The Dreadful Revenge of Ernest Gallen

Chapter 1

Around five o’clock the kids began saying they had to go home, so we quit playing ball for the day. I shouldn’t have been playing baseball anyway: I should have spent the afternoon at Snuffy’s Groceries to see if I could earn a few dimes making deliveries. But it was too nice an afternoon, the way it can be at the end of May when schools almost out—sun shining, just enough breeze to keep the heat down, a few puffy white clouds drifting along upstairs minding their own business and hoping that everybody else will mind theirs. Couldn’t deliver groceries on a day like that.

Sonny Hawkins and I were the last to leave. You gonna play ball tomorrow?

I don’t know, I said. ‘I ought to go over to Snuffy’s and see if they’ve got any deliveries."

Naw, you don’t want to do that, Gene, Sonny said. He was my best friend and said whatever he wanted to me. Let’s play ball.

I ought to go over to Snuffy’s. What are you going to do?

If we can’t get up a ball game, I might as well go over to the country club and see if I can hook a tennis ball. There’s usually a few laying around there.

We used tennis balls to practice baseball with. You could bounce them off the side of a house or something to practice grounders. Or hit them up against a wall, if you could find a good wall. You’re going to get in trouble hooking tennis balls, I said.

I ain’t afraid of them snobs, Yewgene, Sonny said.

What happened to your old tennis ball?

I hit it into the river by mistake.

How come? Sonny was the best baseball player we had and didn’t make too many mistakes in hitting.

I meant to bunt it, but it was hangin’ up there so fat and juicy I couldn’t hold myself back and gave it a wham and it landed in the river. I got to get another one.

Well, if there aren’t any deliveries, I’ll go over with you, I said. Sometimes there were, and sometimes there weren’t. With times as hard as they were, a lot of people would rather carry their groceries home than have to tip a boy to bring them.

So Sonny headed off for River Road, and I set off along Courthouse Street for home. Right then there wasn’t too much wrong with the world that I could see. Sun still shining on my back, cool breeze on my face, the big elms along Courthouse Street waving their leaves just a little in a friendly way. I’d got a couple of nice hits, and was plenty hungry for supper, too.

I was going along that way, humming a little song to myself, when I began to feel a tightening in my chest, sort of like a cramp. Well, not exactly a cramp—more like something was swelling in there. A strange kind of feeling, like nothing I’d ever had before, at least so far as I could remember.

I stopped walking so as to look at it better. It didn’t hurt, exactly, just sort of uncomfortable. I shook myself. Well, it probably wasn’t anything. I’d had a liverwurst sandwich Mom had made me for lunch. That might’ve done it—liverwurst was pretty heavy on the stomach. I took a deep breath and shook myself again. Probably the feeling would go away soon. So I started walking toward home again.

Then something else began to happen. I stopped walking so as to figure it out. The tightness feeling, pressure, whatever you called it, was still there, but now there was some motion inside me, going from one side to the other. Jump a little, bounce again, like a restless animal in a cage looking for something to do. I was starting to feel scared. How could it have got in there? I put my hands on my stomach and felt around, trying to catch whatever was bouncing around in there. I couldn’t feel anything, but the tightness and the bouncing went on.

It had to be that sandwich. Maybe if I took a drink of water it would calm things down. I’d better get home as soon as I could. And I started to put a foot forward when from somewhere inside my head I heard a voice. Hello, Eugene, it said. I’m glad we finally meet. I’ve wanted to make your acquaintance for a good while.

I stopped dead, frozen still, feeling sick and cold. My mouth opened, but I couldn’t speak. For a minute there was nothing, and I was about to decide that I’d imagined it, when the muffled, hollow voice came again. Well, Eugene? Aren’t you glad to hear from me? We’re going to be friends, you know. Or perhaps fellow conspirators is a better way of putting it. Don’t be afraid of me. We have to talk.

You’re not real, I said. I’m just hearing things.

Oh, yes, I’m real. Real as you are. Can’t be seen or touched, that’s true, but real nonetheless. You can’t see the wind, can you? Can’t touch beauty. But they’re real all the same.

I felt strange talking to my own insides. I didn’t want to do it. How did you get inside me?

For somebody like me that’s not a problem, the voice said.

I went on standing there, trying to convince myself that this wasn’t happening, that I should ignore the voice, go on home to supper, and forget about it. Maybe if I ignored it, it would stop.

Then the hollow, muffled voice came again. Yes, of course I’ve knocked you off balance a little, Eugene. I’m sorry about that, but you’ll get used to me.

What do you want? I whispered.

Ah, we’ll get to that. I just wanted to introduce myself this time. You’ll find out more as time goes along. Don’t worry, I’ll be back again. There was silence, and then the clenching in my chest started to loosen and the little thing in my stomach slowly quieted down. In a moment it was over.

I stood there, dazed, weak in my legs. I realized that my face was covered with cold sweat, and I wiped it away with my hand. Then I started to run toward home as fast as I could.

Mom was already putting supper on the table—her rule was that supper went on at five thirty and if you were late and got a cold supper, that was your own fault. We sat down—franks and beans with some of Mom’s homemade bread-and-butter pickles. I wasn’t sure I could eat, since I was still feeling shaky and empty inside. To my surprise, I found myself gobbling up the franks and beans.

Slow down, Gene, Grampa said. This isn’t a horse race. Grampa was big on proper table manners—big on everything like that, such as using good English, standing up when a lady entered the room, saying please and thank you. Before the Depression Grampa had been a judge, had a big house and plenty of money. I remembered that big house. Mom and I had lived there with him when I was around seven. Big pillars in front and a gravel driveway curving up to them. Then came the hard times and Grampa had lost his job and we moved into this narrow little house. He had a little money saved, just about enough for us to struggle on with, along with what little money Mom made typing for people.

Sorry, I said. We played baseball this afternoon and it made me hungry. Generally speaking, I was likely to tell Mom and Grampa whatever had happened to me. Not always—there were some things you wouldn’t tell a grown-up. But I got along with them pretty well. Especially Grampa. He’d take me into St. Louis to see the Cardinals play two or three times a year when he could scrape together a few bucks, as he put it. Sometimes we took Sonny, too—his dad wasn’t one to go to baseball games. But I didn’t want to talk about what had happened that afternoon. Wanted to forget about it, pretend it hadn’t happened, make it go away. So I said, How’d the Cards do yesterday, Grampa?

They took care of the Cubs pretty well. Medwick hit a homer. I liked Medwick, but my favorite player was the Cards’ third baseman, Pepper Martin.

Sonny Hawkins was our best fielder—best everything in baseball—and naturally he got to play shortstop, so I played second base. We practiced the double play a lot. We’d bounce a ball off the side of Sonny’s house and field it until Sonny’s mom shouted out that she couldn’t stand the thumping on her kitchen. How many wins is that for Dean now? I asked, hoping that if I concentrated on baseball the other thing would go away.

Still, I felt kind of shaky and hollow inside. When we finished supper I said that I had homework to do. I washed the dishes, dried them, and put them away. Then I went up to my room. It was pretty small—everything in that house was pretty small. Just room enough for my iron cot bed, a little bureau Mom had got secondhand from the Salvation Army, a little table for my homework, and a chair. Grampa had put hooks behind the door for my clothes so I wouldn’t fling them on the chair at night, but mostly I flung them on the chair anyway.

So long as I’d been eating and talking and washing dishes, I’d been able to push away the strangeness of what had happed to me, but now that I was alone, it came back. I felt like I wasn’t me anymore, like I’d turned into somebody else—wasn’t the same old Eugene Richards I’d been familiar with all my life, but a stranger to myself. I shivered. I decided to work on my science homework in hopes it would take my mind off the feeling. So I sat down at my desk and opened up my science book to Newton’s Laws. But I couldn’t concentrate: odds and ends of things kept rushing in and pushing Newton’s Laws out of the way. Finally I gave up. I went down to the living room to say good night. Grampa looked at his watch—a big gold watch that had belonged to his own father and was one of the few things he had left. A little early for you, isn’t it, Gene?

I just feel tired, I said. And I went to bed. I didn’t sleep too well—kept waking up and lying there with thoughts whirling around in my head, but I’d doze off again, and in the morning I felt a little better. The strange feeling had faded out the way a bad dream does, and it faded out some more as the day went on. Maybe it had just been one of those things that happens once and never happens again. Some kind of trick my mind played on itself, like those times when you suddenly have a feeling that whatever you’re doing happened before. That was probably it—a trick of the mind, like I had skipped a minute and needed a little time to get back in line with the world.

By the time school was out at three o’clock, I was feeling a good deal more like my regular old Gene Richards. So when Sonny said, Let’s go out to the country club and see if we can hook some tennis balls.

I figured I’d do it to show myself I was normal again. We set off on out there along Courthouse Road, past the field where we usually played, and into the countryside. A couple of farms out there, silos, tiny shoots of corn in the field, cows here and there. It was a good ways out to the country club, and to while the time away I said,

Sonny, what do you figure on doing when you grow up?

I don’t figure on growin’ up, he said.

Don’t figure on growing up? I gave him a look. How’re you going to keep from growing up?

Oh, I expect I’ll get bigger. I don’t see no harm in that. Get big enough so I don’t have to take stuff from nobody. But I don’t aim on being a grown-up.

Sonny was always having to look after his little sisters, who mostly weren’t too clean and had snot dripping down their noses. I still don’t get what’s wrong with being a grown-up, I said. Maybe we could be doctors, make a ton of money, and drive around in new Buicks all the time.

Naw, he said. Who wants to be a grown-up?

What’s wrong with being a grown-up?

You ever seen a grown-up you wanted to be like?

Sure, I said. Those guys on the Cardinals—Martin and those.

They ain’t real grown-ups. They’re baseball players.

I thought about