The Art of Fielding: A Novel (21 page)
The bus ground to a halt in the Opentoe lot. The Harpooners rose from their seats, stretching and yawning.
“Now,” said Schwartz as upbeatly as he could muster, “we play ball.”
P
ella realized she’d been asleep for a very long time. The clock by the bedside—by Mike’s bedside—read 1:33, and daylight streamed through the uncurtained window. It was pleasant and scary both, to think about where her mind had been for the past twelve hours or so. She wished she knew exactly what time she’d fallen asleep, so she could record her accomplishment, quantify her journey: I slept for
this long!
Mike was nowhere to be found, and she remembered nothing of his departure. She hadn’t taken any sleeping pills—just half a bottle of wine, barely more than doctors recommended. She headed to the bathroom, which was surprisingly clean, at least compared to the rest of the house. She peed and, for kicks, opened the cabinet above the sink: it contained nothing but a stick of deodorant, an athlete’s foot ointment, and a tube of toothpaste. Amazing creatures, men. She yanked aside the shower curtain and found, inside the elegant old claw-foot tub, a battered beer keg, the metal top clouded with mildew. At least they had a shower curtain.
It would have been nice of Mike to leave a note—“
Back soon!”
—but she hadn’t seen one in the bedroom, and there wasn’t one in the kitchen either. Ah, well. She could live with the omission, given how sweet he’d been to let her, a near stranger, pass out in what had no doubt been the exact center of his little bed, so that he had to scrunch his big body against the wall.
On the kitchen counter, behind a scatter of sticky notes and tented-open books, sat a coffeemaker. The glass pot didn’t contain any egregious mold. She decided to brew a fresh cup and drink it here, before heading back to her dad’s place. He’d probably be pissed; she hadn’t told him she wasn’t coming home.
In the pantry, among economy-sized boxes of cornflakes and gigantic tubs of something called SuperBoost 9000, she found filters and a five-pound can of generic coffee. Everything in bulk: that appeared to be the Mike Schwartz philosophy. The Affenlights, on the other hand, were coffee snobs. She peeled back the plastic lid and sniffed at the coffee, if you could call it that—it was the pale-brown color of woodchips but not as fragrant. It would do.
She dumped the old coffee into the sink, where it diffused in the cloudy water, cascading down over the lips of stacked dishes. So far so good. But when she tried to rinse and refill the glass pot, she couldn’t work the lip underneath the faucet. She tried to shift the dishes to make the faucet more accessible, but they were stacked in a precarious, Jenga-like pyramid, glasses on the bottom, and she was afraid the whole shaky construction would collapse with a ringing crunch.
The thing to do, really, would be to wash the dishes. In fact, she was feeling a strong desire to wash the dishes. She began loading them onto the countertop, so that she could fill the sink with water. The ones near the bottom were disgusting, the plates covered with water-softened crusts of food, the glasses scummed with a white bacterial froth, but this only increased her desire to become the conqueror of so much filth. Maybe she was stalling, because she didn’t want to face her dad after not having come home all night.
As she squeezed liquid soap into the stream of hot water, an objection crossed her mind: What would Mike think? It was a nice gesture, to do somebody else’s dishes, but it could also be construed as an admonishment: “If nobody else will clean up this shithole, I’ll do it myself!” In fact, some version of that interpretation could hardly be avoided. She turned off the water. Even if she and Mike had been dating for months, unprovoked dishwashing might be considered strange. Meddlesome. Overbearing. Unless she’d dirtied the dishes herself: that would be different. Then the dishes
should
be done, and the failure to do them might pose its own problems.
But the dishes weren’t hers, and she and Mike weren’t dating. They hadn’t even kissed. Therefore the doing of dishes could only seem weird, neurotic, invasive. Mike’s roommate—Mr. Arsch, from the mailbox—would take one look at the order she’d imposed and say something penetrating, something along the lines of “Dude, is that chick psycho or what?” And Mike would shrug and never call her again.
She looked down into the white bubbles. Steam rose off the water, brushed her cheeks and chin. Her hand rested on the four-pronged hot-water knob, which felt warm to the touch. She really, really wanted to wash the dishes. Once, late at night, not long after she’d moved to San Francisco, she’d really, really wanted to cut up a slightly mushy avocado and rub the pit in her palms. It was an ecstasy-type desire, though she hadn’t taken ecstasy. She made David drive her to three supermarkets to find the right avocado. She told him she was craving guacamole—a more acceptable urge, if just barely. Luckily he’d fallen asleep while she was rolling the slimy pit in her palms, pretending to make guacamole. In the morning, having buried the chips and the yellow-green mush in the kitchen trash, she claimed to have eaten it all. She still had no idea how to make guacamole.
That episode stood out in Pella’s mind as a benchmark of small but irresistible desire, but if anything she wanted to wash these dishes even more. She could see in advance the scrubbed white color of the fresh-bleached sink, the rows of overturned pots lying on the counter to dry. Maybe Mr. Arsch wouldn’t think she was psycho. Maybe he’d be thrilled. Who wouldn’t want a maid who worked for free? Maybe Mr. Arsch was sad, just as she’d been sad, and that was why the kitchen was such a mess. Maybe a scrubbed-out sink would be the boost he needed. Slovenliness correlated highly with despair—the inability to exert influence over one’s environment, et cetera. Speaking of despair, she hadn’t yet taken her sky-blue pill. She’d probably have a cracking headache in about five minutes. Better enjoy this respite while it lasted.
While these thoughts were spinning through her sleep-buoyed brain, she had scrubbed several plates and laid them on the counter in a fanned-out formation to dry. A fistful of flatware was calling her name. Whatever retribution awaited, she’d left herself little choice but to finish the dishes. She squinched her rag between the fork tines and rubbed.
By the time she finished she’d worked up a sweat, and she needed her sky-blue pill far more than a cup of coffee. On her way out she lingered in the doorway for a long minute, admiring the empty sink.
A
s the Harpooners filed off the bus, each of them slapped the black rubber seal above the door for luck. Driving four hours south made a difference in the weather; birds were chirping, and a loamy smell of spring hung thick in the air. Loondorf began to sneeze. The clouds were breaking and shrinking, leaving marbled patches of stonewashed blue between them. The Opentoe players, clad in their threadbare brown-and-green uniforms, were liming the foul lines and raking the basepaths like old homesteaders.
“Same old Opentoe,” Rick O’Shea noted, scratching his incipient beer belly as he blinked the sleep from his eyes. “Same ugly-ass jerseys.”
Starblind nodded. “Same jerks.” Opentoe College had some sort of evangelical mission that involved perpetual kindness and hopelessly outdated uniforms. The Harpooners hated them for it. It was unspeakably infuriating that the one school in the UMSCAC that spent less money on its baseball program than Westish always managed to kick their ass. The Opentoe players never talked even the mildest forms of smack. If you worked a walk, the first baseman would say, “Good eye.” If you ripped a three-run triple, the third baseman would say, “Nice rip.” They smiled when they were behind, and when they were ahead they looked pensive and slightly sad. Their team name was the Holy Poets.
Usually Owen began warm-ups by leading the team in a series of yoga stretches. Today Henry took his place, omitting Owen’s stream of commentary (“Pretend that your shoulders have dissolved, good, no, let them dissolve entirely…”) and instead just proceeding from one stretch to the next. The Harpooners followed along by rote as they scanned the bleachers. There weren’t any girls, Opentoe was weak on girls, but more and more scouts kept arriving, each new scout announcing himself as such by either his laptop or his cigar, depending on his generation, and by shaking hands with the rest of the scouts.
After they stretched, Arsch took Starblind down to the bullpen to begin loosening up to pitch. The rest of the Harpooners jogged into position for infield/outfield drills. Schwartz, who saved his body for games by practicing as little as possible, retreated to the dugout. Today was going to be a long one: in his rush to leave the house, he’d left his Vicoprofen behind. Now, like a true addict, he emptied his bag, side pockets and all, strewing the contents on the bench. The sweep yielded two chipped and dusty Sudafed, three Advil, and a promising white spheroid that turned out to be a mint. He threw it all in his mouth, germs be damned, and downed it with a slug of lukewarm Mountain Dew.
He ambled to the bullpen to check on Starblind’s progress. The ball struck the heart of Arsch’s mitt with a loud report.
“How’s he looking, Meat?”
“He’s poppin’ it, Mike. Really poppin’ it.”
“Deuce?”
“Poppin’ it.”
“Change?”
“On a string,” Arsch declared. “He’s poppin’ them all.”
After a few more pitches Starblind wandered toward them, working his right arm in rapid, manic circles. Starblind entered a crazed, almost incommunicado state when he pitched. If you didn’t know better, you’d swear he’d done oodles of coke. “Look at ’em,” he said, jerking his head toward the scouts, who were still arriving.
Schwartz shrugged. “Rest of the season’ll be like this. Might as well get used to it.”
“Get used to what?” Starblind snorted. “Those guys see Henry and zero else. I could give up ten or strike out twenty. Doesn’t make a shit bit of difference.”
“Makes a difference to me,” Schwartz said mildly.
Coach Cox called the Harpooners together. “Here’s the batting order. Starblind Kim Skrimshander, Schwartz O’Shea Boddington, Quisp Phlox Guladni. Let’s work the count, keep our wits about us. Mike, anything to add?”
Not only had Schwartz forgotten his pills but he’d also neglected to pick out a quote. That’s what you got for going on a date the night before a game. He’d have to extemporize. He leaned into the center of the huddle and surveyed his teammates, testing each with a mild version of The Stare. “Brook,” he said, fixing his eyes on Boddington, one of the team’s few seniors, “what was our record your first year?”
“Three and twenty-nine, Mike.”
“O’Shea. What about yours?”
“Um… ten and twenty?”
“Close enough. And last year? Jensen?”
“Sixteen and sixteen, Schwartzy.”
Schwartz nodded. “Don’t forget it. Don’t anybody forget it.” He looked around, cranked The Stare to about a five on a ten-point scale. He looked at Henry, Henry looked at him, but nothing useful passed between them. Schwartz took off his cap and wiped the sweat from his forehead. He felt a little off, a little odd, like he was playing himself on TV. He could hear his own voice bouncing around in his head.
But the troops were nodding, waiting, their faces pulled into expressions of grim resolution: they loved Schwartz’s fire and brimstone. They lived for it. They were going to imitate it for their grandkids. He kept going: “All those losing seasons. And not just for us. For all the guys who came before us too. A hundred and four years of baseball, and Westish College,
our
college, has never won conference. Never.”
“Now we’re a different ball club. We’re eleven and two. We’ve got all the talent in the world. But look at those guys in the other dugout. Go on, look at them.” He waited while they looked. “You think those guys care what our record is? Hell no. They think they’re going to walk all over us, because we’re from Westish College. They see this uniform and their eyes light up. They think this uniform’s some kind of joke.” Schwartz thumped himself on the chest, where the blue harpooner stood alone in the prow of his boat. “Is this a joke?” he snarled, throwing in some curse words. “Is that what this is?” His voice softened in preparation for the denouement; it was important to vary your volume and your cadence. “Let’s teach them something about this uniform,” he said. “Let’s teach them something about Westish College.” He scanned the huddle. His teammates’ jaws were clenched, their nostrils flared. Most of their eyes were hidden behind sunglasses, but the eyes he could see looked ready to go. Even he felt a little heartened.