“He also asked that I tell you, ‘Everyone’s ready.’ ”
“Me too,” I said.
He handed me the bat. The kids started shouting. Mostly my name. Unlike last time, though, they kept their distance. They seemed to enjoy their proximity to the Bentley. I listened for Stevie, whose face I couldn’t find, and heard a girl yell, “Of you!” which I knew was “Love you!” with the L clipped off by the noise of the crowd, but also I knew that the yeller wasn’t Stevie, and the subject of the phrase—the other part that I’d missed—probably wasn’t “I,” anyway, but rather just “We,” which I guess, in the end, was better than nothing.
* * *
—
Halfway between the ground and the crossbar, the footless leg had a rusted-out hole. I struck underneath it—fifty-some blows in furious succession—til the leg folded L-like. Pivoting to launch the second phase of my attack, I noticed my shoulders felt buzzy, too warm. They needed a rest. I thought about lying flat on the pavement to let whatever sinew or muscle I’d wrenched cool down and ease itself back into place, but I didn’t want to do that in front of all those kids, so I crossed to the opposite side of the swingset and leaned on the slide, making a face that said, I hoped, “I am busy plotting my next big move.” The crowd hollered praise, as if I’d taken a bow. The swingset was afraid. ||Why’d you stop?|| it said. ||I thought you said you’d help me.|| “I’m helping you,” I said. ||All you’ve done is bend my leg.|| “I need to get you lower first. I can’t reach your crossbar. You need me to get at your crossbar, right?” ||I need you to V it. You can’t just dent it. You really have to make it irreparable,|| it said. “I know that. I know. That’s what I’ll do.” ||You promise?|| said the swingset. ||You’re not just mocking me? This is really important.|| I gave it my word, rolled cracks from my shoulders, my neck, and my jaw, then crossed back to the side that was opposite the slide, and went full bore at the anchored leg, attacking it at a height that roughly corresponded to that of the L’d one’s bend. Within ten minutes, the second leg was bowing, the crossbar at a slant. I jumped up, grabbed hold, and pulled with all my strength, increasing the slope til the bowed leg resembled a lesser-than sign, and the center of the crossbar was lower than my collarbone—four, maybe four-and-a-half feet off the ground.
I took up the bat, started chopping overhanded, and just as the crossbar began to give, the cheering from behind me drastically abated, and members of my audience were rushing past me, on foot and on bicycle, into the trees behind the trailers, yelling out, “Heat!” and “Fuzz!” and “Bacon!”
I looked over my shoulder and saw six officers rounding up kids, spilling bottles on the ground, cuffing the hands of the Firebird owner (we’d later find out he’d had a joint in his pocket). I saw Burroughs waving to two of the cops as he got inside the limo. Then I saw Stevie get out of the limo, turned back to the swingset, and resumed my chopping.
A couple minutes later, a cop approached me. “Put down the bat,” he said.
“I’m doing nothing wrong.”
“You’re destroying private property that doesn’t belong to you.”
“I’m allowed to,” I said. I yelled out to Stevie, “Tell them I’m allowed to do this, Stevie!”
I couldn’t hear what she told the cop she was talking to, but after a second, her cop said to my cop, “She says he’s allowed to wreck that swingset.”
“I don’t care what she says,” my cop said to me. “What you say you’re doing is goddamn stupid, and what I see you doing is you’re brandishing a weapon at a Wheelatine policeman.”
I said, “That’s not true. You know that’s not true. Just let me finish and I’ll put the bat down.”
“Put the bat down,” he said.
I turned back around and went at the crossbar. This was no act of bravery. I knew I’d be in trouble no matter what I did, and I was more afraid of the shame that I’d feel if I broke my promise to the poor, neglected swingset than I was of the police. Plus I didn’t think my cop was willing to hurt me—he’d have stripped me of the bat already were it otherwise. In case I was wrong about that last part, though, I chopped as fast and hard as I could to discourage him from getting any closer to me.
Within a few minutes, I’d M’d the frame, the swingset was dead, and the twenty-some kids the cops had detained were sending up whoops and whistling and clapping. I couldn’t feel my neck. My shoulders were balls of flashing white noise. I gave up the bat and held out my wrists, but no one would cuff me. My cop just smiled, shook his head, then walked me to his car with a hand on my shoulder. He giggled on and off all the way to the station.
* * *
While the cops phoned our guardians to come pick us up, we waited in pine-scented, overlit holding cells. The station had four. The boys were in one, and the girls in another directly opposite. The Firebird guy was in a third with a drunk, occasionally sobbing. Stevie sobbed too, sitting on the bench with her head in her hands, refusing, despite my occasional encouragements, to glance across the passage at the faces I was making in hopes of entertaining her.
What little conversation there was in our cell had mostly to do with who might have called the cops. The Strumms’ nearest neighbors were too far away to have heard the party, which everyone agreed had been relatively quiet. There hadn’t been any parked cars in the street, and the high, tarped fence surrounding the property prevented passersby from seeing inside. Some believed the one who’d dimed was Blackie—that his conspicuous absence made him “prime suspect.” Others said Blackie, evil as he was, would never talk to cops, and proposed a frame-up conceived by Jonboat, who, figuring that Blackie would catch all the blame, made the call from his carphone, or had his driver do it. Rhino Riggins, proponent number one of the Jonboat hypothesis, called out, “Hey, Stevie! Did the limo have a carphone?”
Stevie looked up, then looked back down.
I stopped making faces. I hadn’t forgotten Stevie’d been in the limo so much as I’d told myself my eyes had betrayed me. Now I knew they hadn’t—Rhino and the others had seen the same thing.
“Stevie!” Rhino said, and the guard said, “Shut it,” and all of us shut it, and I started to think about how Stevie’d looked up as soon as Rhino’d said her name, but hadn’t looked up all the times that I’d said it. And I started to think that maybe part of the reason she was so upset was that she knew I’d seen her getting out of the limo, and she knew it hurt me, and she hadn’t wanted to hurt me, and now she was ashamed and couldn’t bear to face me. And then I started thinking that maybe it was even better than that: maybe it was more like she knew that I’d seen her stepping out of the limo and assumed that it looked to me like something it wasn’t, something that would hurt me, but she figured that since I’d already assumed that it was that hurtful something, I wouldn’t believe her if she told me it was something else entirely. (She would think that I wouldn’t believe her, I thought, because she believed that no one ever believed her, which was something I might have remembered her saying once—“No one ever believes me!”—though I couldn’t be sure; that could have been another sad girl we went to school with, or maybe a girl I’d seen on TV; it could have been a thing that a lot of girls had said.) And so the whole situation could have very well seemed just as hopeless to Stevie as it would have if the something in question had been the hurtful kind.