Richard was surprised at how much his mouth watered. “Yeah, you’re right.”
Charlie picked up the little lamp, switched it off. “Well, don’t let it be said that the U.S. Marshall’s Office doesn’t have a little consideration. I’ll be seeing you, Richard.”
“Unfortunately, I think you’re right,” he said, now smelling the delicious scents coming up from the bag. His stomach began grumbling, and he hefted the bag a couple of times as he waited until the other car left the small lot. Richard waited until his eyes adjusted to the darkness, and then he walked a few yards to the beginning of the covered bridge. His feet echoed on the old wooden planks. He leaned over and heard the rushing of the Bellamy River below him, and then took the bag and threw it into the river.
He sighed, rubbed at his face. That was the only way. To follow the rules and survive, and never, absolutely never, dress or smoke or eat or do anything like you once did back home, because they were out there, still out there in the shadows, bent on revenge, and he didn’t want to raise a single scent for their benefit.
He looked at the river for a couple of minutes, and then went back to his car and drove home.
At home he was in the upstairs hallway, heading to the bedroom, when he heard a murmuring noise coming from Sam’s room. The door was ajar and he could make out a bluish light coming from inside. Sam was curled up on his side, his eyes closed, dressed in light gray pajama bottoms. On a dresser at the foot of the bed was a small color TV, and Richard made out a baseball game being played. He reached up to turn it off when a sleepy voice said, “No, Dad, don’t... still watching it...”
“Sam, it’s almost three in the morning.”
“I know... The Red Sox are in Seattle... it’s gone extra innings...”
Richard looked at a little graphic in the corner of the television picture. “Sam, the score is zero to zero, and they’re in the eighteenth inning.”
“Mom said I could watch the game till it was over.”
Richard shut the little TV off. “And I’m saying it’s just a game, okay? You need to get to sleep.”
No answer. Just the soft noise of his boy, breathing. From the hallway light he made out posters of baseball players up on the walls, all of them Red Sox. He shrugged. He wished the boy would at least follow a winning team, like the Mets or the Yankees, but what could one expect. He bent down to kiss Sam’s forehead.
“Just a game, son. Just a game.”
In the morning, before she left for work and to bring the kids to a day camp, Carla brought him another cup of coffee in his small office, which was a spare bedroom when they had first moved in. He took the cup and sipped from it, and she said, “So. What went on last night?”
Other guys back then, they could spin stories to their wives about being solid waste management consultants, but he could not do that with Carla. She had entered things clear-eyed and agreeable, and not once had he ever tried to pull something over on her.
He put the coffee cup down on his desk. “A trip to California in a couple of months. Another testimony deal. Against Mel Flemmi.”
She made a face. “Good. He sure deserves it. What else?”
“What do you mean, what else?” he asked.
Carla gently whacked him on the side of his shoulder. “There’s always something else with the feds. What was it?”
He tried a casual shrug. “I’ve got to keep my nose clean, as always. That way, any defense lawyer won’t be able to say I don’t have the kind of character to testify truthfully.”
“Keep your nose clean...” she said simply. “Does that mean not breaking some guy’s headlights over a parking space?”
“It was my parking space, I’d just got here, and it won’t happen again.”
She leaned over, grabbed his ears, and kissed him firmly on the mouth. “Good. ’Cause it ain’t no game, Richard. I like it here. The kids like it here. We can continue having a good life here. Don’t do anything to screw it up.”
“I won’t.”
“Good. Because if you do, I’ll kill you.”
He kissed her back. “I have no doubt.”
For most of the day, he stayed in his office. He played twenty-three games of computer solitaire and another computer game involving shooting lots of fast-moving monsters — not surprisingly, he scored quite high — and he spent a while on the Internet as well, seeing the combined creativity of a number of women who could just barely dress themselves, and got an idea or two for next Valentine’s Day.
Then, at about 3:00 P.M., he popped in the computer disk, called up a file called “Sea Lion,” and printed out all thirty-three pages. He put the pages in an Express Mail envelope, drove to the post office, and sent the envelope to a publisher in New York City. Back home, he made another cup of coffee and waited for Carla and the kids to show up. “Man, writers have it easy,” he said.
The next day was a practice one for the Pine Tree Rotary team, and he enjoyed seeing how enthusiastically all the kids took to the field — Patrick and Jeffrey and Alexander and his own Sam and even little Leo, chugging out there on his tiny legs, and all the others. They did some exercises to loosen up, and then some pitching and hitting, and some base running. He took it upon himself to spend some extra time with Leo, tossing up pop flies, and Leo managed to catch fifteen in a row.
Then he took Ron Bachman, the town auditor and the team’s manager, aside. “Did you see how Leo’s doing?”
“Yep,” Ron said, making a note on a clipboard. “Not a single dropped ball. That’s what happens when his dad’s not around. Plays a lot better.”
“So tell me, what’s the deal with his dad, George? What’s his problem?”
Ron looked up from the clipboard. “What do you mean, ‘what’s his problem?’ ”
“The way he goes after his kid, that’s what.”
“Oh, that,” he said. “You know, George has got a lot of problems. Drinking and picking fights and being the son of the chairman of the board of selectmen, so he gets a lot of slack cut his way. He’s a mean man who takes his frustrations out on his kid. Typical story. Unfortunately, it has to show itself here.”
“Yeah,” Richard said. “Unfortunately.”
Two days later the team went on a field trip to Fenway Park in Boston, an hours-long drive that took three minivans and a number of other parents to act as chaperones. When putting kids in the vans, Richard made sure that Leo was in his van, and he glanced at the boy some while heading into Boston. He half-expected to see a haunted look in the boy’s eyes, a troubled expression, but no, there was nothing like that there. Just the excitement of being in Boston and seeing the Red Sox play.
Richard took in Fenway Park as they found their seats. It was an old, tiny park, opened up in 1912, the same year the Titanic sunk on its maiden voyage. It had its charms, with the Green Monster out in left field and the intimacy of being close-up to the action, but Richard wasn’t satisfied. It wasn’t Yankee Stadium, it wasn’t the House that Ruth Built, but he kept his opinions to himself.
All part of his new life.
As the game progressed, he enjoyed watching the kids almost as much as the game itself. They followed each pitch intensely and ate popcorn and hotdogs and drank sodas, and cheered when one of the Red Sox players rocketed a home run over the Green Monster, and booed when the opposing pitcher hit a Red Sox player with a fastball, causing both benches to clear. The game wasn’t worth much — an early season bout with the Tigers that the Red Sox managed to lose, 4–3 — but it was still fun. He was glad to be here with his boy and was glad not to be in jail, and it even looked like Leo was enjoying himself, too, watching the game with wide eyes and grins, seemingly thousands of miles away from his father.