The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [84]
“Okay,” Schwartz said. “Nobody out. Let’s get ’em.”
Now Henry had another error to atone for. Hit it to me, he thought fiercely. Hit me the ball. “Sal-Sal-Salamander,” he chanted, pounding his glove in disgust. “Drop that forkbomb. Let me and Ajay turn a little two-step.”
Sal threw another forkball, a good one. The batter cracked a sharp shot to Henry’s left. He snagged it and twisted toward Ajay, who was breaking toward the second-base bag. The distance called for a casual sidearm fling—he’d done it ten thousand times. But now he paused, double-clutched. He’d thrown the last one too soft, better put a little mustard on it—no, no, not too hard, too hard would be bad too. He clutched again. Now the runner was closing in, and Henry had no choice but to throw it hard, really hard, too hard for Ajay to handle from thirty feet away; it handcuffed him, glanced off the heel of his glove and into short right field.
After the inning Henry sought out Ajay to apologize.
“Forget it.” Ajay smiled. “How many times have I done that to you?”
Rick O’Shea clapped Henry on both shoulders. “Don’t sweat it, Skrim. Happens to the worst of us.”
“Bats bats bats!” somebody yelled, drumming on the wooden rear wall of the dugout.
“Bats bats bats! Let’s get ’em back! Bats bats!”
Schwartzy hit a home run. So did Boddington. An inning later, Henry smacked a bases-clearing triple. The umpires stopped the game after six innings, with the Harpooners ahead 19–3. The mercy rule was meant to be merciful to the team getting beat, but no one could have felt more relieved than Henry. For the first time in his life he wanted not to be on a ballfield. He blinked back miserable tears the whole way home, pressed against the shuddering side of the bus.
“You’ve got to relax out there,” Schwartzy told him. “Relax and let it come.”
“I know.”
“Just let ’er rip, like you’re firing at the broomstick. Break Rick’s hand if you’ve got to.”
“Okay.”
The usual depressing landscape unspooled outside, cows and billboards, fireworks stores and adult emporia. Schwartz picked his words carefully. “Why don’t you take it easy tomorrow?” he suggested. “Skip your run, slack off during practice like I do. No use grinding yourself down.”
“I’m fine.”
“I know you’re fine. I’m just saying we’re not in prep mode anymore. We’ve got fifteen games in the next twenty days. We’ve got to conserve our strength.”
The next time Schwartz looked over, Henry’s eyes were closed, his forehead tipped against the grimy window. Schwartz could tell by the nervous tug at the corner of his right eye that he wasn’t really asleep, but he didn’t call him on it.
Schwartz could feel what was happening, or one thing that was happening: he was distancing himself from Henry, and he was using Pella to do so. That was why he hadn’t even mentioned Pella to Henry yet. For years he’d kept no secrets from Henry; now he’d kept two in a matter of weeks.
It was a bad thing to do: to distance himself from Henry, to cut the Skrimmer adrift while pretending nothing had changed—and to do so, when you got down to it, because he couldn’t handle Henry’s success.
He couldn’t do it, not to Henry. Look what was happening already. Maybe it was hubris for Schwartz to blame himself, but it didn’t matter. He would do whatever he could to get Henry straightened out. If that meant picking up the phone at four a.m. while in bed with Pella, then so be it. If that meant spending the next two months thinking of nothing but Henry and how to help him, so be it. Pella could wait. His life could wait. Henry needed him, and the Harpooners needed Henry. That was all he had to know.
29
Today,” said Professor Eglantine darkly as she stood before the chalkboard, feet splayed like a ballerina, and twisted her bony, bracelet-freighted arms into a series of pretzeled contortions while she stared at the tape player provided by the A/V Department, “in lieu of our usual business, I hope you’ll be so indulgent as to listen with me to a recording of the dear dead anti-Semite Thomas Stearns Eliot, reading aloud