It Never Rains in Tiger Stadium by John Ed Bradley

Author:John Ed Bradley [BRADLEY, JOHN ED]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-345-51760-9
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2009-02-17T00:00:00+00:00

WE USUALLY MET AT NIGHT after my parents had gone to bed. I sat outside on the stone bench under the oak tree until the light in their bedroom window went dark, then I started the mile-long walk to the little garage apartment where a lamp burned in the window and Connie waited on a corduroy love seat by the door. The walk took me past the clutter of darkened tennis courts and baseball diamonds at South City Park and down by the football field at Donald Gardner Stadium. I liked to pause at the fence surrounding the stadium and gaze out at the field. The painted yard lines glowed in a white grid and the scoreboard was a large black rectangle in the far trees. When the moon was bright, the clouds seemed to swim past in a rush. I liked how the tall light standards looked against the silver bellies of the clouds. To train in the summers of my high school and college years, I'd run the steps from bottom to top, most days in the hot sun while wearing ankle and wrist weights. Now the steps seemed to float up to the press box, and I fought off an impulse to scale the fence and run two at a time. I wished I could feel again the way I'd felt when I was a player. It seemed a long time ago, although it had been only a few years. My time in the game was moving away from me, like the clouds in the sky.

By the time I reached Connie's door, I was shivering from the cold. She held my hands between hers and rubbed and patted them to warm me. When she kissed me, I closed my eyes and drank in the heat.

I'd missed out on a lot when I was playing football, and I tried now to catch up. There were nights when I walked through Connie's door and headed straight for her bed without even saying hello. I dropped my clothes one after another on my way and I didn't pick them up until later when I made my way back to her door. Other nights we sat up for hours talking about our favorite writers and the movies we'd seen. I brought her books from my collection and read to her while she spun records on her turntable. We laughed a lot, and there was never enough time to say to each other all the things that needed saying.

I left before dawn, staggering out on legs with little left. I was in a hurry to return home before my father walked out for the morning paper, so I ran most of the way, dogs barking as I jogged past houses that had not yet come awake, my football knees and ankles creaking in the cold. That I was twenty-four years old and felt compelled to hide my girlfriend from my parents surely was evidence that I needed a place of my own.

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