Running With Mustangs

Backstory and history of a particular player- make them come to life!
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Running With Mustangs

Post by RonCo » Wed Jun 28, 2017 11:31 pm

It was a black Mustang. Even though it was dark, you could hear it coming from miles away, its gear crank growling, its tires screaming against the concrete of the highway. It was late, too. Two in the morning, maybe three. That’s why she could hear it from the side of the highway. No traffic what to speak of happened on the Interstate at two or three in the morning.

Officer Rowland was sitting on the front fender of her squad car. It had been a busy night. So busy she had barely been able to take in the game. The Nine lost a meaningless match to Vancouver, but it was fun to listen to, bittersweet in a way. The team was going to the play offs, but Officer Rowland didn’t really want the season to end. She was tired. Had hoped nothing big was going to happen the rest of the night so she could let the year just settle over her here in the dark.

The Nine had won 100 games. Imagine the hell out of that. Baseball was her thing. Well, it was her and her dad’s thing, up until the old codger went and kicked off a couple months ago, anyway. He woulda been crying tonight, but Officer Rowland couldn’t quite bring herself to do that. Fact was she hadn't cried since the day the old man finally gave up and died. Crash had been on the mound that night. She remembered watching the last part of the game alone, then going on home from the hospital with a billion things going on in her mind but nothing much coming out of it.

The Mustang was coming, though. From the sound of it she wasn’t going to need her radar gun for anything but the proof of it all if the idiot decided to take it to court.

She strolled around to the door and got in the car.

A moment later, the Mustang flashed by. Yes, it was flying. A convertible. In the thin strobe of light that came as the vehicle flashed past she saw the driver had dark hair and that his head was thrown back in some kind of twisted scream. Yes, a scream. She heard the voice above the sound of the engine and the heavy beat of some kind of Latino rap or hip-hop. She didn’t take time to think much about that, though. Instead, she dropped the cruiser into gear, hit the flashing bubbles and gunned it.

Let’s see if the guy stops, she thought.

Two minutes later she’s got him in her sights. The man’s head is still thrown back, wind blowing stiff waves through his hair (which is black and short). He's wagging it to the left and right. Pounding on the steering wheel as he flies down the road, then throwing his head back and howling over the music that she could still hear over the whining sound of her own engine. Probably drunk, she thinks. Or, since the Mustang is staying pretty much on course maybe the guy isn’t drunk. Just weird. Just when she figures he’s insane because he’s not heeding her lights, the Mustang slows and pulls over. As she comes to a stop behind him, she hears the music fade, then shut off. She shuts her own car down. Everything gets absurdly silent.

She was right. It's a Mustang. A rental, she can see that from here. Probably a tourist. Maybe even here for the game. The team draws a lot from the Latino community.

She leaves the lights on, and takes the flashlight with her, shining it on his hands, which stay on the steering wheel as she approaches. That’s the great thing about convertibles. You can see.

She comes to stand beside the door.

The man sits there, still as a rock, looking forward into the darkness.

“Driver’s license?” Officer Rowland says.

He reaches into his hip pocket and pulls out a wallet, then extracts the license. She flashes over the picture, then puts the light to the guy. His eyes look fine. She can’t smell liquor. She flashes back to the picture. They match. For some reason the guy looks familiar--though, to be honest, she’s not great at distinguishing Latino men.

“Well,” she says, taking another look at the license. It’s issued from Arizona. “Mr.Berrios. Do you know how fast you were going?”

The man smiles.

The name registers. Berrios.

She looks at him again. It’s Jesus Berrios. The kid, if you can call him that. She knows his story. Of fucking course she knows his story. Jesus Berrios is a 29 year-old rookie come up from Flagstaff a couple weeks ago just to spell the names while the end of the season came around. Story says he's going to be released after the season either way, but the team wanted to give him a couple weeks in the bigs after all this time.

That was their story anyway.

Sounded like something topsiders would always say, though. What they really meant was that they were going to use up Jesus Berrios—put him in harm’s way so that their more valuable parts didn’t get dinged up in these meaningless games, then toss him aside when they were done with him. Pretty much like topside of the force did with her dad. Pretty much like all topsides did, no matter where you went.

Here’s the thing about Jesus Berrios, though. The man had a magical two weeks. He hit .333. He scored runs. He stole two bases. He was hitless in four at bats tonight, with a strikeout, but she remembered the radio broadcast from earlier, and the way the voice described Berrios during that last at bat. Everyone knew the score. After that last at bat, Jesus Berrios was probably not going to be a baseball player ever again, and unlike Bo Jordan, for whom the night was a celebration of a career, for Jesus Berrios this night was a career.

“I was going too fast,” Berrios says. “I’m sorry.”

Something in the voice tells her more than the words.

“What was on the radio before you shut it off,” she says.

He can’t hold a smile back. “It’s a song.”

“Put it on for me.”

Berrios looks at her. He shrugs like he’s got nothing to lose, and he clicks on the music. It’s got percussion and a bass line that she likes. The volume isn’t high.

“It’s nice,” she says.

He doesn’t reply.

“When do you go home?” she says on a whim.

“What do you mean?”

“Your flight? When is it going back to Flagstaff? I assume that’s where home is now”

An expression comes over him that says he can’t decide if he’s happy to be recognized or embarrassed to be seen for who he is. He looks into the dark sky.

“This morning.”

She looks at him and, for a moment, she sees her father sitting in the seats in left field where he held tickets. The Nine were all he really had in the end. He followed them every minute. “There’s a beauty to this game,” he told her one afternoon as they sat together. “There’s a heroism to it that you can’t find many other places. The game of baseball is life, baby girl. Don’t you forget that.” He had been preaching to the choir, of course. She had always loved the symmetry of the game. The theory behind it. But for that moment on that day she saw a certain flame burning in him that defied the disease that had been coursing through his veins even as he sat there all frail and hard to look at, almost enveloped in that floppy Nine hat.

She remembers the fire in his eyes then. It's the same fire she's just seen in Jesus Berrios’s eyes as his Mustang flashed past her parked cruiser.

She looks at Berrios again. Harder this time.

Who knows, maybe his career isn’t over. Maybe someone else will take a chance on the 29-year-old career minor leaguer who came up and hit .333. No, that was the fan in her talking. That was the dreamer. Real life doesn’t come with too many dreams. At best Jesus Berrios might get another season or two bouncing around in the minors for some club before being cut loose and heading back home to Puerto Rico or wherever he was going to make a new life that most likely would not include baseball. That was how life worked in the real world. Life with topsiders around, anyway. People who thought they understood how things had to work.

She wonders what Jesus Berrios will wind up being. Probably not law enforcement.

But she looks at Berrios and she knows. Knows. Knows deep in her heart that the man is out here late at night on a road with no traffic, driving a rented Mustang with the top down and howling and letting the wind blow through his hair, and knowing…knowing that for two weeks he had been a .333 hitter in the big leagues, and that now no one can ever take that away from him, and she knows that he knows in his heart of hearts that his life—the thing he was born to do, the thing he was put on this earth to be, is over.

She reaches into her pocket and extracts a piece of metal. It's smooth and warm from her body heat, but cools quickly in the nighttime chill.

She hands it to Berrios. “Take this,” she says.

“What is it?”

“It was my father’s. A cleat from an old baseball shoe he wore back when he played ball in high school, back before a war took his fastball, anyway. I think he would want you to have it.”

The baseball player wraps his graceful fingers around it, and looks at her with a new depth in his gaze. Then he reaches his music player and clicks the device to let the media free. He takes out a cube and hands it to Officer Rowland. “The song is my sisters,” he says. “She’s the singer. If you really liked it, I think she would like you to have it, too.”

“Thank you,” Officer Rowland says as the takes the cube. She puts it in her pocket.

Berrios sits there awkwardly, then.

Officer Rowland flashes the light down the road. “No traffic tonight,” she says.

“No.”

“Makes for a great time to let a horse run, don’t you think?”

Berrios smiles.

“You’re letting me go?”

“Only if you drive fast as you can,” she says. “And only if you promise to keep my father safe.”

He laughs. “Thank you.”

“Have a good life, Mr. Berrios,” she says. “Wherever you end up.”

She turns back then and walks to her cruiser. The Mustang roars to life behind her. 300-plus horses kicking and ready to go. By the time she’s to the driver's door the only thing she can see of Berrios is the twin red glares of taillights getting rapidly smaller. The smell of exhaust is sweet. She feels odd. Light in a strange way. Small and large at the same time. She feels good. She feels alive. She feels her father speeding along with Jesus Berrios, a pair of big leaguers in her eyes. Both .300 hitters.

She gets in the cab and shuts the door. The police radio blares, and she shuts it off to sit in the silence for a moment longer but then finds she can’t stand that as much as she thought she wanted to. So she pulls the music cube out, and plugs it into her system.

The percussion plays.

The bass line runs.

The sound of a voice singing a language she doesn’t understand fills the cab.

Only then does she begin to cry.
Last edited by RonCo on Thu Jun 29, 2017 10:48 am, edited 4 times in total.
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Re: Running With Mustangs

Post by udlb58 » Thu Jun 29, 2017 9:06 am

Words escape me Mr. Collins.
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Re: Running With Mustangs

Post by RonCo » Thu Jun 29, 2017 9:31 am

Thanks. :)
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Re: Running With Mustangs

Post by Lane » Thu Jun 29, 2017 9:52 am

No, I'm not crying, you're crying!
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Re: Running With Mustangs

Post by palmolive44 » Thu Jun 29, 2017 10:13 am

Wow, that was fantastic.
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Re: Running With Mustangs

Post by palmolive44 » Thu Jun 29, 2017 10:14 am

Lane wrote:No, I'm not crying, you're crying!
I think my allergies are acting up.
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Re: Running With Mustangs

Post by Lane » Thu Jun 29, 2017 10:19 am

palmolive44 wrote:
Lane wrote:No, I'm not crying, you're crying!
I think my allergies are acting up.
Yeah, that's it. Definitely the allergies.
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Re: Running With Mustangs

Post by indiansfan » Thu Jun 29, 2017 12:35 pm

Nice :)
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Re: Running With Mustangs

Post by Ted » Tue Jul 11, 2017 8:31 pm

Bump for reads. If you didn't read this yet, do so.
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Re: Running With Mustangs

Post by Rubaboo » Tue Jul 11, 2017 11:32 pm

Well done sir.
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Re: Running With Mustangs

Post by recte44 » Tue Jul 11, 2017 11:35 pm

Amazing.

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Re: Running With Mustangs

Post by RonCo » Wed Jul 12, 2017 1:25 am

Thanks guys. I'll admit to liking this one a bit myself.
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Re: Running With Mustangs

Post by bcslouck » Wed Jul 12, 2017 11:12 am

This is excellent. It's like you're a writer or something..
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Re: Running With Mustangs

Post by bschr682 » Wed Jul 12, 2017 11:17 am

I gotta admit I hold you to an unfair standard because of the fact that you are a professional writer. I didn't think this was that great but that's just me. When I come across a weak part I tend to either stop reading or just skim the rest and disregard it as a whole. No offense intended.
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Re: Running With Mustangs

Post by RonCo » Wed Jul 12, 2017 11:20 am

None taken! One learns pretty quickly that you can't please everyone.
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Re: Running With Mustangs

Post by bschr682 » Wed Jul 12, 2017 11:34 am

I should mention I do like a lot of your stuff. I just couldn't even get past the 2nd sentence in this one.
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