The Art of Fielding: A Novel (27 page)

“Not bad.” Henry nodded. “Not bad at all.”

T
UESDAY
, M
USKINGUM
. The sky was a madhouse of riotous cross-blown clouds, the low ones wispy and torn-cotton white, the high ones gray with sullen underbellies shading to ominous black. Nobody in the stands but scouts and dutiful girlfriends. The Muskingum players wore long-sleeved shirts beneath their powder-blue jerseys. The Harpooners’ arms were bare. Schwartz insisted on it: a psychological advantage could be gained by pretending to be impervious to the weather. By pretending to be impervious, you became so.

Henry checked his teammates to make sure they were shaded correctly, waved Ajay a step to the left. “Sal Sal Sal,” he chanted. “Salvador Dalí Dolly Parton Pardon my French.” Infield chatter wasn’t exactly cool at the college level, but Henry couldn’t help himself. He pounded his fist into the tender pit of his glove. “Dot your
i
s, cross your
t
s, spread a little cheese. Spread a little Muenster, spread a little Swiss.”

Sal cranked into his awkward staccato windup. Henry dropped into his shallow crouch.
Hit it to me,
he prayed.
Hit it to me.
Redemption time. The pitch was a forkball right where Schwartzy wanted it, low and outside. Henry broke from his crouch even before bat met ball with a tinny reverberant
ding.
At the last second the ball skidded off a lump tucked in the grass. He shifted his glove and fielded it cleanly—no such thing as a bad hop if you were prepared.

He clapped his right hand over the captive ball, spun it to find the seams. He cocked his arm, locked his eyes on Rick’s glove. His arm was moving forward, there wasn’t time to think, but he was thinking anyway, trying to decide whether to speed up his arm or slow it down. He could feel himself calibrating and recalibrating, adjusting and readjusting his aim, like an army sniper hopped up on foreign drugs.

As soon as the ball left his hand he knew he’d messed up. Rick O’Shea tried to scoop it out of the dirt, but it hit the heel of his glove and skittered away. Henry turned his back to the infield, looked up at the roiling clouds, mouthed his new favorite word:
Motherfucker.

Schwartzy called time and trudged out to the mound, beckoned to Henry. “You okay?” he asked, his catcher’s mask tipped back on his head, eye black already smearing down into his beard.

“Fine,” Henry said curtly.

“You sure? Wing’s not sore or—”

“Wing’s fine. I’m fine. Let’s just play, okay?”

“Okay,” Schwartz said. “Nobody out. Let’s get ’em.”

Now Henry had another error to atone for.
Hit it to me,
he thought fiercely.
Hit me the ball.
“Sal-Sal-Salamander,” he chanted, pounding his glove in disgust. “Drop that forkbomb. Let me and Ajay turn a little two-step.”

Sal threw another forkball, a good one. The batter cracked a sharp shot to Henry’s left. He snagged it and twisted toward Ajay, who was breaking toward the second-base bag. The distance called for a casual sidearm fling—he’d done it ten thousand times. But now he paused, double-clutched. He’d thrown the last one too soft, better put a little mustard on it—no, no, not
too
hard, too hard would be bad too. He clutched again. Now the runner was closing in, and Henry had no choice but to throw it hard, really hard, too hard for Ajay to handle from thirty feet away; it handcuffed him, glanced off the heel of his glove and into short right field.

After the inning Henry sought out Ajay to apologize.

“Forget it.” Ajay smiled. “How many times have I done that to you?”

Rick O’Shea clapped Henry on both shoulders. “Don’t sweat it, Skrim. Happens to the worst of us.”

“Bats bats bats!” somebody yelled, drumming on the wooden rear wall of the dugout.

“Bats bats bats! Let’s get ’em back! Bats bats!”

Schwartzy hit a home run. So did Boddington. An inning later, Henry smacked a bases-clearing triple. The umpires stopped the game after six innings, with the Harpooners ahead 19–3. The mercy rule was meant to be merciful to the team getting beat, but no one could have felt more relieved than Henry. For the first time in his life he wanted not to be on a ballfield. He blinked back miserable tears the whole way home, pressed against the shuddering side of the bus.

“You’ve got to relax out there,” Schwartzy told him. “Relax and let it come.”

“I know.”

“Just let ’er rip, like you’re firing at the broomstick. Break Rick’s hand if you’ve got to.”

“Okay.”

The usual depressing landscape unspooled outside, cows and billboards, fireworks stores and adult emporia. Schwartz picked his words carefully. “Why don’t you take it easy tomorrow?” he suggested. “Skip your run, slack off during practice like I do. No use grinding yourself down.”

“I’m fine.”

“I know you’re fine. I’m just saying we’re not in prep mode anymore. We’ve got fifteen games in the next twenty days. We’ve got to conserve our strength.”

The next time Schwartz looked over, Henry’s eyes were closed, his forehead tipped against the grimy window. Schwartz could tell by the nervous tug at the corner of his right eye that he wasn’t really asleep, but he didn’t call him on it.

Schwartz could feel what was happening, or one thing that was happening: he was distancing himself from Henry, and he was using Pella to do so. That was why he hadn’t even mentioned Pella to Henry yet. For years he’d kept no secrets from Henry; now he’d kept two in a matter of weeks.

It was a bad thing to do: to distance himself from Henry, to cut the Skrimmer adrift while pretending nothing had changed—and to do so, when you got down to it, because he couldn’t handle Henry’s success.

He couldn’t do it, not to Henry. Look what was happening already. Maybe it was hubris for Schwartz to blame himself, but it didn’t matter. He would do whatever he could to get Henry straightened out. If that meant picking up the phone at four a.m. while in bed with Pella, then so be it. If that meant spending the next two months thinking of nothing but Henry and how to help him, so be it. Pella could wait. His life could wait. Henry needed him, and the Harpooners needed Henry. That was all he had to know.

29

T
oday,” said Professor Eglantine darkly as she stood before the chalkboard, feet splayed like a ballerina, and twisted her bony, bracelet-freighted arms into a series of pretzeled contortions while she stared at the tape player provided by the A/V Department, “in lieu of our usual business, I hope you’ll be so indulgent as to listen with me to a recording of the dear dead anti-Semite Thomas Stearns Eliot, reading aloud his longish poemlike creation
The Waste Land,
and meanwhile to meditate on the ways in which Modernism rejects, retains, or possibly even transforms the traditional elements of orality we’ve been discussing throughout the semester.”

Henry never entirely understood Professor Eglantine, but he took this to mean there wouldn’t be much discussion. He slumped in his chair, relieved. He was perched in the top row of the tiny amphitheater between Rick and Starblind, the three of them tucked into too-small desks with piano-shaped tops and presiding in their game-day shirts and ties over the smaller, less athletic members of the class. Rick’s kelly-green bow tie drooped like mistletoe above a huge expanse of rumpled white oxford, armpit stains visible as he yawned and stretched. Starblind looked ready for Wall Street or maybe Hollywood, in a glossy gold tie and a shirt the shimmering vermilion of leaves in late October. Henry wore what he always wore: beat-up blue shirt, navy-and-ecru Westish tie. He and Rick wore their Harpooner caps. Starblind, who only covered his gel-slick blond hair while on the diamond, did not. Shirts and ties were a Mike Schwartz dictum of which Coach Cox did not approve. “What’s wrong with a sweatshirt?” he’d grumble as the Harpooners filed into the locker room. “Goddamn college boys.”

Henry took his physics labs during fall semester, so they wouldn’t interfere with baseball season. In the spring he stuck to jock-friendly guts and courses for which Owen or Schwartzy already owned the books. Transforming the Oral Tradition, English 129, cross-listed as Anthropology 141, was the latter. It wasn’t easy enough to qualify as a gut, but Rick and Starblind were both in the class, and Schwartzy had “edited” Henry’s paper on the
Iliad
to the tune of an A+.

The classroom faced east and was often flooded with light at this hour, but today the lake churned gravely and it looked like rain. Henry felt a thought creep into his mind, the kind of thought he’d never had before or imagined having:
I hope we get rained out.

“Marie! Marie!”
Eliot squealed, in what seemed like a hopeless bid for Henry’s attention. Starblind scribbled a note on a piece of paper, laid it on Henry’s desk:

!?!

This could mean only one thing, coming from Starblind. Henry scanned the room for the girl in question: a female newcomer seated beside Professor Eglantine. She had kinky, shoulder-length, wine-or bruise-colored hair. She looked older than a student but too young to be a professor. She could have been a grad student, but there weren’t any grad students at Westish. She looked precisely like the kind of girl—or maybe he should call her a woman—the kind of woman Henry knew nothing about. She had a wide and heart-shaped face, and she was chewing one of her sweatshirt’s strings, not out of nervousness, because nervousness was not an emotion likely to be felt by a person who looked like that, but for some other, better reason. Probably she was chewing on the string because she was concentrating hard on this incomprehensible poem and thinking profound thoughts about Modernism of which Professor Eglantine would approve.

Starblind wrote again:
I’d transform her orality. Seen her before?

Henry gave a slight shrug to indicate no.

She’s no prefrosh. She’s 25, 26.

Slight nod.

A little worse for wear, but still…

Henry didn’t respond to this one.

Eggy’s girlfriend?

Henry rolled his eyes. Only in Starblind’s sex-crazed imagination did Professor Eglantine have a twentysomething lesbian lover whom she invited to class.

You’re useless. Wake up Rick.

Henry, using an absolute minimum of movement, elbowed Rick. He didn’t like to talk during Professor Eglantine’s class, not because he’d get in any trouble but because Professor Eglantine seemed as sensitive as a skinned knee, she frequently cried during class at the beauty of various poems, and Henry worried about disappointing her.

Rick’s chin jerked up. He wiped a glistening wisp of drool from the corner of his mouth. “Wuh?” he asked. Henry pointed to the top item on the piece of paper:
!?!
Rick furrowed the big pale brow beneath his sandstone hair-shelf, looked around the room. Unfurrowed, furrowed, looked around some more. “Holy criminy,” he whispered, picking up Henry’s pencil. Eliot droned on. Professor Eglantine lifted her eyes ceilingward as she flicked her paper-thin fingers in rapt arcs like a conductor. The mysterious girl/woman chewed her sweatshirt string and speed-kicked the toe of one running-shoed foot with the heel of the other, in a way that would have looked nervous if she wasn’t who she was. Whoever that was. Rick crossed out
25, 26
and wrote
22,
tapped the pencil against his chin, crossed out
22
and wrote
23.
Starblind pointed to
Seen her before?

Almost didn’t recognize. Tellman Rose. 1 yr ahead of me. Pella Affenlight.

Affenlight, Affenlight?

Rick confirmed this relation with a nod.
WILD,
he wrote.
Also crazy.

Meaning what? Been there?

Not me.

Shocking,
Starblind wrote.

Rick ignored the insult.
Ran off with dude who came to lecture on Greek architecture.
He went back and inserted
old bearded
before
dude.

Heard she had a bunch of kids.

Starblind glanced across the room, nodded thoughtfully.
Could explain the tits.

Henry was mostly ignoring this exchange, which had spilled over its original scrap of paper to cover a full page of his five-subject notebook. Mostly he was looking out the window, wondering whether it would rain. He could feel some part of himself willing it to rain. He’d never quite discarded the childhood belief that he could alter the course of distant or natural events with his mind. Westish Field was already early-April soggy; fifteen minutes of steady rain would probably suffice to postpone the game. The sky was growing darker by the second. A grainy electric grayness accumulated in the room, matching in tone the scratch and crackle of the old cassette player. When T. S. Eliot began to read the part about what the thunder said, Henry, who’d skimmed his homework and knew the thunder was coming, nonetheless assumed it to be a sign of his own unconscious influence.
Da da da shantih shantih shantih
and soon the sky would crack open and rain would whip the field and he wouldn’t have to go out there and try to throw the ball today. But instead the room’s light brightened half a shade as Eliot’s voice crackled into quietness, and Professor Eglantine dismissed the class. He and Rick and Starblind shouldered their backpacks and headed for the exit.