66
Alcohol was banned from the locker room by NCAA decree, but Schwartz had bought three cases of champagne with the last of Coach Cox’s money—he’d also paid his May rent and his Visa bill—and, with Meat’s help, smuggled them into an empty locker at Chute Stadium and covered them with bags of ice. When the Harpooners returned to the locker room after accepting their trophy and hugging their families and posing for pictures and plenty of jumping around, the ice had melted and seeped out the locker’s cracks, forming a giant puddle on the fancy slate navy-and-gold checkerboard floor. Meat undid the lock, and a few moments later they were having the victory celebration they’d seen on TV so many times, dancing shirtless in their sliding shorts to the Spanish hip-hop that blared from the boombox Izzy brought on road trips. Only the cameras were missing.
Schwartz took a long slug from his personal bottle of champagne, which he wasn’t going to waste by spraying around, and sought out Owen, who was shimmying on top of the locker-room bench, his Harpooner cap twisted and cocked like he was from the hood. He paused in his gyrations to give Schwartz a high five. “I’m wearing my cap askew,” he said.
“Looks good.” Schwartz leaned in to be heard above the music without shouting. “Listen, Buddha. After your surgery—they gave you something?”
Owen nodded. “Percocet.”
Schwartz belted back some more bubbly. “Huh.”
Owen reached into the locker, unzipped his bag, and produced a translucent orange cylinder. “This is what’s left.” He slipped the bottle into Schwartz’s palm and closed Schwartz’s fingers around it, like a grandparent distributing dollar bills or illicit stores of candy.
Schwartz, not wanting to seem eager, didn’t shake the cylinder, but he gauged its near weightlessness with dismay. “Thanks, Buddha.”
“Aye aye, my captain.”
Schwartz retreated to a bathroom stall, just to be by himself for a minute, and popped two of the remaining three capsules, hoping to keep one in reserve for later, but it seemed silly to let that lonely little thing jitter around in there like that, like some kind of keepsake, so he swallowed it too. Three Percs weren’t going to do shit anyway.
Even in the best circumstances his enjoyment of moments like this was bound to be partial, muted, hedged; he was already thinking about the next game and how not to lose it. It was a coach’s mentality, a field general’s mentality, and it was his mentality too. Permanent vigilance, because disaster always lurked. The best he could hope for was an instant of peace before the planning began again, a moment when his muscles unclenched and he thought, Okay, fine, we did it.
But today he couldn’t even have that. All he could have today was a sickly champagne-and-Percocet high, and the knowledge that there’d be at least two more games—because nationals were double elimination—before he had to face his fucked-up life. If Henry were here, Henry’s joy would be total, his holy-fool dancing would put the Buddha’s to shame, but Henry wasn’t here. He hadn’t pushed through that one last barrier, his fear of succeeding, beyond which the world lay totally open to him. Schwartz would never live in a world so open. His would always be occluded by the fact that his understanding and his ambition outstripped his talent. He’d never be as good as he wanted to be, not at baseball, not at football, not at reading Greek or taking the LSAT. And beyond all that he’d never be as good as he wanted to be. He’d never found anything inside himself that was really good and pure, that wasn’t double-edged, that couldn’t just as easily become its opposite. He had tried and failed to find that thing, and he would continue to try and fail, or else he would leave off trying and keep on failing. He had no art to call his own. He knew how to motivate people, manipulate people, move them around; this was his only skill. He was like a minor Greek god you’ve barely heard of, who sees through the glamour of the armor and down into the petty complexity of each soldier’s soul. And in the end is powerless to bring about anything resembling his vision. The loftier, arbitrary gods intervene.
Working with Henry was the closest he’d ever come, because Henry knew only one thing, wanted only one thing, and his single-mindedness made him—made both of them—pure. But Henry had tried to beat himself, had inserted himself into the equation, had started to worry about being perfect instead of simply becoming the best goddamn shortstop ever, and now he was no better than Schwartz. He was just like Schwartz, a fucked-up guy with a fucked-up life.
“Schwartzy!” yelled Rick. “Get the bleepity bleep out here!”
Henry, Schwartz thought, hauling himself up from the sink over which he’d been hunched, staring at his sunken but shaven face through a mess of dried toothpaste and spit flecks. Henry’s here. He headed back into the locker room, still throttling his empty champagne bottle. The Harpooners had gathered in a huddle in the center of the room, undressed and dripping champagne, arms draped around one another’s shoulders. Rick and Owen stepped apart to open a spot for Schwartz, and the circle expanded to accommodate his girth. Henry wasn’t there. The rest of them pressed their temples together and swayed back and forth like junior high school kids at their last-ever junior high school dance, singing the school shanty at the top of their lungs.