Suitcase City. Sterling Watson

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       FOUR

       1997, Tampa, Florida

      James Teach, forty-five and feeling it, vice president of sales for Meador Pharmaceutical Company, lifted his Wild Turkey and water, peered through its amber lens at the glittering bottles across from him, and said, “God, that was a good day. That . . . maybe . . . was the best day of my life.”

      The man sitting next to him smiled at the mirror across the bar. A fat man with an odd name Teach had now forgotten.

      It was the end of a long week, and Teach was tired. Here he was in a pretty good bar, Malone’s, in an unfamiliar part of Tampa, lifting his fourth bourbon—or was it his fifth?—and talking to a stranger about the good old days. The days when Jimmy Teach, a walk-on from little Cedar Key, Florida, had quarterbacked the Gators to an SEC championship and two bowl games.

      On his best day, against Auburn in Shug Jordan Stadium, Teach had thrown for three touchdowns and rushed for one. Everything had worked for Jimmy Teach that day. His feet dancing the backfield, his arm a gun firing tight spirals through the crisp fall air into the hands of his fast friends in Gator blue and orange.

      He finished the story: “So, I called a quarterback sneak and just put my head down and prayed to my Jesus, and the next thing I know I’m lying in the end zone with my ears ringing, and the ref’s hands are reaching straight up to heaven.”

      The fat man’s smile applauded the story. Teach shrugged and threw in some humility. “Hell, what was it that guy said? Half of it’s just showing up?” He grinned, noticing the man’s pricey olive-green suit and tropical tie. Teach’s wife, Paige, would have known the three places within a hundred miles where you could buy the suit and probably the name of the designer. Would have known. Paige had been dead a year now, and thinking of it, remembering that next week was the anniversary of her death, Teach felt guilty about the best day of his life. Why wasn’t it the day of his marriage? The day of his daughter’s birth? He shook his head and said, “Who was it said that thing about showing up? You remember?”

      The guy smiled again, showing his teeth, a little rabbity on top, the lower jaw undershot. “No, I don’t. But I do think it was a rock star.” The accent was Savannah or Charleston. The man had said, Rock stahhh.

      In his present state, Teach liked the accent. It was funny. He tapped the bar with his glass for another bourbon. “Hell, enough about football. No great deed goes unpunished.”

      He examined his right hand, the one that had thrown the bullet passes, the one with the half-moon cleat scar on the back. The hand had been stomped by an Ole Miss linebacker, a stomp applied with purpose and glee. “I’m sorry, but I’ve forgotten your name.”

      The fat man said, “Trey McLuster.”

      McLustuh. Teach liked it, that old Charleston music.

      McLuster looked at Teach and smiled the fan smile. That knowing, loving smile. The guy wanted to touch him. Teach knew it from years of times like this, though not so frequent anymore. The guy wanted to squeeze the arm that had thrown the high tight spiral that had settled as soft as cotton fluff into the hands of Digger Dupree in the FSU end zone with three seconds on the clock and bookies dying of cardiac arrest all over the Great Republic.

      Then McLuster said, “Screw rock stars. Tell me about the time you beat Miami in that hellacious rainstorm. That must have been something.”

      So Teach told it. How the ball was heavy with the rain, and slick as a Suwannee River catfish, but he’d completed nineteen of twenty-three and led the Gators to a squeaker 14–13 victory over a team that bettered them in size and speed. Bettered them on paper. But football games, he told the man next to him, weren’t played on paper. They were played on grass in real weather against men whose skill and courage equaled yours or didn’t.

      Teach lifted his glass and gazed into it. Christ, he’d had more to drink than he’d intended. More than he was used to. His companion was quiet now, appreciating what he had said. “Gentlemen,” Teach whispered, including the bartender now, “it’s consistency that wins, not the brilliant thing you do only once. It’s doing the job day in and day out, and knowing you can do it.” It was what Teach had always had, the thing that got it done. The thing you called upon when the contagion of defeat crept into other men’s eyes.

      And suddenly it hurt, what Teach was saying. It hurt because he was forty-five and his best days were behind him. It hurt because he had used the words he had just whispered, the truest words he knew, to sell pills to physicians all over the state of Florida for so many years now that he couldn’t say them anymore without seeing himself in some family-practice doc’s waiting room with a display case on his knees.

      He swallowed the last of his bourbon and remembered that Dean’s ballet recital would start in two hours. He closed his eyes and saw his daughter turning and toeing and sweeping her flower-petal hands in gestures so gorgeous and graceful that they brought tears to his eyes. Well, the football stories had pushed the pills that earned the money that bought the toe shoes and the tutus. Teach caught his reflection in the mirror. It was time to pee and leave.

      The front door opened and sunlight slanted across the floor of Malone’s Bar and a black man stepped in. He was tall and moved with an easy, athletic grace, and this made Teach watch him sit at a table near the men’s room door.

      Teach pushed away from the bar and stretched. “Well,” he said, “time to point Percy at the pavement.” He glanced at his watch. “And then off I go to perform the duties of a father.” He looked at McLuster, inviting him into the age-old complicity of fathers. The man nodded, and it seemed to Teach like a good way to end this pleasant interlude.

      He knew, and he supposed McLuster did too, that he could never share Teach’s understanding of what it was to rise to the top of something. But any man could know the warm arms of a wife, the sweetness of a daughter’s kiss, and the two of them could part in that knowledge.

      As Teach started for the men’s room, McLuster said, “Hell, I guess I’ll bleed the monster too.”

      They were at the urinals when the black man came in. Teach had it out and flowing. His head thrown back, his knees flexed, he was thinking about pulling himself together for the ballet recital. He’d cinch up his tie, drive through rush-hour Tampa to the Women’s Club, get the old Minolta out of the trunk of the Buick. A mint for his breath. Lord, he’d forgotten to buy film. He’d have to find a drugstore.

      Paige’s society friends would all be there in pearls and boutique dresses. Their faces would be made up perfectly, which meant imperceptibly, and they’d smell delicately of Chanel, and their necks and shoulders would be flushed with worry for the girls about to dance. And they would watch Teach, the widower, enter. The man not quite of their station, whose wife had been one of them. Beautiful Paige who had died so suddenly and in such an ugly way.

      “Well, look at you nasty white motherfuckers.”

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