The Art of Fielding: A Novel (31 page)

“Me too.”

“Listen.” Coach Cox’s gruff voice sanded the gaps in the wind. “I heard you were low on cash.”

“Who told you that?”

“Nobody told me. Something I heard.”

“Did Henry say that?”

Coach Cox shrugged. “Let me loan you a few bucks,” he said. “Man’s gotta eat.”

Schwartz had a ten-meal-a-week pass for the dining hall. Lately he’d been eating ten meals a week, plus whatever he could sneak out in his backpack, which wasn’t much. The check-in ladies had never warmed to his charms—his size, an asset in other situations, roused their suspicion. Pella brought him ham-and-cheese sandwiches after her dishwashing shifts. She also offered to take him to dinner on her father’s credit card. Schwartz gobbled down the sandwiches but declined the dinners out. It was embarrassing, having your girlfriend provide for you. Mostly their dates consisted of holing up in Schwartz’s room, eating saltines and drinking Lipton tea while they read their books. Sometimes on dollar-pitcher night they went to Bartleby’s. Now that they’d started having sex he was spending a couple bucks a day on condoms. Condoms were expensive. Not that he was complaining.

“I don’t need any money,” he said.

“Bullshit.” Coach Cox began peeling hundreds off a fat wad held folded by a rubber band. He slipped some number of them against Schwartz’s palm.

“I can’t,” Schwartz said.

“The heck you can’t. Stick it in your pocket.”

Since long before Schwartz’s time, it had been rumored that Coach Cox had a couple million dollars socked away somewhere. “He fits the profile,” Tennant used to say. “Never wears anything but free WAD gear. Eats all his meals at McDonald’s. Drives a car with three hundred thousand miles on it. I’m telling you, the guy’s loaded.”

Schwartz had never been sure one way or the other. Coach Cox hardly ever talked about anything but baseball. A third baseman in high school, he was drafted by the Cubs and played a few years in the low minors, retired at twenty-two because, as he put it, “I didn’t have the stuff. Hell, I couldn’t even fake the stuff.” He moved to Milwaukee, became a line repairman for the phone company, got married, had a kid, became the Westish baseball coach, had another kid, got divorced, quit the phone company, and opened his own two-truck operation. Which, if you believed Harpooner lore, had netted him millions.

Their palms were pressed together, neither of them holding the bills that were in between. It was a risky standoff, given the wind. Schwartz wavered. With money, he could take Pella to dinner tomorrow night. He could make up for all the tea-and-cracker meals they’d had, not to mention the nights he’d canceled their tea-and-cracker plans to go hit ground balls to Henry under the lights of Westish Field. He could take her to Maison Robert, the overpriced French place he’d only ever been to with his history adviser. They could drink wine. He closed his hand, just a little.

Coach Cox stood up and exited the forecabin. The bills threatened to slide out of Schwartz’s grasp; he slipped them into the pocket of his windbreaker, riffling their edges with his fingers to get a sense of his newfound wealth. There were a lot: nine or ten. He closed his eyes and surrendered to the slow roll of the waves like liquid Vicodin.

It might’ve been a few seconds later, or an hour, but suddenly Henry stood in front of him, his pale-blue eyes filled with what could only be called anguish. His lower lip quivered and his soft chin squinched into a web of small rolling lines as he tried to keep from crying. “Skrimmer,” Schwartz said.

“Hey.” Henry’s voice cracked miserably; he coughed to clear his throat.

“You okay?”

Henry nodded. “Yeah.”

“You played well today.” Schwartz removed his headphones from around his neck and tucked them into his jacket pocket. “Arm looked strong, everything looked strong. We’re right where we need to be.”

“I cost us the game.”

“One lousy play,” Schwartz said. “We should have been up twelve by then.”

“But we weren’t.” Henry sat down beside Schwartz, bounced back up as if the aluminum scorched his ass. He clapped both hands to the top of his age-blackened Cardinals cap like a long-distance runner warding off a cramp. “What can I do?” he said. “What can I do?” His voice was quiet and disbelieving; awed, even, at the circumstances in which he found himself.

He bent his head back toward the ceiling and breathed out a short pained sigh or moan. He dropped his hands, worried them in quick circles, clapped them to the top of his head again. His movements were spastic and strange, the movements of a person whose thoughts have become toxic.

“It’s okay,” Schwartz said, “we’re okay,” but Henry’s feet had already carried him through the cabin’s rickety metal storm door, which banged behind him, and out onto the deck. Schwartz hauled himself to his feet to follow. By the time he got outside Henry was out of sight. Schwartz leaned heavily against the railing. The darkness was total, neither a star nor a sliver of moon alive in the sky. The Vicodin, though it did almost nothing to mute the pain in his shins and knees, coursed through his brain in a wonderfully gentle way. All he wanted was to be home, off his feet, curled like a child in bed with one hand on the soft little swell of Pella’s belly.

A cabin door opened, and the dark outline of a person appeared. The figure yawned loudly, muttered a few pleasant curses, and, using the still-open door as a shield against the wind, struck a match, revealing the meaty, splotchy, amiably dissolute face of Rick O’Shea, his lips cupped around a home-rolled cigarette. “Schwartzy?” he puffed, squinting into the darkness and letting the door bang shut behind him. “That you, pal?”

“It’s me.”

Rick ambled over and leaned against the railing, blew a pensive smoke-shape into the night. “Bitch-tit of a game.”

Schwartz nodded.

“You talk to Skrim?”

Before Schwartz could decide how to answer, a patter of footsteps became audible in the distance and another figure hove into view, this one with its silhouetted hands atop its head, silhouetted elbows spread like wings. The head nodded up and down, keeping time with unheard music. As it drew closer, Schwartz could hear short sharp breathing that bordered on hyperventilation.

“Skrimmer.” Schwartz laid a hand on the slick fabric of Henry’s warm-up jacket, but Henry kept moving without slowing down. “I’m just walking,” he said breathlessly, still nodding. “I’ll just walk.”

“You okay, Skrim?” Rick asked. “You got a cramp or something?”

“Just walking,” Henry said. “I’ll keep walking.”

He continued down the deck toward the stern and was absorbed into the darkness.

Rick took one last drag before flicking his cigarette butt over the rail. The orange flame bounced once, twice, against the hull and vanished. “Panic attack,” he said.

“What do we do?”

“My mom usually drinks a couple screwdrivers. She says the orange juice has a soothing effect.” Rick, seized by a thought, took off after Henry. Schwartz tried to follow, but his legs wouldn’t let him.

Before long Rick and Henry reappeared, walking fast, Henry still nodding with his hands locked atop his head, Rick with his face tucked close to Henry’s own, whispering. Schwartz stepped aside to let them pass.

A few laps later, Henry’s arms fell down by his sides, and Rick flashed Schwartz a thumbs-up sign. They made seven or eight more orbits, each at a slower pace than the last, as Henry wound down like a toy. When they finally stopped, the ferry was in sight of the dock.

34

L
ater that night, Schwartz and Pella lay in Schwartz’s bed. Even with some postgame painkillers in his system, even with the deadness that entered his legs after a game, he’d never had trouble before. Pella tried to coax him as they kissed, her fingertips trailing lightly along the flap of his boxers, but it was no use. “It’s okay,” she said. “Why don’t you tell me about it?”

“About what?”

“You know. Henry.”

“It’s bad,” Schwartz said. “I’m starting to worry that it’s bad. The last couple of games, he seemed to be getting over it. But today—today was bad.”

“Are you sure he’s not hurt? Maybe he hurt his arm and he’s afraid to tell anyone.”

“His arm’s fine. You should see the throws he makes at practice. Or even in games, on the bang-bang plays. When he doesn’t have time to think about it. His arm is a triumph of nature.”

Pella said nothing. The stertor of Meat’s breathing came softly, almost soothingly, through the wall. “It’s always the easy plays,” Schwartz said, “the balls hit right at him. You can see the gears spinning:
Am I gonna screw this up? Maybe I’m gonna screw this up.
I just want to grab him by the shoulders and shake it out of him. He’s creating this whole problem out of nothing. Nothing.”

Pella nestled closer, again passed her hand against the front of his boxers. In the three-quarters dark of the bedroom he could see the extra-dark protrusion of her nearer nipple beneath the sheet. There wasn’t an inch of her body that he didn’t desire. She didn’t like her legs, thought they were short and stubby, her ankles too thick to be feminine—sheer stupidity, from Schwartz’s point of view. If anything he wanted there to be more of her, more and more Pella to anchor him to the world.

Since the first time they’d had sex they’d never not had sex. But tonight it wasn’t happening. He was too tired, too tense, had popped one too many pills on the ferry. It was bound to happen eventually, this slip toward domesticity—was a normal and natural and even potentially comforting development, but Schwartz could tell this wasn’t the night for it. Pella would think they weren’t having sex because he was worried about Henry. That was the last thing he wanted her to think, even if it was true.

She had said it was okay, but here she was, persisting. She slid her fingers inside the flap of his boxers and tickled the crease where his pelvis met his thigh. Schwartz tried to feel it. Missiles, redwoods, the Washington Monument.
Come on,
he thought,
one time.

He had a few stray Viagra in the bottom drawer of his broken-down dresser beneath his jeans. No shame in that, was there? Sometimes—okay, usually—you were drunk when you brought someone home. Sometimes the girl was too klutzy, or too shrill, or just plain not that sexy. Sometimes you needed a little extra. Part of the relief of meeting Pella was the way he responded to her so fully, so fundamentally—he’d forgotten the pills were even there. But he wished he’d taken one tonight.

Pella withdrew her hand to his belly, outside his T-shirt. Schwartz searched her little sigh for evidence of exasperation—he found some, but if you corrected for paranoia it might as easily have been a yawn.

“It’s a block,” she said. “Like writer’s block. Or stage fright.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe he should be seeing somebody.”

“He is seeing somebody,” Mike said. “Me.”

“You know what I mean. A professional.”

Schwartz bristled. “Henry wouldn’t go for that.”

“He would if you told him to.”

“It would scare him. He’d think there was something wrong with him.”

“Well, isn’t there?”

“He’ll be fine. He just needs to relax.”

Pella’s fingers brushed his boxers again. “Maybe you should relax a little.”

Schwartz flinched. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“What’s what supposed to mean?”

“About me needing to relax.”

“Nothing. You just seem kind of tense tonight.”

It was the
tonight
that got Schwartz. He’d been tense all month. Hell, he’d been tense all his life. What was so goddamn remarkable about
tonight?

“I’m not tense.”

“Fine,” Pella said. “Whatever.”

The smallness of the bed enforced an awkward closeness. Schwartz was wedged between Pella and the wall. In lieu of a shade, a dirt-gray sheet hung down over the window, barely dimming the lights of the neighbor’s garage.

Since moving out of the dorms he’d only occasionally brought a girl back here—better to go to the girl’s place, with all those pillows and photo albums and unguessable scents, the fresh sheets on the bed and the carefully labeled class binders stacked on the shelf. In the room of a girl at a place like Westish, the presence of family was almost always palpable, not just in the framed photographs but in the careful replication of a childhood room, updated for post-adolescence; the holdover stuffed animals, the condom box or plastic pastel birth-control wheel left in plain view in tribute to the parent who wasn’t there to object. Those absent families soothed Schwartz; for a few hours, he imagined them as his own.

“He should see a psychologist,” Pella said. “A behavioral therapist. Someone who deals with athletes. He wouldn’t have to free-associate about his mother or anything.”

“Maybe that’s what he needs. To free-associate about his mother.”

“I’m being serious,” Pella said.

“So am I,” said Schwartz, but he wasn’t. For some reason Pella’s attempted intervention was really pissing him off. He tried to find a softer, more sincere way of speaking. “Okay, a therapist. But who’s going to pay for that?”