Casey's Home (2 page)

“You wait,” the catcher said.
“You just wait. He’s going to throw this last one, and he’s going to take you
apart, bone by girly bone.”

“Then I’ll get him next year,” I
replied.

“Ha, next year you’ll be too busy
trying out for the pep squad. Next year’s high school. Everything changes in
high school.”

“What are you talking about?” I
said, annoyed.

Across the span of earth to the
pitcher’s mound, I saw Cory Pipkin stretch as if he were winding up, but then
wince and rub his arm.

“Time out!” the catcher yelled
and stepped forward. “Hey, Pip, you ok?”

“Hang on,” the ump said, and
stepped around me to go examine the star of the game.

The heat moved past me like wind.
The bleachers buzzed with over a hundred voices, and from the dugout a call of
“come on, you weenie!” drifted up. I heard Mr. May shush the offending party.

In the bright, unfiltered light
of a Saturday afternoon, I watched the three men on the mound, conferring with
all the absorption of a Series play-off game. Cory rotated his arm and the ump
poked at the arm with one fat finger until Cory winced. Mr. Brooks trotted out
to join them. Everyone, I thought, is taking this thing so seriously. The
catcher had pulled off his helmet and rested it on his hip. He had bright
orange hair to go with the freckles. Long drifts of dust glittered in the low
currents of air. Someone coughed.

In that moment, I came to a
sudden, sharp realization.

I wasn’t going to play baseball.

All around me boys stood and
waited, or sat and picked the seed casings from between their teeth, or chewed
gum or wrestled or just watched, in anticipation of the moment when the game
would resume. Most of them weren’t very good. Heck, most of them weren’t really
even paying attention. But deep in their hearts, in the place where we all know
we are secretly immortal, they knew with unerring certainty that they could,
someday, go to the Majors. My God, the confidence of a teen-age boy, the surety
of their short lives: they could, with no little exaggeration, do anything.

The air hissed in my ears and the
bat felt as if it weighed more than my own body. How could it be, I wondered,
that I had been allowed to live under this ridiculous notion that I was free?
Who had first lied to me? If I hadn’t been so goddamned angry, I would have
wept.

The little cluster of players at
the mound broke apart and moved back to their designated places. I stared at
Cory Pipkin in shock and with a sense of envy so strong it nearly made me sick.
He was grinning that same grin.

I gripped the bat with a manic
intensity. This was it, and suddenly I knew it. I hit the ball, hard.

I would like to say that my final
gift to my team was a slamming home run, but really it was merely a double
knocked into the hole between center and left. Behind me, the bleacher crowd
cheered and the catcher swore. I came screaming around to second, running so
hard I could barely stop. I didn’t have to stand there, trying to breathe,
trying to remain in control, for long. The next batter hit it straight to the
first basemen. I never even left the bag.

Walking off the field, I knew we
still had an inning of play remaining. I knew I was supposed to stop just a few
feet from second base and squat there, content to catch the crappy little
grounders that constituted a Senior League shortstop’s game. Mr. May held up my
glove as I approached.

“Nice hit,” he said. And then, as
I took my glove and walked right out of the chain link fence, I heard him
shout: “Casey?”

My father was standing up by the
time I reached him, his face unreadable. I was crumpling, folding into myself
like a flattened ball of paper.

Around me concerned parents
leaned close, and Mr. May could be heard scrambling up the metal benches to
intercept me.

“Casey?” my Dad said, his eyes
searching my face, my body for signs of visible injury. “What’s going on?”

I simply wrapped my arms around
his chest and burst into tears.

“It’s all right,” he whispered,
stroking the flat palm of his hand across my hair. “It’s all right, baby.”

“Casey? Are you hurt?” Mr. May
asked.

“Leave her,” my father said
quietly. “Go put in someone else. We’re going home.”

As he walked me back to our car,
he left one arm around my shoulder, one hand rubbing my arm. His palm radiated
heat.

“Casey,” he said, unlocking my
door. “You know I’m proud of you, right? I always have been, always. You’re the
best girl I ever saw. Better than any boy there ever was.”

Even as I nodded and slipped from
beneath his arm, I knew he was lying. In my seat, I aimed the air ducts fully
at my face and waited for him to turn the key so I could dry my tears. It
struck me, then, that he had never asked me what the matter was. Of course,
this was because he knew. All along, through my many years of playing, he had
been waiting for this day, knowing with certainty that it would come. Perhaps,
when I was a little girl, he had hoped the interest would wane, all the while
encouraging it because it satisfied something selfish within him to see his own
child hitting the ball, running the bases. Maybe he thought I would just
outgrow the desire.

I was stunned by my own grief at
this notion, that I had been set up to fail. How was I supposed to deal with
the fact that each time my father watched me play, that every time he cheered
for me or threw me the ball a little harder than he had before, he was
expecting disappointment? What the hell was the point of doing anything at all?
On the long drive home, the catcher’s squeaky voice echoed in my head,
finishing Thayer’s words.

1998

“So
what are you up to this weekend, Miss Wells?”

Putting
away the last of the papers to be graded, I looked up to see that Mark was
sitting on the edge of the table, waiting for me. It was Friday, two weeks
before summer break, and the other students had high-tailed it out of the room
like their asses were on fire. Mark, however, had broken his leg two weeks
before and was already adept at using it to great advantage. He knew I wouldn’t
kick him out today, as I sometimes did when the long looks and double entendres
got to be too much. Mark was in my advanced creative writing class, a good
student who wrote imaginative, if somewhat Hemingway-esque stories, and he was
a ball player. Even though he was unable to play, it was perfectly clear, and
not just because of the Pacific Northwest Community College tiger brandishing a
baseball bat on his tee shirt. “He just looks like a baseball star,” the other
teachers said in the faculty lounge, and I knew exactly what they meant.

“This
weekend? Not much,” I answered. “Maybe I’ll work in my garden.” My garden was
two-foot deep in weeds and ablaze with the most gorgeous red poppies I hadn’t
actually planted, remnants of the previous renters. At some point, when I could
no longer locate my anemic tomato plants, I’d decided to let nature win. I
hadn’t looked at the garden in a month. Mark turned back to me, or rather,
swiveled on his good leg and steadied himself against the table.

“That
doesn’t sound very exciting.”

“Maybe
not to you,” I admitted. Not to me, either. I was thirty-four years-old, a
lifetime away from this kid, who couldn’t have been over twenty-one, or I’d
have seen him drinking down the street at Three Bells, where all my older
students went after class. Sometimes, a few of us staff made it there, too, but
perhaps not often enough. I waited as he hopped over to the wall to retrieve
his crutches.

“I’m
sure you could find something better to do than garden.”

I
was fairly sure I could, too. Mark held the door open, waiting for me to leave.
I closed my bag and stepped up to the door. When he didn’t move, I ducked under
his arm and out into the hall, empty in the early evening. I let him hobble out
of the way and then checked the door to be sure I’d locked it. I might have my
own office, finally, but the classroom was shared. If a single dictionary went
missing, I’d hear all about how irresponsible I was.

“You
need a ride?” he asked, as if he could actually provide one with one leg in a
cast.

“I
have my car. Goodnight, Mark,” I said, knowing he was watching as I walked down
the hall.

I
wanted to be good. I have always wanted to be good, even when I was acting like
an idiot. At my car, I found myself jingling the keys near the lock and
glancing over to the bright lights of the college baseball field, casting its
long shadow into the parking lot. A scattered cheer went up from the stands. It
was a lovely hour, with the pearl strings of lights above the gray velvet road
below campus. Just a bit further out, Puget Sound caught the last sunlight and
dribbled it from wave to wave as if it were oil. Really, I told myself, it’s
not that late. I opened the car door and dropped my bag onto the passenger
seat.

The
field was small, and not nearly as big-budget as the stadium on the other side
of campus, but it was pleasantly familiar; a bright, dirty spot in the pristine
grounds. College baseball, especially community college baseball, is not a
money-making enterprise. The only ones who stand to make anything are the
players, and at a good school, they play like they know it. That night, we were
playing a good school.

I
was parked in the student lot, on the edge of the baseball field, tempting
myself nearly every night with the smell of Lion’s Club popcorn and the sound
of a well-hit home run. On the other side of the main building, the faculty lot
waited in all its tarmacked glory. I could have parked there, and avoided
incidents like the time someone left a neat pyramid of empty beer cans on my
hood. I chose not to admit my desire, the way my friend Alex Rushton over in
the history department kept a half-empty bottle of scotch in his bottom desk
drawer long after he’d decided to quit drinking. We all knew it was there, but
no one, especially not Alex, would comment on why he hadn’t thrown it out.

A
metallic whack was followed by another small cheer. After a moment, a booing
erupted, the collective sound of realized expectations. The Tigers were popping
them up again. Leaving the car, I walked across the parking lot to the gate of
the field. The security guard nodded as I passed, bored by the small crowd, the
slow trickling loss of the game. Though we weren’t exactly on a first name
basis, he knew me well enough that I no longer had to flash my ID.

I
made my way through the bleachers, sitting in my usual spot, just below third
base. The line of sight toward the pitcher was best there.

Mark
was already there. He smiled as I sat, clearly knowing he had just come out
ahead. He was cracking sunflower seeds, a small mound already forming at his
feet.

“Who’s
hitting?” I asked.

“You
mean theoretically?” he replied, easy. I smiled at him. Unlike many of my
students, many of the players I had known, he was intelligent and rather sweet.
“Dave Rober just fouled, as usual. You staying long?”

I
shook my head.

At
the mound, the pitcher released the ball and the batter swung. There was a
brief, hollow pop and the ball sailed nearly straight up, landing in an
infielder’s mitt, ending the inning. Leaning forward, I watched as the teams
traded sides, jogging to warm up in the cool spring air. Mark leaned forward as
well, his face effectively becoming my view.

“So,”
he said, not looking at me. “I read your book.”

Inwardly,
I groaned. I didn’t want any of my students to read the damn thing, because
once they did, they immediately stopped respecting me.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.
I particularly liked the part where the gorgeous woman falls madly in love with
the handsome ball player. Great stuff. Very funny.”

The
only really funny part was the blurb on the cover that talked about the book’s
“autobiographical nature.” While I had certainly fallen in love with my share
of baseball players – okay, just two – neither one had gone on to sweep me off
my feet and make my life complete. The last one, Chris Hernandez, had been a
hitter for the Mariners before they were good, and was burned out by the time
they improved. The first had been a terrible childhood crush on my father’s
protegee, Ben McDunnough, who had seemed to disappear and reappear in our lives
like a ghost, until one day he just took up residence near my father and didn’t
go away. By that time, I had.

“Oh
yeah?”

“Yeah.
No really, I did like it.”

One
more tiny royalties check to supplement my measly salary. Having given up my
dream of playing baseball, I concentrated instead on what seemed to be my only
other viable skill: constructing really elaborate lies. Three years after
finishing my novel, I could track its performance at those on-line,
up-to-the-minute bookstores, watching it slide from number eight thousand
twenty-one to eight thousand twenty-six.

But
at the very least, the book got me my job. I didn’t even have to apply; I was
simply begged to come join the faculty. I had no idea what they really thought
of the book, but my editor’s sister headed the department. I was only required
to publish something short every few years, and they would allow me to have my
own sunny little office with its hot plate and computer and slouchy old chair
forever, if I wanted. I wasn’t at all sure that I did want it forever, but I
wrote a few short stories or an article each year anyway, just in case.

“You
up for some dinner?” Mark said it as if it really didn’t matter, as if we
weren’t teacher and student.

“Not
tonight, Mark.”

He
laughed and toed his pile of seed casings. “Ever?”

At
that I turned. He was half-smirking, aware.

“You
know how it is, Mark,” I said, mostly reminding myself. There was no way he
really understood how it was, not for me.

“There’s
no rule,” he said. Just like there was no “rule” against sleeping with my
married news editor, but I had learned quickly how wrong that was. I rose and
stretched.

“I’m
headed home.”

The
opposing batter stepped up, to a few boos. Mark gave me his best leer.

“Have
a good one.”

The
pitcher stung the batter in the side with a curveball that refused to break.
There was a quiet groan from those close enough to see. Tossing his bat toward
the dugout, the opposing team’s player skipped to first base as if it were
Little League. I knew then for certain we would lose tonight, though there
never had been much room for doubt.

I
was making my way back to my car when there was sudden resounding smack, the
sound of a well-hit ball on an aluminum bat, followed by a few desperate
screams of anger. Turning back, I watched in surprise as the ball sailed over
the fence. I had to duck as it came toward me and barely cleared my head. There
was a soft thump as it hit my car and rolled to a stop in the gravel. I picked
up the fallen ball, turned it over and rubbed the warm, dry surface, feeling
the dent left by the bat’s sweet spot. For a moment, I let my fingers search
out the laces to help me define a fastball, then I tucked it into my pocket.

I
spent most of the evening as I always spent my Fridays, cooking a small pot of
pasta, drinking iced tea and pretending that I was interested in anything my
students were writing. The long weekend loomed ahead. It wasn’t that I didn’t
like teaching: I did. But in the end, I was sure I was missing out on
something.

Sitting
in front of the silent television, half-watching a game with the sound off and
half-reading a student story that began: “She was six feet tall, stacked,
Swedish and could kill people with her mind ...” I was interrupted by a knock.
I could have claimed that I had no idea who it would be. It was nearly eleven.

Through
the peephole I saw Mark, holding two beers and trying to support himself on his
crutches. I wasn’t sure where he’d managed to snare the beers, though it was a
college campus, so it really could have been anywhere. He was still wearing his
baseball shirt, and maybe that was what finally did it. Or maybe it wasn’t
really about the shirt at all. It briefly crossed my mind that maybe he thought
my body contained some sort of famous-pitcher mojo. Maybe I believed something
like that, too. Either way, I didn’t even bother to figure out which one of us
had won.

I
let him in.