Just North of Nowhere

by Lawrence Santoro

  Ruth snorted. “I want to talk about your team. That's a sad thing.”

  That chilled it. “You’re a fan of the game?”

  “No. I like children.”

  Jill doubted that. She scanned the woman, top to bottom. She doubted it very much.

  “I like the idea of them, anyway. I want to help. I can help.”

  “Miss Potter. Ruth. I doubt...”

  “...All you have to do is send them to the library.”

  “For books?”

  “For an afternoon. One at a time. For a little background.”

  “Book background?” Jill smiled.

  “Plate time! A field trip, call it.” Jill thought a smirk had pressed the corners of Ruth's mouth, but it was hard to tell. Night had come.

  The kids came back different.

  The day after their meeting on the path, Jill released Walter Bowswinger from practice. Her utility fielder, Walter hadn't had more than a couple half-inning's play that season – one at shortstop for Hap Gilli, and another disastrous stint relieving Kyle Yinger on the mound, pitching into an already way-lost game. In a weak line-up, Walter was, maybe, the exception to her “you don't suck” affirmation.

  Nice boy, though.

  After school Tuesday, Jill packed him off, his head hanging, to the library.

  Wednesday, Walter punched the crap out of Pal Johnson, the third baseman. Walter blacked his eye, bloodied his nose and was still wading in, both fists, to Pal's guts and nuts when Jill pulled him off by his belt; sent him home to mom and dad, still fuming.

  “What the heck was that?” Jill asked Pal.

  By then, a bloody plug of toilet paper hung like a tusk from Pal's nose. “Said I ought to...” He stopped dead, stared at Jill.

  “What? Said you ought what?”

  “Can I swear?” he asked looking at her.

  She nodded.

  “Said I 'ought to piss or get off the G-D effing pot,' and I stunk up the whole third base line…

  “Left field too!” Harold Gilli threw in.

  “'Mother effing left field,'“ Roy corrected, checking his book. “'Mother-effing,'“ he confirmed. He didn't smile.

  Everyone else did. There was giggling around.

  “He didn't say 'effing',” Leslie B. Fritz said. Something like smiling played around her eyes. “Want to know what he really said?”

  Jill cut it off. “Look, guys. Dustups happen! All right? Tomorrow you'll shake hands and forget it. Okay!? Let's go, let's go, let's go! Batting practice all 'round, guys. You need to learn how to place your hits. No point hitting a ball to where the other team wants it! You got to learn to hit 'em where they're not! I'll pitch...and I'm not going to take it easy!”

  “Eff no!” someone shouted.

  “Burn the G-D things over the ess-oh-be-ing...” Kyle began.

  “...emm-effing plate!” Lyle finished.

  “We can handle it, ess-aye-ess!” Harold shouted back.

  “'Sure As Shit'“ Leslie translated for Jill.

  Even Roy laughed.

  Following, was business as usual.

  Next afternoon they fudged a practice game. Lyle and Kyle switched positions, Kyle caught, Lyle pitched, the outfield took turns on the bases, center swung left and right, short went long into the outfield.

  The left fielder, Fat Whendol Rifkin, rotated to the library.

  Back at practice, unrepentant, Utility Walter covered left. He shook hands, but wouldn't talk to Pal Johnson, wasn't a bit chastened by yesterday's duster. Fact was he was proud of it. And he’d taken to spitting.

  What truly was different, was his play. Normally, Walter took the field, his glove over his head, as though wearing a lobster pot for protection.

  That afternoon, Walter Bowswinger stood open on the field, head up, arms at his side, daring the ball. It came his way, he ran to be there; ran to connect, as though catching with his face. Odd kid.

  His efforts seemed to inspire Magnus Ingebretsohn at center. Magnus stayed almost busy that afternoon reaching for pop flies and grounders – he'd taken two bouncing pebble-balls to the gut and one to the inner thigh that just missed his privates.

  Neither Magnus nor Utility Walter had gotten a glove on a ball all afternoon, though, and most hits simply bobbled to the ground or rolled unimpeded to the outer dark. Enthusiastic stupidity wasn't talent, after all and a string of uniquely foul language drifted to the bench from Utility Walter's patch of evening-shaded grass. That was different.

  When the shadows reached the backstop, Jill called it a day.

  Next afternoon, second baseman Magnus Hacker went to the library and Fat Whendol returned from his afternoon field trip with Ruth Potter.

  Practice was interesting.

  After warm-up, Jill fungoed a handful of drives to left to give Whendol a chance to catch up on yesterday's fielding practice.

  Nearsighted and a good 20-overweight, Whendol thrashed through the tall grass. He dove, flopped and slid everywhere he worked. He missed it all, but missed with energy and graceless sweat. By the time of the accident his uniform carried the team's first grass-stains of the season.

  Jill had put one between left and right fields. Hitting to where they weren't, as the saying was!

  Whendol's pudgy legs pistoned like a hare humping a bunny; took him to where the ball fell from twilight. His glasses slipstreamed over his shoulder and even that didn't stop him, not one bit. Both arms groped ahead, blind, and his legs pumped like cherub wings grabbing air to get aloft.

  In the rush, he ignored Darlow Grimm.

  For an inspired moment, rail-thin Dar made a three-step feint toward the ball. When he realized 120 glandular pounds of Whendol Rifkin were bearing down, blind upon him, Dar Grimm back-peddled toward safety.

  Alas, there was no safety in the Catbird outfield.

  Whendol heaved himself aloft. Terrible. Noble. Awful. It was not a beautiful moment. He soared not high. Lacking slow-mo grace, Whendol's flight was quick, heavy, and hard. It ended on Darlow, Darlow, who'd gone to ground, back first, as though preparing a soft place for his teammate to land.

  Belly to belly, two full-bodied WHOOOFs sounded from the outfield to the bench.

  The big WHOOOF was Whendol's.

  The simultaneous WHOOF-POP was Darlow's gut emptying and his left arm dislocating. It drowned the subtle crunch as his nose met his cheekbone and the Catbirds had their first injury of the modern era.

  And Utility Walter joined the Catbird line-up.

  He grabbed the position, sneering. “I'm sharpening these spikes,” he announced, pointing with a bat to the dull plastic nubs on his shoe. “Just so's you know!” he added and spat.

  Jill was now officially curious.

  The library was locked. She knocked. Nothing. Two minutes after, the shade flapped up, the lock clicked and Lyle Younger, the older of the Yinger-Younger kids, stepped into the sun.

  He looked like he didn't belong on the street. Not there. Not in Bluffton. Not anywhere. His eyes were shocked bright, his face flopped slack, and him only half in town, the rest somewhere Jill didn't know where.

  Miss Potter stood behind, still in the afternoon dark of the library. She looked at Jill and did not smile.

  “Send what's his name...?”

  “Kyle...” Lyle said.

  “Kyle,” she said, “Tomorrow.” That was it. Door closed, lock snapped. Shade pulled. Conversation done.

  “Lyle?” Jill said.

  “Call me Bear,” he said. And drifted toward home practicing a walk.

  They were not related: Yinger. Younger. Kyle and Lyle. Their families lived next door, was all. Yingers had lived beside Youngers on Memorial Post Road for as long as...? As that! Mrs. Yinger and Mrs. Younger had gotten pregnant within days of one another – apparently. They gave birth the same day, anyway. Lyle first.

  Kyle slipped into the world twelve minutes later and happy to be there, thank you very much. The standing, knee-slap, gut-convulsing joke between them was: “Yinger's
younger!” Between the two, they had worked for years to find the other side of the gag, the rest of the rhyme: “Yinger's younger but Younger’s...”

  ...something...

  They'd get it. They had a lifetime.

  They were affable kids. More like brothers than not – except they liked each other: never fought, enjoyed the same comics, same cars, same songs. What they didn't like, they didn't like it together. When one got something, the other was happy for him. When one got tired of something, he offered it to the other before tossing it.

  When it came time, neither thought it would be too bad an idea to play some ball. Maybe it'd be fun. Baseball they figured. Kyle could throw a little and mostly put it near where it ought, and, while Lyle couldn't, he liked catching what Kyle threw – those big hands – so that worked out pretty darn good.

  Neither was great, but the team never won anyway and none of the other 'Birds made either Lyle or Kyle feel bad about how not good, not lousy they were, so both were pretty happy.

  After Kyle's Field Trip, he announced his Goddamned name was Bear, and Lyle better just give Goddamnit the hell up on the mother-effing think that anyone was ever going to call him Bear and, anyway, pitchers were more important than mother-humping catchers, didn't he friggin' know that? Especially catchers who couldn't catch the sweet mother-humping God-awful fast shit he burned over the plate to Kyle's butter baby-fingers any-the-hell-way.

  He hadn't said 'effing', either.

  Apparently, Kyle had also grasped the virtue of the bean ball. In actual fact, he seemed more intent on beaning his own catcher than on dusting opposition batters who seemed, annoyingly, to want to get between him and his Goddamned best-friend-for-life, Lyle.

  On the mound, Bear Kyle had become a series of walks, language and attempted assault.

  Warned, Kyle told the umpire, “I'm not hittin' anyone! It's the Goddamn idea that counts, Goddamnit? Pitcher's gotta keep the bastard's thinking don't he?”

  ‘Bear’ was tossed for poor sportsmanship right there, along with Lyle who had refused to return any pitched ball to Kyle without trying to put it up his neighbor's nose.

  In two weeks the Rolling River Valley Consolidated Middle Schools baseball Catbirds had become a different bunch. Attitude with a chip. Ambition without talent. Bad boys with bats and hard, hardballs. All bushers, boneheads and not a topnotcher on the bench. Jill didn't even like them anymore, not as players, not as kids.

  What the hell? It couldn't be Ruth! Ruth had them for, what? Five minutes? They went in. They were gone ten minutes tops. They came out dazed and wandered home. Next day they were back at practice and wanted to be! Be something! Be something they weren't: brave, bold, tough, hard, couthless, colorful. All because of five afternoon minutes with Ruth Potter? Ten minutes tops. Never!

  “I’m helping them to see the game,” Ruth said. “To see the game; the way it was played.

  “Picture books, movie videos, what...?”

  “Field work. Send Arthur Eyestein!”

  That was it. Arthur went, came back a son-of-a-bitch pain in the ass.

  Roy came back odder, was all.

  Leslie squinted more. And smiled a lot more. Licked her lips. Wouldn't talk to anyone. Except Roy. Not unusual, that. But when they talked, they talked harder. The two sat, end of the bench, the stat-book open across their laps, under their elbows. They hissed whispers, nose-to-nose above the pages. Same as always, but the whispers were louder. Sometimes they burst into loud words and silences. Sometimes there was sulking and arm punches.

  Pie-time was a mess. A pleasant hour of friendship reaffirmed after mutual humiliation, had become broiling adolescence and booming chest thumps, all within catching distance of juicy pie and sharp forks.

  Their game hadn't improved, but the Catbirds had become, at least, interesting. Curious folks came to watch the team eat itself alive. Parents came, hands wringing hands, teeth clenching, wondering what the bruises, scuffed knuckles and torn uniforms were all the heck about. Yingers and Youngers sat at opposite ends of the bleachers and didn't talk. They left the park, leaving a good long Bluffton block between families.

  After two weeks of strutting school, his dislocated arm in a sling and his broken nose shining like an egg in a nest of bandage, Dar Grimm returned to practice styling, chomping to get back into the lineup.

  He'd picked a new nickname: “Crab.” Despite the opportunity it gave Utility Walter to mutate Crab's 'b' to an exploded 'p', Dar Grimm slipped the name into the school vocabulary after his visit to the library.

  His new personality in a nutshell: “Got my eyes on youse! All yez!” he said. “You get away with no shit on my watch!”

  That, and his preening. Every chance the world gave him, “Crab” posed; he modeled for mirrors, plate glass windows, make-believe news cameras, he styled for knots of girls, other students in the cafeteria. Wherever he went, he practiced moving to the sound of a crowd, practiced acknowledging cheers, practiced a casual lean and his imagined post-homerun trot of the bases. He kept four, five sticks of gum wadded in his cheek at all times. “What folks's essptect!” he said.

  He also worked his game face, what he called his “long-distance freezin' frown to make the batter's pants run brown!”

  Jill hated him, hated them all, each one, this bunch of bushers, boneheads, and bottom-drawers. How, in so short a time, had she come to despise her team's faces, voices, walks and, cripes, their smell? Two weeks before, they'd been good kids? Ball hadn't been much fun, but it was baseball; a sort of baseball anyway. Now her guts boiled whenever she got near the field or passed a Catbird in the hall. Forget trying to teach anything.

  Leslie stopped by Jill's classroom one stormy afternoon.

  “You're going to have to talk to Roy,” she said.

  Jill stared. “I am?”

  “He's quitting.”

  News to Jill. Roy had been almost the same as always. Considering the changes, he'd been a rock of fortitude.

  “He's scared more than usual.”

  “Scared?”

  “He sees things. He always has. It's what he does.”

  There was a long moment. Summer thunder rumbled down the bluffs. The sky was green with rolling clouds.

  “Things?”

  “He's scared of the...” She stopped.

  “'The'?”

  “Monsters. Things.”

  “Leslie,” Jill began.

  “Like I said, it's what he does. He sees things.”

  “Sees monsters?”

  “And things.”

  “Monsters and things?”

  “And he says they're too many now. Out in the field, now. He can take a few. Now there are too many around the guys.”

  Jill slapped her hands on the desk. Not hard, enough to stop things for a second. “Leslie? Does Rolf know how... How strange you are?”

  Leslie squinted.

  “Leslie, I have no idea what you're talking...”

  “Roy sees things that're there, but aren't. There used to be nothing for most of the team. Roy says the things come when you're older, he says, or when you're real little. You know, monsters in the closet, under the bed?” A flicker of lightning played across her face. “You know? The real bad things come when your old, I think. Now, there's lots he says. Lots he doesn't like.” She stopped again and looked out the window. “I don't see them, but I know what he means. I'm a witch, you know?”

  “I've heard…”

  “And Roy doesn't like this, and I'm trying to make them go away, but he says they're from the library and someplace else...” Leslie leaned close. She smelled a little like skunk cabbage, a little like strawberries. It wasn't too bad. “From the past!” she whispered. “From the pictures. There were some in the library when we went. He didn't go on Mizz Potter's trip because of them. He wouldn't. I did, and, wow, he said, more came back with us.”

  Jill stared at the tip of Leslie's nose. “'Trip...?'“

  “You're going to have to make him rethink.”
/>
  Jill stared. Shook her head. Thunder rumbled. “Miss Potter's trip...?”

  “He's outside.”

  Roy came in.

  “Tell her,” Leslie said. She perched her butt on the edge of Jill's desk and turned her back, took herself out of the conversation but stayed close.

  Looks almost prim, Jill thought.

  “I quit,” Roy said.

  “Because of the ‘things’?”

  He pinched his lips and his eyes flickered to Leslie's back.

  Jill spat it out in her teacher voice. “What is going on here? What in the hell is going on?” She rose. Six-plus feet of English-teaching coach towered over the children. Her front-of-the-room face slipped into pissed-off Jill.

  “Jesus on a pogo, what the shit is happening to you all? What the hell are you talking about, monsters? And what the hell is this 'trip' at the library? Ruth Potter’s trip?” This last was at the top of her coach voice, ball-freezing eyes burrowed into Roy's face and Leslie's back.

  Classroom fluorescents flickered as thunder whammed on top of a three-finger lightning chain that stepped among the trees on the edge of the campus. A sheet of sudden rain burst on the windows.

  Roy's eyes followed something across the ceiling and down the wall behind Jill. Without taking his eyes from it, he leaned toward Leslie. Without looking, Leslie reached behind and took his hand.

  Jill turned. There was nothing. Nothing. Nothing at all! Not a Goddamned thing…

  ...but there was something. Something crawled in the emptiness Roy's eyes had painted across the wall.

  “Roy?”

  “Ask Miss Potter,” he said. “They're her ghosts.”

  Jill jogged to the library between downpours. Without the storm there would have been summer daylight. With it, deep green night steeped the day, a chill of autumn breathed in the air. When she arrived, Jill was sweat wet and damp with drizzle. She took the library steps at a single jump.

  The place was locked, the shades down, but warm light glowed from the high narrow windows around the upper gallery. Ruth answered on the third knock. “Wondered how long you'd be,” she said and stepped aside as fresh rain swept the street behind Jill.