The Dark Side of Nowhere (2 page)

That night, I sat with my dad in the garage, for once not minding the boredom of home.

“Hand me the hammer, son.”

My dad talked like an old Andy Griffith rerun. I refused to ever call him Pa.

“Dad,” I said as I handed him the tool, “why do you think Ethan's parents didn't cry?” I was as interested in how he would react to the question as I was in the answer. The fact was, not only didn't Ethan's parents cry, but they kept shifting their feet and checking their watches, as if this was little more than a real estate deal they wanted to close.

Even stranger to me, however, was how Dad seemed to be acting now. My father had about three emotions. Worry never seemed to be one of them, but now he wrinkled his brow with a look of concern that didn't sit right with me. I thought that it might be just a reaction from his monthly shots, but I knew he hadn't had them yet—we both were scheduled to get our shots at the same time, next Monday.

He thought about his answer, and then just tried to shrug it off.

“Shock,” he said. “Simple shock.”

But there was something more. It had to do with the worry on his face. He said no more, just returned to the bureau he was building for the Carters. He always put his full attention on his woodworking. That was probably why his work was so good. But today his attention was elsewhere, because he caught the edge of his finger with the hammer.

He shouted a word that I rarely heard him use, although, I must admit that I use it on a regular basis. Hearing him say it made me smile. “Dad,” I said, “we're gonna have to wash that trash-mouth out with soap.”

Dad chuckled through his gritted teeth and held his thumb until the pain subsided. Then he turned to me and took a good look—the way only a father does. He took in every feature, memorizing my face, as if he might never see me again. I thought I knew what he was thinking.

“Dad,” I said, feeling a bit embarrassed, “come on—I'm not gonna get appendicitis or anything.”

“No,” he said. “No, you won't. We won't let that happen.”

I chuckled at how weird he sounded, and began to feel cold—not on the outside, but on the inside, as if I was stuck neck-deep in the tip of an iceberg . . . and I had the feeling that this iceberg went clear down to China.

I
guess when you think about it, lots of small towns are like their own universes. Small events seem big, and big events in the outside world seem unimportant, because they're so far away. It was hard to imagine anything we did in our own corner of nowhere ever having an effect on the world. But sometimes huge things can take root in unexamined corners. I can pretty safely say that what happened in Billington never happened anywhere else on earth. At least I hope it didn't. But up till now we were all clueless about it, and the clues didn't start coming until Ethan's “appendicitis.”

The first major clue came, of all places, at a Little League game—and for a guy who spent most of his time reaching for a ticket out of Billington boredom, I was pretty unprepared when the ticket got jammed into my palm.

The people of Billington are Little League fanatics—
it's like a religion to most folks here. When our teams played teams from out of town, you never heard the other towns cheering as much as our parents did. It was downright embarrassing. This week, however, everything started off a bit muted. You could say that Ethan's ghost was haunting the first inning—to be honest, his ghost was everywhere that first week. You never realize the holes a person leaves behind until you fall into them. At the start of the game, there was a big-deal ceremony, retiring Ethan's number. But by the second inning, nobody seemed to care that the Billington Bullets had a new first baseman. I guess some holes get paved over pretty quick.

Now, to set the record straight, I fouled out of Little League early on—much to my parents' dismay. The coach said my attitude was divisive to the team, which was fine by me. As far as I was concerned, Billington Little League was just one more example of the suffocating air of pleasantness that surrounded the town like an eternal silver lining, without a black cloud to go with it. After my quick exit from Little League, I spent my Saturday mornings vegging in front of the TV, playing channel roulette with the five hundred cartoons that our satellite dish dragged from the sky.

This season, however, had made a spectator out of me. I had my reasons.

It was early June, and already hot and balmy. I sat in the stands with Wesley, and about two dozen proud Billingtonites. I kept my eye on the pitcher.

“Where did she learn to throw a ball like that?” Wesley said after Paula Quinn had struck out her second batter.

“I guess she brought it with her from New Jersey,” I answered.

“Think all the girls in New Jersey are like that?” asked Wesley.

I just shrugged, not caring to waste my energy answering a question that dumb.

I heard about the day Paula tried out for the team. No one believed that a girl would be able to outpitch Billy Chambers, who was then the king of the mound, but she showed them real quick. Then, right after she had turned poor Billy into a relief pitcher, she asked him out to the movies.

That was class, because you have to understand one thing—Billy Chambers, aside from being the second-best pitcher Billington had ever seen, was about as butt-ugly as is legally allowed. Not even his Little League stardom could change that. On top of it, he was an angry kid too, and ugly multiplied by angry equaled zero social life. So here, in the moment of his absolute humiliation, the pretty new girl who had just booted him to the bull
pen was asking him for a date. Suddenly his humiliation didn't seem that bad after all. In fact, he probably thought he planned it that way. Of course they didn't go to more than two movies together before there were other girls who wanted some of Billy's moose-faced attention too. So Billy broke up with her and went off to play the field.

As an observer, I realized that this is what Paula had intended all along. Sheer brilliance, and almost as skillful as her curveball. Yeah, she was definitely different from most of the kids in Billington.

I was dreaming about all the conversations Paula and I might have if she didn't hate my guts, when I heard the voice behind me.

If there's such a thing as intuition, I wasn't blessed with it. If there's such a thing as a premonition, I never had one—although I should have when I heard that voice. I should have seen lighting bolts and my whole life flashing before my eyes.

“How come you're not out there?” said the deep voice.

I couldn't place it at first. I didn't say anything back, because I didn't know who was talking to me. Actually he was talking to both Wesley and me.

I turned around to see Mr. Grant, our notorious security-janitor. Wesley replied first, with his typical
shrug of an answer. “I don't know, maybe because I got a life?” he said, which was really just wishful thinking.

Grant stared straight at me. “So what's you're excuse?”

“I used to play,” I told him. “But I got allergic.”

“I remember,” he said, to my uncomfortable surprise.

“Why should you care?” I asked.

He took off his cap and scratched his thick blond hair. He wasn't an old man, but worn and weathered, the way cowboys are in movies. He rubbed his beard thoughtfully. “A kid like you should develop his skills,” he said. “Agility, reflexes, pinpoint accuracy. A kid like you is gonna need those skills.”

By now that run-in that I had with him the other day was creeping back into my mind—that weird thing he said about Ethan. I was starting to get squirmy.

“Baseball and I do fine without each other.”

He nodded and didn't say anything else, but still his voice rang within my head, and I swore I could feel his eyes burning into the back of my neck, right until the last inning.

That's when I got into the fight with the big kid one row down.

It was stupid, really. Maybe it was because I was hot, or maybe because Grant had gotten under my skin in
a way I couldn't fathom, but then again, maybe it was just because I couldn't stomach morons. Anyway, these two kids were rooting for the other team—which was fine, but one of them kept whispering rude things about Paula beneath his breath, as if calling her names would somehow change the no-hitter she was throwing.

I imagined this guy was an insect beneath my feet, and so I planted my foot firmly on his hand, which was resting on the bench.

“Hey, what's your problem?” he said.

“Sorry,” I told him. “I mistook you for a cockroach. Easy mistake.”

By now, Wesley, who had a stronger survival instinct than I did, began leaning away from me, pretending he didn't know me.

The guy, who was a junior and about three inches taller than me, lifted his tread-marked hand and whapped me in the stomach. So I whapped him in the face, and as the crowd cheered the first hit off of Paula, I dove headlong into a brawl.

It was no contest. I knew it was a lost cause from the beginning, but then lost causes were always my specialty. Turns out the guy was on the kick boxing team, so not only could he punch my lights out, but he could kick them out as well.

I got beat up so bad, the guy was embarrassed.

By now there was a crowd around me peering down in pity. That hurt worse than the beating.

“Are you okay, son?” some old guy said, like he was helping some snot-nosed kid on a playground.

“I'm fine,” I said, not looking anyone in the face, “just fine.” And I limped at full speed toward the restrooms across the park.

Once inside, I felt my guts wanting to view the world through my open mouth, but I wouldn't let them. I told myself it was just the septic smell of the dank bathroom that made me feel that way, and I swallowed hard, forcing the feeling back down into my gut. Then I splashed cold water on my face and tried to deny that I was crying. I've always cried too often for a kid who's supposed to be a tough pain-in-the-ass. But no one ever sees. I reached for a towel to dry my face, but there were none, just one of those useless air blowers, and when I looked up, I caught my reflection in the mirror.

My lips were puffing up, my right eye was turning colors, and if that wasn't awful enough, I began to have one of those really miserable moments when you see more than just your reflection in the mirror. Past, present, and future. I saw me in all my glory. I felt all the anger from the fight coming back like a boomerang until it was focused on that reflection, swelling up, growing uglier than Billy Chambers.

It would have been so easy to stare at that reflection and scream at it, “I hate you,” but I'd been through that before, enough to know that hating myself wasn't the problem or the solution. I didn't know what was wrong. I didn't know what I wanted—I just wanted. And all I knew for sure was that Billington was to blame. If I could wipe it, and every town like it, off the face of the planet, I would have done it without a second thought and without a stitch of remorse. But all I had the power to do was to hide in a urine-stenched bathroom, wishing it would all just go away.

The bathroom door opened behind me.

Then it closed.

I figured it was just someone coming in to take a leak until I heard the voice.

“Your head's a mess and you don't know why.”

This time I didn't have to turn around to know that it was Grant.

He continued, so sure of his words. “You have an instinct to fight, but there's nothing worth the battle. How sad for you.” And then he left, letting the door swing closed behind him.

I went after him. Nobody reaches into my head like that without me retaliating with some serious verbal abuse.

I found him leaning up against the side of the
cinder-block restroom, with a large brown paper bag at his feet.

“What the hell's your problem?” I spat out.

He shook his head. “Not my problem—yours.”

“What do you know about it?”

“Enough,” he said. Then he looked at me and grinned, like he was seeing right through me. “Your life is so pleasant. Everything about it is so
nice
.”

He was right. “Nice” is exactly what it was. Not terrible, not wonderful; neither cold nor hot. Room temperature. Nice. A fouler word had never been invented.

“It's all so steady and so smooth,” Grant continued. “You're afraid you'll live nice, then die nice, and your life will have been a nice waste of time. Am I right?”

I nodded.

“Well,” he said, “it's not gonna happen that way.”

I breathed a heavy sigh of relief—as if hearing him say it made it true—and I began to realize just how much power this man suddenly had over me. I wanted to know how he could have done that—but more important, I wanted to know why.

“You need excitement and worlds to conquer,” he said with a knowing gleam in his eye. “Something you can
feel
.”

There were alarms going off inside my head now. Suddenly this little cinder-block bathroom seemed miles
from safety. I felt like a small child who didn't listen and took candy from a the wrong stranger.
What did he want?

Yet I could sense that this wasn't about something he wanted—it was about something he
knew
. Something about me, that nobody else was willing to tell. It thrilled me to think that there could be something about myself that I didn't already know, and the desire to know what it was muffled my alarms.

He picked up his crumpled grocery bag. Something heavy was inside. “Your parents have all chosen to forget,” he said. “You have to make them remember.”

By now the pain in my face and my bruised body seemed trivial. “What's in the bag?” I dared to ask him.

“It's for you,” he said, handing it to me. “I believe it will fit.”