everything.
The Roadkill Crew doesn’t really exist anymore, but it feels as if it does, sitting next to Tim. The Roadkill Crew was the Baseball Family before they started aging and then dying, when they had the time and the energy to drive to away games, attaching themselves to the team. I have, quite happily, become a sort of story receptacle. It helps that the structure of the stadium is still in place, still exactly the same, so sentences can begin with,
I was over there, right there, see where that guy in the red shirt is?
Now, and during every game, Tim makes a second story line, spoken over the image of Nick, as though the two were related—thisperfect boy in front of us and all the games that Tim and his friends drove to decades ago.
Tim speaks to me in
“we.”
In fact, I have never met a man less concerned with the “
I
.” In his stories, he is always with somebody or many somebodies, often not named, just there. Every exploit is shared. Tim has never married. He lives in a one-bedroom house a few blocks from the stadium. He walks to games alone, then walks home alone. He makes venison chili in a big Crock-Pot, eats a little, saves the rest for days. He falls asleep in a single bed. These are things that I know but cannot picture.
They drove twenty thousand miles in a summer, easy. And that’s not including the trips they made down to Arizona for spring training, never stopping through Missouri and then Kansas and then Oklahoma and then Texas and then New Mexico, speeding through the desert and watching the sun rise over the cacti that stood waving in warning or welcome. Tim has never ridden an airplane, has never seen a reason to. He has absorbed every mile that he has traveled away from Clinton, and then he has retraced them all. The Roadkill name isn’t just a joke. More than a few possums were sacrificed for their pilgrimages over the years, left dying with his tire treads in them, tokens of his travels until finally their corpses dissolved in the rain.
Tim calls out to Nick when the half inning is over and he takes the field.
“We love you, bud,” he says.
There’s that
“we.”
And it’s a little different, I think, from the most common uses of the word when screamed by a sports fan. At most stadiums, in most bars, you hear
We did it!
Tim takes no credit. He doesn’t include himself in the perspective of the doers, wouldn’t presume to. His
“we,”
and, sitting next to him, his bare arm around my shoulders, I am included in it, claims only to love.
Nick Franklin doesn’t turn around to Tim’s voice. He gets to where he needs to go and stops on the edge of the infield to adjust the brim of his hat. He’s not being rude; I don’t mean to suggest that. Imagine if he did stop and turn and wave. Imagine, good God, if he did what most people in most relationships do: Awww, I love you guys, too. How the stadium would freeze, all nine hundred people scattered about thefront rows. He is not supposed to gush. He is not supposed to feel the way we feel. Sometimes I think he’s not supposed to feel at all, a strange demand for a teenage boy.
Tim goes back to the stories, a jumble of them rolling in on top of one another, conflating time and place and character.
Once, back when Springfield had a team, we showed up with maybe fifty or so Clinton folks. We organized a full-on caravan down I-74. We got to the stadium like a swarm of bees, and it was like there were more of us than there were Springfield fans. After we won, the Clinton players said,
We couldn’t have done it without you
, which was pretty nice to hear.
Once, we got drunk with the umps before a game in South Bend. It was a generous strike zone that game.
More than once, we had the boys over for barbecues when they looked lonely.
We rode back alongside the bus after the championship in 1991. We honked the whole way. The players pressed their faces on the windows and smiled.
It is easy to reduce Tim’s
“we,”
easy to poke
The Roadkill Crew doesn’t really exist anymore, but it feels as if it does, sitting next to Tim. The Roadkill Crew was the Baseball Family before they started aging and then dying, when they had the time and the energy to drive to away games, attaching themselves to the team. I have, quite happily, become a sort of story receptacle. It helps that the structure of the stadium is still in place, still exactly the same, so sentences can begin with,
I was over there, right there, see where that guy in the red shirt is?
Now, and during every game, Tim makes a second story line, spoken over the image of Nick, as though the two were related—thisperfect boy in front of us and all the games that Tim and his friends drove to decades ago.
Tim speaks to me in
“we.”
In fact, I have never met a man less concerned with the “
I
.” In his stories, he is always with somebody or many somebodies, often not named, just there. Every exploit is shared. Tim has never married. He lives in a one-bedroom house a few blocks from the stadium. He walks to games alone, then walks home alone. He makes venison chili in a big Crock-Pot, eats a little, saves the rest for days. He falls asleep in a single bed. These are things that I know but cannot picture.
They drove twenty thousand miles in a summer, easy. And that’s not including the trips they made down to Arizona for spring training, never stopping through Missouri and then Kansas and then Oklahoma and then Texas and then New Mexico, speeding through the desert and watching the sun rise over the cacti that stood waving in warning or welcome. Tim has never ridden an airplane, has never seen a reason to. He has absorbed every mile that he has traveled away from Clinton, and then he has retraced them all. The Roadkill name isn’t just a joke. More than a few possums were sacrificed for their pilgrimages over the years, left dying with his tire treads in them, tokens of his travels until finally their corpses dissolved in the rain.
Tim calls out to Nick when the half inning is over and he takes the field.
“We love you, bud,” he says.
There’s that
“we.”
And it’s a little different, I think, from the most common uses of the word when screamed by a sports fan. At most stadiums, in most bars, you hear
We did it!
Tim takes no credit. He doesn’t include himself in the perspective of the doers, wouldn’t presume to. His
“we,”
and, sitting next to him, his bare arm around my shoulders, I am included in it, claims only to love.
Nick Franklin doesn’t turn around to Tim’s voice. He gets to where he needs to go and stops on the edge of the infield to adjust the brim of his hat. He’s not being rude; I don’t mean to suggest that. Imagine if he did stop and turn and wave. Imagine, good God, if he did what most people in most relationships do: Awww, I love you guys, too. How the stadium would freeze, all nine hundred people scattered about thefront rows. He is not supposed to gush. He is not supposed to feel the way we feel. Sometimes I think he’s not supposed to feel at all, a strange demand for a teenage boy.
Tim goes back to the stories, a jumble of them rolling in on top of one another, conflating time and place and character.
Once, back when Springfield had a team, we showed up with maybe fifty or so Clinton folks. We organized a full-on caravan down I-74. We got to the stadium like a swarm of bees, and it was like there were more of us than there were Springfield fans. After we won, the Clinton players said,
We couldn’t have done it without you
, which was pretty nice to hear.
Once, we got drunk with the umps before a game in South Bend. It was a generous strike zone that game.
More than once, we had the boys over for barbecues when they looked lonely.
We rode back alongside the bus after the championship in 1991. We honked the whole way. The players pressed their faces on the windows and smiled.
It is easy to reduce Tim’s
“we,”
easy to poke
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