Catching The Ball
Content Warning: Language
I knew my Pa. I knew my Pa for the man who endured, who suffered, who knew what it was like to cope with the vicissitudes of life.
“Cody, son, you can do no better than play the cards that life has dealt you.” He said to me. I think it was my first year at senior high. I believed him. Of course I believed him. He was my Pa.
He taught me to throw the football high, with a tight spiral. He couldn’t teach me to run and catch the damn thing or how to cope with the frustration of the ball bouncing past me time after time.
“Pa, could you catch the ball at my age?” I asked.
“Run, son, run.”
The ball flew high and fell out of the sky like a comet. He laughed as I jumped forward, seeing the football bounce in front of my chin, while I slid across the turf.
“Son, you gotta do better than that!”
I picked myself up, dusted dirt and grass off my knees and cursed at the green stains down my pants.
“You’re an ass Pa, a real ass.”
“If I could run and catch your ass, I’d kick it black and blue, butterfingers.” He was laughing hard, his wheel-chair rocking as he did so.
We left the park at sunset, me covered in grass and dirt and carrying the ball. Pa wheeled himself out, the leather on the palms of his gloves making a swiffing sound as they slid round the chrome push-ring on his chair.
The routine was to play ball, and then go for a burrito and pop at Casa in Lexington. I loved to sit and count the cars on the streets between the park and the restaurant. It kept me busy for the drive.
Mama yelled. Whatever time Pa brought me back she yelled. If I had burrito she yelled, if we pretended I hadn’t had burrito, she yelled. I covered for him, he yelled at her and covered for me, and then I ate whatever crap she had prepared in the microwave. I wanted to live with Pa. The judge said no.
The day the Feds came looking for Pa we were enduring Thanksgiving. Mama and Steve, my latest ‘uncle’ were flush enough to have us eating out at the less than prestigious Railhead Diner in Purcell. The food was good, but to be honest, the excitement of a real life F.B.I. agent walking in and demanding to know where Pa was, knocked the food out the park. Mama almost choked and Steve got all indignant until they threatened to run his license plate. He quietened down real quick after that.
Pa’s disappearance was the talk of Purcell and Lexington for a few weeks. The adjoining towns hummed with excitement over the story. After all, he was a hero, disabled hero at that. Kind of made me a hero by proxy, and now I was a dangerous proxy hero, which some of the girls at school seemed to think it was cool.
“Hey, Cody, the feds chasing your dad because of what he did in Iraq?”
“Yeh, some rag-head dick found a D.C. attorney to sue him for being the best goddamned sniper the Marines ever had.”
They loved that line. Hell, I loved that line. Took me four days to come up with it Got me a date with Sharron Westernock, to first base with Abbie Dance and all the way with Sally Terman. Though she probably would have gone with me anyway, she had that reputation. The truth was, I had no idea what had happened to Pa. At that point I just knew he had disappeared and the F.B.I. were looking for him.
The fall they came looking for him was kind of big for me. But it wasn’t everything going on in my life. There were the girls, I got a little work as a busboy and Mama seemed to be getting pretty serious with Steve. For all he was a jerk who dealt dodgy license plates and dated Mama, he was a cool guy. He took me fishing at Owl Creek, hunting deer in Grady County, and to watch the Sooners at Owen Field. I liked Steve, he was nicer than some of the other. The closer he got with Mama, the more he tried to do Dad things. Sometimes I let him.
“You gotta be nicer to your Mama, Cody. She loves ya, y’know?”
“Sure Steve. S’just she’s riding my ass about school all a’ the time. My Pa did okay without much school, you did too. I wish she’d stop chewing my ass. Know what I mean?” I was really chancing it with this little speech. But the game had been good, and Steve had lit a joint in the truck on the way back, so I knew he would be mellow. I know I was, from the secondhand hit.
“Yeah, she gets a bit uptight does your Mama. But that don’t mean you get t’disrespect her none.” He reached over to cuff me gently I ducked out the way and we both laughed as the truck swerved across the yellow lines. He straightened us up, the headlights sweeping across the edges of the road.
Eventually Steve went the way of Pa and all the others. Mama chewed him up and spit him out. We had to move out the trailer this time. She'd made a mistake and thought it was true love, so co-signed with Steve at the last renewal. Trouble was it was Steve’s cousin, or uncle, or some such that owned the park. Made things difficult when Mama missed the rent. Especially as the guy was gay, and Mama couldn’t pay him in favors.
“Goddam faggots are killing the country. Killing the goddam country. S’like we’re living in goddam Europe. Goddam homos.”
“Y’cant say that Mama. Homosexuals got rights too. Teacher said so.”
“Is that the teacher from Californ-I-A. Bet she’s a dyke as well. Glad we gotta move. Get my boy out the grip of that degenerate bitch!” She slapped the suitcase lid, the old latch clacking shut as the worn spring bounced down.
We argued for a stretch, but it did no good. I wasn’t old enough to be by myself, I'd asked Steve and he threatened to just send me back to Mama if I tried. Told me I could last another six months. I didn’t know where dad was. No one had seen him since before Thanksgiving two years previous.
Run, dad, run.
A year or so later we wound up in Edmond, mama got a job in Oklahoma City. It was here I really started looking for dad. First off, I tried the local veteran’s places. Some nice guys, some dicks, plenty drunks. None of them knew dad. I think some of them had been drinking in the same bars since Vietnam shut down, never mind Iraq.
I went to the library. When I learnt who the Fred P. Snyder on the commemorative plaque was, I got to sit in the quiet room and read what I wanted in peace and quiet. The librarian became real nice when she realized I was researching my dad, a Purple Heart veteran; I didn’t mention him and a bunch of money being missing. She was even nicer when she realized the library was somewhere warm for me.
“Cody, son, when’s your Mama back from work today?”
I looked up from the newspaper I was scouring, “About ten tonight ma’am. Please let me read till closing. I’ll stay real quiet.”
“You just read away, Cody. But at seven I’ll come get you and we’ll have a drink in the canteen together. It’s not good for you to go without a drink for so long.”
We sat on the plastic seats, and she bought me fries and soda, making me tell her about my life. I tried not to make Mama a straight bitch, and dad a full hero. I’m pretty sure I failed. She offered to give me a lift home come closing time, but I figured that was just so she could grill Mama. I ducked out while she was booking out the History Club members.
The papers hadn’t taught me much about dad or the reason he disappeared. While I walked home in the cold and the snow, thoughts clicked round and around. The details were vague. Money from a Veterans account was missing, Pa had been the treasurer. I wanted to believe it couldn’t be true. He was a Marine, and he always told me it was the real deal, not just a tattoo. Though the tattoo was pretty damned cool; USMC on his left shoulder blade in fancy writing, an eagle mid-swoop on his right.
But then, if the charge was a load of bull, why was he still running?
Over the next few weeks things just went round and round in my head. Mama thought I was at school, but most days I stayed home, or came back home after she left for work. I tried to get a job, but there was nothing going.
Mama had been three parts drunk when I was born: Pa in Iraq, the first time round. Back then they lived out in the boondocks, and it was before nine-eleven, so paperwork could still be loose in places. Especially if the people doing it were vague, and between Mama drinking, and the local Doctor being stoned on weed most of the time I ended up with two dates of birth on two birth certificates. One of them said I turned sixteen October past, the other said eighteen.
I left the apartment before Mama, that was normal when she was working late shift. The bus took me down the freeway on seventy-seven and, as we came into the city, went past a football field. I was tempted to jump off at the next stop and go join the jocks out for their pre-school practice. I could almost feel the ball slapping down into my arms.
I killed a couple of hours around the National Memorial, reading the names on the chairs in the wet grass. I sat and looked at my scattered reflection in the pool, the way I hunched against the icy cold made me think of Pa in his wheelchair. Despite the papers and the Feds, I wanted to believe he hadn’t stolen the money. It was difficult.
I crossed the street, narrowly dodging a beat-up Buick as I jay-walked, and entered the recruitment office. My birth certificate said eighteen, my physique was inclined to agree, so screw my biological age.
Semper Fidelis.
Hmmmm
This can't be all the story right??
oh yeh, this was a short one.
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