Halfway through that summer I discovered big Staten Park just ten blocks east. There were ten basketball courts, the kind with steel backboards; chain nets; modern green and red asphalt. There were baseball fields and soccer fields too. A lot of kids, especially in the evening and into dusk, hung out there and played ball. I got really acquainted with basketball that summer there. It didn’t take me long to get neat-handed at it either. I improved a pretty good shot, fast. Those older junior high kids invited me to play often, knowing I could handle the ball—bring it up court even with a press. I could dribble, slithering in and out of guys with some speed and deception. I was quite smaller, but that didn’t matter. In fact, in some areas it helped me. It seems like I often got connected with older kids in my childhood, and that was good for developing skills in sports.
Sometimes we played baseball. Some of those kids were really into baseball. They brought bases, catcher’s equipment, everything. I was fascinated with the catcher’s equipment, and always volunteered to play catcher, confused as to why no one else really liked it. I mean I was involved with every play, with every pitch. Why would someone choose to play third base, or worse—outfield—where he might not even make contact with the ball even once in an inning? Playing catcher guaranteed action, and I just loved all the equipment.
For one short span—three consecutive nights—we played soccer. It was cool enough those nights, and it was a change from baseball and basketball. I loved to play goal keeper, partly because it required less sweating and running, and partly because I felt I was pretty good at it, having quick reflexes, daring recklessness, and somewhat of a protective instinct—like a catcher in baseball. No one ever wanted to play goal keeper either. I liked playing those different, separated positions. I don’t know why.
Whenever Mrs. O’Neil said it was okay—which was usual—I went to the park. I took my bike, looping my mit on the handlebars, threading my bat through the loop, and holding my basketball with a free arm, bouncing it as I stopped at a traffic light.
The one obstacle, almost without fail, came a few blocks down. This black dog always came out of nowhere, it seemed, barking, sprinting, growling. I’d speed up, racing, evading. It became a nightly challenge, a regular vexing nuisance. He’d get his wild looking white teeth right up to my circling, peddling sneakers. I could feel this animal’s breath. He ran directly beside me. I almost ran him over once. I sort enjoyed taunting this dog that taunted me. I felt a strange pleasure in watching him give up his devilish pursuit of me, wearied in the heat with his long tongue swinging down. I looked back with my angry, smiling momentum as he’d finally surrender. The only nice thing about this speedy flight from this crazed canine was that I’d get to Staten Park quicker.
I’m still amazed at how quickly this big group of kids could organize, choosing sides, getting games started. We loved it, as evening temperatures were almost comfortable. The competition was thrilling. Oh, sure we had arguments over plays, even some fights—who’s out, safe, out of bounds, who fouled. That goes with the terrain of kids, competition, and no umpiring supervision.
One of those muggy evenings stands out in my mind. It was August, one of the last nights I lived at the O’Neils’. I had a sad, lonely, full of rage day. Roy, one of the twelve-year-olds, had initiated a nick name for me: Scuzzy. He’d been calling me Scuzzy for two or three nights because of my very visible eczema, and it started to catch on with the other kids. All of them began calling me Scuzzy on this night. It sort of climaxed, connecting with a lot of laughter too. Well, this was getting me furious, in a dangerously quiet way.
We had a close baseball game going. In the fifth inning, this kid Doug hit one into the outfield. Patrick, on second base, took off, rounded third, and headed home while I was behind the plate catching. When the throw home came, I stepped in front of the plate. It was a decent throw—one bounce, right to my waist. I caught it, turned quickly, and tagged Patrick a few feet before he crossed the plate. He should have slid. He was clearly out. “Out!” I hollered.
“You’re out!”
“Safe!” Patrick yelled. “I’m safe! You missed me! I’m safe.”
“No way! I tagged you right on the shoulder. You know it!” In the tension of the competition I forgot how young I was, how new to this part of the island I was.
“Safe! He’s safe, Scuzzy!” Roy stood there shouting. I looked over at his fat, white, concave legs. He was on deck.
“He is not, you fat liar! You’re a liar. You can’t see you fat blind bat!”
“He’s safe, Scuzzy, you filthy punk!”
“What did you call me?”
“You heard me. You’re a scuzzy half—nigger punk. What are you gonna do about it?”
This made me furious. I looked at Roy’s eyes. I lunged at him. He was three years older, thirty pounds heavier, and five inches taller; but I lunged at him anyway—punching, raging, screaming, feeling that same angry knot in my chest I’d felt when I’d tried to vent my anger climbing that unconquerable swamp maple. It was insane. He was bigger, but I didn’t think about it. I did hurt him. I felt my punches connect, surprising him. I was completely padded, with all the catcher’s equipment on, including the mask. Big Roy just grabbed me, lifted me, and threw me down like I was some clawing cat or something. I landed on my back, squarely, and all the wind was just knocked out of me instantly. I felt I couldn’t breathe, or even move. I rolled to my side, still furious, more furious now in my humiliation and gasping. I lay there, gnashing my teeth in a depth of fury that I could not understand, that scared me, that brought me to tears. I felt like the loneliest person in all the world. I could hear the sounds of the muggy dusk. Kids surrounded me, standing over me, waiting to see what would happen. No one knelt down, or even bent down, to see if I was okay. A fight was entertainment to a bunch of kids. They just stood, watching—black kids, white kids, a couple of Hispanic kids.
After a long time I stood to my feet, walked to the fence, removed the equipment, took my own glove and bat and left the field. I was shaking, stunned, queasy. No one talked to me, as far as I can remember. They talked about me in the third person, as though I were not present.
“I think he’s going home.”
“He’s quittin’.”
“Now somebody else has to catch.”
“Ah this game is over.”
“I don’t want to play anymore. You wanna keep goin’?”
“Scuzzy’s leavin’!”
“Is he all right?”
What made matters worse was my bike got stolen. At first I couldn’t remember where I’d left it, and I walked around the park in this stunned, pained, shaky condition, searching. I stopped, looked, stood in disbelief. I returned to the baseball field feeling panicked. A few kids were there. “You guys see my bike? I can’t find my bike.”
“Nope.”
“Didn’t see it. Sorry.”
After a while I began to walk back to the O’Neils’. After about five blocks that night I noticed how quickly the dusk was descending into night. I had a strict nine o’clock curfew from Mrs. O’Neil, and I didn’t want to blow it, so I started to run. I didn’t know what the time was, but I didn’t want to take any chances. I wanted to be permitted to come back to the park in the evenings. I kept a nice pace—better than a jog—down that familiar city street, Mare Trail, ignoring the pain in my back from Roy slamming me.
When I was a few blocks away, sure enough that dog came out barking, running at me. I dropped to a saunter but kept moving. This horrible dog wouldn’t stop. It seemed he got madder and madder, with his bared teeth, heated panting, and viscous saliva against my sneakers. “Get outa here!” I screamed. “Get! Get away!” Who owns this horrible, belligerent dog, I wondered.
This dog’s stature reached my waist: it was not a small dog. His barking decreased as the growling fury increased. I grew nervous as I got angry. I stopped, and as soon as I did, he snapped at my foot—not penetrating, but affrighting me in any case. In reflex and rage I s
wung my bat, instantly cracking the top of his skull. The dog went down, yelping, sort of spinning in the dusty sidewalk, flopping. A man in a doorway across the street watched. I felt swallowed up in unmanageable rage. Something took over me. I felt it. I disregarded the world around me. I swung the bat again, and again, and again…. bringing it high above my head, like an axe, then down, pounding, pulverizing. I felt inside of me this horrifying, insatiate, ravenous quest—something like an urging craving brought near a summit, a brink, just short of gratification. After about the sixth mad thrash of the bat, the dog lay still, motionless, soundless. But that didn’t stop me. As I raved, I kept slamming this dead, black animal, and as I did with all my vigor, I cried, releasing a grunting furious screech with each slam of the bat, until my breath was lost, panting.
Finally this man from the doorway ran across the street, and from behind he grabbed me, holding me, holding my bat, shouting, “Stop! Stop! Calm down, son! Stop!”
I did, and my tension relaxed in his arms. After a half-minute he released me. Some other people came out of their city corridors, stood around, watched.
I sat on the curb and cried, uttering moans and even howls—howls the dog might have emitted had he still lived. I repeatedly threw my head back, then down again, between my knees. Up and down, back and forth, crying, scared, horrified. I became aware of the dog’s blood sprayed over my sneakers, socks, and bare legs. I rubbed my legs and looked at the dog’s blood on my hands. I wiped them on my shorts. I sat there on that curb, rocking. Somehow that song Molly had taught me so many years earlier beneath those April apple boughs returned to my ears. “Jesus Loves Me”: it kept tolling in my ears, in my mind; and in a mysterious, lullaby-like way it gradually calmed me down.
After a few long minutes, I wanted to go back to the O’Neils’. I picked up my mitt and bat. It was late and I didn’t want to get in any trouble, but the man wouldn’t let me. “You just wait here, son. Be still.” He was kind.
The owner of the dog, a big, soiled, laboring man, finally surfaced, along with the police. The kind man who witnessed the whole thing explained everything. They listened. The policeman wrote out a report.
“This dog is never contained officer—”
“He’s always contained. He breaks loose,” the owner said.
“The boy come running down the street and the dog chases him, barking, and he did bite the boy, officer. I saw it. The dog can get vicious. I’ve seen it. So the boy threw a fit, and I don’t blame him. Poor kid was scared, and now he’s all upset as you see. He was protecting himself.”
So I got off the hook. Even though I became more vicious than that dog, I was exonerated—even though I went beyond destroying him.
The policeman took me home. This was now my second ride with the police, and my fourth encounter with them. Imagine, I wasn’t even ten and I was no longer awed by the police. We stopped in front of the O’Neils’ where in the early darkness the car’s colored resplendence and beaming radio utterances attracted a lot of attention with the neighbors.
We walked under the swamp maple and met Mr. O’Neil at the door where the police officer explained everything, where I kept interjecting my little additions here and there: “He chased me every night. He bit me. I didn’t want to kill him.”
Small, bald Mr. O’Neil leaned his small frame on his arm which rested on the stoop railing. His small pot belly bulged forward in his white tee-shirt as he nervously scratched his forehead with one finger, repeatedly nodding to the policeman’s explanation. When I interjected, he ignored me. I could tell he was angry, embarrassed. “Well, he’s not my boy. We’re just fostering him for a spell,” he said twice in the discussion, making sure the policeman understood that he was not connected to such a boy.
I kept wondering what was to be done with the dog. Would I see him there tomorrow night like so many cats, raccoons, opossums, and sometimes dogs I’d seen by the side of the Cary Island roads? Did somebody bury him? I was afraid to ask.
“I’d say he might need some counseling after an episode like that,” was the last statement the policeman made as he tapped my head and walked to the car. Mr. O’Neil made no response.
In my memory Mr. O’Neil is like a statue, an entirely disconnected detached figurine. His human touch, as far as he’d touched me goes, was nonexistent. Strangers were warmer. He was living, yet he wasn’t living; he wasn’t dead, yet he was dead.
That was the third to last day I spent there.
“We’re not going to have any more of this!” I heard Mr. O’Neil say from the other room, within his discourse with his wife that night, as I lay sleepless in the bottom bunk, as I lay wondering, alone. “That’s the kind of kid that’ll wind up in and out of the Cary County jail! That’s the kind a kid that is!” he prophesied.
I can still hear his mean, mewling voice. It still haunts me.
The day before I left I began in the morning by striving to ascend that swamp maple again. It took three tries, and I made it. I was able to fasten my forearm around that first parallel limb I’d told you about, then reach one foot over, and lug the rest of me up. This had been a chief ambition of mine that summer, and I’d succeeded, and it felt good. It felt good to just climb around, swing, look through the green muddle out at the street and into the sky. I stayed up in the canopy of that great tree for about an hour.
When Mr. O’Neil came home from work that night I said, “I climbed around the big tree Mr. O’Neil! I reached the big limb!” “Terrific kid,” was all he responded, without looking at me, and I think those were the last two words he said to me.
ELEVEN
THE ASCENT
Molly arrived in her typical way: smiling, encouraging, trying so hard to pour hope on me. My trunk was all packed, and it seemed like the accumulation of my belongings diminished rather than multiplied each time I moved. All I know is that this time I didn’t have a bike, and that bothered me.
She came with the fifteen-passenger New Blossom Children Services van, driving it herself. I was going to a new household.
“Someone stealed my bike.” I was mad. I was mad at Molly. I don’t even really know why. That happened now and then. I directed my steam vent at her. She seemed to understand though, never returning anger back at me.
“Someone stole your bike? Oh no. Where?”
“At the park.” Folding my arms, I stared straight ahead.
“Well that’s not your fault, honey—”
“So!”
“So? What’s ‘So!’ mean? Uh-oh, Silas is mad!”
“So of course it’s not my fault! I didn’t steal my own bike! That’s stupid!”
Angry tears filled the shallow pools of my lower eyelids. I was so furious, at everything. Molly was my outlet.
“Well we’ll just have to get you a new one Silas. That’s all. That’s not your fault.”
That was relieving news. I’d been worried that maybe I’d have to suffer without one because I’d been careless or something. “Really?” I said, hearing my own tone’s delight.
“Really,” Molly said.
Mr. O’Neil was at work this morning, and Mrs. O’Neil didn’t even walk us out or anything. It was another sunny, late August day, with that ‘almost school’ sensation in the breeze. Cicadas screamed in the trees just like a year ago when I was headed to Mommy Maureen at Crossings House. “I think you’re going to really like living with your new foster parents Silas. The Roccos have a big beautiful home with two other foster kids!” She said this as she slammed the back hatch after lifting my trunk in.
“Any of ’em my age?”
“Yep. Anthony’s ten, maybe eleven.”
“Does he play sports?”
“Yep I think he does.”
I felt a little at peace. Molly opened the door for me. I climbed in, buckled, and she closed it. She walked around and got into the driver’s seat, buckled her belt, and started the engine. She looked so amusing to me seated in that big van like a man. She waved at the front door where I
could see Mrs. O’Neil’s thin little frame blurred by the screen as usual, waving. I waved, and we drove away.
“Is it near the water?” I had to tilt my head back a little as I looked at her face because I liked to wear my Yankee cap down low over my brows, like the other kids did.
“No, not near, but you can see it. That’s for sure.”
“Where is it?”
“Only a few miles. It’s in a new development—new houses—way up on Stony Hill. Wait till ya see it, Silas. You’re gonna love it. Boy was this ever a find! I’m so glad for you, kiddo!”
Molly’s big pretty smile always made me smile. I believed her. I could tell by the way she spoke that she really worked hard to get me into a decent place. They were hard to come by, but they were out there. I hoped this would be permanent, at least for more years. I trusted her, and I really loved her. Sometimes I prayed that she’d become my mom, and I prayed especially after hours that I’d spent with her. As far as I was concerned, she and Mommy Lucinda were the nicest people in the whole world.
“Stony Hill’s the highest elevation on Cary Island. You know that? Three hundred feet above sea level—not a mountain—but it’s nice up there in that community. Get a great vista, and lots a breezes, you know, kiddo?”
Silas Dillon of Cary County Page 12
