The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [54]
“Aparicio?” Henry whispered. “You’re joking.”
“He said he’d like to meet the man who’s tied his record.”
Henry’s ears began to ring. Aparicio, his hero, winner of fourteen Gold Gloves, two World Series. The greatest shortstop who ever lived.
“Apparently he comes to the States every year about this time, to work with the Cards’ infielders. And he’s offered to come up here before he heads back to Venezuela. Which’ll probably be the last weekend of the season, against Coshwale.”
Coach Cox caught Henry’s eye and looked at him sternly. “Now, I don’t want this to be a distraction, for you or anybody else. If we stay in the hunt, those Coshwale games are going to be huge.”
“Don’t worry,” Henry assured him. “Nothing distracts me.”
“I know.” A smile crossed Coach Cox’s face. “Things are happening for you, Skrimmer. Things are goddamn happening.”
After practice, Schwartz and Henry headed up to the makeshift, nylon-netted batting cage in the gym on the VAC’s fourth floor. Schwartz filled the pitching machine and then stood behind Henry with crossed arms, grunting, harrumphing, occasionally offering a word of instruction. Henry drove ball after ball through the middle of the cage. His goal, as always, was to meet the ball so squarely that it retraced its path and reentered the mouth of the pitching machine, sending the big rubber wheels spinning in the opposite direction, as if reversing time. He’d never quite done it, in all these hundreds of sessions, but he continued to believe it was possible.
“Hips,” Schwartz said.
Ping.
“That’s it.”
Ping.
“Don’t drift.”
Ping.
Ping.
Ping.
Every Friday after their BP session, in season and out, Henry and Schwartz drove to Carapelli’s, sat in their usual booth, and ate whatever appetizers Mrs. Carapelli brought them, followed by an extra-large house special pizza with extra sauce, extra cheese, and extra meat. Afterward Schwartz nursed a single slim glass of beer, Henry a mammoth SuperBoost shake, and they talked about baseball until Carapelli’s closed.
But tonight Schwartzy turned on foot toward his and Arsch’s house. “Where’re you going?” Henry said.
“Home.”
“But it’s Friday.”
Schwartz stopped, looked down at his gnarled fingers. His mitt hand’s forefinger nail, nipped by a Milford player’s backswing last night, had turned purple-black and would soon fall off. He’d run out of money, but that wasn’t the reason he didn’t want to go to Carapelli’s. The last thing he wanted to do was sit there acting happy about the Skrimmer’s impending fame. He still hadn’t told him about Yale. And Harvard. And Columbia. And NYU. And Stanford. And U of C. “I’d better stay in tonight,” he said. “Thesis crunch.”
“Oh,” Henry said. “Okay.” He’d been waiting to deliver the news about Aparicio until they arrived at Carapelli’s, where it could be savored properly. But it could wait until tomorrow—and it would have to, because Schwartz was already moving across the lot, his collar turned up against the cold.
17
Affenlight climbed the stairs of Phumber Hall, nervously fingered the key in his jacket pocket. His quarters were next door in Scull Hall, an almost identical building in many respects, same warping stairs and latticed windows on the landings, same hard-to-describe odor of lake water soaked into hundred-year-old stone, but he felt a world from home. Loud music played behind several of the doors. Presumably the students were at dinner, but they let the music play anyway. The proctors needed to emphasize conservation—talk to Dean Melkin about that. Dirty dishes sat on the windowsills. White dry-erase boards hung on the doors, black markers attached by corkscrewing cords. The boards were filled with scrawled phone numbers, quotes, directions. On one, a stick-figure man faced a stick-figure woman. An arrow pointed to his shoulder-high tumescence—THESIS, it read. Another pointed to the blacked-in hair between her legs—ANTITHESIS. Well, thought Affenlight, that about covers it.
Most of Phumber’s residents were freshpersons, still frantic with their recently acquired freedoms.