The Bucket Behind the Backstop

I own four tire shops in three south Georgia counties and a house with a porch swing, and I owe all of it to a man who drove two hours to watch me catch a baseball, game after game, and never once asked why I needed him there.

I am forty-four years old, with a wife named Marla, a daughter in nursing school, and a set of books that has run in the black eleven years straight. None of that was supposed to happen to the boy I used to be.

Last Saturday I wrapped a five-gallon plastic bucket in a moving blanket, laid it in the bed of my truck like somebody’s good china, and drove two hours north to Sardis Mill, Georgia.

Tippins Tire and Alignment was closing after fifty-one years. The town was giving its owner a send-off in his own parking lot, with a fish fry and a bedsheet banner and a microphone he was going to hate.

The owner is Gaylon Tippins. He is seventy-nine years old. He had no idea I was coming.

There was a boy riding beside me, too. Fifteen years old, in a white shirt Marla had ironed twice and a necktie I tied for him in the driveway because nobody had ever shown him how. His name is Kyler. He had not said ten words since Tifton.

I will tell you about the bucket. I will tell you about the boy. But I have to start with who I was, because none of it makes sense without that.

I was thirteen the winter this began, and every adult in Sardis Mill whose job it was to write a child off had already written me.

I had been suspended from the middle school three times by February. Twice for my mouth, once for a fight, and once, which I am not proud of, for breaking into the concession stand at the ballfield and taking eleven dollars and a box of Zebra Cakes.

My mother, Charlene, worked nights at the poultry plant in the next county, forty minutes of two-lane road each way. She slept days. She was not a cruel woman. She was a tired one, and tired people choose whatever is quiet.

That winter the quiet came in the shape of a man named Jerry, who had moved into our trailer in the fall and did not care to share it with a teenager. My mother stood between us about two months. Then she stopped.

Jerry changed the lock in January. My mother worked nights. The arithmetic on that was not hard.

For most of that month I slept in the third base dugout at the county ballfield, in my coat, on a plywood bench, under a feed sack I found behind the concession stand. I ate peanut butter crackers and washed up at the spigot behind left field.

A freight train ran along the back of that field at ten past six every morning. It shook the dugout like a hand on my shoulder. After the first week I quit waking up for it.

On a Saturday in February I woke up for something else. A shadow lay across the bench. A man stood there with a push cart of white lime and a ball of string, looking at me the way you look at a stray dog you have not decided about.

I knew who he was. Gaylon Tippins owned the tire shop across the road, coached the Babe Ruth boys for free, and was the only man in Sardis Mill I had never heard anyone say a bad word about, which at thirteen I took to mean he was hiding something.