Chris Lynch - Kill Switch

I am about to open my mouth to thank him, find it already hanging wide open, start to speak, but stop. Matt pulls out a small lunch bag tightly wrapped in tape, whips it punishingly hard into Jarrod’s midsection. “Besides, this guy right here is three of my best customers.”

We walk down the tired, gray main drag, killing time and being anonymous.

“Wanna bone up?” Jarrod says, because that’s what Jarrod says, and he is walking around with a rock band’s monthly supply.

“The answer is yes,” Da says. Hunching over a bit, smoking on his cigarette as if he is trying to get things out that are just not in there.

“The answer is no,” I say. I put my arm around Da, and he feels a lot less substantial than the guy who loosened my tooth. “Why don’t we just get something to eat?”

“One small smoke, I swear,” Jarrod says, “then eat. I’m buying, even.”

This is an attractive offer. I took a few hundred dollars out of the ATM before we fled, but that wouldn’t last long without a lot of help. I am about to say okay when Da pushes me over the edge.

“Please?” he says.

No matter what his stories. No matter what his tall tales, and I have no idea which ones are redwoods and which have some reality. No matter, no matter, I know the old guy did not go through his life as a chimney like Jarrod.

He just wants to feel better. Any kind of better. Before his mind started the tricks, he was frequently in this kind of stoop-over or that kind of organ discomfort. The blinking lights in his attic sometimes made the physical pains skitter into the shadows. But now, when the meds are not balanced just so, they all seem to come slithering out of the corners.

“Fine. A little. Jarrod, a little by standards other than yours.”

“Promise,” he says.

We wander around the gritty town that we don’t know and that doesn’t appear to want to know us. But this being this kind of town, there has to be an overgrown baseball field around someplace for just this sort of thing.

It takes mere minutes for us to find it, and we are sitting on the bench along the third base line. Where there used to be four slats for baseball butts, there are two, but that is plenty for us. Jarrod does the assembly work, Da smokes another cigarette and stares out over the playing field and the smoke and the overgrowth and time, the way smoking always seems to allow an older person to do. Almost seems worth the smoking for, losing some years at the end of your life, in order to have all that screen time with your younger self.

“You ever play?” Da asks out loud.

“Sure,” I say quickly. “You know-”

He slaps my thigh, hard. “I know you did,” he says calmly. “I remember every pitch you threw, every one you hit, every one you missed. I will forget my feet before I’ll forget any of that. I was asking him.”

“Me? Ya, I did,” says Jarrod.

“Very good,” Da says, looking over the short chain-link fence curving around the outfield.

“Except, you didn’t,” I correct.

“Hey, if he can make up stuff, so can I?” Jarrod says, risking a broken nose or something.

No such thing. Da just sits, still staring. He takes on that creased, crunched expression folks get when they are asked a question they know they should know, they know they do know, only they don’t know it right now. He looks frustrated and confused and reluctant, but he takes the joint when it is passed. Then he smokes and extends it to me, and I am so close to asking him if he indeed knows which of his stories is true and which is otherwise, I can actually feel that W forming on my lips.

“No, I can’t,” I say, and he withdraws.

Jarrod takes the smoke back. I start walking, and point at him as menacingly as I am able.

“I will be right back,” I say. “Do not go anywhere. And do not lose him.”

“How could I even do that? He’s, like, full size.”

I run up to the corner, where we passed one of those discount stores. Probably was a five-and-dime once, a Wool- worth’s, a dollar store, a whatever-the-name-says, but always cheap as cheap and always the kind of place you could get a Wiffle bat and ball but most likely not authentic Wiffle brand.

That’s not exactly what I am looking for, anyway. I find what I want, a sponge ball, orange, and an enormous fat bat, plastic but three times the strength of and about twelve times the barrel width of a Wiffle bat.

I buy four of those balls. Because I am feeling very jacked right now and some balls are going to go downtown.

Next thing, I am standing at home plate. I look out at the fence. How did it get so close? How did the whole field get so small? I feel like I could touch the left field foul pole with the tip of the bat. I played Little League and Babe Ruth League and hit a fair few long balls before I stopped respecting baseball enough to work hard and compete with the guys who did.

Da hated that. Hated it so much, the notion of being good enough at something but not giving it the proper respect. “Suck with dignity,” he said at the one game of mine he ever booed me and walked off from, “but don’t suck with apathy.”

Even when I was good, though, the fence always seemed so far away, such a tall order, not within my reach. Now I’m embarrassed that I ever felt that way.

Suddenly there is Da, on the mound. He has one orange ball in his right hand, one in his left, and two at his feet.

“You,” he says, long past the possibility of committing Jarrod’s name to memory, “out there and shag flies.”

“They are too small for me,” Jarrod says, giggling from the bench.

“Get out there and play some outfield,” Da shouts, and Jarrod jumps.

My cousin camps in center field, and Da waves him over to left. Farther. Farther.

“Come on,” Jarrod whines, “I’m going to have to run a long way if he hits it over there.”

“He won’t. He can’t. He was too lazy to learn to use the whole field. He could only pull and everyone knew it and that’s why he sucked.”

I laugh out loud. Jarrod laughs out loud. The pitcher himself turns in my direction and stares me down.

“Bring it, old man,” I say.

For someone of his age and limitations, Da’s windup and delivery are sweet, as they always were. He rears back, lifts the left knee up about ten inches, extends the left elbow straight at me, comes straight over the top with his right hand, and lets go of the ball at the optimal release point. Straight it comes.

It whistles in fast, and pap , smacks me right in the ear.

“Hey,” I shout, pointing the fat red bat in his direction. “You did that deliberately.”

“Of course I did. Get back in the box.”

I get back in the box, ready to swing. He winds up, unloads one straight and meaty in the middle of the strike zone. I am so excited, by the moment and the ball and the fence, that I swing so hard I pull a chest muscle; I feel it instantly.

I make contact, though, and the ball leaves the infield.

Dribbling harmlessly along the ground, then slowed by the tall grass, right to where Jarrod is waiting for it. He doesn’t even have to move.

The pitcher laughs. The left fielder laughs.

“Bring it, old man,” I say, because it has been a long time since I taunted a pitcher, so I am short on material.

He brings it.

“Ow.” I drop the bat. “Da, that really stings. If you do that again…”

He starts walking toward me, bouncing on the balls of his feet. I may have found the cure for old age here. “Yeah? You’ll what?”

He backs me down. “Nothing. Just pitch.”

“I will. But if you whine one more time, next thing I hit you with is a rock.”

I dig in silently. He winds up with the third ball.