Conviction (13 page)

He grunts. I watch the meat flattening on the cutting board until my face feels tingly and my forehead feels stuffed with cotton balls. Trey glances up at me for a second, then says,
“Maybe you should sit down.”

God. I’m a
pitcher
; I can’t be so weak that just seeing blood does this to me. But the edges of the room have gone soft, so I lower myself onto one of the kitchen chairs. He
sets down his mallet, washes his hands, and dries them on his towel, then fills a glass with water and sets it on the table next to me.

“Here,” he says roughly. “Drink.”

I take a couple swallows of the water. Trey picks up his cutting board and scrapes the meat and fat and bone on it into the trash and picks up his mallet again and a piece of meat from a plate.
I sit for a while longer until the fuzziness in my head is gone. When the world’s solid and sharp again, I say, “Do you think there’s any way I can get out of being in the
trial?”

“A subpoena’s a legal order,” he says between thuds. “So no. I don’t.”

“I really don’t want to do it.”

“Well, I don’t know what you want me to tell you.”

“It’s just—what if I screw everything up?”

He doesn’t answer me. I picture myself alone on a witness stand facing the twelve people responsible for my dad’s life, and my heart lurches against my rib cage. “Can you go be
there with me for the trial? When I have to go?”

Trey turns around to look at me like I just suggested maybe he go move into the jail with my dad. Guess that’s a no. Before I think better of it, I say, “Trey?”

“What.”

“You don’t—I mean, you believe him, right? Dad? That it was an accident and he didn’t know?”

“Braden, I wasn’t there.”

“Who cares if you were there? You know him. You don’t have to have been there to know he’s not—”

He picks up the meat and holds it up to study, peering at it in the light. It’s so thin you can see shadows moving behind it. “You know something, Braden? I drive forty-five minutes
to go to the Safeway in Merced so I don’t have to run into people who want to drag me into exactly this kind of discussion. I don’t want to talk about him. I don’t want to have to
tell you that again. All right?” He pushes his sleeves to his elbows, and when I start to speak again, he spins around to face me and says sharply, “You know what, you should probably
go find something else to do.”

My face is hot. I draw a long breath, listening to his birds chirping, and when he raises his eyebrows like he’s waiting for my answer, it’s only because of what I know I owe him
that I dip my head in acknowledgment and leave the kitchen without telling him what I think—that if he doesn’t believe our dad’s innocent, that makes him a pretty worthless
son.

A
fter my dad’s hearing, we get another shutout (2–0) against Beyer and win (6–3) against McNair. La Abra’s still
undefeated, and Alex appears to be over his slump. But something else happened when La Abra played Ripon: one of La Abra’s pitchers, a righty senior named Kyle Allison, hit the center fielder
in the helmet on a wild pitch and gave him a bad enough concussion his parents got scared and haven’t let him come back. By all accounts it was unintentional—we hear Allison’s
been too shaken up to throw since, and I know he sat out his next start—but Dutch says what everyone’s thinking, which is that it doesn’t bode well for us that they’re
throwing wild like that.

The thing about baseball is you’re rarely honest with yourself about how dangerous it can be; you push it out of your mind so you can play it. You try to forget what you know of shattered
bats or torn ACLs or ruined ex-players, your own close calls or the times you nearly ended it for someone else. You try to forget how forty years ago, a few miles away in the minor leagues, a
prospect named Raciel Infante from Venezuela was struck in the temple on a pitch from reliever Manny Escobar, how by the time they got him to the hospital his brain had swelled up so much they had
to saw off half his skull, and he never walked or spoke again.

You can’t forget, though, not really; the past is buried in shallow graves on every field, waiting to be brought back to life. I’ve always known that. It’s why when I was a kid
I promised Trey so readily I wouldn’t throw up high at anyone, even though my dad’s told me more than once the job might someday demand it. I never knew Raciel Infante, and I
don’t know Ripon’s center fielder, either, but there’s a certain way both of them are real to me, a certain way that what happened to them matters and lives with me and belongs to
me still, and haunts me with each pitch. Baseball is a game you play with ghosts.

After practice Tuesday—two days before we face Brantley, over three weeks since my dad’s seen the light of day—I have Colin go with me to scout the Hughson-Brantley game.
It’s forty minutes out past La Abra to Hughson, mostly orchard and farmland, small towns dotted over long, flat stretches of road. When we pass the
COLINA
,
POPULATION
468 sign, Colin says, “You’re worried about Brantley, huh?”

“I think they’re even better this year than they were last year.”

“They didn’t have many seniors last year. Everyone came back.” He’s quiet as we go by the Colina dairy, the sun glaring off the long white roofs. Then he says,
“Scary stuff about that fielder from Ripon.”

“I feel awful for him. Probably never saw it coming.”

“I’m not saying it was some kind of message, but I bet La Abra sure doesn’t mind word got back to us, either.” He glances at me. “You thought about our game with
them at all?”

“Nope.”

“All right.” He doesn’t believe me. “That’s not for a while, anyway. You’ve got time.”

Brantley beats Hughson, like I figured they would. It’s not close. Brantley’s pitching’s strong, their batters disciplined, their plays pristine. They even pull off a suicide
squeeze, which at this level’s something you almost never see. It doesn’t make me feel any better watching them like I thought it might. We’re making our way down the bleachers
after the game when someone steps in front of me so close our chests nearly touch.

“Excuse me,” I say, but then I look up, and I recognize him right away: Vidal Medina, the shortstop for La Abra. Immediately, the thinning bleachers blur in the background. I stop so
hard Colin rams into me and nearly knocks me over.

“Look who it is,” Vidal says, smiling a tight, hard smile. He’s tall—he’s got three or four inches on me—and lanky in the way some of the younger guys are:
all quick strength. “What are you doing here?”

I think you can literally see my heart beating through my shirt. I cross my arms over my chest to hide it, and I make myself smile until I feel like a jack-o’-lantern. “What’s
it look like? Synchronized swimming? Ballet?”

Vidal cocks his head. “That supposed to be funny?” He looks at Colin then and says something to him in Spanish too fast for me to make out.

Colin stiffens. “There a problem here?”

Vidal’s smile widens, and he says something else, his tone disgusted. Then he takes a step toward me. “How’s your daddy doing, by the way? He having a good time in
there?”

In my chest, there’s a feeling like an animal clawing to get out. “You better watch what you’re saying.”

“Why? You feel guilty?” He takes another step closer so there’s less than six inches between our faces. “How do you
live
with yourself, huh? How do you sleep at
night?”

Next to me, Colin coils, ready, like a spring. I try to tell myself it’s all right, that between the two of us we could take this guy if it comes to that, but then Vidal turns abruptly,
taps Colin just below his rib cage, and says, very quietly,
“Más te vale que saques tu amigo de aquí, hermano,”
and he looks back up toward the top of the stands,
and that’s when I see him.

I don’t even have time to think. I see Colin curl his hand into a fist, and I turn and stumble over the bleachers and head blindly for the car. When I get there, I hunch over with my hands
on my knees and count two breaths, four, six, and then Colin catches up to me.

“The hell was that?” he yells at me, and the people walking to the nearby car turn to stare. Colin’s nose is bleeding. He shoves me, hard. “You start something like that
with some thug and I jump in for you and then you
bail
? Are you
kidding
me, Braden? I don’t even know who that guy
is.
”

I cup my hands together and breathe into them. I still can’t feel my lungs. “He plays for La Abra,” I say when I can breathe again. “But Colin, the guy he was with, a few
rows up—that was Alex. Alex Reyes.”

It’s dark in the parking lot, Colin’s face shadowed and yellowish from the dim lights, but even still I can see his expression.

“Then you’re a coward,” he mutters. He tilts his head back and wipes his nose. “God, Braden, you didn’t even try to stand up for your dad.”

That night I can’t sleep. At three I finally get up and sit down to write my dad a letter. I copy the jail’s address onto the envelope, then turn it facedown. Then I
sit there for a long time.

Dad: I hope you are doing okay in there. I always have my phone with me if you’re ever allowed to call.

I got into something with a guy from La Abra tonight watching Brantley, and I bailed on Colin instead of sticking around to defend him, and I guess you. I’m sorry. I’ve been
feeling pretty bad.

Trey is writing a cookbook. Maybe you could write him.

I stare at the letter a while, then crumple it up and rip out a new sheet of paper.

Dad: How come you can talk to Mr. Buchwald all the time, but you can’t write me even once?

I cross it out.
Dad: I thought you always said God protects people who follow him.
I cross that out, too.
Dad: So whose idea was it to have me come testify in court?

I tear the sheet in half and start over.

Dad: I miss you. I love you. I’m sorry about everything. When you come back, I swear I’ll be a perfect son.

I
t’s warm for March the day of the Brantley game, and the stands are packed. The cheerleaders brought painted signs with all our names on
them—Lindsay Tellerman, Dutch’s girlfriend, has one that says
MY BOYFRIEND SCORES MORE THAN YOURS
and the
O
s are all baseballs. Claire Kolpowski has one
with my name and number on it. I wonder if Maddie’s here.

Brantley’s probably the toughest match in our league, but this is why my dad’s always said they’re the last team you’d ever want to lose to: when I was a freshman, one of
their pitchers, Devon Riley, sued the district to be able to go with another guy to the prom. The case got dismissed, but still. One time that season in practice, Jarrod shied away from a tag
because he was afraid of getting blown up at the plate, and Cardy yelled,
Hey, no Devon Rileys on this team
, and everyone gave Jarrod a hard time about that forever and eventually
Riley’s name turned into team shorthand for playing like a wuss. One of the seniors, Keith Brockmeier, copied a bunch of pictures of him and drew speech bubbles of him saying all these gay
things and taped them all over the locker room. There’s still a couple in the equipment room, where no one ever cleans.

I would never say this to anyone, but the way Pastor Stan talked about stuff like this in church always made me nervous. Because if the reason people even get addicted to homosexuality in the
first place is that they pick the wrong ways of filling whatever holes they have in their hearts, giving into their lust and perversions until they go after other men instead of turning to God or
whatever, then, I mean, maybe that could happen to anyone if they’re not careful.

Maybe it sounds crazy, but in my heart, I’m holding out hope that something might happen with Maddie after all this, when things are back to normal; the truth is, I’ve hoped that
since the first time I laid eyes on her. So in my mind, in those darker places no one goes, I’m faithful to her; I don’t imagine other girls. And even when I feel guilty and kind of
dirty afterward, I still feel relieved that whatever else is wrong with me, at least that isn’t. That’s why Brantley’s pitcher bothers me—because if I were like that, if
everyone either thought I was disgusting or pitied me, I’d try to fix it instead of trying to make it spread. It’s like watching someone light matches inside a burning house.