Authors: Peter Abrahams
DUB’S AUNT HILDY
had two kids, both grown and living on their own. Aunt Hildy, who worked as a paralegal at Weiner and Moor, the biggest law firm in Silver City, looked a lot like her sister, Mrs. Mannion, except older, thinner, and not as happy. She’d been married and divorced a couple times, now lived by herself in a white clapboard two-story, three-bedroom house just outside of town, up on a hill with a view of the Sweetwater River and mountains in the distance. Wyatt and Dub slept in the rooms vacated by Dub’s cousins, Dub in the big one over the garage, Wyatt in the small one on the ground floor.
Aunt Hildy—that was what she told Wyatt to call her—gave him his own key. It was a much nicer house than home, but Wyatt didn’t care too much about that. What he really liked was a kind of absence, namely the absence of tension, when he unlocked the door. Was Rusty inside? What kind of mood was he in? How was he treating his mom? None of that mattered anymore. Except the treating mom part: that was still on Wyatt’s mind, but he told himself that his departure
must have raised Rusty’s baseline mood.
The departure: Wyatt, his mom, and Cammy, all standing around the Mustang in the driveway. Rusty stayed inside; Dub was in his truck on the street, engine running, the plan being to ride down in tandem. A cold wind blew. His mom’s face was very pale, Cammy’s, too. Cammy had a sleep seed at the corner of one eye. Wyatt fought off an urge to wipe it away.
“Take this,” his mom said, holding out an envelope.
“What is it?”
“Just a little money.”
“I’m set for money.” Wyatt had cleaned out his bank account, had $356 in his pocket.
“I want you to have it.”
Send it when Rusty gets a goddamn job.
That was Wyatt’s thought; he kept it to himself, instead just saying, “Don’t need it, Mom.”
The envelope remained in the space between them, wavering in her hand, and then she slowly withdrew it into the folds of her coat. His mom stood there, the wind ruffling her hair, revealing more gray than he’d ever noticed, plus it seemed thinner, too. She looked a bit confused.
Wyatt stepped forward and hugged her. “Bye, Mom.”
She squeezed him close, then took his face in her hands—hurting his nose by mistake, a pain he ignored—and kissed him three times, almost angrily, if that made sense.
“Bye, Mom,” he said again, letting go of her and backing away; her arms were reluctant to disengage, almost clinging to him. And down below, Cammy
was
clinging, clutching his
legs with her little hands.
“Don’t go,” she said.
He patted her head. “See you soon.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. Soon.”
She didn’t let go. Linda pried her away. Cammy was crying when Wyatt drove off, behind Dub in the truck. Wyatt checked in the rearview mirror and saw his mom was waving, her other arm around Cammy.
It took about twenty minutes to get to Bridger High from Aunt Hildy’s. Wyatt and Dub took turns driving, a pretty drive that paralleled the river for a while and then cut through downtown Silver City—a much nicer downtown than East Canton’s, with some restaurants, a coffee shop, and a few stores with gold-lettered signs—and up a hill to the school, bigger and newer than East Canton High and surrounded by well-groomed playing fields that went on and on. The very first day, Wyatt noticed something at the bend in the road, just before it left the river: a sprawling, earth-colored complex on the other side.
“What’s that?”
“The pen.”
“Pen?”
“State pen. The prison.”
“Sweetwater State Penitentiary?”
“Think that’s the name.”
Wyatt would see Sweetwater State Penitentiary twice every school day. Had Sonny Racine been transferred
somewhere else? Wyatt preferred to think so.
As for Bridger High, Wyatt soon realized it was better than East Canton High, meaning the classes were harder.
“You believe all this homework?” Dub said one evening, about three weeks after their move, the two of them at opposite sides of the kitchen table. “What’s
obsequious
mean?”
“Like a sequoia tree, maybe?” said Wyatt.
“Big, you mean?”
“Gigantic.”
Dub stuck the end of his pen in his mouth, gazed at the page. “Yeah, that fits.” They worked in silence for a while and then Dub said, “First practice is tomorrow.”
“I know,” Wyatt said.
The next day, first baseball practice, Wyatt and Dub drove to school in their separate rides, since Dub would be staying late. But Wyatt didn’t go right home. He came close, walking out to the upper parking lot, reserved for students, with his books under his arm. But as he neared the Mustang, his footsteps slowed, as though some magnetic effect was holding him back, and after a moment or two he came to a stop and just stood there. The upper parking lot was at the highest point of the campus, looking down over most of Silver City, the river, and in the distance, Sweetwater State Penitentiary. Wyatt gazed at nothing for a minute or so, then turned, walked around the school, and headed for the baseball diamond.
A beautiful diamond: the base paths reddish just like in the big-time, and perfectly groomed; the outfield grass amazingly green for the time of year, the fence a smooth blue curve
about six feet high, topped by a bright yellow stripe. Two coaches, one old, one young, stood at home plate, watching the players jog around the field. They all wore gray baseball pants, blue stirrups, blue warm-up jerseys, and white caps with a blue B. The caps, especially, were very cool, and Wyatt couldn’t help wanting one.
A few parents sat down low in the stands, huddled together against the wind. Wyatt climbed to the top row and moved toward the very end, past third base, as far from the action as possible. He spotted Dub, dead last in the line of joggers—somehow he’d been getting slower every year—wearing number 19. At East Canton, he’d always worn 9. That meant someone else had 9. Wyatt ran his gaze over the players, found 9 in the middle of the pack—a short, blocky kid with thick legs, a catcher for sure. Last year’s starter? Or last year’s backup to a senior, expecting to be the starter this season?
The team took infield, the older coach standing at the plate and hitting grounders, the players fielding them—or not—and firing to first, the first baseman then throwing home, where Dub and number 9 took turns catching the ball and handing it to the coach. Once in a while the coach laid down a bunt, and whichever catcher was up had to scramble out, scoop up the ball, and snap it to first. This was maybe the moment when everyone began to see what Dub could do, because despite how slowly he ran, he was much quicker than number 9 at the scrambling part; and as for their arms, no comparison—Dub had a cannon.
The coach began hitting line drives and fly balls to the
outfield. Three kids were playing center, Wyatt’s position; it was easy to pick out the starter, a tall kid, number 1, maybe taller than Wyatt and leaner, whose long legs didn’t seem to be moving fast but who easily got to every ball and hit the cutoff man every time with throws just as good as Wyatt’s, if not better.
The sun, still looking pale and wintry, sank behind a cloud, and the wind rose a little more. Wyatt slipped his arms out of the sleeves of his sweatshirt, tucked them against his chest for warmth. The younger coach rolled a screen out to the mound, started throwing batting practice, each batter getting six pitches. Dub hit the first one he saw over the fence in center, then crushed a few more. Number 9 couldn’t get the ball out of the infield. Number 1 batted last. Wyatt was shivering by that time, but he had to see what this kid could do. Swing and a miss; chopper to third; one-hopper to short; blooper to right; foul down the right-field line; swing and a miss. Wyatt rose, clambered out of the stands, headed for the parking lot. Anyone could have a bad day, but Wyatt knew he could start for this team, could have started on opening day, next week. He missed baseball so bad.
Wyatt didn’t watch any more practices. The next day he found a batting cage beside a bowling alley in a run-down part of town. No one was around. He went into the bowling alley: about a dozen lanes, snack bar, popcorn machine with popcorn popping, and only one person in view, a girl his own age or a bit older, stacking bowling shoes on shelves behind the counter.
She turned, came closer. Yes, a bit older. She was good-
looking, with long shiny black hair and a silver eyebrow ring. “Hey,” she said, “looking to bowl?”
“How much for the batting cage?” Wyatt said.
She raised an eyebrow, not the one with the ring. She had shiny dark eyes, almost as dark as her hair. “You want to buy it?”
“No, uh, just use it,” Wyatt said. “For hitting.”
“Sorry,” she said, “just pulling your leg.” She had a throaty kind of voice, like someone who’d smoked for years, but Wyatt didn’t smell any smoke on her. “It’s five bucks per half hour,” she said, “but tell you what—since you’re the first customer of the year, you can hit for free if you help me set up.”
“Hey, thanks.”
She put on a short leather jacket with thick silver zippers and led Wyatt outside. The wind was blowing again.
“It’s not a little cold for baseball?”
“No.” Wyatt opened the trunk of the Mustang, took out his bat, a thirty-four-inch, twenty-nine-ounce thin-handled Easton Reflex he’d bought last summer from a graduating East Canton senior for forty dollars.
“Your car?” said the girl.
“Yeah.”
“Nice.”
“Thanks.”
They walked over to the cage and the girl unlocked it. The pitching machine had an arm-style delivery and a hopper with twenty or thirty balls on the side. Wyatt plugged it in, and it started humming right away.
“Liftoff,” said the girl. Her hand moved to the dial. “Slow, medium, or fast?”
“Fast,” Wyatt said.
She turned the dial, went out the door, and closed it.
Wyatt took his stance at the plate. Hands up, weight back, balanced, still, eyes on that steel arm. It swung back, took a ball that rolled in from the hopper, and came whipping forward. Wyatt saw the ball clearly—those spinning red laces clearer than anything he’d seen for days, weeks, months—and swung. He hit the ball on the screws, rocketing it to the far end with a force that shook the whole cage. And the next one just the same. And the next and the next and the next, smashing every ball in that goddamn hopper. He realized he was stronger than last year, maybe a lot stronger.
“Hey,” said the girl, watching from the safety of the other side of the chain link.
WHEN WYATT WENT BACK
after school the next day, the bowling alley was closed even though the hours-of-operation sticker on the door read 11
A.M. TO MIDNIGHT
. But the day after that it was open. Wyatt entered, bat in hand. The girl was alone again, behind the desk. She watched him approach.
“More BP?” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Have to charge you this time.”
Wyatt laid a five-dollar bill on the counter. She was wearing a black bowling shirt with
GREER
stitched in white over one breast.
“Can you see that all right?” she said. “Greer—with two
E
s?”
He quickly raised his gaze up to her face, nodded a little too vigorously.
“The problem is everybody always spells it
I-E,
” Greer said. “I’ve had to correct them maybe a million times.”
“You know a lot of people,” Wyatt said, a not completely unfunny remark that maybe surprised both of them.
Greer laughed. “What’s
your
name?”
“Wyatt.”
“Wyatt. Never met a Wyatt. Sounds like a gunslinger riding in from the old West.”
This might have been a place for another not completely unfunny remark, but none came to mind. Wyatt’s mouth seemed to open on its own, and out popped something really stupid. “How old are you?”
Greer raised the non-ring eyebrow. “How old am I?”
“None of my business,” Wyatt said, backtracking as fast as he could.
“It’s not a state secret,” Greer said. “Nineteen. And you?”
“Me?”
“Yeah, you. Now that we’re minding each other’s business.”
“Seventeen,” Wyatt said. “Just about.”
“When’s your birthday?”
“August.”
“So what you mean by ‘just about’ is that you’ll be seventeen in, like, four or five months.” Greer’s eyes, so dark and shiny, seemed to get even brighter, like she was about to laugh, but she didn’t.
“Yeah.”
“What date?”
“The second.”
“Me, too.”
“August second?”
“November,” Greer said. “You believe in astrology?”
Wyatt had never really thought about that; did now, real fast. “No,” he said.
“Me neither,” said Greer. “It’s complete bullshit. For example, suppose we were living on another planet.”
“Then, um, uh…”
“The angles would be different, of course,” Greer said.
“And?”
“So the stars wouldn’t line up the same way. The constellations would be gone. No Gemini, no Aquarius, no Taurus the bull. No constellations, no astrology.”
A silence fell in the bowling alley. “Are you in college?” Wyatt said.
“Nope,” said Greer. “I’m in the bowling alley business.”
“How’s that working out?”
What was this? A second not completely unfunny remark? Yes, because Greer laughed again. Wyatt had gone out for a month or two with a girl in the freshman class last year, and been to a few drunken parties in houses when the parents were gone, parties where there’d been some pairing off to various bedrooms, but other than that he had little experience with girls, so…so actually this was going pretty well.
Greer stopped laughing, very sudden. “It’s working out like shit,” she said.
“Oh, um.”
Greer’s eyes narrowed and she looked like she was about to say something negative, but then the phone rang. She picked it up. “Torrance Bowl,” she said. Wyatt heard a man on the other end. He sounded irritated. The brightness went out of Greer’s eyes. She took a key off the wall and handed it to Wyatt, not really looking at him. He went outside, let
himself into the cage, turned the dial up to fast, and crushed baseballs for half an hour.
Back inside, Greer was still behind the counter, punching numbers on a calculator. “Time’s up already?” she said, not taking her eyes off the little screen. “You can hit some more if you like. How much does the electricity cost? A few cents?”
“There’s wear and tear on the machine,” Wyatt said, a concept that came directly from one of Rusty’s diatribes. For the first time, it occurred to Wyatt that maybe Rusty had had a role in shaping him; a very unpleasant thought.
Greer’s fingers went still; she looked up. “Yeah,” she said. “You an accountant in training?”
“No.” But—supposing he didn’t make it to the big leagues, an idea he knew to be a fantasy yet still hadn’t abandoned completely—he’d need a job someday and he wasn’t bad with numbers.
“What are you?”
“What am I?”
“Like, in school, or what?”
“Yeah, in school.”
“Where?”
“Here.”
“Bridger?”
“Yeah.”
“Go, Bears. Rah rah.”
“You went there?”
“My whole life.”
“Huh?”
“Just feels that way,” Greer said. She gave him a long look. “Or are you the kind who fits in?” Wyatt didn’t answer; but yes, he was. Wasn’t he? “Yeah,” she said. “I believe you are. When’s the first practice?”
Wyatt took a deep breath.
“For baseball, I mean. You’re on the team, right? Got to be—I saw you hit. Hardest thing in sports, according to Ted Williams—hitting a baseball.”
“How’d you know that?”
“Know what?”
“Ted Williams, all of it.”
“My dad was a huge fan. He could spout off stats ad nauseam.”
“Sorry,” said Wyatt.
“For what? He’s not dead, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Oh, good.”
“Yeah, great.”
“So he just stopped being a fan?”
“Got involved in other things,” Greer said. “Other games, let’s say.”
“Football?”
She gave him another look. “Know what I like about you?” she said. “Besides your batting stroke?”
Wyatt felt himself reddening, hoped it didn’t show; in fact, she’d somehow sent a charge through his whole body.
“Your sense of humor,” Greer said. “That’s what I like—no one’s got a sense of humor in this town.”
“I’m actually not on the team,” Wyatt said.
“That one I don’t get.”
“It’s not a joke.”
Greer put a finger to her chin: a nice-looking chin with a tiny cleft. “Not on the team but you can hit, so let me guess. I got it—booted off for getting caught with a six-pack.”
“No.”
“A crack pipe.”
“C’mon.”
“You’re right. No doper, obviously. You don’t have that look in your eye.”
“What look?”
“Absent,” Greer said. “So that brings us down to something weird, like you were caught with the coach’s wife.”
“It’s nothing like that,” Wyatt said. “I just moved here and they’ve got rules about transfer students.”
“Of course they do. They’ve got rules for everything, rules that only they can break.”
Wyatt shrugged.
“Must be frustrating,” Greer said.
“It’s all right.”
“Where were you living before?”
“East Canton.”
“A dump worse than this one.”
“It’s not so bad.”
“Your dad got transferred or something?”
“Huh?”
“Or your mom? To a new job—your reason for moving in the middle of the year.”
“No,” Wyatt said. “I came myself.”
“On the lam?”
“You got it.”
Greer laughed. “Your way of saying no more questions, I bet.” She glanced at the clock. “How about a cup of coffee, a Coke, something?”
“Um, okay.”
There were Cokes in the drink machine behind her, but Greer didn’t open it. Instead she grabbed her leather jacket from under the counter and said, “Let’s go in your car.”
“Yeah?” He glanced around, saw no one else to take care of the bowling alley. By that time, Greer was practically at the door. He followed her. She held the door for him, then locked it. “It’s okay to close early?”
“Why not?” said Greer.
“What if someone wants to bowl?”
“They can scratch that itch elsewhere.”
Wyatt and Greer walked to the Mustang. A gust of wind rose and blew her against him.
“Sorry,” he said.
“For what?”
They got in, Wyatt hurriedly gathering books and papers off her seat and tossing them in back.
“First time in a Mustang, believe it or not,” Greer said.
Wyatt turned the key. “This one’s real old,” he said. He started backing out of the space, glanced at her. “Seat belt.”
Greer grinned. “That’s what my grandmother always says.”
“She’s right,” Wyatt said, at the very moment they came to a big icy patch in the middle of the empty lot. Without thinking—but even with thought he might have done it
anyway—Wyatt spun the wheel hard and goosed the pedal. The Mustang spun around once in a tight doughnut, Greer suddenly screaming and gripping his right forearm so hard it hurt, at the same time making it not so easy to bring the car out of the spin. But he did, straightening perfectly and driving out of the lot at five miles per hour, using the turn signal and looking both ways. Greer’s grip loosened on his arm, but she didn’t let go completely, not for ten or fifteen seconds, although it felt much longer than that.
High Sierra Coffee was a shadowy little coffee shop off the main drag in Silver City with worn wood floors, shelves full of books, a few people hunched over laptops. Wyatt and Greer sat at a small round table in the back corner, Coke for him, espresso for her. He’d never actually seen an espresso before, must have been staring at it a bit too long, because she said, “Want a taste?”
“One taste and it’d be gone.”
Greer smiled, sat back in her chair; teeth very white, skin very smooth, eye makeup a little smeared. “I’d like to own a place like this someday.”
“Yeah?”
“That’s my dream, anyway. One of my dreams.”
“How much would it cost?” Wyatt said. “The rent, equipment, all that?”
“Who knows?” Greer said. “Too much.”
“There’d probably be insurance, too.”
Her face darkened. “I’ve had enough of goddamn insurance.”
“What do you mean?”
Greer was silent for a few moments. Clouds must have shifted, because a sudden golden shaft shone through a skylight, illuminating their table and everything on it—Coke slowly fizzing, steam rising from the little espresso cup, Greer’s right hand, a strong, finely shaped hand, the nails all chewed down to the quick. “It’s a long story,” she said.
“There’s time,” said Wyatt. “Unless you have to get back to work.”
She took a sip of espresso. Her lips weren’t very full but were, like her hands, finely shaped. “That’s the point,” she said. “I don’t. We’re in receivership, so who gives a shit?”
Receivership:
a word Wyatt was all too familiar with, from the unfolding of the Baker Brothers bankruptcy.
“You own the bowling alley?” he said.
“The bank owns it now,” Greer said. “Some bank in San Francisco. But before that my father owned it. Plus a whole big amusement center across town.”
“That’s in receivership, too?”
Greer shook her head. “Turned to ashes instead.”
“I don’t understand.”
She finished what was left of the espresso, put the cup down, rattling the saucer. “Last year, when things started to go bad—the economy, all that—the amusement center burned to the ground. My dad was found guilty of arson in a court of law—so it must be true, right?” Her eyes welled up, very briefly, but she didn’t cry. “My father, who built the amusement center from scratch, I’m talking about he even did the framing, the Sheetrock, the painting—guilty of burning
it all down for the insurance money.” Her voice had risen; one or two people glanced over.
Wyatt, his voice very low, said, “You don’t think he did it?”
“Who cares what I think? The fact is he’s stuck in Sweetwater for five years, minimum.”
“Sweetwater?”
“The prison across the river,” Greer said. “Number one employer in the county. Haven’t you seen it?”