Peter Abrahams - The Fan

“What about them?”

“Getting along okay?”

“Sure.”

“No problems?”

“What do you mean?”

“Sometimes there are problems when a big star comes to a new team. You know that. Especially if…”

“If what?”

“If he gets off to a rocky start.”

Bobby rose, crossed the room to the wet bar, got a beer from the small refrigerator beneath it. “There are no problems,” he said.

“Not with any of the players?”

“Correct.”

She opened her mouth as though to say more, stopped herself. They sat in silence, broken only by the whirring of the recorder. He still wasn’t bored.

All at once, she began to pale again. She took a deep breath. “You’ve been generous with your time, Bobby.” She rose, again slightly unsteady. “Just one more thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Have you ever heard of someone called Gil Renard?”

Bobby thought. “I’m bad with names,” he said.

She laughed, seemed to lose her balance, reached out, touched his forearm. “Don’t I know,” she said.

“Is he in the minors?” Bobby asked.

“No.”

“Why do you ask?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Jewel put the legal pad and the tape recorder in her bag.

“That it?” said Bobby.

“I might have a follow-up or two when I pull everything together.”

“Just call.” I said that? he thought, and felt a strange thrill that was almost of danger.

She tilted her head again. “Thanks, Bobby.” Then she was gone. Her touch lingered on his forearm.

Jewel walked toward the parking area in front of the four-car garage. She had a sharp pain in her head and a deep, dull one in her jaw, throbbing in some infernal harmony. She got in her car, parked next to Bobby’s Jeep, closed the door, rolled down the window, breathed in the cool night air, hoping for clarity, or simply the strength to drive home. Pull everything together? She didn’t know where to begin.

Jewel was about to turn the key when a car swept into the circular drive and stopped on the other side of Bobby’s Jeep. She sat motionless. The night was quiet, and what breeze there was blew her way. She heard Wald speak, low but clear: “And now the asshole wants to be traded.”

Then came Val’s voice: “For Christ’s sake, where to?”

“It’s a pipe dream,” Wald said. “No one would touch him. That contract makes him a leper.”

“So what’s going to happen?” Val said.

“Who knows?”

“Can’t you do better than that?”

Wald’s voice rose. “You’re complaining?”

“Shh. I’m not. It’s just that I’d like to know what’s going to happen. Is that so awful?”

Wald snorted. “This one’s up to him.”

“I don’t understand.”

“He’s going to have to start hitting. It’s as simple as that.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“He’s through.”

“But he’s only thirty-one.”

“Thirty-two in a few weeks. Almost geriatric in this game, even though he’s still seventeen in real life.”

“You don’t need to tell me that,” Val said.

Should have been a grave digger.

Another black night, moonless and starry, but now the air was warm, and alive with soft breezes. Surrounded once more by the old town names, written in stone-Pease, Laporte, Spofford, Cleary, Bouchard-Gil toppled the marker that read Renard, R. G., and dug again his father’s grave. This time the once-turned, unfrozen soil had lost its resistance. The earth felt weightless, and Gil very strong, stronger than he could ever remember. He was a big man, he reminded himself, bigger than Bobby Rayburn, as he had discovered when they stood so close at the ballpark; and much bigger than Primo. He pictured the knife flashing into Primo’s hand in the men’s room at Cleats, and his insides stirred with a feeling he hadn’t known since the last time he had faced some dangerous hitter: butterflies.

In what seemed like moments, Gil was down in the earth to shoulder level. The shovel blade struck the pine box. Recalling the jagged holes he had made in the wood, Gil knelt and cleared the rest of the dirt by hand. Then he climbed out of the pit and walked to the shed at the end of the dirt track crossing the cemetery. The pickup was parked behind it. Gil opened the door, reached inside, bent his knees, and hoisted Boucicaut’s body onto his shoulders.

A heavy and unbalanceable load: Gil carried Boucicaut half the distance, dragged him the rest of the way by his belt, bumping him over rocks and tree roots. Gil knew he couldn’t hurt Boucicaut anymore but still was crying by the time he got him to the grave. Boucicaut: a knight in the Crusades, according to some college girl; a real one, not like Robin Hood. He smoothed Boucicaut’s hair a little, plucked a twig from his beard. Bent over the body, Gil was conscious of the stars above, the vast black spaces between them, the infinite blackness beyond. He knew he should say something, eulogize Boucicaut in some way.

“Len Boucicaut,” he said. “Catcher.”

Then he rolled him into the hole. Boucicaut landed with a heavy thump, facedown.

Beside the shovel lay Gil’s MVP trophy, the brass-plated baseball on the hardwood stand. Gil picked it up. He had brought it with the intention of placing it in Boucicaut’s arms. Boucicaut was the MVP, always had been, always would be. It was the right thing to do, but how was it feasible, now that Boucicaut had landed facedown like that? He could climb down into the pit, wrestle the body into position; that was one way. Gil stood at the edge, picturing himself doing it. But he didn’t do it. In the end, he shoveled the earth back in, working faster and faster, hurling and flinging the last clods of it, then tilted his father’s headstone back in place, and hurried off, shovel in one hand, trophy in the other.

Gil drove to the trailer in the woods. The 325i was still parked in the junk-strewn yard, but that wasn’t what first caught his eye. What first caught his eye was the light glowing in the trailer.

He got out of the pickup and closed the door softly. Had they left a light on? Possible, but still he moved as quietly as he could toward the trailer. Now he heard voices, realized as he drew closer that they were TV voices. Could they have left the TV on too?

Gil found a window where the plastic curtains were only half drawn, knelt, and peered over the sill. He saw no one except the figures on the TV screen. Black-and-white figures in some old movie: a man in a tuxedo breathed smoke from his nose and asked a woman in a strapless gown to dance. She breathed smoke from her nose and said her feet were tired.

Then Gil felt something hard in the small of his back, and a real woman said: “Hands way up.”

He didn’t move.

“This is a twelve-gauge, peeping boy, and my finger’s wrapped around the trigger.”

Gil considered the thrower on his leg, tried and failed to imagine reaching it before she could pull the trigger; and raised his hands.

“Now, kneeling down just like that, turn around so I can see your pretty face.”

Gil started to turn. She prodded him with the gun muzzle. “Did I say anything about lowering them?”

Gil raised his hands higher, twisted around, still on his knees. He looked up at the woman. She had painted eyebrows, frosted hair, upside-down Cupid’s-bow lips.

“How to keep men the way you are right now,” she said. “That’s the problem.”

“You’re making a mistake,” Gil said. “I was only returning the truck.”

She didn’t turn to look. “What were you doing with it?”

No smooth lie came to mind. But he did remember something: She’s in the pen. “Returning it, like I said,” Gil told her. “I didn’t expect to see anyone here, that’s all. You weren’t supposed to be back till August.”