The Grasshopper King (24 page)

Higgs's face had taken on an expression of frank interest; his lips pursed, he cleared his throat. The grasshoppers chirped feverishly. Anticipating, I thought of Higgs's voice, the few sentences I'd heard on that decaying reel of tape:
Henderson between the wars
. . .

Then Ellen and Julia came back down the stairs. I spun to warn them off; but it was too late. At their appearance, Higgs's head had snapped back to his accustomed position, and his countenance had once again gone blank. I was dizzy with rage. I moved unsteadily toward Ellen, my hands clenched, murder in mind.

“Any luck?” Julia said, and at this all my fury slumped inward on itself.
There was nothing to be gained from it. The chance was lost, through nobody's fault, my flush of hope as quickly gone as formed. At least I could spare the women the knowledge that they'd ruined everything.

“Only the usual kind,” I said.

“Will you listen to those grasshoppers,” Ellen said mildly. “Sounds like that rain is finally coming.”

That night I saw McTaggett. He'd called me at home and commanded me in a thick, hoarse voice to meet him at a bar downtown, the Tooth and Nail. It was a single solemn room, done up in velvet and dark wood, like the front parlor of a funeral home. For some reason there were little ceramic dogs everywhere: lined up along the bar, nestled between the dusty stoppered bottles, arrayed in twos and threes atop the drink-ringed tables, frozen in their sundry poses like a circus act surprised by a kitschy Medusa. I had never been there before; the bar was unpopular among the undergraduates. Its clientele tended toward the aging and the broad, bourbon-drinking people, people for whom casual tippling was a distant, gauzy memory. Students found it depressing. McTaggett was the only person under sixty in the place.

He had evidently been there for some time. He sat heavily on a stool, his red-rimmed eyes focused with apparent fascination on the mirror behind the bar, and on the counter to his left was a heap of wadded napkins. As I sat down beside him, he plucked a fresh one from the dispenser on the bar, blew his nose dramatically into it, and added it to the pile. A ceramic dog was perched on a miniature stool in front of him, balancing a ball on its nose. The dog's eyes were fixed in an attitude of painful concentration.

“You took your time getting here,” McTaggett said, without taking his eyes off the mirror.

“I live a ways away. I had to take my bike.”

The bartender looked my way. She was a bleak, strict-looking woman optimistically lipsticked in a ghostly shade of coral. I ordered
a scotch; then, thinking of this afternoon, made it a double. My usual drink was a gin and tonic. But I was embarrassed by the thought of drinking something with fruit on it here.

“So he hasn't said anything,” McTaggett said glumly.

“Not yet.”

The strict bartender brought me my drink, which I gulped at silently. It was McTaggett who had brought me here; it was his responsibility to say whatever needed to be said.

“Did you know that this school once produced a championship basketball team?”

“I think so,” I said. Everyone knew that. It was still on the school's letterhead.

“My senior year. I was on that squad.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes,” he said, “it is so. Many people don't even remember this today. Times have been better. Things,” and here he leaned close to me, as if imparting some confidential cipher, “have changed. Of late.”

“It's something,” I said helplessly.

“We had a reunion a few years back. All those boys—they're in advertising now. They're claims adjusters. They got married and moved East. I'm the only one left. You know what makes a good basketball team into a championship basketball team?”

His question caught me off guard. I managed an inquisitive noise.

“Execution,”
he said significantly, and mimed an easy layup. But the way he said it didn't remind me of basketball at all. He had spoken with the relish of a hanging judge.

“Listen,” I said, “what are we here to talk about?” I wanted out of the Tooth and Nail. The old men's murmurs, the amber half-light, McTaggett's soft mountain of napkins, the prancing figurines, had begun to unnerve me, like predictions of an unappealing future.

“I'm getting to that,” McTaggett said.

“Because I've got to go.”

“You haven't finished your drink yet.”

“You can have it.”

“Let me buy you a sandwich.”

“I ate at home.”

“You know what?”

“What?” I said, guardedly.

McTaggett folded his hands in his lap and leaned stiffly back on his stool. “He'll talk.”

Suddenly I became willing to stay a few moments longer.

“You think?”

“He'll talk,” McTaggett said again. He sounded almost sorry; but then, he always sounded sorry. “You know how the cops catch a criminal?”

I wondered if he were changing the subject again.

“Fingerprints?” I guessed.

“It's not fingerprints. And not powder burns either. And not eyewitnesses. The way they get him is that a criminal will always talk about the job.
Always
. He'll tell somebody. It's a law of human nature.”

“Is Higgs a criminal?”

“Jesus Christ,” McTaggett said. “It's an
analogy
.”

He gestured wildly, in the process striking a sidewise blow to the ceramic dog on the bar. The dog's stool tipped, wobbled, and finally fell; the dog cracked in three pieces, and the ball, freed from its perch, rolled to the edge of the bar and dropped to the floor with a little crash. McTaggett stared dumbly at the scattered shards of dog.

The strict bartender glanced over from the register.

“Put it on my tab with the other ones,” McTaggett said.

I stood up. “Now I really do have to go,” I said.

McTaggett turned to me, seemingly startled that I was still there.

“I'm glad we had this talk,” he said.

“Me too.”

“Best to the wife.”

I nodded. I could think of no reason to correct him.

Riding home through the gnatty evening, passing in and out of the greenish, fathomy light of the streetlamps, I tried to reflect on what McTaggett had told me. But I found, to my surprise, that I had no more capacity to think about Higgs. The next morning he would speak, or he would not speak; correspondingly he would not be carried off by Treech to the psychiatric hosptital, or he would. It was as simple as that.

So I thought.

That night I slept at my desk again. I dreamed I was a basketball player. More than that: I was a
spectacular
basketball player. I twisted and knifed through the futile coverage of my faceless opponents, sank jumper after unerring jumper. There was a sense that the game was of great importance, a championship, and that not much had been expected of me.

At the same time, I was a sportscaster in a well-appointed broadcast booth high above the action. My color man was Henderson. In my dream he was a man of about thirty.

“How about that young Grapearbor?” I said.

“I'll tell you, Sam,” Henderson replied. His voice was honey-smooth and every word was served up neatly as a lozenge. He had no accent. “This plucky youngster has just come off the bench and taken over this game. And I think I can say that everyone is extremely excited about the tremendous performance of the young Grapearbor that we're seeing here tonight.”

“Another three for Grapearbor!” I cried, hitting the basket effortlessly from midcourt.

A sumptuous platter of food had appeared in front of Henderson: long, knobby breads, wagon-wheels of cheese, wine bottles, crudité rafts becalmed on dark, still lakes of bean dip, pastry shells and meat salads, stuffed capers, apricots wrapped in strips of bacon, whole smoked fish, tropical fruit. Henderson lifted a dripping veal chop to his mouth and ripped off a chunk with his teeth.

“Well, it all comes down to this, Sam . . . all the practice, all the hype . . . and I've got to tell you, I never thought it would come out quite this way. The ghost of Tip Chandler is living today, Sam, and he is smiling.”

Henderson bent down into a vast tureen of soup, and when he came up his face was smeared with it, and gravy from the chop, and other foodstuffs I could not identify. Back in the game now, I launched myself daintily from the top of the key and floated fairylike, untouched, to the basket, where—just as the buzzer sounded—I slammed home the winning field goal with a contemptuous jerk of my wrists. The force of my dunk broke the glass backboard from its moorings; it shattered wonderfully on the hardwood beneath the spot where I still hung from nothing, beaming. The crowd boiled forth from the stands. From the exits and from the seams in the roof there was an angry pinkish glow, the color of sunrise; it was a fire. And the stampeding fans were celebrating victory and fleeing the flames at the same time. Henderson lifted a paper napkin to his lips and drew it deliberately across his face, back and forth, seemingly unaware of the smoke coiling into the booth. The napkin was growing larger; now it was the size of a piece of writing paper, a poster, a bedsheet. Henderson's whole body was hidden behind it. He said something I couldn't make out; and then the smoke rose up to cover everything, the booth, the stands, the elevated scoreboard, the fire too.

When I awoke, the real sunrise beating on the windows, it had occurred to me how Higgs might yet be saved.

CHAPTER 7

THE GRASSHOPPER KING

It was already half-past seven; there was no time to dawdle. I rifled through the papers on my desk, then, not finding what I wanted, I upended my wastebasket, dropped to my hands and knees and dug frantically through the crumpled sheets of rough draft, wax paper squares, the weeks of used tissues—no luck. I turned out the pockets of every pair of pants I owned. Finally it occurred to me to look under the bed, and there, amidst the gum wrappers and the news magazines I'd been meaning, with all sincerity, to get to, was my object: the paper napkin on which Charlie Hascomb had written his phone number.

The napkin was just out of my reach, and I had to shoulder the bed a few inches to get to it. The motion woke Julia up a little.

“What are you doing down there?” she said drowsily, poking her head over the edge of the mattress. Her nightshirt drooped away from her freckly collarbone and I was stopped short for a moment with affection. Then she woke up a little more. I watched her remember what day it was, our macabre schedule, and how angry she was at me.

“Come on, what?”

One more shove and my thumb and forefinger closed on the napkin.

“Don't worry, darling, sweetness,” I said, standing, straightening, my heart hurrying as if I'd been injected with a new and potent hormone
of resolve. I was bursting with reassurance; but I was still not ready to explain. “Honey,” I said.

Julia lay back on her pillow and shut her eyes.

“Romance,” she said. “What's this for?”

“We're going to meet an old friend of mine.”

“Today?”

“Bear with me,” I said. “Go back to sleep.” I left the apartment—shutting the door gently, so as not to awaken her any further—and called Charlie from the pay phone on the corner.