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Chapter 2
The tripper bar of my car door succumbed to my trembling fingers and the release caused the door to stand ajar. I looked inside my Blazer’s tinted windows and saw nothing I wouldn’t have expected to see under normal circumstances, so I pulled the door open and paused, scanning the interior for further signs that I may be certifiably mad. Then, satisfied that my crisis of sanity had subsided, I sat down in the driver’s seat.
The leather seats, warm from the sun radiating into the closed compartment, comforted and consoled me. Fumbling for my keys, I heard a match strike in the back seat. I turned around in time to see my father waving the match in the air to extinguish it, sucking hard on the cigarette he’d just lit.
“Hey, Buck-o, what say we go down to the Blue Lady? I haven’t been in there in years.”
I looked into the coffee-brown eyes of James Charles Church, III. The man called me ‘Buck-o’ the first fourteen or fifteen years of my life. I didn’t like it then, and I didn’t like it any better now. Whomever or whatever sat in the back seat of my Blazer knew this, too, and the smirk on his face gave testimony to it. There could be little doubt… this was my old man. But how was this…?
I don’t think I can do this… My heart screamed inside my chest and I fought for breath.
“Oh, you can do it, all right…” his words took on the same tone I’d heard whenever he demanded my attention. “Whatsamatter? Chicken?”
Those words thrust me back to the summer of 1959, when he’d called timeout and walked out to the mound. We were one run ahead in the last inning of our ball game. I’d gotten two men to strike out, but Eddie Dodge was at the plate, the league’s leading hitter. I’d thrown two pitches, neither of which was even close to being a strike. Taking the ball from my hand, Dad looked at me and said, “Bobby Ray, if you walk this guy, I’m going to let your sister, Debby, come out here and get this guy out. I’ll give her your uniform and you can wear her dress and play dolls on the sideline. How about that? Can you do it… or are you chicken?”
As I recall, I shrugged, tears welling in my eyes. He put the ball back in my hand and walked off the field. Eddie Dodge launched the next pitch over the tops of the trees in centerfield. So, I was a loser... but I wasn’t chicken.
“Okay, whatever you say… Dad…” I started the car and put it in gear. Slowly, I proceeded along the road leading through the vast fields of identical white markers, being careful not to hit any of the ever-present Canadian geese attempting to cross the road, and pulled out into traffic on Sheridan Avenue. After checking my side-view mirror, out of the corner of my eye I saw my father now sitting up front, adjusting the seat.
When he caught me looking at him, he grinned, held up his cigarette and said, “No ashtray in the back seat. I wouldn’t want to get ashes all over your nice new carpet…”
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