The Evil B.B. Chow & Other Stories

by Steve Almond

  But before I could do any such thing there was a knock on the door. I leapt backwards, smashed my tailbone against the edge of my desk. The door swung open a crack and I could see Brendan Mahoney standing there with his visor in one hand and a cookie in the other. He reeked of pot.

  I lunged toward him and flung the door the rest of the way, so that he could see the entire office, Mandy seated across from my desk with all her clothes on and so forth.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Brendan!”

  “I didn’t realize you were with someone.”

  “Just finishing!” I said.

  “Hey Mandy,” he said, and waved his cookie.

  Mandy was already rebinding her hair, gathering up her purse. She slipped past Brendan without looking at him.

  Brendan remained in the hallway.

  “Did you want to come in?” I said.

  “Yeah. Okay. Sure.”

  He stepped in the office and sat down.

  “What’s up?” I said.

  But Brendan had spotted the antidrug poster, which showed a kid lying on the ground facedown, with his head bleeding. The legend underneath read: drugs sure are glamorous.

  “That’s not mine,” I said.

  “It isn’t?”

  “No. I don’t believe drugs are that bad.”

  Brendan seemed to consider this. “Huh,” he said finally. “Yeah. I guess I’m still sort of undecided on the issue.”

  “Tell me why you’re here,” I said.

  There was a long lag time on the answer. I wondered if Brendan might be under the influence of a more powerful sedative, such as rophynol, and where he might have gotten them and whether he had any in his pocket. He was now examining the naked Plato sketch.

  “Is that you?” he said finally.

  “Plato,” I said.

  “Right. Plato.” He sat up and began to nod. Then he slumped down again, in that way characteristic of young men who haven’t quite grown into their height.

  “So,” I said.

  “Yeah. I guess I wanted to apologize. Like, for all the stuff in class today. Sometimes I kind of get going on an idea and just don’t stop. Mandy must have been pretty pissed.”

  “On the contrary,” I said. “She appreciated how seriously you took her work.”

  “I know Emily was pissed.”

  There was another lengthy pause. It occurred to me that I was getting something of a contact high. Everything had started moving more slowly, more interestingly. The events of the day were coming to seem somehow related. Brendan looked up at me with his sorry, bloodshot eyes.

  “Me and her were involved, you know.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. We just broke up. A couple of weeks ago.”

  “That’s rough,” I said.

  “It was weird, man. I mean, I don’t know if I want to lay it all out.”

  “Your call,” I said.

  “I assume, like, whatever I said would stay between us. Like, on the DL. The Down Low. Anyway, she’s a nice girl. I’ve got nothing against her. But she wanted to do weird stuff.” Brendan sat there, fingering the top of his cookie. “She liked to touch my ass, man. Put stuff up there. Weird. She had these balls made out of, like, mercury or something. And a string of pearls. And all this lube. Man, she was the queen of lubes. She was like, ‘Come on. Be an adventurer.’ I told her, ‘Hey, unless you’re my personal physician, you don’t get to fifth base.’ I dunno, man. I’m from New Hampshire. You know what I mean?”

  I nodded.

  “She was all, like: ‘Are you afraid you’re gay?’ And I was like, ‘No. I don’t like stuff put up my ass. Does that make me gay?’”

  It wasn’t clear whether Brendan wanted me to answer this question.

  “So anyway, that’s part of the reason I might have gotten sort of crazy today. Because here she is coming off all, like, puritaniacal, like, I’m so gross and I’m so sick, when the truth is she’s the freak. Freaky deaky.” Brendan had halfway crushed his cookie and he stared at the pieces in his hand, then crammed them into his mouth. “I just wanted to say sorry. I guess there’s no need to go into detail. You probably don’t need to hear this stuff, seeing as you’re married and everything.”

  “How do you know I’m married?”

  “The ring, bro.”

  “Right.”

  “How’s that working for you, the marriage?”

  “Fine,” I said. “Why do you ask?”

  “I dunno. I just figure it’d be weird to be around all these hot young chicks all the time and have the ball and chain at home.”

  “You learn to live with it.”

  We were both silent for a while. Brendan had slumped down so low his head was resting on the back of the chair. He closed his eyes and said, “I’m pretty sure Mandy Shaw wants to fuck you, dude. Man, I’d like to fuck her.”

  I made my thoughtful professorial noise.

  “What do you want to do long term, Brendan?”

  “Long term?” he said. “Probably brain surgeon.”

  “Don’t you have to have pretty good grades for that?”

  Brendan looked down at his hand and realized, with visible disappointment, that he’d already eaten his cookie. “Yeah, that’s kind of the catch-22 of the situation.”

  “Can I ask if you’re stoned, Brendan?”

  “Not really anymore.”

  “Well, for what it’s worth, I thought your comments today were very insightful.”

  “You did?”

  “Yup.”

  “You weren’t pissed?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “A for the day.”

  Brendan gazed at me shyly, as I imagined a child might gaze at his father upon receiving a gift. “I still kind of miss her,” he said.

  My own wife had loved me once so fiercely that she clung to me through the night. In the moments after love, our skin had glowed and our lungs had screamed with joy. It was her belief, though, that something had died within me, a certain capacity for tenderness. She had me convinced.

  Brendan had gone a little misty on me now. “It sucks to be alone,” he said. “It sucks shit.”

  I got up from behind my desk and looked down into his face, a smooth, open face, with so much woe still to come.

  “What am I supposed to do?” he asked me. “At night, I mean.”

  I laid my hand on his shoulder. “Forgive her. Forgive yourself. There’s no other way.”

  I know this sounds depressing, but it was a lovely little moment, the both of us sitting there in my office with tears pooled in our eyes.

  A number of unpleasant things happened later. Nicole Buswell filed a complaint with the dean of students, alleging that my class was “overly sexualized.” Rob Tway testified on my behalf. So did Mandy Shaw. But the whole thing put a cloud over me and I agreed to go on leave. My wife filed for divorce and took up with a Tae Bo instructor named Jericho. The hard-on difficulty was diagnosed as a partial stricture of the vas deferens, which required a costly and painful surgery. Clinton staggered from office, a disgraced eunuch.

  But all that was still to come on the day I’m describing. On that day, Brendan Mahoney and I rose from our chairs and strolled into the dusk. It was one of those warm spring jobs that coats everything in gold and we floated through the courtyard, with its sleeping crocuses and luminous blades of grass. The cafeteria was pumping out the sweet greasy smell of calico skillet and the tall stone cathedral was dozing before us and all the students gathered in the shadows to hug struck me, just then, as beautiful creatures, freaks, all of them, with their frail bodies and fearless hearts. We could hear them kissing, wetly, to the point of collapse.

  Brendan Mahoney ducked into an alcove behind the rectory. He pulled a joint from his hip pocket, lit up, and took a drag.

  “You want a rip?” he said.

  “Better not,” I said, taking the joint.

  The lovers were all around us, making their strange, gentle noises of mercy. I took my rip and
Brendan nodded. “Nice,” he said. “Nice form.” He put his arm around me, as if we’d done something heroic together, as if the happiness within us were a puff of smoke we might hold on to forever, and he snorted like a horse, a young fearless stallion who’s just shaken his bridle, and pawed the ground, and I snorted and pawed the ground too and both of us began to giggle, wildly, senselessly, and went galloping (us stallions!) off into the dusk.

  I AM AS I AM

  THE DEVELOPER’S HOPE had been to establish the park in Dorset Centre as a “public square” of the sort British townships once organized themselves around. The design featured a lazy slope of grass circled by a gravel pathway. In the proposed model, displayed at Village Hall, little plastic mommies pushed perambulators along this path, while a knot of boys tussled after a ball on a swathe of green. Beyond this, a man on a raised box held one arm aloft, his tiny mouth open. A group of fellow citizens stood before him in postures of thoughtful attention.

  This was not, in fact, how the park looked. The village crime consultant voiced alarm at the prospect of creating an unstructured “youth magnet” environment. The open space, therefore, was somewhat reduced and converted into a par course. When, after several months, it became clear no one used the par course, a baseball field took its place. As the village fulfilled its prophecy of attenuated growth, the roads around the park widened and a new round of fretting ensued over the possibility that a child would chase a ball into traffic. The park’s central location, originally embraced as a quaint communal flourish, seemed, upon sober reflection, inattentive, even reckless. The baseball field was soon encircled by a high chain-link fence.

  This was why the boys of Dorset began referring to the field as the Prison Lot. They grumbled over the sense of confinement, which ran contrary to the sport’s pastoral spirit. And, being children, they took up the obvious challenge: to hit a ball over the fence. In this way, they managed a collaboration that publicly confounded adult concerns. On summer afternoons, with the shadows drawn long across the grass, threads of boys in baseball mitts converged on the Prison Lot to conduct the business of childhood.

  ERIC HIELMAN WAS a handsome boy and he had lived with the advantages of his looks. He was picked up and played with frequently as a baby. He made friends easily. Teachers doted on him. He had a fine jaw, his father’s jaw, and eyes the green of antique glass. He was also the only boy ever to clear the Prison Lot’s fence in a game situation.

  Bat speed was the central issue in Eric’s life. His father, who had played ball in college, explained that a major leaguer must be able to bring his bat from a motionless state to a dynamic point of contact, at waist level, in less than half a second. This required coordination of the entire body: the eye had to pick up the ball and anticipate its path, wrists and forearms had to bring the bat to the back of its swing, upper arms and shoulders had to flex and pivot, the trunk and waist had to rotate, the thighs had to transfer the weight of the lower body from the back foot to the front in a controlled lunge. It was a kind of ballet—Eric’s father had said this, a bit dreamily, quickly adding that the goal was to “maximize bat speed,” that without the cooperation of any one part the swing would fail.

  The most frustrating aspect of a baseball swing, Eric’s father said, was that it had to be intuitive. Eric, who was clever enough but only nine years old, shook his head. “You can’t think about the swing,” his father said. “You can’t tell your body to do all these things I’m talking about. You have to let your body figure it out on its own.”

  Eric spent hours in the backyard practicing, hoping to familiarize his body with the mechanics of the swing, to bleed the process of thought, and listening for the sound of his father’s car in the front driveway. Inevitably, his mother ordered him inside before his father arrived, citing darkness.

  Like his father, Eric was tall and solidly built. By his tenth year, he had developed an exceptional swing: smooth and explosive. When he stepped to the plate, the infielders edged back. The outfielders positioned themselves on the warning track and turned to one another and spat. If the ball sailed over the fence, they would have to retrieve it.

  Eric himself took little notice of these adjustments. He thought of nothing in the batter’s box, tried to think of nothing. This was the key to success in life, as his father had intimated. “The whole problem with this place,” his father would say, eyeing the groomed lawns of Dorset Centre, “is too damn much thinking.” Eric thought about the space at the far end of the park, where the girls now played dolls on the gazebo. And sometimes he imagined his father there, standing on a box and telling the people of Dorset what he really thought of the place. He envisioned this as a heroic moment, one they would secretly share, though he knew his mother would never allow such a thing to transpire.

  AMONG THE PLAYERS were younger and weaker boys. Bill Bellamy was a sad third category: ungainly. He lacked coordination, and worse, lacked the good grace to remove himself from games. A doughy, red-haired boy, Bellamy was so pale his veins appeared to run green. He failed as a player, but always with an exuberance that refused to recognize his failure. He held the bat like a girl, fists apart, and came around late, even on slow pitches. He was a loss in the field, logy in his reflexes, incapable of tracking. Second base or right field were his, unless there were enough fielders, in which case he was happily excluded from the game. The notion of placing him behind the plate was a new one. Perhaps he would do less damage as a catcher.

  The experiment was a failure. Bill Bellamy was frightened of the ball and twisted away, holding his mitt out as if to shield his eyes from a small explosion, then chuckling to himself as he lumbered to the backstop. By the time Eric Hielman came up to bat, on the long last day of summer, players were yelling for a new catcher. More kids had arrived. Bill Bellamy was expendable.

  Down at first base Stevie Hayes was calling out “new catcher new catcher” and Matt Anderson, the shortstop, took up the chant. They were the best players in the game, besides Eric, and the others joined in. Eric stood at the plate and waited, trying to avoid thought. But hesitation was the ally of thought; it muddied instinct. The pitcher, Jamie Blake, looked at Eric.

  “Just pitch the ball,” Eric hollered.

  It hadn’t been his intention to make a noble gesture, only to move the game along so he could take his turn at bat. He felt strong today, and the spot where he stood, at the center of this enclosed diamond, emphasized his strength. As he squared his shoulders and watched Jamie Blake dip into his windup, he experienced the euphoria of perfected focus. The other boys scattered across the brown and green, the hovering sky, the smell of bubble gum and linseed oil on leather, the new tar of distant roads: all these seemed a part of his brightly appointed future. Behind him, Bill Bellamy said, “Thanks Eric,” said this with a goofy conviviality he seemed to feel was shared, and stooped forward on his clumsy cleats, hoping, apparently, to offer his gratitude with a pat on the back or a handshake or some other gesture of touch, which Eric Hielman never noticed.

  The pitch came in, one of Blake’s halfhearted sliders, and Eric could see that it would not break; the rotation was insufficient. It would sit up and wait to be drilled. Eric’s body would execute this and was already beginning to execute this, wrists and arms and trunk and legs acting in concert to pull the swing around, into abrupt dynamic motion, a single whipcord arc beginning over his left shoulder and ending as he stepped forward and felt his bat explode into Bill Bellamy’s head.

  HE DID NOT understand that this was what had happened. Not immediately. What he understood was only a truncation of the bat’s natural progress. He had come up against something, a spongy feeling he would recognize later as flesh giving way to wood. The pitch came in at waist level, but he was off-balance now, as a result of this obstacle, this thing, and falling toward the plate, the trance of his swing broken and shouts knifing in from the field and, on the face of Jamie Blake, a pinched look he had never seen before. From behind home plate came the heavy sound of a bod
y falling without resistance.

  Eric stumbled then righted himself. He turned around. Bill Bellamy lay on the ground, half-curled. His shirt rode up over his belly. An arm lay over his forehead. But even obscured, it was clear his skull was wrongly shaped. His orange hair had begun to mat with dark fluid. His feet twitched. “Bellamy,” Eric said. There was no response.

  Jamie Blake and Stevie Hayes and the others were now gathered around home plate and Eric turned to them and saw that they sagged back an inch or two. Jamie looked down and Eric realized that he still held the bat in his hand and that the bat was cracked. Not a deep crack, one that he would be able to tape if he wanted to use the bat for practice, which of course was no way to be thinking at the moment. He dropped the bat.

  One of the younger kids, Tom Sevrance, began whimpering. “Blood,” he said. “Blood.” He pointed to the small puddle beneath Bill Bellamy’s head, as if it were important to convince some adult just out of view. Without a word, Stevie Hayes set off for the gate and Matt Anderson flew after him, mitts thumping against their hips. The others followed. Only Jamie Blake remained with Eric, trapped in the grim duty of attending to Bill Bellamy.

  “He’s hurt,” Jamie said. “He’s really fucking hurt.”

  Eric said: “Bellamy? Bellamy, can you hear me?”

  “Blood,” Jamie said. “He’s fucking bleeding from his head.”

  “Okay. Calm down. An ambulance is going to come. They’ll call an ambulance.”

  “We should do something, man,” Jamie said. He had begun to cry and now fell to his knees and pounded his head into the dirt. “Fuck, man. Fuck. His head, man. Fuck.”

  Eric considered this idea, of doing something. He looked at Bill Bellamy and noticed that his eyes were closed, but his stomach was moving, quivering with fast, shallow breaths. He knew about CPR from a film in school (a firm thrust of the palms below the sternum, use your weight) and, from swimming certification, he knew about mouth-to-mouth resuscitation (clear the breathing passages and form a seal over the mouth, four breaths then a break). But he knew nothing about head injuries. They hadn’t gone over that: what to do when you have smashed someone’s head in with a baseball bat.