Nine Inches

by Tom Perrotta

  “She didn’t do it on purpose,” Santelli assured him. “Lori wouldn’t do that.”

  “I don’t know,” Tim piped in. “It looked pretty deliberate from where I was standing.”

  “How would you know?” Santelli demanded, an uncharacteristic edge creeping into his voice. “Are you some kind of mind reader?”

  “I’m just telling you what it looked like,” Tim replied.

  “Big deal,” Santelli replied. “That’s just your subjective opinion.”

  “I’m an umpire,” Tim reminded him. “My subjective opinion is all I have.”

  “Really?” Santelli scratched his forehead, feigning confusion. “I thought you guys were supposed to be objective. When did they change the job description?”

  “All right,” said Tim. “Whatever. It’s my objective opinion, okay?”

  “Look,” I said. “We’re doing the best we can.”

  “I sure as hell hope not,” Carl shot back. “Or else we’re in big trouble.”

  Sensing an opportunity, Santelli cupped his hands around his mouth and called out, “Hey, Lori, did you hit that kid on purpose?”

  Lori seemed shocked by the question. Her mouth dropped open and she shook her head back and forth, as if nothing could have been further from the truth.

  “It slipped,” she said. “I’m really sorry.”

  “See?” Santelli turned back to Tim with an air of vindication. “It was an accident.”

  “Jack?” Carl’s expression was a mixture of astonishment and disgust. “You really gonna let this slide?”

  I glanced at Tim for moral support, but his face was blank, pointedly devoid of sympathy. I wished I could have thought of something more decisive to do than shrug.

  “What do you want from me?” There was a pleading note in my voice that was unbecoming in an umpire. “She said it slipped.”

  “Now, wait a minute — ” Tim began, but Carl didn’t let him finish.

  “Fine,” he said. “The hell with it. If that’s the way it’s gonna be, that’s the way it’s gonna be. Let’s play ball.”

  Carl stormed off, leaving the three of us standing by the plate, staring at his back as he descended into the dugout.

  “You can’t know what’s in another person’s heart.” Santelli shook his head, as if saddened by this observation. “You just can’t.”

  “Why don’t you shut up?” Tim told him.

  Lori quickly regained her composure when play resumed. With runners on first and second, she calmly and methodically struck out Antoine Frye to retire the side. On her way to the dugout she stopped and apologized to Trevor Mancini, resting her hand tenderly on his shoulder. It was a classy move. Trevor blushed and told her to forget about it.

  RICKY DISALVO was on the mound for the Wildcats, and though he had nowhere near Lori’s talent, he was pitching a solid and effective game. A sidearmer plagued by control problems and a lack of emotional maturity — I had once seen him burst into tears after walking five straight batters — Ricky had wisely decided that night to make his opponents hit the ball. All game long he’d dropped one fat pitch after another right over the meatiest part of the plate.

  The Ravens, a mediocre hitting team on the best of days, had eked out a lucky run in the second on a single, a stolen base, an overthrow, and an easy fly ball to right field that had popped out of Mark Diedrich’s glove, but they’d been shut out ever since. Ricky’s confidence had grown with each successive inning, and he was throwing harder and more skillfully than he had all game by the time Lori Chang stepped up to the plate with two outs in the bottom of the fifth.

  I guess I should have seen what was coming. When I watched the game on cable access a week later, it seemed painfully clear in retrospect, almost inevitable. But at the time, I didn’t sense any danger. We’d had some unpleasantness, but it had passed when Lori apologized to Trevor. The game had moved forward, slipping past the trouble as easily as water flowing around a rock. I did notice that Lori Chang looked a little nervous in the batter’s box, but that was nothing unusual. As bold and powerful as she was on the mound, Lori was a surprisingly timid hitter. She tucked herself into an extreme crouch, shrinking the strike zone down to a few inches, and tried to wait out a walk. She rarely swung and was widely, and fairly, considered to be an easy out.

  For some reason, though, Ricky seemed oddly tentative with his first couple of pitches. Ball one kicked up dirt ten feet from the plate. Ball two was a mile outside.

  “Come on,” Carl called impatiently from the dugout. “Just do it.”

  Lori tapped the fat end of her bat on the plate. I checked my clicker and squatted into position. Ricky glanced at his father and started into his herky-jerky windup.

  On TV, it all looks so fast and clean — Lori gets beaned and she goes down. But on the field it was slow and jumbled, my brain lagging a beat behind the action. Before I can process the fact that the ball’s rocketing toward her head, Lori’s already said, “Ooof!” Her helmet’s in the air before I register the sickening crack of impact, and by then she’s already crumpled on the ground. On TV it looks as though I move quickly, rolling her onto her back and coming in close to check her breathing, but in my memory it’s as if I’m paralyzed, as if the world has stopped and all I can do is stare at the bareheaded girl lying motionless at my feet.

  Then the quiet bursts into commotion. Tim’s right beside me, shouting, “Is she okay? Is she okay?” Ricky’s moving toward us from the mound, his glove pressed to his mouth, his eyes stricken with terror and remorse.

  “Did I hurt her?” he asks. “I didn’t mean to hurt her.”

  “I think you killed her,” I tell him, because as far as I can tell, Lori’s not breathing. Ricky stumbles backward, as if someone’s pushed him. He turns in the direction of his father, who’s just stepped out of the dugout.

  “You shouldn’t have made me do that!” Ricky yells.

  “Oh my God,” says Carl. He looks pale and panicky.

  At that same moment, Happy Chang’s scaling the third-base fence and sprinting across the infield to check on his daughter’s condition. At least that’s what I think he’s doing, right up to the moment when he veers suddenly toward Carl, emitting a cry of guttural rage, and tackles him savagely to the ground.

  Happy Chang is a small man, no bigger than some of our Little Leaguers, and Carl is tall and bulked up from years of religious weight lifting, but it’s no contest. Within seconds, Happy Chang’s straddling Carl’s chest and punching him repeatedly in the face, all the while shouting what must be very angry things in Chinese. Carl doesn’t even try to defend himself, not even when Happy Chang reaches for his throat.

  Luckily for Carl, two of our local policemen — Officers Freylinghausen and Hughes, oddly enough the same two who’d arrested me for domestic battery — are present at the game, and before Happy Chang can finish throttling Carl, they’ve rushed onto the field and broken up the fight. They take Happy Chang into custody with a surprising amount of force — with me they were oddly polite — Freylinghausen grinding his face into the dirt while Hughes slaps on the cuffs. I’m so engrossed in the spectacle that I don’t even realize that Lori’s regained consciousness until I hear her voice.

  “Daddy?” she says quietly, and for a second I think she’s talking to me.

  MY WHOLE life fell apart after I broke my son’s nose. By the time I got out on bail the next morning, Jeanie had already taken the kids to her mother’s house and slapped me with a restraining order. The day after that she started divorce proceedings.

  In the year that had passed since then, nothing much had changed. I had tried apologizing in a thousand different ways, but it didn’t seem to matter. As far as Jeanie was concerned, I’d crossed some unforgivable line and was beyond redemption.

  I accepted the loss of my wife as fair punishment for what I’d done, but it was harder to accept the loss of my kids. I had some visiting rights, but they were severely restricted. Basically, I took my daughters — th
ey were eleven and thirteen — to the movies or the mall every other Saturday, then to a restaurant, and then back to their grandmother’s. They weren’t allowed to stay overnight with me. It killed me to walk past their empty rooms at night, to not find them asleep and safe, and to be fairly sure I never would.

  Once in a while Jason joined us on our Saturday excursions, but usually he was too busy with his plays. He had just finished his junior year in high school, capping it off with a starring role in the spring musical, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. People kept telling me how great he was, and I kept agreeing, embarrassed to confess that I hadn’t seen the show. My son had asked me not to come and I’d respected his wishes.

  A year on my own had given me a lot of time to think, to come to terms with what had happened, and to accept my own responsibility for it. It also gave me a lot of time to stew in my anger, to indulge the conviction that I was a victim, too, every bit as much as my wife and son. I wrote Jeanie and my kids a lot of letters trying to outline my complicated position on these matters, but no one ever responded. It was like my side of the story had disappeared into some kind of void.

  That’s why I wanted so badly for my family to watch the championship game on cable access. I had e-mailed them all separately, telling them when it would be broadcast, and asking them to please tune in. I called them the day it aired and left a message reminding them to stick it out all the way to the end.

  What I wanted them to see was the top of the sixth and final inning, the amazing sequence of events that took place immediately following the beanball fiasco, after both Carl and Ricky DiSalvo had been ejected from the game, and Happy Chang had been hauled off to the police station.

  Despite the fact that she’d been knocked unconscious just a few minutes earlier, Lori was back on the mound for the Ravens. She insisted that she felt fine and didn’t seem confused or otherwise impaired. She started out strong, striking out Jeb Partridge and retiring Hiro Tamanaki on an easy infield fly. But then something changed. Maybe the blow to the head had affected her more that she’d let on, or maybe she’d been traumatized by her father’s arrest. Whatever the reason, she fell apart. With only one out remaining in the game, she walked three straight batters to load the bases.

  I’d always admired Lori’s regal detachment, her ability to remain calm and focused no matter what was going on, but now she just looked scared. She cast a desperate glance at the first-base dugout, silently pleading with her coach to take her out of the game, but Santelli ignored her. No matter how badly she was pitching, she was still his ace. And besides, the next batter was Mark Diedrich, the Wildcats’ pudgy right fielder, one of the weakest hitters in the league.

  “Just settle down,” Santelli told her. “Strike this guy out and we can all go home.”

  Lori nodded skeptically and got herself set on the mound. Mark Diedrich greeted me with a polite nod as he stepped into the batter’s box. He was a nice kid, a former preschool classmate of my youngest daughter.

  “I wish I was home in bed,” he told me.

  The first pitch was low. Then came a strike, the liveliest breaking ball Lori had thrown all inning, but it was followed by two outside fastballs (Ricky’s beanball had obviously done the trick; Lori wasn’t throwing anywhere near the inside corner). The next pitch, low and away, should have been ball four, but inexplicably, Mark lunged for it, barely nicking it foul.

  “Oh, Jesus,” he whimpered. “Why did I do that?”

  So there we were. Full count, bases loaded, two out. Championship game. A score of 1–0. The whole season narrowing down to a single pitch. If the circumstances had been a little different, it would have been a beautiful moment, an umpire’s dream.

  But for me, the game barely existed. All I could think of just then was the smile on Happy Chang’s dirty face as the cops led him off the field. I was kneeling on the ground trying to comfort Lori when Happy turned in our direction and said something low and gentle in Chinese, maybe asking if she was all right or telling her not to worry. Lori said something back, maybe that she was fine or that she loved him.

  “Easy now,” Santelli called from the dugout. “Right down the middle.”

  Lori tugged her shirt down in back and squinted at the catcher. Mark Diedrich’s face was beet red, as if something terribly embarrassing had already happened.

  “Please, God,” I heard him mutter as Lori began her windup.

  I should have been watching the ball, but instead I was thinking about Happy Chang and everything he must have been going through at the police station, the fingerprinting, the mug shot, the tiny holding cell. But mainly it was the look on his face that haunted me, the proud and defiant smile of a man at peace with what he’d done and willing to accept the consequences.

  The ball smacked into the catcher’s mitt, waking me from my reverie. Mark hadn’t swung. As far as I could determine after the fact, the pitch appeared to have crossed the plate near the outside corner, though possibly a bit on the high side.

  I guess I could have lied. I could have called strike three and given the game to the Ravens, to Lori Chang and Ray Santelli. I could have sent Mark Diedrich sobbing back to the dugout, probably scarred for life. But instead I pulled off my mask.

  “Jack?” Tim was standing between first and second with his palms open to the sky. “You gonna call it?”

  “I can’t,” I told him. “I didn’t see it.”

  There was a freedom in admitting it that I hadn’t anticipated, and I dropped my mask to the ground. Then I slipped my arms through the straps of my chest protector and let that fall, too.

  “What happened?” Mark Diedrich asked in a quavery voice. “Did I strike out?”

  “I don’t know,” I told him.

  Boos and angry cries rose from the bleachers as I made my way toward the pitcher’s mound. I wanted to tell Lori Chang that I envied her father, but I had a feeling she wouldn’t understand. She seemed relieved when I walked past her without saying a word. Mikey Fellner was out of the dugout and videotaping me as I walked past second base and onto the grass. He followed me all the way across centerfield, until I climbed the fence over the ad for the Prima Ballerina School of Dance and left the ballpark.

  That’s what I wanted my ex-wife and children to see — an umpire walking away from a baseball game, a man who had the courage to admit that he’d failed, who understood that there were times when you had no right to judge, had responsibilities you were no longer qualified to exercise. I hoped they might learn something new about me, something I hadn’t been able to make clear to them in my letters and phone calls.

  But of course I was disappointed. What’s in your heart sometimes remains hidden, even when you most desperately want it to be revealed. I remembered my long walk across the outfield as a dignified, silent journey, but on TV I seem almost to be jogging. I look sweaty and confused, a little out of breath as I mumble a string of barely audible excuses and apologies for my strange behavior. If Jeanie and the kids had been watching, all they would have seen was an unhappy man they already knew too well, fleeing from the latest mess he’d made: just me, still trying to explain.

  KIDDIE POOL

  IN A LIGHT RAIN, AT A LITTLE AFTER THREE IN THE morning, Gus Ketchell stood on his back stoop in slippers and shorty pajamas, holding a bulky cardboard box and staring uncertainly at his next-door neighbors’ garage.

  Come on, he told himself. You can do this.

  No one would ever know. The Simmonses’ house was dark, the old air conditioner wheezing away in the second-floor bedroom window. He pictured Peggy alone on the bed, snoring heavily, nearly comatose from the industrial-strength sleeping pills she’d been taking since Lonny’s sudden death a month ago. Gus could probably break down the front door with a sledgehammer, turn on every light in the house, and make himself a ham sandwich without disturbing her.

  Gus’s own wife, Martha, was also asleep, but even awake she wouldn’t have registered his absence at this ungodly hour; aside from the
occasional hotel room, they hadn’t shared a bed in years. There were no longer any dogs in the immediate neighborhood to sound an alarm, either, not since Fred DiMello had been forced to put down his ancient, slobbering basset hound last October. Fred had buried Sadsack in his backyard, and Gus often saw him staring forlornly at the circle of rocks he’d placed in the ground to mark the gravesite.

  So the coast was clear. But still Gus hesitated.

  He just didn’t like the idea of trespassing — breaking and entering, to be precise — even in a place so close to home, where he’d once been welcome. It would have been so much easier — so much more civilized — if he could just have rung the Simmonses’ doorbell in the morning and said, Hey, Peg, sorry to bother you, but I need a favor. And Peggy would have said, Sure, Gus, you name it. But why don’t you sit down and have a cup of coffee first?

  Once upon a time, the Ketchells and the Simmonses had been those kinds of neighbors, back when everyone was young and their kids moved between the two yards as if they were all part of one big family. Lonny Simmons sometimes borrowed Gus’s wheelbarrow and extension ladder without asking; Gus did the same with Lonny’s ratchet set and Weedwacker. The Ketchells had an open invitation to swim in the Simmonses’ built-in pool, a bona fide luxury when it was installed in the early seventies, one of maybe a half dozen in the whole town. The two families barbecued together, went on camping trips, swapped babysitting, and took turns shoveling each other’s sidewalk when it snowed.

  Somewhere along the way, though, it all went sour. The kids grew up and went away. Lonny filled his swimming pool with concrete, said the damn thing was too much trouble. Peggy got fat and haughty; she made some remarks that Martha hadn’t appreciated. There were grievances — a missing drill bit, a motion light that shined into a bedroom window. Gus and Lonny fell out of the habit of shouting jocular greetings to each other when they were both out in their yards. After a while, they stopped waving.

  Nonetheless, relations between the two households had remained reasonably civil until about three years ago, when the Simmonses got a bee in their bonnet about the old oak tree in the Ketchells’ yard, which overhung both properties. Lonny and Peggy thought it was diseased and demanded that it be cut down before falling limbs damaged their precious garage. After a couple of tense discussions, Gus and Martha reluctantly agreed to get some estimates. They hadn’t even had time to make their initial calls when the mail carrier arrived with a registered letter containing vague threats of legal action if the tree was not cut down “with all due dispatch.”