“That’s right.” I took another shot. “What’s the guy’s name?”
“Ed Gradduk.”
The ball hit hard off the back of the rim and came bouncing straight at me. I let it sail past without even extending a hand. It rolled to the far end of the court, but I kept my eyes on Amy.
“Ed Gradduk,” I said.
“That’s how my editor pronounced it. You know him?”
The sun was all the way behind the school now, the court bathed in shadows. The ball lay still about fifty feet behind us. I walked across the court, picked it up, and brought it back to Amy. She was watching me with raised eyebrows.
“You okay?”
“I’m okay,”
I said. “Here’s your ball. Listen, I’m sorry, but I need to leave. Consider it a forfeit if you want. We’ll have a rematch some other time.”
She took the ball and frowned at me. “Lincoln, what’s the problem? Do you know this guy?”
I wiped sweat from my forehead with the back of my hand and looked off, away from the orange sunset and toward the shadows east of us. Toward Clark Avenue.
“I knew him. And I’m sorry, but I’ve got to go, Ace.”
“Go where?”
“I need to take a walk, Amy.”
She wanted to protest, to ask more questions, but she didn’t. Instead she stood alone on the basketball court while I walked away. I went around the school building and out to the street, got inside my truck, and started the engine. The air conditioner hit me with a blast of warm air and I switched it off and lowered the windows instead. It was stuffy and hot in the truck, but the trickle of sweat sliding down my spine was as cold as lake water.
______
It’s early summer. I’m twelve years old, as is Edward Nathaniel Gradduk, my best friend. We are spending this night as we’ve spent every night so far this summer: playing catch in Ed’s front yard. The yard is narrow, as they all are on Clark Avenue, so we begin our game in the driveway. As the night grows late, though, the house and the trees block out the remains of the sun, and we move into the front yard to prolong things. Here, with the glow of the streetlight, we can play all night if we want to. The ball is difficult to see until it is right on you, but we’ve decided this is a good practice element, calling for faster reflexes. By the time we get to high school, we’ll have the best reflexes around, and from there it will be a short trip to the major leagues. High school, to us, seems about as real a possibility as the major leagues this summer; a dreamworld with driver’s licenses and cars and girls with breasts.
“Pete Rose is a worthless piece of shit,” Ed says, whipping the ball at me with a sidearm motion. “I don’t care how many hits he has.”
“Damn straight,” I reply, returning the throw. Ed and I are Cleveland Indians fans, horrible team or not, and if you’re a Cleveland Indians fan you hate Pete Rose. You hate him because he is a star player in Cincinnati, a few hours to the south, but more than that, you hate him because he ran into Ray Fosse at full speed in an All-Star game more than a decade ago and Ray was never the same after the collision. Thirty years after the team’s last pennant, a player like Ray Fosse means a lot to Indians fans. He is another bust now, another hope extinguished, but for this one we get the satisfaction of blaming Pete Rose.
“My dad said he’d like to see Pete Rose come up to Cleveland and go into one of the bars,” Ed says. “Said he’d get his ass kicked so fast it wouldn’t even be funny. ’Cept it would be funny, you know? Funnier than shit.”
Ed has a way of talking just like his old man, which explains the persistent profanity. My own dad would clock me if he ever heard me swearing like we do, but when I’m with Ed, it’s safe. Cool, even. A couple of tough guys.
“Damn straight,” I say again, a tough-guy phrase if ever there was one. “I wish I could be there to see it.”
“Pete’ll never come to town,” Ed says. “Doesn’t have the balls.”
Ed lives on Clark Avenue, and I live with my father in a small house on Frontier Avenue, just south of Clark. Our wanderings carry us as far east as Fulton Road, and a favorite spot is St. Mary’s Cemetery on West Thirty-eighth. Sometimes Ed and I run through the cemetery at night, telling each other ghost stories that start out seeming corny but end up making us sprint for home. Ed’s mother is always at home; my mother has been dead since I was three. I have a framed picture of her on the table beside my bed. The first time Ed saw it, he frowned and asked why I had a picture of my mother in my room. I told him she was dead, flushing with a mix of shame and anger—ashamed that I was embarrassed to have the picture out, and angry that Ed was challenging it. He looked at it judiciously, touched the edge of the frame gently with his finger, and said, “She was real pretty.” From then on, Ed Gradduk has been my best friend.
My dad’s at home now, probably asleep in his armchair with the Indians game on the television or the radio, whichever is broadcasting tonight. We don’t have cable, so we still listen to a lot of the games on the radio. I’m allowed to be at Ed’s house because his mother is home. Ed’s father is probably down at the Hideaway, playing cards and drinking beer. He might come home soon, toss the ball around with us for a while and tell jokes, or he might not come home at all. Ed will pretend he doesn’t care if his dad hasn’t shown up by the time we go to bed, but he’ll also alternate glances between the clock and the street until he falls asleep.
“Pretty Boy Pete Rose,” Ed sings, jogging back until he is on the sidewalk and rifling the ball at me so hard I take a step back and hold my glove up with both hands, feeling silly, but thankful I am able to see the damn thing before it can drill me in the nose.
“Tougher than usual tonight,” Ed says, seeing my near disaster with his throw. He points skyward. “One of the streetlights is burned out.”
“You wanna go in?” I say.
He scowls. “Nah, I don’t want to go in this early.”
I toss the ball in and out of my mitt and wait for him to make a decision. He scuffs his sneaker on the ground and eyes the garage thoughtfully.
“’Member when my dad was painting the house?” he asks. When I nod, he says, “Well, he couldn’t do it till he got home from work, and by then it was already almost dark. So he bought a spotlight to help him.”
“You still have it?”
“Yeah. He never really used it, said the paint always looked different during the day and that pissed him off. But I think he kept the light.”
“We bring that out here, maybe we can even see well enough to hit wiffle balls,” I say, liking this suggestion. “It’d be like playing at the stadium in a night game.”
“Come on.” Ed drops his mitt to the ground and starts for the tiny, one-car garage that sits behind the house. I follow.
There used to be a floodlight attached to the garage, but it, too, is broken. The overhead door is down, and we have to go in through the side door. Ed’s a step in front of me, but even so I can smell the gas as soon as he pulls the door open. Most old garages carry the smell of fuel with them, but this is different, just a bit too strong. There’s music playing, too—Van Morrison singing “Into the Mystic.”
Ed is fumbling against the wall for the light switch, oblivious to the smell. He can’t find the switch, reaching with a twelve-year-old’s short arms, so he steps farther into the garage. I move with him, and now I’m inside the dank little building. The fuel smell is still potent. I’m wearing my mitt, but I slip it off my hand and let it drop to the concrete floor. The baseball is clenched tight in my right hand, my arm pulled back a bit. I’ve never been scared of the dark, but for some reason I want out of this garage.