“Well I’ll be damned, Pruitt,” he said. He stood up slowly, his face wrinkling in pain as he straightened his back. While shaking hands, he nodded toward my truck. “I thought I heard somebody’s redneck-ass truck pull up in my driveway.”
He shuffled over and picked up a closed folding chair that was leaning against the trailer. He opened it and set it down beside his. “Have a seat,” he said. He put his hands on his chair’s armrests and slowly lowered himself. “So,” he said. “It’s been a while.”
“Over four years.”
“When’d you get out?” he asked.
“February.”
“Right in time for spring training,” he said, smiling.
“Yeah. Right in time.”
“You working?” he asked.
“Over at a bar called Tomcat’s on Wilkinson. Weren’t a lot of other options.”
“Well, it’s nice to see you on the outside, man. You look good, stronger than hell.” He flexed his biceps. “You still at it?”
“Still at it.”
“What you on?”
“Deca. Testosterone. That’s about it.”
He turned and looked at the television. “Not me, man. Not anymore.”
My eyes took in the shirt and tie he was wearing. “You been at work?”
He leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs, and then he straightened his tie.
“Hell no,” he said. “I’m at church.” He smiled and pointed to the television, where the Cubs were at bat in the top of the first in Colorado. “At least my mother thinks I am.” He turned around and looked at the trailer where the cords snaked through the cracked window. “She’s inside, asleep, lying up in a hospital bed with lung cancer, hooked up to oxygen.” My mind pictured a shriveled, old black woman with Phrate’s face, her eyes closed, tubes running into her nose and both her arms. “She can’t leave the house,” he said, “but she sure as hell wants to know where I’m at all the time. ‘My way or the highway,’ she says.” He laughed. “On Sunday mornings, I’m… in… church.”
“It’s almost three P.M.”
Phrate smiled. “You ain’t ever been to church with black folks, have you? If you want to go I bet every one of them in town is still meeting.” He looked at his wristwatch. “Probably ain’t even got to the sermon yet.”
In Denver, Sosa hit one out against Kile. The announcers went crazy; so did the fans. Phrate clapped his hands. “All right!” he said. “Ol’ Sammy-that’s fifty-four. That white boy better look out; Sammy’s getting hot.” He reached into his breast pocket for a pack of cigarettes. He shook one out and picked up a lighter off the table. “You know I played with him, right?”
“Yes; ’eighty-seven, ’eighty-eight.”
“That’s right,” he said. He lit his cigarette. “And you were with the-”
“Grasshoppers.”
“Okay,” he said. “I remember now.” He smiled and looked back at the television. “You were something, Pruitt: those quick hands, that nice swing.” He stopped talking and looked over like he was seeing my arms and the rest of my body for the first time. “But now,” he said, “you should be crushing it with Sammy and McGwire.”
“Wade Chesterfield was on that team with you and Sosa.”
“Yep. He was. I played with Wade for a couple years with the Rangers before he-you know.” He stopped talking and acted like he was taking a drink out of a bottle. He looked at me again. “Why?”
My eyes were on the television, but Phrate’s eyes were on me. “Ever see him around?”
“Pruitt, come on, man,” he said, “you got to let that go. That was, what, ten years ago? You’re not one of those dudes who’s on some kind of trip like you see in the movies, are you? Guy gets out of jail and then spends the rest of his life getting even with everybody who screwed him before he went in.”
“Why? You worried about why I’m here to see you?”
“Shit,” he said. He ran both his hands down the length of his thighs and sunk lower in his seat. He took a drag from his cigarette and exhaled through his nose. “Man, what did you want me to do? Roll up in the front office, turn myself in to the cops because I let you juice my players every now and then? Come on, man. You know it don’t work like that.”
“How does it work, Phrate?”
“It’s a calculated risk, man, and you got hit. The Knights hired you to weight-train the team, not to inject those kids with all kinds of shit. But they knew what was going on, and it’s messed up, but that don’t mean it’s somebody else’s fault. It’s like stepping into the batter’s box. You think Wade meant to do that to you? No way. It’s all calculated risk. Nobody knows what’s going to happen. Wade could be a deadbeat and a bum, everybody knows that, but he wasn’t no headhunter.”
“This isn’t about the past.” The Cubs had ended the inning with a pop fly to right, and the game had gone to commercial.
“Then why are you here?” he asked.
“Just need to know if you’ve seen him.”
“I haven’t seen you in years and years, and suddenly you show up asking questions about Wade Chesterfield because you want to know if I’ve seen him?”
“That’s right.”
“I ain’t stupid, Pruitt,” he said.
“Well, then this is a pointless conversation, isn’t it?”
Phrate sat there staring at the television until the commercials were over and the game was back on. The camera followed Sosa as he trotted out to right field to begin the inning. Phrate looked over at me. “You still got your bag of tricks?”
“Maybe. Why?”
“Because I might be a whole lot more interested in talking about ol’ Wade if you do.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Vicodin, Oxy, Flexeril-anything that might take the edge off.”
“Might be some Dilaudid in the truck.”
“A dose of that, and I’ll tell you everything I know.”
Phrate said he hadn’t seen Wade Chesterfield in a couple years, but the last he’d heard he’d gone clean, gotten a good job. “I think that girl he was with had a couple of kids,” he said. “But Wade wasn’t no kind of daddy to them.”
“Boys or girls?”
“Girls,” he said. “One of them was named something like Sunday or Wednesday or a holiday or something. Might’ve been Easter.”
“Easter?”
“Yeah,” he said. “It was Easter. It was definitely Easter.”
“What about the other one?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But I heard their mama OD’d on something a few months ago.”
“Who told you that?”
“We’re just talking about Wade here, man.”
“Anything else?”
“His real name ain’t Chesterfield,” he said, smiling. “It’s Chessman.”
“Why’d he change it?
“Come on, man,” Phrate said, laughing. “Why do you think he changed it? You ever hear of a Jew ballplayer?”
“Hank Greenberg, Sandy Koufax, Erskine Mayer.”
“Well, maybe Wade wasn’t a fan of them.”
“Any other family in the area?”
“Not that I know of.” He was quiet for a minute, like he’d said everything he’d ever known about Wade Chesterfield. Then he raised his eyebrows. “So, back to our deal.”
My doctor’s kit was hidden under a gym bag in the floorboard behind the passenger’s seat of the truck. Phrate’s eyes lit up when he saw me carrying it back to the table.
“Where do you want to do this?”
“Hell, man,” he said. “Right here’s fine. It don’t matter.” The trailer to my right had its blinds closed tight, and there was no car parked in front of it.
Syringes and multidose vials lined the inside of the kit. I slipped on my batting gloves before popping the cap off a syringe and plunging the needle into a vial and drawing out 10 ccs.