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Randall Brown Bats and Balls |
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We won anyway, but Dad wouldn’t let me go to Dairy Queen. Instead he went to the Falcon and returned with the bat and basket of balls kept in his trunk. When I thought I loved him, I ran over the entire earth to catch his monster launches, hurdled over the shrubs at the property line, ducked under the tetherball, ran straight through crabapples that smacked against me. Maybe his passion for physics explained his love of the fly ball and my intuitive gift to be under the ball no matter its trajectory. He took his AP students to baseball diamonds and pool halls. He’d smash drive after drive until he could whack them level, so that a dropped ball would reach the ground simultaneously with the hit one. Baseball. My father’s love. They were entangled, like the webbing of a mitt. My father stood at home plate and said I couldn't leave until I shagged a hundred fly balls. But I was done with baseball. The first fly ball sailed over my head. I sat down, cross-legged. After a dozen, my father started to aim for me, long looping fly balls that thudded yards, sometimes feet away. Dusk. Pink clouds. The type of light balls got lost in. Soon line drives whizzed left and right and over me. It was as if a shadow swatted the balls over third base, curved them toward me in left field. I had found my father’s collection of Playgirl magazines in his closet. They weren’t there when mom lived with us. Bats looked like giant boners—and I pictured my father holding the bats of the men in magazines and heard the playground names for him, felt a deep fear, as if he had a sickness we had to keep secret. I wish he had found me that night with his wild line drives, picked me up and carried me home, away from a world that taught me such hate. Throughout my childhood, I had loved chasing those colossal shots of my father. And then I didn’t.
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