by Chris Lynch
“Oh, that thing,” Theo says as we round the corner of the house, out toward the road.
“That thing, yeah,” she says. “Well, you forget it. That’s the thing I want you to do, and you have to do it, do this one thing for me because you owe me. You owe me because of what you’re doing to me. So that’s the one thing I’m asking … I’m telling you to do for me. Just forget all that. Right?”
“Forget all what?” I say.
“There,” Theo says. “Forgotten already.”
“How many times do you need to get slapped?” she says, vicious serious.
“Sorry, Sue,” he says.
“Don’t bother being sorry. And don’t bother being Christian. You hear me? You go ahead and forget who you are, and go on and kill. Kill everybody you need to. Kill ’em all, understand? Kill everybody, and then come home. You can be Christian later. When Mam’s watching.”
Theo, because of nerves or stupidity or confusion, starts laughing. Which makes Susan start tearing up, which always makes her roar with rage. She hates to show that stuff. The Armed Services of the United States of America has no idea that they aren’t getting the toughest McCallum we have, not by a long shot.
He really is itching for a slapping, so I do my bit. I slap my brother in the back of the head.
“I promise, Susan,” I say, and lean in to hug her.
She shoves me away, hard, points menacingly at Theo.
“Promise me,” she demands.
“I promise,” he says. “Everything that moves.”
“Good,” she says, stomping her way back to the house already.
“I hate you,” she shouts before slamming the door.
“Don’t forget to write,” Theo calls back.
We know she’s heard him when the door swings open again, and we hotfoot it out onto the road with Susan’s roar rattling our ear bones.
“Did you mean to bring that?” I say to him when we are out of range, out of sight of home. I point at his mitt, curled around a baseball and tucked under his arm.
“Of course I meant to bring it,” he says. “How does a guy pick up a ball and glove accidentally? I was thinking about what that meathead said.”
“Well, we’ve heard a lot of meatheads say a lot of things, so could you be more specific?”
“The meathead. Played first base, Centreville Red Sox.”
“Right, with the gimpy ankle. Bucyk. Girlfriend tried to strangle me.”
Theo smiles. “Hmm. Kinda liked her, though.”
“Yeah, me too,” I say.
“Right, anyway. Roman Bucyk, that’s the guy. Meathead, of course; Sox. But what he said about the Nazis …”
“Nazis hate baseball.”
“Nazis hate baseball! Exactly. So I figure, let’s bring the game with us, save the world and drive them demented by playin’ ball all the way.”
I find myself nodding and shaking my head at the same time. “You know the enemy is wicked when they get us taking Red Sox advice.”
“Ha,” he says, “well, if we do this thing right the Sox will be waiting when we return. One evil empire at a time.”
“Okay, brother,” I say, feeling my own ball and glove under my arm. “It’s just, I was thinking I would take the gloves with me.”
“You? Why you? Can you even play catch on a boat?”
“Better than you can on a plane, flyboy.”
“We’re on solid ground most of the time. Which is more than you can say. I should probably take them. I’ll play catch for both of us.”
Suddenly, as we walk, and the bus crests the hill in the distance, this all becomes realer than ever, and unsettling in a way I didn’t anticipate.
Not two days. We haven’t gone two days without throwing a baseball back and forth to each other, and at each other.
I hand him my glove. Feels like I just tore my own arm off.
As the bus pulls up all crank and squeal and dust, Theo starts shaking his head.
“We can’t do this,” he says. I see the bus door open behind him.
“Well, we did enlist,” I say. “I think they’ll be mad if we say we were only joking.”
“Not that,” he says. “This.” His bag is on the ground between his feet, and he is holding each glove up in one hand. “We have to play catch, Hank.”
“Catch?” I say. “Across the world? Well, I could probably reach, but do you think your arm’s up to it?”
“Ha,” he says, shoving a glove back at me. “That’s it, exactly. Catch across the world. Wherever we are, we’ll play catch across the world.”
“Any day now, gentlemen,” the bus driver barks.
I take the glove, and put my hand on my brother’s back, guiding him up the steps.
“But this is your glove,” I say, noticing the relacing Theo does obsessively every year.
“I know,” he says. “That’s so you don’t forget me.”
“Ha,” I say, and shove him a little harder.
We’ve been sitting, side-by-side and silent, with our mitts in our laps for fifteen minutes. It’s like we’re on one more road trip to another unfriendly ballpark, getting our game faces on, thinking about the competition. Then Theo reaches over and plunks the other glove into my lap.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“I’ll find something else to use for the duration,” he says while staring straight ahead. “This set should stay together. Keep ’em together, Hank.”
He is still not looking at me, at a point when I need to be responding somehow. But I just nod anyway, and I know that is enough.
Chris Lynch is the author of numerous acclaimed books for middle-grade and teen readers, including the Vietnam series and the National Book Award finalist Inexcusable. He teaches in the Lesley University creative writing MFA program and divides his time between Massachusetts and Scotland.
Copyright © 2014 by Chris Lynch
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available
First edition, January 2014
Cover art 2014 by Tim Bradstreet
Cover design by Christopher Stengel
e-ISBN 978-0-545-52296-0
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