Songs Only You Know (2 page)

Now imagine the pipe inserted between his lips, the flame lifting toward the poison …

I cut the bat hard, following through with the swing. And this was true, what Dad said about certain muscle memories, that they always come right back to you: riding a bike, swinging for the fence. I hadn’t held a bat in years. Pulling it close, I saw my best friend’s name scrawled in black marker across the aluminum barrel:
WILL
. Damn thing had found its way into our boxes during the move, an artifact of something distant and other: summer-morning baseball games, the weedy diamonds at Ford Woods Park. Will and I kicking the dirt, wadding chaw into our gums.

I planted my feet to give another mailbox a half-assed smack, lost heart before the swing. Ridgewood Hills was the last subdivision before miles of farmland to the west and in the distance the cars traveling the highway sounded oceanic. Pressed against my cheek, the bat was cool metal.
WILL
: faded black ink scrawled wild style over the barrel’s sweet spot. The bat belonged to a time when jotting your name on your belongings was running the risk of wussiness, but Will had his reasons for personalizing the thirty-two-inch Easton. It had gone missing
early one season, and he’d stood there scowling beneath the brim of his mesh-and-foam hat, thwacking his glove against his thigh. Will had a stutter. Back then, it was at its worst when he was anxious or pissed or girls were around.

“Fucking bat” was all he’d managed as the park cleared.

“Don’t worry,” I’d said. “We’ll find it.”

Tall, dapper, brown-mopped Will was the closest thing I had to a brother. We’d long ago developed a shared-thought channel inaccessible to others. Even with me, though, he’d maneuver around words that gave him trouble, skirting questions and situations, which may or may not have rewired his brain to interpret reality from slanted angles. “How’s life out there in Candyland?” he liked to say of my new residence. “About ready to do a little burn job one night after everyone has said their prayers? Are you ready for gasoline?” We didn’t talk about life. The truth was in the pauses after a joke, then the hiss of our laughter. He’d been five years old when I met him. Like many friends in the old neighborhood, he’d acknowledged my dad as a force to behold—the stout, agile mentor who’d tossed the ball with us, who’d made a show of pressing me above his head with a strength their fathers did not possess.

A
CAR MOTORED DOWN
a nearby stretch. I pulled the bat to my thigh until the stillness returned. I’d been walking ten, fifteen minutes. No sense arose to indicate my dad was out there anywhere, but piece by piece the fable of Will’s Easton was coming back to me. Strange as it seems, I never once think of that August night without reliving the tale of my best friend’s bat. How, the game after it vanished, I’d been on the mound, chucking fastballs. Dad had spent a thousand nights coaching me through the windup, the snap of the elbow, and I could pitch the ball straight up the middle—hard as I could, straight as I could. A few innings in, a portly marmot-faced kid named Moe
had stepped to the plate, his team groaning
Moe, Moe
as he wielded the bat. From the mound, I’d seen it: the silver Easton, gleaming and new. I waved Will over from third.

“There’s the rat,” he said, chaw in his teeth.

“I’m gonna put a curse on him,” I said.

We’d been—what?—eleven, twelve years old? Already bored with ball games, coming into our own as a duo forged in blood oaths, the heaviest metal, the ghastliest horror flicks. Pentagrams and electric guitars, phantasms that defied Sunday mornings in church. Cassettes my dad had smashed. Thrillers that gave Caitlin the heebie-jeebies.

Will shuffled back to third, and I wound up to chuck one straight at Moe’s breastplate. A fastball. By some miracle of instinct he fumbled away from the pitch, cursing and tossing Will’s bat to the dirt. From the outfield someone let loose a war cry that silenced the earth, until Moe’s coach said, “Shake it off.”

Only at a distance of years can I admit I was a kid of pulled punches. A daredevil prankster—stealthy yet without true guts. I’d feared just about everything and was angry about being afraid, all of which changed me into a tyrant if ever a viable, deserving victim presented itself. I held steady as Moe pulled his helmet tight, returning to the plate. And a feeling came over me like my limbs were senseless and my teeth had grown giant. The windup, the pitch. Moe ducking as the ball streaked over his head, saying, “What the goddamn shit?” How coyly I’d given my pitching arm the noodle shake. And, yes, I’d felt for Moe, baffled and squinting. I’d thought about giving him one straight up the middle, but I needed Will to know I’d see it through.

A curse was a curse.

I wound and pitched again. A sinker that jerked him into a spastic dance.

“You hit me, and I stick this bat up your ass.” It sounded
almost complimentary, the way Moe had turned his head as he said it.

“It’s not your bat,” I told him.

That’s when Moe knew what it was about.

A
FEW BLOCKS AHEAD
on Ridgewood Drive, a large wooden sign graced the subdivision’s entrance. Gold letters painted on stained-green wood:
RIDGEWOOD HILLS
 …

Hills that had been dozed and sodded and assigned street addresses.

I got the idea to batter that sign into splinters, jagged shards of green wood my dad might view as he made his way home, once his drug run finally ended.

How many swings to tear it down?

Twenty, thirty.

Will would see the green scars on his Easton when I returned it after all these years. He’d tell the story of Moe and the curse, how there’d been one last pitch, right into Moe’s buttocks. After the game, Moe shook our hands, saying, “Swear, I just found it. I didn’t know.”

I’d crunched Moe’s palm respectfully, no hard feelings.

And like that, the curse was lifted.

Just before the subdivision entrance, I came to a three-way corner where Ridgewood Drive met with a final side street. Up ahead I could see the turnoff from the country highway and a murky shape I knew to be the wooden sign. A streetlamp glowed. That close to the neighborhood’s edge, you could sense the unlit countryside sprawling all the way to Ann Arbor. You’d
have thought I was in the wilds, the way that darkness felt like some great mind above, whispering knowledge I couldn’t understand. A hundred or so yards ahead, a pair of headlights dilated at the entryway, beaming up the street.

I thought it might be him.

I began crossing the intersection as the lights rushed forward. The engine whined at an anxious frequency, pushing too hard for that time of night, on that kind of street. But whether or not this speed demon decided to turn, the right-of-way was mine; I drew the bat close and slowed my stride.

The vehicle steered wide to turn up the cross street. Twin rays swept the pavement, and I saw what was what: a cherry-red minivan, accelerating on the turn, its chrome grille charging straight for my bony ass. Walking defiantly—a half step more—I hoped for the sound of squealing brakes. Until my instincts rebelled, lunging my body headfirst the instant the headlights flooded entirely over me.

The bat left my hand as I tucked into the dive. Aluminum clanged, tires ground. The clunk of my bones. I felt the pavement scrape over my back, and then I was reeled onto my feet again, jogging forward to keep balance.

That flightlike thrill as adrenaline rushes through …

I’d never felt so purely the nearness of my own death. Truly, though, I’ll never be certain just how close I came to being run down or if I was taunting the moment, provoking it to be become something it was not. The minivan—now unmistakably a Ford Aerostar—sputtered on without apology, which at that instant seemed the most psychotically rude thing I could imagine.

“Motherfucker.” I raised a fist.

The screams I’d been perfecting with my band had leathered my vocal cords, providing me the dubious ability to summon bestial howls at the cue of a snare drum. I could go from a
mucousy, guttural roar to a high, nasty pitch I’d feel right in the center of my face. My next words ran the scale, echoed through the streets: “Watch where you’re fucking going!”

The van’s tires squeaked out one harsh, staccato yip.

Its rear end fishtailed. Reverse lights flared as the vehicle revved backward, giving me time to snatch the bat from a patch of damp grass. Then the van braked hard, lurching before going still. What I heard most was the snapping of my pulse while the driver’s-side window peeled down revealing a man a few years younger than my dad. Crew cut, curly up top. Red T-shirt. From the look in his eyes it appeared there’d been a tough day at the office, the factory, the eighteenth hole. He was quite possibly shitfaced.

“Stay outta my goddamn street,” he said.

I cocked the bat to make certain he saw it, and the guy smiled. He didn’t look the tough-dad type. My old man could have taken him, but this mindfucker had one of those normaljoe faces that at certain telltale moments will reveal its ulterior sicko—and here it was: a hateful grin widening by the second.

I’d gone out miming a search for trouble, and so it was delivered, along with implications on what it would mean for me to back down. Gripping the bat I counted
one-two
repeatedly, something I’d done before lighting Dumpsters afire or skateboarding down the shingles of Will’s roof.
One-two, one-two
. Sooner or later,
three
usually came, and I’d be mindless, tossing the match or rocketing toward the crash.

“Screw you, man.”

“Little prick,” he said.

The minivan’s interior lights snapped on as he opened the door. One leg stepped to the pavement while the other remained bent, rooted inside the van. An arm extended. He had something to show me: a handgun. Not pointed at my heart. Not ordering my hands to the air or anything of the sort
but harmlessly dangling from his fingertips as if it were a piece of evidence he’d plucked from a lover’s underwear drawer. His wrist was limp. The gun hung black against his red shirt. If he’d turned the barrel on me, there’s a chance I’d have stood like that until he fired.

I flashed him my wildest eyes, channeling Manson—any number of maniacs I’d seen pictures of. That’s how I gave up. Glaring was as brave as I could be.

“Now,” he said, face half lit by the interior bulbs, “stay outta the fucking street.”

He yanked shut the door and peeled out.

The minivan ascended the slightest incline toward an unknown area of the neighborhood. If only Will had been there, seeing it through to some different end: his bat confiscated as evidence while I was cuffed and hauled to the clink or scraped from the pavement. A lawsuit. A funeral.

Instead—here was another story I’d never tell honestly.

I sprinted after the taillights, keeping off the sidewalk, scrambling through unfamiliar front yards. A few blocks up I found the minivan parked in the driveway of a house just like ours, only the walkway to the front porch was lined with shin-high halogen path lamps. Crouched behind a shrub across the street, I raised my head to watch the lamps sequentially go dark and come aglow again as a figure passed each one.

“Ay!” I yelled, swiveling to tear ass home. “I know where you live.”

M
OM WAS PACING THE
hallway when I slipped through the back door. Ozzy grazed her legs, clacking his nails along the floorboards. All the rooms were dark as I made for the front window to monitor the street for headlights. Bits of asphalt were cratered into my back and I felt the burn of a skinned elbow. Somehow
I’d worked myself into a frenzy that had canceled all thoughts of my dad.

“Are you waiting for him?” Mom said.

The blue robe she’d worn for years was tied at her waist. As a child, I’d nestled in its dangling sleeves when she’d read novels or watched
Dallas
. Her blonde hair was pulled taut, revealing fully her huge eyes shining wetly against her soft, freckled skin. A small mouth, like mine. If she’d so much as smoked a joint in the seventies, if she’d ever cursed or knowingly wounded a living thing, I was aware of it. Nor had I sensed any limit to her kindness, which asked very little of me in return; what she wanted most was for my sister and me to live lives unburdened by heavy pain. One of my friends in the old neighborhood called her “Ma,” and another had claimed she looked like an owl, a pretty owl-woman. Tired as she was, her face was strong, a beautiful sight.

“You should go upstairs,” I said.

It had been years since I’d told her much about my life, yet in her presence I’d feel our moods altering each other without a word. An emotional telepathy I shared only with her. She took a breath, getting a read on me.

“What’s with the bat?” she said.

The Easton was turned down at my side, my palm balanced on the butt of the handle. Any other night she’d have pleaded with me to return the bat to where it belonged. She’d have asked questions that shamed me into admitting the right thing to do. Just then she might have been hoping Dad would sulk through the back door; if he had, she might not have said a word to restrain me. In her bedroom upstairs Caitlin would be volted awake by sounds of me demolishing the kitchen table and backing him into a corner. Mom might close her eyes, praying that enough would be enough.