Read Online Home Run: A Novel by Travis Thrasher - Free Book Online Page A

brother looked at him in the same old way he used to as a kid when Cory was pulling his leg. “He did not—”
    “I swear to you. There were tears.”
    “Right.”
    Clay’s eyes seemed to be in a perpetual state of rolling whenever he was around Cory. He headed back into the restaurant.
    “Don’t forget the Arby’s sauce,” Cory called out.
    His brother could only shake his head. This was their typical banter and shtick. It never changed even as they got older.
    When the door closed and Clay was inside, Cory popped the trunk on the Corvette and then walked around to the back of the car. He quickly walked to the nearby trash can and tossed the box of curly fries into it. Then he riffled through his duffel bag till he found the thing he’d been thinking about since deplaning.
    His eyes scanned the parking lot as he casually poured out most of the Diet Coke in his cup and refilled it with vodka. He closed the lid, then slipped the bottle back into its place. He had a feeling he’d need it later this evening.
    The sun began to drift off to sleep in the west as they headed south on the rural two-lane road toward the farm outside Okmulgee. Cory remembered heading the opposite way very well; it had been his escape route out of this place. It seemed like something that had happened to another person, one who’d died just like his mother and father had in the time that had passed since then. That kid was long gone, buried underneath a thousand blurry memories that tried to bury another hundred thousand bad ones.
    Cory took a sip from his nearly empty Arby’s cup as he turned up the Led Zeppelin song on the radio and cranked up the engine. Sandwich wrappers shifted on the console next to them. Clay seemed to brace himself. Not another car in sight. The Corvette drifted over the double yellow lines as if it owned them.
    “Careful,” Clay shouted above Robert Plant’s wailing voice.
    The open road and jamming music summed up exactly how Cory felt. “I love this stretch. Wanna see what this bad boy can do?”
    “Not really,” Clay said, holding the handle on the door next to him.
    Cory could tell his brother was looking at him, but at this point in the evening he didn’t care.
    “Did you drink on the plane?”
    Cory laughed as he glanced over at his brother. Then he punched the engine to see how fast they could go.
    They flew past a sign saying that Okmulgee was only ten miles away. They were close to the tiny town and the terrible past and those nagging, constant reminders.
    Don’t think of them now—just drive.
    Cory did just that, trying to outrace the demons following him. The snapshots and the pictures and the running tape and the running figures and the dancing balls and the screaming faces.
    Clay shouted something, but Cory didn’t hear the words. He was just thinking about when the levee might break and the past would come gushing out over him like a Gatorade bucket full of hurt and disappointment.
    “You coulda been so much more, boy.”
    Thanks, Pop.
    “I miss you, son.”
    But I had to get outta here, Ma.
    “You never loved me and never loved us and you left us to fend for ourselves.”
    This voice hurt the most, and now Cory drove out of anger.
    Mean old memories are just as mean as that levee, aren’t they?
    In the blur of the past and the present, Cory saw it but couldn’t react quickly enough. A fastball that he didn’t have time to hit. Like swinging the bat, Cory instantly jammed on the brakes
    no no no it’s coming up too quick
    as the slow-moving tractor jutted across the highway
    going down going down
    and he swung and tried to make it but the car shook and veered off and struck a side and smashed and all the while Cory could only think of one thing in the madness of his mind.
    Clay

He walks down the street in the middle of the black night with no car around for miles, and he vows to keep walking until he passes out or he’s struck by a semi. The blood he spits up is all over his hands