Winning at Wiffle by James Valvis

Scanlon, two years older than me, had good movement on his curve. It dove inside toward my feet and I ended up swinging the bat like a golf club and missing. His fastball rose as if on a conveyor and I always swung under it. And there was this screwball that sped like a fastball but when it reached home it dropped as if falling off an invisible table. As for me, I possessed just two pitches: a slow fastball and a one knuckle knuckler more flat-lined than Jimmy Hoffa. Most days I was happy to foul some pitches and, before Scanlon got bored and quit, record enough outs the game ended.

Summer after summer, day after day, pitch after miserable pitch, he abused me at the game I loved. Once he asked why every May I stood at his door with plastic bat on shoulder and Wiffle ball in hand when all summer I hardly scored a run, spent hours chasing balls rocketed over my head; why not go do something I could excel at? I didn’t know how to explain that when my bat caught up to the fastball or I threw a pitch that moved a little, this was me being good, as good as I could be, and I felt happy, like an infant running the wrong way in a race, parents saying no no no, go that way, kid smiling because he’s running, because all he wants to do is run when the world demands he run well, toward the finish line, toward mastery.

But I couldn’t put any of this into words and so two years later, when I finally beat him and he said he understood now why I’d suffered all those humiliating years, for this moment, this hour of victory, I didn’t have the heart to tell him he was wrong, that like him I never thought this day would come. I never expected to win.

Sadly, after I won, we never played again. Every May afternoon for the rest of my childhood I knocked, bat and ball in hand, but his door went unanswered. I was sad. Not for me, but for my friend. Guys like Scanlon never know triumph because they only play to win.

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James Valvis has placed poems or stories in Ploughshares, Louisville Review, The Sun, and hundreds of other journals. His poetry was selected for Best American Poetry 2017. His fiction was chosen for Sundress Best of the Net and won 2nd Place in Folio’s Editor’s Prize. His work has also come in 2nd for the Asimov’s Readers’ Award. A former US Army soldier, he lives near Seattle. Read more here: http://valvis.net

Photo: Fathromi Ramdlon

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