King of the Corner (23 page)

“I didn’t know the Marshals had that kind of money.”

Needles and Sylvanus laughed. It was almost as loud as the synthesizers had been. Needles carried his beer through one of the doors, leaving it open behind him. A moment later clothes started flying out into the room: suits and shirts and leather jackets, silver Windbreakers and silk blazers, flocks of knits, schools of sharkskins, herds of ankle-length fur coats. Eelskin boots and Italian shoes with buckles and pointed toes, Reeboks in every color and size from nines to double-digits like basketball players wore, Nikes for muddy days, patent-leather pumps for evening in a town that had no nightlife. In a couple of minutes the rug was covered, colors splashed all over like a light show. Needles came out in a pair of red bikini underpants, pulling on an Adidas T-shirt and swilling Stroh’s, kicking clothes. “I growed up on Mt. Elliott,” he said. “Sylvanus was Erskine. Summers we went barefoot. Winters—winters was big; then we got to wear our brothers’ shoes that didn’t fit them no more. I was twelve the first time I seen anybody wearing a suit and tie outside of television. He axed me for directions. You got a father?”

“Just barely,” Doc said.

“I never did. Sylvanus didn’t neither. Yarnell’s old man been locked up in Marquette since Yarnell was six. Creed’s old man bust his heart working at Ford’s. Closest thing I ever had to a father called himself Fly. He said he seen
Superfly
twenty-six times. He was fourteen when I met him, had him a green Testarossa with blocks tied to the pedals because he couldn’t reach them with his feet from behind the wheel. You could cut your finger on his lapels. Cash? Used to give it away in handfuls like hard candy because he said the bulge broke up the line of his suit.”

“Glittered when he walked, huh?”

“Yeah. Yeah!” But he didn’t get the reference. “When the sun come out and hit his rings that boy shined like a new car. Oh, Fly was something to see.”

“Was he selling crack?”

“No, that wasn’t around so much then. He was dealing that Mexican brown heroin. Trouble was, so was somebody else, and they couldn’t get together on who was to do his dealing where. One day this old rusty piece-of-shit El Camino come round the corner on Mt. Elliott and sprayed metal all over. Fly got one in the neck, he bled dry before the ambulance ever come. They hit a little girl, too, and my best friend, Jimmie. The doc at the free clinic pried the bullet out of his leg, Jimmie carried it around for a good luck piece.”

“What about the girl?”

“Oh, she was meat before she hit the sidewalk. That’s what done it, you know what I’m saying? I mean to me.” Needles had selected a pair of jogging pants with a silver stripe on one side from the pile on the floor and paused as he was stepping into them. “It wasn’t them clothes or the rings or that car of Fly’s. I figured if the same bullets that done for him didn’t know any better than to do for that girl too there wasn’t no sense in nothing. So I might as well have the clothes and the rings and the car.”

He pulled up the pants and tugged his T-shirt out over the elastic waistband. “Let me tell you something about that El Camino. I was there and I seen it coming for just the longest time, like it was just hanging there. Floating, you know what I’m saying? Fly and that little girl, they never seen nothing. If you can see it coming, don’t worry about yourself. It ain’t for you.”

Doc remembered to look at his watch finally. “I better go. Ance expected me back a long time ago.”

“Tell him thanks. We be around in a week or so and square up.”

“I was wondering about that. How come if you’ve got so much cash you couldn’t put up your own bail?”

Needles stuck a bare foot inside a Reebok Blacktop and sorted through the pile for its mate. He was grinning. “That’s the thing about cash. One day you got more of it than you got pockets to put it in. Next day it’s just gone. Clean up all this shit, will you, Sylvanus? You could lose a woman in here.”

“M
OM, WHY DOES GRAMPA
take his food out of his mouth after he chews it?” asked Sean.

“Shhh! He’ll hear you.”

Which was a total lie. The old man was getting deaf, and he always ran the water in the bathroom sink full blast when he used the toilet, forgetting to turn it off afterward. Doc, seated with the others at the table, could hear him bumping around in there.

“But why does he?”

“Because he doesn’t have enough teeth to chew it thoroughly,” Billie said. “You won’t either, if you don’t brush often enough.”

“I bet he brushed all the time. I bet he brushed them so much he wore them all out and that’s why he can’t chew anything. Right, Doc?”

“Uncle Kevin,” corrected Billie.

“Right, Uncle Kevin?”

“Nice try, kid,” Doc said.

The boy grinned and attacked his corned beef and cabbage. Sean had been opening up lately, and it seemed to his uncle that the boy was losing weight, or at least that his weight was losing ground to his vertical growth. He still fooled around with his video games, but as the weather warmed and the days grew longer he was spending more time outside after school. Coming home from work Doc often found him bouncing a baseball off the wall of the garage and catching it in his glove. He was getting to be a pretty good fielder.

When the toilet flushed, Neal got up and pushed the wheelchair into the bathroom and came out a few minutes later pushing the old man. If Sean was getting trim, it seemed to Doc that the boy’s grandfather had become even more of a shapeless blob since his last visit; his chins overflowed his collar and there were gaps between the buttons of his shirt where flesh showed. The flesh was pale and spotted like old cheese. Doc thought it would have that same consistency, and that if he poked a finger into it the dent would remain. He had trouble connecting this inert pile of useless protoplasm with the robust father of Doc’s youth, working with his back sixty hours a week and spending his weekends carrying heavy car batteries up thirteen steps from the basement to sell them to the local junkyard.

Now, watching his sister-in-law bending over the old man’s plate to cut up his meat—meat he would make an unsuccessful attempt to masticate and then line up on the outer edge of his plate in faded pink pellets—Doc felt a twinge of guilt that he was not particularly saddened by his father’s extremity. Doc remembered being closer to his mother, a small thin woman of frontier ancestry with a flair for painting that she might have made into a profession but for marriage to Keith Miller, the third son of a blue-collar family where the women stayed home and the men went out to work and generally exerted themselves to death before they were fifty. But in the kind of gentle rebellion that Doc imagined was typical of her, it was she who had died when her younger son was barely old enough to appreciate her presence. The small stack of watercolors, seascapes mostly, executed in dreamy pastels by a woman who had lived her entire life in a landlocked state, had gone along with her clothes and shoes and sad collection of costume jewelry, given or sold or thrown away by the sort of neighbors who always did the neighborly thing whenever a neighbor was beyond need of them, while Doc’s father submerged whatever he felt—grief, Doc supposed charitably—in boilermakers and fat women with saffron hair and Rexall perfume in the cement-block bar across from the factory where he worked. Neal had had the paternal faith. He was up to his ears in auto shop class learning a trade his father could identify with while his second son was throwing rocks at the hole in the
O
on passing B & O boxcars down at the freight yards, preparing his arm for the Lord knew what—smashing department store windows, maybe. There had never been much to say between Doc and the other Millers.

“See you’re hanging around with nigras now.”

Doc looked up from his meal. His father was staring at him, head turned a little to bring his good eye into line.

Neal looked pained. “His roommate’s TV is on all the time. They keep showing those pictures of you and that Lilley woman.”

“It was just a friendly thing,” Doc said.

“You work with ’em sometimes ’cause you got to. Fuck them if you ain’t got nothing better. You sure as hell don’t go out in public with ’em.”

“Grampa said—” Sean was delighted.

“Be quiet,” his mother snapped. “Father Miller, we don’t use language like—”

Neal said, “Don’t bother. He won’t remember. Eat your corned beef, Dad. It’s tender.”

The old man pointed his fork at Doc. “You know what you get when you shake hands with the devil? You get your hand burned.”

“That’s original,” Doc said.

“Black people and white people go out together all the time now, Father Miller. A lot of them get married. There’s this couple down at the supermarket—”

“That’s for trash. That’s where high yellows come from. I can get along with nigras until one of ’em gets it into his head he’s as good as white. Shake hands with the devil. Get your hand burned.”

Doc excused himself and went out for a walk.

It was a shirtsleeve day, with a touch of humidity as the sun coasted down and a stillness that suggested the stagnant summer days to come. The puddles left over from Sunday’s rain were in remission and would be gone by morning. Rush hour was over, the tinkle and clatter of flatware and crockery and the smells of cooking came out through the window screens as families sat down to dinner. Doc’s footsteps were the only sound on the street.

A new set came up behind him. His brother touched his arm. They faced each other on the sidewalk.

“His mind’s gone,” Neal said. “Half the time he doesn’t know what he’s saying or who he’s talking to. He thought I was Uncle Roy in the car. He’s been dead thirty years.”

“I’m okay. I just had to get out.”

“He won’t be with us long.”

Doc said nothing.

“Billie says some TV people called.” Neal was making conversation.

“Channel Seven,” Doc said. “No, Seven was yesterday. Today I think it was Channel Two. I guess nobody got killed this week.”

“How you handling it?”

“One at a time. I’m doing a talk show next Friday.”

“No, I mean how are you holding up?”

“This is nothing. When I was pitching I did interviews all the time.”

“Then you were a pitcher. Now you’re an exjailbird. Some kind of freak for them to have fun with until they get tired of you.”

“I know that. Don’t you think I know that?”

“So why let them?”

Because I need it. Because if playing ball were all of it, or even half of it, the corner lot would be enough. But if you’ve never had thirty thousand pairs of eyes on you when you were reading signals or using the resin bag or toeing the rubber, you can’t understand.
Aloud he said, “I don’t mind. It keeps me busy.”

“Fuck them. You’re better than them.”

Doc was stuck for an answer. Neal had never said anything like it before. To say it, he would have had to think it, and the idea that he might think that Doc was better than anybody would have been like expecting one of the heads on Rushmore to ask him to reach up and scratch its nose.

The expression on his brother’s face was Rushmore-like. Doc began to wonder if he’d said what Doc had heard. “Still looking for an apartment?”

“I may have found one.” It felt good to be talking again. “It’s in Taylor, back half of a duplex. It isn’t too far to visit. I could catch a bus here for the Saturday game.”

“Need cash?” Neal reached for his hip pocket.

“I’m covered. Would you believe I was walking around with thirty thousand bucks in my pocket yesterday?”

Neal’s hand dropped to his side. Doc could hear the alarm horn. In his brother’s world, too much money was a carcinoma come to the surface. “You’re not getting into something you can’t climb out of?”

Doc laughed. “I spent seven years in a place like that.”

“Quit fucking around.”

“I’m not in any trouble, Neal.”

A breeze came up, freshening the street. A radio clonked on next to an open window, and Ernie Harwell’s voice drifted out like the first green scent of spring. Frank Tanana was warming up at the mound.

“Maybe it’s for the best,” Neal said. “You leaving. Things are getting kind of crowded at home.”

“I guess Sean will be happy to have his room back.”

“He’s
my
son. The last time you saw him he was just learning to walk.”

The harshness startled Doc. Neal’s heavy features were drawn tight, as if someone standing behind him had gathered up a fistful of his scalp and pulled. Doc knew then why they were talking about his moving out.

“He’s a good kid, Neal. You did a good job. You and Billie.”

The tautness went out. His brother nodded. Then his right hand came forward. They made contact. When Neal grinned the years slid off like a veil. “You know what you get when you shake hands with the devil.”

Doc smiled. The contact broke.

“I’m taking Saturday off,” Neal said. “The whole day. So I can umpire.”

“They’re talking about rain Saturday.”

“It wouldn’t goddamn dare.”

They turned around and walked back to the house.

T
HE OFFICE OF PAROLE OFFICER
Peter Y. Kubitski wasn’t shafted for air conditioning. Street noises came through the window propped open behind his desk, but little air, it being mostly static at that level. It was helped along a little by an oscillating table fan of a model Doc hadn’t seen since childhood, and that left over from another epoch, with a green cast-iron base and a stainless steel housing shaped like the nacelle of a B-52. The blades were off pitch, causing the unit to shift its position a fraction of an inch to the left each time the head swung that way. Kubitski was aware of this and without looking up from his desk would reach out to push the fan back to the right just when another revolution or two would have tipped it off the edge of the file cabinet. Doc, who appreciated control, was impressed.

Aside from that he did nothing for Doc’s pulse. Same salt-and-pepper hair teased out at the sides to divert attention from the thinning top, same long white face and crooked nose, same stingy little eyes parked under the mantel of his forehead. It might even have been the same knitted tie and blue Oxford shirt. Doc was sure Kubitski didn’t own two identical mohair jackets. Even hanging on the back of his chair it retained the general shape of his angle-iron frame.