Between the Wickets

There is a baseball game on TV. My dad lays on the couch asleep and I play army men on a coffee table that smells of lemon-oil, drowning them one by one in his coffee mug. The coffee is cold and turns into acid. The green men are prisoners of war. Victims of a conflict they never wanted. Doing their patriotic duty. I had no respect for the Geneva Convention. My wars were godawful and brutal and men are drafted from Woolworth’s almost weekly to repopulate my armies for my bloodthirsty general thumbs.


I don’t care about the baseball game as much as I care about the trials and tribulations of plastic men. Seven die before they were saved by a fellow green soldier who hid out in my mother’s fake potted-plant, which was the epicenter of the coffee table. Beneath the fake green leaves and the fake dirt and the fake grass there was a square green core that the fake stems of the fake plant punctured. Its sole job was to hold the fake plant in place. The green plastic hero, who didn’t have a name, burrowed himself all the way down into that green core so not to be detected by a gook patrol. The gooks were the mustard-yellow guys drowning the green guys in the coffee mug.

The green hero came back and killed all the gooks and a helicopter swept in and rescued everyone and took them back to my bed where they went on with their lives until their next deployment. I left the dead gooks scattered on the coffee table and made a mustard sandwich. My mom was at the grocery store. I normally went with her to get a candy bar, but this time I stayed home because it was raining and my mom didn’t want me to catch a cold. It wasn’t raining wherever the baseball game was being played. A pivotal game 5 of the division series. I ate the mustard sandwich and sat in front of the TV, way too close, but no one was there to tell me to back up or I will ruin my eyes. I wondered what my dad was dreaming about. I imagined he was dreaming about naked women because someone at school had told me all grown men dream about naked women.

It was top of the ninth and our team was up by one. Two outs and a routine groundball was hit softly to the fill-in shortstop, a small-looking man with a clean-shaven baby face. The ball went through his legs. A runner from third scored. A runner from second scored on a throwing error after the shortstop retrieved the ball and overthrew the third baseman. The camera panned to the shortstop who rubbed his face and there was dirt on his forehead. His hat was pushed up off his head and he sighed. He appeared to get some dirt in his eye and tried to get it out. The crowd booed and the announcer’s velvety voice said it was an E6 and that it couldn’t have come at a worse time for the ballclub. Right between the wickets, he said. The camera zoomed in so close I could see his eyes and they were hollow and raw. It was as though I could see every horrible thing that had ever happened to him. Then they glazed over and were empty. The announcers went on and on and the shortstop was stuck there in his position and played the rest of the inning when it looked like all he wanted to do was to go and hide. The pitcher gave up a long ball to the next batter and we were down three. An insurmountable deficit, the announcer said, considering the pitcher warming up in their bullpen. Our pitcher struck out the next batter on three angry pitches. The cameras followed the disgraced shortstop to the dugout.

My mom came in and my dad snored. The afghan had fallen over his face and it was kind of funny because he kept snoring. His jeans were dirty from work and his right muscular arm was laid out like a bridge to the coffee table and his hand was calloused. My mom carried in all the groceries and put them away and made dinner. My dad woke up for dinner and asked me who won the game and I told him they won, but I didn’t say how. Even though I was seven, I knew the shortstop had enough blame for one life. Even though I killed seven men in acid and dozens and dozens of yellow ones by machine gun only moments ago, I had mercy for someone.  

Thirty years later, I am gathering my stuff from my ex-girlfriend’s house who took the kids to the mall so I can move my things out while they are gone. Some gook dropped me in acid and I no longer exist. I am moving in with my mother. She has a two-bedroom apartment in town and is probably there right now making dinner. My dad is dead. He’s been dead for years. His calloused hands and his snores have become ashes and are tucked away in a box somewhere to be spread in Ireland, if I ever make it there. He always wanted to go and I always wanted to go because somewhere down our family tree, that is where we came from so we had a natural itch to go home. My mom and dad divorced well after that baseball game and many more seasons and days of my father sleeping on the couch when he was beat from his factory job. He remarried some woman I barely knew who was misshaped and tired-looking, but nice enough the way a stranger is nice to you in a department store.

I cram my boxes into my car and text my ex-girlfriend to tell her I am gone. She texts back - have a nice life - all in lower case letters which makes it seem colder to me for some reason. I stopped crying a long time ago, but I want to cry now. I have been here before and have done what I have done and there is no point going on about it or asking for forgiveness, or for trust, or for love to save me. There is no love hiding in that green core beneath fake leaves, dirt, and grass. And sitting there in her driveway with a car bloated full of boxes and a bottle of whisky I never drank between my legs because there is no room for it anywhere else, I catch a glimpse of myself in the rearview. My eyes are that shortstop’s eyes. And I know I am him and that God was speaking in a language I couldn’t understand when I was seven. But He plotted me down in front of that TV after that mustard sandwich so long ago and showed me who I was going to be. And as I crack the seal of that whisky, and have a long drink that burns, I can’t remember where I got it. Then I remember it was years-old and left over from my dad’s funeral and was my dad’s favorite whisky and I wonder where his ashes are and how the hell I am going to get him to Ireland. I wonder if he would be upset if I spread him over Niagara Falls because it is much more feasible.

I am the fill-in shortstop on the field kicking the dirt and the dirt is my father’s ashes and I can hear the announcer’s voice go on and on, needling me, saying that it couldn’t have come at a worse time for the ballclub, and that it went right between the wickets. I am the error. The E6. And life just went between my legs and I cannot get it back to do over again. I am looking up at the fans who are a blur of color, and the lights that are blinding, and I am sick to my stomach. They are only going to remember me for that ball rolling through my legs in the division series and nothing else. I never won a gold glove. I never hit a home run, as far as they are concerned. My eyes are hollow and raw. They are empty. And there is dirt on my forehead and nothing left in my soul.

I get to mom’s apartment and she tells me to carry my boxes in tomorrow because it is raining and I might catch a cold, but I carry them in anyway and that coffee table is sitting in her overcrowded living room and that fake plant is on the coffee table and I stare at it with a heavy box of books in my hands. The couch is different and the afghan is gone. There is a flat screen TV, not a cabinet tube, and it sits atop a fake wood TV stand rather than on desert-brown shag carpet.  I carry my things to the spare bedroom and shove the boxes against a wall and slide into bed. My mom yells something and it sounds as though she said to clean your gooks off the table, because I remember I left them scattered. But she said your food is on the table and I go eat because I don’t want to argue.

My mom kept some of my army men and they are lined up on a jelly cabinet. They look like monuments and I don't have any feelings for them anymore as much as I want to. They are all green ones who did their patriotic duty. I ask her where my dad’s ashes are and she says his other wife has them in such a way that I don’t say anything else about it. I just fork my spaghetti and stare at those seven green plastic men. I go to sleep later with the half-drunk bottle of whisky and my cellphone lying next to me with the text from my ex-girlfriend pulled up that says - have a nice life. I don’t dream of naked women. I have never dreamt of naked women.