A Man's Game

by Newton Thornburg

After she closed her eyes, Baird sat there for another five or ten minutes, watching her in the soft light. And when her breathing slowed, he kissed her again, on the shoulder in order not to wake her. Then he got up and started out of the room.

  “Good night, Daddy,” she said.

  He smiled in the darkness. “Good night, sweetheart.”

  He went to the bathroom for a glass of water and ended up drinking two of them. It seemed he could not even think of Slade without his throat turning to parchment. When he got to bed, Ellen sighed and rolled toward him, waking briefly, though without opening her eyes.

  “How’s she doing?” she asked.

  “Okay, considering.”

  “Well, this settles it. She’s going to Illinois.”

  “I don’t think she will.”

  “Maybe if you’d take her—drive her there—maybe then she’d go.”

  “We’ll see,” he said.

  “But then what do I know?” With that, she rolled over again and immediately fell asleep.

  Baird did not even try to follow her. He looked up at the shadows playing across the ceiling—the leaves of his neighbor’s cottonwood rustling in the streetlight—and he felt an overwhelming helplessness. If he had ever needed proof that Slade was not going to back down, he knew he had it now. It just didn’t make any sense to go on hoping for the best, not when you were dealing with a man who would break into a girl’s home for no other reason than to terrorize her, in the process leaving his revolting little calling card, like a wild animal pissing on the perimeter of its turf.

  Baird accepted it now that Slade was just going to keep on pushing, breaking whatever laws he chose to break, knowing that the police would not find anything they could use against him. And eventually, someday, somewhere, he would get Kathy alone, have her totally at his mercy. And Baird, like most fathers—like most pitiful, law-abiding, middle-class wimps—would do nothing but sit and hope and wring his hands, and in the end wind up despising himself for the rest of his days. In fact, all he had to do was turn on the television news and there he was: some poor bereft bastard sitting with his wife in their tacky living room, wiping his eyes and muttering to a reporter that he’d just never thought the fellow would go so far. Sometimes it was a son-in-law, sometimes a daughter’s boyfriend; but just as often it would be an outsider, a random creep like Slade.

  An hour passed before Baird finally gave up and got out of bed. He slipped into his bathrobe and went down to the kitchen, where he filled a glass with ice and vodka, adding a splash of tonic. Then he carried the drink back through the house and went out onto the deck and stood there in the darkness, sipping at the vodka, hoping to relax. To his right, down the street, was Lookout Park, deserted as far as he could see in the lights from the street. Beyond the park, in the brambly woodland down the hill, the darkness was solid, impenetrable. And Baird wondered if Slade was out there somewhere, crouched and silent, observing what he had wrought in the home of his intended.

  Taking a deeper draft of the vodka, Baird recalled a time when he was only seven or eight years old, visiting his grandparents’ Illinois farm. While aimlessly poking around the barnyard, he had come upon some sort of wooden cover lying on the ground, and as he reached down to stand it up, a cat was suddenly at his side, a sleek gray tom with jack-o’-lantern eyes. Baird went ahead and raised the lid, and in the next few seconds he learned unforgettably what the phrase “quick as a cat” meant. For the moment the lid came off the ground, there was an explosion of mice scampering in every direction—though not nearly fast enough to avoid the cat’s murderous paws, which in the space of a few seconds maimed five or six of the tiny rodents.

  Afterward, the cat casually went back over his catch, killing all but one, which he then lovingly played with for a good half hour, softly cuffing it this way and that, carrying it in his mouth and dropping it, repeatedly letting it limp away until it would reach some unknown forbidden point, whereupon the cat would playfully pounce on it again. And when the mouse finally died, the cat kept prodding it, as if trying to wake the poor creature. Failing that, he settled down and ate it.

  Baird certainly didn’t think of Slade as catlike, nor did the creep’s eyes glow bright orange. But Baird would never forget the simple, mindless pleasure the cat found in torturing the mouse, and he couldn’t help wondering if Slade wasn’t similarly enjoying himself, watching helpless old “Pops” boozing out on the deck in the darkness.

  Baird drank the last of the vodka and poured the remaining ice out over the railing. Then he drew back his arm and hurled the glass as far as he could down the hillside.

  Before eight o’clock the next morning, Lee Jeffers came to the house. Baird was in the dining room, reading the paper and having toast and coffee. Ellen and Kathy were still upstairs, both having decided not to go to work that day, Kathy because she was exhausted and frightened, Ellen because she agreed that the girl shouldn’t be left home alone.

  Baird let Jeffers in and took her through the downstairs, showing her the back door and the gun cabinet, then the fireplace mantel, even though there was nothing for her to see there except a slit in the wood where the knife had gone in.

  “You really think it was him?” she asked.

  Baird looked at her. “You don’t? Who else would it be?”

  “I don’t know. It just seems so silly. What did he accomplish?”

  “Other than scaring the hell out of us, I’m not sure. You’ll have to ask him.”

  She smiled wryly. “Oh, we will—don’t worry.”

  Instead of her usual jeans and suede jacket, the detective was wearing a dark pantsuit with a white blouse and a purple scarf. She looked more businesslike but no less appealing than she had two nights before when he had driven her home. Leading her through the house, he touched her arm and the small of her back a couple of times. In the rear hallway, looking at the broken door, she turned suddenly, and they found themselves face-to-face, just inches apart. She looked flustered for a moment, then smiled and moved on.

  “Not too bright,” she said, “breaking the door that way. Not one of your better burglars.”

  “How about one of your better murderous sexual predators?”

  She turned again and looked at him. “Reason enough to stay away from him, wouldn’t you say?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Anyway, no more trying to go it alone, okay, Jack?”

  They were coming into the foyer just then, as was Ellen, from upstairs. The two women said hello, and Baird explained to Ellen that he had just taken Jeffers through the house, showing her Slade’s handiwork. Then he told Jeffers about the missing photographs, and she said that she would check with the burglary detectives during the day and that as soon as there were any developments in the case, she would call and let them know.

  When she was gone, Baird went back into the dining room to pour himself a fresh cup of coffee. Ellen followed.

  “What was that about going it alone?”

  He shrugged. “I’m not sure. The night she went to Leo’s—you remember, she called here first?”

  “Yes. So?”

  “She wanted us to know more about Slade—his juvenile record and so forth.”

  “I already know that.”

  “Well, during the course of the conversation, I think she somehow got the idea that if the police couldn’t make Slade back off, I might give it a try myself.”

  “She somehow got the idea?”

  “I guess from things I said.”

  “Well, you’re not that reckless, I hope.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  Ellen smiled now, not without irony. “A good-looking woman, that Jeffers, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I guess. In an exotic sort of way.”

  “Calls you Jack already. I didn’t realize you knew her that well.”

  “That night at Leo’s, she was there for almost an hour.”

  “That explains it, then.”

  Baird did not respond.


  During the afternoon Baird called the police several times from his car but wasn’t able to get in touch with either the burglary detectives or Lee Jeffers. Finally, at close to five o’clock, he called again from the Norsten office and got Jeffers on the phone. She had just heard from Soto in Burglary, she said. They had searched Slade’s apartment and car and hadn’t found any of the missing items. There were no fingerprints on the knife, and on top of that, Slade had an alibi for the time of the burglary.

  “A stockbroker,” she said to Baird. “Probably one of his johns. If the guy is still in the closet, somebody like Slade can get him to say almost anything.”

  “So he gets away with it,” Baird said.

  “If he did it, yes. We’ve got to have a case, you know.”

  “Oh, I know, I know. What I think I’ll have to do is get Kathy and take her over to his place and let him have his fun. After all, we don’t have a case.”

  Jeffers was silent for a few moments. “What you should do is get her out of town,” she said finally. “Have her visit friends or relatives.”

  “She’s afraid he’ll find her wherever she goes.”

  “Jack, he’s not the F.B.I.”

  Baird sensed that he had gone too far, said too much. So he tried to pull back. “I know. I guess I’m just getting paranoid. But don’t worry about me, Lee. I’m okay. And Kathy’s tougher than she looks. We’ll muddle through this somehow. Maybe Slade will get AIDS and die.”

  Jeffers laughed. “You know, you’re beginning to sound like a cop. Sick.”

  That evening Ellen again broached the subject of Kathy leaving town for a while, and again Kathy was not receptive to the idea.

  “What if Slade found out where I was and came after me?” she asked. “Who would protect me? Uncle Ralph? He gets winded just getting up from the dinner table.”

  Ellen was losing her patience. “Just tell me how on earth Slade would know where you were? How could he possibly find out?”

  Kathy ignored the question. “Or maybe Aunt Dollie,” she went on. “God knows, if she sat down on him, my worries would be over.”

  Like her mother, Kathy was not very fond of Baird’s brother and sister-in-law. When they were in their early thirties, Ralph and Dollie had “found Jesus” and ever since had been zealous Christian fundamentalists. They didn’t drink or smoke or go to the movies, but they did have a hard time pushing away from the table. Otherwise, Baird considered them good, decent people, honest and hardworking. And he knew they would have loved having Kathy stay with them for a time, especially since their only child, Little Ralph, was now living in Hollywood, parking cars and writing godless screenplays. Still, Baird was relieved that Kathy felt as she did. He didn’t like the idea of her being that far from him, not with Jimbo Slade on the same continent. Then too, Baird knew something that Ellen did not: that in the coming days, the initiative wasn’t going to be exclusively with Slade.

  “There are ways he could find out,” Baird said. “He seems to be a resourceful sort.”

  “What ways?” Ellen snapped. “Name one.”

  “Phone records. Maybe he’s got a friend at the phone company.”

  “And if he found out, he’d just drop everything and drive straight out to Illinois. Do you seriously believe that?”

  Kathy answered for him. “I don’t want to find out, Mother. And I’m not going to.”

  Except for that little contretemps, it was a quiet, even peaceful, evening at the Bairds. In every room Slade’s alien presence hung in the air like a foul odor, and probably because of this, the three of them stayed together for the most part. Usually Ellen would wait for Baird or Kathy to go into the family room and turn on the television before joining them, but on this night she led the way. And from eight o’clock on, the three of them were there together. Ellen had her knitting, Kathy chose the programs to be watched, and Baird stretched out on the couch, thinking about the next night, wondering whether he would even be able to find the creep and just what he would do if and when he did. He would have to play it by ear, that much he knew. But beyond that, what the “tune” itself would be, he had no idea.

  As usual, Kathy had set herself up on the floor with a pile of pillows next to Baird’s couch. She was wearing silk pajamas, and her shower-damp hair was tied up off her neck with a scarf. Occasionally she would lean into her father’s hand like a cat wanting to be scratched, and he would lift a finger or two and comply. Then she would settle back again, content for the moment.

  Seven

  The next morning, a Saturday, a carpenter hired by Ellen showed up at nine o’clock to replace the door window, repair the jamb, and install new locks. Considering that burglars could still break into the house through almost any window they chose, Baird and Ellen had agreed not to replace the handsome old door with something opaque, modern, and probably ugly. Baird helped the carpenter for a while, taking the old door off its hinges and removing the rest of the broken window pane. Then he got out of the man’s way and read the morning paper and Time magazine while watching the first two quarters of a pre-season football game: the Giants and the Bears playing with all the fury of Brown against Vassar. He drank two beers and ate half of a ham-on-rye sandwich, leaving the rest because his stomach was already working itself into a knot.

  Finally, at three o’clock, he changed clothes, putting on a blue pinstripe shirt, gray slacks, and loafers. Since it was a fairly warm day, he decided he would have to carry his old suede jacket, at least until evening. Casually meeting Ellen’s searching gaze, he explained that he had some business calls to make, then kissed her and Kathy good-bye and went out the door.

  “You’re not even dressed for work,” Ellen called after him.

  Still walking, he shrugged. “It’s Saturday. And anyway, I’m a wild and crazy kinda guy.”

  If she laughed, he wasn’t aware of it. He got into his car, backed into the street and headed west, going downhill to Lake Union, where he had two double vodka-tonics in one of the yuppie-heaven restaurants scattered along the east shore. Within the hour he was back in his car, feeling only slightly more relaxed, but ready at least to get things rolling.

  He drove back to Fifteenth Avenue and turned into Volunteer Park, passing the spot where he’d had his first dispiriting glimpse of Jimbo Slade, coming out of the bus and hurrying after Kathy. He turned onto the blacktop drive that ran past the art museum, carefully checking the parked cars, looking for the old Impala hardtop. In front of the museum he had to stop to let a busload of Asian senior citizens pass, marching—as if against the flow of history—away from a sculpture resembling a mammoth tractor tire and toward the magnificent Ming dynasty camels that flanked the museum’s entrance. Farther on, he circled the water tower and came back past the museum so he could follow the one-way lower drive that looped down past the park’s men’s room. Of the dozen or so cars parked along the lower drive, none was Slade’s, so Baird returned to Fifteenth Avenue and headed south.

  He didn’t actually expect to find Slade in any of the spots where he’d previously seen him, but he figured it couldn’t hurt to look, especially since all three places—the park, Gide’s, and Harold’s strip club—were on his way to Slade’s apartment in West Seattle, where he expected to wind up again, parked down the street, twiddling his thumbs and going slowly crazy. So as he passed Gide’s, all he did was slow down and glance at the cars parked along the street and in the small lot next to the gay bar. And as a result, he almost missed it, the Impala, parked at the very rear of the lot, near the alley. And even then, the only reason he spotted it was its distinctive bloated shape and greater size, not to mention its unique coloring: pale green, gray primer, and rust. Parking on the next street over, he decided to leave his sportcoat in the car, with the gun in the side pocket. The day was still warm and he doubted he would need any lethal protection where he was going.

  Baird’s experience of gay bars was limited. One of them in the university district was a customer of his, originally strictly phone
-in. But now he stopped in once a month, wrote up their order for napkins and the like, and got out as fast as he could. The bartender seemed straight enough and the place was certainly clean, but Baird could never get used to the feeling of being looked at, sexually appraised, by other males. So it was not easy for him, entering Gide’s on a bright Saturday afternoon.

  The place was larger than Leo’s and handsomely decorated, with real ferns and potted plants, not plastic ones. Also, unlike Leo’s, it was packed wall-to-wall with patrons, most of them male, and almost all of them talking at the same time, some practically yelling to be heard over the din of voices and music. And it was not baseball playing on the TVs at either end of the bar, but hardcore pornography, avid mouths gobbling swollen penises. But the most striking difference from Leo’s was in the patrons themselves, most of whom were physically connecting with each other: touching, nudging, kissing, fondling. And finally there was that difference Baird dreaded most: a number of men turning to look at him in a way Wyatt Earp and old Ralston never did.

  It seemed to take forever before he finally found Slade in a corner booth in an alcove, sharing a pitcher of beer with a forty-ish balding man in designer jeans and a silky short-sleeved shirt left hanging out, which seemed to be the uniform for the out-of-shape, as against the weight-lifter types, who preferred skintight black T-shirts. Slade himself had gone back to the leopard-skin vest, which Baird could see now was only printed leather. Otherwise he looked the same: ponytailed, bare-torsoed under the vest, his neck and ears and arms and fingers bright with junk Indian jewelry.

  Seeing Baird, he started to sit up, then caught himself and lounged back, throwing a muscular arm across the back of the booth, in the bargain showing off his hairy armpit.

  “Well, Jesus Joe Christ, if it ain’t old Pops Baird hisself!” he said. “What is this? You come here to shoot me or what?”

  “Only to talk. May I sit down?”

  “Well, hell yes. Free country last time I looked.”