The Bookmakers

by Zev Chafets

  “Jesus Christ,” said Mack out loud, “I’m starting to crack up.” He shut off the radio with a decisive jab, slipped out of the car and walked slowly across the street. On the front porch he hesitated, took a deep breath and rang the bell.

  The door swung open almost immediately and Mack found himself face to face with a thin, coffee-colored woman. She seemed to be about sixty, although he had never been good at judging the ages of black people. She wore a flowered housedress and an expression that combined curiosity with caution. “Can I help you?” she asked.

  “Hi. My name’s Mack Green. I used to live here. A long time ago.”

  The woman smiled and nodded. “Uh-huh. I was watching you from the window, just sitting out there in your car. Now that I see you up close, I recognize you. Come on in, you must want to see the house.”

  Mack followed her into the small front hall. He let his gaze wander, feeling a little dizzy.

  “Brings back memories, huh?” said the woman softly. “I’m Joyce McClain. My husband and I have been living here for, oh, ten, eleven years now. It’s a fine house.”

  “My grandfather built it,” said Mack. “Did you say you recognized me?”

  “From your picture. On the jacket of The Oriole Kid.”

  “Ah, that,” said Mack.

  “I liked it,” she said in a low, soft voice with just a touch of a drawl, “and I liked Light Years even more. The Oriole Kid is my husband’s favorite. He’s read it probably half-a-dozen times. It’s one of the few books he has read. Tell you the truth, the fact that you once lived here made him want to buy the house.”

  “How’d you know I lived here?” asked Mack, warmed by the woman’s recognition. Praise for Light Years always made him feel especially good.

  “The lady we bought the house from, Mrs. Polk, told us. It was a selling point I guess you’d call it—you know, the home of a famous novelist.”

  “My mother died in the upstairs bedroom,” Mack blurted. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to say that—”

  “That’s all right,” said Mrs. McClain. “I’m not the kind of black woman’s afraid of ghosts.” Green couldn’t judge if she was being ironic. “Why don’t you just take a tour of the house?” she offered. “Then we’ll have a cup of coffee and you can tell me what it was like growing up here.”

  “I really didn’t mean to barge in on you. It was just a spur-of-the-moment thing.”

  Joyce McClain took him gently by the elbow and squeezed. “This isn’t an intrusion, it’s a pleasure,” she said. “Isn’t every day we get a visit from a celebrity. You just take your time, I’ll be in the kitchen.”

  Mack climbed the stairs to his old bedroom, which the McClains had converted into a guest room. Surprisingly, it hadn’t changed much. There was still a desk under the window overlooking the street, bookshelves along the wall and a single bed in the far corner. The decor was different—a Watson lithograph hung on the wall where his Tiger pennant had been, a large Persian carpet covered the once-bare hardwood floor and an unused-looking stationary exercise bicycle dominated a corner of the room—but the place seemed much more familiar than Mack had supposed it would.

  He sat gingerly on the narrow bed and let himself remember. When he was small his father had taught him a bedtime prayer in this room, and for years thereafter he had been unable to fall asleep without mumbling it like an incantation. Here, one unforgettable Saturday morning when he was nine he had turned on his Zenith clock radio and heard a sound so new and raw that it made him want to dance and cry and grow up all at the same time—it was the Chantels singing “Maybe.” He had his first orgasm here, too, self-administered, thrilling and terrifying.

  Mack lay back and put his hand on his crotch. He thought of Linda, and for a moment he was tempted to close the door and quickly masturbate. Then he heard the sound of voices downstairs—a sound that brought back boyhood afternoons when his father came home from the office and he could hear the reassuring murmur of his parents’ conversation.

  The thought of his parents melted his hard-on. Still, it was a great idea for the Diary, the hero beating off in his old room. He took out his notebook, quickly jotted down the thought and headed downstairs. He was ready for a cup of coffee, although what he really wanted was a drink at the Bannister Inn next to the firehouse.

  “… any more of that gumbo?” Mack heard a man say as he entered the kitchen, coughing to announce his presence.

  Joyce McClain turned from the sink and smiled. “Mr. Green, this is my husband, John,” she said, gesturing toward a tall, paunchy but powerfully built white man with grizzled silver hair, amused blue eyes and a large, hawklike nose, who was leaning against the refrigerator door.

  McClain straightened and extended a giant hand. “Joyce told me you were here,” he said. “I hope you’re staying for dinner.”

  “I can’t,” said Mack.

  “Other plans, eh? Meeting old friends?”

  “Not really. But I just got into town and I haven’t even checked into the hotel yet. Maybe another time.”

  “The hell with another time, check in later,” said McClain with gruff heartiness. “Let’s have a couple drinks and get acquainted. I guarantee you won’t get a meal as good as Joyce’s gumbo anywhere around here.”

  There was something immediately likable about the big man’s direct, open manner. Mack had the feeling that he had seen him before, although he couldn’t place him.

  “Well—”

  “Great,” said McClain. He opened a well-stocked liquor cabinet and grinned. “Mack—okay if I call you Mack? And you call me John—”

  “And me Joyce,” said Mrs. McClain in her soft, low voice.

  “—you’re a bourbon drinker, right?” Without waiting for confirmation he splashed three fingers of Old Grandad into a glass.

  “How did you know that?”

  “Elementary, my dear Watson,” said McClain.

  “John’s a retired police detective,” said Joyce, pronouncing it po-lice, “and he’s never gotten over it.”

  Now Mack knew where he had seen McClain.

  “You don’t read your own books,” said McClain, pouring himself a scotch and a Campari-and-soda for Joyce. “Bourbon’s what ‘The Kid’ drinks.”

  “He’s not me,” said Mack. “None of my characters are.”

  “Yeah, right,” said McClain. “You take it on the rocks, don’t you?”

  Mack laughed and nodded.

  “You two fellas go in the other room and talk. I’ll get the gumbo on the stove and join you,” said Joyce.

  The McClains’ living room was decorated for comfort, like the set of a family sitcom. Mack’s mother had had an artistic streak—he recollected Chinese prints, low-slung couches and lots of little Asian statuettes of bald figures with pot bellies in this room. But there were no statuettes now, just well-worn leather easy chairs, a soft sofa under the bay windows and some nondescript landscapes on the wall. Mack noticed ashes in the fireplace; when he was a boy they had never used it.

  “Place changed much since your day?” asked McClain, who had been following his eyes.

  “It seems pretty much the same. It’s in good shape.”

  “They don’t build ’em like this anymore,” said McClain, slapping a wall. “Solid, made to last.” He took a gulp of his drink. “You don’t get back here often.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “How’d you know that? Another clue from The Oriole Kid?”

  “Naw, just logic. We’ve been here eleven years now, and this is the first time you’ve come around to see the house. Besides, I figure if you’d been in town it would have been in the News. What brings you back after all this time?”

  “Work, basically. I’m writing a book set in Oriole, or at least part of it is …”

  “A book set here? Sounds exciting,” said Joyce, wiping her hands on her apron as she entered the living room. She sat down next to her husband on the couch and he shifted his drink to take her hand. “You going to
pull a Thomas Wolfe on us?”

  “There’s no astronauts around here,” said McClain.

  “That’s Tom Wolfe,” said Joyce.

  “Whatever,” said McClain, unruffled by the correction. “What I think you should do is a sequel to The Oriole Kid. Another baseball story.”

  “I believe The Oriole Kid was meant to be an American allegory of sports, sex and success, dear,” said Joyce with affectionate irony, a bit of which, Mack realized, was aimed at him; those were the words from the blurb on the paperback edition of The Oriole Kid. He remembered them because he had written them himself.

  “Allegory? Say it ain’t so, Kid,” said McClain.

  “English teacher?” Mack asked Joyce.

  “Joyce was principal over at Jackson Junior High until three years ago,” McClain said proudly.

  “I knew a kid whose mother was principal there, Derrick Milton. We played ball together.”

  “Derrick’s my son,” said Mrs. McClain. “He lives in California now. He’s a computer programmer.”

  “He was a good guy,” said Mack. “Good ballplayer, too. How’s he doing?”

  “He’s doing just fine,” said Joyce, glancing briefly at her husband.

  “Derrick doesn’t approve of his mother being married to a white guy,” said John. “We don’t see much of him.”

  Mack recalled that Derrick Milton had had a white girlfriend in high school, but he didn’t mention it. He was amused to recognize his silence as an act of instinctive generational solidarity; never tell parents anything. “Derrick’s father was a minister, wasn’t he?” he said.

  “My first husband,” said Mrs. McClain. “He died in 1968.”

  Mack remembered the Reverend Booker T. Milton, a flamboyant preacher who wore expensive suits, drove a red Cadillac and sometimes delivered florid invocations at school events. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I’m not,” said McClain, slipping his arm over his wife’s shoulder. “Meaning no disrespect. You know how I met Joyce?”

  Mack shook his head.

  “I busted her,” John said with a booming laugh. “Honest to God, at that big busing riot in 1970. She jumped an officer of the law and I had to take her in.”

  “That officer of the law was beating one of my students over the head with a club,” said Joyce.

  “I remember the first thing she ever said to me,” McClain continued. “She said, ‘Get your hands off me, you racist pig.’ Romantic, huh?”

  “It was bad enough getting arrested. I didn’t know the punishment would be a life sentence,” said Joyce dryly.

  “In that case you and I have something in common,” Mack said to her. “We’ve both been busted by your husband.”

  “I busted you? When? For what? I don’t remember anything like that.”

  “The scene of the crime was Jerry’s Liquor Mart. I was in high school and you caught me and a friend of mine, Buddy Packer, buying a bottle of peppermint schnapps with a phony ID.”

  “You were friends with Buddy Packer?”

  “You know Buddy?”

  “Yeah, I know him,” said McClain with an expression Mack couldn’t read.

  “Back then you needed three pieces of proof to buy liquor,” Mack said. “One day Buddy, ah, found this guy’s wallet in the theater—”

  “Lifted it, you mean,” said McClain.

  “—and it had a driver’s license and a draft card in it. Buddy went down to Jacobson’s Army-Navy and came back with a Red Cross card from World War II, granting safe passage across enemy lines. I remember it had stamped signatures—Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Mussolini, even Hitler. Buddy typed in the name of the guy with the wallet and presto—three pieces of proof.”

  McClain smiled broadly. “It’s starting to come back to me,” he said.

  “The next day we decided to try it out, over at Jerry’s. Buddy sticks the schnapps on the checkout counter and the lady gives us this suspicious look and says, ‘You boys got some ID?’ Packer says, ‘Hell yeah,’ real confident, and drops the stuff on the counter. She looks at it and holds up the Red Cross card. ‘According to your driver’s license you were three years old when this card was issued,’ she says. And Buddy, never missing a beat, says: ‘Lady, we’re talking wartime. They weren’t taking no chances.’ ”

  Joyce laughed, the loudest sound she had made all day.

  “At which point,” said Mack, “an off-duty policeman who was standing behind us put a hand on my shoulder and said”—he made his voice go gruff—“ ‘Boys, your asses are under arrest.’ ”

  “And that was me,” said McClain. “Hell yes, I remember it now.”

  “So then what happened?” asked Joyce. “I hope this isn’t a story about po-lice brutality.”

  “Actually, he was pretty nice about it,” Mack said. “He gave us a lecture and impounded the wallet. Nothing ever happened. I wonder where Buddy is these days?”

  “He’s around,” said McClain, glancing at Joyce.

  “His name’s not in the book,” said Mack. “You know how to find him?”

  McClain shrugged. “If I had to,” he said.

  “I think the gumbo’s just about ready,” said Joyce, rising. “Mack, you probably want to wash up before supper; you know where it is. Dick Tracy here can give me a hand setting the table.”

  Dinner, from spinach salad to the homemade pecan pie, was as good as McClain had promised. Mack, famished, would have been embarrassed about eating so much if his appetite hadn’t given Joyce such obvious pleasure. “No more, I can’t,” he groaned when she offered him a third helping of pecan pie. “God, I think this is the best meal I’ve ever had.”

  “I done married my wife for her cookin’,” said McClain. “She the baddest soulfood specialiss in O-ree-O.” Mack was startled—McClain’s black accent and inflection, even the expression on his face, were uncannily accurate.

  “John thinks he’s Redd Foxx,” said Joyce fondly. “Just ignore him when he gets like that. I do.”

  “You’ve got a good ear,” Mack said.

  “Spend twenty years working on the east side, you learn to talk like an eastsider.”

  “Why don’t you sing ‘Ole Man Ribbuh’ for our guest, dear?” said Joyce.

  “I only sings Motown,” McClain said. “Anyway, I told you Joyce can cook.”

  “That’s all I do these days, cook and keep house.”

  “Yeah, and volunteer three days a week at the daycare center. And direct the church choir. And play tennis every morning. Now she’s thinking about running for city council.” McClain leaned over and kissed his wife on the cheek. “She’s really something, this woman.”

  “Do you have any kids?” Mack asked. “I mean, of your own? Together?”

  McClain shook his head. “It’s something I missed out on. I was married once before, but it didn’t take. I always figured I’d get around to kids the next time. But then I met Joyce, and—”

  “Forty-year-old women didn’t have babies in those days,” she said. “I already had a grown son. And, to be honest, I’m not sure I would have wanted to raise a mixed child in this town.”

  “Ah, well,” said McClain. There was a long pause and then he asked. “How about you?”

  “Nope,” said Mack. “I was married once too, but I escaped. Not unscathed,” he added, thinking of the settlement.

  “Maybe you’ll find a girl around here,” said McClain. “Or maybe that’s the reason you came back. Returning to the scene of the crime.”

  “John, you leave this young man alone with your romantic po-liceman notions,” said Joyce with mock severity.

  “That’s all right,” Mack said. “It’s been a while since I was cross-examined about girls in this room. Brings back old times.”

  “Everybody’s got some girl in his old hometown,” said McClain. “Tell me I’m wrong.”

  “As a matter of fact, you’re right, in a way,” said Mack. “There was a girl—”

  “And?”

  “And sh
e didn’t think I was good enough for her,” Mack said lightly. “She married an all-American quarterback instead.”

  “No kidding?” said McClain. “Who?”

  “Guy named Gregg Flanders.”

  “Gregg Flanders? From Vanderbilt? He won the Heisman Trophy. No wonder she didn’t think you were good enough for her.”

  “Thanks. Anyway, it was a long time ago.”

  “She from around here?”

  “West Tarryton.”

  “I know people over there,” said McClain. “What’s her name?”

  “Linda Birney. I guess now it’s Linda Flanders.”

  “Birney, Birney,” mused McClain, searching his cop’s memory. “Nope, doesn’t ring any bells. You’d think I’d remember, a local girl marries a Heisman winner.”

  “Where is she now?” asked Joyce gently.

  Mack shrugged. “Last I heard she was living in California.”

  “Well, it’s her loss,” said Joyce. “Are you fellas ready for some coffee?”

  “Ah, would it be all right if I smoked?” asked Mack.

  “How about a cee-gar?” said John. “I’ve got me some tasty Cubanos.”

  “John, you smoke those illegal stogies of yours in the basement,” said Joyce. “I’ll get the dishes cleared away and bring your coffee down.”

  McClain led Green to the wood-paneled basement rec room, where he produced two green coronas and a bottle of Hennessy. “Thought we might have us a postprandial libation,” he said.

  The two men sat puffing, chatting about the Pistons, who were still off their championship form, and the Tigers, McClain’s special love, who he predicted would be in the thick of the pennant race next season. When Joyce joined them with coffee, Mack looked at his watch and saw it was past eleven.

  “I didn’t realize how late it was,” he said. “I’ve got to get over to the hotel.”

  “Where you staying?” asked McClain.

  “The Hilton. I hope they held my reservation.”

  “Forget the Hilton,” said McClain. “Stay here tonight.”

  “Here?”

  “Yeah, here, in your old room. Nobody’s using it.”

  “I couldn’t do that.”