From the shadows on the other side of the circle: “My daddy says he ain’t really dead.”
“I don’t care.” Cal was breathing hard now. He was walking around the circle, having some trouble talking. “I want them people over there taken care of. He stabbed his finger toward the tracks. “Line them up and take care of them.”
By then, some of the other kids were beginning to like the idea of having Hitler back in the land of the living. Hitler was no Marilyn Monroe. He was no mystery. Everyone knew exactly who he was. We’d heard the stories of Hitler, how he bombed or shot or burned down the things he didn’t particularly like. He would have no trouble destroying Nicholtown, turning it into a pile of ash and hot tin. Cal would probably show him the quickest way across the tracks. Once they got there, I knew they would be able to find the black boy, and I imagined what would happen when he came face to face with Hitler. I stared at the candle in the circle and wondered if he would laugh and blow smoke at Hitler’s head.
I don’t want to hear no shit about you, the black boy might tell Hitler. You ain’t nothing to me.
I said to Cal, “You know these things ain’t for real. Hitler ain’t coming back.”
“I aim to get me this nigger,” he whispered.
“Just because you’re too slow to get out of the way of a rock ain’t no reason to send some ghost of Hitler across the tracks,” I said under my breath.
Cal came around the circle at me. “Slow’s got nothing to do with it. You afraid what might happen if I get Hitler back here? You a nigger lover or something?”
Before I could say anything, Cal spit on me. I saw it coming from up above me, like a tiny, gray bullet in the candle light. But I couldn’t dodge it. It hit me softly below the eye.
“See?” he said, wiping his mouth carefully so he wouldn’t disturb his stitches. “Slow has got nothing to do with it.” He ran toward the street, in the direction of his house.
For a couple of minutes no one said a word. They all watched me clean my face with my t-shirt. Kathleen finally said, “I’d just as soon not have Hitler in the back yard anyway. Besides, if he isn’t really dead, we’d just be wasting our time. We know Marilyn Monroe’s dead as a doornail, so why don’t we call her back?”
Kathleen tried her best to make Marilyn appear. She talked up to the sky. I was listening hard, trying to hear if Cal was really gone. A breeze blew out the candle and Kathleen dug her fingers into my palm. But Marilyn never showed. Reverend Welch came to the screen door and yelled at us. Told us all to go home and say our prayers.
I PEDALED FOR home, keeping an eye out for dogs that might run from the ditches. And for Cal, too. I thought he might be worked up enough to try something, even though he’d already spit on me. A block from the Youth Center, I noticed the glow, a dirty layer of gold that spread out in the air above the trees. A.J. had left the lights on again.
I propped my bike at the front of the Center. It was dark inside the building, but I’d been there enough to know where all the ping pong tables were. I weaved toward the back door and there sat A.J., leaning back a little on his stool, several empty beer bottles scattered at his feet. He was gazing off in the direction of the field. He tipped a bottle to his mouth.
He didn’t turn when I walked up and stood beside his stool. He just kept staring at the field and said, “He showed up. Outta nowhere. Showed up and started.”
I looked down the slope. The black boy was there, under the lights. He was running the bases with his shirt off. He was barefooted. He was playing his own game. He would stand in the batter’s box, check his stance, and swing at an imaginary pitch. Then he would head for first base, round the bag, and try to stretch it into a double. I saw him slide, hooking his shin perfectly on second base.
I could barely hear his feet padding on the infield. The sound coming so late after the sight made me think that this wasn’t really happening. The black boy was all of the batters, the whole team. Sometimes he struck out. Once, he hit an imaginary home run and rounded the bases in a slow trot. He waved to the crowd. He waved to the tracks. I think he even waved at us.
THE LONG SUMMER I DABBLED IN RELIGIOUS ECSTASY, Eddie Baxley’s 1972 gray Lincoln Continental was the only thing in our neighborhood with decent air conditioning. This was the big, heavy model with suicide doors, the ones hinged toward the middle of the car, in the wrong place, it seemed to me. Once the weather went full-on hot in mid-June, my father spent most of his afternoons in the Lincoln. He’d fill an empty spackling bucket with Old Milwaukee cans and ice chips and march (a military pace with as much good posture as he could muscle) across the street to Eddie’s yard, where the Lincoln sat large and looming on the little rise above the sidewalk. Eddie Baxley owned a garage for years and years, so he’d run across good deals on nice cars every month or so. The Lincoln he got for a steal. An old lady from Andrews let it run empty of oil and the engine seized just off Highway 527. She told Eddie she’d had enough of big, ugly cars and he could have the Lincoln for five hundred dollars. Eddie died six months after he got the Lincoln running again. Between Christmas and New Year’s, a heart attack hit him while he lay on his mechanics creeper beneath a Ford pickup with a bad transaxle. My father slid him out by his bare white ankles and said he’d never seen a more surprised look on a dead man’s face, like he’d discovered something important, like a new country.
I’ve never known whose idea it was to park the Lincoln in Eddie’s yard and sit in the waves of cold air and watch the neighborhood shimmer in the heat on the other side of the windshield. But it sounds like something my father would’ve dreamed up. He was a smart man, smart enough to never put decent skin in any game he happened to play. Which is why I can see him talking Eunice Baxley into making the Lincoln the coldest place on our street and letting him set up shop with his bucket of beer. But it might’ve been her idea. She had been a stranger to the outside world since her husband died under the Ford. Maybe she arrived at the point that she just wanted someone to talk to. Because as far as we could tell, that’s what my father and Eunice did in the front seat of the Lincoln—talk away the afternoons while the cool air blew on them.
They kept the windows cracked so they wouldn’t die. And they didn’t have to worry about wasting gas because they got all they needed for free, from McGill’s Esso station out on Highway 52. The entire town knew Mr. McGill had family money and ran the Esso station for fun. At least that’s what my old man said. Mr. McGill sipped Old Crow and Sprite from a coffee mug most of the day, so when it came time to close down the station and turn off the lights, he could never seem to remember to shut off the pumps. He would walk away and leave things running all night. My old man would sneak over to the Esso station long after dark and fill the big tank on the Lincoln. He wasn’t the only one. A dozen or so people in town knew that McGill was too buzzed to shut down his pumps at closing time, and they helped themselves to some fuel as well. Everybody said McGill could spare a little, with all he had. I have come to understand now that these people saw the free gasoline as reparations for a long-since-gone offense of some nature. It was an easy, innocent revenge.
When I had twenty-five cents I felt I could part with, I sat in the back seat of the Lincoln and listened to my dad and Eunice talk. It reminded me of a kind of church. They talked in low tones, in that adult code that I had only begun to decipher. I thought if I sat there long enough, the words would start to mean something important, something I hadn’t learned to figure out by myself. My mother had dragged me with her to the Kingstree Methodist Church every Sunday morning for as long as I could remember. The words there were different, all wrapped up in stained glass and candle wax and little bread cubes on a tray. There, I listened to Reverend Scoggins talk about God and the Devil and the existence of miracles in the real world. And when I had a quarter in my pocket, I listened to Eunice Baxley rant about the weather her husband tolerated in Korea and to my dad go on