In the Bleachers

In the Bleachers

By Mark Brazaitis

It was two hours before the game, the last of the season. George’s section of the bleachers was a quarter full with kids and adults hoping to catch a ball during batting practice. Fred was back. Everyone else was new. Given their caps and T-shirts, most were fans of the visiting team.

Only the visiting team, which would make the playoffs with a victory, was practicing before the game. Long relegated to last place, the home team had bypassed the ritual. George—at seventy-eight, the oldest usher in the stadium—would begin his own off-season after the game. He would watch the playoffs and World Series on TV. Beyond that, he didn’t have a plan. His wife had died in March. If she were alive, they would have gone to their winter house in Tampa.

He couldn’t imagine going now. The fourteen-hour drive alone felt impossible, if only because he wouldn’t be able to resist looking over at the passenger seat. He tried to comfort himself with the thought that, this winter, for the first time in years, he would see snow.

George sat in a seat at the top of the bleachers. His section was a great spot, maybe the best in the park, to catch balls during batting practice. He was supposed to have checked everyone’s ticket to make sure they belonged in his section. Although he suspected that most people sitting there now had tickets for seats elsewhere, he hadn’t. When batting practice was over, his section would empty, leaving him alone with Fred.

Fred had been coming to the stadium since he was seven, when his father used to bring him. His father was white and his mother Black, and Fred had told George that, at least once a year, some stranger, on seeing son and father together, would ask Fred if he was adopted. At the end of July, his parents had divorced, and his father had moved across the country.

Fred was thirteen, although—with his height and muscles, accrued from the lawns he mowed and the mulch he hauled for his job with a landscaping business—he looked older. He lived with his mother on the east side of the city. He rode the bus to the stadium, the way George had when he was Fred’s age.

Today, as usual, Fred had been the first fan to arrive, and the two sat together in the last row. They talked about school (Fred didn’t like it much), about girls (they didn’t like Fred much), and about baseball (Fred would have tried out for his middle-school team but he had to work after school). He smacked his black glove, its leather worn, and said, “I haven’t caught a ball all year.”

“That isn’t true,” George said. “I saw you, maybe a month ago, catch one during a game. I remember because Sammy Martinez hit it.” Martinez was the league’s three-time most valuable player. He was back today with the visiting team.

“You’re right,” Fred acknowledged. “But I didn’t keep the ball. I gave it away.”

“To a girl?”

“To a friend.” He looked at his feet. “I thought he was a friend.”

“What happened?”

Fred shrugged.

“Today’s your last chance,” George said.

Batting practice began. The batting cage was 410 feet distant, and the players started by bunting. The fans in George’s section crowded into the first three rows, jockeying for position.

Fred stood by himself at the end of row E. A man of about twenty-five, with claw-like sideburns and the wide, brown eyes of an innocent, skipped up and down the aisles, speaking in enthusiastic outbursts. Every so often, as heavy as a sandbag, he collapsed into a seat and announced, “I’m exhausted!” Seconds later, he would leap to his feet, bouncing on his toes. Over the past few summers, George had seen him in other sections of the ballpark. Because of his exuberance, he was a favorite of whoever filmed crowd scenes to show on the enormous screen beyond the centerfield wall.

The man reminded George of someone he’d known in basic training, Sebastian Sweetwater, who’d bounded into their barracks on the first day like a kid arriving at a birthday party. Their drill sergeant, a short, barrel-chested man with a chin like a dagger, targeted him immediately and relentlessly. He nicknamed him Balloon Boy because he was overweight and his mind tended to drift. He said he was “the definition of ugliness.” He told him he’d better give up on finding a girlfriend—or a boyfriend—and learn to love celibacy.

From the beginning of the sergeant’s abuse, George had fantasized about confronting him. He’d conjured an entire speech, one which would rouse the outrage of the men in his unit and turn the sergeant into a cowering penitent. The country was between wars. Korea’s horrors were in the past and Vietnam’s were yet to come, and the relative peace in the world, and therefore the lack of urgency to create soldiers hardened to meet a savage enemy, made the sergeant’s bullying seem to George all the more unnecessary and cruel.

One afternoon, Sebastian found a loaded rifle and shot off his right ear. George never saw him again.

With Sebastian gone, George was certain he would be the sergeant’s next target. George was tall and thin and had, as his pewee football coach told him whenever he would come limping off the field, “bones as brittle as a ballerina’s.” He lacked a ballet dancer’s grace, however. In marching drills, under the blazing July sun, he had trouble keeping step, a shortcoming the drill sergeant had ignored when Sebastian was on the scene but would, George was sure, pounce on now.

Even as his drill sergeants turned to other targets, George didn’t feel any less anxious. Never a good sleeper, he soon couldn’t sleep at all. One morning, the air thick with heat, he failed to leave his bunk. It wasn’t because he was exhausted, although he was, but because he didn’t see the point of serving under men such as his drill sergeant whose sadism negated whatever courage they possessed.

He received a 4-F discharge and returned home to friends and family whose silence suggested a consensus judgment: coward. His father offered a single comment after George had confessed to him what happened: “You were scared of a bully who hadn’t even bullied you.”

Their bunting over, the players in the batting cage now swung hard. Balls crackled off bats and flew into the outfield. Presently, a ball soared high and far. It appeared headed deep into the bleachers, but it fell fast. Everyone in the front row leaned over the rail, their gloves extended. George worried about someone extending too far, tumbling over the rail, and plummeting the twenty-five feet to the field. But George had given up warning people. They never listened.

George heard the smack of a ball in a glove. One of the fathers, his waist curled over the rail, sprung up and raised his arms in triumph. “Hell yeah!” he exulted. He received congratulations from the other fathers around him before he handed the ball to his son.

Moments later, a ball soared over the heads of fans in the first few rows and clanked into an empty aisle in front of George. Children and adults scrambled over seats. Standing three rows below the ball, Fred seemed in the best position to grab it, but one of the fathers leaped past him, blocking him with his body. After shooting his elbow into Fred’s belly, the father leaned over and snared the ball. He, too, raised his arms in triumph.

Fred muttered, “No fair.”

Short and muscular, with a tattoo of a dragon on his right forearm, the father turned to him, his voice as hard as a hammer: “How old are you, kid? Eighteen? Give the little kids a break, will you?”

“How old are you?” Fred muttered, but the father didn’t hear him.

The father climbed over seats back to his position in the third row. He handed the ball to his son, who couldn’t have been more than a year younger than Fred. Head bowed, Fred retreated even higher into the bleachers, to row K. If a ball flew his way, he would be alone to catch it.

When George was Fred’s age, he wanted to design spaceships. The Russians had launched Sputnik and the United States was desperate to catch up. But his military discharge ended his hope of going to college on the GI bill, and it suggested to him something harsh and conclusive about the distance between his ambitions and what he was capable of. He graduated from a community college and became a math teacher in a public high school.

He and his wife, who taught history at the same school, made a decent living, augmented by his summer work at the stadium and hers at a plant nursery, and eventually saved enough to buy their winter house in Tampa. They lived through tumultuous times, including the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War. Sealed in his classroom, he felt removed from what was happening in the country. Of course he read the newspaper and watched the news on TV, and occasionally what he read and saw inspired strong emotion in him. But he never acted on it. He never attended a rally or fired off an angry letter to his congressman. Unlike his wife, he didn’t even discuss the news of the day with his students. A calculus class didn’t seem the right forum to talk about the Civil Rights Act or the bombing of Cambodia. Over the years, he had dozens of Black students in his classes, and he sometimes wondered what their lives were like outside of the high school.

Balls soared off bats and fell into the outfield or into other sections of the stadium. In the first row of the bleachers, a red-haired, freckled girl in a blue sundress begged Sammy Martinez, jogging in centerfield, to toss her a baseball. Eventually, Martinez complied, under-handing a ball into the girl’s mitt.

A moonshot seemed destined to fall short of the first row, but this didn’t deter the father with the dragon tattoo. He leaned so far over the rail that only his knees held him in place. George felt his fear for the man’s safety undercut by a savage desire to see his recklessness punished with a crown-first plummet onto the warning track. As if compelled by George’s secret wish, the dragon man slipped. But a pair of fathers, one behind him, the other to his left, grabbed him by his calves and pulled him back from the brink. George was happy to see he hadn’t caught the ball.

At last, a ball headed Fred’s way. It was a rainbow, curling across the sky and arcing straight for his glove. Fred extended his mitt and opened its web wide. George was so sure Fred would catch the ball that “Congratulations” was already on his lips. Time stalled. The ball lingered in the air. The tattooed father climbed over seats toward Fred. The man with the sideburns raced down Fred’s aisle from one side and the father of the red-haired girl from the other. Even with his rivals closing in on him, Fred had the clear advantage. A grin illuminated his face.

But as the ball struck Fred’s mitt, the man with the sideburns slammed into his right side and the father of the red-haired girl plowed into his left. Worse, the tattooed father, standing in the aisle below Fred’s, jabbed Fred’s mitt with his fist. His balance betrayed, his body battered, Fred lost his hold on the ball, which flew out of his glove. Two aisles below, a mob of children crowded around the fallen baseball, but it was another father, his arm as swift as a snake striking its prey, who reached into the crowd of children and pulled the ball free. “Mine!” he announced, holding the ball aloft.

The father’s eyes fell on Fred. George was sure he would correct the injustice of what had transpired by flipping the ball to the boy. But the father, a bald and bearded behemoth, taunted Fred instead: “You wanna catch the ball, dude, you have to squeeze it.”

George stared at Fred, examining the boy’s face for frustration, disappointment, anger. He found on it a familiar absence of emotion, a façade he knew well. Over the course of his life George saw where the wrongs of the world were, but he only expressed his indignation at the least powerful purveyors of them: the waiter who failed to bring the correct entree, the grocery bagger who crushed his bananas beneath a gallon of milk, the secretary at his school who forgot to mimeograph his midterm exams. Initially, his anger made him feel flush with power, but after he’d expelled it, he felt petty and ridiculous, as if he’d bullied his way to the front of the line at an amusement park, only to be seated for a ride he didn’t want to be on.

Fred, George was certain, faced indignities regularly, although in what form, Fred had been reluctant to reveal and George’s imagination lacked the power to conjure in specific detail. He could think only of abstract terms to describe them: prejudice, discrimination, belittlement, racism. Yet here, in the bleachers, was an obvious affront to fairness. Fred would never say what deserved to be said. He lacked the power, anyway. But George could. Did he have the courage? As Sammy Martinez jogged toward the batting cage to take his swings, George rose from his seat and opened his mouth.

He’d spoken, hadn’t he? As, on the final day of December, snowflakes tapped against his bedroom window like memories wanting in, George recalled the scene at the stadium, which was either what he’d lived or what he’d imagined so often and so thoroughly since the last day of the season it had become real. Without his wife in the world, he had no one to check his recollections, and what he daydreamed and what he experienced became part of a blended world.

“I want to see everyone’s tickets,” he announced at the stadium. “If you don’t have a ticket to this section, you’ll need to leave. I’m sorry, but I’ll be enforcing the stadium’s policy.”

It was amazing how authoritative he sounded—and how quickly people obeyed him, as if he were armed. In the end, only two people had tickets to seats in his section of the bleachers: the young man with the sideburns and Fred.

The young man with the sideburns declared he was exhausted and therefore done chasing balls. He plopped down in the seat next to George and confessed, in a tired puff of breath, “I have 367 baseballs at home. My mom said I should start collecting something smaller, like stamps.”

Sammy Martinez stepped into the batting cage. He was well over six feet tall and weighed more than 230 pounds, most of them in his forearms. But his smile, as George had seen as the MVP shagged balls in the outfield, was a boy’s, dazzling and mischievous and delighted. The batting-practice pitcher threw the ball, and Martinez, forsaking bunting, a sacrifice only non-baseball gods were called on to make, met it with his bat, the crack like lightning in a tunnel. The ball rocketed toward the bleachers. Fred moved two steps to his left, a smooth shuffle he executed with a dancer’s grace, and opened his glove. The ball met it with a resounding pop, like the sound of a champagne bottle opening. For a moment, Fred didn’t seem to realize what had happened. He stood as stoic as a statue. But presently, he curled his glove in front of his eyes and spread its web to see what was inside. His smile expanded like dawn.

Martinez wasn’t done. He launched another ball—and another—and another—into the bleachers, sending Fred on a one-man mission to catch or corral them all. By the end of batting practice, Fred’s glove, filled with baseballs, looked like a giant’s ice cream cone, with scoops enough to satiate the most demanding appetite, to fill the most egregious absence of sweetness and comfort.

Or perhaps the right metaphor, George thought now, standing at his window and watching winter cover what remained of his wife’s garden, wasn’t scoops of ice cream but snowballs. He remembered, when he was a boy, his winter escapes into his backyard, where he used to gather snow in his palms, shape it into a ball, and throw it at the sky. Upon the snowball’s return from whatever height it had reached, he would do his best to catch it without it smashing against his hands and shattering into pieces around his feet. It was rare when it happened, but sometimes it did—the ball landing in his palm solid and beautiful and unbroken. 

Mark Brazaitis is the author of eight books, including The River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala, winner of the 1998 Iowa Short Fiction Award, and The Incurables, winner of the 2012 Richard Sullivan Prize and the 2013 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Prose. His stories, poems, and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, The Sun, Witness, Guernica, Michigan Quarterly Review, and other journals. A former Peace Corps Volunteer and technical trainer, he is a professor of English at West Virginia University.

The Twin Bill is a nonprofit organization with 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. You can support The Twin Bill by donating here.