Minerva led me directly to a window bench in CJ’s room. She pulled the cushion off and deposited it gently on the floor. The top of the bench opened up like a chest, and she flipped it up with the flair of a magician’s assistant. I could feel her eyes on the side of my head, scanning me for a reaction to what she’d revealed. To her, this scene was not about CJ’s collection but about my reaction. It was about my being touched mystically by CJ.
I should have been bowled over by the clear sign of contact from the other side, all of these baseballs representing positive identification—CJ had visited me. And, had I been any kind of actor whatsoever, I might have performed that particular subspecies of wonder. I did not, because I could not contain my equally wonder-filled but far more mundane amazement at the baseball collection itself.
“That,” I said, “is a lot of baseballs. Wow.”
“He loved his baseballs, yes. But don’t you see—”
Here my acting kicked in. To myself I felt very, very phony, but to Minerva—queen of apophenia, desperate for signs—I must have appeared convincing enough. I flashed my eyes wide in astonishment. “He loved his baseballs so much that they became his calling card. This is amazing. Confirmation that CJ was responsible.”
“That’s why I had to bring you up here, Owen. You realized only half of it. He was inviting you into the family.”
I kneeled down to get a closer look at the balls and to shield my face from view, worried that I might betray the feeling of triumph I was experiencing in the face of what should have been a more solemn moment. The chest was full of baseballs, old, new, torn apart, boxed, even some signed ones in plexi cases.
“May I?” I asked.
Minerva nodded. I reached in and pulled out a ball: Property of Mira Costa Little League. Another: Property of YMCA. Another: LEWIS (in marker). Another: No markings, very old ball. A great number of the miscellaneous balls appeared to have belonged to someone else before coming into CJ’s possession. I wondered if he’d stolen them.
“There’s more,” Minerva said. “Dig toward the bottom right. Be careful.”
“A lot of balls in here,” I said.
“Hold the door open,” she said.
I held it open and she kneeled next to me.
“Remember how I was saying he was mischievous?” She rummaged in the corner of the bench. “Well, there was a period there where he was really mischievous.” She retrieved a cardboard shoebox, an old Converse Chuck Taylor box, from the depths of the bench. Balls rolled down to fill the empty space. The box was labeled with a crudely drawn skull and crossbones and “CJs Stuff Keep Out.” Minerva gestured at me to close the bench and I did.
She set the box on top and pulled it open.
Inside was a lighter, a can of non-dairy creamer, a roll of caps, a deck of playing cards with nude women on them, a dozen shaved-down pennies (all flat across Lincoln’s head), and a lint-speckled piece of fake vomit. Also: a lone baseball with a small X written on it, under which he had written “CJ Stocking 1196 Maple Ave.” Minerva retrieved a small spiral notepad from the bottom of the box.
“We weren’t too happy when we discovered this. Somehow he’d managed to keep this a secret, even as he grew older. I think he probably forgot. Otherwise he would have mentioned it.” She handed me the notepad. I opened it. The first page read:
Madlib #5
v: fuck
vpt: shitted
n: pussy
adv: fuckily
n: asshole
adj: gay
N: Cocknut Johnson
[…]
She shook her head. “Keep going—it’s near the back.”
I flipped through more Mad Libs, drawings of cars and explosions, clouds and lightning bolts, band logos (a VH with wings, etc.).
“There, take a look at that.” It was a list of addresses:
X-ecutioner
1402 Apache (Susie)
310 Sassafras (Fred and Alex)
295 Oak (Kapil)
1356 Cherokee (?)
369 Myrtle (Millers)
371 Myrtle (Millers)
I stared at the page for a moment.
“It took us some time to understand it. Took us a while even to find it. I was in here reminiscing and came across it and didn’t know what to think. Cal Senior figured it out finally. When he was a kid, CJ seemed to have the bad luck of putting baseballs through people’s windows. And he was always afraid to tell us he had done it, so we would find out only when the home’s owner, having read the address off the ball, came to our door during dinner, ball in hand, asking for money to fix the broken window. CJ would apologize and then—in front of the homeowner—work out some scheme to pay his father back as Cal Senior handed the man a few twenties, and then everyone would forget about it. Boys will be boys, right? Little did we know, CJ was keeping track. Still a bit of a mystery, really. We had a good laugh when we figured out what the list was. He was always up to something, that kid.”
“Yes,” I said. “Sounds like he was.”
“So,” she said. “There it is.”
I looked at her, puzzled.
“There’s the ball that came through your window. Should we enter your address into the book?”
I wrote our address into the book.
We put the ball away with the notebook in its box, cleared a space for it in the bottom of the bench, and laid it to rest in the corner, under a heap of baseballs eager to return to their original positions.
Minerva replaced the pillow on the seat and motioned for me to sit next to her. “I wouldn’t have believed it either,” she said. “But things like this have happened so many times.”
I took in the room now, bookshelves first. There I saw senior year high school books—unread copies of Lord Jim, Jude the Obscure, tattered copies of The Art of War and The Prince. Yearbooks, high school and junior high. A small blank-spined black book—his journal?!—I longed to open and examine. A few photographs on the desk, family stuff, and a picture of him with a soccer ball, from some team he’d played on in his mid-teens. Posters on the walls: surf and music. Bed with matching dresser, desk, and mirror—a cream-colored lacquer bedroom set, circa mid-1980s. Baseball bat next to the bed (the only obvious sign of baseball in the room).
The coat hooks on the door were a big wooden C and J. They hung above a crudely installed deadbolt—hallmark of the territorial teenager. I was struck, of course, and this I had noticed upon first walking in, that the room didn’t appear to have changed at all since CJ had lived there.
“I know what it looks like. I’ve heard it all. We need to move on, we should redo the room, put his things away for good. And, you know, I reply that we’ve got plans for the room, or that I can’t bear to change a thing yet, and people turn supportive, Owen, they really do.”
I nodded.
“Much more supportive,” she went on, “than if I told them the truth. How would Nancy So-and-so down the street react if I told her the truth?”
“The truth?”
“We haven’t changed the room because CJ won’t let us—because he’s still among us.”
“Sure,” I said. “Like the baseball. I was afraid to even mention it to you.”
“About six months after he passed away, I came into this room and started to pack his things into boxes. I felt like it had been long enough, that his spirit had moved on. A dozen broken boxes, slamming doors, strange noises, and mysterious chills later, I decided to stop. This was more than a series of coincidences. It was CJ saying—like he always used to—‘Mom! Leave my room alone!’ He’d already been off to college for several years, you see, and we wanted to turn his room into a guest room—Patty’s had already become a home office—but he wouldn’t hear of it. Still won’t. So that’s why it looks like this. Not because we’re having trouble letting go or something common like that. Because CJ wants it that way.”
She was compelling, in the way that anyone can be compelling when they believe what they are saying. And as long as
I continued to validate her experience, I could be assured of her cooperation and support. I had learned this lesson while working for software companies. At conventions, you could usually get people to talk about themselves after a few drinks at the hotel bar. A surprising number of very straight-laced, square people could be coerced into talking from that last cluttered corner of their minds, where a confused, underdeveloped, traumatized sense of spirituality had been packed away, and if you were supportive enough, you could get them to talk crazy for the rest of the night. They had no outlet, no voodoo ceremonies, no Latin Mass. I mention this now to clarify: I did not pity Minerva. I knew full well that most people carried around this kind of mystical mumbo-jumbo. Rather, I was flattered that she would share it with me. It could be argued that CJ brought us closer together.
She sighed. “I’ve got to get back to things downstairs.” Her tone was such that she was not asking me to leave.
“Do you mind if I sit here a moment?” I asked. “This is powerful stuff, and I’d like to collect my thoughts.”
She smiled a warm, motherly smile. “Stay as long as you like. You’ve been invited.”
I watched her leave the room and close the door behind her. I had come here to remind myself that CJ had been a living, breathing human being, and that Raven’s future punishments were the least I could do to avenge CJ’s death. So (I asked myself) who was this young man whose life had been cut short so violently and senselessly?
Aside from the stories I’d heard, I knew very little. I’d learned a few things already: He might have been a baseball thief as a child. Also as a child, he’d enjoyed the destruction of others’ personal property, and appeared to have engaged in it repeatedly, with few consequences. The mysterious “X” baseball was interesting to me not because it was or wasn’t the ball from my made-up story, but because it was the first evidence of something darker in CJ’s personality. He had repeatedly committed petty crimes, purposefully or at least negligently, had left his calling card behind, a baseball with his name and address on it, and had dismissed these crimes as accidents at least six times without incurring any worse punishment than his father’s shaking head. Boys will be boys. Sounded like a brat to me, especially when one considers this additional detail from his college days: he wanted his room kept his way, whether he was using it or not. This was not the CJ I’d heard about, exactly, unless I’d misconstrued the meanings of “mischievous” and “rambunctious.” Then again, who would call their dead son or brother asshole?
19
I stole CJ’s journal. If he had been there, as Minerva believed he was, wouldn’t he have made more of a fuss? I tucked it into my pants, made my escape, and took it directly to the Copy Store. (I later returned the original during a family dinner, after complaining that I had to use the toilet “in a serious way” and disappearing upstairs.) I was dying to examine its contents. At the Stocking house, I had only opened it long enough to ensure that it contained personal thoughts as opposed to a daily tally of events. At the Copy Store, I felt far too paranoid to pay the pages much attention. I looked forward to a leisurely read in the comfort of my home office. Unfortunately, I had Patty’s “weekend” to contend with—she was off for two days. Worse, she had declared this weekend of all weekends as an opportunity to reconnect. Reconnecting seemed to me a difficult task. I was concerned for the moment with lives other than our own. In a mailbox one town away lay, potentially, a response from Raven, and in that potential response, some potential insight into the murderer and his crime. In my office, hidden in the shallow void of my desk’s frame, below the lowest drawer, lay (again, potentially) the innermost secrets of Calvin Stocking Junior, murder victim, tragic loss. How could I be expected to focus on us? We were mere bench-warmers in this battle between life and death.
“I thought we should go to the Bathroom Store today,” she said. “We can get a new soap pump and hand towels for the guest bathroom. Maybe a floormat. To sort of remodel it without remodeling. That would be fun, don’t you think?”
“I’m on deadline.”
“You told me we could go out together today. This is really important, Owen.”
“Do we have to go to the Bathroom Store? Their parking lot is always such a pain.”
“I’ll drive. And it would be nice to have a project together.”
“I guess.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I’ve just got to get in the mood. Right now I’m thinking that people are falling in love, people are cracking up, people are dying. It makes buying a soap pump seem sort of silly.”
“Buying a soap pump with your wife is not silly. Especially when the two of you have not been spending enough time together. Especially when you’ve been overworked and overstressed.”
“Fair enough.”
That day, Patty dragged me to the Bathroom Store, the Lighting Store, and the Outdoor Furniture Store, the cumulative effect of which was so enervating, my entire identity turned to jelly, then liquid, which then leaked out of me until I became no one in particular. The rest of the weekend was only slightly more pleasant, but as far as she was concerned, we’d gotten a chance to reconnect.
I felt like a fraud.
If I could go back to that weekend I would set everything aside to talk to Patty about what was going on, about how she had started by changing her clothes and was now changing our bathroom. About how her desire to reconnect with me was akin to treating her symptoms instead of her disease. I would have talked to her about CJ, and her feelings about CJ, and what she was doing with them now, where she was storing them.
No, that isn’t true.
If I could go back to that weekend I would attempt wholeheartedly to reconnect with Patty. I wish I could do so now. But I didn’t, and I can’t. I participated in body but not in soul, focused the whole time on what spoils lay ahead.
CJ kept this journal intermittently from his sophomore year of high school through the summer before he entered college, with a few scattered entries thereafter, all of them written while on break from college. I have reproduced the journal as accurately as possible (≈95%) under the present circumstances. That said, the dating of entries below is entirely speculative.
CJ did not seem interested in capturing the rhythms of daily life. Most of the early entries appear to be borne of crisis, with some of the later ones recording matter-of-fact life changes. It is difficult to tell, especially in some of the later entries, what motivated him to pick up his journal and scribble a few lines. Overall, he wrote with admirable candor, either unconcerned that someone might discover his journal and read it, or unaware that his words, read by someone else, could have any effect whatsoever.
High School Sophomore Year
Why does fucken Patty think she’s doing me a favor sticking me with her butt-ugly friend’s butt-ugly sister? Patty’s so high and mighty all the time, like an ugly senior should be better than a freshman hottie? DO NOT DO ME ANY MORE FAVORS LIKE CLARISSA “STINKY WINKIE” HYAMS!
Every time I write something in here I want to erase it but Mr. Blatz said not to. Or else it’s useless. The something life is not worth living or whatever.
I stopped writing because I had nothing to say. But now I do: I am in love. A vision of womanhood. Her name is Anastasia Bertano. I don’t know how to tell her or even if I should. I barely know Ana but I know she’s having boyfriend troubles.
Mr. Blatz is always making us use words in sentences we make up. Here’s one: I’m going to exacerbate Ana’s boyfriend problems. Feeling demonic but fuck it. She shouldn’t be with Jeff anyway. Found out from somebody (totally unreliable source) that the problem is he can’t keep his boner hard. Plan A put into motion. Plan A successful! They totally broke up.
Asked Ana out—she said yes! Oh I’m good.
Recap of 1st date with Ana (I am right now): She talked about how bad it was at the end with Jeff and how her feelings were jumbled and crap like that. We made out for a while but she wouldn’t let me touch her tits. Sh
e told me the boner problem thing was a lie and that she was a virgin anyway. Jeff couldn’t handle Plan A, though, which was to have everybody limp when they walked past him at school, and so they broke up.
Ana = frigid. She won’t let me touch her tits unless we’re going steady but she doesn’t want to go steady yet. I’m bored of her crap already so I told a few people (big mouths) that I fucked her and she was a dead fuck. I got Jeff to say it too after I told everyone the limp dick thing was bullshit made up by Marty Gelbart.
Could the waves suck any worse this summer?
High School Junior Year
Ana switched schools—how funny is it that like a year ago I was tying my stomach in knots about her and now I could give a shit? That’s life.
Do your part for the War on Drugs: Kick a stoner’s ass.
I don’t know how it happened but I have a girlfriend already this year, Ana’s ex-best-friend Denise. I saw her at Jeff’s party. She said she was crushing on me all last year and then kissed me. I said if you like me so much show me your tits. We went into the pantry and shut the door and she pulled up her shirt. They were rad. She has already given me two hand jobs and said she would give me a blow job soon when we find a good place. I fingered her and she doesn’t have a stinky winkie.
I HATE MY FUCKEN MOM! I HATE YOU MOM! I HATE YOU! Do not touch my shit any more! Leave me alone! I can’t wait to go to college so you can butt out of my life!
The Interloper Page 12