Be the One

by April Smith

  She had liked Parker early, good curveball with good spin on it, pitched a shutout the first time she had seen him, in command all the way. His dad had been a high school champion javelin thrower, you can see where the body is going. Travis will like his self-control, the way he thinks ahead, and the way he handles pressure—Forget the hitter, just you and me out there playing catch. Parker could turn out to be an important find, a solid blue-card prospect for whom Cassidy could receive major credit down the line.

  She pulls sweat shorts over a lizard-green leotard and laces up the cross-trainers. She should feel good. The lawyers worked out the civil compromise deal. Cruz got spoken to by Raymond Woods and sent back out to winter workout. If he stays away from trouble, and with a strong report on Parker, she will already have improved her percentages for the year. And tonight she has a date with Joe, a real date, a fancy society dinner on the Pier. In a tiny bathroom she turns a corroded tap and a weak stream of water releases the smell of algae from the drain. She brushes her hair and braids it, watching a soulful face.

  Then why the emptiness?

  The kitchen is vintage sixties. Pots and pans hang on a brick wall over a built-in stovetop. The stainless steel oven has a round window like a porthole. Cassidy stands in the center of the linoleum floor drinking apple juice as consciousness comes up inevitably as the light of day: she and this kid Parker will never sweat together. They are not about to conquer the mountain, the dewy freshness of Elysian Park giving way to spectacular city views. They will never jog together through the daily fires of the athlete’s work. With Alberto Cruz she is bonded in a sad and prideful way. With Parker it is different. Parker is a prospect. Cassidy is a scout. In the end, it will simply come down to numbers.

  She becomes aware of yakking birds; notices the ferns in the spectacular flower arrangement Joe had sent are dry. Pouring water into the vase from a measuring cup, brown furls crumbling away in her fingers, she acknowledges the chance she had with Cruz may never come again—to imprint on the muscle memory of a young player, like a leaflet fossil formed in stone, one detail, one petiole from the pattern of her own lifetime in the game. The position of his hands on the bat. Striding into the ball correctly. One small thing he can take all the way to the majors.

  Hold it. The tears in her eyes are completely out of whack. Letting go of Cruz won’t be the worst moment of her life. It won’t be the 1984 Olympics, the year she had been training for her entire career, the year they suddenly dropped women’s softball as an Olympic sport. Or having to bury your brother, or being told your father, who still ran the marathon at age fifty-eight, dropped dead of a massive coronary on the bicycle path near the stream.

  The phone rings. Her heart jumps. Impatiently she wipes a cheek. What now? Marshall wanting her to pick up a tall decaf percent latte on the way to the gym?

  She says, “Hello?” to the screech of a fax.

  She hangs up as the machine on the counter engages. The digital readout says 6:27 a.m. Raymond sends out weekly scouting reports, but not usually before breakfast. She slips two slices of whole wheat into the toaster and watches as the paper starts to roll.

  Her heart jumps again. The first thing to come out of the machine is the logo for Omega Development International, Joe’s company.

  Oh, this is going to be cool! He must be in the same condition—drifting through his day in the Omega tower, one meeting after another, part of his mind absorbing, revising, politicking, making decisions—the other part, like hers, lost in a daydream of perpetual sex. The card that came with the flowers had said audaciously, “Your breasts are like diamonds.”

  The fax goes on for seven pages.

  It includes the lineup, schedule and player bios of the Colorado Silver Bullets, along with an article about a publicity tour through LA.

  The cover letter is not from Joe but from his daughter, Nora:

  Dear Cassidy,

  Thought you would be interested in this.

  Best to you,

  Nora

  The machine stops. Cassidy gathers the pages that have curled all over her counter. She played for the Bullets more than two years ago, why would she be interested in this horseshit now?

  Hey, she tells herself, Nora’s just trying to be friends. Then stuffs the whole thing into the garbage. Toast is ready. Edith whines.

  Outside in Shadow Lane the California sky keeps expanding with dubious promise from royal blue to pale transparency. Cassidy shoos the dog inside. A briny smell comes up from the beach along with a persistent and habitual regret. Backing out the Explorer she glances up at the weathervane on the gambrel roof. It always seems to point in the same direction. Is it stuck, or has she missed the move?

  Marshall says, “I’m here with you.”

  Standing behind her, pressing close, he puts both hands on her waist.

  “Again!”

  She lifts the bar—twenty-five pounds with ten-pound plates on either side—and, muscles quivering, squats deep into a plié.

  “Twelve more. No locking of knees. Tighten up!” He slaps her butt.

  Cassidy is snorting like a Clydesdale.

  “Find the groove, find the groove,” he urges, “find the groove.”

  The snorts become grunts, the grunts become shouts, and they bellow together—“Rrahr! Rrahr!”—like a pair of gladiators, though no one on the StairMasters or treadmills in busy South Coast Fitness Center—a franchise gym in a strip mall behind a Ralph’s supermarket—pays the slightest mind. An Eagles disk is playing and there are plenty of distracting TV monitors showing helicopter shots of freeway traffic.

  “Everybody’s got an exercise video.”

  Marshall picks up an old argument as they move on to leg curls. “Why not you and me?”

  “Because everybody’s got one, that’s why.”

  “But look at us!”

  He forces her to confront the mirror. They do look sort of mythic. He with the cleft chin, spiked hair and sartorius muscles like flying buttresses; she with cheeks flushed bubblegum pink, sweat-soaked bangs, those beautifully sculpted shoulders and powerhouse quads. He with the macho Aussie accent, trainer to the stars; she with the Dodgers.

  “Okay,” she admits. “We’re buff.”

  “And we boff.” He smiles cleanly. “But not on video.”

  Cassidy does not enjoy the joke. Does not, all of a sudden, like seeing herself side by side with this young man at all.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Catching her dismay in the mirror Marshall self-consciously covers his mouth.

  “Do I stink of eggs? I had an egg white omelet earlier.”

  “You’re fine,” Cassidy tells him, “I’m just having a strange day,” and straddles the machine, slipping the pin into the stack of weights at fifty pounds.

  “Talk to me,” squints Marshall, “tell me about your emotions,” the by-the-books manner in which he pretends intimacy with clients. “Pushing their buttons,” he calls it.

  They have an arrangement, no questions asked, she is under no obligation to make a big confession about Joe. It would not be of benefit. She hadn’t been exactly thrilled to hear about the lady hand model, whose job it is to hold bottles of detergent for magazine ads, but at least that had explained the deviant-looking pairs of white cotton gloves in Marshall’s nightstand.

  He is waiting for an answer with a look of concern so fake she laughs.

  “What now?”

  “You spend too much time with actors,” Cassidy huffs.

  “Don’t get me started.”

  But he is already started. The ditz afraid of getting old. The TV detective who needs sex, sex, sex (“Bangs like a dunny door”). The actress who made a career fighting aliens before women had biceps (“Steroids”).

  Usually Cassidy is amused by the Hollywood stuff. Today she finds it intolerable.

  Hefting a dumbbell, “Which one?”

  “Start with eight. All actors want to talk about is themselves. It’s boring. And after a while you fee
l, what good am I? I’m only a trainer. We’ve got to move on.”

  “We?”

  “We have a groove happening here, you and I, a consciousness of the physical that I feel is quite unique.”

  Cassidy performs flat bench flies. Sex with Marshall is like driving a race car in a video arcade game. Level One is a ride in the country, a few tricky curves but navigable, trees and houses going by. Level Two the road comes at you twice as fast and there is menace—roadkill, bridges falling. Level Three is all-out urban warfare, dodging mortar fire and explosions, wrestling the joystick until you die as a result of your own reckless unthinkable acceleration—a meteoric crash, then slo-mo fragments floating on a field of apple green.

  Making love with Joe in the Bentley had been like losing your way inside one of those religious paintings—a mysterious labyrinthine path, pear trees and archways, exalted marble flesh martyred by a flight of golden arrows. They had been fearless with each other, belligerent, shameless and harsh; afterward he had thumbed the fiery tears from her cheeks like a supplicant.

  They had driven to the beach and watched the sky and tried to pinpoint the moment night crossed into day. The cold sand was littered with bits of Styrofoam and fishing twine, cigarette butts and aluminum pop-tops, but the easy slap of the waves was a wonder that seemed to unify their lovers’ story, from the volcanic shores of the Caribbean to the slope of Santa Monica Bay.

  “I’ve got a guy who says you can make a video for less than five thousand,” Marshall is saying. “I told him we’d meet—”

  Cassidy grunts, up to fifteen pounds. “Spring training. I’m gone.”

  “I can get a shitload of celebrity endorsements—”

  Cassidy mops her face with a towel. Sweat stains have turned the bright green leotard a mottled sage.

  “I don’t want to. I don’t really care.”

  She heads toward a multistation. The gym is nothing more than an airless box between a donut shop and a health food store and every morning, just about now, it begins to reek of fry grease and new-mown wheatgrass.

  Marshall is following, clearly puzzled.

  “How’s your piriformis?” he asks and expertly inserts a steely thumb between the muscle layers of Cassidy’s left buttock, instant domination that penetrates to one of the most sensitive junctions of nerves in the body.

  Pain travels with the speed of light down the back of her leg. Her knee buckles.

  She whirls and lands a smart crack across his face.

  He stumbles backward, astounded.

  “Bloody hell.”

  “Keep your hands to yourself.”

  “What is this? PMS?”

  Cassidy steps up and grips the handles of the machine.

  “I told you,” she mutters in the midst of a series of burning abdominal raises, “a very strange day.”

  Marshall rubs his cheek, considering.

  “You’ll want to eat a lot of protein,” he decides.

  When she gets home from the gym, Edith is gone.

  Not in the yard and not in the house although Cassidy is certain she remembers putting the dog inside.

  Edith is eight years old. She is fixed and does not stray. The pounding starts again in Cassidy’s chest and she starts to feel slightly disoriented, as when you have misplaced your keys. She is craving a shower while her muscles are warm, but suddenly it seems a not-very-good idea. Warily she scans the living area—brown plaid sofa, round maple table and spindle-backed chairs—keeping very still as if, in the subtle whisper of air along her skin, she could sense a disturbance. But she cannot sense a thing.

  In the kitchen, another pile of papers has collected on the floor. Another fax from Nora, something off a Web site, pages of citations of books and articles about women in sports. She kicks them aside. The red light is blinking on the answering machine—Coach Jack Hughes full of blustery assurance that Brad Parker will be on the field at three o’clock today. “He’s certainly the kid you want to see. I’ve personally never seen such perfect hitting mechanics—”

  Cassidy cuts it off and speed-dials Dulce at the stadium.

  Dulce confirms Travis will meet her at the high school. “And I have your plane ticket for Vero Beach.”

  The moment she hangs up the phone rings again. Startled, she spasms it clumsily as if it were covered with soap.

  “Cassie? Uncle Pedro. I heard we got some trouble.”

  “What trouble?”

  Now she’s got the receiver around the right way.

  “I heard our kid Alberto Cruz got in some trouble.”

  “He was in jail overnight but no big deal.”

  “No, I’m talking of this terrible blackmail.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The police have been here.”

  “The Dominican police?”

  “An officer called Molina came to my apartment. I wasn’t home. Poor Rhonda thought he was there to tell her I was dead.”

  “No way!”

  “He comes back and explains the situation, about the letters from Nagua, and I tell him, thank you very much but this is a baseball family problem, we gonna solve it like family. You’ll be at Vero?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “We’ll put our heads together. Doing your homework for the regional meeting?”

  “Yes, Uncle Pedro.”

  “Remember what I told you, write everything down. A speech for every prospect. You gotta get their attention, sell your guys, know exactly what you’re going to say. Otherwise, all they’ll be doing is looking at your legs.”

  “Believe me, I’ll be wearing pants.”

  When Cassidy hangs up she hears scratching and follows the sound to the bedroom upstairs. Edith has somehow gotten herself stuck in the closet. The terrier innocently trundles out and licks Cassidy’s leg, probably because she has just peed all over a nice pair of suede boots.

  Cassidy worries the door, wondering how the dog could have become locked inside. The bedroom is the usual mess, no way to know if someone had been there. She pokes around the stuff on the rattan dresser and inside the drawers, exasperated, trying to shake a growing unease.

  10

  By 2:30 p.m. that afternoon the pack scouts have assembled around the metal bleachers on the high school playing field.

  It is a narrow, uninspiring vista angled between the tan industrial edifices of the school—rusted chain link, a cinder-block shack, the smell of fine clay dust and of French fries from a Mexican lunch truck. Way out behind center field on an old retaining wall with flaking paint somebody’s hung a bedsheet with tilted juvenile lettering: Home of Dolphin Baseball.

  Cassidy, in pressed khakis and a plain ivory polo, weaves the gauntlet through a dozen men—tall, Caucasian, heavy-chested, wearing for the most part an assortment of witless polyester shirts and jeans, accessorized with straw cowboy hats, toothpicks, stopwatches. The talk is of two kids who got stabbed in a car, somebody’s mom who has cancer, a wicked storm back east.

  Coach Hughes, who does not look any less like an air-puffed marshmallow because he is wearing a baseball uniform, inspects a couple of puddles on the infield, making a joke about a wet T-shirt contest which Cassidy gracefully ignores. Squeezing past a bespectacled guy in a sports jacket from an American League team, she says, “Excuse me,” and betrays no reaction when he moves aside with an exaggerated pelvic thrust, smirking, “Sure thing. Made my day.”

  Cassidy is wearing her give-’em-nothing face, a mask of calm impenetrable confidence she has shown to the boys since she was eleven years old.

  But it does not mean she is not tense with a low-level outrage that has also, always, been part of the game.

  Travis, looking like a rodeo heartthrob in a black Stetson and denim shirt with pearl buttons, is talking on the cellular way back near the Explorer; no need to billboard the fact a supervisor is here.

  “Here’s the batting order.”

  Travis skims it. “Hmm.”

  “Problem?”

  “Ye
ah, they didn’t put down the arrest records of the players.”

  Cassidy’s eyes narrow.

  “How are we supposed to tell if they’re up to the level of Alberto Cruz?” Travis chuckles. “Assault with a deadly weapon, hey now—”

  “Here’s what’s going to happen,” Cassidy says. “You’re going to give me all this horseshit about Alberto Cruz and then, when he’s Rookie of the Year, you’ll take credit for discovering him.”

  Cassidy and Travis stare at each other.

  Both in silence.

  Both in awe.

  Realizing she has called it exactly.

  Then: “That Parker?”

  Travis has infallibly picked him out of the players gathering around the home-team dugout: four inches taller than the others, Parker is also the one carrying the helmets, checking the scene with an eager smile. A new day. A new game.

  “He’s not like a lot of kids, think they’re doing you a favor,” Travis observes.

  “You hear talk on him but I know he’s not that high on people’s lists.”

  “Talk’s mainly coming from the coach?”

  She nods. “This program hasn’t had a kid drafted in three or four years.”

  Travis watches Coach Hughes yell at the stragglers to start stretching. They ignore him.

  “Clueless.”

  “The kid’s never had instruction.”

  “This the dad?”

  A six-foot-two beefer is headed their way, wearing gray slacks too tight over the glutes and a shirt with floating golf clubs.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “A little early for the hard sell.”

  “The family wants it.”

  Lang Parker is already shaking her hand.

  “Hello, my friend. Good to see you again.”

  His square midwestern face has gone to jowls and a bald spot encroaches on the sandy hair. He and his wife, Pepper, run a tree-trimming business and a string of copy shops out in Perris. Cassidy makes the introductions as her beeper goes off.

  “Can I use your phone?”

  Travis flips her the cellular, nodding patiently at Mr. Parker’s pitch: