Story #10: "The Knuckleball Artist" (Chapter 5)
A stalled car, a stubborn kid, and a reluctant coach: Reginald’s first day of coaching Little League starts in reverse.
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CHAPTER 5
THE NOTORIOUSLY LONG RED LIGHT
In the morning, dawn broke from behind the left outfield wall and sparkled off the shower toiletries hanging from Reginald’s rearview mirror. The sun’s angle lit a scribble of white car dealership crayon on the windshield, just out of reach of the wipers.
Reginald covered himself with a towel, stepped out of the Sleepmobile’s master bedroom onto the backyard parking lot gravel. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes, leaned in towards the windshield, and read the crayon note.
The letters were getting smaller and smaller because they’d started out too ambitious. Reginald leaned in closer.
The letters were now so small Reginald bumped his nose against the glass.
Reginald couldn’t help it. He had to count: “late” was underlined seven times before running into the windshield rubber.
Half the joy of living in What Cheer was watching Reginald start his car. The whole town knew about Reginald bump-starting the Última. There were legends about his missing car battery: some said space was cleared for a high-school trophy, others thought he was making room for a clothing iron.
The truth was simpler: space was precious, and Reginald had gone and removed it. If you could reverse bump-start a car, he reasoned, why have a battery at all?
Forward bump-starting never worked for reasons that escaped him, but he discovered he could bump-start the car in reverse, but believe you me, Iowa is no “Picnic in the Rockies” for do-it-yourself reverse-bump-starts.
And so it was, the night before the first team practice. At 2AM, Reginald found a spot at the top of an Iowa incline that wound down and around and backwards to Phineas’ driveway.
Even a good hundred yards away, Reginald could see the kid sitting on the curb watching him, and just as he gathered enough reverse speed to fire the engine, a Yipper-level wave of self-doubt hit, and he missed the timing. The Sleepmobile sputtered so weakly, it sounded like an apology, but it didn’t fire.
“Oh, come on, Ú.Ú.” he pleaded.
Ú.Ú. sputtered again, barely apologizing this time, and drifted down the street towards the kid’s driveway at the speed of a backwards Amish tractor.
“You’re late,” the kid called out to him as he rolled down the incline and past. He tapped an imaginary watch.
“I’m not.”
He wasn’t.
“You will be.”
“Kid, get in. I need your weight.”
He didn’t move a hair. There was a long pause, and Reginald added, “Please.”
Mistake.
Every teacher on the planet, even the substitutes, knows you shouldn’t use the word “please” with a middle-schooler.
Phineas got up like he was lifting cement bags, let his neck go slack, and looked to the sky. He wobbled sideways, his toes scraped, and he made an unidentifiable moaning sound. Clearly, he couldn’t catch up to a backwards Amish tractor.
When it became clear it was going to be too much for him, he waved goodbye to Reginald like he was watching a cruise ship sail away.
“Forget it,” Reginald barked at him, steering carefully not to hit anything coming up the one-way street.
Phineas walked back to the curb at a perfectly normal speed and sat down bored. The engine caught three quarters of a mile away.
When Reginald pulled up, the kid poked his curly head in through the passenger window.
“You’re late.”
On the way to the field, Reginald just missed getting through What Cheer’s notoriously long red light, the only thing in the county that had ever slowed down the fifteen-year-old tractor drivers.
Reginald took in the little brat. He’d never seen a shorter bat or a tinier glove. For that matter, he’d never seen such skinny little fingers. Well, once. And the glasses on him—so greasy and smeared that Reginald couldn’t hold back:
“Do you have to grease those glasses or is that how they came?”
“Do you have to grease those glasses or is that how they came?” Phineas repeated, then stared straight at him, studying him, the rude little brat.
Still, kid or no kid, Reginald couldn’t help himself. He held up five fingers in front of him. “How many fingers?”
“Oh! Ha-ha, ha-ha. You’re so funny. Let me know when you’re done.” Phineas yawned excruciatingly loudly and pretended to fall asleep against the passenger door with a thud. His nap lasted about three seconds.
The two could hardly take their eyes off each other. Starting with the obvious, Phineas was overpoweringly unathletic. Reginald tried to imagine what that pile of curly hair would look like when it wasn’t pinned under a baseball cap. At the moment, he looked like he was wearing a hairy donut, and for an adult coach he came recklessly close to pointing this out.
And for all that, when humility seemed a given, the kid tried to stare him down with his blinking, or at least, given the poor visibility, that was what he appeared to be doing.
Phineas took in Reginald with the same intensity. Reginald was one of those people you could never get close enough to get a satisfying look at. Spotting him walking in town was conversation enough for an entire weekend. It was hard to say which of them was better at staring rudely.
Of course, Reginald knew exactly what the kid was thinking. Nothing about the sideways, curious-bird angle of his head was new to him. It was Reginald’s turn to look away.
Phineas broke the silence with a surprise announcement.
“It’s an official emergency. I need to pee.”
He raced out the door into the middle of the intersection. Reginald watched the kid scurry around like he was late for a game of hide-and-seek.
“Oh, come on, kid,” Reginald muttered.
Reginald shook his head. It always got worse for Reginald when someone was in the passenger seat. The Boil told customers “the saddest thing in his life is the perfect condition of that passenger seat. The new car smell almost brings me to tears. Come on over, Reg,” he’d tell customers with a chuckle.
This kid was the first person in that seat since Cheryl, his only girlfriend in twenty-one years, and that was a decade ago.
Everyone in the passenger seat had the same expression. He could read their minds. He’d seen and heard it all. Look at his height! The bags under his eyes! Those fingers! Kids at Cougar’s Volkswagen dealership dared each other to make Reginald scoop the popcorn on Saturday mornings.
“Did you see those, daddy-longlegs knuckleball-fingers?”
“Whatever you do, don’t touch his hands,” the checkout cashiers whispered across registers so he could still hear. “Don’t make eye contact,” they’d mouth enthusiastically. “Put the change straight in the bag. You’ll see, he won’t say anything.” They were polite Midwesterners.
Phineas had finally spotted a place to pee. He was hopping over to it like he was in the state fair sack race.
Cheryl, at one point What Cheer’s prettiest cashier for over three decades, had been the one to spell it out for him. “Your fingers are like those machines that trick you into trying to pick up a stuffed animal you don’t even want, and you wouldn’t marry in the first place.”
She delivered this helpful observation while sitting in the Sleepmobile’s living room. She’d been putting on mascara in the rearview mirror.
“Don’t look at me with the sad-dog eyes, Reginald. We’re through.”
Reginald pleaded his case from the Sleepmobile bedroom doorway between the front seats. “You know I’d never give you the yips, Cheryl. I don’t even think it’s something I can do.”
Long silence.
“You’re really leaving me?”
“The whole thing was an April Fool’s gone horribly wrong.”
He didn’t ask.
“Stop looking at me with your whatever-kind-of dog-you-are eyes.”
He still couldn’t take his eyes off her, not even as common courtesy. She caught him looking straight at her in the rearview like he had promised not to on the first date. She shrieked silently, dropped her mascara bottle—mostly on purpose—and scrambled out holding the wand.
“They’re basset eyes!” she yelled at him. “And stop parking on the hill near my house.”
Her words cut deep. For a month he couldn’t look at himself in the mirror and had to hum himself to sleep with a Long and Winding Road.
She hadn’t needed to spell it out so directly.
Phineas crashed back into the car like he’d stumbled off the Titanic. “Whoa-ho-ho-ho-ho,” he said. “That was a rainstorm.”
The town’s notorious red light finally changed and snapped Reginald out of the memories. When he stepped on the gas to get out of there, Phineas bobbled his baseball and for three blocks he clanged against the seat belt tensioner, struggling to grab the ball off the floor. He looked like a kid juggling upside-down.
Partly to get him back for the “you’re late” comment, but mostly for dredging up memories about Cheryl, Reginald tapped the brakes and jerked the car every time the baseball got near the kid’s fingertips.
When they reached the stop sign at the road leading up to the Little League field, Phineas pinned the ball between his two feet and lifted it up to his hands like a frog.
Then he slowly rolled down the passenger window, yawned at full volume, and tossed the baseball out the car window.
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“Phineas crashed back into the car like he’d stumbled off the Titanic.” 😂