Free Casey's Home by Jessica Minier

beckoned with its cool shimmer.
Otherwise, he was staring at not much of anything. He let his mind drift, to
college the next year – he was considering signing up for the general science
program at the JC, mostly because they had a good ball team – and he pondered
this slight gain in independence with a mixture of fear and delight that
sometimes electrified his body and made his breath evaporate from his lungs as
if sucked into a vortex. This happened even when he wasn’t literally hurtling
through a wind-tunnel. He wasn’t really thinking about the Pros, yet. Billy had
hinted at Ben’s being called up fairly quickly, and had suggested he skip
college and go straight into the Minors, but so far Ben hadn’t received any
offers. That meant, he knew, nothing much. He still had one year left of high
school, and though the scouts had been around, no one was biting, yet. His arm
was good, better than even he had expected, thanks to Billy’s training, but he
didn’t want to jinx himself by wanting it too much, or thinking about it with
any confidence.
    When he’d first started throwing,
back in junior high, it had been mostly because the usual pitcher was sick, or
injured. Hitting had been his chief pleasure, then, along with playing right
field. He liked the glamour of a good solid hit, as most kids do, and the way
it felt to race back after a hard-hit ball, to feel it slip almost softly into
the webbing of his glove, and then to hurl it, arm muscles releasing in a burst
of power as the ball sailed dead-on to the second baseman. He hadn’t been as
big, then, and his growth had waited until his freshman year of high school.
Once he’d begun to shoot up and fill out, his coaches had taken notice of the
one thing he’d always had: accuracy and control. They placed him on the mound
with increasing frequency. He was in his element on the mound, though he
wouldn’t have said that was true until he’d been there, day after day, and
finally understood the reasoning behind each pitch. In a pinch, when the team
was struggling, was when his ability to place the ball became almost uncanny.
Billy said it was Ben’s inner stillness, “your fucking Zen nature,” as he put
it. “Like one of those fucking rock stars with their Yogis and their gurus and
shit. Except you aren’t trying to blow peace out of your asshole.”
    Ben had no idea, particularly at
sixteen, what any of that meant. He only knew that his body knew how to throw,
and how to get the ball to go where he wanted it. The coaches may have worked
hard to align his mental with his physical, but he knew it had nothing to do
with his brain. The ability happened, somehow, between his eyes and his hands,
without his conscious mind telling him anything. In fact, the more he thought
about where to throw the ball, the more wild he became. So he didn’t think: he
moved. And if that made him Zen like a rock star, he could deal with that. And
if, someday, it got him a car like this one, he’d meditate each morning in the
low-slung black-leather seats like a child in its mother’s arms.
    The Stingray had no glove
compartment, but instead a series of pockets that seemed to be designed to hold
as little as possible: the manly equivalent of a wallet, Ben supposed, rather
than a purse. Billy had tucked a clearly never-opened map of the entire US, a
packet of beef jerky and three packets of Fruit Stripe gum into the pockets.
Ben’s feet rested over a small cooler filled with cans of Coke. Around noon, it
occurred to him to wonder if this was considered lunch, or if they would stop
somewhere. He didn’t dare ask Billy, who hadn’t said a word to him in four
hours, beyond, “Buckle your goddamn seat-belt, kid. I don’t plan on explaining
to your mother how you vaulted out of my car and I had to scrape your brains
off of the pavement because I had to brake for a fucking squirrel or
something.” Apparently, one of the more important aspects of enhanced machismo
was to speak very