Byron's Lane (4 page)

Besides stirring up a robust debate inside the Muslim community about al Qaeda’s bankrupt version of Islam, the article resulted in a fatwa being issued by a prominent radical cleric in Pakistan. The fatwa decreed that any Muslim who managed to kill or maim Jonathan Adams would earn the reward of a rich and enjoyable afterlife if he or she were killed during any kind of a credible attempt.

I’d feared for my friend’s safety when he first told me what he had done during his last two months in Iraq. Those worries grew as I closely followed the swell of reaction to his
Atlantic Monthly
and
New York Times
articles. But my fears mostly evaporated as a few months’ worth of cable TV news cycles came and went. Monday evening’s shooting revived my concerns and intensified them exponentially. I was sure I knew the reason for what had happened.

“Winston Churchill said that there are few things in life more exhilarating than being shot at and missed,” Adams said. He laughed softly, the understated laugh of a soldier talking around the outside edges of his experience in combat.

“The incident made me think less about what happened to my friends in Iraq. That day’s been too much on my mind. So maybe the shooting had a positive effect.” He laughed again. “Anyway, Jim Brandt, the farmer next door, happened to be walking along his north fence line when all this happened. He saw the rifle flash and heard the shot. He called the police. Not the way I would have handled things.”

Adams walked to his patio table and sat down. I did the same.

“Monday must have been a slow night for the sheriff’s office and the state highway patrol. Six police officers spent an awful lot of time here. A couple of FBI agents from the office in Minneapolis got involved on Tuesday. Fortunately, none of the neighbors seemed to be out and about. I made Brandt take a vow of silence about all this. There’s no need having people around here thinking I’m the target of some kind of a mob hit, or worrying their family might get caught in the crossfire. You know how rumors spread.”

Adams looked out beyond the deck. His eyes followed the path the bullet had taken from his field to his house. When he saw me watching him, he threw me the most calming smile he could muster. The look on his face said: If I can put the matter behind me, you should, too.

But in spite of his assurances, I found myself glancing nervously across the field as the day lengthened. The police car had crossed the prairie’s width, turned around in an apple orchard, and was backtracking toward the county road.

I needed something more than Adams’s explanation to sooth my worry. A welcome distraction came with Jim Breech’s loud knock on the front door. What was left of my consternation and Adams’s melancholy we shed behind as we quickly walked through his house. Breech stood ready, fist raised, to knock on the door again as Adams pulled it open. I was four steps behind him.

A full head taller than us, Jim Breech was fuller in the face and wider in the waist than I remembered him to be in high school. More gray than blond, the front part of his hair was waxed a half inch straight up from the top of his head—the same way it was the last time

I had seen him in the early 1970s. But his hairline had been fighting a losing battle since then. In fact, there wasn’t really much hair left on his head behind what remained of his rooster comb. Breech’s short hair and the gray long-sleeved sweatshirt he was wearing that had
ARMY
stenciled boldly across it in black letters made him look like a thirty-year-veteran sergeant major who was ready to make life hell for a platoon of recruits.

Breech thrust his long arm across the threshold at Adams, inviting a handshake that Adams instantly provided. Breech’s broad smile pulled me closer to the doorway.

“J.J., you haven’t changed a bit,” he bellowed. Glancing over Adams’s shoulder, he said, “Tom Walker, what the hell are you doing here?”

Breech had christened Adams “J.J.” shortly after they met on the first day of fourth grade. His unchallenged status as our greatest local athlete made the nickname stick. It was seldom applied to Adams by anyone besides Breech, and the tradition died soon after high school graduation—as quickly as Breech dropped out of our lives.

Still standing in the doorway, Breech began his visit with an apology.

“Like I told you on the phone, J.J., in order to get permission from Margie to spend a week up in Canada fishing with my suppliers, and stop in and see you on my way back, I had to promise her, my daughter, and my two grandkids that I’d meet them in Wisconsin Dells Thursday night on the way home. Well, it’s Thursday, and I figure it’s a five-hour drive down to the Dells from here. So I’ve got to leave in a couple of hours. Sorry I can’t stay longer.”

“Let’s see how much we can pack into those two hours,” Adams offered as he ushered big Jim Breech into his house.

“So where does somebody go to get a beer here?” Breech asked as he ambled through the foyer. Adams and I stepped out of his way as he strode past us and headed down the hallway, looking for a refrigerator. His familiar manner spanned thirty years in ten seconds. Adams and I knew nothing about three people Breech had just mentioned: a daughter and two grandchildren. That confirmed the two-generation gap in time jammed between us.

In twenty minutes’ time, Adams had given Breech the obligatory tour of his house and thirty years were backfilled with rough summaries of our separate lives since high school. We let Breech do most of the work.

His long pauses after our short answers suggested he was weighing the heft of our responses against what his would be when his turn came to account for the time. The expression on Breech’s face and his having asked neither of us for elaboration about anything we said told me that we were evidence that his horse, so quickly and splendidly out of the starting gate, was trailing as we were passing the three-quarters pole and approaching the finish line. I figured self-assessment had been as heavy on his mind as it had been on Adams’s. It surely had something to do with the considerable effort Breech must have made to find Adams, lost from Maplewood for most of his lifetime. Adams sensed the same thing; a quick glance my way told me so.

Jim Breech had married Margie Rice the month before they began their senior year at Kent State University. Margie was his high school sweetheart and the girl our graduating class voted most popular. Breech received a scholarship to play basketball and baseball at the University of Pennsylvania. By the end of his fifth week on campus, he was feeling lonely and unappreciated, far away in Philadelphia. A disappointing sophomore season playing basketball at Penn finally drove him back to Maplewood, with the intention of finishing college close to home. He happily returned to Margie’s arms.

Everything that had happened to Breech after that was news to us that Thursday afternoon.

By 1990, Jim and Margie had married each other twice and divorced each other once. Their staccato relationship produced two children: a daughter, Angie, and a son, James. James was killed in Kuwait in 1991, a KIA in the almost casualty-free first Gulf War. One of Saddam’s scud missiles hit his mess hall while he was eating breakfast. Jim’s daughter, Angie, and his twelve-year-old twin granddaughters lived in Chicago and were waiting for him with Margie in Wisconsin Dells. Breech made no mention of a son-in-law.

“And I’m still working at the lumberyard in Maplewood,” he announced. Jim Breech was the owner of the lumberyard now. More significantly, he was CEO of the thriving big-box home improvement center that had grown up next to it.

When we lived in Maplewood, a summer job working for Larry Hansen at his sprawling south-side lumberyard was prestigious and paid well. Mr. Hansen had been the school board president for as long as anybody could remember. There was always a place on his payroll during the summer for the school’s best varsity athletes. The fathers of kids who were imported from West Virginia, western Pennsylvania, and southern Ohio to play on the high school football team could count on finding jobs there, too. Breech started working for Hansen when he was sixteen. The only time Adams and I were permitted to wander inside the ten-foot-high chain-link fence that surrounded Hansen’s business was when we helped my father load two-by-fours and paneling onto a rented trailer one springtime Saturday morning—building materials to be used in a never-ending effort to convert our two-car garage into a family room. For my father, it was a weekend do-it-yourself project that turned into a six-year hobby.

Larry Hansen eagerly offered Jim Breech a job in his sales department when he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Kent State. In four years’ time, Breech headed the sales department; in four more, he was Hansen’s business manager, his second-in-command. When Hansen retired, Breech bought half the business. He was elected to fill an open seat on the school board when one of its senior members moved up to succeed Hansen as school board president. That was twelve years ago.

Empty Rolling Rock bottles were beginning to clutter the glass top of the patio table. We took turns making trips to the kitchen refrigerator to fetch full, cold ones. By the time it was my turn, Breech had told us as much of his life story as he wanted to. He was slumped in his chair, looking languidly at the other end of the deck.

Twenty years in the publishing business had taught me how to stimulate a lagging conversation, how to break down the kinds of walls years of disparate life experience builds between authors, publishers, literary agents, and readers. I jumped headfirst into the void. “Did either of us ever get a hit off you in Little League, Jim?” I asked. “I don’t think I ever did.”

Adams sensed what I was trying to do. “Come on, Tom. Don’t you remember? I hit a sixth inning broken-bat single off him once. Cost him a no-hitter, I recall,” he said with a satisfied smile. “And our friend Jim Breech shouldn’t let the fact that you never got a hit off him during your entire career in organized baseball go to his head. Hell, Tom—everybody who ever pitched to you no-hit you.”

It was a nearly true statement, and drew a hardy laugh from Breech. I didn’t mind.

“I still have stitch marks on my butt cheek where Jim plunked me with the first curveball I ever thought I saw,” Adams announced. He stood up from his chair, threatening to show us.

Breech was already more than six feet tall when we were twelve years old. When he started a pitch just forty-six feet away from you—the length a pitcher stood from the batter in Little League—his stride seemed to carry him halfway to home plate before the ball left his hand. Unless we mortals had already started to swing the bat before Breech released the ball, and had somehow guessed correctly where it would be when it crossed home plate a fraction of a second later, there was little chance the bat we fearfully gripped too tightly would ever touch a baseball he threw.

Breech liked listening to us talk about him as if he weren’t there. He enjoyed his Maplewood fame in a pleasant, modest way. We had successfully recharged his battery. He straightened himself in his chair, moving closer to its edge as he leaned over the table and thrust his large hand into what was left of a wooden salad bowl filled with Chex Mix.

“Tom, remember when J.J. got into his first varsity basketball game against Western Reserve our junior year? Remember when he blocked that layup after they got a pass behind him on that full-court zone press we used to run all the time?”

Merely referencing the incident made me recall that night in all of its detail. A smile that quickly grew big enough to fill half of Adams’s face said that he remembered, too.

Prompted by Breech, Adams finished the story. “The gym was full of people—standing room only, as it always was for those games. Remember how loud the place got? But I could still hear Coach Temple’s voice cut through all the noise: ‘Adams, what the hell are you doing!’ We were probably twenty points ahead with only a minute to play, but I knew I’d pay for it at practice on Monday if I screwed up at the end of the fourth quarter that Saturday night.”

Breech interrupted: “I swear, the kid from Western Reserve was standing under the basket with the ball in his hands when J.J recovered at the half-court line, after overplaying a pass he anticipated that never happened. No doubt extremely motivated by our beloved coach’s suggestion that he correct his error, J.J. was suddenly on the poor kid, flying three feet over him. He pinned the kid’s shot against the backboard!”

“I moved faster and jumped higher than I ever have,” Adams proudly added.

“And the crowd went wild!” I shouted, with appropriate inflection. The three of us toasted an event that we had long forgotten about with a clink of our half-empty beer bottles after we rose from our chairs, meeting somewhere over an empty wooden salad bowl in the middle of a patio table.

Revived, Breech was the raconteur for our second hour together. The discussion Breech led was a warehouse full of recollections long ago left in the dust of Adams’s haste to get some place beyond Maplewood. I watched Adams as he listened; he was mesmerized by Breech. I had seen that expression on his face before. When the three of us were growing up in Maplewood, Adams aspired to be just like Jim Breech—admired and respected, cool under fire, unfazed by the simulated crises that Maplewood cast our way. Breech liked Adams, and everyone knew it. I benefited because I was Adams’s best friend. Being the best friend of one of Jim Breech’s best friends markedly boosted my social standing in high school. Such was the potency of Breech’s charisma in the thin air that flowed through the corridors of Maplewood High. Whatever possible benefit a Jim Breech endorsement might have provided me had long since disappeared. But sensing more than half a lifetime later that people back then may have thought I sported that advantage caused me to think more favorably about the time I spent in Maplewood; it seemed like a friendlier place.

As we galloped toward the end of Breech’s visit, Adams sought to find out more about the contemporary Jim Breech. When Adams tried to draw him into a conversation about the issues his school board was facing, Breech turned a terse response into an announcement that one of our classmates, Richard Miller, had reappeared in Maplewood two years ago to audit a Department of Education grant the school district had received. A story about Richard Miller taking Adams’s sister, Sharon, to our senior prom followed. With expansive gestures and well-placed adjectives and adverbs Breech reminded us how unglued Adams became when he found out that his little sister, a sophomore, would be part of his senior year’s biggest social event. Adams gave up probing Breech and we laughed until our sides hurt.

Jim Breech looked at his watch. Our last hour was winding down. He apologized again for having had to make the visit so short, considering the long interlude since he had last seen us. He bridged the expanse of time with his last story.

“A kid named Marcus Jackson broke my Maplewood High single-season and career scoring records last March. Those records had stood for more than forty years. The athletic director and the basketball coach invited me to attend the home game where everybody expected it would happen.” Breech buried his chin into the neckline of his sweatshirt. “I didn’t want to go, but Margie made me. I’m on the school board, I’m a prominent figure in the community, so I could hardly turn the invitation down, she said. She told me that being there would be the gracious thing to do; ‘magnanimous’ was the word she used. She said it would enhance my image and benefit our business.”

An uncomfortable silence filled the deck.

Breech continued: “Shaking the kid’s hand, smiling during the ceremony at half court after the game, and telling a sixteen-year-old reporter for the school newspaper and Hal Barker from the
Maplewood Post
that I always expected my records would be broken were the most difficult things I’ve had to do in a very long time—maybe since we buried Jimmy. I’ve never admitted that to anyone before now.”

Breech looked up at us and painfully smiled. His confession was followed by more intense quiet.

“Today’s game is different than the game we played, J.J. You can’t compare what this Jackson kid accomplished to what we did. They play at least twenty games a season now, instead of eighteen. You get three points for baskets you make that are eighteen feet from the hoop instead of just two. My god, this kid played at least ten more games than me during his varsity career.”

Breech stopped. He seemed embarrassed by his outburst. Adams and I glanced nervously at each other.

Breech gathered himself together, un-shrugged his shoulders and pulled himself up straighter in his chair. “Got to go, guys. Margie and the girls will get nervous if I’m not at the Dells by eleven o’clock.” He grimaced as he stood. “Bad knees—all I’ve got to show for it now.”