Casey's Home

by Jessica Minier

  Casey’s Home

  By Jessica Minier

  Text Copyright © 2000 Jessica Minier

  All Rights Reserved

  To My Mother and Father

  and to all those who loved me as I wrestled with this book

  Table of Contents

  …And Somewhere Hearts are Light

  Student Stories

  Concrete Reality

  American Girl

  Now Arriving at the Terminal

  Best Wishes

  Deliverance

  Deposited

  Getting Lucky

  Hoop Skirts and Misery

  Orientation

  Choosing Your Stance

  Control and Velocity

  Unraveling

  Treading Water

  Mourning in Florida

  The All-American Girls Baseball League

  Hearing

  Shifting

  …And Somewhere Hearts are Light

  1978

  The last day of my baseball career was the hottest I could remember, and the air smelled like dirt. Each scuffling movement brought up a cloud of red dust that hung in my lungs and coated my clothes until I was gritty from head to toe.

  I was the only girl on my team, playing shortstop for the ludicrously named Buczkowski’s Pickles. Most of the girls in town played on the softball leagues, but considering who my father was, baseball had been my only real choice. Besides, I believed softball to be a sport created just for girls, and therefore less difficult. It wasn’t that I consciously thought I was as good as the boys, I just hadn’t yet considered that I might not be.

  My father, retired finally from the Atlantics, was coaching his first year of college ball at DeSoto State and made it to my games whenever he could, mostly so he could shout things like: “Take him out, you idiot! I’ve seen better arms on a goddamn chimpanzee!” from the bleachers. I was the youngest daughter of “Wild” Billy Wells, four-time Cy Young winner with a lifetime ERA under two and a temper to match his blistering fastball. The kids from the visiting team always crowded up into the bleachers after the games, handing over baseballs and gloves for my father to sign while the Pickles groused in the parking lot, anxious to leave for the obligatory run for pepperoni pizzas and root beers.

  It was the final game of our season. The Pickles weren’t a good team, or a particularly bad one. Little League, or since I was fourteen, Senior League teams were constantly in search of a good sponsor, and the Buczkowskis had four young boys and a thriving business. We had the best uniforms in town and plenty of equipment, but we hated being the Buczkowski’s Pickles with a nearly homicidal passion. Not only was our name completely unpronounceable, it was also hideously embarrassing, especially on days like today, when we were playing the Richardson Electrics. Even I thought we sounded like a bunch of pussies.

  The Electrics were a very good team, with a few talented kids who would end up courting my father at State. While no one expected them to make it to the Series, everyone knew they’d make it at least as far as the state playoffs, maybe even the regionals. Their star player was a fastball pitcher named Cory Pipkin who, at fifteen, could already throw nearly eighty miles-an-hour. His hands hung almost to his knees. “Those fingers aren’t natural,” my father would say, watching the boy warm up. “They’re freakish. Good, but freakish.” Cory wasn’t good looking, or particularly smart, but to a thirteen year-old facing him across sixty feet of baked-brick earth, he was something akin to God.

  The Electrics had something else we didn’t: a respected coach. Reggy Brooks had been named the best Senior League coach in our region for seven consecutive years. During the course of a game, Coach Brooks’ face descended from pink to flaming red to purple. When pushed far enough, he had been known to kick his players’ gloves out into the dirt of the warning track and then stomp on them. This was the accepted vernacular of coaching as we understood it. Our coach, Mr. May, annoyed us with his go-team enthusiasm and overt kindness. We wanted Coach May to scream obscenities at us and implore us to win one, just this once, for the Mayster. My father hated Brooks, often saying, in his own brand of blissful hypocrisy, that Coach Brooks was “too hard on his kids.” I had begged to try out for the Electrics, but here I was, playing for the Pickles. It was a fact I chose not to carefully examine.

  The air in the dugout was stifling. Next to me, our chubby catcher, a boy I only ever knew as Blessing, spat sunflower seeds at the tips of his shoes. He still wore his equipment, afraid to take it off as we were in the bottom of the eighth and sinking fast. Cory Pipkin was in rare form. I watched dejectedly as the first baseman collapsed back into place beside me, out without a single swing.

  “I couldn’t even see the damn ball,” he muttered and I noticed, as he reached into Blessing’s bag of seeds, that his hands were shaking. I thought about Walter Johnson; how he had once thrown an imaginary ball at an opponent. The batter swung anyway. The umpire called it a strike.

  “Casey,” Mr. May called. “You’re up next.”

  I walked to the warm-up circle and grabbed a bat. I had faced Cory Pipkin over and over since I was ten years old. For a few years, when I was still in Little League and he had moved up to Senior League ahead of me, I was free to simply enjoy watching him. These days I was back to sweating it out, destined to fail.

  The Electric’s catcher, a tiny boy who looked barely eleven, called out to Davis in the batter's box.

  “It’s all over now, ya know.”

  “Kiss my...” Davis began before the ump shouted, “Language!”

  I took a few practice swings with two bats, just like the pros. My hands felt heavy in the heat and sweat flew off my wrists with each arc of my arms. Polyester coated every surface of my body except for my socks and my wool baseball hat. Even my underwear was a shiny, thin material that seemed to grow stiff the more moisture accumulated between it and my skin.

  “Boy, is it hot,” Mr. May said beside me, wiping at his brow with an already soaked sleeve.

  “Come on, Davis!” I heard someone shout from the bleachers. It sounded like my father.

  From the corner of my eye, I watched as Pipkin wound up and let one go. He didn’t exactly need to finesse it with us, just get it over the plate. At that last second, we wouldn’t have known a curveball or slider if they had worn nametags. A pitch was a pitch. You either hit it, or you didn’t.

  Fielding wasn’t much better. One minute I’d be standing in the infield, wondering who would notice if I yanked my underwear back into place and the next the ball would be right there, hurtling toward me like a large white bullet. Either you caught the large white bullet, or you didn’t. If you didn’t, someone else had to, probably the third baseman. Or you could both run after it, scrambling over the newly-mown grass and cursing under your breath until the two of you reached it at the same time without calling it and then you’d have to decide, right there, who was going to pick it up and try to make the throw to, by this time, third base. There were a lot more triples in Little League than there were in the Majors.

  True to form, Davis swung at nothing. I heard the ball whistle past him and hit the catcher’s mitt with a thud like wood dropping on wood.

  “Strike!” the ump yelled, jabbing his index finger quickly to the right. Everyone enjoyed it when Pipkin threw, except the other team.

  “Shit,” Davis said.

  “Language!” the ump yelled.

  “Swing, batter batter batter!” a group of kids in the bleachers called.

  “That’s actually bad advice, I suspect,” I heard Mr. May say to no one in particular.

  Pipkin stepped back and eyed Davis.

  “Jeez, just do it,” Davis said bitterly.

  With a graceful arch of his back, Cory Pipkin sent another fastball
toward our batter. It hit the backstop with a crash, bouncing into the umpire’s fat calf.

  “Damn,” he swore.

  I felt like screaming “language” at him, but didn’t.

  “Ball,” he said at last.

  “Control!” a voice shouted from the stands. My father again.

  I winced.

  Davis stretched briefly and stepped back up to the plate. I stopped swinging, letting the bats weigh down my arms as I watched the drama building. Even though I wanted Davis to smash one out of the park, I was also rooting for a good fast one, right over the plate. It was impossible not to love something that beautiful.

  Pipkin let another one go. The fastball sang past Davis into the bulls-eye of the catcher’s waiting glove. I wondered if he could throw anything else.

  “Strike!”

  “Right,” Davis said bravely, squaring his shoulders. “Let’s do it.”

  I had to admire him, standing there in front of certain annihilation. Ten years later, Davis would play for the Brewers. Not much of a step up from the Pickles, really. But the Brewers were still a far better fate than what would happen to Cory Pipkin his first year at UCLA.

  Driving just faster than he could throw, Cory would drunkenly plow his 1981 Mustang into a telephone pole at eighty-five miles an hour. He’d live, but his hands, still gripping the wheel as his body hit it, would require so many pins he’d carry a card from his doctor for the rest of his life just to pass through a metal detector.

  At that moment, however, with their futures undecided, I was betting on Pipkin. Davis swung again, but the ball was already sitting comfortably in the catcher’s left hand, like an egg in a nest.

  “Nice try,” I said as he walked past me.

  “Screw you,” he replied, without animosity.

  “Language!” the ump yelled.

  “We’ll get ‘em next time,” Coach May said cheerfully.

  “Maybe you will,” Davis said and moved to sit beside Blessing and his bag of sunflower seeds.

  It is one thing to watch a pitcher from the warm-up circle, swinging to each pitch in your mind, hearing the smack of ball on wood. Or in this case, the ponk of ball on aluminum, which while less beautiful, is still a fine sound.

  It is another thing to stand there yourself, to swing the bat a little and scuff your toes into the dirt in the box and adopt the stance you practiced a thousand times, all while watching a kid who could, quite easily, throw an eighty mile-an-hour fastball right at your head. Batting helmets be damned, it’s a terrifying thing.

  Stepping up to the plate, I pushed the toes of my shoes into the dirt, readied the bat by my right ear and squinted toward the mound. Cory Pipkin was watching me over his glove, preparing for his wind-up. He had large blue eyes, the color people always called cornflower. I had never seen a cornflower, so I just thought they looked unnatural, like blue lightening or the sky just before a really bad storm. Narrowing his eyes, he glared at me, sizing me up. I swallowed a mouthful of spit.

  And then from right behind me, I could hear the catcher say:

  “And when, responding to the cheers, he lightly doffed his hat, no stranger in the crowd could doubt 'twas ... Casey at the bat.”

  I turned to stare, finding the kid grinning at me with a mouth full of metal. He had a face covered with freckles and looked just like Opie. The umpire laughed, as did several people in the stands.

  Great, I thought, just great.

  The scrawny kid nodded at me. “Ernest Lawrence Thayer,” he said. “Memorized it last year for English. Got an ‘A.’”

  “Good for you,” I said, digging in again.

  Pipkin wound up slowly and let one go, hard and fast, as always. As it screamed toward me, my mind chanted, “don’t swing, don’t swing.”

  “Strike!” the ump shouted.

  I told my mind to shut up and pay more attention to the damn ball.

  Again a small voice spoke behind me.

  “‘That ain't my style,’ said Casey. ‘Strike one,’ the umpire said.”

  Someone in the bleachers cheered.

  “Good for you,” I heard the real umpire say. “That’s a classic.”

  “Fuck,” I said.

  “Language!”

  “He pullin’ out the poetry?” a voice called and I looked up to see Cory Pipkin grinning at me. “He’s wanted you all year, just for that.”

  I glared at him and turned and scuffed a little dirt in the catcher’s direction.

  “I’ve heard it before,” I said.

  “Come on, Casey!” my father shouted, as if I were somehow trying to delay the action.

  I steadied my arms and waited. Cory Pipkin threw toward me and this time, I let my mind go and swung when I felt the ball approach.

  I tipped it back, over the cage, to hear it clatter down in the bleachers. Someone cheered.

  “Strike,” the ump said.

  “Casey still ignored it, and the umpire said, ‘Strike two.’”

  “Shut up!” I barked.

  Cory Pipkin laughed.

  “Don’t be such a girl,” Cory shouted.

  Throwing my shoulders back and stretching out my arms, I shouted back.

  “Throw the damn ball!”

  The ump opened his mouth, but was drowned out by a rousing cheer from the dugout behind me.

  “Settle down!” I heard Mr. May say. “Settle down. This is a baseball game, not a boxing ring.”

  I looked up again at Pipkin. He met my narrowed gaze with his own and smiled at me.

  “This is it, Wells,” the catcher said. “This is your last chance.”

  “Pitch the damn ball,” someone else’s father shouted, for once.

  The pitch was high and outside, making the catcher stretch.

  “Ball!”

  “Ha,” I said. “There’s nothing in your poem about that.”

  “You wait,” the catcher said. “You just wait. He’s going to throw this last one, and he’s going to take you apart, bone by girly bone.”

  “Then I’ll get him next year,” I replied.

  “Ha, next year you’ll be too busy trying out for the pep squad. Next year’s high school. Everything changes in high school.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said, annoyed.

  Across the span of earth to the pitcher’s mound, I saw Cory Pipkin stretch as if he were winding up, but then wince and rub his arm.

  “Time out!” the catcher yelled and stepped forward. “Hey, Pip, you ok?”

  “Hang on,” the ump said, and stepped around me to go examine the star of the game.

  The heat moved past me like wind. The bleachers buzzed with over a hundred voices, and from the dugout a call of “come on, you weenie!” drifted up. I heard Mr. May shush the offending party.

  In the bright, unfiltered light of a Saturday afternoon, I watched the three men on the mound, conferring with all the absorption of a Series play-off game. Cory rotated his arm and the ump poked at the arm with one fat finger until Cory winced. Mr. Brooks trotted out to join them. Everyone, I thought, is taking this thing so seriously. The catcher had pulled off his helmet and rested it on his hip. He had bright orange hair to go with the freckles. Long drifts of dust glittered in the low currents of air. Someone coughed.

  In that moment, I came to a sudden, sharp realization.

  I wasn’t going to play baseball.

  All around me boys stood and waited, or sat and picked the seed casings from between their teeth, or chewed gum or wrestled or just watched, in anticipation of the moment when the game would resume. Most of them weren’t very good. Heck, most of them weren’t really even paying attention. But deep in their hearts, in the place where we all know we are secretly immortal, they knew with unerring certainty that they could, someday, go to the Majors. My God, the confidence of a teen-age boy, the surety of their short lives: they could, with no little exaggeration, do anything.

  The air hissed in my ears and the bat felt as if it weighed more than my own body. How
could it be, I wondered, that I had been allowed to live under this ridiculous notion that I was free? Who had first lied to me? If I hadn’t been so goddamned angry, I would have wept.

  The little cluster of players at the mound broke apart and moved back to their designated places. I stared at Cory Pipkin in shock and with a sense of envy so strong it nearly made me sick. He was grinning that same grin.

  I gripped the bat with a manic intensity. This was it, and suddenly I knew it. I hit the ball, hard.

  I would like to say that my final gift to my team was a slamming home run, but really it was merely a double knocked into the hole between center and left. Behind me, the bleacher crowd cheered and the catcher swore. I came screaming around to second, running so hard I could barely stop. I didn’t have to stand there, trying to breathe, trying to remain in control, for long. The next batter hit it straight to the first basemen. I never even left the bag.

  Walking off the field, I knew we still had an inning of play remaining. I knew I was supposed to stop just a few feet from second base and squat there, content to catch the crappy little grounders that constituted a Senior League shortstop’s game. Mr. May held up my glove as I approached.

  “Nice hit,” he said. And then, as I took my glove and walked right out of the chain link fence, I heard him shout: “Casey?”

  My father was standing up by the time I reached him, his face unreadable. I was crumpling, folding into myself like a flattened ball of paper.

  Around me concerned parents leaned close, and Mr. May could be heard scrambling up the metal benches to intercept me.

  “Casey?” my Dad said, his eyes searching my face, my body for signs of visible injury. “What’s going on?”

  I simply wrapped my arms around his chest and burst into tears.

  “It’s all right,” he whispered, stroking the flat palm of his hand across my hair. “It’s all right, baby.”

  “Casey? Are you hurt?” Mr. May asked.

  “Leave her,” my father said quietly. “Go put in someone else. We’re going home.”

  As he walked me back to our car, he left one arm around my shoulder, one hand rubbing my arm. His palm radiated heat.