Chapter 7

“Fair” Isaac Coleman had umpired the local sandlot games for nearly forty years, but the neighborhood children were finding his calls more bric-a-brac now, totem-weary in their unbidden flotsam. And besides, baseball wasn’t as popular as it had once been. Skating, football, sundry skadoodles, and video games had taken its place in the life of the American child, lately pickle-framed and burdened with all manner of unwagging demystifications.

Knuckled and jumping now, the town boys bypassed the dry pastures, ever-searching for endeavors more severe, both in intensity and brevity; the evolution of their weltschmerz prompting goatees in those as young as forty-five one-hundredths score.

The television limped now. All around, the cathodes arrested and fell silent, poisoning the fruits of Cartwright. Games of distraction now replaced games of edification. Yet Isaac remained, determined to bring the children to his beloved game.

Chapwood, urine-pleated pants and Hawaiian shirt, puffed towards the old sandlot, carrying with him the dismay of bad knees and forgotten childhood dreams. The children who remained were joyless to Chapwood. Piss and twist, down and out, black and blue, Jack and Diane, he thrust his core moundward, unwavered in his disdain of propriety as newly defined by club-headed capuchin wranglers whose unfearingness of bites and tosses confounded even the most retarded of mouth-breathers in all of Chapwood’s half-remembered realities.

Having clubbed old Isaac into a coma with the bat, Chapwood’s mind unjointed and crisped to nearer humidity. Yet the world still spun in foolish ways of organized unsense. To this, reconciliation was still unlikely. Undesirable as well. The children meanwhile had skitched, three wide, towards the neon thoroughfare.

Chapwood, mildly sentient now (in relative terms of course), was able at the very least to pro-actively quest.

The piss flaked off, the pleats unfurling. Finally, he could breathe.