A fictional version of a childhood memory

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It was hot. Muggy August in New Jersey hot. The morning was empty, and the afternoon was dragging. I was in my room doing not much of anything other than ignoring my mother’s daily admonition to clean it when I heard my brother call from downstairs.

“Harry, you gotta see this! Come on out back.”

I heard the screen door slap as Ken ran back outside. I scrambled down the stairs and out of the house to see what he’d come up with to escape the day’s humid monotony.

He was standing in the back yard, a couple of yards from our back porch, a baseball bat in one hand, and a golf ball in the other. About half a dozen golf balls were scattered on the ground in front of him.

Ken knew how to hit. He was a Little League all-star who’d crushed 10 home runs in an 18-game season that summer. He wasn’t big, but his coach said he had a quick bat and a good eye for the strike zone. That combination made all the difference. I was just old enough to be his team’s batboy, and it was a thrill to be in the dugout with guys who seemed so much older than me and who thought the world of my brother. He could hit a baseball, no doubt about it. But golf balls? It seemed like a goofy idea to me.

“Where’d you get the golf balls?”

“Don gets ‘em when he caddies up at Thayer Brook Country Club. He gave me a bunch of ‘em when I told him I want to learn how to golf.”

I was skeptical.

“You don’t even have clubs. How you gonna learn to play golf?”

“Listen, moron, I know I don’t have any clubs. I just wanted to see how far one of these things would go if I whacked it with a baseball bat. Wait’ll you see this. It’s unbefuckinglievable!”

I looked around, afraid that someone, anyone, might have heard my brother cussing and I started to feel like coming out to watch might not have been a great idea.

He was facing away from our house towards our backyard which wasn’t all that big, but beyond the yard’s lone weeping willow and a tangle of wild blackberries was an empty field that used to be part of Harrington’s farm a couple hundred years ago. No one lived in the farmhouse anymore, and no one had for as long as anyone could remember.“You watching?”

“Yeah.”

I shaded my eyes with my hand and concentrated. Ken dug his feet in and wiped his brow with the crook of his arm. He grabbed the bat with his left hand and rested it on his shoulder. He tossed the golf ball straight up, grabbed the bat with his right hand, and as the ball came down into his strike zone, he swung away. He hit it square on the bat’s sweet spot and the ball jumped off his bat like nothing I’d ever seen. It didn’t make that distinctive hollow sound of a solid base hit, but the golf ball went shooting over the willow, over the blackberries, and disappeared deep into Harrington’s field.

“See what I mean?”

“Wow! How far you figure it went?”

“A hundred yards. Easy.”

The fences at our Little League field were no more than 200 feet from home plate. The idea that a kid could hit something, anything, another 100 feet seemed impossible to me. But seeing was believing.

“Let me try one.”

“You’ll get a turn. Relax.”

He repeated the process and this time the ball went even farther.

“Geez, that’s a major league home run!”

“Think you can hit one that far?”

“Is it my turn?”

“Sure, but I get the bat back if you don’t hit it as far as I did.”

I hated rules like that, rules that were made up on the spot to make sure I’d lose. But at least I’d get a chance.

“Let me try.”

Ken handed me the bat. It was heavier than the bat I was used to, but I knew better than to ask him to wait while I went back inside and dug my bat out of whatever closet it happened to be occupying.

“Take your best shot.”

I put the bat between my knees, spit on my hands, rubbed them together, and picked up the bat. Ken was waiting for me to get ready. When I nodded, he flipped a golf ball to me. I caught it, dug my feet in, and looked out past the willow tree to Harrington’s field. With the bat on my shoulder and my left hand on the bat, I gave the golf ball a slight toss, grabbed the bat with my other hand, waited for the ball to fall, and swung away.

Whack! I got some good wood on it and the ball went flying! What a feeling! It didn’t go as far as either of Ken’s balls had, but it went farther than any baseball I’d ever hit, and I mean a lot farther. I felt a surge of joy and power and I immediately imagined myself as the next Mickey Mantle, the next Hank Aaron, the next legendary major league baseball slugger. I bent down to pick up another ball to solidify my newly achieved status as the all-time greatest. The roar of the crowd in my imagination was rising!

“Not so fast there, pipsqueak! The rest are mine.”

Ken’s reassertion of his big-brother status killed the roar of the crowd. He pointed to the bat and held out his hand. I surrendered the instrument of my recently-acquired fame and stepped back from the litter of balls.

Ken bent down and picked up another golf ball and turned to the right until he was facing thestreet that ran along the side of our house.

“What are you doing?”

“I bet I can hit it over Cindy Watson’s house. Wanna bet?”

Suddenly our neighbors’ house, two stories tall with an attic on top of that, seemed as tall as the Empire State Building. I doubted anything could be hit over it.

“You better not hit her house, especially her window.”

“What are you, scared?”

“Why should I be? It’s your skin, not mine.”

I lied. I didn’t want anything to go wrong, even if it wasn’t going to be my fault. I didn’t see the point of ruining the moment on a dare. The transition from thrilled to nervous took about five seconds.

Cindy Watson’s window was of great interest to us. When she turned 16, Cindy lost whatever misgivings she may have had about getting dressed in front of that window. My brother, whose own bedroom window faced hers from a distance of about 100 feet, was the first among us, so far as I knew, to discover Cindy’s newly acquired habits. I walked into his room one night. The lights were out, and he was at his window with a pair of cheap binoculars Uncle Fred had given him when he signed up for the Cub Scouts. He motioned to me to join him at the window. When I got there, he handed me the binoculars and pointed at Cindy’s window. I looked and was immediately sorry I had. I dropped the binoculars and ran out of his room, down the upstairs hallway and back to my own room. The sight of Cindy Watson, full-frontal and naked, was more than my eight-year-old brain could handle. I didn’t understand why her breasts weren’t pointy, the way they always were when she was fully dressed. And that dark patch below her belly was a complete mystery. She looked like some superior life form, something I was forbidden to behold, and I was ashamed of both of us for having seen her.

“’Cause if I hit her house, I’m going to tell Dad you did it.”

I knew the threat was a real one. I looked around hoping to see some grownup witness who could vouch for me should Ken’s gambit fail. Ken did the same. Seeing no one, he felt unconstrained. I contemplated running back inside to distance myself from the unfolding disaster.

“Shut up. Just don’t put it through her window. You’ll get us both killed.”

“Here goes. You better hope I make it.”

He tossed the ball, gripped the bat, and swung away. The sound of the ball hitting the bat was followed almost instantly by the sound of the ball crashing through Cindy Watson’s second-story bedroom window. We froze, staring at the near perfect hole the golf ball had made in the window. I was mesmerized, paralyzed, certain that I’d just witnessed a crime!

Before I knew what was happening Ken tossed the bat towards me. Like an idiot, instead of letting the bat fall to the ground, I caught it. He ran by me making a beeline for the back porch. As he hit the top of the porch and grabbed the screen door, he made good on his threat.

“Dad! Dad! You won’t believe what Harry just did,” as he disappeared inside the house.

I stood there, terrified, until I heard our phone ring. I was sure Mrs. Watson was on the other end waiting to tell my parents to clobber me the first chance they got. I dropped the bat, which at this point felt more like a murder weapon, and ran as hard as I could away from the house, over the split rail fence and onto Harrington's farm. I knew that my only chance, and it was a good one, was if Dad was already asleep from the two quarts of beer he’d had with his pickled pigs’ feet at lunch. No way was I going to stick around to find out, so I just kept running, fleeing the scene of the crime, wondering if I’d ever be able to return.

At the dinner table, my father kept looking over at Ken. He’d shove some meatloaf into his mouth and look at Ken while he was chewing. Ken’s face stayed red most of the meal, and he kept his eyes on his plate the entire time.

At one point, my mother said, “Why can’t you boys find something constructive to do?”

She looked at both of us. I knew better than to respond, and Ken kept silent too. She shook her head before adding, “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop,” one of her favorite phrases.

As soon as I finished poking at my string beans, spreading them around on my plate to create the illusion that I’d eaten some of them, I asked to be excused. My mother looked at my father for a response.

“Go on. You too, Jeannie. I gotta talk to your brother here about respecting people’s privacy and property.”

Jeannie and I grabbed our plates, put them in the kitchen sink, and ran out back into the warm summer evening. There was still plenty of light, but the yard was all in shadow as the sun made its way to the horizon. We stopped running, sat down in the cool grass, looked at each other, and started laughing.

“I saw Ken’s binoculars in the trash,” Jeannie chuckled.

“You think Dad’ll make him pay for Cindy’s window?”

“Oh, he’s paying for it. He’s paying for it right now!”

I laughed again, but I wasn’t sure what she meant by that, so I dropped it. I was just grateful to have escaped the devil’s workshop unscathed. We sat there looking up at the sky as the summer evening fell, waiting for it to get dark enough to bring out the lightning bugs.

By Jonathan Dyer

From: United States

Website: https://jonathandyerauthor.com/