Boys Life

I knew. The houses are still here, but many of them are tumbling down, the yards forlorn. It’s not totally a ghost town, however, because some of the houses-a small, small number, it appears-are still being lived in, and there are a few cars on the streets. But already I feel that a great gathering-a wonderful party and celebration of life-has moved on somewhere else, leaving its physical evidence behind like a garden of dead flowers.
    This is going to be a lot tougher than I thought.
    Sandy senses it. “You all right?”
    “We’ll find out,” I tell her, and I manage a feeble smile.
    “There’s hardly anybody here, is there, Dad?”
    “Hardly a soul,” I answer.
    I turn off Merchants Street before I get to the center of town. I can’t take that yet. I drive to the ball field where the Branlins made their savage attack on us that day, and I stop the car on the field’s edge.
    “Mind if we sit here for a minute, kids?” I ask.
    “No,” Sandy says, and she squeezes my hand.
    About the Branlins. Johnny supplied me with this information, being an officer of the law. It seems that the brothers were not of a single nature after all. Gotha started playing football in high school and became the man of the hour when he intercepted a Union Town High School pass right on their goal line and ran it back for a big TD. The acclaim did wonders for him, proving that all the time he only craved the attention his mother and father were too stupid or mean to give him. Gotha, Johnny told me, now lives in Birmingham and sells insurance, and he coaches a peewee football team on the side. Johnny told me Gotha needs no peroxide in his hair anymore, since he has not a strand of it left.
    Gordo, on the other hand, continued his descent. I’m sorry to say that in 1980 Gordo was shot to death by the owner of a 7-Eleven in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he’d fallen in with a bad crowd. Gordo died trying to steal less than three hundred dollars from the register and all the Little Debbie cakes he could carry. It seems to me that once upon a time he did have a chance, but he didn’t listen to the poison ivy.
    “I’m gonna get out for a minute and stretch my legs,” I say.
    “Want us to go with you, Dad?”
    “No,” I answer. “Not right now.”
    I get out and walk across the overgrown baseball field. I stand on the pitcher’s mound, caressed by cool breeze and warm sun. The bleachers where I first saw Nemo Curliss are sagging. I hold my arm out with my palm toward the sky, and I wait.
    What would happen if that ball Nemo Curliss flung to heaven suddenly came down into my hand after all these years?
    I wait.
    But it doesn’t happen. Nemo, the boy with a perfect arm who was trapped by all-too-imperfect circumstances, threw that ball beyond the clouds. It never came down and it never will, and only Ben, Johnny, and I remember.
    I close my palm, and return my arm to my side.
    I can see Poulter Hill from here.
    It, too, has been allowed to deteriorate. The weeds are pushing up amid the headstones, and it appears that no new flowers have been put up there for a long time. That’s a shame, I think, because there lie Zephyr’s faithful ones.
    I don’t want to walk amid those stones. I had never been back, after my train trip. I had said my good-bye to Davy Ray, and he said his to me. Anything else would be a numb-nuts thing to do.
    I turn away from Death, and walk back to the living.
    “This was my school,” I tell my wife and child as I stop the car beside the playground.
    We all get out here, and Sandy walks at my side as my shoes stir the playground’s dust. Our “young’un” begins to run around in wider and wider circles, like a pony set free after a long period of confinement. “Be careful!” Sandy warns, because she’s seen a broken bottle. Worrying, it seems, comes with the job.
    I put my arm around Sandy, and her arm goes around my back. The elementary school is empty, some of the windows shattered. There is a crushing silence, where so many young voices whooped and hollered. I see the place near the fence where Johnny and Gotha Branlin squared off. I see the gate where I fled from Gordo on Rocket and led him to Lucifer’s judgment. I see-
    “Hey, Dad! Look what I found!”
    Our “young’un” comes trotting back. “I found it over there! Neat, huh?”
    I look into the small, offered palm, and I have to smile.
    It is a black arrowhead, smooth and almost perfectly formed. There are hardly any cuts on it