My Brother's Keeper (5 page)

Who are pretty much the guys from last year’s team. All except for Jake, who, even though I figure he’s pretty much guaranteed to make the team on account of being the MVP from last year, should’ve been here for tryouts. I try not to think about this, though, since every time I do, I screw up, which just makes me think about it more.

The scrimmage is in the bottom of the third when the catcher, who I remember making an amazing rip-off-the-face-mask foul-ball grab in the top of the fourth at Division Championships last year, jumps up from behind the plate and charges down the line to tag a runner heading toward home. Except that he falls facedown in the dust halfway between home and third. He grabs the back of his leg and makes an injured face.

Coach Gillis comes over and is concerned for about a half a minute, then he starts yelling at the kid for not stretching like he told him to. The assistant coach helps the kid up, and the assistant-assistant student-teacher coach trots over with an
ice
bag. The kid hobbles off the field and Coach Gillis starts shouting for somebody named Truman.

Badowski yells out “Coach! Coach!” which means that for once, everybody—the coach, the assistant coach, the assistant-assistant coach, and even the real players—are looking over at us.

“Truman moved to Florida,” Badowski says.

“Florida?” yells Coach Gillis. “What the hell did he move to Florida for?”

“His dad got a job down there,” says Badowski.

“What am I supposed to do for a backup catcher?”

Badowski shrugs.

The coach looks around the field. Then he calls out my name.

At that point I just about have an advance attack of post-traumatic stress syndrome.

I point to myself in the chest. “Me?”

“You catch, right?”

I nod yes, because I do catch. Then I shake no, because if he’s asking if I catch right the answer is technically no, since I catch left.

“Do you want to catch?” Coach Gillis says. “Yes or no?”

I just stand there.

Arthur shoves me in the back. “He wants to,” he yells. “He played catcher in middle school. And Little League. He definitely wants to.”

That’s the world’s biggest understatement. Being catcher, aside from it having the absolute coolest equipment of any position, is the best spot on the team. The catcher is the one and only guy who—because he’s the one and only guy facing out while the whole rest of the team is facing in—can see the whole game happening right in front of him. The pitcher can’t see anything going on behind him and the guys on the bases and in the outfield can’t see what the pitcher’s doing. Only the catcher can see the whole thing. Which means that being catcher is like being a fan with the best seat in the house while also actually being on the team.

I look over and see the kid who was catcher last year unbuckling his shin guards. Arthur shoves me again, and the next thing I know, I’m walking the 185 miles between where we were drilling and where the real players were playing, trying to decide if I should put the shin guards and the chest pad on right away and not hold things up any more or if I should stretch like the other kid got yelled at for not doing.

Then Coach Gillis announces that everybody should take a water break, which gives me time to stretch. I try to do it in a way that’s obvious enough for him to notice, but subtle enough not to make everybody think I’m sucking up. Then I put on the gear, snap down the face mask, and catch.

Which I don’t suck at.

I don’t do anything amazing. But I also don’t do any of the hundreds of stupid, bonehead, bush-league, game-losing things I could have done. I just catch.

And then practice is over and everyone’s back in the locker room and Arthur makes like he’s going to pick me up for the second time that day—but he doesn’t. Maybe because even he realizes it’s one thing to pick up your friend when no one’s looking, and when you’re celebrating a once-in-a-lifetime event. And it’s another thing entirely to pick up a kid in a locker room full of older guys when all you’re celebrating is one kid getting a pulled hamstring and another kid moving to Florida and me at least not sucking on the first day of tryouts.

Instead, he pulls my socks down, which looks like he’s busting on me, but is his way of saying congratulations on not sucking. And I snap the waistband of his pants, which looks like I’m busting on him, but is me trying to at least say thanks for helping make it happen.

On the way home, I stop by Mr. D’s. He’s online chatting with some guy in Harrisburg who has a Jason Kendall for sale. He tosses me a pack of WarHeads without even looking up.

When he signs off I ask if the guy sold it to him.

He gives me a Yoda look. “Happiness,” he says, running his hand through his Einstein hair, “is having what you want and wanting what you have.”

I don’t come right out and say it, but I’m pretty sure that means the guy wanted more than Mr. D could afford. I hope that’s not because he spent all his money on the Stargell.

“Here to spend some quality time with the Parker?” he asks.

I shake my head. I’m here to tell him that I might not be able to come in on Tuesdays and Thursdays on account of maybe, possibly, hopefully making the team.

Me not coming in probably isn’t an actual problem, since hardly any real customers ever come in except me, but which still makes me worry about how Mr. D’s gonna manage tying up the recycling on his own or reaching the top shelf where the baseball trivia books are, just in the event that some know-it-all kid
does
come in.

He looks at me, then over at my backpack which I dumped by the door when I came in and which has my baseball glove hanging off the strap.

“Tryouts start today?” he says.

I just look at him and wonder how he always knows stuff without me actually telling him.

“Pretty quick for an old guy, don’t you think?”

“Yeah,” I say. “No. I mean, you’re not that old.”

He just smiles.

“It probably won’t happen,” I say. “But if I do, you know, make the team, I might not be able to come in so much.”

“Oh,” he says. “That’s okay.”

“Like maybe not on school days,” I say. “But I can still definitely come on Saturdays, and do the recycling. No matter what.”

Mr. D says okay again.

“Just save all the recycling for then,” I say. “I can do it all on Saturdays, okay?”

Mr. D puts his hand on my shoulder. “Toby,” he says. “I believe you,” he says. “Like I believe in electricity.”

I don’t get it.

He turns the light switch on, then off. “I believe in it even if I don’t see it,” he says.

This is one of those wise, mysterious Yoda-type moments when whatever Mr. D says makes total sense and which I decide to use next time I need something profound and meaningful to put in a book report or something. Although as soon as I’m not with him, I don’t exactly understand it anymore. Which, I guess, is why it’s a wise, mysterious Yoda-type thing.

M
y mom’s car isn’t in the space out in front of our apartment when I get home from Mr. D’s; instead there’s a beat-up white car with a Grateful Dead sticker on the bumper. As soon as I open the door I can see Jake in the den watching TV with Andy Timmons and his goatee, along with some other kid I’ve never seen before. Andy Timmons is sprawled out on the couch and his boots are propped up on our mom’s glass coffee table. The stereo and the TV are both on and bags of chips and Doritos and Cheetos and bottles of Yoohoo and Mountain Dew are lying all over the place.

I stand in the doorway watching them watching TV and waiting for them to move. They don’t. Which reminds me of the time Jake and I spied on a guard at a wax museum, waiting for him to do something like blink his eyes or scratch his butt so we’d be able to tell if he was real or if he was part of the museum. After a while, when all they do is sit there like wax museum people, I go up to my room, which is also Jake’s and Eli’s room, and close the door.

At which point, I turn into psycho ADD housewife—stacking up old copies of
Mad
magazine in chronological order, matching up all the tube socks on the floor, and sorting Eli’s Beanie Babies by species. Then, as soon as I clear a place on the rug, I lie down and listen through the floor to what’s going on downstairs. Which sucks because the rug is scratchy and it smells like gym clothes somebody left in their locker over the weekend and because listening to people who are downstairs eating Cheetos when your stomach upstairs is growling for them makes you even more hungry.

With all the noise from the TV and the stereo, I can only pick up sound effects, not actual words. One of the people downstairs suggests something; I can tell because the other voices go up like they’re agreeing. Someone walks into the kitchen. It gets quiet, then they laugh. I can’t hear what happens next but whatever it is cracks them up even more. Jake’s laughing his insane laugh, the one that used to make me practically wet my pants when I was little.

After a while I wonder why I’m upstairs lying on a scratchy rug that smells like the boys’locker room when I could be downstairs laughing at whatever Jake’s laughing at and eating Cheetos and drinking Mountain Dew. So I get up, kick a few old
Mad
magazines into the spot where I was lying, and go downstairs.

When I walk in, Jake’s grabbing his stomach and laughing without making any noise and Andy Timmons is pointing at the kid I’d never seen before and snickering. The kid, who’s wearing a T-shirt that says “Pissing Off the Whole World, One Person at a Time,” has a red dot in the middle of his forehead and another one in his hair, which you can tell from the look on his face, he knows nothing about. He reminds me of Maurice, this kid down the block who goes to school on one of those little half-buses and who my mom says we aren’t allowed to call retarded.

“What?” the kid says. “What’s so funny?”

The red dots are left over from the yard sale. The Pissing-Off-the-World kid spins around, like Harriet the Horrible used to do when she was chasing her tail, and I notice that there’s a red dot on the butt of his saggy jeans, too. I make a sort of half-laugh/half-cough sound so they know I’m there. Jake looks up.

“Hey, man,” he says. “You’re home.”

He doesn’t sound exactly glad I’m home—which I always am at this time of day—but he doesn’t sound exactly not glad either, so I go in. I sit on the arm of one of the chairs since all the other seats are taken and Mr. Furry is sitting in my usual spot on the couch.

“I don’t get it,” says the kid with the red dots, looking over his shoulder at me. “What?”

While Jake and Andy Timmons are looking at the Pissing-Off-the-World Kid, I dig my hand into the bag of Cheetos. There’s nothing in it except some former Cheeto dust at the bottom. I reach for the bag of chips, which is also empty, then half-laugh/half-cough again to cover up for my stomach growling.

Jake gets up and puts his arm around the kid with the red dots. “Vince, my man,” he says, secretly sticking another dot on his shoulder. “You need to chill.”

“What?” the kid named Vince says again. “I still don’t get it.”

Jake and Andy Timmons laugh like this is the funniest thing they’ve ever seen. It is sort of comical, but not exactly funny, if you ask me, like the way it’s sort of entertaining to watch Maurice playing make-believe games in his front yard all by himself, but which is also sort of weird, too.

I try to act like it’s no big deal, like your brother getting high in your house with a future hardened criminal and a kid who looks like he’s retarded when your terminally stressed-out and possibly fatally ill mom and your completely innocent cowboy-hat-wearing little brother are about to walk in the door any minute is completely normal, and not something that makes you feel like a car alarm is going off inside your head.

I get up, crumple up the Cheeto bag, grab a couple empty cans of Mountain Dew, and head for the trash can in the kitchen, where I hope to get some kind of bright idea that will shut off the car-alarm feeling.

The sound of fake audience applause comes from the TV, then Jake laughs his insane laugh. I step to the doorway of the den to see what’s going on. The red dots are everywhere now. On the couch, the TV, the La-Z-Boy, the coffee table, the lamp, the rug, the magazines. The room is like one big yard sale. And Andy Timmons is standing right in the middle of everything, the package of red dots in one hand, a pen in the other, putting a price tag on our mom’s spider plant. Jake’s slapping his hand on his thigh, the way people do on TV when something’s funny. Vince’s mouth is hanging open, a red dot on the nose of his glasses.

The next thing I know, Andy Timmons is coming toward me, holding out a red dot, which would mean I was for sale like the rest of the furniture.

Except that Andy Timmons walks right past me and toward the Implosion family picture I saved from the real yard sale. He peels a red dot off the pad and goes to put it on the frame.

“Our mother won’t like that,” I say. I sound like a total dweeb loser, like the crabby little kid in
The Cat in the Hat
who freaks out when Thing One and Thing Two fly kites in the house and who keeps saying, “Our mother won’t like this. Not one little bit.” I clear my throat.

“That frame’s worth something,” I say, like that’s a better explanation.

Jake looks at me like I’m a lower life-form. “You need to chill,” he says.

Which is the same thing he said to Vince a minute ago, in a way that you could tell he really liked Vince, even though Vince was acting like one of the kids on Maurice’s bus. But which, when he says it to me, you can tell he is embarrassed of me, even though I’m only acting like myself.

“Mom’ll be home any minute,” I say.

Jake gives me a disgusted look. “God, Toby,” he says. “You are such a dillweed.”

As soon as they leave, I turn into turbo-drive psycho ADD housewife. I get a new trash bag from under the kitchen sink, dump all the soda cans and ashes and everything else, tie it up, and carry it outside. Just to be safe, I take it across the parking lot and throw it in the Dumpster.

Then I peel the stickers off the furniture so they won’t be there when our mom gets home, which makes me think of the mother in
The Cat in the Hat
again. You never actually see her. You just see the bow on the tip of her high-heeled shoe when she comes home after the mess is all cleaned up. “Did you children have fun?” she says. “Tell me. What did you do?”

The cranky little kid just sits there. “Should we tell her about it?” he says. “Now what should we do?” Then he looks right at you while you’re reading the book. “What would
you
do
if
your mother asked
you?”

T
hat night my mom’s giggling on the telephone. Which is weird because she doesn’t laugh that much anymore, especially when the phone rings. She says it’s usually someone trying to get her to buy something or somebody trying to get her to pay for something she already bought. It’s also weird because it isn’t her normal Mom laugh. It’s more like the way girls in my class put their hands over their mouths and giggle when certain guys walk by in the lunchroom. Jake’s one of those guys.

“I just can’t,” she says. “There’s no one to watch the boys.” She twirls the phone cord around her fingers, then twirls herself around the cord. “Okay, okay,” she says. “I guess so. Just for a little while. “She giggles again, then says good-bye and I go back to pretending to read the sports section.

She sort of half-walks/half-runs through the room, then disappears upstairs, humming. After a while I follow her upstairs to find out what’s going on.

By the time I get there, she’s in her room with the door shut. Jake and Eli are in our room playing Nintendo. I pull my baseball card binder down from the shelf and sit down at the desk and look at the Stargell for the zillionth time.

There’s only one word that comes close to describing the way the Stargell makes me feel. Rich. Not rich like the Food King or like Arthur, but like I have something that makes me special.

After a while, our mom peeks in. Her hair is in some kind of weird upswept style like a bride’s and she’s wearing a clingy red top, a black skirt, and high heels.

“Does this make me look fat?” she says, checking herself out in the mirror.

To tell you the truth, the red top is sticking to her chest in a way that makes me feel shy just looking at her. But at least she doesn’t look like maybe she’s secretly dying of an incurable disease. “No,” I say. “You look good, Mom.”

She smoothes her skirt across her hips, then shrugs. “Jake,” she says. “Put that thing on pause for a minute.”

Jake and Eli keep playing, so she has to step over all the
Mad
magazines and tube socks and Beanie Babies which are all over the place again, and stand in front of the Nintendo, blocking their
view.
Eli groans. Jake elbows him to shut up.

“Now,” she says. “You boys listen to Jake. Do whatever he tells you. I’ll be back soon. Okay?”

Jake whistles. “You look foxy, Ma,” he says.

“You think so?”

I wonder what’s different about him telling her she looks good and me telling her, but decide not to say anything.

She kisses us each good-bye, smelling all flowery and hopeful and leaving lipstick gunk on my cheek which I wait to wipe off till she’s gone, and then I go back to staring at the Stargell and feeling rich.

A
fter a while, Jake sets the controller on the rug, stands up, and leans over me.

“How come you’re always staring at that card?” he says.

I shut the binder.

“I don’t know.”

“I mean, aren’t kids your age supposed to be looking at pictures of Britney Spears or something?”

Britney Spears is definitely okay and all but I don’t exactly see the point of a guy like me thinking about a girl like her. But I figure this is probably as good a time as any to ask Jake stuff about girls, in particular about how a person starts talking to one, like, for instance, Martha MacDowell. I want to tell him about how she smells like clean laundry and about how her hair looks like butterscotch syrup, but that sounds like I think she’s a pile of clothes or a maybe a dessert.

“Hey, Jake,” I say. “What does a person do if he wants another person, like maybe someone in that person’s grade, to talk to him?”

Jake frowns at me. “You just talk.”

I decide to get more specific. “What if the person gives you a certain look?”

He gives
me
a certain look—like I’m an idiot.

“You know, not a normal look,” I say. “A look that might mean something.”

“Tobe,” he says. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

The next thing I know he’s putting on his jean jacket. He opens his bottom dresser drawer, pulls out a small plastic bag, and kicks the drawer shut with his foot.

He’s partway out the front door when I run to the top of the steps and yell out to him.

“What do you want?” he says.

I don’t know what I want, but I clear my throat like I’m about to deliver the State of the Union address. Then I stand there and say exactly nothing.

Jake turns to leave.

“Where’re you going?” I say.

Jake scans the street. “Out.”

“On a school night?” Somehow I’ve turned into our mom, except not even she says anything that lame.

He opens the plastic bag, pulls out a tiny blue pill and sets it on his tongue.

“What’s that?”

Jake doesn’t say anything.

“What did you just take?”

He sticks out his tongue where the little blue pill is dissolving. “Acid.”

Taking acid, I know from Mr. Fontaine’s videos, is a lot worse than getting stoned. People on acid walk out of thirty-six-story windows or dive into pools with no water or step in front of Mack trucks. The car alarm is blaring so loud I can hardly think but I make a grab for Jake’s arm, planning to put him in a headlock until he spits it out.

Except that he sidesteps me and my hand just grabs thin air. Then he’s gone and I’m looking at him through the window as he steps over Tonto and crosses the parking lot.

There’s nothing to do except go back upstairs and watch Eli watch TV.

It’s quiet and creepy with just the two of us home. Eli turns around and looks at me. “Where is everybody?”

I shrug.

Eli wraps his blankie around his shoulders and starts to put his thumb in his mouth. He stops, though, when he realizes I’m looking at him.

I don’t quite know what to do, but I know it should be some sort of big-brother-role-model-type thing. “You wanna play Nintendo?”

“You’ll give me a head start?” he says. You can tell he’s sort of embarrassed to have to ask on account of him liking to think he’s just as good as me.

“Sure.”

He puts on his cowboy hat, which he says is for good luck, hands me the controller, and we start playing. Except that I’m only playing with the half of my brain that’s not wondering if Jake’s okay and where our mom is and what’s going on around here.

So I forget to let Eli get ahead of me and I win.

Eli gets up and switches off the game. Then he pulls his yellow blankie over his head. Which means he’s probably under there sucking his thumb. Which makes me feel like a complete jerk for making an eight-year-old so stressed out that he’s back to sucking his thumb under his blankie.