Murder Is My Racquet (13 page)

“Connie,” Sam explained, “I can talk to the judge here, but Earl caught him fair and square and I don’t like to do the kind of favors for wealthy people that I don’t do for poor ones.”

“Sam, I wouldn’t have it any other way. But he is such a mess, the poor boy. Any gentleness you can show him would be so appreciated.”

Like most of the men who knew or saw her, Sam was already in love with Connie. He could no more defy her than he could defy the mandates of his own nature.

“Connie, I will do what I can. I think maybe the girl’s parents could be persuaded not to press charges if—”

“I’ve already talked to them.”

“How much?”

“Too much. Stephen is expensive to have around, but at least there’s money if the girl has to go to St. Louis or something.”

Stephen’s father was less understanding.

“You had some fun,” said Rance Longacre, leaning in close, faintly smelling of scotch. “But it stops there. I ketch you hanging with the trash, you gon’ be a sorry customer. This here fine old life you live, you know, it can go away damn fast, pardner.”

His father, who lived in a cusp of alcohol-induced rage, was always making absurd cowboy statements like that. Rance was another handsome idler, whose Navy career had not prospered
and who was never the best man in the room. Stephen knew this; he accepted it; it had been a condition in his life since childhood. His father, however, was a handsome man. Rance had a big square head, thick black hair, a perpetual suntan (or, possibly, the complexion of someone permanently pickled), and gray highlights at the temples. He looked like a million dollars; he was worth a million dollars; he was a jerk.

Stephen was good for a few days. Then he went to his car, a new Buick coupe convertible, and drove across Polk County, through Blue Eye and on into Oklahoma, where he found the meanest, lowest Negro crib he could and proceeded to get wildly drunk on rotgut hooch until finally the club’s owner called the Oklahoma State Police. But Stephen left before the police got there, and ended up in a ditch two miles down the road, with a sixteen-stitch gash in his forehead. The coupe was totaled. The officers who dug him out called Earl Swagger in Arkansas, rousing him out of a rare night of sleep at home.

Earl picked him up at the emergency ward and drove him home.

“You are a stupid one,” said Earl. “I seen boys young as you blown to hell and gone in the Pacific. They’d have given anything to live one damn day of your life. Yet you act like buckra trash from morning till night and you will git yourself killed for nothing, and I am getting right sick of it.”

“Yes, sir,” said Stephen.

“Why? You’re a smart boy. You been to a fancy school. You got money, looks, a nice car, a big future. Why? What’s eating you?”

“Mr. Earl, I couldn’t say.”

“You going to kill yourself, your mama will be crushed, and
it will be a tragedy. She don’t need no tragedy. She’s a great lady and she should have a happy life.”

“She chose what she chose. That’s what she gets.”

Earl could get no further with the youngster. It continued all summer: bouts of drunkenness, another two scrapes with an automobile in a ditch or among trees, and general lethargy.

The one change was that Stephen no longer loafed at the Longacre spread, though he loved the place, with its trees and horses and graciousness. He just could not stomach the way his mother looked at him, her face particularly tragic, her eyes bitter, her whole demeanor deflated. He could not stand his father, and all the sinewy, hard-working hands, some of them his own age, boys who had to work like hell for a lousy fifteen dollars a week and considered themselves lucky. Instead, he took up residence in the Polk County Country Club swimming pool, where he lounged the days away, growing tanner and handsomer, acquiring a taste for gin and tonics, and generally avoiding seriousness in all its forms.

It was there, in early August, that his father finally ran him to ground.

“So this is where you been hiding. Your mama wouldn’t tell me.”

“She is a grand woman,” Stephen said.

“You are a little punk-ass weasel. That is the truth, Stephen. You been given every goddamn thing and you have turned into a wastrel and a monkey.”

“Then you should disinherit me.”

“I should. Mr. Earl could probably git you in the Marine Corps as a private. He has big connections. You would like that just fine.”

That shut Stephen up. He had no interest in the military,
which, if he understood the concept, had to do with getting up very early.

“Yeah, I thought that’d dry you up. Well, here’s the way it’s going to be. I want you to
do something
. If I’m going to keep sending money off to these fancy schools and buying you cars to wreck and paying off doctors in St. Louis, I want to know it ain’t being wasted. So, you have to do something this summer.”

“Yes, sir. What would you suggest? I could cure polio, defeat the Reds, make a movie, write a song or a book.”

“Damn you, Stephen, you are a wise guy to the end. I spent close to two thousand dollars the past three summers investing in your future as a tennis player.”

“It wasn’t my idea.”

Stephen hated tennis, despite the fact that he actually had some talent at it.

“The club is having a tournament. I want you to enter it. I want you to start now, get in shape, work hard, and show me something.”

Stephen’s heart sank. Hitting that white puffy ball around those red clay courts for those Polk County doctors and lawyers and ranchers, all swell fellows, and their pathetic wives, who thought they’d made it into the gentry because they could afford to pay the pittance at the tennis club. He hated those people. They were so goddamned smug. And there was something even worse: His father was president of the club and chairman of the tennis committee. His father had played tennis at the Naval Academy in 1930, truly loved the game, and had taken it as his mission, his one accomplishment in life, to bring tennis to the children of Polk County.

“I hate tennis,” said Stephen.

“I know. That’s the point. I want you to do something you hate and do it well.”

Stephen said nothing.

“That is it, Stephen. You play in that tennis tournament in two weeks or I won’t be paying for your school, you won’t go to a fine college, you’ll break your mother’s heart, and that will be that. I’m going to mend your wastrel ways, goddamnit, if it kills us both.”

• • •

P
ossibly it worked. In any event, Stephen filled out his application, acquired a set of the tournament rules, studied them carefully, then studied the club rules carefully. Once he’d established them, he set to work.

His parents didn’t see him except at night, when he returned, sweaty and weary. He showered, went quickly to bed, and got up early the next morning.

“Well, at last the boy is applyin’ himself,” his father said.

Yes, but at
what?
his mother wondered.

Finally she cornered him one night after Rance had passed out.

“What are you up to?”

“I am practicing at tennis, exactly as I was ordered. I go into the Fort Smith public courts every day and I hit against the backboard. Then I find games, anyone who’ll play me. There are some pretty good players up there.”

“Well, I’m impressed.”

“I am making no guarantees, Mother. I am trying this hard, and will do my best and that is that. If he sends me to school or to the Marine Corps, that I have no control over.”

“Stephen, why are you this way?”

“I am the way I am.”

“We’ve discussed sending you to a psychiatrist.”

“No, thank you. The tennis is therapy enough.”

“It would help if you made some friends.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You think these people are such rubes. But you found no friends in more elegant places, either.”

“I was not cut out to be somebody’s pal. It’s something from the movies, but it doesn’t exist in real life. Please, Mother, I have to get my sleep, if you don’t mind.”

“I should tell you that Jeff St. Sebastian is playing. Do you know who he is?”

“No.”

“He is Bo Nickerson’s cousin.”

“The poultry people?”

“Yes, the Nickersons provide Ace Foods with their poultry. They seem to have a lot of money. Anyway, Jeff St. Sebastian is the number-two singles at LSU. They say he could play number one this year. He’s quite good.”

“Well, I will avoid him. I will play in doubles. I trust Rance won’t go insane if I do that.”

“You have a partner?”

“I do. As I read the rules, only one of us has to be a member of the club. Isn’t that right?”

“I wouldn’t know about that. Stephen, what is this all about?”

“It’s all about nothing. I just want someone on my side, so if I get crushed, it’s all right, I won’t be completely humiliated.”

“Stephen, I—”

“Mother. I promise you. I absolutely, absolutely promise you and Rance: I will obey the rules. I only ask that you do.”

• • •

A
s expected, Jeff St. Sebastian ran through the rounds in singles, wiping out everybody he faced. He was tall and blonde and in his immaculate whites with his Jack Purcells grinding into the red clay, he was nimble, fleet, beautiful. He had been accepted at LSU law school and the world was his.

Rance sat under an umbrella in the third row, center, sipping a lemony Squirt, which he laced with gin, watching Jeff progress. Rance was clumsy at the game, and could never hit out, as he wanted to. Instead, he had to pitty-pat the ball to keep it in play, and knew he looked ridiculous. So he admired the way the slick Jeff St. Sebastian could really roll into the ball, some trick of spin, hit a stinging smash, and send it floating deep into the court until its own forward revolution overcame its velocity and pulled it down near the baseline. Jeff could do that all day long.

“He is a fine tennis player, no doubt about it,” said Rance.

“Have you seen Stephen?” Connie asked.

“No,” said Rance, “but the doubles don’t get started till three, so he has plenty of time.

By two-thirty that day’s singles were done. Jeff had played twice, triumphing love and three and two and two; he would meet an older man named Jerry Sieforth the next day in the finals.

After the singles matches, he wiped his handsome face with a towel and whispered something to his cousin Bo. Bo nodded, smiling, and went to the announcer.

“Well, folks,” said that fellow, a retired radio star from Hot
Springs, “we are in for a treat. Seems Mr. St. Sebastian ain’t done with his tennis. He’s going to play in doubles with his cousin and his cousin’s father will sit this one out.”

A polite smattering of applause arose, and after a bit, the team took the court, and quickly enough mashed the Seahorn twins. The two sets, love and love, were over in a little less than half an hour.

Rance looked at his watch, took a little sip on his drink, looked about. He knew it was now his son’s turn, but where was the boy?

“You see him?”

“No, no, I don’t,” said Connie. “Oh, look, there’s Sam. Sam! Sam!”

Sam, in a straw fedora and sunglasses but as ever a dark suit off the rack that hung like a sack of grain, saw her, and advanced. Rance knew the rumors about Sam and his wife; he gritted his teeth but determined to give nobody the pleasure of seeing him uncomfortable. He took a fortifying shot of the ginned-up lemon Squirt, then rose magnanimously as if in command.

“Samuel. By God, sir, damned good to see you. Come on and join us. Sit next to Connie and keep her smiling. The fun is just beginning.”

Sam edged in, but he wasn’t particularly relaxed.

“Sam, what’s wrong?” Connie asked with an intimacy to her voice that Rance hadn’t heard in years.

“Well, I’m not much on tennis, but your boy called my office and requested my presence.”

“What?”

“I don’t know what this here’s all about. And Earl, he’s here, too. He’s outside, sitting in his car, smoking a cigarette
and listening to a ballgame. Earl isn’t what you’d call your tennis fan either.”

“I’d guess not,” said Connie. “I wonder what—”

They felt it first as a buzz, unspecified, an unsettling loosened and set to marching through the small crowd. Rance looked about. His eyes scanned the clubhouse, which was actually the old Harry Etheridge country home, with seventy-five thousand dollars of his own money pumped into it, and the golf course beyond, somewhat raw and ungenteel as it was newly constructed and not yet fully grown in on what had once been cotton fields and hollows where the deer gathered, and beyond the blue rim of the Ouachitas. He had an image of a world he understood: It was so perfect. Here, the quality, people of distinction, who by their very distinction had claimed a rightful place in this little corner of paradise, where the games were formal if silly, in the fashion of the great eastern games, sat and enjoyed what was theirs. He had built the place out of love for his wife, whom he suspected no longer loved him, in hopes of offering her something of the tradition and distinction she had known in her moneyed enclave north of Baltimore, and in hopes of giving her son—his also—that same sense of an ordered world, where things were as they should be, and our tribe was up here, prosperous and pleased, and all the other tribes were invisible.

And then he saw his son and the Negro boy.

• • •

B
y the time Sam and Rance got down there, the thing was at full fever pitch.

“He brought a nigra!”

“Who that boy think he is, bringing a nigra in here!”

“Never heard of such a thing. It’s a damned scandal.”

“This ain’t what we fought the war for.”

“That’s what it is, it’s an insult to all our fighting boys.”

Rance pushed bullishly through the crowd that had formed at the edge of the court, where his son stood with an oddly satisfied look on his face next to a tall, slender, almost impassive Negro youth who, Rance now saw, couldn’t have been more than fifteen. Both were dressed immaculately in tennis whites, creased perfectly, unblemished. Both carried tennis racquets in presses, wore towels around their necks, and looked like the Harvard number-one doubles team, if Harvard permitted Negroes to attend, which, being a Yankee Communist conspiracy against America, it probably did.