This Dark Road to Mercy: A Novel (24 page)

“Look back here,” Wade said. “Back behind us.” He pointed to a huge mountain on the other side of the parking lot that you could just barely see through the clouds. A red-and-white antenna tower sat up on top of it. “That’s Mount Pisgah,” he said, looking up at it with his hands cupped around his eyes even though the sun wasn’t hardly out yet. He dropped his hands and looked over at me. “You know where that name comes from?”

“No,” I said.

“From the Bible,” he said. “God told Moses to climb to the top of Mount Pisgah so that he could finally see the Promised Land.” He looked back over at the mountain. “It wasn’t
this
mountain—that one was out in the desert somewhere—but that’s where the name comes from.”

“Did you make that up?”

“No,” he said.

“Then how’d you know it?”

“What?” he said. “You think I can’t know things just because I know them?” He stood there looking at me like I’d hurt his feelings, and then he smiled and pulled a brochure out of his back pocket and showed it to me. “I got this at the rest stop last night,” he said. “I needed a little bedtime reading.” He opened it and spread it out on the hood of the car. “The early explorers who found this mountain climbed to the top of it and thought they’d found the Promised Land when they saw what waited for them on the other side. Those guys were heading west, just like us.”

“Where are we going exactly?” I asked.

“St. Louis,” he said. “I thought y’all wanted to see some baseball.”

“After that.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Oklahoma? Texas? California?” His eyes got bigger as he listed the names. “We could keep going clear on to the Pacific Ocean if we wanted to.”

“Then what?” I asked. “We can’t live in this car forever.”

“I don’t know,” Wade said again. “I guess that’s why they call it an adventure.”

Ruby opened the car door and climbed out. Wade’s other sweatshirt was wrapped around her shoulders. She looked around the parking lot at all the mountains and the fog; she’d never even been to Crowders Mountain like I had, and I couldn’t imagine what she was thinking.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“Mount Pisgah,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because we’re looking for the Promised Land,” Wade said, folding up the brochure and sliding it into his back pocket. He winked at me. “And we’re almost there.”

The next couple days passed by like blurry dreams of riding in the car on back roads and getting lost late at night in places like Paducah, Kentucky, and Cookeville, Tennessee, where no stores or restaurants were ever open and there was never any place to use the bathroom. Wade had told us it would take about fifteen hours to drive from Charleston to St. Louis, but we were in the car a lot longer than that. It began to feel like we were just driving in circles, and it seemed like there were times when Wade had no idea where we were going or what we were going to do once we got there. We went long stretches without talking, me and Ruby looking out the windows and Wade trying to tune in baseball games on the radio to see where McGwire and Sosa were in the home-run race. It seemed like Wade hadn’t hardly closed his eyes since we’d left Myrtle Beach, and while he drove he told us long stories about playing for the Rangers and throwing batting practice to Sosa: how Sammy couldn’t hit any of his pitches except his fastball; how, back then, Sammy was just a skinny little Dominican kid who didn’t even speak English. The stories and the radio games all ran together, and before long I started picturing Sammy Sosa as a poor, skinny teenager in a Cubs uniform catching McGwire’s pop-ups out in the outfield.

By Saturday night, McGwire had hit sixty home runs to Sosa’s fifty-eight, which meant that McGwire only needed one more to tie Maris’s record. Saturday’s game was in Cincinnati, and Wade said there was no way McGwire would tie the record there; he said that was the kind of thing a ballplayer wanted to do on his home field, and he had no doubt that McGwire would wait on the record until him and Sosa were both in St. Louis on Monday, and he promised us that we’d all be there to see it.

Wade didn’t have tickets to Monday’s game, but he told us he had a feeling they wouldn’t be too hard to come by. The radio had been saying that just one ticket might cost as much as $1,000, so I knew Wade’s hope for a ticket had more to do with the money he had hidden in that black bag than any kind of luck or know-how he pretended to have.

Late Monday morning we drove into St. Louis. Just as we were crossing a river, Wade slowed down and pointed at something on the other side of the bridge. “See that right there?” he asked. It was a huge white half circle that looked to be sitting in a field off to our right. “That’s the St. Louis Arch.” He looked at us in the rearview mirror. “They call it the ‘Gateway to the West.’ ”

Ruby moved over to my side of the backseat to see it better. “What is it?” she asked.

“It’s a sculpture, kind of,” Wade said. “And it’s a monument too.”

“How’s it a gateway?” I asked.

“That’s just symbolism,” he said. “Like a metaphor or an analogy. You know what that means?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head.

“It means when something stands for something else. That arch stands for the gateway to the West. Like the old-time settlers, we’ve left everything behind in the East and we’ve crossed the mountains, and now we’re pointing our horses west.” The car was quiet, and the three of us sat there looking at the Arch as it got closer and closer, and before I knew it we’d driven right past it.

“Like Oregon Trail,” Ruby said.

“What?” Wade asked.

“Oregon Trail,” I said. “It’s a game you play on the computer.”

“I want to go see it,” Ruby said, turning and climbing up on her knees to look out the back window at the Arch.

“We will,” Wade said. “Maybe tomorrow. But today we’re here to see a baseball game. Tomorrow, we head west.”

Brady Weller

C H A P T E R   27

B
efore leaving town on Sunday morning I’d gone by the Fish House to get the $2,000 Roc owed me. He must’ve known I was on the way over to see him because he was sitting on an overturned trash can and smoking a Black & Mild outside the kitchen door when I pulled up.

“Damn, son,” he said when I got out of the car. “Don’t you know we don’t open for lunch until eleven on Sundays? I know your ass isn’t on the way to church.”

“I thought I’d come by here and collect my money so I’d have something to drop in the offering plate,” I said, taking his hand and fumbling through another awkward handshake.

“Sammy and McGwire
mono y mono
tomorrow afternoon,” he said. “You sure you don’t want to let that two thousand steep in the pot?”

“No way,” I said. “Not the way my luck’s been going.”

He laughed, jumped up off the trash can, and pulled a wad of cash out of his pocket, counting out twenty one-hundred-dollar bills and handing them to me. I folded the bills and tucked them into my breast pocket. Roc stuffed what was left of the wad back into his jeans.

“I can’t believe you carry that kind of cash,” I said.

He smiled. “Come on, man,” he said, lifting up his shirt to reveal a compact 9mm tucked into the waistband of his jeans. “Everybody knows the Fish House is the safest place to work in town.”

“Yeah, I see that,” I said. “Before I take off, you mind if I run another name past you?”

“Hey.” He spread his arms like he was about to give me a hug. “That’s what I’m here for, baby: to share my wealth of knowledge with my community.”

“Have you ever heard of a guy named Bobby Pruitt?”

“Robert Pruitt?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”

“Old baseball player?”

“That’s him.”

“Shit, man,” he said, “that’s the dude who took Wade down. That’s the one I was telling you about.”

“The guy he hit?”

“Yeah, man, and I’d stay away from that dude if I was you.”

“I think he’s looking for Wade and those girls.”

“Well, you’d better find Wade before he does.”

I took the keys out of my pocket and nodded toward my car. “That’s what I’m hoping to do tomorrow.”

“Where you off to?”

“St. Louis,” I said.

“For what?” he asked, smiling.

“A baseball game.”

He laughed. “Shit, you got tickets?”

I held up the folded bills he’d just given me. “I do now.”

Pruitt

C H A P T E R   28

A
ll that money, and you’re calling me collect,” the Boss said.

“You should’ve paid it in quarters.”

“Where are you?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“You’d better have good news,” he said.

“He’s been found.”

“Then why don’t I have what I want?”

“Because it’s not time yet.”

“When will it be time?”

“Monday. In St. Louis.”

“Why St. Louis?”

“That’s where he’s headed. And that’s where this will end.”

“It’s Thursday. Why should I have to wait that long?”

“Because the terms of the deal have changed.”

“What the hell makes you think that?”

“Because the cards aren’t in your hands anymore.”

“What do you want?”

“A hundred thousand.”

The other end of the phone was silent. “No way. That wasn’t the deal.”

“The deal has changed.”

“No. It hasn’t.”

“He’s going to be found, and what belongs to you is going to be found with him. It’s up to you if you want it back. Getting it back means the terms have changed.”

“I’m cutting you loose. We’re done. This is over.”

“No, it’s not. Not for me.”

The forty-dollar lot at Busch Stadium was already slam full of people an hour before the first pitch: college kids, families, hundreds of people wearing T-shirts and hats with “61” on them, carrying posters and signs with McGwire’s name and face on them. Outside the lot, scalpers littered the sidewalk, holding signs, looking into car windows, walking back and forth in the street during red lights.

A group of scalpers stood on the corner of Clark and Eighth, and a tall skinny black guy stepped away from them and waved me over. “What do you need, man?” he asked. “Whatever it is, I got it: dugout, left field, right field, everything but the box.”

“Just a ticket to get in. Doesn’t matter where.”

“Get in where you fit in, right?” he said, smiling, looking around like he expected somebody to be following me or trying to get close enough to hear what we were saying.

“What’s the cheapest you got?”

“You a cop?”

My eyes turned toward the group of guys still standing behind him. “Do they ask questions, or do they sell tickets?”

“Hold up, now,” he said. He looked around again, and then he nodded his head toward the parking deck behind him. “Follow me.” He turned and walked into a parking deck on the corner of Clark and Eighth Street, stopping in between a van and a pickup truck. “A grand,” he said, holding up a ticket. “A grand gets you standing room.”

The garage was full of cars but near empty of the sounds of people, everyone already headed toward the ballpark. The only sound was that of me peeling crisp bills off the stack. His eyes stayed on me while the money was counted.

“Fifteen,” he said

“Fifteen what?”

“Fifteen hundred. The price goes up this close to game time.”

The bills were folded and slid back into my pocket. “Okay.” But by the time he heard it the Glock had already been pulled from the waistband of my shorts and the tip of its barrel slammed down on top of his head. His knees buckled, and he fell at my feet.

“Do you want to play?” The barrel pushed down on his head until it felt like it could be forced through his skull. “Do you?”

“No,” he whispered. “I’m sorry. Take it.” He lifted the ticket up toward me, and my free hand closed around it before the sole of my shoe kicked him in the sternum, knocking him back against the concrete wall. He laid there looking up at me, tears in his eyes, his chest heaving like he’d been running as fast as he could. I pulled the grand back out of my pocket and balled it up and threw it at his face. He winced as the money fell all around him.

Easter Quillby

C H A P T E R   29

W
ade had parked under an overpass and left us in the car while he went to look for tickets. All the parking lots had signs up saying they were full, and we drove away from the stadium, looking for a place to park. The streets were empty because everybody was already inside. Other cars were parked around us under the overpass, and me and Ruby rolled down the windows and watched a family climb out of a minivan. Both boys were younger than me, and they both had on baseball gloves and McGwire jerseys, and their little sister stood behind their minivan and stared up at the overpass, sniffing and wiping her eyes like she’d been crying. The man and the woman were fussing at each other.

“It’s not like I meant to leave it,” the man said. He was tall and brown-headed just like the boys, and he had on a Cardinals ball cap and a T-shirt with a picture of McGwire on it.

“You’d just better hope it doesn’t rain,” the woman said. She had the back of the minivan open, and she was stuffing things inside a bag. She looked back at the little girl, and then she looked at the man. “Where are her damn snacks?” The man sighed loud enough for everybody to hear it. “Really, Marty?” she said. She slammed the back of the minivan and grabbed the little girl’s hand and started walking toward the ballpark. The man and the two boys followed her. Me and Ruby watched them go.

Wade had promised us he wouldn’t be gone long, but now we were the only ones still sitting under the overpass. The game was going to start soon, and I couldn’t help but worry while the parking lot got quieter and quieter as everybody headed inside for the game. Soon you couldn’t hear nothing but the cars driving on the interstate above us and the music and announcements coming from far away inside the ballpark.

Ruby had rolled her window down all the way, and she stuck out her arm like she was trying to feel if there was any breeze. “You think we’ll see Big Mac break the record?” she asked.

Sweat ran down my forehead, and I wiped it with my T-shirt. “I don’t know,” I said. “I bet he’ll tie it at least.” My legs were sweating too, and I grabbed a handful of napkins we’d left on the dash and wiped my legs, and then I balled up the napkins and threw them on the floorboard. “There’s another game tomorrow,” I said. “Maybe Wade will bring us to that one too.”