Chapter 1

Summer 1988

.1

Everything started when Jim Rice hit the ball into the woods.

            They were four boys at the tail end of a summer vacation for the records. Cory “Croak” Hopson and Danny “the Jew” Greenfield moved to the Creek that spring and were able to make enough of an impression on Pug and Adam just as the sixth grade was turning down to open the floodgate to vacation that the twosome became four. Maybe it was Stephanie. When the school started showing videos in Sex Ed and those goddamn spontaneous boners started popping when Ms. Lauren got on her tip toes to erase some chalk only to show bare thigh through stockings, boys in class found they had more in common than talk of baseball. Hell no. There were girls. And Stephanie was a peach. Red hair. Cory called her a ginger, and when the Jew asked whether or not the carpet matched the drapes, the snicker that followed proved there was little more Danny needed to do to show he was one of them.

            “Ya mean, what little carpet she has laid,” Pug chortled. The poor bastard could only chortle. A genuine laugh meant opening your mouth past the restriction of sagging jowls.

            “What the hell would you know? You’re Mormon! Your dad has to fight through magic underwear before your mom takes the bait.”

            Pug could only shoot Adam a sour glance. You’ll die a virgin with a mug like that, Pug. Nicknames in youth did not regard the growing political correctness in a climate begging for tolerance. Kids, and boys in general, jumped on a weakness and reduced you to your malformations. In some cases that had everything to do with weight. Or race. Or religion. So Horace Nelson, who was the chimera of two very obvious options, found his resemblance to an ugly Chinese dog won out in the end. So he became Pug. Not the Mormon. Unlike Danny, whose polysyllabic name (a two clapper, Pug would say) would be chopped in half to Jew. “My dad says one of you killed Christ and the other doesn’ believe in him...” Adam said, not quite understanding exactly what that meant but knowing his dad was probably right. Because his dad was smart. A professor. Like those shits that sat up front in science who understood what in the hell heliocentric meant, or who actually went out of their way to invent something in science fairs instead of demonstrating how a candle needed oxygen to burn. One jar. One candle. And a box of matches. Presto.

            So maybe it was Stephanie. Because there’s always a catalyst. Always. And twelve-year-old boys draft according to unwritten rules that would account for utility: what do you bring to the table? Pug’s father had an enormous stash of nudie mags, and even a few skin flicks he’d buried deep in his closet. Danny had some awesome baseball cards. Some his own father lent him on the grounds he never moved them out of the box or removed them from their acrylic screw downs. The Greenfields were from New York. Brooklyn. Imported to the Creek, like all of them, on the basis of a new industry jumpstart. So they were undoubtedly Yankee fans (and would not cheer the defecting Dodgers in their bid over the summer). Danny’s dad had a Mickey Mantle 1951 Bowman and 1952 Topps, the goddamn cream of the crop. Sharp corners. Almost right out of the pack. Rarities. And worth a hell of a lot more than Adam’s Mattingly rookie and the scuffed Ripken Cory accidentally put in his bike spoke to sound like he was piloting some retarded dirt bike. Cory “Croak’s” (a name born of the miasma one must wade through as the body, and voice, change through puberty) older brother had smokes. And lots of them. And he was usually so messed up it didn’t matter if they snuck a few. “At least he’ll watch out for us when we hit the big seven,” Adam said.

            “No chance,” Croak responded, a small squeak breaking the latter word into two syllables. “He doesn’ give one shit about any of us. Including me.”

            “Well, cheers to his Winstons,” Adam said, lighting a match (probably a leftover from the fabled ‘does fire need oxygen’ experiment that was a demonstrable lesson in procrastination) and taking a deep puff of a cigarette he wouldn’t yet inhale.

            Adam Kramer was cool. The other boys saw it and were drawn to him. Like moths to a flame. Even his analogies lacked the pre-thought that might have broken the mold assumed of his laziness. If there was a girl they liked, they all knew they could fawn from a distance (and fawn they did) but it was Adam who could walk right up to her and expect an answer to his questions. But even that sort of self-confidence was a mask, something to hide what he went through to come to the Creek. Because of his father. The Asshole. Nah, Adam would be the heliocentric component of the four, the one pivot around which Pug the Mormon, Danny the Jew and Croakin’ Cory would revolve. And the summer of 1988 was like that. It was baseball and cartoons. Who Framed Roger Rabbit and trying, oh God, trying so desperately to sneak into the Revue to catch Eddie Murphy in Coming to America because rumor had it there were tits, and ever since Stephanie and Rachel (and a whole slew of other unmentionables) had started showing some form under their tank tops, the curiosity of the uninformed required they get a glance of a pair on the big screen, in a big budget movie rather than in one of Pug’s dad’s magazines, whose pages were starting to fold where the man creased them to hold his spot. The summer started with baseball.

            But it would end with what they found in the woods.

2

The diamond was a no-go. Usually was most days of the summer. Danny spotted a bunch of the older kids staking the territory, most under the bleachers lighting up. You could see the smoke sifting up from between the seats. And he was smart enough to know that if he trudged his gear toward the dugout, those guys would emerge with one manageable thought to stave off their boredom: kick the shit out of the Jew.

            So they needed to find another spot. Off the grid, Adam would say. Reedy Creek was a big enough place to ensure you could disappear if you wanted to. Hell, for a town the size of a rest stop on the highway, there was enough to explore during the day to keep one busy. Main Street was mostly patrolled by sidewalk deputies, dotted by fast food chains and a video store (BB’s Rentals), and most of those Small Town Badges questioned every movement a kid made because their presumption always cast the lens on the follies of youth. And immaturity was anything but lawful.

            Pug found the place. He was following the guy everybody called Lazarus in late June, having spotted him outside the Liquor Depot, brown bagging it. In the Bible, the old one, the authentic King James the Gideons left in every hotel room this side of the USSR, Lazarus rose from the dead. This dude was the same. Rumor was he stuck a shotgun in his mouth. Pulled the trigger. Recoil must have slipped his hand or budged his wrist. Either way, the guy blew the slug through his cheek. So the brown bag helped to deaden the alienation of one with half a face.

            Pug wanted to know where a guy like that spent his days. He didn’t work. His dad said the guy probably got welfare and VA kickbacks, sweet government benefits since he supposedly fought the Sandinista guerillas in Nicaragua and was mired by the regrets of what he’d done. Pug wasn’t sure he bought that. The guy was a loon. His dad guessed he was one of those anti-war nuts jabbering on about Vietnam. He was too young to have been drafted but not too young to criticize. “Even if it was a mistake to go there, guys who protest that war today are safe from the draft. It’s easy to judge the past, to stand some moral high ground when you’ve got hindsight on your side,” he heard his dad say at one time or another. He voted Republican. Adam said that was a requirement of the Utah tribe. Pug followed Lazarus from Main Street, through the school’s freshly mown field, whose lines were just painted for football practice, toward a pathway that led out east to the cornfields.

            He left the guy to his bottle when he saw a separate dirt path acting the chute between a row of pines. The dirt was just tamped over time by random footprints. There was a clearing on the edge of deadfall about three hundred feet to the north or so, and a patch of natural growth that was as lush and green as one could hope this deep into a humid summer. That deadfall arced in a parabolic curve around that clearing, and with the tall green pines and birch trees bordering the far side, Pug could swear a Citgo sign must have jutted over the leafline like at Fenway in Boston.

            “It’s perfect,” Adam said when the four of them returned. They couldn’t even hear the traffic down the adjacent road. It was their own pocket of heaven. Their own Fenway, even despite the Jew’s protestations that they turn it into the House that Ruth Built. They played ball there for the rest of the summer. Croak counted out the distance from their makeshift home plate, the bottom half of a tee he’d purchased at a yard sale for fifty cents, prying the tee from the base and chucking it in a bin at the gas station. It was 321 feet or so to the deepest part of that arc, where the clearing banked into slough and the forest ate up the flat lands. Adam and Pug brought weed whackers from home and cut down the grass. They even made bases out of rice sacks. Croak counted out the diamond. Ninety foot paces. To them it was authentic. They could imagine the grid patchwork of Fenway’s outfield. The circular abrasions that had torn up swaths of grass made the field a mess of dead clippings, but the boys could look past that. Because this place was away. Far away. And as far as they were concerned, nobody else knew about it.

            For two months the ball stayed in the yard. Stayed within that 321-foot perimeter. Danny made a few great catches at what they called the warning track. But nothing strayed. Not until August nineteenth.

            Not until Jim Rice finally got a hold of one.

3

“You’re always Guidry.”

            “Hey, I can kick my leg up just as high, I’m just as wiry, and fuck you, Adam. You’re always Jim Rice!” Danny was petulant as they walked through the makeshift pass between the pine boughs. He was carrying an aluminum bat over his shoulder with his glove dangling from the handle.

            “I’m just sayin’, Guidry peaked the last time the Yanks ever had a chance in the Series.”

            Danny threw back his head and laughed. Pug loved the sound of his laugh. It was so genuine. Plus, he liked Adam’s retorts. The confidence that came with them.

            “You didn’t just say that, Adam. You didn’t just say that.”

            “Here it comes,” Croak’s stilted voice added.

            “Nineteen eighteen. Jack ass.”

            Adam smiled. There was a nice breeze. It was warm out. Would be hot soon. And then the skeeters would rise from the grass and the lot of them would have to take a break until it cooled. “Your excuse always changes. Last time it was Buckner. I mean, hell, if you’re going to cuss out the Sox, at least be consistent.”

            “They’re consistent failures,” Danny jabbed. “Guidry won twenty-five in seventy-eight. When’s the last time Clemens won twenty-five?”

            Adam knew the answer to that was never. He knew but he didn’t say it. The Jew was an almanac when it came to baseball. Plus, if he got into it any more, Danny would just have to blurt Bucky Dent and that would be the end of it. ’78 was a banner year for the Yanks and the Greenfields because the Bombers took the World Series, Guidry won twenty-five and took the Cy Young, and the Jew’s dad had tickets to game five so the bastard could burst a blood vessel screaming after Pinella drove home the winning run to send the Yanks back to Los Angeles where they’d win game six. But all of this came after a pennant clinching pussy shot by a twerp named Bucky Dent who lofted a ball over the Monster. The boys were both two when this happened. But their fathers had stories, and what was baseball if not a connection between father and son? Or in Adam’s case, grampa and grandson.

            “What about you two?” Adam finally said.

            The boys walked past the sixth pine in the row. None saw the camera.

            “If I’m pitching, Hershiser,” Pug said. “If not, Mike Scioscia.”

            “You know he’s trim, right? Both of ‘em, at that,” Adam joked.

            Pug only wiped the sweat from his brow. There it was. The clearing. The grass was golden this morning, basking in one of the last dawns they would see before school. The grass was short enough now to cut down on the weeds, and despite the irregular scars in the dirt where the weed whackers had brought up the soil, the field looked resplendent enough to remind the boys that their bickering was only the result of that other world they’d just left. The world on the wrong side of the pass.

            “Andre Dawson,” Croak said.

            “Figures you’d be a Cub,” Adam smiled. Danny followed suit. If there was one team to shoo the Red Sox off the mantel of impressive fuck-ups, it was the Chicago Cubs.

            But if this place was Fenway Park (or Yankee Stadium, if the Jew was at bat), then why the hell couldn’t these four boys be the very athletes that might spike the grass in Boston? Croak wanted to be a baseball announcer like Vin Scully, so he would provide some sort of commentary, eliciting just enough offensive jabs at his puberty-laden vocal disability to make the attempts tolerable. Adam was usually the culprit. But the three of them appreciated the play by play. That way they could imagine their little pickup games transmitting on television…something their own fathers might watch with a beer. Or lemonade if you’re in Pug’s house.

            Cory dropped the bags in place. They’d laid rocks in the grass where the diamond was roughly paced, killing the grass beneath. That way they didn’t have to leave the rice sacks over night. Especially if somebody found the field when they were gone and decided to pillage their little treasure trove. Cory was meticulous though, counting out ninety paces before he’d drop the bags, carefully patting down the sack to smooth out any ruffles. Pug dropped the plate where the grass was flattened against the bumpy dirt, stepping on it for good measure.

            They played catch first. Danny and Adam paired up, the Jew throwing his leg up in that awkward but fluid swing that made Ron Guidry a sort of artist on the mound. A dancer. The Jew was tall. Adam guessed he’d make it to 6’4 if he somehow skipped out on his father’s genes. Danny was already just as tall as the man. And still growing. “Maybe your mom bopped the mailman,” Cory said.

            “If you’re implying the postman’s my dad, wouldn’t he have bopped her?”

            Use humor against humor and never show you’re crestfallen. That was how Pug even survived. His mother told him he was handsome, and though he wanted to believe her, he understood his friends’ playful jabbing was a more truthful appeal to honesty. He could handle that. He could, because he thought they made him more attractive as a result of his being around them. It was a gesture of confidence.

            “Why are you always Jim?” Danny asked, catching the ball, looking at the seam and then throwing back an attempted splitball that barely broke.

            “I don’ know,” Adam answered, but he did. He did know. Jim Rice was easily past his prime. He was number fourteen, which made him twice as good as Mickey Mantle—that joke would raise the ire of the Jew every time he uttered it. But Adam didn’t mention it. The calm morning begged to be taken advantage of. As much as Adam hated the Yanks, he did like Mantle. He was not a player he ever watched, but Danny’s dad had some great stories. Especially about the season of ’61. They would often sit in a semi-circle around the man as he told them of his own childhood, having seen Maris and Mantle and Yogi Berra, having caught eye contact from the stands. Having taken a ball from Whitey Ford’s hand, a fresh Hancock between the seams. He would show that ball, behind a glass case, and Adam could see the nostalgia behind that man’s eyes. He was just the same as they were. The same interests. And Adam knew he’d one day be the same kind of man. A man who would sit down with his kids and their friends, who would tell them about Jim Rice, the strongest damn player in baseball, who could snap a bat in half with just the strength of his forearms twisting the handle and barrel in different directions. His mechanical power was like the torque of a diesel engine, and he took that seeming physical prowess to heart.

            “We gonna do this or what?” Pug said. He was pacing near the plate, punching his mitt. He’d already jammed a fistful of Big League Chew in his maw so that his lower lip bulged and sagged low. Croak was in the field, playing center but leaning left where Adam could see the pines stretching to the stratosphere and where, he could only imagine, the Citgo sign acted the target between the endless needles.

            Adam dropped his glove. He got first bats because they were his balls. Two mints pulled right from the box. The Jew strolled toward the mound, where Cory had piled some dirt and he and Pug had jumped up and down on the plate as they tamped it to form a respectable hump. There was a 2 x 4 Cory had painted white (in spite of his mother’s concern that he not breathe in the fumes) plunged into the dirt and it was here where the Jew ran his sneaker, scuffing the toe and knocking loose debris from the treads. Pug pounded his mitt again and got down on his haunches, groaning when his knees popped. He took a few pitches from Ron Guidry, marvelling a little at that splendid leg swing.

            “And Jim Rice, left fielder for the Boston Red Sox, steps up to the plate. This here is a hot one folks. Air’s just still enough to send the ball flying in front of this sell out crowd of bucks, birds and deer shit.”

            The guys guffawed as guys are wont to do. Cory threw a bow, swiping his glove out in front of him, and Adam stepped to the plate, tapping his shoes with the Easton. Croak’s Vin Scully was pretty good…had Vin sounded like a swamp monster with moss in his throat.

            “We looking at another ’78 disappointment?” Danny said, pulling down his Yankees cap to shade his eyes.

            “Not unless you’ve got Bucky Dent hiding up your ass,” Adam retorted. Pug spat out his chew and fell to his knees laughing.

            “Nineteen eighteen, asshole,” Danny said. He wiped his nose and played with the ball a bit. Testing Adam’s mettle. If this game was anything, it was a form of authenticity for the boys. Though none of them knew to call it such, there was a level of verisimilitude to the event, as if each breeze calling through the leaves was really the crowd cheering at an All-Star match up. Pug pounded his mitt again and the Jew wound up, stepping off the plank and kicking up his spindly leg like an acrobat, pointing his toe down and then driving forward. The 2 x 4 rubber quivered under his weight, pushing back against the dirt fill, and the ball whipped from his arm with an explosive crack as he brought the limb up against his stomach in the follow through.

            “Jesus…watch it!” Adam blurted as he dove back. Pug nearly missed the fastball.

            “Up and in,” Cory called from the field. “Ball one.”

            “You’re crowding the plate, Jim.”

            “We’re not talking ‘bout your mom at dinner.”

            “That’s for Dent,” Danny smiled. He caught the ball and stepped back on the mound. “Just wait an’ see what I’ve got in store now that you’ve brought my mom into it.”

            Adam laughed. “Why do I get the feeling this one’s going for the kill so your ma has something for dinner tonight?”

            Pug choked on his spit this time, falling back on his ass.

            “And there’s some horseplay between Guidry and Rice. And some understandable tension. Will Rice charge the mound?”

            “I dare him to,” Danny called to Croak.

            “Just pitch the ball,” Adam said, tapping the plate with the bat and spitting into the grass.

            Danny wheeled back again. Same mechanics. Exaggerated kick. Flick of the shoe. Bullwhip of an arm. Adam watched the seams on that ball. It was up but not in. Not enough at least. This was what most announcers would call the wheelhouse, and he knew Croak was thinking it, even if he didn’t say it out loud. Danny didn’t have a great curveball, but he used his height to his advantage, leaping from that rubber with the sort of drive that required a grunt of him as he landed on his leading foot. Adam did not blink. He watched that ball arc from the Jew’s hand, a bright spot against the trees behind him, blurring red and white.

            If you don’t swing at this, Croak’ll call ya a nut job and make fun of Rice’s eye sight and old age.

            Adam exhaled. He exploded his hips, turning forward as he snapped the bat around. “Never take your eye off the ball,” his grampa used to tell him in the backyard as he lobbed the ball. “Don’t get greedy. The moment you swing for the fences, you lose sight and look like a moron batting at a mosquito.” He watched that ball off the barrel and bit his lower lip when he felt contact.

            And then it was just the sound. It caromed around that clearing like a spoon falling into a pot. Aluminum on tightly wound string. The image that would take those boys through the rest of the summer was Roy Hobbs dancing around the bases with the broken stadium lights exploding sparks all around the field in The Natural. But here there were no lights. No seats.

            Just the ball. First it was in the clearing. Then it was not.

            “Holy shit,” Pug said. He rarely swore. And when he did, he meant it. Danny had already turned and looked toward the trees behind the deadfall. He’d taken off his hat and slapped his thigh with it.

            “Forget it!” Croak called in his best Vin Scully.

            Forget it.

4

“Christ, you hit that ball a mile if ya hit it an inch,” Croak called, running in from the field. Adam stood in a daze. He could feel the admiration soaking in. They’d been playing here since June and nobody had hit it into the deadfall. A few had rolled that far, par for the course, but this sucker arced into the tree line. Flew past the tree line.

            “Lucky strike,” Danny muttered.

            “Lucky my foot…I framed ya perfect and you hit the target. He was lookin’ inside,” Pug said. They all still stared toward the woods. The ball had breached that perfect little clearing. Now it was just the sound of the birds somewhere in the distance. “How far you figure that went?”

            “Betcha it’s three-oh-five to the left field bank,” Croak answered. “Ball soared well past that.”

            “You think it broke four hundred?”

            Croak thought about that for a moment. “What’s the Green Monster, like thirty feet high?”

            “Something like that,” Danny said indifferently. They’d all gathered between home plate and the mound.

            “I betcha that would’ve hit Landsdowne.” Croak pondered his own statement. No twelve-year-old…hell, no adult these boys knew could hit a ball out of Fenway. But Adam Kramer had just done the impossible. “Jesus H. Christ, Adam…”

            Adam stepped forward, still holding the Easton, still wondering just how on earth he’d pulled it off. There was a sweet spot on the bat. The game had it, if you hit the ball on the sweet spot at just the right angle, there was nowhere for that ball to go but out. You just knew. It was sort of like magic. And Adam had just dipped his foot in the pool.

            “You just hit a ball farther than Bucky Dent.” Croak looked at Danny when he said it, and the Jew only stared at the trees, showing a morose determination to find any excuse in the books that would get him off the hook for this one. He did not want to be the pitcher who threw the pitch. The pitch that meant the hit.

            “We’ve gotta find it,” Pug said. “I mean…this is like, history, isn’t it?”

            “History for four people and a coupla birds,” Danny’s grudge was growing thicker.

            “Yeah, but word’ll get around about this. That sucker would have blown out of the diamond. The high schoolers would’ve given a standing ovation.”

            “You think we’d even find it in all of that?” Croak asked. It wasn’t disbelief but hope. Because Cory knew just what Pug was on about. When Maris hit his sixty-first, Croak bet every part of his aching body wanted to retrieve that ball. Not for any sort of value intrinsic to the milestone, but because he poured his heart and soul into the act. It was real to him.

            “We’ve got to try.”

            This time it was Adam who spoke. And he was already off and running toward the outfield, where beyond the arc stood knotted trees that had been witness to some great baseball over the summer. But none so great as that day.

5

It looked dangerous.

            That was a big part of what kept the boys out of the bowl beyond the clearing. Despite the exploratory nature of kids, there was something in these woods that held a certain regret for those who trespassed. There was no physical sign, no fence, nothing that might outwardly state the property was private, but an unwritten and unspoken agreement had kept them within Fenway, regarding the area beyond the wall with the supposition that left it mired in the many quirks of nature.

            And it was quiet. Too quiet. Beyond the thatch of deadfall immediately past the warning track, the trunks split up from the floor like hungry teeth, throwing a canopy over the forest. When they heard birds from the clearing, the sounds, the caws and chirps, were not coming from this place. Here there were shadows. And where there were shadows the imagination could design monsters.

            “Watch your step. You could twist your ankle.”

            “Okay Captain Obvious,” Danny shot back, watching Adam climb down first, testing each step. The wood cracked and groaned under his weight, showing a collection of many years, the corpses of those pines and firs that had lost the battle to their brethren above them and were left out to rot in the open. The rim of the woods was almost an insult to their dead.

            “It would have hit a tree. Bounced around a bit. Did ya hear any branches breaking?”

            Croak was concentrating on his decline but he looked at Pug. “To be honest, the moment that ball went into the trees, I shot off toward you guys. I could only hear my heart.”

            “Fair enough. But just cause it was hit to the left, doesn’ mean it stayed to the left.”

            “There was enough of an arc that if it did hit anything, it probably would’ve shot straight down.” Croak was the second to reach the base, holding himself steady with a charcoaled splinter that jutted up like an arthritic finger. Like grampa’s finger, Adam thought, taking Cory’s arm as he stepped over a pile of mulch. Danny hopped over some branches and Pug descended last, bracing himself with a bow so he wouldn’t topple on the uneven ground.

            “Surprised the patch didn’t give way beneath ya,” Adam chirped and Pug’s cheeks flushed. He wiped his brow without saying anything.

            “I’m just worried about getting back,” Croak said.

            “It’s like a ladder. All fours ‘ll do it.”

            “Remind me not to go behind him then,” Croak answered Adam, gesturing toward Pug.

            “Okay, okay, I get it. I’m fat. Where do we start?”

            “Well, we keep to the ball’s path and check off from that if we don’t find anything that way.”

            “Needle in a haystack,” Adam said. And he was right. There was white bark and pale stones littering the floor, any one of which could be mistaken for the ball.

            “Yeah, we got another ball. Forget about this and let’s go back.”

            “You’re only saying that so we might forget you were the pitcher,” Pug shot back.

            Danny still wore that forlorn expression of one in bereavement. It was as if he’d let down Ron Guidry. That was how real the clearing and the game was to those boys. They walked forward. They didn’t split up. Cory thought that would not have mattered, especially if any of them lost their way. “We’ve seen enough scary movies to know you stick together.”

            “What does that mean?” Pug asked. There was a noticeable disconcerting silence, something the boys would attribute to night, but here in the shadows, where the old bark, some split into leering grins with knotted eyes above glaring at their folly, there was no night and day. Just a gloom...a dim that reminded Pug of a fridge door just as it closed and the light blinked out.

            Cory only ignored him. Because he was scared too. They were all scared. And none of them knew truly why. It wasn’t just the intermittent sun...the slats of pure darkness.

            It was the calm.

            Just as they entered the clearing that became Fenway, the ambient noise of Reedy Creek shut off. There wasn’t even a hum or crackle of electricity to prove the industrial world was still there, beyond the trees. The clearing provided a cloak, a genuine mask from that civilization, and for the longest time it was that mask that could lend such credibility to their imaginations. But now that was working against them.

            “Do you smell that?”

            Pug could only plug his nose. At first it was just the mulch. Wet leaves and dirt...the earthen musk and humid pang of old rainwater and ancient bush.

            “Christ...it smells like the bin behind the butcher shop,” Danny said, waving his hand in front of his face. Ahead the trees gave way and the boys could spot another clearing opening up. Near the last copse of trees they spotted the first of them.

            “It’s a crow.”

            Adam got down on one knee. The smell here grew stronger. Thicker. The air was soupy with decay.

            “You think it broke its neck?” Cory asked.

            Adam didn’t know. How could he? The bird was just...there. Lying at the foot of a pine, covered partially by yellowing needles, its eye sockets hollowed out where maggots burrowed their nest inside its poor little skull. The sight reminded Adam of Spaghettios in a dirty bowl and it made his stomach curdle. Black feathers ruffled out having lost their polish, the sort of luster that would leave the bird gleaming like tar in the sky. Now its color was muted. More like a shadow.

            “Maybe your homerun did it,” Pug said.

            Adam wasn’t sure if he was serious. This bird’s been dead a lot longer than ten minutes.

            It was Danny who spoke next.

            “Holy shit.” It was really only a whisper. He was not staring at the bird but over the crouching boys. Toward the opening. Toward the clearing. As if through the open curtains of a movie screen two pine boughs arched in opposite directions, cascading the path with one clear view of the field.

            Dotting that grass, itself parched and nearly as pallid as river stones, was a slew of dead animals.

6

“It’s a graveyard,” Cory said, still kneeling by the bird.

            “What, you think somebody brought them here?” Danny mused. They were all slack-jawed. What they were seeing explained the smell. But that was it. Nothing else made any sense. It was not as if a hunter had come through on a shooting spree, and even if one had, he would have at least had the good sense to cart the meat home for storage. These animals were left to rot in the sun. Swaths of flies hovered over the field, like a thunderhead washing the world in malevolent darkness. They could hear the irritating buzz, its consistent twang like the steady thrum of an out-of-tune guitar string or generator on its last throaty breath before the vibration of power turned to silence.

            Adam stood up. The bird was enough to turn his gut. This was worse. Way worse. A deer and its fawn were huddled in a heap. Both decaying in synchronicity, flesh like gelatinous run off as it seemingly melted to the grass. You can feel the maggots on your own skin. Trying to dig under, to get inside. To find a new home. A fresh home. He saw a bear, its legs shorn of hair as most of it had shed in bushy piles, darkening that bleached grass like turds. There were more birds. Like moles amidst the tumorous bodies, tongues hanging awry from opened mouths. A horse stared back at them, the white of its eyes terrifyingly resonant with bad memories. The hum of those flies grew louder. More intense.

            Beyond the field was an old house. Probably once a farm. Now it was left to time and the neglect of disuse had turned its roof to a dilapidated slope where the sheeting was wearing and the shingles were peeling off like sunburnt skin.

            “I don’t like it here,” Pug said. He could not take his eyes off the bodies. He’d never seen a bear. Not in the wild. And this was a black bear, big enough to crush the four of them had it still a breath left to give. Now it was nothing. Just a shape. Food for those goddamn flies. But it wasn’t just the animals. He wouldn’t be able to articulate why that was, but there was something underneath what they were seeing, some provocation beyond the smell that suggested this place was just wrong.

            “Yeah...Let’s get out of here.” Croak backed away. His voice did not break. There was a resolute certainty in the tone he hadn’t found in some time. Curiosity, yeah, that’ll come later, but for now, let’s skedaddle!

            Adam was the last to turn. He was worried about the bird...had felt sorry for it, expecting the poor thing had probably blindly flown into the tree only to snap its neck. There was reason there. There was an explanation. But beyond the woods there were no answers. Not yet. Even if Cory was right and it was a graveyard, that sort of explanation left more questions because that sort of explanation could not exist on its own. Somebody would have made it a graveyard. He looked at that old house a moment longer.

            The windows. They sort of look new. Don’t they? That was his last thought before he left. A place like that, if it wasn’t the weather it was kids like them, coming out of the woodwork with a new stone for every window. What boy didn’t like the sound of breaking glass?

            Adam caught up with the others. They did not find the ball. Never would.

            And they did not see the cameras in the pines. All with their wires cut.