People had told me about fear, but I had never quite believed it existed in real life. I watched Zapp Stillman blowing up a blow-up doll, and something wobbled inside me. I had felt guilt and self-loathing, especially after Reginald, but now I felt worry-fear. Zapp saw me looking at him and gave me a cocky little nod. I nodded back.
Sally was busy studying a big road map with Janelle, charting the escape route and where we were all going to rendezvous if we made it out of town. Sally had taken my vague arm-wheeling notion and turned it into an actual plan, which would let us escape to the Concorde Turnpike and make for Walden Pond, that place where Henry David Thoreau had built a comedy waterslide two hundred years ago. And then maybe head west. Find a quiet place (so to speak) to wait things out. Sally handed her magic marker off to Janelle and came over to stand with me.
“What changed your mind,” she wrote in ballpoint on a pad, “about doing more stunts? You were ready to quit, before.”
I took the pad and pen. Chewed the cap. Wrote: “Ricky won’t leave us alone. We gotta blow town and this is the only way. Plus this is different than just making another weird movie. If this works, maybe we ruin the red bandanas’ day. Maybe we ruin their whole week even. PAYBACK.” That last word, I underlined three times. Sally took the pen back from me and drew little stars and hearts and rainbows and smiley faces around it, until it was the most decorated “PAYBACK” you’ve ever seen.
One of our lookouts shone a flashlight, and Janelle nodded, and Sally and I got stuffed into a little cubby under the floorboards with no light and almost no air, with all the cameras and filming equipment on top of us. We were scrunched together, so her knee was in my face and my left arm dug into her side. Every few moments, the floor over us shuddered, like someone was knocking things around. Sally shivered and twitched, so I gripped her tighter. I was starting to freak out from the lack of light and air and entertainment options, but just as I was ready to wobble myself silly, Janelle and Thor (Scottie?) lifted the lid off and pulled us out.
So. Ballpark Figure was the last movie we ever made, and it was probably one of the last movies anybody ever made. It was a mixture of fiction, reality and improv, which Zapp Stillman said was pleasingly meta — we were counting on the bandanas and the army to play themselves in the story, but I was playing a fictional character, and so were Janelle and Zapp. My character was Horace Burton, the last baseball fan on Earth who had been heartbroken since the MLB shutdown and who was driving his giant hot dog vehicle to try and find the world’s greatest baseball players, in a Field of Dreams-with-lunch-meat kind of thing. Janelle was a former hot dog mascot who had turned Vegan but still wanted to keep dressing up as a hot dog, now just a meatless hot dog. And Zapp was some kind of coach. We filmed a sequence of the three of us piling into our hot dog car with some animated cue-card exposition, and posted it online with minimal editing, as a kind of prequel to the actual movie, which we promised would be posted live and streaming, right as it happened, on our video tumble.
By the time we were ready to leave town, an hour before dawn, the Ballpark Figure prologue had been up for a few hours, and we had a few thousand people refreshing our vumble over and over. I had slept a few hours, but Sally hadn’t slept at all and Janelle was guzzling really terrible coffee. Sally wasn’t going to be in the hot dog, she was going to be one of the people filming the action from — I hoped — a safe distance, using Matt’s remote-controlled camera drones, which I had insisted on. If nothing else came of this but Sally getting somewhere safe where she could start over, I could count that the biggest win ever.
As we rolled into the middle of the street and cranked the hot dog up to its maximum speed of fifty miles per hour, I had time as I clambered out onto the outermost front reaches of the metal bun to obsess over the contradiction between Horace Burton and myself. Horace’s goal, in this movie, was to take his hot dog out onto the open road and find the lost spirit of baseball. Horace didn’t want any trouble — but I, meanwhile, had no goal other than trouble, and (if I were being honest) no plans after today.
How was I going to play that, in a way that preserved the integrity of Horace and his innocent love of sportsmanship? In fact — I reflected, as I raised a baseball and prepared to hurl it at the shaved head of the red bandana standing on the nearest corner in front of a shuttered florist — that might be the reason why people root for the comic hero after alclass="underline" the haplessness. This fresh white baseball was emblazoned with a slogan about bringing back the greatest game, and the story called for Horace to toss them out as a promotional thing, and to hit a militia member in the head purely by accident. So it was important for the story that I not look as though I were aiming. But I also couldn’t afford to miss. Horace is a good person who just wants to bring joy to people, and he gets caught up in a bad situation, and the moment you think Horace brought this on himself through meanness or combativeness, that’s the moment you stop pulling for him.
The baseball hit the teenager in the jaw, over the neatly tied red cloth that looked too big for his skinny neck, and he whipped around and fired off a few shots with his Browning Hi Performance, while also texting his comrades with his free hand.
I tried to wear a convincing look of friendly panic, like I hadn’t meant to wake a thousand sleeping dogs with one stray baseball, and danced around on the front of the hot dog so hard I nearly fell under the wheels. I slipped and landed on my crotch on the very tip of the hot dog, then pulled myself back up, still trying to toss out promotional baseballs and spread goodwill, and it occurred to me for the first time that I had spent so much time worrying that I was going to hurt someone by accident, it never even occurred to me that I would finally reach a point where I would decide to cause harm on purpose.
Our hot dog had red bandanas chasing us, with two motorcycles and some kind of hybrid electric Jeep. I had no idea if anybody was still shooting at me, because I couldn’t see anyone aiming a gun from where I stood on one foot and I couldn’t see any bullets hitting anything —
— until a bullet hit me in the thigh just as the hot dog swerved without slowing and we released the blow-up dolls in their makeshift baseball uniforms. The blow-up dolls flew behind us, and I saw one of them hit a motorcyclist right where the red bandana tucked under his round white helmet, so that he lost his grip on his handlebars and went somersaulting, and I felt the blood seeping through my pants like maybe it had missed the bone but hit an artery and I was cursing myself for forgetting to bring a giant comedy bottle of ketchup to squirt at people, because ketchup is like fake blood only more cheerful, when Ricky Artesian climbed on top of the third car of the five that were now chasing us and held up a big flatscreen TV that read “YOU MADE YOUR CHOICE ROCK TIME TO PAY.” And another bullet tore through my side just as the hot dog made another sharp turn and we disappeared into the tunnel from the abandoned Back Bay T extension project.
The hot dog came to a stop in a dark hutch Xed in by fallen rusted steel girders, just as one of our bready tires gave out and the whole vehicle slumped on one side, and our support crew set about camouflaging the Wienermobile with rocks and planks. Janelle climbed out of the cab and came over to show me the vumble, the insane number of hits we were getting right now and the footage, in a loop, of me hurling baseballs at the red bandanas.
Janelle noticed that I was pissing blood from my leg and my side, and started trying to get me to lie down. Just then a message came through from Sally, who was still masterminding the filming from a remote location: “theyre not taking the bait.” The bandanas were staying on their side of the line and not trying to chase us into the army barricades like we’d hoped.