The Art of Fielding: A Novel (40 page)
“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.”
H
e 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 three 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!
A
ffenlight 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.
T
he 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.