The Art of Fielding: A Novel (14 page)

Hours after the game, he was still wearing his jockstrap and cup—not a pleasant feeling. He pried them away from his crotch, stripped naked, climbed into bed. His legs and feet, gritty from sliding and diving on the infield, chafed against the sheets.

The phone again. He needed to answer the phone: it would be news about Owen, or someone looking for news about Owen.

“Henry Skrimshander?”

“This is Henry.” Not a teammate—a woman’s voice. Probably the doctor.

“Henry, this is Miranda Szabo of SzaboSport Incorporated. I hear congratulations are in order.”

“What for?”

“What for? How about for putting yourself on par with the great Aparicio Rodriguez? Today was the day, right?”

“Oh. Well, I mean, it’s… yes, today.” When a game ended midinning, which happened most often because of rain, the official statistics reverted to the last finished inning. Officially, then, the Harpooners had beaten Milford 8–3 in eight innings. Officially, the top of the ninth inning had never happened. Officially, he’d never made an error.

“Splendid,” said Miranda Szabo. “Listen, I’m sorry to call so late, during your private time, but I’m out in L.A., closing a deal for Kelvin Massey.”

“Kelvin Massey? The Rockies’ third baseman?”

Miranda Szabo paused for a perfect, haughty half beat. “Kelvin Massey, the
Dodgers’
third baseman. But don’t tell Peter Gammons, that snoop.”

“I won’t,” Henry promised.

“Good. The press can’t know till tomorrow. We’re still putting the finishing touches on this little objet d’art. Fifty-six million over four years.”

“Wow.”

“How’s that for a recession special? Sometimes I impress myself,” Miranda Szabo admitted. “But let’s stay focused. Henry, I keep my ear to the ground, and lately your name is all I hear. Skrimshander, Skrimshander, Skrimshander. Like a tongue twister, only better. More mellifluous.”

“Wow. Thanks.”

“Everybody’s asking,
Where’d this kid come from?
And nobody knows.”

“I’m from Lankton, South Dakota.”

“Exactly my point. Nobody knows where you’re from, but everybody knows where you’re going. Straight to the top of the draft charts. I’m hearing third round, I’m hearing higher.”

“Higher?”

“Higher’s what I’m hearing. Third, second, who knows? Now Henry.”

“Yes?”

“Listen to me closely. You’re a busy person trying to balance baseball and academics at a reputable institution. We may not know each other well, but I know enough about you to know that much. And I also know that you’re about to get a whole lot busier. Do you know what the average signing bonus was for a third-round pick last year?”

“Uh, no.” Until very recently, Henry’s thoughts had been focused on next year’s draft, not this year’s—both juniors and seniors were eligible—and his goal for next year’s draft was to get himself picked in the fiftieth round, or maybe the forty-ninth if he was lucky. He’d barely even bothered to daydream about a signing bonus. He had no idea what the five-star guys, the high school hotshots and the sluggers from Stanford and Miami, got paid.

“Guess,” urged Miranda Szabo.

“Um. Eighty thousand?” It felt embarrassing, greedy, to name such a big number, even in indirect connection to himself.

“Close. You forgot the three. Three hundred eighty thousand.”

“Holy shit.” How long did it take his dad to earn that much? Six years? Seven? “Oops. Sorry. I didn’t mean to swear.”

“Swear away, sailor. Now, that doesn’t exactly put you in Kelvin Massey territory, but it’s a reasonable sum of money, and I think it’s the least you can reasonably expect, come June. And that means people are going to want a piece of you. It’s a crossroads, a complex time. You’re going to need someone working for your best interests. You’re going to need representation.”

“An agent?”

“Exactly right. You’re going to need an agent. Someone to help you navigate this crossroads, personally and fiscally. Selecting representation is a big decision, Henry, and not one to be taken lightly. Your agent has to be an extension of yourself. Just like your glove, when you’re out there in the field. Do you trust your glove, Henry?”

“Sure.”

“Well, you have to trust your agent just as much. Your agent, if your agent’s a good agent, doesn’t just draw up terms and disappear. Your agent becomes the fiscally minded, detail-cognizant you. So that
you—
the Henry-you, not the Miranda-you—can focus on baseball. And academics. Do you follow me, Henry?”

“I think so.”

“Have you been contacted by other parties interested in providing representation?”

“Um, no.”

“You will. Believe me. The mere fact that you’re on the phone with Miranda Szabo means that everybody and their mother will be calling to offer representation. Happens every time.”

“How will they know you called me?”

“They just will,” Miranda Szabo said, and sighed at the predictability of it all. “These people are animals.”

Henry’s thoughts swung in odd orbits over the next few hours, as he lay in bed listening to the groan of Phumber’s ancient heat vents. It was strange not to be able to hear Owen’s breathing. Midnight came, and one o’clock and two, and though he wasn’t quite awake he remained aware of the passage of time, the quarterly toll of the chapel bells. Unlike most of his classmates, who pulled all-nighters and slept through their early classes, he hardly ever saw or heard this time of night. He trained too hard and awoke too early, and it was a rare weekend kegger that found him leaned against a wall, politely holding a cup of beer that would be poured into the bushes on his walk home. The windows were cracked open, because it was always warm in their garret room. An occasional glitter of voices rose up from the quad below, an occasional gust of wind shuddered the panes. The latter drifted into Henry’s head and became the gust that helped to blow his throw off course. He wished he could have seen Owen tonight. Just for a moment, just a peek of Owen asleep in his room in the ICU. Then he’d know that Owen was okay. It was one thing to be told by the doctor, another to see it for yourself. In Henry’s half dreams Owen stared out at him, in the frozen instant before he slumped to the dugout floor, his popped-wide eyes asking,
Why?

Why,
in Henry’s experience, was a question an athlete shouldn’t ask. Why had he made such a terrible throw, so bad that Rick couldn’t even get a glove on it? Was it because of the scouts? He’d tensed up because of the scouts? No, that made no sense. For one thing, the scouts weren’t even there, they’d left after the eighth, and he’d seen them go. And anyway he had no fear of scouts in his heart, at least not that he could detect. Was it because he didn’t want to break Aparicio’s record, be the one to wipe his name from the record book, because Aparicio was Aparicio but he was just Henry? Maybe. But he could at least have tied the record before he messed up; then their names would be side by side. Then again he
had
tied the record; the error hadn’t counted. He’d have a chance to break it next game. If he didn’t want to break it, he’d have to mess up again. Maybe he’d mess up again. This was why you didn’t ask why.
Why
could only mess you up. But he’d be fine in the morning, as long as Owen was okay.

Schwartz would be glad about Miranda Szabo. Thrilled. Ecstatic. Henry had been worried about what would happen next year, after Schwartz graduated and went off to law school on the East Coast or the West. But maybe he’d be gone too, off to the minor leagues a year ahead of schedule, with money in his pocket. It was bittersweet to think about leaving, he loved it here, but baseball was baseball, and it was fitting that he and Schwartz might leave together. Without Schwartz there
was
no Westish College. Without Schwartz, come to think of it, there was hardly even any Henry Skrimshander.

12

O
n Schwartz’s law school applications, as on most posted documents, he listed his home address like this:

MICHAEL P. SCHWARTZ

VARSITY ATHLETIC CENTER

WESTISH COLLEGE

WESTISH, WI 51851

He rented a campus-slum two-bedroom house on Grant Street with Demetrius Arsch, his cocaptain on the football team and backup catcher on the baseball team, but rarely set foot inside it. During the day there were classes and practices to attend, plus Henry’s regimen to oversee, and at night he worked on his thesis—“The Stoics in America”—here on the top floor of the VAC, in a dark-carpeted conference room that he long ago appropriated as his personal office. Schwartz held no official position within the Athletic Department, but he’d donated so much time and effort over the past four years that no one begrudged him his key to the building. Books with brittle, snapped bindings and missing pages, collected via his nationwide ILL dragnet, stood in drunken piles all along the long oval table, surrounded by a sea of color-coded note cards, wire-bound notebooks, and empty coffee mugs that had been converted to spit cups. He’d quit chewing tobacco two years ago, but it aided his concentration so much that, as he entered this final thesis crunch, he’d had to make some exceptions. With a good dip in, plus a couple Sudafed for luck, he could crank out nine or ten pages in a night. He wasn’t into Adderall.

Schwartz cherished these private, diligent hours. All day long, no matter how hard he worked, no matter what he accomplished, a voice in his head berated him for his laziness, his sloth, his inability to concentrate. His concerns were trivial. His knowledge of history was shallow. His Latin sucked, and his Greek was worse. How did he expect to grasp Aurelius and Epictetus, inquired the voice, when he could barely string two Latin words together?
Vos es scelestus bardus.
Only here, long after midnight, while everyone else was sleeping, when nothing was expected of him, could Schwartz convince himself that he was working hard enough. These hours felt stolen, added to his life. The voice fell quiet. Even the pain in his knees subsided.

Tonight, though, didn’t seem destined to contain much calm. First the Buddha’s injury, and now, as Schwartz stepped out of the VAC elevator and into the corridor lit only by a red
EXIT
sign at either end, he could see a bulge in the manila envelope he’d affixed to his office door as a makeshift mailbox. He pressed his fingertips to the sandy yellow paper: sure enough, there was something inside, something that—he drew it out, heart thundering—bore the blue insignia of Yale University.

Schwartz prided himself on his honesty. If one of his teammates was dogging it, he busted that teammate’s balls, and if one of his classmates or professors made a comment that seemed specious or incomplete, he said so. Not because he knew more than they did but because the clash of imperfect ideas was the only way for anyone, including himself, to learn and improve. That was the lesson of the Greeks; that was the lesson of Coach Liczic, who’d banged on the Buick’s window.

That happened two years after his mom died of cancer. He was living by himself. He’d never met his dad—his parents had been engaged at one point, but his dad drank and bet on sports and left before Schwartz was born. When the woman from Children and Family Services came by a month after his mom’s funeral, he’d told the woman he was about to turn eighteen. The woman’s paperwork clearly said otherwise, but he was already six feet tall, weighed a hundred eighty pounds, and had little trouble buying cigarettes and sometimes even beer. “Come on,” he’d said as he stood in the apartment doorway, arms folded across his chest, the dog yapping behind him. “Do I look like I’m fourteen?” Baffled, the woman left, and though it wouldn’t have taken much investigation to prove him a liar, she never returned.

His aunt Diane’s family lived nearby, and Schwartz went there often for dinner. In retrospect it seemed strange that Diane let him live alone like that, but then again she and her husband had three little kids and a too-small apartment, and it wasn’t only strangers who equated Schwartz’s size with maturity. His mom had socked away a little money, which paid the rent.

His school—on Chicago’s South Side, near the Carr Heights projects—had metal detectors at every entrance and armed guards in the halls. The rooms had no windows, and the bolted-down desks could barely contain Schwartz’s massive frame. Even though he was white, his teachers eyed him warily; they seemed intent on averting some vague but imminent disaster.
AVERT DISASTER,
in fact, would have been a perfect school motto—the purpose of the place, as far as Schwartz could tell, was to keep three thousand would-be maniacs sedated by boredom until a succession of birthdays transformed them into adults. Schwartz couldn’t stand it, and the bank account was running low. In November of his sophomore year, as soon as football season ended, he stopped going to class. He got a job at a foundry—he was six-two by then, same as now, and people were more likely to ask his bench press than his age. He worked second shift, learned to drive a forklift, lugged tons of alloys from one end of the shop floor to the other. When his probationary period ended he was making $13.50 an hour, plus overtime. Some nights he drank cheap beer or Mickey’s till dawn by himself. Other nights he took girls he’d gone to school with to seafood restaurants that overlooked Lake Michigan. When he woke early enough he went to the library and read the financial news—he thought that once he’d saved a few grand he might switch to third shift and trade stocks online during the day.