Just North of Nowhere

by Lawrence Santoro

  The creature moved to the Man, bent to him, moved the mist away from him. He had color, shape, was warm. A thing beat inside him. It was heart. The creature searched inside itself. No. No heart…

  ...then he was awake. All around, Injun drums pounded. Like always, some nights. Dawn was near and he was still frozen, frozen from the winter that the thing had breathed over him, and frozen from lying on the asphalt in the night mists.

  When Bunch dared open his eyes, the critter was gone. The sun hadn't risen above the bluffs but morning showed red between the trees, its side of the river, and all the birds in the world sang for light. Them dead Injuns were in a state. Past the trees, their firesparks rose pale into the morning. Lamentation and victory chants mixed with the birds that were all talking, by the hundreds, all at once. Mixed with it were the buzzing sounds of chainsaws, the crack of rifles, the booms of explosions, squeals of tires, cries of fear and pain, roars of animals, critters, monsters. Those sounds, the Injun sounds, they were all fading. The birds were beating them back. The sagging screen was going faint. Pictures, pictures that, dammit, Bunch remembered from back when the drive-in was going full blast were going away, like the stars that dimmed in morning sun. The Injuns and the explosions that had gathered around the place like sweat wasps to a garbage can faded, then were gone. Damn.

  Bunch crawled up and scooted out of that moving picture place. The shit heap that had looked to the stars and breathed winter over him was not there. Bunch didn't know where, but it was around. He felt it. It moved somewhere off in the morning. Looking for darkness, he figured. In minute or two, Bunch realized he was running. He ran all the way and was waiting in first sun when the American House opened for eats.

  Chapter 17

  THE EEPHUS PITCH AND HANGING HIGH FLY OF THE CONSOLIDATED CATBIRDS

  A team? The Catbirds? Bunch of kids trying to be not lousy, was more like it! Not one player stood above his game or even wanted to. Most would just as soon have been somewhere else – sitting home or lost in the bleachers watching another someone play the game of baseball. A team? Well, they sat together.

  The season wrapped on a 17 to 1 loss to the Wolverines. In that game the Catbirds scored their one and only run of the whole long, long season.

  That one run, though? It was something! Here's what happened.

  The weather turned warm. Ruth Potter started taking afternoons away from the library, away from the capital J-O-B, Job, and from her real work: cataloguing:

  The Burroughs Collection:

  Glass Plate Photography: Bluffton and Environs

  (ca. 1880-1930)

  Gift of Hillary Arroyo Burroughs: In Memory of the Artist, her Husband, Rex Aubrey Burroughs

  “Not Dead, Just Gone.

  Ruth discovered Elysium Park, just two blocks from the library. She chose a bench near the bleachers. Here was green grass and a distant murmur of birds. The few human voices were also distant. Here, away from the reading room's ticking clock, the dust and scent of old molds and damp library paste, real sunlight fell hard and clean on her face.

  She should have started making these little afternoon escapes a dozen springs earlier, she really should have.

  Suddenly, there came the Consolidated Catbirds! Whatever else a catbird might be, these Catbirds were the Rolling River Valley Consolidated Middle School baseball players. Ruth considered moving to another part of the park. She really did.

  She stayed not because of the sport – she was not an aficionado, not even slightly – Ruth Potter stayed (stubborn biddy that she was and proud of it too) because she refused to relinquish that little place of her life she had decided was good and which should be held back from the town.

  Catbird games were noisy at first. That irritated her. They became quiet, quickly. That interested her.

  After their first loss – the first game – attendance dwindled. After their third game, and third loss, who remained were quiet knots of settled parents. A few smiled bravely. No youngsters came at all after the fourth Catbird humiliation. She wasn't certain, but Ruth thought the team had failed to score a single point in all the games she'd seen.

  Even visiting teams seemed to take little delight in the inevitable victories tallied against the quiet Catbirds. The opposition arrived on buses, the players filed quietly to the field, played quickly – each boy patiently waiting his turn to beat up on the Catbirds – then filed back to their bus and left. Done and done, no looking back on that still afternoon.

  Ruth moved her spring water and salad dinners to the top of the aluminum bleachers. From there, the setting sun caught her face for a few extra moments each afternoon. The elevation gave her a chilly view of the western trees. Their long black shadows reached toward her along the thick white line that ran from home plate through third base and on to infinity.

  Maybe not infinity. To the setting sun, then. Ninety-three million miles, give or take. Ruth swallowed a bite of lettuce. Close enough to infinity for Bluffton. Funny, she realized in an eye blink, I know how far from Bluffton to the sun, but not how far a ball travels when struck.

  A Catbird tapped the ball gently to the waiting glove of a visitor. Not far, she thought. The slight tap was too typical of Catbird play. Each lonely hit invariably found a gloved hand waiting at the bottom of the ball's lazy arc. It was as though the thing were thankful to come to rest. Such easy humiliation. And that was when they hit the darned things! More typically, a Catbird slipped softly to bat and sat down a minute later, never connecting, often never swinging, not even once.

  When opponents hit, now, that ball went; flew, lost, into the sun or bounded like a whizzing rabbit to safety in the thick grass tangles beyond where that Bunch person kept the field nice for the boys. Out there, opponent balls – dozens, must be by now – were still in play in the thicket!

  Might as well have flown to the sun, Ruth thought

  By the time the librarian had noticed all this, parents had stopped attending, even granddads had disappeared. She and Old Blind Ken were the Catbird's only regular audience.

  Ruth Potter? A baseball – what did they call them (not aficionado) – fan? Hardly! She watched and chewed her lettuce quietly. She didn’t know the subtleties of the game or the game, itself, for that matter, but from a lifetime of watching them in the dust of her library, she knew 12-year-old boys.

  Jill Lukowski wasn’t lousy – no worse than any other coach in the Valley League! Okay, she was better than most. She knew the moves and talked the talk till she was blue! Knew how to post a line-up; knew when to pull a pitcher and hold a man on second. Like the good ones, she knew when to kick ass; like the best she knew when to wipe noses. She knew her men...if anyone could truly know the heart of a 12-year-old whose dad had just found another excuse not to show up on game day.

  Jill was big. Always had been: baby, girl and woman. She was tall, strong, fast for her size; nice personality – that cliché. She smiled, talked slow. People knew she'd thought out what she said. And she knew how to frown. Her frown! It could freeze a ball mid-way from the batter's box to outta-here, turn a dinger to a dying quail and drop it in her fielder's straining glove.

  She just about believed she could do that very thing! The problem was, the gloves she coached never strained, were never under, always hesitated elsewhere. The gloves she coached tended to polite deference.

  She watched as Whendol Rifkin at left field and her center fielder, Magnus Ingebretsohn, stood frozen. Heads back watching, the two let a weak pop fly find safe dirt between them.

  She exploded! “Adda boy, adda boy,” she shouted as the ball bounced, “'After you, Alfonse,' 'No, after you, Garcon!'“ Her long lopes carried her half-way from the bench to the infield before she grabbed her senses and backed off, kicking dirt, “'Ats it you Dog Maned Fender Muckers! All forest and no frippin’ trees with you! Right Magnus? That it Whendol?”

  She yelled loud enough – another thing she did well – for everyone to hear. Most that end of Bluffton heard. The stands, anywa
y. The ump. The other team. The few philosophically indifferent parents who'd showed (“It is just a game isn't it? And it teaches character, doesn't it? You know? Character?”).

  The Eagles' bench gave out a few weak calls of “Ooo, Maggie!” and “Way-ta-go-dere Gwendolyn!” She heard one, “Nice mouth, teach',” but that was it. She had almost cussed out a bench of twelve year-olds, and not one adult had bothered to blink.

  Goddamn, but Jill hated swearing – the effort of a weak mind to express itself forcefully! “Frippin'“ was a decent euphemism, and 'Dog-Maned Fender Muckers' apparently was too vague to be offensive. Even the librarian, Miss whatshername, Potter, a regular fan who attended both games and practice, didn’t seem to mind. Too obscure even for Lutherans, ever-alert for euphemism.

  Screw it! Sometimes everyone needed his butt chewed, sometimes the coach just had to vent. For her sake, if not the team's!

  Deep breath.

  The hell with winning. Elysium Park smelled better than school. The air was warm with grass. The breeze from across the Rolling River carried a heady scent of stagnation from the still pond above the old hydro dam. That jumbled together with a rich dead-fish smell of spring mud, below. Somehow it came good, mingled like that. Better than chalk dust. The spillway roar was better than the fly-buzzing silence of year-end classroom daydreams.

  And it was just a frippin' game, after all, dog-mandit! Frip 'em if nobody knew what she was talking about.

  Lyle Younger asked later at the traditional post-mortem pie blast at the American House – Eats.

  Jill was enjoying. She'd long ago gotten over disappointment, was in it, now, for the extra couple bucks, the outdoor hours, and the pie and vanilla ice cream afterward at the Eats.

  Lyle’s big hand was waving. Big hands on a tiny frame. That's why Lyle was catcher. That and his best friend, Kyle, was pitcher and mostly didn't hit anyone. She heard him, “Ew. Ew, Miss Lukowski...ew...”

  “Lyle...?”

  Lyle blushed in the silence she'd cleared for him. He squinted to wind his concentration around the question, anticipating the complexity of the coach's answer. He did that even when asking to go to the toilet.

  “So, coach? What'd you mean back there, then? You know, there, about the tree?”

  “I suggested you can't see the trees for...?” She let it hang, hoping someone would get it.

  There was a moment of silence. “Oh, yeah. Sure. I get it. The forest! Oh, yeah. I see...”

  “We can’t see the forest for the trees.” That from Kyle Yinger, the pitcher.

  “Yeah, for the trees!” Lyle said.

  “Yeah!” they said.

  “The frippin' forest,” someone said.

  Laughter around.

  “I didn't say that. Did I say that?”

  Kyle and Lyle, each waited for the other.

  Roy quoted her precisely. “'Adda boy, adda boy. After you, Alfonse,' 'No, no, after you, Garcon!'“ He waited a moment to see if anyone wanted more. “'That's it you Dog Maned Fender Muckers! All forest and no fripping trees with you! Right Magnus? That it Whendol?'“

  Laughter. Roy looked up from his book. His eyes found Jill.

  Odd kid, Roy. Eugene “Roy” Roy didn’t play; he was team statistician, record-keeper, maintainer of numbers. He sat at the edge of the thing. At his side – here, at the field, in school and always, everywhere – was Leslie B. Fritz, Rolf Fritz's skinny redheaded girl. All skin, scabs and bony joints; same clothes each day, no baths (and her father a teacher who should know better).

  Leslie didn't seem interested in baseball, in the team, in the school. She wasn't Roy's 'girlfriend', not really. Yet there she was. Always. Jill had once asked Leslie's interest in the team. Leslie said she was learning. She was going to be a witch. Roy was her familiar. The team was a place to practice her craft because it was so simple, was all physics and numbers and memory. When she got it right, she'd turn it around.

  Couldn't hurt, Jill thought. This was the only team Jill had ever seen where the statistician was the envy of the players.

  If Jill knew the way Roy and Leslie worked together, the witch had most probably nudged the statistician into speaking up at the Eats.

  Speaking, Roy caught Jill exactly; intonation, pace; her heat delivered with Roy's cold precision; like the numbers he kept, the numbers that were the game, but not.

  “Right you are, Roy! Give that man a cee-gar! Give the man a chewing gum cee-gar!” Jill called too loud.

  Behind the counter, Esther raised her eyes from the travel brochures spread under her arms and elbows. Realizing this was ball-talk, not an order, she bent back to her pictures.

  Except for the regulars – Bunch who did odd jobs, Old Blind Ken, Karl Dorbler from the Wurst Haus – the Eats was theirs.

  “Check your book, Roy. This was our what? Our how many’th consecutive?”

  “Loss?”

  She cocked a look at him.

  He checked. “Eighty-fifth. Our 85th consecutive loss.”

  “Against how many wins?”

  He again touched the numbers as though they were Braille. “About... None.”

  “Not one?”

  He looked again, shook his head. “Not one.”

  “Not a one.”

  The team had gone off its pie. Each face pulled inside its head. Each head went blank.

  “You don’t suck, you know. You know that, don't you?” Jill said it as chipper as she could. Kyle’s face screwed up another couple turns. “Not one of you is that bad.” She saw the looks creeping across their faces. “I don't think this, I know this! I know at least, I'm not that bad!”

  A few looks turned to smiles; Walter Bowswinger, the utility man, was one big grin.

  “We’re not GOOD, don’t get me wrong. Good and bad’s not the point. We’re...” She thought for a second how to say it. Finally, she just said it. “We’re just not there!” She pointed in the general direction of Elysium Park. “We’re not on the gosh darn field.”

  This was vague. She hated being vague. Smiles were fading. Boys needed to know things, details: how to hold the bat, way to grip the ball pitching really tricky shit. They needed secrets. They wanted stuff.

  Leslie hocked back a load of snot, but there wasn't another sound.

  “You all see too doggone much, that’s our problem. You’re all looking at that big green forest out there – the game! What's a game? A game's a series of plays! You're not looking at the ONE play, your play! You don’t get right the heck in there and see what YOU'VE got to do to make the game happen! Your part in the damn darn thing.”

  Dead faces. Not-wide eyes. She ran out of steam in their eyes and silence. The steam came back with the sweet smiles that followed. “I wish to Goddamn hell you for once would loose because you were trying to make something happen! I wish you’d for once stop being so Jesus Christ on a shit stick polite!” Forget grammar, the hell with couth; this was baseball!

  Each Catbird looked at another. Each nodded nicely. “Cool,” someone said. Jill thought it was Kyle, but it might have been Lyle. And, sadly, she knew they were talking about her language.

  They drifted apart after the traditional fuss over the check with Jill covering most of it just to get going. The sky was still postbox blue as her long legs ate the path upward through the trees. She liked the way her legs burned the steep climb—hated the way her butt felt: it was dragging back there. She’d work that butt this summer, yessir! Spring evening washed day’s leftover warmth from the coming night. Cool shadows slid over her. Deep in the woods on either side, night had already arrived. Animals and small winds ruffled the darkness into little noises. It had taken years, but Jill had gotten used to night sounds and the silences between. This city girl had grown country easy.

  She was alone on the dark path home. Then she wasn't.

  “Your boys need help,” the voice said.

  Jill jumped, tingling as though she’d been caught at who-knew-what.

  The librarian, Miss Potter, stepped
from the shadow. She had blended with the night.

  “Startle you?” she said.

  “Not much.”

  “You were somewhere else, I think.” Miss Potter slipped into step beside Jill, three choppy paces to each of the coach's long strides. “I'm familiar with the concept.”

  Jill stepped up the tempo.

  “I want to talk about your team.”

  “So-called,” Jill said.

  Ruth huffed. “Oh, they're a team. They're together.”

  Jill snorted, stretched her step even further. What the hell did this Porter...Potter, whatever her name was...know about baseball, about a team of boys? “Be happy to hear,” Jill said.

  “I hope.” The little librarian stopped dead on the path, stood her ground panting and offered her hand. “Name's Ruth Potter. I run the library. How do you do?”

  Jill turned, looked at the tiny hand, gave it a polite jerk. “Jill Lukowski. I know who you are, Miss Potter. I’ve lived here a few years, myself.” The hand was dry, harder than it looked, firmer than it might have been. Taller by a foot, standing higher on the path, Jill looked down on the librarian. Why, she's going bald, Jill realized. Somehow, the knowledge made Jill smile, warmed her to the lady. She gave the hand a second shake. “Thank you for being so loyal to the team.”