A Man's Game

by Newton Thornburg

  When Ellen had told Baird that she’d bought tickets for the play, he’d agreed to go along, hoping it would in some measure make up for his late-night transgressions. Unexpectedly, Kathy had agreed to go along too, which spared Baird the necessity of convincing her to join them, since he still didn’t want her staying home alone. Always fashion-wise, she seemed to know just what the occasion called for: black jeans, a black-leather jacket, and a large, floppy tam with pink polka dots. Unlike her father, she did not look at all out of place.

  When the play finally began around eight-thirty, not everyone noticed. For one thing, no lights had dimmed. Nor was there a proscenium arch, or even a stage as such—just a large, square platform like a prizefight ring, with corner posts and standing spotlights and television monitors and cameras and microphones and miles of electric cable lying about. There were also a couple of chairs and tables. When the crowd eventually realized that the master of ceremonies was speaking, it quieted down, though the emcee remained largely inaudible, mumbling into a microphone with a cut cord. A barefoot youth, he wore bib overalls with zebra-stripe holes running up and down the legs, also a top hat bearing the letters “M.C.,” which Baird considered a really cute touch.

  Then came the first fully audible sound: the electronically boosted voice of an actress in street clothes engaging a TV monitor in conversation. The actor appearing on the monitor was sitting offstage, in front of a TV camera.

  Baird soon decided that the only way to get through the evening was to think about other things, such as the unsettling hour or so he had spent with Lee Jeffers. But every time he got a coherent thought going, a sudden noise from the stage—usually an electronic screech—would break through. Time and again he had to stifle the urge to lean toward Ellen or Kathy and offer a bit of commentary on the proceedings. And the effort must have shown, for when Kathy looked at him now, she suddenly began to sputter with laughter. Leaning her way, he confided that he was feeling queasy and might need to use her tam as a barf bag, which caused her to sputter all the more and finally to kick him in the leg.

  Fortunately, Kathy was not the only one laughing. The cognoscenti naturally were howling at all the right places, demonstrating their deep knowledge of Chekhov, of just what it was that was being “sent up.” One man in particular, a cackler on a par with Wyatt Earp, was carrying on as if he were at a Henny Youngman concert. When he reached what was hopefully a crescendo, Baird suggested to Kathy that she go tell him to put a sock in it, which resulted in more sputtering and another shot to the leg.

  Ellen gave them both a stern look. Behind them, a man with minty breath and classy diction leaned close and suggested that if they did not like the show, perhaps they should leave.

  Baird turned and smiled gratefully. “Now why didn’t I think of that?” he said.

  As the first act was ending, he told Ellen that he was leaving. “I’ll wait in the car or get a drink somewhere. When it’s over, I’ll have the car out in front.”

  She looked at him as if he were an incorrigible child. “It doesn’t matter that I want to stay,” she said.

  “No reason you can’t stay,” he told her. “I’ll pick you and Kathy up afterward.”

  “No, you won’t,” Kathy interjected. “I want to leave too.”

  Ellen shrugged. “Of course. What else?”

  Baird leaned close to his wife. “Come on, honey, you know this is the pits. It’s excruciating. In a movie theater, you’d demand your money back.”

  She gestured indifference. “Go on, then. Go. I’ll see you both later.”

  It wasn’t easy, making their way through the entr’acte crowd, most of whom were battling their way toward the bar, shouting at each other in order to be heard. The wooden stairwell was deafening and smoke-filled, and when he and Kathy finally reached the cool night air of the street, Baird felt as if he had been swimming up through murky water and just now breached the surface. He noticed that they were not the only ones leaving, that they were in fact part of a sizable crowd heading for their cars.

  “God, was that a waste!” Kathy said. “I can’t imagine what they had in mind.”

  “Apparently not profit.”

  The car was parked in a lot across the street. When they reached it and got in, Kathy wondered out loud where they should go for a drink. “Henry’s would be good,” she concluded.

  But Baird already saw Ellen coming toward them, crossing the busy street. “Probably nowhere,” he said. “Here comes your mother.”

  His prediction proved true. Ellen said that she didn’t want to stop anywhere for a drink or anything else. She just wanted to go straight home. As Baird pulled out of the lot, she explained why.

  “I’d be afraid you two would just get up and leave me.”

  “Oh, come on,” Kathy said.

  “Next time I’ll just buy a ticket for myself.”

  “Mother, you know that thing stunk.”

  “Stank,” Ellen corrected. Smiling then, she suddenly began to laugh. “Oh God, but it stank!”

  She had always had a lovely laugh, rich and easy, and for some reason on this night it opened Baird like a cleaver. To cover the tears unexpectedly welling in his eyes, he laughed too, as did Kathy, in the back seat. And soon the three of them were howling as if they would never stop. Ellen, gasping, managed to get out a few words.

  “It…certainly wasn’t…Hamlet!”

  Even as he was laughing, Baird felt a twinge of uneasiness at his emotion. Here he was, a man prepared to do anything to keep his daughter from harm, a man who had spent most of his waking hours the last two days thinking about Lee Jeffers, and yet a man whose wife could still turn him into jelly with a single laugh. He wondered if he wasn’t becoming a kind of Slade in reverse, a man crippled not by hatred but by love.

  Turning onto Alton, Baird saw immediately that the house was not as they had left it. The lights left burning in the den and kitchen had been turned off, and upstairs, which had been left dark, there was now a light on—in Kathy’s room. As he slowed down, Ellen saw it too.

  “Maybe Kev’s home,” she said.

  Their son had phoned Monday night, but he hadn’t said anything about coming home.

  “He doesn’t turn lights off—he turns them on,” Baird said.

  He slowed the car to a crawl as they moved past the house.

  “His car’s not here,” Ellen said. “The driveway’s empty.”

  “Oh, Jesus!” Kathy cried. “It’s him! I know it’s him! He’s in my room!”

  “We don’t know that,” Baird said. “And we’re not going to look. We’ll let the police check it out.”

  He pulled into a neighbor’s driveway, then backed around and parked, facing their house. Using the car phone, he called the police and explained the situation, told them that “a burglar or burglars” might still be in the house.

  As they waited for the police, Kathy began to pound her fist helplessly against the front seat. “We can’t stop him!” she said. “He’s going to kill me and we can’t stop him. Nobody can.”

  When the police arrived—two cars, with their lights flashing—Baird got out and waved the first one down. He told the officer at the wheel which house was his and why he thought there was trouble inside. For the moment he didn’t mention Slade, figuring it would only complicate matters. He gave the officer a key to the front door and then watched as the man went on ahead and parked in front of the house. The second car pulled into the driveway and two officers got out. With guns drawn, they went around to the back while the first one went up to the front door, unlocked it, and went inside. Baird started walking toward the house. Inside he could see the beams of the officers’ flashlights sweeping back and forth. Then the lights began to come on, one room at a time, first downstairs, then upstairs.

  Meanwhile Ellen was calling out to Baird in a hushed voice, urging him to come back to the car. But he went on ahead, reaching the front porch just as the first officer came back out.

  “They’re gon
e,” he said to Baird. “They broke in the back way. Looks like you lost a few things.”

  Baird signaled to Ellen and Kathy, who then got out of the car and came toward him. The other officers appeared in the driveway, having come from the back of the house. “We’re gonna roll, Charley,” the nearest one said.

  The officer on the porch nodded. “Yeah, I’ll take it from here. But you call in Burglary for me, okay?”

  The two men got into their patrol car and backed into the street. As they drove away, Ellen and Kathy joined Baird on the porch.

  “There’s one weird thing,” the officer said.

  “What’s that?” Baird asked.

  “I’ll show you.”

  The three of them followed the officer into the living room. There, above Ellen’s two Empire settees, Freddy Bear had been nailed to the fireplace mantel with a butcher knife run through his belly.

  The officer shook his head in puzzlement. “It’s just weird, a burglar taking the time to do a silly thing like that.”

  Kathy had started to run from the room, but Baird caught her and pulled her close. He could feel her trembling.

  “I don’t think it was a burglar,” he said.

  Six

  By the time the burglary detectives arrived, Baird had already tried to phone Lee Jeffers to tell her what had happened. But she was not at home, so he left a message on her machine. Both detectives were sergeants in their thirties, an Irishman and a Japanese seemingly more interested in their amiable Mutt-and-Jeff routine than in Baird’s assertion that Slade was the burglar. The Japanese, Soto, did take the time to write down some of what Baird had to give him about Slade—his address and record and the fact that Sergeant Lucca and Detective Jeffers were already working on his case—but the Irishman, Reardon, obviously thought his partner was wasting his time. According to Reardon, it was a “prank bust-in,” a nonprofessional job from start to finish, probably the work of neighborhood kids.

  “A professional burglar,” Reardon said, “would never waste time scrounging up a butcher knife so he could tack a teddy bear to the mantel.”

  Baird wanted to kick the man. “That’s exactly what I’m saying,” he told him. “Slade is not a burglar. This was meant to intimidate us and terrify our daughter.”

  The Irishman shook his beefy head. “Naa, this is strictly kid stuff. What did they get? What did they take? Purty much zilch. Hell, I bet it was some Jap kids that done it.” He looked over at his partner. “What about it, Bobby? Any Jap kids in this neighborhood?”

  “Jap kids, my ass,” Soto said. “Only mick kids be dumb enough to take a Sears VCR and pass up a Nikon thirty-five millimeter.”

  Baird was glad the two of them were having such a fine time. He only wished there had been a rape or a killing so they could have truly enjoyed themselves. At the same time, he recognized that the break-in did have its bizarre aspects, even if the perpetrator—Slade—was interested only in terrorizing Kathy. He had broken in through the back door, for some reason jimmying it open, wrecking the jamb and springing the locks, when all he had to do was break the door’s window, reach in, and unlock it. In the process, though, he had broken the glass anyway.

  As far as Baird could tell, Slade had taken only the VCR, a pair of binoculars, and an old calendar watch of Baird’s, passing up dozens of more valuable items, including cameras and silverware and—oddest of all—Baird’s gun collection, if it could be called that. Basically just an assortment of rifles and shotguns accumulated over the years—nine guns in all, none of any particular value or rarity—they were kept in a glass-front oak cabinet that Baird had bought secondhand when he was in his thirties and still an occasional hunter. Considering what he had said to Slade in the strip club about the guns and what he would do with them, he figured the creep would have stolen them, or at least tried to neutralize them: take them out and break their stocks, smash the barrels against the fireplace, do what damage he could. But all he’d done was break the cabinet’s glass front, leaving the guns untouched.

  It occurred to Baird that this could have been a symbolic act on Slade’s part, a taunting demonstration of just how empty he found Baird’s threats. But then, Baird doubted that old Jimbo even knew what symbolism was. More likely, he simply had been in a hurry to get out of the house. Still, Baird didn’t doubt that the creep had accomplished his objective: invading their home and leaving his grotesque message. Ellen immediately had wanted to take the teddy bear down from the mantel, but the police officer had said to leave it there for the detectives. And eventually Sergeant Soto did attend to it, gingerly pulling the butcher knife out of both the mantel and the bear’s body and dropping it into a plastic hag so it could be tested later for fingerprints—the only such testing the police planned to do. No forensics expert was brought in to dust around the broken door or the gun cabinet or the mantel.

  As Sergeant Reardon explained it: “This is small potatoes. We get a dozen of these a night, most of ’em by users. And even then we don’t usually dust, not unless there was violence—and I don’t mean against teddy bears neither. You were damn lucky, you know that? Japanese kids, they ain’t very good burglars.”

  Soto grinned. “Unlike the Irish.”

  After the comical detectives had left—moving on to their next gig, as Baird thought of it—Ellen phoned Kevin in Bellingham to tell him about the break-in, but he was not at home either. Baird asked Kathy what she wanted done with Freddy Bear, and she said to get rid of him, so he took the bear outside and put it in the trash. Then he did what he could to secure the back door, reflecting ruefully that for years he had been intending to put better locks on the door or even replace the door itself. At least now he would have to see that something was done about it.

  Later, after Kathy and Ellen had gone upstairs to bed, Kathy suddenly cried out, and Baird went bounding up the stairs, passing Ellen in the hallway. Together, they found the girl sitting on her bed, her face in her hands.

  “What is it, baby?” Baird asked. “What’s wrong?”

  She gestured toward her dresser. “The bikini pictures. He took them too.”

  The “bikini pictures,” as Ellen referred to them, were two five-by-seven blowups of snapshots taken at the Oregon beach a couple of summers before. One was of Kathy alone and the other was of the four of them standing in a row in their swimsuits, with the sea and Oregon’s great surf rocks in the background. In each photo Kathy was wearing the same revealing bikini and doing her best to mock its effect, posing with exaggerated sexiness, smiling haughtily while holding one hand behind her head and the other on her hip. As a result, Ellen had decreed that the pictures were not suitable for the baby grand. So Kathy had kept the two framed photos on her dresser.

  They were not there now, however.

  Both Ellen and Baird tried to console the girl, but she was so terrified, Baird doubted that she even heard them.

  “I keep feeling him here!” she said. “It’s like he’s still here. Like he’s taken over our lives.”

  Baird tried to be strong for her, but he too felt Slade’s presence everywhere in the house. It infuriated him, just the thought that the creep had sauntered through these rooms, touching this and that, probably bouncing on the same bed where Kathy now sat, maybe even stretching out, testing it against that fulfilling day when he could throw her onto it and draw out his switchblade.

  Feeling shaky himself, Baird took her by the arms and brought her to her feet, hugged her. “Listen, honey, you sleep with Mom tonight, okay? I’ll take the guest room.”

  Ellen demurred. “She’ll have the same problem tomorrow night. It’s something she’s just going to have to deal with.”

  Surprisingly, the decision came from Kathy herself. Putting her arm around her mother, she ushered her toward the door.

  “No, Daddy’s right,” she said. “I’ll sleep with you tonight. And tomorrow I’ll scrub everything in here. Then I’ll be okay.”

  But going to bed did not mean going to sleep. Baird didn’
t even give it much of a try. Stacking the pillows under his head, he lay there in the dark listening to Kathy and Ellen across the hallway, in the master bedroom. Though he couldn’t hear their words, he could tell from their voices that while Kathy wanted to talk, Ellen only wanted to sleep. He could hear his wife tossing and turning, responding to Kathy’s words with sighs of exhaustion and exasperation. So Baird eventually got out of bed and went in to them. He suggested that Kathy take his place in the guest room, adding that he would sit up with her until she was asleep. She agreed almost too readily, not even saying good night to her mother before jumping out of bed and hurrying across the hall to the guest room. When Baird started to tuck her in, she reached up and took his hand, and he sat down on the edge of the bed.

  “Are you really going to stay until I’m asleep?” she asked.

  “Of course, baby. All night if you want.”

  Her eyes filled. “I can’t stand the thought of him in my room.”

  “Me neither. But for now, just try to put him out of your mind, okay? He’ll be my worry tonight.”

  She nodded. “All right.”

  He kissed her on the cheek. “I’ll never let him hurt you, honey. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “So go to sleep now. I’ll stay right here. Then I’ll be across the hall. I’ll leave the doors open.”