Fast-Pitch Love

by Clay Cormany

  At first, Jace’s strategy seemed to work again, as the next two batters went down on a strikeout and an easy pop to short. But the fifth batter made solid contact, drilling the ball between right and center. By the time the Valkyries could get the ball back into the infield, two runs scored and the batter stood on third base.

  "That’s showing ‘em, Kristin," barked the green-shirted man. "That’s showing ‘em who’s boss." He pumped his fist several times and glared in Mr. Davenport’s direction. Mr. Davenport, his orange t-shirt splotched with sweat, remained silent. But Jace could visualize daggers flying out of his eyes and cutting the loud-mouthed Firebird father into little bloody pieces.

  "Let’s just play ball!" shouted the umpire, who shot a frown at both men.

  The next batter went out on a grounder to second, and in their half of the inning, the Valkyries got one of the runs back when Phoebe scored on a sacrifice fly off Kay’s bat. That made the score seven-four. Corey set the Firebirds down in order in the top of the sixth. But after Heather started the bottom of the inning with an infield single, the next three Valkyries fell to grounders and an easy fly to center.

  "Good effort, girls. I’m proud of you," Sylvia told her players in the team’s post-game meeting. "You hung in there to the very end and gave them a tough fight."

  "We still lost," said Phoebe dejectedly.

  "But remember that this team blew us out the first time they played us," Jace said. "Today, they were lucky to win at all."

  "Jace is right," Sylvia added. "I’m sure that if Coach Waldron were here, she’d be very –"

  Angry voices from behind Sylvia caused her to stop in mid-sentence. She turned and then gasped.

  About fifty feet away from where the team was meeting, Mr. Davenport and the green-shirted man stood nose-to-nose, shouting in each other’s face. The words couldn’t be made out, but it seemed unlikely they were discussing the weather.

  "Dad, stop!" cried Denise. "Don’t get into a fight again." She scrambled to her feet and ran toward the spot where her father and the other man squared off.

  Jace ran toward the men, too, worried that their conflict would soon go beyond words. Before he could reach them, the two men threw punches at each other at almost the same time. Mr. Davenport connected with his adversary’s chin, while the Firebird father planted a fist into Mr. Davenport’s stomach. Each man recoiled, recovered, and then threw one or two more punches before Jace was in their midst.

  "That’s enough!" he yelled, thrusting himself between the two fathers. "You’re making fools of yourselves."

  Jace was aware that other people were running toward the battle. He was also aware of two players close by — Denise and a girl in a Firebirds uniform — wailing and beseeching their fathers to stop fighting.

  "Do you know what he called our team?" sputtered Mr. Davenport. "Did you hear what that jerk said?"

  "I don’t care what he said." Jace turned toward the other man, and that’s when he saw the fist flying in his direction. Although meant for Mr. Davenport, the punch landed on Jace’s face above the right eye.

  Jace flew backward onto the ground, and for a split second, everything around him spun like a pinwheel.

  The green-shirted man stood motionless, his face contorted in horror. "I’m sor-sorry, kid. I didn’t mean –"

  Restraining arms grabbed the man from behind; others took hold of Mr. Davenport.

  Sylvia knelt down behind Jace. Her face touched his and then came the brush of her hair on his neck when she put her hands under his armpits and helped him to his feet. Still woozy, Jace pressed his fingers to his forehead. Phoebe along with other players and several parents gathered around him.

  "I’m okay," he said. "Guess I’m no better as a referee than I was as an umpire."

  "Mom thought she was okay, too, after the ball hit her," Phoebe reminded him. "Maybe you’ll end up in the hospital like her."

  "Nah," said Jace. "But I’ll probably have a bruise on my head like she does."

  Back at the spot where the fight took place, Mr. Davenport and the green-shirted man had calmed down. The people who helped Jace break up the fight let go of both men but kept them far apart. Nearby, Denise sobbed. "I’m sorry," she kept saying to no one in particular.

  Jace walked over to Denise and put an arm around her shoulder. "It’s not your fault," he assured her. "Nobody blames you for what just happened."

  "I don’t know why he acts this way," said Denise, wiping tears off her cheeks. "He got into a fight with another parent last year when I was on my church’s team. After that, they wouldn’t let me play anymore."

  "I’m not sure what they’ll do with your dad," Jace admitted. "But they won’t punish you, since you’re not the one who got in trouble."

  "I wish he wouldn’t even come to my games." Denise choked out the words before her tears flowed again.

  Sylvia came and handed a tissue to Denise and then looked at Jace intently.

  "Your eye is starting to swell," she said. "Let me get some ice out of one of the coolers."

  "You don’t really need to –" Jace broke off the sentence when he realized that he liked Sylvia making a fuss over his eye even more than he liked Stephanie making a fuss over his bee sting.

  While Jace waited for Sylvia to return, a policewoman in a crisp blue uniform came over to him and pulled out a pen and pad from her back pocket.

  "Do you want to file charges against Mr. Jarvis?" she asked.

  "Who?"

  "Mr. Fred Jarvis — the man who hit you."

  "No…" Jace paused and read the officer’s nameplate. "…Officer Shupe. It was an accident."

  "All right," she said. "But I’ll still need to get a statement from you for my report."

  As Jace recounted the events that led up to the brawl, Sylvia returned with a cup of ice chips and a napkin. She wrapped some of the chips in the napkin and then carefully pressed it to the bruise over his eye while putting her other hand behind his head. With the curves of Sylvia’s body right next to him, Jace found himself struggling to recall all the details of the recent fight.

  "What’s going to happen to Mr. Jarvis and Mr. Davenport?" he asked after finishing his statement.

  "I could run both of them in on misdemeanor disorderly conduct," Officer Shupe said. "But since neither man wants to press charges against the other, and no one was seriously hurt, I don’t think I’ll do that."

  Denise sighed with relief, but Officer Shupe had more to say.

  "I will, however, be filing a report about this incident, and a copy of that report will be sent to the league commissioner. It’s her call, of course, but don’t be surprised if both of these men are banned from attending any more games for the rest of the season."

  Officer Shupe thanked Jace and walked away. He noticed the crowd that formed in response to the fight was thinning. Mr. Davenport, sweaty and disheveled, called out to Denise and motioned for her to come with him.

  "We better get home, too," Jace said to Phoebe.

  "Here, take this for your poor eye," said Sylvia, re-filling the napkin with ice chips.

  "Thanks," said Jace. "Don’t mind if I do." He kept the napkin over his eye until he and Phoebe reached his car. There he handed it to her. "Hang on to this and give it to me whenever we stop. Maybe it’ll earn you some points for your first aid badge."

  When Jace and Phoebe arrived home, they found their mother at the kitchen table. One hand held the ice pack to her head, the other held a fork with shrimp and rice on the end. Seeing Jace’s eye, she dropped the fork.

  "Don’t tell me you got hit by a foul ball, too!" Martha exclaimed.

  "No, it was something worse."

  Jace told his mother about the hard-fought game, the nasty remarks the two fathers threw at each other, and the fight they had after the game ended.

  "I tried to get between them so they couldn’t hit each other," Jace explained. "But the one man threw a punch anyway and nailed me instead of Mr. Davenport."

  M
artha nodded but still looked puzzled. "All right," she said. "If you got hit, then that explains the mark by your eye, but where did that other mark come from?"

  "What other mark?"

  "The red one on your jaw."

  "Maybe a few drops of blood," Jace said, swiping a hand from his chin to his ear. But when he held up his fingers, he knew the smudge on them wasn’t blood. His mother knew what it was.

  "How did you get lip gloss on your face in a softball game?" she asked.

  "I don’t know," he said. But he had a good guess.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Jace stared at the dark clouds that loomed above him. The rain from those clouds stopped about a half-hour earlier, but the downpour left all the softball diamonds at Addison Park in miserable condition. Diamond Number Three, where the Valkyries were scheduled to play the Diamond Girls, was the worst. A huge puddle covered home plate and another surrounded the pitcher’s mound like a moat.

  "I’m sorry, but your game will have to be postponed," said a teenage umpire wearing a blue jacket and mud-caked shoes.

  "When will it be rescheduled?" Jace asked.

  The umpire shrugged. "Don’t know yet. Someone’ll give you a call."

  Jace gave the news to the six players who showed up in the hope that the game might still be played despite the weather.

  "Now what’s gonna happen?" asked Lauren, crinkling her nose.

  "The league will reschedule the game sometime soon," Jace answered. "Right now, we might as well go home." Sylvia pulled her cell phone from the pocket of her shorts and started to punch numbers. Jace sensed an opportunity to firm up his next date with Stephanie.

  "Do you and Tina need a ride?" he asked.

  "Yeah," Sylvia said. "I’m going to call my mom."

  "You don’t have to do that. I’ll give you a lift."

  "How nice of you! Come on, Tina, we’re going back with Jace and Phoebe."

  The two teenagers walked toward the parking lot with their younger siblings trailing.

  "Do you know if Stephanie is home?" Jace asked, trying to act nonchalant.

  "She was when Tina and I left," said Sylvia. "In fact just before we walked out the door, she said something to my mother about going to the carnival with you."

  "Oh, yeah, we’ve talked about doing that."

  "Wouldn’t mind going myself, if…" Sylvia paused, took a deep breath, and continued. "…someone would ask me."

  Jace froze in place, and for a brief moment, their eyes met. In those few seconds, he had a sense of being on a collision course with some powerful but unseen object. He recalled an old movie clip of two runaway trains that smashed head-on into each other. Right now he felt like he was on the tracks between those two oncoming locomotives.

  Ten minutes later, Jace pulled his car into the Thornapple driveway. Phoebe and Tina bounded out of the car toward the house.

  "Come on," said Tina to Phoebe. "I’ll show you my posters and trophies."

  The two girls went into the house and up the stairs. Sylvia and Jace entered, walked through the living room, and were headed toward the kitchen when Stephanie came around a corner and nearly bumped into them.

  "Jace!" she said, almost gasping. "What are you doing here?"

  "I just gave Sylvia and Tina a ride home."

  "But don’t you have a softball game?"

  "The game got called off," Sylvia explained. "Where’s Mom?"

  Stephanie didn’t answer right away. She looked worried. "Mom’s next door at the Norberts'."

  Jace felt something was wrong, but decided to take advantage of the situation anyway.

  "Say, Stephanie," he said, pausing to clear his throat, "did you decide what time we should go to the carn–"

  Jace stopped speaking as a hulking figure shuffled out of the kitchen’s shadows. It brushed past Stephanie and stood in front of him, like a predator sizing up its next meal.

  "What's going on?" thundered Carson. The burly football star wore cut-off blue jeans and a faded brown t-shirt with several holes in it. In his left hand, he held a half-eaten banana.

  It didn’t matter that Carson was supposed to be three hundred miles away at a lumber yard in Michigan. Maybe he got fired or laid off, or he killed his foreman. Whatever the reason, he was here in the Thornapples’ home just a few feet away. While he groped for an answer, Jace marveled at how a banana, such an innocent, ordinary thing under normal circumstances, could look like a weapon in the paw of Ridgeview High’s starting nose tackle.

  Before Jace could say anything, Stephanie spoke up. "Carson, this is Jace Waldron. He and Sylvia are helping coach Tina's softball team. Maybe you already know him from school. He's in our –"

  "Yeah, I've seen him around," Carson interrupted. "He runs cross-country, I think."

  "I'm just dropping off Tina and Sylvia," Jace said, trying to act cheerful. "Our game got called off."

  Carson ignored him and glared at Stephanie. "Shouldn’t you be getting ready?"

  "Yes," she answered, heading toward the staircase. "It’ll just take me a few minutes."

  Carson shifted his gaze to Sylvia and scowled. "Don’t you have somewhere to go, Twinkie?"

  "Not really, little boy," she replied. "But I know where I’d like you to go."

  "Syl? Come here, would you?" Stephanie shouted from the second floor.

  Sylvia looked at Jace and pointed a finger at Carson at the same time. "Make sure the Terminator here leaves a few scraps of food behind for the rest of us," she said before heading up the staircase.

  Carson moved a step closer to Jace and bit into his banana. "So you're coaching a little girls' softball team," he said. Banana fragments clung to his teeth. "Kind of a sissy thing to do."

  "No it isn’t," Jace said. "A girls softball team needs good coaching just like any other team."

  "So why not coach a boys' baseball team?"

  Jace hesitated. It would be worthless to explain to Carson that his mother was head coach of the Valkyries and his sister played on the team. And, of course, revealing his original reason for taking the job was out of the question, assuming he wanted to keep living. He needed an evasive answer.

  "No one told me about any baseball teams that needed coaches, so I took the best offer that came along."

  Carson snorted with contempt and a gooey, white clump flew out of his mouth.

  "Baseball, softball — there’s no difference anyway. They’re all pansy sports." He paused and curled his lip. "Like cross-country."

  Those last three words were a gauntlet thrown on the floor between them. Jace didn’t want to fight Carson, but he was tired of being afraid of this oversized manure pile. And he had no intention of letting this insult go unanswered.

  "You don’t really think cross-country is wimpy, do you?" He stared at the big football player in mock amazement.

  "Sure I do," Carson retorted. "Because it is."

  "But cross-country runners must be stronger and braver than other athletes such as, oh say, football players."

  Carson’s eyes narrowed into snake-like slits. "Waldron, you are so full of –"

  "Am I? Think about this. When the gun goes off, the cross-country runner is on his own. Can’t run to a sideline or get help from his teammates, and if he’s injured there’ll probably be no one to help him right away. There’s no halftime when he can relax while the trombone players march around. And the cross-country runner is in constant motion. No huddles. No timeouts. He has to be alert, too. Has to know what’s going on ahead of him and who might be coming up from behind. Football players? Half the time, they don’t even know who has the ball."

  Jace spoke quickly. When he stopped, Carson opened his mouth but then closed it before saying anything. Maybe he didn’t know how to answer Jace’s argument, but in his eyes Jace saw something scarier than words. It was the look of a man who knows his enemy and who knows someday that enemy will have no way to escape.

  Footsteps sounded on the staircase as Stephanie, clad in a pink flowere
d blouse and black shorts, came down into the living room. Maybe it was the lighting, maybe it was his imagination, or maybe it was the frustration of knowing Carson would soon be with her — but something made Stephanie appear even more stunning than usual. The redness of her lips, the curve of her figure, the swirl of her hair sent ripples of desire through Jace’s stomach and visions of Wilson’s Bluff through his mind.

  "I’m all set," she said with a smile that seemed phony.

  "Then, let’s go," said Carson. He took a final bite of the banana and tossed the skin to Jace. "Here, make yourself useful and throw that away."

  Jace caught the flying peel and then watched the football player with his date in tow stride out of the house. Through the living room's picture window, he saw them go down the driveway to a faded red convertible parked on the opposite side of the street. Sylvia reappeared and took the peel out of his hand.

  "What’s he doing home now?" Jace asked, making no effort to hide his dismay. "I thought he’d be at that lumber yard for a few more weeks."

  "Stephanie said he got a couple of days off to visit a college, but then decided to come back to Ridgeview instead."

  "So Stephanie didn’t know he was coming?"

  "Not until he knocked on our door."

  Jace felt his stomach sink even before he asked his next question. "Do you know where they’re going?"

  Sylvia nodded, looking as dejected as he felt. "The carnival."

  Chapter Twenty-five

  The next three games flew by in a blur. The Valkyries beat the Hornets eight-five and the Dragons fourteen-three. The second game ended after only five innings, when the umpire applied the run rule. Patsy Langham and her surly assistant would have gone ballistic over their team’s performance, but they weren’t there. Maybe they had quit or been suspended. In any case, a balding middle-aged man now coached their team — or at least tried to. But these Dragons lost the fire they displayed in their first game with the Valkyries. They seemed to be just going through the motions, just trying to finish without giving much thought to winning. Jace wondered if their previous coaches’ criticism had taken a toll on these girls, robbing them of the fun they should be having. Just the same, the Valkyries poured it on, scoring seven runs in the first inning alone. Lauren hit two triples; Tina went four-for-four, and Corey threw six strikeouts. Denise even got a strikeout in the one inning she pitched.