I tossed the ball to the fielder and as I returned to my original post among the candy-wrappers and beer cans, I looked back in and saw Mattie and John looking at me.
If anything confirms the idea that we’re just another species of animal, one with a slightly bigger brain and a much bigger idea of our own importance in the scheme of things, it’s how much we can convey by gesture when we absolutely have to. Mattie clasped her hands to her chest, tilted her head to the left, raised her eyebrows — My hero. I held my hands to my shoulders and flipped the palms skyward Shucks, ma’am, ‘t’warn’t nothin. John lowered his head and put his fingers to his brow, as if something there hurt — You lucky sonofabitch.
With those comments out of the way, I pointed at the backstop and shrugged a question. Both Mattie and John shrugged back. An inning later a little boy who looked like one giant exploding freckle ran out to where I was, his oversized Michael Jordan jersey churning around his shins like a dress.
‘Guy down there gimme fifty cent to say you should call im later on at his hotel over in the Rock,’ he said, pointing at John. ‘He say you gimme another fifty cent if there was an answer.’
‘Tell him I’ll call him around nine-thirty,’ I said. ‘I don’t have any change, though. Can you take a buck?’
‘Hey, yeah, swank.’ He snatched it, turned away, then turned back. He grinned, revealing a set of teeth caught between Act I and Act II. With the softball players in the background, he looked like a Norman Rockwell archetype. ‘Guy also say tell you that was a bullshit catch.’
‘Tell him people used to say the same thing about Willie Mays all the time.’
‘Willie who?’
Ah, youth. Ah, mores. ‘Just tell him, son. He’ll know.’
I stayed another inning, but by then the game was getting drunk, Devore still hadn’t shown, and I went back home the way I had come. I met one fisherman standing out on a rock and two young people strolling along The Street toward Warrington’s, their hands linked. They said hi and I hi’d them back. I felt lonely and content at the same time. I believe that is a rare kind of happiness.
Some people check their phone answering machines when they get home; that summer I always checked the front of the fridge. Eenie-meenie-chili-beanie, as Bullwinkle Moose used to say, the spirits are about to speak. That night they hadn’t, although the fruit and vegetable magnets had re-formed into a sinuous shape like a snake or perhaps the letter S taking a nap:
A little later I called John and asked him where Devore had been, and he repeated in words what he had already told me, and much more economically, by gesture. ‘It’s the first game he’s missed since he came back,’ he said. ‘Mattie tried asking a few people if he was okay, and the consensus seemed to be that he was . . . at least as far as anyone knew.’
‘What do you mean she tried asking a few people?’
‘I mean that several wouldn’t even talk to her. “Cut her dead,” my parents’ generation would have said.’ Watch it, buddy, I thought but didn’t say, that’s only half a step from my generation. ‘One of her old girlfriends spoke to her finally, but there’s a general attitude about Mattie Devore. That man Osgood may be a shitty salesman, but as Devore’s Mr. Moneyguy he’s doing a wonderful job of separating Mattie from the other folks in the town. Is it a town, Mike? I don’t quite get that part.’
‘It’s just the TR,’ I said absently. ‘There’s no real way to explain it.
Do you actually believe Devore’s bribing everyone? That doesn’t say much for the old Wordsworthian idea of pastoral innocence and goodness, does it?’
‘He’s spreading money and using Osgood — maybe Footman, too — to spread stories. And the folks around here seem at least as honest as honest politicians.’
‘The ones who stay bought?’
‘Yeah. Oh, and I saw one of Devore’s potential star witnesses in the Case of the Runaway Child.
Royce Merrill. He was over by the equipment shed with some of his cronies. Did you happen to notice him?’
I said I had not.
‘Guy must be a hundred and thirty,’ John said. ‘He’s got a cane with a gold head the size of an elephant’s asshole.’
‘That’s a Boston Post cane. The oldest person in the area gets to keep it.’
‘And I have no doubt he came by it honestly. If Devore’s lawyers put him on the stand, I’ll debone him.’ There was something chilling in John’s gleeful confidence.
‘I’m sure,’ I said. ‘How did Mattie take getting cut dead by her old friends?’ I was thinking of her saying that she hated Tuesday nights, hated to think of the softball games going on as they always had at the field where she had met her late husband.
‘She did okay,’ John said. ‘I think she’s given most of them up as a lost cause, anyway.’ I had my doubts about that — I seem to remember that at twenty-one lost causes are sort of a specialty — but I didn’t say anything. ‘She’s hanging in. She’s been lonely and scared, I think that in her own mind she might already have begun the process of giving Kyra up, but she’s got her confidence back now. Mostly thanks to meeting you. Talk about your fantastically lucky breaks.’
Well, maybe. I flashed on Jo’s. brother Frank once saying to me that he didn’t think there was any such thing as luck, only fate and inspired choices. And then I remembered that image of the TR
criss-crossed with invisible cables, connections that were unseen but as strong as steel.
‘John, I forgot to ask the most important question of all the other day, after I gave my depo. This custody case we’re all so concerned about . . . has it even been scheduled?’
‘Good question. I’ve checked three ways to Sunday, and Bissonette has, too. Unless Devore and his people have pulled something really slippery, like filing in another court district, I don’t think it has been.’
‘Could they do that? File in another district?’
‘Maybe. But probably not without us finding out.’
‘So what does it mean?’
‘That Devore’s on the verge of giving up,’ John said promptly. ‘As of now I see no other way of explaining it. I’m going back to New York first thing tomorrow, but I’ll stay in touch. If anything comes up here, you do the same.’
I said I would and went to bed. No female visitors came to share my dreams. That was sort of a relief.
When I came downstairs to recharge my iced-tea glass late Wednesday morning, Brenda Meserve had erected the laundry whirligig on the back stoop and was hanging out my clothes. This she did as her mother had no doubt taught her, with pants and shirts on the outside and undies on the inside, where any passing nosyparkers couldn’t see what you chose to wear closest to your skin.
‘You can take these in around four o’clock,’ Mrs. M. said as she prepared to leave. She looked at me with the bright and cynical eye of a woman who has been ‘doing for’ well-off men her entire life. ‘Don’t you forget and leave em out all night — dewy clothes don’t ever feel fresh until they’re warshed again.’
I told her most humbly that I would remember to take in my clothes. I then asked her — feeling like a spy working an embassy party for information — if the house felt all right to her.
‘All right how?’ she asked, cocking one wild eyebrow at me.
‘Well, I’ve heard funny noises a couple of times. In the night.’
She sniffed. ‘It’s a log house, ennit? Built in relays, so to speak. It settles, one wing against t’other. That’s what you hear, most likely.’
‘No ghosts, huh?’ I said, as if disappointed.
‘Not that I’ve ever seen,’ she said, matter-of-fact as an accountant, ‘but my ma said there’s plenty down here. She said this whole lake is haunted. By the Micmacs that lived here until they was driven out by General Wing, by all the men who went away to the Civil War and died there — over six hundred went from this part of the world, Mr. Noonan, and less than a hundred and fifty came back . . . at least in their bodies. Ma said this side of Dark Score’s also haunted by the ghost of that Negro boy who died here, poor tyke. He belonged to one of the Red-Tops, you know.’
‘No — I know about Sara and the Red-Tops, but not this.’ I paused. ‘Did he drown?’