Scott Turow - Personal injuries

For Feaver, she kept it simple: she didn't start.

"But you were there." He was excited by the idea, clearly gripped again by some revived feeling of his own passionate hope for stardom. He was questioning her as an expert, as someone who'd arrived, who could tell him, perhaps, how he had missed the goal. How had she found the fortitude to pay the price? Where did it come from? The drive? The spark?

Her responses were laconic. She described practicing until long after dark, the way she had fallen asleep with a stick in her hand, not once or twice but a hundred times, reviewing moves in her head. She'd been through a stretch at Iowa when she had not spent even a single holiday with her family, a period in which Thanksgiving to her only meant prep time for the NCAAs and Christmas the "A" Camp in New Jersey, when even the Fourth of July was lost to the National Futures Tournament and in which the time devoted to sport meant it took six years for her B.A. Field hockey became a tunnel in her life, a long passage in which there was little external light. When it was suddenly over, she was like some underworld person returned to daytime, blinded, dazzled.

But beyond detailing her devotion, she could not share an answer to his questions. She was just not as open, or sloppy, choose the word, as he was; she could never take the joy or comfort he seemed to find in revealing himself. It had just been the path that was clear to her. Her father had been a baseball star. And it turned out his ability had leaped generations like an electrical arc. Evon had his power, his surprising speed from such a bandy build, and the precision to make that astonishing triangulation about where a flying ball, her body, and her stick were going to arrive. In the game, with the moving hand of the clock feeling as if it were winding her heart tighter, with the dimension of the known universe shrunk to 100 yards by 60 and its population reduced to the other twenty-one women on the field, with grace and fury possessing her as if they were visiting from somewhere else-at those moments she was finally, fully herself, not the odd, unknown, scowling girl lost in her tumbling home.

Her father lit up like a lantern when she played, paced the side, at times too stirred up to watch, but her mother never really seemed to care for the sight of her, even when she ran from the field in victory. Her hair clung in damp ringlets to her cheeks, her uniform was mud-spotted, and her knee pads and socks were dragging down. Often, at the end of the game, she could see that she was where she had started, odd and vaguely unwelcome. Not simply because she was a girl good at what many still thought was reserved for boys, but because in her passion, in the explosive furious way she crossed the field, she was revealing something about herself, much like her scowling, which others did not want to know.

"I had the talent," she said. "And I worked it. For whatever that was worth." She shrugged, unwilling to express much more. The Mercedes by now had glided to a halt in front of the awning and the handsome refinished doors at her building.

"How far did you get? The team? Did you guys get close to a medal?"

She waved a hand, barring further inquiry. She heard her mother's corrosive warnings about being boastful and showy, and she was still wary, on principle, about going too far, too fast. But neither concern was the real problem.

"I did my best, Robbie, but it's over now. I've had to let it go."

The streets glistened in the warmth of a night thaw that would bring fog by morning. In the reflected light, she could see the fixed way he watched her. He knew about that, she realized, letting loose of the grandest hopes. Loss freighted his expression.

"Yeah," he said. He took quite some time before he spoke again. "If I said, Let me buy you dinner, that wouldn't be right, would it?"

Would it? She sighed on reflex, weighing it. But it was still too chancy. He was dashed, of course.

"Well, okay," he answered, but was too raw to look her way for long. His hurt, like almost everything else, was so open.

What the hell, she thought. What the hey. "We took a bronze," she said.

"No way. Really?"

She indulged them both by absorbing his momentary worship. A medal. An Olympic medal! You could see his heart fly at the thought. She did not surrender often to pride, fearing she could remain stuck there for life, but tonight, under his influence, she felt it fill her out. She had done that. Set her mind, scaled the heights, and returned with the vaunted trophy. Ironically, he recognized the cost, too.

"That's a lot to climb down from."

"It is," she answered. "You realize you're a lot later than other people in getting started on a life."

They talked another moment. Before she left the car, he held out his hand to shake. Congratulations, probably. Alighting, she had another thought.

Peace.

"People talk," Robbie told us, "About Brendan, because Kosic and Milacki are always stuck to him like gum on your shoe. You know, it's like, What gives? Especially with Rollo, cause Rollo's lived for more than thirty years in the basement apartment in that big stone house of Brendan's out in Latterly on the West Bank. And Rollo's sort of been Brendan's loyal liege his whole life. The story is that they're both from the same parish, but Brendan's a few years older, so they didn't really get hooked up until they ended up in the same platoon in Korea. Anyway, they're in some hellacious firefight charging up Pork Chop Hill or wherever, the Commies are kicking their living ass, and Brendan looks around and some Chink jumps out of a bush and just about empties his rifle in Rollo. When they tell the story, and I've heard it only about seven or eight hundred times, it's like in the movies where the guy sort of stands there raffling from the bullets, dead already and only the recoil keeping him on his feet. Rollo's ripped to shreds, but good brave Brendan, under no circumstances will he say quit, he throws Rollo over his back and carries him up the hill for half an hour until he gets him to a corpsman. And this, by the way, is not just a story. Brendan's got the Silver Star at home to prove it." Robbie paused to direct a look across the conference room table at Sennett, a warning that Brendan Tuohey would risk his life to defy his enemies.

"Anyway, when Rollo recovers, he's like some character in an old novel or the Book of Ruth, My life is yours, whither thou goest. I don't know exactly what he pledged, but he's had his nose in Brendan's hind end ever since. Brendan becomes a cop, Rollo becomes a cop. Brendan becomes a deputy P.A., Rollo gets assigned to the P A.'s investigation unit. Brendan becomes a judge, and pretty soon, Rollo's the bailiff in Brendan's courtroom."

Given the living arrangements, Robbie said, there was occasional sniggering. But his bet was what you saw was what you got-two crusty old bachelors, farting and walking around in their underwear. For one thing, Robbie said, Brendan'd had a thing on the side, his secretary Constanza, for more than twenty years now. Constanza was married, which suited Brendan just fine. He had once told Robbie he would no more care to live with a woman than with a parrot. 'Love the plumage,' he said, `but too much jabber. Easier this way.' Indeed, in one of his acidic, if antic, moods, Robbie told us Tuohey had delivered a fairly entertaining monologue about why liquor was a more dependable companion than a woman. Kosic, who said almost nothing to anyone, seemed to share these attitudes. He, too, had a girlfriend, a widow, his second cousin, whom, conveniently, he could never marry.

In Robbie's opinion, the motive for Kosic's and Tuohey's living arrangements was not sex but money. Brendan had extended Kosic's duties as bagman far beyond the usual role of a simple intermediary. The `rent,' as Robbie called it, which certain Common Law Claims judges paid to remain in their courtrooms, was delivered to Kosic and never went farther. For more than a decade, Robbie had never seen Brendan reach into his pocket, even for a quarter for a newspaper. Kosic handled everything-he paid all household expenses, the light bill, the phone company, with money orders purchased at random currency exchanges and banks. Brendan had no credit cards and rarely used his checking account. Meals, vacations, clothing, his debts from his card games at Rob Roy, his country club, even the little bit on the side he had always given Constanza, were always handed over by Rollo. `Forgot my wallet' was the excuse with those who did not know him well; others did not bother to ask. Occasionally, apropos of nothing, Brendan would mention his mother's Depression-learned lessons about the evils of credit and the virtues of hard cash. Bobbie had never heard anything similar from Sheilah, Mort's mother. It was just Brendan's play, always a step or two ahead of his imagined enemies.