Lincoln Hirn
Short Fiction
It is July or maybe early August but either way it is that time during every summer when the heat, so long unchallenged, rules with the complacent power of an aging empire, when even in the morning the shadows are long and the sunlight thick and rich and evening colored, when even though the season has crossed its mathematical meridian everyone knows it will be more than a month before there is any perceptible change in the weather and at least two before Indian summer sets in to make it hot for a while yet, and so it is as though the season has entered into a second youth, as though it has looped around on itself to begin anew. And in the park boys play basketball with their shirts off, in deference to the heat and because they hope that somehow, someway some girls will see them and will stop to watch and even though they have never done this and never will the boys keep their shirts off all the same, and somewhere somebody is grilling hamburgers and the beef smell floats above the playground and the soccer fields and the running track, as indigenous to its environment as incense to a church or manure to a farm in springtime. All this while on the little league field at the park’s far end a team in red tops and white pants pitches to a team in blue tops and grey pants and there are two outs and it is the top of the fourth and there is a boy on third who will not come home or maybe he will, because maybe there are no outs and maybe it is actually the top of the fifth, instead. Not that it really matters, because either way the game is tied and either way it is still all to play for.
And if this is true then in the third base coach’s box there is a man and he is nearing forty and the boy on third is his son or perhaps he is not, but again it does not matter, one way or the other, because the man is clapping his hands and he is shouting “come on come on” at the youth who may as well be his own child because the boy on third is everyone’s child, just as the rest of the ballplayers are, because when a child takes upon themselves the risk of public performance they become the object of all pity and all hope in the hearts of those adults who watch them. And when the air above the field, thick with this emotion, meets with the hamburger smell it takes on certain transmutational properties, so that when finally the scent wafts over the bleachers and the backstop and all the way to the third base coach’s box the man is no longer nearing forty and his knees no longer hurt and his ballcap no longer conceals the rudiments of a bald spot, because he is instead playing second base and there is a man on third and the pitcher is halfway through his windup and the smell is everywhere, just as it always is when you play the Saturday evening game at the park, and the boy at second thinks to himself “it is coming to me it is coming to me it is coming to me.” And he tells himself that he will not miss it, that he will not let it get away from him, and so he bends his knees and gets up on the balls of his feet just as he has been taught to do and as he watches the pitcher’s front leg come down he sees, just beyond the hurler’s falling frame, his manager smoking a cigarette on the front step of the dugout, because the parents on the little league board have not yet passed the rule that will ban smoking on the field and in the stands and within fifty feet of the diamond, and so he is smoking his cigarettes one after the other and the boy knows that this is because he is nervous, this man who was once a great ballplayer himself, way back when, this man who made it as high as Double-A before the tendons in his shoulder gave out, this man who now burns heater after heater in a little public-park dugout because there is a man on third and there are two outs and it is a tie game and who wouldn’t be nervous, in a spot like that?
And back in the third base coach’s box he scratches the nicotine patch on his underarm and with his tongue he moves the gum from one side of his mouth to the other and wishes that he had a cigarette or maybe two but he does not wish that he had a pouch in his lip, he never wishes that, because still he remembers that afternoon in the dugout that even now sits just a few paces to his rear, when one of the boys pulled a circular tin from his bag and offered it around to the rest of the team and then finally to him, who took it (too much of it) and stuck it in his lip even though he never had before, because he was only thirteen and all the others were fifteen and because he (who had shown so much promise, once) had been called up to play with the older team because the usual second baseman had just broken his leg jumping off a pier at the lake into water that he should have known was too shallow. And he couldn’t very well tell the older boys “no I can’t, no I won’t.” And he hadn’t. And so, of course, as if predestined to occur exactly as it had, the too-big plug got stuck somewhere between his teeth and his lip and in the process of dislodging it he swallowed a piece and so while all the other boys were playing longtoss and stretching he was back behind the small little cinderblock concessions stand puking tobaccojuice and red Gatorade onto the dusty rustcolored clay that had not been watered it seemed since early June.
But against all odds he made it back before the first pitch and the coach, laughing when he heard what happened, said to him “get out there, son, get out to second. We ain’t got no one else, sick or otherwise.” And in the first inning he caught a popout and in the bottom of the second he drew a walk and now in the top of the third he is bouncing on his toes with his glove a few inches off the ground with his eyes on the ball halfway between the pitcher’s mound and home plate and from the bleachers he hears his mother’s voice shouting for him and from the bleachers he hears the boy’s mother shouting and he wonders to himself whatever went wrong, whatever pulled us away from one another? And still he nurses an empty little hollow in his heart and he wonders for the hundredth or maybe the thousandth time if he will ever be able to fill it again, fill it with that plug that once made him so happy and complete and full that it has come to feel like a fantasy, like something that never could have happened and so never did, yet even still the memory of that time lingers stubbornly in that hole in his heart like the last vestige of a dream he woke up from long ago.
Then for a fraction of a fraction of a second the sound of the ball meeting aluminum is all anyone in the entire park can sense, and for the briefest of moments it supersedes the golden, latesummer sunlight and it supersedes the hamburger smell and it supersedes even the memories – the ones that hurt because they are painful and the ones that hurt even worse because they are not – so that for an instant it is like the physicists’ theorized singularity has come to pass on a little league field at the far end of a public park in late July or maybe early August.
And then the ball is in play and all is in motion. The third base coach is shouting “go go go!” at the boy and he is breaking for home, because the ball is on the ground and it is skittering madly past the pitcher’s mound and it is kicking up little bits of grass as it goes along and the second baseman has taken three hard steps to his right and suddenly he is fielding it, he is feeling the weight of the ball against the leather of his glove and he is thinking to himself “I didn’t let it get past I didn’t let it get past.” But even as he thinks this he knows that it does not matter anymore, because now all he has done is not let it get past, and now that moment of possibility when it could have passed is gone, and now he has to get the thing to first, because there are boys tearing down both foul lines and because the game is tied. And when the ball is in the air one of them is halfway between third and home and his mother is shouting for him and in her voice there is so much love and pride that the man in the coach’s box almost cannot believe that half of himself is wrapped up somewhere in the boy, who is sprinting down the line with the voice of all his fathers in one ear and all his mothers in the other and the ball somewhere in between, headed for home or maybe for first, and the man watches it cut through the air and he watches the boy start to slide and he wonders to himself “will it be enough? will it be enough?” And the boy sees his throw fly through the air just as the runner flies down the line and he wonders “will it be enough? will it be enough?”
And he finds himself hoping that the ball will remain suspended above the infield forever, hoping that it will never reach the catcher’s mitt or the first baseman’s glove, because while it is in the air it will not only be enough but will be everything, will be the only thing on Earth worth caring about, and all the while during this eternity the summer heat will shimmer through the long shadows cast by the scoreboard and by the backstop and by the trees all around the park and the smell of the grilling meat will linger over all and it will carry with it the scent of Abel’s lamb and the smoke from the burning bush and the drippings from the cook fires that eons ago nurtured the very first humans at their ancient camps.
Lincoln Hirn is a graduate student at the University of Connecticut, where he studies United States history. Though originally from Kentucky, he has lived in Virginia and North Carolina, and now resides in Connecticut with his wife. His work has appeared in the Rivanna Review, Across the Margin, and the Abergavenny Small Press.
Photo Credit: Fabio Sassi makes photos and acrylics putting a quirky twist to his subjects. Sometimes he employs an unusual perspective that gives a new angle of view using what is hidden, discarded or considered to have no worth by the mainstream. Fabio lives in Bologna, Italy. His work can be viewed at www.fabiosassi.foliohd.com.
L'Esprit Literary Review 