* * *
—
Bill looks back to the outfield. And right in front of him, floating down to his eye level, out there in the bleachers with him, is a tiny plane. Or hadn’t Bill seen one before? He has, it’s a drone. A drone plane like they’d been flying into terrorist hideouts and caves in the Middle East. Bill swats at the drone with his trash-grabber. The thing floats back, then turns around and floats down to where he can’t see it. “Hey!” Bill finds he’s yelling at the drone. And then he turns to walk up the stairs, up to the corridor that’ll get him to the stairs that lead down to the field.
When he gets to the top of the stairs at the first deck, plaza infield, he pulls out his binoculars, scans the field for the drone, and finds it. He walks down the stairs, tries to keep it in his scope, but it’s hard while walking, the binoculars shake, and the thing keeps moving. Bill sees that it’s headed for home plate. He skips down the stairs. He hasn’t gotten moving this fast in years. Maybe decades.
Bill can see it with his eyes now. He’s running, trash-grabber in hand. He’ll destroy the thing. Bill still has fight, grit, hot blood running—he can still move. He steps onto the brown-red dirt. The drone is at home base, it’s turning toward Bill as he runs toward it. He readies his trash-grabber, raises it in the air behind him. But the drone sees him just as he gets in range. It flies back. Bill gets a hit in and sets the thing wobbly for a moment. He lifts his trash-grabber again, comes down hard, and misses entirely. The drone flies straight up, quick, ten and twenty, fifty feet in seconds. Bill gets his binoculars back out, watches the drone fly out over the rim of the coliseum.
Calvin Johnson
WHEN I GOT HOME from work I found Sonny and Maggie waiting for me at the kitchen table with dinner made and set. Maggie’s my sister. I’m just living here until I can save enough. But I like being around her and her daughter. It’s like being back at home. Home like we can’t have it anymore. Since our dad left, just disappeared. Really he hadn’t been there all along. But our mom acted like he had. Like him leaving was the end. It wasn’t really about him or any of us. She’d been undiagnosed for too long. That’s what Maggie said.
Being bipolar is like having an ax to grind with an ax you need to split the wood to keep you warm in a cold dark forest you only might eventually realize you’ll never make your way out of. That’s the way Maggie put it. She got it like me and my brother didn’t. But she’s medicated. Managed. Maggie, she’s like the key to the history of our lives. Me and my brother, Charles, we hate and love her like you end up feeling about anyone nearest to you who’s got it.
Maggie made meat loaf and mashed potatoes, broccoli—the usual. We ate in silence for a while, then Sonny kicked me in the shin under the table, hard, then played it straight, kept eating her dinner. I played it straight too.
“This is good, Maggie, tastes like Mom’s. Isn’t this good, Sonny?” I said, then smiled at Sonny. Sonny didn’t smile back. I leaned into a bite, held it over my plate, then tapped Sonny in the shin with my foot.
Sonny broke a smile, then laughed because she’d broken a smile. She kicked me again.
“Okay, Sonny,” Maggie said. “Go get us all some napkins? I got that lemonade you like,” Maggie said to me.
“Thanks, I’m’a get a beer though. We still got some, right?” I said.
I got up and opened the fridge, thought better about the beer, then got out the lemonade. Maggie didn’t see that I didn’t get a beer.
“You can get that lemonade I got for us though,” she said.
“You gonna tell me what I can and can’t do now?” I said—and wanted not to have said it right away. Sonny got up and ran out of the kitchen. Next thing I heard was the screen door opening and closing. I got up with Maggie and went to the front room, thinking Sonny had maybe run out the front door.
Instead, there was our brother, right there in the living room, with his homie Carlos—his shadow, his twin. At the sight of them, Maggie turned around and went to Sonny’s room, where I should have followed her.
They both had forties in their hands. They sat down in the living room with the cool and cruel indifference of guys who know you owe them something. I knew he’d show up eventually. I’d called him a few weeks before to let him know I would get him the money I owed, but that I needed more time. Maggie let me stay with her on the condition that I stayed away from our brother, Charles. But here he was.