Okay, one quick thought about Pella: for someone who was supposedly a fierce insomniac, she certainly slept soundly. He’d neglected to set either his alarm or the backup alarm on his watch, and he didn’t wake this morning until Arsch drummed on the bedroom door and announced that he was ready to go. Which meant they were already late, because Arsch always overslept. Schwartz twisted out of Pella’s grip, threw on a pair of sweatpants, swept his dirty uniform back into his equipment bag (the Harpooners did, or were supposed to do, their own laundry), and headed for the door. On the way out, he paused to sweep a curl out of Pella’s eyes, not sure whether to wake her or not. She didn’t move a muscle. Maybe she’d stay there all day, sleeping and sleeping, her breathing the only sound in the house. The thought pleased him.
Now he pulled out his laptop and brought his thesis up on the screen. He felt, for the first time since he received his first rejection letter, like he might be able to work.
“High school!” called Izzy, pointing out the window at a long windowless structure of turreted gray brick.
“High school,” agreed Phil Loondorf.
Steve Willoughby leaned across the aisle to check it out. “That’s a prison,” he said. “That’s a full-on correctional center.”
As the bus shuddered past the building, a block-lettered sign confirmed that it was indeed the Wakefield Correctional Center.
“No fair!” Izzy said. “Steve saw the sign!”
“No I didn’t. Look at that place. It’s got sniper towers.”
“Who cares, man? So’d my high school.”
“That’s a point for Willoughby,” Henry said.
“Oh man.” Izzy slumped down in his seat. “Buddha wouldn’t give him that.”
“I’m not the Buddha,” Henry said, and that was that. In the absence of Owen, the usual arbiter of High School or Prison, Henry had agreed to serve as guest referee. Whichever freshperson scored the most points en route to Opentoe was exempt from equipment duty for the afternoon. “That makes the score two to one to one,” Henry announced. “To zero, since Quisp is asleep.”
“Who’s better?” Izzy asked Steve and Loondorf. “Henry or Jeter?”
“Oooh. Tough call.”
“I gotta take Jeter.”
“Henry’s better on D, at least.”
“On D, sure. But Jeter’s a better hitter.”
“Henry in five years, or Jeter?”
“You mean Jeter now, or Jeter in five years? ’Cause he’ll be washed-up by then.”
“He’s washed-up already.”
“Jeter five years ago. Henry in five years.”
“Are you guys insane?” Henry whacked Loondorf on the back of the head. “Shut up.”
“Sorry, Henry.”
Every guy on that bus, from Schwartz down to little Loondorf, had grown up dreaming of becoming a professional athlete. Even when you realized you’d never make it, you didn’t relinquish the dream, not deep down. And here was Henry, living it out. He alone was headed where they each, in the privacy of their backyard imaginations, had spent the better part of their boyhoods: a major-league diamond.
Schwartz, for his part, had vowed long ago not to become one of those pathetic ex-jocks who considered high school and college the best days of their lives. Life was long, unless you died, and he didn’t intend to spend the next sixty years talking about the last twenty-two. That was why he didn’t want to go into coaching, though everyone at Westish, especially the coaches, expected him to. He already knew he could coach. All you had to do was look at each of your players and ask yourself: What story does this guy wish someone would tell him about himself? And then you told the guy that story. You told it with a hint of doom. You included his flaws. You emphasized the obstacles that could prevent him from succeeding. That was what made the story epic: the player, the hero, had to suffer mightily en route to his final triumph. Schwartz knew that people loved to suffer, as long as the suffering made sense. Everybody suffered. The key was to choose the form of your suffering. Most people couldn’t do this alone; they needed a coach. A good coach made you suffer in a way that suited you. A bad coach made everyone suffer in the same way, and so was more like a torturer.
For the last four years Schwartz had devoted himself to Westish College; for the last three he’d devoted himself to Henry. Now both would go on without him. Thanks for everything, Mikey. See ya around. After draft day, Henry would have plenty of people telling him what to do. An agent, a manager, a battery of coaches and instructors and teammates. He wouldn’t need Schwartz anymore. Schwartz didn’t know if he was ready for that—ready to not be needed.
Izzy, who was sitting a row ahead of Henry, draped himself over the back of the seat to command Henry’s full attention. “If you went to the majors next year,” he mused, “then I’d be the starting shortstop. That’d be crisp. But you wouldn’t be here.”
“It wouldn’t be the majors,” Henry reminded him. “Not even close. I’d be in rookie ball out in Montana or somewhere. I’d be riding a bus like this every day.”
Schwartz nodded to himself, pleased at this levelheadedness.
“Even in the minors you get mad pussy,” Izzy said. “I’m talking mad pussy, yo.”
“Sounds great.” Henry gazed absently out the window, spun a baseball in his right hand.
“Guys want to fight you too. You walk into a bar and some guy clocks you with a bottle. I read it in Baseball America.”
“Why would anyone want to fight Henry?” Loondorf looked hurt.
“Because he’s a ballplayer.”
“So?”
“So he’s a baller. He’s got cash, chains, crisp clothes. He’s got a hat that says Yankees and it’s the real deal, yo. He didn’t buy it at no yard sale. He walks into a bar and girls are like damn. Dudes get jealous. They want to get in his face, prove they’re somebody.”
“They want to take down the man,” Steve said helpfully.
“That’s right. Take down the man.”
Loondorf shook his head. “Henry doesn’t even go to bars.”
Henry slid into the seat across from Schwartz. “Weird without Owen here.”
Schwartz nodded. It wasn’t all that weird: the Buddha just read in silence on the bus and arbitrated the occasional High School or Prison dispute.
“Any word from your schools?”
“Not yet.”
“I wish they’d hurry up.”
“Me too.”
“I’ve been carrying this around for weeks.” Henry reached into his bag and produced a bottle of Duckling bourbon. “I figured I’d be ready when the good news came.”
A too-precise longing zipped down Schwartz’s spine. Duckling was his favorite, and he’d been craving it lately, in the absence of any money with which to buy a bottle. “Skrimmer—,” he began, but wasn’t sure how to continue. Henry didn’t have a fake ID, nor did they sell Duckling anywhere near campus. He must have gone to considerable trouble.
“Just take it now,” Henry said, pressing the bottle into Schwartz’s hands. “I’m sick of carrying it around.”
“I can’t,” Schwartz said.
“Call it a Passover present.”
“It’s chametz.”
“It’s what?”
“If I observed Passover I’d have to throw that in the trash. Or let the goyim steal it.”
“Oh.” Henry thought hard. “Then it’s an early graduation present.”
Schwartz was starting to get annoyed. He couldn’t tell Henry right now. The little guy had enough on his mind—an errorless game today meant he would break Aparicio’s record, and there were bound to be plenty of scouts in the stands. Once Miranda Szabo called you on the phone, you were big-time, and you had to perform.
“It can’t be long now,” Henry said. “I told you about Emily Neutzel and Georgetown, right?”
Schwartz ground his teeth together. The bus slowed to take the Opentoe College exit. The other Harpooners bobbed their heads to their pregame playlists, whittl
ing down their thoughts to the ones that would help them win. Henry was still holding the bottle. “That stuff’s expensive,” Schwartz said gruffly. “You should keep it.”
“What am I going to do with a bottle of whiskey?”
“Drink it on draft day. Celebrate your newfound fame and wealth.”
The tone of this was wrong, mean, and a confused look crossed Henry’s face. In his mind it was Schwartz who’d be drinking bourbon on draft day, clinking a toast against Henry’s SuperBoost shake as they celebrated their departure from Westish into a bigger, better world. Henry tucked the bottle back inside his bag. He turned in his seat to gaze out the window.
Christ, thought Schwartz. He should have told the Skrimmer straight up, each time a letter came. Now he’d maneuvered himself into a real damned-if-you-do-or-don’t. The only reason not to tell him right now was to avoid distracting him right before the game—but he’d already distracted him by being so brusque and rude. Might as well come clean.
“I didn’t get in.” It came out sounding heavier, more melodramatic than he’d planned.
Henry looked at him. “What?”
Try to be lighter this time. “I didn’t get in.”
“Where?”
“Anywhere.”
Henry shook his head. “That can’t be right.”
“It ain’t right. But it’s true.”
“You heard from Harvard?”
“Yup.”
“You heard from Stanford?”
To keep him from going through the whole list, Schwartz reached into his bag and pulled out the stack of envelopes. Henry flipped through them. He didn’t read the letters, just glanced at the fancy seals by the return addresses, ticking off each of the six in his mind. He handed the stack back to Schwartz, looked at him desolately. “Now what?”
The bus ground to a halt in the Opentoe lot. The Harpooners rose from their seats, stretching and yawning.
“Now,” said Schwartz as upbeatly as he could muster, “we play ball.”
20
Pella realized she’d been asleep for a very long time. The clock by the bedside—by Mike’s bedside—read 1:33, and daylight streamed through the uncurtained window. It was pleasant and scary both, to think about where her mind had been for the past twelve hours or so. She wished she knew exactly what time she’d fallen asleep, so she could record her accomplishment, quantify her journey: I slept for this long!
Mike was nowhere to be found, and she remembered nothing of his departure. She hadn’t taken any sleeping pills—just half a bottle of wine, barely more than doctors recommended. She headed to the bathroom, which was surprisingly clean, at least compared to the rest of the house. She peed and, for kicks, opened the cabinet above the sink: it contained nothing but a stick of deodorant, an athlete’s foot ointment, and a tube of toothpaste. Amazing creatures, men. She yanked aside the shower curtain and found, inside the elegant old claw-foot tub, a battered beer keg, the metal top clouded with mildew. At least they had a shower curtain.
It would have been nice of Mike to leave a note—“ Back soon!”—but she hadn’t seen one in the bedroom, and there wasn’t one in the kitchen either. Ah, well. She could live with the omission, given how sweet he’d been to let her, a near stranger, pass out in what had no doubt been the exact center of his little bed, so that he had to scrunch his big body against the wall.
On the kitchen counter, behind a scatter of sticky notes and tented-open books, sat a coffeemaker. The glass pot didn’t contain any egregious mold. She decided to brew a fresh cup and drink it here, before heading back to her dad’s place. He’d probably be pissed; she hadn’t told him she wasn’t coming home.
In the pantry, among economy-sized boxes of cornflakes and gigantic tubs of something called SuperBoost 9000, she found filters and a five-pound can of generic coffee. Everything in bulk: that appeared to be the Mike Schwartz philosophy. The Affenlights, on the other hand, were coffee snobs. She peeled back the plastic lid and sniffed at the coffee, if you could call it that—it was the pale-brown color of woodchips but not as fragrant. It would do.
She dumped the old coffee into the sink, where it diffused in the cloudy water, cascading down over the lips of stacked dishes. So far so good. But when she tried to rinse and refill the glass pot, she couldn’t work the lip underneath the faucet. She tried to shift the dishes to make the faucet more accessible, but they were stacked in a precarious, Jenga-like pyramid, glasses on the bottom, and she was afraid the whole shaky construction would collapse with a ringing crunch.
The thing to do, really, would be to wash the dishes. In fact, she was feeling a strong desire to wash the dishes. She began loading them onto the countertop, so that she could fill the sink with water. The ones near the bottom were disgusting, the plates covered with water-softened crusts of food, the glasses scummed with a white bacterial froth, but this only increased her desire to become the conqueror of so much filth. Maybe she was stalling, because she didn’t want to face her dad after not having come home all night.
As she squeezed liquid soap into the stream of hot water, an objection crossed her mind: What would Mike think? It was a nice gesture, to do somebody else’s dishes, but it could also be construed as an admonishment: “If nobody else will clean up this shithole, I’ll do it myself!” In fact, some version of that interpretation could hardly be avoided. She turned off the water. Even if she and Mike had been dating for months, unprovoked dishwashing might be considered strange. Meddlesome. Overbearing. Unless she’d dirtied the dishes herself: that would be different. Then the dishes should be done, and the failure to do them might pose its own problems.
But the dishes weren’t hers, and she and Mike weren’t dating. They hadn’t even kissed. Therefore the doing of dishes could only seem weird, neurotic, invasive. Mike’s roommate—Mr. Arsch, from the mailbox—would take one look at the order she’d imposed and say something penetrating, something along the lines of “Dude, is that chick psycho or what?” And Mike would shrug and never call her again.
She looked down into the white bubbles. Steam rose off the water, brushed her cheeks and chin. Her hand rested on the four-pronged hot-water knob, which felt warm to the touch. She really, really wanted to wash the dishes. Once, late at night, not long after she’d moved to San Francisco, she’d really, really wanted to cut up a slightly mushy avocado and rub the pit in her palms. It was an ecstasy-type desire, though she hadn’t taken ecstasy. She made David drive her to three supermarkets to find the right avocado. She told him she was craving guacamole—a more acceptable urge, if just barely. Luckily he’d fallen asleep while she was rolling the slimy pit in her palms, pretending to make guacamole. In the morning, having buried the chips and the yellow-green mush in the kitchen trash, she claimed to have eaten it all. She still had no idea how to make guacamole.
That episode stood out in Pella’s mind as a benchmark of small but irresistible desire, but if anything she wanted to wash these dishes even more. She could see in advance the scrubbed white color of the fresh-bleached sink, the rows of overturned pots lying on the counter to dry. Maybe Mr. Arsch wouldn’t think she was psycho. Maybe he’d be thrilled. Who wouldn’t want a maid who worked for free? Maybe Mr. Arsch was sad, just as she’d been sad, and that was why the kitchen was such a mess. Maybe a scrubbed-out sink would be the boost he needed. Slovenliness correlated highly with despair—the inability to exert influence over one’s environment, et cetera. Speaking of despair, she hadn’t yet taken her sky-blue pill. She’d probably have a cracking headache in about five minutes. Better enjoy this respite while it lasted.
While these thoughts were spinning through her sleep-buoyed brain, she had scrubbed several plates and laid them on the counter in a fanned-out formation to dry. A fistful of flatware was calling her name. Whatever retribution awaited, she’d left herself little choice but to finish the dishes. She squinched her rag between the fork tines and rubbed.
By the time she finished she’d worked up a sweat, and she needed
her sky-blue pill far more than a cup of coffee. On her way out she lingered in the doorway for a long minute, admiring the empty sink.
21
As the Harpooners filed off the bus, each of them slapped the black rubber seal above the door for luck. Driving four hours south made a difference in the weather; birds were chirping, and a loamy smell of spring hung thick in the air. Loondorf began to sneeze. The clouds were breaking and shrinking, leaving marbled patches of stonewashed blue between them. The Opentoe players, clad in their threadbare brown-and-green uniforms, were liming the foul lines and raking the basepaths like old homesteaders.
“Same old Opentoe,” Rick O’Shea noted, scratching his incipient beer belly as he blinked the sleep from his eyes. “Same ugly-ass jerseys.”
Starblind nodded. “Same jerks.” Opentoe College had some sort of evangelical mission that involved perpetual kindness and hopelessly outdated uniforms. The Harpooners hated them for it. It was unspeakably infuriating that the one school in the UMSCAC that spent less money on its baseball program than Westish always managed to kick their ass. The Opentoe players never talked even the mildest forms of smack. If you worked a walk, the first baseman would say, “Good eye.” If you ripped a three-run triple, the third baseman would say, “Nice rip.” They smiled when they were behind, and when they were ahead they looked pensive and slightly sad. Their team name was the Holy Poets.
Usually Owen began warm-ups by leading the team in a series of yoga stretches. Today Henry took his place, omitting Owen’s stream of commentary (“Pretend that your shoulders have dissolved, good, no, let them dissolve entirely…”) and instead just proceeding from one stretch to the next. The Harpooners followed along by rote as they scanned the bleachers. There weren’t any girls, Opentoe was weak on girls, but more and more scouts kept arriving, each new scout announcing himself as such by either his laptop or his cigar, depending on his generation, and by shaking hands with the rest of the scouts.