Clay couldn’t help smiling. “I’ll see you guys soon.”
Cory sat in a booth in the corner of a restaurant, having a conversation with the love of his life. The beauty of this private chat was that she didn’t talk back. She comforted and soothed him, allowing him to vent without saying a single word. She understood his deepest and darkest feelings. She didn’t judge him, either. She simply let him be Cory and let him enjoy as much of her as he wanted.
He finished his “conversation” with the vodka and tonic and crunched an ice cube as he glanced up at the screen above the bar. The volume was down, but ESPN was replaying the glorious highlight of him going ballistic at the game and striking the batboy. A couple of commentators followed to share their own thoughts, and judging by their expressions, they were doing the whole good-commentator/bad-commentator routine. Several pictures came up showing Cory; first his official team picture, then a few other at bats for the year. Cory laughed and looked back at his empty glass, thankful to see the skinny little thing walking up to refill it.
“Another?”
The young woman didn’t smile like the ladies usually did. That was because she was oblivious to who was sitting there. And that was fine with him. The last thing he needed was to cause a commotion and have people start asking for autographs or pictures.
It wouldn’t be good to be seen drinking in a bar at the airport.
But he was inside and facing the back so that he couldn’t be seen. To the waitress, Cory was just another businessman traveling for his job and worried about the wife and kiddies at home.
“Give me a double,” Cory said, knowing the flight would be taking off soon.
He’d spent enough time “catching up” with Clay and making sweet chitchat. He could already see his brother’s mind working. Clay had seemed glad that Cory had to go back home, even if it was for a brief visit. Now Cory could get to know Carlos a little more and try to make amends with some of those he’d lost touch with. In particular, with Emma.
That was why Cory was sitting in this place, in the muted light and the soft hum of conversation. He needed some peace of mind. Some time to not have to think about all that twelve-step nonsense.
Missing one step to tag third base shouldn’t mean I have to enter a freaking twelve-step program.
Helene didn’t care what it meant or what he thought. She didn’t care whether he actually believed in the recovery program. She just knew he needed to get his rear out there in the spotlight to show he was doing something about his “problem.” He had to go through it so he could get back on the field and start producing. Already he’d made her job more difficult in terms of negotiating a new contract. But the idea of talking about a new contract now made him think of NFL coach Jim Mora answering a reporter’s question about the play-offs—“Play-offs? Don’t talk about play-offs!”
Cory couldn’t help laughing a bit. The waitress brought him back a drink, and he gave her a few twenties to cover the tab, telling her to keep the change. He took a sip and stopped thinking of Helene and the team and Clay and all the other stuff. It was just one downward spiral that wouldn’t stop. Feeling bad didn’t change a thing. He’d spent his entire youth feeling bad about his father, but that had gotten him nowhere. There was never anything anybody could do, and then one day not long ago he heard his father had finally died.
Boom.
Just like that. There was no dramatic deathbed scene where his dad gripped his hand and asked for forgiveness.
No, if Cory had been there, Dad probably would have started complaining about the way he’d been hitting.
Feeling bad couldn’t bring Dad back, couldn’t make him replay his youth.
It is what it is.
This was a favorite saying of his because it spoke so much truth. You live, you die. You excite some people, you let others down. You bat a ball over the wall, you knock a batboy over.
Life was full of surprises.
Cory glanced at his first-class ticket and then thought of what awaited him back home.
He wondered if he’d see her, and what she’d say to him after all these years.
It starts to be amusing.
Ten straight hits in three games in the middle of his junior year.
Cory Brand knocking them down.
Home run.
Single.
Double.
Single.
Home run.
He finds a group named Queen, and he starts playing “Another One Bites the Dust” after each game.
People aren’t just watching him with interest anymore.
People are talking about him.
And they should be, because he’d be talking about someone like him.
Cory doesn’t know what it feels like to be arrogant because he’s still some poor kid living on a farm with a freak of a father who berates him every single day. And every day he bats back and shows him. Maybe not his father, because his father isn’t anywhere around, but he’s showing someone something.
Chapter Eight
Hit and Run
The first thing he thought about when he stepped off the plane and waited for his brother by the gate was how he could get another drink. He felt too good to waste this buzz just for Clay.
Cory never wanted this feeling to stop. It was like playing. The game, the moments, the rush, the thrill. It was a tangible, living and breathing thing, something he could scoop up in his arms and then let go to the amazement of the crowd. They burned inside his head and his heart, these strangers who watched and waited and cheered every movement. Time stood still and breaths would be held all while they waited. Hoping for the same rush and thrill. Hoping for the ride.
Sometimes—no, all the time—it was hard to come down. It was hard to turn off the switch. Normal human beings couldn’t understand being put into a situation like that. The pressure and the madness and the adrenaline and the joy. To feel yourself blast a ball out of the park and then to see a whole host of fans under the bright lights, cheering you on … Nothing compared to it. Nothing.
Eventually the lights were turned off, and the fans went home.
Eventually, Cory was left alone.
And this was just a little help to get to the next game. To the next rush and thrill.
It used to be enough. The immense spectacle of it all. The spotlight on him. The favors that came with it. The women. But eventually none of those nothings could fill the inevitable void.
Drinking did that.
To an extent.
His mouth was dry when he simply nodded at Clay coming toward him. Cory needed to do something about that dry mouth, and quickly.
“Whose closet did you raid?” he asked his brother after noticing what he was wearing for the first time.
Clay wore a matching Nike athletic shirt and a pair of sweatpants, both of which were too large on him. He simply nodded at the joke. “A vastly overpaid and overrated baseball player.”
“He obviously works out to fill those duds.”
“Yeah, but he’s also got chicken legs.”
“You know—if you worked out you might look good in my clothes.”
“I’ll never be as pretty as you.”
Cory rolled his eyes at the brotherly jab. There were only a thousand of them they shared. It was nice to have that one person on this earth who would never think of him as Cory Brand but simply as the annoying older brother who never let him win at anything. The big brother who liked to tease and bully, but who’d spent his whole youth protecting this kid’s butt.
Soon they were in the parking lot, looking for the car Cory had rented. Cory pressed the unlock button on the remote, and a black Corvette nearby greeted them with a chirp.
“You didn’t need to waste money renting a fancy car.”
“I’ve nev
er met an upgrade I didn’t like,” Cory said. “Don’t worry about it.”
When they got into the car, Clay mentioned he was hungry. And Cory was thirsty. He figured they could kill two birds with one well-thrown stone.
“What do you say we make one last stop in civilization?”
Cory started up the engine and then revved it as he smiled and raised his eyebrows at his brother.
After loading up on roast beef sandwiches and jumbo-sized drinks at Arby’s, Cory and Clay walked back to the car to eat their food on the way to Okmulgee. It was an hour to town and another fifteen minutes to the old farmhouse, which Clay and Karen now owned. Before getting into the Corvette, Cory looked through the bag he carried and let out a curse.
“Mr. Arby forgot my curly fries.”
Clay glanced at him across the top of the car with a look that said, What do you want me to do about it?
“Don’t make me go back in there,” Cory said.
“Oh, come on.”
“He nearly cried when I signed his hat. A grown man.”
His brother looked at him in the same old way he used to as a kid when Cory was pulling his leg. “He did not—”
“I swear to you. There were tears.”
“Right.”
Clay’s eyes seemed to be in a perpetual state of rolling whenever he was around Cory. He headed back into the restaurant.
“Don’t forget the Arby’s sauce,” Cory called out.
His brother could only shake his head. This was their typical banter and shtick. It never changed even as they got older.
When the door closed and Clay was inside, Cory popped the trunk on the Corvette and then walked around to the back of the car. He quickly walked to the nearby trash can and tossed the box of curly fries into it. Then he riffled through his duffel bag till he found the thing he’d been thinking about since deplaning.
His eyes scanned the parking lot as he casually poured out most of the Diet Coke in his cup and refilled it with vodka. He closed the lid, then slipped the bottle back into its place. He had a feeling he’d need it later this evening.
The sun began to drift off to sleep in the west as they headed south on the rural two-lane road toward the farm outside Okmulgee. Cory remembered heading the opposite way very well; it had been his escape route out of this place. It seemed like something that had happened to another person, one who’d died just like his mother and father had in the time that had passed since then. That kid was long gone, buried underneath a thousand blurry memories that tried to bury another hundred thousand bad ones.
Cory took a sip from his nearly empty Arby’s cup as he turned up the Led Zeppelin song on the radio and cranked up the engine. Sandwich wrappers shifted on the console next to them. Clay seemed to brace himself. Not another car in sight. The Corvette drifted over the double yellow lines as if it owned them.
“Careful,” Clay shouted above Robert Plant’s wailing voice.
The open road and jamming music summed up exactly how Cory felt. “I love this stretch. Wanna see what this bad boy can do?”
“Not really,” Clay said, holding the handle on the door next to him.
Cory could tell his brother was looking at him, but at this point in the evening he didn’t care.
“Did you drink on the plane?”
Cory laughed as he glanced over at his brother. Then he punched the engine to see how fast they could go.
They flew past a sign saying that Okmulgee was only ten miles away. They were close to the tiny town and the terrible past and those nagging, constant reminders.
Don’t think of them now—just drive.
Cory did just that, trying to outrace the demons following him. The snapshots and the pictures and the running tape and the running figures and the dancing balls and the screaming faces.
Clay shouted something, but Cory didn’t hear the words. He was just thinking about when the levee might break and the past would come gushing out over him like a Gatorade bucket full of hurt and disappointment.
“You coulda been so much more, boy.”
Thanks, Pop.
“I miss you, son.”
But I had to get outta here, Ma.
“You never loved me and never loved us and you left us to fend for ourselves.”
This voice hurt the most, and now Cory drove out of anger.
Mean old memories are just as mean as that levee, aren’t they?
In the blur of the past and the present, Cory saw it but couldn’t react quickly enough. A fastball that he didn’t have time to hit. Like swinging the bat, Cory instantly jammed on the brakes
no no no it’s coming up too quick
as the slow-moving tractor jutted across the highway
going down going down
and he swung and tried to make it but the car shook and veered off and struck a side and smashed and all the while Cory could only think of one thing in the madness of his mind.
Clay
He walks down the street in the middle of the black night with no car around for miles, and he vows to keep walking until he passes out or he’s struck by a semi. The blood he spits up is all over his hands and his shirt and pants, but it’s so dark in the middle of this nowhere that he barely knows how bad he looks. He can taste blood, but he thinks it’s from his cut lip.
Soon he’ll realize that a couple of ribs are broken and it’s not just his lip bleeding.
Tomorrow he’ll see crimson-splattered Nike shoes and jeans and a shirt. His right fist will show bloody scrapes from trying to fend off his father. Punching the side of the house and the railing on the deck didn’t help either. He will see the black eye and the J-shaped gash along his cheek.
But mostly Cory will see those eyes that finally know. That finally understand.
He can count on one hand the amount of times his father’s hit him. But earlier tonight, everything that happened—with Mom screaming and crying and eventually taking off with Clay in the car and Cory standing off with his father—it was pure and utter insanity.
The games had gotten to him. Cory was starting to feel big, and maybe his dad thought he didn’t have many more chances to make his son feel small. The old game of standing beside the barn and taking in the blistering pitches no longer worked. Cory would hit every single ball. He’d try to stop the grin from washing all over his face. Every single hit was a message.
You’re not better than me, you foolish old man.
But on this night, the old man was better than him. Because Cory decided to make a stand, and he got beat up. Badly.
His father shoved him back once. Then moved in and punched him over and over and over again. With punches that felt like they’d been stored up inside for a long time.
When Cory finally fell to the floor and bent over and spit out blood, something clicked.
Good old Dad stood there looking at him in horror, his drunken eyes suddenly sobering up and realizing. Then he spoke Cory’s name, but it was all done.
Cory needed help standing up, but then he stood before the monster and asked if he was done. His father started to cry like a baby, and Cory just cursed at him. Then he walked out the door.
He doesn’t care about baseball or Emma or this farm or Okmulgee. All he wants is to get far, far away. He is going to walk to California and start a new life.
But sometime around midnight, Cory stops on the side of a lonely two-lane rural highway. He sits down and puts his arms around his legs and begins to cry. Everything leaks out. Everything.
Chapter Nine
Error
Cory wasn’t sure if it was the collision with the tractor or the ambulance ride to the hospital that sobered him up. If he was forced to blow in a Breathalyzer, it would surely reveal that he was technically inebriated. But as he sat in the chair in the
lonely waiting area in the hospital, he felt the cold, hard slap of reality striking him across the face again.
He already felt hungover, even though the buzz hadn’t completely worn off. And Cory knew all too well that not all hangovers are created equal.
He could still remember his first and last encounter with Jack Daniel’s in high school. It hadn’t been pretty. The last thing he remembered was sitting in the backseat between two pretty girls while holding a bottle between his legs. The next memory was ten hours later, when he woke up in his boxers in the basement of one of those girls’ houses. The parents knew, of course. All the parents knew, including his own. He’d gotten in a lot of trouble for that one, but the worst thing had been how bad his head and stomach felt.
Cory hadn’t blamed it on himself, however. He blamed it on the awful taste of the whiskey.
There was a time while playing baseball in college that he’d decided to drink only wine one evening. His stomach was beginning to hurt from all the beer he’d been drinking, so like an idiot he decided to try to drink cheap wine instead. As if he was drinking beer. That had made the Jack Daniel’s hangover seem like child’s play.
Now he sat in a hospital waiting room, the throbbing in his head minor compared to the guilt he felt. Like every drunk driving cliché, Cory had walked away from the collision with the tractor with only some bumps and bruises. A nice square bandage on his forehead was taped over a cut he’d received from the broken glass flying everywhere. He also walked away without getting another DUI, all because of Clay.
Clay was going to be fine. He looked awful—broken arm and some broken ribs and other bumps and bruises—but the guy on the ambulance was confident that Clay’s injuries weren’t serious.
’Course you thought he might be dead the moment you looked at him once the careening car came to a rest and he just sat there hunched over and bleeding.
Cory had gotten a response from Clay, thankfully. Then when the county cop arrived, Cory was out of the car while Clay still sat inside. The guy’s name was Murphy—that’s what Clay said when he saw him. Clay told him to call an ambulance but made up some excuse about Cory and him being distracted in the car. Murphy recognized Cory, of course, and seemed a bit starstruck.
Home Run: A Novel Page 6