NIRVANA
By Jeff S. Martindale
 

An imposing, stormy gray fence surrounded the bleachers like a powerful sentry.  No way would Owen scale it.  But he did; he couldn’t resist.  Only Landon had that effect on him—simultaneously pushing and arousing him.

Landon of course saw nothing wrong with it.  He probably wouldn’t admit it if he did.

“What I love about this field,” Landon said in a voice equal in tone to a mother’s smile, “is that it’s got a short left field porch. Easier to hit a homer that way.” He scaled the fence and before throwing his legs over the top gazed down at Owen with wide brown eyes and a silly grin. The twinkle in his eyes comforted Owen that he was just being Landon.

“You couldn’t hit one if you tried,” Owen said jokingly.

“Mmm hmm,” replied Landon.  This response always made Owen wonder whether he was humoring him, as Landon often did. Owen sighed away the uncertainty, which made him more uneasy.

Once inside, Owen stood looking with unveiled anxiety from Landon to the road. A kaleidoscope of colorful advertisements covered the old wooden outfield fence.  Standing on home plate, one needed a titanic swing to drive a ball over the fence for the prize, or so they perceived. No one-hundred-thirty-seven-pound, stick-armed boy like himself had ever succeeded, Owen thought.  Of course Landon wanted to try, and he always involved another in his impulses.

Owen wasn’t even athletic really.  Life had cursed him with a small stature, feeble muscles, and an unequivocal lack of hand-eye coordination, but he loved baseball with a passion. He craved the adrenaline rush from hitting a ball over a fence. He could often be found launching whiffleballs over the neighbor’s picket fence bordering their modest backyard.  He was in precarious transition that fall from the provincial status of youth to the virtue of manhood.  The grade above, high school freshmen, neophytes, practically men, rushed ahead of him to locker-lined hallways and maturity, to late-night cruising and advanced make-out sessions in the darkness of their cars. He and Landon were only minutes before playing video games and seeing who could stuff the most marshmallows in his mouth without gagging.  

Until Landon got this idea.

They stood looking at the field: one look of exhilaration, the other of trepidation.  As much as Owen loved home run derby, he was equally passionate about avoiding trouble with his father.  They had always played with tennis balls on the field behind the elementary school.  Never before had they sneaked into the high school park, where Owen and Landon had watched games since they were six and dreamed about wearing real uniforms with their names on their backs. “Do you want to bat first?” Landon asked.  In response Owen made a kind of acerbic half snort that he thought an annoyed shrug might sound like, as if to say, I don’t care.  He looked blankly back at Landon, who turned his blue Dodgers cap backwards and, with bat in hand, went for the baseball in his pants pocket.  “You pitch,” Landon said, tossing Owen the ball.  “I’ll bat first.”

For such an undistinguished athlete, Landon possessed physical advantages Owen only dreamed about. Landon pushed a hundred seventy pounds, which adhered indifferently to his spindly legs, thin torso, and right-angled shoulders. He towered over Owen at six feet two inches. Owen had been asserting every bit of his sixty-sixth inch, but Landon had once said in front of their friends with that plain, disturbing honesty of his, “Yeah, right. You’re five-six and I’m Donkey Kong.”  

Landon began digging a foothold in the red clay, his chaotic leg movements reminding Owen of an African tribal dance he once saw on National Geographic Explorer.  Landon’s bat seemed too small and frail to propel a ball past even the pitcher’s mound, where Owen mindlessly juggled a ball waiting for Landon to finish his tibial gesticulations.  Owen’s mind darted between thoughts of handcuffs, jailhouse food, and the length of his father’s belt hanging behind the closet door, forever awaiting the moment to excise more flesh from his bare buttocks.  At last Landon struck a pose. He looked vaguely like Pete Rose.

“Throw me your best one.”  

Owen didn’t know whether he had one.  

“If I go first, you’ll go next, won’t you?”

Owen said nothing distinctly.

“Well,” Landon cried out, “let’s see if I still got it,” and he took a mighty practice swing, fell out of balance, and slung himself to the ground in a dusty cloud.

“Dammit!” he mumbled, bobbing immediately to his feet, his sweaty cap screwed halfway back to its proper position.  “Throw the ball already, Owen.”

The diamond inundated Owen with a sense of consternation.  His hands trembled and his legs began to feel cruelly unstable. The nebulous din from the nearby street came to him as though murky and foreboding. The wooden bat Landon held now looked bigger than before and much more potent.  Owen knew he couldn’t throw a small orb past something so massive. Emboldened by the anxiety, Owen wound back his arm and threw the ball as hard as he could, ready to dive behind the pitching mound or risk having red seams forever branded on his narrow forehead.

“C’mon, man,” complained Landon, lobbing the ball back to Owen, “throw one I can hit.”  Owen’s first effort landed well short of home plate, and he gauged with acute chagrin that sixty feet six inches looked very expansive from here.  “When Clemens pitches,” Landon advised, “he just rears back and throws.”

Why am I here anyway? Owen thought. Why do I let Landon talk me into these risky things?

“Throw it, Owen!”

With the thought that he was throwing his life away, Owen hurled the ball toward home. Twinges of pain tickled his elbow and he watched Landon’s bat make acquaintance with the ball.  It rose skyward and landed on the soft carpet of grass behind second base, and contiguously Landon commended Owen for his efforts.

“Good pitch, Yokley,” said Landon, after scolding himself for such a trivial swing.  He spoke in his affable, temperate voice.  “Don’t think you’re Pedro Martinez just yet.  I’m still getting warmed up.”

Owen closed his eyes as if permanently.  He didn’t debate or withdraw.  He became insensate.  But Landon prepared to hit again, fidgeting within the batter’s box such that when he shook one of his body parts all the rest of them inclined to join in.

“It’s just you and me, pal,” Landon said, not to Owen but to the ball in his right hand.  “You’re going yard this time.”  They stared at each other across the twenty yards of earth, imploring the other like dueling six shooters.

Landon was Owen’s best friend at that moment.

“You’re enjoying this; I can tell,” said Landon pleasingly. “Aren’t you glad I dragged you here?”

“You didn’t drag me here.”

“Sure I did,” he said.  Owen thought Landon might be screwing with him—as an insecure boy, Owen spent a lot of time suspecting other people were screwing with him—but he detected not an inkling of derision in Landon’s expression or tone.  That didn’t necessarily mean, however, that Landon wasn’t screwing with him.

“You’re better for it that I did,” Landon continued, waggling the bat for the hundredth time.  “You’d be sitting at home playing video games—by yourself—if I didn’t.”

“No, I wouldn’t!” Owen shrieked, though he knew Landon was right.  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Just throw the ball, Sally.  One more then it’s your turn.”

Landon walked around the batter’s box, or rather marched around it, pacing in his Chuck Taylor’s such that ‘walk’ didn’t characterize it.

“It’s almost dinnertime,” Owen announced, looking at his Luke Skywalker watch.  “We should go.”

Landon lowered his arms and the bat barrel struck the plate with a thud. He looked at Owen with an expression halfway between sympathy and protest, the way you look at a homeless man who wakes up to find that he has lost his raincoat.

“Okay,” Landon sighed, returning his cap to the proper position.  “Let’s go.”

Owen walked beside him across the street and through the vast soccer fields that bordered their neighborhood. Dust powdered the droughty brown grass under their feet, and they could smell brown smog hugging the ground, distorting the twilight sun.  They walked in silence, and, freed from the anxiety of certain imprisonment, Owen could now hear the everyday sounds of summer.  Croaking frogs. Chirping birds. A mother calling her children to dinner. A sputtering jalopy bounding along the street behind them. And then over all, literally and figuratively, artificial and displaced, the engine roar of an airplane departing for destination unknown.

The rumble swept through the swaying summits of the oaks, the ample flat roof and building-length windows of the elementary school, and over the open Tennessee heavens to them returning from the ball field.  Owen’s pace quickened as he didn’t want to be late for dinner lest he subject his bottom to unnecessary abuse. He looked at Landon, who returned his gaze with a wink, shaping his bookish face into a mischievous smile that meant something like What’s the rush? and Owen refunded him an anxious scowl that meant something like Get your butt in gear. Landon absorbed the message, and quickly picked up the pace.

Landon didn’t really disrespect authority in general, but contemplated life without pushing the envelope an unbearable proposition, where happiness became trapped in a black hole with no prospects for escape. Landon took great pleasure in hindering Owen’s progress; first with his left leg thrust before his strides to block his way, then with a pointed elbow jabbed in his ribs.  “I gotta get home,” Owen shouted, running now.  He put some distance between them but Landon quickly made up the difference, pushing Owen to the ground, where he landed in a cloud of dust.  “Owen’s gonna be late for dinner,” he said, playfully, “and his daddy’s gonna be reeeeallly mad.”  

They started running again, faster; the fear in Owen’s gut imploring him to speed up, and then Landon grabbed at Owen’s shirt with his bony fingers.  As they jogged swiftly onward Owen greatly condemned the ball field and his awkward gait and the rush to be home for dinner.  He’s right, Owen thought.  And Owen’s evidenced his agreement by jabbing an elbow into Landon’s ribs, surprising him, and he fell instantaneously, visibly delighted. When Owen kicked dirt on Landon’s clothes, sweat dripping from their chins, they frolicked in brotherhood’s nirvana.  They skirmished in some mock war for a while, and called a truce when it was certain the dinnertime curfew had been violated.

They went out of their way to cross the creek via the old wooden footbridge and went on toward the first row of houses, set close to but not quite touching its neighbors. They passed the quaint Kreighbaum’s house—she was hosting another meeting of her sewing club, then the Clowney’s—they had taken their kids to Disneyworld, and the Yendrek’s, the Oeding’s, and the house where the black family recently moved in, where they always left a porch light on.  They strolled around a gentle curve and into the well-maintained cul-de-sac, where the setting sun cast prolonged, bending shadows on the small boxy houses.  A few toddlers frolicked in the street after dinner, and a baby rattle from the hand of one youngster supplemented their gibberish.  The orange sky was uniformly drowning, which brought up the street lights and porch lights and den lamps in the old houses; a warbled radio broadcasted Take Me Out to the Ball Game, invariably in advance of the evening’s Cardinals game.

They went to their homes—Landon’s three doors down from Owen’s.  Under the watchful gleam of the floodlight, Owen carefully opened the rackety screen door and slithered to his room, silently praying his father wouldn’t hear him.  Under the gentle luminescence of the twilight glow, he snuggled onto the bed and rested with his hands behind his head.  His radio, too low to be detected outside the room, played Saturday in the Park before he adjusted it to the game.  Outside Owen heard a whispering timely rhythm of the breeze; the toddlers, allowed out later when the weather was pleasant, went reasonably peacefully back as the mothers pulled them by their tiny arms.  Owen kicked off his shoes and resumed the repose, crossing his legs at the ankles atop a pile of dirty clothes. The time for the first pitch had arrived, and Owen was silently pleased that the Cardinals started their ace pitcher, for they were in second place, only a handful of games out of first, and badly needed a win if they wanted any shot at the pennant.