“He might not want to,” Starblind said. “But he should. For the team.”
“Hell, he can play first base if he wants,” Rick said. “I’ll sit. Anything so he doesn’t have to make that throw from short to first. It’s killing him, Schwartzy. You know that. Anyone can see it.”
“He’s just pressing. He’ll be fine.”
“If he was pressing before,” Starblind said, “what do you think’s going to happen tomorrow?”
It wasn’t like it had never occurred to Schwartz. It hadn’t escaped his notice how smooth Izzy looked at practice, how confident an athlete he was, how much he’d already learned from Henry about playing shortstop. Izzy couldn’t hit like Henry, not even close, but on defense it would actually be—Schwartz felt like a traitor to think it—an improvement. And maybe Starblind was right; maybe it would be not just foolish but cruel, sadistic, to send Henry out there tomorrow when the pressure would be cranked up ten times higher than ever before. Maybe the kid would crack wide open. Maybe it was Schwartz’s job to head that off before it happened.
“Why are you coming to me with this?” he said. “Coach Cox decides who plays and who doesn’t.”
“You know Coach Cox,” Rick said. “Loyal to a fault.”
Starblind nodded. “Remember Two Thirty? Guy was a head case. But Coach Cox wouldn’t bench him. He was convinced Toovs would suddenly start crushing in games the way he did in practice. How many wins did that cost us over two years?”
“Hardly the same situation,” Schwartz said.
“Skrimmer’s lost his confidence. Toovs never had any to begin with.” Starblind shrugged dismissively, thrust his hands into the pockets of his shiny track jacket. “They’re both fucked.”
“So you want me to decide that Henry can’t play tomorrow.”
“You’re the captain,” Starblind said, a hint of snideness in his voice. Schwartz squeezed his right hand into a fist, then uncurled his fingers slowly, like a man warding off a heart attack. Thinking of cracking a few of Starblind’s blinding arctic teeth.
“Just one day off might do the Skrimmer good,” Rick said. “He could relax, take it easy, come back stronger on Sunday. He might even feel relieved.”
Starblind eyed Schwartz levelly. “Just don’t forget what you’re supposed to put first, Schwartzy. It’s not Henry, and it’s not Henry’s pro career.”
It’s this team.
It wasn’t a given that sitting Henry would be the best thing for this team—how far could they possibly go without their best player?—but Starblind’s words gave Schwartz pause. It was true that he’d gotten locked on Henry, Henry’s feelings, Henry redeeming himself to the scouts. Not necessarily to the detriment of the team thus far—Henry’s success and the Harpooners’ had always gone hand in hand—but it was possible, it could happen. It was possible that the younger Schwartz, the hard-ass sophomore who’d galled Lev Tennant into punching him to get Henry into the lineup, would now decide to do what it took to get Henry back out of it. Sometimes you needed a rupture; sometimes you had to clean house. The younger Schwartz had known that. It was easy to know that when you weren’t in charge.
“You guys have a shitload of theories.” Schwartz meant to say this loudly, bitterly, but he could feel the emotion leaking from his voice like air from an old balloon. He sighed, rubbed a hand over his beard—but his beard wasn’t there. His hand found freshly shaved skin that was starting to burn like hell. “I can’t do it,” he said. “We live by the Skrimmer, we die by the Skrimmer.”
44
He wanted to talk to Owen, but Owen wasn’t home. Sometimes it seemed he could talk freely at only two times in his life: out on the diamond and here, in the dark, across the room from Owen. Lying here, ear on pillow, it was easy to figure out how you felt and say it out loud. Your words wouldn’t come back to haunt you but would land softly on Owen’s ears and stay. That was the good thing about having a roommate, a roommate like Owen, but Owen wasn’t home.
He picked up the phone and dialed Sophie’s cell.
“Henry,” his sister whispered. “Hang on.” For twenty seconds the phone banged around. “Sorry,” she said. “I went out in the hall.”
“Where are you guys?”
“Dad’s back hurts, so Mom was driving, and Mom got tired. We stopped at a motel like fifty miles away. It’s kind of gross but I have my own bed. What are you doing up?”
“Couldn’t sleep.”
“Henry, big brother, don’t be nervous. You’ll be great.”
“I know.” It comforted him to talk to Sophie—she had an interest in his happiness and none in baseball—but he always feared she’d say too much to their parents, whom he’d told almost nothing about his troubles. Luckily he’d also told them almost nothing about the scouts and the agents and the huge sums of money that loomed, that used to loom, in June. As far as they knew he was just Henry, their college boy, who’d tied Aparicio’s record and was having a pretty good season.
“Aparicio Rodriguez,” Sophie said. This was the only baseball player whose name she knew. “Are you excited?”
“Sure.”
“Don’t be nervous,” she advised. “Just relax and enjoy it. Soak it in. You’ll be great.”
“I know,” Henry said. “I will.”
“And then we’re going out tomorrow night, right? You promised that when I was a senior we could.”
“Soph, this is a really busy weekend. We have two more games on Sunday.”
“Henry. You promised. You can’t make me spend the whole weekend with Mom and Dad again.”
“In a few months you’ll be in college. You can go out all you want.”
“Yeah, at SDSU. But Westish is so cool. I bought a dress. Don’t tell Mom.”
Henry couldn’t help but smile. “Okay, okay. We’ll go out.”
When he hung up the phone he still wasn’t sleepy. If Owen offered him some kind of pill tonight he’d take it for sure, but Owen wasn’t home. Henry slipped out of bed and into his warm-up pants and Harpooner windbreaker, slapped his Cards cap on his head, and walked down to Westish Field.
He sat down on the damp sandy dirt between second and third, the spot where he’d spent so many hundreds of hours, and pulled The Art from his windbreaker pocket. The worn spine flopped open to a favorite page.
99. To reach a ball he has never reached before, to extend himself to the very limits of his range, and then a step farther: this is the shortstop’s dream.
He flipped again.
121. The shortstop has worked so hard for so long that he no longer thinks. Nor does he act. By this I mean that he does not generate action. He only reacts, the way a mirror reacts when you wave your hand before it.
He wasn’t in a box he could think his way out of. Nor was he in a box he could relax his way out of, no matter how many times Coach Cox or Schwartzy or Owen or Rick or Starblind or Izzy or Sophie told him to relax, stop thinking, be himself, be the ball, don’t try too hard. You could only try so hard not to try too hard before you were right back around to trying too hard. And trying hard, as everyone told him, was wrong, all wrong.
During grade-school winters back in Lankton, his sister and Scott Hinterberg would run ahead, yanking open the mailboxes that lined the streets, and Henry would trail behind to peg snowballs into the mailboxes’ waiting mouths, never missing, never, unless there was mail inside waiting to be sent, in which case he would knock down the little red flag with his snowball, then politely run over and lift it again. How did he make those throws? It seemed amazing now. A kid in a puffy coat that hindered his movement, his fingers numb and raw from packing snow, perfect every time.
The shortstop has worked so hard for so long that he no longer thinks—that was just the way to phrase it. You couldn’t choose to think or not think. You could only choose to work or not work. And hadn’t he chosen to work? And wasn’t that what would save him now? When he walked onto this field tomorrow he would carry a whole reservoir of work with him, the last thr
ee years of work with Schwartzy, the whole lifetime of work before that, of focusing always and only on baseball and how to become better. It was not flimsy, that lifetime of work. He could rely on it.
If he relied on it, he’d be fine. April had been awful, but tomorrow was the real test, like a class where only the final counted. Dwight had told him that though his draft stock had dropped, it hadn’t dropped nearly as far as Henry assumed. “Teams care about potential,” Dwight said, “even more than performance. You’re young, you’re fast, you’re hitting the heck out of the ball. There’ll be twenty teams there on Saturday, I promise. Put on a show for ’em.” And as for the Harpooners, they were only one game behind Coshwale—they would win their first-ever conference title, would go to regionals, if they won three out of four this weekend. Redemption was there for the taking. It didn’t matter that Aparicio would be in the stands, that his parents and Sophie would be there too, that it was Henry Skrimshander Day. He just needed to play baseball, to enjoy it as he always had, to help his teammates beat Coshwale. Everything else would fall into place.
React, the way a mirror reacts.
He climbed to his feet, dusted the damp sandy dirt from the butt of his pants. He turned to the book’s penultimate paragraph. Clouds engulfed the low-hanging moon, so that he could barely see the words at all, but it didn’t matter.
212. It always saddens me to leave the field. Even fielding the final out to win the World Series, deep in the truest part of me, felt like death.
Ah, Aparicio!
45
Affenlight parked the Audi on a side street a few blocks from campus. Owen reached past the gearshift and tugged at the corner of Affenlight’s pocket with his thumb; they couldn’t kiss in front of the Westishers out weeding and mowing their lawns. “I’ve got to go,” Owen said. “I’m late.”
“I’ll be at the game,” Affenlight said, eager to cement some tiny portion of their future.
Owen smiled. “Me too.” He shut the passenger door softly and strolled off toward the north edge of campus, where the athletic fields lay. As he turned onto Groome Street, just before passing from view, he took a few steps in a sashaying, rolling-hipped way—a caricature of a gay man’s walk. Affenlight glanced around, nervous that someone else might have noticed, but even if anyone had noticed they couldn’t possibly have cared. The hip roll was a joke meant for him alone—Owen knew he’d be watching. It wasn’t quite a joke for his amusement, and it wasn’t quite a joke at his expense. More like a joke Owen wanted him to live up to. Don’t take this too seriously, Guert. Don’t be dour about it. Straight gay black white young old—it’s not going to kill you or let you live.
The silence that filled the Audi seemed profound. Affenlight rolled down the windows so he could hear the roar of lawn mowers and patted down his jacket in search of a smoke.
They’d driven far out into the country, headed nowhere except somewhere where nobody knew them, and wound up at a fish fry in a greenly lit basement with no nonsmoking section. The place served pale beer in small glasses, nine or ten ounces each, and every time Affenlight looked down his glass was empty, and every time he looked up the coughing blue-haired waitress had filled it again. They ordered two fish fries—So as to seem polite, Affenlight said, and Owen raised his eyebrows and said, You mean not gay, and Affenlight glared at him reprovingly, flicking his eyes toward the nearby tables, and Owen said, Down, tiger. Owen ate both their salads of iceberg lettuce, pale pink tomato wedges, and sliced cucumbers. Affenlight ate his beer-battered cod and Owen’s beer-battered cod, so as to seem polite and not gay, and then the waitress brought more because it was all-you-can-eat, and Affenlight ate that too, cholesterol be damned. By the time he’d remembered that he was supposed to be at dinner with Pella and David he was already half-drunk. God, what a terrible father. She’d sounded surprisingly un-angry on the phone. Affenlight believed her at the time, but he needed to believe her; he was forty minutes away, a cigarette lit, several lagers in his bloodstream, his shoe tips pressed against Owen’s beneath the table. He should have hustled back for dessert no matter what she said. The motel he and Owen found, forty miles west of Westish, was called Troupe’s Inn.
Now he decided to leave the Audi where it was and take his stroll along the lake, which he’d missed this morning. The pressure in his temples was that of a genuine hangover. How many beers had he drunk? How nervous had he been to spend the night with Owen, share a bed, make love? Pretty nervous, apparently. It had been forty-two years since he’d lost his virginity. He’d never thought then that he would lose it again. He felt a touch of sadness now that it had happened, now that he knew what it was like. Not because it wasn’t enjoyable, or wouldn’t be repeated, but because one more of life’s mysteries had been revealed.
46
The Harpooners were lounging in the outfield under a mellow late-morning sun, pitching Wiffle balls to one another—a favorite Coach Cox drill—when the Coshwale bus arrived. “Here come the douchetards,” grumbled Craig Suitcase, the Harpooners’ third-string catcher, swinging so hard in his hatred of Coshwale that he missed the Wiffle ball entirely. “What a bunch of douchetards.”
For once no one disagreed with Suitcase. They looked like douchetards in their spotless beet-red satin Coshwale jackets, worn despite the pleasant weather, with their spotless beet-red Coshwale bags slung over their shoulders, and their spotless beet-red cross-trainers—which they would swap in a moment for their spotless beet-red spikes—on their feet. The Harpooners, apart from the freshpersons, knew from experience that there were spotless beet-red Coshwale batting-practice shirts beneath the jackets, and that these would be worn throughout Coshwale’s omnicompetent warm-up routine and removed in unison just before game time, revealing—what else?—spotless beet-red Coshwale jerseys, with the players’ surnames stitched between the shoulder blades. Henry didn’t know how they did it; whether they had some kind of professional laundry service or just got brand-new equipment before every game. Three games into any given season his own beloved pinstripes were stained and dingy, his spikes, which he paid for himself, scuffed and fraying before they were even broken in. Coshwale had won UMSCACs eight of the last ten years.
Soon Coshwale’s army of fans began to arrive, dressed in their beet-red attire. They set up their spotless beet-red seat cushions and sun umbrellas in the visiting bleachers, then headed back to the parking lot to set up their grills. “Douchetards upon douchetards,” muttered Suitcase.
Rick appeared at Henry’s side. “Where the Buddha?” he asked. “Thought he was dressing today.”
“Me too.” Owen hadn’t come home last night, and he’d missed breakfast with the team. It was probably time to start worrying, at least a little, but Henry didn’t have room for any more worry. “He’ll be here.”
Coshwale took the field first for infield-outfield drills. The Harpooners spread out near the home dugout, stretching, chatting, pretending not to be nervous, pretending not to watch. Owen once called the Muskies’ drills as crisp as Petrarch’s sonnets; Rick compared them to the North Korean army. Three burly beet-red-clad coaches slugged balls at once, puffing out their beet-red cheeks with the effort. Thirty-one players—a dozen more than the Harpooners had—fielded balls and fired perfect throws to one another in complicated, constantly shifting patterns. Cut two, cut three, cut four, third to first, first to third, 5-4-3, 6-4-3, 4-6-3, 1-6-3, 3-6-1, charge bunt, charge bunt, charge bunt. Always three balls aloft at once, never a missed cutoff, never an errant throw. When their fifteen minutes were up they jogged cockily off the field. You got the sense they might come back for an encore. The Coshwale fans were returning from the parking lot to their cushioned seats with plates of hors d’oeuvres. The home-side bleachers were filling too, faster and earlier than Henry had ever seen.
Just as the Harpooners took the field, Owen came ambling down the first-base line in full navy-on-ecru pinstripes, cleats on his feet. He slung his bag into the dugout, greeted Coach Cox with a jovial bow, and tro
tted out to right field to swap turns with Sooty Kim. Henry smiled. To see Owen wearing his 0 jersey for the first time since his injury was like waking from a bad dream. Everything that had happened between then and now could be forgotten. Today was big, big was good. The sun shone overhead. Fans in the stands. A chance to do some winning.
He slapped gloves with Izzy. Izzy took a cutoff from Loondorf in left, whipped it to Boddington at third. “Izz Izz Izz,” Henry chanted. “What izz what wuzz will be!”
“Let’s go, vendejos!” shouted Izzy. “Let’s go!”
“Cut four, cut four!”
“We ain’t letting these vatos walk into our house and take our shit! No sir!”
“Here, now!” yelled Quentin Quisp from left, as he fielded a Schwartz-struck fly ball and fired it toward home plate. “Right here right now!” These were by far the loudest, most emphatic words anyone had heard from Quisp all year.
“Somebody woke up Q!” Henry yelled. “Somebody woke up the Q!”
“Q Q Q!”
“Somebody woke up the Q!”
“Somebody woke up Henry!”
“Somebody brought back the Buddha!”
“Buddha Buddha Buddha!”
“O O O!”
“Our house!”
“Nuestra casa!”
“O O O!”
It felt good to yell, to repeat, to shout nonsense at the bright spring air. Everyone was nervous and it came out as a clean high giddiness. Henry’s arm felt light like a bird, light and lively, about to take flight from his body. He fired pellets to Arsch, pellets to Rick, pellets to Ajay. Everyone fired pellets to everyone—Henry looked around for what felt like the first time and saw how good this team had become, how good a chance they had to beat Coshwale today. “Izzy,” he yelled, though Izzy was standing beside him, “how come the good guys are vendejos and the bad guys are vatos?”