60

The Harpooners finished dressing and followed Schwartz outside to run stadiums till they puked. No one made a sound. Izzy lingered until he was the last one there, tugging on his wristbands extra slowly, fiddling with the gold crucifix he wore around his neck. It seemed like he might try to say something, but instead he just dropped his head and left. As he passed into the hall he popped his fist loudly into his glove’s webbing, a one-smack salute to Henry’s career.

Henry sat down in front of his locker. His outburst at Schwartz had surprised him; what surprised him more was the way his anger wasn’t subsiding. He, not Schwartz, had messed everything up. He, not Schwartz, was to blame. And yet every memory that popped into his head as he sat there in that underground room thick with memories was a memory of Schwartz causing him pain. He was angry at Schwartz. He kind of hated Schwartz. Remember when he arrived at Westish, friendless and adrift, and Schwartz, who’d brought him here, who’d led Henry to expect he would guide him, had left him hanging for twelve long lonely weeks before he’d finally called, and said by way of excuse that he’d been busy with football? Back then Henry had felt too pitifully grateful to mention his distress, but now the pain of those early days broke over him. He pretty much hated Schwartz for that. Hated him too for every weighted stadium he’d made him run, every five a.m. workout, every thousand-pull-up workout, every torturous toss of a medicine ball… it was pain that Henry had craved and demanded, purposeful pain, or so it had seemed, but what broke over him now was all that pain in its purest state, pain that meant nothing, could not be redeemed, because it all led only here, and here was nowhere. God, how he hated Schwartz. Hated him for his attention and hated him for his neglect. Lately, since Pella, it had been neglect again. Without Schwartz pushing him, torturing him, he wouldn’t be here. Schwartz had brought him here and now he was fucked. Before he met Schwartz his dreams were just dreams. Things that would peter out harmlessly over time.

Time to leave before somebody returned and found him here. He took the fire stairs, slipped out a side door, headed away from the campus toward downtown. The streets looked odd and purposeless as they basked in the afternoon sunlight. He’d never come this way in the daytime except while jogging.

Next to the Qdoba on the corner of Grant and Valenti stood a bank, recently closed for the day. Henry walked up the drive-through ATM lane, his sneakers slurping through the sticky deposits of oil left by idling cars. He punched in his PIN and withdrew the last eighty dollars from his account. He pocketed the bills and headed back up Valenti toward Bartleby’s.

Another place he’d never seen in the daylight. It was empty except for two middle-aged couples gathered around a table littered with half-eaten burgers, half-full beer mugs, broken mozzarella sticks with the cheese stretched out like taffy. The bar was being manned by Jamie Lopez, a football player Henry sort of knew. He leaned over an open textbook, a white bar rag slung around his neck. He was wearing a black Melville T-shirt, the concert-style one with the list of the dates of Melville’s travels on the back. Henry took a stool.

Lopez raised an eyebrow in surprise. “Hey Skrim.” He marked his place with a swizzle stick. “What are you doing here?”

Henry shrugged. “Chillin’.”

Lopez nodded approvingly, frisbeed a cardboard coaster to a spot by Henry’s elbow. “What can I do you for?”

Henry looked down the long row of taps. He’d drunk enough beer at baseball functions to know how bad it tasted. But everything else tasted worse.

“Tell you what,” said Lopez. “Let me mix you up something. It’s my first day behind the bar. Got to practice my craft.”

Henry studied Lopez’s face for a sign that he knew what had happened on Saturday. He found none. And yet Lopez had to know. Everybody knew. Half the school had been there, and the other half would have heard right away. Deep down Henry despised this pleasantry, this Hey Skrim, behind which Lopez was feeling sorry for him, or superior to him, or something. Why didn’t people just say what they were thinking? Then again Henry didn’t want to talk about it either, and Lopez’s acting job, if that’s what it was, could be considered a form of kindness. Or maybe Lopez really didn’t know. A pint glass appeared on the coaster, filled with ice and an inky liquid. Henry sipped at the fat blue straw.

“How’d I do?”

Henry coughed as he swallowed, covering his mouth so Lopez couldn’t see his expression. “Good.” He nodded. “Perfect.”

Lopez grinned proudly. “It’s my take on a Long Island Iced Tea. Kind of nudging it toward the more masculine end of the spectrum.”

Henry stared at the strongman competition on the huge TV behind the bar and listened to Lopez hold forth about bartending school. The shifting lights on the screen held his eye, Lopez’s voice droned softly in his ear, and his drink disappeared in thoughtless pulls at the straw. Lopez made another, set it on the coaster. It grew dark outside. Pool balls clacked together. The bar began to fill with people. Lopez dimmed the house lights until the place was sunk in a greenish nighttime glow, punctuated by the bright red and blue of electric beer signs.

“Hey Skrim,” he said. “Would you fire up the jukebox for me?” He slid a ten-dollar bill across the bar. “Maybe err on the mellow side. It’s early.”

Henry made his way to the jukebox, fed in the ten, pressed the buttons that turned the plastic pages. The only band name he recognized was U2—that was mellow, right? He punched in a bunch of U2 and still had twenty choices left. Flip flip flip. The only songs whose names he knew were the ones Schwartz played while they lifted weights, and those weren’t mellow at all. He gave up and headed for the bathroom.

Pinned to a corkboard above the urinals were the sports pages of USA Today and the Westish Bugler. “Home at Last!” read the Bugler’s banner headline, above a half-page photo of the Harpooners storming Coshwale’s diamond with raised arms and mouths in midscream. Even Owen looked excited. The article, like every article about the baseball team, bore Sarah X. Pessel’s byline:

COSHWALE, IL—They had never, in over one hundred seasons, won a conference . Their opponents, the Coshwale Muskies, had captured twenty-nine in that same time span, including four in a row. Their star shortstop, Henry Skrimshander, was nowhere to be found.

It didn’t matter.

Sunday afternoon, the Harpooners put an exclamation point on a century of frustration, fishhooking the favored Muskies 2–1 and 15–0 to don their first UMSCAC crown. Senior captain Mike Schwartz spearheaded the redemption with two home runs and seven RBI, while junior pitcher–center fielder Adam Starblind, he of the blond locks and movie-star swagger, chipped in four hits and earned the save in the opening game, despite what he described after the game as severe abdominal soreness, lifting his jersey to reveal a bruised but impressively sculpted six-pack.

Freshperson Izzy Avila filled in more than admirably for the absent Skrimshander, scoring a brace of runs and patrolling the middle of the diamond the way Crockett and Tubbs patrolled Miami in the age of early Madonna: with flair. One or two sublimely acrobatic plays even had bystanders murmuring the name of the shortstop he replaced—a man many deemed unreplaceable. “Izzy looked sharp,” intoned mustachioed skipper Ron Cox, a manly man with a nose for understatement.

Schwartz, meanwhile, shrugged off the suggestion that Skrimshander’s apparently unexcused absence, one day after walking off the field midinning after a long battle against waning confidence, would hamper the team as they prepared for their first-ever regional tourney. “Skrimmer’ll be back tomorrow,” Schwartz growled. “You can bet your god-[CONTINUED ON 3B]

Henry ripped down the page, tore it into thin strips like confetti, and peed on the strips. In the mirror as he washed his hands he saw how he looked in his filthy sweatshirt. He hadn’t shaved or showered in days. Lopez wasn’t just being nice—he was humoring him the way you humor a crazy person.

His knees felt wobbly. He lingered by the bathroom doorway until Lopez made his way to the far end of the increasingly crowded bar. He slipped a twenty under his empty pint glass and hustled out the door, crossing the railroad tracks into the heart of deserted downtown, where few students had reason to go.

Walking toward him, or trying to, was Pella Affenlight.

She didn’t see him at first. She was struggling to move a four-legged piece of furniture down the sidewalk. She hoisted it off the ground, clutching its flat top to her chest so the legs pointed straight at Henry. Once she had it in the air she could only stagger a few steps forward and, with a flurry of soft curses, let it drop.

When he reached her, he couldn’t not stop; they were the only two people on the street. They looked at each other across the desk.

Pella pulled a pack of cigarettes and a lighter out of her sweatshirt pocket, tapped out a cigarette and lit it. Henry reached out his hand. Pella looked at him. “You sure?” she said.

Henry nodded. She handed him the cigarette. “Careful. They’re strong.”

Henry didn’t know strong from unstrong. He put it between his lips.

“This isn’t as stupid as it looks.” She nodded at the desk as she lit a second cigarette for herself. “Or actually no—it is that stupid. I knew I couldn’t carry this home. But I really wanted it.”

The cigarette wasn’t having much effect. Henry tried to imitate Pella’s approach, really sucking on the end this time. His head exploded into dizziness, and he put his cigarette-holding hand on the desk to steady himself. He lifted the other to his mouth and coughed a little fluid into it.

“Henry, are you all right?”

He nodded.

“Come on. Let’s sit you down for a minute.” Pella took him by the hand and guided him to the curb, where they sat with their feet in the street. “I got a new place,” she said, to distract him. “It’s over on Groome Street, with two juniors named Noelle and Courtney. They had a third roommate, but she left midsemester—five to one she went into rehab for her eating disorder, to judge by the general vibe of the place.

“When I went to pawn my ring to pay the rent, I saw this writing table in the shop next door. I figured it’d be nice to have one piece of furniture that was mine. So I bought it.”

“It’s nice.”

“Thank you. The owner asked when I wanted to pick it up. And I said, Do you deliver? And he hemmed and hawed and said, Well, he didn’t have his truck, maybe he could bring it by on Saturday. And I said, Saturday? It’s Monday! And he said he knew what day it was. So I said, Forget it, I’ll just take it now. I carried it out of there and got a block away and nearly collapsed.”

“I can help,” Henry said.

“You just take it easy for a minute.”

They sat there in silence while Pella finished her cigarette. Then she helped Henry to his feet and they began lugging the desk toward Groome Street. Henry had to walk forward to keep from getting dizzy, which meant Pella had to walk backward, and her tiny mincing steps, combined with the fact that he kept getting dizzy anyway, made for slow progress. Every half block they had to stop and rest.

Finally they reached Groome and turned east, toward the lake. “It’s on this block,” Pella said. “I think.”

“What’s the number?”

Pella couldn’t remember. “Why do all these houses look alike? And don’t say because it’s dark. Oh wait—maybe this is it.” They set down the table, and she darted up onto the porch and peered in the window. “They really do all look alike,” she said.

Henry hiccuped. The street was tilting under him. “Try your key.”

“I forgot to get one.” She climbed the porch steps again and tried the door—it was unlocked. She peeked inside. “This is it,” she said. “Let’s be quiet.”

They carried the table onto the porch, into the darkened living room, and then into Pella’s room. She flipped on the light to reveal an empty carpeted room with dust bunnies in the corners and a futon mattress on the floor, the contents of her wicker bag and backpack spilled out across it. On the floor beside the futon sat a fresh-from-the-box digital alarm clock, its cord still kinked as it snaked across the rug. “Voilà,” she said. “Mon château.”

They carried the writing table to the obvious spot, kitty-corner from the futon, and worked it up tight to the wall. Pella stood back and appraised it with folded arms, used her hip to shove it a half step closer to the window. “I think that’s it,” she said.

Henry walked down the hall to use the bathroom. On the way back he peeked into the kitchen, where a dim light shone above the sink. On the counter stood a bottle of wine with a rubber stopper in it. He’d never tasted wine before; even in church he skipped that part. The bottle was a little more than halfway full. He pulled out the stopper and glugged it down in two long pulls. He shoved the bottle as far down in the trash as it would go.

The kitchen table had a blue Formica top and four matching chairs, but there were only three people living there. And Pella didn’t have a chair for her new desk. Therefore he picked up one of the chairs and carried it back to Pella’s room, trying not to bang it on the hallway walls as he walked.

“Oh,” Pella said. “I probably shouldn’t use that.”

“What? Why?” Henry felt himself wobble a bit. “Do whatever you want.” He pushed the chair under the desk with a flourish.

“Hm.” Pella folded her arms beneath her breasts and assessed the setup. “Maybe you’re right. It does look pretty good.”

He turned to face her, held out his arms. “You look pretty good.”

“Henry. Cut it out. You’re drunk.”

He belched discreetly into his hand. “I love you.”

“No, you do not.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You moron. How’d you get so drunk? You were drunk before, but not like this.”

“I drank the wine.”

“The wine? What wine?”

“Kitchen wine.”

“You drank kitchen wine? Okay. You drink all the kitchen wine you want. You’ve earned it. But don’t go around telling people you love them. Deal?”

Henry nodded. Then he closed his eyes. Pella took him by the hand and led him out into the living room. When he awoke a few hours later, he awoke in darkness, the room spinning, his face pressed into the couch. A hand was shaking his shoulder. “Henry,” Pella whispered.

He grunted.

“It’s almost five thirty. I’m leaving for work. Go sleep in my room so my roommates don’t get mad.”