Sophomore Campaign (17 page)

“I hear they have some kickass chili,” Pee Wee said, trying desperately to inject some levity into the abject circumstance.

“I sure hope so,” Lester said, frowning at the pile of dirty dishes visible behind the counter. “I sure hope so.”

The three of them sat down on the cracked red leather cushions and surveyed the menu in cursory fashion, especially Mickey, who had placed his down almost instantly in order to address the most recent thought blooming in his mind.

“Mickey is awful sorry about the way some folks is treating you, Lester,” Mickey said.

“Thank you Mick. But it's okay. I'm alright. I'll be fine.”

Lester felt the emptiness of the room and his tenuous place in the menacing world brim full of transitory hope and warmth.

“You know, Mickey had it kind of rough when he first arrived,” Pee Wee commented. “I mean, not as bad as this, but it was tough.”

“That right, Mick?” Lester asked. “Murph mentioned that only briefly. What'd they do to you anyway?”

“Aw, it weren't so bad. Called me some names. Played tricks on me sometimes. Then they beat me up some. It weren't so bad.”

“How'd you handle all that, Mick?” Lester asked.

“Don't reckon I know,” the boy replied. “Don't ever think about that none.”

Pee Wee's mind alighted with a frivolous thought. “Well,
I
can help you with that one, Lester,” he said. “But I don't think it's gonna do you much good.”

He went on to explain how Mickey would sometimes “zone
out—enter a world that nobody else was privileged to. He described the rocking and glassy eyes, and of course, the robotic recitation of the poem by Walter de la Mare. “So you see,” he continued, “all you have to do is learn that poem, and maybe you can shut out all the crap as well, Lester.”

The bemused catcher smiled.

“Yeah, maybe I should try that. What do ya say, Mick? Will ya teach me?”

Lester and Pee Wee laughed, but Mickey was somewhere else, his gaze fastened on a small bowl with the name Lucky on the front that sat on the floor next to the counter. “Hey, Mick,” Pee Wee said louder. “Do you think you could teach Lester here some lines from ‘Silver'?”

The boy began to move his lips, but his eyes were still somewhere else. “I reckon so. My ma taught me. When I was a little boy. Real little. Said it was our special poem, and that it would take me to a special place, in my heart, every time I said it.”

Lester wasn't laughing anymore. “Your ma, she sounds a lot like my mama,” he said, a little tearful. “Full of love and sweet things to say. That sure is something special now. Man, how I miss that.”

“Why, Lester?” Mickey asked, shifting his gaze from the floor to his friend.

“My mama passed on, Mickey, some time ago. Haven't heard her voice in years.”

Pee Wee looked at Lester now, as if he was really seeing him for the first time. “I know the feeling myself. I lost my pa when I was just a little boy. I hear ya, Lester. No matter how long it is, the pain never really goes away.”

Mickey found work for his nervous hands, fashioning different shapes from the toothpicks he had pulled from tiny dispenser on the table. But his mind was also restless, so he spoke as he created.
“Mama says you can still hear someone who's gone, cause they are in heaven. I don't reckon I know where that is. Somewhere in the clouds. I ain't never seen it though. But I drew a picture of it once. You can still hear them, Mama says, cause they still speak to you. Only I never heard no one say nothin' to me. Not even Oscar. He were my porker. My favorite porker. I talk to him every day, but never heard nothin'. Mama says I got's to believe for it to happen, but it's hard to believe something you ain't never seen. Or heard. I don't like them things. I believe in shooting stars and caterpillars changing into butterflies cause I seen them. Just last month I seen both. But I'm still waiting on Oscar.” Lester and Pee Wee looked at each other and nodded, each moved by the trembling sense of innocence attached to the boy's words.

“Thanks, Mickey,” Lester finally said. “I think your ma is right. I think we should all just keep listening.”

They finished their food and continued talking as they walked outside. It was a cool night, and the crickets were plentiful and loud. Mickey has just finished commenting about how he loved to catch fireflies and put them in a jar when it happened.

Up the road, emerging from the darkness like stealthy apparitions haunting the clear night air, came five figures, cloaked in white from head to toe. They were wielding baseball bats and venomous threats that were only partly audible to the stunned trio.

“Oh, man, I don't like the looks of this,” Pee Wee said.

Lester fixed his jaw and began rolling up his sleeves. “Take Mickey, McGinty,” Lester ordered, “and the two of you scram. Hurry. Ain't your fight. Go now and get the sheriff.”

Mickey was still thinking about heaven when he saw the five men in white and Lester and Pee Wee's curious reaction to them. It troubled him briefly, but he was more concerned with the unusual image for the moment.

“What are those people doing?” he asked. “It ain't Halloween.” “I told you, McGinty,” Lester repeated loudly. “Get the hell out of here. Now!”

McGinty thought only for a second, then whispered something in Mickey's ear before rolling up his own sleeves. “We ain't going nowhere, Lester,” he said. “Baseball family, remember?”

The moon dimmed capriciously behind a creeping cloud just as the horrible realization lit Mickey's unsuspecting mind. All at once the melodious song of the crickets and other night dwellers was muted now by Mickey's frantic rocking and poetic recitation and the guttural cries of the approaching mob.

“How's about a little night ball, jungle bunny?” one of the men mocked, pounding his open palm with the barrel of the bat he was carrying. “You game now?”

Lester took a step back, his face awash with fear, and stood uneasily between Pee Wee and Mickey. “Look, we don't want no trouble here. We's just on our way home.”

“He doesn't want no trouble?” another repeated. “Did you boys hear that? Our monkey friend don't want no trouble. Ain't that precious. Well, I can understand that. Who wants trouble? But, sometimes, monkey boy, you get what you get. And for a monkey boy who's put on that uniform you's been wearing, parading around town like you's one of us, I'd say you done asked for it and plum forgot about it.” The others laughed. “Now, we aims to oblige, and show you some good old-fashioned small town hospitality.”

The two groups clashed like freight trains vying for the same stretch of track. Lester had just raised his fists, placed them before a tear-streaked face that flashed dimly in the pale moonlight, when two of the intruders swarmed with unrelenting malice on both sides of him, punching and kicking until the stunned Lester fell to the ground.

Mickey and Pee Wee were embroiled as well. Pee Wee tried desperately to ward off the attack, posturing and swinging frantically with all his might, but fell almost instantly, leaving a dazed Mickey to face the remaining threesome all by himself.

It appeared that the boy, who was rocking violently and crying, was no match for the venomous miscreants. He watched, in brooding horror, as the chaos began to unfold. “Slowly, silently, now the moon, Walks the night in her silver shoon…”

The three men laughed and ceased their assault momentarily, arrested by the catatonic recitation.

“Are you kidding me?” one of them said, slapping the side of his leg as he guffawed. “Nursery rhymes? This is way too easy”

Mickey continued to rock and recite each line with an amplified sense of urgency. “Hey, are you listening to this, Willard?” one of the men questioned. “What kind of stupid shit is this retard mumbling?”

The assailants closed in, bats whirling. But something was happening—something pure and unbridled. Somewhere deep within the recesses of Mickey's fractured memory, torrents of painful recollections rushed over the walls of reminiscence and rocked the boy. These turbulent waters splashed across his usual sensibility, taking with them any inhibitions before uniting at last in one stormy squall that filled his arms and hands with surging anger. He became incensed, a whirling dervish of frenetic fists and feet that hammered away at the group like a cyclone tearing apart a sleepy township. First one fell. Then another. The third went down as well. They all lay pressed to the earth for a moment, flaccid and stunned.

For a moment, there was silence. Mickey backed off and stared. The moonlight slanting through the wind—pinched branches above lit intermittently the bloodied faces and tattered clothing. It bothered him, but not as much as the low moan that suddenly rose
from the pile, a plaintive hum that vibrated sinfully in the night air before morphing into a mumbled exchange between the fallen men. Then slowly, pitiably, they pulled themselves up languidly, one at a time, out of the battle induced stupor and readied themselves for another pass.

Mickey freaked. He saw now in full moonlight what he had done, and realized the ordeal was far from over. With freshets of fear and shame coursing through his body, he placed his hands over his ears and rocked and roared.

The unholy threesome heard the cry, saw the boy's twisted mien and thought better of their intentions. They scattered instantly like flies into the heavy darkness. Mickey followed their flight with steamy eyes, his elbows now dug firmly into his sides in a vain attempt to keep his beleaguered body from shaking. He had all but righted the tremors when the strangled cries of Lester and Pee Wee sounded the alarm again, and Mickey was, once more, a raging instrument of malediction.

The two remaining assailants continued. Pee Wee went down again, but Lester refused to submit. He stood hunched over, chin to chest, forearms locked in front of his face. He was staggering around like a punch drunk boxer about to kiss the canvas when he felt the iron grip of his assailants weaken. Then, just like that, he was free. He unlocked his forearms with guarded curiosity to discover the body of one of his attackers completely sagged, melted into an exanimate heap of twisted limbs; the other was in the vice-like hands of Mickey.

Lester watched from a safe distance as the boy shook the robed villain with erupting vengeance. He pulled him one way, then the next. The violent jostling had all but rendered the man unconscious. Mickey was just about to finish the job, hammer him to the ground, when a fickle wind slipped under the hood of the
scoundrel, lifting it just enough so that only Mickey's eyes could see inside. The face was pale and terror stricken. The face was also familiar. The boy froze. He could hardly breathe. It was as if someone had struck him in the head with a two-by-four. He just stood there, unable to utter a sound, his mind filled with discord. Anyone within one hundred feet of the boy would have sworn he heard the grating confusion—and that it came from inside Mickey's head. It was an awful sound. Something like metal on metal. The grinding of incongruous realities rubbing up against each other.

Pee Wee and Lester continued to watch, and were struck by the boy's sudden paralysis. They were just about to come closer, for fear that their friend was injured, when Mickey's head drooped and his eyes began to leak. Then, with a sinking heart, he released his victim, who crumpled to the ground momentarily before scampering off to join the others.

Murph was to be at a meeting with Dennison that next morning. It was that time of year already—midseason report. Time to face the music. This ritual of Dennison's was always an onerous experience, one replete with the self absorbed owner's haughty posturing and banal observations. Then there were the questions—a proliferation of calculated inquires designed to humiliate him on some level while reaffirming that smug bastard's own dominance. It was torture. And this year, there was an additional angst attached to the appointment, for the status of Murph's job was now twisting in the wind.

On the way to the ballpark, Murph stopped off at the sheriff's station in order to follow up on the report that Lester and the others had filed in the early morning hours.

“I'm sorry, Murph,” Rosco said. “You know I am. But those boys
of yours can't give me much. I got nothing to go on here. Hell, throw a white sheet over anyone in this town and you got a possible suspect. My hands are tied.”

Things did not improve much one Murph arrived at the park. Dennison was standing behind his desk, holding a gray portfolio filled with attendance charts and game reports, when Murph arrived at his office. Wordless, the peevish owner crossed the floor to greet his manager, fanning the air with the stack of papers while nodding his head in cryptic fashion.

“Just been crunching the numbers, Murph,” he said. “Interesting. Very Interesting.” The two took their usual places—Murph on the bleached wood chair whose varnished seat and curious incline kept him sliding obsequiously toward the owner's desk and Dennison, safely ensconced in his preposterously enormous burgundy leather chair, the spot from which he always preferred to espouse his inner workings.

“I have several things I want to discuss with you, Murph,” he said, his voice laced with what sounded like tragic exactitude. “But, before we do that, I'd like to hear from you.”

Murph was a little crestfallen and noticeably phlegmatic in his response to Dennison. He sat, his hands folded neatly on his lap in subtle defiance, saying nothing while staring at the ripple of lines that Father Time and the unforgiving sun had seared into the old man's forehead.

“Well, Mr. Murphy. I'm waiting. What have you got to say for yourself?”

Murph laughed somewhat grimly, then spoke. “What I think, Warren,” he began, folding his arms and leaning his head to one side in thoughtful deliberation, “is that the play on the field speaks for itself.”