The Dogtown Hero

Ted Williams

Fiction by F.T. Rea


June 3, 1959: A lean boy with sandy hair and blue-gray eyes, 11-year-old Roscoe Swift lived in a nine-room stucco house with his mother's parents. The 40-year-old house was in Dogtown, south of Richmond proper.

Roscoe's grandfather was an architect. His grandmother taught children to play the piano. Their yard had two apple trees, a cherry tree, a plum tree and three grape vines in it.   

His mother lived in her studio apartment over a garage that accommodated two cars and his grandfather's seldom used workshop. It was about 30 yards from the house. She was a sometime freelance commercial artist who preferred to work at night and sleep in the day. No one referred to her drinking ways as "alcoholism." When the weather didn't suit her she wouldn't venture outside what she called her "carriage house."

Everybody else called it a "garage." There were spells when Roscoe wouldn’t see his mother for the better part of a week. 

When Roscoe was two years old his mother and father had split up. His father went back in the Army and subsequently died in a helicopter crash somewhere in Korea. Since his mother refused to talk about his father -- she had destroyed all photographs of him right after their separation -- the boy's blurry picture of the dead man had been pulled out of the air.

When his mother wasn't within earshot his grandmother would sometimes say, "Your dad had a wonderful smile." His grandfather had told him his father had been a "pretty damn good outfielder" when he was Army, which had frequently gotten him preferential treatment from the brass.

Two or three times Roscoe had heard his grandfather say with a chuckle, "Don't know much about what else your father did during the war, but he played on the same baseball field with some pros."

When he imagined his father, rather than in a military uniform, Roscoe usually saw him in a Depression Era baseball uniform, like what he'd seen Lou Gehrig and Dizzy Dean wearing in newsreels.

For as long as he could remember Roscoe had been in training to be a hero. It wasn’t something he talked about much, but it was usually close to the heart of his striving. He was a strong reader and had already inhaled many a biography and adventure story about heroic figures. To steel his nerves he had tested himself with daredevil stunts. He wasn't one to back down from a fistfight. At camp the summer before he had won a National Rifle Association Sharpshooter patch, which he kept with other treasures in a cigar box, hidden where nobody would find it.

On this day the most significant test of Roscoe's mettle had arrived: he was playing the biggest baseball game of his career. Remembering the lucky Ted Williams baseball card he’d slipped into his back pocket before he’d left for school, Roscoe looked at the blue sky and smiled ever so slightly.

Mostly, school was easy for Roscoe. He took pride in being able to turn in a paper first and get every question right. His difficulties in school stemmed from his class clown inclinations and his quick temper. Good grades in conduct weren't a given.

He liked reading about history and he enjoyed drawing, especially cartoons. But Roscoe hated being indoors in good weather. Baseball was mattered most to him. During baseball season, using the box scores in the morning newspaper, he routinely calculated the up-to-date batting averages of his favorite Major League players before he went to school.

Two of the fifth-grade classes had finished the season tied, forcing a playoff game to decide the championship. Following lunch, all four fifth-grade classes at Gittes Creek Elementary had been given the afternoon to watch the two teams settle the issue. Which was a treat, because all the previous games had been played during recess.

Students with no taste for baseball had the option of watching a black and white 16 mm documentary film about Jamestown's 350th anniversary. Thus, there was a pretty good crowd for the title game.

With one out, Roscoe's side was two runs down. As he took his practice swings, he reminded again himself of the situation -- bottom of the last inning, men on first and third. "No grounder," he said to himself, as he knocked red dust off his canvas sneakers with the bat ... as if they were baseball spikes.

A group of some 20 men, fathers, uncles and a couple of former minor league ballplayers from the surrounding neighborhood added a measure of authenticity to the crowd. Girls from the two classes in the championship game were acting as cheerleaders. No one could remember that ever happening before, but it suited Roscoe just fine.

In 1959 baseball was still unquestionably America's National Pastime. In Dogtown even fifth-grade baseball in the last week of school was important.

Swift stood in the batter's box on the first base side of home-plate. Originally trained as a right-hander, he had decided that if Ted Williams -- the best hitter in the game -- batted left-handed that was good enough for him. Besides, to Roscoe, for some reason a good southpaw swing looked better. He’d been practicing batting left-handed for a couple of months in neighborhood pickup games. Finally, the switch had to be tested in a situation with something more on the line.

Standing crouched and barely touching first base, Roscoe’s best friend on the team, Bake, cheered him on. "Pick out a good one. Hit your pitch, Number 9."

Even though the boys weren't wearing uniforms with numbers on them, during games most of the starters on Roscoe's team called one another by the numbers they would be wearing. Since Bake's favorite player was Willie Mays, he was called Number 24.   

However, a couple of Roscoe's teammates were imploring him from the bench to bat right-handed, like usual, since everything was at stake. Butterflies the size of eagles disquieted Roscoe's stomach, but he had made up his mind to take the chance.

Stepping out of the box, the Roscoe took three slow and deliberate practice swings. He looked at the crowd standing along the third base line. The cheerleaders for his side were chanting, "Ros-coe, Ros-coe, he's our man. If he can't do it, nobody can!"

His grandfather, who had taken the afternoon off for the first time in Roscoe's memory, stood in the shade of an ancient oak tree with the other men. Peering under the flat brim of his straw hat Rocsoe's first baseball coach stoically watched the action, as only he could.

The other team's cheerleaders and classmates booed and hooted at Roscoe from the first base line. He dug in and did his best to put them out of his mind. However, there was a particular girl with a strawberry-blonde ponytail and lively blue-green eyes cheering for the other team. Her name was Susie and he never failed to notice her.

The best thing to say to Susie never came to mind when she was near. Sometimes she made him feel short of breath. So Roscoe watched her from a distance ... frequently with a sense of longing that baffled him. Although Susie was calling for his team to lose, that very second, he was sure glad she was there.

Back in the box, Roscoe shifted most of his weight to his back foot and turned his front foot thirty degrees toward first base. Relaxing his hands, he jutted his chin out and squinted like he was aiming a 22 rifle.

The pitcher threw the first pitch outside and in the dirt. It got by the catcher. But the ground rules didn't allow stealing bases, so the guys on base stayed where they were. Sure the next pitch would be across the plate, Roscoe leaned back and prepared to cut the ball in half.

With the infielders behind him chattering like magpies, the hurler went into his stretch and fired the ball. Roscoe liked the pitch and took a big roundhouse swing.

Whoosh!

He nearly lost his balance as the sudden explosion of laughter from his opponents and their classmates pierced Roscoe's armor of concentration. Nonetheless, he didn't look at anyone on either baseline. He knew he'd shut his eyes as he'd swung the bat.

Roscoe felt his cheeks flush as he pulled his baseball cap's brim down on his brow. Again, he relaxed his wrists and fingers.

"It only takes one to hit it!" Bellowed his grandfather through cupped hands.

Roscoe leaned away from the pitcher, to put more weight on his back foot. He remembered to take a deep breath, which he let out slowly as the pitcher confidently cut loose with another fastball. Swinging from his heels, Roscoe rolled his wrists just exactly as his weight shifted toward the pitch. The batter tagged the ball sweetly.

Cah-rack!

The ball left the infield with dispatch. After clearing the leaping second baseman's glove by two feet it took a sharp nosedive and evenly split the closing distance between the right and center fielders. The pair frantically chased the top-spinning sphere down the grassy slope.

The utter perfection of the bat’s perfectly timed kiss on the horsehide's sweetest spot resonated through his body. The sudden furor Roscoe heard seemed like it was far away. He ran like a monster was chasing him. As he made his turn toward third base the ball plopped into the trickle of a creek that bordered the schoolyard. Rounding third, he caught up with Bake.

"Slow down, man," Bake advised over his shoulder with a sarcastic chuckle. "Those goons haven't even found it yet."

Roscoe's euphoric classmates were jumping around wildly. His grandfather beamed as he waved his hat back and forth over his head. Teammates, suddenly champions, were pounding him on his back as he crossed home plate.

Meanwhile, Roscoe's capacity to comprehend the intensity of the moment was red-lining. He looked at Susie on the quiet side of the field. The way her head tilted to the side, the position of her limbs, something about her stance, or gesture, made him feel disoriented. It was as though he was viewing the event from a number of different angles, simultaneously. He felt both inside and outside the scenario.

Roscoe's mind raced as everything seemed to be moving in slow motion. Straining to pull all the elements together, to grasp all he was sensing, he heard an explosion.

Boom!

Then he felt a strange calm. All he surveyed seemed vivid and in its place.

As Roscoe crossed home plate, it occurred to him that he hadn’t loped around the bases, a la Teddy Ballgame. Maybe he could have, but he'd been far too excited to feign nonchalance. More importantly, Roscoe had remembered to not tip his cap. If the batting king and ace fighter pilot of the Korean War, Ted Williams, never tipped his cap to the public on his home run trot -- which he never did -- that was good enough for Roscoe, too.

Roscoe felt like he was soaring, somewhere up above all of his dark doubts. He was in a place where heroes don't have have to tip their caps to anyone. Meanwhile, Susie had vanished.

Later on, Roscoe realized no one else had heard the explosion. Although that made no sense to him he promptly dropped the subject and stashed that mystery in the same hidden space with an accumulating stack of guilty haunts and some developing theories.

Still, the moment's hero believed the memory of just how it felt when he hit that baseball perfectly would never leave him.

*

Note: "The Dogtown Hero" is part of a series of stories called "Detached."

Dan Rather on Joe Biden's Pick

It's easy to see why right-wingers and Trumpists like to bash Dan Rather. He makes way too much sense. Here's what Rather wrote last night about former-Vice President Joe Biden's selection of Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate:

For most of my life, candidates on major party presidential tickets tended to look like, and had similar backgrounds to, Joe Biden. It was so unremarkable that it was hard to imagine anything different. No one looked like or had the background of Kamala Harris, not by a long shot. That may go without saying, but it deserves to be said. Boy does it ever.

Ours is a representative government, but for too long in America our leadership wasn't representative of the people as a whole. Not in gender or race. But here's the thing about representation, once walls of the status quo are broken, the imagination of the electorate changes.

Let's take the Senate. It still is in many ways an "Old Boys Club" and one that has about as much racial diversity as a mid-20th Century country club. But there was a time, not that long ago, when that was essentially all that it was. In recent years, that has changed considerably. And now the idea of a woman senator, from either party, seems a natural state of affairs. We sadly have further to go with Black senators. That is not to say that women still don't face many, many more hurdles than men.

They do. But with each woman elected to office, as with governors, mayors, and state representatives, the idea of a "typical" political leader begins to change. And it's easier for those who follow.

So representation matters, and it's not just politics. In occupations from the military, to first responders, to astronauts, to athletes, to scientists, to all the other places in society that were once almost always the exclusive domain of men, and often white men, the breaking of barriers redefines what society in all its diversity thinks is possible.

There will be challenges for reporters covering this campaign. And there should be. Kamala Harris deserves to be vetted, and she expects this. But as we saw in 2016, what some might call vetting can also be shameful exercises in false equivalence, shaped by centuries of bias and systemic impediments to women and ethnic minorities, no matter the talents they possess.

Pioneers are judged, and judged harshly. They are judged on scales weighted against people that look like them. It's perfectly acceptable for a reporter to explore how Senator Harris may help turn out the vote, or inspire her political opposition. But that has to be framed alongside the injustices of American society.

"Electability" is really a standard for judging the American people and not her. Her record in office can be scrutinized. But wondering whether she is "qualified" is really a far-from-subtle code word for race and gender. How she speaks, looks, the tone of her voice, we can't ignore that these things will enter the political discourse. But they are all subjective qualities that are shaped by what our society and history books have taught us a president or vice president is supposed to look like and sound like. It is time these norms are shattered.

As any scientist will tell you, human beings are by our basic nature, biased creatures. Biases, especially when they are subconscious, help us make sense of a complicated world. What do we fear? What do we understand? What challenges our sense of comfort? But bias leads us astray. Biases close us to new opportunities. But often, if we let ourselves, we can break down these biases. We can see the world through new eyes.

Kamala Harris does that. She is a vote for the America of today. Her story is every bit that of the American dream as the tales we look back at from a century ago with sepia-toned nostalgia. Many of those people were also the children of immigrants, different in language, ethnicity and religion from what privileged America thought the country should be . They were also judged, harshly.

That Senator Harris is a representative for Black America makes this moment all the more poignant. Her path though an historically Black university is a path that echoes the founding injustices of this nation, and the long and winding path to hope.

This campaign is far from over. The choice of a vice presidential candidate rarely moves needles much. But whatever happens American politics represents more of America tonight.

Remembering Glenn Pavone

Ten years ago guitar virtuoso Glenn Pavone died.

Richmonders may remember him from his two noteworthy appearances with Billy Price and the Keystone Rhythm Band at High on the Hog (1983 and 1985), as well as his touring with the Bill Blue Band. Glenn also played briefly with Chuck Wrenn's early-'80s band, the Megatonz.

Those who knew Glenn personally remember him as an usually modest and thoroughly nice guy. The video clip above is a rough transfer to-digital of Billy's Price's band performing at High on the Hog 9 in 1985 from a 16-minute documentary that I directed.

Click here to visit the Glenn Pavone Tribute page on Facebook. 

RIP, Glenn.

Central Time

Fiction by F. T. Rea

August 16, 1966: Roscoe Swift sat alone in a day car slowly rattling its way into Central Station. The solitary sailor had spent the last hour turning the glossy pages of Playboy and contemplating infinity. As the train lurched he glanced out of the window at Tuesday morning, Chicago style.

Roscoe had sequestered himself from the marathon poker game in another car. The further the train had gotten from Main Street Station in Richmond the more the call for wild cards and split pots had grown. Finally it had driven him from the table. His resolute grandfather had schooled him to avoid such frilly variations on the already-perfect game of poker.

“Gimmicks like that were invented to keep suckers in the game,” was the old man’s admonition.

On the way to boot camp, volunteering to be a sucker seemed like a bad idea. This was hardly the day Roscoe wanted to invite the jinx that might be set loose by disrespecting absolutes.

In the magazine’s lengthy interview section LSD pioneer Timothy Leary ruminated on his chemically enlarged view of the so-called Youth Movement. Professor Leary called the baby boomers, “The wisest and holiest generation that the human race has yet seen.”

The subculture forming around psychedelic drugs in that time was opening new dimensions of risk for 19-year-old daredevils. Roscoe wondered if he would ever do acid. His friend Bake had tripped and lived to tell about it.

There was a fresh dimension to the conflict in Vietnam that month. The Cold War’s hottest spot was being infused with its first batch of draftees; some 65,000 were being sent into the fray. Until this point it had been the Defense Department’s policy to use volunteers only for combat duty.

On the home-front quakes in the culture were also abundant: A 25-year-old former Eagle Scout, Charles Whitman, climbed a tower on the University of Texas campus and shot 46 people, at random, killing 16; comedian/first amendment martyr Lenny Bruce was found dead -- overdosed and fat belly up -- on his bathroom floor; news of songwriter/musician John Lennon’s playful crack about his band -- “We’re more popular than Jesus Christ now” -- inflamed the devoutly humorless; and reigning Heavyweight Champ, Muhammad Ali, bent all sorts of folks out of shape with his widely reported quip -- “I ain't got nothing against them Viet Cong.”

Since leaving Virginia the morning before, Roscoe had traveled -- via the Chesapeake and Ohio line -- through parts of West Virginia, Ohio, and Indiana, on his way to Illinois.

Taking leave from the airbrushed charms of a model billed as Diane Chandler, who was September’s Playmate of the Month, his mind kaleidoscoped to an image of another smiling pretty girl, Julie, his girlfriend.

Then, for a second, Roscoe could feel the sound of Julie's laughter.

As a preamble to Roscoe’s departure for basic training he and Julie had spent the weekend in Virginia Beach, trying their best to savor the bittersweet taste of war-torn romance, black and white movie style. As luck would have it, the stately Cavalier Hotel’s central air conditioning system went on the blink the Friday they arrived.

Since the hotel’s windows couldn't be opened that meant the sea breeze was unavailable for relief from the heat wave. Nonetheless, they stayed on, because the hotel itself, a stylish relic of the Roaring ‘20s, meant something. After two years of catch-as-catch-can back-seat romance, this was where they had chosen to spend their first whole night together.

That evening they stretched out on the bed and sipped chilled champagne. With the hotel-supplied fan blowing on them at full blast, suddenly, a good-sized chunk of the ceiling fell onto a chair across the room.

Roscoe reported the strange problem to the front desk, “I hate to sound like Chicken Little, but perhaps you have a safer room?”

Then Julie suggested a stroll on the beach to cool off. Walking barefoot in the surf, neither of them had much to say. An hour later Julie and Roscoe were back at the hotel. With a little snooping around the pair discovered the door to the Cavalier’s indoor pool was unlocked. As it was well past the posted time for the pool to be open and the lights were off in the chlorine-smelling room, they reasoned the facility was at their disposal for a little skinny-dipping.

Roscoe set the magazine aside. He smiled, remembering the adage about how Richmond girls are different at the Beach.

*

Stepping off the train, Roscoe was two hours from another train ride. This one, aboard a local commuter, would finish the job of transporting him from Richmond’s Fan District -- with its turn-of-the-century townhouses -- to a stark world of colorless buildings and punishing paved grinders: Great Lakes Naval Training Center was his destination.

In the last month Roscoe had listened to plenty of supposedly useful yarns of what to expect at boot camp. Concerning Chicago, he could recite facts about the White Sox, the Cubs and the Bears; he had seen the movie about Mrs. O’Leary’s cow and the big fire; he thought Bo Diddley was from Chicago. One thing was certain, Seaman Recruit Swift knew he was further from home than he’d ever been.

Outside the train station on the sidewalk, “They’re Coming to Take Me Away” -- a novelty tune on the summer's Top 40 chart -- blared appropriately from the radio of a double-parked Pontiac GTO.

After laughing at the ironic coincidence of the music, Roscoe, Zach, Rusty, and Cliff - comrades-at-arms in the same Navy Reserve unit in Richmond for four months of weekly meetings - considered their options for killing the time between trains, and they spoke of the ordeal ahead of them.

“That’s it, man.” Rusty explained. “The Navy figures everybody eats Jell-O, so that’s where they slip you the dose of saltpeter.”

“Get serious, that’s got to be bullshit,” said Zach. “The old salts tell you that to jerk you around.”

“OK, Zach, you can have all my Jell-O,” Rusty offered.

“Not even a breeze; what do y’all make of the Windy City?” asked Cliff. “It’s just as damn hot up here as it was in Richmond.”

A couple of blocks from the station the team of eastern time-zoners, outfitted in their summer whites, stopped on a busy corner to scan the hazy urban landscape. Finding a worthwhile sightseeing adventure was at the top of their agenda.

Answering the call, a rumpled character slowly approached the quartet from across the street. Moving with a purpose, he was a journeyman wino who knew a soft touch when he could focus on it.

In a vaguely European accent the street-wise operator badgered the four out of a cigarette, a light, two more cigarettes for later, then a contribution of spare change. When the foul-smelling panhandler demanded “folding money” Roscoe turned from the scene and walked away. His pals followed his lead. Then the crew broke into a sprint to escape the sound of the greedy beggar’s shouts.

Rusty, the fastest afoot, darted into a subway entrance with the others at his heels. Cliff was laughing so hard he slipped on the steps and almost fell.

As Roscoe descended the stairway into the netherworld beneath the city, he was reminded of H. G. Wells’ “Time Machine” and observed, “I guess this must be where the Morlocks of the Midway would live; if there are any.”

Zach smiled. No one laughed.

The squad agreed that since they were already there, and only Rusty had ever seen a subway, a little reconnoitering was in order. Thus they bought tokens, planning only to look around, not to ride. Roscoe, the last to go through the turnstile, wandered off on his own to inspect the mysterious tracks that disappeared into darkness.

Standing close to the platform’s edge, Roscoe wondered how tightly the trains fit into the channel. As he listened to his friends’ soft accents ricocheting off the hard surfaces of the deserted subway stop, he recalled a trip by train in 1955’s summer with his grandfather. Roscoe smiled as he thought of his lifelong fascination with trains. Unlike most of his traveling companions, he was glad the airline strike had forced them to make the journey by rail.

Walking aimlessly along the platform, as he reminisced, Roscoe noticed a distant silhouette furtively approaching the edge. It appeared to him to be a small woman. She was less than a hundred yards down the tracks. He watched her sit down carefully on the platform. She didn't move like a young woman. Seconds later she slid off, disappearing into the dark pit below.

Although Roscoe was intrigued, he felt no sense of alarm. Not yet.

Rosacoe didn’t wonder if it was a common practice for the natives to jump onto the subway tracks. He simply continued to walk toward the scene, slowly taking it in, as if it were a movie. When Zach caught up with him Roscoe pointed to where the enigmatic figure had been.

Roscoe shrugged, “What do you make of it?”

"Let's see where she went," Zach said.

To investigate the two walked closer. Eventually they saw a gray lump on the subway tracks. It hardly looked like a person. Then they heard what was surely the sound of an approaching train coming out of the tunnel’s void.

As Roscoe shouted at the woman to get up, Zach took off in the direction of the sound of the train. The scene took on a high-contrast, film noir look when the tunnel was suddenly lit up by the train’s light.

Running toward the train, the two desperate sailors waved their arms frantically to get someone’s attention. As they sprinted past the woman on the tracks she remained clenched into a tight ball, ready to take the big ride.

The subway's brakes began to screech horrifically, splitting seconds into shards.

The woman didn't move.

Metal strained against metal as the train’s momentum continued to carry it forth.

Roscoe's senses were stretched to new limits. Tiny details, angles of light and bits of sound, became magnified. All seemed caught in a spell of slow motion and exaggerated intensity.

The subway train slid to a full stop about ten yards short of creating a grisly finish.

Roscoe and Zach sprang from the platform and gathered the trembling woman from the tracks. They carefully passed her up to Rusty and Cliff, who stood three feet above. Passengers emptied from the train. Adrenaline surged through Roscoe’s limbs as he climbed back onto the platform. Brushing off his uniform, he strained to listen to the conversation between the train's driver and the strange person who had just been a lump on the subway track.

The gray woman, who appeared to be middle-aged, spewed, "Thank you," over and over again. She explained her presence on the tracks to having, “Slipped.”

Shortly later the subway driver acted as if he believed her useful explanation. Zach pulled him aside to say that we had seen the woman jump, not fall, from the platform. Roscoe began to protest to the buzzing mob’s deaf ears, but he stopped abruptly when he detected a feminine voice describing what sounded like a similar incident. He panned the congregation until he found the speaker. She was about his age.

Filing her fingernails with an emery board -- eyes fixed on her work -- she told how another person, a man, had been killed at that same stop last week: “The lady is entitled to die if she wants to. You know she’ll just do it again.”

As she looked up to inspect her audience, such as it was, Roscoe caught Miss Perfect Fingernails’ eye. He shook his head to say, “No!”

The impatient girl looked away and gestured toward the desperate woman who surely had expected to be conning St. Peter at the Pearly Gates that morning, instead of a subway driver. “Now we’re late for our appointments. For what?”

Roscoe watched the forsaken lady -- snatched from the Grim Reaper’s clutches -- vanish into the ether of the moment’s cheerless confusion. Shortly thereafter the train was gone, too.

“Well, I don’t know about you boys,” said Roscoe. “But I’ve had enough of Chicago sights for today.”

On their way back to daylight Roscoe listened to his longtime friend Zach tell the other two, who were relatively new friends, a story about Bake: To win a bet, Bake, a consummate daredevil, had recently jumped from Richmond’s Huguenot Bridge into the Kanawha Canal.

“Sure sounds like this Bake is a piece of work,” said Cliff. “You said he’s going to RPI this fall. What’s he doing about the draft?”

“This is a guy who believes in spontaneity like it’s sacred,” said Zach. “Roscoe, can you imagine Bake in any branch of military service, draft or no draft?”

“If he can hack being told what to do at art school, I’ll be surprised.” observed Roscoe.

“Hey, man, I’m not so sure any of us belong in the service,” Rusty volunteered.”

“I hear you.” Cliff concurred.

Upon rejoining the others from their Virginia contingent at Central Station, the four sightseers found a legion of additional boot camp-bound sailors from all over the country. For the men assembled, a two-year active-duty hitch in the Navy Reserve was preferable to rolling the dice on what the busy Selective Service system might dish out.

Rusty and Zack eagerly rehashed the morning’s bizarre adventure: “One of them told me there’s been three suicides in Chicago’s subways this summer,” reported Zach. “Could it be the heat?”

“I still had no idea what they were doing when I saw these two fools hopping off the platform, right in front of that train,” Rusty chuckled. “Hey, I couldn’t see squat on the tracks.”

“She’s probably standing on the roof of a skyscraper, right now” Zach theorized. “And, I’m sorry, but I’ll let some other hero break her fall.”

*

Aboard the train from Chicago to Great Lakes Roscoe sat by the window considering the unseen dimensions of his new role -- a GI sworn to stand between what is dear to America and its enemies. Only days before, as he walked on the beach with Julie, he had felt so sure of being prepared for the task.

Yet as he sat there, with miles of unfamiliar scenery streaming by, Roscoe felt waves of trepidation washing over his easy confidence. On top of that, he wished he had gotten a little bit of sleep during the trip.

With their destination only minutes away the four Subway Swashbucklers opted to get in a few hands of stud poker; to accommodate Roscoe, wild cards weren’t suggested.

Sitting on a king in the hole, with a queen and ten up, Roscoe called Zach’s fifteen-cent-bet. There were no pairs showing and the bettor had just drawn a jack to his queen.

Cliff mentioned that the Treasury Department had announced it would no longer print two-dollar bills. “And, I heard boot camp pay comes in the form of -- what else? -- two-dollar bills.”

“Where’d you hear that?” Zach challenged. “I bet it’s bullshit.”

“Maybe we’re going to get the last of the deuces,” said Rusty. “And, I’ll take any of them you don’t want.”

Roscoe’s mind wasn’t on payday or the poker game. He was daydreaming about Julie smiling on the beach, with her teal-colored eyes glistening and her sun-streaked hair livened by a gust of wind.

Roscoe grappled with his thoughts, trying to pull them together -- memory, urges, and anticipation all marching to the steady beat provided by the tracks. It occurred to him there was something more than mere distance between his seat on that train and what had been his life in Virginia.

“If time has borders, between one age and the next, it might be thicker at the border,” Roscoe announced to no one in particular.

Rusty, the dealer, batted Roscoe’s oblique remark away, “So, are you calling Zach’s bet, or what?”

Expressionless, Roscoe stared at his fourth card, a nine. He pulled out a cigarette. Nodding toward Zach’s hand -- a pair of jacks, showing -- Roscoe flipped his up-cards over, face down. “OK, even if saving the Queen of the Subway from certain death doesn’t count for shit, anymore, there are certain standards that still don’t change. Not for me.”

Rusty shrugged, “Meaning?”

“So, this disposable hero won’t pay a cent for a fifth card to fill an inside straight,” said Roscoe, lighting his cigarette. “First hand, or last, it’s still a sucker’s bet. And, I’ll sit the next hand out.”

“Whatever you say, man,” Rusty laughed. “But we’ve probably got time for just one more hand. Sure you want to quit now?”

Roscoe took a big drag of his filter-tipped Kool. He drank in the moving picture of Illinois that was streaming past his window. The railroad ties were clicking monotonously. He thought about how movies depict motion by running a series of still pictures through a projector. However, with the memory picture of Julie on the beach he’d just conjured up, it wasn’t frozen like a still. Nor was it in full motion. The image moved ever so slightly, capturing what amounted to a single gesture.

After receiving their last cards Cliff and Rusty folded, too. Zach chuckled as he raked in the pot. Cliff gathered the cards and began to shuffle; preparing to deal the next hand.

“You in, Swift?” inquired the dealer. “The game is seven-card stud. The ante is still a quarter.”

“This time let’s make it 50 cents,” suggested Rusty, sliding two quarters into the center of the makeshift card table.

“Last hand? I’m in,” said Zach.

Roscoe blew a perfect smoke ring, which he studied as it began to float out of shape. He promised himself that no matter what happened to him, he would never forget that smoke ring.  

With a wee smile, Roscoe said, “Sure. Deal me in.”

* * *

All rights reserved by the author. Central Time with its accompanying illustration are part of a series of stories called Detached.