The Spoiler (7 page)

Lofton wanted to get a look at MacKenzie Field in the dark when the stadium was empty. A high green fence surrounded the field, but he knew a place around back where the neighborhood kids had kicked a hole large enough to crawl through. Brunner had ordered the hole boarded several times, but the kids kept kicking it open. Lofton found the hole and crawled through on his hands and knees.

Standing inside the park, his shirt soaked through with sweat, he no longer heard the sounds he took for granted while walking the streets: the beer-gutted laughter, drunken shouts, and loud Hispanic music that seemed always to spill from the tenements. Only one sound got through to him as he stepped into the Redwings' dugout: the long skid of tires on asphalt, followed by the brief, heartbeat blaring of a horn. He shrugged and sat down in the dugout. The accident, if that's what it was he had heard, seemed far away, maybe nothing, maybe just a noise beyond the center field wall.

There had been times like this in Denver, when he had stayed up in the bleachers after the Bears' games, reluctant to go home. He remembered the papers back in the hotel that he needed to sign for Maureen, something to do with the house; she had suddenly decided she wanted to sell it. The papers sat in a pile of other papers along with Maureen's first letter to him in Holyoke, the one that told him never to come back in one line, and in the next said she could not take the sound of her own footsteps pacing the empty house. He had not given her any reason for his leaving; he had mentioned neither his trip to the doctor nor his own misgivings about having another kid. She would make herself happy soon enough, he told himself.

He got up to leave, to walk around the base paths, maybe, or to take a long stroll down the right field line. He spotted a baseball bat leaning in the far corner of the dugout, and he picked it up, running his fingers over the smooth, polished grain. He felt a hairline crack near the trademark. Probably happened on a ground ball, bad enough to make the bat worthless, so the equipment man would not bother to cart it back. Lofton carried the bat with him onto the field.

He kicked the dust from home plate, which glowed white in the darkness, almost phosphorescent. He stared out at the deserted field toward the ghostly wall in left center. He imagined the players, the pitcher standing on the mound and the team in position behind him. He took several swings, trying to make the swings smooth and level, putting all the force of his thirty-seven-year-old body into hard chops at the elusive moon half-hidden in the damp mist over Holyoke.

Backing off from the plate, he flexed the muscles in his back, placing the bat between his knees and rubbing his palms together, a ritual he had seen many men go through over the years—no, not men; boys, children ten, fifteen, even twenty years younger than he—and a ritual, of course, he had gone through himself. And he remembered how his mother, dead twenty-five years now, had come to watch him play sandlot ball in the bitter-bright streets of San Jose, California. It was the summer she died, and she came not with his father but with some other man.

His mother had been a small dark woman who spoke with an acerbic tongue and always wore sunglasses, as if she were in the movies. She and his father fought long and bitterly, always, up to the minute she left him for that stranger who came to the games, a thin man with a frightening presence, or so Lofton remembered him, though he had never seen the stranger close enough to know his face. He knew only the smoky haze that seemed to surround the man and envelop his mother.

Mrs. Lofton died of cancer, a malevolent growth that spread from her lymph glands through her body like a small, angry fire. She knew she had the disease when she left her husband, Lofton found out later, and the stranger knew as well. What bitterness inspired her leaving Lofton did not know. He had given up pondering. He remembered his father crying—drunk, Lofton guessed now—when he thought his sons asleep. And he remembered lying awake, the transistor radio on the bed beside him broadcasting the ballgame, and trying to imagine the land of the dead. He would close his eyes and try to talk with the people there. At first, nothing. No shadows. No whispers. He would keep his eyes closed until, eventually, he saw himself on the street, following the back roads through the city, under the freeway, past the railyards, the cracked porch stoops, and into the ballpark. He saw himself standing alone on the soft outfield, listening to the outfield grass whispering his name over and over.

Now he stepped back to the plate. He crouched at the knees, flexed his wrists, and stared at the mound. The moon hung over center field, fat and silver. He cocked the bat tight, saw the imaginary pitcher rear back, his foot kicking high. Lofton kept his eye on the moon. When the pitcher let loose, Lofton swung hard, hard as he could. He imagined the smooth crack of his bat against the ball and saw the moon high over the park. He ran to first, rounded the corner, and kept running.
I can't tell if it will clear the fence, a double at least
. The stands were full, the Amanti woman and Brunner and his brother and Maureen and Nancy, all the people he knew, watching silently from the bleachers as he ran.
A gathering of the dead
.

He rounded second, digging toward third.
Off the center field wall, a triple
. He wanted more. He ran faster now, faster than he knew he should be able, effortlessly, as if fifteen years of cigarettes and beer were nothing. His invisible opponents scurried after the ball in the dark, trying to nail him before he reached home.

The catcher waited in a crouch.
The relay's coming from center; I'll have to slide
. Lofton imagined the play as he'd seen it unfold on television, the camera replaying it from every possible angle, the runner diving headfirst to the plate, stretching out with one hand while the ball rifled in, bouncing hard off the infield grass, a perfect shot into the catcher's glove, which whisked down to tag the sliding player, but too late, the umpire's arms already outstretched, palms down: Safe at home!

But that was not what happened. He did not get a chance to go into his slide, to evade the imaginary tag. Headed down the third base line, he slipped, almost as if an invisible hand had pushed him face forward into the dirt. He lay with his cheek against the ground, his hand outstretched toward the plate. He was out, the game was over, the winning run did not score, and the park was empty. The fans had left, forgotten his name as they piled into their cars and drove home to sleep.

Lofton got up slowly. His body hurt. His arms were abraded, small bits of gravel stuck in his palms. His cheek was scratched and bleeding, his slacks torn at the knees. But when he walked back to the street, his body sore and aching, Lofton felt good, better than he had felt for a long time.

The heat did not break. Lofton waited on his meeting with Amanti, on the return of the Redwings to MacKenzie Field, and stayed away from the
Dispatch
, where they would pester him about Mendoza. He worked in the Holyoke Public Library, a fading white building with Corinthian columns. The building stood in the center of town, next to a park where teenagers idled beneath the trees, listening to their boom boxes. An old, sun-pocked man sold shaved ice from a wooden cart on the sidewalk nearby.

Lofton wanted to know more about the fires in town. He hoped he could find out from old newspaper stories; at least they would give him a starting point. He could do better research at the
Dispatch
, or at the larger Springfield paper, for that matter, where part-time librarians clipped, sorted, and pasted the stories into books by subject matter, but he did not want anyone at the papers to know what he was researching.

Besides, he preferred the pale anonymity of the public stacks, the heavy wooden tables, and the dim, cool whirring of the electric fans. Also, though it was sometimes distracting, he liked the fact that there were people in the library. He liked the old men who came every day to read the papers from Boston and New York, the children who drifted through the stacks piling up books on dragons and war heroes and ballplayers. He even recognized one of the boys, a pale-haired teenager who sat with the halfway house gang at MacKenzie Field, his baseball cap twisted backward on his head. The kid walked with a limp and had loose, sagging features. At first he thought the boy might be retarded, but hearing the kid talk to the librarian and seeing the books he hoarded changed Lofton's mind. Still, there was something wrong with the kid. He had a hurt look on his face that made Lofton think again of his own son, who was normal enough, as far as he knew, but whom he thought of as somehow damaged, or scarred, or maybe just unhappy. More than once he looked up to see the boy staring at him, but emptily, as if he were not really there.

Lofton scanned both papers, the
Holyoke Dispatch
and the
Springfield Post
. There was a recurring story that worked its way through the years—the back and forth in the state legislature on Holyoke's downtown renovation project. One season it was on, the next off, and the money never got out of committee. This year, with the election coming, the issue was alive again.

Starting with the issues from April, when the minor league season began, he studied the papers more closely. He found an opening day story which pictured the Redwings' owners, Jack Brunner and Tony Liuzza, standing with the mayor of Holyoke at MacKenzie Field. The three men smiled for the camera. Liuzza told the reporter that he and Brunner had gotten to know each other through meetings of the local Democratic party.

“Jack just came up to me one day and told me the Redwings were up for sale. Being a frustrated ballplayer myself, I couldn't resist. I liked the idea of free tickets to the games.”

The story told him little he didn't already know. It mentioned how Brunner's construction company, Bruconn, planned on renovating an abandoned mill downtown: American Paper. The more Lofton thought about it, the more buying the team seemed a good move for Brunner, something to endear him, and his business interests, to the local politicians. Only, with his partner, Tony Liuzza, flip-flopping in the Democratic party, the situation might be going sour. No wonder, Lofton thought, there had been tension between Brunner and Liuzza that night in the press box.

Lofton found some business on Kelley, too, a story announcing how the state senator had endorsed Richard Sarafis for governor. “I support Richard Sarafis because he's the candidate who cares about the disenfranchised, the people away from the power centers, and that includes not only the citizens of Holyoke but all of western Massachusetts.”

Lofton had seen Richard Sarafis speak once, back when Sarafis was a young liberal—as Senator Kelley was now—the candidate with the clean record and clear eyes who worked the college campuses, the immigrant wards of Boston, the parlor halls of the wealthy, all with the same deft skill. Though Sarafis had aged more than a dozen years from the time Lofton had seen him, you couldn't tell time had touched the man at all from the looks of the picture at the top of the newspaper page. The makeup men, the hair dye specialists, and the tailors conspired to keep him forever young.

The real focus of the picture, though, was Senator Kelley. He moved with his hand extended—a small man, slightly burly, with his hair vaguely mussed. The camera had caught him in motion, just as his head turned away from Sarafis, so that his expression was disarming. It was Kelley's eyes. They seemed almost black in the photograph, as if contemplating some inner depths. If you did not know the circumstance of the picture, you would have guessed that the smaller man was the one with the power and that Sarafis, stiff, smiling, practiced, was some kind of plaster dummy set up for show.

The article said little else of substance, just the usual campaign rhetoric, but there was again brief mention of the renovation project planned for downtown Holyoke. The funding issue was currently being swatted around a committee that Kelley headed: “The Wells people are trying to foul the Holyoke money by attaching unacceptable stipulations. They don't want it to go through, not unless we award the contracts to their cronies. They're just daring me to kill it, knowing how much the people in my district need that project. The truth is, their stipulations are unacceptable, and I'll kill the whole thing before we let them have their way, even if it is an election year. I'm not playing partisan politics.”

All told, the articles on Brunner and Kelley told Lofton little he had not already learned. Senator Kelley supported the challenger Sarafis. So did Liuzza. Brunner was on the other side with the incumbent Wells. Both groups seemed to want the Holyoke project to go through; they just wanted to make sure their side got the credit and their supporters got the cream.

As it turned out, the reporter who wrote about the fires in Holyoke was Einstein, the same reporter whose name Tenace had mentioned and who, according to the boys at the
Dispatch
, had left town without so much as blowing them a kiss good-bye. Lofton came across Einstein's work often in the paper: “Maria Ramirez, mother of six, her dress torn and soot-smeared, watched as rescuers searched the debris Tuesday for the body of her sister, believed dead in the recent blaze.” In his stories Einstein made a practice of listing the owners of the buildings that burned; not one of the buildings had belonged to Brunner. One anonymous man who'd been burned out of his apartment said all the fires in Holyoke were arson, part of an insurance fraud scheme. A lieutenant on the arson squad said no, the buildings were old, they were fire traps. Sure, some of them were torched, but most went up through carelessness, just like anywhere else.

Einstein's most interesting stories, however, were his pieces about the Latinos, the street gang Lofton had learned about from Lou Mendoza. Over the course of several months Einstein had tracked the career of one of the gang's leaders, and eventually he had written about the young leader's death.

The leader of the Latinos had been named Angelo. The pictures showed him to be in his late twenties: a good-looking, dark-skinned man, with thick, full lips and wild black hair. When he talked, he mixed the language of the street with the slogans of the sixties' left wing, which Angelo was too young to have been part of but which he may have remembered or read about in books. He had been mobilizing the Puerto Rican community in an unusual way, at least for the leader of a street gang: giving speeches on street corners; criticizing the police and the drug dealers all in one breath. Angelo's popularity grew, and as it did, so did the size of the Latinos. He set up Latino patrols to protect storekeepers, to watch the streets at night, to try to stop the fires that, despite everything, still burned. In the process a street war broke out between the Latinos and a rival gang, the Wanderers.