Ron Carlson is the author of six story collections and six novels, most recently Return to Oakpine. His fiction has appeared in Esquire, Harper’s, The New Yorker, GQ, and many other magazines and journals and has been selected for The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Series, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction and dozens of other anthologies. He is the Director of the Graduate Program in Fiction at the University of California, Irvine. In this touching and comic story, Carlson uses small-town baseball to explore the acceptance of the Other, telling the story through the naive eye of a farm-boy ballplayer who’s just glad to be playing the game for as long as he can.
DEVLIN IS A VAMPIRE and Coleman is also a vampire, but there are no two guys in the whole Mid-Prairie League who can turn a sweeter double play at second base, one of them on a knee or flat out on the infield with the other leaping over the slide and throwing from his place in the air. If records were kept in this league, and they’re going to be next year, they’d have the record twice. As is, every player on all seven teams in the Mid-Prairie League knows that to hit it on the ground up our middle is going to about retire the side. They’re good, and for little guys they can hit.
There may be one other vampire on the team, but no one’s sure. No one’s exactly sure about Devlin and Coleman; it’s what they call an open secret. I mean, they’re vampires, but none of us has really talked about it. At batting practice, I’ve talked to both of them. I asked Devlin when he learned to hit left (meaning how long has he been a vampire), and he said that he decided in high school to learn because there were all those farm boy right-handers. I asked Coleman if he was going to try for the River League (meaning is it hard being a vampire, is there a future in it), and he told me that it was a long shot, that league, but he’d take what he could get.
You’d think two vampires on a baseball team in the Midwest would hang out together, but they really don’t. They don’t sit together on the bus or room together and they’re not even from the same towns. But still. I don’t care. What I care about is taking the grounder off the line at third and throwing across to Coleman and knowing for perfect sure that he’ll make the play. What I care about is that when Devlin hits in front of me that he gets on and steals second, so that I’m not the dummy every night who hits into the double play.
Coach Kaiser doesn’t care about what the guys do off the field as long as they show up and play their hearts out. Everybody has something, he has said in our team meetings, and he’s right. Our right fielder, Benito Porch, who can run like a demon, has full blown diabetes, and Kaiser has to check before every pitch that he hasn’t gone face down in the bunchgrass. It has happened. Harry Whisper is our best pitcher and he’s only got three fingers on his business hand. He can be a pain when he wins, arrogant, and he says some things. Like he said that he had the finger removed on purpose so he could throw his drop ball, a pitch that wins games—for the team. He always says for the team. If you look at him sideways, he adds: You want to see it. I kept it. I’ve got it back at the farm in a jar. He does not have it in a jar. Some skunk ate it the same day he tore it off in a cornfield in a mistake with a combine. And then there’s Mikel Antenna who had our team name OWLS picked off the back of his jersey and replaced with his name in big satin letters. I like to hear my name, he told me. It helps me at the plate and it doesn’t hurt with the scouts either. He is kidding himself about the scouts, but I’m not going to correct him after he’s altered his shirt that way.
Here are the steps from Mid-Prairie to the Big Leagues: you’d get called to the River League up in Illinois. They have one scout total, a hard drinking guy name of Fergus Finity who is on like a permanent DUI and arrives by bus most times. The backseat of his car, Coach Kaiser told me, has got more tickets in it than player notes. The one night last season he was coming to see us play the Hawks out in the village of Toil, he spent the night in jail or so they said. He never showed up, but that didn’t prevent Mikel Antenna from playing his heart out, strutting around, showing his back to two men he thought were the scouts. They were surprised when he went out to where they sat by third base after the game and asked them how they liked it. They said they’d liked it fine, though it had been hard to see because the lights in Toil are old streetlights hung too low. He smiled at them, chewing his gum, waiting, and then he found out they were the vacuum truck drivers waiting for the park to clear so they could clear the septic tanks. Still, there’s hope. From the River League, if you make it, you try for the Ice League, so called because it is up on the North Dakota border and half of the teams are from Canada. It looks like a tough league, and almost all the guys there have full beards, none of these designer goatees you see in Triple A. From the Ice League, you’d go into the Outskirts Association which plays all over. They’ve got an airplane that will seat most of any team, and there have been, so far three guys, all infielders, go on to play in that league with the Bucket Vikings and the LaFluge Pioneers both of whom play one game a year, preseason, near Wrigley Field. It doesn’t get any better than that.
My bride Afton and I made an agreement about my career in sport. She liked it when I played at Mount Nadir. We were dating then and she came to the games, and I said some of my best things to her walking back from the Vo-ed field to the dorms. When we got married, I said I’d like to give it a try. She said, “How long is a try?”
I thought about it. We were living in an apartment in Coalseam, a nice little place, and we had our expenses screwed down tight, and Afton was clerking for the dentist, and I told her, “Three years. If I don’t get called up in three years, I’ll let her go, and we’ll go back up to Fidelity River and take my dad up on his offer to farm there.”
“And we’ll have those kids,” she said.
“Right,” I said. “There’s room for all the kids we want. But for now, I’ll play my heart out and see what happens.”
Well, what happened was what happened. I’m a good ball player and I love it, and I found out that there are about one million good ball players who have the same personal feeling for the sport. I did an inventory last year of the skills and abilities and talents and special dexterities that single me out from the infielders I was running across, and there are none. I was doing just fine, and then two vampires join the team and they glisten every game. They make the infield look like it was a birthday present and they had the pretty paper, the scissors, and the tape.
You stand at third base as the pitch goes in with only two thoughts in the world: hit it to me right now because I am so ready and hungry to join the contest; or please please please do not hit it to me or near me or anywhere at all really for I am fearful and not prepared. These two thoughts fought for space in my head like kids playing king of the hill; they were my constant companions. Every time I looked over at Dracula and Dracula, they were showing their teeth having a wonderful time.
I asked Coleman why he doesn’t show up for our day games, and he looked real surprised. “I’ve got something to do,” he told me.
“Like a job?” I said. We were in the dugout spitting sunflower seeds waiting to see if Kaiser was going to let Benito Porch steal second. We were playing the Herons in Lake Catbite, where there is no lake and never was, and if we won, we’d be above five hundred and get a good seed at the Jubilee Tournament. Benito was dodging and hopping, and he had a good six foot lead. He could run. Then the Heron left-hander just stepped and threw to first. Benito hadn’t moved, and Kaiser picked up the Tupperware of orange juice off the shelf and started out of the dugout because he knew, as we all did, what was going to happen next. Benito Porch went face down in the dirt. He’d forgotten to check his blood sugar. When he falls, it is beautiful, like a kite on a broken string. Just down. No kaboom.
Coleman packed his mouth with sunflower seeds, showing me his beautiful incisors, and he grabbed his mitt as we took the field. “I’m finishing my second year at Lavender Craft.”
“In heating and air-conditioning?” I asked him.
“God, no,” he said. “I’m making teeth for the cosmetic dentistry industry; it is exploding. All the teeth in Chicago come from Lavender.” He ran off to play ball, and I stood at third base, wondering.
We won that game but it took eleven innings. We scored on three errors in that inning, and then Three-fingers Whisper came in and struck out the side. His pitching was way off, but he kept showing his hand and scaring the guys and it worked. So much of being at the plate is about fear.
On the bus back home, I went back and sat by Devlin and told him good game, though he didn’t look too happy. He never really looked too happy. He had a long face from the get-go. “Devlin,” I said. “Why don’t you come to our day games?”
“I’ve got school,” he said. This surprised me because he was like twenty-five.
“Are you at Saint Permission?”
“No, I’m at the seminary in Fort Lunch.”
“There’s a seminary there? I thought it was just the theme park. What are you going to be?”
He tapped his backpack on the floor and said, “I’m going to read these books and then god only knows.”
“What about the weekend games?” I said. He wasn’t fooling me.
“Retreats,” he said. We were driving past the weigh station outside of Catbite and the panes of light flashed across his doleful face. “Different places,” he said. “We were over in Mount Nadir two weeks ago.” I was going to tell him I went to school there, but thought better of it. We were silent. The long dark bus rides are twenty guys sleeping with their iPods in, and Coach Kaiser up in front with his lighted clipboard going over the box score. They are comfortable as a team gets, but I wasn’t comfortable.
I had one more gambit. I pulled my little silver crucifix from my pocket and showed it to Devlin in the dark bus. “You wear these?”
He turned on his light and held it in his two fingers. “No,” he said. “We don’t.” I was astonished that he could let it touch his skin, if that was his skin. “And you shouldn’t either,” he said. “I saw a guy in More put one into his breastbone when he rammed the catcher sliding in at home. I’ll bet you did, I wanted to say, but I held my tongue.
I keep a lot of things to myself. Such as, I would never really tell anyone how much I want to play ball, because first of all, I couldn’t express it with dexterity. Secondly, I would get about half way through it and start to cry. I still cry. Another thing I hadn’t spoken about to anyone was the fact that I promised a three-year shot at the baseball, and this was it. The third season was over and there was one more week of baseball in my whole life forever and ever amen. Afton knew it, but she hadn’t said anything or done anything like X out the days on the calendar or put any countdown on the fridge. She supported me and every time I grabbed my kit to go off to play, she’d say, “Play your heart out and come home to me.” She even said that at home games where I could see her in the stands, sometimes with my folks.
I also keep my worries to myself and my suspicions, but I decided to sample them to Afton the night before the team was going off to the tournament. I had packed my duffel and oiled my mitt and I got into bed and Afton kissed me and snuggled up. She’d always liked the smell of leather oil and I did too. I said, “Do all the teeth in Chicago come from Lavender?”
She put her hand on my chest and pushed herself up. “What?”
“Do all the teeth in Chicago come from Lavender?”
She laughed a little and said, “Not all. There’s a lot of teeth in Chicago.”
“You know what I’m saying,” I said.
“I don’t know what you’re saying, Eddy, you dear man, but yeah, a lot of the crown work and full bridges are made out in Lavender. It’s sort of famous for it.”
“Okay,” I said. She lay back down and was still sort of laughing.
“Is there a seminary over by the theme park in Fort Lunch?”
“Eddie,” she said. Now she was just laughing at her husband. “You mean over by Calvary World?”
“Yes, a seminary.”
“Are you going to take me and the kids over to Calvary World when they’re old enough?”
“What?” I said.
“You know,” she said, “ride the wagon train through the mountain tunnel and do that canoe ride and eat there in the barracks?” I remembered when we’d gone over to the place when we were dating.
“There’s a lot of splashing with those canoes.”
“I want to go,” she said.
“Well, then, I do too.”
“Do you want to go to the seminary there?” she said.
“There is one,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “There’s been one for a hundred years. The seminary was before the Fort Lunch.”
“Devlin said he was at the seminary, studying.”
“He would be,” she said. “His dad was minister at Mercy for years.” She lay back down and said, “And the log slide.” She kissed my neck.
I’m a ballplayer, but I’m not dumb as a door. I knew what was going on. “We are going to have a baby,” I said.
“We are,” she whispered.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It is a boy or a girl,” she said.
“Perfect,” I said. “That’s my choice,” and as I said it I knew it was true. Bring on the boy. Bring on the girl. I’ll go into it with my whole heart. Boys and girls play ball with talent, skill, adroitness, and dexterity.
“Perfect,” she said to me there in the bed.
That win over the Herons put us in fair shape for the Jubilee Tournament in Blister, which includes all seven teams in the Bird League, as the Mid American Prairie League is called in the papers. It’s shorter, but none of the players call it that. It’s a four-hour bus ride and I could sense the anticipation. I could sense my anticipation. Coach Kaiser went up and down the aisle a few times talking to the guys, his hand on our shoulders. Benito asked him if Fergus Finity would be there. “He will,” the coach said. “This is one stop shopping for that guy. You’ll be in his notebook before Saturday,” the coach said. He said that to a lot of us. It was good to hear.
The field in Blister is the toughest place we play. The infield is fine enough for mowed bunchgrass, but the outfield is all stubble alfalfa and left center is low and marshy. With the rain there can be some standing water and you’ve got to play the ball in the air or it hits like a hockey puck and shoots into the tall grass. There is no homerun fence. There’s a three-strand barb wire way back by the surplus canal and always twenty black angus standing there like umpires chewing it over. In the night their eyes glowed.
We beat the Eagles the first night, nine to nothing. Mikel Antenna, who hadn’t homered all year, hit two. It made you wonder if he’d been holding back until the scouts were seated, but a win’s a win. The next night we beat the Loons three to two on a sacrifice squeeze. Coach Kaiser should have been scouted for that call. It was thrilling. Each night was a double-header, and so by Friday there were just three teams left. The Wild Turkeys drew the bye and that meant we faced off against the Robins to make the playoff.
The Robins were all corn fed and big, and they played big. I’ve never seen such swings. These guys stood legs apart and stepped toward the ball like they were on the SWAT team breaking down a door. When they swung and missed, you heard the noise, like an angry ghost going by your head. They hit a homer every inning, these balls lost in the far swale and one causing a minor stir in the supreme court of cattle by the back fence. But, they were big in the field too, and it took them a while to get to anything out of the infield, so we had seven doubles by the sixth inning and were only trailing by two runs.
In the top of the seventh, their catcher hit a double into right which splashed and stuck in the mud in front of Benito Porch. There was a short delay as the umps dried the ball with a towel and put it back into play. I didn’t like this catcher being on second. They were calling him “Hammer” from their dugout, and I hoped it was not an earned nickname, but that he might be from a polite family of Hammers who knew the rules of sport and etiquette. I had already pissed him off by accidentally tapping his hand on the backswing when I had been up in the fourth inning. I hadn’t helped my case by looking at him hunkering there and saying, So move.
Now the two thoughts contended in my ballplayer’s noggin. Come on, big guy, try to steal and meet your certain fate under my mortal tag and Please Please Please do not steal, don’t come this way at all or even look in this direction. When I would glance at him between pitches, though, he was looking in my direction. He looked, in fact without exaggeration like he was coming for me. Harry Whisper threw the next pitch hard, his famous three-finger drop, and our catcher bobbled the ball, not much but just enough to give Mr. Hammer the idea that third base would soon be his. It was only three giant steps away and he was after all a giant, and he was now coming right at me. I ran to the bag and crouched for the throw which was low; it one-hopped and found my glove just as Hammer slid headfirst into my waiting knee. His momentum rolled us both up and over the bag, and I was underneath him, trapped. I looked up and saw the umpire’s thumb. Out! He was out. Literally. Suddenly I couldn’t breathe under this bleeding giant. I lifted my head enough to see the doleful Devlin sprinting over, not looking so doleful now, but with a clear vampire’s lust in his eyes. He too looked like he was coming for me. Hammer’s mouth had struck my knee and his face was all blood, as was my jersey now, as they rolled him onto his back and Devlin knelt above him. It looked like he was feeding. Coleman came over and pushed Devlin away and put his fingers into the bloody mouth. “If we straighten these teeth right now,” he said, inches from Hammer’s face, “he won’t lose them.” And he worked on the man there for twenty minutes in the Blister night.
We beat the Robins by four runs, proving that twelve doubles will beat nine homeruns, but it was an uneasy night for me in the old village. It’s never easy for a ballplayer to have great stripes of blood on his shirt when his teammates, some of them, are vampires.
The championship game was at two in the afternoon on Saturday. We had known this from the start. I knew we’d be without our vampires, and it ended up being the difference. Fergus Finity finally showed up and we saw him talk to Coach Kaiser before the game. I wondered how Devlin and Coleman felt knowing the scout wouldn’t see them—the only two guys on our squad who really had a chance. Finity was a little skinny guy with his hair combed back severely as if it were a lesson. A couple of the guys went up and shook hands with him. Mikel did. Finity came down the dugout and asked my name and I told him. He said, “Third base,” and I was glad he knew that.
“You should see our short and second, though,” I told him. We were alone there for one minute and I could speak. “Coleman and Devlin,” I said. “Not one ground ball got through this season. Not one.”
“I’ll make a note,” Mr. Finity said. “Good luck,” he said.
A few minutes later, Coach Kaiser said, “Play your hearts out, boys.”
I guess we did. The Wild Turkeys beat us six to four in a pretty good game. The sun had dried portions of the outfield, and Benito Porch had an easier time of it. Two of the cows went around and got onto the field so there was a little break in the fifth. Afton and my folks came down and saw my last at bat in a uniform. The pitch was inside and I stepped out and got it all in a line drive down the baseline for a double. Standing on second I could see the whole world.
A person has his hopes and his illusions and he does what he can to foster them. I had mine. I played baseball for a while on a good team; two of our best players were vampires for a while. Now, I’ve turned practical. My father grows flax, but next season we’re going to put in ten acres of sunflowers; this is perfect soil for them and there’s a market. In three years some of them will be in the red and blue buckets in the dugouts of Fenway Park and Yankee Stadium. It helps knowing—even at this distance—that we’ll be part of America’s game.