The Lesson of Graham Brooklyn

I didn’t know who Graham Brooklyn was. But I’m the one who found his body.

I imagined that the 40 oz. beer bottle he had been holding, perhaps purchased only minutes prior from the liquor store around the corner, slipped from his crestfallen hand and smashed on impact as it hit the ground. Shards of glass burst in every direction like shrapnel. A dank sweat trickled down the base of his neck, dampening his torn button down shirt. He tried to inhale but couldn’t. Gulped, captured nothing, much like a gold fish left out of the tank. His eyes danced from side to side until a blurry haze of darkness flashed before him. He fell, first to his knees and then onto his stomach, arms extended out in front of him grasping for helping hands like elusive straws. The ally remained deserted, but for a few pieces of trash scattered about and a thick, snot-colored liquid collecting near a clogged sewer cage. The smell of something rotten, sour milk or possibly scalded fish, lingered over a rusty bin overturned and resting comfortably on its side. A slight twitch shook his left leg momentarily. Then nothing.

***

Life matters not when you’re twelve. What matters, or what mattered to me I suppose, were the worn baseball cards protruding from my back pocket, the yo-yo, baseball glove and Yankees hat (with the brim bent just so) in my knapsack, and particularly, the baseball in my hand.

I walked, one lace-loose sneaker in front of the other, chomping on a stick of Wrigley’s gum as a cow would blades of grass, tossing the ball up in the air and retrieving it with my bare palm, barely paying any attention to where I was going.
Hardly a prediction, a collision ensued between an elderly woman lugging her metal shopping cart behind her while navigating the cracks in the sidewalk with a wooden cane and my left foot.

She squealed as I kicked the cane, causing my sneaker to break free from the sole of my foot and sail through the air. The ball hit the ground, bounced off the shopping cart and rolled into an adjacent ally.

At twelve, you don’t stop to think about a feeble old woman with a cane when your most prized possession in the world had just disappeared into an ally. I didn’t apologize. Instead I ran full throttle, stumbling with one shoe on and the other in my hand. I spotted the ball about half way down the ally, trickling along the ground, propelled forward by a slight downward slant in the concrete.

I slipped on my sneaker and sprinted, gathering the ball up in my hands before it reached the sewer. Something foul stung my nose. I winced, walked backwards towards the street and studied the ball to make sure it was unharmed, untarnished and entirely intact.

A bird or some kind of airborne species flew by, stealing my eyes less than a second. It was more than enough time for me to notice the body. I saw a pair of feet first, followed up the bean stalk legs to the tattered clothing, color faded and ripped along the seams, then across the broad shoulders to the back of the balding head and to the arms spread wide like a pair of broken wings. Whoever lay there had been wearing a maroon cap, velvet red at some point before the weather had gotten to it.

I lost the spit in my mouth. Swallowed the gum. Felt the urge to run, though my legs were cemented to the very concrete beneath my feet. The baseball leapt gently from my hand, bounced off the ground and casually rolled along the curb. It came to a decided stop against a heel at the foot of the body, which coincidently gave me a reason to move closer.

I inched ahead, aware of my breathing and the scraping of my sneakers against the pavement. The world around me seemed to come to a pause, and I glanced over my shoulder to make sure no wandering eyes were upon me. I stopped just short of the ball, bent down to pick it up without moving my eyes from the back of the hairless head in front of me. Biting my lip, I reached for it as far as I could with out bending over then jumped back a few feet as if bitten by a rabid dog. I looked on with horror at the maggot-covered body. My eyes blinked and the maggots were gone.

A moan erupted then, shaking the brick walls that surrounded me as the head spun around revealing a faceless skull, both eye sockets filled with an endless abyss. I closed my eyes again. Upon opening them, the body remained on its stomach, undisturbed.

My imagination was having a go at me.
I stood there not knowing what to do next. The baseball no longer carried any importance. I longed to be back on the crowded streets, away from the body, the ally and the stench of the sewer. My stomach heaved and I wretched, choking back the vinegary acid. Water clouded over my eyes as I tilted my head towards the sky and let the clean air sail through my nostrils refreshing my lungs.

After a moment of reprieve, I glared at the body. A seed of anger began to grow in the gallows of my stomach. I wanted nothing more to do with it. This was the city; there were bodies of homeless people found lying on the ground all the time. If I left it there, someone else was sure to find it. My twelve-year-old conscience wept. I couldn’t leave. Instead, I sat down on the curb.

Head hung low as the afternoon heat rose up from the black top. Armpits caked with sweat, heart saddened, and feeling as though I had just lost a no-hitter by pitching a sludge curve ball to an all-star designated hitter straight from the box during a seventh-inning stretch, I sat and anxiously waited for someone else to arrive. For someone to save me from the looming responsibility I felt creeping up my shoulders and weighing me down.

***

An hour passed. Maybe two. I wasn’t wearing a watch and I didn’t know how to read the sun. I had noticed the shadows cast over my head shifting, which meant that time had indeed gone by. The body had not moved and neither had the baseball.
A sigh eluded my lips. Conceivably a stoic moment and nothing more.
Hunger pains begged me to call out, to scream for help. But fear warned me that I might be blamed or scolded or judged or arrested or worse.

“But I didn’t do anything,” I whispered.

A fly tickled my ear lobe, flew as if it were drunk from my shoulder to the bent in my elbow and then landed on the leg of the body, stoking my vigilance. The longer I sat there the less I wanted to tell someone of my discovery. They would ask me why I hadn’t alerted anyone sooner, and I wouldn’t have an answer for them. They would wonder had I acted accordingly, if the decaying body of the individual who lay before me could have been saved.

I had already convinced myself otherwise, that this shell of a man had already expired before I came along, that he had passed from one world to the next even before his bruised face connected with the asphalt.

Questions were unavoidable now. The neon light of the heat lamp in the interrogation room blinded my mind’s eye. If I left now, just walked away, I could pretend I hadn’t seen it. I could simply forget about the baseball and walk home. I could make up a story as to why I was late, a fight perhaps, after school with some pig-nosed bully, a chase, a hiding spot found incredulously in a deserted ally, a body...no, no body. But the chase, the bully, the fight. Those would work.
But what about the baseball?
The bully stole my baseball.
There. It was all set.

***

I made it home well after supper and was sent immediately to my room without question, answer, water or food. My mother cried punishment. I saw a blessing in disguise.

With the lights off and the shades pulled low, I fell into the softness of my pillows letting the mattress cradle me.
My eyes were blood spotted and itchy from waterless tears. They dampened though, each time I shoved my face into the pillow evoking out a soundless scream.

His name had been Graham Brooklyn. I know because I checked his wallet. He had a one-dollar bill, ripped along the upper left corner, crumpled and shoved into the fold. There was no plastic, no library card, no social security, nothing to indicate that Graham Brooklyn had actually existed except for a driver’s license picture.

It was long expired and revealed a happier time when the hair on his head was a thick mud brown and the creases of his smile were smooth. Deep-set eyes spoke of hope, a known secret. Healthy skin shined. Handsome some would say. Dapper even. I wouldn’t know.

At the time I met him, he looked to me like any other peripatetic man before the ferocious streets ate him up and spit him out into an indebted ally. And I had left him lying there, face down on the cracked curb, melting with the asphalt.

At that moment, I hated Graham Brooklyn. I hated him for never amounting to anything but I hated him more for reaffirming all of my father’s beliefs that no good drunken gutter-dwellers with holes in their shoes end up either lying face down in an empty ally, penniless and dead, or in shelter delaying the certainty of dying in an empty ally, penniless. Most of all, I hated him because he was the epitome of what I feared I’d eventually become.

Me, with my big dreams and lofty aspirations. Hadn’t someone like Graham Brooklyn had those same dreams? What had become of them? Why hadn’t he achieved all that he set out to achieve? Or worse, had he reached the pinnacle of success and decided that was it?

I didn’t have the answers. My God, I was only twelve. But the lesson of that day shaped me for the rest of my life. My decision to walk away, to leave Graham Brooklyn’s body continued to haunt me as I grew older. He left a part of himself, whoever that was, with me. I know because I sometimes see his face in my dreams accompanied by a swarm of butterflies, sweaty disorientation, and a fear of being trapped in that ally, of becoming just like him.

Days later they found the body. And with it, a baseball. They were buried together in an unmarked grave. Maybe they, the cops perhaps or another random straggler, thought the ball had meaning. Maybe they thought it was his soul possession, the one and only thing he cared about in this world. If they only knew.

Years later, someone added a headstone, paid in full by guilt masquerading as cash. It was, apparently, a delicate piece of granite that continued to weather each winter with a sense of purpose. It remains etched with elongated letters in an Old English script enlightening all those who cross its path with a single ambiguous sentence, “You can keep the baseball.”

Story ID:	2207
Written by:	Lyndsey Darcangelo (bio, link, contact, other stories)
Story type:	Fiction
Location:	Buffalo NY USA
Year:	2007