“Strike five, you’re history,” Paul says, and I glare back at him as he snaps my picture with my camera, disdainful concentration on his plummy lips. (I can’t help seeing what I’ll look like: bat slumped to the side, my cheeks sprouting sweat, my hair awry, face distressed by a frown of failure endured in a dopey cause.) “The Sultan of Squat,” Paul says, snapping another picture.
“Since you’re the expert, you need to try it,” I say. Bees are burning my hands.
“Right.” Paul shakes his head as though I’d spoken the most preposterous of words. We are completely alone here, though more ersatz players and their real-life wives and kids are strolling carefree and happy across the hot parking lot, their voices crooning praise and good motives. Balls still rise above and arc down upon Doubleday Field. This is the small, consoling music of baseball. For a man to entice his son into a few swings would not be mistreatment.
“What’s the matter?” I say, letting myself out of the cage. “If you miss it you can say you meant to miss it. Didn’t you say that was the best trick?” (He has already denied this, of course, but for some reason I don’t mean to let him.) “Don’t you eat stress for lunch?”
Paul holds my camera at belly level below “Clergy” and takes another picture, with an evil smile.
“You’re the daredevil tightrope walker, aren’t you?” I say, leaning the bat back against the fence, the big green machine now silent behind me. A warm breeze kicks up a skiff of parking lot grit and sweeps it by my sweaty arms. “I think you’re walking way too narrow a line here, you need to find a new trick. You have to swing if you’re going to hit.” I’m wiping sweat off my forearms.
“Like you said.” His smile becomes a smirk of dislike. He is still snapping my camera at me, one picture after the next — the same picture.
“What was that? I don’t remember.”
“Fuck you.”
“Oh. Fuck me. Sorry, I did forget that.” I come toward him suddenly, pity and murder and love each crying for a time at bat. It is not so rare a fatherly lineup. Children, who sometimes may be angels of self-discovery, are other times the worst people in the world.
When I get in reach of him, I don’t know why but I grapple him behind his head, my fingers achy from squeezing my bat, my shoulders weightless as if my arms were nothing. “I just thought,” I say, strenuously holding him, “you and me could experience a common humiliation and go off with our arms draped over our shoulders and I’d buy you a beer. We could bond.”
“Fuck you! I can’t drink. I’m fifteen,” Paul says savagely into my chest, where I’m still clutching him.
“Oh, of course, I forgot that too. I’d probably be abusing you.” I pull him in even more harshly, finding his rough buzzed hairline, his Walkman earphones and his neck tendons, forcing his face into my shirtfront so his nose pokes my breastbone and his warty fingers and even my camera push and dig my ribs in rejection. I don’t entirely know what I’m doing, or what I want him to do: change, promise, concede, guarantee me something important will be better or pan out, all expressed in language for which there are no words. “And why are you such a little prick?” I say with difficulty. I may be hurting him, but it’s a father’s right not to be pushed, so that I squeeze him even harder, intent on keeping him till he gives up the demon, renounces all, collapses into hot tears only I can minister to. Dad. His.
But that is not what happens. The two of us begin awkwardly scuffling on the pavement beside the batting cages, and almost immediately, I realize, to attract the interest of tourists and churchgoers out for a Sunday stroll, plus lovers of baseball on their way, as we should be, to the famous shrine — except that we’re struggling here. I can almost hear them murmur, “Well, hey now, what’s all this about? This can’t be good and wholesome. We need to call somebody. Better call. Go ahead and call. The cops. 911. What’s the goddamned country coming to?” Though of course they don’t speak. They only stop and gaze. Abuse can be mesmerizing.
I loose my grip on my son’s neck and let him break away, his fleshy face gray with anger and disgust and shame. My grip has ridden into his cut ear and got it bleeding again, its little bandage rucked off. When I see it, I look in my hand and there is beet-red blood down my middle finger and smeared in my palm.
Paul gapes at me, his left hand — the other’s still holding my camera, with which he has gored me in the ribs — gone fiercely into the pocket of his baggy maroon shorts as if he is trying to look casual about being furious. His eyes grow narrow and shiny, though his pupils widen with me in their sight.
“All in fun. No big deal,” I say. I flash him a lame, hopeless grin. “High fives.” One hand is up for a slap, the other, bloody, one finding my own pocket. Sunglassed tourists continue observing us from forty yards out in the parking lot.
“Gimme the cocksucking bat,” Paul seethes and, ignoring my high fives, goes tromping past me, grabbing the blue bat off the fence, kicking the gate open and entering the cage like a man come to a task he’s put off for a lifetime. (His Walkman earphones are still on his neck, my camera now lumped in his shorts pocket.)
Inside the “Dyno-Express” cage he stalks to the plate, the bat slung back over his shoulder, and peers down as if into a puddle of water. He suddenly turns back to me with a face of bright hatred, then looks at his toes again as though aligning them with something, the bat still sagging in spite of one attempt to keep it up. He is not a hitter to inspire fear. “Put in the fucking money, Frank,” he shouts.
“Bat left, son,” I say. “You’re a southpaw, remember? And back off a little bit so you can get a swing at it.”
Paul gives me a second look, this time with an expression of darkest betrayal, almost a smile. “Just put the money in,” he says. And I do. I drop two quarters in the hollow black box.
This time the green machine comes alive much more readily, as if I had previously wakened it, its red top light beaming dully in the sun. The whirring commences and again the whole assembly shudders, the plastic hopper vibrates and the rubber tires start instantly spinning at a high speed. The first white pill exits its bin, tumbles down the metal chute, disappears then at once reappears, blistering across the plate and smacking the screen precisely where I’m standing so that I inch back, thoughtful of my fingers, though they’re stuffed in my pockets.
Paul, of course, does not swing. He merely stands staring at the machine, his back to me, his bat still slung behind his head, heavy as a hoe. He is batting right-handed.
“Step back a bit, son,” I say again as the machine goes into its girdering second windup, humming and shuddering, and emits another blue darter just past Paul’s belly, again thrashing the fence I’m now well back of. (He has, I believe, actually inched in closer.) “Get your bat up to the hitting position,” I say. We have performed hitting rituals since he was five, in our yard, on playgrounds, at the Revolutionary War battlefield, in parks, on Cleveland Street (though not recently).
“How fast is it coming?” He says this not to me but to anyone, the machine, the fates that might assist him.
“Seventy-five,” I say. “Ryne Duren threw a hundred. Spahn threw ninety. You can get a swing. Don’t close your eyes” (like I did). I hear the steam organ playing: “No use in sit-ting a-lone on the shelf, life is a hol-i-day.”
The machine goes again into its Rube Goldberg conniption. Paul leans over the plate this time, his bat still on his shoulder, gazing, I assume, at the crease where the ball will originate. Though just as it does, he sways an inch back and lets it thunder past and whop the screen again. “Too close, Paul,” I say. “That’s too close, son. You’re gonna brain yourself.”