by Pete Dexter
Spooner put his shoe back on and got to his feet and, possibly making a bad situation worse, found himself staring at the spot where the baseball had broken through Russell’s cranium and momentarily entered his brain. Not that there was much to see, really, at least no imprint of the ball. Only a short line of thick black stitching farther back on his head where they’d gone in to ease the pressure and swelling.
Spooner realized now that he was still holding his sock, and realized he’d been staring at Russell Hodge’s head a long time. Safety-wise, this was like napping on the highway, but he found himself unable to look away, and wondered idly if Coach Tinker would visit him in the hospital too. He ruminated awhile, there under the gaze of Russell Hodge, coming eventually to the realization that beyond pain and mortification, what was about to happen would embarrass Calmer and mortify his mother, who still worked that pump like a spare lung—the disgrace waiting for them all if he was ever in trouble at school. Public humiliation, a ruinous effect on Calmer’s career, especially now that he was going to be principal. And the newspapers. The newspapers would have a field day.
Spooner’s mother lived her life with the certain knowledge that the whole thing—cradle to grave—was an ambush. Spooner didn’t necessarily disagree with that, but had never seen any reason to take it personally. The incident about to occur, for instance, would end up in the archives as one more piece of evidence that the world was out to ruin her.
But even as these things floated through Spooner’s brain, some other information was coming in right behind it. As impossible as it seemed, Russell Hodge appeared at this moment to be having misgivings, that or had forgotten who Spooner was, or couldn’t make up his mind how he wanted to kill him.
But wait, it was dread. Spooner saw dread in Russell Hodge, and he knew dread when he saw it like the palm of his hand. These two things, by the way, dread and masturbation, went together all of Spooner’s life once the reproductive system checked in, initially preparing him perhaps for all the dilemmas and complexities that would mark the affairs of the heart all his life.
Right now, for instance, he faced the following choice every afternoon between fourth and fifth period: He could step into a bathroom stall and quiet his reproductive system or take his chances on being caught with an erection in music appreciation. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, which—no happy coincidence—was what the reproductive system was all about. Meaning the fear of being caught—he himself had been in the bathroom when Mr. Craddock, the dean of boys, had stormed in and broken through a stall door trying to catch a kid named Wendell Jeeter smoking, and instead found him in the act of spilling his seed—had to be weighed against the possibility of being called to the chalkboard by Miss Degruso. The problem with music appreciation was that Spooner’s seat was directly in back of the smoldering figure of Dee Dee Victor, at whose back he stared all period long, studying her details through the sometimes translucent shirts she wore, in love with her shoulders, her shoulder blades, her blood pressure, every little pebble of her spine. And when she leaned forward to take notes, a narrow space would open along the line of her skirt, and he would lean forward too, inhaling the air like it was loaded with roast beef, thinking that what he was breathing that instant had just floated out from under her skirt. And then old Peckenpaw would float out too, like a piece of driftwood, and begin to leak, and what if at this critical, boned, leaking, helpless moment Miss Degruso asked him to come to the front and distinguish a piccolo from a fife? It was possible. In fact, that was what she’d asked Russell Hodge to do on the day he’d broken her leg in the storage locker.
Now, however, as he and Russell Hodge continued to stare at each other in the hallway, Russell’s expression continued to change, dread to misgivings, misgivings to confusion, and settling finally almost on the same empty look he’d had lying on the dirt next to home plate after Spooner had plunked him in the head.
The fire alarm rang—one of the Ploof twins at it again probably—and Hodge jumped at the sudden noise, and then, regaining himself, turned and looked up the wall to the spot where the bell was installed, and, finding the source of the noise, he smiled. One of his front teeth had grown in crooked, and while Spooner watched, a line of saliva dropped half a foot from his lip and then held, dancing in the eerie, artificial light, and then broke off and landed on his shirt.
Which was when Spooner noticed that Russell had his shirt on inside out.
Spooner next saw Russell Hodge half an hour before baseball practice. Hodge was sitting on a wooden bench in the caged locker room area where the team dressed, naked except for his socks and cleats, studying a piece of stiff, crumpled gauze about the size of a finch. He turned it one way and another, trying to place what it was. The gauze was crusted with dried blood, and he abruptly shook it, and then held it up to his good ear to hear if it was ticking.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Spooner did not like to be told how to throw a baseball, much less where to throw it. The throwing came from a thousand afternoons outside his grandmother’s house back in Georgia, alone, with his mother inside, crying or sick, and it was secret then, the things he did to get away from her, and somehow secret to him now.
Besides, everything that could be said about throwing a ball had already been said a thousand times, and he understood he was exceptional at this one thing in his life and was chary of talking about it, of even thinking about it too much, afraid of losing the sensation, afraid the happiness of it would dissolve. That was usually the story when he went over a thing too much, began thinking about what he’d done or hadn’t done or should have done instead, or could have done if he’d only done it better. Which is to say that before he’d finished chewing a thing over, it was tasteless.
Least of all was he inclined to discuss throwing with Tinker, but Tinker—who hadn’t got where he was by worrying if he was wanted—continued to come to Spooner again and again, making sure, as he put it, that they were on the same page.
And Spooner continued to throw the ball where he wanted to throw it, and the local papers wrote their headlines, and then one of the Chicago newspapers noticed the local papers and sent a stringer around, who wrote his own stories and pretty soon even the first-string big-city reporters came around to look for themselves, some of them famous, and as the story gained impetus Tinker pressed all the harder to be included.
Not long after the big-city reporters showed up, there were scouts, two of them, sitting behind the screen in hats and short sleeves and ties, charting every pitch Spooner threw, and always Tinker would find a reason to call time-out when they were in the seats, to walk slowly to the mound, put his arm around Spooner’s shoulder, and turn him away from the stands—the way you might create a bit of privacy to tell someone bad news. He would say, “Let’s make sure we’re on the same page with this guy, Spoonerman,” or simply, “Let’s move this guy off the plate.” Sometimes delivering this message in the middle of a string of perfect innings.
After the game, on the bus ride home, he would drop into the seat next to Spooner—the seat next to Spooner was pretty much always empty—and try to insinuate himself into the matter of Spooner’s throwing again. Always pushing him to throw more inside. “What are you afraid of, Spoonerman? That’s what it looks like. It looks like you’re afraid.”
Which was not exactly it, but it was clearer to Spooner all the time that Russell Hodge was no longer Russell Hodge. He was now timid at the plate, unable to find the strike zone on the occasions he was allowed to pitch and, more worrisome, seemed to be taken over by an unnatural sweetness of disposition, and was often distracted as he stood out in his new position of center field by some small creature or plant, and often was watching it or smelling it when fly balls were hit his way, and only his great natural speed, unaffected by the beaning, had saved him from half a dozen embarrassing errors. Russell Hodge was taking time to smell the roses, and it was a pitiful thing to watch, and it would have taken a colder heart than Spooner’s not to regret b
eing the cause.
And so he held Tinker off, one advance after another, like a girl in the backseat who didn’t want to be felt up.
The truth was, Tinker did not much understand baseball, a sport in which no one was doing anything 90 percent of the time. To Tinker, it was more like a student activity than a sport, and he had taken over as the head baseball coach only after hearing the manager Billy Martin on television one day saying that baseball was a contest of wills over who owned the inside part of the plate. Tinker, who had trained himself to think in these terms, saw immediately that life was also a contest of wills over who owned the inside of the plate. He coached it and wrote it in his column and used it in public appearances.
By now the whole Village of Prairie Glen hung on every word he said and still this kid Spoonerman wouldn’t listen.
His fee for public speaking these days was one hundred and fifty dollars, and you can imagine what she said when she heard about that.
Nine games into the season, a columnist showed up from the Chicago Tribune, arrived late and watched only the last inning of a rain-shortened game, and wrote that an instant before Spooner’s slider reached the plate, an intervention seemed to take place, and a pitch would dance out like a fish hitting the lure, and predicting its movement was like predicting the thoughts of a rainbow trout on the hook.
It was about this time that Spooner began to understand that newspaper writers were going to write what they were going to write no matter what they saw when they arrived on the scene.
TWENTY-EIGHT
And so it happened that Calmer looked up from his desk one afternoon and saw Evelyn Tinker standing in the doorway, the ceiling lights reflecting off his skull, which had been shorn of hair down to maybe a sixteenth of an inch.
“Welcome, pilgrim,” Calmer said.
There was a yellowed black-and-white picture on the wall of a professor out somewhere on the prairie, with a dozen students before him on their knees, pressing their ears against a railroad track. The professor was holding a sledgehammer. Tinker knew it was a professor because he had glasses and a beard. He stared at the picture a long time.
Calmer’s tie was loose and his sleeves were rolled up to the elbows, and when Tinker finally turned away from the picture, he noticed Calmer’s forearms and wondered if he’d played ball in high school. He wondered if in some way Ottosson’s forearms might explain how Spooner could throw a baseball.
Calmer motioned to the empty chair on the other side of his desk. Tinker took it and rolled up onto one hip to cross his legs. There was something discordant about Tinker with crossed legs, like a cowboy riding into town sidesaddle. The legs themselves were thickened, and perhaps shortened, by years of four-hundred-pound squats in the weight room, and his forward foot protruded like the beginnings of an erection.
Tinker had another look at the picture. “I like that,” he said. “I could use it myself to help motivate some of these kids I’ve got.”
Calmer smiled and waited. The coach continued to stare at the picture.
“So, Evelyn, what can I do for you?”
Tinker turned back to Calmer, not much caring for the familiar use of his first name by an ordinary member of the faculty. He liked to be called coach. Even Mrs. Tinker called him Coach.
He said, “It’s about our boy,” and realized that he’d just at that moment forgotten Spooner’s name, although now that he thought about it, he wasn’t sure he’d known it in the first place. It wasn’t Ottosson, that much he knew.
“Warren?”
It didn’t sound right, but Tinker nodded along, thinking Ottosson should know. He said, “See, Warren seems to be one of these kids that come along now and then that you can’t coach. That isn’t coachable, if you follow what I mean.”
Calmer nodded as if he had some idea of what Tinker was talking about. “In what way?” he said.
“Well, you know, you coach him, but he doesn’t listen.”
A fire alarm went off in the hallway, the Ploof twins strike again. Every time one of them pulled the alarm, the whole school had to exit in an orderly manner, single file, and stand in the parking lot until the fire department got there and shut off the alarm. The Ploofs themselves were untouchable. Even if an eyewitness saw one of them do it, each of them would only blame the other.
Tinker turned in his chair and stared as the students in the hallway filed out. Smoking, horsing around, dancing—not orderly and single-file at all. “Right there,” he said, “that’s exactly what I mean.”
Calmer got up and closed the door against the sound of the alarm, and when he sat down again it was on the edge of his desk. “You were talking about Warren…”
“Let’s just say I’m not sure he follows everything, if you get my meaning. I thought maybe it was something you’d run into with him at home.” There was a pause, Tinker beginning to feel uncomfortable, like somehow it was his fault the kid was slow. “But the important thing now is the scouts. They’re out there every day, and they’re interested, I can tell you that. This could be the chance of a lifetime.”
“Scouts?”
“Big-league scouts. They’re required by the state to notify me before they can make contact with the student; it’s a state law.” There had been only the two scouts, and one of them had only stayed a few days and left. The other one was still hanging around.
Tinker turned for another look at the picture on the wall, feeling Calmer watching. He wished he could tell him to sit back down behind his desk where he belonged.
“And what is it again that you want him to listen to?”
“To coaching.”
“About what?”
“About playing ball. That’s what we’re talking about. This could be his chance.”
The talk wasn’t going the way Tinker had thought it would. For one thing, there was no sign of appreciation from Ottosson yet that Tinker had taken the time to come over and talk. He wasn’t even sure they were having a talk; it felt like he was confessing. He found himself wondering if he could take Calmer in a fight.
“You never know about these things,” Tinker said.
“He’s seventeen,” Calmer said. “He hasn’t finished high school. He hasn’t even read any books yet.”
Books? Yeah, he could take him.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Tinker said, “I’m all for higher education. All I’m saying is he could get injured tomorrow. He could reach into a lawn mower and cut a tendon.” He told Calmer about a Negro boy he’d played with back at Normal who reached under a running mower with his bare hand and after that it was nothing but fumbles.
The fire bell went quiet, and the room went quiet with it.
Calmer sat on the corner of his desk, remembering how the world outside had looked to him from the farm, when he was sixteen and ready to leave. He’d known things, though, how to work, how to keep what he had, how engines ran, how things were put together, how to fix them when they broke. He wondered sometimes if he should do less of the work around the house, let the boys figure things out more for themselves.
“I just wanted to check he doesn’t have any problems at home that we should know about,” Tinker said. “Family history, things like that. Hearing problems, trouble hitting the books, if he took a whack on the head . . .”
Calmer continued to stare, stared right through him.
“He has to claim the inside of the plate,” Tinker said. “He’s got to make the batter aware that the inside of the plate is his. That’s the whole psychology of the game. Of life, when you think about it. Life is a contest of wills for the inside of the plate. And all these scouts, they aren’t just looking for an arm, they’re looking for the maturity to go with it.”
“He’s seventeen,” Calmer said again.
“There’s still time,” Tinker said, and when there was no reply to that, he stood up to leave. He looked at the picture again and smiled. “There’s an old saying,” he said, “that a picture’s worth a thousand words, and you know, if you
really think about that, it’s true.”
TWENTY-NINE
Calmer left school early, right after fifth period, and drove the Ford to Chicago Heights, where that afternoon the baseball team was scheduled to play Bloom Township. It was six miles and twice that many railroad crossings, and on the way over the muffler dropped off.
He continued on, though, ignored the noise and the looks from the street, imagining what it would be like telling Lily that Warren was going to play baseball instead of going to college. In Lily’s family, a child who didn’t go to college might as well go to prison.
The team was on the field warming up when Calmer arrived, the coaches hitting grounders and fly balls, the infielders turning double plays. A pretty fair sampling of adults sat in the stands along with some students, but baseball didn’t matter in high school the way football did.
Calmer stood off to the side at first, studying the bleachers, and immediately spotted the overweight, middle-aged man sitting alone, smoking Pall Mall cigarettes, making notes on a small pad. He had a permanent-looking tan that he had not acquired around here and the skin at the edges of his ears was crusted. He looked comfortable even with his back pressed into the edge of the bleachers, using his knees to hold his notepad while he wrote. He looked like someone who would be comfortable sitting on a pail or a train track: a man born to sit.