Wolf at the Table, page 42
The priest stared at the check in disbelief. “Are you serious?” he said.
“Deeply serious.”
“Are you a friend of the church?”
“Old friend, yeah.”
“Are you from Elmira?”
“I lived here many years ago,” Alec told him, as if he were from another time altogether, like some sword-carrying medieval dragon slayer. He didn’t bother adding that for most of his youth he’d served as an acolyte, then the head altar boy, and that he’d been caught stealing a sizable haul of offertory money when he was nineteen.
“So you used to attend St. John the Baptist?” the priest asked.
“I did in fact frequent this holy establishment,” Alec said, the oxy lubricating his oral abilities. “In my misspent youth. And since then I have been traveling the land mostly by foot.” He raised his decrepit sandals, showcasing his toenails, most of which were the color of root beer. “And now that I find myself back in the place of my birth I wanted to swing by and get a whiff of St. John the Baptist’s old truculent crotch.” He had no idea what “truculent” meant, but he’d heard someone use the word at the casino once and he liked the way it sounded.
“Can I ask your name?” the priest said, smiling, his beard framing his benevolent little mouth. He was clearly as charmed as he was confused. “I can’t quite make out the signature.”
“Maximillian Mud,” Alec answered, and rose, his fleshy heart-attack stomach and upper torso waggling a bit. Then he pivoted in the direction opposite the altar and flip-flopped down the aisle toward the exit, grinning with bitterness.
“Well, thank you, Mr. Mud,” the priest called after him. “Or whoever you are.”
Part two of his duties were done.
NOW, ACCORDING TO THE cheap mariner’s clock affixed to the wall above the lopsided card table in his Lake Street SRO, it’s just after nine thirty p.m. When he checked in the previous night the room had smelled like an old roast beef sandwich and aerosol deodorant spray, and now you could add beer breath to the mix. The college kid he befriended earlier at the bar—Nash LaMore is his name—sits across from him. LaMore, who is tall, white, blond, and absurdly tan across the pronounced flange of his forehead and the bridge of his nose, is a freshman currently playing center field for the Corning Community College Red Barons.
Alec first encountered the kid that afternoon, following his church visit, as he sat encamped in the bleachers of Elmira College’s tidy, well-kept baseball field, with its manicured outfield grass and purple-and-gold dugouts. The Corning program was apparently borrowing the local college’s facilities. Alec watched LaMore shag deep, towering fungoes, one after the next, with the soft-handed, thoughtless ease of an expert baker catching loaves of freshly baked rolls with a quilted basket. LaMore later ran the bases, exhibiting the kind of stride more often associated with antelope. It was efficient, effortless, an optical illusion in which he was going much, much faster than he appeared to be. Then he took batting practice, and holy shit could this kid rake. He was clearly the best player on the team. There wasn’t anyone else even close. He stands as tall as Alec used to be—a lean, broad-shouldered six-two—and to Alec’s mind was a different species of athlete out there on the field.
After the coaches broke up the post-workout group circle, Alec waved Nash over and introduced himself as a scout for the Florida Marlins and asked him if he’d like to get a cup of coffee. Nash said yes, of course he would, and after he’d showered and changed into his civilian clothes, he met Alec at a tavern just beyond campus, where Alec used some of the money he’d gotten for his Malibu—his “Marlins petty cash,” as he thought of it—to buy Nash LaMore a meal and beverages while he got the kid to tell him his life story.
Nash, who hails from Manteno, Illinois, had set a bunch of school records at Manteno High and had made the All-State first team for small public schools, which resulted in him being recruited by many minor Division I baseball programs throughout the Midwest. But even as a senior he was extremely thin, barely 155 pounds, so programs from the Big Ten who had sent their lower-level coaches to scout him weren’t that impressed when they sized him up and shook his large but meatless hand. Rather than go to a smaller D-I, Nash opted to take the community college route and be a bigger fish in a smaller pond, where he’d have a better chance of standing out and, who knows, maybe even getting drafted or invited to a big league camp. Crazier things had happened.
“Based on what I saw today, I think that’s definitely in your cards,” Alec assured him during their second round of beers.
Since the spring of his senior year Nash has grown two inches, put on twenty pounds of muscle—whey is a wonder protein—and cut two-tenths of a second off his sprint time down to first base. He’s a center fielder but the coaches at Corning are trying to convert him into starting pitcher because of his freakishly great arm. There have been scouts from big Division I programs stopping by spring practices almost every day. Yes, word has gotten out about Nash LaMore, the late bloomer, the best-kept secret this side of the Mississippi. The assistant coach from Syracuse was here yesterday, for instance, and another one from Lehigh University was on hand the day before that. But Alec, whose business card says his name is Jerry Karlin, is the first pro scout to shine his light on him.
Before he left Mississippi, Alec had ordered a box of four-color business cards from a storefront Xerox shop in Crenshaw. He even managed to get the official Marlins logo on there. The cards are damn impressive, on high-quality stock. That meant they weren’t cheap, and he got the smallest possible batch—250—figuring he’d need to hand out only four or five before getting some poor sucker to bite. And wouldn’t you know it, the first one he used worked like a charm. Talk about inevitable!
JERRY KARLIN
SENIOR SCOUT
THE FLORIDA MARLINS
When he handed the card to Nash LaMore, the kid’s face lit up like a jukebox in the back room of a last-resort dive bar.
Over a free meal of chicken-fried steak and mashed potatoes and consecutive pints of Coors Lights, Nash LaMore opened up about his small-town Illinois life. His father, Jimmy Jack, a truck driver and former AA player (a first baseman who could really hit), had died of cancer just last year. He’d taught Nash to bat left-handed when he was five, thus the beautiful, effortless swing. Nash was raised by his mother, who still teaches history at his high school alma mater. Manteno is in the northeast part of Illinois, not far from the Indiana border, and is famous for its insane asylum.
Nash told Alec of his mother’s youth, when she and her high school girlfriends would go find escaped asylum men standing motionless in the cornfields like confused scarecrows, unable to make sense of their whereabouts. “They’d bring them sandwiches,” Nash said, as his eyes emitted a magical light, the kind of special light found only in the eyes of a corn-fed golden boy from a good mother.
Alec nodded appreciatively and shook his head throughout, marveling at the kid’s resilience and dedication. “Wow,” he kept saying. “Just fucking wow…”
After the life story, Alec got down to business.
“You got all five tools,” he told the kid. “As the cliché goes, if he can run and he rakes, he’s got what it takes.” Alec went on to gush about Nash’s speed, the ease with which he ran down fly balls in the outfield, his explosive first step out of the batter’s box, and, most important, his beautiful swing. “You actually remind me a lot of Mickey Mantle,” he offered.
And that’s how he hooked him—good old Mickey Mantle.
Though Mantle had been dead and gone for the better part of a decade, the kid was crazy about him. He’d even gotten compared to him on a few occasions by some old-timers, he said. He had the same blond hair, and like Mantle he was a switch hitter and better from the left side, and he threw right-handed. He also had Mantle’s speed.
“You’re taller,” Alec said. “And you probably have a better arm.” He added that in his humble opinion, it would be a shame for his coaches to stick him on the pitcher’s mound and waste all those other tools—the hitting, the fielding, that effortless speed.
Of course, this was when Alec flashed his trusty Mantle rookie card, the bait of all bait when it came to kids like Nash LaMore. He practically produced it out of thin air like a fucking magic trick, telling Nash that he carried the card around the same way some people carry around bits of scripture or pictures of their wives and offspring.
“Mantle’s my Messiah,” Alec said. “The gold standard.”
Nash, who was on his fourth beer, couldn’t believe his eyes. His father, the late Jimmy Jack LaMore, was Mantle’s greatest fan, he said, and when the old man was teaching his son to hit left-handed he tried to model his swing after the Yankee legend.
How crazy is this? Alec thought. It was like watching a toddler walk toward a birthday cake.
When he told the kid he owned the bat that Mickey Mantle had used to hit his first homer in the majors—the actual bat featured on his rookie card (the famous yellow bat!)—Nash was so overwhelmed he just about turned into a tuft of baby powder, and Alec doubled down by flashing the rookie card again. Then he took another oxy and bought the kid another beer. And another one after that.
Alec really does have the bat. It’s a counterfeit, of course. He found the early-fifties thirty-four-inch Louisville Slugger at a garage sale in Asheville, North Carolina, on his way north from Mississippi. Alec had spray-painted the garage-sale find yellow, just as it appears on the Mantle card.
After they drained their fourth round of beers—or maybe it was the fifth—Alec told the kid that he would give him the card and the bat if he did him a personal favor.
“Really?” the kid said. “You’d give it to me?”
“The thing might be worth a million by now,” Alec said. “I’m sure your mom’s still paying off your dad’s medical bills, am I wrong?”
“No, you’re right,” Nash said. “She had to borrow money from my aunts.”
“That’s a tough situation,” Alec said. “I know it well. My own sister had the cancer.”
“She didn’t make it?” Nash said.
“No, she died,” Alec said, letting a little wobble into his voice.
“Sorry to hear that,” Nash said.
“The card has been professionally verified three times,” Alec said, steering the subject back to the rookie card. “The money could tide you and your family over till you get your first big contract. It’s a win-win.”
Nash drank from his pint of beer. “So what’s the favor?” he said.
“Come back to my place and I’ll ask you there,” Alec said.
A silence hung between them, and then the kid said, “Jerry, are you gay?”
“Not in the least,” Alec said. “No way. It’s just something I can’t ask you here. It’s sort of top secret. You gotta trust me.”
Alec bought three more cans of Coors Lights from the bartender, who arranged them in a paper sack, and then Alec asked him to call them a cab.
Twenty minutes later he and Nash LaMore were back at his Lake Street SRO. The armed security guard was playing gin rummy with the elderly Chinese front-desk clerk, and Alec and the kid walked right past them like two fun-loving guys about to go start their own late-night card game.
AND HERE THEY ARE, sitting across from each other in matching gruel-colored metal folding chairs. The mariner’s clock, with its slightly crooked second hand, marks time at a muted clip. The oxys combined with all those beers have made Alec feel even goofier than before. If only there was a radio in this shithole. To the right song—some Roy Orbison or REO Speedwagon or Boston—he might just get up and dance.
“So this favor,” Nash says.
Alec can tell that the kid’s a bit thrown by the sad little room, its transient simplicity, the blank, off-white walls, the colorless carpeting, the little lumpy bed—a glorified cot, really—wedged into the corner, and the small sink with its urine-yellow water stains, the floor-to-ceiling heating pipe, and this wobbly card table that might as well have a can of cold soup on it. Wouldn’t a top scout for the Florida Marlins be staying in a Marriott or something? Alec considered this but knew the meager, low-tech digs would help him accomplish his mission. There wasn’t a surveillance camera to be found in the place.
“First things first,” Alec says, and sets the Mantle rookie card on the table before him. Also on the table are the postcards that his sister Myra Lee stupidly returned to him, several years ago, down in Eureka Springs, where he’d actually been trying to live a regular life, until she got his friend Lake locked up. The postcards are fanned out for the ritual like a winning hand of gin. This is Alec’s version of his Last Supper, his twisted little Eucharist game.
Alec then reaches behind himself and into the tiny closet next to the transom-windowed entrance, where he retrieves Mantle’s bat, its yellow barrel wrapped in plastic. Alec sets the bat carefully on the table before the kid. It rolls on its knob to and fro a few degrees and then comes to rest.
“That’s really it?” Nash says.
“The one and only,” Alec says.
Nash takes it in his hands and as he beholds the legendary implement a devious look—downright naughty, in fact—passes over his face. A door has opened in this kid’s mind, a black hatch of negative space inviting him to some endless green pasture of velveteen greatness.
Oh, we’re all so fucking stupid, Alec thinks. We’re outfitted with piranha brains. We possess the intellects of catfish and crocodiles.
“So what do you want me to do for it?” Nash says, breaking a long silence.
“I’d like you to stove my head in,” Alec says. He throws away the statement just so. It’s as if he’s asking the kid for a couple of bucks to buy a cup of coffee.
Nash laughs at the proposal. His face turns dumb when he laughs. He’s seen too many movie stars laugh. Too many batting champions. “With the bat?” he says.
“With the bat, yes,” Alec says.
“As in kill you?” Nash says, incredulously.
Alec nods three times, each nod deeply sincere and heavy.
“Jesus, Jerry,” the kid says, his laughter all but gone now. “You’re kidding, right?”
“I’m serious as a fucking ball-peen hammer,” Alec says.
Nash’s smile leaves his face. “But why?” he says. “That’s crazy.”
Alec opens one of the extra Coors Lights and takes a swig. “Some questions can’t be answered,” he says. “Let’s just say it’s an important action that must occur for the good of all things.”
“You’ve done bad shit,” the kid intuits.
“And not enough good shit to balance the ledger.”
“What are those?” the kid asks, pointing at the postcards, a clear gambit to change the subject.
“I collect postcards,” Alec says. “Every time I visit a new place. It’s my little nerdy ritual.”
“What’s ‘Saying Hello and Goodbye’ mean?”
“It means hi and bye,” Alec says matter-of-factly. “The greatest riddles are the simplest ones.”
Nash squints at Alec as if unable to compute his response and shakes it off like a curveball he mistook for a fastball. He asks Alec if this is his first time in Elmira.
Alec nearly winces at the utterance of his hometown. His cheap dentures are starting to slip and slide around in his mouth and he has to clamp them together to reset them. “First and hopefully last,” he says.
A moment passes. The air in the room starts to feel heavy, as if a cold front has settled over them.
“Why can’t you just, like, hang yourself?” Nash says. “Or jump off a building?”
“Because I don’t have the courage,” Alec says. “You’re in the privileged presence of a bona fide coward.”
Nash grabs the beer, drinks.
Alec tells the kid that he’s made it easy for him: the barrel of the bat is covered with cling wrap, and he’ll be providing a pair of extra-large, fingerprint-proof rubber gloves, of the medical variety. There will be no trace of an assailant. He’s already cased the place and there are no cameras, not an iota of surveillance. “Hell, they don’t even make visitors sign in in the stupid place,” he adds. He then sets the rest of his cash on the table. “There’s over six hundred dollars there,” he says. “Think of it as a tip.”
Nash stares at the wad of twenties.
“Go ’head,” Alec says. “Put it in your pocket. It’s yours.”
Nash nods a few times, seemingly working out the logic.
“It should only take one or two good swings,” Alec says, “possibly three. You walk out of here with six hundred bones, the Mantle rookie card, and his famous yellow bat. You sell the card, pull your family out of medical debt. Your mom dotes on you for the rest of your life. Maybe you even buy her a new house. A place where she can grow a little garden.” He can see Nash working through the possibilities. He’s definitely hooked the kid. “When you leave, turn right,” he adds. “There’s a back staircase.”
Nash slowly reaches toward the cash, his hand like a giant, blond jungle spider, then snatches it and inserts it in the front pouch of his hoodie. “What if you start screaming or something?” he says.
From another pocket of his cargo shorts, Alec produces a roll of gauze, sets it on the table.
Nash squints, putting all the variables in order. “You’re not gonna tell me what you did, are you?”
“I’d rather not,” Alec says.
Nash then points to his own nose, signaling to Alec that something is wrong with his.
Alec brings his hand to his nose, which is bleeding. “Fucking nosebleeds,” he says, bringing the gauze to his face.
“You a cokehead?” Nash asks.
“Why, you got some?” Alec asks through the gauze, which is thickening with the blood. “I’m kidding.” He tends to his nose some more. These fucking nosebleeds.
“So long as this isn’t about you going around messing with little girls,” Nash says.
Alec senses an opening. “You got a fondness for little girls?” he says, pinching his nostrils together. He sets the wad of bloody gauze down beside the postcards.
