Free Mudville by Kurtis Scaletta Page A

fives and slaps to the helmet. The pitcher throws his glove to the mound in disgust.
    The umpires meet, and the screen flickers into blackness.
    “What happened next?” asks Sturgis.
    “That was that,” my dad says. “The game was called for rain and never replayed.”
    “Well, now you can have the rematch,” says Sturgis.
    “Sinister Bend is long gone, though,” I remind him.
    “Anyway, we're all old now,” says my dad. “Scattered far and wide, with bad backs and mortgage payments.” Thinking about mortgage payments gets him fretting again, and he goes back to his office to mess with budgets on the computer.

    “Hey, Sturgis, you ever have a girlfriend?” I ask him that night after the lights are out.
    “With this mug?” he asks. I didn't think of that. I barely notice anymore.
    “Hey, chicks dig scars.”
    “Yeah, right, they do.”
    “They do. I'm sure of it.”
    “What about you?” he asks. “Did you ever have a girlfriend?”
    “Not really,” I tell him. Last year, in sixth grade, I was going with this girl for a few weeks. That's what they call it at my school, just going with someone. All it meant was that we had lunch together and she passed me notes. One day, one of those notes said she was breaking up with me, and that was that. I didn't lose any sleep over it.
    “You got your eye on someone?” he asks.
    “What makes you think that?”
    “You wouldn't start talking about girls otherwise. You're trying to get the conversation around to how you like some-one.”
    “Yeah, I guess.” I tell him about Rita, and how I've seen her but not talked to her, and how she smiled but it might have been at Steve. “Do you think a black girl would rather date a black guy?”
    “Last time I looked at a calendar, it was 2000-something,” he says. “That's not an issue anymore. This Rita girl probably digs you.”
    “How do you know?”
    “’Cause look at you,” he says. “You're a jock. You're decent-looking. You're a nice guy. You're the guy a girl would dig.”
    “Well, thanks. I guess if she says no, I have you as a backup plan.”
    “You dig scars, too?”
    “Heck yeah. Rita has a bright red scar right across her head, and it makes her look like a baseball. That's why I like her.”
    He cracks up. I must be picking up my dad's gift of hu-mor.
    “She have any friends?” he wants to know. “The kind who dig scars?”
    “I'll ask her the next time I talk to her,” I tell him. “I mean, the first time I talk to her.”
    “All right,” he says. He's out like a light again, and I'm left in the darkness for a while, wondering when that will be.
    We work for the next few days, removing half-installed Rain Redirection Systems from houses. It's just Sturgis and me and my dad. My dad doesn't want to pay anyone to take down canceled orders and recover the materials, so we do it all by ourselves. That's how Sturgis and I finally get to work up on the roof. I like to imagine Rita will walk by one of those houses and see me glistening with sweat, doing a man's job, and maybe swoon right there on the sidewalk. No such luck, but thinking about it helps pass the time.
    “Well, we're done with that,” my dad says as we wrapthings up late on Friday evening. “I think my rain redirection business is officially done.”
    He doesn't feel like cooking again, which really isn't like him. We pick up a bucket of chicken on the way home. I don't mind one bit. I'm a big fan of takeout.
    “What about that one?” I ask when we get home, pointing at the obsolete contraption of plastic sheeting on our own roof.
    “Oh, right.” My dad looks up at it in disgust. “We'll get it sooner or later.”
    We're barely through the door when my dad has the TV on and surfs through the channels until he finds a
M*A*S*H
marathon. Sturgis joins him on the couch this time, and they eat in the living room, not even using plates—just tossing their chicken bones back into the bucket and passing the little tubs of corn and