Chapter 26 Dante
I’m not clear of the gate before I’m dialing.
Two answers to asked questions ride with me.
I’m good — from Levi, handed over at the door too fast, too smooth, and I took it because I wanted it to be true.
And I can’t tonight. From me. Out fast before his question finished. I’ve listened to a thousand buyers say can’t and mean won’t. I know the sound well and I made it.
I dial the first client before the gate closes behind me.
The first call goes fine. I line a couple up for Sunday, a two-thirty and a four.
Birmingham, new construction, they want a bunk room and I have exactly the thing.
The second call I lose the thread halfway through.
The woman asks about school districts and I come back three seconds late.
I cover it. But I heard the gap and so did she.
Because the morning won’t leave me alone.
There’s only one way to fix that problem. I find the nearest big box electronics store, park crooked and go in.
The prepaid phones are on a rack in the back, behind the cases and the chargers.
The cheap end of the aisle. Forty dollars.
No contract, no account. A month of minutes you pay for at the register, and no one anywhere has your name.
I stand under the fluorescent lights. A man who moved twenty million dollars of real estate before lunch, squinting at the fine print on a forty-dollar phone.
I buy it. The kid at the register doesn’t look up.
Then I sit in the lot and set it up. The AC’s going full against ninety-five degrees coming up off the asphalt.
My tie is loose and the little phone is propped on the steering wheel.
I thumb through the setup screens one at a time.
Language, time zone, the slow stupid carousel of a device built for someone who’s never owned a phone.
It takes forever. And with my hands doing busy work, the night gets its turn.
I touch people. It’s the first language I ever had. In my mother’s kitchen, no one crosses the room without a hand landing on someone. Hugs, kisses. It’s how I say what English makes heavy.
Levi, I’d touched exactly once. A fistful of his collar and a refrigerator at his back. Since then, I’d kept my hands off him entirely. My hand on him was never going to be casual. I knew better all week.
Last night I did it anyway.
I told myself it was because of the ice. The ice wasn’t the reason. I said it out loud first, to give him a warning. Then I put my palm on his bare back, and the connection between us locked into place like I knew it would.
He flinched. I’d given him reason to. Then he stayed steady under my hand. He felt it same as I did, and both of us knew what had been said by me touching him, and there’s no unsaying it now.
That’s why my answer, ‘I can’t tonight,’ came out of me at a dead sprint. I was running from whatever is happening between us.
The screen’s asking for a time zone. Central.
I keep going. I activate the minutes off the card from the register.
I get it to the home screen. No apps, nothing on it.
Then I put one number in it. Mine. Dante.
I type my own number into the contacts, and that’s the address book.
One name. I take out my own phone and put the burner’s number into mine, so it’s there when it lights up.
It’s done.
The crushing weight that’s been sitting on my chest since I left the apartment this morning lifts and I can think straight again. Whatever else happens, the next time Levi is alone in that house at three in the morning, there’s a line out with my phone number in it.
I set the little phone on the passenger seat and pick mine back up. I call the Birmingham couple back about the four o’clock. This time I don’t lose the thread once.
By the time I’ve worked through the list, the sun is setting and I have a legitimate reason to drive back out to the beach. To deliver a phone to Levi. He has a way to reach me now if he needs to.
I pull up the drive, cut the engine, and get out into the evening. Somewhere off in the dark toward the beach a guitar is going. A chord carrying on the night air after a hot day, there and then gone. Probably a Saturday night bonfire down the beach.
I knock, wait the polite thirty seconds and let myself in the front.
The house is dark. One lamp burning somewhere deep in it, the big glass black.
The AC is roaring its head off, cooling the Gulf of Mexico.
That’s the war he’s been fighting all week, and I’ve quit refereeing.
Clear across the main room, the sliding glass door to the terrace stands wide open.
He comes barreling in through it as I walk in the front, like he’s only now hearing the door.
He’s off. I catch it in the half-second before he gets his face straight. He comes in from the terrace hollowed out, a rawness around the eyes he tries to hide. His normal easiness takes a minute to arrive. But I caught the first version.
“Hey.” He pulls up when he sees it’s me, and there’s a question all over him. “What’s going on? Something wrong with the house?”
“Nothing’s wrong with the house.” I lift the bag so he can see it’s an errand. “Brought you something. Sit down a second.”
“You drove all the way back out here to bring me something?”
“I did.”
“On a Saturday.”
“Sit down, Levi.”
He sits, wary of why I’m here. I take the phone out of the bag and hand it to him. He turns it over in his hands like it might explode.
“It’s a burner phone,” I say. “A throwaway. Not connected to any account or credit card.”
“I can see that.”
“Forty dollars at the register. Cash. The kid ringing it up didn’t even look at me.”
“You bought a burner phone. In fancy clothes and a tie.”
“I loosened the tie first. The phone is for you.” I sit down on the arm of the chair across from him.
“There’s no name on it, no plan, no bill.
No card on it, so there’s nothing to follow.
It can’t be tracked. No apps. No one anywhere knows it exists.
” I nod at it. “One number in it. Mine. You need anything, any hour, you call me and I’ll come.
It doesn’t show up on a single screen but the one in my pocket. The phone is clean.”
The rest of it doesn’t get said out loud — and it dials 911 same as any phone, so if a night ever goes the way last night went and I’m not down the hall…
Saying it puts him back on that balcony in front of me, and he’s spent the day climbing off of it. Levi will figure out what the phone is for. He turns the phone over in his hands and doesn’t say a word.
“I don’t know who Freddie is,” I tell him.
“I don’t care who he is. I don’t need to know one thing about the man to know what he’s doing is wrong.
No one should be able to pull up a map and see you stopped for a sandwich.
No one should know where you sleep down to the GPS of it.
That’s not looking after a person. Whatever it is, it isn’t that. ”
He shrugs. “It’s never been any other way. That’s how it is.”
“No. Don’t do that.” I’m up off the chair arm.
My voice is too loud for the room, and my hand is cutting the air in front of me.
“Don’t tell me that’s how it is, because that’s not how anything is.
No one gets to put a — a collar on another man, and a little screen so he knows where he is every minute, and call that — Dios, what do you even call that, what is there to call it —” I hear myself rise, my hands going.
I bring it back down. “It’s not right, Levi.
It’s not normal either. That’s all I’m saying. You’ve got a phone now he can’t see.”
His eyes come up off the phone and onto me. They stay there.
The questions I’m dying to ask are right there.
Who is Freddie? What’s he got on you? Why in God’s name don’t you get rid of him and walk? Why won’t you talk to me?
“Why do you keep the phone on you?” It’s the one I let out, and it’s the smallest one I’ve got. I already know it isn’t really a question.
“Easier than the alternative.”
“Easier than what?”
“Than not.”
He looks back down at the little phone in his hands. He keeps turning the phone over and over and not looking up. When he finally does, there’s too much emotion in his face over a cheap prepaid phone. I wasn’t mentally prepared for the phone to matter this much.
“Nobody’s ever…” he starts, and doesn’t finish it.
My hand comes up off my knee. On its own, headed to grip the back of his neck, the way it would go to Benji’s, to anyone’s. I bring it back down. I know what it means now when my hand lands on him.
“Is that offer still good?” I ask. “For tonight? The ballgame? The pizza?”
His green eyes fly back up to mine. “You said you had calls.”
“All the calls are done for the day and I’m starving.”
“Sure, the pizza offer is still good.” He’s off the couch and already grabbing his old phone.
The only one attached to anything that can summon a pizza.
He’s pulling up a number already, alive in a way he wasn’t ten seconds ago.
“How much pizza can you eat, Dante? Tell me the truth. Don’t get shy on me now. ”
“Order enough for two hungry men,” I tell him, and sit down on the far end of the sectional.
“That’s not a number,” he says.
“It is where I come from.”
He orders extra everything and double whatever. Then he turns on the barn-door television to the game, the second night of the series, and cranks up the volume. He drops onto the other end of the sectional, a long cushion of room between us. I could tell you the length of that cushion to the inch.
For an inning neither of us says a word. Then, at the TV, out of nowhere, Levi says, “He’s tipping his changeup.”
“He’s what?”
“Tipping it.” He nods at the screen. “Glove flares when he’s throwing soft. Watch.”
Two pitches later the glove flares, the batter sits on it, and the ball goes off the wall in left-center. Levi doesn’t gloat. He just nods.
“You played baseball,” I say.
“Some.” A shrug. “You said before that you played. What position?”
“Second base. Little league, then JV, then the bench, then real estate. I could field and I could talk.”
“You left out hitting.”
“No, I didn’t.”
He laughs. Short, surprised out of him, but genuine.
“My father’s watching this game right now,” I tell him.
“Guaranteed. TV sound off, radio on, because he doesn’t trust any man who calls baseball from a booth with air conditioning.
He grew up in Cuba on Luis Tiant. El Tiante.
The windup — back to the hitter, a look up at God, then the ball arrives from somewhere behind third base.
My father is seventy-one and can still do the entire thing in the kitchen with a wooden spoon.
My mother has learned to cook around it.
I tried the windup once at eleven and put a ball through the neighbor’s screen door.
My father paid for it and told everyone I had promise. ”
“Did he come to your games?”
“Every one. Kept score in a spiral notebook — his own system, half the marks aren’t legal scorekeeping anywhere on earth. Every at-bat I ever took is in a drawer in that house.” I shrug. “There aren’t many. It’s a thin notebook.”
Levi listens. “That’s a good dad.”
“He is.” I lob one back. “Where’d you play?”
“Left field. I could run. Our field didn’t have lights though.”
The games ended when the sun did. That’s all he gives me. I take it and don’t push.
The gate buzzes with the pizza delivery. He jumps up, and is back in two minutes with the boxes stacked to his chin. There are four of them.
“I said enough for two hungry men.”
“And that’s what I ordered.”
We dig into the pizza. The game tightens.
Bottom of the sixth there’s a play at the plate, and we’re both up off the sectional yelling at the same replay — him with “He’s out, he’s out, look at the tag,” me around a mouthful of pizza going “Safe. Safe. The foot’s in,” and the umpire sides with Levi.
He points at me across the cushion like he won money on it. He’s lit up with it, grinning.
First argument we’ve had that neither of us needed to win.
Seventh-inning stretch, the crowd sings “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” and next to me — barely there, under his breath — Levi sings with it. Not even knowing he’s doing it, I’d swear.
The sound goes straight through me. Low, rough, warmer than a stadium jingle has any right to be, and I keep my eyes fixed hard on the screen. Levi’s voice should not be able to do that to the seventh-inning stretch.
My intentions were to drop off a phone and get back on the road. That was five innings ago. Levi seems good and has finally quit looking like the floor’s about to go out from under him.
I stay as the innings stack up, one cushion from a man I know better than to touch, and I don’t get up.