by Billy Coffey
“Thanks.”
She waited, puzzling over the care with which I took the rock and studied its facets.
“What is that?”
“Called a rock, Ma.”
She tapped me on the arm. “You’re so smart.”
I heard Dad talking.
“Is it hers?” she asked. “Did Michaela—”
“Owen,” Dad said. He came into the room dragging the phone and cord behind him, face twisted into a look of pained ecstasy. He pushed the receiver into my hand. “For you.”
“Who is it?”
“Orioles,” he said. And then my father smiled. “Go on. Only been waiting about twenty years.”
I held the phone to my mouth. In a spot near my right kidney that I hadn’t thought of in years, a dull tingle formed.
“Hello?”
“Owen?” came the voice. “Carl Norman, Baltimore Orioles. How you doing, son?”
I knew the name. Coach Solis had introduced me to Carl Norman before a game not three months prior.
“I’m good, sir.”
“Carl’s good enough. You ready to get out of Youngstown?”
Dad shifted his weight from one leg to the other, waiting. Mom dabbed an eye.
“I am.”
“Good to hear. Listen, anybody talk to you yet?”
“No, sir. Carl.”
“Well, I’m talking to you right now on behalf of the Orioles. I been looking at you for a while now, always a place for a good catcher. You got a good arm and a steady stick. Head for the game. But it’s more than that. Seen you play up in Cleveland.”
“You did?”
My hand tightened on the receiver. Dad’s eyes begged me for anything, the smallest hint of information.
“Your last at-bat,” Carl said. “Way you stood there soaking it all in. Heart, Owen. You got heart. And your heart’s gonna get you somewhere. What’ll it take for you to sign a contract with the organization?”
I said the first thing in my mind: “A plane ticket and a hat.”
“We’ll give you both. What you say to that?”
Well, what was there to say but yes? You wait so long for a thing like that to happen, that thing you worked at and bled over all your life, though you know in the back of your head might not ever come at all. That dream you have. But to me, baseball was more than that. Four years I had spent acting like I faced toward the future. All along, I lived in the past. But on May 19, 1994, I chose to set myself free. I would forget yesterday and start living for today.
I signed my first professional baseball contract over the phone at the age of twenty-two for a plane ticket, a hat, and a thousand dollars, and then I hung up and hugged my family. It was a miracle, nothing less. And on the heels of such a wonder came another: my father weeping, his hand at the back of my neck, saying, “I’m proud a you, son.
“I’m proud a you.”
-5-
Country won’t speak on what I said. He’s got his eyes to Mussina and saying how the Yanks will get their bullpen up soon, they ain’t got but a choice now, even when Melvin Mora strikes out swinging to bring the inning near to closing. Jay Gibbons, our left fielder, comes up. I see Fordyce on deck and try to imagine that’s me loosening up with my bat, shin protectors on because it’s two down and it just means less he’s got to put on should Gibbons end things.
Country says, “My daddy died in a coal mine when I’s seven. We lived down in Kentucky. My momma brung me up. Swore I’d never step foot in a mine. And I didn’t ever.”
“Sounds like a good woman.”
“She was.” His left hand inched down the barrel of the bat against him. Almost like Country was embracing it, holding her. “She was,” he says again. “Where’d they send you to A-ball?”
“Bluefield. Appalachian League.”
He smiles. “God’s country.”
“I’ll amen that.”
“Hard awakenin’, A-ball. Even for the good ones.”
“Hard for me. And I was good.”
-6-
Bluefield, Virginia, was but a few hours’ drive from Camden, and now for the first time I believe had I been older, wiser, I would have wondered if there was more to its closeness than mere geography. But nowhere in those first days of what Dad called my new life did I allow myself time for reflection. My thoughts ran no deeper than what possessions I needed and which I could leave behind. At no time did it occur to me that I had run all the way to Ohio in order to escape my past, only to all but return home to embrace my future.
The Bluefield Orioles was largely the first stop for every player signed from either high school or college—the lowest rung of the ladder so far as professional baseball goes. Yet it was a rung nonetheless, something Mom repeated in the weeks after my contract was made official, an upward spot upon which I could place my foot and begin climbing. She tried sounding happy. I could tell she wasn’t. As for Dad, he was quick to say the rookie league may sound a small thing, but it was big enough that few players were ever granted such an opportunity.
We both agreed I would be in Bluefield only a short while. I think I believed that even more than Paul Cross. It was arrogance that fueled me back then, this notion that a twentysomething boy from rural Virginia could stand out in such a crowd. That thinking became my first mistake among many. College ball taught me there were far greater players than what western Virginia could produce, though I still rose above most. Rookie ball taught me I was no better than anyone. The boys in Bluefield were bigger, stronger, faster. Their minds were just as sharp. Pitchers threw seeds; every one I faced was a Junior Hewitt and more, fastballs that cut and jerked and off-speed pitches that would disintegrate halfway to the plate before putting themselves back together inside the catcher’s mitt.
I struggled those first weeks in spite of the wonder that permeated the everyday. We were thirty-seven players from as far away as the Caribbean thrown together by dreams and hunger, speaking different languages and adhering to differing cultures and ways, yet to a man we were united in the sheer joy of being paid to come to a ball field. The ballparks were slivers of paradise set in the midst of run-down towns, stadiums rather than simple fields. Bright lights. Press boxes. Stands rather than bleachers. Crisp lines of white chalk and grass that looked like emeralds. The infield dirt was smoothed so not even a pebble could be found. Crowds numbered in the low thousands, which was more than any of us could ever fathom.
Mom and Dad often made the drive. They’d sold the house and transplanted themselves in Charlottesville. Dad confessed their moving was the only way he knew to start over. He found work keeping things up at the hospital. Mom parlayed her library experience into a nice job at UVA. They would arrive in Sunday clothes for a Saturday-afternoon game and find seats close to home, sitting unmoved until the final out. Cheering me in their separate ways, Mom with her shouts of encouragement and Dad with his silences broken by a nod or wink. He never took up a spot near the dugout in Bluefield as he had in Camden. In those days, my father stopped being a coach and simply became a fan. I think in his mind he’d done all he could; there was nothing more to teach me. He was wrong.
I hit .267 those first months of the 1995 season—fair for the majors but not for rookie ball, and woeful for me. The skipper said it was nothing to fret over, a catcher hitting anything above .250 would be considered good enough for the big team. It was the pitchers I needed to worry over instead of my average at the plate. The hitting coach swore my swing was fine and counseled time as the best remedy. I believed time more poison than cure. A baseball player has but a small window of years to succeed. The average age of a major leaguer is twenty-six. He will enjoy approximately six years in the Show. Most will be out of the game by their midthirties, either retiring or receiving their outright release. I was a boy but felt old inside, like something was gaining on me. In a lot of ways those first months in the minors were the hardest of my career. Were it not for Dad they would have been the only months.
He drove down alo
ne one morning in late May. Mom couldn’t make the trip. Not feeling good, he said, though I wondered then if it was more that he wanted to speak to me alone. We met at the stadium long before game time and walked the outfield grass. Dad didn’t say much the whole time. He didn’t have to say why. That stroll was the closest he ever came to the majors.
We were standing near the batter’s box, me on the left side and Dad the right. I told him I was pressing. Worried. Scared. Things I’d never felt on a baseball field. What happens if I wash out? Make it all this way only to have everything taken? What if I’m not as good here as I was everywhere else?
Dad looked out over that wide space of green field and that fence in the distance. He nodded, then scuffed the toe of his shoe at the edge of the plate.
“Need a new one a these back home. Fella took over for me at the high school called to let me know. He didn’t know where to get one. I probably should of took care of it before I left. It was all bowed up and nasty looking. But I didn’t. Couldn’t, I guess.”
He shrugged and gave me a little look that scared me because it was embarrassment in his eyes. I looked away to save us both.
“You touched that plate, Owen. More’n anybody ever has at that school. Crouched behind it. Spent your years there. That plate was yours.”
Dad toed the plate again. He bent down with a terrible cracking in his knees and ran a hand down the center as if stroking a living thing.
“So this fella wants to know what kind a plate he needs and where to get it from. And I says it don’t matter. Only one size, so any’ll do. This plate here? Same’s the one in Camden. Same’s the one in Youngstown. Shoot, this plate here’s same as the one we used in our backyard. Seventeen inches across. You see? Don’t matter where you go, son. Game don’t change.” He ruffled the plate with his knuckles the way he used to do my hair. “Because this don’t change. It’s the fundamentals you got to keep straight. You take the ball to right with a man on second and less than two outs, you bunt the ball down the third baseline for a sacrifice. You hit that sacrifice fly to get a man in from third and take the extra base on a ball in the alley. You call your game. Trust what brung you here. Do your job. Let the game come to you.”
I went 3–4 that night with a homer the Bluefield paper measured at 430 as Dad sat alone in the bleachers. By the end of summer my average was up to .335 and I was on my way to winning the Appalachian League batting crown. Because of my father, the man I’d spent my life trying to impress.
-7-
The crowd groans as Mussina delivers a fastball that rides too far in, clipping Gibbons in the elbow. He jogs to first. Bases loaded, Fordyce up. With two outs and our catcher at the plate, I start putting on the spare set of shin guards. However much I wish my teammate all the best, I admit aloud a secret desire for a little groundout, a weak pop fly, if only to sway Mike’s gaze back to me. Country says don’t worry about it, Fordyce is a good guy and he’s a pro, and part of being a pro is always looking at the guys coming up behind you.
“Guarantee he’s thinkin’ more about you than you him.”
I wonder if that’s true as Mussina settles down enough to get our catcher to strike out on five pitches. Country nudges me. I wonder.
“Sounds like a good man, your daddy.”
“He was,” I said. “In his own way.”
“Turned it around your first year. That’s good. I known many didn’t.”
I leave it at that. I did turn it around, thanks to Dad. But there was more to my first year than a slump, and I won’t tell Country any of that. It was a fine summer, maybe my best, and while I hit and caught and threw like never before, I also forgot that logic can sometimes fail you because we live in such an illogical world. I’d considered the phone call from Carl Norman and my new life in Bluefield as a sign of forgiveness—permission to begin anew. I knew different on an August evening near the season’s end.
We had a kid—Garrett was his last name but I can’t remember his first, so many have come and gone—who the Orioles signed for near to a hundred grand. Lightning arm. Proof, though, that Dad was right when he spent all that time saying about the only reason a pitcher can do what he does is he has a catcher to babysit him. He wasn’t as bad as Travis about shaking me off, but he was close. Garrett’s problem was every time he’d walk a batter (which he did often; half the time when the ball left his hand I had no idea where it would go and neither did he), it was the end of the world. He’d get down on himself. Slump his shoulders. Act like he’d never throw a strike again. It was up to me to keep him confident, because that’s what a catcher does. He keeps the hitters off balance and the pitcher upbeat and the home plate umpire happy, and if he does it well he remains in the shadows, barely ever seen. He is equal parts therapist, strategist, and ghost.
Garrett had started off the fourth by walking the first two batters. I’d gone out to calm him down, you’re pitching good and that last ball was a strike the umpire missed. Trying to get his head where it should be. On the way back to the plate I took my mask off to wipe the sweat from my head and that’s when I saw her, walking up an aisle toward a concession stand. Same corn-silk hair, same bronzed skin. I stopped, so shocked I was, and heard the umpire say something about getting on with the game. She passed behind a family working their way to their seats and disappeared. But it was Micky. I could swear it.
She had followed me after all.
Bottom 5
-1-
Fordyce shakes his head and walks toward the dugout as the Orioles take the field, Johnson, our pitcher, among them. As it will take our catcher a bit to get his gear on and Johnson needs his warm-ups, it falls to me as the backup to fill in.
“Hey, rook,” Country says to me. “Don’t look like no idiot out there.”
I walk toward Mike at the head of the dugout and up the steps, fighting the urge to pause at the edge of the field as before. Around me the crowd moves in tiny waves back and forth, stretching their legs and hollering out for dogs and beers. They pay me no mind. No one does, not the umpire standing away from the plate or Johnson waiting for me to crouch, not the players, and that is as it should be.
It is an easy thirty seconds until I spot Fordyce coming out of the dugout with his helmet and mask tucked under his arm. Johnson throws three fastballs and a curve. I’m nothing but a backstop of flesh and bone, my purpose to catch the ball and throw the ball and nothing more.
Fordyce offers a “Thanks, buddy” to relieve me. I jog off toward the dugout steps. Mike pays me no mind. At the end of the dugout I find Country still grinning. He is an old man of forty-two who looks in better shape than any twenty-year-old I’ve ever seen. Blue eyes twinkle out from a scruff of graying whiskers.
He jokes and says, “Might be you’re cut out for more’n menial work after all.”
-2-
I had a job lined up my last summer in Camden working for Travis’s daddy down at the Auto World. Extra cash for college. Dad helped set it up. Bubba Clements was a deacon at the church and maybe the richest man in town, and he had a soft spot for me since Travis and I were friends.
Keeping the inventory on the lot shiny was about the best Bubba could offer. Travis told me it was easy work (charity was the word he used and I did not doubt it; I couldn’t think of any dealership paying somebody just to wash cars, and three bucks an hour was a whole thirty-five cents over minimum wage). My scholarship would go a long way so far as room and board, but having some money set aside would help get Micky settled when she left with me for Ohio.
With baseball season done and graduation only a few weeks off, I’d told Bubba I may as well start work after school right after prom weekend, which turned out to be the Monday after Micky took the sinner’s walk up the aisle at First Baptist. It was to be Travis’s first afternoon on the job as well, training for his soon-to-be position as salesman—the first step of what promised to be an uninterrupted ascension to successor of the Bubba’s Auto World empire.
That morning Mom packed
me an early supper in case I needed it. I kissed her on the cheek and ruffled Dad’s thinning hair (“Don’t let Bubba push you ’round,” he’d said, followed by something about having to pick up a part for the mower after school, so maybe he’d check on me) and walked out thinking the day would come out as any other. But then I got to school and found Micky wasn’t there, and all the talk I heard was of what had happened out in Simpson’s field after prom and the Shantie girl who’d embarrassed herself at church the next day. I waited all day for her to show. Cut my eyes out of classroom doors every time someone walked by. Even grabbed a bathroom pass and snuck down to the cafeteria when I knew Dad wouldn’t be around, to drop a quarter into the pay phone and call Micky’s house. The number was still disconnected.
Worse was I couldn’t go to our hill right after school. My new job waited, and Travis was insistent I not miss the first day. I drove through downtown, past the grocery where Jeffrey was already working and the church that had already claimed Stephanie as worship director, until I reached the seven paved acres that made up Bubba Clements’s kingdom.
A Shantie working the garage pointed me toward a bay in back where the tools of my summer trade waited—a bucket, a hose, and a sponge. First up was Bubba’s Corvette, which retailed for about what Mom and Dad had paid for our house.
I kept to myself for the first hour or so, my only friend an old radio hung from a rusty nail on the wall. Around four thirty I went to grab a drink from the machine in the showroom and check on Travis. I pulled a Coke from the machine and watched Bubba himself stroll across the showroom floor. He was a tall man, thick-gutted and suited, sporting slicked-back hair and a ready smile. Bubba always looked like he was about to ask if you were interested in a warranty.
He steered himself toward a glass-walled cubicle where Travis leaned in a leather chair behind a desk that appeared to be carved from a single block of cherry. A phone sat there, stacks of manuals. Already Bubba had made up a placard bearing his son’s name in gold letters. Beside it rested a baseball on a pewter stand—Travis’s own souvenir from the state championship game, I reckoned. He had brought a change of clothes from school, a suit that made him look older than he was. Travis seemed more a banker now, or an adult, talking in an easy way to a man in frayed jeans and a denim shirt who was probably his first customer, even if Bubba would be signing all the forms and taking the commission. Bubba looked on like a proud papa. Standing there, it looked as though Travis had leaped back in time from the future to glimpse his former self.
