Going Nowhere Fast

by Gar Anthony Haywood

  "All the same. Your father and I are not completely convinced he had anything to do with that dead man. He just turned up at an awkward time, that's all."

  Mo made a sound conveying one part amusement, three parts disgust, but she didn't pursue her argument any further. She just said, "I think maybe I'd better come down there."

  "No, no, no. Absolutely not."

  I could see her and Big Joe now, drawing lots to see who would get Dog's clothes after the crucifixion.

  "Why not?"

  "Because it isn't necessary. Your father and I can handle this ourselves."

  "Really? How?"

  "By giving him one more chance to tell us the truth. And I mean every word of it, this time."

  Sitting on the bed nearby in our hotel cabin, his father towering over him like the sword of Damocles, Bad Dog heard this and turned to face me, sweating king-size bullets.

  "And if he doesn't tell you the truth?" Mo asked.

  "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it," I said.

  She didn't much care for that answer, of course, but I guess I'd worn her down to the point where she lacked the strength to press the issue. She just sighed with heavy heart and asked me for the name and number of the investigating officer who was handling our case for the Sheriff's Department, saying she intended to call him as soon as we were through, just to see how things were going.

  "Be polite to the man, Mo," I told her, after I'd given her the information she wanted.

  "Yes, Mother."

  "None of that 'Touch my parents and I'll sue you into the next Ice Age' business, like you pulled at Lake Tahoe. You hear?"

  "I hear you, Mother."

  "Dottie, leave the child alone," Big Joe said.

  "We can't go back to Harrah's now, did you know that? We used to stay there all the time, did almost all of our gambling there, but not anymore. We can't show our faces at the door at Harrah's now. They hear the name Loudermilk and boom!—everyone turns cold as ice."

  "Mom, they were trying to cheat you."

  "Out of three dollars and seventeen cents."

  "A payoff is a payoff, Mother."

  "It was a penny slot machine, Mo."

  "Get off the phone, Dottie," Big Joe said.

  Having ignored him once already, I decided to feign obedience and did as I was told.

  * * * *

  "All right, Theodore. Let's have it."

  "Have what?"

  "Joe, go get me my strap."

  "Strap? What d'you want with a strap?" Bad Dog started to laugh nervously. "Hell, you can't whip me! I'm twenty-two years old, I'm a grown man!"

  "I don't care how old you are. Long as I'm breathing, any child of mine asking for a good spanking is going to get one. Guaranteed."

  "Moms, you're not going to whip me. All right?"

  "And just how do you think you're going to stop me? With your father right here in the same room?"

  He stopped laughing. He hadn't thought about his father, and his silence proved it. If he so much as raised a hand against me, Joe would make him wish he'd taken his whipping, and liked it. Twenty-two or no twenty-two.

  Big Joe turned away from the closet to hand me a wide, black leather belt with a heavy silver buckle. Like me, he was as stone-faced as an undertaker at his own funeral.

  "Want me to hold him down for you?"

  "All right, hold it, hold it, hold it!" Bad Dog said, showing his father and me the palms of both hands in an effort to hold us at bay. "I get the idea, all right? You want the truth. All of it."

  Neither Big Joe nor I said a word. In fact, we didn't move, save for my coiling and uncoiling the black belt around one hand, slowly and methodically, over and over again.

  "Okay. Okay. What do you want to hear first?"

  "Let's start with this person Dozer Meadows," I said.

  "Sure, What about him?"

  "You tell us," Big Joe said. "You're the one who took off like a scared rabbit when he showed up at the trailer park this afternoon. Why was that?"

  "Took off like a scared rabbit? Me? No way, man. I just went for a walk, that's all."

  "Theodore," I said, "you were hiding in the closet again. Remember? We just pulled you out of there twenty minutes ago!"

  "Hey, I told you, Moms. I was lookin' for a quarter. I dropped some change on the floor, and a quarter rolled into the closet under the door. So I went in there to get it. All right?"

  Big Joe turned to me and said, "As I was saying. Would you like me to hold him down for you, or not?"

  "Okay, okay! I was hidin' in there, yeah! I was in the closet hidin'!"

  "From Dozer Meadows," I said.

  "Yeah, that's right. From Dozer Meadows."

  "Why? What's he got to do with you?"

  "Nothin'. 'Cept that he wants to kill me."

  "Kill you? For what?"

  "For gettin' him suspended from the team. What else?"

  "You mean suspended from the Raiders?"

  "Of course I mean the Raiders! Who else would I be talkin' about, the Mighty Ducks?"

  "Oh, Jeez Looweez, " Joe moaned, apparently grasping our son's meaning much faster than I. "You trying to tell us that you're the reason that boy got booted off the team?" The possibility had him near tears.

  "Well, yes and no," Bad Dog said, "dependin' on how you look at it."

  "Jeez Loooweeez," his father groaned again, stretching the last word out to magnify his distress.

  "That's why I wanna go to Pittsburgh. To get him reinstated."

  "Best player on the 'whole damn team! The one man that pitiful defense can least afford to lose!"

  "You didn't hear what I said, Pops. I said, if you could just get me to Pittsburgh—"

  "Will somebody please tell me what in the world you two are talking about?" I cried, feeling the tide of Bad Dog's interrogation rolling completely out of my reach. "Dozer Meadows was suspended from the team—all right, that much I understand. Which means he can't play ball, at least for a while, right?"

  "Right," Dog said.

  "For how long?"

  "Two weeks."

  "Says who?"

  "Says the coach. Terry Bell."

  "All right. Why?"

  "For conduct detrimental to the team," Joe said angrily. "For partying so extensively the night before last Sunday's game, he was only good for seven sorry minutes in the game itself."

  "He made a key tackle, though," Bad Dog said.

  "He threw up on the guy," Big Joe said.

  "It was a nine-yard loss."

  "In a game we lost by twenty-four points. To the Cincinnati Bengals. At home!"

  "I take it the Cincinnati Bengals aren't very good," I said.

  Joe looked at me and grimaced. "The Raiders were favored by twenty-one," he said.

  "Hey. 'On any given Sunday…' " his son reminded him.

  "So Dozer was suspended for two weeks," I said, trying to keep our conversation on track.

  "Yeah. And fined a thousand bucks. Strictly to save face, you know? Because the sports guys on TV, man, they must've shown the clip of him upchuckin' on Drew Archer's shoes about a million times that night. Over and over again, they ran it. Made you sick just to watch it."

  "Did you say he was fined a thousand dollars?"

  "Yeah. See, they—"

  "A thousand dollars?" I asked again.

  All of a sudden, Dog clammed up, finally realizing what he'd said.

  "Uh-huh. You see there?" Big Joe asked me, starting to bounce around on the balls of his feet as his blood pressure began to rise to new heights. "What'd I tell you, Dottie? What'd I tell you? He wasn't up for any job with the Raiders! He wanted that money so he could pay Meadows's fine!"

  "I told you—he's lookin' to kill me! I don't pay his fine and get him back on the team in time for the Steeler game this Sunday, he's gonna tear me apart!"

  "Why, Theodore?" I demanded, anxious to get the truth out of him before his father felt compelled to try. "Why does he blame you for his getting s
uspended?"

  "Because he was out partyin' with me last Saturday night," he said, blurting the words out before he could stop himself. "When I was supposed to be… well…"

  He shrugged, the way he had as a five-year-old whenever we'd ask him how he could do such a thing. "When I was supposed to be watching him, like."

  "Watching him? You mean following him?"

  "No. I mean watchin' him. Babv-sittin' him. Goin' everywhere he goes, to keep him out of trouble, an' stuff."

  "To keep him out of trouble? You?" Big Joe asked, incredulous.

  "Yessir. Cubby said to hang with him all weekend and keep him away from booze, drugs, and women. 'Cause Dozer, man, he's got no self-control, right? He doesn't know when to quit."

  Joe started laughing. Hard.

  "Joe, get a'hold of yourself," I told him. But I was smiling when I said it.

  "It ain't funny, Pops," Bad Dog said sadly.

  "No. It certainly is not," I agreed, just before losing it myself.

  Bad Dog sat there and watched us, two old fools laughing and gasping for breath like drunks at a wine-tasting party.

  "I'm sorry, baby," I said to him when I was finally able to speak again, "but you have to admit, it is pretty ridiculous. Somebody hiring you to keep somebody else out of trouble."

  "Yeah? And why's that?"

  " 'Cause that's like hiring a rat to keep the mice out of the cheese," Big Joe said, ,wiping tears from his eyes. "That's why. Trouble's your middle name, boy!"

  The look on Dog's face said he wanted desperately to dispute that, but he knew it couldn't be done. His checkered past spoke for itself.

  "How did you get the job in the first place, Theodore?" I asked him.

  "I told you. Cubby gave it to me. We were always runnin' into each other at the Final Score, like I said, and every time we did, I'd bug him for a job on the team. Any kind of job, I said, I'll do anything you want, just ask.

  "So one night he says, okay, maybe there is somethin' I can do. Somethin' that could lead to a permanent position as an assistant trainer, if I did the job right. So I said, what is it? and he said all I gotta do is hang with Dozer Meadows for half the weekend, Friday and Saturday night. Go where he goes, do what he does, and keep him from gettin' too crazy. You know, don't let him overindulge. Because—"

  "Because he'd had a run-in with the police on a DUI earlier in the season," Big Joe said to me, not trusting our son to tell the story himself. "In Beverly Hills. He totaled a parked car making an illegal U-turn and banged himself up pretty good. You couldn't read about anything else in the sports pages for a week."

  "So the Raiders wanted somebody to watch him," I said to Bad Dog.

  He nodded his unruly head. "Yeah. At least until they left for Pittsburgh, anyway. All they wanted to do was make sure he got through the Cincinnati game without killin' himself, Cubby said."

  "And Dozer went along with this?"

  "Sure. He and I clicked up, we were homies. That's why Cubby picked me for the job. He'd seen us hangin' together at the club all the time, so he knew the Doze and me were tight."

  "The Doze?"

  "That's what all his friends call him, yeah. The Doze."

  "And you're saying he didn't mind that you were going to be his baby-sitter. He didn't resent the fact in any way."

  "Naw. In fact, he actually thought it was a good idea, havin' somebody around him all the time to tell him when he was about to mess up. He appreciated it, even."

  "So what went wrong, then?" Big Joe asked him.

  Our son was suddenly struck stupid. Or at least, more stupid than usual. "Huh?"

  "You heard what I said. What went wrong? How did he end up messing up anyway?"

  "Oh." He wriggled around on the couch like he was trying to dislodge a live hamster from his trousers. "Well, I guess because I tried too hard. You know."

  "What do you mean, you tried too hard? You tried too hard how?''

  "Well… by sort of outthinkin' myself, I guess."

  "Outthinking yourself?"

  "Yessir. See, the first night I watched him—Friday—I just followed around behind him. He did all the drivin', and I did all the ridin' , and we ended up goin' to all his regular hangouts, all the places Cubby said he liked to get in trouble in."

  "And?"

  "And, well, Cubby, was right. The Doze almost messed up two, maybe three times that night. He kept threatenin' to run off with this homie, or that, or the young ladies at one table or another. You know.

  "So the next night, Saturday, I figured, maybe I should change his pattern a little bit. Like, change his routine, keep him out of the places he likes to go, and away from all the people he likes to run with. Protect him from any bad influences, like.

  "So what I did was, I made him hang with me Saturday night, 'stead of the other way around. You understand? I picked all the places we went that night, not him, and they were all places he'd never been to before, places where he didn't know a soul. I thought that would be the best thing for him."

  "But it wasn't," I said.

  "No. It was the worst thing for him, the way it worked out. 'Cause around his friends, see, he was just one of the guys, right? But around strangers, he was…well, he was the Doze! The Man! Bigger than life, and all that. The brothers and sisters in all the places I took him to treated him like royalty, like he was a god from Mount Olympics, or somethin'."

  "Mount Olympus," Big Joe said dourly.

  "Mount Olympus, right. Like in the Thor comic books."

  "Go on, Theodore," I said.

  "Huh? Oh, yeah. Where was I?"

  "They were treating him like royalty."

  "Oh, yeah. Like royalty! Like they'd never seen a professional football player before, or somethin'. They were all over the man like white on rice, offerin' him this and that, buyin' him one drink after another. Seemed like every time I turned around, somebody was slippin' a business card into his hand, or askin' him to autograph a napkin. And the women! Pops, it was somethin' else. They wouldn't stop comin' over to our table! Offerin' the Doze their phone numbers, or bendin' over and pullin' the front of their dresses down so he could autograph their—"

  "Never mind, Theodore," I said.

  "Autograph their what?" Big Joe demanded.

  "I said never mind," I told him.

  He caught the fire in my eye and let the subject drop, but only after he and his son had exchanged a brief but purposeful nod, making a promise to each other I was not supposed to be sharp enough to pick upon: We'll talk later.

  "So what you're saying is that you would have been better off going to all of his regular hangouts," I said to Bad Dog.

  "Yes ma'am. Of course, he might've got just as jacked up goin' to his places as he did mine, but he probably wouldn't have done it so fast. 'Cause, see, you can get pretty wasted just payin' for half your drinks, bur when you don't have to pay for none of 'em. . ."

  "We get the picture," Big Joe said.

  "'What I don't understand is why you didn't intervene when you saw things getting our of hand," I said sternly.

  "I didn't see things gettin' our of hand," Bad Dog replied, somewhat defensively.

  "Why not? You were there, weren't you? You were watching him, weren't you?"

  "Yes ma'am, I was watchin' him. But…"

  "But what?"

  "But I wasn't really seein' him. You know what I mean?"

  "No.I don't." I turned to Big Joe. "Do you?"

  My husband just looked at our son and said, "Tell your mother how many drinks you paid for that night, boy."

  Of course, the answer was none.

  "Lord, have mercy," I said.

  "I hung with 'im for about three hours, then the lights went out," Bad Dog said. "By the time it occurred to me that maybe he was overdoin' it, man, I was too far gone to care. Last thing I remember, this brickhouse in a leather skirt was pullin' down the zipper on one side and askin' the Doze to write his phone number on her—"

  "Don't you start that again," I
said. "So you fell down on the job and let Dozer get smashed. The next day, he played a terrible game and got suspended from the team. Is that right?"

  "Yes ma'am."

  "And everyone blamed you for what happened."

  "Yes."

  "And that's why Dozer wants to kill you."

  "Yes."

  "Okay. So far, so good. That leaves us with only one unanswered question, doesn't it?"

  "What's that?"

  "How in the hell did he find you?" Big Joe asked, cutting in. "Way the hell out here at the Grand Canyon?"

  Bad Dog bit his lip and tried not to meet my gaze directly, afraid to say another word.

  "You didn't tell him you were coming here, did you?"

  I asked, already certain that I knew the answer.

  "Moms, I had to," Bad Dog said, his eyes pleading for forgiveness. "He was gonna destroy me! I had to say I was gonna do something to make things right for him again!"

  "So you told him you were going to get his fine money from us. Is that what you're telling me?"

  "And then square things away with him and Cubby, yeah."

  "Then he knows all about your father and me. And Lucille."

  "Lucille?"

  "Our trailer home, Theodore," I said.

  He shrugged. "Oh. Well… he doesn't know it by name, or anything, but—"

  "Don't stop me this time, Dottie," Big Joe said abruptly, his face as red and luminous as a stoplight. "When I grab hold of the boy this time to break him in half, please don't stop me!"

  I was tempted not to, but I did.

  "Pops, I told you!" Bad Dog cried. "I didn't have any choice! He asked me how I was gonna come up with that kind of money, and I told 'im the only thing I could think of—that I was gonna come out here and get it from you. What else could I do?"

  "You could've taken your lumps like a man and left your mother and me out of this whole mess. That's what you could've done!" Joe started to pace anxiously about the room, his hands going this way and that as he ranted and raved. "Took forty-seven park rangers to get that man in the back seat of a car, he rips the heads off quarterbacks like I pop the caps on catsup bottles, and who's he out here looking for, thanks to you? Us, that's who! Two old people who couldn't stop him from wringin' our necks if you gave us a ten-minute head start and an M-sixteen!"

  "Pops, I didn't know he was gonna follow me! The plan was, he was supposed to wait in L.A. for me to come back with the money."