Now tall, thin, wasted, he doesn’t look his age but a hell of a lot older. Nothing much left of him at all, a hastily scrawled stick figure, all right angles and sharp edges.

A Punch doll, a bad joke.

So when he tumbles off the rusty bleachers it’s like someone’s cut all his strings. He goes slack and silly, lifeless and limp, and falls forward with hardly a sound.

—

Dillon’s rounding first, heading to second, smiling and laughing and raising his arms to the sky and happy for the first time in a long time—least since his real daddy, Ronnie, ran them over to that catfish place in Catlettsburg before he went back up to the corrections for a spell—when Junior Heck’s mama, Tanya, starts hollerin’ loud like a big ole fire truck.

Dillon passes second, slowing down now and the game long forgotten, as mamas and daddies pull away from the bleachers, a few even runnin’ low and covering their heads ’cause they think it’s a shooting. Eleven-year-old Dillon knows all there is to know about that, what to do if someone angry or strung out or just plum crazy ever bursts into Angel Middle. How you hide when you first hear gunshots. But soon as Tanya Heck started up her hollerin’, Dillon knew it wasn’t because of no crack of a hunting rifle.

Most of them mamas and daddies have figured that out too, calmly looking for their kids, rounding them up with waving arms.

But some others are just standing around, wrapped up in cigarette or vape smoke, staring down, embarrassed, at something lying on the ground.

Dillon takes one last look back over the left-field fence to see if his ball’s still flying high, or maybe rolling instead all the way down now to the water’s edge at the Fork, but there’s nothing. That ball, and so many other things the boy can’t put a name to, lost forever in the deepening dusk, where fireflies pop here and there like campfire sparks, like that one time he and his daddy camped down at Yatesville Lake and what a fire that was. It was summer then too and way too hot, but his daddy helped him build it up bigger anyway, feeding it every piece of hickory or black cherry they could find, sitting as close as they dared, his daddy hanging one arm over his shoulder like they were good buddies. They burned hot dogs pitch-black but ate ’em anyway, then laid side-by-side beneath the whited-out stars as his daddy told him stories about the mines and even further back than that, when he was only Dillon’s age.

The boy can’t remember much of those stories now but still remembers his daddy’s hand on his, the warmth of it and the weight of things passed down to him, still gently pressing there.

Dillon never makes third.