There was endless bitching about the fairness and accuracy of the virtual MLB players and teams, but baseball fans loved the resurrection era. Few would go back to the steroid-riddled players of the last, scandal-ridden decades of the live game.
Nick, like the Old Man before him, loved boxing and often watched Friday Night Fights, where a young Cassius Clay could be found fighting Rocky Marciano or Jack Johnson…
“Bottom-san, are you paying attention?” whispered Sato’s voice in Nick’s ear. “Man approaching from your right.”
Nick whirled.
The man coming out of the tent-and-shack village toward him was tall, thin, white-haired, black, and old. The old man wore baggy khaki shorts, sandals, and a spotless white shirt. He walked slowly but almost regally, stopping about seven feet away from Nick and opening his hands to show that they were empty.
“Welcome, sir, to our modest world of Coors Field, sans baseball, sans fans, sans hot dogs and Cracker Jack, sans Coors beer, sans everything but incarcerated felons, myself included, sir.” The old man bowed slightly but very gracefully. His voice was rich, full, deep, mesmerizing, in the way those of some Shakespearean actors and old-time sports announcers used to be.
Nick nodded slightly but looked around, his gaze flicking everywhere, wondering if this was the setup for some trap. Move on, his brain told him. Move on, idiot.
“My name is Soul Dad,” said the old man. “Soul with a ‘u.’ May I inquire as to your name, sir?”
Move on. Move on. Nothing good could come from Nick’s giving his name to some senile old felon.
“My name is Nick Bottom.” Nick heard his own voice as if from a distance. Something about his early-morning conversation with K. T. Lincoln had distracted him at a time when he couldn’t afford to be distracted. It was as if all this—the hovels and felons and sunlight and ravaged old ballpark, even the crazy old man with the amazing voice—was part of some flashback session and Nick was hovering above it all.
Hovering will get you killed, asshole.
Soul Dad chuckled in the same resonant, rich tones. “Well, Mr. Nick Bottom, you left your ass’s ears at home today, sir.”
Nick glanced at the old man and moved slightly to his right, keeping the same distance between them but putting the old man between him and anyone with a gun in the stands straight ahead or to the immediate right, without blocking Sato’s shot.
When Nick didn’t reply, Soul Dad said, “I’ve always thought that when the awakening Nick Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream says, ‘It shall be called Bottom’s Dream, because it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the latter end of a play, before the Duke. Peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her death,’ the ‘her’ he’s talking about is Juliet from Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare wrote the two about the same time, you see, Mr. Bottom… perhaps at the same time, although that would have been very unusual for the Bard… and I believe he allowed one reality to bleed over into another in Nick Bottom’s line there, just as flashback users often let one of their realities seep into another. Sometimes until they can’t tell the difference.”
Nick could only blink. It was odd that the Israeli poet Danny Oz had also brought up the question of who the “her” was in the “sing it at her death” part of that quotation.
Knowing he was wasting time and making himself more of a target, Nick said, “You seem to know quite a bit about Shakespeare, Mr. Soul Dad.”
The old man threw his head back and laughed deeply and delightedly. His teeth were large and white and only one was missing on the upper right side, despite his age. Something about the laugh made Nick think that the old man was Jamaican, although he had none of the accent. Whether he was laughing at being called Mr. Soul Dad or because of the Shakespeare compliment, Nick had no clue.
“I lived for more than forty years in a small railroad-yard shack in Buffalo, New York, with a sterno-addicted philosophy professor of great learning, Mr. Bottom,” said Soul Dad. “Some things rub off.”
Nick knew it was stupid to ask a question and drag things out with this old man, but sometimes one had to be stupid. “Soul Dad,” he said softly, “what are you in here for?”
Again that full-throated laugh. “I am in here for living under an overpass in winter and fouling the view of the Platte River for people paying much money to live in a tall glass tower along the river park,” said Soul Dad. “What, may I ask in return, are you here for, Mr. Bottom? Or, rather, whom are you searching for here?”
“Delroy… Brown.”
Soul Dad showed his strong teeth again in a broad grin. “How gallant of you to leave out the n-word, Mr. Bottom. And I agree with you on the choice. Of all the things I have seen and suffered in my eighty-nine years of life, my people’s return to the never-really-abandoned n-word of our centuries of servitude is the greatest self-inflicted folly.”
Soul Dad turned and pointed to a hovel halfway up the first tier behind home plate, where, of course, all the seats had long since been torn out. “Mr. Delroy Nigger Brown is there, sir, and expecting you.”
“Thank you,” Nick said absurdly and started to step forward.
Blocking the gesture from the sight of those behind him, Soul Dad held up a hand with one finger raised. “They plan to kill you,” the old man said very softly.
Nick paused.
“Not Mr. Brown, whom you seek, but a certain Bad Nigger Ajax. You know the man?”
“I know the man,” Nick said just as softly. He’d been the arresting officer and his testimony had sent Ajax away more than ten years before for repeatedly sodomizing a six-year-old girl. The girl had died of internal hemorrhaging.
“It will be like this,” said Soul Dad in the same quick, soft, reverberant whisper. “Mr. Brown will invite you into his tent-hovel. You will wisely decline. Mr. Brown will say, ‘Let us step up here where it is private.’ Ten steps up, Mr. Ajax will pop up from behind another tent and shoot you in the face. His friends—or, rather, his fearful acolytes, since Mr. Ajax has no friends here—will block the view of your sniper with their bodies while Mr. Ajax escapes into the crowds toward left field. The pistol will not be found.”
Nick stared at the old man. Eighty-nine years old. Soul Dad—whatever his original name was—had been born in the early days of World War II.
Before Nick could speak, even inanely to say “Thank you” again—although he had no idea if the old man was telling the truth or setting him up for some other form of assassination—Soul Dad put his hands together, bowed, turned, and walked away down what once was the third-base line.
Nick took two steps back while surveying the maze of tents and shacks filling the entire first tier behind home plate. “Did you hear that?” he whispered.
“We heard it,” came Sato’s voice in his ear. “I am looking at a photo of Ajax right now.”