Keeping Score |
Issue 12
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Pud had hit a single off Thomas in the first scrimmage of the season, before they even had jerseys, before the playground itself was ready for the summer. They played in t-shirts in a church lot with a metal cage for a backstop and four bases plumped down in the coarse grass. There was no pitcher’s mound. Only a pink cross spray painted on the ground. And Thomas stood there, taller than almost every other kid on the field, not like a bean pole, but like a man, with broad shoulders like the giants towering on the red earth in the MLB. There was nothing fancy to his pitching. Just a hard fastball and a change up and Pud admired that because most of the 13 year olds were trying curveballs and sliders which all the grownups said was bad for you. But Thomas just stood out there slinging that hard fastball and laughing when they struck out and laughing when they got a hit off of him. All the coaches on both teams liked him. And the other kids on Pud’s team, Chase and Nick and Dustin and the rest, all liked him too and grinned when they saw him, and he nodded and grinned a close-lipped grin back. Like a wolf, Pud thought.
He thought it again when he came up to bat, eighth in the lineup, and the bells of Holy Rosary, the next church down Esplanade, struck quarter to seven and he thought about driving through the park with Aunt Priss in the little gray jag she only drove on the weekends, with the top down and the perfumed amber smell of her swirling in the dappled light as she drove him to Mass to sit beside her and slip the hundred she handed him into the basket and eat lunch a little later at Cafe Degas and take a sip from her wine and he thought he could smell her again though she was dead now as Thomas smiled and wound up and he thought it again, Wolf. The pitch was high and hard and a strike and Thomas smiled again with his glove out waiting for the ball to come back and Pud thought the smile now wasn’t of a wolf for the other wolves but for a fat lost sheep. He shook a little as he tapped the far front corner of the plate with his bat and raised it again and he heard the catcher say too softly for the ump to hear it, Heeeere, pussy pussy pussy. The pitch came again, high and hard and inside and Pud leaned back a little and felt the wind of it on his hands and heard the ump heave the gut-yawp meaning strike again and from the stands a voice, not his dad’s, rose up, Come on now, Blue, bout took his head off! Pud tapped the plate again and the curl-lipped smile loomed and he thought he could feel too the catcher and the ump all smiling in triumph realized already in his being as he was still and silent two strikes down without a swing. And the changeup came easy down the middle like a fat fly shining in the sun stupid with food and Pud swung and felt the rare sweet combine of bat and ball in one energy gathered up from both boys and soaring now joyfully into the golden dalliance of the day. In silence he stood a moment twisted in his follow-through, amazed as the ball thumped and bounced in the clover of shallow center, and then he ran hard for first, feet thudding as behind him came cheers as Chase rounded third and slid headfirst for home and scored. Pud stood with hands on hips squinting in the sun, and his dad gave him thumbs-up. Matt flew out to right field on the next pitch to end the inning, and Pud, relieved, ran for his glove, passing Thomas, who clapped him, a little too hard, Pud thought, on the back. Pud turned, but Thomas’s back was already to him. There were two more weeks of practice after that before the season started. Two more weeks at the Jewel Street park that stretched forever between the circling houses near the lake, with the oak trees ringing the field and the dome of the sky seeming to rest on their leafy crowns and the clover racing underfoot giving up the crush of its sweetness as the boys caught fly balls and ran wind sprints and took turns trying to hit Coach Gene’s fastballs and laughing at his good-natured jibes. Pud liked the game then. No one screamed in his face when he bobbled a grounder or threw high. No one shook his head in disappointment. He played right field and batted late in the lineup and he wasn’t Chase or Nick but here no one seemed to hold that, his quiet and his faltering, against him. He was little cheered but he was not pitied, and he enjoyed the game. Now and then he hit one off Coach Gene, and at the end of every practice as the sky cradled the last pallor of the day, he shook hands and said thank you and was happy. Now they had played three games, one every weekend at the playground with five separate diamonds for the different age groups, the games that counted, at least for making the playoffs. They’d won the first and lost the next two, and now, in the fourth week, in the beginning of June, they faced Thomas again. He seemed, beneath the stadium lights where the termites swarmed and flickered, to have grown even larger, monumental in his green jersey with the red dirt of the field dusting the thighs of his white pants. His eyes lay in shadow beneath the green brim of his cap, but his lips still curled in the cool wolf smile. Nick hit a grand slam at the top of the first inning. Then Thomas struck out two, throwing hard and a little wild now, running up the count before the final deft thump of the ball in the mitt and the ump’s strangled cry, and up came Pud. The first pitch came almost before he’d taken his stance, and he swung and knew as he swung how laughably late he was and he thought he heard from the opposite dugout laughter, rightfully, remorselessly. Then came three balls, all below the knees, and Pud hoped only for a fourth and a trot to first and an escape. And the change up came slow and easy over the middle of the plate and Pud let it go by and hated himself and felt the whole world hating him and he did not tap the plate with the bat but stood rooted in shame until the last pitch came so hard and so far inside that he barely stumbled back in time, almost falling over as the ump cocked his hand to the right again and then with his apoplectic jerking motion to match the ox bellow called Pud out. And Coach Gene, who had never yelled, came charging off third plate screaming, Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me, blue? Are you kidding? And the ump stood tall, stout, blue, unmoved except to step to meet the rage advancing down the line and rising murmurous in the bleachers. Pud sat down as the others took the field, patting his back as they went, saying, You’re good, Pud, Let it slide, Pud, Water off a duck’s back, You’ll get him next time, He’s just mad, Pud. Coach Gene and Coach Jay stood talking at the mouth of the dugout, each resting an arm on the chain link fencing rising over their heads saying, The BS these umps try sometimes, Think they God out here, Think they calling Nolan Ryan and Randy Johnson out here, I mean Christ Ahmighty. Pud sat silently, stiff, watching Nick, mountainous with fat, send one batter and a second back to the bench. Then a voice, his father’s, loomed in Pud’s ear. Don’t let him get to ya, bud. Pud’s insides shriveled. He’s a punk. No class. Ya can’t let somebody like that get to ya. Pud nodded and did not turn. You ok? Pud nodded again. Yeah. He did not trust himself to further words. Ok. Hang in there. Slowly he relaxed against the board running along his back, let his head rest on the chain link which dug, not unpleasantly, into his scalp. Thomas hit a high fly ball that hung long seconds against the lights against the blank agate of the sky as Matthew, standing in right field where Pud usually played, waved and stood waiting and caught it as Thomas came into second scattering dirt as he ran and slamming his right fist into his left palm. He walked to the mound, threw his helmet and batting glove at the bench and called for his glove. Pud’s team won. He himself batted twice more and walked both times, coming home once on a triple Chase hit to right center, stumbling over the plate with Andrew hard on his heels, almost pushing him. And he sat the bench and watched Nick chew through the lineup three times as on the other side Thomas burned up and was relieved in the fifth inning to no avail. Pud’s team won, and they lined up and marched across the infield shaking hands saying, Good game, good game, good game before circling up and taking a knee as Coach Gene prayed a martial thanks and sent them off to the concessions for a soda and a snack. Amid the babble and the drink fizz and the hot hiss and bubble of fries Pud waited almost tasting the salt and feeling the red cream soda foam in his mouth. Thomas and two of his teammates were just ahead of him, and he waited, hungry, with his head down, till he saw the cleats facing him and looked up, up, up into Thomas’s face, shadowed still beneath the cap and freckled and grim and unsmiling. Pud held the gaze a moment and the lips split and the words, like a groan from deep in the earth, came forth, Forgive me. A hand came down on Thomas’s shoulder, with a familiar golden ring on the third finger. Back off, said a voice, and Thomas, all grimness gone before a school boy jumpiness, said, What? If there’s anything worse than a sore loser, it’s a sore winner, went the voice, and it was Pud’s dad’s voice, and it went on, concluding, Now get out of his face. Pud did not look up, and the voice ceased as Thomas turned back to his friends, who were waiting several steps ahead now in the diminishing line. Pud caught up slowly, haltingly, hearing the boys say, Now that’s a mean person. That’s a mean, mean person there. He looked down and was ignored and tried to ask in a steady voice for the soda and the fries and walked off alone down the fences of the fields where the late games were underway. He sipped the soda and chewed a fry and he tasted how good they were but it was as if someone else were tasting them while he himself walked on as he seemed to shrivel from within, drawn into the maw of the fecklessness that fed of his whole being. His dad came up beside him, put a hand on his back, withdrew it. You can’t let people like that get to ya, bud. Pud did not answer. He took a sip and turned his head slightly away from his dad and watched the sandals and cleats step every way at once as if at the outset of some nascent disaster. Next time should I just not say anything, his dad asked, not unkindly, as if he too were being consumed. Pud didn’t know. And he tried to say so, but he found that he couldn’t. He sipped his drink and walked on with his head bowed, away from the huge lights into the pied gloom of the oaks where a blue jay, alive to the pallor of the twelve moons burning above the field, shrieked a tender greeting to his mate. |
Daniel Fitzpatrick is the author of two novels, two poetry collections, and a translation of the Divine Comedy. He lives in New Orleans and edits a journal called Joie de Vivre.
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