by Daniel Perry
Mom lowers her voice to an ice-cold register and asks, “Where do you get off?”
“Listen, Mrs.” — he clears his throat — “whatever your name is.”
“Carrion! My name is Susan Carrion!”
He thinks a minute.
“Carrion ... John’s wife? Susan ... Burford?”
“Yes,” Mom says.
“You had a sister ... Beautiful girl ...”
“I still do.” She snorts. “She just doesn’t live here anymore. Imagine.”
“Mm-hmm,” Rummel says. “Listen, Susan. I retrained for this job because no one else would, and the school couldn’t afford someone specialized. It was this or forced retirement. You can tell these kids they can be astronauts if you want, but they have to transfer out of district for introductory physics. What am I supposed to do?”
Mom doesn’t answer.
“Currie hasn’t changed,” he says in a softer voice. “I push the good kids out any way I can.”
“But did you have to suggest the army!?” Mom asks. While she waits for an answer I set the phone gently on the bed. I cross the hall to my room to gather today’s books, English and math, hyperbole and hyperbolae, knowing full well Rummel’s already hung up.
Mercy
IN WAUBNAKEE, WE don’t have a pitcher’s mound. The base paths aren’t lined, and the infield’s not grass, and the superintendent drives the county truck out from Currie just once a spring to drag the gravel flat. You’d think he cuts the outfield just as often. We like the Jays fine, but on summer nights we live for softballs wheeled underhand, rising as they travel the forty feet from pitcher to batter, and the aluminum ping of long drives over fourman outfields, displacing the humidity and the whirring mosquitoes while in a tank-top and jean cut-offs in the canteen Jessie Mueller roasts hotdogs and pouts, “What can I do you for?”
Mothers in Waubnakee use her as the example. In our yard yesterday, my own bawled out my sister for hanging shirts on the clothesline by the shoulders. “It stretches out the neck!” she yelled from the back door. “You think Jessie Mueller’s got it bad? Just you try dressing like that, missy, tits hanging out for the whole town to see. I won’t pick you up at the police station.”
It’s a natural leap for Mom, and it has been since she got into Ray Tarkington’s Mustang on a Friday in August, 1978. Ray’s father drove that car to London two months later and pushed his son out at Wolesley Barracks; from there the army shipped him to Gagetown, New Brunswick. I was born the next spring, on a Sunday, just before the Men’s League game. Mom says the Wanderers missed Ray that year, and finished last in the county. He came home on leave when I was two and married Mom, but when she got pregnant with Nancy he left again, for good, via telephone. John Carrion, once the classmate from down the road who Mom had helped with his math homework at Mrs. Kulich’s discreet request, moved in before Nancy was born, when he and Mom were both twenty. We know now he’s not our father but Nancy and I still call John “Dad.” He’s done more for us than Ray ever did.
As clean-up hitter, Ray’s replacement was Jessie’s bearded, beer-bellied father, Hank. “Your old boy could hit the ball a mile,” he told me once, in front of Dad, of course, staring at him and challenging him. “I even seen him put it on the road one time,” he said, which is pretty far — provided that it actually happened. But if anyone would know, it was Hammerin’ Hank, who got the nickname like Greenberg and Aaron for his bat, plus the one time he chased a boyfriend of Jessie’s off his property with a twelve-pound sledge. We look over our shoulders before we say it.
Hank drives tow truck for a living, and four springs ago he bought Dad’s beloved blue Chev after dragging it home from Highway 401. The pickup needed a threedollar valve, not a new motor like he’d said, and was back on the road in a month. And a year after that, during Grade Eight graduation while I was being handed the English Award for my journal entry about that very truck, Jessie was sneaking out the back door of the gym with the spare key she had swiped from her mom’s purse, to drive to a high school bush party. Hank charged her with theft, and when the case finally went to court she got community service. That’s why she makes hotdogs now.
JESSIE AND I have sisters the same age, too, thirteen. Hers are twins, Rebecca and Stacey, and they’re tall and athletic and already assured a spot on senior volleyball when they start at Currie High School this fall; Nancy, on the other hand, played one season of soccer in Currie when she was seven, and after three games it ended with a goal post and a broken tooth. Now she likes to read books about flying insects and she wanders around our backyard identifying them — but this morning Mom signed her up for fastball anyway. The registration table is set up every year on the warning track in front of the chain link, black tile-topped outfield fence, and beyond that there’s a plaque on the shed-sized Currie Township Museum that says Waubnakee’s been here two-hundred years. Nancy’s will be the first girls’ team anyone remembers — and though population records show that there have always been enough girls eleven to thirteen to field a squad, all around the one-room museum where the walls join the ceiling, photos of Waubnakee’s most accomplished women cast judgment through bright tacky eye shadow. Fall Fair Princesses give way to Homemaking Queens, who keep watch over the pièce de resistance, the Waubnakee Recipe Archive.
So are teenage girls in Waubnakee suddenly into fastball? Not remotely. There’s one legit job in town, at Pete Quinn’s ValuGas, evenings, five-to-ten; Dad had it when he was in high school, and now I’ve got it. Everyone else works down the highway in London, or at least as far as Currie, and no one’s parents get home before seven.
A month ago, the Mueller twins deliberately missed the bus from Currie Elementary to ride home in a twelfth-grader’s Camaro. He was lucky to drop them off while Hank was on a call. When word got out, parents said, “Boys will be boys,” but they must have called a meeting and they must have chosen fastball.
What scares them most is girls being girls.
I QUIT PLAYING ball when I started working for Pete, and most nights I watch the Blue Jays on the little rabbiteared TV beside the till. We lock the pumps when the Wanderers play, on Tuesday nights and long weekend Sundays, and we tape a battered note to the door that says AT THE BALL PARK. COME GET US IF YOU NEED GAS.
We’ve never missed a pitch.
Tonight, a Friday, I show up early and ask Pete, “Do you mind staying?” I’ve played catch with Nancy in our yard all week, in the hour between school and work, and her first practice is about to start. “I promised my sister I’d come watch,” I say. “She’s afraid everyone will laugh at her.”
Pete tucks his grey hair behind his ears, under his green Seedcorp mesh-back, and he chuckles. He bends to open the cabinet below the register and I hear him tear off new tape. He produces the note and says, “I’ll come, too.” We follow the gravel lane behind the gas bar to the park, where ten girls sulk on the bleachers in bad pre-teen makeup. Tonight’s also the monthly youth dance in Currie —no coincidence — and rides to Centennial Arena’s upstairs lounge hinge on going to practice.
From the group of parents milling around the canteen, tanned, smiley Shawn Baylor emerges. He’s just over thirty, and he moved here this winter from London, where both of his daughters played. He introduces himself as the coach and leads the girls onto the field. They drag their feet until he sits them on the grass in a halfcircle. His oldest, Christine, will be pitcher, he says, and her sister, Samantha — who’s only ten — will catch. The rest of the girls sigh in relief. It’s short-lived.
“Who wants to play first base?” Shawn asks.
No one volunteers.
He frowns.
“Second?”
Silence.
“How about third?”
No response.
“Well, then,” he says. “You must all be shortstops.”
“What’s a shortstop?” Nancy asks.
Shawn leans in to close the sale. “It’s the best position, between second and third.�
� He smiles. “You’ll get a lot of balls hit to you.”
“Then no,” Nancy says, shaking her head.
“We should put our best athlete there, anyway,” he says. “Rebecca. And our other best athlete” — he gestures to Stacey — “in centre field.” He assigns the other positions seemingly at random, though Nancy in right field can’t be an accident.
The girls partner off along the first-base line and play catch to warm up. Shawn walks from pair to pair and takes one player aside at a time, to demonstrate throws from the shoulder, not the elbow or wrist. When he calls away a freckle-faced farm girl named Melissa — Nancy’s partner — my sister stands still and looks at the ground, too shy to ask another pair if she can join. She brought my dusty old equipment bag, which sits on the bench now. I walk to the cage and take out my glove; the worn leather embraces my fingers like old friends as I jog onto the field. Nancy throws the ball to me and we play like we did in the yard: she dodges my soft tosses and her hardest land well in front of me. Melissa returns, and I throw with her while Shawn talks to Nancy. He continues down the line, and so do I, until he’s talked to the last player. He wolf-whistles and sends the girls to their positions. I take off my glove and start toward the bleachers. Shawn calls, “Mike! Mind hitting a few?” I shrug and turn back for a bat. While I splash softballs everywhere but right field — I never could go the other way — Shawn moves around the diamond, talking to each fielder about her role. He becomes the pitcher afterward, and I replace each girl who’s in for batting practice, offering the odd tip to my neighbours in the field. They uniformly roll their eyes. The last batter finishes and Shawn ends the practice. The girls all sprint for the parking lot. I walk to the bench and hand Shawn the bat.
“Think you could come back next week?” he asks.
All the parents may be in on the plan, but apparently, Shawn’s the only coach. Before I answer, engines rumbling to life startle me. I look toward the parking lot, past right field, and past the canteen, where Jessie’s lowering the window flap, standing on tiptoes to unlock it for the boys’ game, up next. Her long black ponytail brushes her pale shoulders, bare except for two light purple slivers, the straps of her tank-top.
I look to Pete for permission, who’s caught me staring. He laughs and winks. “The note’ll cover you,” he says.
WE EXPECT TO lose when we arrive in Currie the next Friday. They have twenty times Waubnakee’s population —enough for a Blue team and a White team, even in girls’ league — and because only one of them can be the champion, the association gives Blue to the longest-tenured coach, who stacks it. This is the team waiting on the diamond, warming up in blue jackets, blue jersey numbers sewn on white sleeves.
Our girls choose yellow, white-screened Waubnakee tees from a cardboard box in Shawn’s minivan moments before the game. When they take the field for the top of the first, Shawn tells me he thought about pink, but that he knew some of the mothers would object. He laughs.
“The goal is to get their minds off being pretty,” he says.
Blue scores the eight-run limit with ease, and in our half, our batters strike out, one-two-three. In the second, Blue tacks on another seven, putting the score to 15–0. Bill McLaren, the sixty-year-old umpire, signals to both coaches. The game is over.
“Mercy rule,” Shawn mutters. He looks at his watch. “Twenty minutes.” The parents in the bleachers start grousing about gas money. Shawn waves Blue’s coach over and, after a short discussion, Waubnakee takes on Blue’s backup pitcher and half their hitters. We send back our neediest and hope they’ll soak up some skill as we play out the time slot. In the last inning of the new game, when “Waubnakee” is only down 4–0, Rebecca screams a triple past first base. From third she calls to the next batter, Nancy, “Come on! Hit me home!”
In the bigs, the call would be the squeeze: a bunt toward first to disorient the fielders while the runner on third races home. The Braves tried it in ’92 against the Jays, for the Series, but Timlin threw to Carter in time. Nancy puts a full swing on the first pitch and accomplishes the same, a dribbler between the pitcher and first. At the sound of the ping, Rebecca leaves third, and with a head-first slide more like a belly flop she scores. The pitcher stands, ball in hand, watching the play at home, and she turns around too late to throw Nancy out at one. Our girls scream — even the ones fielding for “Blue” — and they run to the plate to surround Rebecca, our new captain, who rises wincing from the swirling grey dust.
BUSINESS PICKS UP at ValuGas the last week of July, when Ritter closes for maintenance and its workers take their families to Lake Erie. I used to go, too, but now I’m needed close to home to fill cars and get everyone else out of here. Mom and Dad left tonight for New Highlands, a park in a little beach town called Scotsport where Grandpa Ralph keeps a trailer he never uses, and they took Nancy with them, still in her uniform after Waubnakee’s first win, 4–3 over the team from the Reserve. As the Buick pulled away from the diamond, Mom joked “No big parties!” through the window, but she knew I’d have a few friends over for a bonfire. I invited ten, but with most people gone to the lake, the only one I’m betting on is Brian Callaghan. I told him to come around eight, so when I walk across the tracks at seven-thirty, his Dad’s maroon rust-bucket van is already in the yard, doors open, its factory-issue speakers farting out the classic rock station. Brian sits on a red cooler as I approach, unfolding a black fibreglass tent pole, and when I turn down my laneway he’s just blond-frosted buzz-cut and broad shoulders, kneeling on the six-man canvas on the ground. Over Light my Fire I yell, “Brian!” I hate The Doors. This station seems to play them every fifteen minutes.
“Just in time,” Brian says without looking up. He pushes the pole through its sleeve, the last one, and he motions across the tent. “Grab the other side?”
“I told you, everyone’s gone,” I say. “There’s room in the house.” But I walk around the tent anyway and bend down to grasp the fabric. I take one sleeve in each hand and support the tent while he circles it. The poles arc as he secures them in the eyelets. He walks the few feet from the tent to its bag and he pulls out the fly.
“I put clean sheets on Nancy’s bed for you,” I say.
Brian laughs and throws the fabric over the tent.
“Be a man,” he says. “It’s a beautiful night.” He walks the circle again, hooking each stretchy cord into its ring. “No wind. No need to peg it.”
We each lift a side of the cooler and carry it to the back of the lot beside the fire pit, a rusty truck rim in a hole in the ground. I take some kindling from the rotting cardboard box beside the woodpile against the wire fence that separates our yard from the cornfield and I pile it in the centre of the pit. I light it. Mom and Dad sit out here practically every night, and they’ve left two lawn chairs folded out. I sit down in one and Brian hands me a beer. His chair creaks and wobbles as he sits down, too. He clinks his bottle to mine and we drink.
“How’s ball?” he asks.
“The girls got their first win tonight,” I say.
Brian laughs.
“I meant your team.”
“I told you, I’m working this summer. I need the money.”
“Pete closes Tuesdays,” he says. “Why aren’t you playing Men’s League?”
I take a long drink from the bottle.
“I’m not good enough, Brian.”
“So what? I mean, you’d never have made Blue, but you could always slap singles. And you’re a good right fielder.”
“A slap-hitting right fielder. Just what every team wants.” I laugh. “A good right fielder is a bad ballplayer. It’s where you bury home run hitters, just to keep them in the batting order.”
Now it’s Brian who takes a long pull. He was never much of a pitcher, and he shot up eight inches this school year. He’s still on Blue’s bench, but now he can’t hit the broadside of a barn.
“I play right field.”
“Yeah,” I say, “and you hit home runs.”
&nbs
p; He laughs.
“Once in a while.”
I get up and walk to the woodpile again, where I choose a big block. It kicks up a few sparks from the old coals, reignited from last night and the night before that. I stand and watch a moment, thinking, “It can be so peaceful out here,” when Brian says, “Look.” Turning into the laneway is a boxy, brown K-Car I recognize from Currie High School’s student parking lot. The engine quiets down and Brian follows me around the side of the house. A door clatters shut as we turn the corner and meet his older sister, Stella. She brushes her blonde bangs from her eyes and adjusts an oversized white purse on her shoulder.
“What are you doing here?” Brian asks.
“Just out for a drive,” she says, grimacing and motioning to the passenger side where Jessie sits with one hand covering most of her face, her fingertips disappearing into her straight black hair. The bit of cheek we can see is pink, and the corner of a Ziploc bag of ice sticks out, squeezed in her fist.
“Shit,” I say.
“Yeah,” Stella says.
Brian walks to the car and taps the window, startling Jessie. She turns her head and bends toward the console, shielding her face.
“You okay?” Brian asks. “Come on out.”
“Leave her alone,” Stella says.
I look over my shoulder when I hear another vehicle, accelerating toward the tracks. It’s not Hank’s pickup, like I expect, just a small sport truck with no muffler. It roars by.
“He’s going to come looking for her,” I say.
“At our house,” Stella says, glancing at Brian. “He’ll never find us here.”
“The car’s on my front lawn. He’ll fucking murder me!”
“So we’ll move it,” she says. “To the backyard. Close to the house.”
“And leave wheel marks? No way! My parents — ”
Stella laughs. “Your parents might kill you,” she says. “Hank will.” She walks back to the car, not waiting for an answer, and she gets in and starts it. She turns onto the lawn, rounding the house and parking parallel to it with the driver’s side wheels nearly in Mom’s flowerbeds, so close that after Jessie gets out the passenger side, still holding the ice to her eye, Stella has to follow. She straddles the gearshift, worming her way over the seat.