Ben could remember very few of the specifics about his father anymore, other than the known: he was an aerospace engineer, he had brown hair and blue eyes. As to what that meant, outside of a few photographs, he didn’t know. How had he laughed? Ben couldn’t hear it any longer. What had he cared about? Who knew, now? But he could still feel the weight of the older man’s hand on the top of his head as Ben worked math problems at his desk, as if his father’s palm was a conductor, giving him the knowledge to solve the equation without further assistance. For years, that weight had bothered him, frustrated him. Like a phantom limb, it would reappear whenever he felt the dull possibility of failure. Today it felt as if his cap were going to sink into his skull, but he no longer recognized the pressure as some remnant of his father, but rather as a distinct part of himself.
It wasn’t as if he’d never thrown a bad pitch, he rationalized. He’d even thrown the year before in his first Series, and had put out one or two real duds. Everyone did, even the best. Even Billy, especially in game two of this Series. He’d thrown as badly as Ben had ever seen at first, but then he’d held the other team there, suddenly finding the ability to stop the bleeding with that unerring accuracy Ben had so long admired. And then, of course, there was tonight’s massacre.
The batter waited, his compact figure shimmering with the heat of the dirt around the plate. Eddie was watching him cautiously, signing with a conservative motion. Fastball, again. Well, why not? Ben slid into the throw and watched as the little man caught the edge and sent it back over his head into the crowd. Well, Ben thought, that was lucky. He hadn’t intended to throw it as high as it had been, but that extra height had brought the batter up under the ball and tipped it gently back. Fine. Anything would do at this point.
Eddie nodded and again, asked for a fastball. This wasn’t bad or particularly good signing. Fastballs were what Ben mostly threw. While not totally overpowering, he could get them out at a good clip. He renewed his concentration, focusing on the batter and trying to see the arc of the ball in his mind, pushing aside all the anxiety of the last few days. When he let this one go, he watched as it slipped neatly over the center of the plate, leaving the other team’s catcher blinking at his motionless bat as the ump called the third strike.
Thank God, was all Ben could think, raising praise more out of habit than any genuine belief. One down, just a few more to go. Oddly, though his shoulder pinged and throbbed, he felt better than he had in weeks. A bit of a wince as he rotated his arm, but that was it. Maybe it was all salvageable after all. Maybe when this was over, he would take a vacation. Go somewhere cool and pleasant. It would be wonderful to sink his aching hands into a thick bank of snow and bring up a perfect ball of ice, fingers tingling and alive.
Ben watched as the top of the other team’s line-up stepped up to the plate. Greg Arthur, their pull-hitting first baseman. Arthur stretched out with the bat over his back and squinted toward Ben. He wondered briefly, not for the first time, what it would be like to be a great hitter. Certainly, he had hit the ball on occasion, but never when it mattered. Did they see the ball coming or did the mind merely register the presence of a projectile shortly before it arrived? He knew that the average hitter had less than a tenth of a second to decide whether or not this ball was worth swinging at. How did the mind choose, in literally less than the blink of an eye? His father might have known, but he would not have understood. There were some things that physics and biology couldn’t begin to explain.
Ben watched Eddie carefully. He was fully prepared to ignore a sign if he felt it was stupid, but that rarely happened with Eddie. Ben couldn’t remember the last time they had disagreed. The catcher nodded and tapped his thigh. Splitter. Ben was fairly sure that Arthur wouldn’t be expecting one again so soon. He wound up and went through a text-book delivery, with a slight, ghostly finger of pain in his left shoulder.
Straightening up, he was surprised to see Eddie scrambling after the ball as it sailed far to the left, bouncing hard against the advertisements behind the plate. He hadn’t thrown a pitch that wild in years. Ben stared at the ball as Eddie scooped it up, half-prepared to feel some huge gust of wind, the prelude to a hurricane, a tsunami. Eddie lifted his mask briefly as he walked back, sending a worried glance Ben’s way. Ben shrugged and stepped back. That was interesting, he thought, but didn’t know quite what to do about it.
Eddie returned to his squat and Arthur lifted the bat again, heaving it over his shoulder as if he were Santa with a bag of toys. Touching his thigh with one finger, Eddie signed for a change-up. Ben wound up and let it go, knowing that on a good change-up, the batter sees the delivery and thinks: fastball, swinging too soon for the slower ball. His palm still felt the imprint of the ball as it swung wildly to the left, sending Eddie scrambling a second time.
Ben felt like staring at his own arm, but that seemed a bit too much like conceding that he had just thrown the two worst pitches of his adult career. Eddie called time and sidled to the mound, mask up and a strange expression on his face.
“You ok, McDunnough?” he asked, voice gruff. “How’s your arm?”
“It’s fine,” Ben answered truthfully. “It’s less bad than yesterday.”
Eddie nodded, his lips compressed to a thin line. “Well, you holler if it starts to really hurt, ok?”
Ben agreed and watched as the catcher, a man he had always considered his ally and his guide, lowered his mask and jogged back to the plate. Eddie signed for a fastball and Ben nodded.
This time he was determined not to throw left. He adjusted his mind, loosened his muscles with a shake and stepped up to throw the ball.
The pain was mind-shattering. He heard, clearly, the crack of the humerus in his arm as it shattered, the noise ricocheting off the stands like the report from a gun. A sickening, deadly sound in the restless air. He felt his knees buckle and heard his own voice in a high, strangled stream of screams as he grasped his arm. Something swelled beneath the polyester sleeve of the uniform, something unthinkable – the bizarre appendage of a monster. But in the end, really, it was blistering, throat-closing pain that he registered fully. When he was able to open his eyes, there were men gathered around him, shadows against a sky of blindingly white light.
“Oh no!” someone shouted in the stands and he could hear it as clearly as if they had been kneeling there beside him. The whole park was anxiously silent, waiting with their hands up to their faces, over their ears as if they could will the sharp sound out of their memories. Ben groaned and tried to press his face into the dirt of the mound. Anything to cut out the light and the screaming in his mind. He had a moment of evil epiphany, where it occurred to him that now he couldn’t lose the game. He couldn’t lose any game, ever again. But that was terrible, he realized in the same moment. He should get up, straighten out, win this one for the Gipper. Waves of guilty relief swept through his mind and tumbled around his pain like water in a wild rush over rock. Had his arm broken because he didn’t want it bad enough, because he was somehow weak? And the game, the fans sitting out there waiting for him... He had to get up again and pitch, or they would lose. He tried to tell the frantic team doctor this, as the man’s hands closed over the lump in his sleeve, but his mouth wasn’t forming anything through his clenched teeth. The doctor patted Ben’s good arm and called for “a stretcher, goddamn it!” Ben closed his eyes and saw the man’s shape burned into his retina, probably forever.
Then someone, he thought the ball boy perhaps, scrambled forward with a thick green rain tarp. Eddie, an ump, the second baseman, and the fat ball boy held it up over Ben as the doctors worked on him, blocking out the sun and leaving him blinking at the warm, dark dirt, which had come so suddenly into sharper focus.
Unraveling
1998
I didn’t know, exactly, what I intended to do when I borrowed Lee’s car and drove out to Ben McDunnough’s house. Isn’t it strange that the decisions that come to mean the most to us are often those we really can’t explain?
Perhaps, when I pulled into his driveway to find him standing there as if he were waiting for something, I had every intention of just whipping out the letter from my father and asking, is this it? Is this the proof of my parent’s fallibility that I, like all good children, secretly believed existed all along? Or maybe I just wanted, as Lee suggested, to “tie things up.” Whatever reasons I had for leaving the house that morning, complex as any relationship, they weren’t apparently why I was there.
Because I was now standing in the batter’s box on the strange little homemade field of Ben McDunnough’s, listening to the wind pick up in the grassy swamp beyond, to the cicadas and the birds who understood the approach of rain. Where was Ben? Inside, getting us a bat and balls. Because despite whatever motivation brought me there, I was now going to play ball. And I knew, somewhat ruefully, the full import of that particular metaphor.
We were so uncomfortable, the way two people are when each of them is wondering: would it still feel the same way? So I commented on the field.
“Well, at least that’s new,” I said, or something equally inane.
“I haven’t changed much,” he agreed and we both blushed at the meaning springing up around us, like daisies.
He asked me how I was doing, and he meant it. Of course he understood how I was feeling, perhaps better than my own family. So I answered him.
“About as well as you are.”
He seemed to think about this for a moment, and then agreed that yes, under the circumstances, that was probably true. He was always such a kind man, and I felt for us both. How were we supposed to talk to each other now? God, I wanted to make the effort, to drag up the past and connect. It was just a matter of picking the right aspect of our shared history.
Ben did it for me. “You still play?” he asked, as I was staring at the field, which was small and quite shabby, really. It was merely something practical for a man whose dreams evaporated years before he built it. Then he seemed to regret the question, realizing, I suppose, that there was no reason I would. Shuffling forward, he came to stand just behind me and I was aware of the heat of him, even outside in the warmth of summer.
“Not much,” I said. “You?”
He shook his head and the motion was so close, I had to walk. I started out for the field, hands in my back pockets, grounding myself.
“Only if one of the boys is sick,” he answered, following me. “My arm...” He hesitated and I turned to look. His body was toned and firm, and the arm looked strong and capable to my eyes, as it always did, despite the thin web of scars. “It isn’t what it used to be.” He seemed vaguely ashamed. The sun was so warm it was almost stifling there, almost, what with the thick humidity of the swamp beneath us. This was the edge of civilization as Florida knew it. A few more feet and we would sink into the thick mud and be found, years from now, like the bog people of England, perfectly preserved and brown as the earth itself.
“Nothing really is, anymore,” I said, and reached the batter’s box. “I don’t know who would expect anything to be. The same, that is.” The dirt was lighter there, dry and powdery beneath my feet. I scuffed at it, turning it over with the toe of my sneaker as if I expected to find something there. Answers, perhaps.
“You want to play?”
His voice was further. He had decided to wait at the edge of the foul line, and I knew he was watching as I tapped an imaginary bat in the soft dirt and gave a fantasy swing.
“Now?” I said, to maintain propriety. I had come there to play, though perhaps not baseball, so why not? I wiped my hands on my jeans and turned to look at him.
Ben McDunnough was a handsome man, in his youth. Or he was to me, it was impossible to tell anymore what was real and what stemmed from my own need. Standing at the edge of the field, wearing an old-fashioned Yankees’ jersey and jeans that held more dirt than the pitcher’s mound, he was still something to be reckoned with. Shrugging, he seemed confident, though I doubt he really was.
“Why not? I’ve got the equipment in the house.”
“It’s going to rain,” I said, glancing to my right, where the clouds were skimming across the flat land from the sea.
“Not for a minute.” He was already turning to the house and walking swiftly toward the porch. My heart, for a reason I didn’t care to examine at the time, was pounding wildly. I took a moment to catch myself, slow my racing pulse. Would it be the same? How could it, with everything that had come between now and then?
He returned a moment later and I saw, as he handed me the aluminum bat, that he was as breathless as I felt. It was gratifying to know, even as I tightened my hands on the cool metal and took up the familiar stance, that I was not the only one who felt out of control.
“I’m no good anymore,” I said, checking the position of my feet and releasing my knees, which had locked up in an effort to keep me from jumping wildly.
“Right, and I can’t pitch for shit, so we’re even.”
Ben bent over at the mound, his hands on his knees. This was, ostensibly, to warm up his muscles, but I knew that he was really trying to calm his own body. He stood then, holding the glove in front of his smile, and released the ball. We both jumped as it hit the backboard with a bang.
“Jesus, Ben,” I said, startled and pleased. “Go easy on me. I’m not one of your boys.”
He seemed puzzled and I realized he had probably just thrown a baby pitch, thinking he was favoring me.
“Sorry,” he said and threw something that could more safely be called a toss. All the years of training, the drills and shouting and constant practice, came back to me in that instant, seeing the ball approach me. Perhaps my father was right, I did have a sense of it, of where it would be. Swinging easily, I watched as the ball slammed past Ben and skidded neatly to a stop in the tall grass of the outfield.
“You can throw a bit harder than that,” I teased him, stretching my arms over my head with the bat propped up between my feet. Was he looking at me, seeing with appreciation the ways my body had changed, had held up or let me down over the intervening years? I couldn’t risk a glance, but I knew I wanted him to be looking, more than anything.
“Fine,” he called, and did, incrementally. I swung again and with that same sense of the placement of the ball, sent it over his head, though he jumped.
“Should I start running?” I said, cocky. “I wouldn’t want to take advantage here.”
To my satisfaction, he laughed, slightly. Chuckled, with his head down. What would it be like, to kiss him again? Would it still make my heart race?
“I don’t chase,” he said. “Here, try this.” He let me have it, then... fifty, maybe sixty miles an hour. I narrowed my eyes, trying to see the ball, and swung, catching the edge and sending it high over my head. We both ducked as it fell. “Better?” he called.
“Damn,” I told him. “And I just came out here to say hello.”
This seemed to disappoint him and I realized he thought I was there on some sort of sympathy call. Let’s go see Ben once, before he’s fired and sent away. And perhaps I was there out of sympathy, but it was not for him.
“Well, stay awhile,” he called out. “I’m just warming up.”
I laughed, feeling strangely nervous, and stepped forward again. “Don’t overdo it,” I reminded him and I had the feeling that I was talking about something else.
He threw me a slider, and I missed, swinging harder than I expected and wrenching the muscles in my back, but I was still able to throw it back to him with an easy arm. Had I been a boy, I thought for the thousandth time, there was no doubt where I would be now. How strange life is, the choices it tosses to us and the things it denies.
“You’ve still got it,” I said as the first rain fell behind us, hurtling forward like a car wash, humid and greasy. “You should have warned me.”
“I had no idea,” he said, grinning, and looked up to feel the rain arrive.
Turning to the house in unison, we scrambled to the back porch, drops hitting the dust
behind our feet like bullets in a Western. We were spared.
Inside the back porch it was so dark I was momentarily lost. The light that should have been filtering through the shutters had turned thick and gray with the approaching clouds. I could sense where he was by the warmth radiating from his body, though I was sure I was only imagining it, because how could anyone give off something so palpable? I moved toward his body and felt his hand on my arm. The rain reached the metal roof of the porch and slammed it, the sound reverberating around us until I knew we would have to get inside the house or go a bit mad.
“Come on in,” he shouted. It was a given I would stay there until the usual afternoon rain had passed. It was not really an invitation, and yet it was.
Opening the back door, he shepherded me into the house, pushing gently to guide me toward the kitchen at the front. I paused briefly to peer into the living room and it was exactly as I remembered it, complete with the horsehair sofa that always scratched my legs below the protection of my shorts. Though I couldn’t see it from the angle at which I was standing, I could hear the old mantle clock, ticking its way into the new millennium with no fear for the future.
“God, Ben, you really haven’t changed anything,” I said and in the sudden silence of the hall my voice shocked us both. I felt his hand move on my shoulder. “I’m surprised there isn’t a wedding cake in there, covered in dust.”
“I threw it out,” he told me, his voice tinged with humor, “when I realized I wasn’t going to finish it.”
We stepped finally into the kitchen. I took in the worn wooden cabinets and the linoleum, scrubbed pale in spots. Perhaps it should have bothered me that this man had never made any effort to modernize the house, but it didn’t. I found it reassuring, to know he was so little concerned with impracticalities. He was the Ben that I remembered, then. Maybe. “Well, I see you have a microwave,” I said after a moment’s silence that threatened to become awkward. “That’s something.”
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