yeah hey, so, i finished a story
Back to Red Sox, finally.
I'm tempted to call it an R, on the grade-curve scale of other stuff I've written, but there is a sex scene and some, dark themes and (highlight white space for potential spoiler) offscreen encounter of dubious consent, so I'm gonna hafta say it's NC-17.
Leave some time. It's a long one. edit: Actually, the sonuva bitch won't let me do it all in one post. So this is Part I, and Part II is the next post, which should show up above it or something.
Oh yeah, Foulke/Papelbon, that's the way it goes.
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. It is in no way a reflection on the actual life, behavior, or character of any of the people featured, and there is no connection or affiliation between this fictional story and the people or organizations it mentions. It was not written with any intent to slander or defame any of the people featured. No profit has been or ever will be made as a result of this story: it is solely for entertainment. And again, it is entirely fictional, i.e. not true.
last one standing
part I
Wind whips through the park like a knife through water, whistling a little at the corners. Foulke flips up the collar of his jacket and whistles through his teeth right back at it, bunching his hands up into his sleeves and jamming them into his pockets. It's altogether too cold to be baseball season, really, there ought to be a law. The start of the season should be variable, like wild animal breeding time or something, not that he knows anything about that. He would ask Timlin, maybe, but Timlin is on the mound, high red socks scissoring through the air with a crowdful of eyes on him.
Foulke squints against the cold and peers out at the stands. The fans look raw and miserable, some of them bundled in almost full winter gear, their cheeks red and their noses running. It makes him smile, a hard kind of sarcastic grin. Serves them right. Arrogant little judgemental bastards.
A ball bursts up from homeplate, rising into the sky on a high familiar arch, and Foulke tracks it down with his eyes into Wily Mo's waiting glove in center. The leather pockets around it and Timlin waits at the mound to pat him thankfully on the ass as he passes before following him into the dugout.
Foulke twists his hands in his pockets, drums his heels on the ground. The kid's been warming all inning, his fastball thumping neatly in the bullpen catcher's glove, and Foulke isn't getting into this one.
----------
The kid. The damn kid, with his easy smile and his pugged nose, with his stupid fucking mohawk followed, chronologically, by his stupid bald head. The fans love the kid. He'd saved all of two games when Foulke started seeing #58 jerseys in the stands, usually on girls, the fresh young college girls that Foulke himself used to be able to bag in this damn town. Pickings have been slimmer, of late, although he finds that his ring will get him something good if he's desperate enough to go out with it on. That’s a fact he thinks will never change here. But still he's found himself taking home the kind of girls he used to joke about, the girls they call 'Expiration Dates". Past their prime.
The kid can have any girl he wants, pretty much, at least within city limits where he's freely recognized. Youkilis has started hanging around with him as much as he can, a sure sign that he's pulling some fine tail, because Youkilis is the ultimate vulture, following behind his more successful and attractive teammates, taking their leavings. Youkilis used to hang out with Foulke, last season, the season before, but Foulke hasn't heard from him the past four weekends, and doesn't think he will.
"Mrs. Damon" shirts in the crowds disappeared with record speed, but Foulke's starting to sight "Mrs. Papelbon" shirts here and there. It's enough to make a guy sick to his stomach, but at least Foulke is used to that.
----------
For all the talk about Boston, in 2004, shedding the 25-guys-25-cabs lines that have followed them for so long, it was never like that, not really. There was some fun in the clubhouse, sure, but it's not as though the whole team was hanging out together outside of the ballpark, showing up at each other’s houses for potluck dinners and all knowing each other’s favorite drinks.
He preferred to work the bars on his own, but sometimes with Youkilis, sometimes with Wade Miller, that was about the extent of Foulke’s baseball social network in Boston, although he had tried going out with Manny one night, later vowing never again. They had ended up in some girl’s apartment, Foulke trying to catch Manny’s eye to get him to hurry up and pick one, and all of a sudden there was salsa music on and Manny and the girls were dancing in their socks on the wood floor, Foulke left sitting on the couch half-hard and wondering if he’d fallen into some sort of awful parallel universe where nothing meant what he thought it did.
He hasn’t gone out with any of the guys yet this season, existing in a kind of sullen semi-world between the park and his apartment, dark wet Boston roads gleaming yellow at night his lifeline between the two. Papelbon with the save wants to celebrate, though, and the kid is too golden to be denied.
“Let’s go to a bar, you guys, that was a good one, we all did good,” the kid is excited, bright-eyed and alert. Timlin mutters some excuse about his wife and disappears, but everyone else is stuck under the kid’s gaze like moths under a pin.
Foulke sullenly sticks his neck under the shower, even though he doesn’t have to, didn’t pitch or anything, but he’s chilled enough from the mist in the night air that a hot shower seems necessary. He takes as much time as he can, hoping that the kid will get impatient and take the rest of the bullpen and go.
Of course the kid is just as happy to wait as he is about anything.
Foulke shrugs on his jacket and sticks his hands in the pockets, his breadwinners, protecting the joints from the cold. He supposes that if he disappointed the kid it would be a crime against the team, the sort of thing that Francona would pull him aside for and scream at him about. There’s no getting out of it.
DiNardo is already talking in a loud, constant patter, and Foulke can feel a headache prowling in the back of his skull. It was a long game, and it’s going to be an even longer night.
----------
The kid has a habit of grinding his teeth when he pitches. He’s never really been a closer before, not like this, not in Boston with a whole city, a whole state, a whole region hanging on his every twitch, and the stress is getting to him, even if it’s only unconsciously. Every save he makes keeps him perfect and untouchable, and every time he becomes more perfect he feels the stress more keenly. He’s taken to holding a hot pack to his cheeks after games, alternating sides every few minutes, warming his jaw to loosen the muscles.
Foulke really couldn’t give a shit about the kid and the state of his teeth. He only knows any of this because Francona has seen fit to tell him, approaching him as though Foulke will want to be a friendly helpful big brother to the snot-nosed upstart who’s taken his job.
“Foulkie,” Francona always calls him Foulkie, no matter how many times Foulke tells him that isn’t his fucking name, “Foulkie, Pap’s just having a little stress over all this, he’s never done nothin’ like it before and the kid ain’t used to it. I was thinkin’, you’re more than used to it, what you did for us in the postseason, man, you were nails, I was thinkin’ you could show him a thing or two and he’d benefit from it a damn lot.”
If I was such nails, Foulke thinks sharply, why the fuck aren’t I the one closing.
He nods to Francona, sure, have a chat with the kid. Tell him what it’s like to be a closer in your heart as much as in your arm. Tell him it’s not all velocity, it’s not all location. Tell him how to block out and bear down and shrug everything off your back, water from the wing feathers of a duck. Tell him in an hour what it took Foulke years and years to figure out on his own. Tell him what Foulke learned in hundreds of weight rooms and in the backs of a hundred dusty buses and in a thousand sleepless nights at 20,000 feet, in dozens of different cities, with trainers and coaches and teammates and without, but always with his own two hands and his own two arms and his own two feet and his own head and his own heart.
Right. Sure.
He nods and never talks to the kid. Francona doesn’t bring it up again. Foulke doesn’t know if he doesn’t know, or realizes what he was asking, or is giving up on Foulke as a bad job. Foulke doesn’t care. He’s got to have something left, something he can cling to, and he’ll be damned if he’ll give it away.
----------
Water condenses on the side of his glass of beer, beading slow of its own accord, sliding warmly down the edges to seep into the cardboard coaster at the bottom. Foulke draws his fingertips through it and rests his elbow on the bartop, holding his hand up to see the light of the neon Budweiser sign glint sickly red in the wetness, reflecting his headache back at him.
There’s a racket down at the end of the bar where the rest of the bullpen has entrenched themselves. DiNardo is boasting loudly to Tavarez that he can drink the most hard liquor the fastest and everyone else is betting on it. Not real bets of course, most of them are too careful to even blur that line. They’re betting in scraps of IOU paper and snack pack duty for the upcoming road trip. It seems like a pretty good matchup to Foulke, frat boy drinking power set against the power of belligerent craziness, odds about even as far as he can see, but he’s not betting. He’s not even sitting with them, hunched instead over a stool halfway up the bar, fiddling with the sweat of his beer and pointedly pretending he came alone.
He’s surprised, then, when the kid slides up behind him and slaps a hand down on his shoulder. Foulke starts up before realizing who it is and grumping back down into his slumped posture. The kid’s hand is drunk-heavy on his shoulder and even though he shrugs irritably the kid doesn’t seem inclined to move it.
To his infinite annoyance, the kid hauls himself up onto the neighboring stool, hand still deadweighted on Foulke’s shoulder, and signals for another beer. The bartender slides one over without even paying attention to what it is. It doesn’t matter, because the kid never pays for his own drinks these days. If no one in the bar recognizes him, the bartender (a native, always a thick-voiced native so far as Foulke can tell, and he wonders if there’s perhaps a law that says in order to be a bartender in the city of Boston you have to have lived there for a minimum number of generations) certainly will, and anything the kid drinks will be paid for in full or, just as often, on the house.
“Y’should hang with the guys!” he grins, scattered and friendly. Foulke groans inwardly. He forgets, in not hanging out with these new young arms, how easily they fall into their alcohol.
“Go on back, kid, you’ll miss the contest and you won’t collect on that bet even if you win.”
“Wan’ have fun with you!” Papelbon chirps, and Foulke recalls that the kid doesn’t know much at all about betting, manifestly evidenced by the mohawk incident. He’s still not sure how saving a certain number of games meant that Youkilis got free reign with the kid’s scalp, but Foulke’s pretty sure it’s the sort of thing that could only happen to someone who didn’t know shit about bets. Or, he supposes, about Youkilis. Either way, it had all ended up in a hideous mohawk, which lasted until the kid’s wife (Foulke, his own divorce still freshly bitter on his tongue, gives it another 8 months) got fed up and made the kid shave his head bald.
It’s when this same bald head, now slightly fuzzed, starts dropping down onto Foulke’s shoulder that he knows the kid is done for the night. He grabs him by the back of his shirt and secures a massive handful of fabric, enough to pull the front of the kid’s shirt tight across his chest. Foulke blinks briefly at the muscles thus exposed, forgetting for a moment, in his mental insistence on Papelbon’s youth, that the kid is built more like a major leaguer than a proper kid. Hell, he’s already built more than Matt Clement, although that’s not saying much.
Shaking his own head to clear it, Foulke drags the kid outside. The temptation to leave him unconscious in a bar bathroom is very strong, a delicious thought to savor, but Foulke has no illusions about his place on the team. He’s fully aware that someone will tell Francona that he was out with the rest of the bullpen, and somehow it will become his fault for not getting the precious golden boy home in one piece, because he’s a veteran, and who else is there? A bunch of callow AAA callups, and Julian Tavarez, and no one would expect Julian Tavarez to take responsibility for a potted plant, let alone another person.
Sometimes Foulke catches himself wishing he had cultivated a certain level of crazy as effectively as Tavarez has, but then he sees Tavarez with his eyes bugging out, snarling at a towel that missed the laundry cart when thrown, and he decides it’s all for the best.
He shoves the kid unceremoniously into the side door of his truck and steps back to fish in his pocket for his keys, grumbling to himself at the unfairness of it all. There’s a soft thump and he looks up to see that the kid has kind of collapsed to his knees between Foulke and the truck. He hadn’t thought the kid was that drunk. Foulke rolls his eyes up to the sky, blank expanse turned yellowpink with light pollution hanging in the midnight mist, and reaches down to haul the kid upright again.
Except, instead of allowing himself to be pulled up, the kid grabs hold of Foulke’s hand. Foulke looks down at him, surprised, and is unnerved to see the kid looking up at him with a weird smile on his face. It’s a little trembling at the corners and a little soft at the middle and the light isn’t very good. Foulke doesn’t bother trying to read the kid normally, and he can’t read him at all right now.
The kid leans forward, unfamiliar smile still aimed upwards, and dexterously undoes Foulke’s belt with one hand.
Foulke yelps and jumps backwards, sending the kid sprawling forward onto the pavement. He grabs at his belt and hastily looks around, god, what if someone was in the parking lot and saw that? What if they thought something was going on? They’re both public figures, closers past and present, and that’s not exactly a low-profile job in this region. What the fuck does the kid think he’s playing at?
The kid sits up and wipes his palms against each other, gravel raining from between his hands, swaying slightly. It must be painful and it could be trouble for his pitching if he has to get in the next night’s game, but Foulke really could not give a shit about that. He rebuckles his belt and keeps one hand on it, protectively, approaching the kid and watching him closely as though he’s a bomb that might go off if not handled properly.
“Wan’ have fun with you,” Papelbon says, again, eyes closed and that smile, which Foulke now recognizes as a drunken attempt at seductiveness, still hitched onto his face. “Lemme show you.” Fun. Christ. He hadn’t even known the kid was into that shit.
Wordlessly, he grabs the kid under one arm and drags him upright. He turns him around and plants a hand in the center of his back, slamming him into the door to hold him in place and out of the way while he digs for his keys again.
The little fucker wriggles under his hand and turns his head sideways, cheek smooshed against the window of the truck. “’K,” he slurs, almost fucking purring, “we can play that way if y’want.”
Foulke chokes a little and stiffens his arm to stay as far away from the kid as possible. He finally finds his keys and unlocks the truck, shoving the kid in and buckling him into the seat as hastily as he can, with as little contact as is possible. He slams the door and takes a moment alone in the parking lot to breathe, deep and regular.
After he manages to get the kid to tell him his address, he drives there as fast as he can, ignoring signs and slamming down on the gas when he sees yellow in front of him. He squeals to a stop in front of the house, hauls Papelbon out of the truck and dumps him in a heap on his front stoop. The kid pets his shoe and giggles. Foulke toes him softly in the ribs and jabs at the doorbell a few times, figures it’s enough to wake up the kid’s wife.
He just walks away. It’s no longer his problem. He’s leaving a star pitcher lying in an inebriated little mound, palms scraped up with black gravel and grime, for his young wife to discover and somehow, somehow he’s going to get yelled at for it, but he never asked to be a babysitter or anything else, where Papelbon was concerned.
His relief as he drives home is so strong that it almost blinds him. He has to pull over along the highway, cars whizzing by in streaks of white and red like a long-exposure photograph while he rests his forehead on the steering wheel, pants almost hysterically, and he doesn’t even know why.
----------
Once, two seasons before, during that magical year, Foulke had been in the showers at the wrong time. It wasn’t his fault, he usually showered with the rest of the team as a matter of course, but Francona had pulled himself aside to discuss some finer points of his pitching, and how long he thought he would be able to keep it up. Foulke was in pain, unsteady knees and a worrying grind under the bone caps, but in those days that wasn’t anything, he was determined and invincible.
Reassuring Francona had taken time, though, and when he finally made it into the showers most of the team had already gone. He was standing under the spray, turned down to as cold a stream as he could stand it to blast the game from his skin, when his head jogged at a strange sound. It was a wet, heavy sort of sound, the kind of sound that made him immediately nervous even though he couldn’t exactly place it.
Wiping the soap from his eyes, he had tentatively poked his head out of the showers and had been treated to the sight of Kevin Millar bent over a bench with Manny Ramirez busily burying himself in his ass.
Foulke had stared for a full minute in shock before ducking back into the shower and turning the temperature all the way up, trying to scald the sight out of his mind.
He had wrapped a towel around his waist and walked right past them on his way out, ignoring them as firmly as he could and moving at a dignified, unhurried pace, because he was damned if he was going to be freaked out of his own fucking clubhouse.
When he realized he had forgotten his watch and had to pass them again before he could leave, Millar was biting his own hand and squealing around it, and Manny looked up as he walked by.
Foulke had stared at him, trying very hard to not say anything.
Manny had grinned, given him a jaunty double point, and then gone back to his business.
There wasn’t anything Foulke could do or say, because they were winning at that point and you never fuck with the luck, even if the luck involves a worrying exchange of bodily fluids between two teammates. And they had gone on to win it all, so he supposed maybe there was something in it after all.
Millar is an Oriole now, still calling everyone up and leaving incoherent messages on their voicemails at strange hours of the night, living for games in Boston, sheepish in orange and black, so Foulke had assumed that that was the end of that, and he hadn’t thought about it since. Hadn’t really thought that it was something people did, in baseball. It had struck him as a Manny and Millar thing, a weird little bit of their friendship that belonged to them alone. And that had made sense, because they were never Manny and Millar so much as they were MannyMillar, all for one and one for all, a pair in every way, unique in that.
The idea of one, of one guy being interested in that all his own, it baffles Foulke. Caught him off-guard. Manny and Millar had done, well, that because they were two together. Papelbon, so far as Foulke can tell, has no one on the team like that.
He’s just. Well. Apparently gay. All on his own.
Or, Foulke supposes, bi, unless the wife is a much more long-suffering individual than he’d given her credit for.
Still, the kid was drunk and Foulke doesn’t really think, when he gets home and calms down and looks at it rationally, that it’s something he’s going to have to worry about in the future. He revises his mental estimation of the length of the kid’s marriage to 5 months and otherwise puts the incident out of his mind.
----------
Beckett is throwing the kind of high heat that Foulke could never dream of, sickeningly overpowering. The Rangers are baffled, all those big bats swinging emptily through warm dry air. It’s a do-nothing kind of day in the bullpen, the starter looking like he won’t be needing much help, the weather hot enough to keep anyone from wanting to move any more than they absolutely have to. Foulke sprawls on the bench, his legs sticking far out to keep bodyheat away from his core, a towel soaked in cold water evaporating fast, draped around the back of his neck.
It’s so hot that he doesn’t even have the energy to work up a disparaging remark when the kid plops down next to him and offers a cup of cold Gatorade. Foulke drinks it quickly, before the Texas air can leech the coolness from it, and he can feel it running down in the center of his chest like an icy hand stroking under his breastbone.
“You’re married, right?” the kid asks, apropos of nothing. Foulke hesitates and shoots him a look. He’s pretty fucking sure that the kid knows exactly what his marital state is, he knows it was discussed all over the clubhouse last season, the sort of amazing mess that other ballplayers like to talk about, in a relieved ‘at least it isn’t me’ sort of way.
“Divorced,” he grunts, shortly. The question, he decides, doesn’t deserve much more than that.
“How come?
He shrugs one shoulder casually. It’s the same reason any baseball wife in the league could legitimately divorce her husband if she wanted to, nothing new in that department.
“Slept around, huh?” The kid is drumming his heels on the ground under the bench and looking expectantly at Foulke, who rolls his eyes and gives a brisk nod in confirmation. Christ. Of course he fucking slept around. The city loves its baseball players and the college population is enormous, it’s a fortuitous fucking combination for a guy who likes to have a little fun.
Teixeira hits a long, high fly ball that captures their attention for a moment, but they track it harmlessly into Trot’s glove in right. On the mound, Beckett pumps his fist and shouts. In the bullpen, Foulke is too warm and languid to move even when the kid, eyes ostensibly hooked on the arching ball, grabs his shoulder and squeezes familiarly.
Foulke just closes his eyes and waits for it, like the pain in his knees and the sullenness in his heart, to go away.
----------
He doesn’t really hate baseball, not like it’s been made to seem, the way the media has quoted him. They make it sound like he plays baseball only for the paycheck, pure mercenary, someone who would rather be playing hockey and treats this, American fantasy for every man and many women, as simple vulgar rote.
That’s not it at all. He just, with things as they were (are), doesn’t take the same kind of uncomplicated joy in it that someone like, say, Ortiz does. He doesn’t even have the deliberate sort of love for baseball that Schilling does. He doesn’t feel destined for it, like Delcarmen, or immersed in it, like Varitek. Baseball doesn’t amaze him like it does Loretta, and he doesn’t have half as much fun with it as Manny does.
Baseball is a job, but it’s his job, and he loves it as much as he does anything he can do well and succeed at. When they were winning and he was untouchable, Christ, you would have had to be an idiot to say that Keith Foulke didn’t love baseball.
It’s this degrading bench-riding, though, this forced semi-exile, this constant rolling soreness in his knees. It drags a guy down. It makes him incapable of looking past the next paycheck, because there’s nothing else to look forward to. And Foulke’s never been one to censor his thoughts, and in this city, fuck, make one honest comment and you’ll never hear the end of it until you’re fairly run out of town, and again every time you come back to play against the home team, and again in the between-times when local writers are short of ready material.
Boston holds grudges. They’re fucking proud of it. Back when he used to wander around town, still amazed by the sort of city he’d landed himself in, Foulke had walked past all the signs of it. The Boston Tea Party boat, a historical grudge if he ever saw it. Logan Airport in the hazy distance, runways spidering off the impossible little island, a great big fuck-you to common sense. The roads that ran contrary to any semblance of reason, a grudge against every out-of-town driver that ever ventured within the city limits.
But if the city can hold a grudge, so can he. He’s bound by the terms of his contract and nicety, society and business, he can’t do anything, not exactly. But if Papelbon is going to take his job, he’s not going to forget it. And he’s not going to forgive it.
It’s the city passing on a little bit of its own character to its unwanted children. It’s natural. Let the city color those who move within it, that’s always been Foulke’s way of thinking, when in Rome and all that, and there’s no reason to go changing now. He’ll show them how it’s done.
----------
Another day, another win, another Papelbon save. The kid sidles up to Foulke in the locker room and intrudes a hand on the side of Foulke’s locker, real casual.
“Bunch of us goin’ to the bar after this, you want in?”
“Nuh,” Foulke grunts, neatly tying his cleats together at the laces and heaving them into the depths of the locker.
The kid’s face half-falls, something Foulke can see his peripheral vision. “C’mon, man, it’ll be fun. We can have some fun. Promise!”
Foulke digs out his sneakers and jams his feet into them without untying them, his heels squashing down the backs. He rolls his feet until the backs pop up again, then very calculatingly raises his eyes to the kid’s face. Eye contact. The little fucker is hopeful and trying to look sexily cool, which is pathetic on several different levels, so far as Foulke is concerned. It’s perfect.
“I’m not fuckin’ interested,” he says, bland and calm as though it’s the most obvious thing in the world, “in your fun.”
He doesn’t even wait to see the way the kid crumples before turning neatly on his heel and striding out of the clubhouse. He knows how it goes down and, like with a ball off the bat destined for the turnpike, he doesn’t have turn around to watch his handiwork.
----------
He’s watching the end of Saturday Night Live at 1 am when the phone rings. Foulke automatically picks it up and flips it open, wincing when he hears the quavery voice of the kid saying his name down the other end of the line. He should have checked the caller ID first.
The kid, surprisingly, doesn’t sound drunk. He just sounds contrite, and a little scared. It transpires that he had gotten a ride to an unfamiliar bar with Tavarez, who had then disappeared with a girl and his car, leaving Papelbon stranded and standing on a street corner, unwilling to call and worry his wife, but more than willing to call and bother Foulke.
The description of the place sounds familiar to Foulke and, sighing, he gets into his truck and heads towards it. He circles around a few likely-looking blocks before he spots the kid, standing yellow under a lone streetlight like a fucking target, arms folded tightly and nervously to his chest, head twitching side to side, his entire attitude screaming, “Mug me!”
He pulls up and the kid wordlessly gets in. As Foulke pulls away from the curb he can see that the kid is shaking, his knees jittering and his hands drumming in a little curled-together knot in his lap. Foulke rolls his eyes and aims for the kid’s house.
Halfway there the kid mumbles something, sounding plaintive. “Speak up,” Foulke grunts, in no mood for guessing games.
“Don’t take me home,” the kid whispers, nearly pleading. Foulke shoots a surprised glance at him and the kid hangs his head, stares at his twisting hands. “I. I can’t go home like this.”
The car passes under a high bright streetlight and the interior is briefly illuminated. Foulke can see the kid clearly for just an instant, but it’s enough to realize that, aside from the shaking, there’s a nervous flush on his face, a scratch on his cheek, a certain disarray to his clothes, and what looks suspiciously like a bite mark on his neck.
It’s all Foulke can do to stifle his laughter. “What,” he asks, amusement bleeding through. “Bad pickup? Left a few too many marks to explain away for the little lady?”
The kid doesn’t say anything, still staring at his hands and shaking slightly. “What?” Foulke asks again, laughter starting to edge into his voice. “C’mon. I’ve been around the block. She scratch your back while you were fuckin’ her, or what?”
“I didn’t know what to expect,” Papelbon whispers, his eyes still lowered and his voice unsure.
Foulke thumps the wheel and takes the turning to his apartment instead of the one that would take him to the kid’s house. “Aw, c’mon now. You ain’t never fucked a rowdy groupie before?”
“Didn’t know who I was. I don’t. Don’t think he was a groupie.”
“What the fuck were you doin’ botherin’ with someone who wasn’t…” Wait. Foulke backtracks the kid’s statement in his mind, mental rewind whirring. “Wait. He?”
Christ. He hadn’t thought the kid was that much, well, like that, enough that he’d be going in that direction when he hit the bars by himself.
The kid doesn’t say anything for a long time and Foulke has to take his eyes from the road when they pull up to a red light to look at him. The red shine on the edge of Papelbon’s profile makes the rest of him look sickly pale. His head is still hanging, his hands still wringing nervously. The light turns green and Foulke sees it in the change of color on the tip of Papelbon’s nose.
“Kid?” he asks, aware that he’s treading on slightly unstable ground now.
Papelbon makes some small movement that Foulke sees out of the corner of his eye, but they’re back on Storrow Drive now and Foulke has lived here long enough to know that you only take your eyes off the road on Storrow Drive if you have suicidal tendencies. The kid shifts again and when he finally speaks it’s slightly muffled, as though he’s put a hand over his face.
“Thought I wanted to,” he mumbles. “Well. Did. But then. Well. Didn’t.”
Foulke blinks at the road. He doesn’t really know what to say. This is not something he ever signed on for, no sir, and he’s got no fucking idea how to deal with it. He tries to sneak a glance over at the kid again, but Papelbon is staring out the window and all Foulke can see is the back of his head.
They drive in silence for a minute, Foulke mulling it over. He’s not sure how this goes; is he supposed to try to find out exactly what happened, is that important? Or is he supposed to avoid the subject altogether for the rest of their lives? Eventually he decides that it’s more vital to get everything clear than to handle the kid with, well, kid gloves. If the fucker really wants to be a closer he can’t be too soft anyhow.
Tito would be so proud. Being a closer, lesson number one.
“What did. Uh.” It turns out to be a little harder to put into words than Foulke had thought, especially when he’s driving at the same time. He can just barely see that the kid has turned his head a little bit, paying attention. He navigates a tricky turn of the road and marshals his thoughts as best he can.
“What did. OK. I mean. You didn’t want to, so, you, uh. Didn’t. Right? Or.”
A taxi cuts him off and Foulke slams on the brakes, whaling on the horn, grateful for the distraction. He drives on another mile fuming and growling about the fucking awful drivers that get licensed to operate cabs in this fucking city, a fucking crime is what it oughta be, if you’re that bad a driver and still getting paid to do just that.
He quiets down and the kid makes a small noise, a tiny clearing of his throat.
“Did,” he says, voice no bigger than the tiny sound before it.
Hard to ask now, of course, but he can’t be delicate. It’s not in his nature, and it shouldn’t be in the kid’s nature either. Hard to ask, but he’s doing him a favor here, somewhere down the line.
“What, when you say, did, what d’you mean by that?”
There’s a pause filled with an awful kind of anticipation and in the unquiet quiet Foulke pulls into the tiny parking lot behind his building, holding his breath as his truck trundles down the short alleyway leading to it as he always does, taking every pain possible to make sure he doesn’t shear the sideview mirrors off, millimeters away from the brick.
He puts the truck in park and turns off the ignition. The key dangles from the steering wheel column and the silence deepens marginally.
The kid is looking at his hands again, for all his past bravado still embarrassed to look at Foulke and say the kind of things he, in better circumstances, might want to say. He looks somehow reduced, finally looking like the kid Foulke calls him in his mind.
Flying by the seat of his fucking pants here, Christ. Foulke reaches over and very gently squeezes the kid’s shoulder, as companionly and without extraneous connotation as he can possibly make it.
There’s a tiny sniffle and the kid’s shoulders square up under Foulke’s palm. He leaves his hand there. He can be that generous, this once.
“Saw him at the bar,” the kid says, so quiet and low that at first Foulke thinks it’s just night noises melting into the truck cab interior air. “Looked at each other, bar bathroom, well. Y’know how it is. Thought I. Well. Makin’ out, was OK, got. Y’know. Worked up some. An’ I guess, guess I wasn’t sure how it was gonna go from there, cause I ain’t. Well. An’ he kinda. Got me kneelin, an’ I said I didn’t know how or nothin’, and he just. Well. Put me to it.
An’ I mighta struggled ‘gainst it a little but. Didn’t never say no. Not exactly. So I guess it ain’t. Well.”
Foulke doesn’t know too much about it but he does know that this sounds pretty much like what Papelbon is saying it isn’t. He’s never been a particularly sensitive guy, but back in ’04 Kapler had made them all sit in on one of his wife’s little lecture things about, Christ, domestic abuse and shit, the kind of stuff she’d gone through before she met Kapler. Foulke hadn’t paid very much attention to it at the time, had had the feeling that it was mostly directed at Derek Lowe, at whom Kapler had glared the whole way through, because they all knew what Lowe was getting up to, in that know-but-don’t-know kind of way that goes on in baseball, and he was the one who needed to hear that that shit wasn’t cool.
It comes back to him a little bit now, though, and he’s not clear on the legal details or anything, of course, but he’s pretty fucking sure that there was something in there about not needing to say the word ‘no’ to make it, well, bad. Or whatever.
He squeezes the kid’s shoulder more firmly and studies the way he squares up even more. It’s almost enough to make a guy proud, and Foulke isn’t at all used to that.
----------
go on to part II
I'm tempted to call it an R, on the grade-curve scale of other stuff I've written, but there is a sex scene and some, dark themes and (highlight white space for potential spoiler) offscreen encounter of dubious consent, so I'm gonna hafta say it's NC-17.
Leave some time. It's a long one. edit: Actually, the sonuva bitch won't let me do it all in one post. So this is Part I, and Part II is the next post, which should show up above it or something.
Oh yeah, Foulke/Papelbon, that's the way it goes.
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. It is in no way a reflection on the actual life, behavior, or character of any of the people featured, and there is no connection or affiliation between this fictional story and the people or organizations it mentions. It was not written with any intent to slander or defame any of the people featured. No profit has been or ever will be made as a result of this story: it is solely for entertainment. And again, it is entirely fictional, i.e. not true.
last one standing
part I
Wind whips through the park like a knife through water, whistling a little at the corners. Foulke flips up the collar of his jacket and whistles through his teeth right back at it, bunching his hands up into his sleeves and jamming them into his pockets. It's altogether too cold to be baseball season, really, there ought to be a law. The start of the season should be variable, like wild animal breeding time or something, not that he knows anything about that. He would ask Timlin, maybe, but Timlin is on the mound, high red socks scissoring through the air with a crowdful of eyes on him.
Foulke squints against the cold and peers out at the stands. The fans look raw and miserable, some of them bundled in almost full winter gear, their cheeks red and their noses running. It makes him smile, a hard kind of sarcastic grin. Serves them right. Arrogant little judgemental bastards.
A ball bursts up from homeplate, rising into the sky on a high familiar arch, and Foulke tracks it down with his eyes into Wily Mo's waiting glove in center. The leather pockets around it and Timlin waits at the mound to pat him thankfully on the ass as he passes before following him into the dugout.
Foulke twists his hands in his pockets, drums his heels on the ground. The kid's been warming all inning, his fastball thumping neatly in the bullpen catcher's glove, and Foulke isn't getting into this one.
----------
The kid. The damn kid, with his easy smile and his pugged nose, with his stupid fucking mohawk followed, chronologically, by his stupid bald head. The fans love the kid. He'd saved all of two games when Foulke started seeing #58 jerseys in the stands, usually on girls, the fresh young college girls that Foulke himself used to be able to bag in this damn town. Pickings have been slimmer, of late, although he finds that his ring will get him something good if he's desperate enough to go out with it on. That’s a fact he thinks will never change here. But still he's found himself taking home the kind of girls he used to joke about, the girls they call 'Expiration Dates". Past their prime.
The kid can have any girl he wants, pretty much, at least within city limits where he's freely recognized. Youkilis has started hanging around with him as much as he can, a sure sign that he's pulling some fine tail, because Youkilis is the ultimate vulture, following behind his more successful and attractive teammates, taking their leavings. Youkilis used to hang out with Foulke, last season, the season before, but Foulke hasn't heard from him the past four weekends, and doesn't think he will.
"Mrs. Damon" shirts in the crowds disappeared with record speed, but Foulke's starting to sight "Mrs. Papelbon" shirts here and there. It's enough to make a guy sick to his stomach, but at least Foulke is used to that.
----------
For all the talk about Boston, in 2004, shedding the 25-guys-25-cabs lines that have followed them for so long, it was never like that, not really. There was some fun in the clubhouse, sure, but it's not as though the whole team was hanging out together outside of the ballpark, showing up at each other’s houses for potluck dinners and all knowing each other’s favorite drinks.
He preferred to work the bars on his own, but sometimes with Youkilis, sometimes with Wade Miller, that was about the extent of Foulke’s baseball social network in Boston, although he had tried going out with Manny one night, later vowing never again. They had ended up in some girl’s apartment, Foulke trying to catch Manny’s eye to get him to hurry up and pick one, and all of a sudden there was salsa music on and Manny and the girls were dancing in their socks on the wood floor, Foulke left sitting on the couch half-hard and wondering if he’d fallen into some sort of awful parallel universe where nothing meant what he thought it did.
He hasn’t gone out with any of the guys yet this season, existing in a kind of sullen semi-world between the park and his apartment, dark wet Boston roads gleaming yellow at night his lifeline between the two. Papelbon with the save wants to celebrate, though, and the kid is too golden to be denied.
“Let’s go to a bar, you guys, that was a good one, we all did good,” the kid is excited, bright-eyed and alert. Timlin mutters some excuse about his wife and disappears, but everyone else is stuck under the kid’s gaze like moths under a pin.
Foulke sullenly sticks his neck under the shower, even though he doesn’t have to, didn’t pitch or anything, but he’s chilled enough from the mist in the night air that a hot shower seems necessary. He takes as much time as he can, hoping that the kid will get impatient and take the rest of the bullpen and go.
Of course the kid is just as happy to wait as he is about anything.
Foulke shrugs on his jacket and sticks his hands in the pockets, his breadwinners, protecting the joints from the cold. He supposes that if he disappointed the kid it would be a crime against the team, the sort of thing that Francona would pull him aside for and scream at him about. There’s no getting out of it.
DiNardo is already talking in a loud, constant patter, and Foulke can feel a headache prowling in the back of his skull. It was a long game, and it’s going to be an even longer night.
----------
The kid has a habit of grinding his teeth when he pitches. He’s never really been a closer before, not like this, not in Boston with a whole city, a whole state, a whole region hanging on his every twitch, and the stress is getting to him, even if it’s only unconsciously. Every save he makes keeps him perfect and untouchable, and every time he becomes more perfect he feels the stress more keenly. He’s taken to holding a hot pack to his cheeks after games, alternating sides every few minutes, warming his jaw to loosen the muscles.
Foulke really couldn’t give a shit about the kid and the state of his teeth. He only knows any of this because Francona has seen fit to tell him, approaching him as though Foulke will want to be a friendly helpful big brother to the snot-nosed upstart who’s taken his job.
“Foulkie,” Francona always calls him Foulkie, no matter how many times Foulke tells him that isn’t his fucking name, “Foulkie, Pap’s just having a little stress over all this, he’s never done nothin’ like it before and the kid ain’t used to it. I was thinkin’, you’re more than used to it, what you did for us in the postseason, man, you were nails, I was thinkin’ you could show him a thing or two and he’d benefit from it a damn lot.”
If I was such nails, Foulke thinks sharply, why the fuck aren’t I the one closing.
He nods to Francona, sure, have a chat with the kid. Tell him what it’s like to be a closer in your heart as much as in your arm. Tell him it’s not all velocity, it’s not all location. Tell him how to block out and bear down and shrug everything off your back, water from the wing feathers of a duck. Tell him in an hour what it took Foulke years and years to figure out on his own. Tell him what Foulke learned in hundreds of weight rooms and in the backs of a hundred dusty buses and in a thousand sleepless nights at 20,000 feet, in dozens of different cities, with trainers and coaches and teammates and without, but always with his own two hands and his own two arms and his own two feet and his own head and his own heart.
Right. Sure.
He nods and never talks to the kid. Francona doesn’t bring it up again. Foulke doesn’t know if he doesn’t know, or realizes what he was asking, or is giving up on Foulke as a bad job. Foulke doesn’t care. He’s got to have something left, something he can cling to, and he’ll be damned if he’ll give it away.
----------
Water condenses on the side of his glass of beer, beading slow of its own accord, sliding warmly down the edges to seep into the cardboard coaster at the bottom. Foulke draws his fingertips through it and rests his elbow on the bartop, holding his hand up to see the light of the neon Budweiser sign glint sickly red in the wetness, reflecting his headache back at him.
There’s a racket down at the end of the bar where the rest of the bullpen has entrenched themselves. DiNardo is boasting loudly to Tavarez that he can drink the most hard liquor the fastest and everyone else is betting on it. Not real bets of course, most of them are too careful to even blur that line. They’re betting in scraps of IOU paper and snack pack duty for the upcoming road trip. It seems like a pretty good matchup to Foulke, frat boy drinking power set against the power of belligerent craziness, odds about even as far as he can see, but he’s not betting. He’s not even sitting with them, hunched instead over a stool halfway up the bar, fiddling with the sweat of his beer and pointedly pretending he came alone.
He’s surprised, then, when the kid slides up behind him and slaps a hand down on his shoulder. Foulke starts up before realizing who it is and grumping back down into his slumped posture. The kid’s hand is drunk-heavy on his shoulder and even though he shrugs irritably the kid doesn’t seem inclined to move it.
To his infinite annoyance, the kid hauls himself up onto the neighboring stool, hand still deadweighted on Foulke’s shoulder, and signals for another beer. The bartender slides one over without even paying attention to what it is. It doesn’t matter, because the kid never pays for his own drinks these days. If no one in the bar recognizes him, the bartender (a native, always a thick-voiced native so far as Foulke can tell, and he wonders if there’s perhaps a law that says in order to be a bartender in the city of Boston you have to have lived there for a minimum number of generations) certainly will, and anything the kid drinks will be paid for in full or, just as often, on the house.
“Y’should hang with the guys!” he grins, scattered and friendly. Foulke groans inwardly. He forgets, in not hanging out with these new young arms, how easily they fall into their alcohol.
“Go on back, kid, you’ll miss the contest and you won’t collect on that bet even if you win.”
“Wan’ have fun with you!” Papelbon chirps, and Foulke recalls that the kid doesn’t know much at all about betting, manifestly evidenced by the mohawk incident. He’s still not sure how saving a certain number of games meant that Youkilis got free reign with the kid’s scalp, but Foulke’s pretty sure it’s the sort of thing that could only happen to someone who didn’t know shit about bets. Or, he supposes, about Youkilis. Either way, it had all ended up in a hideous mohawk, which lasted until the kid’s wife (Foulke, his own divorce still freshly bitter on his tongue, gives it another 8 months) got fed up and made the kid shave his head bald.
It’s when this same bald head, now slightly fuzzed, starts dropping down onto Foulke’s shoulder that he knows the kid is done for the night. He grabs him by the back of his shirt and secures a massive handful of fabric, enough to pull the front of the kid’s shirt tight across his chest. Foulke blinks briefly at the muscles thus exposed, forgetting for a moment, in his mental insistence on Papelbon’s youth, that the kid is built more like a major leaguer than a proper kid. Hell, he’s already built more than Matt Clement, although that’s not saying much.
Shaking his own head to clear it, Foulke drags the kid outside. The temptation to leave him unconscious in a bar bathroom is very strong, a delicious thought to savor, but Foulke has no illusions about his place on the team. He’s fully aware that someone will tell Francona that he was out with the rest of the bullpen, and somehow it will become his fault for not getting the precious golden boy home in one piece, because he’s a veteran, and who else is there? A bunch of callow AAA callups, and Julian Tavarez, and no one would expect Julian Tavarez to take responsibility for a potted plant, let alone another person.
Sometimes Foulke catches himself wishing he had cultivated a certain level of crazy as effectively as Tavarez has, but then he sees Tavarez with his eyes bugging out, snarling at a towel that missed the laundry cart when thrown, and he decides it’s all for the best.
He shoves the kid unceremoniously into the side door of his truck and steps back to fish in his pocket for his keys, grumbling to himself at the unfairness of it all. There’s a soft thump and he looks up to see that the kid has kind of collapsed to his knees between Foulke and the truck. He hadn’t thought the kid was that drunk. Foulke rolls his eyes up to the sky, blank expanse turned yellowpink with light pollution hanging in the midnight mist, and reaches down to haul the kid upright again.
Except, instead of allowing himself to be pulled up, the kid grabs hold of Foulke’s hand. Foulke looks down at him, surprised, and is unnerved to see the kid looking up at him with a weird smile on his face. It’s a little trembling at the corners and a little soft at the middle and the light isn’t very good. Foulke doesn’t bother trying to read the kid normally, and he can’t read him at all right now.
The kid leans forward, unfamiliar smile still aimed upwards, and dexterously undoes Foulke’s belt with one hand.
Foulke yelps and jumps backwards, sending the kid sprawling forward onto the pavement. He grabs at his belt and hastily looks around, god, what if someone was in the parking lot and saw that? What if they thought something was going on? They’re both public figures, closers past and present, and that’s not exactly a low-profile job in this region. What the fuck does the kid think he’s playing at?
The kid sits up and wipes his palms against each other, gravel raining from between his hands, swaying slightly. It must be painful and it could be trouble for his pitching if he has to get in the next night’s game, but Foulke really could not give a shit about that. He rebuckles his belt and keeps one hand on it, protectively, approaching the kid and watching him closely as though he’s a bomb that might go off if not handled properly.
“Wan’ have fun with you,” Papelbon says, again, eyes closed and that smile, which Foulke now recognizes as a drunken attempt at seductiveness, still hitched onto his face. “Lemme show you.” Fun. Christ. He hadn’t even known the kid was into that shit.
Wordlessly, he grabs the kid under one arm and drags him upright. He turns him around and plants a hand in the center of his back, slamming him into the door to hold him in place and out of the way while he digs for his keys again.
The little fucker wriggles under his hand and turns his head sideways, cheek smooshed against the window of the truck. “’K,” he slurs, almost fucking purring, “we can play that way if y’want.”
Foulke chokes a little and stiffens his arm to stay as far away from the kid as possible. He finally finds his keys and unlocks the truck, shoving the kid in and buckling him into the seat as hastily as he can, with as little contact as is possible. He slams the door and takes a moment alone in the parking lot to breathe, deep and regular.
After he manages to get the kid to tell him his address, he drives there as fast as he can, ignoring signs and slamming down on the gas when he sees yellow in front of him. He squeals to a stop in front of the house, hauls Papelbon out of the truck and dumps him in a heap on his front stoop. The kid pets his shoe and giggles. Foulke toes him softly in the ribs and jabs at the doorbell a few times, figures it’s enough to wake up the kid’s wife.
He just walks away. It’s no longer his problem. He’s leaving a star pitcher lying in an inebriated little mound, palms scraped up with black gravel and grime, for his young wife to discover and somehow, somehow he’s going to get yelled at for it, but he never asked to be a babysitter or anything else, where Papelbon was concerned.
His relief as he drives home is so strong that it almost blinds him. He has to pull over along the highway, cars whizzing by in streaks of white and red like a long-exposure photograph while he rests his forehead on the steering wheel, pants almost hysterically, and he doesn’t even know why.
----------
Once, two seasons before, during that magical year, Foulke had been in the showers at the wrong time. It wasn’t his fault, he usually showered with the rest of the team as a matter of course, but Francona had pulled himself aside to discuss some finer points of his pitching, and how long he thought he would be able to keep it up. Foulke was in pain, unsteady knees and a worrying grind under the bone caps, but in those days that wasn’t anything, he was determined and invincible.
Reassuring Francona had taken time, though, and when he finally made it into the showers most of the team had already gone. He was standing under the spray, turned down to as cold a stream as he could stand it to blast the game from his skin, when his head jogged at a strange sound. It was a wet, heavy sort of sound, the kind of sound that made him immediately nervous even though he couldn’t exactly place it.
Wiping the soap from his eyes, he had tentatively poked his head out of the showers and had been treated to the sight of Kevin Millar bent over a bench with Manny Ramirez busily burying himself in his ass.
Foulke had stared for a full minute in shock before ducking back into the shower and turning the temperature all the way up, trying to scald the sight out of his mind.
He had wrapped a towel around his waist and walked right past them on his way out, ignoring them as firmly as he could and moving at a dignified, unhurried pace, because he was damned if he was going to be freaked out of his own fucking clubhouse.
When he realized he had forgotten his watch and had to pass them again before he could leave, Millar was biting his own hand and squealing around it, and Manny looked up as he walked by.
Foulke had stared at him, trying very hard to not say anything.
Manny had grinned, given him a jaunty double point, and then gone back to his business.
There wasn’t anything Foulke could do or say, because they were winning at that point and you never fuck with the luck, even if the luck involves a worrying exchange of bodily fluids between two teammates. And they had gone on to win it all, so he supposed maybe there was something in it after all.
Millar is an Oriole now, still calling everyone up and leaving incoherent messages on their voicemails at strange hours of the night, living for games in Boston, sheepish in orange and black, so Foulke had assumed that that was the end of that, and he hadn’t thought about it since. Hadn’t really thought that it was something people did, in baseball. It had struck him as a Manny and Millar thing, a weird little bit of their friendship that belonged to them alone. And that had made sense, because they were never Manny and Millar so much as they were MannyMillar, all for one and one for all, a pair in every way, unique in that.
The idea of one, of one guy being interested in that all his own, it baffles Foulke. Caught him off-guard. Manny and Millar had done, well, that because they were two together. Papelbon, so far as Foulke can tell, has no one on the team like that.
He’s just. Well. Apparently gay. All on his own.
Or, Foulke supposes, bi, unless the wife is a much more long-suffering individual than he’d given her credit for.
Still, the kid was drunk and Foulke doesn’t really think, when he gets home and calms down and looks at it rationally, that it’s something he’s going to have to worry about in the future. He revises his mental estimation of the length of the kid’s marriage to 5 months and otherwise puts the incident out of his mind.
----------
Beckett is throwing the kind of high heat that Foulke could never dream of, sickeningly overpowering. The Rangers are baffled, all those big bats swinging emptily through warm dry air. It’s a do-nothing kind of day in the bullpen, the starter looking like he won’t be needing much help, the weather hot enough to keep anyone from wanting to move any more than they absolutely have to. Foulke sprawls on the bench, his legs sticking far out to keep bodyheat away from his core, a towel soaked in cold water evaporating fast, draped around the back of his neck.
It’s so hot that he doesn’t even have the energy to work up a disparaging remark when the kid plops down next to him and offers a cup of cold Gatorade. Foulke drinks it quickly, before the Texas air can leech the coolness from it, and he can feel it running down in the center of his chest like an icy hand stroking under his breastbone.
“You’re married, right?” the kid asks, apropos of nothing. Foulke hesitates and shoots him a look. He’s pretty fucking sure that the kid knows exactly what his marital state is, he knows it was discussed all over the clubhouse last season, the sort of amazing mess that other ballplayers like to talk about, in a relieved ‘at least it isn’t me’ sort of way.
“Divorced,” he grunts, shortly. The question, he decides, doesn’t deserve much more than that.
“How come?
He shrugs one shoulder casually. It’s the same reason any baseball wife in the league could legitimately divorce her husband if she wanted to, nothing new in that department.
“Slept around, huh?” The kid is drumming his heels on the ground under the bench and looking expectantly at Foulke, who rolls his eyes and gives a brisk nod in confirmation. Christ. Of course he fucking slept around. The city loves its baseball players and the college population is enormous, it’s a fortuitous fucking combination for a guy who likes to have a little fun.
Teixeira hits a long, high fly ball that captures their attention for a moment, but they track it harmlessly into Trot’s glove in right. On the mound, Beckett pumps his fist and shouts. In the bullpen, Foulke is too warm and languid to move even when the kid, eyes ostensibly hooked on the arching ball, grabs his shoulder and squeezes familiarly.
Foulke just closes his eyes and waits for it, like the pain in his knees and the sullenness in his heart, to go away.
----------
He doesn’t really hate baseball, not like it’s been made to seem, the way the media has quoted him. They make it sound like he plays baseball only for the paycheck, pure mercenary, someone who would rather be playing hockey and treats this, American fantasy for every man and many women, as simple vulgar rote.
That’s not it at all. He just, with things as they were (are), doesn’t take the same kind of uncomplicated joy in it that someone like, say, Ortiz does. He doesn’t even have the deliberate sort of love for baseball that Schilling does. He doesn’t feel destined for it, like Delcarmen, or immersed in it, like Varitek. Baseball doesn’t amaze him like it does Loretta, and he doesn’t have half as much fun with it as Manny does.
Baseball is a job, but it’s his job, and he loves it as much as he does anything he can do well and succeed at. When they were winning and he was untouchable, Christ, you would have had to be an idiot to say that Keith Foulke didn’t love baseball.
It’s this degrading bench-riding, though, this forced semi-exile, this constant rolling soreness in his knees. It drags a guy down. It makes him incapable of looking past the next paycheck, because there’s nothing else to look forward to. And Foulke’s never been one to censor his thoughts, and in this city, fuck, make one honest comment and you’ll never hear the end of it until you’re fairly run out of town, and again every time you come back to play against the home team, and again in the between-times when local writers are short of ready material.
Boston holds grudges. They’re fucking proud of it. Back when he used to wander around town, still amazed by the sort of city he’d landed himself in, Foulke had walked past all the signs of it. The Boston Tea Party boat, a historical grudge if he ever saw it. Logan Airport in the hazy distance, runways spidering off the impossible little island, a great big fuck-you to common sense. The roads that ran contrary to any semblance of reason, a grudge against every out-of-town driver that ever ventured within the city limits.
But if the city can hold a grudge, so can he. He’s bound by the terms of his contract and nicety, society and business, he can’t do anything, not exactly. But if Papelbon is going to take his job, he’s not going to forget it. And he’s not going to forgive it.
It’s the city passing on a little bit of its own character to its unwanted children. It’s natural. Let the city color those who move within it, that’s always been Foulke’s way of thinking, when in Rome and all that, and there’s no reason to go changing now. He’ll show them how it’s done.
----------
Another day, another win, another Papelbon save. The kid sidles up to Foulke in the locker room and intrudes a hand on the side of Foulke’s locker, real casual.
“Bunch of us goin’ to the bar after this, you want in?”
“Nuh,” Foulke grunts, neatly tying his cleats together at the laces and heaving them into the depths of the locker.
The kid’s face half-falls, something Foulke can see his peripheral vision. “C’mon, man, it’ll be fun. We can have some fun. Promise!”
Foulke digs out his sneakers and jams his feet into them without untying them, his heels squashing down the backs. He rolls his feet until the backs pop up again, then very calculatingly raises his eyes to the kid’s face. Eye contact. The little fucker is hopeful and trying to look sexily cool, which is pathetic on several different levels, so far as Foulke is concerned. It’s perfect.
“I’m not fuckin’ interested,” he says, bland and calm as though it’s the most obvious thing in the world, “in your fun.”
He doesn’t even wait to see the way the kid crumples before turning neatly on his heel and striding out of the clubhouse. He knows how it goes down and, like with a ball off the bat destined for the turnpike, he doesn’t have turn around to watch his handiwork.
----------
He’s watching the end of Saturday Night Live at 1 am when the phone rings. Foulke automatically picks it up and flips it open, wincing when he hears the quavery voice of the kid saying his name down the other end of the line. He should have checked the caller ID first.
The kid, surprisingly, doesn’t sound drunk. He just sounds contrite, and a little scared. It transpires that he had gotten a ride to an unfamiliar bar with Tavarez, who had then disappeared with a girl and his car, leaving Papelbon stranded and standing on a street corner, unwilling to call and worry his wife, but more than willing to call and bother Foulke.
The description of the place sounds familiar to Foulke and, sighing, he gets into his truck and heads towards it. He circles around a few likely-looking blocks before he spots the kid, standing yellow under a lone streetlight like a fucking target, arms folded tightly and nervously to his chest, head twitching side to side, his entire attitude screaming, “Mug me!”
He pulls up and the kid wordlessly gets in. As Foulke pulls away from the curb he can see that the kid is shaking, his knees jittering and his hands drumming in a little curled-together knot in his lap. Foulke rolls his eyes and aims for the kid’s house.
Halfway there the kid mumbles something, sounding plaintive. “Speak up,” Foulke grunts, in no mood for guessing games.
“Don’t take me home,” the kid whispers, nearly pleading. Foulke shoots a surprised glance at him and the kid hangs his head, stares at his twisting hands. “I. I can’t go home like this.”
The car passes under a high bright streetlight and the interior is briefly illuminated. Foulke can see the kid clearly for just an instant, but it’s enough to realize that, aside from the shaking, there’s a nervous flush on his face, a scratch on his cheek, a certain disarray to his clothes, and what looks suspiciously like a bite mark on his neck.
It’s all Foulke can do to stifle his laughter. “What,” he asks, amusement bleeding through. “Bad pickup? Left a few too many marks to explain away for the little lady?”
The kid doesn’t say anything, still staring at his hands and shaking slightly. “What?” Foulke asks again, laughter starting to edge into his voice. “C’mon. I’ve been around the block. She scratch your back while you were fuckin’ her, or what?”
“I didn’t know what to expect,” Papelbon whispers, his eyes still lowered and his voice unsure.
Foulke thumps the wheel and takes the turning to his apartment instead of the one that would take him to the kid’s house. “Aw, c’mon now. You ain’t never fucked a rowdy groupie before?”
“Didn’t know who I was. I don’t. Don’t think he was a groupie.”
“What the fuck were you doin’ botherin’ with someone who wasn’t…” Wait. Foulke backtracks the kid’s statement in his mind, mental rewind whirring. “Wait. He?”
Christ. He hadn’t thought the kid was that much, well, like that, enough that he’d be going in that direction when he hit the bars by himself.
The kid doesn’t say anything for a long time and Foulke has to take his eyes from the road when they pull up to a red light to look at him. The red shine on the edge of Papelbon’s profile makes the rest of him look sickly pale. His head is still hanging, his hands still wringing nervously. The light turns green and Foulke sees it in the change of color on the tip of Papelbon’s nose.
“Kid?” he asks, aware that he’s treading on slightly unstable ground now.
Papelbon makes some small movement that Foulke sees out of the corner of his eye, but they’re back on Storrow Drive now and Foulke has lived here long enough to know that you only take your eyes off the road on Storrow Drive if you have suicidal tendencies. The kid shifts again and when he finally speaks it’s slightly muffled, as though he’s put a hand over his face.
“Thought I wanted to,” he mumbles. “Well. Did. But then. Well. Didn’t.”
Foulke blinks at the road. He doesn’t really know what to say. This is not something he ever signed on for, no sir, and he’s got no fucking idea how to deal with it. He tries to sneak a glance over at the kid again, but Papelbon is staring out the window and all Foulke can see is the back of his head.
They drive in silence for a minute, Foulke mulling it over. He’s not sure how this goes; is he supposed to try to find out exactly what happened, is that important? Or is he supposed to avoid the subject altogether for the rest of their lives? Eventually he decides that it’s more vital to get everything clear than to handle the kid with, well, kid gloves. If the fucker really wants to be a closer he can’t be too soft anyhow.
Tito would be so proud. Being a closer, lesson number one.
“What did. Uh.” It turns out to be a little harder to put into words than Foulke had thought, especially when he’s driving at the same time. He can just barely see that the kid has turned his head a little bit, paying attention. He navigates a tricky turn of the road and marshals his thoughts as best he can.
“What did. OK. I mean. You didn’t want to, so, you, uh. Didn’t. Right? Or.”
A taxi cuts him off and Foulke slams on the brakes, whaling on the horn, grateful for the distraction. He drives on another mile fuming and growling about the fucking awful drivers that get licensed to operate cabs in this fucking city, a fucking crime is what it oughta be, if you’re that bad a driver and still getting paid to do just that.
He quiets down and the kid makes a small noise, a tiny clearing of his throat.
“Did,” he says, voice no bigger than the tiny sound before it.
Hard to ask now, of course, but he can’t be delicate. It’s not in his nature, and it shouldn’t be in the kid’s nature either. Hard to ask, but he’s doing him a favor here, somewhere down the line.
“What, when you say, did, what d’you mean by that?”
There’s a pause filled with an awful kind of anticipation and in the unquiet quiet Foulke pulls into the tiny parking lot behind his building, holding his breath as his truck trundles down the short alleyway leading to it as he always does, taking every pain possible to make sure he doesn’t shear the sideview mirrors off, millimeters away from the brick.
He puts the truck in park and turns off the ignition. The key dangles from the steering wheel column and the silence deepens marginally.
The kid is looking at his hands again, for all his past bravado still embarrassed to look at Foulke and say the kind of things he, in better circumstances, might want to say. He looks somehow reduced, finally looking like the kid Foulke calls him in his mind.
Flying by the seat of his fucking pants here, Christ. Foulke reaches over and very gently squeezes the kid’s shoulder, as companionly and without extraneous connotation as he can possibly make it.
There’s a tiny sniffle and the kid’s shoulders square up under Foulke’s palm. He leaves his hand there. He can be that generous, this once.
“Saw him at the bar,” the kid says, so quiet and low that at first Foulke thinks it’s just night noises melting into the truck cab interior air. “Looked at each other, bar bathroom, well. Y’know how it is. Thought I. Well. Makin’ out, was OK, got. Y’know. Worked up some. An’ I guess, guess I wasn’t sure how it was gonna go from there, cause I ain’t. Well. An’ he kinda. Got me kneelin, an’ I said I didn’t know how or nothin’, and he just. Well. Put me to it.
An’ I mighta struggled ‘gainst it a little but. Didn’t never say no. Not exactly. So I guess it ain’t. Well.”
Foulke doesn’t know too much about it but he does know that this sounds pretty much like what Papelbon is saying it isn’t. He’s never been a particularly sensitive guy, but back in ’04 Kapler had made them all sit in on one of his wife’s little lecture things about, Christ, domestic abuse and shit, the kind of stuff she’d gone through before she met Kapler. Foulke hadn’t paid very much attention to it at the time, had had the feeling that it was mostly directed at Derek Lowe, at whom Kapler had glared the whole way through, because they all knew what Lowe was getting up to, in that know-but-don’t-know kind of way that goes on in baseball, and he was the one who needed to hear that that shit wasn’t cool.
It comes back to him a little bit now, though, and he’s not clear on the legal details or anything, of course, but he’s pretty fucking sure that there was something in there about not needing to say the word ‘no’ to make it, well, bad. Or whatever.
He squeezes the kid’s shoulder more firmly and studies the way he squares up even more. It’s almost enough to make a guy proud, and Foulke isn’t at all used to that.
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go on to part II