Through a Cracked and Dirty Mirror
Through a Cracked and Dirty Mirror
Dale Scherfling
The face staring back at me from the cracked, dirty mirror was one I’d been ducking for years. Tired. Worn. Vacant-eyed in a way that sleep doesn’t fix. Lean and somehow ravaged, though the real hunger had burned out long ago. What was left was routine—a dull, low-grade ache that came from waking up, putting one foot down, then the other, and calling that a life.
I laughed softly and adjusted the cap on my head, frayed at the brim, sweat-stained beyond saving, now in its fifth season with the Rockland Rag Tags—our unofficial name, since no one ever bothered to give us a real one. Fourteen guys in mismatched uniforms, three colors, some with numbers, some without. Jenkins wore a faded red high school jersey from somewhere in Pennsylvania. Rodriguez had navy blue, the “23” peeling off his back like a bad scab. Mine had once been gray, years ago, before sweat, dirt, and time turned it the color of dishwater.
My glove, by god, was older than the cap, loose and floppy like a well-used Baptist bible. But that, I wouldn’t trade. I snapped up come-backers on the mound better than the best I’d played against, in this losers’ league and five others before it, since I was sixteen years of age. The leather remembered every ball, every game, every broken promise I’d made to myself about where I’d be by now.
“No, by god,” I thought. “I can field my position with the best of ’em. Hit too, for a pitcher and backup first sacker. Won as many games with wood and leather as I did throwing smoke and mirrors instead of lightning.”
Ha! Lightning. There’d been a time when I believed I had it. When the scouts came to watch me pitch for Massillon High, when Coach Patterson pulled me aside and said I had “a real shot.” That was 1985. Reagan was president and the steel mills were already dying and my father worked sixty hours a week at the rail yard and came home smelling like diesel and defeat. But I was different. I was going somewhere.
Except I wasn’t. Torn rotator cuff my senior year. Surgery that the insurance barely covered. Rehab that I couldn’t afford to do properly because I had to work at the ShopRite to help Mom with the bills after Dad’s hours got cut. By the time I could throw again, the scouts had moved on. There were always younger arms, fresher dreams.
I flexed the glove, caressed it, actually. Lovingly. Its patina, softness, pliability. Spit in it, wetness of love, rubbed it dry, the leather taking the wetness in, accepting, darker there and aging like an empress. An old girlfriend once asked me why I loved that glove so much. I couldn’t explain it then. Couldn’t tell her it was the only thing that had stayed, the only thing that didn’t leave when times got hard or when the promises dried up like August creeks.
Twenty years ago, when I was an Ohio Hot Stove League teen, my father took me to an industrial league game like this, to see his Lake Terminal Railroad coworkers—as old as him—play on a skinned dirt infield like the one outside. Middle-aged men with beer guts and bad knees, swinging at pitches they used to crush, running bases like they were trudging through mud. I remember praying, ‘Oh Dear God, don’t let me end up like them.’
And here I was.
I looked around at the ballpark restroom with laughing kids running in and out, baseball the last thing on their minds. Probably thinking what I thought then, if they looked at me at all. Just another old guy clinging to a game that had no use for him anymore. The fluorescent light flickered, buzzed like a dying insect. Graffiti covered the stalls. “Jenny gives good head” and “For a good time call” and a crude drawing of something anatomical. The sink dripped a steady rhythm, a metronome marking time that led nowhere.
Outside, I could hear Rodriguez calling for someone to bring the equipment bag. Could hear the metallic clank of the batting cage being assembled, the solid crack of wood meeting horsehide – or something. We had that, at least. Wood to swing. That, we kept.
Thursday night game. Against Valley Forge Machine Shop, probably. Or maybe it was Bethlehem Trucking. Didn’t matter much. We’d show up, play nine innings on a field that hadn’t seen decent maintenance since Carter was in office, and then grab beers after at Kozlowski’s. Then we’d all go home to our efficiency apartments or our parents’ basements or our houses with lawns we meant to mow last weekend.
“This sure ain’t no ball team clubhouse,” I thought, sliding my hand into the old and familiar glove. The leather embraced my fingers like it always did, like coming home, if home was a place you’d never actually left.
Someone had scratched something into the mirror’s frame, words barely legible through years of neglect: “Dreams die here.” I traced the letters with my free hand, wondered who’d carved them, wondered if they were still alive, still showing up to places like this.
The door swung open. Martinez, our catcher, twenty-three and still believing he might get noticed, might catch on with someone. “We’re up in five,” he said, then stopped, looked at me. “You okay, man?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Just thinking.”
“Don’t think too much,” he said, trying for a grin. “Bad for your game.”
I nodded, turned back to the mirror one last time. The crack ran diagonal, splitting my reflection into two imperfect halves. Maybe that was the truth of it. Maybe we were all broken down the middle, the part that dreamed and the part that woke up. The part that believed and the part that knew better.
I passed the mirror without looking at the image of the man I’d feared to be.
But I had looked. And I’d keep looking, every Thursday night, every weekend game, until my arm gave out completely or my knees went or time finally called the game on account of darkness. Because this was all there was now. This glove, this team, this life. And maybe that had to be enough.
Outside, the sun was setting over the oil refinery on Route 9, turning the sky the color of rust and regret. The field lights stuttered on, harsh and unforgiving, illuminating everything and hiding nothing.
Play ball.
Dale Scherfling is a full-time writer/poet, creative writing instructor, and retired U.S. Navy photojournalist. A former newspaper sportswriter, editor, and photographer, he is the recipient of three U.S. Army Front Page Journalism Awards. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including Chiron Review, Close to the Bone, Yellow Mama, San Diego Poetry Annual, Monterey Poetry Review, and Mangrove Review, among others. He has ninety accepted publications across literary journals and magazines.
Chet Parmar is a self-taught artist in his spare time, specializing in pencil, ink, and digital drawing styles. A Bay Area native and San Francisco Giants fan, he hopes to watch a game at every MLB stadium during his lifetime (six down so far). You can find his work on Instagram: @chubbycheetah80
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