Yellow Mesquite Read Free Page B

and carrying on as Phillips took an embarrassing swing at Billy Wayne’s slider. Strike two.
    Harley’s gaze wandered past the backstop, beyond the cars and pickups to the café and Travis’s general store wrinkling in the heat among a half dozen little shoe-box houses down across the school grounds on the other side of the highway. It was high time he hit that road, got off to Dallas. But then there was Darlene Delaney.  
    He looked aside to where she sat with three other girls in Billy Wayne’s ’55 Chevy. They drank Cokes they had brought up from the café, and fanned themselves with magazines, and now and then they’d get out and parade around in front of the cars, laughing and giggling for the benefit of whoever cared to watch—and more than one were willing to watch these girls bursting out all over, jiggling up and down the sidelines in their light summer dresses, tanned arms and legs swinging.
    Things had gone well with him and Darlene for a while now. They had been to the musical at Travis’s general store two Saturday nights in a row, and Darlene had ridden to the Highland ball game with him the week before. That night he had given her a gold ankle chain with a little heart on it. That chain had cost him the last of his going-away money.  
    He watched as Darlene got out of the car, her full twist of a mouth turning down at the corners in a haughty smile, big slanted eyes flashing over high cheekbones. One of the girls said something to her and they all giggled. Darlene flushed and laughed and threw a magazine back through the window at them. Showing off. She tossed a glance in Harley’s direction, then went parading along behind the backstop, hips and breasts doing the damnedest things under her sleeveless cornflower-blue dress. He was pleased to see she wore the ankle chain.
    He heard the crack of the bat but by the time it registered, the ball was a thin white blur whistling past his ear. His glove automatically snapped up in its wake, but that ball was long gone and Jimmy Phillips from Blackwell was pumping his knees ninety-to-nothing, coming down the first-base line with everybody yelling, and Anse, the man on second, was already rounding third, headed home. It was a fair ball just inside the base line. He could have stuck up his glove and had it without moving out of his tracks.
    Frog Anderson tried to stop it in right field but it took a bad hop, jumped his glove, sank up in his jelly belly, and came spitting back out, Frog swatting at it, sucking air. It didn’t matter anyway; Anse was crossing home plate, and everybody was hooting and hollering, and that Blackwell bunch were blowing their car horns and going crazy, and by now Phillips was rounding third, headed home. Phillips had a home run on what would have been a line drive to first if Harley had been on his toes instead of daydreaming over Darlene Delaney. That was it. He had lost the game: Blackwell five, Separation three.
    Billy Wayne Hinchley glared at him with his big head cocked to one side, hands on his hips as though he might like to do something about it. Willie McDonald on second slammed his glove on the ground and kicked up a cloud of dust. There was a lot of noise: “You wanna sleep out there, we’ll get you a cot.” “Get that boy some caffeine.” “Gonna get killed standing around on the ball field, your face hanging out like that.”
    He felt himself flushing—looking like a damn fool right in front of Darlene. Pretty soon everybody quieted down, and some of the boys even thought it was funny. The Blackwell team hung around for a while, rehashing the game with the Separation boys. Most of the older men went on back to work or down to the café.
    “Goddamn , you can flat throw that ball,” Jimmy Phillips said to Billy Wayne.
    “And you can flat hit the hell out of it, too,” Billy Wayne replied, a sideways glance at Harley. “You just about knocked that cover plumb off.”
    “Shit, let’s all go swimming,” Frog