Byron's Lane (13 page)

Adams pointed out how difficult it is for a contemporary politician to hold progressive ideals and project Frank Capra-style optimism. “If you’re in a leadership position, out there all by yourself, you can’t afford to make a mistake. There’s such a premium on winning,” he said. “Failure has too high a price attached to it these days to convince most of us to take chances.”

I butted in. “Always remember, my friend: ‘There can be no honor in a sure success, but much might be wrested from a sure defeat.’” I was hoping I might change his Christina calculus or persuade him to rededicate himself to a career in politics.

“Now, where did that come from?” he asked, his astonishment discernible even in the darkness.

“Attribute it to David Lean, Peter O’Toole, or Lawrence of Arabia,” I answered. “I’m not sure which one.”

Adams asked me to remind him to write the quote in his black book when we got back to the lodge.

“Our free-flowing discussion has produced a sense of urgency in me. It’s caused me to acknowledge my mortality,” he confessed. He told me that his lawyer had called him last week and suggested he needed to amend his will. Adams asked that I remind him to do that, too. We’d finally become like an old married couple, I thought. I had been assigned a job: remind

Adams of things he needed to do, to record things he thought were important. I liked my new role—Boswell to Adams’s Johnson.

“Did basketball and baseball really produce so many life lessons for me?” Adams asked, genuinely perplexed. He knew he could expect an honest response from me.

I theatrically stroked my chin, but I doubt if Adams could see. “It’s hard to overestimate their importance when we were growing up,” I offered. “All our male role models in Maplewood were anxious to bestow on sports the mystical ability to teach us what we’d need to know to successfully handle every challenge we’d ever face.”

“Playing basketball and baseball seemed hardly as important to you as it was to me. You seemed to have turned out okay. How’d that happen?” he teased.

Joke aside, Adams had given me the chance to talk about one of my own Maplewood life-changing moments. I described it in excruciating detail.

We were ten years old. It was the Maplewood Little League championship game. Baseball played at that level is obviously very different from baseball played at the major league level. The bases are closer together in Little League. The distance between the pitcher and home plate is shorter. The game lasts six innings instead of nine. But no one can ever convince me that a major league baseball player in the seventh game of a World Series has ever felt more pressure than I felt that day.

It was the first week in August. Our seasons always ended in early August. We could play a full schedule with a full roster and families still had time to load up their station wagons and go on vacation before school started the Wednesday after Labor Day. Our Martin’s Amoco Dodgers were playing the Briggs Hardware Tigers for the league championship. An injury during the game and the Byrd brothers having left a week early for a two-week vacation in Florida combined to throw me into the game in the fourth inning.

Weak players were usually hidden in either right field or at second base. I was the second baseman in the bottom of the sixth and last inning. The bases were loaded with Tigers. There were two outs, and a left-handed batter, David DeMarco, was up. He was a good hitter who almost never struck out. We had started the inning leading 6-2. The score was 6-5 when DeMarco walked up to home plate.

The stands were filled with screaming parents. Sweat was pouring down my face. I looked around the infield and outfield. Most of us were saying the same silent prayer: “Please God, don’t let DeMarco hit the ball to me.”

I could tell what my teammates were thinking by the frozen looks on their faces and the way they were nervously pounding their fists into their baseball gloves, yelling that stupid chatter before every pitch: “Hey batter, hey batter, swing!”

Our coaches taught us to use the time between pitches to figure out all our options to make a putout if the ball was hit to us. We should consider how many outs there were, how many runners were on base, the capabilities of the batter and the pitcher, the angle and speed of the batted ball. Our mantra was the game’s most basic defensive fundamental: know what you’re going to do with the baseball before you get it. I tried to do that, but my mind couldn’t handle anything beyond my incessant internal plea:
Please don’t hit the ball to me
.

Adams was playing shortstop, to my right, on the other side of second base. DeMarco hit the first pitch Keith Jones threw to him. It was a hard-hit ground ball—coming right at me.

God, why hast thou forsaken me?

Everything began to move in slow motion— everything except the baseball. I didn’t move. I couldn’t—I froze. The baseball found me, hit my glove, bounced off my knee. I was frantic.

Adams had run to second base, ten feet away. Everyone was yelling, but all I heard was his calm voice: “Pick up the ball. Flip it to me.”

The runner from first base was almost past me, on his way to second base. I dove for the baseball, grabbed it, and pushed it more than threw it in Adams’s direction. His glove speared the ball on its first bounce, an instant before the runner’s foot touched second base. The umpire crouching next to me yelled, “You’re out!” and signaled the same with the thumb of his right hand. Sprawled face-down in the dirt a few feet from the base, I buried my head in my baseball glove and offered a two-second prayer of thanks.

Whether we got that third and final out at second base before the runner from third base touched home plate was an open question. A dozen screaming Briggs Hardware Tigers parents were still arguing about it after we’d left the field. I don’t remember the name of the kid who was running from first to second base, but I thanked God that he was slow.

Anyway, we got the out and we won the game.

Technically, I suppose it could be claimed that I was an important part of winning the championship. It was a terrifying experience. I skipped Little League the next summer, announcing to everyone who could hear me that I was dedicating the spring, summer, and fall of 1961 to getting my star badge in Boy Scouts. Since then, I’ve involved myself in high-stakes sports the way most American men do—vicariously.

Adams reveled in my story. We analyzed every aspect of it like CIA Kremlinologists used to pour over Khrushchev’s speeches at the annual Communist Party Congress in Moscow. At first our purpose was to wring whatever laughs we could from it, as adults do when they recall excruciatingly embarrassing childhood incidents from the perspective of decades of distance. We speculated about what might have happened to the rest of my life if DeMarco’s ground ball had rolled through my legs. We decided I would have either turned out to be a homeless heroin addict or in prison for some anti-social thing I couldn’t help doing to some poor innocent soul.

After we had laughed long and loud enough to cause lights to be turned on in the cabin closest to the dock, we concluded that both of us had overestimated the influence those kinds of experiences could have on people’s lives. We said it, but neither of us believed it.

Finally, Adams and I speculated about what kind of fathers we would have been had we pursued the experience of parenthood.

“Kathy and I had a plan,” Adams explained. “We’d put each other through graduate school, then we’d raise a family—no more than two kids. I was still in school when we separated.”

“It’s the only thing I’d change if I had a chance,” I confessed.

“Me, too,” he said.

After a few minutes of thoughtful silence, Adams stood up and shined the flashlight on the blanket. It was my signal to fold it up.

We walked back down the pier, along the lakeshore, toward the lodge’s lights.

Adams let me drive the Porsche back to Minneapolis the next day. We broke camp at the lodge at eleven o’clock, after he and his Democrats had spent three more hours that morning working through the details of what everyone but Adams thought was a winning campaign strategy for next year’s election cycle. The maid woke me at ten, wanting to clean the room, tapping on my door with her key. I had slept through good intentions of jogging around the golf course at sunrise and having a hearty breakfast at nine. I had just enough time for a shower and shave. Adams was standing in front of my door, ready to go.

On the way home, Adams spoke very little about what was discussed behind closed doors at the retreat. He said that the decisions made about campaign strategy and game plan that the group had developed erased whatever doubts he had harbored about quitting politics at the end of his term.

“I tried to persuade them to adopt a campaign theme that acknowledged government’s responsibilities in times like ours—a campaign platform that focused on how Democrats intended to address a bad economy and a shredded federal safety net. Everybody else in the room argued that a theme like that had to be accompanied by a plan for shared sacrifice. They decided that the message couldn’t compete with the Republicans’ sound bite: ‘We’ll cut your taxes and roll back regulations. We’ll make government stop wasting your money.’ I tried hard these past two days to rekindle some enthusiasm for teaching, research, and politics. Things sparked, but nothing caught fire.”

“You know,” I offered, “if you were the Democrats’ candidate for governor, you could probably force a public discussion about whatever you want, and structure it however you want to. You’re clever enough to figure out how to do that without hurting the chances of Democrats running down-ticket.”

“Maybe,” Adams responded, barely audible. “But a successful candidate for governor has to have fire in his belly. Becoming governor has to be his passion. Passion for anything’s hard to generate right now. When Farah, Hind, and Nur were killed, I disintegrated. What good is it to hope for and build something if you can’t protect it—especially when fear, hate, and small minds can so easily destroy it?”

Adams paused. “Something sparked on the pier last night. But whatever it was drowned in black coffee and smothered in oatmeal this morning.”

My friend turned in his seat and put his hand on my shoulder as I drove. “Thanks for trying, Tom.” He rubbed the side of his face as he continued talking. “Political campaigns these days are high-stakes poker games with just one purpose: to sort out winners and losers. A campaign’s objective is to win an election; it’s not to provide a venue for debating different approaches to solving problems. Winning’s become way more important than what winning provides: a chance to govern.”

Adams took a pair of sunglasses from the console between our seats and laid them in his lap.

“I’m not as staggered as I used to be by what I saw after the car was hit by that RPG. But the smell—that awful smell—sometimes it comes back when the news on TV shows a bombing somewhere. That footage is a sanitized version of what happens, Tom: people running around, carrying the injured to ambulances, pushing them onto the beds of pickup trucks. You never see the detached body parts spread all over the street, blood pulsing out of gaping holes in a person, shrapnel everywhere. Last month I stopped in mid-sentence when a medevac helicopter flew by a quarter of a mile away while I was giving a speech in Rochester. After it had moved out of earshot, I couldn’t remember what I was talking about.”

Adams paused. “I had no business being in Iraq, doing what I was doing. The bad guys had no business being there, either. We were on our way out when I was there. The Iraqi government was pushing us out the door. They outlasted us. If that’s how you measure who wins and who loses these kinds of conflicts, they won.” Adams unlatched his seat belt, turned toward the backseat, and retrieved his black book from his overnight bag. I was sure he was looking for the name and telephone number of a visually stunning woman to invite to Christina’s party that night, but after a while, he closed his organizer and carelessly tossed it over his shoulder onto the backseat.

“Doing what I was sent by the State Department to do in Iraq is just another version of what I’ve been doing here my whole life. If the last twenty-four hours have demonstrated anything, they’ve proved that my brand of politics is as out-of-date as carbon paper. If I’m ever going to be able to rebuild, it has to be on a different foundation.”

Adams put his sunglasses on. He stared at Mille Lacs Lake as we began our drive along its west shore. “There’s such a huge void to fill. Do you know what it’s like to have to start life over this far into it? You have to reconfigure how you present yourself—you have to recalibrate everything.” His was looking at me now, the wrinkles in his forehead conveying sensitivity and gentleness. “Was it like that for you when Maggie died?”

I nodded. “Yes,” I said. “I can empathize with you.”

I was lying. Maggie had left me with a lifetime of pleasant memories I could savor anytime I wanted.

“Well, that’s it, Tom. That’s me, here and now. It’s nothing as serious as post-traumatic stress syndrome. It’s more like a gut check. I’ve got the ability somewhere inside me to shake all this off. I need something or someone to pick me up and brush me off and help me bury the wreckage somewhere.”

Adams checked the contents of the storage compartment in the Porsche’s console for no reason other than it gave him something to do. The only sound was the wind through which his car was slicing.

“Okay. We’ve talked about Iraq. We can cross that off the list. But keep an eye on me, Tom. Don’t be afraid to suggest ways I can fill the hole.”

I considered using the time Adams was captured in the passenger seat of his car to force an in-depth examination of the Monday night shooting incident. But the farther we got from Pine Lake and its flock of concerned Democrats, the less timely and on point the subject seemed. Further discussion would likely have given their conspiracy theories more credence than they deserved. Besides, Adams had admonished me not to go there. He was meeting with the police about the incident in two days. On the way back to Adams’s house, I convinced myself that the matter was being attended to.

Instead of discussing the shooting, I tried to take us back to the defining moments in our Maplewood history. Jim Breech’s visit had plowed up acres of memories, but we had conspicuously stayed away from the corner of the field where the most fertile soil was composting.

As Mille Lacs Lake was disappearing in my rear view mirror, I finally asked: “Do you ever think about the day the farmer died?”

Adams looked at me for a second. Then he turned toward the windshield and watched the dashed white lines in the middle of the road disappear under the Porsche’s chiseled front fender. He looked up to the sunroof, reached up and pushed the button that opened it. He kept his finger on the button until the roof had spread open enough that we could feel outside air being diverted into the car. “I haven’t thought about it for a long time. You know, that’s something we’ve never really talked about.”

Victor Pavletich had owned a small farm in Maplewood. Part of his property bounded Adams’s end of Byron’s Lane. Shelley Drive and three strands of barbed-wire fence separated his farm, his woods, his pond, and his cows from our neighborhood. Pavletich’s southern property line ran almost the full length of the north end of our subdivision. His farm was a prime building site for more houses. But Pavletich stubbornly, steadfastly refused to sell any of his land to the developers. They were fast building homes all around him.

In the fall and spring of every year we lived in Maplewood, Adams’s parents and their neighbors on the north end of Byron’s Lane and along Shelley Drive would complain about the smell of the cow manure the farmer would spread on whatever patch of his field he intended to plant in corn the next growing season. The fact that he was there first, fertilizing his fields long before anybody who lived in the neighborhood ever made footprints on its adjacent soil, mattered nothing at all to the newcomers. The only relevant fact for them was that, for a week or two once or twice every year, it was decidedly unpleasant to be out in their yard or have their windows open when the wind blew from the north.

Pavletich’s farm was Disneyland for us. It offered trees that needed to be climbed, frogs and sunfish and tadpoles in his pond that needed to be caught, and dairy cows that had to be ridden after we’d driven one or two of the unfortunate animals into his woods and dropped onto their wide backs from low-hanging tree branches. The land beyond the farmer’s barbed-wire fence was a place our parents forbade us to go, which made it even more appealing.

The farmer, as we called Pavletich, would sit on his back porch all summer long—a third of a mile away from his woods, four hundred yards from his pond. He would watch diligently for any sign of us. When he spotted us on his property, he’d grab a shotgun filled with rock salt, jump into an old dark-green Chevrolet pickup truck, and drive hell-bent across his fields straight for us. Even if we hadn’t posted a lookout, the clanging noise the truck made as it bounced across the field and the sound of its engine racing in first gear always gave us plenty of time to escape. Tony Spinello was the only one of us who had ever felt the sting of rock salt on his backside, after having trouble dismounting his cow once. The farmer was ten yards away when Spinello finally hit the ground running.

But the games of chase and hide-and-seek ended abruptly one day in the late summer of our twelfth year on earth, the farmer’s eighty-third. Pavletich was at the edge of the woods when four of us unexpectedly stumbled into his presence. Seeing us, the farmer hobbled as quickly as he could to his truck, just a few feet away, to get his gun. Just as we turned to scatter, he slumped to the ground next to the truck’s passenger door, grasping his chest with one hand, holding the door handle with the other.

He gasped for breath. At first he yelled. Then he begged for us to help him, as loudly as he could in his gradually muffled voice.

We stopped, turned, and watched him. Steve Wright was already over the hill and out of sight. Adams made a move toward where the farmer lay. The old man was clutching his chest with both hands by then. Greg Kearney ran over to Adams, grabbed his arm, and pulled him in the opposite direction, toward the far side of the woods. Kearney was convinced that we’d caused the farmer’s heart attack. We needed to be far away from the scene of the crime, or we’d be blamed for it. I watched Adams and Kearney argue. The farmer did, too. The argument lasted a minute or two. Then we ran as fast as we could from the farmer’s faint calls for help.

About an hour later, two police cars and an ambulance, flashers pulsing, sirens blowing, rushed up Shelley Drive. They stopped at a place along the farmer’s fence line that was nearest to the place in the woods where the farmer’s truck was parked. While kids on bicycles and a few mothers streamed to the spot where the police cars and ambulance were parked, the four of us assembled in Kearney’s attached garage. Greg, whose father was Maplewood’s mayor, closed the garage door behind us. We huddled in its farthest corner. In the darkness of the empty garage we promised each other to never talk to anyone about what we had made happen.

I’d kept the promise until that Saturday in the Porsche on the ride back to Adams’s house.

That day in Kearney’s garage was the only time I remember an important decision being made in our group without Adams’s participation. He had sat mute on the garage’s cold cement floor, his back resting uncomfortably against an exposed wooden stud on one of its unfinished interior walls.

The weekly
Maplewood Post
confirmed three days later the rumor that had buzzed around dinner tables on Byron’s Lane: Victor Pavletich had died of a heart attack. James Roan told us the day after the newspaper story was published that the farmer died in the ambulance, on his way to the hospital, more than an hour after we had abandoned him. He was found twenty yards from his truck, trying to crawl home. By the time the fire department’s paramedics had gotten to him, the farmer’s death was a foregone conclusion. There really wasn’t much they could do for him.

Adams was pensive as we reached the outer edges of Minneapolis’s northern suburbs. Then he broke the silence: “You’re right, Tom. That was a seminal moment in my life. I don’t like to relive it, so I haven’t thought about it. I learned on Byron’s Lane that unpleasant things have a tendency to go away if you ignore them long enough. I’m surprised how often that proves to be true.”

He straightened his posture in the Porsche’s passenger seat and resumed his fixation on the road’s centerline. The next words he spoke were offered dispassionately, after having hung for so long in the farthest reaches of the attic of his memory.

“After dinner that night—the day the farmer died—I told my dad what had happened. My sisters were playing outside in the backyard. My mother was in the kitchen doing dishes and putting leftovers away. That was always the best time of the day to talk to him, right after dinner. He was sitting in his chair in the corner of the living room, by the picture window. He was reading the newspaper. By the time I was halfway through my confession he had folded the newspaper up and dropped it on the carpet next to his chair. I had his undivided attention. That was rare. So I expected a thoughtful response and some good advice, like Ward Cleaver used to give Beaver.” Adams laughed. He pushed a button on the console. Cool air rushed into the car from somewhere near our feet.

“It turned out that my father’s biggest concern was making sure I didn’t tell anyone else what I had just told him. He said that Pavletich was a very old man.

He told me that he would probably have had a heart attack and died that day even if we hadn’t been there. My father went on to say that telling people—the police in particular—that I was at the scene when the farmer had his heart attack wouldn’t bring the farmer back to life. It would only cause problems and a lot of unwanted attention for my family, my friends, and their families. The whole matter was best left alone. He said, ‘Son, during the next few days, you should figure out what you can learn from the experience—then put the incident behind you.’”