Frag Box (20 page)
With Eddie Bardot snatched off the street, Wilkie was able to persuade Frank Russo to come back for his trial, after all. So the twenty-five thou I had taken out of Charlie’s box, the first time I was in the tunnel, was pure gravy. I was back to playing with the house money. I gave Agnes her back pay and a week in advance for good measure. I didn’t have the five K that the feds took, of course, but that was okay. They left town with Eddie in cuffs, just as happy as if they had good sense. He, presumably, was not so happy, and that was worth something to me.
Not long after that, there was an obituary in the
Kansas City Star
for a Colonel John Rappolt. Apparently he had done what a lot of self-important career officers do when they see their entire world fall apart. He had shot himself. So even though Charlie said he didn’t care, I figured that all the shadows from his personal jungle were finally gone.
I wasn’t sure if mine were, though, and I needed a detached, third party perspective to straighten out the issue. One morning, I headed north out of the Twin Cities, then crossed the St. Croix River into Wisconsin and went east on Highway Eight, across the recently harvested farmlands and into the brown and black late autumn countryside. I was going to a place that I visit seldom but think about often, all the way across Wisconsin and into Upper Michigan. Redrock Prison is its name, and it was where my uncle Fred was doing his fourth term for bookmaking.
After the usual pleasantries, I told him all about Charlie and his box and how I wasn’t sure I had done enough truly to lay him to rest.
“Lemmie tell you a story, nephew,” he said.
“Okay.”
“Back about forty years ago, there was this guy, name of Eddie Feigner, was the fast-pitch king of softball. He could throw a softball, underhand, a hundred and twenty miles an hour, so fast the ref couldn’t even see it. He was just the pure stuff, couldn’t be beat.
“He was too good to play with any regular team, so he used to play traveling exhibition games, like the Harlem Globetrotters did in basketball. He traveled with just three other guys, a catcher and two fielders. They didn’t need any basemen, see, ‘cause Eddie would strike everybody out, but they had to have four men on the team so they had enough people to bat with the bases full. They called themselves ‘The King and his Court.’”
“I seem to vaguely remember something about them.”
“Yeah, I think I might have taken you to a game once when you were little. Okay, so anyway, here’s our boy, at the end of the ninth inning in some nowhere little town. He’s up by one run and there’s two men out and he’s got two strikes on the last batter. But he don’t throw the ball. Instead, he’s pacing around on the mound, looking worried. So the catcher goes out to talk to him.
“‘Hey, man,’ he says, ‘we’re one pitch away from winning this thing. Throw it, already.’
“‘I gotta tell you,’ Feigner says, ‘I ain’t got nothing left. My arm is shot. I’m not sure I can even get the ball to the plate, much less throw a strike. I think we gotta concede the game.’
“So the catcher thinks for a while and comes up with a plan. ‘Gimmie the ball now,’ he says, ‘and I’ll hide it under my chest protector. Then I’ll go back to home plate and you pretend to throw the ball, like always. I’ll whack the ball into my glove like I just caught it, and we’ll see what the ump says.’
“So that’s what they do. Feigner fakes throwing the pitch, the catcher fakes catching it, and the ump yells, ‘Stee-rike! Yer outta here!’
“And all of a sudden, all hell breaks loose at home plate. The batter is screaming at the ump and kicking dirt on his shoes and the ump is pushing him with his chest and they’re both gesturing with their hands and getting red in the face. The catcher wants nothing to do with any of that, so he walks away and goes back out to the pitching mound.
“‘What’s going on?’ says Feigner.
“‘Ah, you know,’ says the catcher. ‘Same old, same old. The batter thinks it was low and outside.’”
I laughed. “Cute, Unc, but what’s the point?”
“It’s not done yet, okay?”
“Sorry.”
“So a year or so later, they’re playing the same team again, and the same batter comes up in the bottom of the ninth. This time Feigner’s arm is fine, but he throws the guy four balls, walks him. So the catcher goes out to the mound.
“‘What the hell are you doing?’ he says.
“‘Paying for my sins,’ says Feigner.
“‘Yeah? Gee, Eddie, that’s really nice. That’s a fine thing to do.’
“‘Thank you,’ says Eddie.
“‘You’re welcome. Don’t do it anymore.’
“And he didn’t.”
And neither did I.
Minnesotans will be quick to note that I have taken some liberties with both time and place settings. Most of the Saint Paul settings are real, including the abandoned tunnel under Kellogg Park, but anybody trying to locate Lefty’s Pool Hall or Nickel Pete’s pawnshop will find himself on a fool’s errand. The Ramsey County Jail moved from its location on the Mississippi River bluff several years ago, but in Herman Jackson’s world, it is still there and always will be. It lets him keep his office downtown. The Iron Range is largely the way it was fifteen years ago, when I used to spend a fair amount of time there. Today, there is almost no trace of the original town of Mountain Iron. The bus station in Eveleth is a real historic reference, though it, too, is now gone. I got off at that station once in May, and the piles of plowed snow were still higher than the parked cars. The VFW bar is pure fabrication.
With history, I have been more scrupulous. The events that triggered the 1967 race riots in Detroit are well documented, and I have not altered them. My scenes in Vietnam are largely composites of the many stories told to me over the years by coworkers or classmates who were there.
The characters, of course, are another matter. If they bear any resemblance to anyone living or dead, it is a matter of pure coincidence, and nobody would be more astonished to discover it than I.
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