The Art of Fielding: A Novel (62 page)

Arsch nodded resolutely, bat already in hand. “Filthy?” he muttered to himself, staring out toward the mound. “I’ll show him filthy.”

The bullpen phone rang. Coach Cox reached down into the dugout and grabbed the receiver. “Mike?” he said. “Mike’s pretty goddamn busy right now.” He moved to hang up the phone, then brought it back to his ear. “Hey. Whoa. Just calm down a sec.” Pause. “Hang on. Hang on. I’ll get him.”

Henry kept one eye on Arsch as the big man stepped in against meek-looking Dougal, and one on Schwartz, who pressed the phone to one ear and a grimy hand to the other to muffle his teammates’ chatter. Schwartz was watching the field too, initially—Arsch took a called strike—but his eyes quickly fell to the concrete floor. “Are you sure?” he said quietly.

Ball one. Schwartz sank down on the bench, ten feet away from Henry.

“Baby. Oh, baby. I’m so sorry.”

His grimy hand made a slow pass over his widow’s peak, fell helplessly into his lap. He was wearing all of his gear except for his mask. He spoke a few more words into the phone, too softly for Henry to hear, and handed the receiver to Jensen to hang up.

Meat struck out swinging. Two outs left in the season. Owen shut his book and stood, stretched his arms over his head, fingers woven together, and hummed a little ditty; he would bat if Starblind or Izzy reached base. Henry looked at Schwartz, who stared down at the squashed paper cones that littered the floor.

Owen pulled his batting gloves from his back pockets, slapped them decisively against his thighs, and headed for the bat rack. “Buddha,” Schwartz said softly. Owen turned around.

Schwartz was wearing a look of indecision that Henry had never seen on him before. “Buddha,” he repeated, even more softly. “That was Pella. It’s about her dad. Mrs. McCallister found him this morning. He’s…” Schwartz’s voice caught. Deep furrows ran through the dirt on his forehead. Henry already knew—felt like he’d known all day—what he was going to say. “He’s dead.”

Owen froze. “You’re joking.”

“No.”

They stared at each other, Owen’s smoke-gray eyes against Schwartz’s big amber ones, for what felt like forever. Starblind’s bat made a loud promising
ping.
Henry glanced up to see the Amherst third baseman wrap his glove around a hard line drive. Two outs. Starblind yelped in anguish and pounded his bat into home plate. Owen, his face expressionless, lowered his eyes and nodded, as if to say,
Okay. I believe you.

“I’m sorry,” Schwartz said.

“Why? Did you kill him?” Owen swam blankly past Schwartz and sank down on the bench. Schwartz sat down beside him. Henry slid nearer, so that the three of them were in a row, Owen bent forward in the center. “You’re on deck,” Henry said.

“So?”

“So…” Henry looked to Schwartz for help, but Schwartz either didn’t notice or wouldn’t meet his eye. Henry wanted to tell Owen to go get a hit for President Affenlight, that that was all he could do right now, that they would work through the rest later, but the words were absurd and they dried on his lips. He patted Owen weakly on the back. “I’ll tell Coach Cox.”

Izzy had one foot in the batter’s box and was performing his usual pre-at-bat ritual—five signs of the cross at maximum speed. “Izzy!” Henry yelled from the dugout steps. “Step out!” His voice dissolved into the crowd’s roar.
“Izzy! Step out!”

Izzy, confused, complied. Henry ran out to Coach Cox and tried to explain that President Affenlight was dead and therefore Owen couldn’t bat. Coach Cox stroked his mustache, annoyed and uncomprehending.

“Owen can’t bat,” Henry said. “He just can’t.”

“Why the goddamn not?”

“Believe me,” Henry pleaded. “He just can’t.”

Coach Cox looked up and down the dugout. The only guys left on the bench were the guys who rarely played—guys who had zero chance against a dealer of filth like Dougal. “Grab a bat.”

“Me?”
Henry said. “But Coach… I’m not even wearing a cup.”

“You want mine? Grab a bat and get a goddamn hit, Skrimshander.”

Oh Jesus,
Henry thought. He didn’t know what to wish for. If he didn’t get to hit, it would be because Izzy made an out and the game was over. If he did get to hit, he was toast. He hurried to the bat rack to find a bat—he chose a lighter one than usual, to match his diminished strength—and took a few tentative swipes at the evening air. The bat felt like lead in his hands.

Dougal rocked and fired. The pitch was a fastball, low and outside. Izzy, overmatched, stuck out the bat. The ball looped torpidly over the second baseman’s head and dropped in shallow right-center for a single.
Oh boy.

Coach Cox pulled his crumpled lineup card from his back pocket and waved at the plate umpire. Dougal stomped pissily around the back of the mound, flipping the rosin bag with the backs of his fingers. Henry squeezed into a batting helmet and slowly made his way toward home plate. He dipped one foot inside the batter’s box, as if testing the temperature of a pool.

“Let’s go, son,” growled the umpire. “Season can’t last forever.”

Henry stepped into the box, tapped the Harpooner on his chest three times. He felt less muscle than he’d grown to expect beneath the starchy fabric. Dougal peered in, agreed to a sign. The Amherst crowd started a chant. The first pitch, an absolutely filthy slider, darted by for a strike.

Henry knew that he was toast. Dougal could throw that filthy pitch twice more, and he wouldn’t come close to hitting it. It was a pro-quality slider, had broken a foot or more while moving outlandishly fast. The timing required to hit a pitch like that was a matter not just of skill but of constant practice. A day off made it tough; a month off made it impossible. Schwartzy might someday have forgiven him for what he’d done with Pella, but now he’d never know—because Schwartz, standing there in the on-deck circle with two weighted bats on his shoulder, would never forgive him for this.

He decided in advance to swing at the second pitch, if only to give Dougal something to think about. Dougal wiped the sweat from his forehead, checked Izzy at first. The pitch was another slider, identical to the first. Henry swung and missed. Two strikes.

Still, he must have done something to catch Dougal’s eye, because Dougal shook off one sign, and then another, and then beckoned for the catcher, who called time and jogged out to confer. The Amherst fans were going crazy. Dougal lifted his glove to his face and spoke through the latticed weave of the webbing, to keep Henry from reading his lips. A burst of affectionate sympathy surged through Henry; somehow all of a sudden, and maybe because he felt so light-headed, it occurred to him that he and Dougal were brothers, members of a tribe of unassuming, live-armed guys, guys who looked like nobodies but carried their force on the inside and were determined to beat you, would do anything to beat you, would kill themselves to beat you, and he knew where Dougal disagreed with his catcher. The catcher figured Henry was an easy mark—wanted to finish him off right away, with another slider down the pipe. The catcher was probably right. But Dougal saw something else in Henry, smelled a whiff of danger
(We are brothers, Dougal, brothers… ),
and felt a need to set him up for the kill—to show the fastball high and tight, before finishing with the slider low and away. It was flattering, in a way, that a pitcher like Dougal would go to such trouble to strike him out. And it was foolish, in a way, for Dougal to be so crafty, to insist on the pride of his craft, to try to orchestrate things, instead of simply letting Henry beat himself.

Henry set up farther from home plate than usual, to encourage Dougal to throw his high tight fastball a little tighter than he otherwise might. He went through his age-old routine—touch the far black of the plate with the bat head, tap the Harpooner on his breast three times, make a single, level pass of the bat through the zone—but it had a different meaning now, a counterfeit meaning, or no meaning at all, since he had no intention of swinging at the pitch.

Dougal checked the runner, began his elegant efficient slide-step toward home. Henry gritted his teeth. It was weird how clear and clean the air felt. His mind subsided into something like prayer.
Forgive me, Schwartzy, for quitting the team.
He stepped sharply toward home plate, dipping his shoulder as he did so, as if expecting, diving into, a slider low and away.

76

H
is first thought was that he was President Affenlight and that he had died, but the mere fact of thinking such a thing meant that it couldn’t be true. Wherever he was was dark. He tried to lift his left arm to touch his head where it hurt, but the movement was arrested by two tubes that were taped to his forearm. A bitter taste stung his mouth. Schwartz was sitting in a chair by the bed, motionless in the dark.

The simple act of moving his jaw sent shocks of diabolical pain through his brain, worse than anything he’d ever felt. When he finally managed to speak, the words came out soft and slurred. “Who won?”

Schwartz cocked his head. “You don’t remember?”

“No.” He remembered the pitch, a tiny white pellet shoulder-high and rising. He remembered trying to spin away so it would catch him on the helmet rather than flush in the face.

“You scored the winning run,” Schwartz said, frowning.

“I did?”

“That fastball hit you square on the earflap. Everybody in the park thought you were dead. Me included. But you bounced right up and ran to first. The trainers tried to check you out, but you wouldn’t let them.
Play ball,
you kept saying.
Play ball!
Over and over again. Coach Cox tried to send Loonie in to pinch-run, but you yelled at him till he went back to the dugout.”

Henry didn’t remember any of that. “Then what happened?”

“Dougal got ejected. He screamed bloody murder about it, but the benches had been warned, and he was gone. They brought in their second-best guy.

“I knocked the first pitch off the wall. I almost hit it too hard, it caromed straight back to the left fielder. But you were flying. I’ve never seen you move that fast. By the time I got to first you were rounding third. Coach Cox tried to hold you, but you never even looked at him.

“You beat the tag by half an inch. Everybody piled on top of you, including Coach Cox. Heck, half the parents were on that pile. And when everybody else got up, you didn’t.”

Henry studied Schwartz’s face, or what he could see of it, in the dimness. To see if he was telling the truth, not that Schwartz ever lied; to see in what ratio the sadness of Affenlight’s death was mixed with the joy of winning the national championship; to see if his friend might be beginning to forgive him.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” Schwartz said sternly.

“Done what?”

“You know what. Eaten that pitch.”

Henry’s idiot lips were taking forever to form the sounds of words. “I thought it was a slider.”

“Bullshit.”

He tried to cover his mouth as he retched, but the tubes inhibited his movement. A few bile-wet Rice Krispies spilled over his lower lip and down his chin.

“Bullshit,” Schwartz repeated. “I saw it live and I saw it on
SportsCenter
while I was sitting in the goddamn waiting room at the goddamn ER. You dove into that thing like it was a swimming pool.”

Henry didn’t say anything.

“You even set up away from the plate, so he’d have to come farther inside to buzz you. You baited him into it.”

Henry wasn’t going to admit it any more than he was going to argue with it.

“What were you thinking, Henry? How many bodies you want to pile up in one day?”

Schwartz was pissed, no doubt about that, though he hadn’t raised his voice and had barely twitched a muscle, as if he’d reached such a state of exhaustion that he’d never move or yell again. “What about the Buddha? Poor Buddha. He just found out about Affenlight—and now he’s got to sit there and watch you try to kill yourself? You could have just stayed home.”

“I thought I’d be able to turn my shoulder into it, get a free base that way,” Henry said. “I didn’t expect him to throw it so high.”

“Well, Dougal’s a crazy bastard. Just not as crazy as you.”

This was the gentlest thing Schwartz had said. An odd giddiness was tickling up and down Henry’s spine, despite the intensity of his headache. “I didn’t have a lot of options out there,” he said.

“Swing and miss. Get us on a plane back home. That was an option.”

“Aren’t you glad you won?”

Behind the shut curtain of the room’s lone window, a little light was beginning to appear. Schwartz’s watch, glowing yellow-green in the grayness, read 5:23—Henry felt too confused to subtract forty-two, but it was four-something in the morning.

“Yes,” Schwartz finally said. “I am.”

The giddiness was washing over Henry from his toes up to his neck. It felt beautiful, like angel-song. Maybe in some partial way, and despite Schwartz’s anger, Henry had redeemed himself in the eyes of his friend.

The giddiness deepened into bliss. His limbs lacked energy to move, but a different type of energy was moving through them, originating somewhere in his bones and organs and spilling outward, scrubbing and scouring him from within, suffusing him to his skin. Maybe it was Schwartz’s presence, maybe it was the fact that the Harpooners had won the national championship—but the bliss laughed at those things, and Henry realized that they were irrelevant where the bliss was concerned. Maybe this was what dying felt like.