The Fan (23 page)

“Bobby?”

Bobby looked up. Burrows was standing in front of him.

“Could use a little bingle,” Burrows said.

“You’re putting me in?”

“Why not?”

Bobby went to the bat rack, looked for the one he’d used in BP before remembering, and picked out a new one. He walked slowly onto the field. Lots of noise. He shut it out, slipped the donut onto the bat, swung easy until he felt loose, knocked the donut off, moved to the plate. The catcher went out to talk to the pitcher. Bobby took a few more swings.

“My feet are killin’ me,” the ump called out to the mound. The catcher returned, crouched behind the plate. Bobby stepped in, took his stance. He thought about the pitcher:
good fastball, better slider, pissy little change—and looked for the slider on the first pitch. He didn’t put himself through picturing anything, or feeling anything, or any other bullshit. He just got ready to do what he’d been doing all his life: hitting a baseball.

And there it was, slider, not a good one, up and over the plate; the kind of pitch he’d punished so many times. Bobby leaned into it and got it all, or almost all. Or maybe just a piece. Just a goddamned piece. The ball soared into the sky, seemed to hang motionless, then looped and began the long drop back down, down into the second-baseman’s glove. Bobby’s first thought was of Bullwinkle.

Bobby hadn’t taken a step. He was still in the batter’s box when Primo trotted down the third-base line, on his way to the dugout, eyes on the ground, but with a little smile turning up the corners of his mouth. He slowed down, allowing Simkins, loping across the infield, to catch up, and whacked him on the butt as they went by.

Bobby stood in the batter’s box, not wanting to move. Where was there to go? Then he felt eyes gazing at him from all directions. That broke the spell. He hurried into the dugout. Everyone else was already in the clubhouse. Bobby stopped by the water cooler and smashed it to bits. The act had lost its cleansing power. This time it didn’t make him feel better at all, not even for a minute. In the clubhouse, he tore off his shirt with the hideous forty-one on the back and ripped it apart. Stook saw him do it, didn’t say a word.

Bobby stayed in the shower until the media was gone. He dressed, gulped down a beer, and went out. Wald was waiting.

“Did you forget?” he said.

“Forget what?”

“That interview for the
Times Magazine.
”

“Did I say yes?”

“Don’t you remember?”

Bobby didn’t remember. “Cancel it,” he said.

“How can I do that?”

“With a phone call, the way you do everything.”

“But she’ll be at the house by now, Bobby.”

“At my house?”

“That was the arrangement. She wants to see it.”

“Why?”

“It’s a profile piece, Bobby. Just the thing to get you in front of a wider world.”

“What wider world?”

“The one beyond baseball, Bobby, like I told you before. The world that’s still going to be out there after all this is over.”

Bobby looked down at Wald. “I want to be traded,” he said.

“That’s a joke, right?”

Bobby grabbed a handful of Wald’s silk shirt. “Get me traded,” he said.

“Let go.”

Bobby didn’t let go. “Trade me,” he said, backing Wald against the clubhouse door.

“Have you gone nuts? I’m the agent, not the owner.”

“Anywhere will do,” Bobby said. “As long as …”

“As what?”

“You know what.” Bobby released him.

Wald nodded. He knew. Eleven.

B
ent over a legal pad in the windowless office she shared with Bernie and Norm, Jewel Stern worked on the list of questions she would put to Bobby Rayburn. She parceled them out in subgroups: “$,” “Lifestyle and Family,” “The Game,” “Misc.” “The Game” was further subdivided into
“Mind” and “Body.” Thirty-seven questions, so far. Jewel reviewed them at random:

Who do you respect most in the game?

What’s given you the most satisfaction in your career?

If you could change anything, what would it be?

How does being on the road so much affect your family life?

Who’s your wife’s favorite player?

Do you miss California?

Do you feel under any special pressure because of the big contract?

Jewel hated every one. She had the feeling they were all the same question anyway, except perhaps the last, and she’d already asked him that in spring training, to no effect. Still, dumb questions didn’t always lead to dumb answers. Maybe Bobby would open up on his own, bubbling forth eye-popping quotes, exploding with inside stuff. Maybe, for example, when she asked him about his family life, he’d blurt something about all the girls he screwed on the road. Maybe she’d get lucky.

Jewel swept that hope aside. Hoping to get lucky was a step toward mediocrity, and mediocrity wasn’t what Jewel wanted. If she was fated to sit one day in some nursing home for husbandless, childless biddies, she wanted at least to be able to dazzle them with what she’d had instead. The Rayburn profile was her chance to rise to another level. Jewel squeezed the pencil tightly in her hand, as though physical intensity might somehow give birth to a good idea.

“The answer’s yes,” the editor at the
New York Times Magazine
had said of her proposal, and Jewel had been so thrilled she hadn’t paid much attention to what had come next: “But we still feel it needs a stronger hook.”

“Don’t worry,” she’d said. “I know it’ll come out of the material.”

But now she was a week from deadline, and worried. In her proposal the hook had been the question of money and pressure, weak in their eyes and now proven impotent. She knew that the
Times Magazine
liked to do profiles of sports
figures, in the desperate hunt for the possibly extinct male reader, but why green-light hers if they didn’t like the hook? Jewel couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened to her proposal if she’d been a man. Were they favoring her to make some kind of statement, or was she still, after a generation of court cases and locker-room scenes, a novelty? Or was it just possible they realized she knew the game?

None of those questions arose at the station. They knew she knew the game; she also had the voice. They paid her well. She slept in nice hotels, ate in nice restaurants, lived in the buzz of a hectic schedule. The question that arose at the station was in her own mind, and attacked from another direction: Had she gone to journalism school, now more than twenty years ago, to spend the rest of her life covering a boys’ game? If asked what Janie was up to—Jewel was her
nom de guerre
, suggested by her first agent, the one who had discovered her, as he liked to put it, at that dinky three-thousand-watt station in Hartford—her mother would say, “She’s in the media,” and if pressed add, “working in radio,” and only if cornered admit: “baseball analyst.”

Jewel doodled a baseball bat wearing a bow tie and an angry face. Her mind drifted back to the image of career biddies in the nursing home. In some track-jumping way, that prompted a new question, one she liked, and wrote down:
What kind of ballplayer do you think
—she checked her notes for the name
—Sean will be?

Bernie stuck his head in the room. He had an ink smudge on the tip of his nose. “When’s the Rayburn interview?”

“After the game.”

“Maybe I got something for you.”

“What?”

“Or it might be nothing.”

“That’s all the foreplay I need, Bernie. What is it?”

“Know Cleats?”

She knew Cleats.

“Where were they sitting?” Jewel asked, raising her voice over the howling dirt bikes on TV.

“Right there,” replied Leon. “Primo had a Coke, Rayburn had a beer.”

“What kind of beer?”

“Heineken. He didn’t finish it.”

Jewel walked into the alcove, glanced at the crossed bats of Aaron and Mays. Aaron’s bat looked authentic, but Mays had used an Adirondack 302 for most of his career, and this was a Louisville Slugger. Leon came up behind her, wiping his hands on his apron.

“And then what happened?” she said.

“What makes you think anything happened?”

“We have our sources.”

“Tanya?”

“Who’s she?”

“One of the waitresses.”

“Can’t answer that,” Jewel said.

Because the tip had been anonymous. But Leon, as she hoped, inferred a zealous concern with protecting confidentiality, and nodded with approval. “They went to the can.” He pointed it out.

“Together?” Jewel moved toward it. Leon followed.

“Yeah. Sort of.”

“Sort of?”

“Primo went in first, I guess. But Rayburn was right behind him.”

“Chasing him, you mean?”

“Nothing like that. This is a classy place.”

Jewel stood outside the men’s-room door. The sign read: DUDES. “And then?”

“They were in there for a while.”

“What’s
a while?
”

Leon shrugged. “Five minutes.”

“Did you hear anything?”

“I’m not an eavesdropper.”

“Of course not. But you did see them come out.”

“I was right there,” Leon said, indicating the beer taps behind the bar, about twenty feet away. “I keep a low profile, that’s my style, but I don’t miss much.”

“Despite your aversion to eavesdropping,” Jewel said, trying to remember how much money she had in her purse.

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing,” she said. “And then?”

“And then?”

“Did it look like they’d been fighting?”

“Who told you that?”

“Sources. Didn’t I mention that already?”

There was a pause. Jewel could almost see Leon fishing through his thoughts, just beneath the surface of his eyes. She waited. “Was it one of those news tips?” he asked. Subtler than most.

She smiled. “News tips?”

“You know. Fifty bucks for the best news tip of the week.”

“We don’t do that,” Jewel said. “I wish I could offer you an inducement but it’s against station policy.”

“Oh.”

Silence. Jewel resisted the impulse to glance at her watch. “But I can reimburse for reasonable expenses,” she said.

“Expenses?”

“Like travel.”

Leon blinked. Subtle, perhaps, but not in her league.

“Suppose we took a little trip, for example.”

“Where to?” said Leon.

“How about Federico’s?”

“But that’s just down the block.”

“It meets the definition,” Jewel said.

Five minutes later, they were sitting at a tiny wrought-iron table at Federico’s. Drinks came: a latte with double cream and cinnamon for Jewel, a split of Cordon Rouge for Leon. Jewel took out a twenty, laid it on the table, safely under her hand. “So,” she resumed, “it looked like they’d been fighting.”

Eyes on the twenty, Leon said, “What about the return trip?”

“Now you’re getting into the spirit.”

Leon laughed.

Jewel laughed with him, took out another twenty, slid it on top of the first. “Let’s have it,” she said.

He stopped laughing. “It’s like you say. Looked like they’d been fighting.”

“How so?”

“Primo’s nose was bleeding.”

“He came out first?”

“And left in a hurry.”

“What about Rayburn?”

“Not a mark on him. What would you expect, a little guy like Primo going up against him?”

“I don’t know,” Jewel said. “What else happened?”

“Nothing else. Rayburn signed a couple of autographs and split.”

“No idea what it was about?”

Leon shook his head.

“What did they act like?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Their mood. Expression on their faces.”

“On the way out of the can, you mean?”

“Sure. On the way out of the can.”

“That’s a funny thing.”

“Funny?”

“Now that you mention it. Primo was the loser, right? But he went out smiling.”

“And?”

“Rayburn looked grim.”

Jewel thought about that. Leon finished his champagne.

“Trip over?” he said.

Jewel checked her watch. Game time. Unable to think of anything else, she started to hand him the money. He almost had his fingers on it when she paused. “Did anyone actually see what happened in there?”

“I told you. They were in the can.”

“Alone?”

“Alone?”

Jewel withdrew the money. “Or was anyone else in there?”

Leon sat back. “Come to think of it.”

“Who?”

“A guy.”

“You know him?”

Leon licked his lips. “This feels like a detour.”

“Detour?”

“On our trip.”

“Jesus Christ. Do you know him or not?” She could see in his eyes that he did.

Leon raised thumb and index finger to his mouth, zipped it shut. Jewel wanted to smack him. She took out another twenty instead.

He shook his head. “This is one of those side trips that’s worth the whole voyage,” he said.

She showed him another twenty.

“How about one more?” he said.

“Fuck off,” she told him.

He grinned. “Gil,” he said.

“That’s it? Gil? That’s worth the trip?”

“He’s sort of a regular.”

“What’s his last name if he’s sort of a regular?”

“Don’t go in for a lot of last names here.”

“Where do I find him, then? What does he do? Where does he work? Et cetera.”

“He works for that knife company.”

“What knife company?”

“Or he used to.”

“What knife company?”

Leon stared down his empty champagne flute for a moment or two, then brightened. “It’s on the Survivor.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’ll show you.”

They returned to Cleats. Leon ducked behind the bar, came up with a knife. It had a red-and-white-checked handle, and a blade that ended in a long, jagged point because the underside of the tip was broken off. He handed it to her.

Jewel put on her reading glasses. “R. G. Renard?” she said.

“Right. It’s all coming back to me now.”

“What is?”

“Renard is the company. But it’s his last name too.”

Jewel handed over the money.

“How about a bonus?” Leon said.