Hillsboro Publishing, LLC

An Excerpt from The Smalltown Way

 

The rules of mailbox ball were simple.

   Two guys on a team. The hitter leaned out the front passenger window with a baseball bat while his teammate took the wheel. One of the opposing team members kept an eye on the speedometer to make sure the driver didn’t dip below 30 mph; the other sat behind the batter to judge the hit. A good-sized dent in the mailbox was a single; knocking it clean off the post was a home run. A whiff or a weak tap on the box was an out, and there was only one out per inning because there were only so many mailboxes down in Ghost Hollow.

   The bachelor party had progressed naturally from shooting pool to throwing darts to getting lap dances from Spalding’s oldest stripper to sitting around mostly drunk but not wanting it to be over. It was almost midnight when Russ Pollard suggested mailbox ball, and it was Russ himself who broke the scoreless tie by getting hold of a silver, standard-issue mailbox and blasting it into the ditch with a runner on base. Buddy took his stance in the window in the next inning as his teammate Tim Derringer spotted a custom mailbox made up to look like a red barn, complete with silos in the background and miniature plastic people dressed as farmers on the platform. Cal Mackey’s mailbox, the one he’d commissioned from an artist over in Garberville. “That should be a grand slam there,” shouted Tim. “Keep your eye on the ball.” Buddy took his cut and shattered the homemade box into a million pieces.

   They celebrated with beers all around and at first no one noticed the set of headlights close behind them. The car refused to pass, even when Tim slowed to a crawl. Russ wanted to stop and beat the shit out of them. Buddy said yeah, we got bats.

  “Great idea if you want to die,” said Tim. “If we acted like we were gonna do that, these crazy-ass Ghost Hollow people’d just shoot us.  I know a guy it happened to.”