Chapter 32 Riley - August 2024, the Azores, Portugal #3
"Because in the fall of 2017 he started wearing them.
The ridiculous ones. He had worn exactly one ridiculous tie in his life before that, in Chicago in April, at a banquet, and after that autumn he wore nothing else on camera for four years.
Zambonis, Riley. He wore a tie with Zambonis on it to a press conference in Toronto. "
"I gave that one a nine."
She looked at me.
"Out of ten," I said. "I've rated every tie that man has worn on camera since November of 2017.
I've never given a ten. I told him the ten was withheld and then I never explained why, because if I'd explained why we'd have had to have a different conversation entirely, and I have been running that operation for seven years. "
Eleanor Sinclair put her hand over her mouth for a second.
"So you're the veto. He stopped wearing three of them, and I noticed.
There's a green one in the back of that drawer that has been out of the house once, and a paisley that came home, and I have wondered about it since 2018 and I have never asked one question about anything. "
"That paisley was a four."
"Well," she said, and shut the drawer, and put her hand flat on the top of it.
"Then I'd like to make it official. You have the veto.
I'll send them to the house in Philadelphia and you can rule on them there, and I would like a number on each one, in writing, because I have been operating without data for six years. "
Big Jack got me alone at the fire pit at eleven. Everybody else had gone up. The tide was doing whatever it does and it was audible under the talking from the deck, and he had the blanket on and the cane across his knees and half a beer he was not supposed to have.
"Sit down."
I sat down.
"I told my grandson a story in a hospital," he said. "Six weeks ago. About a man named Terry Lavoie."
"He told me on a plane."
"Then you know it." He looked at the fire. "I'm not going to tell it again. I've told it twice this summer and once was thirty years too late. I'm going to give you the last part, which is the part I did not give him, because he was not the one who needed it."
"Okay."
"Emmett sat in the fourth row," said Big Jack, "and I've thought about why for thirty years.
And the answer isn't that the family was cruel, because they weren't, mostly.
The answer is that not one person in that church knew the whole score.
Some of them knew a piece. A cousin knew a piece.
A neighbor knew a piece. And a man who knows a piece will always, always do the easy thing with it. "
The fire did what fires do.
"So being seen isn't the dangerous part.
It's being seen in pieces. You want people around you who have got the whole score, all of it, both columns, and there is no safe number of those people except more than none, and it took me until about 1994 to work that out and it cost somebody else everything. "
"He's got four so far," I said. "Five including you."
"Six. His mother had it before either of you told her, she just wanted him to hand it to her." He drank about a quarter inch of that beer. "And I have got it from reliable sources that the score, as of this evening, stands even."
I looked at him.
"He's a Sinclair," said Big Jack. "He reported the result. He didn't tell me one word about how, and I didn't ask, and I've had four days of enjoying it."
Here is the state of things as of the first week of September, in inventory.
Camps open on Thursday. I fly Wednesday morning and he flies Wednesday afternoon out of a different airport, and both of us will be in a room by Thursday with a letter on a sweater and forty people who do not know.
The rivalry resumes on the 11th of October in his building. There is a promotional spot already cut for it, which I have seen, and which uses a few seconds of a handshake line in Chicago in 2017 slowed to a quarter speed with a piano under it.
There are talking points in my inbox from my agent about the negotiation, and there is a briefing folder in his from a man named Marsh Sinclair, sent on the second Monday of the month the way it has been sent for twelve years, and neither one of us has opened either.
There is a key on my ring that is not a spare, next to a $2 bulldog with the face worn off it.
There is a cork in a drawer in a desk in a room in Philadelphia that people now go into.
And the world still does not know. Nineteen thousand people are going to scream at that man in October and I am going to hit him into the boards and neither of us will say one word at the dot.
After the horn we will skate toward separate tunnels.
If we pass close enough, one of us will tap the other's glove half a second past the beat, the way we have since we were twenty-one, and then we will go to separate buses.
And the world can wait.
Because it is not a secret anymore. That's the whole difference and it took two hours on a terrace to build it.
A secret renews itself every morning for free while the two of you sleep.
What we have is a clause, with an expiry on it, and a date it gets reopened on, and a rule that says the door only ever opens by unanimous consent.
Someday is a clause now. It has a number on it. It is number two, it is written in carpenter's pencil on the back of a chemist's notepad on a terrace above a caldera, and it was ratified by unanimous consent of a two-member league in which relegation has been abolished in perpetuity.
There is still nowhere to go. Neither of us is going anywhere.