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It hits Don in quite a literal way as he’s on his way back home from work. A baseball, he surmises, after he’s staggered back against the chain-link fencing which forms the boundary between the sidewalk and the park and nearly fallen on his ass. Things have gone black and white for a moment, except for the dirty red stitching on the ball as it rolls into sight and finds a place for itself over a crack in the pavement, and spots dance in his vision. His coffee, which he’d picked up on his way out just for the sake of holding something warm, has fallen and burst on the sidewalk, and he feels the cooling splatter on the hems of his pants.
A distant shout as he fights against the sluggishness of the world, like a skipping VCR, to get his bearings again– “You killed him!” The voice seems to come from all sides and nowhere at once. Jesus Christ but the top of his head hurts.
Less distantly– “Hey!” Don suddenly finds it less difficult to stay upright, and straightens his spine. There’s a warm weight on his shoulder, which he figures is part of whatever mechanism is keeping him on his feet. “Hey, are you okay?”
The voice is low, not a baritone but close to it, if Don was pressed to find a word for it, and pleasant to listen to. The sound of it makes the ringing in his ears more bearable, and he swings his head (ouch) as he seeks out the source.
“Hey, hey,” he voice says again, and the grip on his shoulder inches closer to the side of his neck for just a moment. Don feels a thumb at the collar of his jacket, and thinks to himself, If this is what it takes for you to start discovering things about yourself, maybe you should’ve gotten beaned with a baseball earlier. “You might not want to move your head too fast, alright?”
“You sound like you’ve done this before.”
“Been hit by a pop fly or seen someone get taken down by one?” A laugh. “Both, by the way.”
“So you must know what you’re doing.”
“Something like that.”
As the spots in Don’s vision start to blink away, his surroundings come into better focus; the hands on his shoulders grow into arms, which are attached to a man who’s stooped over right now to attend to him but who must be a head taller than him, at least. Eyes blue like a husky’s crinkle at the corners in a laugh restrained by concern. Oh, thinks Don, oh, fuck, and weighs the pros and cons of fainting on the spot. Pros: he would get to feel the arms of an attractive, caring stranger around him; cons: he wouldn’t be conscious for it.
The man must have said something to him that warranted an answer, because Don sees his eyebrows pinch together in mounting concern and the strong, steady grip on his shoulders gets stronger and steadier. “Oh,” he blurts. Finds nothing to follow it up with.
The strange man helps him lean back against the fence very gingerly, more gingerly than Don feels he requires at the moment. “Take it easy,” the man tells him, just as two boys appear beside him. They’re both red in the face, as if they’ve just run the whole perimeter of the park to get around the fence, which, Don figures, they must have. Their jeans are grass-stained in patches all over.
“See, I didn’t kill him,” says one of them.
“Not yet, anyway,” says the other, giving Don a harrowing appraisal like he expects him to keel over and expire on the sidewalk. “You probably split his head open.”
“Joe, Web, let’s give the poor guy some space, alright? I’ll see you again Wednesday and we’ll work on your sliding.”
The boys take the time to make it clear that they had better things to do anyway before they scurry off. “You don’t have to give me space,” Don says, gingerly touching the back of his own head to make sure that his skull is intact.
The stranger gives him a sympathetic glance that implies he looks worse off than he realizes, even if he’s not gushing blood and brains down his back. “I was more using the royal ‘we’ there,” he tells him. “You might have a concussion, so I don’t feel comfortable just leaving you laying around.”
Huh. A concussion. Fancy that. “I don’t think I’ve ever had one of those before.”
“Then today’s your lucky day.”
“I think my friend’s had a concussion before.”
“You think?”
“Don’t know for sure, but if he’s hit his head it would explain a lot about him.”
The stranger nods, winces. “Well, it’s always nice to have something to bond over,” he says. “Sorry about your coffee, by the way.”
“That’s okay,” Don replies, and in a sudden burst of confidence which may or may not indicate more damage to his head than he thought, adds, “just buy me another and we’ll call it even.” Why the hell not. The guy is tall and broad about the shoulders and he’s got a jaw carved from stone and he hasn’t yet removed his hands from Don’s shoulders. Maybe that pop fly was divine intervention. He thinks that’s what Skip will say later when he tells him about this.
The stranger laughs again and Don is filled with the need to hear it more. “Yeah, deal,” he agrees. “As a way of making it up to you. I knew we shouldn’t have been practicing so close to the fence. Guess that’s the last time I underestimate Little Leaguers’ strength.”
“Practice?”
The man plucks the baseball up from the ground; shows it to Don with a wry, lopsided smile. “Baseball,” he says, giving the ball a little toss with a flick of his wrist and catching it just as easily. Don watches, mesmerized by the movement of the muscles in his forearm. “If it’s any consolation, Web feels bad about it, too. The first thing he did when he saw he’d hit you was yell for a doctor.”
“Are you the doctor, then?”
“Coach.”
“Ah.” Don nods. “Close enough.”
“Close enough,” says the stranger back to him, before his face goes serious. “Now, you remember your name, don’t you? What year it is, and all that stuff?”
“Donald Malarkey, and it’s 2021.”
“Well, I have to take you at your word, since I’ve got no way of verifying that. Though you did just tell me your last name is bullshit, and that’s making me a little worried.”
“Ha-ha.” Don reaches behind himself for his wallet, flipping it open to his driver’s license. The stranger peers at it, eyes squinted, until he decides the verification is satisfactory.
“Nice to meet you, Donald Malarkey,” he says and holds out his hand to shake. His smile, even self-deprecating, is a winning one. “Sorry it wasn’t under better circumstances.”
Don takes a moment to shove his wallet back into his pocket with a shimmy that should be embarrassing under any other circumstances, and then shakes his hand, feeling himself smile. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Buck Compton. Lynn, if you decide to press charges.”
Don can’t discern whether he’s pulling his leg– one of those if you liked the cake, I baked it, and if you didn’t, my sister baked it things. “Nickname?” he ventures optimistically.
“Yeah. Buck is, I mean.”
“See you in court, then, Lynn.”
“At least let me buy you a coffee,” Buck laughs, and Don finds it very easy to laugh with him. The blueness of his eyes should be alarming, if he weren’t so handsome. “See if we can’t reach a settlement beforehand.”
By now, Don is steadier on his feet– to be honest, he’s been adequately steady for a minute or two, but decided to err on the side of caution for the sake of trying to feel those wide, warm palms through the tough denim of his jacket. But Buck has been worrying over him since he went down, and he thinks any longer and he’ll be taking advantage of this stranger’s concern. “Well,” he says, pulling a quick but sincere smile, “thanks for all your help. I guess you should get back to your…” He glances over through the chain link fence at the baseball diamond; the two boys from earlier are running around in left field, and Joe is ineffectually throwing a handful of grass in Web’s (?) direction. “... team.”
Buck follows his eyes. “They know how to pack up the equipment,” he replies, watching them, too. “Practice is over, anyway, and even if it wasn’t, I’d have sent them home regardless. There’s no way they’d be able to focus after all the excitement.”
“Do they usually play target practice with the pedestrians?”
“No, you were just a special case.”
Don should continue on his way home, too. It’s getting late enough so that the sky is light but everything else is heavy with shadow, the intermediary between afternoon and evening proper. The chill is coming up, as well, making him want even more to be back in his apartment. That, or in a coffee shop with a stranger and a cup of hot chocolate, listening to the last dregs of Christmas music before January registers. Making friendly conversation. Maybe, if he’s very lucky, and if Buck is into that kind of thing, they’ll even partake in a little bit of gazing into one another’s eyes.
Don opens his mouth. His air forms a cloud of fog in front of his face. “So,” he says. “About that coffee.” Buck’s eyebrows jump up high on his forehead, sending a thrill of panic through Don. “... Or, I mean, I was just pulling your leg.”
“Were you?”
“Sorta. Forget it, it’s cool.”
“Oh, that’s too bad. I was flirting.”
The panic doesn’t disappear so much as transform into something else. Something more exciting. The count-in before the first measure. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Buck says. “Unless you want to take me to court.”
Don laughs. “You still flirting?”
“No. Maybe a little.”
On their way down the block, Don collects the baseball from where it lay, tucked safe in a little patch of grass that reaches out through the fence. He tossed it like Buck had, a deft flick of the wrist; fumbles it, nearly drops it on his own toe before catching it.
After that, it lives on his mantle while framed photos accumulate around it. Buck doesn't get why he'd keep a thing like that, but Don's been attached ever since it fell out of the sky.