Bub tries fiction

[vtbub]

With his hands full of his own luggage, the young man emerged from the train station onto the main drag. It was a foggy night, he had hoped to arrive just before dinnertime, but the local from Chicago had been delayed twice for things on the track. It was now after nine at night. He was hungry, wet, and tired as he looked across the street, but he just stopped to marvel at the site.

She had only been around for eleven years, sitting kind of oddly along two blocks of prime real estate at the center of the heartland. Her brick base hid her true shape, yet filled in the sidewalk that held her. For the most part, it was dark, with just a light tower on the roof was partially on, but the rest of her remained dingy and unlit.

Festooned with brown, red, and white ribbons that stretched from her windows to the station across the way, she had an inviting look about her, even at a time when she was empty. Her white limestone rose from the brick base, looking like a model set in a wooden base. There were plenty of windows in which you could see a few bare bulbs and exit signs over ramps, but with her emptiness, you could not really get a sense of the power she held over her community.

The marquee was also dark. Dark letters on frosted glass told what was to come, but it sat empty, along with the gates below it. The turnstiles sat empty, a piece of paper flying around on occasion, the iron gates, a deep black, firmly lowered to the ground, made her look uninviting, but anyone passing by knew that was simply a ruse.

Catching himself, for a moment before hailing a cab that would bring him to warmth and food, he glanced near the roof again and carved in, like a Roman stadium, were the words “City Field” in big block letters that curved around the top. They were the color of the limestone and easy to miss if you weren’t looking. It was not imposing, neither was the exterior as a whole for that matter, but based on the newsreels he had seen and the radio that crackled in the evening, what happened inside of those iron gates carried real weight.

This was a two team city. One treated like a god, the other like the little brother one would pat on the head and say patronizing things about. Tomorrow, he would enter somewhere beyond those gates, and join the Saint Louis Cardinals, the team that in twenty short years had reach deity like status.

No one knew who he was. He was lucky that the fedora matched his coat and pants. At nineteen, he had gone yet again from the big fish in the little pond to the minnow in the ocean. He was sure that he would become as exalted as the stadium as he was looking at. Age and immaturity would do that to most kids, and certainly he was no exception to both. Missouri was a long way from Bensonhurst, New York.

“Hey, you need a ride to the Wilson?” An older voice pieced through the kid’s fog.

He looked stunned for a second at the recognition and said, “Yeah, sir, I do.”

The older man opened the passenger’s side door in his taxi and said, “Hop in.” He took the kid’s bags and put them in the trunk as the younger man settled in his seat, focusing back into reality. As the driver got back in his car, he asked, “Browns or Cards?”

“Saint Louis,” was the instant reply, until he realized again that he was in St. Louis, “The Cardinals.” He blushed.

With a quick chuckle, the driver got back behind the wheel and started down the street, staying quiet for a few seconds as he reached a red light. He glanced at his front seat passenger and asked, “You Colucci?”

Surprised that someone had heard of him, he replied, “Yeah, that’s me.” He beamed in excitement at being recognized.

With a cigar now firmly implanted in his mouth as the light turned green the driver turned and said, “You better pitch us to the pennant.” The kid gave a nervous laugh and wondered to himself just what in the world he had stumbled into.

[Franklinnoble]

Punctuation needs a little work, just to make a few of the sentences flow a little better, and I think in first paragraph you mean "sight" instead of "site," but otherwise, it's an interesting read. I wasn't able to figure that it was a baseball story until paragraph 4 or 5, and that made for a pretty good hook.

[vtbub]

Thanks!

Pure first draft.