by L. L. Enger
SWING
L. L. Enger
For Ty and Hope Published by Pedersen Books
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s
imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead is
coincidental.
Text Copyright © 2016 Leif Enger and Lin Enger
All Rights Reserved
Preface: How We Wrote It
We felt lucky, going into Swing.
Lucky to have a publisher at last; lucky it was Pocket Books, pioneer of the 20th century paperback; lucky Pocket wanted not just one novel but a series – which meant we had better get on it.
By very good luck, all this happened at the moment a dreamy real estate mogul named Jim Morley launched a new professional baseball league – eight teams playing competitive ball in picturesque Florida stadiums. Morley envisioned the Senior League as baseball’s answer to the PGA Senior Tour. Spectators loved watching old golfers, Morley reasoned – why not old ballplayers as well?
The players were mostly retired major-leaguers, like our man Gun Pedersen. They were utility players, solid journeymen, erstwhile comets. The great Rollie Fingers was signed up to pitch for the West Palm Beach Tropics. Louis Tiant was on board. Ferguson Jenkins and Bobby Bonds and Amos Otis were in. So was Dave Kingman, who once hit a fly ball at the Metrodome that never came down. Some were rehabbing from injury, trying to get back to the show. Others just needed the money.
To Jim Morley, the Senior League must’ve glowed like a vision – a dazzling stroke, a risk worth taking.
It also had a whiff of desperation.
When searching out plots, you keep an eye peeled for desperation. It’s the necessary salt of crime fiction, the pinch that makes everything work.
We flew to West Palm, rented a death-rattle subcompact and got a room on the fringe. The room had barred windows, magic fingers, a toy safe glued to the floor. Lin conjectured that Motel Six referred to the number of deadbolts. We were awfully happy – where should crime writers stay, if not where crime seems imminent? We rolled some cigarettes. Gun Pedersen rolled cigarettes, so we rolled some too and forced ourselves to smoke them. We felt pretty cool, making jokes we imagined dangerous characters would make. Opossums scavenged in the parking lot. The room was dank as a sponge.
Next day at the ballpark we watched the Tropics play the St. Petersberg Pelicans. Attendance was sparse, but tickets were cheap and the hot dogs delicious. There was heavy overcast but the tiny crowd was in a sparkly mood. Somebody sang the anthem. The outfield grass was lush and the players seemed up to the job. In the first inning one of the Pelicans hit a drive to left, and the fielder chased it down with a diving catch – he jumped to his feet, tipped his cap and lobbed the ball to a kid in the stands. The Senior League looked all right.
Then the clouds parted. They burned away, and the heat poured down off the sun. We started to forget the game. It wasn’t the game’s fault. It was just too hot to watch ballplayers who weren’t very famous, or very good anymore. The great Rollie Fingers sat in the dugout – there he was, back in the shade, chewing sunflower seeds. The crowd wanted Rollie to stroll to the mound and throw fastballs. Inning after inning went by, and Rollie didn’t come out. The heat got heavier. The players began to melt in the sun. You felt terrible for them, guys in their forties slumped in the outfield, their necks melting into their shoulders. At last in the sixth or seventh inning Rollie Fingers stood up in the dugout. He was tall and lean. A cheer erupted as he took the mound. His mustache was intact. He looked around at the small grandstand. It was hard not to read his expression as one of regret, although he did pitch a beautiful inning. His fastball still hissed, his curve still broke. He pitched to three batters. Then he was done. He returned to the dugout. The game went on in the biblical heat. It felt like the locusts were coming.
After eight innings we left the stadium and drove to the citrus groves outside the city. We rolled down the car windows and breathed. There were shacks of nailed-up vertical siding and people out minding the orchards. The shacks were sharecropper huts and they were older than the sharecroppers. We visited with a man standing in the shade of a hut. He was young but hard and canny. His dad worked the groves and now he did too. They moved here and there working and owned neither land nor house. In the steaming feudal economy we knocked around talking to Floridians. We liked them. The citrus groves shimmered, the roads were pocked and sandy. Feral dogs cruised in small groups, gaunt sinewy dogs loping sideways along the ditches. After a few days we returned to the Atlantic coast and stood next to some old men casting heavy bait into the sea. It was fun to walk on the sand peering up at gleaming homes while the non-rich arrived in creaky pickups with coolers of bait and boxes of corn meal. We walked and walked. Dead things kept washing up on the sand – a dead fish could wash up in the morning and be down to fine bones by late afternoon. Things rot in a hurry down there.
Soon we had pages of notes, a speedy plot, and the conviction that lightning was about to strike. We came home and wrote. The work went fast without any stumbles. We enjoyed overestimating our chances. We talked about titles and were giddy enough to consider going full camp: Gun in the Sun, Gun Having Fun, Gun on the Run and so forth, because a crime writer wants a sense of humor and because both of us, raised on Tarzan of the Apes, Classics Illustrated and Daniel Boone (Fess Parker edition) had a deep love of cheese. In the end we stuck with the baseball theme and chose Swing for brevity, music and innate sexiness. We thought, Here comes the lightning.
We didn’t know yet how quickly a book can plummet from sight. Conviction isn’t enough on its own. Swing came out like any midlist paperback – a quick stop in bookstores, a short steep run in the pulp racks. If you didn’t see it at your corner drug in July of 1991, you probably didn’t see it at all.
The Senior League didn’t fare any better. Despite Rollie Fingers’ hissing fastball and roguish mustache, despite cheap tickets and quality hot dogs, attendance just never picked up. Maybe it was the heat, or bad timing. Maybe some sports can only belong to the young. Golf adores its geezers but baseball is not golf. The league folded in its second season. By the time we put our heads down and barrelled into yet another Pedersen novel, Jim Morley had blown out of Florida and was back in the real estate game. A necessary decision and apparently a good one. Google him, if you’re interested – it looks like he did all right.
Lin Enger, Leif Enger – June, 2016
For Ty and Hope
1
The northern pike came in hard from the east and struck the red-and-white decoy without caution or apparent effort. The decoy disappeared under ice, traveled with the pike to the limit of its monofilament line, and sprang back. Its tin tail fin was crumpled. Flakes of red paint drifted down to settle on the sandy lake floor. In eight feet of green glass the decoy hung still, listing to the right, in shock. The pike was gone. “Twenty pounds and growing,” said Gun Pedersen. He shook his head and leaned the black four-pointed fishing spear against the wall of the shack. The afternoon was getting old; the two-foot square of open water wasn’t letting much light into the windowless spear house anymore. Gun stood and stretched, glad again he’d built the house himself instead of buying it from someone who wasn’t six and a half feet high. He took the red Prince Albert can from its place on the wall and patted his pocket. No papers. There was coffee, though, bitter from an afternoon on the gas stove. He poured some into a white glass mug with green letters that said milo’s your happy chain saw man and stepped out to watch the sun go.
He didn’t get to see it. First thing, a long black snow cloud ranged in from the north and covered the spot
of horizon where the sun was about to land, and then Gun heard a thin scraping sound coming from the shack.
The fish was back. The big pike. Nuzzling the red-and-white decoy like he was sorry he’d hurt it so bad the first time, and the monofilament was moving against the edge of the shack’s cutout floor. Gun reached for the spear, slowly, don’t scare him, gripped it, went to one knee for leverage. Twenty pounds. Bigger. He lowered the spear until the barbed iron tips were an inch below the surface. For half a minute the fish moved around, flirting, in and out of Gun’s vision. Forty seconds. Light’s getting bad, stay still, there now, stay right there—and then a tiny but meaningful tremor touched the ice, and the water rose slightly in the hole, and the big pike fled. At the same time Gun felt the hum of an engine and wheels. There were more ice tremors. The engine moved in nearer, settled up next to the shack and died. He heard the loose clank of car metal and knew it would be Jack LaSaile in his old Scout. He blew out the breath he’d held for the fish, understanding there’d be no such chance again. He forced the thought to fade, filled the Happy Chain Saw mug for Jack and set it on the stove.
See any whales?” Jack said. He’d entered the shack without knocking and picked up the coffee without looking.
“Missed one, just before you got here,” Gun said mildly. “Big one.” He handed Jack the sorrowful decoy.
Jack sat on a canvas camp stool by the stove and squinted in the quickly dying light. He took off leather mittens and felt the ruined tail fin with his fingers. He sniffed it briefly, as if winding pike. He said, “Moby.” Then the sun went for good and the only light in the house was a residual glimmer from the spearing hole that turned LaSalle into a squat dark roundness in the corner. He was nearly as tall sitting as he was standing; he’d pushed back the hood of his parka, and its fringe of gray wolf fur glistened on his shoulders. He carried with him primal smells, oak fire and red meat and beer. He swallowed coffee. “Reason I came, Gun, Moses Gates is trying to get ahold of you.”
It should have been good news. The edge in Jack’s voice said it wasn’t.
“Moses? I haven’t seen him since the Twins traded him to California. After fifteen good years,” Gun said.
“Well, he’s in Palm Beach now. Evidently tried calling your house, and when you weren’t there he called the post office in Stony. Only number he could think of, I suppose. So then that kid Freddy leaves the mail desk, hangs up a sign says postal emergency or something and comes whaling out to my place. I got customers, mind you, I got five big burgers going, and Freddy comes in all important, ‘I gotta find Mr. Pedersen.’ ‘Not here,’ I say, ‘Probably out on the ice.’” A grin came into Jack’s voice. “Poor Freddy. His chance to be the courier for news of great portent, and you’re out of reach.”
“I’m guessing you’ll get around to Moses,” Gun said.
Jack handed across a slip of paper. “I don’t think it was the sort of message Moses really wanted to leave with the mail boy.”
Gun lit a match on the stovetop and read. “Another one is dead, and I could use a hand.” Then a phone number. Gun rested his head against the wall of the shack.
Last he’d heard of Gates, the old catcher was back in baseball. Sort of. He was managing one of those old-timer teams down in Florida, where they had a special league for ballplayers who’d gone broke, or got cut, or just couldn’t let the game go. He didn’t know which group Gates belonged to. Hadn’t talked with him, not in years. He said, “You remember that Gates business, Jack?”
“Not very well. Late seventies, wasn’t it? There was that outfielder, Ferdie something, got strung up in Tinker Field during spring training.”
“Ferdie Millevich,” Gun said. “Played some nice left field for the Twins and was starting to swing nice, too. Then after practice one day the janitor was turning off the power and found him hanging from the press box. Just dangling there, out over the lower-deck seats. Used an electrical cord.”
“I remember they thought Gates did it.”
Gun cast back in his mind and started reeling in the details. They came too easily. “It made good headlines. Gates and Millevich’d had some tough words, and the wrong people heard them. Moses didn’t have an alibi handy, either, which didn’t help.” Gun shut his eyes in the dark. “You want to go home, get out of everybody’s sight once in a while, you know? Moses had the bad luck to do that at the wrong time. Nobody could vouch for him, so all the reporters naturally figured he was out killing someone instead. They were on him, it was like lizards on a cool rock.”
“Wasn’t it suicide, though?”
“Coroner said so, and the grand jury believed him. What happens, though, Moses goes through an investigation that the papers run day-by-day, like Dagwood. He’s got half a dozen fans left defending him and everybody else in the country calling him Hangman Gates. And then the coroner steps in and says suicide, Moses didn’t do it, so all the lizards jump off the rock and scatter, only you know what?”
Jack waited.
“The damn lizards have crapped all over the rock. So you wait You wait and hope that time and weather will get rid of the stains. But they hang on.” Gun stopped. Talking of his friend made him feel as though he’d backed up into his own life. “All you can do,” he finished uncomfortably, “is sit absolutely still, for a long time, and hope the lizards won’t notice you anymore.”
In the darkness Jack lined the empty mug and tilted it over the stove. One drop fell to the hot metal, ssst. “Who’s dead?”
Gun stood, leaned down, cranked the gas handle hard to the left. The stove ticked, cooling, “I don’t know, but it sounds like Moses is getting noticed again.” He swung on his heavy wool coat and Jack followed him into the bright clear night. The winter bite entered his lungs. It would go fifteen, twenty below.
“You’re going south, I guess,” Jack said.
The snow cloud had disappeared from the west, leaving a solid plain of cold white stars on black heaven.
“I expect I am,” Gun said.
2
He walked the mile home from the spear house because he didn’t feel like bouncing over the ice in Jack’s Scout and because he wanted to breathe in enough clean January to hold him for a while. The message was cryptic but clear; someone else Gates knew had died in strange circumstances, and Gates was scared the whole damned nightmare was coming back to get him. Gun had spent his first pro year with Gates, at theTigers’ farm team in Peoria, a year of untended scrapes and short sleeps on the bus. They’d played the same game of baseball then, ground it into their hands like dirt. Even after Gates was sent to the Twins they’d grinned and razzed each other across the diamond whenever their two teams played each other. In the spring of ‘77, when the mudslide started, Gun had flown to Orlando during the grand jury investigation and stolen Gates off to the coast to chase marlin for a day. They caught a few big slow turtles and drank like sea captains, and driving back, thumbed their noses at a green delivery van bearing thousands of copies of the Orlando Evening Mail.
Three years later Moses showed up in Detroit for the funeral of Gun’s wife, Amanda; stood silently in the back of the church and didn’t tell Gun not to blame himself. There were plenty of nice folks doing that already and it didn’t change what Gun knew: that if he’d looked harder at his own family instead of someone else, Amanda never would have stepped on that plane and would be alive today. When he quit baseball the following week and went looking for quiet in northern Minnesota, dozens of ballplayers telegrammed him to stop wasting himself and get back to the game. Moses’s telegram took six months to come, and it contained more truth than any of them, find the good fishing spots.
Gun reached shore and walked reluctantly up the slope to his stripped-log house. Inside he started a fire, took off his coat, found a cold steak in the fridge and laid it on bread with a slice of pale tomato. He’d eat, let the house warm up, have a smoke. And then call Moses Gates. In the kitchen the phone went off like dynamite, and he knew he wouldn’t have to.
&nbs
p; “Gun, it’s Moses.” The voice was deep as always, but had a nervous airiness that was new.
“I got your message.”
“Sorry, man. You seemed like the guy to call, is
all.”
Gun let that sit a few seconds. “I’m the guy. Tell me what happened.”
“A reporter, Gun. A friend of mine. Billy Apple was his name. I was supposed to meet him at his place last night. Late. I got there, knocked, no answer... the door was unlocked.” Moses’s voice was grainy, like a man’s after a driving punch to the gut. His wind wasn’t back yet. “He was hanging, Gun. Just like Ferdie Millevich. Only no suicide. His wrists were taped, they’d pulled a black stocking cap over his face. Billy had this big fireplace like you don’t need down here. They hung him from that.” He stopped a moment. “Not inside it, thank God.”
Gun’s breathing felt suddenly dry in his throat. “Any idea who?”
“No.” Moses paused. “They took off Billy’s shoes, man. Where they hung him, his feet were right in front of the fireplace. There was a nice big fire going when I got there. You want to know what it did, I can tell you.”
“Are you in trouble, Moses?”
“Not jail trouble. This time I got an alibi, you can believe it.”
“Other trouble?”
“There’s a lot to it, Gun.”
The kitchen clock said 7:15. Gun said, “I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Thanks.”
He booked a 2 a.m. flight to West Palm Beach out of Minneapolis and saw Carol Long before he left. Carol edited the Stony Journal and accompanied Gun on occasion.