Slide - Kyle Beachy [110]
I dried my face on the Irenia shirt, then took it off and put on the green polo.
It was a cereal-box morning: cloudless, sun big and sharp and impossibly round.
By the time I reached my car, I was sweating considerably. But this was not sweat. Nothing like it.
Submersion. I wanted submersion.
I found him shirt- and shoeless in his driveway, wearing a knee-length, loose-fitting skirt. He was bent over the ad, painting a splotch of what looked like bird shit onto its curve. The car was covered in dozens of these splotches, some with tails dripping downward, others with purple in their middles. The skirt he wore was gray with thin black vertical stripes.
Stuart looked at me and squinted. “Potter?”
“I need a quick jump in the pool. Take five minutes.”
“Now's not good, actually.”
Something was missing from the driveway. I did a quick count of cars and came up short.
“Where's your car?”
“I gave it to Edsel.”
And yet again: didn't know what to say. I watched him paint bird shit and tried to understand what he stood to gain by giving Edsel his car. Why my dear friend would abet my blackmailer, driving assholishly across the city weaving and cutting off and running his errands and did he even have a license?
“You shouldn't have done that, Stubes.”
“As long as this American fairy tale lasts, I can give away a Ford Explorer whenever I damn well please.” He wet the tip of one finger to touch the center of a splotch, then looked at me. “You should go.”
He was looking past me. I looked at the skirt. Blackmail aside, the skirt had to be mentioned. I turned and saw Marianne at the end of the driveway, walking toward us. Thirty seconds, no more.
“We have to go over what you're wearing. Unless I'm insane, that's a skirt. This girl has you wearing a skirt, Stubes. She's got pants on. There is no way you miss the meaning here.”
“We're all wearing costumes, Potsky Welcome to reality Sometimes it's hard.”
He set the paint down on the hood and went to meet her. The paintbrush jutting upward from the can looked like a. The brush he left submerged in the paint could have been. I saw the brush and thought of.
Stuart and Marianne kissed in the driveway.
Southward, winding roads and midday traffic. Posted speed limits. Lights. Yellow sign peering over trees, Tower Tee.
The man in the hut smiled smoker's teeth and asked how many tokens he could change up for me.
“A whole lot,” I said.
Handed him a fifty and he laughed and filled me a plastic cup's worth.
“Careful,” he said.
The bats available were old and dented, with browned, old athletic tape for grip. The helmet I picked up smelled almost sweet. Nine cages altogether, counting two at the far end for softball. It would have been busy even without the pizza party, for which I had no patience whatsoever. Groups of men and children stood crowded outside the middle cages, leaving free only the slowest cage, to my right, and the fastest cage, a ways to my left.
I stepped into the slowest cage and dropped a token into the slot. The red light above the machine lit, and soon the first ball came slowly toward me. I watched several pitches, settling in. These were not baseballs but yellow, dimpled, more like field hockey balls that were lighter, with a bit more elasticity Behind me was a thick rectangle of black rubber hanging from two corners by rope. I hit a few ground balls and watched them strike the fence before draining down the sloped concrete into the retrieval system. My trigger was lifting my left foot and setting it back down. The red light went off and I inserted another token.
After a while, the balls hardly appeared to move at all. They waited for me and I obliged, crushing them back to the machine. I formalized the technique of my swing. The hips, the