The Game Player

by Rafael Yglesias

  There was a moment of panic as I swung and I blamed it for the fact that all I did was hit a grounder to the second baseman. I was thrown out at first but I shouldn’t have felt too bad because I had fulfilled Brian’s request: he stood safe at second, in scoring position.

  He did score eventually and he walked up to me to say, “Good job.”

  “What position do I play?” I asked, since I didn’t think I should seem satisfied with my Pyrrhic victory.

  “Right field,” he said, and busied himself with advice to other players. I borrowed a glove from a small pile below the bench. All of them were too small since they were left over from the players’ earlier years, and I decided that I should have to buy one of my own. Being an outfielder was glamorous, I thought. I was playing the position of Babe Ruth and Roger Maris.

  Nothing was hit to me, however, during the two innings that intervened between my first and second at bats. The score was tied at two-all when I came to bat in the third inning. There were men on first and third with two out. Brian had just singled, driving in a run, and he had not instructed me about this situation. With two out, I thought, there’s nothing I can do except try to get a hit. The first pitch was slow and strange, curving and dropping altitude at the same time. I didn’t swing and was stunned that the umpire called it a strike.

  I couldn’t hit that pitch if he threw it again, so I waited reluctantly and fearfully. My teammates called out encouragement with confidence. After all, I had driven in a run in just this circumstance the day before. I wanted to turn and tell them it had been an accident. Just as my nemesis began to throw I told myself to feel confident. Wait on that curve ball like Brian would.

  When I realized that this was a straightforward fast ball coming at me it was too late. I assumed it was a strike and swung randomly. From the groans behind me I figured it must have been an obviously high pitch that I should have ignored.

  The catcher returned the ball, my teammates still called out encouragement—though more feebly—and I watched the fielders glance at the sun with an abstracted air that told of my coming doom. There was hardly any energy in my swing at the third strike and certainly no contact.

  During the mixing of teams switching sides I saw Brian wave at me to join him. “Take over the scoring. Billy will be coming in for you,” he said without emotion.

  “Cause I blew it?”

  “No!” The force of this word ended after it was spoken. His next remarks were said casually. “You were coming out even if you hit a home run. I told you yesterday that everybody had to get a chance to play.”

  Then why wasn’t I told at the start of the game that I would only play three innings? And if I hit a home run, there would be no reward? But I asked none of these questions. “Okay,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” he said, leaving me with my unresolved feelings. I was grateful for the scoring job since it occupied my mind, forbidding replays of my humiliation. But the game made my task routine since inning after inning went by without a hit or a run. It was as if the failure of each batter made it less possible for his successor to achieve. Even the best hitters degenerated: swinging late, taking fat pitches, or popping up. Brian walked in the sixth inning and stole second but he died there. And in the ninth, he again walked, stole second, moved to third on a grounder, but only crossed the plate while the third out was landing in an opponent’s glove. Twice Brian had given us the edge: a man in scoring position with less than two outs. He berated no one for failures and that silence was terrible. The players didn’t joke or talk much while on the bench and they accepted their instructions from Brian without meeting his eyes or asking for any explanations.

  As the game went into the tenth inning because of the tie, our opponents smelled blood. This was a game we had thrown away and it was natural to conclude that they had momentum. It was a kind of respect: for us, a tie was almost losing. They cheered their hitters on every pitch and yelled at our fielders as they attempted plays. After their first hitter grounded out, the second hit a fly ball toward left field. It was high enough for both the center and left fielders to reach it and I had my pencil ready to write either seven or eight. I listened with patronizing amusement to their bench screaming that the ball was going to be dropped. “Blow it! Blow it!” Danny yelled, his cheeks puffed and his face red from the effort.

  The center fielder noticed that his colleague was closer to the ball and he stopped his chase. And a moment or two later, mysteriously, the left fielder suddenly halted and looked questioningly toward his fellow. “The ball!” Brian screamed from his position at first, and quickly broke toward second, where the hitter was headed. The ball landed almost directly between the two outfielders and, despite a moment of confusion during which they both tried to pick up the ball, the center fielder threw it toward third.

  The batter was between bases and, after feinting a run to third, he trotted back to second, safely, while the ball bounced twice on its way to the third baseman’s glove.

  Danny put his arms around two of his teammates and they jumped up and down, laughing and yelling, with aggressive joy. 2B-E7, I wrote in the notebook. “You can’t do everything yourself,” Danny yelled at Brian. “Jerks!” He screamed out toward our outfielders. “I love ya!”

  George was their next hitter, the huge fat-faced boy whose twenty-three home runs led our league, and Brian instructed our pitcher to walk him intentionally. This brought even louder and more obscene jeers from the enemy bench. When George reached first, Brian patted him on the back and smiled. His calm was apparently genuine. He put his arms up and called out, “Okay, okay. Let’s settle down. The only way they can win is if we give it to them.”

  “Listen to that horseshit,” Danny said as he selected a bat and approached the plate.

  Brian went to the mound and talked with our pitcher while Danny impatiently and contemptuously swung his bat and tried his footing in the batter’s box. The conference was too short to arouse the ire of their bench and before I had a chance to consider the seriousness of our predicament, the pitch was on its way to the plate.

  Danny swung hard and the ball raised a small cloud of dust in the infield just beyond second base. The whole scene was in motion: the center fielder charging in, the enemy from second running so vehemently that his hair was continuously blown back into a pompadour, our catcher crouching at the plate ready for the throw. Our opponent was rounding third just as the center fielder reached the ball, and I watched its flight home. For a moment it and the runner seemed destined to intersect, but then it bounced well in front of the plate while he crossed home and defeated us.

  I got a notion of how unbearable the opposition would be if their winning were more frequent. “What a choke!” Danny said over and over as he ran in from second. They congratulated themselves as if this one victory wiped out our decisive advantage overall, and the temptation to argue this fact with them drove several of my teammates to answering their taunts. Adam even got into a scuffle with one of them and Brian rushed in to stop it. He then called out: “I want everybody at our bench right now! I want a meeting.”

  “Oh, the crybabies have to talk about it,” Danny said.

  “Come on! Move it!” Brian shoved Adam in the direction of our bench. He caught him unawares and off-balance. Adam stumbled, his face landing into the gravelly surface. The hubbub ceased instantly.

  Our third baseman, a mild moon-faced boy, reached down to help him up but Adam, surprisingly, kicked him in the shins. “Leave me alone,” Adam said, and I got a glance at his tearful face, scratched and bleeding from his fall.

  I have thought about what Brian did next many times. He explained it to me only an hour after its occurrence and I think that’s what surprised me: he maintained this act was not passion, but just a way of calming Adam. And his desire to quiet Adam, he told me, had nothing to do with compassion—Brian wanted him out of his slump.

  In any event, when Brian bent down to help Adam up and Danny said, “Yeah, le
t Daddy change your diapers,” Brian’s quick turn and leap at Danny seemed perfectly spontaneous. It was a wholehearted diving tackle, Brian’s arms hugging Danny’s belly, his right shoulder driving into Danny’s chest. We heard a groan and two boys standing behind Danny scattered, but one of them got a leg pinned under Danny when he hit the ground. It was pathetically comical to watch this boy pulling at his leg, his face contorting more and more with each frantic movement. He was freed when Brian sprung (and I mean sprung) to his feet and pulled Danny up by his arm. Brian yanked him up and stuck out his leg so that Danny’s momentum forward became a vicious trip that sent Danny sprawling and we heard the same sickening sound of gravel crunching as when Adam fell.

  “Now shall I call your daddy?” Brian yelled, but with enough diffidence so that it seemed more ironic than furious. I only half listened to the protests and peacemaking remarks the others spoke; I was waiting for Danny’s reaction of outrage. I watched his dusty, red head move slowly about and I almost felt sorry for him when his face came into view. A pebble had made a jagged scratch across his left cheek and his right knee was exposed, showing a purplish square of skin. He sat up and pressed the flap of pant leg against it. I winced just as he did and thought of how much the iodine was going to hurt.

  “Listen, you fuck,” Danny said. “You want to put on gloves and we’ll go a few in the basement? Or do you only fight like a little faggot girl?”

  Brian listened as if there were no urgency in this situation. He showed neither amusement or defensiveness. “How touching of you to want a fair fight, Dan. Don’t feel you have to waste our time pretending you need revenge.” I thought he was finished, but he suddenly said, “Put on gloves! What kind of shit is that?”

  “I’m talking about a real fight where you can’t kick and scratch like a little girlie.”

  “Girlie?” Brian opened his eyes in such a funny way that the rest of us laughed. I knew then that there wasn’t going to be any more fighting. “Look, Dan,” Brian said earnestly, “I’m sorry I did that. I’m a sore loser, okay? You want to punch me? Go ahead.” He paused and looked so inoffensively sincere that it was almost embarrassing.

  “You tore my fuckin pants,” Danny whined. Someone giggled. “What’s so funny about that? You think it’s funny, you tell my mother about it.” Everybody laughed with him on that.

  “If you like,” Brian said. “I’ll explain to your mom. You know, I’ll tell her I went crazy cause we lost and I’ll pay for your pants.”

  There was much demurring and manly apologies and swapping of mother stories. After a few minutes, Adam, whose upset had been completely forgotten, was busy talking about a fight he had had with his parents that morning. It seemed miraculous, our sudden peace, and only Brian’s apology seemed to have been a calculated act, but later he told me he knew when he rushed Danny that that would be the eventual result. “We’re the captains,” he said seriously. “We’re the ones who have to do the fighting.”

  “But how did you know that Danny wouldn’t make it a real brawl? Then things would have been worse.”

  “They wouldn’t have been worse. Even if the two of us had fuckin stood there and slugged it out, the rest of you would have cooled down and enjoyed the fight. Anyway, I knew that Danny wouldn’t fight. When I first moved here, he and I had a big fight. I kicked the shit out of him.”

  I stared, rethinking Danny’s reactions with this new knowledge.

  Brian misunderstood my blank look. “I did. Really. I know my apology seemed cowardly. It’s just that if I didn’t, his pride would have forced him to fight me and if you beat somebody up twice, all you end up with is a permanent enemy, or, at best, a slave. I don’t want either of those.”

  “Why did Danny keep accusing you of fighting like a faggot?”

  “Oh, cause when I beat him up, he kept trying to make it into a boxing match or something. I just kept tripping him up or kneeing him. You know.”

  I was offended by this explanation. It didn’t sound like an honorable way of fighting. My cowboy heroes hadn’t yet begun to fight that way.

  Brian noticed, of course. “Well, he’s taken boxing lessons and he’s also stronger. I wanted to win, right? So I fought to win.”

  “Yeah, that’s all right,” I said, unconvinced.

  “Anyway, our team’s been playing tight baseball and this’ll loosen us up. You’ll see, everybody will forget about winning and just play ball. We’ll win big tomorrow.”

  It took longer than usual to get the next day’s game started. There was a lot of talk and fooling until Brian ran about ordering people to be serious. And even when we started, my team joked more and were less attentive. Instead of focusing on each pitch and play, the bench talked among themselves, and from my outfield position I was envious of the camaraderie of the infielders—one of them always seemed to be making the wittiest comment possible about our opposition’s batting styles.

  Brian led off our first inning with typical concentration and success: he singled to right field and stole second on the first pitch to me. I kept trying to punch a hit through the right side, and, after the count went to three balls and two strikes, I fouled off five straight pitches. My bench thought this hilarious and yelled out to their pitcher, “Give up. Walk him already.” Adam came up with their favorite line: “No, no, he doesn’t want a walk. Howard’s trying to figure out a way to bunt Brian home.”

  And when the sixth full-count pitch came in high and out of the strike zone, my bench stood up and gave me a standing ovation while I trotted to first. We only got one run out of this beginning and I glanced at Brian but he seemed satisfied. In the third inning Adam made a great play to save a run when he ran hard from shortstop into shallow left field to catch a ball just in the webbing of his glove, somersaulting and holding onto it.

  We got another run in the third, when somebody on their team misplayed a deep fly ball into a triple and the run came home on a ground out. In the fourth, we loaded the bases and Adam, his whole body powering into a nice visible pitch, hit the longest line drive I had ever seen into left center. The ball was there so fast that their outfielders couldn’t cut it off and while I watched their shrinking backs tremble in the sunlight as they chased the ball, everybody crossed the plate, and Adam ran and ran furiously, his face full of excitement and triumph. By the time Adam rounded third, though they had reached the ball, it was obvious that he would score and he began to slow down, in great rearing motions like a horse. He crossed the plate with his feet making loud smacking sounds on the hard dirt.

  We won seven to two.

  It was a pleasant, easy victory and my teammates were proud of themselves. They crowded around Brian as he and I walked home, reminding him of the good things they had done. I was conscious of the privilege everyone now recognized that I had: the confidence of Brian’s friendship. There were no attempts to move between him and me on the way home and whenever I was outside alone, they would question me about his plans with the hopeful tone of underdeveloped countries speaking to the ambassador of a great power.

  When the summer season ended, we had played Danny’s team forty-five times. Our record was thirty wins and fifteen losses. The next summer, because of this overwhelming dominance, the teams were divided differently, though I was still, was always to be, a member of Brian’s team. We played a mere forty times that year because Danny said, after we had won twenty-nine and lost only eleven, that it was too boring to go on. Our last season again involved a new division of talent: but we stopped after thirty-eight games this time, since we had won thirty-one of them, and it had become boring even for the winners.

  Brian once told me that Danny’s best team was the first I had played against. He spent an hour comparing the statistics of the players Danny had that year against when they played for Brian in later years. They had played better for Brian.

  We were older when he told me this and I remember how it irritated me even then, though I should have grown used to it, that such a terrifying competitor
, hell-bent on personal triumph, could make such good use of people.

  4

  It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to put him in possession of truth.

  —John Locke

  MY INTENSE STUDY of Brian ended once school began. There was too much going on independent of him for me to continue perceiving him as an authority, a god whose whimsical displeasure might ruin me. My attitude that summer was an oddity, because I regarded him the way I was accustomed to feeling about my father or my teachers in school.

  He was still the most important boy in our junior high. He was captain of both our baseball and basketball teams as well as being a straight-A student in every subject except art. He only got a B in that and I think it was looked on by others as a further mark of his genius. Only drips got an A in art, unless, of course, you were a pretty girl.

  I liked that school a lot. I got along very well with the girls because their sexuality hadn’t deepened into adolescence, when I could feel the swing in interest from boys like me to boys like Brian. My marks were good: A’s in English, history, and—yes—art; B’s in science and math, except for the year we took biology. I hated dissection and loathed the teacher, a Dostoevsky character whose ill-fitting jacket exposed his reddish wrists and hands. But I loved one of my English teachers, Mr. Lindon, whom all the students thought eccentric because of his outbursts about the misuse of language. He introduced me to the Oxford English Dictionary, Fowler’s Modern English Usage, and the twenty-ninth sonnet of Shakespeare, which he demanded we memorize. I had the best of both worlds: the friendship of girls because of my early realization that being tough was regarded by them as childishness; and the respect of both intellectuals (meaning good English students) and jocks, because of my friendship with Brian.