The Lot

By Chris Morrow

It's the late 1960's and Cody Ryerson and his little brother Adam spend their summers playing ball in the big empty field next door that all the neighborhood kids refer to as The Lot. Now twenty years later Cody is a successful L.A. record producer overrun by the trappings of wealth and fame. Adam wants to see The Lot again and he wants his big brother there when he does. Time is running out for one of them. In this, his newest short story, Chris Morrow, author of the award winning horror novel The Devil's Choir, sets aside genre fiction to tell a story about boys, baseball and brotherhood.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bard and Book
• Release date: Aug 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311721433

Book preview

The Lot

and other Short Stories

by

Chris Morrow

Smashwords Edition

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Copyright Chris Morrow 2015. All Rights Reserved

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Contents

The Lot

Dinner for the Dead

Fear and the Storm

A Note from the Author

THE LOT

You know you’re getting close to the little farming community of Toulouse when the water tower rises over the woods that frame the east edge of town. When Cody Ryerson was a kid the tower was painted silver and if you caught at it just the right angle on a cloudless day it seemed to shimmer like a diamond against the background of a bright blue sky. It stood sentry in the corner of a big open field all the neighborhood boys called The Lot. In the mornings when Cody and his little brother Adam would stand at the curb waiting for the school bus, they would often look up at the tower and try to imagine just how far a guy could see from up there.

In the three years the Ryersons lived in Toulouse, the water tower looked down upon thousands of innings of baseball played on long summer days by boys clad in t-shirts and blue jeans. There were rules, but there were no umpires to enforce them in The Lot. When disagreements occurred – and they occurred with regularity – they were usually resolved without bloodshed. Not always. The time that Theo Gilbert knocked two of Sammy Lanigan’s front teeth out with a haymaker over a disagreement about balls and strikes comes to mind. Lanigan claimed the two teeth were already loose and ready to come out anyway. Nevertheless, no one argued balls and strikes with Theo Gilbert after that.

Ballgames started when the grass was still wet with dew and ran until the fireflies started their lightshow in the woods. The only official intermission came with the wail of the town siren calling noon. At that, gloves were dropped by fielders where they stood, the catcher scratched the number of outs and the count in the dirt and everyone retreated to the shade of the water tower for sack lunches of bologna and cheese or peanut butter and jelly.

Peanut butter and jelly . . .How long had it been since Cody had a PBJ?

The thought yanked Cody Ryerson out of the past and he was suddenly aware of the farm fields racing past the rented Porsche. A farmer was pulling a disc behind his tractor, turning over the earth and the irony was not lost on Cody. This trip was tilling up memories and maybe that’s why Adam had wanted it.

A word popped into Cody’s head and with that single word twenty years melted away and he was ten again – Toulou-La.

He said it aloud and couldn’t help but laugh. It wasn’t to be found in any dictionary then or now, but in the late 1960s it was a word alright, shouted by a chorus of dusty, suntanned boys several times a day in The Lot.

If Webster had put it in his book, the entry would have looked like this:

Toulou-La: verb. To knock the snot out of a baseball and watch it rocket toward town, beyond the reach of all fielders. noun. A Home Run. Synonyms: Big Fly, Dinger, Tater, Moon shot. Usually followed with the exclamation, Holy hot damn!

When one of the boys really connected with a pitcha chorus of Toulou-La! would cascade over The Lot. Everyone would be hollering except the pitcher who’d given up the blast and the outfielder whose job it was to chase the damn thing down. Cody recalled the time Big Jimmy Gregory got every bit of a brand new baseball and sent it sailing into the