The Bucket Behind the Backstop

Under the foil, beside the sandwiches, was a slice of pound cake. Stuck in the middle of it was a single birthday candle, the twisted kind, bent a little where the foil had pressed it. Next to it was a book of matches with Tippins Tire printed on the cover.

I stood there with my back to the field and that plate in my hands. Nobody had ever lit a candle for me. Not that I remembered.

I lit it. The wind put it out. I lit it again, turned my shoulder to the wind, and cupped it in both hands. I did not make a wish. I did not know what to wish for. I just watched it burn down a quarter inch.

Then I blew it out and ate the cake in four bites.

When I walked back out, Coach was on his bucket with his eyes on the pitcher’s mound. He had not turned his head. He looked like a man who had never in his life noticed a thing about me.

“Sixteen is when you get to drive,” he said, to the field.

That was all he ever said about it. I played that night like somebody had loaned me a different body.

Every summer that white truck was in Aunt Nell’s driveway the day school let out, and I went back to the sewing room and swept his shop floor. Aunt Nell stood on the porch with my duffel packed. She was handing me to the one place she knew I would be all right.

“A tire doesn’t care how your week went,” he told me once, standing over a rim I had mounted crooked. “You seat the bead right or you don’t. Do it again.”

I have heard that sentence in my head every working day for twenty-nine years.

By the spring of my sophomore year I was sixteen, six feet tall, and the starting catcher. And I was drowning.

A letter had come from Florida in March. My mother wrote that she and Jerry were moving on to Texas, and that it would not be a good time for a boy. She hoped I understood. She sent ten dollars folded in the card.

I understood perfectly. That was the trouble. Nobody was coming for me. The summers with Coach and Verdie were a lease and not a deed, and the day I turned eighteen the lease would run out.

I told Lyndon, because Lyndon was there.

Lyndon was not a bad boy. He was a lost one. He ran with a boy called Skeeter and a seventeen-year-old named Bo Larkin, and the three of them had found a way to make money that did not involve a paycheck.

There was a feed and seed store on the edge of Pelion Springs with a back warehouse full of copper wire and a welder worth more than my aunt’s car. Skeeter had a key.

“Four hundred a man,” Lyndon said. “Friday night, while the whole town’s at the ball game. In and out in forty minutes, and then we keep driving. Panama City, Cuz. Nobody’d ever know where you went.”

He needed a lookout and a driver. He said I had always been calm.

I said no. I said no for most of a week.

Then Friday came, a home game against Mitchell County. I woke that morning with a duffel bag already packed under my bed, and I do not remember deciding to pack it. I remember only that it was there.