Almost immediately, he knew he’d made a mistake. By then it was too late to back away. That would only have compounded his mistake, making him look like a scaredy-cat, and he couldn’t afford to look like that.
The air was redolent with cigarette smoke, and something else. Tommy couldn’t define it, but he could smell the wrongness in the air, hidden in the cigarette smoke. He couldn’t define that smell, though the familiar odor had been popping up lately in unexpected, unexplained times and places. It was subtle. He couldn’t figure out where it came from. It was just sometimes there, tickling his nose and prodding his consciousness, as it was doing now.
“Hey, look,” one of the three said, “it’s Tommy boy.”
Tommy recognized him from around Christi. He was known to all, even the nuns, as Butch. The kids also called him Butch the Bully, but not to his face. He was a senior, much older than Tommy, who having skipped a year in grade school, was young for a freshman. If rumors were to be believed, Butch was older than anyone else in school. From what Tommy knew about him, he was dumb enough to have been held back a year, or even two. Dumb but big. And mean.
That was a bad combination.
“C’mere, Tommy boy.”
Tommy approached the three reluctantly. Butch was looking pseudo-serious. His sycophants were grinning. Not a good sign. Tommy knew that anything from a verbal hazing to a lunch money shakedown to a serious beating was in store. He also knew that it’d be worse if he ran and they had to chase him.
Butch straightened up from the sink he was leaning against. He expelled a long stream of smoke from his nostrils. It didn’t smell like smoke from a real cigarette. Maybe that was where the sweet smell was coming from.
“How come you’re not in class, Tommy boy?”
He had six inches and fifty pounds on Tommy. He was as menacing as any monster out of myth or movie, and much more frightening because he was there, he was real, and Tommy knew he could kick the shit out of him without breaking a sweat. That sudden, sweet order was strong around him. It was coming off him in waves. Not from the hand-rolled cigarette he was sucking on, pulling the smoke deep into his lungs, but from him. None of the others seemed to notice it. Somewhere in a corner of his frightened mind, Tommy wondered why.
“How come, Tommy?” Butch the Bully repeated, a harder edge in his already edgy voice.
“I have to pee,” Tommy said.
Butch looked at his sycophants. “He has to pee,” he repeated in an almost apt imitation of Tommy’s higher, lighter voice. He looked back at Tommy. “I hope you don’t pee your pants little boy.”
His voice was lilting, mocking. The other two laughed. “Yeah, pee your pants,” one of them said.
Tommy gulped, started to move backward, and Butch came towards him, his sycophants right at his heels. He had a bright, weird look in his too-focused eyes. Some bullies, Tommy knew, liked to have their henchmen deliver beatings for them. Butch looked like he liked to hand them out himself. “Do you need a diaper, little boy?” he said, grinning slow and lazy. “Only babies need diapers.”
I hate this place, Tommy thought, closing his eyes.
Butch towered over him. Backed up against the row of sinks, Tommy had nowhere to go. Butch grabbed Tommy’s shirt and pulled him up onto his toes with little effort. Tommy closed his eyes against the tears that suddenly sprang up in them. Would he rather take the humiliation of a pants-wetting, or the pain of a beating? Considering, though, that they’d probably kick his ass no matter what…
You bastard, he thought, you big dumb ugly bastard.
Butch put his face close down almost against Tommy’s. Tommy’s eyes were still shut, but he could feel Butch’s hot breath against his cheeks. “Piss your pants, boy,” the bully said, his breath oddly sweet as a field of flowers in May. “Pisssssssss-”
Butch’s final word was elongated, like a reptilian hiss, and it concluded with a strange, funny sound like a whispered, gagging, choke. Tommy opened his eyes. Butch’s suddenly stricken face was changing contours.
His features slackened, then seemed to stiffen and tighten. He screamed into Tommy’s face as his head grew narrower, more elongated. His hair fell out in clumps, down upon his shoulders and chest. Butch screamed again and his tongue flopped out of his mouth. It was long and bifurcated. It caressed Tommy’s face like gentle fingers.
“Clarence-” one of his sycophants said, “Uh, I mean, Butch?”
Everyone stared at Butch as he started to twitch all over. Tommy got it first.
“He’s turning a card!” Tommy pulled away from the bully’s suddenly slack grip and started to back away fast. It took the other two a moment, then they barkpedaled as Butch sank to his knees.
“Whu-whut’s happening to me?” Butch asked plaintively, barely able to shape the words with his suddenly lolling tongue and elongated jaw. He shook like a dog trying to throw off droplets of invisible water, but no one answered him.
The boys ran from the bathroom, Butch’s companions screaming like they were on fire. Tommy lost himself in the ensuing excitement, blending in as just another ordinary kid in a group of ordinary, if excited, kids. Eventually Butch was taken away by emergency medics. Tommy, watching safely from the crowd as they wheeled him past, saw that he was tied down to the dolly with all but his head covered with a sheet. He was still alive, at least. He twisted frantically against his bonds, almost as sinuous as a snake or lizard, hissing all the time.
Everyone was talking about it. Tommy, after getting back to the bathroom and unburdening his frightfully over-strained bladder, kept silent about his participation in the affair. He wondered about the strange smell Butch had exuded like a night-blooming orchid. As the morning progressed he managed to get next to Sister Aquilonia for a moment, and took a deep sniff. She gave off the same smell, but not as strongly. A couple others around Christi had it, too. Tommy made careful inquiries among his classmates, and nobody seemed aware of Sister Aquilonia’s perfume, or that of the strange girl in eleventh grade who was quite pretty but had feathers instead of hair. As he checked out of Sanguis to take the sub-way to Ebbets Field over in Brooklyn, Tommy began to wonder. Began to think if maybe detecting that odor was an ability he had alone. It made him feel queasy and excited at the same time.
Was he a wild carder? If so, he was one of the lucky ones. He wasn’t one of those pathetic misfit jokers, but more like Golden Boy, and that Eagle guy, and Cyclone who had that cool uniform. And the Turtle, of course, but no one knew what he looked like. Maybe he was a creepy joker hiding in his shell, but he, Tommy, was a normal kid, maybe just a little smarter than the others.
Tommy was running over the possibilities in his head as he arrived at Ebbets Field and asked directions to the locker room. The gate attendants were skeptical that he was a reporter, but all he had to do was show his magic pass and they let him through.
As he walked through the bowels of Ebbets Field, heading to the locker room, his mind wasn’t on baseball. It was whirling with notions of him, Tommy Downs, actually being a wild carder, being-let’s face it-an ace, with the secret power to ferret out those infected with the virus.
God, he thought as he entered the locker room, that would be great. I wonder if I should get a cool uniform of some kind, like Cyclone’s?
He stood on the threshold of the locker room, looking over the scene of ball players undressing. They were legends, too. Some of them, anyway. Don Drysdale, Tom Seaver, Ed Kranepool. Others were just faces to Tommy, who was just a casual fan. Reporters wove in among them, chattering, asking questions, laughing, taking notes. Real reporters, from real newspapers. Not rags like The Weekly Gospel.