by Thomas Melo
She turned her head back towards the field and began watching again and clapping as Jacoby Ellsbury, a defected Red Sox, stole third base. Lilith knew that watching the game would now be an impossibility for Tyler.
Kenny Baker exited the tunnel, spotted the Yankee-cheering couple both draped in enemy colors, and trudged down the nearly vertical cement staircase towards them.
Tyler was seething while he watched the game. He had to make a conscious effort to keep from trembling with the rage that was threatening to burst out of him in some way. A fleeting thought that entered Tyler’s mind was that this is what caused strokes or infarctions. He begged himself to let it go since his wife seemed no worse for the wear, but this man had insulted his wife, and by extension, had insulted himin one of the most unforgivable ways. He imagined that the only thing worse would be if he had found out that Lilith had had an affair, that would just–
“Hey, cunt,” Kenny Baker calmly said, not angrily, and hurled his steel-toed boot in a side-kick into Lilith’s upper shoulder, the momentum of the kick carrying his boot passed her shoulder and into her right cheek. The collective gasp of the crowd in their section was shockingly loud. People would later swear that Brett Gardner heard the gasp from left field and glanced over to see what had happened.
Kenny Baker had just completed the happening that Lilith had orchestrated eleven years prior. The rest would take care of itself from this point forward, and Lilith’s yelp of what one would construe as pain was actually one of triumph.
Tyler looked wide-eyed at his wife keeled over in her seat, holding her palms up to her face, seemingly in agony, and then sprung from his seat as if he was watching the game on an air-bag that was suddenly engaged. This was it. This is what he came to Boston for.
In Tyler’s haste to get past his wife and at the pre-condemned Mr. Baker, he accidently bashed his knee into her other shoulder, but Lilith was just elated: Tyler passed the point of no return and his rage at this point was simply inexorable, taking over his body like a seizure.
Tyler reached and grabbed the lapel of his wife’s attacker, the ill-fated and now, wide-eyed Kenny Baker and rocketed his fist repeatedly like an oil derrick souped-up with some impossible steroid injected engine into Bakers face. With each fist thrown, the other fist, which had Baker’s blood splattered David Ortiz jersey balled up in it at the lapel, pulled Kenny Baker closer to ensure maximum damage.
There were no fists thrown by Kenny as he was 100 percent on the defensive since the manic flourish began. The scuffle carried the one-sided battle from the third row, where Tyler and Lilith were seated, to the left-field foul line wall.
“Chill! Chill! He’s had enough , man!” a fellow Yankee fan called to Tyler, who stopped punching long enough to reassess the situation, really, to admire his handiwork: the dismantling of the animal who had attacked his wife. Tyler let go of Kenny and backed away after his last punch crunched Baker’s nose, leaving it at a ghastly angle. He had Baker’s blood all over his Derek Jeter jersey, as well as on his punching hand.
Kenny staggered, trying to right himself, briefly succeeding, and then losing it, and then succeeding again. He repeated this cycle a few times before he collapsed backwards into the edge of the foul line fence and tumbled over it backwards. Kenny Baker fell six and-a-half feet to the clay/dirt turf of the baseball field with an audible crunch as he let out a brief shriek that was heard by the first few rows of fans.
It was not a terribly high fall, but such a high fall was not necessary if he landed just right, or wrong, as it were, which is what he did. The crunching sound heard by some when he fell onto the field was his neck breaking. Kenny Baker, the expendable pawn in Lilith’s life’s work, was dead. Role fulfilled; you may go now.
Chapter 6
After strike three was called on Dustin Pedroia, Corbin Morasco, the rookie Yankees third baseman noticed a man falling backwards from the stand and onto the field head first about fifty feet from him. As the man lay lifeless on the field, the rookie screamed for “time out” and the umpires temporarily stopped the game.
Everything happened very quickly after the incident took place. Tyler looked around his section like a cat stuck in a room full of pinwheels and saw a wave of blue shirts coming to engulf him. Amidst the blue security shirts were the unmistakable uniforms of the Boston Police Department.
Tyler was very quick to flash his Nevada State Police badge as he was being detained. It was not that he expected special treatment, he was simply trying to avoid being tuned up. Remember, although he did not implement these practices himself, he was familiar with the dreaded phone directory and its alternate use, as well as the “wood shampoo,” and we’ll just say that Tyler had heard stories about some of his Boston brethren.
Lilith accompanied her husband to the D-4 Police District in Boston where they were brought to an interrogation room–equipped with a phone directory, although the Boston police would have no use for it on this day. Tyler was not handled with kid gloves, however. There were terms floating around the interrogation room such as negligent homicide, reckless homicide, and voluntary manslaughter, the latter sounding as if it would be the most fitting charge from what he and Lilith knew about the law.
He waved his right to have an attorney present for questioning because he knew that his wife, an attorney herself, would not allow him to say anything that would incriminate himself, as well as the fact that he had no doubt in his mind that he was innocent.
Self-defense; open and shut. What happened is what happened, and as unfortunate as the outcome was, it was not Tyler who started the conflict. Still, it was unnerving to be an out-of-stater and to play a pivotal role in the death of a local, self-defense or not.
The Boston Police sympathized with the fact that Tyler’s wife was attacked and that he was acting in his wife’s defense.
“Between you and me, Ty? The guy was a piece of shit. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve picked him up on drug charges, or how many times we’ve caught him catching a quick BJ from some whacked out hooker behind a dumpster in South Boston. The only prawblem is that the guy died, Ty. This isn’t open and shut,” a Boston police officer explained to Tyler.
“This is ridiculous! I was attacked, and we’re being detained? The animal kicked me in my shoulder and face for fuck’s sake!” Lilith erupted.
“Ma’am, I completely understand your situation and I do sympathize with you, really I do. I realize that you were both minding your business, and like I said, I agree with everything you did. Hell, I might have beaten him to death before the damn fall killed him. But we have a prawcess, as I’m sure you guys do in Nevada, Ty. All we can do is go through that prawcess. I understand that yaw a lawyer, Lilith.”
“I am.”
“So, yaw familiar with the law and you know that there’s a certain procedure we are bound by. I wish you both the best of luck and I’m sure that Baker’s character will weigh heavily in the situation. Nawt to mention the fact that there were several witnesses at Fenway that said that they would be glad to testify on yaw behalf; and nawt just Yankee fans either,” the officer said with a smirk and a wink. “The unfortunate paht is that until this is cleared up, I’m afraid you can’t leave Boston.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa! We have jobs we have to get back to! We can’t stay here until this is cleared up!” Tyler fumed.
“I’m afraid you don’t have a choice in the matta, Ty. I’ll be back in a little while, just sit tight fah now…Mrs. Swanson,” the officer nodded to Lilith and left the room.
“Alright, Ty, let me work the phones a little bit. I have a lot of contacts back from school in New York that know a lot of people in the judicial system here. I’ll see what I can do in terms of finding out who presides on these cases in this area and I’ll go from there. We’ll beat this thing. I promise.”
Tyler did not know if he was moved by the sentimentality he heard in his wife’s cadence, which was not present very often, or if it was the predicament he found himself
in, or a combination of both, but being overwhelmed with whichever emotion was hammering at him the most, he found himself choked up.
“You know…we had everything the way we wanted it. I was next in line for the job with the department that I always wanted, you ran a successful law practice…and now at least my job is fucked. There’s no way the force will keep me on with a charge like this.”
“Not if you’re acquitted, which you will be,” Lilith promised.
“It’s not just that. If I don’t get this position with the Instructional Firearms Bureau, which will be available soon, I don’t know if I want to be a cop anymore. It’s not what I thought it was. It’s not me.”
“I bet your supervisors would disagree. You’re the most decorated officer in the unit. You could basically write your own ticket there.” Lilith reminded, knowing full well what was in store for Tyler next. But encouraging words never hurt.
“I don’t know. If the firearms instructor thing falls through, I don’t know. I feel like there’s something else out there for me. Something greater than the police department. You know what I mean?” Tyler asked his wife, praying she knew what he was talking about.
“I do,” she said without hesitation, as if she’s been waiting years for this epiphany. “Remember when we were out to dinner with your parents, when we–”
“Oh FUCK! My parents,” Tyler mourned slamming his slightly bruised fist into the table he was sitting at and then crumpling forward with his face in his hands. “What the hell do I tell them?”
“You don’t have to, you know,” his wife opined.
“Lilith, I love you, but when it comes to relationships with our parents, we are completely different. Your mom didn’t even come to our wedding.”
“Fair enough. Anyway, do you remember that night with them when we were still in high school? We were talking about our plans for the future. You had said the police. Do you remember what I had said?” Lilith asked.
“You said, you had ‘big plans’ if I remember correctly.”
“That’s right, and I do, and I wasn’t talking about law. My law practice is centric in making this grander thing happen, but law isn’t what I was talking about. I was talking about something we can do together.”
“And what’s that?” Tyler asked, truly intrigued. The Nevada State Police was the furthest thing from his mind at that moment.
“You’ll have to figure that one out for yourself, Ty; but you’re a smart man, and I know you will.”
Tyler just stared back at himself, a little deflated from how cryptic his wife was being about their future endeavors, in the one-way glass which spanned the entire front wall of the interrogation room. Of course Lilith knew he would come up with the not-only-life-style-changing, but life-changing idea of the millennium; an entrepreneur’s dream; that night even! This was just another leg of the race to the finish that Tyler and Lilith were running together hand-in-hand, but under the meticulous guile and tutelage of Lilith.
Chapter 7
Thunder crashed and echoed through the mountainside town of Copake like fireworks exploding inside of a coffee can, stealing Jim Colabza out of a restful sleep.
It was morning. It was late enough into the morning so that there was daylight when Jim was yanked from sleep by the monstrous crack of thunder. There was no need for the old panicky feeling which would still sometimes arise during thunder storms like when he was a young boy. Secretly, Jim was still troubled by abrupt loud noises, especially in the still of the otherwise dead-quiet…the soundtrack to upstate life.
Jim made his way down the hallway in his bathrobe and pajama pants to begin his morning ritual of relieving himself, brushing his teeth, and then going out to his driveway to collect that day’s issue of the local paper and the previous day’s issue of the Coopersmither if he had been too busy to collect it before the end of the previous day.
After Jim left the bathroom and made his way toward his kitchen/living room, he heard the mechanical hum and patter of his air conditioner.
“Did I leave that damn thing on again?” But upon closer observation, he realized that the air conditioner was off and he looked out the window to see a torrential rain saturating his lawn and disrupting the serene glassy surface of the pond.
“Huh; knewI didn’t leave it on. For crying out–” he sighed, “getting these papers should be pleasant. I may as well jump in the pond…Christ!” he complained with a frown.
Jim walked across his living room to the front door and let out one more sigh of disgust, this time with himself.
No umbrella.
Jim felt that there was just something about umbrellas that was a little too “gay” even for him, a closeted homosexual…even the plain black umbrellas. So, there was no umbrella, no dome of security from the elements; just him and mother-nature. He opened the front door and the roaring of the torrential rain increased five-fold.
“Here we go!”
He ran outside, well, jogged (the best he could with his bad knee) and made it to the papers, which were lying on top of one another each rolled up in its own plastic bag at the end of the driveway. He reached the papers, grabbed them on the run and began to jog back like some maniacal relay race. Just before he made it back to his porch, he tripped on the tail of his bathrobe, which was now soaked, and fell to his side and into a bush on the side of the house. The bush waved Jim in “safe at home plate” as its branches slowed to a stop. If he was not so livid from being wet and grubby, he would have laughed hysterically, as would any onlooker. Fortunately for Jim, there were none of those.
He got up slowly, (there was no need to rush now, as he was soaked and covered in mud), and walked back into the house. He stripped at the front door and stepped out of his wet clothes and went straight to the bathroom to shower and get comfortable again and took the papers in with him.
He tossed the local newspaper onto the bathroom floor and went straight for the Coopersmither as he sat down on the toilet. News of Copake’s next tractor pull and town hall meeting condemning the useless homeowner’s association could wait until later.
Jim unsheathed and then unrolled the Coopersmither and was alarmed immediately.
FORMER ST. ANASTASIO RESIDENT AND TOP COP ON TRIAL FOR VOLUNTARY MANSLAUGHTER.
Jim’s heart sank into his feet as he read the headline. It had been years since he had heard any updates about any of his students in the Coopersmither, but he knew who the article was written about just the same. He would read the entire article later, but for right now, all he could do was stare out of his bathroom window into the copious foothills and pine trees, his mind in disquieting overdrive. If Jim Colabza ever doubted that there was something other-worldly about his old classroom nemesis, Lilith, his doubts just flew out of his bathroom window and made for the furthest foothill Jim’s eye could detect.
He always knew there was something. He would just see the spellbound look on Tyler’s face in class that was never there before he met Lilith, and it went beyond puppy-love. He could not, for the life of him, articulate what was different about the typical teenager-in-love look and the look on Tyler’s face, but it was in a realm of its own. Even after the ardelio incident, one of the driving forces that led Jim to take an early retirement, still left him dubious about the girl, but this…this was it.
His former student was being led through the trials and manufactured hardships of life like a marionette and Lilith was the puppet master. Jim didn’t read the article yet, but “voluntary manslaughter?” Not possible; not Tyler. To attempt to prove such an outlandish hypothesis as Lilith having supernatural power or some sort of hypnotizing influence would be futile, but he had that old feeling rise up in him. It was the same one that urged him to yell to his father that Jim’s brother, Matty, had fallen through a thin sheet of ice on the pond down the road from his house before it even happened. The EMT workers said that if they had even been called a minute later, Matty surely would have been dead from hypothermia.
“It was
just a feeling,” he had told his parents that night at the hospital.
These feelings visit human beings every so often without the permanency of one being able to claim psychic abilities or clairvoyance. Every human, at one time or another, has guessed which song would come on the radio next (predictable and drab radio playlists aside), prophesied the exact time the phone would ring, or in Jim’s case, intuited trouble on the horizon.
Contacting Tyler and sharing this hypothesis would also prove to be futile. Imagine having to break the news to a good friend that his girlfriend was as obnoxious and toxic as the day is long, and the complications that would arise if a friend did such a thing. Now imagine an old teacher–hardly a close friend–trying to convince that person that his wife had some sort of control over him, and not only that, but may possess a supernatural evil? Good luck to you. Hasta lasagna, don’t get any on ya. However, in this case, a small part of Tyler may have understood.
Anyway, Jim delved into the article as he sat in the place where a man allegedly does his best thinking.
Chapter 8
The judge had seen Tyler’s case before he left the municipal building for the day, and set Tyler’s bail and the next court date. Unfortunately for Tyler, he and Lilith did not figure bail money into their travel fund before they had left for Boston. This translated to a night in county lockup for Tyler. The irony was biting.