Country Hardball

by Steve Weddle

  Yeah, I’d done things I wasn’t proud of. The accident with my parents. A few other things that ended up with people dying. Put a man down in self-defense. Finished a fight I hadn’t started. The neck is a fragile twig. But I’d served my time for some of that and that was behind me. Someone else’s life. Not who I’d wanted to be, who I’d become. I knew that if I lived clean from here on out, woke up every morning in the light, things would be fine. I was starting from scratch. Only this point on counts. A good job. Coworkers. Friends. The sunlight. The glare from the road. The summer brightness of things not yet destroyed.

  He had me up, blade at the back of my neck, pushing me out the door to the edge of a ravine behind his field. He hit me in the shoulder with the hilt of the knife, and I dropped to my knees.

  “My girl was impressionable,” he said. “Young. Innocent.” He sounded like he was going to cry, sniffling a little. But he didn’t. Just stood there looking out at the ravine. “What you did to your parents sent her over the edge. S a couple of drunk Mexicans.J2 said, he was young. Troubled. Artistic. Like her mother.” He pointed the knife at one of the other sheds. Another cinderblock box that brought me out here in the first place. I was sluggish from the head shots, but I focused where he pointed.

  “That one there,” he said. “With the lock on the door. Full of her paintings.” I wasn’t talking, so he kept on. “She did thirty-seven paintings of you and your mommy and daddy. The car crash. Locked herself in her room and painted. And screamed and cried. And painted. All ’cause of you and your goddamned fool life. Broke her soul.”

  “I didn’t kill your daughter.”

  “Damn sure did.” He walked to the edge of the ravine and looked down. “She couldn’t take it. The emptiness. The darkness. Whatever it is these kids feel. I just tried to get her through it after her mother died. Just hoping she’d be okay. Hope.” He spit. “Damn hope.”

  “I’m sorry about your daughter, but I didn’t kill her. I’ve done a lot of bad things, but I didn’t kill her.” Back here was dark, muddy, seeping through the knees of my pants.

  “I been watching you. Waiting for you. Thought I was gonna have to come after you. Then I hear you’re working for the county now that you’re a free man. Made a call. And here you are. Come to deliver paperwork. Just like the social services people when they took Lily away. They take your daughter and give you forms. Then they come back and tell you she ate a bottle of pills. And then there’s all that other paperwork to bury her.” He walked up to me, put the point of the knife to my neck. “You killed her. Sent her over the edge.”

  I tried to hold my head still as I talked. “Not my fault.”

  I could carry the blame for a lot of stuff. But not this. All I wanted was a new start. Fresh on the job. A blank slate.

  He put the heel of his boot into my chest, my breath falling in sputters on the ground. “You took my daughter from me, you piece of shit. After all those years. The past is the past. But you never get out of it. You can let it go all you want, boy, but it ain’t up to you. It don’t let go of you.”

  I thought he was talking about me. What I’d done. My parents. The time I’d spent in juvie. The week I was free before I’d been pushed around enough and went out looking for a fight and found it. The year and a half I went inside for the stabbing. Trouble inside. More trouble outside. Six months at Haven House, then on my own.

  I was facedown on the ground, trying to push myself up. “Trouble’s a dog, son. A goddamned fucking dog. It gets your scent and hunts you down.” I thought he was talking about me.

  He wasn’t.

  “Yeah, I did some shit I ain’t proud of. Some ‘fucked-up, repugnant shit.’ That’s from a movie, son.” I was still struggling to get up, and he kicked my arms out from under me. I fell back into the dirt, hit the side of my head on a rock, something hidden just below the dark ground. “I thought I was clear. That I’d left it behind. Then Claudia, that’s my wife, she gets sick and leaves. Then Lily gets depressed because of your stupid shit. Says there ain’t no point anymore.” He looked at the buildings that held her paintings. “She got artistic. Woman at her school said that was good. An outlet.” He spit. “Outlet, my ass.”

  He?” Caskey askedan H walked over to me. He was close enough that I could snap his neck, but I was past that. I was good now. I could get through this without violence. Let him talk. Let him free himself. Let him come through the pain, the broken glass in the belly like I had. Just let him talk.

  “You understand what I’m saying to you?” He leaned into my ear. “Can you hear me?”

  He turned his back on me, but I didn’t have the strength to get up. My eye was covered in dirt and blood. My head was liquid, moving around, looking for balance.

  Five years ago I could have taken out his knee in a couple of seconds, sent an elbow into his Adam’s apple. Five years ago that is what I did. What sent me back inside. I didn’t want to go back inside. And I didn’t want that, that darkness he was talking about, back inside of me. If you’ve never felt it, then you don’t know what I’m talking about. The darkness that fills in from the edges. You think you can hold it back, but it seeps through like mud through door cracks.

  He turned around to look at me. Take the knife, then I could settle him down. Talk to him. I didn’t want to have to break him. I didn’t want that life back.

  “Claudia gone. Lily gone. All payback, son. For the shit I’d done when I was a young man.” He shook his head. “It comes after you. Takes a while, but it finds you.” He kneeled down near my face. “Like I found you. And that’s what I’m gonna do. You see, some people get bit by a dog and they get scared of dogs. They run and hide. Wet their pants when a dog barks.” He spit. “And some people, well, son, some people get mad at the fucking dog. Some people get real fuckin’ pissed at the dog. And some people find that dog and carve a fuckin’ hole in that piece of shit’s head to clean out the darkness.”

  He aimed the knife at me, reached back into his belt for a pistol in the other hand. “You’re not the first piece of shit I’ve had to settle a score with.” He looked at me, then down to the bottom of the ravine. “You know how many bodies they’ve found down there?”

  I didn’t say anything, kept my eyes on his. Tried to fight the desire to send my head into his jaw.

  He said it again. “You know how many bodies they’ve found down there?” He leaned down into my face. “Not a goddamned one.”

  I stood up, heart beating, filling my ears with thumps and blood. I was good now. The pressure coming back, again. I’d given up drugs. Pressing against the inside of my skull. I didn’t even cuss anymore. Pushing and pulling. Filling me. I could feel the blood moving out from my chest into my arms, my thighs. “I didn’t kill your daughter.”

  My hands were still tied, which was fine. I didn’t need much freedom anymore.

  • • •

  I got back to the office in time for lunch. A birthday cake was there for Shirley. Her fortieth, so it was all black with balloons here and there in the office.

  When I walked in through the side door, everyone stopped and looked up at me. The mud on my pants, dark stains on my arms. The painting I was holding. A ravine filled with text/css” href

  PURPLE HULLS

  “What are you making?” I asked my grandmother that afternoon. The heat outside was like a layer of the sun pressing down on us, and we’d picked purple hull peas until we’d filled all the baskets we had.

  We’d walked across the fields back to her house, climbed up the cement steps, and used our elbows and chins to open the thin-metal screen door. A sprig from a dying nandina bush had gotten caught in the door. I’d reached back, snapped the branch like a finger, then closed the door behind me.

  My grandmother had gotten old, bleach-stained sheets from the back room, the one my mother grew up in, the room she kept sealed like a tomb now, and spread the sheets on the floor. She’d picked up some cross-stitch from the seat as she sat down into her chair. “A li
ttle Christmas sampler for Ettie May,” she said. Then she pressed a button and the chair lowered her to a sitting position. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath. Maybe said a little prayer.

  We shelled purple hull peas for an hour, popping the peas out of their shells, staining my fingers purple. She didn’t talk about the car crash that had killed my parents so many years ago. How it had been my fault. How she missed them every day. She didn’t talk about how we’d gone fifteen years after the funeral without seeing each other. How this was the fifth weekend in a row we’d been together, making up for lost time since I was trying to put things right, trying to fix what that one night had sent to pieces.

  “So you still working for the county? Government work? Nice office job?”

  I said I wasn’t. “Kinda went downhill quick,” I said. She nodded like she knew. Like she was fine with whatever happened. I said I was planning to look for something down in Springhill, up in Magnolia.

  She didn’t talk about the letters on her kitchen table behind me. The ones that said she was in default. Past due. She didn’t talk about the reverse mortgage, the bad investments. The man at the bank.

  She tossed some purple shells my way. “You got to get to them before they go full purple or they’re too tough,” she said. “Don’t let them dry up on the vine. Snap ’em right off.”

  I said okay.

  “There’s a sweet spot,” she said. “Couple days when they’re just right. Keep at it. You’ll learn.”

  But I wouldn’t. That’s not the way things work out.

  She turned on the radio, and we listened to a replay of a show at the Louisiana Hayride. They were talking about a guitar player. A retrospective. Local boy made good. James Burton. I didn’t recognize the name.

  “That Burton boy,” my grandmother said. “Had a talent. Played with Elvis Presley. That Ricky Nelson, too.”

  I was running out of peas, so I pulled some from her basket.

  “Made music with his hands,” she said. “Work with your hands, Roy. Best thing for a ying into his own house.””>“mavoung man like you. Make something. Make something of yourself.”

  She wasn’t talking to me anymore. She was just talking.

  I stood up and got us some sweet tea from a heavy pitcher. Boiled the water until it had soaked up all the sugar, all the sweetness it could handle. The hotter it gets, the more sweet it holds. Up to a point. Then it all falls apart.

  I looked at a framed picture she’d nailed to the wall. A faded, square Kodak photograph from the early ’70s. Me and my mom and dad, all covered in sweat and pasted with dirt from cleaning up the storage barn in the back. I was five or six in the picture and I remembered the pants, how they didn’t come down far enough. They had a patch on the knee, a yellow piece of cloth my mom had used to cover the hole I’d made flipping a bicycle down a flight of sidewalk steps in Magnolia. Little pieces of thread holding it all together, so many years ago.

  I pulled back the curtains and watched an oil truck drive toward someone else’s property.

  In back of the house were things that were boxed up after my parents died. I looked up through the door. Someday I’d have to sort through everything.

  The show ended, and the news people talked before they changed to jazz. My grandmother talked about the news. A smash and grab. Breaking and entering. House fire in Minden. “Why don’t they ever tell you about the good news? Always negative. What is this place coming to?”

  I said I didn’t know. She hummed along to some big band tune and leaned her head back.

  I pulled the sheet outside and cleaned up the hulls, put the peas away for her while she fell asleep in the chair. I sorted her mail, shut the window to keep her safe. I put one of the bank letters in my pocket.

  I made a little noise moving a chair to wake her up, then walked across the room to kiss her goodbye. She pressed a button and the chair my cousins paid for lifted her a little so that I caught her on the eyeball instead of the forehead. I told her I’d see her next weekend and left.

  • • •

  That Wednesday I met Cleovis in the old Magic Mart parking lot and got into his truck. I asked if he was still cool with the plan. He said he was.

  “But you know this won’t fix anything,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said, looking across the empty lot. “Nothing ever does.”

  On the way to the man’s house, I looked at my face in the side mirror. Like watching someone on a television show you weren’t used to.

  Cleo turned the radio to a pop country station and smacked his palms on the steering wheel, drumming along.

  We got to the man’s house and walked around, making sure he was alone. He was wearing sweatpants and a robe when he opened the door.

  “Can I help you?” he asked, looking at Cleo, then at me.

  I told him who we were looking for, and he asked again whether he could help us. So I showed him the letter from the bank.

  “Look,” he said, “I don’t know what this is about, but I am no longer affiliated with that establishment, so if you have business to conduct, please contact my replacement.”

  He talked to us like he was writing us another letter.

  When he tried to close the door, I stepped into his house and brokes stayed close to home. ming out his nose with the heel of my hand. He reached up to cover his face and I put the toe of my work boot into his balls.

  Cleo closed the door behind us as the man hit the floor and tried crawling backward. He wasn’t fast enough. Cleo locked the door and turned off the porch light.

  I talked to the man for a few minutes about his job, about how it was wrong of him to deal with people the way he was. How people can only take so much until they have to do something. He said something about the entire industry being in turmoil. Derivatives. Regulations. Cash flow. I thought about what my grandmother had said about James Burton, about making something with your hands.

  I put the man’s forehead into his granite counter a few times until he almost passed out.

  The man sat on his kitchen floor, sniffling blood up his nose, then coughing it out. Then shaking, crying. He asked why we were there. He said his brother was an army captain and would be back soon. He said he had a safe upstairs with money. He said a lot of stuff just trying to hold things together.

  I told him how my grandmother worked for years after my grandfather died just to pay for the house. I told him how she knitted caps for every newborn in the hospital. I told him how she jarred pickles each year so that the needy at her church pantry had something besides just canned soups.

  Then I thought about what this man had done to my grandmother. About what had happened to my parents. About how that was my fault. About how I think about that every day. About how nothing I will ever do will make it right. How you make one mistake when you’re not even thinking and everything falls apart. And nothing can patch that. Nothing can make that right. Nothing “http://www.w

  THIS TOO SHALL PASS

  “The stars,” she said. “See how close together they are? Almost touching? Look.” She took his fingers, pressed them together to hold a star. “You can almost touch one to another. Feel the light, one against the other. The fire.”

  He said okay. Sure.

  She rolled back into the dark field.

  “But then you get close,” she said, “and it turns out they’re millions and millions of miles away. Did you know that?”

  He said he didn’t.

  “The closest star, I mean one to another, the closest one is like a hundred million light years from the next one, like in the whole universe. And the closer you get to a star, like they look close together now, but if you were to fly up there, all that way, the closer you get to the stars, the further away you are from the next one. The further away everything is.”

  He said he didn’t know that, either. He closed his eyes, thought about the tips of her fingers on his, pressing

  Trade Paperback ISBN 1, should have been together. The flat of her t
humb against the knuckle of his. The tip of her index finger guiding his. He’d seen a movie, maybe a documentary, and a soldier had stepped on a land mine in the desert darkness. Had both his legs blown off. And he woke up, still feeling the legs. Still feeling the weight. It was called a “phantom” something. Feeling it pressed against you. He wondered how long that could last.

  He heard something. Something deep. Something throbbing. Then a little light in the distance. Like stars on the ground. Only not stars. Not stars, at all. He looked across to see wavy shadows moving in and out of the light as people were coming toward them, getting bigger the closer they came.

  “Staci,” one of the guys said. They were all wearing their red football jerseys, jeans, boots. “You all right?”

  “Yeah,” she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “I think … ” She swallowed. “I think those Jello shots put me over the edge. Somebody oughta check those.”

  Rusty sat watching. No one said anything to him.

  One of them reached a hand down for Staci. Then they walked away, toward the house, their football jerseys shining in the moonlight, the stars, the house lights. Everything reflecting off them.

  Alone in the field, he watched everything move further away.

  • • •

  Jake found Rusty sitting on the steps to the house, back turned to the party.

  “Hey, man, you been out here all this time? Thought you were going to take a piss.”

  Rusty rocked back and forth a little, legs pulled close. “Tripped over Staci out in the field.”

  “No kidding? What was she doing out there? Taking a piss, too?”

  “Yeah,” Rusty said. “I guess she was.” He stood up, moved his head from side to side, couldn’t get his neck to crack. “You see the stars?”

  Jake smushed his lips together, raised an eyebrow. “The stars?” He looked up. “Uh, yeah. Stars.”