Country Hardball (7 page)

“Yeah. Just into the game, I guess.”

“Don’t worry. He’ll do fine,” she said.

“That’s what you always say.”

She kissed my shoulder, patted the top of my knee I put you down for?”a H. “Just relax.”

The next kid hit a foul ball over the dugout, into the open area where the kids were playing cupball by wadding up a Coke cup, using it for a ball, an open palm for a bat. They chased after the foul ball. One of the kids grabbed it and walked up to the concession stand for a free sno-cone.

“He makes the team, it’ll be fine, right? Maybe he makes the high school team. College scholarship.”

“Sure.”

“Just think of what he could do with a college education,” Nancy said.

“Honey, he’s twelve.”

“I know. But you have to plan ahead. We have to start thinking about these things. Putting some money away.”

The Marlins at bat, one of the Lacewell bunch, let a couple go by him to fhe waitress ma

The old man was holding the framed photograph, turning it around in his hand, pointing to the men one at a time. Around a desk. Men in polyester dress shirts. Thick, loose ties. Shoulder holsters.

“Wojo, I can’t remember the guy’s name. Real nice guy. The Asian guy, he was a funny little fella. And the black guy and the Jew. They were class acts, every one of them. You probably don’t even remember
Barney Miller
, do you?”

“Yeah, I remember the show,” Roy said, looking at the other pictures the man had on the wall.

The old man turned the volume back up on the ball game. Houston was up by a run over the Cardinals. Then journeyman reliever Johnny White gave up a walk to load the bases.

“Max Gail,” the old man said, slapping his hands together. “Wojo. The guy’s name was Max Gail. The actor.”

“Okay,” Roy said.

The old man shut the game off when a wild pitch tied the game. He turned to Roy, still standing at the wall of pictures. “That’s me even younger with the
Adam-12
crew. Named my boys after those two. Pete Malloy and Jim Reed. Good guys.”

Roy thought about the man’s two boys, men when they were killed in Iraq. He wonderedT">“What do you mean?”, should have been whether Father’s Day was any worse than the rest of them. If the old man missed them so much every day that holidays couldn’t be any worse. The way Roy missed his parents all year, every year for the past decade, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day didn’t matter too much. Like tossing a match into a burned-out car.

“So you used to be an actor? Like a long time ago?”

“Not that long ago,” the old man said. “I was the guy they’d pick up in the first part of the show, then find out—whatever it was—I didn’t do it.” The man took a drink from his cup, then set it back on the table next to him. “A good suspect, they said. That kind of face.”

The men sat in silence, watching the white dot on the TV screen fade away.

“I wanted to ask you about the Darby money,” Roy said. “Bonnie and Clyde.”

“Bonnie and Clyde?” The old man laughed. “No, they were dead before I was born. I’m not that old. Killed in Louisiana by a group of Texas cops. Chased all over the South, robbing and killing. Frank Hamer finally got those bastards, though. You know, you hear all the damn time about Pat Garrett and what a hero he was for tracking down Billy the Kid. Nobody remembers Hamer. But they got shrines to Bonnie and Clyde. Nobody gives two shits for Hamer, for the good guys. Not two shits.”

“What about Darby?” Roy asked, working the old man back on the subject.

“H. D. Darby,” the old man said. “They grabbed him and a girl down around Ruston and dumped them over in Waldo. Don’t remember the girl’s name.”

“Waldo?”

“Yeah, Waldo,” the old man said. “Not ten miles from where you’re sitting. Bonnie and Clyde dropped the pair off there. And you want to know something scary?”

Roy said he did.

“Bonnie Parker asked Mr. Darby what he did for a living. And you know what he told her?”

He didn’t.

“He told her he was an undertaker.”

“Undertaker?”

“Right.” The old man tapped his nose. “When he told her that, when he says that to her, Miss Bonnie Parker laughed and laughed and said that maybe someday soon Mr. Darby would work on her.”

“Okay.”

The old man took another drink. Set the glass down. “Soon enough Bonnie and Clyde were shot dead in Louisiana and Mr. Darby was one of the undertakers who worked on them.”

They talked a few more minutes about Bonnie and Clyde. Then Roy asked about the hideout.

“Old farmhouse between Magnolia and Waldo. Nobody’s real sure where. Three oak trees form a triangle. In the middle they buried a chest. That’s all folks know for sure. Lot of treasure hunters turned over a lot of Columbia County dirt back in the ’30s and ’40s looking for it, but no one ever found anything.”

“Still there?”

“Nobody ever claimed it,” the old man said.

“So what do you think?” Roy asked. “Worth looking for?”

“That why you’re asking?”

“Ju)T said, st saw a documentary about it. Got to thinking about it, that’s all.”

The old man twisted around, trying to pop his neck. He gave up. Took another drink. “You know who Myrna Loy is?”

“From
The Thin Man
movies?”

“Yeah, sure. That’s what everyone remembers her for.
The Thin Man
.” He smacked his lips together for a bit. “Ever see
Across the Pacific
?
The
Desert Song
?”

Roy said he hadn’t.

“Jesus God.” The old man shook his head. “What a woman.”

Roy waited, then, “Not sure what this has to do with Bonnie and Clyde.”

“You were asking if it was worth it. I went to Hollywood back in the ’60s, looking for Myrna Loy. She was a little older than I was. She was probably, hell, fifty or sixty then. Saw a show on the TV the other day about that. Older women and younger men. They’ve got a name for that now. Can’t remember what it is. But we didn’t have shows like that back then. We had Mike Douglas and Andy Griffith. You probably don’t remember them either, but they were something special. They don’t make them like that anymore.”

“Okay.”

“So I go there looking for Miss Loy. You know she had four husbands? Divorced all four of them. What I’m going the long way around the barn to tell you is you go searching for something and you don’t know what you’re going to find. I go searching for Miss Loy and meet my Abigail Landry and we have two great boys and a great life. Luckiest man alive.” He leaned his head back on the recliner, looked off at something. “You go out looking for something, maybe there’s something looking for you. Maybe you need to let it find you.”

“Somebody goes looking for the Bonnie and Clyde money, maybe they find it, maybe they find a lot of dirt.”

“I don’t know what I’m talking about, Roy. Just looking at all these old pictures. You get old enough, you’re looking back at whoever you were and wondering how much of that person is left.”

“You ever find Myrna Loy?”

“I oughta tell you I met her and she was fat and ugly. Keep you from chasing after nonsense.”

“You never saw her?”

“No, just in the movies.” The old man found the remote on the side table, turned on some baseball highlights, then muted the TV. “Roy, you remember what I told you the first day I saw you? After you moved in with your grandma?”

“You said if I leave grass clippings on your carport you’ll skin me alive.”

The old man laughed. “I said you look like your grandpa.”

“Yeah, well. I guess I ought to.”

“Not that much. You know, you get pieces from everybody. But you got most of your pieces from him. He was a good man, your grandpa.”

“So I’m told.”

“And I’m guessing you were told your grandpa went looking for that money, too.”

Roy looked away.

“Your grandma tell you that? That where you got do our part.”

“Just going through some old boxes of stuff at her house is all. Got me thinking.”

“Got him thinking, too. Fool’s gold, Roy. Myrna Loy. Bonnie and Clyde treasure. Being a hero for your country. Damn it, you’d best just cut your grass and keep your head down, son. Stop hoping after something that ain’t there.”

“Worked out for you, though.”

The old man nodded. “Ask your grandpa how it worked out for him.”

The old man turned the game back on, poured himself another drink, then fell asleep before the ice had melted.

Roy stood at the wall, looking at the photographs. Cop shows from the ’60s and ’70s. Autographs from cast members. Notes they wrote the old man and his pants

Hurley’s truck wasn’t there when I pulled up, so I went around back of the place to look at the boat.

I had a good enough setup to just tow the fucker right off if I wanted to, but that ain’t what I was set for. I went and knocked on the screen door in back. Shaky cinderblock steps next to a half-finished deck. Budweiser cans, stomped and squashed, spread around the yard like some drunk midgets had been playing a hopscotch game last night before the storm.

Hurley’s girlfriend answered. Agreeable gal. V-neck T-shirt. Can of Bud. Nice, smooth tan. Not much else. She made a point of showing me she was cold. Couple points, I figure.

“You Cleovis? You here for the boat?”

I explained as how I was.

She wanted me to come in and she’d get the keys to the trailer lock. No sense making a big mess of shit, she said.

I came in and sat down at their kitchen table. A card table. Duct tape not quite covering up a cut at the edge. Three chairs. Unmatched.

She hollered from across the hall. “Can I talk you out of taking the boat just yet?”

I said Bill had been pretty clear about how I was supposed to conduct things with her no-account boyfriend. hat supposed to mean?”

“mavHe’d suggested that I bring back the fucking boat and stop fucking around or he’d fucking shove a fucking ramrod up my fucking ass. I kinda gave her the short version.

She came out into the kitchen. She’d taken off the T-shirt. I couldn’t see any tan lines from where I was, so I took a closer look.

• • •

After we finished, she brought me a can of beer and lay back down on the bed, resting on her elbows.

“So maybe you come back for the boat next week?”

I said I wasn’t so sure about that.

She rolled over on her back and looked up at me. “See, Hurley’s got this job and he’s good for it. I mean, I’m kinda looking out for him, you know? Making sure shit gets took care of. That’s how come I’m offering this little payment to you, you know. Kinda on account.”

I didn’t say anything. I thought about her asshole boyfriend. His worthless self.

My Aunt Velma wiped the Red Man juice from her chin, put the coffee can back on the TV tray. “Doyle, you just need to get yourself down there and fix her antenna is what you need to do.”

“I will, Aunt Vee, I will. Just gotta finish this up first,” I said. I pulled my cap up, sleeved off the sweat from my head.

I’d been staying with my aunt off and on for the past year, ever since I’d gotten laid off from the flooring place outside Magnolia. Price of gas these days, wasn’t worth it anyway. I’d finished a line of caulking on the inside of the leaky window and was cleaning it up with the edge of one of those credit cards they send you in the mail. Sign up and spend $5,000 and I’d get 5,000 points to take the family to Disney World. I don’t have a family.

So I dragged the edge of the card along the window frame, worked the caulking into the corners as best I could, then used a rag to wipe off all the excess. I wiped the card off on the same rag, then slid the card into my pocket where I used to keep a wallet. “She say what was wrong with it?”

“Said it was broke. I don’t need her and her niece coming up here every damned day to watch my stories with me and eat up all my goddamned food. I swear I’ve never seen a girl put away so many gizzards in one sitting.”

Her stories.
As the World Turns
.
Guiding Light
. Her stories. Her world. When I started staying here, she’d send me out on errands in the early afternoon so I wouldn’t get in her way. Most days I didn}, should have been’t have anywhere else to go, so I’d just walk up and down the road picking up cans out of the ditches. Down to Mr. Tatum’s place and then back again was pretty close to long enough for me to stay away. Usually managed enough cans to make it worthwhile, too. After a while I’d stay and keep my mouth shut. Little while after that, I’d say something about one of the characters. One day I said Blake Thorpe looks like Miss Angela down at the Texaco. Turns out my aunt doesn’t much care for Miss Angela. I didn’t say too much after that.

“I’ll see what I can do,” I said, using a loose nail from the windowsill to clean some of the caulk from under my thumbnail, “but I’m not much of an electrician.”

“Weren’t much of a plank layer before that, were you?”

“They cut me back. Wasn’t my fault the housing market went to hell.”

She wiped a little more Red Man from her chin. “You watch your mouth, young man.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Guess it wasn’t your fault Ellie walked out on you, was it?”

I sent the tip of the nail into my thumb, coughed. “No, ma’am.”

“Right. Right. What’s she doing now? Who’s she staying with?”

“I don’t know.”

“I heard somebody down at the beauty shop say they saw her with that Dwayne boy used to go around with MeChell from the insurance place. Robert’s youngest.”

“I wouldn’t know. I don’t see her that much.”

“Yeah, well, whose fault is that?”

I don’t know how it went so wrong with Ellie. I should have done things differently, I guess. I just never knew which things. I walked to the back of the house to the couch where my pillow and radio were and scanned for any afternoon baseball games. On a good day, sometimes I could get a Texas Rangers game. I didn’t much care for any of them, but if they were playing the New York Yankees, at least I’d have someone to root against. Sometimes it just works out better to root against something.

The weather was pretty clear, which isn’t always the best for picking up games on the radio. But after the weather we’d had, I’d take clear and quiet. Last week we had some awful storms come through. Took out a church up near Emerson and a couple of old farmhouses. Flooded most of the back roads around here. And other smaller problems. Like the antenna on Miss Imogene Crawford’s place.