Becky's Kiss

by Fisher, Nicholas

  “It’s got to be Rutledge,” he whispered, “because there’s something I need to show you there.”

  He backed off then and rested his hand on the maple tree right by Dad’s new birdhouse.

  “It’s a place, really, a space, an area, totally magic.”

  “Magic? How?”

  “For one thing, no timer,” he said. Then he backed up a step and disappeared into the shadows.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Becky crossed County Line Road, and when she saw a set of headlights coming, she broke into a run, even though she’d vowed not to get sweated up. But she had no intention of getting caught out here, breaking curfew, so she burst in full sprint across the school’s front lawn to the left of the black tiger mascot statue, around past the dimly lit theater parking area, the back lot, and then down the wide gravel path to the meadow at the farthest edge of the property.

  It was nearly pitch black, and she slowed to a walk, her breath hoarse. Suddenly, she was afraid that she’d step in a ditch back here and pitch forward straight on her face. Cicadas were chirring like mad, and a cool wind crept across the grass. Her eyes were adjusting to the gloom, and the trees at the outskirts looked tall and dark, black sentinels, watching, waiting, making her feel incredibly small. Becky’s arms broke out in goose bumps, and she was afraid. Childhood monsters and phantoms came back in a flood of memory, and she tried her best to shake them off, to convince herself that this was a grown-up thing to do, not some childish nightmare. She was going to melt into the arms of the love of her life. It’s what teenagers lived for.

  She almost ran into the girls’ softball backstop, adjusted, and then moved on past it, a rise to her left with high weeds leading into the stretch of forest that flanked County Line Road and marched all the way to the Community College. Finally, she reached the varsity field at the back edge of the deepest part of this massive rectangle cut into the wood. She crossed over the pitcher’s mound, and behind the third baseline, she could make out the thick stand of trees, intertwined with vines and briars and brush and overgrowth. She was just thinking about how many balls probably got lost in there, the righties fouling off the old ‘neck-tie’ high and tight, the lefties protecting away, and then she saw him.

  “Danny!” she whispered.

  He was there, sitting on the bench. She could see his outline in the darkness through the fence, the silhouette of his hat brim pointing upward like he was wearing it all cool on the back part of his head.

  He stood.

  She went through the batter’s gateway, approached heavily, and threw her arms around his neck. He embraced her, and they pressed together, form and contour. He had the fragrance of some old-school cologne on him that brought up images of churches, mountains, valleys, and sunsets. She closed her eyes and melted into him, head in the crook made by his neck and shoulder, hot wax spreading into the grooves and grains of some lovely antique.

  He broke away softly, still holding her hands in his. His voice had rust in it, thick with emotion, managed, but barely.

  “I’ve been waiting a long time for you, Becky Michigan.” He closed his eyes and murmured, “And gosh-darn, you’re sweet as pie.” He looked at her seriously then, all business. “But you’ve got to know something about me. I mean, I’m going to tell you everything soon, the whole deal, I swear, but for now I owe it to you to come clean about one thing in particular.”

  “What?” Becky said, not really caring, still riding high from the hug, and the way he’d just said her name like some precious fragment of poetry. And oh-my-Goodness, wasn’t it just so real to have him holding both her hands like this, unconsciously running his thumbs across her knuckles!

  He let go.

  “Touching me has benefits,” he said bluntly.

  “Don’t I know it…”

  “That’s not what I mean.” He looked at his feet. “I don’t wanna scare you away or anything.”

  “I’m not scared.”

  “You will be.”

  “Try me.” Her lip was jutted out a bit in defiance. There was no way on this green earth that this boy could frighten her. He put his hands in his pockets and kept his glance lowered.

  “What I’m saying is that my touch is like magic. Not kiddie magic, like pulling a rabbit out of a hat, but…weird magic, like dark magic, giving you visions of things you’d never dream you could see.”

  “I don’t want any ‘visions.’

  He looked up with a saddened smile in his eyes.

  “But you’re about to get one that’s gonna knock you flat on your butt just the same. It comes with the territory. The first one is a freebie, and you get to choose.”

  Becky didn’t believe a word of it, but she didn’t love him any less for it either. She shook her hair out of her face.

  “Fine. Let’s do this.”

  He took a deep breath, as if a colossal worry had just been lifted from his shoulders, and a little smile crept into his face.

  “Ok,” he said. “Name it.”

  “Name what?”

  “Your vision. What is it you’d like to see? Be creative.”

  “The birth of Jesus.”

  He laughed and it sounded like music.

  “Within reason, geez!”

  She folded her arms, mouth open in the shape of a grin that said, ‘Hey…you’re teasing me and I kind of like it!’ She made a quick recovery, and came back with, “You. I want to see a vision of you when you were five.”

  He gave a blank sort of stare, and then a little nod of the head.

  “Okay then.”

  She waited, feeling rather triumphant that she’d made a proper call in this odd little game, and nothing happened.

  “Well?” she said.

  “Give it a second.”

  And then…

  …in an instant transfer of physical presence, she was suddenly a lamp post. There was no thinking process within its cold shell, because of course it was a lamp post, but she knew that nine-hundred-thousand, four-hundred-and-fifty-nine birds had perched on her arm since her birth. Her flood had been changed a record twelve times only, and from her position, she’d seen many human things illuminated there in her glow between chipped curb and asphalt street: three car accidents, all of them fender-benders, walkers, joggers, passing skateboarders, prom dates, bad parking jobs, good parking jobs, arguments, lots of ladies with shopping bags, guys with briefcases, and kids with tricycles.

  None of these things had proportion or form, because she was a lamp-post after all, and while Becky couldn’t ‘see’ these things in lamp-post number 257’s history, she recorded them as ideas, like check marks, or statistics. Most important, she could see very well what was there in the lamp light at this moment in time, positioned on the sidewalk, and though number 257 didn’t feel any kind of way about it, Becky Michigan certainly did.

  There were two faces looking up into the glow for a moment, measuring its level of illumination for some kind of purpose, and then they were eye to eye with each other: a man with handsome lines carved deep in his face, and he was squatting down to speak to this boy, this beautiful boy, five years old, in a red Phillies t-shirt and matching red shorts, and it was Danny, and he was possibly the cutest, sweetest little thing Becky had ever seen in her entire life, like an angel-babe with curly blonde hair, nodding in exaggerated agreement as the man, who appeared to be his father, gave him advice, orders far too advanced for any five year old, but delivered with a grown man’s intensity just the same.

  “Listen to me,” he was saying. “You have a talent, Daniel, an ability like I’ve never seen before. It’s a gift from God, and you’re gonna change the game. Bank on it, I’m here with you, buddy, every night, every day, I don’t care if I’ve got to quit my job and walk a thousand miles!”

  They both laughed, like it was a humorous personal saying they’d exchanged thousands of times over, and Danny was actually jumping up and down with it and waving his hands in the air like five-year-olds were notorious for doi
ng when they heard their various ‘trigger-jokes.’ Dad reached and hugged him, and then he had Danny’s hands like Danny had just held Becky’s, and he was serious again, making Danny look in his eyes.

  “Now remember everything we’ve been working on, shoulders slightly inside your feet, back elbow up but relaxed, head straight—“

  “And core coming forward, not away through the swing!” Danny finished triumphantly.

  The dad then reached behind and grabbed for a bucket that had multi-colored balls in it. He set it next to him and put a baseball glove under his knee. Last, he got a metal pole about an inch-and-a-half thick and three feet long, held it like a scepter, and posed there for a second, one knee up and one knee in the glove.

  Soft toss, Becky thought. He’s going to underhand those little balls from the side into the strike zone and see if little Danny can connect with that skinny pole. And he’s insane. It’s too hard. The balls are too small, and the ‘bat’ is too thin.

  “You love baseball, kid?” he said, handing over the pole.

  “Yes, Da-da!”

  He scraped the bucket over closer and dug in carefully.

  “You gonna break every record?”

  Little Danny had the pole and was looking at it like it was the funniest thing in the world, and his smile was so animated it went cheek to cheek, and he spoke lovingly and spoke to the pole.

  “I want to win, and I’m gonna hit a home run every time, and I’m gonna have an ice cream party that lasts all night and haa-ho!”

  “Ready position,” Dad said, and things changed. Beautiful little Danny went from a gorgeous five-year-old to a cold, oiled machine, his stance perfect, pole up, then cocked back on the shoulder. In his eyes, the five-year-old’s joyous glint had sharpened to a fierce, animalistic gleam. Then Dad made the task even harder.

  “I’m going to call a color, big boy. Ignore the other two colors, and hit the ball I tell you, line drives only, no pop ups, no misses.”

  “Bring it,” Danny said.

  Dad let his arm swing down, and in rhythm little Danny rocked back to the rear foot, and as Dad’s hand came forward to toss, this tiny five-year-old started moving through his swing—perfect form, perfect lines.

  Three golf wiffle balls went up in the air toward little Danny, the yellow higher than the other two, the red and the blue only an inch apart on their downward arc, and Dad called out, “Blue!”

  And little Danny ripped the pole through the zone in a swing that looked both beautiful and deadly, air hissing, wrists snapping over, pole striking the blue ball clean and sending it in a whizzing line drive off into the darkness beyond the glow of the light pole. Little Danny followed through, then quickly drew back the pole into a hitter-ready position.

  Dad dug in the bucket, threw three balls in the air and again called a color.

  Little Danny went twelve for twelve, all line drives, all hard as heck, and after the twelfth, he dropped the pole to the ground, and Dad reached for him, and Danny’s face was a picture of joy as Dad scooped him up under the arms, stood, and spun the small boy in circles.

  The scene faded, and Becky was on her rear, right there on the ground as advertised. She turned to Danny, and he was sitting on the bench with his head hanging down.

  “I miss him,” he said.

  It wasn’t too much of a stretch to figure that his father had passed, and Becky wanted to comfort him. But the act of becoming a light pole and sharing its dull consciousness had left her a bit woozy, and she kept her place there below him.

  “He believed in you, huh?”

  “He was everything. More than a best friend, ya know?” He looked up at the sky, as if searching for his father up there. “I hit my first wiffle ball when I was three-and-a-half, right back at his face so hard it made him fall back on the grass. It was all baseball then, every night in the warm weather until it got dark, wiffle balls to tennis balls to hard balls…heck, I was hitting six thousand pitches a summer by the time I was five. It’s how we bonded, how we passed the time, how we had something to look forward to together. I didn’t grow up with toys and action figures. I came into my own with a bat in my hand, and it was Dad who made it happen, pitch by pitch. I mean, his saying ‘You wanna go to the ball field for a home-run derby, just make sure you lift ’em,’ wasn’t just some special occasion. It was a way of life. My life, you know?”

  Becky nodded. Then, on pure instinct and emotion, she blurted,

  “Oh, my gosh, Danny, I love you so much!”

  Immediately, she brought her hands to her mouth, wanting to push the words back in where they came from. It was selfish of her somehow, with his father’s memory still lingering over them like some fine tropical mist. Danny shifted uncomfortably.

  “You might not love me so much when I tell you the next part.”

  “What next part?”

  He sat forward on the bench, elbows on the knees, hands clasped up by his mouth.

  “You’ll run away screaming.”

  “No I won’t.”

  “You will.”

  “Try me.”

  He looked at her, his eyes actually glowing soft blue in the gloom.

  “I know about your dream, Becky, the one with the eight pitches. There was a saying at the end of it…a saying that didn’t make sense.”

  “Three strikes and you’re in,” Becky whispered. He was right. This was kind of creepy, but she certainly wasn’t about to run away screaming. “What’s it mean?”

  He paused, but only for a second.

  “It’s better if I show you instead of tell you,” he said. “But if I do, you’ll have to be ready for anything, like seeing things in the here and now that make the vision from the lamp post seem lame. Seeing things, like…not of this earth.”

  Becky did not pause, thank you very much.

  “Show me,” she said.

  “It’ll start a cycle, like lighting a fuse,” he said carefully.

  “Let’s light it,” she said.

  “It’ll be strike one,” he said back evenly.

  “Then strike one it is, whatever that means,” she said, standing up and folding her arms. “I’m going to say it again, Danny. I love you so much I almost can’t think straight, and if you want to tell me stories and turn me into light poles and make me trip out and see things, well, whatever.”

  She sifted through her thoughts, prospecting, trying to sound mature.

  “I want to meet your family, and I want to hold you if you’ll let me. I want to have a relationship.” She glanced down and kicked at a pebble, sending it tumbling off into the gloom. “I kind of don’t believe my own eyes anymore anyway…all this “magic,” all these things that have happened.” She looked at him and shook hair out of her face. “And I don’t really care. I just want to be with you and make you stop disappearing all the time.”

  He stood and came near.

  “If you really mean it, Becky…if you won’t freak out seeing weird stuff that couldn’t possibly exist…if you’re ready to put something in motion…something…unnatural but totally natural, something…supernatural…then pitch to me.”

  “What?”

  He came even closer, that rich, wonderful breath mingling with hers, becoming her own.

  “Pitch to me, like my dad used to.”

  “That’s it?” Becky said. “That’s the big “strike one,” the universal, cosmic trigger switch or whatever you call it?”

  “That’s it, all right,” he said. “If you have the guts for it.” He smiled craftily then. “But don’t worry. If you decide to pitch to me, Becky Michigan, I promise to lift ’em, nothing coming back at you straight through the chute.”

  Something crackled in the air, and the moment of awkward, unworldly promises twisted to an edge that was hard and competitive. Becky moved even closer so their noses were almost touching, like two boys about to fight in the schoolyard.

  “Lift ’em?” she said. “You aren’t even gonna get wood, not even a foul tip. This ain’t so
ft toss under a lamp post.”

  “You’re good, but you ain’t that good.”

  “Really? Well, let’s just find out tomorrow then, huh?”

  “Why wait?”

  Becky’s heart was pounding time to this strange mixture of sexual tension and the desire to throw one by him at ninety eight miles per hour.

  “It’s kind of dark, isn’t it?”

  “Follow me,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “To the magic place.” He was already heading toward foul territory, becoming one with the brush and the darkness.

  Becky Michigan took a deep breath. Then she followed him into the woods.

  Chapter Twenty

  It was difficult at first, considering the prickers, the hardened vines that snaked across the forest floor, the stones jutting out at odd angles, and the branches crisscrossing in the dark. There was a creek nearby, Becky could hear it, and off to the left, down in a short gully, she could have sworn there was some family of small animals scratching and scattering in the leaves. There were faint slants of moonlight coming through, but only in odd places, making random angles. At one point, there was a long, black shape blocking the path, a mammoth upended tree trunk, and as Becky side-saddled over it, she saw the massive roots at one end reaching out like the gnarled fingers of some petrified witch.

  Then the path got a bit more defined and there was a fence, a chain-link fence over-run and patterned with ivy. It was waist high, and Danny climbed it with a casual ease. Becky following suit, catching the bottom cuff of her jeans for a second but pulling free just in time to avoid a tumble.

  She hopped down and followed, the area before her coming into definition, the dark sky above now open and clear of the forest roof that had obstructed it.

  There were ferns as high as Oklahoma rye gently waving and bobbing in the night breeze that blew across what used to be the infield, and no dugouts, but rather wooden player’s benches bordered by high fencing choked with overgrowth. The back stop rose up high to the right, and two massive trees behind had actually ensnarled their branches in it, as if making to rip the structure straight from the ground. The outfield was a jungle of marsh and reeds, the scoreboard in center field rising up against the surrounding forest like some dark and cancerous tomb stone.