Empire Falls (45 page)

The celebration over, the crowd now focused its attention on the injured quarterback. After a minute he managed to sit up, then finally stumbled to his feet, his arms draped across the shoulders of his coach and a teammate. When the three of them started for the sidelines, number 56 hurried over and insisted on taking the place of the assisting player. The Fairhaven coach looked like he was going to object, but in the end he allowed Zack Minty to sling the arm of his still woozy quarterback over his shoulder pad and help bear the rubber-kneed boy off the field.

Watching this, Jimmy Minty’s eyes filled with tears. “That boy’s a class act,” he said, nodding at the tableau unfolding below them. “That there’s why we have kids, eh, old buddy?”

Miles, too, was moved by the scene, though he was unable to share Jimmy’s specific emotion. Once the boy was propped safely on the bench, there was a smattering of polite applause, until Zack Minty trotted back onto the field and was greeted with a thunderous ovation.

“That’s the kind of lick that turns football games around,” Jimmy Minty told Cindy, his hands cupped at her ear so she could hear what he was anxious that she understand amid the roar.

It was the kind of hit that turned more than games around, in Miles’s opinion, and suddenly the policeman’s continued presence seemed intolerable. “Is there something you wanted to talk to me about, Jimmy? Or did you just come up here because you were plum tuckered out from quelling disturbances and looking for a place to set?”

It was Cindy Whiting who reacted first. She turned to him and blinked, sorely puzzled, it seemed, to hear Jimmy Minty’s phrases coming out of Miles Roby’s mouth. Minty also heard—Miles was sure of that—but he stared down at the field for several seconds longer before turning toward him. Miles saw that the emotion that had welled up over his son’s “sportsmanship” had drained out of his eyes, which now were hard and empty. “I apologize for your friend here, Miss Whiting,” he said, turning back to Cindy. “Miles and me go way back, but for some reason it embarrasses him that we were friends. He always feels better after making a joke or two at my expense. Which I don’t mind—not one or two, anyway. A man who goes away to college and comes home with a diploma has earned that right, I guess, and I figure I’m a big enough man to take a little lip, as long as it’s not too much.”

Miles started to say something, then stopped. There was too much phony sentiment being expressed here to respond to any single part of the speech, though of course Miles knew that for a man like Jimmy Minty trumped-up emotion was indistinguishable from the genuine, heartfelt variety. So he satisfied himself with correcting one fact. “I never got any diploma, Jimmy.”

“That’s right, you didn’t,” Jimmy readily conceded, which might’ve suggested that Miles had fallen into a trap, had Jimmy Minty been smart enough to set one. Too bad Max wasn’t with them, Miles thought. The old man was just what the situation called for. He’d be innocently inquiring whether everybody in the police department was issued live ammo or did the dummies get blanks. Where
was
Max, anyway? Miles wondered. It was unlike his father to miss a home game. He usually worked them like a pickpocket, which in a sense he was, putting the touch on every other person he ran into.

“Please convey my best wishes to your mother for me, Miss Whiting,” Minty said before turning back to Miles. “You really want to know what I come up here for, Miles? I come up here to tell you I got things all straightened out with your brother, so you don’t have to worry. I come up here to say there’s no hard feelings. I knew you were mad at me last week, and I didn’t want any bad blood between old friends. Because that’s what we used to be, Miles. Friends. Used to be. Maybe we aren’t friends anymore, but that’s because of you, not me. You don’t want to be friends, that’s okay. But I’ll tell you one thing. You don’t want Jimmy Minty for an enemy.”

A roar went up on the field just then, and Miles looked up to see Zack Minty emerge from a pile of bodies and hold the ball up with both hands, first to the stands on the Empire Falls side of the field, then to the Fairhaven fans, an in-your-face gesture that whipped the hometown fans into an even wilder frenzy. The boy seemed to know right where his father was, and when Jimmy saw what had just transpired, he too raised both arms into the air, a mirror image of his son’s gesture, lacking only a second football. Even Cindy seemed to understand that something significant had occurred, and she let go of Miles to join in the celebration, madly clapping her hands together. After all, Miles reflected, there was only her whole life to suggest that this physical abandon might be a mistake. But then again, was it not her whole life that Cindy Whiting was hoping to escape for a few short hours this one particularly lovely Saturday afternoon in early October, lovelier still for the hint of winter in the air? Then Miles saw her lose her balance and pitch forward, and he caught her arm, but Cindy Whiting wasn’t a girl anymore, and Miles’s grip wasn’t good enough to prevent what would’ve happened had Jimmy Minty not turned back to give Miles one last look and seen her coming toward him in time to catch her. The look of terror on her face remained there even after she was secure in the policeman’s arms, where she continued flailing, as if in her imagination she hadn’t been caught at all, but was tumbling, head over heels, down to the bottom of the bleachers.

Only when she was seated and calm again, clutching Miles’s sore left arm with both hands, Jimmy Minty having disappeared into the crowd below, did Miles recall the clattering sound he’d heard when Cindy pitched forward, and see that her cane had once again fallen to the ground below.

CHAPTER 16

S
ixty
was all Janine Roby—soon-to-be-Comeau—could think.
Sixty, sixty, sixty, sixty
.

Down on the field, the game was stalled because one of the Fairhaven players—their quarterback, she heard somebody say—had been injured. She couldn’t see much from where she sat, and she wasn’t that interested anyway. She’d sat through most of the first half without really watching. Her only interest in the game was that this was the one everybody turned out for. When she was in high school, she’d missed every damn Fairhaven game because she was fat and her mother made her wear stupid clothes and nobody ever asked her out. She’d been savoring the ironic, vengeful sweetness of this particular event for weeks, imagining it in every detail, praying the weather would stay warm enough that she could wear her new white jeans and halter top, which she indeed was wearing, even though it was a little chilly. Walt, who pretended to be a big football fan, mostly just enjoyed strutting around at any social event that didn’t require a jacket and tie; he’d even wanted to get there early, but Janine had nixed that goddamn idea right off the bat. What she had in mind was an entrance, which meant that everybody else had to be in their damn seats. The only problem there was that if everybody had already taken their seats, there’d be no seats left open.

Like most conundrums, though, this one was hardly insoluble, and eventually Janine thought of her mother. For some time she’d been trying to think of ways to get the old bat to like the Silver Fox a little better. She and Walt were getting married, after all, and by the time of the ceremony, she hoped, her mother would at least have stopped referring to him as “that little banty rooster.” Maybe if Bea had a good time at the football game, it would occur to her that Walt hadn’t spoiled it, and that would be a beginning. An afternoon in Bea’s company might do Walt some good, too. The Silver Fox didn’t have anything against her that Janine knew of, but he did seem to have trouble remembering Bea’s existence. Every time Janine mentioned her mother, Walt’s eyes narrowed and he regarded her suspiciously, as if she’d been keeping this person a secret from him. As if he hadn’t been keeping the biggest damn secret of all from her.

But the real reason for hauling Bea along to the game was so that for once she could be the solution to a problem instead of its source. The plan was, she’d call her mother, say they were running late down at the club, and have her go over to Empire Field early and grab three spots, as close as possible to the fifty-yard line and all the way up at the top, so they’d have a good view. And also so everybody’d have a good view of Janine in her new white jeans and halter when she and Walt climbed up the bleachers filled with men who’d never once asked her out when they were boys, and with the women they’d asked instead. Most of these wide loads now took up the better part of two seats, so let them have a good look too. Janine had learned from all those hours on the Stairmaster that the only time a woman in the right getup is going to look more intoxicating than when she’s going up stairs is when she turns around and goes back down them.

But of course everything had conspired to spoil her entrance, which only went to prove what Janine already knew: that no matter how well you planned something, God always planned better. If He was feeling stingy that day and didn’t want you to have some little thing you had your heart set on, then you weren’t going to get it and that was all there was to it. And today, for some reason, God didn’t want Janine Roby—soon-to-be-Comeau—to have the entrance they both knew she deserved. Bea had gone early, but she’d put the three cushions down on seats only a third of the way up the bleachers, because anymore her feet always hurt from standing all day, and so did her lower back from wrestling kegs, and she didn’t see any reason to be all the way up there in the nosebleed section anyway. Had Janine thought about it, she would’ve foreseen all this, but she’d been concentrating instead on the effect of her outfit.

Still, it wasn’t really her mother’s refusal to follow simple instructions that spoiled the plan. The truth was, Janine was still reeling from this morning’s surprise. Sixty! Down at the county clerk’s office, Walt had produced a folded copy of his birth certificate, which he kept trying to smooth out with the palm of his hand, and when the woman at the window asked him to read the date of birth printed on it, he’d silently pushed the document across the counter toward her instead. Janine should’ve known right then and there that something was up. Actually, she should have been suspicious already, after all those weeks she’d been trying to get him down there to file for their marriage license so that when her divorce finally came through they wouldn’t have to waste any more time on paperwork. His first excuse was that he couldn’t find the damned certificate, and then twice last week he’d managed to futz around at the club until the clerk’s office was closed. Only today did she understand his reluctance. He’d almost gotten away with it, too. The woman had silently typed the date of Walt’s birth on the application, then slid his birth certificate back through the slot in the window. Had she folded it before doing so, Janine never would have spotted the faded date printed there: April 10, 1940.

1940?

“What the hell is that?” she said, pinning the document to the counter with the tip of her index finger to prevent the Silver Fox from folding and returning it to his pocket, a maneuver he seemed anxious to execute, and when their eyes met, his expression was the same one he used when he thought he’d pulled a fast one on Horace at gin. “Is that some kind of misprint?” she demanded. The funny part was, if he’d told her that it
was
a misprint, she probably would’ve believed him, because there was no way Walt Comeau looked any sixty.

Janine located him now, down on the sideline. It was coming up on halftime, and he was talking to Horace, who was moving a long metal pole with chains up and down the field. Being down there on the field was pure Walt, of course. If there was someplace he wasn’t supposed to be, that’s where you’d find him. He never went into the Empire Grill until it was getting ready to close. For some reason he liked the sound of the door locking behind him and the idea that other people would want in too and wouldn’t be able to get in. He’d swivel around on his stool and see who it was pulling up outside, only to be disappointed by the Closed sign. He liked the whole damned concept of “inside,” as in inside information, claiming it was the only kind that was worth anything and letting on that he was in sole possession of loads of it. Which, now that Janine thought about it, probably was why he never surrendered any. If you told somebody, you’d just let it outside.