Parker Field (6 page)

“The hell you say!” he roars for the third time, laughing so hard I’m thinking about giving him the Heimlich maneuver, if I could get his fat ass out of his chair long enough to do it. I’m not sure any of his colleagues would bother with trying to save Bootie.

“He said he turned Clemson down because they served him shrimp, and he doesn’t like shrimp? Well, what did you all serve him? … Yeah, I think I’d stay away from all kinds of shellfish, if I was you.”

He talks for another five minutes. I gather the person on the other end is either some assistant coach Bootie’s on drinking terms with or a jock-sniffing donor, and the other party is giving him the skinny on the latest high school moron Virginia Tech wants to pass off as a student-athlete. The schools that want to be “big time” in college football, meaning they get pounded by Top Ten teams instead of Podunk U, all have to save a few places in the freshman class for kids with “special talents.” The talents usually trend toward 4.4 times in the forty-yard dash or thirty-nine-inch vertical leaps.

Bootie’s system works, for him. People tell him things they don’t tell the mass comm grads who do it by the book. They tell him things because they like him, and because they know he won’t print about nine-tenths of what he knows.

“Willie!” Bootie says as he sets the phone down hard enough to make it ring. “How the hell are you? Long time, no drink.”

Yeah, we’ve had a few together. Like golfers, drinkers tend to gravitate toward each other, even if they don’t have much else in common.

I tell him what I have in mind. Bootie’s probably the least professional journalist occupying the ever-shrinking newsroom. He’s been here for forty-one years, since the day he walked in fresh out of Washington and Lee. The old sports editor, another W&L man, hired him on the spot, and he never left.

Bootie does a column three times a week, most of which focuses on things that happened before many of our would-be readers were born. Wheelie and Grubby would probably give up their corner offices to get rid of Bootie Carmichael. He’s the opposite of the kind of employees they want: multiplatform news gatherers who work like dogs for peanuts because they don’t know any better. They, like everyone else in Richmond, know Bootie’s sometimes on the take.

But Bootie is popular, especially among our ever-diminishing Baby Boomer readers who can relate to a column about Secretariat or Pete Rose, two of Bootie’s favorite causes. At least twice a year, our readers are reminded that Secretariat is the greatest horse that ever lived (he has a point) and Pete Rose was unjustly railroaded by baseball (bullshit). Every time they do a readership survey, Bootie comes out as more popular than any hard-hitting reporter or thoughtful news-side columnist we have. So, while perfectly good journalists are sent packing in the latest layoff, Bootie survives.

They’ve tried to make him quit on his own. He doesn’t get to spend a week in Louisville drinking bourbon before the Kentucky Derby any more, and he doesn’t get to go to the World Series and play poker with his cronies who also are too popular to fire. Like for most of us, raises are only a fond memory to Bootie, and he has to occasionally write what his bosses want him to write. No one can forget his epic of cluelessness on the X Games two summers ago.

He still carries the title of sports editor, but they hired a thirty-five-year-old with a future instead of a past and gave him the title of executive sports editor, which means he runs things. Everybody but Bootie concedes that executive SE outranks sports editor.

But Bootie, while he wails and moans about real and imaginary slights, has no plans to quit. He’s sixty-three and says he wants to do this until he’s eighty. Sally, Jackson, I and a few other old-timers have a pool on who’ll go first, Wheelie, Grubby or Bootie. My money’s on Bootie sitting fat and comfortable in his comfy chair eating the stale cake they’ll serve at Wheelie’s and Grubby’s going-away parties.

I start to lay out my proposal to Bootie.

“Have you heard the latest?” he asks, interrupting. “About the company cars?”

Yes, I’ve heard. This one did kind of defy belief. They’ve sold the company cars. This was no hardship to me, since I’d rather rent a bicycle than drive most of our rolling stock. The rumor is that our latest fleet was bought from some wholesaler who got them cheap after they were flooded during Hurricane Irene. They ride, and break down, like they were sitting in salt water for a few days.

It is scary, though. If I owned stock in this fine media empire and heard that news, I think I’d be giving my broker a call.

“How the hell are we supposed to cover games in Blacksburg and down in Chapel Hill?” Bootie wails. The man is 260 pounds of pink and righteous indignation. “They kept two cars, two of the Sonatas, I think, for Grubby and the big cheeses.”

I commiserate with Bootie and then steer him back to the proposal. Bootie wasn’t here in 1964, but he’s old-school enough to realize that there might be some merit in my idea.

In general, I don’t like the long-winded tree killers that upper management used to be so fond of before a diminishing herd of reporters and the cost of newsprint made the bottom-line guys rethink the whole five-part series thing, our epic on the city’s riverfront notwithstanding.

This time, though, I’ve made an exception. For one thing, I love baseball. For another, I’d like to do something that would make the people living around Les Hacker aware that he once was something more than an old fart who’s dropping brain cells faster than I’m losing hair. Like Bootie, I can be driven by my own interests.

“It’s a buffet,” Sally Velez observed right after the last cuts. “Serve yourself.”

“The ’64 Vees, huh?” Bootie says, when I bring him back around to the purpose of my visit to Toyland. “Huh. That might be interesting.”

It’s quid pro quo. If I can tap into the sports department’s budget for a little travel money, sports can get something that might win them the national awards the executive sports editor covets. It shouldn’t be too hard for Bootie to sell the ESE on that. I don’t flatter myself when I tell you that whatever I write will be above the usual standards of our sports department.

“I’ll take care of it,” he says, winking at me in a way that lets me know it won’t be aboveboard. What a surprise. Bootie once bought a jacket in Baltimore when it turned suddenly and unseasonably cold at The Preakness. When the bean counters rejected it on his expense account, he didn’t argue. Instead, he turned in another expense account, complete with receipts for meals and lodging, whose bottom line was equal to the penny to the one he’d turned in originally.

“Let the sons of bitches find the jacket,” he famously told our managing editor.

My idea is pretty simple, like most good ideas. I’ll do a story on the 1964 Richmond Virginians, then and now. It’ll be full of interviews with the old guys who are still upright, lots of memory lane crap for our core audience. It’ll give what few under-forty readers we have a glimpse at what the world was like before free agency made multimillionaires out of utility infielders. (Not that I don’t usually side with the multimillionaires with bats and gloves over the billionaires who arm-twist ragtag cities into building new stadiums instead of schools. But for Christ’s sake, couldn’t you spare a few nickels for the fans?)

I can do a lot of it in my spare time and take vacation days, if Wheelie won’t swing for a paid sabbatical. Yeah, I’d be working for free. The suits love that. But sometimes, it’s the only way.

Once, back when Bob Parks was city editor, I was railing about what I considered an injustice: We were only given 3 percent raises because corporate had decided we didn’t turn a big enough profit.

“That’s it,” I said after I’d stormed into Parks’s office. “From now on, I work to the contract. Forty hours and not a minute more.”

Parks laughed.

“Bull.”

I asked why he thought it was bull.

“Willie,” he said, “do you really want to look back, at the end of the day, and say, 'I showed them. I didn’t do one damn thing more than I had to. They didn’t get anything extra out of me.’?”

Parks was right. Sometimes, as Sally says, you have to serve yourself.

I will need a handful of days to travel to exotic places like Tete de Fromage, Wisconsin, and East Bumfuck, Georgia, to get the “now” part right, but it won’t be that hard. If I have to take vacation time to do it, hell, I usually spend my vacations at Penny Lane, anyhow.

I wander through the newsroom, killing a little time before I take Peggy over to see Les. Sarah Goodnight is standing by Mark Baer’s desk, and her smile makes me wonder if, God help her, they’re dating again.

“Hey, Willie,” she says. “How’s Les?”

I give her the company line and ask her if anything new and terrible has happened since Sunday morning.

“Oh, the usual. Chuck Apple had a meltdown. I guess you heard about the company cars.”

It turns out that Chuck’s ancient Toyota died about three months ago, and Chuck’s been using company cars for his main source of transportation.

“He lives about five miles from here,” Baer says. “He says that now he’s going to have to break down and buy something.”

I think about the depth of poverty that would force a person to depend on our chariots for transportation. Maybe we should take up a collection for Chuck.

I put in a call to Peachy Love. She tells me that they’re waiting for Finlay Rand to return from vacation. They don’t have any record of a shooting like that happening around here, or anywhere in Virginia, for the past five years at least.

“The guy must have been a nut,” Peachy offers. “I mean, they’ve been talking to everybody, trying to find out who might have a bone to pick with your stepdaddy, and they’ve got nothing.”

“They’re not married.”

“What?”

“My mother and Les. They’re not married.”

“OK. Guess I knew that. Still, he’s like a daddy to you, right?”

I concede that he’s about as close to one as I’ve had.

I could have told them Les doesn’t have any enemies. Hell, I did tell the detective who talked to me the day after it happened. I guess they hear that a lot. “He didn’t have an enemy in the world. He was the sweetest, kindest man you’d ever want to meet.” In Les’s case, though, it’s pretty much true.

“Well,” I tell Peachy, “Rand ought to be back on Wednesday. Maybe he’ll know something.”

A minute after I put the cell phone back in my pocket, it rings.

I’m greeted by the slightly giddy voice of Andy Peroni.

“How soon can you be ready to go to Baltimore?”

I’m quiet for a few seconds.

“Baltimore,” Peroni says again. “The azaleas are blooming, the Birds are in town for an afternoon game. Time for a road trip.”

I heard laughter in the background. I recognize R. P. McGonnigal.

“We decided to have a mental-health day,” Peroni says. It’s easy enough for Peroni to do that, since he now owns the hardware store his old man left him. And I guess McGonnigal works in a business where you aren’t hanging somebody out to dry if you take a vacation day on ten minutes’ notice.

I tell them I have to get Peggy and take her to the hospital.

“Then go get her,” McGonnigal says, grabbing the phone. “We got four seats down the third-base line on StubHub. Hell, man, you don’t even work on Mondays. You’ve got no excuse whatsoever.”

They’re right. I can drop Peggy off and get Custalow to pick her up later. Custalow hates baseball, and he really does have to work today.

We agree that they’ll pick me up on Broad Street, outside the hospital, in an hour.

“Road trip!” Peroni yells. There’s something in all this of the forced gaiety of men our age trying to relive what can only be lived once. No doubt there will be an ice chest full of Miller pony bottles, and Andy will be blasting beach music all the way there. I only hope he doesn’t give over completely to the dream and take the convertible. It’s a nice day outside, for early April, but it’s not that nice.

Still, it’s spring and it’s baseball. I’m sure Les will understand. He’ll probably want to go with us. I wish he could.

“Wait,” I say just as Peroni is ringing off. “You said four tickets.”

“My sister,” Andy says. “She’s a baseball nut, too.”

I vaguely remember Andy’s sister, Cindy. She was six years behind us in school. I heard she’d gotten divorced.

“Don’t worry, Willie,” R. P. yells into the phone. “You won’t get cooties.”

I
DROP
Peggy off. Custalow will come get her about four thirty.

I’ve been standing outside about ten minutes when Andy pulls to the curb. He and R. P. are in the front. I get in the back. Thank God, he took the sedan.

“Hey there, Willie Black. Am I old enough to play now?”

I haven’t seen Cindy Peroni in ten years. I knew through Andy that she’d moved back to Richmond after the split and was living somewhere off Patterson in the West End.

I don’t get the allusion at first. Then I remember little Cindy Peroni, her face red as a fire engine, demanding that we let her play basketball with us. She must have been in the fifth grade, and she was growing into a pretty good athlete—made all district when she was a senior, I think—but we were a bunch of knuckleheads who wanted no part of a girl in our game. It happened more than once, I’m remembering now.

Yeah, I tell Cindy. I think you’re old enough now.

She’s grown into her age pretty well. She still has those brown, sparkly eyes that made her a real knockout by the time she finished high school. Her hair’s still brown, although whether by nature or science I can’t say. She’s wearing jeans and a long-sleeved Cal Ripken T-shirt, and she’s wearing them well. She’s either taken care of herself well or she’s decided the best revenge on her former husband is to turn into a major
MILF
.

I ask her how long she’s been back in Richmond.

“About two years,” she says. “I can’t believe I haven’t run into you before now.”

With Andy’s speakers blasting out songs older than we are and he and R. P. chatting away in the front seat, Cindy and I help ourselves to a couple of pony bottles each on the way to Balmer and catch up. She’s spent most of her adult life following the guy she married right after high school from Richmond to Raleigh to Charlotte to Northern Virginia while he got rich replacing woods with suburbs. She has a twenty-year-old son living up in Fairfax. She’s taking courses at VCU. Her midlife crisis, God help her, seems to involve getting a degree in English.