Tumbleweeds (37 page)

In 2001, after his eleventh season with the Chargers, his contract was not renewed. The blow had come before the events of 9/11 and the stunning news that Cathy’s fiancé had perished in the North Tower of the World Trade Center. The San Francisco 49ers picked him up as their second-string quarterback, but on his first play he lost his concentration and held the ball too long before catching a nearly paralyzing blow to the head that sidelined him with a concussion. Because of knee problems, he limped, literally, through the rest of the season, when San Francisco bid him adieu at the end of his one-year contract. He was thirty-four years old.

For him, the game was over. He refused to make the pro circuit as a second stringer, sitting on the sidelines, competing for playing time like a hungry rookie, and he dusted off his business degree from the University of Miami. His name alone gained him interviews with executives of top corporations in the San Diego area, most of whom were tightening their belts because of the Silicon Valley debacle and the following terrorist attacks that sent the stock markets tumbling again. None of the positions he tried suited him until finally he was hired within the last year as a fund-raiser for a nonprofit organization. He liked the charity work and people, mostly dedicated volunteers, and for the first time unashamedly enjoyed using his star status and charisma to pump money out of the well-heeled to relieve the
suffering of the less fortunate. There were times, after a successful campaign, he wished John could see him accept the check that had resulted from the employment of his magnetic powers.
What do you think of these apples, Tiger!

“At least you have no debt,” his broker was saying, “and if you sell your condo—”

“I’m not selling my condo,” Trey interrupted. “That’s not an option.”

“Well, if you continue to work, you should be able to live in… reduced but certainly satisfactory circumstances.”

If he continued to work.
He had an appointment with a doctor in San Diego right after he left here today. He’d been having headaches, blurred vision, for some time, and they seemed to be getting worse. He hoped the problem was not the result of that last doozy of a concussion he’d suffered. If so, he’d deal with it. Headaches, dizzy spells, memory loss were the price of admission to play on Sundays in a sport built on and driven by violence.

Rain slashed at his car windows when he drove into the office parking lot of an internist he’d researched on the Internet. He’d chosen to go to a stranger rather than to his old sports medicine doctor, where members of the media hung out to catch and snap famous athletes on their medical visits. He chose for his to remain unreported.

When he turned off the ignition, he sat a few minutes watching the rain through the window of his BMW, his hands tight on the wheel. Then he drew a deep breath and pushed open the door. To hell with an umbrella. If getting soaked was the worst that happened to him today, he’d welcome it.

A physician’s assistant took a history of Trey’s symptoms followed by a neurological exam that tested his vision, balance, coordination, and mental status. After that he was sent for a CT scan and MRI of his brain. When it was explained that in order to assure accurate pictures, he would have to lie absolutely still and strapped to a moveable
examination table that would slide through a closed-sided imaging chamber, his issues with claustrophobia came surging back. He would have turned and walked away if not for the technologist who treated the famous San Diego quarterback—“
you’re my hero, Mr. Hall!”
—with such respect and reverence.

“Think of the most beautiful time in your life, and it will all be over before you know it,” he said to Trey as he injected a special dye into his vein.

Trey thought of the night he’d spent with Cathy after the junior prom.

When it was over, he waited an hour before the technician returned to the sitting room. “A radiologist will analyze the images and send a signed report to your primary-care physician, Mr. Hall,” he said. “You’ll hear something in about three days.”

It was less than twenty-four hours before he was summoned back to the internist’s office. The doctor explained the results of the tests and said afterwards, “I’m giving you a list of the finest physicians in our area specializing in the treatment of your disease, Mr. Hall.” He pushed a sheet of alphabetized names across his desk. “As you can see, there are ten, all located at the cancer center here in San Diego. Personally, if I were you, I would choose the second from the bottom.”

Trey looked at the name he indicated with the tip of his pen: Dr. Laura Rhinelander, neuro-oncologist.

F
ather John Caldwell woke abruptly from a bad night’s rest. He had not been able to get to sleep after the brief, cryptic, out-of-the-blue midnight telephone call from his onetime best friend, Trey Don Hall. He had gone to bed feeling the shock of having picked up the phone to hear the voice of a man he hadn’t heard or seen personally in twenty-two years. What was more, Trey would be arriving in Kersey today. John had tossed and turned all night wondering what could be bringing Trey back to his hometown after so long an absence. John still couldn’t buy that it had anything to do with the sale of Mabel Church’s house. Finally, toward morning, he had fallen asleep, only to drop into the morass of a nightmare that had jolted him awake with his mouth dry and his heart pounding. He realized that part of the drumming in his ear was due to his housekeeper, Betty Harbison, knocking on his bedroom door, bringing him his morning coffee.

“Come in, Betty!” he called, too sluggish to get out of bed.

“Father?” Betty stuck her head curiously around the door. “You’re not up?”

John rubbed his eyes. “Not quite. I had a sleepless night.”

“You mean the part of it when you finally got to bed?” Betty set the tray on a table and poured a mug from a carafe of extra dark roast
brewed just for him, her disgust plain. “I heard the phone ring around midnight. Don’t people realize you’ve got to get your sleep?”

“I was awake,” John said. “I’m sorry if the ring disturbed you.”

“I didn’t mention it out of concern for myself, Father.”

“I know,” John said, propping himself up to take the mug. “You worry about me too much, Betty.”

“And who else will?” She favored him with a hairline smile as she drew open the draperies, the most anyone could usually pry from her. John had rarely heard her laugh. Only he and her husband and those who had known her for many years understood why.

“We’re going to have a guest with us for a few days, an old classmate of mine,” John said. “He’s arriving today and says he’ll be here in time for lunch. I hope the short notice won’t be a problem. I only learned he was coming last night.”

“The midnight caller,” Betty said. “No, it won’t be a problem. The women’s auxiliary is sending out Eunice Wellborn and Bella Gordon to help me this morning. An old friend, you say?”

“An old
classmate
,” John corrected. “I haven’t seen him since we graduated from high school. At least you don’t have to bother with breakfast for me. I have an early appointment in Kersey.”

Betty waited to be told more, the name of the visitor at least, but she recognized that Father was waiting patiently for her to leave before getting out of bed in his boxers and T-shirt. “It would be no bother,” she murmured. She took the tray and quietly pulled the door shut behind her. Whoever it was, Father didn’t seem too keen on seeing him. A freeloader, she’d bet. Father let people impose on him too much.

John threw off the covers and pushed his feet into slippers to go out onto his balcony. The coffee did not set well on his soured stomach, and his balcony presented a soothing view. It overlooked a large vegetable garden and livestock pens and corrals beyond where the children of Harbison House raised the animals for their FFA (Future Farmers of America) project. Felix, the orphanage’s pet dog, was eating his
breakfast on the back porch steps, and all around the prairie, now in bloom, flowed toward a quiet, pastel infinity. An idyllic setting, but John had the sense of something building at a distance, unknown and unseen, that would soon threaten its tranquility, like a storm gathering just over the horizon.

He remembered the last contact he’d tried to make with TD Hall. It was the summer of 1990, in Guatemala. John was working with the Jesuit Refugee Service at an especially dangerous time when the brutal government security forces had escalated its slaughter of political dissidents and their suspected supporters, among them the Jesuits. Thousands had had to flee their homes and country, and his task was to assist refugees in completing documents for political asylum and to record human-rights abuses. After days of hearing their appalling stories, of eluding death squads and battling the jungle’s steaming heat, mud, snakes, and mosquitoes, it had come as a respite in the evenings to write to his old buddy back in the States. John had not given up hope that eventually he and Trey and Cathy would reunite. Father Richard had told him that a sizeable check arrived yearly from an anonymous donor to be deposited in the scholarship fund set up in Donny Harbison’s memory—an indication that his old pal was still recoverable. Trey had not forgotten his promise made to John the night of their heart-to-heart after the district game. But one night John had risen straight up out of an exhausted sleep on his cot and from then on had never written to Trey again.

It was one of those inexplicable moments when the subconscious reveals a truth that has heretofore been buried beneath a pile of denial. Trey was never coming home. He was as lost to him and Cathy as the origin of the Mayan civilization. Perhaps some night his subconscious might kick out the reason Trey had abandoned them and his child, but whatever the cause—real or imagined in that capricious head of his—it was enough to guarantee they’d probably never see Trey again. It was simply something John was certain of, like a twin knows
instinctively that a mishap has befallen his womb mate. His letters, and even his prayers, sent with the hope that Trey would return to them, were pointless. He wrote at once to let Cathy know. She’d written back: “It’s all right, John. I let Trey go a long time ago.”

So why was he coming home now?

“Don’t bet on it, Tiger,” he’d said when John had told him it would be good to see him. Now what did Trey mean by that? What threat lurked behind those cryptic words?

Loose ends to tidy up, he’d said. When had TD Hall ever cared about loose ends? Mabel Church had been a loose end, the aunt who’d raised him and done her best by him, and Trey hadn’t even come to her funeral. He hadn’t bothered about the loose ends of leaving a girl pregnant in 1986 with the son he’d never acknowledged. When Trey had been halfway into his celebrated career, a reporter had gotten hold of a school picture of him at eight years old that showed a remarkable likeness to a boy of the same age in his hometown rumored to be his son. Trey was quoted as saying: “The Texas Panhandle breeds a bunch of us long, tall, drink-of-water look-alikes. We’re as common as tumbleweeds.”

Though she’d held her head high, John knew the implication had crushed Cathy and no telling what it had done to Will, but in the county it had boomeranged against Trey. It was one thing for a man to refuse to support his illegitimate child but another to deny the kid as his when everybody knew from his looks and the timing of his birth that he could only be the son of TD Hall. No wonder Trey hadn’t shown his mug in Kersey in twenty-two years.

So why now? Was he coming home to claim Will at last? To woo Cathy again? The possibility of it turned John’s stomach. Cathy’s “past indiscretion” had been forgiven, as she sardonically referred to it. John liked the way she’d once phrased her restoration to the town’s good graces: “If you keep your head up long enough, eventually the floodwaters will recede, and you can walk to shore on dry land.”

And indeed she had, as Trey would soon discover. Cathy was a vital contributor to the community, serving as president of the school board, a member of the city council, and a committeewoman on civic boards. Everybody adored her. She was lovelier than ever and owned a prosperous café hailed as one of the top small-town finds in the Southwest.

The town took as much pride in her son as it had in him and Trey. John Will Benson had batted his baseball team to the state finals, losing in the last nip-and-tuck inning. “He’d have been a natural on a football field,” Coach Turner once confided with both regret and relief that Will had not followed in his father’s footsteps. Will could have gone to most any college on a baseball scholarship, but his academic achievements had earned him a free ride to Rice University. He had recently graduated with a petroleum engineering degree and had accepted a job in Delton at a regional office of the oil company for which he’d interned. While John and Cathy were thrilled to have the boy close by, she’d hoped her son would have selected a position in the company’s other offices scattered around the country and the world. “He needs to expand his horizons, to experience life beyond Kersey County,” she had said, but Will loved the Panhandle and planned to buy a ranch in the county someday and raise horses.