nine
Dash
Youder came by to work out. The weeks before spring training were spent making sure we didn’t get our asses kicked in Arizona. We were out of shape, lazy, sloppy. Youder and I had worked out together three times a week from January to March the same way for the past five years.
We took the old stone steps down the hill to the southernmost point of my property and turned right around. The hill looked like a sheer face with bushes and rocks latching onto the dirt to defy gravity. We scrambled back up the hill on well-worn trails, hitching and heaving, working out arms and legs against our own body weight.
Twenty-five laps per session in January.
By the first week in April, we could do a hundred even if it took all afternoon.
He had his foot on the top of the fence separating the patio from the baby fig tree, stretching, and he spoke as if what he was saying wasn’t supposed to mean anything to me. “Trent’s pushing me to move.” He took his leg down and put up the other one.
“That’s how he makes his money.” I twisted at the waist, stretching the sleeping back and shoulder muscles.
“Yeah. He says Baltimore’s got a young team. They’re looking for maturity, and they have a third-base coach moving into retirement.”
Jack would make a great coach. He was a natural leader and a clear-and-unemotional thinker. He knew the mental game. He’d mentored me when I was at Cornell, and he’d been on the team that wanted me the most. He was the reason I was playing for Los Angeles and not Pittsburgh.
“Barnett’s never retiring,” I said.
“Trent says otherwise.”
“He doesn’t know shit. He’s an agent.”
“He knows plenty. He’s an agent.”
I stopped stretching. “You’re not going to Baltimore.”
He regarded me seriously, putting both feet on the ground. “I might.”
I took a deep breath and looked toward the horizon, over the stretch of the Los Angeles Basin, to the stadium, like a bird’s nest on the east side of Elysian Park. At night, it looked like a spaceship landing, but in the day, it was just a grey cleft in the city.
“You’ll be all right,” he said. “We have three winning seasons behind us. They can pay the best—”
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “But Baltimore’s a loser. For you.”
I didn’t wait for an answer but trotted down the old, cracked steps that led to the southernmost, wildest, and lowest edge of my property. My meds hadn’t kicked in, and I was going to say something impulsive.
It was his career. He could do whatever the fuck he wanted.
He caught up to me at the bottom, and without a word, we started up. My anger at Jack abated as my body expended energy, dealt with pain, opened my thoughts.
I don’t like expiration dates.
I pulled myself up on the trunk of a bush, needles catching my arm and going for my face. I was impervious to accidents and pain. More stimuli to get me through and distract me enough to let me pay attention.
Expiration dates.
The treadmill was impossibly boring without a book. Free weights were no better unless I had an audiobook in the headset. Counting reps literally caused me psychic pain, the urge to run was so strong.
This I could do. Climbing up a hill I could fall down was good. I could give it attention, and the stakes were high because falling could lead to a career-killing broken bone.
Things last until they don’t.
I threw myself up the hill and back down again. One step at a time. I’d built the charms in my life one at a time, and one at a time, they’d collapsed.
So one at a time, I’d have to build them again.
I didn’t have women in Los Angeles, yet the hopefulness of that thought brought Vivian to mind. I tried to shake her as I climbed. I had reasons for the rules.
So no.
But I tasted her in my dry mouth. Heard her in my gasps. Once her voice came to my mind with its talk of expiration dates, I couldn’t shake it. She was in my invigorated muscles and the ache in my arms, and the harder I pushed, the harder she did.
Maybe I could break the Los Angeles rule.
It seemed reasonable. If things were going to fall out of the bottom, I couldn’t just fill from the top. I had to rethink and remake the setup of my life then hold fast again.
One step at a time with her. No rushing. I could have her by the time I went to the Cactus League. I would have her. Own her. Make her body mine. Satisfy my unreasonable, disproportionate craving for her. I gasped for it with every wrench up the hill, every burning muscle, every drop of sweat down my face.
As I climbed the hill, lifting myself by a tree branch, leveraging enough weight to get my leg up to a ledge in the slope, I passed Youder for the third time.
“Last lap,” I said, breath heaving.
He gave me the thumbs-up and scrambled behind me.
When I got to the top, I grabbed his bottle and sat on the edge. I’d never gotten this far ahead of him.
He threw himself on the flagstones at the top of the hill, where my patio started. “Jesus.” He barely had enough breath for the two syllables.
I leaned back and handed him the bottle. “You have two months to get it back.”
He sprayed his face with water even though it was freezing out, then he downed half the bottle. “I won’t.” He sat up. “This is it. This is where the shit starts filling up the bag.”
“Whatever.”
“The age thing. It’s real, son.”
“You’re just lazy. Julio Franco played until he was forty-nine.”
“I’m not Julio.”
He wasn’t Julio. I wasn’t saying he was. I couldn’t tell if he was being intentionally thick or if I was bent out of shape for no good reason. Let’s face it, I didn’t make the effort to figure out the difference.
“People look up to you. They look at you, and they see a guy who could play ball to the end. You start getting soft, you work through it. Get a little older, work harder. If you leave, you just prove this game’s like all the other ones, okay, but it’s not. And it’s not because guys like you play.”
“Old guys?”
“You know what?” I stood and put my hand out for him. “You’re not a free agent until October. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
He grabbed my hand, and I pulled him up. He clapped me on the back.
I drank a quart of water when he left. It took so long to drink that much water, and I had to stay still for it. Jack getting too old to play hurt me in places I didn’t poke too often. The place where I couldn’t play. The place where an injury took me off the lineup. The place where my life was turned upside down and death fell out.
I had a book to read. I’d stop thinking about Jack leaving and playing without Daria’s pin and the missing ports-of-call women if I buried myself in it.
Fifteen minutes in, when I laughed at a line so clever it seemed to twist on itself, I wondered if Vivian had read it.
I was sorry she hadn’t been able to let me finish the job at the same time as I was grateful she’d refused me before she went full psycho. I respected that. Admired it. She had a lot going for her. It was too bad about the circumstances.
Another line cracked me up, and I realized the book I was reading was by Dwayne F. Wright. The same guy who’d written Eternal Joke.
It didn’t all have to be about sex, did it?
We could be friends. That could be part of the New Rules.
I grabbed my phone.
Have you read The Underling?