by Billy Coffey
On the party went, the fervor increased by an abundance of alcohol and the lateness of the hour, each of us to a person invincible in our own private ways, seventeen forever. It was near to one in the morning when the amber light appeared in the distance. A whistle calling across flat-topped fields and answered by a chorus of drunken whoops and a voice—Travis’s, Jeffrey’s, or someone else’s, I have never known—calling out, “Chicken. Let’s chicken the train.”
“Chicken the train,” said another, mocking the bird’s call.
Travis stood. Said, “I’ll do it,” against Jen’s laugh. He walked off wobble-legged away from the fire and on through the field, followed by others, Jeffrey and Stephanie and Jen, drawing the same crowd that had followed them since kindergarten. Shanties as well, drawing up from the dust and dirt they had sat upon all night. Every one of us following so we might behold for perhaps a last time the stupid courage Travis Clements wore as a tin badge. Micky rose and motioned me to go with my friends.
The train bore on with its triangle of lamps. The whistle sounded a siren’s call, and Travis the doomed sailor stumbled toward his own death. A slight grade of rocky land rose up from the field to where the tracks lay. I heard the rails sing as we neared. Travis climbed to the center and spread his arms wide, laughing, Jen’s meek “What you doing?” coming as Travis’s arms opened wider as though to embrace the engine barreling on.
He shouted over the noise, “Ain’t none y’all got the guts, do ya?”
Jeffrey yelled, “Dude, get down from there.”
I could not move. None of us could. Then the shadow of a figure moving up the grade—
-5-
I jerk with the bat’s crack and see Knoblauch sprinting down the first base line, Hairston fielding the grounder and throwing to first. Two down, Johnson commanding the game on the mound. Jeter up to the plate and the crowd stirring, the voice of God saying over the speakers, “Der-ek Jee-ter,” and some now standing, wanting to see something, hoping to see—
-6-
—the train bearing down now and a whistle sounding not as a call but a warning, three short pulls followed by a long wail that pierced the darkness. Micky stumbled over the ties. She brushed Travis aside and stood afore him.
I shouted, “Micky,” not caring that no one else knew her by that name, not the town kids who considered her as little more than Earl’s daughter or the Shanties who called her Michaela. The whistle rang out again as she opened her arms. Travis leapt from the grade as the sound of rolling steel blew and I ran, pushing him away in my ascent as he himself descended. Scrambling on all fours, I reached the first rail. The steel shook in my hand. I pulled myself up into a tempest of angry roars and wheels turning. Wind gathered in a hot swirl. Dust and cinders shot into my face. Micky’s arms had lowered. She gaped not toward the long line of cars bearing down but to the rock and wood at her feet, streaked with oil. To her fingers. Her hands.
I grabbed Micky’s wrist. What spell had captured her broke at my touch. Her head spun, her eyes showing panic at seeing me there. She yelled, “Owen, no!” as the massive brakes bit down with the sound of the world tearing itself in half, a howl as frightening as it was mournful. The noise drew me. I gathered in that approaching light and found myself frozen by fear. Every muscle and impulse to run froze. My body betrayed me. It was as if my mind had fled, leaving my bones as lifeless as the ties and rocks beneath me.
The train could not stop. It shrieked and buckled and smoked but rolled on, the triangle of lights in front of the engine growing to three suns that meant to swallow us both. I braced myself as I could, sucking in a final breath I believed would never be expelled. And as that great wind swirled about inside a darkness I have not known since, all I knew was cut away in a single stroke.
It was as if Micky and I had somehow found ourselves back on our hill, or as if I stood in the box with my weight shifted to my back foot and my stride already taken, bat angling toward some racing fastball. The world compressed to a dot no larger than the bubble of eternity formed around us—all the eternity I had ever sought. No sound of the train’s brakes reached me. That long black snake slowed to a speed imperceptible, leaving only glaring lights. The gale surrounding us was silenced to little more than a soft rustling of silk. In this bubble, only silence reigned. In that space came the flutter of my breath spent outward, only not mere breath. It was a mist that came through my lips, golden and silver-tipped, rising upward just beyond my eyes and hanging suspended before bursting to tiny suns I could not count before spiraling in directions I could not fathom.
Micky went rigid with wonder. Her hand thrummed in my own. Our eyes met, and in them we each beheld entire worlds. Her lips parted to breaths that came in the soft noise of joy wedded to bliss, leaving her own golden suns to rupture and race. When that breath crossed my path, I felt every ripple and hidden atom. They caressed me like a mother’s touch, the tickle of a dandelion held at your chin. What felt like warm water flooded down my arm into Micky’s. Tingling, almost probing me, the way a fish will nibble at your toes when you dangle them just over a pond’s surface. That arm rose as Micky lifted the hand I held. It came into sight bathed in the train’s honey-yellow lights—all the outside world the bubble allowed to penetrate. Our fingers were laced, and with a terrible awe I realized those were not our fingers at all, not our hands, but two joined objects so filled of wonder and horror that I felt my mind strain and bend and finally snap.
Our skin was gone, stripped away, the bones and muscles left as thin translucent strips that held together not merely blood and vessel but a universe of tiny pointed lights laid in the shape of ringlets. They ran up and down the length of our hands, billowing into and out of our fingers before disappearing from sight past our wrists, coming back, undulating in a dance I could only process as cosmic, while what remained of all rational thought could only speak three letters—
DNA.
I am looking at my own DNA.
Molecules swam. The very blood within me trilled and chanted. Micky’s face had taken on the sheen of one peering into the very face of God. Our hands lowered. Clear but shimmering eddies of gravity rippled outward into a night that had come alive in a way that exceeded life itself. A moth floated motionless at my periphery, wings spread, and I saw upon them every intricate design and heard the slow rocking of its tiny heart. Every rock glowed. The wooden ties beneath us were no longer wood but everything wood could be, everything wood was meant to be. All beat and danced and played in a symphony guided by a great Source that felt at once everywhere and separate. The air itself lay charged, dense with quarks and leptons, with gluons, bosons, and neutrinos, and it mattered not I had never heard of such words nor possessed any capacity to understand their meaning because I knew their meaning then. In that moment I knew everything, and my smallness most of all.
And then the bubble around us felt to expand and contract as though from a great shaking. Far away came the rustle of a great storm building. The train’s lights settled into a growing intensity. The pop of a brake. A release of steam—the world being unpaused, rushing back. I wanted to scream for Micky to
(Jump)
but the word would not form inside my rapture. I felt her hand tighten and looked to find the true beauty of it gone. Only her perfect skin remained, chipped nails colored red for prom night. All of the peace I had felt now fell away. Every bit of understanding. What remained of my heaven was knowing that here, at my end, I would at least leave this life with the only one I had ever loved.
Time rejoined us. All the clamor and swirl of hot wind and screeching brakes and blaring whistle came at once, leaving no time to even speak. Then came the force from behind us, toward the side where nearly a hundred kids stood screaming next to a bonfire. A giant hand took hold of me like death and shoved. I slammed into Micky’s side. We went sprawling over the rail and down the slope. Rocks tore at our clothes and skin. Stars moved from above us to below as we tumbled down the opposite side of the slope as t
he train wailed past.
The world returned with the sound of my name and Micky’s face hovering above my own. Upon her was a stillness of fear gone to shock. Acrid smoke that smelled of smelting iron engulfed us. The train had skidded to a stop well beyond. I turned my head to see a measure of railcars behind us. Faint screaming on the other side of the grade—the train had cut us off from the field.
Her mouth moved but made no sound except for a whimpered shriek that held multitudes. I took Micky’s hand. We ran toward the back of the train. Afterimages burned into my eyes, resembling little more than flashes and streaks. Even then, some part of me had begun to forget.
No, I tell myself now, shaking my head as Jeter lets the first pitch go for a ball. I never forgot what I saw as that train bore down. What I felt. It was more that as I pulled Micky toward the last railcar and then around to our side of the track, I had begun to tuck it all away. Pushed it down and down into a drawer labeled Do Not Open in that far inward place where the walls are black and the floors are covered with the ashes of fairy tales told when you were young, into that drawer where go all the things that do not affirm all you believe.
I heard the faint call of a man and spotted a shadow climbing from the side of the train’s engine. Then another. Our classmates ran in every direction but toward us. Trucks and cars tore away. Headlights bounced over the field’s dips and ridges.
Micky’s hand had gone cold and clammy. Twice she stumbled. I led her around my truck and opened the door to get her inside. In the far distance I saw a light on Brutal Simpson’s porch and a man standing there. Micky sat crumpled in the seat, empty eyes staring out the windshield as I gunned through the field, so numbed that she accepted a torrent of my screaming with neither word nor sound.
“What were you doing . . . thinking?”
She would not hear me. Could not.
Miles away, a siren set to wailing.
She said nothing of substance beyond simple directions to guide me: “Left” and “Right” and “Keep straight” and, some minutes later, a simple “There.” I doused the headlights and pulled into the lane well away from the little shack, wary of waking Earl. The windows were propped open. Pale curtains fluttered in the night breeze like wandering souls.
She said, “Take the road all the way to the fork. Bear right, then make every left you see. You’ll come out along Route 20. It’ll be a drive, but you won’t be seen.” Much of Micky’s makeup was gone, leaving her skin looking like the blemished skin of a peach. But there was no hurt on her face, no pain.
I studied the house. Waiting for Earl to stumble out onto the porch wearing a pair of soiled old skivvies and one sock and swinging a shotgun, but that never happened. And truth be told, I knew Earl wouldn’t. He’d sit watching in the darkness if he woke at all. The man was a drunk and a scoundrel but a coward most of all.
Micky opened the truck door and shut it and spoke through the open window. “You saved me, Owen.” A robot’s voice, mechanical and dead of feeling. Or maybe there was so much feeling that nothing but a false voice could be managed. She stepped away but kept a hand to the door. “You saved me,” she said again.
She walked away barefooted in a pair of cutoff jeans but with a royal’s gait. My hand reached for the gearshift. I wiggled my fingers and touched each with my thumb. Only a hand. Just a hand was all. I could not back my way down the lane without the reverse lights shining and so pushed the gear into first, intending to make a quiet circle around the front yard. When I’d turned away from the house I kicked the lights on again and stopped dead when they swung onto Micky’s form. She stood blocking my way.
“What did you see?” she asked.
It was hard to tell how much of my expression lay visible behind the headlights. Not much certainly, little more than a blackened blob over the steering wheel, though her eyes were square to mine.
“At the train, Owen. What did you see?”
My hand gripped the wheel. Just a hand. Four fingers and a thumb, three of which lay slanted from where they’d been broken and jammed over the years by foul tips and headfirst slides. Catchers age, oh they age.
“Nothing.”
“What happened to us?”
“Nothing,” I said again.
My foot eased off the brake. The truck inched forward. Micky stepped aside and let me pass. I could never speak anything but the truth to that girl. To do otherwise simply wasn’t in me, and Micky would know it if I tried. Like she knew then. I lied. Oh, how I lied, because the truth was already an unbearable thing wedged in that place far down in me. I lied many times in the days and months and years after. A lie is what my life became. But never once did I lie with such conviction as I did that night in Micky’s driveway. Nosir, not once.
-7-
Jeter swings and misses for the third strike, bringing Johnson’s total to three. He near leaps off the mound, runs rather than walks to the dugout. Momentum has swung back our way. The players crowd into the dugout bumping fists. Gloves slap onto the bench. Ethan readies the bats we’ll need. Far to the end near Mike, I see Country Kitchen eyeing me.
There are games within the game. Baseball is not nine innings but three innings played three times. As in life, a night of baseball contains within itself a beginning, a middle, and an end. As the top of the fourth readies to commence, I know my beginning here this night is now done. The middle innings stretch out before us as once did that old field on the outskirts of Shantytown, empty and dark and filled with unknowns.
And then comes the end, as must come the end of everything. I look out over the diamond and try not to give thought to the sense building inside me. The beginning has begun and the middle is now and then comes the end, and what of the end? What happens at the last out when the bases are cleared and the crowd is silenced and there is nothing but some tomorrow that may never come?
I shudder as the teams trade sides on the field, what Momma used to say was a rabbit running over my grave.
Top 4
To my father there lay an order to the universe far beyond the ability of humankind to know, and an Orderer both fearsome and mysterious. Such was the sum of his religion. The world as it lay before him was a simple place, all straight edges, nary a curve to be seen. You worked and you got by and could call your life well spent if you managed both.
I believe he and Momma both adopted themselves into the Lord’s family as an act of thanksgiving. They saw it as God’s hand, us getting away from a waiting poverty in Stanley to a somewhat comfortable life in Camden. I always felt Momma had been drawn to faith—the searching out of that great Mystery—which goes long in explaining the choices she made that summer. For Dad, faith was what waited at the other end of a long and hard life. He could otherwise make no sense of his hardships. For him must be some waiting reward or explanation. A hope that the grainy picture of his days would someday be made clear and he would find his rest.
He clung to church more for that than for the milk and meat Reverend Sebolt preached each Sunday. Religion became his religion, more even than baseball, and so long as he obeyed the rules and ensured his wife and son followed, so long as Paul Cross manned the door at Sunday service and we poured out our hearts at Wednesday-night prayer meetings and once a month took our wafer and grape juice and imagined them the Body and the Blood, we would keep strong. His family would live on always.
I myself have always struggled with things divine. I cannot abide what I cannot see, and when seen I cannot accept them. That is why I put what happened in front of that train as far from my mind as I could—that event so holy but that seemed to me then so threatening. And yet I call myself a superstitious man no less than any other upon this field or in these stands. Baseball makes us so. No other game is so entwined with the mystical and the groundless. I know players who refuse to wash their jock in the middle of a hot streak, players who will trip themselves rather than step on a foul line or must eat the same meal before every game. Any pitcher throwing a no-hitter after the fifth i
s shunned. I will not sit with him on the bench, will refuse to visit the mound. Bats are considered living things. Sex is either the key to a streak or the curse of one; for as many guys who swear by lying with a woman before a game, others are monklike in their abstinence. Chicken bones are good luck, the sight of a cat inside a stadium bad. Rally caps hold magic. Full moons make the ball fly. Ghosts rise.
I see them displayed now, batters making the sign of the cross before they step into the box. How they point heavenward after a hard base hit that finds a hole, a gap. The rituals of the on-deck circle done to a precise formula governed by the mind alone—pine tar upon the handle and the weighted donut over the barrel and the swings, never wavering. The same circuitous route Mussina makes around the mound after each out. How Johnson sits in the same spot on the bench and will not move from it unless he comes in from a bad inning, that spot now poisoned. The way Ethan will hold some bats by the barrel and others by the handle alone as he retrieves them, according to the wishes of his players.
Upon a baseball field I am more a believer in God than anywhere else in this world. I am no nearer heaven than when I play. My crouch behind the plate is my penitent bow.
Yet what magic we call forth for the top of this inning falls to deaf ears beyond the arc of lights that reach high to the full dark. There is greater power here than the workings of mere men. Fordyce and Hairston and Anderson each go down with strikeouts, two swinging and one frozen by Mussina’s knuckle-curve.
Though no one speaks of it as the players clutch their gloves and run out onto that hallowed field, I believe we all are thinking the same. Those ghosts, they lurk. It is said that in the dark mountains of Appalachian Virginia the past is never dead, never even past. The same is true for baseball, where curses are living things to be borne and where players and times long dead are spoken of as though they still breathe. In fact they may, and that is why the game is eternal.
