by Darryl Brock
“A nigger with red hair? Works here? You mean Johnny?” Scowling, she pointed toward the rear of the room. “That one back there?”
I peered into the gloom. Sure enough, Johnny had emerged with a push broom and dustpan. “That’s him,” I said.
“You’re here to see the nigger clean-up boy?” Lydia looked me up and down, her face hardening. “I reckon you’re a cop after all.”
At that moment, shockingly, a bottle exploded against the brick wall near Johnny. He bent matter-of-factly and swept shards of glass into the dustpan.
Christ, I thought. I pushed my chair back, ignoring Lydia’s clutching fingers.
Johnny saw me coming. He didn’t look happy. “Go away, Sam,” he hissed. “You’ll cost me this job!”
“You didn’t want to be a clown,” I said, “so you work here?”
He didn’t answer. His eyes were fixed over my shoulder. “Oh no, they’re settin’ you up!”
I turned and looked. Lydia was talking urgently to the bartender. His eyes were on me. Suddenly his hand lifted, cracking hard against her face. With startling abruptness she toppled to the floor. The bartender motioned and several men began to move toward us.
“Is there a back way out?” I said.
Johnny pointed to a door in the corner. “Somebody’ll be out there too.”
It couldn’t be worse than here, I figured. I turned, but the bartender already was blocking our way, knife in hand.
Johnny pushed past me. “Wait, he’s my—”
He didn’t get a chance to finish. The knife flashed upward. Johnny leaped sideways barely in time to avoid being impaled.
I ran forward, yanking out the derringer. I aimed it between the bartender’s eyes. He froze and slowly, very slowly, stepped aside. I wrenched open the door. Johnny slid through. I followed him into an alley that smelled like a sewer. Two men holding truncheons barred our way. I kicked one in the balls, swung around and gave the other a close-up of the derringer’s business end. His club thumped to the ground. We sprinted frantically for the corner. Shots ricocheted past us.
We were chased through murderous alleys called China and Dead Man. Finally I turned and squeezed off a shot. It reverberated nicely in the narrow passageway, kicking up a spout in a stagnant pool. Our pursuers took cover, giving us just enough time to lose them in the next series of dark streets.
At length we reached the waterfront and the Blue Anchor.
“Jesus,” I said, trying to catch my breath. “I can’t believe you’d work in that dump.”
“I don’t anymore,” he said shortly. “You fixed that.”
“Am I supposed to feel bad about it?”
He was silent.
“Johnny,” I said. “Tomorrow I’m going to look for a place to rent here. How about sharing with me?”
“You’re staying on?” He looked at me levelly, his face hard to read. “How long?”
I had no real answer.
“A while.”
Monday, October 4, the Stockings’ last full day in the city, was chilly and gusty. I spent the morning looking for a flat and found a beauty on Russian Hill, several doors from an oddly familiar octagonal house on Green Street. Our rooms occupied the upper floor of a small mansion, its picture window overlooking sparsely settled slopes. The squat Montgomery Block loomed in the foreground, Telegraph Hill behind it, and beyond that the bay. The furnishings were cutesy but comfortable. I paid a month’s rent of forty-five dollars and sent a note to Johnny at the Blue Anchor to meet me the next morning at our new digs.
The exhibition game that afternoon was played in a howling sand-laden wind that made each fly a fielder’s nightmare. Sweasy chased one pop-up all the way from second into the crowd behind the foul line. Nonetheless, three thousand were on hand for a final look at the Stockings. The “Wrights,” padded with four Pacifics, defeated the “Brainards,” with four Eagles, 20-7.
That night the city’s baseball clubs, their uniforms brilliant blocks of colors, treated us to a farewell dinner. Over three hundred of us crowded into a hall draped with flowers and banners and bunting. A string orchestra played during the five-course supper.
Then the toasts began: “To the Red Stockings: may they never meet the wash in which they may be bleached.” “Our national game: may we never think it Wright to let our exertions come to a shortstop.” On they went, corny and labored. Toasts to Harry, who blushed and mumbled, to Hatton, to the press, to the government, to the ladies. In a speech of thanks, Champion included a pitch for temperance. Too late. A good many ballists lurched from the hall.
The Cosmopolitan desk clerk informed me that a gentleman had called for me. He’d left no card, but the clerk recalled that he’d called himself a captain.
“O’Donovan?” I said.
“That’s it,” said the clerk. “He insisted that we find you before you departed the city. Grew angry when we couldn’t tell him your whereabouts. Said his mission was urgent.”
I felt the shakiness coming on.
“Yes,” I said. “I imagine it is.”
Pea-soup fog blanketing the Broadway wharf at 6:30 a.m. mirrored my feelings of dislocation.
“Come onto some flush new money game,” Brainard said, “and cut me in.”
I considered the five hundred dollars he owed me. “Okay, if you do the same.”
He laughed and turned away.
“’Luck, Sam,” said Waterman gruffly.
“Get back in time to see us warm the Athletics,” urged George, clapping me on the back, flashing his grin.
Sweasy nodded. Mac asked me to keep an eye on local mining stocks; he was inclined toward speculating. Gould crushed my hand. Allison twanged, “So long, bub.”
“If you’ve a mind to work with us,” Harry said, “I’ll need help with the rink this winter.”
“Thanks.” It felt good to be wanted. “Maybe I can dream up some new wrinkles.”
He smiled. “I have no doubt.”
I hugged Andy hard. We had difficulty finding words. He stepped back and looked at me.
“You’re coming back soon, then?”
I nodded.
“Want me to tell Cait anything?”
“Just that I think of her all the time.”
I watched him follow the others. He turned and waved from the bow, above the riverboat’s name, New World. Loneliness hit me like a fist. I felt an urge to leap for the retreating gangplank. The whistle sounded, steam hissed from the boilers, smoke belched from the stacks, and the great wheel began to turn. The craft inched from the dock. Kids waved and called to the Stockings. They’d been everywhere that summer: a generation that carried indelible memories of this matchless season. It felt strange to be standing among them. What on earth was keeping me here?
The watery slaps of the wheel faded and the steamer’s silhouette blurred in the mist. I turned away, my footsteps echoing on the planks, the Stockings’ song sounding inanely in my brain like a movie soundtrack. Hero walks up the dock. Alone. Fade into the mist.
We are a band of ball players
From Cincinnati City,
We go to toss the ball around . . .
Was someone calling?
“Mr. Fowler!” I heard a voice with high-pitched girlish lilts, familiar.
I peered into an alley. As nearly as I can remember—I’ve spent hours trying—it was off Broadway, between Stockton and Powell. In the gloomy passageway a figure materialized with a bundle extended to me. I stepped back involuntarily.
“For you, Mr. Fowler,” she said. “From Caitlin.”
I recognized Clara Antonia. So I had seen her that night. She put the bundle in my hands, bulky and soft. I untied the paper and stared at a patchwork coverlet. It was the size of the one from my childhood. I recognized some of the patches, several from Cait’s yellow dress.
“Did she make this?”
Clara Antonia’s ringlets bobbed below her bonnet. “For you,”
“But there hasn’t been time.”
She smiled. “She intended that you have it.”
“Cait sent you here to find me?”
She smiled again, the opaque eyes regarding me. “Your pain is nearly ended, Mr. Fowler.”
I stared as she retreated into the murky alley. What did she mean by that?
“Wait!” I shouted.
She was gone. Dissolved in the mist. Exactly the sort of weirdness I needed right then, I thought. I studied the patches: fragments of Cait’s dresses, curtains, tablecloths. She’d wanted to encircle me, warm me, with the shapes and colors of her surroundings. I pressed the fabric to my face, breathed—or imagined that I breathed—Cait’s faint minty scent, and wondered why this had arrived.
The climb from Vallejo Street was long and steep. Over a shoulder of Russian Hill I saw tendrils of fog being swept before a brisk ocean wind. I stood at the edge of a high bluff. Far to the north the steamboat carrying the team looked like a toy. I strained to make out the stocking flag flying at its stern.
My vision began to change. I first I thought it was the sun emerging from the fog. The bay took on a milky, dazzling radiance. I rubbed my eyes and felt the vertigo coming. Not here, I thought. Not so close to the edge. Move away. But the dizziness muddled my sense of direction.
“Sam!”
Blurred as if behind a scrim, Johnny was running toward me, yelling urgently. I lifted my hand to wave. He shook his head, pointing to my left.
A figure stood several yards up the slope, erect against the gray sky. I raised my eyes slowly, puzzling over the familiarity of the green trousers. Above a wool topcoat, Fearghus O’Donovan’s face regarded me with a thin, humorless smile. He held a gun aimed at me.
His smile broadened as my eyes focused on his. “Sure and you thought to make me the fool again?” The cutting voice sounded almost genial. “Not going with the others . . . did you think I’d be taken in?”
My hands trembled badly. I pressed them hard against my thighs. O’Donovan seemed wrapped in grainy light.
I'll be having the money now.”
Johnny moved into my truncated vision. He halted when O’Donovan moved the gun threateningly.
“It’s gone.” My voice sounded muffled.
His eyes were the blue of deep ice. “You’re a liar.”
“All gone in the gold collapse.”
The sound of a boat’s horn wafted up from far below, a flat, tinny buzz.
“No,” he said. The gun wavered for an instant.
I realized then that I’d removed the only obstacle to his killing me. Would he do it? Probably. The whiteness thickened slowly, enveloping us. It was important to finish this.
“You’ll never have the money,” I said. “Or Cait.”
He said nothing, but his eyes stared. Mad, brilliant blue. Out there. Nearly gone.
“It’s not really the money you want.” I heard a distant reverberation, like drumming wings. “McDermott and Le Caron couldn’t do it, so you came.”
“To do what?” he snapped.
“Finish me.”
“Hush, Sam!” Johnny shifted his feet, looking, I knew, for a sign to spring at O’Donovan. He wouldn’t get one from me. Death stood with us on the hillside.
Within the milkiness the drumming neared, a thrashing, whirring disturbance, gargantuan wings beating overhead. Or in my brain.
O’Donovan glanced upward. Did he hear it? Coming very close now: wings hammering the air, battering my face. Hard to breathe.
“Colm was murdered,” I said.
“Murdered . . . ?” O’Donovan’s face bled into the light. Only his eyes remained, cold blue beams. From the whiteness I heard him say something about McDermott.
I was borne backward in the milky light. Greenery floated on the peripheries of vision. My heart pumped lifeblood, a rhythmic exalted drumming.
“Sam!” Johnny’s distant voice.
“You killed him.” I floated rearward through a leafy forest, trunks of trees drifting past. “You wanted Cait.” A wing touched my shoulder, pulling my arm upward. As if in a tide, hand thrust high, I struggled to stop receding, to take a single step forward. “Wanted my Cait!”
A rush of angry sound poured from O’Donovan.
“You killed Colm!” I screamed it above his voice and above the wind’s roar and the wings and the rush of backward flight. “YOU MURDERED HIM!”
Then the wings were no longer wings but folds of a green banner, the light not milky but smoke-filled, and finally I was reliving it, all of it, and it was as starkly clear as if I’d always known. . . .
I carry the standard like a javelin, the folds of cloth snapping and rustling beside my face as I sprint through the smoldering aisle, hurtling charred stumps and saplings. Explosions erupt close by. The ground buckles and dirt rains through the branches. I run on, keep running, gaining on the blue-clad figure ahead.
I reach for him, my straining fingers grazing his tunic. He twists aside and wheels to face me, chest heaving, face smudged with powder. I see no recognition yet in the dilated eyes.
“There now, Fearg,” I gasp. “Colm’s here with you.”
He shakes his head, his throat working convulsively, his eyes locked on the forest behind us where crimson flashes lace through billowing black smoke.
“They’re butchering the lot,” he croaks.
I clutch his arm as he gathers himself to run. “No, we’re holding firm, Fearghus. We need you.”
Flecks of cottony foam spray from his mouth. “Let me be, Colm!”
“They’ll call you coward all your days!” I try to leech the anger from my voice. “Come back with me, Fearg, I’ll see you through.”
“I’ll not.” It is half-sobbed.“Come, old lad.”
“No.”
I tug at him. He wrenches free with a violent twist and pulls his service Colt from his belt.
“Look at you with your damned flag . . . always gotten eveything.”
I move toward him. . . .
“I hate you.” His voice is choked.
I reach out, crooning, “Old Fearg . . .”
“Let me be!” It is high-pitched, keening.
“Til help, Fearg.”
The Colt rises.
“Fearg . . .”
Flame shoots through my chest and there is a spear of light in my brain. I careen back through the trees, the banner trailing over me. A solitary shaft of sunlight stabs through the greenery. I hear a bird’s sweet, cooing note. And the earth rises like a solid wave. . . .
O’Donovan’s finger was tightening on the trigger.
“No! Jesus, no!” screamed Johnny.
I grabbed frantically at my pocket for the derringer.
The sky darkened as throbbing wings closed on my shoulder again, lifting and thrusting me at O’Donovan. Face contorted, he tried to steady the pistol. A shape rushed at him—not Johnny, but a shadow in dark uniform. It seemed to merge with O’Donovan as the gun fired. Terrible noise split my body and hurled me to the ground halfway over the bluff’s edge.
O’Donovan lurched forward as if dragged, his heels dug in. He leaned back desperately, his mouth a rictus of terror, and was drawn inexorably toward the cliff.
“COLM!” he shrieked.
His feet thudded against me. I saw his staring eyes fixed on the precipice. He plunged forward.
And disappeared over the edge.
Soon after, cradled in supporting arms, I felt myself floating slowly after him. A shadowy face near mine. Blue tunic, brass buttons.
I don’t know whether he answered any of my questions. Possibly he did. In the end they seemed of little urgency.
We were together.
Moving backward. Accelerating. The bay a narrow river on the other side of which stood a knot of people. We raised our arms in salute, moving faster, air speeding through my chest.
Before the darkness came I looked back, just once.
Johnny bent over me, his yellow cat eyes gazing tearfully into mine.
I heard Cait whisper my name.
And I was gone.
Epilogue
When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened.
MARK TWAIN, Autobiography
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them . . .
T. S. ELIOT, Four Quartets
The rumbling came from earth and sky, broken by a rhythmic beeping. My eyes focused on an ant moving across blacktop. I tried to raise my head. My face was stuck. Fearing I’d melted into the blacktop, I raised an arm and triggered a spasm of pain in my chest. Then I remembered the wind-raked bluff, O’Donovan’s maniacal eyes, the flame from his gun.
I inched my hand upward. My beard was matted to the asphalt. I worked it loose with my fingertips. Things were gooey farther in. I raised my head a few millimeters and shuddered.
The sickening pain and gashed cheek, yes, the station outside Mansfield . . . but beeping? . . . the black locomotive had rumbled and hissed. . . .
A fearsome noise split the universe. I turned my head a few degrees and saw a vapor trail white against the azure sky. At its point sped a dart with tiny swept-back feathers.
Navy jet, I thought, heading for Alameda.
And then I thought: Oh, no. Oh . . . no.
The shock lifted me. The ground swam. In awkward stages I climbed to my feet. I noticed the breast pocket of my coat bulging oddly, then saw a small, blood-crusted hole in the fabric. Jesus. I tried to think . . . nothing. Breathe. Don’t give in.
Shaky steps along the blacktop path stirred sediments of pain. I couldn’t lift my head. Pine boughs swayed beyond the ivy, a faint whispering in the pervasive rumble. I stood before what looked like a bronze plaque. The words came slowly into focus.
INA COOLBRITH
First Poet Laureate of California
1841-1928
I thought it was a coded message. I stared at the 1928 and decided I couldn’t decode it just then.
I tried a few steps uphill to my left. Too hard. I turned around. The beeping—shrill spikes of sound—drove into my brain.
Just do it, I urged myself. Lift your head.