The first pitch is a strike. Tony takes it looking. His dad always said that most batters in the big leagues do that to get a feel for the pitcher. But Tony has batted against Mitchell plenty and, Lord knows, this ain’t the big leagues.
“Stee-rike one!”
Joe sounds like a real goddamn girl when he calls the strike count. Tony searches the field, catches something like a hiccup in his throat, and steps out of the batter’s box. He’s not worried because he still has two strikes left. Plenty of time for something good to happen.
Joe heaves the ball back to Mitchell and it bounces at the front of the mound. After three summers of pickup ball and one season of minors, Joe still throws like his arm is made out of spaghetti. Tony chokes up and takes a few practice swings while the brothers jaw back and forth. Big Bill’s Doberman barks, brassy in the distance. Runners at first and third, down by one. The sun is low and Tony knows, before it sets, he’s gonna hit the big one.
Down the hill, past the dump, Big Bill sits in a folding chair outside his cinderblock office next to the municipal garage, listening to the final echoes of the boy’s game. A powder-blue Buick Skylark sputters into the municipal lot, one cracked tail light glaring back at him like a bloodshot eye. A woman steps out, delicate fingers folded over a white leather pocketbook. Bill’s Doberman, Berry, bounces off his fence, slobbering with excitement.
She points up the slope. “Is this where the boys play baseball?”
Big Bill nods. She has a marvelous wreath of black hair beneath her hat and vines of white flowers crawling up her black dress. He points to the ridgeline across the pit.
“Those are my boys, you know.” Big Bill checks his tank top: the collar is translucent with sweat, but what can you do? No mustard stains, at least. “I’m like their manager. I’m the one who mows the diamond on the municipal field up there. It’s the town’s mower, but not the town’s time.”
Big Bill holds one finger up to his smile for some friendly secrecy. It’s against department policy to use municipal vehicles for non-work related matters. The woman grimaces at the rocky slope winding up the rim of the pit, pops the clasp on her pocketbook, and dabs her neck with a handkerchief. The echoes of children’s voices sound like squawking parrots.
“There isn’t another way?”
“The boys don’t walk up this way, so I assume so. A path through the wood-line on the other side of Cable Street, probably, if you can find it. Me, I just walk up there no problem. But you?”
Big Bill creaks back in a broken-spirited desk chair and lifts a boot; its sole hangs looser that Berry’s tongue. The woman wears two-inch high heels about as thin as a finger bone. She might as well just sit down and break her ankles, Big Bill thinks, and save herself the trouble of the walk.
“Hey, I bet I know who you are,” Big Bill says. “You’re Tony Guarana’s mother, right? Your boy’s up there, alright. Little fighter, that one.”
Mrs. Guarana squints into the sunset. One at a time, she teases open the tiny buckles on top of her shoes and wiggles them off. Her toes flex in their white stockings. The asphalt is scalding, but she doesn’t hurry. She places her shoes upright at the edge of the lot and steps onto the loose, rocky soil that winds up the rim of the pit. Big Bill feels the sweat beading on his bald spot.
“Careful up there, Mrs. Guarana!”
She waves over her shoulder without looking.
“C’mon, Tony!” Mitchell calls out from the mound. “You’re gonna have to swing if you wanna hit the ball!”
“Shucks, Mitch, I don’t think he can do it!”
“I know that, Joe, that’s why I said it! God, I wish you’d just shut up sometimes!”
Tony stands outside the batter’s box, observing the two brothers, one long-limbed and wiry—built by God to throw a ball—the other short and dumpy, with eyes like a doll. They must have switched the bassinets.
“Mom said you’re not allowed to yell at me like that!”
Tony tightens his grip. He used to play at the Goldmans’ house every week, kick-the-can, army guys, capture-the-flag. Nearly every game ended with Joe getting an imaginary bruise and running inside to mommy. Mitchell was two years older and no better. When his brother fled, Mitchell’s favorite game was to noogie Tony’s scalp until it smoked.
“Calm down, Joey.” Mitchell adjusts his cap. “I didn’t mean it.”
The abuse and the whining were worth it for the lunches. Mrs. Goldman prepared full-on festivals for her little angels: platters of tuna fish and peanut butter sandwiches, cut into tiny triangles with their crusts removed. Pitchers of pink lemonade and soda pop. Things Tony had never even seen before, like celery. Mrs. Goldman reminded Tony of a cartoon sun on a box of cereal, always plump and smiling.
Joe wriggles his catcher’s mask over his head and waddles over to the dugout, a frayed scrap of tarpaulin tented up over an ancient coat rack. Mitchell tosses back a groan and jogs over to tease or beg or serenade his brother back to the field. The outfielders wander toward each other, talking about the first day of school or blowing bubblegum through their nostrils. Tony keeps his practice swings easy and his mind on his own business.
Minding his own business is something Tony has gotten a lot better at over the past couple months. Mr. Guarana works nights and when he’s home he’s either drinking a few beers before bed or getting ready for his next shift. Tony isn’t sure what his dad does as a security guard at the electric company, but it must involve a lot of compression, because during these windows of time, Mr. Guarana has to decompress. Whatever that means, it’s none of Tony’s business.
Tony has been getting so good at minding his own business, Mr. Guarana has started to notice. One morning, two months ago, they were sitting in front of the television, and Mr. Guarana blew a cloud of cigarette smoke into Tony’s face and didn’t even realize until Tony sneezed.
“God bless,” Mr. Guarana had said. “Oh, hey, Tony. Forgot you were there. Grab me another beer, would ya.”
Tony had been in the beer-getting business back then, and business was good. His father stuck another cigarette in his lips and rasped his lighter.
Then Tony had done something pea-brained: he asked if mom was coming to his game that Sunday, the last game of minors. He should have known that was none of his dad’s business. But if she was staying with Aunt Mary, then she would go to church at eight in the morning and be free at nine-thirty for the game.
“Goddamnit, Tony Guarana!” Mr. Guarana’s belt uncoiled like a viper. “I said it’s none of my damn business, and if it’s none of my damn business, it’s none of yours neither!”
Leather snaps as the ball finds the pocket of Mitchell’s glove and Tony shakes his head clear. Joe huffs and puffs back to home plate. The ochre of late summer bleeds into the hay tufts, distending shadows across the field.
“Let’s get this show on the road!” says Manny at third base.
Mitchell bows his head. On the mound, he is the best of them, a natural. His gaze becomes dark and powerful; his body snaps with mechanical precision. Mitchell has hair like a scrap of tire and bushy eyebrows. He throws every pitch hard and inside. He stares at Tony like he is going to hurt him, like he’s going to whip that ball right at Tony’s head.
Tony spits. So what, he’s been hit before. There’s no walks in pickup ball and that’s the way he likes it. Better to stay at the plate and fight back. Mitchell kicks and arches like a cobra. His body wrenches his hand, the ball. The pitch.
Tony swings like he’s trying to knock it out of Sunday.
Something stabs the soft sole of Margaret’s foot and, for the first time, she looks back at the municipal garage. The fat man with his tobacco-stained lips is gone and her Skylark is still there, both good things. She takes a moment to rest and absorb her elevated view of the cultural carnage below.
Splintered bedframes, bald tires, cracked tableware, rotting diapers, and shattered bottles fill the pit. Still, it hungers. She pictures cars pulling in and out all day, fathers and sons and old women pitching their garbage into the landfill and never thinking about it again. The refuse grows and grows, but never expands.
Margaret met Jim when she was eighteen and they decided to have fun right away, and that meant having kids right away, because they were both Catholic and that’s what you did. So they got married, and the next year Tony arrived, and so did their problems. Mortgage payments and other bills, and then drinking because of bills, and broken promises because of drinking and bills. In just a few years, Jim changed. He took on about the same temper as that junkyard dog chewing through the chain-link.
Margaret admits that she changed, too. She had been happy in her youth. Rusted plumbing and busted bed frames grasp up at the fading daylight. The dump seems to have a limitless appetite for broken things. A place Tony has been nearly every day this summer.
Margaret is starting to feel sick, but it’s not the smell that’s turning her stomach. The distant garage door swings open and William—or whatever the fat man’s name is—waddles to the parking lot. Margaret turns back up the slope, and not until she has put several more steps behind her does she lift her foot to look for the rock or thorn that pricked it. The fat man scares her. She can’t say why, something he said, maybe, the way the words dribbled down his chin. The sting in her foot has not subsided, but Margaret keeps on walking towards her son.
The ball nicks the top of the bat and pops straight up. Tony staggers across home plate and disappointment fills him like nausea after a shot to the groin. It floats foul down the third baseline, ignoring gravity for a few extra seconds just to make it as easy as possible for Manny to dash Tony’s hopes and dreams. Tony prays for God to intervene and send him another pitch, just one more, just this one prayer because, for Chrissakes, you owe me at least one.
But God tends not to listen to Tony. He wasn’t listening when Tony asked for something to show up in the fridge besides pickles and Schlitz. He wasn’t listening when Miss Kate found Tony’s crude pictures of all his least favorite classmates, beheaded, or when his parents had their screaming match at PeeWee Sign-Ups night and Tony spilled juice on his pants, definitely juice. God doesn’t even seem to hear Tony’s smallest requests, things He normally gives other kids, like Matchbox cars and new bike tires.
Maybe Tony just missed the wrong day of church, the bicycle homily, and now he’s doomed to walk the sunbaked streets until his next confession. Whatever the case, Tony’s mom hasn’t lived in their house since PeeWee Sign-Ups night, he has eaten too many pickles, and he walks past a crippled bike every day on his way to the field.
So now Tony prays to the Devil, too.
As Manny runs, Tony curses him with hornet stings and untied laces and stray bullets, anything he can think of. He doesn’t know if it’s God or the Devil, but one of them is listening, and the clumsy infielder stumbles over a crinkled fold of chicken wire and loses the ball in the sun. It hits the ground with a puff of late summer dust and the whisper of you’re welcome.
Tony would dance but that’s not how they do it in the big leagues.
Margaret sees the game for the first time as she nears the top of the ridge, though the players still look like bath toys bobbing beyond the tall grass. She thinks about calling out and waving, but she doesn’t want to upset their game. To the male sex, sports are more than just games.
She just has to see Tony before she says anything.
A stiletto of dry grass pierces the bottom of her stocking and the skin beneath. The rocks were brutish, but someone made these weeds out of upturned syringes. Worse yet is the run up the nylon on her left calf, her last good pair. It is a fitting punishment for coming so late to reclaim her son. A blood offering. She said she’d be over in the afternoon to watch him play ball, and then they would go out for ice cream. That was three weeks ago, and she’s just reaching the grass of the field.
She has been afraid. Seven times today, she walked out to Mary’s car, and six times she found something else to do: forgotten lipstick, the kitchen trash, that letter of penance to Father Francis. She wasn’t afraid of running into Jim again, but she wasn’t looking forward to it, either. She can see him sitting on their couch, his couch, bags beneath his eyes the color of a plum. Drinking himself to sleep every morning, smoking himself awake every night. Just alert enough to follow the spot of a flashlight around a chain-link fence, lap after lap. Living in reverse. The man put her through hell, but she doubts he has much fight left in him. He isn’t the one she’s afraid of.
Lord knows, she has been weak. She calls herself worthless, more awful than worthless, a monster. She hears these accusations loudest when she tries to pray, and that’s why she has stopped going to church. Her thoughts echo in the building. She’s afraid to see Tony, her own little desperate Tony. She casts a final look into the trash pit. Margaret might be an unfit mother, but her husband is a coward, and Tony will not grow up to be like him.
The sun roosts on the horizon, scarlet with the end of summer. Mitchell wipes an arm over his forehead. Even now, as the shadows grow, the heat gnaws at the boys’ skin. For weeks, Tony has been sleeping on top of his sheets. He lays there, anyway.
Mitchell winds up and delivers. Tony hesitates. He can hardly see with the glare of the sun. The ball, half-solid, half-shadow, soars outside.
“Strike three!” Joe sings.
“No!” Tony barks.
Tony has a lot of snappy comebacks: he could tell Joe to take a long walk off a short pier, that he needs to get his vision checked, that he’s cruising for a bruising. But all he can manage is a shrill whine, a balloon losing air.
“Hey, I think Tony’s broken!” Joe shouts.
“Calm down, Tony,” Mitchell waves his glove for the ball. “That was a ball, Joey.”
“I was just kidding.” Joe chucks the ball back to his brother. Mitchell has to lunge forward to snatch it, but it’s an improvement. “Oh, boy, Tony, you shoulda seen your face.”
“Assface.”
Joe grins beneath his catcher’s mask. Tony remembers the day Joe got his catcher’s mask, along with a truckload of other birthday presents. A catcher’s mask, what better gift for the ballplayer who hates to run and is afraid of everything. Tony’s surprised he doesn’t wear it at recess. Mitchell knocked Tony in the pool that day and he had to spend the rest of it in itchy underwear, but the only thing he really remembers is that perfect, shiny, unbreakable mask.
In February, Tony’s father threw a blue glass vase against the kitchen doorframe. Tony didn’t see it happen, but later he found the dent in the wood, and he had heard the glass scream. Glass screams just like anything else. It shattered into a million blue crystals that burrowed into the shag carpet. Things break all the time.
Morning light always seemed to cure the night’s carnage. The family came together for breakfast, his mom read the paper, and his dad smoked a cigarette. But while Tony lay in his bed pretending to sleep, things would start to break again.
The first thing to break was always the silence, done in by his mother’s whine or his father’s bark. Next came the stillness. The floor creaked and squeaked as they moved from room to room, one following the other, like they were looking for something that could not be found. Tony would twist his sheets around his fists and in the morning he would wake up with all his blankets in a ball against his chest.
Voices broke—sobbing, choking, going hoarse—then lightbulbs, kitchen plates, drawers as they were ripped out of cabinets. Picture-frame glass, drywall, seven members of a ceramic crèche. More than once, the dewy rays of morn found one of his mother’s eyes dark and puffy or her smile swollen, the veins broken.
That was until she moved in with her sister in Camila. Now the house is quiet every night, and still Tony cannot sleep.
Baseball is a game of waiting. Its beauty is in its empty moments. The pitcher staring down the batter. The pendulum of the bat. Outfielders blowing bubbles while their hearts patter.
Tony stands at the plate while, half a mile away, his father stands at the kitchen sink, scalding his hands in hot water as he half-washes dishes. He thinks about kicking the aluminum legs on his dining table the wrong way, because he just can’t think of anything else.
The fielders look like paper cut-outs against the sinking red light. Tony imagines seeing his mother out of the corner of his eye, rising slowly over the rim of the dump like an angel in black. He blinks back to the pitcher and the game at hand.
Mitchell is smiling. “Fat lady’s singing, Guarana.”
“Come on, Mitch,” Joe says. “It’s eight o’clock and I’m starving!”
“Alright, alright.” Mitchell tosses the ball into his mitt. “Last pitch of the summer, coming right up.”
A breeze passes through carrying the smell of charcoal and lighter fluid. The pitcher steps into his wind-up and lifts his knee. The batter breathes and tightens. The catcher hollers, “Let ‘er rip!”
Mitchell slings and Tony swings.
It is a dull thud, nothing special. Tony teeters sideways and falls to a knee as the baseball dribbles down the left field line. A squib, cries an infielder. Joe leaps up, throwing his mask into the dirt. Tony can’t believe it. Mitchell and Joe are both yelling, and Tony can’t even run for first base. Always run to first, full bore, his dad told him, that’s how they do it.
The ball hits a divot and hops into foul grass. Tony rises to his feet. He stands in the last ray of sun that he can only assume is the glory of the pardon of God. One more chance. The ball went foul. He stands unvanquished.
Joe grabs the ball. Catcher pads flapping, he runs over to Tony and tags him hard in the shoulder.
“You’re out!”
Tony recoils in horror. They all must know it was foul. From the pitcher’s mound, Mitchell yee-haws.
“I got him!” Joe cries.
But, it was foul—at the end there—all the fielders are running in—
“Better luck next time, Guarana!” Mitchell hoots.
Margaret wades through the knee-high grass beyond the diamond to see her son ground out. Tony stands at an odd angle, like he’s broken, the same way he used to cower against the wall when Jim was drunk and off his rocker. She stops and covers her heart for little Tony.
Joe Goldman holds the ball over his head and squeals, “It’s over! Case closed! Sorry, pal, maybe next time—”
Tony cracks the bat into Joe’s teeth.
Leaning against the window of a Buick Skylark, Big Bill hears the crowd go wild.
