Pitch Was What We Called Him

Pitch was what we called him. It wasn’t his real name, but it was the only one we ever knew him by. People said it was because he was always running around in the pitch black. But Pitch didn’t run; he crawled. He would creep around, day and night, in the backs of dank alleyways. To us, he was born in the dark. But I used to think that his name came from the way that he fought. He would pitch himself up into the air, like a cat, and pounce. 
He had a family. A mom and eight younger siblings. But I think he liked the darkness of the alleys, where he couldn’t see how tightly his sallow, chapped skin stretched over the bones in his hand. He liked the cats. He liked the cold. But the wind used to wail so horribly up in the mountains, I would lay awake in bed wondering how he could bear it. Not the weather. The name he got from being enmeshed with the darkness, or maybe from the crazed way that he fought. Pitch was wild, and most folks couldn’t understand it. But what I couldn’t understand was his content to be judged without saying anything.
So, one day I decided to ask him. I waited till around 7:00 PM, when the sun was going down, and I stuffed half a sandwich in my bag left over from lunch. When I got to his usual hiding spot, I dropped the bag at the entrance of the alleyway and listened. There wasn’t any good in looking for Pitch; you just listened.
After a moment, I heard distinctly non-catlike shuffling from the shadows.  I waited. I knew he was aware of my presence.
“What do you want?” Came the gruff voice. I could see the outline of messy hair, a skinny frame, but could not see his facial expression.
I looked down. The street light shone on his feet and the torn, stained cuffs of his pants.
“Want a sandwich?” Was my response. I expected him to turn around and ignore me. It took a few moments for me to realize that he was waiting for me to pull it out.
I unzipped my bag and handed him the sandwich. He took it, and then he did something I expected even less.
He slunk forward, out of the darkness- out of the anonymity his name shielded him with. Watching him show himself was like watching him step out of the identity I had crafted for him in my mind. Pitch, I thought, was a normal-looking kid, if anything else. His eyes didn’t harbor the rage or the wild intensity I’d imagined they would, and his posture, the way that he carried himself, was straight and tall, not hobbled or meekly feral. His face was unexpectedly clean for days spent sitting next to dumpsters. He had dusty blonde hair, but his eyes were a deep brown. He looked me up and down, half of the sandwich already in his mouth, and with a healthy amount of indignation I thought, if I didn’t know any better, that the sight of me amused him.
“Why are you out here?” Was his next question. I answered with another.
“Do you know what people say about you?”
He looked surprised.
“They say you live back here. That you like fighting, and the dark, and that you don’t sleep.”
Surprise quickly morphed to irritation. Thinking I’d upset him, I stepped back, preparing to leave, but just then he spoke again.
“So why ask me, if you believe everything they say?”
“People call you Pitch. That’s weird. Most people have never seen your face. That’s weird, too. But I’ve been thinking, the weirdest thing of all is how wild you are. That’s what I don’t understand.”
He looked at me for a minute, just looked, studied, and I couldn’t glean any emotion from his face. Then, he said,
“So you must be one of those people that’s attracted to weirdness. I think that’s weirder than anything else, maybe even weirder than trying to understand people.”
This made me take great pause, and I realized that Pitch, in all his oddity, was right. 
Pitch and I saw a lot of each other after that. I would visit one of his alleyways most evenings with a deck of cards, and we would play, but mostly we would talk. We talked about anything and everything, and if you asked me or him, we would both say that we did not have anything in common. That was the only thing we ever agreed on.
I never asked him about his family. That wasn’t the sort of thing we talked about. Instead we talked about the way things worked; right and wrong, why lightning strikes, why he was poor and I wasn’t, what makes us different from the cats who prowl the streets. Every discussion we had left me more unsatisfied than before as to why he was so untamed and why I yearned so desperately to get to the bottom of it. I could not understand him, and that made me madder than ever.
Where most people saw a novelty to gawk at, I saw in him something that made me want what I had always thought I should be terrified of; the stability that solitude brought, and what must change a person so much that he truly desired to be alone. I wondered if, to achieve that, he’d had to find a way to turn off the natural yearning for human connection, or if he’d simply stopped responding to it. I wondered. That was about all I did.
“You and I, we’re going to run away,” he said to me one afternoon. It wasn’t a demand, just a statement, as if I already knew what he was going to suggest.
“Where to?” I asked, busy with the deck of cards I was shuffling.
“Anywhere.” He leaned back on his hands. “California, maybe. That’s where everyone goes. But I want to go somewhere cold.”
“I hate the cold,” I muttered. “Besides, what do we have to run away for?”
“Nobody’s making you come. I just wish you would.”
“Of course I’ll come.”
He chuckled, running his hand absentmindedly back and forth across his wrist.
“But why the cold?”
“I like the cold.”
I shrugged and began dealing the cards. He watched me, and when I said nothing, he took the cards from my hand and put them on the ground.
“What’d you do that for?”
“Let’s stop playing for now. I have a story.”
“A story?” I looked at him sideways. That wasn’t typical of him; he didn’t seem like the type to enjoy fiction. He talked about real things, not metaphors.
“Yeah.” He rubbed his hands together and leaned back against the wall. “So there’s this guy, right? This kid. It’s his tenth birthday, and he’s watching his younger siblings while his parents are out getting him a cake. It’s a nice day, everyone’s in a great mood, and his folks get back with the cake and he’s as happy as can be. It’s an ice cream cake.”
“Are you going somewhere with this?”
“Don’t interrupt. So, anyways, as they’re about to cut the cake, the air conditioner turns off. Before they can go see what’s going on, the landlord shows up. He says the air conditioner is broken and the maintenance guy can’t get out to fix it until next week, cause they live up in the mountains and his office is all the way down in the valley. Tough luck. So then the house starts getting real hot, right? You can’t open a window. It’s summer. It’s 90 degrees out. The cake melts, and they eat it anyway, because they can’t afford to waste it. And that night they sleep two to a bed, like they usually do, but it’s hot, and it’s cramped, and the blankets are stripped off cause it’s sweltering in that house.”
As he talked, I could see him getting lost in his words. It was freezing outside, but he was wearing a tank top. I hadn’t noticed until then.
“So after a few days, his folks hand him a box of old clothes and shoes and tell him to get lost until they’re all sold, because they need money for the air conditioner. Well, it’s hot as hell outside, but he wants the air conditioner back, so of course he goes. He spends all day walking up and down the street, peddling clothes and shoes that no one wants. By the evening he’s sold less than half of it, so he has to go out again the next day. The day after that, they give him another box of stuff to sell. By the fourth day, he’s aching from sunburns all over his body, and the house is still turning into a boiler room. He makes it till noon, walking up and down that street without any water, before his legs give out and he starts panting. Folks come up to him, trying to figure out what’s wrong, but he can’t talk, he’s too tired. Then he passes out.
“He wakes up in a hospital room to cool air blowing on his face, and let me tell you, it’s the best thing he’s felt all summer. He wishes he could just lie there feeling it forever. Then a doctor comes in to talk to him, and he tells him that his family hasn’t been by to get him in the two days he’s been there. That doesn’t feel too good.”
“Did you ever get back to your family?” I asked.
He slapped a hand over my mouth. “Who said this was about me? Anyway, shut up. The doctor says a lot of words, like hyperthermia and malnourishment. The kid knows what’s going to happen next, so he sneaks out of the hospital that night. It’s a teeny hospital, with just a ground floor, so it’s not much trouble for him getting out. He gets back to his house, and his parents-” here he paused, and it was only because I knew him that I could see him getting choked up. “They ask if he lost the stuff he was selling. And he hands them the doctor’s wallet. It pays for the air conditioner for the rest of the summer.”
I took in the story. Pitch looked up at the night sky and sighed.
“I want to go somewhere cold.”
“Alright,” I agreed.
The next day, we decided on going east. New York, maybe, for the beaches, but upstate, since we’d never be city people. Or maybe somewhere further down south, like Pennsylvania. We sprawled out on the filthy ground as we made our plans, and by this time I was used to the foul stench of garbage that always hung over the alley. He looked at me as we talked- the only thing that was different from that first day that I spoke to him was that now I could recognize where that fiery intensity always was. It wasn’t absent, you just had to get to know it in the way that his eyes moved and the way that his brow rested. It had a home there; you couldn’t know his face without knowing it as well. I had gotten that wrong the first time. I knew that then. But that was about the only thing I knew. 
I didn’t understand what a kid named after something so unpredictable and unforgiving as the night could see in my friendship, or how someone as observant as he was couldn’t see the way I studied him, still eager to know more- to understand him. Or maybe he did know. Maybe we both really were attracted to oddity, and that was one of the few things we did have in common.
It was over a month before the topic was brought up again. Maybe he didn’t want to touch it until he’d made the plans. Or maybe he felt like I didn’t want to go. I didn’t care too much what we did, because I had come to enjoy his company and I didn’t want him to leave without me. When we spoke about it again, he approached me with a train schedule for the week to follow.
“We’re getting on a train to Michigan on Tuesday. We have to catch another one to Pennsylvania from there.”
“A train? I guess that makes sense.” I watched as he hungrily ate the chips I brought for him. “But what will we do when we get there?”
He laughed- it was a deep, raspy sound, another thing about himself that fit his name. “Do you really have to ask? Anything we want.”
I met him before the sun rose on Tuesday. In all those months we’d known each other, it was the first time I had seen him fully, unobscured by the shadows, since the first day we spoke.
He wore shoes today, sneakers with holes in the toes, and a red baseball cap. He had a canvas knapsack over his shoulder.
I looked around, but there were no other passengers in sight.
“How exactly are we affording these tickets?” I asked him. He looked a little bit guilty.
“We’re not. We’re hopping. The passenger train would’ve been too risky.”
“Would’ve been?” I knew him well, and yet I was taken aback. “This isn’t a passenger train?”
“It’s a cargo train. Next best thing.” He adjusted the brim of his cap and watched as a man in a uniform made rounds on each of the compartments, checking inside each one with a flashlight. I don’t know why, but the sight made me shudder.
“We’ll have to be quick getting in. The train leaves in fifteen minutes, but we have to wait until the last minute so we don’t risk getting caught.
I agreed begrudgingly. We slunk past guards, staying low behind the bushes, and waited at the edge of the train tracks, startling at every little noise and sudden movement. We wanted to be ready; we were foolish to think that we could be ready, but that didn’t stop us.
I followed his lead, creeping up alongside him to the train car when he signaled that there were no guards around. We peered inside. The car was full of huge containers secured to the bottom- refrigerator boxes, maybe. 
He pointed at one, saying, “let’s hide behind there,” before he grabbed the steel edge of the car’s floor and pulled himself up. He turned to give me a hand, and I climbed inside.
We settled behind the refrigerator box and waited. The sun was beginning to peak up into the sky. I looked at him. I knew that he had been waiting for this moment his entire life.
I never truly believed that we would get away with it until I heard the door slide shut.
Darkness fell over us as quickly as the sun had appeared. I looked in the direction he was sitting, and I knew he was used to this. He lived in it- no, was a part of it. He breathed the darkness. Knowing his life, I understood why. Sometimes you just couldn’t look any longer.
For most of the day, we slept. Somehow, sleep came easy. When the train would stop, we held our breath, but after the first couple of times, we stopped expecting a crew member to burst in and chase us out. We ate the food I packed sparingly. I checked my watch. A lot. I would look at the time- we weren’t due to arrive in Michigan until 3 PM the next day- and wonder what he had gotten me into. Had I grown so accustomed to his company, so addicted to gaining, piece by piece, the knowledge of what made him the way he was, that I had chased him across the country?
Or had I already given up on understanding him?
He woke me up in darkness the next afternoon, telling me to jump and run.
“Shake your legs out,” he said, shining a flashlight in my face. “This is going to be the difficult part.”
I stood groggily, wondering what could have been more difficult than the ride. I checked my watch. It was only 12:30, but the train was stopped.
“It’s their last refuel before they get to the station,” he said, as if he’d read my mind. “This is where we have to get out.”
Before I could ask how we were supposed to get out, he began banging on the door of the train car.
“Stop!” I panicked. “What are you-”
A commotion began outside. I could hear the click of the door unlocking, and before I could react the door was open and he was knocking down the crew member who had come to investigate and telling me to run.
We jumped out amidst the surprised shouts of other crew members and began running. We were in a sparse residential area- I still don’t know how I was able to gauge my surroundings while I was running, but I did.
“What are we supposed to do now?” I managed to gasp out between heavy breaths.
“It’s okay!” He shouted back. “I know where we’re going.”
Of all the things he had done, he had never lied to me. We must have run half a mile before he slowed down and led me between two houses into a quiet street with a grocery store and a restaurant. We chose the restaurant and sat down in a cool booth, resting our faces on the table.
When we had caught our breath, we just sat there for a moment, looking at each other. I noticed the way his brow furrowed when we made eye contact, and I thought then, for the first time, that maybe he had a penchant for studying me the way I did him.
“We can get money for the train tickets to Pennsylvania,” he said. Anger suddenly rose in me.
“We shouldn’t have done this. At least not now. It was too messy. We didn’t have a good plan.”
Irritation crossed his face, then fury at the implication of what I meant.
“You can’t seriously think it’s the right time to rethink this. It’s too late.”
I doubled down. “It was a dumb idea.”
“Dumb?” He looked a little hurt, but had the nerve to look perplexed at the same time. “Then you shouldn’t have come. I was always going to do this. I just told you to come along ‘cause I like you. Are you still in it? There’s nothing I can do for you if you aren’t.”
I looked at Pitch, and thought of him, jumping out of the train car, kicking the crew member in the head and knocking him unconscious. I saw a boy running from the heat of an overcrowded house, the stench of the dumpsters, and the prying eyes of his neighbors- trying to escape from the disorder of life. Living his life alone in the darkness meant that he could stop worrying about those things. To be wild was to remove himself from the burden of being human, and reduce himself to the lower, simpler class of an animal on the street. Those things weren’t gone; he had simply retreated into the shadows where they were hidden from sight. I knew that he had to be alone, because he had shut his soul off to the world around him. There was nothing here for me if I stayed.
I nodded at him across the table. “Yeah, I’m still in it.”