Free Wingshooters by Nina Revoyr Page B

parents; living with them had been shifting and uncertain. I wasn’t sure I was really eager to go back to that life. But I did want to feel like they wanted me.
    Thinking about all of this, I felt a sudden surge of loneliness. Then I heard scratching at the door. When I opened it, I found Brett there, ears lifted in concern and questioning. I leaned over and petted him on the head, kissed him on the snout. I brought him into the room and invited him to jump up on the bed, which he did, and then I hugged him until I drifted off to sleep.

FOUR
    D uring the fall of 1974, time seemed to move both faster and more slowly than usual, with each event brightened and magnified like the leaves on the maple trees, which were bursting then with color. I remember that time vividly, the particular tensions in the air, the way that all of us faced the morning with a heightened awareness, as if we were preparing ourselves for whatever the day might bring. The uneasiness in town was sharpened by events in the larger world—the resignation of the president, long lines at gas stations, the kidnapped heiress who was still missing even though her captors had been killed or arrested, the escalating crisis in Boston. Everyone seemed to be on edge, and at nine years of age I felt suddenly old, as if I knew that the things I was witnessing then would propel me into an early adulthood.
    But there was more to those weeks than tension and difficulty. Some good days were mixed in, too. And as those days grew increasingly rare, I held on to them more tightly.
    The Saturday after I’d been questioned about the Garretts at dinner, Charlie and I loaded the car up with several bats, two gloves, about three dozen baseballs, and headed out into the country. My grandparents’ car was a lime-green ’64 Pontiac LeMans, so big it could have fit eight people in its long bench seats, one short of a starting lineup for a baseball team. The car had clocked 22,000 miles in the ten years they’d owned it, just slightly more than I rack up now in a single year in California, and it’s a measure of my grandfather’s view of the world, of his essential satisfaction, that he never saw reason to drive more than fifty miles from Deerhorn, and then, really, only to hunt.
    That day, he sat with his right arm thrown across the back of the seat and his knees spread wide, so relaxed he might have been sitting in his living room. His left hand rested lightly on the bottom curve of the wheel, even as we hurtled along at eighty miles an hour down a two-lane country road. I wasn’t scared because everything about the way he held himself made clear that he had this powerful machine completely in his control. Besides, I was eager to reach our destination. There was a baseball field about ten miles into the country, which used to be the home of the Deerhorn Bombers until the new ballpark was built close to town, and which now served mostly as a practice field for the boys who still lived out on the few remaining farms. It was at the far end of a pasture that backed up to the woods, and deer would wander into the outfield at dusk. Charlie drove me out there sometimes when we knew the place would be empty to work on my batting and fielding. We always brought Brett with us, and as we approached the field that morning, he raised his head to feel the rushing air against his face, the wind lifting his black ears like sails. When we pulled off the road onto the gravel parking area he began to circle and whine, as eager as Charlie and me to be outside.
    Is there any place more perfect than a baseball field in autumn? Anything better than the smell of the grass; or the crisp, cool air; or the red and yellow leaves against the clear blue sky, which was paler now than it had been in the summer? I didn’t think so, and this field was my favorite. Because it wasn’t used as much as the fields in town, there weren’t any worn spots in the grass, and the infield was perfectly level. The