The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [183]
When the screen went dark he felt so deeply and sweetly tired that even to walk upstairs seemed impossible. With effort he pushed back his massive chair and made his way over to the love seat. He sat down and laboriously unlaced his wing tips. Contango was asleep on the rug. Affenlight lay down, crossed his long legs at the ankles, and spread his jacket over his torso so as not to get cold. He’d taken to turning the building’s thermostat down, way down, at the end of the working day.
The music that entered his dream wasn’t Gounod or Mozart or anything Affenlight loved. It was the first few notes of the old Westish fight song, sentimental, unassuming, played by a flute or some other trilling woodwind. The band kicked in, brassy and strong. Eighty-six maple go. Eighty-six maple go. Hut hut. The ball came back between Neagle’s gold thighs, snapped into Affenlight’s hands. The pleasure of pebbled leather against his palms. Cavanaugh on the go route, fastest man on the team, a wonder of speed but with terrible hands. Affenlight drop-stepped, scissored, dropped, scissored. The end would come from his blind side. Cavanaugh loved the go route, ran it like a big-college guy though he couldn’t catch anything, what a tease that made him, a purveyor of false hope with his racehorse strides, neck and neck with his man but not for long, no safety ever deep enough to be there to take credit when Cavanaugh dropped the ball. Still there was always the chance that this would be the one. The next one was always the one.
How many days since Affenlight found that sheaf of papers in the library basement? Now with the scrum of linemen snorting and collapsing around him, he remembered the music of H. Melville’s words. How odd. His concentration was usually total, everybody’s was, needed to be, that was what made it work, the common agreement that the game was all-important, but now the encroachment seemed lovely, an intimation of a world beyond the world of the green-and-white field. It was then, as he finished his seven-step drop and heard Melville’s words and saw Cavanaugh gaining separation from his man, that Affenlight knew he was through with football, through for all time, he wouldn’t be back next year. Other things awaited. It was good to be young and to know it for once. So much unfolding to do. He had the laces, he patted the ball. Footsteps pounded toward him from behind. There was no hint of wind, a ship captain’s nightmare, a quarterback’s dream. I won’t be back next year. He pushed off and threw as high and as deep as he could, the ball arcing through blue toward Cavanaugh’s terrible hands, but he no longer cared whether Cavanaugh caught it or not, and as the end arrived and his breath left him he couldn’t remember or imagine ever having cared. He was five or six, he was cutting pumpkins in the sun with his father. The tiny sere needles of stems bit through his cotton gloves and stung his hands. Still he loved the pumpkins, he could not lift the big ones, and the field all around was autumn brown.
74
The Harpooners queued along the third-base line, shoulder to shoulder, their caps clapped over the spearmen that adorned their pinstriped chests. Schwartz gazed out at the emerald diamond, which was part of the Atlanta Braves’ spanking-new AAA facility in