Free The Crime Writer by Gregg Hurwitz Page B

of what would have been the neighbor’s front yard. I watched her, as I often did, with awe. To me she was the Great Mother, a beautiful woman with soft curves and a ready grin, always pregnant or nursing or laying cornbread on a just-wiped table. We ate lunch. Buckets of sweet potatoes, trays of corn, sliced sourdough off the cutting board.
    Angela pressed the tops of her breasts, grimacing. “I’m engorged. I need a mouth.”
    I said, “Don’t look at me.”
    Frowning her amusement, she threw a blanket over one shoulder as Jamaal handed off the baby.
    Chic buzzsawed through a plate of baby backs, shrapnel flying. He paused to belch, and Asia, chin level with the table, said, “Don’t forget you can’t do that when you start kindergarten.”
    “Okay, baby.” Chic pointed at Ronnie’s plate. “You gonna eat all that?”
    Ronnie shielded his plate with both arms. “Uh-huh.”
    “All right, then. You don’t finish, I gonna make you clean the toilets with your toothbrush.”
    “Nuh- uh. ”
    “Just you wait and see.”
    Ronnie went back to picking at his plate. Finally he slid it over to his father, who crowded him in the crook of his elbow and kissed him, leaving a greasy stain on his forehead that the other kids groaned about. Angela sat the baby in her lap, biting off his fingernails and spitting them into the bougainvillea. It was cool and the air smelled of jasmine, and I looked over at Angela and said, “Thank you.”
    She winked at me and rose, signaling that the clearing phase had begun. The ambulatory children helped, then were dispensed to their rooms for naps or reading or setting fires.
    Chic and I sat at the picnic table, drinking O’ Doul’s and counting the passing cars. We got to fifteen before a middle-aged guy in a construction truck bellowed, “You’re a fuckin’ choker, Bales!”
    Chic and I waved as we’d practiced many a time, the beauty-queen hand pivot.
    A one-game playoff to determine the NL West had taken place up at San Francisco a few years before I’d met Chic. The Pop-Up. I’d cursed at it live, and thousands of replays had kept it fresh in my mind ever since. Bottom of the eighth, Dodgers in the field, up by one. Runners at the corners. Tie game. Robbie Thompson hits a towering pop-up, two outs voiding the infield-fly rule. Bales is under it, waves off the second baseman. An eternity as the ball fights swirling Candlestick winds. Uribe, circling from first, is halfway down the third-base line when the ball nicks Bales’s glove, strikes his thigh, and dribbles into the Dodgers’ dugout. The Men in Blue go three up, three down in the top of the ninth and lose the pennant. Chic goes out drinking and doesn’t come back for two years.
    I said, “At least now I can keep you company in the ranks of the despised. I feel like the tuba player in high school.”
    Chic smiled. “High school. Worst six years of my life.”
    “Does it ever get to you?”
    “Nope.”
    “Really?”
    “Course it does, Drew-Drew. But then I remind myself: Everyone carries a burden. It’s about how gracefully you elect to bear it. Don’t you read the Good Book?” He snickered, worked something out from between his teeth. “My burden’s making a fuckload of money, then becoming one of the biggest goats in the history of Major League Baseball. So I made a fool of myself in front of twenty million people. Nineteen-plus of who I don’t know and never will.” He shrugged. “Beats getting gang-raped in a Rwandan torture camp.”
    I conceded the point.
    “What I did ain’t no J-O-B. Yours ain’t neither. There’s no need for our so-called services, and no sick baby gonna get cured by a page-turner or an opposite-field line drive.” He paused, his thick arms straightening in an air swing. “Pretty as it may be. What I provided can’t even be construed as a luxury. Lamenting that I been marginalized? Hated? Shit, I’d rather work on my barbecue sauce. ’ Cuz you know that takes a brother