Byron's Lane Read online

  The sound of the telephone ringing inside his house interrupted us. Adams braced the sides of his chair, then changed his mind and decreed, “Let the machine get it.” After the ringing stopped, he pressed forward, his arms resting on the end of the table. He slid to the edge of his chair. His brown eyes danced; he was busy building his answer.

  “Remember that first spring we lived in Maplewood, when we had Little League tryouts? It was late March, a cold day—full of drizzle, like the second half of March always seemed to be in Ohio. Too wet to play on the baseball fields. Remember? My parents dropped us off at the edge of the shopping center parking lot.”

  I closed my eyes as Adams spoke and felt the chill he described, heard the anxious, hushed voices of two hundred boys whispering to each other, the sharp commands of two dozen men, the crack of wooden bats hitting balls, the sound balls make when they’re speared by leather baseball gloves on cold days. I wondered why the people who owned the shopping center built that parking lot so big. It was never more than half filled, even during Christmas season. The outer edge of the lake of black patched asphalt was so distant from the lights of the stores that it became a destination point for loitering kids who Maplewood’s vigilant adults and small police force were sure were up to no good.

  The memory Adams had recreated caused me to break into a sweat. “I remember. Somebody’s father called your number. It was written in black Magic Marker on a piece of white paper attached with safety pins to the back of your sweatshirt. He hit two ground balls to you.”

  The balls were rubber-coated, because Maplewood

  Little League’s Founding Fathers didn’t want to scuff the leather-covered baseballs on the parking lot asphalt. The rubber-coated hardball came at you quickly, like a golf ball thrown against a brick wall. It bounced almost as wildly. After you caught the ball or knocked it down, you threw it to somebody’s father who pretended he was playing first base.

  Adams took up the story again: “Then you were pushed to another line and hit a couple of fly balls. You threw five pitches to a catcher from a makeshift pitcher’s mound on the grass next to the parking lot. Finally, you got three swings at pitches from some adult who couldn’t throw the ball over a plastic home plate. God help you if you didn’t swing at every one of his pitches.”

  I closed my eyes and recalled the groans from the grown-ups and how louder they got with every bad pitch you didn’t swing at. Men with clipboards were constantly evaluating us. They stood in clumps of two and three watching us, talking to each other in hushed tones after every ball was caught, missed, tossed, or hit. They took notes about our performance that none of us ever saw, with the exception of James Roan, a provisional member of our clique who lived on Keats Drive. Roan somehow had access to everything we were never supposed to see: everyone’s permanent record at school, everybody’s IQ and SAT scores, Playboy magazines, and boxes full of paperback crime novels that featured buxom women in provocative poses on their laminated covers.

  Roan even knew all our teachers’ first names. But his greatest accomplishment was when he uncovered proof in seventh grade that we were divided into class sections based on how smart the teachers, the principal, and school administrators determined we were. Breech, Adams, and I were in 7B, a class full of kids who Roan claimed had higher IQs than the kids in 7A. Roan was in 7D. He couldn’t dribble a basketball to save his life, but his investigative abilities earned him a permanent place on our crew’s periphery.

  After a thoughtful pause, Adams continued: “Those Little League tryouts were the first time I was ever in a pressure-packed situation. In Maplewood, a boy’s social standing during his entire tenure at school was likely determined during those fifteen minutes on that shopping center parking lot. I used to seek out situations like that. I was addicted to the adrenalin. Those moments build and measure your character. Character is the essential ingredient in good, effective leadership.”

  I always thought character-building had more to do with how we handled the fallout from the bad decisions we made and jaw-dropping disappointment. Over the years, we’ve have several friendly arguments about that.

  Adams had a good baseball tryout that Saturday morning. He became a steady, serviceable member of our Little League team, Martin’s Amoco Oil Dodgers. He moved on to Babe Ruth League and the high school baseball team. I spent two years on the Dodgers’ bench and never tried out for anything athletic again.

  Without stopping to catch his breath, Adams continued: “There’s another one, Tom—the summer between sixth and seventh grade. I had an eye exam as soon as school was out that June. I flunked it and was prescribed those damn glasses.” He spoke as if the eye exam should have been as important to me as it was to him.

  “I hated wearing glasses, but couldn’t see much more than twenty feet in front of me without them. Remember Pamela Drake and how the guys would walk her around to the back of Cambridge Elementary School and she’d French-kiss them?”

  I nodded and smiled. Pamela Drake was such a hot topic of discussion that summer that mere mention of her name decades later caused me to recall everything about her, down to the mole on her left foot, behind her big toe.

  “Well, it took me until mid-August to create the right situation to maneuver her back behind the school. She and I were sitting on the steps in front of one of the school’s back doors. After fifteen minutes, I asked if I could kiss her.” Adams paused, took a drink of beer, and continued his story. “She looked at me for a long time. Then she shook her head and said, ‘No, I don’t think so. You’re not my type.’ I was mortified. Humiliated! I figured it was the glasses. I was chewing three sticks of Dentyne, so it couldn’t have been bad breath. She had kissed all the guys on the sixth-grade basketball team except me by then. So I lost the glasses for five years.”

  Adams shook his head. “It probably cost me the centerfielder’s job on the baseball team, a starting spot on the basketball team, maybe two-tenths of a point on my GPA—until I could afford contact lenses midway through our senior year. But nobody’s turned me down for a kiss since.”

  I couldn’t tell if Adams was bragging, or making a joke.

  “The Pamela Drake experience taught me two lessons, Tom. The ability to execute a plan with style and panache is more important than having developed a good one in the first place. And it taught me to not ask for permission, but for forgiveness.”

  Adams flashed me one of his trademark smiles. I was beginning to feel better. Pamela Drake had French-kissed me behind Cambridge Elementary School twice that summer.

  “How about a pizza?” Adams rose from his chair. He was already in his kitchen before I could respond.

  Adams never did pass the ball back to me. I never had a chance that Thursday to talk about my life-shaping Maplewood experiences. Honestly, I was more relieved than offended. It would have taken me a few more drinks to return to places I’m not sure I wanted to go. Still, I was surprised he hadn’t mentioned what would surely have been near the top of my list: the death of Victor Pavletich.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  As I followed Adams into the kitchen his doorbell rang. He had just opened the freezer door when it happened. The sound stopped him mid-task; it seemed to startle him. He took too much time to process how he ought to respond.

  After the bell rang a second time, he gathered himself, frozen sausage-and-pepperoni pizza in hand, and walked quickly toward his front door, pausing along the way to check his appearance in a mirror that hung in the hallway. I don’t think he noticed that his reflection was carrying a pizza. He ran his fingers through his hair and straightened his Polo shirt.

  I followed him, as I had when Breech had knocked on the front door a few hours earlier. But this time I didn’t go as far. I stopped at a place where the hallway gave way to the foyer, a part of the house remarkable for its shiny gray marble floor and wrought-iron chandelier that hung precariously from an open second-floor ceiling.

  Adams w
as clutching the doorknob with one hand and dangling the pizza in the other. His body language indicated that the person who had rung the doorbell, a woman it turned out, was capable of draining all the self-confidence he had just preened for me. I presumed that her unannounced visit wasn’t entirely unexpected, given Adams’s stop in front of the mirror.

  As he opened the door, he blocked my view. I could only see her outer edges: her silky-soft dark-blond hair, her arms around Adams as she hugged him, the tips of her shoulders over which her hair slightly draped, the outline of a grass-green summer dress. She fit Adams perfectly. The top of her head nudged neatly under his chin. A white plastic bag dangled from her clasped hands as she hugged him.

  Her arms dropped to his side an awkward instant before he relinquished his embrace. He finally stepped aside, allowing me my first good look at her. The late afternoon sunlight that followed the woman into the foyer gave her an angelic presence. I recognized her. We’d been introduced when I last visited Adams in Minnesota three years earlier. She was his next-door neighbor, Christina Peterson. She lived in the house south of his, on the other side of a thick stand of oak and aspen trees that separated their parallel driveways.

  What I had just witnessed persuaded me that this woman had become something more than a neighbor since I had last seen her. I wasn’t positive. Never during the three years since I’d met her had Adams mentioned her name. And she was not the type of woman I had come to associate with him since his divorce from Kathy twenty years ago. As Adams grew older, his women got younger. Christina Peterson was somewhere near our age. Her beauty was natural, not contrived or owed to youth. She had tawny soft-looking skin that made her eyes the freshest shades of brown and green. Her appearance exuded confidence.

  “Michigan peaches,” she said, holding the plastic bag up as she stepped back from him. “You’ll like them.”

  Her voice had a cotton-ball purity to it, soft and absorbent.

  “Thanks,” Adams mumbled. Then he quietly asked her, “What do I owe you?”

  His face was long and his voice sad—out of sorts with the words he spoke. His back was against the wall and he was being consumed by it, becoming ever smaller in her presence.

  “You owe me nothing,” she answered. She stared at him for a moment. Her expression suggested her gift wasn’t really peaches.

  Recovering some of his swagger, Adams gently pulled Christina through the doorway and closed the door behind her. “I want to introduce you to the man who’s been staring at you from the hallway. This is Tom Walker. Tom, this is Christina Peterson, my friend and neighbor.”

  His eyes never left her as he made the introduction.

  My shoes clicked too loudly on the marble floor as I approached her. Christina had stepped in only as far as the door needed to swing shut.

  “We’ve met before,” she said, extending her hand. “It was a few years ago—at one of Jonathan’s parties.”

  “Yes, I remember,” I answered as I approached her, eager to see her up close.

  “It seems Mr. Adams is the only one here who doesn’t,” she said. We smiled at each other and shook hands. By now, Adams had wedged himself between the closed front door and Christina, blocking her escape. As she spoke, she gently grabbed his chin, forcing him to make eye contact with her like a mother admonishing her six-year-old. “How are you ever going to grow up to be president of the United States if you can’t recall who you’ve introduced to whom?”

  Her gestures signaled that she felt comfortable around Adams. It was apparent that she was hardly in awe of him, like the other women who moved in and out of his life. By every indication, she seemed to be at least his equal.

  Adams was still holding the frozen pizza. A wet spot on the back of Christina’s summer dress, where he had held her in his embrace, indicated the pizza was in the process of defrosting.

  “Would you like to stay for dinner?” he asked, his face naturally framing a familiar boyish grin. That look had helped successfully clear a path through every difficult situation I ever had the privilege of watching him navigate. He held the pizza up for her to see. Moving the melting frozen pizza from one hand to the other, he wiped his wet palm on his jeans.

  Christina gave the invitation more thought than it deserved. I had a front row seat at a performance where both actors, the only people on stage, seemed to have forgotten their lines.

  “Sorry, I can’t tonight, Jonathan. Richard is here this weekend. He’s making dinner at my house for six of our—” She corrected herself. “Six of his friends. I have to get back. I wanted you to have these. I know how much you like peaches.” She passed the plastic bag to Adams’s free hand.

  Adams looked like he had just walked out of a grocery store, frozen pizza in one hand, fresh produce in the other. He glanced around nervously for a place to put them. He set them on the nearby deacon’s bench, on top of my discarded jacket. Then he looked up at Christina, offering her a shrug of his shoulders.

  “Well, I’m sorry. You’ll be missed at dinner. But that means more for us, Tom.” He smiled and brushed a wayward strand of blond hair behind her ear.

  Christina gave Adams a frown that was probably meant for only him to see. Then she stepped beside him and reached for my hand. “I’ve really got to go. It’s nice to see you again, Tom. Make sure you and Jonathan come over to my house Saturday night for a drink or two, or five or six. You have it on your calendar, don’t you, Jonathan?”

  As she spoke, she gently touched his arms just below his shoulders—a gesture of endearment she apparently felt to be inappropriate just as quickly as she had made it. Christina’s hands dropped to her side and she stepped back.

  “We’ll come to your party as long as Richard’s not invited,” Adams answered. His impish smile never left his face.

  Christina smiled back, slipped past him, and was halfway down the driveway before Adams moved. Her soft good-bye and a gentle brush of his cheek with the back of her open hand hung behind her in the air for just a second, then left his house through his wide open red door and chased her home.

  *

  I pulled a fresh beer from the refrigerator on my way to the back deck. Adams dallied behind me—first in the hallway and then in the kitchen. Alone again, I moved my chair far enough away from the table to allow a full view of Adams’s manicured lawn from beneath the bottom of the top porch railing. Dabs of dusty blue in the clouds were turning pink and rose-colored as the sun crawled closer to the horizon. Adams joined me after more time than it should have taken him to stow Christina’s peaches and put the pizza in the oven. He resumed his post at the deck railing and stared out over his field of tall prairie grass. Wind brushed the tasseled tops of the long grass. The breeze split into several gentle gusts that chased each other back and forth across the field. I rose from my chair and took a seat next to him on the railing.

  “Christina doesn’t know about Monday night, does she?”

  Adams ignored my question. That wasn’t important. Based on what I had just observed I was beginning to think that maybe Christina Peterson could fix him.

  His face firmly focused on his prairie, he started to share parts of himself again. The phone inside rang once more, but Adams had no intention of dashing inside to answer it.

  “I’m lonely as hell, Tom. I’m surrounded by nice things and beautiful people. But I get no pleasure from the nice things around me and I’m incapable of maintaining a two-way relationship with the beautiful people. Everything I ever been associated with except you has had a beginning, middle, and end.”

  Adams craned his neck. He closed his eyes as though replaying a tape in his head of what he had just said.

  “I sound depressed, don’t I? These are the classic symptoms of depression, aren’t they?” He kept his eyes shut while he spoke, like someone trying to absorb pain. But the tone of his voice was unemotional, clinical. The way he had just expressed himself was less a cry for help than a stru
ggle to diagnose his state of mind.

  I had to find out why he hadn’t taken advantage of what Christina seemed so willing to offer. But before I had an opportunity to launch my investigation, we were interrupted.

  A Minnesota Highway Patrol officer appeared at the foot of the steps of Adams’s deck. The officer’s presence startled us. Seeing someone with a silver badge on his chest, a handgun holstered around his waist, usually signals that something on the other side of ordinary has either happened or is about to. I looked out at the field and prepared to duck.

  Adams recovered before I did and walked across the deck to speak to the officer. Adams didn’t introduce us, but the state patrol officer acknowledged me with a slight nod of his hat-covered head, his left hand touching its brim in a cowboy way. The officer’s eyes drifted from me to the yellow tape above the patio door and out to the place in the field where a bullet had been fired three days prior.

  Their conversation was a short one, conducted in hushed voices and ending with a handshake. I couldn’t hear any of it from where I was. After the police officer politely said good-bye, he pivoted, as if Adams had commanded him to do an about-face. He walked down the steps and disappeared around the corner of the house.

  Adams returned to his seat at the patio table. I followed him there and sat down in the chair opposite his. I stared at him expectantly.

  “Fingerprints on the rifle didn’t match anything in their database. Serial numbers had been filed off. So I guess the kid had a stolen firearm,” Adams said, without looking at me. He seemed bothered by this latest news.

  “They want to do a full investigation. They’re sure there’s a terrorist connection and they’re worried about gun-toting Muslims riding around town in late-model Toyota pickup trucks.” He was trying hard to inject humor into his update. “We’ve scheduled a meeting for Monday morning at the police station in Brookfield. The FBI will be there. They’re the ones driving the theory about an al Qaeda connection. Federal law enforcement agencies see terrorists everywhere these days.” Adams shook his head wearily. “At the meeting we’ll decide where this goes next.”