Red Shirt

by A. J. Stewart

  “If they want to make money they do.”

  “Yeah, and there are loads of banks that aren’t in it for the money.”

  He frowned like I was serious.

  “So why did those banks fail? They didn’t fail because they couldn’t cover their deposits, but because people started to believe that they couldn’t cover them. It was the belief that killed them. It was the word on the street.”

  “So?”

  “So, Pickering, the word on the street is that you are in over your head. The word on the street is that you can’t cover your investors’ money, and if that news is on the street, then I am willing to bet that the smart end of town knows it, too. And if they know it, and your investors are figuring it out, then I’d wager that it’s actually a whole lot worse than they think it is, and it’s only a matter of time before they coming knocking, and your whole damned house comes crashing down around your ears.”

  For a moment, Brett said nothing, as if reality needed time to run across his mind in order to be absorbed. Then he shook his head.

  “No, see, it doesn’t work like that.”

  “Yeah, it does.”

  “No, I don’t do deposits. You can’t just withdraw your money from these investments. They take time. I have time.”

  “No, you don’t. I don’t know what you’re into exactly, but I can tell you that you don’t have time. Because the people on the street are knocking on the door, and I’m willing to bet some knock louder than others. Some might even want to see your books. And those people might not care about you or what happens to you, like I do. They’ll call the Feds. They’ll do what they have to do to get their money back. Even if it’s pennies on the dollar. But pennies on the dollar isn’t good enough for Coach. Because that’s still failure to him. It’s your failure, but he’ll see it as his own. Like he let you down, somehow, like he let his own family down by trusting you.”

  Brett looked at the cold concrete at his feet. I wasn’t sure if it made him think of a cold, hard prison cell or not, but something was going on inside his head, because he suddenly burst into tears. It was like a dam bursting, and his body convulsed and he gasped like he had choked on a hot dog. I heard the distant sound of a whistle, and a cheer, and then as Brett Pickering spasmed, I heard the thunder of hooves.

  But they weren’t hooves, they were cleats. The players from Yale broke from the field and charged up the tunnel toward the half-time rooms. Suddenly, what had felt like a cavernous space became awfully small. Large men with full pads ran through, and Brett and I were shoved to either side of the tunnel. It was like being in the New York subway when an express train went screaming through. There was no thought of stopping for us and little consideration of that fact that we were standing there at all. The sounds of cleats and back slaps and guys yelling at each other bounced around the tunnel like a thousand tennis balls.

  And then, like a passing stampede, they ran into the half-time rooms and the sound went with them, and then the soft-shoed coaches and various other staff followed them, and the sound died away, and I was left with a fast-beating heart and the sound of Brett’s heavy breathing.

  He had stopped convulsing. Perhaps the stampede of players had driven it from his body like one of those defibrillator machines. He was pressed against the wall of the tunnel, still breathing hard, seemingly still on the verge of tears, although holding steady.

  “Let me help you,” I said, “or I’ll take what belongs to Coach and leave you to the wolves.”

  “I can’t,” he huffed, as if he had run a mile in record time.

  “Don’t be stupid, Brett.”

  “You don’t understand. I can’t.”

  “You don’t have a choice.”

  “They’ll kill me!” he screamed, and then he pulled back into his shell.

  “Who will kill you?”

  He shook his head.

  “Who Brett?”

  “The Russian.”

  “Russian? What Russian?”

  “Investor.”

  “You have an investor in Russia?”

  “No, he’s here, but he’s Russians or Soviets or something. And he won’t call the Feds and he won’t take pennies on the dollar.”

  I had a new plan forming in my mind. It wasn’t a good one. It involved getting whatever I could from Brett and then leaving him to these Russians, whoever the hell they were. It was his bed, not Coach’s. But it was like Brett could sense my thoughts, because he looked at me, all puffy-eyed.

  “He’ll come after anyone who gets any money. He’ll come after my family. He’ll come after Coach. That’s why I need to finish this deal. So I can pay him back.”

  “What deal? There is no deal. I told you, the word on the street says you’re done.”

  “These guys don’t know that,” he said, nodding upward, toward the room full of wealthy Yale alums.

  “You don’t get it, do you? They talk. They all talk. They’ll ask around. And once they do, they won’t touch you with a chair and a whip.”

  “They might not talk.”

  “Brett, I’ve been in town five minutes, and I know all about it. The ladies at the hair salon know. If the ladies know, the guys with the checkbooks will know.”

  Brett’s lip dropped and I thought he might start crying again, but he just stared at the floor. It was muddy and wet now, and the tunnel smelled faintly of pasture.

  “Look, I know some people,” I said. “Maybe I can help with this Russian. But you have to come clean, and you have to be honest with me.”

  He looked at me. It wasn’t a look of hope. It was a look that said he was two scores down with twenty seconds left on the clock. Not impossible, but pretty damned unlikely.

  “I’ll help you,” I said, “if you promise to help Coach. If you do whatever it takes.”

  He took a deep breath and nodded.

  We heard noise stirring from within the half-time rooms. The Yale boys were getting fired up for the second half.

  “What do we do now?” Brett asked.

  “We get the hell out of this tunnel. You go home. Don’t drink too much. Then we’ll meet at your office first thing Monday, and we’ll see how things stand. You can give me the full story.”

  Chapter Ten

  I left Brett at the top of the tunnel in Jensen Plaza and watched him walk away to wherever his car was parked. I had gotten the name of this Russian from him, and that was all I had. There was a cheer as the teams retook the field, but I didn’t hurry back inside. I had no desire to see the game. I’d grown accustomed to hearing the distant roar from Yale Bowl but never seeing a snap get taken, and I didn’t feel much like messing with tradition. I took a walk down around the tennis complex, and then around the baseball diamond at Yale Field. I didn’t much care for the feeling it roused inside me so I kept walking, looping my way back to the bowl.

  There was no roar when the game ended and I took that as a bad sign for the home team, but people started pouring out of the stadium seemingly in good spirits, so maybe I was wrong, or maybe they just weren’t that invested in the result of a football game. My media pass got me into the tunnel again, and I wandered down the stairs and out into the bowl. I didn’t take the field. It didn’t feel right. It wasn’t my field. Not then, not now. I cut back up the steps and walked high into the bleachers and then sat down. The last of the supporters were slowly making their way out of the stadium, leaving the hollow blue bowl quiet and fallow. Most stadia had the molded plastic seats now, but even after renovation Yale had stuck with tradition and kept the flat bench bleachers.

  I watched a team of people move around the stands as I had done many times, many years ago. As soon as the last of the crowd left, the cleaners moved in to pick up the trash the supporters left behind. My father had been one of those cleaners. Every home game we had wandered down from our house and then waited for the final whistle, upon which we had entered like salmon against the stream, and I had sat in the bleachers while my father picked up garbage. As a sma
ll boy I had seen it as some kind of loyalty thing, payback to the college that employed him as a campus custodian. Only later did I realize that he did it to earn a little extra money to supplement his janitor’s wages.

  There was no sound but the breeze curling around the bowl and the occasional shot of laughter from the cleaning crew. The sun was dropping low and the temperature was going with it. Soon my blazer wasn’t going to cut it anymore, but for a while I sat in the shadow of the Kenney Center and watched the familiarity of the empty Yale Bowl. As a boy I had stared at the field, running the plays that I couldn’t name in my head, picturing myself down on the hallowed turf, commanding the troops, onward to victory over Harvard or Brown or Dartmouth.

  I didn’t picture the plays in my head now. Instead, I was thinking about the effect those late fall afternoons had had on my life. Perhaps if I had seen the games it might have turned out differently, but despite my pleas my father never brought me into the stadium before the final siren. It was as if the right of entry was only valid to those who had studied at the college, rather than those who had worked there for as long as I could remember. So instead of seeing the real thing, I played those games in my mind, ever more vividly, until eventually I was able to take a proper field in junior high.

  They say that top performance athletes from the Olympics to the NFL visualize their games, their events, their races before they ever happen, over and over. They win a thousand times in their minds before they ever take the field for real. I never really sat in a room at college visualizing the playbook; I never saw myself pitching for a no-hitter. It never occurred to me that I had already done years of visualization, playing games in the Yale Bowl over and over again.

  I was a better baseball pitcher than I ever was a quarterback, but it was football that I played in my mind’s eye all those times. This place, this cold ancient stadium with uncomfortable bleachers and no locker rooms, had imprinted the game on me. In some way it was responsible for everything that came after. I had chosen to go to Miami for many reasons—the sunshine being one of them—but also because most colleges offered only limited scholarships for baseball, and UM had offered a full ride if I played both baseball and football. Truth was I was barely good enough to be backup quarterback at college, but I had an ability to absorb the playbook and transpose it, to fire directions at the guy playing quarterback, even when he didn’t always care to hear them. A number of the coaches at Miami had told me they thought I could become a great college football coach one day. My head coach had never suggested that. He hated me, and he hated the fact that I wasted half my year playing baseball, and he hated the fact that the university made him let me do it.

  But life had taken me toward baseball, and the minor leagues for six years, and the major league for 29 days. And I had met Lenny Cox, and he had taught me that even as a college senior I was still a boy, and when I had come back six years later I was closer to being a man, but that I still had a long way to go and a lot left to learn.

  I was still learning.

  “Thought I’d find you up here,” she said from down below where I sat. Beccy moved up toward me, still in her warm coat and scarf, long hair bouncing with each step.

  “Still contemplating the world in the bleachers,” she said as she reached me.

  “Lot of memories here, I guess.”

  She settled in beside me. “You ever play here?”

  “No.”

  “But your dad worked at Yale, right?”

  “That’s right. He helped clean the stadium, so I used to come here a lot as a kid.”

  “You pretend to be Joe Montana down there?”

  “I’ve never stepped on that grass. And I never pretended to be anything as a 49er, or a fighting Irish.”

  “You never stepped on that grass? Like even throw a ball around with your dad?”

  “Never. My dad was kind of old school. He believed in traditions and stations in life and all that. Two hundred years ago he would have been a footman with aspirations to be a butler but nothing more. He said the field was reserved for the players.”

  “Plenty of students have run on that field.”

  “I wasn’t a student, either.”

  “I remember. You chose Miami.”

  “Maybe Miami chose me.”

  “I’m glad, either way. I wouldn’t have met you if you had stayed in New Haven.”

  “But now you’re here anyway.”

  “As are you. Why is that?”

  “An old friend—a guy I owe a lot to—is in a bit of trouble. I have to help him out.”

  “You have to?”

  I nodded. “Yeah.”

  “A high school pal?”

  “My old coach.”

  “The guy whose house you lived at when your dad went, you know, downhill?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They must have been pretty hospitable.”

  “They were more than that. They were like my family. And you do anything for family, right?”

  “I suppose you do.”

  I stared out over the field, but I could feel Beccy looking at me.

  “You’ve got that look,” she said. “Let’s go get that drink before you go getting all poetic on me.”

  She stood and offered her hand. She had gloves on, which felt like overkill but might not feel that way soon. I took her hand and stood, and then we stood looking at each other for a moment. Then she dropped my hand and led me down the stairs and out through the concourse.

  “You have a car?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “I walked.”

  “Let’s take mine. I know a place.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Beccy drove a sporty BMW SUV into downtown New Haven. She found a parking spot and we walked along Chapel Street to a little wine bar that overlooked New Haven Green. The green was a large commons that had been created back in the 1600s. I had been told that the Puritans had made it just large enough to hold all the people they expected to survive the second coming of Christ, which apparently was 144,000 souls. I had no idea how they came to that number or how they decided the amount of space those people would occupy, or why indeed all those remaining would need to gather in downtown New Haven all at once, but despite the original usage not coming to fruition, the green had survived as it had from my childhood, and centuries before.

  The green looked as I remembered. Everything else felt different, as if I had maybe seen it before in a movie but was now visiting it live for the first time. The churches and the old college buildings were the same, but most of the stores and the signage was new and updated. Beccy led me into a place that simply wouldn’t have existed when I was a boy. It was dark and moody, and wine barrels played the part of cocktail tables, with tall stools and small candles and a long list of wines from faraway places.

  We both ordered a glass of red from California and toasted old friends. The candlelight played on her face and made me feel like she was different too, in ways I couldn’t pinpoint. In the final years of my previous life she had been like Florida personified. She was bright and bubbly and beautiful, full of energy and vigor and sunshine. She was a beer and peel’n’eats kind of gal, who loved nothing more than reciting baseball stats over a ball park hot dog.

  Now she looked like New England. She shook off her coat and slipped off her scarf, but the long sleeved blouse and the jeans and the boots were all current fashion. There was something about cold weather that lent itself to stylish clothes, although I had come to believe that a linen suit was the be-all and end-all of fashion since moving to Florida.

  Beccy had also aged, but not like a beer, which just goes bad, but more like a fine wine. She looked collected and attractive, and yet like New Haven, familiar and foreign to me all at the same time.

  “Cheers,” she said.

  “Cheers.”

  We sipped our wine. I had to admit that at home, Danielle and I drank wine more often than beer these days. Perhaps it was something to do with aging tastebuds, or perh
aps more to do with the calories in a beer finding a home on my belly.

  “So,” she said.

  I waited for her to continue, but then I noticed a guy walking into the wine bar. He was vaguely familiar, but I was getting used to the notion that lots of things here were, even when they weren’t. He was with a woman I definitely didn’t know. But I caught the guy’s eye as well and he did a double take. He had a good hard look as the woman stepped by him and selected a seat at the bar. Then the guy stepped toward us. Beccy saw me looking over her shoulder and turned.

  “Redshirt?” said the guy. “Redshirt Jones?”

  As soon as he spoke, I knew that I knew him. “Dustin,” I said.

  “It is you. Geez, man, how long has it been?”

  “A long time. A very long time.”

  “Got that right.” He glanced at Beccy who smiled. “I’m sorry to interrupt,” he said.

  “No problem,” she replied, sipping her wine.

  He looked back to me. “How’ve you been.”

  “Can’t complain.”

  “Still in Florida?”

  “Yeah. You?”

  “Still live here, boring I know. You guys married?”

  Beccy raised her eyebrow at me.

  “No, we’re old friends. You?”

  “You know the drill. Divorced, two kids. This is wifey numero deux.” He jinked his head toward the woman at the bar. “How long have you been back?”

  “I’m just in town for a few days.”

  “Man, a few of the boys are getting together tomorrow afternoon at the lobster pound. You’ve gotta come.”

  I shrugged. I had some good friends in high school and I had some good times—despite everything else—but I wasn’t sure if I wanted a trip down that memory lane.

  Dustin took out his wallet and handed me a card. He was an insurance agent. It was a fine line of work.

  “What’s your number?” he asked, taking out his phone. I considered giving him a fake number but that felt unnecessarily low. I gave him my real number.