In spite of the pain, Burny smiles. One of the children getting away from him! Even one of the special ones! What an idea! “Don’t worry,” he says. “Just . . . if you speak to him . . . to Abbalah-doon . . . tell him I’m not past it yet. If he makes me better, he won’t regret it. And if he makes me young again, I’ll bring him a thousand young. A thousand Breakers.”
Fading and fading. Now Mr. Munshun is again just a glow, a milky disturbance on the air of Burny’s sitting room deep in the house he abandoned only when he realized he really did need someone to take care of him in his sunset years.
“Bring him just dis vun, Burn-Burn. Bring him just dis vun, und you vill be revarded.”
Mr. Munshun is gone. Burny stands and bends over the horsehair sofa. Doing it squeezes his belly, and the resulting pain makes him scream, but he doesn’t stop. He reaches into the darkness and pulls out a battered black leather sack. He grasps its top and leaves the room, limping and clutching at his bleeding, distended belly.
And what of Tyler Marshall, who has existed through most of these many pages as little more than a rumor? How badly has he been hurt? How frightened is he? Has he managed to retain his sanity?
As to his physical condition, he’s got a concussion, but that’s already healing. The Fisherman has otherwise done no more than stroke his arm and his buttocks (a creepy touch that made Tyler think of the witch in “Hansel and Gretel”). Mentally . . . would you be shocked to hear that, while Mr. Munshun is goading Burny onward, Fred and Judy’s boy is happy?
He is. He is happy. And why not? He’s at Miller Park.
The Milwaukee Brewers have confounded all the pundits this year, all the doomsayers who proclaimed they’d be in the cellar by July Fourth. Well, it’s still relatively early, but the Fourth has come and gone and the Brew Crew has returned to Miller tied for first place with Cincinnati. They are in the hunt, in large part due to the bat of Richie Sexson, who came over to Milwaukee from the Cleveland Indians and who has been “really pickin’ taters,” in the pungent terminology of George Rathbun.
They are in the hunt, and Ty is at the game! EXCELLENT! Not only is he there, he’s got a front-row seat. Next to him—big, sweating, red-faced, a Kingsland beer in one hand and another tucked away beneath his seat for emergencies—is the Gorgeous George himself, bellowing at the top of his leather lungs. Jeromy Burnitz of the Crew has just been called out at first on a bang-bang play, and while there can be no doubt that the Cincinnati shortstop handled the ball well and got rid of it fast, there can also be no doubt (at least not in George Rathbun’s mind) that Burnitz was safe! He rises in the twilight, his sweaty bald pate glowing beneath a sweetly lavender sky, a foamy rill of beer rolling up one cocked forearm, his blue eyes twinkling (you can tell he sees a lot with those eyes, just about everything), and Ty waits for it, they all wait for it, and here it is, that avatar of summer in the Coulee Country, that wonderful bray that means everything is okay, terror has been denied, and slippage has been canceled.
“COME ON, UMP, GIVE US A BREAK! GIVE US A FREEEEAKIN’ BRAYYYYK! EVEN A BLIND MAN COULD SEE HE WAS SAFE!”
The crowd on the first-base side goes wild at the sound of that cry, none wilder than the fourteen or so people sitting behind the banner reading MILLER PARK WELCOMES GEORGE RATHBUN AND THE WINNERS OF THIS YEAR’S KDCU BREWER BASH. Ty is jumping up and down, laughing, waving his Brew Crew hat. What makes this doubly boss is that he thought he forgot to enter the contest this year. He guesses his father (or perhaps his mother) entered it for him . . . and he won! Not the grand prize, which was getting to be the Brew Crew’s batboy for the entire Cincinnati series, but what he got (besides this excellent seat with the other winners, that is) is, in his opinion, even better. Of course Richie Sexson isn’t Mark McGwire—nobody can hit the tar out of the ball like Big Mac—but Sexson has been awesome for the Brewers this year, just awesome, and Tyler Marshall has won—
Someone is shaking his foot.
Ty attempts to pull away, not wanting to lose this dream (this most excellent refuge from the horror that has befallen him), but the hand is relentless. It shakes. It shakes and shakes.
“Way-gup,” a voice snarls, and the dream begins to darken.
George Rathbun turns to Ty, and the boy sees an amazing thing: the eyes that were such a shrewd, sharp blue only a few seconds ago have gone dull and milky. Cripe, he’s blind, Ty thinks. George Rathbun really is a—
“Way-gup,” the growling voice says. It’s closer now. In a moment the dream will wink out entirely.
Before it does, George speaks to him. The voice is quiet, totally unlike the sportscaster’s usual brash bellow. “Help’s on the way,” he says. “So be cool, you little cat. Be—”
“Way-GUP, you shit!”
The grip on his ankle is crushing, paralyzing. With a cry of protest, Ty opens his eyes. This is how he rejoins the world, and our tale.
He remembers where he is immediately. It’s a cell with reddish-gray iron bars halfway along a stone corridor lit with cobwebby electric bulbs. There’s a dish of some sort of stew in one corner. In the other is a bucket in which he is supposed to pee (or take a dump if he has to—so far he hasn’t, thank goodness). The only other thing in the room is a raggedy old futon from which Burny has just dragged him.
“All right,” Burny says. “Awake at last. That’s good. Now get up. On your feet, asswipe. I don’t have time to fuck with you.”
Tyler gets up. A wave of dizziness rolls through him and he puts his hand to the top of his head. There is a spongy, crusted place there. Touching it sends a bolt of pain all the way down to his jaws, which clench. But it also drives the dizziness away. He looks at his hand. There are flakes of scab and dried blood on his palm. That’s where he hit me with his damned rock. Any harder, and I would have been playing a harp.
But the old man has been hurt somehow, too. His shirt is covered with blood; his wrinkled ogre’s face is waxy and pallid. Behind him, the cell door is open. Ty measures the distance to the hallway, hoping he’s not being too obvious about it. But Burny has been in this game a long time. He has had more than one liddle one dry to esscabe on hiz bledding foodzies, oh ho.
He reaches into his bag and brings out a black gadget with a pistol grip and a stainless steel nozzle at the tip.
“Know what this is, Tyler?” Burny asks.
“Taser,” Ty says. “Isn’t it?”
Burny grins, revealing the stumps of his teeth. “Smart boy! A TV-watching boy, I’ll be bound. It’s a Taser, yes. But a special type—it’ll drop a cow at thirty yards. Understand? You try to run, boy, I’ll bring you down like a ton of bricks. Come out here.”
Ty steps out of the cell. He has no idea where this horrible old man means to take him, but there’s a certain relief just in being free of the cell. The futon was the worst. He knows, somehow, that he hasn’t been the only kid to cry himself to sleep on it with an aching heart and an aching, lumpy head, nor the tenth.
Nor, probably, the fiftieth.
“Turn to your left.”
Ty does. Now the old man is behind him. A moment later, he feels the bony fingers grip the right cheek of his bottom. It’s not the first time the old man has done this (each time it happens he’s reminded again of the witch in “Hansel and Gretel,” asking the lost children to stick their arms out of their cage), but this time his touch is different. Weaker.
Die soon, Ty thinks, and the thought—its cold collectedness—is very, very Judy. Die soon, old man, so I don’t have to.
“This one is mine,” the old man says . . . but he sounds out of breath, no longer quite sure of himself. “I’ll bake half, fry the rest. With bacon.”
“I don’t think you’ll be able to eat much,” Ty says, surprised at the calmness of his own voice. “Looks like somebody ventilated your stomach pretty g—”
There is a crackling, accompanied by a hideous, jittery burning sensation in his left shoulder. Ty screams and staggers against the wall across the corridor from his cell, trying to clutch the wounded place, trying not to cry, trying to hold on to just a little of his beautiful dream about being at the game with George Rathbun and the other KDCU Brewer Bash winners. He knows he actually did forget to enter this year, but in dreams such things don’t matter. That’s what’s so beautiful about them.