The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [204]
“Hey,” Henry said to her.
“Hey.” It seemed strange not to hug, so after a brief fit of school-dance awkwardness they finally did. He smelled ripe, like an adolescent boy not yet attuned to the fact that he needed to wear deodorant. It’s because he’s been on the bus all day, she thought, and hoped this was true—hoped he hadn’t smelled this way since June. She held on to him for an extra second, long enough to detect an undertone of sticky Greyhound pleather in the scent of his skin.
They’d arranged to meet here, at the Melville statue. The afternoon had been scorching, and the dog-day humidity had compressed itself into a drumming rain that now, just after dusk, was dwindling to an ambient mist. The lake, churned-up but calm, looked like fresh-poured cement. Already the days were shorter than they’d been in June.
Two shovels, a cooler, a picnic basket, and a giant vinyl football equipment bag leaned against the weathered brick of Scull. They shouldered the gear and set off. Henry didn’t ask where they were going or why; maybe he’d figured it out, or maybe he’d forgotten to care. It could be hard to tell with Henry, and Pella didn’t know what effect the summer had had on him. When she’d called his parents’ house in South Dakota, she’d merely said, “We want you to help us with something before Owen leaves.” And he’d merely said, “Who’s we?”
They crossed the Small Quad and then the Large in silence, walking four abreast. Contango sauntered along behind, eyeing the occasional darting sparrow with lazy suspicion. The grass of the practice fields had been burned khaki by the endless heat.
“Let’s stop a moment. My arms are exhausted.” Owen set down the beer-laden cooler and took from Pella the picnic basket, which he’d packed. He opened the wicker lid and took out a bottle of scotch from her dad’s collection. “You first,” he said, handing it to her. She lifted it to her lips and took a long slow glug. It burned nicely all the way to her stomach. Great minds, she thought, patting the flask in her windbreaker pocket as she handed the bottle to Owen, who drank and gave it to Mike. And then to Henry, and back to her. When the bottle was half gone, they put it in the basket and moved on.
Three rolls of sod had been laid over Affenlight’s grave, and though the grass had grown long and damp, the edges of the rolls were still visible. One of the spades had a flat, rectangular head, while the other’s was heart-shaped. Mike took the flat one and plunged it into a sod seam. The grass roots began to yield with a series of weak pops and groans as he leaned his weight on the handle. He worked his way around all three rolls. He and Henry lifted them off the grave and laid them aside.
They worked mostly in silence, Mike with the flat spade, Henry with the heart-shaped one. Owen, his reading light clipped to the brim of his cap, held the battery-powered lantern and distributed cans of High Life from the cooler. Pella sat nearby on an upright headstone, drinking scotch and stroking Contango’s fur. The recent rain had softened the topsoil, rendering it easy to dig through, but beneath that the earth was pale and rock hard, and soon their progress slowed.
Sometimes a cloudless swatch of sky would blow past the moon, and Pella could see the outline of Mike’s face in slightly sharper relief. It was strange the way he loved her: a sidelong and almost casual love, as if loving her were simply a matter of course, too natural to mention. Like their first meeting on the steps of the gym, when he’d hardly so much as glanced at her. With David and every guy before David, what passed for love had always been eye to eye, nose to nose; she felt watched, observed, like the prize inhabitant of a zoo, and she wound up pacing, preening, watching back, to fit the part. Whereas Mike was always beside her. She would stand at the kitchen window and look out at the quad, at the Melville statue and beyond that the beach