The Blues & Billie Armstrong 46
BATTING PRACTICE
Previously in The Blues & Billie Armstrong…
She looked like a candle moving away toward the dark. The moment gone, her shadow ducked back through the window to her room. I heard the wooden scrape of the window sliding shut. The light went out.
This is the part where she fights back.
I woke suddenly to some noise, a thud or something else that goes whump in the night and leaves quiet behind. All was darkness and the low hum of the civilized world. And this time I sat up, fully awake. I listened to the dark and strained my ears for information. From the kitchen, I heard the wall clock tick away a minute. The harvest gold refrigerator chanted om in its stately meditations. No more music drifting in under the window. No other sound.
I slid out of bed and stood naked on the rough plank flooring. Felt and sensed my way toward the window. Knocked one of the model cars off the sill—hopefully the red Mustang. My eyes adjusted and shapes of darkness announced themselves—edges defined by degrees of shadow. Some promise of dawn whispered timidly on the glass.
Billie had come to me through the window and gone back the same way, that memory was at least fresh if not certain. I tugged and slid the lower pane up, grimacing at the creak and scrape of the wood, not wanting to wake her but needing to check on her, needing to test reality.
I stuck my head in and saw my mother’s old clamshell travel clock on the nightstand next to the rollaway bed. Three a.m. it said with its glow-in-the-dark hands giving off just enough light to reveal the crumpled twist of empty sheets. Across the room, the other window, which faced the narrow sideyard, had been left slightly up, perhaps to invite the night air.
I thought I heard the thunk of a car door closing. I hurried on my cutoffs, a t-shirt, and Keds with no sox. I went out the front door and there was the Ford Fairlane still parked at the curb under the streetlight. It was empty, or at least Billie wasn’t behind the wheel. But her duffle bag lay across the back seat, and a tug in my stomach said she was packed to leave Lupoyoma City that night, for good. Forever.
There was nothing moving on Fourth Street. I went back in the house and tried the dayroom door. It was locked from the inside. I went out onto the back stoop. The three-quarter moon was now high and yellow in the west, lighting a path across the yard. The loose plank had been moved aside and the gap in the fence left open.
I wriggled through the fence into the same old dirty, empty parking lot of the Lupoyoma Yacht Club, Garfunkel and the Ferris Wheel now vanished, presumably on to the next town. I crossed the street to the edge of the park lawns and searched out at the shadows, unsure what I was hoping to see. One voice of me suddenly felt exhausted with dread and wanted only to return to the blue waves of my bed, to backfloat into heavy sleep. Another voice was frantic with the desperation of abandonment.
The carnival had evacuated, packed up and gone like it was married to the wind. The park lawns lay down in patterns of rectangles and connecting paths, trampled and dimly faded in the wake of the crowds, littered with crumpled paper cups and balled up food wrappers. The air was still and warm. In the dark absence of the music and the machines and all the mad chatter of the carnival, the slurp of water meeting the shore seemed impolite.
But ahead, in the aura of one of the park lights, a silhouette in the shape of a young woman was moving quickly across the lawns. I kept my distance and followed the shape I assumed was Billie, which cut across the park on a diagonal line, straight for the Weeping Willow archway, pulling away like a bus I couldn’t catch.
When she stepped out under the streetlight in front of the archway, it was her, no question—patchwork skirt, tank-top, combat boots, and my baseball bat in her right hand, held like a club. I didn’t yell out; the quiet and the darkness seemed to rule the night. I began to jog at first, thinking I could catch up to her before she did whatever she planned to do with that bat.
Inside the Weeping Willow, the world talked in its sleep. Transformers hemmed and hawed on telephone poles, midges gossiped under streetlights. Electric fans prattled next to windows, fathers snored in tents, and a breeze off the lake whistled in the willow trees.
Billie marched up ahead, down the middle of the one-lane blacktop, then turned up the long driveway to Trey Morgan’s trailer. She marched, and I scuttered along, leapfrogging between the shadows of trees on the edge of the lane, never close enough for her to hear my steps.
Hank’s Mustang was parked in front of Trey’s trailer, the red paint job shining in the moonlight. Billie headed straight for it, and I hid myself behind the trunk of a huge oak tree.
As she reached the Mustang she lifted the bat from her side. She coiled up the entire force of her body and smashed the bat down into the middle of the car’s windshield. The impact made a sound like popping the top on a shookup can of beer. Pwoosh. Then a crackling sound like the crumpling of brittle paper.
I froze against the tree. I almost called out to try and stop her, but the door to the trailer burst open and Hank suddenly stood on the front stoop—tan khakis, white sox, no shoes or shirt, fly open, wavering like a sleepy boy.
“Jesus Christ, what the hell,” he said, and then, “Oh no. You bitch. You little bitch.” He started down the porch stairs.
“Stay where you are.” She took a big swing at one of the headlights and it popped and shattered, shards of glass splashing to the dirt. She brandished the bat like a warning.
Hank stood still. “That’s enough goddammit!” Then more calmly, like he was the rational adult on the scene, “You’re making too much out of this, Billie. Just put the bat down, walk away and there won’t be any trouble.”
“No, Hank. You’re not getting off that easy.”
He looked to his left and right as if searching for a witness. Or a weapon. Billie wound up for another smash, but something inside the Mustang caught her eye, and she checked her swing. She reached in through the driver’s side window, pulled out Hank’s keys, the Playboy bunny charm dangling from the ring. She jingled the keys in the air.
Hank clenched his fists and sucked in air like smelling salts. “I’m warning you, don’t fuck with me.”
Billie rested the bat on her shoulder with one hand and walked down the length of the car. You could hear the key cutting a deep gash into the paint job, the red paint flaking away.
“That’s it.” Hank said. He leapt off the stairs and bounded toward her, but in the shadowy moonlight, he must’ve stepped on some of the headlight glass. He cried out and went down to a knee.
Billie slipped the keys into the pocket of her skirt, turned and started running away.
“You fucking whore,” Hank hollered after her. “I’ll kill you, goddammit!”
She ran back the way she came. Hank stood, quickly tested his foot, and started after her like a stud relief pitcher called in to snuff out a late inning rally—measured strides, chest out, fists pumping.
I held my breath and flattened myself against the crusty bark of the oak tree as each of them pounded by in the street. He would catch her eventually. Hank could probably run for an hour at that speed, even with the cut. Billie could not.
I followed them, lagging behind, shadow to shadow again, not running but fast-walking and sometimes jogging, but never making enough noise to turn Hank’s head. Blood churned at my temples, a wet drumming pulse shot through with static, a sound like the recording of an unborn baby’s heartbeat.
Billie ran through the parking lot, under the oak tree archway and cut across the street. I could tell, even from thirty yards behind, she was headed for Preacher’s Alley, and Hank was gaining fast.
I picked up my pace, Billie disappeared up the alley, then Hank. I heard a sharp, short scream and then a scuffle and thump and what I heard as a grunt of surprise, followed by a wooden clatter. I thought she’d either dropped the bat or thrown it aside. I pictured it cartwheeling down the concrete passage and rolling to a stop against one of the buildings. Maybe she thought she could run faster without it. Maybe she threw it at Hank to slow him down.
Some semblance of relief hit me that this bat I had spent so many hours with should be cast out of this particular game. It was part of Hank and part of me, and I didn’t want it to be part of this. Right then I wanted to go down to the shoreline and hit rocks out over the lake, and listen to the sound of the stones punching holes in the water. I didn’t want to wear a gray suit or play in the big leagues or know any woman’s secrets. I wanted to stand by the lake and play ballgames in my head.
I took several more quick strides across the street and turned into the opening of the corridor. I saw the cowering shape of Billie rise from the pavement and stagger out onto Main Street. She did not look back.
Hank stood near the end of the passageway, wobbly on rubber legs, and this time he heard me and jerked his head around.
He pivoted to face me and pulled his head back as if sizing up the unexpected. His face all a question and the yellow moon over his shoulder.
The Blues & Billie Armstrong is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents in this book are either the product of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance of the fictional characters to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
© All Rights Reserved