Elegy on Kinderklavier (7 page)

•

What do I remember?

John Hedis is lost on patrol. He hasn't meant to get lost, but there he is, in the alleyways and the narrow streets (that are indistinguishable, in parts, from alleyways), and he is lost. Only Reeter is there with him. Reeter—against the wishes of the unit, which is holed up in a building while they try to figure out where in the hell they lost Hedis along the way—has broken off on his own, because he thinks he knows where Hedis vanished from the group. He is sure that he saw that towering hulk of John Hedis's body wandering, his big, dumb face distracted, slightly off route as they went through the big open square where the villagers were having their bazaar. Reeter is pretty sure John Hedis got flustered when that kid came up to him and tried to sell him the lighters with the picture of the planes crashing into the towers on them, and when John Hedis looked up, the line of his squad were nowhere to be seen.

It's not really John Hedis's fault. Things have gotten pretty relaxed with their new assignment (not yet in Fallujah): just a small village, in the middle of nowhere, no real history of insurgent activity.
This feels closer to what they were really qualified to do, as reserves: that is, to walk around with their weapons on safety and nod and smile at the Iraqis.

But then there is the chattering teeth of small arms fire, at once distant and close, and both Reeter and Hedis are now apart from the unit—a major screwup in standard operating procedure—and Reeter begins to run. He rounds the corner and there is John Hedis looking, bewildered, up at the towering wall of an apartment block above him. And there is more small arms fire, and then the muffled concussion of a grenade going off, somewhere back in the direction where the rest of the men are.

Reeter grabs Hedis by the equipment harness and pulls him into the nearest doorway. They collapse to the floor behind some tables and as the dim light resolves, they see they are in, of all places, a bakery. Flour hangs in the air, coats their faces, their arms. Reeter does not think it is a good idea to go back to where the other men are engaged with the insurgents, by the sound of it. The back-and-forth reports go on and on. How terrified they are, in the bakery listening to the destruction outside, half-expecting the walls to come crashing down on them. Afternoon stretches into dusk, then evening, then night.

Reeter wakes Hedis up by shaking him, whispers that it's time to go. Together, they make their way slowly through the streets back toward the building the unit was holed up in, hoping they are still there. The village has become a zone of intense battle, by the look of it. They pass three buildings in a row on fire, not a person in sight. The air is searing hot as they pass, but they cannot get away from it, only hurry through.

Then they are back at the building, and the men are still inside, and the man on guard, Pat Lincoln, stands up from his crouch and stares at them. What? Reeter says. What? Hedis says. Lincoln approaches and begins to pick at their skin. Reeter feels something breaking off and Lincoln holds it up for him to see. The flour had mixed with their
sweat as they lay. When they walked by the fire, the heat baked it: thin lines of bread, right there on their skin.

But Samuel isn't even really listening anymore. The boys in the bleachers after practice look about half-impressed, half in wonder, except for Samuel. Big Hilton Hedis looks so happy he might cry. Reeter won't look anyone in the face.

•

On the mound I remember Samuel's great unthinking. There's lots of space on a baseball diamond, and even with his cleats sinking into the potting-soil mound I could see there was a sort of rapture in the lonely field. Around about four innings in it would suddenly feel like he was a great distance away from the other players, Brother Reeter leaning back into the shadows of the dugout, the handful of curious Bible counselors or little kids in the stands fading into an unfocused blend of color and light, and he would—there was no other way of saying it—more or less forget what he was doing out there. He still threw, sending the ball hissing through the air where he knew no batter from St. Pius X or Veritas Academy could hit it, and he still felt the ball appear back in the smooth leather of his glove after Hilton's mindless throws, but he thought a lot about the desert, what it must look like to the insurgents, perched high in his imagination on rock outcroppings, as they watched a speeding convoy pass, kicking up a dust cloud below, as they whispered into a handheld radio.

He cycled his pitches, gripping the seams, letting the ball slide off his fingers as necessary; the other team would eventually figure out what was coming, but it didn't matter. He always finished on his curve, what Hilton called his cliff ball for the way it dropped, seeing as the ball left his hand what the terrorists must be seeing: the convoy stopped below,
his father getting out of the lead vehicle, the unseen man crouched above, raising his rifle just as the pitch, which had first appeared to the frightened batter to be coming right at his face, dropped into Hilton's glove in the center of the strike zone, the innocent kid looking up into the ump's growling face as if hurt by the idea of a world where a projectile could change so quickly. Then the inning would be over and Samuel would be blinking as Hilton flipped the ump the ball and jogged toward the dugout, laughing his big loon laugh, saying, “WOE BE TO HIM WHO CALLS A STRIKE A BALL AND A BALL A STRIKE.”

I'm imagining this, of course, how it was for him. He certainly never talked about it, then or later, and so there is now a kind of truth to what I think it must've been like, as I seem to be the only person who still thinks about that season at all. It really was something to behold, him up there on the mound, which had begun to look like a dark wound on the dirt. Is there anything more full of the bumbling divine grace, anything further from what life will make of a person, than a fifteen-year-old boy in summer?

That is how the days more or less passed, anyway, Samuel pitching in his trance until he couldn't anymore, then us losing as I watched from the bleachers, the late afternoon quiet ringing in my ears. But then, on the seventh Saturday of the summer, Hilton Hedis's father stepped on an improvised explosive device wired to three pounds of plastic explosive, and we took the tail end of a doubleheader against the Good Harvest Baptists for our very first win of the season.

•

Hilton's tape is particularly hard to watch, because he keeps looking up at the boys after each punch like he's sorry, like he doesn't understand, and he cries and cries.

•

At some point I sat with Samuel in the airless little town library on a Saturday afternoon so he could use the free Internet. He was showing me videos of IEDs going off in Baghdad, pictures of Kalashnikovs. He pulled up a long list of names, and pointed to one.

“This is the one they're fighting in Fallujah,” he said, pointing to a line that read: The Badr Brigade.

“What does that mean?” I said. “The badr brigade? What's a badr?”

Samuel leaned back.

“In Arabic it means ‘full moon,' apparently,” Samuel said. He laughed. “We're like knockoffs,” he said. “We're like the half-moon brigade. We're the half-moon martyrs' brigade,” he said again, distantly.

Later that day, or maybe the next Saturday, Marly put down her fork at dinner and leaned forward, steepling her hands, her elbows on the table.

“Where have you ever even been?” she said to me. “Have you ever thought about that?”

At some point, by some miracle, we won enough games to get the last spot in the regional playoffs.

•

The game was on a Sunday, and church that morning was packed with double the usual crowd; the families and fans of the Athens' First Baptist Blasters looking slightly uncomfortable in our Church of the Holy Sepulcher (of the One True Congregation of the Savior
and Nazarene). Brother Reeter was supposed to give the special blessing at the end of services that day, in honor of the game, but he was missing the whole morning. Instead, Elder Peters had to get up and extemporize with some well-meaning verses. He seemed cheered by it, his voice rising as he went on about being the “shepherds of all that flies in the field” and avoiding “the errors that let our objects pass by our hands in distraction.”

Brother Reeter didn't show at warm-ups either, though we didn't talk about it. None of us were talking much by then.

There are times in Kansas at the end of the summer when the land offers itself like an upturned palm, when the green and the air seem somehow elevated, overwhelming, and the late afternoon of that playoff game was like that. Both makeshift stands were full, and people had brought out lots of lawn chairs and large glass jugs of lemonade that they shared as they fanned themselves. They must have cheered at times during those first four innings, but mostly I just remember the quiet, heavy and flat, that seemed to have come over everything.

Samuel was pitching solidly, the ball cracking into Hilton's glove, sometimes the Athens' Bible batters visibly flinching at the sound. Seven innings in and he was throwing a perfect game: no hits, no walks, almost all strikes too.

Samuel didn't want to drift into the place he was used to going. He tried to focus on the particular details of each batter before he threw, tried to keep his mind there—he was tired of the desert, of ghosting behind the insurgents as they moved according, even in his head, to some mysterious design.

By the bottom of the seventh inning it was still tied, and all the uninitiated in the stands had by this time had it explained to them what a no-hitter was, what a perfect game meant in its spectacular rarity.

There were two outs and Samuel had run up a full count on the batter he was facing when he saw him. He threw a fastball and the
kid in the batter's box meekly presented his bat and by sheer luck the ball nicked the barrel and glanced off high, popping up straight down the third-base line.

I don't know why Samuel didn't look. He just stayed facing forward, while everyone in the crowd rose to their feet as one, craning to see if the ball would stay fair and ruin his perfect performance or drop safely into foul territory. Once he realized what was going on Reeter must've waited, hanging back, not wanting to show himself, not wanting to ruin at least this small thing for Samuel. But Reeter couldn't help it when that ball went up and the game was in the balance, and he took a small step to lean out around the corner of the stands he'd been standing behind and the dark green of his Casualty Affairs uniform gave him away.

His hands were clasped in an official-looking manner in front of him. The black of his military beret and his carefully polished shoes seemed very dark against the trees and the grass. As the ball fell safely foul and everyone relaxed, regaining their seats, most of the crowd looked at Samuel to see his reaction, his perfect game saved. Brother Reeter did too, by reflex, his body already moving back to where he'd been hidden. But he saw that Samuel was looking at him, saw that Samuel had seen him, and I watched a small cloud of frustration pass over Reeter's face before it went blank and he looked down and away and I knew that he had the manila envelope, and that he was waiting there for Samuel, for Samuel's mother, to be done.

Samuel Lincoln only paused a moment. Then he threw a blistering fastball that the batter fanned at hopelessly and the inning was over. While we were at bat in the eighth, the people in the stands must've realized that Brother Reeter was there and seen his uniform, because a kind of quiet swept over them. We kept on playing but nobody cheered. Around me in the stands, nobody said anything.

Samuel threw and threw, his breath hard and flat. He didn't wait
for Hilton's signals: it was all straight fastballs anyway. Around him the sky drew itself up for dusk, the air going watery and bluish, shadows gathering themselves in the corn and under the trees. Tiny birds played in the grass of the outfield, occasionally rising in a shifting, hovering form, as if to a soundless call. In the distance, behind the stands, the waters of Galilee Lake winked in the long sun.

The eighth inning passed, and the ninth, and the tenth. Brother Reeter had solemnly stepped out into full view after I'd seen him, and he stood now, watching silently. There was some discussion among the Athens coaches after the tenth inning, as if they didn't want to let the game go any further, like it was cruel now, but Samuel was already back on the mound, not even waiting for the batters, slamming the ball to Hilton again and again. When the first batter stepped up, it barely broke his rhythm.

In the top of the eleventh, Hilton floated a long fly ball over the corn for a home run. In the bottom Samuel struck out the three batters he faced in a row. The game was over and people began to get up from their seats, but Samuel hadn't stopped throwing. Hilton obediently stayed in place. Everyone was quiet. He just kept throwing. After about ten pitches, the batter who would've been next stepped up to the plate. Then the next. As each one struck out the next stepped up, the whole Athens team cycling quietly through again and again. After a while the majority of the crowd got up and petered away, averting their eyes as they went. A while later the rest of our team trotted slowly in from the field, then sat down on the bench to watch. They were followed by the umpire, who wordlessly stripped his gear. Samuel didn't look at anyone.

The Athens batters kept going, their coaches standing silently, their arms crossed. I don't know how long this went on. Samuel was doing something else by then, the pitching steps raveled into a suite of movement, a semaphore for nothing.