They jumped up and down. They hugged each other and shouted their heads off. They all got trophies and a handshake from a man in a seersucker suit, and Gil got a special one for being MVP: a brass-plated baseball mounted on a hardwood stand. No one left the field for half an hour or so. That’s when they found Gil’s father’s body, cold and gray, slumped in the front seat of his old Chevy on Spring Street.
Gil, wearing his stand-up red-and-black tie and the shirt and suit so recently unwrapped from dry-cleaner’s plastic, awoke on the dugout bench, shivering. It was still night, but the moon had risen; frost silvered the grass all the way to the outfield fence. Stiff with cold, Gil rose and puked in the corner of the dugout. Nothing but liquid, foul and bitter: what his stomach had done to all the beer and shots. He hadn’t eaten since… he tried to remember when and couldn’t.
Gil climbed the fence, not so easily this time, and got back in his car. He drove back to Main, heater on full blast, and turned up Hill, following it to the northern edge of town where the cemetery separated the last dwelling from the woods. Like many reps with snowy territories, Gil carried a folding shovel in his trunk. He took it now and entered the cemetery.
The town might have been smaller, but the cemetery, like the woods, had grown. The gravestone of Renard, R. G., which had been in the farthest row, with nothing but empty field between it and the trees, now had other stones all around it. Familiar town names: Pease, Laporte, Spofford, Cleary, Bouchard. Gil read them in the moonlight. It took him some time to locate Renard, R. G.
The lawyer who’d executed the will had sold the Chevy to pay for the stone: marble-faced and round-topped, a little nicer than some of those around it, but not very big. There was room for no more than the carved name and the dates of birth and death, bracketing an interval that might have represented the average life expectancy in some sub-Saharan country. Gil pushed it over easily.
He unfolded the shovel, snapped the handle in place, started digging. Quickly down through a wet layer, slow through a still-frozen layer beneath that, a little faster through the dry earth below. Gil began to sweat, although his hands and feet were cold. He dug himself down, knee deep, waist deep, down into his father’s grave, his moonlit breaths rising urgently in the night. After a while, the eastern sky turned milky, as though a celestial eyelid were opening, but Gil, up to shoulder level in darkness, didn’t notice. He bore down with the shovel, tossed out earth, bore down, tossed out, bore down, tossed out, in rhythm, just like hammering at the anvil. It was almost enjoyable, certainly better than any work he’d had since those days at the forge. Should have been a grave digger, he thought, but was considering the possibility that grave digging too was controlled by men like Garrity and O’Meara, when the shovel struck something hard. He looked down, realizing only then that it was daybreak and he had to hurry, and saw a cleared section of pine board, the varnish dulled and grimy. Gil cleared a bigger section, then raised the shovel high and plunged the blade down with all his strength, splitting the wood at his feet. He paused, his nostrils anticipating the arrival of some putrescent smell, but none came.
Gil struck a few more times, smashing a small hole. Then he knelt, snapped off a few jagged pieces-pine, but thin and pocked with knots-and peered inside. He saw the buttoned-up buttons of a white shirt, a white shirt decaying and full of holes; a scattering of little bones, palm and finger bones, resting on a rep tie, also eaten away; and, lying among the bones, a brass-plated baseball mounted on a hardwood stand, perfectly preserved. Gil stuck his hand inside and took the trophy. A few of the little bones came with it, one somehow slipping under the cuff of his shirt, sliding coldly up his forearm.
Gil let out a sound then, not loud, but totally uncontrolled by his larynx, vocal cords, brain. He shook his arm frantically, launching the bone into the brightening sky and out of sight. With the trophy in the other hand, he tried to scramble out of the hole, but lost his balance and tumbled back down the side, landing on the coffin. He made the sound again, perhaps more loudly this time, and then, without knowing how, he was up on ground level, clawing on all fours through the dirt, crawling at an unsustainable pace. He fell forward, and lay panting, his face on the icy grass. Gray light spread softly around him. He puked again, but nothing came out.
Gil got up, looked around, saw no one. Beyond the cemetery and down Hill Street, the town was still in shadow. He returned to the grave, filled it in, tipped up the stone, walked it back in position. Then, trophy in hand, his trophy, he turned to go. At that moment, something flashed orange in the woods, and he heard the crack of a rifle. Gil ran, ran as hard as he could, dodging gravestones, ran toward the road, cold in the small of his back, waiting for that cracking sound again, for the hot ball tearing through him. But there wasn’t a second shot. Gil slowed, glanced back.
A man stepped out of the woods. He had a rifle in one hand, and a doe over the opposite shoulder. Even from where Gil stood, the animal appeared to be under the limit; besides, it wasn’t hunting season. Gil understood at once: it was his hometown, after all. The man looked around, scanning the cemetery and beyond. Gil dropped behind a gravestone, a big one with a cross on top.
The poacher moved quickly through the cemetery, heading not toward Hill Street, but to a pickup Gil hadn’t noticed before in the darkness, parked behind a shed at the end of a dirt track. A big man, powerfully built, but grossly overweight. He had shoulder-length hair, an untrimmed black beard, and like many fat people didn’t appear to feel the cold: he wore jeans and a T-shirt. Blood stained his bare arms. Gil crouched behind the gravestone, and would have remained there, but as the man came closer, as close as his path was going to bring him, about twenty yards away, it struck Gil that there was something familiar about that rapid, bowlegged stride. He stood up.
“Co?”
At the sound of Gil’s voice, the poacher dropped the deer, wheeled, raised the gun, all in one quick motion, impossibly quick for such a huge man. That proved it.
“Who the fuck are you?” said the poacher, gun muzzle pointed at the middle of Gil’s chest.
Boucicaut, without a doubt. Gil had never been as happy to see someone in his life.
12
“ By God,” said Boucicaut, flinging a handful of deer intestines out the door of his one-room trailer, “some car you got there, Gilly.” The 325i sat in Boucicaut’s muddy yard beside the pickup, a rusted and doorless oven, bald tires, a stained mattress, windblown scraps, garbage. Gil, drinking coffee at the grimy-topped card table by the sink, remembered yards like that from his childhood, but the Boucicauts’ hadn’t been one of them.
“Thanks,” Gil said, but he knew the car was ruined for him now. It meant payments he could no longer make and that pissy smell inside; his mind shrank from the thought. “So what are you doing these days?” he asked. The coffee was trembling in his cup, as though the earth were unsteady, far below. He put it down.
“Running for Congress,” Boucicaut said.
Gil, not sure he had heard right, stared at him.
“Joke, man,” said Boucicaut. “What’d you think I’d be doing?”
That was easy, and Gil blurted it out: “Catching for the Sox.”
Boucicaut laughed a barking laugh, then said, “I don’t get you.”
“That’s what I always thought,” Gil said. “That you’d end up in the big leagues.”
“Then you were living in a dream world.” Boucicaut gave Gil a long look. The expression in his eyes changed. “That’s a sharp suit, Gilly. To go with the wheels.”
A cheap suit, compared to what was out there in the world of suits, and stained with coffee besides. Gil said nothing.
“How does it feel?”
“How does what feel?”
“Raking in the big bucks.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Don’t appear that way to me,” Boucicaut said. He had the deer laid out on newspaper on the vinyl floor and was gutting, skinning, and butchering it, all with a monstrously oversized and ill-made hunter, probably from China. Gil watched Boucicaut hack away for a minute or two, his oily black hair hanging over his face in two wings, then pulled out the thrower and gave it a quarter spin across the room. It stuck in the floor, a foot or two from Boucicaut’s hand. Boucicaut didn’t even twitch.
“Try that,” Gil said.
Boucicaut turned to him and smiled. Both incisors were missing. “You kept it up?”
