Steal Away Home Page 6

  Johnson starts off well on the mound, getting the leadoff Yankee hitter on a lazy fly to left. But now over the intercom come the deep tones of Bob Sheppard, the man they say possesses the voice of God Himself, and Jeter is up. I lean forward as the crowd sets to buzz. He is a tall man, thin but muscular, built to play shortstop. A gamer, as my father would say. Brook and Johnson pitch him well, getting Jeter to hit a sharp grounder to second, but that’s a hustler moving down first, head down and legs pumping, forcing Hairston at second to throw the ball wide and the crowd to utter a roar I feel in my bones. The bench grumbles. Johnson looks off to the pale moon.

  David Justice is next. Johnson is rattled and lets loose a breaking ball in the dirt that Fordyce can’t handle, sending Jeter to second as the tying run.

  “Go out there,” I whisper. “Get him easy before they even this thing up.”

  Fordyce is thinking the same. He takes a walk to the mound and lays a hand to Johnson’s back, his mask on so the Yanks on the bench cannot read his lips. A pat on the butt and he’s gone. Whatever words he says are enough. Williams and Martinez both fly out, ending the inning and preserving our slim lead. The dugout joins my clapping. I stand and bump fists with the Oriole players as they come in. Fordyce meets Johnson in the dugout, going over what went wrong and how to adjust. Brook calls me over to listen. It’s an escape, that inning. We all know it. And it’s a long way to go.

  -3-

  Mom and Dad were in bed when I got home from the hill. On the table next to Dad’s lamp were a baseball and two notes. The first had been scribbled by my father on a sheet of paper with Augusta County Schools stamped along the top. It reads: 440’ measured. Harpers found it. Sign and take to Pr. Taylor in morning. Third deck Yankee Stadium. An arrow was drawn from the bottom of the page to the ball.

  The second sheet of paper was folded like a card and standing upright like two sides of a triangle. Owen was written on the front. I looked down the darkened hallway and conjured a ghost of Mom coming along once Dad had gone to bed, shaking off his second skin of janitor’s clothes for a few hours before putting them on once more. Her glancing down the hallway toward the bedroom before laying down her own bit of thoughts.

  Owen, I just want you to know how proud I am and always will be to have had a hand in raising such a fine son. Love, Mom

  I crumpled the notes and pushed them into the trash can beneath the table, then picked up the baseball I had smacked a distance few ever managed, so great that it would have landed in the upper reaches of Yankee Stadium. Turned it in my hands. Held the seams crosswise as Junior Hewitt would have thrown it. I signed and dated it with Dad’s pen and dropped it off at Principal Taylor’s office the next morning, three days before prom and the beginning of everything’s end. Mister Taylor vowed that ball would remain in a hallowed spot in front of the Camden High School’s trophy case alongside mementos from football and basketball teams long forgotten, and first-place plaques the school’s Future Farmers of America had garnered in parliamentary procedure competitions. I suppose that ball is there even now.

  The memory of crumpling those two pieces of paper and tossing them into the trash has followed me like a curse. The crinkle of the pages in my hand; the edge of Dad’s letter nicking the side of my forefinger, drawing blood; the faint smell of Mom’s perfume. None of it mattered to me then, none of it felt real. I slipped down the hallway and fell to bed, forgetting how far that ball had traveled and how proud my mother would be regardless. I could have gone oh-for-five that afternoon and sacrificed a puppy between innings, she still would have left me a note that said Love, Mom.

  It meant little to me then. It means near everything now that she’s gone.

  Top 2

  Our batboy is a kid named Ethan. So far he’s kept close to the rack and refused to stray from his duties. The players joke with him, flick the bill of his hard hat and lay their hands to his shoulder, squeezing the bone. His grin is a tired one, like smiling is something that until late he has rarely done. Mora and Gibbons grab their bats and head out toward the on-deck circle to start the second. I leave my spot on the bench long enough to pull myself up on the top step of the dugout. Keeping my back and legs loose, but also staring out into that great mass of bodies and faces.

  They are kids mostly, children as I once was, wearing their Yankee caps and shirts, streaks of ketchup on their faces and the grime of the seats on their elbows. Most hold a glove close by for a wayward foul ball or benevolent act by a player who has caught the last out of the inning. I see fathers and mothers. Brothers, sisters. Grandparents stooped over spiraled scorebooks with ballpoint pens shaking in their hands. I see a few alone but content, the smiles on their faces like Ethan’s—maybe recalling loved ones with them on nights like these long past, or maybe experiencing the magic of how a simple game can stanch the pains of loneliness.

  That is all baseball resembles to most—a simple game. A thing to pass time on a warm spring afternoon or a hot summer’s night. It has always been true enough to me. A game is all it has ever been.

  Yet it has remained for me the only thing I ever truly mined the depths of, like a puddle of cloudy water you think will reach only your ankles until you step into it and are swallowed whole. I have never known anything but this game. My mother once said my name came from her not an hour after my birth. She cradled me at her breast and looked into my still-shut eyes and said, “We’re going to name him Owen.” And in her account my father brushed a sweat-slick forelock of her hair away and then settled his eyes to my hands, taking one in his thumb and marveling at how my fingers reached clear around the knuckle and squeezed. His pronouncement would seal my future more than even a name: “We gone make him a catcher.”

  I look at those hands now as Mora steps to the plate and sends a lazy pop fly that lands in the first baseman’s glove. These hands. By the time I’d won Camden its championship, I could hold four baseballs in my splayed fingers. Often on our hill, Micky would press her palm to mine and laugh at the result.

  She would say to me, “God really did make you a catcher, didn’t He?” and I would answer, “No, Dad did.”

  He had been made a pitcher by his own father’s will at the age of ten, when on a quiet April evening of catch after his chores were done my father threw an errant pitch that knocked a hole clean through the Cross family’s chicken house. My daddy played league ball growing up, then on to high school. To my knowledge, Paul Cross remains the only pitcher in Stanley history to throw four no-hitters in a single season. The Hewitt kid paled in comparison.

  Dad managed a scholarship to Georgia Tech but lasted only his freshman year before his arm went, and with it every dream he had ever possessed. Schooling itself meant nothing to him. He came home a failure and found work at the mill, met Momma some years later. He was a broken man by then. My mother’s parents wanted no part of him. But Momma saw something in this man she loved, a goodness that had been beaten down and she believed worthy of coaxing back, even if Paul Cross was nothing more than a tired mill worker with a bum arm.

  His greatest fear was that his life would come to nothing, which was why he felt such renewed purpose when I came into the world. My father gave me many things in his life. Most of all, he gave me baseball. In that diamond pattern of dirt and chalk I found a sense of beauty and truth and the answer to every question sprouting in my heart. We played constantly in our small backyard on Stanley’s outskirts; it was no mere work or practice but love made through effort, sweat gathering beneath the small brim of a Cubs cap I found under the Christmas tree and grass stains Momma could never get out of my jeans.

  A single by Jay Gibbons trickles through the middle of the infield. Ethan grabs the bat from the grass in foul territory and stumbles over his feet halfway to the dugout, drawing jeers from the fans. His head is low when he reaches the dugout. Mike claps him on the back, tells him good job. Fordyce is the next batter and strikes out looking. Two down. Mussina looks to have settled down on the mound before Hairston
makes up for his earlier error and singles to center, allowing Gibbons to reach third. Shouts from our dugout. I sit back down at the end of the bench and tell myself to keep my head in the game. Can’t let my thoughts wander.

  Anderson’s up, our DH. He’s built like a tank and you can tell he’s always been the best at what he does. Every field and sandlot in his youth, Brady was the man. Looking down the bench and out onto that emerald field glowing in the dim evening, all those Yanks on the other side, I know we were each once that—the cleanup hitter, the stopper on the mound, the kid you pitch around in high school.

  I was eight when Dad took me down to the Ruritan club and signed me up for my first year of Little League. Tryouts were held the following Saturday. I stood in the box a lefty (“Better able to handle the curve,” Dad said) and watched in abject horror as the first pitch given me by a volunteer coach lobbed in so slow that I let it by, believing the throw a mistake. I stepped out and looked at Dad, who chuckled and nodded. The next four pitches sailed over the fence, and I knew then there was not a single boy on that field who could match me. Not one kid in Stanley or anywhere else. I could hit farther and throw harder and run faster than any of them. When you come across something you’re good at, something that sets you apart, the conviction of that being the thing you’re going to do forever isn’t far behind. I was born to play ball, yes. But I was born to play it because that’s how Paul Cross raised me. Because that was how he’d been raised himself.

  Hairston steals second and I don’t know why. I hear a grumble from the other end of the dugout and see Mike Singleton shaking his head. Anderson’s got a big stick, likes to drive the ball out to the gaps. But with first base now open Mussina has the option of pitching carefully. Anderson walks. The crowd groans as the bases load. We may have the makings of a little two-out rally here, but Hairston’s stolen base may cost us in the end.

  Think, Dad would always tell me. You got to think out there, Owen. That’s your job.

  Mike Bordick is our shortstop. He takes a fastball from Mussina and sends it on a line to center, scoring Gibbons and Hairston and sending Anderson to third. The boos descend sharper, fueling our dugout’s yells and clapping, though I notice much of the celebration is for Ethan’s charge out to the plate to retrieve Bordick’s bat, giving a clear path for Gibbons and Hairston to touch the plate.

  A guy next to me, Stills, a utility player just over in a trade by the Dodgers, nudges my arm. He says, “Ethan’s a good kid. Daddy’s in jail and his momma’s drying out in some rehab. Kind of broken, I guess. We all adopted him.”

  Richard steps into the box as the pitching coach for the Yanks comes out to calm Mussina down. Their meeting at the mound doesn’t bear much fruit. Richard cracks a deep ball into the left-center gap that scores Anderson and Bordick and gets the Yankee bullpen stirring. A wild pitch to Conine sends Richard to third, but Conine can’t capitalize. He strikes out, ending the inning, but we’re up now five-zip and our dugout is feeling good. Johnson nearly sprints out to take the mound for the bottom of the second.

  I leave my spot and wander up the dugout to where Mike and the bench coach stand, lingering over the bats. Ethan eyes me. To him I say, “Good job out there, little man,” and hold out my fist.

  He bumps it with his own and thanks me with a quiet grin.

  Bottom 2

  -1-

  Dad used to say that in any game and any life, momentum makes all the difference. He knew this from experience, so close as he came to foundering after both his injury and his layoff at the mill. We’re the ones with momentum now. Our guys have an extra hop in their step as they take their grounders and long throws. Johnson zips the ball even on his warm-ups. Mike rocks back and forth on his heels by the dugout steps, sensing a rare win at Yankee Stadium. We’re feeling good.

  With nothing to do at the bottom of each inning, Ethan takes a quick look to make sure the bats are in order before sliding down the dugout. He takes a seat not far from me. O’Neill is up, a tough out to be sure, but Johnson catches him off balance and gets the leadoff hitter for the Yanks to ground out to third.

  “First out’s always the hardest one.” It’s Ethan says it. “You get that first one right off, it’ll be a good inning most times.”

  “I’d say you’re right.”

  “You the busher they call Hillbilly?”

  “Yep.”

  “Where you up from?”

  “Bowie. Double-A.”

  “Lopez’s daddy’s sick. They say he’s in the hospital. You got a daddy?”

  “Not no more.”

  “Me neither.”

  He takes up another few inches of the bench. I move my mitt out of his way. It is a bond of understanding between us, both our fathers gone. Like two veterans comparing wounds from some dark war.

  “Johnson,” Ethan says, “he’ll be all right so long as his shoulder don’t fly open. It’s always trouble if he does that. Plus that moon out there.” He won’t look, superstitious I suppose, and instead shakes his head in the wizened way of one who has seen too much in this short season. “I don’t think this one’s over. It ain’t over ’til it’s over. That’s what they say.”

  “Could be you’re right.”

  Ethan stretches forward as Brosius steps to the plate, says the Yankees’ third baseman is one of his favorite players. When he settles back on the bench, he is almost atop me. I see the happiness of his eyes and the pain at rest beneath. Kind of broken. I know that look well. Seen it in all those Shanties back home. Seen it in the kids most of all.

  -2-

  In no other place are the discriminations of the world laid so bare as the nearest high school cafeteria. There the line separating those who belong and those who do not is made clearest, with those two groups divided even further: what your last name happens to be; the color of your skin; your degree of ugliness or beauty; your address. By these we are judged by a common jury of peers driven by the deep human need to classify every person, ourselves most of all. Which I suppose gives at least partial reason why Todd Foster decided he was going to sit at the wrong table that next afternoon, three days before prom.

  The Camden High cafeteria was a wide room set along the school’s west side. Illumination relied more upon the bank of windows facing the parking lot than the rows of fluorescent lights Dad climbed a ladder each month to repair or replace. Cinder-block walls painted dull gray gave hint to the food we ate, dished by old women wearing hairnets and scowls. Rows of tables laid end to end covered most of the cracked linoleum floor. Three narrow paths ran the room’s length. The chairs were red plastic disks bolted to the table bottoms.

  Ours was the table nearest the food line and the trash cans, a spot coveted not only for the ease of movement but the commanding view it offered—the popular table. Travis claimed the chair at the head the same as Dad did his La-Z-Boy in our living room, like it was the throne from which to gaze upon his kingdom. The seat to Travis’s left was a revolving one of the prettiest girls in school. In the days leading to prom it was Jen Hamrick there—the who rather than the what Travis was doing. Jeffrey sat on the other side with Stephanie Sebolt, the preacher’s daughter. The final spot was mine.

  I was never ignorant of the reason I was afforded such a prime spot to dine on little smokies and fish sandwiches. My friends hailed from rich homes, or homes as rich as any in Camden could be. Bubba Clements, Travis’s daddy, owned the biggest car dealership in Camden, leaving Travis with looks and athletic ability and money all. Jeffrey’s father owned the IGA—the only grocery in town. Jen’s momma ran the flower shop, and her daddy was responsible for the tile or laminate or carpet in just about every house and business in twenty miles. Some were of a mind the Hamricks were richer even than Bubba. And while the Sebolts were not overly wealthy, Stephanie at least strolled the hallways with knowledge that her father was the Lord’s mouthpiece to us all, or at least those who believed in a Lord worth listening to.

  But the Cross family was ever doomed to o
ccupy that thin space between Emerald Hills, the fancy subdivision where Travis and Jeffrey and Jen lived, and Micky’s home in Shantytown. I never possessed much in the way of looks. My clothes came from sale racks at J. C. Penney. Mom made little more than minimum wage at the library. Dad pushed a mop in front of every single one of my peers. Were it not for baseball, I would have been cast off with the rednecks who claimed the table closest to the FFA room or the stoners who held court by the pay phone near the doors. I may well have even been banished to the loser table where Micky and the rest of Shantytown’s kids kept to safety in numbers. I’d won a spot at the popular table for one simple reason: I had been born with the unique ability to square a rounded ball against an equally rounded bat.

  Lunch was the only time Micky and I crossed paths at school: twenty minutes of trying to steal looks around all those tangled bodies, to smile and dream of each other before darting away. On that particular day her eyes lingered. Looking back, I am left to wonder if she had some premonition of what was about to happen.

  Jeffrey was regaling us with a re-creation of his gutsy seventh-inning walk the day before. Travis leaned across his tray to kiss his current flame. I looked toward the double trash cans not twenty feet away where Dad kept duty, looking like a prisoner, a man convicted. He plunged a hand down into the slop and pulled out a fork some student had tossed away, a man robbed of pride and future both standing at semi-attention over bags of trash he would pull and knot and carry to the Dumpster out back.

  Todd cut through my stare as he passed, a slim body of little more than gristle and bone wearing stone-washed jeans and a bright T-shirt. Blue that day rather than purple or green or (Todd’s favorite) neon pink. Two smooth hands with neither callous nor blemish gripped the sides of his tray. His fingernails were long and carried a constant shimmer many swore was clear nail polish. But it was Todd’s hair that stood out more than his attire, an auburn mane brushed to wings and sprayed stiff. The running joke was that of all Camden’s girls, Todd’s hair was prettiest.