I\u2019m with my son Evan on a green golf fairway in Sha Tin, Hong Kong, twenty minutes before his little league game starts. I\u2019m punching my baseball glove to loosen it up. I want us to work on Evan\u2019s curve ball. It used to be my secret weapon when I was his age.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou 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?\u201d<\/p>\n
He nods and throws a fast pitch. It\u2019s not a curve ball, but I smile anyway.<\/p>\n
\u201cTry the curve ball, ok?\u201d<\/p>\n
He nods. \u201cAlright,\u201d he says. He throws again, and it snaps in my glove, and it\u2019s still not a curve ball.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
He asks, \u201cYou\u2019ll be here for the game?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYes. I told you. I\u2019m filling in for coach today.\u201d<\/p>\n
The sky is blue like steel catching light. Like irises. Though the humidity floats up from the damp ground and it\u2019s 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\u2019ve got too much on my mind. I met a woman in Thailand when I was there with the delegation. She\u2019s not Thai. It\u2019s not like that. She\u2019s 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 clich\u00e9. All these years on the road and I\u2019ve never done anything like that before. What really unnerves me is how I barely feel guilty.<\/p>\n
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\u2014ones I bought on our last trip as a family to the U.S.\u2014is thick\u2014thickly grown but each blade is also thick and heavy. It\u2019s a kind that grows out here you don\u2019t have back where I grew up in Minnesota. In Hong Kong, there\u2019s 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\u2019ve got bad tennis elbow from when I played a lot after college\u2014pickup games in the parks in the \u201870s. I had a wicked serve, but I did it wrong, whipping my arm like it was rope, and now I\u2019m going to throw this curve ball, but I\u2019ve only got a couple in me before I\u2019ll 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\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n
My son is ready.<\/p>\n
I throw the curve ball, doing my best, and it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cShit,\u201d I say. \u201cGod. I\u2019m sorry Evan. Shake it off. Can you just shake it off?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt hurts. Does it hurt?\u201d<\/p>\n
He shakes his head.<\/p>\n
My own father taught me to throw\u2014he 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\u2014hunting and sports. He showed his love. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
But here I am, coaching. Doing what Evan likes.<\/p>\n
He doesn\u2019t trust me.<\/p>\n
He wipes off his tears. \u201cI don\u2019t want to play today,\u201d he says. \u201cLet\u2019s go home.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re starting pitcher. You wanted to be starting pitcher this whole season.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNo,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cEven without the curve ball. Forget the curve ball! You\u2019ve got a great arm! Coach Williams says so.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy arm hurts too much. I can\u2019t play,\u201d Evan says.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust watch the game, or?\u201d I gingerly touch near his elbow where the ball hit. He sucks in air, and I can see the tears again.<\/p>\n
I wait for the team to show up and let another dad\u2014Dave Erickson\u2014know. He\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s a little fracture. He\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n
At our door, his mother hugs his head to her chest for a long time and gives me a look.<\/p>\n
\u201cI taught him the curve ball, though,\u201d I say.<\/p>\n
\u201cDan, come on,\u201d she says. We stand there quiet for a moment. I don\u2019t say more about my trip. When I got home last night, she asked me about it, and I said I was too tired. \u201cTomorrow then, after Evan\u2019s game,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
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\u2014a wistful, yearning U2 album they both hum along with.<\/p>\n
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\u2014the one with the inning where he pitched two strike-outs in a row, with that simple fast ball he does. They can\u2019t see the TV screen from where I\u2019m sitting with my beer. I\u2019m wondering if Signe would still be impressed with me now, knowing my wife isn\u2019t. I have to tell her about Dubai soon. And if I mention what I did in Thailand\u2014that\u2019s a nuclear power plant meltdown.<\/p>\n
I want to see Evan make one great pitch again. I can\u2019t even say why. The video is paused and there\u2019s no back stop because they\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cJoin us, please?\u201d my wife asks, holding a tiny puzzle piece up between her fingers\u2014her ring finger lifted with the wedding ring next to her engagement ring, simple but priceless because of where it comes from\u2014my own mother\u2019s. My dad who had to fix somebody\u2019s skid loader to pay for the tiny diamond. I lift my hand with my drink, meaning, in a bit. It\u2019s been a long journey. You know how it is.<\/p>\n
I press play and watch the fuzzy motion of Evan\u2019s fast ball. I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s the humidity or what, but I feel the soreness in my own elbow coming on like it hasn\u2019t in years and the bourbon isn\u2019t enough to dull the pinpricks in my bones. I should see a doctor soon before it all gets worse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
All these years on the road and I\u2019ve never done anything like that before. What really unnerves me is how I barely feel guilty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":182,"featured_media":23702,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","writer-joshua-d-wetjen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/182"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22709"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22709\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23703,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22709\/revisions\/23703"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}