(New installments will be posted below, to keep the beginning at the top, where it should be, I think.)
*****
It’s all part of the game—that’s what they said, anyway. It was their game, so they should know the rules at least. In all his 20 years of life, J.D. had never had anyone explain to him that everything going on around him actually was a game. He’d always believed it was just a series of unrelated random events. So, at least he was making progress. The dumbass.
Diane Sheppard was different. She was the youngest girl of four in her family, so she had so much advice through the years it made her head hurt when she thought about it—and she made sure anyone she talked to would soon suffer the same malady.
Diane Sheppard was frequently alone, which was odd considering her rather good looks. At this moment, she was not alone, however. She was in one of the 12,000 seats that made up Durham County Stadium. She stood and applauded like the rest of the packed stadium as Jonathan “J.D.” Dawson struck out his 10th batter in a row.
J.D. wondered for a second what else was going on behind the scenes that he didn’t know about, then walked off the mound as 12,000 fans made a hullabaloo about something he’d been doing all his life—namely, throwing the horsehide by guys wielding wooden weapons. Frankly, he was a bit bored by it all, but the signing bonus was in multiple millions, so he couldn’t just quit. Not to mention the fact that in a few years he’d be in the majors blowing people away and cashing checks most people could only dream about. As he crossed the threshold of the dugout, he looked up into the stands and winked at Diane Sheppard.
When J.D. winked at her, every girl in Diane’s vicinity wanted to kill her. Knowing this, she beamed a proud smile and sat back down in her seat feeling like she was floating on Earth like some kind of angelic carnality. That aura made all the girls around her want to kill her twice and piss on her rotting corpse. It was a vicious circle. But then again, so was life.
The North Carolina sun beamed down on the ball field, gleaming in green and brown and white-chalked splendor, when something really quite strange happened. As J.D. sat on the bench, the crowd went crazy for no obvious reason whatsoever.
***
J.D. couldn’t care less about what those yahoos in the stands were getting all lathered up about. As his teammates spilled out of the dugout to get a better view, he walked down the long hallway back to the small, dank locker room. He ripped a worn hard-copy book from his locker, and re-read the passage that had proven a mental obstacle for him for a good while now: “Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view. Yet the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design as if by a master watchmaker, impress us with the illusion of design and planning.” J.D. shook his head as slow as a field plow.
At that moment, Diane Sheppard couldn’t care less about natural selection. That was because at that precise moment she was getting beaten down like a child molester in prison by three women in the stands of Durham County Stadium. The other 11, 996 fans in attendance didn’t dare stop the cat fight, even though the scuffle was so obviously unfair.
***
J.D. shook his head, in fact, all the way back to the bench. He wished that damned bitch, that damned Diane Sheppard biotch, never put any of these cornball “idears” in his head. They made him feel… feel… he didn’t know. Weird? Gay? Superstrange? Whatever you wanna call it, J.D. didn’t like it. At all. He resolved silently to tell Diane about it, too.
He couldn’t tell her right then even if he wanted to, because she was flat on her back in the rear compartment of an ambulance headed to St. Regis’s emergency room. J.D. didn’t know that right then, though. If he had known, it wouldn’t have made much of a difference.
J.D. would have been perfectly happy without Diane’s intrusion into his inner sanctum—his restful mind. But no, she had to get all up in there and start kicking things up, start making a whole heckuva lot of noise for no good reason. He wished he could just go back, back to those lazy High School days when cheerleaders would go down on him just to be able to say that they did. It was like a badge of honor for them or something. A wet, sloppy badge of honor. And how could he deny them the pleasure of earning that badge? It made HIM happy, it made THEM happy, it made everyone happy. Well, everyone but the cheerleaders’ boyfriends, but screw them.
And then this Diane Sheppard person had to come along and screw it all up for him. What right did she have, really? What right did she have??
J.D. wanted to expel her from his life, but for some reason, some crazy fucked up reason, he couldn’t. He just couldn’t.
He could resolve to, sure, he had done THAT like a bazillion times before. But he could never carry it out, could never close the deal. Every time he tried, he had to look in those EYES, and then everything was lost, gone, forgotten.
And J.D. thought that was an awfully rotten thing for her to do. Awfully rotten. And the worst part was, she hardly had done anything at all. So effortless. Diane Sheppard was nothing if not effortless.
***
Diane Sheppard effortless flickered one of her eyelids open. She was in a hospital bed, and her brain was screaming for mercy from the searing pain invading its space. She had bruises all over her head and body. She wondered what she had done to deserve such a savage beating. And then she drifted off into a very pleasant coma.
***
The Durham Bulls scored a bunch of runs, so they decided to pull Dawson. He shrugged on the bench when Coach Faizon told him about the strategy. He then meandered off to the showers.
****************************************
Labels: brooklyn frank, fiction, frank marcopolos
