SUMMER SPORTS CLASSIC II

The Away Game

Home isn’t always where the heart is

It was ten years later, the summer of Olivia and John, and I was driving back to Idaho to bury my grandfather.

The highway followed the Snake River the way I remembered it, with the brown hills and black basalt cliffs rising above the water. I hadn’t been back since I was thirteen. The radio was on low, and then suddenly there it was:

“Summer loving had me a blast…”

I laughed. Mine had been a different kind of summer.

I came from Berkeley, California, where organized baseball for kids my age barely existed. It was 1968, and people were more interested in rights and protests than Little League. We played Strikeout! against walls, and made diamonds out of empty lots. A bat, a ball, a glove — anything could be a base. That was all baseball really needed.

The game fit me. I wasn’t big or especially strong, and didn’t have the quickest hands. But baseball has always allowed room for the imperfect. The bar for success is roughly thirty percent. With a little guile, some cunning, and enough talent to survive, I could play. I liked tricking hitters into hitting me the ball. I liked showing left and hitting right. I liked finding solutions. Among my friends, I became Shifty Henry.

Every August, my family drove from Berkeley to Grand View, Idaho, to visit my grandfather. For one month, I became somebody else. There were empty lots and parks, and boys who lived on farms and ranches played baseball every day. Somehow, by scraping along intuitively without coaches or uniforms, I found myself on their Little League team.

I can still see that old school bus carrying us to Glenn’s Ferry for an evening game. I sat alone near the back, beside the bags of bats and balls, while the baked mountains followed us in the late-afternoon light. I was just happy to be wearing a uniform. Mostly, I rode the bench, but I had teammates. I had coaches. I belonged to something. To me, that felt like the major leagues.

Then baseball did what baseball often does. Two outfielders collided. Our catcher took a pitch off his elbow. Suddenly, the coach yelled:

“Erickson! Grab a bat!”

What I remember most isn’t the score. It was the light. It was one of those August evenings near the Snake River when the cool air begins to seep onto the land. The willows beyond the fence were stirring. The western horizon glowed orange beneath the darkening sky. I took a walk in my first at-bat. Stanley Regan, from the spread outside town, hit a grand slam. I ended up catching.

I had never caught before or handled that overstuffed mitt. But I’d spent so much time studying the game from the bench that I found myself moving fielders around and blocking balls in the dirt as though I belonged there. We eventually lost, but I got a single and scored. On the bus ride home, I didn’t sit alone.

I was a part of the team now, sort of, and it felt good. A few days later, I was finally starting in right field against Bruneau.

But I never made it through that game. Something happened on the way to the ballpark.

The parking lot behind home plate was full of cars and pickups. One faded Chevy sat in the middle of it all. An old woman was inside with a Pekingese. As I walked by, the dog began growling.

“Oh, he’s fine,” she said. “He’s on a leash.”

Then the dog lunged.

I backed up.

The dog kept coming.

The chain kept coming too, as though someone were performing a magic trick with handkerchiefs. No matter how far I retreated, there was always more leash and more dog.

When it bit me, it seemed completely unreal. I yelped and shook the animal off. The old woman reeled it back into the truck. I rolled up my pant leg. Three tiny punctures sat on my calf, one just breaking the skin.

“I’m sorry,” she called. “He’s never done that before.”

I pulled my pant leg down and limped to the field. By the third inning, my coach saw blood on my pants.

“What the hell, Erickson? Someone else has to wear that uniform next summer!”

I never came to bat again in Idaho. At twelve, it felt tragic. Looking back, it seems almost perfect. My Little League career ended not with a strikeout or a championship, but because a Pekingese objected to my existence.

After the game, we had ice cream on Main Street. Then I walked slowly back to my grandfather’s house with my bat on my shoulder and my glove hanging through it.

There was a red-haired girl in town I’d started noticing that summer. Her father owned the gas station and seemed permanently angry at me. She and I used to catch crawfish in the creek below the slaughterhouse.

We’d fill buckets with them and boil them after, then lie on her cool green lawn and eat them while her father watched us from his station across the street. I had my first crush on her. Then summer ended. We went back to Berkeley.

The song was still playing as I crossed that same creek on my way to the cemetery. I suddenly realized I couldn’t remember the girl’s name.

“Summer loving happened so fast…”

That much, at least, was true.

I was twenty-two years old now. My grandfather was dead. The dog bite still seemed to linger somewhere in my leg. I was returning to a place I loved but barely knew.

I pulled into the cemetery lot and walked toward the people gathered beside the grave. And there she was. The red-haired girl from Grand View. Suddenly, I remembered her name, the creek, the crawfish, the baseball field, the bus rides, the orange evenings beside the river–everything.

I thought I was remembering a season of baseball.

What I was really remembering was the last summer before life became complicated.

Thanks for reading!

Jerry Coté