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“Yeah, last couple of nights, it’s been chilly here. Nothing like a fire to keep the damp out of a room.”
By the doorway, as they were walking out, the chief pointed to a collection of sports gear in the corner. “It doesn’t look like everybody plays basketball who comes up here, does it?”
Glen stood quite still, looking at the mess in the corner. The hockey sticks for street hockey on the asphalt, the soccer balls, Frisbees, baseball gloves, baseballs, and footballs. “That’s right,” he said. “My grandkids come up here, they sure like to play with other stuff. They get tired of Grandpa beating them on the basketball court.”
Colter laughed and just as he was getting ready to leave, just as he was getting ready to step out of the room, he said, “Oh, one more thing.”
Oh, how fake, Glen thought. How fake can you get? “Sure, what is it?”
Colter’s smile disappeared. “I’d like to take a look around. If you don’t mind.”
“Here? The house?”
A crisp nod. “Yes. Your house. If you don’t mind.”
He certainly did mind but he shrugged and said, “Go ahead. Knock yourself out.”
So they spent the next fifteen minutes as the chief went through the closets, checked out the attached utility room that held the water heater and oil furnace, went back into the living room and kitchen and then upstairs. The cottage had no basement. More poking through the closets and in the bathroom and the master bedroom and the two spare rooms-“Marcus spent the night in this one,” Glen said, pointing out the spare room that had a view of the lake-and then they came to the last room in the small house, at the end of the hallway.
Colter said, “What’s in here?”
“My office, that’s all.”
“I’d like to take a look at it, if you don’t mind.”
Glen said, “It’s just an office. Nothing in there at all.”
Colter said, “Please. Open the door, Mr. Jackson. Or I’ll come back here with-”
“Oh, for God’s sake, here,” Glen said, opening up the door. “Look as much as you want.”
The office was small, another spare room that had been converted. There was a desk and office chair and filing cabinets, and a closet that the chief looked into. Glen stood perfectly still. Near his desk was his ego wall, a twin of the one back home, in his larger office. Framed certificates, photos and plaques, and one large framed uniform from his last season with the Celtics. Colter closed the closet door and then looked up at the ego wall. Glen did not move, tried not to show a thing. Colter said, “Lots of photos up there.”
“Yeah, well, you tend to get those over time.”
Colter stepped forward and Glen closed his eyes, imagined the questions that would come his way once Colter looked at the photos and the inscriptions and what was there, but Colter said, “Hey, I recognize this guy. Red Auerbach, am I right?”
Glen opened his eyes. “Yes. You’re absolutely right.”
Colter turned away from the wall and said, “Well, I guess it’s time to go.”
Another handshake outside and then Colter headed to his cruiser. “Thanks again for your cooperation, Mr. Jackson, and for the history lesson. You’re not offended that I’m not a basketball fan, are you?”
Glen tried to keep the relief out of his voice. “Not at all. Tell me-I’m heading home to Boston tomorrow-can you keep me informed on how the investigation is going?”
“Sure,” he said, “but… well, I don’t know. It just seems so damn strange, like the earth just opened up and swallowed him. Quite strange.”
“Yeah,” Glen said. “Strange.”
Twelve hours after the police chief had left him, Glen was out on his powerboat, alone, just past midnight, in the middle reaches of Walker ’s Lake. He had slowly motored out here and then waited, and switched off the engine and the ru
Out in the distance a loon called out to its mate, the trilling sound making the back of his hands tingle, and he thought of Marcus’s wife, back there in Queens, alone and wondering what had happened to her husband.
He sighed, shifted some in the seat, and then stood up, the boat weaving back and forth. He said in the darkness, “I bet she misses you, though I don’t know why, you rotten son of a bitch.”
But there was no reply, no sound coming back from the plastic-wrapped object in the stern of the boat, secured on both ends with concrete blocks. He went to the back of the boat and waited, still looking at the dark stretches of the shoreline. Aloud he said, “Just my luck he wasn’t a basketball fan, ol’ boy. He stood in my office and looked at my plaques and trophies, and it was staring right at him. My old nickname on the court. The Enforcer. That was me, Marcus the Enforcer, and that’s why you shouldn’t have come to see me. ’Cause I was going to enforce our agreement. Man, even somebody as young as that chief should have seen that.”
Part of the story was true, about the discussion and the beer and the barbecue, but he had left out the part when ol’ Marcus, hair gone gray and stomach gone thick, had got into a screaming match, saying screw you, screw the team, I’m on my own, it’s been thirty years, the hell with you all, and when he started storming out of the cottage, saying he was going to walk to town and catch a cab or do something to get him back home and get that silver medal in his hands, well, Glen was not going to allow it. Not for a moment. And when Marcus got to the door, he had reached into the sports gear and picked up a baseball bat and creamed the back of Marcus’s skull.
The baseball bat that he had burned in the fireplace later that night.
And dammit, if it hadn’t been for all those fishermen, hanging out all those hours, Marcus would have been gone before the chief showed up. Shit, that had been a close-run thing.
One more look around the dark waters, and then he bent down and grunted and picked up the body and dumped it into the water. It didn’t make much of a noise, hardly even a splash, and as it disappeared from view, he thought about the fall coming up quick, and then the ice, and then the long winter, and by the time spring came ‘round, Marcus would be gone.
“Thing is,” he said again to the darkness, “the chief forgot to ask me one more question. About the taste of silver. And this is what I would have told him: that the taste of silver is the taste of losers. That’s it. And I ain’t no loser.”
With that, he went forward and started up his powerboat and headed back to his cottage, thirty years later, still feeling like a wi
FEAR OF FAILURE by Parnell Hall
He was tall, black, and dead. A bad combination. And for an ex-Celtics fan, one that conjured up images of Len Bias and Reggie Lewis. I say ex-fan because it was about then that I stopped following the team, when Bird, McHale, and Parish retired, to be replaced by a crop of young players I did not know who did not win.
Since then I’ve followed the Knicks, an interesting exercise, to be sure, recalling just the sort of heartbreak I’d grown used to from years of watching the Red Sox. A disappointing but interesting team, the Knicks: I was in Madison Square Garden when Starks made the dunk, and watched on TV that seventh game of the Finals when he threw up brick after brick. I listen now, in the post-Ewing era, when people in the elevator of my Upper West Side apartment building maintain that while they like Marcus Camby, he’s a forward, not a center, and what are the Knicks going to do now? And I realize after twenty years I am finally assimilated.