One Shot at Forever by Chris Ballard

Just seeing her, he forgot all about the yearbook she held, even if it was the reason for her visit. Technically, the yearbook was for research purposes. Carl Poelker, the affable math teacher, was again trying to set up Sweet with some girl or another, and this one—whose name Sweet now couldn’t even remember—was a senior at Eastern. So Sweet had asked one of his students, Jeanne’s younger sister Lou Ann, to procure a yearbook. Lou Ann had in turn written a postcard to Jeanne. And now here she stood, passing the yearbook to Sweet through the window in his classroom.
    He took it and promptly tossed it on his desk. Then he suggested she come back at noon to grab lunch.
    Jeanne agreed. That she brought along her older brother didn’t bother Sweet in the least. The more the merrier, he thought.
    Besides, Sweet wasn’t exactly lacking for companionship. Already casually dating a few girls, he found the prospect of adding another to the mix exhausting. But the more he talked to Jeanne, the more interested he became. In many respects, the two were opposites. Her family was Catholic; he was agnostic. She was a small-town girl; he was a product of larger cities. She was reserved and patient; he was gregarious and spontaneous. Almost instantly, they clicked.
    They saw each other again that night, talking for a couple hours at Jack Stringer’s house over beers, and then went their separate ways. Each had dates that Saturday night, but as they went through the motions, he in Champaign and she in Chicago, neither could shake the thought of the other.
    This sense of longing was new for Sweet, and he didn’t like it. For a man who’d led an itinerant life, who’d dated dozens of women, who’d been, in the words of Champaign friend Fred Schooley, “a real cocksman,” Sweet’s fall was remarkably fast. He saw Jeanne again on Sunday for a motorcycle ride, which led to a night at Claire’s Place, which led to Jeanne skipping two days of school to stick around in Macon. That week, they saw each other every night. By the end of the month, Sweet was smitten.
    Now, on the eve of the regional finals, Sweet headed off to see her again. It was probably better that he didn’t know what awaited in the morning.

8

The Announcement
    The call came over Macon High’s loudspeaker on Wednesday, May 20, the morning of the regional finals.
    â€œAll Macon baseball players and Coach Sweet, please report to the library to see Principal McClard.”
    John Heneberry was in class at the time, and he felt a tingle of excitement. Breezing down the hall, he entered the library expecting a good old-fashioned pep talk—perhaps a blustery pronouncement of how proud McClard was of the boys for “representing the school, God, and country,” followed by a send-off.
    After all, what else was there to talk about? Though the nation was in turmoil—the front page of that morning’s Decatur Herald & Review featured a South Vietnamese army tank churning through a mud-choked stream in eastern Cambodia—in Macon, the world had narrowed down to one game: the Ironmen versus the Running Reds. The boys would load onto buses in the early afternoon to make the trip to Johns Hill School in Decatur. A group of parents and students planned to caravan behind them. Even board president Merv Jacobs was considering making the trip. In less than two weeks, the Ironmen had gone from local curiosity to a genuine source of civic pride.
    And now McClard was going to rally the troops, or so the boys assumed. Only, instead of doing so, McClard began talking about Macon High in general, or maybe it was athletics in general, no one much remembers. He continued on like this for about fifteen minutes. Finally, he came to his point. “I want all of you whose names I’m about to call to raise your hands.” And then McClard began to read from a roster: “Mike Atteberry, Jeff Glan, John Heneberry,