Just North of Nowhere (36 page)

In two weeks the Rolling River Valley Consolidated Middle Schools baseball Catbirds had become a different bunch. Attitude with a chip. Ambition without talent. Bad boys with bats and hard, hardballs. All bushers, boneheads and not a topnotcher on the bench. Jill didn't even
like
them anymore, not as players, not as kids.

What the hell? It couldn't be Ruth! Ruth had them for, what? Five minutes? They went in. They were gone ten minutes tops. They came out dazed and wandered home. Next day they were back at practice and wanted to
be
! Be
something
! Be something they weren't: brave, bold, tough, hard, couthless, colorful. All because of five afternoon minutes with Ruth Potter? Ten minutes tops. Never!

“I’m helping them to see the game,” Ruth said. “To see the game; the way it was played.

“Picture books, movie videos, what...?”

“Field work. Send Arthur Eyestein!”

That was it. Arthur went, came back a son-of-a-bitch pain in the ass.

Roy came back odder, was all.

Leslie squinted more. And smiled a lot more. Licked her lips. Wouldn't talk to anyone. Except Roy. Not unusual, that. But when they talked, they talked harder. The two sat, end of the bench, the stat-book open across their laps, under their elbows. They hissed whispers, nose-to-nose above the pages. Same as always, but the whispers were louder. Sometimes they burst into loud words and silences. Sometimes there was sulking and arm punches.

Pie-time was a mess. A pleasant hour of friendship reaffirmed after mutual humiliation, had become broiling adolescence and booming chest thumps, all within catching distance of juicy pie and sharp forks.

Their game hadn't improved, but the Catbirds had become, at least, interesting. Curious folks came to watch the team eat itself alive. Parents came, hands wringing hands, teeth clenching, wondering what the bruises, scuffed knuckles and torn uniforms were all the heck about. Yingers and Youngers sat at opposite ends of the bleachers and didn't talk. They left the park, leaving a good long Bluffton block between families.

After two weeks of strutting school, his dislocated arm in a sling and his broken nose shining like an egg in a nest of bandage, Dar Grimm returned to practice styling, chomping to get back into the lineup.

He'd picked a new nickname: “Crab.” Despite the opportunity it gave Utility Walter to mutate Crab's 'b' to an exploded 'p', Dar Grimm slipped the name into the school vocabulary after
his
visit to the library.

His new personality in a nutshell: “Got my eyes on youse! All yez!” he said. “You get away with no shit on my watch!”

That, and his preening. Every chance the world gave him, “Crab” posed; he modeled for mirrors, plate glass windows, make-believe news cameras, he styled for knots of girls, other students in the cafeteria. Wherever he went, he practiced moving to the sound of a crowd, practiced acknowledging cheers, practiced a casual lean and his imagined post-homerun trot of the bases. He kept four, five sticks of gum wadded in his cheek at all times. “What folks's essptect!” he said.

He also worked his game face, what he called his “long-distance freezin' frown to make the batter's pants run brown!”

Jill hated him, hated them all, each one, this bunch of bushers, boneheads, and bottom-drawers. How, in so short a time, had she come to despise her team's faces, voices, walks and, cripes, their smell? Two weeks before, they'd been good kids? Ball hadn't been much fun, but it was baseball; a sort of baseball anyway. Now her guts boiled whenever she got near the field or passed a Catbird in the hall. Forget trying to teach anything.

Leslie stopped by Jill's classroom one stormy afternoon.

“You're going to have to talk to Roy,” she said.

Jill stared. “I am?”

“He's quitting.”

News to Jill. Roy had been almost the same as always. Considering the changes, he'd been a rock of fortitude.

“He's scared more than usual.”

“Scared?”

“He sees things. He always has. It's what he does.”

There was a long moment. Summer thunder rumbled down the bluffs. The sky was green with rolling clouds.

“Things?”

“He's scared of the...” She stopped.

“'The'?”

“Monsters. Things.”

“Leslie,” Jill began.

“Like I said, it's what he does. He sees things.”

“Sees monsters?”

“And things.”

“Monsters and things?”

“And he says they're too many now. Out in the field, now. He can take a few. Now there are too many around the guys.”

Jill slapped her hands on the desk. Not hard, enough to stop things for a second. “Leslie? Does Rolf know how... How strange you are?”

Leslie squinted.

“Leslie, I have no idea what you're talking...”

“Roy sees things that're there, but aren't. There used to be nothing for most of the team. Roy says the things come when you're older, he says, or when you're real little. You know, monsters in the closet, under the bed?” A flicker of lightning played across her face. “You know? The real bad things come when your old, I think. Now, there's lots he says. Lots he doesn't like.” She stopped again and looked out the window. “I don't see them, but I know what he means. I'm a witch, you know?”

“I've heard…”

“And Roy doesn't like this, and I'm trying to make them go away, but he says they're from the library and someplace else...” Leslie leaned close. She smelled a little like skunk cabbage, a little like strawberries. It wasn't too bad. “From the past!” she whispered. “From the pictures. There were some in the library when we went. He didn't go on Mizz Potter's trip because of them. He wouldn't. I did, and, wow, he said, more came back with us.”

Jill stared at the tip of Leslie's nose. “'Trip...?'“

“You're going to have to make him rethink.”

Jill stared. Shook her head. Thunder rumbled. “Miss Potter's trip...?”

“He's outside.”

Roy came in.

“Tell her,” Leslie said. She perched her butt on the edge of Jill's desk and turned her back, took herself out of the conversation but stayed close.

Looks almost prim
, Jill thought.

“I quit,” Roy said.

“Because of the ‘things’?”

He pinched his lips and his eyes flickered to Leslie's back.

Jill spat it out in her teacher voice. “What is going on here? What in the hell is going on?” She rose. Six-plus feet of English-teaching coach towered over the children. Her front-of-the-room face slipped into pissed-off Jill.

“Jesus on a pogo, what the shit is happening to you all? What the hell are you talking about, monsters? And what the hell is this 'trip' at the library? Ruth Potter’s trip?” This last was at the top of her coach voice, ball-freezing eyes burrowed into Roy's face and Leslie's back.

Classroom fluorescents flickered as thunder whammed on top of a three-finger lightning chain that stepped among the trees on the edge of the campus. A sheet of sudden rain burst on the windows.

Roy's eyes followed something across the ceiling and down the wall behind Jill. Without taking his eyes from it, he leaned toward Leslie. Without looking, Leslie reached behind and took his hand.

Jill turned. There was nothing. Nothing. Nothing at all! Not a Goddamned thing…

...but there was something. Something crawled in the emptiness Roy's eyes had painted across the wall.

“Roy?”

“Ask Miss Potter,” he said. “They're her ghosts.”

Jill jogged to the library between downpours. Without the storm there would have been summer daylight. With it, deep green night steeped the day, a chill of autumn breathed in the air. When she arrived, Jill was sweat wet and damp with drizzle. She took the library steps at a single jump.

The place was locked, the shades down, but warm light glowed from the high narrow windows around the upper gallery. Ruth answered on the third knock. “Wondered how long you'd be,” she said and stepped aside as fresh rain swept the street behind Jill.

Ruth Potter sat across the oak table at the back of the reading room. A grandfather clock ticked ponderously in the dark over her shoulder. A sonorous mechanical escapement ratcheted time from one side of eternity to the other. The clock seemed slower than passing seconds.

A glass photographic plate lay on the table between them. Framed in dark wood, a small white spot on the edge bore a note in faded ink. Jill couldn't make out the details of the picture, but it seemed to be of people, people on a field, playing a game possibly. Probably old, from a time when glass carried pictures.

“Here, have this.”

Ruth shoved a plastic drinking glass into Jill's hand. A half-inch of oily yellow liquid sloshed inside.

“What?”

“Aquavit. Don't worry, I didn't give it to the kids. They were ready to accept this. You're not. I know I wasn't when I first slipped through.”

“Slipped...?”

“Through, yes. Don't worry. It won't hurt. You can't do it yourself, I don't think. But I can take you. You have to hold my hand on the way. Or I have to hold yours...” Ruth's mouse-dry hand covered Jill's big mitt. “Take some aquavit. Just to relax.”

Jill sniffed the stuff. Heady, spice-smelling. She tasted it. Thick. “Cardoman?” she asked. “Smells like my granddad...”

“Take it all,” Ruth said, and picked up the photograph. “I want you to know: This...” she waved the plate. “It's all real, and it all takes just
that
long!”

The clock ground out a long thump as five o'clock chimes began.

Jill downed the thick stuff. Across the table, Ruth Potter became summer heat, she dissolved to sunlight and a long view...

...of the baseball field at Elysium Park. The lingering scent of cardoman morphed into air that smelled of horse dung, dirt, dust, and bees. Wet heat wrapped her in a damp blanket of summer. The silence of the library washed away in the passion and shouted joys of a ball game...a play in progress...a high ball descending into the outfield...men running, shouting to take the thing from the air...the crowd howling to shove it further along...beyond the grip of converging fielders. And...

...beyond the white-lime diamond, the rushing men and falling ball, the grass flowed into the outfield and far beyond, a green carpet cut and rolled all the way to the trees. It was so close to Elysium, yet not. There were no houses along the park's edge. No! One. Almost lost in trees, was the old Victorian that retired doctor had fixed up. The place stood alone. Different. The colors different. A stable in back. Nothing else near. None of the houses that had been there...there for years.

Above, on top of the bluffs, stood a vast rambling stone house. Damn near a castle. From where she sat, Jill could just make out its tops and turrets.

“Burroughs’s house...” Ruth Potter pointed with her chin at the house on the cliff. “The photographer.” She had to shout above the crowd. “The man who built that, took this picture.”

Jill couldn't keep her eyes on one place, the game, the house, houses, trees, Ruth, field, or people. She drank it all. The field! The field! Her eyes grabbed and held. The field was different. Was the same. Dimensions the same, that hadn't changed. No, it was baseball. Same as always. And different. No chain link backstop behind home plate. A low split-rail fence separated the crowd from the catcher, batter, umpire, the game. The fence offered no protection from missed pitches or spinning fouls. It simply marked a border: “Beyond here is Baseball” it said!

Twenty feet off the third base line, where now – where in Jill’s “now” – visitor’s busses parked, where moms and dads waited in station wagons – now a sun-bleached white canvas pavilion stood on flattened grass. Its canvas top bellied out in the breeze, sagged in the stillness. The tent was filled with people. Their noise spilled onto the grass, onto the field. People mingled, drank steins of beer, smoked cigars. The crowd filled the hot blue white afternoon and flies filled the air.

Jill's eyes kept moving. She licked her lips and tasted the memory of aquavit and a “now” of dust. Dust was everywhere at once.

And the base lines: The lines stretched forever. The trees at the far end of the field seemed the same...or more distant, she didn't know...they were not, but seemed!

The field dwarfed but embraced the trees, the distance.

And the game was not of children, but of men. Big men. Their voices bullied away above the crowd, cement and gravel in the player’s throats and calls. Threats and flashes sounded on the field and around her.

Jill's butt perched on wood, on bleachers of wood that once – or later were, or would be – metal, aluminum, but now were of wood. On the field! The men. She heard them move, could smell them. From the top of the stands, surrounded by others in the heat of the day, July, August, maybe, Jill breathed tobacco, tobacco smoked or spat, and the friendly reek of beer, the sweat of beer and labor and clothes not washed this week, this month, and breath, breath exhaled from meaty guts and hair pomade and other smells of men a century gone.

Ruth Potter's hand still covered hers.