to the outfield, just as the little girl leveled the bat and smashed the ball into the air, as threatened.
The ball sailed toward Rachel, the wind picking it up as it flew past first base, shifting it slightly away from the foul line. As usual, Rachel panicked and covered her face with her mitt. The dog remained sitting at her feet. Ronda walked to the ball, just as the little girl rounded second and barreled toward Red Mabel, who might have met her match. Instead, the girl cruised past, and Red Mabel scorched the outfield with profanities. Her invectives were drowned out by the cheering of the children in the dugout.
“You,” said Laverna. The girl grabbed her stand, and spat in the dirt near Martha. Expressionless, even though her teammates screamed and rattled the cage. “What’s your name?”
“Klemp,” said the girl. “I ain’t telling you my first name. That’s my right. This is America.”
“Jesus,” said Laverna. “Klemp, I want you to keep hitting.” Klemp propped her stand back into place. Laverna turned to Jake. “Get me a dollar out of my purse.” Jake rooted around and pulled out a bill. “Go give it to Klemp.” Jake opened his mouth to protest, but Laverna had had enough sass from children for one day. “I can’t use my arms, for fuck’s sake!”
Klemp took the dollar, but didn’t have any pockets in her uniform. She tucked it into the inside of her sneaker.
“Keep hitting,” said Laverna. “Just like that.”
Klemp turned around and cleared her throat. This time, she pointed her bat at Bucky. She refused the ball, once again. “Do your job,” she said. Bucky made a wide berth around her as he rested it on top of the T-ball stand.
Klemp pointed her bat at the taller Sinclair. The taller Sinclair flinched, lowered herself into ready position, jean skirt dragging in the grass. She pushed up the sleeves of her sweater, and Laverna’s hopes rose. They came crashing back down when Klemp blasted the ball far into left field, and it grazed the mitt of the shorter Sinclair, kept on flying.
“I’m fucking with them,” said Klemp. Laverna decided not to give her any more money. This continued for the next ten minutes. Klemp gave Bucky the evil eye until he arranged the ball, and Klemp bashed it into the outfield, and the Flood Girls proved to be useless. Rachel especially. Once she saw an easy target, Klemp hit it to Rachel again and again, until Rachel just held the mitt up to her face permanently.
Laverna was disgusted. She forced Jake to fetch her an antianxiety pill, and he held up the can of beer to her mouth. She could no longer watch the carnage, and she sighed. She studied Klemp, her grimly determined face and firmly planted stance. Laverna had no doubt that Klemp would grow up to be a silver miner.
“You’re not even trying!” Laverna shouted to the outfield, her casts slammed against the chain link, and pain shot up her arms. The dog reached the ball before any of the outfielders, and pushed it with his nose, deeper into the grass. Ronda threw her mitt at the dog, missed by a good three feet. Finally, the taller Sinclair scooped up a ball and threw it to Diane, who had hustled out into the grass of the outfield. At least the Sinclair had hit the cutoff, thought Laverna. Of course, Diane had been wildly gesticulating with her hands, so she wasn’t hard to miss.
The Flood Girls did not need uniforms. Laverna would rather spend the money on something useful. She wondered how much it would cost to import a ringer from Cuba, a woman who could actually play ball. She didn’t give a shit about the language barrier, or the paperwork. Laverna calculated the cost of housing a foreigner, and the expense of finding plantains, or whatever Cubans ate. The hell with it, decided Laverna. She would figure out a way to draft Klemp, even though she was too young for the league.
Concealer
Jake found himself awake at three in the morning. This had been happening for a week. He would lie there, still as a corpse, for two hours, glancing out of the corner of his eye at the alarm clock until 5:00 a.m., when he would just give up and put on his headphones.
Jake didn’t dare turn on a lamp. When Krystal worked the night shift, he made himself as unobtrusive as possible. He didn’t want a lecture about Jesus, so