And it was definitely her. Shoes over her shoulder, gum going in her mouth, nose still zinced, jean shorts over her one-piece, the whole deal.
I timed it perfect, getting back to the box, was wound up to launch this ball just at the point when she’d be closest to me.
So of course Les threw it high.
I could see it coming a mile away, how he’d tried to knuckle it, had lost it on the downsling like he always did, so there was maybe even a little arc to the ball’s path. Not that it mattered, it was too high to swing at, but still—now or never, right? This is what all my planning had come down to.
I stepped back, crowding Theodore, who was already leaned forward to catch the ball when it dropped, and I swung at a ball that was higher than my shoulders, a ball my dad would have already been turning away from in disgust, and knew the instant my bat cracked into it that there wasn’t going to be any lift, that it was a line drive, an arrow I was shooting out, blind. One I was going to have to run faster than, somehow.
Still, even though I didn’t scoop under it like I would have liked, and even though I was making contact with it earlier than I would have wanted, I gave it every last thing I had, gave it everything I’d learned, everything I had to gamble.
And it worked. The cover flapping behind it just like a comet tail, it was a thing of beauty.
Les being Les, of course he bit the dirt to get out of the way, and Gerald and Rory—second and short—nearly hit each other, diving for what they knew was a two-run hit. A ball that wasn’t even going to skip grass until—
Until left field, yeah.
Until Michael T.
And, if you’re thinking he raised his glove here, that some long-forgotten reflex surfaced in his zombie brain for an instant, then guess again.
Dead or alive, he would have done the same thing: just stood there like the dunce he was.
Only, now, his face was kind of spongy, I guess.
The ball splatted into his left eye socket, sucked into place, stayed there, some kind of dark juice burping from his ears, trickling down along his jaw, the cover of the ball pasted to his cheek.
For a long moment we were all quiet, all holding our breaths—this was like hitting a pigeon with a pop-fly—and then, of everybody, I was the only one to hear Amber Watson stop on the sidewalk, look from the ball back to me, exactly like I’d planned.
I smiled, kind of shrugged, and then Gerald called it in his best umpire voice: “Out!”
I turned to him, my face going cold, and everybody in the infield was kind of shrugging that, yeah, the ball definitely hadn’t hit the ground. No need to burn up the baseline.
“But, but,” I said, pointing out to Michael T with my bat, to show how obvious it was that that wasn’t a catch, that it didn’t really count, and then Rory and Theodore and Les all started nodding that Gerald was right. Worse, now the outfield was chanting: “Mi-chael, Mi-cheal, Mi-chael.” And then my own dugout fell in, clapping some Indian whoops from their mouths to memorialize what had happened here, today. How I was the only one who could have done it.
But I wasn’t out.
Michael T wasn’t even a real player, was just a body we’d propped up out there.
I looked back to Amber Watson and could tell she was just waiting to see what I was going to do here, waiting to see what was going to happen.
So I showed her.
I charged the mound, and, when Les sidestepped, holding his hands up and out like a bullfighter, I kept going, bat in hand, held low behind me, Rory and Gerald each giving me room as well, so that by the time I got out to left field I was running.
“You didn’t catch it!” I yelled to Michael T, singlehandedly trying to ruin my whole summer, wreck my love life, trash my reputation—“Even a zombie can get him out”—and I swung for the ball a second time.
Instead of driving it off the T his head was supposed to be, I thunked it deeper, into his brain, I think, so that the rest of him kind of spasmed in a brainstemmy way, the bat shivering out of my hands so I had to let it go. And, because I hadn’t planned ahead—charging out of the box isn’t exactly about thinking everything through, even my dad would cop to this—the follow-through of my swing, it wrapped me up into Michael T’s dead arms, and we fell together, me first.
And, like everything else since Les’s failed knuckle ball, it took forever to happen. Long enough for me to hear that little lopsided plastic ball rattling in Amber Watson’s whistle right before she set her feet and blew it. Long enough for me to see the legs of a single fly, following us down. Long enough for me to hear my chanted name stop in the middle.
This wasn’t just a freak thing happening, anymore.
We were stepping over into legend, now.
Because the town was always on alert these days, Amber Watson’s whistle was going to line the fence with people in under five minutes, and now everybody on the field and in the dugout, they were going to be witness to this, were each going to have their own better vantage point to tell the story from.
Meaning, instead of me being the star, everybody else would be.
And, Amber Watson.
It hurt to even think about.
We were going to have a special bond, now, sure, but not the kind where I was ever going to get to buy her a spirit ribbon. Not the kind where she’d ever tell me to quit smoking, because it was bad for me.
If I even got to live that long, I mean. If the yearbook staff wasn’t already working my class photo onto the casualties page.
I wasn’t there yet, though.
This wasn’t the top of a rocket, I mean.
Sure, I was on my back in left field, and Michael T was over me, pinning me down by accident, the slobber and blood and brain juice stringing down from his lips, swinging right in front of my face so that I wanted to scream, but I could still kick him away, right? Lock my arms against his chest, keep my mouth closed so nothing dripped in it.
All of which would have happened, too.
Except for Les.
He’d picked up the bat that I guess I’d dragged through the chalk between second and third, so that, when he slapped it into the side of Michael T’s head, a puff of white kind of breathed up. At first I thought it was bone, powdered skull—the whole top of Michael T’s rotted-out head was coming off—but then there was sunlight above me again, and Les was hauling me up, and, on the sidewalk, Amber Watson was just staring at me, her whistle still in her mouth, her hair still wet enough to have left a dark patch on the canvas of the sneakers looped over her shoulder.
I put two of my fingers to my eyebrow like I’d seen my dad do, launched them off in salute to her, and in return she shook her head in disappointment. At the kid I still obviously was. So, yeah, if you want to know what it’s like living with zombies, this is it, pretty much: they mess everything up. And if you want to know why I never went pro, it’s because I got in the habit of charging the mound too much, like I had all this momentum from that day, all this unfairness built up inside. And if you want to know about Amber Watson, ask Les Moore—that’s his real, stupid name, yeah. After that day he saved my life, after Les became the real Indian because he’d been the one to scalp Michael T, he stopped coming to the diamond so much, started spending more time at the pool, his hair bleaching in the sun, his reflexes gone, always thirty-five cents in his trunks to buy a lifeguard a lemonade if she wanted.
And she did, she does.
And, me? Some nights I still go to the old park, spiral up to the top of the rocket with a “Bury the Tomahawk” or “Circle the Wagons” spirit ribbon, and I let it flutter a bit through the grimy bars before letting it go, down through space, down to the planet I used to know, miles and miles from here.