Hangman's Game (14 page)

“Yes?”

“You should hear yourself tell me about these women, how admiring, how infatuated you sound when you describe them. And after they leave Philadelphia and go back to their regular lives, you're grumpy for a week. You don't even know it, but trust me, you are. And I can tell by the way you keep going back to that housewife artist—what's her name?”

“Jessica.”

“Jessica. And it sounds like you've got a great thing going there. That's your move, if you ask me. You should ask her to marry you.”

“I think her husband might have a problem with that.”

“A-ha!” Freddie says, pipe raised triumphantly.

“A-ha what?”

“That's the first objection you raise, that she has a husband,” he says. “It's not anything about her personality.”

“So?”

“So if after three years of road testing, that's your only problem, I think you may have found your mate.”

“Smoke some more pot, Freddie,” I say. “You're seeing everything really clearly.”

Freddie puts down the pipe and pulls his hair back, attempting to neaten himself. “She and her husband don't have any kids, right?”

“No kids.”

“So this artist woman is basically single, save for some paperwork.”

Never mind that he has never even met Jessica. Freddie tends to believe that he can intuit the truth about anything, no matter how few actual facts he is working with. He really would make a fine lawyer.

“Take my word for it, Freddie,” I say. “It's just not happening.”

“Yuh-huh,” Freddie says. “Three years. Something's happening.” He gives up neatening his hair and returns to his bowling, starting up a new game. In between my heckles (“Don't blow it here, pal. You wouldn't want to miss this to the left … oooh, too bad”), I take Freddie's laptop and click back to the site that has the photo of Melody and me. The story is on the indefatigable news site Footballmania.com, which has a separate blog devoted to the latest developments in the Samuel Sault case.

As I look through the Samuel-related stories, one catches my eye, titled “Carson's Hometown Known for Gang Murders, Retribution.” The reporter interviewed characters from where Jai grew up, in a rough part of Memphis, and details a universe of single-parent homes where murder was common and young men gravitated toward gangs to find a sense of family. The story made the case for Jai's guilt, in its way, by offering as an excuse the environment he was raised in. This seemingly sympathetic incrimination-by-poverty was at least balanced out by one quote from a high school assistant coach who knew Jai and wasn't having any of it: “Jai Carson came from here, but when you look around, you see what he's transcended. A gangbanger is exactly what he's worked so hard not to become. And he's not going to throw his life away because some kid didn't know his name.”

The man this coach describes is the same one I ran the hill with this afternoon.

I scroll through the other news stories and I begin to understand how my trip to the park became a headline. Reporters are scrambling for any way to get in on the story. I see one preposterous article that evaluates the eleven quarterbacks that Samuel had injured for their potential as murder suspects. The story goes through the players one by one, attempting to account for their whereabouts on the night of the murder. I read the story not because I buy into its premise, but because I am always curious to see what becomes of football players when the game doesn't need them anymore. In this case, though, the ex-quarterbacks hadn't had a chance to become much, as they were all quite young. A few are still in school, while others are going to graduate school or are working pedestrian jobs.

The reporter located nine of the eleven injured quarterbacks. Five guys had strong alibis—“I was at the senior prom—chaperoning,” says David Pleasance, whose tibia was snapped by Samuel and who is now a middle school teacher in Shreveport, Louisiana. Four offered weaker accounts of their whereabouts that night, but could be located in places geographically inconvenient to South Philadelphia. “I was at home, on the Internet,” said Peter Barbaro, who had his elbow dislocated by Samuel and is now installing drywall part-time in Jacksonville, Florida. “Check with my provider if you want. But don't ask what sites I was on, okay?”

There were two injured quarterbacks the reporter could not immediately locate. One was Herrold McKoy, who played at Mobile State. Samuel ruptured McKoy's spleen, and he needed to be rushed to the hospital for a life-saving operation. He recovered, but he never rejoined his team.

The other was Luke Reckherd, whose last name resonates with dedicated football fans. Luke is the son of Wee Willie Reckherd, who was a great college quarterback and even earned a couple of Heisman votes back in the seventies, despite having gone to a historically black college and standing only five foot nine. But what really distinguished Willie Reckherd was that he played quarterback ambidextrously—that is, he could throw equally well with his right and left hands. He played professionally, too, for Baltimore, though not as a quarterback. They switched him to receiver and punt returner. He performed respectably, but he was never the star he had been in college.

His boy Luke was a five-star quarterback prospect coming out of high school. At six foot five and 232 pounds, he had his choice of major college programs, but chose to attend his dad's alma mater, Langston University. This landed him in the same conference of historically black colleges that included Samuel's school, Western Alabama. Samuel broke Luke's collarbone when Luke was a sophomore, and then tore his MCL when Luke was a senior.

After college Luke signed with a minor-league indoor football team, the Hartsburg Hyenas, but was cut after four games, and the Hyenas couldn't provide the reporter with contact information. After that call, it was time to publish.

My takeaway from this story is that no one has any idea who shot Samuel and Cecil, or why.

*   *   *

Freddie's bowling score drops to 151 in his next game, a sign that the tentacles of cannabis are entangling his mind. Afterward he takes a seat on the sofa—just a breather, he says. He closes his eyes, and soon he is wheezing a light snore. I shake him on the shoulder.

“Hey, buddy,” I say. “Maybe you should go up to bed.”

“Good idea,” Freddie says. His eyes flit open, and he pushes himself up with arms, just a couple of inches, before he drops back down into the softness of the sectional, defeated.

It is a little after eleven. I should go to sleep, too, but my mind is restless. I move Freddie's laptop to the kitchen table and continue to noodle around on it. I don't want to read about the murder anymore, so I look for some distraction. I am curious to see if Melody has a Facebook page. Maybe I can learn the identity of her mystery roommate.

It is then that I realize I do not know Melody's last name. I search “Melody Stark's,” but she does not turn up in any news stories, so that is a dead end. Then I think of soccer. Melody said that as a senior in high school she made it to the Class A state finals in New Hampshire. She is twenty-three now, so she would have been a senior in high school five or six years ago.

I go to New Hampshire's high school athletics site, click around for a while and find the girls' Class A soccer results for those years. I see no Melodys on the rosters. I find Camerons and Brittanys and Tiffanys aplenty, an Antigone and an Abigail and an Alice. But no Melody. I run the same check a year forward and a year back, but I still don't find any Melody. Her story of athletic prowess suddenly looks as dubious as one of Jessica's tall tales, such as the one about the U.S. Mint and the thousand-dollar bills. Except Jessica's lies are just a passing amusement; she wasn't trying to build herself up.

On a long shot, I search for “Melody Winking Oyster.” Nothing.

Then just “Winking Oyster Strip Club.”

The search doesn't bring up the club's page, as I expect, but it does direct me to a newspaper story: “Providence Strip Club Shut Down.” The story, from last summer, says that the Winking Oyster was closed by local law enforcement, and seven employees were arrested because the club had been serving as a base for drug and prostitution rings.

Melody neglected to mention any of this. I close my eyes and breathe deep.

The thing is, I often enjoy the company of people who indulge in what is forbidden to me. Freddie is a prime example. He is so spectacularly
unmaximized
. I will run into him at the end of a long practice, and he will tell me how he slept until one in the afternoon because he had been up late taking peyote and watching Japanese porn. Being friends with someone like Freddie reminds me that there is more to me than what I have been told to become.

I have to say, I got a similar kick when Melody told me about the network she had set up in the Philadelphia food service industry. Can I really argue to myself that it isn't much of a leap from snaring free whoopie pies to selling whoopie?

I put the laptop to sleep. My capacity for rationalization is officially exhausted.

Perhaps Freddie has a point about my instincts with women.

Still hungry, I go to Freddie's pantry. The lower shelves are crammed with cookies, crackers, potato chips, pretzels, jars of peanut butter, boxes of cereal, and flavor units for his SodaStream. The top shelves are lined with bottles of hard liquor, mostly Scotch and bourbon, but with enough gin and vodka to accommodate a guest's preferences. I pull off a bottle of bourbon that is dimpled and shaped like a hand grenade.

The label announces in elaborate script that this is a bottle of Blanton's Reserve. I know nothing about the brand, but I am sure it will do. I grab a glass and head outside to Freddie's back deck. I sit at the poolside table, which has an umbrella protruding from the center. I close the umbrella and lash it tight and settle down for a drink.

I am on my third glass—though it's hard to count precisely, because I am refilling before I hit bottom—when I think of my mother, and the way she reached under the table this morning to take Aaron's hand.

All my life people have told me that I take after my father, and it's an obvious analysis to make—because of the football, for starters, and also our competitiveness. But my mother can be competitive, too. After dinner we used to play hearts to see who would do the dishes, and it was almost always one of the boys who would have to attack the pile in the sink. When she left my dad, after years of having displayed nothing but contentment—to my brother and me, at least—it felt like she was shooting the moon one last time, swooping in unexpectedly for the win. If you can call it a win. But after all those years of apparent subservience when it came to setting the tone of our household, she turned it around with one deed, punctuated by her declaration: “I have a soul, too, you know.”

So do we all. I would bet the killer felt the same way, even after he had left a strapping twenty-one-year-old dead by the side of the road.

Samuel and my dad—two lives ending in the street like that. They say it takes three to make a trend, right?

I topped off my glass again, even as I observed, this is the problem with drinking. The drunker you get, the more you want to make all the details cohere into one story. As if my father's car crash had anything to do with why someone killed Samuel.

“Long after tonight is all over, long after tonight is all gone…” The chorus of an Irma Thomas song from last night is stuck in my head. Oh, well. I could have worse earworms to live with.

Soon I have drained half the bottle of Blanton's Reserve. I stand up, just to see if I can, and I am perfectly able. I think of the bourbon sloshing around in my belly. I need to rid my body of it as soon as possible, so it won't drag on me tomorrow. I lift the bottle to my mouth and swig straight from it, with the goal of overloading my body's systems.

I walk off Freddie's deck and into the dunes, which is planted with clusters of reeds designed to prevent erosion. The planting is so dense that there is no good place for me to kneel, so I keep walking until I have crossed the dunes and I stumble down onto sand that is wet and soft enough to swallow my feet. The tide is higher than I expected. Blame it on the moon.

A wave climbs the shore and rushes in, soaking the bottom of my pants. I hike them up before they get too wet.

I take a couple of heavy steps toward the ocean and then I drop down to all fours and tell myself that I need to do what I came here to do, and to do it quickly. I slide a finger into my mouth and press down on the back of my tongue, and this ignites the insurgence in my stomach. One heave, two heaves, a third, and then a fourth, as an ocean wave surges in and covers my calves and wrists with chilling water. My hands and knees sink into the wet sand as the wave washes back out, clearing away the vomit. Mostly.

I gather my will and rise to my feet before the next wave comes in. I wipe my mouth and then gasp the cool air. My insides feel wrung out, but quiet.

I turn, leave the water behind, cross the dunes, and walk across the deck, pulling off my dripping pants and flinging them over a deck chair to dry. Then I go into the house and I head up the stairs toward Freddie's guest bedroom. I feel dead, but I keep climbing, one step and then another. Being pantless, I notice the definition in my quadriceps. My legs are the strongest part of me. I hear my dad's voice:
this is why you train
.

 

CHAPTER 11

W
HEN
I
FINALLY
sleep, I am visited by a familiar anxiety dream: I am punting, and I miss the ball when I attempt to kick it. I've had this dream a hundred times. Other people dream about taking a test for which they are unprepared, and I have this.

The unease of the dream wakes me a little after six. The inside of my mouth is fetid, despite having brushed my teeth before I fell into bed. I raise myself up on my arms, and I feel surprisingly fresh, though a little dehydrated. Not that there are many other contenders, but forcing myself to throw up was the smartest thing I did last night.