there is no real baseball happening

Arlo. Arlo in his car. Driving to the baseball field on a rainy day.

Arlo had somehow found his way into Lake county on his way to the ballpark. He’d been listening to the radio, to Christian talk radio, and had been absorbed in the conversation, not paying attention to the road at all. Today they were talking to recovering gays—he assumed from elsewhere; the station was piped in from Washington state, broadcast from somewhere in Eastern Washington, in the Tri-City area, where the fields of grain and stands of trees, destined for the paper mill, stretched and rolled out in infinite file. So, in his head were the fields of grain and the stands of trees and the probable squatness of the radio station and the men inside of it, starched white shirts and cowboy-cut jeans with God on the radio. And the probable hygiene and peace of mind of the gays, the ex-gays, of their newfound cleanliness soaring across the phone lines and radio waves of Western America. Their voices filled him with admiration at their rebirth and a profound sense of the promise, and it was one of those days in the Flathead Valley when the rain hung down in curtains and the sun between the clouds shot the land full of holes, and the clouds dragged their skirts of rain across the valley floor like great ghosts and he, in his car with the heater on and the smell of the dusty carpet rising up from the floorboards, racing along the Somers cutacross, felt like he was in the very right place.

He remembered about practice—little leaguers sitting in their cars with their parents in the rain, the kids who’d been dropped off sitting in the dugout, kicking the chain link of the backstop—and turned around in the parking lot of a gas station. He did not curse. Arlo almost never cursed anymore. He had a new wife and she hated swearing. He had gotten used to it, gotten used to the feeling of cleanliness that came from a clean mouth and conscience. He liked how it felt. He liked the new friends his wife had introduced him to, all Gregs and Scotts who drank Corona with lime and joined him on his motorboat for evening cruises around the lake, sometimes some waterskiing or golf on Sunday. He pulled out of the parking lot, thinking how good it was that he had moved out here. Here where there are the nods and firm handshakes and Mexican food and women with turquoise and amber amulets all wrapped up in silver dangling between their tan breasts. He was from Lincoln; he had never had that before.

Art by Carolyn Kelly, who lives in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania and has illustrated for publications such as Pittsburgh City Paper, Platform Magazine, and Pittsburgh Quarterly. More of her work can be viewed at http://www.carolyn-kelly.com.

He had never been a coach before, either. He had never considered himself to be coaching material, but his wife convinced him that it would be a nice thing to do, and besides hadn’t he played baseball in high school. It had really been his idea in the beginning. He had once mentioned the idea and he had surprised her pleasantly. But it was important to be humble and understated, also. This was something he had learned, and so after the idea was in the air he resisted and hemmed and hawed and his wife had said good wifely things like well everyone says you were very good then and the kids would love you and baby it’s a great idea and so he had finally melted into bashful smiles and affirmations and gone down to the school cafeteria to sign up on the clipboard that said “Coaching.” But it had been a couple of weeks and the team wasn’t looking so good. There was the giggling of the kids and the long heat in the late summer with the dust always mixing him up and he would get angry and the kids would get scared or sullen and then there was no real baseball happening. And damned if he was going be the guy with the team that didn’t know their ass from their elbow. Something was off and today he would fix it.

When he’d woken up that morning he’d taken a shower and gotten out and shaved and stared Romanly into the mirror with a face covered in shaving cream. He tried to look the way Randy Jackson looked when he was on the mound, the bored, tired façade over a swamp of alertness. Arlo had an inevident problem with movies, and with the wanting of life to follow after itself like a movie. It was a difficult and inscrutable problem of which he himself was not aware, but as he stood in front of the mirror staring into the backs of his eyeballs, he was watching a film about himself and the bigness of his heroism on the diamond and the bigness of the children’s following eyes. The problems, he knew, would disappear when the bat cracked and there was chalk and dust in the air and the shells of sunflower seeds in the dirt. What was important was to look like Randy Jackson. And to talk and act like The Coach. That was the part he had been practicing.

To be The Coach, you have to dredge up your whole history of carnal sports knowledge and wear it on your sleeve like a bloody bandage. You have to know exactly how to say the right thing, like which things are “killing you” and when it is time to “take a seat on the shitcan, cause you’re done, son.” You have to walk with a bowlegged limp and drink your cup of Gatorade like a glass of bourbon. When Arlo went to the Mexican bar with his friends after the gym, he would sometimes practice his bourbon drinking face, taking a drink of his bourbon, holding the look he got, looking into the mirror across from the bar. And then he’d take a drink of water and do the same face as close as he could. He practiced looking out like a cowboy at the highway that ran by the bar. You had to use all those things. You had to cultivate them like a player did. Arlo had always thought it was strange how nobody thinks of the coach as a player.

And then there was his new wife to think about. That was a funny thing, what was happening there. She had glowed with pride and satisfaction when he made his decision and she had been there to rub his back and make him a BLT and tell him good job but after the first time and after the reports from the concerned parents started coming in at the shoe store, the funny looks started and the cocked not-understanding-or-believing head when he was talking to her. But today, with the new resolutions and the voices on the radio, Arlo was riding the great wave of cinema into the ballpark.

He was driving along the lake now, and slowed around the curves in the road where the lake almost lapped at the highway, all chalky and turquoise. Arlo hadn’t been born with a sense of aesthetics, but sometimes he was still awed by things. Like this lake. He still didn’t really know how to talk about how he felt. Most of the time he could wait until what he wanted to say was expressed and then nod or mm-hmm in agreement. He knew enough to know when somebody had said a right thing. He liked the exchanged-look secretive feeling that happened when something good was said or acknowledged. He liked basking in the collective warmth generated by those moments when the group’s taste seemed to mark the shape of the thing itself, to embellish its fineness with the honor of having been acknowledged as such. Arlo wasn’t very talented at picking out those things. But sometimes he could acknowledge that something was happening to him because of those things. Sometimes he could acknowledge the awe.

He drove past Woods Bay, where all the cherry and plum trees went from the top of the hill above the highway all the way down to the lake shore. He had heard stories about a real cold winter, probably about ’91, when the entire lake, all 27 some miles of it, had frozen over with two feet of ice and most of the trees had died. Folks who had been around said that the snow was so high that you had to dig trenches to all the outbuildings and you couldn’t see the horizon from the highway, the berms were piled so high. But that had been a good seven years before he’d moved up here and before the town was featured in “Destinations” and exploded in an influx of oldness and whiteness and golf. After that, all the places where the migrant workers who came up from San Diego and from Washington hung around and pitched their camps for the summer got bulldozed and new boutiques and restaurants got built. Now they camped out here, closer to the orchards.

As far as Arlo was concerned it was progress—he himself had moved up here with a construction crew to build a high-end shoe-store/cafe that imported clogs and other leather shoes from Sweden and Holland as well as fine handcrafted cowboy boots that were made out on the East Side not far from Miles City. His wife owned the shop and that’s where he met her. She had been a popular girl in high school and still had a lot of friends here. A couple of them worked at the grocery store in town and some worked as landscapers or in the galleries in the summer and as substitute teachers in the winter. Arlo remembered being in the store late on a Friday night doing finish work or sanding and seeing her with her gal friends sitting in the café adjacent to the shop and her gal friends talking and giggling and looking his way and her just sort of queening over them, all calm and confident. He would just try to never react, keep on doing what he was doing. Part of that was cause he was shy but a bigger part was cause he knew that it was good to be silent and have big veins on your hands and sawdust in your hair and just sort of smile sometimes. He was trying for that. So when he was working late one night and she was doing the books in the office and then she came up behind him and he felt her hand on his back he was not surprised. She did a lot of talking. They got married pretty soon after that.

Everyone said Arlo was a very handsome man. And very strong. That made him feel good, and it didn’t even bother him when the old boyfriends got drunk at the wedding and talked about doing it in cars and how she was crazy then and did she still have it. Their wives got madder than he did, probably, because everybody wanted to dance with his wife. His wife. Arlo had never had that before. He could tell she was impressed with how well he handled himself, with her parents and with the relatives. He was very good with family members—all his old girlfriends’ parents had always liked him because of the nod and the mm-hmm. And he could always fix a car or a toilet or chop wood in the winter. Afterwards he’d come in from the cold and the mothers would pour him some coffee and cook him a steak with homefries or mashed potatoes and he would wolf it down while the mothers looked on with matronly pride and the girlfriend would be there smiling, maybe with her hand on his knee while he ate. So he knew what older folks liked.

Everyone at the wedding was invited by his wife. He had invited a couple of folks from down in Lincoln, but none of them showed up. His parents had died a few years back from asbestos, so they weren’t there, either. It was probably better that way anyways. He didn’t think many of the folks from Lincoln would get along too well with this crowd. It was also easier for him, a lot less for him to defend, because, secretly, Arlo knew he was a sheep in the company of wolves.

So now Arlo was driving to the baseball field, trying to keep the wolves off his scent. He rounded the bend and crossed the bridge, headed back toward town. The river had been low, but the rain of the last few days was shoring it up, making it murky. It was always a relief when the rain came in September, damping down the smoke from the fires that burned in the Park all summer and making the air blue and clean again. It was Arlo’s favorite kind of day. He pulled onto the Swan River Highway and took it down to the old Dump Road and pulled into the parking lot of the ball field where Ford Explorers and minivans were huffing and puffing blue exhaust and turning it purple in their red taillights. He reached into the glove compartment and grabbed his can of chew and put it in the breast pocket of his shirt and opened the door. Turned and stretched against the jamb of the door. When the kids saw him doors started opening and orange-and-white uniforms began to congregate in the dugout to the right of home plate.

He took roll and two kids were missing. Nathan Douglas had a dentist appointment and coach he told you that last time and Patrick Gembala had gone home because his mom got tired of waiting. That was okay. They were second-string anyway. Today he wanted to run infield defense first which meant Corey and Ben and Seth and Felix on the bases, Conor on the mound and Tucker catching. Katie and Jean and Stevie had outfield at least for the first half hour—if it wasn’t working, they’d switch it up and I know Pete that you only played ten minutes last game—we’ll get to it. But first I want ten laps around the outfield and then pushups. Let’s go boys. What? And Katie. Sorry.

And now the kids were running the outfield, the sound of their steps audible above the drip of rain on the tin roof. Everything today will be right, thought Arlo, thinking of his wife’s tan arms and the silver bangles on her wrists, crossed before her tan full breasts, the neckdown promise of baseball.

The kids’ running gave him a minute to recoup and figure out what needed to come next. The Coach would talk after the team had earned it, and any fool could run in circles around a ball field. Better to do it after the first half of practice, he thought. He hoped Gil would get there soon. Gil was the assistant coach, Felix’s dad, and was as serious about baseball as Arlo was now. He wanted to talk to Gil about good cop/bad cop. Gil would make a good good cop. He was a Mexican or El Salvadoran guy whose parents had gotten stuck here years ago when their car broke down and didn’t get fixed before winter came and so they had had to find work at the bakery and the hardware store—Gil’s dad still worked there, in fact, in the lumber yard. A tough old guy. Gil’s mom had thrown her back out and couldn’t pay for a chiropractor or a brace and so she sat at home now, selling the things she knit at the farmers’ market on Saturdays in the bank parking lot. They got by pretty well, actually. From what Arlo could tell, Gil had been about six when they’d gotten stuck out here and had picked up English in school. Gil worked in retail—he sold pellet stoves and snowmobiles and motorcycles and repaired them all, too. He worked hard, and still got on really well with all the migrant folks who made their way through. He would even put up some of the more naïve ones who came through unprepared for the alternating heat and stormy cold that could happen because of the weather off the lake. Arlo liked Gil and what he represented. But he was pretty sure Gil suspected him of being disingenuous. And that was probably true. Definitely true. He knew that Gil had something which he did not have, probably it was the moral high ground. But that is why Gil would be the good cop.

The kids came in and started to head for the dugout. Arlo said get out to your positions so everyone did. And then Gil drove up in his old Chevy, which was good because Arlo was running out of things to say. Instead, he just said run number three—the kids all knew what that meant. The ball went, catcher-to-pitcher-to-third-to-first-to-short and underhand to second and on back to home plate. TuckerConorBenSethFelixCoreyTucker. Sometimes it got dropped and the kids would laugh or yell or groan and Arlo would say C’mon guys—baseball. But when it went right it sounded so good- the timed thwack of the ball in the right spot in the mitt and the shuffle and the grunt.

Gil came on into the dugout wearing a blue corduroy ball cap high up on his head and a blue rayon warm-up and his work pants, which were stained with grease from all the machines. Gil smoked a lot and rolled his own. He said hey Arlo how are ya and shook his hand and sat down on the bench, taking out his tobacco from his inside jacket pocket. Arlo liked to watch Gil roll cigarettes because Gil’s hands were rough and scaly, with little white borders of dead skin around the pads of his thumbs and forefingers and always a nail was turned black and blue from getting slammed in a hood or hit with a hammer. Arlo said hi back and not too bad—the kids looked okay today. Gil snorted and said, “Yeah, well, give ‘em ten minutes out there in the drip and that Gina Rossdale scootin’ around on her dirtbike out there behind the outfield and there’ll be no baseball happenin’. When he made that grunting noise before he spoke, his whole frame sort of bounced and expanded with the sound and then settled back. He was a short guy, probably about 5’8”, and thin. Arlo was also wiry and tough, but a little bit thicker and squarer. He often felt like he would have done better in a smaller frame, just a little bit lighter so he could stay skinny into old age. He didn’t want to become one of those guys you see at the clubhouse at the golf course, with their faces all ginblossomed and their paunches keeping them away from the edge of the table.

His assistant coach lit a cigarette and leaned back against the chain-link wall of the dugout and the smoke from his cigarette reminded Arlo of the next-morning toxic hangover cigarette, the smoke that tickles and soothes the nausea, the kind that his dad used to smoke to wake him up in the trailer. On Saturday mornings his father would turn on the football game on the TV in the kitchen and it would shout into his dreams and he would stumble out into the yard to get firewood in the snow. It was a wordless command: football means firewood. He would wear the big quilted flannel shirt he’d gotten for Christmas and big Sorel boots and his wool pants and walk out to the wood pile. He’d sweep aside the snow-covered tarp and grab a few pieces of wood, throwing them onto the part of the driveway that was packed down from the truck, and cover the wood back up and gather up the pieces he’d thrown and head back for the house. But sometimes he would stop in the middle of the wooly thick whiteness with his head aching and feel sick to his stomach and the snow fell and he would be awed by the big darkness of the mountains’ meeting the floor way on the other side of the valley and all the fencelines stretching out and away. He would get stuck in the deaf silence of snow and feel his nostrils freezing and there might be the moan of a car on the road or an airplane somewhere above him. And the sound of his breath and the clouds that came out of his mouth. And all of it worked together to make him deaf and dead or dreaming with his hungover head and trembling stomach like the baby birds he once found in the birdhouse on the fence that writhed when he opened the top and the cold air came flooding in. He felt how he was nested in the cold and how we are all always nested in something and how when he went inside he would be nested in the football and there was nothing he could do about it. And there would arise the wish to sit in this nestedness, maybe to build a snow cave and stay out in the cold.

His dad would be sitting in the breakfast nook to the right of the entryway when Arlo came back in, drinking coffee and smoking and looking across at the little TV that sat next to the toaster oven under the cupboard. His mom was at work at the restaurant at the truck stop at the junction. So his dad would grunt and gesture at the toast that was too dark and cold and the coffee and the hard butter, all without looking away from the game. Arlo would fry some eggs without talking and take them to his room with the cold toast and a cup of coffee he heated up in the microwave. He would read in the local newspaper about how they were planning a new shopping center on the outskirts of town, then read the sports section and look for his name because he played basketball too. Then he’d go take a shower and maybe jerk off and come back to his room and get dressed, and bring his dishes to the kitchen, finding that his father had taken off for the bar or the casino.

He remembered how on one particular occasion he had come out and his dad had been gone and he had decided to go out in the woods. He would normally take the snowcat but this time he decided to walk. He brought his gun with him. He didn’t really know why. But he put on his boots and hat and gloves (the kind where you can pull back the mitten part and have your fingers free) and walked out the door and around the back of the house and into the woods towards the top of the hill. He had woken up kind of late, around noon, and it was the middle of winter so the light was already getting dusky and dull. Arlo went up the mountain, up the hill, towards where he knew the radio tower was. The snow was deep, up to his crotch, and he could feel it, freezing and grainy, as it squeaked and shifted with his progress. He kept moving despite the slow going and soon made it to the ridge. Now he just had to follow the spine up to the station and there he could sit, eat the baloney and bread he’d brought with him and maybe wait for something to shoot.

But then he heard something down the hill to his right, like human voices. He paused, turned, started down the hill and stopped. Something about people together in the woods, about meeting haphazardly in the woods. It could be indecent. If they stopped to talk, or if they saw his gun. It’s always uncomfortable when you are caught in the act of making a movie.

The voices got closer and they were female. Arlo could see their clothes now, flashing through the trees—they were skiing. Skiing up the logging road on a Saturday afternoon. Two hippy girls with knit wool hats and gators on. They were breathing hard and trying to talk as they skied. Arlo decided to turn around and avoid them by going up to the top—he was almost there and the logging road didn’t go all the way up so the girls would probably turn around. He scrambled back up to the spine and started walking again, a little faster this time, looking for the places where the trees had sheltered the ground and where the snow would be a little less deep. The girls’ voices got fainter. They must have gone the other way or stopped or something, he thought. It started to snow. But he kept walking and made it all the way up to the radio tower, which was not actually a tower but a big square building made of sheet metal and covered on the outside with foam into which people carved their names and initials and the dates they had been there. It had a big antenna coming out of the roof, with four red lights that flashed every half-minute or so. That was probably why they called it a tower. But the best part about the radio tower was that on one side, the hill on which the tower was built had eroded a little bit and so you could crawl under there if it was too hot or rainy or if you just wanted to feel good. And in the winter when the snow was still light and hadn’t melted or frozen or anything you could float down into that space on the powdery snow and the light that made its way in through the gap between the snow and the building would be feathery and painted like the light that gets through a down blanket on a really bright day. It was too dark out for that now, but still Arlo crawled down inside and sat down on a boulder that the erosion had exposed and looked out over the valley, green-black and white and blue, through the gap between the snow and the building. He took out his baloney and bread and ate them slowly, alternating between bites of bread and bites of the meat. He liked the way food tasted after you had carried it somewhere. He was hoping that a deer would come by or a goat or something. He hadn’t gotten anything during hunting season. It wasn’t actually legal to be hunting right now, but out here it really didn’t matter if the season was open or not. And technically he wasn’t actually hunting. Not right now anyway.

Then he heard the voices of the girls—they were quite close—now he could even hear the swish and crunch of their skis on the dry snow. Too late to try and get away. They stopped right in front of him—he could see their leather ski boots and their gators.

“Whew- made it.”

“Yeah, I didn’t think it was gonna take us this long. What time is it now?”

“Mmm… five thirty. Shit. We’re definitely going to be late for dinner.”

“What time did Mom want us there?”

“She said seven. But I think it’s gonna take us at least two hours to get down.”

A pause.

“Do you think we should go?” Another pause.

“Can we just sit for a minute? We’ll leave soon as you start getting cold. We’re gonna be late anyways. Just a few minutes.” Arlo waited for the talk about boys to begin, the praise of and worry over men that he imagined crowded the confidences of girls when there were no real men present. He imagined women crouched over this conversation as over a fire, left by men, which slowly dwindled until men returned to build it up again.

Then skied feet had become regular feet and hands came out of the sky and the skis disappeared. And he remembered how the two girls had sat down before him, one sitting in front of the other, hugging, and how they had started to kiss and the mittens had come off and soon they were lying there in the snow, packing it down with their rolling. And Arlo saw all of this and did not say a thing, kept completely quiet because he was only seventeen no only watched in amazement the flushed faces framed in the gap and listened to the sound of breath. Soon it was dark. The girls got up and left but it was Arlo’s first time and he was amazed and got lost in the dark of the forest. He wandered around feverishly, thinking of how their rolling had shamed him, how it had outraged him. How he felt the warmth of their bodies still rising from the angels they had left in the snow and thought again of that fire but this time he did not feel deified or grand, only foolish and spent.

He wound up on the highway some five miles from home and walked halfway back before a car had finally stopped. He had been exhausted and his father had slapped him and pushed him into his room but he had gone to bed thinking only of how in the snow he had seen the beckoning ghosts of the future and how they had frightened him with their indifference of a wider, wizened world. He stripped down out of his wet wool pants and socks and climbed into flannel sheets and dreamed about that future burning out there in the snow in the woods.

And Arlo, coming back to himself there in the dugout, thought then about how his wife had told him he didn’t need to work for Don Hansen anymore, that there was plenty to do around and related to the store and besides the shop was doing so well it didn’t make sense for him to be working like that—construction is so dangerous. He could help pick out the men’s lines and work on the addition they were putting on in back and that would mean he could be home early in time for a real dinner and maybe he could even learn how to cook himself—you know ladies go crazy for a guy who can cook. And Arlo had let that bitch ruin him and take away his balls. That is what they would say back home. That is what he looked like now. For a moment this anger flashed in his chest, but he moved quick to subdue it. The baseball; the rain; Gil’s cigarettes; it didn’t make any sense.

He realized he needed to pull it together; somewhere along the line his mood had gone sour and this was not the way the Coach should behave. Still, there was something scratching at the back of his throat which felt like doubt or uncertainty or maybe it was the feeling of finding oneself suddenly in the midst of an unanticipated danger; Arlo stood up and Gil stood up with him. The sun was even starting to shine a bit through a hole in the clouds; the rain let up; the tin roof of the dugout dripped. The kids stopped throwing the ball around and looked up and basked in the light that seemed to come from another part of the world, sent here and then opened. Arlo walked into the center of the diamond with authority, but none of the kids were looking his way—they all had moth-eyes for the sun and Arlo noticed that he too liked the feel of the sun on his face, so he stood there with them on the diamond, all of them looking like a crop of sunflowers for a moment and to a passing motorist it would have seemed strange, all those children looking dazedly up and a man in a ball cap and work boots right there in the middle of them. Arlo noticed a rabbit had come out and was eating grass along the outfield fence. The air smelled of wet grass and autumn and its particular melancholy. The colors came back and the moment passed. Arlo straightened and adjusted his cap and his nuts.

“Alright guys—gather round.”

The kids came in and stood in a rough semicircle around him, all orange caps, cleats and runny noses, shifting on their feet and picking their uniforms out of their butts. He looked out over their sea of expectation and hoped that he could put this ship rightly afloat upon it. He hoped and now it was a sincere and noble real-life lifting hope and not made of film or dogged by any of his vanity; this assemblage of small humans made him feel the twinge of fatherhood in the small of his back and made the children into pilgrims.

“We gotta figure out what’s going wrong with our offence. Gil thinks it’s our base running, but I’m not sure. That’s definitely a big part of it. But really, I think our whole attitude’s gotta change. Y’know what I think it is: I think it’s that we’re all scared to win. We been stoppin’ the other guys from scorin’ a pretty good amount of the time, but when it comes our turn to go to bat, something’s happening. Or not happening is prolly a better way of putting it. We’re gonna try and figure that out today. Cause I think y’all could make some real nice baseball happen out there—y’know I seen it when you were running number three a while back there. That’s not the part y’all are afraid of. But I understand what’s scaring ya. It’s that feeling of being all by yourself out there and then it’s like even your own team is against you somehow. I know that feeling—it used to get me all the time. We gotta reconceptualize y’all’s attitude to the ball, to the plate. That make sense to ya?” The kids nodded. Baseball. “Good. And I’m hopin’ that by the end of the day, y’all’ll be able to hit that rabbit way out there. I’m bettin’ you’ll be able to do it.” And with that Arlo took the bat and turned around with his back to the kids, tossed a ball up and swung. The bat sounded and Arlo remembered about how he had played, how it had drugged him to play. And he turned back around without looking where the ball had gone.

But something had gone wrong. Some of the kids gasped and others giggled. Something about it was not right. There were craning necks and eyes shielded from the sun. Katie looked pale.

Coach—I think you hit the rabbit.

Hit the rabbit. What did that mean. There was what the words meant, but the thing, the thing itself.

“Well, shit, Arlo,“ Gil. “better go see if it’s still alive.”

“Don’t swear in front of the kids, Gil.”

Arlo turned and headed out to where he could see the ball and it was such a long walk. A few of the kids followed him out there but kept their distance. The grass squished as he walked and Arlo felt nauseous. Not for the rabbit or the kids. It wasn’t that. It was something else that had spoiled. He recalled his dad slaughtering chickens at the old house. But he kept on walking, out out out to the fence and it got bigger and redder the closer he got until he was right up against it and the rabbit was lying there in the grass, its little stomach heaving in panicked breaths. Arlo squatted down before the animal; the ball had hit it in the shoulder, it looked like. Its front left leg was bent out all wrong. The rabbit was brown and its eyes were darting and it tried to get up and run when Arlo knelt down but just squealed and flopped back over, limbs quivering. Katie and Corey and Seth had followed him all the way out; the rest of the kids had gotten scared and were lingering in various stages of the outfield, their shadows shooting out behind them in the polarized low-angle light of the evening. It was quiet except for a goldfinch singing somewhere. Seth said something but Arlo didn’t hear him. He was thinking about other things, trying to distance himself from what he was going to do—he thought about snow and about his wife and her bracelets and the clouds dragging their skirts across the valley floor and Mexicans moving blue tarps of cherries from tree to tree. He thought about the radio and dust and the Coach. He stood up. He was still holding the bat.

“Turn around, kids.”

And Arlo swung.

Butch Korpela is a freelance CPA and writer from Eureka, MT. He spends his free time protecting the (Canadian) border and working on his golf swing. At present he is working on his first novel, as well as an adaptation of Portland poet Tom Blood's The Sky Position for the stage.