St. James City and listen to John Mooney play.”
John Mooney, one of the great blues guitarists, lived on Pine Island. Every baseball Sunday, we always did that, too.
On the way into town I told Tomlinson about my conversation with Amanda Richardson. Glancing from the road over to this strange vision: cattle rustler’s face, hippie hair, goatherder sandals and baseball uniform.
He smelled of primo glove leather (he was breaking in a beautiful Wilson A2000 infielder’s glove) and patchouli, the favorite perfume of dope smokers. Probably had a joint hidden somewhere on his person, too, for he had embraced some of his old habits. By unspoken agreement, he pretended not to know that I knew.
Yet, for all his weirdness and his flaky spiritualism, Tomlinson is an attentive listener and he possesses an intellect of the first magnitude. I wanted his assessment of the situation. In hindsight, I realize now that I was not as open-minded as I generally pretend to be. Yeah, I wanted Tomlinson’s opinion, but I had already come to a conclusion about the so-called disappearance of Gail Calloway. My old buddy’s widow was being taken advantage of by one of the common cast of chubby, middle-aged Casanovas that infest every Florida beach town from Jacksonville to Pensacola. True, there were a couple of elements in Amanda’s story that I found unusual, even troubling. But the chances of Gail’s being in genuine danger were very slim indeed.
Not that I wasn’t interested and not that I wouldn’t help. I’d do what I could, no questions asked. Bobby would have done the same for me. Besides, I liked his daughter a lot. Yeah… nice woman with an outsider’s gift for observation and a no-nonsense intellect.
We all prioritize, and I had already put the problem on one of the middle burners: important but not so pressing that I needed to drop everything and go charging off to the rescue.
So, also in hindsight, make note of another screw-up by the kindly, well-intentioned dumbass, Doc Ford. Add one more M ^ 2 to a growing list. M-squared as in double M-which stands for Major Miscalculation. It was not my first nor, unfortunately, will it be my last, for I seem to have a limitless gift for failing to heed my own instincts… particularly when the welfare of an innocent person is at stake.
Why that is true, I cannot fathom. It hurts me. It makes Why that is true, I cannot fathom. It hurts me. It makes me furious. But the fact that I so seldom seem to meet my own expectations is probably the main reason why I hang in there and keep banging away, trying to get it right. I can forgive myself for being dumb or for lacking insight. I could never forgive myself for quitting.
So, in truth, all I wanted from Tomlinson was for him to validate my view by echoing my opinion. Isn’t that what we ask most often from friends?
Tomlinson, however, is not your run-of-the-mill friend.
As I drove across the causeway, then north into Fort Myers, he listened patiently as I spoke. He grunted and humphed and made attentive listening sounds while he chewed at a strand of his scraggly blond hair, a nervous habit.
He questioned me closely about certain details of Amanda’s story. At one point he asked, “Old photographs? Why was she going through her mom’s stuff looking for old photographs?”
“Sentimental value? I don’t know. She wanted a picture of her mom and real dad.”
“You believe that?”
“Of course I do. Why shouldn’t I?”
“Which she said she found in her mother’s hope chest. The photographs. That was the only place?”
“No, what she said was, she was looking for old photographs and was about to give up. There’s a difference. Her mother had apparently packed them all away. Amanda said she’s a neatness freak.”
Now Tomlinson was twisting his hair into a braid. “You don’t find that odd? I find that very odd.”
“You find it odd that a woman who’s been a widow for nearly two decades has put away photos of her late husband?”
“And of her own daughter, too, apparently.”
“The girl did that herself. Because she once had a crossed eye. A lazy eye and she’s probably still ashamed of it.”
“She told you that?”
“You drive me nuts sometimes, Tomlinson. You know that? Yes, she told me that she’d put the pictures away. Hid them, that’s what she said. I’m guessing at the motive. But it’s a reasonable assumption based on circumstantial evidence.”
“Like you said, man, sentimental value. A guy like you, a guy who doesn’t feel much emotion, it’s something easy to miss. But to a spiritual headbanger like me, it stands out like a sore beezer.”
I thought: Jesus, you’re weird, Tomlinson.
A few minutes later, he asked: “You’re absolutely sure this girl you’re talking about-Amanda? — you’re sure she’s really the biological daughter of your old friend? Him and his wife, I mean. She wasn’t maybe adopted or has a different father or something?”
“What difference would that make?”
“I’m just asking. The thing about the photographs bothers me.”
The photographs again. What the hell was he talking about?
I said, “I would bet that she’s the biological daughter of Bobby and Gail Richardson, yes. But no, I haven’t asked for a DNA test to prove it. But I look in her face, I can see her dad. No doubt about that. Something about the eyes. And her mom-I’ve only seen photographs-but she’s got her mom in her, too. I may not be an expert on sentiment, Tomlinson, but give me some credit for basic observation. Genetics aren’t easy to disguise. We’re necessarily bits and pieces of all the people who went before us. And don’t forget: I saw a picture of Amanda as a little girl.”
There were other things that troubled him about the girl’s story. I drove and looked at the scenery, listening a lot, answering occasionally.
We were driving into the heart of Fort Myers. Municipalities on Florida’s Gulf Coast tend to expand in population, bulging southward and northward until they finally rupture and are absorbed by the concrete artery that is U.S. Highway 41, a strip-mall corridor that is a mile wide and more than a hundred miles long. U.S. 41, or the Tamiami Trail as it is called, connects the rolling oak pastures north of Tampa with the saw-grass hardpan of the Everglades. The city of Fort Myers lies just off that fast conduit, a kernel of old buildings built of brick and coquina rock, a tiny Old Florida town at the core of massive, modern growth.
Fort Myers is called the City of Palms. It is well named. Cuban royals lined the street. They are palms that look as if they had been made by squirting cement into a pillarous tube. The high fronds caught the spring sunlight. As Tomlinson talked, I watched the Sunday flow of joggers lope down the small town sidewalks. A girl with hair the tawny red of autumn leaves and honey-colored skin caught my eye. I watched her until she vanished from my rearview mirror.
You see one like that, a woman with the physical sensibilities of a deer, and you wonder if she is The One, The One you have been waiting all your life to meet.
You also worry that if you don’t immediately stop, if you don’t act on the strange urge to introduce yourself to a stranger, that you may have forever missed the chance…
We were headed toward the city’s eastern border and an antique baseball complex named Terry Park. Since 1925, the diamonds there have been a hub of Grapefruit League spring-training activity. Terry Park is one of the reasons I didn’t mind making the long drive into town. It is among the last fields of its kind in Florida: a precise space of grass and red clay to which baseball legends once arrived by steam engine and, decades later, left for Opening Day by charter jet. The main stadium is made of tin and wood, everything painted gazebo-green. It looks small and shaded, as if it comes from the time of straw hats and nickel beer. It does. That’s why the modern major league teams have moved on to more sterile, twenty-first-century plants.
But the dugouts of Terry Park are still cool little caves with slabs of wood for benches; benches that are pitted by seven decades of wooden bats, Copenhagen cans and steel spikes. And the base paths are still the exacting conduits over which ran all the boys of summer from all the summers past. Name a player: Ruth, Cobb, Berra, Mantle, Maris, Clemente, Mays, Brett, Blyleven. Name ten thousand players. They sat on those same benches, they ran the same base paths. They all came to Terry Park to play a game called baseball, and the game is being played there still… often by wannabes like Tomlinson and me. Not that we felt any shame in that.
No indeed.
I was looking forward to the game. We were to face an ex-minor leaguer; a left-hander named Johnson who
