Painting the Black Read online

  “I hit all right,” I answered. “How about you? You play on your school baseball team?”

  He nodded. “And football. Quarterback and pitcher.”

  I acted more surprised than I was. “Really?”

  “Really.”

  After that neither of us talked for a while. The baseball went back and forth, back and forth.

  It was the first time I’d ever used a catcher’s mitt. I thought it would feel awkward, but it felt fine, and I loved having a baseball in my hand again. I could have thrown easy like that all day, but I sensed Josh was getting edgy.

  “Look, Ryan,” he finally said. “How about squatting down so I can cut loose a few fastballs? I haven’t thrown hard in a while, and I miss it.”

  When you’ve got a bad ankle, going into a catcher’s crouch isn’t exactly your favorite thing. If it had been anybody else I’d have said no, but from the start Josh was different.

  “I’ll give it a try,” I answered, squatting behind the plate. “But remember, I’m no catcher.”

  After the first two pitches I wasn’t worried about my ankle. I was worried about my face. Josh wasn’t fast; he was FAST. The ball absolutely exploded from his hand. The palm of my left hand burned, and it was hard not to back off.

  “Do you think you could handle a curve?” he asked after he’d blazed fastballs at me for fifteen minutes or so.

  I almost said yes, just to get away from the fastballs, but I thought better of it. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a real curve.”

  He stretched his arm over his head. “You’d better not, then, not without a mask.” He looked at his watch. “I should get back anyway. Otherwise my old man will throw a fit.” He paused. “Does that offer to help still stand?”

  “You got it,” I said.

  4

  Back at his house, Josh’s father was standing on the porch, hands on his hips, frowning. “No more baseball until every box is inside and unpacked,” he said before heading into the house. He didn’t even look at me. Not exactly a pleasant guy.

  But his mother was different. She looked like Josh, tall and dark with a long face and dark eyes. When she saw me, she smiled and introduced herself. She asked me about my mother and father, and whether I had any brothers or sisters. “Josh has an older brother, Andrew, who is at UCLA on an academic scholarship. Andrew is planning on law school when he graduates.” Her voice was alive with pride. “We’re hoping he’ll come up to visit this summer, or maybe we’ll go down over Christmas.”

  From the sour expression on Josh’s face, I could tell he hoped his brother would never come up.

  Once the introductions were over, Josh led me to the Ryder truck, jumped inside, and handed a box down to me. He picked up another one, and I followed him up the stairs to his room. From his window he had a view of Mount Rainier. “This is a great room,” I said, putting the box down and looking out.

  He shrugged. “It’s okay, I guess. I liked our house in San Jose better.”

  “Why did you move?”

  “It wasn’t my idea. My mother is the brains in this family. My mother and my famous brother Andrew. She worked for Apple, but she’s afraid they’re going out of business. So when she got an offer from Microsoft, she took it.”

  “What about your father?” I asked.

  Josh snorted. “He’s a plumber. There are toilets everywhere.”

  After that it was work. Up and down we went, trip after trip after trip. When the last box was out of the truck and in the house, we stopped to eat sandwiches his mother had bought at the deli on Market.

  While we were sprawled out on the porch eating, Josh’s father came out from the back of the truck grinning and holding up two wolf masks. “Remember all the Halloweens you and Andrew wore these? You two would howl and jump around in the front room, and your mom and I would pretend to be scared out of our wits.”

  “Just throw them away, Dad.”

  His father shook his head. “I’ll stick them in the basement. They’re not taking up any space, and you might want them someday.”

  Josh looked at me and rolled his eyes.

  We spent the afternoon unpacking the boxes we’d carried upstairs. Josh had a ton of sports stuff: baseballs, bats, footballs, gloves, caps, shin guards, a basketball, shoulder pads. Most of it got shoved into a hall closet right outside his room. “There’s one more thing I’ve got to get,” he said when the last box was empty.

  I followed him to the truck. Up against the back wall was a big cork bulletin board. It wasn’t heavy, but maneuvering it up the staircase was tricky. Twice we had to flip it around.

  Once we got the bulletin board hung up, Josh unzipped a portfolio, pulled out a stack of newspaper articles, and handed them to me. As he pinned the first one up, I flipped through the rest of them. The headlines were all alike. Daniels Strikes Out Twelve! Four TD Passes for Daniels! Daniels Named Valley MVP!

  I stared at the huge pile. “You told me you played,” I said, “but you didn’t tell me you were the greatest athlete in the history of the world.”

  “I’m not quite that.”

  I flipped through a few more articles. “If you’re half as good as these clippings say you are, you might just be the guy who can finally push Crown Hill High over the top.”

  He stopped what he was doing and turned to look at me. “What does that mean?”

  I shrugged. “We have good teams, really good teams, every year. But when it comes to the championship game, O’Dea High always beats us. It’s been like that for as long as I can remember. They end up state champions, and we don’t even make the tournament.”

  “Really,” he said, and then he went back to pinning up articles. But I could tell he’d taken what I’d said and filed it away in his mind.

  I got up to go. “I promised my father I’d do some yard work. I’d better get on it.”

  “What about tomorrow morning?” he said. “You want to throw the ball around again?”

  “Sure,” I answered. “That would be great.”

  5

  My parents were full of questions. What was he like? What were his parents like? Did I know what they did?

  They liked my answers too, even the one about his father’s being a plumber. My dad laughed when I told him. “That might come in handy some cold winter night.”

  I did the yard work, then went upstairs and showered. The whole day had gone smooth as ice, but something was bothering me, like a tiny rock in a shoe. I dried myself off, put on clean clothes, then went to my bedroom to listen to the end of the Mariners game before dinner.

  The Mariners were up by two in the ninth when Albert Belle drilled a bases-loaded double to steal the victory from them. I flicked off the radio, then found myself wondering if a guy like Belle pinned up his newspaper clippings on a bulletin board in his bedroom. I smiled at the thought of a big star like Belle with his scissors out snipping away at newspapers, but then I looked up at my own bulletin board and I stopped laughing. Suddenly I knew what had been eating at me.

  My bulletin board was half the size of Josh’s. Pinned to it was a note I’d written in March about a history assignment, a birthday card from my grandfather Kevin, and a calendar that still showed May. The rest of it was empty. Completely empty.

  I hate people who feel sorry for themselves. It’s too much like making excuses. But there are times when I can’t help but wonder what my life might have been like if I hadn’t broken my ankle. Maybe my name would have been in headlines, like Josh’s. Ward Drives Home Three! Ward Homer Wins Game! Ward Leads Vikings to State!

  What makes it doubly hard to think about is that the accident was so stupid, so completely and utterly stupid. I was twelve when it happened. For two full years I’d been healthy. No ear infections, no bronchitis, no nothing. I’d grown six inches in those two years. I felt stronger every day, every minute. I guess I felt then like Josh felt now—that nothing could stop me, that I could do whatever I wanted, that the whol
e world was mine.

  That was the spring when I hit the home run that won the championship. But I hit more than that one shot. I batted over .500, led the league in RBIs, and my coach told me I had the quickest wrists he had ever seen. I was going to be the next Ken Griffey, Jr. All you had to do was ask me.

  July came and Little League ended. None of my baseball buddies lived nearby, and school was two months off. I was bored stiff—until Brett Youngblood moved into the house on the corner.

  Brett’s father was an animal. He’d yell at Brett and his brother, Jack, yell and scream and shake them so hard you’d see their heads swing back and forth like rag dolls. It was usually over nothing—a bike on the lawn, the garbage not being taken out. Little things, but he’d go berserk. He never touched me, but I was terrified of him. I stayed clear whenever he was around, which wasn’t often.

  Brett’s mother was a different story. I didn’t stay away from her. She was younger than my mom. But it wasn’t just that. She was different, too. Summer days she’d walk around in a thin white shirt. She wouldn’t have a bra on, and I could see the outline of her breasts right through her shirt.

  Sometimes she’d catch me staring. Then she’d laugh. “Naughty, naughty,” she’d say, wagging her finger at me and smiling, and I’d turn bright red. Brett glowered at me when she did that. But I couldn’t help myself, and his mother thought the whole thing was a big joke.

  Brett was actually younger than I was, but he acted older. He swore all the time, and he was always talking about what he would do to this girl or that girl if he ever got her alone somewhere. I smoked my first cigarette with him, and had my first beer. I knew he was trouble, but he was also exciting, and nobody else my age lived on the block.

  We mainly hung out at the Community Center, shooting hoops or playing catch or hitting baseballs. But some days we’d go to the forested part of Golden Gardens Park. That’s where we coughed our way through those stolen cigarettes and choked down the warm beers. But we didn’t smoke or drink that much—maybe three or four times all summer. Most days we just hiked the trails and climbed trees together. Typical stuff.

  Brett was always the better climber. He moved through trees like a squirrel. He was fearless. In every sport—baseball, basketball, football—I could crush him. But climbing trees, he had me.

  He liked rubbing it in, too. He’d scurry up some fir tree and throw cones down at me and laugh. “You wouldn’t believe all the things I can see from here,” he’d say.

  I shouldn’t have let it bother me. With his deranged father and his sexy mother, he needed his moment. I should have let him have it. But I didn’t.

  One windy afternoon in late August, Brett climbed way up in a maple. I want to say the tree was a hundred feet tall, but it was probably closer to fifty. Still, from the ground he looked small as he clung to one of the top branches.

  “This is so amazing!” he shouted down. “This is the coolest thing in the whole world!”

  I listened and fumed for ten minutes. Then I started climbing. I scratched myself up pretty good, and it took me a lot longer than it had taken him, but I finally made it as high as he’d gotten.

  When I pulled myself up next to him, he looked pained, pained and angry. I didn’t care. I felt as if big firecrackers were exploding inside me. There was nothing I couldn’t do.

  Then came a gust of wind, and the branches swayed. “I’m going down,” Brett said, and a second later he was gone, moving from branch to branch, down and down and down.

  The breeze didn’t whisper through the branches. That’s what it sounds like when you’re safe on the ground. When you’re up there, way up there, it sounds like groaning. The wind picked up even more and the whole tree started rolling. It was as if it were trying to shake me off its back like a wet dog shakes off drops of water.

  I looked down. Brett was on the trail throwing rocks into the brush. “Let’s go, Ryan,” he hollered up.

  “Okay,” I managed to call back.

  But nothing was okay. I hugged the trunk of the tree for all I was worth, hoping to find enough courage to begin. But the courage wasn’t there. “Help me, Brett!”

  Brett stood at the base of the tree, looking up. “What do you want me to do?” His voice was angry.

  “Get my dad!” I shouted.

  “I’m not going to get your dad. You got up there; you can get down.”

  I clung to the tree for what seemed like hours, but was probably only a minute or maybe two.

  “I’m going home,” Brett shouted up disgustedly. “See you later.”

  “You can’t leave me!” I screamed.

  “I’m not going to stay here all day.” He started toward the path that led out of the park.

  “Wait!” I called to him. “Come back.”

  But he kept walking, down the path and out of sight. I never saw him again.

  I don’t know how long I stayed in the tree. Probably no more than five minutes, but it seemed like hours. Finally I started down. The first ten feet were okay. Then came a long bare spot. I dangled my legs down, stretching to reach the branch below me. But I couldn’t reach it. I was trying to pull myself back up when my right hand slipped. I clawed at the bark with my fingertips, clawed like a cat claws. It was no good. My left hand started slipping too. I dug my nails into the bark. I could feel the splinters going into the soft skin of my fingertips. It burned like fire, but I had to hold on. I had to hold on.

  A second later I was falling. Not straight down. I’d be dead if I’d fallen straight down. No, I came down more like a pinball goes through a pinball machine. I must have bounced off twenty branches before I hit solid earth.

  A woman walking her dogs found me. I don’t remember much about her—only that she put her coat over me and then ran off, her dogs barking.

  They drove the Medic Aide car right into the park. This man talked to me, felt my stomach, my arms and legs, and then with another man lifted me onto a stretcher.

  I spent two weeks at Children’s Hospital. Some of the nurses who remembered me as the Helicopter Baby visited. “Couldn’t stay away,” they joked.

  I didn’t get a body cast, though the doctors considered it, but I did end up with casts on both legs and my left arm, and with pins and a metal plate in my right ankle. My stomach was wrapped tight, and for a while I had to wear a neck brace, though I don’t know why. My neck never hurt.

  When I got home it wasn’t much better than being in the hospital. I couldn’t go to school; I couldn’t go downstairs; I couldn’t even make it to the bathroom. That lasted for two months. Sometime in there Brett moved away.

  Then came the day when all the casts and wrappings came off. The doctors had warned me my legs would be weak and skinny; my mom and dad had told me the same thing. I just didn’t believe them. I thought that happened to everyone else, but that I’d be different, that I’d pop out of bed and be like new—able to run and jump as well as ever, better even.

  And then . . . there they were. A scaly, scrawny left arm. Two skinny, pathetic-looking white strings for legs. I couldn’t run—I could barely walk. My right ankle ached. I couldn’t bend it, and walking stiff-legged made my left hip sore.

  I was depressed for a while, but then I came out of it. I figured all I needed to do was work and I’d be as good as new.

  I did my physical therapy exercises, all of them, every day. And I got stronger and was able to run a little and do things. Only not as well as before. Not nearly as well. So I worked harder, tried harder, got down on my knees and prayed to God. But things that had been so easy and natural—running, hitting, throwing, and catching a baseball—felt awkward and unnatural.

  And then, one day, I faced it: I wasn’t going to make it back. There was no point in endlessly banging my head against a brick wall. For five years I didn’t pick up a baseball.

  Until Josh Daniels.

  6

  The next morning Josh was waiting for me. His front door opened before I made it halfway up his porch ste
ps. “Good to see you,” he said as he stepped out. He handed me a catcher’s mitt and a mask and a little piece of sponge. “If you shove that in your mitt, your hand won’t hurt so much.” He grinned. “And you should get yourself a cup too, unless you don’t plan on having any children.”

  When we reached the diamonds, I wanted to throw the ball right away. But Josh shook his head. “We’ve got all morning. We should stretch out first, run a little, get loose. Do it right.”

  I felt my body go tense. The stretching was okay, but I didn’t want to run. He’d be too fast, and I’d feel like a fool. I swallowed. “I’ll stretch out,” I said, “but I’m not sure how my ankle will hold up running.”

  “It’s that bad?”

  “It’s not very good.”

  Stretching has always seemed like a waste of time to me, but Josh was dead serious. Ankles, calves, hamstrings, groin, hips, torso, arms, neck—he stretched everything. I watched whatever he did and copied as best I could. The whole routine took at least half an hour. Finally he stopped. “What do you think? Seven, eight laps?”

  “I’ll try,” I said. “But don’t you stop just because I do.”

  It’s about a quarter of a mile around both fields. Josh had long strides, but he wasn’t churning his legs fast. My strides were short and choppy, but I was able to keep up. And my ankle didn’t hurt—not at that pace.

  We ran a lap, two laps, three laps. Slowly, probably without even knowing it, he picked up his pace. My breath was coming faster; my heart was thumping; my lungs burned; my side ached. As we finished our fourth lap, I slowed to a walk. “Go on,” I said.

  He ran backwards for a few steps. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I answered. “I’m just going to walk a little.”