If my mother heard me crack the front door and ease out, she didn’t say a word to stop me. The last thing I heard was the theme music from some show on the television when I walked into the thick night-air on the porch. It smelled old outside, as if the air had gone stale. I could have done a half-dozen things to make that night pass, could have eaten leftover chicken or messed with my little brother or snuck back to my room and jerked off with the picture of Miss December that Lonnie stole from his father’s night table and gave to me. Anything except climb on my bicycle and ride into the dark. I didn’t go fast, but still, when I hit the pools of lights under the telephone poles, the moths pelted me like soft bullets as I glided through them.
Instead of heading toward Laurice’s house and the Bantam Chef, I went left—not right—toward the river. The streetlights gave up, and the cicadas sang louder the closer I rode to the furniture store. I felt the slight downgrade as I came off the bluff and coasted toward the flood plain. The security light from Baker’s Furniture Store glowed near their loading dock, fuzzy in the humidity, giving me just enough light to find the beginning of the sidewalk at the end of the bridge. I left my bike in the weeds. What little glow there was made the bridge shine white, like it was covered in ice, which confused me for a quick second until I realized how hard I was sweating from the ride. I reminded myself it was the end of August. We hadn’t felt rain in weeks. I heard the river gurgle as it dodged the thick cement footings somewhere under me. I found a place to balance on the rail. We’re all idiots when we’re thirteen. All I had to do was take that step into nothing but the invisible, heavy air.
Complete idiots. We think the world cares when we’re thirteen. I don’t really recall all that happened next, but I knew below me was only water, and under that, things I would never be able to see, and as it turned out, none of it killed me.
BACK THEN, THERE WERE ALWAYS TWO, MAYBE THREE black boys on the other side of the tracks that ran alongside the first base line. The tracks were raised above the field on a steep hill, so they would lie flat against the slope, waiting for the train to come through on its way from the lumber mill. When it did, they would lob rocks at us from behind the steady rush of cars, and we’d run to our dugouts until the caboose passed by and the man in the window waved. By then, of course, the black boys would be nowhere in sight. The umpire would holler and start things up, and as soon as we picked the rocks out of the field, we would be baseball players again. In the stands, the people—mostly mothers and fathers—sat and looked over their shoulders at the tracks, in the direction of Nicholtown, where all the black people lived. It was just something that happened.
One afternoon, early in the game, we were already way ahead. I could smell the creosote railroad ties cooling down after a day in the sun. Someone had turned the lights on. I could hear the bulbs buzzing above the field. The train blew a warning at the far end of town, so some of the parents stood up and tried to wave us off the field before any of us even saw the locomotive.
Be smart, they were saying to us. Get off that field before you have to make a run for it. We grinned and waved back and acted like big leaguers. We spit pink bubblegum juice in the dust and chattered at the kid standing at home plate.
The locomotive churned behind first base. We knew we could probably get in a couple more pitches before the rocks started. The noise from the train spun everything into a kind of dream. Mouths moved, but the only sound was the clank and groan of the cars on the rails. The umpire jerked up his arm and screamed, but you couldn’t hear the call. Parents tried to yell at their boys. Then, it started.
Our third baseman ran by. “Niggers.” He mouthed the word carefully against the noise from the tracks.
The rocks fell in lazy, heavy arcs, so slow you could dodge them easily as you ran to the dugout. I headed in from shortstop, kept my eyes up, and saw the caboose pass by. Short train. Less time for them to throw. That was good for the slower guys, the dumber ones who couldn’t run and watch the sky at the same time.
But above us on the rails, in the fumes the train left behind, was one of the black boys in full sight. He was big, and stood facing us, cocked up a little on one hip, his arms at his sides. He peered down into the field for a second, then began his windup from his huge pitcher’s mound.
High leg kick.
Push off.
I saw the exact second the rock left his hand, and I watched his pitch spin through the air. It had no arc. Just a steady, straight line from the tracks to the field. I could almost hear the rock when it hissed over the dugout and caught Cal, our first baseman, in the face, on his cheek. Cal flopped across the foul line in the clay dust. The boy on the tracks flipped us the bird and jumped out of sight.
CAL’S MOTHER WAS on her hands and knees in the base path, looking at the ground, but screaming at us. “What are you gonna do!” she yelled. “Somebody?” She was too stocky to be crawling around in the dirt in a dress.
Most of us were a few feet away, keeping her at a safe distance as though she had a disease. But right beside her, our coach balanced Cal like a drunk, holding him up by his collar. Cal didn’t know where he was, but he could mumble and sort of stand up, blood running from the cut on his cheek.
“There ain’t a thing to do, Louise,” one of the fathers said from the crowd. “No way we can find out who done it, and ain’t a one of us about to go poking around Nicholtown looking for one nigger that hit a white boy with a rock.”
It turned out that Cal wasn’t as bad off as he looked. One of the mothers in the stands, who was a nurse, said that it would probably only take a dozen or so stitches and wouldn’t leave much of a scar.
Cal’s momma kept screaming, and our coach couldn’t decide if he should bring Cal and leave Louise in the base path, or if he should try to carry them both. From where I stood, they looked like a family that couldn’t make up its mind. One of the mothers walked over and grabbed Louise under her arms. “Now, now. It’s over. Let’s take Cal to the doctor and get him sewed up, OK?”
Louise screamed. “I want to know who did it! Don’t you want to know?” She stuck her head up and watched the crowd.
Some folks nodded their heads and some couldn’t care less. Some just wanted to go home. It was no big deal to me. I’d seen that guy before. Twice. I knew all I wanted to know about him.
THE FIRST TIME I saw him was in broad daylight at the baseball field. I always came early to the field, got the key to the equipment shed from A.J., and marked off the foul lines. It was really A.J.’s job to line off the field and cut the grass and hand out ping pong paddles at the Youth Center, but he spent every afternoon on his stool in the back door of the building, drinking bottles of warm beer, looking down the hill at the baseball games. He conned some of us into doing his work for him. “It’s development,” he told us. “I’m letting you develop valuable skills.”
By that summer, I was so developed I could lay down a straight chalk line without having to stretch a string to guide me. I’d get the key from him, open the shed near the snack bar, take out a bag of lime and the rusty push machine. Then, I’d mark off the difference between fair and foul. It was an easy thing to do if you focused your eyes on something way up ahead. If you were at home plate, you needed to look out to the corner of the outfield. Then you walked slow. But if you kept your eyes on your feet and watched the lime trickle out of the machine, you would wander all over the base path.
The afternoon I saw the black boy, I was almost to the outfield grass, dropping the trail of lime behind me, when I smelled something. It was different. It wasn’t the lime dust or the railroad ties or the mowed wild onions. It was cigarette smoke,