Murder Boy. Bryon Quertermous
up body.”
He tossed me the keys and I stared at them like one of those pocket puzzles they give you at truck stop restaurants to distract you from the poor service and depressing atmosphere. I gripped them tightly and pondered their irony. They represented freedom from this mess, from the consequences of my arrogance and poor planning, and more importantly from the immediate vicinity of Rickard and the mystery van. But Rickard was already in the passenger seat so I couldn’t steal the car from him and if I tried to run from him I suspected the crippled hobo lady would run me over.
So I continued staring at the keys until Rickard, once again, leaned out a window and hollered at me.
“Let’s go,” he said. “We need to see what we’re fighting for before this snow gets too bad.”
“THESE GUYS,” Rickard said, smacking the radio in the Buick. “Moron hosts and moron callers dissect everything about baseball but what’s important.”
He was listening to a sports talk radio station I listened to myself when I got sick of the forced banter and homogenous rotation of the same 10 songs of your chosen genre that was the state of modern radio. I’d heard Detroit had a vibrant music scene but I’d never had the patience or desire to dig for it so I was stuck with the same songs you could hear in Scottsdale or Schaumburg or Sherman Oaks or any other bland suburb.
“Nice radio,” I said, running my finger along the screen of a shiny chrome box that looked more expensive than the car itself.
“Satellite,” he said. “I’m kinda obsessed with baseball and this lets me listen in all over the country and see what they’re saying about our boys.”
“The Tigers?”
“Look at these empty streets,” Rickard said.
I vaguely recognized the area. We were on the immediate outskirts of the downtown area but I couldn’t place exactly where until Rickard continued talking about baseball and I realized we were near the old spot of Tiger Stadium. To hear old guys talk about it, you’d think the neighborhood was some kind of magical baseball heaven. But in actuality, it was just as run down as the rest of the city, if slightly more populated due to the higher concentration of white people left over from its days as the Irish neighborhood known as Corktown.
What was left of the stadium was a corner chunk of faded gray steel that had been the corner of the stadium behind home plate. The field was still there, lovingly maintained by a small group of fans, but the fields surrounding it were weedy and littered with trash.
“This place is like a fucking graveyard now, but back in ‘84, there were crowds and cars and miniature bats being handed out.”
I nodded along, wondering if this was the speech he gave Steve before doing whatever he did to get him into the trunk.
“You were here back then?”
“First time my dad took me to a game in years. Money was tight, he was always getting laid off and that free little wooden bat was my only souvenir.”
He didn’t say anything else for several minutes while he circled the block, slowing every so often as a young black guy in a security guard uniform walked the outline of the weedy lot. Finally, Rickard circled one last time to the back side of the lot.
“I could list all of the stats, the player bios, all of the box score shit, but what sticks in my head are my memories of the stadium: the smells, the sounds, and the voice of Hickey Ernest calling the plays.”
He paused again, this time only briefly. Then said, “Fucking Hickey Ernest.”
“When I was younger, seven or eight,” I said, “before my dad turned into an asshole, we used to do work around the house and in the yard on the weekends. He always had baseball games on the radio with Hickey Ernest.”
“The times we went to the stadium my pop would bring one of those little radios to plug in his ear so we could still get his commentary. Everything I know about baseball, Detroit, and being a man I learned from Hickey Ernest.”
Said the man with a fresh body in the trunk and a bloody knife in his pocket.
“It sounds like maybe you don’t care for the man anymore,” I said.
“He changed. We all changed, but he changed worse. For the worse.”
It seemed like he wanted to say more, but the security guard was moving swiftly in our direction.
“Sir,” the guard said.
Rickard didn’t say anything and neither of us moved. I looked down and saw Rickard’s hand moving around in the pocket with the knife. He wouldn’t really kill this guy in front of me. Would he? In broad daylight?
“Sir,” the guard repeated. “I thought we had an agreement from this morning. You told Steve—”
“I don’t see Steve around,” Rickard said.
“Please leave.”
“Come on,” I said. “The longer Farmington is alone with Wade—”
“You ever go to a game, you know, when this place was real?”
Rickard was talking around me to the guard.
“Not here,” the guard said after a second or two of contemplation. “But the new place, they did good with it and I’ve taken my kid a couple times.”
Rickard nodded in slow agreement with his head down then looked up and surveyed the whole field. The last blast of cold weather through town had left a layer of frost over everything, giving the field the look of a ball diamond preserved under hockey ice.
“It’s a different game now,” Rickard continued. “Different people, different spirit. I just want to hold onto the good times a bit longer.”
“They’re really cracking down though on you people coming through here. I can’t be taking my boy to no games if I’m on the unemployment line, you know?”
“My friend here and I,” Rickard said, nodding toward me, “we have a common acquaintance who could have saved this place.”
They both looked at me. I had no idea what he was talking about.
“The Professor,” Rickard said. “Wouldn’t give me my share of our money in time to save the corner.”
“Right. That’s what they called it here. The Corner.”
“No, the corner is behind home plate. The actual home plate, for that matter, that’s now in Toledo.”
The guard saw his last opportunity to get us out of there and mumbled something about us maybe heading to Toledo to try our luck. For some reason it worked this time and Rickard motioned for me to follow him back to the car.
“Make sure you get that son of yours to a real ball park before he’s too old,” Rickard said by way of goodbye. “Fenway or Wrigley. Some place with character.”
“STEVE WAS a…I mean that body was a security guard?” I asked in the car, driving away from the ball field.
“You said you didn’t want to know anything about it.”
“No...you’re right. Let’s talk about what you said about Farmington and his deal with you and how you were going to save this corner. What did I get myself in the middle of?”
“Sons, fathers, legacies, back stabbing, misplaced trust. It’s like that guy Shakespeare: real dramatic and shit.”
I’d never been a standout in any of my literature seminars, but I spent enough time in them that something was bound to seep into my subconscious. So as Rickard talked, I started having a mishmash of flashbacks to Native-American literature, Greek mythology,