OCR Text |
Show Throwing the Bread Butch and Fenn Stories 90 What happens? Well, I stand up on our row, the top row of those bleachers beside my friends, and I extract the bread from its wrapper a slice at a time and begin to throw each out above the baseball diamond. Each piece spins and sails like a small white frisbee, landing softly by second base. Bread can really fly. Fenn laughs while Butch sits watching, and for a moment the air is full of bread. But even as I toss each slice, I think: some things are not supposed to fly, even for a minute. It is easy to forget about bread. We forget it right away when Butch reveals, under intense questioning, that he has some coinage, and we all walk directly down to the pharmacy for ice cream and frosted root beers. Fenn loves to play the jukebox; it strikes him as a clever way to spend money, and he rises and is pushing the button for his favorite numbers, which are always Chopin's Polonaise and Love Me Tender. Butch gives me the hard stare. "Well," I say back to him, "I didn't want a loaf of bread, particularly." "It was a waste." "Yeah. Tell me about it. We should have mailed it to Europe." "A waste." "You said that already." I drain my root beer and push off the stool. When I walk by Fenn, he is still lost in deciding what to play next on the juke-box. |