Dead Ball (13 page)

“It’s a postcard,” Moss said, coming out of the bathroom with his Dopp kit and seeing Harvey. “That’s what white folks liked to do. They’d lynch a black man, take a few snapshots for souvenirs or send ’em to their friends and relatives. Sometimes you had a huge crowd in suits and hats, looked like an old-time baseball crowd, except they weren’t watching any game. You gotta love those guys in the foreground, don’t you? They’re just having the time of their lives.”

Moss swept a few vitamin and supplement bottles off his bureau top into his arms and dropped them in the suitcase. “I’ll tell you an interesting story about that one. The story goes that that dead man there told the mob just before they murdered him to please make sure his wife and young son were sent a copy of the photograph he knew they were about to take of him, so they’d know what happened to him. Seeing as some of the lynchers actually knew the man—he’d done some yard work for a couple of them—they obliged him and made sure his family received the picture you hold in your hands there. I always think about him sliced up and ready to have his neck snapped, and he looks at that redneck photographer and probably says, ‘Mister, jes’ please make sho’ you send one of them pitchers to my wife and my boy. Any one of these men here knows where they is.’ I just know he said, ‘Please.’ ” Cooley blinked.

Harvey looked at the image in his hand, a terrible message hurled across time.

Moss grabbed it out of Harvey’s hands. “That one there happened in nineteen-thirty-three. You know who the Scottsboro Boys were, don’t you?”

“They were a bunch of black teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women on a train. One of the landmark events in American racist history.”

“Nineteen-thirty-one,” Moss said. “They were convicted again and again in kangaroo trials before all-white juries and spent many, many years in prison, mostly under death sentences, often near the execution chamber where they could hear other men die. At one of the trials the attorney general of the state of Alabama referred to the defendant in court as ‘that thing.’ In his presence. The Communist Party’s defense of them put the Communist Party on the map in this country, although the hero, the boys’ defense attorney for many of the trials, was a Jewish lawyer from New York hired by the Commies who wasn’t a Commie himself by a long shot. Samuel Leibowitz. Anyway, charges against four of them were finally dropped in ’thirty-seven, more than six years after they were arrested. Another four were finally paroled in the mid-forties. The last one escaped in ’forty-eight.”

“Moss, I’m impressed.” Harvey had read Marshall Levy’s copy of the
Sports Illustrated
piece on Cooley during the game, and nothing in it—the youngest of six children of a steelworker and school librarian, the scholarships, the reputation for hard work and aloofness—nothing had suggested this.

“Don’t patronize me. I grew up in the state that put those innocent black boys behind bars and slowly sucked the life out of them. It’s in my blood, Bagel Boy.”

“I’ve been around ballplayers my whole life, and I’ve never heard one of them show any real interest in American history. They barely show interest in
baseball
history. There was nothing in
Sports Illustrated
about your historical interests.”

“You think I’m going to talk to the Chihuahuas about this shit?” Cooley said, packing three pairs of expensive slip-ons. “Now, this picture here?” He held it up to Harvey again. “In thirty-three, two years after their arrest, a judge—an Alabama judge—set aside the second conviction of one of the Scottsboro Boys, Haywood Patterson, and ordered a third trial. This riled up a lot of the good white folks, a black ‘rapist’ ”—he set the word off in verbal quotation marks—“escaping the chair for the second time, and in their frustration they started lynching other blacks left and right all over the South during the summer and fall of ’thirty-three. This one took place not too far from Scottsboro itself.”

The bedroom window blinds were swept by the headlights of a car and Harvey moved quickly to the window and peered out between slats at an SUV that turned into a driveway across the street.

“This picture goes where I go,” Cooley said. “Just in case I slip up and forget who I am. I don’t need a fuckin’ lawn jockey to remind me of that.”

Harvey left Cooley to finish up his packing and went downstairs to check the first floor and yard for any unusual noise or activity. All was quiet on the Cranston front. He settled into the BarcaLounger, turned on the reading lamp, and began going through Cooley’s hate mail.

“You cock suckin coon you make me sick”; “stupid fuckin’ nigger kinky-haired Cooney”; “How many spears can a spearchucker chuck? Who the fuck cares? Just watch your nigger ass if your ever in Memphis”; “First you jigaboos take over basketball and football, now we got niggers even in hockey and a half-breed nigger stinking up in golf why dont you get out of baseball before you get hurt and I mean hurt”; “your lower than whale shit you piece of turd. What is it like to look at yourself every day and see that you are the color of shit?”; “What do you expect from someone who never had parents a crow just shit on a rock and the sun hatched you”; “You are one uppity junglebunny I saw you innerveiwed on ESPN and you obviously think you are smarter then the rest of us when you are another big lipped coon, may you rot in hell with that other coon, Martin Luther Coon”; “You are good reason to bring slavry back”; “You are a mother fucker because I am sure you fucked your own mother.”

Moss Cooley’s hitting streak had reopened a poorly healed wound, and it was oozing the same old primordial racist sludge, unchanged since the beginning of time, seeping out of cities and towns across the country. It was as though the words didn’t really belong to the individuals who wrote them, but to a flaw in human nature itself. How else could you explain the fact that most of these disgraceful letters were proudly signed and came in envelopes with return addresses—Covina, California; Junction, Texas; Indianola, Iowa; Gastonia, North Carolina; Hudson, Ohio; New Kinsington, Pennsylvania; Springfield, Illinois; Broomfield, Colorado; Newport, Rhode Island?

Cooley came down the stairs with his bag, an emigrant in his own house.

“You good to go?” Harvey asked, stacking the hate mail and putting the rubber band around it.

“Do it to it.”

Suddenly there was a sound just outside the house, a repetitious beat moving closer. Before he could even think about it Harvey had his .38 out of his belt. “What’s that?” he whispered to Cooley.

“Shit, man, what’s
what
? What’re you talkin’ about?”

“That.” The regular beat was getting closer, approaching the door.

Cooley listened for a moment, then stood. “Shit—that’s Kevin dribbling his basketball back home from the lighted courts. He lives two doors down.”

The doorbell rang, a two-note chime.

“I’ll get it,” Harvey said. He was at the front door now, back pressed against the wall next to it. “Who’s there?”

“It’s Kevin. From down the street. Is Mr. Cooley home?”

“Are you alone, Kevin?”

“Yeah, but I can come back another time.”

“No, it’s all right, Kev,” Cooley said, advancing out of the shadows. “Give me a second to turn off the alarm system.”

“Hey, Cool!” Kevin said excitedly from behind the closed door. “You were awesome tonight. I watched it on the tube.”

“One second, Kevin.” Cooley’s fingers flashed over the alarm system’s keypad.

Harvey holstered his gun and opened the door, letting in the muggy night. Kevin was a gangly teen, cradling a worn basketball, with a teenage boy’s standard-issue acne-mottled face. He wore a FUBU jersey and baggy cutoffs. He stood on the stoop, sweating heavily.

“Hi. I’m Kevin Lovick.”

“I’m Harvey, one of Moss’s friends.”

“Hey, Kev, whassup?” Cooley said, knocking fists with him across the threshold.

“Three-for-four! You’re crankin’.” Harvey knew the kid would be talking about having been Moss Cooley’s neighbor for the rest of his life.

“Thanks, man.”

Harvey said, “You haven’t seen any strangers or strange cars in the neighborhood, have you?” The teenager shook his head. “Listen, Kevin, would you do Moss a big favor?”

“Absolutely!”

“Moss is going to be away from the house for a few days, so I was wondering if you could keep an eye on the house for him. You know, especially at night. Let us know if you see anybody casing the house. Take down a license plate number, that sort of thing.”

Kevin looked at Moss quizzically. “But you guys are just beginning a home stand.”

“There could be a field pass in it for you,” Cooley said. “Hang out with me at batting practice.”

“Awesome.” Kevin was glowing. “Sure.”

“How’s the jumper coming? You keeping that right elbow in?”

“Absolutely.”

“Good. Well, listen, Harvey and I have a little business to attend to, so I’ll dig you later, okay?”

Harvey found a scrap of paper in his pocket and wrote down his cell phone number on it. “This is what you call if you have any news.”

“Awesome,” Kevin said. “Thanks!” He bounced the ball once excitedly on the front stoop before dribbling off into the darkness.

In the Subaru, on the way to Exeter, a light steamy drizzle began to fall. Harvey set the wipers at a slow interval.

“I don’t know if this streak’s worth it,” Cooley mumbled.

“Well, Moss, having set no records of my own in my brief career, I’m really not in a position to give you any advice on that. All I can say is, on the one hand, I understand it’s no fun feeling like your life’s in danger. On the other, you just don’t want to give up too quickly on a chance to be known as the man who did the impossible.”

“What’s this?” Cooley said, picking up a videocassette off the dashboard.

“Oh, that’s a documentary I thought we could watch in our new home. Seeing as how we’re going to have all that time on our hands.”

“When It Was a Game,”
Moss read off the label.

“Might appeal to a man with your sense of history. Speaking of which, Moss—before, remember when you were telling me that the lynchers knew where their victim lived because he’d done some yard work for them?”

“Yeah?”

“How’d you know
that
?”

Moss Cooley let the wipers complete their arc before answering. “Because he was my granddaddy.”

I
T WAS TWO IN
the morning. Upstairs slept a man whose grandfather had been murdered and strung up, and who was now one of the most recognizable and revered figures in the country. Only in America, Harvey thought bitterly, sipping some pilfered cognac on the downy sofa the last occupant had left behind.

The rain had kept up, troubling Harvey with the cover it provided for other sounds. Despite the newly installed motion detectors and pressure mats, the loaded .38 lay on his stomach. It had been a while since he had ventured into the land of physical peril, and it was hard to relax. He felt like talking to Mickey, but a call at this hour would probably wake her out of some much-needed sleep. He dug a pack of Export A cigarettes out of his knapsack—the pack was a week old and still half full—and lit one. He sat and smoked, thinking of nothing. That was a cigarette’s charm—it offered a brief dopamine-charged release from rumination.

When he stubbed it out, he began thinking again—about how his first career, baseball, had chosen him. He had chosen his second, private investigation, without at first understanding why. Later, knowing that some of life’s biggest decisions echoed the obscure mandates of childhood, he wondered if he hadn’t laid the groundwork as a boy, when he turned out to have a gift for finding errant baseballs hit into the woods that lay beyond the outfield of his school playground. As he and his friends grew older, and stronger at bat, no game was complete without several balls disappearing into the dense foliage that acted as a short center-field fence. His skill was in greater and greater demand. He had a sixth sense for what had been lost. His gift, though, was complemented by a sense of responsibility to find the ball, whether or not he had been the one to hit it. He took a profound pleasure in it. It wasn’t simply that baseball was always more important to him than the others and so he was willing to assume responsibility for keeping the game going; it seemed, in some deeper sense, to be his job to do what was necessary.

“Oh, let Blissberg find it,” one of the Orlowsky twins would say, happy to have a breather, perfectly content to move on to the day’s next activity. They’d sit on the scruffy grass and watch their skinny friend, whose father would often treat them to submarine sandwiches at his Italian restaurant after their games, as he jogged single-mindedly toward the trees. With his preternatural talent for gauging the trajectory, direction, and speed of a baseball, Harvey would fix his eyes on a point in the forest where he figured the ball had settled. And it would be there. Or nearby, underneath some trillium leaves, behind a fallen branch.

One time he came out of the woods after an unusually difficult five-minute search, only to find that everyone had gone home, leaving him alone with a smudged Rawlings ball and his own strange intensity.

He heard Moss walking above him now, padding to the bathroom in the strange house, unaware that they had something in common. They had both lost family to hate. Harvey’s own great-grandmother on his father’s side, and her daughter, who was his grandmother’s sister, and
her
diabetic husband and two children had been taken to Auschwitz by the Nazis. But there was no photo of their death to keep the horror fresh. In post-World War II America, among Jews who had come long before the war, the Holocaust was not a daily touchstone of racial agony; by the time Harvey began to understand what had happened, the unthinkable events had disappeared behind a scrim of history. Once in a while—even at Fenway, during that brief eternity between pitches—the upstage lights came on, revealing the carnage, and he was shocked, but the shock would end abruptly, like awaking from a bad dream of falling to one’s death. Harvey felt stranded at one end of an impossible contradiction.