The Art of Fielding

by Chad Harbach

  Lopez shrugged. “Got me. He’s with some chick.”

  “Great,” said Schwartz. “Outstanding.” Seven hours till the bus departed for the biggest and—if they lost, which they wouldn’t—the last games of his Westish career. Not only was he not asleep, not only was he out of meds and pissed about it, not only could he feel every beat of his pulse in his half-destroyed knees, not only was his best player despondent and AWOL, but his second-best player was breaking curfew to chase tail. “Mind if we take a peek?”

  Lopez leaned into the glass door with a fleshy forearm, letting them bypass the line and the two-dollar cover. Bartleby’s was full of bodies and flashing lights. Neon cursive signs glared down from the walls, advertising the old local beers—Schlitz, Blatz, Hamm’s, Pabst, Huber, Old Style—that were now owned by a Southern tobacco conglomerate. NBA playoff games on the TVs, crappy hip-hop on the jukebox, two beefy townies aiming plastic guns at the console of Big Buck Hunter IV. Owen leaned forward to yell in Schwartz’s ear.

  “What?” Schwartz yelled back.

  “I said, I’m standing in beer.”

  “We’re all standing in beer.”

  “But why? It’s disgusting.”

  It was too loud to explain heterosexual courtship to Owen, even if he’d wanted to, so Schwartz kept pushing through the crowd, peering out over the baseball caps and the glossy hair of girls, unable to stop looking for Henry even though there was no way Henry would be here. God, that beer smelled good. He tried not to drink before games, but in the absence of Vikes—he’d run out this morning—a few beers were a near necessity.

  Owen tapped him on the shoulder. “I see Adam.”

  “Where?”

  “End of the bar.”

  His face was obscured by the abundant wheat-colored hair of the girl he was kissing, but the shimmering silver jacket was unmistakably Starblind’s. When the kiss was finished he plucked a lime rind from his mouth, dropped it in a squat glass, and held up two fingers to signal the bartender for another round. The girl draped one arm around his neck, her head resting against his shoulder in drunken worship.

  “Oh my,” said Owen.

  Schwartz elbowed his way through the heaving, half-dancing crowd, fists clenching and unclenching in a slow alternating rhythm. The bartender poured out two more shots of tequila. Sophie stood up, gathered her hair in a two-handed sheaf, and presented her neck to Starblind, who licked it slowly, then picked a salt shaker off the bar and sprinkled some whiteness on Sophie’s wetted skin. Sophie took a wedge of lime from the bartenders’ condiment bins and placed it between her teeth, pulp side out. She closed her eyes and tipped her head back. Starblind leaned in, licked the salt from her neck in a leisurely, lizardly way, and with a surreptitious flick of his wrist as he moved in for the kiss tossed a strobe-lit shot of tequila over his shoulder and down the front of Schwartz’s shirt.

  “Hi guys,” Schwartz said.

  Starblind blanched. “Mikey-o!” Sophie crowed, flinging her arms around Schwartz’s neck and swooning in to peck his cheek. She had the same fish-belly complexion as her brother, minus the windburned tan that came from spending winter mornings running stadiums, plus the mottled tequila flush that spread from her cheeks to the neckline of her butter-colored sundress. “Owen-o!” she cheered, doling out another hug.

  The Buddha smiled the sort of untroubled smile that had earned him his nickname. “Hello, my dear. Having fun?”

  “Yes. Where’s my brother? I need to find my brother. Let’s all do a shot.”

  “We were hoping you guys had seen him,” Schwartz said. “Where’s Pella?”

  “Pella,” said Sophie, “is beautiful.”

  “I agree. Buddha, would you order Sophie a cup of coffee? I need to confer with Adam for a moment.”

  “Aye aye, Captain.” Owen wrapped a slender arm around Sophie’s shoulders and led her away, gesticulating with his other hand as he embarked on some complicated story. Sophie nodded hypnotically, her brow furrowed to show that, no matter how drunk, she was smart enough to keep up with whatever Owen was saying. Good old Buddha.

  Schwartz looked at Starblind, to whose cheeks the color had mostly returned, though the arctic Starblind smile was nowhere to be found. “Where’s Pella?”

  Starblind shrugged sullenly. “I bumped into them on the street. Pella said she wasn’t feeling well.”

  “She left you in charge of Sophie?” Schwartz could get only so pissed at Starblind; Starblind was Starblind the way a dog was a dog and a shark was a shark. You didn’t expect moral distinctions from a shark. But Pella—what could she have been thinking, handing Henry’s sister over to a shark? Why, why, why? How irresponsible could she be? He trusted her, wanted to trust her, wanted to hold her to the same standard he held himself. And then she pulled something like this. “Team curfew is midnight,” he said.

  “I could say the same to you.”

  Schwartz stared him down in a way that emphasized his height advantage. “I don’t recommend it.”

  “I wasn’t drinking,” Starblind said. “If that’s what you’re thinking. Just showing Sophie around.”

  “She’s Henry’s sister.”

  “So what? You never hooked up with anybody’s sister?”

  “She’s seventeen.”

  Starblind shrugged. “She told me eighteen. Anyway, Skrim owes me one. Little bastard cost me a win today.”

  Schwartz picked up Starblind the way you pick a baby out of a bathtub, under the armpits, holding it at arm’s length so it won’t drip on your shirt, though Schwartz’s shirt was already wet with tossed tequila. Starblind’s feet kicked and flailed. Schwartz jacked him up against the side of the Buck Hunter machine. The machine rocked and shuddered. The two beefy townies turned to register their displeasure but stopped when they saw the warning ire in Schwartz’s eyes.

  Schwartz fired his left forearm into Starblind’s collarbone to pin him to the machine. Starblind’s head snapped back and cracked against the plastic. The pain made Starblind angry, and being angry made him smile. One thing about Starblind was he wouldn’t back down. “Fuck’s wrong with you?” he said. “You’ve been getting sucked off by Henry for years. I just wanted a little Skrimshander love.”

  Schwartz slid his forearm up from Starblind’s chest into his Adam’s apple. Starblind, coughing, twisted his head to the side to try to breathe. He brought up a knee into Schwartz’s balls—a glancing blow but a blow nonetheless. Schwartz crumpled, straightened, drove the palm of his hand into Starblind’s forehead, cracking his head on the plastic again. Starblind’s eyes rolled. He squirmed and twisted, freed one hand well enough to take a few wild swings.

  Even in the haze of his rage Schwartz could tell that awareness of a fight was spreading through the packed noisy bar. He had to finish this before some cop he didn’t know showed up and there was hell to pay. He felt like killing Starblind but instead he cocked his fist and drove it low, as hard as he could, into Starblind’s solar plexus, where no one would have to know, and where the pain wouldn’t keep him from playing tomorrow. The breath whooshed from Starblind’s body as he slid down the side of the machine to the beer-slick floor. He looked up at Schwartz and sneezed pathetically.

  “Hey,” Sophie protested as Schwartz lifted her drink-leaden arm, looped it around his neck, and steered her toward the exit. “I thought we were doing shots. Where’s Henry? Where’s Adam?” She leaned in to confide in Schwartz’s ear. “He’s hot. I mean like seriously.”

  “He’s a dreamboat.” Owen held the front door, Lopez saluted, and they passed out into the night.

  “My car’s down the block,” said Schwartz. “This way.”

  Before they even reached the Buick, Schwartz’s phone began to ring. Or more likely it had been ringing all along, but he hadn’t noticed amid the din of Bartleby’s. He glanced at the caller name: HOME.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey,” said Pella. “Any luck?”

  “We found a Skrimshander. But not the one we were loo
king for.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean Sophie. Remember Sophie? Sweet kid you were supposed to watch out for? She was at Bartleby’s, totally ripped, with Starblind sucking on her face. So I dropped him, which I maybe shouldn’t have done, but hey.” Schwartz, riled afresh, banged a paw on the hood of the Buick. “What’d you do, get her drunk and raffle her off to the shadiest guy you could find? What were you thinking? Where are you?”

  “I’m at your house.”

  “I know where you are!” Schwartz yelled. “Why aren’t you with Sophie? Why do I have to babysit the whole goddamn school? Why can’t I just worry about what I have to worry about?” His voice carried down the windswept street. A gaggle of sophomore girls wavered by in their heels, en route from Bartleby’s to some house party. No two of their tube tops or flouncy miniskirts were precisely alike, in cut or in color, and these slight variations made the outfits look all the more carefully orchestrated as they linked arms and passed by, pretending not to listen. Schwartz tried to comfort himself with a long look at their ten slender thighs turned pink by the cold, the good odds that he’d been between four or six of those thighs on oblivious drunken nights, but it was useless, the girls looked absurd to him now, and it no longer seemed that the universe contained an endless supply of anonymous pink thighs to which he could escape from his troubles. Pella would never dress like that.

  “Sorry,” Pella said, sounding more sullen than sorry. “After dinner we bumped into Adam, and I asked where the hotel was, and he said he was headed that way, he’d walk Sophie back. And why wouldn’t I believe him? And then I came to your place to see you.” She paused and, when Schwartz didn’t fill the void with yelling, ventured a change of subject. “Still no word from Henry?”

  “Nope.”

  “Now what?”

  “I don’t know,” Schwartz said. “First I have to put Sophie somewhere. I can’t take her back to her parents like this.”

  “Do they know Henry’s still missing?”

  “I’m going to call them now. I’m going to tell them both their children are sleeping sweetly.”

  “Okay.” Pella sighed that wounded-kitten sigh into the phone again. “Mike, I know it’s not a good time, but I really need to talk to you. It’s about my dad.”

  “I’ll be there,” Schwartz said. “Just hang tight.”

  By the time he phoned the Skrimshanders and climbed behind the wheel of the Buick, Sophie was curled up asleep on the queen-size backseat, site of most of Schwartz’s high school conquests. Her knees were drawn close to her chest, sunlight-white calves flashing out beneath the hem of her rumpled dress. If she wasn’t sucking her thumb, she at least had her thumbnail hooked thoughtfully between her teeth. Drunk and asleep, her face drained of its teenage-girl defiance and willful sophistication, she looked even more like her brother. Schwartz fired the engine as softly as possible, tried to get into gear without creating the usual impression of the undercarriage dropping out, and nosed away from the curb.

  “I’m worried,” he said.

  Owen nodded. They idled down Groome Street, Schwartz’s foot never touching the gas, silently scanning the bushes like a couple of cops who’ve been partners forever.

  “We’ll take Sophie back to your room, if that’s okay.”

  “Sure.”

  Schwartz parked in the service bay of the dining hall. Sophie showed no signs of waking as he scooped her weightless bird body into his arms and carried her across the Small Quad, the heels of her laced-up sandals banging gently against his thigh. The front door of Phumber Hall was propped open by a crate of art-history books, causing the swipe-card box to twinkle an inviting green. The hip-hop anthem of the moment blared from a ground-floor window, accompanied by a chorus of blurred and delirious voices. The song faded out and immediately began again, the bass line kicking in.

  “Beer?” Owen offered.

  “I don’t see why not.”

  Owen ducked into the party and returned with two bright-blue plastic cups topped by foam. “Naked,” he reported.

  “Girls too?”

  “Everyone.”

  Owen carried the beer upstairs. Schwartz followed with Sophie. The unspoken hope was that Henry would be there, lying in bed reading back issues of Sports Illustrated. Whereupon Schwartz would lace into him like never before—he’d been scripting the tongue-lashing in his mind all night, phrase by delectable phrase—and everything would be fine. But the room was dark and empty. All the anger leaked from Schwartz’s body, taking what remained of energy and hope along with it. He lay Sophie down on Henry’s unmade bed, covered her with a quilt, and folded back its bottom edge so that he could unlace her complicated sandals and set them by the door. Owen handed him a warm, overly frothy beer, which he accepted wordlessly and drank in one long slow gulp. The ten blocks back to Grant Street, where Pella was, might as well have been a thousand miles. He lay flat on his back on the blood-colored rug and dreamed about God-knows-what.

  54

  After the game ended, Henry briefly joined his teammates’ celebration at home plate. Meanwhile he kept one eye on the first-base bleachers, where Aparicio was signing an autograph for Sal’s little brother. He, Aparicio, who might soon become the president of Venezuela, was wearing a coat and tie, had come all the way from St. Louis, had put on a coat and tie to watch Henry humiliate himself once and for all. He looked just as Henry had imagined, as trim and fit as during his playing days, his neck long and regal, his skin almond brown, his shoulders no wider than Henry’s own. Dwight Rogner stood nearby, speaking into his cell phone, and Henry didn’t need lip-reading skills to know what he was saying: “Forget the Skrimshander kid.”

  Henry grabbed his bag and slipped into the crowd, ostensibly to shake the hand of President Affenlight, who was standing there alone, and who gave him the sort of commiserative look he’d need to spend the rest of his life avoiding. When President Affenlight looked away, Henry scuttled around the backstop and safely traversed the no-man’s-land between Westish Field and the football stadium. There, in the shadow of an arch, amid the cool, sweet smells of moss and rot, he sat and cried.

  Afterward he felt much worse. What at the diamond had been a sharp adrenal anxiety, fueled by purpose—Get me out of here, away from everyone—was settling into a flat, sullen expanse of awfulness. A moment would come, and then another, and then another. These moments would be his life.

  He opened the crate where he stored the weighted vest he wore to run stadiums, put it on over his Cards shirt, buckled the straps over his sternum. The game had ended near dusk, and now it was dark. He cinched the straps tighter until the vest dug into his chest.

  He left the stadium and walked eastward across the practice fields toward the lake. The wind came straight off the water, stiff and chill. He scrambled down the little scree-clotted slope to the beach, clutching at scraggly bushes for balance, and started north along the water’s edge.

  Where the beach ended a path began, cutting through thatchy rain-flattened grasses humming with insects. After two miles the path ended in a kind of meadow, mowed by the county during the summer months, out of which the lighthouse rose. On his usual weight-vested jog, Henry circled the lighthouse, slapping the repoussé letters of the plaque the Historical Society had fixed into the stucco, before returning the way he came. Farther north lay only a high razor-wire fence that ran from the water’s edge all the way back to the highway, however far west. On the other side of the fence was a privately owned forest. On the other side of the forest lay the next town north. Henry didn’t know the town’s name; he’d never been there.

  The lighthouse was a tall white tapering cylinder, no longer in use but kept in good repair. Paintings and photographs of it hung in every shop and restaurant in Westish. The wide-planked doors sat back in an alcove. He pulled at the arrow-shaped iron handles, but the place was locked tight. He dropped his bag in the alcove and waded out into the chilly water.

  Just as the slow rolling waves
touched his chin he reached a sandbar that exposed him to his hips again. The wind bit through his wet shirt and flak jacket. His teeth chattered loudly. The water, though freezing, felt more comforting than the wind. He sank to dunk his head. His Cards cap stayed on the surface when he went under, as if refusing to participate in whatever asinine shit he was getting into; the waves carried it beyond arm’s reach, into the darkness. He leveled his body to the water and began to swim.

  The first dozen strokes felt hard, almost impossible, because of the drag of the vest. But once he’d reached a good speed the vest didn’t hamper him much. He swam past the first buoy, past the second buoy. The campus lights receded behind him. He kept swimming.

  When he’d gone what felt like halfway across the lake he slowed to a paddle, his chin atop the dark water, atop of which was dark air. All he could see were stars. There were no gulls out here and nothing to listen to. It seemed possible no one had ever swum to this spot before, so far from shore. Or maybe hundreds or thousands of years ago people did it all the time. Maybe that was their sport. The water seemed to groan beneath the weight of itself, the weight of other water.

  He turned around to face the campus, those few little lights pricking the distance. He let his bladder go, peed into the water. It calmed his whole body, if only for a moment.

  All he’d ever wanted was for nothing to ever change. Or for things to change only in the right ways, improving little by little, day by day, forever. It sounded crazy when you said it like that, but that was what baseball had promised him, what Westish College had promised him, what Schwartzy had promised him. The dream of every day the same. Every day was like the day before but a little better. You ran the stadium a little faster. You bench-pressed a little more. You hit the ball a little harder in the cage; you watched the tape with Schwartzy afterward and gained a little insight into your swing. Your swing grew a little simpler. Everything grew simpler, little by little. You ate the same food, woke up at the same time, wore the same clothes. Hitches, bad habits, useless thoughts—whatever you didn’t need slowly fell away. Whatever was simple and useful remained. You improved little by little till the day it all became perfect and stayed that way. Forever.