My mother was napping, so I dialed Avalyn’s number. She must have been at Inman Grain, because no one answered. Still, I couldn’t let this new recollection rest. Something Avalyn had told me kept repeating in my head: her insistence that my dreams were clues, that I should seek out the necessary information. “Be your own detective,” she’d said. And now I knew that the aliens had kidnapped someone else besides me, another boy on my Little League team. I asked myself if this boy might still be around, still living in Hutchinson. And I wondered what, if anything, this boy had managed to remember.
It was essential, I thought, to determine the names of the kids who’d played on my baseball team that June. Most had lived in Hutchinson; they hadn’t been boys from my school. Perhaps there were records somewhere. I remembered the Hutchinson Chamber of Commerce, the building on the city’s west side where my father had taken me at that summer’s outset. Surely they had files, documentation that could lead me toward the boy I’d dreamed about.
I did something out of character and decided to take the car into Hutchinson without asking my mother’s permission. I found a shirt in the pile of dirty laundry, tugged it over my head, and bounded down the steps. I scrawled a note-“URGENT. BE BACK SOON”-and stuck it to the refrigerator door with a magnet shaped like a celery stalk. Then I rummaged through my mother’s purse; the car keys, a lipstick, nickels and dimes, and a few bullets toppled to the floor. Without cleaning the mess, I grabbed the keys, ran outside, and hopped into the Toyota. I turned the key in the ignition, praying it wouldn’t rouse my mother.
The roads into Hutchinson needed repair, but I took them at seventy miles per hour anyway. I sped past fields of corn and wheat; overgrown meadows intersected by branches of Cow Creek and the Little Arkansas River; pastures where cattle hunched under trees to avoid the heat. Oat and sorghum silos gleamed in the sun, and farmers I’d never met waved as I passed. Leftover fireworks debris had been strewn through the ditches. When I passed the turnoff toward Inman, I thought of Avalyn.
The Chamber of Commerce stood tall and shining in the center of a series of buildings, a buckle on the belt of the street. A few people milled around inside. I entered the main hall and opened the first office door. A dark-haired receptionist sat at her desk, nibbling on beef jerky, one hand typing fiercely at a manual typewriter. She turned to me, asked the standard “May I help you,” and listened as I fabricated a foolish story. I was researching a college baseball player who’d played for Hutchinson Little League teams ten summers ago. “This guy’s going to be the next big thing,” I said. “I’m doing a story on him for the community college paper.”
Luckily, the receptionist believed my hogwash. She explained that they kept no records of the summer’s teams. “What we do have, however, are old photographs.” She indicated the floor by shuffling her fingers. “In the basement hallway, chronologically by year, are photographs of all the League squads since we began sponsoring the program over twenty years ago. Makes the walls rather unsightly, if you ask me.” She stopped gesturing downward, took another bite of the beef jerky, and turned back to her typewriter. “You might be able to find things easier if you know the name of the team you want.”
“Panthers,” I said, and descended the stairs to enter the empty basement, its fluorescent lights buzzing. Framed glossy photos covered the hall walls. I could vaguely remember our first team practice, that initial week after my father had signed me to the Panthers’ list. I had made certain my uniform was in place, then lined up with the others as a photographer had snapped our picture. I thought it strange that for all these years, my photo had been nailed to the wall, here in this building, without my knowledge.
“Nineteen eighty-seven, eighty-six, eighty-five…” I wandered the hall, sliding back in time, until I arrived at 1981. That year’s team photographs were grouped together, twenty-two in all. The navy and white pizzas on our uniforms’ fronts divulged my team. I stood eye-level to the picture. I scanned faces, not really seeing them, until I came to mine. There-me, kneeling on one knee in the front row center. I rested my gloved hand on my other knee, faking a smile. My hair was blonder than I remembered, my face flushed and sheened with sweat.
I looked away from the photo and made sure I was alone in the basement. And then, for the first time in my life, I committed a crime. I reached up, delicately maneuvered the frame from its nail, and pulled the photo from the wall.
Upstairs, I wedged the photo inside the waistband of my shorts, then untucked my shirt to conceal it. I scurried through the Chamber of Commerce, my steps punctuated by the chattering of the receptionist’s typewriter. I made it. When I got back to the car, I sat for a second, breathing. I felt as though I’d just done something unspeakable, like a bank heist or a gun blast between someone’s eyes.
I slid the photograph out, and the smiling faces stared back at me. I focused again on the eight-year-old me. I glossed over the front row, and once again, folds of memory layered in my head: here was a kid I remembered as our pitcher, his arm gunning forward to strike me out during practice; another kid, one of a pair of twins, whom I remembered spraining his ankle during the Panthers’ opening game; and another, the weaselly-looking boy at the end of the row, was the one, I suddenly knew, who’d broken my glasses and laughed at me, that Halloween night when the aliens had returned for me.
But none of the boys in the front row was the kid in my dream.
When I switched and began scrutinizing the top row, I found him. He stood there, his jaw clenched, a line of black sunblock below his eyes like warpaint. He wore jersey number ninety-nine. His face looked savage, the face of a kid who’d been raised in the jungle by wolves or apes.
I didn’t bother looking at the others. I knew those were the eyes that had looked into mine; the hands that had led me into the blue room. The kid stood next to the end of the top row, his arm brushing the arm of the Panthers’ coach.
Something about the coach stopped me. Strangely, I couldn’t remember anything about him. For years I had recalled things about baseball practices, those agonizing first games I’d trudged through before quitting. But I had erased this coach. Still, something about him looked familiar, as if he’d starred in an outdated movie I’d seen through my half-sleep, years ago. In the photograph, he towered above everyone else, smiling broadly, the expression almost noble, brimming with pride for his team. His teeth shone unnaturally white beneath the broad curve of his mustache. He was the only person in the picture who gave me as intense a response as the boy from my dream, and I wondered if this coach had somehow played a part in the abduction as well. Perhaps he had been there, just as Avalyn’s grandparents and brother had been there when the aliens had kidnapped her on that long-past afternoon.
My heart was thrumming. I had taken one step, perhaps one giant leap, closer to discovering an answer. “What next?” I said aloud. Curiously, I felt queasy, as if I were being watched by someone or something that wanted to harm me. I glanced at the side and dashboard rearviews, then rolled the window down and squinted up at the sky.