The Next Time You See Me (23 page)

What Stefany could perhaps grasp least about the life of an athlete was how important that fraternity became to you. Tony had grown up an outsider—black in a white town and a white sport—and though he had been popular at RHS, it was a popularity that did not always hold up out of school or off the field. Tony could feel comfortable around his white teammates and their white girlfriends, but the minute he showed up at one of their houses, sat down at the dinner table with their white mothers and fathers, he could sense a static charge in the air between them. It wasn’t always rudeness, though sometimes it was; and once, unforgettably, a father had instructed him in a low, steady voice, “Get the fuck off of my property.” But in some instances, Tony sensed, if anything, that his white hosts were treating him with more care than they did the other young men at the table—passing him food first, agreeing too emphatically with his opinions. And while this was certainly preferable to the rudeness or the outright menace of those other situations, he could not escape the belief that what he was witnessing was a careful staging, after which, in his absence, his hosts’ real selves would emerge. Why else would Jake, whose mother
had insisted so enthusiastically that Tony “come back soon, dear,” never invite Tony over again?

The team was different. He was one of only two black men playing that season, but Tony felt he had more in common with the lot of them, black and white, than he’d ever had with anyone back home—even his own family. How could his father, with his stoop and his soft middle and his job as a custodian at the nursing home, ever know what Tony knew? Who but Tony’s teammates would understand, not laugh, if Tony admitted that he sometimes felt a spiritual connection with the ball? They played together—not always harmoniously, often in the face of petty jealousies, but even those jealousies were welcome to Tony. It seemed to him only natural that a man could resent his swing, though he still could not fathom why a man would resent his skin color.

A lot of them were poor kids from nowhere, like Tony. Like Tony, they had their heads filled up with major league dreams of money and fame and women (though there was never, even in the minors, any shortage of those). Was it a wonder that they were all bad boyfriends and husbands? They gave their best, truest selves to the game and to each other, and so the women, in the wake of that, were interchangeable: objects toward which to direct their pent-up sexual energy, the occasional reminder of softer domestic pleasures. And though Tony had tried hard with Stefany, had stayed with her long after one of his teammates would have moved on to the next girl, he had to admit to himself, watching her cry and rage that day in the kitchen, that his only true allegiance was to his team, and what he was getting from Stefany he could get, and had gotten, from a dozen other girls. He could see in her face that she knew it. This was the irony: she was angry, and she wanted to go through the motions of punishing him, but she needed him more than he needed her. She would not be the one to leave, Tony realized, and so she could mock him all she wanted for saying that thing about the life of an athlete, but her every action only proved him right.

“I need to know that this won’t happen again,” she said finally,
breathless. She had halted her zigzagging progression behind the kitchen peninsula, and she uncrossed her arms and put the palms flat on the countertop. “Tell me this won’t happen again, Tony.”

“It won’t,” he said. The necessary lie. He wasn’t even sure why he said it, since he found that it didn’t matter much to him if his relationship with Stefany continued. But she was a habit, effortless, and it was better to tell her what she wanted to hear than to force her to acknowledge the obvious: that this thing between them was temporary, that she would not be following him to the majors, that he wouldn’t be her ticket out of Bluefield. As it turned out, he wasn’t even his own ticket—he blew out his back moving a big-screen television, his first major adult purchase. It had taken him another two years to pay off that TV, time enough to weather two surgeries, a year of physical therapy, and the realization that he’d never be well enough, or young enough, to play again. The TV still sat in his living room. The picture hadn’t been right since he dropped it that fateful day ten years ago, but he’d be damned if he didn’t get his money’s worth out of it.

2.

Now, here he was: Tony Joyce, detective in a town of ten thousand people. He was thirty years old and renting a one-bedroom apartment in a complex on the edge of town. He thought occasionally about buying a nice little house—he could afford a ranch in one of the town’s middle-grade subdivisions, or he could get an older home near the library and start putting some work and money into it—but buying here in Roma would be the final admission of defeat, the final acknowledgment that he’d given up not only on all of those major league dreams but on the minor league ones, too: the dream of living somewhere other than this town, of making a name among people who didn’t know his previous glory and couldn’t measure him by it. In towns like Lexington or Louisville or Nashville, he knew he could ascend quickly among the ranks. He was educated—one thing he
did do right was return to college part-time to finish his degree—and capable, articulate. His two years in Bluefield would be interesting trivia, the kind you wanted your low-level politicians and car salesmen and fast-food franchise owners to have. Here, if he were to run for sheriff—and he thought about it a lot; Timothy Coe had all but promised to step down after finishing out his current term—he would be fighting a battle against his blackness as much as any opponent, and it would be high school all over again, the smiling, tense faces and worried murmuring the minute his back was turned. He didn’t know if he could do it. If it could be done.

But there were certain inescapable facts to consider, like his mother and father, who still lived in Roma and who were both in poor health and who would, he suspected, live with gaping holes in the walls of their house if he didn’t happen to see and fix them. It wasn’t as if his brother and sister were any help. Or perhaps it was just the fact of his own cowardly heart—for he’d once felt certain of his prospects, had seen them as his due, and what he had learned was that nothing was his due.

He was on his second cup of coffee and his fourth ibuprofen, trying to watch a Saturday-morning cartoon (something jerky and neon-colored with screechy, obnoxious characters—this is what kids liked?), when he realized that it was going to be a Darvocet day, after all. He tried to lay off it, especially when he had real detective’s work to do, and he usually succeeded. But the pain, which never receded entirely, liked to step forward occasionally and announce itself.
Tony! Here I am! Did you think you were rid of me finally?
Yes, the pain had become sentient: it was a character, an arch-nemesis, with a voice not unlike that of the characters on this cartoon he was trying to watch on his damaged big-screen TV. Yes, he thought, just like that fellow with the huge pink eyes and ears and the mouthful of jagged teeth; the pain was
gnawing,
that was the right word for it. On the good days, it annoyed him—made it hard for him to find a comfortable position in bed, protested when he leaned over to pick something up. On the Darvocet days, it would not be ignored; it put sharp fingers into his
lower back, sent tremors even into his hips and shoulders. The scar from his surgery felt as if it were glowing with heat, and indeed, each time Tony checked it in the mirror, he was surprised anew by the shiny vein of it: a darker black on the normal days, an itchy red on the ones like this. He downed one pill, thought about it, and swallowed another.

They were starting to take hold a half hour later, as he was pulling his unmarked cruiser in at the Fill-Up and scanning the lot for Susanna’s car. The pain was calling at him from such a distance now as to not even be audible, and a beautiful calm had settled over everything. It was like wading hip-deep through clear, still water. He backed into a parking spot—a habit so ingrained that he never even registered doing it anymore, or remembered the reason he started—and felt a tremor, a ripple in the calm, as he realized that Susanna was there already, standing in front of the gas station and waving to him. He lifted a hand back. She was wearing jeans today, and her long hair, not held in place with a band or barrettes, was lifted in a gust of cold wind. She kept trying to comb it into place with her fingers, and he could see through the windshield and even through the fog of his medication that she was nervous, a nervousness that had as much to do with him, he knew, as with the information they hoped to gather today. He grabbed his satchel from the passenger floorboard and started across the parking lot.

“Good morning,” she said. Her smile was broad despite the nature of their outing, her cheeks bright with cold.

“Hi there. Ready for this?”

“As I’m going to be.”

“OK,” Tony said. He unzipped his satchel and removed a notebook and pencil. “Having you here with me isn’t quite protocol, so hang back and let me do the talking, even if there’s something you really want to say. Just save it up and tell me later.”

“Got it,” Susanna said. She was close enough to him that he could smell her clean scent: not perfume, nothing strong, but soap, maybe shampoo. Her dark hair was tucked behind a small, round ear. He
could remember the day he’d drawn that ear, the feel of the rough paper beneath his fingertip as he had smudged a shadow, softening the curve. It had occurred to him over the years, when he chanced to think about that semester and his misguided, misplaced affections, that he had thought it love because he had drawn her, and to draw a person that way was intimate, almost a transgression.

The convenience mart inside was like most of them, smelling of burned coffee and old frying grease, the fluorescent lights overhead harsh and unforgiving. He approached a woman at the food counter and put on the serious but reassuring expression that he’d found was most effective in these situations, especially with potential witnesses. People could be guarded around cops—suspicious. They thought that you were out to get them. At least this woman wasn’t white; Tony hated trying to win over the old, poor white folks.

“Ma’am, I’m Tony Joyce, with the police department. I let your manager know I’d be coming by.”

“That’s right,” she said. She glanced between him and Susanna, who was waiting by a rack of snack crackers, and transferred a handful of fried chicken from a stainless steel pan to a warming tray. She was a very small woman with her graying hair in a net, and she looked like she was probably in her late sixties—an age when a woman ought to be able to retire, Tony thought, not work the night shift at a gas station.

“You’re Patricia Williams? You were here on late evening of October twenty-third, morning of the twenty-fourth?”

“That’s what Mr. Highland say. What the timesheets say, he tells me.” She turned the pan over and dumped the crumbs on top of the pile of chicken.

Well, this was off to a promising start. “Do you have any recollection of that night at all? Anything that would set it apart from another?”

“I guess it was the evening I worked midnights. I only work midnights when Lana has her grandbabies for the weekend.”

“OK, great,” Tony said. He flipped the cover on his notebook over.
“I’m going to show you a photograph. What I want you to do is think about whether or not you recognize the person, that’s all. And if you do, tell me how you think you know her.” He slipped Ronnie’s photo out of the pocket on his notebook cover and handed it across the counter. Mrs. Williams took her plastic glove off and pinched the photo by the very corner, as if she was afraid of smudging it.

“Yeah, I saw them that night.”

Tony sensed Susanna stiffening behind him. “Now, take your time,” he said, pencil poised. “What do you remember?”

“I’d seen her before. I think she works at the sewing factory—they come over here at shift changes.”

“But you said ‘them’?”

The old woman nodded. “She had some man with her. Some older white man. They bought food and beer.”

Tony scribbled all of this down. “This man. What can you tell me about him?”

Mrs. Williams shrugged. “I hardly looked at him.”

“But you could see he was older. How much older?”

“His fifties, maybe,” she said. “He kind of hung back, like she’s doing.” She nodded toward Susanna. “I didn’t get a good look at him.”

“What kind of build did he have?” Susanna blurted out. She glanced apologetically at Tony, then bulldozed forward. “Thin, fat? Tall or short?”

Tony had to restrain himself from hissing at her. He waved Susanna back and patted the counter, trying to get the old woman’s eyes on him. “Mrs. Williams,” he said. “Back to me, ma’am. We’re not trying to rush you. I just want you to take your time. Don’t push yourself to remember something you don’t.”

“He was overweight,” she said decisively. “I remember that much. And taller than the woman by a good bit. She was a little-bitty thing.”

Tony glanced at Susanna. “Ronnie’s two inches shorter than I am,” she said sheepishly. “Five foot.”

“When you say overweight, what do you mean? Can you be a bit more specific?”

The woman put her hands out in front of her, as though she were pregnant, or Santa Claus. “He was pudgy but not great big. Had a stomach on him and a round face.”

“OK, great.” Tony wrote some more down. Then he stopped and thought. He wasn’t sure if the idea he had was a good one or a bad, but he paged forward in his notebook to a clean sheet. “Susanna,” he said. “Grab me a couple of magazines from off the rack there, would you please?”

She seemed eager to fulfill the request, as though it might make up for the fact that she had spoken after he asked her not to. “Here you go,” she said, putting a
People,
a
Newsweek,
and a
National Enquirer
on the countertop. Tony set the
National Enquirer
to the side right away, then paged through the others. He found two photographs, one in each magazine, and put them side by side. The first was of a sitcom star, a big, heavy man with a face that had probably once been handsome before all of his high school muscle had turned to fat. The second photograph was of a British politician whom Tony had never heard of, a man with sagging, doughy skin and a ruddy bulb of nose. His hair, blondish and thin, was brushed raggedly across his forehead. Tony, operating from instinct, had chosen the men not for their features so much as their feel. One seemed vigorous and confident in his weight, the other defeated—pathetic, even.