Boys Life

flashlight.
    “I’m Cory Mackenson,” I said. I stood there, waiting, with my fingers grasping the fence’s mesh. “Don’t you have a name?”
    “Yeth,” the boy answered.
    I thought he’d said Seth at first, and then it dawned on me that he had a lisp. “What is it?”
    “Nemo,” he said.
    “Nemo? Like Captain Nemo?”
    “Huh?”
    A student of Jules Verne he was not. “What’s your last name?”
    “Curlith,” he said.
    Curlith. It took me a few seconds to decipher it. Not Curlith, but Curliss. The new boy in town, the one who had a traveling salesman as a father. The boy who sat on the horse to get his hair cut at Mr. Dollar’s. The pansy.
    Nemo Curliss. Well, the name suited him. He looked like something a net might drag up from twenty thousand leagues. But my parents had taught me that everybody deserved respect, no matter if they were pansies or not, and to tell the truth, I was nothing to write home about in the physical looks department. “You’re new in town,” I offered.
    He nodded.
    “Mr. Dollar told me about you.”
    “He did?”
    “Yeah. Said”-you sat on the horse, I almost told him-“you got a haircut.”
    “Uh-huh. ’Bout thaved me baldheaded,” Nemo said, and he scratched the top of his scalp with a thin-fingered hand attached to a white, bony wrist.
    “Heads up, Cory!” I heard Davy shout. I looked up. Johnny had put all his strength into a fly ball that not only overshot Davy’s glove, but cleared the fence, banged against the second row of bleachers, and rolled down to the bottom.
    “Little help!” Davy said, smacking his glove with his fist.
    Nemo Curliss walked down from the top and picked up the ball. He was the littlest runt I think I’d ever seen. My own arms were skinny, but his were all bones and veins. He looked at me, his dark brown eyes magnified owlish by his glasses. “Can I throw it back?” he asked.
    I shrugged. “I don’t care.” I turned toward Davy, and maybe it was mean but I couldn’t suppress a wicked smile. “Comin’ at you, Davy.”
    “Oh, wow!” Davy started backing up in mock terror. “Don’t scorch me, kid!”
    Nemo walked up to the top bleacher again. He squinted toward the field. “You ready?” he yelled.
    “I’m ready! Throw it, big hoss!” Davy answered.
    “No, not you,” Nemo corrected him. “That other guy out there.” And then he reared back, swung his arm in a circle that was impossible for the eye to follow, and the ball left his hand in a white blur.
    I heard the ball hiss as it rose into the sky, like a firecracker on a short fuse.
    Davy cried out, “Hey!” and backpedaled to get it, but the ball was over him and gone. Beyond Davy, Johnny looked up at the falling sphere and took three steps forward. Then two steps back. One more step back, to where he’d been standing when the ball was thrown. Johnny lifted his hand and held his glove out in front of his face.
    There was a sweet, solid pop as the ball kissed leather.
    “Right in the pocket!” Davy shouted. “Man, did you see that thing fly?”
    Out toward first base, Johnny removed his glove and wrang his catching hand, his fingers stinging with the impact.
    I looked at Nemo, my mouth agape. I couldn’t believe anybody as little and skinny as him could throw a baseball over the bleachers fence, much less half the width of the field and into an outstretched glove. What’s more, Nemo didn’t even act as if it had hurt his arm, and a heave like that would’ve left my shoulder sore for a week, even if I could’ve gotten that kind of distance out of it. It was a major league throw if I’d ever seen one. “Nemo!” I said. “Where’d you learn to throw a ball like that?”
    He blinked at me behind his glasses. “Like what?” he asked.
    “Come down here. Okay?”
    “Why?” Nemo looked scared again. I had the feeling that he was well acquainted with the bad end of the stick. There are three things every town in the country has in common: a church, a secret, and a bully ready to tear the head off a skinny kid who couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag. I imagined that Nemo Curliss, in following his salesman daddy from town to town, had seen his share of those. I felt ashamed for my wicked smile. “It’s all right,” I said. “Just come on down.”
    “Man, what a throw!” Davy Ray Callan, having retrieved the ball from Johnny, jogged up to where Nemo was entering the field through the players’ gate. “You really nailed it in there,