by Bill Syken
My dad’s point seemed validated at his funeral, because at least a couple hundred of his former players were there, many of them so crestfallen one might imagine it was their own father who had died. The tears were many, the flower arrangements bountiful.
The tribute that caught my eye, though, was sent by a friend of my dad’s named George Chamberlain. The assemblage of white blossoms was towering; you would think my father had just won the Triple Crown. And while George had known my father nearly all his life, sometimes coming by on Sundays to watch the games with the neighborhood guys, they were not each other’s favorite people. From what I knew of George’s finances, the floral display was beyond his means. His son Gary, who was in my class, wore the same winter coat all through high school, even after it became too tight and short on him. Over the years I had heard more than once that George had been laid off from some low-level managerial position. Dad would recount George’s career failings, if not with glee exactly, then at least with an absence of sympathy.
So when I saw George’s giant wreath, I wondered if I was missing something.
After the service I asked Charlie Wentz about it. Charlie was my dad’s offensive coordinator and his closest friend. He is also a bachelor; he had dinner over at the house at least once a week. And he was part of my dad’s drinking crew at Liston’s, as was George Chamberlain.
“That’s some display George sent,” I said to Charlie.
“‘R.I.P to a true friend,’” Charlie said, reading the words on the sash that went across the wreath.
“What’s George up to these days?”
“Um … he delivers meals, I think,” Charlie said. “Institutional meals. Brings food to the county retirement home, the vocational school, places like that.”
“Must pay all right,” I say. “Look at the size of that wreath. I didn’t think he and Dad were that close.”
“Yeah, well…” Charlie trailed off.
“Well, what?” I asked.
“Nothing,” said Charlie, though not very convincingly. He looked away. “Nothing that matters.”
I patted him on the elbow. “Excuse me, Charlie,” I said. “I’m going to thank George for the wreath.”
George was a bulky and bearded man who wore a dark green winter coat with a big metal zipper over his suit. He was standing with his wife and another couple.
I approached George and placed my hand on his shoulder. The other three, after imparting condolences to me, stepped away.
“So sorry about your dad, Nicky,” he said. “So sorry.”
“I appreciate that, George,” I said. “And thank you for the flowers. Very generous of you.”
“It’s nothing,” he said. “Your dad would have done the same for me.”
Not likely.
“Hey, Nicky, I saw you in the playoffs last week,” George said. “You were great. Your dad was so proud of you.” My dad died the Friday after I had played in my first playoff game with the Sentinels. I had punted well, not that it mattered. The correlation between my performance and the team’s success is dispiritingly thin. In my last conversation with my dad, he had ranted about how I would have done a better job at quarterback than the Sentinels’ starter, Bo John White.
I forced a smile. “Thank you, George. I appreciate that. I have a question I wanted to ask you.”
“Sure, whatever you’d like,” George said, though he sounded nervous already.
“Is there anything you can tell me about what happened the night my dad died?” At this point, I had been told that my dad had been at Liston’s, and he had a beer buzz going, but not much else.
I said this politely, but I looked intently at George in a way that was meant to be unnerving.
“I don’t know, Nicky,” he said. “He’s probably driven that road a thousand times in his life. I really don’t think he was that drunk.…”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.”
“What do you mean?” he said.
“You have a mug behind a counter at Liston’s, just like my dad did,” I said. “You must have been there. Once the season’s over, all you guys are there every Friday night. I just want to know about his last hours. What is the last thing he said to you?”
“Oh, I don’t remember, Nicky,” George said, and then bit his lip. “I really don’t. Again, I’m very sorry for your loss. If there’s anything I can do for you, let me know.”
He began to walk away, but I grabbed his fleshy upper arm and held on.
“I don’t need your politeness, George, and I don’t need your flowers. I need you to tell me the truth.” I was speaking in a muted tone, my jaw tight. “Pretend we’re not at a funeral. We’re at a rest stop on the highway. You’re going one way, I’m going the other. No matter what you say, we’re never going to see each other again. Just tell me the truth. Because I look at those flowers and I think, George Chamberlain feels guilty about something. What is it?”
George bit his lip again. “It’s just that telling you, Nicky … well, it might give you the wrong idea.”
I let go of him and he took a step back. “The wrong idea about what?” I glanced to the side and saw, from a distance, Charlie Wentz talking to another of the Liston’s crew, both watching me interrogate George.
“Your dad and me, we both had a few drinks, and we were saying things to each other,” George said, his voice quavering. “But you know how people say things, especially when you’ve been drinking, and it don’t mean nothing. You’re just saying something to say it.”
“I understand that,” I said. “This is my dad, George. I know better than anyone on this earth what a hard-ass he could be. Just tell me what happened.”
“It was nothing, you have to understand,” he said, sounding tired. “We were just giving each other shit.”
“About what?”
George slumped. His eyes looked baggy and dark even beyond his age. He took the zipper of his coat and pulled it up high, so just the knot of his blue-and-yellow necktie was showing.
“We were playing darts,” he said. “That’s how it started. We were playing darts, and he was winning. And he kept calling me Delivery Boy.”
“Delivery Boy?”
“Right,” he said. “Because of my job. Every time I missed a shot, he’d say something like, ‘I don’t know, Delivery Boy. That delivery isn’t so special.’ Some of the other guys were joining in, too, piling on. It just got worse and worse.”
I felt like I was listening to a second-grader complain about how the kids at school were teasing him. “So what did you do?” I asked him calmly.
“I started giving back.”
“How?”
“You know how it is. You go for a guy’s weak spot.”
I didn’t even need to guess. “So you were teasing him about the divorce. What did you say?”
“I’m not going to repeat it. The words aren’t going to come out of my mouth, not at your father’s funeral. It wouldn’t be right.”
He was correct. He did not need to go into the exact wording of his taunts. I could use my imagination—and the less of it I used, the better. Somehow, someway, it would amount to: you couldn’t please your woman.
“I’ll tell you the last thing he said to me.” George now had tears in his eyes. “He told me I was a failure. That I always have been a failure and I always would be a failure.”
Funny how George was willing to share that. I was glad I wasn’t spending my life in this town. “That’s enough, George,” I said. “You’re right, the details don’t matter.” I extended my hand. He took it. “Take care,” I said.
George shook my hand quickly and walked away, headed toward his wife. Soon Charlie came up from behind me and put his hand on my shoulder.
“Well done, Nick,” he said.
“How so?”
“You shaking his hand,” Charlie said. “That meant a lot to him. He’s had some rough bumps the past few years. I’m glad you were kind to him. The incident can sound worse than it
was.”
“That’s what George said,” I answered, quietly noting the word incident that Charlie had used, which sounded a notch stronger than needed for what George had described.
“I mean, really,” Charlie said, “it was just one punch.”
“Punch?” I looked back at George, who was guiding his wife urgently to the parking lot.
Charlie exhaled, creating a wintry cloud between us, and then he filled me in on the details. George had told me the truth, up to a point, but he had left out the ending. When he started needling my dad about his divorce, my dad shoved him. George came back with a wild right. He hit my dad in the ribs, and the blow sent him stumbling. It wasn’t a hard punch, Charlie said—it really just knocked my dad off balance. But he went backward into a table, and he knocked it over along with a couple of chairs. He fell to the ground and a beer from the table spilled onto my dad’s lap. He sprang up right away to show he wasn’t hurt, but still, it didn’t look good, and my dad was left with a big stain on his pants. And then guys jumped in to separate my dad and George, and the fight was over. Which is when my dad really began running down George with every insult he could think of. He wouldn’t let up, and finally the guys told my dad to go home.
From a distance I could see George driving away. It was sad, to learn that my dad’s life was in such a fragile state that George Chamberlain was capable of provoking him into a fatal froth.
* * *
We land in Birmingham just after noon. The temperature is in the upper eighties, and the humidity is magnifying its effect. I can feel the heat on the asphalt through the soles of my shoes as the rest of us stand sweltering on the open tarmac, sweat already beginning to bead, while Freddie changes his clothes on the plane.
When Freddie pops out, he looks fabulous. His suits are all hand-tailored, and they hang on him with an easy elegance. The one he is wearing is charcoal, single-breasted, with a nearly invisible purple stripe.
We have two rental sedans waiting for us. With no discussion as to how we would divide up, the adults climb into one car, leaving the other to Freddie and myself. They pull out first, and we follow.
“So remind me again—what are you doing here?” Freddie says, one hand on the wheel and the other scratching behind his ear, as we exit the airport grounds and merge onto the interstate. “You had dinner with Samuel once, right?”
“Yes,” I say. “I just wanted to see a couple things for myself.”
“What kind of things?”
I tell Freddie what I read about Kaylee Wise.
“So you’ve come down here to make some moves on the wealthy widow?” Freddie says with a teasing grin. “I suppose everyone needs a retirement plan.”
We ride on in silence.
“I do wonder if she could have had anything to do with the murder,” I say after a time.
“Really?”
“Love and money are more classic motivations for killing.” I throw this out there as casually as possible.
“I see your point,” Freddie says, after considering for a moment. “And she wouldn’t even have to be the killer herself. She could have a brother or cousin who’s all angry that this big, black football star screwed the blond princess and then abandoned her. So they kill Samuel, they uphold the family pride, and Kaylee gets thirty million while they’re at it.”
His language is more crass than what I would have chosen, but the logic is close enough.
Freddie, without warning, pulls our car to the side of the road.
“Is something wrong?” I ask.
“No.”
“Then why did we pull over?”
“Um … hello?” Freddie says. He gestures toward the red roadside shack near where we have stopped, which has a hand-painted wooden sign that reads AUNT LOLA’S BBQ. The dilapidated structure stands on some uninviting acreage, with only a few random weeds popping out of hard-baked soil. No other structures are within sight.
“Are you out of your fucking mind?” I say. Tanner’s car is nearly out of view. “Get going before we lose them.”
“Look at this place,” Freddie says, gazing admiringly at the shack. “We can’t pass it by.”
“It looks like it’s about five minutes from being condemned,” I say. I am not even sure it is open, despite a screen door that appears to be unhitched. The only other car in the lot is a dusty red pickup truck.
Freddie turns off the engine. “One day, Hangman, I pray that you actually get on my wavelength, and not just near it,” he says, opening the door and letting in a blast of hot outside air. “But here’s a basic rule of life. If you’re traveling and you see a place like this, you stop, because you’re not just getting a meal, you’re getting a story about how you were cruising some back road in Assfuck, Alabama, and found this dumpy little shithole and had the best barbecue of your life.”
“And missed a funeral because of it,” I say. “Which kind of ruins the anecdote.”
Freddie mulls this point. “Depends on the audience,” he concludes. “Besides, I didn’t have any breakfast.” He then steps out of the car, as if that clinches the argument, because there can be no greater need than his immediate appetites.
I sit and stew as heat infiltrates the car. Tanner and the others are now out of sight. I somehow doubt that Freddie has directions to the funeral, so I am not sure we will get there at all. This isn’t a culinary adventure, it is an act of self-destruction. I wish I had been driving; I could have prevented this.
The air in the lowlands here is even thicker than it was by the airport, and going into Aunt Lola’s restaurant provides little relief, either from the heat, or the feeling this is an obvious mistake. The entire restaurant looks like it costs less than Freddie’s suit—which, I suspect, is half the fun for him being here.
I find him chatting up a mountainous middle-aged woman in jean shorts and a sleeveless top. The sight of her isn’t exactly revving up my saliva glands.
“Nick,” he says, looking delighted. “This is Aunt Lola herself.”
“Howdy, slim,” she says. My first thought is that if this woman has gotten to look the way she did by eating her own cooking, I don’t want any of it in my body. Aunt Lola’s kitchen consists of one large pot of meat, a plastic bag full of buns, and a jar of pickle slices. Napkins and paper plates rest in torn-open plastic wrappers from the store.
“Pulled-pork sandwich,” Freddie says, leaning against the counter. “That’s the whole menu. The barbecue is Memphis-style around here. Upstate they do more Carolina-style, with a mustard-based sauce. You like Memphis-style, right, Nick?”
“I only eat Carolina. Can we go now?” One day I am going to knock Freddie’s teeth out.
He turns to Aunt Lola. “You’ll have to excuse my friend,” he says. “We’ll have two sandwiches.”
“You’re gonna love it,” Aunt Lola says to me with a discomfiting wink.
We then watch Aunt Lola prepare the order, which she manages to turn into an endurance event. I swear I’ve seen guys run the length of a football field and back in less time than it takes for her to undo the twist-tie on a bag of buns. Eventually she gets down to the ladling of the meat, and we are handed our pulled-pork sandwiches on paper plates. The buns are so flimsy that eating as we drive is out of the question, unless we want the food to end up in our laps.
So Freddie and I sit outside at a table. One bite of the sandwich is all I need. The sauce is sickeningly sweet, as if Aunt Lola decided that the best way to make it tangy was to add Tang. Add in the toughness of the meat, and I feel like I am biting into candied tire.
Freddie chews away happily though. I wonder if I have just lost my taste for this kind of food. Jessica once told me that the danger of prioritizing function over pleasure in my diet was that I might be reprogramming my taste buds; that the area of my brain wired to enjoy decadent foods could atrophy. She told me this after I had refused to try the deep-fried bacon that she had brought home from some allegedly gourmet food shop. “If the part of your brain
that craves fatty foods withers, think about what happens next,” she said. “Right next to it is the part that enjoys sex. Your brain is like your mouth—if one tooth starts rotting, those next to it will follow. Pretty soon, the only things you’ll enjoy in this life will be kicking footballs and thinking that you’re better than everyone else.”
But no part of me wants to eat this mess from Aunt Lola’s. I take my paper plate and fold it around the remains of the sandwich.
“Don’t tell me you don’t like it,” Freddie says, mouth half full. He swallows and then adds, “This is a great sandwich. Great fucking sandwich.”
By way of registering my dissent, I squeeze my plate extra-tight around the sandwich. Then I stand up, hold the bundle aloft, take a step-step-step, and kick the sandwich across the road.
As my leg rises up I feel a sharp twinge up the back of my thigh. My hamstring. Shit.
“You can be such a bitch,” Freddie says.
I now do not care anymore about the sandwich, or the funeral, or Freddie, or anything else except the pain running up the back of my leg. With minicamp starting in two days, and Woodward Tolley on the hunt. This is horrible.
It is my fault, too. I know better than to make a full kicking motion with no warm-up, especially after sitting for hours on that damn plane and then in the car. I shouldn’t have come here to Alabama in the first place. I should have stayed behind in Philadelphia, taking care of myself and sticking to my routines.
This could well be the precise moment when my life begins to fall apart. I could lose my job to Woodward Tolley, I would have to leave Philadelphia and fight for a roster spot somewhere else, assuming I could even get an invitation to camp. All because of this mistake.
I walk around gingerly, trying to keep myself loose.
Freddie, oblivious, continues eating—his chewing is becoming slower and more strenuous as he nears the end of his sandwich. His joy seems to have worn off. After the last bite, he looks at his wrist to check the time, even though he is not wearing a watch. I have seen him do this, oh, about a thousand times. The gag never gets old.
I continue pacing, and the shock in the hamstring seems to be subsiding. This might be okay, I tell myself. I would have to stretch at the first opportunity, but this might not be that bad.