The Art of Fielding: A Novel (41 page)

Soon Coshwale’s army of fans began to arrive, dressed in their beet-red attire. They set up their spotless beet-red seat cushions and sun umbrellas in the visiting bleachers, then headed back to the parking lot to set up their grills. “Douchetards upon douchetards,” muttered Suitcase.

Rick appeared at Henry’s side. “Where the Buddha?” he asked. “Thought he was dressing today.”

“Me too.” Owen hadn’t come home last night, and he’d missed breakfast with the team. It was probably time to start worrying, at least a little, but Henry didn’t have room for any more worry. “He’ll be here.”

Coshwale took the field first for infield-outfield drills. The Harpooners spread out near the home dugout, stretching, chatting, pretending not to be nervous, pretending not to watch. Owen once called the Muskies’ drills as crisp as Petrarch’s sonnets; Rick compared them to the North Korean army. Three burly beet-red-clad coaches slugged balls at once, puffing out their beet-red cheeks with the effort. Thirty-one players—a dozen more than the Harpooners had—fielded balls and fired perfect throws to one another in complicated, constantly shifting patterns. Cut two, cut three, cut four, third to first, first to third, 5-4-3, 6-4-3, 4-6-3, 1-6-3, 3-6-1, charge bunt, charge bunt, charge bunt. Always three balls aloft at once, never a missed cutoff, never an errant throw. When their fifteen minutes were up they jogged cockily off the field. You got the sense they might come back for an encore. The Coshwale fans were returning from the parking lot to their cushioned seats with plates of hors d’oeuvres. The home-side bleachers were filling too, faster and earlier than Henry had ever seen.

Just as the Harpooners took the field, Owen came ambling down the first-base line in full navy-on-ecru pinstripes, cleats on his feet. He slung his bag into the dugout, greeted Coach Cox with a jovial bow, and trotted out to right field to swap turns with Sooty Kim. Henry smiled. To see Owen wearing his 0 jersey for the first time since his injury was like waking from a bad dream. Everything that had happened between then and now could be forgotten. Today was big, big was good. The sun shone overhead. Fans in the stands. A chance to do some winning.

He slapped gloves with Izzy. Izzy took a cutoff from Loondorf in left, whipped it to Boddington at third. “Izz Izz Izz,” Henry chanted. “What izz what wuzz will be!”

“Let’s go,
vendejos!
” shouted Izzy. “Let’s go!”

“Cut four, cut four!”

“We ain’t letting these
vatos
walk into our house and take our shit! No sir!”

“Here, now!” yelled Quentin Quisp from left, as he fielded a Schwartz-struck fly ball and fired it toward home plate. “Right here right now!” These were by far the loudest, most emphatic words anyone had heard from Quisp all year.

“Somebody woke up Q!” Henry yelled. “Somebody woke up the Q!”

“Q Q Q!”

“Somebody woke up the Q!”

“Somebody woke up Henry!”

“Somebody brought back the Buddha!”

“Buddha Buddha Buddha!”

“O O O!”

“Our house!”

“Nuestra casa!”

“O O O!”

It felt good to yell, to repeat, to shout nonsense at the bright spring air. Everyone was nervous and it came out as a clean high giddiness. Henry’s arm felt light like a bird, light and lively, about to take flight from his body. He fired pellets to Arsch, pellets to Rick, pellets to Ajay. Everyone fired pellets to everyone—Henry looked around for what felt like the first time and saw how good this team had become, how good a chance they had to beat Coshwale today. “Izzy,” he yelled, though Izzy was standing beside him, “how come the good guys are
vendejos
and the bad guys are
vatos?
”

“That’s how it goes,
vendejo!
That’s how it goes!”

The outfielders finished their portion of the drill and sprinted toward the dugout, whooping like madmen as they ran. As each infielder left the diamond he fielded a faux bunt rolled out by Coach Cox. Henry nudged Izzy before his turn. “Watch this.” He charged at full speed, barehanded the ball, and whipped it behind his back to Rick, never looking or breaking stride as he ran off the field and down the dugout stairs. Perfect.

Owen was already folded into his favorite corner of the dugout, reading light clipped to the brim of his cap, book in hand. He looked up at Henry and smiled. “How’s the wing, as the natives say?”

Henry nodded. “Wing’s A-OK.”

“Shall we do our elaborate handshake?”

“Let’s.”

Owen stood, tenting his book on the bench—
The Art of Fielding.
Their handshake involved both hands and both elbows, a kiss on the cheek, mock punches to the stomach, something resembling patty-cake, and a lot of kung fu–style bowing. Henry took his eye black from his bag and drew a line beneath each eye. He removed his cap, gave the sweat-softened brim a single squeeze, and placed it back on his head. He spit a few drops of saliva into Zero’s well-worn pocket and kneaded them in with his fist. Ready. The home-plate umpire strapped on his chest protector. “Two minutes, coaches.”

Coach Cox wasn’t much for pregame speeches. “Here’s the lineup, men. Starblind Phlox Skrimmer. Schwartz O’Shea Boddington. Quisp Guladni Kim. No reason we can’t handle these guys. Schwartzy, you got anything to add?”

Schwartz reached down and plucked an index card out of his shin-guard knee-flap. “Schiller,” he said. “ ‘Man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man. And he is only completely a man when he plays.’ ” Schwartz paused and passed his eyes around the huddle slowly, allowing them to settle on each of his teammates’ faces, intense but benevolent. Whatever remained of the Harpooners’ nervousness burned away like gas when the pilot’s lit. “We’ve done the work. We ran and lifted and puked our guts out. We built this program out of nothing. We made ourselves proud to put on this uniform. We don’t have a single goddamn thing left to prove to anyone. We’re proven. Today we play.” He extended a hand into the center of the huddle. He looked at Henry and smiled. “
Play
on three. Onetwothree—”

“PLAY!”

“Kill the douchetards,” Owen said.

47

P
ella swam six laps, rested on the edge of the pool, swam six more. Chlorine sluiced neatly through her sinuses. Her head felt clear. She used to swim miles at a time, used to have a sleek stomach and slender, powerful arms—but oh well. She hoisted herself from the pool, triceps quivering, and stretched on the deck while she dripped dry. She could feel the lifeguard watching her half surreptitiously from his high perch, ignoring the splashing faculty brats in the shallow end for as long as it took her to cross the slick tile toward the locker room. As she passed his chair she peeled off her bathing cap and shook her hair down over her shoulders. Pride goeth.

She showered and dressed and headed outside, hair still wet, Westish windbreaker zipped to her chin. She’d never been to the baseball diamond but she could see the crowd gathered there in the distance, past the grassy practice fields. A copy of the new Murakami novel, its cover an opulent yellow, poked out of her jacket pocket, bought at the campus bookstore to commemorate her first-ever paycheck.

All over campus the flyers were taped to windows and maples and bulletin boards:
WESTISH VS. COSHWALE! SUPPORT THE HARPOONERS! APARICIO RODRIGUEZ!
The students who came through the dining-hall serving line lately talked about little else. Pella was going as a conciliatory gesture—she wanted to support Mike, and she wanted him to see her in the stands, supporting him, and to feel a little remorse at the way they’d fought. She certainly wasn’t going to watch baseball, which among team sports struck her as singularly boring. It was so slow, so finicky. This one a ball, that one a strike, but they all looked the same. When she was young, her dad had taken her a few times to Fenway Park, and she remembered the trips fondly—the sizzle of onions and peppers on vendors’ carts along Lansdowne, the beach balls bounding gaily through the bleachers, the thrilling crush of impossibly tall, squawking women in the foul-smelling bathroom while her dad was forced to wait outside—but those Sunday afternoons weren’t really about baseball, for her or for him; they were cultural sallies, like trips to the symphony or the MFA.

“Hey,” someone yelled amid a flurry of voices, “watch yourself!” A checkered ball skidded toward Pella, and she realized she was trespassing on an intramural soccer game. “Sorry,” she mumbled, mostly to herself. She was about to kick the ball as a kind of apology, but the girl who’d yelled was closing in.
“Move!”
she shrieked, baring her tiny teeth. Pella sidestepped the ball, then the girl, and hurried toward the safety of the orange cones that marked the out-of-bounds. She sighed, feeling glad to have averted catastrophe, then fifty yards later realized she’d dropped her book on the field.

WESTISH 2, VI ITOR 0.
Hooray, hooray. The field was ringed with people, not as many as at a Red Sox game, but lots—a thousand, maybe more. Pella spotted a few empty seats in the west-facing bleachers, which were otherwise full of people dressed in a fierce beet red. She climbed up to an empty patch of aluminum in the fifth row, her windbreaker catching snotty glances from the people she squeezed past on the way.

She scanned the field for Mike. There he was, sandwiched between the beet-red-clad hitter and the black-clad umpire, squatting on his haunches in the dirt, his face hidden behind a grid of metal bars. The pitcher—the handsome blond guy from Professor Eglantine’s class who thought he was God’s gift—threw the ball. It looked like a good pitch, then dropped suddenly into the dirt. The batter swung and missed. The Westish fans cheered. Mike flung himself down to smother the ball. It bounced up and hit him square in the chest. This was fun? No wonder his knees hurt all the time. And with that bat flashing inches from his face.

On the next pitch, the batter, one of the
VI ITORS
, lofted a fly ball far into the outfield. Pella felt sorry for the poor outfielder as he listed in uncertain circles—who could catch a ball like that, a speck in the shredded clouds?—but at the last moment he lifted his glove, and the ball, improbably, dropped in. Pella jumped to her feet to cheer. Her bleachermates shot her dirty looks.

As the Westish players jogged off the field, Mike flipped up his mask and Pella saw that he’d shaved his beard. He looked as handsome as she’d imagined he would, even with that weird black makeup smeared beneath his eyes, even with his cheeks strafed red with razor burn. He wasn’t one of those guys who needed a beard to disguise a weak chin or acne or the fact that he had no lips. He had gorgeous, model-caliber lips, and cheekbones too. But why had he done it
now?
She’d hinted at it a hundred times, made a joke of it, even while trying not to seem to care too much. And he’d just grunted, that famous Mike Schwartz grunt. And then as soon as they stopped seeing each other he went and did it. For the next girl, maybe. Or the new girl.

“We need to start hitting some balls at Skrimshander,” said the man sitting behind Pella. “Let him boot a few.”

His neighbor chuckled.

“I’m not kidding. Apparently the kid’s lost it. You don’t read Tom Parsons’s blog?”

“We’re talking about the shortstop with the streak? The kid all the scouts are after?”

“Not anymore they aren’t. According to Tom Parsons the scouts started sniffing around and he started thinking about it. You know what happens when that happens.”

“Think yourself out of a job.”

“Bingo.”

“I bet the kid pulls it together, though. He’s the best I’ve seen in this league. He’s like an acrobat out there.”

“Care to put your money where your mouth is?”

“Meaning?”

“Hundred says he chucks one in the stands before this game ends.”

The second guy thought about it.
Come on, second guy!
Pella silently cheered.
Show that first guy who’s boss!
“Guess not,” he said at last. “Shame, though. Kid was fun to watch.”

Before she knew what she was doing, Pella had whirled toward Guy #1: “You’re on.”

He looked like you’d expect him to look: an overfed shiny-cheeked guy in a beet-red golf shirt. He clutched his plastic plate of grilled shrimp in his stubby arms and leaned away like she was feral: “I’m what?”

Pella patted the thin sheaf of twenties in her windbreaker pocket. Easy come, easy go. “You’re on,” she said evenly. “Hundred says Henry won’t chuck one in the stands.” She held her hand out to shake. It hung there in the air.

Guy #2 grinned and winked at Pella, clapped Guy #1 on the back. “Cat got your tongue, Gary? Sounds like a wager to me.”

Gary arranged his pudgy features into something resembling a smirk. “Fine. You’re on.” His handshake was either naturally effete or a form of condescension to the fact that she was a woman. Pella made a show of wiping her hand on her jacket afterward.

“Good luck to your boyfriend,” Guy #2 said, referring to Henry.