Bone Coulee (2 page)

Pete buys a ticket and throws three balls. One bottle remains standing.

“It’s rigged,” Pete says.

“You’re the baseball pitcher,” Abner tells Mac. “You try.”

It seems easy, but it’s not. Mac figures that one of the bottles is weighted at the bottom. When the barker knocks them down, he has the weighted bottle on top of the other two. For everyone else, the weighted one is one of the bottom bottles. Mac will have to strike it right at the base.

On the first pitch he hits the stack dead centre, but one bottle remains upright. With his second throw, he hits again. The stubborn bottle rocks back and forth but doesn’t fall. Mac rubs the third and last baseball into the palms of his hands, more out of nervousness than out of any particular throwing strategy. He does the same thing on the pitcher’s mound, where it’s more to get the proper grip for a curveball. He notices the pretty Indian girl still standing beside the fortune teller’s tent, and she notices him. Mac catches this, and she quickly lowers her eyes.

Straight overhand he throws. The ball strikes the turf and the bottle, flipping the bottle up off the ground; it falls on its side.

“A winner!” the barker shouts. “Pick out your doll!”

What can Mac do with a kewpie doll? Another doll for the Bickley twins and they won’t have to fight over them. He’s about to pick one out for Esther, but he looks over her shoulder and sees the Indian girl again. The others Indians are leaving, but she stays where she is.

“Which one do you want?” the barker asks.

“Give me a minute,” Mac says. There are blonde dolls and redheads, but he chooses a dark-skinned, black-haired Hawaiian doll and takes it to the girl.

“What’s he doing?” Jeepers whispers.

“Excuse me,” Mac says to the girl. “This is nothing I could use. Would you like to have it?” She glances up, and for another fleeting moment their eyes meet. Without a word, she takes the doll. Her hands bob the doll up and down for a moment or two, and then she runs to join the others.

For the rest of the evening the girl’s image stays with Mac. What would people say if he went to the Indian camp to ask her if he could take her to the sports day dance? Would she come? And does he have enough nerve? He doesn’t. Sober, he doesn’t.

Mac waits for his father to come out of the beer parlour, which won’t happen until it closes for the night. He kills time in the pool hall, watching the old-timers play blueball. Every time someone sinks the blue ball, everybody else doles out a nickel. He’s tempted to join in, but he knows that he’s not in their league. Around ten-thirty, he walks back out to the fairgrounds.

The midway is silent and still, but for the muffled sounds of stragglers leaving the grounds and the bedtime murmurings of the midway people settling in for the night. Mac walks alone on the vacant track. It’s a night of the full moon, and he can clearly see the outline of the midway on the west horizon, and the aspen bluffs of the Indian camp on the east.

It’s a warm June night, the air filled with the scent of prairie roses, racehorses and the wood smoke of the camp. He has heard that an Indian camp never sleeps. Is the girl awake? He can’t just walk through the trees into the camp, but he wishes he could. What did he see in her eyes? What was she thinking?

He walks around the racetrack three times, hoping that she might somehow appear from out of the bushes and notice him. What would he do if she did? He could ask for her name. Ask if she likes the kewpie doll. But she doesn’t appear, and it’s time to take his father home. He’ll want Mac to drive the car.

Mac pitches the final game
in the Duncan Sports Day tournament. He did the first game in the morning, and Sid pitched the semifinal at two o’clock. Mac’s now working the ninth inning of the final.

Smack!
His rising fastball is right on the mitt.

“Strike one!”

“Hey, Mac! Once more, big guy! Big left-hander! Big Uke!” Abner calls for a sinking curve. They’re one run up and working on the last out, an Indian the Mainline Rockets picked up for the tournament.

Mac has been pitching senior ball for three years. They are a young team, half of them farm boys from the Buffalo Hollow School District. Their coach, Herman Scarf, Pete’s father, is a son of homesteaders who brought the game of baseball up with them from the States.

Mac takes off his cap and wipes his brow, takes his glove off and with both hands rubs the baseball. He steps up to the mound, then steps off and feigns a throw to first, checking the runner. Stepping up on the mound again, his back foot on the rubber, he eyes first base a second time, then winds and pitches home, not to Abner’s mitt but at the batter’s head. The Indian falls back, the ball breaks and drops but across the centre of the plate.

“Strike two!”

The Indian steps out of the box and with the end of his bat taps out the dirt caked in his spikes. He turns to the umpire and gives him a broken-toothed grin.

Mac sets up again, same routine. Fingers across his wet forehead. Same wet fingers rubbing the baseball. Same two-finger call from Abner for the curveball. In set position, Mac checks the runner a third time, then throws his sinker, right to the batter’s head. But this time the ball doesn’t break, and only the Indian’s sudden reflex to hit the dirt saves him from getting beaned.

“Ball one!”

Abner motions to the umpire for a time out. A strap on his left shin guard has come undone. He checks all the snaps, stretching time to give Mac a breather. Pete’s dad has coached them well. Create moments like this to rest the pitcher, break the batter’s rhythm. Herman’s coached the boys a long time. When they were kids he’d come to the Buffalo Hollow School and tell the teacher he’d take the afternoon to give the kids some physical education. It didn’t matter if some of the students were girls. They’d all get their share of pop flies.

Now the boys are one fine senior team; men in their late teens and early twenties, four of them under seventeen and still going to high school in Duncan. Mac is eighteen. Abner, nineteen. One-eyed Jeepers in right field, eighteen. Pete in left, twenty. Nick on second,
eighteen. Sid, twenty-one, and the oldest guy on the team…

“Ball two!” Again, right at his head, for the second time forcing
the batter to hit the dirt. He shakes himself off and stands back in the box waving his bat slowly back and forth above his head. He doesn’t grin.

Abner calls for a new ball from the ump, and he rubs it in the dirt, then works it round and round in the pocket of his catcher’s mitt. Then he calls for a time out again. He unfastens the snap on his chest protector, then re-fastens it. Taps his face mask on home plate as if to shake out dust that might be clogged in the sweat soaked into the mask’s leather pads. He takes a handkerchief from
his pocket and wipes the pads. Finally he walks over to the players’
bench, says something to Herman and digs into the equipment bag for his other mask.

Meanwhile, Mac has stepped off the mound. He looks across the grounds to the midway, and he hears the squeals of girls rocking back and forth in the chairs of the Ferris wheel. The horses
race down the stretch, their drivers perched on their sulkies, trimly
dressed in their coloured jackets and matching caps, urging their horses on to the finish line.

Mac’s grandfather Dmytro, his
dido,
never missed a Duncan Sports Day. He came only for the races, and in his later years got to be one of the judges up on the stand at the finish line. “Horses, they be in my Cossack blood,” he would say in his broken English. Mac was named after his
dido,
but there are not that many Ukrainians around Duncan.
Mac
was much easier for his friends at school to say than
Dmytro,
and a lot more Canadian.

His father is sitting on the bleachers behind home plate. Mac’s mother stayed home at the farm. She thinks the hay that’s cut in the yard might be dry enough to rake by now. And after that, she’s going to walk over to the Petrushkas’ to make cabbage rolls with Jeepers’s mother, and talk Ukrainian.

“Okay, big Uke! Let’s smoke this guy out of here! Have it in here now! Big one! Big one!”

Another pitch, and this one hooks outside, down and low in the dirt. Abner blocks it with his shin guard but the runner steals second. Mac waves his glove above his head and steps towards home. He’s not even thinking straight, his mind wandering as if he has heatstroke. Must be the humidity in the air. Abner had called for a fastball, but Mac had missed the signal. He hadn’t even thought of what he was throwing. He just threw. Herman signals to the ump for
time,
and walks out to the mound. Nick joins in from second base.

“Come on!” the Mainline manager yells. “Play Ball!”

Herman glances over to the Mainline bench and flicks the peak of his cap. “Arm sore?” he asks Mac.

“Just need to catch my breath. God, it’s hot!”

“We could put him on,” Abner says.

“Yeah,” Nick says. “Fill the hole. Then if he hits it, we can play any base.”

“This guy’s a hitter,” Herman says. “The Rockets didn’t pick him for the good of their health.”

“We could have had him,” Nick says. “He’s with the rock pickers. Been camped out here all month.”

“Okay,” Mac says. “Let’s just do it and finish.”

He doesn’t have much left, if he’s got anything. But a Chorniak doesn’t throw in the towel. “I’ll finish it,” he tells Herman.

“Yeah? I don’t know. We could walk him. We could change pitchers…”

“Sid?” Abner asks.

Herman waves to the bench for Sid. It’s one of those baseball moments.
Three and two
on the batter, and they all know that Sid’s arm is about done in. What should they do?

“So, Sid?” Herman asks. “Get Mac to walk him, then bring you in?”

“Something’s popped in my shoulder,” Sid says. “I don’t think I can do it.”

“My curve’s not breaking worth a shit,” Mac says.

“Just one more pitch,” Abner says. “Fastball at the knees. Give this last one all you got.”

“Sure,” Mac says. “Let’s go.”

“It’s settled then,” Herman says. “Okay, Mac. All you got.”

He watches Abner strut back to home plate. Mac will miss his friends when he goes to agriculture school in Saskatoon this fall. How’s he going to like living at the Mohyla Institute with all the Ukrainians? His mother insists that he does…. Is he getting delirious? He urges himself to get with it. Come on Mac. Just one last pitch.

Abner’s in his crouch, tapping on his mitt.

“Okay, big guy! Big left-hander. Big Uke! Blow this one by. Take him out!”

Concentrate. No checking the runner. Full windup to get as much steam as he has left. No holding back. He lets it go and it feels right. Maybe too right…too much straight down the middle…too much above the knees. The Indian’s front knee crooks…his front shoe cocked with its spikes just teasing the dirt.

He swings.
Crack!
The ball is in the air. Up. Up…. Mac turns in time to watch the ball clear the fence in centre field. The game is over.

Mac kicks the rubber, then draws a groove in the clay mound with his spikes, one way, and then across, making a big
X.
It’s funny how he somehow doesn’t want to leave the pitcher’s mound and make the slow walk to the bench. Jeepers comes in from right field, stops for a minute to shrug his shoulders and pat his glove, but he doesn’t say anything.

“I think your father’s brought us some cold beer,” Nick says, as he and Mac make their trek to the bench.

Sid hands Mac a bottle of liniment.

“That for me to drink?”

“I used it on my shoulder,” Sid says. “But don’t rub too hard. It burns like hell.”

“Smells like the stuff they use at the barns.”

“Yeah,” Sid says.

“That’s what it is? Horse liniment?”

“Herman says it’s the best thing for a sore arm.”

“Might go good with a cold beer,” Mac says.

The players sprawl on the grass, making a circle near the open trunk of Paul Chorniak’s new 1950 Ford. Mac lies on his stomach,
plucking blades of grass with the fingers of his left hand, his throwing hand. His right hand grips an ice-cold bottle of Pilsner. Every player has one, except Abner, who sips on his second bottle of Coca-Cola. Pete reaches into the trunk and grabs his second beer floating in an iced-filled copper boiler, and he snaps the cap off with his teeth.

“Should have walked him,” Jeepers says.

“If the dog hadn’t stopped to take a shit,” Nick says, “it would have caught the rabbit.”

“Do you know where your old man hides his homebrew?” Pete asks Jeepers.

“You don’t need homebrew,” Jeepers says.

“Minski sells it under the counter,” Sid says.

“Here’s my contribution,” Nick says, dumping pocket change into his baseball cap. “Put some in and pass the hat,” he tells Mac.

“Not me,” Abner says. “I’m going home to soak in a bathtub.”

“No dance?” Nick says. “What will Jen think?”

“Did I say I wasn’t going to the dance? It wouldn’t hurt you to take a wash.”