Esther M. Friesner - Jesus at Bat.pdf - Esther Friesner - margozap

ESTHER M. FRIESNER

JESUS AT THE BAT

PHILIP ROTH HAD ALREADY written The Great American Novel; Victor Harris was

screwed. If you're going to be successful with the writing thing you have to

write about what you know, and the only thing Victor Harris really knew was

baseball. (He thought he knew sex, but that's another story.) The only

question

remaining was: How much longer would he be able to keep up the sweet,

unstressful position of sensitive, creative, Aspiring-Author/ Househusband

(without actually becoming Published Author/Househusband) before Barb, his

wife,

caught wise?

He kept a copy of Stephen King's Playboy interview prominently displayed in

the

small basement cubby that was his "office," the better to remind Barb of at

least one loyal lady who'd held down a decidedly unfun job (Dunkin' Donuts)

while hubby mud-wrestled with the Muse until he hit pay dirt. Stand by your

man,

it seemed to say, and soon you shall limo beside him. Cast your sugar crullers

upon the waters and they shall be returned unto you an hundredfold as caviar.

But the interview was curling with age faster than Victor's first rejection

slip

(also prominently displayed: it was from the New Yorker and had the

distinction

of sporting an actual, human, hand-written note of comment scrawled in the

margin, viz.: "Sorry." Whether this referred to the rejecting editor's regrets

or the manuscript's quality was best left nebulous) and Barb was starting to

get

the hard-bitten, narrow look of a ten-year-old facing off against parents who

persist in chirping about Santa. Not good.

So the King interview was a life-vest whose kapok molecules were rapidly

metamorphosing into cesium. Victor told himself that many a good woman of

Barb's

generation would be grateful to have a fulfilling multiphase career as

aesthetician by day, Amway rep by night, but Barb didn't see it that way. Why

didn't she appreciate the stresses of the Art? Why must he cringe each time

she

demanded, "Haven't you sold anything yet?" or "Why don't you go down to Four

Comers Used Cars and see if Jerry'll give you your old job back?" or "Why in

bell did you ever major in English? Everyone around here speaks it already."

Useless to attempt explaining the creative nature to such a scrawny soul.

Futile

to preach the exquisitely painful yet glacial process of inspiration,

motivation, and execution in l'oeuvre Harris to the heathen. None so blind as

they who will not see themselves vacationing in Hawaii this year -- again! --

and the Millers next door have already gone four times!

Of the bricks of such marital differences are the divorce courts of this fair

nation built. So, too, the occasional ax-murder-with-P.M.S.-defense case. On

the

surface it would seem that a miracle would be necessary to save Victor Harris'

neck from the chop. That was where the Brothers' Meeting Little League came

in.

No, really.

And that was why, with luck, there would forever be one less used car salesman

at Four Comers and never a moment's peace for the Harris family at the Sharon

Valley Regional Elementary School P.T.A. spring picnic.

"Barb, hon, you look just gorgeous!" Sally McClellan swept down on Barb like a

tornado on a trailer park.

The McClellans and the Harrises didn't usually move in the same circles.

Victor

Harris moved in circles pretty constantly, while Phil McClellan moved solely

a steep, straight line of ascent to the windswept heights of financial success

whence he might safely piss on the upturned faces of those below.

However, when the first sweet shoots of spring green burst through the hard

Sharon Valley earth, Phil McClellan graciously maintained temporary bladder

control so far as Victor's face went. As he told The Little Woman, if kissing

Victor Harris' skinny ass was called for to achieve your goals, then by God

and

Ted Turner Industries, Phil McClellan would take a back seat to no one when it

came to posterior pucker-ups. The Little Woman conducted herself accordingly

regarded Mrs. Victor Harris' more shapely buns, indeed.

Barb was nobody's fool except Victor's and he'd had to marry her for that

privilege. She knew just what Sally was after and she sat back on the picnic

table bench with all the smirking superiority of a Renaissance prince

contemplating where to insert his next dagger. "Sally, darling" she purred.

Cheeks brushed. Kissy-kissy mwah-mwahs were uttered. "When are you gonna come

around to the La Belle so I can get my hands on your hair?" (La Belle being

the

town aesthetorium where Barb currently aestheted.)

Sally gave a nervous little giggle and fluffed her golden pour of curls with

apparent need. "Oh, I'll be around. I don't think I'm due for a trim just

yet."

"Every six weeks." Relentless, that was Barb in the spring. "And I know I

haven't seen you since last September." Somewhere a ghostly poniard glittered.

"I hear tell you've been going up to Pittsburgh to have it done." Zzzip-zot, a

slender blade slipped in and out between Sally McClellan's spareribs without

The

Little Woman feeling anything but a draft tickling her pancreas.

Sally turned bright red. "Who told you that?"

"Marylynn Drummer." Barb's eyes were hooded and inscrutable, but she licked

her

lips to savor the taste of blood.

"Well, it's just a baldfaced lie!" Sally spat. "When did she say so?"

"Mmmm, hard to recall." Barb sucked a few last crimson drops off the tip of

her

index finger. "I see her so often. Every week she's in the La Belie for a

shampoo and blow-dry at least. She's got a standing appointment." It was time

for the coup de grace, the mercy stroke to end the victim's misery but good.

"Sometimes she even brings in little Bobby, and you would be amazed to see how

that boy has grown. Why, just the other day Vic was saying to me, 'Barb, I'd

like to see what Bobby Drummer could do if I gave him a chance to pitch, I

really would.'"

It was all over except for where to ship the body.

Sally McClellan's face sank in on itself like an old helium balloon with a

pinhole leak. "Isn't that interesting," she said through a smile so stiff it

clattered. "But do you think it's wise? My Jason has always pitched for the

Bobcats, and I assumed --"

Barb laughed. "It's not like Vic was breaking up a winning team set-up,

sweetie.

Who knows? If Vic gives Bobby a chance to pitch, maybe that'll turn the trick.

And you should have seen Bobby's little face light up when I told him what

Coach

Vic was considering."

"Considering? Then it's not settled?" Sally's eyes flashed. She fingered her

hair. "You know, it's so easy to let yourself go over the winter, don't you

agree, Barb? Maybe I should take a lesson off Marylynn Drummer. You got room

for

another standing appointment on your calendar?"

"I'll see what I can do," Barb murmured. "Of course it is harder to fit things

in these days. Did I tell you that Pauline Fleck's having me host an Amway

party

at her family reunion?" Needless to say, Barb went on to rhapsodize over how

much dear little Scott Fleck had grown this past winter and didn't Sally agree

that the boy deserved a tryout as pitcher for the Bobcats, too?

That night, Victor didn't have to listen to Barb's barbs about where he was on

the stairway to success and where he ought to be. Happily swamped with pleas

for

La Belle and Amway appointments (high tips and high sales guaranteed, you

betcha), Barb had better things to do with her tongue than rag on the man

whose

chronic underemployment made his Little League coaching job possible. Yes,

baseball season was upon them once more, and so long as Victor owned the power

to say whose son played (and whether the boy's field position were somewhere

this time-zone), domestic bliss and Barb's own auburn-turfed diamond were his

all his.

Nor did it matter a lick that the Brothers' Meeting Bobcats were a team so

slack

and poorly that a reputable publisher of dictionaries had asked them to pose

the illustration for pathetic.

No, it didn't matter to Coach Vic at all, but it mattered very much to Vic

Junior.

Vic Junior loved baseball. He was one of those pure souls born with a vision

The Game untainted by the dross and illusion of this sorry world. To him,

baseball spoke of Buddha-nature, not Lite Beer. (The Tao which can be named is

not the Tao, but the Tao which has its batting stats printed on the back of a

trading card is way awesome.) I The smell of a newly oiled glove, the clean

crack of bat hitting ball, the sight of so many strong, young lads tearing

around the bases in those tight-fitting pants, all moved him in ways he could

not yet hang a name on. It was a source of spiritual pain to him that his team

so seldom won.

It was a pain less spiritual every time Jase McClellan knocked him down in the

school yard and taunted him with the fact that he wouldn't be on the Bobcats

team at all if not for the fact that his old man was the coach.

Vic Junior could have tattled on Jase, but he was what adults called a good

child. In other words, there were sponges adorning the ocean floor who had

backbone than he. He went to church without a fuss and riven listened to what

his Sunday school teacher had to relate of Hell. He tithed his allowance not

because his mother made him but in the sure and certain hope that he was

making

time payments on one colossal, outsize, super-mega-omniprayer of his own

asking

being answered some day. He wasn't sure what he was going to request when he

finally submitted his sealed bid to Glory, but he knew it would be something

much better than just asking God to burn Jase McClellan in the fiery pit until

his eyeballs melted and his hair frizzled away and the skin on his face

blackened and cracked and flaked from the charting bones and his dick fell

off.

And then, one day, something happened. Who knows how these things get started?

So much depends on serendipity. Pharaoh's daughter might have kept on walking

when she heard that wailing in the bulrushes. "Just one of the sacred cats

being

devoured by one of the sacred crocodiles," she'd say with a shrug of her sweet

brown shoulders, and Charlton Heston's resume would have been several pages

shorter.

What serendipped in this case was Vic Junior came into La Belle to see his

Morn

and by some karmic radar happened to find the one copy of Sports Illustrated

the whole establishment. Like a crow among the lilies it reposed in dog-cared

splendor amidst the issues of Woman's Day and Mademoiselle and Good

Housekeeping. Last desperate refuge of the male compelled for whatever unholy

cause to accompany his woman into the lair of glamor, its well-thumbed antique

pages gave moving testimony that a man will submerge himself in last year's

sports "news" sooner than he will open a copy of Cosmopolitan to willingly

read

"Impotence: Things Are Looking Up."

"Mom!" Vic Junior cried, bursting in on his hardworking parent, waving the

tattered magazine. "More, did you see this?"

Barb was giving Edna Newburgh a streak job. More couldn't see much of anything

for all the ammonia fumes peeling her eyeballs raw. "Don't bother Mommy now,

sweetheart," she said testily.

"But Mom, look! There's an article in here about how the American Little

League

champions got to go to Japan!" Vic Junior was insistent. Despite the noxious

atmosphere he jiggled closer to Edna Newburgh's reeking head and thrust the

magazine under his mother's nose.

"So what's that to you? Champions means winners. I said not now!" Barb

snapped,

flipping the open copy out of Vic Junior's hands with one jab of her elbow.

(That she could do this at all was mute testimony to the worthiness of Vic

Junior's team nickname, "Wimpgrip Harris.") Like some monstrous mutant

butterfly, the magazine took wing and fluttered to the hair-strewn floor.

Giving his mother a cold you'll-be-sorry-when-I-grow-up-to-be-a-cross-dresser

eye, Vic Junior gathered up his treasure, brushed clots of brown, black,

blonde,

and red tresses from the slick pages, and retreated to his chair in the

waiting

area.

He didn't need her to tell him what champions meant. It was a fishbone of

resentment lodged deep in his throat, proof against all psychological Heimlich

maneuvers, that the Bobcats were the losingest team in the history of Little

League, baseball, and American sport. The only time a group of kids ended up

with that much public egg on their faces was during the Children's Crusade

when

hundreds of starry-eyed juvenile pilgrims to the Holy Land ended up in the

slave

pens of the East instead. But even some of those guys could hit better than

the

Bobcats.

For Vic Junior it was his mother's scorn that hurt more than losing per se. A

man might rail against the sun's rising in the east as easily as against the

Bobcats once again playing the part of the walked-on in the league's latest

walk-over -- such were the dull-eyed Facts of Life --but she didn't have to be

so mean about it! Of course she wouldn't see it that way; she'd say she was

only

being realistic.

In his subconscious, Vic Junior understood as follows: A man ought to be

entitled to hold onto his dreams without some fern ale always yawping at him

about reality. Somewhere in the Constitution it should say that any woman

apprehended in the act of trying to yank us back down to earth by the seat of

our pants will be stood on her head in a pit of hog entrails and left for the

buzzards, just to see how she likes that for reality!

But a little above the subconscious, in his heart-of-hearts, all that Vic

Junior

said into the listening dark was: Please, God, give us the way to win!

It was a child's simple prayer: sincere, unadorned, pure as a baby dewdrop. On

the cosmic scale of values it had clout, pizzazz, and buying power.

It worked.

EXCUSE ME, sir, but is this where the Little League tryouts are?"

Victor Harris looked down at the brat presumptuous enough to tug at his

clipboard-toting arm. "Who are you?" he snapped. His mirrorshades filtered

through the picture of a skinny twelve-year-old kid like many others on the

team: dark hair, dark eyes, all arms and legs, a little more sunbrowned than

most of the specimens currently blundering through warm-ups on the outfield.

"Did you sign up at school?"

"No, sir," the kid replied, too respectful to be true. "I just got here." He

Esther M. Friesner - Jesus at Bat.pdf

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