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Bad Hop
By
Jarrid Deaton, May 08, 2009
I could hear the thumping sound of the equipment bag hitting the wall in the hallway before he made it back into
the living room. He slung the bag on the couch and pulled out one of his old hats, the bill stained with years of
sweat.
“My old man would have beat my ass already if he caught me in the damn house in front of the fan on a day like
this, boy,” he said, and squatted down to limber up his knees. “What we’re going to do tonight is catch two
hundred straight, boy. I might hit a grounder, I might pop it up, or I might line one right back at you. You have
to be ready for it. In a game, you ain’t going to know what’s coming at you.”
We went outside and started the game of Pepper without another word.
A cloud of gnats had already started swarming near me. When I threw the first pitch to Dad, one of them flew
right in my goddamn eye. I got lucky, because Dad hit a slow grounder back to me which I fielded with no problem.
We did that twenty times before I was able to get the gnat out by rubbing my arm against my eyelid.
When Dad hit ball number fifty-six, he hit it high. I jumped to try and snag it but it hit the top of my glove
and fell to the ground.
“Starting over,” he said.
I picked up the ball and threw it back at him. He hit a line drive that I barely caught. Even though he swung the
bat in a way that the ball would never go too far for me to have a chance at it, he sometimes hit the bastard
hard. When we got to ball number seventy-seven, I screwed up again.
Dad showed no sign of getting tired. He came from the days of practices where the coach would punch you in the
gut if you slowed down. I had trouble breathing. We had been going for two hours and I was just back up to
seventy. It had started to get dark, but that had no bearing on the practice. If I couldn’t see, then I couldn’t
see. I tried to stay focused and ignored the cramping pains in my legs and my shoulders.
One-hundred-twenty took a bad hop and hit me in the chin. I was still able to catch it, though, so Dad kept right
on going, even though my whole jaw felt like it might lock up.
“Way to keep in front of it,” Dad said.
At ball one-hundred-fifty, it was totally dark outside. The security light hummed to life and the gnats got
worse.
When we got to ball one-hundred-ninety-three, Dad hit a worm burner. The thing came rolling at me so fast that I
didn’t have time to react and it went through my legs.
“Can’t you fucking bend over, boy?”
I chased the ball and threw it back to him. My whole body felt like one big muscle on the verge of cramping.
Instead of hitting the ball, Dad let it smack against the building and drop to the ground.
“We ain’t stopping till you catch all two hundred without screwing up,” he said. “My old man wouldn’t put up with
your pussy shit. He would have already put stripes on your ass and had you running laps until your legs fell
off.”
When he hit ball thirty-three foul, and it rolled to the side of the house, I knew I had at least twenty seconds
to catch my breath. I walked over to the edge of our home to get the ball when I saw something that I thought
could bring an end to the whole thing.
A fat frog sat right next to the ball when I went to pick it up. It probably came around every night to eat some
of the gnats that swarmed there. I watched it, almost the size of a baseball, its sides twitching in and out as
it breathed the night air. The frog was so lazy, so slow, content and full that it made no attempt to hop away
when I picked it up and put it in my glove. I hoped I could joke with Dad, that he would laugh and we would go
inside.
I tossed the frog high, to make sure its legs spread out so he could see it. Dad would watch the frog reach its
arch then fall to the ground in front of him. He would look at me and maybe say “Goddamnit,” and start laughing.
He would put his arm around me and tell me that we could call it a night. We would go inside and get something
cold to drink and maybe catch the last few innings of a game on television.
Ping.
When you think about an aluminum bat connecting with a frog, you really never stop to think what sound it might
make. You just assume it will splat, or make a crunching sound like a twig snapping. Instead, when my father made
contact, the bat hit the frog directly in its skull. The noise was the same sound as ball number twenty-three,
ball number seventy-eight, all of them.
Ping.
It went a surprising distance, arcing ten feet, before falling in a lump near a batting tee that I had used since
I was six years old. I walked over to the frog and there wasn’t much left. It was just a mass of green and pink.
The frog’s tongue was the only thing left of its head. I reached down to pick it up, and its insides spilled over
my hand.
I turned back around to look at Dad, expected him to come over and inspect the damage. He hadn’t moved.
“Goddamnit,” he said, with the bat against his back from the follow through.
Jarrid Deaton lives and writes in eastern Kentucky. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from Spalding
University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pear Noir!, Zygote in My Coffee, Cut-Thru Review, The
Legendary, and elsewhere. He is co-founder and editor of The Wrong Tree Review.
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