. About how to keep Bluerock from getting his ass blown off, trying to redeem himself and his wacky, murderous friend.

  ******

  We got to the Parkses’ ranch just as the sun was setting. An access road veered off from the main highway, cutting through a dark stand of pines and ending in a dirt yard, in front of a small white house that was crumbling at the corners, like stale cake left out on a plate.

  A tall, stocky man was sitting on the porch steps. He eyed us hostilely as we got out of the car. He looked to be in his early fifties, with a rugged, florid, deeply lined face, a bull neck, and a heavy gut that filled up his flannel shirt and spilled over a wide, buckleless belt tied like a rope at his hips. His brilliantined gray hair was combed straight back from the forehead, hanging in stiff, arrow-shaped tufts above his shirt collar. The thick coat of Vitalis almost made his hair look barbered, but the tufts in back gave him away, like wild curls sneaking out beneath a shower cap.

  Behind him, from the porch of the house, a woman was looking through the black mesh of a screen door—not staring at us but watching the man, watching his back. I couldn’t see her face clearly in the lamplight, but there was a purpose in the way she stood, as if she were monitoring his movements.

  “Mr. Parks?” I said as I walked up to him.

  He grunted at me. “I’m Lew Parks. Who are you two, and what do you want?”

  Bluerock came around the side of the car and walked up to him. “Don’t you remember me, Mr. Parks? I’m Otto Bluerock. I’m a friend of Bill’s. You met me once in Cincinnati.”

  The man nodded abruptly. “I think I do remember you. How you been, son?”

  “Okay,” Otto said. “You think we could talk to you for a few minutes? About Bill?”

  The man looked back at the door of the house where the woman was standing. “I guess so. You looking for him, too, are you?”

  I glanced at Otto. “Who else is looking for him, Mr. Parks?”

  He stuck his hands in his trouser pockets. “Some guy come by this afternoon. A cop name of Clayton. I sent him on his way.” He laughed. “Dumb bastard thought he could get by me for a few lousy dollars.”

  I hadn’t counted on Clayton showing up, although I suppose I should have. He had to do something dramatic to get back in the department’s good graces, and bringing Bill in might turn the trick for him. If we didn’t get to Bill quickly, Phil’d have to be dealt with, just like the other three.

  “You boys come on in,” Lew Parks said.

  We followed him up the porch steps. As soon as the woman saw us approaching, she turned away from the door and disappeared into the house.

  There was a small foyer behind the screen door, papered in yellow stripes.

  “You can wipe your shoes on that mat by the door,” Parks said, disguising an order as an afterthought. “Jewel don’t like anyone tracking dirt through the house.”

  Bluerock and I wiped our shoes on a cocoa fiber mat in the hallway.

  Up close, Parks smelled strongly of bourbon. It could have been an aftereffect of the murders, but the tremor in his hands made me think differently. He had the kind of parched-lipped, sallow-eyed face that measures time by the pint. But then with Jewel as a helpmate, it was probably inevitable.

  Parks paused before going farther into the house, searching the hallway as if he wanted to avoid running into his wife. While he did his reconnaissance, I took my own look around. Given the decrepitude of the farm, I was surprised at how well kept everything was inside. What I could see of the place was like a page from the Sunday supplement.

  “Let’s go to the study,” Parks said, when he’d satisfied himself that Jewel wasn’t lurking around a corner. “It’s more private there.”

  We followed him down the hall to the study. I glanced through a couple of open doors along the way. Every room was the same—plump, pillowed contemporary American furniture in floral designs, papered walls, shuttered windows, deep-pile carpeting on the floors. All of it immaculately clean. Picture perfect.

  The study was leaner and more masculine than the rest—an oak desk, with a ladder-back chair behind it and a captain’s chair across from it, an oak sideboard with a pile of trophies on it, a few framed newspaper articles and photographs on the walls, and a couple of bookshelves full of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. Parks fit into the ladder-back chair like a tongue into a groove, planting both hands on his knees, straightening his neck and staring at the sideboard. Amid the trophies stood one lone fifth of whiskey. He glanced at it furtively, as if it were a pretty girl passing by.

  “You boys want a drink?” he asked, when his thirst got the better of him. I could tell from his tone of voice that he didn’t really want to pay our tab.

  Otto shook his head.

  I said, “No, but you go ahead.”

  Parks wet his lower lip and replied, “Well, maybe just the one.”

  He got up and went over to the sideboard, tipping the fifth back and studying its contents like a man studying the label of a wine. “Just let me get a glass,” he said over his shoulder and walked out of the room, taking the bottle with him.

  While he was gone, I walked over to the table full of trophies. They were arranged in tiers on the sideboard, like the layers of a wedding cake. The ones on the lowest level were for state wrestling championships, next higher up were weight-lifting trophies, and sitting on top was a silver punch bowl. I took a look at the inscription on its side: “Big Eight Lineman of the Year, William Parks, 1977.”

  “He should have won the Outland in seventy-eight,” Parks said as he came back into the room. “He would have, too, if he hadn’t torn his knee up halfway into the season. He missed six games and still made all-Big Eight. But it cost him.” He dashed the whiskey bottle into a jelly glass he was holding in his right hand. “Christ, did it cost him.”

  Parks took his glass and bottle back to the desk and sat down again in the ladder-back chair. I sat down across from him and watched him drink. Bluerock leaned against the sideboard. Almost at once the whiskey took effect, reddening Parks’s face and clearing his eyes. His hands stopped shaking too. He poured another ounce into the jelly glass and drank it in one swallow.

  “Did you ever see Billy play?” he said to me. “On TV, maybe?”

  I nodded. “Many times. He was good.”

  “He was better than that,” Lew Parks said. “He was going to be one of the great ones. If he could’ve gotten his mind right. I don’t know how many times I’ve told him that you play the game up here.” Parks touched the glass to his forehead. “Ask any coach worth his salt—football’s fifty, sixty percent mental. Of course, you gotta have the build for it, and God knows Billy’s got the strength and size. But concentration, that’s the key. You concentrate, you don’t get hurt. Billy thinks it’s all down here.” He pinched his right bicep through the shirt sleeve. “That’s why he popped his knee. That’s why he didn’t get drafted until the eighth round. Have any idea how much money that meant, getting drafted eighth round instead of first?”

  “A goodly amount,” I said.

  “Hell, yes. A goodly amount.” Parks began to cry. Just like that. Without any warning. Crying for what might have been. Crying a little bit, I thought, for all that money his son would never make. Although that might have been unfair.

  I glanced at Bluerock. He was staring, shamefaced, at the carpet.

  “Do you have any idea where he is, Mr. Parks,” Bluerock said huskily. “It’s important that we talk to him.”

  Parks looked up at us, tears streaming down his cheeks. He started to say something, when a voice from the hall said, “No!”

  All three of us glanced at the doorway. Jewel Parks was standing there, scowling at her husband. She was a large woman, rawboned and running to fat. But unlike Parks, she wore the weight well. On him it looked sloppy; on her it added sensual appeal. A big-breasted, big-hipped woman
with bobbed brown hair, a bee-stung mouth, and a fair-skinned, pretty, careworn face. She was wearing a white linen dress that crossed at her bosom and swept in thick folds around her belly. It was clear from the way she carried herself that she was used to being looked at by men, and that she liked it. She must have been something fifteen years before, I thought.

  The surprising sensuousness of his wife made me reevaluate Parks. I hadn’t really thought about it because of his gruffness and his booze, but he must have been a handsome, athletic kid himself, fifteen or twenty years before. He still had an athlete’s frame—big shoulders and arms. But the flesh had sagged on the hanger, like an old suit with change left in the pockets. He looked ten years older than his wife and ready for middle age. He also looked as if he was aware of the difference and slightly cowed by it.

  As soon as his wife came through the door he scrubbed his cheeks with his fists, as if she’d caught him doing something shameful.

  “You might have offered these men a drink, Lew,” she said as she swept into the room. Her voice was low and melodious, an odd complement to her husband’s barking bass. “Seeing that they’re whiskey drinkers like yourself.”

  “I did offer them a drink,” Parks replied testily. “I’ll offer them one again, if it suits you.”

  She didn’t answer him. Instead, she stared directly at Bluerock. “I know you,” she said, giving him a fierce, reproachful look. “I know what you want, and you won’t find it here.”

  “I can handle this, Jewel,” Parks said feebly.

  “No, you can’t, Lew. You can’t handle anything with a bottle in your hand.”

  Parks rattled in his chair, exactly as if she had laid her hands on his shoulders and shaken him violently. “Watch your mouth, Jewel,” he said hoarsely. “I said I could handle it.”

  “Just like you handled Bill,” she said. “Just like you handle everything else.”