Stephen Longacre's Greatest Match Read online

  As Jimmy was dragged by, he looked over at Stephen.

  “Stephen, you’d best hope there’s a early bus out of town tomorrow. The boys is cranked up something terrible!”

  Stephen looked away, trying to deny the fear he felt.

  But it came, nevertheless, dry and hot to his heart.

  He walked over to William.

  “You okay?”

  “Like to died, seen that gun come up.”

  “He’s an asshole. They’re all assholes. You want to call it a day?” We can get out of here. You get the same money, no problem. I won’t short you.”

  “No, suh,” said William. “Come to play. We can play it out now, if you want.”

  “Okay, William. You got some kind of nerve.”

  “You stay out here with me, you gots some kind of nerve.”

  Meanwhile, Earl took Jimmy to the two deputies and left him securely in their care. “If he tries anything, you bop his pretty curly head with that stick you’re always carrying, Buddy.”

  “Can’t b’lieve you’re asking me to whap a white fellow in favor of a colored one.”

  “The law is the law, and that’s all it is,” Earl said.

  Then he turned and addressed the ugly townie contingent.

  “Y’all settle down now. You let these fellows play their fool game, do you hear. I will call out a riot squad, by God, if I have to.”

  That was Earl. You couldn’t scare him with an atom bomb. He’d face up to anybody anywhere anytime, over any issue. It would get him killed one of these days.

  By the time some kind of order was restored, it was near twilight. The players now seemed almost bloody, not from their own plasma, but from the spray of red dust, which then clung to the sweat on their legs or the damp wool and canvas of their shoes. Where Bo had fallen, he wore a crown of red, like the red badge of courage; unfortunately, it was on his ass.

  In the third set, St. Sebastian and Bo rallied, went up 2-0 on Jeff’s serve and against William’s, which remained the least impressive part of his game. But Stephen held, the rattled Bo double-faulted three times, and then everybody held through the next round, and it was 4-4, William’s serve.

  He nodded at Stephen, who came over.

  “You okay?”

  “Yes, suh,” said William.

  “What is it?”

  “Do I have to hit it straight-like?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, do I have to hit it right in the center?”

  “Well, if I understand you, you can hit it anyway you want to.”

  “I could hit it on an angle. Like, you know, I could sort of brush it and git it to spinning.”

  “Well, yes. You didn’t know that? Gosh, I’m sorry, that’s my fault. William, you can hit it any way you want to.”

  William nodded solemnly, taking all this in. His eyes were faraway and intent, as if he were figuring something out.

  He went to the service line, showed the ball to signify the start of play, then stepped a good two yards back and tossed it high.

  Too high.

  He tossed it very high.

  But as he tossed it, he himself leaped, and, airborne, he was a thing of majesty, as if suddenly having found his creativity, his place in the game and the universe, and he hit the ball at a sliced angle so that it rocketed downward but broke to the left radically, and poor Jeff couldn’t get a racquet on it.

  “Jesus Christ, you could do that all the time?” said Stephen.

  “I guess,” he said.

  At any rate, he did it three more times and each time, the other fellows struggled for it.

  Suddenly the crowd was quiet.

  A thunderhead rolled in from out of the mountains.

  Nobody said a thing.

  Jeff was serving at 4-5 to stay in the match.

  William walked back to Stephen.

  “You be cool, man. It ain’t nothing. You just be there, man, cool and quiet and in control, you got me? We gon’ take these motherfuckers, okay. Take they asses.”

  “You got that right.”

  Jeff double-faulted his first serve.

  On his second serve, he hit a nice shot that William blocked back, but he came up with a screamer.

  Two more good serves, and he was serving for the game at 40-15.

  But he hit another double.

  Stephen watched him. He bounced the ball three times. Backhand. Stephen began to cheat, but then it occurred to him that Jeff hadn’t been bouncing the ball at all. He’d caught on! He cranked the racquet back to the forehand grip and at least got his momentum going, and when Jeff hit his best serve of the match, a bullet to the right, Stephen lunged and dinked a looper back that just hit on the line, which deflected its bounce just a bit, and Bo drove it into the net.

  Deuce.

  Jeff served to William, who blocked clumsily, something like a Texas leaguer, right at Bo at the net, but Jeff didn’t trust him, screamed “NO” as he came in to take the ball on the hop, utterly confusing Bo, who didn’t give way and hit it out.

  Suddenly, it was match point.

  Jeff conferred ever so quickly with Bo.

  He didn’t bounce the ball.

  He collected himself calmly, began the syncopation of the server, the orchestration of left to right, the shiver that liberated the strength to rise through his lean body, the delicacy of the toss, the ball, now red and shaggy, hanging at the equipoise as he craned his arm through, snapped shoulders and hips, the whole world, it seemed, resting on his brow.

  • • •

  His mother would always remember this moment. There were cruel days to come, when Connie didn’t think she could live another second, and only the ministrations of good men like Sam kept her alive. But there was also her memory of this moment, her only son’s, her doomed son’s, her haunted, crazed, and self-destructive son’s best moment on earth.

  Jeff served, Stephen got it back, a nice return fated to go deep and extend the point, but Bo had been instructed to poach. So, on the serve of the ball, he’d moved quickly to his left and was set to volley Stephen’s return into the alley, and for once, his nerve and his coordination didn’t fail him, and he got a good stiff-wristed volley onto the ball to tap it away.

  What was not expected was that in the split second he left his position, William left his, too, and raced toward him along the net, and when Bo’s volley crossed, there was William to volley it back, and it bounced in the alley, and Jeff ran full-goddamn-out to flick it back through the falling dusk and did get it, hitting a nice clean shot into the open court, but, alas, on the second bounce.

  No cheer went up.

  Rance didn’t stay to congratulate his son.

  Somehow the cup signifying victory was never presented.

  The crowd filed out sullenly.

  William and Stephen were too goddamned tired to embrace.

  Jeff disappeared quickly. Bo seemed to fade from the surface of the planet in a split second.

  The two boys stood there, heaving with oxygen depletion.

  “How’d you know he was going to poach?”

  “Poach?”

  “You know, come to my side of the court?”

  “Oh, he up on his toes when the serve be tossed. He don’t never do that before, so I figgered something was up. I just ran, and as I ran, I could see what he was trying to do and, I just keep on running and got there.”

  “Wow,” said Stephen, “you sure figured those boys out.”

  “Wasn’t much,” said William.

  The one man who approached them was Earl.

  “You know what, this ain’t a place to be lingering. Let’s git to my car, and I’ll get you boys out of here.”

  And that’s the way it ended, the two tennis players, sweaty and smeared with red clay, climbing into Earl’s State Police Ford. William sat in back and held Earl’s young son, Bob Lee, and Earl drove them straight up Route 71.

  “Where to?”

  “Can you cut over to Littl
e Rock?”

  They drove in silence the two long hours to Little Rock. William had nothing to say.

  Finally, swallowed by the squalor of that city’s black district, they drove by honky-tonks and fried chicken parlors and throbbing night crowds.

  “Turn left up here,” William finally said, guiding them down Kedzie to 154th, then right again, this time up Wilson.

  They pulled up in front of a block of row houses, decrepit and mostly deserted.

  “You live here?” Stephen said.

  “Wif my mama. You got my money?”

  “Of course.”

  He handed an envelope over.

  “It’s all there, plus something. Hey, you really did well.”

  “Yeah, we showed them boys, didn’t we?”

  “We sure did.”

  “William,” said Earl, “ is there someone we could talk to? A doctor, a priest, your dad, or someone? I’d like to tell them what a great young man you are and how well you did today. They should know. You were a real hero.”

  “No, suh,” said William. “I am fine. Thank y’all fo’ being so nice to me.”

  But then, there was a moment of awkwardness. The child, Bob Lee, had fallen asleep in William’s arms. William didn’t want to wake him, but there was no other way. Gently, he laid the child down on the backseat of the car.

  “So long, little man,” he said, and with his envelope, left the car and was gone.

  “That’s an athlete,” said Earl.

  “That is an athlete. He’s supposedly the best basketball player this city has ever seen. He’s legend. He can do things with a basketball you can’t believe.”

  “I hope he’s all right. Is there a place for him to go?”

  There seemed to be no answer to that question, so the trooper, the boy, and the child drove back in silence to Polk County and what lay ahead for them.

  Hemingway

  Stephen Hunter

  What was it like the night Hemingway socked me in the jaw at Toots Shore’s?

  Not much fun, I can tell you.

  I was at the bar, knocking back my usual Sidecar. Toots himself came over.

  “Papa just walked in with his crowd of swells. Chum, maybe it’s time to take a powder.”

  Hemingway had been badmouthing me all over town since the success of my novel, Not Yet Unto Plowshares, about the lives, deaths, and loves of a squad of marine paratroopers Sten-gunning their way across Europe from the Seine to the Volga, and Toots knew something ugly was about to unspool.

  But it was too late. The big guy was on me, yelling, spraying, and shoving. His movie star pals were laughing it up while everyone else in the saloon got real quiet. His rage was theatrical, Old Testament, pure purple and gigantic.

  “Same to you, Gabby Hayes,” was all I could come up with, and that’s when he threw his shot.

  Next thing, I’m looking at the ceiling through sunglasses smeared with butter. There’s a fireworks show going on. And that’s about all I remember. Maybe you read about it in the papers.

  Well, you probably didn’t, as it happened not on the Planet called Earth, but the Planet called Steve, pop. 1. But it could have happened, if the chronology was right, and I was a lot more successful than I am and books still mattered as much as they once did. That’s because I’m a member of a species Hemingway in particular abhorred. I write a lot about war, like he did; he’d been in war, and I never have. In fact, despite all the scenes of slaughter and military mayhem in my books, I hadn’t been within 7,000 miles of a combat zone.

  I do know a few things about war culture that Hemingway didn’t. I know what it’s like to be a private; you get yelled at a lot. I know what it’s like to do 18 hours of KP, pots and pans, no less. I know what it’s like to bury a kid while his parents weep beyond control. I have a pretty good manual of arms on the old nine-ton M-14. I still know how to spit shine a dress shoe, and I’ve felt the shame and ignominy of defecating in a row of defecators.

  But I don’t know what it’s like to shoot a man and see his face shatter under the impact. I don’t know what it’s like to lie in mud and shit while strangers try to reduce me to the atomic state by dumping large amounts of high explosive all around the position. Hemingway knew that, so did J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, and on up to Tim O’Brien and Karl Marlantes, and so many others who were not only brilliant writers but brave men. If you have lain under artillery, you have learned that you are not a coward. I don’t know that about myself.

  The issue here is: who owns the combat experience? Is it only writers who’ve survived it, or, as I would somewhat unenthusiastically maintain, is there some room for us battle virgins, if we do it correctly.

  That’s the key, if done correctly.

  For one thing, no man who hasn’t been in a war can claim to have been in one. Maybe it’s an ancient ’50s relic of a belief, but I still hold that the ordeal is a test of manhood and to claim it without having passed it breaks some kind of rule that can’t be expressed. Like most writers, I’m manipulative, malicious, full of toxic grudges and general animosity to my peers and colleagues and unscrupulous whenever it might advance my career, but I remain scrupulous about the lame truth of my military experience. My hero snipers have hundreds of kills, I have none, as I explain over and over at book signings, mostly to very young men who haven’t quite mastered the difference between doing and pretending. I’m tempted, as a natural liar obsessed with heroics, to fake a bigger resume. But I never have.

  Another reality is that war has been so penetrated by generations of brave cameramen that its visuals are no longer mysterious. Hemingway lived and wrote just as camera equipment was becoming mobile. For his generation of combat survivors, a part of their singularity was that they had seen what few others had. They knew the look and feel of war, while outsiders had only a few hundred feet of the same combat photography, which mostly showed men crouching and a Bijoux’s worth of back-lot Warner’s impersonations, where the Japanese always charge in an unwavering line, shouting things like “You die, Babe Ruth.” Any fifties kid knew that was wrong, but the true iconography of war was private; seen and remembered only by those who’d been to hell and back.

  Now, we know so much, owing to the belly-crawling cameramen and, in their race to keep up, the technicians of Hollywood. Look at the Teneru river fight in “The Pacific”: it’s a magnificent, thoroughly convincing evocation of what must have been very close to the reality of the event, with the tracers floating through the air, the layers of gun smoke, the incredible speed of the machinegun bullets pecking through the dirt and flesh, the blood everywhere, the odd mélange of horror and exhilaration. Of course, it traces its lineage back through “Band of Brothers” to “Saving Private Ryan,” each of which moved the standard of reality forward significantly.

  And the experience has been penetrated psychologically as well. The big news that Hemingway brought back from the First World War was that it wasn’t a romantic crusade but a bloodbath, degrading to all, leaving in its wake years and years of depression and a sense of futility distilled from the Western Front wastage as well as eternal suspicion towards the men who had engineered such slaughter in the name of granfalloons like “Our Nation” and “The Fatherland.”

  After the Second World War, that message was refined as we began to calculate the damage done to men exposed to high explosive and machinegun fire over lengths of time. Indeed, Hemingway himself and, I would argue, Salinger, were sufferers from Combat Stress Syndrome, and it may explain the thinness of the older man’s work afterwards and the younger man’s concentration on teenage and Zen culture. (Lord, I hope they find a great, last World War II novel in Salinger’s papers, but I doubt it.)

  So us trespassers must understand and dramatize that, as we must understand that each war creates its own language, which we must master; and each war has its own unique technology, which we must understand; and each war reflects the larger society that sent its men off to battle, and that context, we must
grapple with.

  All that said, isn’t it ultimately only the text that matters, not the experience of the man who wrote it? Do the words compel and convince? Are they charged with fire? Do they alter your confidence in the physical world around you, do they sting, wound, lacerate and linger? Do you learn death and killing from them and the joy and guilt of survival? Do you question your own rigor in facing such a test?

  If that can be so, then perhaps they contribute something. In fact, the more I think about it, darn it, the more right I think I am and the more I feel it’s all right to create the fabric of war without ever having sat in its mud and cowered under its incoming..

  But please, tell me if you see Marlantes, or Sebastian Junger, coming through the door. They look pretty tough.

  CLYDE & BONNIE

  Stephen Hunter

  Route 154 seems like a road out of a Beckett landscape, a long, hot, flat, dusty strip that runs through a featureless pine forest. It comes from nowhere, it goes nowhere—connecting, on a more-or-less straight shot, Mt. Lebanon and Sailes, in Bienville Parish in Louisiana’s northwestern corner.

  Not much has changed in 75 years. Someone has asphalted what was once raw earth and now, of course, you may Google up a certain point and view it through the satellite’s eye, sliding through the magnifications from the comfort of your own home. What you see, no matter the height, is a ribbon of road running through a green nothingness. But in that desolate place at 9.10 A.M., on May 23, 1934, something memorable happened.

  If the outer space eye existed then, it would have presented the image of a sleek Cordoba gray Ford V-8, expertly driven, raising a shroud of dust as it roared along, at nearly 70 miles an hour, in the direction of Sailes. It would observe neutrally as the vehicle slowed as it approached what appeared to be an old farmer’s truck, in some distress, off the side of the road. As its occupants recognized the truck, and possibly the owner—accounts differ as to his presence—they halted.

  Without blinking, the satellite would chronicle the next development: Six police officers arose from the bushes at the roadside, the closest 25 feet from the Ford. As intimate a view as it would have provided, it would not resolve the many details that remain in dispute.