Billy Royce’s Last Chance Valentine

Billy Royce’s Last Chance Valentine

The Sunday Before Valentine’s Day

“I love you, too,” Hank told his ex-wife as he hung up the phone. They had talked for an hour, which was fairly normal for them in the past month or so. He was even hearing her talk about how his lifetime ban had more to do with problems between the owners and the players, and how what he had done was so much less than what other players had gotten by with in the eighties. She would not acknowledge he was innocent, and he had stopped trying. Still, even this small bit of mercy gave him a scary kind of hope they might get back together.

It was nine in the evening, and he had nothing better to do than grab a beer from the fridge and sit down to watch whatever college basketball team was playing that night. He went to his fridge and grabbed a beer. He pried off the cap and didn’t have time to take a swig before his phone rang again.

He had an idea about who it was, and it was not his ex-wife. Someone had been beeping in on the call-waiting for the last half hour of his talk. Since he looked out his window and didn’t see anything burning down, he decided they could wait until he was done talking. Now that he was off, they would finally have their chance. Hank set down his beer and picked up the phone.

“Hank? This is Taylor Nickles. I’ve called you before about joining the Cedar Falls HooseCows. Sent you some things in the mail,” the voice said.

“Right,” Hank said. The first thing he remembered was that all of the letters had come addressed to “Tombstone” James, using the nickname he despised. He sat down on a barstool.

“So, what’d you think of what Billy said?” Taylor Nickles asked.

“Billy who?” responded Hank. He had to hurriedly swallow a mouthful of beer he hadn’t had time to swallow.

“He was supposed to have been there yesterday to talk to you personally. Played you with for a few years in the minors. Billy Royce. Remember?”

“Yeah,” Hank said. Billy had never made the majors. He had been in a three year relationship with a local girl on the East Coast when he caught her making out with another ballplayer from another team. He just walked out of the room where they were kissing, went outside, and started piling up brush on the porch of her small house in the older part of town. He lit his cigarette before he lit the pile of wood on fire. Later, he told some buddies he had gotten halfway through his cigarette before anyone noticed. Everyone lived, the porch was ruined, and Billy was off the team before the next day’s game, where he would’ve pitched against the man who had been in bed with his girlfriend.

Hank remembered exactly why he had no interest in responding to Nickles’ offers to join his team.

“Wait, you’re the guy whose teams full of guys with criminal convictions, right? The HooseCows? Like “hoosgow,” the old slang for “jail?’”

Taylor laughed a big laugh, and even over the phone Hank could tell he had a big, showy smile.

“Hank, if I can get several thousand more people out to watch games in the hot Iowan sun by using a little gimmick, and if that gimmick can get a bunch of players that major league owners are too rich and snooty to talk about a chance to get some stats together and get back in the game, why do you have to make it sound like I’m doing such a bad thing?”

Hank didn’t smile.

“Some of us aren’t proud of what people say we did.”

“And some of us have been around enough to know when other people got a bum deal for something they never did.”

Maybe Taylor was just a really good salesman, but Hank believed the owner and manager of the Cedar Falls HooseCows really believed he was innocent. Still, he said nothing. The idea of hearing long, drawn-out “Tooooombstone” calls as fans yelled at him and called him a crackhead didn’t appeal to him.

Nickles let the silence continue, and then he began talking again, as if he wasn’t at all frustrated by the former player’s standoffishness.

“Well, you can tell Billy all about what bugs you. He’s gonna pitch for us, and that’s damn sure a better chance at getting in the majors than he was going to get anywhere else. Lot more people would see him if you joined the team, too.”

“Sure,” Hank said.

“And would you call me if Billy doesn’t get there by Tuesday? He’s on the clock, and if he’s out whoring it up, I don’t want to be paying for that.”

The next morning, Hank was up early with a snow rake and a smile. This chore could keep him busy for the better part of a morning, and it would make his drive out to the town bar seem more like a reward and less like an obvious step down a road to bitter, drunken, lonely old age. Plus, he had held off going the night before, so it would feel like he earned it twice as much.

Off his front doorstep there was a patch of snow that had been disturbed and kicked about. There were reddish-brown dots in the snow. Hank looked around for tracks in his lawn. He could be looking at the signs of a coyote kill, but he figured it was more likely a neighborhood dog that had snagged a rabbit or squirrel and drug it off somewhere.

He waited until seven to go into the bar, although he was dressed and ready by five. There was no restaurant in this bar, so he wouldn’t have to put up with showy couples with flowers. In fact, many of the people in the bar would be worse off than him in relationships. They’d spend a large portion of their nights talking about restraining orders and things that bitch had said in court.

On his way down the secluded road that led to his house (“mansion,” his father always called it), he noticed a car parked off to the side. A dusting of snow from the night before covered it, so it had been there for close to a full day. It could’ve been some autograph seeker (there were still a few who came out, usually polite but always awkward), but he figured he’d have seen them by now. More likely than not, it was either some crazy teen or some hunter.

At the bar, he disappointed himself by drinking responsibly and then offering to take a drunk man named Michael Janssen home. The bartender gave Hank a look when he offered, and once Hank decoded the look as a sign of pity, he realized he had made a mistake. Immediately after this realization, Michael put an arm around Hank and told him that wouldn’t work, because he had been thrown out a week ago for something he did that he wasn’t really explaining all that clearly. Michael just let the unasked question hang in the air, and Hank offered up a spare bedroom in his house.

On the way, Michael found a radio station playing an old seventies song and he cranked it up to deafening. He sang the words he could remember as loudly as he could, and when he could no longer remember the words, he just screamed out the window, to no one in particular, “I’m a rock star!”

This lasted for half of the ride home, and then Michael became quiet and slumped. His eyelids were drooping and he was smiling at Hank a lot. It was clear one of two things would happen: the drunk man would vomit, or he would fall asleep. From the wet, teary eyes that were looking at him, and from the way he kept licking his lips, Hank became more convinced Michael was going to vomit. He wanted to drive faster, but the road here was rocky and he feared the bumps would be all Michael needed to begin vomiting like a rock star.

They were getting closer to home, and Michael was now coughing and holding his hand up to his mouth. Hank was very close to getting him to a bathroom, and was indeed practicing the route he would lead the staggering man through to linoleum and safe vomiting. He might have gotten his plan to work, too, if he hadn’t noticed the car parked outside his house had Iowan license plates.

He gently pulled off to the side of the road and parked.

“Open the door, now,” he commanded Michael.

“Okay. Geez,” Michael said, indignant. He opened the door and then put his head in his hands. By the time Hank stood up and got out of the vehicle, he could hear Michael vomiting away onto the shoulder of the road.

The car he was approaching was from Iowa, and that’s where the HooseCows were. He wiped snow off the back windshield, looked in the backseat, and saw a jersey with his name on the back, along with the number 3. He remembered the snow and brown spots in front of his house, and he realized whatever had happened there had left no other tracks, and any kill would have been dragged up the driveway before the snow fell. Most animals would rather handle their kills on grass, wouldn’t they? He had fallen asleep in front of the TV yesterday. Had it happened then?

“Should’ve cut me off, man. Someone should’ve cut me off!” Michael said, and a fresh round of sickness was launched into the night air.

The driveway was up ahead, and so was a pile of logs he had stacked in the fall but neglected to haul back to the house. The wood had come from two trees, and he had piled then up into a corner about five feet high, like a house with only two walls.

“Where ya going?” Michael asked. He did not move from his seat inside the truck.

The walk down the side of the ditch was difficult, as the snow came up to Hank’s thighs and the ground itself was slick and frozen solid. As he neared the bottom, he had to steady himself with his hands. The snow scratched at his palms but did not draw blood. He looked up to see his woodpile was closer, like a castle on a hill that he had to storm. He began walking up the other side of the ditch, now needing to use his hands with every step. At some point, due to the steepness of the hill, it felt more like crawling than walking.

“Hank!” Michael yelled. Hank looked back over his shoulder but there was nothing to see. Apparently, Michael had now become sad and lonely.

It was hard to see anything behind the wall of logs. For only a second, Hank considered getting down on his hands and knees to feel if there was anything propped up in the corner, waiting for him. Then, he thought about what it would feel like to touch the dead skin of what he was afraid he would find. Would he immediately recoil, or would he have to keep touching to be sure?

“Michael, I need you to point the truck at me and turn on the lights,” Hank sad. Nothing in the still, dead woods moved.

“No way!” Michael slurred. “That’s a DWI if some cop comes down to check on your great big mansion. And in case you didn’t notice, Hank, I ain’t feelin’ so good.”

Hank had noticed all of these things. He had also noticed the snow around him appeared to have been walked in recently. He noticed that, in the woods at this time of night, you really couldn’t see into the trees.

“It’s just backing it up.”

“I could lose my license!”

“So you’ve done this before,” Hank said, taking a deep breath. “If you go real slow and get out as soon as you’re done, you’re gonna be fine. It’ll take a few minutes. You see any cops that are going to be here in a few minutes?”

Hank heard nothing the occasional ruffling of branches for a few moments, and then he heard his truck back up very slowly. He knew Michael had been cursing him out the whole time.

The headlights slowly moved along the wall of logs facing the road, and then enough light spilled in that he could see what was there. Beside the two beer cans he’d left there when he cut the wood, and propped up in the corner of the wood, was the body of Billy Royce. There was a red trail of blood leading from the upper right part of the man’s chest and down the front of his dress shirt. Hank saw Billy had fallen on hard times in the way his body had lost so much of its youthful muscle, and then he was sad and scared at the same time.

“Can we go inside now?” Michael yelped.

Hank didn’t answer. Instead, he crawled slowly to the piece of paper Billy’s hand was clamped around. The whole time he moved, he felt sure something was standing over him, ready to stomp on his back and pin him to the ground. His teeth were clenched tightly but, somehow, he made it to the paper without being attacked.

Michael had begun honking his horn. Hank jumped and came very close to bumping into the dead body of Billy Royce with his cheek.

“I’m coming!” he said.

The piece of paper was a letter asking him to sign with the HooseCows. The bloody “Don’t” made the whole meaning of Billy’s death too clear.

(NEXT)