I waited. She couldn’t have picked a more desolate spot. Abandoned cars, tires, not even a street light within four blocks. Avondale. Now a ghetto. A bar two blocks away and even that was abandoned. Finally, it wasn’t the silver Jaguar X12 that pulled up, and this was understandable. In fact the car was pretty beat up, whatever it was. But all right.
She parked behind me. I watched her get out, her face completely covered with a black and red shawl. She halted when she noticed me staring so I quickly turned my head, which prompted her to move in and then enter the back seat in one athletic leap. She fairly bolted in. I had the rearview mirror turned down as she instructed. I felt her eyes watching me but the funny thing was, I didn’t feel Stephanie’s eyes. They were someone else’s eyes, also understandable because Stephanie WAS someone else.
Nothing was happening.
I was reluctant to speak; wrong choice of words might take her away, given how skittish she had become.
“Stephanie?” I said.
Still nothing. I started the car and slowly drove around the parking lot as if I were just trying to relax the two of us and casually passed by her car, about 30 feet away – but even from that distance and even in the dark it was unmistakable. Those were Kentucky license plates…
* * *
The Reds were doing all right and Dad saw that as a good sign. I stayed with him for a week and he never asked me what had happened. This thing about RANDOMNESS was more Dad’s than Beckett’s. Dad didn’t ask questions. He expected anything to happen. I had been stabbed twice in the chest when I turned around. I lunged to intercept the knife but Sonja managed to get in two stabs amid a flurry of strikes. She was saying all sorts of things but I couldn’t make out the language. Something about seeing people as they really were INSIDE, and that now it was my turn. She was very pissed off. So was I. Not at her coming at me with that knife and trying to cut the life out of me as much as having this person do all this, and consumed by all this, this hatred, for NO REASON – that I could think of. There probably were people who had a legitimate right to go after me with a knife and I would have been horrified all right, but not ticked off.
But this was annoying. That a STRANGER should have it in for you like this.
Hatred ought to be something you EARNED. Deserved. Just like love.
The randomness was what ticked me off.
But even randomness wasn’t really random. It was systemized according to the law of averages, which had an order all its own. The more people you saw the more likely you were to run into one of every kind, and I had finally found my sickie, a woman who singled me out as her cause, her struggle, her kampf. How many girls had I interviewed for telephone solicitor? Hundreds. Among them came a Stephanie, and a Sonja. Law of averages.
After those couple of stabs – and I didn’t know how seriously they had penetrated – we grappled until I overcame her and shoved her out of the car. She still held the knife. I punched her in the mouth, which prompted her to let go of the weapon. Then I had her by the neck and began tightening my grip. She managed to say: “Me too? Just like New York?”
So I let go.
“That bullpen,” Dad said in admiration.
There were times when I could lose myself in a game and find myself living and dying with each ball and strike. But other times I’d find myself riveted to Dad’s radio and then realize that five innings had gone by without my noticing. Two people who should have paid a price, gotten the CHAIR, the guy who plotted Lou’s death, and Sonja, the girl who had ruined Stephanie – both were alive and well and living in Cincinnati, including the wife-beating neighbor upstairs and all the other wife-beaters and child molesters. I couldn’t figure it out. There was no getting at them. The guy who had killed Lou had committed the perfect crime because he had committed no crime, technically. Sonja? Stephanie would never testify against her and I was helpless to bring her in on account of that thing in New York, which would bring me in as well, if I were on the books. I probably was. Maybe not. I just didn’t know.
But it just didn’t make sense, how things worked out. I wondered how many other people had done all sorts of things and were never punished and HELL, that included me! Was that my punishment, to know that among us walked evil – evil that was never recompensed? You were brought up to believe that good merits good and evil merits evil and you knew more people were a shade off, when it came to the good. But you never imagined that BLOODSHED, for example, went unpunished. Made you think. Made you wonder about what was around you. What secrets people had.
To say that life was unfair, well, that was trite, of course, but we were beyond that, into something much darker, more than randomness, outright chaos IF IN THE EYES OF JUSTICE THERE WAS NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL. Here on earth, you mean, the good perish, evil prevails, and to top it all off, there may not even be an afterlife! Then what? Then those bumper stickers are correct: Life sucks and then you die.
Dad sat there in the big cushy chair glancing over his scorecard. The game was over. Always a letdown. There was comfort during the game. Kept you busy, even if you were diverted. Kept you serene knowing that something important was happening that wasn’t really important. Win or lose he never said a word after the game. Took a shot of cognac and went straight to bed.
“Good night,” he said.
“Good night, Dad.”
Did he know that I’d been stabbed? Did he know I was his son? Probably not. I arrived straight from the hospital. He saw me. Made me a cup of tea. I often wondered if he knew I was his son. Not that I was complaining. It was better this way. I just wondered.
The injury hurt after the second day, when the sedation wore off. I felt myself burning up inside.
If I knew Sonja, she’d write it off as an accident – and maybe she was right.
Yeah. Everything was an accident. Really it was.