Ham On Rye

I was alone, walking. On my side of the street just before reaching the first boulevard on the long walk home there was a small neglected store. I stopped and looked in the window. Various objects were on display with their soiled price tags. I saw some candle holders. There was an electric toaster. A table lamp. The glass of the window was dirty inside and out. Through the rather dusty brown smear I saw two toy dogs gri

I looked in and I liked it. There was nothing happening there. It was a place to rest, to sleep. Everything in there was dead. I could see myself happily employed as a clerk there so long as no customers entered the door.

I turned away from the window and walked along some more. Just before reaching the boulevard I stepped into the street and saw an enormous storm drain almost at my feet. It was like a great black mouth leading down to the bowels of the earth. I reached into my pocket and took the medal and tossed it toward the black opening. It went right in. It disappeared into the darkness.

Then I stepped onto the sidewalk and walked back home. When I got there my parents were busy with various cleaning chores. It was a Saturday. Now I had to mow and clip the lawn, water it and the flowers.

I changed into my working clothes, went out, and with my father watching me from beneath his dark and evil eyebrows, I opened the garage doors and carefully pulled the mower out backwards, the mower blades not turning then, but waiting.

42

"You ought to try to be like Abe Mortenson," said my mother, "he gets straight A's. Why can't you ever get any A's?"

"Henry is dead on his ass," said my father. "Sometimes I can't believe he's my son."

"Don't you want to be happy, Henry?" asked my mother. "You never smile. Smile and be happy."

"Stop feeling sorry for yourself," said my father. "Be a man!"

"Smile, Henry!"

"What's going to become of you? How the hell you going to make it? You don't have any get up and go!"

"Why don't you go see Abe? Talk to him, learn to be like him," said my mother…

I knocked on the door of the Mortensons' apartment. The door opened. It was Abe's mother.

"You can't see Abe. He's busy studying."

"I know, Mrs. Mortenson. I just want to see him a minute."

"All right. His room is right down there."

I walked on down. He had his own desk. He was sitting with a book open on top of two other books. I knew the book by the color of the cover: Civics. Civics, for Christ sake, on a Sunday.

Abe looked up and saw me. He spit on his hands and then turned back to the book. "Hi," he said, looking down at the page.

"I bet you've read that same page ten times over, sucker."

"I've got to memorize everything."

"It's just crap."

"I've got to pass my tests."

"You ever thought of fucking a girl?"

"What?" he spit on his hands.

"You ever looked up a girl's dress and wanted to see more? Ever thought about her snatch?"

"That's not important."

"It's important to her."

"I've got to study."

"We're having a pick-up game of baseball. Some of the guys from school."

"On Sunday?"

"What's wrong with Sunday? People do a lot of things on

Sunday."

"But baseball?"

"The pros play on Sunday."

"But they get paid."

"Are you getting paid for reading that same page over and over?

Come on, get some air in your lungs, it might clear your head."

"All right. But just for a little while."

He got up and I followed him up the hall and into the front room. We walked toward the door.

"Abe, where are you going?"

"I'll just be gone a little while."

"All right. But hurry back. You've got to study."

"I know…"

"All right, Henry, you make sure he gets back."

"I'll take care of him, Mrs. Mortenson."

There was Baldy and Jimmy Hatcher and some other guys from school and a few guys from the neighborhood. We only had seven guys on each side which left a couple of defensive holes, but I liked that. I played center field. I had gotten good, I was catching up. I covered most of the outfield. I was fast. I liked to play in close to grab the short ones. But what I liked best was ru

Every Sunday a dozen or more girls from the neighborhood would come and watch us. I ignored them. They really screamed when something exciting happened. We played hardball and we each had our own glove, even Mortenson. He had the best one. It had hardly been used.

I trotted out to center and the game began. We had Abe at second base. I slammed my fist into my mitt and hollered in at Mortenson, "Hey, Abe, you ever packed-off into a raw egg? You don't have to die to go to heaven!"

I heard the girls laughing.

The first guy struck out. He wasn't much. I struck out a lot too but I was the hardest hitter of them all. I could really put the wood to it: out of the lot and into the street. I always crouched low over the plate. I looked like a wound-up spring standing there.

Each moment of the game was exciting to me. All the games I had missed mowing that lawn, all those early school days of being chosen next-to-last were over. I had blossomed. I had something and I knew I had it and it felt good.

"Hey, Abe!" I yelled in. "With all that spit you don't need a raw egg!"

The next guy co

Shit. The ball sailed into a tall tree at the back of the lot. Then I saw the ball bouncing down through the branches. I stationed myself and waited. No good, it was going left. I ran left. Then it bounced back to the right. I ran right. It hit a branch, lingered there, then slithered through some leaves and dropped into my glove. The girls screamed.

I fired the ball into our pitcher on one bounce then trotted back into shallow center. The next guy struck out. Our pitcher, Harvey Nixon, had a good fireball.

We changed sides and I was first up. I had never seen the guy on the mound. He wasn't from Chelsey. I wondered where he was from. He was big all over, big head, big mouth, big ears, big body. His hair fell down over his eyes and he looked like a fool. His hair was brown and his eyes were green and those green eyes stared at me through that hair as if he hated me. It looked like his left arm was longer than his right. His left arm was his pitching arm. I'd never faced a lefty, not in hardball. But they could all be had. Turn them upside down and they were all alike.

"Kitten" Floss, they called him. Some kitten. 190 pounds.

"Come on, Butch, hit one out!" one of the girls pleaded. They called me "Butch" because I played a good game and ignored them.

The Kitten looked at me from between his big ears. I spit on the plate, dug in and waved my bat.

The Kitten nodded like he was getting a signal from the catcher. He was just showboating. Then he looked around the infield. More showboating. It was for the benefit of the girls. He couldn't keep his pecker-mind off of snatch-thoughts.

He took his wind-up. I watched that ball in his left hand. My eyes never left that ball. I had learned the secret. You concentrated on the ball and followed it all the way in until it reached the plate and then you murdered it with the wood.