The Spoiler

by Domenic Stansberry

  During the break the Amanti woman suddenly left Brunner. She touched Brunner on the shoulder first. Brunner glanced back, nodded his thick head, and she left. She walked up the stands toward Lofton. Though he had been wondering when she would come, he was still surprised when she stopped in front of him and introduced herself. He glanced to the press box, but Tenace and the others could not see him from this angle.

  She did not seem as good-looking up close as she had from a distance. A dark woman with dark hair, she had unsettling blue eyes and a splotchy birthmark on her left cheek. She stood in front of him awkwardly, but even in her awkwardness there seemed something feigned, something rehearsed. Her eyes did not settle on him but skirted the crowd. He asked her to sit down. She shook her head.

  “I saw you in the press box. You’re a reporter?” she asked, though her inflection suggested she already knew the answer.

  “Sure,” Lofton said. “I’m a reporter.”

  She smiled, nothing flirtatious, just a smile. She told him she had a story, something he might be interested in. He shrugged and motioned for her to sit down. She refused again; instead, she handed him a slip of paper. He unfolded it, glanced at her name and address written in harsh black strokes on white paper, then tucked it into his shirt pocket.

  “When should I come?”

  She did not seem to be listening. She glanced from the concession stand to Brunner, then to the press box. Brunner had not looked back during this interchange. Lofton did not know why, but he did not want Brunner to see them talking. He could think of nothing else to say to this woman; he almost wished she would go away. He watched the first baseman, who was warming up on the mound now, practicing his delivery to the catcher, pausing every once in a while to look over at Coach Barker, as if wondering how long before the ruse would be over and he could go back to his regular position. Amanti touched Lofton on the shoulder, arresting his attention.

  “Tomorrow?” she asked, a note of anxiety in her voice. He nodded, and Amanti went back down the stands to Brunner.

  Lofton felt nervous. He did not trust this woman. Though the stakes were small here, or seemed small to Lofton, people always tried to use the press in some way—to grind someone else’s nose, to promote themselves. Still, he might wrestle something from her, some small scrap of color he could paste into the background of the story he wanted to write.

  On the field, the first baseman had finished warming up in his new position. From the looks of him, he had probably pitched before. A lot of minor league talent had played pitcher at some point or the other, in high school or college. Aside from being good showmanship, Barker’s move, transferring the first baseman to the mound, made a degree of sense. No point in dragging another good arm into a lost game.

  The first baseman pitched surprisingly well. To the cheers of the crowd, half-drunk on ballpark beer, he struck out the opposing pitcher. The next batter hit the ball hard, but the Holyoke right fielder, caught up in the carnival atmosphere, made a daring dive and caught the ball before it hit the asphalt track.

  When the inning was over, the first baseman walked off smiling, obviously pleased with himself. Lofton was amused, but he was not impressed. When you knew you were going to lose, when all the pressure was gone, then sometimes you outperformed yourself.

  The rest of the game went quickly. Glens Falls scored once—a long, solo home run by the team’s cleanup hitter—and Holyoke did not score at all. Afterward Lofton hurried down to the dugout. In contrast with the fans, who had enjoyed a good joke, the players were grim. They shuffled off the field slowly. Even Elvin Banks, the center fielder who liked to flirt with the teenage girls after the game, was subdued.

  Lofton was struck, again, by how young the players were. There was still a part of him, left over from when he was a kid, that idolized ballplayers, that saw them as men engaged in an important, epic struggle. To see them as just kids was disillusioning.

  He could not find Sparks. He saw the Springfield reporter, Rhiner, interviewing the first baseman. He walked up close and eavesdropped, writing down what the first baseman said. Rhiner threw him a foul look, but Lofton did not care. He wrote the quote down anyway, leaving blanks for the words, the sentences he did not catch, figuring he could guess at those if he needed them. Nobody expected you to be that accurate. He had one question of his own for the first baseman, but Rhiner herded him away. Lofton asked Tim Carpenter, the second baseman, instead.

  “Where’s Sparks?”

  Carpenter, another blue-eyed Southern Californian, did not know. He shrugged his shoulders. Lofton spotted the first baseman, free now from the Springfield reporter’s questions.

  “Where’s Sparks?”

  The first baseman shrugged also. “Split, I guess. Probably in the showers.”

  He should have guessed. After leaving the dugout area, he ran up the third base side toward the small brick building that served as the Holyoke team’s clubhouse, general office, and meeting room. He ran by the players, scanning for Sparks. Instead, he found Coach Barker.

  “Where’s Sparks?”

  Lofton was out of breath. Barker did not answer.

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  “You just did,” said Barker. Lofton ignored the crack.

  “Just tell me, what are Sparks’s chances of making it up to the majors?”

  “This year? I don’t know about those things. The Blues have—”

  “I don’t mean now. I mean ever.”

  “Sparks is a major league prospect.”

  Coach Barker looked at the dirt as he said it. It was just a line. He would say the same about any player.

  “Then how come you pitch him so often? His arm can’t survive that.”

  Barker kept looking at the dirt as he walked toward the clubhouse. Lofton asked again.

  “Because that’s what he wants. Simple.” Barker still did not look up. He grabbed the handle of the clubhouse door. Lofton stopped. Barker had a policy, no reporters inside. At least not until you had been around for a while.

  Lofton waited outside. Lumpy, the catcher, came out dressed in street clothes, a pair of jeans and a white T-shirt. If he had showered, it did not look it.

  “Where’s Sparks?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Inside?”

  “Ain’t seen him.”

  Lofton gave up and left the stadium.

  Outside in the parking lot he saw him. Sparks, still dressed in his Holyoke whites, stood talking to a woman. Amanti. Sparks seemed animated, upset. Amanti, on the other hand, looked placid as a cat. Maureen’s black cat, Lofton thought; then he instantly remembered Garcia was dead, run over by a car.

  Soon the conversation ended. The Amanti woman walked away, and Sparks, his head down, remained staring at the asphalt.

  “I miss that cat,” Lofton whispered to himself, and left Sparks alone in the darkness.

  He took the back way home, along the less well-lighted streets. A longer way, but he was in no hurry, even though he had to have his story ready for the Dispatch by early morning.

  The streets were dark and dirty; they smelled of wet ash and rotting plywood. Many of the tenement buildings had been burned, their doors and windows covered with old wood and nailed shut. Men sat on their porch steps, their wives talking to one another in the shadows behind them. Kids straddled their banana-seat Sting Rays and laughed to one another. A Hispanic man in his early twenties, long black hair tied in a ponytail, cupped his hands and yelled out in Spanish. Lofton could not tell if the man was yelling at him, only that what the man yelled was an insult. The man stood on his porch step and glared. Lofton kept walking.

  His old redbrick hotel stood on Cabot Street near a canal where the Connecticut River had been siphoned off into a green and unmoving stream between two old mills. He asked the night clerk if there had been any calls for him. No one had called, but there was a letter from his wife. He put the letter in his shirt pocket and went up the narrow stairs. He could smell the heavy odor of Pu
erto Rican cooking, tomatoes and grease, and could hear the thick Spanish of the family on the first floor.

  When he lay down in his room, he could not get himself to read the letter in his pocket. He got up and took a cigarette from the pack of Viceroys on top of the old Crosley refrigerator—he had cigarettes everywhere—and opened the refrigerator door for a beer. Again he went back to the bed. He still did not open the letter.

  He had met Maureen at his brother’s house in Denver. He had just come out from California, where he’d been working on a story for the San Jose Star, about a city councilman hooked up with the gaming parlors and crack houses downtown—and with other things, too, that reached out in a complicated, tangled web to Las Vegas and to the state legislature in Sacramento. His editor at the Star had been resisting the story the whole way, every column inch. Then, and it had seemed a coincidence at the time, Lofton had gotten a call from Senator Hansen in Washington. The senator wanted Lofton to be his press secretary for the Sacramento office. Lofton was tired of fighting his editor; the story itself had become frightening, maybe dangerous; besides, he liked Senator Hansen, so he took the job. Things had been great for him at first, chumming with Hansen when the senator was in town, drinking with the governor’s boys and their blonde secretaries, but then the whole thing had gone sour in a way he didn’t like to think about anymore. So Lofton had recouped his losses: He walked out of the office and drove to his brother’s house in Colorado.

  When he first saw Maureen, she sat at the kitchen table, her back to the door, while his brother, Joe, chopped salad greens at the counter in front of her.

  “Frank,” his brother said, “I have somebody for you.”

  A clumsy introduction, but Joe had always been clumsy. When they were kids, he could not even shag a fly ball. He was afraid and cringed at the last minute. Other times, like running track, he was beautiful.

  At first he’d thought Joe and Maureen were together, considering the familiar way they talked and how, when standing up to help with the plates, Maureen touched his brother on the shoulder. She was the type his brother would dig up, a schoolteacher, never married, a plump, almost pretty woman with pale skin and black hair. Except there was something about her—a fierceness in her eyes, maybe, or a hollow in the cheeks, or a way of turning her head—that made her seem, from certain angles, beautiful and that told him she was not involved with his brother.

  “So how do you know my brother?” he asked when Joe was off in the other room.

  “He dates my cousin, Daisy,” Maureen said. “She’s a writer, too. And a bitch.”

  Lofton liked Maureen. She held her hand to her throat when she talked, and later that night, when she took him for a drive through the empty back streets of Denver, they stopped at a fashionable bar in the warehouse district and sat close to one another, touching and kissing in the gloomy, smoky air. The next morning he looked out the upstairs window of the old house she lived in, bought with the insurance money her father had left when he died. He could see over the rooftops toward the Colorado Rockies: the old brownstones, the tall buildings and steel towers, all converging at the base of the great mountains jutting out of the high plains. As she leaned over him, he noticed fine wrinkles in her face and a clear depth in her eyes. They got married with his brother watching, half smiling in the bright courthouse air.

  After they were married, Lofton decided to stay away from the dailies and work free-lance instead. With Maureen working, and her house paid for except taxes, he had a chance to make the transition. When he did not have an article, which was more often than he cared to admit, he drove down to Mile High Stadium to watch the Bears, a hot Triple A club with players who were going places. Though he enjoyed watching the games, it bothered him that all he could pick up in town were nickel-and-dime features for the local papers. Part of the reason for his difficulty, he grew to suspect, had to do with that Hansen business back in California and the rumors that went along with his sudden departure. He did not tell Maureen about any of this; her goal, it seemed, was to be happy, to be fascinated with the life around her. She was as impressed with the view out an alley window as she was with the scent of the wind whipping through the vast farmlands. He remembered now lying in bed beside her and staring into the darkness. In Denver, when the smog lifted, you could sometimes smell the entire Midwest, the heart of the country, whipped up against the Rockies. He might have been able to stay in Denver. Then one night Maureen said she wanted to have a child. The darkness over the bed suddenly seemed infinite. He remembered when his first wife, Nancy, had gotten pregnant. Instead of cementing their marriage, the pregnancy had ended it. For a while he’d wanted her back; he wanted the child, his son, he’d told himself. Lying beside Maureen, staring into the darkness, he tried to imagine his son. Denver was an impossible city, he told himself; he couldn’t stay there any longer.

  One day, while Maureen was at school and the Bears were out of town, he went into the garage to look for a mower. The backyard was overgrown with high grass. Before he could find the machine, his leg went numb and the numbness seemed to reach from his toes to his chest. He pitched onto the floor. His chest hurt. He coughed into his fist.

  “Was there blood after you coughed?” the doctor asked. The doctor was young but moved slowly, speaking through a western American accent, as if the wind were blowing in his face.

  “Yes,” Lofton said, but wondered if it was true. Had he seen blood? His mother had died of cancer, but he did not really believe it could happen to him.

  “Have you ever hurt that leg before?”

  “No,” he said. Then he remembered yes, of course, he had hurt the leg, when he was coming down, years ago, from retarring a roof, and his ankle twisted on a lower rung of the ladder. He was answering everything wrong, backwards. He avoided the doctor’s eyes.

  “Did the blood leave any stains? On your shirt, your handkerchief?”

  He shook his head. He hadn’t checked, he said. The doctor held a stethoscope to Lofton’s chest. The man’s face was inscrutable. “I had a man in here yesterday who insisted that faith heals, that medicine kills, that men only die when, deep down, they want to die.”

  “What was he doing here?”

  “Dying,” the doctor said.

  Eventually Lofton slammed out of the office. The doctor watched placidly. A few days later, while sitting at his desk, a cigarette in his hand, Lofton felt his chest tighten. He got angry, no explanation in the world, and smashed his fist, first into the keys of his typewriter, then into the windows of the lower part of the house. By the time he had finished, the tightness had passed.

  Maureen looked around in disbelief. “Why have you done this?”

  “To relieve my tension,” he said. He grinned. Maureen ran upstairs, and he chased her. She would not let him into the bedroom.

  Lying in his bed, Lofton kept thinking of Maureen. He remembered places he had been, most of them alone, so that while he thought of her, he also thought of the humid fields of Iowa, of a gas station somewhere in the California desert, of the ragged sweep of brownstones in polluted Denver. She was everywhere, even here in this sagging bed, listening with him to the street noises coming through the window. He touched the letter in his pocket again. He wished she would not write.

  He set the half-finished beer can on the nightstand. He was drowsy. Forcing himself up, he sat at the Formica table and opened the letter. It was brief, written in her strange, angular handwriting. It did not seem like the handwriting of a schoolteacher. She said simply that she was selling the house, filing the papers for divorce.

  He went to the refrigerator and opened a new beer, forgetting about the half-finished one by the bed. He thought about the story he had to work on, how he should focus on Sparks, but in a way that would not humiliate the pitcher. He lay down and played with the first line in his head: “After a frustrating evening, Rickey Sparks threw his pitching glove into the dirt,” but before he could get it right, he began to doze.

  He woke
up in the early morning, before light. Standing in the clothes he had slept in, he typed out the story and drove to the Dispatch. He made deadline without any problem.

  Later that day he drove the back way out of Holyoke, past the tenements where laundry hung drying in the humid Massachusetts summer air. In another minute he was over the bridge, across the Connecticut River, driving past the rich colonial homes of South Hadley, a town that took its tone from Mount Holyoke College, a women’s school of stern brick buildings covered with dense ivy.

  He followed the road up over the Notch, past the gravel mill at the peak of the Holyoke Range. His car had trouble making the low, steeply sloping hill, but the downhill coast into Amherst was easy.

  When he reached Amherst, he was early for his meeting with Amanti, so he parked his car near the Commons, a large block of trees and grass nestled in the center of town. The University of Massachusetts, where both Lofton and Nancy had gone to school, was just a few blocks away. She had been a thin, sandy-haired Irish girl with a striking profile and the ability, when she wanted, to draw attention to herself. Only, when she received the attention, she seemed to withdraw. Under close scrutiny she became remote. When he courted her, she was elusive. He was stubborn. Maureen, now that he thought about it, had been more fun.

  It had been a long time since he’d been in Amherst. He felt unreasonably afraid someone might recognize him. The town had not changed much. Hastings Newsstand still stood in the middle of the block of buildings owned by old man Hastings, though, Lofton guessed, it must be his son who ran the business now. The tobacco store was still there, and the skid row bar, or the closest Amherst would ever have to such a thing, still existed under the same name: the Mongoose. Some of the other places had changed ownership, the bars had changed decor—polished butcher-block wood instead of Formica, men waiting tables instead of women. But Amherst had always been essentially a polished town, where the young people kept their hair in place even when they drank and had an innocent look about them, the attractive and soft air of polite, insecure children being groomed for the offices of New York and Boston. Lofton, who grew up in California, had never felt at home here. He was glad it was summer and the town given over to the locals.