Me, Johnny, and The Babe

by Mark Wirtshafter

the clubhouse, Johnny finally released his grip on my neck. He let go with a very strong shove and pushed me into the brick wall next to the window. He starred at me and I starred back at him, neither of us saying a word.

  Well, here we were. Maybe now I would be able to figure out what was going on. Maybe once we got inside the clubhouse Johnny would say or do something that would give me some clue as to what his problem was. Maybe, just maybe…

  36

  As we stood at the entrance to the clubhouse, I felt as though I was Johnny’s prisoner. He guarded me as though I was about to flee at any moment. To be honest, if I thought I could outrun him I probably would have run away. I waited for a minute to see if he would go into the clubhouse first, but he motioned for me to go in ahead of him.

  “I want you to go in first,” he said. “I don’t want you running away when my back is turned.”

  “I’m not gonna run away, I’m not afraid of you.”

  I crouched down and pushed my legs through the window easing myself gently down to the floor. Johnny followed a few seconds later.

  As he hit the ground I turned away from him and noticed that the chairs that were in the far corner of the room had been overturned. Some of our personal items that had previously been neatly placed on the table had now been knocked onto the ground. A noticeable odor seemed to permeate the room.

  Johnny was running the show, so I waited for him to say something. I did not know whether I was waiting for an apology or an explanation, or if he was going to kill me. I just stood there silently, looking directly into his eyes.

  “OK, we’re here now,” Johnny said, “Are you happy?”

  I wasn’t answering that. I needed him to tell me what was going on. I looked at him and waited for him to say something, so that I could understand what the hell was going on.

  “You wanna know why I didn’t want to come here, why I never wanted to come here again,” he said. “I’ll show you why.”

  Johnny slowly walked over to the far corner of the room, where a few of the chairs were laying. I watched as he removed them, one at a time, and neatly stacked them along the wall. Underneath the chairs, I saw our brown army blanket, spread out to its full length and width.

  Just then, a shudder went through my body. I could see that under the blanket was something that was six foot long and appeared to be in the shape of a body. Johnny removed the last chair that had been obscuring the blanket, and knelt down next to it.

  Johnny stayed there for a few moments, starring at the blanket. He looked up at me, and then reached over and began to slowly pull the blanket back. My stomach felt like it was going to come out of my mouth, and my heart felt like it was beating so fast it would explode.

  As soon as he pulled the blanket back a few inches, I could see the top of a person’s head, black hair mixed together with a sickly mixture of dark red dried up blood. He slowly lowered the blanket revealing the face and chest of what I was now sure was a dead body. Johnny neatly creased the blanket over the chest of the body. He stood up, never looking back towards me.

  There was dried up blood on the floor all around the body, and splattered on the wall behind it. I should have noticed the blood on the wall right away since the blanket and chairs did not hide it very well. The face on the body had been smashed in, and I could not recognize it. There was a bloody red brick on the floor next to the body and I assumed that was the weapon used to do the damage.

  I had never seen a dead person before, and I felt as though I would throw up. Not only was this a dead body, but the obvious brutality with which this person had died made me even more nauseous.

  The right side of the face was turned towards me, and I saw that it was caved in. It was hard to make out any of the facial features because of all the blood. I knelt over the body, careful not to touch anything. I saw that the left side of the face was still mostly intact. Slowly I reached down and gently turned the head a tiny bit to the right revealing the full face. Then a second shudder shot through my body. I knew this person. I recognized the left side of this face; it was Billy Brannigan.

  Johnny must have sensed the moment that I realized that it was Billy’s dead body. Just at that instant, he looked at me and started to speak.

  “This is why I didn’t come to the game,” he began. “I came down here that morning to get my baseball glove for Ruth to sign and I found Billy dead in the corner. I tried to help him, but after a minute or two, I knew he was dead. I didn’t know what to do, so I ran home and stayed there all day in my room.”

  “Why didn’t you call the police?”

  “I figured that since we are the only ones that come down here that they would think that we had something to do with it.”

  “Why would they think that we had anything to do with this?”

  “Well, for one thing all our junk is down here, and not many adults are thin enough to fit through the window to get into here, so I am sure they would figure that we must have done it,” Johnny replied.

  Even though I was talking, I felt as though I was stunned. I usually had very good instincts when it came to deciding what to do when faced a difficult situation, but this one had left me blank and immobile.

  Johnny looked me dead in the eyes and said, “You gotta believe me, I didn’t have anything to do with this.”

  I do not know if I believed him or not, but I knew I wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible. Every second we stood there we were at risk of being seen standing in the room with Billy’s dead body. I prayed that Johnny was telling the truth, and that he did not have anything to do with any of this.

  Johnny leaned back down and raised the blanket back up, so that it once again covered Billy’s face. He then took the chairs from the stack on the wall and placed them over the body, once again obscuring it from view. When he finished he turned back to look at me, but did not say a word. It seemed as though he was trying to gauge whether or not I believed him.

  I tried to conceal whatever my natural reaction to this disaster was. I tried to force a neutral blank expression onto my face, to hide the rush of emotions that I was feeling. Johnny silently watched me for what seemed like an eternity.

  Finally I spoke.

  “We need to get our stuff and get out of here. We need to get rid of every trace of our ever being here and never come back to this place. We need to do it right now!”

  Johnny shook his head. We started grabbing everything that we had brought and piled it up near the window. We filled our pockets with all the small things. It only took a minute of two for us to get all our stuff together and we put it on the table that we used to climb out of the clubhouse. I took one last slow look around the room, just to assure myself that we had not left anything behind. I also knew it would be the last time that I would ever see this place and I wanted to try to burn a picture of it into my mind; a picture that would include everything, everything except Billy’s dead body.

  37

  I hoisted myself out of the basement window first. I stood on the street and took a good look around to make sure that nobody was standing nearby. I did not want anyone seeing us taking our stuff out through the window.

  “The coast is clear,” I yelled down to Johnny. “Start handing me the stuff.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yea, there’s nobody here. Let’s hurry we do not have much time. Someone will walk by any minute.”

  It only took a minute or so for him to pass all our stuff through the window and he pulled himself up through the open window. We both filled our arms with the junk, and walked briskly away from the building. Fast enough to be moving quickly, but not so fast as to raise suspicion from anyone who might see us.

  When we turned the first corner and the building was no longer in sight, I felt a bit of relief from the intense stress that was starting to overcome me. I guess I hoped that if it was out of sight, it might also be out of mind, but that surely was not going to be the case.

  My mind was racing all the way hom
e.

  “I still think we should call the police and tell them we found the body while we were playing,” I said.

  “No. I don’t want to get involved with this anymore. I just want to leave it behind us and forget about it.”

  “There’s no way that they’re gonna think we had anything to do with it.”

  “Look, I ain’t ever gonna say anything to the cops about this and either are you. Do you understand?”

  “Alright. Are you sure, we didn’t leave anything behind. Maybe we should go back and double check.”

  “You’re just being paranoid. We didn’t leave anything behind and we’re not going back.”

  “Paranoid? I’m gonna worry every day that we left a clue behind and that the police are going to knock at my door and drag me away and I had nothing to do with any of this!”

  When we reached home, we parted company with a simple nod. There was no talk of a cover story, or what we might say or do when the police found the body. I did not know how many people had ever seen us enter and leave the clubhouse over the past few months, if they would even remember that it was us they had seen.

  The one thing that I did know, as I laid on my bed with the covers up to my chin, was that the sight of Billy’s dead body would haunt me for the rest of my life.

  38

  Over the next few days, I waited for something to happen. I was sure that every knock on our door was the police coming to question me about the body. I kept trying to