Slippin' into Darkness

APRIL L OUISE DESTINO

April Destino had brought the pitcher here tonight. She was dead, and he was one of her boys. He wasn’t one of the boys of summer, even though he wore a baseball glove. No, he was one of the boys of April.

Toeing the mound, the pitcher imagined carrion worms doing their work on the dead insurance man six feet beneath his battered cleats. He slammed another bottle into the webbing of his glove. A puff of dust rose from cracked leather. He twisted off the cap and drank. The windup.

A flashlight beam cut at the pitcher’s eyes. He turned away quickly, as if acid had been flung at his face, but the tattered bill of his baseball cap couldn’t protect him from the unyielding glare.

The pitch.

The sight: the flashlight beam too bright, too strong, somehow able to pull the bottle off course so that it sailed low and outside under the left arm of the cross that bore April’s name. The sound: bottle skidding over grass; brewed Rocky Mountain spring water sloshing, spattering alcohol tears.

“Hey! What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

The pitcher didn’t answer. The flashlight beam was dry ice on his face, and his eyes burned and his pupils shut down to nothing, and then his eyes screamed.

A muscle twitched in the pitcher’s neck. He started to get a little angry. He bit his lower lip, and then his tongue went to his upper lip and licked at a trickle of sweat.

“Goddammit! You can’t sneak into the cemetery in the middle of the night and do this shit! You’re in trouble, asshole! Big trouble!”

The shouting man was close now. Short and fat and staring up from under the pitcher’s chin, his little fatman voice too loud and incredibly self-righteous.

The man was an umpire ready to argue balls and strikes.

The pitcher didn’t say a word.

The umpire bumped his chest against the pitcher’s.

The windup…but this time the pitcher’s hand was empty and balled into a fist.

The pitch: knuckles cracked against the umpire’s jaw, and he shut up, and he fell down.

The pitcher turned off the man’s flashlight and welcomed the darkness. In a moment his eyes adjusted, and he picked up the thing he had brought with him in place of a bat. He stood over the umpire, not looking down, looking instead at the playing field, the mounded bases, the baselines that were nothing but fugitive shards of moonlight. A marble Christ waved at him from centerfield, daring him. It was an unseasonably warm April evening, but in the pitcher’s mind it was an April afternoon and the ghost of a morning fog born on Pacific tides could still be tasted in the air.

A thousand echoes of a thousand lives haunted this place. Crashing waves washed the silence. Foghorns sang baritone and time-clocks clicked a staccato rhythm and a shipyard quitting whistle played sharp counterpoint. Blue-collar fathers shouted encouragement to boys in dirty uniforms. Worn cleats bit into dusty earth.

And then came the single echo the pitcher wanted to hear: the musical voice of a cheerleader begging him to put one over the fence.

It was not a bat that he held in his big hands, but in his mind he imagined that it was.

The crack of the bat. He wanted to hear it.

The roar of the crowd. He could hear it still.

April was here, asleep in the ground.

And it was opening day.