catching up, 3
Two starts into the season, Burnett began to complain of elbow soreness. This seemed ominous to Pudge, who saw intimations of doom in every pitcher complaint after years of working with stoic veterans in Texas who only complained when their arms were about to fall off, but they were all young in Florida. He was being paranoid. Half the time these kids were probably only bringing up pain because they hadn’t yet been around long enough to know what level of soreness was normal for a big league pitcher.
Four starts into the season, they were playing the Cardinals at home. In the sixth inning Pudge called for a ball high and outside. Orlando Palmeiro was batting, and when Burnett floated a meatball right over the middle of the plate (very much not high and outside), Palmeiro crushed it right back into the empty orange outfield stands.
Burnett turned on the mound to watch it go with his mouth hanging open and his right arm hanging limply by his side. Pudge could not yet read these Marlins as well as he could read, for instance, Rogers, but something about the way Burnett was standing there looked very Not Right to him. He glanced back to check that it was OK with the umpire, then trotted out to the mound.
He had to say Burnett’s name three times before Burnett could focus on him, and he almost recoiled when Burnett did. The usually ice-pale eyes were wide, glassy, black. It took him a moment, but as soon as he understood what he was looking at he raised a hand, calling out for the trainer.
The pupils of Burnett’s eyes were blown huge, dilated to the point where they seemed to take over his eyes. This was, as Pudge remembered it, a sign of many possible things. Drugs. A brain injury. More likely: a severe pain reaction.
Four days later Burnett was having Tommy John surgery to replace the shredded ligament in his right elbow.
They were playing that night in Arizona. Pudge heard Redmond, huddled with his phone in the closet that the Diamondbacks were trying to pass off as the opposing team weight room, leaving a message on Burnett’s voicemail before the game. He briefly considered trying to do the same before deciding that Burnett would not, in all likelihood, give a shit. They had only worked four real games together and now Burnett was out for the rest of the season. Pudge essentially meant nothing to him.
Everyone was appropriately downcast to start the game, especially the pitchers, who were taking Burnett’s need for surgery as a very bad sign indeed. It was another stark reminder of the way in which a young team reacted differently from an older team. Injuries had been treated like the unwelcome but natural course of things in Texas; on the Marlins they were alarming events that forced very young pitchers to confront their own pitching mortality, or something.
But when they jumped out to an early lead, Todd Hollandsworth and Alex Gonzalez hitting multi-run homers, it looked like things might work out-- might be survivable, anyways. Redman was plodding along with his usual unspectacular but effective pitching; calling games for him was extremely low-stress compared to the tense vigilance needed to call games for Burnett or Beckett.
Late in the game, Redman’s turn in the batting order came up with men at first and third, and so Jeff Torborg, the manager, signaled for a bunt. Pudge hung himself over the dugout rail to watch. He was still trying to get a grip on the whole concept of pitchers who batted, trying to figure out what impact their at-bats had on their pitching performance in the next inning.
It was a very bad bunt, the sort of bunt an AL pitcher would have laid down, the ball popping straight up into the air, in a perfect position for the first baseman to catch the runner there off the bag for a double play. Redman came back into the dugout shaking his head, and his hand. He had caught the ball off of his thumb. It was reddened, a little swollen, but Redman seemed fine, his face alert (Pudge stared intently into his eyes until he was satisfied of this), his grip as firm as a left-hander’s grip ever would be.
He pitched two more good innings. Pudge doubled, and Mike Lowell homered the both of them in. By the end of the seventh, blood had begun to pool under Redman’s thumbnail. Pudge forcibly herded him over to the trainer, who frowned and dragged Redman down into the depths of the clubhouse.
It was only after the game that they heard that Redman had been taken to the hospital for X-Rays, and that his thumb was broken and he would be out for at least a month.
They were down two starting pitchers in two days.
So when Beckett’s elbow started to hurt him so badly that he could not hide it anymore, a week later, it was all Pudge could do to keep from knocking the kid unconscious and dragging him off to some place where he could keep Beckett tied up, or locked up, where pitching could not find him and do him harm. The coaches for once were equally alarmed and had management pack him off to Dr. Andrews, some arm specialist in Alabama, without the usual delay they would have allowed to see how bad it might get.
Beckett came back a couple of days later, morose. “They’re callin’ it a strain,” he said, in response to Pudge’s frantic questioning. “Fifteen day DL, is what they’re sayin’.”
“Ay! They put you onna DL?” Pudge ground his fists into the sides of his head, squeezing his eyes shut. “What are we suppose to do? Who is suppose to make starts? Madre de Dios.” Three pitchers gone-- three!-- in not even so many weeks. The season was barely under way and they were already fighting out from under odds so bad that it defied belief. Pitching was the single most important part of a team, no matter what some narrow-minded hitters might say, and it was their pitching that was being decimated, and it was all injuries, injuries on top of injuries, nothing anyone could do to prevent them or put a stop to it, and this team was so young, what must they be thinking now, the work Pudge was going to have to do just to keep them all from despairing utterly, it was monstrous to contemplate, impossible--
“I know. I know. I’m sorry,” Beckett said, sounding totally miserable. That was the only thing that could snap Pudge out of the spiral of catching-horror into which he’d started to descend: for him, misery in his pitchers was like the cry of a baby to its mother.
“Sorry? You don’ gotta be sorry, it is not your fault,” he said. Beckett looked down. Pudge grabbed him by the shoulders, making Beckett’s head snap back up in surprise. “Hey. Is not like you need a surgery, no? Is jus’… they say, a strain, nothing in the tendons or what?”
Beckett shook his head once. His shoulders, under Pudge’s hands, were tense.
“So it is nothing you can control. So it is not your fault. And is only 15 days, right? Not a 60-day DL, right? So we jus’. We jus’ hold it together until you get back, and by then Red, he will start to get back, maybe, and we will be OK.” He took a deep breath, looking right into Beckett’s eyes (big, brown, so young it was like a punch in the chest). “It is early in the season. We will be OK.”
Beckett held his gaze for a long moment, then looked away. “I still shoulda. I dunno. Somethin’.”
“What, not pitch? Do you blame AJ for his tendon explode or whatever? You blame Red for a ball hit him inna hand?”
“No,” Beckett muttered, very much like a surly student having an answer dragged out of him by a persistent teacher.
“Then how is this any more your fault? Because, it is not. OK, I got this, we will be fine and I can get us through this,” Pudge said, becoming aware as he did that the rest of the clubhouse had gone quiet, listening. He was horrified to hear himself saying it-- he could get them through it? What was he thinking?-- but when conversation resumed again, the tone was perhaps no longer quite as depressed as it had been. Some of the older players were nodding at him. Some of the younger pitchers were gazing at him in something like awe.
He took his hands away from Beckett’s shoulders, self-consciously aware that other people were looking at them now. Beckett touched the outside of his right elbow, startling him badly because he had not been expecting it-- hadn’t been expecting any kind of reciprocal touch, not when he was the one who did the touching on this team.
“Fifteen days, an’ a little more with rehab,” Beckett said softly. His hand twitched like he wanted to touch Pudge’s elbow again. “And then I’ll be back. And you’ll be… you guys’ll be…”
“Fine,” Pudge said, just as soft, only for Beckett to hear. “I will get us through.”
**
What Pudge knew about Ugueth Urbina when he was first traded to the Marlins could fill a scouting report, and not much more. Twenty-nine years old. Venezuelan. Good movement on his pitches, tough on lefties. A closer in Montréal, so probably a back-end-but-not-quite-closing reliever anywhere else. He had dimples, good biceps, thick expressive eyebrows.
//What I wouldn’t do to that boy,// Urbina sighed. They were in the hotel bar, huddled down at one end together. A small group of Marlins was clustered around a table, Derrek Lee and a bunch of pitchers. Lowell was in the middle of a quietly intense conversation with Miguel Cabrera at the other end of the bar. The rest of the team was out somewhere in the wilds of Philadelphia.
Pudge turned to follow the line of Urbina’s gaze and came up against Carl Pavano. He wrinkled his nose. Urbina was leaning sloppily on the bar, his elbows sliding out from under him, shoulders slumped, but it wasn’t the alcohol that made him look at Pavano like that.
When they first met, Pudge had looked Urbina up and down, not with any particular directed intent, just as a matter of course, until he realized that Urbina was doing the exact same thing. Urbina had realized what Pudge was doing at more or less the same time. There followed one night of frantic, mutual-gaydar-ping fucking. The sex was not exactly earth-shattering, more on the order of a sort of intense relief. What Pudge remembered most clearly was the way Urbina took off his belt: all in one motion, using just one hand to deftly undo the buckle and whip it out of his beltloops. Obviously practiced. Pudge had been on his knees, mouth watering, practically before the end of the belt snapped free.
After that, though, they had settled into an easy friendship, uncomplicated by further sex. He liked Urbina, liked how simple things were with him, the tacit understanding between them, but there was no real spark, nothing that would sustain a romantic or even just sexual relationship. Maybe he let himself be a little more physical with Urbina than he would be with most of the others: he put his hands on Urbina often, leaned into him unselfconsciously on the plane, cupped Urbina’s right hand in both of his own right there in the dugout to look at it when Urbina thought he might be developing a hangnail. But he probably would have done all that anyways.
//Why don’t you ask him, then, huh?//
Urbina pushed a thumb around the rim of his glass. //He wouldn’t. Not a chance.// They both watched Pavano for a moment. He was listening to a story or something that Brad Penny was telling, nodding along, occasionally nudging Redman, who was sitting next to him, left thumb sticking stiffly out in its cast. Pavano wasn’t into what they were into. Pudge had been around the league long enough, by now, to feel pretty certain about that.
//No harm in looking, though, that’s what my Papa always said, eh? ‘Course he wasn’t talking ‘bout big, mmm, butchy right-handers…// Urbina made another revolution of his glass rim, then propped himself precariously up and licked his thumb. He was too drunk to make it properly suggestive, but Pudge grinned and rolled his eyes anyways.
//Speaking of big, butchy right-handers,// Urbina added, nudging Pudge sloppily with an elbow.
//What?//
//C’mon, c’mon. What about your right-hander. You think he would?//
//He’s not my right-hander,// Pudge muttered, //and I’m not gonna try to find out. More trouble than it’s worth.// He had not told Urbina about Ryan (he was not going to tell anyone about Ryan), but he was pretty sure by now Urbina had figured out that Pudge had done something with some teammate at some point in the course of his Texas career.
Urbina shook his head, then kept slowly swinging it back and forth, like the momentum of it was too much for his alcohol-loose neck muscles to stop. //He likes you, though. Beckett, he likes you. More’n he likes anyone else here.//
//That’s not saying much.//
//Maybe,// Urbina said. //Maybe, maybe, maybe.// He tried to wink and ended up blinking both eyes instead. Pudge reached over and rubbed his back fondly; Urbina sighed and melted a little further down towards the bartop. Glancing along the bar over Urbina’s back, Pudge caught sight of Lowell looking at them. Lowell grinned, good ol’ Urbina, drunk off his ass again. Pudge grinned back. Urbina was like this in Philadelphia and New York and Montréal and Chicago and every other city. There was nothing in the soft hilly decline of his shoulders, Pudge’s hand soothing their lines, that the team hadn’t seen before.
**
The first time Beckett turned his back on home plate, huffing and grumbling to himself in the wake of a call with which he disagreed, the umpire just rolled his eyes. It was Beckett’s first start since coming off the DL, and the umpire seemed willing to cut him a little slack. A good sign. Not all umpires were so accommodating.
The second time, the umpire frowned and squinted at him. Pudge watched nervously out of the corner of his eye. After the fifth such occurrence, the umpire coughed. It was not just any cough. It was a particularly Portentous Umpire Cough, one that carried a surprising lot of nuance to a veteran, and the umpire knew full well that Pudge was precisely the sort of veteran who would get the message. He immediately stood up and held out his glove, facing the umpire squarely.
“He better knock it off,” the umpire said. He dug around in his little hip bag and plopped the resulting ball firmly into the pocket of Pudge’s glove. “He keeps this up, it ain’t gonna get easier.”
Pudge jerked his chin down once in a minimalist version of a nod to show that he understood. “Maybe I go talk to him.”
“You do that,” the umpire said, dangerously agreeable.
Pudge trotted out towards Beckett, telling the corner infielders to stay at their bases with one quick left-right sweep of his eyes. He was sweating profusely in the humid Florida weather (hotter in Texas, maybe, but the air was so much drier there) and badly wanted to reach up and wipe it away from his forehead, but doing so would amount to showing weakness in front of Beckett during a game. Pudge had learned that this was, in general, not a good idea.
When he reached the mound he immediately grabbed the front of Beckett’s jersey to keep him from turning away, although he tried to make it look like a gentle catcherly chest pat for the cameras. “Ey. Hey,” he repeated, until Beckett looked at him. “Stop showin’ up the ump, or it will get harder for a strike call.”
“Whatever,” Beckett muttered. “You don’t know that. I get mad at his bull-shit, I’m gonna be mad, I’m gonna act mad.”
Pudge shook his head. “He will do it, he say as much.”
“He… he can’t do that! That’s ill-ee-gull!”
“He says it to help you,” Pudge said. He resisted the urge to grab Beckett and instead tried to telegraph urgency through the one hand already warningly braced on his chest, trying to physically will him to understand. “He sees a kid who do not respect him, he could so easy jus’ start to call pitches tight, but he think, this kid does not know, I will give him a chance, I will take a time out of my very busy umpire life to tell him how it is. He don’ have to do this, it is to be a help, out of the kindness of his tiny umpire heart, you see?”
“M’not a damn kid,” Beckett muttered. “I been up a year an’ some.”
“You sound jus’ like me when I was your age,” Pudge said, exasperated. The point was not the kid thing, but it was just what he would have seized upon ten years ago, so it served him right that it would be what Beckett immediately seized upon as well.
“Really.” Beckett looked wary, somewhere between intrigued and offended.
Pudge nodded and patted him firmly on the chest. “Sí, really. So listen to a dude who was there, and has plenty of years on top of that. No more stompin’ around a mound, big obvious sigh, glare in at nice umpire man, jus’ stop, OK? Keep it onna inside, throw your glove at a wall after the game, whatever, OK?”
Beckett glared at him. Pudge stared back calmly. With many other pitchers he would have gotten angry, but Redmond had told him early on that that sort of thing only fueled Beckett’s irate fire, and experience had borne that warning out. After almost a full minute, during which time Pudge could practically feel the umpire’s gaze on his back, Beckett cut his eyes down to his own glove and chuffed out a pissy little breath. Pudge patted him on the chest again, more gently, and trotted back to his patch of dirt behind home plate.
They were up by five after the eighth inning, so Jack McKeon, who had taken over the manager’s position when Torborg was fired in May, brought Urbina in for the ninth. Pudge did not call anything fancy, Urbina threw reasonably well, and the side went down in order. Pudge peeled his mask off of his helmet and tucked it under his arm, wiping an armband across his forehead, squeegeeing the sweat off as best he could. He was already thinking about cold showers in the locker room, nice clean sprays of water.
The victory lineup was half-formed by the time he got to the mound. He gave Urbina a casual smack on the lips, high-fived Derek Lee, accepted a sharp thwack between the shoulder blades from Juan Encarnacion, and was manhandled in various other ways as the rest of the team passed by, until finally he got to McKeon, who shook his hand with a gruff, “OK, that was good, uh, bueno,” and waved him into the dugout, where the steps leading down to the cool air conditioned clubhouse were beckoning.
Beckett cornered him after they had showered. Pudge had almost been expecting it, and was not particularly surprised, which seemed to upset Beckett even more for some reason.
“The fuck was that?” Beckett asked.
“Look.” Pudge carefully threaded the buckle of his belt, taking a moment to collect his thoughts before he turned around. “Look,” he repeated. “You cannot pull shit like that. Don’t act like you are all a martyr here, OK? I am a catcher, I am your catcher, you act up on a field, I call you out on your shit. You don’ like I do it durin’ a game, fine, you don’t act up durin’ a game. I will say it honest, what you pull today, that was shit I don’t even see from a kid who throws his very first game. I do not blame the ump one bit, he has every kind of a right to get mad when you act like that, and I do not hesitate one bit to do again what I do today. Comprende?”
“I… what… you… that wasn’t what I meant,” Beckett sputtered. “I meant… at the end… the end of the game…”
There was a pause. “That is what we call a ninth inning,” Pudge said carefully. “It is what you get after the firs’ eight innings are done. Three outs for each half. Usually it is the last inning of a game.” He frowned. “I know you are young an’ all but I expect you to know that.”
“That’s not. I.” Beckett was turning decidedly red. “After the end. Durin’ the lineup, when everyone’s doin’ the high fives and shit, and you went up to… Urbina… and, and…”
Pudge made an encouraging little gesture with one hand. Beckett screwed up his forehead so that it became a sea of horizontal wrinkles; this was plainly costing him a great deal of effort. “And you… you,” He lowered his voice. “You made out with him.”
Years of pro ball had familiarized Pudge with the idiom, but it still took him a moment to recognize it in this context. “I… what?” Beckett grimaced and scuffed at the clubhouse floor with his sneaker, looking down. Pudge thought back; he had not made out with Urbina since that first and last encounter, when Urbina joined the team; Beckett could not have possibly known about that, and so it could not have been what he meant. After another few agonizing seconds of staring at Beckett’s now brilliantly crimson face, though, he got it.
“You mean… after the game, he come up, I give him a little--” here he made a kind of mwah kissing moue. “Sí?” Beckett nodded, glancing up at Pudge defiantly. Pudge shook his head. “That is not ‘making out’. Is nothing, is jus’ like, a bump of a fist, no big deal.”
“Uh, that ain’t just like bumpin’ fists. What, they do shit that different in your country?” Beckett was at least doing Pudge the bare courtesy of keeping his voice low. “I mean, what, seriously, where you guys come from, you just… go around kissin’ other guys?”
“OK, for the first, me and Ugie, we are not from the same country.” Beckett shrugged, now looking uneasy. Pudge took a step away from his locker, towards Beckett, and jammed his fists into his own hips, which he knew made him look a bit like a sullen squashy tree stump, but he did not really care. “Hey. You do not shrug and look at other shit when your catcher talk to you. I am from Puerto Rico, Ugie is from Venezuela, OK, Venezuela is a big stupid country onna top part of Sout’ America, Puerto Rico is una isla, also it is part of the United State of America. You are from Texas, no? Is not like you come from a place wit’ no Latinos, what is this, you suddenly come over stupid?”
“Look. I just… nevermind.” Beckett was rubbing the back of his neck now, not looking at Pudge at all. “You don’t see dudes fuckin’ kissin’ on the field, OK, it was weird, I thought… just nevermind.”
“You thought what?” Pudge asked in a dangerous sort of voice. He took another step towards Beckett.
Beckett gave him one fleeting, wide-eyed look, backing up a step and looking to the side, but their teammates were all occupied with their own post-game routines, no doubt assuming, if they noticed Beckett and Pudge at all, that they were simply having it out over some little quirk of pitching. “I just, OK, OK, I just thought, if you were… if you and, and him were… y’know… you shouldn’t. Ah. You shouldn’t do that on the field, is all. You guys should be, uh, more. Um. More careful.” The look on his face indicated that he might have wanted to say more, but he swallowed the words down, still very red about the ears.
Pudge let that hang in the air for a moment. “There is nothin’ for us… for me and Ugie to be careful about.”
Beckett looked back at him sidelong. “Nothin’ for us? You put that pretty careful. Nothin’ for just you t’be careful ‘bout?”
Pudge shrugged. The flush was started to recede from Beckett’s face. He shifted a little, maybe about to say something again, but he stopped when Redmond suddenly appeared next to him, moving with surprising stealth for such a clumsy-looking catcher. “Everything’s good over here, guys, right?”
“Great,” Pudge said, after waiting to see if Beckett was going to reply. “Everything is fine.”
“That’s wonderful. That’s really a beautiful thing. I’m taking some of the guys out to get a few drinks, the ones who’re actually old enough to drink, right--“ Cabrera slunk by in the background, looking sulky-- “are you fantastically great and fine folks in?”
“Probably jus’ goin’ home. Long day, you know.”
Redmond nodded soberly. “Absolutely. I am, you know, full of understanding. Tell the lovely Maribel I say hi, right?”
Pudge stared at him a beat too long before nodding once, sharply, turning to dig his cell phone and wallet out of his locker, not waiting to see Redmond leave, not waiting to see Beckett’s reaction, if he even had one. Fuck Redmond. He hadn’t ever said more than five words at a time to Maribel, he could have only barely known who she was. Fuck him for sticking his nose in where it didn’t belong, fuck his idea of being helpful. Fuck.
**
It did not come up again, at least not in so many words. A few days later Beckett casually mentioned something about a club after the game; Pudge went assuming most of the team would be there, but found it was only him and Beckett. The same thing happened a week after that, and then again several days after that. Then they were on the road, and when Beckett asked if he’d like to go try out such-and-such a Chicago restaurant that he had heard good things about, Pudge was wholly unsurprised to find out it was going to be just the two of them.
Urbina teased him endlessly about it. //What,// Pudge protested, //I can’t have friends?//
//Friends? He doesn’t even speak Spanish!//
//So what? I speak English.//
//Sort of.//
//Fuck you, and fuck the crusty, saggy-titted whore-mother you rode in on,// Pudge muttered.
Urbina patted him on the cheek. //Darling, you always say the sweetest things.//
Maybe it was a kind of stupid, old man’s vanity-- Pudge was 31, short and, well, pudgy; Beckett was freshly 23 and in the kind of shape that made the groupies pretend to swoon-- but he liked it. He liked that Beckett sought him out, wanted to spend time with him away from the field. Beckett seemed to touch him more away from the park, little brushes of his hand, leaning an elbow into Pudge’s shoulder to get his attention in the darkness of a club, squeezing up next to him in a crowd. And he seemed to look at Pudge more too. On the field he was always looking at a million things at once, keeping the batter in the corner of his eye always, watching the umpires, the coaches, the crowd. Away from all that, he was surprisingly good at ignoring waitresses and bartenders and the ever-optimistic groupies. If Pudge found a little pleasant fodder for his imagination-- his fantasias-- in Beckett’s friendship, well, as Urbina would say, there was no danger in just looking. It was only dangerous to do something, and he had no intention of doing anything.
But Beckett was young and headstrong and convinced that everything he wanted was his by rights. He was curious, not afraid of much, and he did seem to like Pudge more than anyone else on the team. So, in retrospect, it was not terribly surprising that something should happen, but Pudge was so busy determinedly Not Doing Anything to Beckett that he was completely and totally caught off guard when Beckett Did Something all on his own.
They had been winning more than they’d been losing, and the whole team had been infected with a sort of reckless giddiness: the stress of playing well and staying competitive within the division was rising by the day, but the euphoria of winning was pervasive too. Pudge caught McKeon whistling to himself before the postgame press conference, some days, and some of the younger rookies were getting so excitable that there was talk of banishing all the coffee pots from the clubhouse. It was the sort of clubhouse atmosphere that could so easily lead to a young player doing something exuberant and very, very stupid.
Beckett, in the middle of this stretch, threw a complete game three-hitter against a very good Braves team. Pudge caught the game, and Beckett did not shake him off once, which was quite possibly a first; Beckett always shook him off at least a few times per game, it was some kind of dominance thing with him.
In this one, though, they had the same ideas about the Braves hitters, the same understanding of the pace of the game, what pitches needed to be thrown at what times. Pudge did not glance back at the dugout once for a signal from McKeon or a National League hint from Redmond; everything he needed to know was right there on the mound. It was certainly the first time, since he had joined the Marlins, that he had experienced anything like the kind of simpatico pitching relationship that he had had with Ryan or Rogers.
Afterwards, downstairs in the clubhouse, Beckett grabbed Pudge by the arm and dragged him into the video room, eyes glossed over in a way that made Pudge nervous. Beckett was breathing hard, the fingers on his right hand twitching like he was still feeling for seams. As soon as the video room door swung shut he shoved Pudge up against a solid wall of outdated VHS tape bricks with a dull clunk, and kissed him hard.
Pudge shoved him off. “Madre de Dios, what the fuck! Are you crazy?” Beckett pinned him to the wall again by his shoulders. “No,” Pudge hissed. “Down, down, bad pitcher! Don’t be stupid, the whole team is right here. This is… we are not going to do this wit’ a whole team right here.”
Beckett gave him a look, clearly translatable as What are you, some kinda pussy? Pudge squeezed his eyes shut momentarily, squirmed out from under Beckett’s big hands and stomped firmly out of the room.
Five minutes later Beckett was back at his own locker, changing into his street clothes with aggressive, jerky little motions. His jeans were slung low on his hips, exposing a strip of clean white boxer briefs, his chest bare except for the spot where his favorite hemp pitching necklace hit the hollow of his throat as he deliberated over a shirt. He looked stupidly good. Pudge could not believe how good he looked, and to think, he could have been touching that, right now. What was he, some kind of pussy?
But someone had to be the adult around here, or the clubhouse would dissolve into chaos. It was essentially Pudge or nothing, when it came to adulthood on the Marlins. Beckett was just a punchy, rogue kid. And, Dios, such a kid, what the fuck did he even mean by that, throwing a game that good and finishing it off by trying to jump down Pudge’s throat?
Beckett had his little one-city girlfriends. He talked about them with the other guys; Pudge was pretty sure he had heard Beckett and Penny debating the merits of shaved vs. unshaved pussy in the dugout just a few days before. Of course Pudge himself was married. He fucked the occasional groupie. But that… that was him. Beckett was just a kid, he could not possibly be like him.
Beckett was giving Pudge a look, from halfway across the clubhouse, that could only be described as smoldering. There was no misinterpreting that. Whatever Beckett might or might not be, he was attractive and good at pitching, and he was, apparently, interested. Pudge was not that strong.
“You live by yourself?” Pudge asked quietly, sidling up to Beckett once they were both fully dressed and the likelihood of either one of them doing something monumentally foolish where McKeon had a chance of seeing it seemed reduced. Beckett nodded. Too quick, too eager. Twenty-three years old. Pudge was going to have to keep reminding himself.
“OK,” Pudge said, “this is what we do. Wait ‘til mos’ everyone else is gone, you get in your car, I get in my car, I follow you out. We go to your place. We… we talk about this. OK?”
“Talk. Right.”
“This is not a joke,” Pudge warned. “Talk, yes. Maybe… we see. But this, no, you cannot jus’ jump me inna lockerroom like some little U Miami sorority chica and not say a word, things go to shit when you do that. I been around, OK, I know.”
For a moment it looked like Beckett was going to protest, was going to treat this like just another mound conference, where anyone questioning his understanding of baseball would be subject to his immediate scathing scorn, but he ducked his head and nodded, almost sheepishly. It was the first time Pudge could remember seeing Beckett admit that he might, just possibly, be out of his depth.
**
As soon as he walked into Beckett’s apartment, it became clear that Beckett had done some reassessment on the way over. Instead of holding back and waiting to see what Pudge would do, which was what they had essentially agreed upon, he immediately cornered Pudge in the living room (or TV room, or whatever the bachelor rookie apartment equivalent of that room was) and tugged with fetchingly intent concentration at Pudge’s belt.
Those big hands… but no, hell no, he was not going to let Beckett derail him that quickly. “Talk! I said we would talk!”
“Uh hunh,” Beckett mumbled. He was looking at Pudge’s mouth, but he didn’t seem to be focusing on what Pudge was saying.
Pudge grabbed both of Beckett’s wrists, trying to hold him off, at least slow him down. “Since when do you even like boys? I only ever see you wit’ women.”
“I only ever see you with women, outside’a Urbina,” Beckett said, not nearly as mockingly as he could have. “Maybe I got to thinkin’ I should give it a try. Maybe I seen you makin’ out with the relievers, I got curious.”
“You did not see me make out wit’ any reliever,” Pudge shot back. “But me, this is what I do, for years and years. You, all of a sudden? And you come with this to me, of all people, why?”
Beckett blinked. “Years and years? You been… you been doin’ shit with guys for years?”
This seemed too obvious to even address, so Pudge ignored it, taking advantage of Beckett’s sudden stillness to shove him onto the nearby couch. He underestimated his own relative strength and ended up on top of Beckett, braced stiffly over him, but in that position he could both keep Beckett mostly pinned down and retain his attention, so it was not necessarily a bad thing.
“Why?” he repeated. “Why me, why now, why all of this?” He could feel the heat of Beckett’s body practically radiating up off the couch at him, but they were going to do at least a minimum of talking about this, even if it killed him.
“Dunno.” Beckett looked away. “You didn’t seem like you’d get pissed? And, like, today. During the game. There was… with you, and me, there was a thing.”
“A thing.”
“A thing, a thing, I dunno. Fuck. A thing, with the pitches, and me throwin’ ‘em and you callin’ ‘em, and how good it went, and it was so good, and I got to feelin’ like… and it was a thing. You tellin’ me you don’t know?”
“A weird baseball thing, you cannot explain no more than dat.” Pudge sighed. He released Beckett’s hands and settled down, sitting on Beckett’s thighs instead of hovering tensely over them. “Do I know. Sí, I guess.” Beckett looked shocked, like Pudge was unexpectedly letting him get away with something. Maybe he was.
“I still think this is a bad idea,” he added. Beckett had put his hands on Pudge’s hips and was squeezing lightly, rhythmically, like he’d never touched anyone with an appreciable amount of fat on their frame before and was near-hypnotized by the sensation. “This, wit’ a teammate, this will always be a bad idea.”
“Nah. It’ll be good, it’ll be, man, it’ll be good. I trust you.” Beckett slid one hand around to the small of Pudge’s back, just grazing the very top of his ass, still hesitant, still acting like he was getting away with something and he could not quite believe it.
Pudge sighed, leaned forward to press a nuzzling kiss to the side of Beckett’s head. “Yeah. That is what I am afraid of.”
**
In order for Beckett to count something as sex, Pudge quickly learned, it had to be as energetic as possible. Pudge had restricted their first few encounters, Post Braves Game, to kissing and mutual touching (plenty satisfying to him), both to give this thing, whatever it was, some semblance of order, and also to give Beckett a chance to back out if it got too weird. It was not too weird, apparently: Beckett had wanted to immediately get into what he considered proper sex.
“Sex in the ass is not the only kind of sex,” Pudge said, exasperated. “And you cannot jus’ jump right into it.”
“I’m aware,” Beckett said. “You think I never fucked a lady up the pooper before?”
“Oh yes, that is the mos’ sexy thing you could have said. Pooper.”
“Well sorry, I don’t know the word in Spanish.” Beckett reached down, getting a good handful of Pudge’s ass. He never seemed to get tired of it, which was kind of funny, because Pudge had never noticed any particularly impressive asses on the girls Beckett picked up. “Do you want me to put it pretty or somethin’? Do I gotta do some kinda demonstration to prove I know how to get a butt ready for my dick?”
“I’m in una relación wit’ a ten year old. Dios, ayúdame.”
“I dunno what that means, but it sounds hot,” Beckett rumbled, rubbing up against Pudge.
June turned into July, July into August. The humidity in Miami kept climbing, spiking up to a new peak every time Pudge thought it had finally reached a plateau. The kids got out of school and Maribel started bringing them around to games; she always wanted to sit in a box, where there was air conditioning, but half the time Dereck managed to talk her into watching the game from the front row. It had been a long, long time since Pudge had spent an entire summer somewhere other than Texas.
The Marlins were, improbably, playing well, but Beckett was having a hard time getting wins. It was bad luck, mostly, and bad run support; Beckett himself was doing a good job, his curveball as smart as any Pudge had seen. Still Beckett insisted on taking each loss like a personal affront, becoming frustrated, and then wanting to work his frustration out, usually on Pudge.
It was not a casual one-off, as it had been with Urbina. Nor was it a fraught one-off, like it had been with Ryan. It was not a zero-expectations one-off like the encounters he occasionally had with groupies, because Beckett did have expectations: that they would meet up again, that they would do more than they had done the previous time, and if they couldn’t do more, that they would do whatever it was they’d done before harder, faster, in a new and more challenging position. It was not enough for Pudge to fuck Beckett lying flat on the bed; Beckett wanted to be fucked bent over in the shower, braced on three different surfaces while Pudge slipped and slid around trying to keep his footing. Or he wanted to fuck standing up, with Pudge’s legs wrapped around his waist; a position that Beckett insisted was “totally possible,” but Pudge suspected he had never seen done outside of porn, or at least not with anyone who weighed as much as Pudge did.
Pudge actually had to sit him down, explain to him why having sex in the clubhouse was a bad idea-- mixing work and sex (as if they weren’t already), two guys having sex around a bunch of teammates who might not take so kindly to that, sex where there were cameras, a whole laundry list of very good reasons. Beckett listened politely, nodded along, then suggested that he could steal a set of keys so that they could sneak in after hours and have sex on the actual field. Explaining why that was also a bad idea took another ten harrowing minutes out of Pudge’s life.
These were not problems that he ever had with Maribel, or indeed with groupies, but of course there were compensations. Those big brown Beckett eyes locked tight on him during a game, ignoring hecklers in the crowd and increasingly fractious umpires. The jolt in the pit of his stomach when a particularly good Beckett fastball came screaming into his glove, the batter swinging emptily for visualized fences-- the knowledge of what that abbreviated Beckett fist pump on the mound meant for him later.
What Beckett might have lacked in experience (with men; even without knowing any of the details, Pudge had no illusions about Beckett’s track record with women), he made up for in sheer enthusiasm, and an utter lack of shame that Pudge would have never, ever, not once in a million seasons expected from a presumed straight-but-experimenting ballplayer. Beckett liked holding Pudge down and squeezing his ass and fucking him hard, but he also grew stupidly proud of his blowjobs and would kneel happily at Pudge’s feet for an entire Sportscenter hour, licking and sucking and trying out ridiculous contortions of his tongue until he found the specific sequence that would set Pudge to hysterical swearing.
“You are goin’ to kill me,” Pudge groaned. They were in the middle of a road series, and so he was flat on his back on what was nominally Beckett’s hotel bed, getting in what time he could before they went back to Florida. Beckett was draped over him, two fingers angled up inside, thumb pressing at the back of his balls. “You goin’ to fuck, or play wit’ me until I die?”
“Roll over an’ grab the headboard,” Beckett suggested. His voice was probably supposed to be silky, seductive, but instead he just sounded eager.
“Dios, why you always got to make it more complicated, jus’ do it like dis.”
Beckett opened his mouth to protest. Pudge reached down and grabbed his own cock, stroking it firmly, a gesture that felt a thousand times better with something in his ass, and would feel better still if Beckett would replace his fingers with a slightly larger part of his anatomy. Beckett closed his mouth and looked down at Pudge with his eyes narrowed.
“You’re doin’ that on purpose.”
Pudge shifted his hips a little, driving his cock up through the circle of his fingers, gently jostling Beckett’s hand. “Sí, usually when a dude has a hand on his dick, it is on a purpose.”
“I mean, to make me wanna do it your way insteada… ah, fuck it,” Beckett muttered. “Where’d I leave that lube?”
“Romántico as always,” Pudge sighed. But he was not really complaining.
**
On the road he made a habit of rooming with Beckett. This was not unusual: the Marlins were too cheap to get individual rooms for everyone, even though most of the rest of the league had given up the roommate system years ago. And nobody objected to a catcher rooming with a young pitcher. Certainly there was some talk among the coaches that he ought to be rotating, staying with a different kid pitcher on every trip, but as the season wore on and Beckett got stronger, kept pitching better, that sort of talk tailed off. Something was working, and there was not a coach on the team who would want to be responsible for screwing it up.
They were in Pittsburgh, late August, where the last of the afternoon’s sunlight threw the yellow bridges over the Allegheny into high relief. The Pirates had shut them out that night, which was distinctly unnerving. They had won ten more games than the Pirates at that point in the season. They were second in the division, leading the race for the wild card. The Pirates were fourth in their division and falling fast: not the kind of team to which they should be losing.
Pudge came back to the hotel surly, having gone 0-for-4 in the game. Penny had not pitched well, and had complained to McKeon about the pitches Pudge had been calling, even though Pudge knew damn well that the pitch calling was not the problem. Penny had only gone four innings. There had been four innings of relief pitching to get through and he had called those just fine, no runs and hardly any hits, the problem was clearly Penny, and what was he supposed to do? There was only so much he could do; he couldn’t magically create good pitching where none existed. If Penny was so damn afraid of Jason Bay, that was his own problem, and had nothing to do with Pudge.
Seemingly as soon as he crossed the threshold into his hotel room, grumbling irately to himself over the conversation he’d had to have with McKeon that had kept him at the ballpark so late, his phone started to ring. He was inclined to ignore it at first, in that foul a mood, but the name that came up on his screen was one he hadn’t seen in months: Rogers, who was busy working his way through a season in Minnesota, of all godforsaken places.
“Hey,” he said, pausing for Rogers’ answering hey. “What’s wrong?” Because there was something in the way Rogers had returned his greeting that made him certain something was wrong.
“Nothin’. Baseball,” Rogers said, evasively. “Just thought… I just wanted to call. What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothin’. Why would you think there is?”
“You sound kinda upset, is all.”
“I say, what, ten words to you?” Pudge grumbled, ignoring the fact that he had done the same thing to Rogers in even fewer words. Beckett was out with some of the younger guys, at a bar or a club or something; Pudge didn’t know. Not back at the hotel yet, anyways. “Is nothin’. Just, Penny blame me for some shit, he say I call today’s game bad. I hate he say that to the coaches, I just don’ need that mierda here so late inna season.”
“Nah. You, callin’ a whole game bad? I don’t think so, ain’t no coach gonna think so.”
“How would you know? You watch? You get a Marlins game on TV out there?”
“Well… no,” Rogers admitted. Pudge snorted out a laugh. “Whatever, I know you, I know how you play.”
“Ay, shut up. You don’t even… really, why did you call?”
Rogers sighed heavily into the phone. “What, I gotta have a reason? I dunno, I just hadn’t talked to you in forever. And maybe I had a shitty-ass start today and wanted to talk to someone who wasn’t on this fuckin’ trainwreck of a team.”
“Ah ha. Pierzynski not workin’ good wit’ you?” AJ Pierzynski was the starting catcher for the Twins. Pudge assumed he had caught the latest game.
“You don’t even want me to get into Pierzynski. He’s…” Rogers trailed off, at a loss for words to describe precisely what Pierzynski was. “He’s not you,” he finally said, as if that was some kind of actual answer, as if that was something other than what he had said about every catcher he’d played with since Pudge. “But hey, fuck, I didn’t call just to bitch about my shitty squad, I called to get distracted from my shitty squad. You guys are playin’ good, right? You’re on the road now?”
“Pittsburgh, sí. We play OK for now. The Braves, they are in top of the division, but we do OK. Maybe a wild card. Lots of injuries, you know, these pitchers. One thing after another, it feels like.”
Then of course Rogers had to have the run-down on who had been injured, and how, and when, and how long the rehab had taken, if it was even finished. This was a morbid kind of pitcher’s curiosity with which Pudge was very familiar; they all liked hearing about what had gone wrong with other guys, part schadenfreude-esque happiness that it wasn’t them and part warning for a possible future. Halfway through his description of AJ Burnett’s weird continued refusal to watch a game from the dugout following his surgery and the various theories that had sprung up around the clubhouse to explain this, there was a loud thump at the door, followed by a softer thump lower down. “Hang on,” he said to Rogers, who just grunted.
When he opened the door he was not particularly surprised to see Beckett there on the floor, leaning against the doorjamb with his knees up, his arms looped loosely around them. He nudged Beckett with a toe just to see if it would tip him over. Beckett tilted his head up and grinned sloppily, all teeth and goatee and black hair going in twenty different directions.
“Forgot mah key,” he slurred, sliding off the doorjamb and stopping up against one of Pudge’s legs.
Pudge sighed. “OK. C’mon.” He underhanded the cell phone onto his bed, reached down to get both of his hands under Beckett’s arms so that he could haul him to his feet. He just barely managed to lever Beckett up onto the other bed (lifting with his legs, not his back, like he was in the weight room and the trainer was yelling at him). Beckett made a sweeping attempt to grab at him, but Pudge dodged this easily and retrieved his phone.
“Sorry. Roommate is bien bebido. These kids, can’t hold the alcohol.”
“You gotta pair up on the road? I didn’t know there were teams still doin’ that. Who’s the roomie?” Rogers asked, suspiciously interested.
“Nobody, is jus’ one o’these kid pitchers. You wouldn’ know--“
“Sure I would, you think just ‘cause you’re in the NL I don’t keep track? Gimme some credit, fucker. It ain’t Penny, I’m guessin’ that much.”
“Dios, no. Jus’ this kid, Beckett--“
“Josh Beckett? The kid with the blisters? And the elbow? And the strikeouts? Yeah, that’s Beckett, isn’t it, with the whole Texas thing, right--”
“Didn’t know you knew so much about a Marlin,” Pudge muttered.
“--and the goatee,” Rogers finished. “Huh. Pretty big guy, isn’t he? Pretty good pitcher?”
“I guess… what?”
“Hey, nothin’. You room with him all the time?”
Pudge let himself keel over backwards onto his bed and dropped his free hand down over his eyes. “Why?”
“No reason at all,” Rogers said, in a rather unconvincingly innocent tone of voice. “This is an excellent distraction from Twins-shit, you know.”
“I do not know what you are talking about,” Pudge said, very even, he thought, but Beckett chose just that moment to get his legs working again long enough to stagger over to Pudge’s bed and flop down on top of him. He squeaked, surprised by the sudden weight, and tried to push Beckett back off, but Beckett interpreted that as groping and got excited, writhing his entire body up against Pudge’s.
“Josh,” Pudge hissed, shoving ineffectually at various parts of Beckett, “no, I’m onna phone, Josh.” Laughter spilled out from the phone, a little tinny with distance. He managed to twist away far enough to get the phone back up to his face. Beckett curled up around his lower body, long limbs absurdly out-sized for the task, and nuzzled at the hem of Pudge’s shirt.
“You got a type, buddy,” Rogers said. “You gotta be careful.”
“I do not. Fuck you.” Pudge put a hand on Beckett’s head to keep him from working his way upwards, where he would be even more of a nuisance.
“I’m serious. I mean, me, this is funny, but what if it hadn’t been me on the phone just now, hey? What if it was, was, I dunno, your agent, or manager, or Maribel?” That was a low blow, and Pudge winced at it. “I mean, like, what if it was your kid callin’ to tell you ‘bout his day at school? Oh, daddy’s just wrestlin’ with his friends?”
“Is like midnight, Dereck is not gonna call,” Pudge said, “but I am careful. It is not like everybody know, OK, you don’t hear this in the, the media, you don’t hear it inna locker room. I am not stupid, you know that.”
“I just found out, didn’t I?” Rogers pointed out. “I ain’t some kinda super detective Inspector Gadget freak. If I can figure it out...”
“No. You, it is different,” Pudge said. Rogers made a gentle noise of protest. “You are. You know me better’n any, any Inspector Gadgets, you have una ventaja.”
“Maribel knows you pretty good,” Rogers said, quietly.
Beckett had gotten the hem of Pudge’s shirt shoved up and was snuffling at his waist. Pudge squirmed a little, just to see if he could get free easily, but Beckett had him well wrapped up and did not seem inclined to move. “Well, OK. She knows I… I mean, with groupies, she is not blind or stupid she mus’ know how it is.”
“Groupies are one thing. This is another. Team, Pudge…”
“Yeah, but if she finds out… she would not be happy, I don’ think. I mean, I know. But it is not so so bad. I mean, no worse than if it was a groupie. I would not talk about a groupie either, is jus’, like… polite. She don’ bring it up, I do nothing to make her have to bring it up.” It was deeply weird to talk about this while Beckett was warm and drunk and affectionate, right there, working with a cheerful drunken lack of coordination at the button fly on Pudge’s jeans.
“I think you’d be surprised,” Rogers said. “What the wives know ‘bout the difference, with team, that kinda thing.” And wasn’t that interesting? But something in Rogers’ voice was clanging alarms in Pudge’s head, warning him off of it, don’t you fucking dare ask.
They sat in silence for a moment, Pudge chewing over the whole of the conversation, Rogers presumably backing away from the edge of whatever precipice they’d just happened upon. It was like old times; he could have sat in comfortable silence with Rogers for another ten minutes, but Beckett had Pudge’s fly halfway to open and was trying to pull the pants right off of him, although the significant volume of Pudge’s ass meant that the jeans were going nowhere until one of them got the fly the rest of the way undone.
“I will be careful,” he said. “I am not sayin’ that I am not careful now, you know. But even more careful. If it will help you to sleep at night.”
“Oh, yeah, OK, it’s all about me.” He could almost hear Rogers’ smile through the phone. “Whatever. I don’t know why I even bother with your dumbass shit. Go back to your underage little strike-thrower--“
“He is 23!” Pudge said, laughing, scandalized. “That is four years older than me when I…” He stopped and let the sentence die off, abruptly horrified at what he had been about to say. They did not-- nobody talked about him and Ryan.
There was a beat while they both let the fake-adrenaline rush of nearly mentioning it pass. “Yeah, well, you were jailbait back then too,” Rogers said, just barely skirting the issue.
“I am so done wit’ this talk,” Pudge said. “Go back to your Pierzynski.”
“Go back to your twink.”
“Madre de Dios--“
Rogers was laughing as he hung up. Pudge dropped his phone to the carpet in fond disgust and scrubbed his fingers through the wild hair at the top of Beckett’s head, only to discover that Beckett had fallen asleep, all curled up around Pudge’s legs, and was drooling onto his stomach.
**
The last game of the regular season was such a non-event that Pudge didn’t even play--Redmond got the start, and was weirdly gleeful about it, saying things like, “Hey, gotta get my cuts in while I can, you’re gonna get all those playoff starts, right?”, nudging Pudge with his elbow. Willis pitched and got on base twice, a walk and a single. After the hit he pointed into the dugout with a goofy grin. Pudge pointed back at him with both hands.
“What’s that about?” Beckett asked, looking sidelong down the bench.
Pudge smirked. “That? Hittin’? I teach him everythin’ he know.”
“Teach me some’a that,” Beckett grumbled. Pudge looked back out at the field, pretending to pay attention to Willis’ lead off the base so that Beckett wouldn’t see his smirk evolving into bigger grin. Beckett was a pitcher through and through; he was terrible with a bat.
Two days into the future the schedule called for Beckett to pitch in the first game of the Division Series. It would be Beckett’s first trip to the playoffs. If Pudge was managing the team, he would have found a way to stagger the rotation so that Beckett’s very first postseason experience was not also his first postseason start-- he would have preferred to let Beckett watch someone else, Penny or Redman or something, make a start beforehand-- but of course he didn’t have any real say in the matter, and so here was Beckett, biting the fingernails of his left hand in the dugout and compulsively knocking his heels against the concrete floor until Juan Encarnacion had had enough and screamed at him to knock it the fuck off, hijo de puta.
When the inning ended Redmond sat down next to Beckett with an armful of catcher’s gear, scuffed shinguards with straps so thoroughly stained by sweat that their original teal color had darkened almost to black. “Settle down, yeah?” he said, mildly, bending over to work his leg into the zone marked out by the straps. “Makin’ people nervous, Josh.”
“Fuck ‘em,” Beckett muttered. He had his left thumb in his mouth, worrying at the nail with his teeth.
Redmond tugged at the foot-plate of his left shinguard, which was stuck in an upwardly cocked position. Outfielders were already leaving the dugout, running out to their positions. “You’ll be fine. We know the Giants, right? And being all fucked-up about it today, that’s not gonna help you come gameday, right? Uh, a little help?” Pudge rolled his eyes and got up to help Redmond unstick his shinguard, something that required an unreasonable amount of undignified tugging. Beckett watched with an indecipherable expression on his face.
“Dude, c’mon!” Willis yelled. He was at the top of the dugout steps, windmilling an arm towards the mound. Pitcher needing a catcher: Pudge was up and halfway to the steps before he remembered that he was not playing that day.
“You’re gonna make me look bad, Rodriguez,” Redmond said under his breath, crooking a smile in Pudge’s direction as he passed. Pudge rolled his eyes and turned his back on the dugout steps, looking to where Beckett hunched over himself on the bench, shard of thumbnail twisted and white between his teeth.
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