June in Northeast Ohio

Twelve one-hundred word scenes about a troubled minor league coach and his longtime nemesis.

1.

June in Northeast Ohio.
Dirty palms, snakes in creeks, old iron looming; toxic Mahoning river laying low.

In the deserted ballpark, the wind carries echoes of ash on leather and voices long-since faded, and the smell of coke ovens and mercury poisoning.

Mike thought he’d buried some things long ago, but like hidden fossils they show at length. If he were anybody else at all he wouldn’t be willingly subjecting himself to Youngstown again.

But he’s not just anybody else.
He’s a sucker, and a loser. He’s a wounded dog that just won’t lie down.

Yes, he deserves this place.

2.

He’s been wandering around like a ghost ever since he hung up his bat and glove. He can barely remember when he did: all his life after baseball is a transparent purgatory.

Everything that happened between those chalk lines, God knows how long ago, he can recall clear as day, each blade of grass on the field and each stain of dip on concrete.

When he tries to spell out his own address, he’s at a loss.

It’s like they’re two different people, the ballplayer and the civilian, except he isn’t certain he ever was anything else but the former.

3.

Mike half-expects something to happen when he sees McCormac again, a chemical reaction of some sort. He’d walk through the door and the cramped office would implode, drywall and plexiglas flying everywhere, their bodies hurled out into the ether by the blast.

But the staff meeting’s just that: a meeting. And if anything stirs, it’s his stomach, bile burning at the bottom of his throat.

It doesn’t matter. Mike needs the job more than he needs to breathe. It’s not about money: it’s about survival. Honestly, he’s pretty sure he forgets his own name every time he leaves the ballpark.

4.

“What’s he gonna teach them? How to break legs?”

Mike’s been alone his whole damn life. He used to be that tragic baseball sob story: perseverance, adversity, ferociousness, enough pity to drown in. But you’re only a story when you’re good, and eventually he really wasn’t anymore.

Call it an attitude problem, or maybe he wanted it all so much more than anybody else, with nothing to hold him back, just him and rage and baseball. He doesn’t care either way. He has a clean conscience.

Mike’s been alone his whole damn life and that’s not something you can teach.

5.

The guys arrive, all pink and brown and golden like overgrown cherubs on porcelain pots, straight up from Florida. They’re beautiful and so alive, eager and sun-kissed, three-dimensional and real in ways Mike knows he’s incapable of being.

They look at him like he’s got all the keys to paradise, with that frightening and undeserved fascination he’d always seemed to arouse in rookies, children, and dogs; it scares him the way the annunciation scared the shepherds.

He knows first-hand the minor leagues make promises he can’t possibly keep. But failing himself is one thing.

Failing these kids would surely kill him.

6.

It’s not like he went in blind to the whole thing.

“I know about the history between you two, so I’m giving you a fair warning.”

History. What a way to put it. They have history alright: just not the type you read about in books. But life in baseball’s a compromise, so Mike just sucks it up. Three pieces of gum tucked inside his cheek to keep his teeth from grinding, he leans in when the lefty from Stanford turns into a batting practice pitcher.

“Kid’s tipping.”

McCormac sneers, spits out his seed shells, and stares right ahead.

“No shit.”

7.

Mike can tell McCormac’s high because he comes and talks to him.

“Why’d you take the job?”

When that wonder of engineering McCormac calls his left arm broke down, he bargained for months like performance art, butchering at his shoulder until the only thing he hadn’t tried was hanging it up. A load of goddamn good that did. There he goes, blasted on Vicodin on the job.

“I don’t know, Kelly. You tell me.”

The sun cuts out McCormac’s silhouette, his face the dark side of the moon.

“I think you like it. You like suffering.”

Now look who’s talking.

8.

He’s got a bridge in the back of his mouth from a blurry evening where he spit out bloody teeth in the dirt of a baseball diamond, red on red.

The metallic taste of anger and humiliation, the streaky crimson on his home whites, the useless, ridiculous rush of bodies around him, well, them, the deafening roar of the crowd, Ancient Rome calling for gladiators’ heads.

“You’re all fucking talk,” The voice bounces against the inside of his skull, viciously, chainlink fence distortion. “No fucking show.”

The worst thing about seeing double is there’s two of Kelly McCormac’s handsome face.

9.

It’s already a joke, because comedy is tragedy plus time, so they like to remind him he’s ended more careers than he’s won playoff games.

It was an accident, really, not that anybody cared.
But the truth was that had he known what would happen, he would have done the same — bone sticking out, and all.
So maybe he was dirty.

Sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night, and for a few minutes of a panic attack, he feels fear, and guilt, and shame, all rushing up his throat like bile.

He swallows it all back down.

10.

Broad heavy sleeping back, smell of sweat and tiger balm, glimmer of gold cast aside on a hotel bed-stand. McCormac’s wedding band is one of those things Mike wishes he weren’t so familiar with, so he notices that it’s gone, the arthritic ring finger that once curled around that devilish circle change unadorned.

“So how’s the wife and kids?”

Now there’s an evil, venomous look if Mike’s ever seen one, the kind that lets you know you’ve struck a nerve, and he would feel remorse if he were a good person, but he’s not stupid enough to pretend he is.

11.

The back of Mike’s head slams hard against the concrete wall and he sees stars. He tries to recollect how he ended up here, but with McCormac’s forearm crushing his windpipe it’s a little harder.

“When are you gonna learn to cut that shit out?”

Mike wonders if McCormac wants to kill him.
God knows he’s had the thought before — they’d have that in common.
Blood pummels at his temples, but he just stares, wheezes for air, and says nothing.

At the pulsing corners of his hazy vision, McCormac’s handsome the way he was when he knocked Mike’s molars out.

12.

The kiss comes unexpectedly and almost draws blood. It’s Mike’s belief that they’re both on a short hallowed list of baseball fights that actually made contact, and maybe this is another instalment, another black-ink statistic to record, if only they were still playing.

But it’s June in Northeast Ohio, and the iron furnaces are quiet and dark. They’re both built on old aches and regrets, and Mike has long forgotten why this all even started.

So what is this, really, Kelly’s mouth biting at his, Mike biting back? Just the battle of pitcher and hitter. Just another swing that connects.