A Man's Game

by Newton Thornburg

  Smoking and sipping at his Scotch, he lay there in his crummy bed, in his crummy room, thinking about the two of them up in his penthouse, out on the deck. He would be lying back in a real fancy lounge chair and she would be kneeling beside him, timidly running her hand back and forth over his flat gut, moving gradually, maddeningly, lower. Then he would look at her and smile, giving her permission, and she would lean forward, her beautiful hair falling across his body. And he would feel her mouth then, like warm honey running over him.

  This was the picture in his mind when he heard the car pull in and park outside. At first he figured it was his neighbor, the spic cleaning lady in the next apartment. But the footsteps on the porch were a man’s. Then there was a knock on the door. Slade placed the roach in an ashtray and flicked open his knife, holding it ready, next to his body, on the side away from the door, which he hadn’t bothered to lock yet.

  “It’s the police,” he heard. “Open up.”

  “Come on in,” he said.

  It was Jeffers’ partner, Lucca, the big soft slob who had joined her in questioning Slade after the Ravenna thing, three months before. Slade let go of the knife and raised the glass of Scotch, preparing to take another drink.

  “Well, Sergeant, what brings you here?” he asked. “Come on in. Sit down. You want something to drink? Coffee, beer, Scotch—you name it.”

  Lucca shut the door behind him, but made no move to sit down. “This ain’t a social call,” he said.

  “I figured that.”

  The sergeant took out a cigarette and lit it, gumming it like some toothless old woman, all the while looking down at Slade through his Coke-bottle glasses as if he were studying a very large, very dead, snake. Slade had to admit it was a pretty good act.

  “What can I do you for, Sergeant?” he asked.

  “The night before last. Where were you?”

  Frowning hard, Slade pretended to concentrate. “Jesus, lemme think. One day’s purty much like another, you know?”

  Lucca shook his head. “Don’t fuck with me, Slade.”

  “Hey, I’d never try to fuck with you, Sergeant. I’m trying to remember—honest.”

  “Between midnight and two in the morning.”

  “Well, let’s see—I was here last night.”

  “Not at this hour, you weren’t. My partner and I came by then too. No one was here.”

  “Detective Jeffers came by last night? No shit? Jesus, I’m sorry I missed her. What a fox, huh? You know, I’m beginning to think she’s got a thing for me—I mean, the way she keeps after me, even though I ain’t done nothin wrong.”

  “Midnight and two A.M., asshole. Where were you?”

  “Night before last, huh?”

  “Right.”

  “Why? What happened then?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Hey, I wish I could help. I really do. But all I draw is a blank.”

  “You want to do this downtown?”

  Slade did not respond to that. “Midnight and two in the morning, huh? Lemme think. Oh, yeah. I was at that rock club near the Needle. Some new band was playing.”

  “What club? What band?”

  “Well, lemme put the old thinkin cap on, okay? Let’s see now. The band was this buncha creepy kids—Alien something, I think. Yeah—Alien Beings, something like that. And the club—well now, let’s see—they keep changing owners so often, you know? Lemme think. Oh, yeah—the Semi Hard Rock Café. You know, a typical Seattle name. Real cute.”

  “Anybody see you there?”

  “Well, I’d think so, wouldn’t you?”

  “We’ll check it out.”

  “Naturally.”

  The sergeant just stood there for a while then, saying nothing, staring down at Slade with a sour look, as if he had a gut ache.

  “Mind if I look around?” he said finally.

  Slade shook his head. “Not at all, Sergeant. Not if you got a warrant.”

  “You think you’re real cute, don’t you?”

  “Jesus, Sergeant—I’m just dumbfounded, you know? I mean, you ain’t got a warrant? You came all this way just to ask me where I was a couple nights ago?”

  “You’re never out of my way, scum.”

  “Why? You live here too? You live in West Seattle, Sergeant?”

  “Where I live is my business.”

  “Well, sure. Naturally. I was just making conversation.”

  Slade was enjoying himself immensely. He had drawn up one leg, letting his robe fall, away to the point where he was almost exposing himself. And it made him want to howl, the way the ugly old bastard kept glancing at him there, as if he was afraid some giant snake was about to come slithering out, spitting fire at him. Slade hadn’t forgotten what one of his johns had told him about Lucca. Supposedly, years before, when the sergeant worked Vice, he’d had the habit of picking up teenage male prostitutes—runaways—and giving them a hot meal and a sermonette, all for the price of a blow job. Slade didn’t know whether it was true or not, but he was inclined to believe it. Lucca was just too weird for his own good, coming here like this alone at night, and the way he stood inside the door like some kind of giant stuffed owl, ogling everything but touching nothing.

  Slade had known a lot of cops over the years, and Lucca was the only one he could think of who wouldn’t have leaned on him by now. At the very least, they would have made him get up and put on some clothes. Most of them, taking in his filthy sink and crummy furniture and tacked-up porn, would have kicked over a few chairs and slammed him up against the wall. And they would have poked around too, with or without a warrant.

  Not Lucca, though. He seemed content just to stand there and gawk, like some kid who had lost his way. Well, Slade was not above helping him try to find it again.

  “I just had a long, hot shower,” he said.

  Lucca sneered. “Who gives a shit?”

  “I’m so squeaky clean, I bet if I got a hard-on, my dick would squeak.”

  “What are you, losing your mind?”

  Slade grinned. “I just thought you might be interested, Sergeant.”

  “Well, you thought wrong, buster.”

  “It’s just that…well, I’ve kinda heard certain things, you know?”

  “Heard what?” The sergeant’s eyes looked as if they were about to pop right through the Coke bottles.

  “Or maybe it’s I’ve got this sixth sense, you know? After a while—doing what I do—a man begins to recognize certain kinds of people, you know?”

  At that, Lucca finally moved, coming straight over to the bed and tipping the flimsy thing, spilling Slade onto the floor. “I guess your sixth sense didn’t tell you to expect that, huh?” he bawled.

  Slade got to his feet slowly, apologetically, holding out his empty hands, for it suddenly had occurred to him that the wacko cop might just up and shoot him.

  “No, I sure didn’t expect that,” he said.

  On his way out, the sergeant stopped and looked back at him. “We’ll check out your story,” he said. “Meanwhile, don’t leave town, understand?”

  “Why would I? This is my town.”

  “Lucky us,” Lucca said.

  Baird would have had to eat alone that night if Kathy had not joined him at the kitchen table. Even microwaved, it was a delicious dinner—a stuffed pork chop, baked apple, and scalloped potatoes—food that Ellen had painstakingly prepared. So he could understand her added coldness to him, not coming home till almost nine o’clock. Kathy of course wanted to know all about his trailing of Slade, and he told her what he could, omitting only the creep’s homosexual transaction, if that was what it was. He told her that Slade had left his car in the park, near the art museum, and he had followed him home from there.

  Later, in the family room, he finally got Ellen to agree to go with him and Kathy to the police station in the morning. She grudgingly conceded that the university library could probably go on functioning without her part-time labors at the magazine checkout desk. And she even
went so far as to ask Kathy about “this Slade character,” what he had done that day, what he had said.

  Kathy spoke softly, as if she found it more embarrassing to tell her mother these things than she did Baird.

  “Oh, just more of the same junk. Only today he had a name for it—oxygen ‘depovation,’ as he pronounced it. He seems to think that if a woman lets a guy choke her while he’s making love to her…well, for her, it just doesn’t get any better than that.”

  Baird came close to spitting out a mouthful of coffee. “Jesus Christ! I ever get my hands on that—”

  “Oh, come on,” Ellen cut in. “To me, he sounds like a poseur. The Great Pretender. Probably read it in Playboy.”

  “I don’t think he reads much of anything,” Kathy said.

  Ellen made a face, an expression of mild distaste. “Well, we’ll have to see what the police say.”

  For the rest of the evening the three of them said very little. Across the room, on television, the Candice Bergen sitcom had come to an end. Though Baird wasn’t very interested in it or any of the shows that followed, they at least were conducive to dozing, which he did, lying on the couch while Ellen sat knitting in one of two easy chairs that faced the TV. As usual, Kathy had taken some pillows off the couch and rigged herself up on the floor, close to Baird. And finally she sat back against the couch in such a way that his hand rested on her shoulder. Sometimes she would squeeze in at the head of the couch, making him scoot down and rearrange his pillow halfway onto her lap. Then she would play with his hair, twisting it around her fingers, even as short as it was.

  “Pepper,” she would say. “And here’s some salt.”

  Ellen occasionally would look over at the two of them and shake her head in disgust. But Kathy was oblivious to her mother’s disapproval, and Baird wasn’t about to shove his daughter away. Not unexpectedly, he and Ellen had had a number of quarrels about the problem, Ellen accusing him of encouraging the girl, even reveling in the “childish crush” she supposedly had on him.

  “What do you suggest I do?” he’d say. “Get up and move? Push her away? Slap her hands?”

  Ellen did not lack for answers. “A little fatherly coldness would do the trick. I know I certainly got plenty of it from my old man, and yet I managed to grow up! At eighteen, I sure as hell wasn’t Daddy’s sweet widdo baby girl.”

  For the life of him, Baird couldn’t imagine what Ellen expected him to do about Kathy. Just because she didn’t want to be the kind of young woman currently fashionable—some hard-assed, hard-nosed future doctor, lawyer, merchant chief—what was he supposed to do? Reject her? Throw her out? As far as he was concerned, she was precisely the kind of daughter parents should have been proud to have: not only beautiful, but thoughtful and loving, a girl who wasn’t a slut or a drug addict, a girl whose only crime seemed to be that she was in no hurry to grow old and hard. She had dated in the past. She’d had friendships and opportunities. She’d had good grades in her one year of college. But she had not been happy there, and for now, her job and her home and her parents seemed enough for her. Which was all right with Baird.

  Unfortunately, Kathy was not the only thing his wife was unhappy about. And that unhappiness had been going on for almost four years, starting even before their son Kevin had gone off to college in Bellingham, ninety miles north of Seattle. Ironically, for the previous eighteen years Baird and Ellen had been “the happy couple,” the envy of most of their friends, the one couple who seemed to know how to make a marriage work. It hadn’t seemed to bother her any more than it did Baird that he was not a professional man like most of their neighbors. He had made his choices and Ellen had gone along with them, beginning with the move to the Northwest after the two of them graduated from the University of Illinois, their home state.

  Because the Vietnam War was then at its unpopular zenith, they had married while still in school, hoping to keep Baird from being drafted. Partly for the same reason, he had decided to take a job teaching English Lit in a Seattle high school. But after five years, as the war wound down and the job began to bore him, he joined a fledgling advertising agency formed by two of his friends. Because he was the best writer of the three, he became the ad creator, the inside man, while the others worked as account executives.

  Though the business prospered, Baird eventually found himself having to deal with the same feelings of boredom and frustration he had experienced in the classroom. And finally he figured out that the problem was not the kind of work he did—not the frivolousness of advertising nor the annual sameness of teaching—but where he did it: inside a building, in a room, at a desk. So he eventually found his way into the sales job with Norsten. As a college graduate, he knew he was overqualified for the work, but it paid well enough, certainly more than he could have earned as a schoolteacher, and he was not confined to an office or tied down to a desk. He was content, and he had thought Ellen was too.

  Then suddenly, four years before, she had informed him that his job was a laugh and their lives were a waste. Overnight she became a dedicated feminist and an ardent defender of minorities and gays and whales and spotted owls. It seemed there was not a single liberal cause that could have survived without her tireless support. She marched on Gay Pride Day and Martin Luther King’s birthday and was even on the scene, cheering wildly, when Seattle’s lunatic fringe set fire to the American flag at the local post office. She resented the money that could have been donated to “good causes” but which Baird instead “wasted on pleasure.” In time she refused to go out fishing with him or even boating on Lake Washington, and finally she typed up a statement and magnetized it to the refrigerator, a rundown on just how much his favorite hobby was costing them—exactly four hundred and eleven dollars per fish per year. Since their kids were nearing college age at the time, Baird went along with her and sold his boat, a twenty-four-foot Reinell that he had kept moored in Lake Union, just a few blocks from home.

  In time, though, Ellen began to lose her political fervor and eventually even expressed a total indifference to it all, as if some lingering fever had finally released its grip on her.

  “It’s just a lot of sound and fury,” she said, “like everything else.”

  Unfortunately this newfound reasonableness did not extend to family matters, and especially not to her daughter. Ellen simply could not accept the girl’s refusal to become the kind of woman her mother wanted her to be.

  That night in bed Baird as usual had to deal with the paradox that while his marriage was increasingly loveless, he still desired his wife as much as ever, even though maturity had made her more handsome than pretty. Ellen was a tall woman, only two or three inches shorter than Baird, who was five-eleven. Her hair was colored a shade of strawberry blond and she had a nice strong smile and a steady, blue-eyed gaze that would have made a judge squirm. Though she had gained about ten pounds since college, it only made her seem more voluptuous to him.

  Like him, she slept naked, just as they had done from the very first. And this puzzled him, because she otherwise tried to discourage his general horniness. Whatever her reasons, he was grateful for the lapse. Cuddling close, he put his arm around her, holding her breasts, and his cock rose between her buttocks. He edged a little lower, hoping to enter her, but she straightened out on the bed and pulled away.

  “I’m almost asleep,” she sighed.

  He kissed her on the cheek and rolled onto his back, disappointed but not in the least surprised.

  “Good night,” he said.

  Three

  The next morning was a little too perfect for an old Seattleite like Baird. There was a stiff breeze blowing out of the north, holding the temperature in the high sixties and scouring the air so vigorously that the city’s streets and buildings seemed to sparkle in the brilliant sun. Flags spanked and trees shimmered, and down the hill the Sound was a lake of blue fire rimmed by the green of the peninsula, above which the Olympics soared snowcapped and jagged, as if they had been placed there by the Ch
amber of Commerce.

  Baird knew the effect a morning like this could have on tourists, for he had been one himself the summer after his sophomore year in college. He had caught salmon and climbed Mount Si with a pair of fraternity buddies, and he had decided then that once he graduated, he too would become a citizen of the great Northwest. The only problem was that over the next quarter-century so many other tourists had followed his lead that the place was turning into Southern California. He wished that before making the big move all future immigrants would visit the city in December, sit gridlocked in their cars on Interstate 5 at six in the evening, listening to the drone of their windshield wipers and dreaming nostalgically of that halcyon time, months before, when they had seen the sun. But it was already too late. Even now, Baird had to drive around for fifteen minutes before he found a parking space near the Public Safety Building.

  As usual, Ellen had set the mood for the three of them, saying absolutely nothing as they drove the few miles from their house on Capitol Hill. She was dressed for work, wearing a white blouse, one of her voluminous artsy skirts, and a cardigan. Back at the house, she had tried to make Kathy change out of a short-skirted, low-cut lavender dress suit, saying that she might come across as a more believable victim if she weren’t “half-naked.” But Kathy had stood her ground, reminding her mother that she would be going to work later and that the lavender suit was the kind of “garment” the store wanted its clerks to wear. She worked in the costume-jewelry department and often had to model items for customers. Though she never said it in so many words, Baird had little doubt that the most important part of her job was simply to look the way most of the store’s clientele wished they could have looked.