Cub

He’s twenty-nine now, but you wouldn’t know it. His eyes are sunken and hollow, lines etched into his skin by the afternoon sun. The ’95 Camry rumbles as the key turns in the ignition, its seats scratched by age and weather and too many nights spent asleep in the backseat. Up the driveway, right, then left, onto the I-6 towards Lincoln, where he is just another pair of hands used to put up the new developments. It’s easier than home, where his name lingers in the high school, in the mouths of the grocery clerks, in the rumble of the farmers. “Cub,” they say, “how you been?” or, to their kids: “Look, it’s Cub, he’s the best of us, he’s been to New York, to the Dominican Republic, to Washington D.C.” He nods and smiles, his name empty on their tongues, a name given to him when he was six, a name concerning someone who hasn’t existed for decades. At work they call him Chris.

Dirt stained his jersey as he stood, singular, on top of the mound. Floridian summer sky stretched out over him, humidity down his neck, suffocating heat refusing to yield. Cub didn’t care. His only focus was the bat, sixty feet away, idling in the hands of another eighteen-year-old who felt the world was theirs for the taking. Cub felt the seams on the baseball, red stripes inlaid into white. He twisted his fingers to get the grip and threw. Muscles strained in his arm, pushing forward, force flowing through it. The ball shot away from him and the batter swung, wood perfectly aligned with the ball, lined up to hammer it into the heavens. At the last second the ball dipped, spun out of the bat’s reach. The gunshot of leather hitting leather rang out across the diamond. He pumped his fist and walked towards his dugout, high fives and congratulations waiting for him, adrenaline coursing through his veins. He wouldn’t be here much longer, he thought, he was too good, too much better than everyone else on the field tucked behind the turnpike. He was right.

FOX HOLE, read the sign, green neon flashing into the night, one small bench outside a single red door, cigarette butts littering the concrete. It was a shitty old place, made worse by the seasons and the clientele: truckers, mostly, and those leaving Lincoln, going home to the empty plains, to their single-spire churches and inescapable childhoods. Cub held the pool cue in his left hand, end firing through his fingers, rising above the ball, pushing it the wrong way, towards the pocket. He grimaced and picked up his beer. Ben, his opponent, leaned over his cue. He knew who Cub was, they all did, but no one mentioned it. The two stained pool tables, the unstable stools, and the cheap liquor were all that mattered there.

He drives home drunk, sometimes bringing someone else with him, a stranger that wandered in from Lincoln, looking to forget their lives for a night, and find Cub, who buys them a drink, then a second, until the both of them are fumbling for each others clothes in the back of the Camry. It’s mostly women, often with tan lines on their ring fingers, but men too, those times quieter. They start with a shared look and wandering outside for a smoke, then not coming back in. Cub always feels worse after those, driving home faster, eyes struggling to see the road, only the signs, bright green and white and always coming up on him far, far too quickly. 

After one of these nights, flooring the Camry over asphalt, a deer jumped out in front of his headlights. His name was Alex, dark curly hair shoved under a White Sox hat, tattoos twisting down his arm. His right headlight slammed into its hind leg, shattering the bone. They played a game of pool, bet a drink on it, and did a round of shots after he let Alex win. It bled onto the shoulder, bone poking out of its skin. Cub brought up cars, they both had Toyotas, he offered to show him his, he accepted. It was still alive, whimpering, pleading for death. They got in, Cub driving, and drove to a motel, him paying the clerk as Alex sat in the car, waiting. He got back in the car, reversed it down the highway, lined his front right tire up with the deer’s head. Their hands slid over each other, stripping away clothes and sliding downwards, Cub pushing Alex onto his stomach. The car jumped as it crunched over the deer. They laid on the bed afterwards, not touching each other. He didn’t stop accelerating. Cub drove him back to the bar, said he’s around all the time, watched him drive away as he smoked. Sunlight woke him the next morning, pouring through the blinds and onto his bed. He checked the car, where the only scratch was a faint veneer of blood over the tire, then drove to church.

He bought the house from a farmer, the same one his father worked under for decades. It’s old, much older than Cub, floorboards groaning under the weight of memory. Here, his mother, dead by his fifth birthday, holding a hoe, pretending to sow a field. There, him, holding a baseball bat, smile stretching under the great midwestern sky. His father is the subject of most of them, arms burdened by a deep tan, face steeled against the wind, or cold, or anything strong enough to make him feel. He died of a heart attack; Cub found him. He had come back home for the offseason, surgery after surgery eating away at him. Each doctor said a different thing, had a different approach, had thought they could do it differently. They couldn’t. His elbow had destroyed itself, day after day of using it to punch a hole in the world. He had failed; it was time to go home. He packed his bags and drove. Across the vast deserts of the West, up through the Rockies, Utah and Colorado flashing by, meadows and mountains forming an infinity unto itself. Eventually, it emptied out, the plains opening up before him, vast and empty and familiar. He pulled off the interstate before Lincoln, up the dirt-gravel driveway he had scraped his knees on a thousand times, and parked. The door wasn’t locked, it never was. His father lay on the floor, unmoving. No one could tell Cub how many days it had been since they’d seen him. It was peaceful, Cub hoped, the end. Quick, too, maybe, but he couldn’t know. 

The shade of a small maple tree in the corner of the town cemetery marked the grave. Cub was the only one at the funeral, the singular suit he owned on, dusty and black. Prayers were said, flowers laid: dying orchids clustered together by a thin blue string. He never got him a  gravestone, he didn’t care, knew that no one else would. He’d come back once since then, on Christmas day. Drifts of snow had lay across the cemetery, white and bright under the Midwest sky, the lick of whisky he had poured out staining it brown. He drove away after that and had never come back. Why would he? All there was to see there was the memory of a quiet, lonely man swallowed up by the plains.

He’d do anything to go back to before it all. Before the months spent in gyms, recovering an elbow that refused to heal, before his childhood home was empty, before the sky closed and the world spun away from him. For a long time, he was the best of them, hanging onto every word his coaches said. It was his ticket out of Nebraska, out of the corn and the soybeans and days in the field that felt like they would never end. He woke early, his dad driving him to Lincoln, to get on travel team buses that dragged through the uniform states of the Midwest. They played in mud-wrecked and rust-stained fields, rain and heat mere afterthoughts. He hated it; he loved it.

Long bus rides marked his time in Double-A, Texas landscape changing by the hour, the Chihuahuan desert giving way to thick forests giving way to the coast, water shimmering and stretching out to islands of another world. The spines of books lay cracked open on flipped-down tables, forgotten as quickly as they were opened. He watched out the window, taking in the world that waited for him. In the locker room, arms marred by a farmer’s tan that had become a baseball one, he put his socks on his hands, stretched them out, then on his feet, pulling them up as far as they would go, reaching towards his knees. It was a silent routine before the field opened up before him, wind and chance caught in the vastness. He was good, better than good, a comet rocketing through the solar system, the rings of Saturn already a distant memory, the asteroid belts before Mars empty husks of rocks, the Sun the guiding light, burning hard and bright in the distance. Soon, the distance wasn’t so far anymore. The heat around him built up, white fire entangling blue, blinding him to the melting ice at his edges, his form breaking in the heat. Water ran off behind him, a trail left in the sky, empty and cold. He passed Earth, a million pairs of eyes looking up to mark his passing, then fell, spent and gone, into the abyss, to be carried off by the whims of the universe.

The farmer lowers his voice in a protective whisper, the husk of it sanded down, cleaned by the finger of whiskey he holds in his right hand. He speaks of the man who returned after escaping, the one who bought the house his father lived in outright, who works in Lincoln and never shows his face. The others — the elders of town, with callused hands and guarded secrets — lean in, eager for more. He doesn’t sleep, the farmer says, the light in his window on late and early alike, steam spilling out into the winter night. He doesn’t know how, or why, he hasn’t killed himself yet, or left. The others agree, nodding their heads. There’s nothing else left for him here, the priest offers. He can leave, he has before, why doesn’t he? It’s a luxury the rest of us will never have, the sheriff says. None of them can say for sure as the sun set over the plains, sky swirling orange and pink overhead. The farmer says that, sometimes, when he wakes to milk, he can see Cub watching him from his window, drinking god-knows-what from a small cup. Eventually, they let the conversation turn to simpler things before leaving, each driving home tipsy, headlights blaring down empty country roads. The farmer puts the glasses in the kitchen and heads to bed, falling asleep in the same house he always has, the same house he always will. 

Half a mile away, Cub sleeps, dreamless. He wakes before dawn, sweat on his brow, right hand clutching his elbow. The sky is as dark as ever, cloud cover stretching out into the wastes. He sighs and gets up, drifts to the bathroom and pisses, then brushes his teeth. The light flickers on in the kitchen, the stove after it, kettle full with water. He sets a stained metal mug on the counter, puts a scoop of instant coffee in it and waits. Out in the field the farmer walks towards the barn, sees the light on across the soybean and raises a hand in greeting. Cub pours the water into the cup and stirs. Coffee burns down his throat, bitter and metallic, a grimace shooting across his face as he stares out across the plains. The clock reads 5:43 AM, with no sign of sunrise out the window. The pain never goes away.