Don't Leave Hungry: Fifty Years of Southern Poetry Review

Body and Soul

B . H . FA I R C H I L D Body and Soul Half-numb, guzzling bourbon and Coke from coffee mugs, our fathers fall in love with their own stories, nuzzling the facts but mauling the truth, and my friend’s father begins to lay out with the slow ease of a blues ballad a story about sandlot baseball in Commerce, Oklahoma decades ago. These were men’s teams, grown men, some in their thirties and forties who worked together in zinc mines or machine shops or on oil rigs, sweat and khaki and long beers after work, steel guitar music whanging in their ears, little white rent houses to return to where their wives complained about money and broken Kenmores and then said the hell with it and sang Body and Soul in the bathtub and later that evening with the kids asleep lay in bed stroking their husband’s wrist tattoo and smoking Chesterfields from a fresh pack until everything was O.K. Well, you get the idea. Life goes on, the next day is Sunday, another ball game, and the other team shows up one man short. They say, we’re one man short, but can we use this boy, he’s only fifteen years old, and at least he’ll make a game. They take a look at the kid, muscular and kind of knowing the way he holds his glove, with the shoulders loose, the thick neck, but then with that boy’s face under a clump of angelic blond hair, and say, oh hell, sure, let’s play ball. So it all begins, the men loosening up, joking about the fat catcher’s sex life, it’s so bad last night he had to hump his wife, that sort of thing, pairing off into little games of catch that heat up into throwing matches, the smack of the fungo bat, lazy jogging into right field, big smiles and arcs of tobacco juice, 224 ❚ The 1990s and the talk that gives a cool, easy feeling to the air, talk among men normally silent, normally brittle and a little angry with the empty promise of their lives. But they chatter and say rock and fire, babe, easy out, and go right ahead and pitch to the boy, but nothing fancy, just hard fast balls right around the belt, and the kid takes the first two but on the third pops the bat around so quick and sure that they pause a moment before turning around to watch the ball still rising and finally dropping far beyond the abandoned tractor that marks left field. Holy shit. They’re pretty quiet watching him round but then, what the hell, the kid knows how to hit a ball, so what, let’s play some goddamned baseball here. And so it goes. The next time up, the boy gets a look at a very nifty low curve, then a slider, and the next one is the curve again, and he sends it over the Allis Chalmers, high and big and sweet. The left fielder just stands there, frozen. As if this isn’t enough, the next time up he bats left-handed. They can’t believe it, and the pitcher, a tall, mean-faced man from Okarche who just doesn’t give a shit anyway because his wife ran off two years ago leaving him with three little ones and a rusted-out Dodge with a cracked block, leans in hard, looking at the fat catcher like he was the sonofabitch who ran off with his wife, leans in and throws something out of the dark, green hell of forbidden fastballs, something that comes in at the knees and then leaps viciously towards the kid’s elbow. He swings exactly the way he did right-handed, and they all turn like a chorus line toward deep right field where the ball loses itself in sagebrush and the sad burnt dust of dustbowl Oklahoma. It is something to see. But why make a long story long. Runs pile up on both sides, the boy comes around five times, and five times the pitcher is cursing both God and His mother as his chew of tobacco sours into something resembling horse piss, and a ragged and bruised Spalding baseball disappears into the far horizon. Goodnight, Irene. They have lost the game and some painful side bets The 1990s ❚ 225 [18.217.144.32] Project MUSE (2024-04-16 20:40...