catching up
This was, originally, a request from tangleofthorns. She said, Pudge Rodriguez has a kink for big, goofy, flame-throwing pitchers who think they're heterosexual. Tell me how he indulges it. It was originally going to be a quick, fun 5-times-type fic. As you can see, it got a bit out of hand. In related news, I hate writing.
pairing(s): Iván (Pudge) Rodriguez/ (Maribel Rodriguez; Nolan Ryan; Ugueth Urbina; Josh Beckett; Justin Verlander)
rated: hard R
length: 73,488 words
NOTES: Conversation //in backslashes// is taking place in Spanish, between native speakers. I wasn't really sure how else to handle this, as many of the characters in this fic would naturally speak Spanish around each other, not English; this was the best solution I could come up with. If it doesn't work for you, or you have a better solution in mind, please let me know. Given the number of Spanish-speaking characters in the fandom, I'm sure it'll come up again in future fic.
This is the longest fic I have written to date, in terms of words (73,000+), pages (152, single-spaced in Word), and time period covered (1991-2022). tangleofthorns, I blame you.
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.
catching up
1991
The Rangers’ double-A team, at the time, was called the Tulsa Drillers. It was entirely as ridiculous as it sounded, but it was also only two steps down from Texas, real baseball, and that, Pudge kept telling himself, was something that made it all worthwhile. He was on the mainland, he was getting paid to play in the pros. He had a girlfriend named Maribel who kept him mostly sane when he was off the field and nothing else stood between him and the flat, terrible, khaki-colored Tulsa-ness of it all.
Once he had made it to those minor leagues, though, it all happened very fast. One morning he was bumming around the stadium in his gimmicky Drillers hat, wondering what he would do if he broke another bat (in double-A, there were only so many bats, and after you had broken a certain number you and the team would just be shit out of luck) and that very same night he was in Comiskey Park, wearing an honest-to-god Rangers away uniform, crisp and clean and with his name across the back, with promises of as many bats as he could have ever possibly wanted.
His very first game, he threw out two runners trying to steal (they didn’t know him yet, of course, didn’t know what it meant for him to be behind the plate). He hit a two-run single and they got the ball for him, tossed it back into the dugout so he could keep it to remember his first big league hit, in case he never got another one. He called pitches for Kevin Brown, and then for Mike Jeffcoat. The Rangers won.
It was an anonymous Thursday in the middle of June. The start of his big league career wasn’t a big deal, worthy of announcements or anything; he was just another kid catcher with a club that wanted to get a better look at him, up where it mattered. He was nineteen years old.
**
Nolan Ryan made his big league debut five years before Pudge was even born. By the time Pudge met him, Ryan had evolved-- or perhaps devolved-- quite a bit from the scrawny, smooth-faced teenager he had been when he first came up. Pudge had seen the old pictures. There were lines around Ryan’s eyes and under his jaw now, where the skin looked looser than it had back in those black-and-white days. His hair was shaggier, less sleek, sprinkled with gray and edging backwards up his forehead.
He still wore his uniform fitted close to his body, though, his socks halfway up his calves with the stirrups cut as high as they would go, and it still looked good on him-- the old ballplayer pooch hadn’t snuck up on him yet. Pudge probably weighed more than he did, even though Ryan was half a foot taller. His leg kick was as huge as it had ever been, so that at the top of his pitching motion he could tuck his nose up against his kneecap. It terrified Pudge the first time he saw it up close. Nobody pitched like that in the minors.
Of course, this was Nolan Ryan. Nobody pitched like that, period.
When Pudge got to him, Ryan had just thrown his seventh no-hitter. In Tulsa one of the clubhouse kids videotaped it while the Drillers played, and they all crowded into the humid, cramped locker room afterwards to watch it on the half-busted TV they had down there, which had a dead stripe on the left side of the screen but otherwise worked OK, so nobody bothered to replace it. There wasn’t much drama in it-- they all knew the only games that got taped were perfect, or no-hitters, games that had triple plays in them or something-- but it still made Pudge’s heart skip, a little bit, watching that. Seven no-hitters. That was more than Sandy Koufax had thrown; that was more than anybody had thrown. And here Pudge was now, expected to catch for the guy who had thrown them.
He knew, of course, in some abstract way, that Ryan threw hard. He had seen it on TV, and in ballparks; even up close once, when the Rangers brought some young prospects in to watch the veterans practice one spring. But experiencing it first-hand, literally, the ball exploding in his glove like a concentrated cannonball, Dios. That was something else.
His very first warm-up session with Ryan, he came away sweaty, red-faced, panting. He barely had to move his feet, only rocking backwards and forwards on his heels, shifting from the tensely coiled catching position to the more firmly based knees-in-the-dirt throwing position. Ryan had been the one doing all the work, but somehow it was Pudge whose heart was racing like he’d just run a marathon.
“You OK, kid?” Ryan asked, coming off the bare practice mound to peer down at Pudge critically.
“Sí, OK.” It was kind of embarrassing; he couldn’t even say that much without sounding breathless. He straightened up out of his crouch and realized, to his extreme mortification, that he barely came up to Ryan’s chin, even with his helmet and cleats on.
“That little ol’ fastball ain’t too fast for ya, right?” Ryan teased, rough, but concerned too, like he was worried that it really might be too much for a rookie. He had a Texan drawl, overwrought vowels and lazy consonants, so authentic it almost swung back around into parody.
Pudge shook his head, not trusting himself to say anything.
They got their first win together in July. Ryan struck out fourteen and seemed mostly bored by the entire process. He was nearing the end of his career and at that point, if it wasn’t a no-hitter, he did not seem inclined to find it exciting. Pudge put down the signs, calling for the fastball and the slider; he had the most intimate, immediate knowledge possible of where the pitches were headed, and he still could not believe how Ryan was pitching.
Wally Joyner, batting late in the game, muttered, “Hol-ee fuckballs,” to himself, skipping the head of his bat desultorily in the dirt after Ryan struck him out. Pudge was willing to take that as a small comfort. At least he wasn’t the only one reduced to stunned amazement.
**
He talked to Kenny Rogers sometimes. Rogers was older than him, but not so much in baseball terms-- he had only been around for a year and a bit. He had met his wife in high school, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything, and he wore his pants tighter than, like, figure skaters, so Pudge figured maybe it was safe to talk. He worked up to it, of course: an off-hand remark about Juan Gonzalez’s ass, the kind of thing that could have been brushed off as a joke, then a more serious comment. Then, when Rogers showed no particular signs of freaking out, a deep sigh over the fact that Gonzalez’s ass was off-limits.
“More’s the shame,” Rogers said, deadpan. Pudge never did figure out if Rogers was actually some variety of gay, or bisexual, or if he just didn’t give a fuck, not even years later when they met up again in Detroit, but it worked out the same so far as he was concerned. So long as there was at least one person he could talk to, for whatever reason, he’d be fine. It was the one thing he couldn’t talk about with Maribel-- she understood a lot, about him and about baseball, but they were married now, their phone conversations revolving around American kid’s TV programming and unexpected choking hazards that could be picked up by tiny hands. There were some things better left unsaid, there.
They had just lost a game to the Brewers, roasted by the unrelenting Texas heat that should have edged the advantage their way. Pudge was annoyed with himself because he had only managed one hit, a single. Rogers was annoyed with himself because he had particularly wanted to strike Robin Yount out and he hadn’t managed it. Everyone was annoyed because they couldn’t afford the loss, pressure starting to tamp down all around them.
The postgame spread consisted of some kind of awful semi-soggy sandwich things that Pudge could not bring himself to eat, so he ended up, without ever discussing it, at Wei Good with Rogers. Wei Good was a small, calculatedly shabby-looking Chinese restaurant in Arlington, the kind of place that was crowded with permanently sticky tabletops and chairs that looked like they had been discarded from three or four different institutional cafeterias. It was the kind of place that most ballplayers would not be caught dead in, which was a significant part of why Pudge liked it: he was unlikely to run into anyone he didn’t want to run into while he was trying to eat. The food was also fairly cheap, a plus for someone who was still making the major league minimum.
“Sucked today,” Rogers muttered, in between mouthfuls of something noodley. “Should be gettin’ past these fuckers.”
“Sí, I know.” Pudge pushed his own food around his plate with a chopstick. Wei Good did not have forks, although whether this was an authenticity thing or some sort of cost-effectiveness thing was hard to say. “You pitched good, should have more wins by now. Nolan also. His ERA, what is it, three an’ a bit? And the best we can get him is 4 wins. Pat’etic.”
Rogers nodded. “Right, right. It’s like, the way he throws, how’s he lose at all?”
Pudge nodded back, thoughtfully stabbing a gooey piece of chicken. “You think he’s hot?” he asked, casually as he could manage. Rogers’ head snapped up. He gave Pudge a long, unreadable look, his heavy jaw frozen shut. A little bit wary, which maybe Pudge deserved. “I was jus’, you know. Thinking.”
“He’s pretty old,” Rogers said, eyes narrowed across the table. “Like, twenty years older than you. Right?”
“I guess.” More like twenty-four or twenty-five years older. More than twice as old as Pudge, anyways. He twirled his chopsticks, gathering a skein of noodles up around his chicken. “Age is jus’ a number, though, no? I mean, he still pitches good, he don’t pitch his age.” He smiled to make it a joke, because Rogers was still watching him cautiously, nervously, like Pudge was a bomb that might explode at any moment.
“He’s married,” Rogers said. Pudge tilted his head and stared across the table, politely not saying anything, until Rogers sighed and shook his head. “Yeah, OK, I know, so’s most everyone. But I’m pretty sure he’s. Not into.” He gestured vaguely. “Not into. You know.”
“Not into teens?” Pudge prompted. Rogers pressed his lips together and jerked his head minutely to the side. “Not into the short kid? Not into the fat kid? No? More rump for better hump, no, you don’t think?” Rogers seemed to be developing a sort of facial tic. Pudge forged onwards. “Not into the Puerto Rican lovin’? Not into catchers? No? You don’t think?”
Rogers’ lips had gotten whiter and whiter as he pressed them together more and more tightly, his façade of disapproval growing tenser, more tightly-strung, until finally it snapped and he dropped his chopsticks, putting a hand over his face and laughing helplessly. “Oh fuck you, man, fuck.”
Pudge waited for him to subside into hiccupping giggles. “I know,” he said. “Not into los hombres.” He sighed. “Who is?”
Rogers refused to rise to the bait, wiping his eyes and picking up his chopsticks again. “Girls are easier. You should know--“ pointing at Pudge with a chopstick, “you went’n married one.”
“Is not like dat,” Pudge muttered, because it wasn’t. Maribel loved him and he-- truly, honestly, sincerely-- loved her. She was sweet and practical and he could so easily see himself spending the rest of his life with her, growing old in the comfortable circle of her arms, raising a little pack of bilingual babies who would wear miniature versions of his jersey and try his catching glove on while it was still way too big for them. None of that was about easy.
This other thing, where he looked at guys, and sometimes did more than look, that was no different from what every other ballplayer did when they went on the road. Road sex was something all its own. The groupies and college kids and willing hangers-on, they were just another road-city diversion, like a little too much alcohol in an unfamiliar bar filled with opposing-team fans. They had nothing to do with the family you had at home.
All of which Rogers knew, of course. He wasn’t some kind of exception to the ballplayer rule. Pudge scowled at him. Rogers shoved more noodles into his mouth, eyebrows raised, not saying anything.
1993
Dr. Conway, the team physician, was eyeing him beadily from the top of the clubhouse steps. Pudge ignored him, bending to finish snapping his shinguards into place. He could feel Conway’s eyes on his back all the way out to home plate.
Things had, admittedly, been a bit of medical drama for him lately. His cheekbone had been fractured on a backswing a week ago, which was both incredibly painful (he had broken fingers and hands and even a rib, once, but he’d never broken his face before) and incredibly stupid (it wasn’t even his own fault). He had had surgery to stabilize it last Friday. They put little metal plates into his face, which was sort of cool. He was like some kind of robot now, or something-- cyborg, hombre mecánico, whatever.
Here it was Wednesday of the next week, and he was back out on the field, with Conway tagging along, annoying the trainers. The previous day he had come out in the middle of the game with torturous dizzy spells. Not just light-headedness: the entire field had felt like it was spinning around him, the dirt beneath his cleats old oatmeal with a thin skin over it, lurching unpredictably every time he tried to move more than one step in any direction. It was hard to say if it had been the surgery itself or the pain medication that had brought it on. Conway had insisted upon bed rest, which in all fairness seemed to have done the job.
In this game he wasn’t dizzy at all. At this point Conway was only making him nervous, which was going to make him act dizzy just because he’d be thinking about it so damn much, and that was bad, because Ryan was pitching. Pudge needed his wits about him if he was going to have a prayer of catching that fastball.
The forced cold shoulder worked for the first inning; Conway gave him a very dubious once-over when he came back to the dugout, but made no move to pull Pudge from the game. When he was sure Conway had turned away to talk to someone else, he carefully pressed two fingers to his cheek. It was still a little puffy from the surgery, although the redness had gone and he was sure nobody could tell unless they were intimately familiar with what his face normally looked like. Soreness lingered long after he took the pressure of his fingers away.
He edged up to Ryan while their first trio of batters limbered up. “Ey.”
“What.” Ryan was annoyed; he had given up two runs in the first, although one of them had come on an error. Dean Palmer, who had bobbled the ball, was all the way down at the other end of the dugout, cowering unsubtly behind the water cooler.
“Maybe we should throw somethin’ dat is not a fastball,” Pudge suggested, in as mild a voice as he muster.
“Maybe you should try not bein’ such a pussy,” Ryan said. He wasn’t even looking at Pudge, his eyes a thousand miles away.
Pudge sighed. This was actually fairly civil for Ryan, who could wind himself up to an unbearable degree while he was pitching. Anyways, by braving the fire of Ryan’s wrath and bringing it up, he had discharged his duty. If Ryan wanted to throw fastballs for the rest of the game, fine: it was still, of course, Pudge’s problem, but it could no longer be said that it was in any way his fault.
The second inning went easily enough until Alex Fernandez, the White Sox pitcher, hit Juan Gonzalez high and inside, way up on his shoulders, almost under his chin. It was probably not intentional, but Pudge, messing around with pine tar in the dugout, flinched hard anyways. Ryan was not the type of pitcher who would let that go by without making some sort of reprisal with his own arm. Pudge slowly wiped down the handle of his bat, drawing it out, nervously running over the White Sox lineup in his head. Matt Merullo, the DH, would be up first, then Robin Ventura (he glanced at third base without meaning to), then Steve Sax (another involuntary glance, out to right field this time).
Ryan wouldn’t go after Merullo. He was a terrible hitter and would almost certainly make an out on his own. That left Ventura and Sax, and then Dan Pasqua, assuming one of them was put on base.
Julio Franco lined into a double play, cursing floridly as he passed Pudge on his way back to the dugout. Pudge schooled his face into careful blankness, although in truth he was frustrated; Fernandez was a good pitcher, chary with runs, and batting with empty bases arrayed in front of him, two outs already on the board, was not going to make it any easier.
He stared out at the outfield wall’s broad semicircular path across the grass for a moment. There were no corners or tricky bits in Arlington, just that sweeping curve; when there was a lot of stupid bullshit going on in a game, like there was right now, the smoothly unbroken wall was a kind of calming talisman for him. Like he could reach out and run his hand over the long blue line of it.
He cut his eyes back to Fernandez, who brought his hands up together in front of his face, hiding his nose. He took a deep breath. Pudge took a deep breath. The bat balanced perfectly in his hands, so secure in his palms that he barely had to touch it with his fingers. Fernandez exploded in a flurry of arms and legs.
The curveball that resulted was hanging so fat that Pudge almost fell over in his haste to get around on it. He made contact and the ball bounced hard on the grass, a tricky grounder. For one glorious second he thought that it was going to get away from the outfielder, but Raines ran it down, and Pudge pulled up sharply past first, pushing off backwards to bounce his tailing foot back onto the base itself, as clean a single as anyone could ask for.
Of course his triumph lasted for all of a minute, which was all the time that it took for Palmer to step into the batter’s box, waggle his bat importantly, and line out to deep left. Pudge closed his eyes momentarily before tipping his batting helmet off into his hands. He had hoped-- against all reason, when Palmer was involved-- that they could extend the inning, that a longer inning would give Ryan more time to let his rage simmer out. A quick glance at Ryan as Pudge tucked his helmet back into its tar-stained dugout cubby was enough to tell him that there had been absolutely no calming whatsoever.
The White Sox came up to bat. Merullo popped predictably out to center, the ball floating up into the sky lazily, dropping down slowly enough for Pudge to follow it even against the riotous colors of the crowd. Ventura stepped in, scraping at the painted lines of the batter’s box with the toe of his cleat. Pudge settled into his crouch and tapped three fingers against the inside of his right thigh. Ryan shook his head, then straightened up to narrow his eyes at Pudge. Pudge knew what Ryan wanted to throw, and Ryan knew perfectly well that Pudge knew.
He sighed, and shot a single finger downwards, stabbing it towards the ground. He did not have to look up to know that Ryan would accept the call. The both of them would be living and dying by the fastball for the rest of the game, and Pudge was going to have little say in the matter. Fine. He was fine with it. Ryan was the longest-tenured veteran on the team, one of the longest-lasting players in the league; he had more than earned the right to overrule his catcher and call his own game if he liked. Fine.
The pitch came rocketing in almost faster than Pudge could follow. Even so he could see it tailing inside, and high, and although he didn’t have time to actually sigh again, he managed a kind of mental sigh, and had already started shifting in that direction by the time the ball slammed into Ventura. Ventura, his own ballplayer instincts no doubt tingling, had turned into it a little, so that the ball hit him hard on the flat of a shoulder blade, instead of worryingly close to his face. There was no crunch of bone, but it still made a mildly nauseating, meaty thud as it impacted Ventura’s flesh.
There was, at that point, a Moment.
The entire ballpark seemed to be holding its breath. Ventura had taken one automatic step out of the box and stopped, staring at the ground, as if he was thinking. He still had his bat in his hands, although it was dangling uselessly. Pudge was half in and half out of his crouch, hamstrings complaining, torn between wanting to go after the ball and wanting to keep an eye on Ventura. Ryan was standing up straight on the mound, staring off into the middle distance to show Ventura, and by extension the entire White Sox team, exactly how much he thought of them. It was, briefly, quiet.
Ventura dropped the bat. As soon it had got clear of his hands he reached up and tore the helmet off his head, throwing it aside and changing direction, charging out towards the mound. Ryan immediately shed his glove and stepped slightly to the side as Ventura made the mistake of going in low to knock Ryan off balance.
Instead of obligingly falling over, Ryan grabbed Ventura around the neck and started punching him vigorously in the head. Pudge raced up from behind, trying to grab Ventura by the waist and pull him away. Protecting his pitcher from any and all rogue batting elements was an expected part of his job, but he was not at all sure that it was Ryan who needed protecting. Ventura was 25 and in the brawny prime of health. Ryan was 46, old enough to be balding, for God’s sake, but Ventura was utterly helpless in Ryan’s grip, and all Pudge could think was that Ryan might actually kill Ventura, break his neck or crack his skull or something, and he had to get Ventura out of there before irreparable damage was done. Which was crazy-- when was the last time someone had actually died on a baseball field?-- but with Ryan’s fist slamming into Ventura’s head over and over again, his arm already nice and loosened-up by all those damn fastballs, it did not seem so very impossible.
He kept getting shoved around, side to side, back and forth, but with all of his attention focused on Ventura and Ryan, it took Pudge a little bit to realize that the shouting was not just coming from the two main combatants, that an awful lot of other people had spilled out onto the field, pressed in around him. Some of them were trying to pull on Ryan, some were trying to pull on Ventura, some were trying to pull on Pudge himself. He gave up on extricating Ventura from the now-roiling mass of ballplayers and concentrated on just staying upright for a while. He got occasional glimpses of Ryan, enough to confirm that he was still basically unharmed and that Pudge, thus, had not entirely fallen down on the job.
Somebody elbowed him in the face, right on top of his recently-reconstructed cheekbone. Everything went pain-haze-gray for an indeterminate amount of time. It was almost an amazing level of pain, enough to make it seem like his brain had unhooked itself from reality; it did not seem possible that he was still, somewhere in the world, up on his feet and conscious, although that was apparently the case.
The umpires managed to get everyone calm again (their shouting vague to Pudge’s ears, like they were trying to yell at him while he was twenty feet underwater) and he was vaguely aware that he was back behind the plate, going through the automatic motions of catching, throwing, standing at the plate when Coach Kennedy planted a hand in the middle of his ass and shoved him out of the dugout. The next time he was really aware of things again, he was flat on his back in the trainer’s room, staring up at the ceiling, where Conway had taped a third-grade-level poster of the food pyramid.
Make whole grains the base of your nutrition plan today!
Ryan was hovering off to the side, at the edges of Pudge’s peripheral vision. “Sorry,” he said. He was shifting rapidly from foot to foot, some kind of dire excess of energy.
Pudge considered. He seemed to be having trouble thinking clearly. It was not impossible that he had a concussion. “We win?”
Ryan moved closer to the padded trainer’s table, nodded where Pudge could see. “Um. Five t’two. Are you, uh, ok?”
“Sí,” Pudge said, then stopped, surprised, because it was more or less true. He wasn’t really in pain anymore, although by rights his much-abused cheekbone ought to have been throbbing. Conway must have pumped him full of some industrial-grade painkiller, which would also explain a number of other things, such as the interesting way the room seemed to be warping.
“Doc said you…” Ryan trailed off, maybe thinking better of telling Pudge whatever Conway had said. “Anyway. Sorry, it’s… kinda my fault. I forgot you had the…” Ryan waved a hand over his own cheek, and his tone turned faintly chiding. “You shouldn’ta come int’a knockdown fight like that.”
“I’m the catcher,” Pudge said. “He rush you. Canno’ let him jus…”
“I can take care’a myself out there,” Ryan interrupted, “’specially when it comes to little wanna-be punks like Robbie V.” He put a hand on Pudge’s shoulder, squeezed. “But thanks, kid.”
As a gesture, this meant nothing. Actually, it meant a lot of things-- the brotherhood of team, the aged veteran passing approval to the kid still wetting his feet in the league, that hypermasculine middle-American jock habit of expressing complex emotions through wildly inadequate physical gestures with which Pudge had become sadly familiar-- but the kinds of things it indicated were so utterly common in baseball that they did not normally need to be remarked upon.
But Pudge had had a long week, and an even longer day. He had managed to catch most of a nearly three hour baseball game while the world splintered and reformed, distorted by pain. He had been flooded with fight-or-flight adrenaline, probably the only thing that had kept him upright, and now he was drugged out of his mind, doctor’s orders. Whatever senses of self-preservation and restraint he usually had were dulled down to nothingness.
Out of this chemical and mental fog came Ryan’s hand.
What Pudge should have done, when Ryan patted him on the shoulder, was nod manfully, make a sort of expressive grimace. Something like that. He knew how it went; he had been in the game in one way or another for years, with Maribel for many of them. He was familiar with the rules of the game, on and off the field, both written and unwritten.
Instead he closed his eyes, sighed deeply, and put his own hand over Ryan’s. “Drive me home,” he said. “Don’t t’ink I should make to drive myself.”
There was silence for a moment, but then the hand on his shoulder squeezed again. “Sure, kid,” Ryan said.
**
The sight of Ryan walking into his apartment was a deeply strange one. He resisted the urge to look furtively up and down the street; there was nothing wrong with having a friend over, even if it was a teammate, even if it was a veteran who normally wouldn’t have much to do with him, even if it was a superstar surefire Hall of Famer and Pudge still just a couple years out of raw rookiehood.
“Where’s your wife?” Ryan asked, looking around. “You’re married, right?”
Pudge busied himself with the apartment door. It got kind of sticky sometimes, and the latch wouldn’t take properly when he closed it unless he jiggered it just so. “Miami.”
“Miami?”
“All her friends, they are in Miami, you know? Closer to Puerto Rico. It makes her, uh, more happy, to be down there.” He finally got the door closed and turned to look at Ryan, who seemed enormous in the relatively small space, larger than the life Pudge was used to having in his home, and still jittering slightly with post-brawl animation.
“Thanks for the ride,” Pudge said. He walked up to Ryan with the intention of, he didn’t even know, maybe offering him a drink, something innocuous, but his filters were all shot to hell. He kept going, right into Ryan’s space, until he was close enough to stretch up on his toes and kiss Ryan right on the mouth.
Or the lower lip and some of his chin. Ryan was a lot taller, there was only so much he could do.
Ryan went stiff immediately. Pudge could almost see that good solid Texan upbringing zinging along Ryan’s veins, spreading out from his lips to freeze the rest of his body in a shatter-sharp crystalline structure of fear and manly disgust and religious horror.
Under normal circumstances this would have been enough to strike Pudge down like every godly thunderbolt from On High that Ryan must have been imagining at that very moment. But it was already August. The season was winding down. Ryan had announced that he was retiring after this year anyways. And Pudge was, at that moment, as high as Bill Lee after an all-night bender. Fuck it. Fuck it: he got both hands on Ryan’s shoulders so that he could lever himself up a little bit, tease at Ryan’s lips with his tongue.
Ryan stiffened further, spine straightening him away from Pudge. His shoulders flexed, the only warning Pudge had before Ryan forced his hands up to Pudge’s chest and shoved him into the nearest wall, not as hard as he possibly could, but pretty damn hard. Pudge let his shoulders take the brunt of it, keeping the muscles of his neck controlled so that the back of his head thunked into the wall with a dull boom instead of a dangerous crack. It still sent enough energy ringing into his skull to make the pain in his cheek flare up again, but he was only aware of that in a distant, how-about-that sort of way. He would have to remember to ask Conway about that drug.
“What the fuck,” Ryan hissed. “What the… what the fuck, kid?” He pulled Pudge away from the wall a little bit just so that he could slam him back into it again.
Pudge tipped his head back, let his eyes fall closed. The wall felt gritty under his hair, like some of the plaster had been knocked loose. His cheek was definitely offering up some complaints, but the painkiller was a buffer, allowing him to ignore it for the time being. More important was the itchy, restless feeling in his hands-- he wanted to touch Ryan right now. Yes.
He thought hard for a moment and eventually his right hand rose, flattened itself against Ryan’s stomach. Ryan made a stiffly suppressed gasping sound. He slid his hand up to Ryan’s chest. Ryan had quite good muscle tone for a guy in his mid-40s, and he was displaying it to good effect, holding Pudge against the wall like this.
“Are… you… brain damaged? Did… did somethin’ happen in the fight?” Ryan’s voice sounded kind of mangled. That good Texan upbringing must have been wreaking all kinds of havoc in his system, which would of course not be prepared to deal with these types of inputs. He couldn’t seriously beat Pudge up-- who would catch the rest of the season? So he was going into a kind of sexually horrifed shock, maybe.
“I’m serious, kid, are you… what are you doin’?” Ryan did not squeak, but his vocal chords were definitely toying with the higher registers. Pudge rubbed one of his thumbs in circles, pressing into Ryan’s chest.
He really wanted to say something like, Isn’t it obvious? Let’s fuck. But even now, with everything groovy-good, riding this accommodating swell of painkillers, he knew that that was a very bad idea. Let’s fuck was probably the worst thing he could say-- it would send Ryan into a terminal panic-- there was just no way his mind could handle it. Pudge had already fucked things up in a way that was probably going to mortify and appall him tomorrow, but he still knew that much.
“Scared?” he murmured, letting whatever shredded remnants of instincts he had left guide him into taking a different tack. Ryan gave his shoulders a renewed push, as if to say, You think I’m scared? Pudge arched his back against the wall, catlike. “Is not so scary, honest.”
“This ain’t… I… I’m happily fuckin’ married,” Ryan hissed. “And I ain’t some… some one like that.”
“So also, we all.” Pudge paused, lining up the words in his mind. “So. What? Because we are not on the road?”
Ryan took this like a fastball to the face. He stepped back, hands falling limply down to his sides. Pudge came down off his toes and rolled his shoulders cautiously, feeling the sockets pop. Ryan stared at him. Pudge, not knowing what else to do, stared back.
“This is just… normal? For you?” Ryan was staring pretty intently. Pudge nodded slowly and carefully, partly to make sure Ryan could see every dip of his head and partly because his neck felt funny from being snapped into the wall. “It’s just, like… like fuckin’ groupies on the road?”
“Sure, yes. What else would it be like?”
“I dunno. I don’t know shit ‘bout… your kind.” Pudge rolled his eyes. Ryan folded his arms over his chest and thrust out his chin awkwardly. “Well. It’s a sin, kid, it’s ‘gainst the Bible.”
“So is adulterio,” Pudge shot back. “Engaño. Cheating. Covet somebody else’s girl. Dat stop you? Dat stop anybody when we go on road an’ there’s ten girls who wan’ to fight over a lap of one ballplayer in the bar? Anyway,” he added, while Ryan slowly turned red, “adulterio is a part of 10 commandments, a big one. Compare to dat, what I do, is no big deal, hardly a note.”
“What.” Ryan stopped. He looked vaguely queasy, although it was impossible for Pudge to tell if he was queasily panicked or queasily curious. “What. You… do?”
Pudge stepped forward, getting back into Ryan’s space again. He reached up, very deliberate, and draped a hand over the back of Ryan’s neck. “Lean down, por favor. Some of us are short.”
Ryan snorted, then looked surprised, as if amazed that he could laugh in the midst of all this heinous sin. After a few distinctly agonizing seconds, he leaned down. Pudge met him halfway, up on his toes again, and kissed him full on the lips, pressing with his tongue even though Ryan’s mouth was remaining chastely closed.
After another few seconds Ryan slammed him into the wall again.
There was no warning, no way for him to stop the base of his skull from cracking into the wall this time, but Ryan followed him the whole way in, kissing him ferociously. There wasn’t even room for his head to bounce back on the rebound. A white-noise ringing filled his ears and Pudge found himself wondering, stunned and dim, how much damage was being done to his head today, how bad it would be when the drugs finally wore off. Was he concussed yet? Had his cheekbone re-fractured? Maybe one of the little metal plates had jarred loose, trailing jagged along the bone beneath it, or maybe his brain had racked up against the interior of his skull and was swelling now, pressure building at the back of his face.
It was, however, rather difficult to get too worked up about it when Nolan Ryan was sucking Pudge’s tongue into his own mouth, trembling tensely against Pudge’s body.
There was an old saying, Árbol que nace torcido, jamás su tronco endereza. A tree that is born twisted can never grow straight. He had heard an Americanized version of it in the minor leagues, mostly from younger coaches, winking at one another behind the backs of the more grizzled vets. You can’t teach an old ballplayer new tricks. A good saying. Very true when it came to baseball, where almost as a rule things were done the same way they had always been done.
“Let me,” he gasped, although it came out more like “et ee,” fighting against Ryan’s mouth. Ryan backed up, hands still on Pudge’s shoulders, face flushed red all the way up to his much-receded hairline. Pudge made a careful shift sideways, keeping a close eye on Ryan, just in case. But Ryan got it right away, stepping back again so that Pudge could move away from the wall, turning to put his own back to the wall when Pudge touched his hip lightly, the kind of touch he’d use to slow a pitcher down on the mound. Ryan still looked pretty wild around the eyes, and he flattened his palms against the wall at his sides like he was afraid of what he might do if he let them float around freely, but he was there, not cringing away from Pudge or posturing aggressively or doing any of the other things he was probably normally inclined to do.
So it was possible to teach new tricks to old ballplayers, at least sometimes. Maybe the key was to involve erections.
Pudge dropped down easily, automatically shifting on the balls of his feet for balance. Ryan visibly relaxed, peeled a hand off of the wall and rested it on the top of Pudge’s head. Pudge reached for his belt.
In his catcher’s crouch at the feet of his pitcher. That was right; it was how things were supposed to be ordered in the world. It had to be some small part of why Ryan was now allowing this, was OK for some heavily relativized version of OK. Pudge was meant to fold at the knees and do any number of things in the service of men towering high over him, throwing him fastball after fastball and sometimes a curve.
Ryan tasted faintly of the hypoallergenic scent-free bulk-ordered soap they all used in the clubhouse showers after a game. Hard, he was a little bigger than Pudge had been expecting, but that was fine so long as he kept his jaw slack, angled his head so that when Ryan’s cock pressed itself up against the inside of his cheek, it did so on the side that hadn’t recently been riveted back together. He had a wide mouth anyways, and plenty of determination to make this work.
“Shit,” Ryan said. The hand on Pudge’s head flexed, setting off fascinating cascades of radiating sensation bordering on pain-- sensations that would be pain soon enough. “Sheeeee-it.” Ryan gasped, then made a kind of choked-off grunting sound and pushed his cock almost to the limit of Pudge’s gag reflex.
Pudge twitched, nearly falling out of his crouch, reflexes saving him at the last second. Ryan was swearing steadily now under his breath, his hand flexing rhythmically, the muscles of his abdomen jumping, twitching the cock in Pudge’s mouth. He was making Ryan swear like that. He was responsible for the light tremble in Ryan’s thighs, so close to his face. The wetter he made his mouth, the more he dragged his tongue around, the harder Ryan shook, the more fluid his swearing became. It was nearly as good as getting a blowjob himself.
Lucidity crept up on him, a definite mixed blessing. As sensations became clearer-- the bitter soap-salt taste of Ryan on the back of his tongue, the heat of the base of Ryan’s cock where he had wrapped a hand for balance, the embarrassingly hot sensation of spit slicking his lips and chin-- he got more and more turned on, his own cock straining hopefully against his pants. But at the same time the sensations of pain were growing stronger. His cheek ached, a droning hum of soreness punctuated with sharp spikes of bright agony that penetrated all the way to the back of his skull. His eyes hurt in their sockets, the lids feeling paper-thin, overstretched.
Just when he was starting to think that he couldn’t take much more, that he was going to have to stop and pull off, let his swimming head clear, maybe lie down on the floor and die for a few minutes, Ryan swore with particular vehemence, grabbed the sides of Pudge’s head with both hands, and came down the back of his throat. He teetered there for a couple of long seconds, hips making tiny helpless aftershock twitches, then thrust Pudge’s head away from him so fast that Pudge tumbled backwards onto the carpet, coughing gratefully.
Ryan slid down the wall and covered his face with his hands. Pudge rolled over onto his stomach and dedicated some time to coughing-- not too rapid-fire, because that would probably lead to him throwing up, but slowly and steadily, methodical.
When he could mostly breathe again he rolled over onto his back, eyes open to the ceiling. He did not think that he could stand up even if he wanted to. He could see Ryan out of the corner of his eye; Ryan still had both hands over his face, his knees up, his softening cock hanging out of his pants like an afterthought. Pudge had no idea what was going on in his mind. Maybe nothing was going on. Maybe Ryan always looked like that after getting off.
His own cock was anything but soft, positively throbbing now, almost as painful as the racket going on between his ears. He let his eyes drop closed, brought up the still-fresh image of Ryan’s face twisting with pleasure and surprise as he came, and eased a hand into his own pants.
**
Take Your Kid to Work Day was near the end of the season. He let Maribel know well in advance, giving her plenty of time to prepare the usual mass of child-care equipment for transit. He cleaned the apartment obsessively the week before she was due to fly up, vacuuming every surface he could find and baby-proofing off a list he had paid the clubhouse kid to copy out of a book from the library: electrical sockets stopped up with plastic covers, low corners rounded off with rubbery bumpers, poison-bearing cabinets securely locked.
//He didn’t cry at all on the flight over,// Maribel said, bouncing Dereck on her hip as she walked in the door, a brace of brightly colored bags balanced precariously on her other shoulder. //The flight attendants all loved him.//
//Oh yeah?// Pudge carefully scooped Dereck up to his own chest, supporting his butt, which was squishy with diapering. Dereck was a little over a year old, chubby and cheerful. He had just recently learned how to recognize Pudge on TV and according to regular reports from Maribel was consequently giving his burgeoning language skills a workout, yelling papa! at the screen for the first few innings, before he invariably fell asleep.
Pudge thumbed Dereck’s nose and smiled at the resulting burble. Dereck had a more snub version of his own nose, with his wide-set eyes and broad mouth, instantly recognizable even through the roundness of babyfat.
Maribel leaned into him, reaching up to rub Dereck’s back. //It’s so nice to have my boys back together.//
//Mmm. I’ll be back down in Miami as soon as the season’s over.// Which was true, and he was looking forward to it. He spent altogether too much time away from Dereck during the season, with all his home games in Texas and Maribel preferring to spend as much time as possible in the National League territory of south Florida. Not that he begrudged her that; she would have been miserable in Arlington. He wrapped his free arm around her waist. She grinned, and kissed him on the cheek.
**
The baseball diamond in Arlington was filled with very small white home jerseys, rising only a couple of feet above the ground. A casual observer would see three or four Palmeiros standing together, a large Henke running after a small Henke, a couple of young Francos instructing an even younger Rogers in the finer points of bare-handed catch.
Dereck was not doing a whole lot of walking yet, but he could crawl deceptively fast, so it was in Pudge’s best interests to keep him occupied. He managed this by sitting on the infield grass and rolling a soft kiddie ball, printed with fake stitches, across to Dereck, who would either roll it back or try to put it in his mouth. Maribel stood off to the side, chatting in Spanish with Elaine Gonzalez, who was married to Juan and had some complicated array of additional athletic connections of her own: she was a professional field hockey player, or a volleyball player, something like that, and she was also the sister of Javy Lopez, who was some rookie catcher over on the Braves.
Maribel was wearing one of Pudge’s jerseys, blousy over her still-nursing-swollen chest, and shorts. Pudge kept glancing over at her, his eyes getting caught on the solid strength of her bare legs, making him light-headed every time he remembered that he had the good fortune to be married to this amazing woman. Still only 21, and he already had a wife and kid padding around the stadium wearing his number seven on their backs.
Two of Ryan’s kids were with him, both already fully as tall as Ryan himself. He made a few efforts to go over and talk, introduce Dereck, something, but every time he managed to make his way over to wherever Ryan had been, Ryan had already left. Pudge saw him hardly at all for the first part of the day, when the older kids took batting practice and the younger ones amused themselves with puffy toy bats and more soft balls like the one Dereck had slobbered all over. The sun hiked itself up the sky and arced off the bleachers, blindingly bright.
Around noon they all trooped into the clubhouse for lunch; the food would not last very long if left outside in the Texan heat. Maribel emerged from the crowd of wives and girlfriends around the extra folding tables that had been shoehorned into the clubhouse for the event, extracted Dereck from Pudge’s arms, and spirited him away to be cooed over by women in two different languages.
“Hey,” Rogers said, sidling up to Pudge and handing him a paper-wrapped sandwich.
“You see Ryan aroun’?” he asked, taking the sandwich and unwrapping it gratefully. Rogers narrowed his eyes incredulously. “Not like dat! I mean, I jus’ didn’ see him much today, but his wife, his sons, they are here, he must be here somewhere, no?”
Rogers glanced around, studiously casual. “I met his kids, yeah. You know the oldest one, Reid, he’s right around your age.”
Pudge winced. “No. Serious?”
“Mmhm. You’re, what? When’s your birthday?”
“Noviembre. I’m 21, you know dat.”
“Aw, you kiddin’?” Rogers made a sympathetic little grimace. “You’re like exactly the same age as his kid, man. Like. Exactly. He’s 21 and I’m pretty sure he was born in November. He’s been at some damn prep school and he’s gonna pitch for a college team next year.”
“Madre de Dios,” Pudge muttered. He put a hand over his face, just pressing into his eyeballs for a few seconds.
“Well, it ain’t like you actually did anything, right?” Rogers asked. When Pudge did not say anything, just dropped his hand down and stared at the floor, Rogers groaned. “Oh no you did not. Aw, man. C’mon.” He grabbed Pudge’s arm and dragged him through the crowd, muttering a trailing string of excuse-mes until they burst out into the relative quiet of the bathroom. Rogers dragged him into the showers, which were dry and, for once, clean.
“You had sex with a guy literally old enough to be your dad?”
“We didn’ have sex,” Pudge muttered. Both of Rogers’ eyebrows shot up. “We didn’! We jus’… I jus’…” He waved the hand holding the sandwich vaguely, hesitated, then took a big bite, chewed deliberately, and swallowed. He wiped his lips pointedly.
Rogers sighed, the air going out of him like a slowly deflating car tire. He propped a shoulder up against the tiled wall. “That’s a kinda sex. And now everyone’s got the wives here, and your kid’s here, and his kids… man. That’s… I don’t think they’ve invented a word for how awkward that is. No wonder he’s avoidin’ you today.”
“You think he is try to avoid me?”
Rogers looked away. Pudge shoved the rest of the sandwich into his mouth and fiddled with the top button of his jersey, slumping a little against the wall, feet planted so that his back wouldn’t skid down it.
It was easy to forget how old Ryan was, in the middle of the season. He was a veteran, of course, but there were a number of veterans on the team. He didn’t look that much older than, say, Julio Franco, who had just recently shaved all his hair off so that his hairline would no longer be an issue. He was still spry enough to beat up Robin Ventura when Robin Ventura required beating up.
Ryan wasn’t the first vet to fuck around with someone much younger than him, and Pudge wasn’t the first kid to fuck around with someone much older than him, but usually that meant groupies, not other ballplayers. There weren’t any complications involved in fucking groupies. Other ballplayers… that was nothing but complications, apparently. He could practically feel the sympathy and disapproval radiating off of Rogers, although Rogers was visibly doing his best to master both.
“Look,” Rogers said, his voice blustery, echoing off the tiles. “I ain’t gonna say it’s not so bad. But… it could be worse? You just… you just gotta get through the rest’a this season, and there ain’t too much left.” Pudge nodded, looking down, a rush of stupid affection for Rogers sneaking up on him so that he had to blink rapidly to hold back embarrassed and embarrassing tears.
“’Least you know he won’t bring it up,” Rogers added. “Not with everyone here. Shit, that’s the last thing good ol’ Nolan Ryan would do.”
“What’s the last thing I would do?” Ryan asked quietly.
Pudge snapped upright, the sandwich doing a barrel roll in his stomach. Rogers yelped and skidded on the tile floor, flailing for several seconds before sliding gracelessly to the ground. Ryan was standing at the open spot where the shower tiles gave way to the rest of the bathroom, arms folded, face perfectly blank.
There was the sound of a door opening, the happy normal noise of the rest of the team and their families briefly spilling into the bathroom as someone else came in. “Get out,” Ryan said, in that same quiet, even voice, without looking around. Someone Pudge could not see made a few confused noises, but the door opened and closed again as whoever it was obviously backed back out of the room.
Ryan cut his eyes down to where Rogers crouched uncertainly on the floor. “You too.” Rogers opened his mouth to protest and Ryan’s shoulders tensed with implied menace. “Out.” Rogers cast a sideways glance at Pudge, all nerves and defiance, but Pudge shook his head minutely, not worth it, not when he gets like this. He stood in stiff silence while Rogers levered himself up from the floor, giving Pudge one more glance, apologetic this time, before shuffling out of the showers. He gave Ryan as wide a berth as he could on his way out.
“So you. You.” Ryan inhaled deeply, nostrils flaring in a way that sparked instinctually dangerous in Pudge’s mind. “You talk to him. About, what? Everything?”
Pudge tried to look Ryan in the eye and found that he could not; he settled for looking at Ryan’s chest instead. “You don’ gotta worry. He’s, Kenny’s OK. He don’ care.”
“I care. You have no right…” Ryan stopped, flexed his hands. His footsteps echoed faintly as he walked over to Pudge, who stiffened even further. “You got no right to talk about that… that. With anyone. I can’t believe you…”
“He is my friend.” Pudge drew himself up; not that it made much difference, standing in front of Ryan, but it made him feel a little bit better. “I talk to my friend about stuff dat happen in my life, OK, it is my every right. And like I say, Kenny don’ care, he is not gonna tell nobody, and I don’ tell him the detail anyway, OK, is not like he know dat you--“ He pulled up short, silenced by the look that had crept over Ryan’s face, which was somewhere between about to faint and about to commit murder.
There was silence while Ryan’s face went from white to red and back again, his mouth twitching on a thousand things he was trying to not say. Eventually he leaned in towards Pudge, whose heart rate ratcheted up in excitement, but Ryan was only getting close so that he could speak quietly without his voice being projected all over the bathroom.
“You ain’t a rookie anymore.”
“I know dat, you think I don’ know dat? Dat was years ago, I know how things are now--“
“You can’t, no, OK, you can’t keep doin’ this…. this kinda shit. You can’t keep actin’ like a kid anymore--“
“Hey! I am 21 years old, I am not act like a kid--“
“Stop, stop, stop!” Ryan shouted, then froze, eyes swiveling towards the open end of the showers. They both stood still for a moment, breath held fast, waiting to see if anyone had heard.
“Is… is prob’ly pretty noisy out dere, wit’ everyone all close in,” Pudge offered quietly. Stupid, mentioning his age out loud, estúpido, estúpido, just dangling it right in front of Ryan’s face, Pudge and his son the same damn age. Fucking stupid. “Nobody hear--“
“Shut up,” Ryan hissed. He looked unhinged, unpredictable lines around his eyes, lips trembling. “Just… just shut the fuck up.” He took a deep, shaky breath, then straightened, smoothing a hand down the front of his shirt. It was a plain white button-down shirt, tucked into his jeans. Pudge helplessly noticed that he looked good in it.
“I was out of it. OK. On account of the brawl. And trainer gave me some shit so my hand wouldn’t swell up. Who knows what that shit does to your head. And you, you were even worse, you didn’t hardly know what was goin’ on by then. It was stupid and, and, and a mistake, a disgustin’ mistake, and it never would’ve happened if we’d both been in our right minds, so. So it may as well’ve never done.” He narrowed his eyes at Pudge and balled up his fists, leaning his knuckles against the shower wall on either side of Pudge’s head, daring him to contradict anything he had just said. “I’m gonna do my damn best to forget all about it, and you, you… you damn fuckin’ well better do the same.”
“You think I can jus’ forget, jus’ like dat? Maybe for you, you can, but for me? Is my life.” Ryan was starting to look truly alarming again. “Not you! That is not how I mean it. I don’… I don’ want anythin’ from you,” Pudge said, although that was not strictly true. If Ryan agreed to it, he would have jumped him right here in the showers, where anyone could walk in on them. He would have gone down to his knees again in a second.
But Ryan was, right now, as far away from welcoming that sort of thing as a person possibly could be. Maybe for him it had only been about the brawl, the adrenaline, the intoxicating rush of power that he must have felt as he secured Ventura under his arm and knew that he had the ability to win this thing.
“I cannot jus’ turn off the brain, make what happen go away,” Pudge said, trying to put finality, firmness, something into the words. “Even if I could make history to change, and I cannot, is not like dis is what I would erase. For me, dis is not jus’, jus’, a blip. A mistake pitch, no, OK. Dis is part of how things are always, for me.”
Ryan made a disgusted noise, deep down in his throat, turned his head sharply to the side, like he couldn’t even stand to look at Pudge. He pushed off from the wall with both hands at once, a smooth motion, powered by shoulders that could muscle a baseball through the strike zone from just over sixty feet away. A faint, deeply inappropriate stirring twisted in the pit of Pudge’s stomach; he knew that power, knew it up close and personal as only a catcher could.
“I’m already forgettin’ just as fast as I can,” Ryan said. The crazed rage was bleaching out of his eyes and a kind of blank deadness was moving in, much more frightening. Rage he could handle, rage he had seen from Ryan any number of times. But this he had never seen before, on the pitcher’s mound or off of it. “That’s how it is for me. This ain’t… it wasn’t me. I ain’t. Like that. And I don’t care how it is for you. From now on I don’t give half a shit ‘bout how it is for you.”
He turned and walked out of the showers. Pudge was still frozen, back stiff against the wall, palms flat, pressed just above the shower knobs on either side. His mind had gone blank. A showerhead somewhere had started to drip slowly, each drop hitting the tile with deliberate crispness. He heard each watery plink as a separate entity, a little parcel of time. Nothing else seemed real.
Ryan stopped at the edge of the tile, silhouetted against the white walls of the rest of the bathroom. His voice came carrying back as if it were traveling down a long, dimly lit tunnel. “If you ever, ever… ever talk about it to anyone else…”
He trailed off, but that was fine. Ryan was going to the Hall of Fame. He was a living legend, kids basing their entire careers on his style, imitating his pitching motion in Little League and high school and college and the minors. There were things he felt he could have associated with his name, and things that he felt he could not. Pudge was not so young that, even through the dense white noise crashing around the confines of his skull, he could pretend he didn’t know exactly what Ryan meant.
On the mound, a pitcher would not ignore his catcher. It was impossible. The catcher was half the equation, hands soft and open to receive whatever the pitcher was throwing. There was always a sort of rawness between a pitcher and a catcher, much more so than between other players, because no two other players on a team had such a direct baseball relationship.
Pudge had never been a non-entity to one of his pitchers. He would not have thought it was possible. None of them had ever looked at him like he was a clear pane of glass and all they could see was the wall behind, the way Ryan would look at him for the rest of the season. It did not so much break his heart as wrench free some firm conviction he had had in the configuration of the world.
The tiled wall at his back had been the only thing still holding him upright. He had stayed there for a while, looking towards the end of the showers, waiting for Ryan to come back, make eye contact, tell him it had all been a terrible misunderstanding, that he hadn’t meant what he had said. But Ryan had not come back.
next
pairing(s): Iván (Pudge) Rodriguez/ (Maribel Rodriguez; Nolan Ryan; Ugueth Urbina; Josh Beckett; Justin Verlander)
rated: hard R
length: 73,488 words
NOTES: Conversation //in backslashes// is taking place in Spanish, between native speakers. I wasn't really sure how else to handle this, as many of the characters in this fic would naturally speak Spanish around each other, not English; this was the best solution I could come up with. If it doesn't work for you, or you have a better solution in mind, please let me know. Given the number of Spanish-speaking characters in the fandom, I'm sure it'll come up again in future fic.
This is the longest fic I have written to date, in terms of words (73,000+), pages (152, single-spaced in Word), and time period covered (1991-2022). tangleofthorns, I blame you.
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.
catching up
1991
The Rangers’ double-A team, at the time, was called the Tulsa Drillers. It was entirely as ridiculous as it sounded, but it was also only two steps down from Texas, real baseball, and that, Pudge kept telling himself, was something that made it all worthwhile. He was on the mainland, he was getting paid to play in the pros. He had a girlfriend named Maribel who kept him mostly sane when he was off the field and nothing else stood between him and the flat, terrible, khaki-colored Tulsa-ness of it all.
Once he had made it to those minor leagues, though, it all happened very fast. One morning he was bumming around the stadium in his gimmicky Drillers hat, wondering what he would do if he broke another bat (in double-A, there were only so many bats, and after you had broken a certain number you and the team would just be shit out of luck) and that very same night he was in Comiskey Park, wearing an honest-to-god Rangers away uniform, crisp and clean and with his name across the back, with promises of as many bats as he could have ever possibly wanted.
His very first game, he threw out two runners trying to steal (they didn’t know him yet, of course, didn’t know what it meant for him to be behind the plate). He hit a two-run single and they got the ball for him, tossed it back into the dugout so he could keep it to remember his first big league hit, in case he never got another one. He called pitches for Kevin Brown, and then for Mike Jeffcoat. The Rangers won.
It was an anonymous Thursday in the middle of June. The start of his big league career wasn’t a big deal, worthy of announcements or anything; he was just another kid catcher with a club that wanted to get a better look at him, up where it mattered. He was nineteen years old.
**
Nolan Ryan made his big league debut five years before Pudge was even born. By the time Pudge met him, Ryan had evolved-- or perhaps devolved-- quite a bit from the scrawny, smooth-faced teenager he had been when he first came up. Pudge had seen the old pictures. There were lines around Ryan’s eyes and under his jaw now, where the skin looked looser than it had back in those black-and-white days. His hair was shaggier, less sleek, sprinkled with gray and edging backwards up his forehead.
He still wore his uniform fitted close to his body, though, his socks halfway up his calves with the stirrups cut as high as they would go, and it still looked good on him-- the old ballplayer pooch hadn’t snuck up on him yet. Pudge probably weighed more than he did, even though Ryan was half a foot taller. His leg kick was as huge as it had ever been, so that at the top of his pitching motion he could tuck his nose up against his kneecap. It terrified Pudge the first time he saw it up close. Nobody pitched like that in the minors.
Of course, this was Nolan Ryan. Nobody pitched like that, period.
When Pudge got to him, Ryan had just thrown his seventh no-hitter. In Tulsa one of the clubhouse kids videotaped it while the Drillers played, and they all crowded into the humid, cramped locker room afterwards to watch it on the half-busted TV they had down there, which had a dead stripe on the left side of the screen but otherwise worked OK, so nobody bothered to replace it. There wasn’t much drama in it-- they all knew the only games that got taped were perfect, or no-hitters, games that had triple plays in them or something-- but it still made Pudge’s heart skip, a little bit, watching that. Seven no-hitters. That was more than Sandy Koufax had thrown; that was more than anybody had thrown. And here Pudge was now, expected to catch for the guy who had thrown them.
He knew, of course, in some abstract way, that Ryan threw hard. He had seen it on TV, and in ballparks; even up close once, when the Rangers brought some young prospects in to watch the veterans practice one spring. But experiencing it first-hand, literally, the ball exploding in his glove like a concentrated cannonball, Dios. That was something else.
His very first warm-up session with Ryan, he came away sweaty, red-faced, panting. He barely had to move his feet, only rocking backwards and forwards on his heels, shifting from the tensely coiled catching position to the more firmly based knees-in-the-dirt throwing position. Ryan had been the one doing all the work, but somehow it was Pudge whose heart was racing like he’d just run a marathon.
“You OK, kid?” Ryan asked, coming off the bare practice mound to peer down at Pudge critically.
“Sí, OK.” It was kind of embarrassing; he couldn’t even say that much without sounding breathless. He straightened up out of his crouch and realized, to his extreme mortification, that he barely came up to Ryan’s chin, even with his helmet and cleats on.
“That little ol’ fastball ain’t too fast for ya, right?” Ryan teased, rough, but concerned too, like he was worried that it really might be too much for a rookie. He had a Texan drawl, overwrought vowels and lazy consonants, so authentic it almost swung back around into parody.
Pudge shook his head, not trusting himself to say anything.
They got their first win together in July. Ryan struck out fourteen and seemed mostly bored by the entire process. He was nearing the end of his career and at that point, if it wasn’t a no-hitter, he did not seem inclined to find it exciting. Pudge put down the signs, calling for the fastball and the slider; he had the most intimate, immediate knowledge possible of where the pitches were headed, and he still could not believe how Ryan was pitching.
Wally Joyner, batting late in the game, muttered, “Hol-ee fuckballs,” to himself, skipping the head of his bat desultorily in the dirt after Ryan struck him out. Pudge was willing to take that as a small comfort. At least he wasn’t the only one reduced to stunned amazement.
**
He talked to Kenny Rogers sometimes. Rogers was older than him, but not so much in baseball terms-- he had only been around for a year and a bit. He had met his wife in high school, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything, and he wore his pants tighter than, like, figure skaters, so Pudge figured maybe it was safe to talk. He worked up to it, of course: an off-hand remark about Juan Gonzalez’s ass, the kind of thing that could have been brushed off as a joke, then a more serious comment. Then, when Rogers showed no particular signs of freaking out, a deep sigh over the fact that Gonzalez’s ass was off-limits.
“More’s the shame,” Rogers said, deadpan. Pudge never did figure out if Rogers was actually some variety of gay, or bisexual, or if he just didn’t give a fuck, not even years later when they met up again in Detroit, but it worked out the same so far as he was concerned. So long as there was at least one person he could talk to, for whatever reason, he’d be fine. It was the one thing he couldn’t talk about with Maribel-- she understood a lot, about him and about baseball, but they were married now, their phone conversations revolving around American kid’s TV programming and unexpected choking hazards that could be picked up by tiny hands. There were some things better left unsaid, there.
They had just lost a game to the Brewers, roasted by the unrelenting Texas heat that should have edged the advantage their way. Pudge was annoyed with himself because he had only managed one hit, a single. Rogers was annoyed with himself because he had particularly wanted to strike Robin Yount out and he hadn’t managed it. Everyone was annoyed because they couldn’t afford the loss, pressure starting to tamp down all around them.
The postgame spread consisted of some kind of awful semi-soggy sandwich things that Pudge could not bring himself to eat, so he ended up, without ever discussing it, at Wei Good with Rogers. Wei Good was a small, calculatedly shabby-looking Chinese restaurant in Arlington, the kind of place that was crowded with permanently sticky tabletops and chairs that looked like they had been discarded from three or four different institutional cafeterias. It was the kind of place that most ballplayers would not be caught dead in, which was a significant part of why Pudge liked it: he was unlikely to run into anyone he didn’t want to run into while he was trying to eat. The food was also fairly cheap, a plus for someone who was still making the major league minimum.
“Sucked today,” Rogers muttered, in between mouthfuls of something noodley. “Should be gettin’ past these fuckers.”
“Sí, I know.” Pudge pushed his own food around his plate with a chopstick. Wei Good did not have forks, although whether this was an authenticity thing or some sort of cost-effectiveness thing was hard to say. “You pitched good, should have more wins by now. Nolan also. His ERA, what is it, three an’ a bit? And the best we can get him is 4 wins. Pat’etic.”
Rogers nodded. “Right, right. It’s like, the way he throws, how’s he lose at all?”
Pudge nodded back, thoughtfully stabbing a gooey piece of chicken. “You think he’s hot?” he asked, casually as he could manage. Rogers’ head snapped up. He gave Pudge a long, unreadable look, his heavy jaw frozen shut. A little bit wary, which maybe Pudge deserved. “I was jus’, you know. Thinking.”
“He’s pretty old,” Rogers said, eyes narrowed across the table. “Like, twenty years older than you. Right?”
“I guess.” More like twenty-four or twenty-five years older. More than twice as old as Pudge, anyways. He twirled his chopsticks, gathering a skein of noodles up around his chicken. “Age is jus’ a number, though, no? I mean, he still pitches good, he don’t pitch his age.” He smiled to make it a joke, because Rogers was still watching him cautiously, nervously, like Pudge was a bomb that might explode at any moment.
“He’s married,” Rogers said. Pudge tilted his head and stared across the table, politely not saying anything, until Rogers sighed and shook his head. “Yeah, OK, I know, so’s most everyone. But I’m pretty sure he’s. Not into.” He gestured vaguely. “Not into. You know.”
“Not into teens?” Pudge prompted. Rogers pressed his lips together and jerked his head minutely to the side. “Not into the short kid? Not into the fat kid? No? More rump for better hump, no, you don’t think?” Rogers seemed to be developing a sort of facial tic. Pudge forged onwards. “Not into the Puerto Rican lovin’? Not into catchers? No? You don’t think?”
Rogers’ lips had gotten whiter and whiter as he pressed them together more and more tightly, his façade of disapproval growing tenser, more tightly-strung, until finally it snapped and he dropped his chopsticks, putting a hand over his face and laughing helplessly. “Oh fuck you, man, fuck.”
Pudge waited for him to subside into hiccupping giggles. “I know,” he said. “Not into los hombres.” He sighed. “Who is?”
Rogers refused to rise to the bait, wiping his eyes and picking up his chopsticks again. “Girls are easier. You should know--“ pointing at Pudge with a chopstick, “you went’n married one.”
“Is not like dat,” Pudge muttered, because it wasn’t. Maribel loved him and he-- truly, honestly, sincerely-- loved her. She was sweet and practical and he could so easily see himself spending the rest of his life with her, growing old in the comfortable circle of her arms, raising a little pack of bilingual babies who would wear miniature versions of his jersey and try his catching glove on while it was still way too big for them. None of that was about easy.
This other thing, where he looked at guys, and sometimes did more than look, that was no different from what every other ballplayer did when they went on the road. Road sex was something all its own. The groupies and college kids and willing hangers-on, they were just another road-city diversion, like a little too much alcohol in an unfamiliar bar filled with opposing-team fans. They had nothing to do with the family you had at home.
All of which Rogers knew, of course. He wasn’t some kind of exception to the ballplayer rule. Pudge scowled at him. Rogers shoved more noodles into his mouth, eyebrows raised, not saying anything.
1993
Dr. Conway, the team physician, was eyeing him beadily from the top of the clubhouse steps. Pudge ignored him, bending to finish snapping his shinguards into place. He could feel Conway’s eyes on his back all the way out to home plate.
Things had, admittedly, been a bit of medical drama for him lately. His cheekbone had been fractured on a backswing a week ago, which was both incredibly painful (he had broken fingers and hands and even a rib, once, but he’d never broken his face before) and incredibly stupid (it wasn’t even his own fault). He had had surgery to stabilize it last Friday. They put little metal plates into his face, which was sort of cool. He was like some kind of robot now, or something-- cyborg, hombre mecánico, whatever.
Here it was Wednesday of the next week, and he was back out on the field, with Conway tagging along, annoying the trainers. The previous day he had come out in the middle of the game with torturous dizzy spells. Not just light-headedness: the entire field had felt like it was spinning around him, the dirt beneath his cleats old oatmeal with a thin skin over it, lurching unpredictably every time he tried to move more than one step in any direction. It was hard to say if it had been the surgery itself or the pain medication that had brought it on. Conway had insisted upon bed rest, which in all fairness seemed to have done the job.
In this game he wasn’t dizzy at all. At this point Conway was only making him nervous, which was going to make him act dizzy just because he’d be thinking about it so damn much, and that was bad, because Ryan was pitching. Pudge needed his wits about him if he was going to have a prayer of catching that fastball.
The forced cold shoulder worked for the first inning; Conway gave him a very dubious once-over when he came back to the dugout, but made no move to pull Pudge from the game. When he was sure Conway had turned away to talk to someone else, he carefully pressed two fingers to his cheek. It was still a little puffy from the surgery, although the redness had gone and he was sure nobody could tell unless they were intimately familiar with what his face normally looked like. Soreness lingered long after he took the pressure of his fingers away.
He edged up to Ryan while their first trio of batters limbered up. “Ey.”
“What.” Ryan was annoyed; he had given up two runs in the first, although one of them had come on an error. Dean Palmer, who had bobbled the ball, was all the way down at the other end of the dugout, cowering unsubtly behind the water cooler.
“Maybe we should throw somethin’ dat is not a fastball,” Pudge suggested, in as mild a voice as he muster.
“Maybe you should try not bein’ such a pussy,” Ryan said. He wasn’t even looking at Pudge, his eyes a thousand miles away.
Pudge sighed. This was actually fairly civil for Ryan, who could wind himself up to an unbearable degree while he was pitching. Anyways, by braving the fire of Ryan’s wrath and bringing it up, he had discharged his duty. If Ryan wanted to throw fastballs for the rest of the game, fine: it was still, of course, Pudge’s problem, but it could no longer be said that it was in any way his fault.
The second inning went easily enough until Alex Fernandez, the White Sox pitcher, hit Juan Gonzalez high and inside, way up on his shoulders, almost under his chin. It was probably not intentional, but Pudge, messing around with pine tar in the dugout, flinched hard anyways. Ryan was not the type of pitcher who would let that go by without making some sort of reprisal with his own arm. Pudge slowly wiped down the handle of his bat, drawing it out, nervously running over the White Sox lineup in his head. Matt Merullo, the DH, would be up first, then Robin Ventura (he glanced at third base without meaning to), then Steve Sax (another involuntary glance, out to right field this time).
Ryan wouldn’t go after Merullo. He was a terrible hitter and would almost certainly make an out on his own. That left Ventura and Sax, and then Dan Pasqua, assuming one of them was put on base.
Julio Franco lined into a double play, cursing floridly as he passed Pudge on his way back to the dugout. Pudge schooled his face into careful blankness, although in truth he was frustrated; Fernandez was a good pitcher, chary with runs, and batting with empty bases arrayed in front of him, two outs already on the board, was not going to make it any easier.
He stared out at the outfield wall’s broad semicircular path across the grass for a moment. There were no corners or tricky bits in Arlington, just that sweeping curve; when there was a lot of stupid bullshit going on in a game, like there was right now, the smoothly unbroken wall was a kind of calming talisman for him. Like he could reach out and run his hand over the long blue line of it.
He cut his eyes back to Fernandez, who brought his hands up together in front of his face, hiding his nose. He took a deep breath. Pudge took a deep breath. The bat balanced perfectly in his hands, so secure in his palms that he barely had to touch it with his fingers. Fernandez exploded in a flurry of arms and legs.
The curveball that resulted was hanging so fat that Pudge almost fell over in his haste to get around on it. He made contact and the ball bounced hard on the grass, a tricky grounder. For one glorious second he thought that it was going to get away from the outfielder, but Raines ran it down, and Pudge pulled up sharply past first, pushing off backwards to bounce his tailing foot back onto the base itself, as clean a single as anyone could ask for.
Of course his triumph lasted for all of a minute, which was all the time that it took for Palmer to step into the batter’s box, waggle his bat importantly, and line out to deep left. Pudge closed his eyes momentarily before tipping his batting helmet off into his hands. He had hoped-- against all reason, when Palmer was involved-- that they could extend the inning, that a longer inning would give Ryan more time to let his rage simmer out. A quick glance at Ryan as Pudge tucked his helmet back into its tar-stained dugout cubby was enough to tell him that there had been absolutely no calming whatsoever.
The White Sox came up to bat. Merullo popped predictably out to center, the ball floating up into the sky lazily, dropping down slowly enough for Pudge to follow it even against the riotous colors of the crowd. Ventura stepped in, scraping at the painted lines of the batter’s box with the toe of his cleat. Pudge settled into his crouch and tapped three fingers against the inside of his right thigh. Ryan shook his head, then straightened up to narrow his eyes at Pudge. Pudge knew what Ryan wanted to throw, and Ryan knew perfectly well that Pudge knew.
He sighed, and shot a single finger downwards, stabbing it towards the ground. He did not have to look up to know that Ryan would accept the call. The both of them would be living and dying by the fastball for the rest of the game, and Pudge was going to have little say in the matter. Fine. He was fine with it. Ryan was the longest-tenured veteran on the team, one of the longest-lasting players in the league; he had more than earned the right to overrule his catcher and call his own game if he liked. Fine.
The pitch came rocketing in almost faster than Pudge could follow. Even so he could see it tailing inside, and high, and although he didn’t have time to actually sigh again, he managed a kind of mental sigh, and had already started shifting in that direction by the time the ball slammed into Ventura. Ventura, his own ballplayer instincts no doubt tingling, had turned into it a little, so that the ball hit him hard on the flat of a shoulder blade, instead of worryingly close to his face. There was no crunch of bone, but it still made a mildly nauseating, meaty thud as it impacted Ventura’s flesh.
There was, at that point, a Moment.
The entire ballpark seemed to be holding its breath. Ventura had taken one automatic step out of the box and stopped, staring at the ground, as if he was thinking. He still had his bat in his hands, although it was dangling uselessly. Pudge was half in and half out of his crouch, hamstrings complaining, torn between wanting to go after the ball and wanting to keep an eye on Ventura. Ryan was standing up straight on the mound, staring off into the middle distance to show Ventura, and by extension the entire White Sox team, exactly how much he thought of them. It was, briefly, quiet.
Ventura dropped the bat. As soon it had got clear of his hands he reached up and tore the helmet off his head, throwing it aside and changing direction, charging out towards the mound. Ryan immediately shed his glove and stepped slightly to the side as Ventura made the mistake of going in low to knock Ryan off balance.
Instead of obligingly falling over, Ryan grabbed Ventura around the neck and started punching him vigorously in the head. Pudge raced up from behind, trying to grab Ventura by the waist and pull him away. Protecting his pitcher from any and all rogue batting elements was an expected part of his job, but he was not at all sure that it was Ryan who needed protecting. Ventura was 25 and in the brawny prime of health. Ryan was 46, old enough to be balding, for God’s sake, but Ventura was utterly helpless in Ryan’s grip, and all Pudge could think was that Ryan might actually kill Ventura, break his neck or crack his skull or something, and he had to get Ventura out of there before irreparable damage was done. Which was crazy-- when was the last time someone had actually died on a baseball field?-- but with Ryan’s fist slamming into Ventura’s head over and over again, his arm already nice and loosened-up by all those damn fastballs, it did not seem so very impossible.
He kept getting shoved around, side to side, back and forth, but with all of his attention focused on Ventura and Ryan, it took Pudge a little bit to realize that the shouting was not just coming from the two main combatants, that an awful lot of other people had spilled out onto the field, pressed in around him. Some of them were trying to pull on Ryan, some were trying to pull on Ventura, some were trying to pull on Pudge himself. He gave up on extricating Ventura from the now-roiling mass of ballplayers and concentrated on just staying upright for a while. He got occasional glimpses of Ryan, enough to confirm that he was still basically unharmed and that Pudge, thus, had not entirely fallen down on the job.
Somebody elbowed him in the face, right on top of his recently-reconstructed cheekbone. Everything went pain-haze-gray for an indeterminate amount of time. It was almost an amazing level of pain, enough to make it seem like his brain had unhooked itself from reality; it did not seem possible that he was still, somewhere in the world, up on his feet and conscious, although that was apparently the case.
The umpires managed to get everyone calm again (their shouting vague to Pudge’s ears, like they were trying to yell at him while he was twenty feet underwater) and he was vaguely aware that he was back behind the plate, going through the automatic motions of catching, throwing, standing at the plate when Coach Kennedy planted a hand in the middle of his ass and shoved him out of the dugout. The next time he was really aware of things again, he was flat on his back in the trainer’s room, staring up at the ceiling, where Conway had taped a third-grade-level poster of the food pyramid.
Make whole grains the base of your nutrition plan today!
Ryan was hovering off to the side, at the edges of Pudge’s peripheral vision. “Sorry,” he said. He was shifting rapidly from foot to foot, some kind of dire excess of energy.
Pudge considered. He seemed to be having trouble thinking clearly. It was not impossible that he had a concussion. “We win?”
Ryan moved closer to the padded trainer’s table, nodded where Pudge could see. “Um. Five t’two. Are you, uh, ok?”
“Sí,” Pudge said, then stopped, surprised, because it was more or less true. He wasn’t really in pain anymore, although by rights his much-abused cheekbone ought to have been throbbing. Conway must have pumped him full of some industrial-grade painkiller, which would also explain a number of other things, such as the interesting way the room seemed to be warping.
“Doc said you…” Ryan trailed off, maybe thinking better of telling Pudge whatever Conway had said. “Anyway. Sorry, it’s… kinda my fault. I forgot you had the…” Ryan waved a hand over his own cheek, and his tone turned faintly chiding. “You shouldn’ta come int’a knockdown fight like that.”
“I’m the catcher,” Pudge said. “He rush you. Canno’ let him jus…”
“I can take care’a myself out there,” Ryan interrupted, “’specially when it comes to little wanna-be punks like Robbie V.” He put a hand on Pudge’s shoulder, squeezed. “But thanks, kid.”
As a gesture, this meant nothing. Actually, it meant a lot of things-- the brotherhood of team, the aged veteran passing approval to the kid still wetting his feet in the league, that hypermasculine middle-American jock habit of expressing complex emotions through wildly inadequate physical gestures with which Pudge had become sadly familiar-- but the kinds of things it indicated were so utterly common in baseball that they did not normally need to be remarked upon.
But Pudge had had a long week, and an even longer day. He had managed to catch most of a nearly three hour baseball game while the world splintered and reformed, distorted by pain. He had been flooded with fight-or-flight adrenaline, probably the only thing that had kept him upright, and now he was drugged out of his mind, doctor’s orders. Whatever senses of self-preservation and restraint he usually had were dulled down to nothingness.
Out of this chemical and mental fog came Ryan’s hand.
What Pudge should have done, when Ryan patted him on the shoulder, was nod manfully, make a sort of expressive grimace. Something like that. He knew how it went; he had been in the game in one way or another for years, with Maribel for many of them. He was familiar with the rules of the game, on and off the field, both written and unwritten.
Instead he closed his eyes, sighed deeply, and put his own hand over Ryan’s. “Drive me home,” he said. “Don’t t’ink I should make to drive myself.”
There was silence for a moment, but then the hand on his shoulder squeezed again. “Sure, kid,” Ryan said.
**
The sight of Ryan walking into his apartment was a deeply strange one. He resisted the urge to look furtively up and down the street; there was nothing wrong with having a friend over, even if it was a teammate, even if it was a veteran who normally wouldn’t have much to do with him, even if it was a superstar surefire Hall of Famer and Pudge still just a couple years out of raw rookiehood.
“Where’s your wife?” Ryan asked, looking around. “You’re married, right?”
Pudge busied himself with the apartment door. It got kind of sticky sometimes, and the latch wouldn’t take properly when he closed it unless he jiggered it just so. “Miami.”
“Miami?”
“All her friends, they are in Miami, you know? Closer to Puerto Rico. It makes her, uh, more happy, to be down there.” He finally got the door closed and turned to look at Ryan, who seemed enormous in the relatively small space, larger than the life Pudge was used to having in his home, and still jittering slightly with post-brawl animation.
“Thanks for the ride,” Pudge said. He walked up to Ryan with the intention of, he didn’t even know, maybe offering him a drink, something innocuous, but his filters were all shot to hell. He kept going, right into Ryan’s space, until he was close enough to stretch up on his toes and kiss Ryan right on the mouth.
Or the lower lip and some of his chin. Ryan was a lot taller, there was only so much he could do.
Ryan went stiff immediately. Pudge could almost see that good solid Texan upbringing zinging along Ryan’s veins, spreading out from his lips to freeze the rest of his body in a shatter-sharp crystalline structure of fear and manly disgust and religious horror.
Under normal circumstances this would have been enough to strike Pudge down like every godly thunderbolt from On High that Ryan must have been imagining at that very moment. But it was already August. The season was winding down. Ryan had announced that he was retiring after this year anyways. And Pudge was, at that moment, as high as Bill Lee after an all-night bender. Fuck it. Fuck it: he got both hands on Ryan’s shoulders so that he could lever himself up a little bit, tease at Ryan’s lips with his tongue.
Ryan stiffened further, spine straightening him away from Pudge. His shoulders flexed, the only warning Pudge had before Ryan forced his hands up to Pudge’s chest and shoved him into the nearest wall, not as hard as he possibly could, but pretty damn hard. Pudge let his shoulders take the brunt of it, keeping the muscles of his neck controlled so that the back of his head thunked into the wall with a dull boom instead of a dangerous crack. It still sent enough energy ringing into his skull to make the pain in his cheek flare up again, but he was only aware of that in a distant, how-about-that sort of way. He would have to remember to ask Conway about that drug.
“What the fuck,” Ryan hissed. “What the… what the fuck, kid?” He pulled Pudge away from the wall a little bit just so that he could slam him back into it again.
Pudge tipped his head back, let his eyes fall closed. The wall felt gritty under his hair, like some of the plaster had been knocked loose. His cheek was definitely offering up some complaints, but the painkiller was a buffer, allowing him to ignore it for the time being. More important was the itchy, restless feeling in his hands-- he wanted to touch Ryan right now. Yes.
He thought hard for a moment and eventually his right hand rose, flattened itself against Ryan’s stomach. Ryan made a stiffly suppressed gasping sound. He slid his hand up to Ryan’s chest. Ryan had quite good muscle tone for a guy in his mid-40s, and he was displaying it to good effect, holding Pudge against the wall like this.
“Are… you… brain damaged? Did… did somethin’ happen in the fight?” Ryan’s voice sounded kind of mangled. That good Texan upbringing must have been wreaking all kinds of havoc in his system, which would of course not be prepared to deal with these types of inputs. He couldn’t seriously beat Pudge up-- who would catch the rest of the season? So he was going into a kind of sexually horrifed shock, maybe.
“I’m serious, kid, are you… what are you doin’?” Ryan did not squeak, but his vocal chords were definitely toying with the higher registers. Pudge rubbed one of his thumbs in circles, pressing into Ryan’s chest.
He really wanted to say something like, Isn’t it obvious? Let’s fuck. But even now, with everything groovy-good, riding this accommodating swell of painkillers, he knew that that was a very bad idea. Let’s fuck was probably the worst thing he could say-- it would send Ryan into a terminal panic-- there was just no way his mind could handle it. Pudge had already fucked things up in a way that was probably going to mortify and appall him tomorrow, but he still knew that much.
“Scared?” he murmured, letting whatever shredded remnants of instincts he had left guide him into taking a different tack. Ryan gave his shoulders a renewed push, as if to say, You think I’m scared? Pudge arched his back against the wall, catlike. “Is not so scary, honest.”
“This ain’t… I… I’m happily fuckin’ married,” Ryan hissed. “And I ain’t some… some one like that.”
“So also, we all.” Pudge paused, lining up the words in his mind. “So. What? Because we are not on the road?”
Ryan took this like a fastball to the face. He stepped back, hands falling limply down to his sides. Pudge came down off his toes and rolled his shoulders cautiously, feeling the sockets pop. Ryan stared at him. Pudge, not knowing what else to do, stared back.
“This is just… normal? For you?” Ryan was staring pretty intently. Pudge nodded slowly and carefully, partly to make sure Ryan could see every dip of his head and partly because his neck felt funny from being snapped into the wall. “It’s just, like… like fuckin’ groupies on the road?”
“Sure, yes. What else would it be like?”
“I dunno. I don’t know shit ‘bout… your kind.” Pudge rolled his eyes. Ryan folded his arms over his chest and thrust out his chin awkwardly. “Well. It’s a sin, kid, it’s ‘gainst the Bible.”
“So is adulterio,” Pudge shot back. “Engaño. Cheating. Covet somebody else’s girl. Dat stop you? Dat stop anybody when we go on road an’ there’s ten girls who wan’ to fight over a lap of one ballplayer in the bar? Anyway,” he added, while Ryan slowly turned red, “adulterio is a part of 10 commandments, a big one. Compare to dat, what I do, is no big deal, hardly a note.”
“What.” Ryan stopped. He looked vaguely queasy, although it was impossible for Pudge to tell if he was queasily panicked or queasily curious. “What. You… do?”
Pudge stepped forward, getting back into Ryan’s space again. He reached up, very deliberate, and draped a hand over the back of Ryan’s neck. “Lean down, por favor. Some of us are short.”
Ryan snorted, then looked surprised, as if amazed that he could laugh in the midst of all this heinous sin. After a few distinctly agonizing seconds, he leaned down. Pudge met him halfway, up on his toes again, and kissed him full on the lips, pressing with his tongue even though Ryan’s mouth was remaining chastely closed.
After another few seconds Ryan slammed him into the wall again.
There was no warning, no way for him to stop the base of his skull from cracking into the wall this time, but Ryan followed him the whole way in, kissing him ferociously. There wasn’t even room for his head to bounce back on the rebound. A white-noise ringing filled his ears and Pudge found himself wondering, stunned and dim, how much damage was being done to his head today, how bad it would be when the drugs finally wore off. Was he concussed yet? Had his cheekbone re-fractured? Maybe one of the little metal plates had jarred loose, trailing jagged along the bone beneath it, or maybe his brain had racked up against the interior of his skull and was swelling now, pressure building at the back of his face.
It was, however, rather difficult to get too worked up about it when Nolan Ryan was sucking Pudge’s tongue into his own mouth, trembling tensely against Pudge’s body.
There was an old saying, Árbol que nace torcido, jamás su tronco endereza. A tree that is born twisted can never grow straight. He had heard an Americanized version of it in the minor leagues, mostly from younger coaches, winking at one another behind the backs of the more grizzled vets. You can’t teach an old ballplayer new tricks. A good saying. Very true when it came to baseball, where almost as a rule things were done the same way they had always been done.
“Let me,” he gasped, although it came out more like “et ee,” fighting against Ryan’s mouth. Ryan backed up, hands still on Pudge’s shoulders, face flushed red all the way up to his much-receded hairline. Pudge made a careful shift sideways, keeping a close eye on Ryan, just in case. But Ryan got it right away, stepping back again so that Pudge could move away from the wall, turning to put his own back to the wall when Pudge touched his hip lightly, the kind of touch he’d use to slow a pitcher down on the mound. Ryan still looked pretty wild around the eyes, and he flattened his palms against the wall at his sides like he was afraid of what he might do if he let them float around freely, but he was there, not cringing away from Pudge or posturing aggressively or doing any of the other things he was probably normally inclined to do.
So it was possible to teach new tricks to old ballplayers, at least sometimes. Maybe the key was to involve erections.
Pudge dropped down easily, automatically shifting on the balls of his feet for balance. Ryan visibly relaxed, peeled a hand off of the wall and rested it on the top of Pudge’s head. Pudge reached for his belt.
In his catcher’s crouch at the feet of his pitcher. That was right; it was how things were supposed to be ordered in the world. It had to be some small part of why Ryan was now allowing this, was OK for some heavily relativized version of OK. Pudge was meant to fold at the knees and do any number of things in the service of men towering high over him, throwing him fastball after fastball and sometimes a curve.
Ryan tasted faintly of the hypoallergenic scent-free bulk-ordered soap they all used in the clubhouse showers after a game. Hard, he was a little bigger than Pudge had been expecting, but that was fine so long as he kept his jaw slack, angled his head so that when Ryan’s cock pressed itself up against the inside of his cheek, it did so on the side that hadn’t recently been riveted back together. He had a wide mouth anyways, and plenty of determination to make this work.
“Shit,” Ryan said. The hand on Pudge’s head flexed, setting off fascinating cascades of radiating sensation bordering on pain-- sensations that would be pain soon enough. “Sheeeee-it.” Ryan gasped, then made a kind of choked-off grunting sound and pushed his cock almost to the limit of Pudge’s gag reflex.
Pudge twitched, nearly falling out of his crouch, reflexes saving him at the last second. Ryan was swearing steadily now under his breath, his hand flexing rhythmically, the muscles of his abdomen jumping, twitching the cock in Pudge’s mouth. He was making Ryan swear like that. He was responsible for the light tremble in Ryan’s thighs, so close to his face. The wetter he made his mouth, the more he dragged his tongue around, the harder Ryan shook, the more fluid his swearing became. It was nearly as good as getting a blowjob himself.
Lucidity crept up on him, a definite mixed blessing. As sensations became clearer-- the bitter soap-salt taste of Ryan on the back of his tongue, the heat of the base of Ryan’s cock where he had wrapped a hand for balance, the embarrassingly hot sensation of spit slicking his lips and chin-- he got more and more turned on, his own cock straining hopefully against his pants. But at the same time the sensations of pain were growing stronger. His cheek ached, a droning hum of soreness punctuated with sharp spikes of bright agony that penetrated all the way to the back of his skull. His eyes hurt in their sockets, the lids feeling paper-thin, overstretched.
Just when he was starting to think that he couldn’t take much more, that he was going to have to stop and pull off, let his swimming head clear, maybe lie down on the floor and die for a few minutes, Ryan swore with particular vehemence, grabbed the sides of Pudge’s head with both hands, and came down the back of his throat. He teetered there for a couple of long seconds, hips making tiny helpless aftershock twitches, then thrust Pudge’s head away from him so fast that Pudge tumbled backwards onto the carpet, coughing gratefully.
Ryan slid down the wall and covered his face with his hands. Pudge rolled over onto his stomach and dedicated some time to coughing-- not too rapid-fire, because that would probably lead to him throwing up, but slowly and steadily, methodical.
When he could mostly breathe again he rolled over onto his back, eyes open to the ceiling. He did not think that he could stand up even if he wanted to. He could see Ryan out of the corner of his eye; Ryan still had both hands over his face, his knees up, his softening cock hanging out of his pants like an afterthought. Pudge had no idea what was going on in his mind. Maybe nothing was going on. Maybe Ryan always looked like that after getting off.
His own cock was anything but soft, positively throbbing now, almost as painful as the racket going on between his ears. He let his eyes drop closed, brought up the still-fresh image of Ryan’s face twisting with pleasure and surprise as he came, and eased a hand into his own pants.
**
Take Your Kid to Work Day was near the end of the season. He let Maribel know well in advance, giving her plenty of time to prepare the usual mass of child-care equipment for transit. He cleaned the apartment obsessively the week before she was due to fly up, vacuuming every surface he could find and baby-proofing off a list he had paid the clubhouse kid to copy out of a book from the library: electrical sockets stopped up with plastic covers, low corners rounded off with rubbery bumpers, poison-bearing cabinets securely locked.
//He didn’t cry at all on the flight over,// Maribel said, bouncing Dereck on her hip as she walked in the door, a brace of brightly colored bags balanced precariously on her other shoulder. //The flight attendants all loved him.//
//Oh yeah?// Pudge carefully scooped Dereck up to his own chest, supporting his butt, which was squishy with diapering. Dereck was a little over a year old, chubby and cheerful. He had just recently learned how to recognize Pudge on TV and according to regular reports from Maribel was consequently giving his burgeoning language skills a workout, yelling papa! at the screen for the first few innings, before he invariably fell asleep.
Pudge thumbed Dereck’s nose and smiled at the resulting burble. Dereck had a more snub version of his own nose, with his wide-set eyes and broad mouth, instantly recognizable even through the roundness of babyfat.
Maribel leaned into him, reaching up to rub Dereck’s back. //It’s so nice to have my boys back together.//
//Mmm. I’ll be back down in Miami as soon as the season’s over.// Which was true, and he was looking forward to it. He spent altogether too much time away from Dereck during the season, with all his home games in Texas and Maribel preferring to spend as much time as possible in the National League territory of south Florida. Not that he begrudged her that; she would have been miserable in Arlington. He wrapped his free arm around her waist. She grinned, and kissed him on the cheek.
**
The baseball diamond in Arlington was filled with very small white home jerseys, rising only a couple of feet above the ground. A casual observer would see three or four Palmeiros standing together, a large Henke running after a small Henke, a couple of young Francos instructing an even younger Rogers in the finer points of bare-handed catch.
Dereck was not doing a whole lot of walking yet, but he could crawl deceptively fast, so it was in Pudge’s best interests to keep him occupied. He managed this by sitting on the infield grass and rolling a soft kiddie ball, printed with fake stitches, across to Dereck, who would either roll it back or try to put it in his mouth. Maribel stood off to the side, chatting in Spanish with Elaine Gonzalez, who was married to Juan and had some complicated array of additional athletic connections of her own: she was a professional field hockey player, or a volleyball player, something like that, and she was also the sister of Javy Lopez, who was some rookie catcher over on the Braves.
Maribel was wearing one of Pudge’s jerseys, blousy over her still-nursing-swollen chest, and shorts. Pudge kept glancing over at her, his eyes getting caught on the solid strength of her bare legs, making him light-headed every time he remembered that he had the good fortune to be married to this amazing woman. Still only 21, and he already had a wife and kid padding around the stadium wearing his number seven on their backs.
Two of Ryan’s kids were with him, both already fully as tall as Ryan himself. He made a few efforts to go over and talk, introduce Dereck, something, but every time he managed to make his way over to wherever Ryan had been, Ryan had already left. Pudge saw him hardly at all for the first part of the day, when the older kids took batting practice and the younger ones amused themselves with puffy toy bats and more soft balls like the one Dereck had slobbered all over. The sun hiked itself up the sky and arced off the bleachers, blindingly bright.
Around noon they all trooped into the clubhouse for lunch; the food would not last very long if left outside in the Texan heat. Maribel emerged from the crowd of wives and girlfriends around the extra folding tables that had been shoehorned into the clubhouse for the event, extracted Dereck from Pudge’s arms, and spirited him away to be cooed over by women in two different languages.
“Hey,” Rogers said, sidling up to Pudge and handing him a paper-wrapped sandwich.
“You see Ryan aroun’?” he asked, taking the sandwich and unwrapping it gratefully. Rogers narrowed his eyes incredulously. “Not like dat! I mean, I jus’ didn’ see him much today, but his wife, his sons, they are here, he must be here somewhere, no?”
Rogers glanced around, studiously casual. “I met his kids, yeah. You know the oldest one, Reid, he’s right around your age.”
Pudge winced. “No. Serious?”
“Mmhm. You’re, what? When’s your birthday?”
“Noviembre. I’m 21, you know dat.”
“Aw, you kiddin’?” Rogers made a sympathetic little grimace. “You’re like exactly the same age as his kid, man. Like. Exactly. He’s 21 and I’m pretty sure he was born in November. He’s been at some damn prep school and he’s gonna pitch for a college team next year.”
“Madre de Dios,” Pudge muttered. He put a hand over his face, just pressing into his eyeballs for a few seconds.
“Well, it ain’t like you actually did anything, right?” Rogers asked. When Pudge did not say anything, just dropped his hand down and stared at the floor, Rogers groaned. “Oh no you did not. Aw, man. C’mon.” He grabbed Pudge’s arm and dragged him through the crowd, muttering a trailing string of excuse-mes until they burst out into the relative quiet of the bathroom. Rogers dragged him into the showers, which were dry and, for once, clean.
“You had sex with a guy literally old enough to be your dad?”
“We didn’ have sex,” Pudge muttered. Both of Rogers’ eyebrows shot up. “We didn’! We jus’… I jus’…” He waved the hand holding the sandwich vaguely, hesitated, then took a big bite, chewed deliberately, and swallowed. He wiped his lips pointedly.
Rogers sighed, the air going out of him like a slowly deflating car tire. He propped a shoulder up against the tiled wall. “That’s a kinda sex. And now everyone’s got the wives here, and your kid’s here, and his kids… man. That’s… I don’t think they’ve invented a word for how awkward that is. No wonder he’s avoidin’ you today.”
“You think he is try to avoid me?”
Rogers looked away. Pudge shoved the rest of the sandwich into his mouth and fiddled with the top button of his jersey, slumping a little against the wall, feet planted so that his back wouldn’t skid down it.
It was easy to forget how old Ryan was, in the middle of the season. He was a veteran, of course, but there were a number of veterans on the team. He didn’t look that much older than, say, Julio Franco, who had just recently shaved all his hair off so that his hairline would no longer be an issue. He was still spry enough to beat up Robin Ventura when Robin Ventura required beating up.
Ryan wasn’t the first vet to fuck around with someone much younger than him, and Pudge wasn’t the first kid to fuck around with someone much older than him, but usually that meant groupies, not other ballplayers. There weren’t any complications involved in fucking groupies. Other ballplayers… that was nothing but complications, apparently. He could practically feel the sympathy and disapproval radiating off of Rogers, although Rogers was visibly doing his best to master both.
“Look,” Rogers said, his voice blustery, echoing off the tiles. “I ain’t gonna say it’s not so bad. But… it could be worse? You just… you just gotta get through the rest’a this season, and there ain’t too much left.” Pudge nodded, looking down, a rush of stupid affection for Rogers sneaking up on him so that he had to blink rapidly to hold back embarrassed and embarrassing tears.
“’Least you know he won’t bring it up,” Rogers added. “Not with everyone here. Shit, that’s the last thing good ol’ Nolan Ryan would do.”
“What’s the last thing I would do?” Ryan asked quietly.
Pudge snapped upright, the sandwich doing a barrel roll in his stomach. Rogers yelped and skidded on the tile floor, flailing for several seconds before sliding gracelessly to the ground. Ryan was standing at the open spot where the shower tiles gave way to the rest of the bathroom, arms folded, face perfectly blank.
There was the sound of a door opening, the happy normal noise of the rest of the team and their families briefly spilling into the bathroom as someone else came in. “Get out,” Ryan said, in that same quiet, even voice, without looking around. Someone Pudge could not see made a few confused noises, but the door opened and closed again as whoever it was obviously backed back out of the room.
Ryan cut his eyes down to where Rogers crouched uncertainly on the floor. “You too.” Rogers opened his mouth to protest and Ryan’s shoulders tensed with implied menace. “Out.” Rogers cast a sideways glance at Pudge, all nerves and defiance, but Pudge shook his head minutely, not worth it, not when he gets like this. He stood in stiff silence while Rogers levered himself up from the floor, giving Pudge one more glance, apologetic this time, before shuffling out of the showers. He gave Ryan as wide a berth as he could on his way out.
“So you. You.” Ryan inhaled deeply, nostrils flaring in a way that sparked instinctually dangerous in Pudge’s mind. “You talk to him. About, what? Everything?”
Pudge tried to look Ryan in the eye and found that he could not; he settled for looking at Ryan’s chest instead. “You don’ gotta worry. He’s, Kenny’s OK. He don’ care.”
“I care. You have no right…” Ryan stopped, flexed his hands. His footsteps echoed faintly as he walked over to Pudge, who stiffened even further. “You got no right to talk about that… that. With anyone. I can’t believe you…”
“He is my friend.” Pudge drew himself up; not that it made much difference, standing in front of Ryan, but it made him feel a little bit better. “I talk to my friend about stuff dat happen in my life, OK, it is my every right. And like I say, Kenny don’ care, he is not gonna tell nobody, and I don’ tell him the detail anyway, OK, is not like he know dat you--“ He pulled up short, silenced by the look that had crept over Ryan’s face, which was somewhere between about to faint and about to commit murder.
There was silence while Ryan’s face went from white to red and back again, his mouth twitching on a thousand things he was trying to not say. Eventually he leaned in towards Pudge, whose heart rate ratcheted up in excitement, but Ryan was only getting close so that he could speak quietly without his voice being projected all over the bathroom.
“You ain’t a rookie anymore.”
“I know dat, you think I don’ know dat? Dat was years ago, I know how things are now--“
“You can’t, no, OK, you can’t keep doin’ this…. this kinda shit. You can’t keep actin’ like a kid anymore--“
“Hey! I am 21 years old, I am not act like a kid--“
“Stop, stop, stop!” Ryan shouted, then froze, eyes swiveling towards the open end of the showers. They both stood still for a moment, breath held fast, waiting to see if anyone had heard.
“Is… is prob’ly pretty noisy out dere, wit’ everyone all close in,” Pudge offered quietly. Stupid, mentioning his age out loud, estúpido, estúpido, just dangling it right in front of Ryan’s face, Pudge and his son the same damn age. Fucking stupid. “Nobody hear--“
“Shut up,” Ryan hissed. He looked unhinged, unpredictable lines around his eyes, lips trembling. “Just… just shut the fuck up.” He took a deep, shaky breath, then straightened, smoothing a hand down the front of his shirt. It was a plain white button-down shirt, tucked into his jeans. Pudge helplessly noticed that he looked good in it.
“I was out of it. OK. On account of the brawl. And trainer gave me some shit so my hand wouldn’t swell up. Who knows what that shit does to your head. And you, you were even worse, you didn’t hardly know what was goin’ on by then. It was stupid and, and, and a mistake, a disgustin’ mistake, and it never would’ve happened if we’d both been in our right minds, so. So it may as well’ve never done.” He narrowed his eyes at Pudge and balled up his fists, leaning his knuckles against the shower wall on either side of Pudge’s head, daring him to contradict anything he had just said. “I’m gonna do my damn best to forget all about it, and you, you… you damn fuckin’ well better do the same.”
“You think I can jus’ forget, jus’ like dat? Maybe for you, you can, but for me? Is my life.” Ryan was starting to look truly alarming again. “Not you! That is not how I mean it. I don’… I don’ want anythin’ from you,” Pudge said, although that was not strictly true. If Ryan agreed to it, he would have jumped him right here in the showers, where anyone could walk in on them. He would have gone down to his knees again in a second.
But Ryan was, right now, as far away from welcoming that sort of thing as a person possibly could be. Maybe for him it had only been about the brawl, the adrenaline, the intoxicating rush of power that he must have felt as he secured Ventura under his arm and knew that he had the ability to win this thing.
“I cannot jus’ turn off the brain, make what happen go away,” Pudge said, trying to put finality, firmness, something into the words. “Even if I could make history to change, and I cannot, is not like dis is what I would erase. For me, dis is not jus’, jus’, a blip. A mistake pitch, no, OK. Dis is part of how things are always, for me.”
Ryan made a disgusted noise, deep down in his throat, turned his head sharply to the side, like he couldn’t even stand to look at Pudge. He pushed off from the wall with both hands at once, a smooth motion, powered by shoulders that could muscle a baseball through the strike zone from just over sixty feet away. A faint, deeply inappropriate stirring twisted in the pit of Pudge’s stomach; he knew that power, knew it up close and personal as only a catcher could.
“I’m already forgettin’ just as fast as I can,” Ryan said. The crazed rage was bleaching out of his eyes and a kind of blank deadness was moving in, much more frightening. Rage he could handle, rage he had seen from Ryan any number of times. But this he had never seen before, on the pitcher’s mound or off of it. “That’s how it is for me. This ain’t… it wasn’t me. I ain’t. Like that. And I don’t care how it is for you. From now on I don’t give half a shit ‘bout how it is for you.”
He turned and walked out of the showers. Pudge was still frozen, back stiff against the wall, palms flat, pressed just above the shower knobs on either side. His mind had gone blank. A showerhead somewhere had started to drip slowly, each drop hitting the tile with deliberate crispness. He heard each watery plink as a separate entity, a little parcel of time. Nothing else seemed real.
Ryan stopped at the edge of the tile, silhouetted against the white walls of the rest of the bathroom. His voice came carrying back as if it were traveling down a long, dimly lit tunnel. “If you ever, ever… ever talk about it to anyone else…”
He trailed off, but that was fine. Ryan was going to the Hall of Fame. He was a living legend, kids basing their entire careers on his style, imitating his pitching motion in Little League and high school and college and the minors. There were things he felt he could have associated with his name, and things that he felt he could not. Pudge was not so young that, even through the dense white noise crashing around the confines of his skull, he could pretend he didn’t know exactly what Ryan meant.
On the mound, a pitcher would not ignore his catcher. It was impossible. The catcher was half the equation, hands soft and open to receive whatever the pitcher was throwing. There was always a sort of rawness between a pitcher and a catcher, much more so than between other players, because no two other players on a team had such a direct baseball relationship.
Pudge had never been a non-entity to one of his pitchers. He would not have thought it was possible. None of them had ever looked at him like he was a clear pane of glass and all they could see was the wall behind, the way Ryan would look at him for the rest of the season. It did not so much break his heart as wrench free some firm conviction he had had in the configuration of the world.
The tiled wall at his back had been the only thing still holding him upright. He had stayed there for a while, looking towards the end of the showers, waiting for Ryan to come back, make eye contact, tell him it had all been a terrible misunderstanding, that he hadn’t meant what he had said. But Ryan had not come back.
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