Something for Nothing (2 page)

Martin looked at Roberts for a second, thinking. He had to lean away from him, both because he was wearing strong cologne and because he had a faint smell of rot on his breath.

“Actually, Gary, I don't need to do the gas lines,” he said. “I've got a pump out at the airport. I just fill up out there.”

He gave Roberts a pursed-lip smile, fake but amicable, gauging his expression. He knew he shouldn't have said anything, that Roberts was the town gossip, but it was worth it. Screw you, Martin thought. He glanced at Peter in the rearview mirror. He could tell he was listening.

Martin watched Sarah walk toward the far side of the main building, toward some bike racks. Where was she going? The bell had just sounded as they drove up, and he knew for a fact that her class wasn't over there, in the bike racks. There was a group of boys standing there, though, and they looked up and smiled as Sarah walked up to them.

Martin looked back at Roberts and saw that he was smiling appreciatively.

“So,” he said to Martin. “Your own gas station. Nice.”

Roberts had blond, receding hair and reddish-blond eyebrows. He didn't look like a swimming hero now. Fleshy, balding. And Martin saw, suddenly, that his lips were thick and splotchy. He wasn't just a creep, Martin decided. He was also disgusting.

“Hey,” Roberts said, leaning in a tiny bit closer. More bad breath. “When're we gonna hook up for some salmon fishing? I know Brian would be thrilled. I think he'd love to spend some time with Peter. You bring the kids out with you sometimes, right?”

Roberts was referring to Martin's boat, a six-year-old, forty-six-foot Viking. Wood-hulled, a big below-deck cabin space, with a little living room area, a kitchenette, and a couple of beds up in the prow. He'd named it
By a Nose,
in reference to the racehorse he'd had at the time and that horse's penchant for close finishes (now he had a different horse, and this one seemed to like close races, too). The boat had cost him almost as much as his house—more than a thousand dollars a foot, Linda had pointed out. In fact, she'd been horrified when he'd bought it about two years ago.

“You've got a lot of toys, Martin,” she'd said. “Let's see: racehorses, cabin up at Tahoe, and now a deep-sea fishing boat. Are you sure we can really afford all this?”

The honest answer (which he hadn't given her) was no. But he'd bought it anyway. He kept it in Jack London Square Marina, in Oakland, and when the salmon were running, he'd head out under the Golden Gate Bridge and past the Farallon Islands and catch the limit. Sometimes he'd bring back more, but more than once he'd been stopped by a game warden at the dock, and so he had to be careful, hide the extras down in the cabin, in a separate cooler. Sarah wasn't interested, but Peter loved it. He'd started baiting his own hook, and he wasn't squeamish about handling the fish once they reeled them in. Those were good days out there, even in crappy weather and even when they didn't catch anything. Martin wasn't sure, but he thought that the boat was starting to become a refuge for Peter—an escape from getting teased and bullied
(or just plain ignored) at school. So even if Gary Roberts brought twenty gallons of Baskin-Robbins to the marina, there was no way in hell he and his jerk-off son would ever set foot on his boat.

“Listen,” Martin said to Roberts, nodding. “The fish aren't running yet, but when they do . . . let's do it.” Martin glanced in the rearview mirror; Peter made momentary eye contact with him, then looked back down at his notebook.

Roberts gave the top of Martin's car a slap and took a step back. “Gotta go,” he said. “Delivery coming in from Berkeley at nine, if the traffic isn't too bad.”

Martin nodded and gave Roberts a half wave. He wanted to say that there wouldn't be any traffic because no one had any gas, but he didn't want to extend the conversation even that far.

He turned forward one last time to watch Sarah. The sun was shining at an angle through his windshield, and it was hard to see her clearly. He certainly saw—again—that her skirt was too short. Even from this distance he could see that her tanned legs looked long and appealing, and he had a feeling that the junior high boys and even the male teachers would be checking her out all day long.

He also had a feeling she'd be getting high at some point during the day. Maybe more than once. For all he knew, she might not even make it to class. He and Linda had suspected this for a long time. Then, a couple of months ago, Linda had found a bag of pot in a hidden compartment in Sarah's purse. It was one of those things made out of an old pair of jeans; you undid the zipper to get to the secret compartment.

“Martin,” Linda had said to him, holding the bag out toward him. “Look at this.” From her expression, Martin had thought that it was going to be something genuinely awful—a bunch of pills, or a cut-off finger, even. But when he saw the little bundle of dried up, greenish-brown plant material, he'd been relieved. It was a problem, he knew that. But not an emergency.

Linda had felt differently, though, and soon Sarah was in drug-counseling class two nights a week at a high school a few towns over.
It was a family thing, and so they had to go with her; they even had to take Peter. There were films of heroin junkies retching in stairways; tough-love talks by cops and detectives and ex-addicts; counselors talking about opening the channels of communication in your family. It was a little crazy.

“So how do we know they're not using actors in those films?” he'd finally asked at one point. They were in the car, driving home, all four of them staring silently out the windows into the darkness.

Peter had laughed, and Martin could tell he'd scored points with Sarah. But Linda hadn't been amused.

“That's right, Martin,” she'd said. “It's all a big joke. You're a comedian.”

Martin apologized, but what he really felt was relief—he'd almost made the same joke right there in the classroom, in front of all the kids and parents. And he would have done it, except that a couple of the cops were a little intimidating. This was especially true of one of them. He was a detective—one of those plain-clothes guys, like on TV—and he'd shown them his bullet wounds from two separate shootings during drug raids in Oakland. Martin remembered him, because during a break the guy had stopped Peter and asked what he was reading. (It was
Baseball Stars of 1973
.) They were just out of earshot, and Martin saw that they talked for a couple of minutes.

Later, when he asked what they'd talked about, Peter just shrugged and said “The A's.”

“What about them?”

“Just, you know, the playoffs and stuff.”

“Did you tell him we went to a playoff game last year?” Martin asked.

“I don't know,” Peter had said, his voice flat and hard to read. “I don't think so.”

“Did you tell him we live right near Sal Bando?” Martin persisted. “That you've trick-or-treated at his house?”

Sal Bando was the third baseman and team captain for the A's. Martin's realtor had told him that Bando lived nearby when they were
first looking at houses. He'd also mentioned that the A's catcher, Gene Tenace, lived somewhere in town as well. Bando's house was nice, but not incredibly nice. Like some other houses in the neighborhood, it had a Japanese theme. Sand pits and ponds and decorative wooden extensions on the arches of the roof. It even had one of those sit-on-the-floor dining-room-table things (or at least that's what the realtor had said).

Martin was pleased to realize that he was in the same income bracket as a guy like Sal Bando (though he was pretty sure Bando wasn't up to his eyeballs in debt like he was). Peter, though, was thrilled. He was obsessed with Bando and with the A's more generally. Walked the dog past Bando's house every day, wrote reports about the A's for school, listened to all their games on his little orange transistor radio.

Martin had never spoken with Bando, of course, and in fact he'd only caught a glimpse of him a few times. The first time he was by himself. It was as Martin was driving past, and Bando had just walked out his front door. Martin had seen him plenty of times on TV, and had even seen him a handful of times live, in games at the Oakland Coliseum. Here, though, because he didn't have his uniform on, he seemed bigger, somehow, than Martin realized. He really filled out his street clothes, that was for sure.

“He's a big motherfucker!” he'd said later on to Linda, giving over to his excitement. “I'll bet he's got a huge cock.”

Linda had shushed him, motioning to indicate that the kids were in the house somewhere. But then, after a pause, she'd also laughed, which Martin liked—Linda could roll with the crude humor once in a while, even give a little back.

“He had nice shoes, too,” Martin had also told her. “Alligator, I think. He was wearing light-brown slacks and some sort of short-sleeved shirt. He's got big arms. He's a big guy.”

Martin's only regret about this sighting was that he'd made the mistake of slowing down a little too much to check him out. This made Bando turn to look at him, and when he did it was obvious what Martin was doing. But Martin didn't panic. He just gave him a little
wave—“Hello, neighbor!”—and Bando did the same, his thick forearm and meaty hand raised in response.

More than once after this, Martin had fantasized about building on this encounter somehow. He'd read about the Brooklyn Dodgers—the way stars like Pee Wee Reese, Gil Hodges, and Duke Snider were just regular guys in the neighborhood near Ebbets Field, and he wondered if Bando was up for something like that. This wasn't Reggie Jackson, after all, who was a genuine superstar, and far too rich and flashy for Martin's neighborhood. Guys like Bando and Tenace, they were all right. He'd heard somewhere that they were the real enforcers in the dugout and the locker room, and it made sense. You didn't win the World Series, as the A's had done two years in a row, without a few guys keeping things in order. And look, Bando wasn't the team captain for nothing, right?

The scenario he thought about most often revolved around a fishing trip with Bando. Martin and Peter would swing by early, before it was even light, and they'd drive out to the marina, talking about Charlie Finley, the A's owner, and why he was an asshole. Martin would show Bando the ins and outs of deep-sea fishing, and then later, someone would snap a photo of the three of them—Martin and Peter and Sal Bando—once they were back on the dock, all of them sunburned and tired but their faces flushed with excitement because they'd caught their limit and had a great time. Peter would take the photo to school, watch the other kids shit their pants with jealousy. And Martin would frame it and put it up in his office—though he'd act like it was no big deal. The customers would eat it up, and even Radkovitch would be impressed.

M
ARTIN HURRIED TO DROP
Peter off at school (no sign of his teacher today, unfortunately), and then hit the freeway. He was going to be late, he knew, but he tried to give over to it. He sighed audibly—heard himself do it and wondered if he did it more than he realized (Linda said he did it all the time).

Had they made a mistake in moving to the suburbs? Walnut Station and the other little suburban enclaves nestled east of Oakland and Berkeley were in a beautiful area, no doubt about it. All along the freeway it was open foothills, large stretches of tall grass, and patches of old oak trees. From what Martin had been told (by Sarah, as part of a seemingly endless series of reports on the Gold Rush era), Walnut Station had been a Pony Express stop for San Francisco and Sacramento; the word
station
was the giveaway, apparently. That was why the town council still maintained some of the original mid-nineteenth-century buildings at the center of town. Or at least the facades of the buildings. Wooden exteriors, swinging saloon doors, rail fences. The main building was The Miner's Hotel. Now, though, it was a restaurant and a bunch of antique shops. The council hired a blacksmith to heat up his forge on weekends and say “Howdy, folks!” when you walked past, and to show kids how to hammer something on his anvil.

Martin thought it ridiculous—embarrassing. Not to mention boring. And that was the real problem, wasn't it? Walnut Station had turned out to be hot, isolated, and boring. He hated to admit it (and he certainly wouldn't admit it to Linda), but the move was a bit of a bust.

Living in Oakland, he'd had a quick commute. Better, he was close to the track, and most of their friends lived nearby. Now it took forty-five minutes to get to work, and he spent half his time driving back and forth to see their old friends—mainly because they hadn't made any friends out here in the suburbs. He'd thought for a while that a couple down the street, the Weavers, might become friends. Hal Weaver had inherited a big steel plant in Antioch, or Pittsburg, or one of those crummy cities by the delta, and he and his absurdly good-looking wife Miriam liked to throw a lot of cocktail parties. But the friendship had fizzled out. Martin would see cars in the Weavers' driveway and in the street, maybe a few people on the stoop, and know that he and Linda had been blown off. Once, Hal had even given him a friendly wave as he drove past, as if it hadn't even occurred to him to feel guilty for not inviting them. Maybe next time! the wave seemed to say.

Hal was a pompous, drunken lout, and so missing out on a friendship with him was no loss. But Martin was genuinely disappointed that Miriam had backed away—was mortified, in fact, to think that it might have been his fault. And probably had been. He'd have a few drinks, and the next thing he knew he'd be fawning over her, staring at her dark hair and deep blue eyes or her breasts. Or, worse, he'd make suggestive jokes and then laugh too hard, grind the conversation to a halt.

Even Linda had noticed it. “You're making an ass of yourself,” she'd said to him the last time they'd been over there. That was six or seven months ago. He still saw Miriam in her yard once in a while. He'd spot her on his way home from work and slow the car to a stop, roll down the window and say hello, chat her up a bit. He knew he seemed overeager, but he couldn't help himself. And it wasn't just that she was so attractive. No, the real issue was that she seemed so contained and so confident. She'd look at him, smiling in a vague sort of way, as if it amused her to know he was that interested, or that curious. It drove him crazy.