Plunking Reggie Jackson (2 page)

He needed to rise out of his chair in order to reach across. He leaned his elbows on the table. Her hand was small and soft. When he took it, he felt awkward. “I'm Coley Burke.”

“I know,” she said.

The top button of her blouse was undone. He enjoyed the limited view of her breasts, which weren't huge but seemed substantial on her thin body. A faint pattern of freckles speckled the top of her sternum. “How do you know my name?” he asked.

“Oh, please. I may be a transfer student, but I'm not stupid.”

He took the remark as a compliment, even though he was used to attention. Coley was one of the school's main studs, an all-around athlete whose baseball stardom had brought him an abundance of public recognition. He had been written up in the local and regional newspapers so often that his mother needed to keep buying additional pages for the scrapbook she kept. He had even been featured in a
Chicago Tribune
article. Coley had been interviewed so many times by television reporters that the procedure bored him.

But this moment seemed uncommonly inflating for some reason. He sat down in his chair again.
I may be a transfer student, but I'm not stupid
. Bree Madison was a definite turn-on. Especially right after having Mrs. Alvarez on his case and getting another lecture about being an academic underachiever.

In about two minutes the bell was going to ring. He closed his magazine. “How'd you like to go out with me?” he asked Bree.

“Go out? You mean a date?”

“Yeah, that would be what I mean. A date. How'd you like to go out?”

“Where would we go?” she asked.

Coley shrugged. “Wherever. Knight's Action, a movie somewhere, wherever you'd like.”

“I thought Gloria Freeman was your girl.”

“Why do you think that?”

“It's what everybody thinks,” she replied. She was smiling, though, like she was teasing him.

“That's history,” Coley said to her. “That's over.”

“Does Gloria know it's over?”

“She knows.”

“I bet she's not happy about that,” said Bree.

He shrugged again before he said, “I guess she's not. Breaking up is hard to do.”

“Very funny,” said Bree. Students were on their feet by this time, anticipating the bell by collecting their books. Bree put her encyclopedia away before she returned to the table. “I'll go out with you,” she told Coley, “but we're not gonna mess around.”

The combination of these two declarations gave him second thoughts. “Who said anything about messing around? Did I say that?”

She was smiling again. “You didn't have to. Guys never have to.”

“Oh, yeah? What're you, fifteen? Sixteen maybe? You're like the expert, is that it?”

Bree Madison giggled before she replied. “I wouldn't say I'm an expert, but I know what males usually want.”

Her remarks were as surprising as her demeanor, especially, for some reason, her choice of the term
male
. While Coley was searching for words that would make a clever response, the bell rang.

Chapter Two

From the window in Patrick's shrine Coley could see the entire backyard. He could also hear the phone messages as they played back on the answering machine in his father's den, across the hall.

Their backyard was more than two hundred feet deep at the southeast corner, where it was also its widest. The irregular shape of their property, like that of their nearest neighbors, owed its shape to the winding contours of Laurel Creek, located beyond the redwood privacy fence.

His mother's passion for landscaping was evident. In the center of the yard there was a kidney-shaped plot of yew bushes surrounded by violets and a fieldstone terrace. The anomaly was the bull pen, near the back fence. His mother's name for it was “eyesore.”

But it was a bull pen, just as surely as the one at Busch Stadium or Wrigley Field. It had an elevated dirt mound, with authentic pitching rubber, perched sixty feet six inches away from an official home plate, that old rubber pentagon with black margins. Ten feet behind the plate was a Cyclone fence backstop. A well-worn path connected the home-plate area to the pitching mound.

From this perspective, on the third floor of their trilevel house, Coley could even see the statue. It stood in the left-handed batter's box. Cast in bronze, it was a life-size replica of Reggie Jackson with the bat on his shoulder. It was blue green from years of weathering, and it had a speckled pattern of bird shit. Coley couldn't see these details from so far away, but he knew they were there.

His father had discovered the statue at some sports memorabilia extravaganza in Indianapolis in the mid-eighties, and then paid an ungodly sum of money to buy it and have it shipped. It was hauled to their house and installed in their backyard by the Ryser brothers, who bolted it into the ground on a concrete slab.

Coley couldn't remember a time when the statue wasn't a fixture in their backyard. He was only a toddler when it was brought to its permanent resting place. He had heard his mother complain about how “gauche” it was, especially on the day when it arrived, the day his father had pronounced it “unbelievable.” “Yes, that's a good word too,” his mother had replied.

The installation of the statue had prompted his mother to intensify her landscaping efforts on that side of the yard. The fruits of her labor were mature now, in a flared pattern of privet hedge and lilac bushes that concealed most of the bull pen from view, if you were standing on the ground.

But not from up here, not from Patrick's shrine. Not even the lilacs, by the time they achieved their full foliage in late spring, would completely screen the view of the statue from the vantage point of this upper floor.

Most of the messages on the answering machine were for his mother—people wanting to schedule appointments to look at houses on the market. While Coley listened with half his brain, waiting to see if there were any for him, he wandered with the other half along the framed pictures and trophies that adorned this room. He didn't come in here often.

Just about every award and honor ever bestowed upon his older brother, Patrick, was preserved on these walls and shelves. There was a Hall of Fame precision in their pattern of display, so as to highlight the huge color photo of Patrick in his Mets uniform. Coley called the room Patrick's shrine, although never out loud if his father was in earshot.

The robot's voice on the answering machine asked if he wanted the messages replayed. “No, thank you,” Coley hollered across the hall. He'd turned the volume up so loud he couldn't even hear the rewind button kick in. He descended the short flight of stairs that led to the main level of the house.

If the upper level belonged to his father, the main level was all his mother's. The large living room, the nearly-as-large dining room, the kitchen, the laundry room, and the sun porch. Nobody else's. Nobody else's decision which pictures hung on which walls, which copies of
Good Housekeeping
rested on whatever coffee table, which flowers got planted in the flower boxes on the deck. No dirt, no dust, no clutter.

Coley took the steps rapidly down to the lower level,
his
level. The red shag carpet was old but still in good condition. The bigger area, which had once upon a time functioned as a family room, was twenty by thirty feet. A small couch and easy chair hovered near a modest TV-VCR entertainment center at one end, while a disorganized mound of sports equipment, consisting of bats, balls, shoes, gloves, football helmets, and assorted team jerseys, crowded the other. There were various team pictures on the walls, from high school as well as summer baseball leagues, in addition to huge posters of Ken Griffey Jr. and Michael Jordan.

On the ceiling directly above his weight bench was a nude photo of Cindy Crawford taken from a
Playboy
magazine. She was lying on her stomach, though, which meant the most crucial parts of her anatomy were hidden. Coley hated lifting, but if he had to do it, it eased the pain to have a view of the sublime.

His bed and study desk were in the bedroom, which was also spacious. When he got mail, his mother left it on the study desk. Today there were three letters. Two were from college athletic departments—Indiana University and Murray State, specifically. Coley opened them and glanced at them ever so briefly before tossing them. He was still getting letters from colleges even though he had already signed a national letter of intent with Bradley. It was the reality of mailing lists that once your name was on them, they never seemed to take you off.

The third letter was from the Royals' complex in Fort Myers, Florida. It was signed by a player development representative named Bobby Esau. Esau's letter said he planned to be in Coley's region in about a month, looking at prospects. He hoped to see Coley pitch and wondered if they might be able to get together for a visit.

After he read through the letter a second time, Coley decided to keep it. This wasn't the first letter he'd received from a big-league organization, not by a long shot; but some of them were only form letters, not worth saving. He knew that
player development representative
was just a la-di-da name for
talent scout
.

Coley looked at the textbooks in the center of his study desk, stacked with the values survey he was supposed to do for human dynamics. They weren't in this prominent position by accident. His mother had placed them, just as purposefully as she had placed the mail. She had been urging him to take this homework along on the Florida trip so as to make some productive use of his free time. In his mind's eye he pictured Mrs. Alvarez seated behind her desk and staring at him with that arched eyebrow.

Right after that he thought of Bree, the girl in the library. He remembered her pale skin and her reddish hair.

He nuked two ham-and-cheese sandwiches in the microwave, then took them, along with a twenty-ounce Pepsi, out onto the deck to eat. The sun couldn't seem to drive the temperature above the 45-degree mark. He could only hope it would warm up by the time they got back from Tampa.

Illinois weather in early spring was often nasty for baseball, which was why Coley had wanted to sign a letter of intent with Southern Cal or Arizona or Florida. He hated to pitch in cold weather.

And those were only a few of the warm-climate schools that had offered him a scholarship. His father had nixed those options, even though they were prestige opportunities with the potential to maximize any baseball player's development and market value. Coley knew why—if he was that far away from home, his father's level of control would be reduced. If Dad was a father in the first place, he was an agent in the here and now.

He devoured his second sandwich nearly as rapidly as the first. Washing it down with the Pepsi, he walked clear back to the bull pen, where next to the mound there were two dozen baseballs in a plastic milk crate covered with a yellow poncho. Most of the balls were old, but some were in decent shape.

With no glove and the wrong shoes, he took one of the balls and stood on the mound in the stretch position. He wasn't sure if he intended to throw the ball or not. He stared at the rigid Reggie Jackson, dug in fearlessly, bat at the ready position. As he stood by himself in this spot it was only natural for Coley to think of Patrick.

Patrick was dead now, and had been for four years. The mementos in the shrine room would never—
could
never—change. But if that was the glory in it, it was also death; the things that could never change.

It was Patrick who'd shown him how to plunk Reggie Jackson so you could get a
gong
sound. Even then Patrick had a major-league arm, so it took more than simply hitting the statue in the right spot, you had to have some serious velocity as well. Coley remembered Patrick's demonstration clearly—how if you hit the statue just beneath its bronze rib cage, in precisely the right spot, there was a hollow resonance that produced a mellifluous
gonging
tone. It was sort of like tapping a wine glass with a spoon in just the right location.

It had taken Patrick six or eight pitches to plunk the statue just right. Other times, when he hit the shoulder or the kneecap or the elbow, there was a tinnier sound. Sort of a
clink
or
tank
, like a plucked guitar string when it isn't held down clean along the fret. It wasn't the same as the real thing.

“Won't Dad be pissed if he knows you're hitting the statue on purpose?” Coley remembered asking.

“Who gives a shit?” Patrick had replied.

Since Coley was only twelve at the time, he hadn't been strong enough to deliver the heat; not enough velocity. Even when he hit the statue squarely, he only got one of the
clinks
or a thin kind of
pink
. No
gong
. But Big Brother had encouraged him by saying, “Don't worry, your day will come.”

Another memory associated with Patrick was as embarrassing and frustrating as it was vivid. He recalled the time Patrick was home for a weekend in June, between his tour of duty in the instructional league and the date he was to report to the Mets' complex in Tampa. Along with Mom and Dad, Patrick had come out to watch Coley's PONY League game at Washington Park.

Coley had been playing first base that day, which wasn't his usual position. He didn't like it. In the sixth inning a guy named Leon Tibbs came out of the baseline in a rundown play. His hard plastic cleats slammed into Coley's wrist and knocked the ball out of his glove. Tibbs was safe, while Coley had to scramble after the loose ball, which was rolling into foul territory. He got it in time to make sure Tibbs didn't advance, but then he sat square on his butt and began massaging his sore wrist. The ump called time.

Coley knew he had pain, but he also knew that the only real injury was to his pride. It was the humiliation of coughing up the ball in a tough-guy collision. He was content to sit there for a few moments and absorb any sympathy that the spectators might be inclined to spend on his condition. From the corner of his eye Coley was able to watch his family's reactions.