He walked up the alley. A cool autumn breeze rolled through. It was quiet. No pushers. No people.
While turning his key in the back door’s lock, he realized the gym was as empty as it looked. Rhya’s class didn’t run on Saturdays. None of the juniors had shown up to spar. Jack was out for the afternoon. And Roddy was home in bed, recovering.
Speaking of whom: Owen had forgotten to check if the paper had covered the fight. No matter, really—as nothing in print would have shed any light on his evening’s experience. Goodall would have assigned a reporter to follow the match on television, then dash off an article by midnight, at best. If they had run a piece at all … Owen, having worked the corner, probably wouldn’t have suffered the coverage well. He could picture it now: “In the end, the pressure was simply too much for our hometown boy”—which was true, admittedly, though none of the hacks at The Plea would have understood why, or how. Roddy’s performance should have been as far beyond their grasp as their word on the matter.
Thinking about it made Owen’s experience back at the paper seem insignificant. His mind, his tangible worth was still back at the fight, in the corner, jumping and hollering. Nothing would ever contend with that—certainly none of the Stepford Kegels …
Owen stepped into the darkened expanse of the training room and looked around. A feeling of confirmation went up in him.
This was what it was all about.
The room was cool and enormous around him. It almost emitted a silent hum: the slapping of leather on leather, the music of discipline, momentarily suspended.
He stood in the half-light coming to terms with the fact that he now played a part in this world. He’d landed a role in the fight game, at last. He felt like a kid in a candy store. True, his exhilaration was cut with a nagging concern as to how The Coach’s regular fighters might receive him, the “rich” white kid from the suburbs, initially. But Owen felt genuinely up to the challenge, and by that, his efforts were sure to pay off. In time, he would win them over, ho ho. All it would take would be perseverance.
Once in the office, easing his way into Jack’s chair was the strangest part. He had to remind himself that he wasn’t intrud-ing. He wasn’t sneaking around. The Coach had asked him, directly, to be here. He was supposed to be watching the place.
As discussed, emergency contact numbers were filed away in a flash card box. A security console was mounted behind him. Keys were stashed up under the desk. A .45 automatic was tucked in a subcompartment of the top right drawer. Dossiers, tax records, files and photos were stored in the cabinets to either side.
Everything was exactly in order.
Owen leaned back in the chair, at last allowing himself a moment’s respite. Slowly, he ran his gaze across the opposite wall, photo by photo: Jack with Vito Antuofermo. A younger Jack with Earnie Shavers. Jack in the corner of numerous amateurs, in between rounds, barking instructions … Jack in a spat with a referee … His Golden Gloves Hall of Fame certificate … Trophies, ribbons, plaques, inscriptions and eulogies lining a row of shelves … And, front and center: a photo of Jack, beaming with pride alongside of Rodrigo Velazquez, the West Side’s prodigal son—holding the lightweight belt between them …
Slowly, as the fear that somebody might barge in and find him there without written consent and work him over began to subside, his exhaustion, brought on by the match and the joint in his system and so forth, overtook him. Soon, the photos along the walls had begun to fade and blur in his vision. The chair beneath him softened and cradled his worn-out body. He closed his eyes. The opening shots of an inner-eyelid movie in lavender—which felt to be warming up to a great escape in blue—appeared to him just as he started to drift.
Then the telephone rang.
He jumped.
He hadn’t expected a call, Jesus.
He glared at the phone: a battered old rotary deal hooked up to an answering machine. The portable unit appeared to be broken. Actually, just the receiver was gone. The ringer jangled and tore at the calm like an air horn, echoing up the stairs.
Quickly enough, the machine picked up.
“Hello, you’ve reached the West Side Gym. We’re not available to take your call …”
Owen relaxed as the tape started rolling. For a moment, he thought about picking up the line—mostly because he could.
But he didn’t.
He went back to settling in for a doze—back to the land of lavender safety …
Suddenly, from out of the speakers sounded a vaguely familiar woman’s voice. “Hello?”—pausing to wait out the screening routine. “Jack. Hello, this is Scarlet.” Another delay for good measure. Then: “Jack, are you there?”
Owen sat up in the chair.
Scarlet …
She exhaled. “No. I guess you’ve left already.” Her tone was confidential. “All right, then. Everything’s ready on this end. We’ll see you tomorrow. Or Monday.” Another pause. Then: “Please be careful.”
The line went dead.
Owen stared at the answering machine for a long, inconclusive minute.
To start with, he offered himself belly-up to the sanguine, echoing lull of her voice. There was no mistaking it: that was The Coach’s lady friend. She was mesmerizing.
But then her warning (“Please be careful”) succeeded in growing to wear on his nerves.
He grabbed the receiver. His first act in office, per se, instead of taking a call was to trace one.
Class, he thought …
This was shameless.
He should have been minding his own business.
The call had been placed from the area code 812. He dropped the receiver and reached for the phone book.
812 was Indiana.
What the hell was she doing out there?
Owen had taken Scarlet for more metropolitan—or possibly rural Southwestern. And Jack had claimed he was going out west.
Confusion.
They must have been related. Was that it? Jack had mentioned family matters, and she had said: “We’ll see you tomorrow. Or Monday.”
In response to which, Owen was filled with a strangely perturbing, ineffable sense of relief.
Feeling no less underhanded, however, he sat back down in the chair. He couldn’t be trusted. You couldn’t leave people like Owen alone with your wife or business. Ever.
More out of guilt than exhaustion now, he forced himself back into a slumber. But try as he might, he couldn’t drive Scarlet’s voice from his mind. “Please be careful.”
Why would Jack ever need to be (please be) careful? The man was a fucking giant. Maybe his driving was scary, but still—her message had seemed more specific than that.
Whatever, the sound of her voice was enough to leave Owen drifting in hammy-eyed rapture. The Indiana fertility goddess. Already, she had invaded his dreams. And there she would stay, awaiting his drifting return …
But not if the phone could ruin it.
This time, he didn’t fly out of his skin when it rang. Instead, he sat up expectantly. It might have been her again, calling back. If so, he would force himself to answer.
But no. The call was from someone named “Jarret.” He sounded Caucasian. His tone was urgent.
“I need you to be there, Jack,” he said. “Come on, now. Unexpected news. We’re due in court in twenty-five minutes.” He trailed off, waiting.
Owen hesitated. He didn’t know where Jack was at the moment, and he didn’t want to deal with a heated emergency …
Still, this guy sounded plenty distressed—he could have been told, at least, to look elsewhere.
Owen decided to pick up the line.
Yet, just as he reached for it, the voice started into a series of guttural blurts that sounded, at first, like static interference. Owen, confused, held off for a moment. He stared at the speaker, cocking his head. What was this? … He drew in closer … What was this person saying? What language was that? Was it … German? Was he speaking German? … Or worse: was that Dutch? … Was th
at Py. Dutch? … It was ugly enough: lilting and plummeting nasally … It sounded like Stepford Anus … It was … That was Pennsyltucky Dutch … Someone was leaving a message in Plain Folk … Wasn’t he? Yes … That was definitely Plain Folk. Owen could hear it ….
The caller hung up.
Owen rewound the tape and listened again. Confirmed. He could see the pucker.
But that gave rise to the question, then: why was Jack receiving this message? One could only assume it implied that he spoke the language. But where had he learned it?
Owen peered around the room. An older photo of Jack in what seemed to be his early thirties, standing with the junior Olympic team of 1980, hung next to the door. Owen got up and went over to check it out. Jack looked as young in that photo as anything filed away in the paper’s archives. While writing his piece on Roddy and Jones, Owen had come up short on available bio material for Jack at The Plea—specifically childhood information. Regardless of the stream of publicity he had received in Stepford over the years, nothing on record pertaining to Jack predated November of ’78. Panning around the office now, that seemed to be the case here too. No photos of Jack in adolescence, no trophies, no amateur boxing awards, no evident memorabilia from childhood, nothing at all appeared on display. Roddy had offered little help, saying only that Jack was from somewhere in western Ohio. Owen hadn’t pushed it. At the time, it just hadn’t seemed important.
But now, with this call, he was starting to wonder.
He dialed the Stepford Personitary.
As long as his press badge was still active, and he hadn’t been blacklisted locally (yet), this would be the quickest and easiest way to ascertain the facts.
A secretary answered. Owen provided his access number and waited for clearance. It came. Relieved, he placed a request for the deed of sale on the West Side Gym.
While holding, he scanned the wall again. The fog in his head was beginning to lift. He was wide-awake now. Any hopes for an inner-eyelid movie in blue had vanished.
The secretary came back, reading the building’s deed of inheritance from Mortimer Zane, the previous owner and head coach, to Jack Stumpf—dated April 20, 1981. Owen bypassed the terms of inheritance, proceeding directly to the recipient’s claim. There he was able to ascertain The Coach’s social security number.
Next, he called the historical society. On credit, he was able to contract a research assistant to pull up a resident file. The assistant, taking note of The Coach’s address and social security number, told Owen to give him twenty minutes. He would call back with the file in hand.
In the interim, Owen was able to examine The Coach’s awards, piece by piece. Again, he found no inscription dated prior to 1978. There was something hanging, though, up on the wall to the right of the trophy rack, surrounded by photos—something so small that, until then, it had eluded his attention—as even now, it seemed out of place, otherworldly, bizarre. He had to look closer to verify, thinking at first that he’d spotted a mason’s broach. But the metal pin in the small glass case before him spoke for itself, on appearance. Leaving little room for doubt, it was cast in the form of a purple heart. Even though Owen had never laid eyes on a Purple Heart, he was left to assume, by deduction, that a small metal pin in the shape of a purple heart was, in fact, just that, as the name inscribed on a small gold plaque beneath the piece reading Corporal Jack Stumpf, April, 1975, suggested that Jack was a Vietnam vet.
When the research assistant got back to him, sooner than expected, the emerging pattern persisted: there was no birth certificate, no medical history and no academic record on Jack. There was, however, a certificate of social security instatement. Dated February 3rd, 1975. Which seemed to suggest to the research assistant, based on cases he dealt with frequently, that Jack might have grown up within, then left, the Old Order Amish or Mennonite communities. Confirmation could be obtained at the Paradise Basin’s Heritage House …
Before the assistant had even stopped speaking, a series of images overwhelmed Owen: the Paradise Basin’s Heritage House—or the Stepford Mennonite Historical Society … The Basin as home to the Blue Ball Devil, more recently known (or mistaken) as The Kornwolf … Shady reports of armed Plain Folk conducting searches in Lamepeter Township … The Amish youth suspected of vandalism … The other one—the Bontrager kid—who had driven the Sprawl Mart trailer into a ditch … The beverage delivery man’s insistence that the Blue Ball Devil, the original, was gone, as “Uncle Sam had hauled it away …” And the constant reference, wherever he went, to The Dutchies, The Dutchies—“Beware of The Dutchies.”
And now, Jack …
How many Anabaptists could crowd the shot arbitrarily?
So then, continuing / picking up right where he’d left off:
What about Uncle Sam?
Circa, 1974: toward the end of the conflict in Viet Nam …
As the Dogboy’s delivery man had recalled of the Blue Ball Devil, now coming to mind: “His name was Jacob Speicher. He died in The Nam.”—which led into Jack’s Purple Heart on the wall, having escaped his attention … Jack Stumpf, wounded in action. Jacob Speicher, killed in action. Jack Stumpf. Jacob Speicher. Jack. Jacob. Speicher. Stumpf … J. S …. The same initials … Jacob Stumpf? …
Coincidence?
Backing up:
Legally speaking, the Plain Folk weren’t obliged to pay social security taxes. Only when shunned from The Order for life would an individual lose that exemption. Likewise, only when shunned was a person made eligible for military conscript and service. The Old Order Amish were recognized as a nonviolent, deeply pacifist sect. Their members qualified as conscientious objectors. If, hypothetically, Jack had grown up Plain, then his excommunication would have preceded by a matter of months, if not weeks, his instatement in the social security system—and from there, his registration for the draft. As the research assistant had asserted, that instatement was enacted in February of ’75. According to the paper’s archives, the last known sighting of the Blue Ball Devil had fallen on November 3rd of the year before. Meaning, by sheer coincidence or no, the Blue Ball Devil had ended roughly three months before Jack had “begun.” One marked an end to “The Time of the Killing,” as printed in The Budget (“The Time of the Killing Is Back”), the other, feasibly, could have marked the start of Jack’s career in the military …
Deciding to risk it—or maybe too freaked out not to—Owen picked up the phone. He dialed The Plea with trembling fingers, was transferred to Bess in Layout, connecting. She answered. Forgoing the schmooze, he offered her fifty dollars, whatever she wanted, to access The Coach’s military file. The fact checker, Riggs, could dig it up for her. She would just have to persuade him.
“You know,” said Owen. “Use your feminine charm.”
She hung up.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid …
He had to calm down now. Take a deep breath. This was all hypothetical: remember—go easy … Don’t burn your bridges before you’ve reached them … And don’t offer payment for services rendered. She may be swamped in student loans—but that doesn’t mean you proposition her …
Now he would have to call Riggs himself. And Riggs, like the others, couldn’t stand him.
Bungling. Reckless. Foolish. White.
Too many leaps to conclusion. Slow down …
If Jack had grown up Amish or Mennonite, as assimilating details appeared to suggest, and had left the fold in connection somehow—and this was a leap—with the Blue Ball Devil—and then been drafted, not to return for the better part of the next four years—assuming all of that to be true, it would follow, as well, that he wasn’t involved (directly) with the panic now sweeping The Basin—as Owen had been in Philth Town with Jack on the previous evening. The Coach had an alibi. Maybe in youth, that wouldn’t have been the case. Indeed, plausibility allowed for Jack (as a Speicher—the change of names had yet to make sense) as an angry young man—whether spurred by worldly envy or material greed (desire for the English neighbor’s pickup), d
efiance of elders, rejection of principles, alienation, creative ambitions, irreverence, wanderlust, secular interests or even an untreated chemical imbalance (Jack had been popping pills at the fight)—either losing his mind or, more probably, waging a campaign of terror locally. If so, then what a campaign it must have been. For a copycat syndrome to spring up now, without his involvement, almost twenty years later, he had to have pulled out all the stops. And then been caught, shunned and drafted …
On a larger scale, hypothetically still, the above assumed that on the afternoon of October 8th, out of 500,000 people in the county, Owen had blundered haphazardly into Jack, one of the (as-yet unknown) central figures in a story that, only the day before, had surfaced (by way of Gibbons’s photo) on the other end of town, and then been published, under Owen’s name, in the paper that morning.
How likely was that?
A half a million to one, for starters.
If Jack was involved in the Blue Ball Devil, in whatever manifestation, per se, then Owen’s appearance at the West Side must have thrown him, The Coach, for one hell of a loop. To glance up from trying to make sense of the article only to spot its (unsus-pecting) author sauntering into the building. Jesus … What must he have thought? What a mindfuck … Owen could only have looked the freak … And since then, Jack would have watched him closely … Which would, come to think of it, explain a few things … Jack would have kept a quiet eye on him—probably not speaking a word to him, initially. Then, once Owen hit too close to home, he would have been lured in, cornered …
He was now sitting in The Coach’s office.
He suddenly felt like a thousand eyes had been watching from every side for weeks—and here he was poised for sentence and delivery: into the river with concrete boots …
Or stoned, perhaps. Again, he was getting ahead of himself. Delirious. Paranoid.
He needed to retrace his steps, go back. Annul the hypotheses, void the instinct—operate solely on logic and likelihood—back through the fearful conjecture to (cringing) his conversation with Bess before: to October of 1974, right where he’d left off: “The Time of the Killing.”
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