Christopher Moore - Secondhand Souls

By this time, my wife was breeding Yorkshire terriers, so naturally I’m nearly able to claim her vet as a dependent on my taxes, so in exchange for a stack of prime tickets behind home plate, the vet hooks me up with some animal steroids in powder form, which are supposed to be tasteless except for a slight hint of dog balls, which I figure Villarreal will never notice because he constantly eats jerk chicken and Caribbean pulled pork, which, for all I can tell, are spiced with garlic, fire, and dog balls anyway. So I start slipping a spoonful of powdered dog balls in Villarreal’s Gatorade in the clubhouse, and after a week or so, when I figure it has built up in his system enough to be detected in a piss test, but before he starts barking and humping an ump’s leg, I have my wife call the anonymous tip line to rat him out.

Now, it’s a hard sell with the league to convince them a guy is on performance-enhancing drugs when he’s so slow that when he hits a double, fans can go take a leak and still get back to their seats to see him slide, but my wife, it turns out, is a terrific liar, so I’m thinking that Villarreal is going to be peeing in the hundred-game suspension cup any day, but the day before the spot test, the son of a bitch whiffs on a backdoor slider, winding himself into a knot and snapping the hamate bone in his right hand, which gets him put on the disabled list for three weeks while he has the bone removed. (Turns out the hamate bone is one of those things like the appendix, the tonsils, and algebra, that you don’t really need but is left over from a time when we used to live in trees and didn’t have calculators.)

But with Villarreal out of the clubhouse for a month, my batting average jumps up twenty-five, my blood pressure drops twenty points, and I’m starting to make some good plays on defense. At this point, when my guard is down, my wife decides that we need to buy a house in Marin with a bigger yard for her dogs, and I’m in such a good mood, I give in, and before you know it, I’m commuting to the ballpark across the Golden Gate Bridge every day.

A week before he can actually start playing, Villarreal comes back from Arizona, where he was doing rehab on his hand, and he’s in the clubhouse, all day, every day, “How you doing? You getting some good at bats, man. How’s your wife? She like the new house?”—six thousand times a day, and my batting and fielding go to shit again and I’m afraid I’m going to get sent down to the minors unless Villarreal shuts the fuck up. But how?

So my wife is on me about the new house, how there are all these plants in the backyard that aren’t safe for her precious puppies and maybe even the kid and she wants them out of there. Foxglove, she calls them. Really tall flowers. I look at the Yorkies, which are about a foot tall at best, and the foxglove, the poison part are the flowers, which are about four feet off the ground, and I tell her I’ll get to it next time we have a day off.

“Digitalis,” she says. “It’s in the flowers. If one of them eats one of those flowers, their little heart will explode and we won’t even know what it was from.”

“What?” I say. I say, “What?”

“Digitalis. They make heart medication from it. If you have a weak heart—”

Before she finishes her sentence I decide it’s time to do some yard work because, goddammit, those little dogs give her a lot of joy and you can’t have one of their little hearts explode from eating those horrible flowers. So I cut those sons-a-bitches down, pile them up until I have a whole bale of them, then put them in the garage workshop where the puppies can’t get to them, and so they can dry and I can get rid of them responsibly.

So next day off at home the team has, I strip all the dried flowers off the stems and crunch them up in a coffee grinder, until I have about a baby-food jar full of fine powder, I mean really fine, like you pinch it between your fingers and it just sticks in that shape. Of course I don’t taste it, but it doesn’t have very much odor at all, and I can’t wait to get to the clubhouse next game day and get ready for the team meal. I mean I am excited. I cram as much of the powder into the jar as I can, and I’m off to the ballpark. But as I’m driving down the hill out of Sausalito and onto the bridge, I’m almost too excited. I mean, I’m sort of out of breath, and I’m sweating like crazy. Then my vision gets kind of blurry, like vibrating blurry, and I lose sight of the road for a second, I drifted out of my lane a little, I guess.

It turns out that there was a semi-truck coming the other way that stopped me from really hurting anyone else, although don’t let them fool you, no matter what they say about how safe Mercedes are, they cannot withstand a head-on with an eighteen-wheeler at fifty miles per hour. Guy driving the truck was fine.

Yeah, it turns out that digitalis can be absorbed through the skin, so I probably should have worn gloves when I was preparing my powder. Who knew?

Villarreal batted.335 that year and you can bet your ass he didn’t shut up the entire time. I’m just glad I wasn’t there for my funeral, because I know he probably talked until half the people there wanted to join me in the casket just for some peace and quiet.

“So, like I said, I’m cursed. You think it was the bird or the murder plot?”

“I don’t know,” said Mike.

“Do you believe in karma? Because if karma is a thing, I’m thinking it’s the murder plot.”

“That sounds reasonable,” said Mike. “But why are you telling me about it?”

“You don’t know?”

“That’s why I asked.”

“Well, because I’m stuck. I’m not moving on. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be. Mind you, I don’t know how it’s supposed to be, but this isn’t it—stuck on a bridge forever with a bunch of other loopy spirits. I thought you were the one that was supposed to move things along.”

“And telling me about an annoying catcher is supposed to help that how?”

“It’s supposed to make you realize it, I suppose,” said the ballplayer. “It’s like stealing second base. The manager can tell you to go, the first-base coach can signal you to go, the batter can know you’re going to go, but you have to watch the pitcher, watch the catcher, watch the first baseman, you have to see all the signs, then you know it’s right to steal. I’m just one of the signs, but you have to make the move to steal.”

“That’s the least helpful sports analogy I’ve ever heard.”

“Well, you’re not the one who needs help, are you?”

Bird played “Summertime” on the speakers. Minty Fresh stepped out of the back room of his store when he heard the bell over the door jingle and saw a man in a yellow suit and homburg hat coming down the aisle. Minty caught himself against the counter. The man in yellow pulled up, almost losing his balance, but for sure losing his cool with the misstep. The man in yellow had no more expected to see Minty Fresh than Minty expected to see him. He turned his surprise into a fingertip-to-the-brim-of-his-hat salute.

“Minty,” he said.

“Lemon,” said Minty Fresh, all of sudden feeling his shit tightening down.

“I didn’t expect to find y’all here.”

“I expect not,” said Minty.

“I had some business with Evan.”

“Yeah, he don’t work here anymore.”

Lemon looked to the back of the store, where a fortyish African American man in a nice suit was browsing the jazz vinyl.

“I don’t suppose y’all got them souls vessels here, do you?”

“No, cuz, I do not. Those motherfuckers are not here.”

The man in the suit—he wore caduceus pin on his lapel, a doctor—came to the counter with a first pressing of Mile Davis’s Birth of the Cool . He set it on the counter, and as the Mint One rang it up on his old-style mechanical register, the doctor looked from Minty, to Lemon, to Minty, then back to Lemon. From the seven-foot, shaved-head man wearing a mint-green shirt and chocolate dress slacks in light wool, to the linebacker-sized gent dressed head to toe in yellow, even down to his yellow python-skin shoes.