One Shot at Forever (11 page)

Bearing down, Geisler retired Mark Miller on a fly ball and induced Otta to hit a routine grounder, but the third baseman threw it away, allowing Otta to reach. Now it was Stew-Stras' turn to feel nerves. Catcher Brad Friese walked to the mound for a conference with Geisler. Moments later, Geisler pitched out with the goal of nabbing Otta on the run. Only, behind the plate, Friese was expecting a fastball. The ball bounced to the backstop. Glan didn't hesitate. Throwing his chin back, he broke for home and scored easily. Behind him, Otta advanced to third. Another roar went up from the bleachers. Macon was down only a run, 3–2.

Still, other than Roush, no one had hit Geisler hard all day. Between the dribbler, the error, and the wild pitch, the Ironmen were lucky to have scored at all. Sweet knew this, but he sensed perhaps that the boys did not. He certainly wasn't about to tell them. As Shartzer walked to the plate, Sweet began clapping. “C'mon Steve, let's win this thing!” he bellowed.

All season Shartzer had been Macon's run producer, leading the team in hits and home runs. Now he had a chance to avoid taking the loss, to make up for his failure on the mound. He was damned if he would go down swinging. On the third pitch he smashed the ball toward second base, just hard enough that Otta could beat the throw home. Tie game.

The boys leapt out of the dugout. In the stands, the Macon students whistled and howled. The Ironmen were not only still alive but, against the odds, had a chance to finish off Stew-Stras right here, in the bottom of the seventh inning. With two outs and a runner on first, the game lay in the hands of Mike Atteberry, the diminutive senior.

Of all the boys, Atteberry perhaps needed this opportunity the most. Two-and-a-half years earlier, when he was fifteen, his father starting having blind spots while driving. When it persisted, Mike's mother took him to the doctor. The diagnosis came back as brain cancer. Charles Atteberry lasted less than a year before succumbing at the age of forty-eight. Ever since, Mike's mother had been distant. He often walked into the kitchen to find her standing silently, staring off into space. As a senior and a one-sport athlete, Mike dealt with the loss in his own way, pouring his energy into baseball. It was something he understood, something he could control.

He adjusted his black-rimmed glasses, took a practice cut, and stepped in.
Just make hard contact
, he thought. Geisler started in, then drew back. His first pitch was off the plate, his second a strike on the corner. Then came his third: a fastball, high and hard. Atteberry cocked his elbow, took a small step forward, and tried to murder it.

Instead of a mighty
boom
, though, there was only a weak
crack
. Atteberry watched, aghast, as the ball rolled harmlessly toward third base. His only hope now was to beat the throw. He tore off toward first, and as he sprinted he thought about making the last out of his high school career, of being the one who killed what could be the final Macon rally. He heard the defense yelling. He heard Heneberry yelling. And then he saw the first baseman's eyes widen and his glove rise as the ball approached. Desperately, Atteberry launched himself at the bag, flying through the air and sliding into first in a bloom of dust. The dirt cleared. He looked up at the first base ump.

“SAFE!”

The bench went nuts. Atteberry exhaled. Macon's rally lived.

On the mound, Geisler looked exasperated. It had been a long inning, and his defense had now failed him twice. If he was getting out of this, he needed to bear down and strike out the next batter, Macon's star, Tomlinson. This was no time to mess around with the knuckler. So, just as he'd done with Roush, Geisler fired one toward the outside half of the plate, as hard as his arm allowed. It was the same pitch he'd used to strike out Tomlinson earlier in the game.

It's possible Geisler had lost some velocity after seven innings. Or perhaps Tomlinson finally got a read on the pitch. Either way, he connected on the fat part of the bat. To the Macon parents in the stands, it sounded like a gunshot, the noise echoing off the wooden bleachers.

On contact, Shartzer broke from second, head down. At no point did he turn to watch the ball or look up as he approached third. The fastest kid in Macon County had one goal, and it lay 180 feet away.

Behind him, the ball rocketed into left-center and bounded off the grass. By the time Stew-Stras' center fielder picked it up, Shartzer was already around third, legs a blur. Had it been Glan, Heneberry, or Snitker, the center fielder might have had a shot at him, but it would take an unreal throw to catch Shartzer.

Shartzer didn't know this. All he knew was that he had to score the winning run at any cost. He couldn't hear the Macon fans in the stands, standing and yelling. He couldn't hear his dad, down by the sideline, demanding that he “BRING IT HOME, STEVE!” And he couldn't hear his teammates, now on their feet and out of the dugout, yelling and pinwheeling their arms, a dozen third base coaches directing him toward the plate. All he could hear was the thudding of the blood in his temples and the
scritch
of his cleats on dirt.

The throw skipped onto the infield grass, bound for the catcher. Shartzer was way too fast. With room to spare, he beat the ball home, scoring standing up. Within moments of touching the plate he was mobbed by his teammates. In the stands, parents raised their hands into the sticky sky, exulting. Bob Shartzer looked so proud he might burst. Macon students hurdled the fence and tore onto the field, joining the players in one happy mass. The boys slapped hands and cheered.

For the first time in school history, the Ironmen were headed to the regional finals.

That night felt different from any that had come before. The boys headed out to the Country Manor and sat on the hoods of their Fords in the parking lot, smoking cigarettes and listening to Johnny Cash's “At Folsom Prison.” Again and again, they relived the moments: the way Roush looked as surprised as anybody when he hit that ball, the way Glan chugged around third, pumping so hard that his chin was pointed to the sky. There was something else, too, something beyond elation. The boys felt
important
. Heneberry was the one who voiced it, how it felt like “Now we're playing for all the small schools, the Blue Mounds and the Moweaquas and places like that.”

As for Sweet, he was still beaming the next morning when he walked into the teacher's lounge at Macon High. There, he sat down to write up his
customary postgame sheet
. In addition to updated statistics, he included a quick note next to each player's name. Beside Shartzer's he wrote, “Clutch hitter, gutsy performance.” For Atteberry he wrote, “Socking the old apple.” And next to Brad Roush's name, thinking back on that timely third swing, Sweet wrote, “It only takes one.”

Throughout the day, congratulations poured in. Britton stopped by. So did Carl Poelker and Burns, coaches who understood just how hard it was to advance to the regional finals in this part of Illinois. Left unspoken was what one more win would mean: sectionals. No Macon team in any sport had advanced that far in nearly a decade.

First there was the matter of the regional finals, though, and when Heneberry heard who the Ironmen would face, he didn't know whether to be thrilled or scared. “We get the Reds?”

As the only Decatur native, he knew it was one thing to play schools like Mt. Zion and Stew-Stras and another to play the Running Reds of Stephen Decatur High. With two thousand students, Stephen Decatur dwarfed Macon. Not only were the Reds a traditional big-city power, but they'd also been dominant in the tournament so far, needing only five innings to trigger the mercy rule against Clinton High in the semifinal. It was the kind of team Macon never got to play, the kind of opponent they dreamed about getting a shot at. It would be an outsized test.

If the boys were nervous that afternoon at practice, they had a strange way of showing it. They took turns trying to hit the longest home run, cracked jokes, and talked about girls. Sweet was equally loose. As he saw it, there was no point in making an inspirational speech and, besides, he didn't believe in those anyway. So instead he joked about Glan's dribbler during the Stew-Stras game, and the look on Atteberry's face when he was called safe. Then he affected a mock serious tone. “OK, we got a big game tomorrow, boys,” he said, staring them down. “So don't go spending the
whole
night with some girl.”

The irony was that Sweet went out and did exactly that himself. Her name was Jeanne and, against his better nature, Sweet was falling in love.

Jeanne Jesse never thought she'd date a guy like Lynn Sweet. Not with those sideburns and the long hair and the radical politics. Four years earlier she'd been a senior at Macon High and, like most, had taken Sweet's English class. Plenty of girls had crushes on Sweet, but she wasn't one of them. A cheerleader, she preferred clean-cut types, the kind who played basketball and said “Yes sir” and “No sir.”

She wasn't in a rush, anyway. The seventh of fifteen kids in the Jesse family, Jeanne knew plenty about patience. Growing up, she'd shared dinners with up to twelve siblings, each one assigned one piece of the two fried chickens their mom cooked (Jeanne's was the thigh). Her father was a proud, decent man who worked at Caterpillar and, later, as an insurance salesman and a millwright. When he came home, he saved the disciplining for dinner. Thus any Jesse who'd transgressed knew that, at 7
P.M
., he or she—but usually he—would receive a scolding. Jeanne rarely got into trouble, though. Quiet, thoughtful, and meticulous, she decided at a young age that to survive in a family as large as hers she needed to be organized and efficient. So she stayed after school each day until she finished all her homework, lest she bring home her books and papers and lose them amid so many others.

College had changed her, though. At Eastern Illinois University she majored in business education and became more curious about the world. She'd been out to bars, been courted by older men. When she returned as a junior for spring break in March of 1970, she looked different, too. Always considered a prize in Macon, Jeanne had only grown more stunning. Her shoulder-length dark hair fell on either side of small, delicate eyes. Her athletic figure had filled out in all the right places. It was impossible not to notice her.

Sweet certainly did when she first pulled up on a motorcycle outside his classroom one March afternoon.
That
was Jeanne Jesse? Just seeing her, he forgot all about the yearbook she held, even if it was the reason for her visit. Technically, the yearbook was for research purposes. Carl Poelker, the affable math teacher, was again trying to set up Sweet with some girl or another, and this one—whose name Sweet now couldn't even remember—was a senior at Eastern. So Sweet had asked one of his students, Jeanne's younger sister Lou Ann, to procure a yearbook. Lou Ann had in turn written a postcard to Jeanne. And now here she stood, passing the yearbook to Sweet through the window in his classroom.

He took it and promptly tossed it on his desk. Then he suggested she come back at noon to grab lunch.

Jeanne agreed. That she brought along her older brother didn't bother Sweet in the least. The more the merrier, he thought.

Besides, Sweet wasn't exactly lacking for companionship. Already casually dating a few girls, he found the prospect of adding another to the mix exhausting. But the more he talked to Jeanne, the more interested he became. In many respects, the two were opposites. Her family was Catholic; he was agnostic. She was a small-town girl; he was a product of larger cities. She was reserved and patient; he was gregarious and spontaneous. Almost instantly, they clicked.

They saw each other again that night, talking for a couple hours at Jack Stringer's house over beers, and then went their separate ways. Each had dates that Saturday night, but as they went through the motions, he in Champaign and she in Chicago, neither could shake the thought of the other.

This sense of longing was new for Sweet, and he didn't like it. For a man who'd led an itinerant life, who'd dated dozens of women, who'd been, in the words of Champaign friend Fred Schooley, “a real cocksman,” Sweet's fall was remarkably fast. He saw Jeanne again on Sunday for a motorcycle ride, which led to a night at Claire's Place, which led to Jeanne skipping two days of school to stick around in Macon. That week, they saw each other every night. By the end of the month, Sweet was smitten.

Now, on the eve of the regional finals, Sweet headed off to see her again. It was probably better that he didn't know what awaited in the morning.

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