The Apple Sniper
IFD Publishing, P.O. Box 40776, Eugene, Oregon 97404
U.S.A.
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This is a work of fiction. The characters have been created for the sake of this story and are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Art Copyright © 2012 by Alan M. Clark
eBook Design, Eric M. Witchey
This eBook edition, Copyright © 2012 by Eric
M. Witchey
Produced by IFD Publishing
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4524-4882-4
Originally Printed in the United States of America
Table of Contents
Other Stories from IFD Publishing
Introduction
“The Apple Sniper” is one of a dozen or so short stories I did in order to explore the childhood relationships in a neighborhood much like the one where I grew up. I was particularly interested in how the proverbial nurturing village’s assumed values play a role in the development of the diverse adult personalities that later emerge. I hope the “The Apple Sniper” speaks to your child within. I also hope it speaks to the wiser, more comprehending perspective of the adult who was once that child. Most important, I hope it reminds us all that it takes a village to raise a sniper.
Eric M. Witchey
The Apple Sniper
We played ball on our battlefield, and we played war on our ball field. To us, everything was a game, and our heroes in baseball and war and adventure were the older kids who had lived in the neighborhood longer and had learned secrets that they handed down to us before they left home. In time, it was our job to pass on the secrets.
The neighborhood was a skinny block of twenty pre-war, coal-furnace, custom-builts with covered porches and gabled roofs: ten on Jefferson Avenue, ten on Gaylord. On one skinny end, the block was cut off by Ohio State Route 39—a pain in the ass to cross most of the time. On the other end, it was cut off by the back road, which likely as not had a real name we never used. A narrow swamp separated the back road from the Baltimore & Ohio’s tracks raised up on black cinder ballast scraped from the walls of steel mill furnaces. The tracks ran from the center of town, through our world, and off to fantasy worlds far beyond Ohio’s soy bean and corn fields.
Across the street from our ivy-covered brick house on Jefferson was the battle and ball field, a gone-to-seed vacant block surrounding an oil bulk depot—seven white, towering tanks connected to a pump house by pipes through an earthen dike. If the tanks ever leaked, the dike was supposed to contain spilled oil, kerosene, and gasoline.
The pump house filled trucks that drove away to fill fuel-oil tanks for homes, gasoline tanks for gas stations, and we really didn’t know what else. We used to wonder who still used so much kerosene that we needed a 2,000 gallon tank of it in our ball field.
Didn't matter. The kerosene tank was dead centerfield, and hitting it on the fly counted as a ground rule double. Clearing the top was a homer.
Those were the rules handed down from the big kids. The big kids were the guys in high school. I was a little kid. Sometimes I didn't count when we played ball. Sometimes I did. It kinda depended how many big kids were playing, and by my twelfth birthday, not many played anymore. Some had gone to college. Some had gone to war.
Older than me by nineteen months, my brother claimed a full two years and thought he was a big kid because my best friend's brother, Gordon Carson, had sworn him in as an honorary big kid before Gordon climbed on the Army bus.
They held the initiation in the ball field.
With Dad's binoculars, I watched them from my bedroom window. Lying under the summer sky on their bellies, Gordon, who could smack the ball clean over the tanks and past the pump house, scraped away the grass of the outfield, dug a small crater in the dirt, then flicked his Zippo lighter. He touched the lighter to the dirt. Blue flame rippled across the little crater of contaminated dirt. He said something. My brother nodded. Then Gordon passed the lighter to him. After that, my brother was a big kid even though he still had another year before high school.
Blond and blue-eyed and white-smiling, he'd always been golden even though his name was Wayph.
A name means something. It makes part of who you are. We knew that even then. We all had nicknames that fit us better than our real names, but nobody made a nickname for Wayph. Not even the big kids. Wayph was his name, and he was just Wayph.