He swings the bat from his shoulder into the oncoming ball and it connects with a crunch of bone as he sees how big it is, and just as it begins to break up, that it has a face: Tony Lord’s—exploding, splattering, spraying, once and for all, before the irresistible drive of his bat. Not wood, he thinks, aluminum. He steps into the box again, and this time the ball has Chapin’s face.
Deanie whispers sleepily, “What’s wrong?”
Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he reaches for the glass of water on his nightstand.
“Bad dream.”
He fans his fingers over the curve of her skull at rest in the crook of his elbow. The stubble is downy.
“Must be catching,” she murmurs.
He finds her hand, wraps her fingers around his cock. She rolls over tight against him. He doesn’t know why it helps, sweating together, making the sweet machine thrum, but it does. When he wakes again in the predawn, she is still in his arms, a faint smile curving her mouth.
“Pete’s out for the season,” Coach tells them shortly, as they gather for morning gym.
The news settles over them oppressively.
“We’ll miss him on court. You guys are gonna have to work harder to make up for the loss. You know the drill. Organize somebody to buy him a card and pass it around for signatures. Styles, get these people started and see me in my office.”
A few minutes later, Coach hunches at his desk, hands cupped around a paper cup of vending-machine coffee from the teachers’ lounge.
“This is lousy,” he says, leaving Sam unsure whether he means the brew or the loss of Fosse. There is a long, despairing coachly sigh. “The question is, is Skouros up to the job?”
“Yessir.”
“I know Dale Michaud,” Coach announces abruptly. “He lives around the corner. Couple times a week, we run into each other walking our dogs at night. Stand on the curb and shoot the shit while the dogs sniff each other.” The coach’s eyebrows flex and knot with piss-off. “Lemme tell you something, Sam, just between the two of us. If Pete had screwed my underage daughter, I’d a done more than kneecap him. I’d have taken that bat to his nuts. I tell you, I’m disgusted. I don’t understand it neither. So far as I can see, this school is wall-to-wall twitches, ninety percent of ‘em willing to put out. Don’t tell me Pete Fosse couldn’t have found one who’s at least of age to haul his ashes for him.”
“Yessir,” Sam agrees.
Coach hammers the desk with both fists. The paper cup of coffee jumps violently and spills. He seems not to notice the liquid flooding over his desk.
“Goddamn it,” he cries, “I will not have this kinda crap going on. Not on my team. You hear me! You tell the rest of those hard-ons too!”
Sam, fascinated, stares at the spreading puddle of coffee on the coach’s desk. The sharp acrid odor assaults his nose. “Yessir.”
Coach notices the coffee at last. “Oh shit,” he says.
Sam clears his throat. “May I go back to the gym?”
Coach flops a dismissive hand. “Sure, sure. Is Gauthier really going to wear that mask to play?”
“Yessir.”
He rolls his eyes. “Sweet baby Jesus.”
Sam retreats, pondering how he’s going to phrase Coach’s instructions to the troops.
“Crazy fucker,” Chapin explains, to the small circle of visibly attentive listeners in the weight room. Getting his version into circulation. He’s noisy—noisier than usual, close to babbling, the edgy brittle hysteria in his laugh. J.C. can’t keep his baby blues, with their pupils like BBs, from tracking Sam as he moves from machine to machine. When Sam encounters his gaze, J.C. tries to harden his expression, flash a little of his own particular brand of cool amused contempt, but an almost rabid terror shows through the inadequate mask.
His workout finished, Sam wipes his face and drifts toward the shower room. As he passes the equipment cage, he turns to look back and finds J.C. still watching him. Sam grasps the wire and rattles it against the diamond racks of baseball bats. A matching tremor goes through Chapin.
On the bench in the locker room, Sam tightens the laces of one high-top. Then something lets go and he is holding one end of the lace, and the other dangles from the eyelet. He rummages in his duffel for his spare pair of laces and sets it on the bench next to him, then bends to tie the other high-top. And something lets go again and he’s holding another broken shoelace. This time he examines the ends. His stomach lurches. Most of the way through the lace, the break is smooth, and then the shoestring frays. It has been cut through almost completely. Closer study of the first broken lace reveals the same thing. While he showered, someone sliced through each shoelace far enough to ensure they would break at the first application of tension.
Sam doesn’t have to read at grade level to get this message: the cuts could have been less drastic, so the ties didn’t break right away but went on quietly fraying with the stress of every tightening and tying and of the flexing and pounding of his feet. The mental vision of pushing off to make a shot, and coming down on a suddenly unsupported foot and ankle, brings a line of cold sweat to his upper lip.
Reaching up, he unhooks the padlock dangling from his locker. He closes it and gives it a squeeze and it pops open. Way too easily. Now he can see the way the shackle no longer sockets properly into the body. It’s been popped before, by Fosse to leave the rat and by whichever one of them left the square, and now by Chapin. He ought to have
