The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell(37)

Throughout high school my classmates had bastardized my last name and called me Hell. Every so often Ernie fell back into that habit.

“What up, Hell?”

“Wondering if you wanted to catch a beer at Moon’s and watch the Forty-Niners game, but it doesn’t sound like you can get a hall pass, you pussy-whipped candy ass.”

“Insult me all you want, you red-eyed son of the devil,” Ernie roared in a very good imitation of Muhammad Ali. “We both know who wears the pants in my house, if I choose to wear pants at all. I have committed to nothing, and I am the king of my castle!”

“You want to call me back after you call and get permission?”

“You know it, brother.”





3

Moon McShane’s drew a lot of Burlingame regulars and Forty-Niners faithful, making parking on Broadway scarce.

Most of the tables inside had already filled by the time I arrived. I took a seat on a stool at the bar, ordered a beer, and immediately drank half the glass. The thought of David Bateman, even after so many years, had unnerved me. The belief that he could be abusing his child made me sick.

Ernie entered ten minutes after I’d taken a seat. It felt like another ten minutes before he reached the bar stool I’d saved for him. People were drawn to the great Ernie Cantwell like magnets to metal. It had always been that way—at OLM, at Saint Joe’s High School, and at Stanford, where I followed a year behind him. Ernie had played wide receiver and studied computer science. The Pittsburgh Steelers drafted him in the third round, and he played in the NFL just long enough to bankroll his hefty salary and retire in the prime of his career. It had been Ernie’s intention since childhood to join the computer company his father had started in the garage of their Burlingame home. Cantwell Computers had grown significantly, and Ernie said the company had only scratched the surface of its potential, that someday every desk in every office and home in the world would have a personal computer. I had my doubts. It seemed more Star Trek than reality, but I hoped he was right, because I had a vested interest—Ernie had strong-armed me into investing some of my early inheritance in Cantwell Computers.

Ernie shook my hand and told the bartender to pour whatever I was drinking. I ordered my second. Ernie held up his glass. “Cheers,” he said, then got that look of disgust. “You still wearing those dumb-ass contact lenses?”

“How many times are you going to say that?”

“Until you take them out.”

“I don’t want to scare my patients.”

“If that’s the reason, you ought to wear a mask.” He considered the overhead television. “I was listening on the radio. Sounds like the Niners are kicking some butt.”

I didn’t know the score. “How long is the hall pass?”

“I told her I’d leave at halftime.” Ernie and his wife met and married in Pittsburgh before moving back to California. They owned a house just south of Burlingame and had two young boys who called me Uncle Sam. “I didn’t push it. I’m holding out for something bigger.”

“Bigger than the Niners on Monday Night Football? Blasphemy,” I said.

Ernie reached inside his suit coat and produced two tickets. I knew immediately what they were. Every sports fan in the Bay Area knew what they were. “You’re shitting me! You scored a World Series ticket?”

“Two, my friend. So, I was going to ask . . .”

“This is unbelievable.”

“Would you mind watching the boys while Michelle and I go to the game?” Ernie laughed so hard I was surprised beer didn’t shoot from his nose the way grape juice did when we were kids. Michelle hated to watch sporting events on television or in person. How the two of them met and married was a mystery.

“You asshole,” I said.

“Be nice or I won’t take you.”

“How’d you get them?”

With the San Francisco Giants playing the Oakland Athletics in what the media had dubbed the Battle of the Bay, finding a ticket had been next to impossible. “My dad’s client can’t make it, so he offered them to me. I was going to take someone else because I thought you were going to Tahoe. What happened?” he said.

I hadn’t told Ernie about the vasectomy and didn’t intend to. He would have chastised me about it until my ears were as red as my eyes.

“Turns out Conman rented it for the weekend, so change of plans. I had a consult today,” I said. “A mother and her daughter—the daughter is losing her vision because of a head trauma.”

“Sad.” Ernie alternately glanced at me and watched the television.

“The mother’s name is Trina Crouch.”

Ernie shook his head to indicate he’d never heard of her and resumed watching the game.

“The mother and father are divorced. The daughter’s name is Daniela Bateman.”

Ernie lowered his beer.

I nodded. “No shit.”

“His daughter?”

“His daughter.”

We both drank in silence. After Bateman’s expulsion from OLM, he became more myth than real. We’d heard he went to the local public school but got expelled when he punched one of his teachers. Rumor was his parents had sent him to a military school back east and that, upon graduation, he’d enlisted in the marines.