Tag Archives: Alan Carpenter

Thank You

Afterward, when the cop car pulled up to the ballpark in Mankato, Hank James looked out from the backseat. His face was wet with tears. All of his team, and most of the Mankato Man-Pigs, were standing in the parking lot watching him. Mickey Danz turned his head away and began shaking violently. A few very slow-moving families were still around, gawking at the events transpiring before them. The cops let him out of the back seat and Hank stood up, revealing that he had not been handcuffed. One of the young guys walking past, half drunk, asked loudly if someone was barbecuing. Hearing this, Hank bent over and vomitted.

Before any of that happened, at the end of the ball game, Mickey Danz had darted from the dugout when the rest of the team ran out to high five everyone after beating the Man-Pigs 7-2. After congratulating them, Hank saw the wiry pitcher dart out to the other team’s bullpen. Alan Carpenter was waiting by the gate, like he was expecting the visit. Alan Carpenter was a man Hank James respected and feared, but had never even been able to get hit off of. No one in the league had.

Mickey handed the Mankato reliever something wrapped in a towel. Carpenter accepted this gift like his first-born child was being returned to him, and he even embraced Mickey with one arm. Then, Alan Carpenter jogged out of the bullpen toward his own dugout, and Mickey walked back to the visitor’s dugout.

“I hope I did right,” he said.

“What?” Hank asked.

“I called Alan up once I found out what was going on.”

“What was going on?” Hank asked, annoyed that Mickey had kept him in the dark about this. Alan Carpenter had already left the field, seemingly in a hurry.

“He said he made a deal with something, when he was struggling in college and about to lose his scholarship. Ever since then, he strikes everyone out. He’s hiding out in this league ’cause he’s got nothing better to do, and he grows the beard out so no one can recognize him.”

“A deal with something? What did he make a deal with?” Hank asked.

“He wouldn’t tell me,” Mickey said. “Or maybe he did, and I just didn’t want to know.”

Hank nodded and worked his way in to the locker room. The team was celebrating; as usual, many of them were convinced major league scouts were in attendance. Some of the players could spot scouts anywhere, even though their manager told them no scouts were watching.

“I just hope you’re not mad I gave him the baseball you got from those dead children that follow us,” Mickey said. As soon as he said it, Hank stopped him and put his hand on the pitcher’s chest.

“You thought it’d make him feel better?” Hank asked.

“He throws those baseball out in the woods because that’s what he did the first time. He wrote ‘Let No One See Or Hit My Pitches,’ on the ball, and it came back scorched with the words ‘It Is Done’ scratched into it. So he writes ‘Please Let Me Take It Back’ on a baseball and hopes he can get himself free.”

“He probably scratched those words himself, and he was so high and out of it he didn’t remember later.”

Mickey pushed out from under Hank’s hand and met the bigger man’s eyes.

“He’s been throwing balls out into the woods, waiting for another response, throwing baseball after baseball into the brush. Praying for another response. So I thought it might work better if he had the right ball.” Mickey gritted his teeth when he finished, but he held eye contact with Hank. It was Hank who looked away first.

“Maybe that’s why they gave it to you, you know?” Mickey said. He was deadly serious when it came to things Hank wasn’t one hundred percent sure were real.

“So he’s going over the deep end this time,” Hank said to himself.  He remembered the panic on Alan Carpenter’s face when he left the field. Then, he shook his head, gave the pitcher a soft shove, and went to his locker. He changed quickly, without talking, and found himself breathless from the panic when he ran out into the parking lot. Mankato was a small enough town it didn’t take much begging to find someone trusting enough to bring him out to Sibley Park, where he and Mickey had seen Alan Carpenter trying to make his peace with whatever evil thing he had thought he had sold his soul to.

On the ride, he smiled and answered questions about baseball and the big leagues. Inside, he worried they would see the way his hands were shaking, and the jittery way his eyes bounced around inside his skull. It was unbelievable to him that a grown man could attribute his phenomenal success at pitching to some silly deal he imagined making with whatever evil he most feared. Alan Carpenter must be a man with a lot of guilt and too little sanity. And yet, Hank thought as the hair on his arms rose, he had stood at the plate against the man and never even seen the ball. No one had.

When he was dropped off, Hank waved at the friendly people who gave him a ride and walked toward the woods. When they were out of sight, he began to run as fast as he could. He tried to run as quickly as he had seen desperate Alan Carpenter run off of the field. He was afraid of what the man would do once his final prayer for freedom from shame was left unanswered. The trip was not as simple as it had been with Mickey Danz leading the way, and he had to find his way again after getting lost several times.

He saw the hollow, and he saw Alan Carpenter kneeling where he had last time. Only this time, the reliever was saying “thank you,” over and over again. He was pulling at his beard, taking out great chunks of it, as if he couldn’t stand to have it on his face for one more second.

And then, just over the rise, Hank James thought he saw a massive head atop a broad pair of shoulders, walking away. The air around the figure seemed hazy and smoky, and it was only a moment before it was out of sight. Hank wasn’t even sure if he had seen the figure at all.

What happened next was completely, and unfortunately, real. It started with Alan Carpenter screaming loudly, as if a balloon of pain had just exploded in his mind. Then, the flames came up from the kneeling man’s chest and spread up over his body. They moved impossibly fast, so that when Hank tried to run forward to save the day, he was unable to force his body closer than ten feet from the burning man. Hank covered his mouth and nose with his shirt, to keep out the smoke and the stink out. Before him, the fire had burned impossibly fast. He was staring at a crouching skeleton, and then that skeleton fell completely to the ground and shattered.

After the police came, took his statement, and drove him back to the team, Hank found himself wiping vomit from his lower lip because some drunken fool had reminded him of what Carpenter had smelled like when he had started aflame. A fire that had left nothing but ashes and firefighters trying to decide what kind of accelerant than man must have used. Hank wondered if maybe Mickey Danz had been right, and maybe the Man-Pigs reliever had made a deal that finally went all the way bad. He thought Mickey felt the same way, but Mickey wouldn’t turn to face him. Not sure what else to do, Hank James stared at the sick between his feet and tried to forget that, just before the flames reaches his bones, he thought he heard Alan Carpenter say “thank you” one more time.

(NEXT)

Hank and Mickey’s Errand

The HooseCows had beaten the Mankato Man-Pigs 7-1 earlier that evening, so the grim task Hank James and Mickey Danz had less heartbreak to it. Most of the other team members were going to enjoy Mankato’s adult entertainment, and that included every person on the short list of potential murderers Taylor Nickles had asked Hank to keep an eye on. They were no further along in that investigation then they had been when Hank and Taylor had met back in the clubhouse. Hank managed disguise how cold and clammy his encounter with the ghostly children had left him, and neither of them had found out who had been in the parking lot, stalking the teenaged girls.

It was possible part of Hank’s good mood stemmed from not having to face Alan Carpenter at all that night, and that was part of the reason why he and Mickey were out on this fool’s errand. Rumors about Alan Carpenter were spreading through the league. In just over two weeks of play, no one had even hit a foul against the relief pitcher. No one had even touched the ball with a bat, or reported seeing the ball at all.

Players were talking to each other in bars after games, and even Alan Carpenter’s teammates thought he was creepy. Nathan Johnson, a 21-year-old still enjoying the newness of legal drinking, had shared a pitcher or two with HooseCow Rick Newton the last time they were in town. Johnson had confirmed what everyone else was saying – Carpenter was unhittable. He also said Carpenter always closed his eyes for pictures and only signed autographs if he had to. Said the guy was creepy, and never spent any time with the rest of the team.

“You know he’s not connected to the kids, right?” Mickey told Hank, for at least the sixth time. Hank had finally started talking to Mickey about the ghostly kids that he, too, had seen. His confession to the erratic HooseCow pitcher came with a promise: tell anyone, especially Taylor Nickles, about these conversations would lead to the Hank causing Mickey Danz severe bodily harm.

“I know. But it just seems like there’s something here. Something not right.”

“I could’ve told you that,” Mickey laughed, “and I’ve never stepped into the batter’s box with the man.”

“Nathan Johnson told Ricky some of the guys followed Carpenter after he left the clubhouse, and that he drove his beat-up old Cutlass Sierra to Sibley Park. They didn’t follow him any further than that,” Hank said.

“Because they wimped out,” Mickey said. He leaned up in the passengers seat and turned down the volume on the radio. “Hank, you don’t just think he found some new way to cheat the game, do you?”

“I think there’s something wrong with him,” Hank said. “Something really wrong.”

They were driving to the east side of the park, away from the baseball diamonds. There was an old bat rattling around in the back of the car Hank had borrowed from Nathan Johnson. Hank had brought it with him, because he felt like they needed to take a weapon of some sort with them. He wasn’t sure he would be able to take it with him as they tromped around the woods. If they found Alan Carpenter, they weren’t planning on beating him to death. They just wanted to see what was going on with him.

“Can you keep quiet and together out there?” Hank asked Mickey. He remembered all of the confused looks he had seen on the other player’s faces when they saw he was spending time with crazy Mickey Danz. He parked the car by the side of the road.

“Yeah,” Mickey said. Then, he took a flashlight out of Hank’s hand and tossed it in the backseat. “We need to just leave that. Otherwise, he’ll see us coming a mile away.”

Hank nodded, and neither man suggested bringing the baseball bat. They got out of their car and saw the rusty Sierra they knew belonged to the Mankato team’s best relief pitcher. The two walked a little under half a mile out of their way to walk by the parked car.  As they walked by, Hank noticed a pillow and blanket in the backseat, amidst a sea of fast food wrappers. He knew Carpenter wasn’t spending any time with the rest of the team, so he must be sleeping here, by the side of the road.

The world shrunk, and grew silent, as soon as they stepped into the trees. The itch weed was tall, and Hank was glad he had worn jeans. There were still some bugs out, and the air was still heavy and warm, but it was falling into a deeper, cooler portion of the night. Thick with life, the trees blocked their view of the road before they were too deep into the woods. Mickey was silent, and Hank got the feeling he wouldn’t even dream of talking. Hank wasn’t going to disturb the solemn silence.

Hank realized, before they were too far into their trip, that he had no idea of how to track down Alan Carpenter in the park. He needn’t have worried. When Hank started in a direction that would have been going the wrong way, Mickey simply tugged on his shirt and pointed in a different direction. This happened three or four times, and it wasn’t long before they were at the end of a small, dark hallow. Hank couldn’t see much in the darkness, but he could hear the sounds of something big moving around. Mickey motioned for Hank to sit, and Hank did so. He wondered how the pitcher had found his way through the woods so quickly. Could he hear something, or was Mickey Danz so far gone he could actually smell the other man like he was an animal?

Hank crouched, using his hands to steady himself, and felt some smooth, thin fabric under his hands. He lifted it up and saw it was a hair ribbon of some sort, probably lost by a young girl wandering through the woods when they were brighter. He brushed a few more sticks and pebbles out of his way, careful not to make any noise, and he settled in. The earth felt strong and dry under his hands.

They heard the sound of a man’s heavy breathing next. Hank and Mickey looked to each other, but neither said anything. Hank could not read Mickey’s facial expression. They heard the man in the hollow toss something into the thick brush on the other side of the hollow. The object landed, then rolled through leaves and rattle twigs.

“Answer me!” Alan Carpenter yelled, unaware he was being watched.

After that, nothing happened. In the darkness, Hank wanted to stand and confront the pitcher. He felt reasonably certain he could shake some sort of truth out of Alan Carpenter, even though he was a little frightened by his eagerness to confront the man. Mickey seemed calm, although Hank couldn’t see his face to know for certain if he was. In the dark, unmoving, Hank tried not to swat at all of the bugs that were finding him again. Even his own breath seemed too loud to his ears.

Finally, the reliever let out a sigh and stood. Hank nearly jumped and stood to fight when he thought the man was walking straight toward them. The man instead climbed up the side of the hollow and walked back to his car, and Hank turned from the direction of this movement to see Mickey was watching him in the darkness. The men waited until the footsteps faded into the night.

Without a word, Mickey moved into the hollow and Hank followed. They remained silent, and they walked very carefully. Hank wished they had the flashlight, but before he could say anything, Mickey whispered into his ear.

“I think I heard where it went,” he said. Mickey went into the brush and fished around, making a little more noise than Hank was comfortable with. Then, the noise stopped and Mickey walked back to him in the dark.

“Let’s get back to the light,” Mickey said. He led Hank out of the woods a different way than they came in, and when he was done he explained it was because they would come out away from where Carpenter was undoubtedly sleeping in his parked car. When they had stepped out of the woods into the streetlights, Hank felt relief. Mickey handed him the object he had retrieved from the hollow.

In his hands, Hank held another baseball. For a second, his heart skipped a beat as he remembered the baseball the ghost-child had given him on a previous night, but then he noticed there was writing on the ball. He held the ball up in the light, and he was able to make out the words. Carpenter had written “Please Let me take it back!” on the ball.

“Kinda makes you wonder who he was expecting to answer,” Mickey said.

(NEXT)