Ride Around Shining (21 page)

“Nice specs,” the man of the house said.

“Hey, mister, whose cheese is this?” his son asked, pointing down at their food. His mother smiled in silent pride. In her lap she held a handmade sign:
ODEN FOR MVP.

Being in an open place brought back my paranoia, and all game I watched the screen whenever they showed crowd signs, prepared to drop something and look for it if they showed her.

Even with the binoculars, it took me until the fourth to find Antonia. She was in a private box, and until the game grew close she must have been behind glass, doing whatever they did there—sitting on a leather couch, eating rarefied appetizers, and drinking cocktails shaken with ice. From out of the blur I caught her leaning over the rail. She'd cut her hair short, and when I adjusted the one useful knob I could even see the fuzz at the back of her neck. She stood with her face turned away, but I knew—no one I'd seen all game looked so aloof in an arena. I saw her fragile-looking wrists as her hands grasped the rail, and her attentive chin, and I wondered what she saw, how much of the game she'd ever wanted to learn. She might've seen the pattern of it all, the lob coming before the pin-down was set, or it might've all been sweat and noise, a dull pageant of exertion she'd long treated as something to escape from.

“I see you,” I texted.

“Meet at 216 entrance. I'll come down.”

By the four-minute mark, our lead had stretched to fifteen. With the game in hand, I looked into the box in time to see Goat come out with two drinks and hand one to Antonia. I focused the lenses until the stubble on his smiling jaw leapt out.

“This guy's got ants in his pants,” the cheese boy said solemnly as I scraped past his dad's khaki knees.

Coming down from the cheap seats, I circled the concourse until I found the number. There was a narrow red stair there that led up to the box level, carpeted to suggest opulence and guarded by a bald guy with a velvet cordon.

“Box ticket holders only, sir,” he said in a worn-down voice.

“Why's it velvet?” I asked. “I never got that.”

“Excuse me?”

“The rope. Why's it made out of that?”

I bumped up against his rope a little, to illustrate, like I was some kind of poor little boat drifting around, and the rope was helpfully redirecting me away from the rich boats and back into the main channel. I guess I was light-headed, but I really thought he'd understand.

He put his hand up then. He put it right under my chin and made contact. He pushed me back a little ways.

“Please step away from the rope, sir,” he said. “There's no loitering here.”

I gathered myself. I could feel myself brushing my shirt front and going up on my toes like some affronted fop.

“I'm waiting for my employer,” I said.

It felt a long time since I'd adopted the proper servant manner. It came out stiff, and of course he didn't believe me. He stared at me with his beef-rimmed, unfeeling eyes, and then he reached for the two-way on his belt.

“Security,” he said.

“You're security,” I told him.

Just then I saw her little shoes coming down the stairs. She stopped with her hand on the rail. “That's her,” I told him disgustedly.

The security man's belt jingled importantly as he turned to her.

“Can he come up?” Antonia asked.

“This man works for you, ma'am?” He didn't even have the decency to sound incredulous.

“Very hard,” she said.

The man's neck wrinkled and the cordon lifted grudgingly away. I wanted to give him a stare, to put my hands up as I slid by him, but she was there. I had to be reasonable again.

And then I slowed, under her long-lost gaze. I felt like some albatross of hard science was hanging around my neck, and my thigh throbbed suddenly where her cat had bit me. “I brought you these binoculars,” I said.

“Thanks so much,” she said faintly. She was familiar as a sister after so long away. Her hair was mussed a little, and it was like something I'd been around all my life, like it'd gotten in my face when we'd slept together in our narrow summer beds. Whatever trouble and tension we'd had seemed a chance mistake. Even that night with the sheets felt like just some minor role-play, devoid of permanent consequence. We knew each other, we mostly got along, and here we were again, in this stairwell of thin, unconvincing luxury. In my brief life of service, her wary face and inscrutable jokes were some of the oldest living things.

She put out her cool hand, and when we shook it felt listless and rote. I sensed she was in a bad way, but could only guess at how she'd stand up to the latest, worst news. I couldn't decide whether I wanted to tell her about Odette, whether it would spark the fight that would bring her back to him or turn her further away into the furtive dwindle of her new life.

“I didn't know you went to games,” she said as we went up along the inner hall, hung with old framed jerseys.

“I didn't know you did.”

“Lucas insisted.”

“You know him?”

“From his stint here last year. I kind of liked his old girl. I guess she's gone now.”

“We were at the Pharaoh's together.”

Her pace slowed just slightly. “I'd always hear about that place. Did you go cliff diving?”

“I wasn't that kind of guest.”

She asked about my work and I put on a faraway smile, as though in reminiscence of the nice quiet time Calyph and I were having together. I found myself wishing she would ask after him. Had his brother come and found him yet? It was his day off, so it wasn't certain—he might still be huddled there, shivering, his white suit growing heavy with dew. I wanted to tell her all of it, to confess and compel her return—and then Goat's face appeared down the hall.

“We await you,” I said. I tried to say these strange words clearly, without any slant, and then he was on us. He took us both by an arm and led us inside, the self-congratulatory good cheer coming off him in waves. His smile was large and fixed—he dared us not to like him as though it were a dare at all. There was a wet spot on his jacket that smelled faintly of tonic.

“A great day,” he kept saying. “A great day.”

“Why didn't you play?” I asked.

“I wasn't gonna get any minutes tonight. Why play when you got a box? We got this box as long as we want it, people!”

“Just till nine,” laughed the attendant. I could hear the public-address announcer doing his postgame wrap through the glass.

A half ring of cushion-backed stools had been pulled around opposite a black leather couch, where Goat sat center. There was some X Games–looking guy on his left, and on his right he'd left room for Antonia. The table in the center was a mess of sad and basic snacks in gleaming glass bowls.

The rest of the crowd was split between those trying to look like the money and those trying to look like the talent. Some were older, in business clothes, and they ranged up in age far enough that I wouldn't have been surprised to see Goat's parents there, huddling proudly. The rest were familiar counterculture—there was even a white girl who made blond dreadlocks look acceptable. She ushered Antonia over next to Goat and made her drink something fizzing with a lime in it, and as she settled in the room's open gaiety felt suddenly forced.

All I remember of our time in the box was Goat's advance. I never can believe in people who have love for everyone, but his main problem was his love always coming back to Antonia. “Sweet times are here again,” he'd say in a singsong voice, and she'd nod back doubtfully. He sprang up from the couch in order to get her a glass of water and six people had to move out of his way. He touched her knee relating an unfunny story, and when she laughed politely back at him I resented his draining her social energy.

Abruptly he turned to me. “I'm back in the palace,” he said, in a voice taken by its own myth-making.

If there was anything sympathetic to find in him anymore, it was there in his desperation to let everyone know he could roll high once more. It was clear he knew how tenuous it all was. A little of that old hospital fragility clung to him in his forced happiness, and you could see he sensed how rarely the horn sounded for the twelfth man, how often they sat there waiting to be evaluated solely on the enthusiasm of their cheering, vying only for the team spirit award, until they were sent away again, to some obscure hinterland.

The Cali punk next to him laughed into his sleeve tattoo. “Some palace,” he said.

“This place should have a Jacuzzi,” said the dreadlocked girl.

“Look at it,” Goat said, insisting at the emptying arena with a thick-jointed finger. “That's the most famous building in the city right there. Blimps fly over it. The whole country knows Portland from this place.”

“I used to like to stay in and watch the games,” Antonia said suddenly. “If it was a national broadcast, they'd always show the river and the bridges and the city lights. I'd be all alone in the house, and look across at the trees on the far bank, and it was hard to think it was the same water. It was hard to think it was the same lights, from just up the bend, that seemed so close.”

“That's right,” Goat said, turning to her intimately, as though she were the only one who understood. He picked up a little carrot from the crudités on the table and held it out as though to feed it to her. With deft fingers she took it and held it in a closed fist.

I saw a looming managerial type put his head in the doorway. Ignored there, he stepped in. He looked like he might have been an old player, but I couldn't place him. “Fifteen minutes, folks,” he said.

“Anybody want to go to the bathroom?” X Games asked, pulling out a showy lighter. “Last chance.”

I went out beyond the glass to the real seats and stood watching the janitors work. The most famous building in the city had the look of an empty festival-ground, getting swept for popcorn and soda cups. The scoreboard still showed the Blazers' victory, but the digital ads beneath the scorer's table had been turned off. All the hokey signs of allegiance remained, presiding over the empty rows: there was a group of seats marked
Przybilla's Posse
, and the
Aldridge Army
, awaiting the return of the departed host. There was even one for Calyph, a small swath in the corner under the banner of
West's Warriors
. I wondered if I could sneak away a second, and call somebody anonymously from a pay phone and get them to go bring him inside, so he wouldn't go and catch the flu if it rained. It might be bad for his knee to be out there. There might be an exercise he couldn't do or some meds he was missing.

I heard the door slide open and Goat came and stood alongside me.

“We're going to the Gaucho. You know you're coming.”

“I don't know,” I said.

“Antonia says you have to. She won't come without you.”

I turned on him. The fuzz of his new mustache gave him the look of a stretched-out undergraduate looking for a score. “Make this one memorable with somebody else,” I said.

He put his hand on my shoulder and gave me his tired, inexhaustible smile. “It isn't like that,” he assured me. “We've been through a lot together, right? You and me both. Just one drink, Jess.”

In the lounges of El Gaucho
it was happy hour all night. Half-drunk already on arena rail liquor, even Goat's parental stand-ins clamored for top-shelf. When I tried to get a coffee, Goat shouted me down and I was given a Spanish. Behind us a guitarist played placidly on, as though it would be his pleasure to ignore all behaviors at all volumes.

Goat kept bringing over spare chairs. “Some of the guys are coming,” he'd say, as though we'd all fixed our hopes on this and he didn't want anyone to lose faith. “My new brothers!”

“No brothers in Toronto but Joe Carter.”

“More than here! Shouldn't some of our guys be around?”

“They go to the cigar lounge,” Antonia said. “It's private.”

She rose to go to the bathroom, and Goat sent several chairs clattering backward as he stood to head her off.

“They don't let you go alone in here,” he cried. She put her hand on his shoulder, to soothe him and fix him to his spot, and we watched her go across the room.

“They won't let her,” Goat muttered.

Sure enough, as she was about to leave the bar a black-jacketed waiter materialized to accompany her.

“I'ma bring her back,” he declared, but his X Games friend stood and said something in his ear. Obviously sulking, Goat turned to me.

“You got a girl's name, Jess. You try it.”

Somebody made that long
oh
sound frat boys make when someone's picked a fight or brought a new insult into the world, and I figured I didn't want to abide the table anyhow.

“Okay,” I said. I picked up Antonia's purse to further laughter, but when I slung it around my shoulder, Goat's eyes widened a little—he needed Antonia to remind him he was having a good time, and he wasn't going to miss a trick from anyone who might try to take her away.

“One at a time,” he cried, but I was up and gone already.

I went through the dining room to the back, and as I stepped through a doorway I smelled cigar smoke. I saw a core of ash bobbing softly in a corner next to a red lamp, gleaming above a dull pair of shoes. Above it was the sleepy face of the Pharaoh. He lifted one eyebrow slightly and looked at me with hooded, impassive eyes. Then he started to laugh soundlessly.

“Nice purse,” he said.

I took it off my shoulder and held it bunched in my hand. “This the men's line?”

“I think we need to have a talk, you and me.”

“I'm in a hurry,” I said. “Talk away.”

The men's opened and Wedge stepped out.

“Not that kind of talk, ma'fucka,” Pharaoh said softly. He came off the wall and loomed comfortably in front of me. I could feel Wedge behind me, and I said I guessed I could spare just a minute.