Authors: Peter Abrahams
“You’ll get a turkey at Christmas,” Jewel told him.
Jewel, driving late to the ballpark, called R. G. Renard and asked for Gil.
“No longer with us,” said a woman with some sort of attitude, Jewel didn’t know what or why.
“Can you tell me how to reach him?”
“No.”
Jewel waited for elaboration. None came. “It’s important,” she said.
Silence. Jewel heard a phone buzz at the R. G. Renard office, then another. She had maybe five seconds, and nothing to go on but the woman’s seeming antipathy toward Gil Renard. “He owes me money,” she said.
“Oh?”
“Yes.”
“A lot?”
“You could say that.”
Half a minute later, Jewel had Gil Renard’s address and phone number. She dialed it, listened to a few rings, and then, “I’m sorry, the number you have dialed is no longer in service.”
She checked the time—2:17—switched on the radio: “top of the third, one out, nobody—” The ballpark was ten or fifteen minutes away, Gil Renard’s address in the northern suburbs at least half an hour farther than that, maybe more. She knew she should go to the ballpark—how could she interview Rayburn in the evening without having watched him play in the afternoon?—but she drove north instead.
The radio was tuned to the game, but Jewel wasn’t really listening. Questions for Bobby Rayburn, half formed, unsatisfactory, rose and fell in her mind. She was parking in front of the worn three-decker in a working-class district off the ring road before she realized he wasn’t playing.
Jewel mounted the steps to the open porch. There were five buzzers. She pressed number four, Renard. She waited ten or fifteen seconds and pressed it again, listening this time for a buzzing sound inside and hearing none. She tried it again, and once more. Then, on the chance that the buzzer wasn’t working, she knocked, first lightly, then harder.
No response.
Jewel stepped back from the door, looked around. A few plastic garbage bags stood in one corner of the porch, next to a cardboard box marked
IWO JIMA: THE SURVIVOR, NEW FROM R. G. RENARD FINE KNIVES
. She looked in the box. There was nothing inside but an empty bottle of Jose Cuervo Gold and five or six yellow neckties. She picked one out, saw nothing wrong with it.
Jewel walked around the house. There was an alley at the back with a squat apartment building on the other side, its bricks sooty from the pollution of decades. Parked outside the back door of the three-decker was a rusted-out pickup with Maine plates. Jewel went a little closer. A big bearded man sat in the passenger seat, head against the window, eyes closed.
“Excuse me,” Jewel said.
He didn’t respond. Was there any point in waking him, any chance he lived in the building, or knew someone who did? Jewel tapped on the glass.
Still no reaction. “Excuse me,” she said again, a little louder, and tapped a little louder too. The sounds she made had no effect on the bearded man, but they did mask a crunch in the gravel behind her. Jewel was just starting to turn when something hard and heavy struck the back of her head. The blow rang changes through her senses, making her taste bile, feel sick, see nothing but cloud, black and quivering around the edges.
Jewel got up on her hands and knees in time to see the pickup round a corner at the end of the alley and disappear.
B
obby Rayburn put one arm around his wife and gave her a squeeze. Val turned to him, gazed up into his eyes, and smiled her brightest smile.
“Very nice,” said the photographer from the
New York Times Magazine
, changing lenses. He had a faint accent, the
r
in
very
more liquid than an English
r
and slightly rolling.
“All done?” said Val.
“Your part is,” the photographer replied. “Thanks so much.”
Val slipped out of Bobby’s grasp, her smile fading fast. Bobby walked down toward the pool. Wald was sitting at the edge, talking on the phone, his suit pants rolled up, his bare feet, pale and hairy, dangling in the water.
“This is pissing me off,” Bobby said.
“Almost done,” the photographer called. “Perhaps one or two more with the
piscine
just a little in the background?”
“Pissing me off big time,” Bobby said.
Wald lowered the phone. “No one knows where the hell she is.”
“I’m splitting.”
“Ten more minutes, Bobby.”
“Why should I?”
“It’s important.”
“To them, maybe. Not to me.”
Wald took off his sunglasses. “I’m going to tell you something crucial right now, big guy.”
“Crucial?”
“The world—our world, Bobby—sits on four pillars. The owners, the agents, the players, the media. It’s just like this
house. If one of the pillars is shaky the whole thing comes crashing down.”
“What are you getting at?”
“Simply this: you’ve got to learn how to use the media.”
“Mr. Wald, is it?” said the photographer. “If you would be kind enough to clear the shot?”
Wald got out of the way. The photographer took a few more pictures. “Perhaps with the
chemise
removed? On the diving board?”
“What’s he talking about?”
“I think he wants you to take your shirt off,” Wald said.
“Forget it.”
Val, on her way up to the house, stopped and turned. “Come all over shy?”
Wald laughed.
The photographer smiled a puzzled smile. “It’s up to you, of course,” he said.
Bobby thought:
I’m in the best shape of my life
. And:
It might be good for a GM or owner somewhere to see that. Use the media
. But sticking it to Val was reason enough. He took off his shirt, stepped onto the diving board. Val crossed the patio, disappeared through the French doors, closed them hard enough for the sound to carry down to the pool.
“If you would maybe sit on the end of the board,” said the photographer.
Bobby sat.
“And be looking directly in the lens.”
Bobby looked. The lens was a big indigo eye. He could see his reflection in it, tiny but very clear. There was nothing wrong with the eyes that did the seeing, nothing wrong with the reflected body they saw.
“Relax,” said the photographer.
That annoyed Bobby. “I am relaxed,” he said.
“Of course.” Click. “Very nice.” Click click. “All finished. Thank you so much.” The photographer started packing up.
Bobby felt the evening sun on his bare back. He closed his eyes. A minute or two later the photographer said good-bye,
and Bobby, eyes still closed, nodded. Was he relaxed? No. He knew that. Out on the end of the diving board, he tried to relax, to the marrow of every bone, to the nucleus of every cell. Not easy, with his ninth-inning at bat replaying itself in his mind. He didn’t watch it, but it was there, looping around over and over. Bobby told himself: I’ve still got the eyes, the body, the hands, good as ever. A gift, like Einstein’s brain. He’d tried everything, gotten nowhere. The solution was obvious: he had to play on a team where number eleven was available. All his problems, even the fiasco of his stupid, broken promise to Chemo Sean and the lost four-leaf clover, stemmed from not wearing it.
“I meant it,” Bobby said. “About trading me.”
No answer.
He opened his eyes. Wald had gone too. Bobby stood up, took off the rest of his clothes, dove into the water. It was warm. He floated, gazing up at the purpling sky, quieting his mind. He could almost have fallen asleep like that, except for an awakening tension in his groin, caused simply by the warm water and his nakedness, but sparking desire for a woman. He thought at once of the scraps of paper jammed in his glove compartment, scribbled in girlish hands with names and phone numbers. Easy to dial the numbers, easy to meet somewhere; the problem was he couldn’t picture the faces that went with the names. A bar, then? That sports bar, Cleats, for example. Almost as easy.
A hand touched his shoulder.
Bobby jerked his head out of the water, twisted around. A woman knelt by the side of the pool, her arm still outstretched.
“Didn’t mean to frighten,” she said, “but you didn’t hear me.”
“My ears were underwater,” Bobby said. “And you didn’t frighten me.”
The woman almost smiled. She seemed familiar, but he couldn’t place her. No chance that he’d slept with her, though, so nothing embarrassing was about to happen: she
was older than the women who hung around ballplayers, her dark hair streaked with gray along the sides. But not unattractive, despite her pallor and a nasty scrape along one side of her jaw.
“Sorry I’m so late,” she said. She glanced up at the house. “Your wife told me to just walk down.”
“Late?”
“Jewel Stern. For the
Times
interview. I was … unavoidably detained.”
Bobby had forgotten he was pissed off. He slipped back into the mood. “I’m on my way out,” he said.
“I don’t need long.”
Bobby shook his head.
“Fifteen or twenty minutes.” No pleading in her tone, he noticed, a little surprised; just announcing the fact.
“I’ve got other commitments.” Bobby swam to the ladder, started pulling himself out. He was halfway up when he remembered he wasn’t wearing a suit. He turned to see if she was watching.
She was. “Catch,” she said, and tossed him a towel.
Bobby caught it, wrapped it around his waist, climbed out.
“Funny how no one ever goes into a fielding slump,” she said.
On the top step, Bobby paused. “What do you mean by that?”
“Just an observation.”
Bobby started up the slate path that led to the house. She drew alongside after he’d gone a few steps.
“Beautiful,” she said.
“What’s beautiful?”
“The flowers. I didn’t take you for a gardener, Bobby.”
“I’m not.” He hadn’t even been aware of the flowers bordering the path. Who took care of them? He hadn’t noticed anyone working on the grounds. Now he saw that the flower beds needed weeding, and the lawn needed mowing. He would have to speak to Wald.
The woman went up the patio steps ahead of him. She had
a nice body. Use the media, he thought. Then he realized he’d forgotten her name.
“Why don’t we start with the tour?” she said. “We can talk after.”
“Tour?”
“Of the house. Didn’t Wald mention that?”
“You don’t seem to be hearing me,” Bobby said. “I’m on my way out.”
“I hear you,” she said.
They went into the kitchen. There were drop cloths on the appliances, wires dangling through holes in the ceiling, pink-and-green marble tiles forming the beginning of a checker-board pattern at one end of the plywood subfloor.
“What’s this?”
“She’s remodeling. Valerie, if you’re going to mention her in the article.”
“Not Val,” the reporter said. “She already covered that.” Again, she seemed to be on the verge of smiling. “But how can there be an article with no interview?”
“Not my problem,” said Bobby. “Can you find your way out?”
“Of course,” the woman said. She reached into her shoulder bag. “Your wife asked me to give you this.” She handed Bobby a note.
He unfolded it and read:
Gone to dinner w/Chaz. Sean’s eaten. He’s in his room. V
.
Bobby looked up. The woman was watching him. He thought of the girlish handwriting on the scraps of paper in the glove compartment. This woman’s handwriting wouldn’t be anything like that. Without a word he turned and went upstairs.
Sean was at the space console, the crusts of a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich on a plate beside him. “You have thirty minutes, eighteen seconds,” came a deep voice from the computer. “Then your entire planet will be sprayed with the gas Sorgon B, and all oxygen-based life will be vaporized.” In an on-screen window, a video previewed the catastrophe.
Not looking up, Sean said, “What’s oxygen?”
“The stuff you breathe. Is the baby-sitter here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is she coming?”
Sean, tapping at the keys, didn’t answer. He paused, waiting for a response from the computer.
“Negative,” said the deep voice.
Bobby returned to the kitchen. The woman was sitting on the bottom rung of a stepladder. She had known the whole time, of course, known he wasn’t going anywhere. He was forming a stinging remark when he saw that her face was even paler than before.
“I’d like some aspirin, please,” she said.
Bobby searched three or four of the seven bathrooms, without success. Then he remembered that the Moprin people had sent him a case. He found it in the basement, brought her a package. She was where he had left her, motionless on the bottom rung of the ladder.
He handed her the package. She removed the bottle, fumbled with the plastic seal around the top. She couldn’t get it off. He took it from her, ripped the seal, popped off the top, pierced the foil, drew out the cotton. Her gaze was on his hands the whole time; another one of those women who noticed hands. He waited for her to say something about them, but she did not. Instead, she took the bottle—her fingers felt cold—shook out two pills, and asked for a glass of water.
Bobby found a glass in a box in the pantry, turned on the tap. No water came out.
“Christ.”
“Never mind,” the reporter said. She put the pills in her mouth and swallowed them. A little color returned to her face almost at once. He could still get rid of her, invent some other excuse; but he was no longer pissed off.
She glanced around the room. “What sort of house did you have in California?”
“Nicer than this.”
The reporter looked surprised.
Bobby hadn’t considered his answer; it had just popped out. Was this part of the interview? He began to see ways it
could be used to make him look like a spoiled asshole. “Not fancier,” he explained. “Nicer.”
“In what way?” She took a legal pad and a mini tape recorder from her bag. “Mind if this is on?” Bobby did mind—that was one of the things he hated about reporters—but before he could say anything, she added, “Just so I don’t misquote you,” and he said nothing. “Nicer in what way?” she asked.
“In every way,” he said, wondering for a moment what this had to do with baseball. But now that he was started on this subject, he found that he wanted to finish the thought. “See those tiles?” he said, pointing to the unfinished pink-and-green checkerboard. “They’re from Italy. You wouldn’t believe how much they cost.”