B008J4PNHE EBOK (49 page)

A dark fork of blood leaked from his nostrils. Although his face was wide and rounded, his features were pinched so that even under normal circumstances, he tended to look mildly nonplussed. Currently, his eyes were so huge that they were nearly knocking together. He blinked at his wife’s lover. “I’m in a car in a tree,” he said.

“Are you badly hurt?” asked Sam.

“I’m in a car in a tree.” Jo-Jo made a high-pitched noise. It was not a giggle or a sob but contained aspects of both. “I’m not, you know, super, yah?”

In the five or so minutes since Polly’s husband had attempted to make him a hood ornament, Sam was surprised to find that he was not more surprised—maybe it was shock? His chief sense was of wonder. As Jo-Jo had pointed out, he was in a car in a tree—along with a couch and many fragments of Tom’s house. Also, it was heartening to encounter someone who was an even greater disaster than Sam himself.

“We’re going to get you down,” said Sam.

“Cool!” The man in the car in the tree found this sidesplitting. “I’ll just hang out, yah?” He beeped the horn and flicked his one remaining headlight high-low-high across the treetops.

Mina, who had been silently staring up and pondering the hole in the wall of the house, yawned. “It looks like Mr. Kool-Aid broke through, doesn’t it?”

“It does, doesn’t it,” said Tom. “I haven’t thought about Mr. Kool-Aid in years. Is he still around?”

“Oh yeah, he’s still around,” said Mina.
“Oh yeah.”

“I really feel that we should call the police, or at least the fire department.” Since he had come outside, Booth had yo-yoed sharply between fury and tears.

“No. We’re not calling anyone,” said Sam. What had happened was, at least partially, his fault. Jo-Jo had not been justified, but he had been wronged. If the accident ended up in the papers, it was hard to believe that the Yankee organization would look kindly on one of its employees taking a shortcut through someone’s living room. Add in Sam and Polly’s affair, and the headlines in the
Post
practically wrote themselves:
GOOD GERMAN, BAD DRIVER; THE CATCHER WAS A CUCKOLD; ICH BIN EIN WHACKJOB; AUTOBAHNED! YANKS YANK KNECHT AUF AIR!

Booth rushed at the base of the tree. “Fine! Then why don’t we leave him there! Let him try to survive the winter up there! Let the owls pick his bones!” He whacked the maple’s trunk several times with his cane as if to shake the car loose, like a wasp’s nest.

“You’re going to give yourself a heart attack, Booth.” Tom gently hooked his friend’s elbow and drew him away.

“Hey,” said Sam. “Everybody. Be quiet.” It wasn’t a yell. It was a simple command, spoken clearly and firmly. Adrenaline had its limits. The mess had to be sorted before everyone was too tired. “I need you, please, to be quiet and listen.”

“That fucker tried to kill my son, Tom!” Booth dabbed a piece of his cape at his eyes. He turned to Sam. “He tried to kill you, Sam.” A fragment of yellow leaf had gotten stuck in the old actor’s beard.

“Dad,” said Sam. “I’m okay. I promise. Are you okay?” He spoke to his father as gently as he could. Right then he couldn’t be concerned with
what he had seen in the study; for the sake of everyone, right then he could worry only about what had to be done.

His father frowned, blinked several times, and allowed a reluctant nod. Sam patted him on the shoulder. “Thank you.”

 ■ ■ ■ 

In the next couple of minutes, Sam swiftly directed the members of the crew to their respective tasks.

Mina was charged with gathering up the couch cushions scattered about the backyard. Tom was sent to fetch the two blow-up mattresses that Sam had seen tucked in the coat closet. Booth was told to station himself at the foot of the driveway to intercept any police. It was late, and the house was set fairly far from the road, but it wasn’t inconceivable that someone might drive by, notice the Mr. Kool-Aid hole in the wall, and call the cops.

“What do I tell them?” his father asked.

“You’ll think of something.”

“Hmm,” said Booth. “Very well.”

As soon as his father disappeared around one side of the house, Sam heard shoes tromping around the other side. There was the crumble and slide of dirt and gravel, a baby’s burble, a sneeze.

Tess moved into the light. Behind her was Wesley, and last was Polly, bearing Rainer in a Björn.

“Sam!” cried Polly, rushing ahead of the other two. “You’re alive! For God’s sake, will you please answer your phone the next time my husband is planning to assassinate you? I know it’s partly my fault, I told him this is where I thought you’d be hiding, but as soon as he got all his weapons together, I called to warn you.”

Sam apologized. “I was watching
Blow-Up
with a friend.”

“You were ignoring me, is what you were doing.” Polly threw a surreptitious thumb back toward Tess and winked at him. She mouthed, “She’s so great! Go you!”

The GTO’s horn bleated. “Get lost, whore!” Jo-Jo screamed. “Get away from my tree!”

His wife walked within a few yards of the maple to gaze up and address her husband. “Jo-Jo. Look at you. You’re hung up there like a kite. What are we going to do with you?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Fuck you. You broke my heart.”

Rainer chattered in baby and shook his tiny fists.

Jo-Jo was heard to blow his nose on something. “Hello,
sohn,
” he called down to the child.

Tess touched Sam’s elbow. She wore a puffy green vest, and her black hair was loose around her shoulders. The pebble of a gem at her nostril was flickering between pink and purple, and her mouth was tight. She was gorgeous and perturbed. “I called Wesley, and he mentioned that he was thinking about taking the train up, and I was worried about you, so I tagged along. Our taxi dropped us off just a second after your mistress and her infant pulled in.”

An apology would have been worthless, and an excuse would have been offensive, so Sam was blunt. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said. “I hope you’ll stay.”

“I know you are, and I know you do.” Her tone made it clear that she herself was less sure.

She jammed her hands in her vest pockets and walked over to stand beside Polly. Their talk made puffs in the air. Sam was simultaneously curious about their conversation and relieved that he couldn’t hear it.

“Evening, fuck-snot.” Wesley was wearing a wrinkly red button-down with a frilly napkin thing tucked into the collar. The frilly napkin thing looked like what French kings wore when there were French kings. “What can we do?”

Sam gestured at the napkin thing. “You forgot to take off your bib.”

“It’s a jabot,” said Wesley.

“It’s a bib,” said Sam. “Now go help Tom with the mattresses, and maybe grab an armful of blankets, too.”

“No problem.” Wesley yelled over to Tess to run up to the house and help Tom with the mattresses and to try and find some blankets, too.

 ■ ■ ■ 

By one in the morning, they had the couch cushions and the inflated mattresses laid out to create a crash pad, with blankets and some movers’ quilts from Tom’s garage piled on top. Jo-Jo tested the pad by dropping some objects that he had in the front seat of the GTO: an oversize roll of black garbage bags, a bone saw, and an ornate wooden chest about as wide and deep as a milk crate. All three items were reasonably heavy, thumping down into the plush surface and bobbing up with no problem.

Sam asked Tom what he thought.

“So long as he doesn’t miss, he should live.” Tom was halfway through a six-pack. Grinning, he added, “Probably break his legs, though.”

Jo-Jo, thinking along similar lines, hollered to the people below: “I’m going to get paralyzed!” He had swung his legs around to dangle out the open door. With one hand, he gripped the upper edge of the door, and with the other, he had hold of a branch. The GTO appeared remarkably secure in the clutch of the tree.

The ex-ballplayer’s mood had shifted erratically in the course of his ordeal. His fury at Polly had preceded a sullen period during which he hurled coins from the GTO’s console in an attempt to wing Sam and instead nicked Wesley in the cheek with a penny. Lately, Jo-Jo had become fatalistic. “Get Rainer out of here, yah? I don’t want him to see me die.”

“It doesn’t matter. His declarative memory isn’t there yet. Whatever happens, sweetheart, I promise Rainer won’t remember any of it,” Polly replied, perhaps not as helpfully as she might have. (Rainer was actually asleep in the Björn, drooling, his crown and ears snugly encapsuled in an orange hat with a green stem that was meant to suggest either a carrot or a pumpkin. Either way, it was darling.)

Now, with the extraction nearly at hand, Sam worried that Jo-Jo’s next shift would be into a state of panic. Sam cupped his hands around his mouth and called, “Jo-Jo! I need you to take a few deep breaths, man. You can do this.”

“No, no. You can do this, dude. You can do this, yah? You can jump without a parachute and get paralyzed.”

Sam was tired. His nose was cold, and his body was sore. Wet had seeped through his sneakers and soaked his socks. They were all of them wrung out from running up and down the slope. It was late, time to wrap it up. Sam squeezed his fists and pressed his tongue hard against the back of his teeth.

Tess came to stand beside him. She was regarding him in an expectant way. The arc lights traced violet waves in her hair. Her attention fortified him. Sam nodded to her and redirected his attention to the man in the tree. “Jo-Jo, you’re going to be fine! All you have to do is let go and fall.”

“It’s not so easy, dude!” Jo-Jo was shifting around at the open door, swinging his feet, trying to work himself up to it.

“If you just jump straight, everything will be okay.”

Jo-Jo kicked his legs back and forth and seemed to inch forward slightly. After a few seconds, he visibly slumped. “Ah! Can’t do it, dude.”

Tess groaned. “We’re never getting this Kraut out of the tree, are we?”

“Hey,” Sam called up. “Hey, hey.” He inhaled.

Sometimes you needed what you needed. It wasn’t about you, though. It was about the crew, about all the people who worked to make it possible, and their effort, and their belief in the common goal. The director’s responsibility was to that shared investment. When persuasion bumped up against necessity, the director had to make sure that necessity won. Sam had been wrong to leave Brooks out in the rain all those years before; but he had been absolutely right to whip Wyatt across the face with the rolled-up script.

He made a bullhorn with his hands. “Jo-Jo! Thunder thighs! If you don’t come down out of that goddamned tree in the next three seconds, I am coming up to get you!”

By the last word out of Sam’s mouth, Jo-Jo was flying. Arms spread, legs tucked, his silhouette was awesome, superheroic. He resembled a frog uncoiling. As he fell, his scream lengthened into a screech, then cut off sharply as he struck the crash pad, the resolute thump like the sound made by a hard ball settling into a soft mitt.

 ■ ■ ■ 

Whether because of the dual impacts—the crash and then the fall—or because of the situation in general, Jo-Jo emerged from the pile, deflated. “I see what you did,” he said.

Sam reached out and pulled him upright. “Sorry.” Jo-Jo said it didn’t matter.

Sam walked up the slope alongside Jo-Jo, while Polly ran ahead to put Rainer into his car seat. “You feel all right?” Sam asked.

Jo-Jo said yeah. He’d been in worse crack-ups. “I just want to go home, yah?”

Sam wanted to say something to cheer or divert the man, whose discouragement was made manifest by the heavy sighs that accompanied each step up the hill. It was dicey, though, trying to find the right morale-boosting approach for the person whose wife you’d fucked and who had attempted to murder you. Sam settled for repeating that he was sorry.

“Yeah,” said Jo-Jo. “Me, too.”

When they arrived at the driveway, Jo-Jo lifted a hand in vague farewell to the assembly and, without speaking, accepted the keys to the Knecht family SUV from Polly and climbed into the driver’s seat. Seconds later, the Knechts were on their way home to Westchester County.

That left the rest of them in the driveway, a few yards from the GTO-size opening in the street-side wall of the house. Booth had walked in from the street—no sign of police—and stood propped by his cane. Wesley and Tess leaned against the hood of the rental car. Mina had lugged up the bone saw in its hefty plastic case and taken a seat on it.

“Good job.” Sam’s godfather clapped him on the back.

“You guys ready?” Sam turned to his friends. It was time to split. What he’d needed to do, he’d done, and he didn’t feel it was safe to stay around Booth another minute longer than necessary. Now he was exhausted, but later, Sam thought—and it was a dispassionate realization—when he had more energy, he might feel compelled to inflict an injury on his father. It was best to leave before it came to that. They could find a motel.

Tom spread his hands in a show of dismay. “What’s this? Don’t leave. We’ve got room for everyone. Hell, we can set up a tent in the hole room if we have to. I was going to hang some plastic sheeting to keep out the elements anyhow.”

Sam said thank you, but he needed to be going. “Love you, buddy.” Before his godfather could respond, he wrapped him in a hug.

“Don’t go, Sam.” Mina was seated on the bone saw case. The damp air had smeared her eye shadow into purple blotches. It made her look more than ever like the child he needed to quit thinking of her as.

A stray realization had descended upon him, and it was this: his sister was not the only child of Booth Dolan with a less than admirable tendency for taking drastic measures. Sam himself had been abruptly cruel to Tess and to Jo-Jo, and that was just this weekend. Mina, meanwhile, at least had her age for an excuse.

“I’m sorry about what I said this morning,” he said. “Your mom’s being nuts has nothing to do with you.”

“Okay,” said Mina.

“I’m not mad that you made up that shit about Booth having stomach cancer. I’m not mad that you kicked everyone’s ass. I’ve been pushy, and I’m sorry about that, too. But you do need to calm down.”

“I do?” She picked at her bangs, running her fingernails along the silver strands.