“Hey Vinny, get your head outta your butt and catch the ball next time.” I yelled.
“Oh yeah, how bout ya put a throw on my chest, Joey!”
Vinny and I played baseball every Sunday in the lot beside the middle school. Sure, there were only two of us, but our imaginations placed all-time greats like Babe Ruth and Shoeless Joe Jackson on the weed infested diamond.
“Hey whadda ya say we do a homerun derby?”
“Joey, you know I’d kick your butt and you’d pout the rest of the day.”
It was on. I grabbed a stolen hair pin from my backpack and jogged over to the equipment shed down the third base line. The equipment shed was not much. Built in two hours by a few dads who were sick of fundraising to replace stolen gear every summer. I looked for easy openings to slide through then examined the cheap padlock.
“Joey, get outta here ya don’t know how to do this. Listen, my cousin back in Youngstown showed me how to pick a lock in under a minute. I could prolly do it with my eyes closed but don’t wanna show ya up.”
“Shut up man and lemme focus.” I replied harshly.
After five minutes of fiddling with the padlock, we were still outside the rundown shed. My right lip began to twitch as I focused intently on the turning of the gears in the lock.
“You’d make a pretty bad criminal, huh Joey?” Vinny said with impatience. “Gimme that pin.”
I handed the pin over and gave Vinny a punch to the shoulder. He immediately began working like a surgeon on the padlock.
“See Joey, ya gotta feel for the gears to click. Ya can’t just try to listen to it. Ya gotta feel it.” He said as the padlock clicked open.
Vinny puffed up his chest with confidence and swung the door wide open. There it was. The pitching screen and bucket of baseballs. The homerun derby was on. I knelt to pick up the bucket of waterlogged balls when a rat the size of my leg scattered out.
“Ahhhhhhhhh!”, I let out a high-pitched scream and fell backwards into the cobweb filled wall. “Cmon Vinny let’s get outta of here.”
“Don’t tell me your afraid of a lil’ mouse!” Vinny yelled as he bent over laughing.
To save my masculinity, I quickly grabbed the baseballs and scampered out.
Vinny and I set up the tattered pitching screen forty feet in front of home plate and reviewed the everchanging ground rules for the game.
“Alright, anything past the bushes is a homerun. Hitting the school is two and breaking Ms. Carlson’s window is three.” Vinny said with a mischievous smirk across his face.
Ms. Carlson ruled her classroom with an iron fist. Last month, she gave my buddy Theo a detention for missing school after his father’s fatal motorcycle accident. She wore the same outfit every day no matter the weather. Black slacks, a black blouse, and half framed glasses that sat on the edge of her pointy nose.
Vinny recently got in trouble with Ms. Carlson for replacing the hand soap in her classroom with Elmer’s glue. She finished a science experiment with the class, washed her hands, and ended up with sticky palms. His punishment was to walk to school every Saturday and wash his hands until they bled.
“You won’t put a ball near her window, you string bean.” I replied to Vinny.
Vinny would have to hit a ball past the bushes and over the wooden fence to even be near Ms. Carlson’s window. A feat no one at our school had ever come close to accomplishing. Also, the baseballs we were using must have sat out in the rain because they weighed about two pounds each.
After going over the rules, we flipped an old penny we found in the dugout to decide who would hit first. I called heads in mid-air and watched the penny rotate in slow motion before landing on the dusty cement floor.
“Heads!” I yelled.
“Cmon best two out of three!”
Vinny hung his head and picked up his worn-out Rawlings glove and jogged to the pitching screen. Vinny might have been skinny, but he could sling the ball harder than anyone else at our school. His left-handed release was so smooth many of the high school coaches were already interested in him.
I spit on my hands, grabbed an old metal bat, and dug my Converse into the batter’s box. Vinny locked eyes with me as he lifted his leg over his head and let a fastball go right down the middle. I closed my eyes and swung as hard as I could as the ball flew into dead center field. I heard it when the ball landed on the other side of the bushes.
It was a crash outside Ms. Carlson’s window. Surely, I did not hit the ball that far. I had never even hit a ball to the wooden fence behind the bushes before. Her window was another fifty feet past that.
“Oh my gosh ya did it now! We’re gonna be in so much trouble if someone finds out.” Vinny yelled in a mixture of excitement and fear.
We both took off past the bushes in centerfield to investigate the damage we had done to the window. About twenty feet in front of the wooden fence, I stepped on the baseball, hidden in the tall grass.
“How’s the ball this far away from the window?” I said.
“If the ball is here…. that – that means you didn’t break it.”
“Then who did?” we questioned simultaneously.
We crouched down and approached the wooden fence to get a better view of the scene. Surely enough, Ms. Carlson’s window was shattered.
“Let’s check it out.” Vinny whispered.
“You tryna get us locked up? Let’s go home.”
“Naw Joey trust me. My cousin in Youngstown told me all about crime scenes. We gotta stay and investigate so we don’t look suspicious.”
Vinny forgot to mention his cousin is serving a sentence in the Ohio State Penitentiary for tampering with evidence.
“Ah fine.” I replied hesitantly.
Vinny quickly dropped down into an army crawl and began making his way to the shattered window.
“Hey, take out your pocketknife, dummy.” He whispered back to me as we crawled. “Ya never know what danger is ahead.”
After fifty feet of crawling, we arrived at the window. Vinny carefully stood up and peaked his head inside.
“Sweet mother, this place is ransacked.”
Indeed, it was ransacked. Ms. Carlson’s desk was split in two pieces and there was graffiti on the walls. The lights on the ceiling flickered, illuminating the ruins that used to be a classroom. Worst of all, Mr. Cuddles, Ms. Carlson’s prized guinea pig laid slain on the floor.
“Who the heck did this?” I asked.
Vinny quickly turned around putting his hand over my mouth. “Someone is still in there.”
As we peaked in the window frame, we saw a figure dressed in all black urinating on the lockers in the back of the room.
“Hands up! Don’t you boys move a muscle.”
Behind us stood Officer Walcott in his aviator sunglasses. He was a well-respected man in the community who had recently lost the race for mayor. We turned around to see his bulky frame closing in on us. Walcott had been a standout linebacker in college before trading in his cleats for a badge. He had gained some weight around the stomach since then, but there was no chance we could outrun him.
“Hi – uhhh hi sir. I think this is just a misunderstanding. See we….”
“Shut it son or you can spend the night downtown.”
Officer Walcott handcuffed each of us and walked us out to his police cruiser before calling our parents. He did not even bother to check out the classroom. The car was so humid water began settling in the crevices of the plastic bucket seats in the back.
“Why aren’t these seats cushioned?” Vinny asked.
“Is that what ya care about now? We might go to jail!” I replied harshly.
Officer Walcott stood in the sun, sweating through his light blue uniform as he waited for our parents.
“Vinny, what the heck are you doing!”
Mrs. DeCanzo was a fiery lady who could scare the daylights out of even the meanest criminal in town. She stormed to the back of the car, sweat beading down her face and grabbed Vinny by the ear before spanking him in the middle of the street. I giggled in the back of the police cruiser as I watched Vinny cry and apologize to his mom.
“You interrupt my cooking for this?” she shouted. “Can’t you behave yourself once?”
My giggling soon came to a stop when I saw my father’s old Ford pickup truck appear two blocks down. My father was a man’s man. He had worked in the steel industry since he was twelve years old, and I began to think he was made of the material. Pa swung open the baby blue door and stared into my soul from across the street. Pa shook hands with Walcott and began to chat, letting me think more about the punishment I was going to endure.
After ten dreadful minutes of waiting, Pa opened the door for me.
“Out.” He said sternly.
Pa was too classy of a man to spank me in public. He claimed he had been spanked in front of his class once and was made fun of until he was eighteen years old. Pa tightly grabbed the back of my shirt and led me to the baby blue pickup. I waved to Theo who was walking out of the baseball lot as pa drove me home.
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