Home of the Braves

by David Klass

  Dianne Hutchings was standing in the middle of our dining room, throwing anything at him she could find. She hurled a sugar bowl. “YOU ARE SUCH A COWARD!” She fired a salt and pepper shaker at him. “HOW CAN YOU EVEN LOOK AT YOURSELF IN THE MIRROR? DO YOU KNOW WHY YOU STOPPED CALLING ME? BECAUSE YOU LIKE ME, AND IT SCARES YOU. YOU DON’T WANT TO GET HURT AGAIN. COWARD!”

  She had run out of ammunition. She looked around wildly, and spotted our breakfront, where our china was arranged on shelves. She picked up a ceramic serving platter, and swung it like a discus. “YOU DON’T DESERVE ME!” She hurled it at him and he just managed to ward it off with the chair. It smashed into a billion pieces.

  Next she grabbed a dinner plate, and drew back her hand to whip it at him, but I caught her right wrist from behind. “I think that’s enough,” I told her.

  “I’M JUST GETTING STARTED.” She was so strong I could barely hold her as she struggled. “YOUR FATHER’S A BUM. I’LL GIVE HIM A TASTE OF MY TEMPER.”

  “He’s already got that taste,” I told her softly. My own tiredness gave my voice a steady, emotionless quality that seemed to drain some of the fury out of her. “We need that plate,” I told her. “Please don’t break it.”

  She stopped struggling and let me take the dinner plate out of her hand. She tossed her head proudly, and stormed off toward the door, stopping near the overturned table to shout at him, “GO FIND SOME CHICK YOU DON’T LIKE AT ALL, AND THEN YOU CAN SCREW HER WITHOUT FEELING THREATENED. YOUR EX-WIFE’S STILL GOT YOU BY THE BALLS AFTER ALL THESE YEARS! YOU FILTH. YOU PIG. I’M OUTTA HERE!” She let herself out, slamming the door behind her so hard that it almost came off its hinges.

  I walked over to where my father was cowering behind the table. “Is she gone?” he asked.

  I looked out the window. “She’s getting into her car. She’s pulling away. No, hold it, she’s driving up onto our front lawn! She knocked over our mailbox! Now she’s in reverse. Okay, she’s gone.”

  I helped my father out from behind the table. He had sugar in his hair, and chips of porcelain and ceramic over his arms and shoulders. As I helped brush him off, I said, “Dad, I’ve been thinking about what you said a while ago, about how well you understand women and how you could explain them to me.”

  “This isn’t a time to try to be funny, Joe,” he said. “Can’t you see I’m in pain?”

  “But you said you could tell me all I needed to know about women in five minutes,” I continued. “I can see I have a lot to learn from you, and I’m ready whenever you are.”

  “Learn this,” he said. “When a tornado hits, take cover.”

  We stood side by side, looking around at the shambles of our dining room. Hurricane Dianne had done a lot of damage in a short time. Then Dad surprised me by laughing out loud, and muttering to himself, “Jesus, what a hellcat.” He didn’t sound mad at her. He sounded amused, and even, in a strange way, admiring.

  25

  The phone call I had been waiting so long for came bright and early Saturday morning. “Yo, Brickhead,” a familiar high-pitched voice said.

  “Is that you, Mouse?”

  “How many people call you Brickhead?” he asked, sounding like my cheerful friend of old.

  “Only one, and I thought maybe he was gone for good,” I told him. “Where are you?”

  “Back in town, but not for long. Thought I’d give you a call. We have a little catching up to do.”

  “That’s putting it lightly. Where have you been?”

  “I’ve been away and I’m going away again,” Mouse said. “To a place over the rainbow where there isn’t any trouble.”

  “Mouse, what are you talking about?”

  “And I’m not coming back,” Mouse said. “So this might be our last chance to talk for a while. I don’t have much time. Feel like a hike to Highwood Hills? We can meet at Indian Rock.”

  “I’m on my way,” I told him. “And Mouse, bozo though you are, it’s good to hear your voice.”

  “Mutual, Brickhead. See ya soon.”

  I jogged a mile and a half up the steepening back slope of the Palisades cliffs to Highwood Hills, a mile-square wooded area on the eastern fringe of Lawndale. Mouse and I had spent several summers playing cowboys and Indians in the little town forest more than a decade ago. There was a boulder we always called Indian Rock because it looked to us like an Indian brave wearing a war bonnet. As I neared the rock I saw that Mouse had beaten me there, which wasn’t a surprise, since Highwood Hills was a short walk from Grandview Lane. Mouse was sitting cross-legged atop Indian Rock, looking down at the panoramic view of the town of Lawndale.

  “Hey,” I said walking up and trying to sound casual. “Whatcha doing on that rock, Chief Mouseman?”

  “Thinking I won’t miss it,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Any of it. The school, the town, the people, the soccer team, the swamp, the teachers, the houses, the lawns, the creek. None of it. Not for one minute.”

  He slid down from the rock and offered his right hand. It seemed a little formal—I don’t normally shake hands with my best friends—but I took his hand and looked him over to see if anything had changed. His grip was firm and he looked relaxed and happy, but serious. “I will miss you, Joe.”

  “Where are you going, Ed? And where have you been?”

  “So many questions, so little time,” he said. “Let’s walk.” So we started off along one of the trails. We walked in silence for a while, pushing vines and branches out of the way. “It was weird,” Mouse finally said.

  “What?”

  “All of it. Whatever you told my dad sure shook him up. When he came home that night, he was … crazed. He broke into my room. Cracked my locked desk drawer open with a hammer. Found the stuff I was working on. So much for personal privacy.”

  “Sorry,” I told him. “I didn’t want to get you into trouble.”

  “No, you did a great thing,” Mouse said, with gratitude in his voice. “Although it wasn’t what you thought. I wasn’t going to hurt anybody or blow up the school. But I was going to create something that would make a major, major statement and give our school the stench it deserves. If my super stink bomb had gone off, I’m not sure they could have ever gotten the smell out. And I was also thinking about running away to New York City. Either of those would have screwed up my future. So I owe you a big thanks for ratting on me.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said. “Anytime.”

  Mouse laughed, and we turned onto an even narrower trail. It was a perfect fall morning to be out in the woods. The air was cold and crisp and the leaves on the trees overhead were turning red and gold and black and orange.

  “So after your father found whatever he found, and confronted you, what happened?” I asked. “If you don’t mind talking about it.”

  “Not at all,” he said. “Dad went … berserk. I’ve never seen him lose control like that. It was kind of cool, in a way. He dragged me out into his car, and we took off at like a hundred miles an hour. Nothing packed. No maps or plans. We just drove away and headed north at double warp speed. We ended up in a fishing lodge high up in the Adirondacks. They had shut down for the winter, but they gave us a bungalow with a fireplace. A rowboat came with it. I guess the boat was for fishing, but we didn’t fish. We just rowed out into the middle of that beautiful mountain lake and we talked. And we talked some more. Then we rowed back to the bungalow and we kept on talking.”

  “Sounds like a lot of talking,” I observed quietly.

  “Once we got started, it was like a dam breaking,” Mouse said. “My dad turned out to be as unhappy as I was. He’s been so lonely since my mom died he’s been taking drugs for depression. It felt to him like he died, too. He kept it all inside him, and tried to deaden the pain by working long hours, but it was eating him up. He said it was like he crawled into a hole and he didn’t know how to get out. He didn’t know how to reach out to me. And I told him everything that happened at school. All the crap that’s be
en going on, and who did what, and how I felt about it. He was horrified.”

  “I’ll bet,” I said.

  “Yeah, things got pretty emotional,” Mouse continued on, in a lower voice. “It was like the two of us, out there all alone on that lake, finally faced each other and opened the spigots and let it all come out. We cried a lot. I know that sounds stupid, but we spent one whole night with lightning and thunder flashing and crashing and rain pounding on the roof of the bungalow and the two of us sitting up talking about my mom and our screwed-up lives, and just weeping. I told him I was never going back to that school, and he said I never had to. So then we talked about options to make our lives happier. Money’s not a problem. My grades aren’t a problem. And he’s pretty good at what he does. So there were a lot of options, once we started discussing them.”

  I noticed that the trail we were following was leading us toward Grandview Lane. Mouse was heading home. “We made some calls,” he continued, “and visited a few schools together. We found a private school in Connecticut that I really liked, that will take me in mid-semester. It’s not snooty at all—it’s very relaxed, and it’s got all kinds of advanced calculus and chem classes, and incredible computer equipment. They’ll help me make sure that switching schools during my senior year doesn’t hurt my college chances. I’m starting there Monday. Which means I’m moving in this afternoon. So there’s a lot of work to do.” He glanced at his watch. “My dad and I have a three-hour drive ahead of us. And then we have to unpack.”

  “What about your dad?” I asked.

  “One of the reasons we chose Connecticut is because his company has a big lab there. He can get transferred, and rent a place near my school. And he’s gonna stop working so hard, and we’re gonna spend much more time together, and we promised to tell each other the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about everything, so help us God. So it’s gonna be better. Much, much better.”

  “It sounds like it,” I said. “Congratulations.”

  He had been gushing on about himself, but now he looked at me and I think he saw a bit of how miserable I was. “What about you, Joe? You don’t look so good.”

  I told him about the soccer team’s successes and how I couldn’t feel any joy over them, and about the Phenom’s singing with Kris on her balcony, and my own doubts about the future. I mentioned that I was having trouble falling asleep at night.

  “Yeah,” he said, “I know what that’s like. I feel like I’m leaving when you need me. But maybe I can help a little.”

  “I doubt it,” I said.

  We had walked out of the woods onto Grandview Lane and were now a hundred feet from the McBean house. “Come in for a minute,” he invited. “I have something I wanna give you.”

  “Not another photograph of us on a kiddy soccer team?”

  “No,” he promised. “Something you’ll find more interesting.”

  So I followed him into his house, and waited while he ran up to his room. I spotted three bulging suitcases in the living room, ready to be loaded into his dad’s car. I thought to myself how nice it would be to have an escape route—to just start over clean and fresh somewhere new.

  Then Mouse came bounding down the stairs holding a big manila envelope. “Read it at your leisure,” he said. “One night I was surfing the Web and I thought I’d dig up whatever there was to learn about Antonio Silva. I was a little curious why a star from the junior national team in a soccer-mad country would suddenly transfer to Lawndale, New jersey.”

  “And what did you find?” I asked.

  “Read it for yourself. There are lots of sports papers in Brazil that cover youth soccer. A couple even publish English editions. I downloaded an article on our buddy. Now I’ve got to go upstairs and pack up my computer stuff. Dad’s getting nervous about the traffic if we don’t leave soon.”

  He walked me out the front door and we stood on the top step. “When will I see you again, Mouse?” I asked.

  “Maybe Christmas, or over the summer. Or come visit me in college. Or I’ll come visit you …”

  He didn’t want to say it, so I helped him out. “You’re gonna visit me here, Mouse? At the car wash? Somehow I don’t think so.”

  “We’ll keep in touch and we’ll find each other. Joe, you’ve been a great friend. I would’ve seriously messed up my life. You saved me.” There was a moment of awkwardness.

  This time I was the one who stuck out my hand. “Bye, Mouse,” I said. “Try not to screw up in Connecticut. If they have a soccer team, don’t show them all your moves the first day.”

  He grinned and we shook for a few seconds. “They do have a team, but I’ll take it easy on them,” he promised. “I’m sorry you’re going through what you’re going through, but you’ll make it, Joe. You’ll tough it out.”

  “You think so?”

  “Absolutely,” he said very seriously. “You’re a lot tougher than I am, Joe. You’re the best guy I know, but in some ways I think you’re also the toughest.”

  “Not the smartest?” I asked.

  “Don’t push your luck.”

  We stopped shaking hands and Ed the Mouse walked back into his house and the door swung shut. I turned and walked down the steps and realized that I might not see my oldest and best friend again for months or even years. I was not holding on to my childhood anymore—it was moving away from me at high speed.

  I started down the sidewalk, and then heard Mouse calling my name. I turned, but I had been wrong—it wasn’t Mouse; it was his father. Dr. McBean also looked happy and relaxed. “Joe, wait, I wanted to say something to you.” So I waited, and when he ran up he swallowed, and searched for the words. “You … you gave me my son back,” he finally said. “I can never, ever thank you enough for having the courage to talk to me. But thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” I told him. “Good luck in Connecticut.”

  He stood there looking at me, and his eyes started to tear up. Before I knew what he was doing he reached up, put both arms around me, and gave me a tight hug. I think he might have even kissed me if I hadn’t been too tall. “God bless you,” he whispered, released me, and headed home to his son.

  26

  Things that are hidden have great power. I didn’t open that manila envelope right away on Saturday. I let it sit there, on my desk, wondering what secret Ed had uncovered.

  I did some homework, and fixed and ate a big sandwich for lunch, and the envelope still sat there. When I went outside to get the mail, I ran into Kris, who was taking her friendly mutt, Suze, for a walk. Suze was a big dog, part collie and part Lab, and each time she saw a place she wanted to go, Kris had to win a tug-of-war to drag Suze away.

  We hadn’t talked much since our big fight on the bench, but there didn’t seem any point to being rude and ignoring her. “Hey, K,” I said, “who’s walking who?”

  “No doubt about it, she’s walking me,” Kris said. “How’s it going?”

  “Can’t complain. With you?”

  “Happy,” she said simply. And she looked it.

  “I’m glad,” I told her. And then, for lack of better conversation, “Ed the Mouse is leaving school.”

  “You mean for good?”

  I told her just a little of what had gone on, and where Ed was heading.

  “Wow,” she said. “Sounds like a good move for him. But tough for you. I know he was a real close friend.”

  “Yeah, a pretty good guy for a social zero.”

  Kris tugged Suze away from an attack on a squirrel. “I’m sure we both said a lot of things we regret,” she told me.

  “Not really,” I said. “But I am glad you’re happy. I heard you singing the other night, and it sounded like you were enjoying yourself.”

  She realized I must have heard Antonio singing also, and looked a little embarrassed. “Hope I didn’t keep you awake.”

  “You know me,” I told her. “I sleep like a rock. Looks like your dog has had enough of our talking.”

  “She
’s got more important things to do than listen to us,” Kris agreed. “Bye, J.”

  “Bye.”

  I watched the big dog drag Kris off down the block. She was laughing and shouting at Suze, and I have to admit, in all the years I had known her, Kris had never seemed happier.

  When I got back to my room, I opened the envelope. Seeing and talking with Kris had given me the power to break the seal, so to speak. It was a small, downloaded article from a Brazilian sports newspaper, published in Sao Paulo. I sat at my desk and read it through in about two minutes.

  There had been a scandal at a teen soccer tournament in France. Five members of the Brazilian Junior national youth team had been accused of using drugs and alcohol in their hotel room and had been suspended indefinitely. Antonio Silva was the first name mentioned. The article didn’t say what drugs were involved, or whether the accusations had been proven. But I figured if this was why Antonio had left Brazil and the national team to resettle in Lawndale, he probably wasn’t completely innocent.

  I put the article back in its envelope and went out for a long run. I think I must have run ten miles. I left Lawndale far behind me, and ran through two whole towns. I ran fast, but I never felt winded—not a cramp, not even a pinch between the ribs, or a slight burning in the lungs. It felt like I could have run on and on forever.

  While I ran, I thought about Mouse, and what it would be like to go to school without him. I had always taken it for granted that he would be around. I tried to imagine what it had been like when he and his father finally faced each other at that mountain lake, and spoke the truth to one another. It’s sad that the two of them had to be pushed that far to open up, but I’m not sure it’s that out of the ordinary. As I ran, I wondered what it would take to make my father and me have a conversation like that. I had a gut feeling it would never happen. I had been right all along about Mouse—in some ways he was very lucky.