Burger Wuss

by M. T. Anderson

  Rick shook his head. “Man, I don’t want to visit your brain.”

  “I keep wondering. The other day I asked Shunt whether he thought it was stronger to give in and do it or to control yourself.”

  “Yeah? What did he say?”

  “He grabbed my hair, pulled my head over, and yelled into my ear, ‘Attention, moron: Resist the chemicals.’”

  “Shunt’s a freak.”

  “I always worried about this with Diana.”

  “Look. The way I figure it, you can’t think about this kind of thing too much.” As we walked through a field with lots of yellow spiders, he said, “We’re talking about passion here. You don’t want to be a dripster. Don’t think. You think too much. Don’t. It’s about passion, man. You can’t ask questions about passion.” His voice filled with a runny, sticky kind of golden sunlight. “Passion is like — something beyond all other . . .” He waved his hands. “. . . things. Passion is about true love. When you’re in love — I mean, like Jenn and me are — I’m talking truly in love — and you care deeply about a person — what could be wrong? When there’s not a minute of the day when you aren’t wanting to be with them, lying on the couch, watching videos, and kissing, and feeling them up, and fooling around with them. I think about her all the time. That’s true love.”

  We had reached the high concrete wall in the woods where someone had spray-painted:

  There was an apostrophe painted out in another color.

  “You’ll understand someday,” said Rick, standing under the huge “GUYS SUCK.” “When you’ve really felt true love. I mean, eternal. The way that a man can love a woman. Then you’ll know what I’m talking about.”

  Looking at the wall made me sad. I thought about Diana’s shoulder pressed next to mine. Someone’s size ten sneakers rotting on our shoulders. Wondering whether we would kiss the first time. I turned around. Rick was sizing up the trees. We started away from the wall in the woods. We went down a hill. Someone had strung up a wire between two trees, like they were trying to kill a motorbiker. We stopped and tried to take it down. We couldn’t without tools.

  Later we came upon the ruined house in the woods. Rick wanted to go in and look around. I said no, it was dangerous. I didn’t want him to find the troll. I said, “Let’s go back.”

  On the way back to the car, we made up stories about what was buried in the foundation.

  The day of the softball game against Burger Queen, it was raining. I had to start work at six in the morning. It had been raining all night. Business was very slow. The rain washed down the windows in waves. When Rick came in at seven-thirty, he was angry.

  “Rained out. Can you believe it? This sucks vastly.” I didn’t care. I was so sleepy I could hardly stand up.

  At around ten, Mike arrived.

  “Sorry about the rain, boys,” he said. “This is a time when we all just need to be patient. There’s always next week.”

  He went into the back to make a phone call. A few minutes later, he came out. He looked confused.

  “I just talked to them over at Burger Queen,” he said. “The game’s on.”

  Rick shook his head. “Have they looked outside?”

  “It’s their prerogative,” said Mike. “They’re the home team.”

  When my shift was over, I went into the back and slept for about twenty minutes. It was the early afternoon. The game was at three. I changed. Rick gave me a ride. The rain beat down so hard Rick had his windshield wipers on high. They whacked back and forth. The field was right behind some new condos. I had played soccer on it several years before. It had been fine then.

  When we got there, we were surprised. Apparently, when they built Riverview Estates, they had blocked up the river. It had overflowed. The field was a broad pond. The BQ team was already warming up, ankle-deep in water. The O’Dermott’s players were just getting there. Two of them had thought the game was off, and had spent the morning getting baked and watching cartoons. Turner drove up in his Oldsmobile. There was a girl at his side. She had her arm around him. He got out, patted the car, and kissed its roof. She laughed.

  “Who’s that?” I asked Rick.

  “I don’t know. I think her name’s Stacey. She’s Turner’s girlfriend.”

  “Hm,” I said. “I didn’t know he had a girlfriend.”

  “It’s strange but true.”

  Shunt arrived on his bicycle. He wasn’t scheduled to play. He was wearing black jeans, some chains, and an old cheerleader’s skirt. The skirt was looking kind of moth-eaten and torn. The BQ team started laughing at him. Shunt walked up to their center fielder and grimaced. He head-butted the center fielder, and the center fielder went down. Luckily, it was raining too hard for anyone to notice.

  Mike’s wife was standing in a pink raincoat holding a polka-dotted blue see-through umbrella. Her double-stroller was under the umbrella. Mike was on the pitcher’s mound, yelling at BQ’s captain and the ump. We went over to hear.

  “I call this substandard!” Mike waved his hand around the field. The current made little ripples around his legs. “We do not have to stand for this lack of drainage!”

  The BQ captain grinned. “Hey, our team is ready to play. Of course, we’ve been practicing here for several weeks, so maybe we’re just used to playing ankle-deep in water. But we’re ready to go.”

  “You cannot seriously expect us to play on this field,” said Mike to the umpire.

  The umpire looked around. “What’s the problem? You want to forfeit?”

  “Forfeit?” cried Mike. “We should not have to forfeit!”

  “Home team calls the fitness of the field. Captain, your assessment?”

  The BQ captain said, “Looks fine to me. Looks like it has every afternoon for oh, the past three weeks.”

  “You’ve been practicing every day for three weeks? This is supposed to be a casual game!” Mike turned to the umpire. “You have got to call the game on account of rain.”

  The ump shook his head. “Correction: I don’t got to do anything.”

  “You’ve been paid off, haven’t you?”

  “No comment.”

  “They paid you off.”

  “Is your team going to forfeit?” said the umpire. “Just tell me now.”

  “No we are not going to forfeit!” said Mike.

  “Ho-key-doh-key,” said the ump slowly. He shrugged and walked away.

  BQ’s captain wriggled and smiled. “This’ll get you back for the troll.”

  Mike looked confused. “I’m confused. What troll? What troll would this be you’re talking about?”

  The BQ captain nodded. “Sure. You know nothing. O’Dermott’s knows nothing. That’s fine, Mike. Keep playing that game. Meanwhile, we’ll whup your asses at this one.”

  He walked away from us. He looked confident.

  Mike stared after him. Suddenly, he knelt. He put his hands under the water. He ran them along the ground. He looked up and called after the BQ captain, “Hey, this isn’t grass! This isn’t even grass, but some kind of lake weed!”

  I was not in the starting lineup. That made me grateful. That meant I could just stand in the rain without moving for a couple of innings. Just until one of the starters developed pneumonia and had to go get a tracheotomy.

  There were no bleachers. Apparently they had washed downriver a couple of years before. The bleachers were now sitting behind the junk lot at Ray Gormagan’s Autobody and Parts, as if rust were a spectator sport.

  We stood in clumps on a slope. Some people had umbrellas. Not many people came just to watch the game. Rick wouldn’t go under an umbrella. He said that would be weak. He had on a cap. He had four little rivers spitting constantly off his visor. Shunt didn’t seem to mind the rain. He danced around in it and howled.

  The first inning didn’t go well. Turner hit a double with no one on base. No one brought him home. The BQ team didn’t talk much or make fun of us. They didn’t need to. There was laughter in their eyes. Turner was furious. He st
ood there way out in the field of water. He shifted from leg to leg near the floating milk carton that marked second. He looked uncomfortable.

  It wasn’t long before they were up. Turner pitched. They were good pitches. They were fast and angry. That didn’t stop BQ from getting two runs.

  The next inning was worse. My teeth were chattering. Listening to the other team talk, I started to realize that they had made playing in water a basic part of their game. They had adapted. They figured the current into their batting and fielding. They had a special language.

  “Go for it, Fletcher! Gargle on third!”

  “Diveball to center field!”

  “Yo, Webster! Periscope up!”

  There was only one person on our side who didn’t seem to notice the game was underwater. Mike’s wife. She was very peppy. She was always clapping and yelling, “Go OD’s! Go, Emerald Ovals! Go, go, go O’Dermott’s!” When there was a quiet moment on the field, she would lean down to the stroller and coo, “‘O’Dermott’s.’ Can you say that? Clap your widdy hands. ‘Go, O’Dermott’s! Go, Daddy! Go, best daddy in the world!’ Say it!”

  When people dived for bases, they were almost half underwater. The ball smacked into the water and rolled. One of our fielders’ gloves was coming apart. The leather was wet. The score by the end of the fourth inning was 6-1. Mike tromped up and down, his cuffs heavy with water. His hands were shaking with rage. Our players stood with their shoulders slumped and their equipment dragging. Their hair stuck down straight from their caps. Shunt was cavorting. He’d grabbed clumps of lake weed for pom-poms. He was calling out letters of the alphabet for people to give him. No one gave him the letters he wanted. People just glared at him. The letters all spelled names of places in South and Central America which had been clear-cut by beef suppliers. He and Mike’s wife were the only two egging the team on.

  “Go, O’Dermott’s! Go, Emerald Ovals!” she would say.

  “Go, multibillion-dollar, multinational corporations!” Shunt would add, clasping his hands together. “Go, go, go hypocritical murderers bent on world domination!”

  “Hi, you must be Stacey,” I said to Turner’s girlfriend. She was blonde, with very complicated hair.

  “Yeah,” she said, flinching her nostrils.

  “Turner’s always talking about you.”

  “I hate to think.”

  “No, only good things. Only good things! Well, of course, you know Turner: It isn’t only good things. But it’s mostly good things. I mean, mostly things that are pretty good. Sometimes. You know how he is.”

  “A jerk?”

  “Yeah.” There was an awkward silence. She was waiting for me to say something. At this point, I realized I didn’t have anything else to say. I didn’t know how far I could go bashing Turner before she told him. So I rocked on my heels. I tried: “Great day for a ball game, huh?”

  She shook her head. “This is so gross. I can’t believe they did this to you guys.”

  “It’s like really raining.”

  “Yeah, and the river and all.”

  “There’s an octopus in the dugout.”

  She looked around. “Where’s the dugout?”

  “Uh, no,” I said. “There is no dugout. That was a joke.”

  “Yeah, thanks. I knew it was a joke, I thought there might just be a dugout, that’s all.”

  “No.”

  “You’d drown, anyway.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you play for the team?”

  “Badly,” I admitted.

  “It’s a stupid game, anyway,” she said.

  “It sure is,” I said.

  “Like why do you want to hit a stupid ball with a bat?”

  “A piece of wood,” I agreed. “Hitting a little pouch of leather and rubber with a stick.”

  “Really dumb,” she said. “What’s it ever done to you?” She laughed at her joke.

  “Exactly,” I said. “Now you’re talking.”

  “Sorry to be so like negative.”

  “You can say whatever you want. Doesn’t Turner let you say whatever you want with him? I mean, I personally am all for people saying whatever they feel like saying.”

  She looked at me from under her hair. “You hitting on me?” she asked.

  “Ack —!” I said. “What do you —? What? Am I —? Am I hitting on you? No. Got to go.” This seemed like a really good way to get my butt whipped fast. I was out of there like a shot.

  “Anthony,” said Mike. “Top of the sixth, you’re in.”

  “As what?”

  “Substitution for Lee. Right field.”

  “Are you sure you want me to go in?” I asked, looking at the water.

  Mike shrugged. “It doesn’t matter now. At this point, we’re just playing to play,” he said miserably.

  Now I was nervous. I looked around the field. I recognized several of the guys from BQ who had beaten me up. Kid was the catcher. Things were not looking good. After five innings, the score was 8-2.

  I was late in the lineup. Our first batter struck out. The second one popped the first pitch right to the third baseman. The rain kept up. Turner flied out. He threw down the bat and yelled things. Mike cautioned him about language.

  We had to go out onto the field. I walked down the final few feet of slope before the water started. I splashed out to right field. The muck oozed in my shoes.

  The second I got on the field, I could feel the anger. Out there, there was no protection. My team was full of hatred. The other team was full of spite. All of it was raw. Nobody was pretending.

  Turner scowled on the mound, but it didn’t do any good. He wasn’t used to the drag of the water. His pitches were lame. The ump called several balls. Then BQ’s batters started to connect. Johnny Fletcher whacked a long, high fly to center field. Webster hit a grounder to the mound. He brought Fletcher home.

  Marston stepped up to bat.

  Mike yelled, “Anthony! Play him deep! Play him deep!” He waved his hands as if shoving me backward.

  “Deep meaning what?” I yelled. “Twenty-thousand fathoms?” Nobody laughed. I backed up.

  Marston bunted.

  Everyone swore. People just wanted to quit. There was a little dispute, because the ball washed into foul territory. The ump was on their side. They got the runs. Turner looked angry, or like he was about to cry.

  It was at about this time that I looked up and saw some girls arriving in a station wagon. I knew Diana had been hanging out with some of the girls from BQ and Wendy’s. I couldn’t make out faces through the rain. Something was happening to my left.

  “The ball! Stop gawking! You have got to think, Anthony! Concentrate!” Mike yelled.

  The ball was dribbling out past me. Too late.

  I stood, dripping and defeated. Silt washed through my boxers.

  By the time we were up again, the score was 13-2. I was determined to do something heroic before she left. It didn’t look like she was going to be staying long. She and the other girls watched the game, but they didn’t look very interested. It looked like they were just there to switch cars or pick some people up.

  The top of the seventh did not start very well. The first batter struck out. The second batter popped a fly right to first. I was milling around on the shore. I tried to wander in her direction to hear what they were talking about. Mike saw me.

  “Anthony!” he said. “Where the heck are you going? Where is your team spirit? Explanation as to why you aren’t watching? Explanation as to why you’re lost in your own world? Explanation as to why I should give you the chance I’m giving you?” She heard my name and looked over. I stood and concentrated on the catcher’s back. Rick and Turner were up, then me. I was already feeling weak and nervous.

  Rick drove a single to left field. Turner stepped up to bat, gritting his teeth. I could tell he was mad. The BQ pitcher was Johnny Fletcher, who worked window. Fletcher was teasing Turner. He sent Turner pitches which were high and slow. They had a weird spin, almo
st dainty. Turner was covered in mud. I could hear him swearing. On the third pitch, he finally swung and connected.

  “Go, O’Dermott’s!” yelled Mike’s wife. “Go, go, green!”

  The ball shot past the right fielder’s shoulder. He splashed after it. The ball thwacked into the water. Turner slogged to first. The fielder was scrabbling way off in the outfield. Turner was kicking up a spray somewhere around second. Rick had made it to third. He had just started home when the ball flew back into the infield and smacked into Fletcher’s wet glove. Rick turned and hurled himself back toward third. He came up choking and wheezing. The third baseman had caught the ball. Rick’s eyes were wide and he was hiccupping.

  “Player’s choking!” yelled the ump.

  “You choking?” asked the third baseman. Rick couldn’t answer.

  “Use the Heimlich maneuver!” yelled the BQ coach.

  “That a play?” asked the third baseman.

  “No! You grab him around near the ribs, like this!”

  Rick gagged and thrashed his arms.

  The third baseman caught on and went to help Rick. Rick was gargling. The third baseman went to wrap his arms around Rick’s torso. Rick saw the ball in the glove and backed off, choking. He thrashed one hand in the water, and with the other, grabbed at the buoy that marked third. He fell, and writhed backward.

  “What’s the matter?” yelled the ump.

  “He’s running away. I think he’s trying to make sure he’s safe.”

  The ump trudged over. “Is he touching the base?”

  Fletcher asked, “Is the ball still in play?”

  Mike screamed, “Would you just declare the boy safe before he drowns to death?”

  The ump shrugged. “Ho-key-doh-key. Safe!”

  “Now give him the Heimlich maneuver!” said the BQ captain.

  It just took a minute before Rick was spewing water. His face turned back from red.

  I was up. Everyone glowered at me. They were not happy about Mike’s lineup. Men on second and third, two outs, and I was up. This didn’t look good to anyone.

  Fletcher smiled at me like a wolf or some other cruel pack animal. I turned and looked for Diana. She was watching.