radio. I’m allowed to be at Ed’s house because his mother is home. Ed’s father is probably down at the Hideaway, playing cards and drinking beer. He might come home soon, toss the ball around with us for a while and tell jokes, or he might not come home at all. Ed will pretend he doesn’t care if his dad hasn’t shown up by the time we go to bed, but he’ll also alternate glances between the clock and the street until he falls asleep.
“Pretty Boy Pete Rose,” Ed sings, jogging back until he is on the sidewalk and rifling the ball at me so hard I take a step back and hold my glove up with both hands, feeling silly, but thankful I am able to see the damn thing before it can drill me in the nose.
“Tougher than usual tonight,” Ed says, seeing my near disaster with his throw. He points skyward. “One of the streetlights is burned out.”
“You wanna go in?” I say.
He scowls. “Nah, I don’t want to go in this early.”
I toss the ball in and out of my mitt and wait for him to make a decision. He scuffs his sneaker on the ground and eyes the garage thoughtfully.
“’Member when my dad was painting the house?” he asks. When I nod, he says, “Well, he couldn’t do it till he got home from work, and by then it was already almost dark. So he bought a spotlight to help him.”
“You still have it?”
“Yeah. He never really used it, said the paint always looked different during the day and that pissed him off. But I think he kept the light.”
“We bring that out here, maybe we can even see well enough to hit wiffle balls,” I say, liking this suggestion. “It’d be like playing at the stadium in a night game.”
“Come on.” Ed drops his mitt to the ground and starts for the tiny, one-car garage that sits behind the house. I follow.
There used to be a floodlight attached to the garage, but it, too, is broken. The overhead door is down, and we have to go in through the side door. Ed’s a step in front of me, but even so I can smell the gas as soon as he pulls the door open. Most old garages carry the smell of fuel with them, but this is different, just a bit too strong. There’s music playing, too—Van Morrison singing “Into the Mystic.”
Ed is fumbling against the wall for the light switch, oblivious to the smell. He can’t find the switch, reaching with a twelve-year-old’s short arms, so he steps farther into the garage. I move with him, and now I’m inside the dank little building. The fuel smell is still potent. I’m wearing my mitt, but I slip it off my hand and let it drop to the concrete floor. The baseball is clenched tight in my right hand, my arm pulled back a bit. I’ve never been scared of the dark, but for some reason I want out of this garage.
“I can’t find the damn switch,” Ed mutters beside me, and then there’s a click and the little room fills with bright white light. For a second it’s too bright, and I close my eyes against the shock. They’re closed when I hear Ed begin to scream.
My eyes snap open and I take a stumbling step backward, trying to get out of the garage, thinking that there is an attacker in here, some sort of threat to make Ed scream like that. My back hits the wall, though, and in the extra second I’m kept in the garage my eyes finally take in the scene.
Ed’s father’s Chevy Nova is inside the garage. The driver’s window is down and upon the doorframe rests Norm Gradduk’s head. His face is pointed toward the ceiling, his skin puffy and unnatural. It takes one look to tell even me, a child, that he is dead.
Ed runs toward the car, shrieking in a pitch higher than I would’ve thought he could possibly reach. He extends his arms to his father, then pulls them back immediately. He wants to help him; he’s scared to touch him.
“We gotta call somebody,” I say, my own voice trembling. I step closer to the car despite a deep desire to get as far from the scene as possible, and now I can see inside. There’s a bottle of liquor in Norm Gradduk’s lap. One of his hands is still wrapped around it. On the stereo, Van Morrison sings of a foghorn blowing, “I want to hear it, I don’t have to fear it . . .”
Ed turns and runs past me, out the door and into the yard. He’s still screaming, and after one more look at Norm Gradduk, I begin to shout, too. Inside the house, Ed’s mother yells for everyone to keep it down out there.
It takes the paramedics seven minutes to arrive, and about seventy seconds for them to tell Ed and his mother that there is nothing they can do.
CHAPTER 2
I still knew the house, although I hadn’t been inside in years. Word of mouth brought me the news that Ed had bought his childhood home, and while I could no longer remember the source, I remembered hearing about it. The house had never been a showpiece—nothing in our neighborhood was—but when Ed’s dad was alive it had been the best on the block, hands down. He’d spent hours on it, painting and repairing and weeding. My own father had always been impressed by it, telling me on many occasions that while Norm Gradduk had his faults, he took pride in his home, and there weren’t enough men around who still did that.
It was evident that Ed intended to match his father’s devotion. The house looked bad, with a sagging porch roof, a broken window on the second story, and paint that had forgotten whether it was pale yellow or white and decided to settle on grimy gray. A ladder was leaning against the west side of the house, though, and it was clear that someone had been scraping the peeling paint off that wall with the idea of applying a fresh coat. A stack of discarded scrap wood near the porch was evidence of new planking laid on the floor. No doubt the porch roof was next on the list.
No police cars were in the driveway or at the curb when I arrived, but I saw a black Crown Victoria parked on the street two blocks down. They would be there all night, watching for a return that would surely not occur. I parked my truck facing them, and then I walked through the yard and up the front steps. Maybe someone would be home. A girlfriend, or a roommate. Hell, he could be married by now for all I knew.
My footsteps were loud on the new porch. I stood there and looked around for a minute, lost in memories, then nearly fell back off the porch when someone screamed at me from inside the house.
“Go away, go away, go away,” a woman’s voice screeched. “I told you filthy bastards to go away!”
I started to heed the command, but then the voice jarred something loose in my memory, and I stopped and turned to the closed front door.
“Mrs. Gradduk, it’s Lincoln Perry,” I said, speaking loudly.
Cars passed on the street, and a few blocks down some kids were yelling and laughing, bass music thumping in the background, a party building. The streetlight flickered and hummed, and I stood with my hands in my pockets and waited. I waited until I was sure she was not coming to the door, and then I reached out and knocked. I’d hardly laid my knuckles to the wood when the door swung open and a thin woman with hollow eye sockets and deep wrinkles stood before me.
“You son of a bitch,” she said. Her voice was as thin as she was; you could hear it fine but it always seemed on the verge of breaking, maybe disappearing altogether. If you didn’t know the woman, you’d associate those vocal qualities with old age or a lifetime of cigarettes. But I knew that the voice had always been the same and that she’d never smoked. Her hand rested on the door-knob, and her forearm and wrist were the sort of severely thin that made me think of starving children in Africa and black-and-white footage of Holocaust concentration camps. Her skin hung draped from sharp, angular bones in the same fashion as her sleeveless dress, creased and puckered and wrinkled. Her blond hair was gray now, filled with split ends and tangles. Looking at her, it was hard to believe that she had once been a beautiful woman. Not that many years had passed, but it seemed she’d aged ten with every one that had gone by on the calendar.
“Evening, Mrs. Gradduk,” I said. Evening. As if I’d dropped by for a glass of lemonade and a chance to discuss the weather and the kids.
