Ballpark

The leaves had turned, some early jumpers blew down the sidewalks, others congregating in corners whispering that Winter was near. Lucinda looked again at her friend and saw the lines in his face, his perfectly combed hair grey as this mornings sky. After a moment he went on.

"I made his acquaintance early, he came for Gary Garrett when we were just boys. We used to walk over to the ball park after school, a bunch of us. You could climb up on the center field wall where the flag pole was ... we'd hold the rope- you know, the one used to raise the flag - jump from the wall and swing around and land again on the other side. Like pirates I guess, hell it was a small town".

He smiled a sad smile without looking up. She knew Ethan as well as anyone, and she saw it coming. On rare occasions he would get just the right combination of booze and weed, the planets would align, and he would be real. Completely honest, naked of pretext, he would show no hint of the other, of "True Blue". She always took it as a sort of miracle, a message from the universe to her, these brief transformations from asshole to oracle.

"Gary's daddy used to beat his ass. It was the first serious thing I ever knew about in my whole life. My first secret. We were in the 7th grade when Gary pulled his shirt up in the boys bathroom and showed me, told me about things worse than that, then made me swear not to tell. It made me want to throw up. Then it wasn't two weeks later it happened, when we walked to the ballpark after school that day. There were probably six or eight of us fooling around. Lots of times we'd spend an hour or so then each of us breaking off, or maybe in pairs, we'd walk on home. We'd been there swinging, whooping, forgetting anything but our pirate play. Taking swings in turn, all of us in line on that eight inch wide wall. It was thrilling, like flying or something. It wasn't really very dangerous though, you could let go half way out and land pretty easily in soft well kept grass. We'd all done it. Or when you came back to the wall swinging your feet up to catch, the others would reach out and grab you. This day though Gary looked at us and joked 'I gotta get home or my ol man is gonna beat my ass", and it passed as exaggeration but he and I locked eyes as he took his grip on the thin rope. I was nearly sick again right there. He took off, dropped halfway out in the arc waved and turned to walk away."

Lucinda sat silent, anxious at where the story seemed to go. Blue stared, still, at the snuff glass he drank from, rolling a final drop round and round, working his wrist in a pitched circle. Niether breathed for a moment. Finally he spoke.

"The flag pole snapped."

He raised his eyes looking for a bottle. It was empty. He half reached anyway, then lowered his hand and gaze.

"It didn't make any sense, still doesn't. The flag pole snapped and broke and fell in a perfectly straight line, hitting him right in the head. It doesn't make any sense how precise it seemed. I puked and someone ran to get a grown up. It didn't make sense at first, but I met Death early. And worse I met Evil just a few days before. It's a tough lesson for a 7th grader that sometimes Death is an escape from Evil. That sometimes it ain't something you can be afraid of. "