Читать книгу Strangers to Temptation - Scott Gould - Страница 8

BASES

BACK THEN, THERE WERE ALWAYS TWO, MAYBE THREE black boys on the other side of the tracks that ran alongside the first base line. The tracks were raised above the field on a steep hill, so they would lie flat against the slope, waiting for the train to come through on its way from the lumber mill. When it did, they would lob rocks at us from behind the steady rush of cars, and we’d run to our dugouts until the caboose passed by and the man in the window waved. By then, of course, the black boys would be nowhere in sight. The umpire would holler and start things up, and as soon as we picked the rocks out of the field, we would be baseball players again. In the stands, the people—mostly mothers and fathers—sat and looked over their shoulders at the tracks, in the direction of Nicholtown, where all the black people lived. It was just something that happened.

One afternoon, early in the game, we were already way ahead. I could smell the creosote railroad ties cooling down after a day in the sun. Someone had turned the lights on. I could hear the bulbs buzzing above the field. The train blew a warning at the far end of town, so some of the parents stood up and tried to wave us off the field before any of us even saw the locomotive.

Be smart, they were saying to us. Get off that field before you have to make a run for it. We grinned and waved back and acted like big leaguers. We spit pink bubblegum juice in the dust and chattered at the kid standing at home plate.

The locomotive churned behind first base. We knew we could probably get in a couple more pitches before the rocks started. The noise from the train spun everything into a kind of dream. Mouths moved, but the only sound was the clank and groan of the cars on the rails. The umpire jerked up his arm and screamed, but you couldn’t hear the call. Parents tried to yell at their boys. Then, it started.

Our third baseman ran by. “Niggers.” He mouthed the word carefully against the noise from the tracks.

The rocks fell in lazy, heavy arcs, so slow you could dodge them easily as you ran to the dugout. I headed in from shortstop, kept my eyes up, and saw the caboose pass by. Short train. Less time for them to throw. That was good for the slower guys, the dumber ones who couldn’t run and watch the sky at the same time.

But above us on the rails, in the fumes the train left behind, was one of the black boys in full sight. He was big, and stood facing us, cocked up a little on one hip, his arms at his sides. He peered down into the field for a second, then began his windup from his huge pitcher’s mound.

High leg kick.

Push off.

I saw the exact second the rock left his hand, and I watched his pitch spin through the air. It had no arc. Just a steady, straight line from the tracks to the field. I could almost hear the rock when it hissed over the dugout and caught Cal, our first baseman, in the face, on his cheek. Cal flopped across the foul line in the clay dust. The boy on the tracks flipped us the bird and jumped out of sight.

CAL’S MOTHER WAS on her hands and knees in the base path, looking at the ground, but screaming at us. “What are you gonna do!” she yelled. “Somebody?” She was too stocky to be crawling around in the dirt in a dress.

Most of us were a few feet away, keeping her at a safe distance as though she had a disease. But right beside her, our coach balanced Cal like a drunk, holding him up by his collar. Cal didn’t know where he was, but he could mumble and sort of stand up, blood running from the cut on his cheek.

“There ain’t a thing to do, Louise,” one of the fathers said from the crowd. “No way we can find out who done it, and ain’t a one of us about to go poking around Nicholtown looking for one nigger that hit a white boy with a rock.”

It turned out that Cal wasn’t as bad off as he looked. One of the mothers in the stands, who was a nurse, said that it would probably only take a dozen or so stitches and wouldn’t leave much of a scar.

Cal’s momma kept screaming, and our coach couldn’t decide if he should bring Cal and leave Louise in the base path, or if he should try to carry them both. From where I stood, they looked like a family that couldn’t make up its mind. One of the mothers walked over and grabbed Louise under her arms. “Now, now. It’s over. Let’s take Cal to the doctor and get him sewed up, OK?”

Louise screamed. “I want to know who did it! Don’t you want to know?” She stuck her head up and watched the crowd.

Some folks nodded their heads and some couldn’t care less. Some just wanted to go home. It was no big deal to me. I’d seen that guy before. Twice. I knew all I wanted to know about him.

THE FIRST TIME I saw him was in broad daylight at the baseball field. I always came early to the field, got the key to the equipment shed from A.J., and marked off the foul lines. It was really A.J.’s job to line off the field and cut the grass and hand out ping pong paddles at the Youth Center, but he spent every afternoon on his stool in the back door of the building, drinking bottles of warm beer, looking down the hill at the baseball games. He conned some of us into doing his work for him. “It’s development,” he told us. “I’m letting you develop valuable skills.”

By that summer, I was so developed I could lay down a straight chalk line without having to stretch a string to guide me. I’d get the key from him, open the shed near the snack bar, take out a bag of lime and the rusty push machine. Then, I’d mark off the difference between fair and foul. It was an easy thing to do if you focused your eyes on something way up ahead. If you were at home plate, you needed to look out to the corner of the outfield. Then you walked slow. But if you kept your eyes on your feet and watched the lime trickle out of the machine, you would wander all over the base path.

The afternoon I saw the black boy, I was almost to the outfield grass, dropping the trail of lime behind me, when I smelled something. It was different. It wasn’t the lime dust or the railroad ties or the mowed wild onions. It was cigarette smoke, which isn’t all that strange. But it’s not something you expect on a little league baseball field. I turned around, and between me and home plate, the big black boy was smiling at me, dragging one of his bare feet in the dirt, erasing my line. The butt of a cigarette dangled from his huge grin. He wore a pair of blue jean shorts split way up his legs and no shirt. It looked like he had rubbed some of the new lime on his chest. I could see two white hand prints smeared across his belly.

I took off after him, but before I could make up any distance, he had already jumped the fence near the dugout and started up the hill to the tracks. When he reached the top, he didn’t look back. Just leaped out of sight like a man going off a cliff. Except he was laughing.

I redid the part of the line he erased, and that evening during the game I could still smell his cigarette smoke hanging like a cloud in the thick air over the field. There were no trains that night, so no rocks, but I could feel all of those black boys, feel them watching us play our game, somehow blowing their smoke over the rails and into our field inning after inning.

When the game was over, I remembered I still had A.J.’s key tucked in my sock. I took it back and found him in the back door of the Center, staring down at the baseball field. “Don’t forget to turn off the lights,” I told him. There were times when he fell asleep drunk in the Center and the lights buzzed and burned all night, driving the moths crazy until daylight.

“I won’t,” he said. Then, “What would you have done?”

“What?”

“What would you’d done if you’da caught that big nigger today?”

The cigarette smoke filled my nose again, and I glanced over my shoulder just to make sure we were alone. All I saw was the glow from the field. “I guess I didn’t think about it,” I said.

A.J. took a pull from his bottle of beer. “You need to. You catch him, what you gonna do with him?” He finished the bottle and slung it toward the lights.

Sometimes, I can see what’s going to happen. Tomorrow or maybe the next day, someone would run over that bottle with a lawnmower, and the day after that someone else would cut his foot on the glass.

I SAW HIM again, a few days after he erased the foul line. It was in the woods near my house. I spent a lot of time there, high up in the sycamores and oaks, smoking reeds, the kind that stuck up through the dead leaves on the ground—about as big around as a pencil, and hollow, like a straw. Once they died and turned brown, you could break them into little cigarette-size pieces, light up the end, blow out the flame and puff it while it glowed. I always headed for the trees where nobody from the neighborhood would think to look, and if it was humid enough in the woods, you could shoot out a gray cloud of smoke that settled into the limbs of the hardwoods like a fog.

One afternoon, I left the house with a book of matches, and a hundred feet into the woods, I had gathered enough reeds for an hour of smoke. For some reason, I didn’t climb a tree. Instead, I just went deep enough into the woods to feel safe and sat at the base of a huge oak. I lit up, closed my eyes while the smoke swirled over my teeth, and I heard somebody laugh. I jumped up before I opened my eyes, but when I did, he was there, maybe twenty yards in front of me. Big and sweating, he seemed comfortable with the heat in the woods. I choked on the smoke, the thick reed smoke that I never usually swallowed now deep inside my lungs. He laughed once more, then reached in his pocket. Out came an old brass lighter and a pack of Camels. He lit one up, blew the smoke out of his nose and walked through the trees toward the tracks.

I STARTED HAVING dreams where the two of us met again in the woods. He carried a baseball with him, an old one that was scuffed and yellow with age, and he showed me the autographs on the cover. Black ballplayers who had signed just their first names with a pencil in a grade-school style print. I told him I’d never heard of these players, and he laughed at me behind a fresh Camel. He had a glove, too. An old one not much bigger than a mitten. I smelled mildew and saddle soap. I followed him to an open spot in the woods and found a pitcher’s mound made of Spanish moss and, sixty feet away, a wide pine stump for a catcher to sit on. There was a straight stripe of chalk line that ran from the mound to the stump. He told me this was where he practiced.

But we’re on my side of the tracks, I said.

He laughed again and said that those tracks weren’t nothing but a couple pieces of steel on a hill, and he and some of his friends took turns with a shovel and dug a big tunnel underneath the tracks so they could come over here and throw the baseball in the trees. I started to tell him about how I climbed the trees here and smoked reeds.

The black boy stopped me and said, I don’t wanna hear no shit about you and your trees. You ain’t nothing to me.

He kicked at the lime with his bare foot, then he climbed the moss mound and wound up, the same slow windup I saw that evening on the tracks above our baseball field. He pushed forward and let fly, and the ball rocketed through the trees, through the center of the thick trunks. The trees bent from the force of the pitch, like saplings in a hurricane. And if you walked behind him and looked over his shoulder, you could see a straight line of holes, all the size of a baseball, and the holes seemed to go for miles and miles, until they disappeared into a single dot of darkness.

WE WERE ALL playing kick the can after dark. That’s what we told our parents. The only reason they ever let us leave the house after dark was that we told them we would be playing at Kathleen Welch’s house. Kathleen’s daddy was the minister at First Presbyterian, and most of our parents thought that his connection with God would protect us once the sun went down. What they didn’t know was that Reverend Welch slept in front of the television, and we pretty much had free run of the huge back yard. Kathleen’s house was a few blocks on the other side of the Youth Center, so it was a long ride on my bike, but the dogs that always chased me couldn’t see me coming in the dark, and there weren’t any hills. Just a straight shot down 2nd Avenue, parallel to the tracks, then coast into Kathleen’s yard.

Cal was there with his bandage on. It had been maybe a week or so since the thing with the rock. He hadn’t been back to the baseball field, but it was so close to the end of the season, his mother was making him sit out until next year, when everything would be healed up. He was just supposed to watch and not sweat on his stitches. What he really did was wander through the yard in the middle of our game, while everyone else tried to stay hidden behind the hedges. He talked and gave away all of the hiding spots. He was just mad that he couldn’t run or do anything. He was mad about the blood and the thin scar he was going to have. He was mad that his momma screamed and crawled around the infield on her hands and knees in front of a crowd.

Somebody said we should have a séance since we couldn’t play kick the can. Kathleen ran inside her house and took a piece of candle and some matches from the kitchen drawer. She dripped a pile of wax in the grass, stood the candle up straight, and we sat in a circle around the flame. We’d have to hold hands eventually, so everyone jockeyed for positions. I ended up with Kathleen on one side of me and Cal on the other. Then, we tried to decide who we wanted to call back from the dead. We went through the usual list for this kind of thing: Kennedy, George Washington, Marilyn Monroe, crazy relatives, rich relatives. Kathleen pushed hard for Marilyn. She said she was mysterious and tragic.

“Hitler,” Cal said, almost in a whisper.

“What?” I said.

“Hitler, Adolph Hitler. We need to talk to Hitler,” he told us.

Kathleen said, “What you want with Adolph Hitler?”

Cal stood up. “Look at this shit,” he said, pointing at his cheek. I didn’t look up, but I knew what he meant. “I got this and I can’t do nothing about it. If I could get Hitler here, I’d tell him everything.”

“And then what?”

“Hitler wouldn’t let no nigger get away with this. Everybody else might, but ain’t no way Adolph Hitler’d let us get rocks chunked at us every time a train comes by,” Cal said. I turned toward him. With just the little flicker of light from the candle, I could see how shiny his face was. He looked like he was going to sweat right through his stitches. “Hitler’d go over to Nicholtown and kick some butt,” he said.

I wanted to laugh. No matter how mad people got, they still called it Nicholtown. Nobody ever said Niggertown even though everybody knew that’s what it meant. Instead of laughing, I said, “I think it might be a little hard calling Hitler back.”

From the shadows on the other side of the circle: “My daddy says he ain’t really dead.”

“I don’t care.” Cal was breathing hard now. He was walking around the circle, having some trouble talking. “I want them people over there taken care of. He stabbed his finger toward the tracks. “Line them up and take care of them.”

By then, some of the other kids were beginning to like the idea of having Hitler back in the land of the living. Hitler was no Marilyn Monroe. He was no mystery. Everyone knew exactly who he was. We’d heard the stories of Hitler, how he bombed or shot or burned down the things he didn’t particularly like. He would have no trouble destroying Nicholtown, turning it into a pile of ash and hot tin. Cal would probably show him the quickest way across the tracks. Once they got there, I knew they would be able to find the black boy, and I imagined what would happen when he came face to face with Hitler. I stared at the candle in the circle and wondered if he would laugh and blow smoke at Hitler’s head.

I don’t want to hear no shit about you, the black boy might tell Hitler. You ain’t nothing to me.

I said to Cal, “You know these things ain’t for real. Hitler ain’t coming back.”

“I aim to get me this nigger,” he whispered.

“Just because you’re too slow to get out of the way of a rock ain’t no reason to send some ghost of Hitler across the tracks,” I said under my breath.

Cal came around the circle at me. “Slow’s got nothing to do with it. You afraid what might happen if I get Hitler back here? You a nigger lover or something?”

Before I could say anything, Cal spit on me. I saw it coming from up above me, like a tiny, gray bullet in the candle light. But I couldn’t dodge it. It hit me softly below the eye.

“See?” he said, wiping his mouth carefully so he wouldn’t disturb his stitches. “Slow has got nothing to do with it.” He ran toward the street, in the direction of his house.

For a couple of minutes no one said a word. They all watched me clean my face with my t-shirt. Kathleen finally said, “I’d just as soon not have Hitler in the back yard anyway. Besides, if he isn’t really dead, we’d just be wasting our time. We know Marilyn Monroe’s dead as a doornail, so why don’t we call her back?”

Kathleen tried her best to make Marilyn appear. She talked up to the sky. I was listening hard, trying to hear if Cal was really gone. A breeze blew out the candle and Kathleen dug her fingers into my palm. But Marilyn never showed. Reverend Welch came to the screen door and yelled at us. Told us all to go home and say our prayers.

I PEDALED FOR home, keeping an eye out for dogs that might run from the ditches. And for Cal, too. I thought he might be worked up enough to try something, even though he’d already spit on me. A block from the Youth Center, I noticed the glow, a dirty layer of gold that spread out in the air above the trees. A.J. had left the lights on again.

I propped my bike at the front of the Center. It was dark inside the building, but I’d been there enough to know where all the ping pong tables were. I weaved toward the back door and there sat A.J., leaning back a little on his stool, several empty beer bottles scattered at his feet. He was gazing off in the direction of the field. He tipped a bottle to his mouth.

He didn’t turn when I walked up and stood beside his stool. He just kept staring at the field and said, “He showed up. Outta nowhere. Showed up and started.”

I looked down the slope. The black boy was there, under the lights. He was running the bases with his shirt off. He was barefooted. He was playing his own game. He would stand in the batter’s box, check his stance, and swing at an imaginary pitch. Then he would head for first base, round the bag, and try to stretch it into a double. I saw him slide, hooking his shin perfectly on second base.

I could barely hear his feet padding on the infield. The sound coming so late after the sight made me think that this wasn’t really happening. The black boy was all of the batters, the whole team. Sometimes he struck out. Once, he hit an imaginary home run and rounded the bases in a slow trot. He waved to the crowd. He waved to the tracks. I think he even waved at us.