I’m with my son Evan on a green golf fairway in Sha Tin, Hong Kong, twenty minutes before his little league game starts. I’m punching my baseball glove to loosen it up. I want us to work on Evan’s curve ball. It used to be my secret weapon when I was his age.
“You get the balance of the wind-up? How the weight goes on your back leg? How you keep your palm turned in toward your body?”
He nods and throws a fast pitch. It’s not a curve ball, but I smile anyway.
“Try the curve ball, ok?”
He nods. “Alright,” he says. He throws again, and it snaps in my glove, and it’s still not a curve ball.
I wave him over to me. I grab his right throwing arm by the wrist and guide it in the slicing movement with his palm toward his body, keeping his arm top-to-bottom instead of across his body.
He asks, “You’ll be here for the game?”
“Yes. I told you. I’m filling in for coach today.”
The sky is blue like steel catching light. Like irises. Though the humidity floats up from the damp ground and it’s a harbinger of how steamy it will be today, the hills loom in the distance, and I would call the moment bucolic. Bucolic and I’ve got too much on my mind. I met a woman in Thailand when I was there with the delegation. She’s not Thai. It’s not like that. She’s Norwegian. She was there bathing, topless, gorgeous, alluring, asking me questions at the hotel pool. I was just on my way to grab another drink and I offered to get her one. She was a flight attendant. That part of it makes it a cliché. All these years on the road and I’ve never done anything like that before. What really unnerves me is how I barely feel guilty.
A woman in a Chinese sunhat is watering flowers on the side of the fairway with a black hose and behind her is a bamboo grove and some deciduous trees. The grass under our cleats—ones I bought on our last trip as a family to the U.S.—is thick—thickly grown but each blade is also thick and heavy. It’s a kind that grows out here you don’t have back where I grew up in Minnesota. In Hong Kong, there’s not much grass at all, and what grass there is, is usually off-limits to walk on. This golf course is hours from where everyone lives who I know, and this little league is quite the hidden alliance of Americans and Japanese expats figuring out how to do something that holds no clout in this British colony, where kids play soccer and rugby and girls play field hockey and the stodgy old guys at the clubs play cricket or lawn bowls, but most of the snobs I know play tennis. Funny thing is, I’ve got bad tennis elbow from when I played a lot after college—pickup games in the parks in the ‘70s. I had a wicked serve, but I did it wrong, whipping my arm like it was rope, and now I’m going to throw this curve ball, but I’ve only got a couple in me before I’ll need to down the Ibuprofen and ice the hell out of my damn elbow. I feel sore from the travel already, and I have a headache. It’s almost like I expect Signe the flight attendant to emerge from around a bunch of the wilting jacaranda flowers and beckon me over again. Or do I want her to?
My son is ready.
I throw the curve ball, doing my best, and it’s a great one, but he reaches his glove down to catch it, and instead it hits his elbow hard. He hops up in down in pain. I run over.
“Shit,” I say. “God. I’m sorry Evan. Shake it off. Can you just shake it off?”
“Yeah,” he says, nodding. But his eyes are watering and then tears come in at the corners and head down his cheeks in two glistening lines.
“It hurts. Does it hurt?”
He shakes his head.
My own father taught me to throw—he taught me a bunch of pitches. He farmed and worked at the post office. We barely had money for anything, but we had so much time together—hunting and sports. He showed his love. It’s hard for me to think straight. I want to be more communicative than I am. Part of my composure is still at that resort hotel in Pattaya.
But here I am, coaching. Doing what Evan likes.
He doesn’t trust me.
He wipes off his tears. “I don’t want to play today,” he says. “Let’s go home.”
“You’re starting pitcher. You wanted to be starting pitcher this whole season.”
“No,” he says.
“Even without the curve ball. Forget the curve ball! You’ve got a great arm! Coach Williams says so.”
And we have to move again in a couple months to Dubai. My wife will hate me for it, and so I tripped myself up with Signe.
Evan, and his preternatural pitching arm I blow-up in my mind, bragging about it with all the Americans I run into, and more so with Europeans because it gives me a chance to have to explain baseball, which allows me the folksy-homespun-Norman-Rockwell quality that builds trust and seals deals. Like when Signe started giving me that massage and I tried to deflect with talk of Evan and instead it had the opposite effect and she asked me if he was growing up handsome like me, and she noticed my arms and their muscles. I do try to hit the gym. I was a real athlete in my day.
“My arm hurts too much. I can’t play,” Evan says.
“Just watch the game, or?” I gingerly touch near his elbow where the ball hit. He sucks in air, and I can see the tears again.
I wait for the team to show up and let another dad—Dave Erickson—know. He’s happy to take over to coach, that smug bastard who puts his boy first in the line-up no matter what. I hand him the clipboard with the pitching order, underlining it with my thumb, and I hold Evan and walk the both of us over to our car, the goddamn Mercedes, and we drive to the Methodist hospital and get the x-rays, where Doctor Ng smiles at us, mentioning his medical school degree from the University of Chicago, and the nurse handles Evan’s arm with a delicate touch while also looking shocked that a father would throw a hard baseball at his son, yet not saying a fucking thing about it out loud. It’s a little fracture. He’ll need a sling. He smiles when we leave the hospital to head home, the zipping lights yellowing the Aberdeen tunnel like hornets, the winding, sea-lined cliffs home like a drop-off into oblivion, and Evan sniffling in the back and me trying to assure him, feeling like a failure.
At our door, his mother hugs his head to her chest for a long time and gives me a look.
“I taught him the curve ball, though,” I say.
“Dan, come on,” she says. We stand there quiet for a moment. I don’t say more about my trip. When I got home last night, she asked me about it, and I said I was too tired. “Tomorrow then, after Evan’s game,” she said.
She makes him some soup from a can, and the two of them crank up the AC in the dining room of our Shouson Hill apartment and start a puzzle of the Eiffel Tower on the glass table. They put on some music—a wistful, yearning U2 album they both hum along with.
She asks me to join them at the table, and I hate to admit it, but I have that one VHS tape of Evan pitching queued up with the sound off—the one with the inning where he pitched two strike-outs in a row, with that simple fast ball he does. They can’t see the TV screen from where I’m sitting with my beer. I’m wondering if Signe would still be impressed with me now, knowing my wife isn’t. I have to tell her about Dubai soon. And if I mention what I did in Thailand—that’s a nuclear power plant meltdown.
I want to see Evan make one great pitch again. I can’t even say why. The video is paused and there’s no back stop because they’re playing on an all-grass field in Sha Tin but it makes me think of the ball diamond of my high school with that chain-link that was bent in that one place and my dad who came to every game and even built a little springing net to return the ball when I practiced pitching behind the machine shed on the farm. And my dad is dead. Evan barely knew him.
“Join us, please?” my wife asks, holding a tiny puzzle piece up between her fingers—her ring finger lifted with the wedding ring next to her engagement ring, simple but priceless because of where it comes from—my own mother’s. My dad who had to fix somebody’s skid loader to pay for the tiny diamond. I lift my hand with my drink, meaning, in a bit. It’s been a long journey. You know how it is.
I press play and watch the fuzzy motion of Evan’s fast ball. I don’t know if it’s the humidity or what, but I feel the soreness in my own elbow coming on like it hasn’t in years and the bourbon isn’t enough to dull the pinpricks in my bones. I should see a doctor soon before it all gets worse.
