Parker Field (23 page)

He taught me how to fight and how to keep from having to fight. He taught me how to know the point at which either fight or flight was inevitable, and how flight was just going to lead to another fight later on, so land the first punch and as many in a row as you can afterward, just to make your point.

After a while, nobody in his right mind called Abe a Tom-Tom, and nobody laid the n-word on me more than once. If the boy was bigger, I just waited until later and ambushed him, using whatever foreign object was at hand.

“They don’t deserve a fair fight,” was the way Abe Custalow, all of nine years old, explained it. Made sense to me.

Most of the kids I went to school with were decent, as kids go. A few of them, though, needed etiquette lessons. We gave them, free of charge.

Abe was always big for his age. I wasn’t, so it sometimes was necessary to get people’s attention. A kick in the balls usually did it. I did spend a fair amount of time in the principal’s office, and once in a while I got suspended, but Peggy always stood behind me if my motives were pure, and sometimes even if they weren’t.

“Just try not to get your butt killed,” she told me once, when I was eleven. “Some of those little bastards might use more than their fists.”

I found that out one day, a year later. Billy Ray Pitts had come to Oregon Hill when his father got five years in prison for his role in a bank robbery. Billy Ray, his brother and his mother, who’d been living somewhere on the North Side, had rented a place over on China Street, perhaps to be closer to Mr. Pitts, who now resided at the state penitentiary over across Belvidere. Billy Ray was ugly as a mud fence, with bad teeth and the onset of what would become a near-terminal case of acne. And, he was mean. It was said that the apple had not fallen far from the tree.

We were in the sixth grade. Billy Ray, being new to the neighborhood, hadn’t learned all the social graces that made living in Oregon Hill so much more pleasant. He had not learned, among other things, not to fuck with Abe Custalow and Willie Black.

He was fearless, which isn’t a bad thing, as long as you don’t combine it with a near-fatal case of dumb. He had made a few borderline get-your-ass-kicked comments in school, at recess and in the lunchroom, and we let them pass, but Abe told me one day, a week before it happened, that there wasn’t going to be but one way to shut up Billy Ray Pitts.

Billy Ray seemed to be assembling a little gang of like-minded future criminals around him. And then, he stepped in it.

The day it happened was in late September, so he had only known us for a few weeks.

He followed us home from school, staying half a block behind us. He had a couple of his new disciples with him, fifth-graders. They seemed to think it was funny when he’d throw a pebble, sometimes hitting us, sometimes not. Abe and I were handling it pretty well. I looked over once, for my cue, and Abe was smiling, like he was savoring an upcoming hearty meal of whip-ass.

Then, Billy Ray said the magic words.

Abe remembers it as, “Hey, it looks like Pow Wow the Indian Boy and the nigger are asshole buddies. Maybe they ought to get married.”

I don’t remember it quite like that, but I do remember the n-word.

When we dropped our books on the sidewalk and turned around, the fifth-graders sized up the situation in about two seconds, and then Billy Ray Pitts was on his own, just him and his mouth.

He started out standing his ground, and then, with us running toward him and his former acolytes hightailing it in the other direction, he turned and started running, too. Too late. I tackled him before he got to the corner, and we proceeded to kick his butt across the corner and halfway to his house. I’ll admit, we were enjoying it. We’d let him get up and try to start running, then Abe would kick him to the curb or trip him, and we’d stomp him some more. The fifth-graders saw it all, staying at least a half block away, now firmly on our side.

By the time he got to his house and inside the front door, we were feeling our oats pretty good. We called him every kind of pussy we could think of. We banged on the front door and the windows. His mother was at work, and I guess Billy Ray’s little brother was hiding under the bed by this time.

We were about to leave when the door opened. Billy Ray Pitts stepped out with a shotgun in his trembling, twelve-year-old hands.

“You can’t talk to me like that,” he said.

“How about if we kick your ass some more?” Abe said. “Is it OK if we do that?”

I suggested that maybe he should tell his jailbird father on us, come next visiting day.

The newborn lamb does not fear the lion. Twelve-year-old boys don’t ever believe the gun is loaded. Abe started walking toward him, telling him if he didn’t put the shotgun down, he was going to take it away from him and shove it up his ass.

Then, the gun went off. The noise and shock of it knocked me to the sidewalk. I looked up at Abe, halfway up the steps to Billy Ray by then. Somehow, the shot had missed him, and now he was just pissed off.

Billy Ray Pitts might not have meant to pull the trigger. His father probably left the gun there before he went away and maybe gave Billy Ray a quick lesson in loading and firing it, him being the man of the house and all. But he had this, “Oh, shit. What did I do?” look on his face. He got inside the door, sans shotgun, just ahead of Abe. If Abe had caught him, I don’t think it would have been a positive outcome for either of them.

Nobody ever got arrested. One of the neighbors called the police, and the shell knocked a hole in the house across the street, but all they could get out of any of us was that Billy Ray had been showing us his father’s gun and it accidentally went off. We might beat the little bastard senseless, but you didn’t collaborate with the cops. And our erstwhile tormentor had been well trained along those lines. He said he tripped on the sidewalk.

“Yeah,” I remember the cop saying, “maybe seven or eight times, it looks like.” But they let it, and us, go.

It was the last time Peggy ever hit me. Peggy never planned corporal punishment; it just happened. When she came home from work, after hearing the story from two neighbors before she’d even gotten in the door, she just dropped the bag of groceries on the floor and started boxing my ears. I let her, protecting myself as best I could. Then, she wrapped her arms around me so hard I couldn’t breathe.

“You little shit,” she said. “If something happened to you, I’d die.”

I once stumbled on a quote from George Bernard Shaw. I looked it up the other day:

“If you strike a child, take care that you strike it in anger, even at the risk of maiming it for life. A blow in cold blood neither can nor should be forgiven.”

Peggy never read George Bernard Shaw, but they had the same philosophy on child rearing.

Abe Custalow and I survived our childhoods and have muddled through what probably is the majority of our adulthoods, wandering in and out of each other’s lives. Bringing him to share the apartment has worked out well for both of us, seldom more so on my behalf than right now.

I
PHONED
Finlay Rand after I got home last night. He seemed to be in what Clara Westbrook or one of our other Prestwould grand dames would call “a state.”

“I don’t know what to do,” he said. “He’s going to kill me. I know he is.”

I told Rand all I’ve learned about who Raymond Gatewood has and hasn’t been talking to. It didn’t seem to appease him.

“And the paper keeps running all those stories. Why can’t this just go away? And why do they always have to use my name?”

I’m not very long on patience with Mr. Rand these days. I reminded him that the latest story ran because Les Hacker died, and that it was essential to explain why Les’s death was a big deal, especially to Mr. Gatewood, who is now facing life in prison or worse. I reminded him that this was a great personal sorrow to me. I refrained from telling him to go fuck himself.

“Yes, of course,” he said, getting a grip. “And I am sorry for your loss. I didn’t realize. Where can I send flowers?”

I gave him Peggy’s address and told him, once again, that I didn’t think he had anything to worry about. Custalow came in while I was still on the phone. He was frowning, and he had a couple of videotapes in his hands.

Rand was still talking when I hung up.

“That guy’s nuts,” I said. Abe just walked over to the TV.

“This is what I wanted to show you.”

He said that something was nagging him, right from the beginning, about the shooting.

“They had the video of the guy in the wig and the sports jacket, leaving the building,” he said. “But where did he come from? When did he get in?”

I said that I assumed he got in the same way he got back out again. Somebody’s always leaving that back door cracked open, either accidentally or on purpose.

“Yeah. I know. I have to close it about every other day. But we videotape that basement door every day, not just the day Les got shot.”

I thought about this for a few seconds. Then the twenty-watt light bulb that powers my thimble-size brain flickered on.

“Yeah,” Abe said. “So, if we assume the guy got in the same way he got out, that would be on the videotape, too, right?”

I nodded my head and wondered why Richmond’s finest didn’t figure this out. Or why the inestimable law firm of Marcus Green and Ex-Wife didn’t think of it. Well, hell. I didn’t either. It took the cranial capacity of Abraham Custalow to deduce the obvious.

He went back two days on the tapes of the basement door, he said. He never saw anyone vaguely resembling Raymond Gatewood come in.

“But this is what I did find.” One of the videotapes was for April 3, two days before Les was shot. He put it in and fast-forwarded it to a certain spot, then stopped it.

“Watch this.”

He started the tape again, at about double speed. It was like watching paint dry. But then I saw someone enter the door. Abe rewound, and we watched it at real speed.

He ran it twice, just so I could make sure I was seeing what I was seeing.

“Son of a bitch,” was all I could say.

I
SMOKED
, drank and slept on it last night after talking to Abe. Didn’t get to bed until after two.

Today, I went for a walk, had a late breakfast at Perly’s and then went into the office just to clear my head. It’s definitely time to have another discussion with Chief L. D. Jones, and another one with Green and Kate. But I’m stalling. Knowledge is power, and it almost gives me a hard-on to have this kind of information and not share it with anyone. I hoard information the way the Koch brothers hoard money, not wanting to let anyone have a slice until I can present the whole package with a nice bow on top, so everybody says what a smart boy I am.

This can be a problem, but it’s my problem.

Sarah comes in while I’m looking stuff up. Ed Chenowith isn’t in today, but with Sarah’s help I’m able to find much of what I was looking for.

“Hurry up,” she says, and I know she’s not talking about my little search. “Wheelie’s got me covering city hall and your beat, too, and he says Grubby won’t sign off on overtime. He said I could take comp time later, and then he gave me some bullshit speech about working for myself, not wanting to wake up one day and realize I’d just punched a clock. I wanted to punch him.”

I tell her they used to work that scam on me, too, although they did pay for overtime back then. They’re supposed to now, but in our business-friendly state, your employer has the right to work you like a dog and hire somebody else when you don’t roll over and fetch.

I also tell her, though, that sometimes you really do have to play their game to get where you’re going. If you work overtime for free and win a Pulitzer Prize, you can go to the copier, pull your dress up, pull your panties down, hop up and photocopy your bottom. Then you can take the photocopy, march up to Grubby’s office, hand it to him and tell him to kiss it.

“Nice image,” she says, rolling her eyes. “It’d probably get him excited.”

“It’d do it for me,” I say.

“Oh,” Sarah says. “I thought you’d retired.”

“Just trying to flaunt my self-control.”

I ask her if she and Mark Baer are still an item.

“An item? How old did you say you were, anyhow? Yeah, we still hang out, you know.”

It’s like talking to Andi. Whenever I try to delicately extract information from my daughter about her boyfriend, roommate, drinking buddy, whatever, Thomas Jefferson Blandford V, she gets as slippery as a greased eel.

“What are you doing, anyhow?” she asks, looking over my shoulder.

I explain as much as I can without giving it all away.

“I’m sorry about that guy, Les, by the way,” she said, putting one of her warm hands on my neck. The slight connection of bare skin to bare skin is like an electric shock, enough to trigger a flashback. Must be age appropriate. Must be age appropriate. “I met him once. He was with you at a Squirrels game, I think. He seemed like a really good guy.”

I assure her that he was. It is too much information to add that he was the closest thing to a father I ever had, but I say it anyhow.

She gives out the kind of “awww” that women seem to emit when they see kittens, babies or orphaned fire victims. It’s a multipurpose sound apparently indicating empathy of one kind or another. She hugs me. I wasn’t fishing for one, honest.

I thank her for her concern. She asks me when the funeral is. I tell her and assure her that she won’t be written out of my book of life if she doesn’t come. She tells me to shut up, but in a nice way.

She walks away. It is a pleasure to watch Sarah Goodnight walk away, especially on casual Saturday, when jeans are permitted.

Someone clears his throat behind me. I don’t know how long James H. Grubbs has been standing there. Not too long, I hope.

“So,” he says “are you back with us? Or have you decided to spend the rest of your working career, however long that may be, chasing ballplayers?”

I remind Grubby that I am, after all, on my own dime now, burning up what little vacation time I’ve accrued since my last luxurious sojourn, which I spent on Andy Peroni’s houseboat on Lake Anna. It’s moored just below the nuclear plant. Even if the kids didn’t pee in the water, it’d still be warm.