Graveyard Plots (18 page)

Falsehoods and fornication were only two of his sins. Like I said before, he was guilty of much more than that. Including plain thievery.

He wasn't in town more than a month before folks started missing things. Small amounts of cash money, valuables of one kind or another. Mrs. Cooley, who owned the boardinghouse where Legion took a room, lost a solid gold ring her late husband gave her. But she never suspected Legion, and hardly anybody else did either until it was too late.

All this went on for close to three months—the lying and the fornicating and the stealing. It couldn't have lasted much longer than that without the truth coming out, and I guess Legion knew that best of all. It was a Friday in late September that he and Amanda Sykes disappeared together. And when folks did learn the truth about him, all they could say was good riddance to him and her both—the Sykeses among them, because they were decent, God-fearing people.

I reckon I was one of the last to see either of them. Fact is, in a way I was responsible for them leaving as sudden as they did.

At about two o'clock that Friday afternoon I left Mr. Hazlitt's store with a scythe and some other tools George Pickett needed on his farm, and rode out the north road. It was a burning hot day, no wind at all—I remember that clear. When I was two miles outside Wayville, and about two more from the Pickett farm, I took Silverboy over to a stream that meandered through a stand of cottonwoods. He was blowing pretty hard because of the heat, and I wanted to give him a cool drink. Give myself a cool drink too.

But no sooner did I rein him up to the stream than I spied two people lying together in the tall grass. And I mean "lying together" in the biblical sense—no need to explain further. It was Legion and Amanda Sykes.

Well, they were so involved in their sinning that they didn't notice me until I was right up to them. Before I could turn Silverboy and set him running, Legion jumped up and grabbed hold of me and dragged me down to the ground. He cursed me like a crazy man; I never saw anybody that wild and possessed before or since.

"I'll teach you to spy on me, Ben Boone!" he shouted, and he hit me a full right-hand wallop on the face. Knocked me down in the grass and bloodied my nose, bloodied it so bad I couldn't stop the flow until a long while later.

Then he jumped on me and pounded me two more blows until I was half-senseless. And after that he reached in my pocket and took my wallet— stole my wallet and all the money I had.

Amanda Sykes just sat there covering herself with her dress and watching. She never said a word the whole time.

It wasn't a minute later they were gone. I saw them get into this Ford that was hidden in the cottonwoods nearby and roar away. I couldn't have stopped them with a rifle, weak as I was.

When my strength finally came back I washed the blood off me as best I could, and rode Silverboy straight back to Wayville to report to the local constable. He called in the state police and they put out a warrant for the arrest of Legion and Amanda Sykes, but nothing came of it. Police didn't find them; nobody ever heard of them again.

Yes, sir, I know the story doesn't seem to have much
point right now. But it will in just a minute. I wanted
you to hear it first the way I told it back in 1931—the way I been telling it over and over in my own mind ever since then so I could keep on living with myself.

A good part of its lies, you see. Lies worse than Jimmy Legion's.

That's why I asked you to come, Reverend. Doctors here at the hospital tell me my heart's about ready to give out. They don't figure I'll last the week. I can't die with sin on my soul. Time's long past due for me to make peace with myself and with God.

The lies? Mostly what happened on that last afternoon, after I came riding up to the stream on my way to the Pickett farm. About Legion attacking me and bloodying me and stealing my wallet. About him and Amanda Sykes running off together. About not telling of the sinkhole near the stream that was big enough and deep enough to swallow anything smaller than a house.

Those things, and the names of two of the three of us that were there.

No, I didn't mean
him
. Everything I told you about him is the truth as far as I know it, including his name.

His name was Legion.

But Amanda's name wasn't Sykes. Not anymore it wasn't, not for five months prior to that day.

Her name was Amanda Boone.

Yes, Reverend, that's right—she was my wife. I'd dated those other girls, but I'd long
courted
Amanda; we eloped over the state line before Legion arrived and got married by a justice of the peace. We did it that way because her folks and mine were dead-set against either of us marrying so young—not that they knew we were at such a stage. We kept that part of our relationship a secret too, I guess because it was an adventure for the both of us, at least in the beginning.

My name? Yes, it's really Ben Boone. Yet it
wasn't
on that afternoon. The one who chanced on Legion and Amanda out there by the stream, who caught them sinning and listened to them laugh all shameless and say they were running off together . . . he wasn't Ben Boone at all.

His
name, Reverend, that one who sat grim on his pale horse with Fanner Pickett's long, new-honed scythe in one hand . . .

His name was Death.

T
he last time I had seen Alex Rolfe was twenty-one years ago at the old Madison Square Garden at 49th Street and Eighth Avenue, in what was once called the heart of Manhattan.

That night, with the Continental Basketball Association championship series between the New York Sabers and the Chicago Wildcats tied at three games apiece, Rolfe had come into the last quarter of the seventh game when the Wildcats' first-string center twisted an already tender ankle. And he had scored 18 points in ten minutes on a remarkable assortment of fadeaway jumpers and hook shots and reverse layups, had blocked five shots, had taken down eight rebounds, and had, unusual for a big man, twice forced turnovers on pressure defense. As a result, the Wildcats had wiped out a 13-point Sabers lead and on the strength of Rolfe's last-second tip-in sent the game into overtime.

In the five-minute extra period he had blocked two more shots, grabbed another four rebounds, and scored all 14 of the Wildcats' points. The final score was 109-100, Chicago. His teammates had surrounded him after the buzzer and half carried him off the court, not a small accomplishment considering that Alex Rolfe was six-nine and weighed in the neighborhood of 270 pounds.

He was twenty-seven then, born on September 12, 1930, according to the program, and in his fifth season in the CBA. He had kicked around quite a bit; the Wildcats were his fourth team. He'd been a competent center in college, but the faster and more intri
cate patterns of professional basketball seemed to have confused him. Or they had until that one game, that one brilliant performance.

The next day all the New York papers, including the
Telegram
and
Journal-American
and
Daily Mirror
of sainted memory, had been filled with interviews and suggestions by a couple of columnists that Rolfe might be on the verge of realizing his full potential. I remember one particularly effusive writer suggesting that he might even become another George Mikan. My own write-up of the game—in those days I had covered the Sabers for the
Herald-Tribune,
also of sainted memory—had been a bit more restrained. There was no denying what Rolfe had accomplished, or of its impact on professional basketball in that era, but the Sabers were my team and he had almost singlehandedly taken what would have been their first championship away from them.

As things turned out, though, that game was to be Rolfe's last. The day after it was over he literally disappeared from sight, never to be heard from again. No one seemed to know where he'd gone, or why—not even the management of the Wildcats—and he failed to show up when training camp opened the following season. There were a few "Whatever happened to Alex Rolfe?" stories that summer and during the next year, but after that most people forgot about him and about that glorious night in the Garden. Yesterday's sports heroes are always quickly forgotten. It's the heroes of today who get the ink and the adulation.

Now, twenty-one years later, Alex Rolfe was just a name in the yellowing pages of newspapers and sports magazines and record books. The old CBA was gone; all its great players were retired or coaching obscurely at the high-school or small-college level and just as forgotten as Rolfe himself. Professional basketball had entered a new and different age, a better age in a lot of ways. The high and low points of its past were little more than dim memories.

But some people still remembered, and I was one of them. Even after two decades I remembered that night in the Garden and I remembered Alex Rolfe and what he'd done. Rolfe had become something of an obsession with me over the years. The thing was, I thought I knew why he had vanished so suddenly and so completely, and I wanted to find him and talk to him about it. And the thing was, too, that his performance against the Sabers in 1957 had marked a turning point in my own life.

I had been young and ambitious in those days, on my way to the top, I thought; but my life and my career hadn't quite worked out the way I'd always believed they would. In 1958 I had lost my job with the
Herald-Tribune
, for internal reasons that weren't my fault, and I had also lost my wife in the divorce courts for domestic reasons that may or may not have been my fault. After that, my life and my career had settled into mediocrity—a succession of jobs with minor newspapers, a few freelance articles for second-string sports magazines, two sports biographies that hadn't sold well, too many sessions with the bottle, and too many loveless affairs. My own dim memories of the past were all I had left now. Memories of the way it had been in the old days in New York, covering the Sabers and dreaming of wealth and fame. Memories of men like Alex Rolfe.

Off and on for the past twenty years I had spent time and energy trying to locate him, without success. Then, three days ago, the paper I was working for in Dayton had taken on a sports reporter whose last job was in Madison, Wisconsin. This reporter and I had gone out for a drink, and talk had turned to basketball, and Rolfe's name had come up. And it turned out that the reporter knew of Rolfe, knew where he was living—in a small village in upstate Wisconsin, where he owned a tavern. The reporter had wanted to do a feature on him a year or so ago, but Rolfe had been uncooperative, saying that he didn't want any publicity; the reporter hadn't pursued the matter.

I had gotten on the phone immediately, dug up an address and number for Rolfe in the village of Harbor Lake, and then called the number. When I got through to Rolfe I explained that I was writing a series of articles on basketball players of the fifties for a national sports magazine and did he remember my name? He was silent for several seconds; then he said yes, he remembered me, but he didn't want to be interviewed and besides, I had to be scraping the bottom of the barrel if I wanted to do a story on him. I reminded him of the championship game in the Garden and told him the magazine had given me
carte blanche,
write up anyone I cared to, not necessarily the stars but the journeymen players who had had moments of greatness in the past.

He still didn't want to see me. I said I was going to be in Wisconsin anyway to talk to another old player and that I intended to drop in on him; said I was going to write about the Sabers-Wildcats title game with or without an interview. He told me it was my privilege to write whatever I felt like writing, and hung up on me.

The next day I took a leave of absence from the paper, got into my car, and headed north to Wisconsin.

And now, two days and eight hundred miles later, I had arrived in Harbor Lake. It wasn't much of a town, just a few scattered houses along a small, tree-rimmed lake and half a dozen stores along a one-block main street. Quiet, sleepy, off the beaten track. It was a little past 4:00 P.M. as I drove through it, looking for the Harbor Lake Tavern. The leaden sky forecast rain, but there was nothing on the windshield of my car except streaks of dirt that gave the buildings and the gray-looking lake water a vaguely distorted appearance.

Rolfe's tavern turned out to be on the far side of the village, tucked back near the water's edge. It was a small, weathered building with a rustic façade, shaded by pines; no neon sign or electric beer advertisements, nothing to tell you it was a bar except for the neatly painted wooden sign above the door that spelled out its name. I imagined that he did most of his business at night, even during these late spring months; there was only one other car on the gravel parking lot besides mine when I shut off the engine and went inside.

The car must have belonged to Rolfe himself because he was the only one in the place. He stood behind the plank, slicing lemons and limes into wedges. A man six-nine in his twenties is imposing, but in his forties he angles toward a question mark. There were heavy lines in his cheeks and a kind of melancholy in his expression, and when he came down to the stool I had taken he walked with a pronounced limp, as if he were suffering from arthritis. He looked old and tired—the same way my reflection looked in the backbar mirror. The years hadn't been good to him either.