Parker Field

by Howard Owen

  Peachy Love, my favorite police flack and occasional whoopee partner, says they’re still working on the angle of trajectory and all that bullshit. One thing she said, though, got my attention.

  “This is totally off the record, Willie,” she said. “You can’t print this. You can’t even talk about it, or my ass is in a sling, and I’ll never talk to you again.”

  Not being able to talk to Peachy Love again would be a great loss to me. I promise, crossing my heart and hoping to die.

  “It looks like it came from somewhere up high. It’s not that easy to figure, and these guys aren’t geniuses, but what one cop told me was the investigators think the perp must have been shooting down at the victim.”

  “What direction?”

  “That one they’re sure of. The shooter was to the north of him.”

  There are a couple of high-rise dorms just down the street, but they’d be a little out of range. Unless the bastard was perched in a tree, there’s one tall building, all twelve stories of it, just to the north of Monroe Park.

  The Prestwould.

  Chapter Three

  SATURDAY

  The chairs they provide for hospital visitors are made to encourage short stays. The one I’m sitting in is the least comfortable of the two Les’s room has been allotted. Peggy has the one right beside the bed. Every fifteen minutes or so, I use one excuse or another to take a walk.

  Les is hanging in there. He’s not the same old Les, though. The disorientation, the drugs, the damn trauma of being shot are all working against him. He thrashes around. He complains a lot, and I’m not sure I’ve ever heard Les Hacker complain before this. He pretty much knows who we are, but when Peggy and I look at each other, and we’re sure he’s not looking at us, I am certain that we do not brim with optimism.

  It’s a ten-minute walk to the nearest nicotine zone, so I’m doing more walking than sitting. I think I’d rather walk ten miles than spend an uninterrupted hour in a hospital room.

  Out on the deck, it’s turned cooler again. I’m tucked into a corner, out of the wind, when I hear my name being called.

  “Willie! Hot damn, don’t you know that shit’ll kill you?”

  I stub out my Camel and greet the tireless Jimmy Deacon. Jumpin’ Jimmy Deacon. He actually refers to himself that way sometimes, in the third person. He’s done it ever since Buddy Hicks, one of our sports writers, called him Jumpin’ Jimmy in a feature story probably twenty years ago.

  The nickname fits. Jimmy must be seventy-five now, and he’s still working as much as they’ll let him. Or can stand him. Jimmy would make the Sphinx jumpy. He has, since I’ve known him, had the energy level of a hummingbird. Unfortunately, he also has the brain of one. He’s had one job or another involving Richmond and baseball for his entire adult life, none of them paying for much beyond his rent and groceries. In what he calls the off-season, between the end of the minor-league season and spring training, he referees, he keeps score at high school and small-college basketball games. He even worked as a stringer for the paper for a while, covering prep basketball, until someone realized that Jimmy couldn’t read and write very well.

  I read in the paper the other day that his title now is assistant groundskeeper. That’s probably as good a fit as anything. The main thing with Jimmy, as any number of general managers will tell you, is to keep him busy. If you can find the right treadmill to put him on, one that keeps him busy and accomplishes something, he will work until he drops.

  Jimmy looks like he weighs about 120 pounds. Somebody said he ran a 10K a couple of years ago, wearing a pair of work shoes, and finished in under fifty minutes. Somebody asked him how much he’d trained.

  “Why the fuck would Jumpin’ Jimmy run another six miles just for practice?” was the reported response.

  “How’s Les?” Jimmy asks me. We’re face-to-face now, and Jimmy seems to be kind of vibrating. His red hair has faded to a weak yellow, but his bright blue eyes still shine, powered by some internal generator that doesn’t seem to have an off switch. As much as I dislike sitting in a hospital room, I can’t imagine Jumpin’ Jimmy Deacon lasting five minutes.

  I tell him Les is doing well.

  “Well, I come to see him.”

  I see that Jimmy has some roses in his right hand. They aren’t in a vase. They look like he bought them at the grocery store on the way over.

  “I figure they’ll have something to put ’em in,” Jimmy says when he sees me staring at the flowers. A thorn seems to have cut Jimmy’s hand, which is bleeding a little. Still, it was a nice thought.

  “Who the hell would want to shoot Les?” Jimmy asks. “Jumpin’ Jimmy never knew a better fella. Some of those ball-players, I tell you, they can be kind of high-hatted sometimes, you know? But Les wasn’t ever like that.”

  I knew Jimmy before I knew Les but didn’t really get to know him until Les and Peggy hooked up. He and Les have been friends for almost half a century, since Les caught for the Vees and Jimmy was whatever he was at the time—clubhouse guy, ticket seller, advance man, peanut vendor. At one point many years after Les retired, he and Jimmy would share the duties of warming up the pitchers in the bullpen. In the big leagues, they have an actual catcher doing that. In the minors, it falls to anybody with a glove. So, either Jimmy or Les would put on a uniform—by then it was the Richmond Braves—and spend the game out in the area staked off along the right-field line for the relief pitchers.

  Les said he kind of enjoyed it. He said he could still teach some of the young knuckleheads a thing or two. He said they wanted him to do it for every home game, because Jimmy’s chatter was driving the whole bullpen crazy, in addition to which he loved to razz the opposing team’s right fielder. One night, Jimmy got on this big goon from Toledo so bad that he went after him, right in the middle of the game, chased him all the way under the bleachers.

  Les said he told the GM that thirty-five games were about all his knees could stand. He was probably fifty-five or sixty by then.

  The main reason, though, was that he thought being replaced as bullpen catcher would have hurt Jimmy’s feelings.

  Jimmy and I agree that we can’t think of anyone who would want to shoot Les Hacker.

  “Musta been a case of mistaken identity,” Jimmy says, and I have to concur.

  We’re walking back into the VCU hospital, with Jimmy talking all the way.

  “Les is luckier than some. Those ’64 boys, they kinda had a hard time of it.”

  I figure he means the 1964 Richmond Vees. Les has told me how Jimmy seems to remember all the players on all the Richmond teams, no matter how obscure they are, as if all of Jimmy’s scant brain cells have been focused on that one thing.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, Lucky and Phil, the only ones that made it to the bigs, they’re both gone.”

  Jimmy stops and rubs the knot over his right eye.

  “Damn!” he says. “I’m just remembering. They both were shot, too. Damn!”

  I remember Lucky Whitestone, because he was the most famous member of the 1964 team. He made the All-Star team two or three times in the majors, I think. Almost led the league in hitting one year. I used to have his baseball card. I was four years old when he played his one season for the Vees, but everybody talked about him when I was growing up. Les still does. He said he had all the tools “and knew it, too.”

  “He died in some kind of hunting accident, right?”

  “Yeah,” Jimmy says. “He’d already retired. Had ten years in the majors. I heard he’d retired to Florida. Talladega, I think.”

  “Tallahassee?”

  “Yeah. Yeah. That’s it. They said he’d been deer hunting. They found him out there in the woods, shot through the head.”

  Jimmy stops for a couple of seconds and offers his final thoughts on Lucky Whitestone.

  “He was a prick.”

  I ask him who Phil is, or was.

  He looks at me as if I don’t know who George Washington was.

>   “Phil Holt! He was a big old southpaw. From somewhere in Alabama. He won twelve games for the Vees in ’64. Won fifteen for Detroit one year, before he threw his arm out.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “I heard it was a holdup. He’d kind of pissed his money away. Hell, there wasn’t that much back then anyhow. He was managing a 7-Eleven or some such shit, maybe he owned it, I don’t know. This guy came in with a gun. Nobody else in the store but them, musta been late. Best they could figure, the guy just blew him away. They said he got about twenty dollars. I don’t think they ever caught the son of a bitch.”

  So, yeah, Les could be a lot worse off.

  “They were the only two that year that really did anything in the big leagues,” Jimmy says.

  I ask him how close Les had come to making it. Les always downplays his exploits, so it’s hard to know.

  Jimmy is quiet for a few seconds, which is rare.

  “Oh, he coulda made it,” Jimmy says. “If he hadn’t been with the Yankees, there might of been opportunities. But they were full up on catchers. Les could hit a little, and he had a gun. They didn’t run much on him. Best thing about Les, though? He could talk to the pitchers, get their heads on straight.

  “You know that movie, 'Whispers to Horses’?”

  “ 'The Horse Whisperer’?”

  “Yeah. Whatever. Well, Les, he was the pitcher whisperer.”

  Up in Les’s room, Jimmy hands the flowers to Peggy, who holds them for a few seconds and then sets them down gently on the bedside table.

  Jimmy talks to Les for a few minutes. I can see him shifting from one foot to the other at the bedside. Les has the closest thing I’ve seen him have to a coherent conversation since he was shot. It’s like seeing Jimmy Deacon has taken him back to an earlier time, when he wasn’t addled and lying in a hospital bed with a ruined shoulder.

  “You won’t be throwing out many runners with that thing,” Jimmy says, tapping Les’s bandaged shoulder.

  Les laughs and says he didn’t throw that many out before he got shot, either.

  “Aw,” Jimmy says, “you did, too. You were a cannon back there.”

  By the time Jimmy leaves, all of ten minutes and a few thousand words after he arrived, Les seems to be feeling better.

  Jimmy’s barely out of earshot when I hear Peggy laugh.

  “That man,” she says, “just sucks all the air out of the room, doesn’t he?”

  I HAVE to be at work by three. I can’t let Chuck Apple take another weekend night shift for me. As I’m leaving, I tell Peggy I’ll pick her up and take her home in about three hours.

  “Damn,” she says, “I could use a smoke.”

  I know she doesn’t mean tobacco. I tell her to hang in there.

  “Easy for you to say. Your sins are all legal.”

  Mostly, I tell her.

  In the parking lot, the cell phone buzzes. It’s Kate.

  She asks me about Les. It’s the second time she’s called. I appreciate her concern. My ex-wives have been kinder to me than I deserve.

  I fill her in. She takes a breath and then dives in.

  “I was going to call you anyhow. I didn’t have a chance to tell you the other day. You had another call coming in, I think.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “Well,” she says, “the rabbit died.”

  It’s such an old-fashioned phrase, especially from the decidedly new-fashioned Kate Ellis, that I don’t get it for a couple of seconds.

  “Oh, that rabbit.”

  The rabbit has been eluding Kate and her husband, Greg, for a couple of years. They have employed doctors and drugs and, for all I know, rhinoceros-horn emulsions in an effort to have a baby. Something finally worked.

  I offer my congratulations, making a heroic effort to render them heartfelt.

  “I feel kind of, you know, weird. But I didn’t want you to hear it from someone else.”

  Kate and I never tried to have a baby. We tried not to have a baby. Or at least I’m sure I did. Kate was finishing law school and then getting her career started. I just wasn’t into having another kid right then. Still, hearing the news is like hearing a distant door slamming. You walked away from it a long time ago, but there was always the hope that it might stay cracked just a bit. Kate and I did love each other. We just loved some other things, too, and in the end there wasn’t enough love to go around.

  We’ve become friends since we got over the initial unpleasantness, and we even managed to have one nostalgia fuck a year and a half ago that at least one of us doesn’t regret in the least.

  Still, the door is shut.

  I ask her when, and she says probably October. The math says she’s three months along.

  “Remember that time we thought you were pregnant?” I kind of wish I hadn’t said it as soon as the words are out of my mouth.

  There’s silence for a few seconds, and I’m afraid she’s hung up the phone.

  “It was probably for the best,” she says at last.

  Yeah. It wasn’t one of my finer moments. After all, she was the one who was still in law school, the one who would have had to make some major changes in her bright career plans. But it had come as a shock to me. I thought we were being careful.

  It was a mistake to ask if she’d skipped a birth control pill or six. It was a mistake to mention an abortion. It definitely was a mistake not to do the happy dance. After she finally had her period, there was a little bit of a chasm there, one I never succeeded in doing anything about but widening.

  “You’ll be a great mom,” I tell her.

  “And Greg will be a great father,” she says, and I’m smart enough to know that I’m supposed to second that motion, no matter how much I think it’s bullshit.

  “Any news on who shot him?”

  I tell her I don’t have a clue. I feel like it’s important not to breach Peachy’s confidence and talk about the Prestwould angle. Besides, I’m sure the cops will spill their guts as soon as they have enough information to make it look like they’re earning their doughnuts.

  And, of course, she can’t resist asking The Question:

  “How about you and AA?”

  “Next question.”

  She’s been after me to “confront my problem” ever since the DUI that cost me my license for a while. I did try. I went to three meetings. But when they’d get to the part where I had to stand up and say, “Hi, I’m Willie, and I’m an alcoholic,” I just couldn’t do it. Dammit, I don’t feel like an alcoholic. I still have a job, at least for the time being. I still have a functioning liver. I haven’t had anyone have to tell me what I did the night before in months now. I know people AA has helped. No denying that. I just don’t think I’m one of them.

  Kate says I’m too stubborn. Maybe she’s right. I tell her I’ve cut back to a fifth a day, which she doesn’t think is terribly amusing.

  I hear the dramatic sigh.

  “Well, it’s your life. Live it however you see fit.”

  I thank her for caring enough to nag.

  She tells me to give Peggy and Les her love. I tell her to give Greg mine. She calls me a smart ass and hangs up.

  ON THE way to the office, I call Andi. She’s been by the hospital once already. She’s working an early shift today at a place west of Boulevard that only sells food because the state says you have to if you want to sell liquor, too. Andi says it’s so bad she’s been helping out with the cooking. She’s recovered from almost getting killed by an idiot driver eighteen months ago and is putting in four shifts a week plus taking three courses. It is possible that she and VCU will part ways sometime in the next year. She’s really trying to pull her weight, tuition-wise, but my bank account will be a little less anorexic when she graduates.

  She says she’ll come by the hospital after work, and that she can pick up Peggy there and take her home.

  My daughter is dating a guy who has rings in both nostrils and a stud on his tongue. She says he’s really good to her, t
hough, so who cares about rings and studs? Plus, he’s old money, and maybe there’s still some of it around. And he’s bound to be better at relationships than I’ve been.

  THE NEWSPAPER is in usual Saturday hibernation mode when I come in. It’s hard to explain to civilians how Saturday is such a dead day around the newsroom.

  “Isn’t Sunday your biggest paper?” they tend to ask.

  Yes, I explain. But if you look at what’s in the Sunday paper, you soon realize that the only sections that can’t be locked up on Thursday, or Friday at the latest, are the A section, the local section, and sports. All the feature stuff, the business pages, whatever bullshit the editorial writers have come up with, can be done ahead of time, and I guarantee you most of A1 and the local stuff is written and turned in before the sun sets on Friday. The Saturday crew is there to edit and write headlines. And, sometimes, actual news breaks out. The actual news tends to be of the criminal variety, which gets me out of the office.

  I kind of like it. It’s quiet in here for the most part, with the occasional shooting to break the monotony, and nobody’s on your case, because anybody with a suit probably isn’t even answering calls at home by Saturday afternoon.

  Sarah Goodnight is at her desk on her day off.

  She looks up when she sees me standing beside her.

  I ask her why she’s working for free.

  “They had a brawl last night at Tredegar.”

  The American Civil War Center, one of our fair city’s many efforts to turn the Late Unpleasantness into tourist dollars, is down by the James, in the old Tredegar Iron Works building.

  Part of the exhibit is a video with paid talking heads trying to be fair and balanced, giving all sides. At one point, they ask you to press one of four buttons beside your chair, answering the burning question: What caused the Civil War?

  Three boneheads from the South Side started arguing with the screen when it was revealed that the most common answer was, duh, “slavery.” They were pretty sure the answer was “states’ rights,” as in states’ rights to allow slavery. A few tourists from somewhere well north of the Potomac begged to differ, and it was on.