The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [129]
She showered and dressed and headed outside, hair still wet, Westish windbreaker zipped to her chin. She’d never been to the baseball diamond but she could see the crowd gathered there in the distance, past the grassy practice fields. A copy of the new Murakami novel, its cover an opulent yellow, poked out of her jacket pocket, bought at the campus bookstore to commemorate her first-ever paycheck.
All over campus the flyers were taped to windows and maples and bulletin boards: WESTISH VS. COSHWALE! SUPPORT THE HARPOONERS! APARICIO RODRIGUEZ! The students who came through the dining-hall serving line lately talked about little else. Pella was going as a conciliatory gesture—she wanted to support Mike, and she wanted him to see her in the stands, supporting him, and to feel a little remorse at the way they’d fought. She certainly wasn’t going to watch baseball, which among team sports struck her as singularly boring. It was so slow, so finicky. This one a ball, that one a strike, but they all looked the same. When she was young, her dad had taken her a few times to Fenway Park, and she remembered the trips fondly—the sizzle of onions and peppers on vendors’ carts along Lansdowne, the beach balls bounding gaily through the bleachers, the thrilling crush of impossibly tall, squawking women in the foul-smelling bathroom while her dad was forced to wait outside—but those Sunday afternoons weren’t really about baseball, for her or for him; they were cultural sallies, like trips to the symphony or the MFA.
“Hey,” someone yelled amid a flurry of voices, “watch yourself!” A checkered ball skidded toward Pella, and she realized she was trespassing on an intramural soccer game. “Sorry,” she mumbled, mostly to herself. She was about to kick the ball as a kind of apology, but the girl who’d yelled was closing in. “Move!” she shrieked, baring her tiny teeth. Pella sidestepped the ball, then the girl, and hurried toward the safety of the orange cones that marked the out-of-bounds. She sighed, feeling glad to have averted catastrophe, then fifty yards later realized she’d dropped her book on the field.
WESTISH 2, VI ITOR 0. Hooray, hooray. The field was ringed with people, not as many as at a Red Sox game, but lots—a thousand, maybe more. Pella spotted a few empty seats in the west-facing bleachers, which were otherwise full of people dressed in a fierce beet red. She climbed up to an empty patch of aluminum in the fifth row, her windbreaker catching snotty glances from the people she squeezed past on the way.
She scanned the field for Mike. There he was, sandwiched between the beet-red-clad hitter and the black-clad umpire, squatting on his haunches in the dirt, his face hidden behind a grid of metal bars. The pitcher—the handsome blond guy from Professor Eglantine’s class who thought he was God’s gift—threw the ball. It looked like a good pitch, then dropped suddenly into the dirt. The batter swung and missed. The Westish fans cheered. Mike flung himself down to smother the ball. It bounced up and hit him square in the chest. This was fun? No wonder his knees hurt all the time. And with that bat flashing inches from his face.
On the next pitch, the batter, one of the VI ITORS, lofted a fly ball far into the outfield. Pella felt sorry for the poor outfielder as he listed in uncertain circles—who could catch a ball like that, a speck in the shredded clouds?—but at the last moment he lifted his glove, and the ball, improbably, dropped in. Pella jumped to her feet to cheer. Her bleachermates shot her dirty looks.
As the Westish players jogged off the field, Mike flipped up his mask and Pella saw that he’d shaved his beard. He looked as handsome as she’d imagined he would, even with that weird black makeup smeared beneath his eyes, even with his cheeks strafed red with razor burn. He wasn’t one of those guys