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		They sat in the empty Firefly dugout, Victor eating chicken, Padgett watching the last of the sun in the mist of the sprinklers that watered the outfield grass. Inside the big Firefly head, Padgett’s face dripped with sweat. The game was lost. The fans and most of the players had gone home. The sun was down, set behind the left field wall, beyond the Tennessee Life and Casualty bulls-eye, the same bulls-eye that Victor Salandra had hit, despite the team’s losses, three times in two weeks. Padgett lifted the head from his shoulders and set it beside him on the dugout bench. The head grinned at him, the big gold Firefly smile that was also the gap through which Padgett in costume could see. He tapped the head’s right eye. When he’d first taken the Firefly mascot job, the right eye had partially come undone and he couldn’t get anyone to stitch it back on, for two games it sort of hung there like the Firefly was losing an eyeball, so he bought some crazy glue and stuck it back on himself. The left antenna did not always work. Seams were loose in the torso. Up close, the Firefly was not in the best of shape. Padgett shifted his belly, made still larger by the wire and shell, reached around, tore off his wings, and threw them to the dugout grass. “Motherfucker,” he said. He glanced at Victor Salandra. Victor Salandra was the Fireflies’ new star. He was from Mexico. He’d got a $50,000 signing bonus. At twenty-two, he was seven years older than Padgett and he swore constantly: fucking ump, fucking sun, fucking humidor by which he meant humidity. Padgett rarely swore. His neck felt hot when he did it. Victor spat. A wing bone sailed end over end and stuck to the dugout’s top step. The step was littered with bones. Maybe he’d talk to Victor some day, about what it was like to hit a home run, about how it felt to strike a ball so hard that it sailed beyond the ballpark walls. Padgett gathered up his wings. He dug dirt from the ridges with his thumb. He slapped at a mosquito that bit into his stockinged calf. Maybe, he thought, she hadn’t seen him fall. Or maybe she realized that he’d been tripped by the Concord Seahorse, how when you’re wearing the Firefly outfit it’s not so easy to stop falling once you’re on your way. He had asked Victor what Victor saw, but Victor had been in the clubhouse during the race, calling his mother in Guadalajara on a cellular phone. He unsnapped his torso’s belt. His belly released out and it ached. He had not eaten, much, since noon. He would not eat. It was not fair that a guy like Victor could eat a twelve-piece Mountain View chicken box each night and still beat out an infield hit. He glanced at the remaining biscuits. They were hot, with pats of butter. He eyed the crunchy skin that Victor peeled and ate separately from the meat. Maybe Victor had grown up on a diet like this, in Guadalajara, so that his system had adapted. But then again, Padgett had grown up on a diet like this and he had what his sister June called more chins than a Chinese phone book. She thought that joke was a riot. He plugged his battery pack into the dugout wall. His knees were sore and scratched. Chasing the Concord Seahorse around the bases in the Pioneer League’s Weekend Battle for Tennessee, he’d tripped and fallen to the edge of the outfield grass. The battery pack had jammed into his gut; his tail had snapped into the air and shorted. He’d eaten dirt. The crowd, his own hometown, went wild. Bags of peanuts and crumpled cups had rained down around him. When he’d tried to stand, he’d fallen again, his shell having shifted and become heavy to one side, and this had brought a still larger ovation from the growing Firefly crowd, growing because of Victor Salandra, and all he could think of was Jeannie Haynes. Their hands had met, briefly, just after the top of the first, when he’d asked her for a bag of peanuts, and later for an eskimo pie. Mist across her, her bare arms, when she gave him the pie she’d smiled, and even through his blue black Firefly gloves, he could feel her softness and her heat. Jeannie Haynes, in shorts that showed the butterfly tattoo on the inside of her right thigh; Jeannie Haynes, whose blonde hair fell into one eye, hair that she’d curl around her ear, that she threaded through the space between the snap and the felt of her cap so that her neck would see the sun. The sweat across the front of her Firefly t-shirt, the gathering of beads along the track left by the tray strap, along the soft lines of her neck, and down into spaces about which Padgett could only dream. He reached for a piece of chicken. Victor looked up. “You all charged fucking in?” Victor asked, nodding toward the battery pack, two fingers digging around in his mouth, a small bone appearing between his teeth. When Mr. Coyle offered Padgett the mascot job, because, Padgett knew, Mr. Coyle was friends with his mother, Mr. Coyle had told him about Victor and how he’d like Padgett to be available to Victor, if Victor ever had any questions. Victor never did. Not that Padgett was any genius, with a 2.5 at Greenville High, with the copy of A Catcher in the Rye that his brother had given him still somewhere beneath some pile in his room, even as his brother had been dead now for nearly two years. “Charged fucking up,” Padgett answered, to be helpful, reaching also for a biscuit. He’d started that book and found it gloomy, filled with rich kids whose problems did not seem his own. “Up, not in.” He squeezed the biscuit, to watch the butter pool the crust. Jeannie Haynes ran a broom absently around the floor of Shelly’s Hair West Salon. Jeannie Haynes was in love with Victor Salandra. She loved the muscles in his arms, the ass in his pants, the way he hit the ball. She loved his eyes. Mostly his eyes, although she could not avoid his ass. His eyes were gentle and henna, henna eyes, or like that clove shampoo, dark but like chocolate, like storm clouds, like lakes. Well, maybe not lakes, and she did not want to say too much to Shelly, who talked to everyone, it did not matter whose hair Shelly was cutting, could be the lowest trash in town, could be the mayor’s wife, she talked, and Jeannie loved this about her, but she didn’t want her love for Victor to be all over Greenville. Not because he was Mexican, Jeannie didn’t care, her best friend, Tip, was black, but because he was better than her. He’d hit the Tennessee Casualty and Life bulls-eye three times in two weeks, and all she had was a tattoo on the inside of her right thigh. Lately, she thought her mother was right, that she was an idiot, a slut, although not for the reasons her mother claimed. Her mother was a drunk, her father was “absentee,” and she’d let Tip’s brother finger her because she was hot for Victor. On Saturday afternoons she washed hair, swept up hair, answered the phone, got Shelly coffee. Shelly was cutting the hair of a roofer. “You could hear the bang of the ball in the back of the right field bleachers,” the roofer was saying. “I thought that bulls-eye was going to come crashing on down.” She’d never been in love. She’d never really enjoyed lovemaking, had never really, in fact, been hot, with the three she’d been with, including Davis who got her pregnant and paid for the abortion and her mother claiming she had to get baptized again, Jeannie threatening to kill herself if her mother did not sign the papers of parental consent. She wouldn’t have killed herself. She would have had that baby. She tried not to think about it. “Of course I wish this Victor Salandra were a local boy,” the roofer was saying, “or at least from California or something, like that Hendricks boy we had back here four summers ago. But man, the nigger can hit.” She looked at Shelly, but Shelly did not flinch. She hoped Shelly would stab the roofer with her shears, but Shelly just carried on, and then they were talking about roofing, Shelly giggling when he talked about taking off his shirt to show her where his tan line began. A roofer paying fifteen dollars for a haircut. A roofer who was no more than twenty, looking her up, using the word nigger like he were seventy. If she used that word it was for a criminal, real trash, someone who’d disgrace blacks like Tip and even Tip’s horny brother. And she was even thinking lately that this was not right. She’d ask Tip. Tip would tell her. She turned her back. She felt the roofer’s eyes on her. She went to the alley for a smoke. It was a blazing Saturday. Jeannie stood out back beneath the shade of the City Beer awning. Someone had stuck a newspaper between the drainpipe and the wall. Probably the guy, Patrick something, who worked in the City Beer stock room. She’d see him sometimes, carrying boxes, or stacking empty kegs by the dumpster. A college kid. She used to see him when she and Davis would stop for wine. She’d look the kid in the eye, daring him to say something about her age. Davis was forty-two. He was a union sheet worker and she’d run her hands inside his shirt and feel the soft hairs along the muscles of his belly. He’d been sweet. He’d listened to her about her mother’s drinking, and she’d listened to him about Alice, the woman he’d lived with until, he’d said, although Jeannie did not now believe it, he’d thrown her out. And then he’d started to hound around and call her less and then, when she was pregnant, she’d asked what he’d do if she decided on her own to keep the baby and, outside in the Firefly parking lot, he’d lit her cigarette, then his, and said, a hand on either side of her against his car, “First I’d kill it, then you.” Jeannie lit a Camel Light. She checked the weather page. Scattered thunderstorms, but no threat of steady rain. No threat of a washout. She turned quickly to the sports: the last place Chattanooga Hillcats had lost again. She exhaled. She shut her eyes. The damned, loser Hillcats. On Monday, the Fireflies went on a ten game road trip and then, well, she’d been around A ball long enough to know where a player like Victor Salandra was headed: up to those last-place AA Hillcats, or even straight to the AAA team in Syracuse, New York. Victor, she whispered, Salandra. She even liked his name. The corners of his brown eyes, the center of his thick lips. The square of his shoulders, his black hair on his forehead when he ran. She felt her heart, beating fast. She felt her stomach, falling away. A car with a cherry bomb muffler peeled around the corner. She opened her eyes. A cat padded by in the heat. She flicked the butt at it. Padgett stared into his computer. No address found. It was stupid to think about these things. But on Monday his father would have been gone for exactly four years. Padgett had come home on that night and he and his brother Danny had made bologna sandwiches because his mother had been at night classes studying to be a school administrator. Eventually he’d wound up back at the kitchen table, alone, running his finger around the rim of a water glass. His mother, upstairs on the phone with her mother; his sister, crying in her room; Danny shooting basket after basket in the driveway by the porch light. Padgett had run so many Net searches for his father since his mother had brought a school computer home for the summer that sometimes he had to stop himself from running just one more. It was hot. Outside, the neighbor kids were playing in a plastic pool. Padgett pulled off his Tennessee Titan jersey, the one he’d got at BP gas. He poured himself a big glass of Pepsi from the plastic bottle on his desk. He should drink diet, his mother bought him diet, but it did not taste the same. He heard his sister June rummaging about in her room, getting ready to go to a barbecue the senior class was having, a barbecue that the more popular juniors and sophomores were invited to, a party that did not include him. He didn’t care. He drank a big belt of soda. He was not eating as much. In the past twenty four hours he’d had a turkey and cheese sandwich, one glazed donut, some orange juice, orange soda and coke, another donut, and an egg sandwich that his mother had made him this morning before she went to school on a Saturday to catch up with some summer work, no bacon. And the drumstick. And the Eskimo Pie from Jeannie Haynes. Straight from her hand. Sweat rolled down his ribs. Padgett adjusted the fan, raised his arms and let the humid air blow across him. For a time he’d watched his sister dress through the heat vent between his wall and hers. It wasn’t much, his own sister. Once he’d been lucky and her friend Olivia had stayed over, and those were the only breasts he’d seen outside of a magazine he’d found in a dirt pile behind the Greenville middle school gym. He tried to imagine Jeannie Haynes’ breasts. He’d never gotten much past her smile and her eyes. Her arms like wings behind her head, her underarms smooth and open to him. Her breasts. Her tits. Raised up to him. Nipples. He glanced at the door. The house was quiet. He gently pressed the door lock. He silently lowered the window shade, turning back to the hot breeze that blew across the butterfly at her thigh. By the seventh inning the Fireflies were losing 11-2. The heat was so bad that she could see her bra through her damp shirt. The tray strap dug into the back of her neck. She’d been leered at for most of the game. Men stared at her chest, women frowned at her, and a little kid had put his sticky hand on her knee. Victor had singled and walked. He was due up again in the bottom of the seventh, after the stretch and the race between the Firefly and Seahorse. The Firefly was a kid from school whose brother had died and she felt bad for him. He was fat and didn’t look you in the eye when he spoke. She thought he might be in the school band. She wanted a smoke. She had two cokes left, with the ice nearly melted in both of them. She scanned the crowd. A man with a grey beard, sitting alone on the far end of the steel bleachers, waved his hand. He wore a hat low across his eyes. She’d have the other coke herself. She glanced at the scoreboard. She had a little time. Her father had a beard, at least when she’d last seen him. He wasn’t a bad man. She just wished he’d have taken her with him. The Concord batter hit a lazy fly to left. She wondered if she’d recognize him if she saw him now. She wondered if he’d recognize her. And then she turned to face the man again and before she’d even met his eyes she knew that it was Davis. He stood, and Jeannie began to run. She ran up the cement bleacher steps and past the rail, through the jammed beer line, and tray-first into the employee door that was guarded by a cop. Inside, she pressed her hand to her heart. She didn’t open her eyes. He’d fucked her and left and now he was back. For what? For more of what she had? She didn’t have it for him. He’d given her money and gone away. She found the bathroom and made it to the stall. The cokes had spilled up all over her shirt. Padgett was atop the Firefly dugout, shaking his tail at the crowd. The taillight was flickering he knew, and the left antennae was out, but the crowd did not seem to care. He stuck his arms across his body to make an F. The crowd yelled F. When the race came, he’d be careful not to get too close to the Seahorse. Maybe with a burst of speed, he might make it a race at the end. He wanted to win. He held his arms against his sides. The crowd yelled I. He wanted to show her. He wanted to show her he wasn’t the kind of guy who always tripped and fell. The crowd was working up. Kids raced along the aisles, making letters, sliding in spilt beer and water from the afternoon’s rain. When the crowd started really hollering, he did not need to turn to know what was behind him. Mothers folded windbreakers across seats, fathers scrambled down steep steps with big beers and corn, a bugle blared from the loudspeakers above. The Seahorse had emerged. Padgett set a hand to the edge of the dugout and lowered himself down to the field. This was it. Someone threw a chicken leg at him. From out the dugout, Victor Salandra threw a can. “Hey Firefly, kick some motherfucking Seahorse ass,” Victor hollered. He could imagine her, there, at the top of the stands, the storm clouds red behind her, a night breeze, her bare shoulders, and her hair. The Seahorse and the two umpires stood at home plate, talking like old friends. Padgett weaved across the infield like he was supposed to, a firebug buzzing toward home. The home plate umpire winked as he reached them— “hey Padgett, watch that turn at second.” The infield umpire laughed. Padgett wiggled his wings. Behind the Tennessee Life and Casualty bulls-eye, thunderclouds rolled above the trees. When he was seven, his father had shown him and Danny how to climb the back of the Life and Casualty bulls-eye from the parking lot side of the centerfield wall. Watching the players from above, Danny reeling off batting averages and ERA’s, his father’s arm around him, his father’s voice, and it did not matter what they had been saying, it was the feel of them, that they were there. The loudspeaker came on. Oh I wish I was in the land of cotton. They were there and now they were gone. Old times there are not forgotten. The crowd sang along. When Danny got sick, his mother had called his grandfather who’d told her that he’d pass on the message, if Padgett’s father called. She leaned against the bathroom’s tiled wall. Her bike was locked near the player bus. She waited after every game, thinking of something to say, but Victor never noticed her. She checked her watch. Nine pm. Her mother would be watching TV, fucking, getting slapped around, or sleeping. It was too early to tell. She could ride around. Maybe see Tip. Her work shirt was stained with coke. She took the shirt off. She turned on the taps and rinsed it. She had a bag with her, in her locker. She’d brought her red silk shirt, and the velvet choker that she’d bought that afternoon. She felt sick to think about them. She rinsed her mouth. She looked at her face. It was ugly and flat. She pressed her forehead to the mirror, looked into her eyes. She brought her arms across her chest. This was Davis, she thought, this close and this cold. The Firefly was rounding first base, already five steps behind the Seahorse. She moved down, away from the bleachers toward the field. The tower lights were glowing on. Thunderclouds rolled above them. She knew Davis would find her. There was no point in running. He’d be in town maybe a day, or maybe permanently. There was nothing she could do about it. A breeze was damp across her. The smell of hot-dogs and beer. Padgett saw his tail go out as he rounded the first base bag. He reached back to slap it and broke off a wing. He weaved. He heard the crowd roar. The Seahorse stopped ahead of him and made like it was checking its watch. The second wing slipped away as he rounded second, fluttering above his head. Padgett reached for it. He heard a seam tear, and the wing disappeared, and for a moment he was staring into the darkness of his Firefly head, and then as his gaze leveled he saw her, she was there, Jeannie Haynes, up above the third base line, leaning on the rail. She wore a red shirt. It was open at her neck and the breeze blew through it and he could see her damp skin. He felt suddenly the heat. He felt like he did when he swore, only more so, his whole body releasing with prickling heat. He would not lose. He made his hands into blades, to slice the air, to go faster, as he had once learned in gym. To try harder. He looked up again. Her bare arms were spread along the rail. And then he saw clearly her eyes. He stopped. A rib bone sailed out from the crowd. Between third base and home, the Seahorse waved its scaly arms. Tears were running down her face. Padgett stood for a moment, and then in the heat and the rain of debris and catcalls, he pulled off the firefly head and let it fall, down to the infield dirt. The skies opened up. He stepped across the third base bag, and into the emptying stands. Victor Salandra ran up the dugout steps. “Fucking-A—,” as Padgett stepped toward a girl in a red shirt who was crying, and carefully offered her his fuzzy arms.
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