They walked across the parking lot toward the stadium, making their way through the maze of parked cars and the cleanup detail from tailgate parties. Chris breathed in the scent of fried chicken and beer and summer stadium air, caught off guard by a pang of nostalgia.
He could feel his heart pounding against his ribs by the time they reached the ticket window. They stood next to each other in line, quietly. Chris was too anxious to talk. It was going to be all right, though. He caught a glimpse of his reflection, with sunglasses and cap, in the glass of the ticket window and hardly recognized himself.
But the grizzled, middle-aged man behind the glass had no problem at all.
“Chris Garrett!” he exclaimed, exposing a set of perfect dentures in a wide grin.
Chris tensed, his smile freezing in place. Behind him, a ripple of recognition passed through the line, and conversations stopped, only to begin again with new enthusiasm.
“How are you doing?” he asked the man, as though they were old friends. He slid enough money for two tickets under the glass shield of the window.
“Great!” Still grinning, the man passed the tickets back to him. “Good to see ya, fella,” he said. “The game hasn’t been the same since you were out there.”
“Thanks,” Chris said, surprised by the compliment. He stepped out of the line without glancing at the people behind him, and only then realized that Jeff was no longer with him. He spotted him several yards away, standing alone, facing the parking lot.
Chris walked over to hand him a ticket. Jeff touched the brim of Chris’s cap.
“Effective disguise,” he said.
“That was a fluke,” Chris said, unable to suppress his sense of delight in that early reception.
They walked under the broad concrete overhang of the stadium and through the gate. Chris took off his sunglasses. The smell of hot dogs was suddenly inescapable and seductive, and the clamor of fans already in their seats filled the air. Chris glanced at his ticket to be sure they were walking in the right direction.
“You know,” he said, eying the concessions, “I never eat hot dogs, but there’s something about a baseball game that makes me feel like I’m breaking the law if I don’t have one.”
Jeff grunted a response. He seemed preoccupied. His walk was stiff and wired. He was, Chris thought, ready to bolt.
“How about a dog and a beer before we find our seats?” Chris suggested, more directly this time.
“Hmm?” Jeff frowned. “Oh, sure. Right.”
They stood in one of the four lines leading to the concession stand, and Chris quickly became aware of the whispering on his left. People were staring, pointing. After five years away from this world, he hadn’t expected to be so easily recognizable. He lifted his chin, squared his shoulders. He wouldn’t allow himself to be thrown by anything anyone might say to him.
One of the men in the line to his left nudged him, lightly. “Haven’t been able to get my wife to come to a game since you left,” the man said, smiling.
Chris heard the compliment behind the words. He grinned. “That’s funny,” he said. “I never had any trouble getting her to come.” He cringed at his own brashness. It had been a hell of a long time since he’d let loose with that sort of innuendo, but the man let out a burst of laughter, and his friend—a man with a dark pony tail and a small hoop in one ear—joined in.
“You look good, Garrett,” said a third man, from further down the line. “Politics must agree with you. How’s the arm?”
Chris raised his right arm into the air. “It’s dynamite at pushing papers across my desk.” He glanced at Jeff, who stared straight ahead from under the visor of his cap, pretending for all intents and purposes not to know him.
The men—and a couple of women—were starting to form something of a circle around him. The lines were disintegrating. He was used to this, but it hadn’t happened in a long, long time. “They don’t appreciate you out in Valle Rosa,” said an older man, who was wearing a El Cajon Little League jacket. “Come back to the Padres where you belong.”
The man with the earring touched Chris’s arm. “I met you once when I lived in New York. It was at a Mets game. I was a big Mets fan back then, no offense. I was hoping you’d get hurt or something and not be able to play, ‘cause I knew we didn’t stand a chance if you were pitching.”
Chris laughed. “Thanks, I guess.”
A boy of about ten squeezed through the crowd. He plucked a baseball card from the stack in his hand and offered it to Chris, along with a pen. “Could I have your autograph, Mr. Garrett?” he asked.
Chris dusted the top of the boy’s head with his hand. Then he signed the card, leaning it against the back of the man from New York. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d autographed a baseball card.
He was about to hand the card back to the boy when a woman popped out of the circle of people, coming to a stop directly in front of him. She was blond. Young. Pert. “Hi, Chris,” she said.
He looked at her blankly. She was with a dark-haired friend who was trying vainly to tug her away from him.
“You don’t remember me, do you?” the woman asked.
He shook his head. “No, sorry.”
“Kim Rickert,” she said. “It’s been a long time. I was from your pre-Carmen Perez days—if you know what I mean.”
The man from New York let out a hoot, and Chris colored. He had no memory of her whatsoever, but he doubted she was lying. Most likely he had slept with her once, maybe more.
Her friend groaned, tugging at her arm. “Come on, Kim.”
Kim allowed herself to be dragged away. “We miss you, Chris!” she called over her shoulder.
The men snickered as Chris put his hands over the little boy’s ears. “You didn’t hear any of that, did you?” he asked, laughing himself.
“Uh uh.” The boy grinned as he took the card and disappeared back into the throng.
Chris and Jeff had reached the front of the misshapen line. Chris noticed that three policemen who’d been served several minutes earlier were still milling around at the edge of the concession stand, obviously waiting for him. They were grinning and laughing.
“Can you handle one more autograph?” one of them asked, handing him a napkin. “It’s for my kid,” he winked.
“Yeah,” said another. “A forty-five-year-old kid.”
“I’m only forty-two,” said the first officer indignantly. He watched over Chris’s shoulder as he wrote.
When Chris looked up again, he saw that one of the other officers was staring at Jeff with narrowed eyes.
“Aren’t you that rainmaker guy?” he asked.
Chris hadn’t seen fear in Jeff’s face before, but he had no problem recognizing it now. For the first time since he’d met him, Jeff seemed at a loss for words. It was painful to see that uncertainty in him. Painful to see him afraid.
“Shit!” Chris said suddenly, and the policemen turned to look at him. “I left the binoculars in the car.”
He locked eyes with Jeff, who suffered only one brief moment of bewilderment before a look of understanding crossed his face.
“We can get by without them,” Jeff said.
“No way!” Chris said. “I’d rather get by without the beer.” He stepped out of line and turned to the police with a wave. “We’ll be back. Nice seeing you guys.”
Jeff fell into step beside him as they walked toward the exit.
Outside the stadium, the air suddenly lost its compressed, superheated quality, and Jeff drew in a long, long breath.
“Joe Fan,” he said dryly.
“Sorry. I really had no idea.”
It had grown dark outside in the short time they’d been in the stadium, and the parking lot was a mixture of light and shadow.
“I assume there are no binoculars in the car?” Jeff’s voice was flat. Tired.
“Right.”
“So what exactly is the plan here?”
Chris put his arm across Jeff’s shoulders, a
little self-consciously. “We’re going to get in the car and drive back to Valle Rosa and reinstate you firmly in your hideaway at Sugarbush.”
Jeff was quiet for a moment, but Chris felt his relief.
“I could go to a movie or something and come back to pick you up,” Jeff offered. “You were really psyched for the game.”
Chris lowered his arm back to his side. “There’ll be other games,” he said, and he knew there would be. He would never be afraid of going to a game again.
They continued walking in silence, the sound of their footsteps growing louder as the roar of the crowd fell behind them.
Chris got into the car and reached over to open the door for Jeff, who was still looking uncertainly at the stadium.
“Are you sure?…” Jeff asked.
Chris nodded toward the passenger seat. “Get in,” he said to his friend. “We’re out of here.”
Neither of them spoke until they’d driven out of Mission Valley and had turned onto the freeway. Then Jeff shook his head. “Your basic object of scorn,” he teased.
Chris smiled to himself. No one had uttered a negative word about him, at least not to his face. They seemed to remember only his achievements, as if they’d developed a collective amnesia regarding his humiliating last season with the Padres.
“Would you mind pulling off?” Jeff asked suddenly, pointing to the first exit.
“Here?” Chris glanced at him in confusion.
“Uh huh.”
Chris shrugged and turned off the freeway. The ramp took them onto a road above Mission Valley.
“Stop here.” Jeff pointed to a 7-Eleven, and Chris obediently pulled into the parking lot.
“Anything you want?” Jeff asked as he got out of the car.
Shaking his head, Chris settled down to wait for him.
In a few minutes, Jeff returned with a fairly large brown bag. “Thanks,” he said, fastening his seat belt. “Now how about driving around this area for a while?”
Chris looked at him skeptically. “Is there a point to this?”
Jeff half-smiled. “Trust me.”
Chris drove for nearly a mile on the winding residential streets above the Valley. Finally, Jeff pointed to a small apartment complex. “Pull in that parking lot,” he said.
Chris did as he was told.
“All the way to the rear. That’s right.” Jeff was smiling now, and as Chris neared the far edge of the parking lot, he began to understand. They were high above Mission Valley. The stadium was below them in a circle of starry lights.
He looked at Jeff, who reached over and turned off the ignition.
“Push your seat back till you’re comfortable,” Jeff said, adjusting his own seat. Then he opened his bag. The aroma of hot dogs quickly filled the car, and Chris laughed.
Jeff pulled the hot dogs from the bag, along with two beers, a bag of unshelled peanuts and a box of cracker jacks. He leaned over to turn the key in the ignition. The radio came on, and he raised the volume until the roar of the crowd surrounded them.
He handed a beer to Chris.
“Cabrio, you are too fucking much,” Chris said, still laughing.
Jeff twisted the cap from his own beer and tapped his bottle to Chris’s. “To the Padres,” he said.
“To the rainmaker,” Chris responded, and settled back in his seat to listen for the crack of the bat.
26
IT WAS LATE, BUT Carmen was still at the station when she received the call from Dennis Ketchum. He wanted to see her in his office, he said. Tonight. Now.
She felt only slight trepidation as she knocked on his door. It couldn’t be bad news. All the feedback she’d received on her reports lately had been positive.
“Sit down, Carmen.” Dennis stubbed out a cigarette and let loose with one of his thick, frightening, smoker’s coughs as Carmen lowered herself into the chair near the door.
“Well.” He was almost smiling as he swiveled his chair around to face her. “I think we’d be crazy not to give you five days a week at this point.”
A surge of joy shot through her, but she kept her face impassive. “Right,” she said. “You would be.”
Dennis reached for a stack of mail on his desk and dropped it into her lap. She lifted her hands quickly to keep the letters from spilling onto the floor.
“All those viewers are asking for you,” he said, nodding toward the letters. “It’s a little like the old days.”
She had some difficulty keeping her smile in check. She wouldn’t appear too eager.
Dennis coughed again, then shook his head, a look of mild amazement on his face. Amazement, and something else. Admiration? “You’ve managed to turn nothing into something, Carmen,” he said. “I don’t mind saying that I was worried about you—about your ability to do your job after the past few years. But you’re impressing the hell out of me, kid.”
She crossed her legs, fully composed now. “So, does that mean News Nine will pick up the tab if I need to travel again to further the story?”
“I’ll arrange it.” He leaned forward, elbows on knees, and looked hard into her eyes. “There’s some real dirt on this guy, isn’t there?” he asked. “How close are you?”
“I’m not sure,” she hedged. She had no idea what she might find on Jeff, and she was no longer certain she would ever find anything of significance.
“Well, you’re doing fine with it. Keep the screws good and tight on Cabrio. Take your time. Just be sure you’re the first to get the scoop.” He sat up straight again and lit another cigarette. “The other stations are frustrated as hell,” he continued, blowing two streams of smoke from his nose. “They’re in the dark, and their ratings are falling day by day. Don’t let them get to it before you do, Carmen. I’m trusting you to time this right.”
Late the following afternoon, as ashes from a new fire danced outside her News Nine office window, Carmen reached one of Jeff’s high school teachers.
“I taught chemistry for forty years,” Frank Howell said, over the phone. “There are exactly three students who stayed in my mind, and Rob Blackwell is at the top of the list.”
With the receiver clutched in her hand, Carmen breathed a sigh of relief. The librarian at the high school in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, had been most cooperative. The yearbooks indicated that Robert Blackwell had attended the school for three years, graduating in 1973 at the age of sixteen. The librarian had given her the names of some of the teachers pictured in the yearbook, and Carmen spent the rest of the day trying to track down phone numbers for them, with little success. She finally reached Lillian Phelps, an elderly woman who had taught English during the years Jeff attended the school, but who didn’t remember him at all.
“He probably would have been more into science than English,” Carmen had told her, and Lillian Phelps suggested she try Frank Howell, who had retired from teaching chemistry only a few years earlier.
Frank Howell was an enthusiastic, clear-thinking historian. For the first time, Carmen decided to give her interviewee a taste of the truth behind her questioning. She had to know if there was a chance Jeff was for real.
“Robert Blackwell has suggested he might be able to ease the drought here by producing rain,” she said, careful to keep her voice neutral, to keep the cynicism in check.
Howell chuckled. “Cloud-seeding?”
“No. Some other way.”
“Well,” Howell said slowly. “I can’t say that surprises me. Rob had a real feel for science. A gift. Although he could be a reckless son of a gun.” He chuckled again.
“Reckless?”
“Yes. He caused an explosion in the chemistry lab one day. I’m sure he used to lay awake at nights and think of experiments that weren’t in the book.” He drew a long breath. “Truth was, by the middle of Rob’s sophomore year, he was way ahead of me. I went to the board and told them we needed something to challenge this kid or we’d lose him. So, they worked up a special program for him through Rutgers. Let him take some college
courses in math and science for a few hours each day. It cost the family something, but Rob’s father—stepfather, I guess it was—paid for it.”
For the first time, Carmen could truly picture Jeff as a teenager. Serious, brilliant, far above his fellow students. Far above his teachers. Probably, he hadn’t fit in well.
“What was he like socially?” she asked.
“Socially? That’s something I didn’t pay much attention to. That wasn’t the part of him that intrigued me.”
“Well, I was wondering if he was perceived by the other students as a goody-two-shoes or a… a nerd because of his intelligence.”
“Neither,” Howell said. “He wasn’t a goody-two-shoes by any stretch of the imagination. He got into his share of trouble.”
“Like what?”j
“Hmm. Always had to push the limits. If you said to the class, ‘No talking or else,’ he’d have to talk just to find out what the ‘or else’ was. Or if you told him to add two grams of a particular compound to a beaker, he’d have to see what would happen if he added three.”
“You make him sound irresponsible and impulsive.”
“Oh, not really.” There was a smile in Howell’s voice. He had clearly felt some affection as well as respect for young Robert Blackwell. “He was just curious. Think where we’d be today if our inventors and scientists hadn’t been curious.”
“You said the other students didn’t see him as a nerd?”
“Not that I knew of. Seems as though he always had girls around him. I don’t know if there was anyone special, though. He did have a good friend who was another top chemistry student. Kent someone or other. I can’t recall his full name, but he was sharp too, and they were always trying to outdo each other. Talk about reckless! Kent lost a couple of fingers when he tried to plant a little homemade bomb in another kid’s locker.”
“Nice,” Carmen said. Lovely kids Jeff hung out with.
“They suspended him, but not for long. Guess they figured losing half his hand was punishment enough. He and Rob weren’t much alike outside of their interest in science, though. Kent was always a little strange, where Robbie was just a good-looking, normal kid who happened to excel in everything he did.”