Ghost Man
Short a runner, we called out for a ghost man and a boy stepped out of the corn. It was the boy who’d disappeared years before we were born, sent into the corn to look for the ball his older brother had just hit into oblivion. His brother told the boy that if he didn’t go in after it, he wouldn’t get the turn at bat that he’d promised him. So he went into the corn in search of it. No one had seen exactly where it had gone, but they figured it wouldn’t be very hard to find, though the corn was trembling mockingly, as if to say Here! No, here! It was August. The corn was tall. His older brother and his friends, who the boy had begged to play with, were sick and tired of corn. They’d worked on the detasseling crew earlier in the summer, getting paid in cash that smelled sweetly of corn, and talked a lot about buying cars, though they were a year or two too young to drive. The boy was still in the corn. The older boys started kicking at the bases, old seed sacks that the corn now growing in the field had come in. It was the only ball they had and if they lost it they’d have to find something else to do, and, in that town, in that year, it was easier to find a baseball in a cornfield than to find something to do, and anyway they’d have to ask one of their older brothers or sisters to drive them into town, which was out of the question. What was taking him so long? The boy’s older brother yelled his name, while his friends, beginning to get a little nervous, gave him a hard time for the home run. Why’d you have to hit it so far? He shrugged his shoulders, said, Why’d you have to throw such a shitty pitch? Then, as if they only intended to help the boy look for the ball, they waded into the corn, spaced about ten yards apart, like members of a search party. And like all members of a search party, only one of them, the boy’s brother, really had anything at stake. It wasn’t his father’s farm. He and his little brother lived down the road a ways, and had come there that night with their parents, who were sitting on the porch, talking about, well, the corn, how well it was growing, what they could expect it to bring at the elevator come fall. The boys were working their way into the field, calling his name. Their tactic had changed. They were calling out for him to quit joking around, it wasn’t funny, they were going to beat his ass once they found him, but, though he threatened punishment too, the kid knew his little brother wouldn’t joke around like this. He thought maybe he’d been stung by a bee and gone into anaphylactic shock, though, as far as he knew, his brother wasn’t allergic to bees. Or maybe he’d just fainted from the exertion of looking for the ball in the heat, though it wasn’t that hot. In fact, it was cool. Evening. Soon, the first stars. They heard a voice. It was one of their dads, a little drunk, come out to give them a hard time, to tell them they swung the bat like girls. They came out of the corn like runaways. They may as well have had their hands up. The kid whose dad it was said, on behalf of them all, that the boy had gone into the corn after the ball and had never come out. This dad yelled the boy’s name, as if the boy couldn’t help but obey him and promptly emerge to be appropriately disciplined. Then this dad turned around and walked back to the house. When he came back, all the adults were with him, including the boy’s parents, who looked concerned, but not panicked. Beers in all their hands. The red arcs of cigarettes. The dark seemed to fall all at once, and against it, like a pulley system, the fireflies were rising. Neighbors had heard. Trucks pulled right up into the backyard, into what had earlier been the diamond, and poured their high beams into the corn. One of the mothers came out with a plastic grocery bag of flashlights. The boys were somewhat relieved. The adults were failing to find him too now. But the boy whose brother was lost was crazed. He kept going deeper and deeper into the field, like he wanted to disappear himself, like a diver who almost drowns searching for the drowned. In the dark corn, out of sight of everyone, he wept and prayed, promising God he would never treat his brother badly again, though, in truth, he didn’t treat his brother badly at all. The cops showed up, the fire department, a helicopter from the hospital. They searched all night, chaotically at first, then more logically, using string to mark off quadrants. In shifts. Taking breaks from time to time in the kitchen, drinking water from hands cupped under the faucet. The beer disappeared. People were getting drunk and failing to hide it. Someone asked was there a map. Someone else asked what good a map would do. Finally, deep in the night, the parents of the missing boy went home to get some rest. The mother had become hysterical. Someone had pressed a bottle of pills into the father’s hand and told him to take her home and try to get her to sleep. But the older brother, he begged to stay, along with one of his friends, while the kid whose farm it was went upstairs. Unforgivable. Finally, the older brother collapsed on the couch, thin red scratch marks along his arms from where the corn leaves had cut him, ticks crawling through his hair, burrowing into his scalp, which they numbed first with their toxins so he couldn’t feel them and claw them out. His friend, his true friend, who’d stayed awake with him and who’d let him have the couch, lay in a blanket on the floor. The search resumed at first light. Crop dusters flew over. The boys were questioned. Had they seen anyone strange in town that day, anyone they hadn’t seen before? They were thinking abduction. They were thinking a boy doesn’t just walk into a corn field and disappear. It seemed significant when a girl the older brother happened to have a crush on found the ball. This happened in the dead of afternoon, when spirits were really starting to sag. The finding of the ball seemed like a sign that they would soon find the boy. The search focused in on the place where she’d found it (though she couldn’t be exactly sure where that place was — in her excitement at finding it she’d walked straight out of the corn when she should have stood in place screaming). Maybe there was a sinkhole. They tried the ground with their boots. They put their fingers to their lips for silence and listened. The corn listened too. They heard nothing. The corn heard something but it had ears, not mouths. They lost hope gradually, like a married couple who, over the years, cease loving one another. In other words, the loss of hope was as imperceptible as it was final. When it came time to take the corn down that fall, they took it down carefully, with an old two-row picker, the boy’s father and brother walking ahead of the farmer whose corn the boy had vanished into and who felt almost as responsible as the brother did. The whole field. Nothing. The kid kept the ball for a long time. The girl had given it to him, along with a few other things, until she too disappeared. Sometimes, even years later, married, with two boys of his own, he’d take the ball out of the shoebox where it lived, cradled in a sweat-darkened glove, and study it, running his fingertips along the red seams, touching his cheek to the cool white cowhide. The ball itself seemed to hold the secret. He was tempted to put it on one of his wife’s cutting boards, slice it open like an onion. But he knew what he would find. Just inner stuff – yarn, rubber, cork. He was tired of inner stuff — the insides of cornfields, of baseballs. He spent a lot of time in the yard after his family was safely asleep, looking up at the stars. And then came that evening, years after everyone, even the boy’s older brother, had lost hope, when the boy stood at the very edge of the field, one row deep, watching us play, the way he watched all boys play baseball in that county in the summer. The joy he must have felt when we finally called for him to join us. When he emerged from the corn he was not a day older than he had been when he went into it, and was wearing the same clothes. He hadn’t been able to find the ball, but he’d found us, boys he’d never seen before, but who he felt he knew. But who couldn’t see him.