Читать книгу Winged Shoes and a Shield - Don Bajema - Страница 9

The stakes are always so high. From the very beginning I thought it must be a complex combination of guts, glory, luck, and resolve. But I was looking too hard. If it had been a snake, it would have bit me. All the stakes are high, it shouldn’t have thrown me off. As usual, I guess, I wanted it simplified.

It turned out to be more difficult than simply “Keep your eye on the ball.” An old Indian used to drink behind our Little League Park. A home run was a lost ball. I was still ignoring the warning track in those days. After bouncing my head off the chain-link fence with a miracle disguised as the third out stuck in my glove, I lay still on the grass for an eternity. I knew a dramatic moment when I felt one. Slowly I raised my glove above my prostrate body. My dugout, of course, became a Vienna choir of cheers. Ecstatic, and bounding toward my team, I heard the Indian’s voice pulling me down to earth, growling, “Relax.” I told him to speak to me in English. His laughing fit lasted the next two extra innings. We lost.

For the next few days, the Indian was determined to teach me to hit. He made his own assumptions, I guess. He thought I’d be motivated by his words, had a direction to begin with, and really wanted to hit the ball in the first place. I didn’t.

My field of glory was out there. Not in some box with a fat man in black breathing down my neck, pointing out which ball I could have hit. I lived in the field, in the un­predictable moments of defense. I didn’t want anything served up, I didn’t want to think about a trick pitch. My life was never gonna be a count of three or four.

But the huge face with the purple alcoholic lips kept insisting, “Keep your eye on the ball.” I knew it was the wrong advice for me. With a nervous system resounding like a perpetually rung tuning fork, I became a strike-out king. I started swinging the Louisville 31 about the time the dust popped out of the catcher’s mitt. I wasn’t gonna look harder, I wasn’t gonna look at all.

The Indian must have known that. He had to. I was born to live above the letters and below the knee. Out of the strike zone. His advice just turned me on my heels and sent me walking, emptying the Red Hots down my throat, thinking in a whisper . . . speak to me in English.

I liked that Indian, I think he was telling me about something he had once but didn’t own anymore. It took me a long time to understand it. But now, to this very day, every time a fastball hisses at my heart, I can hear his voice echoing. “Take your base.”

Clarity

It rains accidentally, or it rains on purpose. It rains, we know that for sure. At weird intervals, for a moment, or for a couple of celestial days, I’d get it all. I could see it all plain, I’d be absolved of all these sins, I’d have the blessing of cognizance and capacity. I’d be living right then and there. But it evaporates. It leaves no trail. When it’s gone, you feel left behind, on fire, in the glare, wishing that clarity would drop out of the sky and soak your long hair, and wash your burning face.

Next Fall

Sex does the same thing. Hours where whatever ground your feet are planted on, the rest of your body is wrapped in the confusing immersion of hers and yours. Warm rapids rolling and bouncing into a flat placid space, revolving slowly in a fainting spin toward the lip of the next fall. Old women whisper about it, saying to anyone who’ll listen, that it’s just like youth, one day it just doesn’t come back. It’s gone, except in annoying dreams that make the fabric of their clothes irritate them here, here and here. They look away, and their fingers draw light circles on their soft cheeks, they get up and walk into another room.

The magic of a principled universe has us on our knees anyway, there’s no need to bend down. We stand in our gain, and walk to our loss. There’s nothing to remember and only ourselves to forget.