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Summer at Forsaken Lake

Page 2

by Michael D. Beil


  “Okay, we’ll be down in a second,” Nicholas said.

  He went back to the secret hiding place and reached in once again. The twins kept away from him, arms crossed and half expecting him to try to trick them again. There was no trick, though. First, he pulled out a tattered spiral notebook, its front cover nearly torn off, and set it on the floor. The second item was more mysterious-looking. It was a round metal canister, gray-green in color, about six inches in diameter and half an inch thick. Someone had printed The Seaweed Strangler on one side with a black marker. Nicholas gently lifted the lid off and saw that a reel of movie film lay inside—the narrowest film he had ever seen. He unwound a few inches of the film and held it up to the light, but the pictures were so small he couldn’t make anything out.

  Meanwhile, Hayley picked up the notebook and flattened out the cover with her hand. “The Seaweed Strangler, by Will Mettleson,” she read.

  “Daddy wrote a story?” Hetty asked.

  “Looks that way,” Nicholas responded, glancing at the notebook. “But this is old movie film—from before video cameras were invented. I wonder if he …”

  “What?” asked Hetty. “If he what?”

  Nicholas turned to the twins. “I think maybe he made a movie.”

  “Daddy? Made a movie?” said a doubtful-sounding Hayley.

  “Can we watch it?” Hetty asked, getting more excited by the second.

  “All right, kids, time to go,” Nick shouted up at them.

  “We’ll be right down,” Nicholas said, placing the film reel back in its canister and setting it and the notebook on the bed.

  “I can’t believe Daddy made a movie,” said Hetty.

  Nicholas smiled to himself, remembering his father’s words: You never know what you might find.

  * * *

  One detail that Nicholas’s father hadn’t considered when planning his children’s summer at the lake was Nick’s attachment to his pickup truck, the only vehicle he had and the last remnant of his days as the owner of a small Ford dealership in Deming. It was a 1968 Ford—built long before the addition of backseats and other creature comforts. Nope, Betty (for that was her name—and no, Uncle Nick wasn’t telling why) was a truck. Firm bench seat. AM radio. Manual transmission. (Nicholas marveled at Nick’s one-armed driving technique.) Air-conditioning? In a truck? Who needs it when you have perfectly good windows that roll down … by cranking a little handle!

  After the four of them squeezed into the cab, Pistol, a mix of beagle and who-knows-what-else, jumped in on Nicholas’s lap before he could close the door.

  “I guess Pistol’s coming with us,” Uncle Nick said. “You’ll have to hold on to him if he sees any rabbits. He’ll go right out the window after them.”

  Hayley and Hetty looked at their uncle doubtfully. “He wouldn’t really,” said Hetty.

  Nick held up two fingers. “Done it twice already. The first time we were stopped, but the second we were going about twenty-five.”

  “Wh-what happened to him?” Hayley asked.

  Nick shrugged. “Nothing much. Limped a little for a couple of days. He’s a tough old son of a gun.”

  As they reached the end of the long gravel drive and pulled out onto Lake Road, Nicholas rolled his window up partway and slipped three fingers under Pistol’s collar. Pistol turned to look at him, his tongue hanging from the left side of his mouth.

  “Looks like you’ve met your match,” Nick said.

  Nicholas wasn’t sure if that was meant for him or Pistol.

  * * *

  When they got to town, Nick and the twins went into the A&P, on Deming’s town square, while Nicholas decided to follow Nick’s advice and do a little exploring. He bought a can of soda at the corner gas station and then, remembering his promise to send his dad a letter or a postcard a week, stopped to browse through a rack of outdated postcards on the sidewalk in front of the drugstore. There were the usual pictures of the old railroad station, and the town square (with cars from the fifties and sixties parked in front of the diner), and a couple of aerial shots of the lake. They were ten for a dollar, so he picked out a dollar’s worth, paid for them out of the money his dad had handed to him in the train station, and then started to walk up a side street with signs indicating that a school was nearby. Halfway down the block, a Little League baseball team was practicing in the yard behind a tired-looking school building. Except for a chain-link backstop, the field was bare; the outfield was covered in grass and weeds badly in need of cutting, and the infield was good old-fashioned dirt—which, on a rainy day like this one, meant good old-fashioned mud. Nicholas stopped and leaned against an oak tree next to the sidewalk to watch. On his team in New York, the Yorkville Yankees, he was a decent-fielding second baseman with a solid .285 batting average. But everyone knows that pitching wins baseball games, and the Yankees, sadly lacking in that department, ended the season in last place. Of course, if they had made the play-offs, he would probably still be in New York.

  On the “mound”—actually a rubber floor mat from a car, set in the middle of the infield mud—a girl was getting ready to pitch. A long brown ponytail hung through the back of her cap, and she blew an enormous bubble with her gum as she listened to some instructions from the coach, who sat in a folding chair where the first-base-side dugout would be—if there were a dugout.

  “Don’t try to strike him out,” he said of the chubby, red-cheeked boy waiting in the batter’s box. “You can’t strike everybody out, Charlie. Keep it low. Make him hit it on the ground.”

  She shrugged and blew another bubble. “I’ll try.”

  The first pitch came in low, as the coach requested, and considerably harder than Nicholas expected. It landed safely in the catcher’s mitt with a satisfying pop as the batter swung late.

  On the sidewalk, Nicholas involuntarily puckered his lips into a silent whistle. If they’d had a pitcher like her on his team, maybe they would have won a few more games.

  “C’mon, Crenshaw!” the coach yelled at the batter. “Look alive up there. You were late by a mile—and that wasn’t even her best stuff.”

  Who is this kid?

  She wiped her forehead with the back of her glove and stared in at poor overmatched Crenshaw. The second pitch was chest-high and even harder than the first, and he missed it, too.

  “Not even close,” the coach shouted at him. “Charlie, give him something to hit. This is supposed to be batting practice. The fielders are getting bored out there.”

  She turned to the shortstop, who sat cross-legged on an old duffel bag at the edge of the infield, and smiled. “Sorry, Zack.”

  He waved. “Hey, no problemo. Next time remind me to bring a video game or something.”

  Then she got set and threw a perfect strike—right down the middle of the plate—as Crenshaw swung fiercely, spinning and knocking himself down in the process. The ball smacked the catcher’s mitt so hard that the catcher hopped up to his feet, shaking his hand in pain.

  Nicholas hadn’t intended to laugh out loud, but the sight of Crenshaw crumpled on the ground and the tiny catcher jumping up and down in pain made it impossible for him to contain that one loud “Ha!”

  The pitcher glanced over at him and smiled. “You wanna try me, funny guy?”

  Nicholas blushed a little, not saying anything and trying to blend into the oak tree. The rest of the infield joined in, taunting him to pick up a bat and show what he was made of.

  “You’re not afraid of a girl, are you?” the shortstop asked.

  “Who is he, anyway?” asked the first baseman. “A spy from the Tigers?”

  “Look at him—he looks like a wimp. I’ll bet he can’t even lift a bat,” the second baseman teased.

  Nicholas weighed his options. He could just walk—or run—away. Even though it seemed likely that he would never see any of them again, he knew that was a lousy choice. He had a pretty good idea of what he and his teammates would say to someone scurrying away in the same situation, and he coul
dn’t bear the thought of hearing those insults.

  He briefly considered faking an injury, telling them all he was recovering from a broken wrist, when he suddenly nodded at the pitcher. “Okay, why not?” he said. What are you doing? Did you see that last pitch?

  “You sure about this, kid?” the coach asked. “You play ball?”

  “Yeah, I can play. Not here—in New York,” he said, picking through the scattered bats, looking for something his size.

  “Oooohhh,” the shortstop chided, assuming—in this case, correctly—that anyone from New York was from New York City. “A city kid. Show him how we do things around here, Charlie.”

  Nicholas finally selected a bat and wished that he’d worn a baseball cap so there would be something between his head and the disgusting batting helmet he pulled on. There was no way he was facing anybody who threw that hard without a helmet; that much he knew. Then he took his place in the batter’s box, digging his feet into the sandy soil around home plate.

  “You want my best stuff?” the pitcher asked.

  “Definitely,” Nicholas said, hoisting the bat over his shoulder. “When I get a hit off you, I don’t want you to have any excuses.”

  Oh, that’s good. Make her mad.

  “That’s fair,” she said.

  Nicholas, remembering something his coach told him about facing a pitcher for the first time, decided not to swing at the first pitch no matter how tempting it looked. He tensed as she went into her windup and let loose a fastball that was low and inside. It was a ball, but not by much. In four years of Little League in New York, he had never faced anyone who threw as hard as this ponytailed girl. He choked up on the bat a few inches and waited for the next pitch.

  It was waist-high, on the inside half of the plate, the kind of pitch he usually laced over the shortstop’s head into left field. Not this time, though. He swung his hardest, but he was late and the ball slammed into the mitt behind him. His lips did that involuntary whistle thing again. He stepped back to reevaluate, choking up another inch.

  She was smiling at him from the mound, not a mean-spirited smile, but one that said, I can’t help myself—this is what I do. And then she reared back and fired again. This time, Nicholas was ready, and he fouled the pitch off to the first-base side, forcing the coach to duck. He was still swinging late, but at least he made contact, which the girl acknowledged with a slight nod in his direction.

  That foul ball gave Nicholas confidence, and he stepped up to the plate, wagging the bat over his shoulder, waiting for another chance. I don’t need a home run, he thought. A ground ball. A pop fly. Just don’t strike out.

  On the mound, the girl took a deep breath and let go. The pitch was chest-high and well inside, and Nicholas instinctively jerked his head back—just in time to watch something extraordinary happen. A few feet before reaching him, the ball took a sharp left turn and gracefully crossed over the center of the plate, leaving him standing there openmouthed. A perfect big-league-quality curveball, unlike anything he’d ever seen in New York.

  “Steee-rike three!” the catcher yelled.

  “Yerrrr outta there!” the shortstop added unnecessarily.

  Nicholas let the bat fall to the ground at his feet, which were still frozen in place. “Who is this kid?” he asked no one in particular.

  “She’s your worst nightmare, son,” the coach answered. “A cute girl with a wicked curveball. Remember this name, kid: Charlotte Brennan. Charlie. You’ll be hearing it again.”

  “You sure you don’t wanna try one more time, city boy?” the girl asked. “C’mon. You’re just getting warmed up.” She seemed to want him to stick around, but Nicholas figured that was only because she wanted to humiliate him again.

  He smiled and shook his head. “Maybe another time. I’ve gotta go.” Overhead, the rumble of thunder confirmed that he was making the right decision.

  “Well, I guess we’ll see ya round,” Charlie said, smiling back.

  Charlie Brennan. Remember that name.

  CHAPTER TWO

  He got back to the truck just as the rain started to fall again, huge drops bouncing off the hood and roof with loud pings. Uncle Nick, the twins, and Pistol were waiting for him, and they squeezed together to make room on the seat.

  “Where did you go?” Hayley asked.

  “Nowhere. Just down the street. Watching some kids play baseball.”

  “You should have played with them,” Hetty said. “You’re good at baseball.”

  “That right?” Nick asked.

  “I’m okay,” said Nicholas.

  “We’ll have to play some catch,” said Nick. “If it ever stops raining.”

  Nicholas wasn’t sure if his uncle was kidding or not. He looked at Nick’s empty left sleeve, safety-pinned to the side of his shirt. “R-really?”

  “What, you think I can’t play catch with only one arm?”

  “Um, no, I just, uh …”

  Nick laughed. “It’s okay, Nicholas. It’s a fair assumption. I guess your dad never told you.”

  “Told me what?”

  “Well, before I lost this,” he started, glancing at his left shoulder, “I was a good ballplayer—shortstop. Played for the high school team, then a little American Legion ball—even had a tryout with the Pirates. Guess I wasn’t quite that good. When I lost my arm, I didn’t want to give up playing ball forever, so I taught myself how to pitch. I knew I’d never be much of a hitter again, and nobody expects the pitcher to be much of a hitter, you know what I mean? Learned how to kind of tuck the glove under my stump while I threw, and then get it back on my hand so I could field.”

  “That’s incredible,” Hetty said. “You’re like a superhero.”

  “Ha! Not quite,” Nick said. “But I was good enough to play for my old team out in Williamsfield. Pitched a no-hitter once. Still have the ball.”

  “A no-hitter!” Nicholas stared at him in wonder and puzzlement. Why didn’t Dad ever tell me any of this?

  “It was a long time ago. Nowadays, I help out with some of the local kids, that’s about it. So, how about you? Wait, let me guess: catcher.”

  “Nope!” said Hetty. “Not even close!”

  “Second base,” said Nicholas.

  “Good for you,” said Nick. “Catching is too hard on the body anyway. The infield is the place to be.” He paused as lightning streaked across the sky directly in front of them. “Sailing is definitely out for today, but we’ll hit it bright and early tomorrow. Going to be a beautiful day. Right now, though, let’s swing by the library and get you all library cards. If you’re going to be here all summer, you’re going to need one. They’ll let you take out a couple of books today, and we can come back as often as you want. I’m a regular—I’m in there once a week at least. Today’s going to be a good day to curl up with a good book, and I have just the one in mind for you girls. It’s back at the house. And I’m sure I can dig up something for you, too, Nicholas. Between the library here and my own bookshelves, I think we can find some books about sailing that’ll be helpful. You can’t learn everything about sailing by reading about it, but you can start to learn some of the lingo, know what I mean?”

  But Nicholas was already thinking of the strange discovery he’d made—the film and the notebook—and was looking forward to a little more exploring. “Um, you wouldn’t happen to have a movie projector, would you?”

  Nick turned to look at him, a quizzical expression on his face. “Now, that’s a funny question. Why would you—”

  “We found a movie in Nicholas’s room,” Hayley said, earning a dirty look from her brother. “In a secret compartment.”

  “You’re not pulling my leg, are you?” Nick asked.

  “Nope!” cried Hetty. “We really did. It’s called The Seaweed Strangler! And we think Daddy made it.”

  “I’ll be darned,” said Nick, turning the truck into the drive. “You’re right—your dad did make it. When he was about your age, Nicholas. I haven’t thought about that mo
vie in years. Figured it was long lost. Your dad never, uh, told you about it?”

  “Seems like there’s a lot of things he didn’t tell me,” Nicholas noted.

  * * *

  When Nick said they were going to “swing by” the library, Nicholas pictured a ten-minute visit. He figured that would be more than enough time to get a library card and maybe even pick up a book or two about baseball. But that was before he realized that the Deming Public Library was much more than just a place to borrow books—it was bustling with activity, and Nicholas couldn’t believe the flow of people in and out the front door.

  “Hey, Janet,” said Nick, pushing the three kids toward the librarian’s desk. “Meet my nieces, Hayley and Hetty, and my nephew, Nicholas. They’re going to be spending the summer with me, and they need some library cards.”

  Janet greeted them warmly, adding, “You’re very lucky; Nick has the nicest place on the lake. It’s my dream house.”

  “Kids, Janet here is the most powerful person in town,” Nick said. “She has worked here for going on forty years, and not only does she know everyone in town, she can tell you what kind of books they all like, too. So, do you think you might find something for these three?”

  “Let’s see what we can do,” Janet said. “Why don’t we get you set up with cards first, and then we’ll look around.” She took a good long look at Nicholas, tilting her head slightly as if she recognized him. “You look familiar. Have you been in before?”

  Nicholas shook his head. “Um, no. First time. Ever.”

  “He looks like his dad,” said Nick. “Just like. He used to come in, too. Will Mettleson.”

  “Oh, of course. Will. I remember him; he liked books about sailing … and movies, I think. How about you, Nicholas? You look like a baseball player to me. We have a wonderful section devoted to sports. Are you a sailor, too?”

  “Not yet,” said Nicholas.

  “But he will be soon,” Nick said.

  * * *

  Dear Dad,

  The first official postcard! I’m waiting at the library for the twins. Deming doesn’t seem too bad, so far. My room + Nick’s truck = awesome. He’s like a rock star around here—everyone waves at him when he drives by.

 

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