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The beating was quick enough that we might have missed it if we weren’t sitting on my steps, waiting just for it. But we didn’t miss it, we caught it in all its ugliness, the flash of violence and submission, a glimpse into the dark heart beating inside that house.

What do you feel then, when you realize you’ve stumbled carelessly into something dreadful and made it worse? You feel shame, and remorse, and pity, of course you do, and I could see all those emotions reflected on the faces of my two best friends. But that’s not what little J.J. Moretti felt, as he watched this beating unfold from the steps of his prison in split-level hell. Instead he rubbed the side of his face, still bruised from the football, and felt the taste of victory, bubbly, cloying and rich, like an ice-cold bottle of Coke pulled straight from the cooler at Milt’s.

Tony scavenged around the neighbor’s garbage cans until he found an old brown paper bag and then, with his hands, he started shoveling the dog crap, handful by heedless handful, into
the bag. And in the middle of his shoveling, there was a moment when he looked up from beneath his brow, to my house, to my stoop, right to me. As if he knew.

Of course he knew.

I waited for him to hit back. I kept hanging out with Augie and Ben, listened to their laughter and warnings, and grew ever more terrified. I tried to steel myself for Tony’s revenge. Would he do it himself or would he tell his brother what had happened, sending that tattooed monster my way? I tried to guess how many teeth it would cost me, how much blood. And then I didn’t have to guess anymore.

I found him outside in our backyard, my sweet little dog, curled into a fluffy ball beside his still-full water bowl, calm and quiet when he was never calm and he was never quiet.

And at that moment Tony Grubbins was no longer just another street bully, he had become a mortal enemy, which might have been exactly what I needed at the time. Whatever Pitchford threw at me in the years to come, I could handle it because I had an enemy. The more Tony Grubbins beat on me, the stronger I would become. And he did beat on me, continuously over the years, and I did strengthen. And it was sweet, my hatred, deliciously alive, it was something I could hold close in my darkest times and watch with joy as it grew, until I was ready, finally, to make Tony Grubbins pay its full freight.

But such empowerment was still far in the future. All I had now, along with my weakness and overweening pride, was the mere seed of that hatred for Tony Grubbins. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to keep my shovel clicking into the dirt as I dug a grave in the woods behind the park, under a dying cherry tree.

T
HERE HE WAS,
standing in the outfield, lost and bored, staring off into the ether as the game trundled on without him, about the same age as I was when I buried my dog Rex in the woods at the end of Henrietta Road.

My son, Eric.

It is no crime to hate baseball, except maybe in Patriots Landing, where the only legitimate excuse not to play baseball is lacrosse. But Eric hated lacrosse even more than baseball. He hadn’t wanted to play Little League anymore, had wanted to give it up for video games and comic books, but I, the all-American dad, wouldn’t let him.

“A boy needs to play baseball,” I said. My wife, Caitlin, flapped her arms in frustration but let me have my way.

Now, as I approached the Little League complex—three diamonds, each with stands and lights and hard green fences plastered with advertisements, along with rows of batting cages hung with netting—I grimaced at the sight of my boy looking so out of place. A short and slight eleven-year-old, his wire glasses on and his oversized uniform hanging off him in loose folds, he was like a tiny lamb among the raging beasts in the field. I wanted to yell out at him to pay attention to the game, but I stifled the urge. My son played the outfield badly, batted last, stood ungainly at the plate as the coach clapped his hands and called out to him to
wait for his pitch, hoping he would wait himself to first base. The whole thing was a humiliation.

For me, I mean.

Caitlin, standing by the backstop, saw me approach and gave a blank stare that barely acknowledged my appearance before turning away. She was undoubtedly mad at me for coming home late from Vegas, or mad at me for not calling, or still mad at me for forcing Eric to play baseball and her to show up at the games. These days my wife seemed always to be mad at me. Whether it was a suburban thing or a longtime married thing I wasn’t sure, but it was endemic in the marriages of Patriots Landing, at least those still extant. Our wives’ anger was a main topic of discussion at the clubhouse bar, the butt of our jokes on the third tee. Yet Caitlin’s anger seemed fiercer than that of the others, which I never quite understood.

I didn’t drink to excess, didn’t torture cats or pick my teeth with a knife. And I didn’t cheat on her. Men who cheat, men like my father, need to keep alive some secret splinter of their existences, something totally their own, separate and apart from their marriages. I already had that. And truth was, even though I found my gaze sometimes wandering over the lithe bodies of the Little League wives, like Carl Spackler in
Caddyshack
ogling the lady golfers on his course, I was in the peculiar position of being married to the prettiest of them all. So no, I didn’t sleep around. I was one of the good guys; all I was doing was doing all I could to keep our lives intact in difficult times. Which made it all the more peculiar, to my way of thinking, that Caitlin had let me know that she was leaving me, which meant that I should start thinking about moving out.

She was now in a pack of Little League parents in their plaid shorts and wide sunglasses, like a pack of wolves, talking about their kids’ private coaches, their kids’ tournament teams, their kids’ upcoming trips to Cooperstown to play against the best teams from all over the country. Caitlin nodded patiently
through it all as her son was swallowed whole by the expanse in right field. In Pitchford we had had Little League, sure, but it was of far less import than our street games. And parents didn’t seem to care so much, only occasionally making it out to the scabby little field to watch us play. It was a working-class neighborhood and the parents were usually, well, working. But just as I felt it was obligatory for Eric to play, it seemed obligatory for the parents in our neighborhood to show up to cheer, to cajole, to berate the umpire, to bitch at the coach about their kids’ not pitching or playing shortstop.

Little League baseball in Patriots Landing: fun for the whole family.

I was putting in an appearance, I was trying to look like everything was normal the day before I disappeared, but I didn’t think I could handle the whole wolf-pack thing, so I bypassed the bleachers and stood a bit down the line and watched as Eric meandered in the outfield, oblivious to the events going on in front of him. When he gazed down at his feet and kicked at the grass, I again restrained myself from yelling a heads-up to my boy. I had been calling out to Eric to pay attention in the field since T-ball, and it never worked to prick his indifference, it served only to embarrass him. To get him to play this year I had promised to keep my mouth absolutely shut during his games. So I stood silently along the third-base line and did what I always did when Eric was in the field: hope that the ball didn’t get hit to him.

“Where have you been, buddy?”

I turned to see Thad Campbell, tall and handsome with lank blond hair and a chin like a cartoon hero. His kid was the star player on the team facing off against Eric’s. Thad and I played golf most every Sunday, we shared beers after golf, had dinner together occasionally with our wives. He was about as good a friend as I had at Patriots Landing, which was sad, considering I didn’t like him much.

“I was away on business,” I said. “How are we doing?”

“You’re up by three in the fifth, but we’ve got the bases juiced.”

“What about Eric?”

“He struck out a couple times, I think. Good swings, though. You playing tomorrow?”

“I don’t know.” I spotted Caitlin looking at the two of us, her eyebrows suddenly rising in concern. I turned to Thad and stared at him flatly. “Only if we start early. I’m thinking of going fishing in the afternoon.”

“Really?”

“The blues are running,” I said without blinking. I wasn’t much of a fisherman, and never really knew what the hell was out there to be caught. I either relied on Harry or, when I was alone, just sat in the water and drank beer and thought about things. But if you wanted to explain a sudden fishing trip in Patriots Landing, all you needed to say was that the blues were running, and the understanding nods would follow.

“Blues, huh? Want to cut me some nice fillets for the grill?”

“No problem.”

“Great,” said Thad. “We’re still on for tonight, right?”

“Tonight?”

“Dinner. At Sal’s. With Charles and June.”

“Oh yeah, that thing.” Caitlin’s attempt to keep up appearances. “Sure.”

“It will be terrif to get together with everyone. We haven’t seen you and Kate in a while.”

“It’s been a little crazy.”

“Is everything okay with you guys?”

“Sure,” I said. “Peaches.”

At Patriots Landing, there were appearances and there was reality, and it was hard to say which was more important: in that way, I suppose, suburbia is like the US Senate, without the sex. There would be a moment when it would all go to hell, and then
everyone would know everything, but until then Caitlin and I were as perfect a couple as every other.

On the field, our pitcher was slinging it in there, and the batter was having a hard time catching up to the speedball. On two late swings he barely got enough of the ball to foul it back. But he was a big kid, and if he connected his late swing would wang the ball to right field, straight to Eric, who was gazing now intently up at the clouds. I clamped my mouth shut and fought the impulse to coach from the sidelines, but one more late-swing foul as Eric stared into the sky and I couldn’t bear it any longer. It’s not like I expected Eric to make the majors, I just wanted him to do well. Catch a fly ball to save a trio of runs, or at least not screw up too badly. For his own sake, I mean, for his own self-image.

“Heads up, Eric,” I yelled, finally unable to stifle it any longer. “He makes contact, it’s coming to you.”

The coach’s head snapped up at the sound of my voice. “Hey, Willing,” he called out for all to hear, “come on now, pay attention out there.”

When the batter finally caught hold of one, Eric was staring at me, his hands at his hips and his mouth agape even as the ball sailed like an artillery shell over his head.

“That’s a shame,” said Thad, dropping his palm on my shoulder as Eric turned to trot after the ball while the runners whipped around the bases like greyhounds after a hare.

Y
OU PROMISED,” SAID
Eric, as soon as I stepped into our kitchen.

I had followed Caitlin’s black Lexus RX10 from the complex to our house, but had waited a moment in the car to steel myself for the inevitable drama. This was not how I wanted to spend the last day in my current life, defending my stupidity, but in a way it was fitting, for this was how life had been playing out for me lately. I couldn’t anymore make a move, no matter how well intentioned, that wasn’t wrong. When I finally built up the courage to enter the house, Caitlin was leaning on the Sub-Zero refrigerator with arms crossed, while Eric sat at the granite-topped island, eating ice cream from a bowl, staring at me with hard black eyes. Is there anything colder than the angry eyes of an eleven-year-old boy?

“I was just trying to help,” I said. “That guy was never going to pull Jake’s fastball. The only place he was going to hit the ball was directly to you.”

“But you promised never to call out to me when I was in the field or at bat. Didn’t he, Mom?”

“Yes he did,” said Caitlin.

“You need to get into a ready position with every pitch,” I said, clapping my hands together and then spreading them open like an infielder ready to make a play. “That’s one of the first
things I ever taught you. Watch the way Derek Jeter does it on television.”