My Brother's Keeper Read online

  The coach throws me the nut cup, which I drop, probably ruining my chances of making catcher before even getting out of the locker room.

  I pick it up, trying not to fully touch it.

  Coach Gillis looks at me like he’s waiting for something.

  “Thank you,” I say even though I’m not feeling especially thankful for being handed a nut cup that isn’t even mine.

  He’s still looking at me. “Malone?” he says. “Where’s your brother?”

  “I dunno,” I say. I pretty much figured Jake was somewhere else in the locker room, like in the VIP section with other guys from last year’s team, and that he wouldn’t necessarily want me coming up and being associated with him.

  Coach Gillis shakes his head like he’s disgusted, which he probably is from having to deal with things like nut cups. Then he sticks his thumbs inside the waistband of his pants, hitches them up, and walks away.

  Arthur and Badowski and I are crossing the parking lot on the way to the practice field when we see the girls’team up ahead also crossing the parking lot At which point I notice a girl with a butterscotch-colored ponytail sticking out of a baseball cap.

  “Hey, look,” says Arthur. “It’s Martha MacDowell.” I try to look without looking like I’m looking. “She’s hot,” says Badowski. Saying someone is hot is something guys in our class say all the time about certain girls; for some reason, though, when Badowski says it about Martha MacDowell, it sort of annoys me.

  I accidentally on purpose trip him.

  He looks offended.

  “That’s for saying I’m having a midlife crisis in Human Sexuality class,” I say.

  We walk the rest of the way to the field with the two of them talking about tryouts and me wondering what’s going on with me that I’m all of a sudden noticing things like girls’ponytails and caring about people calling other people hot.

  The new-kid-baseball-player-wannabes, like me and Arthur and Badowski, are drilling grounders in a patch of grass that’s about as far as you can get from the field without being in the bleachers, while the kids from last year’s team are playing a scrimmage. No one’s watching us, not even the assistant-assistant coach, who’s a student teacher and who wandered away from our drill after five minutes to watch the real players. We’re not even watching ourselves, on account of trying to also watch the real players, too.

  Who are pretty much the guys from last year’s team. All except for Jake, who, even though I figure he’s pretty much guaranteed to make the team on account of being the MVP from last year, should’ve been here for tryouts. I try not to think about this, though, since every time I do, I screw up, which just makes me think about it more.

  The scrimmage is in the bottom of the third when the catcher, who I remember making an amazing rip-off-the-face-mask foul-ball grab in the top of the fourth at Division Championships last year, jumps up from behind the plate and charges down the line to tag a runner heading toward home. Except that he falls facedown in the dust halfway between home and third. He grabs the back of his leg and makes an injured face.

  Coach Gillis comes over and is concerned for about a half a minute, then he starts yelling at the kid for not stretching like he told him to. The assistant coach helps the kid up, and the assistant-assistant student-teacher coach trots over with an ice bag. The kid hobbles off the field and Coach Gillis starts shouting for somebody named Truman.

  Badowski yells out “Coach! Coach!” which means that for once, everybody—the coach, the assistant coach, the assistant-assistant coach, and even the real players—are looking over at us.

  “Truman moved to Florida,” Badowski says.

  “Florida?” yells Coach Gillis. “What the hell did he move to Florida for?”

  “His dad got a job down there,” says Badowski.

  “What am I supposed to do for a backup catcher?”

  Badowski shrugs.

  The coach looks around the field. Then he calls out my name.

  At that point I just about have an advance attack of post-traumatic stress syndrome.

  I point to myself in the chest. “Me?”

  “You catch, right?”

  I nod yes, because I do catch. Then I shake no, because if he’s asking if I catch right the answer is technically no, since I catch left.

  “Do you want to catch?” Coach Gillis says. “Yes or no?”

  I just stand there.

  Arthur shoves me in the back. “He wants to,” he yells. “He played catcher in middle school. And Little League. He definitely wants to.”

  That’s the world’s biggest understatement. Being catcher, aside from it having the absolute coolest equipment of any position, is the best spot on the team. The catcher is the one and only guy who—because he’s the one and only guy facing out while the whole rest of the team is facing in—can see the whole game happening right in front of him. The pitcher can’t see anything going on behind him and the guys on the bases and in the outfield can’t see what the pitcher’s doing. Only the catcher can see the whole thing. Which means that being catcher is like being a fan with the best seat in the house while also actually being on the team.

  I look over and see the kid who was catcher last year unbuckling his shin guards. Arthur shoves me again, and the next thing I know, I’m walking the 185 miles between where we were drilling and where the real players were playing, trying to decide if I should put the shin guards and the chest pad on right away and not hold things up any more or if I should stretch like the other kid got yelled at for not doing.

  Then Coach Gillis announces that everybody should take a water break, which gives me time to stretch. I try to do it in a way that’s obvious enough for him to notice, but subtle enough not to make everybody think I’m sucking up. Then I put on the gear, snap down the face mask, and catch.

  Which I don’t suck at.

  I don’t do anything amazing. But I also don’t do any of the hundreds of stupid, bonehead, bush-league, game-losing things I could have done. I just catch.

  And then practice is over and everyone’s back in the locker room and Arthur makes like he’s going to pick me up for the second time that day—but he doesn’t. Maybe because even he realizes it’s one thing to pick up your friend when no one’s looking, and when you’re celebrating a once-in-a-lifetime event. And it’s another thing entirely to pick up a kid in a locker room full of older guys when all you’re celebrating is one kid getting a pulled hamstring and another kid moving to Florida and me at least not sucking on the first day of tryouts.

  Instead, he pulls my socks down, which looks like he’s busting on me, but is his way of saying congratulations on not sucking. And I snap the waistband of his pants, which looks like I’m busting on him, but is me trying to at least say thanks for helping make it happen.

  On the way home, I stop by Mr. D’s. He’s online chatting with some guy in Harrisburg who has a Jason Kendall for sale. He tosses me a pack of WarHeads without even looking up.

  When he signs off I ask if the guy sold it to him.

  He gives me a Yoda look. “Happiness,” he says, running his hand through his Einstein hair, “is having what you want and wanting what you have.”

  I don’t come right out and say it, but I’m pretty sure that means the guy wanted more than Mr. D could afford. I hope that’s not because he spent all his money on the Stargell.

  “Here to spend some quality time with the Parker?” he asks.

  I shake my head. I’m here to tell him that I might not be able to come in on Tuesdays and Thursdays on account of maybe, possibly, hopefully making the team.

  Me not coming in probably isn’t an actual problem, since hardly any real customers ever come in except me, but which still makes me worry about how Mr. D’s gonna manage tying up the recycling on his own or reaching the top shelf where the baseball trivia books are, just in the event that some know-it-all kid does come in.

  He looks at me, then over at my backpack which I dumped by the door when I came in and
which has my baseball glove hanging off the strap.

  “Tryouts start today?” he says.

  I just look at him and wonder how he always knows stuff without me actually telling him.

  “Pretty quick for an old guy, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “No. I mean, you’re not that old.”

  He just smiles.

  “It probably won’t happen,” I say. “But if I do, you know, make the team, I might not be able to come in so much.”

  “Oh,” he says. “That’s okay.”

  “Like maybe not on school days,” I say. “But I can still definitely come on Saturdays, and do the recycling. No matter what.”

  Mr. D says okay again.

  “Just save all the recycling for then,” I say. “I can do it all on Saturdays, okay?”

  Mr. D puts his hand on my shoulder. “Toby,” he says. “I believe you,” he says. “Like I believe in electricity.”

  I don’t get it.

  He turns the light switch on, then off. “I believe in it even if I don’t see it,” he says.

  This is one of those wise, mysterious Yoda-type moments when whatever Mr. D says makes total sense and which I decide to use next time I need something profound and meaningful to put in a book report or something. Although as soon as I’m not with him, I don’t exactly understand it anymore. Which, I guess, is why it’s a wise, mysterious Yoda-type thing.

  My mom’s car isn’t in the space out in front of our apartment when I get home from Mr. D’s; instead there’s a beat-up white car with a Grateful Dead sticker on the bumper. As soon as I open the door I can see Jake in the den watching TV with Andy Timmons and his goatee, along with some other kid I’ve never seen before. Andy Timmons is sprawled out on the couch and his boots are propped up on our mom’s glass coffee table. The stereo and the TV are both on and bags of chips and Doritos and Cheetos and bottles of Yoohoo and Mountain Dew are lying all over the place.

  I stand in the doorway watching them watching TV and waiting for them to move. They don’t. Which reminds me of the time Jake and I spied on a guard at a wax museum, waiting for him to do something like blink his eyes or scratch his butt so we’d be able to tell if he was real or if he was part of the museum. After a while, when all they do is sit there like wax museum people, I go up to my room, which is also Jake’s and Eli’s room, and close the door.

  At which point, I turn into psycho ADD housewife—stacking up old copies of Mad magazine in chronological order, matching up all the tube socks on the floor, and sorting Eli’s Beanie Babies by species. Then, as soon as I clear a place on the rug, I lie down and listen through the floor to what’s going on downstairs. Which sucks because the rug is scratchy and it smells like gym clothes somebody left in their locker over the weekend and because listening to people who are downstairs eating Cheetos when your stomach upstairs is growling for them makes you even more hungry.

  With all the noise from the TV and the stereo, I can only pick up sound effects, not actual words. One of the people downstairs suggests something; I can tell because the other voices go up like they’re agreeing. Someone walks into the kitchen. It gets quiet, then they laugh. I can’t hear what happens next but whatever it is cracks them up even more. Jake’s laughing his insane laugh, the one that used to make me practically wet my pants when I was little.

  After a while I wonder why I’m upstairs lying on a scratchy rug that smells like the boys’locker room when I could be downstairs laughing at whatever Jake’s laughing at and eating Cheetos and drinking Mountain Dew. So I get up, kick a few old Mad magazines into the spot where I was lying, and go downstairs.

  When I walk in, Jake’s grabbing his stomach and laughing without making any noise and Andy Timmons is pointing at the kid I’d never seen before and snickering. The kid, who’s wearing a T-shirt that says “Pissing Off the Whole World, One Person at a Time,” has a red dot in the middle of his forehead and another one in his hair, which you can tell from the look on his face, he knows nothing about. He reminds me of Maurice, this kid down the block who goes to school on one of those little half-buses and who my mom says we aren’t allowed to call retarded.

  “What?” the kid says. “What’s so funny?”

  The red dots are left over from the yard sale. The Pissing-Off-the-World kid spins around, like Harriet the Horrible used to do when she was chasing her tail, and I notice that there’s a red dot on the butt of his saggy jeans, too. I make a sort of half-laugh/half-cough sound so they know I’m there. Jake looks up.

  “Hey, man,” he says. “You’re home.”

  He doesn’t sound exactly glad I’m home—which I always am at this time of day—but he doesn’t sound exactly not glad either, so I go in. I sit on the arm of one of the chairs since all the other seats are taken and Mr. Furry is sitting in my usual spot on the couch.

  “I don’t get it,” says the kid with the red dots, looking over his shoulder at me. “What?”

  While Jake and Andy Timmons are looking at the Pissing-Off-the-World Kid, I dig my hand into the bag of Cheetos. There’s nothing in it except some former Cheeto dust at the bottom. I reach for the bag of chips, which is also empty, then half-laugh/half-cough again to cover up for my stomach growling.

  Jake gets up and puts his arm around the kid with the red dots. “Vince, my man,” he says, secretly sticking another dot on his shoulder. “You need to chill.”

  “What?” the kid named Vince says again. “I still don’t get it.”

  Jake and Andy Timmons laugh like this is the funniest thing they’ve ever seen. It is sort of comical, but not exactly funny, if you ask me, like the way it’s sort of entertaining to watch Maurice playing make-believe games in his front yard all by himself, but which is also sort of weird, too.

  I try to act like it’s no big deal, like your brother getting high in your house with a future hardened criminal and a kid who looks like he’s retarded when your terminally stressed-out and possibly fatally ill mom and your completely innocent cowboy-hat-wearing little brother are about to walk in the door any minute is completely normal, and not something that makes you feel like a car alarm is going off inside your head.

  I get up, crumple up the Cheeto bag, grab a couple empty cans of Mountain Dew, and head for the trash can in the kitchen, where I hope to get some kind of bright idea that will shut off the car-alarm feeling.

  The sound of fake audience applause comes from the TV, then Jake laughs his insane laugh. I step to the doorway of the den to see what’s going on. The red dots are everywhere now. On the couch, the TV, the La-Z-Boy, the coffee table, the lamp, the rug, the magazines. The room is like one big yard sale. And Andy Timmons is standing right in the middle of everything, the package of red dots in one hand, a pen in the other, putting a price tag on our mom’s spider plant. Jake’s slapping his hand on his thigh, the way people do on TV when something’s funny. Vince’s mouth is hanging open, a red dot on the nose of his glasses.

  The next thing I know, Andy Timmons is coming toward me, holding out a red dot, which would mean I was for sale like the rest of the furniture.

  Except that Andy Timmons walks right past me and toward the Implosion family picture I saved from the real yard sale. He peels a red dot off the pad and goes to put it on the frame.

  “Our mother won’t like that,” I say. I sound like a total dweeb loser, like the crabby little kid in The Cat in the Hat who freaks out when Thing One and Thing Two fly kites in the house and who keeps saying, “Our mother won’t like this. Not one little bit.” I clear my throat.

  “That frame’s worth something,” I say, like that’s a better explanation.

  Jake looks at me like I’m a lower life-form. “You need to chill,” he says.

  Which is the same thing he said to Vince a minute ago, in a way that you could tell he really liked Vince, even though Vince was acting like one of the kids on Maurice’s bus. But which, when he says it to me, you can tell he is embarrassed of me, even though I’m only acting like m
yself.

  “Mom’ll be home any minute,” I say.

  Jake gives me a disgusted look. “God, Toby,” he says. “You are such a dillweed.”

  As soon as they leave, I turn into turbo-drive psycho ADD housewife. I get a new trash bag from under the kitchen sink, dump all the soda cans and ashes and everything else, tie it up, and carry it outside. Just to be safe, I take it across the parking lot and throw it in the Dumpster.

  Then I peel the stickers off the furniture so they won’t be there when our mom gets home, which makes me think of the mother in The Cat in the Hat again. You never actually see her. You just see the bow on the tip of her high-heeled shoe when she comes home after the mess is all cleaned up. “Did you children have fun?” she says. “Tell me. What did you do?”

  The cranky little kid just sits there. “Should we tell her about it?” he says. “Now what should we do?” Then he looks right at you while you’re reading the book. “What would you do if your mother asked you?”

  That night my mom’s giggling on the telephone. Which is weird because she doesn’t laugh that much anymore, especially when the phone rings. She says it’s usually someone trying to get her to buy something or somebody trying to get her to pay for something she already bought. It’s also weird because it isn’t her normal Mom laugh. It’s more like the way girls in my class put their hands over their mouths and giggle when certain guys walk by in the lunchroom. Jake’s one of those guys.

  “I just can’t,” she says. “There’s no one to watch the boys.” She twirls the phone cord around her fingers, then twirls herself around the cord. “Okay, okay,” she says. “I guess so. Just for a little while. “She giggles again, then says good-bye and I go back to pretending to read the sports section.

  She sort of half-walks/half-runs through the room, then disappears upstairs, humming. After a while I follow her upstairs to find out what’s going on.

  By the time I get there, she’s in her room with the door shut. Jake and Eli are in our room playing Nintendo. I pull my baseball card binder down from the shelf and sit down at the desk and look at the Stargell for the zillionth time.