Recess bell rang out and wild horses couldn’t have stopped us from getting out to that ball diamond…
My bulldozing buddy had pushed me right through the door to get me out first on account I’d given him four peanuts packages that I traded to other kids. I gave away my milk under the table for one pack, my butter patties to a tubby kid name of Caddy for another, and I split my hamburger in half so as to get one peanut pack apiece even though the buns were soaked clean through from the creamed corn they served us every single day until it ran out, which we was all glad for. It was a fair trade, all of it, and Upland, eating peanuts all the way, led me out the gym door, down past home and straight out to left field to get a good spot for a pop-up, gawking up at the sky like idjits looking for Martians.
Shortly after, Dadburny strutted out the long way so Miss English Teacher had time to adjust her view of him, and then, dropping his first pitch, WHOMP! Out that first ball went, curved along the third base line, clean as a train whistle only six feet off the ground the whole way, and like to take the hair off Upland’s head. Hit the corner pole dead on, took a bounce like it was in a pin ball machine, careened off’n two teacher cars and knocked out most of the letters on the school sign announcing OPEN HOUSE for next Tuesday. We tried not to laugh, but dang it, all that was left on the school sign was a P, and two E’s and it was a teacher who done it.
Dadburny, man, he looked irritated at all of us laughing out there in left field. But we were glad he hadn’t hit a pop fly, be’n that it took the pressure off of us for a while. But he weren’t glad at all, he was nervous jittery, and not smiling, because he was going to have to explain why he put a dent in two cars and left P-E-E on the school billboard. Miss Flimsy-English just smiled at him from over by first base where she was standing pretending to grade papers, but she had her eye on him like a mother hen.
I thought of my grandmother just then, how she told me to go meet the ball if I got a chance. I thought of being there with my notebook spread out on her kitchen Formica counter working on the science, and I felt for the first time like I wasn’t going to get a chance to meet that baseball, being so crowded around all these cotton-pickin’ kids in left field. I needed some space to meet a pop-up the science way if’n I got the chance, so I took off, yes I did, and ran like lightning over to right field where all the first graders were playing in the sand boxes, and four square, and poke-me-then-I’ll-poke-you type a games.
I ran out there where no one was and stood there by myself looking up to the heavens where I could hear my grandmother’s voice back home and could talk to her for a minute before Dadburnit knocked the snot out of another ball. I looked way up to the eternal, and it was quiet up there, and I swear I saw the finger of God pointing to huge cloud shape of a white popsicle, least that’s how I looked at it, and I closed one eye to line His finger up with my own. It was like God and me having a conversation and him having the last words, “Go out there and meet the ball!”
Then, it came…I heard the pop of a bat sound off like a firecracker. CRACK!
Danged if Danburnit hadn’t hit one to right field, and everyone in left looked a disappointment because no one was out there waiting for it.
But I was.
I didn’t move my feet one inch because I was nailed to the ground frozen tight like a tin soldier, I was. The ball went up to that finger in the sky pointing to a popsicle, went right through and broke the clouds like a jet on the Fourth of July. In the back I heard Miss Flimsy say “oh dear” as if she might have to catch it herself. But I wasn’t giving gravity any time to make a mark. I took off towards the sidewalk, then back a little, lined myself up and let both my hands go up to meet that ball, which came down like a brick square in the middle of them both, clamped shut and done stopped solid.
Later someone told me there was a solar eclipse that day, which I had to look up in chapter five on weather in the science book. But it didn’t make any difference. You could have heard a pin drop from here to Itchy Goomy. I was stunned myself, and believe, now looking back that I may have gone to the bathroom on myself. Probably not, but I could have.
That baseball looked a lot different in my hands that it ever had, kind of like it was glowing in my hands, bright as an evening star and I felt like it was a ball that I was meant to keep, standing there. But Mr. Dadburny had a different plan. He was so mad that someone had caught his pop up, so enfumigated in front of his lady friend, that he didn’t know exactly what to do. I think Miss Flimsy lost a little bit for him when I caught that ball, a little of her affliction for him left because I looked over and saw her look away from him, like she was embarrassed, and then she went to adjusting her spring dress.
Out of sheer meanness, Dadburny was so confused what to do he took off running me down! Came straight at me full speed like a locomotion! And here I thought he was going to come out and shake my hand or pick me up and hug me or give me a science ribbon he had in his pocket or something. Nope, he was gritting his teeth, mad as a hornet. He came straight at me like a bull, and I just knew he was about to run me down and knock the ball out of my hand and then say I dropped his pop fly. Then he’d have his perfect record of never having one caught, and he’d keep his girlfriend too. But you know what save me? You’ll never guess.
Off to the side, Miss Flimsy screamed “FRAAAAAANCIS!” At the top of her voice she did, like she’d seen a ghost!
And if the baseball field hadn’t been dead quiet before my catch, it was now.
“FRANCIS!” She yelled again, “Don’t do it!” She called him by his first name, like do-you-take-this-man-to-be-your-lawful-wedded-husband-Francis! And I heard it, and my friends heard it in left field, and the entire school heard it like a loudspeaker drill off a tornader. Oh man, you’d never think an English teacher like her dressing like a flower could yell like a dock hand, but there it was!
“FRANCIS! DON’T YOU LAY A FINGER ON HIM!!”
And his full speed run stopped like a ring in a bell, just short of running me over, and I saw a madness there, like pride gone crazy, his bad side ready to hurt me got caught right out there in right field by the gal he’d been winking at and rubbing elbows with. Now she saw the other side of him, that ugly side he’d been hiding from her all this time, and she didn’t like what she saw, no, not one bit. And I saw a row of his ugly crooked teeth up close like could bite me in half.
So, there you have it, and I told you I’d get to it and tell you the whole story. I loved the game of baseball, and one way or another, through all the lies and anger the finger of God came down like gravity unleashed, and my hand went up to meet that baseball, and forced Dadburnit to show the side he never hoped would come out. I can stand here and say it happened yes it did.
Shortly after that I got that C in science out of pure revenge from Mr. Francis Dadburny. He weren’t no perfect baseball hitter, he weren’t no science expert neither. He was a teacher I came to know by catching his pop fly, and having to pay for it with a lot of booking I didn’t care for one bit.
And it all made sense now from my view behind the backstop. That was the day after I ran all the way back to school and saw Francis come to his knees in the parking lot begging Miss Flimsy to take him back, but she weren’t having it, no she wasn’t. She had seen the light and there wasn’t any future in a man who’d knock a kid down on account of a pop fly, and she knew it. And then, I understood why I had got that C in science, and that revenge was spelt with a capital R.
Funny thing about that too. I never got another C in science again, and that is the truth as I stand here. I got a few B’s, but mostly what I got on my six-week report cards was A’s after that, bigger’n all get out. Capitol A’s, with remarks from Francis Dadburny like “works well with others,” or “good handle on vocabumalary, and so on and so forth and what have you. I couldn’t believe it. My punishment was cut, and I played ball after school every day, except for the days when I ran home because guess who was waiting for me at the gate?
You’ll never guess in a million years. And it wasn’t grandma neither.
It was of all people, my dad! Sure as Lincoln standing there with a mitt on, ready to catch some with me, and not make a mention of that C I got and all the while, don’t you know, he’d talk up a storm about, yep, it was the science. Mostly about cell my-toesies, but he talked about Einstein’s Theory of Relatives, and Copernicus, and Otis and Wilson Wright and all the rest of the gravity geniuses, like a meeting, a great meeting of minds. And I was right there in the center of them all, like we were having the World’s Fair of Science and playing catch together with my dad jabbering a mile a minute.
But it didn’t bother me one bit. By then I knew all of those science people in the book, and some that weren’t and could talk up a mean streak about every one of them myself, all the while throwing a dadburn baseball back and forth with my own dad ‘til Grandma yelled out back told us class was over and come in to wash up and smiling as we ran in, saying if we didn’t come now, she was going to call us out at the plate, even though, in a million years, I knew she weren’t never would.