Fragile Beasts (50 page)

“Does he want to play?”

“I don’t know.”

“Am I to understand that you’re not here to see how Klint is feeling,” Miss Jack breaks in, “but only to see if he’s still capable of playing your silly game?”

“Silly game?” Coach exclaims.

“He hasn’t talked to me at all about the team,” I dive in, suddenly realizing it might be good to keep Coach and Miss Jack from talking too much to each other.

I think Luis has the same idea because he tries to get Miss Jack to sit down, but she won’t listen to him.

Coach gets right to the point.

“Do you think he can still play?” he asks me.

“Sure. Why wouldn’t he be able to play? He’s fine.”

“I’m not talking about here.”

He curls his arm and claps his hand down on his bicep.

“I’m talking about here.”

He taps the side of his head.

“He’s not the same anymore. He’s crazy.”

“He is not crazy,” Miss Jack says, angrily.

“He’s not crazy,” I agree with her. “He was crazy before. Now he’s okay.”

“Okay. Whatever. Crazy then. Crazy now. What I’m saying is, he was a great ballplayer before. Can he still play ball now?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“It’s a mental game, Kyle.”

“A mental game?” Miss Jack interrupts. “Baseball? I thought it was a bunch of men standing in a field waiting for another man to hit a ball to them with a stick. I can’t see how that could require any more thought than throwing rocks in a pond.”

Coach Hill’s face starts to turn the distinctive shade of burst-capillary reddish pink it always becomes before he explodes at a player or an ump.

“She doesn’t know anything about baseball,” I explain to him, trying to head off an outburst he might regret. “She’s never seen a game. Ever.”

He stops being mad and becomes dumfounded.

“He needs to play in state finals this year,” I tell him, trying to distract him from Miss Jack. “What about his future?”

“I don’t know that he’s got a future. No college coach wants a kid on their team who might crack under the pressure and try and kill himself.”

“Coach Hill,” Miss Jack gasps, “I am not going to let you speak that way about Klint.”

Luis looks toward heaven.

“Qué mierda,” he mutters.

“A criminal record they can overlook,” Coach goes on, ignoring her, “but crazy …”

“Would you please stop using the word
crazy
?
”
she interrupts him again. “Klint Hayes is one of the sanest people I’ve ever met. It takes a tremendous amount of mental and emotional fortitude to endure what he’s endured.”

We all fall silent at the sound of footsteps in the hall.

Klint comes walking into the room. He’s in a pair of jeans and a plain blue T-shirt. He still has marks around his neck; they look much better but only to us, I realize as I watch Coach’s eyes fasten on Klint’s throat and a pained expression cross over his face. They must look horrible to him.

“Hey, Coach,” Klint says. “I thought I heard your voice.”

“Hey, Klint. We’ve missed you at practice.”

“I’ve missed being there.”

“You have?”

“Well, sure. I’ve never missed this much practice time in my life.”

“You know you were always welcome to come back. No one ever thought you were off the team. I mean, I wasn’t exactly thrilled with the way you handled yourself at the Laurel Falls game. It was pretty stupid and you may have lost …”

“Coach Hill!” Miss Jack cries out again, her patience obviously wearing very thin.

Coach glances at her and shakes his head in disgusted defeat.

“What I’m saying is, you weren’t kicked off the team because of it,” he finishes.

“Thanks.”

“Is that what you thought?”

“I didn’t know what to think.”

“I suppose I should’ve been in touch sooner but we’ve been busy getting ready for states. I guess it slipped my mind.”

“Your best player slipped your mind?” Miss Jack scoffs.

“Why are you here?” Klint asks.

“Well, I wanted to see how you’re doing. Maybe see if you feel up to playing on Monday?”

“Isn’t it kind of late to come and ask me that?”

“I went ahead and put you on the varsity roster.”

“Thanks, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Why didn’t you ask me last week?”

“I wanted to give you your space.”

Klint doesn’t buy it. I can see it in his eyes. He’s probably wondering the same things I’m wondering: Does Coach actually believe Klint can’t play anymore and that’s why he wrote him off, or has he been afraid to see him? Was he so freaked out by Klint’s suicide attempt that he was actually ready to jeopardize their shot at the state title rather than face him?

We’ll never know for sure. Coach may have a one-track mind, but that track passes by a lot of weird places. All that matters is if Klint wants to play.

We’re all waiting for his answer when he surprises us by turning to Miss Jack.

“Will you come to the game?” he asks her.

She’s been standing there glaring at Coach like she might pull a shotgun out from under her robe and blast his head off and now she falls apart into a female fluster.

“Oh. Well. I …,” she stammers, then glances at Luis and composes herself.

“Yes,” she says. “Yes, I will.”

Klint holds out his hand to Coach Hill. He takes it and they shake.

“Okay, Coach,” he says. “You’ve got yourself a second baseman.”

“Good. Practice tomorrow and Saturday,” Coach says. “I’ll see you there.”

He starts to leave, then pauses.

“Oh, by the way, Mrs. Hill says she hopes you’re feeling better.”

We nod and stare at the floor while we wait to hear Luis see him out, then we look up at each other and burst out laughing.

I
’M PRETTY PUMPED
up after Coach leaves. I’d been in a kind of denial where I avoided talking to Klint about finishing the season in case it upset him, but the truth is, it’s all I’ve been thinking about. They have a shot at being state champs this year. It’s a big deal, and it’s something Klint has wanted since he set his first Little League MVP trophy on the shelf beside the TV.

Klint’s in a great mood now, too. He leaves the room for a couple minutes and comes back with two of his gloves and a ball.

He throws his old glove at me and says, “How about some catch?”

I don’t know how many times in my life I heard my dad say those words to Klint. He never said them to me. He never had to. By the time I was old enough to throw a ball around, he was busy with his superstar in the making.

Klint’s the one who taught me. We haven’t played in a long time. Somewhere along the way, when baseball stopped being a game for him and became a job, tossing a ball back and forth in the yard with his little brother must have seemed pointless.

Today he acts like there’s nothing he’d rather be doing.

Miss Jack has hundreds of acres, but we stay in front of the house in the gravel drive. The warm sun on my shoulders and the lazy rhythmic smack of the ball hitting our gloves lulls me into a waking doze. I hear the sound of a car’s engine in the distance, but I don’t notice that it seems to be getting closer. A flash of red streaking through the trees behind Klint jolts me back to my senses.

Before I can decide if I should run and hide or stay and be snubbed, Shelby has parked her car and the choice has been made for me. She’s seen me and I can’t leave without looking like a coward or a jerk.

I’m hopeful from the moment I see her. Gone is the drab disarrayed chic of her Paris wardrobe. She’s wearing neon pink Converse tennis shoes, white shorts, and a crisp sleeveless yellow blouse tied beneath her rib cage exposing the flat plane of her belly.

Her eyes are hidden behind big sunglasses set in yellow frames, and I can’t tell what’s she’s thinking or feeling as she walks toward the house.

I never told Klint about Starr and me, but he did figure out something was wrong between Shelby and me. He asked what happened and I told him it didn’t matter, the main thing was I got sick of her jerking me around. This seemed to be all the explanation he needed.

The two of us stop playing catch and stand stiffly on either side of Miss Jack’s front lawn like palace sentries.

Klint takes the ball and throws it into his own glove.
Thwack!
He does it again.
Thwack!
He watches Shelby suspiciously as she approaches.

I wonder if she’s actually going to walk into the house without saying a word to either of us. This would be a whole new level of cold for her.

She comes to a stop directly between us.

Thwack!

“Hi, Klint,” she says without making any move to get any closer to him. “How are you?”

Thwack!

“Good.”

Thwack!

“Hi, Kyle,” she says quietly.

“Hey,” I reply.

She takes off her sunglasses and looks at me.

“Could we talk somewhere?”

Thwack, thwack, thwack!

“Sure.”

Klint lopes up the front steps and disappears into Miss Jack’s house before I can even glance his way.

“Where do you want to talk?” I ask her.

“We can do it right here.”

We walk over to the porch and both take a seat on the bottom step. She pulls off a leaf from one of her aunt’s rhododendron bushes and starts rolling it between her fingers.

“I like your shoes,” I tell her.

“Pretty bright, huh? I got tired of dressing like a cold, rainy day,” she says with a sigh, “even if it was tres chic.”

“What’s wrong with dressing like bubblegum ice cream?”

She smiles at me.

“Nothing.”

I don’t say anything else. It was her idea to talk. I wait for her. After a minute of staring at her shoes, she goes on.

“I thought I was so mature when I was in Paris. There I was wearing serious dark clothes and drinking wine and being openly seduced by grown men in public places.”

“What?”

She waves away my concern with her leaf.

“Then when I got home, I freaked out on you because you had sex with my sister. That wasn’t very mature of me. I had no right to act that way. You’re not my boyfriend. You can have sex with whoever you want.”

“Not exactly. Let’s say I can have sex with whoever wants to have sex with me.”

She smiles at me again.

“I know Starr’s no angel. And she’s very hot. What guy would say no to her? You know what the strange thing is? I was always worried she’d go after Klint and instead she goes after you. Isn’t that funny?”

“Yeah, that’s funny,” I say with a nervous laugh.

“I guess I’m trying to say I’m sorry for the way I acted.”

“It’s okay. I said some pretty rotten things, too.”

“I deserved them. Especially when I started going on and on about how much I loved Klint.”

Her voice trails off, and I can tell something else is bothering her.

“When I heard about Klint, I didn’t feel as bad as I should have felt,” she confesses.

“What do you mean?”

“If I truly loved Klint with all my heart and soul the way I thought I did, when I heard what happened I would’ve been devastated. I would’ve been racing to see him. His pain would have been my pain. Instead, the only person I was thinking about was you.”

“Me?”

“Yes. I was worried about
you
. And something else. I know this sounds horrible but knowing what he did”—she pauses and struggles with her words—“it changed how I feel about him.”

“He’s not crazy,” I state automatically and defensively, recalling Coach Hill’s accusations.

“I know,” she replies quickly, her eyes widening in apology. “I don’t think anything like that. It’s just that Klint always seemed so tough. Like nothing could shake him.”

“Now you think he’s weak?”

“No, I don’t think that, either.”

She stops and goes back to staring at the tips of her sneakers.

“What he did makes him seem human.”

I can’t help laughing at this.

“You were looking for an inhuman guy?”

She laughs, too.

“I could introduce you to Chad Hopper,” I tell her.

“Who’s Chad Hopper?”

“Someone who fits into that category.”

“Maybe inhuman isn’t the right word. How about unreal?”

“Well, that sure isn’t Klint or me. We’re as real as they come.”

As soon as I make this proclamation, she reaches for my hand and squeezes tightly.

“Do you remember how we met?”

“Four years ago at the county fair,” I rattle off. “You wanted to go on the Zipper and your friend, Whitney, wouldn’t go with you. I heard you talking about it and I volunteered to take you.”

“I couldn’t believe it,” she says, grinning broadly at the memory. “You weren’t like any boy I knew at my school. They would’ve stood around in a big, stupid group laughing and making fun of me. None of them would’ve had the guts to ask me to go on a ride no matter how much he might have wanted it because he’d be afraid I’d embarrass him. But you didn’t care about what anybody else thought. You were your own man.”

This seems like a good moment so I go for it.

“Since you’re not stuck on Klint anymore, does that mean you’re available?” I ask, hopefully.

“I don’t want a boyfriend right now,” she replies, giving me a playful smile. “I like being free.”

“Maybe we can be free together?”

“Okay.”

She gets up suddenly from the step, and her eyes widen again, this time with excitement.

“You know that bullfighter, El Soltero? The one that’s in all those posters all over Aunt Candace’s house?”

“Yeah.”

“It turns out she was going to marry him.”

Her voice takes on the low, hurried, breathless quality I love so well.

“They were madly in love, but the night she was going to accept his proposal, he was killed by a bull. Right in front of her. The bull she brought home with her. Calladito! Ventisco’s grandfather! Have you ever heard of anything so romantic?”

I’m not sure I’d call it romantic, but I smile and nod and act like this is the first time I’m hearing about any of it.

“When I went to visit her in the hospital, she told me all about it. She’s going to show me some pictures today. Do you want to see them?”