The Buffalo Nickel Five Stories of Short Fiction

by Lance Allen

  Listen here buddy boy. My hands are tied as far as my probation goes, but I got this school in my back pocket. You so much as shit and I will be all over you. You got my meaning.

  I hear you Zack. But I can’t do what I can’t do. Hey Slacker, you thinking of cutting an album or something?

  What did you say?

  Ah nothing lighten up. Listen I get it. You are tough guys and I got to pay attention. Consider the message delivered. You stay away from me and I will stay away from you.

  Stay away from my sister motherfucker.

  Zack, I will do what I want.

  Cheryl you shut the fuck up too. You know what Dad would say. I warned you kid. You do right by what I say. Next time might not be in your best interest. If you get my meaning.

  I heard you. And I ain’t scared of you. None of you. Just stay out of my way and I will do you the same courtesy. Till then from now.

  The ice breaking in the science lab that day served as a hiatus from any further hostilities. JC had not regained any measure of his previous popularity but his days in school were by no means miserable. He had the occasional migraine but the effects were by no means as severe as before. He often sought refuge in the broom closet of the nurse’s office during his lunch break, allowing the medicine the nurse dispensed time to react to his symptoms.

  Trouble seemed to be waning in the faint light of winters thaw. Spring was about to hatch and with it the promise of a new season on the diamond and a resurgence of old abilities and feelings of past glory. JC had begun training for baseball all be it later than he had wanted but starting training all the same. He found his legs weren’t as fresh and his arm not as limber. His dislocated shoulder had healed but a popping sensation every so often told him everything was not right, even if it was healed.

  When he stood in the batters box at the local indoor batting facility, he could not quite get his bat threw the ball like he once did. There was something with his follow through that wasn’t true to his original form. He watched old game tape of him from the prior year and tried to emulate what he saw. He needed things to be right, he needed to be in shape, he needed his ‘A’ game. He wasn’t guaranteed a roster spot on the Varsity club. He was going to need to earn it just like everyone else. Just like Zack Everman.

  Varsity baseball tryouts were scheduled for 8am on Saturday morning. There was room inside the gymnasium in the event of rain but the forecast predicted sun and temps in the low 50’s. The type of weather expected was the worst possible kind for JC due to the perfect storm it would take to warm his joints and muscles up and keep them active and engaged for the entire time.

  Although he put his game face on and showed flashes of brilliance, the hardship he had endured during the fall exacted too much of a toll on his body and it was simply not able to deliver the performance required to get to that level. The coach apologized profusely, suggesting he could play junior varsity ball and hope to make enough improvements to perhaps be called up in the event of an injury.

  The coach’s words rang hollow. JC understood and wasn’t the least bit upset with the coaching staff or their choices for the team. He had been outplayed and out hustled by the other boys at the tryout. It didn’t even seem to matter that a caricature with a painted smile and shining face stood exalting his triumph, beaming from paper ear to paper ear. As Zack high fived his father, JC had a sickening feeling growing in his stomach at the prospect of telling his own father he had not made the team. The one thing, which had brought them together, was the one thing JC feared would tear them apart.

  If JC no longer had a sport to excel at, no longer was going to be the shinning star on the dusty diamond, what did they have left to share.

  Wesley Montero was a simple hardworking man, who loved telling stories of the past. He still lived in the moment when he scored the winning touchdown in four straight games and led his team to the finals. He loved reminiscing about scrimmages in the park when he was a boy and he would run circles around the older boys and beat them at their own game. He lived to watch his own son do the same things in the present that he had accomplished in the past. As long as JC was running, throwing and hitting, he could sit back and take it all in because a part of him was out there too. A part of Wesley Montero was 12 or 14 and hitting tape measure shots and striking out the side in the 8th inning. JC now feared with the sun setting on this day, he too would see the peak of his relationship with his father and the inevitable darkness that followed.

  Dad, I didn’t make the team. Well I made JV, but not varsity.

  What happened?

  I don’t know. I just didn’t have enough in the tank. I got one out of there, but in the end it just wasn’t enough.

  What did coach say?

  He said if I try real hard and stick with it…

  You just might make it in the end. Something like that?

  Yeah. How did you know?

  Cause that’s what they say to all the kids that don’t make it. Hardly your fault though. Those kids who kicked your ass. They got most of what’s doing. How’d that little shit head make out anyway?

  He made it.

  Course he did. Little gutless shitbag! He needs to get his and by right!

  I’m sorry dad.

  Don’t be sorry son. Ain’t your fault. In the end, we ain’t supposed to be successful. I didn’t have the test scores and you ain’t got the chin. We all gots to fall JC. We all gots to fall.

  Exhausted and distraught, JC went off to shower and then to bed. Before turning in, he signed into his e-mail to see if there was a message from Cheryl.

  JC, I heard about today. I am so very sorry. That shithead brother of mine won’t shut up about it. I really do hate him. I can’t wait for the fall and my grand exit from this place. They are all so insufferable. That’s not to say I won’t miss you greatly, but today I realize I can’t live here happily. If you could take me away I would go. I love you. Ttys,C.

  The baseball season came and went. By all accounts it was a successful season. The team managed to squeeze into the state tournament but exited early after just three games. In the end, they lacked the pitching depth JC would have been able to provide. The starters were shaky and the bullpen lacked any punch. When the team got behind they were never able to stop the bleeding.

  Zack ended with respectable numbers, nothing great, but enough to earn second team all conference honors, a decent award. But that is where the decency ended. Zack continued his off the field deriding of his former rival. Even in these days of unimpeded success, Zack felt obligated to chide and degrade JC in any forum possible.

  One day in gym class during a game of three on three, shirts versus skins, Zack had set a moving screen and knocked JC to the floor, then stood over him and glared daring him to fight. His probation was long in the books and as long as he didn’t start any trouble he was free to do what ever he wanted. JC just picked himself up off the floor and asked for a sub. To him it wasn’t worth the effort. He was still trying to work back to the Varsity team and any more run-ins like the last could mean an end to that plan.

  What puzzled JC the most since the first incident was the lack of response from any of the teachers or other kids in the school. It seemed to him that every one around him was siding with his antagonizer. Never once did he hear a teacher tell Zack to knock it off. Not once did he hear a fellow student come to his aid. Had he been a stranger in a strange town he might have anticipated the lack of input but he was one of them. He was from here, born and raised. Yet he had somehow become a social outcast. He tried to stay focused but every day got harder and harder.

  In the fall of his senior year, the headaches that had subsided returned. The headaches were the kind which sent him into hiding from the pain and the fear. There were times he was afraid he might claw his own eyes out to make the pressure go away. He was convinced there were days where a red hot poker of iron was being seared into the back of his eyes and left there with a bellows to brand a new meaning of pain
into his already fragile system.

  After the third such visit to the nurse’s office, she recommended he see an eye doctor and have his vision tested. The ophthalmologist returned with only marginal suitable advice, glasses for reading and not to watch television in the dark.

  JC didn’t have money for real glasses so he went to the drugstore and picked a pair off the rack, which closely matched the numbers the eye doctor suggested he needed. When he tried them on he felt humiliated. He looked like an old guy at a coffee shop dying over a stale cup of coffee and a full ashtray. JC wanted to cry but knew it would only make matters worse if a classmate saw him in public buying old man glasses and crying. He quickly paid for them and went home. That night he cried himself to sleep.

  Cheryl, I miss you already. I hope you are settling in and getting to know lots of cool people. I had to buy a pair of glasses today. They make me look like old man Phelps down at Donut World. I hate them but the eye doctor thinks they will help with the bad headaches I get. Maybe I can come see you some time. Ttys. JC

  Throughout the winter months, JC kept a low profile at school, only staying as long as he had to and then taking the transit bus home. Even at home he had to stay out of the limelight. His father had been laid off periodically for the better part of the last 6 months. He would work two weeks collect for two weeks and then work another week and collect another two weeks.

  With his free time at home he started drinking and watching any video he could find on the Internet. Didn’t really matter what he watched so much as he could click on it and while away the hours. Every so often he would invite JC to watch some kid or another he had found on the internet who could hit a long home run or steal home plate or some other such modern marvel. The video was always followed up by a personal remark about JC and his inability to get well enough to go back out and play. JC would try and explain that he was doing all he could do to get himself in shape to play but Wesley would just scoff and open another beer and go back to the Internet.

  A week before the tryouts, JC got a migraine so bad that while he was standing in the dark of the nurse’s closet he passed out and in the process fell out of the closet and banged his head on the floor. The nurse had trouble reviving him so she called for an ambulance and JC was rushed to the hospital.

  While there, he was given a cat scan which revealed a small amount of bleeding on the inside of his head near where he hit it on the floor of the nurse’s office. When JC came to and he was given the news, he openly cried and didn’t stop for almost 24 hours. The doctor told him he would be unable to participate in any strenuous activities for 4-6 weeks while the injury to his head healed. The bleeding was considered minor as long as he took the advice of the doctor and took it easy.

  Missing the tryouts and requiring so much time to recuperate was definitely resonating with him now. He wasn’t just missing another season of baseball; a game, which he so enjoyed and found success at, was not just being taken from him; a piece of his life had been stolen from him and not just some insignificant parcel.

  The relationship he had forged with his father had been reduced to ashes. The driving force behind his engine of success had been seized. If he no longer had a father’s love, real or imagined, and if he stood directionless in a field mired in obscurity, where would he go and how would he find his way there? It had been brewing for far too long. The top was about to spout off.

  Cheryl, I miss you most of all. Through everything I have been through, you have been the one constant beacon in my night sky. My dad hates me. My mom forgot who I was a long time ago. I am 17 years old and have sunk to the bottom of a lake from which I cannot surface. I have not the arms to swim or the feet to kick. This contentment should not be shared. I have realized for too long now, my flame burned the brightest at the worst possible time. I needed the light to find my way in life yet I used it to play a silly game. I wanted so much to succeed not for myself but for what it meant to my Dad. I loved him and he me. When the crowd cheered so did he. But when the cheers stopped and the people went home and the cameras were put away, he left too. I can see him right now, drinking a beer and watching some other guy’s kid on the Internet and wishing it was him and me. But it can’t be. Not anymore. Any way. I had hoped to save this for another time and another place but here and now will have to do. I love you. Ttys, JC.

  The newspapers and television crew who covered it could never get it right, no matter how they tried. They could look at it from every angle and could dig up every clue, but they would never be able to say with any certainty why a boy would go to school, a place of supposed safety, a building full of knowledge teaming with unbridled minds passionately waiting to absorb the thoughts and ideas contained within and bring with him a loaded weapon and discharge that weapon in a room full of students and in the end turn it on himself. No one can ever know what plan existed in that boy to cross that line and do that thing. But he did. And it had to mean something to someone. In the end though, the victim had a different name.