the diamond.
“Here,” said Gil.
“Thanks.” Richie put the bat and the poster on the seat beside him. Gil checked the time. 1:59.
“Having fun?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve got to go for a little while,” Gil said.
“Go?”
“Just make some calls. You sit tight. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Do you have to pee or anything?”
“No.”
“Good.” He patted Richie’s shoulder. 2:01. Down on the field, the Sox had something going. First and second, nobody out. A sac bunt. 2:04. He could get to the car in three minutes or less, if he ran. Base on balls to Primo. 2:08. He didn’t need five minutes for parking; he could doublepark if necessary. Lanz went to a full count, fouled off the next pitch. Socko raised his huge three-fingered hands to the heavens.
“Come on, come on,” Gil shouted.
Lanz fouled off three more before striking out. Socko rolled over and died on the dugout roof. Gil hated mascots.
2:14. Rayburn walked in from the on-deck circle, entered the batter’s box. The pitcher toed the rubber. Rayburn stepped out, knocked the dirt from his cleats.
“Jesus Christ, let’s go,” Gil shouted, barely conscious of the Harvard woman’s eyes on him.
Ball one, outside.
Rayburn stepped out again. 2:16.
“Down in front, down in front.”
Strike one, swinging. Rayburn glanced back at the umpire.
“Down in front.” Gil felt a tug on his jacket, realized he was standing, sat.
Ball two. 2:18. Rayburn tapped his cleats again.
“Let’s go, let’s go.”
“Down in front.” Another tug. Gil wheeled around, spilling more beer, this time down his shirt.
“Get your hands off me,” he said to the man sitting behind him.
“How am I supposed to see?”
“Just ask politely,” Gil said, feeling the weight of the thrower around his leg.
“I did.”
“Down in front, down in front,” yelled someone else.
Gil heard the ball smack leather, turned to see the catcher throwing back to the pitcher. Strike two. 2:19.
Then came a ball, a foul, another foul. Rayburn stepped out.
“For fuck sake.”
“Down in front.”
The stadium buzzed, louder and louder, beer seeped down his shirt. 2:23. He gazed at the numbers on his watch, and their meaning penetrated. All at once, his tie felt too tight and his heart began to race. He knew the meaning of 2:23: Move, asshole.
Gil pushed past Richie, past the Harvard woman’s stare, into the aisle. By the time he reached the ramp, he was running. He ran through the darkness under the stands, loosening his tie, pumping like a sprinter. A tremendous roar went up from the crowd. The whole stadium shook. The vibration came up from the cement floor, through the soles of Gil’s shoes, into his body.
8
Three strikes.
One: the parking lot, 2:34. Gil, breathless, ran up to the ticket booth, loosening his lucky tie, feeling beery dampness on the fabric. He checked for the 325i in the front row-hadn’t he said, “Keep it unblocked,” and tipped the son of a bitch ten dollars? But the car wasn’t there. Gil saw that at once, and then saw it again slowly, scanning the row car by car. His head filled with interrogative noise: was this a different lot? Had he left by the wrong gate? Had his instructions been somehow unclear? Then he spotted it, in the very last row. The noise level inside his head rose, although outside his head the city seemed uncommonly quiet, as though it were Christmas Day; a bleak Christmas Day, with luck no longer in the air. He pounded on the side of the ticket booth, but the pounding made sounds weak and muffled to his ear, so he pounded harder. The attendant, reading a book in an alphabet Gil didn’t know, looked up in surprise through the open door.
“Sir?” he said.
Pakistani or some damned thing. Gil hadn’t even noticed before. He couldn’t patch together a sentence out of the noisy fragments spinning in his head. All that came out of his mouth was, “My fucking car.”
“Sir?” said the attendant, half rising, closing the book but retaining his place in its foreign pages with his foreign finger.
It struck Gil then that the little bastard probably didn’t understand English, had taken the ten bucks without grasping a word he’d said. An innocent mistake, maybe, but it maddened him all the same: he had no time for mistakes, no time for translation. He took the attendant by the shoulder and pulled him outside, a little roughly, perhaps. Pointing with his free hand, Gil said, “Is that what they call unblocked where you come from, Slugger?”
“But, sir,” said the attendant in English only slightly accented, “it is.”
Gil let go. The attendant went to the back of the lot, unlocked a gate that Gil hadn’t noticed, swung it open. Then he got into the 325i, backed smoothly into the alley, swung around the lot, and came to a stop on the street, right next to Gil.
He got out. Gil got in, slammed the door.
“Do you wish a receipt?” asked the attendant.
Almost no accent, and he spoke a fancier English than Gil’s. Gil didn’t reply. He just floored it, glancing back once, to see the attendant’s dark and watchful image shrinking in his rearview mirror.
Two: in the tunnel, 2:51. Stop and go.
“Come on, come on.”
And without warning, Gil had to piss, bad. He squirmed in his seat, unbuckled his seat belt, looked around for a place to pull over. But there was nowhere: even the breakdown lane was jammed. Gil honked his horn, just like those asshole drivers he couldn’t stand; and someone honked back, long and hard, blaring through the normal tunnel din.
“Come on, come on.”
Long lines of brake lights flashed on, reddening the gloom. Traffic stopped.
2:51.
2:52.
“Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” Gil said, rocking back and forth. So late; he should have been rehearsing his excuse, but all he could think of was the pressure building in his bladder. He unbuckled his belt. That helped a little.
2:53.
2:54.
2:55.
Still stuck deep inside the tunnel, and rocking again. Frantic to get to Everest and Co., frantic to piss. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.” Gil put his hand on his crotch, squeezed the end of his cock through his suit pants. A mistake. His bladder, or some muscle or whatever it was, abruptly felt free to just let go, so nothing was holding in all that piss but the clamping of his hand. At that moment, traffic jerked forward and started rolling. But Gil couldn’t move before shifting into first, and he needed his hand for that. He let go and piss shot out of him, hot and uncontrollable,
