Bucky's 10th

Before Owen reached the trail’s end, a bat screeched by, quickening his heartbeat, and he repeated what he had often been told about the creatures whose paths he crossed: they’re more frightened of you than you are of them. He repeated these words but stopped short of a mantra. He reached the trailhead and turned left to walk along the fence surrounding the tennis courts. He crossed a small field that was more of a storm drain basin and passed through the gap in the fence near the dugout. You could smell the honeysuckle on the breeze. When he dropped the duffel bag, glass clinked on metal. He was between home and first. The unchalked path was all weeds and dandelions.

“I wasn’t sure you’d make it,” said Charlie, his father-in-law, and in the synthetic moonlight of the stadium lights, Owen could see the man pointing to his wrist. “So why’d you bring me out here?”

“Did you bring cups?”

The man held up a sheath of plastic solo cups still bagged in plastic. “And a six-pack.”

“Save it. I brought something better.” Owen lifted a bottle of bourbon. “It’s Dylan’s.”

“I was hoping it was ours.”

“They call it Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door. I thought we could try it.”

The older man examined the bottle’s contents in the lights, maybe seeing something, maybe not. Charlie handed it back.

“Not a hundred proof,” he said as he removed a pocket-knife from his hip pocket. “Your subterfuge made me think I should prepare myself.” He stretched the plastic and poked a hole in it with the knife. He then closed the knife and removed two cups. He had a tendency toward dry humor and unnecessary dignity—an older way of doing things.

“Do the honors.”

Dylan’s bourbon plopped into the cups.

“Cheers.”

They pushed the cups together. Then raised them to their lips.

“Not bad,” said the older man, and Owen agreed. “Maybe a bit too sweet.” Owen did not agree. Could anyone really tell good bourbon from bad? It was all warm on the throat and in the belly. It was bourbon doing what bourbon does.

“I brought something else,” Owen said. He kneeled and unsheathed two bats from the duffel bag, one wooden, the other metal. “I only have one glove, though.”

“So no playing catch.”

“No playing catch.”

“Is it a right- or left-handed glove?”

“Righty.”

“How about I pitch then?”

“Sure.”

They both took another pull from their cups.

Owen walked to home plate with two bat handles cradled in the knuckles of one hand and his drink swishing in the other. He dropped the metal bat in the dirt, and it rolled through the backstop weeds. He took a one-armed cut. When was the last time he had even swung a bat? He looked over at his father-in-law. The man was stretching in the lackadaisical fashion of most ballplayers—all too serious and yet not strained in the slightest. One arm held the other against his chest. Then the arms swapped places. He leaned from side to side. He windmilled from his shoulders. He moved with the grace and effort of habit and time. Owen felt a tightness in his legs and hips and shoulders. He had neglected to attend any recent yoga sessions.

“You ready?” the older man called.

“Are you?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be. You still holding your drink?”

Owen raised his answer toward the mound. Then he took his stance, holding the bat over his shoulder with one arm. The first pitch flew at his head. He ducked. Bourbon bled into the dirt. 

“Holy shit! What was that?”

“Sorry. Couldn’t see you. It’s all rust and darkness out here.”

Owen picked up the ball and threw it back to the mound. The ball smacked in the glove’s pocket.

The windup started again.

“Hold on,” Owen interrupted. “I need another drink.” He jogged over to the duffel bag and took a pull from the bottle. He checked the bag again. “You need more balls?”

“Do you have any?”

“Three more.”

“Toss ‘em. No one wants to be hunting in the dark after each pitch.”

Owen rolled the balls in the mound’s direction where his father-in-law gathered them into a nest. He swung at the second pitch, popping it up behind home plate where the cage gathered and returned it in a slow roll.

“You’ll have to catch up with it,” said the older man, and Owen knew Charlie was right. He walked towards the backstop and scooped up the other bat. He scraped the wood against the metal as if he were sharpening knives. He sided with metal. 

Owen hit a grounder between second and third on the next pitch, and Charlie chuckled as he bent over to lift his cup. Owen watched the next ball sail by, and he tossed it and the other ball back to the mound. He fouled off the next pitch. When the ball floated into his ken the next time, it shone like the moon. He could feel his muscles drawing in to unleash a fury upon it. Everything in slow-motion, like he’d already lived through this moment in a dream or a movie or a novel. He knew the ending and recognized the rhythm. The ball turned over and over, and he locked in on each rotation frame by frame.

The crack of the bat split the moonlight. And the ball’s flight died with an eggplant thud at the mound. His father-in-law dropped, and Owen stood frozen at home plate, staring through an empty infield of knee-high grass and into the dark outer realm of the outfield that dissolved into the tree line’s nothingness. Then his brain fired in spurts. Holy shit! Holy fucking shit! Short circuiting in panic, he remembered a SportsCenter highlight. Had that bird exploded when Randy Johnson’s fastball hit it? Was this that? Was the old man in pieces? Owen dropped the bat and sprinted to the mound, hoping against hope.

Charlie lay on the ground in the fetal position, his bourbon cup on its side and empty. In the middle school lights, Owen could just make out the cratered imprint the ball had left on the man’s neck just under his jawline. Was it already purpling with blood?

“Charlie?”

Nothing.

“Charlie, can you hear me?”

Still nothing.

“Charlie, it’s Owen. We’re playing baseball. We’re at West Melville Middle School. Can you hear me?”

“Don’t tell your mom. I said I was going out for a drive. Promised I would be alone.”

Then the older man’s eyes closed, and he didn’t speak again. When the paramedics arrived, Owen was sitting with the man’s head in his lap and his hands in his. The bats and bourbon were all back in the bag. As the flashing lights and sirens pulled away from the school, Owen started his mad sprint back through the woods and toward home. He couldn’t ride in the ambulance with Charlie because of COVID protocols. In fact, COVID protocols were why Owen and his husband Michael had stayed away from Michael’s father throughout the spring and summer and into what was now early October. In fact, COVID protocols and self-imposed exiles that felt like mandates were why Michael and Charlie were no longer on speaking terms. Charlie had been willing to sacrifice his health to see his son, and his son had been willing to sacrifice having a father for his father’s health. The idea to meet at West Melville had been all Owen’s idea. He knew the old man missed baseball as much as family. What the fuck was he going to tell Michael when he ran into the house all sweaty and out of breath and with a duffel bag full of baseball equipment and Bob Dylan’s bourbon? He ditched the bag in the woods somewhere and kept on running.

*

The Art of Fielding sat underneath a pile of bills and junk mail, its spine in a pristine, absolutely unbroken state. Michael had received it as a gift from Owen, but who had time to read a 512-page novel that was almost a decade old when one could be doing almost anything else? Somewhere in the stack was a calendar from The Nature Conservancy. Lots of birds and otters and sea turtles in need of saving. But absolutely no whales on the horizon. That was the desk situation as Michael, a former blogging prodigy turned self-published novelist and infrequent freelancer, sat not working and not reading a decade-old novel about America’s favorite pastime.

In a sea of clickbait, the sites were starving for content. People needed content to lighten their dark screens in a time of desperate isolation and existential dread.

The world was fielding questions about hospitalizations and close contacts, and Michael thought he could help by counting down the best this and the best that, the most overrated and the most underrated, all the forgotten glories and overrated abominations a culture has to offer. His conclusion: everything was underrated, even the godawful and unforgivable. These slideshows he soon realized were not all that original or unique. They just gave the people what they already knew about the things they already loved. You could shuffle them like a deck of cards. And with each hand dealt they would read brand new, almost.

Michael wanted to feign normalcy. He wanted to give all those people stuck at home a seventh inning stretch, so he pitched an editor on a slideshow featuring all the great baseball movies and then some.

Could he include Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!!?

The list had to be obvious and not too obscure, and yet it needed to be salted with the familiar tastes and twists of a ballyard pretzel. He had to start small. The list had to sneak up on a reader with its subtleties, even as it reached some obvious conclusion, but it also needed a strong hook. If he named The Sandlot, he also needed to consider Bang the Drum Slowly. If he named Rookie of the Year, he also needed to think about Gary Cooper in pinstripes. He couldn’t decide on five, so he stretched the list to nine and then ten. He couldn’t keep the list at ten, so he upped it to fifteen. The number of slides kept on growing until every baseball movie in IMDB was an open tab on his laptop in need of remixing and fresh takes.

In no particular order, he crafted slides for Major League One and Major League Two, for Moneyball and Major Big League, for Bad News Bears and Bad News Bears. He thought about including Fever Pitch. He wrote two sentences about Fever Pitch. He passed on Fever Pitch. He included the movie Sugar instead. Sugar was his sleeper pick. Then he remembered A League of Their Own. How could he forget A League of Their Own? He thought about Tom Hanks, which got him thinking about other Tom Hanks movies. Was Saving Private Ryan a baseball movie disguised as a war movie? Was A League of Their Own a war movie disguised as a baseball film? One movie was a homestand. The other was a road trip. That idea needed unpacking. It was too much for a slide. And what to do with Chadwick Boseman in 42? He liked 61 and had to include The Natural or else the list might be devoid of myth and allegory. He did not think about The Perfect Game, and he really wanted to avoid Field of Dreams. He nodded confidently at Eight Men Out instead. Why was Kevin Costner everywhere before the internet?

The lineup was neither a representation of Michael’s head nor his heart. The list existed for clicks. The list was about execution. Throwing strikes. Setting ‘em up. Sitting ‘em down. It was for likes and retweets. But that meant it was as much about being good at being wrong as it was about being right. The list had to be insincere and imperfect. He needed blind spots. He needed to anger his readers. He needed to throw a little chin music. What was that film with Freddie Prince, Jr. in it? And he did not need anyone playing catch with dead fathers. Now was not the time for Kevin Costner corniness. Build it and they will tweet about it. Tear it down and they will tweet about it again and again. He probably had to include Kevin somewhere—what about Bull Durham? Kevin Costner and Tim Robbins would do. Wasn’t there a baseball scene in Shawshank Redemption?

Michael had a draft ready, but he hadn’t clicked submit. He walked away from his laptop. He sat down at the kitchen table. He had brainstormed through suppertime. He grabbed a plate of leftovers and ate alone, eyeing the empty chair where his husband usually sat.

“I’m headed out for a walk,” Owen had said, but Owen had not returned.

Ever since the ebb of life had congealed due to a virus that specifically targeted the elderly, the weak, the exposed, whatever demographic was found wanting that day, he had taken to walking at night. Owen would alternate biking and running in the mornings, but he walked every night, peering through the neighborhood’s assortment of Ed Hopper door frames and windows. Stolen glimpses of home, that’s what he called it.

Michael rinsed his plate in the sink. He checked his phone. He picked up The Art of Fielding. He read the first six or so chapters with a vague sense of déjà vu. He closed the decade-old novel when an out-of-breath husband burst through the door.

Bryan Harvey's writing has appeared in McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Heavy Feather, Cold Mountain Review, Florida Review's Aquifer, HAD, Juke Joint, and Bull. He lives in Virginia. He tweets @Bryan_S_Harvey when he’s not running.