“Shit. I mean, shoot.” He picked the penny up, tossed it, and took another swing. He missed again. “Shoot.” He tossed the penny and swung wild again. “Shoot!” He glanced toward Kohn, then away, his cheeks reddening. “I can hit it,” he assured Kohn. He pointed, and Kohn saw that the ground before him was sprinkled lightly with pennies.
“You have a game today?” said Kohn. He had spoken to no one but his lawyer in days, and the bassoon twang of his voice struck his ears oddly. He unzipped his hood a little.
“No, I have practice. Today’s the first day.”
“In the rain?”
“It’s not raining.” Kohn guessed that he was right; it had rained all winter, every day but January 11 and February 24, from early December to mid-March, a magical-realist deluge that made fence posts sprout green leaves and restored Chubb Lake, lost thirty years earlier to a failed Army Corps of Engineers drainage project. This spring weather was something different, hardly weather at all—a thin, drifting blanket of sparkling grayness that would not prevent islanders from mowing their lawns, washing their cars, or working on their home-run swings. Again Bengt tossed the elusive cent into the air. This time he connected, and the coin chimed an E-flat against the tube. It hooked foul, toward the Civic, ricocheted, and landed in the mud ten feet from Bengt’s shoes, leaving a white scar in the blue flank of the car. “Yes!” he cried grimly. He reached into his pocket, fished around, and brought out another penny. “I suck.”
“Pennies are small.”
“Baseballs are small, too,” Bengt observed. He probed at the mud with the end of his pipe. “I’d like to shoot a crossbow one time,” he went on irrelevantly. He operated an invisible crank, took aim along the stock of his PVC pipe, and then let a bolt fly with a thwok! of his tongue. He looked down at his feet. “These shoes were my uncle Lars’s. I know they’re stupid-looking.”
“No,” said Kohn. “Not really.” Kohn looked at his wristwatch. A few seconds later he looked at it again. Lately he was always checking his watch, but the next moment he never seemed to remember what it had told him.
“Huh,” said Bengt finally. “Well, okay. I’m late now. I guess I must be pretty late. I guess I might as well not go. I hate baseball.” He glanced up at Kohn, then away, looking to see if he had shocked Kohn. Kohn tried to look shocked. “I’m much more interested in archery.”
“Is your mom driving you?”
“She’s with my gran in the hospital. She fell off a step stool in the kitchen, my gran I mean, and broke her hip. My uncle Lars is staying with me supposally but I don’t know where he is. I called Tommy Latrobe and his dad is supposed to come over to pick me up. But I guess they forgot.”
Bengt tossed a penny and connected again, pulling it to the left but keeping it more or less fair this time. Then he dug down into his pocket again.
“You sure have a lot of pennies in there,” Kohn said.
Bengt brought out a handful of fifty-cent penny rolls, in crisp, tight, red-and-white wrappers. He held them out for Kohn to inspect, then slipped all but one back into his pocket. From this one he peeled down a quarter-inch of wrapper, and loosened another handful of coins.
“They were my dad’s,” he said. “My mom said he used to have a lot of time on his hands. On the boats.” The Chubb Island Thorkelsons ran an outfit that went up to Alaska, rounded up ice floes, and drove them to Japan, where they were sold, suitably shaved and crushed, in elegant bars. Wondrous the things a Japanese person would buy. “There’s a whole box of penny rolls under my mom’s bed.” He tossed a penny, swung, and drove it toward the ivy-or vinyl-covered wall of his imagination.
“Don’t hit them into the mud!” Kohn was appalled. “Your father’s pennies!”
“I don’t need them.”
Bengt pressed another penny between his thumb and forefinger and tossed it into the air. He brandished the length of pipe and reached back to take his hack. Kohn reached out and grabbed hold of his wrist and cupped the spinning penny like a moth. The boy looked at him, astonished. He wrenched his hand away and gave it a shake. His arm bore briefly the pale impression of Kohn’s fingers.
“Oh, my God, I’m sorry,” said Kohn, surprised by himself. They were only pennies. They rolled under the refrigerators of the world, wedged themselves into the joints of desk drawers, disappeared into the bowels of auto seats, slipped behind breakfronts, bureaus, and toilets. No one bothered to fish them out. They fell from the hands of careless pedestrians and lay for hours on the sidewalk without anyone stopping to pick them up. Kohn himself had tossed ringing handfuls into the garbage. “Did I hurt you? God, I’m sorry. Let me give you a ride to practice. I’m on my way into town.”
Bengt studied Kohn, his forehead wrinkling. He checked Kohn’s adequate build. He appraised Kohn’s knotted, strong-looking hands. “Do you like baseball?” he said.
Kohn considered the question. He had first come to the game at the age of eight, in Washington, D.C., and had fallen in love with Frank Howard, but at the end of the season Howard and the Senators had departed for Texas. That November, his parents had ended their own marriage. The candy manufacturer for whom Mr. Kohn worked as an accountant transferred him to Pittsburgh. After a nasty legal battle the young Kohn went with him. The following spring his father took him many times down to the big ugly ballpark at the Confluence. The Pirates had a handsome Puerto Rican outfielder who hit in the clutch and cut down runners at the plate with strikes from deep right. He collected his three thousandth career hit on the last day of the season, and died the following winter in a plane crash. After that Kohn gave up on the organized versions of the sport.
He shook his head. “To be honest I kind of hate it, too.”
“I know,” said Bengt, banging the ground with the end of his pipe. “God!”
“But I play a little softball sometimes.” Kohn had played on an intramural team in college. He had been the second-worst player on a team that finished in ninth place out of twelve.
Bengt looked a little surprised. “What position?”
“Outfield.” Kohn had a sudden craving for the broad skewed vista from far right, the distant buzz of chatter from the bench, the outfielder's blank bovine consciousness of grass and sky. If you backed up far enough out there on a hot summer day you could sometimes see the curvature of the earth. “Mostly left.”
“Do you have a glove?” Bengt was getting a little excited now.
“Somewhere in my van, I think.”
“Cool,” said Bengt. He dropped the piece of pipe, picked up his own mitt, and started toward Kohn’s van, cleats spraying clodlets of mud as he went. Kohn trudged after him. When he climbed in behind the wheel he saw to his dismay that the boy was smiling.
“I have to go see my lawyer,” Kohn said. “Did I mention that?”
Ordinarily Kohn drove the island roads with unstudied recklessness. His work demanded that hours of intense care be paid to very small things and when he got behind the wheel of a car he always came a little unwound. But he drove his twitchy, voluble young passenger toward town carefully and slowly. He worked at it. He was doing a good deed and a part of him was afraid of doing good deeds. They often seemed to result, he had noticed, in tragedy and newspaper articles. A kindly, heartbroken neighbor drives a troubled young fatherless boy to his baseball practice. Their van flips over and bursts into flames.
“My uncle Lars is like eighty years old,” Bengt was saying, warily watching his shoes. “He played for the St. Louis Browns. He was the pitcher who killed somebody, you know? With a baseball, I mean, in a game. Johnny something, I don’t remember. It was in a book. Strange but true baseball stories.”
“Lars Larssen?” said Kohn. Kohn had read this same book, or one like it, as a child. “That’s your uncle Lars? Wow. Johnny Timberlake, wasn’t it?”
“Timberlake.”
“What happened to him after that?”
“He died!”
“I mean, your uncle. Did he have to go to jail, or anything??
??
Bengt shook his head. “He had to retire, I guess was all,” he said. “It was a wild pitch. It was just bad luck.”
At the intersection of Cemetery Road and Chubb Island Highway they pulled up to the traffic signal, one of only two on the island. The light turned from green to yellow, and Kohn slowed the car to a stop. He looked over at Lars Larssen’s old spikes, with their reptile skin, their rats’ snouts, their laces like quivering feelers. Kohn would not have wanted to put his own feet inside them.
“I have to wear six pairs of socks,” said Bengt.
“Can’t you just buy new ones?”
Bengt didn’t immediately reply. He looked at the cursed shoes that were swallowing his feet, at the curling, scarred black toes of bad luck itself.
“I wish,” he said. There was more to it, his tone suggested, than lack of money. It seemed to have been impressed on him that these shoes were his inheritance.
In spite of Kohn’s fears, they arrived safely at practice. Kohn cut the engine, and they sat. They stared through the windshield at the men and boys gathered on the grass. The team practiced on the dirt-infield diamond behind Chagrin Harbor Elementary School, on the edge of a cow pasture frequented, autumn midnights, by the local island coven of shroomheads. The fathers were standing around in their baseball caps, in a knot, smoking and talking. They looked over at Kohn’s van, trying to identify it. Many of them would have known each other all their lives. On this field they would have tormented the chubby, bespectacled goat of their generation. Their sons sat clumped along the bench like pigeons on the arm of a statue. One boy stood off to one side, taking practice swings with a red aluminum bat, and two others were practicing some private martial art that involved kicking each other repeatedly in the behind. At last a tall, heavyset man separated himself from the group of fathers and approached the boys, clapping his hands. The men spread out behind him, arms folded across their chests, suddenly all business. The boys scrambled to their feet and went to string themselves out along the third base line.
“You’d better get going,” Kohn said, looking at his watch.
“I can’t,” said Bengt.
“Go on. You’ll be fine.”
“Aren’t you coming?”
“Some other time,” Kohn said. “I’m serious, I really do have to see my lawyer.”
Bengt didn’t say anything. He affected to study the engineering of his fielder’s mitt, picking at its knots and laces. Kohn checked his watch again. He was already ten minutes late for his appointment.
“Who’s your lawyer?” Bengt said at last. “Mr. Crofoot? Mr. Toole? Ms. Banghart?”
“Ms. Banghart.”
Bengt nodded. “Are you making out your will?”
“Yes,” said Kohn. “And I’m leaving everything to you. Now, go on.”
Bengt looked down at his lap. His glasses started to slide off, but he caught them and pushed them back up his nose. His eyelids fluttered and he took a deep breath. Kohn was afraid he might start to cry. Then he opened the door. Before he got out of the car, he reached into the muff of his sweatshirt and took out a neat, tight roll of pennies. He handed it Kohn.
“I can get someone to bring me home,” he said. “Thank you for the ride.”
Kohn hesitated, but he felt that because of Bengt’s father, because of the fruitless nights the late Mr. Thorkelson had spent rolling stacks of coins as he drove the broken ice across the sea, he could not refuse payment. He took the pennies, then watched as Bengt, slow, hunched forward as if he were dragging some huge, cumbersome object, trudged over to join the other boys. Kohn put the pennies in his pocket and got out of the car.
The boys stood in a broken line along the base path between third and home, in bits and pieces of outgrown and hand-me-down uniforms, ripped jeans, dusty caps bearing the insignia of a dozen different major league teams, but all of them wearing complicated polychrome athletic shoes tricked out with lights, air pumps, windows, fins, ailerons, spoilers. They were skinny, mean-looking boys, scratch hitters and spikers of second basemen, dirt players, brushback artists. One of them was almost as tall as a man, with a faint pencil sketch of a mustache on his upper lip. They all stared at Bengt as he sidled up to the line. He was shorter than any of them, ten pounds heavier, and as he looked up at the coach he blushed, and gave an apologetic little laugh, which, amid that gang of tiny hard cases, came off inevitably as shrill and unbecoming. Standing with the other boys Bengt reminded Kohn of the leather button used in his family for many years to replace the shoe in Monopoly, ranged at Go alongside the race car, the top hat, and the scrappy little dog, plump and homely and still trailing a snippet of brown thread. When he saw Kohn he colored again, and looked down at his feet. This time his glasses fell off. They landed in the mud. A few of the boys laughed. Bengt picked them up and wiped the lenses on his sweatshirt.
“I guess now we know what happened to Joe Jackson’s shoes,” said a father, and all the men and boys laughed.
“Hello,” said the coach, walking over to Kohn, looking a little suspicious. “Glad you could make it. You must be …”
He held out his hand, waiting for Kohn to supply the explanation, the narrative that would plausibly connect him to Bengt Thorkelson.
“I’m just a neighbor,” Kohn said.
“Hey, that’s okay,” the coach said. He was a large man, rubicund in the face, hard and fat in the Boog Powell style. A pure pull hitter. He forced his genial features onto a grid of seriousness, and looked at Bengt, who was looking down at his uncle’s shoes. “We understand.”
Kohn was handed third base, a heavy mysterious parcel, and stepped out onto a ball field for the first time in ten years. It was not much of a field; mangy, pebbly, two-thirds-sized, with the hulk of a commercial henhouse collapsing in the field on the other side of the fence in deep right. But the dirt was a rich brown, the color of fir-tree bark, and where there was grass it was thick and spongy and freshly cut. Bengt led him to the square pipe buried in the dirt at the hot corner, and they tamped the pegged base down into it. The boy kicked at the base, circled it, then climbed up onto it and kicked at it again, affecting the taut air of a base runner stranded at third, waiting for somebody to hit one, anything, a blooper, a cheap little broken-bat single.
“I’ve never been on third before,” he said presently.
“It’s nice,” Kohn said.
“It’s not bad,” said Bengt. He looked at his watch, black plastic with a liquid-crystal face. “Don’t you have to go?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“But you can’t stay, can you?”
“I’d better not.”
“They don’t really do anything,” Bengt said. “Mostly they just stand around talking.”
“That doesn’t sound too tough,” Kohn said. “I could probably manage that.”
For the first ten minutes the coach had the boys stretch, alternate crunches with push-ups, and focus their mental energies, since the key to good baseball, in spite of what they might have seen or observed, was mental effort. All of the fathers appeared relieved to be exempted from this portion of the proceedings. They stood around behind home plate, smoking, leaning against the backstop. Then when practice began—ball tossing, bunting and base-running exercises, followed by an intrasquad game—the men, as Bengt had suggested, mostly stayed put. From time to time they exhorted their sons, or teased them, not always kindly. The boys made a study of ignoring the men and the things they said. And yet Kohn felt that the presence of their fathers on the other side of the chain-link backstop was as indispensable to them as bats, dirt, spikes, grass, the reliable pain of a baseball smacking against the heels of their mitts. If a boy’s father somehow missed a play, a nice catch, a bunt laid down stiff and inflexible as rebar, the boy acted quite put out.
Kohn found himself standing with the fathers, neither included in their conversation nor made to feel particularly unwelcome. Some of the men seemed to recognize him; they exchanged pleasantries and agreed t
hat it had, finally, stopped raining. At one point there was a low chuckle at the far end of the group of fathers, some of the men looked at him, and Kohn heard the name of Bengt’s mother mentioned. He wondered if he should say something to explain, to correct their misapprehension. The coach hit a soft line drive toward Bengt, who stumbled, knocked the ball to the ground, and chanced to fall on top of it. He stood up, looking stunned, then remembered to pick up the ball and shag it back in to the coach. His throwing style managed nonchalance without troubling much about accuracy.
“Nice stop!” Kohn called.
Half an hour into the practice, a station wagon pulled up. The door sprang open, and a boy ran onto the field. Kohn gathered that this was Tommy Latrobe, who had been taken ill during school hours with an illness now unaccountably cured. The other boys hectored him like crows until he told them to shut up.
Tommy Latrobe’s father walked up and stood beside Kohn. He was fair, freckled, dressed in the full, pinstriped regalia of the Chubb Tavern Mudcats, carrying a glove and a pair of bats. He looked Kohn up and down. “Cold?” he said.
Kohn unzipped his parka as far as he could; the zipper always jammed at the last two inches.
“Uh-oh,” Latrobe said, pointing. “That one’s through.”
Kohn looked out at the field, where Bengt Thorkelson, at short, down on one knee, with boys running wild on the base paths, waited for the slowest ground ball in the history of baseball to roll into his mitt, his small face bright with wonder and dread.
“So which one is yours?” said Latrobe.