Free Why Dogs Chase Cars by George Singleton Page A

days a week for an entire summer and listened to him bark “Ball!” unless our opponent’s batter blasted a pitch out of the park. A lot of times I missed catching it completely, of course, and the umpire’s shin stopped the ball. He said often, “Goddamn you, Dawes, I’mo send your daddy my doctor’s bill for bruises.”
    And I always said, “A man with his leg stuck hard on the ground isn’t going to go far in life,” like my father told me to say, which wasn’t the smartest thing, of course. Or I thought, A man with his leg stuck hard on the ground will never learn how to fly no matter how hard he flaps his arms. Invariably the umpire was one who’d worked at the cotton mill at one time or another and was missing digits, too.
    C OACH D. R. P OPE wouldn’t get his wish in regard to the team not setting a losing-streak record. Our team had lost all of its games for the three years before I could playand went on to lose until D. R. quit the mill and moved down to Myrtle Beach less than a year later. He got a job, I found out, as the maître d’ at a fancy shellfish restaurant in Murrells Inlet. He had always talked about his dreams and goals and ambitions after we lost games by enormous margins, but I thought he talked big like that so that we would play harder the next game,
maybe win,
and not chance losing him for a coach who popped his players’ hamstrings after every strikeout or error.
    â€œMy wife’s cousin Sandy married into a rich family down there at the beach. They made they money paving driveways with seashells, you know. And then they thought, Hey, why don’t we open up a big old restaurant, and we can get our clam and oyster and scallop shells for free every night? So that’s what they done. And Sandy’s husband, Claude—he’s no account, and the family just flat-out give him his place to manage called Sandy Claude’s—he said I’d be perfect for greeting eaters, when the time was right.”
    D. R. Pope told me his little story after everyone else left the players’ bench, while I tried to stuff my mask, glove, shin guards, and chest protector into an old duffel bag.
    â€œYou know what’s keeping him from going down to that restaurant today?” my father asked me as we drove home maybe midway through the 1968 season. This was a time before some touchy-feely psychologist figured out that losing kids would feel better about themselves if a game plain ended when one team was behind by ten runs at the end ofthe third inning or whenever. We’d lost this particular massacre 49-0. I remember only because their coach kept yelling at D. R., “Hey, we done scored seven touchdowns and every extra point after!”
    To my father I said, “Coach doesn’t want to go on to Myrtle Beach until we finally win a game, I guess.”
    My father honked the horn at nothing and laughed. “He’d never get to go to Myrtle Beach if he waited for that.” He laughed and laughed. “That’s a good one, Mendal.”
    I said, “I ain’t trying to be funny and you know it. Why’s he waiting, then?”
    My father pulled into the Dixie Drive-In so we could get milkshakes. “The mill pays those boys a thousand dollars for every missing digit. It’s something like five thousand dollars for an arm from the elbow down. Times get tough, a man like D. R. Pope just grits his teeth and sticks his arm in a machine. I’m thinking that his cousin-in-law wants D. R. to go ahead and lose the matching fingers on his left hand so he’ll look more like a lobster. Or crab. Or any of those other things with pincers. Like a scorpion. And I bet D. R. needs three more thousand dollars in order to make the move, you know. If he puts his other three grand in a bank account, that’s a pretty nice little jump start.”
    I ordered a plain vanilla when the carhop woman showed up. I