A Face in the Crowd

paid for the refrigerator—a top-of-the-line Sub-Zero, thank you very much. He’d paid for her Audi. And her tennis club dues. And her massage therapist. And all the stuff she bought from the catalogs. And hey, let’s not forget Patrick’s college tuition! Evers had had to put together a jackleg combination of scholarships, loan packages, and shit summer jobs to get through school, but Patrick had gotten a full boat from his old man. The old man he was too busy to call these days.

She comes back from the dead, and why? To complain. And to do it on the goddamn iPhone I paid for.

He thought of an old saying and wished he’d quoted it to Ellie while he still had the chance: “Money can’t buy happiness, but it allows one to endure unhappiness in relative comfort.”

That might have shut her up.

The more he considered their life together—and there was nothing like talking to your dead spouse while you looked at her in a club seat to make you consider such things—the more he thought that while he hadn’t been perfect, he’d still been all right. He did love her and Patrick, and had always tried to be kind to them. He’d worked hard to give them everything he never had, thinking he was doing the right thing. If it wasn’t enough, there was nothing he could do about it now. As for the thing with Martha… some kinds of fucking were meaningless. Men understood that—Kaz certainly would have understood it—but women did not.

In bed, dropping into a blissful oblivion that was three parts Ambien and two parts scotch, it came to him that Ellie’s rant was strangely freeing. Who else could they (whoever they were) send to bedevil him? Who could make him feel any worse? His mother? His father? He’d loved them, but not as he’d loved Ellie. Miss Pritchett? His uncle Elmer who used to tickle him till he wet his pants?

Snuggling deeper into the covers, Evers actually snickered at that. No, the worst had happened. And although there would be another great match-up tomorrow night at the Trop—Josh Beckett squaring off against James Shields—he didn’t have to watch. His last thought was that from now on, he’d have more time to read. Lee Child, maybe. He’d been meaning to get to those Lee Child books.

But first he had the Harlan Coben to finish. He spent the afternoon lost in the green, pitiless suburbs. As the sun went down on another St. Petersburg Sunday, he was into the last fifty pages or so, and racing along. That was when his phone buzzed. He picked it up gingerly—the way a man might pick up a loaded mousetrap—and looked at the readout. What he saw there was a relief. The call was from Kaz, and unless his old pal had suffered a fatal heart attack (not entirely out of the question; he was a good thirty pounds overweight), he was calling from Punta Gorda rather than the afterlife.

Still, Evers was cautious; given recent events, he had every reason to be. “Kaz, is that you?”

“Who the hell else would it be?” Kaz boomed. Evers winced and held the phone away from his ear. “Barack fucking Obama?”

Evers laughed feebly. “No, I just—”

“Fuckin’ Dino Martino! You suck, buddy! Front-row seats, and you didn’t even call me?”

From far away, Evers heard himself say: “I only had one ticket.” He looked at his watch. Twenty past eight. It should have been the second inning by now--unless the Rays and Red Sox were the 8:00 Sunday-night game on ESPN.

He reached for the remote.

Kaz, meanwhile, was laughing. The way he’d laughed that day in the schoolyard. It had been higher-pitched then, but otherwise it was just the same. He was just the same. It was a depressing thought. “Yeah, yeah, I’m just yankin’ your ballsack. How’s the view from there?”

“Great,” Evers said, pushing the power button on the remote. Fox 13 was showing some old movie with Bruce Willis blowing things up. He punched 29 and ESPN came on. Shields was dealing to Dustin Pedroia, second in the Sox lineup. The game had just started.

I’m doomed to baseball, Evers thought.

“Dino? Earth to Dino Martino! You still there?”

“I’m here,” he said, and turned up the volume. Pedroia flailed and missed. The crowd roared; those irritating cowbells the Rays fans favored clanged with maniacal fervor. “Pedie just struck out.”

“No shit. I ain’t blind, Stevie Wonder. The Rays Rooters are pumped up, huh?”

“Totally pumped,” Evers said hollowly. “Great night for a ball game.”

Now Adrian Gonzalez was stepping in. And there, sitting in the first row right behind the screen, doing a fair impersonation of a craggy old snowbird playing out his golden years in the Sunshine State, was Dean Patrick Evers.

He was wearing a ridiculous foam finger, and although he couldn’t read it, not even in HD, he knew what it said: RAYS ARE #1. Evers at home stared at Evers behind home with the phone against his ear. Evers at the park stared back, holding the selfsame phone in the hand that wasn’t wearing the foam finger. With a sense of outrage that not even his stunned amazement could completely smother, he saw that Ballpark Evers was wearing a Rays jersey. Never, he thought. Those are traitor colors.

“There you are!” Kaz shouted exultantly. “Shake me a wave, buddy!”

Evers at the ballpark raised the foam finger and waved it solemnly, like an oversize windshield wiper. Evers at home, on autopilot, did the same with his free hand.

“Love the shirt, Dino,” Kaz said. “Seeing you in Rays colors is like seeing Doris Day topless.” He snickered.

“I had to wear it,” Evers said. “The guy who gave me the ticket insisted. Listen, I’ve gotta go. Want to grab a beer and a d—ohmygod, there it goes!”

Gonzo had launched a long drive, high and deep.

“Drink one for me!” Kaz shouted.

On Evers’s expensive TV, Gonzalez was lumbering around the bases. As he watched, Evers suddenly understood what he had to do. There was only one way to put an end to this cosmic joke. On a Sunday night, downtown St. Pete would be deserted. If he took a taxi, he could be at the Trop by the end of the second inning. Maybe even sooner.

“Kaz?”

“Yeah, buddy?”

“We should either have been nicer to Lester Embree, or left him alone.”

He pushed END before Kaz could reply. He turned off the TV. Then he went into his bedroom, rooted through the folded shirts in his bureau, and found his beloved Curt Schilling jersey, the one with the bloody sock on the front and WHY NOT US? on the back. Schilling had been The Man, afraid of nothing. When the Evers in the Rays shirt saw him in this one, he’d fade away like the bad dream he was and all of this would end.

Evers yanked the shirt on and called a cab. There was one nearby that had just dropped off a fare, and the streets were as deserted as Evers had expected. The cabbie had the game on the radio. The Sox were still batting in the top half of the second when he pulled up to the main gate.

“You’ll have to settle for nosebleeds,” the cabbie said. “Sox–Rays, that’s a hot ticket.”

“I’ve got one right behind home plate,” Evers said. “Stop somewhere they’ve got the game on, you might see me. Look for the shirt with the bloody sock on it.”

“I heard that fuckin’ hoser’s video game business went broke,” the cabbie said as Evers handed him a ten. He looked, saw Evers still sitting in the backseat with the door open, and reluctantly made change. From it, Evers handed him a single rumpled simoleon.

“Guy with a front-row seat should be able to do better’n that for a tip,” the cabbie grumbled.

“Guy with half a brain in his head should keep his mouth shut about the Big Schill,” Evers said. “If he wants a better tip, that is.” He slipped out, slammed the door and headed for the entrance.

“Fuck you, Boston!” the cabbie shouted.

Without turning around, Evers hoisted a middle finger—real, not foam.

The concourse with its palm trees lit like Christmas in Hawaii was all but empty, the sound of the crowd inside the stadium a hollow surf-boom. It was a sellout, the LED signs above the shuttered ticket windows bragged. There was only one window still open, all the way down at the end, the WILL CALL.

Yes, Evers thought, because they will call, won’t they? He headed for it like a man on rails.

“Help you, sir?” the pretty ticket agent asked, and was that Juicy Couture she was wearing? Surely not. He