A Friday afternoon retirement party in early March. Just the sort of bullshit I never have time for the rest of the year, but that I’ve allowed myself to be dragged to this time. The river ice isn’t thick enough anymore, not for fishing or snowmobiles. I’m hoping to get home in time for Jerry Springer though. I hear Kara calling me, as I surf the hors d’oeuvre table. Pigs in a blanket. Perogies. Nachos. Big bowls of Salt n’ Vinegar chips. Tray of veggies from the deli at the Safeway. Usual stuff.
“Walt honey, this is Sean Harder. From the office."
I look up from my pickings, knowing to expect something. There’s a loaded quality to her tone of voice. I offer my hand, repeating his name. “Sean Harder.”
“Nice to finally meet you Walt. I’ve heard a lot about you.” He’s not quite as tall as me. Not at all what I was expecting. Sean was the Goose Gossage of my Little League years, always pitching for the best team, Kennewick, dominating everyone along the way.
He's a good looking guy, Black Irish, pale and trim. He's grown out of the doughy body that was his strength back then and into a litheness I can feel in his handshake. This is a guy who's struck me out probably thirty times in my life. More.
"How are you?"
"So you're Kar's man, are ya?"
"Aye." In Saskatchewan, the baseball season has always been days long, a brief
respite between spring thaw and school letting out, when the kids go off to the farms to work. Your only hope against Sean Harder's teams, always in PetroCan red, even the year that the Insurance agency sponsored them, they stayed in red, your only hope against those teams was to catch them on the nights Sean couldn't pitch. Our league had a once a week rule for starting pitchers. Kara gives me a look, impatient, something, over Sean’s shoulder and moves off.
"You been together long then?"
"Oh, aye, I guess. Long enough, eh? Living together now a couple years." Kara’s been his secretary down at the bank since he got back. So I’ve known about him, but I’m still surprised. The way Kara talks, I’m surprised to see that I'm a bigger man than him now. She makes it sound like he’s ten feet tall. Before he started at the bank, I hadn't thought about him in years.
"You still play any ball?"
This is the first indication I get that he's even recognized me. But I guess that Kara’s mentioned that I remember him. "You set me off that pretty much, eh?” Quick laugh. “How 'bout you?"
He's looking closely at my face, watching me, like he hasn't heard me right. Smiles. "A little. I lost that fastball years ago. But I hear things like that so much here ‘bouts, how I did this to people. Why did you stop if you liked it?"
"Oh, I guess you had nothing to do with it. The options dry up local, eh?. Hard to even get up a regular slo-pitch league." Even that last year of Pony League, there’d been only enough guys for four teams in our league, one for each town and one catch-all. That catch-all team was real bad. So we all got to see plenty of Seanny. "So you still
play then?”
"I got as far as the Pan-Am Games try-outs, a couple years back. Catching. I couldn't hit well enough to make the team, eh? But it got me into school though, out in BC."
"That's still pretty something, eh? Local boy makes good, right? Never heard about it.”
"Well. It's Kennewick and all." And he's right.
This is Pasco and crossing that bridge is a whole other world. “Oh, aye. Who knows what they get up to over there. So, you’ve been to school in BC. Are ya a doctor then Sean?”
We're three communities out here, Kennewick on the other side of the North branch of the Saskatchewan, and the other two, Pasco and Richland, on this one, a bend of the river cutting through the three. Railway came a hundred years ago and froze things, not cutting through any one of the towns, only leaving its mark at a great water tower and later the silos that sprouted up there. Eventually the bridge and a crossroads where most of the commercial stuff, first a Zellar's and a Field's, with them eventually being pushed out by the WalMart, where the retail stuff spiked up. But the towns stayed pretty much the towns.
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