The Spoiler

by Domenic Stansberry

  Again the two editors paid little attention to Lofton. They each remained in their respective places, saying nothing for a long time, each man tugging at his lips and avoiding the other’s eyes—as if trying to avoid the fact that when you got down underneath the skin, there was not really very much difference between the two of them.

  “That’s old news,” Kirpatzke said suddenly, as if that somehow settled something. “Besides, we’ve already got a political reporter.”

  “I’m not interested in writing politics; I just can’t help wondering if anything’s changed in Massachusetts since the last time I was here.”

  The truth, Lofton had already guessed, was that nothing had changed. Aside from a few people dying and some younger ones taking their places, the political machinery was pretty much the same. The party regulars plastered the telephone poles and signboards with names in the summer heat, and the names stayed there to whiten in the sun, then to dampen in the snow and the wet. Eventually either the names faded or the paper that carried the names yellowed and frayed in the wind; then someone came along with more names to plaster over the ones that had disappeared. No, the names had not changed, at least not in any way that mattered, and the machinery had not changed either. Whoever won the Democratic primary, it was the same thing as winning the governorship. The Republicans were gray men in gray suits with gray ties in a party permanently out of power. So in the end it was only the Democrats, and for the last twelve years that had meant either Richard Sarafis or Ed Wells. Wells had won the governorship last time around, Sarafis before that, and now they were plastering their names up all over again. “How does this new senator, this guy Kelley—how does he fit in?”

  “He’s preening himself for bigger things, you ask me,” Kirpatzke said. “Maybe he thinks he can be governor someday. Anyway, he wants to prove he can deliver the vote out here. He’s got ambition.”

  There was another pause, more lip pulling and a general silence that suggested the editors had been through this conversation before, and even their mutual dislike for each other couldn’t get them excited, at least not at the moment. Lofton asked where the Dispatch stood on the election.

  “Nowhere,” Mac said.

  “That’s right,” Kirpatzke agreed, brightening up in a way that was obviously and deliberately false, like a Christmas tree in a department store window. “We’re taking no sides, holding up the lantern of objective truth. That’s why Mac wants you chasing two-bit thugs around town. Keeps the heat off. Makes us look impartial and socially conscious at the same time.… Why don’t you cut it out, Mac, and let the guy do his lousy baseball story?”

  “Crime’s an issue here,” Mac said curtly. Kirpatzke sighed and shook his head. He started to say one last thing, it looked like, making ready a final pitch to can the story. But then he changed his mind and just walked away.

  “I knew a man who had a breakdown writing crime.” Lofton smiled.

  “Lots of people have breakdowns,” said McCullough. “You’re free-lance, so do as you please.”

  After stopping at payroll, while walking down the hall, Lofton had caught a glimpse of Kirpatzke and McCullough, haggling apparently. They stood in one of the side offices, the door open. McCullough had his back to Lofton. Kirpatzke was shaking his head over and over and waving his yellow hands in the air.

  The business between the editors hadn’t bothered him much until he saw Lou Mendoza’s apartment building. Why send a reporter to interview a man arrested for small-time vandalism? He would have walked away from the story except the Redwings were out of town, and he could not talk to the shortstop Randy Gutierrez—the man Amanti had directed him to—until the team came back.

  Inside, the place was dirty, the hallways scrawled with graffiti. He found Lou Mendoza upstairs, in a four-room apartment with tattered wallpaper, peeled away in spots, each layer a brighter color than the one before. A young woman cooked in the kitchen, stirring sweet red Goya paste into the rice. Mendoza sat on the couch; he didn’t wear a shirt. Playing with a pencil, touching the point delicately, as if it were a knife, he told Lofton he wanted nothing to do with the press, that the papers never got anything right because they were on the take from the police. Even so, it was obvious he enjoyed being interviewed and seemed to think he could somehow use the attention to his advantage.

  “You make heroes out of the Latinos, and they are the ones who tried to kill me. Why should I trust you now?”

  “Who are the Latinos?”

  “The police report said they were trying to rob me, but it wasn’t robbery. The Latinos didn’t want my money. They want me. They want to kill me on the street.” Mendoza pointed at himself with a peculiar pride. He spoke with an accent, but it was the accent of a native, someone who had grown up on the streets and could speak both English and Spanish well enough, but each with the inflections of the other. The right side of his face was swollen, but he smiled as he spoke to Lofton, a smile that was somehow both menacing and friendly at the same time.

  “There were too many for me to fight back. They held my arms and beat me in the face. Pretty soon there was blood in my eyes, and I couldn’t see. I couldn’t feel either. I didn’t even know when the police came. They took me in their car, but pretty soon the radio said they want me for burglary, robbing, something like that. So the police take me to the station. But that vandalism they talk about—it’s nothing. Nobody lives there; the place is burned out by fire, just windows on an empty shell. Who cares if I smash the glass out?” Mendoza paused, realizing his mistake. “But I didn’t break any glass, don’t write that down. I just want people to know that the police, instead of helping me, of chasing murderers, they put me in jail.” Mendoza paused. He clenched his fist and raised it, melodramatically, to his chest. “Meanwhile, the people in Holyoke—everybody starves.”

  “Who are the Latinos?” Lofton asked again.

  Mendoza shook his head, as if amazed by Lofton’s ignorance. Then he told Lofton that the Latinos were a street gang. Mendoza himself had belonged to a rival gang, the Wanderers, but his gang had broken up, thrown off its colors, and decided to go legitimate. At least that was Mendoza’s story.

  “They’re trying to kill all the old Wanderers. They’re hunting us out, one by one. We want to be like the rest of the community. That’s why the Latinos hate us. We’re not hoodlums; they are.”

  After the interview Lofton had gone to the Holyoke police station and found one of the arresting officers, a man named James Lopez, who was half Puerto Rican, half Anglo.

  “Listen, I can’t tell you anything. The case is headed for court. Off the record …” Lopez raised his dark eyebrows.

  “No, not off the record.”

  “Off the record,” Lopez said, ignoring him, “that mugging business is nonsense.”

  “What about his face?”

  “Fuck his face.”

  Lopez walked away. He did not seem to care what Lofton put in the paper. Lofton dogged him down the police station steps to his cruiser.

  “Don’t let him fool you with that starving Puerto Rican routine. We’ve heard it before. If the Latinos hit him in the street, it’s what he deserves. They would’ve taken care of him if we hadn’t stumbled along at the wrong time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We been after him for a long time. Finally, we get him, not much, just this vandalism, breaking and entering, and the landlord drops it. Can’t believe it. The bastard landlord’s been complaining for years. ‘Get the punks that trash my buildings!’ We get the kingpin of trash, and he drops the charges.”

  Now Lofton sat at his Formica table, shirtsleeves twisted up, notebook in front of him, a half-typed sheet rolled into the type-writer: “Lou Mendoza, who claims he was beaten and robbed late Friday, has threatened to bring suit against Holyoke police for harassment and neglect of duty.”

  Lofton was not sure what to do with the story. Officer Lopez did not want to be quoted. Mendoza, on the other hand, seemed to have an ax to grind
—against the Latinos and the police—but how much of what the man said was true? Still, there seemed to be something under the surface, something neither man was saying. Now that he thought about it, Lofton wondered about the way McCullough had gotten the story idea. Why was the editor poking around in Einstein’s notebook? A reporter’s notes were supposed to be left alone, especially at his own paper. Why had Einstein left the paper, and where was he now?

  He was still puzzling over the story when the knock came, timid at first, then a quick, staccato rapping, loud enough to break through the music of the radio in the alley. He opened the door, and the hotel clerk gave him a message. It was from Amanti. She wanted him to call. Just as well, he thought, it was too hot in the apartment, and he could finish the story later, after he had eaten, when his room had had a chance to cool in the evening air.

  He walked to Barena’s, not far from the ballpark, a cafeteria-style Italian restaurant owned and operated by a family of Greeks. The food wasn’t wonderful, he told Amanti from the phone booth in the corner, and the air-conditioning didn’t work as well as it might, but Barena’s let you sit there as long as you wanted. Amanti was silent on the other end, but he went on talking, friendly, wondering what she’d wanted. For an instant, his own voice sounded far away to him, as if someone else were doing the talking. There’s also an old color TV, he said, plugged into the cable from Boston, that shows Red Sox games. The color’s bad, but the picture’s clear as cake.

  “Not tonight,” Amanti said, “but I can meet you Friday.” She gave him the name of the Little Puerto Rico, a café down on Commercial Street.

  The conversation confused him; Amanti almost acted as if his call were a surprise. First his editors, then Mendoza, Lopez, and now Amanti—nobody approached him directly; they all came from angles. Maybe it’s the heat, Lofton thought. Maybe people just aren’t thinking clearly in the heat.

  Lofton wanted to get a look at MacKenzie Field in the dark when the stadium was empty. A high green fence surrounded the field, but he knew a place around back where the neighborhood kids had kicked a hole large enough to crawl through. Brunner had ordered the hole boarded several times, but the kids kept kicking it open. Lofton found the hole and crawled through on his hands and knees.

  Standing inside the park, his shirt soaked through with sweat, he no longer heard the sounds he took for granted while walking the streets: the beer-gutted laughter, drunken shouts, and loud Hispanic music that seemed always to spill from the tenements. Only one sound got through to him as he stepped into the Redwings’ dugout: the long skid of tires on asphalt, followed by the brief, heartbeat blaring of a horn. He shrugged and sat down in the dugout. The accident, if that’s what it was he had heard, seemed far away, maybe nothing, maybe just a noise beyond the center field wall.

  There had been times like this in Denver, when he had stayed up in the bleachers after the Bears’ games, reluctant to go home. He remembered the papers back in the hotel that he needed to sign for Maureen, something to do with the house; she had suddenly decided she wanted to sell it. The papers sat in a pile of other papers along with Maureen’s first letter to him in Holyoke, the one that told him never to come back in one line, and in the next said she could not take the sound of her own footsteps pacing the empty house. He had not given her any reason for his leaving; he had mentioned neither his trip to the doctor nor his own misgivings about having another kid. She would make herself happy soon enough, he told himself.

  He got up to leave, to walk around the base paths, maybe, or to take a long stroll down the right field line. He spotted a baseball bat leaning in the far corner of the dugout, and he picked it up, running his fingers over the smooth, polished grain. He felt a hairline crack near the trademark. Probably happened on a ground ball, bad enough to make the bat worthless, so the equipment man would not bother to cart it back. Lofton carried the bat with him onto the field.

  He kicked the dust from home plate, which glowed white in the darkness, almost phosphorescent. He stared out at the deserted field toward the ghostly wall in left center. He imagined the players, the pitcher standing on the mound and the team in position behind him. He took several swings, trying to make the swings smooth and level, putting all the force of his thirty-seven-year-old body into hard chops at the elusive moon half-hidden in the damp mist over Holyoke.

  Backing off from the plate, he flexed the muscles in his back, placing the bat between his knees and rubbing his palms together, a ritual he had seen many men go through over the years—no, not men; boys, children ten, fifteen, even twenty years younger than he—and a ritual, of course, he had gone through himself. And he remembered how his mother, dead twenty-five years now, had come to watch him play sandlot ball in the bitter-bright streets of San Jose, California. It was the summer she died, and she came not with his father but with some other man.

  His mother had been a small dark woman who spoke with an acerbic tongue and always wore sunglasses, as if she were in the movies. She and his father fought long and bitterly, always, up to the minute she left him for that stranger who came to the games, a thin man with a frightening presence, or so Lofton remembered him, though he had never seen the stranger close enough to know his face. He knew only the smoky haze that seemed to surround the man and envelop his mother.

  Mrs. Lofton died of cancer, a malevolent growth that spread from her lymph glands through her body like a small, angry fire. She knew she had the disease when she left her husband, Lofton found out later, and the stranger knew as well. What bitterness inspired her leaving Lofton did not know. He had given up pondering. He remembered his father crying—drunk, Lofton guessed now—when he thought his sons asleep. And he remembered lying awake, the transistor radio on the bed beside him broadcasting the ballgame, and trying to imagine the land of the dead. He would close his eyes and try to talk with the people there. At first, nothing. No shadows. No whispers. He would keep his eyes closed until, eventually, he saw himself on the street, following the back roads through the city, under the freeway, past the railyards, the cracked porch stoops, and into the ballpark. He saw himself standing alone on the soft outfield, listening to the outfield grass whispering his name over and over.

  Now he stepped back to the plate. He crouched at the knees, flexed his wrists, and stared at the mound. The moon hung over center field, fat and silver. He cocked the bat tight, saw the imaginary pitcher rear back, his foot kicking high. Lofton kept his eye on the moon. When the pitcher let loose, Lofton swung hard, hard as he could. He imagined the smooth crack of his bat against the ball and saw the moon high over the park. He ran to first, rounded the corner, and kept running. I can’t tell if it will clear the fence, a double at least. The stands were full, the Amanti woman and Brunner and his brother and Maureen and Nancy, all the people he knew, watching silently from the bleachers as he ran. A gathering of the dead.

  He rounded second, digging toward third. Off the center field wall, a triple. He wanted more. He ran faster now, faster than he knew he should be able, effortlessly, as if fifteen years of cigarettes and beer were nothing. His invisible opponents scurried after the ball in the dark, trying to nail him before he reached home.

  The catcher waited in a crouch. The relay’s coming from center; I’ll have to slide. Lofton imagined the play as he’d seen it unfold on television, the camera replaying it from every possible angle, the runner diving headfirst to the plate, stretching out with one hand while the ball rifled in, bouncing hard off the infield grass, a perfect shot into the catcher’s glove, which whisked down to tag the sliding player, but too late, the umpire’s arms already outstretched, palms down: Safe at home!

  But that was not what happened. He did not get a chance to go into his slide, to evade the imaginary tag. Headed down the third base line, he slipped, almost as if an invisible hand had pushed him face forward into the dirt. He lay with his cheek against the ground, his hand outstretched toward the plate. He was out, the game was over, the winning run did not score, and the park was
empty. The fans had left, forgotten his name as they piled into their cars and drove home to sleep.

  Lofton got up slowly. His body hurt. His arms were abraded, small bits of gravel stuck in his palms. His cheek was scratched and bleeding, his slacks torn at the knees. But when he walked back to the street, his body sore and aching, Lofton felt good, better than he had felt for a long time.

  The heat did not break. Lofton waited on his meeting with Amanti, on the return of the Redwings to MacKenzie Field, and stayed away from the Dispatch, where they would pester him about Mendoza. He worked in the Holyoke Public Library, a fading white building with Corinthian columns. The building stood in the center of town, next to a park where teenagers idled beneath the trees, listening to their boom boxes. An old, sun-pocked man sold shaved ice from a wooden cart on the sidewalk nearby.

  Lofton wanted to know more about the fires in town. He hoped he could find out from old newspaper stories; at least they would give him a starting point. He could do better research at the Dispatch, or at the larger Springfield paper, for that matter, where part-time librarians clipped, sorted, and pasted the stories into books by subject matter, but he did not want anyone at the papers to know what he was researching.

  Besides, he preferred the pale anonymity of the public stacks, the heavy wooden tables, and the dim, cool whirring of the electric fans. Also, though it was sometimes distracting, he liked the fact that there were people in the library. He liked the old men who came every day to read the papers from Boston and New York, the children who drifted through the stacks piling up books on dragons and war heroes and ballplayers. He even recognized one of the boys, a pale-haired teenager who sat with the halfway house gang at MacKenzie Field, his baseball cap twisted backward on his head. The kid walked with a limp and had loose, sagging features. At first he thought the boy might be retarded, but hearing the kid talk to the librarian and seeing the books he hoarded changed Lofton’s mind. Still, there was something wrong with the kid. He had a hurt look on his face that made Lofton think again of his own son, who was normal enough, as far as he knew, but whom he thought of as somehow damaged, or scarred, or maybe just unhappy. More than once he looked up to see the boy staring at him, but emptily, as if he were not really there.