Driver's Education (26 page)

The game dragged on tediously, at that lackluster pace people bemoan when they talk about baseball being an irritatingly slow sport. Meanwhile, the day had followed suit: it had a dangerously lazy disposition.
The ciscoes grew weary, resting their brittle bodies on the bills of ball caps and empty Cracker Jack boxes. The air stacked on top of itself in cakey layers.

But this windlessness wasn't necessarily a bad thing, my granddad has told me. At least not for the ballplayers. Wrigley can be a strange place, specifically when it comes to wind. Toward the end of summer the breeze comes from the west and southwest; it blows out. And that's a pitcher's nightmare: balls that should be harmless flies get an added boost and become home runs. But earlier on—say in April or May, when this game was being played—the wind comes off the lake, which is to say it blows in. It wreaks havoc on the batter. It drags down potential homers, turning them into outs. So, when Banks stepped up to the plate at the bottom of the eleventh, after the Cubs and the Braves had stalemated at 3–3, the fans silently blessed the quiet that hung in heavy sheets around them. They cooled their sweaty cheeks with flyswatters that roaming vendors were shilling in the place of hot dogs.

That stillness didn't last, though. The weather was conspiring against the Cubs. When Banks slugged a fastball fired off by Braves pitcher Pat Jarvis, the gusts from the lake suddenly picked up for the first time that day. The ciscoes lifted from their perches—a trilling black veil hovering above the field. At least three-quarters of the fans covered their eyes, and Wrigley itself held its breath; the green cheeks of the stadium turned blue.

My granddad says that everything slowed, and I believe him. Because I've seen this while I've been editing other peoples' lives. I've seen how the world decelerates its hurried rotation at moments like this: how it allows time for us to hold them, to taste them, to shoulder them. He watched as the ball inched through the taut air, slicing a blue smear through the screen of flies, which fell, one by one, into the stretched mitts of the infielders. Then, once it had soared over third, the wind began to tug at its trajectory, pulling it perilously close to the foul line, and my granddad sprang from his seat. He tackled the stadium's stairs three at a time. He crisscrossed through the fans, some of whom had uncovered their eyes and had thrown their arms into the air, where they waved in slow motion, blades of grass caught in an underwater current.

When my granddad made it to the top of the stands, the wind was just beginning to twist Banks's ball to the outside of the left-field foul line. So, he reached out toward it. He removed the flies: first by taking each one by its pair of wings and plucking it from his path. But then, as the ball slipped farther from history, he did it in great scooping handfuls: he grabbed their fleecy bodies the same way you'd shovel up popcorn, or peanuts, or sand. And finally, when he'd mowed a clear tunnel through which to stretch his arm, he did the only thing he could do, the only thing that was natural—he gave the ball a poke. He pushed it—literally—into baseball's lore.

There are two ways this story ends: the right way, and the real way. In the right way, once the world had caught up, and the fans had started cheering, squashing flies between their palms, my granddad quietly found Banks's ball and tossed it into the bull pen. He knew as well as anyone that a treasure like that would best be preserved in a museum—not on a mantelpiece. He left then. With a Braves' pennant he wiped away the ciscoes from Lucy's windshield, from her side mirrors, and he departed Chicago, content with the role he'd played in rearranging history. That's the right way.

The real way, though, goes like this: My granddad wasn't alone at the left-field foul line. Rather, a wholly despicable man whom he'd later come to know as the Gangster met him at that post. He was shaped like an underripe banana, I'm told: lean, hard, a slight rightward curve to his spine. He wore a three-piece suit, even in the stagnant heat. His hair was slicked with so much oil that when the flies landed upon it they became entrapped, their legs kneading deeper and deeper into the muck as they tried, unsuccessfully, to escape. And his hands—his hands were no palms and all fingers, these protracted claws that snatched up Banks's home run as soon as my granddad tipped it into fair play.

After pocketing the relic the Gangster disappeared immediately. And in the chaos and jubilant confusion that followed, no one seemed to notice that the game ball had gone missing. He slunk back through the crowds, making his way, eventually, to West Roscoe and North Ashland, where he ran a bookie business that swindled cash from drunks, and petty thieves,
and all other species of unsavory characters. Twilight was descending on the city, and the ciscoes—who were nearing the end of their ephemeral lives—began dropping in a steady rain to the street. The Gangster slushed through the flies' lifeless corpses as he swung open the door; he wiped away their guts from the tips of his pointed shoes. And he set Banks's ball in a small glass box where it would sit, for more than four decades, waiting to be rescued.

•  •  •

The Gangster has died and his daughter, who also calls herself the Gangster, has turned her father's illegal bookkeeping business into an above-board pizza place that's called, appropriately, The Gangster's. She's deliberately kept the bookie's vibe, it seems: all the lights in the restaurant are banker's lamps, names and numbers and dates scratched into their green glass shades. The wood-paneled walls are tricked out with bits of nostalgia—pictures of racehorses; a greyhound chewing its tail, ribs poking through too-thin skin. In the corner, a multigenerational arcade featuring Pac-Man, Mortal Kombat, and a claw crane, the windowed box of which is filled with Cubs memorabilia. Hats. Baseballs. Tiny bats engraved with painted red C's.

Instead of booths, or banquettes, customers sit at one of five long communal tables that smell like beer and bourbon and mozzarella, their asses drooping over oak benches. Randal and I sit at the end of one of these—the one closest to the door.

“This place is weird,” I say.

“So weird.”

We've ordered a deep-dish pepperoni pie. We peel the tiny saucers of meat from the cheese and feed them to Mrs. Dalloway, who's got her head half poked out of Randal's bag. She belches and hiccups between bites, occasionally pausing to lick grease from her chops. Not more than five minutes ago we spotted the baseball, set in a glass case on a small shelf that's been built out above the kitchen's entrance. A gold plaque below it reads: E
RNIE
B
ANKS'S 500TH HOME RUN BALL, CAUGHT FAIRLY AND ENTIRELY SQUARELY BY MY FATHER THE
G
ANGSTER
.

“You sure you want to do this?” Randal asks.

I tell him, “I'm sure.”

“It could get ugly.”

“I'm a man with nothing left to lose.” Then: “I just don't know how the fuck we're supposed to get it down from there.”

Randal tears away the crust from an uneaten slice of pizza. He chews it slowly, thinking, pursing his lips. He drums a finger against the space between his eyebrows. He winks both eyes at the four corners of the room.

“What?” I ask, finally.

He stands. He says, “Leave the details to me.”

I ask
What?
again, but he just puts a hand lightly on my shoulder. At the cashier, past a maze of men spinning pizza slicers, he exchanges a five-dollar bill for twenty quarters. Dalloway alternates between roaring and clucking anxiously as she fixes her hourglass eyes upon him; she lifts her one front paw from the pack and I reach down and shove it back in.

His pockets sagging with change, Randal crosses to the makeshift arcade—specifically to the claw crane, where he begins unloading his quarters. I haven't a clue what he's doing, but I know his first six attempts at it are unsuccessful: I watch as the claw pinches the edges of different prizes, as it loses its grip, as it returns to its starting position accompanied by a deflated electronic
Da-da-duuuuuuuum
. But then, on the seventh try, Randal strikes gold. He rustles up a baseball in plastic casing that's hidden beneath a bear in a blue jersey and pinstriped pants. He lifts the prize above his head, shakes it once triumphantly.

When he returns to the table, he asks if I've got a pen. He sticks out the tip of his tongue as he works, biting down on it so it appears as a pink triangle fixed to his upper lip.

He says, “Do you know what a pigeon drop is?”

I tell him, “No.”

“Some people say it's a type of con. A type of trick.”

“So it's a way of stealing.”

“That's a dirty word. Let's call it reappropriating.”

He presses the pen to the baseball's white skin and begins to draw slow, deliberate lines. I lean forward to see what he's writing, but he tells me to stand back. He tells me I'm blocking his light.

“So, the CliffsNotes description of the pigeon drop: you've got someone
who has something you want. Money, some valuable item, memorabilia—whatever. We'll call this person the mark, all right? The goal is to get the mark to exchange whatever he—or, in this case she—has for something of lesser value while convincing her that she's actually trading up. Profiting from the deal.” Then: “You get it?”

“I think so.” Mrs. Dalloway peeks out from the bag and I give her my finger to lick with her rough tongue. “Did you learn all this stuff when you were selling forged autographs?”

He says, “That's not really how I see it. There was an old man whose dying wish was to have a signed photo of Celeste Holm. I sold him one for twenty dollars, when it should have gone for at least twice that.”

“But you forged it.”

“I made people happy, and I think that's what matters most.”

He blows gently on the baseball, drying the black ink, a signature that reads:

“How many career home runs did Banks end up hitting?” Randal asks.

“Five hundred twelve.”

“Then this will be that one.” He cracks the ball against the table's corner, giving it a sizeable dent. He scuffs it along the soles of his dirty sneakers. “This will be the five hundred twelfth. Which we'll convince her is more valuable.”

I tell him, “That's completely and utterly unbelievable. She'll never buy it.”

Randal inspects his handiwork; he burnishes the ball on the underside of the table, giving it a good, filthy sheen.

“That isn't how these things go down, Finn. They don't depend on believability. Cons work because they rely on human nature. On the most basic, dependable parts of a mark's psyche. Things like greed, and dishonesty, and vanity, and naïveté.”

He adds, “Sort of like reality TV.”

•  •  •

We request an audience with the Gangster from the man behind the cash register. We're told to wait near a machine that flattens pennies into panoramic views of Chicago, where we loiter for ten minutes before being led, finally, through the kitchen and into an empty back dining room. Which is nicer than the front of the house, I'll say. The long tables and benches have been replaced with smaller individual tables draped with checkered cloths; the chairs have cushioned seats and all four of their legs intact. There are still the strange banker's lamps—under the glow of which you'd imagine men in wide-brimmed hats conducting unspecific and nefarious business—but these ones are larger, and their emerald shades aren't chipped. Their light gathers between the tables and against the walls, where framed artifacts of debatable veracity are tacked. A yellowed handkerchief that may or may not have been dropped by Al Capone. A half-used tube of lipstick allegedly used by Britt Ekland on the set of
Get Carter
. A very ordinary looking buckle that—evidently—belonged to Bugsy Siegel's favorite belt.

From the other side of the room, where she's seated at the far side of a circular table, the Gangster says, “What can I do for you?”

She's glamorous, but in a severe and frightening way. She inherited only the finest pieces of her father's looks: his lean, stretched frame; his long, ropy muscles. Her spine, though, seems to err slightly to the left, instead of the right. Her dark hair is fixed in a tight bun, yanked back so firmly that her forehead's wiped clean of creases. When she sets her hands on top of each other it's like a crane folding its wings—graceful, but a little off; calm, with an undercurrent of tension. She adjusts a ring with her thumb, the base of which is stained with specks of marinara.

The room's hot: heat from the pizza ovens slips through cracks in the kitchen door, wraps around the legs of chairs. With a napkin, the Gangster dabs at sweat that's appeared just above her lip and on her granite forehead. She wipes at her painted-on brows, her cheeks. I try my best to focus on all these minute details and subtle actions instead of staring straight into the Gangster's left eye—which looks like it's made of solid glass.