Parker Field (5 page)

He’s not laughing now.

“What is he doing here?” he says now by way of greeting.

The lieutenant tries to explain that I’m a relative, that this is all off the record. Gillespie slips into the kitchen, trying to make his fat ass invisible.

“I don’t care if the victim was his got-damn daddy!” L. D. says, going into full James Earl Jones mode, bouncing up and down as he gets in the lieutenant’s face. “Nothing’s off the record with this son of a bitch. Get him the fuck out of here.”

The chief doesn’t even look at me as I leave.

I
PICK
up Peggy and Awesome Dude and take them over to the hospital. On the way, I give Peggy the news that Les seems to have been shot from the very building where I sleep, in the currently vacant apartment three floors up.

“The Prestwould?” she asks. “Those rich bastards don’t go around shooting people.”

“Rich bastards” is the way Peggy sees my fellow owners and renters. To her, the place seems like the Taj Mahal, with its Oriental carpet in the lobby and full-time staff. I have told her more than once that the place is full of widows on fixed incomes.

“Well,” she said the last time we had this discussion, “I bet it’s fixed a lot better than mine is. Social Security doesn’t fix it too high, I can tell you that.”

I assure my mother that the police are on top of it, that they’ve got the weapon and it’s only a matter of time until they find out who shot Les.

“I hope they find out why, too,” she says. I have to agree that I’m also kind of short on possible reasons.

“Ought to string the bastard up,” Awesome adds.

Yeah, I agree. They should.

At the hospital, I’m surprised the nurses can’t smell the marijuana that permeates my mother’s clothes. The way they look at her, maybe they do. But she and Awesome are both more or less straight.

We don’t have that much to talk about. Normally, I see Peggy once every week or two. Being together every day for several hours has already emptied the shallow reservoir of chat we might have been storing up.

Peggy mainly sits and holds Les’s hand, talking to him when he’s coherent and knows who she is, otherwise just sitting there. The TV is on, but she doesn’t seem to be focused on much of anything.

I asked her once, years ago, why she and Les never married.

“Honey,” she said, “I don’t want to jinx it. Me and husbands don’t have such a track record, you know?”

I know. The best adjective you could affix to any of my three stepfathers would have been “negligent.” There were days I prayed for negligence. Oregon Hill in those days was a place where putting bread on the table—even if it was from the past-due-date store—gave you permission to administer tough love to kids, sometimes without the love.

Now, with the best man in her checkered adult life doing no better than “hanging in there,” my mother looks old. It’s all relative, I guess. She’s almost seventy, and she’s long had a weather-beaten look that she earned wrinkle by wrinkle. But she’s always been lively, even when she was stoned. Now, though, her natural high-beam energy looks like it’s down to about the level of a night-light.

I’m about to take my third smoke break in the last two hours when Jumpin’ Jimmy Deacon, whose voltage has not been diminished in the least, comes vibrating into the room.

“Hey!” Jimmy says, jolting us out of our torpor. “How’s the old Hacker doing? Ready to catch both ends of a double-header?”

Les opens his eyes and smiles at the sight of his old friend.

“Might need to warm up a little,” he manages.

Jimmy dives into a discussion about the Flying Squirrels, whose home opener is on Thursday.

“The Rats look good,” he says. “Got some talent coming up. Got some arms.”

“Rats” is short for “Tree Rats,” which is what Jimmy and other old-timers call the Double-A team that is Richmond’s latest minor-league offering. Even the sports department balks at the tendency to name minor-league ball teams like they’re characters in a Saturday morning kids’ TV show. The sports guys have motives that are more selfish than aesthetic, though. The problem they have is that you can’t get “Squirrels” into a one-column headline. Management has not yet approved using “Rats” in heads, as in “Rats/edge/Sens/in 10.”

The Atlanta Braves pulled their Triple-A team out of here three years ago. They moved it to an Atlanta suburb, and we got demoted to Double-A.

You could see the train wreck coming ten miles away, but nobody put on the brakes. The city and the surrounding counties don’t play well together on a good day. The counties owe most of their growth to white flight, leaving the urban centers to stew in their own juices in a state where it’s almost impossible for cities to incorporate an inch of suburban topsoil. Parker Field evolved into The Diamond back in 1988, the previous time the parent club gave us a fix-it-or-lose-it proposition. Richmond and the counties buried the hatchet and built a new stadium together, but they didn’t bury it forever, or even deep.

This time, the shakedown came in the midst of what feels like more than just a recession if you’re not a trust-fund baby. When tax money started drying up, regional cooperation was the first thing to go. Several plans failed, some cooked up by greed heads who saw a way to make a buck with blue-sky schemes that promised a hell of a lot more than they could deliver. The city had no money, the counties pleaded poverty, and the R-Braves packed up and left.

It took about two minutes for the Giants to agree to move their Double-A team here from some beaten-down northeastern city with bigger problems than ours, and now we are the proud host city of the Richmond Flying Squirrels.

The kids love the mascot, Nutsy, and I guess that’s the whole idea. I just hope they still love him when they’re old enough to actually know the rules of baseball.

And, of course, the Giants brain trust already is harrumphing about the fact that we’re not stepping lively to build them a new stadium.

If it weren’t for the game itself, I’d have stopped following baseball a long time ago.

The Diamond does need a major makeover. It was built on the cheap and was (and still is) in need of either major renovations or dynamite. A chunk of concrete had been known to fall on the upper deck, although not, so far, on anyone’s head. The visitors’ locker room should be shut down by the health department.

“I think Nutsy’s neat,” Awesome offers. Jimmy just stares at him, speechless for once.

Jimmy and Les start talking about the old Vees. Jimmy does most of the talking. I’m afraid he’s wearing Les out, but the old guy seems as animated as I’ve seen him since he was shot.

“Remember the time ol’ Roy Haas told Rabbit Larue to just go up there without a bat and try to get a walk?” Jimmy says. “Rabbit was about oh-for-June, and he was in the on-deck circle.”

“Yeah,” Les says, so low you can barely hear him. “Rabbit was pissed.”

“Guy before him strikes out, and there’s still runners on first and third, two out. Haas is hitting behind Rabbit.”

“How do you remember this stuff?” I ask Jimmy.

“Oh,” Jimmy says, tapping his skull, “Jumpin’ Jimmy don’t forget nothin’. I got a pornographic memory.”

“So then,” he continues, “Haas says, 'Hey, Rabbit. Just leave the bat back here. Work him for a walk.’ ”

He and Les crack up, although the effort makes Les wince.

Jimmy’s wheezing, he’s laughing so hard.

“So Rabbit turns around and charges Haas. He’s got a bat, and so does Roy, who’s got to outweigh him by fifty pounds. They look like The Two Mousketeers out there, like two kids sword fighting. I don’t think either one of them made contact, which was about par for the course for Rabbit.

“The umpire didn’t know whether to shit or go blind—excuse me, Ma’am. Finally, old Trent Julian—hell of a manager, old Trent was—he walks out of the dugout, spits a big wad on the field and says, 'Hey, ump. Throw ’em both out. I’m sick of ’em.’ ”

“Funniest thing was,” Les says, in about the longest sentence I’ve heard him speak in the last four days, “Rabbit went four for four the next day.”

“Three for four,” Jimmy says, and Les yields to his superior knowledge of the 1964 Richmond Vees.

But Les knows something that Jumpin’ Jimmy doesn’t, pornographic memory and all.

“It’s too bad about old Roy,” he says.

“What?” Jimmy asks him.

“Heart attack. He died back in 2008, I think it was. Him and me exchanged Christmas cards every year. The only one I still kept up with. Him and Rittenbacker. And he’s gone, too.”

Jimmy fills us in on Jackson Rittenbacker.

“The Ripper,” Jimmy says. “Him and Haas and Whitestone were about the only guys we had that year that could get it past the warning track. I didn’t know he was gone, too. What happened?”

Les is starting to fade.

“I think he drowned,” he says, and then he lies back, and I suggest that we let him get some rest.

“I’ll be back soon,” Jimmy says, grabbing his hand so hard that I’m afraid he’ll dislodge the IV line. “We’ll talk some more. Remember Frannie Fling? You can’t talk about ’64 without Frannie coming up.”

Les opens his eyes and then shakes his head. And then he’s asleep.

I walk Jimmy back out to his car. I need a smoke break.

“So Haas and, what, Rittenhouse, they’re gone, too?”

“Rittenbacker. Hit fifteen home runs and struck out 138 times. Had a hole in his strike zone you coulda drove a truck through.”

I’m thinking Jimmy’s maybe an idiot savant, rather than just the first part.

“But, yeah, if Les said they’re gone, they’re gone. That’s a shame. We’re all getting old.”

Not that old, I’m thinking. A thought sprouts in the arid landscape of my brain.

“It’d be interesting to do something on the old Vees. Readers eat up that whatever-happened-to stuff.”

Jimmy snorts.

“Sounds like you better find some that’s still above ground.”

He’s getting into a Chevy that looks like it’s about one oil change from antique status.

I thank him for coming.

“Aw, it ain’t nothing.”

And then he tells me how Les, back when he ran a roofing company, paid most of Jimmy’s hospital bills one winter when Jumpin’ Jimmy had to have an emergency appendectomy and found out his health insurance with the team ended with the last out the season before.

“Les,” he says, “he’s a prince. I couldn’t get him to take a cent for it. Must have cost him thousands, even back then. He’s like that fella in the Bible, the good Sammerian.”

“Samaritan?”

“Whatever.”

“Oh,” I ask Jimmy as he gets the Chevy to start on the third try. “Who was that you mentioned there at the end? Frannie somebody.”

Jimmy shakes his head.

“Frannie Fling. Her real name was Frances Flynn. That’s kind of a sad story. Maybe you can get Les to tell you that one when he wakes up. Whoa. Look at the time. Gotta go. Ain’t got but four days to get that field ready.”

And with that, Jumpin’ Jimmy drives away. Through the exhaust fumes, I can see his head bouncing up and down, like a life-size bobblehead doll, like he’s listening to some music that the rest of us can’t hear.

Chapter Five    

M
ONDAY

B
uford “Bootie” Carmichael is sitting back fat and comfortable in his plush chair, talking too loud. Both the chair and Bootie dwarf their smaller, more streamlined peers. The other sports writers, who look like they all got together and ran a 10K before breakfast, are sitting in the ergonomically correct, cheap-as-shit chairs the company provides. As with raises, the suits are minimalist when it comes to office furniture.

Bootie’s chair isn’t standard issue. He picked it out and had it delivered to the sports department. Anyone who knows Bootie is pretty sure no money changed hands in the deal. The week after he ensconced his butt on his new throne, he wrote a column about how comfortable it was, praising the store that “sold” it to him. Bootie has been doing business like that since before I came to work here.

He’s at least thirty years older than any of the other five reporters, three male and two female, who share the sports department with him this morning. I can’t help but notice that the young lions’ conversations tend to be very businesslike and to the point. Bootie, on the other hand, likes to ramble. Two of the other reporters are plugged in to iPods.