Keep Them Close(35)
“You sure you want to do this tonight?” she asks. “It’s freezing.”
I’m not sure I ever want to do this. Talking about the worst moment of my life? Reliving the day that I lost the thing that made me special, the months of agonizing rehab and physical therapy, knowing all the while that no matter how hard I worked to get my arm and shoulder back into shape, I’d never be a fraction of the pitcher I had once been?
But I made a commitment to Trinity and this documentary. It’s the right thing to do. Besides, I’ve spent the last week, since getting suspended, staring at walls. There are only so many miles you can run, so many weights you can lift, so many lunges and crunches and planks. I need a task.
“I’m sure,” I say.
A gust rattles the icicles hanging from the gutters; I jam my hands deeper into my pockets. Grace Park in early March feels dormant: lawns buried, gardens asleep, everything yearning for spring. The evening streets are quiet except for the scrape of a shovel somewhere down the block.
“We called it riding the hill,” I say. “But it was really a race. My grade school, Hilltop Elementary, got its name for a reason. The hill was behind the school, this long, angled slope. Think of the perfect tobogganing hill and you get the picture. But the eight or nine months of the year when there wasn’t snow, we would ride down it on our bikes.”
“The school let you do that?” Trinity brings her handheld recorder toward her mouth as she speaks, then moves it back toward me.
“Oh, God, no. The school erected a fence, maybe five feet high, keeping us away from the hill. But we were kids, right? Especially in the summer, when very few adults were around. The way it worked, we’d leave our bikes at the racks by the school. We’d trudge up the hill, and one person was appointed the ‘gofer.’?”
“The ‘gofer’? What did the ‘gofer’ do?”
“Well, someone had to go around to the front, grab the bikes from the rack, walk them to the fence, and hand them over the fence to the rest of us.”
“Got it.”
“Then we’d race,” I say. “One at a time. Each of us would be timed individually. Someone would stand at the bottom with a stopwatch. Usually it was Jimmy Wilding, because he had a frilly watch with all kinds of functions, and I always thought he was afraid to ride the hill. Anyway, the guy at the bottom would do the old ‘On your mark, get set, go!’ and then one of us would fly down the hill, riding as fast as we could, from the top of the hill down to the manhole cover by the sidewalk. Which was not very far from the street.”
“So basically, insanely dangerous and reckless,” says Trinity.
“Completely. Totally. Boneheaded. I don’t know what we were thinking. And if your bike reached the sidewalk, you were eliminated. Meaning, ride as fast as you freakin’ can, with all the momentum heading down that huge hill, reach the manhole cover to get the best time, then skid to a stop almost immediately so you don’t reach the sidewalk.”
We pass under the bare limbs of an oak tree stretching high and skeletal. The street is hushed, like everything has gone to sleep beneath the snow. And intimate, as if the world has quieted just for us. That’s how I see it, anyway.
Not so much for Trinity. I steal glances at her as we walk, as I narrate. She’s got her hair tied back, a knit hat pulled low, cheeks pink from the cold. She’s beautiful in that effortless way; my chest tightens at the thought that she’s here next to me. But her eyes are down. She is not thinking of me, at least not in the way I am thinking of her. She is listening, concentrating, strategizing how to bring my story to life.
“Here we are,” I say, pointing across the intersection.
Hilltop Elementary and Grace Middle School share a one-square-block campus. Extensive renovations have made it unrecognizable from my youth—once all-brick schools replaced with structures of recycled steel and glass—but the biggest change is the hill, the infamous hill, the one they called “Luke’s Hill” after my accident. Occupying that south area of the campus now, connected by an annex to the schools, is a multipurpose athletic facility owned by the park district, including a swimming pool and indoor courts for basketball and racket sports.
“Unfortunately for your purposes,” I say, “you’ll have to look at old photos. But trust me, that hill was basically a ski slope.”
“Kind of odd, actually.”
“Yeah, I know. Why put a school next to a slope like that? Apparently, before it was settled and became Grace Park in the 1800s, the terrain was quite hilly. The founder flattened a lot of it, but for some reason was excited about having a school on a hilltop. Some shining beacon or something? So he refused to flatten this block. When he endowed this land, he wouldn’t let it be changed. But about a decade ago, the town worked it out somehow with his ancestors and did this whole renovation. Shiny new buildings, and no more hill.”
Though I’ve passed this intersection countless times, I’ve never gotten used to the new look since the renovations. I still see that hill in my mind, still feel a small twinge every time I pass by. Most times, I remind myself of what I’ve overcome, how I turned tragedy into success, if a different kind. I’m full of rationalizations, too: The odds of making the major leagues are so infinitesimal; I probably would’ve hurt my arm like most people shooting for the bigs; focusing on the cerebral part of the game at such an early age made me the coach I am today.