Captain Impatient
He lay with his face on the cool, wet grass on the infield, looking at a dew drop against a back drop of the startling green of the grass, the smoky green of the backstop, and the red seats behind home plate. He felt good, not a care in the world. His cheek, stubble-less, as he'd shaved before coming out that morning, squashed any number of those same dew drops into the grass. At first, he'd been feeling the stretch in his neck and twist down his spine as he pressed himself down flat on the ground, arms down at his sides, glove facing open side up against his left thigh. But as he got deeper into the stretch, and deeper into the grass, he started to see what was in front of him, and drifted off, like the grass was a koan and he a Buddhist monk. He felt at one with everything -- the infield, the diamond, the ballpark, the big chunk of lands carved out of the fens, even the Pike and the rest of the expanse of roads heading away in all directions, including underground.
Which is when the baseball ricocheted off the turf in front of his head, off his forehead, and dribbled over to the third base bag.
"Get off the field!" Johnny Pesky didn't look too happy. Actually, Steve wasn't great at reading Johnny Pesky. He was waving his left arm and the fungo bat in his right hand at the prone figure on the infield grass and shouting, so Steve would have guessed he was angry, but after spending a bit of time with Johnny he realized that he got the same way when he was talking about his playing days, when he was talking about his wife, God rest her soul, when he was chowing down on the post-game spread, when he was sitting in the dugout on a game day. Steve propped himself up on his left arm to see if got any better idea of what it might be. He could feel the tingle of his arm as it rubbed out yet more dew drops on the lawn. Johnny scooped another ball off the ground at his feet and cracked it off Steve's left elbow, which had the double purpose of knocking him down and getting him to scramble to his feet and get off the field.
Steve Bellyitcher had an unfortunate name, especially for a pitcher, and especially in this town. He came to town the year before, not exactly heralded, but it's not like people were pissed off that he'd been signed. For the most part, as had happened for most of his career in the big leagues, he was seen as a good number three or four starter, expected to hold down the fort, pitch his share of innings, keep his team in it, and not worry about threatening "fan" mails from angry fantasy team owners.
He stood on the third base line massaging his elbow. Actually, he was a lot closer to the third base dugout than the third base line, because Pesky kept shooting him what he thought were dirty looks every now and again. His elbow wasn't damaged severely or anything, nor was his head. Heck, he'd taken a harder shot off his head the year before, just about midway through the season. It was no big deal. Happens all the time when you play a sport with a little, white, tightly wound bit of string and cowhide whipping around the field at upwards of 85 miles per hour, and that's just out of the pitcher's hand.
But last year, being in a new city, having this thing happen where he gets beaned off the head by a ball coming back probably a lot faster than 85 miles per hour, and then having his whole season go into the tank, well, that was tough.
disclaimer:
This is an excerpt of a story-in-progress by the founder and chief banana of of Sane Magazine, a weekly magazine about pretty much anything and everything, so long as it's not terribly informative or educational for its readers. It (the story, when it's no longer in progress) may or may not be appearing (or at least submitted) to a prestigious sequel of fiction about a sports team struggling in the anonymity of the big city, Boston.
This is also not about a CIA agent. In fact, I seriously doubt that our reference to a future CIA agent story will ever surface. Especially now that the writer who had originally offered to write that particular story has since finished reading Robert Littell's The Company and is on to something else, non-spy-related. He's more likely than not to write us a story featuring Repairman Jack, stolen almost word for word from an F. Paul Wilson novel (for example, All the Rage).
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