Going Nowhere Fast (6 page)

"You said you knew who that was?" I asked, turning to Big Joe. He seemed to be in a daze.

"I don't know. It looked like…" He let his voice trail off.

"Who?"

"But hell, that doesn't make any sense. He wouldn't have no business bein' out here."

"
Who?
"

"Dozer Meadows. Left defensive end for the Raiders. Four-time All-Pro, the best in the business."

"The
Raiders?
"

"Yeah." He turned around himself to get Bad Dog's opinion. "Wasn't that—?"

But Bad Dog, who'd been standing in our shadows only seconds ago, wasn't there anymore.

Somehow, I wasn't terribly surprised.

4

Ever hear the expression "A day late, and a dollar shy"?

That's the story of my children, right there. Oh so close to being good kids, yet not quite there. They're always just missing, coming within inches of doing the right thing before drifting off to do the wrong one. They fail by the merest fractions of time, space, and cab fare.

Even Mo. She isn't as bad as the others, no, but she has her moments.

"Now, Mom, don't get excited, but I think I should warn you about something," she said as soon as I picked up the phone. It was as if she were calling me of her own accord, and not in response to the message I had left on her answering machine an hour ago, telling her where her father and I could be reached.

"We know," I said.

"Bad Dog was by my place a few weeks ago, and I think he went through my mail. I'm not sure, but I think he knows where you guys are, and intends to go out there looking for you."

"We know," I said again.

"You know? What do you mean, you know?"

"I mean, your brother's been with us now for almost two days. But thanks for the warning, just the same. It's good to know there's always someone there to alert your father and me to life-threatening disasters that happened to us over forty-eight hours ago, just in case we failed to notice on our own."

"He's already there?"

"Yes, Mo. He's already here. He slipped you a curve and
flew
to Arizona, rather than walk the whole way."

"All right, Mother," my daughter said, no doubt sensing a well-deserved guilt complex coming on. "I'm sorry. I should have called you and Daddy earlier, obviously."

"Don't be silly. You only had two weeks."

"Listen. Are you going to be civil, or do I have to ask you to put my father on the phone?"

"Go ahead. See how much good it'll do you."

We both laughed. We do a lot of that, Mo and I.

"So tell me," she said. "What's he up to this time? Or do I want to know?"

I told her everything, from my discovery of Bad Dog in our closet to the scene involving Dozer Meadows at the trailer park less than two hours ago. Naturally, she interrupted me every thirty seconds or so to ask if I was joking, but overall she took the news rather well. Her initial comment aside, anyway.

"Let me kill him, Mom. Please. I'm an attorney, I know how to get away with these things."

"You're being judgmental, Mo," I said.

"Mother, he's involved you two in a
homicide
this time! That's just a tad more serious than petty larceny, you know."

"Now, Mo, we all agreed we weren't going to talk about that incident anymore, didn't we? Theodore told us he didn't know those encyclopedias were written in Spanish, and the judge believed him."

"The judge threw the case out of court for lack of evidence, Mother. Not because he thought Dog was innocent."

"All the same. Your father and I are not completely convinced he had anything to do with that dead man. He just turned up at an awkward time, that's all."

Mo made a sound conveying one part amusement, three parts disgust, but she didn't pursue her argument any further. She just said, "I think maybe I'd better come down there."

"No, no, no. Absolutely not."

I could see her and Big Joe now, drawing lots to see who would get Dog's clothes after the crucifixion.

"Why not?"

"Because it isn't necessary. Your father and I can handle this ourselves."

"Really? How?"

"By giving him one more chance to tell us the truth. And I mean every word of it, this time."

Sitting on the bed nearby in our hotel cabin, his father towering over him like the sword of Damocles, Bad Dog heard this and turned to face me, sweating king-size bullets.

"And if he doesn't tell you the truth?" Mo asked.

"We'll cross that bridge when we come to it," I said.

She didn't much care for that answer, of course, but I guess I'd worn her down to the point where she lacked the strength to press the issue. She just sighed with heavy heart and asked me for the name and number of the investigating officer who was handling our case for the Sheriff's Department, saying she intended to call him as soon as we were through, just to see how things were going.

"Be polite to the man, Mo," I told her, after I'd given her the information she wanted.

"Yes, Mother."

"None of that 'Touch my parents and I'll sue you into the next Ice Age' business, like you pulled at Lake Tahoe. You hear?"

"I hear you, Mother."

"Dottie, leave the child alone," Big Joe said.

"We can't go back to Harrah's now, did you know that? We used to stay there all the time, did almost all of our gambling there, but not anymore. We can't show our faces at the door at Harrah's now. They hear the name Loudermilk and boom!—everyone turns cold as ice."

"Mom, they were trying to cheat you."

"Out of three dollars and seventeen cents."

"A payoff is a payoff, Mother."

"It was a penny slot machine, Mo."

"Get off the phone, Dottie," Big Joe said.

Having ignored him once already, I decided to feign obedience and did as I was told.

*     *     *     *

"All right, Theodore. Let's have it."

"Have what?"

"Joe, go get me my strap."

"Strap? What d'you want with a strap?" Bad Dog started to laugh nervously. "Hell, you can't whip me! I'm twenty-two years old, I'm a grown man!"

"I don't care how old you are. Long as I'm breathing, any child of mine asking for a good spanking is going to get one. Guaranteed."

"Moms, you're not going to whip me. All right?"

"And just how do you think you're going to stop me? With your father right here in the same room?"

He stopped laughing. He hadn't thought about his father, and his silence proved it. If he so much as raised a hand against me, Joe would make him wish he'd taken his whipping, and liked it. Twenty-two or no twenty-two.

Big Joe turned away from the closet to hand me a wide, black leather belt with a heavy silver buckle. Like me, he was as stone-faced as an undertaker at his own funeral.

"Want me to hold him down for you?"

"All right, hold it, hold it, hold it!" Bad Dog said, showing his father and me the palms of both hands in an effort to hold us at bay. "I get the idea, all right? You want the truth. All of it."

Neither Big Joe nor I said a word. In fact, we didn't move, save for my coiling and uncoiling the black belt around one hand, slowly and methodically, over and over again.

"Okay. Okay. What do you want to hear first?"

"Let's start with this person Dozer Meadows," I said.

"Sure, What about him?"

"You tell us," Big Joe said. "You're the one who took off like a scared rabbit when he showed up at the trailer park this afternoon. Why was that?"

"Took off like a scared rabbit? Me? No way, man. I just went for a walk, that's all."

"Theodore," I said, "you were hiding in the closet again. Remember? We just pulled you out of there twenty minutes ago!"

"Hey, I told you, Moms. I was lookin' for a quarter. I dropped some change on the floor, and a quarter rolled into the closet under the door. So I went in there to get it. All right?"

Big Joe turned to me and said, "As I was saying. Would you like me to hold him down for you, or not?"

"Okay, okay! I was hidin' in there, yeah! I was in the closet
hidin'!
"

"From Dozer Meadows," I said.

"Yeah, that's right. From Dozer Meadows."

"Why? What's he got to do with you?"

"Nothin'. 'Cept that he wants to
kill
me."

"Kill you? For what?"

"For gettin' him suspended from the team. What else?"

"You mean suspended from the Raiders?"

"Of course I mean the Raiders! Who else would I be talkin' about, the
Mighty Ducks?
"

"Oh,
Jeez Looweez
, " Joe moaned, apparently grasping our son's meaning much faster than I. "You trying to tell us that
you're
the reason that boy got booted off the team?" The possibility had him near tears.

"Well, yes and no," Bad Dog said, "dependin' on how you look at it."

"
Jeez Loooweeez
," his father groaned again, stretching the last word out to magnify his distress.

"That's why I wanna go to Pittsburgh. To get him reinstated."

"Best player on the 'whole damn team! The one man that pitiful defense can least afford to lose!"

"You didn't hear what I said, Pops. I said, if you could just get me to Pittsburgh—"

"Will somebody please tell me what in the world you two are talking about?" I cried, feeling the tide of Bad Dog's interrogation rolling completely out of my reach. "Dozer Meadows was suspended from the team—all right, that much I understand. Which means he can't play ball, at least for a while, right?"

"Right," Dog said.

"For how long?"

"Two weeks."

"Says who?"

"Says the coach. Terry Bell."

"All right. Why?"

"For conduct detrimental to the team," Joe said angrily. "For partying so extensively the night before last Sunday's game, he was only good for seven sorry minutes in the game itself."

"He made a key tackle, though," Bad Dog said.

"He threw up on the guy," Big Joe said.

"It was a nine-yard loss."

"In a game we lost by twenty-four points. To the Cincinnati Bengals. At
home!
"

"I take it the Cincinnati Bengals aren't very good," I said.

Joe looked at me and grimaced. "The Raiders were favored by twenty-one," he said.

"Hey. 'On any given Sunday…' " his son reminded him.

"So Dozer was suspended for two weeks," I said, trying to keep our conversation on track.

"Yeah. And fined a thousand bucks. Strictly to save face, you know? Because the sports guys on TV, man, they must've shown the clip of him upchuckin' on Drew Archer's shoes about a million times that night. Over and over again, they ran it. Made you sick just to watch it."

"Did you say he was fined a thousand dollars?"

"Yeah. See, they—"

"A thousand dollars?" I asked again.

All of a sudden, Dog clammed up, finally realizing what he'd said.

"Uh-huh. You see there?" Big Joe asked me, starting to bounce around on the balls of his feet as his blood pressure began to rise to new heights. "What'd I tell you, Dottie? What'd I tell you? He wasn't up for any job with the Raiders! He wanted that money so he could pay Meadows's fine!"

"I
told
you—he's lookin' to
kill
me! I don't pay his fine and get him back on the team in time for the Steeler game this Sunday, he's gonna tear me apart!"

"Why, Theodore?" I demanded, anxious to get the truth out of him before his father felt compelled to try. "Why does he blame
you
for his getting suspended?"

"Because he was out partyin' with
me
last Saturday night," he said, blurting the words out before he could stop himself. "When I was supposed to be… well…"

He shrugged, the way he had as a five-year-old whenever we'd ask him
how he could do such a thing
. "When I was supposed to be
watching
him, like."

"Watching him? You mean following him?"

"No. I mean
watchin'
him. Babv-sittin' him. Goin' everywhere he goes, to keep him out of trouble, an' stuff."

"To keep him
out
of trouble?
You
?" Big Joe asked, incredulous.

"Yessir. Cubby said to hang with him all weekend and keep him away from booze, drugs, and women. 'Cause Dozer, man, he's got no self-control, right? He doesn't know when to quit."

Joe started laughing. Hard.

"Joe, get a'hold of yourself," I told him. But I was smiling when I said it.

"It ain't funny, Pops," Bad Dog said sadly.

"No. It certainly is not," I agreed, just before losing it myself.

Bad Dog sat there and watched us, two old fools laughing and gasping for breath like drunks at a wine-tasting party.

"I'm sorry, baby," I said to him when I was finally able to speak again, "but you have to admit, it is pretty ridiculous. Somebody hiring you to keep somebody else out of trouble."

"Yeah? And why's that?"

" 'Cause that's like hiring a rat to keep the mice out of the cheese," Big Joe said, ,wiping tears from his eyes. "That's why. Trouble's your middle name, boy!"

The look on Dog's face said he wanted desperately to dispute that, but he knew it couldn't be done. His checkered past spoke for itself.

"How did you get the job in the first place, Theodore?" I asked him.

"I told you. Cubby gave it to me. We were always runnin' into each other at the Final Score, like I said, and every time we did, I'd bug him for a job on the team. Any kind of job, I said, I'll do anything you want, just ask.

"So one night he says, okay, maybe there
is
somethin' I can do. Somethin' that could lead to a permanent position as an assistant trainer, if I did the job right. So I said, what is it? and he said all I gotta do is hang with Dozer Meadows for half the weekend, Friday and Saturday night. Go where he goes, do what he does, and keep him from gettin' too crazy. You know, don't let him overindulge. Because—"

"Because he'd had a run-in with the police on a DUI earlier in the season," Big Joe said to me, not trusting our son to tell the story himself. "In Beverly Hills. He totaled a parked car making an illegal U-turn and banged himself up pretty good. You couldn't read about anything else in the sports pages for a week."