16

The plows had been working since before sunrise, and the midday sun was warm. The roads were nearly clear. Henry had brought everything he could think of that Owen might need: schoolbooks, spare glasses, red sweater.

“It’s funny, isn’t it?” he said in the car. “I was freaked out about what would happen next year, after you left. But now I might not be here either.” He hesitated, glanced at Schwartz, and brought out the thought that had been working on his mind all day. “I was thinking, if I did wind up getting a good signing bonus, like Ms. Szabo said, we could use it to pay your law school tuition. So you wouldn’t have to go any further into debt.”

Schwartz white-knuckled the steering wheel. “Skrimmer…”

“It wouldn’t be a loan,” Henry said. “More like an investment. After law school, you’ll be making serious money. So we could just—”

“Henry. How much money do you have in the bank?”

Henry tried to remember what he’d spent on his last SuperBoost run. “I don’t know. Four hundred?”

“Then that’s what you’ve got.” Schwartz swung the huge hood of the Buick around a snowbank and into the hospital parking lot. “No matter what some hotshot agent says.”

“Sure,” Henry said. “I was just thinking—”

“Don’t think.” Schwartz, bleary and beleaguered, cut the engine. “If anybody else calls you, agents, scouts, whoever, tell them to call Coach Cox. Understood?”

“Sure,” Henry said.

When they found the room, Owen was asleep. “He’s on a lot of meds,” the nurse told them. “Even if he was awake he wouldn’t be making much sense.” The left side of his face, from the undercurve of his eye socket down, was hugely swollen. Henry stared at the blooming bruises, the ugly muddy mix of purples and browns and greens. He’d done that to his friend. Either the swelling or the broken cheekbone was interfering with Owen’s breathing, and he sucked in air with a gasping honk. Henry left the stack of belongings beside the bed.

When they arrived at practice, Coach Cox was yelling at Starblind.

“Starblind!”

“Yes, Coach?”

“Did you get a haircut?”

“Uh, no, Coach.”

“Don’t pull that crap with me. I saw you at eight o’clock last night. You were shaggy as a dog.”

Coach Cox had only two hard-and-fast rules: (1) show up on time, and (2) don’t get your hair cut the day before a game. Haircuts threw off a ballplayer’s equilibrium, because they subtly altered the weight and aerodynamicity of his head. It took, according to Coach Cox, two days to adjust. This posed a problem for Starblind, whose extreme sensitivity to the smallest fluctuations in his own attractiveness led to frequent emergency visits to his stylist.

“You want to ride the bench tomorrow?”

“No,” Starblind said sullenly.

“Then you’d better give me twenty shuttle drills after practice. Get that equilibrium unkinked.”

Starblind groaned.

“Groan some more, it’ll be thirty.” Coach Cox motioned to Henry. “You got a minute?”

“Sure, Coach.”

They stepped out into the hallway. “I got a call from the UMSCAC commissioner,” Coach Cox said. “Apparently the league wants to make a little fuss over your streak.”

“Oh,” Henry said. “That’s not necessary.”

“Goddamn right it’s not. But Dale seemed set on it. Publicity opportunity and all that.” Coach Cox stroked his mustache and fixed Henry with a big-news kind of expression. “Somebody over there managed to get Aparicio Rodriguez on the phone, and he said he’d be willing to be here for it.”

“Aparicio?” Henry whispered. “You’re joking.”

“He said he’d like to meet the man who’s tied his record.”

Henry’s ears began to ring. Aparicio, his hero, winner of fourteen Gold Gloves, two World Series. The greatest shortstop who ever lived.

“Apparently he comes to the States every year about this time, to work with the Cards’ infielders. And he’s offered to come up here before he heads back to Venezuela. Which’ll probably be the last weekend of the season, against Coshwale.”

Coach Cox caught Henry’s eye and looked at him sternly. “Now, I don’t want this to be a distraction, for you or anybody else. If we stay in the hunt, those Coshwale games are going to be huge.”

“Don’t worry,” Henry assured him. “Nothing distracts me.”

“I know.” A smile crossed Coach Cox’s face. “Things are happening for you, Skrimmer. Things are goddamn happening.”

After practice, Schwartz and Henry headed up to the makeshift, nylon-netted batting cage in the gym on the VAC’s fourth floor. Schwartz filled the pitching machine and then stood behind Henry with crossed arms, grunting, harrumphing, occasionally offering a word of instruction. Henry drove ball after ball through the middle of the cage. His goal, as always, was to meet the ball so squarely that it retraced its path and reentered the mouth of the pitching machine, sending the big rubber wheels spinning in the opposite direction, as if reversing time. He’d never quite done it, in all these hundreds of sessions, but he continued to believe it was possible.

“Hips,” Schwartz said.

Ping.

“That’s it.”

Ping.

“Don’t drift.”

Ping.

Ping.

Ping.

Every Friday after their BP session, in season and out, Henry and Schwartz drove to Carapelli’s, sat in their usual booth, and ate whatever appetizers Mrs. Carapelli brought them, followed by an extra-large house special pizza with extra sauce, extra cheese, and extra meat. Afterward Schwartz nursed a single slim glass of beer, Henry a mammoth SuperBoost shake, and they talked about baseball until Carapelli’s closed.

But tonight Schwartzy turned on foot toward his and Arsch’s house. “Where’re you going?” Henry said.

“Home.”

“But it’s Friday.”

Schwartz stopped, looked down at his gnarled fingers. His mitt hand’s forefinger nail, nipped by a Milford player’s backswing last night, had turned purple-black and would soon fall off. He’d run out of money, but that wasn’t the reason he didn’t want to go to Carapelli’s. The last thing he wanted to do was sit there acting happy about the Skrimmer’s impending fame. He still hadn’t told him about Yale. And Harvard. And Columbia. And NYU. And Stanford. And U of C. “I’d better stay in tonight,” he said. “Thesis crunch.”

“Oh,” Henry said. “Okay.” He’d been waiting to deliver the news about Aparicio until they arrived at Carapelli’s, where it could be savored properly. But it could wait until tomorrow—and it would have to, because Schwartz was already moving across the lot, his collar turned up against the cold.