by Gerald Duff
“Seems to me,” Nova Hebert said, “you watch baseball kind of funny.”
“How’s that?” J.W. said, rattling the ice in his third drink of Schenley’s gin, the clink a true and friendly sound at the edge of the feeding frenzy in the Metronome’s bar area. “You mean I don’t pay attention to what’s going on?”
“You pay attention all right,” Nova said, “from what you say, but it doesn’t seem like you focus on what most people did.”
“Yeah?”
“You don’t talk about final scores, for one thing. Who do you think’s going to win tonight? Memphis or Chattanooga?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.”
“I have,” Nova said. “A little bit.”
“Oh.”
“Do you want to make a prediction?”
“Not really, no, “ J.W. said. “I don’t mind you doing it, though. What do you think?”
“I’m not going to tell you, Sergeant Ragsdale,” Nova said. “You got to do your own research, if you want to know.”
“I don’t, though.”
“I know you don’t.”
“You still working on that glass of wine?” J.W. said. “You ready for some more of it?”
“In a minute. Why did you want to sit so close to first base? To watch if the runners were safe or not, coming from home?”
“Naw, let the umpire worry about that,” J.W. said, feeling the gin beginning to move in the tops of his thighs, a gradual process and then a jump. “I ain’t going to do his job for him.”
“Why, then?”
“Oh, I like to listen to what the first baseman’s saying to the pitcher and catcher. That’s what I like about that ballpark. You’re close enough you can hear what they’re saying most of the time, at least when the damn crowd ain’t hollering too loud.”
“What does the first baseman say?” Nova Hebert said. “I’m ready for some wine now. See can you catch Elvin’s eye.”
“Elvin?”
“The bartender. I don’t know his real name. That’s what I call all bartenders. Elvin.”
“Why Elvin?”
“That’s what they like to be called. They might not know it until I say it, but once I do, they come to recognize that’s the name they’ve been wanting to be called all their lives. So I do it.”
“I imagine most men would like to be called any name by you,” J.W. said, thinking that was a damn good comeback for a man in midlife to come up with on the spur of the moment while his legs were being put to sleep by three double gins.
“Some names no man wants to be called, though,” Nova Hebert said. “No matter who says it to them.”
“What name would you not call a man? What one could you say he wouldn’t want to answer to?”
“Harold,” Nova said. “For one. Or Shirald. Any name that rhymes with that.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” J.W. said. “You put it that way, I wouldn’t want to argue.”
“What does the first baseman say that you want to hear, J.W.?”
“Well,” J.W. said, “the other night, the best thing the Redbirds first baseman said was when that shortstop for Nashville kept taking a long lead because he figured he could run on that right hander for Memphis. Remember that?”
“No, I don’t. What did he say?”
“He said,” J.W. said, taking the first drink from his fourth gin and lifting a hand in the air for Elvin to see, “after the third time the pitcher’d thrown over to first base to hold the runner, he said ‘there he goes.’”
“That was it?”
“Yeah. I liked the way he said it. The first baseman didn’t say ‘there,’ he said something like ‘thar.’ And he said the same way a cotton farmer in picking season says it when he looks out at the goddamn rain coming just when it’s right to start picking the crop. He ain’t surprised, he ain’t whining about it, but he’s damn sorry to see happening what he knew was going to happen all day. ‘Thar it goes,’ he says. He ain’t complaining, he’s just telling what he sees, what he knew was coming, and there ain’t a damn thing he can do about it but let folks know.”
“I believe I understand that, J.W.,” Nova Hebert said. “Here comes Elvin with my wine. Are you you about ready to go to the ballpark?’
“I sure am,” J.W. said, the bar gin at full blossom in his legs. “Yes, ma’am, I am ready to sit in my seat by first base.”
***
Later in the night after a blowout game in Memphis, the Redbirds winning big for a change, J.W. heard Nova beside him in her bed in her apartment on Fondren Street say something.
“What was that you just said?” J.W. said. “I was halfway dozed off here.”
“I said ‘thar he goes.’” Nova said. “That’s all.”
“Why?”
“I knew that damn runner was going to take off and steal that base, but there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. But I had to make a statement.”
“Yeah,” J.W. said. “See, when the first baseman does that, it don’t stop a single thing from happening, but at least it gives him some relief.”
“It shows he’s in the game,” Nova Hebert said, moving her head to a more comfortable position on her pillow.
“It does that, for sure,” J.W. said and carefully buried his face in the mass of curls of Nova’s hair there beside him on her bed.
SEVENTEEN
J.W., Tyrone, and Lo Lo Tedrick
Tyrone Walker was driving, and that was the way J.W. liked it. Being able to look off to both sides of the car at whatever caught his eye, focusing when he felt like it and letting it slide on by when he didn’t. Making it all clear up, and then letting it blur. Appreciating a little non-involvement, J.W. considered, was a sign of fully achieved maturity. Besides, J.W. hadn't left Nova's place until just after midnight, and had only caught a short catnap before getting ready to join Tyrone in a pre-dawn visit to Lo Lo Tedrick's den.
“So you think Lo Lo Tedrick is going to know something about a bunch of pissant little Bones claimers at Central High School?” J.W. said. “Be able to give us a little help this evening?”
“He might,” Tyrone said. “Lo Lo is likely to, I do expect, for two reasons. One, he styles himself the man these days since he has done worked so hard to get where he is. And you know, the big dog has got to know his puppies and where they den.”
“All right, I buy that, I reckon. A rooster that’s offed two or three of the competition on his climb to the top of the manure pile is bound to notice things, all right. But why would Lo Lo Tedrick give a shit about a bunch of little fools strutting around a high school claiming they be Bones Family?”
“You got to let me finish my lecture, J.W.,” Tyrone said. “You got to be patient when you’re in the classroom and the professor’s talking.”
“All right, Dr. Walker, what?”
“Like I said, number one, as the headknocker of the Bones Family, Lo Lo has got to keep informed, and part of that business is knowing who’s being a claimer for Bones.”
“And for the Gents and for the Beale Street Boppers and the Jackson Avenue Dump Dogs and all the rest of the little shitheads.”
“To use that technical term, yes,” Tyrone said, slowing the city car as the light ahead flashed yellow. “And a corollary of that assumption is that Lo Lo has to know who’s likely for enrollment in the Bones Family when the time comes.”
“Corollary,” J.W. said. “Lord, you show me all the time what I missed by not going to Memphis State, Tyrone. But that ain’t the second reason Lo Lo might be able to tell about the junior partners of Bones yonder in Memphis Central High School. That’s what you mean by corollary, right?”
“Right. And some folks think you’re not educable, Sergeant Ragsdale. I always tell them I got faith in you, don’t you worry. But, yeah, enrollment planning is part of why Lo Lo would be interested in Bones Family claimers still hanging around high school. That’s still reason number one.”
“Reason number two comes from
the fact that Lo Lo Tedrick is a stone-crazy motherfucker with strong manifestations of obsessive-compulsiveness, and he has got to know everything there is to know about himself and what he thinks belongs to him.”
“You got that out of a psychology class back down the line somewhere, didn’t you?” J.W. said. “Bringing them theories out of the classroom and into the streets.”
“You got it, J.W.,” Tyrone said. “Lo Lo is of a kind mentally with lots of aberration. He’s like, say, these freaks coming to Memphis by the thousands here during the hottest part of the summer just to be in the place where Elvis first started singing That’s All Right, Mama fifty years ago come day after tomorrow.”
“You mean Lo Lo is nuts.”
“Again, Sergeant, you use the technical term to describe the subject, but yes.”
“Actually, Tyrone,” J.W. said. “Just to set the record straight, Elvis didn’t sing it the first time on the fifth of July in ‘54. Sun just released the record then and Dewey Phillips played it on his radio show that day for the first time. There’s your real facts about That’s All Right, Mama.
“I suppose you remember it,” Tyrone said. “You were probably listening down there in Panola County, all huddled up by the Philco with the whole family while y’all were chopping cotton in the living room.”
“Naw, I was barely even born, but I wished I had heard it and known what was going on. It could’ve saved me some trouble on down the road, that song could.”
Tyrone slowed the car again and pointed ahead toward the left side of the street. “Up here’s where we got to leave civilization,” he said. “Tip toe on down into the jungle.”
“Lo Lo be cribbing on Baby Street still?” J. W. said. “Not in the same house where Apple Jefferson used to stay, is it?”
“Not the same house, no. After Apple got done, that shack was torched a couple of years ago by the Gents, and good damn riddance to it. But this whole area is still Bones Family, and Lo Lo ain’t about to move out, traditionalist that the little shitass is. That’s where we’re going to find him cribbing.”
“He believes in the old ways, Lo Lo does,” J.W. said, shifting in his seat to ease the shoulder holster cutting into his underarm area. “I do respect a man who honors the past.”
“Yeah,” Tyrone said, hooking a left and slowing the city car to avoid a chug hole in the street big enough to hold a child-sized coffin, “sometimes on a good day when the dope in his head’s died down a little, I expect Lo Lo Tedrick can remember the past way back yonder eight or nine hours ago.”
Leaving the avenue and moving onto a lesser street plunged the city vehicle almost instantly into a darker region, J.W. noted, like it usually did in particular neighborhoods of Memphis. Ordinarily in these locations, fully half the streetlights were out, some from gunfire, some from well-thrown missiles, some from simple equipment failure which went unattended for months on end.
J.W. understood the reluctance of the city to send work crews in for repair to public property, and he didn’t blame anybody for it. After you’d replaced light bulbs in the same socket or support standards or wiring or a combination of all three on a weekly basis for a year or two, thing’s got discouraging. That, he considered, and also the fact that as soon as a work crew began attending to the business of repair, they naturally had to take their eyes off their trucks and the equipment carried on them, and that’s when the ad hoc work crews of the region would descend.
How many wrenches and spools of wire and plastic pipe and hammers and electronic meters and bulbs and all that went with the job could the city afford to buy weekly? J.W. sympathized with the supervisor who had finally just thrown a sheaf of requisitions and work order forms against the wall and said fuck it, let them live in the dark.
Other than the light from Tyrone’s low beams, the only illumination evident the deeper the car moved into the approaches to Baby Street came from inside the houses along the way, and that was muted, coming as it had to from behind closed doors and windows covered with bed sheets and pieces of paper and whatever else residents could come up with to avoid setting themselves up as well-lit targets.
Electrical power was getting to the houses themselves, J.W. knew. It had to be, judging from the bass notes of woofers loud enough to be felt in the viscera of anybody driving by and by the hum of air conditioners in the windows of about every fourth house. The other ones, those not cooled by Freon percolation and forced air, were generally the last residences of old women and a few old men now and then, huddling behind all the locks and barriers they could afford to erect against what might be moving outside through the Memphis night.
“Been a lot of old folks suffocated by the heat this summer, Tyrone?” J.W. said. “You hearing of many?”
“Not so many this summer as last,” Tyrone said, steering carefully as he focused on the moonscape of roadbed before him. “But hell it’s early still. Wait’ll August gets here. That’ll bring a spike in the mortality rate among the old folks in the less upscale neighborhoods of Memphis.”
“Damn a closed window,” J.W. said. “I purely hate being boxed up.”
“You got to choose what box you want, J.W.,” Tyrone said, hitting his high beams for a couple of seconds. “That’s the choice these old folks got. Look up yonder at that collection of SUV’s.”
“Looks like either a fundraiser for soccer moms, or a convention of the Bones Family,” J.W. said. “Kill your lights, and let’s pull in behind that Navigator. You don’t suppose they’re all in the same house, do you?”
“No,” Tyrone said. “There’s not but three cars in all, and I bet the titles of every machine up there’s in Lo Lo Tedrick’s name.”
“You don’t figure Lo Lo messes with car titles?”
“I know he does,” Tyrone said. “I’ve had occasion to look into that matter, and I can tell you Lo Lo’s a law-abiding citizen as far as his property rights are concerned.”
“Let’s walk up on his porch, then,” J.W. said. “Say howdy to the landowner.”
“Yeah,” Tyrone said. “Let’s test out his knowledge of the subcontractors operating under Lo Lo’s trademark. See how well he keeps up with the help.”
The house the two detectives headed for had begun its existence as a small bungalow, built as a unit in a subdivision of cheap housing during the postwar boom of the late ‘40’s and ‘50’s and financed mainly by VA loans. It had been added to over the years, and its ill-planned sprawl reminded J.W. of the architectural genius he had often seen cropping up in sections of towns in North Mississippi – Holly Springs, Batesville, Senatobia, even Oxford – of its time and going down fast.
“What do you think the old boy that added that garage to the side of the house thought he was doing, Tyrone?” J.W. said, picking his way around a discarded mattress on the curb next to the shell of a Kenmore washer from which the salvageable parts had been pulled, leaving only rust marks to show they’d ever been there.
“Looking for space for all them children, I expect,” Tyrone said. “Just like he was when he built that lean-to or whatever you call it on the other side of his residence.”
Much of the porch to the bungalow had rotted away, but a poured cement set of steps led up to the front door, wide enough for J.W. and Tyrone to climb abreast.
“You want me to knock on Lo Lo’s door and you stand off to the side, or do you want to do it?” Tyrone said.
“The way you’re gathering yourself I know you’re dying to do it,” J.W. said. “You knock, and I’ll be unlimbered off to the side here.” He unsnapped the strap on the holster of his Glock 9 and moved to the end of the cement platform to give Tyrone room to operate.
Tyrone Walker set his feet, reared back and began hammering on a panel of the door to the house on Baby Street with the flat of his hand, creating a series of booms loud enough to rival the bass notes of a good midlevel-quality sound system.
After the first three or four strokes from Tyrone’s hammering resounded, the only lights in the are
a visible, those from windows of two houses across the street, went off, and true darkness descended on Baby Street.
“What you want?” somebody said from the other side of the door Tyrone was working on. “Who the fuck beating on my door?”
“Open up,” Tyrone said. “Memphis police officers are standing out here in the cold. We need to talk to Lo Lo.”
“Lo Lo ain’t here,” the voice said. “He gone.”
“Open the goddamn door, Lo Lo,” Tyrone said. “Or I’ll let a police officer try out his hello hammer on it. It’s a brand new one, and he’s just aching to see how many licks it’ll take to bust a door down.”
A lock turned, the door opened a crack, and J.W. shined the beam of a flashlight at eye-level at the opening.
“Damn, get that light out of my face. I can’t see nothing.”
“Come outside and talk to us, then,” Tyrone said, “or we’ll light up your hidey-hole like a Christmas tree.”
“Let me get the chain first. I got to push the door close first.”
“Officer,” Tyrone said. “Step up here with the hello hammer. We got resistance to a lawful police request and reason to believe a felony has been committed on these premises.”
“Naw,” the door opener said, yielding the point. “It’s done open. Don’t be busting my front door up none.”
“Lo Lo, turn on your lights and step aside. This ain’t going to take long if you don’t act the fool with us.”
Tyrone Walker was first to step through the door, J.W. close behind with the flashlight, and by the time both men were inside the room, Lo Lo Tedrick had flipped the wall switch.
“Damn, Lo Lo,” Tyrone said. “Why you so afraid of the light? You making me think you’re half vampire or something.”