One Shot at Forever (3 page)

“Here's your desk, your textbooks, and your grade books,” Britton said, pointing to a stack of materials on an old wooden desk. “We play poker on Wednesday nights.”

Sweet stared at him. “That's it? I got the job?”

Britton nodded. He hadn't said a word about what he expected of Sweet or his curriculum, and this was by design. Britton had taught in three schools, had a master's in education from Millikin University in nearby Decatur, and was pursuing an advanced degree from Eastern Illinois University. He'd been around a lot of teachers of all inclinations and Sweet struck him as a man who valued autonomy, who perhaps harbored grand ideas about teaching. He was a man to be encouraged, not reined in.

“But I haven't accepted it yet,” Sweet said.

“True, but we'd like you to,” said Britton.

Sweet stood there considering the offer, and the friendly but assertive man in front of him, and he began to warm to both.
It's not like I have to live in Macon the rest of my days
, he thought. Life was full of opportunities; if he didn't like this one, he'd move on to the next. Besides, he was only an hour from friends and family in Champaign and, best he could tell, Britton was offering him carte blanche as a teacher. Plus, he did like poker.

Ah hell
, Sweet thought,
why not?
He extended his hand and smiled.

Britton smiled back. “Welcome to Macon,” he said. He turned to leave, took one step, and then paused. “One more thing,” Britton said. “There are three taverns in the town and as teachers we don't drink at them. To set a good example, you understand.”

Sweet nodded and gave Britton a look that said,
Of course I understand
.

A few minutes later, when the paperwork was in place, Sweet walked out to his Ford. He turned on the ignition, pulled out of the parking lot, and promptly drove down to Cole's Tavern, where he drank a beer with the locals and talked about the Chicago Bears. He then proceeded across the street to Claire's Place for another beer before dropping in at the Nite Owl on Wall Street, where he shared a Pabst with the afternoon crew, at which point Sweet felt safe in his determination that all three were fine establishments.

It wasn't Champaign or Chicago, but Macon would do.

2

Three years later and five miles up the road, a fourteen-year-old boy who would become very important to both Lynn Sweet and the town of Macon found himself in a bit of a jam. From his hiding place, he could hear sirens, could hear police yelling at him to “COME DOWN RIGHT NOW STEVE SHARTZER.” He appraised his options and thought about making a run for it.

The trouble began a few months earlier, when Steve was biking through his hometown of Elwin one afternoon looking for something to do, an endeavor that usually proved futile. If Macon was a dot on the map, Elwin was a pencil point. Just off County Highway 30, Elwin harbored ninety-odd people, one gas station, one motel, and one runty grain elevator. Really, it was more of a four-way stop sign than a town. Steve's parents had moved to Elwin from Decatur when he was in the second grade to provide their two children with a quiet environment. However, it proved far too quiet for Steve's tastes, and in the intervening seven years he'd gone to great lengths to entertain himself. More often than not, this meant turning even the most mundane activity into a game.

Steve was a pure, obsessive, born competitor. When he was one, his father learned that if he rolled a small rubber ball to his son, Steve would reach up and roll it back. Not once. Not twice, but for five, ten, fifteen minutes at a time. By the time he was three, Steve could swing a bat and catch a baseball. Not allowed to leave the block, he'd sit at its end, where it abutted Fairview Park, and stare down at the expanse of grass below, watching the older boys play pickup games of baseball. Inch by inch, he'd scoot farther down that hill until, finally, he was close to enough to really watch. Always, he hoped they would ask him to play. They never did.

By four, Steve was hitting balls in the family's tiny back lot in Decatur, which was separated by a wooden fence from an alley, which in turn bordered a synagogue. One afternoon, he sent a ball soaring over the alley and crashing through one of the ornate windows of the synagogue, a mammoth blast for a child his size. The rabbis were not impressed. Neither was his father, Bob. At least not that he let on.

From an early age, Steve learned one abiding lesson from his dad: losing hurts. Bob Shartzer was a veteran of World War II and the Korean War who worked for the railroad on the St. Louis to Chicago line. He was a big man who spoke rarely, drank hard, and was not to be messed with. He saw in his son a boy with loads of talent who nonetheless needed to learn early on that life handed you nothing. So whenever he played a game with Steve, whether it was Old Maid or checkers, Bob refused to let the boy win. After each loss, Steve yelled. Then, when that proved fruitless, he began crying, sometimes for minutes on end.

“Can't you let him win, just once?” Georgianna Shartzer said to her husband.

“He'll win some day,” Bob replied.

When, as a six-year-old, Steve begged his dad to erect a basketball hoop in their backyard, his father complied. Only, instead of a full set, he installed only an iron pole with a bracket at the top gripping a naked rim. “When you can make it on this I'll get you one with a backboard,” Bob Shartzer said. Steve hated his dad for this, but he had no choice. So he practiced incessantly. He had one bald rubber ball and his “court” consisted of a ten-foot patch of dirt, which made dribbling problematic and, when it rained, impossible. Still, Steve made the best of it, looping in one jumper after another from most every spot in the yard. By the time, many years later, that Bob Shartzer deemed his son worthy of a backboard, Steve was accurate from anywhere inside twenty-five feet. On principle, he considered refusing it.

That backyard in Elwin was Steve's world growing up. A good half acre in size, it bordered on a cornfield and, beyond that, groves of wild elm trees. Stuck in a town with only a few boys his age, Steve collected rocks and, when he couldn't find those, stole pieces of gravel from the driveway so he could swat them with a broomstick. He fired football after football through a tire attached to a rope swing. He sat rapt in front of
Jim Thorpe
—
All-American
on the family's small color TV, then went outside and tore around the house until he threw up, believing that doing so would make him the best athlete the world had ever seen.

There was no pursuit Steve didn't think he could master. When he saw an older kid throwing the discus, he thought,
Hell, I can do that
. So he trudged out to the backyard lugging a high school discus and stood there, at the back of the lot, heaving the iron plate out into the cornfield, time and again. After each throw, he marked the landing spot with a cornstalk, then walked back to do it again, just trying to move that stalk. By the time he was at Macon High, where all the kids from Elwin commuted for high school, he could throw the discus more than 160 feet, a distance that would qualify him to compete at the state finals.

Baseball was his first love, though. By the time Steve was six he was playing with the eight-year-olds in Little League. By ten, when everyone had taken to simply calling him “Shark,” both because of his name and his demeanor, he was bruising other boys' hands with his throws. When a kid named Stuart Arnold came out for the Elwin team, small for his age and intent on being a catcher, Steve knocked him over the first day with his fastball.

As he got older, Steve began to wonder whether there were other uses for his arm. Which was how, as a cocky, wiry eighth grader with a short brown burr haircut that invariably cow-licked in the front, he came to stop his bike outside the general store, having spied, parked off to the side, an unmanned produce truck. Peering in the back, Shartzer saw a sea of tomatoes—boxes and boxes of fat, round, red tomatoes. Each one, he noticed, was roughly the size of a baseball.

Half an hour later, Steve and a buddy were lugging a crate through town like a couple of scrawny sherpas, looking for a suitable launching spot. There weren't many options; only a few buildings in Elwin were more than one story. The grain elevator at the intersection of 51 and County Road 30, however—now that was forty feet tall. So up they scrambled, higher and higher above the two-lane road known as the Mt. Zion blacktop. There, perched on metal scaffolding, they could see many things. Including, it turned out, cars approaching from a good three miles away.

Steve informed his buddy of his intention: to hit every car not once but at least twice.

“But how are we going to do that from way up here?” his buddy said.

“I'll show you,” Steve said. And with that, he took a tomato and, gauging the speed of an oncoming car, lobbed it up into the air. Then, while the tomato arced toward the asphalt, Steve reloaded and pumped two more overhand shots at the hood of the approaching sedan.

The first shot, the lob, missed. The other two did not.

It's worth considering for a moment the physics of the situation. The cars on the highway were going
60
mph, Shartzer was fifty feet away, and the tomatoes were of varying weight and size. In essence, his task was akin to a quarterback trying to properly lead a wide receiver, only the receiver happens to be standing in the open door of a passing train. Yet, again and again, Steve torched those cars.
Splat. Splat. Splat
. Tomato guts shot into the air; seeds sprayed across windshields.

Some of the drivers kept right on going. Others screeched to a halt, then leapt out and looked around angrily for a culprit. They never thought to look up. Even if they had, Shartzer was hidden from view.

For months, Shartzer wreaked havoc from on high. He loved the sense of danger, the power of the moment, and, most of all, the challenge. Every time he hit one of those cars, it was proof of his talent, testimony to the future that awaited him. Sometimes friends joined him; other times he chose a different launching spot. No one, it seemed, was the wiser. Down in Macon, farmers spent their afternoons muttering about how crates of tomatoes kept mysteriously disappearing from their trucks.

Eventually, however, Steve tired of tomatoes. As he saw it, they had two flaws: They were soft and they didn't always carry well.

You know what carried well? Apples.

And that's how Steve found himself jammed above the axle of a big soybean truck on the night of the Macon High prom, sirens screeching outside.

Earlier in the evening, accompanied by a kid named Waldo Ross, Shartzer had once again ascended the grain elevator. He and Waldo were having a grand time flinging fruit, detonating one shot so artfully that pulp smattered the dress of a prom-bound girl like apple shrapnel. And then they did it: Steve hit an Illinois state trooper. Not once, or twice, but with the elusive triple.

“Oh SHIT!” said Waldo, suddenly very scared.

“GodDAMN!” said Steve, suddenly very proud.

Then the cop car stopped, turned around, and came roaring back—right toward the grain elevator. With the same quickness that served him so well in so many sports, Steve scrambled through a busted-out window in the elevator and climbed atop the wheel well of one of the towering bean trucks, wedged under the motor some ten feet off the ground and prepared to hide for as long as was necessary. Until Waldo, who was neither as quick nor as creative as his friend, tried to wedge in next to him.

“Get out of here. There ain't room for both of us,” Steve hissed.

But the boy kept pushing and pushing until he had all but one leg in that crevice. Moments later, the cop yanked on that leg and down came Waldo. Steve was still hidden, though. For what felt like an hour, but couldn't have been more than five minutes, Steve huddled there, scared shitless in a way only fourteen-year-old boys who've suddenly realized they're not indestructible can be. Finally, he heard Waldo's voice.

“Shark, come out. We're caught.”

By this time, two more troopers had arrived, though it seemed like ten to Steve when he walked out to see all those twirling lights. What's more, the cops had their hands on their guns. Steve thought about running, but before he could move he was thrown to the ground and handcuffed.

A few hours later, Bob Shartzer showed up at the police station in Decatur to retrieve his son. After a brief lecture from a tired officer about the dangers of throwing fruit, Steve was released into the night.