Pleading Guilty (38 page)

I told Bert we had to talk.

"How about the Bath?" he asked. "You know, oven's on. It's blow-your-brains-out hot in there. It'll be great. Get all that oil and stuff right up to the skin. How about it?"

I had some thoughts, silly bigoted ones, about sitting around naked with Bert, even wrapped in a bedsheet, and then I began to feel sheepish and stupid, sure that if I said no he'd read that as the motive. So we hung our clothes in the lockers and Bert found the way down, both of us in the ocher-colored bedsheets cinched at our bellies and worn much like skirts. Bert didn't dare burn a light near a window. The shower room outside the bath remained dark, and the bath itself was lit only by a single bulb that left a gloomy light the color of tea. The stones had all been shoveled back into the oven and the room was arid, the great fire roasting the air. Even so, the place still had a vaguely vernal scent. Bert cracked the door a bit on the oven and then sat himself down on the top bench in the stepped wooden room and made exultant noises in the withering heat.

You'd have thought he had no troubles, chatting away about the Super Bowl, until I asked him to tell me on the level how it had been. He looked down then between his knees and didn't answer. Scary times, I suppose. Here was a fella who'd flown wartime missions, who knew what it was like being throttled by fright. But time had passed; the imagination takes over; honest memories fade. The pain of fear had plainly surprised him. "I been eating fried food. Drinking bad water, man. Can't tell what's gonna get me first. You know?" He smiled. Loopy old

Bert. He thought he was funny. Lead from the tap or a gun barrel was lead either way.

"And where the hell have you been hiding out?" I asked. He laughed at the question.

"Brother," he said and laughed again. "Here, there, and everywhere. Seeing the sights. Tried to keep moving."

"Well, let's take today, for instance. Where'd you start out?" "Today? Detroit. -

"Doing what?"

He fidgeted in the dense heat while words evaded him. "Orleans had a game up there last night," he said finally. He was looking the other way as he said it and he didn't say any more. I got the picture: Bert was seeing all the best places, Detroit and La Salle--Peru, chasing Orleans, romancing on game nights in funky motels, places like the U Inn.

"And what about money? What've you been doing to live?" "I had a credit card in another name."

Kam Roberts?"

That startled him momentarily. He'd forgotten what I knew. "Right. I thought it'd be better than using my own, they'd have a harder time tracking me down, but they did anyway." "I thought Orleans used that card."

"I had one, he had one. We scissored them finally. The cards were about to expire anyway. But we piled up some cash. That's okay. What the hell do I need? A motel with cable, I'm cool. It's just those guys, man. They were right on us. They were checking at stores where Orleans used the card, stuff like that. Scared the hell out of us both. Man.- He looked at me. "Those guys were cops, you're saying?"

"They're hot on the trail." I had remained on my feet. I figured if I kept the sheet clutched around me and my butt off the boards, I'd make Brushy happy and come home unblemished. "That's our problem, Bert. The coppers. They know I've been looking for you, so now they're looking for me, especially after that runaround at the House of the Hands on Friday. I haven't slep
t a
t home for four nights. You and I have to scope out what I tell them, Bert, cause 'I dunno' doesn't really seem to cut it. This whole thing with Orleans--I'd like to know how it happened, just so we can figure what kind of dance step I do."

I wasn't facing him then. There was no point in that. Even so, I could feel him sort of hanging, suspended in space as we sat here in this hot wooden box.

"I mean, you know," he said behind me.

"Right," I said. We were going forward easy. "You net him when he came to visit his morn at work. Something like that." "Right."

So we stumbled around in conversation and Bert told me the tale of Orleans and him in his own half-ass way. We were there broiling, not looking at each other, just two voices in the tea-gloomy light and incredible heat. Bert wasn't much of a storyteller. He did a lot of shit-out-of-luck mumbling. "You know," he'd say, "you know." And I did, I guess. I got the point. Orleans changed Bert's life the way people's lives are ordinarily altered only by human violence and natural disasters--volcanoes, hurricanes, typhoons. You see the pictures all the time, some poor son of a bitch in his hip waders, looking with zoned-out disbelief at the roof of what used to be his house, now angled into the black waters of the flood. That was Bert after Orleans. I'd only seen the guy across the distance of a basketball court, so I couldn't tell you a thing about him, except that he was a fine-looking young fellow. But as I put the pieces together, my two bits, he was sort of high-strung and erratic. Apparently he'd been a high-school football star who tore up his knee and suffered a lot over that, getting cut out of athletics, then started refereeing various sports while he was still in college. These days he taught grade school p
. E
. as a sub and reffed, but his principal occupation apparently was fighting with his mother. He had a peculiar job history, moving in and out of town, always coming back, living at home half the time. I suppose Glyndora wanted him to be different and he was engaged in the usual parent-child struggle
,
always angry with her and wanting her to accept him, the way we all want with our folks at one level or another.

Somehow, though, they connected. For Bert, it was epochal. Orleans, I took it, was Bert's first actual real-life thing, and Bert was in love with him the way you'd love the genie if you'd found that magic lamp. Orleans to Bert was liberty. Destiny. In the midst of his longing, his attachment, Bert was also wild with gratitude. It's hard to believe that this could really happen in this day and age--people who live on the other side of earth from what they're really feeling--but the old copper in me says it occurs every day. Look at Nora. Look at me. Suddenly you're at an age when your own naughty thoughts exhaust you; no matter how much you try to ignore them, they remain. Whatever ugly stamp they place on your soul is impressed there indelibly. You might as well be whatever it is they say you are. You are anyway.

So they got their rumba going, Bert and Orleans, and Glyndora caught on and went wild. I got the feeling that was okay with Orleans, to be causing that kind of ruction.

Bert was walking back and forth now on the tier above me, roaming on his big feet with the long nails and the calluses from his loafers and athletic shoes. His black hair was heavy with perspiration and his unshaven cheeks looked darker in the heat. "And how'd this betting thing happen? Whose idea?" "Oh, you know, man," he said again, for the one hundredth time. "There was never any idea about it. We'd talk games. Players. Stuff like that. You know how it is, you hang with somebody, you kind of figure what they're thinking, I mean maybe he'd say-- He'd say. You know, before the Michigan game, he'd say, 'I'm going to call Ayres tight, he's a street player, you got to call him tight.' Or Erickson at Indiana. All elbows." "And you'd bet it. Right? If Ayres was going to be called tight, you'd bet against Michigan."

"Yeah," he said. He was slowed by shame. "It didn't seem like much. Just a little edge. I didn't really think twice."

"Did Orleans know?"

"To start?"

"Eventually?"

"Man, do you know I bet the games?"

"I do," I said. Orleans, he was saying, knew too. I thought for a sec about Bert as a gambler. What was it that compelled him? Did he lust to feel favored by chance, or did he want to dare punishment? What drew him? The men? Or the sport? The grace, the fact that it was all winners and losers with no compromise? Something. It was part of the game of hide-and-seek he was playing with himself.

"Did he ask if you bet his games?"

"Not like that. He'd just ask what I was down on. You know, I'd tell him. He wasn't even sure where he was going until 4:30 the day before." This was slow: "He never said I'm gonna fix this. It was nothing like that. -

"But did you notice that he was taking care of it?"

I dared a look back at Bert, who was standing on the top tier, his head in the rafters, his black eyes still and stricken.

"You want a real fucking yuk? When I knew what he was doing--when I saw it, you know, I was happy. I was fucking pleased. God." Bert suddenly reached forward and hooked one hand on the beam and leaned out, muscles articulate in his long arm, wincing, holding on to his sheet with the other hand. What he'd thought was that Orleans was in love with him. That's why he liked it. Not the money. Not even bragging rights in this room. Because it was a token of love. Now he was in pain.

"What a sick stupid thing," he said.

I realized suddenly that I had been looking forward to having this out with Bert for my own reasons. Here we both were, two middle-aged men, big-deal successes, sort of at least, and both of us felons. There may be no honor among thieves, but there is a kind of community, knowing that you're no weaker than somebody else. And I guess I'd been thinking that cornering Bert, making him account for himself, I'd have an answer or tw
o t
o throw back at that nagging voice of my ma's. But this was a letdown. Bert's was a crime of passion. Not in the sense that the object of the scam was secondary; maybe it was with me too. But because for Bert and for Orleans there was really no scam at all. It was simply a stepping-stone, a point of access to the place they needed to go, Bert especially, where "wrong" didn't even exist.

"And how did Archie find out?" I asked him.

"Well, Christ, he's taking the bets. All the sudden I'm betting one game heavy three times a week and making a bundle. I didn't want him to get hurt. I'd tell him, Watch out for this one. Everybody down here had money in Archie's book." Bert took an instant to explain Archie's system with Infomode, everybody with a credit card and a funny handle. One guy's Moochie. Hal Diamond got called Slick. Bert was Kam.

"We sit here, we're talking games for hours. And, you know, we keep track of each other. Real close. You know how that is. We're all in each other's pockets."

So pretty soon everybody here knew. They'd kid Bert. 'What's Kam Roberts got today?' Bert realized it was a mistake. Afterwards. At the time he couldn't resist. That was his way: talk and swagger. I'm a fella. Who says we'll ever change?

"Archie had no idea where you were getting the information?" "I wasn't talking, I don't know what they thought. Some connect to the players, I guess."

I paused to put it together in my head. "And Orleans got the credit card?"

Wrong thing to say. Bert popped. He came down a tier, cat-quick, got right up in my face. My favorite madman.

"Hey, fuck yourself, Mack. It wasn't like that. Christ, it's part-time work. Refereeing. He's a teacher. You know, you have money, you give a friend money. Get real. I had this credit card, money to spend. That's all, man. But it wasn't like that. Don't give me that crap." Orleans wasn't really fixing games. Ber
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asn't really sharing the proceeds. It wasn't corruption. Not in their minds. It was love. Which, of course, it was.

Behind me I heard a faucet loosen and water begin to run. He had turned on one of the spigots between the boards and was filling a bucket, getting ready to do that number with the icy aqua over the head.

I realized about then that I'd sat down. I jumped up and did some heavy-legged version of the hootchy-kootchy, swearing, swatting at my big broad Irish bottom as if that was going to do any good. Bert watched, but I didn't explain. I pushed him back to the story.

I said, "So play it out for me. Some dude with brass knuckles starts making an impression on Archie, telling him he's got to give up the fixer, and all he can give them is you. And you find Archie in your refrigerator and go for the world tour, right?" "Sort of. I knew I was leaving. Martin had pretty much convinced me of that."

Bingo. I watched the sweat gathering among all my gray chest hairs, the rivulets running over the swell of my belly and dampening the sheet bundled there.

"Martin had?" I asked. "Fill in the blank, Bert. Where does Martin fit?"

Bert's reaction was amazing. He hooted.

"What a question!"

"Where he fits? Martin?"

"Hey, the answer's like, 'In Glyndora,' " said Bert and, smirking like an absolute juvenile, circled his index finger and thumb and poked a finger through the form a couple of times. The gesture was so silly but direct that we both laughed out loud. What a life! Here we were, me and Bert of all people, giggling about somebody else's peccadilloes.

"Mar-tin?"

"Fuckin A," he answered.

"No way."

"It's ancient history. Years ago. Not now. Orleans was in grade school. But they're still like, what would you say--" Bert shifted a hand. "I mean, when things get heavy for her, that's who she goes to. Not just around the firm, man. You know. Life." "Martin and Glyndora," I said. I was still marveling. I have made addled party-time chatter with Martin's wife, Nila, for years and know nothing more about her than what meets the eye: elegant looks and cultivated manners. I'd always assumed that Martin was happily wed to his own pretensions. The idea of him with a girlfriend was somehow at odds with his projected image of complete self-sufficiency.