It's one of those nights in the South like you might read about in a story where, even though the sun has been down for a couple of hours, there's still no escape from the heat of the day.That's how it is in mid-August with almost everything radiating the heat it's absorbed all day long, there's even a haze in the air you can see being cast out 20 or 30 feet from the big banks of lights surrounding the baseball field, haze and moths and dust kicked up from the infield... I am 10 years old.
The front of my white uniform is covered in the tan dirt of the infield from sliding face first to beat a throw to 2nd base and from leaping to snag grounders. I play 3rd base and in two more years when I make the throw to 1st the ball will make sounds like bacon frying in a pan when it leaves my hand but right now?My arm is good enough. We'll go on in a few weeks to win our district championship, our first, my first, and also the first for our coach, a local-boy-makes-good small town athletic hero. He'll be pretty danged proud of us and there'll be lots of photographs of us grouped around a trophy taller than half the team.
But our game's over and I'm standing along the 3rd base fence where our dugout is watching the pony league boys play a team from a much bigger town and, therefore, with a much bigger crop of boys to choose from. Meaning? They're always tough and our guys aren't having a great year but? Their hitting and fielding, the pitching, it's all coming together tonight and we are beating the shit out of the visiting team.And the visiting team doesn't much care for that.
In fact, they don't care for it so much that around the 6th inning the opposing pitcher has clearly tried to bean a couple of our batters. This leads, as it often does in baseball, to our pitcher throwing more aggressively, brushing batters off the plate and things... Well, things get out of hand. Players, coaches, fans, are openly hostile, boys are slamming bats against the dugout fences, threats are being shouted and a physical altercation looks all but inevitable at this point, the kind of conflagration that will probably end up sending people to the hospital...
"TIIIIIIIIIME!", the umpire yells, stepping towards home plate with his meaty sausage fingers hooked in his facemask to remove it.Holy crap... that's my dad. Now, as my father walks down the 3rd base line, past our dugout and thru the opening in the fence, past me and headed into the parking area, his dusty black cowboy boots crunching across the gravel, lemme tell you about my dad: He's always been this John Wayne sonuvabitch, everybody calls him "Rough" (they call his brother "Hard Head" but that's a story for another time) and he's not a particularly complex man but he's not a simpleton, either. He's the kind of guy who'll buy a beat up old flat bottom boat off of you for $50 only to fix it up, put a little elbow grease to it and in about a week have it sold back to you for $150. If you follow what I mean? And he's not afraid of anything.
Well, he doesn't much care for snakes because when he was a little boy, about 5, a copperhead nailed him on the foot and it damn near killed him but I really mean it when I say he has no fear. Later? When he's much older & God sticks a divine finger in his heart to administer his first heart attack? He'll learn what it means to be afraid and start hedging his bets with the Lord by faithfully attending church every Sunday and Wednesday but tonight?
He's heard and seen enough.So, when he gets to his truck he opens the door, leans across the seat to pop open the glove compartment where he keeps his .38 Police Special.He grabs it, pops the cylinder open to check the load, closes it with a click-clack, shoves into his back pocket and begins that same deliberate gravel crunching fucking John Wayne walk back to the baseball diamond.
And when he gets there, he doesn't look around at everyone looking at him in all that silence that's taken the place of the violent rhetoric and threats from just a few minutes ago, he doesn't say anything at all, he just hooks his big ol' sausage fingers in the grill of the umpire's mask, flops it over the top of his head, yanks it down and yells:"Play BALLLLLLL!" And don't you know? They went on, finished the game and afterwards everyone went home without incident, safe and sound, the way you'd expect a game to end.
