Thursday, May 16, 2013

The Ball



“The Ball”

Thirteen and white in a world where everyone else is also white, a world that longer exists: Cherokee County, Georgia in the 1980’s.  In 1987, south Cherokee County was still largely an undeveloped second-growth forest.  Due to the poor soil, farming or ranching never really took hold in the area, save in the river bottoms, and after they dammed the Etowah to make Lake Allatoona (pron. Al-toona locally), almost all of that good land was underwater.  It was an odd place in that there were trees galore, everywhere, but not many animals, as they had been hunted out sixty years before when people were truly hungry during the Great Depression. 

So, we find our hero playing with his friends one day at the Army Corps of Engineers’ Galt’s Ferry Day Use area at the end of Rocky Lane just down the street from his home.  Recently and innocently, by accident, he had become a true sexual being, and he began to study women like he had few other things ever.  The shape and curve and voice and personality and eyes and hair and basically anything feminine within the realm of reproductive age became the texts he long to read.  He was no voyeur though, and he was too sheepish to actually talk to women, still full of the romantic ideas he found in the novels and comics he read about how a man should woo a woman.  But, Cherokee County at that time was not a European battlefield, a desert isle, or a colony town full of intrigue.  It was a boring white-bread backwater, though within 20 years, the whole place would change, better in some ways, but no longer an innocent place with a Sheriff with "" marks around his name and a "Don't spit in the fountain" sign in front of the county courthouse.      

The Day Use area had a large beach, a man-made one.  Its sand had been trucked in in 1985 from some remote shore, and an artificial sandy beach had emerged where before there had only been rusty red Georgia clay littered with veins of webby white quartz.  In 1986, the Army Corps had developed the area more by installing a modern triple boat ramp, building a jetty that extended out a good 40 yards into the channel of the lake (they would thereafter heap spent Christmas trees along the edges in an effort to create an environment for minnows, which would make the area a good fishing ground; it didn’t work.  Lake Allatoona was called “The Dead Sea” in the 1980’s because of the lousy fishing), building two picnic pavilions, a bathroom facility, a few RV pads, and about 15 picnic sites with BBQ pits.  It was a solid piece of work, and the kids were in love with riding their bikes around the smooth concrete sidewalks that ran beneath the pine trees.  At that time, the side roads in the Galt’s Ferry area were still all gravel.  There was no mail service.  There was no cable tv.  It was the sticks, and it was absolutely fabulous. 

So, this day, probably July, maybe late June, our hero, in swimming trunks, cheap flip-flops and nothing else, has spent the entire morning at play.  His skin has taken on the natural tan of the young that existed before parents knew what SPF meant, with blond highlights coming out in his curly hair.  He lives outside all day and is in good shape and can run and play all day, despite his unmistakable pudginess.  Having grown up around the water, he can swim fairly well, though not very quickly.  He would think nothing of swimming from one shore to the other in the area of the lake where he lived (he could not have swum the channel up by the Dam—too far).

So, their games took them to the large parking lot behind the beach area.  Between the parking lot and the beach were some pine trees with picnic tables for shade.  They sat down, and that’s when he saw her, a woman, a mother of three small kids—cute kids.  She was in her late 20’s/early 30’s, and he knew that he couldn’t take his eyes off her.  He wasn’t leering, but he knew that she was lovely, and he enjoyed watching her playing with a bouncy ball with her toddlers.  She would pick it up, bounce it toward one of them, they’d run and grab it and bring it back to her with looks of pure joy on their faces.  It made him smile.  And, every now and then, he would study the frame of her body in the pink one-piece swimsuit, quickly looking away if he felt her gaze even remotely close to fixing on him, feeling guilty about it, but not guilty enough to stop for a while.    

This lasted about 15 minutes, and then it happened.  He had stood up and started to walk down the beach toward some new adventure, when he heard the children start to cry.  An errant throw, and the ball had bounced out of reach out onto the water, and since she was by herself, she couldn’t go get it.  He told his friends, “yall, I’ll be back” and he ran out into the water after the ball.  Only, there was a breeze, and his approach made ripples that carried the ball farther away.  It got to where he had to swim, and as much as he tried, he couldn’t close the distance between himself and the ball.  But, he didn’t give up.  He knew that she had seen him go after it, and she was yelling to him, “It’s alright, don’t worry about it,” but he wanted to impress this woman because she was beautiful and lovely and that’s what his body and brain were telling him to do.  It was a mix of chivalry, lust, and charity for the little children.  He remembered their joy while playing with the ball, and in his heart, he hated (and still does) when a child is sad over having lost something.  So, he swam on and on.  He also wanted to impress her, to feel a woman, some woman, any woman, besides his mom and grandmas, looking at him with tender eyes.

Now, the ball was headed for land, across the cove from the beach, so he knew that he’d get it eventually.  He kept swimming.  And swimming.  And swimming.  And swimming.  He’d swum a good 400 yards when the ball came to rest on the opposite shore, in the back of Caleb Dupree’s house.  He was about 50 yards away when his heart filled with rage, for he couldn’t believe what he saw: that little shit Michael was riding his bike down to the ball, stealing his thunder, robbing him of glory.   He yelled, “Wait, that’s mine,” but Michael just smiled and turned around and rode off.  He eventually pulled himself up out of the water, catching his breath, and stayed there long enough to see Michael give the ball back to her.  She thanked him, patting him on the head, and then turned and waved to him.  He waved back, walked back on the road to his bike, and then went home and cried.  Even now, all these years later, unlike other days—great days even, the memories of that afternoon may never leave him.  
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Copyright 2013