Dark Screams, Volume 8

by Dark Screams- Volume 8 (retail) (epub)

  I couldn’t help it, and anyway, I was trying to cheer him up. I gestured over the roof of the stadium at the empty road. “Maybe they got stuck in traffic.”

  “Mr. Sifuentes, sometimes I think you are not a nice man.”

  This time, the gunshot startled us both and stopped everybody on the field right where they were. It echoed through the grounds as though it had gone off in the tunnel down there. Which it very well might have.

  “Should somebody call the police?” Blue Shirt whispered, as though whoever was shooting might hear him. Given the cavernous emptiness of the Fault, that wasn’t an entirely ridiculous notion.

  “Did that before I even pulled into the lot,” I told him. “If the strike rate slows down and Team Yellow stops dropping wickets, it’s possible you’ll see cops before the match ends.”

  “Strike rate is for batters, not bowlers,” And with that, he sagged to the table, lowering his chin to his brilliant blue collar. “This is a disaster.”

  “It’s a beginning,” I said. I even patted his back, because I really am a nice man, most of the time. Try to be. And what Blue Shirt was trying—which would never, ever work, not here, probably not on this continent—made him a man after my own heart. Even though I’d long since stopped trying anything, much.

  And then—and this is hard to explain, and it lasted for only maybe fifteen minutes—the game on the field caught me. When a bowler bowls a set of overs, cricket people call that a spell. That’s as good a word for that next quarter-hour as any.

  Team Yellow had lost their fourth wicket, having scored all of eighteen runs to that point. That brought in the fireman to bat with Wasim. After I announced him, he just stood in front of his stumps, leaning one way, then the other, looking about as stable and permanent as a just-planted sapling in a San Bernardino wind. He blocked the first few balls hurled at him back down the wicket for no runs. On the last ball of his first over, he abruptly dropped into his hips, and his body seemed to flow over itself as though it had gone boneless, become current sweeping his bat forward, and the ball exploded off it to his left and past everyone along the ground for a four.

  Over by the cheerleaders, Frankie Violet actually turned his head. He did it at the sound of ball on willow, he didn’t even watch where it went. He just looked at the fireman.

  With his next swing, the fireman stroked the ball between two fielders—the slips—and he and Wasim ran out three more runs. Beside me, Blue Shirt lifted his head. Out by the stumps, the umpire, Mr. Seagull…well, he didn’t nod approval or anything. But he straightened his hat.

  After that, we were all of us—even the cheerleaders, who I was pretty sure knew even less about cricket than I did—leaning forward. Even the players, as they played.

  It’s funny how little you have to know about a thing to know it’s being done well. In this case, what I noticed was the stillness of the fireman’s bat, the flow of his just-going-flabby, middle-aged body as he glided back on his heels, swept forward, seeming more in charge of the moments passing than most of us will ever get to feel about any moments we’re in.

  Frankie Violet had left his perch by the cheerleaders, and now he was yelling things at his team’s bowler, taking up a position. Clapping his hands. The bowler bowled, and the fireman cut the ball 180 degrees away from Frankie, where it rolled all the way to the outfield wall. “Four!” I yelled, and Frankie clapped his hands at the fireman, howled with laughter, poked the hat off another one of his players, and dumped his own sunhat in the grass as he moved in toward the stumps. He settled maybe fifteen yards off the shoulder of the older of the two Pakistani women. The mom. He said something to her. In the bleachers, the fans were actually clapping and yelling, or I would have heard him clearly. But I’m pretty sure he told her to duck. Then he yelled and pointed at the bowler. Instructing. Aiming with a straight arm, like a golfer lining up a putt.

  “There?” the bowler yelled back, gesturing toward a spot outside the fireman’s far stump. The off stump?

  “Just there,” Frankie called, and he did a little swooning, sweeping dance-step right in place, and held up his hands. “Next time you swing, Boss. No matter what you do. It’s coming right here.”

  Overhead, right as the bowler started the run-up for his next toss, one of the lights spasmed, and a burst of brightness flooded the field. That was the first moment I knew there really were people in the tunnel. I saw their silhouettes—three of them, weirdly long, like walking palm trees, the one out front also weirdly wide, almost winged—and then the fireman smacked another four, this time over his own shoulder, once again as far from Frankie Violet as it was possible for him to hit.

  “No, no!” Frankie yelled to the bowler, his voice clear, now, and he was grinning as he trotted past the Pakistani woman, gave her a stroke on the back as though to reassure her, but closer to her ass than I suspected she was comfortable with. I have no idea what he said to her this time. I know it made her laugh. “Give the ball to me. Come on.” As he reached the mat, he snaked out a pointy finger, and I realized he was about to flick Mr. Seagull’s hat. I thought that might be a bad idea. So did he, apparently, because he didn’t do it.

  Down near home plate, the three figures emerged from the tunnel. The lights that had spasmed before caught, now, like a lit fire in a grate, and so at least one square of dust-colored grass and a corner of the stands stayed lit. But the three figures moved away from that, away from the other eight or so fans, and took up seats way down in the shadows along the left-field line. The wide one, who walked in front, may or may not actually have been wide. It was hard to tell under his fur coat. But the skin of his neck and cheek—which was all I could really see between the collar of that coat and the giant, circular sunglasses over his eyes—was the same dusky brown as Blue Shirt’s. I first mistook the glinting, curving gold necklace—worn out, dangling down the front of that coat—for an American dollar sign. But it was actually a snake.

  “Who is he kidding?” I muttered.

  “He cannot do that,” Blue Shirt was saying, but he wasn’t talking about the newcomers, and indeed seemed not even to have noticed them. I glanced where he did and saw Frankie Violet spinning the cricket ball on the tip of his long index finger as though it were a basketball, right in front of Mr. Seagull’s impassive face.

  “Change bowlers mid-over, you mean?”

  “Look at him.” Blue Shirt clapped. Only then did I realize he was expressing delight, not approbation. “He is a wonderful showman. An ideal investment for America’s Rockin’ Professional Cricket.”

  “Okay, now,” Frankie Violet was all but singing, waving the ball like a palm nut, swiveling his hips. “Now you see it…” He took six, seven, eight exaggerated steps backward off the edge of the wicket into the grass and held the ball aloft again for the nonexistent crowd.

  Had he behaved like this during test matches, I wondered? When he’d played for the West Indies? Was this why he was no longer welcome? Obviously, there had to have been more to it than that, no matter how members-only, white-trousered, colonialist-gentleman cricket’s code of conduct remained (if it did), no matter how restrictive and rigid its governing bodies. I’m sure Frankie had been a right bastard to all sorts of people who deserved kinder treatment. He’d no doubt proven a shit role model. But he’d pretty much have to have shot somebody before I barred that guy from playing.

  Not that anyone in a position to ask was asking me. Then or since.

  Lowering the ball to his hip, crouching like a cat but never for one second ceasing to smile, Frankie rocketed forward. In his crease, the fireman seemed to withdraw under his helmet, a tortoise who has spotted the eagle. The bat settled against his leg pads, aimed downward to block whatever Frankie was about to hurl at him. Frankie reached the edge of the square, seemed to accelerate, and right as he reached the far stumps, he gave a little hop, and his hand flew up behind him like the basket of a catapult.

  I never even saw the ball, just the fireman’s stumps exploding, th
e decapitated bale flying fifteen feet straight backward into the hands of the wicket-keeper, who looked as surprised as the fireman. In the middle of the wicket, Frankie came to a spread-legged stop, threw his arms wide and his head to the sky, and screamed, “HOWWWWZAAAAATTTT?”

  The eightish fans near third base leapt to their feet—actually leapt—and started yelling and clapping. As the echoes of Frankie’s shout died, the fireman straightened, casting a single, rueful glance at the wreckage of his stumps. He started to shake his head. But he was also laughing.

  And then came a moment so inconsequential—at least in the light of everything afterward, and yet I remember it almost more clearly than what came next—I’m not sure even Blue Shirt saw it. Behind Frankie, as the fans resettled and the Blue Team members who had surged in to congratulate Frankie returned, skipping and goofing and grinning, to their places, the umpire—Mr. Seagull—stirred, for what seemed the first time since he’d assumed his post. He took a single step closer to Frankie. And into the resurgent silence, I heard him say, flatly and clearly, “No ball.”

  For a second, Frankie just looked blank, looked stunned, then started to whirl with his arms already gesturing in fury and disbelief. But all that stopped when he saw Mr. Seagull’s face.

  The umpire was grinning, too. A ridiculously wide, white-toothed grin, as absurd on that stony face as a rose bush in the middle of the Mojave.

  Even Mr. Seagull, it seemed, was no match for Frankie Violet.

  “Aaaah, Boss. Good one,” Frankie said. For the second time, he reached out to poke the umpire’s hat, and for the second time, he didn’t. Laughing, he stepped off the wicket, turned, and stopped.

  Froze, really. In mid-stride. He had his arms up, one leg raised, as though the ump had bewitched him, turned him to stone.

  Except it wasn’t the umpire who had done it. That wasn’t where Frankie Violet was looking.

  I followed his gaze down the left-field line, toward the three figures who had just recently entered. Beside me, Blue Shirt, still chuckling and clapping, glanced that way, too. Then he froze. Turned to stone.

  Once, a long time ago, a woman I must have liked an awful lot got me to a Meeting, somehow. I don’t even know what sect. All I know is the way that woman sounded at the end of the service, kneeling on the floor of the tent while the canvas walls went wild in the San Bernardino wind, quietly crying, eyes aimed straight up, praying to a Jesus she really seemed to be able to see. That’s the closest I can come to the way Blue Shirt looked now.

  “He came!” Blue Shirt whispered. “Mr. Sifuentes…he came!”

  “Who came? Who is that, Blue?”

  “The Destroyer! That was his nickname in his glory days. I asked my father to invite him. He is visiting my father from India. But I didn’t really think…he doesn’t typically approve of Twenty20, and he has never…” He gestured at the field. Maybe he meant the whole thing: the stadium, the game, the women, all of it. I have no idea.

  “Destroyer, eh? So maybe I should hold out for the chance to see him bat?”

  “Not that kind of destroyer. That is not where he got his name. He was at best a middling cricketer. But in his heyday…before the Indian Premier League, and Sky Television…as an administrator…as the secret power behind so many crucial world cricketing decisions…Have you ever before been in the presence of a Knight of the Realm, Mr. Sifuentes? A real one? An OBE?”

  I shrugged, smiled, enjoying his reverence. “Not that I know of.”

  “One thing is for certain. You have never been in the presence of one who was born almost an untouchable in Chennai. Though, of course, it was Madras, then. And it was only after the end of his brief test-match career, many, many years ago, that his true importance became known. That man was the architect of the Indian Test cricketing dynasty. And that is only the beginning.”

  “Do tell.”

  “I cannot tell. I do not know. As I said, he was a secret power. Only those—like my father—who had dealings with him knew of him. All I can tell you is, when he was sent by the International Cricket Council to Bangladesh, they were in total disarray, a nation of ragged amateurs. Within months, entire boards of directors disappeared and the boards were entirely repopulated. Whole leagues and local tournaments were wiped out and replaced with efficient, modern, and credible structures modeled on proven and profitable ICC systems. Today, Bangladesh has been granted full Test Nation status. Do you know what this can mean to a country like Bangladesh?”

  “Think he could do it for San Bernardino?” I murmured.

  That stopped Blue in mid-gush. “You are mocking, Mr. Sifuentes.”

  “I’m not mocking you, Blue. I just hope he appreciates the enormity of your task, here.”

  Blue waved a dismissive hand. “He is retired now, of course. A relic of another cricketing age. Nevertheless, his presence is a great honor, and his influence can not be overestimated.”

  “You sound like you’re reading his Wikipedia page.”

  “He’s here. The Destroyer has come to America’s Rockin’ Professional Cricket!”

  He might have said something else, but by that point, he’d hopped over the table and out of the booth and was scurrying down the stadium steps. I watched him hurry past the gaggle of fans who’d been there all along. To Blue Shirt’s credit—he really was something—he slowed as he passed, touched several on the shoulders, thanked them for coming. He asked if they were having a wonderful time. But he didn’t stop. And he never quite got his head turned from the figures in the far seats.

  Only when he was in their section, out past the square of light, a few rows below where they’d positioned themselves, did Blue Shirt slow. I saw him approach, nodding and waving, putting his hands together to clap but not clapping. I could no longer hear what he was saying. My first thought was that these guys were the money. And the reason I thought that was the posture Blue Shirt adopted.

  Which wasn’t a loan-seeker’s, exactly. More like a vassal approaching a king. Or a supplicant. As I said.

  I didn’t like it. Don’t ask me why. I think, mostly, I just liked Blue Shirt. I’m pretty sure that’s why I cued that particular AC/DC song. Just to alert Mr. Fur down there who had the biggest balls of all in this particular empty stadium.

  Out on the field, Frankie Violet had shaken free of whatever was holding him, and he was skipping and racing around among his fielders again. But differently now. Instead of giving wedgies, sprawling Slip-and-Slide-style at their feet, or flirting with the Pakistani women, he was taking each player in turn by the shoulders, all but uprooting them, replanting them in new places. Proper positions. A couple times, he cupped his hands in front of them, bent his knees, as though showing children how to catch rain. Eventually, he circled back to the bowler and showed him something with the ball and two split fingers. Never once, after that first time, did he glance at Mr. Fur and his entourage in the left-field shadows. Not one time. He couldn’t have signaled more loudly that he knew they were there if he’d hurled himself into the stands and kissed their feet.

  The last Team Yellow wickets fell in less than ten minutes. I hoped someone had been keeping track of runs, because I’d lost count, gotten too busy watching the pantomime below. Only the players—the ones who weren’t Frankie Violet—seemed completely oblivious to Mr. Fur and his gang. At every stumping, every stumbling run down the wicket, every (very occasional) accidental smack or cut for four, they all laughed. Every one of them.

  Blue Shirt’s original schedule had called for a thirty-minute break between innings. “To please the concessionaires,” he had actually typed on the sheet in the folder he had given me, apparently still believing he’d rented some of those along with the stadium. “To give the excited crowd a chance to catch their breath.” That was also written in my instructions.

  Dutifully, I set up some music. But Frankie had hustled and cajoled Team Yellow right back into the field in less than five minutes, gotten his Blue teammates situated in the first-base dugout, dir
ected the younger Pakistani woman to the far end of the mat as his opening batting partner, and assumed his place at the nearest stumps. He reset the bale himself while Mr. Seagull checked the other.

  In the brief breaks between songs, I heard more shouting from the parking lot. A lot of shouting. I remember wishing everyone out there would just get their business the fuck over with and get out of here, so we could all go home when the time came. How long could one deal gone bad/Wednesday-night fun brawl/mass murder take?

  I always tried to think of those things that way—it had always seemed important, for my life—when I ran into them, which was way too often. In San Bernardino, gatherings like the one in the Fault parking lot were like Santa Ana winds, or brushfires. Something to wait out, go around. Something not to make more of than it made of itself. But this one must have been bothering me, because I kept thinking about it, listening for it, expecting a full-on barrage of gunfire at any second.

  That’s why Blue Shirt had to leave the Destroyer’s side, come all the way back behind home plate, and yell before I realized he wanted the music shut off. When I finally looked down, he was chopping his hand back and forth in front of his face, in what I assumed was some subcontinent version of the good old American throat-cut. I killed the music.

  “Mr. Sifuentes, can’t you see we are ready to play?”

  From outside came a roar, a blur of swearing voices, like birds disturbed in a bush. Blue Shirt jerked his head that way, as if he was going to tell those guys off, too. Suggest that they needed to adopt a more respectful attitude if they wished to remain official parking-lot thugs for America’s Rockin’ Professional Cricket.

  Fortunately, he said nothing, and the noise outside quieted again. I kept wanting that one more noise: car tires shedding rubber as they squealed out. But silence apparently was the best I was going to get.

  Abruptly—and for the last time—Blue Shirt smiled at me. Up the bleachers he came. He didn’t climb back into the booth but took a seat in the top row just below. “Now. Mr. Sifuentes. Enjoy.”