Still … time stands for no hardball; waits for no bat. When contact was made, and Good Lord it was, the sound—the explosive crakkkk—sent the Madness bench into, well, madness. The ball took off like a streak of light, a test for the best eyes to follow. Lost in the sun’s glare as the crowd rose, it must have been a good five seconds before someone yelled, Holy, it’s gone, it’s freakin’ gone, no wait, there it is, before the ball sailed past the outfield, past the warning track, past the fence, past the picnickers in the hollow there, past the footpath along the river, and then fell from orbit and into the Little Sioux with a sploop, that no one was close enough to hear.
Jones stepped lively to first, rounded second, and headed for third. He’d known, maybe even when he was on-deck, he was going to hit a homer, he’d just known. He turned at third with a swagger, the ball long since bobbing for breath in the Sioux, and as he made his way toward home, corked a taunting laugh to that shaken face on the mound.
That was it. The gangly kid had taken all he could take and wasn’t going to take any more. He charged from the mound, eyes aflame, trying to fling his glove off. He was moving so fast his cap blew up and off. He let out a horrible growl, something akin to the sound one might hear when a bear has taken enough of the smartass kid at the zoo who’s been rattling the bars of his cage.
Halfway to the plate the runner sped up, but the pitcher was on him before he made it home. The kid dove into him, knocking him off stride, but it was only enough to slow him. Jones kept on, turning round, walking backwards at a brisk pace. He was egging the kid on with his hands.
“Come on, dickwad. Ya fight better than ya pitch?”
Both benches cleared. It looked like the mayhem after the final out in the World Series. Teenage boys standing and watching, some yelling for Jones to drop dead, some for the pitcher to, pockets of boisterous fans rising from their seats. The pitcher was fuming, standing there with his glove still caught on his wrist, his brown hair all over the place. He struggled to catch his breath, and just when you thought he might not charge the batter, he did. He bolted hard and was met broadside by Coach Plummer. The man threw his arms round the boy, his high pants riding up even higher. His weight bowled them over. They hit the dirt hard, dust flying up like ghosts from their graves. Jones started laughing; some of the others did, too. The infield and outfield had come in, most of them shaking their heads. The umpire and the catcher both stood with their masks up, agog.
“Enough,” the coach said, his big body pinning the boy. “ENOUGH.” He waited for a sign of capitulation, and finally received it in a dour nod. The man got to his knees, rose, and started dusting himself off.
All eyes were on Ryan Bishop now. He wasn’t a pitcher, suddenly; wasn’t Number 23, wasn’t a ballplayer anymore. He was just a boy, a bad one at that, a troubled one with a chip on his shoulder. He lay there unmoving, spilling with anger and embarrassment. Awkward silence engulfed him like cold rain.
Benny the shortstop made a move toward his teammate, but the coach waved him off.
“No, son. No. Just give him space. Everybody just give him space.”
William Jones chuckled, and with a satisfied grin, stamped on home plate to make it official. Game over. I win. Technically the game wasn’t over, the Tigers had last at-bat, but no one wanted to play. Some of the players had already started packing up.
“Damn you, Jones, wipe that smirk off your face.” It was the Madness coach. He rounded up the rest of his team, most of them moving through the gate and into the parking lot with their heads low. A few of them straggled behind to watch the show, then followed the handful of disappointed parents who’d made the trip from Mason City. Jones’ dad—the man in the red ball cap—threw his arm round his son and congratulated him on a great game, going on about how proud he was, how damn proud.
The field emptied as Coach Plummer asked his team to clear out. He reminded them of the next practice two days from now, told everyone to be on time. Ben Caldwell said he’d wait for Ryan in his pickup; he was giving him a ride home. Plummer waited for the shortstop to leave them.
Ryan Bishop was sitting up now. Stewing.
“You okay, son?”
The kid nodded. “Yeah. No sweat.”
Coach Plummer helped him up. “I gotta be honest with you, Bishop. It’s been two weeks now and—”
“Save it, Coach. I’ll save you the trouble.”
“You got an arm, son. Lots of it.”
“Tell someone who cares.”
The kid walked away, and the coach called after him.
“Come on, Ryan. What’s the matter with you?”
The kid stopped at the fence just before the exit. He turned suddenly, to the lone spectator still in the stands.
“What’s your problem?”
Kain said nothing. He realized he’d been staring like an old street hen spying on the neighbors. It was useless to look away. Useless not to.
And then the static struck him. Knifed him right between the eyes.
“Go home,” the kid said, boiling. “Show’s over.”
~ 5
Kain exhausted the week in search of work, his fruitless mornings turning to rejuvenating walks along the Little Sioux in the afternoons. He had missed any ballgames that might have been scheduled, but today he’d caught the last hour of a Tigers practice. All in all, the team looked pretty good. They were a little weak in the batting department, their first baseman a real strikeout king, but they had a solid, fast defense, and from what he saw, a real ace in Number 29, the tall Sioux. Not surprisingly, 23 hadn’t shown, invited or not.
The ballpark emptied by sundown, and he made his way back by nine. He supped at Rosa’s Roadside on meatloaf and scalloped potatoes, and as he sat in his booth by the window letting the evening slip by with a Coke, that stubborn restlessness began to inch its way through his mind like some crawling insect.
Living down the hall from Henry Roberts had been fine. Until last night. The bar had been hopping, even for a Wednesday, and he had had no trouble sleeping through the din below; he’d slept in far noisier places. The road taught you how. But then, around eleven by his figure, someone in Five brought up the screamer. Jesus. They weren’t at it five minutes when the wailing started. Unbelievable. Like some kind of wild, shrieking cat or something. Old Henry, his old hearing as good as his word, staggered upstairs half-cut and blew off the lock with his .30-.30. Like the rube in Three, Kain had stuck his head out into the corridor for a look, catching the tail end of two naked bodies scampering down the stairs. They were screaming bloody murder, but not nearly as loud as Henry was, shouting after them that they owed him a goddamn lock.
But was that the reason he felt so miserable? The noise?
The fact was, Spencer just wasn’t working out. He wanted to stay—God he did—and didn’t that stick in his craw. Even Brikker might have liked Iowa. The sonofabitch might have even loved it.
~
He was drifting north by sunup. A crisp morning sky greeted him, a soft breeze easing the stifling heat. He had made three miles toward Spirit Lake (a place with a name like that just had to be salt for the soul) when a dusty brown flatbed rolled up beside him.
The passenger window was halfway down, and you could hear “It’s Only Make Believe” by Conway Twitty on the radio. He wasn’t a big country fan, but some of it was all right. Elvis. Don Gibson.
“Not goin’ far,” the driver said, in a deep, warm voice that seemed a full octave lower than the drifter’s. “But you’re welcome to take a load off just the same.”
“Every bit helps,” Kain said, climbing in. “Thanks.”
“Al Hembruff.” The big man offered his hand. He owned a tanned, down-home face with a double chin, and a smallish nose that didn’t seem to match his ample size. He held a farmer’s scruff, and bold, honest eyes that must have guided a combine through a couple of world wars and countless harvests.
“Kain. Kain Richards.” They shook, and the man’s hand nearly swallowed his
.
“So where you headed so bright and early? Spirit?”
“Wisconsin, actually … the long way.” The man laughed, and Kain could only be impressed at how genuine that sound was. Sweet and sincere. A good laugh.
“Family?”
Kain recalled those college kids who had picked him up on their way to Des Moines. They’d been searching for jobs and adventure; for now, he’d had enough of the latter.
“Work, I hope.”
Al Hembruff gave him a look that wasn’t quite suspicious, wasn’t quite trusting.
“Drifter, eh?”
“Guilty as charged.”
All the man offered was Huh.
They drove for the flattest two miles before the farmer stopped at a crossroad. Not wanting to linger, Kain thanked him with a handshake and a simple So long. The flatbed threw up a blanket of dust as it carried on heading west. He started to cross, but then the vehicle slowed. It stopped a moment, and then, to his surprise, began to back up.
“Hired my summer hands a while back,” the big man told him. He lifted the brim of his cap just a bit, his seasoned eyes losing themselves over promising fields that could have sprawled to the ocean. “What the hell. I could use another set a hands. Lord knows my Georgia wants me out of the fields … ol’ ticker’s runnin’ a lot jumpier these days. I can’t pay much, and I work you hard, but it’s good work. Honest work.”
~
Kain put in a solid day, enjoying the sweet air and relishing the farm work. His heart and lungs pumped and breathed as if they were new. He felt alive. It was as if he were free of the cold shackles that bound him, free to work and to laugh out here in the sun, out here in these fields of Heaven. Joining five strapping young men, he helped repair a fence that had been damaged by heavy winds over the winter. Four of them were born and bred in town, and the other, the tall Sioux from the ball team, called home just this side of Spirit Lake. They poked fun at him, asked if they were working him too hard, had he seen action in the Great War or the Civil War, and he took the jibes in good humor. The sweat and the toil—even the jokes, especially the jokes—rejuvenated him, and by sundown that itch to move on seemed to settle at the back of his mind somewhere, the way bad ideas sometimes do.
“And this is Jimmy,” Big Al had said in the brisk introductions. Al Hembruff, it turned out, was big on people calling him Big. “Don’t turn your back on him, not to scratch your nuts. You’ll likely end up with your undershorts yanked right up your ass.”
The other boys laughed as a team. If there was one constant in the universe, it was the indisputable fact that boys (and most men) found an act of wedgie the most sublime form of humor. Of course, wedgies were like Christmas gifts—it was always better to give than to receive.
“Trust me on that,” Big Al added, and the group chuckled knowingly.
The Sioux offered a nod to the stranger that seemed to say something to the big farmer.
“You two know each other?”
“You got one helluva fastball,” Kain said. “Smoke.”
“Me smokum peace pipe,” the Sioux said in B-movie Injun, and just when Kain was sure he wasn’t joking, the kid burst out laughing. Jimmy Long was half Lakota, his mother a German immigrant who had skipped out a week after he was born. He was muscular, with deep, dark eyes that at once seemed open-bookish yet mysterious, with perhaps a hint of sadness buried there. He was the kid on your street who always made your mom give him extra candy on Halloween, just by batting his peepers like a lost puppy, and he was also the kid who would boast the next day that mom’s always fall for that shit, they really do.
“A comedian,” Big Al said. “A real Jerry Lewis.”
“Jerry Sioux-is,” Jimmy Long said, slipping into Injun again. “Me makum White Man laugh.” He started hopping up and down and patting his mouth, dancing and hollering like an idiot. The other boys joined in, and then there was a whole tribe dancing and hollering like idiots.
“Cripes, Jimmy—all of you—stop that shit before Georgia sees you.”
The group stopped what they were doing, half of them laughing full out. A few of them were holding their guts, doing their best to contain themselves.
“Georgia’s got no patience for jokes,” he said to Kain. “Never had much of a sense of humor, that woman.”
Kain offered a hand. “You looked sharp yesterday.”
Jimmy Long was still grinning when he shook. “Thanks.”
Big Al exchanged glances between them.
“You must have had ten strikeouts,” Kain said.
“I think Coach said twelve or thirteen. I was just happy to be out there.”
“I’ve seen him pitch,” Kain explained, to the clearly confused farmer.
Jimmy Long regarded the drifter. Then: “Wanagi cikala kin.”
“‘Wana’ what?” It was Big Al.
“The Little Ghost,” Jimmy Long repeated, this time in English. “He comes out of the sun like a spirit. Over the rise behind the diamond.” He chuckled. “Ben Caldwell says he crawls out of the river.”
“Not the river,” Kain said. And then, in Injun: “Me fallum from big sky.”
“Cripes.” Al Hembruff said cripes like it was a bodily function. “Do me a favor, will ya? Get to work. And Jimmy, no more of that woo woo crap, you hear?” He was about to head off to his truck when he patted Kain on the arm. “And show the Little Ghost here the ropes.”
As if snared by the beat of a drum only he could hear, Jimmy Long started to dance and holler and pat his mouth again—WOO woo woo woo, WOO woo woo woo—and led the motley crew, the young men all woo-wooing like idiots now, into the cornfields. Kain, trying desperately to hide a growing grin from his new boss, followed quickly, stifling an adolescent urge to join in on the nonsense. It was complete silliness, yes, but it was one of those stupid things that struck you as hilarious, and he almost laughed out loud. Big Al just shook his head at the lot of them and started for his flatbed. He held a look of Why me? pasted across his face, but all in all, the big farmer with the good laugh and the ol’ ticker that was runnin’ a lot jumpier these days, seemed quite content.
~
Just as she had for the last thirty-seven years, as her immigrant mother and grandmother had before her, Georgia Hembruff served up one of her delicious meals for the hired hands, the men clustered round a long oak table in the ample Hembruff kitchen, feasting on stew and cornbread, muffins, and apple pies. Big Al supplied cold beer, which meant two apiece for the hired help, no exceptions, for Georgia held no party to providing more than that to those she (not to mention the law) considered children (even at this she extended the house limit to her own husband). Laughter and chatter filled the warm home, the evening taken up with talk of the day’s work and of tomorrow’s, of women, the heat, the dearth of rain, and of course, the Little Ghost. At one point, Jimmy Long offered odds on how long it would be before wanagi cikala kin keeled over in the hot sun, trying to keep up.
“The fields are for young bucks,” Georgia said above the laughter. For such a diminutive woman, she commanded a strong voice, and she directed her comment not at the newest hire, but at her husband, who was in mid-belch as he finished—house drinking rules be damned—his third brew. This brought more laughter from the gallery, and a chuckle from Kain as well.
“I’m young at heart, darlin’.” Big Al patted his good woman gently on the bum.
“You’re a horny old coot, that’s what you are.” She snatched the empty from his hand. “And I think you’ve had enough of this for tonight.”
An even bigger laugh from the farmhands.
“You’ve all had enough, by half. Bar’s closed, boys.”
More laughter. The farmhands finished their drinks, thanked their hosts, and headed out for the drive home. Kain had already accepted an offer from Big Al to stay the night, and they sat out on the deck enjoying the mild evening under the darkest skies of the Midwest. Georgia joined them for a spell, but when her arthritic elbow, her right, started to a
ct up, she decided to turn in.
“You gotta see old Doc, darlin’.”
“I’ve been. How many times? Lord knows he can’t do anything. Besides, it’s not as bad as it used to be.”
“It’s worse. Stubborn woman.”
“Not as stubborn as some, I’d say.” She looked like she was going to head inside, but instead she lingered.
“Birthmarks,” Kain said, and she looked more than a little tongue-tied. “You looked like you wanted to ask.”
“Nobody’s business,” Big Al said. “She’s too damn nosey for her own good, is all. Women.”
“Allan Jefferson Hembruff!”
“Cripes. You’ve been starin’ at him all night like … well, like he is a little ghost.”
Her face went limp, an Oh my Lord kind of limp. She stammered a bit, and just when you thought she might say something rabid to Big Al, said goodnight to her guest, and then simply excused herself and went inside. The screen door clattered behind her.
“Guess I’ll be joinin’ you on the sofa,” Big Al chuckled. “It’s pretty well molded to this old body anyhow.”
The big farmer got up and stretched his legs. He checked the door and cocked an ear.
“Sometimes she listens,” he whispered. “Damn near forty years with someone … you learn a few things.”
He waited for it, and there it was; the slam of their bedroom door. He nodded impishly, and in that moment seemed neither sixty-five nor even fifty-five, but five. “Good. Good.” He moved quietly to the end of the veranda, knelt down, and set a tanned, leathery hand behind the barrel there. There was a wee clank-clunk sound, and a satisfied chuckle only old men and devils shared. The farmer returned to his chair with a mischievous grin, handing a cool one to his guest.
“She thinks I hide ’em inside that old drum,” Big Al said. “I move my spots around.” He winked, then snapped the tab off the Schlitz, careful not to make much of a sound. He sipped. “Cripes, that tastes a whole lot better when the house cops aren’t watchin’.”
Kain drew his open, equally careful so as not to give them away. They were breaking the “law” as it were, and he didn’t feel right about doing it behind Georgia’s back, but he had to admit, it was kind of fun. Like a couple of kids getting away with something. It made him feel young, at least in the moment.
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