Ham On Rye - Charles Bukowski [68]
The next guy connected hard with one but it was high, very high and I ran back to make an over-the-shoulder catch. I sprinted back, feeling great, knowing that I would create the miracle once again.
Shit. The ball sailed into a tall tree at the back of the lot. Then I saw the ball bouncing down through the branches. I stationed myself and waited. No good, it was going left. I ran left. Then it bounced back to the right. I ran right. It hit a branch, lingered there, then slithered through some leaves and dropped into my glove.
The girls screamed.
I fired the ball into our pitcher on one bounce then trotted back into shallow center. The next guy struck out. Our pitcher, Harvey Nixon, had a good fireball.
We changed sides and I was first up. I had never seen the guy on the mound. He wasn’t from Chelsey. I wondered where he was from. He was big all over, big head, big mouth, big ears, big body. His hair fell down over his eyes and he looked like a fool. His hair was brown and his eyes were green and those green eyes stared at me through that hair as if he hated me. It looked like his left arm was longer than his right. His left arm was his pitching arm. I’d never faced a lefty, not in hardball. But they could all be had. Turn them upside down and they were all alike.
“Kitten” Floss, they called him. Some kitten. 190 pounds.
“Come on, Butch, hit one out!” one of the girls pleaded.
They called me “Butch” because I played a good game and ignored them.
The Kitten looked at me from between his big ears. I spit on the plate, dug in and waved my bat.
The Kitten nodded like he was getting a signal from the catcher. He was just showboating. Then he looked around the infield. More showboating. It was for the benefit of the girls. He couldn’t keep his pecker-mind off of snatch-thoughts.
He took his wind-up. I watched that ball in his left hand. My eyes never left that ball. I had learned the secret. You concentrated on the ball and followed it all the way in until it reached the plate and then you murdered it with the wood.
I watched the ball leave his fingers through a blaze of sun. It was a murderous humming blur, but it could be had. It was below my knees and far out of the strike zone. His catcher had to dive to get it.
“Ball one,” mumbled the old neighborhood fart who umpired our games. He was a night watchman in a department store and he liked to talk to the girls. “I got two daughters at home just like you girls. Real cute. They wear tight dresses too.” He liked to crouch over the plate and show them his big buttocks. That’s all he had, that and one gold tooth.
The catcher threw the ball back to Kitten Floss.
“Hey, Pussy!” I yelled out to him.
“You talkin’ to me?”
“I’m talking to you, short-arm. You gotta come closer than that or I’ll have to call a cab.”
“The next one is all yours,” he told me.
“Good,” I said. I dug in.
He went through his routine again, nodding like he was getting a sign, checking the infield. Those green eyes stared at me through that dirty brown hair. I watched him wind-up. I saw the ball leave his fingers, a dark fleck against the sky in the sun and then suddenly it was zooming toward my skull. I dropped in my tracks, feeling it brush the hair of my head.
“Strike one,” mumbled the old fart.
“What?” I yelled. The catcher was still holding the ball. He was as surprised at the call as I was. I took the ball from him and showed it to the umpire.
“What’s this?” I asked him.
“It’s a baseball.”
“Fine. Remember what it looks like.”
I took the ball and walked out to the mound. The green eyes didn’t flinch under the dirty hair. But the mouth opened up just a bit, like a frog sucking air.
I walked up to Kitten.
“I don’t swing with my head. The next time you do that I am going to jam this thing right up through your shorts and past where you forget to wipe.”
I handed him the ball and walked back to the plate. I dug in and waved my bat.
“One and one,” said the old fart.
Floss kicked dirt around on the mound. He stared off into left