21

As the Harpooners filed off the bus, each of them slapped the black rubber seal above the door for luck. Driving four hours south made a difference in the weather; birds were chirping, and a loamy smell of spring hung thick in the air. Loondorf began to sneeze. The clouds were breaking and shrinking, leaving marbled patches of stonewashed blue between them. The Opentoe players, clad in their threadbare brown-and-green uniforms, were liming the foul lines and raking the basepaths like old homesteaders.

“Same old Opentoe,” Rick O’Shea noted, scratching his incipient beer belly as he blinked the sleep from his eyes. “Same ugly-ass jerseys.”

Starblind nodded. “Same jerks.” Opentoe College had some sort of evangelical mission that involved perpetual kindness and hopelessly outdated uniforms. The Harpooners hated them for it. It was unspeakably infuriating that the one school in the UMSCAC that spent less money on its baseball program than Westish always managed to kick their ass. The Opentoe players never talked even the mildest forms of smack. If you worked a walk, the first baseman would say, “Good eye.” If you ripped a three-run triple, the third baseman would say, “Nice rip.” They smiled when they were behind, and when they were ahead they looked pensive and slightly sad. Their team name was the Holy Poets.

Usually Owen began warm-ups by leading the team in a series of yoga stretches. Today Henry took his place, omitting Owen’s stream of commentary (“Pretend that your shoulders have dissolved, good, no, let them dissolve entirely…”) and instead just proceeding from one stretch to the next. The Harpooners followed along by rote as they scanned the bleachers. There weren’t any girls, Opentoe was weak on girls, but more and more scouts kept arriving, each new scout announcing himself as such by either his laptop or his cigar, depending on his generation, and by shaking hands with the rest of the scouts.

After they stretched, Arsch took Starblind down to the bullpen to begin loosening up to pitch. The rest of the Harpooners jogged into position for infield/outfield drills. Schwartz, who saved his body for games by practicing as little as possible, retreated to the dugout. Today was going to be a long one: in his rush to leave the house, he’d left his Vicoprofen behind. Now, like a true addict, he emptied his bag, side pockets and all, strewing the contents on the bench. The sweep yielded two chipped and dusty Sudafed, three Advil, and a promising white spheroid that turned out to be a mint. He threw it all in his mouth, germs be damned, and downed it with a slug of lukewarm Mountain Dew.

He ambled to the bullpen to check on Starblind’s progress. The ball struck the heart of Arsch’s mitt with a loud report.

“How’s he looking, Meat?”

“He’s poppin’ it, Mike. Really poppin’ it.”

“Deuce?”

“Poppin’ it.”

“Change?”

“On a string,” Arsch declared. “He’s poppin’ them all.”

After a few more pitches Starblind wandered toward them, working his right arm in rapid, manic circles. Starblind entered a crazed, almost incommunicado state when he pitched. If you didn’t know better, you’d swear he’d done oodles of coke. “Look at ’em,” he said, jerking his head toward the scouts, who were still arriving.

Schwartz shrugged. “Rest of the season’ll be like this. Might as well get used to it.”

“Get used to what?” Starblind snorted. “Those guys see Henry and zero else. I could give up ten or strike out twenty. Doesn’t make a shit bit of difference.”

“Makes a difference to me,” Schwartz said mildly.

Coach Cox called the Harpooners together. “Here’s the batting order. Starblind Kim Skrimshander, Schwartz O’Shea Boddington, Quisp Phlox Guladni. Let’s work the count, keep our wits about us. Mike, anything to add?”

Not only had Schwartz forgotten his pills but he’d also neglected to pick out a quote. That’s what you got for going on a date the night before a game. He’d have to extemporize. He leaned into the center of the huddle and surveyed his teammates, testing each with a mild version of The Stare. “Brook,” he said, fixing his eyes on Boddington, one of the team’s few seniors, “what was our record your first year?”

“Three and twenty-nine, Mike.”

“O’Shea. What about yours?”

“Um… ten and twenty?”

“Close enough. And last year? Jensen?”

“Sixteen and sixteen, Schwartzy.”

Schwartz nodded. “Don’t forget it. Don’t anybody forget it.” He looked around, cranked The Stare to about a five on a ten-point scale. He looked at Henry, Henry looked at him, but nothing useful passed between them. Schwartz took off his cap and wiped the sweat from his forehead. He felt a little off, a little odd, like he was playing himself on TV. He could hear his own voice bouncing around in his head.

But the troops were nodding, waiting, their faces pulled into expressions of grim resolution: they loved Schwartz’s fire and brimstone. They lived for it. They were going to imitate it for their grandkids. He kept going: “All those losing seasons. And not just for us. For all the guys who came before us too. A hundred and four years of baseball, and Westish College, our college, has never won conference. Never.”

“Now we’re a different ball club. We’re eleven and two. We’ve got all the talent in the world. But look at those guys in the other dugout. Go on, look at them.” He waited while they looked. “You think those guys care what our record is? Hell no. They think they’re going to walk all over us, because we’re from Westish College. They see this uniform and their eyes light up. They think this uniform’s some kind of joke.” Schwartz thumped himself on the chest, where the blue harpooner stood alone in the prow of his boat. “Is this a joke?” he snarled, throwing in some curse words. “Is that what this is?” His voice softened in preparation for the denouement; it was important to vary your volume and your cadence. “Let’s teach them something about this uniform,” he said. “Let’s teach them something about Westish College.” He scanned the huddle. His teammates’ jaws were clenched, their nostrils flared. Most of their eyes were hidden behind sunglasses, but the eyes he could see looked ready to go. Even he felt a little heartened.

Henry stuck a batting-gloved hand into the center of the huddle, palm down. Everybody else followed suit. “Owen on three,” he said. “One-two-three—”

“Buddha.”

STARBLIND WALKED, Sooty Kim bunted him to second, Henry roped a single past the pitcher’s ear. Schwartz crushed a moonshot into left-center field. Opentoe’s park had no outfield wall in the usual sense—just a faraway chain-link fence to separate it from the soccer field. A faster or better-medicated man would have made it to third or even scored, but Schwartz could only trot to second, press both hands to the small of his back, and stand there wincing while Rick and Boddington made outs. Two–nothing, Westish.

Meat was right. Starblind was popping his pitches like Schwartz had never seen. The only balls put into play were weak pop-ups or squibblers back to the pitcher. Schwartz heard a couple of Holy Poets cursing under their breath as they swung and missed. The curses were different from his own, but the currents that ran beneath their shucks and biscuit and featherhead were equally dark. Then their cheery looks returned, whether because a world of deeds and miracles surrounded them even when they lost, or because they were playing Westish and were therefore bound to win.

Between pitches Schwartz snuck glances at the crowd of scouts sitting three-deep behind the backstop, their wraparound shades disguising their thoughts. If there wasn’t one from every major-league team, it was damned close. He almost wished that Starblind wouldn’t pitch so well, so the Poets would put more balls in play, so the Skrimmer could show off his defense.

In the bottom of the fourth, finally, an Opentoe batter laced a low shot into the hole between short and third. Henry broke toward it with typical quickness, snapped it up cleanly on the backhand side. As he set his feet to throw, though, the ball seemed to get stuck in his glove. He had to rush the throw, which flew low and wide of the bag. Rick O’Shea stretched to his full length and scooped it out of the dirt, lifted his glove to show the ump he had the ball.

“Safe!”

“What?” Rick, enraged, jumped like he was hornet-stung. “I scooped it!” he yelled, waving the ball. “I scooped it clean!”

The ump shook his head. “Foot came off the bag.”

“No way!”

Schwartz couldn’t say for sure whether Rick’s foot had stayed on the bag or not. Normally he might not have argued, but Rick seemed adamant—and if the runner was safe, the play would be ruled an error. Henry’s streak would be over, Aparicio’s record unbroken. He turned to the plate umpire. “D’you see that, Stan?”

“Not my call.”

“You’re in charge out here.”

Stan shook his head.

“I’ll be right back.” As Schwartz walked toward him, the field ump resumed his crouch, hands on thighs, peering in toward home plate as if the next pitch were about to be thrown. This was his way of saying, Don’t approach me. Schwartz approached. “Close play.”

The ump kept his hands planted on his thighs, humorlessly ignoring Schwartz. “Stan said I could come out here,” Schwartz told him.

“Good for Stan.”

Schwartz glanced at Henry, who was earnestly smoothing the dirt with his cleat, head bowed. “The throw had him,” he said.

The ump stayed in his crouch and stared straight ahead.

“Stand up and talk to me like a man,” Schwartz said.

“Watch yourself.”

“You watch yourself. You blew the call and you know it.”

“I don’t know who you think you are, kid, but you’ve got till the count of one to get out of my face.”

“Kid?” Schwartz repeated. He lowered his chin to stare down into the watery eyes of this pathetic, ineffectual man.

Whether the umpire did it on purpose, or was fumbling his words because it unnerved him to have two hundred thirty pounds of Schwartz looming over him, or simply because such things were inevitable when you put two faces so close together, a fleck of spittle flew out of his mouth and struck Schwartz on the cheek. A red cloud descended over Schwartz. He never should have told Henry about law school. “You little pissant,” he hissed. “Your real job sucks, your wife doesn’t, so you come out here and boss around a bunch of college kids every weekend, to make you feel like a man, a big fucking man, a big fucking little man, and now you’re going to spit on me? Do you have any idea who you’re fucking with? I’ll tear you apart. I’ll tear you up and eat your godda—”

The next thing he knew Coach Cox had him around the waist and was leading him off the field, calmly chomping his gum while Schwartz twisted halfway around so he could keep screaming at the umpire. The ump fiddled with his ball-strike counter and pretended not to listen. Schwartz stopped midsentence. The red cloud behind his eyes began to lift, and he wondered what all he’d said. Of course he’d been ejected. He glanced back toward Henry, who offered a tiny lift of his shoulders. Schwartz never should have told him, not right before a game.

Schwartz shifted his gaze to the scoreboard in right field. There it was, plain as day, that green light winking in the distance beneath the letter E. Somebody said a few words over the loudspeaker, announcing the end of Henry’s streak. The whole crowd, including the scouts and the players from both teams, rose as one and began to applaud.