Boy's Life (41 page)

     Friends. They really know how to knock you off your pedestal, don’t they?

     Three days before school started, on a clear afternoon with fleecy clouds in the sky and a cool breeze blowing, we all rode our bikes to the ball field, our gloves laced to the handlebars. We took our positions around the diamond, which was cleated up and going to weed. On the scoreboard was the proof that our Little League team was not alone in agony; the men’s team, the Quails, had suffered a five-to-zip loss from the Air Force base team, the High Flyers. We stood with pools of shadow around our ankles and threw a ball back and forth to each other as we talked with some sadness about the passing of summer. We were in our secret hearts excited about the beginning of school. There comes a time when freedom becomes… well, too free. We were ready to be regulated, so we could fly again next summer.

     We threw fastballs and curves, fly balls and dust-kickers. Ben had the best wormburner you ever saw, and Johnny could make it fishtail an instant before it smacked into your glove. Too bad we were strikeout kings, each and every one. Well, there was always next season.

     We’d been there maybe forty minutes or so, working up a sweat, when Davy Ray said, “Hey, look who’s comin’!” We all looked. Walking through the weeds toward us was Nemo Curliss, his hands plunged deep into the pockets of his jeans. He was still a beanpole, his skin still buttermilk white. His mother ruled that roost, for sure.

     “Hi!” I said to him. “Hey, Nemo!” Davy Ray called. “Come on and throw us a few!”

     “Oh, great!” Johnny said, recalling his blistered hand. “Uh… why don’t you throw some to Ben instead?”

     Nemo shook his head, his face downcast. He continued walking across the field, passing Johnny and Ben, and he approached me at home plate. When he stopped and lifted his face, I saw he’d been crying. His eyes behind the thick glasses were red and swollen, the tear tracks glistening on his cheeks.

     “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Somebody been beatin’ up on you?”

     “No,” he said. “I… I…”

     Davy Ray came up, holding the baseball. “What is it? Nemo, you been cryin’?”

     “I…” He squeezed out a small sob. He was trying to get control of himself, but it was more than he could manage. “I’ve gotta go,” he said.

     “Gotta go?” I frowned. “Go where, Nemo?”

     “Away. Jutht…” He made a gesture with a skinny arm. “Jutht away.”

     Ben and Johnny arrived at home plate. We stood in a circle around Nemo as he sobbed and wiped his runny nose. Ben couldn’t bear the sight, and he walked off a few paces and kicked a stone around. “I… went to your houth, to tell you, and your mom told me you were here,” Nemo explained. “I wanted to let you know.”

     “Well, where do you have to go? Are you gonna go visit somebody?” I asked.

     “No.” Fresh tears ran down his face. It was a terrible sight to behold. “We’ve gotta move, Cory.”

     “
Move?
To where?”

     “I don’t know. Thomeblathe a long way from here.”

     “Gosh,” Johnny said. “You hardly lived in Zephyr a whole summer!”

     “We were hopin’ you could play on our team next year!” Davy told him.

     “Yeah,” I said. “And we thought you were gonna go to our school.”

     “No.” Nemo kept shaking his head, his puffy eyes full of torment. “No. No. I can’t. We’ve gotta move. Gotta move tomorrow.”

     “
Tomorrow?
How come so fast?”

     “Mom thez. Gotta move. Tho Dad can thell thome shirts.”

     The shirts. Ah yes, the shirts. Nobody wore tailored white shirts in Zephyr. I doubted that anybody wore tailored white shirts in any of the towns Mr. Curliss took his wife and son and his fabric swatches to. I doubted if anybody ever would.

     “I can’t…” Nemo stared at me, and the pain of his gaze made my heart hurt. “I can’t… ever make no friendth,” he said. “‘Cauthe… we’ve alwath gotta move.”

     “I’m sorry, Nemo,” I said. “Really I am. I wish you didn’t have to move.” On an impulse, I took the baseball out of my glove and held it out to him. “Here you go. You keep this, so you can remember your buddies here in Zephyr. Okay?”

     Nemo hesitated. Then he reached out and wrapped the skinny fingers of his miracle pitching hand around the ball, and he accepted it. Here Johnny showed his true class; the baseball belonged to him, but he never said a word.

     Nemo turned the baseball over and over between both hands, and I saw the red-stitched seam reflected in his glasses. He stared at that baseball as if into the depths of a magic crystal. “I want to thtay here,” he said softly. His nose was running, and he sniffled. “I want to thtay here, and go to thcool and have friendth.” He looked at me. “I jutht want to be like everybody elth. I want to thtay here so
bad
.”

     “Maybe you can come back sometime,” Johnny offered, but it was a measly crumb. “Maybe you can—”

     “No,” Nemo interrupted. “I’ll never come back. Never. Never even for a thingle day.” He turned his head, facing the house they would soon be leaving. A tear crawled down his face and hung quivering from his chin. “Mom thez Dadth gotta thell thirts tho we can have money. At night thometimeth thee hollerth at him and callth him lathee, and thee thez thee never thouda married him. And he thez, ‘It’ll be the nextht town. The nextht town, that’ll be the lucky break.’” Nemo’s face swung back to mine. It had changed in that instant. He was still crying, but there was rage in his eyes so powerful that I had to step back a pace to escape its heat. “Ith never gonna be the nextht town,” he said. “We’re gonna move and move and move, and my mom’th gonna alwath holler and my dad’th gonna alwath thay it’ll be the nextht town. But it’ll be a lie.”

     Nemo was silent, but the rage spoke. His fingers squeezed around the baseball, his knuckles whitening, his eyes fixed on nothing.

     “We’re gonna miss you, Nemo,” I said.

     “Yeah,” Johnny said. “You’re okay.”

     “You’ll get up to the mound someday, Nemo,” Davy Ray told him. “When you get there, you strike ’em all out. Hear?”

     “Yeth,” he answered, but there wasn’t much conviction in his voice. “I with I didn’t have to…” He faded off; there was no point in it, because he was a little boy and he had to go.

     Nemo began walking home across the field, the baseball gripped in his hand. “So long!” I called to him, but he didn’t respond. I imagined what life must be like for him: forbidden to play the game he was so naturally gifted at, shuttered away in a series of houses in a parade of towns, staying in one place only long enough to get picked on and beaten up but never long enough for guys to get to know who and what he was behind the pale skin, the lisp, and the thick glasses. I could never have stood such suffering.

     Nemo screamed.

     It came out of him with such force that the sound made us jump. The scream changed, became a wail that rose up and up, painful in its longing. And then Nemo spun around, his head and shoulders first and then his hips, and I saw his eyes were wide and enraged and his teeth were clenched. His throwing arm whipped around in a blur, his backbone popped like a whip, and he hurled that baseball almost straight up into the sky.

     I saw it go up. I saw it keep going. I saw it become a dark dot. Then the sun took it.

     Nemo was on his knees, the scream and the throw having drained all the strength out of him. He blinked, his glasses crooked on his face.

     “Catch it!” Davy Ray said, squinting up. “Here it comes down!”

     “Where?” Johnny asked, lifting his glove.

     “Where is it?” I asked, stepping away from the others to try to find it in the glare.

     Ben was looking up, too. His glove hung at his side. “That bugger,” he said softly, “is
gone
.”

     We waited, searching the sky.

     We waited, our gloves ready.

     We waited.

     I glanced at Nemo. He had gotten up, and was walking home. His stride was neither fast nor slow, just resigned. He knew what was waiting for him in the next town, and in the town after that. “Nemo!” I shouted after him. He just kept walking, and he did not look back.

     We waited for the ball to come down.

     After a while, we sat down in the red dirt. Our eyes scanned the sky as the fleecy clouds moved and the sun began to sink toward the west.

     No one spoke. No one knew what to say.

     In later days, Ben would speculate that the wind blew the ball into the river. Johnny would believe a flock of birds had hit it, and knocked it off course. Davy Ray would say something must’ve been wrong with the ball, that it had come to pieces way up there and we hadn’t seen the skin and the innards plummet back to earth.

     And me?

     I just believed.

     Twilight came upon us. At last I climbed on Rocket, the other guys got on their bikes, and we left the ball field and our summer dreams. Our faces now were turned toward autumn. I was going to have to tell somebody soon about the four black girls I saw in my sleep, the ones all dressed up and calling my name under a tree with no leaves. I was going to have to read my story about the man at the bottom of Saxon’s Lake in front of a roomful of people. I was going to have to figure out what was in that wooden box Biggun Blaylock had sold in the dead of night for four hundred dollars.

     I was going to have to help my father find peace.

     We pedaled on, four buddies with the wind at our backs and all roads leading to the future.

THREE

Burning Autumn

Green-Feathered Hat—The Magic Box—Dinner with Vernon—The Wrath of Five Thunders—Case #3432—Dead Man Driving—High Noon in Zephyr—From the Lost World

1
Green-Feathered Hat

“CORY?”

     I pretended I didn’t hear the ominous whisper.

     “Cory?”

     No. I wasn’t going to look. At the front of the schoolroom, Mrs. Judith Harper—otherwise known as “Hairpie,” “Harpy,” and “Old Leatherlungs”—was demonstrating on the blackboard the division of fractions. Arithmetic was for me a walk into the Twilight Zone; this dividing fractions stuff was a mystifying fall into the Outer Limits.

     “Cory?” she whispered again, behind me. “I’ve got a big ole green booger on my finger.”

      Oh my Lord, I thought. Not again!

     “If you don’t turn around and smile at me, I’m gone wipe it on the back of your neck.”

     It was the fourth day of class. I knew on the first day that it was going to be a long year, because some idiot had decreed the Demon a “gifted child” and had double-promoted her, and like the fickle finger of fate, Mrs. Harper had devised a seating chart—boy, girl, boy, girl, boy, girl—that put the Demon in the desk at my back.

     And the worst part, the very worst, was that—as Davy Ray told me and laughed wickedly—she had a crush on me as big as the cheesy green moon.