Old Bones: A Collection of Short Stories (6 page)

“Stee-rike one!” the umpire bellows.

I try to shut out the voices around me as the
catcher taunts me with “No batter no batter no batter.”

Coach Walker gives me the swing away
sign.

This time I shut out the crowd until I only
hear the sound of my heart thumping in my ears. I lace the next
fastball pitch behind Coach Andrews standing foul of first
base.

The umpire’s voice is far away. “Foul ball,”
he says.

Coach Andrews gives me a nod and raises his
thumbs. Coach Walker gives me another sign to swing away. I dig in
at the plate and want to rip the cover off the ball if I should I
hit it. I look at a fastball just below my kneecaps.

I stare at another swing-away sign, dig in,
and see another low fastball.

After the same sign and a high fastball for a
full count, Coach Walker calls time and hurries to my side. I meet
him halfway. “Butter pitch,” he says.

I gulp and nod and enter the batter’s box
with wobbly legs. Beyond the pitcher, Petey Wilson is dancing at
second base. Over at third, Danny Walker is taking a big lead. The
pitcher is eyeballing Danny as the third baseman leans toward third
base and the second baseman charges second base. Nothing happens,
so I step out of the batter’s box and sniff at the dust in the air
while my heart rate decreases. Danny and Petey return to their
bases until I step back into the batter’s box. Then the dances and
my racing heart start again.

The pitcher nods to his catcher, mimics a
professional pitcher’s windup one more time, and sends the ball my
way. I’m afraid to swing!

“Hit the ball!” Julie’s voice breaks the
barrier. It seems like she is standing behind me, reaching around
me and grabbing my wrists, forcing me to swing at the pitch.

And she is.

I feel her embrace, smell her rosy perfume,
and hear and feel the clunk of the baseball as it strikes a thin
section of the ash bat directly above my right fist. The ball
shoots high above the infield. It’s a pop up heading between the
third baseman and the shortstop, sending them into the outfield
grass.

With my shoulders slumped in defeat and my
face pasted with disappointment, I lope to first base and never see
the third baseman and shortstop collide or the ball fall safely to
the ground. When I reach the bag and kick it, I hear cheers come
from our side of the field. Looking across the diamond, I see Petey
Wilson on the heels of Danny Walker. The two of them race toward
home. The right fielder fumbles the ball that got away from the
other fielders, and Danny and Petey score the tying and winning
runs.

Our dugout and bleachers erupt with whoops
and shouts and boisterous cheers. Coach Andrews hugs me and slaps
my back. “Luck be a lady tonight,” he says. As we leave the field,
Coach Walker hands me the game ball. “It wasn’t the prettiest of
hits,” he says, “But it got the job done.”

My teammates mob me and a few of them remind
me how lucky we were to win.

“An error is an error and two runs scored,”
Coach Walker says as he fills his pipe and lights it. He parades us
to the infield where we congratulate the other team with handshakes
and hand slaps. When we return to the dugout, I see Julie leaving
the bleachers with the rest of the crowd. Suddenly, I don’t care
what others may think of me. I know I want to talk to her before
she goes, so I run to her. Somewhere inside the mass of bodies, I
lose her for a moment. Then I see her through the shifting mass.
Her head turns and our gazes meet before she disappears again. A
beefy hand touches my shoulder and a waft of cherry scented smoke
warms my nose.

“That’s one pitch I would have tried harder
to connect with,” Coach Walker says.

I nod. “I’ve missed a lot of good pitches,” I
say.

I return to the dugout and retrieve my
baseball glove. Derek and I walk down the left field foul line,
following the others to the parking lot. Inside his car, I tell him
what happened while he drives away from the school, past the
football field, and toward the sun sinking to the gentle hills of
Ridgewood Cemetery.

Derek stops and I get out. The cast shadows
of daylight cover me. I say another prayer for the passenger who
the ambulance rushed to the hospital a month ago. At a large and
pink marble headstone, I place the game ball on her grave. A breeze
stirs through the trees of Ridgewood Cemetery and I embrace its
warmth. Julie whispers in an ear, “It didn’t feel like hitting
butter.”

I laugh and share her warmth, and the two of
us talk—boy and girl, mortal and spirit—until, in the final moments
of twilight, a cooler breeze stirs through the trees of the
cemetery and I embrace Julie’s love one last time.

#

The Trespasser

FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD Vree Erickson finished mowing the
lawn an hour before the Pennsylvania weather forecasters’
predictions of heavy evening snowfall for Ridgewood began.
Satisfied with her achievement, she drove the mower to her father’s
shed, then dismounted and propped open its double doors, unaware of
the magma that exploded one hundred miles beneath her. The
explosion slammed superheated carbon toward the earth’s surface at
supersonic speed, shoving tons of carbonic graphite into the deep
bowels of the ridge she stood on. The limestone remnant created by
an ice age more than ten thousand years ago shook, and portions of
Myers Ridge splintered and opened, including the spot where Vree
stood. She scrambled to climb from the ground falling with her, but
the hole beneath her feet swallowed her and her grandfather’s
riding mower.

Her landing was softer than she expected
despite the rock and stone she fell on. The John Deere’s landing,
however, sounded worse. From skylight filtering through the eye of
the hole, she could make out the crumpled edges of the overturned
mower a few feet away. She smelled gasoline fumes mixing with the
cool, earthy air, and knew that rock had punctured the gas
tank.

On her backside twenty feet below her
grandparents’ backyard, she shivered and rubbed her arms through
her jacket. A miserable wet chill penetrated her clothes and
stabbed her skin like a thousand icy knives. She looked around and
saw a boxy chamber of stone—a cave no bigger than her bedroom. As
she sat up, dim green light from a long protrusion of crystal next
to her right leg caught her attention.

The crystal rose diagonally almost fifteen
inches from the floor and was nearly six inches in diameter. When
she took hold of its smooth and angled sides, the crystal
brightened and warmed her palms. She pulled herself closer, wrapped
her arms around it, and let its heat and blazing emerald light
consume her until she felt her backside stop throbbing and the
chill inside her leave.

She marveled at the crystal’s heat, tried to
recall if all crystals produced heat, and then wondered how she was
going to get out. No one was home to rescue her; her mother had
gone shopping in town and her grandparents and siblings were
picking out Thanksgiving turkeys at a farm on the other end of the
ridge. And now, the gray sky began to unleash a chilly rain that
would eventually turn to snow. The thought of dying of hypothermia
left her trembling. She hugged the crystal and wished she could
magically fly from the hole.

As she pressed her forehead against the
crystal and told herself she would be okay, that someone would
rescue her as soon as they got home, the ground shook again.

Tumbling sod from above fell around her as
the sinkhole widened. Then the cave floor collapsed and sent her
deeper into Myers Ridge. She screamed moments before she landed
face down on sod and rubble; a blanket of straggling stone followed
and covered her until the second quake stopped. Stunned and dazed,
she rested inside her burial mound, the crystal still glowing and
in her embrace. Then, coming to her senses, she rose to her hands
and knees and pushed away the rocks and dirt and tried to stand,
but her lower back felt sprained from the hard landing. She felt
battered and bruised, and blood oozed from cuts on the backs of her
hands, but none of her injuries seemed life threatening.

Icy air crawled inside her clothes and icier
rain fell on her face from where the dismal skylight revealed a
larger underground chamber, perhaps forty feet from the top; she
prayed there were tunnels to lead her back to the surface.

The rain increased and the skylight almost
vanished. She looked down, saw a shimmer of green light in the
rubble in front of her, then rescued the crystal and cradled it in
her arms until it blazed again and its heat warmed her and stopped
the pain in her back. Then she used the rock’s green light as a
beacon to look for a way out.

Away from where the topside earth had fallen
into the cavern, rainwater streamed across a granite floor and
filled centuries-old furrows, turning them into rivulets where the
floor sloped down. She followed the largest rivulet for several
minutes to a narrow passage. There, the rivulet became the
passageway’s floor, so she sloshed cautiously along, keeping her
footing until the floor steepened and angled down almost forty-five
degrees. She thought about turning around and looking for another
way out, then considered she had to be close to an exit, and
continued.

As soon as she stepped on the angled floor,
gravity yanked her feet from under her. Like a hapless rider on an
amusement park’s waterslide, she plummeted along the slippery floor
until the hill’s interior ejected her and the rainwater.

The cliffs of Myers Ridge rushed past her and
upwards as she followed the rain down. Her sudden entry into
bristly treetops along the bank of Myers Creek sounded like
gunshots as boughs of pine broke against her tumbling body.

When the fall ended, she lay on her back on a
mattress of pine needles, catching her breath. When she tried to
sit up, her lower back screamed with pain again, so she used pine
branches overhead to help pull her to a seated position.

Lightning flashed and the sky opened. Through
the downpour, she saw the green crystal glowing brightly on the
ground ten yards away. She shielded her eyes and looked away when
the crystal became too bright. Its heat came to her like wildfire
then, entered her clothes and dried her, mended her bones and took
away the pain, and filled her mind with new purpose. She stood—a
slim figure suddenly strong inside a burning array of emerald
light—and locked her mind on a familiar’s thoughts miles away.

AT A NEAR near-empty Walmart parking lot in
Ridgewood, a heavy man leered across the passenger seat of a white
Impala and out a partially open window. A middle-aged woman bundled
in black imitation fur slid from a silver SUV’s driver’s seat and
dropped onto the black pavement. She wore her auburn hair in a
pixie style and was dressed in blue jeans and black pumps. She
opened a yellow umbrella, looked up at the dark, galling sky, and
held up a hand as though trying to catch raindrops. Then she
reached far inside the van for a black purse before she hurried
across the sparsely lighted lot and entered the store.

The man heard no blip from the automatic door
lock on her keychain or the horn honk and lights flash to tell him
she had locked the doors. He waited a moment, then wiped away
fingerprints with a rag from under the seat before he squeezed his
large body from behind the steering wheel and wiped away prints
from the door. Then, as he crossed behind the Sorento, he looked at
the vehicle in contempt.

“Honor this,” he said as he raised a middle
finger at the MY CHILD IS AN HONOR STUDENT bumper sticker.

He opened the side door and climbed in on all
fours.

The roomy rear interior contained two rows of
seats. A magazine titled
Elle Decor
, some paperback books,
and a box of glitter crayons littered the first seat. A day planner
had fallen behind the passenger seat. He opened the notebook.

“Karrie Erickson,” he said, reading the name
of the book’s owner. “A school teacher.” He smiled, looking
pleased. “I got something for ya, teacher, but it ain’t no
apple.”

He flipped away the planner, closed the door,
and hunkered on the floor of the back row seat. He snatched a
crumpled bag from McDonalds beneath the seat in front of him and
ate some old fries.

Drippings of sweat pooled across his forehead
and mixed with the rain there. He undid the top three buttons of
his flannel jacket before he wiped his fat face with his sleeves.
He was a short, floppy man with graying hair that seemed to explode
from his head. He had a mocking thick-lipped face that appeared
angry from behind pudgy grease-stained fingers always lurking
there. And his bulbous brown eyes—not so much looking as unable to
relax—were forever in motion.

After many minutes, Karrie Erickson returned
to her vehicle, got in, tossed two plastic bags on the passenger
seat and started the ignition. A pleasant tone from the dashboard
reminded her to buckle up. She jabbed at the radio and a lamenting
song about lost love encircled her and the mostly concealed
intruder behind her.

Large wipers slapped across a panoramic
windshield in tune to the music as she put the Sorento in gear and
drove away from the stolen Impala that had lost its shine somewhere
in Ohio and was now showing rust around the wheel wells. Even the
chrome that its dead owner had once been proud of had turned
dull.

Karrie drove to the nearly deserted main
street and headed south away from downtown Ridgewood, back toward
Alice Lake and the road to Myers Ridge. Along the way, she
increased the volume of a favorite song.

After they had gone about a half mile, the
man crawled to behind Karrie’s seat, took a black Smith &
Wesson M&P from the belt holster of his sagging blue jeans, and
pressed the pistol against the back of her neck. She jumped and the
man grinned at the sudden intake of air as she gasped.