“Where am I today?”
“You’ve got third base, Phil,” the umpiring crew chief tells him.
The name ‘Phil’ is written under the brim of his umpire’s hat. That was a trick his dad taught him because Phil always lost everything. This was well before his dad forgot his own name, forgot everyone’s name.
***
Cuba isn’t as scary to Phil as it was when he was growing up. It was the stage of the Missile Crisis. Nuclear annihilation was his strongest source of fear. Crawling under desks a childhood memory. Glancing at cuss words, nauseated by the gum wads. There are so many Cuban players on the field nowadays, smiling everywhere, playing ball. It’s only a memory of fear now.
Phil dives under a sharp line drive. The ball sails overhead. Just like hiding in school from the bomb. The grass tickles his nostrils. He stands up. Smiles at the laughing he hears in the stands. Scans the crowd, sees faces. He motions foul ball with his arms. Stiff repeated motions like a little action figure with a lever in his back.
***
A new hitter steps to the plate. It’s Jimi Hendrix, eschewing his batter’s helmet for a few thickly wrapped head scarves. Takes practice swings clutching his Louisville Electric Guitar. Plays left, bats right. The crowd hollers song requests. Hendrix goes down swinging on a pitch soft and away. Chasing fog.
Phil succumbs to his daydreams at the wrong time. If that’s what they are.
***
Searching for something in the infield grass, Phil pulls up blades like they were hairs from a shedding kitten in the carpet.
***
The towns float past as if he were unconvinced on a carousel. He sends postcards of monuments to his wife of forty years.
He stretches each morning after waking up. His temples are grey and he’s afraid to take his cap off to see the rest. His uniform is disheveled. Sometimes he falls asleep in it. As though the cloth were permanent, inerasable.
He looks out the windows of the hotels he stays in. Some days the horizon is on fire, some days the water has crept up past the ground floors of the other buildings outside. Is there a paddle boat to row to the stadium today? Perhaps an umbrella to hold out into the wind so it will carry him like a mite of dust into the center of the baseball diamond right in time for the first pitch?
***
“Hot dogs!” a vendor screams from the bleachers. Phil’s working first base today. He turns from his position down the foul line, and waves at the vendor. Ambling over, thumbs hooked in his pockets. He searches for money, patting himself, but realizes that he left his wallet in the umpire’s locker room. He snatches the hot dog from the vendor’s grasp and shoves it into his mouth.
“I’m good for it, come back during the seventh inning stretch.”
***
“Where am I today?”
“First base. Did you get a good night’s sleep, Phil? You look lost.”
“I’m well rested,” he says, “My heart’s just not in it.”
***
Phil catches a snippet of back and forth conversation from the second baseman and the lead base runner. They’re discussing the extinct western black rhinoceros. Phil asks the players if they’ve seen the picture of the last known northern white rhinoceros, with its security detail.
“African military ground troops usher the lone beast and protect it. Guard it, watching its every move, following it like a loyal fan follows a team.”
They have not seen the picture. Phil shrugs, returns to the game, mind whirring like a clay pigeon through the air, dodging shot.
Can an umpire paint his face like a rhinoceros? Large streaks hooking from over his eyes down the sides of his face? Can he stuff cotton balls in his lower lip to make it widen and protrude? Configure a prosthetic nose? The umpire rhinoceros feels alone.
***
Written on a postcard from Philadelphia, after working a game:
‘Dear Marla and Winkles the Cat, Much like the Liberty Bell, which our founding fathers rang every day to signal the lunch buffet during the workshop sessions of our nation, I think I am cracking up’.
***
John Travolta, wearing his white pants and high heeled shoes from ‘Saturday Night Fever’, hits a limp flare hooking foul. Phil strafes, reaches out, and bare-hands the soft liner before it can plash into the first baseman’s glove. Phil tosses the ball back to the pitcher on the mound who swats at it with his mitt, flapping his lips on a piece of gum. The pitcher spits at the ground and doesn’t miss.
“Blue, that was a surefire out,” the pitcher screams, “What the hay?”
“I caught one!”
“Are you some kind of dumbass?”
Out runs the manager. His spittle flips and putters off his lips.
“What luck,” the manager cries, “To have you working our game!”
The crew chief behind home plate rushes up the line and intervenes. He has a flair for explosive situations.
“You’re! Outta! Here!” the crew chief shouts to the manager, ejecting him from the game. The crowd boos. The manager starts kicking at the dirt, little rooster kicks that dirty up the crew chief’s cleats. Home team fans are pouring screams down the levels of seats like tepid beer rolling down a belly. All these booze boos dribbling toward the umpiring crew. Dribbling onto Phil. The manager rips his own hat to pieces, his bench players drag him away to the clubhouse.
Phil glances into the crowd and can see the home fans yelling at him. Jaws extended wide and their tonsils shaking. Many middle fingers extended at Phil. Screaming complexions deepening red.
The pitcher snatches at the rosin bag on the back of the mound and pats down his forearms. Phil feels remorse for his poor decision to catch the foul ball before the player had a chance to record the out. He can’t recognize himself, and it’s too late to take it back. The pitcher pounds the rosin bag into the earth and a dust cloud mushrooms up around his legs.
***
“Where am I today?”
“You’re home, Phil.”
“Home, really? Oh, dear! Where’s Winkles?”
***
During a rain delay, Phil has constructed in his daydream an arm that is as sharp as a diamond, and with it he is slicing through the ancient trees of the sequoia national parks. Each tree falls a different way. Topples uniquely into others as it heaves from its cleft stump. Phil notices with a tear that the felled trees lean on their brethren for support until they roll sideways and crush the soft forest floor underneath.
Phil has never been to these forests before, his bare feet have not pulled at clumps of the cool forest carpet with his toes. If that’s what it is like. The trees must be a color of red that he thinks of when he thinks of his sister’s hair when she was a little girl. Copper.
He does know the clipped grass on the baseball field, that smell. How all this summer rain looks sluicing over the edge of the dugout. Like a falling curtain.
***
The ejected manager has resurfaced, disguised in a false mustache, glaring at Phil through Groucho glasses.
“I thought that was last week,” Phil says to the crew chief.
“You all right Phil?”
“Who, me? Let’s just get this one in the bag, baby.”
***
“Play ball!” the home plate umpire yells. Phil has second base today.
Jim Morrison is batting leadoff. He saunters into the batter’s box, swinging a rattlesnake. His jersey is unbuttoned to his waist. On the first pitch of the game Morrison hits a sharp line drive to the alley in left-center. Phil watches him hustle out of the box. Jim’s whipping around second base and foolishly digging for third. He winks at Phil as he passes him by. The throw comes in from the center fielder. A rocket. Morrison leaps head first at the bag. An explosion of dirt. Morrison is called out, and when the dust falls he is nowhere to be seen.
Phil takes his hat off, sees his name written in it. He places it at his feet and silently ejects himself from the game. He looks at the flags and pennants drooping in the breeze in the grandstands one last time, and not knowing what city he’s in, or how he’ll get back home, be it bus, plane, rowboat or umbrella, he climbs into the stands and works his way up the steps, exiting the stadium.
SEAN LYON is a native Texan living in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn. He has a story published online at Cleaver Magazine, and poems in print and online at Literary Orphans, The Main Street Rag, Washington Square Review, and One Sentence Poems.
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