Tics version
It was what you dreamed about as a kid: on the mound for game seven of the league championship series, two outs, top of the ninth, up a run. The crowd was magma forced up through the earth, roaring and ready to almost perfection itself: Little League championship game, smalltown U.S.A., bottom of the last inning, score tied, bases loaded, two outs. Nine boys in red faced nine boys in blue under the lights. Sno-cones a dime at the concession stand, smell of popcorn on the evening air, the scoreboard just metal numbers hung on hooks. A scene as simple and wholesome as a bowl of cornflakes. If only my elbow didn't shriek like a rabid animal dragged from its hole every time I so much as lifted a peanut to my lips. (But no sunflower seeds, not in my dugout. And any kid who even used "sun" and "flower" in the same sentence rode the bench, "Rule 5 - Everybody Bats" be damned.)
I clapped a couple times and muttered some half-hearted encouragement to my defense. Let's look alive out there. But who was I kidding? I just wanted it to end --- a passed ball, balk, brush fire, runaway comet, anything so I could go home and get my arm under a hot shower. I was pretty sure it took more than tap water to drive out a legion of demons, but that didn't stop me from running the stuff down the Duplantis family drain by the hogshead. But then nothing helped anymore, hadn't for years. Percodan, Darvon, Darvocet, Lortab, Oxycontin. Two M&M's three times a day would've done as much good.
I sagged against the dugout wall and pulled for the fat kid at the plate to bounce one off the scoreboard, nevermind that my own son was on the mound, sweating every delivery. But the fat kid only managed a dribbler to first. Side retired. Extra innings. Fan-damn-tastic.
If I had ever written a guide to coaching Little League baseball, it would have included the following fundamentals: 1) Don't chew on your glove. 2) Always pee before the game. 3) If you want to survive middle school, don't let your mom put your cup on you in the parking lot. There would've been a short section on how to finagle a sponsor whose kid bats .490 and had an arm like an M1A1 Pack Howitzer, two-hundred and nineteen pages on "Managing the Difficult Parent," and a special supplement devoted to the calculus of staffing the concession stand. Throw the ball, catch the ball, hit the ball? Way down the list.
My team, Thriblett Funeral Home (and heaven knows I begged the league president to find me another sponsor, Port-A-Potty, Tampax, anything but a funeral home) was the typical pee-wee roster: Hardison, Dumont, Fusco, Vanover and Fontenot, who didn't know first base from the concession stand; Mahaffey, Etheridge, Beeson and Lawhorn, who managed to keep up with their caps and gloves through six innings; and then there was Pridemore --- "Attaboy Amos" --- who came to practice humping pancake training mitts for everybody, arm strengtheners, a batting tee, hurricane net, a dozen balls, gloves and an array of custom-balanced aluminum alloy bats, all crammed in a rolling game bag big enough to take shelter in in case of rain. Amos was the best player in the league by far, and had he ended up on another team, I can't say for certain that I wouldn't have traded my own son for him, a lifetime supply of Twizzlers thrown in to sweeten the deal.
The boys came loping off the field, cross as wet wasps, already up past their bedtime, and the dugout, so serene only a moment before --- just little Fontenot alone at the far end of the bench talking to his Pez dispenser --- was suddenly awash with short tempers and bellows of blame. I had planned a big pep talk, We can take this team, got 'em right where we want 'em, and so forth and so on, but instead I had to wade in and separate my shortstop and second baseman, who were working out their differences over who was supposed to cover the bag by trading blows to the breadbasket, one of which went astray and caught me bang on the old elbow. I roared, kids squalled, and then the ump was barking for a batter. The pep talk would have to wait.
Don't get the wrong idea: I wasn't one of those honey-I'm-home dads who sat down his briefcase, loosened his tie and went straight out into the backyard to show Junior a few pointers while Mom cooked dinner. I coached because I couldn't let the game go, had been there myself --- ten years old and eaten up with baseball. Shoebox full of trading cards, Redbirds on the radio, Sunday sports section spread out on the living room floor like a sacred manuscript. I must've chucked a million balls up against the side of our old white clapboard house out on dusty Route 19, trying to get the pitches down --- fastball, curve, slider, change-up, split-finger, circle-change. I threw in blizzards, in cyclones, in apocaplyptic downpours that sent the town council scurrying for old disaster plans and heatwaves that roasted the corn in the fields. I threw dawn to dusk and by the light of the silvery moon. Threw until my fingers cracked and bled, healed over and cracked and bled again. Other kids my age wanted to be firemen when they grew up, astronauts, stock car racers. I dreamed only of becoming a big league ballplayer, of perfectly straight chalklines and the way my name would echo from the loudspeaker: Pitching for the Cardinals, Max Duplantis ... Duplantis ... Duplantis...
In my reveries, I was a fan favorite, a leader on and off the field, always available to host a black-tie event for charity or toss the ball around with a few kids in the stadium parking lot. I dominated the National League: fanned McCovey, caught Aaron looking, set down Rose like he was nothing, a cigar store indian, a rube, an ultramaroon. I was the first person to pitch back-to-back no-hitters since Johnny Vander Meer did it in '38, then bested him by hurling a third in my next start. My seventy-six shutouts tied Cy Young's record. The World Series rings piled up on my dresser, the Hall of Fame automatic. And then on a corker of a September afternoon in the deep green of my backyard, my dog Wimpy panting at the end of his chain, I retired. I stood through a solemn and tearful pre-game ceremony, my dad preserving the moment with his Bell & Howell Filmosonic Super 8, as the organization retired my jersey, everybody from the club owner to the batboy taking a turn at the microphone, lump in my throat, toeing the dirt at the plate, the ovation washing over me like a tender tide. Oh, I had been there, all right. Been there and then some.
Officially I blew out my elbow warming up in the bullpen --- the papers didn't mention the Jumbo-Pak of Maysweet Sunflower Seeds. (And "jumbo" didn't begin to describe it. This was a bag you squatted to lift and threw over your shoulder, the beginnings of a levee. With this thing, the Central Division was fixed for sunflower seeds. Except I would never get to insert the first one into my mouth because the bag was designed to ride out a plunge into the heart of the sun. It was impregnable. Bulletproof. Seaworthy.)
The team was finished taking infield, the ump dusting off the plate, and where was the starting pitcher? Where was the rookie phenom who was going to rewrite all the record books? Still in the bullpen, going at a bag of sunflower seeds like his family was trapped inside. I'd tried everything short of TNT when suddenly the thing opened, by which I mean exploded in every direction, a sunflower seed supernova, and there was no chance of salvaging even a handful. And anyway by that time even the organist was cramping up. So I wrote off the sunflower seeds, bolted out of the bullpen and took maybe three steps before I tripped over the shadow of the Gateway Arch or something and went down hard. The pain was so sudden and intense I thought I'd been assassinated, and I even glanced up into the stands --- sunflower seeds in my hair, in my jock --- half expecting to see a couple of good Samaritans already scuffling with the gunman.
I was scrambling to my feet, mortified, already waving off the trainer when the state of Missouri detached itself from my cleats and dropped away into the yawning depths of space. I lurched, the cloudless sky blackening at the edges, the crowd noise a distant buzz. I saw my teammates abandon their positions and float toward me, one of them (was it Pasco or Swinghammer? And how on God's green earth would I know? I'd been in town what --- eight minutes?) shouting and waving toward the dugout. And then the ground was up against my cheek, a blade of grass in my ear. And through it all was the elbow, an elbow that had suffered some sort of fundamental collapse, an abrupt and irreversible transformation from elbow to something else entirely, an elbow that was simply no longer an elbow at all.
The skipper took one look at the MRI and slung his arm around my shoulder. Tough break, kid. You got a ride home? And there it was then, I was a cup of coffee, washed up before the crowd could squirt mustard on their hot dogs, in the bigs barely long enough to get my cap back on after the national anthem. I was a trivia question on SportsCenter, a joke for the late innings of a televised blowout: Name the only major league pitcher to suffer a career-ending injury without ever actually getting to the mound.
My dad drove three and a half hours to pick me up, the ride back a morphine blur. And then I was back in my old bedroom among the faded pennants and posters, bobbleheads, souvenir programs, popcorn-box megaphone, AM radio, Reggie Jackson nightlight. Dad stood in the doorway with his hands in his pockets while Mom shook imaginary dust out of my blankets in her green bathrobe and fussed with my Felix the Cat alarm clock, finding reasons to linger. I couldn't blame her. I was twenty-two years old, feet hanging over the end of the bed, job offers turned down, college skipped, bereft of even the most rudimentary knowledge that kept a roof overhead and food on the table, no more self-sufficient than the day she brought me into this world.
That night I dreamed of voter registration, compound interest, resumes, life insurance, laundry, tire rotation, termite control and all the other mundane details of life that even the dullest among my high school graduating class had long since mastered. Barely an hour had ticked off old Felix when I woke, disoriented, the sheets damp with my own sweat, the house silent. The drugs had worn off and my elbow felt as if Dad had crept back in while I was sleeping and applied a little good old-fashioned handyman know-how with his trusty Black & Decker Multi-Tool. Reaching for the bottle of painkillers in the gloom, I knocked over the glass of water Mom had left on the nightstand, and suddenly it was all too much: the humiliation in front of the home crowd, the drugs, the long drive, the notion that baseball was in the past (and I still couldn't imagine it, couldn't make it real). And with Joltin' Joe, the Iron Horse and the Bambino frowning down from the walls in disgust, I pulled my bedspread over my head and bawled until I felt the familiar weight of my mother on the bed beside me.
The sun came up, the sun went down. Dad's 401K hemmed and hawed, Mom's tomatoes ripened on the kitchen windowsill. The seasons rolled past my bedroom window like a sleepy grade school filmstrip, and the North American continental plate drifted beneath my feet. I married Elaine Moffitt, my high school sweetheart, and took a job selling sporting goods at her father's department store. For three years we failed to bring forth a child. Tests showed my wife was as fertile as a flood plain. It was me. It happens sometimes, the doctors said.
In the offices of Immediate Family Adoption Services (a cute name evidently chosen to blunt the suspicion and hostility waiting inside), I stood with my hands on Elaine's shoulders as she filled out the application. The office director, a Ms. Jane Loom, was perched on the extreme edge of her swivel chair behind the desk, scrutinizing Elaine's answers like a vulture sizing up a wounded rabbit. She had black hatpin eyes that seemed lashed to her head by the net of hairline wrinkles criss-crossing her face and a severe black bun clung to the top of her head like a parasite to its host. I hated her instantly. When she saw that Elaine had checked the boxes next to "Boy" and "Will accept infant only," she frowned and asked if we were aware that the children's homes were overflowing with older children who deserved a home just as much as a newborn. Were we sure we weren't thinking only of ourselves? We were. Had we fully considered the child's point of view? We had. Did we know that infant adoptions, especially gender-specific infant adoptions, sometimes took months? Even years? We'd wait. Jane pursed her lips, let out a little hmmph and set aside our application, no doubt hoping the background check would turn up a past felony conviction or a troubling association with the Communist Party. She stood and said she'd be in touch.
The next day I hired a local artist at seventy-five bucks an hour to paint a homerun fence around three walls of the nursery and a miniature diamond on the hardwood floor, poked in the cobwebbed corners of my parent's attic for my oldest and most-prized memorabilia. The crib could've been commissioned by the Topps Baseball Card Company, one in their Limited Commemorative Babies of the National League Series. A gigantic mobile featuring pint-sized versions of all thirty team mascots turned overhead playing a music-box “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” I left nothing to chance. There wasn't a teething ring, Beanie Baby or Little Golden Book that wasn't a nod to the grand old game.
It was a Monday when the phone rang, almost eight months to the day since applying for the adoption. I held the receiver out so we both could hear. Jane was succinct. She had an infant boy, only four days old, but there was something we should know: there were complications during the delivery, the boy had gone several minutes without oxygen, there could be brain damage. Were we still interested? I looked up at Elaine. There were tears in her eyes and she was biting her lip, but she didn't hesitate. She nodded. I said we were still interested. Jane hmmphed and I could picture the pursed lips and the disapproving arch of her drawn-on eyebrows. Of course, she said, we didn't have to commit over the phone. She had taken the liberty of pencilling in an appointment for us to meet the child. Was Friday at one satisfactory?
We decided it would be best to get out of the house early that Friday, thinking it would help pass the time if we made a day of it --- coffee and doughnuts, a little shopping, then lunch at Olive Garden, Elaine's favorite restaurant. But it turned out to be a mistake. Both of us were too wound up to enjoy it, and we bickered over every little thing. By the time we were ushered into Jane's office we were both drained and on edge. But it all melted away when Jane backed through the door cradling our son. I could tell she was trying mightily to maintain her customary sour disposition, but she couldn't seem to keep the corners of her mouth from turning up. And who could with an angel like that in her arms? Instantly, all was forgiven, the initial ugliness, the third degree, the nerve-wracking wait, all blocked out by the enveloping glow from my son, my heir, my future Hall of Famer.
We named him after Honus Wagner. (And if that wasn't evidence of my wife's understanding of the bigger picture, I didn't know what could have been. All she asked was that we call the boy by his middle name, and when I thought about it, "Honus Duplantis" did sound a bit, what's the word --- contagious?) And each night, like some stooped and devout curate charged with raising the chosen one, I carried my son to the cathedral, laid him on the altar and beseeched the saints for their blessing. Mantle, Mays, Williams, DiMaggio. This was the canon, these the names I whispered. And the boy prospered, delighting in Cracker Jacks and corndogs even as he learned the ways of the journeyman and the free agent at his father's knee. He calculated slugging percentages before he lost his first tooth and absorbed the arcana of the double-switch and the infield fly rule as other children his age wrestled with their ABC's. The brain damage seemed to be a false alarm, and Elaine and I began to relax.
For his fourth birthday I wrapped up my own first baseball bat, an Al Kaline Signature Series Louisville Slugger. The handle was wound in enough electrician's tape to dampen a lightning strike and I had darkened in the signature with a Magic Marker before I knew any better, but other than that and a few nicks in the barrel from when I caught my brother in our driveway hitting rocks over the house, it was in great shape. So when the cake was consumed, the grandparents and neighbors heading for the exits, I dug a ball out of the closet, took Wagner out into the backyard and placed the bat in his impossibly small hands, hands I could have put in my mouth. I stood him up straight, adjusted his stance, stepped back and showed him the ball.
This was it: the payoff pitch. A mock wind-up for Mom behind the video camera, and then I released the gentlest of underarm lobs. The ball arced toward the boy, his eyes locked onto it, he swung, and praise Hillerich and Bradsby, it nearly took my ear off. I threw up my hands out of reflex and my elbow gave me hell for it, but I hardly noticed, hardly noticed at all because the boy was already running to first trailing wails of joy that would have melted the wintry heart of Tyrus Raymond Cobb, himself.
Later, the dishes done, party favors in the trash and the little All-Star tucked in snug, I was watching the highlight reel for the umpteenth time when Elaine yawned off to bed. And that was when I noticed the bee, bombus sylvestris, diving at the ball like a MiG intercepting a jumbo-jet that had wandered into Soviet airspace. I thumbed the remote, rewound the tape, got down on my knees and pressed my nose to the screen. I ran it backward and forward, frame by frame, with sound and without. Over and over, long into the night, until there was no doubt, no doubt at all: It was the bee the boy was watching, the bee he swung at. The ball just happened to be in the way. And he wasn't running to first trailing any wails of joy, either. He was just plain old running and wailing. It was a blow, a kick in the gut. I had already telephoned everybody short of the commisioner of baseball to brag about how it was early yet, but the kid looked like he was going to be a real gamer, a chip off the old block.
I curled up on the floor and tried to picture myself with one of those sons who doesn't get sports, a thin-wristed, reedy-voiced pantywaist with zero coordination and even less backbone. I'd grown up with a pigeon-toed, horn-rimmed-glasses-wearing milquetoast named Gilbert Cuppernell who spent all his afternoons under a tree with his nose in a book. We showed him no mercy. He came to school everyday wearing high-water dress slacks and carrying a dry pair of underwear in his book satchel to change into instead of facing the torture awaiting him in the boys' bathroom.
I imagined Wagner in Gilbert's place, backed up against the playground fence, glasses slipping down his nose, wilting into a warm puddle of his own making. And I thought: maybe if I put a television in his room and signed up for that on-demand cable sports package deal so he could watch all the out-of-market games. Sure, that was the ticket. And between innings I could flip over to the Disney Channel and have Tinkerbell sprinkle a little pixie dust on the old elbow.
I laid there on the floor like a man lost at sea, unable to summon the will to regain the sofa, let alone stand upright, cross the room and climb the stairs to the bedroom. And that was how Elaine found me the next morning, deflated, a heap of hollowed-out flesh in front of the TV, the picture frozen on a ball and a bee and a boy who didn't know the difference.
The ump called the coaches out to the plate to ask how we wanted to handle the extra innings. He addressed us as "gentlemen" and explained that if this were the regular season, we would go one extra frame and if neither team scored, the game would be declared a draw. "And everybody goes to the Dairy Queen for milkshakes," I said, suspecting that was all the kids wanted in the first place.
The ump gave me a weary smile full of sore feet and aching back and continued. "But since this is the championship, gentlemen," --- and I could tell he'd rather eat third base than finish the sentence --- "I've been authorized to allow the game to continue until one team emerges victorious."
I rubbed my elbow and shrugged, open to anything that would end it --- one inning, coin flip, rock-paper-scissors. But the other coach, a real blowhard by the name of Hoyt Bracy --- demanded to go by the book, major league rules, and screw this one-extra-inning-and-share-the-trophy shinola. He wanted a fight to the finish, head-to-head competition, gladiators deciding the outcome on the field of play.
I asked Bracy to be reasonable, and he got a laugh from the peanut gallery questioning the existence of certain private parts of my anatomy. I pointed out that it was already past ten o'clock and the gladiators were all tuckered out. He shot back that maybe certain gladiators were just a big bunch of pussies.
And that tears it. In a flash we were nose to nose, chewing through a litany of profanities, kicking up dust, bumping bellies. The crowd rushed the backstop. The ump slung his mask and stuggled to get between us. A frenzied squall line of four-foot tornadoes broke loose from the dugouts, shrieking and spun up on an eight-hour diet of Sugar Babies, Cherry Coke and Laffy Taffy.
And it was this, the sight of my team --- my own son --- crazed and out for blood, that tore me away from the confrontation. "Fine, fine, fine," I said, backing away, both palms up. "We'll do it your way." The teams had formed up behind us, and I was relieved to see that they were following the schoolyard script of posturing and name-calling. A couple more years on them and there might have been real trouble. Bracy grinned, nodded and stepped toward me, extending his hand. "No hard feelings?"
I looked at his hand like it might've been a live wire. Bracy knew about the elbow. The ump knew about the elbow. The boys, the crowd, the entire Western Hemisphere knew about the elbow. But what could I do? Every eye was on me, lives in the balance. So I shook. And Bracy really went to town, pumping my arm like a politician down ten points in the polls.
It was all I could do to remain upright, the pain off the scale. I wanted to bolt, run the bases until I dropped, bash my head against the foulpole, get down on all fours --- or all threes, at least --- and chew up the infield turf. My eyes watered, my ears rang, the ballpark tilted beneath my feet, and if not for the crush of boys at my back I could've just fallen backward into my grave.
But I didn't let go, didn't want to give Bracy the satisfaction. Instead, I locked my jaw, ignored the blitzkrieg in my somatosensory cortex, and thought, If this is the way you want it, you fat mother scratcher, okay then. Let's play ball.
Two ambulances were idling in front of the school along with several police cruisers, and my brain called up images of all those school shootings covered on CNN --- students climbing out windows, officers in bulletproof vests, parents straining at yellow police tape, their faces telling the whole story, and no one needed any talking heads back at the studio to explain what they were feeling. And what did the victims always say? --- You never think it will happen here --- as if the news crews carried it around on a cue card.
A couple of officers were stationed at the entrance, and when I told them my name, one of them clamped down on my bad elbow and hustled me inside. I hounded him with questions all the way down the hallway, but all he would say is Come with me, please over and over as if he were some kind of robot specifically assembled for this situation and his programmers hadn't wanted to waste memory on idle chit-chat functions. Behind me, I heard a similar routine, the same flat phrase, Come with me, please, presumably directed at another parent in the grip of his own robot.
The officer deposited me in a small office where several other sets of parents clung to each other like shipwreck survivors in a lifeboat. Elaine breathed my name and pressed her cheek against my chest. She didn't wait for me to ask. "They haven't told us anything." And then angrier, "They haven't told us anything at all."
And so we all waited like zoo cats at feeding time, pacing, hungry for explanations, lashing out at each other when the speculation became too dreadful to contemplate. Now and then a new parent was introduced into the pen and one or the other of us would repeat what little we knew (which was nothing, really, nothing except that this was very, very bad and none of us would ever so much as pass by a school again let alone entrust our offspring to the scoundrels and fools inside).
A half hour fell off our lives, then forty-five minutes. And just when the suspense had reached a level I believe Alfred Hitchcock would have hesitated to film, the door banged open and Principal Brewington hurried into the room flanked by the chief of police and another official of some sort. (Terry Brewington was our catcher in high school, prototypical --- slow-footed, slow-witted and pissed off about it. Not a civil word had passed between us since he allowed a passed ball that knocked us out of the state semi-finals our junior year. When I heard he was Wagner's principal I thought somebody on the school board owed him money. A lot of money.) Brew looked bad. His face was flushed and beaded with sweat, his comb-over hanging down in his eyes. He was a big boy, the kind who squirmed in dress clothes, and he had shoved his sleeves up past his elbows and stuffed the end of his tie into his shirt pocket, either it to keep it out of his way or out of his lunch, it was hard to tell with Brew.
"I apologize, folks," he said as if he were merely late for a parent-teacher conference or a PTA meeting. He gave me a glare and for a second I thought he was going to tell me to meet him out back after school, but he just moved to the desk, sat on the corner and sighed. "The situation, as I understand it, is as follows: First off, nobody's dead."
The police chief flinched and the parents erupted, the mothers wailing like their children were already being brought out under sheets, the fathers posturing and shouting ultimatums. Brew sputtered and gave us his aw-shucks grin like he always did when he found himself in a situation he didn't quite comprehend. When that didn't work, he just hung his head, out of his depth. He was going to lose his letter sweater over this one, and he knew it.
The chief barked something into the radio clipped to his shoulder and took control of the proceedings. He used a lot of unfamiliar police jargon and was entirely unwilling to commit himself to any one scenario, but we did learn that this was not, "repeat, not a hostage situation," the "suspect" was himself a student and in police custody, and the crisis had "come to a not undesirable conclusion." I asked the chief to run that last bit by us again. "Injuries were sustained," he said, "but are not thought to be life threatening." He went on to say that there were officers waiting outside to take us to our children. And as everyone was filing out of the room, the chief approached me and Elaine and asked us to stay. Elaine went rigid and began to moan. The chief closed the door.
"Mrs. Duplantis," he said, placing a hand on her shoulder. "Mrs. Duplantis, your son is not hurt." And I thought, "repeat, not hurt, Mrs. Duplantis" and got the giggles. It was entirely inappropriate, and for what it was worth, I felt like an idiot. But I couldn't seem to stop. Elaine and the chief both gave me a wilting look, and I feigned a coughing fit until I got myself under control.
The chief motioned for us to sit, and we did as we were told. Brew was still in the room, hanging back in the corner, trying hard to avoid our eyes. The chief took off his cap and ran his hand across the top of his balding head. And then Brew decided to come to life. "It was that freak kid of yours, Duplantis," he said, stalking around the desk. "He went schizoid or something."
The chief snapped that he would handle the interview and Mr. Brewington should feel free to attend to whatever needed attending to at that moment. "This is my freakin' office!" Brew shouted, which got the chief muttering into his radio again, and soon Principal Brewington was escorted out of the room by two very capable police sergeants.
The chief repeated the head-rubbing routine then picked up the thread. "Your son," and here he consulted his notebook, "Honus ---"
"Wagner," I said. "His first name is Honus, but we call him by his middle name. He's named for the baseball player?"
The chief said, "Uh-huh, well, that seems to be at the center of the incident." And I knew the way it had played out before the chief said another word: First day of school, teacher reading the roll, the kids falling out of their desks laughing.
"What did he do?" Elaine asked.
"Nothing the first two or three periods," the chief said, "but I guess there's only so much teasing a kid can take." And I could tell he was struggling not to ask us what we'd been thinking saddling a kid with a name that was bound to get him beaten up. He consulted his notebook again. "At approximately 11:25 a.m., the suspect attacked several students in the lunchroom with a fork. Four students have been taken to the hospital with puncture wounds to the face and throat, one may lose an eye."
The eye was saved, thank God, and the rest of the boys were treated and released. The judge ordered mandatory counseling, and Wagner returned to school two weeks later. The funny thing about it all was, Wagner insisted that he hadn't attacked those boys because they were making fun of him, it was old Honus he was sticking up for, a complete stranger in his grave almost forty years.
The counselor suggested that we ease up on the baseball a notch or two, get the boy interested in other things, balance his life out a little. So one day while Wagner was at school, Elaine and I redecorated his room. Down came Willie and Ozzie, up went Luke and Chewbacca; out went the boxes of trading cards, in came Monopoly and Clue. I even splurged on an elaborate electric train set that I'd planned to set up in the garage where Wagner and I could spend years adding little touches to it. When he got home from school, we stood on either side of his bedroom door as he went inside, took one look around and slammed the door in our faces. Elained looked at me and I shrugged. "He'll get used to it."
About a week later, Elaine showed me where Wagner had started tearing pages out of old Sports Illustrated and Baseball Digest magazines and taping them to his closet walls. I messaged my elbow and figured it wouldn't do any harm. If that was the limit of his rebellion, we should count ourselves lucky.
By twelve o'clock, word had gotten around town and everyone short of the newborns in the hospital nursery and the near-death in long-term care were streaming into the park like holy bugs drawn to a water-stain Virgin Mary. They arrived in comfy, outsized sweats, flannel pajamas, terrycloth bathrobes. They carried pillows and blankets, lounge chairs, cots, sleeping bags. Up and down the foul lines, campstoves were assembled, tents raised. Fathers congregated in twos and threes to lay bets; mothers sat on the ground and read bedtime stories to tots tucked in and yawning beneath snug mounds of handmade quilts. The concession stand had long since run out of everything and the fans picked up the slack potluck style --- hot dogs and marshmallows roasted over open fires, soft drinks and beer materialized from oversized coolers, here and there the odd portable smoker punctuated the night air with the essence of hot wings, polish sausage, ribs, beef brisket.
Bracy's team got the crowd on its feet in the bottom of the eleventh, putting two on with nobody out. But the next three batters went down swinging and everybody settled back into their nests. Then, in the top of the twelfth, Amos Pridemore led us off with a triple, the ball rolling right past the head of Bracy's right fielder who was flat on his back, sound asleep in the grass. Bracy called time and hustled in a substitute. The right fielder was too worn out to even walk back to the dugout, and his father had to trot out onto the field to carry the boy to the car.
The next pitch bounced six feet in front of the plate, dribbled between the catcher's legs, and Pridemore sprinted down the third base line to score. The crowd came unglued, and I was right there with them. It was the first blood I'd smelled in four hours, and I was ready to go in for the kill. Okay, sure, these were ten-year old boys playing for the Podunk title, and maybe I didn't even particularly want the damn trophy. But Bracy did.
Bracy bawled threats of bodily harm from the sideline, and his team rallied to put out the next three batters in fine fashion. Still, I sent my boys out for the bottom half of the twelfth up one run and three outs away. But it wasn't to be. Bracy's catcher sent the first pitch over the centerfield fence, and we went into the thirteenth locked up at seven apiece.
A ripple went through the crowd when a crew from Channel 6 showed up in the fourteenth to tape a segment for the morning news. It was almost one-thirty in the morning, but the reporter was a local celebrity and nobody wanted to miss her. Little kids mugged for the camera, the men stretched and sucked in their spare tires, and the women whispered about how thin the reporter looked. Too thin, if you asked them. Skin and bones, really, and she would be sorry someday when she was lying in the hospital, wasting away to nothing.
We named the baby Michael, after no one in particular, and the nursery was blue with cowboy wallpaper. We read the standards --- Green Eggs and Ham, Curious George, The Little Engine That Could. We watched hours and hours of Barney, Elmo, Blue's Clues and Berenstain Bears. And every night I carried my son to his ordinary room, placed him in his ordinary crib and sang him to sleep with ordinary lullabyes.
Wagner seemed to take it all in stride. The counselor advised us to watch for signs of jealousy. Any agression directed toward Michael should be immediately addressed. And I thought, Agression? This was his brother, just a baby, not some brat at school. Wagner had issues, granted, but he wasn't a monster.
It couldn't have been a week later that Elaine and I were awakend by Michael's screaming. This wasn't the typical why-is-everybody-snoozing-when-it's-been-two-whole-hours-since-my-last-bottle caterwauling, this was primal survival instinct, screaming to wake the neighborhood. Elaine sprang out of bed and I was right behind her. I smacked my elbow on the door facing and felt something give, something that would require the full complement of unguents, emoilients, heating pads and probably several trips to the physical therapist, but not now. Now was the time for caveman thinking: Danger. Run. Fight.
The baby wasn't in his crib. Wagner. We bolted to his room but it was empty, too. For an instant we were at a loss. I thought of child abductions, Polly Klaas, the Lindberg baby. And hadn't I left the baby's window cracked just to let in a little fresh air? I was turning to rush to the front door when another scream snapped me back around. The closet.
There were no longer just a few harmless photos taped to the wall. What had started out as a warm reminder of happier times had flared up into an out-of-control fixation. There were articles cut from newspapers, pages torn from library books, flattened Wheaties boxes. Not an inch of the walls or ceiling was left uncovered. Obscene drawings and vulgar words were scrawled in bright red marker over the images like the macabre ramblings of a serial killer. Wagner was sitting on the floor in a sort of meditative state, rocking on his haunches and holding Michael out at arm's length, upside down. Elaine snatched the baby out of Wagner's hands and backed out of the closet. Wagner blinked a couple times, looked up at me and said, "I can hear his dreams."
That was it for Elaine, the last straw. We put Wagner in a treatment facility five-hundred miles away and visited when we could. When my health insurance quit paying the bills four years later, we went to court to dissolve the adoption. It was devestating, more like he had died than anything else, and that's how we chose to treat it.
The morning of the championship game, we got a telephone call from Jane Loom. She was retired now, she said, but she still tried to keep up with the children she had placed, made sure they could always reach her if there was anything she could ever do for them. She supposed she sounded like a mother hen, but if we only knew the half of it with these unfortunate ones. And, well, to make a long story short, Wagner had contacted her with a request. He was still a patient at the treatment center, probably would be for the rest of his life considering that he had made only limited progress getting along in the world, but the staff did grant him short, supervised leaves from time to time. And the reason she had called, she said, was because Wagner had one day remaining before he had to be back and he wanted to spend that day with me, his father. Or at least the man who was the only father figure he had ever known.
I didn't know what to say. I was willing, of course. After all, it was the least I could do for the boy. And how old would he be now? Twenty? Twenty-one? If it was any day but today, I said. We have this Little League championship game. Or, Michael , my son, my real --- I mean, my ten-year-old --- has this game. And I coach, you know...
She let me stammer, and I could feel her cold judgement through the phone line.
"You know," I said. "Sure. Absolutely. Can you meet us at the ballpark?"
I was a bundle of nerves, standing at home plate with a bat on my shoulder, trying to put my team through infield practice and watch for Wagner and Jane at the same time. Elaine kept a lookout from the top bleacher, watching the parking lot, shading her eyes against the glare. She had been reluctant at first, but warmed to the prospect on the drive over. It's only for one day, I said. Not even that. A few hours after the ballgame. We'd go by the Dairy Queen, sit on the picnic table outside and catch up. Michael never really knew his brother, after all, and didn't he deserve to at least meet Wagner? And besides, I said, we owed him. She knew we did. At least an explanation. And Jane would be there the whole time. And it was almost like that Friday so long ago, both of us almost giddy with the idea, jazzed on the familiar anticipation of seeing our son, our first son.
We were already in the top of the second inning when they finally arrived, Jane looking as put out as ever, and Wagner...well, Wagner had changed. He was impossibly big, fat actually. And he had grown a beard where I had once tickled him with kisses until he cried. But the eyes were the same. And when they had climbed the bleachers and settled in next to Elaine, I waved from the dugout and motioned that I'd see him after the game. Hour, hour-and-a-half, tops.
There was trouble in the middle of the sixteenth, a couple of parents arguing a close play at second, one saying his son got in under the tag, the other saying his son laid on the tag a good five feet in front of the bag and anybody who couldn't see that must be blind or retarded or both. Other parents chimed in with their incendiary remarks and the situation ignited like they'd been sitting in gasoline all night long. It took a combined response from the police, sheriff's office and volunteer fire department to bring the crowd under control, but nine paramedic calls and five arrests later the bottom of the inning was underway. A cordon of officers outfitted in riot gear remained on hand, and the red-and-blues rotating atop the squad cars parked around the field pulsed across the grass like the heartbeat of a barely tamed beast. I looked up into the stands and shrugged. Jane looked at her watch for the ten-thousandth time and Wagner waved.
In the bottom of the seventeenth, my boys dragging themselves around the field like zombies on a drive-in picture screen, the news crew long gone, the communal feast a ball lost and forgotten in the weeds, Bracy had the top of the order up and in minutes the basepads were jammed. It was a turning point in a marathon contest that had seen very few reasons for the crowd to rouse itself from the numbing sameness of batting orders cycled through so many times even the moths busy in the lights knew them by heart. But the bleachers were all but silent, glum as an oncologist's waiting room. They'd seen it all before. And sure enough, the next batter fanned. And the one after him just stood with the bat on his shoulder like he'd been exhumed.
Facing the grim certainty of an eighteenth inning, a few of the parents enlisted the brawn of a sympathetic deputy and approached Bracy in the dugout, demanding to leave with their kids. Bracy stomped and snorted and was pulling out the permission sheets the parents had all signed at the beginning of the season when there was a wail from behind the plate. I looked over and Beeson, my catcher, was supine in the dust, the ump on one knee, waving me over.
It was important at this level not to make too big a deal about injuries. Most were superficial and fussing over them too much just scared the kid even more. But Beeson wasn't moving. Trotting to the plate, I decided I'd had enough. The kids were walking in their sleep. This had to stop.
I bent over the boy, and the ump pointed to where the ball had gone in, just above the chest protector. I extracted the ball and bent in close. I had seen a broken larynx once in double-A ball, and as far as I knew, the poor guy still carried a notepade on a string around his neck and ate through through a tube. I felt the shadows of Mr. and Mrs. Beeson fall across my back, and I called the boy's name, asked if he could hear me. The gurgle sent the boy's mother into hysterics, and I hollered for somebody to call 911 before remembering we had every unit short of Hawaii Five-0 already waiting in the wings. Being the thoughtful human being he was, Bracy put his hands around his mouth and bawled, "Nine-one-ooooone! Nine-one-ooooone!" but it didn't get as big a laugh as he hoped and he skulked back to his dugout to scold his team about their jocks smelling up his dugout or their shoes being tied the wrong way.
Fifteen harrowing minutes later, spent syringes and bloody latex gloves strewn around the plate, my boys parted to allow the ambulance to depart, the Beesons visible through the back window, absolutely stricken. And I was heading for the dugout to bag up the gear, wondering whether I should go straight to the hospital or wait until there was word on the boy, when Bracy bellowed, "What's the count, Blue?"
I wheeled around, stunned. "'What's the count?' Are you kidding me? 'What's the count?'"
Bracy shrugged, said the kids had been out there a long time, put out a lot of effort. He'd hate to see all that come to nothing. I stalked up to him and said that if he cared at all about the kids, he would see that they were worried sick about that boy they just carted off to the hospital with enough tubes in him to reanimate the 1908 St. Louis Browns. Bracy surveyed the field and said it didn't look that bad to him. Besides, they couldn't do anything for the kid now.
I shoved my watch in Bracy's face (and that was a mistake; my elbow lashed out and for a second the Earth fell out from under me). He shrugged, and I remember thinking that if I didn't walk away, that very instant, I was going to pick up the aluminum bat at my feet and beat the bastard until the infield was decorated with his redneck blood, collapsing star in my elbow notwithstanding.
"We're done," I snapped and stomped off. This was ridiculous, beyond ridiculous, it was child abuse. Besides, I had maybe an hour before Wagner had to be at the airport, and I intended to make the most of it, even if that meant visiting in the car on the way over. I was out of time. That was it. Game over. Then the ump said, "You forfeiting, coach?"
I stopped and turned. The crowd was standing, breathless, hanging on my answer. I started to argue, then stopped. A breeze lifted the American flag on its pole out past the centerfield fence then dropped it again, the moon slipped a degree lower in the sky. Forfeit? Well, no I wasn't forfeiting. I was behaving like an adult, putting things in proper perspective.
And then a voice from the stands piped, Play ball! Another voice drifted from the shadows down the left field line and then another out past the fence: Play ball! Others picked it up, one by one, first a handful, then dozens, then hundreds, growing like a battle cry, like a movement, until it was deafening. Play ball! Play ball! Play ball! Play ball! I imagined people all over town, throughout the county, statewide, standing on rooftops, hanging out bedroom windows, dangling from grain silos and radio towers, all shouting toward the field, Play ball! Play ball! Play ball! Play ball! I looked up to the top bleacher and was already holding up my index finger --- One more inning. Just one more and then we're outta here, I promise.
THE END
posted by Tony @ 10:53 PM
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