"Esther M. Friesner - Jesus at Bat" - читать интересную книгу автора (Friesner Esther M)

That night, Victor didn't have to listen to Barb's barbs about where he was on
the stairway to success and where he ought to be. Happily swamped with pleas
for
La Belle and Amway appointments (high tips and high sales guaranteed, you
betcha), Barb had better things to do with her tongue than rag on the man
whose
chronic underemployment made his Little League coaching job possible. Yes,
baseball season was upon them once more, and so long as Victor owned the power
to say whose son played (and whether the boy's field position were somewhere
in
this time-zone), domestic bliss and Barb's own auburn-turfed diamond were his
all his.

Nor did it matter a lick that the Brothers' Meeting Bobcats were a team so
slack
and poorly that a reputable publisher of dictionaries had asked them to pose
as
the illustration for pathetic.

No, it didn't matter to Coach Vic at all, but it mattered very much to Vic
Junior.

Vic Junior loved baseball. He was one of those pure souls born with a vision
of
The Game untainted by the dross and illusion of this sorry world. To him,
baseball spoke of Buddha-nature, not Lite Beer. (The Tao which can be named is
not the Tao, but the Tao which has its batting stats printed on the back of a
trading card is way awesome.) I The smell of a newly oiled glove, the clean
crack of bat hitting ball, the sight of so many strong, young lads tearing
around the bases in those tight-fitting pants, all moved him in ways he could
not yet hang a name on. It was a source of spiritual pain to him that his team
so seldom won.

It was a pain less spiritual every time Jase McClellan knocked him down in the
school yard and taunted him with the fact that he wouldn't be on the Bobcats
team at all if not for the fact that his old man was the coach.

Vic Junior could have tattled on Jase, but he was what adults called a good
child. In other words, there were sponges adorning the ocean floor who had
more
backbone than he. He went to church without a fuss and riven listened to what
his Sunday school teacher had to relate of Hell. He tithed his allowance not
because his mother made him but in the sure and certain hope that he was
making
time payments on one colossal, outsize, super-mega-omniprayer of his own
asking
being answered some day. He wasn't sure what he was going to request when he
finally submitted his sealed bid to Glory, but he knew it would be something
much better than just asking God to burn Jase McClellan in the fiery pit until
his eyeballs melted and his hair frizzled away and the skin on his face