The Bucket Behind the Backstop

I told Coach Annis at lunch that I had a stomach bug and could not catch. He looked at me a while and told me to go home and rest. I did not go home. At four o’clock I stood at the fence beside the parking lot, in my street clothes, with the duffel over my shoulder.

Lyndon’s truck idled at the far end of the lot, the one with the blue door. Skeeter and Bo sat in the cab beside him. They meant to ride around until dark.

I had one foot out on the gravel. I want you to understand how close it was. I had already walked twenty steps toward that truck.

That was when a white Ford pulled in behind the backstop.

Gaylon Tippins got out in his work shirt with the plate in one hand and the bucket in the other, same as every game since the first. He started toward his spot behind home plate.

Then he stopped.

He looked at me, standing in blue jeans at the edge of a ballgame with no catcher’s gear on. He looked at the duffel on my shoulder. He looked down the lot, at a Chevy with a blue door and three boys in it.

I have thought about that look for twenty-eight years and never once been able to read it.

He walked over. He did not hurry. He held out the plate.

“Verdie fried you a chicken leg,” he said. “Hate for it to go cold.”

I took it. I could not think what else to do with my hands.

He nodded once. Then he turned his back on me, walked to the backstop, and set the bucket upside down in the gravel. He sat with his back to the parking lot and his face to the field, and he did not look around again.

I understand it now. I did not then. He had decided he was not going to watch me choose.

I stood there holding a hot plate. Behind me Lyndon leaned on the horn. A short one and a long one.

I did not turn around. My feet did something I had not told them to do. They carried me across the gravel and through the gate and into the dugout, where Coach Annis was writing out the lineup.

“Stomach’s better,” I said.

He looked at me. He looked at the duffel. He did not ask. He put my name in at number four, and I caught seven innings against Mitchell County and could not tell you one pitch.

Behind the backstop, an old man sat on a bucket and watched.

Sometime in the third inning I heard the Chevy leave. It had a loose exhaust. You could hear it from the field, going away down the highway, until you could not.

The next morning Aunt Nell came into my room before light, still in her scrubs, her face gone gray.

Deputies had been waiting at the feed store. Somebody had tripped a silent alarm. Lyndon and Skeeter were caught with a hand truck full of copper at ten past nine. Bo Larkin ran and was picked up in a ditch.

The deputies asked about the lookout. There had been a lookout, they said. Someone to watch the road. Someone who had not shown.

Lyndon never said my name. Not to the deputies, not to the lawyer, not to the judge. He got three years in state prison, and I have thought about that every week of my adult life.

I went into the bathroom and was sick.