Plunking Reggie Jackson (20 page)

Coley was getting annoyed, crawling the car along the curb while trying to talk to her through the other window. “I can't do this forever, Bree. Come get in.”

She moved into the passenger's seat demurely, while looking straight ahead. Her hair was loose, so it covered most of her face. She was wearing her sunglasses. “Okay, so I'm here. But just don't start asking me lots of questions.”

He headed the car toward Washington Park. “I got another progress report from Grissom,” he told her quietly. “I'm ineligible.”

“Oh, no.”

“Believe it. That's why I'm not at practice. I'm not eligible.”

“But why?”

“How do I know? You'd have to ask Grissom. I don't know what the bitch wants from me, anyway. Could you at least look at me? Would that be too much to ask?”

She didn't, though. She kept her eyes straight ahead. “I tried to tell you I'm not good company.”

“I can't pitch again. I'm not eligible.” He lifted her chin so he could look at her face.

“You better stop the car,” she told him.

He stopped the car. When he removed her sunglasses, he could see that the left side of her face was swollen. Not grotesque or disfigured, but smoothed out so that there was no definition on that side, as if lacking a cheekbone. A blue green bruise was at the corner of the eye.

Bree wrenched her face away and replaced the sunglasses. “Are you satisfied now?” she asked. Her gaze was fixed out the windshield once again.

“Why did he do this?” Coley asked. “Why did he hit you?”

“We were late from prom.”

“We were fifteen minutes late. He hit you for that?”

“It doesn't matter how long. We were late.”

The intensity of his frustration was suddenly accelerated to a level he couldn't tolerate. He pounded the steering wheel with the heel of his hand before he said, “Jesus
Christ
!”

Chapter Fifteen

Flight 106 left O'Hare International Airport at 6:00
P.M.
and landed in Orlando just after 9:30, Eastern time. Bree slept soundly on board, but Coley tossed and turned. He had taken some Dramamine just before takeoff, which made him drowsy, but not enough to put him under. He twisted uncomfortably in his cramped aisle 9 seat while the leading players in the dreams that troubled him came forward like the accusatory ghosts that tormented Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas Eve. His mother. Mrs. Alvarez. Bree's mother. Mrs. Grissom. There may have been others, but in his disturbed awake-and-asleep condition he struggled to get rid of these tormentors. “Go away,” he groaned at one point. “Leave me alone.”

At Orlando International he stood dumbly in line at the Hertz rental counter. Bree was bouncy. “This is real close to Disney World,” she said. “We could stay all night and spend the day there tomorrow.”

“Yeah, really.”

“It would be fun.”

“It might be fun, but it wouldn't get us where we need to go.”

“Oh, poop. Is this the way you're going to be?”

“Probably.” When it was Coley's turn, he used his Visa card to pay for the Ford Escort. He said, “Miami,” when the counter clerk asked for the drop-off point, and he rented the car for a full week. He'd also used the credit card to pay for the airline tickets and to get some cash. He had twelve hundred dollars in his pocket.

When they were putting their luggage, what there was of it, into the trunk of the car, Bree asked him why he'd said Miami. “We're going to the other coast, right?”

Coley sighed before he answered. “The same reason we flew to Orlando instead of directly to Fort Myers. Since I used the credit card, we'll be easy to track.”

“Oh.”

“The rest of the time we use cash. Anyone who wants to follow us will go to Orlando and then Miami.”

“You really are smart, Coley. You really are.”

“Oh, yeah. That's why I'm here with you and not going to graduate and trying to arrange a tryout for myself plus an abortion for you.”

He was behind the wheel, and she was clinging to his arm with both hands. “Now, we're not going to have that kind of talk, okay? You'll just ruin everything if you only see the bad parts. We're free now.”

“Yeah, that's sure how it feels.”

They spent the night in a cheap motel near Lake Buena Vista called the Seaview. It was an ironic name for the place, since there wasn't any ocean for at least a hundred miles. What there was instead was a lot of truck traffic all through the night along Highway 4, which made sleeping difficult.

But not for Bree. She awoke early the next morning rested and refreshed. As soon as she got out of the shower, she was ready for action. She crawled on top of him so they could make love. But even as she was astride and he was thrusting, he couldn't help visualizing Bree in this position a few years earlier as a pleasure machine for a pathetic middle-aged groper.

The mental picture passed when he reached his climax, followed by the first moments of serenity he'd known in the past forty-eight hours. She curled up beside him and started to tweak his few chest hairs (as she often did) to annoy him. “You feel better now, don't you?” she purred.

“You know what, Bree, sex isn't the answer to everything.”

“But you do feel better, so admit it.” Saying this, she gave a firmer yank on one of the hairs.

“Ow! Knock it off!”

She pulled another one, stinging him sharply. “Not until you admit you feel a lot better.”

“I feel a lot better.” He found himself giggling.

“We're on our own, Coley. It's just the two of us now, with nobody to tell us what to do. We're in love and we're on our own.”

He repeated her words, somewhat mellowed in spite of himself: “We're in love and we're on our own.” Coley stared up at the four-bladed fan suspended from the ceiling, turning slowly and making a
click-click-clicking
noise as it wobbled on its uneven axis. It was hypnotic.
Numb is a lot better than stressed
, he couldn't help thinking. “I feel a lot better,” he said in a monotone.

They stopped for breakfast at a McDonald's on the outskirts of a town named, appropriately enough, Baseball City. Bree was as buoyed and effervescent as she might have been winning the lottery or being chosen prom queen. Her appetite reflected her mood. She ate pancakes and sausage and hash browns, then ordered a cheese danish to top it off. She weighed only about 110 pounds, so Coley had to wonder where she was putting it all.

While she went to the bathroom, Coley took the opportunity to visit the pay phone next to the parking lot. He made it a point to have plenty of coins on hand, so he had enough to make the call home. While he heard the phone ringing, he could feel the knot swelling in his chest. Finally there was an answer: “You've reached the Burkes, but no one is able to answer the phone at this time. When you hear the tone, please leave your message.” Coley heard the tone. Actually, he felt a measure of relief in speaking to the machine.

“Okay, Mother, this is Coley,” he started out. After pausing, he continued, “We're okay, so you don't need to worry. Nobody's hurt or anything. I can't tell you where we are right now, but I will real soon.… I wish I could explain exactly what's going on, but I don't think I can.…” He paused to moisten his lips and swallow. He knew that the machine would not record a message longer than sixty seconds. “This all has to do with Bree and the fact her stepfather beats her. I had to get her away to a safer place.… It also has to do with me goin' ineligible for the play-offs, but I'm sure you know all about that by now. We'll get this all figured out sometime soon, and I'm sorry to put you through this. But I don't want you to worry.”

Then he hung up. Leaving the message made him feel a little better, but he could only hope it would have the same effect on his mother.

Bree was waiting in the car when he slid behind the wheel. “Were you calling one of the Gulf Coast League teams?”

“No. I called my mother.”

Bree sat up very straight in her seat at the same time she seemed to go pale. “What did she say?”

He started the car. “Nothing. She wasn't home. I left a message on the answering machine.”

“You didn't tell her where we are?”

“No. I just told her not to worry. We can drop the subject now.”

It took almost four hours to drive down to Fort Myers, owing in part to the fact that Coley took Highway 17. This was a road that meant passing through lots of towns and traffic signals, but he figured there would be fewer state patrol cars this way. He was right, but he still tensed up each time he spotted one.

They didn't get back on the interstate until just past the town of Cleveland. And even when they entered Fort Myers proper, Coley continued on to the south by way of Highway 865 all the way to Fort Myers Beach on Estero Island. The afternoon sun sparkled on the blue gulf waters just beyond the cocoa palms that flanked the roadway.

“It's so beautiful,” said Bree.

Even though he was tired, Coley had to agree. It looked like paradise.

“So, so beautiful,” she continued, “but why'd we go all the way through the city? I thought Fort Myers was where you'll get your tryout.”

“I'll
ask
for a tryout,” he corrected her. “Nothing's for certain. I just thought if we were out of town, we'd be harder to trace.”

“You think of everything, Coley. Sometimes I'm amazed how smart you are.”

“Oh, absolutely. I flunked English, I knocked you up, I'm not going to graduate high school—”

“Okay, you can just stop talking that way. I'm not going to let you ruin everything.”

“I'm on the run, I could probably go to jail for kidnapping, I'm practically a genius, Bree.”

“I said you can just stop. I'm not going to listen to that kind of talk.”

They found a room in a motel called the Coral Cliffs, which was nice enough, if not elegant. There was nothing that looked like a cliff, but Coley assumed there were plenty of coral reefs offshore.

He parked the car in a rear corner of the parking lot, where some low-slung bougainvillea created partial shelter. Most of the vehicles in this spot wouldn't be visible from the road. He registered under the name of Mr. and Mrs. George Lenny by combining the two main characters from
Of Mice and Men
. Bree waited in the car while he completed the paperwork.

On the west side of the motel was a small swimming pool and a concrete patio adjacent to a modest tiki bar surrounded by plenty of recliners. The view of the ocean was breathtaking, all the way to Sanibel Island.

“Why did you get a reservation for only two nights?” Bree asked him.

“We can add more nights on if we want to.”

“But it's just gorgeous here. I want to stay here longer.”

“Maybe we will. But we can't live in a motel, Bree, nobody has enough money to do that. Sooner or later we'll have to find the kind of place where people live, like an apartment.”

“But we can take care of all of that later, Coley.”

After supper they sipped Pepsis and watched the sun go down on the water. There were quite a few other people nearby, mostly old folks. Latin music was playing on a karaoke near the bar, but not loud. Coley found it was hard to feel stressed in this ultra-mellow setting, or guilty, even though he had the inclination. “I've been to Sanibel Island,” he told her.

“You have? When?”

“When I was little. My parents took me and my brother there on vacation.”

“Can we go over there?” Bree asked eagerly. “Let's go out there tomorrow.”

“Not tomorrow. We have stuff to get done.”

“What stuff?”

“I have to go over to Lee County Stadium. That's where the Royals have their Gulf Coast offices.”

“I don't know why you care about the Kansas City Royals. Who ever heard of them? Why don't you sign up with the Yankees or the Braves?”

“You don't just sign up, Bree, there's a major-league player draft in June. A team picks you, and you can sign with that team or you can go on with school and enter the next year's draft.”

“Okay, so why the Kansas City Royals?”

“Because I'm hopin' to throw for Bobby Ricci. He saw me pitch at Galesburg on a day when I had my good stuff. Besides, he's a guy who's never contacted me or my old man. Nobody knows I even know who he is.”

“Wow. You've really thought this through, huh, Coley?”

“Yes and no. Just don't tell me how smart I am.”

Bree was wearing the turquoise bikini. Prone on her vinyl lounger and sipping on her long straw, she seemed at utter peace with the world. The sea breeze tossed her fine hair while the low sun highlighted its red value. She looked beautiful. “I still want to go to the island,” she declared.

“We'll go after the abortion, how's that? We'll spend the day over there just beachcombing, swimming, maybe even a little scuba diving. How would you like that?”

“How am I supposed to get the abortion?”

“You can call the Fort Myers Planned Parenthood. We'll get their number out of the phone book in our room.”

“What if they don't have one?”

“Then you can call the one in Cape Coral. It's just as close.”

“But you'll have the car. You'll be gone for your tryout.”

“I keep telling you it's not exactly the same thing as a tryout. Anyway, I won't be gone the whole day, just a couple of hours.”

She flipped the hair out of her eyes before she answered. “Okay, I'll call.”

“You'll call and make an appointment. I'll go to the baseball complex, you'll take care of the clinic arrangements. You said, ‘What stuff,' well, that's the stuff.”

“Okay, okay, I said I would. Now, we can't have any arguments, because it's too beautiful here.”