Why is there so little good fiction about sports?
I have theories, but as usual, I’d rather share what I’ve got and have you all decide if it’s good than bandy those about.
Roger Angell had a theory, something about the world of sports being already so full of stories that trying to invent new ones risked corniness, or strained credulity, or elitist smugness, or just superfluousness. Which all seems true to me…except couldn’t one say that about all fiction, about anything?
Nope, nope, not going further down that path. I’ve got a new story I want to share instead. It’s one I’ve been trying to get right for thirty years. It’s part of a whole series I’ve been trying to get right for thirty years. And suddenly, for no reason I can ascertain, they’re all becoming themselves at the same time.
I’m not going to pretend I’m not happy with this one. I am, in ways I rarely let myself be about anything I write.
I know some of you are not sports fans. I hope you’ll read this anyway, in the same way I always hope readers who think they don’t like horror will try my ghost stories. It’s just another story by me, about the same things I always write about.
I hope you like it. If you do— and if you want to see more exclusive new fiction here— I hope you’ll say something about it somewhere. Comment here, recommend to friends, post links anywhere you think there might be interested readers. And if you can, and find the work of value, please do subscribe below (and get yourself the October New (or Re-)Subscriber Special as a thank you).
My series about my dad is not finished, and will return in November, along with the latest quarterly new music round-up.
I got split responses about whether readers of this Substack prefer new fiction in one complete post or serialized. I decided just to put up the whole story, because of course those who prefer to parse out their experiences always have the option to stop at a tantalizing point and come back later.
So here goes. Genuinely can’t wait to hear what you think.
PRETTY GOOD STICK
for Bryan Di Salvatore
The two greatest athletic moments of his life. That’s what we gave him. Or at least, we were there when they happened. He did them for us.
Meaning, he had our cap on his head, with the meat-splat logo Mann the butcher—Man the Butchiest, in teamspeak, because of his beard—spent three years getting to look quite like that, quite that drippy over the brim.
Our team name on his jersey, in pink and gray meat-splat colors: Gristles. The Gris, when we speak it.
How do we know they were his greatest moments? Come on. We know. If you were there, you know, too. If you’ve seen him, ever, you also know. Those spindle-arms. That toes-turned-out run. Not like a duck. Like a marionette with its strings tangled. Or cut.
Have you, by the way? Seen him? I mean, obviously, yeah, not around here, not in years. No one has. Thought I’d ask. If you ever do...
The first moment? Needs some context. Ali the piano player—Tin-Pan in teamspeak, Tin-Pan Ali—just brought him along one spring Sunday morning. First or second practice of that year. We were at our usual pre-season venue, Foothill Park—Easy Walk for Ed Field, in teamspeak, because M the B went all puckery one day, the way he did during the years leading up to his divorce, and told the rest of them where I live and that I don’t even have to get on a freeway or “even in his fucking car,” M the B’s words, to get there—and we were just throwing easy. Loosening up. Listening to our forty- and fifty-something year-old joints pop in the already scorching Inland Empire sun like leftover popcorn kernels. Watching the Wingspan—Luis is his real name, but he was Wingspan before he got to us, on account of his, obviously—scoop groundballs and fling them around the horn at us. I can’t have been the only one thinking, and not without sadness, that the Gristle had come for Luis at last. The guy wasn’t even forty yet, I don’t think. But those wings weren’t swooping quite like they used to.
We had our caps on, so we were all sweating away, but it’s just a thing I have, practically a team rule: no sunscreen until April. Just can’t stand the smell, and it slicks up the balls and bat handles, and then it’s in your skin and up your nose and on every single thing you put in your mouth from then until November. One day, the skin will just melt off us, and inside, instead of bone, we’ll all be Zinc.
So there we were. And there came Ali, looking exhausted as always, and also like he’d come straight from work, which he can’t have—can he?—because the hotel bar where he tickles ivories so much more delicately than he butchers ground balls closes at two a.m. We know this because the Wingspan and his librarian girlfriend somehow convinced us all, plus a few of our wives, to have a team outing there once. It was actually fun, mostly because we kept peppering Ali with requests and then tipping him in quarters. Then we all went home and slept ‘til July.
Anyway, this day, there was Ali, goatee all bristly and the skin around his eyes so wrinkly it made his pupils look like the mouths of bottles in paper bags, and he was trailing this kid.
I say kid because he looked like one. I bet he still does. It was the walk more than the arms. Most people, they either grow out of walks like that, or get bullied out of them. Actually, I’ve never quite seen that walk on anyone else. Like a robot emu—a short one, baby one—made of Legos, but with the legs snapped on the wrong hips. Reassembly required.
I’d been tossing with the kid a good ten minutes before I realized he had to be at least twenty-five. Something about the way his smile grooved his face, or the precise slot he kept dropping his shoulder down into to throw. Three-quarter sidearm. Two-thirds, maybe. Weird angle, but practiced. Whole-life habit of a wrong angle.
Turned out he was a grad student at Riverside. I never did get in what, something not journalism, but journalism related. Journalism theory. Or something. In the twenty-plus year history of the Gristles, we haven’t had many grad students. Lots of temporaries. At least a third of our team every year is temporaries. Younger siblings, nephews, new girlfriend’s cousins, latest guy trying to fix the Wingspan’s car. Twice we’ve had cops who stopped Ali for driving drunk, only to find he was driving tired, and also was his charming self. They all stay a year, or a few years. Then life-waves come and sweep them away. Our team is a submarine. Only so much room below deck. Sometimes that pisses off the newbies. But it’s not like we planned it. We never meant to be exclusive; hell, except for M the B and me, we’re not even close friends, really. There’re just only so many permanent berths.
So they come and go, the temporaries. Occasionally, they come back. If they stay long enough, they almost always leave with nicknames.
But this kid. I had R.E., the Robot Emu, in my head before his first toss hit my glove. But I never said that one aloud. Now I’m glad. It isn’t bad, might have stuck. But the name we eventually gave him was better.
“What are you smiling at?” I asked, after maybe eight minutes of surprising silence. Easy silence, the Sunday morning softball practice kind. Toss-thwack. Toss-thwack.
Even the kid’s shrug tilted. Like he’d been retrofitted. Built to shake in the onslaught. “This,” he said.
And there I was smiling back. I had no idea what he meant. I knew just what he meant. “How do you know Tin Pan? Ali?”
“Who?”
Toss-thwack.
Turns out he didn’t know Ali, really, except as the piano guy where he worked. The Wingspan’s librarian girlfriend—Wingspan’s Librarian Girlfriend, in teamspeak, but only when speaking to Luis; her real name was Zulybeth and we all called her that, and we loved her—was the one who brought this kid to us. First to Ali, who’d gotten him a job dishwashing at the hotel bar because the kid needed to supplement his pittance of a work study award from UCR, or maybe he’d lost the award, somehow. I’ve never been totally straight on that.
“Didn’t think he’d last a single shift,” Ali told me once, near the end of the kid’s streak that first summer, as we watched from whatever cage dugout we were in at whatever field. He said it admiringly. Shaking his head. The way we all did and sounded when we talked about the kid.
The Loss. In teamspeak. Teamspeak now, obviously, not then. Not ever when he was with us, and never to his face. We couldn’t quite get a name on him when he was with us.
I’m not even sure how he officially became a Gris. We have a strict probationary period. Spring tryout, as it were. Okay, we’ve won all of two championships in all these years, the last one two decades ago, but still. Especially then. You had to be a decent enough player on our team not to agitate the Wingspan, because the Wingspan got tense when agitated, then Zulybeth would threaten to dump him or at least stop coming to games, and we’d long since decided we would rather eat M the B’s post-divorce spaghetti every night for the rest of our lives than have Zulybeth stop coming to games.
Also. You don’t have to add to our team chemistry, such as it is. Don’t have to banter, never have to acquire a nickname or accept one. You don’t even have to like us. But even our chemistry...any chemistry that causes or just allows any group of adults to spend summer weekend mornings and Wednesday nights in each other’s company...that’s a fragile thing. An unstable compound. And it doesn’t occur naturally in nature.
So.
And yet. By the end of that first practice, during which he tossed with four or five us, took a set of batting practice swings—spray hitter, as expected, but not no hitter—got a laugh out of M the B about something or other involving Tio’s Tacos, and tried to turn down one of the bottles of Black Market Rye I’d brought to celebrate Opening Day because he said he couldn’t afford to reciprocate, he was our new right-center fielder. A fully minted Gris.
His first season started okay. From a softball standpoint. He wasn’t timing the arc of good slow pitches very well. We batted him eighth. Plus, for someone that skinny, with so little on him to create drag, he was astonishingly slow. Slower than me, and the Wingspan once clipped a little piano Christmas tree ornament through a beltloop on the back of my baseball pants just so the whole team could yell, “Unhook the piano!” every time I charged around the basepaths.
That also meant he couldn’t be “the Emu,” Robot or otherwise. I don’t think he scored his first run for us until June.
He had a terrible arm, too, no matter what angle he released from.
But he did get a surprising jump on line drives, as long as they weren’t hit directly at him. Directly at him, he sort of froze, took too long to commit, so that a few too many catchable balls soared directly over him. Which would have agitated the Wingspan, except for what the kid kept doing on line drives to his right. Or his left. Within a month, he’d made four of the five greatest catches in the history of the Gris (the fifth being that time the de Bergerac literally leapt straight up out of his pants). The most astonishing one came at Potter’s Field (which is actually called Porter’s Field, but not by anyone who plays in our league, because whoever’s in charge there just lets the grass grow and the fences fall in, so that you don’t so much patrol that outfield as wade in it). For that catch, I swear, the kid wasn’t just horizontal but tipped nose down like some desperate, diving bird of prey, and his glove arm disappeared into the grass at the exact second the softball did, then his head and shoulders disappeared, then we kept seeing his feet, then his head, then his feet as he tumbled. Then he came to a stop and held up his glove. I half-expected to see bones in it, part of some poor lost soul buried out there. But all he had in his webbing was the ball.
One of the assholes from the Blue Streaks actually started to protest, said the kid had picked the ball off the ground before he resurfaced. The Wingspan told that guy to get out there and try one somersault while a teammate of his choice lobbed a soft throw at him from three feet away. If he could catch it or just come up holding it, we’d award the batter a ground rule double. The guy flipped Luis both fingers, started to turn away. Then called out, “Fuckin A, kid. But you should probably scrub your whole body down with lye when you get home. That grass...”
Another time, this one at Easy Walk for Ed at the tail end of a flash thunderstorm we probably shouldn’t have been playing in, the kid laid himself out for a whistling line drive, caught it maybe eight inches off the sopping ground, hit chin first, then slid a good ten yards across the grass, right up to Tin Pan’s feet. Tin Pan, whistling, shook his head, straddled the kid, patted him down as though checking for broken ribs. Then grabbed him by the belt, called out something like, “4-88. 4-88. Roger, Y-spot, on three!” And hiked him.
Every single person on that field—both teams, umps, everyone—just sat down where they were and laughed. In the stands, too. Everyone except Zulybeth, on her feet in her spot on the top row of the bleachers. Her clapping gave our laughter rhythm.
We were well into July, maybe even August, before any of us realized the kid had started to hit. I think I was the first to notice, but only because I’d finally given in to the Wingspan’s perpetual badgering and dragged myself to my calculator one seriously bored Sunday night and run the averages. I ran the kid’s three times, just to be sure I had it right. Then I sat back in my chair and closed my eyes and tried visualizing. Remembering.
It was real. Happening right in front of our laughing-slightly-more-than-usual faces.
To be clear, he wasn’t leading the team or anything. Wasn’t topping or even pushing the Wingspan. But, .610.
.610!
Our next game was against the Speedway, way out by West Covina at the field we all hate most. For years, we’d refused even to give it that place a name, just called it the one by the gasworks. No capital letters, even. But when we realized that phrase had started becoming its name, and the only way any of us ever referred to it, we gave in and christened it properly: The Fucking Stink.
M the B showed up with one of those black athletic tape strips across his nostrils. When I told him I thought the purpose of those—assuming there actually was one, other than wearing black tape on your nose—was to pull nostrils further open, thus allowing freer breathing or something, he just shrugged. “Symbolic gesture.”
Then he asked if I wanted a strip.
I showed him the lineup card.
“You’re leading him off?”
I showed him the batting averages. He stared at those a long time, looked at me, looked off toward the refinery beyond the leftfield fence. Same way I had when I first did the calculations, only I’d been looking at my tiny dirt backyard, and the wooden slats that separate it from the beer garden on the other side. “.610,” he murmured.
I didn’t tell anyone else, just let them figure out what was happening. The Wingspan didn’t catch on until the kid stepped out into the warm-up circle to take some practice swings. Immediately, he turned to me and started to protest. I held up the piece of paper with the averages.
After a few seconds contemplating that, Luis said, “He’s too fucking slow.” But then he turned to the field and clapped his hands. “All right, now. Just like it’s been, string bean. My man. Little bingle.”
He took it all more seriously than the rest of us, Luis did. Still harbored dreams of winning, and thought doing that might matter in his life. Also, he could say bingle and not sound like the rest of us saying it.
We chimed in, anyway. Clapping. Yelling, “Little bingle.” Like a t-ball team. It was fucking great.
Eventually, Bert the Bi (not as in -Focals, not an umpire-needs-glasses joke, the guy had been out and proud since the ‘80s) called “Play!”, and the Speedway dudes rushed toward each other and huddled up the stupid way they do, every inning, out by second base. We love playing them. We love making fun of their Pit-CREW!! shirts, which, I’ll give them this, really are the color of used STP when you drain it onto your driveway. We love that they huddle, and have chants when they break huddle like “Pedals to medal!” Most of all, we love taunting them about their name, pointing out that a speedway is a strip of asphalt, the least fast thing imaginable. Literally inert. We’ve played them however many dozen times, made the same jokes every single year, and they’ve never come up with a retort. They just stand there and look mad.
“Look at ‘em fly!” Tin Pan called that night when they broke formation, all yelling something that probably wasn’t “Vroom”—come on, not even those guys—and fanned out to their positions. Nhat, their pitcher, took one look at our kid, turned around, and motioned the outfielders in closer.
“Little bingle,” Luis called. Nervously, I think. Remembering—the way we all were, suddenly—where most of our kid’s hits had fallen.
Nhat waved his long fingers again. Brought everyone in one more step.
The kid jacked his first toss over all of their heads for a triple.
Luis leapt and hollered the whole time (and it took some time) for the kid to robot-Lego-emu all the way around to third. The rest of us just fell back onto the splintery dugout bench and laughed. Having reached the base at last, the kid stood with both feet on the bag and looked at us and laughed, too. Luis doubled him home two pitches later.
That wasn’t the moment, though. The first of the kid’s big two, I mean. Those didn’t even come that year. Despite the Wingspan’s badgering, I didn’t run the final averages for that season until December, and I only did them then to give to Zulybeth so she could mount them or whatever to give to Luis as a Christmas present. This time, I was surprised to see that the kid’s numbers had actually dipped a bit, down to .565. As far as we’d seen or noticed, he’d gone right on hitting.
After that, we didn’t see each other for a few months. We mostly don’t in the off-season. I’m pretty sure that was the year we tried to arrange a New Year’s meet-up at Ali’s piano bar, but in the end everyone except M the B and me had better plans—like staying home—and begged off. So just the two of us went for an hour, requested “Stairway to Heaven” as a joke, and then watched in genuine amazement as Tin Pan played it, the whole thing, with this grin we had never once before and never have since seen on his face. Like he’d been waiting his whole working life for the moment.
Right before we left, we asked if we could say hello to the kid.
“Oh, God, he got fired,” Tin Pan told us, still glowing, mopping his brow with a towel. No one besides us had tipped him a cent for the performance of his piano-bar life. “Or maybe quit. He was a terrible dishwasher.”
“What does that mean?” M the B asked. “How can anyone over twelve be a terrible dishwasher?”
Tin Pan shrugged. Still glowing. “Man. You think he runs slow...”
For some reason, that next spring started out all wrong. M the B’s divorce finally got finalized, and he went sullen for months, even though he and his wife had been separated for three years by then. The de Bergerac showed up for the first spring practice with a cast on his wrist, said he’d broken it snowboarding, and announced he was retiring, anyway. From the Gris, I mean. To snowboard more, or some stupid something. He promised to drop by and watch games sometimes. We signed his cast. Off he went.
Then some freak climate change rain roared in, and Easy Walk for Ed flooded along with half the other fields in the county, and we couldn’t really practice again until a week before Opening Day. When we did, the Wingspan rolled up in that Mazda convertible he has spent years rebuilding, threw down his kitbag in the third base coaching box, scowled at all of us, and said, “All right, fuckers. Fucking Gris. This is our year.”
Which is how we learned that he and Zulybeth had broken up. Which, in the moment, hit me much harder than M the B’s divorce, and M the B’s Tami was an actual good friend of mine. Had been. It hit all of us that way. Hell, in the moment, I think it hit M the B harder.
If anything, the kid had gotten leaner since we’d seen him last. He looked positively concave above his pants belt, now. More Tinkertoy than Lego Robot Emu. I actually thought about asking him if he’d been eating. I think I briefly considered adopting him. Then Tin Pan hit a practice fly too hard over his head, and he actually judged it correctly for once, spun and ran, looked up over his shoulder—in that one second, I swear he looked like Willie Mays, we all thought it—and then hooked his ankles and fell on his face. Ball came maybe five inches from dropping on his skull and killing him.
He got up dripping mud. Off his shirt, pants. His chin. As though he were a blind osprey who’d mistaken the mud for a river. He just stood there dripping, looking at all of us. And then he laughed.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” snarled the Wingspan.
And then he laughed.
Then we all did.
Which brings us, finally, to Moment #1. Opening Day, against the damn Blue Streaks. “First step, Gris-men,” the Wingspan roared as soon as he popped open the door of his Mazda, before he’d even laced up his cleats. “First step.” He went on yelling that at every single one of us as he prowled up and down the foul line, doing high-knee jogging moves, stretching his shoulder at angles my shoulder has never in its life stretched, “Come on, Ed,” he said, burning a warm-up toss at me so hard that I almost just let it pass. When it smacked into my glove, I could feel my palm light up like one of those metal mushrooms in a pinball machine.
“Bring it,” said the Wingspan, pounding his own glove. “Like you mean it, Ed. This is our year. First steps.”
“Wingspan, I’m just telling you now, if you ever use the word bingle at me, I will key your car.”
The Streaks spent most of their warm-ups complaining to the ump, some new guy who clearly hadn’t learned not to listen to them, about the condition of the field. As though he had anything to do with that. As if it was really in any worse shape than any of our fields ever were.
“Officially playing under protest yet?” I called out to their manager guy, I always forget his name. He doesn’t play. They have a fucking manager.
“Shut up, Ed,” he called back.
“You ever actually won one of these protests? I mean, I guess you have, because the standings always show you with wins here and there.”
“Was I talking to you, Ed? I don’t remember talking to you. I don’t ever remember talking to you.”
“He doesn’t remember talking to me,” I said to M the B as he slouched by. “Also, this will shock you, they’re playing under protest.”
“Fucking assholes,” said M the B.
Which wasn’t the right answer at all.
I shut up, went about filling out our lineup card for the new ump and dumping batting helmets in the on-deck circle. There wasn’t a single soul in the bleachers, but it wasn’t like Zulybeth or Tami or anyone would have been there that day even if they still liked us. Too wet and cold.
On the field, the Streaks fanned out, and Manager-man hit a last, crisp set of ground balls for them to throw around the horn. The new ump pulled his mask down—gratefully, I thought, like a guy getting a cage between himself and a bunch of gnawy little sharks—and yelled, “Play.”
It happened right as the kid stepped into the batter’s box. He did his usual, kind of dug around with his cleats and adopted what passed for his stance. Hips turned just a little back, and also his shoulders, which made him look like a weathervane between gusts. Or a child’s three-speed bike against an invisible wall.
Armando—who has pitched for the Streaks almost since I formed the Gris, and who’s pretty all right when he’s not a Streak—toed the rubber, indulged in that first game-time sigh of spring. Looked, for one second, happy to be there. Looked at the kid. Abruptly, he turned to his outfield and motioned at them with his non-glove hand.
Motioned them back. “Pretty good stick,” he warned.
And at home plate, the kid—our kid—inflated. That’s the only word I can pin to that moment. For those few seconds, he straightened, though he never lowered his bat; he just stood there and watched a whole outfield, four overweight guys in blue pinstripe baseball shirts they never buttoned right, back up for him. Because of him.
He glanced toward me. I really thought his mouth might fall open.
“Little bingle,” I heard myself say.
Next to me in the dugout, the Wingspan laughed. His first real laugh of the spring. Angry one, maybe. But laughter nevertheless. “LITTLE bingle!” he yelled, and rattled the chicken wire.
In the third base coach’s box, M the B said nothing. But he clapped.
The kid drilled Armando’s first pitch harder than I remember him hitting anything, even during his big run the previous summer. Positively smoked it. The ball rocketed over shortstop, over all that beautiful, muddy spring grass, straight into the glove of the left fielder in his new, deeper position.
Back came the kid to our dugout. He was still a few steps away when he finally let his grin happen.
“Just keep swinging like that,” I told him.
“Just like that,” said the Wingspan, and pounded my back, and fist-bumped the kid. “They’ll fall.”
But they didn’t. Not really. Not often. For a while—until Luis started messing with his swing, trying to teach him to go opposite field, which just made him pop everything up— the kid kept nailing line drives into left and left-center. Right to where pretty much everyone in our league had figured out where to wait for them.
The first time I ran the averages, I knew the kid’s would be bad. But I was thinking slo-pitch softball bad. .350, something like that.
He was hitting .195.
I don’t usually discuss line-up changes with players when I make them. Honestly, I don’t make many; almost everyone who has ever played for the Gris knows that pretending games matter—treating them like they do— is what matters. Is what makes games fun. The Wingspan-when-single being the obvious exception, and he’d had and lost a Zulybeth that year, so cut the guy some slack.
But.
.195.
I didn’t show anyone those averages. When the Wingspan asked, I told him my calculator broke. When he grabbed my phone out of the kit bag and opened the calculator app and held it up to me, I told him I’d thrown up on that phone the night before, and now he had vomit on his fingers. Then I pulled the kid aside and asked him to help me grab the bats and helmets out of my truck. I told him I was dropping him back to batting eighth, just for a while. To take the pressure off.
Was there a moment? Did he deflate? Turn back into regular-size Robot Lego Emu? Every now and then, in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep, I run through that conversation, even now. Not that he said much. I know he nodded. I think he may have said, “Sounds good, Easy E.” And I’m positive that he’s the one who gave me a thump between my shoulders with his glove before trotting off to warm up with M the B. Because I swear I can still feel that.
I didn’t realize until the middle of that game—a rare easy win, and the kid had a bad-hop groundball single and even scored a run—that the new young woman sitting alone in a red hoodie at the top of the bleachers had come with him. Was with him. It wasn’t even me that realized it, it was M the B, which, especially that year, given the depth and duration of his sulk, is downright embarrassing. Fourth or fifth inning, as we grabbed our gloves and took our places in the field, he tapped my forearm and gestured toward the stands.
Said, “Aww.”
Then we both watched the kid glance over his shoulder, sort of control his smile, and half-wave. Which made him look even more unwieldy than he always did, which I really hadn’t thought possible. Lego Robot Emu with original pieces missing. Some new ones pressed on in their place.
The third time that girl came—yeah, I know, but she was a girl to us—I asked the kid if we were going to get introduced. Right away, as if he’d been waiting for the invite, he waved her down. I wish I could remember her name. It seems wrong that I don’t. She was shy, or maybe just quiet. Kind of small. Really pretty green eyes. She always sat at or near the top of the bleachers. Other than that hoodie and her eyes, I remember exactly two things about her:
One, she ate string cheese. Every game. Kept sticks in her sweatshirt pockets. Sometimes, I’d get to the field and find her and the kid up there eating string cheese together.
And two, in all the times she came, I never once saw her take out her phone. Or a book, or a crossword. Which means that in the span of maybe two months, she probably saw more actual Gris softball than the rest of our wives and girlfriends and boyfriends together, since ever, combined.
She was there almost all of that summer. Then one day she wasn’t. The second time she wasn’t, I asked. Actually, M the B and I asked, together. We’d decided in advance that we would coordinate. The kid started to shrug, then he just looked sad. Not like he was falling apart, going Wingspan or anything. He didn’t start yelling bingle at everything that moved. But the sad stayed on him for a while. M the B had his arm around his shoulders a lot for a few games.
In the end, neither he nor the Gris had a bad year, exactly. The kid’s average came up at least some, from how-is-that-even-possible to plain old slo-pitch pathetic. He made a couple more insane catches, one of them with his bare hands. Meaning both of them, because he was in the middle of slipping and had somehow dropped his glove, but still. We lost more games than we won, but only a few more. On the last day, we got scheduled at Northbrook, which we call OnlyBrook, because if there’s another “brook” that deserves that name—flows steady, makes those silvery sounds all through our scorching summers—anywhere near any other softball field in the Inland Empire, we’re not invited to play near it. We beat the Speedway. Right before Tin Pan caught a pop fly for the last out, a bunch of pizzas showed up. We figured the Speedway guys had ordered them, and they thought we had, and we were in the midst of eying each other warily and considering thanking one another when we spotted Zulybeth watching and laughing from under the lone, withered live oak on the other side of the brook. She did a sort of salute when she saw us gaping.
“End of season present. Kinda missed you guys.”
“Move,” said the Wingspan, jostling through us on his way toward her.
“Some of you guys,” Zulybeth snapped, and the Wingspan started to pull up, as though a gust had caught him. Then he kept going.
I don’t remember who I talked to. Don’t remember who anyone talked to. The pizza was plain cheese atop that canned industrial restaurant pizza sauce. It tasted fantastic. On the other side of the brook, out across the lots of burnt summer grass, Ontario International—which wasn’t so international by that point, half its airlines having abandoned it—glowed orange as the sinking sun caught in its windows.
Abruptly, the kid appeared at my elbow. Tapping my elbow. Saying, “Hey, Ed?”
Emu, I started to answer, realized I’d never actually called him that to his face, never officially attached that or any name to him.
“I wanted to thank you,” he said.
For a second, I genuinely didn’t know what he meant. “I didn’t order this shit,” I told him. “I would have ordered proper shit.”
He laughed. That choppy, cough-y laugh, like a propeller not quite catching.
Abruptly, I did know what he meant. I started to lift a hand, maybe for a shake, maybe to put my arm around him. Neither felt right.
“For everything,” he said.
“Isn’t...I thought your program was three years.”
He shrugged. Or maybe didn’t, I’m not sure the movement was even a gesture. “It is if you finish. I’m off to Reno. Got a job.”
“You don’t feel like a Reno, kid. I hate to tell you.”
He did shrug, then, and waved at the field. Or maybe at us. “This...It’s been the best part of my time here.”
Not school. Not his green-eyed girl. God help him, he meant it.
“You come back any time, you hear? I hereby dub thee Gris for Life.”
Which earned me one more shot of that grin. Off he went toward the parking lot, glove dangling from his wrist but not on his hand. Like a third hand. Broken spare Lego part.
“Come around for that beer before you go,” M the B called, stepping up beside me.
I don’t think the kid heard. There were planes taking off overhead, drowning out all other sound. He waved, though, as he reached his car. Zulybeth trotted over before he could climb in. They talked a few seconds. She kissed his cheek. Off he went. We watched from our respective places: Wingspan still on the other side of the brook; Tin Pan in a clump with some Speedway guys; M the B and me next to our dugout; Zulybeth where the kid had been.
“That’s a loss,” murmured M the B.
Which is how we finally came up with his name. Pointless, by then. Too late. But still.
The Loss.
And it wasn’t entirely pointless. Because he did come back. Once. Two years later, almost to the day.
By winning percentage, at least, we’d had our best run in ages. The Wingspan had brought us a bunch of ringers, and some of those guys could really play. For a while we thought we might win league, and wound up solidly third. That was fun. Of a kind. Winning is fun. But not fun you share, not for long. Not even with a team you win with. So hard to explain, unless you’ve had other kinds, or at least can imagine other kinds.
Beating the Speedway, for example, was less fun that year. Almost grim. That’s who we were pounding that last day, up 13-2, bottom of the 4th, which meant we were going to mercy-kill them next inning, which meant a shortened game, which meant two innings less softball. Less fun. See?
Anyway, out of nowhere, or out of the parking lot, anyway, there he came, emu-walking across the baked low-desert scrub with his face all crinkled up, because the Stink was in full flower that day, in that heat.
M the B saw him first, from the third base coach’s box. “Loss!” he called.
Of course, even I didn’t know what he meant at first. Too out of context. Certainly, the kid didn’t know; he’d never heard the name. I suddenly wasn’t sure I wanted him to, or at least wanted him to understand what we meant, and I had no idea how to go about explaining it to him or when I’d get a chance.
But he was him, you know? Already grinning when he saw us looking. Probably before. Then he waved.
“Guys,” he said when he reached us. “Gris.” But he said Gris looking down at his sneakers, because he’d realized he only knew about half the people in the dugout.
The ringers all took one look, then went back to staring at the field, the way they did: as though clustered around a magnifying glass positioned over an anthill. The Wingspan stuck his head up from amongst them. To my relief but not surprise, he broke out smiling.
“Hey!” he called.
The Loss waved some more.
After that, there wasn’t much to say. We scored another couple runs, insuring the shortening of summer when the mercy rule kicked in after the Speedway’s next at-bats. We had two outs, runners on second and third, and I was on deck when inspiration struck.
“Hey, Dougie,” I called to the ump. “Pinch hitter.” Then I turned around and motioned to the kid.
For a second, he looked startled. Almost panicked. In the coach’s box, M the B clapped and laughed. “Yes, sir! Little bingle, kid.”
The ringers all looked baffled. They’d already told the Wingspan they didn’t like the Gris, much. Claimed M the B and Tin Pan and I were a “cabal”, and also not “committed” enough. They were planning on fielding their own team next year. Luis, I already knew, would join them.
But that day, he took a step out onto the field, extending a bat toward the kid. “Ha. Nice one, Ed. Little bingle, buddy.” Then he handed the kid his cap. M the B had moved down the line from the coach’s box, unbuttoning his uniform shirt, which he handed over.
“I don’t have shoes,” said the Loss.
He meant it more literally than I’d first thought. The sneakers on his feet might have cost ten dollars. One of them still had a tongue. The sole had detached from the tip of the other, and it lolled in the dirt like fish gut.
“Get up there,” I said, and buttoned M the B’s shirt around him. It was way too big.
Taking the bat, the kid waved it around a couple times, took a practice cut. Then he stepped to the plate, assumed his ridiculous position. Out past shortstop, the new Speedway left-fielder crept in a few steps. They had a new pitcher, too. Nhat would have remembered.
“Pretty good stick,” I called out cheerfully. Only fair.
From the batter’s box, the kid glanced around. I don’t know why, but it’s always that smile that haunts me, now.
The first pitch was ridiculous, five feet over his head, but the kid rocked back like he was going to swing. Held up. Ball one.
The second pitch was only slightly less ridiculous. That one, the kid hit.
Nicked, anyway. Straight down into the dirt, maybe two feet from home plate, where it spun in the grassless dust.
As he’d said, he had no shoes. He hadn’t been expecting to bat, probably hadn’t swung a bat since we’d last seen him. His blush ignited like particulates in a sunset.
But he was the Loss. Our Loss. He dropped the bat and ran. Halfway down the first-base line, the tongueless sneaker flew off his foot. The kid kept running. The Speedway catcher leapt out from behind the plate—not that leaping was necessary, he probably wouldn’t even have had to lean forward, and remember, this was the Robot Emu, unbelievably slow even in two shoes, so the guy had all fucking day—and scooped up the ball and swiveled. His throw sailed five feet over the first baseman’s head and down the rightfield line.
“GO!” M the B screamed, practically hopping up and down, arms flailing as though they’d come free of their sockets and might spin off him.
Both runners had already scored by the time the kid got halfway to second. For some reason—because he played for the Speedway—the right fielder decided to throw home anyway. He missed by about thirty feet, and the ball caromed off the top of our dugout and back out over the shortstop’s head into left field.
M the B literally whirled himself into the dirt. But that didn’t stop him flailing those arms, or yelling, “Come on, kid. Move!”
Me, though...I’m pretty sure I went silent. My eyes kept flicking back and forth between the one-shoed kid stumbling around second and the Three Stooges movie unfolding in left center, as at least four different Speedways crashed into each other, fell on their asses, then looked around as though they kept expecting yet another fielder to swoop in and pick up the ball.
By this point, M the B wasn’t even managing words. Also, his left arm had finally given out, so only the right one was still waving wildly over his head like the tipped-up wheel on a crashed bicycle. From his throat popped sounds that were mostly laughs, but of a kind I hadn’t heard from him in years. Not just pre-divorce; pre-marriage. Pre-Gris, when we were just two guys—kids—without pasts or nicknames or even anyone to name us except each other.
The kid understood, though. That is, he understood the non-verbal, one-armed coaching instruction. Around third he came, charging—okay, lunging? Two-legged crawling?—toward home.
He was laughing, too. But a different laugh.
“Down!” Luis was shouting from the dugout. “Slide.”
But there was no need. Whichever Speedway had finally picked up the ball out there didn’t even bother throwing home, just flicked it in disgust toward the pitcher’s mound.
Even a couple of the ringers joined our mini mob at the plate. The Speedway guys were pissed, thought we were rubbing it in, and I don’t blame them. I tried explaining, afterward, in the handshake line. Got a lot of “Fuck off, Ed,” for my troubles. Then I went back into the dugout, grabbed my latest printout with the averages, and startled scribbling.
“No. No. Come on, dude,” the Wingspan snapped when he looked over my shoulder. “That was an error. That was eight fucking errors. You can’t count that. If that was a home run, I’m...”
I just sat there watching, pencil in hand, until he wore himself out.
Then I nodded. “Probably right. Single, then errors?”
“Ok. Sure.” Abruptly, Luis grinned. “His speed definitely caused the first error, so yes, call that a hit.”
“Okay, then. One-for-one. Giving him a final season average of... one thousand. And the Golden Gris award for tops on the team.”
“Ed. No. Come on. That’s what my guys mean when they...”
I stood up and walked away and left him there frothing. Twitching back and forth. Wingspan, Luis. Luis. Wingspan.
Gris. Winner. Winner. Gris.
The kid had come off the field, was standing with his arms crossed by the bleachers, listening to M the B and Tin Pan talk at him. Smiling and blushing. He hadn’t even gone back to collect his shoe. Quite possibly, being him, he’d forgotten he’d lost it. I could see he was embarrassed. Not so much about the shoe, I figured—although maybe that, I don’t know—as the hit. The only “home run”, such as it was, that he had or will ever hit in his life. And also, I think, his insertion into a moment and season that wasn’t his, even though he hadn’t done the inserting, we had. I had.
I think maybe he understood before I did that it wasn’t even his moment.
“Frame this,” I said, and handed him the sheet of averages. He glanced at it. Blushed and grinned some more.
I invited him to the team barbecue. M the B said we should meet for beers. The kid said he had to go, that he’d just swung into town to pick up a box of stuff he’d stored in a friend’s garage when he left. Timed his trip so he could drop by the field.
I found myself wondering if the friend with the garage was that girl. His girl. Former girl. Probably, it wasn’t. I just never saw him with any other friends. Except maybe us. If we counted.
Then he left. I haven’t seen or heard from him since. None of us have.
On the spreadsheet where I now do our averages, I inserted a column in his honor. LBs. Little Bingles, defined specifically as reaching first base on an error by the catcher. In Gris team calculations—meaning mine— they count as hits.
Sometimes, I still think about that laugh. The Loss’s laugh. More, I think about the look on his face as he crossed home plate. And the one from before that, when he glanced my way from the batter’s box, with Luis’s cap on his head and M the B’s shirt draped around him.
Those are the times when I let myself think I figured him all wrong. Maybe that kid has turned out to be one of those guys, you know? The kind who always catches people off guard. Surprises them. Pretty good stick.
He found us, after all. Got a kiss on the check from Zulybeth, and dated a green-eyed girl. Maybe he really was—is—the kind of person luck keeps finding. Encircles, and protects.
But I don’t think so.
.