Читать книгу Murder Boy - Bryon Quertermous - Страница 12

“THESE GUYS,” Rickard said, smacking the radio in the Buick. “Moron hosts and moron callers dissect everything about baseball but what’s important.”

He was listening to a sports talk radio station I listened to myself when I got sick of the forced banter and homogenous rotation of the same 10 songs of your chosen genre that was the state of modern radio. I’d heard Detroit had a vibrant music scene but I’d never had the patience or desire to dig for it so I was stuck with the same songs you could hear in Scottsdale or Schaumburg or Sherman Oaks or any other bland suburb.

“Nice radio,” I said, running my finger along the screen of a shiny chrome box that looked more expensive than the car itself.

“Satellite,” he said. “I’m kinda obsessed with baseball and this lets me listen in all over the country and see what they’re saying about our boys.”

“The Tigers?”

“Look at these empty streets,” Rickard said.

I vaguely recognized the area. We were on the immediate outskirts of the downtown area but I couldn’t place exactly where until Rickard continued talking about baseball and I realized we were near the old spot of Tiger Stadium. To hear old guys talk about it, you’d think the neighborhood was some kind of magical baseball heaven. But in actuality, it was just as run down as the rest of the city, if slightly more populated due to the higher concentration of white people left over from its days as the Irish neighborhood known as Corktown.

What was left of the stadium was a corner chunk of faded gray steel that had been the corner of the stadium behind home plate. The field was still there, lovingly maintained by a small group of fans, but the fields surrounding it were weedy and littered with trash.

“This place is like a fucking graveyard now, but back in ‘84, there were crowds and cars and miniature bats being handed out.”

I nodded along, wondering if this was the speech he gave Steve before doing whatever he did to get him into the trunk.

“You were here back then?”

“First time my dad took me to a game in years. Money was tight, he was always getting laid off and that free little wooden bat was my only souvenir.”

He didn’t say anything else for several minutes while he circled the block, slowing every so often as a young black guy in a security guard uniform walked the outline of the weedy lot. Finally, Rickard circled one last time to the back side of the lot.

“I could list all of the stats, the player bios, all of the box score shit, but what sticks in my head are my memories of the stadium: the smells, the sounds, and the voice of Hickey Ernest calling the plays.”

He paused again, this time only briefly. Then said, “Fucking Hickey Ernest.”

“When I was younger, seven or eight,” I said, “before my dad turned into an asshole, we used to do work around the house and in the yard on the weekends. He always had baseball games on the radio with Hickey Ernest.”

“The times we went to the stadium my pop would bring one of those little radios to plug in his ear so we could still get his commentary. Everything I know about baseball, Detroit, and being a man I learned from Hickey Ernest.”

Said the man with a fresh body in the trunk and a bloody knife in his pocket.

“It sounds like maybe you don’t care for the man anymore,” I said.

“He changed. We all changed, but he changed worse. For the worse.”

It seemed like he wanted to say more, but the security guard was moving swiftly in our direction.

“Sir,” the guard said.

Rickard didn’t say anything and neither of us moved. I looked down and saw Rickard’s hand moving around in the pocket with the knife. He wouldn’t really kill this guy in front of me. Would he? In broad daylight?

“Sir,” the guard repeated. “I thought we had an agreement from this morning. You told Steve—”

“I don’t see Steve around,” Rickard said.

“Please leave.”

“Come on,” I said. “The longer Farmington is alone with Wade—”

“You ever go to a game, you know, when this place was real?”

Rickard was talking around me to the guard.

“Not here,” the guard said after a second or two of contemplation. “But the new place, they did good with it and I’ve taken my kid a couple times.”

Rickard nodded in slow agreement with his head down then looked up and surveyed the whole field. The last blast of cold weather through town had left a layer of frost over everything, giving the field the look of a ball diamond preserved under hockey ice.

“It’s a different game now,” Rickard continued. “Different people, different spirit. I just want to hold onto the good times a bit longer.”

“They’re really cracking down though on you people coming through here. I can’t be taking my boy to no games if I’m on the unemployment line, you know?”

“My friend here and I,” Rickard said, nodding toward me, “we have a common acquaintance who could have saved this place.”

They both looked at me. I had no idea what he was talking about.

“The Professor,” Rickard said. “Wouldn’t give me my share of our money in time to save the corner.”

“Right. That’s what they called it here. The Corner.”

“No, the corner is behind home plate. The actual home plate, for that matter, that’s now in Toledo.”

The guard saw his last opportunity to get us out of there and mumbled something about us maybe heading to Toledo to try our luck. For some reason it worked this time and Rickard motioned for me to follow him back to the car.

“Make sure you get that son of yours to a real ball park before he’s too old,” Rickard said by way of goodbye. “Fenway or Wrigley. Some place with character.”

“STEVE WAS a…I mean that body was a security guard?” I asked in the car, driving away from the ball field.

“You said you didn’t want to know anything about it.”

“No...you’re right. Let’s talk about what you said about Farmington and his deal with you and how you were going to save this corner. What did I get myself in the middle of?”

“Sons, fathers, legacies, back stabbing, misplaced trust. It’s like that guy Shakespeare: real dramatic and shit.”

I’d never been a standout in any of my literature seminars, but I spent enough time in them that something was bound to seep into my subconscious. So as Rickard talked, I started having a mishmash of flashbacks to Native-American literature, Greek mythology, Roman mythology, biblical stories, and a screenwriting story seminar that I drove to Chicago for on the night after Melissa lost the baby.

“You’re a trickster,” I said. “You and Posey. Devious beings that exist to fool around in my world and manipulate events for your own entertainment.”

“Hmmm,” he said.

“But there’s another character. I’m not the most important character.”

“Me?”

“Farmington. I’m telling it, but he’s my mirror character. The one I’m supposed to learn through.”

Rickard stared dumbfounded at me and I didn’t really blame him. It sounded ludicrous out loud but made perfect sense to me. It put my entire life in perspective. I was meant to tell great stories, but before I could do that I needed to develop as a storyteller through life experiences. The universe’s first attempt had almost worked. Some of the most honest, disturbing, and brilliant writing I did was in the midst of my worst trials with Melissa. Then I squandered all of that honesty writing cheesy stories about hit men and strippers and self-congratulatory, navel gazing stories about writers.

“That look on your face,” Rickard said. “It’s like you’re playing with the dolls in your head.”

“Farmington was right. I was selling myself short with the stuff I was writing. It wasn’t the crime part that sucked, it was the sucking part that sucked.”

“Wow. Yeah. You’re great with the words.”

“I was almost married once,” I said. “She was pregnant and I dropped out of school and gave up writing and took an office job in a cubicle and thought that was going to be the rest of my life. I even went out and bought a briefcase.”

“Sucker.”

“She lost the baby then left me and I got a second chance at the life I was meant to have. I don’t ever want that other life. That is no life. I can’t do that. And Farmington holds the key to saving me from that.”

“Let’s go get him then.”

“First though, I’m hungry. I have low blood sugar and I feel myself starting to drag.”

I’d lost track of the time and emerged from my thought bubble unsure of how much real time had passed. I was tweaked about my self-realizations and excited to jump into my vision quest, but when my blood sugar drops, I lose focus easier than normal and my decision-making skills completely disintegrate.

“How about Taco Bell?” I said. “There’s one near here, isn’t there?”

“By the college. I got a burrito there once at like 2am after I stabbed a guy at a bar.”

I stared at him and knew my energy was already depleted because I didn’t jump out of the car right then.

“He didn’t die,” Rickard said. “Not from that. He asked me to stab him. He had a vest on.”

I nodded and thought about whether I wanted tacos or a burrito. Rickard tapped his fingers obnoxiously on the steering wheel navigating through the college area. Two blocks from the restaurant we noticed the police car following us. Rickard was the first to notice it was a campus police officer just before the cruiser rammed us from behind.