Parker Field (2 page)

The doc said he’d look in on him later.

“Don’t worry,” he said, in an almost-human show of sympathy. “He’s in good hands.”

I’d barely gotten back in the room when I heard Peggy down the hall, being loud.

“Les Hacker,” she said, using her outdoor voice. “H-A-C-K-E-R. Am I going too fast for you?”

I retrieved her before they called security. Awesome Dude was with her, looking almost as stoned as Peggy. At first I didn’t recognize the other guy and then realized it was Jerry Cannady, Peggy’s neighbor and Oregon Hill’s official pain in the ass. I figured Peggy must have been really desperate to get here in a hurry.

I thanked Jerry for driving them to the hospital. He grunted something like “you’re welcome.” I don’t guess I ever apologized for threatening to pinch Jerry’s head off and shit down his neck last year after he made such a fuss about Les’s increasingly erratic behavior. Maybe I’ll do it later. Apologize, I mean.

Abe Custalow, my corenter at the Prestwould, came and got us when it was time to go. When we left the hospital, Les was “resting comfortably.” Peggy looked about as close to crying as I’d ever seen her. I had to convince her that staying by his bedside all night might not be good for her health or his, that he needed to sleep.

My mother has bid soon-to-be ex-husbands adieu with no evident regrets beyond wondering how we would pay the rent. (Usually, she could pay it better without them.) But I know Les is the one she doesn’t want to get away. Even now, even while he isn’t always sure where he is or where he’s going, he adds some kind of crazy stability to my mother’s house, perhaps because he’s the only one there who isn’t always stoned.

Theoretically, Peggy and Awesome Dude could go off the wacky weed and be a lot more dependable than Les. Theoretically.

A
FTER
I dropped them off, promising that we’d go back again today, and every day, as long as it takes, I went back to the office and wrote my story.

“He’s your mother’s, what, boyfriend? Jesus,” Sally Velez said. “How old is your mother?”

I told her Peggy’s as old as she’ll be some day, if she’s lucky.

“Do you think they’re still … you know.”

I told Sally to mind her own business.

I dropped by the hospital later, but Les was sleeping. I sat and watched him sleep for a couple of hours, then went home. I heard Penny Lane Pub call my name as I drove by, but for once I ignored its siren song. I’ve only recently become entitled to drive our streets again for anything other than work, fallout from my having been apprehended by our finest last year while trying to drive back from Penny Lane to the Prestwould, eleven blocks west, on an eastbound street, then spectacularly failing a sobriety test.

Chuck Apple had volunteered to cover for me on cops last night. His reward, I see in my morning paper that whacked against my door sometime after five, was a double-homi on the South Side. There’s only a short on it on B1, which means it happened after ten, but Chuck probably had to spend half the night sending out tweets and Facebook postings and updating the tablet version of our creaking, wheezing rag. I owe him one.

The suits are sure the tablet is the answer, that we can get the suckers—er, readers—to pay to read us on their iPads and such, since they sure as hell aren’t going to pay for our website after we’ve given it away for free there for more than a decade.

Putting stories on the tablet requires a lot of extra typing and clicking and dragging. They probably could train monkeys to do it for bananas, but the brain trust would rather have professional copy editors and night editors do it, giving them less time to—what’s the word I’m trying to think of? Oh, yeah: edit.

Enos Jackson says he would like to give tablets to the suits. Cyanide.

Les’s shooting is above the double-homi on B1. This is partly because the double-homi happened late, but partly because Monroe Park is more or less on the Virginia Commonwealth University campus and Les is white.

I drive over to Oregon Hill. The weather, fickle as ever, has turned from late winter to full-blown spring overnight. Along Laurel Street, the camellias are blooming and the trees seem to have turned into a yellow-green canopy, shading the sidewalks their roots are slowly destroying. Everything looks better on a warm day, I guess, although Les’s condition is a cloud that kind of mocks all the beauty.

I see R. P. McGonnigal’s Jeep Cherokee parked in front of Peggy’s. With Jerry Cannady spreading the word, I’m sure everyone on the Hill knows about Les by now.

I give my old friend a man hug and thank him for stopping by. Several neighbors have brought over various casseroles and baked goods, which Peggy and Awesome seem to have already tucked into. A banana pudding seems to have been decimated, hapless victim to the munchies.

“What the hell happened?” R. P. asks me.

I tell him I’m damned if I know. Yesterday, the cops were still trying to figure out where the shot came from. After that, maybe they can tell us who would want to try to kill, or at least maim, a 79-year-old ex-minor-league catcher and roofer who, to my knowledge, didn’t have an enemy in the world.

Out Peggy’s front window, two kids who should be in school are walking up Laurel, throwing a baseball to each other as they go, keeping a desultory eye out for traffic.

“This would be a great day to take in a game,” R. P. says, knowing full well that we both have other responsibilities. “Birds are home. Afternoon game. We could be there in time to have a couple of Nat Bohs at one of those little bars next to the stadium …”

“Stop it.”

It is a perfect day for what McGonnigal suggests. The notoriously inaccurate weather page we run in the paper said seventy-five degrees and sunny, and it looks like maybe we got it right for once. If Les weren’t in the hospital, I swear I’d call in well, get in the Cherokee and be off to Baltimore.

R. P. sighs.

“Yeah, I know. We must be a couple of old farts. We wouldn’t have thought twice, a few years ago.”

“Maybe twenty years ago.”

“Aw,” R. P. says, “not that long. When did we go to Bo Brooks for crabs that time, in the middle of the week, day kind of like this, maybe a little later in the year, then scalped those tickets down the third-base line?”

I tell him I think it was 1995.

“See? That was just … Shit, seventeen years ago. How did it get to be 2012?”

I tell him I don’t have a clue. It did seem like we used to get away once or twice a year to see the Birds, and the less planning involved, the better. It was like throwing down a flag on the top of Mount Don’t-Give-A-Shit and laying claim to the youth that all logic indicated had passed you by like a runaway freight train.

“One of these days,” I tell him. “We’ll do it again, I swear. Soon.”

“Well,” R. P. says, looking at his watch. “If you’re going to pussy out on me, I guess I’d better get my ass to work.”

R. P. works for an ad agency. I can’t remember which one, because it’s a different one every time I see him. He’s smart and I’m guessing pretty valuable, but an ad agency might be a less stable place to work than even a daily newspaper newsroom. The wind shifts, and twelve people lose their jobs.

I walk him to the door. He’s already in his Cherokee when I remember I should have asked him about his latest “friend,” partner, whatever. The idea that R. P. McGonnigal, bosom friend of my misspent youth, is playing for the other side kind of throws me sometimes. I hope it doesn’t show. Shit, I just want for R. P. what I want for just about everybody. I want him to be happy.

The only neighbors who are still there leave. I go into the kitchen, to help Peggy wrap things up and refrigerate anything that might spoil.

“Damn,” she says, as we do a little triage and figure out what has to be either pitched or sent home with me, “you’d think somebody died.”

As she says it, there’s a little hitch in her voice. I put my arm around my mother and tell her everything’s going to be all right.

Awesome Dude, who has been down in his English-basement living space and appears to have even showered and shaved, comes in and awkwardly puts his arms around both of us. On a normal day this nice, Awesome would have headed over to the park or gone down to the river to reunite with old acquaintances who haven’t been as fortunate as he has. Stepping back and watching him comfort Peggy, though, I’m thinking that my mother has gotten more out of her generosity than just somebody to smoke dope with. Awesome has a roof over his head when he wants one, and Peggy has somebody to share her pain.

B
ACK AT
the hospital, Les is in and out of consciousness. It’s hard to tell how much of it is just Les and how much is the work of some of our more potent pharmaceuticals.

He thrashes about a bit, and a lot of what he says is incoherent. But then he’ll look up at Peggy and tell her everything’s OK, that he’ll be home before she knows it.

The doctor comes by while we’re there. He’s still playing it pretty close to the vest, afraid to promise more than he can deliver. It’s OK for me to assure my mother that Les will be all right. If I’m wrong, nobody will sue me for malpractice.

Les is still not quite clear on what happened, but then neither are we. I’ve checked with the police, and they’re still trying to figure it out. The Richmond cops have plenty to do above and beyond figuring out how somebody almost got killed. There are plenty of successful homicidists out there. This one will get some attention, though. Most of the bullets that hail down on our fair city do not land in an area frequented by college kids.

Peachy Love, my favorite police flack and occasional whoopee partner, says they’re still working on the angle of trajectory and all that bullshit. One thing she said, though, got my attention.

“This is totally off the record, Willie,” she said. “You can’t print this. You can’t even talk about it, or my ass is in a sling, and I’ll never talk to you again.”

Not being able to talk to Peachy Love again would be a great loss to me. I promise, crossing my heart and hoping to die.

“It looks like it came from somewhere up high. It’s not that easy to figure, and these guys aren’t geniuses, but what one cop told me was the investigators think the perp must have been shooting down at the victim.”

“What direction?”

“That one they’re sure of. The shooter was to the north of him.”

There are a couple of high-rise dorms just down the street, but they’d be a little out of range. Unless the bastard was perched in a tree, there’s one tall building, all twelve stories of it, just to the north of Monroe Park.

The Prestwould.

Chapter Three   

S
ATURDAY

T
he chairs they provide for hospital visitors are made to encourage short stays. The one I’m sitting in is the least comfortable of the two Les’s room has been allotted. Peggy has the one right beside the bed. Every fifteen minutes or so, I use one excuse or another to take a walk.

Les is hanging in there. He’s not the same old Les, though. The disorientation, the drugs, the damn trauma of being shot are all working against him. He thrashes around. He complains a lot, and I’m not sure I’ve ever heard Les Hacker complain before this. He pretty much knows who we are, but when Peggy and I look at each other, and we’re sure he’s not looking at us, I am certain that we do not brim with optimism.

It’s a ten-minute walk to the nearest nicotine zone, so I’m doing more walking than sitting. I think I’d rather walk ten miles than spend an uninterrupted hour in a hospital room.

Out on the deck, it’s turned cooler again. I’m tucked into a corner, out of the wind, when I hear my name being called.

“Willie! Hot damn, don’t you know that shit’ll kill you?”

I stub out my Camel and greet the tireless Jimmy Deacon. Jumpin’ Jimmy Deacon. He actually refers to himself that way sometimes, in the third person. He’s done it ever since Buddy Hicks, one of our sports writers, called him Jumpin’ Jimmy in a feature story probably twenty years ago.

The nickname fits. Jimmy must be seventy-five now, and he’s still working as much as they’ll let him. Or can stand him. Jimmy would make the Sphinx jumpy. He has, since I’ve known him, had the energy level of a hummingbird. Unfortunately, he also has the brain of one. He’s had one job or another involving Richmond and baseball for his entire adult life, none of them paying for much beyond his rent and groceries. In what he calls the off-season, between the end of the minor-league season and spring training, he referees, he keeps score at high school and small-college basketball games. He even worked as a stringer for the paper for a while, covering prep basketball, until someone realized that Jimmy couldn’t read and write very well.