unbroken, the frame unbent. Rocket had been bruised but was amazingly healthy
for such a nasty spill. I righted the bike, thanking whatever angel had been
riding on my shoulder, and as I ran my fingers over the dented fender I saw
the eye in the headlamp.
It was a golden orb with a dark pupil, and it stared at me with what
might have been a brooding tolerance.
I blinked, startled.
The golden eye was gone. Now the headlight was just a plain bulb behind a
circle of glass again.
I kept staring at the headlight. There was no eye in it. I rolled Rocket
around, from sun to shadow and back again, but the image did not return.
I felt my head, searching for a lump. I found none.
It’s crazy, the things a boy can imagine.
I got back on the seat and started pedaling along the sidewalk again.
This time I took it slow and easy, and I hadn’t gone twenty feet before I saw
all the glass from a broken Yoo-Hoo bottle scattered across the sidewalk in
front of me. I swerved Rocket over the curb and onto the street, missing the
glass fragments and saving Rocket’s tires. I hated to think what might have
happened if I’d gone over that glass at high speed; a few scratches from a
leafy hedge were mild compared to what could have been.
We had been very lucky, Rocket and me.
Davy Ray Callan lived nearby. I stopped at his house, but his mother said
Davy Ray had gone to the ball field with Johnny Wilson to practice. Our Little
League team—the Indians, for whom I played second base—had lost our first four
games and we needed all the practice we could get. I thanked Mrs. Callan and I
aimed Rocket toward the field.
It wasn’t far. Davy Ray and Johnny were standing out in the sunshine and
the red dust, pitching a ball back and forth. I rode Rocket onto the field and
circled them, and their mouths dropped open at the sight of my new bike. Of
course they had to touch it, too, had to sit on it and pedal it around a
little. Next to Rocket, their bikes looked like dusty antiques. Still, this
was Davy Ray’s opinion of Rocket: “It don’t handle so good, though, does it?”
And Johnny’s: “It sure is pretty, but the pedals are stiff.” I realized they
were not saying this simply to rain on my parade; they were good friends, and
they rejoiced in my happiness. The fact of the matter is that they preferred
their own bikes. Rocket had been made for me and me alone.
I rested Rocket on its kickstand and watched while Davy Ray threw high
fly balls to Johnny. Yellow butterflies flew from the grass, and overhead the
sky was blue and cloudless. I looked toward the brown-painted bleachers, under
the signs advertising different Merchants Street stores, and I saw a figure
sitting at the top.
“Hey, Davy!” I said. “Who’s that?”
Davy glanced over and then lifted his glove to snare Johnny’s return
pitch. “I don’t know. Just some kid, been sittin’ there since we got here.”
I watched the guy. He was hunkered forward, watching us, with one elbow
on a knee and his chin propped on his palm. I turned away from Davy and walked
toward the bleachers, and the kid at the top suddenly stood up as if he meant
to run.
“What’re you doin’ up there?” I called to him.
He didn’t answer. He just stood there, and I could tell he was trying to
decide whether to take to his heels or not.
I got closer. I didn’t recognize him; he had short-cropped dark brown
hair with a wiry cowlick sticking up from the left side of his head, and he
wore glasses that seemed too big for his face. He was maybe nine or ten years
old, I figured, and he was a real beanpole, with gawky arms and legs. He wore
blue jeans with patched knees and a white T-shirt, and the buttermilk pallor
of his skin told me he didn’t get outside very much. “What’s your name?” I
asked him as I reached the fence between the field and the bleachers.
He didn’t reply.
“Can you talk?”
I saw him tremble. He looked as scared as a deer caught in a hunter’s
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, kid! How old are you?”
“Nine,” was the answer. “Almost nine and a half.”
I could tell Davy was as puzzled as I was about Nemo’s size; there should
have been no way on earth for a runt like that to drill a baseball into a mitt
as he had. “Go stand on second base, Johnny!” I shouted, and Johnny waved and
ran over to take the position. “You want to throw some, Nemo?”
“I don’t know. I’m thaposed to be gettin’ home thoon.”
“It won’t take long. I’d kinda like to see what you can do. Davy, can he
wear your glove?”
Davy took it off. The glove swallowed Nemo’s left hand like a brown
whale. “Why don’t you stand on the pitcher’s mound and throw Johnny a few?” I
suggested.
Nemo looked at the pitcher’s mound, at second base, and then at home
plate. “I’ll thand right there,” he said, and he walked to the batter’s box
while Davy and I stood dumbfounded. From home plate to second base was quite a
toss for guys our age, much less anybody nine-and-a-half years old. “You sure,
Nemo?” I asked, and he said, “Thure.”
Nemo took the ball out of the glove with what might have been reverence.
I watched his long fingers work around it, find a grip on the seams, and
fasten themselves. “Ready?” he called.
“Yeah, I’m ready! Let ’er ri—”
Smack!
If we hadn’t seen such a thing with our own eyes, none of us would ever
have believed it. Nemo had wound up and pitched in a heartbeat, and if Johnny
hadn’t been extra quick, the ball would’ve caught him right in the center of
his chest and knocked him flat. As it was, the sheer power of the pitch made
Johnny stagger back off second base, dust smoking from the ball in his
clenched glove. Johnny began to walk around in a circle, his face pinched with
pain.
“You okay?” Davy shouted.
“Hurts a little,” Johnny answered. Davy and I knew it must be bad for
Johnny to admit it. “I can take another one.” We were too far away to hear him
say, under his breath, “I hope.” He threw the ball back in a high arc to Nemo,
who stepped forward six paces, watched the ball speed downward toward his
face, and plucked it out of the air at the very last second. The kid knew what
economy of movement was all about, but I swear he’d been an instant away from
a smashed nose.
Nemo returned to the plate. He wiped dust off the tops of his brown
loafers by rubbing them on the backs of his jeans legs. He started to wind up,
and Johnny braced for the throw. Nemo unwound and put the ball back in his
glove. “Throwin’ ain’t nothin’,” he told us, as if all this attention
embarrassed him. “Anybody with an arm can do it.”
“Not like that!” Davy Ray said.
“You guyth think thith is a big deal or thomethin’?”
“It’s fast,” I said. “Real fast, Nemo. The pitcher on our team’s not even
as fast, and he’s twice your size.”
“Thith ith eathy thuff.” Nemo looked out at Johnny. “Run for turd bayth!”
“What?”
“Run for turd bayth!” Nemo repeated. “Hold your glove anywhere, just keep
it open and where I can thee it!”
“Huh?”
“Run as fath as you can!” Nemo urged. “You don’t have to look at me,
jutht keep your glove open!”
“Go ahead, Johnny!” Davy called. “Do it!”
Johnny was a brave fellow. He showed it right then, as he started
pounding the dirt between second and third bases. He didn’t look toward home,
but his head and shoulders were pulled in tight and his glove was down in
front of his chest, the pocket open and facing Nemo Curliss.
Nemo pulled in a quick breath. He drew back, his white arm flashed, and
the ball went like a bullet.
Johnny was going full out, his gaze fixed on third base. The ball popped
into his glove when he was still a half-dozen steps from third, and the feel
of it wedging solidly into the pocket was so startling that Johnny lost his
balance and went down on the ground in a slide that boiled up yellow dust.
When the dust began to clear, Johnny was sitting on third base staring at the
ball in his glove. “Wow,” he said, stunned. “Wow.”
I had never in my life seen a baseball thrown with such amazing accuracy.
Johnny hadn’t even had to reach an inch for it; in fact, he hadn’t even known
the ball was coming until it hit him in the glove. “Nemo?” I said. “You ever
pitched on a Little League team before?”
“Nope.”
“But you’ve played ball before, haven’t you?” Davy Ray asked.
“Nope.” He frowned and pushed his glasses up with a finger because the
bridge of his nose was getting slick with sweat. “My mom won’t let me. Thays I
might get hurt.”
“You’ve never played ball on a team?”
“Well, I’ve got a ball and glove at home. Thometimeth I practith catchin’
fly ballth. Thometimeth I thee how far I can throw. I thet up bottleth on a
fence potht and knock ’em down. Thuff like that.”
“Doesn’t your dad want you to play ball?” I asked.
Nemo shrugged and scuffed the dust with the toe of his loafer. “He don’t
have much to thay about it.”
I was struck with wonder. Standing before me, in the shape of a skinny
little runt with thick glasses and a lisp, was a natural. “Will you pitch me a
few?” I asked, and he said he would. I got Johnny’s glove—which he gave up
gladly from his sore hand—and I tossed the ball to Nemo. I ran to second base
and planted myself. “Put it right here, Nemo!” I told him, and I extended my
arm and held the mitt level with my shoulder. Nemo nodded, wound up, and let
fly. I never had to move my hand. The ball smacked into the glove with a force
that jangled the nerves all the way from my fingertips to my collarbone. When
I threw it back, Nemo had to run forward and dart and weave to catch it. Then
