old radioTitle: The Closest They Came
Author: Erik Doughty
Category: Fiction

A half hour before the season opener at Yankee stadium, Milton Chang parks at the Princeton Cemetery.  He walks down the hill holding a shoebox and passes the headstones casting shadows on the yellow grass.  It’s the first time since his father’s death two weeks ago that he’s left the house.

When he reaches his father’s grave, his friend Norm is there waiting.  Their fathers have neighboring plots and once had neighboring businesses—a bagel shop and a Chinese restaurant.  There were rumors around town that they were sleeping with each other’s wives, poisoning the lox or the Peking duck, and sparring chopstick vs. butter knife.  But Milton and Norm both knew that behind the CLOSED signs and safe in the light of the refrigerators, their fathers shared straws, pots, and punchlines.  The “rivalry” was just good for business.

Milton sits next to Norm, both their backs leaning against their fathers’ headstones.  A cardinal flits across the cable wires above, and Norm takes the shoebox from Milton.  He finds inside a baseball, a portable radio, and a corner-bent trading card of Wade Boggs.

“Mint condition, it might have been worth three or four bucks.  Now it’s completely worthless.”

“Point is, I never traded it away,” Milton says.

After Norm’s father passed last September, Milton kept the restaurant open past midnight and the whiskey on the house.  There were other places in town someone could go for a drink, but not many other men understood a good talk, that the words were the beverage, and the bottle just kept the hands from shaking.

From the shoebox, Milton places the radio amongst the broken neck flowers fossilizing around the stone’s base.  When he was six, he sent away for the radio with 110 proofs of purchase of Kraft macaroni and cheese.  All summer, they listened to it beneath the Jersey Shore boardwalk—Dad drawing the diamond and the score card in the sand—until the lifeguard stands flipped on their sides, the sun puddled up on the horizon, and Mom came yelling for them to get their asses to the car.
Norm grabs the ball from the box.  “I’m selling the shop,” he says.

“Go to hell.”

“I mean it.  I can’t fill the old man’s shoes.  I feel like a clown.”

“And what are you going to do instead?”

“Come work for you.”  Norm tosses the ball to Milton.  He runs his fingers over the scuff marks on the red threading like a palm reader feeling out the past.

“He caught it at the game Jim Abbott threw the no-hitter.  I was eight,” says Milton.

“September 4, 1993.”

“I wasn’t watching the game.  I was watching him because everyone was standing with their arms in the air.  All I could do was look at his face to see if something good happened.”

Norm picks up the radio and holds it to his mouth like a walkie-talkie. “Carrrlos Baerga, batting .318—hitless on the day,” he says with a commentator’s inflection.

“When Abbott threw the last pitch, everyone jumped.”

“Abbott deals.”

“Before I knew it I was flying.”

“It’s a ground ball to short.”

“Dad shouted, ‘Hot diggity dog!’”

“Velarde—to Mattingly.”

“And he grabbed me and threw me above his head so I could see the final out and the pile on.”

“Abbott’s done it.  No-hitter, no-hitter for Jim Abbott.”

“Then he dropped me over the shoulder of the guy in front of us, and my face splashed into his cup, but it didn’t matter.  It was a no-hitter and everyone was drinking each other’s drinks.”

“What about Abbott?  You left out his missing hand,” says Norm.

“It’s not important.”

“Tell that to Jim Abbott while he’s doing chin-ups.”

Milton puts down the ball.  “That was my first beer when he dropped me.  It smelled terrible.”

Norm looks at his watch.  “Game’s about to start.”

“Don’t sell the shop, Norm.”

Norm drops his head and stares at his shoes.

“You don’t trade that shit away,” says Milton.

Norm reaches for the radio.  It will take time, late poker nights, and several shouting matches, but Milton knows Norm can be convinced.  Norm extends the antenna and places the radio between them.  As the national anthem crumbles through, Milton folds his hands behind his head and lies down in the shade of the tall stone.  He recalls his final game of little league, the last time he heard the anthem sung live.  Remembering the smell of lemonade and dugout dust wrinkles his cheeks to a smile.

He’s a small kid whose bowl haircut tousles in the wind when he places his hat over his heart.  While the pitcher warms up, the boys in the infield take turns hitting each other in the crotch to test the durability of their cups.  Milton sprints towards the outfield, dragging his hands across the tips of fresh grass, stealing the morning dew to wash his hands.  The batter steps into the box.  Milton coughs up a little chatter, but realizes he’s out of earshot from the mound.  Out in left, he bends his knees and the brim of his hat thinking, this is the closest I will ever come to outer space, and when Toby Ferris clocks a shot towards the fence, he gives chase as if it were a shooting star, a final chance to make good on an eternal hope to sit on the shoulders of his teammates, look at his father chin-to-chin, and in a moment of triumph, know with little uncertainty that he kept his eye on the ball, just like he said.

Erik Doughty is an Asian American writer from New Jersey.  He lives in Boston, working as an editor at Digi-Block, Inc., and carries a notebook, air guitar, and inhaler with him wherever he goes.