Steal Away Home

by Billy Coffey

  “And when was that?” he asks.

  I don’t answer, knowing Country’s point is made.

  “Long time ago. Shoot, Gooden’s done now.” He nods toward the other dugout. “Yanks cut Gooden after spring training. You imagine that? Guy has his problems, don’t get me wrong, but in his prime? Wasn’t a better pitcher maybe ever. Then he gets old. Gets cut like some rookie. No offense.”

  I wave off the words.

  “This game will humble you, son.” As proof of that, Hairston strikes out on five pitches and makes the long walk back to our dugout under a cloud of quiet. “It will raise you up and set you down. You know that.”

  “I do.”

  He gripped his bat and lofted it, the barrel even with his nose. “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-nine.”

  “Twenty-nine years, catching in Double-A. Makes you about as much dinosaur as me. Still holding out hope. Am I right?”

  “Well, I’m here, ain’t I?”

  “Yep, right here in the Bigs. But let me tell you something, whole other mess of problems to deal with up here in the Show. Got the media always on you, got people trying to hook you into any sort of crazy deal. Injuries to play through, and that long unending season. Takes a beatin’ on you. You know that well as anyone. Never understood why anybody in their right mind wants to be a catcher. Not when you can be out there in the outfield in all that soft grass, looking at the pretty women between pitches.”

  “Ain’t all bad. You’re out there calling every pitch, lining up the defense. Jawing with the ump and the hitters. Good way to keep going on in the game once you’re done. Plenty managers used to be catchers.”

  “True enough. Ain’t many twenty-nine-year-old rookie ones, though. I’m forty-two. Forty-two years old. Makes me a relic. Tell the truth, I feel like one sometimes. Hell, half these kids was in diapers when I come up. Wife keeps telling me it’s time to quit and come home. Got us a horse farm near Bowling Green. Know what I tell her?”

  I don’t.

  “‘One more year.’ Been saying that for the last seven. ‘One more year.’ I got three hunnert sixty homers in the Bigs. ’Nother forty’ll give me four hunnert, and that’ll punch my ticket to Cooperstown. That’s why I keep. Because all I want’s something that’ll outlive me. It’s why all these guys is out here. They say they love the game or they’re making good lives for their families, but most why they’re out there every day playing through sore arms and knees is because they want to be great. They want to be remembered. You get that, don’t you?”

  “More’n you know.”

  We watch as Anderson comes to the plate.

  “You got a girl?” he asks.

  “Not no more.”

  “She get jealous?” He stares at me, nods like it’s from experience. “That what it was? ‘It’s me or it’s baseball’ thing?”

  “You could say that. Pretty much.”

  Country leans to me, interested. “You pick the right one?”

  “Guess that don’t matter now.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because she died.”

  -2-

  I traveled north once more after spring training in 1996, though not to Bluefield. A batting title was enough to convince the Orioles I had talent enough to match the heart they signed me for, and they sent me to the Bowie Baysox in Maryland instead. Double-A, the Eastern League, which meant one step closer to the Bigs.

  More, I left Sarasota no longer your average minor leaguer. The organization labeled me a prospect. That designation is near as cherished as a ticket to the Show when you’re a busher. It means more of everything: money, status, future. I signed with an agent who got me a contract making $2,500 a month from March through September. I was twenty-four years old and clearing more money in seven months than my parents made in a year. I wasn’t just playing ball. I was earning, and earning meant more to me than anything.

  Dad couldn’t have been happier. Mom tempered her congratulations with a plea to lay aside as much pay as I could. Given my home was a room in our third base coach’s basement and I didn’t have a car, that turned out to be quite a bit. I lived as much a king as I ever would, and I relished every minute.

  You learn early on to take even the smallest victory baseball hands you. It’s easy to watch a game in person or on the TV and think it’s a bunch of men at play. Even the ump says it at the start of each inning: Play ball. But I never knew a guy went about his business on a baseball field and thought “playing” was what he did. It’s work, day in and day out, and behind it all is a fear you cannot know. Every time you step onto a diamond can be your last. One awkward step will blow your knee. One too many throws can snap your elbow or tear your shoulder. Could be you’re sitting dead red for a 3–1 fastball grooved down the middle and it’s in your jaw instead, hundred-mile-an-hour gas that knocks you cold and bloodied, and after the surgeries and rehab you realize you can’t even bring yourself to stand in the box again. Could be a thing so simple as the manager asking you into his office and telling you to shut the door and how he calls you “son,” and you know your playing days are over.

  That’s what you live with. Doesn’t matter if you’re pulling in ten million a year in the Show or riding the pine in the rookie league. Doesn’t matter if it’s Bobby “Country” Kitchen or me, the fear stalks you. You accept it as what comes from loving a game that likely won’t miss you at all when you’re gone. Baseball is beautiful because it is so big, and it is terrible because you are so small.

  In what was becoming something of a ritual, Mom and Dad made the trip to help me settle. Dad looked his same strong self. Mom looked older, more frail, yet peaceful in a way she’d never been. They say the passage of time can heal all. I say it soothes only the wounds we allow to show. Their move from Camden to Charlottesville went a long way in repairing the damage done both to and by them. Mom held to near the end that Micky wasn’t really gone. Her belief faltered in her last days, but it burned hard during my years in baseball and brimmed over while with me in Bowie. She would never speak of Micky in Dad’s presence, but she felt no such hesitation when we were alone. It was always rumors of Earl and recollections of all that had gone on that summer, much of which my mother continued to call miracles, related to me with adoration. Tears would gather at the corners of her eyes as she spoke the same words over and again: “The mob will always crucify Christ, won’t they? That is the sadness of this world.”

  I hated my mother’s faith then, as any unbeliever would. It seemed unnatural even as my own faith in a game of sticks and balls felt so true. Belief came so easily for Mom, though she had only Micky’s words to drink. Yet I had beheld true wonder that night at the train, and not even such magic as that was enough to make me yield my own selfishness. Micky was right about so many things. None more than that faith comes hardest for those who have much to lose.

  Mom and Dad left for Charlottesville after the first week of the season, though not before watching me hit my first home run and throw out my first base runner as a major league prospect. Prince George’s Stadium was a basilica where upward of ten thousand people a night came to watch me work. I signed my first autograph there and sent home my first baseball card. You should see that picture, me in my stance grinning like I was seven. You take what baseball gives you.

  Days spent under a sky so blue it hurt to look into it for a ball popped high behind the plate. Nights I would pause for an instant before tossing a ball back to the mound so I could look at how the moon sat above the stadium lights. Crowds cheering and booing. The smell of hot dogs and popcorn. The feel of fresh-cut grass. Those are the things I remember. They were what kept me grounded.

  Ballplayers will talk of the long season. April and May pass in a blur. You’re strong and healthy and still have those winter months of rest to draw from. June and July are harder. August can be hell if you’re struggling or your team is out of contention. By September, all you want is rest. You still love the game, but you come to
realize the long season demands more than heart.

  I hit .267 my first year in Double-A and have never matched that in my five years since. Played years with guys who got the call up to Triple-A and the pros. Played with guys on their way out. Sometimes I’ve wondered why the organization keeps me around. There are days when it’s so hard getting out of bed and nights when I wonder if this is what it feels like to be thirty, all broken up and sore. But I play on. I work like no one. Not because I have a dream, but because somewhere along the line I realized a dream was all I had. I’m a twenty-nine-year-old catcher, and my time is low.

  That fear burns as bright and hard as any faith my mother could summon.

  -3-

  Brady Anderson takes a fastball over the right field stands and sends about a third of the crowd walking toward the gates. Another third follows as Bordick homers to right center. We’re up big now, getting late, and I see Country starting to fidget a little next to me. He’s gripping Betsy like he’s already up to the plate looking to inch closer to his four hundred dingers.

  “Might be out there,” he says. “You too, Hillbilly. This might be our time.”

  Richard flies out to left and Conine follows with a little pop-up to Soriano at second base, ending the half inning. We both look Mike’s way now. Our manager is looking happier, a little calmer, and Country says that’s a good sign.

  He says it’s a good sign indeed.

  Bottom 6

  -1-

  You could call it the middle innings during that early summer of 1990 as well. May dwindled in a succession of warm days and moonlit nights. There was nothing for us at school but to take our final exams. I kept washing cars for Bubba in the afternoons and telling myself it was money that would be put to good use when Micky and I left for Youngstown. Told myself that over and over not as a reminder but as a lie I could come to believe through repetition. I scrubbed Bubba’s cars under a metal roof that left me sweating and tired, had for years worked at a game that had already left me sore and worn, but I’d never worked so hard as I did trying to convince myself nothing had changed in my life.

  We met every evening. By then, Dad was so used to my walks through the woods after our backyard practice sessions that the only thing he said to me was to make sure I mixed in some talking to the Lord. Clancy had all but forgotten how a bunch of Camden kids had evidently gotten drunk enough to near derail a train, but my father never would. To him, it was a warning sign I could veer from the path he and God had labored to lay out for me. Our trips to church on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings became more fervent. Like Dad was leading us into battle. Him and Momma went up one Sunday to rededicate their lives to Christ and dragged me with them. Dad wanted Reverend Sebolt to baptize me again as though the first time hadn’t taken.

  Micky was always waiting. And though she seemed happy to see me and eager to speak on all the wonderful things going on in her new life, I will admit it was sometimes difficult for me to make the trip to our hill. It was as if it had grown somehow, gotten steeper, and its top no longer offered a wide view of the world. All Micky talked about was how the Shantie folk were taking such interest in all the things she had to say and how needy they all were, and all the while she never once spoke of me or our future. She’d quit school. Said there was no time for it now, which made me believe there was also no time for me. Yet my anger remained no match for my loneliness, and that was what brought me to the oak again and again. I told myself I’d rather have some of Micky than none, even if the some of her left me seething.

  Every night she held the same sense of urgency, reminding me of the work needing done and the short time to do it and always, always bringing our talk around to what happened on those railroad tracks. Analyzing it from one side and another. Poking holes in every excuse I gave.

  “It wasn’t you,” she’d tell me. “You was too scared to move. And it wasn’t me. So who pushed us, Owen? Or I was and you weren’t, but you got caught up in it. I think you coming up there changed things. But only for a while.”

  “Wasn’t nothing at that train, so you stop it.”

  “Remember the first day we met? That snake? What’d I tell you back then? Sometimes a snake quivers because it don’t know it’s dead yet. Maybe that’s all we’re doing, Owen. Maybe you and me’s just quivering too.”

  -2-

  She never did ask me to stay in Camden again. Never once said I should give up baseball because the train had made baseball as worthless to me as school to her. But in our parting Micky would always take my hands in hers and kiss me soft and deep, say she loved me, and ask what I loved most of all. I never did know what to say. Sometimes it was nothing. Other times I said I loved her and loved baseball and our future most of all, and she would smile like a momma will when hearing a child too innocent and ignorant speak of the truth of things.

  It was as though in the days after her first appearance at church Micky knew she would not have to work as hard convincing me as I did convincing her. She believed other forces were at work on her behalf. Sometimes I could not help but believe the same. Those small weeks before graduation were a blur of activity. But in ways more fundamental it felt like the world had become a stranger to me, or I a stranger to myself. There were times in the backyard with Dad when I would grow obsessed with something as insignificant as a leaf or a corner post of the shed, moments I could hear Dad telling me I needed to change my stance for those college pitchers and feel myself nodding in a distant, noncommittal way because I wasn’t listening to him at all. I was staring at that leaf. That shed corner. Trying to remember how to see as I had in Simpson’s field

  (breath not breath, a mist golden and silver-tipped stoked into tiny suns that explode and shoot, soft noise of joy wedded to bliss beating beating, symphony guided by a great Source)

  and know things as they truly were, worlds within worlds turned such that they bent toward some far but near wellspring that Micky called Love. I spent one whole day at the Auto World on my hands and knees trying to see an ant as I had the moth that had fluttered between me and the train. At none of those times did I ever see anything. It was always a mere leaf or post. Some insect. That night in Simpson’s field had done more than alter Micky’s life. It was as though she’d been remade. Yet to me, all of what happened on those tracks became little more than a dream left faded in the middle and fuzzy at the edges.

  -3-

  My quiet struggle could not last long. There lay an empty place inside me, like Micky had gone somewhere else even as she remained close. Travis and Jeffrey noticed it. Dad too, though he gave it over to those long summer months when there was no baseball to play. But I could not keep the truth of it from my mother. Moms always know. Even the bad ones, but the good ones especially.

  Dad was away at a deacons’ meeting one week before the turn of June and graduation. I was struggling with the notion of not going to the hill at all when Mom said to me, “Something preying on you, Owen. You want to talk to me?”

  Though I didn’t, I knew I must. I had no one else then. Travis and Jeffrey were friends but in the male way alone, that teenage boy way in which all things were open for discussion up to a certain point. I could go to my father for nothing but a hitch in my swing. My nights on the hill with Micky had turned to something I could not reckon. It was like a gulf had formed between us, like I spoke to her as I would anyone else in town, talking but never saying anything. That was the worst of it, the emotion those weeks had birthed in me—I felt alone.

  “I’m taking Michaela away with me,” I told her. “When I go to Ohio. We’ll find her a place close to campus and a job somewhere. I’m giving her all the money I’m making at Bubba’s this summer. We’ll make it work.”

  “Sounds like a bold plan.”

  “We’ve been talking about it for a while. I have to get her out of here. Shantytown.”

  “Been hearing talk of Shantytown. There’s some Shantytown girls work evenings at the library cleaning up. They say things is chang
ing in the Pines and give Michaela the credit. To hear them say it, the Lord’s speaking through that girl.”

  “Don’t know who’s doing the speaking.”

  Mom sipped. I studied my hands.

  She asked, “All this comes from what happened after the prom?”

  “Didn’t nothing happen. Travis thought he’d get up there and play chicken and I don’t know why. Michaela followed him and I don’t know why she did that neither. I ran up there to get her off. That’s it.”

  “You sure?”

  “Why you ask that?”

  “Because I seen her. Yesterday down at the IGA getting her and Earl some groceries. She was talking to the Harper boys and then she got to talking to me—”

  “She’s talking to you?”

  “And I seen a change in her. Yes, she’s talking to me.” Her eyebrows shot up. “That okay, ain’t it?”

  I didn’t say either way.

  “Michaela told me you saved her. She give all the credit to you. Said she’d of never heard from the Lord if you hadn’t been up there with her, she’d just be dead. She said she seen the truth of things up there, and she thinks you did too.”

  “Didn’t see nothing but death coming at us. You don’t think she heard from the Lord, Ma. Tell me you don’t. I love her and I’m taking her away to give her something better, but I still know she’s just a Shantie.”

  The word was out of my mouth before I knew it, stinging me with a measure of shame.

  “I didn’t mean nothing by it,” I said.

  -4-

  She said she was going to build a church. Said it with the very conviction with which she’d once said we would someday be married and she would be walking down inside some big stadium wearing fancy clothes and a smile to sit in the wives’ section and cheer me on. She was going to build some place where everybody in Shantytown could come to hear her speak, and she wanted me to help because she couldn’t do it herself. When I told her I couldn’t because I was too busy working to give her money enough to come to Ohio with me, Micky only acted as though she knew better. As if she’d seen the long days of our future and knew our single road diverged into two, one only some shorter than the other.