They had to pull up the wickets to let them cut the grass, so Justin and Sam went around the side of the house and practiced whacking the balls as hard as they could, knocking them off trees and through bushes, gouging up clumps of mud. They played hockey, clacking their mallets together, then quit when the ball hit Justin on the ankle. They spun each other on the swing, stumbled off like drunks. They had a buckeye fight until Sam hit Aunt Arlene’s car. She was out on the dock and didn’t hear it with the mowers going. It didn’t make a dent, but they stopped anyway. The guys finished and drove off, and Sam and Justin put the wickets and stakes up again, trying to find the same holes.
In the shade the cut grass was wet and stuck to their sneakers. It was a lot easier to hit the ball. Their shots went straight instead of bouncing, and when you knocked the other guy’s ball, it went a long way. Justin was winning, and then Sam missed a wicket on purpose so he could hit him.
“Yes!” Sam taunted him, dancing like an idiot. “Who’s the man?”
Justin stood off to the side while Sam settled his orange ball next to his red one. Sam’s idea was to knock him forward, toward the porch, so he would have to come all the way back to go through the middle wicket. Sam clamped his own ball underneath his sneaker, keeping his balance, lifted the mallet, then chopped down hard. He caught part of his foot, but got enough of the ball to send Justin’s shooting over the low grass, headed straight for the porch. It didn’t stop when it got close, it rolled right under, disappearing into the black gap, a hole in one.
Sam laughed, doing his stupid Nelson—“Ha ha!”
“Shut up. You have to get it.”
“It’s not my ball.”
“You hit it.”
“If I get it, you have to forfeit.”
They both got down on their hands and knees and looked. Sam brushed away the cobwebs with his handle, and as their eyes grew used to the dark, they could see the cool mounds of dirt in back that could be hiding anything—rats or giant spiders or worse.
“There it is,” Sam said.
The ball was too far in to reach with a mallet. Maybe Sarah or Ella could get it later.
“Let’s play wiffle ball,” Sam said, and jumped up, and Justin followed him. Losing the ball bothered him—it was his, and he thought they should tell someone—but Sam was already whipping the bat around like a light-saber.
They couldn’t find the wiffle ball anywhere. They looked on the porch and in the garage, Sam even ran around back. It wasn’t under the porch. Rufus sometimes chewed them up, or the wind blew them into the lake and they floated away. Maybe the mowers ran it over.
Sam picked up a buckeye and tried to hit it and missed. He tossed another one up and connected with a plastic smack, the buckeye whistling off across the yard.
“Whoa!” Justin said.
The two of them collected enough buckeyes to fill their pockets and made sure home plate faced the lake so they wouldn’t hit the cars. Justin pitched first. He wasn’t very good, but the buckeyes were so small it was hard to make contact, and Sam struck out twice before he even foul-tipped one. The next three pitches bounced in the grass at his feet.
“Throw strikes,” Sam ordered him.
Justin did his best, lobbing the biggest buckeye he had over the heart of the plate. Sam swung hard and lined it cleanly, the buckeye coming straight at his face. Justin put his hands up, sure he was going to catch it, but somehow his hands moved or closed too soon—as if it had changed direction or slowed in midair, a trick—and he could see it had sneaked through, was still coming. He had just a split second before it hit him to remember the feeling he had leaving the croquet ball under the porch, and thought: I should have gotten it.