Justin Hunt
The Summer We Left
For Reid, Greg, Eddie, Leonard, Spunky, Ron, Tony and Phil
After shutting out the locals, we loaded up our bats and found a quiet, musty pool hall where I drank my first beer— on a parched, south-wind night in Anthony, Kansas, August 1968. In the dim, stale air we perched on vinyl-covered stools bolted to the floor, grimy spittoons below us, our schooners heavy globes of ice as we eased into the velvet carbonation of Coors. Our talk was soft, a murmur as measured as nine scoreless innings, while the crack of snooker balls tacked time and place to memory: our last game together, all of us splitting off, some to night shifts at Boeing, others to college or Vietnam. Outside, we mumbled goodbye, piled into dusty cars and pickups—into the reek of gasoline, oil and our fathers’ sweat. And when I drove the forty miles home through black, empty prairie, it was to a life somehow larger than the one I’d left earlier that day, though not large or long enough yet to mourn our old fierceness—the way we spit and slid and stole for each other, the way we slugged.
Justin Hunt grew up in rural Kansas and lives in Charlotte, NC. His work has won several awards and appears or is forthcoming in a wide range of literary journals and anthologies in the U.S., Ireland and the U.K., including, among others, Barrow Street, Five Points, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Ohio Review, The Journal, Solstice, River Styx, The Baltimore Review, Arts & Letters, The Florida Review, Bellingham Review, Crab Creek Review, Terrain.org, Southword, Live Canon and The Bridport Prize Anthology. For more information on Justin, please visit www.justinhunt.online.