The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [140]
“Beer?” Owen offered.
“I don’t see why not.”
Owen ducked into the party and returned with two bright-blue plastic cups topped by foam. “Naked,” he reported.
“Girls too?”
“Everyone.”
Owen carried the beer upstairs. Schwartz followed with Sophie. The unspoken hope was that Henry would be there, lying in bed reading back issues of Sports Illustrated. Whereupon Schwartz would lace into him like never before—he’d been scripting the tongue-lashing in his mind all night, phrase by delectable phrase—and everything would be fine. But the room was dark and empty. All the anger leaked from Schwartz’s body, taking what remained of energy and hope along with it. He lay Sophie down on Henry’s unmade bed, covered her with a quilt, and folded back its bottom edge so that he could unlace her complicated sandals and set them by the door. Owen handed him a warm, overly frothy beer, which he accepted wordlessly and drank in one long slow gulp. The ten blocks back to Grant Street, where Pella was, might as well have been a thousand miles. He lay flat on his back on the blood-colored rug and dreamed about God-knows-what.
54
After the game ended, Henry briefly joined his teammates’ celebration at home plate. Meanwhile he kept one eye on the first-base bleachers, where Aparicio was signing an autograph for Sal’s little brother. He, Aparicio, who might soon become the president of Venezuela, was wearing a coat and tie, had come all the way from St. Louis, had put on a coat and tie to watch Henry humiliate himself once and for all. He looked just as Henry had imagined, as trim and fit as during his playing days, his neck long and regal, his skin almond brown, his shoulders no wider than Henry’s own. Dwight Rogner stood nearby, speaking into his cell phone, and Henry didn’t need lip-reading skills to know what he was saying: “Forget the Skrimshander kid.”
Henry grabbed his bag and slipped into the crowd, ostensibly to shake the hand of President Affenlight, who was standing there alone, and who gave him the sort of commiserative look he’d need to spend the rest of his life avoiding. When President Affenlight looked away, Henry scuttled around the backstop and safely traversed the no-man’s-land between Westish Field and the football stadium. There, in the shadow of an arch, amid the cool, sweet smells of moss and rot, he sat and cried.
Afterward he felt much worse. What at the diamond had been a sharp adrenal anxiety, fueled by purpose—Get me out of here, away from everyone—was settling into a flat, sullen expanse of awfulness. A moment would come, and then another, and then another. These moments would be his life.
He opened the crate where he stored the weighted vest he wore to run stadiums, put it on over his Cards shirt, buckled the straps over his sternum. The game had ended near dusk, and now it was dark. He cinched the straps tighter until the vest dug into his chest.
He left the stadium and walked eastward across the practice fields toward the lake. The wind came straight off the water, stiff and chill. He scrambled down the little scree-clotted slope to the beach, clutching at scraggly bushes for balance, and started north along the water’s edge.
Where the beach ended a path began, cutting through thatchy rain-flattened grasses humming with insects. After two miles the path ended in a kind of meadow, mowed by the county during the summer months, out of which the lighthouse rose. On his usual weight-vested jog, Henry circled the lighthouse, slapping the repoussé letters of the plaque the Historical Society had fixed into the stucco, before returning the way he came. Farther north lay only a high razor-wire fence that ran from the water’s edge all the way back to the highway, however far west. On the other side of the fence was a privately owned forest. On the other side of the forest lay the next town north. Henry didn’t know the town’s name; he’d never been there.
The lighthouse was a tall white tapering cylinder, no longer in use but kept in good repair. Paintings