A scout from Triple-A, a graying man who’d pitched for the Dodgers when they were still in Brooklyn, told Duro his fielding and base running weren’t the problem, it was hitting. “You can hit a waist-high fastball, kid,” the scout had said, “but so can everybody else. A big league curve, you got to be able to go into the locker with it and make contact. Otherwise, you empty that damned locker and say goodbye.”
But the training, the coaching, the sweating and straining in the humid and fruit-scented air of ballparks in Lakeland, Florida hadn’t worked for Duro Lasari. The team had dropped his option at the end of one year.
Lasari pulled the collar of his jacket tighter about his neck and leaned into the wind. His hair was thick and dark, his face hard and intense. His normal expression, the one he showed the world, was one of careful, cool appraisal, a look of dignity and reserve that was also challenging, a defiant and racial fineness defined at its purest in the centuries-old portraits one could see in the museums of Florence. Duro had seen such paintings in books, amused at the shadow of himself that showed out of fading oils and in the sharp, dark eyes of courtiers, shaded by plumes and soft hats.
A police car turned into the block ahead of him. It was cruising, not on call, and its dome light was dark. Yet anyone on the streets in this crumbling neighborhood at this hour could be routinely stopped for questioning. Without hurrying or changing his pace, Lasari turned and walked back to the luncheonette and ordered black coffee with rye toast.
His car was parked across the street, a black Pontiac GTO, a dozen years old but in show condition. The waitress saw him looking out at it as she put his coffee down on the counter.
“It’s like yesterday,” the waitress said. She stared at the old Pontiac, gleaming in the rain. She was about nineteen, plump and soft, with curly blonde hair. “Like I remember yesterday, anyway,” she said. “That your Goat over there, mister?”
The police car had cruised past and out of sight down the street. “Yes,” he said.
“They’re the best. It never really happened to me, it happened to my brother.” She smiled. “But he was like a god or something. I was just a kid when he bought a Goat and drove out to California to live. He wrote me that he got it up to ninety-five going through Kansas.”
“And nobody stopped him?” Lasari said.
“Not that he told me,” the waitress said. “He’s down near San Diego somewhere, working in avocados. He’s still got the car,”
Lasari sipped the black coffee, the cup sending warmth through his stiff hands, content to sit at the counter, listening to the waitress with her thoughts about a fabled souped-up car and a godlike brother she hadn’t seen in years, delaying the moment he’d have to leave this warm place and walk back to the Veterans’ office and tell them about what he had done.
Chapter Two
The Greyhound bus station near Van Buren and Randolph streets on the north side of the Loop was cold and windy and smelled of worn luggage and discarded cigarettes. An old man in overalls was mopping the terrazzo floor, a bucket of hot water steaming in the chill air.
Only one ticket window was open and the clerk was reading the sports page of the Tribune. A pair of Military Police, big young men with white helmets and shining leather hip holsters, stood beside the glass doors leading to the ramps for loading and departing buses. All the parking bays were empty. The last buses from O’Hare and Midway had come in more than an hour ago, quickly emptying civilians and soldiers with duffel bags before pulling away to the garage behind the terminal. Most of the exhaust fumes had blown away by now, and the air around the loading ramps was brisk and cold with the wind off the lake.
Mrs. Amanda Lewis sat alone on a wooden bench and wondered what she should do next. Randy hadn’t been on the bus from O’Hare, as he’d written he would, and now there wouldn’t be another bus until seven the next morning. All the way from Germany, she thought, and here she’d missed him right in Chicago. Her skin was the color of milk chocolate and so smooth that even her ready, quick smile hardly creased it. She looked respectable, even old-fashioned, in a neat brown coat and a hat with a brown feather that lay on her cheek against her graying hair. But her eyes reflected her worry, her uneasy concern. Amanda Lewis had not made a trip to downtown Chicago for years and found it challenging and foreign terrain. She’d made a note of the date on her kitchen grocery pad the day Randy’s letter came, but now she wasn’t sure if it was A.M. or P.M., when his flight was due in from Frankfurt. And somehow, she’d lost or mislaid the letter.
Amanda Lewis, who was Randy’s aunt and only living kin since her sister had gone, had arrived at the bus station before nine that morning and stayed all day and into the evening to watch the buses coming in from the airports.
His mother had been dead only a month, sick from alcohol and buried in their hometown of Barlow Bend. Randy wrote he wanted to see his aunt in Chicago before he went on home to that empty house in Alabama, and Amanda planned to cheer him up, to show him a real welcome home. She’d borrowed fifty dollars from the credit union so they could go somewhere nice for dinner and maybe hear country music.
Randy was kind of wild, never having a father to raise him and Missy Jane always blaming herself and the bottle weakness. But maybe he’d be all right. His letter had been serious. He wanted to see Aunt Mandy, he wanted to talk to her, he said. He was planning to make something of himself when he got out of the Army. And he was bringing presents, or maybe he’d mail them, German stuff he’d picked up. He hadn’t asked for any favors, didn’t go to the Red Cross or anything, but a sergeant had heard about his mother’s death and arranged for him to leave for the States early, even fixed the stopover in Chicago.
“There are some fine people in the world,” he’d written, “people who don’t mind helping us get ahead if we cooperate.”
If you could use such a word about Randolph Lewis, then he had matured, she thought. The big crazy kid, with all his Southern boy tricks and meanness, had sounded grown up for once in his life.
The MPs, the military police, they’d been real nice. One of them was named Homer Robbins, she saw that on his nameplate. He’d told her the best thing to do was to find that letter, come back tomorrow. Maybe she had the wrong date, Robbins said, or maybe her nephew missed his flight and was a day late.
The old man mopping the floor said she could call Missing Persons, but they’d probably tell her to wait a week or so. Then the clerk at the ticket window suggested a soldiers’ place he’d read about, over near Diversey about twenty blocks from here, open twenty-four hours a day. They answered questions for servicemen and their kin and didn’t ask too many of their own, that’s how the man put it. They could make a few phone calls, advise her. Mrs. Lewis knew she’d rest better if she could tell someone about her nephew, so she took down the address, stepped carefully around the wide, wet swaths of suds on the floor and went outside.
A few lights shone from nearby bars and from a small, four-story hotel, but all the brighter lights seemed on the far horizon, the big hospital and the rows of tall apartment buildings along the lake shore. Nobody is on the streets this time of night but fools like me, Amanda Lewis thought as she got into her car, locked the doors quickly and started the motor, letting her breath out as the motor caught.