“Car phone.”
“About?”
“Rayburn.”
“Know the format? Bernie’ll intro you and-hang on. Just a-putting you through…”
“Let’s take a few calls. Gil on the car phone.”
“… now.”
“Hi, Gil.”
“Am I on?”
“You’re on the JOC.”
“Can you hear me?”
“I can hear you fine, Gil. Mind turning down your radio?”
Gil turned it down.
“Much better. What’s on your mind?”
“Bet you guys are eating crow today.”
“How’s that, Gil?”
“Based on the way you were running down Rayburn yesterday.”
“Easy now. I was in Atlantic City yesterday.”
“Your pal Norm, then.”
“What’s your point?… Hello? You still there?”
“Why are you guys so negative all the time? I guess that’s my point.”
“Negative? I’m a well-known Pollyanna in this business. The thing is, good people-”
“Then why get on Rayburn before the season’s even started?” Gil began a second sentence, “If you were as good at your job as he is at his, you’d be-” but stopped when he realized he was listening once more to a dial tone. He turned the radio back up.
“-isn’t a religion, for God’s sake. It’s not the Catholic church. Or the Protestant church, for that matter, or the Jewish synagogue, or the Muslim mosque. What am I leaving out? The Buddhist shrine? Temple? Baseball’s none of that. It’s just-”
The car phone buzzed, and Gil missed whatever baseball was.
“Yeah?” he said.
“Gil?”
“Who’s this?”
“Figgy.”
“Oh.”
“Was that you? On the JOC?”
Gil laughed, embarrassed.
“You shit disturber,” Figgy said. Then came a long pause that cost them both money-Gil could hear that Figgy was on his car phone too. “What’re you doing right now?” Figgy said.
“Working.”
“Oh,” said Figgy. Pause. “Thought we might meet somewhere.”
“Can’t.”
“How about tonight? At Cleats.”
“I’ll try,” Gil said.
He swung onto a ramp, walled in on both sides by snow crusted like burned marshmallow skins. Expressway traffic was heavy. Gil didn’t mind. He liked challenging the 325i. He stepped on the gas and headed south, changing lanes frequently to pass, being passed by no one, listening to the JOC. Twenty or thirty miles past the city, beyond the suburbs, traffic thinned. Fog flowed in from the sea, first in little tongues through the bare trees, then in high- banked tides. The 325i took over; Gil slumped a little behind the wheel.
Hanging onto a one-run lead against the Tigers. Bases loaded. Two out. Bottom of the twelfth. Pease, the cleanup hitter, at the plate, waggling his huge black bat. Boucicaut comes out for a conference, pushing up his mask; sweat streaks make war-paint patterns on his dusty face. There’s a dusky hint of mustache over his upper lip.
“Just throw strikes,” he says, handing Gil the ball.
“What do you think I’m trying to do, you idiot?”
Boucicaut stares at him. “Got any gum?”
“No.”
Boucicaut pulls down his mask, trudges back behind the plate, squats. Gil glances into the dugout. No one is moving, no one is coming to get him, although that would be fine with him. Gil takes a deep breath, looks at nothing but the round shadow in the center of Boucicaut’s black Rawlings, tries to ignore his elbow, sore inside and out. “Just imagine a pipe from you to the catcher,” his father always said, “and fling the ball down that pipe. It’s simple.”
Gil flings the ball down the imaginary pipe. Pease turns on it, catches it square, rockets it down the third- base line, foul. Gil’s next two pitches are in the dirt, both blocked by Boucicaut. He takes another deep breath, thinks he hears his father calling from the stands, “C’mon, Gil,” but that isn’t possible, since his father’s in the hospital.
The next pitch just misses the outside corner.
“What’s the count?” Gil calls.
The umpire holds up his fingers. Three and one.
Gil stares into the shadow in Boucicaut’s mitt, goes into his windup, comes over the top with all his strength. As he lets go, he hears the sound of paper tearing, feels pain like hot barbed wire being drawn through his elbow. Pease hits this one over the fence, foul.
The umpire tosses Gil a new ball, holds up his fingers. Three and two.
Gil rubs the ball in his hands, checks the still dugout. Waiting for his elbow to settle down, he walks around the mound. He knows he can’t throw the ball past Pease. He considers his curve. Can’t trust it, not on a full count; can’t even throw it, not with his arm like this, not with the prospect of what he would feel the instant after. That leaves the change-up, which he doesn’t have, and the knuckler he fools around with on the side and has never thrown in a game.
He plants his foot on the rubber, grips the ball with the tips of all four fingers and his thumb. The knuckler. Pease waggles his bat. Gil winds up, puffing out his chest as though he were reaching back for a little extra, and fires.
In the movies, everything happens in slow motion after that. In life, it happens so fast, the swing, the miss, that Gil isn’t sure it’s all over until Boucicaut, charging out with his arms open wide, knocks him on his back and jumps on him.
Absolute fact; except perhaps for the part about believing he’d heard his father’s voice.
The wind had risen, driving away the fog. Gil checked the speedometer, saw he was doing ninety, eased off. Boucicaut. A rock. He’d had his best years with Boucicaut.
Gil crossed the bridge onto the Mid-Cape. He had it almost to himself. The wind blew across the highway but didn’t bother the 325i at all. Gil loved the way it handled, loved its smell. He remembered the car payment, due tomorrow, and the years of car payments still to come. He was adding his debts in his mind when he came to the exit, circled off the ramp, and headed for the shore. Couldn’t give up the wheels; without wheels, you were dead.
Gil drove past a village green, a stone church, and a seafood restaurant, boarded up, and onto a road with a PRIVATE sign posted at the entrance. He stopped at the gatehouse.
An old man came out, dressed in a pea-green army coat too big for him.
“Renard,” Gil said. “To see Mr. Hale.”
The old man ran his finger down the page on his clipboard, nodded, raised the barrier. Gil went through.
The road cut across a golf course to the sea, followed it for a few hundred yards, past three or four big houses and up a bluff. Another big house stood on top of the bluff, its windows beaten gold in the sunlight. Gil parked in the driveway, took the bowie and the thrower from the glove compartment, wrapped them in a chamois cloth, and walked to the door, the wind snapping at his pant legs. He rang the bell.
