The Spoiler

by Domenic Stansberry

  The truth, Lofton knew, was that Strom was a bore. Lofton knew writers who had interviewed Zeke Strom. The man had nothing to say. His was a dullness, without cause or explanation, that made it impossible for him to have a slump, to suffer psychological doubts, or have a bad day, no matter how the team played around him. Even now, trapped in the underwater haze of the barroom’s television, Strom connected. He rapped the ball into short right and ran slowly—huffing and puffing, a lumbering giant in an unhappy dream—to first base.

  “I hate the fuckin’ Red Sox,” said Tenace.

  Lofton attempted the kind of comradely laugh he guessed Tenace wanted.

  “I guess you’re wondering why the fuck I wanted to talk to you,” the scorer went on. Despite his loathing for the Red Sox, Tenace’s eyes were still on the game. “I wanted to tell you to watch yourself.” He reached across the table and patted Lofton on the shoulder. “You got me, pal?”

  “No.” Lofton felt a churning in his stomach, like glass.

  “Okay, I’ll say it clearer. Stay away from the slut.” Tenace’s eyes filled with a sharp, vicarious pleasure. “I seen you with her the other day. It’s not smart. They’re tight, all of them.”

  “All of who?”

  “Amanti. Brunner. Liuzza. They been together a long time. You know those guineas. Fuck each other, screw each other, but don’t you do it. Kinda like West Side Story. Man, woman, knife, cock—as long as it’s in the family, as long as it’s one guinea to another.”

  “Give me a break. You’ve been reading too many junk magazines.”

  “Suit yourself. Fuck her until you’re silly in the head, for all I care.”

  “I’m going to see her tomorrow. I’ll mention your suggestion.”

  Tenace smirked. “You’re stupid.”

  “Why?” Lofton had a feeling he had just made a mistake, but he wasn’t sure how. The uncertainty made him dizzy, as if the blood were leaving his head. He reached over for one of Tenace’s cigarettes. Still smirking, Tenace turned back to the game.

  “They called that one wrong. It’s not a hit; it’s an error.”

  “What were you and Golden talking about yesterday, down at the field, before you asked for this little meeting?” He remembered how Golden had looked, gloomy and sulking, ready to detonate.

  “Golden confides in me. About his sex life.” Tenace laughed, pleased with himself. Lofton didn’t respond; sometimes Tenace just wasn’t funny. “You’re really something, Lofton, you know that.” The scorer chuckled again. He stared at the table, at the beer glass in front of him. “Really something.”

  “Who sent you?” Lofton asked. Tenace stared at his glass. Lofton realized how drunk Tenace was; the scorer had got himself punched good to play this routine.

  “I’m just warning you. You won’t be the first guy who thought he could ride himself a piece of Italian ass to the gates of heaven. But let me tell you something: That ass’ll trick you, they always do, and there ain’t no heaven.”

  “Is this a friendly warning or a threat? Tell me who sent you to talk to me.”

  “Some big shot. I don’t remember his name.… You could help yourself pretty damn good, Lofton, you know, by minding your own business.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” he asked again. When Tenace did not respond, Lofton reached across the table, hitting Tenace’s shoulder. “Huh, pal, why the favor?”

  Tenace clicked his head up. He no longer looked drunk. “You wanna know the truth, I don’t give a goddamn. I’m fattening up my wallet. Gonna make it fat as a dago prick.”

  “You talk filth. How long since you been laid?”

  “Forty years. And you want to know the truth, I’d like to see you stick it to him, stick it to him good.”

  “Stick it to who?” Lofton asked, but Tenace was wound up, and he kept going, ignoring the question.

  “But it ain’t gonna happen. I seen what’s going on, I see it all. Guys like you, they think someone like me’s a loser, but I know my situation, I know when to grab and when to duck. I want to go to Spain, you know, I had some good luck with the broads there back when I was in the service. But I’m too old for the service now, too fat. So, if I want to go there, if I want to do anything, I have to write my own ticket. I’m not going to spend the rest of my life working for somebody else, ticking away my life like a watch in that bastard’s crotch pocket.”

  “Who’s got you in his crotch pocket? Brunner?”

  Tenace winced, as if he feared that the conversation had let something loose that was supposed to stay secret. But he could not keep himself from talking; it was just his nature. So he tried to correct his mistake.

  “Back off. I done my job. Maybe I didn’t tell it to you subtle, maybe I didn’t whisper it to you one pal to another, but this is the message: Back off or your head’s smashed.” Tenace smiled, almost friendly; his grip was tight around his glass. “Okay?”

  “Okay, but who’s going to do it, you?”

  “Sure, me. Why not me?”

  “Thanks.”

  “No problem. My wallet’s already getting fatter. My ass’s floating right off the ground.”

  Tenace sighed as if relieved, as if he had just finished an unpleasant task. The scorer turned back to the television. At the plate Tony Ramas, whom the Red Sox had bought for big money, took a called third strike on the outside corner.

  “Blind bastard,” said Tenace. “Even Babe Ruth’s corpse would’ve swung at that.”

  The walls were gray in the morning light, and the air was hot. Overnight, the heat had returned, and Lofton had not slept. At every sound in the hall or scuttle in the street, he started up. Mendoza, he thought, the Latinos. He chain-smoked through the night, worried that this investigation would lead him the same place it had led Einstein: into the middle of the warring street gangs. Einstein’s investigations had gotten him near the truth, and Kirpatzke—well, he wasn’t exactly a hard-nosed editor, snorting up the truth like a hog after truffles. It seemed the editor preferred leaving the dirt pretty much as it lay. Einstein had kept scratching anyway, and eventually he had scratched too close. When McCullough had sent Lofton down the same path, Kirpatzke had tried to steer him away from the story. Whom was Kirpatzke covering for? Despite everything, Lofton still had nothing proving that Brunner gained anything by the fires. It was possible that Brunner was just a businessman, interested in politics and baseball, who happened to choose a mistress that wanted to use him back, to get at her old lover. It could be the whole story was an elaborate scheme of Kelley’s, a way of getting at his old rival. Or maybe Randy Gutierrez’s stories were simply the ravings of a man who had done too much coke and found himself too far from home.

  He almost wished that one of these explanations were true, that the arson conspiracy were nothing but a baroque invention and the fires had somehow started entirely spontaneously, for no reason at all. As in other stories he’d worked on, his notebook was full of names, written increasingly illegibly, lines drawn between them in an attempt to figure out connections, then crossed out and drawn in again, until finally he discovered that in an idle moment he had sketched his own name in among the others, as if in some mysterious way he were as guilty as everyone else, guilty as Golden, who acted as the go-between, and guilty as Brunner, who worked behind the scenes to keep the city burning, and guilty as Kelley, who tried to play the fires to his own advantage. By asking around for Gutierrez, Lofton thought, I brought him attention. I helped grease the trigger.

  He wondered about Tenace. Someone had sent the scorer to talk to him, to warn him out of town—probably Brunner. It seemed Brunner knew Lofton was on the case now, too, and was beginning his own efforts to scare him off. Lofton doubted Tenace was Brunner’s errand boy on any kind of permanent basis. The scorer’s manner was too clumsy, unprofessional. He guessed that Brunner—or one of Brunner’s people—had given the scorer a few bucks to pass along the message as a friendly warning, one buddy to the next. Tenace had botched it: He’d been too trans
parent; Brunner’s hand was visible behind the scenes. Still, it might be well to heed the scorer’s warning. The next person Brunner sent might not bother to keep his fists under glass.

  As soon as business hours started, Lofton went to a quick-photo place and got back the pictures he had left there to be developed, the shots he had taken while rummaging in the old mill. Though his camera had broken when he fell from the fence, the film had survived. The pictures were foggy, all orange light and darkness, but you could still make out the debris pushed into deliberate piles. He wasn’t sure what the pictures proved, other than the fact that Brunner really hadn’t gotten too far with renovations. He pulled out his trunk and put the pictures in with his other papers. He gathered up Gutierrez’s letters and the other things he had taken from the shortstop’s apartment. He still hadn’t managed to get the letters translated; they’d been no help to him so far. He bent over the trunk. His body was sore and scratched; he still hurt from his fall at the warehouse. His blood tingled with nicotine.

  I have my mother’s cancer.

  The thought gave him a funny pleasure, like rubbing a sore spot or picking a scab. He thought of Maureen and the shining blue Colorado sky; he thought of his son in Vermont. I should see the boy, he thought, I should get going. I should take Tenace’s advice and leave. Kirpatzke had given him the same warning. And Liuzza, with his check for a grand, asking for nothing, really, in return, had given him the means. He flipped through his clipbooks, his collection of old articles and headlines that he still carried with him from place to place: WOMAN LIVES WITH CANCER; DOG WEEPS ON MASTER’S GRAVE; BOY WITH NO ARM SURVIVES FIRE; HOMOSEXUAL MAYOR BOOTED; GIRL, FAMILY DIE IN FATHER’S SUICIDAL RAGE.

  He had written these stories back when he started, back after he’d broken up with Nancy, traveling from one dusty weekly to another, working his way up to those rural California towns where enough people placed want ads for a daily to survive.

  “He never loved his children.”

  “He lost his testicles during the war.”

  “She cursed the family on her deathbed. We fought over the old man’s money all our lives.”

  Secrets. He scrawled them in the margins of his notebooks. Not the stuff of local papers. Better saved for himself and—he could not help imagining this, though who would ever be interested enough to struggle with his handwriting?—the person who rummaged through his papers when he was dead. “Fame is a killer,” a local TV personality once told him. “Covers your whole life with dirt.” Like everyone else, Lofton thought, I want my bit, too, just like Mendoza, in his drug-charged dementia, wants his name scratched in the dust. Then something else occurred to Lofton: If I keep on with this arson story, I might be killed. I won’t die, sweet and slow, in a hospital, with time to think it over. I’ll die on the street. Maybe that’s better, but I’ll never see my son.

  Kenner, Vermont, was about two hours off the interstate highway, a small New England crossroads that did not have the upkeep and blush of towns more on the tourist trail. The white Congregationalist church was freshly painted, but the town’s two main streets, and the buildings clustered around their intersection, were old and battered: a rusting breakfast diner; a G&Y grocery; an American Legion hall with two bronzed cannons on the lawn; and an old people’s home, painted a dull green, where a solitary woman sat rocking on the porch.

  Lofton drove through the village and took the road north out of town. Driving these roads that twisted and wound through the low hills, he began to feel drowsy, as if he were reading a book and his life were a distant concern. He began to see why Nancy stayed in this part of the country, although he always thought she’d hate to be so isolated. Nancy could have aborted the baby, she could have killed it, he thought, but she hadn’t. That’s why he’d driven up here, twelve years ago, to get her back. That’s why he had thought she still loved him.

  Lofton made the last turn, onto a dirt track road. He saw a boy playing in a field behind the trees, and imagined the boy throwing down the bat, running to meet his father—to meet me—and then Lofton turned the car again, plummeting down a dirt road that wound through the trees to his first wife’s house.

  The house was in the open sun, except for trees shading it in the back. There was a car in the driveway, a small foreign model with a hatch. He guessed that if Nancy were here, she had heard his car come in and was probably looking at him now. He wondered if her husband, Davenport, was here, too. Back when Lofton had known him, Davenport was just starting out as a contractor, redesigning old houses. Lofton had no idea if Davenport was still in the same business, if he had succeeded, or, for that matter, if Nancy and he were still married. Stepping out of the car, into the sun, he found it amazing that the house was still here, that Davenport’s name was still on the mailbox. He walked a little more slowly, wondering if they watched him coming up the walk, if they recognized him and asked themselves why he had come. For a second he thought he saw someone watching him from behind the screen. As he walked closer, he was no longer sure. The image seemed nothing more than a phantom, sunlight and shadow rippling on the wire mesh.

  When Lofton reached the door, he could see a man inside the house, sitting in the living room, his back to the door. Lofton knocked, full of foreboding. For a crazy second, as the man raised and turned himself in the shadows, Lofton thought the man was not Davenport at all but Brunner.

  Of course he was wrong. His imagination had simply cross-circuited, confused the past with the present. Davenport had aged. He was no longer young and ambitious, fresh out of college, but a man close to forty, just a few years older than Lofton.

  “I’ve come to talk to Nancy.”

  Davenport studied him. “Sure,” he said, and disappeared into the house. He didn’t recognize me, Lofton thought; he just thinks I’m a salesman or somebody from town whose face he’s forgotten.

  Lofton waited on the porch. The trees were thick and green nearby; mosquitoes gathered around his head. Tempted to leave, to forget the whole thing, he looked back at the car.

  When he turned, he saw Nancy at the open door. She looked him up and down. Her face expressed neither surprise nor fear, nor any particular joy.

  Lofton could think of nothing to say. He had not seen her in twelve years. Her hair had grown gray in a few places; she had not dyed it. She might be a little heavier, too, now that he looked closely. She looked good, he thought.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked. Lofton shrugged. He saw her odd, crooked smile—he had forgotten about that—and then he shrugged again.

  “I work at a paper down the road.”

  “How far?” she asked.

  “Over the border.” Lofton laughed.

  Her smile softened, and Lofton stepped closer.

  “What do you want?”

  Lofton felt the sharpness in his chest and the sun on his back. He stared into her wide-cheeked face another moment, still not answering. He wondered if her husband was watching.

  “Nancy.” Lofton started to speak; then he heard the soft, childlike tone in his voice and felt his mouth fall open, heavy like a stone. I have cancer. He could not say the words. They seemed absurd, melodramatic, and they were probably not even true.

  “What do you want from me?” Her voice lilted, loud enough for Davenport to hear.

  He closed his eyes. He remembered the long conversations with her on the phone and the long pauses, the silence over the dark wires. She put her hands on her hips, a defiant gesture he had always found attractive.

  “I want to see my son.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Lofton pursed his lips, a tight smile. She was probably right. When he imagined the boy, he imagined old pictures of himself, the black-and-white photos, ragged white edges, the boy posing—as Lofton had once posed—leaning against a stone wall, wearing baggy trousers and a striped T-shirt.

  “Your son’s away. He’s at camp.”

  “Which camp?”

  She would not answer; instead, she looked him ov
er again, up and down. For a moment the world—the bushes, the trees, the hot summer air—seemed to be tight around them.

  “Should we go for a walk?” he asked.

  She nodded and led the way, starting down a path into the forest. Along the way he thought of things to ask her—Are you happy with Davenport?—and he answered the questions for the most part on his own, guessing the answers from the movement of her body, the way the sun shimmered off her blouse, and allowing the surface talk between them, the one-sentence exchanges—Do you walk down here often?—to disappear into the hum and chatter of the afternoon.

  They came to a clearing, and in that clearing was a cracked cement foundation, walls all but gone at the edges, a stone hearth at the center, still intact but crumbling, rising into the air like an old tree. The hearth was filled with twigs and leaves.

  “The birds nest there in spring,” she said. They stood watching each other, far from her husband.

  “There’s a root cellar over here.” She pointed at a hatch, half-decayed, broken, that opened into the floor. Lofton thought he heard an animal scuttling below.

  “Type of place you like to go when you’re a kid,” he said.

  “Maybe.” She turned and looked up the path they had come.