by Joel Arnold
I like the smell of the place, too. The smell of baseball gloves and cut grass and dirt. I have an aluminum bat I keep with me and sometimes I go out to the batter’s box and take a few swings at the air.
Sometimes, some of the kids will sneak on the field at night to drink beer and smoke weed. Sometimes they’ll make out in the middle of the field or in the bleachers. I don’t pay them much mind, and half the time, they don’t seem to know I’m even there. I’ve scared more than a few kids in the dugout, their pants down around their ankles, humping each other the way kids these days do. I don’t mean to scare them, but I don’t really feel like waiting for them to finish just so I can have a smoke, and all it usually takes is for me to clear my throat, and then they run the hell away like I’m some kind of ghost or something.
Some nights, the boys will come out here and give me a twenty dollar bill for keeping quiet when they have their initiations, but I’d probably keep quiet for just a ten.
The other night they brought out this kid wrapped in a dirty shag carpet. I could hear him trying to scream, but it wasn’t doing him much good. There were about ten of the boys, and they set him on the pitcher’s mound and all took turns throwing baseballs at him. Some of them could throw pretty darn hard, and I even winced at a few of the zingers that hit the carpet. He stopped screaming after a few of those.
After the boys left, I unwrapped him, and he was barely breathing. He looked pretty near like every bone in his body had turned to mush. His skin was all blue and purple and black like an eggplant, the kind some folks put on their salads.
He tried to tell me something, but I didn’t pay him any mind. I could already hear the ambulance coming — the boys are thoughtful that way. So I left him there and gathered up my smokes and soda and walked up to the top of the bleachers and watched the doctors work on him. They didn’t see me up there. They never do.
I know the difference between good and evil, and the world is full of both. It’s like they’re two sides of one of them old fashioned scales, the kind in the movies where they’d weigh the prospector’s gold on. And on one side is good and the other side evil. And they have to stay in balance. If things get too bad, something good is going to happen. And if things get too good, something bad is coming along shortly. These boys, as far as I’m concerned, were just trying to keep the scales balanced.
Like in the war when I was a prisoner for four months and they poked out my left eye and threw it against the bamboo cage and about a hundred rats jumped on it and fought over it. I was weighing down the bad side of the scale so there could be some good done somewhere else, is the way I see it.
A few weeks ago the boys came down and had a new pledge with them and they had him stripped down to his underwear. His hands were tied behind his back, and they laid him out on the pitchers mound. One of the boys sat on his legs so he couldn’t get up, and another boy squatted behind him, holding his mouth open. The other boys took turns peeing in his mouth. I could tell they’d been drinking beer because they came over to where I sat watching, and asked if maybe I felt like taking a leak. I told them no thanks; I’ll just take the twenty.
Sometimes I see them during the day when I’m working and they’re jogging around the track for phys-ed. I see them jogging and sweating just like everybody else, and they won’t look at me or say “Hi, Hank,” they just keep their eyes ahead like I’m invisible, and I don’t pay them any mind. Sometimes I feel like sticking out my foot and tripping them just to get their attention, but then I think why would I want to do that? It would just get me in trouble and their parents would complain and I’d be out of work again, and maybe they wouldn’t even let me stay at the halfway house, they’d put me back in the hospital.
One night though, just last week, they brought out another pledge who I recognized because it was one of the kids who would always smile and say, “Hi, Hank,” to me when he passed on by. Not only that, but he’d sometimes stop and talk to me, ask me how my day was going, how I was getting along in life. A real nice kid.
They had him wrapped in duct tape all the way up to his eyes, and I was wondering how he could even breath, but then I saw they’d poked a hole for one of his nostrils. His eyes looked scared as shit, and they laid him out and started smoking cigarettes, laughing and joking, and this boy all laid out on the pitchers mound looking like a gray piece of wire. Then when their cigarettes were almost sucked down to the butt, they put them out on his forehead and in his scalp, and you could smell the skin burning, but the sound of the sizzle was swallowed up by the crickets. They came over to where I was in the dugout smoking my own cigarettes, drinking my soda, and handed me a twenty-dollar bill.
“I can’t take that,” I said.
“What? Why?” they asked.
“No,” I said. “Not tonight.”
“Are you getting greedy?” one of the boys asked. “You want more money?”
“No,” I said, looking at him with my good eye. “You pay me to keep quiet and I don’t feel like keeping quiet about this one.”
“Are you crazy?” the boy asked. “You can’t tell anyone about this.”
“I don’t know, I just feel like telling someone, is all.”
The boy turned to the others, but they all shrugged. He pulled out a fifty dollar bill. “Take this,” he said. “And shut the hell up.” He tried to grab my hand, but I jerked it away.
“What’s your problem? You want us to send you back to the loony bin? You know we can do it.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t want to go back there.”
“Then take the goddamn money and shut the hell up.”
“He was just a nice boy is all,” I said. I looked at the twenty-dollar bill in his hand. “No,” I said. “You keep your money.”
“I’m serious,” the boy said. “You say a word about this, and we’ll get you sent right back to the crazy farm.”
I thought about it for a moment. I didn’t want to go back there. No way. But I also couldn’t take the boy’s money for hurting the kid like that, the same kid who always would say “Hi, Hank,” and smile, and ask me how my day had been. Like I was part of his family. I couldn’t take that money.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m not taking the money, but I won’t say anything to anybody.”
The boy looked at me like he didn’t really believe me, but then he nodded. “Have it your way. But remember who we are and what we can do to you.”
I looked away. I didn’t look up until I could hear that they’d left.
I sat back down in the dugout watching the kid lying there on the pitcher’s mound. His body was hitching up and down like he was still having trouble breathing. I could hear the ambulance in the distance, and then the sprinklers went on. The kid squirmed on the mound as the water came down upon him.
Sometimes you have to do your own balancing of the scales. Sometimes you have to adjust a little here, a little there. It’s hard to always know, though, which way the scales are leaning.
I decided to unwrap his face. Let him breath a little easier. I knew I didn’t have a lot of time, because the ambulance siren was getting pretty loud by now.
I had to tilt the scales back so they were even. I leaned down, the sprinklers soaking me through, and gently pulled the tape from his mouth. He sucked in a lungful of air. I could see the burn marks on his forehead, the singed strands of hair.
“Thank you,” he said.
“No,” I told him. “Thank you. Thank you for being so good to me.”
I pulled the aluminum bat from behind my back and beat him into the ground, tipping the scales back into balance.
The Canoe
He lives with his son in a cabin next to a cold, rusty river. The rust reminds Tab of blood spilled in the Mekong. His blood. His mother and father’s blood. Caught in a hail of bullets as they swam toward freedom. But that was many years ago, and this rust comes from the taconite processing plant twenty miles upstream.
His cabin has two bedrooms, a small living room
, a kitchen, a bathroom, a fireplace that pops and hisses during the winter and the cool, spring nights. Tab wishes his wife was still alive. She always talked about living in a home with a fireplace.
The Kraemer River smells like fish and rust and pine. The walleyes and northerns are sparse, and those caught are thrown back in. The DNR says the mercury levels are too high, that eating the fish is dangerous. But sometimes Carl and Tab sit on the bank and throw in their lines and struggle with the slippery fish, reel them in with whoops of joy, admire them briefly, and throw them back in. It’s time like these when Tab feels he’s getting his son back.
Forest. Deer. Moss. Pine. The air tastes sweet and cool. The sun is a mellow orb through the trees, the rays neither harsh nor demanding. The forest can be dark, even when the sun is high in the clear sky, but the pine and birch branches shelter, not menace. A big change from New York City. No gangs. Carl is sixteen now.
“Are you bored here?” Tab asks.
“Sometimes.”
“What about your school friends?”
Carl shrugs.
Life is so much better here. During the year, Carl became involved in basketball, his grades improved. Good people here.
Carl says, “People in school call me a gook.”
Tab’s smile vanishes. “What? Why is this the first time I’m hearing this? Who calls you that?”
“Some of the kids.”
“Which kids?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter, anyway.”
“When did they call you this?”
“A bunch of times.” Carl looks at his father, his eyes steady and cold. “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want us to move again.”
“You know why we moved.”
“I liked New York. I had friends there.”
“Thugs and hooligans. We live here now. These are good people. Maybe some are ignorant, but soon they’ll see we’re good people, too.” Tab smiles encouragingly at his son. “We’ll survive here. We will, Carl. We’ll survive.”
An aluminum canoe with fading red paint washes up on shore while Tab and Carl cast their lines to the river’s poisonous fish. There is crude lettering on the bow. FARBANTI. There are dents, too, but they can be pounded out with a rubber mallet.
“Help me push this out into the river,” Tab says.
“Why don’t we keep it?”
“Because. Maybe someone is waiting for it.”
They slide it over the muddy bank into the water where the current takes hold. It straightens like the needle of a compass, and disappears into the evening’s dim light.
New York. As many people as insects. Ceaseless noise.
But this is where Tab married. Where Carl was born. Where Mina died.
One sweltering night, when Carl was only fourteen, there was a knock on the apartment door. Rare to get visitors. Tab opened the door a crack, leaving the chain attached.
Carl. In handcuffs. Smelling of beer. Cigarettes. A cut on his face. An ugly bruise. Suspended between two policemen.
“This your kid?”
Tab unlatched the chain and opened the door wide. “Yes, this is my son.”
“We saw him jump out of a van, throw a punch at a college student. When we intervened, the van took off.”
“Is this true?” Tab asked.
Carl’s jaw was set. He stared at the floor, breathing sharply through his nose.
“He said it was his initiation into the Laughing Tigers. A Vietnamese gang.”
“We’re Cambodian. American, now.”
“Yeah, well. He didn’t give us much trouble, said he lived here. I told him as long as you were home, we’d turn him over to you.” The cop unfastened the handcuffs. Carl hurried past Tab into the apartment. “Keep an eye on him,” the cop said. “I won’t be so nice next time.”
“Yes, sir,” Tab said. “Thank you.”
How do you keep hold of your son, your only son, the only family you have left, when you don’t know what he does during the day? When he doesn’t come home until two in the morning on school nights?
You move. Move someplace safe.
The river. Always moving. Giving and taking with indifference.
The canoe washes up again, its stern caught on the protruding roots of an ash tree. The bow bobs in the flowing river.
Farbanti.
Again, Carl asks, “Can we keep it?”
Tab looks up and down the river, wondering where it came from. “If no one else claims it.” He pulls it onto the shore so the tug of current won’t reclaim it. “Go inside and grab some rope. We’ll tie it to this tree for now.”
“Let me take it out on the river,” Carl says. A warped paddle lays across the canoe floor. Carl looks up at his father. “Come with me. It’ll be fun.”
“Neither of us knows how to ride this.”
“I do. It’s easy.”
“I don’t think—”
Carl shoves the canoe into the water and straddles the bow. “Forget it,” he says. “I’ll go myself.” He pushes off from shore, carefully steps across the bottom to the stern, sits, picks up the paddle, and straightens the canoe.
“Be careful,” Tab calls.
Carl and the canoe slip easily around a bend in the river and disappear from view.
Tab fashions a flier on yellow paper and carries it to the roadhouse. There is no community center up here, no coffee shop, no VFW. There is only the roadhouse, and if anything needs to be said or learned, this is the place to go.
Tab sits at the bar. “Anybody missing a canoe?” he asks Jim, the bartender.
“Haven’t heard anything.” Jim pours a cup of coffee for Tab, and slides a container of half-and-half across the bar.
“It washed up at our home the other day.” He shows Jim the flier. “May I put this up?” He staples it to a bulletin board by the door on which other fliers announce items for sale, property for rent, dogs and cats lost and found, rides offered out of town to Duluth and the Twin Cities.
Tab comes back to his cup of coffee. Sips it. Carl has already taken the canoe out on the river each of the last two days, and was gone for hours both times. This is good for a boy his age, isn’t it? Out in the forest, in the branch-filtered sun? Good exercise. Fresh air. Better than sitting in his room all day playing video games and watching television. Why is it, then, that Tab feels the familiar pangs of worry in his heart?
“Something wrong?” Jim asks.
“No.” Tab looks up. “Nothing is wrong.”
But what about drugs? Maybe that would explain Carl’s melancholy. Once, Tab found marijuana in his room in New York. But here? Up here where there is clean air and warm sun and a pleasant river flowing nearby?
No. Not here, Tab decides. Carl’s lonely. He’s a young man. He has no girlfriend. That’s all it is.
Three round, pink scars throb like fluttering moths on Tab’s back and shoulder. Three round, pink scars left by bullets all those years ago while crossing the Mekong River. Maybe someday Tab will tell Carl about them. Maybe someday. But it is too hard to talk about now. Too hard to think about. Maybe someday.
River. Slow and steady. Carl gone all day long. What is downriver that interests a teenage boy so much? When he comes home each evening, he is full of sweat and quiet. Goes straight to his room as if he’s got a secret. Three weeks have passed since the canoe showed up. Every day, Carl has taken it out, letting the current ferry him away, only to come back in the evening, paddling hard.
And last night, Carl didn’t come back until past midnight. Tab drove the Volkswagen down a service road adjacent to the river, shining a flashlight through the trees, looking for the talcum red glow of hull in the cone of light, but saw nothing. He stopped at the roadhouse and asked if anyone had seen him. No one had. When Tab drove back to the cabin, there was Carl in bed, snoring heavily. He would wait until morning to scold him.
But come morning, Carl is gone, the rope that kept the canoe tied to the ash tree frayed and loose, floating in the river like
a dead, sun-dried snake.
Tab works a drill in Walt Emory’s machine shop three miles upriver. He’s worked there since arriving; just shy of a year ago, drilling holes in chunks of die-cast metal. But so often as he works, his mind is back there, back on the Mekong, drifting along the current. The sweat on his brow becomes river water splashed up onto him from the force of bullets.
The memories make Tab close his eyes. He tries to force the memories back so they can’t overwhelm him — concentrate — but sometimes they are impossible to ignore.
So long ago.
Bullets. Muddy water. Pain.
In the Mekong, thrown off the raft they had paid river pirates so much to take them on.
Mother screaming. A bullet ripping through her chest, her neck, spraying blood on the boy she carries. Tab grabs the boy, his baby brother, as his mother sinks beneath the murky water. His father is gone, too, the only trace of him a brief patch of rust on the river’s surface. The brother squirms in Tab’s arms, screaming, crying. Bullets slap the water around them. Tab holds his breath. Holds his brother close against his chest. A bullet catches Tab in the back of the shoulder. Another in the back. Another below that. Intense pain, like spears of ice. More bullets zip past his ear, kiss the water like hot drops of rain. He smells cooked flesh — his own — where the bullets entered. Water bites into his eyes.
His brother’s forehead is warm against his chin, his brother’s breath is wet against his neck.
I’m sorry, brother. I’m sorry.
Tab sinks below the surface. Holds his brother with one hand, swims with the other, as brother struggles, tries to break free of Tab’s weakening grip.
