Fiction
Friday, August 25, 2006
Taillights
(An Onteora County romance. If you cock your ear just so, you can hear about 837 gazillion women ranting about how hard it is to find a good man. Stipulated that there are some schmucks out there, but there are about an equal number of self-indulgent, self-absorbed princesses. Beyond both groups, there’s a third that receives little to no attention: the truly superior types of both sexes, for whom a suitable mate can be as elusive as...well...as the butterfly of love.)
"Where will I be sitting?" Jeanne Newton asked.
Art Giordano waved at an unoccupied desk. It appeared to have been recently cleaned. The fabric-covered chair beside it looked new.
Jeanne cast a quick glance at the men at the neighboring desks. All had their heads down over their work. Most wore wedding rings; the exceptions didn't look particularly tasty. All the same, she sashayed past them in her sassiest style, planting one high-heeled foot in front of the other in the deliberate stride of a runway model. A number of eyes rose to assess her figure and dress.
Giordano led her away, past the secretary's station and toward a walled office whose door stood open.
"Time to meet the brains of the outfit," he said.
Behind the wide mahogany desk that faced the door hunched a casually dressed middle-aged man with a pleasant face and a thick mop of dark brown hair. His brown eyes were intent on the terminal screen before him. The founder of Arcologics slid his mouse along the desktop with the delicacy of a microsurgeon.
"Todd?" Giordano said softly.
The brown eyes leaped, skipped off Giordano's face and settled on Jeanne's. "Hm?"
"New associate. Miss Newton, this is Todd Iverson. Todd, this is Jeanne Newton."
Iverson grinned, rose, and offered her his hand. "Charmed." Before she could reply, he said, "What's your specialty?"
"I -- I was an operating room nurse."
"Where?" The eyes bored into hers from well above her, warm but unsettlingly intense. There was no ring on his left hand.
"Onteora General."
"How recently?"
"Until about three weeks ago."
"Excellent." Iverson's eyes flicked to Giordano again. "She'll know what we need to verify the gatekeeper procedures Olympian's been using on our health insurance claims."
Giordano nodded. "My thoughts exactly."
"Have you started already, Miss Newton?"
"Uh, yes, just today."
He smiled brilliantly and came out from behind his desk. "Then it's time you made the acquaintance of our benefits liaison officers. They'll be the source of all your nightmares for the next few months." He indicated the door, and they strode out into the larger office space. Giordano excused himself and moved off.
She surveyed his body furtively. He was considerably taller than she, athletically slender, and visibly charged with vital energy. He was easily the most attractive man she'd seen in Arcologics' offices so far, but his proportions seemed a bit off. His arms looked short for his height, and his waist fell two or three inches higher than seemed natural.
She glanced sideways at his legs. His knees appeared unusually placed as well. His stride was somewhat compact for a man of his height, as if he were just slightly unsure of his balance.
He's wearing high heels.
Though his slacks were long and baggy enough to shroud them, the way the fabric flowed as he walked, combined with his carefully shortened gait, gave the game away.
They have to be four inches high at least. Without them, he'd be no more than five-nine.
He squired her to the Personnel offices and introduced her to several other women, addressing each of them with "Miss" and her surname, and speaking of each in terms complimentary enough to elicit a blush. They glowed in response. All of them regarded him with the gaze by which a woman says I'd do anything at all for you. If they were aware of his footwear affectation, they gave no sign.
Presently they returned to his office. He waved her into a guest chair, settled into his own chair, and, defying all expectation, tilted back, hands behind his head, and swung his feet up onto his desk.
There they were. Laced ankle boots of matte black leather, with two inch platforms and five inch heels. He winked at her as she gaped.
"I knew you noticed," he said. "Any problems?"
"Uh, no, but...why?"
He shrugged. "I like being tall." He raised an eyebrow. "And yourself?"
"Huh?"
"Why do you wear high heels?"
"Well," she stammered, "I guess because all women do."
He shook his head. "No they don't. You've met a dozen or more women here today. Were any of them wearing heels?"
She thought, and shook her head.
"So why you, then?"
"Uh, maybe for the same reason as you?"
He grinned. "Maybe. Or maybe because you were raised to prefer them. Or maybe because you're single -- yes, I noticed -- and you know that men like the sight of a woman in heels, especially a petite woman such as yourself. But it's by choice, right? No one forced you into them before you came here this morning?"
She grimaced. "Yes, it's by choice."
"Good." He pulled those disconcerting boots off his desk and slid forward. "So let's talk about health care cost accounting."
Jeanne returned to her Chedwick flat that evening to find Sarah already at home. Her roommate was dressed to the nines as usual, lounging on their living room sofa with a book: The Uses And Abuses Of Psychiatry, by someone with an Eastern European name. The television was on but unwatched. A newsreader droned unintelligibly in the background.
"So? How was your first day?"
"Tiring." Jeanne dropped the leather satchel that served her as a briefcase and thumbed through the pile of mail on the secretary. It was the usual assortment of junk mail and bills. There was nothing from Walt. The answering machine's readout showed 0. "Any calls on the machine when you got home?"
Sarah shook her head.
Bastard meant it when he said we were through.
"Any plans for the evening?" Sarah asked.
Jeanne shrugged. "I thought to ring Larry up, but I'm really too tired. You?"
"Well," Sarah said, "I thought I might take you out for dinner, to celebrate the new job." She grinned. "And to pump you about it. Any cuties?"
Jeanne tensed internally. She tried not to let it show on her face.
"Not that I noticed. Nobody who'd meet your standards, anyway."
"Oh? Which part of my standards?"
The part about being richer than you. Except for one, maybe. "You'd probably think they were all pretty dull. They work a lot, don't make much small talk."
"I teach small talk." Sarah Forslund rose gracefully, smoothed her hammered-silk skirt, and slipped into her high-heeled pumps. She was a natural dancer-athlete whose every smallest movement and gesture, conscious or not, was an esthetic delight. Her grace, her classic beauty, her high intelligence, and her family's wealth made Jeanne feel like a member of a lesser species. "Anyway, you shouldn't expect much of that on the first day. Let's go get fed."
Jeanne sighed. "Lead the way, roomie."
Jeanne hadn't been hired for her medical background; Arcologics hadn't been looking for a nurse. Its help-wanted ad had declared an interest in anyone who could pass its intelligence and judgment tests, qualities with which Jeanne was well supplied. No more than a day had passed before she realized how very much she'd need them.
Her work absorbed her completely. The company was as much a maverick as its founder and CEO. Nothing about it fell within the bounds of conventional commerce. She had to learn at a terrifying rate, for the firm's needs were both immediate and considerable.
Though her responsibilities as insurance liaison officer didn't require it, she began to spend large fractions of her evenings poring over the corporate records, trying to make sense of Arcologics's product offerings and its relations with other companies. In its four years of existence, it had marketed a robotic food irradiation unit, a self-contained hydroponics control system, a catalytic air sanitizer, an electrical power conditioner, and a program for solving advanced problems in mechanics. It had entered into co-development agreements with a manufacturer of nuclear reactors, a maker of specialty fabrics, and a statistical reliability assessment firm. It was deep in negotiations with a commercial construction firm that specialized in giant office towers, having won the subcontract to provide the environmental controls for an eighty-story skyscraper to be erected in Rochester the coming year.
Arcologics's activities seemed to be united in only one way: they all showed a profit.
Profit seemed to be Todd Iverson's Holy Grail. He wasn't just Arcologics's founder and chief executive officer; he was also its resident inventor. All its products to date had been born in his mind. A man like that would normally invest emotionally in his creations; he'd be stubborn about pushing them all the way to the market no matter how slender their commercial possibilities might be. Not Iverson. He'd killed several of his own ideas under development despite his lieutenants' enthusiasm for them, when he became convinced that they'd earn too little to be worth pursuing.
The attitude carried over to inter-corporate relations. Iverson handled all contract negotiations personally. He invariably set terms that would return a fifteen percent pre-tax profit to Arcologics, and he never budged from them. He ignored attempts to deflect his attention onto matters of little relevance. He refused to "buy into" a deal: to accept a reduced profit margin on the matter under immediate discussion in return for a promise of concessions on some notional larger deal to come. "We're here and this is now," he would say. "Let's do what we came here to do." He'd never yet failed to carry any point he cared to make.
But if Iverson were mad for money, there were no symptoms of it in his treatment of Arcologics's personnel. He paid above-average salaries, and provided above-average noncash benefits, to everyone on his payroll. He'd rebuffed his own personnel officer for suggesting that there be a cap on annual merit raises. He kept a lawyer in-house, at a generous salary, strictly for the convenience of his workers. He employed three people, most aberrantly, to negotiate with other companies of every description -- again, strictly for his employees' benefit. Jeanne was one of the three.
He was as courtly and considerate to everyone in his office as Walt had been to her at the peak of their romance. They were "Mister" or "Miss" to him, and he was "Todd" to them, without exception. He paid for their coffee and tea. For those who stayed late, he paid for their meals. He swapped small talk, jokes, and personal anecdotes with anyone who cared to do so. No few of his people would jump in front of a speeding truck to protect him.
And he wore high-heeled boots to the office every day, and no doubt everywhere else he went, and no one ever said a word about it.
Larry Lansing put down his fork and flattened his palms against the table. "Something on your mind?" he said.
"No, not really." Jeanne kept her eyes on her plate. She toyed with her scallops in drawn butter, seeking an arrangement that would make them look more like a remnant than an entirely untouched meal. "I'm just a little off my game."
"Does the new job have you down? You haven't said a lot about it."
I didn't appreciate being quizzed. "There's a lot of learning involved. Lots of ropes to get hold of." She put down her own fork and sat back. Around them, the Aquarium buzzed with the usual clamor of the Friday evening dinner crowd. The little seafood restaurant's every table was full. Its reliably fresh cuisine and modest prices made it a favorite haunt of Onteora's courting couples and young marrieds.
Ever since she'd admitted her fondness for fish, Larry had taken her there and nowhere else.
His anxious gaze remained on her. "I hope it isn't wearing you out. You've been putting in a lot of overtime."
That sat her up straight. "I haven't said anything about that." Even though it's true. "What makes you say so?"
He cringed at that. "You've been a lot less available lately. I just figured it was probably work."
That's what you wanted it to be.
She sighed faintly. "I guess I have. I've been tired, Lar. I'm not getting enough..."
"Enough what? Rest?"
She scowled. "I don't know."
But it's not the job. I'm more alive in the office than when I'm out with him. A lot more.
Walt was a bastard, but at least there was some substance to him. He had some interests, some conversation. He could see what was around him without my having to point it out and tell him why it mattered. Why am I wasting my Friday evenings on a man with nothing to him? A man who doesn't dare take me to another restaurant? A man for whom I can barely stay awake and can't bear to touch?
The thought that followed from that rose almost to her consciousness. It brushed the surface of her mind before she seized her mental broom and drove it back into the darkness.
He leaned forward and dropped his voice. "Would you like me to take you home?" His tone was so solicitous it made her want to scream.
She forced herself to count to ten. "Maybe that would be best. I really am tired."
He nodded and signaled for the waitress.
At her door, she smiled and turned to put her key in the lock, when he surprised her by reaching for her hand. She stood there, silent and half-paralyzed, while he groped for words.
"Jeanne..." He faltered, collected himself, and produced a plastic smile. "Thanks for tonight." She thought he was about to kiss her, but he merely chafed her hand gently before releasing it, turned swiftly and walked away.
He knows.
She unlocked her door and found the apartment dark. Sarah was still out. She dropped her keys on the phone secretary and slipped swiftly through the darkness to her bedroom. She manage to undress, remove her makeup, and secure herself between the covers, all the lights out, before the tears came.
She dialed Iverson's extension with a microscopically trembling finger.
"Yes?"
"It's Jeanne Newton. I think I have all the claims rejection data assembled, if you'd like to see it."
"Sure would. Come on by." The connection broke at once.
She swept her charts and spreadsheets into a neat bundle, rose, and strode for Iverson's office with all the confidence she could simulate. His door was open. She started to deliver a pro forma knock, saw what he was doing, and halted herself. He seemed not to notice her arrival. She slipped in and slid into his guest chair without a sound.
He was sketching with a charcoal on a huge vellum pad. His charcoal was sharpened to a fineness that would have done credit to a #3 pencil. Its marks were delicately precise, as minute and perfect as the smallest scalpel cuts of the finest surgeon. The sketch was a profile of a middle-aged woman's face. It was more detailed than Jeanne could have imagined possible in so soft a medium. He was drawing a group of fine hairs that lay along her right temple.
She watched in silence as he worked. When he'd completed the woman's hair, he set to work on a headpiece that covered nearly all of it. It was that of a Catholic nun.
Presently he ceased to draw, merely sat staring down at the completed sketch with the charcoal in his hand. She thought to alert him to her presence, decided against it when she saw his eyes brim over.
"What do you think?"
She started. "I didn't think you knew --"
He looked up at last. "Of course I knew. You did call me, remember?" He glanced at his desk clock. "Twenty-seven minutes ago, at that." He grinned. "It's all right to interrupt me. That's what I'm here for."
I got lost in what you were doing.
"So," he said, shoving the gorgeous thing toward her, "what do you think?"
"It's...exquisite." She frowned. "But why charcoal?"
"The saddest medium. Charcoal helps to bring out the somberness of an image. She was always a sad figure, even after she took her vows." He grinned wanly. "Even though that was the one thing she'd always wanted to do."
He seemed unaware of the tears running down his face.
Someone he loved very much. Someone he's lost. To the Church?
"When did she die?"
He shook his head. "She's still alive."
"An aunt?"
Another shake. "My mother."
She suppressed a gasp. He grinned again.
"Don't get the wrong idea. She wasn't a nun when I was born. That came afterward, after my father passed away." He rose and shoved his hands into his pockets. "That stuff can wait till after lunch, can't it?"
"Well, if you say so."
She rose and was about to depart when he said "What's your taste in music like?" He rounded his desk and grabbed a cardigan from the coat tree by the door.
She shrugged. "I like a lot of stuff."
He shrugged into the sweater and cast a speculative look at her. "You've already gotten to play art critic this morning. Want to take a stab at music reviewer?"
"Uh, sure, why not?"
He gestured her toward the door with a sweep of his arm. "Then lunch is on me."
He drove them to a small one-story warehouse on the western edge of the city, about a mile from the Arcologics offices. Another car, a German sedan of venerable years, was parked alongside them. The building was shabby, and lacked an identifying facade, Its windows were heavily begrimed. The large sliding drive-through doors were padlocked shut. He strode to the personnel door without comment and pushed inside.
Funny place for a concert.
The interior of the little warehouse was no match for its exterior. It was as clean as many a private residence. It contained nothing that suggested storage or any other rough use. All its surfaces were padded with eggcrate foam panels. Musical devices lined the four walls. Most were identifiable: keyboards, electric guitars, assorted brass and wind instruments, and a bevy of amplifiers and speakers. Some were more mysterious. A web of cables joined them to a computer that stood beside a large mixing board.
At the far wall, laboring over one of the instruments she couldn't identify, she spied a tall, frail-looking man of perhaps sixty. He was clad in denim, and his rough gray hair was pulled back into a ponytail. When he saw Iverson approach, he put down the tool he'd been using and spread his arms in welcome. Iverson embraced him.
"Padrone!"
"Paisano mio!" Iverson replied. He turned back to Jeanne and beckoned her forward. "Miss Newton, I'd like you to meet Sal Acunzo, one of the two best completely unknown keyboardists in America, who does me the honor of playing with me in my spare moments. Sal, this is Miss Jeanne Newton, who's doing us the honor of listening to us today."
Acunzo extended a hand, and she shook it.
"How did he rope you into this?" Acunzo said.
"He promised me lunch."
"Todd! When are you going to learn some new tricks?"
Her employer shrugged. "Why bother, when the old ones still work just fine?"
Acunzo shook his head. "Hopeless. Did you get the bridge of that thing you were working on last week straightened out?"
"Got a new tack to try, but I want you to rip it to shreds for me."
Acunzo flipped a hand. "Lay it on me."
Iverson's eyes roved among the cables that crisscrossed the floor. "Ready for it?"
"Just finished."
Iverson nodded and positioned himself before an enormous console that had more keyboards, switches and dials than any organ she'd ever seen. The older man leaned against an amplifier case and beckoned Jeanne to join him. She perched herself beside him as Iverson did a series of incomprehensible things to the huge device.
Abruptly, without a word of preliminary, Iverson straightened, put his hands to one of the keyboards, and began. The speakers that lined the warehouse walls fountained forth a rippling cascade of glory.
"So," he said around a mouthful of bacon-cheeseburger, "what did you think?"
What sort of test is this?
Jeanne laid her fork alongside her plate and sat back in her chair. "Mr. Iverson --"
"Todd, please."
"Okay." She scanned the little tavern as she chose her words. They were almost alone. A lone customer sat at the bar. The bartender was busying himself with minute rearrangements of his condiment trays.
"Why did you want my opinion in the first place?"
He grinned. "Answering my question with a question is hardly cricket. Don't you know any other artsy types?"
She grimaced. "One or two."
"And from that face you just made, I'd guess that they press their stuff on you at every opportunity. Am I right?"
She nodded.
"Well, why should I be any different?"
Because you're a genius. As much a genius at art and music as at engineering, management, and marketing.
His eyes pressed her for a response.
"I suppose," she said, measuring out each syllable, "I'd say that you just have to know how good you are already. You certainly don't need the praise of a former operating-room nurse. So why did you want my opinion?"
He merely grinned more widely.
"Todd...do you display these gifts of yours to all your new employees?"
"Nope." His grin turned impish and he looked away. "Only the young, single, pretty ones."
She opened her mouth, closed it without speaking, and went back to digging through her chef's salad.
Sarah peered at her over their omelets. "Not hungry?"
"Yes and no." Jeanne stopped stabbing at her eggs and laid down her fork. "More distracted than anything else, I think."
Sarah smiled. "And you can't do two things at once. At least not when one of them is eat and the other is moon over your new boss."
Jeanne sat up straight at that. "Excuse me? Who said anything about him?"
"You did."
"What? But --"
"By not saying anything about him for nearly two weeks now. The word around town is that he's a major hottie, and that he's very, very eligible. And you work directly with him. But I haven't been able to goose a word out of you with a pitchfork, practically since you started there, and that's just not you. So what's the story, roomie?"
Jeanne let her eyes rove around their kitchenette and tried to get her thoughts to congeal.
Sarah's social connections are a lot better than anything I've got. Maybe she's heard something about him. About him and me. God knows, enough people have seen us together.
And I still can't figure out if he's hitting on me.
"You know," Sarah said, "if you don't want him, you could always toss him my way."
Jeanne frowned. "Haven't you met him, Sar?"
Sarah shook her head. "Haven't had the pleasure, as much as I'd love to. Dad invited him to a shindig a few weeks ago, and we didn't even get an R.S.V.P."
So his manners aren't perfect.
"What was the occasion?"
"Just a big backyard party. Dad invites the whole clan, all his business associates, and anyone he's decided he'd like to meet. The non-family invitees almost always show up bearing gifts."
Not too surprising when the invitation's from Onteora's only billionaire.
"He probably didn't know he'd been invited, Sar. You wouldn't believe how many hours he puts in, or all the, the stuff he does outside the office. He's --" She halted herself just short of the sort of effusive praise that would confirm Sarah's guess.
From the look on her face, it was clear that Sarah Forslund had received all the confirmation she needed.
Jeanne was straining to choose between going to the local art house to see a movie she'd seen before and curling up with a book she'd read twice before when the phone rang.
"Hello?"
"Hi, Jeanne."
Jeanne's mood went at once from mildly bored to despairing. "Oh, hi, Larry."
"Interested in going somewhere tonight?"
"I hadn't thought about it. What did you have in mind?"
There was a brief silence on the line. "I don't know. I thought you might have an idea."
Well, at least it's not dinner at the Aquarium.
"I'm kinda dry of ideas tonight, Larry. Maybe we should try another night?"
Another silence.
He has to get the message at some point.
"Okay, Jeanne. See you soon. You have a good evening, okay?"
"You too, Lar. Good night."
"Good night."
Jeanne set the phone down with a sense of pointlessness.
I would have liked to go somewhere, do something. Anything. Sarah never has a problem filling her free time with good stuff. She's always full of stories, even though she goes out alone almost every evening. But all Larry ever offers me is the world's most boring crap. Why can't he come up with anything worthwhile?
Why should I expect him to, at this point?
She banished the thought forcefully, grabbed her twice-read romance novel, and headed for her bedroom.
Jeanne did her best to stay buried in work. There was plenty of it; deliberately or not, Olympian Assurances had become a thorn in Arcologics' flesh, regularly rejecting half the claims submitted to it and occasionally more. Her days were evenly divided between reviewing disputed medical claims and phoning various Olympian officers with information, complaints, and carefully phrased threats. It was the only thing in her life interesting enough, and plentiful enough, to keep her from daydreaming about her handsome, charming, brilliant, excessively gifted, maddeningly indirect, high-heeled boss. It worked.
It was close to being the only thing in her life at all. Her free time was spent with her books, her music, and an occasional rerun of a medical drama. Larry had stopped calling. Sarah had taken to spending all her evenings out of the apartment, often leaving only a note asking Jeanne to leave a light on when she retired. Even telemarketers seemed to have decided to let her be. When she came home after a day of work, Jeanne had a completely private world.
She found it peaceful, even refreshing. She'd never minded her own company, but her failed romances with Walt Rustow and Larry Lansing had somehow deflected her from the enjoyment of the things she really loved. She'd allowed herself to become anxious over her advancing age, but why? Time would pass at a rate of sixty seconds per minute whether she was dated, mated or alone. For the first time in months, she felt no need to expose herself to potential suitors.
It came as something of a surprise when Sarah, whose face she'd hardly seen for several weeks, swooped down upon her at the end of a workday and dragged her out to an artists' cafe for coffee and distraction.
"A poetry open mike?" Jeanne said as they sat.
Sarah nodded. "Most of these guys are about as interesting as listening to paint dry, but a couple have really got it. With luck we'll get one or two of them."
The cafe was decently large, yet every table but theirs was full. Except for them, the crowd was exclusively male, but no one had taken conspicuous note of their presence. That they might ignore her was thinkable to Jeanne, but for Sarah's Nordic beauty to go unremarked struck her as unthinkable.
"Is this a gay hangout, Sar?"
Her roommate shrugged. "It hadn't occurred to me to ask."
A waiter in a suede drawstring shirt and black beret asked for their order. Jeanne asked for coffee, Sarah for a fruit and cheese platter. As the waiter made for the kitchen, the lights came down and a similarly garbed emcee mounted the stage and moved to the microphone.
"We have a short lineup for you tonight," he murmured into the mike. "Two new contributors, Danny and Steve --" He paused as a rustling murmur passed over the crowd -- "and Todd whose work you've enjoyed before."
At the last name a round of applause punctuated by scattered cheers rang out. The emcee smiled. "You know, for an artsy bunch, you guys sure seem to like the old forms." That triggered a second round of applause, and a considerable amount of laughter.
"All right, let's get to it." The emcee departed the stage and a tall, husky young man moved diffidently toward the mike.
Danny, the first entrant, hunched over the mike as if he were hoping to hide behind it. He read a free-verse poem about war casualties in a reedy, halting voice. At the conclusion there were a few scattered claps, but on the whole the audience seemed unmoved.
Steve, the second contributor, was a short, slight man of middle age with a tubercular cast to him. He clutched the microphone stalk as if he could barely stand without it. His poem, if it could be called that, was a shrieking, twenty-minute denunciation of greed and selfishness that shaded over into a demand for respect for "the shades that linger, endlessly dying, awaiting the respect that will set them free." There was no applause.
There was a brief hiatus before the third participant stepped out of the shadows toward the mike. His platform boots clapped loudly against the wooden tympanum of the stage. The crowd roared in approbation, and Jeanne suppressed a gasp. Beside her, Sarah hmmm'ed in approval.
Todd Iverson smiled shyly. "Hi, everybody." He held up a single sheet of paper. "I call this one 'Valkyrie'."
Silence fell, and he read.
Their forces loomed, hard, angry, fierce of eye,
My mistress spurred her steed and charged, forbye.
Retainers who had ne'er knelt to a foe,
Pulled hard upon their reins and watched her go.Her battle-cry resounded forth alone,
Her courser's hooves struck sparks from flint and stone.
She did not turn to see the naked plain,
Her yeomen having thought best to refrain.Sword gleaming in her hand, she struck and swore,
The foemen quickly giving ground before,
Such righteous rage boiled from that flaxen head,
That those she did not fell soon mocked the dead.As through the bristling ranks uncompanied,
She drove, with flashing steel and brilliant speed,
Her own behind her muttered at such play,
Alone yet unafraid, to win the day.All quit the field before that angel's rage,
Her foemen and the men who wore her gage,
The foe feared death, her own feared to remain,
To face her and her most deserv'd disdain.And when the plain lay thick with blood and steel,
She sat unmarred, and scanned that crimson field,
Sheathed sword and turned her courser toward her home,
Into her keep she rode, proud and alone.'Twere dark, and grim, and pierced by northern cold,
Strange in that sunlit land, Valkyrie's hold,
Wherein she could await the promised day,
When he for whom she yearned would make his way,A knight of strength and grace, unmarred by fright,
To company her each morning, noon, and night,
Till battle's joys, and life's, could not abide,
They set together on Valhalla's ride.I could but wish to be that worthy knight,
To raise my sword and join her in the fight,
But only a crude seneschal am I,
To dream, to yearn, regret, renounce, and sigh.For heroes notice not the lowly born,
Such mind their place, endure their betters' scorn,
Except alone, when nightfall sets them free,
To dream of other worlds where such might be.
He bowed his head. For several seconds there was a silence as profound as night, and then the crowd came to its feet, clapping and cheering to shake the very roof loose from the walls.
He raised his head once more, and the silence returned.
"Thank you."
And he strode off into the shadows.
"Pretty obviously they had their eye on an art nouveau sort of ambiance," Sarah said. She guided her Mercedes smoothly into the Arcologics parking lot and pulled up alongside Jeanne's battered Honda. Other than their two cars, the lot was empty. "I don't think it developed the way they expected."
"Nouveaux artes," Jeanne muttered absently.
"Hm?"
"It's one of the exceptions," Jeanne said. "In French, all adjectives come after the noun they modify except for those that indicate beauty, age, goodness, or size."
"Oh. Okay." Sarah turned and fixed a concerned look on her. "Going straight home?"
Jeanne shrugged. "I guess so. Why?"
A ripple of mild irritation passed over her roommate's face. "Because you should. You've been working too much. Pushing the outside of the envelope of human dedication." Sarah smiled faintly. "I know you love your job, but there are limits. You're a good friend and a good apartment-mate. I'm not going to stand by in silence while you trash yourself with overwork. Anyone in my family could tell you how that usually works out."
Jeanne opened her mouth, closed it, and studied Sarah's face.
She means it. She's not just reading from a good-roomie script.
"Sar... well, first of all, thanks for caring that much. But it's not what you think. Yeah, I enjoy the work. I spent a lot of years helping to patch up broken bodies, and getting pissed when some prick of a surgeon decided a patient was too unimportant for his best work, or too...interesting to be treated as a suffering human being instead of an experimental animal. Now I'm on the other side of the desk, swinging a money club and making sure my people get the treatment they deserve. I've got to tell you, it's great. It beats any thrill I ever had in an O.R. all to hell. But I don't do it compulsively. I do it because it's the best thing I do... the best thing I have to do."
She bit her lip, torn by her own words. Were they a simple statement of priorities, or an indirect admission that her life had collapsed around a single, monochromatic pursuit?
Sarah peered at her through the darkness. After a moment, she shrugged.
"Can I interest you in a look at how the other half lives?"
Jeanne's brow furrowed. "Are you inviting me to visit the compound?"
Sarah shook her head. "A backyard party. Grandpa said I could have you, but you have to dress nice. Oh, and you can bring a date if you want." She grinned. "Dress him nice, too."
"I, uh, I'll..."
"Just think about it and let me know before Saturday after next. Get home safe, roomie."
Jeanne nodded. "I will."
By seven PM on a Wednesday, even the most dedicated of Arcologics's staff were ready for something else. Jeanne had completed her latest round of case analyses and was about to head home when her phone rang.
"Jeanne Newton."
"Miss Newton, would you please stop by my office for a moment?" Todd Iverson's voice sounded strangely hesitant.
"Uh, sure, be right there." She clapped the handset back into its cradle, grabbed her rucksack and trotted through the rows of empty desks toward Iverson's office.
She found him standing, clutching a sheet of correspondence-sized stationery and squinting at it as if he couldn't make out what it said. She stopped in his doorway and delicately cleared her throat. He started and swiveled to smile at her.
"Please, come in and have a seat." She perched at the edge of one of his guest chairs. He gestured with the paper. "I, uh, have a little problem, and I was hoping you could help."
Is he sick? "Sure, Todd, anything at all." She tried to smile reassuringly.
"I, uh, have to go somewhere Saturday after next," he said. "A social engagement. A party. Forgive me for making it sound like a chore, but if I thought I could decline the invitation, I would. I think I would. See, uh, I'm not going to know anyone there, and I'm just...not too good among strangers. If you're, uh, free that afternoon, would you consider coming with me?" He opened his eyes comically wide. "I'll try to make sure you have a good time."
Jeanne's mouth fell open. Despite her most earnest efforts, she emitted a squirt of astonished laughter.
Iverson grimaced in pain. "I guess not, eh?"
She almost leaped out of her seat. "No, no! I'd be overjoyed to be your date!" She laughed again, in pleasure and relief. "You just had me worried about you. I figured this was about a health claim of yours."
The creases in his face immediately relaxed. His whole body seemed to loosen, as if he'd been relieved of some invisible weight. He released an explosive sigh.
"Thank you, Miss Newton. I'd been telling myself --"
She held up a hand. "Stop right there. I forgot to mention the conditions."
The worry lines returned at diminished force. "Oh, I assure you that --"
"Todd!"
He lapsed into silence.
"For such a smart guy, you sure have a hard time recognizing when to shut up." He grinned bashfully and studied the floor. "It's not about what you were thinking. First, you have to agree to call me Jeanne. At least when we're not in the office, okay?"
He nodded. "Okay."
"The second one I'm going to hold for the moment. Third, there's something we have to do first."
"What's that?"
"Dinner. Now."
He laughed. "Okay. How about Grucci's?"
"You're on."
"Did you really think I might say no to you?" Jeanne forked up a medallion of veal.
Iverson shrugged. "I didn't let myself think about it."
She suppressed a snort to save her mouthful. She laid down her fork, chewed and swallowed, and said deliberately, "I would have agreed to go anywhere with you. I was just surprised that you would want to go anywhere with me."
It was his turn to gape in surprise. He sat back, laid his arms flat along his chair's armrests, and studied her face.
"Why not?" he asked, voice barely above a whisper.
Before answering, she scanned the restaurant. There were few diners, it being fairly late on a midweek day, and no one particularly nearby, but she didn't want to say anything that might be overheard to his embarrassment.
"You have to know," she murmured, "how all-stops-out impressive you are. I've seen you excel in half a dozen different fields already, and I have a feeling I ain't seen nothin' yet. On top of that, you're good looking, charming, considerate, and more generous toward your employees than Sarah is willing to believe. You're so far ahead of me in every way that I can barely even see your taillights. Why would a...a major hottie like you want to go out with me?"
He sat silent for several seconds. "Who's Sarah?"
"My roommate."
"Oh." He stared at the table, visibly composing himself to reply.
"Having second thoughts? I do tend to shoot my mouth off in socially awkward ways."
He chuckled. "No, it's not that. Miss Newton --"
"What was my first condition?"
Another chuckle. "Sorry. Jeanne, have you ever had the misfortune to be, well, courted by someone who bored you to tears?"
She cackled. "Have you been keeping watch on my apartment?"
He smiled. "Then you know what it feels like not to be able to deal with a companion you just can't admire. But what if that were all you could date? Men who were flat-out unworthy of a moment of your time? What do you suppose that would do to your attitude toward men?"
"Nothing good, admittedly. But Todd," she said, "I've been on the other end of the stick, too. My last serious romance was with a man who kept complaining about having to 'drag me along,' as if I were a dead weight on his arm. Aren't you at all worried about my doing that to you?" She braced herself for his response.
"Maybe I would be," he said in a measured voice, "if I hadn't had the chance to observe you as I have. You spoke of my excellences before, but apparently you have no idea of yours. You meet people on their own level. You see and you hear without any barriers or preconceptions. You aren't frightened by what's outside your experience. You fight for what you think is right. And you don't back down from your convictions. How many more assets does a woman need?"
Her breath came short and blood fountained into her face.
"How can you think so well of me?" she whispered.
He shook his head as if to clear it of cobwebs. "How can you not? Isn't it possible that you think too little of yourself? That you've been dating down? That you're single not because you don't meet anyone else's criteria, but because you've never allowed that you meet your own? Jeanne," he said in a cracking voice, "you're not just a former operating room nurse who got fired because she mouthed off to one too many arrogant asshole surgeons!"
She could not speak.
"I touched a nerve with that, I know," he said. "But you had to know I'd check into your background before agreeing to hire you. Everything about those incidents struck me as entirely to your credit. I wanted you onboard before I ever saw your face. After we met, I had to know if we might...well...be more than just employer and employee to one another. So I tested you.
"I test everything, Jeanne. I test myself, I test my ideas, I test my subordinates, I test my collaborators, I test the market, and I test my own damned patience until I can't stand myself any longer. It's got to be that way. Too many people depend on me for too many things. I can only afford to be wrong once in a long, long while. If I were to get myself wrapped around you without being pretty sure it was going to work, God alone knows what sort of hash I would make of things. So I made a point of testing you. I showed you everything that's scared away the other women I've courted. And you hung in there."
Her eyes brimmed over. She stretched a hand blindly across the table, and he took it.
"Todd," she whispered, "if I let myself fall in love with you..."
"Yes?"
"...it has to be the real thing. Not a convenience, not a fling, and not some sort of sympathy trip. If you don't think you can fall in love with me, you have to set me straight before I... I..."
He squeezed her hand. "I don't think that will be a problem."
They sat like that, unspeaking, for a long while.
Presently he said, "Are you ready to tell me about that other condition?"
"Maybe later," she said. "After you've taken me home."
"But --"
"Your home. From here. Tonight." She grinned impishly. "There's more to compatibility than mutual admiration, and I want to know now."
He stared hard into her eyes, nodded, and signaled for the waiter.
They stepped through the arch of roses that gated the huge Forsland grounds hand in hand. Spread before them was a wonderland of luxuries: a hedge topiary stippled with seating and buffet stations; a set of terraces, atop which stood an elegant, brightly lit pavilion; a display of statuary in a range of styles; and several beautifully sculpted mini-gardens centered on koi ponds. Among them all, dozens of elegantly dressed guests strolled, sat, or stood in clumps.
Todd gawked as delightedly as a small boy. Jeanne smiled.
"The very rich are different from you and me," she said.
He chortled. "Yeah, they have a lot more money."
"You're pretty well fixed yourself. You could live like this if you wanted to."
"Not quite, babe. Anyway, I still have a lot of work to do. Old Anders has done his bit. He can kick back and relax." A puzzled look crossed his face. "You know, you never did tell me about that remaining condition, but here we are."
She shrugged. "It can wait."
He raised an eyebrow. "Come on!"
She pulled his head down to her and whispered in his ear. He snapped upright, eyes wide.
"You're kidding!"
"Call it a nurse thing."
"But --"
"Todd, you can take the nurse out of the hospital --"
He grimaced. "But you can't take the hospital out of the nurse. Okay, just give me a little while to adjust to the idea."
"Not too long, sweetie. I've been waiting." She grinned wickedly. "Oh, you can leave your boots on. I let you wear them here, didn't I?"
He noted the gleam of lust in her eyes and shuddered.
A waiter approached and asked them if they'd care for refreshment. Todd asked for white wine, and Jeanne for a mimosa. Moments later they were ambling, drinks in hand, toward one of the koi ponds when she spied Sarah, playing assistant hostess to a knot of Onteora Aviation executives.
She squeezed Todd's hand. "Give me a minute, sweetie?" He nodded, and she scampered across the great lawn as daintily as high heels would allow.
"Sarah!"
Sarah Forslund's head whipped around. "You came!" she squealed, and ran to embrace Jeanne, the OA execs frowning at her back.
"It's gorgeous, Sar," Jeanne said. "Thanks ever so much for the invite. Are you planning to introduce me to any movers or shakers?"
Sarah nodded. "Anyone you want, roomie. But they're mostly kinda old and kinda married."
Jeanne smiled crookedly. "Can't win 'em all, I guess."
"Did you bring anyone?"
Jeanne nodded. "Want to meet him?"
"Of course!"
They strolled across the lawn to where Todd Iverson stood. His back was to them. He was studying a pair of intertwined figures in marble as if he were calculating how to improve on it.
"Sweetie?"
Todd turned to face them, and Sarah gasped.
"The poet!"
"And a lot more," Jeanne said. "Sarah, I'd like you to meet Todd Iverson, chief executive officer of Arcologics. Todd, this is my roommate Sarah Forslund."
Todd bowed slightly and offered his hand. "Charmed." Sarah stood goggle-eyed, hardly thinking to take it.
"Mr. Iverson," she said in an awed voice, "the whole county is agog with talk about you." Her eyes flicked quickly to Jeanne's and then back to Iverson's. "You can't imagine how much I've wanted to meet you." She gave him a ten-million watt smile, fully equipped with champagne, hot tubs, and satin sheets.
Jeanne stepped to Iverson's side and slipped a possessive arm around his waist. He looked down at her and settled an arm protectively along her shoulders.
"Oh you'll get a lot more chances to get to know each other, Sar," she said. "He's with me."
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Wednesday, February 01, 2006
Two Flash Fictions
1. The End Of The Affair.
"I told you we weren't meant for each other."
"How could you say such a thing?" The finality of her expression brought him to the edge of tears. "You're beautiful, I'm brilliant. We can't stand to be apart and everyone loves us together!"
She threw a glance over her shoulder as her bedroom door creaked. "Not everyone."
She put both hands to the top of the window sash and jerked it down. It barely missed his fingers as he allowed himself to fall the eighteen feet to the street below.
2. Policy Decision.
"Behold!" He spread his hands.
I burst into applause. "Jolly well done!"
He smiled, obviously pleased with Himself. "Yes, rather. The last batch were so long ago, I wasn't sure I remembered how."
Yet even when the winds of His power had quieted, the bipeds continued to scatter about the Garden. The animals fled them as if gripped by fear. Had this been part of His intention?
"Lord, was this the way you wanted it?"
His eyebrows rose. "Oh, didn't I mention? This lot will need room to grow, so I gave them the ability to move about on their own. No restrictions."
"But... but soon they'll be everywhere!"
He nodded and cast a fond eye over His newest creatures. "Afraid so, Michael. Made in My image, just like you and yours. But you'll keep a good eye on them for Me, won't you?"
"Uh, yes, Lord."
Bother!
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Saturday, November 26, 2005
Names
(Possibly the hardest of all fictional feats is to retell a classic story -- a genuinely great and inspiring story -- in a fresh, original fashion that's truly your own.
The following story is the one of which I'm proudest. I doubt I'll ever write a better one. Consider it my Christmas gift to you, in this year of Our Lord 2005.)
Census has always been an irritant. There are many -- I am one -- who feel it to be intrusive, however necessary it might be. And the costs, both to the government and to the individuals it enumerates, should not be discounted.
I have the trust of certain highly placed persons. Because of my reputation for thoroughness and integrity, at the outset of the last two censuses, the tetrarch has assigned me the supervision of a district. I took advantage of this to tell him of the grumblings the census causes. On the first occasion he assured me that the complaints I heard were the braying of asses, nothing more. Census had never caused a revolt and would cause none. This last time he was slower to respond.
On my way back to Jerusalem with my tallies, I decided to take lodging at a country inn rather than travel through the night. The proprietors knew me from previous encounters. Well that it was so, for there was only one room left and a goodly throng clamoring for it. I tried to be unobtrusive about securing it for myself, but a few noticed and protested as vigorously as their fatigue would allow. To avert the disturbance, I slipped out of the common room as quickly and quietly as I could. When I'd divested myself of my bags, I descended the back stairs to wander the hills until my mind had quieted enough to allow me to sleep.
A census marshal has absolute authority over the procedures to be used in his district. Knowing the popular sentiment, I took the inconveniences upon myself. I went from town to town, consulting with local magistrates and figures of prominence, and took the count without requiring anything of the people save their names.
The local officials were always glad to see me go. What would be required of them and their neighbors afterward, of course, was money. Census is always about money: how many folk there are, and how prosperous, and what levy can be exacted of them without provoking an insurrection.
By the size and surliness of the throng on the roads that day, and at the inn, I knew I was passing through a district whose marshal was not so kindly disposed. As the law permitted, he'd ordered the people to come to him. He'd imposed enormous discomfort upon every man of that region, rather than burden himself with the dust and expense of my sort of circuit.
It was not a happy place.
In passing through a crowd, I am forever speculating. Which among these, I ask myself, is known to his neighbors as a person of substance? Which is reviled for his indulgences, or held in contempt for his dissolution? Which among them is known outside his village, and why? Which of them will become known? Which of them, by dint of deeds mighty or monstrous, will climb to stand on the shoulders of history? Which will change our world?
Usually it's a way of passing the dreary times, no more.
The day had provided me with copious fodder. There was an old man in a dirty samite robe, stooped nearly double from years of toil, who leaned so heavily upon his staff as he walked that I feared it might break beneath him. Yet when his wife addressed him in a manner he disapproved, he straightened like a spring suddenly unbound and struck her across the face with that same staff, to send her to the ground bleeding and blubbering. There was a merchant, a large, solid man in a rich cloak of gabardine, who intervened uninvited in a loud dispute between a traveler and a street peddler, to counsel them to moderation. They turned their wrath from one another to him, hurling the foulest of epithets into his face until he left them to resume their profitless quarrel. There was a tall youth of perhaps twenty, with a face of chiselled perfection and a body like unto the Greeks' statues of their gods. He strode smiling through the world as if he owned everything in it, and all marveled at his beauty as he passed. Yet when a raddled old harlot beckoned to him in terms too vulgar even to think them onto this page, he did not respond with derision or scorn. He stopped and went to her, spoke to her softly, pressed a coin into her hand, and passed on.
Of which of these would I hear again? Any? None?
Even if it should happen, I would not know. I did not know their names. My acquaintance with names was a professional one, confined to the tallies I carried in my saddlebags.
The Sun had dropped below the horizon, and the hills were growing cold. The traffic on the road to the city had dwindled to nothing. Outside the inn, the stragglers for whom there was no accommodation crouched and huddled against its southern wall, making what provisions they could for a night of unplanned exposure. In the near distance a shepherd surrendered his staff to his son and trudged back to his hovel for an evening meal.
Movers? Shakers? Doers of mighty deeds? Icons of superlative virtue or courage?
Not likely.
Even those acclaimed as such by the world often struck me as persons elevated to their stations by blind chance, rather than merit. One night, deep in his cups, a patrician of my acquaintance admitted as much to me. He called his chamberlain a more able man by far. In a better world, he allowed, their positions would have been reversed. I agreed, though I forebore to say so.
I passed no judgments. I was no mover nor shaker. I was a functionary, an industrious keeper of tablets with a gift for inspiring confidence in those of higher station, nothing more. No deed of mine would disturb the world's slumbers. My name would not be recorded in an annal of greatness nor praised from a tall tower.
There was some comfort in it.
The night grew cold. The clouds receded from the southern sky, and the stars brought their pale glory to that humblest of places. I headed back to the inn, with no thoughts but of a mug of mead and an early bed.
A faint commotion arose as I passed the stables. The doors were closed, of course, but human sounds issued from within. I stopped and laid my ear against the wind-worn wood. A woman was panting with increasing urgency. A male voice murmured repeated exhortations to courage.
It climaxed with a great cry, followed by a lesser one: the unmistakable wail of a newborn child. The tallies for that district would be augmented by one.
One what? Shepherd? Peddler? Laborer? Surely not a rich merchant, whose hands would flow with gold and whose path would be strewn with obsequies lifelong. Surely not a prince of the realm, whose stern gaze and unblinking eye would strike fear into lesser men and command them to instant obedience. Not a mover nor a shaker. Such were not born in stables.
I swung back the stable door and slipped inside. No one noticed.
There were only the three: man, woman, and child. A single frail candle burned against the back wall of the stable, casting their silhouettes at me like inverted shadows. The woman had wrapped the baby in a loose cocoon of white muslin, leaving only its head exposed, and was laying it in the feed-trough that stood between the rows of stalls. She straightened, stepped back, and wordlessly collapsed into the man's arms.
Around the little tableau, the horses were silent.
I stepped forward, started to address the couple, and stopped. He cradled her in his lap, his arms tight about her, his face ablaze with uxorious devotion. Her eyes, large and luminous, were fixed upon her new child.
It took all my strength to produce a voice. "Do you... require anything?"
Her gaze remained locked upon her child. He assessed me with a glance and nodded with a certainty I could not help but envy.
"Some water, perhaps."
I nodded and started for the inn, but something held me. I bent to the feed-trough, pulled the muslin back from the tiny face and looked into it, not knowing why or what I hoped to see.
The baby's eyes were open.
The eyes of the newborn are never open.
They were large, and dark, yet filled with the light of a million stars, and more knowledge than I had seen in the eyes of any man, high or low. They held recognition and regal acceptance.
I know you for what you are, that infant gaze said. Without knowing, you have sought me, and now I have come for you, and for all those like you. The humble and the just. Though you know not my name, though it be the least of the tallies for this census, and not even one of yours, when you hear it you will know it at once. On a day not far off I shall summon you, and instruct you in the ways of truth and righteousness, and together we will awaken this weary world to a dawn of hope.
The eyes closed. I stood and backed away.
"I'll fetch water," I whispered. Neither husband nor wife stirred. I slipped out of the stable and closed the door behind me.
The common room of the inn was crowded and painfully noisy. There were far too many folk there for its size. Servants moved quickly through the room with mugs, plates and coarse blankets, stumbling here and there, receiving muttered thanks or none at all. I stood at the arch to the kitchen and waited to be noticed.
"Is there water?"
A young girl turned away from the pot she was stirring and looked up at a portly man tending a large oven. He nodded. She filled an ewer from a dip well and presented it to me in both hands. I took it and thanked her.
"There's a couple in the stables..."
The man nodded. "We know."
"She's given birth."
"Is she well? And her baby?"
"I think so."
He took a loaf from a high shelf and brought it to me. "We haven't much left. The first harvest won't be soon enough for me. But we do what we can, as little as that may be."
I smiled. "It will serve."
He nodded and returned to his labors.
The family in the stable was as I had left it. The child was asleep. The man accepted the bread and water with grave thanks. He was dividing it with his wife as I left them.
We all do what we can. For some that is more than for others, but no effort is to be shirked. I was far from my place of resource, but that did not excuse me from my portion.
What of the child in the manger? What would his portion be?
I had met a great one at last. A king of kings, one whose proper place would be at the head of every table.
I hoped I might live to see him rise to his estate, but if I did not, it would be of little moment. I had seen him enter the world. That would be enough.
Jerusalem was a day's ride away. The next day I delivered the census rolls, and remarked again to the tetrarch how noisome and costly the census had proved, not for myself but for the least among his subjects. He thanked me with his usual courtesy, well beyond that owed to a lowly recordsmith, and bade me return to my usual duties. But each day since then I have remembered the child, and wondered what his name, the name I would know as I heard it, would prove to be.
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Saturday, October 01, 2005
The Sport
You've gotta love 'em. They're the biggest bunch of crybabies, narcissists, and all-around scum you could find this side of a coke dealers' convention, but they think we're the worst vultures and fiends in creation. Miss one syllable of theirs, and they scream about being misquoted. Quote 'em accurately, and they yell about being taken out of context. If you catch one of 'em doing somebody a favor, you can be sure the favor's owed. If you catch him treating someone with what looks like respect, you can bet the debt is money. Big money.
Money's the only thing that gets their undivided attention. Which is why, when I spotted one who didn't seem to care about money, he got mine.
Truth be told, he would have gotten it anyway.
They have to register their contracts; it's league and union policy. The union is protecting its CBA, and the league is enforcing its salary arbitration system. The rule couldn't be tougher if they had an actual cap. And there has to be a contract. The date on the contract is what determines eligibility to play.
It's not unusual for a new guy to get the minimum. Hell, I wouldn't complain about it; the minimum is twelve times what I get for more or less honest work. A thirty-seven year old no-name should count himself lucky to get a shot at the majors, even with a going-nowhere expansion team like the Olympians. But when June starts to fade and the guy is 14-0 with twelve complete games, a no-hitter, and a 0.31 ERA, and he's still getting the minimum, you start thinking about alien invasions and sanity hearings.
And feature articles. Not Page One above the fold, but top, front and center of the Sports section, with your byline in bold, and serious prospects for TV spots and panel shows.
Not only was he getting the minimum salary permitted to a major leaguer under the CBA; he wasn't spending it. The money never hit his checking account at the team's bank.
As far as I knew, I was the only hack who'd noticed. I had to conceal the discovery. I wanted an interview with Conrad Bearing -- who didn't -- and the money angle was my crowbar, but I had to let him know what I knew without spilling it to my competitors.
We are a bunch of vultures. Vultures that will snatch up meat that's still breathing, if there's no carrion to be had.
With reporters all over him before and after every game, I had to slip him the hook in a way the others wouldn't snag. It was going to be a challenge. But if I couldn't find a way, I wouldn't get the scoop.
I wouldn't deserve it.
He didn't finish his fifteenth, but he won it. It would have been a shutout, but the reliever gopher-balled the Twins' number-one RBI man with one out in the ninth. Still, 4-1 wins just as well as 4-0, and the reliever got the earned run. Bearing's ERA was down to 0.30, and his statistics were screaming Cy Young and MVP. It would be the first time ever in the history of the sport, but if he finished the season the way he'd started it, no one in America could deny it to him.
The usual horde was besieging him. I was part of it. As he dressed, he answered the shouted questions, no matter how pointed or personal, the same way he always had: with silence and a shake of the head. He didn't look up but twice, both times with the same stony face he showed to opposing batters from the mound. His teammates, knowing they wouldn't get two seconds' worth of any of us while he was around, faded away without a word.
I'm used to pro ballplayers. I know why they all look older than their ages. But I'd never gotten over how old he looked. You could have convinced me that he was fifty. His hair was solid gray, his face was deeply lined, and I'd swear he had liver spots on his hands. He was fit and trim at six feet and one-eighty, but there was a suggestion of a stoop to him, even when he sat, that suggested that just maybe, the years on his face weren't just from sun and wind.
The other hacks were half-crazy. None of them had turned up the first thing about him. They knew his name, and his face, and his incredible pitching, but not one damned thing more. He saw no one but his teammates, and them only in the locker room, the dugout, and the clubhouse. He made no phone calls and received no mail. Nothing about him had turned up on the Web. Despite offers in six and seven figures for the beginning of a clue to who he was and how he'd risen from nothing to the top pitcher in the game -- in the history of the game -- no one had stepped forward with the smallest morsel of fact about him.
A man who arrives at training camp as a free agent, has never played pro ball before, then wins fifteen consecutive starts in sixty games has no business being anonymous. Maybe he wasn't doing it to spite us, but that was the effect it was having. At first, they just wanted to know who he was. Now they wanted to get him.
I had him. It was time to land him.
I held my tongue until the rest of the pack had stopped baying. I wasn't going to shout. Not likely he would hear me clearly over the rest, even if I did shout. But if I waited until the din died down a touch, and caught him looking my way, I could mouth what I had to say. Eyes like his would catch it.
They did.
His eyes caught mine. He looked about as if he were still attending to the others, but never more than a few degrees off our personal line of contact. I stayed stock still, hung back as unobtrusively as I could until the locker room cleared. The five seconds before the door swung shut behind the last of my colleagues were the longest of my life.
He turned to face me squarely, clapped his hands against his thighs, leaned forward and murmured, "What was that about my salary?"
Even his voice sounded old. I looked him in the eye. "You've barely spent the first dollar of it."
"And you know this...how?"
I smiled and said nothing.
He grimaced. "What are you angling for?"
"A scoop, of course."
He looked away. His hands clenched, relaxed, and clenched again.
"All right," he said. "You get an interview. Twenty minutes, right here and now. But strictly about baseball. Nothing personal. And only on the condition that you stop looking into my private affairs, permanently."
He sat back, plainly expecting me to start into a conventional sports interview. When I shook my head, his face fell.
"Then what do you want?" he said.
"The same thing everyone wants: to know who you are and where you came from. To know where you got that fastball, that curve and that control. To know where you're headed next, since a pitcher that good isn't going to stay with an expansion team for the minimum two years running." I pulled my cassette recorder out of my jacket and pushed the RECORD button. "Give me that if you want me to lay off your finances and your miser's ways."
He glared at me as if I'd hit a grand slam off him the inning before. I just smiled. But my smile faded when he chuckled.
"I don't know which of us is more ridiculous," he said. "You for overplaying such a weak hand, or me for taking you seriously. You lose. Take your best shot and we'll see what you can learn on your own hook. I won't try to stop you."
He rose, hefted his duffel, and left me there gaping at his back.
Yes, sports hacks socialize. Professionally, we'd cut each other's throats given half a chance, but we can be pals after curfew. After all, who wants to drink alone?
The Tenth Inning was its usual noisy post-game self. No major-leaguers, but a few triple-As and the customary swarm of collectors and jock itches. Most of them were there in the hope that a utility infielder might wander in, susceptible to a plea for an autograph or the offer of a bed partner. The hacks were there...well, why were we ever there? It was the boozery nearest the stadium, and we all had expense accounts, so why go anywhere else?
Besides, there was always a chance he might wander in, even if he never had before.
"What gets me," Mitch Rainier said, "is the endorsements."
"What endorsements?" Cal Martinez said. "He won't even do a no-lines spot for a soft drink."
"Right." Mitch flashed his one-sided grin. "Fifteen-and-oh with the All-Star break still three weeks away, he could probably pull down twenty million in spots this year alone, but none of the flacks have gotten within a county of him. The doormen at his hotels are all given instructions to pitch them into the street."
He's not interested in money, I thought. But why else does anyone play this game?
"He won't keep them at bay forever," Martinez said. "They'll hook him. They hook everybody sooner or later. Who was the last big guy said he wouldn't do a spot for anything?"
"Guidry," I said.
Martinez nodded. "And they got him, didn't they? They used a Cause. Once they found out he had a thing for dogs, he was meat on the table."
"So," I said, "if they find out he has a soft spot for dogs, or old buildings, or alcohol-soaked hacks, they've got him, eh?"
"Right. Of course," Martinez said, grinning, "that first step is a doozy." He hefted his glass and squinted down into it. "Who buys the next round?"
I was about to own up when Floyd Whiggins slouched through the front door. He scanned the bar, saw us and headed for us, and I nodded in his direction.
"He does."
Bearing was Torre's immediate choice to start the All-Star Game. It's not like he had to think hard about it.
The Olympians wouldn't have anyone else on the squad, but their star was enough for the whole league. Everyone in America wanted to see him pitch. Hell, there were hacks advocating rescinding the rule against more than three innings per pitcher just to see what he could do against the National League's finest.
Thing is, he didn't want to play at all.
Day after Torre announced his picks, Bearing made his first phone call that year. Hell, maybe the first of his life. He called Torre and asked to be removed from the squad, completely.
I hear the call lasted for nearly an hour. Torre finally persuaded him to play. It was close, but that's why Joe's a great manager. The manager's job is to get your lazy ass onto the field and goose it into performing no matter how sick or tired or hungover you might happen to be, and Joe is the best manager in the game. Ask any of the primadonnas he's had to coddle.
The game was special. First baseball game ever to out-draw a Super Bowl, and Conrad Bearing was the reason. Two days before, he'd won his twentieth straight game. Another complete game shutout.
He sauntered out to the mound as if he had nothing much to do that day, just crank up the windmill, throw a few balls, then go back to Spokane, win, lose, or draw. But I'd caught a glint in his eye and a hard line along his jaw as he warmed up. He wasn't happy to be there, but as long as he was, he was going to show us his best.
I didn't know that we hadn't yet seen his best.
The National League owns all the slugging records these days. They grow 'em big over there. But they also grow 'em quick. Every man in their starting lineup had an average of .320 or better. Some of those guys could hit Nolan Ryan's best fastball all the way to Paris.
Bearing peered in at Alec Altman -- .365, 22 homers, 76 RBI -- and whipped a fastball past him that practically fried the Jugg gun. It was right down the cock, a perfect hitter's pitch, but it clocked in at 115 miles per hour. Altman's mouth sagged open and he called for time. The ump, whose mouth sagged just as loosely, gave it to him. It didn't help.
Bearing threw two more whizzers, same place, same scorching speed. Altman swung at the last one, God knows why. Up went the thumb.
He threw three curves to Edgar Kretgen. Real yellow hammers. All three looked to be high and away. All three nicked the low-inside corner of the zone. Another thumb.
Juan Gottfried came to the plate holding his bat like a truncheon. A lot of the pre-game chatter had been about whether he could handle Bearing. He'd blasted the best pitchers in the NL all year long: thirty-six homers in eighty-one games. It seemed they could only keep the ball in the park by plunking him, and a lot of them did. His glower said he knew he had something to prove. He practically dared Bearing to throw at him.
Bearing didn't take the bait. He cocked and threw, and I gasped.
The ball seemed to float through the air like a dirigible. It was the fattest-looking pitch I'd ever seen. I was certain Gottfried would put it into orbit.
Just as it closed on the plate, the ball sank three feet. Gottfried missed it by two.
Bearing threw two more, and Gottfried could come no closer.
Nine pitches, three strikeouts.
He did it again in the second inning, and once more in the third. When he stepped off the mound at the end of his stint, the thunder could have cracked the world.
He looked up at the stands, and his face, for three innings a stone mask, melted into a sunny, boyish smile. He doffed his cap and waved, and the applause seemed to redouble.
When the hacks went looking for him after the game, he was nowhere to be found. Torre told us he'd left the stadium as soon as he was off the mound, and caught an early flight back to Spokane.
The Olympians weren't going anywhere. Expansion teams never do, Their team batting average never broke .220, and they didn't have a certified power hitter anywhere in their lineup. Their fielding was no better. Except for their star, their pitching frankly stank. Only Conrad Bearing could get them near to respectability, and he only played one game in four.
But every game, they played before a capacity crowd. Only the size of their piddly-ass beer-baron's stadium limited their gate. They could have packed the Grand Canyon.
It wasn't dreams of the postseason. It wasn't that there'd been an untapped market for baseball in the Pacific Northwest. It wasn't clever marketing or promotional days. It was Conrad Bearing. Whether he was slated to be on the mound or not, the people of Spokane wanted to be near him.
The hacks and the flacks continued to pursue him. There wasn't a reporter in the game who wouldn't have sold his children into slavery for five minutes of his time. There wasn't a corporation in America that wouldn't have given him a controlling interest for five words of praise for their products...and a replay of that All-Star smile.
He kept taking the mound every fourth day. He kept winning. He was even more unhittable after the All-Star break than before it. Game after game, he mowed down the American League's best as if they were toddler league scrubs. But the smile never returned.
I could learn no more about him. None of us could. Not that any of my colleagues would have shared even the smallest tidbit. Hell, just learning whether he liked his socks to be wool or nylon would have been a million-dollar scoop. It didn't matter. He revealed nothing, and no one could unearth anything. All we knew of him was his name and his prowess on the mound.
For the sportswriters, it was an agony of agonies. For the city of Spokane and baseball fans the world around, it was more than enough.
The season is long. Players tire, even the ones who keep up their conditioning regimens and scrupulously avoid the bars and the Baseball Annies. It's simple physics. We all knew that Bearing had to lose a game eventually.
Except that he didn't.
He won his thirtieth straight game on August 8: his second no-hitter. He threw not a single gopher ball. His ERA sank to 0.28. From the All-Star Game onward, he was never taken off the mound before the end of the game.
He just kept on, looking as strong or stronger each day than the previous one. And the crowds kept flocking to see him.
Fans have always preferred free-hitting games. There's more color to them. More seems to be going on. Paradoxically, because they demand less attention, they hold your attention better. The history of the game seems to bear it out. Back in the late Sixties, when hitting was on the skids and titans like McLain and Gibson ruled the field from the mound, attendance and viewership hit their postwar lows. So why did this unhittable pitcher command such adulation and love? Wasn't he doing exactly what the fans should have resented: taking the action out of the game?
I couldn't fathom it, any more than I could fathom him.
He kept accepting the minimum, and none of it ever reached his checking account.
Bearing was scheduled to start against the Angels on the last day of the season. His record stood at 40-0. He hadn't allowed an earned run since late July. As usual, the stands of Olympus Field were packed.
As he took the mound, Cal Martinez nudged me and murmured, "Think he'll go out undefeated?"
"What else would you expect?" I said. "Has anyone laid a bat on him this whole year long?"
"First time in the history of the sport," he said.
"First time for everything, pal." I settled back and propped my steno pad on my knee as the ump yelled "Play ball!" and the first Angel batter stepped to the plate.
Bearing didn't hew to the practice he'd followed the whole year long. He didn't concentrate immediately and wholly upon the batter. Instead he put his hands on his hips, scanned the stands from end to end and back again, and nodded as if he'd come to a decision. Catcher Roy Wriston started to rise from his squat, but Bearing waved him back down, peered in for the sign, wound up and threw.
The ball smacked into Wriston's glove with a clap so sharp I'd have sworn it could be heard in Canarsie. The catcher reeled backwards as the digits on the Jugg display whirled, slowed, and finally settled on their verdict.
128 miles per hour.
Right down the cock, yet completely unhittable. The crowd shouted in amazement.
Bearing nodded, wound up, and did it again.
And again.
And again.
Is there really a first time for everything? How would I know? Or anyone else, for that matter? As the game progressed, it dawned on me that never in the history of the sport had a pitcher eliminated his opponents without ever allowing the ball to touch their bats. It was inconceivable, a degree of dominance no player had ever achieved in any sport. But as Conrad Bearing strode out to the mound at the beginning of each Angel half-inning, it became ever clearer that I was witnessing exactly that.
After six innings he'd thrown exactly fifty-four pitches. After seven, exactly sixty-three. After eight, exactly seventy-two. All strikes. All about as hittable as a rifle bullet.
The crowd went by stages from amazement to hoarsely screaming delirium.
When he took the mound at the top of the ninth, I was no longer able to sit. I could hardly breathe. Martinez was apoplectic beside me. He'd been screaming along with all the others. The wonder of the game had flensed him of his sports hack's veneer and left him to stand without disguise, as the fan he really was. As all of us who cover this sport have to be.
I couldn't imagine what the hacks in the TV booths were saying, to their viewers, to one another, or to themselves. I couldn't imagine what I would have said in their place.
We were witnessing a miracle, a new definition for "the perfect game." It was draining us of words, the stuff of our trade.
In that time and place, Conrad Bearing had stripped us of our defenses. We jaded and cynical ones, too worldly wise to admit to our childlike devotion to a childish game, had been reduced to the same openmouthed state of awe a small boy feels in the presence of his hero, or a man feels at the discovery of his one true love.
We knew he had perfection in him. We'd seen eight innings of it. We were desperate to see him end as he'd begun. He did not disappoint us.
Three whizzers down the cock to Berglund. Three curves that seemed to swerve around the bat of Sant'Angelo. Two sinkers to Petrovich that looked like they'd dropped all the way to China.
He saved his best for last.
When he wound up, you could see him marshaling his forces for the pitch, a service that would ring all the bells in America. When he let fly, I half-expected his arm to catch fire.
Petrovich swung...about half a second after the ball reached Wriston's glove.
144 miles per hour.
"Yerrrrr....out!"
The crowd went mad.
His teammates converged on him at a sprint. Before they could reach him, he held up a hand in the universally understood sign to halt. They did. The stands fell immediately silent.
He stood there on the mound, scanned the stands end to end once again, and smiled: the supremely sunny smile from his All-Star appearance.
"Thank you," he said, and walked off the mound toward the dugout.
By the time Martinez and I got to the locker room, he was gone.
Time warps the memory. Things once bright and clear grow dim and indistinct. We illuminate the high points and efface the drudgery and drear. The lucky ones among us retain their "signposts:" the events that mark their transitions and achievements, and gave color to their undertakings.
I will never forget that last game. It would be the last game Conrad Bearing would ever pitch. He did not return for the following season. The Olympians' public relations office gave no explanation.
I thought I understood it. By baseball standards, he was an old man. He'd had a season to eclipse every other season any pitcher had ever played. Likely it would never be surpassed. Why return? Why show the fans he'd thrilled so completely anything less than that pinnacle of performance? It was obvious he didn't care about the money. He was letting us remember him at his peak.
It was several years before I discovered how wrong I was.
His departure from the game was as sharp as his arrival. Not only didn't he turn up on anyone's roster; he didn't turn up anywhere. No sportscasting billet; no endorsements; no appearances at charity events. No one had an inkling of where he'd gone or what he was doing. Conrad Bearing had absented himself completely from the public eye.
When I stumbled into him in a department store in Seattle, it took me a moment to recognize him for who he was.
I wasn't at my sharpest. I was sorting through flannel shirts and thinking about the mass of yard chores I'd been putting off all spring. He was passing behind me when an old woman lurched into him and knocked him into me. He was steadying her on her feet when I turned and registered his face.
"My God!" I said.
His eyes caught mine, he smiled meaninglessly, and tried to pass on. I grabbed him by the arm -- that incredible baseball machine -- and held him there.
"Where have you been?" I murmured.
He essayed another meaningless smile. "Excuse me? I think you might have mistaken me for someone else." He tried to pull away. I didn't let him.
"Oh, I don't think so, Conrad." I pitched the name so that only he would hear it. "I still want that interview, you know. And don't try to give me the slip or I'll call out your name, here and now."
"It's George," he hissed. "George Matulovich. Now let go!"
I shook my head. "Maybe that's what it is now. Your car or mine?"
He tried to stare me down, but I wasn't about to relent. I kept my grip on him and waited. Presently he conceded defeat.
"All right. Yours."
That must have been hard.
"What do you do now?"
"Not much. Until last year, I was a mailman."
"So why did you retire?"
"I got bored with delivering mail."
"No, from baseball!"
"I always wanted to be a mailman, and I didn't want to lose my last chance."
"Come on!"
He shrugged. "Don't you have a theory?"
I scanned his living room. It was as ordinary a place as I've ever been. Moderately used mid-grade sofa, recliner, and tables. Two bookcases filled with popular novels in paperback, plus two portrait photos of a handsome older woman. A small television propped on a homebuilt redwood stand. It was a modest house, in a modest rural neighborhood well removed from the clamor of city life. A retired mailman's house.
"At first," I said, "I figured it was that you wanted to go out at your peak. That would have been natural, so I believed it for a while. But then I realized that it would have been the only natural thing about you. So no, I don't. Would you tell me, please?"
He stared at me in silence for a long interval.
"George," I said, the name strangely ill-fitting in my mouth, "I'm as far out of the game as you are, now. I don't have a byline any more." I spread my hands. "No steno pad. No tape recorder. I don't want to sell you to anyone. I just want to know."
He rose from his recliner and paced the little room, hands in his jeans pockets.
"Who would believe me anyway?" I said.
"It's not who would believe you," he said. "It's whether I can get you to believe me."
I started to protest, thought better of it. If there'd ever been a figure to challenge credulity, on the field or off, it was he.
He stopped before one of the bookcases and caressed the photo it bore.
"Your wife?"
He nodded without looking at me. "She passed away six years ago."
I counted backwards. "Right after...your season?"
Another nod.
"Then you retired to be with her?"
"You could say that." He closed his eyes. There were tears at the corners. Presently he opened them and returned to his seat. I inched forward on mine.
"Doris was...very sick when I joined the Olympians. Pancreatic cancer, one of the worst forms. She had very little chance to live, and all of it depended on a treatment we couldn't afford. I had to raise a lot of cash very fast, and baseball was the only legal way to do it."
What?
"Are you telling me," I said slowly, "that you did it for the money?"
He frowned. "Well, of course! Why else would anyone play pro baseball?"
"Uh, never mind. But...you took the minimum! You never haggled, never tried to renegotiate, never threatened to, uh, strike. If it was all about money, why didn't you press your advantage?"
He looked at me as if I'd started babbling in tongues. "I made what we needed. We didn't need more. Why should I have demanded more?"
"But..." I fell silent. There are some things you don't probe. It took me two divorces and a catastrophic career collapse to learn it, but learn it I had.
It took me a moment to realize that I hadn't asked about what I'd always wanted to know. He'd startled the question right out of me with his revelation about money.
"George...the why makes sense, but I have to know about the how." He grimaced. I could see him casting about for a credible lie. I held up a hand. "No evasions, now. No one else will hear."
He hunched forward, dropped his eyes to the floor, and sat silent for a long interval. Finally, he rose and headed for the back door.
"Come with me."
He had a spacious back yard, well maintained. It sported a large barn and was surrounded on three sides by a split-rail fence. Along one run of the fence were propped a quartet of sheet-steel plates. The first three were irregularly perforated with ragged circular holes about a baseball's size. The fourth was unmarked.
"I used to stand over there," he said, pointing to the opposite run of the fence, "and throw baseballs at plates just like those until I could exactly control which hole it would go through. I did it for hours at a time, day after day, until it was almost a bore. Then I started experimenting with curves, screwballs, and sinkers. I got so I could make the ball do whatever I pleased, and still make it go through whichever hole I chose. It was mostly a way of passing the time, but I never completely outgrew it."
I squinted at the plates. "What made these holes?"
He shrugged. "A baseball."
"What? Are you telling me --"
"Want to see me do it right now?" He had a baseball in his hand.
"Uh, no.
The far fence was about a hundred fifty feet away.
"How old were you when you...developed your skills?"
"About ten." He smiled. "I've always loved baseball. The sport, not the professionalized entertainment spectacle and scandal factory."
"And you kept on at that for twenty-seven years, until your wife's illness made you decide to cash in?"
He pursed his lips and turned away.
A retired mailman.
"George, how old are you?"
He hesitated. "I'll be sixty next month."
"You were...fifty-three the year you played for the Olympians?"
"Fifty-four, actually."
I was six years his junior.
"What's the matter, son?" He grinned. "Do you think I needed more seasoning?"
I barked a laugh, halfway between absurdity and pain.
I'd have given everything I've ever had and everything I've ever been to play even one game in the majors. I'd never gotten beyond single-A, and I knew early on that I never would. He'd disdained it for fifty years, and turned his back on it once it had served his need.
He sensed my anguish and laid a hand on my shoulder.
"You're thinking I wasted something priceless, something you'd have given your soul to have," he said gently. "But think about that last game, the one where I let it all out. Suppose you were a freak like me. Suppose you could have done that, not once, but every game you played, once every four days, even into your sixties. What would that have done to you? What would it have done to the sport you love?"
I could not reply. He nodded and squeezed my shoulder.
"A sport like baseball is only worth playing if there's a rough equality among the players. Oh, some will always be better than others, no denying it. But for one player to be an order of magnitude better than all the rest, able to have his way with them whenever he pleases, would belittle the sport itself. Whenever he was on the diamond, it would be no fun at all, even for him."
"Are you saying it was no fun for you? All that ability and you didn't even enjoy it?"
His grin was rueful. "Very little, son. Until the very last game I had to hold myself in check, as much as morally possible. Except for the All-Star Game, of course."
"So you never gave the team your best, then?"
His eyebrows rose. "What I gave the Olympians won them forty-one of the sixty-five games they did win. What point would there have been in humiliating the rest of the league even further?"
"But that last game..." I misted up at the memory. He smiled.
"Yes, that day I let it all out. I had to know just how good I could have been. I told myself the sport wouldn't suffer too much from that one indulgence. Was I wrong?"
"No."
He hefted the baseball, loped to the opposite end of his yard, and tossed it at me. I caught it automatically, started to throw it back, and stopped.
"You do love the game, don't you?" I called.
He nodded. "Almost as much as I loved Doris. About as much as you. You just going to stand there, or are you going to throw that thing?"
We played catch for the rest of the afternoon.
Friday, May 13, 2005
Miracles
(From the Onteora Canon. Nothing so excites the derision of the materialist as a claim of a miracle. But miracles have their place in the world. For one thing, not all of them involve suspending the laws of nature. For another, not every skeptic survives contact with them unchanged.)
No one took any notice of Joseph Reinhold as he slunk into the city room of the Onteora Register. The eyes of the other reporters and editors remained glued to their typewriters, or their daily planners, or the scribbles on their desk blotters. He sauntered to his desk, slipped into his desk chair without removing his jacket, and laid his divorce decree on the almost-clean surface of his desk.
He flipped to the last page and stared at it. Mary had already signed it. Even on this document, seeing her rounded cursive made him remember high school, notes scribbled on pages from loose-leaf notebooks, and mini-flirtations snatched between classes.
He fumbled in his top drawer for a pen, gave up before finding one. There was no need to hurry this. It recalled too many fights, too many unapologetic admissions of infidelity, and too much regret. It made him feel tired.
The life of the newspaper swirled and hummed around him. Typewriters clicked, couriers trotted back and forth, muffled phone conversations blended into the characteristic city room din. The contrast with his own inertness amplified his sense of fatigue and his conviction of failure.
How long are they going to let me sit here?
The city editor had reminded him sharply that he hadn't filed copy in more than two weeks...and that was nearly a week ago. Granted that his wasn't the most demanding of positions, he was still expected to produce a story about something from time to time. He fought back the oppression of his weariness, pulled out his planner and leafed through it. He reviewed his list of popular themes and found nothing he wanted to pursue. His list of seasonal topics left him equally unmoved.
I should start looking for another job before they toss me out of this one.
He'd been sitting motionless for about twenty minutes when his phone rang. The sound startled him; it hadn't rung in more than a month.
"Reinhold."
"Have I reached the Religious and Cultural Affairs editor?" The voice was a smooth, mature alto.
"Well, they don't let me call myself an editor, but otherwise you're on target. How can I help you?"
"I think I might have a story for you." A note of tension had entered the voice.
Reinhold pulled a steno pad from a drawer. "And your name is?"
"Rachael Rosenthal. Look, this is sort of uncomfortable for me. Do you suppose we could talk face to face?"
Reinhold grinned to himself. "Humor me a moment more, please. This wouldn't be about a water stain of the Blessed Virgin on someone's basement wall, would it?"
There was a protracted silence on the line.
"Look, Mister, I'm the bookkeeper for Our Lady of the Pines Roman Catholic Church. I don't do stains, I do figures. And I'm a Jew, just so we have that out of the way. Now, do you have an hour or so to spare me, or not?"
A financial scandal in an Onteora church? This could get interesting really fast.
"Give me an address."
The Idle Hours Diner was diner-typical in shape and size, but was constructed and decorated entirely in chrome, glass and leather-like vinyl. Reinhold didn't care for it personally, but he supposed it was easier to keep clean than many other treatments would have been.
Rachael Rosenthal was a small, slender woman with dark coloration and an unassertive manner. She'd seated herself without removing her winter coat, and kept her hands jammed deep in its pockets. It made her look as if she were swaddled in several heavy blankets. Her air of diffidence reminded him of Mary.
Reinhold opened his steno pad on the table surface and wrote Rachael Rosenthal, December 12 at the top of a fresh page. "It's your dime, Ms. Rosenthal."
She nodded. "Have you ever looked into small-scale religious finance?"
"No, not as such. Why?"
"Because it's a struggle and a mess." She squirmed inside her envelope of wool. "I'm not in that area myself. I just count it as it comes and goes."
"Then why did you mention it?" He scrawled dances around on his steno pad.
She shrugged. "Bookkeepers talk, you know. I know all the other religious bookkeepers in the county. They all tell the same story: income down, expenses rising. The Episcopalian pastor is dipping into their capital reserve to meet monthly operating expenses. The Lutherans and the Russian Orthodox have decided to share space to save the rent on a building." A quick, mischievous grin. "That's going to be an interesting marriage, this time next year."
"How about the Catholics?"
She pressed her lips together, uncertainty showing in her eyes.
"That much worse?"
"No, the opposite. Father Schliemann says Mass attendance is steady or a little down, but parish revenues are up, like a spike, for the past three months."
He wrote Catholic revenues up sharply 4th qtr. "So what's Father Schliemann's secret? He hasn't started selling indulgences, has he?"
She shook her head but said nothing. Reinhold had the sense that she was sizing him up, trying to decide how much of a surprise he could weather.
"Are you telling me there's cash coming in through an anonymous channel?"
She laughed. "No, Mr. Reinhold, it's not cash. Each month for three months running, Father Schliemann has handed me a large check to deposit in the parish's operating funds account."
"Payable to?"
"The bearer. You know, cash."
He scribbled donations by untraceable check. "Drawn on whose account?"
She hesitated again.
"Miss Rosenthal?"
"The New York State Off-Track Betting Commission."
He straightened and sat back in the booth.
"I'll be damned."
Our Lady of the Pines' rectory was set slightly back from the church proper, and connected to it by a slender, screen-walled breezeway. It was a little after noon when Reinhold pulled up before it. He found a young man hard at work installing a snow fence along the path that led from the street to the rectory entrance.
The young man was short, pale, and slender, with brown eyes and a thick mop of dark brown hair. He wielded his mallet as if there were nothing in the world more important than making certain the fence would stay erect against the savage winter winds of central New York. He looked up as Reinhold approached, and their eyes met for a curiously uncomfortable interval.
The young man looked to be about thirty. His eyes were large and very dark. His perfectly neutral expression gave Reinhold a sense of being weighed in a balance, with his very life at stake on the reading of the scale. He held Reinhold's gaze locked to his so firmly that the reporter could not step past him.
"Good evening," Reinhold said. "Is Father Schliemann in the rectory?"
The young man's dead-neutral expression remained unchanged. "Yes, he is." His voice was a soft baritone. "Would you like me to fetch him for you?"
Reinhold held up a hand. "No need. I can introduce myself." He turned and started to make for the door, and found that the young man was already turning the knob. The door closed behind him with Reinhold still several strides away.
Well! But perhaps that's part of the service.
A minute later, the young man returned, accompanied by the tall, silver-haired figure of Father Heinrich Schliemann, Onteora's pastor for more than forty years. The young man gestured at Reinhold and went back to his yard work without a word.
Schliemann approached with a hand extended. "I'm Father Schliemann. And you are...?"
"Joseph Reinhold, Father." They shook hands. "Perhaps you've seen my byline in the Religious and Cultural Affairs section of the Sunday Register."
Schliemann's eyebrows went up. "I have, indeed. You've manned that post for, what is it, about eight years now? How is it we haven't met before?"
Reinhold smiled. "Partly chance, partly the good behavior of Onteora's Catholics and their priests. Newspapers have always thrived on the seedier side of life, Father. Even the life of the spirit."
Schliemann grinned ruefully. "Well, one who wears a Roman collar isn't supposed to want to be famous. Especially not these days. May I offer you some coffee?"
The pastor laid a gentle arm around Reinhold's shoulders and shepherded him into the rectory.
They'd lounged over coffee and cakes in the rectory's antique sitting room, passing an hour in a warm and animated conversation on diverse topics, when Reinhold realized that he was unable to frame the question he'd come to ask.
How do I ask this supremely courteous man of God why and when he started playing the ponies to pay the parish's bills?
Despite his trade, or perhaps because of it, Reinhold had held himself immune to the lure of religion. He'd felt it to be beneath the dignity of a mature adult. But in Heinrich Schliemann's presence, he had to concede that there were men of dignity who'd given faith a place of importance in their lives...that at least one man of a dignity well beyond his own had given it the whole of his life.
"Something private on your mind, Mr. Reinhold?"
The query arrested his spate of reverie. "Uh, well, no, Father, not exactly. I was just dithering a bit over, ah --"
"Over what sort of story you might wrap around your visit here?" Schliemann's eyes were warm.
Reinhold chuckled. "Bingo." He chuckled again. "Sorry, bad choice of exclamation. We've had a very nice chat. It's just, ah, difficult to put a journalistic angle on it. I can't just transcribe our exchanges about the Catholic faith. Those who don't already know all about it will hardly care. Is there any development of real significance going on in the Church, either here in Onteora or in the wider world, that I can use as a narrative hook for the other things we've discussed?"
Schliemann leaned forward in his armchair, hands clasped in his lap. "Real significance," he said. "You mean secular significance, don't you?"
Reinhold squinted in discomfort. "Well, yes and no. A secular hook is the easiest for a reporter to work with, of course. It also garners the most interest, even in the Religious and Cultural Affairs column. But any development that stands out from the steady state of parish practice -- I mean, that's out of the ordinary for you or your congregation -- would give me a good start."
Schliemann nodded. He sat silently for a long moment.
"There's a question in you that you can't quite disgorge," the pastor said. "You've been casting about for a way to ask it since you first shook my hand. Why not just let fly? I promise not to be offended, if that's what you're worried about."
Reinhold's mouth dropped open. He laughed as one will who's been caught in a dissimulation. Schliemann smiled.
"Go ahead, Mr. Reinhold." He spread his hands. "I'm unarmed."
Reinhold started to speak, halted himself, and thought furiously.
"Father," he faltered at last, "how do Catholics stay married?"
"More coffee?" Schliemann said.
Reinhold shook his head. "My back teeth are floating, and I've taken up far more of your time than I had any right to ask. But..." He looked away briefly. "Would you be amenable to another chat sometime? Sometime fairly soon?"
Schliemann's face crinkled. "Do you really expect any answer but yes?"
Reinhold bit his lip and nodded.
"Mr. Reinhold, giving counsel is my profession, but it's also my love. I could hardly have become a priest if I found it onerous or irritating to help others through their difficulties. Besides, I was flattered to be asked for help on such a sensitive matter by someone who isn't one of my communicants." The priest canted his head. "Would you happen to be considering that as well?"
Reinhold pondered.
"I wasn't when I came in here," he said. "And I wasn't when we started talking about my marriage, and I wasn't up to the moment you asked the question. But perhaps I am, now. I know the general teachings of the Church fairly well. The practical ones strike me as sober and sensible, if a bit straitlaced on certain subjects. But I've given no thought to the theological doctrines for many years." He leaned back in his chair and looked off into the corner of the room. "Religion was never a real presence in my life."
"Did you receive any religious instruction as a youth?" Schliemann said.
"I was baptized. That's about it."
"Which sect?"
"Episcopalian."
"Ah. That's not too far a throw from Roman Catholicism, you know."
"You think not?" Reinhold surged forward. "Episcopalian shenanigans -- Protestant shenanigans generally -- have kept me supplied with dirt for the last eight years. How can they be your close cousins when they're so mired in doctrinal wars and so prone to internal squabbling but you're...you're..."
"Not?"
"Yes!"
Schliemann rose and stepped over to the sitting room's bay window. The sun had set, but the gleam of the streetlights outlined the shapes of the trees that lined the front of the rectory yard and the silhouette of Reinhold's car.
The young man who'd been installing the snow fence when Reinhold arrived was still at work, digging a slit trench that would allow the flowerbeds around the large statue of the Blessed Virgin to drain into the semi-cylindrical gutters that ran along the edge of the walk. As before, he worked with the concentration characteristic of a serious craftsman rather than the surly effort of a typical day laborer.
"Who is that, Father?"
Schliemann looked back at him and smiled. "My enforcer."
"Hah!"
"Oh, I'm quite serious." Schliemann turned and crossed his arms over his chest. "He doesn't know it, though. His name is Louis Redmond, by the way. He's an engineer by trade. He spends his days making warplanes. Most of his free time he's here, maintaining the church and the grounds. He's been doing it for fifteen years, out of the goodness of his heart."
"You don't pay him?"
Schliemann shook his head. "He won't take a cent from me. The one time I raised the subject, he told me that Onteora Aviation already pays him more than he's worth, and anyway, it was his duty to support the parish. This is how he chooses to do that." He pursed his lips. "You've heard Christians use the motto 'What would Jesus do?' haven't you?"
Reinhold nodded.
"On most subjects that touch on modern life, it's an unanswerable question. At least, I can't think of anything Christ said that would help with questions about flex time, intellectual property or double-entry bookkeeping."
Reinhold immediately remembered the subject he'd originally come to broach. He did his best to suppress a wince and hoped the pastor hadn't noticed.
"But anyone who knows Louis," Schliemann said, "has a model that will serve for just about anything. He's a genius, a world-class athlete, and a moral paragon. He's no theologian. At least, he's never talked about abstractions of faith with me. He's just the best Catholic -- the best man -- it's ever been my privilege to know. I've never known him to succumb to malice, or envy, or cupidity, or sloth, or any of the other failings of men. So when some other parishioner falls short of the far looser standard to which most Catholics hold themselves, I cite Louis to him. And when I feel my own resolve beginning to slip, such that I might not be as open to those in need as my pastorate requires me to be, I cite him to myself."
Schliemann turned back toward the figure cutting the soil with a hoe. "And he's the loneliest, most tragic figure I've ever known, as well. He lost a beloved elder sister to epilepsy, and both his parents to a plane crash. He has no living relatives. He has no one to whom he's really close. Tell me, Mr. Reinhold, when you approached him, did he look you in the eyes?"
Reinhold felt the blood rush to his cheeks. He nodded slowly.
"I thought he might have," Schliemann said. "It has quite an effect, doesn't it?"
"You know it, Father," Reinhold said. "Is it a veneer he puts on to...protect you, or is it the real him?"
"It's quite real," Schliemann said. "He does it to everyone. Everyone who comes here, at any rate. You can almost feel him deciding whether you're fit to live. Between his gifts and his intensity, he terrifies nearly everyone. Fate has left him nothing except himself."
"And the Church," Reinhold murmured.
"And the Church. I've offered the consolations of faith to many a desolated or frightened parishioner, Mr. Reinhold. Every life knows loss at some point. Every man knows times of darkness and doubt. But I would never think to offer Louis the platitudes I bestow upon those others. I would be ashamed of myself for belittling his strength."
Reinhold rose and joined the pastor at the window. In the all but extinguished sunlight, he saw Louis scraping and firming the walls of his trench with a craftsman's precision.
"So," he said, "you have an Olympian genius of immaculate morals tending your church and grounds for no compensation, and he also assists you in your pastoral duties, by humbling anyone who complains about his lot in life just by his example. Does he leave you anything to do?"
Schliemann nodded. "I get to make us coffee."
Five days later, Reinhold returned to the rectory. He found Louis squatting before the stone half-wall that ran along the property's street border, touching up the mortar where it had begun to loosen and flake away.
"Excuse me," Reinhold said. "Mr. Redmond?"
The young engineer looked up. "Yes?"
"Might I have a minute of your time?"
Louis laid his trowel down and stood with a hint of reluctance. Reinhold noticed a tremor in his hands. His pallor, too, was more pronounced than it had been five days before.
"What can I do for you, Mr. Reinhold?"
Reinhold counted to three and put on his warmest, most reassuring expression.
"I could use some advice on picking winners at Aqueduct or Belmont Park."
Louis's eyes went wide. He drew a breath to expostulate, chopped it off and fixed Reinhold with a no-nonsense glare.
"Mr. Reinhold, if someone referred you to me for any such thing, I'd suggest that you put less stock in his next recommendation."
"On your authority," Reinhold said with all the assurance he could muster, "the Off-Track Betting Commission writes a check for ten thousand dollars once a month, payable to cash, and sends it to this address. Now, do you have an inside connection, or shall we talk about your system for handicapping horses?"
Louis gave him the most scorching glare he'd ever seen. After about fifteen seconds, the engineer realized it wasn't making the necessary impression, sighed, and shook his head.
"Shall we retire to my office, Mr. Reinhold?"
"Certainly. Lead the way."
Louis took two steps backward and sat on the stone half wall. He gestured to Reinhold to do the same. When Reinhold had achieved a stable perch, he brought forth his steno pad.
"Now, where would you like to begin?" the reporter said.
Louis grinned. "Right where I'd like to end: I don't gamble. Not in any way."
"Hm?"
"Was there something ambiguous about that, Mr. Reinhold? Should I have used shorter words?"
"Hey, all I want is --"
Louis held up a hand. "I know what you want. I also know what I want. The two are not compatible. Do you fancy yourself to be a capable investigator, Mr. Reinhold? Can you piece a puzzle together from fragments of evidence and the patterns they make? Or do you rely entirely upon your talent for goosing your victims into surrendering their privacy on their own?"
Reinhold was momentarily speechless.
"Because it would have occurred to a competent investigator, once he'd discovered the source of the funds and at whose direction they were being disbursed, to ask how they got into that account in the first place, instead of just assuming that they were track winnings. Did you do that?"
"...no..."
"Then your inside connection is getting off lightly. You haven't made him earn his keep. Go put him back to work." Louis hopped off the wall and bent to his trowel and mortar pan.
"Mr. Redmond?"
Louis stopped in mid-squat. "Yes? What now?"
"If I do find out, will you confirm it for me?"
Louis grinned crookedly. "You aren't going to find out. I assure you, there's no story in it. But beyond that, if you violate my privacy again, I'll hurt you. Not fatally, but badly enough that you'll never do it again. I don't care about what the gaming law allows you to learn, I don't care about your foolish notions about the public's right to know, and I don't care about your career or your journalist's sense of mission. I care about this church, this pastor, and this parish. Do you understand me?"
Reinhold gaped at him. Louis stood looking at him for a long moment more, then turned and resumed repointing the rectory wall.
Reinhold knocked on the door firmly, his misgivings stopped down as tightly as he could hold them.
Mary opened it, recognized him, and started in surprise. "Joe? What are you --"
"Looking for a miracle." He held up the divorce decree. "You signed this the day it reached you, didn't you?"
She hesitated, then nodded.
"No second thoughts, no might-have-beens, just like that?"
She studied his face, then moved aside and beckoned him in.
They sat in her kitchen, in the glare of an overhead light that had always been too bright for the little room. He'd meant to replace it with something more suitable for several years running, but there'd always been something more urgent to attend to.
"Mary," he said, "I want to give us one more try."
She winced.
"You don't, then?"
"I haven't allowed myself to think about it," she said.
"Why? After fourteen years of marriage, what could be more important?"
She looked away.
"Mary..." He paused to gather strength. "Is there someone else now?"
She shook her head without looking at him.
"But there was, wasn't there?"
Her mouth quirked. "Does it matter?"
He pondered.
"I guess not. Not if you'd like to try again. God knows, I haven't exactly been celibate since we separated."
Without looking at him, she said, "There's something else you're not."
"What?"
"Pregnant."
He fell back in his chair. "Ah."
She turned to face him again. "Does that matter?"
"Yes. It matters a lot. A baby should have a father." He drew a long, shaky breath. "Will I do?"
Her eyes went wide. "You're serious?"
He nodded. "I am."
"Why, Joe? Why now, after all the crap we've poured over one another this past year?"
"If I tried to tell you," he said slowly, "I'd almost certainly mess it up. So I'd like to propose an alternative: let me show you, instead."
They sat in silence for a long time. Finally, he said, "Do you know whether it's a boy or a girl?"
"No. It's too soon for the amniocentesis, and I'm not sure I want to know, anyway."
"Okay. How do you want to do the rest of this?"
She laughed, a duet for irony and tears. "You want to go fast, don't you? Are you afraid you'll lose your nerve?"
He grinned. "Maybe. But I've been changing a lot of things lately, and fast seems to work better than slow. Oh, one more thing."
"Hm?"
"I'm looking into becoming a Catholic. Don't start," he said when she opened her mouth to reply. "It's not about you, and it doesn't have to involve you. I just thought you ought to know."
"But..." She hesitated. "What about the baby?"
"Well," he said, scratching his head stagily, "I suppose we could use the Solomon method. I'd raise my half Catholic, and you could do whatever you want with yours."
"Joe!"
"Just kidding. We'll take it as it comes, okay?"
"Okay." She stretched a hand across the table and laid it on his. "I've missed you."
"I've missed you too, babe."
"But what's with the Catholic thing?"
"Oh, that." He sat back and steepled his fingers. "Well, it's about miracles. I saw one a few days ago, and I'd like to see a few more. Apparently they keep 'em in good supply, over at Our Lady of the Pines."
"Seriously?"
He nodded.
"Can you tell me anything else about it?"
"Sorry, babe. Clerical confidentiality and all that."
She frowned. "You're not a priest."
"Not yet."
"Joe!" But she was smiling.
"Just take my word for it, okay?"
"Okay."
Despite the garish lighting, the little kitchen felt warm and secure.
How do I tell her that miracles sometimes take human form? That a lonely young man with enormous powers, a forbidding demeanor, a tragic past, and terminal cancer has arranged to give his life's savings to a backwoods church, and has set it up so that no one will know? That he threatened me with bodily harm if I endangered his arrangement, and showed me something whole and unspoiled for the first time since our wedding day?
Maybe I don't.
"Joe?" she said. "This Catholic thing...?"
"Hm? What about it?"
"If you're serious about it, maybe I'll look into it too, but..."
"But what, babe?"
"We're not naming the baby Jesus!"
"Aw!" He pulled a face. "Not even if it's a girl?"
"Joe!"
"Okay, okay!"
