by Joe Hill
“Is it just me or is it really stuffy in here?” my father asks. “Like, short on oxygen?”
“It gets a good airing out before the fall semester begins,” replies Mr. Grace. “There isn’t anyone here hardly except for a few of the summer-program kids.”
We perambulate together outside and into a grove of enormous trees with slippery-looking gray bark. At one end of the grove is a half-shell amphitheater and terraced seats, where they have graduations and occasionally hold productions or shows for the kids.
“What’s that smell?” my father asks. “Does this place smell funny?”
What is interesting is that my mother and Mr. Grace are pretending not to hear him. My mother has lots of questions for Mr. Grace about the school productions. It’s like my father isn’t there.
“What are these beautiful trees?” my mother asks, as we’re on our way out of the grove.
“Gingko,” Mr. Grace replies. “Do you know there are no trees in the world like the Gingko? They’re sole survivors of an ancient prehistoric tree family that has been wiped completely off the earth.”
My father stops by the trunk of one of them. He scratches a thumb along the bark. Then he gives his thumb a sniff. He makes a disgusted face.
“So that’s what stinks,” he says. “You know, extinction is not always a bad thing.”
We look at a swimming pool. Mr. Grace talks about physical therapy. He shows us a running track. He talks about the junior Special Olympics. He shows us the ballpark.
“So you get a team together,” my father says. “And you play some games. Is that right?”
“Yes. A team, a few games. But this is more than just play, what we’re doing out here,” Mr. Grace says. “At Biden we challenge children to squeeze learning out of everything they do. Even their games. This is a classroom too. We see this as a place to develop in the children some of the most crucial life skills, like negotiating conflict, and building interpersonal relationships, and releasing stress through physical activity. It’s like, you know that old cliché—it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s what you take away from the game, how much you learn about yourself, about emotional growth.”
Mr. Grace turns and starts away.
“What did he just tell me?” my father says. “That was like in a different language.”
My mother starts to walk away too.
“I didn’t get him,” my father says. “But I think he just told me they have one of these pity-party teams where no one ever strikes out.”
Mr. Grace takes us last to the library and it’s here that we meet one of the summer-session kids. We enter a large circular room, with rosewood bookcases wrapped around the walls. A distant computer clickety-clicks. A boy about my age is lying on the floor. A woman in a plaid dress has him by the right arm. I think she’s trying to get him on his feet, but all she’s managing to do is drag him around in circles.
“Jeremy?” she says. “If you won’t get up, then we can’t go play with the computer. Do you hear me?”
Jeremy doesn’t respond and she just keeps dragging him around and around. Once when she has him turned around to face us, he looks at me briefly with vacant eyes. He has the leak too—drool all over his chin.
“Wanna,” he drones in a long, stupid voice. “Wannaaa.”
“The library just installed four new computers,” says Mr. Grace. “Internet-ready.”
“Look at this marble,” my mother says.
My father puts his hand on my shoulder and squeezes me gently.
THE FIRST SUNDAY in September I go to the park with my father, and of course it is early when we get there, so early that no one is there, only a couple of rookie call-ups who have been in since the dawn to impress my father. My father is sitting in the stands behind the screen overlooking home plate and talking with Shaughnessy for the sports pages, and at the same time the two of us are playing a game, it’s called the secret things game, where he makes out a list of things for me to look for, each item worth a different number of points, and I have to run around the park and try and hunt them down (no digging through the trash which he should know I would not do anyway): a ball-point pen, a quarter, a lady’s glove, et cetera. No easy task after the crews have been out cleaning.
As I find things on the list I run them back to him, ball-point pen, string of black licorice, steel button. Then one time when I return, Shaughnessy has gone off and my father is just sitting there with his hands laced behind his head and an open plastic bag of peanuts in his lap and his feet up on the seat in front of him and he says, “Why don’t you set awhile?”
“Look: I found a matchbook. Forty points,” I say, and I plop into the seat beside him.
“Get a load of this,” my father says. “Look how nice it is when no one is here. When you get the place quiet. You know what I like best about it? The way it is right now?”
“What do you like best about it?”
“You can get some thinking done, and eat peanuts at the same time,” he tells me and cracks a peanut open.
It is cool out, the sky a whitish-blue arctic color. A seagull floats above the outfield, wings spread, not seeming to move. The rookies are stretching in the outfield and chatting. One of them laughs, strong, young, healthy laughter.
“Where do you think better?” I ask. “Here or home?”
“This is better than home,” he says. “Better for eating peanuts too, because you can’t just throw the shells on the floor at home.” He throws a few shells on the floor. “Not unless you want Mom to hand you an ass-kicking.”
We were quiet. A steady cool stream of air was blowing in from the outfield and into our faces. No one was going to hit any home runs today—not with that steady wind blowing in against us.
“Well,” I say, popping up. “Forty points. Here’s my matchbook. I better get back to it. I’ve almost found everything I’m looking for.”
“Lucky you,” he tells me.
“This is a good game,” I say. “I bet we could play at home. You could send me out to look for things and I could hunt around and find them. How come we never do that? How come we never play the game where we look for secret things at home?”
“Because it’s just better here,” he says.
At that point I run off to look for what’s left on the list—a shoelace, a lucky rabbit’s foot key chain—and leave my father behind, but the conversation came back to me later on and is kind of stuck in my head so that I think about it all the time and sometimes I wonder if that was one of those moments you aren’t supposed to forget when you think your father is saying one thing, but actually he’s saying another, when there’s meaning buried in some comments that seemed really ordinary. I like to think that. It’s a nice memory of my father sitting with his hands cupped behind his head and the wintry blue sky over the both of us. It’s a nice memory with that old seagull floating over the outfield and not going anywhere, just hanging in place with its wings spread, never traveling any closer to wherever it was heading. It’s a nice memory to have in your head. Everyone should have a memory just like it.
THE BLACK PHONE
1.
The fat man on the other side of the road was about to drop his groceries. He had a paper bag in each arm, and was struggling to jam a key into the back door of his van. Finney sat on the front steps of Poole’s Hardware, a bottle of grape soda in one hand, watching it all. The fat man was going to lose his groceries the moment he got the door open. The one in his left arm was already sliding free.
He wasn’t any kind of fat, but grotesquely fat. His head had been shaved to a glossy polish, and there were two plump folds of skin where his neck met the base of his skull. He wore a loud Hawaiian shirt—toucans nestled among hanging creepers—although it was too cool for short sleeves. The wind had a brisk edge, so that Finney was always hunching and turning his face away from it. He wasn’t dressed for the weather either. It would’ve made more sense for him to wait for his father inside, only John Finney didn’t l
ike the way old Tremont Poole was always eyeballing him, half-glaring, as if he expected him to break or shoplift something. Finney only went in for grape soda, which he had to have, it was an addiction.
The lock popped and the rear door of the van sprang open. What happened next was such a perfect bit of slapstick it might have been practiced—and only later did it occur to Finney that probably it had been. The back of the van contained a gathering of balloons, and the moment the door was open, they shoved their way out in a jostling mass…thrusting themselves at the fat man, who reacted as if he had no idea they would be there. He leaped back. The bag under his left arm fell, hit the ground, split open. Oranges rolled crazily this way and that. The fat man wobbled and his sunglasses slipped off his face. He recovered and hopped on his toes, snatching at the balloons, but it was already too late, they were sailing away, out of reach.
The fat man cursed and waved a hand at them in a gesture of angry dismissal. He turned away, squinted at the ground and then sank to his knees. He set his other bag in the back of the van and began to explore the pavement with his hands, feeling for his glasses. He put a hand down on an egg, which splintered beneath his palm. He grimaced, shook his hand in the air. Shiny strings of egg white spattered off it.
By then, Finney was already trotting across the road, left his soda behind on the stoop. “Help, mister?”
The fat man peered blearily up at him without seeming to see him. “Did you observe that bullshit?”
Finney glanced down the road. The balloons were thirty feet off the ground by now, following the double line along the middle of the road. They were black…all of them, as black as sealskin.
“Yeah. Yeah, I—” he said, and then his voice trailed off and he frowned, watching the balloons bobbing into the low overcast of the sky. The sight of them disturbed him in some way. No one wanted black balloons; what were they good for, anyway? Festive funerals? He stared, briefly transfixed, thinking of poisoned grapes. He moved his tongue around in his mouth, and noticed for the first time that his beloved grape soda left a disagreeable metallic aftertaste, a taste like he had been chewing an exposed copper wire.
The fat man brought him out of it. “See my glasses?”
Finney lowered himself to one knee, leaned forward to look beneath the van. The fat man’s glasses were under the bumper.
“Got ’em,” he said, stretching an arm past the fat man’s leg to pick them up. “What were the balloons for?”
“I’m a part-time clown,” said the fat man. He was reaching into the van, getting something out of the paper bag he had set down there. “Call me Al. Hey, you want to see something funny?”
Finney glanced up, had time to see Al holding a steel can, yellow and black, with pictures of wasps on it. He was shaking it furiously. Finney began to smile, had the wild idea that Al was about to spray him with silly string.
The part-time clown hit him in the face with a blast of white foam. Finney started to turn his head away, but was too slow to avoid getting it in his eyes. He screamed and took some in the mouth, tasted something harsh and chemical. His eyes were coals, cooking in their sockets. His throat burned; in his entire life he had never felt any pain like it, a searing icy-heat. His stomach heaved and the grape soda came back up in a hot, sweet rush.
Al had him by the back of the neck and was pulling him forward, into the van. Finney’s eyes were open but all he could see were pulsations of orange and oily brown that flared, dripped, ran into one another and faded. The fat man had a fistful of his hair and another hand between his legs, scooping him up by the crotch. The inside of Al’s arm brushed his cheek. Finney turned his head and bit down on a mouthful of wobbling fat, squeezed until he tasted blood.
The fat man wailed and let go and for a moment Finney had his feet on the ground again. He stepped back and put his heel on an orange. His ankle folded. He tottered, almost fell and then the fat man had him by the neck again. He shoved him forward. Finney hit one of the van’s rear doors, head-first, with a low bonging sound, and all the strength went out of his legs.
Al had an arm under his chest, and he tipped him forward, into the back of the van. Only it wasn’t the back of a van. It was a coal chute, and Finney dropped, with a horrifying velocity, into darkness.
2.
A door banged open. His feet and knees were sliding across linoleum. He couldn’t see much, was pulled through darkness toward a faint fluttering moth of gray light that was always dancing away from him. Another door went crash and he was dragged down a flight of stairs. His knees clubbed each step on the way down.
Al said, “Fucking arm. I ought to snap your neck right now, what you did to my arm.”
Finney thought of resisting. They were distant, abstract thoughts. He heard a bolt turn, and he was pulled through a last door, across cement, and finally to a mattress. Al flipped him onto it. The world did a slow, nauseating roll. Finney sprawled on his back and waited for the feeling of motion sickness to pass.
Al sat down beside him, panting for breath.
“Jesus, I’m covered in blood. Like I killed someone. Look at this arm,” he said. Then he laughed, husky, disbelieving laughter. “Not that you can see anything.”
Neither of them spoke, and an awful silence settled upon the room. Finney shook continuously, had been shivering steadily, more or less since regaining consciousness.
At last Al spoke. “I know you’re scared of me, but I won’t hurt you anymore. What I said about I ought to snap your neck, I was just angry. You did a number on my arm, but I won’t hold it against you. I guess it makes us even. You don’t need to be scared because nothing bad is going to happen to you here. You got my word, Johnny.”
At the mention of his name, Finney went perfectly still, abruptly stopped trembling. It wasn’t just that the fat man knew his name. It was the way he said it…his breath a little trill of excitement. Johnny. Finney felt a ticklish sensation crawling across his scalp, and realized Al was playing with his hair.
“You want a soda? Tell you what, I’ll bring you a soda and then—wait! Did you hear the phone?” Al’s voice suddenly wavered a little. “Did you hear a phone ringing somewhere?”
From an unguessable distance, Finney heard the soft burr of a telephone.
“Oh, shit,” Al said. He exhaled unsteadily. “That’s just the phone in the kitchen. Of course it’s just the phone in—okay. I’ll go see who it is and get you that soda and come right back and then I’ll explain everything.”
Finney heard him come up off the mattress with a labored sigh, followed the scuffle of his boots as he moved away. A door thumped shut. A bolt slammed. If the phone upstairs rang again, Finney didn’t hear it.
3.
He didn’t know what Al was going to say when he came back, but he didn’t need to explain anything. Finney already knew all about it.
The first child to disappear had been taken two years ago, just after the last of the winter’s snow melted. The hill behind St. Luke’s was a lumpy slope of greasy mud, so slippery that kids were going down it on sleds, cracking each other up when they crashed at the bottom. A nine-year-old named Loren ran into the brush on the far side of Mission Road to take a whiz, and never came back. Another boy went missing two months later, on the first of June. The papers named the kidnapper The Galesburg Grabber, a name Finney felt lacked something on Jack the Ripper. He took a third boy on the first of October, when the air was aromatic with the smell of dead leaves crunching underfoot.
That night John and his older sister Susannah sat at the top of the stairs and listened to their parents arguing in the kitchen. Their mother wanted to sell the house, move away, and their father said he hated when she got hysterical. Something fell over or was thrown. Their mother said she couldn’t stand him anymore, was going crazy living with him. Their father said so don’t and turned on the TV.
Eight weeks later, at the very end of November, the Galesburg Grabber took Bruce Yamada.
Finney wasn’t friends with Bruce Yama
da, had never even had a conversation with him—but he had known him. They had pitched against each other, the summer before Bruce disappeared. Bruce Yamada was maybe the best pitcher the Galesburg Cardinals had ever faced; certainly the hardest thrower. The ball sounded different when he threw it in the catcher’s glove, not like it sounded when other kids threw. When Bruce Yamada threw, it was like the sound of someone opening champagne.
Finney pitched well himself, giving up just a pair of runs, and those only because Jay McGinty dropped a big lazy fly to left that anyone else would’ve caught. After the game—Galesburg lost five to one—the teams formed into two lines and started to march past each other, slapping gloves. It was when Bruce and Finney met each other to touch gloves that they spoke to each other for the one and only time in Bruce’s life.
“You were dirty,” Bruce said.
Finney was flustered with happy surprise, opened his mouth to reply—but all that came out was, “good game,” same as he said to everyone. It was a thoughtless, automatic line, repeated twenty straight times, and it was said before he could help himself. Later, though, he wished he had come up with something as cool as You were dirty, something that really smoked.
He didn’t run into Bruce again the rest of the summer, and when he did finally happen to see him—coming out of the movies that fall—they didn’t speak, just nodded to each other. A few weeks later, Bruce strolled out of the Space Port arcade, told his friends he was walking home, and never got there. The dragnet turned up one of his sneakers in the gutter on Circus Street. It stunned Finney to think a boy he knew had been stolen away, yanked right out of his shoes, and was never coming back. Was already dead somewhere, with dirt in his face and bugs in his hair and his eyes open and staring at exactly nothing.
But then a year passed, and more, and no other kids disappeared, and Finney turned thirteen, a safe age—the person snatching children had never bothered with anyone older than twelve. People thought the Galesburg Grabber had moved away, or been arrested for some other crime, or died. Maybe Bruce Yamada killed him, Finney thought once, after hearing two adults wonder aloud whatever happened to the Grabber. Maybe Bruce Yamada picked up a rock as he was being kidnapped, and later saw a chance to show the Galesburg Grabber his fastball. There was a hell of an idea.