No Place (2 page)

“I’m going to Rice,” I said patiently. “The letter of intent’s supposed to come in a few weeks. The deal is basically done. But in the extremely unlikely case that I pitch lights out at the tournament, and some major-league team actually wants to sign me straight out of high school? Rice would let me go.”

“And you’d really do that? Even after that coach arranged for your work study and stipend?” Talia asked. Was it any surprise that
Legally Blonde
was still one of her favorite movies? Only, unlike Elle Woods, Talia didn’t start with the ditz thing and then wait until law school to discover she had brains. Talia displayed lawyer smarts whenever it suited her.

“He wouldn’t be happy, but he’d understand,” I tried to explain. “It’s all about the big show. He knows that.”

I can’t say I was sorry when we reached the corner in the hall where each day we parted after lunch. As if she suddenly no longer cared about Thanksgiving or baseball, Talia smiled, all white teeth and lip gloss. “See you at eight? Carrie’s party?”

Now I understood. She knew I didn’t want to go to that party, but there was no way I could refuse after saying no to her family’s Thanksgiving trip. Getting me to the party was probably what the whole Thanksgiving argument had been about in the first place. I may have been considered an exceptional high school athlete, but once again I’d been
totally outclassed by a girl who stood five feet two inches and barely weighed 100 pounds.

“We don’t have to stay at the party that long,” Talia assured me with a winning smile.

Defeated, I sighed. “Sure.”

She stretched up and kissed me on the cheek. “Good boy.”

 2 

In baseball the pitcher and catcher together are called the battery, which is kind of strange since when they’re pitching and catching, neither is batting. It’s the tightest unit on the field. Outfielders and infielders have to work together to turn plays, but no two guys have to be more in sync than the battery. Noah Williams and I had been a battery for so long that we were
beyond
in sync. We didn’t only finish each other’s sentences, we sometimes started them.

“Want to hit the studio? Buzzuka Joe’s coming in,” he said in the car after we finished working out in the school weight room that afternoon. Noah’s older brother Derek had a recording studio in Burlington. While not exactly a hotbed of musical talent, the small city ten miles west of Median provided just enough homegrown bands, radio commercials, and public service announcements to keep Derek in business. Friday afternoons were reserved for local acts, and sometimes
Noah and I would hang out and watch the recording sessions.

“Besides, Olivia’ll be there . . .
stud
,” Noah kidded at a red light.

“Oh, yeah?” I yawned.

“And you act like it’s no biggie.” Noah smirked. “Just another fox with the hots for Handsome Dan.”

I shrugged. Olivia was cute and sexy and interning at the studio. We’d flirted the last time I was there, but it was just good-natured fooling around. She knew about Talia.

The light changed and we passed a cluster of orange, blue, and military olive tents that had sprung up like mushrooms over the summer in a weedy, neglected park not far from Town Hall. It was called Dignityville and there were supposed to be homeless people living there. As we passed, a girl with curly, reddish brown hair came out of the park carrying a laundry basket. I felt a mild blip of surprise. “Is that Meg Fine?”

Noah glanced. “Yeah.”

Meg had been my lab partner in chemistry the year before, and was in government and politics with me this year. I sometimes saw her at parties, although now that I thought about it, not recently.

“What’s she doing there?” I wondered out loud.

“You have to ask?” Noah said.

Meg Fine was homeless?

*  *  *

It took about twenty minutes to get to Burlington. Derek’s studio was in a run-down neighborhood of old factories,
auto repair establishments, and pawn shops. Broken glass glittered along the curbs. Empty bottles inside brown paper bags littered the sidewalks.

A few blocks from the studio we passed a police car with its blue and red lights flashing. Two cops had a big tattooed man bent facedown on the hood of a dark green Range Rover. They were cuffing his hands behind his back while a young woman argued with them.

“Hey, stop,” I said. “It’s Olivia and Oscar.”

Noah slowed down.

“Come on, pull over,” I said.

“It’s a bad idea, man,” Noah warned.

“Just stop.”

“Dan, you don’t—”

“I said
stop!
”

Noah pulled to the curb and I got out in time to hear one of the cops say to Olivia: “Sorry, miss, but he’s got no license or registration for this vehicle.”

The handcuffed man’s name was Oscar, and he’d once been a promising college running back until a couple of severe concussions ended his career. Now that he was handcuffed, the cops let him straighten up.

“I told you I changed clothes and left my wallet in my other pants,” Oscar tried to explain. “I work for Buzzuka Joe. This is his car.”

While I watched from the sidewalk, Noah stayed in his car. We both knew why he hadn’t gotten out. I leaned into the car’s window.
“Call the studio. See if you can get someone over here.”

Noah tried his phone, listened, shook his head. “I got the message. They’re probably recording.”

“Then go over there and get someone.”

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Noah muttered, and pulled away.

The truth was, I had no idea what I was doing. I just had this strong feeling that if Oscar had been a different color, or in a different part of the city, this wouldn’t be happening. By now the cops were glancing at me with puzzled expressions; this wasn’t a part of Burlington where you saw a lot of white teenagers.

I cleared my throat. “Excuse me, officers, but I think there’s been a mistake.”

One of the cops scowled. “Sorry?” he said in a tone that implied,
And just who do you think you are?

I took my time answering. This wasn’t about changing their minds. It was about stalling while Noah went for help. Nodding at Olivia and Oscar, I said, “I’m a friend of theirs, and I’m sure everything they’ve told you is true.”

Both cops looked at me like I was whacked. “Oh, really?” One of them snorted.

“Yes, sir. This young lady works at Williams Sound, the music studio down the street, where Buzzuka Joe is recording his new album.” Buzzuka Joe was a former gangbanger turned rapper who was a big deal around Burlington. “You gentlemen are familiar with Buzzuka Joe, right? ‘If The Phone Don’t Ring, You’ll Know It’s Me’?”

“Yeah, so?” one of the cops said.

I didn’t have an answer. I’d been ad-libbing and suddenly had no libs to add.

The cops seemed to sense that I was at a loss. “Listen, kid,” one of them said, “I don’t know who the hell you are, but if I were you I’d disappear, pronto.” He took Oscar by the arm and started to guide him toward the police car.

I stepped between them and the police car, blocking their path. The cop with Oscar stopped and gave me an astonished look, then jerked his head at his partner, who came toward me. “I’m gonna count to three before I bust you for obstruction of justice and interfering with police duties. You got that?
This is none of your business
.”

My heart was pounding and a voice in my head was screaming to get out of the way. But in my gut I knew that if Oscar were white they wouldn’t have bent him over the hood of the car and handcuffed him. There was a time when I might have shrugged it off as just another of life’s many injustices, but a lot of things had changed since then. I didn’t budge.

“Listen, buddy, for the last time,” the cop snarled. “You don’t want to be a hero and you don’t want to get arrested. So
move
!”

Even Oscar agreed. “He’s right, man. Stay out of this.”

I could feel my pulse with every breath I took. I’d never been in trouble with the police before, and this was a bad time to start. I peered hopefully down the street, but there was no sign of Noah or anyone else from the studio.

“Listen to him, Dan,” urged Olivia, who’d been watching my sidewalk improv.

“Hey, you remembered my name,” I said, grinning.

It almost seemed like she blushed. “Of course.”

“Aw, for Christ’s sake,” the other cop growled, reaching for his handcuffs and starting toward me.

“Okay, okay.” Raising my hands, I backed away. “I’m going. It’s just hard to believe that you’d arrest a guy just because he forgot his wallet. Like that never happened to you?”

“You’re really asking for it, kid,” snapped the cop holding Oscar. He walked the big man to the police car, put his hand on Oscar’s head, and began to ease him down into the backseat.

There was still no sign of Noah or anyone from the studio. In a few moments they’d take Osacar downtown and book him, or whatever it was that cops did when they arrested you. It just seemed so stupid and wrong, but I couldn’t think of a way to stop it.

Oscar was in the back of the police car now, bent uncomfortably forward in the seat because his hands were cuffed behind him.

The cop started to close the door.

A horn honked. Everyone turned as Noah’s car raced up and screeched to a stop. Out jumped a little guy wearing a white suit, sunglasses, and a black fedora.

*  *  *

Fortunately, Buzzuka Joe had a copy of the car registration, and a little while later the cops let Oscar go with a ticket
for driving without a license. He thanked me emotionally. “I don’t know why you did that, man, but God bless you.” Shaking his large hand was like shaking a baseball mitt.

Olivia gave me a grateful hug, then added in a scolding tone, “Do you have any idea how close you came to getting popped?”

I shrugged and gave her a wink. She smiled and kissed me on the cheek. “See you at the studio.”

They got into the Range Rover, leaving Noah and me on the sidewalk. Now that the danger had passed, my best friend put his hands on his hips and affected the amused patois he sometimes used in private when issues of race came up. “What de hell was
dat
, white boy? Trying to impress Olivia?”

I shook my head. “No, it just bothered me.”

“Since when?”

Since everything started going against me and my family too
, I thought. But what I said was, “Don’t you think the guy’s had enough crap in his life? His football career ends with a concussion, and now they want to arrest him because he forgot his wallet?”

“So
you
have to be the hero?”

“A man got to do what he got to do.” The line from
The Grapes of Wrath
, which we’d read in school the year before, had become a little joke between Noah and me, a sort of catchall explanation anytime one of us did something that we couldn’t, or didn’t want to, entirely explain.

 3 

After watching Buzzuka Joe lay down a couple of tracks in the studio, we headed back to Median. It was dark by the time we got there. “You guys coming to Tory’s later?” Noah asked as he drove. Tory Sanchez was his girlfriend.

“We have to go to this stupid party first,” I answered glumly. “Some friend of Tal’s from dressage.”

“Why can’t she go without you?”

I gave him a weary look. “Because we’re a couple, remember?”

“Bet Olivia wouldn’t make you go to boring horse parties.”

Back at the studio I’d been Olivia’s knight in shining armor. Now that I’d “saved” Oscar, she couldn’t stop touching and flirting with me. Talk about having your ego stroked. After that, everyone flopped on the couches and relaxed into a fun time digging on the music. It was so different from being with Talia’s dressage friends. They were all nice enough,
but reserved and careful about everything they said and did. Maybe it was because they came from a world of private schools, country clubs, and fancy vacations. Of course, except for private school, that was Talia’s world too. And, to some extent, Noah’s and Tory’s, as well. But it was different when I was with them. We’d all known each other since grade school.

Noah turned onto my street. When I spotted the U-Haul van backed into my driveway, my spirits plunged faster than a two-seam fastball.

Stopping at the curb, Noah glanced at the van, but said nothing. I was pretty sure he knew what it meant, but it was something we’d never spoken about.

And we’d spoken about practically everything.

“See you later?” he asked solemnly.

I nodded, got out of the car, and pretended to walk up the driveway. The second Noah’s taillights were out of sight, I stopped. A heavy sensation of dread had begun to mass in my chest. I’d known this day was coming sooner or later. Only I’d been clinging to the hope that it would be later.

A
lot
later.

Like, maybe, not in this lifetime.

*  *  *

Moving boxes were stacked in the front hall.

“That you, Dan?” Dad called from the kitchen.

“Yeah.”

“Just in time for the last supper.”

Welcome to my father’s demented sense of humor.

I went into the kitchen, where my parents were sitting on folding chairs at a card table having bowls of homemade vegetable soup and bread. On the floor were cardboard boxes filled with kitchen utensils.

“So this is the end?” I slumped down while Mom got up and prepared a bowl of soup for me, adding boiled beef because she knew I needed extra protein in my diet. Both of my parents were vegetarians, but they were cool with me being a carnivore.

“This is the end . . . buhm, buhm, buhm . . . beautiful friend, the end,”
Dad chanted as if even now he couldn’t take it seriously.

“I prefer to see it as a new beginning,” Mom said.

I shook my head. “Hard to believe.”

“You don’t have to,” Dad said. “It’s just a temporary setback, Dan. We’ll get things together. You’ll see.”

“We’ve got our health,” added Mom.

“Oh yeah, I forgot. Right.” I pretended to agree. Like as long as we had our health it didn’t matter that we were losing our home.