Solomon versus Lord

Seventeen
STEALING HOME

Three steps off third base, Steve bounced on his toes, knees flexed, arms relaxed. A wet fog had settled over the field, and he could barely see home plate.

“Steal home,” a sweet, seductive voice whispered.

He stayed put. “Who said that?”

The pitcher threw a sizzling fastball that vanished into the mist. “Stee-rike!” an invisible umpire called out.

“Steal home for me,” the seductive voice murmured.

Steve turned and squinted through the fog, and there she was. The third base coach. Victoria Lord, and she was not wearing pants! Nothing but skin between her University of Miami jersey and her high-heeled, cork-soled sandals with orange and green straps.

“You're wild and reckless,” she said. “That's what I love about you.”

“You do?” He was vaguely aware he was dreaming.

Another pitch disappeared into the mist. “Stee-rike two!”

“Please, Steve. Please steal home.” A Siren of the base paths.

Steve shivered. It was growing colder, the moisture soaking through his uniform. The pitcher started his windup, and Steve took off. Through the thickening fog, he saw it all unfold in slow motion.

A soft floating pitch.

The catcher turning to shield the plate. That tub of guts, Zinkavich!

The umpire tearing off his mask. Mr. Judgmental himself. His father! Steve slid headfirst, one hand darting beneath Zinkavich's pudgy legs, just as the mitt came down hard, crashing against his temple with a sound of a bowling ball hitting the pins. Pain flared in his skull.

“Out!” Herbert Solomon yelled. “You'll never be the ballplayer ah was, you pantywaist.”

“Uncle Steve!” Bobby cried out from somewhere.

“The boy's mine!” Zinkavich thundered. “The boy's mine now!”

“Uncle Steve!” Bobby cried again.

The throbbing in his head grew worse, and now Steve felt a great weight pressing down on his chest.

“Uncle Steve!”

He was coming out of the fog.

Back in his bedroom, but something was wrong. Bobby was on top of him, pushing him into the mattress, clutching at him. Crying, trembling, shouting. “Uncle Steve! Somebody's here!”

“Who? Where?” Steve was wide-awake. Heart racing.

“Outside my window. Looking in!”

“A dream, Bobby. Just a dream.”

“No! Someone's here!”

Steve looked at the digital clock on the nightstand: 4:17.

“Don't let them take me,” Bobby said.

“No one's taking you. Ever.”

Steve reached under the bed, grabbed a metal baseball bat, told Bobby to stay there. Wearing only his Jockeys, he padded to the boy's bedroom. Windows closed, bedsheets tangled. He looked out the window. Nothing but the blackness of the yard. He went into the kitchen, took a flashlight from a drawer, and unlocked the door. Walking barefoot into the yard, the flashlight in one hand, the bat in the other, he looked around. Still nothing.

From a neighbor's yard, he heard the clack-clack of a woodpecker hammering a bottlebrush tree. He inhaled the smells of moist earth and jasmine. And something else…

Cigarette smoke. Or was it? The smell came and left.

He looked under Bobby's window. No footprints, no cigarette butts.

The poor kid. Bobby couldn't separate reality from his nightmares. But then, Steve wondered, could he?

Two hours later, the sun was just coming up; Bobby was sleeping soundly; and Steve was in the kitchen, slicing a juicy papaya, scooping out the seeds. He left it on the counter with two slices of lime, went into the yard, and checked everything again. No sign of intruders, not even the neighborhood raccoon that turned over garbage cans. Just another nightmare, he thought. If only he could expel the demons from the boy's mind.

Wearing shorts, running shoes, and a Bar Association T-shirt, “Lawyers Do It in Their Briefs,” Steve left by the front door and locked up the house. Slipping his Walkman onto his head, he would jog to Tahiti Beach and be back in time to share breakfast with Bobby.

It was a glorious morning of dazzling blue skies and low humidity, the wind gusting from the northwest, signaling an advancing cold front. Steve had already crossed the bridge at the Gables Waterway and hadn't even broken a sweat. On the Walkman, Bob Marley was telling his little darlin' to stir it up. Different music was playing in Steve's mind, Victoria's words from his dream: “That's what I love about you.”

Now that he thought about it, hadn't she been nicer to him lately? Yesterday, when Cadillac brought lunch, hadn't there been a softer look in her eyes?

So what? She's engaged, fool.

Sure, he could pursue her, but what lay at the end of that road? Heartbreak City. Just what he needed with the Barksdale trial and Bobby's case coming up. He had no time for emotional messiness. Hell, he didn't even have time for a one-night stand.

A solid line of whitecaps broke on the reef offshore. The wind grew stronger; a change in the weather was brewing. Picking up his pace, Steve jogged alongside a county bus that was stopped along Cocoplum Circle, disgorging its cargo of uniformed maids, on their way to the ritzy waterfront homes where they toiled. A Mercedes convertible sat at the berm, a young man and woman in the bucket seats, Natalie Cole crooning “Opposites Attract” on the radio, which made him think of Victoria once again. She'd been staring at him when he was talking to Cadillac. Was there some interest there? Didn't lots of women back out of their engagements?

Dammit. She's here for one case. Then she's gone. Live with it.

The sweat was flowing now, his breaths coming hard and fast, his shoes smacking the asphalt with a rhythmic slapitty-slap. Then he hit the zone, and he was floating. Running effortlessly, feeling strong, able to leap piles of palm fronds in a single bound. His mind drifted back to the early morning and to Bobby. Had someone been at the bedroom window? No way to tell. But he would take precautions. The burglar alarm had been on the fritz for years. He would get it fixed. He would…

What the hell!

Pulling out of Mire Flores Avenue, he saw the muddy green pickup truck. Burning rubber, screeching around the corner, headed toward LeJeune Road.

Steve strained to see which way the truck would turn when it reached the intersection. He was running faster than he ever had, faster than he ever thought possible. Thoughts of Bobby, alone in his bed, streaked across his mind. When the truck turned right, Steve was close enough to watch it approach the Circle.

Please, God, let it go halfway around, straight out Sunset, or farther, straight down Old Cutler.

But it turned right.

And headed across the bridge.

Toward his home.