The last part of the drive, the last thirty minutes to Pensacola, is the best part. It’s a flat straightaway; dark walking-papers that funnel you straight into the ocean, or at least that beach road right parallel to the surf—and it’s a pretty stretch. Turn from your headlight’s glare to the side and there white glints of the moon are multiplied in a thousand puddles of the secret bogs on either side of an anonymous two-lane highway. But the other view that Vic has when he turns his head, besides the moon and bogs and all, at his companion, he finds him to be fast asleep, meaning he can enjoy the simplicity of the view without babbling commentary. Ray still has his mouth open though, his head rolled over toward the window. In twenty-six years, Vic had never met someone who was quite as peculiar in their logic as Ray. Even though most of the old war horse’s habits were annoying, Vic had to admit that life was interesting when Ray was around. He didn’t like the state of Ray’s apartment, didn’t like how much Ray drank and smoked, didn’t like how loudly he dressed or how loud he just was, and Vic didn’t like Ray’s work ethic (or a complete lack thereof). But somehow, without Ray around, life’s meaning had to be garnered from a trip to the grocery store or a barbecue, and though Vic didn’t put much stock in such things, he knew there was more to life than that.

Vic watches as the yellow reflectors in the road snake lightly left then right like a miles-long lumbering and unending centipede—as though he were not traveling at all, not driving, but just sitting in his seat aimlessly pulling the steering wheel to and fro, as a giant glowing animal with a million legs scuttles past. He looks to the right and sees that dark marsh passing him by, wondering about all the things occurring in front of him that he just cannot see, wondering about life and what it means to him—just him—days slipped by. His father had given him a “speech” from behind the batting cage once, yelling at him from behind the chain-linked fence after the rest of the team had gone home, after the coach had gone. “Life is basebell! If you ever want to amount to anything, you better believe that it’s in hitting that ball, or you minus well quit now!” Vic was to be a priest to the religion of baseball. He played every day, ignorant of all else that was going on. 50 some-odd years on now, there is just a stupid beach that Ray wants to watch the sun rise over. Fair enough, thinks Vic. They were already 250 plus miles from home; surely it was too late to protest his actions.

The only thing Vic had imagined love to be was a good-looking woman who loved his passion for baseball—loved him for his love for baseball—a woman who came out to see him play every time he stepped up to a plate. The baseball did not care about her, she was not aiming at it. Her goals lay elsewhere, and when his concern for the ball was gone, she became as meaningless as the name on that god damned bat he’d swung.

The weavings of that little white sphere spun through his mind in a curveball that beanballed any hopefully philosophical thoughts. The only meaning to be gained from life orbited around that ball, wove itself into the fabric. And when one day in April, that ball flew right past him with a loud leather thump in the catcher’s mitt, he had believed that his life was truly over.

Now, the calm pre-dawn blue that surrounds him makes its rebuttal. It is beginning to filter through the trees, and making him breathe, and showing him a world where that baseball was equal in all things—even then, he sees a place where meaning is derived from love that lasts a lifetime. Where were his fans, his father, his wife, as he plows through Florida to the gulf? Where is the meaning in not saying what he feels? What was the point in leaving a place that he’d always planned to leave anyway? He looks to Ray again, sleeping quietly, and smiles, the indigo of a coming dawn, a jackhammer attacking the young wrinkles around the corners of his eyes.

Ray just sleeps in his flower print shirt. Ray asks no questions in his sleep; fails to ponder why his life had gone one way and not the other. And Ray has never known anything about baseball besides how to watch it. The only time the subject had ever come up between the two of them, a few years after they first met, Ray had asked, “So what exactly do those batting averages mean—like, where do they come from? Do they actually count every time you bat?” Ray hadn’t believed it, couldn’t believe it; that someone actually stood and counted every single time you batted, quantified your every move, added your life up by the numbers and divided it. He had said it was too much “like Santa Claus’s list of brats” to be believed.

Read the whole thread: Thinstyle

Characters and Places: , ,