We all sat and watched a videotape of me sticking the game under my jacket. Apparently most theft occurred at the video games; it was the only part of the store televised. There was no footage at all of Jeremy, at least none that we saw. I was more scared of Jeremy than Officer Harper, so I kept my mouth shut. Officer Harper told my mom and Michael to call him Dusty.
“He’s never done anything like this before, Dusty,” my mom said. “He’s a great kid.”
Dusty had a stern look for me, a concerned one for my mother. “You and your husband,” he began.
“I’m not her husband,” Michael said.
“Where’s his father?”
Apparently we weren’t telling the police about the alien abduction. “He’s not part of the picture,” was all my mother would say about that. “Is there any other man taking an interest in him?” Dusty asked. He was looking at Michael.
“Christ.” Michael blocked the look with his hands, waved them about. “This is our first date. This is me, meeting the kid for the first time. How do you do, Nathan.”
“Don’t kids with fathers ever shoplift?” my mother asked. She was looking so nice, but her voice had a tight-wound sound to it.
“I’m only asking because of the Playboy.” Dusty had confiscated the magazine and inventoried it with the other officers. Now he put it, folded up discreetly, on the metal desk between us.
This was the first my mother had heard about the Playboy. I could see her taking it in and, unhappy as she already was, I could see it made an impact. “I do have a suggestion,” Dusty said.
It was a terrible suggestion. Dusty coached a Little League team called the Tigers. He thought Mr. Bertilucci might not press charges if Dusty could tell him he’d be keeping a personal eye on me. “I don’t like baseball,” I said. I was very clear about this. I would rather have gone to jail.
“A whole team of ready-made friends,” Dusty said encouragingly. You could see he was an athlete himself. He had big shoulders and a sunburned nose that he rubbed a lot. There were bowling trophies on the windowsill and a memo pad with golf jokes on the desk.
“And I suck at it.”
“Maybe we can change that.”
“Really suck.”
My mother was looking at me, her eyes narrow, and her earrings swinging. “I think it’s a wonderful idea.” The words came out without her hardly opening her mouth. “We’re so grateful to you, Dusty, for suggesting it.”
So I was paroled to the Tigers. I was released into my mother’s custody, and she wouldn’t let me bike home by myself, and she was feeling bad about Michael’s spoiled evening. So she hissed me into Michael’s car, apologizing the whole time to him. She suggested that we could maybe all go to the miniature golf course together. Michael agreed, but it wasn’t his idea, and he and my mom were still dressed for a first impression.
I couldn’t have been more miserable. I was hoping hard that Michael would turn out to be a jerk so that I would only have ruined the date, and not the rest of my mother’s life. I hated him the minute I saw him, but you can’t go by that. I could pretty much be counted on to hate every guy my mom went out with. This was easy since they were all jerks.
My mom was so mad at me that she couldn’t miss. By the time we got to the fourth hole she was already three strokes under par. The fourth hole was the castle.
“I still don’t get what not having a father has to do with shoplifting.” There was a perfect little thwock sound when she hit the ball. She was clicking along on her two-inch heels and she owned this golf course.
Michael had been holding his tongue, but this was about the eighth time she’d said this. “It’s not my business,” he offered.
“But …”
Michael banked the ball off the side of the castle door and it rolled all the way back to his feet. “I just don’t think his father would be letting him off so easy.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means, here he is. Two hours ago the police picked him up for shoplifting. Is he being punished? No. You take him out for a game of miniature golf.”
“Oh, he’s not having a good time,” my mom said. She turned to me. “Are you?”
“No, ma’am,” I assured her.
“He stole something. If that’d been me, my father would have made real sure it never happened again,” Michael said. “With his belt he would have made sure.” Another ball missed the opening by inches.
“I have raised this kid all by myself for eleven years,” my mother said. She was below us now, on the second half of the hole, sinking her putt. “I’ve done a great job. This is a great kid.”
I saw the glimmer of a chance. “Don’t make me play baseball, Mom.” I put my heart into my voice.
“You. Don’t. Even. Speak to me,” she answered.
By the time we got to the sixteenth hole, the anthill, we were really not getting along. “Playboy!” My mother was so far ahead there was no way for her to lose now. She’d forgotten about the dressed-up mousse in her hair, hair snot, she calls this. Sometime around hole seven she’d run her hand through it. Now it was sticking up in odd tufts. Of course, neither Michael nor I could tell her this even if we’d wanted to. She sank another ball. “I picketed the campus bookstore for carrying Playboy. Did you remember that, Nathan?”
I was hitting my balls too softly. I couldn’t get them over the lip of the hole. Michael was hitting his balls too hard. They bounced into the hole and out again. He’d put his hair behind his ears, but it wouldn’t stay there.
“There, you see …” Michael said.
“What?”
“Not that it’s my business.”
“Go ahead.” My mom’s voice was a wonder of nasty politeness. “Don’t hold back.”
“I just think a desire to look at Playboy magazine is pretty natural at his age. I think his father would understand that.”
“I think Playboy promotes a degraded view of women. I think it’s about power, not about sex. And I think Nathan knows how I feel.”
Michael lined up his ball. He looked at the anthill, back down at his ball, looked at the anthill again. He took a little practice swing. “At a certain age, boys start to see breasts everywhere they look.” He hit the ball too hard. “It’s no big deal.”
“I think that’s six strokes,” my mother said. “That would be your limit.” She was snarling at him, her hair poking out of her head like pinfeathers.
His ears turned red. He snarled back. “It’s not a real game.”
“I think I’ve had six strokes, too,” I said.
My mother retrieved her ball from the hole. “Don’t you even speak to me.”
Michael dropped us at home and we never saw him again. In my mind he lives forever, talking about breasts and taking that sad practice swing in his Star Trek tie. Because it was already midseason it took most of the next week to get me added to the Tigers’ roster. Dusty let my mom know he was probably the only coach in town who could’ve accomplished it. His own son was the Tigers’ top pitcher, a pleasant, pug-nosed kid named Ryan. Jeremy Campbell played third base.
My first game came on a Thursday night. So far I’d done nothing but strike out in practice and let ground balls go through my legs. While I was getting into my uniform my mom tossed a bag onto my bed. “What’s this?” I asked. I opened it up. I was looking at something like a small white surgical mask, only rigid and with holes in it.
“Little something your coach said you might need,” my mother told me.
“What is it?”
“An athletic cup.”
“A what?”
“You wear it for protection.”
I was starting to get it. What I was getting was horrifying. “I’m going to be hit in the balls? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“Of course not.”
“Then why am I wearing this?”
“So you don’t have to worry even for a minute about it.” Which of course I wasn’t until this cup appeared. “I can show
you how to wear it,” my mom said. “On my hand.”
“No!” I slammed the door. I couldn’t get it comfortable, and I didn’t know if this was because I wasn’t wearing it right, or because it was just uncomfortable. In a million years I wouldn’t ask my mother. I took it off and stowed it under the mattress.
Victor drove us to the game since we still didn’t have a car. “It looks to me like your distributor got a bit wet,” the mechanic had told my mom. “We could just dry it out, if that was all it was. But it looks to me like somebody just kept trying to start it and trying to start it until the starter burned out. Now your starter is shot and you’re going to need a new battery too since it looks to me as if somebody tried to charge up the battery and thought they could just attach those jumper cables any which way. I wish you’d called us first thing when we could just have dried it out.” He’d made my mom so mad she told him not to touch the car, but he’d let her leave it anyway, since we all knew she’d have to back down eventually.
So Victor drove us, and I tried to appeal to him. No way, I thought, could he have played baseball any better than I did. But he betrayed me, he was a scrappy little player, or so he chose to pretend. I’ve never yet met a grown man who’ll admit he couldn’t play ball. And then he added a second betrayal. “You watch too much television, Nathan.” He had his arm stretched out comfortably across the seat back, driving with one hand. Nothing on his conscience at all. “This’ll be good for you.”
Tamara met us, since they all insisted on being in the stands for my debut. Because I was on the bench, I was practically sitting with them. I could hear them having a good time behind me, heading for the snack bar every couple of minutes, and I could have been having a good time too, except that I knew I had to go on the field eventually. Everyone plays, those were the stupid rules.
Ryan took the mound. A guy from the college was umping, a big, good-looking, long-armed cowboy of a guy named Chad. I heard my mom telling Tamara and Victor she thought he was cute and I was suddenly afraid she was going to like Little League way too much. Ryan warmed up and then the first batter stepped into the box. Ryan threw. “Strike!” Chad said.
“Good call, blue,” my mother told him from the stands.
The other coach, a man with a red face, gray hair, and his ears sticking out on the outside of his baseball cap, called for a time-out. He spoke with Chad. “They’re using an ineligible pitcher,” he said. “We’re filing a protest.”
“You can talk to me,” Dusty told him. “I’m right here. What the hell do you mean?”
“You pitched him Monday. All game. You can’t use him again for four days.”
Dusty counted on his fingers. “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.”
“You can’t count Monday. You pitched him Monday.”
“Did he pitch Monday?” Chad asked.
“Yes,” Dusty said.
“Oh, you bet he did.” The other coached pushed his hat back from his puffy, red face. “Thought I wouldn’t notice?”
“I thought it was four days.”
“Game goes to the Senators,” Chad said.
“Wait. I’ll pitch someone else,” Dusty offered. “It was an honest mistake. Come on, he’s only thrown a single pitch. The kids are all here to play. We’ll start over.”
“Not a chance.” The other coach told the Senators to line up. “Shake their hands,” he told them. “Give the Tigers a cheer. Let’s show a little sportsmanship.”
Back in the stands I could hear Victor saying how much better Little League would be if the kids made up the rules and didn’t tell them to the parents. Whenever the parents started to figure them out, Victor suggested, the kids could change them.
But I thought this had worked out perfectly. Chad was already picking up the bases. My mom called to him that he umped one hell of a game. “Don’t give me such a hard time, lady,” he said, but he was all smiling when he said it; he came over to talk to her. Dusty took the team out for ice cream. There was a white owl in the air and a cloud of moths around the streetlights. A breeze came in from the almond orchards. I was one happy ballplayer.
Of course they wouldn’t all be like that. Sooner or later I could see I was going to be out in right field with the ball headed for my uncupped crotch, the game on the line, and Jeremy Campbell watching me from third.
On Friday my mother called and told the garage to go ahead and fix the car. This was a defeat and she took it as such. I didn’t have another game until Monday, but I did have practice on Friday so I was not as happy as I could have been either. The practice field was on the way home from the garage so Mom drove by later after she’d picked up the car. The weather was hot and the team was just assembling. She stopped for a moment to watch and then the car wouldn’t start. “Jesus Christ!” she said. She banged the horn once in frustration; it gave a startled caw.
Jeremy came biking in beside her. He started to pedal past, then swung around. “Pop the hood,” he told her.
“I picked this car up from the garage about two minutes ago. I won’t even tell you what I just paid that crook.”
Jeremy lifted the hood. “Your ground strap came off.” He did something I couldn’t see; when my mom turned the key, it started right up.
“What a wonderful boy,” she said to me. To him, “You’re a wonderful boy.”
“Forget it.” Jeremy was all gracious modesty.
She took off then, engine churning like butter, and we’d just barely started passing the ball around when Dusty got called away on a 911. The assistant coach hadn’t arrived yet, so Dusty told us all to go straight on home again. After Dusty left, Jeremy chased me into Putah Creek Park, where my bicycle skidded out from under me when I tried to make a fast, evasive turn. He threw my bike down into the creek gully. He left me lying on the ground, hating myself for being afraid to even stand up, thinking of ways I could kill him. I could run him through with a magic sword. I could hang him from a meathook. I could smother him with his own athletic cup. If I bashed his skull with a baseball bat, no one would ever suspect it was me.
The bank of the creek was steep. I slid all the way down it. Then I slipped in the mud trying to get myself and the bicycle out again. The creek was already covered with summer slime and I got slick, green, fish-smelling streaks of it on my pants. My shoes were ruined. The front wheel of the bike was bent and I had to carry it home, rolling it on the back tire.
This was a long, hard, hot walk. I loved my bicycle, but there were many, many moments when I considered just walking off and leaving it. I’d hit my knees and my hands on the pavement when I fell, and my injuries stung and throbbed while I was walking. I told my mother I’d fallen off the bike, which was certainly true, and she bought it, even though I’d never fallen off my bike before, and certainly not into the creek.
Tamara was singing at Cafe Roma that evening and my mother had mentioned it to Chad, so she was thinking he might show. It had her distracted and she didn’t make the fuss over my injuries that I expected. She was busy borrowing clothes from Tamara and moussing up her hair. This was a good thing, I thought, fewer questions to deal with and it probably meant I was growing up. But the lack of attention made me even more miserable than I already was. It would have all been worthwhile if my injuries had kept me out of Monday’s game, but they didn’t.
When everyone had left the house I took a hammer to the athletic cup. I meant to prove the cup wasn’t up to much, but I found out otherwise. The blows bounced off it without leaving a mark. To make sure the hammer wasn’t defective I tested it on the floor in my room. I left a ding like a crescent in the linoleum inside my closet. I smashed up a bunch of old crayons and put a hole in the bedroom wall behind the bed. I took an apple I hadn’t eaten at lunch outside and crushed it like an egg. I was more and more impressed with the cup. I just needed a whole suit of the stuff.
This was all about the same time Boston third baseman Wade Boggs went on national TV and told the world he was addicted to sex.
> We had a game Monday against the Royals and, like a nightmare, suddenly, there we were, down by one run, two outs, sixth and final inning, with Bjorn Benson on first base and me at bat. So far I’d only connected with the ball once and that was a feeble foul. Jeremy came out to the box to give me a little pep talk. “This used to be a good team before you joined,” he said. “But you suck. If you cost us this game you’ll pay in ways you can’t even imagine, faggot.” He smelled of cigarettes, though no one in my town smoked; it was like a town ordinance. Jeremy spit into the dust beside my cleats. I turned to look at the stands and I saw my mother watching us.
Dusty came and took the bat out of my hand. He went to the umpire, who wasn’t Chad. “Ryan batting for Nathan,” he said. He sent me back to the bench. It took Ryan seven pitches to strike out, which is surely four more pitches than it would have taken me.
Our car wasn’t working again and Victor had dropped us off, but he couldn’t stay for the whole game, so my mom asked Dusty’s wife, Linda, a pretty woman who wore lipstick even to the ballpark, for a ride home.
When we got in the car we were all quiet for a while. Dusty finally spoke. “You played a good game, Nathan. You too, Ryan.”
Linda agreed. “It was a good game. Nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Usually you can hit off Alex,” Dusty said to Ryan. “I wonder what happened tonight.”
“He didn’t get to bed until late,” Linda suggested. “Were you tired, honey?”
“I don’t think Alex was pitching as fast as he usually does. I thought he was tiring. I thought you’d hit off him.”
“That was a lot of pressure, putting him in then,” Linda observed. “But usually he would have gotten a hit. Were you tired, honey?”
“One more pitch, we would have had him, right, Tigers?”
Ryan looked out the window and didn’t say much. There was a song on the radio, “Believe It or Not,” and his lips were moving as if he was singing along but I couldn’t hear him.