Four Past Midnight (89 page)

He stopped abruptly and scuffed at the tar with his shoes. Naomi looked discreetly off toward the horizon. Just then a fuel truck drove up. Soames walked over quickly and fell into deep conversation with the driver.

Sam said, “You had quite an effect on our fearless pilot.”

“Maybe I did, at that,” she said. “I feel wonderful, Sam. Isn't that crazy?”

He stroked an errant lock of her hair back into place behind her ear. “It's been a crazy day. The craziest day I can ever remember.”

But the inside voice spoke then—it drifted up from that deep place where great objects were still in motion—and told him that wasn't quite true. There was one other that had been just as crazy. More crazy. The day of
The Black Arrow
and the red licorice.

That strange, stifled panic rose in him again, and he closed his ears to that voice.

If you want to save Sarah from Ardelia, Sam, forget about bein a hero and start rememberin who
your
Library Policeman was.

I don‘t! I can't! I
...
I mustn't!

“I really have to go home now,” Sam Peebles muttered.

Naomi, who had strolled away to look at the Navajo's wing-flaps, heard him and came back.

“Did you say something?”

“Nothing. It doesn't matter.”

“You look very pale.”

“I'm very tense,” he said edgily.

Stan Soames returned. He cocked a thumb at the driver of the fuel truck. “Dawson says I can borrow his car. I'll run you into town.”

“We could call a cab—” Sam began.

Naomi was shaking her head. “Time's too short for that,” she said. “Thank you very much, Mr. Soames.”

“Aw, hell,” Soames said, and then flashed her a little-boy grin. “You go on and call me Stan. Let's go. Dawson says there's low pressure movin in from Colorado. I want to get back to Junction City before the rain starts.”

Pell's was a big barnlike structure on the edge of the Des Moines business district—the very antithesis of the mall-bred chain bookstore. Naomi asked for Mike. She was directed to the customer-service desk, a kiosk which stood like a customs booth between the section which sold new books and the larger one which sold old books.

“My name is Naomi Higgins. I talked to you on the telephone earlier?”

“Ah, yes,” Mike said. He rummaged on one of his cluttered shelves and brought out two books. One was
Best Loved Poems of the American People;
the other was
The Speaker's Companion,
edited by Kent Adelmen. Sam Peebles had never been so glad to see two books in his life, and he found himself fighting an impulse to snatch them from the clerk's hands and hug them to his chest.

“Best Loved Poems
is easy,” Mike said, “but
The Speaker's Companion
is out of print. I'd guess Pell's is the only bookshop between here and Denver with a copy as nice as this one ... except for library copies, of course.”

“They both look great to me,” Sam said with deep feeling.

“Is it a gift?”

“Sort of.”

“I can have it gift-wrapped for you, if you like; it would only take a second.”

“That won't be necessary,” Naomi said.

The combined price of the books was twenty-two dollars and fifty-seven cents.

“I can't believe it,” Sam said as they left the store and walked toward the place where Stan Soames had parked the borrowed car. He held the bag tightly in one hand. “I can't believe it's as simple as just ... just returning the books.”

“Don't worry,” Naomi said. “It won't be.”

As they drove back to the airport, Sam asked Stan Soames if he could tell them about Dave and the baseballs.

“If it's personal, that's okay. I'm just curious.”

Soames glanced at the bag Sam held in his lap. “I'm sorta curious about those, too,” he said. “I'll make you a deal. The thing with the baseballs happened ten years ago. I'll tell you about that if you'll tell me about the books ten years from now.”

“Deal,” Naomi said from the back seat, and then added what Sam himself had been thinking. “If we're all still around, of course.”

Soames laughed. “Yeah ... I suppose there's
always that
possibility, isn't there?”

Sam nodded. “Lousy things sometimes happen.”

“They sure do. One of em happened to my only boy in 1980. The doctors called it leukemia, but it's really just what you said—one of those lousy things that sometimes happens.”

“Oh, I'm so sorry,” Naomi said.

“Thanks. Every now and then I start to think I'm over it, and then it gets on my blind side and hits me again. I guess some things take a long time to shake out, and some things don't ever shake out.”

Sam touched the comer of his mouth with a trembling hand.

“Well, hell, I'd known Dave a long time before it ever happened,” Stan Soames said. They passed a sign which read AIRPORT 3 MI. “We grew up together, went to school together, sowed a mess of wild oats together. The only thing was, I reaped my crop and quit. Dave just went on sowin.”

Soames shook his head.

“Drunk or sober, he was one of the sweetest fellows I ever met. But it got so he was drunk more'n he was sober, and we kinda fell out of touch. It seemed like the worst time for him was in the late fifties. During those years he was drunk
all
the time. After that he started goin to AA, and he seemed to get a little better ... but he'd always fall off the wagon with a crash.

“I got married in '68, and I wanted to ask him to be my best man, but I didn't dare. As it happened, he turned up sober—that time—but you couldn't trust him to turn up sober.”

“I know what you mean,” Naomi said quietly.

Stan Soames laughed. “Well, I sort of doubt that—a little sweetie like you wouldn't know what miseries a dedicated boozehound can get himself into—but take it from me. If I'd asked Dave to stand up for me at the weddin, Laura—that's my ex—would have shit bricks. But Dave
did
come, and I saw him a little more frequently after our boy Joe was born in 1970. Dave seemed to have a special feeling for all kids during those years when he was tryin to pull himself out of the bottle.

“The thing Joey loved most was baseball. He was nuts for it—he collected sticker books, chewing-gum cards ... he even pestered me to get a satellite dish so we could watch all the Royals games—the Royals were his favorites—and the Cubs, too, on WGN from Chicago. By the time he was eight, he knew the averages of all the Royals starting players, and the won-lost records of damn near every pitcher in the American League. Dave and I took him to games three or four times. It was a lot like takin a kid on a guided tour of heaven. Dave took him alone twice, when I had to work. Laura had a cow about that—said he'd show up drunk as a skunk, with the boy left behind, wandering the streets of K.C. or sittin in a police station somewhere, waitin for someone to come and get him. But nothing like that ever happened. So far as I know, Dave never took a drink when he was around Joey.

“When Joe got the leukemia, the worst part for him was the doctors tellin him he wouldn't be able to go to any games that year at least until June and maybe not at all. He was more depressed about that than he was about having cancer. When Dave came to see him, Joe cried about it. Dave hugged him and said, ‘If you can't go to the games, Joey, that's okay; I'll bring the Royals to you.'

“Joe stared up at him and says, ‘You mean in
person
, Uncle Dave?' That's what he called him—Uncle Dave.

“‘I can't do that,' Dave said, ‘but I can do somethin almost as good.' ”

Soames drove up to the Civil Air Terminal gate and blew the horn. The gate rumbled back on its track and he drove out to where the Navajo was parked. He turned off the engine and just sat behind the wheel for a moment, looking down at his hands.

“I always knew Dave was a talented bastard,” he said finally. “What I don't know is how he did what he did so damned
fast.
All I can figure is that he must have worked days and nights both, because he was done in ten days—and those suckers were
good.

“He knew he had to go fast, though. The doctors had told me and Laura the truth, you see, and I'd told Dave. Joe didn't have much chance of pulling through. They'd caught onto what was wrong with him too late. It was roaring in his blood like a grassfire.

“About ten days after Dave made that promise, he comes into my son's hospital room with a paper shopping-bag in each arm. ‘What you got there, Uncle Dave?' Joe asks, sitting up in bed. He had been pretty low all that day—mostly because he was losin his hair, I think; in those days if a kid didn't have hair most of the way down his back, he was considered to be pretty low-class-but when Dave came in, he brightened right up.

“ ‘The Royals, a course,' Dave says back. ‘Didn't I tell you?'

“Then he put those two shopping-bags down on the bed and spilled em out. And you never, ever, in your whole life, saw such an expression on a little boy's face. It lit up like a Christmas tree ... and ... and shit, I dunno ...”

Stan Soames's voice had been growing steadily thicker. Now he leaned forward against the steering wheel of Dawson's Buick so hard that the horn honked. He pulled a large bandanna from his back pocket, wiped his eyes with it, then blew his nose.

Naomi had also leaned forward. She pressed one of her hands against Soames's cheek. “If this is too hard for you, Mr. Soames—”

“No,” he said, and smiled a little. Sam watched as a tear Stan Soames had missed ran its sparkling, unnoticed course down his cheek in the late-afternoon sun. “It's just that it brings him back so. How he was. That hurts, miss, but it feels good, too. Those two feelings are all wrapped up together.”

“I understand,” she said.

“When Dave tipped over those bags, what spilled out was baseballs—over two dozen of them. But they weren't
just
baseballs, because there was a face painted on every one, and each one was the face of a player on the 1980 Kansas City Royals baseball team. They weren't those whatdoyoucallums, caricatures, either. They were as good as the faces Norman Rockwell used to paint for the covers of the
Saturday Evening
Post. I've seen Dave's work—the work he did before he got drinkin real heavy—and it was good, but none of it was as good as this. There was Willie Aikens and Frank White and U. L. Washington and George Brett ... Willie Wilson and Amos Otis ... Dan Quisenberry, lookin as fierce as a gunslinger in an old Western movie ... Paul Splittorff and Ken Brett ... I can't remember all the names, but it was the whole damned roster, including Jim Frey, the field manager.

“And sometime between when he finished em and when he gave em to my son, he took em to K.C. and got all the players but one to sign em. The one who didn't was Darrell Porter, the catcher. He was out with the flu, and he promised to sign the ball with
his
face on it as soon as he could. He did, too.”

“Wow,” Sam said softly.

“And it was all Dave's doing—the man I hear people in town laugh about and call Dirty Dave. I tell you, sometimes when I hear people say that and I remember what he did for Joe when Joey was dying of the leukemia, I could—”

Soames didn't finish, but his hands curled themselves into fists on his broad thighs. And Sam—who had used the name himself until today, and laughed with Craig Jones and Frank Stephens over the old drunk with his shopping-cart full of newspapers—felt a dull and shameful heat mount into his cheeks.

“That was a wonderful thing to do, wasn't it?” Naomi asked, and touched Stan Soames's cheek again. She was crying.

“You shoulda seen his face,” Soames said dreamily. “You wouldn't have believed how he looked, sittin up in his bed and lookin down at all those faces with their K.C. baseball caps on their round heads. I can't describe it, but I'll never forget it.

“You shoulda seen his face.

“Joe got pretty sick before the end, but he didn't ever get too sick to watch the Royals on TV—or listen to em on the radio—and he kept those balls all over his room. The windowsill by his bed was the special place of honor, though. That's where he'd line up the nine men who were playin in the game he was watchin or listenin to on the radio. If Frey took out the pitcher, Joe would take that one down from the windowsill and put up the relief pitcher in his place. And when each man batted, Joe would hold that ball in his hands. So—”

Stan Soames broke off abruptly and hid his face in his bandanna. His chest hitched twice, and Sam could see his throat locked against a sob. Then he wiped his eyes again and stuffed the bandanna briskly into his back pocket.

“So now you know why I took you two to Des Moines today, and why I would have taken you to New York to pick up those two books if that's where you'd needed to go. It wasn't my treat; it was Dave's. He's a special sort of man.”

“I think maybe you are, too,” Sam said.

Soames gave him a smile—a strange, crooked smile—and opened the door of Dawson's Buick. “Well, thank you,” he said. “Thank you kindly. And now I think we ought to be rolling along if we want to beat the rain. Don't forget your books, Miss Higgins.”