Steve Hamilton - The hunting wind

“What’s it gonna be?” I said to him. “Are you gonna wake up today or not?”

The machines beeped.

There was a chair in the corner. I sat down and closed my eyes for a while. I got up and looked out the window at the beautiful day going on outside, then sat down again.

I thought about Harwood’s phone call. I still didn’t understand the connection, this business of Randy telling him to go have his fortune told, back in 1971. It didn’t make any sense. There had to be more.

Something else was bothering me, something more immediate. The way he sounded when he said everything would be changing soon.

Forget it, Alex. It has nothing to do with you. Not anymore.

I went out of the room and walked around the rest of the hospital for a while. That got old fast, so I went outside to let the sun shine on me. I killed an hour walking around outside, bought a newspaper, then went back up to the room. The doctor was shining a light into Randy’s eyes. “Nothing yet,” he said. “I’ll be back.”

I sat there in the room reading the newspaper for another hour. The Tigers were already pitching themselves out of the season. The Red Wings were getting ready for another run at the Stanley Cup. The Pistons would make the play-offs, but nobody believed for a second that they’d make it past the first round.

I told the deputy I’d bring him up some lunch, went down to the street, and walked to the same bar I had been in the first time around. The bartender recognized me immediately. But then, the place wasn’t exactly filled to capacity. The woman who’d been watching the soap opera the first time I was there had been replaced by a man watching SportsCenter.

“Hey, did you ever make it up to Orcus Beach?” the bartender said.

“I stopped in,” I said.

“What did I tell you?” he said. “Pretty boring place, huh?”

I didn’t remember him saying that, but I wasn’t about to correct him. I let him set me up with a Strohs and the sandwich of the day, some kind of pastrami with cheese. I ordered a second one to go for the deputy. While I was sitting there eating, I kept thinking about Harwood’s call, and wondering why it was still bothering me. I kept picturing Maria in my mind, whether I really wanted to or not, the way she looked when she took me up to her bedroom.

Forget about it, Alex. Just forget about it.

I took the sandwich back to the deputy. I sat in Randy’s room and waited. I took another walk. The sun kept shining all afternoon.

Before the deputy left for the day, he told his replacement to keep letting me through the extra-tight security. He gave me a wink on his way out, and thanked me again for the sandwich. I figured I’d get off to a good start with the new deputy by offering to bring him back dinner. He liked that idea, so I went back down to the same bar. The same bartender was still there, the same man sitting on his stool watching television. It was the kind of bar that never changed, for better or worse, and when I sat down again, the same thought invaded my mind. Maria. Her face. Her body. Her lies.

Then I thought about the rest of her family. Her mother, her brother. Her daughter. Maybe Harwood’s daughter, too. It didn’t sound like it mattered to him.

Delilah, standing in the doorway, in the softball uniform.

Everything will be changing soon, Harwood said. I’m glad you won’t have to be around to see it.

He was driving his RV. There was traffic in the background.

Lots of traffic.

It hit me. He was going to their house, in Farmington. I knew it.

That’s why he’d called me. To see where I was. To make sure I wouldn’t be there. Stay away, he said. Stay away.

Goddamn it, I thought. He wouldn’t do that.

The hell he wouldn’t.

I got up and went to the pay phone. The same wooden chair sat in the narrow hallway. I had used this same phone to call Randy’s wife, and his three kids. Now I was going to call somebody I never thought I’d ever call again.

She answered on the third ring.

“Maria,” I said. “Listen very carefully.”

“Alex! I’m glad you called.”

“What?” I looked at the phone in my hand. “Maria, Harwood called me this morning. He said some things that got me thinking. That’s the only reason I’m calling.”

“Leopold is here,” she said. “He says hello. Everybody says hello, Alex.”

“Everybody? Everybody is there?”

“I called them last night,” she said. “After you left. Even when everybody else lets you down, your family’s going to be there for you.”

I let that one go. “Okay, then,” I said. “That’s good.”

“Chief Rudiger came over first,” she said. “I called him and asked him to come over. He stayed with me until they got here.”

“You called the chief?”

“I know it was late,” she said. “But he came right over. That’s the kind of man he is.”

I let that one go, too. “How did he look?”

“He was just fine. A little tired, I suppose. Why do you ask?”

“Never mind,” I said. More lies, just what I needed. “It doesn’t matter. Look, I’m sorry I called.”

“Don’t be,” she said. “I’m sorry things happened the way they did. I shouldn’t have asked you to help me in the first place. But it’s okay, because I have my whole family here now. We had breakfast on the beach, Alex. It was such a beautiful morning. Leopold made pancakes. And the chief said he’s going to go take care of things. So I’m fine.”

Leopold made pancakes. What the hell was I supposed to do with that? “Okay,” I said. “I’m hanging up now.”

“Good-bye, Alex. I hope you’ll think about me sometime.”

“I imagine I will, Maria. Good-bye.”

I went back to the bar. What a wonderful idea that was, giving her a call. I am so full of wonderful ideas.

“Leopold made pancakes,” I told the bartender. “Give me another beer.”

He slid one over.

“And the chief is going to go take care of everything,” I said. The chief who supposedly came over to sit with her until her family got there. The same chief I left lying on the floor with a bottle of Wild Turkey on his chest.

I froze, the beer bottle lifted halfway to my mouth. “Oh no,” I said.

I put the beer down.

“Oh my God.”

I have an excuse. It’s not much, but here it is.

Have you ever picked up a baseball? Have you ever felt how hard it is? A good pitcher throws it at speeds approaching a hundred miles an hour. Sometimes the batter swings at the ball and just barely makes contact with it. In that case, the ball doesn’t slow down, and it doesn’t change its direction more than a few inches. But those few inches are enough to make the catcher miss it completely. That’s why a catcher wears a mask.

If you’ve ever worn an old catcher’s mask, you know that it’s basically just a metal cage with padding around the edges. If a foul tip catches you square in the mask, that metal cage is there to make sure you don’t lose half your teeth or break your nose. The problem is, if a fastball hits you right in the middle of your mask and then drops to the ground, all that force has to go somewhere. It doesn’t matter how much padding you’ve got on that thing. Your head is still absorbing the blow.

Nowadays, they’ve got these catcher’s masks that look more like the masks hockey goalies wear. They’re streamlined, so that anywhere you hit them, it’s just a glancing blow. A catcher never has to take a straight-on fastball in the head anymore. Of course, they didn’t have those when I played. So how many of those fastballs to the head had I taken? Two thousand? Three thousand? I couldn’t even guess. But I do remember what it felt like when I took a couple good ones in the same inning. I’d go back to the dugout feeling like a prizefighter staggering back to his corner.