Story #10: "The Knuckleball Artist" (Chapter 2)

After a tragic debut at Yankee Stadium, Reginald returns to What Cheer, Iowa on a three-wheeled Greyhound bus.

Nov 17, 2024

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CHAPTER 2

WHAT CHEER, IOWA

There was no place left for Reginald after the disastrous game but “home is where they have to take you in.” This was stitched clearly on one of his mother’s tea towels.

So, Reginald caught the B Train from Yankee Stadium down to the Port Authority Bus Terminal on 42nd, then slumped onto a Greyhound bus, carrying his unspeakable tragedy back to Iowa.

Other than the right rear wheel that started whistling in West Virginia, the bus was silent as a tomb. Even the driver barely acknowledged him, maybe an irritated grunt in his general direction when the right rear went cold flat in Indiana.

When they arrived in What Cheer, Iowa, the Greyhound bus with three wheels screeched to a surprise stop at the base of the town’s tallest hill. A gravel road led up to his old Little League field, the same field where he’d thrown his first knuckleball. The driver wrangled an old-fashioned lever-contraption to force the door open. Something mechanical hissed, and the Greyhound kneeled at a sad tilt.

Reginald walked up the hill to the old field, set his scuffed brown suitcase down on the pitching mound, and placed his 0-1 count Yankee baseball on the pitching rubber.

For a long time, he stared at that baseball like this was the end of the road. He was 19 and washed up. He vowed to never touch another baseball again. Then Reginald slumped his gangly 6’ 4” height past the town water tower where some Mischief Night pranksters spray-painted a question mark after “What Cheer.”

The whole walk back on the old county road his suitcase dangled from his long fingertips. In front of his home, he stopped briefly on the lawn, bucked up, and reminded himself “home is where they have to take you in at least for a week or so anyway.”

He stepped in through the back screen door. His father was sitting in front of a TV dinner. He didn’t get up from the living room chair when Reginald came in.

“One week, Reg,” his dad called out, then changed channels until he found a ballgame out of St. Louis.

“Tops.”

Tears brimmed in both of their eyes – for entirely different reasons.

What neither of them knew was that Reginald’s first-pitch Yankee baseball stirred in the middle of the night, plopped off the pitcher’s rubber, and, propelled by the regulation 10” height of the pitcher’s mound, wiggled, then rolled gently, gently, gently down the slope of the mound, veering this way and that, gathering steam, its red stitching laying down knuckleball railroad track, course correcting from pebbles and poor field maintenance, and, at last, made its way to dead center of home plate where it stopped cold.

Sixty feet, six inches.

From the odd angle, you couldn’t make out a face, but a silhouette stood an umpire’s distance behind home plate holding a pair of bolt cutters.

A second silhouette, this one a three-legged dog, pogoed over to retrieve the baseball. Together, the two wandered off down the first base line, leaving an odd number of footprints beneath a sliver of Iowa moon.

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