Night Game (4 page)

The story I filed wasn’t going to win any awards, but I got it done and in by the time I was due to go to Flakey’s.

I got into the stupid little generic tin can I had rented for the duration, thinking longingly of the quirky Citroën Deux Chevaux sitting at home in my garage, gathering dust. The rental, with its automatic transmission, was no fun at all to drive.

I turned out of the parking lot onto the side street down towards the beach, past block after block of almost identical bungalows, each with a large car in the driveway and a tidy lawn. The houses, which had no character and little charm, looked as if they had all been built in the past twenty years, designed by a cookie-cutter. The gardens were tight and contained, rigid despite the kind of climate that could create riotous vegetation. And there were no people, no kids playing, no retirees working in the garden, no signs of life at all. This part of Florida always reminds me of one of those science-fiction movies where alien beings have spirited away entire populations.

Flakey’s condo was in a two-storey stucco building painted in that peculiar pale puce that is so popular down here, with rustic shingling on the roof. It was a beach-front complex built around a pool. This is another strange Floridian phenomenon. Why anyone would rather swim in a chlorine-tainted concrete box in the ground than in God’s blue ocean is beyond me, but poolside was packed when I arrived just before 4:00.

Players’ wives sunbathed or sat around one of the round patio tables playing cards, while they kept an eye on the kids paddling in the shallow end. I could tell they were players’ wives by the diamonds strewn around their bodily parts.

There were no players around. They get enough sun on the job. My sister-in-sportswriting, Lucy Cartwright, was perched on a deck chair, talking with Glen Milhouse and Domingo Avila, who were having a hard time concentrating on their answers. She had taken off her shirt, and her tube-top had them mesmerized.

A guy wearing coveralls was vacuuming the hot tub and looking as though he was in charge. I asked him where I’d find Flakey.

“He expecting you?” he asked, suspiciously.

“I have an appointment at four,” I said.

He grunted, then pointed up the stairs at the corner of one of the side wings.

“Up there, first door,” he said. I thanked him and climbed the stairs. He watched me all the way.

Flakey answered my knock almost immediately, dressed in jeans and a short dressing gown that looked like silk, and probably was. Black, with embroidered dragons.

“Your photographer’s been here for half an hour,” he said, looking grim. I didn’t blame him.

“That’s strange,” I smiled. “I told him four o’clock.”

“I was in the neighbourhood anyway,” Bill Spencer said, getting slowly up from his chair. His shirttail was half-out and he had a can of beer in his hand. “I thought I’d get things set up and ready to go.”

He had used up all sorts of equipment around the room. There were lights bouncing off the walls and ceiling, and one of those weird umbrellas photographers use. His camera was on a tripod, set up a few feet away from a stool centred against a blank wall painted a light chartreuse. Does Florida get a special deal on paint factory mistakes?

“Ah, it’s your well-known Yousuf Karsh imitation, I see. I thought we’d just get some candid snaps,” I said.

“I didn’t want to take any chances,” he said.

Flakey came back into the room carrying a couple of cans of cold beer and handed me one. He was followed by a smiling oriental woman in a nurse’s uniform.

“This here is May,” Flakey said. “She’s going to shave me.”

“Okay, let’s do it,” I said.

Flakey sat on the stool and pulled funny faces while May clipped his hair and beard short. Then she covered his head and face with shaving foam from a can and got to work with the first of several disposable razors.

The result was startling. By the time she got to his eyebrows, even Bill Spencer was giggling.

“You look like an egg,” I said.

“No, he looks like an extraterrestrial,” May said. “A man from Mars.”

“I think it gives me a certain dignity,” said Flakey, trying to look it. He didn’t succeed.

We took a few more shots of May shaving his legs, then I told Bill to pack up his gear.

“I think perhaps we’ll leave before this begins to get X-rated,” I said. Spencer looked disappointed.

“If you like, I could stick around,” he said to Flakey, hopefully. “Maybe you’d like some souvenirs.”

“Yeah, that would be great,” Flakey said. “I’ve got to get a full frontal shot for my scrapbook.”

“I’ll leave you to it,” I said. “I’ve got to go.”

“What’s wrong, Kate?” Flakey asked. “You afraid of seeing my dick? You see it every day in the clubhouse.”

“That’s out of duty, not choice,” I said. “This time I choose to leave. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

As I let myself out the door, Patterson was unzipping his pants.

Catcalls greeted me as I came down the stairs towards the pool. Stinger Swain was lying on a plastic lounge chair, next to a cooler full of beer.

“Now we know why you give Flakey such good ink,” he yelled. “He’s giving you a little on the side.”

This rapier-like wit was greeted by guffaws from his buddy Goober Grabowski.

“Get your mind out of your pants,” I said. It was the best I could come up with on short notice.

“Leave her alone, Stinger,” said Gloves Gardiner, from the other side of the pool. Looking around, I realized that most of the team was there, with their families. They had set up a couple of barbecues.

“What’s going on, guys?” I asked. “A little pre-training party?”

“Yeah, and you’re not invited,” shouted Grabowski.

“Well, I’m just going to cry all the way home, then,” I said.

Gloves came over, wearing an apron with clever barbecue jokes on it. His wife, Karin, was with him. We exchanged greetings.

“Sorry about this, Kate,” Gloves said. “Team party. No press.”

“Hey, I don’t mind. I didn’t come here for a party. I’m working. No problem.”

As I drove off, I realized that I had been protesting too much to Gloves. It wasn’t that I wanted to stick around the players’ party, but my exclusion reminded me of my own lack of social life and made me lonely. Especially on my birthday. It’s times like this that I hate my job.

I was working myself up to some fine self-pity. That wasn’t how I wanted to spend my birthday, either. I cut into a mall parking lot and stopped at the liquor store. A half-bottle of champagne wouldn’t break the budget. If I was going to feel sorry for myself, I might as well do it in style.

I also bought myself some flowers to go with Andy’s rose, and was feeling quite cheery when I arrived back at my efficiency apartment. I put the champagne in the mini-fridge to chill, while I showered and changed into jeans and an old police department sweatshirt of Andy’s that I wear when I miss him. Then I did a fast tidy so I would deserve the champagne.

By the time the wine was cold, the newspapers had been stacked in a corner, my clothes were all put away, and the flowers on the coffee table made the impersonal place quite homey. I took the bottle, a glass, the flowers, and my presents out to the tiny grimy balcony, ready to toast the sunset. I could just see it if I leaned way out and looked to the left.

I had just popped the cork when I heard a knock at the door. It was Jeff Glebe, with a bottle of champagne in one hand and a plastic bag in the other.

“I couldn’t let you celebrate your birthday alone,” he said, handing me his offerings. “I’m sorry they’re not wrapped.”

“You shouldn’t have,” I said, genuinely touched. “Come in. You’ve saved me from the sin of solitary pleasure.”

He looked alarmed.

“Drinking alone,” I said.

I put his champagne in the fridge—it was Californian, mine was French—and fetched another glass. We toasted me and the sunset, then I opened his present.

It was a book, a new novel by a woman writer I had heard of but not read. It was thoughtful of Jeff. One reason we get along is because we both like to read things other than box scores. It sets us apart from many of our colleagues.

“Thanks, Jeff,” I said. “You’re a real friend. This wouldn’t be about the perils of middle age, would it?”

“No way,” he said, raising his right hand in a boy scout salute. “I checked it out myself. It’s about getting older is getting better.”

“Thanks, pal,” I said. I got up and kissed him. There was an awkward silence. I broke it.

“We might as well make it a real party,” I said. “You can watch me unwrap my other presents.”

The parcel from Saskatchewan was also a book. My parents were obviously trying to improve my mind and keep me on the political straight and narrow: it was a collection of reminiscences about T.C. Douglas, the former premier of the province and federal New Democratic Party leader, a Henry family hero. I was delighted.

There were two gift-wrapped packages in the parcel from home. Sally and T.C., (Douglas is a hero in their household, too) had each sent a gift. T.C.’s was another book.

“This is getting monotonous,” I laughed, holding the package up to show Jeff. “I’m opening Sally’s first.”

I should have been warned by the card, which read, “For a woman in her prime and on the loose.” Inside the innocuous-looking box was a low-cut, backless nightie in a leopard-skin print, edged with black lace. When I pulled it out, a box of condoms fell on the floor. Leopard-print condoms.

I laughed as hard at Jeff’s blushing face as at the scandalous gift.

“There are some who don’t think I’m washed up at forty-two,” I said. Jeff is barely into his thirties.

I repacked the box and opened T.C.’s package. It made me laugh, too. It was called
Be Your Own Private Eye: An Amateur’s Guide to Detection
.

“Just what I really need.” I laughed, holding the book up so Jeff could see the title.

“Oh, God,” he said. “There’ll be no stopping you.”

“And now, my fine young friend, I’m going to change into something presentable and you can take me out for a splashy dinner.”

“Will Denny’s do?”

“Not on your life,” I said.

Three hours later, and a bottle of wine more relaxed, Jeff and I sat in a booth made from wagon wheels in The El Rancho Roadhouse, watching bank tellers and time-share salesmen in cowboy hats doing the two-step around a giant dance floor. In front of us on the table (which had seashells imbedded in it from the joint’s previous incarnation as a seafood restaurant), were long-neck Lone Star beers with side shots of tequila.

We’d had a quiet dinner in the only decent restaurant in town, a small French place that serves good duck and lacks the three curses of Florida tourism: Happy Hour, Early Bird Specials, and the salad bar. It was my idea to tryout The El Rancho, an ersatz cowboy bar a ten-minute walk from the apartment hotel we both called home. Or a fifteen-minute stagger if things got out of hand.

I was feeling very mellow, watching the ripe young women and muscular young men posing at the long bar, as if they were auditioning for some beer commercial. Looking ever so cool but crying out through their body language: “Choose me!
Please
choose me!”

“Cheer up, Kate,” said Jeff. I looked at him, surprised.

“I’m extremely cheerful,” I said. “You will find as you mature that it is possible to be philosophical without being depressed.”

“Huh,” he said.

“Huh, what?”

“I never noticed before that you sound like my mother when you drink,” he said.

“Oh, piss off,” I said.

“That’s better. What are you thinking about?”

“I’m thinking about what it was like to be in my twenties,” I said, nodding towards the bar. “I’m thinking about all the things these kids don’t know. I’m thinking about how the things that scare them now don’t look so bad twenty years down the road.”

“Like what?”

“Like going home alone. Like not being as pretty or as handsome as your best friend. Like getting old.”

“This is cheerful?” Jeff said. “Sounds to me like singing the birthday blues. Come on. You’re not old.”

“I’m forty-two, Jeff. To these kids, that’s way past it. You should see the way the women look at me in the ladies’ room. They stop talking when I come in. And the men, their eyes slide past me as if I wasn’t there. And you know what? It’s not so horrible. I’ve got so much more than they have, in experience, in confidence, in money, status, everything, but they pity me because I have wrinkles. It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.”

I drained my tequila and signalled to the waitress for another round.

“See that girl at the end of the bar?” I asked. I motioned to a dark, shy, awkward young woman, five inches taller than her two bouncy friends, Lucy Cartwright clones. They all looked to be in their late teens, early twenties.

“She’s having a terrible time. She’s lonely. No one has asked her to dance. She doesn’t have the moves. The guys are all over her two friends. Right now she’s cursing herself for agreeing to come tonight. She’s trying to figure out how to get home, to disappear with some dignity.”

“Come on, Kate. Ditch the melodrama.”

“No, no,” I said. “I’m right. I know. I’ve been there myself, and it was agony. I wish I could just talk to her. I would tell her all sorts of stuff she’ll know one day. Like that cute doesn’t last. That when she and her friends are thirty, she’s going to be the beautiful one. That those guys the airheads are attracting are all jerks anyway. That I would bet on her over anyone else in the room.”

I lit another cigarette.

“I could tell her that and save her a lot of grief,” I went on. “But she wouldn’t believe me. She’d just think I was some pathetic middle-aged woman who’s had too much to drink. That’s the really crazy truth about the whole deal.”

I felt tears in my eyes. Not for me. Not for middle-aged me, but for her, and for the me who used to be her. Jeff was looking down at the table, fiddling with my lighter, avoiding my eyes. I laughed, and wiped the tears away with the back of my hand.

“Come on, young fellow. Aren’t you going to ask the old broad to dance?”

“I’m not sure I can stand the damage to my reputation,” Jeff sighed, getting up from the table. “Those young beauties won’t give me a look once they see me with you.”

“You lost your chance when you turned thirty, Bubbah,” I said, taking his hand. “I sure enough do hope you know how to two-step.”

I had learned the dance one wild off-night at Billy-Bob’s in Fort Worth when the Titans and Rangers were rained out. Jeff did his best to follow me, but we weren’t Fred and Ginger. If I’d been writing the movie, the young whipper-snappers would have formed a clapping circle around the two of us as we dazzled them with our grace and sex appeal, but, as it turned out, I was glad when the song ended and we could escape the dance floor spotlights and stumble back to our table. Maybe that last tequila hadn’t been such a hot idea.

“Maybe that last tequila wasn’t such a hot idea,” I said.

“Hey, lighten up,” Jeff said. “If we can’t get a little drunk on your birthday, what’s the point?”

His logic made such sense to us both that we ordered another round.

They kicked us out when the bar closed at 2:00, arms around each other, partly in companionship and partly to help us stay upright. The moon was full over the water.

“Beach walk!” Jeff said, steering us in the general direction. “Moonlight beach walk!”

We both took off our shoes and walked by the edge of the water. I’m afraid we sang, too. “Jose Cuervo (You Are a Friend of Mine)” and “Older Women Make Beautiful Lovers,” in bad harmony. It was quite chilly. My miserable cold had been helped by the medicinal spirits with which I’d been dosing myself, but sloshing through ankle-deep ocean set me sneezing again. I couldn’t stop. I put together a string of about fifteen, which, for some reason, we found hysterically funny.

We sat on the sand to catch our breath. Jeff suddenly turned serious.

“Are you really depressed about your birthday?” he asked. “You shouldn’t be. You don’t seem older. You don’t look it. You don’t act it.”

“Thanks, Jeff,” I said. “You’re a pal.”

He didn’t understand, of course. It wasn’t that I wanted people to think I was younger than forty-two. I wanted people to think that forty-two is just a perfect age to be.

“No, really,” he said, with earnest, drunken intensity. “I think you’re great.”

He was crouched in front of me, his hands on my shoulders, looking into my face in the moonlight. Neither of us spoke. Somewhere, a car backfired. He kissed me.

I wish I could say that I gracefully detached myself with a gentle rebuke, reminding him of his wife, and my whatever, at home, but I didn’t. We got into some pretty passionate necking. Only the cold kept us from going any further.

“Let’s go home,” Jeff said, finally. He got up and took my hand, helping me up. We walked along the beach in charged silence, still holding hands.

We passed by a thatched cabana that served as a beach bar behind one of the big hotels, with deck chairs chained to a post in a row next to it. There was someone sprawled on one of the chairs in the shadows, covered with a dark beach towel. A beer can lay on the sand, partly under the chair.

“Looks like someone else has been doing some celebrating,” Jeff said.

“It’s cold. Do you think we should wake him up?”

“Nah, let him sleep it off,” Jeff said.

“We can’t,” I said, pulling him across the sand.

“Kate, this is Florida. You don’t want to get involved.”

“Come on.” I argued. “We can handle some drunk. No one should sleep outside. It’s probably a hotel guest.”

“All right, do your good deed,” he said.

We were a few feet away from the chair.

“Excuse me?” I said. “Hello! In the chair! Maybe you’d better sleep somewhere else.”

That didn’t work.

I approached the chair, reached out, and touched the person on the shoulder. Jeff came up behind me.

“It’s a woman,” he said.

Blonde curls were showing above the top of the towel. I pulled it off.

“Oh, my Cod,” I said, turning away.

It was Lucy Cartwright lying there, and I could tell from the amount of blood that she wasn’t ever going to wake up.