Parker Field (11 page)

T
HURSDAY

“W
hat the hell is an Altoona Curve?”

Jimmy Deacon is only being academic, or as academic as Jumpin’ Jimmy ever gets. He’s been aware of the Curve for at least the last two seasons. That’s when Richmond got bumped down to Double-A because of our dilapidated stadium.

The Diamond was built on the cheap. When it replaced Parker Field, the old stadium was as past due date as a Christmas wreath in March. Even in 1985 dollars, eight million wasn’t much, and you get what you pay for. A hurricane blew part of the roof off. The outfield developed a sinkhole. A damn chunk of concrete the size of a football fell onto the stands. It might have hit someone, if the team had been more popular at the time.

The thing is, if you go to the stadium, it doesn’t look like such a bad place. The corn dogs are still tasty. The seats are wide enough, and there’s a little holder in front of you where you can put your beer. Most of the sight lines are good. Even if you don’t know diddly about baseball, it’s a nice place to take the kids and let them scream like banshees, usually right in my ears, until the tykes tire out around the seventh-inning stretch and are carried out draped over their fathers’ shoulders like bags of ketchup-stained cement.

The worst parts of The Diamond, where they figured nobody would notice a little corner cutting, are hidden away from the general public. Tops on that list would be the visitors’ locker room. The home team’s quarters are no prize, but nobody in the metropolitan Richmond area gives a damn how claustrophobic, mildewed and rat infested the visitors’ digs are.

But, hell, the place still looks OK to me. When did it become accepted wisdom that baseball stadiums don’t last as long as some Hondas?

Richmonders don’t exactly have the high ground when it comes to goofy nicknames. Even in a league littered with SeaWolves, Baysox, two kinds of cats (Fisher and Rock) and, yes, the Curve, the Flying Squirrels stand out. Their bug-eyed mascot seems designed for the pre-K crowd, and it’s hard to get a half inning in sometimes between all the PR stunts.

But the carnival acts do get people out to the ballpark. That’s something. And the baseball’s pretty good. A lot of these guys will bypass Triple-A, which has become kind of a retirement home for utility infielders, and go straight to the bigs.

It’s opening night, and my companions are Jimmy Deacon and Cindy Peroni. Cindy certainly elevates the style and attractiveness of our party by quite a bit. Plus, she seems to know the history of most of the Squirrels. Between her and Jimmy, I have an overload of horsehide trivia pouring into each of my ears, sometimes simultaneously. I nod a lot.

I
T’S BEEN
a busy day.

In the wee hours of the morning, when I should have been closing down Penny Lane, I got most of the rest of the sad story of the 1964 Richmond Vees. Using my pedestrian online research skills, usually employed only for Internet porn, I found Boney Bonesteel, Rabbit Larue and Buck McRae. Or, rather, I found out what happened to them.

Paul Bonesteel was thirty-three years old in 1964, playing out the string like Les. He hit .255 with ten home runs in the last year of a career that was only exceptional in that 99.9 percent of us guys who started out with big dreams in Little League never got anywhere near Triple-A to begin with.

He was smarter than most of the Vees, which made him, no doubt, a tall midget. But he had a college degree and, apparently, he had a pretty good career as a stockbroker, which started before he retired from baseball. And then, one spring evening in 1993, he was standing at a commuter rail station in the Long Island suburbs, perhaps after having a few pops at his favorite bar after a hard day ruining our economy on Wall Street. He was making a connection and evidently was alone at the platform when he lost his balance and fell in front of an incoming train. It was not, I’m thinking, an open-casket funeral.

In the news story I dredged up, Bonesteel’s brother said Paul was a happy guy with a wife and two kids who loved him. He was going to retire that year. He also said he had the best balance of anyone he knew and could hold his liquor “like a champ.”

There was no evidence of anyone seeing anything out of the ordinary before Bonesteel did his swan dive onto the tracks.

Rabbit Larue was the classic good-field, no-hit second baseman. Like Bonesteel, he never made it to the majors. Unlike Bonesteel, he didn’t seem to have a great fallback position once he realized baseball wasn’t going to love him back.

Information was scarce, but I did learn that he returned to the north Georgia town where he grew up. He was only forty-eight years old in 1990, when he disappeared. Whatever work he did after he retired from the game wasn’t worth mentioning in the obituary. In the photograph, he looks worn out.

The obit said he was hiking a stretch of the Appalachian Trail near his home, something that was listed as one of his passions. He would go out for three or four days sometimes, his daughter said, and refused to let anyone know where he planned to go.

“He’d just say he was going walking,” was her only quote.

I couldn’t find any mention of his body being found. Actually, there wasn’t any mention of anything about James “Rabbit” Larue anywhere in the ether after he disappeared. He was just gone.

I did find a live one. Buck McRae is still among us, or at least he was as of about a year ago. He lives in or near Fayetteville, North Carolina. He seems to be having a pleasant dotage, according to a feature the paper there did on him, with a loving wife and six kids, all still alive and living near him. There was a video accompanying the story.

As of a year ago, Buck still had his hand in the game, helping coach one of the American Legion teams. The hook for the interview was Jackie Robinson Day. The reporter asked him all kinds of stupid-ass questions about what it was like to be an African-American playing in 1953, when Buck signed a big-league contract and got sent to Brunswick, Georgia.

“We weren’t African-American back then,” McRae reminded the reporter. “We were colored, and that was on a good day. And there wasn’t many good days.”

What I read about and saw of Buck McRae, I liked. He appeared to have as many smile creases as frown wrinkles. I see on my map that I can get to Fayetteville to talk with him in a little more than three hours.

It’s a pretty sorry list I’ve come up with. The 1964 Richmond Vees starting lineup has mostly retired from breathing.

Opening-day pitcher: Phil Holt died in a holdup in 1985, when he was forty-five.

Catcher: Les is still with us, for now.

First baseman: Jack Velasquez is the only one I haven’t been able to track down. He’d be seventy-five if he’s still alive.

Second baseman: Rabbit Larue disappeared hiking the AT at the age of forty-eight.

Third baseman: Roy Haas died of a heart attack four years ago. He was seventy.

Shortstop: Lucky Whitestone was killed in a hunting accident in 1988. He was forty-seven.

Left fielder: Paul Bonesteel. Crushed under a commuter train in 1993. He was sixty-two.

Center fielder: Jackson Rittenbacker. Assumed to have drowned in Lake Michigan in 2001 at the age of sixty-one.

Right fielder: Buck McRae. Alive and well, at last report.

People die. Eventually, it could even happen to me. But six of the nine Vees starters are dead, and five of those at least did not go gently into that good night. Two were shot, one apparently drowned, one disappeared on the AT and one fell under a train. And, of course, there’s Les, who has not been exactly immune to violence of late.

I have asked Ed Chenowith, our remaining researcher at the paper, to please try and find Joaquin Velasquez, whose last known whereabouts was south Florida. He said he’d see what he could do.

I slept from three to eight, awakened by Kate, who informed me that I could interview Raymond Gatewood today at ten.

“You’re going to behave,” she says, not asking.

“Yes, ma’am. I won’t be packing.”

“Hah. Well, I’m taking you at your word. Gatewood doesn’t know that you’re Les’s, uh, whatever.”

“Almost stepson.”

“Yeah. Well, he doesn’t know, or I doubt he’d be interested in talking to you.”

We agree that I will not try to pinch Raymond Gatewood’s head off and shit down his neck.

I get Andi to agree to take Peggy and Awesome over to the hospital if I’ll pick them up later.

At the city jail, they checked me for lethal weapons. Kate was waiting for me.

“When you see this guy,” she said, “you’ll see what I mean. He’s not competent enough to find his ass with both hands.”

We were taken back to a room where Kate and I sat on one side of a desk, with Gatewood, manacled, on the other.

I have to say, he’s a somewhat scary-looking dude. He’s about six two, with brownish hair that resembles a rat’s nest. He looks amazingly fit for someone who obviously hasn’t been keeping up his health-club dues, but his skin has that dark, leathery appearance you get from living outdoors in the winter. When he looks at you, he doesn’t seem to be really looking at you, but at something a few feet behind your head, like you’re not there, or he doesn’t differentiate between chairs and human beings.

Kate had filled me in a little on his numerous trips to Iraq and Afghanistan and his discharge after he tried to strangle a captain who apparently offended him in some way.

“I think,” Kate said, “that he was basically over there to kill people.”

I observed that that’s kind of what soldiers do in wartime.

“No,” she said. “I mean up close and personal, and maybe not armed combatants, just people somebody thought might be thinking bad thoughts about the United States.”

Well, somebody’s got to do it. But he’s definitely a candidate for a little post-traumatic stress, and I know how diligent the VA has been in getting these guys help, so I was thinking, yeah, this definitely is a son of a bitch who’d shoot somebody from the ninth-floor window. For him, it’d be a fucking nostalgia trip.

But I promised Kate I’d hear the guy out, have the hanging after the trial.

“Why won’t they believe me?” he asked my ex-wife.

I was thinking, why would they? You still were wearing the same dumb-ass jacket you had on when you shot Les.

“Tell him about the coat,” Kate said.

He didn’t seem to know at first what she was talking about. And then he did.

“Oh. Yeah. Like I’m lying there on my bench, tryin’ to catch some rays, get out of the wind, you know? And I feel something hit my legs. I figure it’s those damn college kids, fucking with me again. One of these days… ”

“The coat,” Kate said, interrupting.

“Oh. Well, I look down and there’s this package balled up there at my feet. Some guy’s walking away. I yell for him to come back, that he’s dropped something, but he’s moving pretty fast.

“Then I unwrap the package, and there’s this coat. It was a little small for me, but, hey, beggars can’t be choosers.”

When he smiled, I could see that he was missing a couple of front teeth.

“So,” I asked him, seeing Kate’s look of annoyance at my breaking in, “what did you do with the wig? Why not wear that, too? It’d keep your head warm, maybe.”

He looks at me like I’m speaking Swahili.

“Wig?”

“Wig. The one you wore when you shot Les Hacker.”

Maybe I said it with a little more heat than I meant. Maybe that’s why Kate kicked me.

“I don’t know anything about a damn wig. I don’t know what you’re talking about, man. And I didn’t shoot nobody. I did all my killing over there, protecting you pussies. And I didn’t have to use a damn rifle every time, either.”

Gatewood said he wore the coat a couple of days. Then, out of nowhere, “a bunch of mean cops threw me to the ground and kind of fucked me up.”

He pointed to the missing teeth.

“They’re goin’ to have to get me a partial plate,” he said. “And then I’m gonna sue their asses.”

He put his cuffed hands on the table. He looked like he wanted to rip them off and mess somebody up. I wasn’t sure he couldn’t do it.

“Get this straight,” he said. “I didn’t shoot anybody. Man left me a coat, and I was glad to get it. If I knew all the shit that was going to come out of this, I’d of run the bastard down and made him take his coat back.”

I asked Gatewood if he got a look at the man.

“Nah, just his back. He was just some guy.”

We talked some more, me mostly trying to get him to slip up and admit that he knew about the wig, but my heart wasn’t in it. If he was dumb enough to wear the same jacket he used for the shooting, in the damn shadow of the Prestwould, from Thursday to Monday, it seemed highly unlikely that he would be smart enough to pretend he didn’t know anything about the wig.

When I asked him how he got hold of the key, he seemed equally adamant about his ignorance.

“C’mon,” I said. “You know you took the key out of that vase and opened the door with it.”

“I don’t know anything about any fucking key, and I don’t know anything about any fucking vase. You people are crazy.”

We were winding up when he pointed to my finger.

“VCU grad?” he asked.

I told him that, yes, I was. An alumnus in good standing, good for twenty bucks a year to the mass comm school, come rain or shine.

“Me, too,” he said.

Raymond Gatewood then proceeded to tell us what I can only assume he hadn’t told the cops yet. He was class of ’05, majoring in history.

“But, then, you know, I thought it wasn’t right, not doing my part. I’d hear these big mouths, talking about how we ought to go over there and kick bin Laden’s ass and blast ’em all back to the stone ages, and it kind of made me sick. I thought, if you’re not going to do it, don’t talk about it. So I did it.”

I know what he means. We do have an overabundance of alligator mouths and hummingbird asses in the land of the free.

Gatewood rubbed his forehead. He looked tired.

Kate asked him if he was OK. He said he had a headache.

“Some days,” he said, “I’m good. Some days, I’m not. Just the way it is. They say they’re working on better drugs, but I tell you, all they do is make me sleep.”