The late afternoon sun hung over Piankashaw like a cigarette left in an ashtray, stubbornly smoldering, one last ember refusing to go out. Dust clung to my teeth, sweat clung to my shirt, and when the air moved it felt like the devil’s breath. It was a long, hot mid-summer day in June, and the day, just like this year’s baseball season, was almost over.

I dug my cleats into the pitcher’s mound, dirt crumbling under my heel. I looked ninety feet away at my opponent and took a deep breath.

Brian Bowden.

He stood smirking in the box with his aluminum bat slung lazily on his shoulder. That look he always had, like he’d already won and the rest of us were just extras in his highlight reel.

Rich boy. Blueblood. The kind of kid who carried himself like God had signed over the county deed to Piankashaw and told the rest of us to go pound sand. He had talent and money, the only two things that mattered around here, and he made sure everyone knew it. While the rest of us were plough horses straight off the farm, Brian had been raised like a thoroughbred, fattened on summer camps and private lessons since he could hold a bat.

He stepped out of the box to knock imaginary mud off spotless cleats. I knew it was imaginary because it hadn’t rained in a week and the Piankashaw Valley was drier than hell. So dry the Baptists were about to start sprinkling folks with water from Dixie cups because there wasn’t a creek left to dunk their converts in.

My arm was screaming. Elbow and shoulder on fire, every pitch another reminder I’d been throwing too hard for too long. Pain was expected by now. But something new had crept in. A hum. Numbness.

I wound up and threw with everything I had left. The ball whistled through the heavy air and hit Bubba’s mitt with a thud.

“Ball one,” the umpire said, in that greasy, mocking tone that told you he’d already picked a side.

“Bullshit,” I hissed.

Brian looked smug. He planted his rear foot at the back of the box, swung the bat up onto his shoulder, and waited. He spit a brown bullet toward the baseline, knocked the imaginary dirt off his cleats again. He was playing to the crowd. He always did.

Behind the plate, Bubba squatted low, fat mitt flashing a sign. Curveball.

I shook him off.

Bubba grinned through the mask. He flashed the sign again. Trust me, his eyes said.

I nodded. We both knew Brian wouldn’t be looking for a breaking ball. He was too smart for that. But I knew something else too. This was our last Pony League game, the last summer of Little League. We both knew we wouldn’t make the high school team come spring. Too slow, too fat, too poor. Brian had a scholarship already written in the stars. This was the end of the line for Bubba and me, and we both knew it, though neither of us had said it out loud.

I wound up and threw. High and inside.

“Ball two,” the ump said.

“Ball three,” he said on the next one, and an uneasy silence dropped onto the field like a dark cloud promising thunder.

“You’ve got some real trouble now,” Bubba said, wiping his brow. He gave me that nice play, Shakespeare look kids give when you’ve screwed up.

“I know,” I said. “Three and oh. I can’t just throw it down the chute.”

“Not just that,” Bubba said, pointing toward the third base line. “Big Daddy got out of the truck.”

Big Daddy, my grandpa, was a legend in Piankashaw baseball. Played for the St. Louis Browns minor league affiliate in his younger days, coached my dad and Uncle Jake to championships back in the sixties. Parkinson’s had been taking its toll for years now, but he still loved the game, and his eyes lit with broken pieces of yesterday every time he got near a diamond.

“Bend your back and follow through,” he called from the third base line. “You’re throwing like a girl.”

“Did the old man come to straighten you out?” Brian said, loud enough for the bleachers. Laughter rippled through the crowd. The old boys in seed caps, the church ladies in their lawn chairs, the little kids sticky-fingered from sno-cones. The whole county leaned forward when Brian was at bat.

I glanced past Bubba at Big Daddy. He was leaning against the truck like a ghost carved from cedar, arms folded across his chest, hands trembling but eyes steady. He pounded his fist once, slow and deliberate, right over his heart.

The old signal. He wanted me to hit Brian with a bean ball.

“Time,” Bubba said. He shuffled out to the mound like an old deacon delivering a sermon nobody asked for. He pressed the ball into my hand.

“Listen,” he said low. His eyes weren’t joking. “This is it. Our last dance. You gonna let that son of a bitch get the best of us?”

He turned and walked back to the plate.

Brian knocked the imaginary dirt again. I smiled at him the way a water moccasin smiles before it strikes. He stepped in. Bubba signed a curve to make it look like an accident. I waved him off until he gave me the fastball. If I was going to hit Brian Bowden, it was going to hurt.

I wound up and threw with everything I had left in my arm. Every nerve screamed bloody murder, but I didn’t care. The ball left my hand like it was the last thing I’d ever give this world.

It caught Brian square on the earhole. Sounded like a church bell clanging Easter morning. His knees buckled. He dropped like a sack of feed.

Everything stopped.

You could hear a mosquito sneeze. The old boys in the bleachers stopped chewing and spitting. The church ladies went quiet mid-gossip, mouths hanging open. The little kids tugging at sundresses for sno-cone money went still. Even the air seemed to hold itself.

Bubba ripped his mask off. “Jesus Christ…”

Brian’s coach ran out of the dugout. The crowd let out a collective sound, low and uncertain, the sound a county makes when something bad might have just happened.

I stood on the mound and waited. I thought about brain damage. About what it means when the wires short-circuit and just hang there. For half a second, I thought I’d killed him.

Then Brian stirred. Slow. Shaky. He put his hand to the side of his helmet and blinked. He staggered up like Lazarus and stumbled toward the dugout, glaring at me through a fog of pain and fury.

I grabbed the resin bag and acted like one had slipped.

They swapped him for a pinch runner who looked scared to death. Dave Daffron came to bat, reluctant and pale. I checked the runner and painted the corner. Strike one. Dave jumped back like I’d thrown a rattler at his ankles. He hadn’t hit a ball off me all season. Three pitches later, he was done.

Game over.

***

Bubba and I walked the handshake line, palms slapping like we’d just buried something instead of winning. Brian gave me the kind of stare that promised fire and brimstone. I winked. Why not.

After, I bought a cherry sno-cone. The syrup dripped down my chin and stained my tongue red. I slung my bag over my aching shoulder and headed for Big Daddy’s truck.

Two little kids were tossing a ball near the dugout, scrawny and hopeful and dumb enough to still believe the game loved them back. Bubba and I had been those kids once. That was the part that hurt most.

I climbed into the cab and leaned against the hot glass, sweat cooling in streaks. The dust kicked up behind us as we pulled out of the lot.

I didn’t look back until the field blurred behind the heat shimmer. It lay there quiet, swallowing the last light of the day. And under my breath, to no one but myself, I said it.

“Goodbye.”

Not just to the field. Not just to Pony League, or to the summer that had baked us half-dead. It was bigger than that. Goodbye to being a kid. Goodbye to afternoons when all that mattered was a ball and a mitt and a friend fat enough to block the plate. Goodbye to the idea that talent or money didn’t matter here. Goodbye to believing Brian Bowden didn’t already own tomorrow.

Big Daddy tapped the steering wheel with trembling fingers, eyes on the road. Neither of us said a word.

The dust rolled behind us like smoke from a funeral pyre, and the field shrank to nothing in the rear glass.

***

Matt McCarter teaches literature and writing at the college level and serves as Associate Editor of The Iron Horse Literary Review at Texas Tech University. His recent fiction has appeared in Reckon Review, Neon Origami, Earworms, Low Life Lit Press, The Blotter Magazine, and All Your Stories, among others. His fiction collection, Cornbread Voodoo and Crawdaddy Gumbo, is forthcoming from All Things That Matter Press.