65

Affenlight’s meeting with the trustees ran long, and the drive, even at dangerous speed, took more than two hours, so he didn’t arrive at Grand Chute Stadium until the top of the eighth inning. Beer, no matter how fervently one wished for it, was not being sold at the concession stand. He bought two hot dogs, applied mustard and relish, and found an available seat—not a swatch of corrugated bleacher but an actual flip-down seat—behind home plate. The UW–Chute Titans’ colors were navy and gold, with emphasis on the navy, so that when Affenlight looked straight at the field and squinted, the seas of people filling his peripheral vision could easily be mistaken for Westish fans.

The Harpooners were trailing by the very respectable score of 3 to 0. They had played admirably to reach this, the regional championship game, winning three of their first four games in the double-elimination tournament, far exceeding the expectations of everyone involved, especially their opponents, who’d expected to crush them—and yet, as Owen told Affenlight on the phone this morning, to dream of winning this game was probably folly. The University of Wisconsin–Chute was on another level, a state-funded university with an enrollment of fifteen thousand and an extraordinary investment of pride and money in their baseball program, as evidenced by their lush, cozy, pro-style ballpark, suitable for hosting a regional tournament. Not to mention, Owen added, that this would basically be a home game for them.

“Excuses, excuses,” said Affenlight, half joshing.

“Oh, we’ll come to play,” replied Owen. “Mike wouldn’t have it otherwise. The real problem is pitching. We’ve never played so many games in so few days. Remember the old poem Spahn and Sain and pray for rain? For us it’s Starblind and Phlox and then get rocked.”

“And lots of walks.”

“And poor Coach Cox. I don’t know how long we can keep it up. Adam has already pitched two complete games. His eye contains that crazed I-can-do-anything look, but I don’t know if he can lift his hand above his shoulder.”

For as many games as Affenlight had attended this season, he’d yet to see Owen actually play. Now, as he settled into his seat, that beautiful creature was settling into the left-handed batter’s box, a clear plastic face-mask attached to his batting helmet to protect his damaged cheek from further injury. Owen had complained vociferously about the contraption, which he considered unflattering and potentially performance-disrupting, but Coach Cox—good man—turned a deaf ear.

Whereas some hitters twitched and stomped while awaiting the pitch, chopping their bats into the strike zone, Owen exuded a listless calm. He might have been standing in the quad, pursuing a postlecture discussion, holding an umbrella against a light spring rain. The first pitch blazed past the inside corner, inches from his hip, and struck the catcher’s glove with a sound more powerfully percussive than any Affenlight had heard at Westish Field, even when Adam Starblind was pitching. Affenlight flinched in fear for Owen’s safety, leaving fingerprints in his hot-dog bun; Owen merely turned to watch the pitch go by, cocking his head in contemplative disagreement when the umpire called it a strike.

The second pitch came in just as fast but more toward the center of the plate. Owen, after waiting what seemed to be far too long, dropped his hands and swung. It was a baseball commonplace, dimly remembered from Affenlight’s childhood days as a halfhearted Braves fan, that left-handed batters had more graceful swings than righties, long effortless swings that swooped down through the strike zone and greeted shoe-top pitches sweetly. Affenlight didn’t see why this should be so, unless the right and left sides of the bodies possessed inherently different properties, something to do with the halves of the brain, but Owen’s languid, elliptical swing did nothing to deflate the hypothesis.

The ball looped over the third baseman’s head and landed squarely on the left-field line, kicking up a puff of chalk. Fair ball. The home crowd let out an anguished sigh that seemed all out of keeping with an empty-bases hit in a three-run game. As Owen loped safely into second base, they rose, almost in unison, and began to clap. Affenlight thought them very magnanimous to cheer so heartily for an opponent; somehow Owen inspired that kind of behavior in people.

Affenlight stood to clap as well, but it was the pitcher who, as the noise continued to mount, sheepishly tipped his cap. Affenlight, flummoxed, asked the woman beside him, who was wearing a gold-and-navy CHUTE YOUR ENEMIES sweatshirt, what happened. “That lucky twit,” she said, indicating Owen, “just broke up Trevor’s no-hitter.”

Out on the electronic scoreboard in center field, the 0 in the Westish hit column had changed to a 1. Affenlight reproached himself; a real fan would have noticed that immediately. He reproached himself again; he’d gotten a dab of mustard on his Harpooner tie. Not that he didn’t have three dozen more at home. “I don’t know,” he said. “I thought it a rather skillful play.”

The woman chuckled. “I’m pretty sure his eyes were closed.”

The next batter, Adam Starblind, drew a walk. “Your pitcher seems a bit rattled,” Affenlight noted.

“Trevor? Please. These rich preppy kids couldn’t hit him with a ten-foot pole.”

Affenlight wanted to point out that several of the Harpooners came from extremely modest or even straitened circumstances, and that the team didn’t have a baseball facility anywhere near this luxurious—how on earth did a public school afford it?—but it would be hard to make the case while wearing his best Italian suit, and anyway the game had reached a critical moment, two runners on, the tying run at the plate. The batter was the Harpooners’ replacement for Henry Skrimshander at shortstop—Affenlight prided himself on knowing the students’ names, but the freshpersons often eluded him. The Latino non-Henry, whatever his name, performed several rapid signs of the cross as he stepped into the batter’s box. He took one strike, then another. He gamely fouled off two tough pitches, then slapped a ground ball that glanced off the fingertips of the second baseman’s glove. Bases loaded.

“Almost!” cheered Affenlight, with what amounted to a kind of sneering glee. Remorse quickly followed. What if that second baseman was this woman’s child? In any event, he was somebody’s child.

“Do you have a son on the team?” he asked, trying to atone, but the woman simply shushed him and pointed to the field. Mike Schwartz, his daughter’s cuckolded lover, was walking toward home plate.

The catcher called time and jogged out to calm Trevor, who was storming around behind the pitcher’s mound, talking to himself. Affenlight focused his attention on the lovely Owen, who, while standing with both feet on the tiny island of third base, reached into his uniform’s back pocket and produced a roll of mints. He offered one to Coach Cox, who declined with folded arms, and then to the third baseman, who shrugged and held out his palm.

Mike Schwartz, by comparison to Owen—or, really, to anyone—had a snarling, hyperactive mien in the batter’s box, like a barely restrained bull. His back foot gouged at the dirt until it found a purchase it liked; his hips twisted, screwing his knock-kneed stance more tightly into the ground; his shoulders bobbed while his fists made curt, jerky motions that slashed the bat head through the air. He crowded close to home plate, smothering it with his bulk, daring the pitcher to find a place to throw the ball. Affenlight couldn’t tell whether all this kinetic menace came naturally to Schwartz or was a performance designed to intimidate; probably any such distinction would be false. Only in the instant of the pitch’s release did he quiet himself, and then the swing became compact and dangerous, and the pitch—a high fastball, probably in excess of ninety miles per hour—shot off the bat with a pure loud ping of aluminum. Affenlight leaped to his feet, thrust a fist in the air. The ball landed in the tall firs beyond the left-field wall, and all four Harpooners—Owen, Starblind, not-Henry, and Schwartz—stomped joyously on home plate in turn. Four to three, Harpooners.

Adam Starblind, who had been playing center field, came in to pitch the last two innings. The Titans stranded a runner on third in the eighth, and in the ninth not-Henry and Professor Guladni’s son Ajay turned a handsome double play to end the game. Affenlight wended his way through the stands toward Duane Jenkins, the Westish athletic director, who was standing behind the Harpooner dugout, filming the celebration with his cell phone.

“Nationals,” Duane said, beaming. “South Carolina. Can you believe it?”

“I can now.” Affenlight held out his hand. “Congratulations, Duane. A lot of hard work went into this.”

“I’d like to take the credit. But we all know who to thank.” Duane jerked his head toward the field, where Mike Schwartz had somehow obtained a folding chair and was sitting quietly apart, undoing the buckles of his shin guards while his teammates jitterbugged around Adam Starblind, who thrust the big faux-gold trophy aloft.

Affenlight wrapped an arm around Duane’s schlumpy shoulders. “That’s precisely what I wanted to talk to you about.”