King of the Corner (2 page)

“He won’t get to first.”

A second guard, equally anonymous but one Doc had seen before, took him to Admissions, where a young harried clerk with an acne condition spent twenty minutes looking for Doc’s paperwork before stamping it and giving him a copy. It contained the name of his parole officer and the date and time of his first appointment. The clerk broke the seal on a manila envelope with dog-eared corners and tipped out items Doc hadn’t seen in seven years: gold Hamilton wristwatch, class ring, black enamel money clip with no money in it, and a Franklin half-dollar struck the year Doc was born, his lucky piece. He’d carried it in his pocket during all his saves. On the other hand, he’d had it with him the night he was arrested and the day he was convicted. He considered giving it to the stressed-out clerk, but minutes away from freedom he worried that it might be considered bribery and break his parole. He signed a receipt, put on the watch and ring, and pocketed the other items.

His brother Neal was standing in the waiting room with his hands in his pockets looking at the framed prints on the wall when Doc entered with the guard. (No halfway measures here. He was a prisoner until he was not.) Fair and balding, two inches shorter than his brother and running to fat, Neal had gotten most of the Irish blood in his family, down to the leprechaun jowls and a twinkle in his gray eyes that was entirely illusory; the elder of the two Miller boys had no humor. For the reunion he had put on a plaid sport coat over a clean work shirt and gray woolen trousers gone fuzzy in the knees. Doc was pretty sure the sport coat was the only one Neal had ever owned.

“Put on some,” was the first thing he said to Doc.

“Not since your last visit.”

“You was sitting down then.”

Under the guard’s eye they shook hands briefly. Although Neal had washed—outside the shop he always smelled of the brown grainy Fels Napthe soap he used—there was a cross-hatching of old black grime in the creases of his palm. He had been a mechanic at a John Deere dealership on Middlebelt since his teens, and the grease was ground in as deeply as the central Kentucky drawl that he had hung on to years after Doc’s had slipped away. “I was starting to think you got yourself in trouble again and they wasn’t going to let you out.”

“Paper chase.” Doc thought about something else to say. Communication had always been difficult with this brother who left high school the year Doc entered first grade. “How’s Dad?”

“The same. He’s coming over for dinner next week.”

The female security guard at the desk, pulled-back hair and burnished cosmetics in a pale blue starched uniform blouse, buzzed open the door. At the gate the guard who had escorted Doc from the cellblock turned a key in the mechanism. It clonked, and the gate shunted open. “Have a nice day.” They were the first words the guard had spoken.

In the parking lot Neal unlocked the driver’s door of a new GMC three-quarter-ton pickup, heaved himself up and under the wheel, and reached across to open the door on the passenger’s side. Suddenly locks were opening everywhere. Doc stepped up into the plastic-smelling interior. It was a great square silver tank of a vehicle that had cost as much as a Cadillac, and which his brother would probably still be paying for in five years. By which time he’d have traded it in on something bigger with an even higher testosterone level.

It was a typical nippy Michigan early-April day. The sky was the color of iron, and crusted snow clung to the shady side of the berms on both sides of the road. Neal drove with the seat pushed forward almost as far as it would go—a painful sight when it involved a man his size—his shoulders hunched over the wheel and his big heavy face screwed into a strained expression as if power steering had never been invented.

They took Michigan Avenue through Jackson, four flat, faded lanes cleaving between new-looking glass and steel buildings that soon gave way to horizontal structures of crumbling block with signs rusting through their paint; a prison town whose personality matched the gray bland decaying interior of the penitentiary itself. An electric sign ringed with yellow bulbs flashing in a spastic pattern advertised the Island Health Spa. A number of cars and a van with its fenders eaten away were parked outside the building.

“You start Saturday.”

“Saturday?” Doc shifted on the seat. The sight of the massage parlor had given him an erection.

“Sure Saturday. Farmers can’t afford to farm full-time, they all got jobs. Saturday’s the only day they got to shop.”

“What am I selling?”

“Well, not tractors. That’s commission work. You sell parts and accessories. Anyone comes in wants to look at the heavy equipment you steer him to a salesman.”

“What’s it pay?”

“Three hundred a week. I’m sorry it ain’t a million a season and your own car.” Neal sounded testy.

“It’s better than I’ve been making.”

“You wouldn’t of got parole if the board didn’t think you had a job waiting.”

“Thanks, Neal. I know you went out on a limb.”

“Not so much.” He relaxed a little. “Warren’s a baseball fan. That’s the manager. Probably ask you a million questions.”

They entered I-94 then and didn’t exchange another word until they reached the suburbs of Detroit.

W
ILLIE
H
ERNANDEZ, BACK WHEN
he was still Willie and not Guillermo, before he lost home plate and his sense of humor, had told Doc after the last Minnesota game he was the greatest reliever Detroit had had since John Hiller. That was the best night of Doc’s life. Hiller was his hero when everyone else in school was talking about the starters McLain and Lolich; and when it was really going well, when the plate looked as big as a manhole cover and Doc couldn’t miss, he borrowed an old Hiller trick and threw three balls in a row just for the hell of it before striking them out. Those days the third strike was like ejaculating, and the look of surprise and rage on the batters’ faces when the umpire’s thumb went up was better than a cigarette afterward.

That particular night he had come on in the seventh at three-two with two men on base and sent down eight men in order for the save. On his way to the dugout everyone had come over to shake his hand and pat his butt, Lance Parrish, Kirk Gibson, Sweet Lou, Tram, Darrell Evans, Roger Craig, and Sparky. DOC DIAGNOSES TIGER WIN, read the headline in the
Free Press
the next morning.

The headline in a different section of the
News
the next evening read MILLER CHARGED IN COCAINE DEATH.

Asked by the police and later by reporters if he’d known there were drugs at the party he threw at the Westin, he said no; but there were always drugs, joints and little glittering capsules and square white paper packets like the ones that used to contain the prizes in boxes of cereal. He was the host, and the girl who died, some little high school ride brought by a batboy Doc didn’t remember inviting, was underage. The EMS crew was still working on her when the detectives, one black and neatly dressed, the other white and smelling of cherry cough drops, took Doc into the bedroom to talk. They called on his house the next day wide a warrant

The lawyer sent down by the front office gave advice, then bowed out, saying something about conflict of interest. The lawyer Doc retained on the recommendation of a friend on the TV 2 sports desk got the charge reduced from negligent homicide to the degree manslaughter and told Doc he’d get probation and community service. Doc pleaded guilty. The judge, facing re-election the next year, made a speech about sports figures having a responsibility to behave as role models and sentenced him to ten to fifteen years.

Doc’s appeal was denied. He fired his attorney and hired another with a national reputation, who went to work on getting the guilty plea set aside and securing a trial based on the first attorney’s incompetence. Meanwhile his client began his incarceration. Penitentiary life, Doc told himself in the beginning, wasn’t so different from life on the road; the cells weren’t that much smaller than some of the hotel rooms he’d stayed in, and you could even get room service once you learned which trusties would share their bribes with the right guards. At least you didn’t have to put up with roommates. His size protected him from homosexual rape, and although there was resentment on the part of some of the other prisoners toward a young man who would throw away a bigger break than they would ever see on the same sort of mistake they had made, he wasn’t unpopular enough to be made a victim of the gang variety, and besides, the Jackson team needed pitchers.

But prison was not the road. On the road you could always bust curfew and the worst you’d get would be the bench or a fine or both. In prison they locked you in. He had thought the fact obvious, but the reality was worse than the most hair-raising movies he had seen. The lights went out at 9:30 and you lay in the gray twilight shed by the recessed bulbs in the corridor, reliving all your best plays while the rest of the world was forgetting your name. The warden was a frustrated George Steinbrenner, and so you stamped books in the library to avoid ruining your arm on the punch presses in the shop, and you spoke across the table in the Stranger’s Room with your brother and your attorney, and you lost your edge pitching to batters who wouldn’t make the first cut in double-A, and time passed in lockstep. He’d had a girlfriend, a live-in blonde who slept in one of his old jerseys and talked his roommate in Cincinnati into bunking somewhere else one night so she could greet Doc at the door of his hotel room naked. She wasn’t in court the day he was sentenced. Two years later, during a game he was watching in the TV Room, the camera cut to the wife of the Philadelphia catcher applauding her husband in the stands, and she had put on weight, but not enough to erase the memory of that evening. In his cell after the game he had tried masturbating to the memory and failed for the first time. And time hung like cobwebs, and his lawyer told him to be patient until the Republicans were out of office.

In the end it was his own mild demeanor that got him out, that and a warden’s gratitude for his first Midwestern Penal System Championship trophy in the glass case outside his office. Meanwhile the attorney had attached Doc’s house, car, and bank account and written a best-selling memoir in which Doc’s name did not appear.

Neal Miller lived in a tract of aluminum-cased ranch-styles, constructed on a block formerly occupied by saltbox homes built by Ford for employees of the Dearborn plant. Neal wedged the big GMC into the garage between a plastic tricycle and a stack of pop bottles, and they went into the kitchen through the side door. In the big room paved with brick-colored linoleum and lined with new appliances—bought, like the truck and the house, on time—Doc embraced his sister-in-law stiffly. She was a small thin woman a few years younger than her husband and an odd match for Doc’s beefy brother. He could feel her ribs and shoulder blades clearly through the thin cotton of her dress. Her dark wavy hair was her best feature, but it threw into relief the lines of strain in her skeletal face.

They parted quickly and she said, pushing back a lock of her hair, “I hope you’re hungry. I made enough to feed the city.”

The kitchen smelled of roasting meat and boiling vegetables. Just then Doc realized he was famished. In Jackson they were sitting down to lunch.

“Billie overfeeds everybody but herself,” Neal said. “She don’t eat enough to keep a roach alive.”

“No roaches in this house. You try eating after you’ve been cooking all day.” Doc noticed that she had picked up some of her husband’s twang. She was born in Detroit.

The conversation lagged. After a moment Doc said, “Where’s Sean?”

“In school. He can’t wait to meet you.” Billie turned to stir a pot on the stove. Creamed spinach and garlic thickened the air. It was comforting to learn that the national hysteria over healthy food hadn’t spread to the Miller home.

“It’s hard to believe he’s in school. Last time I saw him he was just learning to walk.”

“Wait’ll you see him,” Neal said. “Kid’s built like a truck. I bet he’s your size by the time he’s sixteen. Billie feeds him too much, too.”

“He needs it if he’s going to get that football scholarship.” She replaced the lid on the pot.

“He don’t stand a chance if we don’t get him away from that fucking TV set and out in the backyard. She thinks Nintendo’s a day-care center,” he told Doc.

“We had some video games in Jackson. I didn’t take to them.”

A look passed between Billie and Neal. Neal said, “Kev, we’d take it a favor if you didn’t talk about Jackson when Sean’s around. We’ve been telling him you were in California.”

“Who with, Oakland or San Francisco?”

“We told him you’re a salesman. He don’t know his Uncle Kevin is Doc Miller. When they talked about you on the news we didn’t let on.”

“We thought it was best,” Billie said, pushing back the lock of hair. “If it got around school—well, you know kids. Thank God Miller’s a common name.”

He knew a chill of mortality.

The room Neal took him to on the second floor looked out on the driveway they shared with the house next door. It had a single bed, a nightstand, a chest of drawers, and toy soldiers on the wallpaper. “Sean’s room,” said Neal. “We moved him into the basement. We didn’t think you wanted to be down there.”

When his brother left, Doc opened the small case he’d carried from the prison and laid away his change of trousers and two shirts in the drawers. He took off his jacket and hung it in the closet. In the bathroom down the hall he washed his hands and face. He wondered if the daily routine would just fade away on its own or if he would have to change it himself. He hooked on his glasses, and his face came into focus in the mirror. In that light he looked older, creased under the eyes, the line of his chin blurred. Silver glinted at his temples like steel shavings. He looked down and saw that he had crumpled the wet washcloth into a tight sphere roughly the size of a baseball. He shook it loose and hung it up.

Lunch was odd. His tastebuds had accustomed themselves to bland institutional fare, and the pungent flavor of the beef and the vegetables floating in butter made him slightly ill. He attempted to disguise it with conversation. “Is there a neighborhood team?” he asked Neal.