Home of the Braves

by David Klass

  There was a pine right alongside the fence with low branches to climb, and near it someone had bent back the barbed wire at the top of the fence to create two handholds. I can do thirty chin-ups without even slowing down, so it only took me a few seconds to haul myself up among the thin branches, with the sweet smell of the pine needles all around, reach out and grasp the two handholds, and swing myself over from tree to fence.

  For a long moment I supported my entire hundred and eighty-five pounds with my arms as I carefully shifted first one leg and then the other over the razor-sharp barbed wire. And it was during that long moment, as I rotated my torso over the knifelike barbs and prepared to climb down the side of the fence that faces the golf course, that I first heard the screams. They were distant and indistinct, blown and distorted by the night wind. They were pained and full of fear—someone was either being hurt or terrified. At least one of the voices was high-pitched—it could have been a girl screaming. Either that or my best friend Ed the Mouse McBean.

  Instead of climbing down, I dropped ten feet to the soft ground, rolled to cushion the force of the landing, and came up running. I headed for the lake where, five months ago, Charley the Fish had been christened.

  7

  I don’t know if you have ever run across a golf course in moonlight, listening to the screams of your best friend getting louder and louder as you get closer to him. The golf course, always mysterious in moonlight, seemed to grow more ominous as I ran forward. The dark fairway gaped wide as a sea monster’s maw, odd, misshapen hillocks hunched like trolls in ambush, and sand traps and gullies popped open out of nowhere, as if the ground itself was trying to trip me up or suck me down.

  Then the moon dipped behind a cloud and it was so dark I could barely see my own feet. I had to slow down, and veer out into the center of the open fairway to avoid obstacles. As I ran I imagined all kinds of awful scenarios of what could be happening up ahead.

  There was a rumor that the Mafia actually owned this golf course, and that they didn’t take kindly to local kids tromping all over the greens at night. Suppose they had decided to send in a few leg breakers to make an example of one intruder so the rest of us would stay away. Another often repeated rumor was that guard dogs were occasionally set loose on the course at night. I didn’t hear any barking or growling, but that didn’t stop me from imagining the worst as I neared the lake.

  Words came to me clearly now, blown by the breeze. “Get off,” Ed the Mouse was shouting. “Damn you, take your hands off me.”

  “Please, just let us go!” Charley the Fish wailed.

  And what I heard in response to Ed and Charley’s pleas made me clench my fists and run even faster, risking injury as I hurtled through the darkness. Not dogs snarling, not Mafia hit men threatening … but laughter. Someone was enjoying Ed’s suffering. Using it as entertainment.

  I heard voices I recognized from school, laughing and hooting and teasing, and a few girls’ voices protesting that this was going too far. And I knew what had happened. A football team party on the golf course had turned ugly, and my buddies had blundered into the wrong place at the wrong time, and now they were paying for it.

  As the moon emerged again, I saw the lake, the wind-stirred ripples on its surface glinting in the silvery light. Fifty feet ahead, where the bank made a broad sweep beneath some willow trees, I spotted two dozen kids—some from Lawndale but most from Bankside—standing in a semicircle facing the water. Every clique in our school has a nickname, and these were the “hard guys” and the chicks who hung with them. The hard guys played on the football team, pumped iron in the weight room, and hung out at their own parties where lots of beer was consumed and fights were not only common but considered part of an evening’s entertainment. Even on this cool autumn night most of the hard guys were wearing sleeveless T-shirts to show off the results of those long hours in the weight room.

  I spotted Charley the Fish first, and he looked okay. Two guys had twisted his shirt up around his neck and shoulders like a collar, and they were holding him there, preventing him from running away or going to the aid of Ed the Mouse.

  Tony Borelli, the backup center of the football team, nicknamed “Jaws” because of his ability to open beer bottles with his teeth, was waist-deep in the lake, and at first I thought he was trying to drown Ed the Mouse McBean. He had him around the waist and by the back of the neck, and he dunked him and held him down, so that when he finally let him up Ed sputtered water before he started screaming. “Let me go, you Neanderthal. Or I swear to God I’m gonna—”

  But Ed the Mouse never finished his threat because Jaws dunked him again, and held him down, thrashing and flailing but unable to raise his head, till I waded out in three or four giant, hurried, splashing steps. “That’s enough,” I said. “Let him go.”

  Jaws looked a little surprised to see me there, and I could tell he wasn’t sure what to do. On the one hand, I wasn’t one of the hard guys, and I played on the soccer team with Charley and Ed, who they were in the process of roughing up. But, on the other hand, I wrestled on the same team as some of the hard guys, and if we weren’t close friends, we respected each other. And there was one more thing: if push came to shove, I could kick Jaws Borelli’s butt all over this golf course, and he knew it. “I was just giving your buddy what he wanted,” Jaws said with a laugh. “He was thirsty, so I let him have a drink.”

  I grabbed Ed’s feet and yanked him away from Jaws, and half carried, half dragged him out of the water, up the steep bank, where he managed a few stumbling steps and then collapsed, making retching sounds.

  Charley the Fish broke away from the two guys holding him, who must have been distracted by my unexpected appearance, and ran off into the darkness. It wasn’t very brave of Charley to flee like that, but I didn’t have much time to think about it, because Jaws was wading out of the water and following us up the bank.

  “Your buddy got what he had coming to him,” he said to me. “He stole a beer—”

  “I didn’t steal anything, you fat liar,” Ed the Mouse gasped. “Tracy gave me a beer. Ask her.”

  “Just be quiet,” I whispered to Ed the Mouse, but it was too late.

  “What did you call me?” Jaws demanded. “‘Fat liar’? Sounds like you need more time in the lake, little man.”

  I stepped between Jaws and Ed and raised my hands, but not as fists. Instead, I kept my hands flat, palms out, like two stop signs. And I forced my body to relax and I even tried to smile. “He’s had enough of the lake,” I said. “Why don’t you go on partying and let me take my friend home.”

  “Since when is it your business what I do?” Jaws asked me. He didn’t want to fight me, but he also couldn’t back down.

  “It’s none of my business,” I agreed with him. “Just go on with the party and let me take him home. This is over.”

  And I really thought it was. Because I sure didn’t want to push it. And I had paid them respect, so they had no reason to push it. Even Jaws seemed to agree that it was over, because he shrugged and started to walk away.

  Then a deep voice rumbled, “It’s not over,” and a hulking figure shuffled toward me through the gloom.

  I knew who it was before I saw him clearly. His name was Slade, but everyone from Bankside called him “Slag.” Maybe they called him that because he looked like a slag heap. He was about three inches taller than me, and he must have outweighed me by thirty pounds. The bad news was that it was all solid muscle. I believe there were muscles on the crest of his forehead. He had a neck like a fire hydrant. His shoulders and arms were so big it was tempting to think he was bloated from weightlifting, but he was one of the few hard guys who didn’t haunt the weight room. This was just the way Slag looked. He was a co-captain of the football team, and he also boxed—he had made it to the state semifinals in Golden Gloves. Oh, and one more thing. He was from a tough Bankside family, and was a cousin of Jack Hutchings.

  “It’s not over,” Slag repeated. “Your friend is marked
. The other guy, too.”

  So there it was. Exactly what I didn’t want to hear. I didn’t want this to escalate, but I couldn’t let it stand. “They’re not marked.”

  Slag stood there barely three feet away. “They have it coming to them,” he said. “Your soccer team’s been dissing us. I got my starting left tackle out three weeks to a month because one of your players kicked him in the knee. I got these two showing up at our party, stealing our beer, talking to our chicks. And I got this little punkass wising off to us in school and now calling Jaws a Neanderthal. Time to teach some respect. They’re marked. Who are you to say different?”

  Slag had moved two more short steps forward, close enough so that I was now in his swinging range, and even as I kept talking, nice and relaxed, I was watching his left hand because that was the one he would lead with, and I was also monitoring his feet for the weight shift that would be the only clue that the punch was coming. I knew that with his training in boxing, one clean punch to my face or body might take me out.

  “I’m not disrespecting you, but you flat out have it wrong, Slag,” I said as calmly as I could, under the circumstances. “Jack was picking on that new kid from Brazil. That new kid took it for a while, and then he busted up Jack’s leg. I saw it happen and I couldn’t blame the kid. But that’s between you, Jack, and that new kid. He’s not on my team, and he’s not a friend of mine.”

  “I heard he was on your team,” Slag growled.

  “I asked him to join and he said no. I got nothing to do with him.”

  “He came to your game today,” a hard guy named Donovan shouted.

  I couldn’t deny this. “He came to watch.”

  “And he’s out banging one of your soccer chicks tonight,” another hard guy lobbed in from the shadows. “Scotty saw them parked out by the boat landing, steaming up the windows of that fancy blue sports car.”

  For a minute my world rocked. Slag hadn’t swung on me—he hadn’t moved a muscle—and I still almost went down. “I don’t know anything about that,” I mumbled.

  “Sounds like you don’t know about a lot of things,” Slag rumbled. “That new kid is gonna get his, whether he’s on your team or not. And this little wiseass friend of yours has got to learn a lesson. You’re marked,” Slag said to Ed the Mouse, and the way he said it was like the pronouncement of a sentence by a judge. “Show respect or face the consequences. As for you, Brickman, time to put up or shut up …”

  I knew I had to fight him then, and I knew I couldn’t win. Even if I got through his punches and took him down, he had two dozen friends with him, any one of whom might jump on my back. Still, I couldn’t do what Charley the Fish had done. I couldn’t turn and run. It wasn’t in my nature, and it would just postpone the inevitable. If I had to take a beating, I would rather take it now.

  And that was when the sirens sounded. Someone must have heard the screaming and called the police. At least three squad cars were coming up the cart path at rapid speed, sirens blaring and lights flashing.

  The party broke up at record speed. One minute there were thirty kids by the lake, the next minute there was empty grass.

  Ed the Mouse and I slid back down the bank to the water’s edge and then took off, skirting the bank. “Can you run?” I asked him.

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” he gasped. “Miller’s hole?”

  “Just what I was thinking,” I agreed.

  There were a half-dozen secret ways out of the locked and fenced golf course, and we knew them all. Miller’s hole was an actual hole in the fence, nearly three feet in circumference—so big that you didn’t even have to crawl to get through it. You just had to crouch and you could walk out.

  The hole in the fence was on land owned by the Miller family, and the reason no one used it very often was because it was in a distant corner of the course, way off above the thirteenth fairway, with lots of thornbushes all around it.

  But at the moment, the fact that it was so isolated seemed a big plus. Keeping behind bushes and trees, and moving farther and farther from the police spotlights that were sweeping the fairways, we hurried to the rough that bordered the thirteenth fairway, and then to the thick undergrowth beyond. Soon we were feeling our way around thornbushes, searching for the secret way out.

  8

  Ed the Mouse was shaking. As we walked up Grandview Lane to the McBean house, his shoulders were jerking back and forth in quivering, uneven hops. It was dark and he kept his face turned away from me, so I couldn’t tell whether he was shivering because he’d been dunked in a lake and was now walking through a chilly autumn night, or if something else was wrong with him. But I thought I knew, even without seeing his expression. After all, it wasn’t that cold a night. And I didn’t hear Ed’s teeth chattering. So I guessed something besides the cold was making my friend shiver. I figured maybe he was crying, and that was why he kept his face hidden from me.

  One thing was for sure: he didn’t want to talk. I asked him how he had ended up at that football team party, and who gave him a beer, and I even tried to make a joke about how we would have to rename Charley the Fish Charley the Weasel because of the way he’d run off and left us. But Ed didn’t answer any of my questions and he wasn’t amused by my attempt at humor—he just kept walking uphill, with his shoulders quivering and his head down and turned to one side. So we climbed Grandview Lane in silence, keeping our troubles to ourselves.

  I had painful thoughts of my own to deal with. Strange as it may seem, I wasn’t too worried about my confrontation with Slag. Oh, I knew my run-in with him might have dangerous and even violent consequences in the near future. Just for example, somebody might try to beat me up in school on Monday. But as I climbed Grandview Lane, I wasn’t really worried about Slag or any of his buddies coming after me. What was torturing me, poking and prodding me, drumming through my brain over and over, was the words one of the hard guys had shouted out about the soccer chick getting banged in the blue sports car.

  The Phenom’s Mustang convertible was without any doubt the only fancy blue sports car around. And the soccer chick in question had to be Kris. The Boat Basin is a famous local makeout spot, down by the Hudson River. The Phenom hadn’t grown up here—he would’ve never known about it. Kris must have taken him down there.

  The thought of the two of them together was killing me. I felt betrayed, which was strange because Kris wasn’t my girlfriend and she had made no promises to me. But I couldn’t stop myself from thinking that promises had been made between us without words, woven into the long years of our friendship.

  She barely knew him. This was their first date. The thought of his lips on her lips, of his hands on her body, made my fists clench hard as two rocks in the darkness. I wanted to scream, to hit something, to bash something down, but all I could do was keep climbing the long hill in silence.

  Soon the McBean house came into view, surrounded by its landscaped yard. The porch lights were on, but all of the windows were dark, and it looked big and gloomy and empty. Ed’s mom died of cancer five years ago, so Ed lived alone with his father, just like I lived with mine. But there the similarity in our situations ended.

  I’m going to own up to something now that is not gonna sound very nice. But I did warn you, right up front, that I’m not the nicest guy in the world, and that you could find a nicer one if you went looking. So here’s my confession. On some level, even though I felt terrible for Ed about what happened to his mother, I secretly couldn’t stop myself from thinking that in one way, at least, he was kind of lucky. I’d had that thought many times in the last few years, when I’d visited Ed, or hung out at his house, or spent time with him and his father. I always felt guilty for thinking it, but I’m not sure you can be held responsible for something that keeps popping into your mind.

  I know that Ed’s mom went through sheer hell, and that her slow death was a tremendous blow to her husband and son. There was a six months’ stretch when I was just about the only guy at school Ed would talk to. Twice I wen
t with Ed to the hospital to visit his mom, so I saw her bravery and suffering firsthand.

  But Ed’s mother didn’t leave him voluntarily—in fact, she fought mightily to stay with him for every precious day and hour that she possibly could. What she did was the exact opposite of what my own mother had done, fleeing New Jersey for greener pastures without a backward look. Mrs. McBean’s tragic departure was a rejection of no one and nothing. Her final courageous struggle was a testament to how much she loved her family. If she was still alive, she would be in this house, watching over the ones she loved, and Ed knew that, and his father knew it, and so they could get on with their lives without guilt or self-doubts.

  It was a big house, set on a bend of Grandview Lane, high above the town of Lawndale. From the astronomical observatory Dr. McBean had set up in the attic with an expensive telescope, to the Ping-Pong and foosball tables in the finished basement, it was roomy and filled top to bottom with fun stuff. Ed the Mouse had an enormous bedroom cluttered with books and gadgets and the most cutting-edge computer stuff his father could buy for him.

  Dr. McBean was a research chemist who worked at a big pharmaceutical company in Rutherford, a few towns away. Don’t get me wrong—I love my own father—but whenever I saw him next to Ed’s dad, at a school function, it occurred to me that they were about the two most different fathers imaginable.

  Even at school events, when he was on his best behavior, my father was always on the prowl, telling bad jokes, dressing flamboyantly, and flirting with every young woman who would listen. I don’t think Dr. McBean had ever even looked at another woman. Instead, he dedicated his life to his job and his son. I know it’s an awful thing to envy a friend, but I couldn’t help thinking that it must be great to have a father who hid his education and accomplishments behind gentle dignity—instead of one who flashed his ignorance and his biceps behind the counter of his car wash on a daily basis. And that it must be great to have the memory of a mother who had tried to stay with him as long as she possibly could, with that unbreakable, instinctive love that mothers are supposed to give their children.