Nobody Bats a Thousand

by Steve Schmale

  I took a small sip of beer, just enough to remind me that at this point it tasted like hell, then I returned to the question I’d tried to get out earlier. “So who exactly was Chipper? I’ve heard his name my whole life. I know he was your friend and he died in Vietnam, but who was he?”

  “Who was he? My best friend, my second baseman from little league on…what can you say about someone who dies before they’re twenty?”

  “Do you remember the last time you saw him?”

  “Oh yeah, at my bachelor party, we both got drunker than sin. Two days later I got married to your mom. Five days after that I was on a bus to Fort Ord. Chipper got drafted about a month later. We really didn’t stay in touch…I guess we just naturally figured we’d pick up the friendship again after we got out.”

  “Did you ever find out how he got killed?”

  “A jeep accident, he rolled a jeep a few days before he was supposed to come home.” He looked up at the sky. “A Goddamn jeep accident.” My old man paused and was still. When I stared at his face he seemed to be looking into himself. “That’s the part that’s so fucking weird. Chipper went through some heavy shit, and I was in the middle of a bunch of heavy shit most of my whole tour, but we both came through all of it with nothing more than a bunch of shit-stained skivvies, and then Chipper gets it in a car wreck two days before he gets on the plane.” He paused and looked out at the desert. “It don’t make no sense. There ain’t no logic or laws of faith or karmac that can explain shit like that.”

  “Karma, dad, laws of Karma, Karmac is from Johnnie Carson.”

  “Well, whatever…the only thing that can explain crap like that is fate, destiny, whatever you want to call it. There’s nothing anybody can do ‘cause it all boils down to fate.”

  Just then a bright light from behind swept onto us and stopped. We both turned, bathed in the light. “Shit, a cop.” I quickly leaned over and set my beer on the sand under the car.

  The black and white crept to a halt just behind my old man’s car as we stared into the blinding light. Then there was a voice, “Scooter? Is that you?”

  My old man smiled. Still holding his beer wrapped in the crinkled sack, he started towards the cop.

  “Melvin, what brings you out here to God’s country? You finally run out of skateboarders to bust?”

  The cop killed the spotlight, and my old man walked up to within a few feet of the police car. “I should be asking the questions, Scooter. You been drinking?”

  My old man cocked his head back as he took a long pull, killed off his beer, crushed the can and threw the empty fifteen feet with an underhand toss through his car’s open window onto the back seat. “Just got done.”

  “Scooter, why you got to do that right in front of me?”

  “Hey, it’s my kid’s twenty-first birthday. We’re doing a little celebrating, no big deal, actually, we’re out here getting sobered up so the old lady doesn’t kill me when I get home.”

  The cop sat still and silent.

  “How’s your old lady Melvin? Everything okay at home?”

  “Damn you Scooter.”

  “Oh, come on Melvin, you know I can drive better a little buzzed than most people can sober.”

  “Damn you, Scooter. Don’t get me in trouble,” the cop said. He shook his head, put his car in gear and drove away.

  My old man was still smiling as he walked back to me.

  “Jesus, dad that scared the shit out of me.”

  “Well, I guess there are some good things about growing up in a small town, especially if you grow up going to school with some of the cops, and they still owe you a few favors. As slowly as this town grows it’ll probably be the same for you, and probably the same for your kids.”

  “That’s the thing. I don’t want to have kids.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “No, I don’t want to have kids because I don’t want to marry Gina, and I don’t want to work at some boring job at the irrigation district for the next forty years.”

  “Who cares what you want? You got to do something. You don’t like school. You don’t want to work, and you’re getting too old for this bullshit, Billy. It comes to a point where it doesn’t matter what you want. It just becomes what you have to do.”

  “That’s easy for you to say, you got a job you like ”

  “What are you talking about? I hate that job! I hate having to get up at four-thirty every morning to do the same boring crap over and over.” He stood and looked out into the night. Then he turned to me. “You going to finish that beer or what?”

  “I don’t feel too good.”

  “Well don’t let it go to waste.”

  I handed him my warm tallboy, which had been sitting in the dirt. He finished it with two long pulls, he almost seemed to be gargling with the beer, before crinkling the can and tossing it out into the darkness of the desert. “Come on, let’s go.”

  We got in his car and began a slow drive back towards town. The radio in his car had quit working years before. He had never bothered to fix it, so all we had for the drive was the engine noise accompanying the headlights centered on the dark road.

  “It’s just,” my old man broke the silence, “I guess I don’t want you ending up like I would have ended up if it hadn’t been for your mother.”

  “Which is?”

  “A bum, a bum on the streets if I didn’t have your sister and your mother to take care of that’s where I would have ended up.”

  “Sure.”

  “And I almost went that way anyway. Your mom had to drag me out of bed to go take the post office test. And even then, without my veteran’s points I never would have got the job.”

  Two cars, their headlights pointing in our direction, passed us just before we hit the sparse lights on the outskirts of town.

  “It’s not like I don’t worry about things. I worry about the future and all that. I worry about it all the time,” I said.

  “You worry?” He smiled. “I always thought you didn’t worry about anything.”

  “Really?” I was surprised he had ever given such a matter any thought.

  “Yeah, but what bothered me was not that you didn’t worry about anything, in fact that might be great, but I always figured that you just didn’t give a damn about anything. There’s a huge difference between that and not letting life bother you.”

  “No, I’m just the opposite. I worry about everything, about being on time, about what people think of me, about all kinds of stupid stuff. In fact I worry a lot about dying. I know it’s dumb, but there were times when I’d be sitting in class, nervous about whether the teacher was going to call on me, and my chest would feel tight and right away I’d figure I was going have a heart attack, like my heart was going to burst, and I’d picture myself lying there on the floor, and the paramedics coming, and I’d think about how embarrassing the whole thing would be. Maybe I was more afraid of how foolish I would look but the thought of dying, the thought of having my heart pop like a balloon really worried me.”

  “Cancer and just plain old age has always got our people. I can’t think of a single relative that’s died from heart failure.”

  “I know, that makes it all so much more unreasonable. But have you ever thought about…about facing up to death?”

  “Yeah.”

  My old man looked straight ahead, seemingly thousands of miles past the reaches of his headlights. “Yes, I guess I have but not for a long time.” He slowed the car, pulled to the side checked his side mirror, then made a U-turn and began to retrace our path. “Let’s not go home just yet,” he said, he drove a little farther, made a right on Jensen and eventually stopped at a little liquor store, which sat alone surrounded by empty lots.

  He went inside, and that short time I spent sitting alone in the car made me realize how terrible I felt. My head was already starting to hurt. I felt tired but not sleepy, and my stomach was twisting and turning, teasing my bowels.

  My old man came out carrying a l
arge sack. He sat, handed me a beer I really didn’t want, opened one for himself, then took out a bottle, broke the seal, took a drink and handed it to me. More whiskey. At this point I could hardly handle even the smell, but I felt obligated, some sort of communal obligation. I took a small sip, basically acting like I was drinking, before handing the bottle back.

  My old man took another hit from the bottle, screwed the top back on then began to drink from his beer. We were parked at the side of the building, looking directly ahead at a brick wall, which my old man focused on for quite awhile before he began to speak.

  “This may not sound good, but I resigned myself to dying years ago,” he said as he glanced in my direction. I guess either to see how I reacted or if I was listening, again he looked straight ahead. “You know your sister was conceived during one of the last nights before I went to basic training. When I found out your mom was pregnant at first I was real happy, but then I started getting these weird feelings and for the last six months I was in Vietnam I had this eerie feeling that I just couldn’t shake. Something just kept telling me that no matter what I did or how careful I was, I just wouldn’t live to see your sister or ever see your mom again.” He stopped for a drink of beer. “It really bothered me for awhile. I didn’t sleep good, couldn’t eat, and I was more scared than normal about everything going on. Then one bright, sunny, beautiful morning just before we were scheduled to go on this three-day patrol, something in my mind just shifted, and I wasn’t worried about anything anymore. Because I knew I was going to die. Something inside told me, convinced me that I wasn’t going to make it, and all my fears and worries just disappeared. Me and your mom were married so I knew the army would take care of her and your sister, and I just had this feeling of freedom, of relief. Like something I’d never felt before. I knew I was going to die. I was going to be just another body bag loaded on a plane and shipped back home, but I was okay with it. I accepted it as my fate.” He was silent for several seconds. “In fact when it didn’t happen, as strange as it sounds, I think I was a little let down.”

  This type of confession from him was so rare I felt an urgent need to keep the conversation flowing so he wouldn’t feel uncomfortable. I went with the first thing that popped into my head.

  “I remember reading a thing about Timothy Leary talking about eating acid and experiencing your own death, and that was what it was all about.”

  “Yeah, well that sixties stuff is lost on me. The sixties didn’t hit this town until the seventies. By that time I was already married and supporting a wife and kid with you on the way.” He killed off his beer, tossed the empty over his shoulder onto the backseat floor and started the car. “Let’s get out of here. I don’t want to run into Melvin again tonight. He might start acting like a real cop.” He backed up and moved out of the parking lot and onto Jensen. “How about we go check out the old diamond, how would that be?”

  “Sure,” I said just trying to be agreeable. But I really didn’t have any idea what he was talking about until a few minutes later when we pulled up to the curb on the street outside the cyclone fence that surrounded the varsity baseball field at the high school we both had attended.

  My old man carried the beer and liquor. The gate was open so we just went in like the place was ours, and my old man walked straight to the shortstop position on the field as naturally as could be. He just stood there for a time, smiling and looking around. Like he was reliving the pageantry and glory he had once felt. He set down the sack, pulled out a beer, then suddenly he crouched down into a fielding position, did a quick slide step to his left and came up firing, throwing the full beer can in a strike to first base. He pantomimed a few more fielding plays, quickly and gracefully, almost like he was dancing across the dirt infield. Then he picked up the sack with the beer and whiskey and walked over to the step-down dugout where I was sitting on the bench with my back against the cool bricks, trying not to move, trying not to get sick.

  “Man, I didn’t remember how much fun I had on this field.” He sat a few feet from me. Pulled out the whiskey and offered me the bottle, which I declined. “You okay?”

  “Barely.” A dull pain tighten my stomach. “I think I had too much fun tonight.”

  My old man looked away from me, took a small sip of liquor, and then just sat there looking out at the field softly lit by the glossy light from the full moon braced high above us.

  I belched and felt a little relieved and a little less likely to throw up, and then I felt a sudden rush of energy, of thoughts bare and simple. “See that’s the thing, I want to have too much fun or at least some part of me does. Part of me wants to do everything and be everywhere. To travel around the world and learn and experience everything, to fall deeply in love and have a hundred kids and run for congress and who knows what else, and part of me wants to just sit in my room and just watch TV and never have to come out and see another human being for as long as I live. Gina told me once that my main problem was that I didn’t know what I wanted. I guess she was right. That might have been the only really intelligent thought she’s ever come up with.”

  “What do the other kids, your friends think?”

  “‘Bout what?”

  “About life, about their futures, about their plans?”

  “I dunno. There’s a fair amount of goof-offs at school. Guys like me just sort of going through the motions, not really sure of where they’re going. Then there are all of those others who think they got it all dicked. Guys and chicks, who figure they’ll get their criminology degrees or their business or marketing degrees, and from there they got it all mapped out. Like the world is just out there waiting for them to come take charge.”

  “Like David Briggs?”

  “Well, no, he actually had some brains. All these other jerks just think they’re smarter than everybody else.” I thought for a second about David. “But I guess Briggs is, or was kinda what I’m talking about. He’s a guy who never got less than an A in his life, who never let a moment go unplanned, a guy who felt guilty if he wasted one second, and now he’s just another grease spot on Highway 95.”

  “Before he really ever got a chance to live.”

  With a light breeze slowly dancing across us in the dugout, we sat in silence for probably close to a full minute. Then my old man suddenly stood and slammed the bottle of whiskey into a thousand pieces on the cement floor of the dugout. “Fuck it! Just fuck it, Billy! Fuck it all! If you work for a living, that’s all you’ll ever do is work for a living. There’s got to be another way. There’s got to be.” He moved above me to the top step of the dugout. “If you really want to tell Gina and her old man no, do it, follow your instincts, follow your heart. You really have no other choice,” his voice got louder and clearer. “If you want to buck convention and become the Don Quixote of the high desert, do it, just do it!” He stepped out of the dugout, stumbled and had to grab on to the metal support post to keep from falling. “Whoa…I guess I got a little drunker than I should have.” He pushed away from the post and righted himself. “But fuck that too. Nobody’s made of stone. We’re not robots in total control all of the time. You got to get out and test the boundaries, get out and howl at the moon every so often. It’s part of being a human being.” He looked up at the full moon and actually started to howl but stopped mid-howl as he stumbled backward a couple of steps like he was suddenly dizzy. “Whoa.” He swayed a bit as he focused in on me. “I think it’s time to go.”

  We left the schoolyard. I almost said something about the beer we left behind, but I certainly didn’t want any so I let it go. Out on the street just before I opened the passenger door I looked across the roof of the car at my old man. “So you really won’t get pissed off if I don’t try to get on at the irrigation district?”

  “What you or I want doesn’t matter. It’s all in the hands of fate. Fate makes all the decisions.”

  And those were the final words between us for the night. My old man drove home slowly and rather rationally as far a
s I could tell until he slid both tires against the curb in front of our house as he jolted us to a stop. We staggered inside, split up and went to bed.

  Sometime later my stomach jarred me awake. I rushed into the bathroom and barely made it to the toilet before all that was left in my stomach of that wonderful Mexican food and beer and whiskey came back up, flew out of my mouth, and splashed into the water of the porcelain bowl. I flopped down on the floor and sat there dazed and weak. I had to throw up a couple of more times, mostly just clear vile tasting liquid, before I found the strength to rise, rinse my mouth, wash my face, and stumble back towards my bedroom.

  On the way I noticed a noise from my older sister’s old room. I stuck my head inside and could see in the dim light from the small nightlight in the hallway that my old man had plopped down on her bed without even taking off his shoes. He was breathing and snoring with abandon. He seemed so free of pain and drudgery. I soon quit watching and headed to my bedroom, seeking the same relief.