Written by RF Wilson – When old lady Cheminski disappeared after Christmas that year, we didn’t think much about it except it was nice to not have her yelling all the time. She was always shooing the birds out of her flower garden, hollering at dogs who wandered into her yard, yelling at us because we were kids.

When Mr. Cheminski burned trash in the old oil drum in the strip of woods between his yard and our ball field, she’d be after him. “Har-old!” she’d yell, her voice rising up at the end of his name like she was calling a pig or something. “Be careful. You’ll set the woods on fire.” Every time we went by their house she was yelling about something.

When our development was built they’d left a space for a street between the Cheminskis and the Perkins. It never got made, but Mrs. C acted like the property was hers. It was also the way we got to our baseball field. Every time we went up there she’d hang out a window and yell.

“Go on, go on. You boys get off my property.”

We knew it wasn’t hers so we’d just keep going. If Mr. C was out he might say something to her like, “Ilka, you know it’s not our property.” But she’d keep saying, “go on, go on,” which is what we were doing anyway.

The ball field was once a pasture, part of a farm that now only raised chickens. The owner said he liked that the land was being used. A couple of years ago some dads and kids cleared the land and put up a backstop and a dugout. The leftfield fence was rusty barbed wire running between the field and woods. Center and right fields disappeared into swamp and muck that ran down to a pond. In the spring we’d go up and burn off what had grown since the end of the last season. Mr. C would come out and help us keep the fire under control. Of course, Mrs. C would holler at all of us that we were going to set the woods on fire.

The backstop didn’t have a top over it like the kind on a real field, so a pop foul ball might land in the Cheminski’s back yard. If the old man wasn’t around, she’d yell, “You boys keep off my grass or I’ll call the police.” If he was there, he’d throw the ball back to us. He had a good arm. You could tell he’d played when he was a kid. We thought he’d probably like to join us.

We never had enough of us for real teams. Some days there’d be only five, one pitching for both teams, a guy in the outfield, one in the infield. You always supplied your own catcher when you were at bat. Getting somebody out was a big deal so you had scores like 30-22 for five or six innings. If we had enough for four on a side, you’d have a pitcher, an infielder, a guy in short outfield on the batter’s weak side, and an outfielder on his strong side.

The best player was Petey D’Angelo. He once hit a ball into the woods past center field, something nobody else had done since Mac Robinson’s dad did the day they put up the backstop. Billy Neely was the worst. He was younger than most of us but he owned more bats and balls than the rest of us together. He also had all of the catcher’s gear – mask, shin guards, chest protector – but he was too scared of getting hit so he never used them. If you got stuck with Billy on your team and you had enough guys, you always put him in right field since nothing much happened out there. He’d always whine about it, saying he was going to ruin his shoes in the mud.

A couple of weeks went by near the end of that summer when Mrs. C didn’t come out to give us a hard time. When their next door neighbor, Mrs. Perkins, finally decided to say something to Mr. C about not having seen Ilka for a while, he said she’d gone to Pennsylvania to look after her sick mother. Danny Parry’s mother thought maybe she’d run away with someone, although we couldn’t imagine who’d want her. Then there was the rumor that she’d gotten a hold of all his money and she and a sister had gone off to some island. Mostly, people were happy for Mr. Cheminski for not having to put up with her anymore.

With Mrs. C away, we didn’t see much of Mr. C. He used to be outside all the time picking up stuff in the yard, sweeping his driveway, cleaning the gutters, messing with something. Staying away from his wife, we figured, since she only came out to yell at us or chase the birds. That next spring, he didn’t come out to help us burn off the field.

It seemed like it rained every other day that spring. Even on sunny days it was too wet to play. Finally, there were a few nice days in a row and we got our gear together. Mr. C was outside cleaning up the yard. He pretended not to see us but we knew he did.

Right field was more of a swamp than usual. Whoever was out there had to play toward center or up closer to the infield. I was on Petey D’Angelo’s team and we were winning something like 35 to 10. He decided to bat lefty, which he hardly ever did.

Billy Neely was in his usual spot in right. The other team yelled for him to back up and he cried that he was going to ruin his new shoes and his mother would be mad. Petey swung and missed the first two pitches. You could tell he was trying to knock the stitches off it. On the third pitch, he looked like the picture of Ted Williams on the bubble gum card. He smacked that sucker way over Billy MacArthur’s head. It hooked barely foul.

The ball disappeared in the muck and Billy just stood there looking in the general direction of where it had been swallowed up. We were all laughing and yelling at him to go get it until he started screaming. I figured he’d lost a shoe in the mud or something. Then he started pointing. Pointing and screaming. Not just make-believe crying now. Saying something we couldn’t understand. Tony Michaels went over from centerfield, got near Billy, stopped and turned around, holding his nose. When the rest of us went out there, I was right behind Charley Morrison. He stopped, turned around, and threw up on my shoes.

Then I saw it. A hand. Well, just fingers, really. Sticking up out of the mud. Then I saw the head, all black and wrinkled, holes where the eyes had been. Creepiest thing I’d ever seen. Creepier than the old lady in Psycho. We all just stood and stared until Mac Robinson said we needed to call the police. It was a dead body after all. A corpse.

All of us ran up to the Cheminski house except for Charley who stayed back to keep an eye on the thing even though we all knew it wasn’t going anywhere. Billy just stayed there crying. Mr. C didn’t come when we banged on his door but we looked in the garage window and his car was gone. Next door, Mrs. Perkins had to yell at us to be quiet and one person talk at a time before she could understand what we were saying.

“A dead body?” she asked. “Are you sure somebody isn’t playing a trick on you?”
“No, no,” we all said, “it’s a real body.”
“And Mr. Cheminski is gone?” she asked.
We all nodded.
“I’ll call the police,” she said.

We knew we’d be grossed out to see the whole body but we still wanted to. When the police came, they put yellow tape across the doors of the house and then around the whole ball field so we couldn’t get a good look at it anyway.

Mrs. Perkins said, “I doubt we’re going to see Mr. C again.”
It took a minute to sink in.
She was right. We never did see him again. We all thought it was too bad he couldn’t have come out and played with us. At least once.

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RF Wilson writes in Asheville, NC, where he lives with his wife, Beth Gage. He is the author of the novel “Killer Weed,” recently published by Pisgah Press and the short story “Accident Prone,” in the anthology “Carolina Crimes” published by Wildside Press.