by Cash, Wiley
“I don’t know. Maybe, but I can’t say for sure. I ain’t in no kind of position to make any promises.”
I heard the floor creak as Wade walked toward the door that led out to the porch. I heard him put his hand on the knob and turn it, and then I heard the sound the door made when he opened it. But then I knew that he was just standing there because I didn’t hear it close.
“I want you to know that I was tricked into signing that paper,” he said. “I never would’ve signed it if I’d known I was giving them up.”
“I understand,” Miss Crawford said. “And I—” But Wade shut the door and she didn’t say nothing else.
I didn’t knock on the office door to ask Miss Crawford to sign me on to the computer because I didn’t feel like playing Oregon Trail anymore. I didn’t feel like doing much of anything right then except being alone. I crept across the kitchen and walked down the hallway, past the computer room with that empty computer, back to our bedroom. I closed the door behind me and sat on the edge of the bed and just looked around at the few things we had in there that we could call our own: the light pink bedspreads covering mattresses that sat up off the floor like beds are supposed to; a closetful of clothes; the board games and books stacked up beneath the table between our beds. I tried to imagine those things far away from here in some bedroom in Alaska, where Mom had told us it snowed so much that it piled up against the windows, where there wasn’t no sun for almost half the year and it was always dark just like the nighttime. It was impossible to picture me and Ruby and any of our things in a place like that.
I knew exactly which piece of paper Wade was talking about signing. I’d found it in Mom’s room after we’d all come home from the courthouse; it was the last time I’d seen Wade. Mom had made me and Ruby go to court with her, even though I was only nine years old and Ruby wasn’t nothing but four. I remember her saying, “I want you both to see what your daddy’s willing to do if you ask him nice enough.”
Wade was waiting on us when we got to the courtroom. His eyes were swollen and red. He rocked back and forth on his feet, and finally he just sat down in a chair and waited for things to get started. Me and Ruby sat with Mom. She wouldn’t let us go over and say nothing to Wade, even though he kept looking over at us and sniffing real loud like he was trying to get us to look at him. We hadn’t seen him in a while, and Mom acted like she didn’t even see him now. He’d tried to dress up and look nice by wearing a button-down shirt, but it still had the crease marks where it had been folded at the store; it looked like he’d just unwrapped it and put it right on.
I can’t quite remember what happened next, and I can’t quite remember what the judge said, but I do remember watching Mom and Wade go up to where the judge sat. Mom walked right up there like she couldn’t wait to hear what he had to say, but Wade just shuffled his feet and moved so slow that I thought he might not ever make it. The three of them whispered back and forth, and every now and then Wade would turn his head and look over at me and Ruby to try to get our attention. I watched him rock back on his heels, and a couple of times he rocked too far and had to grab on to something to keep from falling over.
But one thing I do remember is watching them sign that piece of paper, and I remember watching as they gave Mom a copy of it. As soon as she got that piece of paper in her hands it was over; we were out the door and walking back down the street away from the courthouse and away from downtown. She didn’t tell Wade “bye” or give the judge a “thank-you” or nothing—just gone. Me and Ruby couldn’t hardly keep up with her. She put that piece of paper in her pocketbook and took me and Ruby by the hand. “It’s just us now,” she said. “All we’ve got to worry about is ourselves—ourselves and nobody else.”
When we got home, Mom took that piece of paper into her room and shut the door. A few minutes later I heard her crying.
That night, while she was in the kitchen getting Ruby something to eat, I snuck into her bedroom and found the paper folded up on her bedside table. I picked it up and read all that I could. Across the top, it said Termination of Parental Rights. Farther down it said, In signing this document, I, Wade Chesterfield, hereby relinquish my parental rights to Easter Renee Quillby and Ruby Justice Quillby, both minors . . . Relinquish: I had no idea what that word meant, but I saw where Mom had signed, and I recognized Wade’s signature right by hers. I folded up that piece of paper and left it exactly where I’d found it, and I snuck out of Mom’s room and went into our bedroom. My spelling book was in my backpack, and I got it out and flipped to the back where there was a dictionary that we used to look up our vocabulary words. I found it. Relinquish: to give up; leave; abandon. That sounded just about right to me.
That night, after Mom had gone to bed and Ruby was asleep, I crept down the hallway to find the one thing Wade had left behind in our house. I opened the closet by the front door just as quiet as I could, and I picked up the bag and slung it over my shoulder and carried it into the bathroom. I closed the door behind me and flipped on the light, and then I looked under the sink and found a bottle of nail-polish remover and a bunch of cotton balls. I sat on the floor with my back against the tub, opened up that bag, and, one by one, took out all those old baseballs that Wade had signed back when he thought he was going to be famous, and I used Mom’s nail-polish remover and tried my hardest to take his name off every single one.
Pruitt
C H A P T E R 5
The old man taught me how to hit a fastball by setting an empty bottle of Michelob Light on top of a T-ball tee he’d picked up at a yard sale. He tossed me the safety glasses he wore in his shop, and then he stepped back and took a swig from a fresh beer, nodded toward the empty bottle, and said, “Go on and hit it.”
The sound of an aluminum bat busting a glass bottle is just about the best thing a six-year-old can hear. The old man stood far enough away so the glass couldn’t reach him, and he laughed every time one of those bottles busted, and then he’d open another beer and drain it just so he could set it up on the tee. Beer gleamed on the bat, and my arms and shirt were damp.
After we’d gone through a six-pack he walked into the carport and got another one out of the dirty white refrigerator by the steps. He twisted the top off another beer and set the six-pack down on the hood of the car. “Could you feel that glass on you?” he asked.
When I looked down at my wet arms I saw that it wasn’t just the beer that had been sprinkling my skin; little bits of glass had been mixed in too. “Yes.”
“Good,” he said before knocking back the rest of his beer. He walked across the yard with his open hand out in front of him. “Go on and take them glasses off.” He took the glasses from my face, and then he folded them and dropped them into the breast pocket on his union suit. He balanced his empty beer on the tee and stepped back. “Hit it,” he said. He crossed his arms and waited. “Hit it,” he said again.
“Will you give me back them—” but his hands were on me before the words had left my mouth. My hands tried to drop the bat, but he closed his fingers around mine and gripped it tighter. “Hit it, sissy,” he said. He raised my hands so the bat was over my right shoulder. My nose sniffed back a sob and my eyes narrowed to keep the tears from running down my cheeks. He slapped me on the back of the head.
“Crying ain’t going to get you these damn glasses back,” he said. “Now hit it!” He turned and walked back to the carport and opened another beer and lit a cigarette. My stance was open toward him like he was playing first base, and his eyes were on me like he was waiting to see where the ball would go.
The bat came off my shoulder and swung toward the bottle, but at the last second my face turned away, and the front of the bat clipped the tee and knocked the bottle off into the grass. The old man slammed his beer on top of the hood and stormed across the yard.
When he reached me he bent down eye level. “Why’d you turn your head?” he asked. “You’re supposed to keep your eyes”—he left the cigarette burning in the corner of his m
outh and plopped his huge hand down on my head and turned it toward the tee—“in line with your shoulders.” He swung my shoulders around so they squared with where home plate would’ve been.
“Okay.”
“Okay, what?”
“My head won’t turn.”
“Bullshit, it won’t,” he said. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and blew smoke in my face.
“What if that glass gets in my eyes?”
He put a finger under my chin and turned my face so that he looked right at me. “Then close them,” he said. “That bottle’s there whether you can see it or not.”
Another six-pack had been busted off the tee before the screen door on the porch slammed shut behind me. My mother sat on the sofa in the living room, folding laundry and watching soap operas with the sound turned all the way down. “What was all that noise out there?” she asked. She looked up and saw me and dropped whatever she’d been folding. “What in the world did you do?” She jumped up off the sofa and took my hand and pulled me down the hallway toward the bathroom.
She sat me up on the counter and used peroxide and cotton balls to clean the blood while my eyes stared at her in the mirror before they closed to picture those bottles exploding. Even with my eyes closed my body could sense every move her hands made, every time she’d stop and reach for the peroxide, each part of my face or my arms those wet cotton balls were about to touch. When my eyes opened again, the streaks of blood were gone and the counter was covered in pink cotton.
My mother looked at me in the mirror like she was studying my face to make sure she’d gotten all the blood off. She sighed. “I swear,” she said. “Sometimes I think your daddy does meanness just for meanness’s sake.”
But what she’d said wasn’t true—not all of it anyway. My father was trying to teach me something valuable about baseball, maybe even something valuable about life itself, and that is this: anything you want to do well you’d better be able to do with your eyes closed.
The old man’s lesson has stayed in my mind, and it was still there as my eyes opened slowly into the darkness of another Saturday night at Tomcat’s; I scanned the near-empty room from the last seat at the far end of the bar: two middle-aged men with wedding rings on sitting at one table, watching as a tanning-bed blonde—too old to be moving how she was moving on the dance floor—made eye contact and tried to squeeze them for another drink; three local boys from either Belmont or Stanley knocking back Budweisers and screaming at the television where the highlights of the Carolina Panthers’ final preseason game played on the TVs over the bar; Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child o’ Mine” blasting from the speakers in the ceiling. It was a pretty regular Saturday night.
Different story in the Boss’s office.
He’d come in a few minutes before eleven with his two cousins, Rick and Eddie, and gone straight back to the office and slammed the door, but not before Eddie stopped by the bar and picked up a couple of Bud Lights and a Dewar’s on the rocks.
For the next couple of hours the Boss could be heard from his office during the breaks between songs, even though his door was closed, even though the bar hummed with people’s voices and the sound from the TVs. Somebody’d been banging something against the inside of the office door; earlier it sounded like a file cabinet had been overturned. Every now and then a “shit” or a “bastard” came from that end of the hallway. He’d never acted like this during my two-month stint at the door.
A shaft of light from the office shot down the hallway before disappearing. Rick walked toward the bar; even in the near dark of the club his forehead looked to be sweating and his face seemed pale. He picked up a cocktail napkin from the bar and took off his glasses and wiped his face. My nose caught a whiff; what had looked like sweat was actually whiskey.
He caught me staring at him. “How in the hell can you see with those sunglasses on?” he asked. He balled up the cocktail napkin and tossed it on the bar.
“What’s up with all the noise back there?”
“That’s the sound of the shit hitting the fan,” he said.
“Something happen?”
“Yeah,” he said. “You could say that. You could definitely say that.” He picked up another napkin and wiped his face. “Why are you asking?”
“It gets boring out here.”
“Lucky you,” he said. He sighed, and then he took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. He put them back on and looked up at the television. “Somebody stole something from the Boss,” he finally said. “Something they definitely shouldn’t have stolen.”
“What was it?”
The television reflected in Rick’s glasses: a preview of McGwire’s Sunday game against the Braves. Rick stood frozen, staring up at the screen. “You played baseball, didn’t you, Pruitt?”
“Yes.”
“Does the name Wade Chesterfield ring a bell?”
“Maybe.” The skin tickled around my nostrils. A wipe at my nose left a faint smear of blood across the back of my hand.
“If you know where to find Chesterfield, then you should tell the Boss.” Rick nodded toward the office. “The Boss might want you to ‘talk’ to him.” He used his fingers to make quotation marks in the air. “Know what I mean?” He stepped back and looked at me. “Seriously,” he said, nodding toward the office again. “Go talk to him.”
Rick opened the door and walked into the parking lot. The floodlights showed rain dotting the windshields on the cars parked out front. On the other side of the bar the Boss’s office sat at the end of the hallway it shared with the restrooms. The strip of light beneath the door vibrated like something was being thrown against it.
No one answered after the first knock. After the second knock the Boss’s voice boomed from inside. “What?!” he screamed.
“It’s Pruitt.”
“Now ain’t the time,” he said. “Ask Ducky at the bar to take care of it. He’s not doing anything.”
“This ain’t about the club. It’s about Wade Chesterfield.” A second later the lock popped on the door and fluorescent light spilled into the hallway.
“Well, come on in,” the Boss’s voice said.
The office light was near blinding after the darkness of the club. To the right of the door, a file cabinet leaned at an angle against the wall, the drawers hanging open, files scattered on the floor below. The desk near the back wall had been cleared, and papers and broken picture frames covered the floor on either side of it. The Boss sat at his desk like nothing had happened, his boots—fancy embroidered cowboy boots the color of stained red cherry—were up on his desk and crossed at the ankles. His black hair and goatee were so dark it was obvious he dyed both. His cousin Eddie sat in a folding chair, leaning up against the wall, his arms across his chest, a fresh hole the size of the Boss’s fist in the paneling behind his head. Eddie lifted a hand and pushed his cowlick down on his forehead. Then he combed his fingers through his thin mustache.
“What’s up, Pruitt?” the Boss asked.
“Heard you’re looking for Wade Chesterfield.”
“You know where he is?” He pointed to Eddie. “Because my asshole cousin has been looking for him since yesterday, and guess what?” He turned up his palms and shrugged his shoulders. “Nothing,” he said. “So, what can you do?”
“Find him.”
“Do you know him?” Eddie asked. The room grew quiet.
“Do you know him?” the Boss repeated. Eddie’s smile caught the corner of my eye.
“From the minors, back in the day.”
“Was that before . . . ?” The Boss pointed to his eye and let his voice trail off.
“Yes. Before that.”
“Is that why you wear sunglasses all the time?” Eddie asked.
My focus stayed on the Boss. “You’re not going to find anyone more willing to kill Wade Chesterfield.”
“Is that right?” the Boss asked. He smiled and looked over at Eddie and nodded like he agreed. “Then why haven’t you killed him? It wou
ld’ve saved me a lot of trouble.”
“You’re the first that’s been willing to pay for it.”
The Boss stared for a second, and then he started laughing. He dropped his feet off his desk and fell forward in his chair and put his hands on his knees. “Are you serious?” he asked. He waited for me to respond, tears in his eyes, then he busted out laughing again, harder than he had before. “He is serious,” he said. Eddie snickered from his chair against the wall.
The Boss laughed himself hoarse, and then he wiped his eyes and sat up straight in his chair. He took a tissue from a box on his desk and blew his nose. “Jesus,” he said, out of breath. “It’s been a shitty day. I didn’t know how bad I needed that.”
“There’s nothing to laugh at.”
“There’s nothing to laugh at,” the Boss repeated in a whisper. “Well, I disagree, Pruitt. Your old buddy stole a lot of money from me, and I happen to want it back. What you said is funny because the idea that I’d pay you to do something I can do myself is about the most hilarious thing I’ve ever heard.” He started arranging things on his desk like the conversation was over.
“If you could do it then you would’ve done it already.”
“Good night, Pruitt,” he said. “Close the door on your way out.”
“Twenty-five thousand to find him. Another twenty-five and he’ll disappear forever. He’ll be found and killed one way or another; the only difference is that right now you can decide whether or not you’ll get your money back.”
The Boss leaned back in his chair and smiled. “Well, well, well,” he said. “You want to play hit man.”
“It’s not a game.”
“You’re right,” he said. “It’s blackmail. But I’ll tell you what, Pruitt. Here’s what I’ll do: five thousand up front, five thousand if you find him, and then five thousand if I get my money back. Another five thousand if he disappears for good. Deal?”