By Skip Horack

“Former Prep Star Makes Lifesaving Catch” — that was the below-the-fold headline of the News Star two days later. My high school coach called the hospital to tell me good job, nice grab, and not long after that I went viral, became an Internet celebrity.

The video was shot with a camera phone by some morbid bastard. Kevin is falling headfirst to the ground when I enter the frame. I grab hold of his collar and flip him midair. There is contact not unlike a home-plate collision, and I stumble backwards, cradling Kevin to me as I fall. My head bounces hard against the shiny tile, and I go limp as a dead man. Kevin scrambles into Connie’s arms, and I’ve just started vomiting on myself when the video ends.

All told, I spent the better part of two weeks laid up in Glenwood Regional, wracking up medical bills that I’ll never be able to pay. My head turned out to be mostly fine, but grabbing hold of Kevin destroyed my bum shoulder, and believe it or not, I damn near lost the arm. They said I’d get better with rehab, but that it would be a long and painful and expensive road — and so I was already in a dark mood when the mall manager left a message on my cell saying, I’m really sorry, Mr. Spain, but we’ve canceled your lease. We just can’t have this kind of thing happening in Pecanland.

I was still in the hospital when Simon broke Monkey Mountain down and moved it to a storage shed somewhere by the interstate. Connie never called, never came by, and that told me everything I needed to know about us. I was discharged home to my dim apartment, and I spent a week popping Vicodin and watching soap operas before, late one Sunday afternoon, Simon came for me. He’d been trying to get me to start drinking again ever since I quit, but now when he saw the bottle of Old Crow on the coffee table, the empty beer cans clustered here and there, he just shook his head.

“Clean yourself up and get dressed, cousin,” he said. “We’re taking a ride.”

“The hell we are.”

Simon shrugged and sat down next to me on the couch. “I ain’t leaving,” he said.

“That’s up to you.” I looked over at him. “Where is it you wanna go anyways?”

“Connie asked to see you,” he said. “I told her I’d deliver you to her.”

“Since when do you talk to Connie?”

“Since now.” He stood up and killed the television. “We going or not?”

*   *   *

My arm was still in a sling, and so Simon drove me in his rattletrap Volkswagen to the batting cages out in the pinewoods west of town. He waited by the car as I walked out across the dusty parking lot. Connie was sitting by herself on the top row of the aluminum bleachers, and I was climbing to her when she glanced up from her paperback and saw me. I could tell by the look on her face that Simon had conned me. Nothing about her was saying, Joe, wow, I’m so happy to see you, baby.

“Hey there,” she said.

“Hey, Connie.”

She stood and we hugged in a half-assed and awkward sort of way — partly because of my sling, and partly because she obviously wasn’t too keen on touching me. “How are you feeling?” she asked, but her eyes were looking off behind me so I didn’t bother answering. I turned and saw Kevin penned up in one of the batting cages, swinging away.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll get going in a second.”

Connie tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear. “What are you doing here?”

“Simon said you wanted me to meet you.”

“I don’t understand.”

“There’s nothing to understand. He lied and I’m an idiot, that’s all.”

“I could have sworn I saw him this afternoon. I think he might have been following me.”

“Yeah, well, sorry for the hassle. When my shoulder gets a little better I’ll straighten him out.” I made to leave, expecting her to tell me to hold on, but she let me get halfway down the clanging bleachers without calling out, and so I climbed back on up to her. “Really?” I said. “There’s nothing you wanna say to me?”

“Take it easy,” she said. “Are you drunk?”

A few other parents were scattered across the bleachers, watching their children hit under the lights, and a blocky woman I recognized from the ballpark kept peeking back at us. I looked away and saw Kevin swing and miss at a pitch. A couple of boys were standing outside the cage and teasing him, saying he should try a slower machine.

Connie moved over and motioned for me to sit down with her. “Please sit,” she said. “Sit before you fall.”

“God forbid.” I heard the sharp plink-ping of an aluminum bat. Kevin had corrected his swing, and his friends were clapping for him now. The green batting helmet was huge on his head, and he looked like an evil Martian. Finally I sat down.

“He could have died,” whispered Connie.

“But then I saved him,” I told her. “What came before all that was an accident.”

“That’s not really true,” she said. We were both watching Kevin. He hit a line drive back to the pitching machine, and Connie clucked with approval. She couldn’t help herself. Her boy had his timing down.

“That’s really what you think?” I asked. “That I brought this on?”

She locked eyes with me. “Yeah, I guess that I do think that.”

“So that’s it?”

“Yes,” she said. “It’s gotta be.”

Connie started to say something more, but then instead she squeezed my knee and began to pick her way down the bleachers to retrieve Kevin from the batting cage. They left together in a hurry, and eventually all of the batting cages had emptied. For a long time I stayed there, alone on the top row, listening as car after car crunched out of the gravel parking lot and onto the blacktop highway. Simon honked his horn let’s go, but I wouldn’t leave. I sat there and I waited, and then finally some invisible hand shut off the lights.