Dead Ball

Fifteen years of living have gone on in front and behind these eyes. Fifteen years isn’t all that long to a turtle or an oak tree, but it’s a lifetime to a dog. There have been a lot of changes to my old neighborhood in a dog’s lifespan. Dresden Lane was a great place to grow up. It was healthy and vibrant, full of families and prosperity. Now it is sick, and I made it sick. I was not the main factor, but I definitely played a role in it.
I’m sick as well. It was a bad thing to see and an even worse thing to be part of. My sickness is in my heart and in my soul. There have been whole days where I haven’t felt that sickness. Happy days full of family and friends, but I have never gotten through a single night without feeling that sickness. The nights are the worst, when it’s dark in the house and the only noise is your own guilty conscience poking that sharp stick in to your heart and relentlessly reminding you of what you were a part of. I had to come back.
I sit on a park bench where a playground used to be. The jungle gym’s are all gone, and the grass is a lot higher in most places than it used to be. The fact that it is unkempt is obvious, but it does not go unused. There is a guy in baggy pants and a tank top hanging around a bench on the other side of the park. Three different people have approached him and purchased drugs from him. I was a little surprised at first that he would be so blatant with a well-dressed stranger watching the whole thing. Then I remembered that nothing surprises me anymore and I stopped paying attention to him. I guess that is just another side effect of the sickness.
I never sleep well. The voices of that long ago day plague me in the silence. I hear it like echo’s bouncing off of my skull. Sometimes it is such that I feel I might go mad if they don’t stop. Drinking helps, but it’s risky. I don’t want to become dependant on the alcohol to get me to sleep, so I only utilize that on the real bad days. “Robert the retard! Robert the retard! Robert the…” I wish I could get an enema for my mind, and wash all of that out, but maybe it is my penance for not standing up and defending him. I knew it was wrong, even at that age, but I didn’t want to go against the group. I joined them. I was a part of it.
Kids are cruel. Yea, that is true, but it is a copout and too easily dismissed as unavoidable. Kids know they are cruel, and they do it anyway. There were other kids there that didn’t take part in what happened. I am sure if any of us had of taken the time to look around we would have seen the looks they gave us. Would there have been horror, disappointment, maybe even pity. We were like animals, running on some basic instinct to weed out the week. Mob mentality at its purist and most simple. Dangerous.
We were playing pop up’s in the big field. Patrick had the bat and the rest of us were scattered away from him. I wonder constantly what would have happened that day if it were I hitting the balls at that moment. How much differently things may have worked out. If just one aspect of the chain of events that transpired to lead Robert to Patrick at that exact moment, was different.
Being out in the field when the first contact was made, I will never know the first few words spoken by Robert to Patrick. I can only assume he asked to play, or maybe he even asked to hit a few balls. Patrick hit the last ball, a sweet pop-up that went out to the middle of the field. Michael Evens, my neighbor from across the street caught it easily. It was 100 points. The scoring system was simple. 100 points for catching the ball before it hit the ground, 75 after one bounce and 50 for anything after that, as long as the ball was still moving. No points for a dead ball.
Michael was just about to throw the ball back when Patrick dropped the bat and shoved Robert. Robert fell backwards on to his backside in the grass. Some of the other guys started to jog towards the action to get a better look. There was about fifteen of us give or take, and we formed a semi-circle around Patrick and Robert. Some of the guys were cheering Patrick on.
I don’t know all the details about Robert. I know he wasn’t physically handicapped, at twelve years old he was bigger and stronger than most of us. He was mentally handicapped, but in a high functioning sort of way. He was referred to as a half-wit by most of the adults. To all of us kids he was definitely strange in a way we didn’t quite understand. He acted differently than we did. He was childish and repetitive, and he would do odd things. We just called him retard.
Patrick was always mean, but he was a good athlete and that meant he was popular in our twelve-year-old world. Patrick was always getting in to trouble at school and with the police. He stole things, fought and skipped class. His parents never punished him, it seemed that they just didn’t care enough to bring him up well. The rest of us had no such excuse.
If Robert’s mind were working to full capacity he would have known better than to throw that mound of dirt in Patrick’s face. He didn’t have the fear of Patrick the rest of us did. He was just fighting back in his own way. There was complete silence after he threw the dirt, as everyone was shocked, at this new turn of events. Even Patrick took a few seconds to process what had just happened. Then there was only rage. Patrick flew in to a fit of fists and kicks directed toward Robert. The dirt had mixed with the summer sweat on Patrick’s face creating black streaks down his face. This only made him look more savage.
Robert took the first few blows and then managed to push himself off the ground. He was making a panicked noise as he started to flee. It was like panting and crying mixed together. Patrick picked the baseball bat off of the ground and gave chase. We, of coarse, followed. I would like to think that in the beginning, we were just running behind Patrick to see what was going to happen next. We were going to play no other role in the actual fight, other than one of spectators. I’m sure Robert just saw us as one big gang of nasty, hateful villains trying to hurt him. He ran on. I remember feeling a potent exhilaration in the chase, but Robert was faster than we were, and he would have gotten away easily. That makes what he did next all the more puzzling.
We had been running the wide path that wove through the large park. There were huge trees on either side of the path, with thick trunks and lots of branches spreading up like fingers toward the summer sky. Robert began to frantically climb the biggest tree in the park. He was a good ten feet and still climbing when we all arrived at the base of the huge oak tree. Patrick started spewing forth obscenities and threats directed up at Robert. I heard for the first time, a single voice coming from behind me… “Robert the retard…Robert the retard!” Shamefully I was about the eighth person to join in to the chorus. The chanting took on a very choreographed nature as we were all chanting in unison and Patrick would whack the bat in to the trunk of the tree in between every “Robert the Retard.”
If any one of us had of taken the time to think about what we were doing, we probably would have stopped. There was no time to think between the chanting and the sound of that Louisville Slugger slamming in to the base of the tree. We became one large, pulsating organism of hatred. Robert just continued to climb higher and higher in to the tree until the branches became too thin for him to climb any higher. Then he just clung to the tree and screamed down at us to leave him alone. We were screaming at him and he was screaming at us, and the whole time Patrick continued to swing that bat in to the trunk of the big tree. Through all of that noise, every one of us heard the sickening sound of that branch snapping at the top of the tree. It became completely silent except for the sound of Robert falling. He fell more than fifty feet from that perch atop the tree. He brought a few branches down with him, but none of the branches he hit were big enough to slow his fall.
I watched in horror as his body went limp after smashing his head off of one of the thicker branches. Everyone spread out, away from the tree in a loose semi-circle and watched him fall. The sound he made when he hit the ground was, in my memory, exactly the same as the branch that caused the fall. I don’t know if he was alive before he hit the ground but I was damn sure he was dead after. We stood around him looking down at his impossibly twisted head. Someone began to cry behind me, and then someone began to scream. It may have been me.
Nobody was ever charged for any crime, but we were all guilty. Word got out, what had happened that day and how all of us were involved. Families started to move out of the neighborhood one after another. They wanted to escape what had happened, and nobody wanted to see that vacant look in the eyes of Robert’s parents. For Sale signs peppered the yards in my neighborhood until there was one on my own yard. So many houses for sale in such a small area, made the property value plummet. The riff-raff that moved in chased out the last of the good families.
My father was offered a position within his company, which would relocate us to another province. He jumped at the opportunity. He took me as far away from this place as he could but it didn’t make any difference to my nightmares. I did, however, appreciate the attempt. The days and the weeks turned in to years, and the misery and pain that I was constantly told would eventually go away never did. I’m a grown man, now, sitting on a bench looking at the tree that a little boy fell to his death from. The pain is still very much there, the shame and the regret too. A piece of me died with Robert at the bottom of that tree. If it hasn’t gotten any easier in fifteen years, I don’t imagine it ever will. But then again, why the hell should it?