“Exactly. Now, where are we going tomorrow?” He winked and toasted me with his beer. “I’ve only got one day and I want it to be good.”
And it was, once we got going. On the drive out to Tiger Mountain, we listened to the game on the local sports radio. Dad called the shots before the commentator, a feat of prediction that would have astounded anyone on the psychic network. I found that after the first few moments I was no longer listening to the announcer, but instead to my dad’s voice, as warm as the sun through the windshield.
My father was so genuinely impressed by the early fall weather that he couldn’t even attempt to grouse about the rain, or lack of it. Brilliant flashes of golden deciduous trees in the evergreens seemed to jump out above a pulsing red layer of undergrowth, as if the mountain were on fire from within. We hiked through the crisp, clear air, me struggling behind my ever-athletic father. It was as if we had returned to the happiest times of my childhood, camping together, leaving Lee and my mother to argue over a game of gin rummy in the trailer.
I was, in fact, their third child. My eldest sister was stillborn. Half-way through her pregnancy with me, confined once again to her bed for months on end, my mother declared she would not be having any more children, end of discussion. So my father, allowed to name me, chose Casey. Third and final time at bat and the mighty man strikes out. Still, I did my best. I wore Toughskins and fought with the boys. My mother, happy with one girly daughter, let me run wild as I liked.
The year I turned seven, my world shifted as if someone had run into it and knocked it spinning out into space. My father and I went to the park to practice my swing, but ended up watching a group of local kids play out a game. We formed a tiny cheering section in the metal bleachers as a thin young man stepped up to the plate and delivered a blistering seventy-five mile-an-hour fastball within an inch of the batter’s nose.
Outraged, the batter screamed at the pitcher: “What the hell, are you trying to kill me?”
The high schooler, his back turned, rubbing his palms over his pants, answered: “Not really. If I wanted to do that, I’d have aimed at your head, not your nose.”
My father had him practicing in our backyard within the week. Suddenly, I was no longer the favored child, the only hope, the son my father could never have. I could say I was scarred by this, but it wouldn’t be entirely true. Because, sitting on those bleachers, holding my legs up to keep the bare skin below my shorts from touching the burning seat, I fell as deeply in love as I have ever been. It’s simple, really. If you can’t be something yourself, you will come to adore someone who can.
I couldn’t have picked a gentler object to desire had I fallen for a puppy. Ben came from what used to be called a “broken home”, living with his mother and grandparents in that massive old Florida farmhouse on the edge of town, its trellised foundation seeming to either be sinking into or rising from the swampy earth, depending on how you looked at it. It was the most absolutely silent house I have ever been in, as quiet as the pasture outside. I once sat on the horsehair sofa in the living room, or as Ben’s grandmother would have said, on the davenport in the parlor, and waited for him to come play catch with me and my father. We Wellses are not a quiet bunch; silence unnerves us. We looked at one another, but were unable to break the quiet of the room, the only sound being the slow ticking of a clock on the mantle. I could hear Ben come down the stairs and along the hallway so clearly, it was as if he were stomping his feet right in front of me.
“That’s why he pitches so well,” my dad once said. “Because the whole time, he has a stillness inside.”
If Ben was as anxious for a father as my father was for a son, I have no idea. He remained polite and diffident throughout his time at our house, slightly remote from the screeching tumble that constituted our Sunday afternoons. There are photos in my scrapbook from this period, where my father stands with his arm around Ben’s shoulder, my mother rests a hand on Lee’s arm and I am standing in the middle, still looking more like I belong to the laughing family than Ben ever did. I believe he knew he would lose us, even then.
My father had long given up on creating a son in his image by the time he flew to Seattle. Standing on the crest of Tiger Mountain on a cool September afternoon, we were comfortable with one another, panting with the triumph of a difficult hike. After a long swig from his water bottle, my father surveyed the surrounding hills, the hovering groups of paragliders with sails as blue as the sky, the gentle roll of the land toward the sea.
“Now that’s a view,” he said. “I’d love to build a house right here.”
“As long as we could have a damn road,” I wheezed, propping myself up with my hands on my knees.
My father looked over at me and laughed. “And you wanted to play ball.”
“I did,” I confirmed. “But I gave that up a long time ago.”
“You were good,” he said gruffly. “I never met someone with as clear a sense of when to hit a ball.”
I simply stared up at him, bent double, trying to catch my breath.
“But you know,” he said quietly. “I never wanted you to be a boy, Case, not really.”
“Oh come on,” I managed, my heart slowing painfully.
“Ok,” he said. “Maybe when you first popped out. But then I saw you had your grandmother’s big brown eyes and sweet mouth, and I thought, thank God she isn’t a boy, ‘cause she’d probably turn out gay.”
“Oh nice,” I said and listened to him laugh all the way down the mountain.
In the car on the way home, we followed the final game of the American League play-offs. Sometimes, sitting in the cheap seats in the Kingdome, lulled into drowsy contemplation by the canned air and the inevitable boredom of my date, I could almost feel how it would be. To step up to the plate, listening to, but not really hearing the sound of the crowd behind me. I wouldn’t have been a pitcher, like my father. I had no sense of how to throw, it just wouldn’t come for me. My father’s childhood heroes: Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, hell, even Babe Ruth when he still pitched, didn’t hold that same thrill for me. Even Nolan Ryan or Sandy Cofax. I couldn’t connect with a pitcher’s game. I was a child of the new era, where power mattered more than precision. I wanted to hit and to run. I wanted to stand back between second and third and catch a howling grounder, hurtling it to first just in time to catch the furious batter. I liked the infield because my arms were shorter – I lacked the power for outfield play – but also because the game was faster there, more acrobatic. How wonderful it would be to hear the solid sound of a wooden bat on a small, hard ball, rather than the hollow ponk of aluminum on soft, graceless leather. I had grown to hate softball with a passion. Not because it was really any less difficult to play, but because it wasn’t baseball.
“Do you think that a woman will ever play pro ball?” I asked my father as we drifted back into the city. The sun hovered just above the mountains, defining their jagged white tops against the brilliant orange glow of the sky. He was watching the water, closing in on our right, playing hide and seek with the freeway.
“Women have played pro ball,” was his immediate answer, without even turning his head.
“I meant in the majors.”
He was quiet for a moment, and I realized he was genuinely considering the question, which surprised me. Mostly because it meant he hadn’t ever considered it before.
“Maybe,” he said at last, glancing over at me. His face was purposely unreadable. “But I doubt it.”
“Why?” I asked, instantly defensive. “Because they aren’t physically strong enough? Because you know, Dad...”
“Before you put words in my mouth, Case, maybe you could listen to my reason.”
Effectively silenced, I let him talk. He narrowed his eyes and stared at the darkening waters of Lake Washington, as if he were concentrating on the flotilla of small white sailboats that skimmed past us.
“I don’t think it would be fair,” he finally said, after much deliberation. “Not b
ecause women aren’t strong enough. There wouldn’t be a female Jose Canseco, mind you, but there could easily be a female Harold Reynolds. He’s no macho man.” I smiled at his constant disparagement of my home team. “But no matter how well she played, it would always be the same. Everything she did would be news because a woman did it. If she screwed up, it would be just like a woman. If she did well, it would be amazing, because hey, she’s a woman. And she’d always be a little bit behind the best, never able to really excel. Now, Harold won’t be a superstar, but he didn’t know that from the moment he stepped in the ring, and neither did his manager. Any man they sign could become a great player. Any woman they sign could be a very good player, but she probably won’t be great. Would you want to play in that atmosphere?”
“I might have liked the choice, Dad.”
He studied me for a moment, then sighed. “You could have played softball.”
“I hate softball. You know that.”
“It’s not all fat fifty year-old men taking their shirts off at first base and standing around in the outfield drinking beer, you know.”
I snorted. “No, it’s all women playing with a bigger ball, shorter base paths and aluminum bats because everyone knows that girls couldn’t possibly run as far or throw as hard or hit as well as men, so let’s give them a break. It’s like golf,” I said, angry with him for not understanding, angry with myself for being unable to explain. “I don’t want the advantage. I want to hit the ball from the same point as everyone else. If it doesn’t go as far, fine, but boy does it feel wonderful when it does. What use is it to be the best at something when you aren’t playing against fifty percent of the competition?”
He pondered this as we crossed the bridge back into Seattle. Traffic backed up at the end, beginning to show the early stages of the gridlock that would drag the city to a halt.
“Do you know anything about the All-American Girls Baseball League?” he asked at last.
“You mean the women’s Fifties league, from the movie,” I said.
“You know they were a softball league.”
“I remember.”
“Well, in the twelve years they played, something amazing happened, without anyone really noticing. The ball kept getting smaller. It was easier to throw that way.”
“Small hands,” I said viciously, and he grinned.
“And it kept getting harder. Now it was easier to hit further. Then the base paths started to get longer, to accommodate all those harder hits. They started stealing the occasional base, since those base paths were so much longer. And then the pitchers started throwing overhand, because the batters were so much better. By 1954, their last season, they weren’t playing softball anymore.”
I looked over at my father, his face shadowed in the descending light, and he was smiling, a little sadly.
“They were playing baseball,” I finished for him. He just nodded.
“I know how it is for you, Case. I know how badly you wanted it. I’m just telling you the truth. Maybe someday someone will start another women’s league. The climate is right. But if you want to play baseball, the honest truth is, you have to be a man. That’s just the way it is.” He laid one gentle hand on my arm then, and I turned from the stopped car ahead of me to watch him. “I’ve never been sorry you weren’t a boy, Casey. Besides, this is all irrelevant,” he pointed out after a moment’s silence.
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“Because I’m right, but not for those reasons. Every girl growing up today who wants to play ball is funneled into softball. You wouldn’t have grown up dreaming about being in the majors. You’d have grown up dreaming of being in the Olympics.”
I smiled at him as the last light disappeared and we were left in darkness.
“That wouldn’t be so bad,” I admitted.
“No,” he chuckled, “And I’d have been out there in the stands, cursing those damn Russians or Germans or whoever the hell it would have been. Forget goodwill, I would’ve worn an American flag sewn right across my damn chest.”
And the wonderful thing was, in that moment, I knew he would have.
Hearing
1998
Though he would have said in the weeks prior, that the morning of the hearing would probably be gray, tinged with winter, Ben was somehow not surprised to wake with shimmering clear sun outlining his bedroom window. Lying on his warm sheets, spread out like a sunbather on the beach, Ben felt strangely marvelous. Better, perhaps, than marvelous. Something in the nature of truly wonderful. He considered this feeling in the shower, turning it over in his mind as if it were a globe, a crystal ball, searching for the meaning in his joy. It wasn’t, he decided, because he was resigned to his fate. It wasn’t the knowledge that he would be picking Casey up on the way in, though that was good too. He thought, as he shaved in front of the wavering glass of the medicine cabinet, that it might be because the outcome no longer mattered. He had nothing left to prove. In the broadest sense of the words, he was in love; not with a woman or with himself, but with everything at once, like skimming above the atmosphere and looking down to see it all.
Thinking of the story Casey had told him about her mother just two nights before, he dragged an old Who tape out of his glove compartment and listened to it on the way into town. The rising sun pulled steam in great ribbons across the roadway and he plowed through them, leaving swaths of empty air in his wake. He rolled the window down and let the wind dry his hair in decidedly unprofessional tufts.
Ben had always believed in many good and important things; the foundation of his mother’s and grandparents’ gentle teachings. These were the same sorts of things that most people profess to believe in: God, country, faith, honesty, hope, the essential goodness of the human soul. He tried, with the usual limited success, to live within the boundaries set out by his particular set of morals. Sometimes, those boundaries shifted and he found himself standing in territory that frightened or confused him. And sometimes, as they had one day twenty-two years before, the boundaries as he understood them disappeared entirely.
The reporter had been nice enough. A tall, wiry, young man who was obviously hoping to find that one story that would finally establish him as a journalistic visionary, the next Woodward or Bernstein. He even wore a rumpled gray pinstriped suit, smoked too much and drank his coffee stinkingly black. He was earnest and honest and as stupid as any greatly intellectual, well-educated young man can be. What he wanted was so simple. Tell him who was involved. They knew there were bets being placed against the Atlantics and they suspected it was someone on the team. Someone had used Ben’s name, though they’d got his middle name wrong. Could it have been Billy? Just tell the truth, buddy, and no one will blame you for anything. After all, your career is over, right? What do you have to lose?
Oh Joe, Ben thought as he stared at the reporter’s serious tie. Say it ain’t so.
What would it mean, to be absolved of his guilt? What was his guilt, after all? So he had smothered his accusations and his knowledge. He hadn’t done anything wrong; he’d just kept his mouth shut, a favor for a friend. At least that’s what he was telling himself in his hospital bed, itching all over from the excessively starched sheets, drugged-up and trussed like a turkey.
Though no one had definitively said it yet, he already knew he was never going to pitch another ball, never going to get teased in the dugout, never going to hear the sharp crack of a bat and know with certainty that the ball was foul simply because he had thrown it to be. And this kid; this scrawny, overdressed and self-righteous kid from Stanford or Yale or maybe Boston; this kid wanted him to just tear down everything he had ever believed in to save something that didn’t even exist anymore. What the hell was wrong with the world, anyway? Where was that line he had learned to recognize through bitter experience, the one that told him firmly where he stood? Jesus, how do you choose between two distinct and necessary parts of your own soul?
“Fuck you,” he told the kid in no uncertain terms. He w
as normally very polite in print, but if this kid thought, for even a moment, that Ben McDunnough was going to turn patsy on his friends, on his team, on his whole fucking game, then he was in for a surprise.
“Mighty defensive, aren’t we?” The kid cocked an eyebrow and made some notes on a yellow legal pad.
Ben stared at the yellow pad and wanted to grab it, to throw it out the window and watch it reel slowly down to the parking lot like a yellow butterfly. Maybe the kid would go after it. Ben could just picture the kid’s wiry body as it fell, arms out and grey suit spread wide, gliding. Instead, he grit his teeth and shook his head. “We won, for Christ’s sake. What the hell does anyone care about this shit, anyway?”
Oh, people cared all right. If they didn’t, Mr. Junior Reporter was going to make them care. Ben wanted to strangle him. Maybe if he’d had two good arms... But in the end it didn’t matter. Nothing ever turned up. No one ever rolled over, or coughed it up, or whatever phrase was used for what he used to call snitching.
But it didn’t end because there wasn’t a story. Ben could still remember sitting in his room in his mother’s house, being cautiously ignored after he’d put his hand through the wall above the telephone. That little room, the same one he’d slept in as a dreaming child, when the world was as wide open as a summer afternoon. What he’d done in that bed seemed to go beyond weeping into something more cataclysmic, more life-threatening. Even if he hadn’t gone to California and nearly drank himself to death, he would have broken apart. The world was wide open, all right, but that was because every line of conscience, everything he’d believed about friendship and sportsmanship and doing what was right, damnit, had been fractured and blown like dust into his ever-expanding empty future. It was like standing in the middle of the desert. Everywhere he looked seemed just as deadly, just as unreal, without baseball to fill the void.
Now that he was older, in the singing sweetness of May, the void hadn’t disappeared, exactly. With time he simply felt he knew it. Florida never really had a spring, per se, but this morning the sun was shining with a renewed brightness, like a polished coin. Doves lined his way, flapping in soft flight from the edge of the road as he passed. Citrus blossoms took away the dank smell of swamp and replaced it with pure sugar. Ben was in love, all right, but not with Casey. He liked her. Perhaps he even felt something more than that, something there wasn’t a word for in the limited language of English and the stilted heart of a grown man. But right now, trailing ghostly fingers of mist through eddies of sparkling air as if he’d been patted down with glitter, Ben was delighted with the world, with life and with the glorious moment that was now.
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