feel carrot-stick brittle. Two or three snap off when I pick up my bat.
I try to dig in against the Otter Point pitcher anyway. He jams me with an inside curve. The ball rotates in like a chunk of packed ice. When I foul it, mostly to protect myself, my thumb shatters. Now I’m holding the bat with one finger and the heel of my hand. How can I drive the ball even if I make contact? The outlook isn’t brilliant. I seem to fall apart the piecemeal way icebergs do.
D-D-Daddy! I yell.
The Otter Point pitcher vanishes. So do the guys in Army-green parkas and gutta-percha boots behind him. Just like the Red Stix, gone. I stand at the plate, a perforated steel grid at the end of a steel runway. The runway looks like an ocean, an ocean of Marsden matting. It laps at the foothills of a squat rampart of mountains.
An airplane appears in a mountain notch. As it drops toward the field, its wings rock in the fog. A P-40 Warhawk—like the planes piloted by Chenault and his Flying Tigers, tiger jaws painted on its snout—flies straight at me.
Behind the P-40, lightning splits the sky. Fiery, zigzagging snakes of lightning. A thunderclap bounces the runway’s long steel gridwork, the first thing besides the wind I’ve really heard. More thunderclaps. They back up on one another and blend into one flat murmuring BOOOOM! The landing strip buckles in waves. If the P-40 doesn’t plow me under, the mats will hurl me down and stamp me like a waffle. But I freeze where I stand. The Warhawk’s pilot doesn’t drop his landing gear or try to land. He blitzes toward me a few feet above the steel plates, ahead of the crest of their buckle. If he won’t pull up, his propellers will dice me for sure.
Then I see the pilot in the cockpit. His face belongs to my father, Richard Oconostota Boles, but a twisted version of the face I remember. His eyes bulge. His lips sneer. His nose lies flat, like a second-rate pug’s. Just before he yanks back on his joystick and goes roaring away toward the sea, he gives me a wink; a wink , for Christ’s sake.
Then the last wave of the Marsden grid drops toward me, clattering. I cross my arms over my head in a stupid attempt to keep the panels from crushing me. The background keen of the wind seems a fit sort of white noise to what’s happening. I still can’t tell if its keening scours my mouth or comes from it, but so what? It suits our loss. Also, my daddy winked.
I jerked awake. The clicking of the rails echoed in my chest: clickety-clack, clickety-clack . Life meant more than baseball. The look on Daddy’s face rushing toward me in that P-40 was a look he’d really given me once, right down to the wink. Sitting there, I dredged up that old memory, the whole lousy business.
When I was thirteen, early one A.M., Richard Oconostota Boles and the former Laurel Helvig shouted and scraped chairs around. Again. I’d have to remap the living room in my head to get to the john without stubbing a toe. The shouting never let up. The shouts smeared into an angry howl. Sofa legs scraped, chair legs tap-danced.
Usually when my folks argued, at some point the noise level dropped off. A breather. Not this time. The din got so loud I figured they’d called in a few pals to help them argue. Then, over the raised voices, I heard a storm of flaps and soft collisions—the noise you’d probably get if you set up a huge fan at one end of Sparrow Alley. Had Daddy released a bunch of bats in the front room?
“ Tear up another one, Dickie, and I’ll kill you! ”
“ Try it! Jes try it! ”
My leg’d gone to sleep, but I limped into the front room to see the row firsthand. I hoped just a glimpse of me would shame my parents into making up. But I’d walked into a holy mess. Daddy had been playing Jack the Ripper with Mama’s Life magazines. Black-and-white photos of Hitler, Shirley Temple, Lou Gehrig, and so on shingled the floor. Bedsheet pages. Daddy had torn them out and strewn them. One teetered on a
I try to dig in against the Otter Point pitcher anyway. He jams me with an inside curve. The ball rotates in like a chunk of packed ice. When I foul it, mostly to protect myself, my thumb shatters. Now I’m holding the bat with one finger and the heel of my hand. How can I drive the ball even if I make contact? The outlook isn’t brilliant. I seem to fall apart the piecemeal way icebergs do.
D-D-Daddy! I yell.
The Otter Point pitcher vanishes. So do the guys in Army-green parkas and gutta-percha boots behind him. Just like the Red Stix, gone. I stand at the plate, a perforated steel grid at the end of a steel runway. The runway looks like an ocean, an ocean of Marsden matting. It laps at the foothills of a squat rampart of mountains.
An airplane appears in a mountain notch. As it drops toward the field, its wings rock in the fog. A P-40 Warhawk—like the planes piloted by Chenault and his Flying Tigers, tiger jaws painted on its snout—flies straight at me.
Behind the P-40, lightning splits the sky. Fiery, zigzagging snakes of lightning. A thunderclap bounces the runway’s long steel gridwork, the first thing besides the wind I’ve really heard. More thunderclaps. They back up on one another and blend into one flat murmuring BOOOOM! The landing strip buckles in waves. If the P-40 doesn’t plow me under, the mats will hurl me down and stamp me like a waffle. But I freeze where I stand. The Warhawk’s pilot doesn’t drop his landing gear or try to land. He blitzes toward me a few feet above the steel plates, ahead of the crest of their buckle. If he won’t pull up, his propellers will dice me for sure.
Then I see the pilot in the cockpit. His face belongs to my father, Richard Oconostota Boles, but a twisted version of the face I remember. His eyes bulge. His lips sneer. His nose lies flat, like a second-rate pug’s. Just before he yanks back on his joystick and goes roaring away toward the sea, he gives me a wink; a wink , for Christ’s sake.
Then the last wave of the Marsden grid drops toward me, clattering. I cross my arms over my head in a stupid attempt to keep the panels from crushing me. The background keen of the wind seems a fit sort of white noise to what’s happening. I still can’t tell if its keening scours my mouth or comes from it, but so what? It suits our loss. Also, my daddy winked.
I jerked awake. The clicking of the rails echoed in my chest: clickety-clack, clickety-clack . Life meant more than baseball. The look on Daddy’s face rushing toward me in that P-40 was a look he’d really given me once, right down to the wink. Sitting there, I dredged up that old memory, the whole lousy business.
When I was thirteen, early one A.M., Richard Oconostota Boles and the former Laurel Helvig shouted and scraped chairs around. Again. I’d have to remap the living room in my head to get to the john without stubbing a toe. The shouting never let up. The shouts smeared into an angry howl. Sofa legs scraped, chair legs tap-danced.
Usually when my folks argued, at some point the noise level dropped off. A breather. Not this time. The din got so loud I figured they’d called in a few pals to help them argue. Then, over the raised voices, I heard a storm of flaps and soft collisions—the noise you’d probably get if you set up a huge fan at one end of Sparrow Alley. Had Daddy released a bunch of bats in the front room?
“ Tear up another one, Dickie, and I’ll kill you! ”
“ Try it! Jes try it! ”
My leg’d gone to sleep, but I limped into the front room to see the row firsthand. I hoped just a glimpse of me would shame my parents into making up. But I’d walked into a holy mess. Daddy had been playing Jack the Ripper with Mama’s Life magazines. Black-and-white photos of Hitler, Shirley Temple, Lou Gehrig, and so on shingled the floor. Bedsheet pages. Daddy had torn them out and strewn them. One teetered on a
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