‘When Joe got the leukemia, the worst part for him was the doctors telling him he wouldn’t be able to go to any games that year at least until June and maybe not at all. He was more depressed about that than he was about having cancer. When Dave came to see him, Joe cried about it. Dave hugged him and said, “If you can’t go to the games, Joey, that’s okay; I’ll bring the Royals to you.”
‘Joe stared up at him and says, “You mean in person, Uncle Dave?” That’s what he called him – Uncle Dave.
“‘I can’t do that,” Dave said, “but I can do somethin almost as good.”‘
Soames drove up to the Civil Air Terminal gate and blew the horn. The gate rumbled back on its track and he drove out to where the Navajo was parked. He turned off the engine and just sat behind the wheel for a moment, looking down at his hands.
‘I always knew Dave was a talented bastard,’ he said finally. ‘What I don’t know is how he did what he did so damned fast. All I can figure is that he must have worked days and nights both, because he was done in ten days … and those suckers were good.
‘He knew he had to go fast, though. The doctors had told me and Laura the truth, you see, and I’d told Dave.
Joe didn’t have much chance of pulling through. They’d caught onto what was wrong with him too late. It was roaring in his blood like a grassfire.
‘About ten days after Dave made that promise, he comes into my son’s hospital room with a paper shopping-bag in each arm. “What you got there, Uncle Dave?” Joe asks, sitting up in bed. He had been pretty low all that day – mostly because he was losing his hair, I think; in those days if a kid didn’t have hair most of the way down his back, he was considered to be pretty low-class – but when Dave came in, he brightened right up.
‘The Royals, a course,” Dave says back. “Didn’t I tell you?”
‘Then he put those two shopping-bags down on the bed and spilled em out. And you never, ever, in your whole life, saw such an expression on a little boy’s face. It lit up like a Christmas tree … and … and shit, I dunno . . .’
Stan Soames’s voice had been growing steadily thicker. Now he leaned forward against the steering wheel of Dawson’s Buick so hard that the horn honked. He pulled a large bandanna from his back pocket, wiped his eyes with it. then blew his nose.
Naomi had also leaned forward. She pressed one of her hands against Soames’s cheek. ‘If this is too hard for you, Mr Soames -‘
‘No,’ he said, and smiled a little. Sam watched as a tear Stan Soames had missed ran its sparkling, unnoticed course down his cheek in the late-afternoon sun. ‘It’s just that it brings him back so. How he was. That hurts, miss, but it feels good, too. Those two feelings are all wrapped up together.’
‘I understand,’ she said.
‘When Dave tipped over those bags, what spilled out was baseballs – over two dozen of them. But they weren’t just baseballs, because there was a face painted on every one, and each one was the face of a player on the 1980 Kansas City Royals baseball team. They weren’t those whatdoyoucallums, caricatures, either.
They were as good as the faces Norman Rockwell used to paint for the covers of the Saturday Evening Post. I’ve seen Dave’s work – the work he did before he got drinking real heavy – and it was good, but none of it was as good as this. There was Willie Aikens and Frank White and U. L. Washington and George Brett … Willie Wilson and Amos Otis . . . Dan Quisenberry, lookin as fierce as a gunslinger in an old Western movie … Paul Splittorff and Ken Brett … I can’t remember all the names, but it was the whole damned roster, including Jim Frey, the field manager.
‘And sometime between when he finished em and when he gave em to my son, he took em to KC and got all the players but one to sign em. The one who didn’t was Darrell Porter, the catcher. He was out with the flu, and he promised to sign the ball with his face on it as soon as he could. He did, too.’
‘Wow,’ Sam said softly.
‘And it was all Dave’s doing – the man I hear people in town laugh about and call Dirty Dave. I tell you, sometimes when I hear people say that and I remember what he did for Joe when Joey was dying of the leukemia, I could -‘
Soames didn’t finish, but his hands curled themselves into fists on his broad thighs. And Sam – who had used the name himself until today, and laughed with Craig Jones and Frank Stephens over the old drunk with his shoppingcart full of newspapers – felt a dull and shameful heat mount into his cheeks.
‘That was a wonderful thing to do, wasn’t it?’ Naomi asked, and touched Stan Soames’s cheek again. She was crying.
‘You shoulda seen his face,’ Soames said dreamily. ‘You wouldn’t have believed how he looked, sitting up in his bed and looking down at all those faces with their KC baseball caps on their round heads. I can’t describe it, but I’ll never forget it.
‘You shoulda seen his face.
‘Joe got pretty sick before the end, but he didn’t ever get too sick to watch the Royals on TV – or listen to em on the radio – and he kept those balls all over his room. The windowsill by his bed was the special place of honor, though. That’s where he’d line up the nine men who were playing in the game he was watching or listening to on the radio. If Frey took out the pitcher, Joe would take that one down from the windowsill and put up the relief pitcher in his place. And when each man batted, Joe would hold that ball in his hands.
So -‘
Stan Soames broke off abruptly and hid his face in his bandanna. His chest hitched twice, and Sam could see his throat locked against a sob. Then he wiped his eyes again and stuffed the bandanna briskly into his back pocket.
‘So now you know why I took you two to Des Moines today, and why I would have taken you to New York to pick up those two books if that’s where you’d needed to go. It wasn’t my treat; it was Dave’s. He’s a special sort of man.’
‘I think maybe you are, too,’ Sam said.
Soames gave him a smile – a strange, crooked smile – and opened the door of Dawson’s Buick. ‘Well, thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you kindly. And now I think we ought to be rolling along if we want to beat the rain.
Don’t forget the books, Miss Higgins.’
‘I won’t,’ Naomi said as she got out with the top of the bag wrapped tightly in her hand. ‘Believe me, I won’t.’
CHAPTER 13
The Library Policeman (II)
1
Twenty minutes after they took off from Des Moines, Naomi tore herself away from the view – she had been tracing Route 79 and marvelling at the toy cars bustling back and forth along it – and turned to Sam.
What she saw frightened her. He had fallen asleep with his head resting against one of the windows, but there was no peace on his face; he looked like a man suffering from deep and private pain.
Tears trickled slowly from beneath his closed lids and ran down his face.
She leaned forward to shake him awake and heard him say in a trembling little-boy’s voice: ‘Am I in trouble, sir?’
The Navajo arrowed its way into the clouds now massing over western Iowa and began to buck, but Naomi barely noticed. Her hand paused just above Sam’s shoulder for a moment, then withdrew.
Who was YOUR Library Policeman, Sam?
Whoever it was, Naomi thought, he’s found him again, I think. I think he’s with him now. I’m sorry, Sam …
but I can’t wake you. Not now. Right now I think you’re where you’re supposed to be … where you have to be. I’m sorry, but dream on. And remember what you dreamed when you wake up. Remember.
Remember.
2
In his dream, Sam Peebles watched as Little Red Riding Hood set off from a gingerbread house with a covered basket over one arm; she was bound for Gramma’s house, where the wolf was waiting to eat her from the feet up. It would finish by scalping her and then eating her brains out of her skull with a long wooden spoon.