28

Sunday morning, quietest time of the Westish week. The dining hall didn’t serve breakfast. The chapel held no early service. The VAC didn’t open until eleven, the library until noon.

Spring was coming for real, and the chirps of robins and sparrows curled toward the upper reaches of the football stadium. From high above came the nasal honks of gulls. One word kept bobbing to the surface of Henry’s mind. He spat it out on the broad stone steps. It came back again, insidious, bright as a neon sign. Motherfucker. He spat it out and back it came. When he hit the top he knuckle-popped the sign, number 17, dodged along the stone bowl’s rim to the next row of steps, triple-timed it down. The south end goalpost’s paint looked dull and chipped. Goalposts need paint, motherfucker.

He was running as hard as he could, vest cinched tight, sprinting to the top and chop-stepping down, saving nothing. He thought of engines running hot, burning the oil spilled on their blocks. When his vision blurred and sweat stung his eyes, he thought of the salt as wrongness, impurity, error—spill it onto the concrete and watch it evaporate. Offer it up, motherfucker.

He wanted to chase down the holy vacancy that marked his best workouts, to sense his body as a hollow drum. Wanted to let the cool gray-blue of the lake and the green-brown-gray of the campus enter and open his lungs. But he was too agitated, too pissed off. He finished the stadium, his second, and started back the other way. Stair-pounding pain shot up through his anklebones to his shins. He quickened his pace.

He finished his third stadium with a halfhearted war whoop and turned to survey what he’d done. He hadn’t quieted his mind, but at least he’d reduced his legs to quivering, twitching, thoughtless things. The sun lifted high above the lake. A pair of circling birds swooped toward unseen prey and, finding nothing, braked their heels against the water. The dew lay heavy on the football field’s scattered patches of living grass, green welts amid the rutted mud. There against the far goalpost leaned Schwartz, sipping coffee from one of two steaming paper cups he held. He wore WAD sweatpants, shower thongs, a flannel workshirt whose untucked tail flapped in the wind. Henry collected his scattered clothing and hopped the short stone wall that separated the stands from the field.

“You’re crazy, you know that?” Schwartz held out a paper cup. “It’s supposed to be your day off.”

Henry’s nostrils sucked in the wonderful chemical sweetness of powdered hot cocoa, but he couldn’t catch his breath well enough to take a sip. “Couldn’t sleep.”

“Me either.”

They walked across the practice fields toward the VAC, the sun warm against their necks, Schwartz’s flip-flops slurping noisily through the mud. From the VAC they collected their gloves, a bat, a bucket of balls, and a broomstick. They headed out to the baseball diamond.

First base was held in place by a metal post that fit into a long, square-edged hole in the ground; Henry pulled out the base, tossed it aside, and wedged the broomstick into the hole. It tilted a few degrees off the vertical. He slapped it with his hand to check its steadiness, drained the sweet dregs of his cocoa, and jogged out to shortstop.

“How’s the wing?” Schwartz yelled. The wind was whipping off the water; it was hard to hear.

Henry worked his shoulder in its socket, gave Schwartz a thumbs-up.

“Take it easy,” Schwartz called. “Last thing we need is a dead wing.”

“What?”

“Easy!”

Schwartz held up a ball. Henry nodded, dropped into his crouch. The first ball shot up high on his backhand side, snapped sharply into his glove. After a long night of thinking, it felt good to be out here doing. He planted his back foot, brought the broomstick into his sights, whipped his arm. The ball cut through the crosswind and struck the broomstick solidly.

There were fifty balls in the bucket. Seventeen hit the broomstick. The others described a tight arc around it, like the knives of a circus performer around the assistant’s sequined body. “Feeling better?” Schwartz asked as they gathered their stuff and headed for the dining hall.

“Not bad.” Henry nodded. “Not bad at all.”

TUESDAY, MUSKINGUM. The sky was a madhouse of riotous cross-blown clouds, the low ones wispy and torn-cotton white, the high ones gray with sullen underbellies shading to ominous black. Nobody in the stands but scouts and dutiful girlfriends. The Muskingum players wore long-sleeved shirts beneath their powder-blue jerseys. The Harpooners’ arms were bare. Schwartz insisted on it: a psychological advantage could be gained by pretending to be impervious to the weather. By pretending to be impervious, you became so.

Henry checked his teammates to make sure they were shaded correctly, waved Ajay a step to the left. “Sal Sal Sal,” he chanted. “Salvador Dalí Dolly Parton Pardon my French.” Infield chatter wasn’t exactly cool at the college level, but Henry couldn’t help himself. He pounded his fist into the tender pit of his glove. “Dot your is, cross your ts, spread a little cheese. Spread a little Muenster, spread a little Swiss.”

Sal cranked into his awkward staccato windup. Henry dropped into his shallow crouch. Hit it to me, he prayed. Hit it to me. Redemption time. The pitch was a forkball right where Schwartzy wanted it, low and outside. Henry broke from his crouch even before bat met ball with a tinny reverberant ding. At the last second the ball skidded off a lump tucked in the grass. He shifted his glove and fielded it cleanly—no such thing as a bad hop if you were prepared.

He clapped his right hand over the captive ball, spun it to find the seams. He cocked his arm, locked his eyes on Rick’s glove. His arm was moving forward, there wasn’t time to think, but he was thinking anyway, trying to decide whether to speed up his arm or slow it down. He could feel himself calibrating and recalibrating, adjusting and readjusting his aim, like an army sniper hopped up on foreign drugs.

As soon as the ball left his hand he knew he’d messed up. Rick O’Shea tried to scoop it out of the dirt, but it hit the heel of his glove and skittered away. Henry turned his back to the infield, looked up at the roiling clouds, mouthed his new favorite word: Motherfucker.

Schwartzy called time and trudged out to the mound, beckoned to Henry. “You okay?” he asked, his catcher’s mask tipped back on his head, eye black already smearing down into his beard.

“Fine,” Henry said curtly.

“You sure? Wing’s not sore or—”

“Wing’s fine. I’m fine. Let’s just play, okay?”

“Okay,” Schwartz said. “Nobody out. Let’s get ’em.”

Now Henry had another error to atone for. Hit it to me, he thought fiercely. Hit me the ball. “Sal-Sal-Salamander,” he chanted, pounding his glove in disgust. “Drop that forkbomb. Let me and Ajay turn a little two-step.”

Sal threw another forkball, a good one. The batter cracked a sharp shot to Henry’s left. He snagged it and twisted toward Ajay, who was breaking toward the second-base bag. The distance called for a casual sidearm fling—he’d done it ten thousand times. But now he paused, double-clutched. He’d thrown the last one too soft, better put a little mustard on it—no, no, not too hard, too hard would be bad too. He clutched again. Now the runner was closing in, and Henry had no choice but to throw it hard, really hard, too hard for Ajay to handle from thirty feet away; it handcuffed him, glanced off the heel of his glove and into short right field.

After the inning Henry sought out Ajay to apologize.

“Forget it.” Ajay smiled. “How many times have I done that to you?”

Rick O’Shea clapped Henry on both shoulders. “Don’t sweat it, Skrim. Happens to the worst of us.”

“Bats bats bats!” somebody yelled, drumming on the wooden rear wall of the dugout.

“Bats bats bats! Let’s get ’em back! Bats bats!”

Schwartzy hit a home run. So did Boddington. An inning later, Henry smacked a bases-clearing triple. The umpires stopped the game after six innings, with the Harpooners ahead 19–3. The mercy rule was meant to be merciful to the team getting beat, but no one could have felt more relieved than Henry. For the first time in his life he wanted not to be on a ballfield. He blinked back miserable tears the whole way home, pressed against the shuddering side of the bus.

“You’ve got to relax out there,” Schwartzy told him. “Relax and let it come.”

“I know.”

“Just let ’er rip, like you’re firing at the broomstick. Break Rick’s hand if you’ve got to.”

“Okay.”

The usual depressing landscape unspooled outside, cows and billboards, fireworks stores and adult emporia. Schwartz picked his words carefully. “Why don’t you take it easy tomorrow?” he suggested. “Skip your run, slack off during practice like I do. No use grinding yourself down.”

“I’m fine.”

“I know you’re fine. I’m just saying we’re not in prep mode anymore. We’ve got fifteen games in the next twenty days. We’ve got to conserve our strength.”

The next time Schwartz looked over, Henry’s eyes were closed, his forehead tipped against the grimy window. Schwartz could tell by the nervous tug at the corner of his right eye that he wasn’t really asleep, but he didn’t call him on it.

Schwartz could feel what was happening, or one thing that was happening: he was distancing himself from Henry, and he was using Pella to do so. That was why he hadn’t even mentioned Pella to Henry yet. For years he’d kept no secrets from Henry; now he’d kept two in a matter of weeks.

It was a bad thing to do: to distance himself from Henry, to cut the Skrimmer adrift while pretending nothing had changed—and to do so, when you got down to it, because he couldn’t handle Henry’s success.

He couldn’t do it, not to Henry. Look what was happening already. Maybe it was hubris for Schwartz to blame himself, but it didn’t matter. He would do whatever he could to get Henry straightened out. If that meant picking up the phone at four a.m. while in bed with Pella, then so be it. If that meant spending the next two months thinking of nothing but Henry and how to help him, so be it. Pella could wait. His life could wait. Henry needed him, and the Harpooners needed Henry. That was all he had to know.