1st inning
A June evening in Hagerstown, Maryland. Town of one Denny’s, town of the car dealership that uses a motel parking lot to store inventory. It was my brother’s idea to take our father to a Minor League game for Father’s Day, revive that old feeling we got as kids, leaning over the infield fence with too-big baseball gloves begging for a ball with a little bit of wear. Something somebody almost good enough to be important had touched with dirt, spit, pine tar—stuff that smelled of use. My girlfriend has just broken up with me and neither of them know it. Brother asks me if I want chicken fingers. Father asks me if I want a Coke. I want both, I say.
The field is crowded with Little Leaguers tugging at their disruptive dicks. They get to stand there with their fathers behind them while a little girl sings the national anthem. Some of them forget to take off their caps, so their fathers slip them off their heads. The girl belts it. There’s feedback and she gets softer until she belts it again and the sound clips from the speakers. On a field full of men, she has no father behind her, and she does not know what to do when she is done, lowering her eyes when the applause comes, her feet enacting a nervous shuffle. A voice makes an announcement. It is some boy’s birthday. It is some man’s bachelor party. Men cheer. The players jog out onto the field. I am here, America, land of the steel tracks, land of the golden hour, and I am sad.
2nd inning
The man who sits two rows in front of me wears a leather vest that reads trucking is America and America is trucking. I wonder if he gave his truck a woman’s name. I wonder if he has ever fucked a woman in the cab of his truck. I wonder if the two acts together constitute cheating, or something morally ambiguous. A child with a glove bigger than his head blocks my view. He’s chugging a can of Mountain Dew and his mother says that will stunt your growth, but he seems big for his age and well-freckled and almost still adorable and I think he will do just fine if he does not grow into another year to know what comes after the innings of this game are done and the balls he has collected and perched on the shelves of his room are tossed in the move and forgotten in the growing and make no difference to the women or men he comes to love who then come to leaving him. Everything smells like funnel cake and beer. My father watched me grow into and out of my love for this game without missing a single inning. I called the pitches for him, ran my fingers through dirt for him, jogged out to the mound to comfort rattled pitchers for him. And now I am here in the boondocks of northern Maryland for him, offering him French fries soaked in ketchup.
3rd inning
There is the loud crack of cowhide on wood, and a man who will never be famous jogs around the bases after hitting a home run. The ball arcs over a sign for a Hampton Inn before disappearing into the wilderness beyond the fence. The children in their Little League uniforms jump to their feet and practice invisible swings with invisible bats. Trucker guy opens his third beer. I’ve been counting. He is too skinny for the black leather of his vest and the tattoos on his arms have faded to a marine blue. I imagine him fondling his gearshift in the dark of the night in the middle of a long drive cutting through the spine of this country. I remember holding my now-gone girl and tracing the map of this country around the soft pink flesh of her nipples. How I made pretend travellers out of my two fingers, had them climb the hills of her flesh and come to points of clarity, and how I called those points love. Hit the bull’s-eye, a sign in left field reads, win a… but it has faded beyond recognition. Win your love back, is what I think. I crack my knuckles and grip the narrow stem of the Coke bottle as if it is a bat. It is a game laced with imperfection, one you can only master when you realize that certain things are not in your control. The best ball you ever hit could land in the glove of a fielder and be called an out. The shittiest little turd of a ground ball could find its way between unsuspecting players and be called a base hit. Fail two out of every three times and you have a name all the children remember.
4th inning
It is the magic hour. The sun hangs low on the horizon and spills its gold everywhere, creating long shadows that darken into nowhere. The clouds look like spaceships, and we are all sitting in a Stephen Shore photograph. A man in a hot dog suit throws hot dogs into the stands. The kids go wild. The Blue Ridge Mountains are ridged in dark blue. The husband from the old couple next to me pours a large beer into two separate glasses and puts an arm around his wife. There is a seat open to my right, and it is for her, but she does not know. She is miles away. I rehearse the dream again. A soft pretzel to split, a couple beers, the forgetting about the dreams we carried before the sitting, before the watching, before the playing. Father wakes me from the dream, asks if I want another Coke. Let me indulge, Dad. Please. Yes, I’ll take another. Please.
5th inning
The first time I caught a fastball thrown over 90 miles an hour, I described it to a friend as straight sex. The way the sound of the ball followed the object itself. How it arrived with a splintering crack into my mitt before the addicting and dizzying whir of it travelled through the air. Mark Richard wrote the sound of love always follows where love has been. Love was that split second when the ball was just a ghost of a thing travelling electric to my still frame. And then the sound. How the best sex we ever had was so tender I can make myself believe that I can hear the cotton of her underwear pillowing to the floor. And there is the boy growing in front of me. Trucker guy idling an unlit cigarette between his teeth. I am a dream I return to. An eight-dollar beer savored between an old couple. A body soaped against a shower wall. And the ball, travelling so fast it is not even an image, so elusive I cannot reach to grab it. Somewhere beyond this fence a man sits alone at a Denny’s. I know this because I see him later, piled behind plates. They have brought the thermos of coffee onto his table. Sadness is the sound that follows love, and it echoes with want. It is a fork tapping an empty plate. My father beside me, humming the tune of his wedding song.
6th inning
The woman with the Mountain Dew son whistles to herself. She whispers. That boy is a tall drink of water. She is not talking about her son. A new pitcher has come into the game. His curveball, as they say, falls off the table. When I was little, my father used to throw pretend jabs my way and then hook them into nothing at the last minute. This is how you hit a curveball: you lean into the pitch and swing at an invisible point where you feel with some instinct that the ball should appear. All these boys fake-swinging into nothing. By the time I had grown my first chest hair I had probably struck out hundreds of countless times, and now I am twenty-three and have swung and missed at love in a now-empty room. The woman who knew my name walking out the door. A dugout with an unmade bed and a framed Renoir above my desk that I let myself believe portrays my mother and father dancing. I want to ask my father how he felt when my mother left. Were you alone I want to say. Did it hurt I want to say. Do you ever think of her at night I want to say. But his shirt is dotted with ketchup stains and now never feels like the right time. That boy is a tall drink of water, she says again. And he is, long-legged and handsome, his hat pulled low over his eyes. And tonight there is a motel room where he will sleep, and in the morning a long drive to Greensboro, where the textile mills still smell with the sweat of dogged husbands with tender hands, gentle women returning home to bark at their sons.
7th inning
A black man affectionately known as Big Tim sings “America the Beautiful.” He is big. He deserves his name. I see him later, stomping around the stands to lead children into impromptu cheers, wearing a white shirt stained with sweat and clinging to his massive frame. Father, Brother, and I—we are here, and we are family. And I see it now, my father dragging me out to the park to play catch the day after my mother left. Rolling ground balls to me on the stony infield dirt, balls that skipped with no intention of predictability, balls that popped up into boy chins and brought me to my knees. His sharp, itchy beard against my cheek. Me never crying, but knowing I could have, there in those arms. We are mouthing the words to “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” We no longer touch each other anymore. We are too old for that. What I want now, in this sun setting between Blue Ridge Mountains, is tenderness. No more groundballs to the chin. A body to hold in sleep. A shoulder to cry in. The sound of love always follows where love has been. And I can hear you now, in Hagerstown, town of one public high school, town of coal miner’s daughters, I can hear you whispering Dolly Parton, singing me into dreams.
8th inning
The home team will not win, but no one seems to mind. Trucker guy cradles a sixth beer, wraps his arm around and plants a kiss on a woman I thought up to this point was his sister. Maybe she is. Maybe that’s alright. Old couple next to me shares a jacket as a blanket over unified legs. The night folds into the sky. I can see stars, count them too. Look up at the sky and know we are both looking at the same stars and moon, my mother said in the months after leaving. Look up at the sky and know we are both looking at the same stars and moon, I whisper to the empty seat next to me. Mountain Dew boy’s mother turns, meets my eyes, looks away.
9th inning
The definition of a perfect game in baseball is simple. Twenty-seven batters come to the plate, twenty-seven batters get turned away. But every perfect game is different. Pitchers throw balls instead of strikes. Dirt wedges its way into the seams. I once turned to her before sleep and said your body, your love, is perfect for me. She shrugged it off the way pitchers do when they and the catcher are of a different mind. All this night I have struggled with the notion that I did not find the perfect words, that I could have found them, that they are singing in wait somewhere beyond the Denny’s, somewhere beyond the mountains. Maybe they are sipping on a tall drink of water. Maybe we all are struggling. Father stays quiet. Brother thumbs his phone.
In baseball, there is such a thing as an immaculate inning. A pitcher throws nine pitches in one inning, strikes out three batters, each on three pitches alone. Only seventy-one players have done this in over a hundred years. Immaculate, something god-like, perfection. Just an inning. I bring my knees up to my chest, hug them. The game is almost over.
When it ends, the people line out of the small stadium, pile into cars parked on crunched gravel, return home, return nowhere, fade out of mind. I will go to Denny’s with my father and brother and eat eggs. They do not know my wrestling, but they are of my blood. And there is a woman miles away who knows, if only for an instant, that she was my perfection, on a low night in a big city surrounded by windows holding back names we will never know. And there was a kiss before sleeping, her hair in my eyes, my arms in that one small moment before dreaming pulling her close to my frame.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Devin Kelly is an MFA student at Sarah Lawrence College, where he serves as the nonfiction editor of LUMINA. His poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Armchair/Shotgun, Post Road, RATTLE, The Millions, Appalachian Heritage, Midwestern Gothic, Meat for Tea, apt, Kindred, Dunes Review, Steel Toe Review, Cleaver Magazine, Passages North, and Lines & Stars. He co-hosts the Dead Rabbits Reading Series in Upper Manhattan, and teaches Creative Writing and English classes to 7th graders and high schoolers in Queens, as well as the occasional children’s poetry workshop at the New York Public Library in Harlem, where he currently lives.
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BT #015 © 2014 Devin Kelly. Published by Little Fiction | Big Truths, November 2014.
