Field of Fantasies Read online

  To prove those doubts wrong, he spent the next day running errands around town, chatting with the clerk at the post office, and the woman at the circulation desk of the library—just small talk, but still, a connection, something to build on. Like every summer, Pat and his family had taken off for the Cape and Sue’s folks’ place. Evers called their machine anyway and left a message. When they came back they should really get together. He’d love to take them all out to dinner somewhere, their choice, or maybe a ballgame.

  That evening he prepared his dinner as if nothing had happened, though now he was very aware of the time, and ended up rushing his grilled chicken so he could catch the first pitch. The Rays were playing the Mariners again, and again attendance was sparse, the upper deck a sea of blue. Evers settled in to watch, ignoring where the pitch was, focusing instead on the third row just to the left of the umpire. As if to answer his question with a cosmic Bronx cheer, Raymond, the team’s mascot, a creature with blue fur not found anywhere in the natural world, flopped across the seats, shaking his fist behind Ichiro’s back.

  “You’re going shack whacky,” Evers said. “That’s all.”

  The Mariners’ ace, Felix Hernandez, was going for them, and King Felix was on. The game was fast. By the time Evers cracked his nightly beer, it was the sixth and the M’s were up by a couple. It was then, just as King Felix caught Ben Zobrist looking, that Evers saw, three rows deep, in the same pinstripe suit he was buried in, his old business partner Leonard Wheeler.

  Leonard Wheeler—always Leonard, never Lennie—was eating a hot dog and washing it down with what ESPN’s Sports Center smartasses were pleased to call “an adult beverage.” For a moment, too startled for denial, Evers defaulted to the outrage the merest thought of Wheeler could call up from his gut even now. “You controlling son of a bitch!” he shouted, and dropped his own adult beverage, which he’d just been bringing to his lips. The can fell into the tray balanced on his lap and knocked it to the floor between his feet, where the chicken, instant mashed potatoes, and Birds Eye string beans (also of a color not found in the natural world) lay on the carpet in a foaming puddle of beer.

  Evers didn’t notice, only stared at his new television, which was so state-of-the-art that he sometimes felt he could simply pick up a leg, duck his head to keep from bumping the frame, and step right into the picture. It was Wheeler all right: same gold-rimmed glasses, same jutting jaw and weirdly plump lips, same head of flamboyant snow-white hair that made him look like a soap opera star—the mature lead who plays either a saintly doctor or a tycoon cuckolded by his sleazy trophy wife. There was no mistaking the oversize flag pin in his lapel either. He’d always worn that damned thing like a jackleg congressman. Ellie once joked that Lennie (when it was just them, they always called him that) probably tucked it under his pillow before he went to sleep.

  Then the denial rushed in, swarming over his initial shock the way white blood cells swarm into a fresh cut. Evers closed his eyes, counted to five, then popped them wide, sure he’d see someone who just looked like Wheeler, or—perhaps worse—no one at all.

  The shot had changed. Instead of a new batter stepping in, the camera focused on the Mariners’ left fielder, who was doing a peculiar little dance.

  “Never seen that one before,” one of the Rays’ announcers said. “What the heck is Wells up to, Dewayne?”

  “Li’l crunk move, I ’spec,” Dewayne Staats vamped, and they both chuckled.

  Enough with the sparking repartee, Evers thought. He shuffled his feet and managed to step on his beer-soaked chicken breast. Go hack to the damn home plate shot.

  As if the producer in his gadget-loaded broadcast truck had heard him, the shot switched back, but only for a second. Luke Scott hit a bullet to the Mariners’ second baseman, and in the wink of an eye, the Trop was gone and Evers was left with the Aflac duck, who was plugging holes in a rowboat even as it plugged insurance.

  Evers got halfway up before his knees gave way and he collapsed back into his chair. The cushion made a tired wooshing sound. He took a deep breath, let it out, and felt a little stronger. This time he made it to his feet and trundled into the kitchen. He got the carpet cleaner from under the sink and read the instructions. Ellie wouldn’t have needed to read them. Ellie would have simply made some half-irritated, half-amused comment (“You can dress him up, but you can’t take him out” was a favorite) and gone to work making the mess disappear.

  “That was not Lennie Wheeler,” he told the empty living room as he came back. “No way it was.”

  The duck was gone, replaced by a man and his wife smooching on a patio. Soon they would go upstairs and make Viagra-aided love, because this was the age of knowing how to get things done. Evers, who also knew how to get things done (he’d read the instructions on the can, after all), fell on his knees, returned his sopping dinner to the tray in a series of plops, then sprayed a small cloud of Resolve on the remaining crud, knowing there’d probably be a stain anyway.

  “Lennie Wheeler is as dead as Jacob Marley. I went to his funeral.”

  Indeed he had, and although his face had remained appropriately grave and regretful throughout, he’d enjoyed it. Laughter might be the best medicine, but Dean Evers believed oudiving your enemies was the best revenge.

  Evers and Wheeler had met in business school, and had started Speedy Truck Rental on a shoestring after Wheeler had found what he called “a gaping hole the size of the Sumner Tunnel” in the New England market. In those early days Evers hadn’t minded Wheeler’s overbearing manner, perfectly summed up by a plaque on the man’s office wall: WHEN I WANT MY OPINION, I’LL ASK YOU FOR IT. In those days, before Evers had begun to find his own way, he’d needed that kind of attitude. Wheeler, he sometimes thought, had been the steel in his spine. But young men grow up and develop their own ideas.

  After twenty years Speedy had become the biggest independent truck rental outfit in New England, one of the few untainted by either organized crime or IRS problems. That was when Leonard Wheeler—never Lennie except when Evers and his wife were safely tucked into bed and giggling like a couple of kids—decided it was time to go national. Evers finally stood up on his hind legs and demurred. Not gently, as in previous disagreements, but firmly. Loudly, even. Everyone in the office had heard them, he had no doubt, even with the door closed.

  The game came back on while he was waiting for the Resolve to set. Hellickson was still dealing for the Rays, and he was sharp. Not as sharp as Hernandez, though, and on any other night Evers would have been sending him brain-wave encouragement. Not tonight. Tonight he sat back on his heels at the base of his chair with his bony knees on either side of the stain he was trying to clean up, peering at the stands behind home plate.

  There was Wheeler, still right there, now drinking a beer with one hand and holding a cell phone in the other. Just the sight of the phone filled Evers with outrage. Not because cell phones should be outlawed in ballparks like smoking, but because Wheeler had died of a heart attack long before such things were in general use. He had no right to it!

  “Oh-oh, that’s a loo-oong drive!” Dewayne Staats was bellowing. ‘Justin Smoak smoked aaa-allloi that one!”

  The camera followed the ball into the nearly deserted stands, and lingered to watch two boys fighting over it. One emerged victorious and waved it at the camera, pumping his hips in a singularly obscene manner as he did so.

  “Fuck you!” Evers shouted. “You’re on TV, so what?”

  He hardly ever used such language, but had he not said that very same thing to his partner during the aigument over the expansion? Yes. Nor had it just been Fuckyou. It had been Fuckyou, Fennie.

  “And what I did, you deserved it.” He was dismayed to discover he was on the verge of tears. “You wouldn’t take your foot off my neck, Leonard. I did what I had to do.”

  Now the camera returned to where it belonged, which was showing Smoak doing his home run trot, and pointing at the sky—well, dome—as he crossed home plate to
the apathetic applause of the two dozen or so Mariner fans in attendance.

  Kyle Seager stood in. Behind him, in the third row, the seat where Wheeler had been was empty.

  It wasn't him, Evers thought, scrubbing the stain (that barbecue sauce was simply not going to come up). It was just someone who looked like him.

  That hadn’t worked very well with Young Doctor Young, and it didn’t work at all now.

  Evers turned off the TV and decided he’d go to bed early.

  Useless. Sleep didn’t come at ten or at midnight. At two o’clock he took one of Elbe’s Ambiens, hoping it wouldn’t kill him—it was eighteen months past the expiration date. It didn’t, but it didn’t put him to sleep either. He took another half a tablet and lay in bed thinking of a plaque he’d kept in his own office. It said GIVE ME A LEVER LONG ENOUGH, A FULCRUM STRONG ENOUGH, AND I’LL MOVE THE WORLD. Far less arrogant than Wheeler’s plaque, but perhaps more useful.

  When Wheeler refused to let him out of the partnership agreement Evers had foolishly signed when he’d been young and humble, he’d needed that kind of lever to shift his partner. As it so happened, he had one. Leonard Wheeler had a taste for the occasional young boy. Oh, not young young, not jailbait, but college age. Wheeler’s personal assistant, Martha, had confided to Evers one rum-soaked night at a convention in Denver that Wheeler was partial to the lifeguard type. Later, sober and remorseful, she’d begged him never to say a word to anyone. Wheeler was a good boss, she said, hard but good, and his wife was a dream. The same was true of his son and daughter.

  Evers kept mum, even keeping this nugget from Ellie. If she’d known he intended to use any such scurrilous information to break the partnership agreement, she would have been horrified. It’s surely not necessary to stoop to that, she would have said, and she would have believed it. El thought she understood the bind he was in, but she didn’t. The most important thing she didn’t understand was that it was their bind—hers and little Patrick’s as well as his own. If Speedy went nationwide now, they’d be crushed by the giants within a year. Two at the outside. Evers was dead certain of it, and had the numbers to back it up. All they’d worked for would be washed away, and he had no intention of drowning in the sea of Lennie Wheeler’s ambitions. It could not be allowed.

  He hadn’t opened with Fuckyou, Lennie. First he tried the reasonable approach, using the latest spreadsheets to lay out his case. Their market share in New England was due to their ability to rent one-way and at hourly rates the big boys couldn’t match. Because the area they covered was so compact, they could rebalance their entire inventory within three hours, where the big boys couldn’t and had to charge a premium. On September 1, move-in day for the students, Speedy owned Boston. Spread the fleet thin trying to cover the Lower 48 and they’d have the same headaches as U-Haul and Penske—the same lumbering business model they purposely avoided and undersold. Why would they want to be like the other guys when they were killing the other guys? If Wheeler hadn’t noticed, Penske was in Chapter 11, Thrifty too.

  “Precisely,” Wheeler said. “With the big boys on the sidelines, this is the perfect time. We don’t try to be like them, Dean. We chop the country into regions and do what we already do.”

  “How does that work in the Northwest?” Evers asked. “Or the Southwest? Or even the Midwest? The country’s too big.”

  “It may not be as profitable at first, but it won’t take long. You’ve seen our competition. Eighteen months—two years tops—and we’ll be absolutely killing them.”

  “We’re already overextended, and now you want us to take on more debt.”

  As they went back and forth, Evers honestly believed in his aigument. Even for a publicly owned company, the problems of capitalization and cash flow were insurmountable—a judgment that would prove devastatingly true two decades later, when the downturn hit. But Lennie Wheeler was used to having his way, and nothing Evers said would dissuade him. Wheeler had already talked with several venture capital concerns and printed up a sleek-looking brochure. He planned to take his proposal directly to the shareholders, over Evers’s protests, if necessary.

  “I don’t think you want to do that,” Evers said.

  “And why’s that, Dean?”

  He’d tried, really tried, to do this ethically, honorably. And he knew he was right; time would prove it. In business everything was a means to one end— survival. Evers felt it urgently then and still thought it true today: He had to save the company. Hence, the nuclear option.

  “I don’t think you want to do that because I don’t think you’d like what I’d take to the shareholders’ meeting. Or should I say, whom.”

  Wheeler laughed, a sick little chuckle. He stared at Evers as if he’d pulled a gun. “Whom?”

  “We both know whom,” Evers said.

  Wheeler slowly rubbed a hand up the side of his face. “I was wondering why you walked in here like you’d already won something.”

  “We’re not winning anything. We’re avoiding a mistake that would lose us everything. I’m sorry it came to this. If you’d have just listened to me—”

  “Fuck you, Dean,” Wheeler said. “Don’t try to apologize for blackmail. It’s bad manners. And since it’s just the two of us, why don’t you roll those spreadsheets tight—that’s the only way you’ll get them up that narrow ass of yours— and admit the truth: you’re a coward. Always were.”

  Within a year, Evers bought him out. The split was expensive, and, in retrospect, a better deal than Wheeler deserved. Lennie left New England, then his wife, and finally, in an ER in Palm Springs, this earthly vale of tears. Out of respect Evers flew west for the funeral, at which, not surprisingly, there were no lifeguard types, and, of the family, only the daughter, who dryly thanked Evers for coming. He didn’t say the first thought that had come into his mind: Sarcasm doesn’t become fat girls, dear. A few years later, after a thorough vetting of the numbers and fueled by Bain Capital, Speedy actually did go national, using a streamlined version of their old regional plan. That Evers had been right—that it ended with Speedy’s lawyers filing the same Chapter 11 briefs as their vanquished rivals—was little vindication. He came out of it with a goodly sum, however, and that was.

  The funny thing was that with a minimum of digging—an offhand question or three to Martha, a keen read of her blinking—Wheeler could have bought himself an ironclad insurance policy. When Evers realized this, he gently dropped her, which, because they both had a conscience, was actually a relief. Their fling had run its more than pleasant course, and rather than fire her, he kept her closer, making her his executive assistant at double the salary, working beside her day in, day out until, eventually, she accepted a lavish early retirement package. At her farewell party, he made a speech and gave her a Honda Gold Wing and a peck on the cheek, to raised glasses and warm applause. The affair ended with a slide show featuring Martha on her old Harley Tri-Glide, while George Thorogood sang “Ride On Josephine.”

  It was a rare moment for Evers, a happy parting. Beyond the silly intrigue, he’d always liked Martha, her brash laugh and the way she hummed to herself as she typed, a pencil tucked behind one ear. What he said in his speech—that she wasn’t merely an assistant but a dear and trusted friend—was true. Though he hadn’t spoken to her in ages, of all the people he’d worked with, she was the only one he missed. Drowsing now as the Ambien kicked in, he wondered hazily if she was still alive, or if, tomorrow, he’d turn on the game and find her behind home, wearing the sleeveless yellow sundress with the daisies he liked.

  He rose at eight—a full hour past his usual time—and stooped to pick the paper from the mat. He checked the sports page and discovered the Rays had the night off. That was all right; there was always CSI. Evers showered, ate a healthy breakfast in which wheat germ played a major role, then sat down to track Young Doctor Young on the computer. When that marvel of the twenty-first century failed (or maybe he just wasn’t doing it right; Ellie had always been the computer whiz), he pi
cked up the telephone. According to the morgue desk at the Shrewsbury Herald-Crier, the dental bogeyman of Evers’s childhood had died in 1978. Amazingly, he’d been only fifty-nine, nearly a decade younger than Evers was now Evers pondered the unknowable: was his life cut short by the war, Luckies, dentistry, or all three?

  There was nothing remarkable in his obituary, just the usual survived by and funeral home info. Evers had had absolutely nothing to do with the drunk old butcher’s demise, just the bad luck to be his victim. Exonerated, that night he raised an extra glass or four to Dr. Young. He ordered in, but it took forever, arriving after he was well in the bag. CSI turned out to be one he’d seen before, and all the sitcoms were stupid. Where was Bob Newhart when you needed him? Evers brushed his teeth, took two of Ellie’s Ambiens, then stood swaying in front of the bathroom mirror, his eyes bleeding. “Give me a liver long enough,” he said, “and I’ll move the fucking world.”

  He slept late again, recovering with instant coffee and oatmeal, and was pleased to see in the paper that the Sox were coming in for a big weekend series. He celebrated the opener with steak, setting the DYR to capture whatever malevolent spirit his past might vomit up. If it happened, this time he’d be ready.

  It did, in the seventh inning of a tie game, on a key play at the plate. He would have missed it if he’d gone off to do the dishes, but by then he was poised on the edge of the sofa, totally into the contest and concentrating on every pitch. Longoria doubled to the gap in left center, and Upton tried to score from first. The throw beat him but was wide, up the first baseline. As Sox catcher Kelly Shoppach lunged toward home with a sweep tag, directly behind the screen a scrawny, freckle-faced boy not more than nine rose from his seat.

  His haircut was what used to be called a Dutch boy, or, if you were taunting this particular fellow at school, a soup bowl. “Hey, Soup!” they used to hound him in gym, pummeling him, turning every game into Smear the Queer. “Hey, Soupy. Soup, Soupy!”