Nobody Bats a Thousand

by Steve Schmale

Mary Jean could feel the pressure of tension fill the Buick. She had really struck a nerve without a clue as to why. Bill turned onto Broadway and cruised along slowly.

  After a few minutes a notion slipped into MJ’s rapidly whirling brain. “Maggie told me she had saved people’s lives, she saved your life didn’t she? That’s what the big favor you owe is all about isn’t it? I bet you were strung out just like that creep back there. That’s why you know so much about it, and that’s probably why you hate him so much.” She smiled. “That’s it isn’t it? I don’t know how it all works exactly, but that’s what it’s all about isn’t it?”

  Bill didn’t react other than casting a droll look. “Boy, you are quite the little detective aren’t you, Queenie. Quite the detective I must say. I bet you are a whiz at crossword puzzles.”

  “I am. And I read a lot of mysteries.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you what, Ms. Detective, since we’ve seemed to have reached a little impasse on this caper, I’ll let you call the next move…come on, Queenie, where do we go from here?” Bill smiled and ran his free hand across his baldhead.

  Mary Jean was not about to back down from the challenge. She was looking out the window, trying to think, when she saw him sitting in a parking lot with his back against a building. “Go back! Let’s talk to him,” she said pointing.

  “Who, that bum in the parking lot? Come on, when I ”

  “Just go back there. You asked me what to do, and I’m telling you.”

  “Don’t tell me you know him?”

  “Just go back.”

  “Bill made a U-turn, pulled into the parking lot so the Buick was parallel to the Monk against the wall. At first he seemed fearful. He stood and looked ready to run until Mary Jean rolled down her window.

  The Monk smiled. “The blonde witch,” he said slowly moving toward the car.

  “He does know you.”

  “Shut up…no, not you,” she said to the Monk. “It’s me, Maggie’s friend.”

  “I know. I had you in my dream.”

  “Oh, please…”

  “Not a sex dream, amiga, I dreamed you were coming to talk to me, and now you are here…or am I dreaming again? Sometimes I’m not sure.”

  “Sometimes I think this might just be one big bad dream, but in case it’s not I need to ask you if you know a guy named.” She turned to Bill.

  “Henry, Henry the Weasel.”

  “Sure, I know Enrique,” the Monk smiled as if he had just won a prize.

  “Have you seen him around? Recently?”

  “Very recently, amiga.”

  MJ dug into her jeans and pulled out a five-dollar bill. “You can have this if you can tell me where I can find him.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t  Okay.” He snatched the bill from her hand. “I saw him and his friends around a barrel fire behind the Ortega tortilla factory on my way over here not twenty minutes ago. I would have liked to join them around the warm fire, but I do not like their company.” He smiled. “Or probably them mine.”

  “Do you know where that is?” Mary Jean asked Bill, who nodded his big shaved head. “Gracias, my friend. You’ve been a big help.”

  “Okay witch. Hey.” He caught Mary Jean just as she was about to roll up the window. “You should take some advice, amiga. You know the Sleeping Prophet said this is all going to end soon anyway, so you shouldn’t be stressing so much. You should learn to just play it cool.”

  “Yeah, right, I’ll give it some thought.” She pushed the button to close the window.

  Bill pulled out of the parking lot and into the street.

  “So this place can’t be far, right?”

  “It’s not far.” Bill sped down Broadway for a little less than a mile, made a left, turned off his lights, and slowly crept down a narrow dark street until he could see down a darker alley behind a row of old brick buildings. He stopped the Buick. Fifty yards down the alley, the darkness was broken by the faint glow of a dying fire, the light lifting up from a round container.

  “There! There! There it is!”

  “This is not the time to get frantic on me, Queenie. Take your friend’s advice would you, and just be cool, just relax. When an animal goes in for the kill, that’s when they become the most peaceful and still.”

  “He’s not my friend, just an acquaintance.”

  “Now listen carefully. Look down that alley and study it as best you can with the lack of light.” Bill waited less than ten seconds before he lifted his foot from the brake and drove forward. A block away he pulled to the curb and set the Buick in park. “Now listen, this is what we are going to do,” he went into a sixty second discourse about his plan, which ended with a question followed by a bit of advice. “Have you ever driven a car this big before? Just remember it’s not a damn sports car, don’t try to keep it revved up, just cruise. You’ve got to treat her gently.” Bill drove around the block and again set the car in park. He reached across Mary Jean to pull something from the glove box, which MJ first thought was an electric razor.

  “What’s that?”

  “Just a little attention getter. Now remember, don’t fool around. It should take me just about as long as it takes you to drive around the block to do what I have to do.”

  “Are you sure you know what you are doing?”

  “Think about it. Does anyone really know what they are doing? See you in a bit.”

  As soon as Bill got out of the car MJ slid behind the wheel, put the car in gear and sped off.

  A thin mist was playing with the darkness as Bill advanced on a trio of men, passing a bottle, gathered around the fading barrel fire. They saw him approach and stood firm and anxious, like predators welcoming new prey.

  Bill began to push at a button on a device he had pulled from his pocket, and at each touch a rattling, crackling flash of light lit his path. The trio’s demeanor stiffened.

  “I just need to talk with the Weasel there. I don’t want any trouble with you two,” Bill said, and after the quick negotiation the two strangers were history, they disappeared off into the darkness.

  Henry the Weasel took but a few seconds to surmise the situation; he turned to sprint down the alley, away from Bill but had only made it twenty yards before he saw his path was about to be blocked by the shadowy figure of the huge black Buick, its headlights off, speeding towards him down the alley. Mary Jean hit the lights and stopped a few feet in front of Henry who, temporarily blinded, shielded his eyes with his arm as he quickly renewed his plans for escape. The Buick was effectively filling the alley with only inches between it and the buildings on either side. So, instinctively going with his final option, the Weasel was up on the hood and about to go over the car when Bill grabbed him by a leg and pulled him down hard, first violently banging his body onto the hood of the car then even harder onto the ragged asphalt.

  Bill lifted the Weasel, jabbed his stun gun into Henry’s ribcage and gave him a surge, effectively ending any resistance before it could begin.

  With his free hand, Bill grabbed Henry by the throat as he pushed him against a wall. “Where’s the clock, Henry? Don’t lie. I just saw a tape of you walking out the backdoor of those kids’ store with it. I’ve got this gun set on high. If you don’t want another taste of it right in the nuts, start talking, and you better tell me something I want to hear.” Bill pushed the stun gun against the Weasel’s privates.

  “Okay, okay, I took it,” Henry said, his voice weak from the recent surge of pain, “but it was just a piece of junk.”

  “Well then, give it back.”

  “ I can’t.”

  “Don’t try my patience, Henry.”

  “I saw the poster offering a reward. I figured if anybody would pay money for anything that ugly there had to be something inside, but there wasn’t nothing in it. I swear. I swear to God.”

  “I understand your sudden need for religion, but you are still not telling me what I need to know. One more time, where’s the clock?”

  The Weasel strugg
led to point and speak with Bill’s thumb still digging into his windpipe. “There, there, the barrel.” Bill lessened the pressure. “I tossed in into the fire not ten minutes ago, but I swear there wasn’t nothing in it.”

  Bill switched the stun gun from the Weasel’s crotch to his temple and his grip from the front of Henry’s neck to the back of it as he led him twenty feet to the barrel where he kicked the heavy cast iron container over so its fiery contents spilled out onto the asphalt. As Bill kicked through the embers he could make out melted plastic stuck to small pieces of blackened wood.

  “I’m done talking, Henry. Give up what you found in the clock, or, since I’m in no mood for a strip search, I’m just about to give you a poor man’s lobotomy so we can cut to the chase.” He pressed the gun harder against his temple.

  “There wasn’t nothing. I swear it! I swear it!”

  “This is getting old. Oh well, you had your chance.” Bill kept the gun against Henry as he pulled his head towards him. “Well, here goes, I’ve never really tried this before it might be interesting.”

  “No! Don’t you think I’d give it up if I had something?”

  “That’s going to be a moot question in about three seconds. One…Two…”

  “Stop. Let him go. He doesn’t have it,” Mary Jean had parked the car and was now beside them, lightly sorting through the ashes from the barrel with her foot.

  “How do you know for sure?”

  “What I was looking for was in the wooden base, and he wouldn’t have wanted it even if he had broken it apart to find it.”

  Bill released his grip on the Weasel who at first staggered, then took off running like a rabbit being chased.

  “That base was what, a quarter of an inch thick? What could you hide in there? A stock certificate? A safety deposit key? He’d know they were valuable. He wouldn’t know what to do with them, but he wouldn’t throw them away. Get in the car, we can catch him again.” Bill looked at the fleeing Weasel, now two blocks away.

  “Nope, it’s gone.” MJ kicked again at the melting embers hopelessly holding out for a miracle reprieve. “Damn it! We were so close.”

  “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “I held up my end of the bargain. We didn’t find it in the condition you wanted, but we found it. Now pay up. Tell me. What have we been looking for?”

  “An autographed picture.”

  “An autographed picture? It better have been of the Pope or the President or Elvis Presley for all the trouble we’ve been through.”

  Mary Jean stood staring at the ashes and moping until Bill prodded her again. “Come on, give it up, an autographed picture of whom?”

  “Raymond Burr.”

  “Raymond Burr? Perry Mason? You’re shitting me.”

  “I don’t expect you to understand. I told you what we were looking for was very valuable to me but not to anyone else. He was my all-time favorite actor, and the photo was autographed to me personally the one time I briefly got to meet him.”

  “So we‘ve been chasing all over the county looking for a picture of some dead fairy actor? How about that?”

  “He wasn’t gay. I met him personally, and he was quite a gentleman.”

  “Sorry to clue you in, Queenie, but I knew people in the business who partied with him and knew him well, and they told me he was a swisher from the word go. He was more of a prancer than Santa’s damn reindeer…Hey, I’m just stating facts not putting him down. It just proves what a great actor he really was.”

  “I still don’t believe,” said Mary Jean, still looking down filled with desperation. Finally, after a quarter minute of silence she continued, “My whole life is just a series of strange, pitiful, meaningless coincidences.”

  “Welcome to the club, doll.” Bill started towards his car, then stopped and turned after several steps. “You coming?”

  “Where?”

  “To celebrate, to celebrate the closing of the case. Come on, I’ll buy you several drinks.”

  They had drinks at an upscale restaurant across the street from the Pyramid Theater. Sitting at a small table against the big windows, looking out at the pedestrians and the cars, and the large dark silhouette of the pyramid, hovering like a piece of history too weary to be remarkable, but too worthy to be forgotten.

  After his third beer, Bill began to let his hair down, metaphorically of course.

  “This is the first time I’ve ever violated my pledge to drink only on Fridays, first time in eighteen years. I think you might be a bad influence.”

  “Especially on myself.”

  A beer and a half later he really loosened up. “I don’t know how you guessed, but you were right about the smack. It’s been a quarter of a century ago, but I started running with the wrong people up in the City, and this lead to that, and before I knew it I was there where I never thought I’d be. I had a habit. It got so bad I was going through my monthly trust fund check in less than a week, which forced me to do a lot of things I shouldn’t have done. Anyway, something lead me here to Ashland to look up Maggie, an old friend I hadn’t really thought of in years. She took one look at me and locked me in her basement for three or four days. Three or four days of unbelievable agony, and once I detoxed, I haven’t gone back since. So I guess you could say she did save my life, her and Carl.”

  “Carl?”

  “Her late husband, a very large man, a dead ringer for Hoss Cartwright on Bonanza. I suppose he was doing it for me or maybe just to keep Maggie off his back, but if Carl decided you were to stay put there wasn’t much you could do.” After a sip of beer, Bill looked MJ firmly in the eyes. “So I’ve told you a secret, now you tell me one. Tell me about your picture.”

  Mary Jean was too comfortable, too at ease, and probably too drunk to hold back. She told Bill how whenever she was in Healdsburg visiting her maiden Aunt Pearl, she would drive past Raymond Burr’s estate endlessly, hoping to catch a glimpse of the famous actor, hoping she could get him to sign the glossy picture of him she kept carefully stored in a manila envelope in her car’s glove compartment. That was the last thing she remembered telling Bill before she blacked out. She didn’t know if she told him she was also probably subconsciously hoping Raymond would invite her inside to start the love affair of her life, or that when she did get the picture signed she was too drunk to know if the picture was actually signed by the actor, if she had really talked to him, or if the autograph had been done by the gardener or some other stranger who obliged just to get this crazy blonde in a convertible MG to move on.

  Those were the first thoughts that rumbled through her brain just after she opened her eyes, and, after a few seconds realized she was home in her bed in the small apartment above Maggie’s garage. She was still drunk from the night before and had no idea how she had gotten home. Possibly she was still in a blackout. She didn’t know for sure. What she did know was she hurt so bad it was painful to blink her eyes.

  With her quest for her wayward timepiece now over, she knew there were once again life decisions to be made. She would have to sort through her options. Maybe a massive yard sale and a one-way ticket to Alaska would be the answer to everything. Maybe it was time to go back to school to get her teaching degree. The only thing she knew for certain was that this was certainly no time to decide for now she needed aspirins for the pain and an Ativan to help her sleep through the hangover. She staggered into the kitchen for water to wash down the pills, and then staggered back to the comfort of her bed. Within minutes she was warm, asleep and headed for dreamland, and that was a good place to be.

  The End

  HOME ON THE RANGE

  Under a huge breezy blue sky, a ’62 Chevy pickup—original green paint, faded and beset with forty years of scrapes and dents—moved along Highway 40 just beyond the first big curve, the point the two thin lanes pulled away from town.

  Jimmy, alone in the truck, was wary of his destination. He had passed Charlie’s a couple of hundred times, but since he was under
age he had never thought of going inside. He U-turned twice, and was about to make his third pass of the long whitewashed building when he finally forced himself to pull into the big, dirt, parking lot, stopping next to a large yellow rental-truck backed up near the building.

  Jimmy killed the engine and sat, gripping the wheel, lightly biting his lower lip; barely moving for several slow minutes until he was surprised by someone coming out of the building, a heavy-set male, his hair shaved two inches above each ear, wearing a tiny ponytail and a rainbow tie-dyed shirt.

  As the stranger with the strange hair walked up to the rental truck, and pulled down the rear door, sliding it closed with a loud slam, Jimmy affected a lame pretense, trying to look busy by staring straight ahead at the weathered white wall. But soon from the side of his vision he could tell he was being scrutinized by the stranger as he leaned against a hydraulic lever, bringing up a lift until it was flat against the truck.