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Show Car Baseball Butch and Fenn Stories 79 dizzy. Sometimes one of us sits, taking two strikes before rising and nailing a single, then sitting again. Late, late into the night there is a long, long period of no cars, and then a short period of cars all in a hurry, rounding the corners wide, racing away. And then the whole night changes and I realize I've never been up so late before in my life. The dark is thicker than it was, the few stars now fuzzy. I run hard for a double on some kind of truck, a van, and slide onto my bag easily, when we hear a strange noise rising from down Concord Street. At first I think the sound, so raw and magnified, might just be in my head, but then I see Butch's face, up listening in the small starlight, and the screeching of metal rises all around us. It sounds like a train wreck. Then there is a whump! whump! and we feel the earth shudder as Concord Street explodes in a shower of sparks. The street light cries and collapses over the stop sign, and cartwheels like a thrown torch, once, twice, into the vacant lot. Our eyes are split open by the flash, but in the yawning dark, I see the stop sign snap and shear into the street like a knife. There is a figure in the air, a figure flying, a figure I can only recognize as Parley- He sails through the smokey air three yards above Emery Street and on into the darkness of the ruined vacant lot. It's like I'm dreaming: I swear he flew by in slow motion. And next, a series of sparks skitters out along the asphalt, and the Plymouth, lights out, surges past |
