The Art of Fielding: A Novel (43 page)
A
ffenlight was still seated between the two baseball men.
“Blass,” Dwight Rogner said, breaking a long and awful silence. “Sasser. Wohlers. Knoblauch. Sax.”
“I played against Mr. Sax for years.” Aparicio’s voice was always soft, so you had to lean in to listen, but even more so now. “A good man, though of dubious politics.”
“Chuck Knoblauch and I were teammates. His only full year in the minors—one of my ten.”
Aparicio nodded.
“And then Rick Ankiel, of course, for our organization.”
Affenlight didn’t know the names. They proceeded from Dwight’s tongue with respectful reluctance, like a litany of friends killed in war.
“They call it Steve Blass Disease,” Dwight explained to Affenlight. “After the first player it happened to. A pitcher for the Pirates. That was a little before my time.”
“Those were the Pittsburgh teams of Clemente,” said Aparicio. “They won the Series in seventy-one. Clemente was named Most Valuable Player, but the honor could easily have gone to Mr. Blass. He had an exceptional ability to control the baseball.
“A year later, on New Year’s Eve, Clemente was killed in a plane crash while delivering aid to Nicaragua. When spring training began, Mr. Blass could no longer do what he’d always done. It happened very suddenly. Walks, wild pitches. One year later, only two years removed from the height of his career, he decided to retire.”
“You think this was related to Clemente’s death?” Affenlight asked.
Aparicio touched his chin. “I suggested as much by the way I told the story, didn’t I? But in truth I have no idea. Clemente’s death affected
me
deeply, and I never met him. But I was a child, a child from that part of the world. Clemente was a hero to us. Teammates are not inevitably so interested in one another.”
The Coshwale batter laid down a bunt. Rick O’Shea, remarkably spry for his size, charged and fielded it neatly, but his throw to third sailed wide, and the left fielder failed to back up the play. Two more runs scored. It was now 5 to 2 in favor of the
VI ITORS
.
“Your pitcher is throwing his heart out,” Dwight said, as Adam Starblind banged his glove on his thigh in disgust. “Talented guy too. But the rest of the team looks done for.”
They were sitting directly behind the Westish dugout, so that they couldn’t see Henry inside. “Do they ever recover?” Affenlight asked. “The players with this disease?”
“Steve Sax did. Of the big names, he might be the only one. Knoblauch moved from second to the outfield, where the longer throw gave him less trouble. Ankiel moved to the outfield too.”
“But a longer throw is harder,” Affenlight pointed out.
Dwight shrugged. “Sometimes harder is easier.”
It comforted Affenlight to have this conversation, to try to wrap his mind around what had happened to Henry, to try to contextualize it, but Aparicio’s eyes were quietly trained on the field, even the eager and garrulous Dwight seemed reluctant to say much, and it seemed clear that to discuss such matters at length, in such proximity to someone to whom it was actually happening, violated one of baseball’s codes. He decided to risk one last question.
“Did it really never happen before that? Before seventy-three?”
Aparicio breathed in and out—a kind of ethereal idea of a shrug. He waited a very long time before answering, as if registering a dignified protest against the demand Affenlight had placed on him. “How many times does something happen before we give it a name? And until the name exists, neither does the condition. So perhaps it happened many times before but was never named.
“And yet. Baseball has many historians, including among its players. There are statistics, archives, legends, lore. If earlier players had experienced similar troubles, it seems likely the stories would have been passed down. And then the name would be applied in retrospect.”
Nineteen seventy-three. In the public imagination it was as fraught a year as you could name: Watergate,
Roe v. Wade,
withdrawal from Vietnam.
Gravity’s Rainbow.
Was it also the year that Prufrockian paralysis went mainstream—the year it entered baseball? It made sense that a psychic condition sensed by the artists of one generation—the Modernists of the First World War—would take a while to reveal itself throughout the population. And if that psychic condition happened to be a profound failure of confidence in the significance of individual human action, then the condition became an epidemic when it entered the realm of utmost confidence in same: the realm of professional sport. In fact, that might make for a workable definition of the postmodernist era: an era when even the athletes were anguished Modernists. In which case the American postmodern period began in spring 1973, when a pitcher named Steve Blass lost his aim.
Do I dare, and do I dare?
Affenlight found this hypothesis exciting, if dubiously constructed. Then he glanced at Aparicio, hands folded mournfully in his lap, and his excitement curdled to embarrassment. Literature could turn you into an asshole; he’d learned that teaching grad-school seminars. It could teach you to treat real people the way you did characters, as instruments of your own intellectual pleasure, cadavers on which to practice your critical faculties.
“Doubt has always existed,” Aparicio said. “Even for athletes.”
T
he Harpooners lost 10 to 2. Between games, no one mentioned the ceremony that had been planned and advertised in Henry’s honor. Instead the Westish players headed down to their usual spot near the right-field foul pole, where they spread out on the grass and listlessly munched the sandwiches that had been delivered from the dining hall. It had become a gorgeous, sun-kissed afternoon. There were even a few ambitious tanners laid out on the practice fields in bikinis. Henry, marked out from his teammates by his faded red T-shirt, lay on his back with his eyes closed, inviting them to carry on without him. Starblind stewed bitterly, muttering to himself and glaring at his bare right arm as he rubbed Tiger Balm into it. Nobody else broke the funereal mood, or even glanced at the spot behind home plate where Aparicio was signing autographs.
Henry tapped Izzy on the knee. “Play their three hitter toward the hole a little more. You could’ve had that last ball he hit.”
Izzy nodded.
“Especially with Sal pitching. Compared to Adam, play everybody a step to pull against Sal. Unless he has his changeup working. Then you have to watch Mike’s signs and play it more by feel.”
Izzy looked down at his yogurt.
“Comprende?”
Henry said.
Izzy nodded. “
Comprende,
Henry.”
Henry hauled himself to his feet and walked over to the fence, where a skinny, coltish girl with long wavy sandy hair was waiting for him. As he approached she poked her index finger through the fence. After a moment Henry touched it with his own.
“Who’s that?” asked Starblind.
“I think it’s Skrim’s sister.” Rick looked to Owen. “Buddha?”
Owen nodded.
“Huh,” Adam said. “Not bad.”
I
zzy scored the winning run in the second game of the doubleheader when, with the score tied 6 all in the bottom of the tenth, Schwartz hammered a double into the left-field corner. The Harpooners poured out of the dugout to greet Izzy as he crossed home plate, trading fist bumps and man hugs and muted words of praise. The split left them one game behind Coshwale in the UMSCAC standings, with another doubleheader tomorrow at the Muskies’ home diamond. “Tomorrow,” someone said, and it became a refrain to nod to and repeat.
“Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow.”
Back in the locker room, they set about their private postgame rituals, stretching and heating and icing, showering and shaving and scraping off eye black, slathering on the stinging menthols of Icy Hot, Tiger Balm, Fire Cool, detonating sneezy white puffs of foot powder, baby powder, fungus powder, crotch powder. Schwartz headed into the whirlpool room to soak. He turned off the lights, lowered himself into the rattling tub, and tried not to think about baseball for a few minutes, tried not to think about Henry, while the salts and churning water did their inadequate work on his body. He’d spotted Pella in the stands today—she hadn’t hopped a plane back to San Francisco with The Architect. It had been sweet to see her navy windbreaker amid all that ugly red.
When he returned to the locker room it was empty. His back hurt as much as it ever had. It took two minutes to put his underwear on. He popped a handful of Advil—he was fresh out of anything better—and finished dressing as quickly as he could.
By the time he emerged onto the broad stone steps of the VAC the sun had set, and the evening had turned spring cool. Through the semidarkness he could see someone wandering the parking lot in mothlike circles—she stopped and looked up as the wooden doors creaked shut. “Sophie,” he said.
“Mike?”
She trotted over, backpack bouncing on her shoulder, and gave him a commiserative hug. Schwartz felt like he knew her well, though they’d only met once. She looked distinctly like her brother—same slender neck and elegant posture, same soft features and pale-blue eyes. She looked older than the girl in the faded photo above Henry’s desk, more nearly adult, but also as skinny and credulous as Henry had been when he arrived at Westish. The Skrimshanders were late bloomers. “Where’s Henry?” she asked.
“Probably at Carapelli’s, with the rest of the team. I’m late to meet them.”
“I
saw
the rest of the team,” Sophie protested. “Henry wasn’t with them. I figured you two were together.”
Goddamnit. Schwartz reached for his phone—his first impulse was to call Owen, but he didn’t want Sophie to know that he didn’t know where Henry was. Instead he tapped out a text:
is H w u?
“Your brother likes to use the fire door,” he lied. “One of his rituals. Where are your folks?”
Sophie rolled her eyes. “My mom dragged my dad back to the hotel to keep him from yelling at Henry. He’s, like, half a second away from an aneurysm.” She deepened her voice to a growl.
“Kid just quit. Quit on his team. Deserves what he gets.”
“He’ll cool off.”
“Someday. Anyway we’re all in one room. I’m keeping away from there.”
Schwartz wasn’t sure what to do. He could take Sophie to Carapelli’s for dinner with the team, she could meet Aparicio Rodriguez, nobody would object—but he was already beginning to understand that Henry might not be there. That he might be gone. Whatever
gone
could mean, on this little campus.
His phone trilled in his hand. He assumed it would be Owen, but the caller ID showed his own home number.
“Hello?”
“Hey,” said Pella. “Where are you?”
“In front of the VAC.”
“In your favorite towel?”