B00BSH8JUC EBOK (3 page)

I slammed into Randie’s office. “This was supposed to be a plum assignment,” I yelped.

Randie chuckled. “You ought to be careful what you wish for. Sometimes you get it.”

“She’s a brat.”

Randie put a cool hand on the back of my neck and steered me toward the wall. I knew where we were going, and I didn’t want to be there.

She put me in front of a photograph of a championship softball team. There I was, the shortest player, kneeling in the first row—the only one in this happy crew refusing to smile for the camera.

“You know a little something about brats, don’t you?” Randie said.

“Yes, Captain.”

The fight was draining from me. I looked at her, and she looked at me, both of us remembering.

***

I grew up in Hillsboro because both of my parents worked at the college. Mother was a physics professor. Father was the vice president of finance—which meant he had slightly less regard for people than an agent from the Internal Revenue Service. Children ranked even lower.

I was a grave disappointment to them. I was their only child, and they wanted a scholar, but there was something in me that did not love books. I was only happy outside. I loved the wild winds around me and the sky above, the grass and the dirt when they smelled of springtime, a rain so cold it left me shivering, and the dark night that made me feel invisible.

My parents and I simply did not get along. They were creatures of the earth, and I was of the air. They liked long and civilized evenings that began after dark, and I craved the mornings when the early sun created new, pastel colors every day. They thrived on measured conversations, and I preferred a churn of quick smiles, dancing eyes and a staccato of incautious words.

My father’s name was Wendell Tyler Kotter. My mother’s was Lynn Catherine Ives. They named me Wendy Lynn Kotter, as if I were the miniature personification of both.

They called me, formally, “Wendy Lynn” when they spoke to me, but they said I was free to use “Wendy” or “Lynn,” whichever I preferred. They said it as though they were bestowing a great gift on me, but it was a phony academic freedom. They didn’t want me to be me. They wanted me to be them.

Well, I didn’t want to call myself Wendy because it reminded me of him, and I didn’t want to call myself Lynn because it reminded me of her. Fortunately I had one of those last names that everybody used anyway.

I liked being called “Kotter.” It was a name
they
hadn’t chosen, and it made me feel like myself.

By the time I reached the seventh grade, our household was in so much turmoil we could have used some United Nations peacekeepers. We had a huge fight over my extracurricular activities, and a truce was out of the question. They wanted me to be in the Reading Club at the Hillsboro Library. I wanted to play field hockey at school. They refused to sign the release form for sports. I skipped so many Reading Club meetings I was kicked out.

I stopped talking around the house or even meeting their eyes. They pinched their lips together disapprovingly and had long, low conversations with their colleagues in the psychology department.

I heard them talking one night when they thought I was asleep.

“What about therapy for her? Evelyn says there’s a good child psychiatrist in Darby,” Wendell said.

“She’s just going through an adolescent phase, dear. Didn’t you see her report card? Her grades are still good,” Lynn said.

I wasn’t bookish, but it didn’t mean I was stupid. I kept my grades high enough to hold my parents at bay.

Funny, you never know where you’ll find the path to salvation. I discovered it the summer after seventh grade by wandering into a sporting goods store. On the wall was a poster that showed Joan Benoit Samuelson, the Olympic marathoner, running along a tree-lined rural road. She looked so peaceful I decided to try it.

There was a park in the middle of Hillsboro that served as a sort of class divide. On one side—our side—lived the families with the respectable jobs at the college and the hospital and the local businesses, the people who thought affluence was their birthright. On the other side were the paper mill workers and the employees and serving staff for our side, the people who had been Papa de Ville’s world. The classes rarely met socially, but everybody used the park. I decided I would run there.

The morning after I saw the poster, I put on my cross-trainers from gym class and trotted along the uneven sidewalk until I got to the dirt running trails in the the park. I followed a path to the ball fields, where I noticed a girls’ softball team at practice. The players appeared to be high school age, and all but two of them were black. I didn’t know anyone. Clearly they were not from my side of town.

The running trail circled the ball field, and I watched the practice as I went. At first I looked at the players, but after a while I was drawn to their coach—a slender and youthful African-American woman with a presence a Marine commandant would kill for.

She never stopped moving. She hit balls to the outfielders. She fixed someone’s batting stance. She knocked an errant ball away before it hit her third base player in the head. She seemed to be aware of everything that was going on everywhere all the time, and her steady chatter kept her players focused.

Just being near her made me feel good. I circled the field until the practice was over, and then I beat it.

I was back the next day. The day after that, I came by earlier and watched the coach as she hauled in the softball equipment and set up the bases for her practice.

I simply couldn’t stay away. If I got tired running, I walked. Sometimes I quit altogether and just watched.

A week went by. Then the unexpected happened.

I got to the field as usual before the players arrived. I was circling behind the backstop near home plate when the coach looked right at me and said, “You.”

I stopped dead. “Me?”

“What are you doing here?”

“Nothing. I—running. I’m not—I’m allowed to, aren’t I?” I was scared to death.

“Do you like softball?”

“Uh, sure.”

“Come on inside then.”

I hesitated. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“No. I don’t know.”

I heard her chuckle for the first time in my life. It was the mirth of a fortune teller who knew more about you than you did and might tell you or might not. It was up to her, not you. “What’s the matter?” she said. “Are you afraid you’re the wrong color to come in here?”

It was exactly what I was afraid of. Once she said it, though, I didn’t seem to mind anymore. I walked over to the gate and let myself in.

“What’s your name?” she said.

I glanced down and kicked at the turf. “Wendy Lynn Kotter.”

“What do people call you?”

How did she know to ask that?
I was falling rapidly under her spell. “Kotter.”

“Nice to meet you, Kotter. I’m Coach Wilkes. Do you want to play some catch?”

“Sure.”

She picked a couple of gloves from a heap of them and tossed one to me.

“This is no good,” I said.

“Why not?”

“I’m left-handed.” I pitched the glove back into the pile. It kicked against the other gloves as though it had been hit by gunshot and then lay still.

Why there was no thunder and lightning in the next moment I’ll never know. Randie looked at me so piercingly I knew how Adam and Eve felt when they tested the apple.

She walked toward me very slowly. I backed up until I was plastered against the fence. She didn’t stop until she stood inches away from me, like a drill sergeant at boot camp. There was no one else around. I was terrified.

“Don’t you ever show me disrespect,” she said, her voice low and controlled. “Don’t you ever show disrespect to the equipment. There was a civil way to do that, wasn’t there?”

I nodded.

“I bet I can find a left-handed glove, if you’d still like to play catch.”

“I—yes, I would, Coach.”

I never threw another piece of sports equipment again. In the years to come, I never slammed down my batting helmet after I struck out. I never even kicked second base after I was caught stealing. When Randie Wilkes taught you a lesson, it took.

She tossed me a left-handed glove, well-worn and grass-stained. I wriggled my hand into it reverently, as though it was a relic from the Hall of Fame. I wondered who had worn it before me and what sort of catches it had made. I smelled its leather smell and was happy. What was it about a glove that found the poetry in me?

Randie lobbed a throw, and I caught it snug in the pocket and threw it back smoothly. The next one came in a little harder, and pretty soon we had a nice rhythm going. Pitch and catch. Pitch and catch. The only sound that mattered was the
pop-pop-pop
of the ball cleanly hitting the leather.

Randie broke the silence as our game of catch went on. “What grade are you going into?”

I hesitated. I didn’t want to talk about other troubling things. “Eighth.”

“Do you like school?”

“It’s okay.”

“Do you have a favorite subject?”

“Not really.”

“Are you on any sports teams?”

I put a little extra on the ball as I threw. “No.”

Randie quit trying to draw me out. Obviously I was a more serious case than she first thought. A little while later, she glanced at her watch. “Listen, Kotter, I’ve got to set up for my practice. You want to help out?”

“Okay.”

I helped her lug the water jugs from her car, a recent-model Jeep Cherokee, and I arranged the bats while she anchored the bases.

“This team is in the Police Softball League,” Randie said. “It’s for girls going into tenth, eleventh and twelfth grade. We play other teams in the county, and if we do well, we go to the state tournament at the end of the summer. I’m a corporal on the police force. I work in the community affairs division.”

“I didn’t know you were a cop.”

“It’s all right, Kotter. I haven’t arrested anyone on the team all year.”

I laughed. This coach was making me feel nervous and relaxed at the same time.

“You can stay and watch the practice if you want to,” she said.

I wanted to. I retreated to the bench when the players started to arrive, sauntering and styling as athletes do. They greeted Randie warmly and went about their practice in that relaxed but alert manner of every good ballplayer.

I minded my own business until a batter smashed a foul ball off her shin. Randie was beside her almost before she hit the ground and hollered at me, “Kotter! Go to my car and get an ice pack out of the ice chest in the back!”

I scrambled off, elbows and knees pumping, not to mention my heart. Years later Randie teased me about it. “You looked like one of those skinny, little pale sandpipers with a hound dog after it. I never saw a child scurry so.” All I knew at the time was that I was wanted.

I brought her the ice and made myself scarce again. At the end of the practice, she asked me to wait until the players had departed. We walked to her car and she gave me one of the team’s dark blue baseball caps.

“Here,” she said. “I can use you again tomorrow.”

I wore that cap everywhere, jammed down low over my eyes. My mother hated it but didn’t ask me to get rid of it. Freedom of expression, you know.

I spent all of that summer hanging around with Randie’s team and all of the next one, too.

At some point I wondered idly how a cop could have so much time for a softball team, but I never asked her. Little did I know it was a major part of her job. The police force knew what it was doing. It made the biggest drug bust in the history of Hillsboro after one of Randie’s players whispered that some dealers from out of town were casing her neighborhood. Randie got a citation for that one.

***

The citation still hung on Randie’s wall. I glanced at it, then looked back at her and shrugged. “I guess I can put up with Alie de Ville,” I said.

Randie gave me that all-knowing chuckle. “Why don’t you come to dinner tonight,” she said. “Julie’s barbecuing chicken and boiling up some corn on the cob.”

“Thanks. I’ll be there.”

Randie and Julie lived in a little house near the park on a street that served as a transition from one side of town to the other. They could have afforded better, but Randie didn’t want to be too far from the meaner neighborhoods. Law enforcement was a full-time commitment for her.

Randie answered my knock. “Come on in. Dinner will be ready in a minute. Is that the beer?”

“Aye, aye, Captain,” I said, lifting a paper bag in one hand and saluting mockingly with the other.

She kicked me in the seat of my pants as I walked by. I could get away with sassing her in their house, but I always paid for it.

I went into the kitchen to put the beer in the refrigerator and see Julie.

“Kotter! How’s it going?” Julie turned from the stove and melted against me in a sensuous hug. Randie watched amusedly from the doorway.

“Julie, let me take you away from all this,” I said. “I’ll show you sunsets in Paris, romance on the Riviera, candlelight cruises on—”

Julie shoved me away. “What’s the matter, Kotter? Can’t you get that clerk at the Rising Moon to pay any attention to you?” she teased.

“It’s not the clerk that’s the problem,” Randie said. “It’s that tennis pro.”

Julie smiled mischievously. “What a pity. You should have seen her, Kotter. A body like that doesn’t come along every day. Lean, muscular, skin like silk, lying there naked on my massage table. As soon as I touched her, she started moaning real softly, like she was fantasizing about—”

“Would you guys lay off?” I yelped.

“You started it,” Julie said.

“She always does,” Randie said drily.

I sighed. I wasn’t going to win this one. “I think I could use a beer,” I said.

“Not to mention a cold shower,” Randie said. She got herself a beer, handed one to me and found Julie an Evian. Julie didn’t drink. She said her body was a temple—which was perfectly obvious to anybody who looked. We sat down to eat.