44

He wanted to talk to Owen, but Owen wasn’t home. Sometimes it seemed he could talk freely at only two times in his life: out on the diamond and here, in the dark, across the room from Owen. Lying here, ear on pillow, it was easy to figure out how you felt and say it out loud. Your words wouldn’t come back to haunt you but would land softly on Owen’s ears and stay. That was the good thing about having a roommate, a roommate like Owen, but Owen wasn’t home.

He picked up the phone and dialed Sophie’s cell.

“Henry,” his sister whispered. “Hang on.” For twenty seconds the phone banged around. “Sorry,” she said. “I went out in the hall.”

“Where are you guys?”

“Dad’s back hurts, so Mom was driving, and Mom got tired. We stopped at a motel like fifty miles away. It’s kind of gross but I have my own bed. What are you doing up?”

“Couldn’t sleep.”

“Henry, big brother, don’t be nervous. You’ll be great.”

“I know.” It comforted him to talk to Sophie—she had an interest in his happiness and none in baseball—but he always feared she’d say too much to their parents, whom he’d told almost nothing about his troubles. Luckily he’d also told them almost nothing about the scouts and the agents and the huge sums of money that loomed, that used to loom, in June. As far as they knew he was just Henry, their college boy, who’d tied Aparicio’s record and was having a pretty good season.

“Aparicio Rodriguez,” Sophie said. This was the only baseball player whose name she knew. “Are you excited?”

“Sure.”

“Don’t be nervous,” she advised. “Just relax and enjoy it. Soak it in. You’ll be great.”

“I know,” Henry said. “I will.”

“And then we’re going out tomorrow night, right? You promised that when I was a senior we could.”

“Soph, this is a really busy weekend. We have two more games on Sunday.”

“Henry. You promised. You can’t make me spend the whole weekend with Mom and Dad again.”

“In a few months you’ll be in college. You can go out all you want.”

“Yeah, at SDSU. But Westish is so cool. I bought a dress. Don’t tell Mom.”

Henry couldn’t help but smile. “Okay, okay. We’ll go out.”

When he hung up the phone he still wasn’t sleepy. If Owen offered him some kind of pill tonight he’d take it for sure, but Owen wasn’t home. Henry slipped out of bed and into his warm-up pants and Harpooner windbreaker, slapped his Cards cap on his head, and walked down to Westish Field.

He sat down on the damp sandy dirt between second and third, the spot where he’d spent so many hundreds of hours, and pulled The Art from his windbreaker pocket. The worn spine flopped open to a favorite page.

99.    To reach a ball he has never reached before, to extend himself to the very limits of his range, and then a step farther: this is the shortstop’s dream.

He flipped again.

121. The shortstop has worked so hard for so long that he no longer thinks. Nor does he act. By this I mean that he does not generate action. He only reacts, the way a mirror reacts when you wave your hand before it.

He wasn’t in a box he could think his way out of. Nor was he in a box he could relax his way out of, no matter how many times Coach Cox or Schwartzy or Owen or Rick or Starblind or Izzy or Sophie told him to relax, stop thinking, be himself, be the ball, don’t try too hard. You could only try so hard not to try too hard before you were right back around to trying too hard. And trying hard, as everyone told him, was wrong, all wrong.

During grade-school winters back in Lankton, his sister and Scott Hinterberg would run ahead, yanking open the mailboxes that lined the streets, and Henry would trail behind to peg snowballs into the mailboxes’ waiting mouths, never missing, never, unless there was mail inside waiting to be sent, in which case he would knock down the little red flag with his snowball, then politely run over and lift it again. How did he make those throws? It seemed amazing now. A kid in a puffy coat that hindered his movement, his fingers numb and raw from packing snow, perfect every time.

The shortstop has worked so hard for so long that he no longer thinks—that was just the way to phrase it. You couldn’t choose to think or not think. You could only choose to work or not work. And hadn’t he chosen to work? And wasn’t that what would save him now? When he walked onto this field tomorrow he would carry a whole reservoir of work with him, the last three years of work with Schwartzy, the whole lifetime of work before that, of focusing always and only on baseball and how to become better. It was not flimsy, that lifetime of work. He could rely on it.

If he relied on it, he’d be fine. April had been awful, but tomorrow was the real test, like a class where only the final counted. Dwight had told him that though his draft stock had dropped, it hadn’t dropped nearly as far as Henry assumed. “Teams care about potential,” Dwight said, “even more than performance. You’re young, you’re fast, you’re hitting the heck out of the ball. There’ll be twenty teams there on Saturday, I promise. Put on a show for ’em.” And as for the Harpooners, they were only one game behind Coshwale—they would win their first-ever conference , would go to regionals, if they won three out of four this weekend. Redemption was there for the taking. It didn’t matter that Aparicio would be in the stands, that his parents and Sophie would be there too, that it was Henry Skrimshander Day. He just needed to play baseball, to enjoy it as he always had, to help his teammates beat Coshwale. Everything else would fall into place.

React, the way a mirror reacts.

He climbed to his feet, dusted the damp sandy dirt from the butt of his pants. He turned to the book’s penultimate paragraph. Clouds engulfed the low-hanging moon, so that he could barely see the words at all, but it didn’t matter.

212. It always saddens me to leave the field. Even fielding the final out to win the World Series, deep in the truest part of me, felt like death.

Ah, Aparicio!