Story #10: "The Knuckleball Artist" (Chapter 13)
A child's balloon, a warm garage, an Iowa rainbow, and a powerful lion.
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CHAPTER 13
MEXICO
The night after losing the eighth consecutive game, this one by a score of 26-1, Reginald couldn’t fall asleep, so he sat down in front of the Volkswagen hood ornament. He sat cross-legged with his chin in his hands.
“Show me the pitch, Ú.Ú.”
She did. In the hood ornament he saw himself standing on the pitching mound in Yankee Stadium. He watched the knuckleball float from his fingers. It was like he shot a three-pointer with a child’s balloon. It slid up a NASCAR wall and shot down a straightaway. It ping-ponged to the left, skipping-stoned to the right, cartwheeled backwards, shimmied up high and shrugged down low. It landed in the catcher’s mitt as soft as a thumb pressing down a stamp.
Strike.
0-1.
The only strike he would ever throw.
“Thanks, Ú.Ú.”
He looked away. He thought it might cheer him up, but it didn’t. It was just some dumb baseball that happened to go backwards and twenty-seven other directions. You couldn’t argue about it: he’d thrown the greatest pitch in the history of baseball, but if you’ve ever been miserable, you know that helpful facts only make things worse.
Reginald sat out in the bleachers until the automatic lights switched off. Stars sparkled in the sky. A crescent moon appeared exactly over the Iowa flagpole. The whole universe was trying its best. Reginald pretended not to notice. Instead, he retreated into the Sleepmobile master bedroom and wrangled the rear window lever so his toes could get some air.
After a long while, Reginald whispered to the Última Última.
“It’s not looking good, Ú.Ú. I’ve hidden something from myself, and I can’t find it.”
After that cheerful announcement, he tried to turn over and bang the side of his face smack into the car seat pillow. He needed the Última Última to know how upset he was, but his Yankee pajamas snagged on the seatbelt, and he got stuck. His torn old uniform bunched up, and his number 21 slid all the way around to the front. Well, he sure didn’t want to wake up in the night and see that number staring right at him.
“This might be the end of the road for us, Ú.Ú. He’s rich. He’ll give you car washes, maybe even a warm garage.”
There was no way The Boil was doing this. Nobody was fooling anybody.
He didn’t like to show weakness in front of the Última, but generally speaking he didn’t have the least control over himself. He had to get it out. Maybe a tiny bit he wanted the Última Última to feel bad, too, so he wouldn’t be all alone with everything.
As he was falling asleep that night, his earworm, depression go-to song came to him. He fell asleep hearing the whole world singing the “Long and Winding Road.”
“The wild and windy night,” the world sang, and Reginald hummed along. He made a little orchestra ‘bump-pa’ sound right where it went, but it came out so sad it was almost tragic. The universe continued on, “that the rain washed away has left a pool of tears…
He did not sleep soundly. He went from one dream to the next that night.
In the first one, the Última Última was parked in a beach parking lot that stretched as far as the horizon. A giant billboard well out past the surfers read “MEXICO.” As far as you could see, the cars were Volkswagen Beetles, They were parked with their headlights facing the sea. He saw the year they arrived at the beach on their front license plates. On the back license plates each of the Volkswagen Beetles had a different year.
The ocean parking lot was what we like to call “beautiful” in Iowa.
We like our colors in rainbow order, and the Volkswagens were lined up just right. Red ones, then yellow, then greenish-blue, but the Última Última was different. She was the only one that had a bent radio antenna, and she had a missing rear plate. He got down on his knees behind the car to inspect more closely.
A tiny note where the rear plate should have been located said, “The Motor Vehicle Board of the State of Iowa is on its way to fix this.” It was signed by “The Governor.”
Then, like I said, it was a busy night for dreams.
Reginald took a walk from the beach parking lot to the concession stand and really needed to pee. Then he thought maybe he wasn’t dreaming but needed to go pee for real. Then he decided he didn’t need to pee for real, and it was okay.
That’s when he walked through the door of Yankee Stadium and remembered he was pitching in ten seconds because he could see the stadium out through the men’s room janitor’s closet, and everyone was waiting for him in there.
When he showed up at the pitcher’s mound, a short, little manager was flashing the team signs from the dugout. He was pacing up and down flashing signs like he was wiping a swarm of invisible bugs off his arms and face.
Reginald couldn’t understand any of the signs. Even in his own dreams, he was always the last to get it. For some reason, the manager started banging his palm into his forehead and throwing juice containers into the on-deck circle.
It was Phineas.
He wasn’t wearing glasses anymore. He was older, and very tall now, and his eyes were normal size for once, but his hair was yellow and puffed up bigger than ever. He looked like a proud lion. He was trying to tell Reginald something, but Reginald didn’t know what, so he made the official sign for “take me out I can’t do it,” which only made the kid swat at his bugs harder.
Then, all of the sudden, in the dream there was a campground near third base, and his air mattress went flat in the tent, and the ground was like a rock, and it was pouring rain outside the visiting team bullpen.
He had been dreaming. When he sat up, it was dawn, and it was raining hard. Turns out he did need to pee. Through the steamy vent window, he saw puddles had formed on the third-base line.
When he stood by the car in his soaking wet Yankees uniform, he saw both of Ú.Ú.’s rear tires blown, which explained the flat air mattress. After fumbling in the Sleepmobile front garage, it turned out her spare was flat, too, and, well, the day was not shaping up as cheerful as a quote on a tea towel.
Reginald pulled the last of his savings out from the passenger seat “carpet safe” and headed into town to get the tires patched. The whole time he had to push two flat tires along at the same time, chasing one to the right, then the other to the left the whole way. Believe you me, it was an earful.
Late that afternoon, when he was rolling the tires back from Cougars Volkswagen Car Dealership, Reginald stopped short, smack in the middle of his corn field shortcut. Both tires flopped over.
Reginald couldn’t see over the top of the corn or even front or back because the farm was on a hill. You couldn’t get any further into Iowa.
That’s when the dream about Ú.Ú and the parking lot hit him like a thunderbolt. Ú.Ú, his Última Última of twenty-one years, wasn’t well.
First it had been the dashboard lights, then the muffler, then the stick shift knob, now the tires. The holes in the floor were big enough to deliver a cow.
Reginald sat down on a tire in his soaking wet uniform. Mud leaked in through his blown sneakers.
It was the memory of the rainbow of all the Volkswagen Beetles lined up that shook him, and how all the Beetles next to the Sleepmobile were faded green-blue, too, and how beautiful and sad it made him with all of them looking out at the sea with their headlights on.
But it was the note from The Governor at the Motor Vehicles Board of the State of Iowa that made him well up. The Última had a front plate with 2003, the year she burped off the line in Puebla, but the whole time she’d never had a rear plate. Every year, Cougars promised the rear plate was on its way. Reginald couldn’t put something into words, but it made something tight in his chest.
When he got back to the Sleepmobile that night, her roof lights wouldn’t turn on, and the glove compartment refrigerator light was blown. Reginald put his baseball glove on for comfort.
He went out to sit in the stands for a long while. Eventually, he walked out to the mound, stared in at home plate and waited for the sign. The twenty-one lost years of his life got the better of him. His glove dangled so low, it hit rock bottom. The rest of it from there is his personal business.
Out in right, a porch screen door made an accidental little creak, and Pinball snuck quietly back into the house.
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Reginald had a Crystal Ball’s worth of dreams. In the midst of this unhappy but hopefully heading to a crescendo of a happy ending, it may be the first time I was saddened to think of a final resting place for Volkswagen Beetles, but you made it sweet and lovely
“…Volkswagen Beetles, they were parked with their headlights facing the sea.”
I think the Sleepmobile is heading towards a grand finale of her final performance of a lifetime.
Not to make this about me, but a missing rear plate feels a lot like not knowing one’s paternity. May the DMV finally deliver UU and her loyal companion a sense of belonging in this world.