Brian Reynolds
Listening to the Game
Thick, damp wind rattles the Venetian blinds. Ira sits in the rocker listening to the baseball game being played in the vacant lot across the street. He smells the rain approaching. He tastes it. He feels it, even though he hasn't seen a dark cloud or swaying maple branch, a blue sky or field of green for fifty years, not since the accident.
He ought to feel down along the leg of the rocker and find his cane, tap-tap-tap out to her kitchen, and tell his daughter that the windows will need closing. He should, but listening to the game has hypnotized him.
"Humm batta batta batta."
"Talk it up."
"Heeeey, batta. Swing!"
In all that time, the songs are just the same. The chants designed to make a young lad lose his nerve or break his concentration haven't varied since Ira was a kid. He listens. He imagines what every voice looks like, the position that it plays, the way it holds its hands and rocks up on its toes. He seeks the central players—pitcher, batter—neither of them speaking, but both revealed by banter, every other player focused on them, bouncing sound waves off them, giving them a form.
"Missed it a mile."
"You got his number."
"Smoke it past him."
Ira was a catcher. Here. In the house his daughter now owns. He'd played out there, razzing like the others. His voice was softer though, talking to the batter. "Looking for a fast ball? Down the pipe? He's getting wild. Maybe miss inside? Not afraid, are you?" George Cardinal. Big and strong like Ruth. A homerun hitter, one who rattled easily. Prone to stepping in the hole, cocking the bat, and trying for the fence on a lazy change-up that'd make him look like a fool. "Swing!"
"Come on guys. Some chatter."
"He's shaking in his shoes."
All part of the game, Ira thinks. Always was. Was back then. Have to learn to shut it out, learn to concentrate. Stay inside yourself, they told him. Tunnel vision, daddy said. Don't beat yourself. Shut out all the noise. It's just you and the pitcher out there. Just you and the ball. Ira loved to tease George Cardinal. "Shoe's untied, George."
"Dad?" He's heard her coming, sensed her from the moment that she set the spoon against the stove and walked from tile across linoleum to carpet. She's standing there beside him, his only daughter, smelling of spaghetti sauce with garlic and some onion. "Dad? How's the game? Are you okay? Can I get you anything?"
"I'm just fine. I was listening."
"It's getting dark in the west. We're going to have quite a storm."
"I felt it."
"I should close the window. I hate to, though, if you're listening."
"No. You go ahead." Easy to say, don't mind their chatter. Hard to do, he thought. When he'd stood at the plate to hit and the crowd was on his case he almost always let it get to him. He never would have made it as a pro. "The rain's almost here. They'll have to stop the game anyway." He was good at rattling others, though. Very good at that.
"Are you okay, Dad?"
"I'm fine. I think I'll just lie down for awhile before supper. I always like the sound of rain." Yes, he'll rest his eyes, his perfectly functional blind eyes attached to a brain with a smashed occipital lobe. He'll close them and see it, in perfect focus, the last image that he ever saw.
He sees a cobalt sky with one white cloud shaped oddly like a mermaid. For decades he'd played the game that children play, turning clouds to other things. Finally he decided that his cloud, the only cloud he had to play with, was half-fish, half-woman, with an arm held out above her head. He sees the cloud behind Eddy Wilkerson, the short stop, moving fast to cover second. Tyler Jones is stealing. George Cardinal is at the plate, one strike, two balls, when Ira whispers, "Fast ball! Swing!" The mermaid waves. Ira rises to take the outside pitch and throw to second. George steps back and swings for the fence. The last colour, shadows, shapes he'll ever see.
Fade to black.
"Fifteen minutes, Daddy. Can you hear the thunder?"
He stands. "You have no idea how beautiful it sounds, love. It's as pleasant as listening to a baseball game."
©2005 by Brian Reynolds
Brian Reynolds is a retired middle school teacher,
landscape
artist, library clerk, and volunteer basketball referee. He lives in
southern Ontario. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in
SmokeLong Quarterly, edifice WRECKED, Gator Springs Gazette, Melange Magazine,
and FRiGG, among others.
