Split Decision (6 page)

Cody looked up and released a long, slow breath of relief. “Thank you, Sir,” he whispered. “I owe you one.”

Cody smiled a small smile as a realization hit him.
Check that,
he prayed silently.
I owe you
everything!

Cody lowered himself tentatively onto a first-row bleacher near the scorer’s table. Coach Clayton walked toward him, his footfalls hollow in the near-empty gymnasium. Cody looked up at his coach. “Uh,” he said nervously, “I’m gonna be late for algebra. I really shouldn’t be staying late after your class.”

“I’ll write you a pass, dawg,” Coach Clayton said, his voice barely better than a whisper.

Cody stared at the hardwood floor, its gleam dulled by a thin layer of dust
. Where is a fire drill when you need one?
he asked himself. He heard his stomach gurgle. The sound reminded him of his dad’s ancient coffeemaker.

He wondered if Coach Clayton could hear his stomach turmoil
. Of course he can hear it,
a voice inside Cody’s head admonished.
They can probably hear it clear over in woodshop class—in the building across the street!

Cody drew his head upward as he heard the coach clear his throat. “Dawg,” he said, “I gotta tell ya; I’m surprised. Disappointed. And, to be honest, a little hurt. You’re not runnin’ track? Cody Martin is not running track for me!? Did I do something during basketball to make you not wanna run for me? I mean, I’ve always tried to be more than fair with you. ’Cuz I appreciate having a guy like you on my teams. And I thought we kinda shared something special—like Wooden and Walton, like Shanahan and Elway.”

Cody wagged his head vigorously. “We do, Coach. It’s not like you did anything to drive me toward baseball. Uh, it’s kind of hard for me to explain, but I guess Coach Curtis just kinda caught me off-guard, and I guess I gave the first answer that popped into my head.”

Coach Clayton groaned. “Is that the way you make all your big decisions? Say the first thing that pops to mind? Shucks, dawg, I’d be less ticked off about this if you’d flipped a penny to make your choice. Then I would have had at least a fifty-fifty chance.”

Cody feared he was going to cry. He closed his eyes for a moment and prayed for strength. Then he looked his coach in his wounded eyes. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said. “I realize I didn’t do a good job making a decision. But, the fact is that I did make a decision, and now I feel I need to stick with it. It seems like the right thing to do, you know?”

Coach Clayton glided a hand over his close-cropped hair. “Aw, horse feathers,” he said. “I’m gonna have to think about this thing, Mr. Martin. I can’t argue with anything you just said, but let’s not close the barn door just yet, okay? All the critters ain’t home and accounted for.”

Cody willed himself to flash his coach a grin. “It’s a deal, Coach. Thanks for being so understanding.”

Coach Clayton offered an exaggerated shrug. “What can I say? I’m a very gentle, understanding fella. Now, come back tomorrow ready to play ya some dodgeball. Five bucks if you nail Alston in the gut!”

Cody laughed politely and trotted to his algebra class.

Cody stepped into the batter’s box and tapped his bat three times on home plate. “Give me a fat one,” he called to Bart Evans, who was tossing batting practice to Cody and the other Grant freshmen.

Bart’s first pitch sailed over Cody’s head and clanged off the backstop. “Uh,” Cody chuckled, “not
that
fat, Bart.”

Bart pounded his fist into his mitt while he waited for catcher Mark Goddard to scramble to the backstop to retrieve the ball.

“Just let those go, Goddard,” Bart said, disgusted. “I have more than one ball here, you know.”

Goddard said nothing, but Cody could tell he put some extra mustard on his toss back to the mound. Then, the stocky catcher went back into his crouch and waited for Bart’s next pitch—which kicked up dirt three feet in front of home plate.

Coach Curtis, who was studying Bart from the front of the home dugout, shook his head wearily. “Mr. Evans,” he said, “this is batting practice. Therefore, it would be nice if you could put the ball someplace your teammates can actually bat it! Is that clear?”

Bart kicked angrily at the dirt behind the pitcher’s rubber. “Yes, Coach,” he mumbled. He tried to guide his next pitch over the plate. Cody sensed the pitch was going to hit him; however, it was traveling so slowly, like a lazy bumblebee, that he took one step back and caught it bare-handed before zipping it back to Bart.

“Heaven help me,” Cody heard Coach Curtis grumble, his face tilted toward the cloudless sky. “It’s gonna be a long, long season.”

Eventually, however, Bart began to find the zone. But, just as he seemed to be settling in to a comfortable batting-practice rhythm, Coach Curtis called an end to BP and ordered his squad to finish practice with four laps around the field.

By lap two, Cody had put thirty yards between himself and a small “chase pack,” composed of Goddard, star third baseman AJ Murphy, and the Evans twins.

By lap three, he couldn’t hear even the faintest scuff of footfalls behind him. He lapped a couple of stragglers before he finished—with a strong sprint down the third baseline.

“Whoa!” he whispered to himself as he stepped on home plate. “That felt good.”

“You looked good out there today, Martin,” Coach Curtis said as he began to load bats into the bat rack near the dugout. “Looks like you’re gonna have a strong season.”

“Thanks,” Cody said, noting that he had already caught his breath.
I was wondering, for a while there,
he said to himself,
whether it was going to be baseball or track season, but I haven’t heard anything from Coach Clayton, so I guess this is it. I wonder if Chop’s freakin’ over at the track. I wonder what he’s gonna say to me if we hit the showers at the same time. Man, I hope the track dudes practice late tonight. I’m not ready to explain all this to Chop!

Finally, the Fight

T
his is like watching a horror movie,
Cody thought, as he watched the scene unfold across the locker room.
It’s like, gonna be so gruesome that you want to get up and walk out, but at the same time, you find it hard not to look!

Alston, who had just unwound a long, snakelike strip of athletic tape from his right wrist, wadded it up into a baseball-sized wad and tossed it at Pork Chop’s head as he walked by, on his way to the urinals.

Alston didn’t fire the tape-ball hard; it was more of a playful lob. But it was enough to set Chop off. He charged like a rhino toward Alston, and when he drew close enough, he began raining sledgehammer blows on his antagonist’s head and shoulders.

The punches landed with sickening cracks and thuds. Cody felt a wave of nausea building in his stomach. He expected to see Alston crumple to the ground under the furious onslaught. But soon, the shorter athlete was crouched in a low fighting stance, firing his fists like pistons into Chop’s midsection.

Cody pushed himself up from the bench in front of his locker. He felt a magnetic pull to step between the two combatants, but the fight was so furious that such intervention seemed impossible.

The locker room was almost vacant, but the few stragglers moved closer, forming a half-circle around the fight. No one cheered, though. No one taunted. To Cody, it seemed like he and the others had stumbled upon a grisly auto accident. They were intrigued and repulsed at the same time.

“You gonna stop this?” Bart whispered to Cody. “They’re gonna kill each other!”

“I don’t think I can stop it,” Cody said, his voice cracking with panic. As soon as he finished speaking, he began praying:
Please, God, make ’em stop!

A moment later, Cody found himself dashing from the locker room. He had a hunch, and he hoped it was correct.

He burst through the doors to the gym, and, sure enough, there was Coach Clayton, shooting free throws. “Coach!” Cody gasped. “Come quick … locker room … fight!”

The coach almost bowled over Cody on his way out of the gym. Cody tailed him to the locker room.

Chop and Alston were on the floor now, clinching, rolling, and swearing. Chop had just grabbed two handfuls of Alston’s thick, sandy hair when Coach Clayton blew his whistle so loudly that Cody felt his eardrums trembling. “Ya’ll break it up right now,” the coach said, voice trembling, face crimson. “Or I’ll break ya up!”

Chop released his grip on Alston’s hair and carefully drew back, keeping a wary eye on his opponent all the while. Alston stood and smoothed his right hand over the front of his T-shirt, which hung in tatters across his torso. His left eye was swollen shut.

Chop’s shirt was intact, but soaked with sweat— and perhaps water from the locker room floor. His face looked less swollen than Alston’s; he had only a small trail of blood trickling from one nostril. But Cody knew that his friend would be feeling all the body blows he had endured for a long, long time.

“Sit!” Coach Clayton said, after giving the twosome a chance to catch their breath and gather themselves.

“I wanna ask what started this,” he began, “but I think we all know, don’t we? You just finally had to go and do it, didn’t ya? Had to prove who’s the baddest man in the freshman class. Who’s the toughest. Well, I got a question for the both of ya—How does it feel?”

Alston’s head was bowed, eyes fixed on the floor. Chop stared straight ahead, glassy-eyed, at the wall behind the coach.

Coach Clayton slammed his palms together; the smack echoed like a thunder clap off the locker room walls. “I want an answer, you two numb noggins; that wasn’t a rhetorical question. “You, Alston,” the coach continued, pointing a long forefinger like a weapon, “you feel better about yourself now than you did a few minutes ago?”

Alston was as still as a statue. He didn’t even cast his eyes upward.

“What about you, Porter?” Coach Clayton said after a long pause. “You feel like a big man now? You’re always talkin’ about ‘representin’.’ What, exactly, do you feel you’ve represented?”

Cody expected more silence, but Chop cleared his throat and began to speak, his voice raw. “He’s been coming at me for a long time. Challenging me. Thinking I’m gonna back down because he’s the big hot-shot athlete—and he’s a year older than the rest of us freshmen. Well, I don’t back down from anyone.”

That comment brought Alston’s head up. “Neither do I. You think your size intimidates everyone. Wrong, big man. You got sixty pounds on me, but I don’t care. You are bigger … doesn’t mean you’re tougher.”

“Ah,” Coach Clayton said, a humorless smile stretching across his face, “now we’re getting somewhere. This is about who’s tougher, isn’t it? Well, fellas, here’s your reality check—you didn’t prove you’re tough. Either of you. We already
knew
you were tough. You’ve shown that by how you’ve conducted yourselves, on and off the field—until now.”

He stared down Alston. “Tough, Terry,” he said, softening his voice, “is standing in front of your team, as you did last basketball season, and apologizing for being a short-tempered knucklehead. Tough is playing varsity basketball as a freshman, giving us solid minutes off the bench.”