home plate, the big black boy was smiling at me, dragging one of his bare feet in the dirt, erasing my line. The butt of a cigarette dangled from his huge grin. He wore a pair of blue jean shorts split way up his legs and no shirt. It looked like he had rubbed some of the new lime on his chest. I could see two white hand prints smeared across his belly.
I took off after him, but before I could make up any distance, he had already jumped the fence near the dugout and started up the hill to the tracks. When he reached the top, he didn’t look back. Just leaped out of sight like a man going off a cliff. Except he was laughing.
I redid the part of the line he erased, and that evening during the game I could still smell his cigarette smoke hanging like a cloud in the thick air over the field. There were no trains that night, so no rocks, but I could feel all of those black boys, feel them watching us play our game, somehow blowing their smoke over the rails and into our field inning after inning.
When the game was over, I remembered I still had A.J.’s key tucked in my sock. I took it back and found him in the back door of the Center, staring down at the baseball field. “Don’t forget to turn off the lights,” I told him. There were times when he fell asleep drunk in the Center and the lights buzzed and burned all night, driving the moths crazy until daylight.
“I won’t,” he said. Then, “What would you have done?”
“What?”
“What would you’d done if you’da caught that big nigger today?”
The cigarette smoke filled my nose again, and I glanced over my shoulder just to make sure we were alone. All I saw was the glow from the field. “I guess I didn’t think about it,” I said.
A.J. took a pull from his bottle of beer. “You need to. You catch him, what you gonna do with him?” He finished the bottle and slung it toward the lights.
Sometimes, I can see what’s going to happen. Tomorrow or maybe the next day, someone would run over that bottle with a lawnmower, and the day after that someone else would cut his foot on the glass.
I SAW HIM again, a few days after he erased the foul line. It was in the woods near my house. I spent a lot of time there, high up in the sycamores and oaks, smoking reeds, the kind that stuck up through the dead leaves on the ground—about as big around as a pencil, and hollow, like a straw. Once they died and turned brown, you could break them into little cigarette-size pieces, light up the end, blow out the flame and puff it while it glowed. I always headed for the trees where nobody from the neighborhood would think to look, and if it was humid enough in the woods, you could shoot out a gray cloud of smoke that settled into the limbs of the hardwoods like a fog.
One afternoon, I left the house with a book of matches, and a hundred feet into the woods, I had gathered enough reeds for an hour of smoke. For some reason, I didn’t climb a tree. Instead, I just went deep enough into the woods to feel safe and sat at the base of a huge oak. I lit up, closed my eyes while the smoke swirled over my teeth, and I heard somebody laugh. I jumped up before I opened my eyes, but when I did, he was there, maybe twenty yards in front of me. Big and sweating, he seemed comfortable with the heat in the woods. I choked on the smoke, the thick reed smoke that I never usually swallowed now deep inside my lungs. He laughed once more, then reached in his pocket. Out came an old brass lighter and a pack of Camels. He lit one up, blew the smoke out of his nose and walked through the trees toward the tracks.
I STARTED HAVING dreams where the two of us met again in the woods. He carried a baseball with him, an old one that was scuffed and yellow with age, and he showed me the autographs on the cover. Black ballplayers who had signed just their first names with a pencil in a grade-school style print. I told him I’d never heard of these players, and he laughed at me behind a fresh Camel. He had a glove, too. An old one not much bigger than a mitten. I smelled mildew and saddle soap. I followed him to an open spot in the woods and found a pitcher’s mound made of Spanish moss and, sixty feet away, a wide pine stump for a catcher to sit on. There was a straight stripe of chalk line that ran from the mound to the stump. He told me this was where he practiced.
But we’re on my side of the tracks, I said.
He laughed again and said that those tracks weren’t nothing but a couple pieces of steel on a hill, and he and some of his friends took turns with a shovel and dug a big tunnel underneath the tracks so they could come over here and throw the baseball in the trees. I started to tell him about how I climbed the trees here and smoked reeds.
The black boy stopped me and said, I don’t wanna hear no shit about you and your trees. You ain’t nothing to me.
He kicked at the lime with his bare foot, then he climbed the moss mound and wound up, the same slow windup I saw that evening on the tracks above our baseball field. He pushed forward and let fly, and the ball rocketed through the trees, through the center of the thick trunks. The trees bent from the force of the pitch, like saplings in a hurricane. And if you walked behind him and looked over his shoulder, you could see a straight line of holes, all the size of a baseball, and the holes seemed to go for miles and miles, until they disappeared into a single dot of darkness.
WE WERE ALL playing kick the can after dark. That’s what we told our parents. The only reason they ever let us leave the house after dark was that we told them we would be playing at Kathleen Welch’s house. Kathleen’s daddy was the minister at First Presbyterian, and most of our parents thought that his connection with God would protect us once the sun went down. What they didn’t know was that Reverend Welch slept in front of the television, and we pretty much had free run of the huge back yard. Kathleen’s house was a few blocks on the other side of the Youth Center, so it was a long ride on my bike, but the dogs that always chased me couldn’t see me coming in the dark, and there weren’t any hills. Just a straight shot down 2nd Avenue, parallel to the tracks, then coast into Kathleen’s yard.
Cal was there with his bandage on. It had been maybe a week or so since the thing with the rock. He hadn’t been back to the baseball field, but it was so close to the end of the season, his mother was making him sit out until next year, when everything would be healed up. He was just supposed to watch and not sweat on his stitches. What he really did was wander through the yard in the middle of our game, while everyone else tried to stay hidden behind the hedges. He talked and gave away all of the hiding spots. He was just mad that he couldn’t run or do anything. He was mad about the blood and the thin scar he was going to have. He was mad that his momma screamed and crawled around the infield on her hands and knees in front of a crowd.
Somebody said we should have a séance since we couldn’t play kick the can. Kathleen ran inside her house and took a piece of candle and some matches from the kitchen drawer. She dripped a pile of wax in the grass, stood the candle up straight, and we sat in a circle around the flame. We’d have to hold hands eventually, so everyone jockeyed for positions. I ended up with Kathleen on one side of me and Cal on the other. Then, we tried to decide who we wanted to call back from the dead. We went through the usual list for this kind of thing: Kennedy, George Washington, Marilyn Monroe, crazy relatives, rich relatives. Kathleen pushed hard for Marilyn. She said she was mysterious and tragic.
“Hitler,” Cal said, almost in a whisper.
“What?” I said.
“Hitler, Adolph Hitler. We need to talk to Hitler,” he told us.
Kathleen said, “What you want with Adolph Hitler?”
Cal stood up. “Look at this shit,” he said, pointing at his cheek. I didn’t look up, but I knew what he meant. “I got this and I can’t do nothing about it. If I could get Hitler here, I’d tell him everything.”
“And then what?”
“Hitler wouldn’t let no nigger get away with this. Everybody else might, but ain’t no way Adolph Hitler’d let us get rocks chunked at us every time a train comes by,” Cal said. I turned toward him. With just the little flicker of light from the candle, I could see how shiny his face was. He looked like he was going to sweat right through his stitches. “Hitler’d go over to Nicholtown and kick some butt,” he