Orvitch sat on the fence, heels of his old workboots pressed into the rusting chainlink.
One of his temples was speckled gray from him doing a pisspoor job of combing in the over-the-counter hair dye.
Larson sort of appeared, Orvitch hadn’t noticed him until he spoke.
“Fence is kinda high for an old man like you to be perched on it.”
Orvitch nodded his agreement.
“Yeah, but better view from up here. Trying to figure out why the pitcher bounces the ball.”
The Bengali kids and Pakistani kids were playing cricket.
Larson grimaced. “Watching this weird shit worth falling and cracking your skull?”
Larson pulled a pint of cognac from the inside pocket of his windbreaker, took a slug, twisted the cap back on almost like it was a waste of time.
“I don’t plan on falling,” Orvitch said. “If sitting on an eight-foot fence is too much of a life risk, I might as well completely pack it in.”
Orvitch went back to watching cricket. He could have looked up the rules, but he wanted to watch, learn it organically. Seemed like he always knew the rules to baseball without anyone having to tell him.
“You don’t drink no more, right?”
Orvitch answered without taking his eyes off the game.
“That’s right.”
“Hmmm.” Larson fidgeted. Orvitch couldn’t see it, but he could feel it.“How long’s it been?”
A kid struck out and swore.
Orvitch wondered if they called it a strikeout. And he wasn’t sure what the kid said was a swear word. It just seemed logical, because the other kids laughed.
“Seventeen years,” Orvitch said.
“Damn,” Larson said, somewhere between ‘impressive’ and ‘fuck that.’
Larson took another pull from the cognac. Orvitch didn’t see Larson do it, but he could feel it.
The cognac was the cheap kind, the brand that was on the billboards in the neighborhoods where all the movie theaters were turned into churches.
“So now insteada drinkin’ you sit on the fence and watch Arab kids play cricket?”
“That’s what I’m doin’ today.”
“You was over here yesterday, too. I seen ya.”
“Yeah, that’s what I was doin’ yesterday, too. Interesting game. Lot like baseball. The kids sure do seem to have fun.”
“You miss it?”
“Baseball?”
“No, drinkin’. You ever miss drinkin’?”
Orvitch turned and looked at Larson.
He could have told him to fuck off. He could have told him anything. He could have ignored him.
“ I miss bourbon sometimes.”
“Like when?”
Orvitch hopped down from the fence. His right knee popped a little bit and he wobbled.
“Like now. I wouldn’t mind grabbin’ me a bottle a bourbon and wrappin’ myself in it like an old bathrobe that smells like Jamie Lee Curtis.”
Larson snap chuckled out of one side of his face. “So why don’t ya?”
Orvitch rubbed his knee.
“Because I’m still learnin’ the rules of the game.”
***
Photo by Yogendra Singh on Unsplash
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