as soon as he hit his twenty years. Eighteen months later he was having his retirement dinner at an Outback Steakhouse off the New Jersey Turnpike, wondering what the hell had happened to him.
And so here he sat, mired in a corporate bureaucracy, a middle manager debating whether something fell inside or outside of his department, his job description. It was pathetic. He needed action. An excuse to get outside. Victor turned back to his desk, grumbling, head shaking, and picked up the phone. He dialed the lab and asked for Ted Ross.
III
“Swing like you’re trying to kill it.”
Ronald Grimaldi held the Louisville Slugger right over left and swung slowly, demonstrating the rotation of the hips, the follow through. The kids watched him, some of them mimicking his movements with imaginary bats of their own. “You see, just like this.” He spoke to them over his shoulder. He demonstrated again, feeling the weight of the bat in his hand, thinking back to all the nights, the screams, the cracking sounds, the tension, and the hushed silences.
Every time he swung one, a distant, atavistic rush overcame him. The bat felt like an extension of his body, as though his own blood coursed through it, his own pulse throbbing at its extreme end: a lonely human thud in the cold and silent wood. Perhaps a symbol of the loneliness of his own existence in the vast, uncaring desert? Perhaps not. But in any event, to Ron, the bat was a manifestation of his own power, his own potential to impact the world, and he loved it. He loved the feel of it in his hands, the smooth fit of the grip in his palms. He loved the vibrations of the impact against his fingers as they traveled back through the wood and into him, where his body absorbed and fed on them.
But to the kids, he was just a coach, a grown-up who liked baseball.
“You see, it’s all in the hips. That’s where all the power is. If you try to just swing hard with your arms and shoulders, you won’t be accurate, and you won’t hit very far. Form is the most important thing. Feel the bat in your hands. Treat it like an extension of your body. Become one with the bat.”
But ten-year-olds have no philosophy. They bounced around from foot to foot, puffed out their cheeks, bored only three minutes into practice. Across the grass, beyond the diamond, far out into center field, was another team already forming up. The sight of it made Ron’s team even more restless and he knew he was mere minutes from complete systemic breakdown.
While he enjoyed coaching little league, the headache of dealing with a mob of unruly ten-year-olds was something Ron Grimaldi had little tolerance for. He gave up hope, tossed the bat onto a pile of bats and clapped his hands together.
“Okay, listen up, red team on the field, blue team’s batting first.” The kids split up, with members of the red team complaining about having to take to the field. “Go on, get out there,” Ron said to two stragglers, who immediately went from a slouching walk into an unenthusiastic trot.
He stood on the sidelines and watched the lights click on all around the field. The high chain-link backstop occupied one corner of the only park in town, which also comprised about eighty percent of the town’s green grass. The desert climate was bad for grass, but the warm evenings were perfect for baseball.
The team practiced ineptly and Ron stood along the first base line shouting instructions to the shortstops, outfielders, the batter, catcher, and pitcher. A small group of parents sat in the bleachers behind the backstop and clapped or called out to their kids for little or no reason at all. On the whole, little league practice wasn’t very exciting, but it attracted a decent crowd regardless. Weeknights in Nickelback had little else to offer.
Along the parking lot there were a dozen cars with people leaning against them or sitting at the park benches, watching the action, or lack of it. One of those cars was the Chevy Suburban police cruiser driven by Sheriff Mickey O’Reilly and one of his deputies. They came to every practice. Ron could set his watch by it.
After four years in Nickelback, Ron could tell a stranger where the police were at almost any given moment. They were that predictable. He saw them at Ruth’s in the morning, getting coffee and stealing donuts