Dead Ball (12 page)

On the second floor he was met by a spindly floor lamp with a fringed mustard shade and a telephone table on which he was hardly surprised to find a rotary-dial telephone. The rest of the floor consisted of three bedrooms, each one smaller than the next, and a bathroom with a shag bath mat and a shower curtain cloudy with scum and mildew.

Almost all the evidence of Cubberly’s occupancy was concentrated in the largest of the bedrooms, overlooking the street. It was the only room that had been altered by his presence, although his additions were few: a Torso Track exercise machine; a set of dumbbells; a CD player and a CD storage tower filled with a mix of rock and country-and-western music; and a king-size bed with a black lacquered metal headboard. Atop the painted pine bureau was a pharmaceutical skyline of Tylenol PM and Motrin bottles, aerosol shaving cream and deodorant cans, and skin cream dispensers.

Whatever Harvey thought he might find as he went through Cubberly’s drawers—white supremacist literature; scissors, tape, and unused letters clipped from magazines; iron dust and a Sawzall—he found only clothes and an X-rated videocassette called
The Better Bosom Bureau,
whose box cover guaranteed that all the women featured within were in possession of their original breasts. He sifted through the detritus: paper clips, receipts, blank stationery, pens, and a roll of first-class stamps. A fistful of Providence Jewels schedules. A rubber mouth guard. A snapshot of an unsmiling brunette and a boy who looked like Cubberly. There was nothing lying around, not a scrap of evidence, to indicate he was still involved in racist groups or activities. An address book, closely examined, might tell a different story, but Harvey couldn’t find one. Cubberly probably had it with him. Perhaps he had told him the truth, that he wasn’t into that shit anymore.

The bookshelves held one surprise: a smattering of serious Civil War history books and novels—McPherson’s
Battle Cry of Freedom,
Channing’s
A Crisis of Fear: Secession in South Carolina,
the eyewitness accounts of Gettysburg by Lieutenant Frank Haskell and Colonel William C. Oates, and Keneally’s
Confederates,
among others.

A bookmark protruding from McPherson’s book caught his attention. Harvey took the volume down and opened it.

It was a chapter, heavily underlined, called “South Carolina Must Be Destroyed,” and it detailed the final Union offensive of the war, in the spring of 1865, after Sherman had completed his “march to the sea,” from Atlanta to Savannah. In February Sherman turned north and began moving his sixty thousand men through one of the last Confederate regions spared Yankee invasion: the interior of South Carolina. Harvey, who, like most aficionados of the Civil War, had read McPherson’s history when it came out in the late 1980s, stood near the bedroom window and read the copious underlinings in the dying light.

“As his army had approached Savannah in December 1864,” McPherson wrote, “Georgians said to Sherman: ‘Why don’t you go over to South Carolina and serve them the same way? They started it’… Destroyed it was, through a corridor from south to north narrower than in Georgia but more intensely pillaged and burned. … The war of plunder and arson in South Carolina was not pretty, and hardly glorious, but Sherman considered it effective. … ‘My aim then was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us.’ …Sherman was confident that the war was nearly over and that his destruction of enemy resources had done much to win it.”

The underlinings continued into the next, and final, chapter of the book, which concerned in large measure the dilemma faced by the Confederacy in the last half of the war: whether to conscript and arm slaves to shore up the South’s faltering prospects. The debate raged in southern newspapers and legislatures. McPherson quoted editors of the day: “ ‘We are forced by the necessity of our condition,’ they declared, ‘to take a step which is revolting to every sentiment of pride, and to every principle that governed our institutions before the war.’ The enemy was ‘stealing our slaves and converting them into soldiers. … It is better for us to use the negroes for our defense than that the Yankees should use them against us.’ ” Conscripting slaves also raised troubling questions about having to promise blacks emancipation in exchange for their fighting. “It was true, admitted the
Jackson Mississippian,
that ‘such a step would revolutionize our whole industrial system’ and perhaps lead to universal emancipation, ‘a dire calamity to both the negro and the white race.’ But if we lose the war we lose slavery anyway, for Yankee success is death to the institution… so that it is a question of necessity—a question of a choice of evils. … We must… save ourselves from the rapacious North,
WHATEVER THE COST
.’ ” A deeper contradiction was pointed out by the
Charleston Mercury:
“ ‘If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong.’ ”

Harvey lowered the book, thinking of Moss’s comment on Cubberly in the car: “I grew up around a million like him. He was probably so poor he was afraid he might wake up black one day.” Outside it was dark now. The chorus of crickets poured in through the screen window. Harvey was almost surprised to find himself in Providence, and in the present.

To alter the human heart was the world’s hardest work. Campy Strulowitz could add twenty points to Harvey’s batting average more easily than a man could learn to see things differently, even for a few minutes. Now Harvey wondered if Andy Cubberly, long after Appomattox, wasn’t somehow still fighting the Civil War by other means.

Harvey was back in Marshall’s skybox by the seventh inning, in time to see Moss’s third hit of the game, a single through the shortstop hole. The Jewels put Baltimore away with three in that inning for an 8—2 victory. An hour later, after Moss had finally extricated himself from the clubhouse tangle of reporters, microphones, and cameras, Harvey whisked him to the players’ parking lot and into one of the rented Subarus.

F
ROM THE SHADOWS OF
the narrow alley that ran like a dingy fissure between two warehouses across from the players’ parking lot, he watched Cooley and the detective emerge from the stadium and walk to an unassuming silver Subaru. Maybe he had overshot with the jockey. He would have liked to have kept it just between Cooley and himself, a step at a time, until he got the message—all he’d wanted to do with the jockey was make the needed impression, cut through the clutter of hate mail without bringing the law into it, it was so goddamn hard to hit the right tone. Like writing condolence letters, he thought, chuckling at the analogy.

Anyway, one private detective didn’t exactly qualify as the law, a Jew no less.

He pulled on his second Seagram’s miniature, keeping just enough alcohol in his bloodstream to take the edge off his alarm. He had come too far to lose it now. Goddamn Ed, going off and dying without a word, his death the first link in the improbable chain of circumstance that now threatened to hang around his own neck. He wanted the chain around Cooley’s.

The important thing was to compartmentalize, that was the key, he’d done it all along and now he just had to keep doing it. At work he had to seem absolutely unchanged, no one could suspect, no one could know. Jesus, what would life be like if you couldn’t compartmentalize? All the bad endlessly flowing into the good and spoiling it? Just like the mixing of the races. Good fences make good neighbors. He sucked on the Seagram’s. Good and bad had to be kept apart, within and without, if it was all in one box you couldn’t make any sense of it. Jesus forgave you for your sins, let you wash them away, not put them in a goddamn box where someone could find them. And after everything he did for Ed’s wife.

The guard was letting the Subaru out of the lot now, the Jew driving and Cooley in the passenger seat with a hat mashed down on his head. He had to laugh, since he too was wearing a hat, a thrift shop fedora, he felt like Glenn Ford or George Raft or somebody in an old thriller. The Subaru turned out of the lot and drove off. He had to laugh at the fact they were in a Subaru instead of Cooley’s Range Rover. He had to laugh at all their wasted effort and motion. This was his power now, to be able to see all the unnecessary elaborations of the fear he had planted.

Like he was going to follow Cooley. Like he wasn’t watching him all the time anyway.

H
ARVEY WAS DRIVING MOSS
out to his Cranston development to get his things before they headed over to the house in Exeter. He took the left fork on I-95 to 95 South. To make sure he had no tail, Harvey got off at the first exit and back on.

“Is that necessary?” Moss asked when they rejoined the traffic.

“Listen, I may not have a forty-seven-game hitting streak, but I know how to shake a tail.”

Moss pulled his hat down lower on his head. “You’re the man,” he muttered.

“I want to put this in just the right way, Moss: There are two people in this car who’d rather not be doing this. You and me. But since we have to spend some quality time together, let’s just make the best of it.”

“You got some suggestions?”

“How do you feel about gin rummy?”

“Don’t press your luck.”

“We could stay up late and tell each other ghost stories.”

Moss snorted. “It beats becoming one yourself.”

“Take it easy. I haven’t lost a ballplayer yet.”

“That’s a big load off my mind.”

They drove on in silence for a while, Harvey working over Cubberly in his mind. If he wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, it was unlikely he would have authored the wordiest death threat in history. Then again, the outfielder had a handful of semi-scholarly books suggesting he still had a hair across his ass about the War between the States. Harvey decided not to bother Moss with his thoughts about the contradictions of Cubberley’s personality. In any case, the odds still weighed heavily against Moss breaking DiMaggio’s record. The odds were still in favor of the jockey being nothing but a harmless eruption.

Moss, as if reading Harvey’s mind, suddenly asked him what he thought the chances were of getting to fifty-six straight games.

“Hell if I know, Moss.”

“It gets less likely, doesn’t it, the longer it goes on?”

“I’m no statistician, but it’s been proven mathematically that there’s no such thing as momentum. The fact you’ve hit in forty-seven straight doesn’t work for or against you. Every game you’re starting over.”

“I could do it, then.”

“Of course, in baseball you’re at the mercy of so many variables.” Harvey was driving through Cranston. “You’ll let me know when to turn, right?”

“I won’t let you down.”

“It’s not like you’re shooting day after day at a stationary basketball hoop that’s always ten feet off the ground. Every pitcher you face is different. The hoop moves to a different place on every pitch.”

“What are you saying?”

“I have no idea. I think I’m saying drink plenty of milk, get lots of rest, and lay off the liquor.”

“And no pokey on the night before a game.”

“Not with me, anyway,” Harvey said.

He drove around the development once, looking for suspicious cars, before turning into Cooley’s white Mediterranean-style mini-mansion with its little comma of a circular driveway. The lot wasn’t big, with woods creeping up within ten feet of the garage, so whoever had left him the lawn jockey’s head had probably parked elsewhere and come on foot.

The decor was that of a man with far more money than ideas how to spend it. Each room had two or three large objects in it and nothing else: a giant flat-screen television and a BarcaLounger… a stationary bicycle, old-fashioned jukebox… a sectional sofa, glass coffee table, and CD rack. There wasn’t a rug or carpet in the place. The house looked like an appliance store in the last stages of a liquidation sale. Cooley kept mumbling as Harvey followed him up to his bedroom, “Man hits in forty-seven straight and has to leave his own home… has to leave his own fuckin’ home.”

Harvey pulled the bedroom blinds shut and watched as Cooley took clothes from his immense walk-in closet and carefully laid them in a giant rolling suitcase he put on the king-size bed. He remembered a
Sports Illustrated
article in the 1970s about Pittsburgh Steeler running back Frenchy Fuqua that showed him in his walk-in, suits in every shade, like a decorator’s color wheel. Cooley’s palette ran more conservatively to blues and earth tones. In the corner of the bedroom was a wicker hamper overflowing with dirty clothes. On the bed lay a copy of
Pro
magazine, a quarterly circulated only to professional athletes, who received it free. Its tiny target audience of about 25,000, most of them millionaires, would find in the current issue tips on investment planning and how to buy extremely expensive watches, as well as an article titled “The Cure for the Common Choke: A Sure-Fire Remedy for Over-Thinking.”

Next to the bed was a laptop computer and a tall stack of paperback books. Harvey had tilted his head to read the titles, mostly thrillers, when he was distracted by an object that Cooley had taken off his bureau and placed facedown on top of some silk shirts. Harvey picked it up, turned it over, had to look twice before he understood what it was.

The old black-and-white photo in a simple frame made from willow twigs showed a young black man, his hands bound in front of him, swinging by the neck from a rope tied to a thick tree branch. The man wore only remnants of his clothes, and on closer inspection Harvey could see that his body was riddled with wounds. The front of one thigh had been filleted open, revealing muscle. Judging from the scrap of clapboard house in the background, it looked like the lynching had taken place in a residential neighborhood. A crowd had gathered, and the photograph’s foreground was swimming with white faces—men, women, and even children. Some of them were gazing up at the lynching victim, some of them looked off, and a few white faces were looking right at the camera. Two men, one in a well-creased hat, smiled guiltily right at the lens.

Above them, his head wrenched back on its elongated neck, twisted skyward, as if looking for God, the black youth dangled, so recently a member of the living.