by Tim Green
His feet hit the cool concrete floor. Up ahead, one of them flicked on a flashlight. Ryder heard small splashing sounds. Above, cobwebs thick as spaghetti hung limp from stained and moldy wooden beams. White plastic pipes and rusted iron ones crisscrossed each other, some hung by coat hangers and others by plastic collars. Ryder tried to step carefully through the shallow pond of bad water, the maze of hulking boilers and discarded appliances, and up through a broken brick wall into a man-sized black hole. The tunnel turned to dirt packed so tight it looked gray in the flicker of yellow light up ahead.
It was impossible to believe, but the smell got worse, thick and hot so that Ryder had to concentrate hard to keep the cereal he’d had for breakfast in his stomach. They stepped out of the tunnel onto a concrete walkway and turned left. Below the walkway, a river of filth slogged silently along the bottom of a bigger tunnel. With every step, Ryder’s imagination haunted him with the idea that he was headed to his own grave. He heard the squeak of a rat that scurried over the top of his shoe before skittering along crumbling concrete. He looked at the empty blackness behind him, thinking that by now they must be under the stadium, or even past it, approaching the Harlem River.
The walkway suddenly ended at a metal door and the five of them crowded up to it while Attack Dog held the light and Orange stuck something into the rusted keyhole, then cranked the handle. They slipped through and their voices became hushed. Orange held the door, looked back at Ryder, and mashed a finger to his lips. Ryder nodded that he understood, and followed Orange through the door.
They came to a metal ladder and up they went with only the sound of their feet dinging the rungs as they passed through a concrete tube and stepped up onto the floor of a room crowded by a maze of piping thick as tree trunks. A steady hum filled the space and Ryder swallowed the fresh air that poured in from somewhere above. Orange worked on the lock of another metal door that led into a vault where a pump the size of two city buses churned and growled.
Halfway across a narrow metal bridge, Orange stopped and turned back, holding out a sports headband for Ryder.
“What?” Ryder whispered.
“Put this over your eyes. This is a secret. Don’t worry, I’ll lead you.”
“What do you mean?” Ryder asked, scared to death.
“Don’t worry. We just can’t have anyone knowing how we do this. No one’s gonna hurt you. Come on.”
Ryder swallowed and nodded, knowing he had no choice. He was too far in. He pulled the band over his eyes and followed the rest of the way. Someone spun him around and led him through a few bends and doorways before Orange pulled the band off.
“See? Easy.”
They piled into the bottom of a stairwell and when Orange closed a massive door, the pumps became nothing but a hum. The five of them started up the metal stairs. On the floor above, huge fire doors tattooed with red warning signs stood ready to burst open in an emergency. They went up another flight, then Orange jimmied that door and motioned for Ryder to come forward.
With a hand on the back of Ryder’s neck, Orange leaned close enough for his lips to tickle Ryder’s ear. “See how this tunnel goes?”
Ryder nodded because he could see through the crack that the big, wide hallway went about twenty feet before turning a sharp right.
“So,” Orange whispered, “you go down that way and make the right. Then go down two more doors on your left, and take that second door, and when you get through there you’ll be in the concession area and no one will even see you in the crowd.”
“Where are you going?” Ryder’s insides trembled like Jell-O.
Orange chuckled softly. “We got some business. You just get on and go give your cousin a kiss for me.”
“What if someone stops me?” Ryder asked.
“No one’s gonna stop you,” Orange said. “Now get going before I change my mind about being so nice.”
Orange tightened his grip on Ryder’s neck, widened the crack, and shoved him out into the cinder-block tunnel. Ryder looked back but the door had already been closed. He didn’t trust the people who’d just robbed him. He knew something was wrong, but it looked like the tunnel truly was inside the stadium, and maybe he really could get into the crowd where he’d be safe. He started cautiously down the hallway, got to the corner, and peeked around it, seeing that there were two doors on the left. He grew hopeful that the second door really would take him where Orange said it would.
He stepped carefully around the corner and started walking softly down the hall. He was halfway between the two doors on the left when a door farther down on the right swung open and two men dressed in baseball uniforms burst into the hallway.
Ryder froze.
Instinctively, Ryder flattened himself into the recess of the doorway on his right.
Even as he did, he realized the players’ backs were to him. They talked and laughed, and then their voices faded away. He peeked around the edge of the doorframe, eyeing the exit he needed to escape through, but the players’ door burst open again. Without thinking, he yanked on the handle poking into his back and slipped inside the door.
He pulled the door shut and stood in total blackness. The voices grew closer this time and two people passed him by. His heart beat wildly. He listened for nearly a minute, but just as he reached for the handle, he heard more people in the hallway. When their voices faded, he told himself it was time to make his break.
He turned the handle and slowly eased his head through the crack.
The door down on the right burst open again, banging the cinder block wall. Ryder ducked back inside. The sound of his breathing kept him company as he tried to imagine why players kept coming out every other minute from the door up the hall. He sat listening for a while before he realized that the door must open into the players’ clubhouse.
With his hands out in front of him feeling blindly, he moved through the dark space. He bumped his way through a maze of boxes stacked from the floor to as high as he could reach and realized he’d entered a storage room. He felt his way forward and to the left, in the direction of the room the players had emerged from. When he reached a wall, he didn’t have to go far before he felt the cold metal of another door. He put his ear to it and could clearly hear the sound of men talking and joking. It had to be the locker room. Every so often, there would be the bang of a door. He suspected it had to be the one that led out into the hall.
Ryder knew for certain the players’ lockers must be just beyond this door. He felt the handle and turned it carefully. It was unlocked.
His legs trembled and sweat broke out on his upper lip as he listened to the sound of the locker room emptying out. He had to pee now, more than he’d ever had to before in his life. He grabbed his own face and squeezed it, unable to believe he was hiding in a storage closet outside a players’ clubhouse in Yankee Stadium. It seemed impossible.
When the talking finally stopped on the other side and the last voices faded through the banging door, Ryder turned the knob and peered into the clubhouse. In front of him were all the lockers, and he knew by the colors of the travel bags lying around on the bottoms of the big open lockers that this was the Braves’ visiting locker room. Off to his right were the showers, toilets, and sinks. Ryder thought for a moment about dashing in, finding Thomas Trent’s locker, dropping the note, and bolting out of here.
The excitement of that possibility, though, made his urge to use the bathroom so great he thought he’d explode before he took ten steps, so instead he dashed into a stall and took care of business. He was zipping up his pants when he heard someone cough behind him, then footsteps clacking along the bathroom floor tiles.
Ryder froze, then realized, as the footsteps kept getting nearer, that his feet would be seen beneath the stall door. He climbed up onto the toilet, stood on the rim of the bowl, and tried not to even breathe. The steps stopped two doors down and whoever it was rattled the knob and swung open the door.
“Ahhh! Whew! Oh, that stinks!” The man,
talking to himself, slammed the stall door shut.
Now, his footsteps moved up the line of doors, past the one next to Ryder’s and stopping right outside his door. He could see the tips of the man’s cleats and guessed that one of the players must have returned to use the bathroom. Ryder stared at the door and bit into his lip to keep from crying out. His legs began to shake again, this time so violently that he realized he might slip right off the rim of the bowl.
The knob rattled and turned. Ryder wondered if he could reach across the open space and flick the lock. He braced his hand against the wall and started to lean. It was his only chance.
But even as he reached for the latch with his other hand, a crack of light appeared in the door and it began to sneak open.
A foot of open space gaped in front of Ryder. He could see the edge of the player’s body and the left arm of his uniform, but the door stopped before it reached his face.
“No. Too close. Aw, that smell is terrible.” The door swung shut again and the player went into the next stall over.
Ryder sniffed the air and realized now that there was a bad smell coming from a few stalls down.
A belt buckle clinked against the floor in the stall next to Ryder as the player’s pants dropped down around his feet. The feet turned around and the player sat down. Ryder stood like a statue, so scared he couldn’t even feel his legs.
Thankfully, the player was in a hurry, so it wasn’t long before the toilet flushed, the belt jingled up, the door creaked open, and footsteps clacked across the tile floor and faded around the corner. When the locker room door banged in the next room, Ryder hopped down, let himself out, and crept into the locker room again. The second locker he looked at had the name THOMAS TRENT written on the nameplate above. Ryder’s hands shook like October leaves in a windstorm as he pulled the note from his pocket, smoothed it, and set it down onto the stool in front of his father’s locker alongside a Braves batting glove.
He reached for the glove because something told him to take it, and that, in a way, it belonged to him. The baseball was really his mother’s, and didn’t he deserve something for himself? His mother’s voice sounded an alarm in his brain, reminding him that stealing was stealing, no matter what. He let his hand drop, set the note on the stool, and turned to go. He took one step before he turned and snatched up the Braves glove again, cramming it into his pocket. He went out the way he came in, through the storage closet. At the door leading into the main hallway, he listened, heard nothing, and eased it open.
The hallway was empty.
Relieved and emboldened, he slipped out of the storage closet and hurried down the hall toward the door on the left that would set him free into the crowd. He thought now that he’d still try and talk to Thomas Trent from above the dugout, but he was already glowing with the knowledge that the note had been delivered. Mr. Starr was a real writer, a professional. His note would certainly convince Thomas Trent to connect with Ryder and then to help his mom. After all, the letter Thomas Trent had written said nothing could make him stop loving her. It said he worshipped her, and Ryder told himself that feelings like that didn’t just end.
Bubbling with joy and his face decorated with a giant smile, he opened the door and burst into a small welcome party of grim-faced stadium security guards.
The guards all wore black uniforms and gold badges, with guns and batons fixed to their shiny black belts. “Hey, you! What are you doing?” The one nearest to Ryder’s right grabbed him by the collar and held him up enough so that his toes barely danced on the floor. She seemed stouter and stronger than the men she worked with and she forced him around and mashed his face into the wall. Another guard had him spread his hands against the painted cinder blocks before patting him down.
“He’s clean.”
The guard who had him by the collar spun him back around and now Ryder realized they had Attack Dog too, only his hands were zip-tied behind his back.
“What’s that?” The woman guard held Ryder with one hand and pointed at her partner with the other.
“That’s my mom’s baseball,” Ryder said.
“Not that old yellow thing,” the woman said.
“Looks like a Braves batting glove.” The guard held the glove he’d taken from Ryder’s pocket up in the air and turned it over. “Hey, it’s got Thomas Trent’s name on it. The pitcher.”
The woman guard shook Ryder. “You were in the locker room?”
Panic pumped a gusher of words from Ryder’s mouth and he started his rambling explanation. “I had to give him a note. I left it at his locker. My mom’s real sick. I gotta talk to him. I saw him but a bus came so I had to get in and these guys said they had a tunnel and . . .”
Orange—who also stood with his hands zip-tied—and Attack Dog glowered hatefully at Ryder. He swallowed and stopped talking, then looked nervously back and forth between the guards. One of them ducked out through the doorway Ryder had come through and returned half a minute later with Ryder’s note.
“See?” Ryder brightened with the thought they might believe him, know he wasn’t really a thief, put the note back, and let him go.
The looks on their faces sank that ship in an instant.
A city cop suddenly appeared in their midst. “What’s going on?”
The woman spoke for them all. “We’ve been after this gang for a while. They get in somehow and send a young one up the main hall. We see him on the cameras and grab him and then they raid the supply room. We didn’t even know how the stuff was going missing, but we figured it out and this time we were waiting. They got away with a couple thousand dollars’ worth of stuff already.”
“Well, it’s not good,” the cop said, “but I don’t want to use up a squad car on some petty thieving. You all can take them in.”
“Oh yeah?” The woman guard tilted her head and wore a thin smile. “What about this?”
She held up the knife Ryder had seen in Attack Dog’s pants. Attack Dog glared at the woman, then the cop.
The cop let out a low whistle.
“Threatened to use it.” Another guard spoke from behind them.
“First-degree robbery,” the cop said.
The woman reached into her back pocket. “The other one had a knife too.”
The cop looked at Ryder. “What about him? He the decoy?”
Attack Dog suddenly erupted. “He’s the one who planned it all. Said he could get us some free stuff.”
Ryder’s mouth fell open. “Wait, what?!”
“Went right into the locker room and stole a Braves batting glove. Got guts.” The woman nodded.
“Got no brains,” the cop said. “I’ll meet you out at the loading dock, take them to the station in my car, and get them booked.”
“Come on, you.” The woman who had a hold of Ryder shoved him away from the door he’d come through and down another hallway.
Two other guards had Attack Dog and Orange by their collars, only they stumbled more because of their hands being cuffed behind their backs.
“Really, I’m not with these guys.” Ryder tried to talk so the woman guard could hear him but the others couldn’t. His mind kept telling him that no matter how she looked, a woman would still have some sympathy for a lost boy trying to save his own mom.
“Quiet, you.” The guard led him down the hallway, toward the light from the stadium. Just before they reached an entrance that led out to the field, they took a sharp right and filed down through a curving concrete tunnel. A man in a Yankees uniform appeared from around a corner and bumped into the woman guard and Ryder. The woman stumbled and Ryder went right down, hard on his butt.
“Oh my gosh. I am so sorry.” The man helped Ryder to his feet even as Ryder began crying. “Hey, buddy. You okay?”
Ryder saw that—despite the uniform—the man was too old to be a player. The close-cut hair sneaking out from beneath his cap was already gray, but the tan face and big dark eyes were familiar.
“It’s our fault, Mr. Girardi.” Th
e woman guard snatched Ryder’s arm. “We got some thieves here. NYPD is meeting us at the loading docks.”
“Thieves?” Joe Girardi, the Yankees manager, looked Ryder up and down. “He’s what, thirteen? Fourteen?”
“Twelve,” Ryder croaked.
“Well, come on.” Joe Girardi frowned. “What did he take?”
“These others have been stealing from the supply room. Uniforms. Bats. Gloves.” The woman gestured at Orange and Attack Dog. “The kid was with them. Took a batting glove.”
Joe Girardi gave the older boys a blank look, then nodded. “Okay. Well . . . can you just let the kid go, though? I mean, an old batting glove? He doesn’t look dangerous. He doesn’t even look like he belongs with these characters.”
Joe Girardi gave each of the guards the flat empty stare of someone who was used to being obeyed.
Ryder held his breath and wondered if this was the miracle he needed.
“Of course, Mr. Girardi.” The guard’s concrete face softened. She smiled and nodded her head, but kept a tight grip on Ryder. “I’ll have to see him out, though. Hey, good luck today.”
Joe Girardi looked at Ryder again and gave him half a smile along with a wink before he disappeared, walking down, deeper into the tunnel until his pin-striped uniform got swallowed by the gloom.
“Let’s go.” The woman guard’s voice became harsh again, and she didn’t stop being rough with Ryder, even when they stood on the loading dock together with her fist wrapped up tight in his coat collar.
He thought about telling her that he’d let Mr. Girardi know if she didn’t cut it out and get her hands off of him, but decided to keep quiet.
“Can I have my ball back?” Ryder was emboldened by the power of the Yankees manager.