Graves' Retreat (10 page)

    That was Harding’s favorite word.

    Concentrate.

    So Les took the ball and did the best he could on concentrating.

    It wasn’t easy-not when images of his brother hanging from a gallows filled his head.

    No, sir, it wasn’t easy at all.

    

    

    Many people noted the fat man’s passage to the bleacher way at the top. He moved with the difficulty of a boat in troubled waters.

    By the time he reached the top, his cupid’s face ran with sweat and his celluloid collar was yellow with sweat.

    For the first few minutes he took off his hat and fanned himself. A plump black crow swooped down and sat next to the man, watching him. The man, annoyed with the bird, struck him with his hat. The crow flew away.

    Finally, finished fanning himself, the man turned his attention to the field below.

    He did not like games. They bored him. Still, there was something exciting about the sight of nine men in clean white uniforms in the field and a park full of rooters cheering them on. The few times he’d gone to see the Chicago White Stockings, boys had passed among the spectators, with the boxes filled with various kinds of food for sale- sort of like a traveling cornucopia. The boy who worked his way up the aisle seemed to be selling only one thing. Some kind of semilemonade concoction. The fat man bought two of them.

    Then he went back to looking at the field.

    Even from here, even without the help of field glasses, he could see the resemblance between the man he sought and the man on the pitcher’s mound.

    The pitcher was not so good-looking as the brother-the brother being almost pretty-but the resemblance was indeed unmistakable.

    The pitcher was not having a good day and this led the fat man to wonder why so many of the townspeople made such a fuss over his pitching.

    Thus far the fat man had watched him face three batters. Two of them he’d walked and one of them had gotten a single. The crowd did not seem disappointed so much as confused, as if they didn’t quite know what to make of what they were seeing.

    A luxurious breeze came and dried the rest of the sweat on the fat man’s face. He could smell the nearby river and newly mown grass and the sweet smell of cigar smoke lazing up from the bleachers below.

    In all, nine batters came to the plate before the top half of the sixth inning was over. Two runs had been scored. The pitcher looked disgusted and faintly embarrassed as he left the field. By now the fat man had figured out that the pitcher was playing against his own second team and the second team’s pitcher looked better than he did.

    The kid with the cold drinks came by again and the fat man bought two more.

    

    

    There were three more innings and the way young Graves was pitching, they promised to be long ones.

    In the reserved box seats below, Clinton Edmonds, red-faced and angry, waved the manager Harding over.

    Harding came running. He wore the face of the eternal supplicant, the gladiator prostrating himself before the emperor.

    “Yes, sir, Mr. Edmonds?”

    “I’d like to know exactly what in hell is going on here.”

    “Sir?”

    “With Graves.”

    “He’s just having kind of an off day.”

    “Need I remind you that we play Sterling the day after tomorrow?”

    “No, sir, you certainly don’t need to remind me.”

    “And need I remind you that I have a great deal of influence on who will and who will not be the manager of this baseball team?”

    At this point, both Susan and Byron cast their eyes down and sat in rigid embarrassment as Clinton Edmonds got louder and angrier and as everyone within earshot began hearing him.

    “No, sir, I guess you don’t need to remind me. No, sir, you surely don’t.”

    “Then you go talk to Graves and tell him I want to see at least five strikeouts in the next two innings.”

    “Yes, sir.”

    “And by God, I hope you’re taking me seriously."

    Harding gulped, nodded and then trotted back to his team.

    Clinton Edmonds said, “I am surrounded by incompetents. Surrounded by them.” He glared at Byron Fuller. “Aren’t I right, Byron? Aren’t I surrounded by incompetents?”

    Byron looked miserably at Susan. It was obvious she did not want him to agree with her father.

    But meekly, Byron said, “Yes, sir. You are surrounded by incompetents.”

    He knew he dare not look over at Susan.

    

    

    T.Z. was still thinking about the girl in the tavern last night.

    His tastes seemed to change. Constantly. One day he liked the type of sophisticated women he’d known in Chicago and St. Louis, other days he preferred the working girls of smaller towns.

    To T.Z. women were power and he had understood that since an incident that took place when he was eight years old.

    A nine-year-old, a bully who seemed to have a special dislike for T.Z., beat him up savagely in front of other children on the way home from school.

    T.Z. had never been hit so many times or in so many places.

    Finally, he fell on the ground, bleeding from eyes, mouth and even ears.

    The others, including the bully, had run away, leaving him there in the chill autumn afternoon.

    Despite the temperature, despite the fact that he knew he should get up and hobble home, he could find no strength for anything but lying there, letting the pain pound through him.

    Then he’d felt a warm and gentle palm on his forehead, and when he opened his eyes, he saw a girl he knew to be in the grade ahead of his bending over him. He knew one other thing about her too. She was generally regarded to be the bully’s girlfriend.

    “I’m sorry he did this to you,” she said, and he noticed there were tears in her eyes.

    She lifted his head and poured water from a cup into his mouth.

    “My name's Audrith,” she said, as she then helped him to his feet.

    Between swollen lips, T.Z. had said, “I’m T.Z.”

    “I know who you are. I mean I’ve-” He saw she was blushing. “I mean I’ve noticed you around before. You’re-”

    She stopped then, embarrassment claiming her completely.

    Even through his pain he wanted to hear her say it because he saw the way she looked at him and he sensed in her glimpse real power for himself. Money he had not; nor the strength of even an average boy; nor was he especially intelligent at schoolwork.

    “You didn’t finish what you were going to say,” T.Z. had said.

    “Oh, it wasn't important.”

    “Of course it was.” And he’d faced her directly. “Everything you think is important. To me, anyway.”

    So that afternoon, as purple dusk gathered, they took the long way home, down by the railroad yards, where the great trains linked and unlinked like huge metal dinosaurs copulating, and as they walked, and the more she blushed, he sensed within himself his growing power.

    There was a crooked creek, silver with the season’s first membrane of ice, and they stopped there and found cold water for his face. And once his face was clean, he did what he’d been longing to do, and what he knew she had been longing for him to do-he kissed her, right there and right on the lips.

    And he was almost overwhelmed with his power.

    Three more times the bully beat him before the snow flew, but from this experience T.Z. learned that he had one thing most men did not have and would never have-a real grip on the hearts of women.

    Let the others boast of strength or gold; T.Z. had his looks and his laugh, and no matter how imposing the man, there was a good chance, if T.Z. applied himself, he could steal the man’s woman- maybe for no more than an hour or two, but steal her nonetheless.

    Lying on the bed, late summer sunlight rich red gold across his slender body, T.Z. sighed.

    In the three months following the death of that baggage car man, there had been little time for women. There had been time only for running and hiding and jumping at even the vaguest hint that he and Neely had been discovered.

    And that was why the nightmares were back. The one about holding the old man in his arms and crying for him not to close his eyes because when he did close his eyes, all history would come crashing down and there would be only darkness and oblivion and-

    “Easy,” Neely said.

    “What?” T.Z. said.

    “Easy. I said it was going to be easy.”

    Neely sat over in the comer of their hotel room. He had been at the table with his tablet and pencil for more than an hour.

    Neely was always this way before any kind of operation, no matter how big or small.

    Neely liked to draw diagrams in blunt pencil strokes, the way military commanders did before battles. Strategy, it was called.

    “We hide in the closet and then, when the guard goes, all we have to do is sneak out and unlock the safe.”

    T.Z. smiled lazily. “I didn’t know you knew a whole hell of a lot about safes.”

    “Don’t need to.”

    “Then just how do you propose to get into the safe?”

    Neely frowned. “Since when did you start worrying about how I handled things? I’ve always handled them all right in the past, haven’t I?”

    T.Z. sat up on the bed, lit up the yellowed remains of a quirly. “The kid’s got things good here. I want to get that money without anybody finding out that he even knew us.”

    “I’ve got it all figured.”

    T.Z. kept his eye on him. “I’m serious, Neely. I don’t want nobody to know that the kid’s my brother or that he’s got anything to do with

    us.”

    Neely stood up and smiled. “You don’t sound real scary, pretty boy, when you make threats like that.” He picked up T.Z.’s shirt from the chair and then tossed it to him. The smile was long gone. “Come on. We’re going to go watch a little baseball.”

    Sullenly, and without a word, T.Z. put on his fancy lace shirt and his string tie, and then his fancy-cut black coat.

    "I want you to go easy on the kid, Neely. And I’m serious,” T.Z. said.

    Neely just shook his head. “You’re a pathetic bastard, T.Z. You know that? Whose idea was it to come to Cedar Rapids anyway?”

    “Well-”

    “Who said, ‘My brother works in a bank. He can get us some money.’ Was it me, T.Z.?”

    “Well-”

    Neely shook his head again. “Like I said, T.Z., you’re one pathetic bastard. You know that?”

    Then they went to the ballpark.

    

    

    In the seventh inning, the sky vermilion and banked with golden clouds, Harding came out to the mound.

    The score was 6-5. The second team was beating the first.

    Les Graves stood slamming the ball into his glove. The cheers of the crowd had long ago vanished into the gathering dusk.

    Harding, reaching him, said, “You gotta concentrate, Les.”

    Les looked up. There was a wildness in his eyes. “I am concentrating.”

    “No, you’re not. Just before you throw, your eyes move to the right. To the stands.”

    Les sighed.

    “I know who you’re looking at.”

    Les shook his head, fearing the answer that Harding would offer.

    “You’re looking at Clinton Edmonds.”

    Les frowned. Harding was half right. He was probably, in fact, looking to the right, just to the west of the batter’s box, but it was not Clinton Edmonds he was looking at. It was Susan Edmonds.

    “You remember how I told you to relax?”

    “Yes.”

    “Then try it.”

    “I-I don’t know if I can.”

    “C’mon, Les. You gotta try.”

    “All right.”

    Les turned slightly away from the manager, closed his eyes and began taking a series of deep breaths and trying to blank his mind entirely. Harding insisted that an ancient Sioux Indian who lived up near Parnell had taught him this trick. (Les had never had the courage to ask Harding what an ancient Sioux Indian was doing up near Parnell, when the Sioux reservation was three hundred miles north.) But he tried it. He pictured in his mind his toes and then his legs and then his groin and then his stomach-all the way up his body to his brain itself-relaxing, relaxing, relaxing… and in truth, the tension did seem to flow out of his body as his awareness of the crowd, even Susan, began to diminish. His felt his muscles surrender, surrender…

    A few minutes later, Harding said, “Now, we’re going to do that again when we’re up to bat and you have some more time. Now, you just step up to the mound again and everything’s going to be fine.”

    Les smiled. “I sure hope you’re right.”

    “You just wait and see. That damn Sioux chief I told you about knew half the secrets of the universe.”

    This time the ancient one was a chief. The last time his name was invoked, the man had been a mere warrior.

    Les laughed. “You sure you knew this Indian?”

    “You think I make up shit like that?”

    “Hell, yes, I do.”

    This time Harding laughed. “You should be ashamed of yourself,

    Graves.”

    He walked back to his team, waddling a bit because not only was his stomach spreading as he reached forty but so was his backside.

    Les, continuing his deep breathing, and concentrating,
concentrating,
stepped up to the mound, shook off two different signals from the catcher, waited till he found one he liked and then sailed one so fast and so fine across the plate that the crowd went flat-out crazy again.