Fielders

Fielders

By Edmondson Cole

The rich kids played lacrosse. Wasn’t a rule anyone decided on. It’s just how it was. They were the sons and daughters of doctors and lawyers and bankers, soon to be finance and law and medical students themselves, that future for them all but guaranteed. We watched them sprint up and down the adjacent field while we stood around waiting for Coach Donahue to feed us a pop fly. It was Kirby and me in the outfield—him center, me left.

We’d watch the guys across the way practicing passes, stick checks, face-offs. In their shoulder pads and helmets their bodies could not have looked more different than ours. These big torsos on little legs. Us in baggy, gray trousers that made us look like old men.

Every once in a while, you’d see them looking our way. Likely they felt bad for us, standing there, routinely bored out of our minds. One afternoon, a few of them were watching us, long enough to make us uncomfortable. I raised my glove and waved if only to say “Yeah? We see you. What’s up?” Without so much as a nod they turned away. I felt like a tool. Kirby, always decent, spent the rest of the afternoon calling them a bunch of snobs and asswipes. But by the end of the season his opinion had changed.

“I bet it looks better on their applications,” Kirby said. It was mid-May and the sun was hellacious. We were out there sweating, squinting, gnawing on stale Big League. Across the way the lacrosse guys were doing lunges up and down the field.

“Job applications?” I said.

“College.”

I shrugged. “Wouldn’t know.”

I should have argued, should have tried to change Kirby’s mind, because he quit baseball the next season to spend his junior year playing lacrosse. They stuck him on the JV team and kept him there his senior year. From what I heard, those guys never fully accepted him. They ribbed him constantly, even the freshman. Said he held his stick like a girl. Said he couldn’t lay a check worth shit. I have no idea how he lasted two seasons with those pricks. But he did and he got into state university. With Kirby’s grades that was no small feat. Maybe those two seasons helped, made him look like something more than a plumber’s son. I imagine that’s all he wanted.

Senior year I shared the outfield with some sophomore. I forget his name. Kid didn’t talk much and when he did it was always the same thing: some nostalgic comment about the day Jake King strode over to the lacrosse field and used his batting helmet to bash Kyle Peterson’s face in. Story was Peterson had fucked King’s sister, told everyone, maybe even taken a photo. I’m not sure that last part was true, but if it was no one would have been surprised. Peterson and his pals walked around town like it belonged to them. Jake King repaid him by breaking Peterson’s nose and knocking in his front teeth. From my spot in left field, I had a clear view of it all. I remember how King sounded calling Peterson’s name. Casual. Almost friendly. Like he’d found the guy’s keys. What came next I’d hardly call a fight. Not that I had much experience in that department. I’d only ever been in one scuffle myself, the time Luke Oldman threw a bad pitch and caught this Grove Park kid in the shoulder. Honest mistake. We all knew how unreliable Oldman’s curveball was. But this kid took it personally. He threw down his bat, then his helmet. Next thing I knew, we were all running toward the mound. If you’d asked me beforehand, I would have said I didn’t give two shits about Luke Oldman, that if I saw him getting his ass kicked I would have assumed he deserved it. But that kid charging at him, I don’t know, it triggered something, and there I was, diving into the fray with the rest of the team, trying to get my hands on that asshole, throwing punches at the Grove Park kids as they came sprinting out of the dugout.

Kyle Peterson, he took that beating all on his own and I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. King stood over him swinging that helmet down and shouting “Never again” for what felt like a long time, each second an opportunity for Peterson’s teammates to step in. None did, and I wondered then what was different about those guys. Those big guys with their gloves and pads and sticks, Jake with nothing but his bloody helmet. The way they backed off, you’d have thought he was waving a gun.

Years later, after I’d taken over my father’s contracting business and married this girl from the next town over, we were, she and I, looking to buy our first place. Nothing fancy, a little two-bedroom one-bath. Kids were the plan. We stopped in at an open house in a cul-de-sac by the middle school. Quiet neighborhood, a bit run-down. I’d gone trick- or-treating there once as a kid, seen the streets and sidewalks overrun with Power Rangers and Sailor Moons. Back then it was a nicer place than I ever would have imagined living. But now the kids had grown up, the parents grown old. The neighborhood had faded and aged into our price range.

241 Beverly Drive. We pulled in alongside just one other car, a blue compact with a baseball-sized ding in the driver-side door. Odd, so few takers, but maybe it was the timing—2:30 p.m. on a Monday. Not great for an Open House.

I was inspecting the roof and the gutters as we came up the walk and didn’t see him until the door was open and he was welcoming us in—Kyle Peterson, grown and bellied, his suit decent-looking if a bit rumpled. I hadn’t seen him since high school— almost eight years now—but I’d have known him even without his name tag. His hair had thinned, but that goofy smile of his remained the same.

“Peterson,” I said, as we shook hands. I could see the gears turning as he tried to place me.

“Carl Miller,” I said. “Class of ’03.”

He flashed that smile again, though it was different now. And that bridge they’d put in, you could really see it, the porcelain teeth a shade whiter than the rest.

“Right,” he said. “Carl. Hi.”

He seemed uncomfortable, and I thought maybe I’d looked too closely at those teeth. Maybe he could see what I was thinking, sense me remembering how he got that bridge. High school being what it is, the King incident became Peterson’s only lasting claim to fame.

“Good to see you,” he said, his smile now subdued. “Come on in.”

I introduced him to Sarah and the three of us stood in the entryway a moment. I felt obligated to make small talk, though this was already the longest conversation Peterson and I had ever had.

I tried to remember what it was his father had done. Was it real estate? Struggling to find the words, I managed to ask if this was the family business.

“No.” Peterson said. “Just a job.”

I explained to Sarah that he and I had gone to school together. “And then didn’t you go to Cornell?” I said.

Peterson nodded, that smile now a wince. “I did a semester,” he said. “It didn’t work out.”

The way he said it you could tell there hadn’t been a second school. I felt like I’d stepped in conversational dog shit and despite my attempts to ease the discomfort— telling him I had friends in realty, good money there—his expression told me I was only working it deeper into the tread.

He cleared his throat, looking everywhere but at us. “Let me show you the house.”

We followed him through a small-ish living room, then the dining room with its newly laid pine floors. My wife admired the large front windows and asked about the fireplace. I was looking at Peterson’s baggy trousers and scuffed shoes, remembering how spiffy him and his buddies used to get for every school dance. By the looks of them, these were those same dress shoes he’d worn back then.

“It’s a nice place,” he said. “Big yard. Great neighborhood.” He paused and scratched the back of his head. “Well,” he said. “I’ll let you two look around.”

He excused himself to take a call and so we toured the bedrooms and the kitchen, the basement and the backyard, deciding fairly quickly this wasn’t the place for us. Fine house, but we didn’t love it. And though we had only a few concrete requirements, loving it was one.

We found Peterson out on the front lawn. He must have just hung up the phone. In the clear afternoon light the lawn looked especially patchy, its green pale. He stood there on a swath of crabgrass and I could see the build the lacrosse coaches must have liked, the broad shoulders and long legs. It didn’t matter that Peterson had put on weight. We all had. He still looked like he belonged on an athletic field. He was staring up the street, across a stretch of similarly tired-looking lawns, a hollowed-out look to his face.

We told him we’d think it over though we wouldn’t. Told him it was good to see him, though in truth it was uncomfortable as hell. Peterson thanked us for coming, but that smile of his, it looked sewn on.

We climbed into the truck, watched Peterson unpin his nametag as he walked back to the house.

“You went to school together?” Sarah asked.

“Yeah,” I told her, putting the truck in gear and backing out. “But I didn’t really know him.”

“He play baseball with you?”

Peterson turned, the lawn putting some fifty feet between us, and we made eye contact once more. I saw him wave but I had one hand on the wheel, the other shifting into first.

“Nah,” I told Sarah. “He played lacrosse.”

This story was nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

Edmondson Cole (he/him) is a graduate of Pacific University’s MFA in Writing, a former Elizabeth George Foundation fellow, and a former finalist in the Maine Literary Awards’ Short Works in Fiction category. His work has appeared in Portland Monthly Magazine, Drizzle Review, and the anthologies I Could Be Here Now and Then Again, published by Pine Pitch Press. He has received support from the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Millay Arts, Hewnoaks, and the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. He lives in Portland, Maine.

Jason David Córdova lives in Puerto Rico as an illustrator and painter. Some of his art can be seen on Instagram at @jasoni72. You can visit his shop on Red Bubble.

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