Just North of Nowhere

by Lawrence Santoro

  Ruth Potter sat across the oak table at the back of the reading room. A grandfather clock ticked ponderously in the dark over her shoulder. A sonorous mechanical escapement ratcheted time from one side of eternity to the other. The clock seemed slower than passing seconds.

  A glass photographic plate lay on the table between them. Framed in dark wood, a small white spot on the edge bore a note in faded ink. Jill couldn't make out the details of the picture, but it seemed to be of people, people on a field, playing a game possibly. Probably old, from a time when glass carried pictures.

  “Here, have this.”

  Ruth shoved a plastic drinking glass into Jill's hand. A half-inch of oily yellow liquid sloshed inside.

  “What?”

  “Aquavit. Don't worry, I didn't give it to the kids. They were ready to accept this. You're not. I know I wasn't when I first slipped through.”

  “Slipped...?”

  “Through, yes. Don't worry. It won't hurt. You can't do it yourself, I don't think. But I can take you. You have to hold my hand on the way. Or I have to hold yours...” Ruth's mouse-dry hand covered Jill's big mitt. “Take some aquavit. Just to relax.”

  Jill sniffed the stuff. Heady, spice-smelling. She tasted it. Thick. “Cardoman?” she asked. “Smells like my granddad...”

  “Take it all,” Ruth said, and picked up the photograph. “I want you to know: This...” she waved the plate. “It's all real, and it all takes just that long!”

  The clock ground out a long thump as five o'clock chimes began.

  Jill downed the thick stuff. Across the table, Ruth Potter became summer heat, she dissolved to sunlight and a long view...

  ...of the baseball field at Elysium Park. The lingering scent of cardoman morphed into air that smelled of horse dung, dirt, dust, and bees. Wet heat wrapped her in a damp blanket of summer. The silence of the library washed away in the passion and shouted joys of a ball game...a play in progress...a high ball descending into the outfield...men running, shouting to take the thing from the air...the crowd howling to shove it further along...beyond the grip of converging fielders. And...

  ...beyond the white-lime diamond, the rushing men and falling ball, the grass flowed into the outfield and far beyond, a green carpet cut and rolled all the way to the trees. It was so close to Elysium, yet not. There were no houses along the park's edge. No! One. Almost lost in trees, was the old Victorian that retired doctor had fixed up. The place stood alone. Different. The colors different. A stable in back. Nothing else near. None of the houses that had been there...there for years.

  Above, on top of the bluffs, stood a vast rambling stone house. Damn near a castle. From where she sat, Jill could just make out its tops and turrets.

  “Burroughs’s house...” Ruth Potter pointed with her chin at the house on the cliff. “The photographer.” She had to shout above the crowd. “The man who built that, took this picture.”

  Jill couldn't keep her eyes on one place, the game, the house, houses, trees, Ruth, field, or people. She drank it all. The field! The field! Her eyes grabbed and held. The field was different. Was the same. Dimensions the same, that hadn't changed. No, it was baseball. Same as always. And different. No chain link backstop behind home plate. A low split-rail fence separated the crowd from the catcher, batter, umpire, the game. The fence offered no protection from missed pitches or spinning fouls. It simply marked a border: “Beyond here is Baseball” it said!

  Twenty feet off the third base line, where now – where in Jill’s “now” – visitor’s busses parked, where moms and dads waited in station wagons – now a sun-bleached white canvas pavilion stood on flattened grass. Its canvas top bellied out in the breeze, sagged in the stillness. The tent was filled with people. Their noise spilled onto the grass, onto the field. People mingled, drank steins of beer, smoked cigars. The crowd filled the hot blue white afternoon and flies filled the air.

  Jill's eyes kept moving. She licked her lips and tasted the memory of aquavit and a “now” of dust. Dust was everywhere at once.

  And the base lines: The lines stretched forever. The trees at the far end of the field seemed the same...or more distant, she didn't know...they were not, but seemed!

  The field dwarfed but embraced the trees, the distance.

  And the game was not of children, but of men. Big men. Their voices bullied away above the crowd, cement and gravel in the player’s throats and calls. Threats and flashes sounded on the field and around her.

  Jill's butt perched on wood, on bleachers of wood that once – or later were, or would be – metal, aluminum, but now were of wood. On the field! The men. She heard them move, could smell them. From the top of the stands, surrounded by others in the heat of the day, July, August, maybe, Jill breathed tobacco, tobacco smoked or spat, and the friendly reek of beer, the sweat of beer and labor and clothes not washed this week, this month, and breath, breath exhaled from meaty guts and hair pomade and other smells of men a century gone.

  Ruth Potter's hand still covered hers.

  She looked at Ruth.

  Ruth smiled. “The Bluffton Loggers,” she shouted over the crowd. “Nineteen-aught one! And there...”

  She pointed to the team in the field...

  “...they are the White Stockings from Chicago. This is a...what do they call it? An exhibit. A game against our team, the logging company's team. It was considered pretty good for its time and place and please don't break my hand Miss Lukowski!”

  Jill still gripped Ruth's fingers, as though the librarian were holding her out the top window of an impossibly tall building. Jill couldn’t let go, not for her life. She would hold on even as she cut off circulation to her own hand.

  “It’s all well,” Ruth yelled, “you don't have to hold on. When I return, you'll come with. Can't help it. You can go. Go wander!”

  Jill eased her grip, but did not let go. She stared at Ruth Potter's small round face and smile.

  “Go. I encouraged the boys to. One of them, I think, by the way, may have had a drink or two. Only beer but they brewed it strong in 1901.” She pointed toward the pavilion. “Weren't careful about underage drinking back then, either. One reason for the Volsted Act, I suspect.”

  Jill barely heard. This was a game of baseball between the Chicago White Stocking, their first year in the American League. This was between men dead for years she couldn't calculate. Men dead before she was born, certainly, were playing here. And she was watching.

  She let the librarian's hand slip slowly away. Nothing happened. She didn’t plummet, she stood. Six feet and more of her rose, and it didn't seem a bit too much. She moved down the bleachers among dead men and women, their now-deceased children ran, breathed, screamed, enjoyed around her.

  The game was the same.

  No! No, it was different. Slower, faster. The ball didn't move as fast nor fly so far. The men moved slower but seemed to do so with more weight, more power, in them. They ran more, risked more, stole more, cheated more, cut more bases. The player’s voices filled the summer. There was violence in them. It was a game of meat and blood and a thrill of competition she'd not seen since... Well, not ever she thought. Well, maybe when I was very, very young...when games were life and death. Yet these were grown men. Professionals, some of them. And they wanted to win, to win more than money. They wanted to win for the blood fun of it.

  She passed through the crowd, aware suddenly of her clothes. She wore what she’d worn to school that morning more than a hundred years from now. A rust red knit shirt hugged her broad shoulders, small chest, tapered over her flat stomach and was coming untucked from her khaki slacks. She wasn't the only woman in pants, big women in canvas pants were not rare she noticed, but Jill seemed to be only one that looked dressed from a rack at K-Mart.

  Coarse woolens worn in this late summer heat brushed her bare arms. There were bodies under the cloth. Real. Solid. Flesh, bone. People a century dust.

  Women turned and stared at Jill’s soft, smooth clothes, men looked
, appraised the Amazon among them.

  She had seen a thousand games of baseball in her life. They'd all been as expected, wins and losses – even surprises were various options of the expected. This! This was the game as seen for the first, the very first, time! Seen under a new sun.

  The play was lopsided. Chicago was killing the Loggers, but the Loggers weren't taking any shit from the pros. They gave almost as good as they got, but lost each play by that much – just a little bit! It was the 'almost' that mattered in this game of inches! A game of inches. The idea never seemed more right than here.

  Blood heat was in the air, everywhere. Shouts and cries, fists flew. Men rolled under her feet and she danced a dodge around them. On the field, only one ump to the game, slides to second bit into deep meat; tag-outs were delivered with roundhouse blows. At least four runners had undressed the catcher at home. The Stockings' pitcher, Katoli, had beaned two consecutive Loggers, putting them on bases – drawing blood from the ear of one – then he retired the side, brushing back the next two men who swung out, growling and flinching!

  Jill saw where Kyle had gripped the concept of dusted batters! From this Bear, Bear Katoli!

  As she watched, Jill saw models for each man her boys had latched onto. The Crab, the Bear all the animals of field and base. The kids had grabbed the passion, but lacked the skills of these men.

  She barely noticed when the game ended. A last out and players and fans alike made for the beer tent. Angry voices and laughter mixed fresh. Shouts and spits. Swedish. Norwegian. German. Accented English and standard cusses! Children mingled, lost among legs, guts and dripping steins and the blue, blue smoke above it all.

  Beneath its shade, the hot canvas sweated a waxy mildew breath. Jill moved among the men. She breathed their smells and that of the beer and the world around them. The lone woman, here, she was not ignored by the men, neither was she welcomed, neither was she denied. She was viewed, measured for what she wasn't...a baseball Annie on the make! Okay, for now.

  Beer was a nickel and she didn't have a nickel. Not one of theirs.

  The stein that thrust into her hand came from a man in a sweat stained Chicago uniform. The center fielder. A tiny man among giants, five-three, maybe five-four! Hard to say his age, they all looked so old, yet Jill knew few were more than 30. Except around the eyes, this one looked young. Among rough beards and burnished skins, he looked like a boy. But if his play had been an indicator, he was rougher than most. He was clean-shaved among thick moustaches spiked to five inches on a side and six day's growth of sandpaper stubble.

  She smiled and tipped the stein to the man. “Thank you,” she shouted over the noise, took a long sip of the shade-cool beer.

  The man pointed to his ear and shook his head... “Hoy,” he shouted. “Will Hoy...” Something like.

  “Thank you, Mr. Hoy!” she shouted. “A good game,” again shouted.

  He pointed to his ears, taping one with his half-empty mug. “Deaf,” he said, thickly and smiled so sweetly, so completely that he filled the place.

  A hand slipped into hers. Jill turned. The tent and its scents, the beer she held, the smile of Will Hoy, and the sound of men dissolved into...

  ...library darkness and its silent dust, the plastic tumbler, Ruth Potter's smile and the second grandfather chime of the five o'clock hour.

  Jill threw down a third aquavit. “Where?”

  “Here.” Ruth offered Jill the glass plate. “In here.”

  Jill jerked back from the thing.

  “It won't hurt. It's real, you see. But not. It's a whole world. Captured by Burroughs, the photographer. He made thousands. I don’t know, but I think each one's a whole world, complete. It's not going back in time. It's visiting another country. But it's a country that is exactly what the world was then. In this case, one warm day in September, 1901.”

  Jill had no idea what she would say next. When it came out, it was: “What were you thinking? Taking those little boys back there! And Leslie Fritz!?”

  “I like that Fritz girl,” Ruth said, splashing another quarter inch into Jill's empty glass. “She seemed to catch on.”

  “To what?!”

  “That to be good at anything, you have to be ready to be bad! Can't be afraid of being awful!” She took a short sniff of the drink. “The stuff on TV! I’ve looked at it. It’s so good. The boys needed a game. A real one, up close. Lopsided and violent. Grown men acting like fools. Not that they couldn't see foolish behavior here any day of the week...”

  “They did that! They saw and they came back wanting to be strapping great...! Male pigs! No talent! They learned to act like fools, indeed!”

  Ruth's smile widened. “I think he was called “Dummy” Hoy,” she said. “He was deaf. I looked him up.”

  They gathered in the classroom. “Close the door,” Jill told Leslie. The door closed. “Draw the shades,” Jill said.

  There were empty seats between each boy and his teammates. Jill held a baseball. “I've been there,” she said. “I've seen the Loggers play the Stockings”

  Utility Walter perked. “You see Sugden spike that big a-hole Logger...what's his name?”

  “Lundgrin!” Pal Johnson yelled. Then they shut up.

  Leslie and Roy sat at the back of the room. Roy shivered staring at a place over Jill's shoulder. Leslie took his hand.

  Jill ignored the question. “Congrats. You now suck. It's official. Each of you's a sore-thumb stand-out. No, congratulations. I mean that!”

  Silence. All eyes on her.

  “You now do not mind being major league whizz-bang paycheck fuck-ups.” There was a titter. Leslie snuffed back snot.

  “Believe it or not, guys, Leslie, that's the right direction. The difference between you and them? They were good. Great, maybe. Maybe the Loggers could have killed in the bigs. I don't know. The Sox did. And they were assholes, too. But they had something going on before that. They were good. They had magic. Assholes and angels.”

  Every eye was on her.

  “You got nothing; you have their piss without their vinegar. Roy?” She looked to the back of the sweltering room. “How many games we have?”

  “Left? One,” he said without looking in the book.

  “Okay, here's the story: tomorrow you all play. It'll be a fudge game. We rotate positions. Roy, you, all of you, will play. Leslie, you too.”

  Roy opened his mouth. Leslie grabbed his hand.

  “That's right Roy: out among the monsters, there will you be! They are there for real and true. Ghosts and beasts, things with fangs and bad breath and blood-dripping guts and an urge to eat you! They'll try to tear you and all you've got is your bat and that stupid Spaulding baseball.” She tossed one to him. He fumbled, dropped it. “You'll live or die on it!”

  Leslie smiled!

  The rest of the team stood cold-cocked. “What we need,” Jill said, looking at the small smooth faces in front of her, “is magic.” She turned to Leslie. “That's your position, Fritz: Witch hitter.”

  Leslie smile flickered.

  “You're also going to catch!” Leslie's smile drooped.

  “You'll suck,” Jill shouted. “You'll be awful, trust me, but you all get a whack at Mr. Spaulding! You're going to play like you want to kill the monsters of field and air. You're going to loose. And you're going to have fun, Goddamnit. Then we'll go have pie.”

  Pandemonium.

  Ruth Potter perched in the bleachers, a cushion under her bum. Pleasant day, not like that unseasonably hot September when Bluffton played Chicago. She'd watched that game how many times now? Good grief!

  Today was only pleasantly warm and the stands were nearly empty. As she understood these things, today counted for nothing. Except for the statistics the game would generate. The opposition Wolverines were good, apparently. Apparently, they would go to play for the league championship, everyone said, no matter what happened here. Her Catbirds were at the bottom of the standings, no place to fall. Even an unlikely win would mean nothi
ng. She smiled.

  The girl, Leslie, was catching. Ruth liked that. She liked that girl. She was strange and a little off. As a ballplayer she was awful, missed the pitched ball more than she caught it. When she missed she got mad and, when mad, she fumed. So few pitches got to her, though. So, awful was the pitcher, Roy, the one who had refused to travel, the boy who had spent his minutes in the library, pressed against the wall, eyes darting here, there, head flicking from side to side. He was the same on the field. Under siege, he seemed, as though invisible things were everywhere. Strange boy, Ruth wondered if he was all right.

  His pitches were weak lobs. They wandered and wiggled. Sometimes it was as though he were hurling at those invisible somethings, those somethings not there. When he did get the ball through what Ruth had learned was an invisible place called “the strike zone”, it entered at the top so high and steep that by the time it came out the other end it had dropped to the bottom and Leslie had to reach to the dirt to catch it.

  “An eephus!” someone near her called it. “Kids got a Goddamned eephus pitch!”

  “Excuse me,” she asked the back of the head, “What's eephus mean?”

  The man turned. He was not a happy man. So few were. “It means nothing, lady. Just that: 'nothin'! A pitch that's not nothin'“

  “Huh. Thank you, she said.” Ruth liked that. “Eephus,” she said. It meant nothing, but she liked the sound.

  A Wolverine swung furiously at one of Roy's eephuses; missed mightily.

  “Hard to hit? One of those eephus things, yes?” She smiled at the scowling man. A Wolverine father, she figured.

  The man growled and turned back to the game.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  An interesting game, baseball. All numbers, names, words, and passion.

  Nothing at stake, Jill was having fun. The kids were enjoying the day, growling and scratching, spitting, farting, pretending. Roy actually got a few strikes as relief pitcher. Bear Kyle and Bear Lyle were sitting next to each other – arguing, but arguing with a lungful of laughs along with the cusses and monkey punches.