by Kyle Beachy
After a while, the balls hardly appeared to move at all. They waited for me and I obliged, crushing them back to the machine. I formalized the technique of my swing. The hips, the shoulders, the hands coming downward through the zone. More tokens. More swing. But there was only so much satisfaction in conquering that which was presented on a platter. When the red light turned off, I took my plastic cup and stepped out of the slow cage.
I sat holding a can of Fanta in each hand, cold metal easing the blisters already forming on my palms. Calluses gone, hands soft. A few men were discussing this afternoon’s game. We had apparently called up a catcher from our Triple-A Memphis affiliate to fill in for the starter, who was suffering from back spasms. Poor old crumbling veteran catcher. Explanation for spasms likely that he spent his whole professional life crouched. His replacement was twenty-two years old and had spent four years in the minor leagues. I sipped a Fanta for Derril Brandt, the rookie, his first day in the Show, then walked into the only other available cage.
Token in, red light on, I stood waiting. The ball rocketed out of the machine, and I watched the hanging rubber square shudder. Watched a token’s worth of balls slung toward me with enough backspin that I could see the pitch climb on its approach.
A group of construction workers took turns in the cage next to me. Hourly wages, laughter, recreation. Between tokens I watched. I admired but no longer envied. Work alone would not be my salvation. I dropped a token into the machine and waited. I felt my trigger and swung, missed, and saw the shadow of the rubber padding swing. The sun had crested and shadows were growing longer.
The balls thudded against rubber, then gathered at my feet. Another token and I began to catch up. My hands were being rubbed raw. Finally I caught a piece of ball, just a nick, a tip, fouling it off into the fence. The light went out.
“Zooming, ain’t it.”
A man was standing outside the cage with his arms crossed. A big but I wouldn’t say tall man, flat wide face, eyes pinched close and shaded by the barely curved brim of his ball cap. He could have been any of a number of coaches I had known in my life, those authoritarians who barked help but could also chatter for days. Watching the kid who can’t seem to catch up with a single pitch.
“It’s like I can’t swing early enough,” I said.
I had to go down the slide. I had to make sure my top hand rolled over the bottom hand on my follow-through. Had to minimize the stroke. I had to calm the bat head while waiting. I kicked the balls forward and fed another token to the slot.
“You’re lifting your head,” he said. “You’re backing out of there; you’re scared of something. Got to stay over it.”
He was absolutely right.
“You’re right. Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me,” he said.
More tokens, more missing. What had been pain in my hands faded to complete numbness. There were natural mechanics, that which the body did instinctively, versus that which was learned, forced, trained. The towering overhead lights flickered on and I thumbed another token into the slot. I hit a few weak ground balls. The other cages had cleared out. But there was no point going back to anything slower now; I was catching up.
On the next token, I found the rhythm. My trigger went earlier and my timing fell into place. To hit a ball square was a satisfaction unlike any other in life. And when I caught one a bit out in front of me and pulled it into what would be left field, the cheap bat responded with that clap sound like fwap, solid, and the dimples whizzed into the fencing.
“There you go,” the man said. “There you go.”
The most wonderful rhythm. After a few more of these it came to me; I knew what to do. I would immerse myself in the ethos of our national pastime. I would chew tobacco and coach some kind of team, Little League or Legion ball or anything I could find. Yes. I would lug bags of equipment and clap encouragement and say things twice. Speaking with them as this man spoke to me.
“You see what the Redbirds did today?” I asked.
“Yes sir. This kid Brandt might could turn into something.”
“That’s what I hear. Good for him,” I said.
Let this be the point. The rhythm of amicable speech, common interest between strangers. I would find a wife. We would attend the church of her choice, another weekly rhythm. I would grow myself a mustache, mow the lawn, and listen to sports radio. I would have children by former wives with whom I would maintain contact via the language and ritual of baseball.
The man said, “Left too many runners on base, though. Again. It’s what I been saying all summer. Keep swinging the bats like this, and we’re going nowhere.”
“The bats are starting to come around,” I said.
“I got my doubts about the bats. Bullpen’s getting tired also.”
“You said it. You nailed it with the bullpen.”
I would advocate the use of military force abroad to protect our national interest and pastime. I would buy a home buried somewhere deep in the county, a place west enough that my commute would be long, an important portion of each day, and I would appreciate my car.
“How many more coins you got in there?”
“Just a few more,” I said.
“You know, back when I played we used to drill a hole straight through a ball, run a piece of string through there, and tie it off, then take our cuts from a tee. Nothing like this place. Didn’t even know it was here until yesterday. Came by yesterday, then back today.”
The allure of the cage, a place where arms swung or stayed comfortably crossed.
“Then what happened sometimes was the string would break. You hit it so hard the string would tear apart. Or other times the knot would rip clean off. Always felt like you did something right when it happened. You’d see the ball go fly off into the distance and think maybe you were due some kind of reward. Then you realized the only reward was having to go get the damn ball.”
I laughed through a swing, then let two pitches go while I refocused. Once more, the sun released its hold on the day. The etymology of token, the satisfaction of it disappearing into the slot. Aside from two young women in one of the softball cages, everyone else was gone. The pitching machine churned, the red light came on, I swung, the red light went off.
“ ’Bout time for you to wrap it up.”
I looked at the man outside my cage. His arms were no longer crossed. One of the overhead lights flickered.
“Is it closing time?”
“I’m getting real tired of waiting out here.”
“Oh hey, I’m sorry,” I said. “Got so wrapped up in my swings I didn’t realize you were waiting. I don’t mind taking turns.”
“Not waiting for the cage,” he said. “Waiting for you to step out.”
A man all shoulders and chest, jaw prominent. He pointed a finger through the fence.
“You got some serious pain and harm coming your way.”
I stood holding the bat in two hands rubbed bloody by athletic tape. My shoulders ached fiercely. I glanced down at my green Pine Ridge polo shirt, drenched with perspiration, then looked back to the man across the fence.
“There’s a lesson to be learned in what’s coming. Take heart in that. Lesson is stay your ass away from other people’s kids unless you’re looking to get beat real real bad.”
The girls were gone. Just like that, nighttime had returned. Where had I been all day? Here? The machine waited for a token.
Mr. Worpley crossed his arms and leaned closer to the fence. Colors in the fluorescent light were harsh and cold. Eyes that appeared black. Eyes like shotguns, face of fire. My hands trembled around the cheap bat and I forced them to grip tighter. If he came at me I would have a weapon.
“At least now you know. Tonight’s the night you’re gonna find a bad corner of life. Soon as you step out of that cage. How’s that feel, knowing?”
“Difficult to say.”
“Smart mouth, ain’t you? Well, you can count on this. It’s gonna hurt, true as the rain
and the dark and every other god-awful fact of the world. And it won’t change either, talk all you want.”
I could, of course. Talk to perpetuity. But any words at my disposal had been systematically drained, rendered insufficient. What nouns? What verbs?
“You might not even be a pervert. I sort of doubt you are. I don’t know who you are and I don’t care either way. Come around my house and this is what has to follow.”
I had wronged this man terribly. One minute my face pressed to the wife’s chest, her fingers tearing into my back. Then she was above me and I was reaching up to her face. I remembered the bat and looked down at my hands, pale skin flapping over raw patches of blood. The mistake was approaching Ian without any of society’s established blessings. The boy and his alien world I couldn’t hope to understand; sympathy versus empathy. I lifted off my helmet and leaned the bat against the fence. Anything I’d done to Ian I had also done to his father. But I was not a pervert, as far as I knew. I wanted to say something, tell him about purity of intention, innocence, and a desire to help. I lifted the latch and stepped out of the cage.
“I never touched your son. Or hurt him on purpose. And there’s something else I should say, regarding your wife. I shouldn’t have slept with her. It’s just. It’s all very.”
The first blow was a sweeping right haymaker that caught me just below my eye. I stumbled, then hovered for a moment while the jolty echo knocked around my skull. Lost balance and fell forward to my hands and knees. Then the sidewalk, which I was relying on for support in this dire moment of need, shot a slab of concrete up into my chest, spinning me onto my back. Like nothing I’d felt. Kick. It was a kick. Then he was standing over me, rocking back and forth as he leveled more kicks into my ribs and abdomen.
My left eye closed of its own accord. Halfway there. T. Worpley stood over me like an actual giant, fairy-tale notion, the boy’s mythical father. And perhaps this was all the proof I needed. He stopped kicking and I saw his boots move a few steps away. He stopped. I thought to stand up, but this was impossible. I heard a long series of heavy breaths. When I saw him step back toward me I thought to try harder, then thought to play dead, then thought of the time Audrey and I went to the zoo, how she hated the zoo but I dragged her along because, I tried desperately to explain, it was while watching monkeys cavort that I best understood mankind.
He knelt over me and pummeled downward, so now gravity was in on the act as well. Each punch gathered steam in those terrific, round shoulders, then spread in compact, economic motions to his arms and fists. He punched my chest and stomach and I tried to roll and lift and he punched my face and now I was all the way on the ground now, for good.
He ran a jackhammer, this man, and not one of those pussy forty-five-pounders. City would be in trouble without him, as my father had said to Ian. He was talking through clenched lips, and if I concentrated very hard I could almost make out his words, the passwords and whatever he could have taught me.
Each impact made for a cluster of floating candles out on the borders of the world. This was probably for the best. Get me off the streets. I smiled into his fist. Dancing candles floated out there but not as far anymore. I heard a terrific crack, and the candles got too close.
labor day
when our progress slowed enough to see and understand the faces around us, we knew we had become part of the thing. A winding line like a pilgrimage of deep conviction, our procession to the New West County Mall. The traffic was everything the media had predicted, but also good-natured, in a sense; a self-selecting club of we who had been duly warned and had come anyway. Eventually we made it off the highway and found police in white gloves playing conductors, the new traffic lights not yet fully operational. They pointed and waved and chirped whistles. I felt pain in my cheeks, the bruises, which meant I was smiling. I turned to see Audrey in the passenger seat next to me, smiling back.
“I feel like you always kind of wanted a broken nose,” she said.
“I kind of did. You’re right.”
She was wearing jeans I recognized and a shirt with tiny sleeves that left her arms bare. She was tanned a deep olive, her face freckled astronomically. Pretty Audrey come to visit her college boyfriend.
Nine days since waking, I still felt some residual, lingering sense of wonder for the dimensions of the world, common enough among those who brush against death. I was enjoying it. There was a hot-air balloon floating above the parking lot. The police passed us off to attendants in orange vests waving orange flags, and soon we were walking, crossing the blacktop slowly while others passed us by, moving with the quick, gaping strides of anticipation. I was happy to have Audrey at my side. As we neared the structure we saw clowns painting faces and ponies being led in slow circles through hay. There was a radio station broadcasting live on location with a mixture of their morning hosts and their afternoon hosts. My face began hurting again.
It’s easy to imagine a parallel world wherein she was there when I awoke in the hospital, her face gleaming above me, tanned and present. In reality, my mother, back home after a lengthy stay at my bedside, heard the cell phone ringing in the junk drawer, saw Audrey’s name, answered, and explained. She had then gone to the computer in my father’s office and booked her a ticket. Between waking in that bed, flanked by a parent on each side, and Audrey’s arrival, I was given a week to prepare. On top of the entire summer. Driving to the airport was my first venture from the house, and I waited for her outside security. There were people all around me. I observed their shapes and motions, their interwoven desires and individual contingencies, and it made a solid kind of sense. She had lied about shaving her head. Funny girl.
When we made it into the mall, we approached a large display map surrounded by a crowd of the overwhelmed and stimulated. Squeezing through while I watched over shoulders, Audrey pointed one finger to a large purple square, then squeezed back out, and we walked as a pair to the toy superstore, through a great jingling maw of moving parts and gesticulating robots. I secured a shopping cart while she watched a man in a giraffe suit pose for photographs with frightened children. Pushing our cart along the aisles, I took time to read the backs of boxes and kept only the toys buttressed by what I considered sufficient narrative history, those with some role in a grander story, however ridiculous. Pieces to some whole, armies of good and evil and a war that crossed the galaxy to land on our planetary doorstep.
I had explained that I wanted to make a donation, and she had smiled, and nodded, and left it at that. I hadn’t asked her many questions either, so the facts I knew were only those she had shared without prompt. She and Carmel were joined first by a writer and photographer from London, male, whom she referred to as the scribe. There were three Australians, trolls in disguise, from whom they were eventually forced to flee under the cover of Italian night. The search for the faeries began after meeting two South African witches, benevolent, who had tracked them (the faeries) across the better part of Europe, until finally uncovering a herd of them in Budapest. It was soon after finding the faeries that Audrey split with the robot and the others, spending the rest of her time alone, moving at will and whim, sometimes boarding trains for the sole reward of watching field and hills scroll by. She’d been home since the middle of August.
To make things fair, I told her of the covetous ogre driven by American myths of success and fulfillment, skilled in the equally American arts of manipulation and selective ethical disregard. I mentioned the wingless angel who lived in town (location ambiguous), who learned and taught the meanings of certain important words. And I spoke of a half-orphaned boy to whom I had spoken Audrey’s name, and my failed hero’s quest to locate and retrieve his mother. I mentioned a ghost only in passing. She allowed every abstraction, shrugging aside the euphemism and glaring holes of my story and focusing, instead, on what moral I could take away from the summer. If it was a story, she said, which it should be, then there would be a moral.
“Otherwise what’s the point?”
<
br /> “Alright,” I said. “One thing would have to be about history, and that when you and the people around you ignore the history you share, or shove it aside to some dark corner of a dark room, you do that history a grave injustice. Meanwhile, we’re always searching for answers that we presume must be hidden somewhere. And the desperate faith that answers do in fact exist, the frustration of this search, might explain why we’re always beating and clawing at one another, like what’s inside you might remedy or at least explain what’s inside me. And so we become tangled and implicated in each other’s lives in ways we maybe shouldn’t be. That not everybody wants your help. Or maybe, simply put, the moral is all things change. All meaning all. Staying the same only means changing in parallel, and is a kind of miracle when it lasts. Oh, and also that the center of a place, of any community, is desirable in a way that people who reside on the edges won’t ever understand. My father is right on that. I buy it completely.”
She said that was nice, then was silent for a minute before saying hers had to do with movement, with borders and how they define, or fail to define, and also how the world is overflowing with men who have no idea what to do with a full-size penis.
We drove with the toys to the Goodwill office downtown, following one-way alleys until we found the donation dock. There, teams of men wearing thick leather gloves unloaded furniture from a flatbed truck. To begin the process, I handed over an envelope containing the five hundred dollars my mother had given me at the mall. A woman with a clipboard asked if I wanted a receipt. I said no thank you, then Audrey and I began removing toys from my trunk. Call it atonement or call it generosity. Poorly veiled selfishness. Call it buying my way out or really call it anything at all. I focused on a thought of a boy or girl holding a new toy. The unloading went quickly with two of us, and soon we’d filled two industrial laundry carts with shiny and sharp-edged boxes, everything but the two baseball gloves I asked her to leave in the backseat.