Parker Field Read Online Free PDF Page B

the Taj Mahal, with its Oriental carpet in the lobby and full-time staff. I have told her more than once that the place is full of widows on fixed incomes.
    “Well,” she said the last time we had this discussion, “I bet it’s fixed a lot better than mine is. Social Security doesn’t fix it too high, I can tell you that.”
    I assure my mother that the police are on top of it, that they’ve got the weapon and it’s only a matter of time until they find out who shot Les.
    “I hope they find out why, too,” she says. I have to agree that I’m also kind of short on possible reasons.
    “Ought to string the bastard up,” Awesome adds.
    Yeah, I agree. They should.
    At the hospital, I’m surprised the nurses can’t smell the marijuana that permeates my mother’s clothes. The way they look at her, maybe they do. But she and Awesome are both more or less straight.
    We don’t have that much to talk about. Normally, I see Peggy once every week or two. Being together every day for several hours has already emptied the shallow reservoir of chat we might have been storing up.
    Peggy mainly sits and holds Les’s hand, talking to him when he’s coherent and knows who she is, otherwise just sitting there. The TV is on, but she doesn’t seem to be focused on much of anything.
    I asked her once, years ago, why she and Les never married.
    “Honey,” she said, “I don’t want to jinx it. Me and husbands don’t have such a track record, you know?”
    I know. The best adjective you could affix to any of my three stepfathers would have been “negligent.” There were days I prayed for negligence. Oregon Hill in those days was a place where putting bread on the table—even if it was from the past-due-date store—gave you permission to administer tough love to kids, sometimes without the love.
    Now, with the best man in her checkered adult life doing no better than “hanging in there,” my mother looks old. It’s all relative, I guess. She’s almost seventy, and she’s long had a weather-beaten look that she earned wrinkle by wrinkle. But she’s always been lively, even when she was stoned. Now, though, her natural high-beam energy looks like it’s down to about the level of a night-light.
    I’m about to take my third smoke break in the last two hours when Jumpin’ Jimmy Deacon, whose voltage has not been diminished in the least, comes vibrating into the room.
    “Hey!” Jimmy says, jolting us out of our torpor. “How’s the old Hacker doing? Ready to catch both ends of a double-header?”
    Les opens his eyes and smiles at the sight of his old friend.
    “Might need to warm up a little,” he manages.
    Jimmy dives into a discussion about the Flying Squirrels, whose home opener is on Thursday.
    “The Rats look good,” he says. “Got some talent coming up. Got some arms.”
    “Rats” is short for “Tree Rats,” which is what Jimmy and other old-timers call the Double-A team that is Richmond’s latest minor-league offering. Even the sports department balks at the tendency to name minor-league ball teams like they’re characters in a Saturday morning kids’ TV show. The sports guys have motives that are more selfish than aesthetic, though. The problem they have is that you can’t get “Squirrels” into a one-column headline. Management has not yet approved using “Rats” in heads, as in “Rats/edge/Sens/in 10.”
    The Atlanta Braves pulled their Triple-A team out of here three years ago. They moved it to an Atlanta suburb, and we got demoted to Double-A.
    You could see the train wreck coming ten miles away, but nobody put on the brakes. The city and the surrounding counties don’t play well together on a good day. The counties owe most of their growth to white flight, leaving the urban centers to stew in their own juices in a state where it’s almost impossible for cities to incorporate an inch of suburban topsoil. Parker Field evolved into The Diamond back in 1988, the previous time the parent club