Playtime (9 page)

His brother says, "Blaine-" 

 "I'd like to be alone for a while,"
Blaine says, and walks right past him. "Make some coffee, will you?" 

 He goes into the bedroom and takes down the
picture of her he has hanging on the wall. It had been put away and he'd hauled
it back out of a drawer when she'd spent the night. Hung it back up.   

 She has a big smile on her face, a glowing look.
They had been headed out to a big dance. She was all dolled up in a beautiful,
blue taffeta dress. String of faux pearls encircling her neck. Touch more
makeup than she usually wore but it looked great. She looked great. Tears are
streaming down his face now. He curses himself silently for even thinking of
seeing fault in the features of the dead. They had no fault. She surely had no
fault. She should be here right now. There was no sin she'd committed, no
reason for this at all.   

 He touches her through the glass of the picture
like it will bring her closer. They will never have the chance to find out how
bad each other's flaws are now, never know if she had an unhealthy need for a
father figure, if Blaine could support her; none of the questions that were
inherent in their relationship would be answered. He feels like he has been
cheated, like she has been cheated. He makes a low moaning sound and kneels
next to the bed. He doesn't know why. 

 He finally gets up and hangs the picture back
carefully in its spot on the wall. He gets his workout stuff together and
dresses in that, gym shorts and running shoes, an old Tee. His brother hollers
that the coffee is ready as Blaine goes out the back door. 

 The garage really had been made with space enough
for two vehicles. The Shadow takes up some of the extra room, but he has a
small area toward the back where he has a heavy bag hung. With the big wooden
fence around the yard for privacy, it is a nice place to work out, and once or
twice a week he comes out here in addition to the run and hits the bag. Kicks
the bag. He is not as limber as the days when he practiced Tae Kwon Do all the
time, but he can still throw a pretty mean kick.   

 He sticks the smaller gloves on to protect his
hands and goes to work, developing a rhythm. He throws two and three punch
combinations, dancing, moving his head in anticipation of the counters. Every
so often, he varies his attack with a kick. He works his way around the bag,
sticking and moving, sticking and moving. Settles into that, and just shuts his
mind down for a while. Stick, stick, move. Stick, stick, move. Kick. Head
feint. Stick, move, stick. 

 He has loved boxing since his younger years when
he had seen that pacifism wasn't a viable option. It is physical. A brutal test
of skill and heart. Power and speed. Could a boxer hit? Did he have a knockout
punch? Could he take a shot to the chin? Did he have good defensive skills? Was
he an attacker, or a counterpuncher? Did he have that ability to hit back when
he'd been hit and hurt? That was probably the most important factor, in
Blaine's mind. The ability to take a hard shot that would put most guys on the
canvas, out, and come back from that fighting even harder than you had been.
That was the mark of a champion. Boxing skills might take you a good distance,
but if you didn't have the ability to get back up when you had been put down,
you were not going to really make it.   

 All these thoughts are flashing through his mind
as he hits the bag, mixed with images of Renee. He tries to ignore those as he
hits, focusing on the bag. His mind settles on that image of a fighter getting
up off the canvas, and he realizes that is the image that he needs to get
himself through this. He must get up; though he has been hit hard he must rise.
It is what the real fighters do. Then he thinks of the bastard that had done
this to his girl, and he hits the bag harder: with all his force. This guy will
not get away with this. If the police don't find him, he will.   

 The bag is creaking and groaning on the rope it
hangs from as he circles and hits it. He is sweating all over, and he realizes
he has been hitting for a while, but he doesn't stop. 

 If it was that bastard, big guy in the bar he
would find him and bring him to justice in some form. He realizes he might be
fixated on the guy. It could have been anybody. Bars are full of creeps. It
doesn't take a genius to figure that out. He curses himself again for not
getting her out of there. 

 Stick. Move. Stick. Move. Sweat pouring down all
over now. He needs to talk to some of the folks in the bar. See if anybody had
seen anything. That tall girl. The bartender. The manager. Somebody must have
seen something.   

 The police are trained for that and should be on
top of it, ought to be asking all those people, but he doesn't trust the cops.
They have so much going on, and they are not motivated like he is. It won't
hurt just to ask around a bit, find out what had been happening after he and
Todd left last night. 

 The thumping sounds his fists make on the bag are
lessening in volume and intensity. He is running out of steam. He forces
himself to hit harder, move. Breath is coming out of his open mouth in huge,
tearing gasps. Hit harder, move.   

 Suddenly, Todd appears in the garage doorway with
a towel. "Hey, big guy," he says, "Why don't you call it a day?
You've been at it a while." Blaine just stands there breathing like a
locomotive. Todd helps him take the gloves off, hands him the towel. 

 They stand there for a few minutes, not saying
anything, as Blaine's breathing begins to return to normal. Todd puts his arm
on his sweaty shoulder. The towel is dangling from Blaine's hand. Finally, he
takes it and begins to wipe the sweat off.   

 "That cop sure was eyeballing us," he
says. 

 "Yeah," Todd replies. "Both of them.
I guess it's the job they have. They deal with scum day in, day out. Probably
gets real old after a while." 

 "They were looking at us," Blaine says.
"Oh, they were playing the good citizen, bringing the news, but they were looking
at us hard." 

 "They always look at the husband or wife or
boyfriend or whatever," Todd says, "because most of the time that's
who it is in these deals." 

 "Well I hope they don't waste a lot of time
and energy on that, because that will just take away from the effort to catch
this guy." 

 "Blonde was fairly good-looking," Todd
says. "I might not struggle too hard if she wanted to slap the cuffs on
me." 

 "Yeah," Blaine says automatically. He
could give a damn about the blonde or the handcuffs. He doesn't think Todd
really does either. It's just his way of keeping things moving, stopping them
from sliding completely into the sorrow of the day.   

 "C'mon, man," Todd says, tugging on his
shoulder, "Let's get you into a shower and sit and drink a cold beer.
Screw the coffee." 

 He decides to skip the shower for a while and
they sit at the table drinking icy brews from the fridge. He tells Todd about
all the doubts he had about the relationship and where it was going. The job
thing and the no daddy deal. It all seems so petty and unimportant now. They
would have worked those things out. They were nothing. He tells him how she
brought him the soup after the accident and was sitting right at the table
where Todd is sitting now. How all his resolve to stay his own man, have it his
own way, had faded into insignificance when she smiled at him in a certain fashion.
How they had exited the table and renewed their vows, such as they were. And
they were vows, even if private and mostly unspoken. 

"No," says Charlene Wilcox. She is
sitting on the hotel bed. He had hugged her long and hard when he came through
the door, though they had never been that close. She looks like a much beat up
version of Renee, a ridden-hard version. Her face is tougher, with less
expression. Her hair is close to the same. She wears more makeup. He had asked
her about viewing Renee. "You think you want to see her, take a last look,
but you really don't. That's not Renee lying on that slab. It doesn't even look
like her." She sighs, rubbing her eyes with one hand, wipes a tear off a
cheek, looks at him. "I'm going to do you a favor, even if you don't
realize it and spare you that. Let you remember her the way you knew her." 

 He can't argue too much with her, not now, in
these circumstances. Her grief may be more than his. It is hard, and somehow
ridiculous, to think about measuring these things. He should begin to try and
move down the long road towards acceptance anyway, but the desire to see Renee
has not lessened as the reality has begun to sink in. He couldn't help but ask. 

 She had left a message on the phone to let him
know where she would be staying and a good time to meet. He asks about a
funeral service. She is vague on the details. 

 "The service will be here, I guess,"
she says after a pause, "in Galveston. Her friends were mostly here, and
it will give them an opportunity to say good-by to her." Her eyes well up.
"I carried a policy on her from when she was a kid that ought to cover
things. It won't be fancy, but …" her voice trails off. 

 "I've got some money," Blaine says.
"I'll help on that." 

 "No, not necessary, Blaine. The policy will
cover it." 

 "I should have gotten her out of that
place," Blaine says. He is standing by the window now, looking out at the
Gulf. They are seven floors up at a hotel near where she had worked. He can see
the stretch of beach where she died.   

 "She was her own woman," her mother
says. "That was always true. If she didn't want to do something she wasn't
going to. Not for you or me or the king of England. It was something that drove
me crazy when she was a kid, but I learned to like it later." 

 "That's true," Blaine says. "When
she set her mind she was something to see." 

 She says, "I brought my scrapbook with all
her kid pictures. We didn't photograph everything like they do these days, but
I thought you might like to see them." 

 "You bet I would," says Blaine, and
they sit at the table next to the window, facing the Gulf, her moving her chair
next to his and explaining this and that as they flip through the pages of the
album. She doesn't smell like Renee at all, and he is glad for that. There are
pictures of Renee as a baby and little girl and all the way up to adulthood. She
is beautiful all the way through. Shots of her and a clown at her 8
^th
birthday party. Recitals at school. In uniform on the basketball team.
Graduation shots and a beautiful photo of her dressed up to go to the prom. Tears
start flowing down his face as they look through and he tries to hold them in
like a man, and after a moment just gives that up and balls like a baby. They
stop for a few minutes so he can regain his composure, then her mother starts.
It goes like that for a while. 

 She asks him about that last night, and he sees
no reason to hold back. He tells her how he and Renee had gotten back together
after the accident. He and his brother coming to the bar. The big guy.   

 He says, "I hope the cops find this guy. I'm
worried they think I have something to do with it." 

 "Oh?" she says. She looks at him then
away at the gulf. 

 "They always look at the boyfriend or
husband or whatever," he says. "I just hope it doesn't take too much
away from them looking in other directions. That's what bothers me." 

 "They asked me about you," she says.
"What I thought of you, whether you guys fought a lot, had you ever hit
her. That kind of stuff." 

 He had known that's how they were thinking, that
it was bound to be part of their job, but it still gives him a jolt.   

 "I loved Renee," he says. "I never
would have hurt her." 

 "I know that," she says and puts an arm
around his shoulder. "Even when you guys broke up she never had anything
bad to say about you. I could tell she thought it was a temporary thing, was
still in love with you." 

 "I thought I was over it, had myself
fooled," he says. He leans against her, looking out over the gulf again. Black
storm clouds hang on the horizon, but closer the sky is pure and blue. 

When he leaves he stops by the club and looks
around but nobody he knows is in there. They run it during the day, but usually
it is very quiet on weekdays. The bartender and cocktail waitress on duty are
strangers, and he looks for a minute at the carousel bar and walks on out the
front door.   

 He heads out to the beach to drive by where she
had died. The police have come and gone, gathered whatever evidence they had
gotten from the area, and the only real signs of the crime are a few tattered
remnants of yellow crime scene tape. 

 The scene is on the softer sand back in the
dunes, about 20 yards or so from the hard-packed sand that most people drive
on. It is not really a road. It is just beach down here. There is a ramp that
comes down from the seawall that stretches for seventeen miles or so along the
south end of the island. The island is famous for being the site of the
greatest natural disaster in American history, in terms of loss of life, the
1900 storm. Back in those days there were no weather buoys floating out there in
the gulf. Storms still broke upon the coastal areas with little or no warning. That
morning had dawned clear and unthreatening. People had an idea they were in for
some weather later that day but no real idea what they had headed their way.
There was no seawall then. Storms had hit in the area before but never caused
much damage. Galveston was the biggest, most prosperous city in the state.
Blaine looks out to sea. He knew that the storm had hit Cuba as a tropical
storm, much weaker. The US forecasters had predicted an "Atlantic
turn" with the storm curving up the coast and eventually dissipating.
Instead, it turned into the Gulf of Mexico, strengthened, and began buffeting
the coast. Damage to the telegraph lines kept word from reaching Galveston. At
around 5 p.m. on September 8, the island began receiving hurricane-force winds.
The highest point on the isle at that time was a bit less than 9 feet. The
winds were estimated to be some 145 mph at the height of the storm with a 15
foot storm surge, so the entire island was under water for a time. Some 3600
buildings were torn from their foundations and ravaged by the seas. Nobody
knows exactly how many people died during the hurricane. Estimates vary from as
low as 6000 to as high as 12000. Bodies were so numerous that they first tried
to bury them at sea then gave that up - they kept washing back to shore - and
made funeral pyres and burned them. 

 Blaine is walking along the crime scene. It looks
not much different than any other part of the beach. He can see shovel marks
where it appears like they had removed some sand, probably for blood analysis.
His jaw clenches. He thinks about the deaths during the storm, wonders how the
people handled it. Must have had that air of surreality that he still is
feeling. Probably became frighteningly ordinary after a while, he thinks. He
has always had a kinship with the sea, always felt that the planet was this
huge organism where the tiny buds of humanity appeared and flourished briefly,
then vanished back into the soil and sea to appear again, later, in some other
form. He wonders at how strangely uncomforting this thought now is.   

 The thing of it is that Renee is gone from his
life. Whether or not she exists now or later in some other form or fashion, she
is gone from him. That is the reality of it. And even if she is absorbed into
that greater stream of living creatures, broken down into elements that
eventually return, so what? Where will be the Renee he knew and still loves?
How can he find comfort in that? 

 Maybe there is no comfort to find. Maybe we just
fool ourselves with God, or the idea that everything in the universe is connected,
somehow, part of one thing. Maybe we're mostly cowards of some sort, unable to
face the fact that this is it: nothing after, nothing before. From what he has
seen people would do almost anything not to think about that. They want,
I
want
, he corrects silently, for life to have meaning and value, and will
twist and turn things till they find it. Maybe these are all meaningless abstractions.
It feels that way right now. He prays anyway.