Casey's Home
Authors: Jessica Minier
Casey’s Home
By Jessica Minier
Text Copyright © 2000 Jessica
Minier
All Rights Reserved
To My Mother and Father
and to all those who loved me as
I wrestled with this book
Hearts are Light
1978
The last day of my baseball career was the hottest I
could remember, and the air smelled like dirt. Each scuffling movement brought
up a cloud of red dust that hung in my lungs and coated my clothes until I was
gritty from head to toe.
I was the only girl on my team,
playing shortstop for the ludicrously named Buczkowski’s Pickles. Most of the
girls in town played on the softball leagues, but considering who my father
was, baseball had been my only real choice. Besides, I believed softball to be
a sport created just for girls, and therefore less difficult. It wasn’t that I
consciously thought I was as good as the boys, I just hadn’t yet considered
that I might not be.
My father, retired finally from
the Atlantics, was coaching his first year of college ball at DeSoto State and
made it to my games whenever he could, mostly so he could shout things like:
“Take him out, you idiot! I’ve seen better arms on a goddamn chimpanzee!” from
the bleachers. I was the youngest daughter of “Wild” Billy Wells, four-time Cy Young
winner with a lifetime ERA under two and a temper to match his blistering
fastball. The kids from the visiting team always crowded up into the bleachers
after the games, handing over baseballs and gloves for my father to sign while
the Pickles groused in the parking lot, anxious to leave for the obligatory run
for pepperoni pizzas and root beers.
It was the final game of our
season. The Pickles weren’t a good team, or a particularly bad one. Little
League, or since I was fourteen, Senior League teams were constantly in search
of a good sponsor, and the Buczkowskis had four young boys and a thriving
business. We had the best uniforms in town and plenty of equipment, but we
hated being the Buczkowski’s Pickles with a nearly homicidal passion. Not only was
our name completely unpronounceable, it was also hideously embarrassing,
especially on days like today, when we were playing the Richardson Electrics.
Even I thought we sounded like a bunch of pussies.
The Electrics were a very good
team, with a few talented kids who would end up courting my father at State.
While no one expected them to make it to the Series, everyone knew they’d make
it at least as far as the state playoffs, maybe even the regionals. Their star
player was a fastball pitcher named Cory Pipkin who, at fifteen, could already
throw nearly eighty miles-an-hour. His hands hung almost to his knees. “Those
fingers aren’t natural,” my father would say, watching the boy warm up.
“They’re freakish. Good, but freakish.” Cory wasn’t good looking, or particularly
smart, but to a thirteen year-old facing him across sixty feet of baked-brick
earth, he was something akin to God.
The Electrics had something else
we didn’t: a respected coach. Reggy Brooks had been named the best Senior
League coach in our region for seven consecutive years. During the course of a
game, Coach Brooks’ face descended from pink to flaming red to purple. When
pushed far enough, he had been known to kick his players’ gloves out into the
dirt of the warning track and then stomp on them. This was the accepted
vernacular of coaching as we understood it. Our coach, Mr. May, annoyed us with
his go-team enthusiasm and overt kindness. We wanted Coach May to scream
obscenities at us and implore us to win one, just this once, for the Mayster.
My father hated Brooks, often saying, in his own brand of blissful hypocrisy,
that Coach Brooks was “too hard on his kids.” I had begged to try out for the
Electrics, but here I was, playing for the Pickles. It was a fact I chose not
to carefully examine.
The air in the dugout was
stifling. Next to me, our chubby catcher, a boy I only ever knew as Blessing,
spat sunflower seeds at the tips of his shoes. He still wore his equipment,
afraid to take it off as we were in the bottom of the eighth and sinking fast.
Cory Pipkin was in rare form. I watched dejectedly as the first baseman
collapsed back into place beside me, out without a single swing.
“I couldn’t even see the damn
ball,” he muttered and I noticed, as he reached into Blessing’s bag of seeds,
that his hands were shaking. I thought about Walter Johnson; how he had once
thrown an imaginary ball at an opponent. The batter swung anyway. The umpire
called it a strike.
“Casey,” Mr. May called. “You’re
up next.”
I walked to the warm-up circle
and grabbed a bat. I had faced Cory Pipkin over and over since I was ten years
old. For a few years, when I was still in Little League and he had moved up to
Senior League ahead of me, I was free to simply enjoy watching him. These days
I was back to sweating it out, destined to fail.
The Electric’s catcher, a tiny boy who
looked barely eleven, called out to Davis in the batter's box.
“It’s all over now, ya know.”
“Kiss my...” Davis began before
the ump shouted, “Language!”
I took a few practice swings with
two bats, just like the pros. My hands felt heavy in the heat and sweat flew
off my wrists with each arc of my arms. Polyester coated every surface of my
body except for my socks and my wool baseball hat. Even my underwear was a
shiny, thin material that seemed to grow stiff the more moisture accumulated
between it and my skin.
“Boy, is it hot,” Mr. May said
beside me, wiping at his brow with an already soaked sleeve.
“Come on, Davis!” I heard someone
shout from the bleachers. It sounded like my father.
From the corner of my eye, I
watched as Pipkin wound up and let one go. He didn’t exactly need to finesse it
with us, just get it over the plate. At that last second, we wouldn’t have
known a curveball or slider if they had worn nametags. A pitch was a pitch. You
either hit it, or you didn’t.
Fielding wasn’t much better. One
minute I’d be standing in the infield, wondering who would notice if I yanked
my underwear back into place and the next the ball would be right there,
hurtling toward me like a large white bullet. Either you caught the large white
bullet, or you didn’t. If you didn’t, someone else had to, probably the third
baseman. Or you could both run after it, scrambling over the newly-mown grass
and cursing under your breath until the two of you reached it at the same time
without calling it and then you’d have to decide, right there, who was going to
pick it up and try to make the throw to, by this time, third base. There were a
lot more triples in Little League than there were in the Majors.
True to form, Davis swung at
nothing. I heard the ball whistle past him and hit the catcher’s mitt with a
thud like wood dropping on wood.
“Strike!” the ump yelled, jabbing
his index finger quickly to the right. Everyone enjoyed it when Pipkin threw,
except the other team.
“Shit,” Davis said.
“Language!” the ump yelled.
“Swing, batter batter batter!” a
group of kids in the bleachers called.
“That’s actually bad advice, I
suspect,” I heard Mr. May say to no one in particular.
Pipkin stepped back and eyed
Davis.
“Jeez, just do it,” Davis said
bitterly.
With a graceful arch of his back,
Cory Pipkin sent another fastball toward our batter. It hit the backstop with a
crash, bouncing into the umpire’s fat calf.
“Damn,” he swore.
I felt like screaming “language”
at him, but didn’t.
“Ball,” he said at last.
“Control!” a voice shouted from
the stands. My father again.
I winced.
Davis stretched briefly and
stepped back up to the plate. I stopped swinging, letting the bats weigh down
my arms as I watched the drama building. Even though I wanted Davis to smash
one out of the park, I was also rooting for a good fast one, right over the
plate. It was impossible not to love something that beautiful.
Pipkin let another one go. The
fastball sang past Davis into the bulls-eye of the catcher’s waiting glove. I
wondered if he could throw anything else.
“Strike!”
“Right,” Davis said bravely,
squaring his shoulders. “Let’s do it.”
I had to admire him, standing
there in front of certain annihilation. Ten years later, Davis would play for
the Brewers. Not much of a step up from the Pickles, really. But the Brewers
were still a far better fate than what would happen to Cory Pipkin his first
year at UCLA.
Driving just faster than he could
throw, Cory would drunkenly plow his 1981 Mustang into a telephone pole at
eighty-five miles an hour. He’d live, but his hands, still gripping the wheel
as his body hit it, would require so many pins he’d carry a card from his
doctor for the rest of his life just to pass through a metal detector.
At that moment, however, with
their futures undecided, I was betting on Pipkin. Davis swung again, but the
ball was already sitting comfortably in the catcher’s left hand, like an egg in
a nest.
“Nice try,” I said as he walked
past me.
“Screw you,” he replied, without
animosity.
“Language!” the ump yelled.
“We’ll get ‘em next time,” Coach
May said cheerfully.
“Maybe you will,” Davis said and
moved to sit beside Blessing and his bag of sunflower seeds.
It is one thing to watch a
pitcher from the warm-up circle, swinging to each pitch in your mind, hearing
the smack of ball on wood. Or in this case, the ponk of ball on aluminum, which
while less beautiful, is still a fine sound.
It is another thing to stand
there yourself, to swing the bat a little and scuff your toes into the dirt in
the box and adopt the stance you practiced a thousand times, all while watching
a kid who could, quite easily, throw an eighty mile-an-hour fastball right at
your head. Batting helmets be damned, it’s a terrifying thing.
Stepping up to the plate, I
pushed the toes of my shoes into the dirt, readied the bat by my right ear and
squinted toward the mound. Cory Pipkin was watching me over his glove,
preparing for his wind-up. He had large blue eyes, the color people always
called cornflower. I had never seen a cornflower, so I just thought they looked
unnatural, like blue lightening or the sky just before a really bad storm.
Narrowing his eyes, he glared at me, sizing me up. I swallowed a mouthful of
spit.
And then from right behind me, I could hear the
catcher say:
“And when, responding to the
cheers, he lightly doffed his hat, no stranger in the crowd could doubt 'twas
... Casey at the bat.”
I turned to stare, finding the kid grinning at me with
a mouth full of metal. He had a face covered with freckles and looked just like
Opie. The umpire laughed, as did several people in the stands.
Great, I thought, just great.
The scrawny kid nodded at me.
“Ernest Lawrence Thayer,” he said. “Memorized it last year for English. Got an
‘A.’”
“Good for you,” I said, digging in again.
Pipkin wound up slowly and let
one go, hard and fast, as always. As it screamed toward me, my mind chanted,
“don’t swing, don’t swing.”
“Strike!” the ump shouted.
I told my mind to shut up and pay
more attention to the damn ball.
Again a small voice spoke behind
me.
“‘That ain't my style,’ said
Casey. ‘Strike one,’ the umpire said.”
Someone in the bleachers cheered.
“Good for you,” I heard the real
umpire say. “That’s a classic.”
“Fuck,” I said.
“Language!”
“He pullin’ out the poetry?” a
voice called and I looked up to see Cory Pipkin grinning at me. “He’s wanted
you all year, just for that.”
I glared at him and turned and
scuffed a little dirt in the catcher’s direction.
“I’ve heard it before,” I said.
“Come on, Casey!” my father
shouted, as if I were somehow trying to delay the action.
I steadied my arms and waited.
Cory Pipkin threw toward me and this time, I let my mind go and swung when I
felt the ball approach.
I tipped it back, over the cage, to hear it clatter
down in the bleachers. Someone cheered.
“Strike,” the ump said.
“Casey still ignored it, and the
umpire said, ‘Strike two.’”
“Shut up!” I barked.
Cory Pipkin laughed.
“Don’t be such a girl,” Cory shouted.
Throwing my shoulders back
and stretching out my arms, I shouted back.
“Throw the damn ball!”
The ump opened his mouth, but was
drowned out by a rousing cheer from the dugout behind me.
“Settle down!” I heard Mr. May
say. “Settle down. This is a baseball game, not a boxing ring.”
I looked up again at Pipkin. He
met my narrowed gaze with his own and smiled at me.
“This is it, Wells,” the catcher
said. “This is your last chance.”
“Pitch the damn ball,” someone
else’s father shouted, for once.
The pitch was high and outside,
making the catcher stretch.
“Ball!”
“Ha,” I said. “There’s nothing in
your poem about that.”