See What Happens?

By Jack Steinbrink

This might be hard to believe, but baseball fields can be lonely places at night.

I had just finished announcing the high school baseball game, and after shutting everything down and locking up, I rolled down the ramp they built for me, from the announcer’s booth to the parking lot, in time to see some of the players from my former high school jump into pickups with friends and head out into the early evening. I sat there for nearly an hour, watching everyone leave: Players from both teams, all the umpires (including the home plate umpire who has a big, black beard and is a real character), parents and little kids (siblings of the players who have been dragged to the game), and finally even the concession people.

It usually takes my mom a while to show up in the van, and it’s not like I can roll home in my wheelchair. By the time she got there, there was a chill in the air, and I could actually hear crickets. We won the game and the kids from my old high school were whooping it up, probably heading off to a big keg party. I couldn’t blame them since I had done the same thing when I was their age, and it was Saturday.

Some of them waived to me as they left, and I waived back. One time after a game a girl flashed her boobs at me. That was nice, like the girls do in New Orleans, from what I hear. I’ve never been there, but I bet it would be fun to sit above that Bourbon Street and watch all the partying. Having too much fun is the reason I’m in this chair, or that’s what my mom likes to say, though I kind of wish she would stop saying it.

It was the spring of my senior year, and we had just won the baseball district title (which is a big deal in our town, and I got two hits in the game: a single and a double), and I hopped into the back of a pickup with all my gear and my teammates and a few friends and some girls (including my girlfriend) who always came to my games, and we sped off in the direction of a party. Someone handed me a Coors Light tall boy, and I stood up and chugged it, right there in the back of the truck. After I finished chugging, I smiled at everyone, and right then we hit a pothole and the bounce pitched me over the side. I remember getting launched over the side of the truck, the world seeming to roll over, and I remember it almost in slow motion like something in a movie, but I don’t remember much else. I woke up in the hospital and couldn’t feel anything below my waist, and that’s the way it’s been ever since.

The park was completely dark when my mom rolled up in her van; even the lights for the field had

been turned off (a guy named Todd Ingraham does that, and he always waves goodbye to me on his way out), so the only light came from the street and passing cars. Before she got there, I just sat and listened to the sound of cars on the highway.

We drove straight to the Tasty Shack, after she loaded me into the back, that is. My parents paid for the specialized van with my college money after my accident, and after I got out of the hospital the county gave me a job announcing all the high school games (football, baseball, basketball and even wrestling) in our town. It doesn’t pay much, but the health insurance is really good. I guess you could call it a charity type job, but I can’t complain. I’m happy to do it, and my folks were happy that I didn’t leave home, even though that’s what I planned to do before my accident.

My mom left me in the van while she went in to get our food. She always got the same thing, and it didn’t take that long: five cheeseburgers, five orders of fries, five cokes, and five chocolate milkshakes. The Tasty Shack makes amazing milk shakes. I have two little sisters, and sometimes they’ll trade me their fries for my milk shake because I’m not always in the mood for a milk shake.

The worst part about sitting there waiting for my mom to get our food is seeing people as they walk inside. The windows have a light tint, but a lot of them stare at their shoes and try not to look at me sitting there in the back of the van, and once in a while they waive, but usually it’s a sheepish, almost ashamed kind of waive, like they’re waiving at the living reminder of what happens when you do something dumb in the back of a pickup involving girls and alcohol. I’m tired of seeing that look, if I’m being honest.

I’m also tired of sitting in my chair having to watch life unfold around me because that’s all I can do, but I guess I’ll have to make my peace with that. Sometimes I even see mothers point at me and tell their kids, “See what happens when you drink and act like an idiot?” I’m not that fond of being a living reminder. The worst part is when my mom does it. About once a week, she points to me and asks my sisters if they want to end up like me if she catches them doing something, or even planning to do something, she thinks they shouldn’t. It’s humiliating, but I get it.

One of the best things about my job is that I get caught up in the game I’m announcing, and I can forget about being a living reminder and stuck in the chair for a while. Baseball games are my favorite, especially since I have a booth mostly to myself, and they even bring me nachos sometimes. Some of the players and the parents have told me I do a good job, and I appreciate that. One time, after my old school won a game on a single in the bottom of the ninth, the parents of the guy who got the hit came up to the booth to thank me and shake my hand. They told me it was one of the best nights in their son’s life, and that I did a good job adding

Shirley, one of the employees at the Tasty Shack, had to help my mom with our order, with getting all the bags into the van and all, and that’s not the first time she’s had to do that. Once we have the food it’s only a ten-minute drive home. We don’t live out in the country, but our house is at the end of the street and there’s a big, open field west of our house and no houses behind us because we sit at the back end of the neighborhood, so it kind of feels like we’re out in the country, even though the rest of the town is right there.

That field is kind of amazing. I used to play baseball and football out there with kids from the neighborhood all the time. Kids from all over town would come to play there because it’s just this big, open space. I have great memories of playing out there for hours, especially in the summer when you can lose track of time in the evening.

My sisters Kayla and Kendra are crazy. They’re pretty girls and good kids (much better than I was at their age; I was constantly drinking beer and sneaking out at night), but when we got home, they were arguing about some boy Kayla likes (she’s two years older than Kendra), and Kendra screaming that this boy already has a girlfriend. My poor dad tried to referee, but they kept on yelling at each other. While my mom put the food on the table, Kayla chased Kendra around the table until my dad grabbed Kendra—and you’d think this would calm things down, but really it only made them worse because Kendra started yelling that my dad was on Kayla’s side, even though he was just trying to get them to stop screaming and fighting at dinner time.

“The food is on the table if y’all will stop this,” my mom said, nodding in the direction of our dinner, and mercifully that worked (kind of), and I rolled up to the table to eat, and my dad handed me a cheeseburger and fries, and I fished a coke out of the plastic holder Shirley gave us, and a straw, too. All of a sudden, everyone was eating, and the girls (they’re both blonde like my mom and will probably grow up to be stunners) mercifully ate in silence.

After dinner we moved to the living room and everyone sat around the TV. We watched SportsCenter, and then ‘The Bachelor’ because that’s what my mom and sisters wanted to see. It’s funny to watch their reactions, and my dad just sat there and shook his head but wouldn’t really say anything. After some channel flipping, we watched part of ‘The Shawshank Redemption,’ a movie we all like and have seen before, and after an hour or so of that, it was time for everyone to take showers (if they’re doing that) and get ready for bed. I take a bath by myself, which is something I can do on my own now, at least in part thanks to some of the handles and stuff my dad installed. For quite a while after the accident, I needed my dad to pick me up and put me in the bath, which was humiliating. Thinking you’re a grown man, but your dad has to pick you up like a baby and

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anymore.

Probably the worst thing about the aftermath of my accident, and the biggest surprise for me, was when my girlfriend (the one who was in the truck with me) got engaged to another guy. To be honest, I thought about killing myself for about a month after that, but then I got my announcer job, and slowly things got better, and I thought about it less and less. It’s still not something I like to think about. She’s married and has a twoyear-old son now. I hope she’s happy but hearing about all that was like getting kicked in the nuts about a million times in a single day—although I wouldn’t be able to feel that now. Sometimes I think about the way she was smiling that night of my accident, her long, dark hair kind of floating around her face. It’s like it all happened to someone else, until I look down at my legs and the wheelchair.

After I took my bath I put on a t-shirt and some shorts, and I got back into my chair and went out to the couch. I sleep on the couch at night because it’s easier to get back into my chair and go to the bathroom (another thing that took a long while for me to do by myself) if I need to at night or in the morning. I usually keep the TV on and mute the sound, and I just leave it like that with all the lights out in the house. That’s how I like to fall asleep, and sometimes I sit there and channel surf a bit, depending on how tired I am. On this night I was tired after announcing that game, so after I said good night to my dad and my sisters and my mom, I was out there on the couch with a thick blanket and a pillow and I drifted off to sleep relatively quickly. All I could hear was the occasional sound of a car on the road, or the train off in the distance.

At some point in the night, I heard a creaking sound, the sound someone makes when they walk across the living room, and when I opened my eyes and sat up, there was some guy wearing jeans, a gray hoodie and a baseball hat standing there in front of the couch. He had a goatee, and he was drinking a glass of milk that I assumed to be from our refrigerator, and his eyes were like bloodshot marbles. For a moment we just looked at each other, and he looked over at my wheelchair.

“You shouldn’t leave windows open,” he said finally, in a quiet voice that made it sound like he smoked a lot and walked into the kitchen. My heart was pounding, and I was so scared I couldn’t even say anything or call out, like my voice had been frozen or someone was holding their hand over my mouth, and then I heard the back door open. After a minute or two I hoisted myself into my chair and rolled into the kitchen. He was gone and the lights were out, but the back door was wide open.

I shut the door and locked it, and I looked around to try and see how he got in, but I couldn’t really see much in the dark, so eventually I went back to the couch and tried to go back to sleep. It took a while for my

heartbeat to slow down, and even when I did eventually drift off, I had some crazy dreams about being chased. The only good part about that is that I can still walk and run in my dreams, so I have these dreams where I’m playing baseball or basketball, but I always get to the middle of the game (but the end of the dream) and all of a sudden, my legs won’t work, and that’s when I usually wake up.

In the morning I nearly fell off the couch when I heard my dad leave for work (he works for the railroad), and I wasn’t sure if I had dreamed the whole thing the night before. My mom and my sisters were in the kitchen moving around and getting some breakfast ready, my sisters still chirping at each other about that boy from the night before, and I went to the bathroom and came back to the kitchen thinking I really had just imagined it all, or it had been a really intense dream, like the kind that seems real even after waking up, and nothing had happened because why would someone break in for no reason? I sat in my wheelchair at the kitchen table, and my mom turned and asked, “Hey, why did you leave a glass of milk out last night?”

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Contributors

Photography for Sharon Pybas-Cheatwood is a means of storytelling and documenting moments. She has worked in various mediums and genres but always returns to her camera. Her work has been included in print and online for Oklahoma Today, Lawton Constitution, City of Lawton and Industrial Engineering Magazine. Sharon’s work has also been used in films and for film production location scouting. “In Repose” captures a moment when Celine settled into her new surroundings after her former owner passed away. The chair is now hers.

M. A. Istvan Jr., whose artworks have recently resulted in his due-process-less and unappealable termination from Austin Community College, does not write academic articles or poetry or satirical textbooks or comic routines or so on in ignorance of the burgeoning threat to artistic freedom. Dr. Istvan is aware that, worldwide (and especially in the US), artists are censored and intimidated—and more and more under the feel-good banners of “protecting the youth from corruption” and “nurturing diverse spaces.” In fact, one of the larger motivations behind his iconoclastic and provocative art is to keep the circumference of what can be expressed wide enough that we do not need to fear losing our livelihoods for exhibiting our humanity. Far from corrupting the youth or shutting down diversity, Dr. Istvan works, in effect, to ensure that the youth grow in a world of voices that are not just diverse on surface-levels or in the “right way.”

Living what could be charitably called a nomadic life, Paul Juhasz was born in western New Jersey, grew up just outside New Haven, Connecticut, and has spent appreciable chunks of his life in the plains of central Illinois, in the upper hill country of Texas, and in the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania. Most recently seduced by the spirit of the red earth, he now lives in Oklahoma City. He has worked at an Amazon fulfillment center, manned a junk truck, and driven for Uber, material he’s drawn on for his poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. He has read at dozens of conferences and festivals across the country, including Scissortail and the Woody Guthrie Festival. His work has appeared in bioStories, Red River Review, Red Earth Review and elsewhere.

Brian Lutz teaches at Delaware Valley University. In 2003 he was named Poetry Laurate of Bucks County, PA. His poetry has been published in numerous journals including Slate, Potomac Review, Louisville Review, Poet Lore, The Black Fork Review, The Meadow, West Trade Review, Visitant, Lost Pilots Literary Journal, Little Patuxent Review, and Cimarron Review. Brian lives in Pennsylvania with his wife, two kids and three cats.

As an Oklahoma native, Abigale Mazzo finds herself staring into many beautiful sunsets accompanied by her dogs and her husband. She enjoys hiking, reading, and trying new foods. Abigale graduated in 2020 with a Master’s of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing and she will begin pursuing her PhD in English Literature at the University of Tulsa this fall. Her work has appeared in the Gold Mine, the Jelly Bucket, and 580 Monthly.

Michael Milburn teaches English in New Haven, CT. His poetry has appeared recently in Slant, Descant, Grey Sparrow, and in a previous issue of Oklahoma Review.

Sheila Robinson received numerous awards for work during more than a decade in journalism. Her articles and photos have appeared online and in newspapers from Alaska to South America. She received commendations from Oklahoma Governor Frank Keating as well as Governor Brad Henry for publicizing stories about employment and living programs geared to assist individuals with disabilities. Born in Oklahoma and raised in New Mexico, she’s lived from California to Florida and a handful of states in between. Sheila is happily retired now.

Jack Steinbrink grew up in Texas and Oklahoma. He earned his undergrad degree at Baylor University, a MA in English-Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University, and a PhD in English-Creative Writing (Fiction) at Florida State University. After teaching writing classes in the Tampa Bay area for more than a decade at schools that included the University of South Florida, Hillsborough Community College and the University of Tampa, Steinbrink moved back to Stillwater in 2019 after the death of his mother. He currently works as an editor for Energy Abstracts in Tulsa but lives in Stillwater.

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Cameron University 2021