Mudville

by Kurtis Scaletta

  “It's only a game,” he says with a shrug. “So maybe you made a mistake as manager, but all's well that ends well.”

  It's hard to argue that I made a mistake when all ended well, but I let the remark slide.

  “I pitched pretty good, right?”

  “You were fantastic.”

  “I could have pitched ten more innings,” he says. “I could go pitch again tomorrow. My arm feels great.”

  “That's good news.”

  “Do you think I'm ready?”

  “Ready for what? You already pitched against a good team and won. I think you're there.”

  “All right, then.” He seems satisfied, and I edge in with my agenda.

  “So maybe next time we play, you can act like a member of the team? You know, the handshakes and all that. It's part of the game.”

  “I was never much for the formalities.”

  “The other guys—” I start to say.

  “What?” His voice takes on an edge. “The other guys what?”

  “I was just going to say that the other guys were asking if you were okay.”

  “You can tell them I'm fine.”

  “Well, next time, maybe go along with the formalities. Just so they don't worry about you.”

  “Sure,” he says. “It's no big deal.” To prove it, he's sound asleep a few seconds later.

  “So do you want to come with?” Sturgis asks me in the morning. He's groomed and ready to go by the time I wake up.

  “Huh?”

  “Come see my grandma.”

  “Really?”

  “Why not? You met my dad. She can't be any worse than him, right?”

  “She's just in a nursing home, at least,” I tell him. “Not in prison.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I guess.” Visiting old people isn't high on my list of fun things to do, but I figure it's a good start at mending the little feud we had yesterday. Also, I'm a bit curious. So I take a quick shower and put on my cleanest jeans and a kind of Hawaiian shirt that looks nice and not too gaudy. Just festive.

  “Lookin’ sharp,” says my dad when he sees me. “Got a date? Maybe with this Rita?”

  “No,” I tell him, feeling myself redden. It's a lucky guess on my dad's part that I'm even interested in Rita. “I'm going with you guys.”

  “No kidding. Did Sturgis say you could come?”

  “He asked me to,” I explain.

  Sturgis's grandmother lives in Temple Village, a retirement community a few miles short of Sutton down the highway. It's a gray little cluster of buildings poking above the yellow prairie. There's a stiff wind blowing, which is probably why the terrace and grounds are empty, even with the sun shining.

  My dad has brought the Sunday paper and now settles into a comfy-looking chair in the lobby to read while Sturgis leads me up a flight of stairs and down a long hallway that smells like asparagus.

  “Don't mention baseball,” Sturgis suddenly whispers as we approach the end of the hall.

  “Huh?”

  “She doesn't know I play,” he explains. “She wouldn't like it.”

  He knocks loudly, and we hear coughing and scratching about until the door finally opens.

  She's not even that old, I think. No older than Steve's grandma, who's still working and always doing things, and nowhere near the retirement home kind of lifestyle.

  Sturgis's grandma is a little worse for the wear, though. There's a yellow tinge to her skin and eyes, and she smells funny. There's something weary and broken about her. She's sick with something, I know. It must be one of those long, drawn-out diseases that destroy you in slow motion.

  “Oh, it's you,” she says. “You've brought a friend?”

  “This is Roy,” he tells her. “Remember, I told you about Roy?”

  “Of course I remember Roy,” she tells him crossly. “My liver isn't working right, but my brain is.” She nods hello to me but doesn't notice the hand I offer.

  “Come in, come in,” she says. “I'm making soup.”

  The kitchen is just a little open area off to the side, not a proper room. I can see potato peels and carrot shavings in the sink and something bubbling on the stove. I'm a bit scared of eating anything made in this place, but it smells okay. Just vegetables, I tell myself. Vegetables probably can't hurt you.

  “It won't be ready for a while,” she says to me. “You hungry now?”

  “No, ma'am,” I tell her.

  “‘Ma'am,’” she repeats with a weak smile as she walks slowly back to the living room to sit down. “He's a polite one, Stuey.”

  “I told you, he's a nice guy.” Sturgis sits by her on the couch, and I take a dining room chair, since there's pretty much nowhere else to sit.

  “Well, I'm glad you have a friend,” she says, plopping down on the couch. “Sturgis never had friends,” she explains.

  “Grandma,” he says in disbelief.

  “Well, it's true,” she says. “It's my fault, I guess. I should have moved to Moundville instead of living in the old farm-house out in the middle of nowhere.”

  “So your family is originally from Moundville?” I ask.

  “Oh, we're not from Moundville,” she says. “Them's fighting words,” she adds with a wheezing laugh.

  “Sinister Bend,” Sturgis explains.

  “You never told me that.”

  “Didn't I?” He won't look at me for some reason. “Well, I never lived there myself. Just Baltimore and out at the farm-house.”

  “Right.” I try to incorporate Sinister Bend into the Nye family history.

  “It was probably a mistake to homeschool, too.” His grandma is still obsessing over her mistakes. “But what else could I do after you got kicked out?”

  “Crab apples?” I whisper to Sturgis.

  “Different occasion,” he whispers back. “Hey, do you want to watch a movie or something?” He picks up the remote.

  “We're talking, Sturgis.” She reaches for the remote, and he hands it to her. She puts it down in front of her.

  “I suppose you know about Sturgis's dad?” she asks me.

  “Mostly,” I tell her. “I know he's in prison.”

  “It's true. My boy's a jailbird,” she says with a sigh. “You try to keep your boys out of trouble, but they always find it. He fell in with the wrong crowd, he did. That and the devil music and the trashy novels, he never had a chance.”

  Sturgis rolls his eyes. He's inherited all of his father's books and music, after all.

  “I tried to keep this one out of trouble,” she says of Sturgis. “He was getting into fights at school, so I took him out.” She's just said he was expelled, and now she's trying to cover her tracks. “Who knows what goes on in schools any-more anyway?”

  “He turned out okay,” I tell her, wondering how Sturgis kept his hard-rock tapes and Orc books hidden from her when he lived there.

  “I don't know what inspired him to throw rocks at cars,” she says. “You can't pin that one on me.”

  “Kids just do dumb things,” says Sturgis. He's looking longingly at the TV, and I guess he usually tries to pass the time by finding a movie rather than talk about the past for two hours.

  “You might think he did it just to get me in trouble,” she says thoughtfully.

  “That's stupid,” says Sturgis quietly.

  “Maybe I didn't do enough!” she suddenly says, as if the thought has just occurred to her. “Was I a bad grandma?”

  “Grandma, you say the same thing every week. Nobody said you were a bad grandma, just that you were sick.”

  “I don't know about that,” she grumbles. “You were at the hearing. You heard what they said.” She punctuates her despair with a short fit of coughing.

  “You did a good job with Sturgis,” I tell her. “He's not going to turn out like his dad.”

  She looks at me for a long time, her lower lip trembling, and I'm not sure if she's going to cry and thank me, or yell at me to mind my own business.

  “Wel
l, I'm glad you have friends,” she says, but she's not looking at Sturgis, she's looking at me. It's weird. It's almost like she's accusing me of something. Maybe she's assuming my friends are also the wrong crowd and we'll lead Sturgis astray.

  “Let's play Scrabble,” says Sturgis.

  “How was it?” my dad asks when we finally make our way downstairs after a bowl of flavorless vegetable soup and three games of Scrabble, two won by Grandma and one won in a squeaker by Sturgis. Grandma didn't have a dictionary handy, and I think she made up words. I'm pretty sure Sturgis made up “jonquil” to win the last game and intend to google it as soon as we get home.

  “Sorry for such a boring afternoon,” Sturgis says on the drive home. We're both riding in the back, so we can talk. “I figured it would be less torture if you were there.”

  “It wasn't that bad,” I tell him. It really wasn't.

  “My grandma. She hasn't really forgiven herself.”

  “What, for not taking care of you?”

  “Nah. She tried. I mean my dad. She hasn't forgiven her-self for my dad. You know, turning out the way he did.”

  “That's too bad. It's not her fault he's such an—” Here I almost stop myself but don't. I use a word you probably can't use in Scrabble.

  Sturgis glares at me.

  “Oh, come on. I didn't mean it to come out like that.”

  “Sure you didn't.”

  “Well, he is one. Kind of. You have to admit.”

  “I don't talk trash about your dad.”

  “Guys?” My dad hears us arguing but doesn't know what we're talking about. “Is everything all right?”

  “We're fine,” says Sturgis, sinking into the corner and glowering. Nice way to treat a guy after he goes to see your dad in prison and your grandma at the home, I think. Not to mention sharing his bedroom and teaching you an off-speed pitch.

  I do a little sinking and glowering in my own corner.

  As soon as my dad pulls into the driveway, Sturgis is climbing out of the truck. It's awkward because it's a two-door and you're supposed to spring the seat forward, but Sturgis crawls over it. He looks a little bit like Gollum, in the movie.

  “Is everything all right?” my dad wonders.

  “I'm going for a walk,” Sturgis says as he finally gets out of the truck.

  My dad nods and looks like he's thinking of something fatherly to say. “Be home by dark,” maybe, or “Stay out of trouble.” Before he can come up with anything, Sturgis is nothing but a long-legged dot in the distance and fading fast.

  My dad and I watch a West Coast game on ESPN that evening and fill up on pizza and popcorn. The Yankees are playing the Angels. Both teams score a bunch of runs.

  Around the seventh inning, we're startled by a boom of thunder. I glance out the window. Dark clouds are moving in. The thunder booms again, there is a flash of lightning, and rain begins to pour down.

  “It's just a regular old rain,” says my dad.

  “I know,” I say. “I'm glad. The baseball field needs it.”

  We sit through the end of the game. The rain continues, and Sturgis still doesn't come home.

  “He must be waiting out the storm somewhere,” says my father. He looks upset, though. “Do you think I should call the police?” he asks a bit later. “Would that be overreacting?”

  “I don't know,” I tell him. “He's probably okay. He's taken care of himself a lot.”

  “This is true,” says my dad.

  “He might want a ride, though,” I say. “We should go out looking for him.”

  “All right,” my dad says. We turn off the television and grab our ponchos.

  We drive around, listening to the radio, which gives us nonstop advice to get back inside. We stop downtown, and I check the shadows of both dugouts while my dad pokes his head into the pool hall and the bar, just in case Sturgis is getting into trouble after all.

  “I don't think he'd go back to his grandmother's,” my dad says.

  “No, me neither.”

  “Is he good friends with anyone on the team?” my dad asks.

  “Not especially.”

  We drive aimlessly, past darkened stores and rows of houses. My dad turns around in the circular driveway of the school.

  “I think we should head home,” he says uneasily. “We can't drive around all night.”

  “Nope,” I agree.

  We take a long route, hoping to catch a glimpse of a wet boy hurrying along on the sidewalk.

  “He might even be home when we get there,” I tell my dad.

  He isn't, though, and there are no messages.

  “He must be waiting out the storm,” says my dad again. “I'll call the police in the morning if he doesn't call.”

  We watch some old comedy reruns on TV and wait. I drop off to sleep and have crazy dreams. When I wake up, it's stopped raining, and my father is asleep in the chair. The television is off.

  Sturgis is slumped in the other chair, drowsy but awake.

  “What's up?” I ask.

  “I guess you are.”

  My dad opens his eyes and looks around in confusion before he remembers where he is.

  “Must have nodded off,” he says. “What are you boys doing up? And you,” he says, pointing at Sturgis. “You have to let me know where you're going from now on. And you ask permission, and you don't stay out late. I'm not running a youth hostel.”

  “I was just with P.J.,” says Sturgis.

  “Who?” My dad looks puzzled.

  “Peter Labatte's son,” Sturgis reminds him. “I ran into him, and we went over to help his dad with this place he was working on, and then the storm came and we holed up there. There's no phone there. He has a cell, but with the storm …” He shrugs. “As soon as the storm let up, he dropped me off.”

  “All right, then,” my dad says, too tired to stay angry. He's not so good at the traditional dad stuff, like yelling or laying down the law. He doesn't tell Sturgis how we drove around in the storm trying to find him.

  “We talked a lot about baseball,” Sturgis tells me. “Peter says he's ready for the rematch.”

  “Huh? Which game?”

  “Moundville versus Sinister Bend. What else?”

  “There is no Sinister Bend team.”

  “That's what you think.”

  Even though none of us have had proper sleep, the three of us have to go to Sutton in the morning. Sturgis and I need to register for junior high.

  Sturgis's records are complicated, what with the “home-schooling,” so the school wants him to take tests to figure out how to place him. He's the right age for seventh grade, though, so they tentatively let him register for the usual slate of classes.

  Afterward, Sturgis and I walk out of town and down a muddy road to the ruins of Sinister Bend.

  “Where are we going anyway?”

  “You'll see,” he says.

  It's only about a two-mile walk, but it feels like we're descending into one of the outer rings of Hades. We go down the hill and arrive at the Bend, the treacherous pile of rocks in the river that used to beach boats and gave the town its name— the very spot where I imagine Ptan Teca went for his last swim.

  After crossing the river by the arched bridge with a bunch of “Danger” and “Do Not Enter” signs, we bear east, taking a gentle rise to the higher part of the town—the part that was only regularly flooded, and not completely claimed by the lake. There's garbage and debris strewn about, and rotten sewage smells fill the air. Only the occasional patch of cement in the mud suggests our path used to be an actual road.

  When my dad was a little kid, he tells me, it was still possible to find arrowheads and other artifacts in the mud around Sinister Bend. Kids would go with their classes to find them and learn about the history of the region.

  Now another civilization has sunk into the mud. Perhaps future school groups will sort through the remains of Sinister Bend, looking for artifacts from the 1980s. I imagine a museum case full of Wham! records, armles
s Cabbage Patch dolls, and “Reelect Reagan” buttons.

  It's eerily quiet, and neither of us talks as we walk past the sagging houses and moldy buildings, curious what the buildings might have once been. A coffee shop? A beauty salon? I wonder what became of the people who lived in those houses, and what they left behind. Their houses must be filled with their former belongings, rotten and decayed and tossed about by the floodwaters.

  The road narrows, and it seems to get darker as the hills on either side become steeper. We walk on into the shadows. The houses here are bigger. Of course, they are just as broken down and lifeless as the other houses, but this used to be the nicer part of Sinister Bend.

  “Nearly there,” says Sturgis. We reach the end of the path at a clearing where the sun breaks through the hills and shines brightly. We cross what used to be the massive lawn of a large house. Off to the right, some kids are laughing and hollering. They have lines drawn in the dirt and are playing sandlot baseball, with five or six kids on a side. PJ. is there and a few other kids I recognize from Sutton Little League.

  Out of the front door comes Peter, smiling and offering his hand.

  “Roy, it's good to see you,” he says.

  “What—why are the Pirates practicing here?”

  “We're not the Pirates anymore,” he says. “We're the Sinister Bend team now.”

  “You moved the whole team to a ruined town?”

  “We don't live here. We just practice here. We wanted it to be official.”

  “Official?”

  “Officially Sinister Bend. So we can play the rematch.”

  “Just practicing here once or twice doesn't make your team Sinister Bend.” I don't know what he's trying to prove, just slapping a Sinister Bend sticker on a Sutton team that's always going to the play-offs.

  “The Pirates are all kids from Sinister Bend,” he explains. “Their families are originally from Sinister Bend anyway. The families that ended up in Sutton, we keep in touch with each other. We wanted to have a team ready for when it finally stopped raining.”

  I gulp once or twice. While most of the kids in Moundville are learning the game all over again, Sinister Bend has a team of ringers just waiting to beat the snot out of us. I have to hand it to them. They take their baseball pretty seriously.