The Art of Fielding

  “That’s how it goes, vendejo! That’s how it goes!”

  The outfielders finished their portion of the drill and sprinted toward the dugout, whooping like madmen as they ran. As each infielder left the diamond he fielded a faux bunt rolled out by Coach Cox. Henry nudged Izzy before his turn. “Watch this.” He charged at full speed, barehanded the ball, and whipped it behind his back to Rick, never looking or breaking stride as he ran off the field and down the dugout stairs. Perfect.

  Owen was already folded into his favorite corner of the dugout, reading light clipped to the brim of his cap, book in hand. He looked up at Henry and smiled. “How’s the wing, as the natives say?”

  Henry nodded. “Wing’s A-OK.”

  “Shall we do our elaborate handshake?”

  “Let’s.”

  Owen stood, tenting his book on the bench—The Art of Fielding. Their handshake involved both hands and both elbows, a kiss on the cheek, mock punches to the stomach, something resembling patty-cake, and a lot of kung fu–style bowing. Henry took his eye black from his bag and drew a line beneath each eye. He removed his cap, gave the sweat-softened brim a single squeeze, and placed it back on his head. He spit a few drops of saliva into Zero’s well-worn pocket and kneaded them in with his fist. Ready. The home-plate umpire strapped on his chest protector. “Two minutes, coaches.”

  Coach Cox wasn’t much for pregame speeches. “Here’s the lineup, men. Starblind Phlox Skrimmer. Schwartz O’Shea Boddington. Quisp Guladni Kim. No reason we can’t handle these guys. Schwartzy, you got anything to add?”

  Schwartz reached down and plucked an index card out of his shin-guard knee-flap. “Schiller,” he said. “ ‘Man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man. And he is only completely a man when he plays.’ ” Schwartz paused and passed his eyes around the huddle slowly, allowing them to settle on each of his teammates’ faces, intense but benevolent. Whatever remained of the Harpooners’ nervousness burned away like gas when the pilot’s lit. “We’ve done the work. We ran and lifted and puked our guts out. We built this program out of nothing. We made ourselves proud to put on this uniform. We don’t have a single goddamn thing left to prove to anyone. We’re proven. Today we play.” He extended a hand into the center of the huddle. He looked at Henry and smiled. “Play on three. Onetwothree—”

  “PLAY!”

  “Kill the douchetards,” Owen said.

  47

  Pella swam six laps, rested on the edge of the pool, swam six more. Chlorine sluiced neatly through her sinuses. Her head felt clear. She used to swim miles at a time, used to have a sleek stomach and slender, powerful arms—but oh well. She hoisted herself from the pool, triceps quivering, and stretched on the deck while she dripped dry. She could feel the lifeguard watching her half surreptitiously from his high perch, ignoring the splashing faculty brats in the shallow end for as long as it took her to cross the slick tile toward the locker room. As she passed his chair she peeled off her bathing cap and shook her hair down over her shoulders. Pride goeth.

  She showered and dressed and headed outside, hair still wet, Westish windbreaker zipped to her chin. She’d never been to the baseball diamond but she could see the crowd gathered there in the distance, past the grassy practice fields. A copy of the new Murakami novel, its cover an opulent yellow, poked out of her jacket pocket, bought at the campus bookstore to commemorate her first-ever paycheck.

  All over campus the flyers were taped to windows and maples and bulletin boards: WESTISH VS. COSHWALE! SUPPORT THE HARPOONERS! APARICIO RODRIGUEZ! The students who came through the dining-hall serving line lately talked about little else. Pella was going as a conciliatory gesture—she wanted to support Mike, and she wanted him to see her in the stands, supporting him, and to feel a little remorse at the way they’d fought. She certainly wasn’t going to watch baseball, which among team sports struck her as singularly boring. It was so slow, so finicky. This one a ball, that one a strike, but they all looked the same. When she was young, her dad had taken her a few times to Fenway Park, and she remembered the trips fondly—the sizzle of onions and peppers on vendors’ carts along Lansdowne, the beach balls bounding gaily through the bleachers, the thrilling crush of impossibly tall, squawking women in the foul-smelling bathroom while her dad was forced to wait outside—but those Sunday afternoons weren’t really about baseball, for her or for him; they were cultural sallies, like trips to the symphony or the MFA.

  “Hey,” someone yelled amid a flurry of voices, “watch yourself!” A checkered ball skidded toward Pella, and she realized she was trespassing on an intramural soccer game. “Sorry,” she mumbled, mostly to herself. She was about to kick the ball as a kind of apology, but the girl who’d yelled was closing in. “Move!” she shrieked, baring her tiny teeth. Pella sidestepped the ball, then the girl, and hurried toward the safety of the orange cones that marked the out-of-bounds. She sighed, feeling glad to have averted catastrophe, then fifty yards later realized she’d dropped her book on the field.

  WESTISH 2, VI ITOR 0. Hooray, hooray. The field was ringed with people, not as many as at a Red Sox game, but lots—a thousand, maybe more. Pella spotted a few empty seats in the west-facing bleachers, which were otherwise full of people dressed in a fierce beet red. She climbed up to an empty patch of aluminum in the fifth row, her windbreaker catching snotty glances from the people she squeezed past on the way.

  She scanned the field for Mike. There he was, sandwiched between the beet-red-clad hitter and the black-clad umpire, squatting on his haunches in the dirt, his face hidden behind a grid of metal bars. The pitcher—the handsome blond guy from Professor Eglantine’s class who thought he was God’s gift—threw the ball. It looked like a good pitch, then dropped suddenly into the dirt. The batter swung and missed. The Westish fans cheered. Mike flung himself down to smother the ball. It bounced up and hit him square in the chest. This was fun? No wonder his knees hurt all the time. And with that bat flashing inches from his face.

  On the next pitch, the batter, one of the VI ITORS, lofted a fly ball far into the outfield. Pella felt sorry for the poor outfielder as he listed in uncertain circles—who could catch a ball like that, a speck in the shredded clouds?—but at the last moment he lifted his glove, and the ball, improbably, dropped in. Pella jumped to her feet to cheer. Her bleachermates shot her dirty looks.

  As the Westish players jogged off the field, Mike flipped up his mask and Pella saw that he’d shaved his beard. He looked as handsome as she’d imagined he would, even with that weird black makeup smeared beneath his eyes, even with his cheeks strafed red with razor burn. He wasn’t one of those guys who needed a beard to disguise a weak chin or acne or the fact that he had no lips. He had gorgeous, model-caliber lips, and cheekbones too. But why had he done it now? She’d hinted at it a hundred times, made a joke of it, even while trying not to seem to care too much. And he’d just grunted, that famous Mike Schwartz grunt. And then as soon as they stopped seeing each other he went and did it. For the next girl, maybe. Or the new girl.

  “We need to start hitting some balls at Skrimshander,” said the man sitting behind Pella. “Let him boot a few.”

  His neighbor chuckled.

  “I’m not kidding. Apparently the kid’s lost it. You don’t read Tom Parsons’s blog?”

  “We’re talking about the shortstop with the streak? The kid all the scouts are after?”

  “Not anymore they aren’t. According to Tom Parsons the scouts started sniffing around and he started thinking about it. You know what happens when that happens.”

  “Think yourself out of a job.”

  “Bingo.”

  “I bet the kid pulls it together, though. He’s the best I’ve seen in this league. He’s like an acrobat out there.”

  “Care to put your money where your mouth is?”

  “Meaning?”

  “Hundred says he chucks one in the stands before this game ends.”

  The second guy thought about it. Come on, s
econd guy! Pella silently cheered. Show that first guy who’s boss! “Guess not,” he said at last. “Shame, though. Kid was fun to watch.”

  Before she knew what she was doing, Pella had whirled toward Guy #1: “You’re on.”

  He looked like you’d expect him to look: an overfed shiny-cheeked guy in a beet-red golf shirt. He clutched his plastic plate of grilled shrimp in his stubby arms and leaned away like she was feral: “I’m what?”

  Pella patted the thin sheaf of twenties in her windbreaker pocket. Easy come, easy go. “You’re on,” she said evenly. “Hundred says Henry won’t chuck one in the stands.” She held her hand out to shake. It hung there in the air.

  Guy #2 grinned and winked at Pella, clapped Guy #1 on the back. “Cat got your tongue, Gary? Sounds like a wager to me.”

  Gary arranged his pudgy features into something resembling a smirk. “Fine. You’re on.” His handshake was either naturally effete or a form of condescension to the fact that she was a woman. Pella made a show of wiping her hand on her jacket afterward.

  “Good luck to your boyfriend,” Guy #2 said, referring to Henry.

  Pella flicked her eyes toward Gary. “Good luck to yours.” Several people sitting nearby guffawed. Nothing like some casual homophobia to win over a crowd.

  As she turned around she glimpsed through the fence, over on the Westish side, that oh-so-familiar head of silver-flecked hair. He was so extravagantly busy all the time, holed up in his office from four a.m. till evening every day, too busy to show up to dinner last night—and yet he had an awful lot of time to spend watching baseball. He’d been out later than Pella, and then up and out the door before she awoke—unless he hadn’t come home at all. Who knew what his personal life was like these days? He never spoke of it, and even her gentlest teasings about Genevieve Wister had been met by a colorless silence.

  He was sitting in the front row of bleachers behind the home dugout, flanked by a big Nordic guy in a leather jacket and a slender Latino man who, like her father, was dressed in a jacket and tie. Her dad looked dashing as always, he ruled the school, but among their trio it was the Latino man who seemed somehow to be the leader. He had the graceful, upright posture of a monk, shoulders back, hands folded placidly in his lap. When he spoke, the two taller men leaned toward him, straining to hear, and nodded eagerly. Pella imagined him divulging great truths with extreme modesty, and at extremely low volume.

  After a few minutes her father excused himself. He stood and stretched and walked along the chain-link fence, shaking hands with parents and students, exchanging pleasantries, in full baby-kissing mode, until he reached the spot where the fence abutted the far end of the dugout. There, leaned against the inside of the fence as if waiting for him, stood Owen Dunne.

  Pella felt intensely compelled by whatever was about to occur. Her father slowed his steps, paused, said something. Owen, his eyes on the field, index finger preserving a spot in his book, replied from the side of his mouth. Her dad declined his head and smiled a smile that threatened to bloom into laughter but didn’t, quite. They stood and looked out at the field together.

  Something happened in the game—a cheer shot through the Westish bleachers while the beet-red people around Pella groaned. Owen broke the tableau with a single sidelong word and disappeared down the dugout steps. Her dad lingered at the fence, as if savoring the spot where Owen once stood, the look on his face a pensive one of puppy-dog love.

  Could it be? At first she tried to dismiss the thought—it seemed less an intuition than a flash of insanity. But it wouldn’t go away. It wasn’t just the look on his face, though that look said all that could be said. It wasn’t just the way he and Owen had stood there at the fence, communicating so subtly, alone among a thousand people. It was her dad clambering into the ambulance to accompany Owen to the hospital; his obvious jitters when Owen and Genevieve came for drinks; his obvious indifference to Genevieve thereafter; his emergence from that dormitory last night, with Owen moments behind; the fact that he hadn’t been home when she awoke this morning. If you swapped out just one premise—the premise that her dad was straight—it was just too obvious. Of course, that was literally the premise on which her life was based.

  A woman in a Westish sweatshirt approached her dad and tapped his elbow. Absently, reluctantly, he left off thinking about Owen and turned to engage the woman. Pella, watching him there on the other side of the diamond, two lengths of fence between them, was awash in anger and fear. Her dad had lied to her, had lied and lied, had caused everything to change. But he was also in danger—he’d forgotten himself, made himself too vulnerable, or else he wouldn’t be taking these foolish risks, talking to Owen in public, falling in love. She felt exhausted. She wanted to curl up on the bleachers and go to sleep, but there wasn’t any room.

  Gary stuck his face over her shoulder, his breath reeking of shrimp and Tabasco. “You lucked out on that one,” he said.

  48

  The throw was high and fluttering higher. Henry wanted it back as soon as it left his hand; even as he finished his follow-through his fingertips grasped after the ball, as if he could bring it back. Motherfucker.

  It seemed destined to sail over the fence and into the bleachers until Rick O’Shea somehow detached his two-hundred-plus beer-bellied pounds from the earth—it was impressive, how much air that leap put beneath his spikes—and snow-coned the ball with the fringe of his extralong mitt. Rick landed, spun, and slapped a tag on the hustling runner. One out.

  Henry lifted two fingers in sheepish gratitude. Rick nodded and winked—No sweat, little buddy—and whipped the ball back to Henry to begin the around-the-horn.

  Henry spun the ball in his throwing hand. It felt cold and slick and alien. He tucked his glove under his arm and worked the ball over with both hands, trying to knead some life into it. Technically illegal, only pitchers could do that, but the umps weren’t going to stop him. A minute ago he’d felt fine, or thought he felt fine, but now the possibility of failure had entered his mind, and the difference between possible failure and inevitable failure felt razor slight. His lungs clenched like he was standing in the lake to his armpits.

  Relax, let it go. He’d had one bad throw in him and he’d gotten it out of his system. Rick had saved his butt. They were ahead 2 to 0. He pushed the bad throw aside, steadied his breathing, tossed the ball to Ajay. Turned around and flashed an index finger at Quisp in left: one out. He could see without seeing Aparicio in the stands, his sister, his parents, Coach Hinterberg in the bright-green cap of Lankton High, a private bit of rooting amid all the red and blue. Owen’s voice came floating out over the grass: “Henry, you are skilled! We exhort you!”

  He pummeled his glove with his fist, dropped into his shallow crouch. Starblind threw a backdoor curve that looked like it caught the corner. The ump called it a ball. “Lookedgoodlookedgoodlookedrealgood!” cheered Henry. Stay up, stay vocal. Don’t wither, don’t withdraw. “That’s your spot, Adam, that’s your spot. Won’t get robbed again.” The more guys Starblind strikes out, the fewer ground balls get hit to me. Henry caught himself thinking this and chastised himself, caught himself chastising himself and tried to quiet his mind.

  The next hitter rapped a single to center. At least if it’s hit to me now I won’t have to throw to first, I can flip to Ajay for the force. If it’s hit to Ajay I cover and make the turn. I haven’t had trouble making the turn.

  Quiet quiet quiet.

  The Coshwale fans were standing, whistling, stomping their feet. Ready to rally. Sweat poured down Starblind’s temples as he took the sign from Schwartz. He checked the runner and fired a wicked two-seam fastball that was tailing in. The batter’s front foot lifted and Henry knew where the ball was headed before the swing was half finished, a sharp grounder three steps to his left, ideal for a double play. He was there waiting when the ball arrived. Ajay darted over to cover second. Henry, still low in his crouch, pivoted and whipped his arm sidelong across his body, just as he’d practiced so many th
ousands of times, but at the last moment he sensed the throw would be too hard for Ajay to handle, so he tried to decelerate slightly, but no, that was wrong too, but it was too late, the ball left his hand and began sliding rightward, out into the path of the charging runner, and Ajay, all five-foot-five of him, tried to stretch to make the catch, but the ball caught the tip of his glove and scooted into short right field as the hard-sliding runner took out his legs and sent him flying ass over teakettle. By the time Sooty Kim chased down the ball the runners were coasting into second and third. Ajay lay flat on his back in the dust, groaning. A voice rang out from the Coshwale dugout: “Thanks, Henry!”

  GARY STUCK HIS FACE OVER Pella’s shoulder again. “We won’t count that one.”

  Her dad had returned to his seat between the blond guy and the self-possessed Latino man. “How could we count it?” Pella said angrily. “It didn’t go in the stands.”

  “Plenty of time for that. It’s only the third inning.”

  AJAY POPPED TO HIS FEET and waved off the trainer. Schwartz called time and moseyed out to the mound, his leisurely pace meant to convey and instill a sense of calm. He motioned for the infielders to join him. “Play back,” he instructed. “We’ll give up that one run.”

  Starblind gave a curt caustic chuckle, stared a hole in Henry. “We’ll give up more than that, we don’t get our shit together.”

  “Just keep throwing like you’re throwing,” Schwartz said mildly. “We’ll make the plays.”

  Starblind spat on the ground between them. “Aye aye, Captain.”

  The next batter struck out. Two down. Let’s just get out of this inning, Henry thought. Get back to the dugout, regroup.

  First pitch, fastball. Henry saw, with his usual prescience, where the ball was headed: right at him. Easiest play in the world. He charged and fielded it at sternum height, just at the lip of the infield grass. Rick stretched toward him, offering his huge mitt as a target. The batter was barely a third of the way down the line. Plenty of time. Henry slide-stepped, pumped his arm.