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Show Car Baseball Butch and Fenn Stories 46 "It's not a rule. We didn't vote. I can hide all day. Hit the ball!" Fenn has a distracting windmill windup which I try to ignore, and he delivers straight overhand. The tennis ball, black as an eight ball, lobs up and falls sharply through my swing: strike one. It's the best pitch in Wall: the slow drop. However, because the ball is still wet from Tiny's nursing on it, I can see where the spot on the wall where Fenn threw it, and I move closer, four feet. The neighbors would think I am about to attack the house with a broomstick. There are five or six patches chipped out of the wooden shingle siding where that, in fact, has happened. That's what is great about Butch's place; his parents don't care that we're out back wrecking the house. Budd, Butch's father, wrecked the front of the house himself. He parks his sprung pink Ford flat across the front yard as if this is some estate with a circular drive. Actually, he's created a circular driveway right in the grass where his tire marks are etched forever and ever. But one night last year he wheeled home from the swing shift and swung right through the corner of Karen's room, blasting a hole in the house, and dragging Karen's quilt and stuffed elephant right into the night on the corner of the bumper. He climbed out of the car, fell in the quilt, but rose again to poke his head up into the still creaking fissure to see if Karen was sleeping |