The x-ray photo in Life magazine of the big ghostly silver spike inside the kid’s chest convinced us to never risk climbing over the spiked wrought iron fence surrounding Knox Field again. From then on, we snuck into games by going under it…

I dragged my knuckles along the iron bars of the fence as I walked alongside it, straining to hear the loudspeaker announcements over the buzz of the crowd.

The steel towers above us lit the night sky brilliantly as we bucked the current of fans making their way to the main entrance. Shafts of blue smoke wafted upward, drawn to the lights. Cigar and cigarette odors mingled exotically with aromas of pizza and popcorn from the vendors lining Perry Street.

“Welcome ladies and gentlemen to beautiful Knox Field for the Sir Bill’s lid-lifter against the Blue Streaks from Saratoga. Our sponsors tonight are Teens and Tots and Dandy Landry.”

“Pssst.” I pointed with my thumb toward the inside of the fence. “Let’s hurry up. They’re already naming the sponsors.”

“So, if you want to get taken to the cleaners,” Dondi said. “Go to Dandy.” He always made the same joke, and we always laughed at it, pretending we were cool and calm.

Woody, Dondi, Malcolm, and I reached the corner of the fence where it jogged east toward the junior high school.

“Not yet,” I said to my companions. “Just keep going straight.”

In less than twenty yards, walking in slow motion away from the field, the announcer’s voice crackled over the loudspeakers.

“Everyone please rise for our national anthem.”

We stopped walking and listened attentively.

“Oh-oh say can you see…”

That was our cue that all the patrolmen inside would be standing at attention, facing the flag down on the field, with their backs to the fence. We had a minute and a half to break in. The four of us bolted back in the direction we had come, to the deepest shadows near the school, to a depression in the ground under the fence. Woody wriggled under in seconds and dissolved into the crowd. Dondi went next and waited to help pull Malcolm through.

“Hurry up,” I said to Malcolm, as I pushed from the outside.

“I can’t. I’m caught somewhere.”

“Where, here?” Dondi asked.

I could feel Malcolm spasming with laughter.

“Or here?” Dondi repeated.

“Come on, hurry,” I hissed. “Stop tickling him and help.”

Already, the raspy recording over the P.A. system was building to its closing crescendo and I was still on the outside…

“O’er the land of the freeeeeee….”

Frantically running my hands underneath each iron post, I found the belt loop of Malcolm’s jeans that was snagged. “Okay, you’re free,” I said, unhooking him. “Go. Go.”

I squirted under, just as the closing line began that I knew would send the crowd into a frenzy.

“…and the home…of the… braaaave!”

With that final note, an officer not fifty feet away turned to scan the fence line behind him, pointed at me with his finger like he was aiming a gun, and shouted, “You, right there. Freeze!”

I did freeze — but for just for a split-second — as I weighed my odds. Then, when the cop took one step toward me, I sprinted a wide arc around him. He immediately brought both hands together and went into a half-crouch, as if getting ready to shoot. He continued tracking me with his make-believe gun as I disappeared into the crowd at the top of the bank.

I burrowed into the crowd, stripped off my green plaid jacket, turned it inside out, and put it back on with its reversible khaki side out. When I emerged out of the crowd at our rendezvous spot near the grandstands, I watched the cop as he scanned the crowd.

I shielded myself behind three men with stogies clenched in their teeth. They were taking hits off a bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag.

“Thing of beauty,” the guy with the really big gut said, shaking his head in wonder. His black leather coat was unzipped to give his belly some air. I looked up at him and followed his gaze down to the emerald playing field below. He handed the paper bag to one of the men standing next to him.

“We ought to give Leo and Bob undefeated jackets whenever the team gets ‘em,” the bald man said. He was wearing a deerskin jacket that was cut to look like a shirt. He took a swig from the bottle.

I knew they were talking about Leo Davis and his sidekick, Bob “Boomer” Bennet, the groundskeepers. Leo and Boomer manicured the field with matching walk-behind Locke Reel Mowers – the same model used to mow the Yankee Stadium field, the White House lawn and the grass at the Kremlin.

“Shit,” the third man said, exhaling a blue cloud of smoke. “We gave Coach Jehlinek a goddam, gold Caddie for producing back-to-back undefeated seasons.”

“Should’ve been undefeated and unscored-upon,” the bald man corrected him. “Except for one piece-of-crap defensive play by that Keszey kid.” He shook his head sadly.

“And the school board made Jehlinek principal,” the big gut guy pointed out, waving his cigar like he was conducting an orchestra.

I stared at the field with them. It really was beautiful, but I wasn’t the fan of Leo and Boomer that these guys were. Whenever we gathered to play pickup games, Leo would come storming out of his maintenance shed shouting, “Goddamn it! Get the hell off that field!”

Then he and Boomer would come racing up in their motorized cart. Boomer was a tall, rangy man who looked a lot like Chuck Connors on The Rifleman. But instead of a rifle, he carried a pitchfork.

For revenge, one day after school Dondi and I dragged a box of old 78-rpm records from my parent’s basement to the top of the bank overlooking the field and whipped them off into space. They almost disappeared as a thin edge, and then suddenly reappeared as they flashed broadside, twisting and turning, before knifing into the pampered turf below. We had been so mesmerized watching them soar, we had failed to notice Leo and Boomer tearing up in their little motorized wagon until it was almost too late.

The loudspeaker on the tree over my head boomed, “Ladies and gentlemen, Johnstown High School now presents the Sir Bills.” Two thousand heads — almost a fifth of the town’s population — swiveled to the left to watch their team lined up at the top of the bank above the north end of the field.

“You made it.”

I turned around to see Dondi, with Malcolm and Woody. They were all smiling.

Leaving my hands in my jacket pockets, I shrugged and opened my jacket enough to reveal the plaid side. “Works every time,” I said.

The fact that the cops never caught on to our reversible jacket trick only reinforced our belief that we were way smarter than they were.