by Ron Carlson
“We’d have gone with Sheila. She liked that stuff; she liked Halloween.” The boy follows him back inside.
“You want a ride home?” Ruckelbar says, knowing instantly that it is the wrong thing to say, the offer of sympathy battering the boy over the brink, and now the boy stands crying stiffly, chin down, his arms crossed tighter than anything in the world. Ruckelbar’s heart heaves; he knows about this, about living in his silent house where a kind word would have broken him.
They stand that way, as if after an explosion, not knowing what to do; all the surprises in the room have been used up. Everything that happens now will be work. Ruckelbar is particularly out of ideas; he’s not used to having anyone in the office for longer than it takes to make change. His father sometimes sat in here and chewed the fat with his cronies, DiPaulo and others, but Ruckelbar has never done it. He doesn’t have any cronies. Now he doesn’t know what to do. Ruckelbar points at the boy. “You go ahead, get the truck, bring it around front.” He hands the boy his keys. The boy looks at him, so he goes on. “It’s all right. You do it. You know my truck.” With it dark now, Ruckelbar can see himself in the front window, a man in overalls. He’s scared. It feels like something else could happen. He reaches for the phone and calls Clare, which he doesn’t do three times a year. “Clare,” he says, “I’m bringing somebody home who needs a warm meal. We’re coming. It’s not something we can talk over. We’ll be about fifteen minutes, okay, honey? Did you hear me? Can you put on some of your tea?” He has never said anything like this to Clare in his life. The only people who are ever in their house are Clare’s sister every other year and a few of Marjorie’s friends who stand in the entry a minute or two.
“Paul,” she says, and his name again jolts Ruckelbar. She goes on, “Marjorie spoke to me.”
“I’m glad for that, Clare.”
“She’s a good girl, Paul.”
“Yes, she is.”
There is a pause and then Clare adds the last. “She misses her father. She said that today.” Ruckelbar draws a quick breath and sees his truck like a ghost ship drift up front in the window. He lifts a hand to the boy in the truck. What he sees is a figure caught in the old yellow glass, a man in there. Ruckelbar thought everything was settled so long ago.
He turns off the light before he can see what the image will do, and he grabs his keys and the camera. Outside, the boy has slid to the passenger side. When Ruckelbar climbs in the boy says, in a new voice, easy and relaxed, “Nice truck. It’s in good shape.”
“It’s a ’62,” Ruckelbar says. “My dad’s truck. If you park them inside and change the oil every twenty-five hundred miles, they keep.” He puts the camera on the seat. “This was in your sister’s car.”
The boy picks it up. “Cool,” he says, hefting it. “This is a weird place,” the boy says. “Who painted it blue?”
Ruckelbar is now in gear on the hardtop of Route 21. He looks back at Bluestone once, a little building in the dark. “My father did,” he says.
ZANDUCE AT SECOND
BY HIS THIRTY-THIRD BIRTHDAY, a gray May day which found him having a warm cup of spice tea on the terrace of the Bay-side Inn in Annapolis, Maryland, with Carol Ann Menager, a nineteen-year-old woman he had hired out of the Bethesda Hilton Turntable Lounge at eleven o’clock that morning, Eddie Zanduce had killed eleven people and had that reputation, was famous for killing people, really the most famous killer of the day, his photograph in the sports section every week or so and somewhere in the article the phrase “eleven people” or “eleven fatalities”—in fact, the word eleven now had that association first, the number of the dead—and in all the major league base-ball parks his full name could be heard every game day in some comment, the gist of which would be “Popcorn and beer for ten-fifty, that’s bad, but just be glad Eddie Zanduce isn’t here, for he’d kill you for sure,” and the vendors would slide the beer across the counter and say, “Watch out for Eddie,” which had come to supplant “Here you go,” or “Have a nice day,” in conversations even away from the parks. Everywhere he was that famous. Even this young woman, who has been working out of the Hilton for the past eight months not reading the papers and only watching as much TV. as one might watch in rented rooms in the early afternoon or late evening, not really news hours, even she knows his name, though she can’t remember why she knows it and she finally asks him, her brow a furrow, “Eddie Zanduce? Are you on television? An actor?” And he smiles, raising the room-service teacup, but it’s not a real smile. It is the placeholder expression he’s been using for four years now since he first hit a baseball into the stands and it struck and killed a college sophomore, a young man, the papers were quick to point out, who was a straight-A student majoring in chemistry, and it is the kind of smile that makes him look nothing but old, a person who has seen it all and is now waiting for it all to be over. And in his old man’s way he is patient thrugh the next part, a talk he has had with many people all around the country, letting them know that he is simply Eddie Zanduce, the third baseman for the Orioles who has killed several people with foul balls. It has been a pernicious series of accidents really, though he won’t say that.
She already knows she’s not there for sex, after an hour she can tell by the manner, the face, and he has a beautiful actor’s face which has been stunned with a kind of ruin by his bad luck and the weight of bearing responsibility for what he has done as an athlete. He’s in the second thousand afternoons of this new life and the loneliness seems to have a physical gravity; he’s hired her because it would have been impossible not to. He’s hired her to survive the afternoon.
The day has been a walk through the tony shopping district in Annapolis, where he has bought her a red cotton sweater with tortiseshell buttons. It is a perfect sweater for May, and it looks wonderful as she holds it before her; she has short brunette hair, shiny as a schoolgirl’s, which he realizes she may be. Then a walk along the pier, just a walk, no talking. She doesn’t because he doesn’t, and early on such outings, she always follows the man’s lead. Later, the fresh salad lunch from room service and the tea. She explores the suite, poking her head into the bright bathroom, the nicest bathroom in any hotel she’s been in during her brief career. There’s a hair dryer, a robe, a fridge, and a phone. The shower is also a steamroom and the tub is a vast marble dish. There is a little city of lotions and shampoos. She smiles and he says, Please, feel free. Then he lies on the bed while she showers and dresses; he likes to watch her dress, but that too is different because he lies there imagining a family scene, the young wife busy with her grooming, not immodest in her nakedness, her undergarments on the bed like something sweet and familiar. The tea was her idea when he told her she could have anything at all; and she saw he was one of the odd ones, there were so many odd ones anymore willing to pay for something she’s never fully understood, and she’s taken the not understanding as just being part of it, her job, men and women, life. She’s known lots of people who didn’t understand what they were doing; her parents, for example. Her decision to go to work this way was based on her vision of simply fucking men for money, but the months have been more wearing than she could have foreseen with all the chatter and the posturing, some men who only want to mope or weep all through their massage, others who want to walk ahead of her into two or three nightspots and then yell at her later in some bedroom at the Embassy Suites, too many who want her to tell them about some other bastard who has abused her or broken her heart. But here this Eddie Zanduce just drinks his tea with his old man’s smile as he watches the stormy summer weather as if it were a home movie. They’ve been through it all already and he has said simply without pretension. No, that’s all right. We won’t be doing that, but you can shower later. I’ll have you in town by five-thirty.
THE ELEVEN PEOPLE Eddie Zanduce has killed have been properly eulogized, the irony in the demise of each celebrated in the tabloid press, the potentials of their lives properly inflated, and their fame—brief though it may have been�
�certainly far beyond any which might have accompanied their natural passing, and so they needn’t be listed here and made flesh again. They each float in the head of Eddie Zanduce in his every movement, though he has never said so, or acknowledged his burden in any public way, and it has become a kind of poor form now even in the press corps, a group not known for any form, good or bad, to bring it up. After the seventh person, a girl of nine who had gone with her four cousins to see the Orioles play New York over a year ago, and was removed from all earthly joy and worry by Eddie Zanduce’s powerhouse line drive pulled foul into the seats behind third, the sportswriters dropped the whole story, letting it fall on page one of the second section: news. And even now after games, the five or six reporters who bother to come into the clubhouse—the Orioles are having a lackluster start, and have all but relinquished even a shot at the pennant—give Eddie Zanduce’s locker a wide berth. Through it all, he has said one thing only, and that eleven times: “I’m sorry; this is terrible.” When asked after the third fatality, a retired school principal who was unable to see and avoid the sharp shot of one of Eddie Zanduce’s foul balls, if the unfortunate accidents might make him consider leaving the game, he said, “No.”
And he became so stoic in the eyes of the press and they painted him that way that there was a general wonder at how he could stand it having the eleven innocent people dead by his hand and they said things like “It would be hard on me” and “I couldn’t take it.” And so they marveled darkly at his ability to appear in his uniform, take the field at all, dive right when the hit required it and glove the ball, scrambling to his knees in time to make the throw either to first or to second if there was a chance for a double play. They noted that his batting slump worsened, and now he’s gone weeks in the new season without a hit, but he plays because he’s steady in the field and he can fill the stands. His face was the object of great scrutiny for expression, a scowl or a grin, because much could have been made of such a look. And when he was at the plate, standing in the box awaiting the pitch, his bat held rigid and ready off his right shoulder as if for business, this business and nothing else, the cameras went in on his face, his eyes, which were simply inscrutable to the nation of baseball fans.
And now, at thirty-three he lies on the queen-size bed of the Bayside Inn, his fingers twined behind his head, as he watches Carol Ann Menager come dripping into the room, her hair partially in a towel, her nineteen-year-old body a rose-and-pale pattern of the female form, five years away from any visible wear and tear from the vocation she has chosen. She warms him appearing this way, naked and ready to chat as she reaches for her lavender bra and puts it of all her clothing on first, simply as convenience, and the sight of her there bare and comfortable makes him feel the thing he has been missing: befriended.
“But you feel bad about it, right?” Carol Ann says. “It must hurt you to know what has happened.”
“I do,” he says, “I do. I feel as badly about it all as I should.”
And now Carol Ann stops briefly, one leg in her lavender panties, and now she quickly pulls them up and says, “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I only mean what I said and nothing more,” Eddie Zanduce says.
“What was the worst?”
He still reclines and answers: “They are all equally bad.”
“The little girl?”
Eddie Zanduce draws a deep breath there on the bed and then speaks: “The little girl, whose name was Victoria Tuttle, and the tourist from Austria, whose name was Heinrich Vence, and the Toronto Blue Jay, a man in a costume named William Dirsk, who was standing on the home dugout when my line drive broke his sternum. And the eight others all equally unlikely and horrible, all equally bad. In fact, eleven isn’t really worse than one for me, because I maxed out on one. It doesn’t double with two. My capacity for such feelings, I found out, is limited. And I am full.”
Carol Ann Menager sits on the bed and buttons her new sweater. There is no hurry in her actions. She is thinking. “And if you killed someone tonight?”
Here Eddie Zanduce turns to her, his head rolling in the cradle of his hands, and smiles the smile he’s been using all day, though it hasn’t worn thin. “I wouldn’t like that,” he says. “Although it has been shown to me that I am fully capable of such a thing.”
“Is it bad luck to talk about?”
“I don’t believe in luck, bad or good.” He warms his smile one more time for her and says, “I’m glad you came today. I wouldn’t have ordered the tea.” He swings his legs to sit up. “And the sweater, well, it looks very nice. We’ll drive back when you’re ready.”
ON THE DRIVE NORTH Carol Ann Menager says one thing that stays with Eddie Zanduce after he drops her at her little blue Geo in the Hilton parking lot and after he has dressed and played three innings of baseball before a crowd of twenty-four thousand, the stadium a third full under low clouds this early in the season with the Orioles going ho-hum and school not out yet, and she says it like so much she has said in the six hours he has known her—right out of the blue as they cruise north from Annapolis on Route 2 in his thick silver Mercedes, a car he thinks nothing of and can afford not to think of, under the low sullen skies that bless and begrudge the very springtime hedgerows the car speeds past. It had all come to her as she’d assembled herself an hour before; and it is so different from what she’s imagined, in fact, she’d paused while drying herself with the lush towel in the Bayside Inn, her foot on the edge of the tub, and she’d looked at the ceiling where a heavy raft of clouds crossed the domed skylight, and one hand on the towel against herself, she’d seen Eddie Zanduce so differently than she had thought. For one thing he wasn’t married and playing the dark game that some men did, putting themselves closer and closer to the edge of their lives until something went over, and he wasn’t simply off, the men who tried to own her for the three hundred dollars and then didn’t touch her, and he wasn’t cruel in the other more overt ways, nor was he turned so tight that to enjoy a cup of tea over the marina with a hooker was anything sexual, nor was she young enough to be his daughter, just none of it, but she could see that he had made his pact with the random killings he initiated at the plate in baseball parks and the agreement left him nothing but the long series of empty afternoons.
“You want to know why I became a hooker?” she asks.
“Not really,” he says. He drives the way other men drive when there are things on their minds, but his mind, she knows, has but one thing in it—eleven times. “You have your reasons. I respect them. I think you should be careful and do what you choose.”
“You didn’t even see me,” she says. “You don’t even know who’s in the car with you.”
He doesn’t answer. He says. “I’ll have you back by five-thirty.”
“A lot of men want to know why I would do such a thing. They call me young and beautiful and talented and ready for the world and many other things that any person in any walk of life would take as a compliment. And I make it my challenge, the only one after survive, to answer them all differently. Are you listening?”
Eddie Zanduce drives.
“Some of them I tell that I hate the work but enjoy the money; they like that because—to a man—it’s true of them. Some I tell I love the work and would do it for free; and they like that because they’re all boys. Everybody else gets a complicated story with a mother and a father and a boyfriend or two, sometimes an ex-husband, sometimes a child who is sometimes a girl and sometimes a boy, and we end up nodding over our coffees or our brandies or whatever we’re talking over, and we smile at the wisdom of time, because there is nothing else to do but for them to agree with me or simply hear and nod and then smile, I do tell good stories, and that smile is the same smile you’ve been giving yourself all day. If you had your life figured out any better than I do, it would have been a different day back at your sailboat motel. Sorry to go on, because it doesn’t matter, but I’ll tell you the truth; what can it hurt, right? You’re a killer. I’m j
ust a whore. I’m a whore because I don’t care, and because I don’t care it’s a perfect job. I don’t see anybody else doing any better. Show me somebody who’s got a grip, just one person. Survive. That’s my motto. And then tell stories. What should I do, trot out to the community college and prepare for my future as a medical doctor? I don’t think so.”
Eddie Zanduce looks at the young woman. Her eyes are deeper, darker, near tears. “You are beautiful,” he says. “I’m sorry if the day wasn’t to your liking.”
She has been treated one hundred ways, but not this way, not with this delicate diffidence, and she is surprised that it stings. She’s been hurt and neglected and ignored and made to feel invisible, but this is different, somehow this is personal. “The day was fine. I just wish you’d seen me.”
For some reason, Eddie Zanduce responds to this: “I don’t see people. It’s not what I do. I can’t afford it.” Having said it, he immediately regrets how true it sounds to him. Why is he talking to her? “I’m tired,” he adds, and he is tired—of it all. He regrets his decision to have company, purchase it, because it has turned out to be what he wanted so long, and something about this girl has crossed into his view. She is smart and pretty and—he hates this—he does feel bad she’s a hooker.
And then she says the haunting thing, the advice that he will carry into the game later that night. “Why don’t you try to do it?” He looks at her as she finishes. “You’ve killed these people on accident. What if you tried? Could you kill somebody on purpose?”
At five twenty-five after driving the last forty minutes in a silence like the silence in the center of the rolling earth, Eddie Zanduce pulls into the Hilton lot and Carol Ann Menager says, “Right up there.” When he stops the car, she steps out and says to him, “I’ll be at the game. Thanks for the tea.”
AND NOW at two and one, a count he loves, Eddie Zanduce steps out of the box, self-conscious in a way he hasn’t been for years and years and can’t figure out until he ticks upon it: she’s here somewhere, taking the night off to catch a baseball game or else with a trick who even now would be charmed by her unaffected love for a night in the park, the two of them laughing like teenagers over popcorn, and now she’d be pointing down at Eddie, saying, “There, that’s the guy.” Eddie Zanduce listens to the low murmur of twenty-four thousand people who have chosen to attend tonight’s game knowing he would be here, here at bat, which was a place from which he could harm them irreparably, for he has done it eleven times before. The announcers have handled it the same after the fourth death, a young lawyer taken by a hooked line shot, the ball shattering his occipital bone the final beat in a scene he’d watched every moment of from the tock! of the bat—when the ball was so small, a dot which grew through its unreliable one-second arc into a huge white spheroid of five ounces entering his face, and what the announcers began to say then was some version of “Please be alert, ladies and gentlemen, coming to the ballpark implies responsibility. That ball is likely to go absolutely anywhere.” But everybody knows this. Every single soul, even the twenty Japanese businessmen not five days out of Osaka know about Eddie Zanduce, and their boxes behind first base titter and moan, even the four babies in arms not one of them five months old spread throughout the house know about the killer at the plate, as do the people sitting behind the babies disgusted at the parents for risking such a thing, and the drunks, a dozen people swimming that abyss as Eddie taps his cleats, they know, even one in his stuporous sleep, his head collapsed on his chest as if offering it up, knows that Eddie could kill any one of them tonight. The number eleven hovers everywhere as does the number twelve waiting to be written. It is already printed on best-selling T-shirt, and there are others, “I’ll be 12th,” and “Take Me 12th!” and “NEXT,” and many others, all on T-shirts which Eddie Zanduce could read in any crowd in any city in which the Orioles took the field. When he played baseball, when he was listed on the starting roster—where he’d been for seven years—the crowd was doubled. People came as they’d come out tonight on a chilly cloudy night in Baltimore, a night that should have seen ten thousand maybe, more likely eight, they flocked to the ballpark, crammed themselves into sold-out games or sat out—as tonight—in questionable weather as if they were asking to be twelfth, as if their lives were fully worthy of being interrupted, as if—like right now with Eddie stepping back into the batter’s box—they were asking, Take me next, hit me, I have come here to be killed.