What Hearts (8 page)

What had rushed past him was Coach Henderson. It was hard to recognize him. The crisply mannered, fine-featured man was now hunched and flailing, his face like a plum-colored knot squeezed out from his humpy shoulders. He was snarling at the umpire; Asa noticed, as the ump stepped away and Coach Henderson turned his head to follow, that the coach had crooked teeth. Asa had never seen them before; he would never have expected them to be crooked. The opposing coach, a
consistently jolly Greek man named Stravros who owned the Table Talk Bakery, was out of his dugout, trying to catch Coach Henderson by one of his elbows. There seemed to be four or five of them in the air, but he couldn't snag one. Then the umpire, his face full of fear, shot his arm into the air.

Still Asa did not know; he stood there not knowing, his fists of celebration still made. It was only when Coach Henderson stormed by, flushed with anger and, now, with what Asa recognized as shame, and said, “Sorry, Asa, but you were safe, my boy,” that he realized. He was not safe. He was out. The umpire had called him out.

He walked back to the dugout. A couple of boys patted him and said, “We got one anyhow.” On the field, as if in a hurry to reestablish the nature of things, a Cool Guy swung at a bad pitch and popped out. Asa found his glove and trotted out to center.

Out? Well, perhaps. How did he know? He hadn't been watching: he had been in there, inside the moment—tangled in legs and red
shin guards and twisting arms at the end of the tunnel, not watching, not thinking, just concentrating on getting to the plate. What kind of judge was he? For once, it was up to somebody else to see the sequence of things, and somebody had done so. Out? It could be. There were only two choices, and one had been made. Asa would have preferred being safe, but preference was not knowledge. He wasn't angry. In a way, he was thrilled, simply to have been too involved to know.

The Table Talk batter swung at the first pitch and lofted a long fly to left. Asa watched without surprise as it soared, peaked, kept flying, and cleared the fence by twenty feet. The Baptist child choir woke up. He did not watch the hitter jump and dance as he ran the bases; they all did that, and he hated it. If
he
ever hit a home run, he would put his head down and scurry. He supposed he would be proud, but pride was private. Eventually the gamboling Table Talk boy touched home, and the game was tied.

Next up, the pitcher cracked a line drive that hit the shortstop in the chest. The Cool
Guy collapsed, cringing and crying, while the ball spun like a planet in the dirt. He came out of the game, replaced by the kid who had been coaching third base when Asa had run around it. The runner was held at first. The next batter popped up a bunt. Pete snatched it out of the air and nearly doubled the runner off first. One away. Left-handed hitter. He swung at the first pitch and bounced it on one hop over the right-field fence. Men on second and third. One out.

The next Table Talk hitter knocked a grounder that Tim dove to his left to spear. Springing up, he drew back his arm at the runner who had taken off from third, until the boy dove back. Then Tim hummed a throw across to first and beat the runner by a stride. It was a great play. Asa hollered Tim's name.
Great
play. Two out. They could get out of this. If they did not let up, they could get out of it.

James Neal sauntered to the plate. He was a right-handed hitter but his power was to center. He was the best hitter in their league: every swing was level and true, no matter what the pitch, a disciplined slash that swept
the ball through the infield in a blink. When James hit home runs—and Asa could think of half a dozen he had seen—they were line drives that just kept rising as they flew. Once he had struck one over Asa's head into the tin Scoreboard, and its impact had sprung five numbers off their nails onto Asa's grass.

Asa looked around at his teammates. They were watching James Neal advance to the batter's box, and they were all slinking.
No!
Asa wanted to holler.
Stop! We can do this guy! There are two out! Just one out to get and we are back at bat and we can win it
. He wanted them to see this—it was so simple! Asa kicked at the grass. They were giving up. He did not understand giving up—that was all. Giving up did not
work
.

The first pitch whizzed in. James Neal took a cut and everybody gasped. Asa leaped a step forward, but it was a foul back up over the Quik-E-Freeze dugout into the night. The runners, cocky in their trots, touched up, and waited; with two out they would fly on any hit. Both would score on a single. James Neal waved his bat and stared at the pitcher. He
was a very emotional player, but there was no feeling in his face right now, only concentration. And here came the pitch.

Asa realized as soon as James Neal started his swing that he ought to have been playing in closer. So he started his run just as the ball sprang off the bat dead on a line four feet above second base. Asa did not slow down; he sprinted from his jump start, straight at where the ball was dipping, dipping, touching the wet grass, and rising in a long, low bounce right at him. Somewhere in his awareness he registered the whirling arms of the base runners romping safely home, the yowls from the Table Talk dugout, the cheers of half the parents springing to their feet in the stands. But mostly he was aware of three things—the ball he was speeding to intercept, the moon face of his first baseman turned this way to watch the hit, and James Neal, his grin bright with the grandest pleasure, his arms held straight up, his legs scissoring as he celebrated with a couple of leaps on his way to first. Somewhere inside Asa there was a whiz of physics that added these things up, and though he hadn't
time to feel it, he knew there would be happiness in a moment. For now, he gloved the ball and plucked it out with his throwing hand and planted his left foot perfectly, then with every ounce of momentum developed over fifty feet of sprint he whipped his hips and snapped his arm and spun into a follow-through. He watched the ball. It flickered through the air and smacked into the barely opened mitt of the first baseman while James Neal was coming down from his last scissor leap, six feet from first.

The first baseman stared into his mitt at the ball, then looked down at his foot on the bag. Nobody cheered. James Neal stopped, gaped, then shook his head and looked around. He walked to first and stomped on it. “It's a clean
single
,” he said to no one, his voice winding up for tears.

The Cool Guy infielders still didn't get it; neither did most of the boys on the Table Talk bench. But they all began to see that Asa got it. He trotted in with his head down, and one by one the players grew still and watched him. His rubber spikes crunched on the infield dirt.
No one spoke but James Neal; he ran to the umpire, who stood between first and second, watching Asa approach.

“It's a clean
single
,” he pleaded. His cheeks were red as match heads. He grabbed the umpire by the left arm but the ump shook him off without looking at him. Then, slowly, the man raised his right arm until his fist poised high above his ear, as if he had a knife. He watched Asa; only James Neal did not.

As Asa crunched by, he glanced up and met the umpire's look. “Out,” said the man clearly.

FOUR

After a couple of weeks on a low twilit field not far from their house, Asa found he and Dave were communicating entirely through the baseball itself. At first there were a few blunt instructions, but it became clear that not only did Dave dislike baseball—he also did not know it very well. After telling Asa he
should “watch the ball” and “not try to kill it” he hadn't much to add that Asa couldn't pick up better simply by swinging. So Dave pitched, hard, from a bag of old baseballs he had wangled from a semipro team sponsored by the company he worked for. Asa stood and swung and stood and swung and stood and swung.

It also became clear that the absence of words did not mean they had nothing to say. Between them, suddenly, the air crackled with danger; through that air passed the ball. Asa could feel shoves of anger or doubt or pure competitiveness in the spin and speed of the pitch at the moment he struck it—always as hard as he could—with his bat. He was certain his replies were just as clear: high-strung line drives, overmatched pop-ups, meek ground balls, and spirited, sloping flies he watched with a burning in his chest that could not have been more violent and celebratory if he had strode out to Dave and socked him. Two hours might pass without a word, but at the end they would both be drained.

It was not fun, but it was practice. And it
worked: pitch by pitch Asa learned things, and soon he was becoming a hitter. Occasionally he sensed some grudging satisfaction in Dave when he lashed out six or seven tough pitches in a row to all parts of the field; they both seemed to remember, if only for the moment, that Asa's progress meant they were
both
doing well.

But sometimes they forgot. If Asa hit too many pitches too hard, Dave would hum one way inside at him, and Asa would have to spin away from it into the dirt. The first time this happened, he said, “Hey!” and Dave said, “Hey what? Part of the game,” and motioned for him to stand back in; the next pitch was right over the plate. After that Asa said nothing. He saved his energy to bash the next ball.

One day, Asa stroked a long fly to dead center and stood watching it contentedly, holding a hand up to Dave as a signal that he should wait until Asa finished gloating. The ball landed far out in the green; Asa sighed happily. When he lowered his hand, Dave hit him with the ball. There was no pretense about it. He did not even wind up the way he
did for a pitch: he let Asa step up to the plate and then he drew his arm back and threw—hard, always hard—directly at the boy's ribs. Asa froze. The ball seemed to take forever to arrive, but then it sprang at him and burrowed into his bones. He dropped backward and landed flat, screaming and rolling over and over. He knew he was crying because he felt mud on his cheeks from tears and dust, but he did not hear a thing, nor did he notice any vision: the whole world was a hole in his side. But before he could think, the pain switched over, and the world became a fury in his heart. He stood up.

Dave was out in the outfield collecting the balls Asa had hit, putting them in the canvas bag. His back was turned, and Asa knew he would keep it turned. Asa looked around home plate. There were three balls he had fouled into the backstop. He picked up his bat and one of the balls. In left center, Dave bent, straightened, bent, and straightened. Asa tossed his ball and hit it viciously. It sailed toward Dave with good distance, but tailed
away toward right; Asa watched as it whizzed over Dave's head and landed twenty feet beyond him. Dave looked up and watched it land, too, but he did not turn around. In fact, he remained upright and motionless, as if offering his back in case Asa wanted to hit another. Asa did not. He left the other two balls and took his bat home.

The family ate dinner as usual that night—or almost as usual. It was obvious that something had happened, but neither Dave nor Asa spoke of it. Asa saw his mother studying Dave, and knew she was studying him when he wasn't looking. He wondered if Dave would tell; he certainly wouldn't.

The next day he remained in his room after school, reading comics. As the hour for their daily practice approached, he reached for more comic books; there was no, question about whether or not the workouts would continue. They were finished.

But about ten minutes past the time, someone knocked on his door. He said, “What?” and the door opened. His mother stepped in.

She was wearing white tennis shoes and one of Dave's golf caps and holding Asa's bat in her right hand. His glove hung over her left wrist: she wore it like a bracelet. He stared. She smiled. “Let's go,” she said.

“But—”

“Come on. Your tryout is in two weeks. Let's go chuck a few.”

He started to protest. But in her eyes was a look that made him rise. It was part command, part entreaty; part confidence, part loss. He went with her.

On their way to the field she did not say anything to explain why she was taking Dave's place; instead, she pointed out weeds that were coming into flower or trees that had brought forth buds. Asa nodded and commented politely, softly. In his life there had been half a dozen times when the air around him filled with an aching sweetness, a thick feeling of fragile bliss that poured into him and out of him at once, and moved with him as he moved. Always it was sad as well as happy, and always it ended suddenly. It came when someone gave him something and he took it with
out knowing. When the feeling was gone, sometimes the gift was too. He did not know, as he walked to the park beside his chatty mother, whether what she gave would last for him or not, but the swelling of sweetness and woe clouded around them, and he drew it in all the way to the pitcher's mound. By the time he explained why this strange little hill was here and showed her how to put on his glove, the cloud had vanished.

Her first pitch was six feet outside and ten feet high. Her second was lower, but farther away. Her third arrived near the plate on second bounce, and he gave it a tap into right field. “See,” she yelled, gleefully. “Hooray for us!”

They had brought only the one ball; Asa retrieved it. When he came back, he went to the mound.

“Know what?” he said. “I've really pretty much done nothing but bat up to now, for two weeks.”

She looked at him warily, unwilling to be patronized. “So?”

He tried to sound chipper and spontaneous.
“What I need is the chance to field a lot.”

“Field?” She looked around. “A lot?”

“Sorry—it means to catch the ball, make throws: play defense. I, urn, only got the chance to do offense before. There didn't seem to be much interest in the other side. But it's just as important. At the tryouts they watch you hit, but they also make you catch and throw. It's actually more complicated than swinging the bat.”