by Howard Owen
“Road trip!” Peroni yells. There’s something in all this of the forced gaiety of men our age trying to relive what can only be lived once. No doubt there will be an ice chest full of Miller pony bottles, and Andy will be blasting beach music all the way there. I only hope he doesn’t give over completely to the dream and take the convertible. It’s a nice day outside, for early April, but it’s not that nice.
Still, it’s spring and it’s baseball. I’m sure Les will understand. He’ll probably want to go with us. I wish he could.
“Wait,” I say just as Peroni is ringing off. “You said four tickets.”
“My sister,” Andy says. “She’s a baseball nut, too.”
I vaguely remember Andy’s sister, Cindy. She was six years behind us in school. I heard she’d gotten divorced.
“Don’t worry, Willie,” R. P. yells into the phone. “You won’t get cooties.”
I DROP Peggy off. Custalow will come get her about four thirty.
I’ve been standing outside about ten minutes when Andy pulls to the curb. He and R. P. are in the front. I get in the back. Thank God, he took the sedan.
“Hey there, Willie Black. Am I old enough to play now?”
I haven’t seen Cindy Peroni in ten years. I knew through Andy that she’d moved back to Richmond after the split and was living somewhere off Patterson in the West End.
I don’t get the allusion at first. Then I remember little Cindy Peroni, her face red as a fire engine, demanding that we let her play basketball with us. She must have been in the fifth grade, and she was growing into a pretty good athlete—made all district when she was a senior, I think—but we were a bunch of knuckleheads who wanted no part of a girl in our game. It happened more than once, I’m remembering now.
Yeah, I tell Cindy. I think you’re old enough now.
She’s grown into her age pretty well. She still has those brown, sparkly eyes that made her a real knockout by the time she finished high school. Her hair’s still brown, although whether by nature or science I can’t say. She’s wearing jeans and a long-sleeved Cal Ripken T-shirt, and she’s wearing them well. She’s either taken care of herself well or she’s decided the best revenge on her former husband is to turn into a major MILF.
I ask her how long she’s been back in Richmond.
“About two years,” she says. “I can’t believe I haven’t run into you before now.”
With Andy’s speakers blasting out songs older than we are and he and R. P. chatting away in the front seat, Cindy and I help ourselves to a couple of pony bottles each on the way to Balmer and catch up. She’s spent most of her adult life following the guy she married right after high school from Richmond to Raleigh to Charlotte to Northern Virginia while he got rich replacing woods with suburbs. She has a twenty-year-old son living up in Fairfax. She’s taking courses at VCU. Her midlife crisis, God help her, seems to involve getting a degree in English.
“I got tired of his shit,” is the way she delicately explains the termination of marital bliss. I’d heard from Andy that Donnie Marshman had not been the ideal husband, and that his sister had kicked Marshman out on at least one occasion for doing the horizontal hula with another party. Well, with three divorces to my credit, who am I to judge?
“I gave him back his name,” Cindy says, “and he gave me a house and sends me a nice check every month.”
Well, I say, it’s always better to dump a rich guy than a poor one.
“True dat,” she says, clinking bottles with me.
WE’VE DRIVEN around a perfectly good major-league baseball stadium to get here. Washington fans have their own team now. People are rolling around on the ground and speaking in tongues over the Nats, but our drive down memory lane doesn’t go into DC.
“I’m an AL East kind of gal,” Cindy says, and then proceeds to do a fifteen-minute running commentary on the Orioles’ past, present and future. The Ripken T-shirt is probably older than her son, and I see that it’s autographed, although Cal’s signature has faded a bit.
“You ought to see my tattoo,” she says.
“I probably should,” I say.
“Maybe later,” she says.
WE HAVE a couple more beers in one of those places outside the stadium that they must hose down after every home game, then treat ourselves to barbecue at Boog Powell’s place. R. J. says it’s a shame they didn’t pay baseball players more when Boog was in his prime. He might not have had to sell barbecue for a living. I tell him to think about that the next time he bursts a blood vessel over some forty-year-old left-handed reliever getting a couple of million.
“Gotta be some middle ground,” he mutters.
We’ve somehow nabbed seats twenty rows up and maybe fifty feet back of third base. We drink Natty Bohs even though I’m not that crazy about them any more, because that’s what you do in Charm City. It must be seventy-five degrees. It’ll probably be forty again tomorrow, but carpe the damn diem.
I yield to nature in the middle of the third inning. On my way back to our seats, I run into Cindy, coming back from a similar urge.
Just before we step into the concourse leading back to our seats, she spins me around and lands a big one right on my lips. She has to bend my head down a little and stand on tiptoes to do it. A couple of kids walking by telling us to get a room.
“Thanks,” Cindy Peroni says. “I’ve waited to do that since I was eight years old.”
I am never sure what drives human beings to bond with each other. Looking at Cindy’s fine butt as she leads the way to our row, I’m just glad it works out that way sometimes.
It’s a good day all around. In the seventh inning, Luke Scott hits a foul pop-up down the third-base line. Looking up into that perfect blue sky, I’m reminded of what it felt like at ten, trying to get a bead on a black dot of a ball, still learning how to be where it landed, when it landed. Usually, they look like they’re coming right to you and then wind up ten rows away. This one, though, never swerved. I can never understand how those guys catch foul balls, even home-run balls, with their bare hands, and I’d never try. But this one hits two seats over, does a carom underneath the seats as we all stand, mouths open at this rare occurrence. Like I’m wearing a ball magnet, it rolls right up to my left shoe. All I have to do is pick it up. Somehow, this is cause for applause and congratulations in the general vicinity.
I give the ball to Cindy, who tells me to give it to the five-year-old girl in the row in front of us, and I tell her that’s a fine idea.
The Orioles beat the Blue Jays, and I’ve managed to walk that tightrope between pleasantly high and stupid. At ballpark prices, I can’t drink enough beer to get drunk, even with the head start I had.
On the way back to the car, I ask Cindy if she’d like to have dinner or something sometime.
“I dunno,” she says, “I’m think I’m busy that night.”
She pauses about two beats and then laughs.
“What the hell do you think?”
MY HEARING’S not that great. I’ll have to be stone deaf to get a hearing aid unless they can make them a lot better than they do now, but I am missing some things.
Like my cell phone. If it rings and I’m in anything except a quiet room, I don’t hear it. On the way to the car, I check and see that I have two calls.
The first one is from Sally Velez.
“Hey, I thought you’d like to know,” she says. “They’ve caught the guy.”
“That shot Les?”
“Yeah. They have video surveillance in your building, outside the basement doors, where they make deliveries. Did you know that?”
No, I tell her, I didn’t. Abe has never mentioned it. It makes sense, I guess. We’re only an improperly closed door away from the drug dealers across Grace Street, just around the corner from the occasional chaos of Monroe Park. They must’ve decided to do that at a board meeting I didn’t attend, which would be all of them.
“So, when the cops get around to looking at the tapes, they see th
is asshole with what looks like a really bad blond rug and a plaid sports jacket, coming out the alley entrance. They didn’t have to look too far to find him.”
An undercover cop had been hanging out in the park the last two days. Today, the sports jacket showed up, worn by a man who apparently had seen a bit more than his mind could handle on one of his many all-expenses-paid trips to Sandland, compliments of the US Army.
“His name’s Raymond Gatewood,” Sally says. “Four tours in Iraq, one in Afghanistan. He’s been in and out of the park for the last two years. Apparently just went nuts. They said they had to Tase him twice to subdue him.”
I ask Sally how he got into the building and how he laid hands on the Winchester .30-30.
“They just brought him in,” she says. “One thing at a time. The cops are feeling pretty good that they caught the guy.”
I check the other call, the one I should have taken first.
“Willie,” my mother says, “Les isn’t doing so well.”
A breeze blowing in off the harbor puts a chill on my perfect afternoon.
Chapter Six
TUESDAY
Sometime yesterday afternoon, Les apparently had a stroke. He is, indeed, not doing well. Peggy’s beating herself up for not being there. She had just left to go back home and catch up on some much-needed cleaning. By the time she got a ride back with Andi at five, the damage seemingly had been done. One of the nurses said he was the way he is now when they checked in on him.
When I got back last night, I wondered out loud how a man could have a stroke in a major teaching hospital and no one notices. Nobody really had a good answer for that one, although the night crew seemed pissed off that I’d had the temerity to ask.
Les’s mouth is drawn to one side, and he can’t seem to do much with his right arm and right leg. He looks at me like a dog that’s been hit by a truck.
Today, I can’t help but think about something he once told me. I’d gone with him to visit one of his old friends from his days as a roofer. The guy was in about the same shape Les is in now.
Les tried to jolly him up a bit. We left after maybe the longest half hour I could remember.
Neither of us said anything until we were back in the car. As I was turning the ignition key, Les said, “Willie, if I ever get like that, please shoot me.”
CINDY COMES by for a while. She and Peggy remember each other from the old days on the Hill.
None of us feel much like talking. At one point, I look over and Peggy’s holding one of his hands while Awesome Dude holds the other one.
Somehow, Jimmy Deacon gets word about Les’s turn for the worse. Jumpin’ Jimmy is subdued, for him. But he’s still doing his best to get Les to smile, which I’m not sure is possible right now.
“Openin’ Day, man,” Jimmy says, clapping his hands and startling the nurses. “Just two days until they throw out the first pitch. Gimme some peanuts and Cracker Jacks!”
Les just lies there, looking straight ahead. He’s managed to cheer us up so much over the years, often just by being Les, and now we can’t seem to do a damn thing to return the favor.
When I’ve had about all I can bear without crying, I step out into the hall, headed for somewhere that allows smoking. Jumpin’ Jimmy joins me.
“Geez,” Jimmy says, “that’s tough. But old Les’ll pull through. You can bet your bottom damn dollar on that.”
But he kind of chokes up when he says it. Even Jumpin’ Jimmy Deacon is having trouble whistling a happy tune today.
“You know,” he says, changing the subject, “you asked me about Frannie Fling.”
I have to think for a couple of seconds before I make the connection.
“Well,” he says, “today’s April 10. That was the day it happened. I don’t forget dates or players.”
I’m fishing for a cigarette.
“What? What happened on April 10?”
“April 10, 1965. That was the day she did it.”
I ask him to be a little less cryptic. I’m already switching from concerned human being to journalist, taking mental notes for my big piece on the ’64 Vees, homing in on some local color.
“She went down to Florida that spring. I guess she thought she could get Whitestone to do right by her.”
I ask Jimmy if he would mind starting at the beginning, or at least at some point where I can catch up.
Frannie Fling was, Jimmy says, a Baseball Annie. She liked baseball players. She liked them a lot, and she wanted them to like her, too.
“She was a runaway, from up north somewhere. New Hampshire, I think. No, wait, Vermont. Yeah, Wells, Vermont.” He taps his addled head. “I never forget stuff from the past. It’s the present that’s a bitch sometimes.”
Jimmy tells me he thinks Frannie Fling was eighteen in 1964. She showed up at Parker Field one day in February, looking for a job.
“I think she’d been a waitress or something before that,” Jimmy says. “Anyhow, the GM hired her, probably because she was pretty. She had these bedroom eyes that just sparkled, and kind of devilish-lookin’ eyebrows. Brown hair. Built like a brick shithouse—excuse me for being crude, but she was. She looked like she was ready for just about anything. Maybe it wasn’t such a good thing that she got that job with the Vees.”
Jimmy says they employed her to sell concessions, work in the ticket office and do whatever else needed doing.
“They even had her wear that mascot outfit. She would do anything they asked her. Hell, she’d work with me getting the field ready.”
When the players came north from Florida, it didn’t take them long to start sniffing around Frances Flynn.
“I tried to kind of warn her,” Jimmy says. “I tried to tell her those boys weren’t into buying anything at that point in their lives. They was more into short-term rentals, if you know what I mean.”
She wasn’t a bad person, Jimmy said, but she was young and not inclined to listen to the advice of a jackleg minor-league baseball gofer like him. She told him she had been an honors student in high school, but that she just woke up one day and realized she was going to spend the rest of her life living and working in this little Vermont town. And so she left, halfway through her senior year of high school.
“She said she wanted to go somewhere where it didn’t snow in April.”
She had meant to go all the way to Florida, but she had a friend who had enrolled at Richmond Professional Institute and had a spare bed. After waiting tables and figuring that was about as glamorous in Richmond as it was in Wells, Vermont, she saw an ad in the paper one day advertising for a “position” with the Richmond Vees.
“She said she had always liked baseball, and when she found out the Vees were the Yankees’ Triple-A team, her being a Yankees fan her whole life, she was like, 'How could I say no?’ ”
It was, I suppose, something of a rush to have young studs, maybe guys who would be playing in Yankee Stadium someday soon, tripping over their dicks to be near you. At any rate, Frances Flynn was soon Frannie Fling.
“She started with Phil Holt,” Jimmy says. “He had a fiancée back in Alabama, but Alabama was a long way from Richmond. Holt was in a two-bedroom apartment with three other guys, and it wasn’t exactly a secret that Frannie was doin’ the nasty with him.”
Jumpin’ Jimmy knows for sure, or at least on second-hand knowledge, that she slept with Jack Velasquez, Roy Haas, Rip Rittenbacker and Rabbit Larue.
“She might of done the whole team,” Jimmy says. “They was always joking that Frannie had batted around.”
Jimmy holds up his right hand like a traffic cop at an intersection.
“Wait! Scratch that. The one she didn’t sleep with, that I’m sure she didn’t sleep with, was Les. Well, him and Buck McRae. Buck was black, and it was, you know, 1964.”
I don’t bother telling Jumpin’ Jimmy about my dad, the late Artie Lee, or why my mother named me Willie Mays Black. My African-American heritage would just get in the way of Jimmy’s story, and the b
est thing a good reporter can do is not get in the way.
Before I can ask him what was wrong with Les, he answers the question.
“Les wasn’t like that. Les was already married. He was a little older than some of the other fellas, and maybe he was just more decent. Anyhow, when they’d start laughing about ol’ Frannie Fling, he’d just move away or tell them to act their ages.
“One time, I heard him ask Holt, who’d managed to take pictures of Frannie the night before, buck naked, how he’d feel if that was his sister.
“Holt just stared at him like he was crazy. He said, 'My sister wouldn’t do shit like that.’ They all respected Les, mostly because he could have kicked most if not all their asses, but you could tell the Frannie Fling thing kind of drove a ledge between him and the other boys.”
I’m sure Jimmy means “wedge,” but I’m not about to interrupt now.
“I wondered if all the shit that summer, and what happened in Florida next spring, wasn’t the last straw that broke the camel’s back for Les. I mean, he kind of knew his day had come and gone, but it seemed like the fun had gone out of it for him. The Vees had up and left for Toledo, but Les came back to Richmond that spring. He was done with baseball.”
“But about Frannie Fling …”
“Oh, yeah. Well, by July, she had worked around to Whitestone. Which was bad news.”
Lucky Whitestone, I already know from my research and what Bootie Carmichael has told me secondhand, was the Chosen One on the Vees that year.
“They thought he was goin’ to be the next Yankee superstar,” Jimmy says. “And he might have been, if he hadn’t screwed up and got himself traded to Cleveland for a pitcher with a dead arm and an outfielder that couldn’t hit left-handers. He developed some bad habits, the way guys do who have too much looks and talent and time on their hands. But he still had a pretty damn good career. Ten years in the bigs. Lifetime batting average was .278. Not bad for a shortstop.”
When Frannie and Whitestone hooked up, the rest of the team kind of backed off. There was a pecking order, as there always is, whether you’re a lawyer or a left fielder, and Lucky Whitestone was at the top of it.