for the Watertown end where we never played anyway. There was an invisible line we all knew that separated Newton from Watertown.
“Stay away from the Watertown end unless you want to get the crap knocked out of you,” Stretch warned.
The Watertown end was for the older kids like Peggy Anderson, who was blond, with long legs sticking out of white short shorts and a chest that would make Margie Marini look like a boy. She always went down that end after supper and always with more than one guy. Four or five other couples joined them on the side of the green and lush hill and I always wondered what they did down there all that time. I used to get excited and hot and sweaty when I thought about it.
“O.K. You can use the Park and the Streets—all backyards except Jugger Casey’s and Bessie O’Leary’s.” Stretch laughed that head-rolling laugh. “Unless you want to join the missing cats. He, he, he, ha, ha.” His exaggerated, insane laughter sent chills up our spines as we took off, shouting and screaming into the night.
It seems I always was a Hider and I never knew where to hide. I remembered listening to “The Most Dangerous Game” on the radio where the internationally known big game hunter Rainsford is now being hunted by a General Zaroff. Rainsford’s plan was to get as much space between him and Zaroff because Zaroff wants to hunt and kill “The Most Dangerous Game-Man.”
So, in my mind I became Rainsford who was now discovering what the animal must feel when being tracked. I headed up by the Green Box and then I scaled the fence into Jugger’s backyard.
I crawled past an open bulkhead and stood motionless behind a fruit tree that smelled like cheap perfume. Somebody was coming up the cellar stairs just as I was about to make a run for it to Gardner Street. At first, I thought it was Jugger’s father but then I realized it was the old Jug himself. I was about to whisper to him that we were playing hide and seek but before I could, I heard him crying. Crying like me in the Park that night we sat on the Green Box and he let me have a few swigs of wine. And he said those things about accidents and how things just happened like his father said.
He was muttering something I couldn’t make out because he was crying so much. Then, he stopped and put a bottle to his mouth, drained it off and flipped it into the woods where the sound of glass on glass broke the silence. Below me in the Park I could hear some of the giddy girls squealing. Jugger picked up a rock, wound up and with his crooked arm sticking out sideways, he threw the stone into the same place in the woods. It landed softly. “You Frog, you son of a bitch, Frog. I wish I killed you. Frog. Frog. Frog.” His voice gained in volume until Mr. Casey opened the back door, the yellow light from the kitchen spilling out to the yard and washing over Jugger who stood glassy-eyed, shyly drawing back into the shadows.
“What? What in God’s little green acre do you have on? Come here. Come here to me, Francis. Come here this instant.”
The Jugger moved out of the dark silhouette of trees into a splash of light. His crooked arm hung guardedly over his jacket in a vain effort to cover it. As he moved forward, I could see that Jugger was wearing a World War I doughboy uniform, even down to the puttees. We had a picture of an American soldier in France that had been my uncle’s and The Jugger was dressed the same way, except for the baseball cap he always wore.
“Why in God’s name are you dressed in my uniform? Have you gone completely crazy? What possessed you to put it on? Answer me.”
“I dunno, Pa. I just wanted to.”
“You just wanted to? What kind of a reason is that?”
“Well, all the pictures in the paper.”
“What pictures? What paper? What are you talking about?”
“The War pictures. The soldiers. They all wear uniforms. I see them every day in The Boston Post and The Record. And, and those good ones in Life magazine. Those are the best, Pa.”
“Oh, Francis, you are the cross I have to carry. My only child and –” he paused. “Francis, you are not a soldier, you are not a baseball player anymore, you, you, you’re just my son. Come in the house and take off the uniform and do not drink any more wine. Your shouting woke up your mother.”
“I’m sorry, Pa. Honest. I’ll take off the uniform. But, can I still look at Life?”
“Ah, O.K., I suppose so. Please come in for the night.”
Mr. Casey closed the door, snuffing out the light as Jugger stumbled up the porch steps. “Frog bastard,” he shouted to the woods and then he went inside.
I let out a long, deep sigh. I felt almost sick. I had been part of something strange and kind of sad and scary at the same time and I didn’t know how to react at first. But, as my body unstiffened, I realized I better get out of there, so I raced through the high grass of the driveway and out onto the Street and on past my house.
My mother and father were really going strong now with
“You’ve got to ac-cent-tchu-ate the pos-i-tive,
E-lim-my-nate the neg-a-tive,
Latch on to the af-firm-a-tive,
Don’t mess with Mister-In-be-tween.”
I caught sight of a gang furtively sneaking up from the Park and I took off through my yard and over Leavit’s fence and double backed through Fagan’s, running like a wild horse, until before I realized it, Bessie O’Leary’s house materialized before me as though emerging from some inky, subterranean cave. One light burned from an upstairs room, the remainder of the house barely visible in the jet-black night.
A slight rustle of leaves from a silent maple brought my breath in short, rapid gasps. From the Street, sharp commands, quick and pointed from Birdie to his searchers, reached me as I crouched behind the Witch’s Wall. I knew they would never go into the Witch’s yard, but they could double back the way I did and come up behind me. So, I made the decision to jump the wall and sneak out behind them and race back to the Park and the Green Box. According to the rules, you had to stay out at least twenty minutes and I had already done that.
I took a short jump and bellied my way over the wall, slipping quietly to the ground. I waited until I knew they were halfway up the hill and then I picked my way through the dark past the clothesline where a white, linen gown or something, hung limply in a ghostly pose. I continued across the yard and then suddenly a cat cried, and was answered by the sound of other cats.
My eyes narrowed to the location of the sound. I was curious. I was insanely frightened, too, but I began walking to the rear of the old house. I was doing exactly what I warned others not to do in those Class B horror films, when in spite of the warnings from the first four rows of the Paramount, the hero began his long walk upstairs to the attic and whatever was lying in wait.
The cellar door was open and at the far end, the Street side of the cellar, a vague, blue bulb threw just enough light to make objects distinguishable. What manner of madness drove me on I could not explain to the thumping heart or throbbing brain that seemed the only parts of my body that were alive. I was always a reader, ever since I could pick the colors and the names of animals from the large print books my mother got from the children’s library, and now in Bessie O’Leary’s midnight black yard, I was a character out of Edgar Allen Poe, and I was in search of The Black Cat. I ducked under the low frame of the door and felt my way along the damp, fieldstone walls. Before me, cats of all sizes slept or crawled or pawed at each other as they collected in large pockets.
Charles Webber was right, but Webber had never walked through and around slinking, sloe-eyed cats. They lay in heaps on top of wooden S. S. Pierce boxes or in furry mounds on top of last winter’s ash heaps. Some peered out from the coal bin with yellow, jungle eyes as I stepped gingerly over them. Was I crazy? What was I doing here? My mouth was filled with cotton and sweat poured off my forehead. My armpits prickled. There must have been a hundred cats in that cellar and scattered all over the cement floor was corn meal that the cats picked at and then settled back into their individual colonies.
The cellar itself was stacked with newspapers that reached the