The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [62]
“Thanks.” Another stack of books was removed from the bed, and then she felt Mike lie down beside her. The heaviness of his body depressed the mattress, rolling her toward him. He whispered her name, which struck her, for some reason, as amazingly strange. Maybe he was just making sure he remembered it. She could feel the softness of his beard—denser, softer than David’s—against her forehead. The candle flickered and waved, the snoring came faintly through the wall. She nestled into the line of his body, smelled the sweet sweaty odor of his neck, and fell asleep.
19
The Harpooners rumbled down a poorly maintained highway toward Opentoe, Illinois, for their noon doubleheader. Half the team slept. The other half stared out the windows at passing farmland, DJ-sized headphones clamped over their baseball caps. The cloud-clotted early light filtered through the bus windows and smeared itself on the drab pebbled olive of the seats. Schwartz’s temples throbbed with half a hangover. Eighty ounces of Crazy Horse wasn’t part of his usual pregame regimen. Still, he felt better than he had yesterday. Two games today, a rest day tomorrow, and after that, perhaps, another datelike evening with you-know-who. He wanted to try not to think about her, not even her name; wanted to keep the fact of her existence tucked in the back of his mind, like an extra thousand dollars in your bank account. Bad example: his bank account was officially kaput, his credit card killed off by last night’s dinner. If he wanted to buy a coffee at a rest stop, he’d have to ask Henry to spot him. Henry, all of a sudden, could afford it.
Okay, one quick thought about Pella: for someone who was supposedly a fierce insomniac, she certainly slept soundly. He’d neglected to set either his alarm or the backup alarm on his watch, and he didn’t wake this morning until Arsch drummed on the bedroom door and announced that he was ready to go. Which meant they were already late, because Arsch always overslept. Schwartz twisted out of Pella’s grip, threw on a pair of sweatpants, swept his dirty uniform back into his equipment bag (the Harpooners did, or were supposed to do, their own laundry), and headed for the door. On the way out, he paused to sweep a curl out of Pella’s eyes, not sure whether to wake her or not. She didn’t move a muscle. Maybe she’d stay there all day, sleeping and sleeping, her breathing the only sound in the house. The thought pleased him.
Now he pulled out his laptop and brought his thesis up on the screen. He felt, for the first time since he received his first rejection letter, like he might be able to work.
“High school!” called Izzy, pointing out the window at a long windowless structure of turreted gray brick.
“High school,” agreed Phil Loondorf.
Steve Willoughby leaned across the aisle to check it out. “That’s a prison,” he said. “That’s a full-on correctional center.”
As the bus shuddered past the building, a block-lettered sign confirmed that it was indeed the Wakefield Correctional Center.
“No fair!” Izzy said. “Steve saw the sign!”
“No I didn’t. Look at that place. It’s got sniper towers.”
“Who cares, man? So’d my high school.”
“That’s a point for Willoughby,” Henry said.
“Oh man.” Izzy slumped down in his seat. “Buddha wouldn’t give him that.”
“I’m not the Buddha,” Henry said, and that was that. In the absence of Owen, the usual arbiter of High School or Prison, Henry had agreed to serve as guest referee. Whichever freshperson scored the most points en route