In the Dim Light Beyond the Fence
In the Dim Light Beyond the Fence
By Mitchell Toews
It was a Wednesday night and Robyn expected an easy shift. The soft evening light shone on Burrard Inlet, a drowsy fall evening. The roadwork holding up traffic on Highway 99 had finished and there was still at least a month before the winter rain came in off the Pacific, pushing its weight around.
Their first call came from Nat Bailey Stadium where the Canadians were playing. Parked at the third base gate, they found an older gentleman in the concession concourse. In the eye of a small crowd, he was lying on a table, outlined by the clutter of plastic cutlery and condiment packets.
“He ordered a brisket sandwich, then he just toppled over,” the vendor said.
“I’m okay,” the man said, hiking himself up on his elbows. “Really. Get me off this table, would you? I feel stupid.”
“Sure thing, hon,” Robyn said. “Let us help you. We’ll get you outta here and give you a guided tour of downtown Vancouver.”
She checked his pulse, his thick wrist heavy in her hand. Liverspotted skin, pale and bloodless. The beat was erratic, faint. Sticky spittle caught in the corners of his mouth. As he started swinging his legs down, he made a muffled noise and then fell back on the table. His head landed softly on a wadded-up sweater someone had placed there.
“He just passed out! Let’s get him on the gurney!”
* * *
I remember it now. The outfield falling away in endless green except for the white chalk lines climbing the foul poles. Fences so distant only immortals could see them, much less challenge them.
We pull cleats and bats from the trunk of the old Ford. The ballpark is bigger than it looks from the road.
Our team warms up in shallow right. Rakes rasp on the base paths accompanied by the rhythmic tink-tink-tink of the long spikes driven in at 60’6”. The syncopated smack of warmup tosses, back and forth, and lots of bantering. Loosening mind and body, freeing the soul.
Meadowlark alarm cries join with lawn chair clatter as the crowd comes in. Catcher trotting to the mound with his shin pads clacking. I can smell the sting of lime as they draw out the batter’s boxes—righty and lefty poured out of the same brown paper sack. Baseball, a game that takes an irregular world and makes it diamond perfect.
Kornelsen raps out some fungoes to us. He hits a flat line drive to my right and I round on it, picking the ball out of the air on a bounce. It rests in my glove, freshly smudged from the grass—lipstick on a man’s cheek.
The game begins and I’m up. It’s not long before the red stitches are spinning, and my soft liner clears the shortstop’s glove and settles in front of the galloping fielder. He one-hops it—a little too casual for my liking—and I make an extra wide turn at first just to piss him off.
When everyone is ready, I wander off the bag and stop.
The catcher’s eyes follow me through his mask as he gauges my lead. Too much chaw. He looks drunk. As if he heard me, he tilts up his mask and a thin brown stream re-wets a dark spot on the sand. The pitcher, a lanky kid from North Dakota, grips the ball with a hand the color of boot leather as he looks in for a sign.
“You never know,” says a woman’s voice as I take my lead and the pitcher goes into his stretch.
Sure enough, he throws over. I’m back in plenty of time and the first baseman slaps me with a high tag. Goddamn trapper: it’s like getting hit in the chest with a phone book. Jolts me—more than I would’ve guessed. I throw him a look, pure stink eye.
* * *
The gravel in front of our bench is littered with sunflower seed shells. It’s like the high tide mark after a storm. First game lost and now we’re tied here, top of nine. Everyone is a little bushed and ahead of us, there’s still a long car ride home.
Sun setting, barn swallows darting, a little kid laughs. There’s a car parked behind third and a family picnics from a blanket spread near the open trunk. I get a whiff of their cold fried chicken and see long neck bottles of beer, sweating in a bucket of ice.
“Like you can,” Kornelsen, coaching at first shouts from cupped hands—big, meaty carpenter’s hands. “Like you can, Red!” his voice echoes off the whitewashed backstop.
I pluck at the starchy grey of my pants until the stiff cloth stands away from my thighs to catch an inside pitch. I’ll take a free pass if I can get it.
“Hey, Red, we’re aiming for your head, not your legs,” the catcher says to me with a brown-tooth grin.
“Do it, buddy. I’ll come all the way around and steal home on you,” I say back to him.
“Cut the shit, you guys,” the ump says, “I gotta get home.”
“Me too,” I say with a wink at the catcher. And then a funny thing happens. The air goes still and so do the crickets and frogs. It’s so quiet it’s like my ears are ringing. A purple-black cloud is edging towards us out of the west and I hear that same woman in the stands say, “Let’s get you home.” Not loud but I hear it.
“Ball one,” the tired umpire says, clicking his counter. Then he taps the catcher’s shoulder because the ball went behind my head. “That’s the last one like that,” the ump says to him, mad.
I am still puzzling about the lady behind the backstop and I realize I hadn’t moved an inch. Just stood there and the catcher must have snagged it. But come to think of it, I don’t even remember the pitch.
I touch the plate with my bat and see they are playing me to bunt.
The big kid throws hard but he’s fading. Nothing but high fastballs and I take the inside ones, sliding my hand up the barrel to keep that idea in their heads. I foul off the rest, biding my time. The pitcher gets on the rubber and then kicks with his right foot twice—stabbing his toe in the dirt behind him. Kornelsen told me about this and I’m ready.
The left fielder and the shortstop both take a couple of lazy steps back and towards the line. I see the change-up coming big as a grapefruit and I wait so I can knock it by the meathead at third who is still at bunt depth.
“See, I don’t want to pull it foul,” I say to the lady behind the backstop.
“Sure. I’m with you, Red,” she says. She knows what I mean.
“We’re almost there, hon,” she adds with a nice smile. I think I get what she means. Now I stride and take my cut as the ball comes at me, right down Main Street.
Then a coldness rushes up my arm and I feel the rumble from that big thunderhead, just like we’re driving over a wooden bridge. I can feel it in the muscles in my back. And then my neck tingles as I connect and it’s dead-set solid right up into my chest. It feels so good—the bat slowed for the smallest instant by the impact then completing its arc. The ball jumps into the night air, and then it’s floating above the lights, heading for the dimness beyond the fence.
The earth trembles some more and something nearby rattles as I drop my bat. First base is so far away, and there’s that wheezing bastard Kornelsen jumping up and down and wind-milling his arm.
“Go two, Red! Go two!” he’s screaming as I hit the bag, arms pumping, head down.
* * *
They pulled in, one ambulance among the others now, outside the hospital. Robyn double checked the wires to the monitor. A persistent flatline. She winced and glanced at her watch before flicking the toggle switch, finally, to Off.
The van door opened behind her, framing the face of an emergency nurse.
“Time of death, 19:55,” Robyn said.
A wordless question shows in the nurse’s eyes.
“I’ve been administering for the last twenty minutes,” Robyn said, cleaning up the paddles, coiling the cords. She wrote the TOD down on a clipboard dangling from the side of the gurney. “It was peaceful. I’ve seen worse.” She signed the form and folded it neatly, trimming the fold with her fingernails, sharpening the crease as she gazed down at the man.
“He was coherent when we picked him up,” she said. “Then he fainted, and we put him in the van. The hot dog guy at the park said his name was Red. It’s ‘Ambrose’ on his driver’s, but I like ‘Red’ better.”
“Me too,” the nurse said as she reached over to touch Robyn’s sleeve.
“He regained consciousness once more, but he was not sharp. We talked about the game he had been at. Places, ballgames he remembered, back on the Prairies.”
The nurse nodded. After a few seconds, she unfolded the form and signed it, her pen scratching in the silence of the ambulance interior, the needle on a record at the end of a song.
Mitchell Toews, a 65-year-old emerging artist, lives and writes lakeside on Treaty 1 and 3 lands in Manitoba. His stories have appeared in a variety of literary journals and anthologies and a novel is underway. Way under. Follow him on the trails, on the water, across the winter ice, or more conveniently at Mitchellaneous.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
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