Against All Odds

by Scott Brown

  Whenever my father came inside to collect me, my mother would be ready, claws bared, to spring at him. “Why are you late?” “You aren’t dependable. You’re never on time.” She was furious at him for missing child support checks. She was supposed to get $25 a week or so. He paid when he felt like it, which usually wasn’t often. He had a new house and plenty for his new family, while we, my mother would point out, were living in shit holes. She would scream; he would counter. Every pickup dissolved into a shouting match, until I learned that the easiest thing was to stay outside on the stoop, for however long it took, rather than take a chance that he might actually come in.

  After Albion Street, my mother moved around the corner to 202 Broadway, a brown, unadorned New England clapboard. We had the second floor. The house was an architectural version of Ichabod Crane, long and narrow, with shutters hanging cockeyed from one hinge, and so shadowed by the woods behind that it was dark even at the height of the summer sun. The backyard was hardly a yard; it was damp dirt with a few scattered weeds and blades of grass. It was too dark there for anything to grow. Once, I set up a tent to air it out for Boy Scouts and after it had been staked, it smelled worse than when it had been rolled up. It was also covered in mildew. The Scout leader down the block yelled at me, calling me a liar and saying that I had not tried to dry the tent. In frustration, I quit the troop. Down the block too was the house with the concrete foundation where I fell playing touch football and jammed my knee so hard that I nearly ripped my kneecap off and needed a winding chain of stitches. It was a two-month-long recovery. Any more damage and I might have permanently ended my basketball career.

  I didn’t think too much about the larger world around me back then. I knew about things like Woodstock and Vietnam; I watched the moon shot in the summer of 1969. The year before, we saw film footage of the Detroit riots and the Chicago Democratic convention. I felt the bleak, collective sadness when Robert Kennedy died. But these were also things that happened a bit more on the periphery of my and my friends’ lives. Growing up, I waited eagerly each Sunday night for The Wonderful World of Disney to appear on the television screen at 7 p.m., when Tinker Bell touched her wand to illuminate the castle of the Magic Kingdom with sparkly fairy dust.

  That summer after fourth grade, like the summer before, I went to a religious camp down on Cape Cod. My grandparents and my mother drove me down and set me up in my bunk with six other children and a counselor. I loved the sand and the water and the clean Cape air and the quiet. Wakefield was the base of a triangle between the Route 1 corridor and Interstate 93, bounded by Route 128 and later Interstate 95, as this multitude of highways bisected the suburbs and converged, giant automotive arteries flowing to and from the beating heart of Boston. Wakefield itself was slow and quiet, with its large lake and Center Green for Fourth of July fireworks and an old-style bandstand. But the space around it was in constant motion. On the Cape, things held still, as in New Hampshire, except for the clockwork motion of the tides.

  The camp was Christian, but it was the late 1960s, so many of the counselors had long hair and love beads dangling across their chests. They wore sandals and T-shirts emblazoned with peace signs. I was happy that we were busy. We made all kinds of objects out of Popsicle sticks and strung lanyards with gimp, the colored vinyl string. I was a master at the box stitch used to make eyeglass holders or key chains. One of the things we learned was sailing, and I took to the lessons, winning first place in the competition for small single sailboats.

  At home now, we almost never attended church. I can count on two hands the number of times we went to services in Wakefield, or before that in Malden, or Revere. But at camp, we said grace before meals, our sun-bleached heads and peeling noses bowed over our plates. And the camp had religious speakers who came to address us in the amphitheater. I was either eight or nine when I heard one speaker talk about God. I’ve long since forgotten the words, but I sat, a rare thing for me, entranced. It was the first time that I had ever considered God, or given thought to the meaning of life. The first time that I began to consider, introspectively, the possibility of there being somebody, a higher power, who could help me. Walking to meals, steering my small boat out from the dock, before bed, several times a day, I began to pray, asking for guidance and support. I’d never ask for things, but for help. I’d ask for a clear mind, clear thoughts, good health, and the tools to do things better. When I was young, there would be times when I would pray, “Help me find a way to score fifty points or get the game-winning shot”; now all I usually ask is, “Please help my kids be safe” or “Please give me the strength to make good decisions.”

  Perhaps as a legacy of those summers, I’ve never felt that I needed a church. I go today, but over the years, I’ve always felt closest to God while riding my bike, pondering as the wheels move and the road passes beneath my feet the meaning of life and why I am here or how I am going to solve a particular problem. Whenever I have a conflict or need some guidance, a good bike ride or a run is how I handle it. I pray when I’m riding, when I’m running, when I’m swimming. I can dive into the lake or the ocean, feel the cold water surround me, hear the flap of bird wings, feel the blaze of the sun in a blue sky, and with each inhalation and exhalation feel connected to God.

  I sometimes wonder if God found me in that camp because he knew what else would find me there.

  I have purposefully erased his name from my mind, but I can remember how he looked, every inch of him: his long, sandy, light brown hair; his long, full mustache; the beads he wore; the tie-dyed T-shirts and the cutoff jeans, which gave him the look of a hippie. He had already finished college, so he was nearing his mid-twenties, and he was a counselor at the camp. He was somebody who was always kind of cool, walking with a real swagger. He was kind of funny, witty in his jokes and his put-downs—all that sort of crap. And he knew, from living around our cabin, that I was the kid whose parents hardly ever came to visit on parents’ weekend, who got very few letters, who kept to himself, who could be alone even in a crowd. The counselors used to sleep with us, in their own bunks; we could hear their breathing a few feet away. Nothing happened while we were sleeping, although when we were changing into our pajamas or climbing into our sheets he might come in and stand too close, touching and brushing.

  One afternoon, I didn’t feel well. I went to the infirmary and he came, but the room was empty. I walked into the bathroom, and he followed. I was standing there with my pants down and he came right up next to me and asked me if I needed help, and then he reached out his hand. He began to play with me, his hands fondling me. I was ten years old. I took a step back and he had his own pants off, showing himself to me, saying, “This is what will happen when you get older,” and he took my hand and placed it on him, to touch him. All I could think was: Oh God. Help. But he was my counselor, one of the few older men who had ever taken an interest in me. On the surface, he was a nice guy, he was fun, and I liked him. And he was my counselor, the person I was supposed to go to with any problem.

  But going through my mind was: How do I get out of this? I was stuck, stuck with a predator, although I didn’t know the word then. And I didn’t know what to do. He was tall and he looked down at me and my hands and said, “Why don’t you put it in your mouth?”

  It was the Malden woods all over again, but I had no rock, nowhere to run. I saw the hair, smelled the thick scent of male sweat, and my stomach was close to heaving. My shoulder shook; my face must have looked alternately horrified and appalled. And I looked him in the eye and screamed, “No. Get away from me. No, no, no.”

  I yanked my hands away, and there on the institutional-tile floor, trapped by a sink, a toilet, and a mirror, I stood my ground. I tried to push my way by him, he stopped me, and I yelled “No,” screaming at the top of my lungs. Up until that moment, I don’t think he had imagined anything other than my giving in. Then suddenly, I think he got worried that someone else would hear me and enter the infirmar
y. He got nervous, glanced around, and abruptly stopped. Once he let me go, I raced outside. But there were several other times where he carefully maneuvered me into very similar situations, alone with him. It rapidly reached the point where I tried to avoid him. I was uncomfortable just at the sight of him striding into our cabin, even if every other one of my bunkmates was around. And he knew it. He got me alone one more time and told me that if I told anybody, ever, he’d hurt me badly, that he’d come to do it in the middle of the night, and that he would know if I said anything.

  He leaned over, so that I could hear the clear threat in his tone. If you don’t keep your mouth shut, he said, I will make sure that you never get the chance to say anything.

  I did try to tell someone, my mother or my grandparents, but whatever I said, however I said it, I couldn’t get the whole truth out or they didn’t believe me. Finally, I just said that I didn’t want to go back to camp again. Ever. But I couldn’t tell my mom or my grandparents why. When the next summer came, they packed my trunk and I was back again. He was still there, but I was in a different portion of the camp. I saw him once and yelled at him not to come near me. I stayed for the entire summer month, kept my distance from him, and nothing happened. The next year, I returned, and this time, he was gone. I was made an assistant counselor, and it was my best year. But I was always on my guard.

  There were, I knew now, no safe havens, no one I could truly trust, just my legs beneath me, running, riding as far as they could carry me, and the slow motion of my lips, offering up a silent prayer.

  Chapter Six

  Albion to Broadway to Salem

  The year I turned ten I started to grow my hair long. By the time I was eleven, it dipped down past my ears, came to rest against my neck, and then skimmed my shoulders until I could pull it back and stick it in an elastic band; my grandmother did just that, in fact, whenever I came to visit. The shorter front pieces flicked in my eyes, and when they grew too distracting I would take a pair of kitchen scissors and snip off the ends, until they fanned out in a slightly shorter, jagged fringe. My mother never told me to get a haircut, and so I was simply Scott, the long-haired kid, wearing my thick brown hair like a mane.

  I had friends now in the neighborhood. Broadway Street, where we had the top-floor apartment, stretched between Albion and the train tracks running along North Avenue. Wrapping around beneath it like an asphalt dipper was Plymouth Road. My best friend, Jimmy Healy, lived there at number 54. It was only a little more than a block away, but the houses seemed as if they inhabited another world from the duplex on Broadway or the three rooms on Albion. Jimmy’s house was big but not huge, but to me it looked enormous, ample enough for him and his brother, sister, mother, and father. There was a half basketball court in the backyard behind the fence and an inground pool.

  We nicknamed Jimmy Healy “Hacka” that first summer, because every time that I would drive the ball to the basket, he would foul me—a hack—so I started calling him Hacka. We could play on his half-court for hours, shooting again and again until we stopped noticing time or the slow fade of the sun. The Healys always had new cars and a full fridge, and I so wanted to be a part of their family that one night I took a ring from my mother’s jewelry box and went over to Jimmy’s house to propose to his sister, Diane. I thought that if I married her, I could go to live with them. Jimmy’s mother spied the ring, and I told her I found it in a box of Cracker Jack. She made a quick face and asked if she could look at it up close. When she turned it over in her hand, she realized that it wasn’t a cheap faux-metal prize from a box of caramelized popcorn. It was a real ring. I think she called my mom and made me carry it carefully back home.

  I could spend hours at Jimmy’s, shooting hoop up into the net, or at the park or on my bike. I could spend hours anywhere but at 202 Broadway.

  I whiled away hours at the pet shop on Albion Street, where I bought goldfish swimming in circles in plastic bags for under a dollar and watched cats, rabbits, hamsters, and guinea pigs play in the confines of their cages. And I began watching the school behind our new rented home. It was a long, low brick school, one story, with some frosted glass around the windows. The roof rose and fell in a series of peaks. Massachusetts winters were too much for most flat roofs; there had to be something to channel and melt the snow. The school sat up high on a hill, but I could easily glimpse the low field behind it through the mass of trees in our backyard and hear the carrying sounds of children running and playing.

  It was summer, but the school was crowded—crowded enough, I realized, that it would be easy to join in, to play with the kids outside without being noticed. And so, late one morning, I hatched my plan. I slipped through the trees to the edge of the field and watched them, boys and girls my age, playing on the big field. A day or two later, I wandered out from the tree line just as they arrived on the grass, a big, long field with a baseball diamond at one end. There were games of kickball, baseball, and basketball. Like a circling wolf inching up on a new pack, I slowly tried to blend in and join their games. I stayed on the field as a bunch of classes rotated outside for recess and game time. The teachers watched me from the sidelines and the blacktop, wondering who I was. But their interest faded once the bell rang and it was time to head in. I never followed when the kids raced inside for lunch, but I wanted to. I was curious and always hungry. It was one of the periods when my mother was receiving some aid from the government. She was eligible for food assistance, and we got brown packages of government cheese, tubs of butter, and other food in cans. It was sporadic; she signed up in periods after marriages or between jobs, when she was working hard, doing her best, and trying to find some kind of stable employment that would support her and her two children—when she had to figure out how to be a sole provider again. Leeann was gone from the house in day care, in camp, in something, so until I went to that religious camp down on the Cape, the daytime hours were mine alone. At the school, there were games and food and activities to do in the classrooms, and I thought that I had discovered a great secret treasure, hidden just through the woods.

  After a couple of days, when the regular students had gone in, I was standing in the parking lot, alone, dribbling a basketball. I was tall for my age, taller than all the other kids around, and my clothes were more than a bit too small and tight. I had on a sleeveless shirt and ratty shorts, dirty clothes that had been washed so many times the material had taken on a permanent state of dinge, and my long hair was falling in my eyes, looking as if it rarely saw a comb. A teacher walked up to me as I moved around the asphalt. I remember thinking that she was young and beautiful. I had seen her watching me. She smiled and began to talk, asking me questions, “Hi, who are you? Where do you live? What are you doing here?” I mumbled something and then she explained to me, “This is remedial summer school.” I didn’t really know what she meant, but after she told me, I was stunned. I had stumbled into a special session for kids who were struggling with their classes and lessons, who were forced to go to school, and here I was thinking it was the greatest place in the world. I looked up at her and I said, “Can I come here? Can I come to school here for the summer?”

  I was, she later told me, the first and last kid she ever met who actually wanted to come to summer school, who didn’t mind that everyone else was catching up.

  Judy Patterson was a reading teacher, and she invited me into her classroom. She asked if I knew how to read, and then asked me to show her. She gave me a dictionary and told me to look up a word. I couldn’t do it, so she showed me how to use the dictionary. Then she gave me another word and I found it. The next word was harder, something like “kinetics.” I couldn’t find that one, but she told me, “Well, it’s a good try. You have the basic tools. Would you like to stay on with us? Just try it for a week? And come and have some fun?” I nodded my head, saying, “Yeah, that would be great.” That afternoon, she spoke to the principal, who called my mom. The school didn’t cost anything, and my mo
ther was happy for me to have somewhere to go. I didn’t need summer school—I was a B or C student—but I could play basketball on the blacktop and baseball in the field and I could run the bases in kickball. Inside the school, I loved the music classes and the singing, and Judy gave me extra work, advanced reading, which I also loved. And she kept watching me, more thoroughly than I had watched those kids from behind the tree line.

  My summer school was my new elementary school as well. I studied in its classrooms, ate lunch under its pitched cafeteria roof, and ran on the slick, varnished floor of its gym. And I stayed at school long after the other kids had gone. At gym class and recess, I played baseball, usually as a pitcher because of my height and my arm. I could get the ball farther and faster than the smaller kids my age, and I had pretty good luck finding my target, although my throws tended to be wild, keeping the batters off-balance. But when I didn’t have a team, I played baseball alone. On the weekends, or when school was out, I would walk over with my mitt and a ball and, just as I had done on Redfield Road, draw a chalk mitt on the brick wall and throw the ball against it for hours, catching it after it struck and bounced back or scooping it up like a grounder when it dropped and rolled along the cement. Or I might grab an old basketball that had been left behind on the court that bordered the grass field and play for hours on end. I dribbled and shot until they turned the lights out, and then I would walk home in the dark, moving through the woods toward the faint glow of lamps from the houses.

  After a while I made friends, and other neighborhood kids would meet me on the field. Together we’d play baseball, basketball, and kickball, the rubber of our sneakers stinging against the rubber of the ball as it took flight through the air and the kicker ran the bases. Kickball can be played all year, and we played it even in winter, shedding our jackets as we ran around on the frozen fields. I wanted to be fast, so fast that when Jimmy or some of the other kids whipped the ball at me, it would sail past its target or if it found me, my feet would be solidly on base. We all wanted to be fast, but I wanted it most of all.