The Spoiler Read online

  “Come on, I’m a businessman,” Brunner said. “Of course I want a profit on my buildings downtown. The renovations on my property are an investment. I’d be doing that no matter what. If it’s good for the town, if it builds things up, that’s what business is supposed to do.”

  There was another pause. Lofton didn’t quite understand; Brunner was talking not about Senator Kelley but about local business, about real estate development and downtown property.

  “Sure,” Brunner went on, “Tony Liuzza and I, we have our differences off the field, but it’s nothing; when you get down to it, we’re both still Democrats.” Brunner put a hand on Tony Liuzza’s shoulder. “Don’t let anybody fool you about that.… Come on, let’s enjoy the ball game.”

  As a way of ending the interview, Brunner shook hands with the reporters. He would have passed over Lofton if Tenace hadn’t intervened.

  “Don’t forget our new man. He’s a real reporter. From out of town,” Tenace said, trying to be funny. “He’s with the Dispatch now—showing the rest of these guys how it’s supposed to be done.”

  “Down from the big leagues, huh?” Brunner said as he shook Lofton’s hand. His grip was firm, and he held the handshake longer than most men, long enough to make you want to let go. The young woman was still watching, taking in this interchange.

  After the owners had left, Lofton listened to the reporters’ banter. He learned that Brunner and Liuzza were both active in the Democratic party. Brunner supported the current governor. Liuzza, on the other hand, had decided to support the liberal challenger in the upcoming Democratic primaries. Liuzza had political ambition as well as family money, and it was rumored that the combination would fetch him a good-size plum—maybe a secretaryship in the Massachusetts Department of Education—if his man won the governorship.

  “So there’s bad blood between Brunner and Liuzza?”

  Rhiner, the young Springfield reporter, shrugged.

  “No,” said Tenace. “No bad blood. Brunner and Liuzza are still buddies. Weren’t you listening?”

  “And what about that renovation project? What’s that about?”

  Nobody responded, at least not right away. The reporters were watching the game, and it took a while before Rhiner decided to talk.

  “Brunner owns some buildings downtown. He’s hoping for some federal seed money to help with renovation, but the state has to act first. Massachusetts has to cough up some funding; then the feds will follow suit. Senator Kelley heads up the committee that decides how much money, if any, the state’s going to give. So Brunner’s at his mercy.… And Kelley’s the one who talked Liuzza into switching sides in the governor’s race.”

  Lofton got the general idea. It was the usual tangled business of local politics, but when you got beneath the surface—ignored the committee meetings, the press conferences, the mounds of documents and legal abstracts—it was really pretty simple. One man controlled something the other wanted. In this case Kelley controlled the state renovation funds that Brunner needed, and the two men were on opposite sides of the political fence.

  “Why doesn’t Brunner just switch sides, too?” Lofton asked.

  “Who knows?” the reporter said, cocking his shoulders and smirking, the same wise-guy look Lofton had seen a hundred times, on a hundred different reporters, and even once or twice in the mirror.

  As the game wore on, most of the other reporters cleared out, mumbling that they’d gotten their story, if you wanted to call it that, and there was no sense in hanging around any longer tonight, no use in milking a cow that had been dead as long as the Redwings, the sorry birds. The owners and the dark-haired woman stuck the game out together down below in the first base stands. A curious triangle, Lofton thought; he couldn’t quite figure them out. Tenace noticed him watching.

  “The woman’s name is Regina Amanti. She’s Tony Liuzza’s cousin,” the scorer said, “and Brunner, he’s giving her a little piece of pork on the side.”

  When neither Lofton nor Rhiner responded, Tenace repeated himself and nudged Lofton, just to be sure, it seemed, that the reporter had caught his meaning. When Tenace still got no response, he shook his head sadly. “You guys are really something, you know that,” he said, then called down to one of the hawkers to bring him something to eat.

  Since the day he’d met Jack Brunner and Tony Liuzza, Lofton had been back to the field often. The reporters in the box knew him. They nodded to him, in the way that reporters did, quick and noncommittal, giving him a fast up-and-down, sizing him up—as if he were a woman, or an athlete on an opposing squad—then turning their attention back to the game. He knew they still regarded him as an outsider. He had not gone through the ritual with them: getting drunk; talking the gossip you could not print; bitching about local editors; complimenting their work.

  He saw one of his own recent pieces on a folded page of the Dispatch, on the metal chair next to the Springfield reporter. If he’d wanted to, he could have recited the piece out loud.

  EVEN DEAD MUST PAY

  For more than three hours yesterday the corpse of a 48-year-old Hispanic woman sat slumped over a table in a Ward 3 housing project while neighbors and a county examiner tried to hire an undertaker.

  In the course of writing the story, he had wandered door to door with the dead woman’s sister-in-law. He’d watched from the curb while she tried to collect money from neighbors and friends to bury her brother’s wife. She collected the money in twenty-four hours and gave it to the mortician, who, though he would not speak to Lofton, told the woman he would not bury welfare people anymore, not without cash up front. That whole time, and now as well, reliving the memory, Lofton thought of the dead woman slumped over the kitchen table. Her image disturbed him; he could not get it out of his mind.

  He had told the reporters here that he was a correspondent for the Globe and that he was only doing features for the local papers. In fact, he had contacted Steve Warner, an old college friend who now worked the city desk at the Boston paper.

  “How’s your new wife?” Warner had asked over the telephone. Lofton had not talked to Warner for some time, since before his own second marriage, but news of weddings—like news of births and deaths—had a way of traveling.

  “Maureen? She’s fine.”

  “Where are you two staying?”

  “The cemetery,” Lofton said. It took a second for Warner to laugh. Then there was a hesitation, Warner waiting for the real answer. Lofton told him Maureen was still in Colorado; she would be here soon. He asked if the Globe would be interested in a story about Holyoke, a color piece. Warner was encouraging but vague. When Lofton called again, Warner was not at his desk. Lofton guessed the problem was that he’d been living too far west, out of range. He was not ready, at least not yet, to move into the city and compete with the Boston hacks on their own turf.

  “Working on another special for the Globe?” Tenace asked the question from the side of his mouth. He wore an idiot grin, but Lofton could tell he meant no harm by what he said. Rhiner, the Springfield reporter, let out a brief, unconcealed laugh.

  When the game resumed, the regulars fell back into complaining, a slow slur of complaints muttered between pitches and dropped balls. Tenace complained he was not getting paid enough for scoring. The games went on too long, too fucking long. The Springfield reporter said the new owners weren’t handling the press right. They weren’t baseball men; they didn’t understand much of anything. They’d bought the team so they could showboat to their friends. The concessioners and the hawkers, who sat in the press box during their breaks, complained the most bitterly. The crowds were rotten, and the new owners had cut their commissions. Things were better, they said, before the old owner sold out to Brunner and Liuzza. And the team—no one could remember one this bad.

  “Lover girl’s here again. She was asking for you a little while ago,” Tenace said, pointing a fat finger at Lofton.

  “Who?”

  “The Amanti whore, over there.” Tenace nod
ded in the direction of the first base stands, where Amanti and Brunner always sat, behind the dugout of the opposing club. “Yeah, she sent a kid over. Said she wanted to talk to the guy from the Globe. The one who did all the specials.” Tenace smiled.

  The Springfield reporter laughed again, harder this time. Lofton paused at the broken door, propped full open with Tenace’s cooler.

  “What’s the reliever’s name?”

  Tenace told him, and Lofton left. He headed toward the top of the stands. He was irritated with Tenace, or maybe with himself. Sometimes he did not like being laughed at. But the Springfield reporter, Rhiner, was still young, baby-faced. Maybe when he looked at Lofton, he knew he was looking at himself in fifteen years. Lofton lit a cigarette, drawing on it fiercely now, and smoked it all the way down.

  Lofton sat high in the bleachers, in a place where he could study both the field and the Amanti woman. Though Tenace had said she was looking for him, Amanti hadn’t approached him, at least not yet. She had walked up to the concession once, then stood around as if waiting, but Lofton had stayed in his seat. He was not quite sure he believed Tenace; the scorer liked to play games. Besides, if she really had something to tell him, it would be best to let her make the first move. Meanwhile, he made notes, questions he should ask Sparks, obvious stuff he did not even need to think about. The idea of a more wide-ranging story, something that would capture the flavor of the team and the town, intrigued him.

  As he sat, he jotted down names. Brunner. Liuzza. Amanti. Tenace. He wrote the names as they came to him, trying to visualize the faces, marking down bits and scraps of their histories, whatever he knew. It was an old journalist’s habit, partly, but it was something he had done as a child, too, writing down the names of his teachers, of girls in the neighborhood, of major league ballplayers, imagining their faces, their lives. The names, the people would come alive in his dreams, the faces changing, until by the time he woke up the faces no longer went with the names, and he didn’t know whom he had been dreaming about. The same type of thing still happened to him sometimes. The street corner he stood on would suddenly look, except for some small, mysterious difference, like every other corner. He would not know where he was or whom he was going to see. A second later everything would occur to him at once, a tangle of names, of alleyways, in which he was immediately lost.

  He added another name to his list. Dick Golden. Earlier that day he had talked to Golden, the Redwings’ general manager. Golden had pitched with the California Blues for a season, then been drafted by the army. It had happened during the Vietnam War, and Golden had refused to go. Lofton remembered the San Jose Star carrying stories on the business. It wasn’t a matter of principle, Golden had said. He didn’t have an opinion on the war either way; he simply wanted to play ball. Lofton remembered a follow-up story, a few years later, about Golden’s handicapped wife. Golden had aged since the time of the newspaper photos. The aging was surprising, distressing. Lofton remembered admiring Golden, rooting for him. Now, though the man was a few years younger than Lofton, he looked older. Though he still carried the same good looks, there was a hardness in his face, a hardness in his eyes—a gray look that was almost empty at times, as if he looked at you from someplace far away, or maybe did not even see you at all. Only occasionally, and then only for brief instants, could you catch a glimpse of the talented, innocent kid Golden had once been.

  “I keep track of the paperwork, chase the kids off when they try to sneak in,” Golden had said as they stood together during practice, watching the Redwings shag balls under the afternoon sun.

  “Any good prospects?”

  Golden scanned the field, as if evaluating the players. “Some of the California kids look pretty good,” Golden said.

  Lofton nodded. “Which ones?” Golden himself had gone straight from college ball to the majors. Lofton remembered his glamorous rookie year: how it had culminated, like a television movie, in Golden’s marriage to a beautiful young woman who had admired him all summer from the third base bleachers. What he really wanted to ask, of course, was how Golden felt. Was he bitter? He held off asking, partly out of respect, but partly because of Golden’s reputation for moodiness, his tendency to lose his temper suddenly and without warning.

  “Tim Carpenter, if a place clears for him. Sparks, maybe. His arm looks good, sometimes,” Golden said.

  Because the West Coast papers had made a fuss over his resisting the draft—one labeled him the “California Dodger”—Golden and his wife headed for Canada. But the papers soon forgot; Golden’s name dropped from the headlines. So Golden did his stint in obscurity, pitching semipro for the Alberta Stars, working part-time as a sportswriter, copying scores from the wire services. By the time Jimmy Carter had granted amnesty to draft resisters, Golden’s pitching arm was gone, his wife confined to a wheelchair—multiple sclerosis—and the rookie bonus spent. After Golden failed at a comeback, Cowboy told him about the Holyoke job. Now he counted the gate for Brunner and filed scouting reports to California.

  “The players, they excited about being in the Blues’ organization?” Lofton asked.

  “Of course they’re excited. They’d be foolish to be otherwise.” Golden bent over, picked up some trash, and pitched it into a can. He walked away from Lofton, into the clubhouse.

  Though the score did not change, and the Redwings were not threatening, the fans let out a cheer. Batting now, with two outs in the sixth, was Randy Gutierrez, the Nicaraguan shortstop whose wife and kids were waiting back in Managua until Randy had something firm with the Blues’ organization. Gutierrez was popular with the local fans, particularly the Puerto Ricans. Good field, no hit—that was the line on Gutierrez. Unless he started hitting soon, Gutierrez might find himself back in Managua.

  Gutierrez made the sign of the cross before stepping into the batter’s box. He took a called strike, then backed away from the plate.

  Lofton had assumed until a few days ago that Gutierrez’s slump was just a slump. Maybe there was too much pressure on him to make the big leagues; maybe he felt too much uncertainty about his family back in Managua. Tenace, however, had another explanation. Gutierrez had gotten carried away in Holyoke. He spent his spare time getting coked up with the ballpark honeys. His seven hundred dollars a month—a double leaguer’s salary—disappeared, Tenace said, quicker than a sneeze in the air, so now Gutierrez was in debt, playing worse and worse, digging himself one deep hole.

  Gutierrez took another strike, moving his bat this time but coming around too late, after the pitch had hit the catcher’s leather. Lofton hoped there weren’t any Blues scouts in the stands.

  Gutierrez’s decline was a story he thought he could sell if he played the angles right, maybe to the Globe or a sports magazine, for more money than the Dispatch paid. He would have to interview him, get some quotes about the slump, label him a hot Blues prospect—true, in a way—and rely on Tenace’s insinuations to get drugs and women into the story. Then, at the end, a thin ray of hope, maybe the religious angle, the sign of the cross.

  Gutierrez stepped up to the plate and watched a pitch float over the outside corner. Ball one. His partisans yelled encouragement, a smattering of Spanish and English. He stepped out of the box, surveyed the stands behind the first base side—where Amanti and Brunner sat—and then crossed himself again.

  The Glens Falls pitcher, a bullish man with a huge chaw of tobacco in one cheek, stepped off the mound, stared down Gutierrez, then spat in the infield dirt.

  The pitcher went to his delivery. Gutierrez took a wide-sweeping swing at a sucker pitch. Strike three. A small, fat man cursed in Spanish and kicked at the bleachers.

  I could write him up, Lofton thought, and Randy Gutierrez, whose career is going nowhere, probably would never know. Speaks English, but with an accent thick as mangoes are sweet, and sure as hell can’t read it. But focusing on Gutierrez would be too narrow; the story would be trashy. He wanted something better.

  From where he sat, Lofton could
see the sweep of the field, the iridescent blue and black of the evening sky beyond the low, shattered skyline of Holyoke. He looked from the Amanti woman away to the recreational fields beyond. Another game, between two local American Legion teams, was being played in a field nearby. Often they received better coverage in the Holyoke paper than the Redwings.

  MacKenzie Field, where the Redwings played, was next to Holyoke High, part of the city’s recreation department. A high school track ran through the outfield. The outfielders complained about it. They had to field skidding balls off the crushed cinder. Rather than dive to catch a low liner, the fielders often let it fall in for a hit.

  He made a few notes, but there was no way he could get it down, no way he could separate the cars moping along the dirty streets from the men jabbering in Spanish in the stands behind him from the players who struggled on the sparse, shabbily tended turf. No way he could separate himself from Tenace, from the bitter hard-core fans.

  He went back to studying Amanti. She had a shadowy presence and did not seem quite real. Tony Liuzza, the younger of the two owners, the lawyer, was not at the park today. He seldom was except on promotion nights. Amanti sat close to the other man, Jack Brunner, but not so close as to touch him. There was a small space on the gray bench between the two. Occasionally Brunner leaned forward, touching her on the knee and calling attention to something on the field. She would respond, nodding her head as if she did not quite hear him. She had the same preoccupied look while watching the action.

  The crowd started to thin. The Glens Falls team, an aggressive Chicago franchise, hit the ball hard, stealing bases and making Holyoke look, if possible, worse than they were. Lofton watched Coach Barker. The man had lost his fatherly mood. He stormed onto the field, a showman’s gesture, and waved the reliever off with his hand. He called over to the first baseman. To that player’s surprise, Coach Barker handed him the ball, pointed to the mound, and went over to play first base himself. A good move, thought Lofton. The game was lost. Might as well entertain the fans.