A God in Ruins - Leon Uris [37]
She simply stared as he worked his way through his discomfort. “Greer, I don’t think your readers need an Oliver Twist chapter.”
“All right, then, let’s go off the record,” she answered.
“Why are you doing this?”
“For Christ’s sake, Quinn. I like you. I like you a lot. Coach Hoy gave me the pick of the litter. I saw your tush doing all those little first baseman ballet steps and the long stretches. Then you examine the ball and whip it to the third baseman in the same motion. The first baseman’s moves are unique.”
“I leap, too, for overthrown balls. You want me to leap for you?”
“Depends on where you land.”
“The only thing is,” Quinn said, “I’m a nonentity until I know who my parents are. Was I born in a lady’s room? Have I got a sister in Dallas? The people who adopted me were sworn by some kind of Catholic voodoo to silence, and they have suffered from it as much as I have. My dad told me last weekend that a lot of the anger against me was not that I wasn’t his son, but that I could do most things better than he could. Dad’s your basic Brooklyn cop. He’s tough and knows the territory. So, this little squirt here is found under a rock, shoots better, rides better, reads books he’s never heard of, repairs cars, and loves the Mexicans in the valley whom Dan is never quite comfortable with.”
Greer flipped her notepad closed. Quinn looked so smooth and easy on the ball field she’d thought she’d gotten a pudding. Six hours into a relationship and it was void of vulgarity and snappy rejoinders about feminists and bras.
She slurped the bottom of the milk shake as though it was a dying man’s last supper.
“One more?”
“Pass.”
“How do you stay so slim?”
“Sex,” she answered.
“Here, you’ve got a mustache,” he said, dabbing her lip with a napkin.
“I want to thank you for the dinner, but I have bad news. You hit two-seventy last year because you’re loaded with bad habits. I could get you up to three hundred.”
“Excuse me?”
“My pop played double-A ball for Des Moines, and being the son he didn’t have, I have intimate knowledge on everything, including jock straps.”
“You wacko?”
“Yep, but I can raise your batting average. You’ve got me, afraid to say, ‘in more ways than one.’”
“Explain.”
“You’re either a batsman or a gorilla. Nine out of ten college players are gorillas. Quinn, no offense to your macho, but I could throw you sliders and splitfinger fastballs all day, and you wouldn’t hit one past the pitcher’s mound.”
“You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“Tomorrow’s Sunday. See you after noon mass?”
“I don’t go to mass.”
“Neither do I. I think I’m like a Lutheran or something Scandinavian.”
* * *
They loaded up the ball machine and took a dozen bats from the racks. Greer stood at the pitcher’s mound, set the machine on medium speed, and the iron arm began hurling missiles.
Quinn was a right-handed batter who got a piece of most balls and cracked a few that sounded like a hallelujah chorus. After thirty or forty swings she stopped the machine and came to the plate.
“Ski?” she asked.
“Half-ass racer.”
“Golf?”
“Few times.”
“How about tennis?”
“I love it, but I’m a real hacker, a lefty.”
“All right,” she said. “We’ve just thrown a club to a cave man, and he’s going after a lion. Most of his moves are natural. Put a bat in your hand, and most of your moves are what you feel comfortable with. There is one basic movement in tennis, skiing, and baseball. Drive your hip.”
She swung in slow motion, the forward step natural, and that set off the sequence. The hip turn and change of weight must be fluid and part of the whole swing, or everything goes out of synch.
She drilled him as though he had never held a bat. What was astonishing was her reasoning.
“You bat right-handed but play tennis left. Now, I want a back-handed swing, hold the bat with your left hand only. Don’t let your backswing fall too low. Now loft the ball like a backswing, loft it this way, loft it that way.”
Quinn found himself seeing more of the ball than he ever had. His swing had been jerking his eyes and thrusting his bat out a millisecond too