you are more than the sum of your parts

[candle_beck]

yep! epic stuff, man. it was a strange idea that i had, picked up speed from the length of the disabled list, and it's not as much about billy beane as i might have supposed. can't predict these things anymore, which is actually encouraging.



A Green Field As Far Away

In the spring, Billy began calling.

The first message, Harden was drunk enough to be seriously unsettled, Beane coughing between words and breaking off curses, but then, luckily, unable to remember it in the morning. The second message he listened to with the oddest sense of déjà vu.

Beane wanted to know if Harden would come in to Sacramento for dinner sometime, maybe see a River Cats game. Harden played it back three times, looking for hidden meaning, wondering what Beane’s angle was. Beane didn’t just do stuff like this, not with guys as removed as Harden was.

Harden ignored the message and the two subsequent ones, and walked the floors for a little while, opening the windows against the flooded gold of the fields. There were cracks in the walls and the stairs were increasingly treacherous, battered old farmhouse ten miles from the closest gas station, and it was worth it for the silence in the morning, the warmth that came with more power than it ever did to the Oakland hills.

Harden was on his fourth year, living in the Central Valley.

Crosby called that afternoon, and Harden ascertained from him that Beane had been acting no stranger than usual recently. The team was still playing out their first home-stand, and Beane was down in the clubhouse a lot, but that was normal for April. Harden got distracted by new team gossip, fitting the phone against his shoulder as he made himself a rum and coke.

After awhile of that, Harden half-asleep on the front porch, in the wooden swing with his feet on the rail, Bobby said that he should come back before the team left for Texas.

Harden let his eyes close the rest of the way, blacking out the scrub grass in the yard, the long brown twist of the driveway. Crosby kept a spare room ready for him at all times, but Harden didn’t like going home much. It’d been four years, and he felt like a reflection of himself when he was back with them. He’d lost weight and gained shadows under his eyes, his hands shaking noticeably unless he was drinking, and they were so perfect still, all this time later-it shamed him. Seeing Crosby and the others, smelling the ocean in the air, it made him want to scream.

He did end up there several times a month, though, long weekends and midweek day games with barely ten thousand people in the stands, going out with the boys and home with Bobby.

He dodged Crosby, feeling the seep of afternoon light through his skin, the drunk stir under his skin. Crosby said, “We worry about you out there, you know?” and he was probably mostly kidding.

They said their goodbyes and the quiet slammed back in all around him, fields and sky running for miles. Ends of the motherfucking earth, Harden thought, and rubbed his eyes, his throat dry and his chest feeling hollow.

Beane called again that night, when Harden was watching three games simultaneously, flipping through the satellite feeds and taking notes on various players. It was an old habit and, at this point, kinda psychotic, but he got itchy if he stopped.

More than a little drunk, Harden picked up, saying, “Jesus, Billy, most people can take a hint.”

Beane didn’t answer for a minute, likely surprised that Harden had actually answered. “I think the fact that my methods are unorthodox has been pretty well established.”

Harden smirked. Zito’d said once the thing about Beane was that he honestly couldn’t give a shit what other people thought. He’d used up his fear of failure very early on, came out the other side reckless and manipulative. It made him extremely good at his job, eleven years in contention now, but dangerous to have around late in the summer.

“What’d you want that’s so important?”

“What, I’m not allowed to stay in fucking touch?”

“You are, yes,” Harden said, licking at the rim of his glass, mouth hot. “But when have you ever?”

Beane made a scuffing sound like a laugh, and Harden trolled around the channel guide looking for the A’s game, missing it by inches and seconds. He couldn’t ask Beane the score; Beane wouldn’t know.

“Anyway, come to the game, all right? Team’s good this year.”

The team was good every year, at every level of the Oakland organization but none moreso than the River Cats, steadier even than their compatriots to the west. Harden hadn’t been following the farm system as closely as he did the major leagues, but he could feel it in his future, when the hours get long enough that any game would be welcome, a whole new league to track and analyze. He could probably only name seven guys on the ‘Cats roster.

“You can’t bribe me with baseball, Billy.” Harden exhaled, tired beyond the telling of it. Beane made the same sound and Harden wondered if it was something he’d picked up in the years since they’d last spoken.

“Oh, really? The kid starting for the ‘Cats, he’s a lefty out of Oregon State. He hits ninety-five, ninety-seven, good movement, and he’s got two breaking pitches, one of which is a fucking seventy mile an hour knuckle-curve. They say that coming out of his hand, it looks like it’s going backwards.”

Harden held his breath, held still. He watched six or seven hours of baseball a day, but he hadn’t been to a game since Street’s little brother was in Triple-A at Fresno, and that was better than a year ago and a knuckle-curve, who the fuck threw a knuckle-curve anymore?

“I can’t help feeling that you’re leaving something out,” Harden said, because Beane always, always had secret agendas and a master plan.

“You know, you’ve gotten suspicious as shit living out there all alone. Back here in society, we occasionally meet up with old friends and watch a fucking game.”

Sneering, Harden wished he’d brought the rum in from the kitchen, wanting to say, we were never really friends, dude. Beane was essentially his old boss. It was weird. He was pretty sure it was weird.

He found the A’s game at last, a splash of green and white. “Your actual team is losing, by the way.”

“The fuck do I care? It’s April.”

Harden sagged back, remembering slow starts and the last two months always ripped like paper, quick and sharp and easy. Crosby wasn’t in the game; he was sharing time with a kid in his rookie year who’d lit the Cactus League up like tee ball. Kid had three triples in the early going, played short like he was tuned half a second into the future.

Crosby would be down in the clubhouse with Haren, maybe, or one of the others, drinking beers out of coffee mugs so that they wouldn’t get in trouble, watching something other than the game.

“You should really do something about the lineup, you know.”

“Pray tell,” Beane said dryly.

“Carter should be playing centerfield, first of all, and hitting in front of Remigo, not leading off. You gotta stop that situational shit with the bullpen, and make Swisher only hit left-handed, and tell Danny that he’s losing his angle when he throws off-speed stuff. And get rid of that new color-man, he’s fucking awful.”

Beane was quiet for a minute before saying, “You’ve been paying attention.”

Harden laughed noiselessly. His life revolved around the satellite TV and the internet, here in the heartland, two hours from anywhere. He had nothing but time, nothing to do but pay attention to the young baseball season. Last year, he finished first in four different fantasy leagues, and this year he was going for seven, using the teams to test certain theories he had about pitching and defense.

“I keep up.”

“I’m sure the boys insist on it.”

“Yeah, well.” Harden popped his knuckle against his knee, watching the game end predictably on a four-three, and thought that Crosby would be calling him soon. He usually did, as he drove home. “We gotta have something to talk about.”

“Yeah, I really think you should come to the game.” Beane said decisively.

“Man-”

“Come on, I’ll see if I can get them to let you throw out the first pitch.”

Harden hissed through his teeth; that was cold. Beane seemed to realize he’d gone too far almost immediately, saying quickly, “They’d be fucking lucky to have you, of course.”

Passing his hand over his eyes, Harden shook and wondered if he started drinking heavily right now, would he be able to black this out?

“You know, me and Bobby promised when he got called up that we’d never go back to Triple-A again.”

Beane coughed. “You did go back. You both have.”

“So? I still promised. And I never exactly went voluntarily.”

“Jesus, Rich, it’s just a baseball game. You like baseball, remember?”

And that stumped Harden, remarkably, stopped him dead. He rolled the glass against his leg and thought seriously about baseball for a minute, though it made him feel dried out and airless, scared him with its distance, the course of it better than history. He liked baseball-he lived for baseball, now maybe more than ever.

“I, um,” he said, but couldn’t think of anything else.

“Okay, then. You can park in the players' lot, I’ll tell them you’re coming.”

Harden sighed, giving up and blaming it on the drunk. “All right.”

“Cheer the fuck up, will you? The kid throws a fucking knuckle-curve.”

Grinning hard against the heel of his hand, Harden considered the long drive west tomorrow, and an hour more would get him to Oakland, at this speed. He makes a note to buy some seeds, find his sunglasses. Going to a ballgame, oldest ritual of his life, too-early heat in the air, cut grass and hay.

“I coulda thrown a knuckle-curve.”

“Never in a million years, Richie.”

Harden thought, yeah, he’d go back home after the game. Crosby’d be incredibly welcoming, after a night like that.

“I’ll see you there, I guess,” but he sounded doubtful as hell and Beane heard it no question.

“I don’t remember ever leading you astray before,” Beane said back, sharp, and Harden had to laugh at that, thinking that if he only had one word for his life right now, ‘astray’ would be pretty fucking apt.

Long after he’d gotten off the phone with Beane, after the last of the games was over and Harden had run out of Coke and was drinking straight, he found himself folded over his knees, calling Crosby. It went to voicemail, two in the morning and a day game tomorrow, and he fell asleep in the middle of telling the dead air that velocity was only as good as off-speed and it wasn’t really fair if even the pitcher didn’t know where the ball was gonna go.

*

In the morning, Harden’s shoulder ached like a low burn under his skin, scratching at the scars. The third surgery was what really did it, though the fourth didn’t help. That point where the cure was worse than the disease, in his fourth major league season, his second straight year on the DL.

He wrapped it because pressure sometimes worked, and stuck his mitt and extra shirt and bottle of water and bics (both pen and lighter) in his backpack. He had a flask of either rum or whiskey, he forgot which, and he’d smuggle that in his belt, against the small of his back, so that he could spike a soda in the stands.

Sacramento was a two-hour drive going about ninety-five. Perfect straight flat valley roads, with the sun going down directly into his eyes, a bizarre transitory state to be in. Windows down, traveling westward.

He called up to Beane and Beane sent someone down to take him to the seats, which were, happily, right behind home plate, three rows back. Harden bought a scorecard and a soft pretzel, put his feet up on the empty seats in front of him. Wednesday night Triple-A game, local families and teenagers, random shit going on in the breaks. Harden tried to remember how many times he’d been knocked back to Triple-A on rehab. Every injury except the last one, he supposed.

Beane didn’t come down until the third, kinda incredibly rude, but Harden didn’t care. The kid did throw a knuckle-curve, and man. Harden kept score down to the pitch counts, engrossed.

Billy climbed over the seat and sat down next to him. “Sorry.”

“’Sup?” Harden said distractedly. Beane grinned

“You see? Didn’t I say? You’d watch that shit all day, huh?”

Harden nodded, leaned back at the inning’s end. He looked at Beane, who was getting very CEO in his looks and age. Beane still often acted like he was twenty-five years old, but that was just personality.

Beane explained his reasons for being late in exhausting detail, talking about some deal but he wouldn’t use real names or teams, and Harden amused himself for awhile trying to piece it together, asking leading questions and making Beane narrow his eyes.

The River Cats had a seven-run lead in the fourth, and Harden shook his head. “Trip-A.”

“I keep saying, mercy rule, come on. This is just rough.”

But Beane was gleeful, a spiral on his knee, making notes about players on both teams. Harden thought Billy had the very best job in the world outside of actually playing. Beane had had a hand in all of this, somehow. They talked baseball for awhile.

Travis Buck was out in right field, and Harden pointed him out, saying, “I didn’t know he was back up.”

Beane nodded and spit seed shells out to the side. He ate them compulsively now, since giving up dip three years ago. Harden still thought that the real reason Beane had traded Huston Street was because of nicotine withdrawal.

“He had a good spring. We’ll see, though. The kid’s swing has more holes every year.”

Harden squinted out at Buck, testing the give of his mitt, fiddling with his sunglasses, a strict set to his shoulders, his hair jagged under the edge of his hat, though not as long as it used to be. Buck had had an unconscious rookie season, but fallen back to the minors the next year, bounced around ever since. He made the majors in September a couple of times, but never stuck around. He was the only guy on the field that Harden had played with.

Buck seemed to recognize him once, coming in from right, a flash of eyes and tense mouth, but then he slipped down into the dugout and away, just another minor leaguer.

Beane raised an eyebrow at Harden pouring liquor into his drink, and then tapped their cups to request his share. He said in the seventh that he wasn’t sure who paid for the beers that kept getting brought to them, after they’d both had about four. He looked purely bemused, his sunglasses pushed up; the stadium lights were on.

“It’s a perk of running the fucking organization, I’d imagine,” Harden told him, idly transcribing the lineup changes. Twelve runs up, the ‘Cats had put in their entire second string, a bunch of twenty year olds. It promised to be pretty funny.

“Yeah. ‘Bout that.”

Harden eyed him, Beane kinda smirking and looking away. He blew out a breath in astonishment. “Ulterior motive, I would like to say, that I called from the very start. You are just not an honest person, Billy.”

“Oh, stop the fucking presses,” Beane says caustically. “Like we didn’t already know that. And, shut up,” he cut Harden off, “listen to my ulterior motive, I think you’ll like it.”

Harden crossed his arms over his chest and smiled at the field. Nothing like a blowout, really.

“Come work for me.”

Sensing that he was being fucked with, Harden tugged the brim of his cap and checked the scoreboard for the count. He took his time with his rejoinder. “I’d point out that it’s incredibly bad taste to joke about that, man, but because I am drunk: fuck your mother.”

Beane laughed out loud. “That’s not bad. Of course, I’m not joking.”

Harden curled his lip. “You want me to be the comeback story of the year? Five hundred thousand plus incentives to be the fifth man?”

“Fuck, kid, I don’t want you to pitch.”

Harden stopped, blinking at Beane. Harden didn’t exactly have any other occupational skills. That’d been the whole problem; too dependent on his body, he had nothing to fall back on when it betrayed him.

“What. What do you want me to do?”

Beane nodded at the game. “This.” Harden gave him a look, and Beane grinned. “I want you to be a scout.”

*

Driving to Oakland later that night, Harden tried to figure out what he was missing here, why Beane’s idea seemed so insane to him.

He’d been instinctively suspicious ever since he’d washed out, limped away from baseball. The fourth surgery had rearranged his veins in some strange way that took ten miles off every pitch and he couldn’t locate, going that slow. He was in pain almost all the time and in August something right behind his shoulder gave, snapped, during the first game of a double-header, in the smeary gray rain.

Weeks after, they told him that basically his life was over. Beane released him outright to make space on the roster for the kids coming up, explaining almost angrily, “I woulda kept you healthy over everybody else, if I only had one choice, but what the fuck, man, what can you do?”

What Harden did was lie around on Bobby Crosby’s floor for about a month, shell-shocked and numb, and then went to Victoria, but the world felt dead up there, hard-frozen. He came back to California as it was turning summer, found a haunted farmhouse in the middle of a cornfield, and dedicated himself to demolishing what was left of his talent.

He’d let four years pass.

He still talked to Crosby most days and played chess with Zito by email, and Street, perpetually lost out on the East Coast, sent him postcards and shot glasses bought at airports. Danny Haren drunk-dialed him a lot. He sent Chavez’s kids presents every birthday and Christmas like clockwork. Though viscerally removed from the day-to-day, he was still attached to the team in ways that mattered.

And down in the valley, he could live without leaving a trace behind, expertly concealed. Harden had gone through his collapse in full view of the national press, and now he just wanted to be left alone, watching the crops come up from the front porch.

Harden was eighty percent sure that he should turn Beane down. He knew nothing about scouting. This was some weird consolation prize, a misguided attempt to draw him back into civilization. He needed to see if Bobby was in on it, if it was like an intervention.

The lights were still on when Harden pulled up in Crosby’s driveway, the new house’s address written on a matchbook. He’d been here once before, the weekend Crosby moved in, handprints on cardboard boxes and Crosby telling him not to lift the heavy shit. The front door was unlocked, as it always was when Crosby was home.

Leaving his shoes in the hallway, Harden sought out Crosby, located him eating a bowl of rice krispies at the kitchen table, the little white TV playing clips of basketball. He grinned when Harden came in, dust on the side of his face.

“Decided to show your face?”

Vaguely reeling, Harden took the seat across from Crosby. “I’ve had an odd night.”

Crosby got up to get them each a beer. He was barefoot, wearing board shorts and a T-shirt with a maple leaf on it, faded to pink. Hair grown out again, he’d get tired of it in a month or so and shave it all off once more, but Harden had always liked him better like this, uncombed and rough.

“Yeah? There’s a full moon, you know. Strange things afoot.”

Harden flicked the bottle cap across the table at Crosby’s hand. “I went to the River Cats game with Billy. He. He offered me a job.”

“Well, that’s pretty fucking cruel, even for him.”

Harden smiled a little bit. “Not on the team. Scouting.”

“Scouting?”

Appreciating that Crosby sounded as confused as he was, Harden leaned on his elbows, fists near his temples. “So basically I need to figure out if he’s fucking with me or if he’s serious, you know, what the fuck I’m supposed to do next.”

Crosby tapped his finger thoughtfully on the bottle, a small, unfamiliar scratch on his cheekbone, as if he got clipped by a piece of flying gravel, sliding into second. Harden always felt better when he was with Crosby, the clamor and fear ebbing away.

“I think he probably is serious, what with the historical evidence, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a good idea,” Crosby said.

“You don’t think I could do it?”

“You could totally do it, man, but, like, following in the footsteps of Billy fucking Beane? That’s kinda asking for trouble.”

Harden took a drink, thinking. Billy hadn’t known anything about scouting either, when he’d walked out of the clubhouse and up to the front office, retiring from the outfield and asking for a desk job in one breath. Beane hadn’t been run out by injury, or at least, nothing physical, and he probably could have wrenched around the majors as a bench player for a few more seasons, but he’d given it up. Harden thought that if there was even the slightest chance that he could pitch again, in any way, in the minors or the independent leagues, in Mexico or Japan, he would have dug in, played for room and board.

Beane had let it go, and now he was almost like a myth. Better than twenty years out of major league baseball, he was still working on his Hall of Fame case.

“I’m not sure I follow,” Harden said slowly. “Billy’s done all right for himself.”

“Except for that whole sociopath thing.” Crosby shook his head, smiling. “Like, have you ever talked to the scouts? Because they’re generally very weird, lonely people.”

Harden rubbed his mouth. “As opposed to me.” Crosby kicked him under the table.

“You’re not that weird.”

Twisting his expression into something like a laugh, Harden worked on his beer for a minute, wondering honestly what would change if he started scouting, going to games and getting paid for it, weaseled his way back into baseball.

“I could be good at it, I think,” Harden said to his hands. Crosby sat back, propping his feet on the empty chair next to Harden, looking speculative and pretty fucking good, all things considered.

“That’s true. You can, like. You see that stuff. You’ve always been able to see things right.”

Harden looked away. He could see, he couldn’t turn it off. He knew when he was twenty-three years old that something was badly wrong with his body, that it wasn’t meant to be that difficult. He’d proved a little more every day that he wasn’t built for this, bestowed with all the passion and talent and none of the requisite strength. Going down, he counted the hours.

“So what do you think, man?” Harden asked him. Bobby shrugged.

“It’s definitely a possibility,” he answered, and Harden glared at him, really not in the mood for riddles. Crosby smiled again, quick pull of light across his face. “I think, fuck it. You’ll kill yourself wondering if you don’t.”

Harden nodded, though his stomach hurt almost petulantly at the sight of Crosby and his silver eyes. He couldn’t fathom the number of times he’d prayed for one more day, keep me in the game, lord, please. This was misinterpretation, like old stories about wishes that backfired. It would eviscerate him to live in ballparks again and never get to play.

“I guess I can try. And if it sucks, okay. Lesson learned.”

Crosby reached across the table to clink bottles with him in solidarity, and started talking about life on the road, man, and you’re out of practice. Harden tried to act like he’d missed being in motion, but really he just felt dangerously unanchored whenever he was out of the valley.

They stayed up late, talking. Crosby was probably the brightest single presence in his life, and Harden was tired from the ballgame and the hours he’d spent in the car, the beer and dulling overlay of two drunks in one day. His mind wandered, lost track on the line of Crosby’s neck, the clean undersides of his arms.

Crosby wandered into the guest bedroom brushing his teeth, keeping up conversation with Harden around the toothbrush, his mouth shiny white. Harden undressed, hanging up his belt and folding his jeans, telling Crosby that the thing about baseball this year was that every division would go down to the wire. He kept himself from looking at Crosby too much, pajama pants hanging off his hips.

Over the course of their now decade-long friendship, Harden had thought exactly twice that he might have a chance with Bobby. The first time, Crosby was frighteningly drunk, slumping onto Harden’s back with all his weight, breath on Harden’s shoulder, babbling. His skin felt soaked with heat, and though he looped his arms around Harden’s neck and tried to pull him down, tried to kiss him, Harden had to twist away, his hand pressed under Crosby’s jaw, feeling the thunder of his pulse. Crosby’s eyes were half open, glittery and blank, and it turned out he had a hundred and three degree fever, which turned into bronchitis, which shelved him for almost three weeks. Harden was pretty much convinced that Crosby didn’t remember pulling him down and licking Harden’s mouth, though he’d never quite had the stones to ask.

Six years later, Crosby broke up with his fiancée a month before the wedding, moved back in with Harden. Crosby barely spoke as they drove back and forth, and when the last of his stuff was in the car, he looked around the apartment, newly excised of any trace of him. He turned on Harden, eyes wide, panicking, and Harden took him by the shoulders and pinned him down on the wall.

He hadn’t known he was gonna do that, but once he had, he liked the fit of it, and he said something vaguely distracting, keeping Crosby still until he calmed down. Crosby ended up slouching back against the wall, eyeing Harden almost like a dare, like Harden could just lean right in.

But he hadn’t been able to-it was important that Crosby not get any more fucked up than he was already, for the team’s sake if not Rich Harden’s.

Bad timing was all it was, really. Harden thought for years that it was inevitable, only a matter of time, but he hadn’t factored in being released, and now it seemed unattainable, a misplaced hope of his youth. Too much had changed.

Trying to fall asleep, Harden added up the totals from the game in his head, holding his breath to hear Bobby Crosby talking in his sleep through the wall.

*

Harden turned off his phone for four days, and didn’t check his email, and didn’t see anybody. He’d slowed down recently; he needed more time to make decisions that could alter his future indelibly.

What’s the point of only going halfway back, he wondered, walking fifty paces out from the cherry tree and kicking at the hank of wood he’d buried in the dirt. He threw baseballs all afternoon at the dented trunk of the tree, missing pretty much all the time. As if being robbed of velocity weren’t enough, his location had never returned.

Long still sunset over the fields, fiery and spread out like a blanket, and Harden considered life on the road and day games in hundred degree heat and if he’d still be able to come home and see Crosby a couple times a month. He thought that basically what he was being asked to do was identify his best friends in their twenty, twenty-one year old incarnations. Find starting pitchers and infielders to build a franchise around, kids who were patient and crafty, high school boys already throwing splitters, outfielders who existed on another plane.

He remembered the minors with remarkable clarity, though it really wasn’t that long ago. Dust and humidity in Texas, the crawl of the flatlands into him when they were at Sacramento, always thirsty, always wired. Crosby had focused things, given Harden a reference point that didn’t move, and in third innings and past midnight, Harden would recognize the strain of happiness that ran through his days for what it was.

What’s the point of only existing tangentially? Harden told himself that he’d really never been cut out for this stuff, looking up Zito’s minor league stats, and Street’s, and his own. He got drunk and asked Bobby on instant messenger, do you think a better scout would have seen that I was a bad idea?

Crosby responded almost immediately: extremly good idea. you see some guy that looks like you 10 yrs ago, you give him whatever he wants.

The next day, Harden called up Beane and got yelled at for awhile, and then they made plans to meet in Sacramento and officially reinstate Rich Harden within the Oakland organization.

*

Billy had an office at the River Cats stadium, possibly more lived-in than the one at the Coliseum, with a door that opened into a box suite overlooking the field. They had drinks brought up and went through the paperwork and logistics of an actual adult-type job, watching the game.

Beane was trying to impart everything he’d ever learned about scouting, but Harden was having trouble paying attention. The ‘Cats were engaging as hell, even behind glass.

“A lot of this is laid out for you. We can tell you everything you need to know about what a kid has done. It’s a different situation entirely when trying to predict the future.”

Harden glanced at him, wondering if Beane had ever predicted this for him, maybe the first time he got hurt or the second, when it was still mysterious deep-tissue injuries, a heaviness in his side like he’d turned to melted lead there. Pitching had always done unpredictable things to him.

“You’ll hear a bit about make-up,” Beane told him, pacing and trying to keep his eyes off the action. Beane tried not to watch too many games, particularly live games, because he didn’t want to disturb his vision with untrustworthy observation. He was fickle about that, though. Like Harden, Beane got anxious when he went too long without seeing some baseball.

“Yeah,” Harden said. “I’ve heard that before, actually. But I’m still not completely clear on what it means.”

Beane looked up at the ceiling as though for inspiration. Harden knew that make-up was something that guys like Crosby and Street had, something he himself did not. You had to be a letter-perfect All-American boy, apparently.

“You look for guys who aren’t gonna fuck up just because they can. Guys not in it for the money and guys who won’t get drunk and arrested. Think about it like this. You make them richer than they’ve ever anticipated. You take them far away from their families and let them play baseball every day, and meanwhile they’re living single and young in some major city, and you need to find the guys who can stay sane in spite of all that. Pro ball’s not a good idea for the psychologically weak. It’s a lot to ask, considering the age.”

Drumming his fingers on the arm of the chair, Harden watched a double-play performed perfectly like a hand swept across the field. Everyone in both lineups was younger than him, he was realizing, a depressing thought, but who really wanted to be back in Triple-A?

He tried to think of where he matched the description of bad make-up guys in Beane’s estimation. He never got too far into it, never stayed out all night in a foreign city and come in disastrously hungover, like certain closers from Texas that he could name, and the game always came first with him, that was never in doubt. Maybe this was some kind of institutionalized gay-bashing, because his was an open secret within specific confines.

Even more galling, he’d spent six years keeping his hands off his teammates, despite dire temptation in the room down the hall and Zito drinking tequila for hours on Cinco de Mayo. If he was going to be unfairly judged based on his deviant lifestyle, he should have really gotten to fuck Bobby Crosby at least once.

“I’m not sure if that’s something you can distinguish, necessarily,” Harden said, because, honestly, everybody was a fuck-up for a couple of years early on.

“You’d be surprised.” Beane smiled slightly. “I was always looking for guys who were nothing like me. So that was easy. You’ll have your own way.”

Harden fingered the plane ticket Beane had given him. He was going down to New Orleans tonight, a red-eye flight after the game. Beane started him on the Pacific Coast League, which was a nice thing to do, actually, kept him relatively close to home. He was gonna have to get a place in Sacramento. No way could he maintain the commute back to the farmhouse, after weeks spent in motion.

Bad make-up was something ragged at the edges, Harden thought. For him it was the treacherous wrench of his motion, the stagger out of a bar in Midland, when he’d done everything he could to stay drunk for days, his legs kicked out from under him by the guy playing short and living in his house. He had a tendency to be emotionally wrecked at times, but it almost never came over into his game.

“Does talent supersede make-up, though?” he asked finally. “If they’re good enough, do you look the other way?” Beane grinned.

“Yes.”

“Okay.” Harden sat back, propping his foot up on the windowsill. He recognized the carry of Buck’s shoulders, walking into the on-deck circle, before he saw the number on his jersey. Winning again, and Harden really couldn’t remember why he’d stayed away from ballgames for so long.

Beane gave up on his ignorance and dropped into the chair next to Harden, his eyes scanning quick across the scoreboard and the field, settling back a little when he saw that the River Cats were ahead. The thing about Beane wasn’t that it was hard to figure out his angle; it was that he had six or seven different angles always going at the same time. He shifted priorities and changed his motivation too often to be easily tracked.

“Are you,” Harden started to say, then stopped, frustrated. He cleared his throat. “Am I supposed to know how to spot when a guy is injury-prone?”

Beane smirked. “If you can, I never woulda let you pitch in the first place.” Harden recoiled, stung, but Beane was shaking his head. “No, man, I mean ‘cause you woulda been more valuable as a scout than a pitcher, that’s all. I’ve had some time to think about it. The single biggest reason that we’ve never gone the distance is because motherfuckers keep getting hurt.”

“So you wouldn’t have signed any of us, if you knew?” Harden swallowed, cracking his knuckles against the chair arm. Beane sighed as the ‘Cats ran themselves right out of the inning.

“I don’t know. Maybe. The problem is, we were trying to get away from conventional wisdom, and the conventional wisdom with regard to fragility is actually pretty accurate.”

“Yeah?”

“They say, don’t sign guys who’ve been relying on breaking pitches for a dozen years, particularly curves. And don’t bring up Zito, because, clearly: freak of nature. They say, don’t sign anybody who’s had back or hamstring problems, because that shit lingers. They say, don’t sign short power pitchers.”

“Hey,” Harden protested weakly, but Beane grinned and cut him off.

“But that’s the thing, Richie, because I think I still probably would have signed you. You shoulda seen what you looked like back then.”

Uncomfortable, Harden curled his hand under the bend of his knee and watched Buck go crashing into the right field wall. He’d been dealing with regret for so long, it seemed strange when other people didn’t respond in kind.

“I always figured, I could identify talent and I could gauge it and produce evidence in support of it, but as far as durability, I could only guess, and I wasn’t gonna make decisions based on that. So I rarely did. And now motherfuckers keep getting hurt.” Billy smiled kinda ruefully, his face tilted downwards. “So, whatever. I don’t need to talk to you about bad luck.”

“No,” Harden said, looking at Beane, who looked back. “You don’t.”

Beane grinned again, and Harden thought that that was one thing about it, he’d never had to keep his downfall secret, and he couldn’t work out whether that was good or bad. He never had to explain what he’d lost, because everyone could see it, but at the same time-everyone could see it.

“You’re gonna do fine,” Beane told him without hesitation, and Harden flinched, struck hard. Billy had said that to him once before, many years ago.

*

Down in the players' lot after the game, Harden was taken surprise by someone calling his name, a stone echo. He turned and Travis Buck came up to him, damp-haired and dressed in his street clothes.

“Hey, Rich, what the fuck,” Buck said conversationally, sliding his hand through Harden’s.

“How’s it going, T?” Harden asked, running on automatic and checking the corners. He’d only played with Buck that one year, Buck’s rookie year and Harden’s last full season in the majors.

“Did you get a place out here or something?”

Harden shook his head, then shrugged. “I’m gonna, I guess.”

“That, that’s cool. I mean, Sacramento, you know, whatever. But you probably have your reasons.”

“Yeah. Um.” Harden noticed something unfamiliar and pinched in Buck’s face, remembering the stupid kid playing lit and overcome with joy, a big even grin that had been replaced by something crooked and screwed up. “I just took a job scouting the PCL.”

“No shit?” Buck’s eyes widened and flashed. “You can do that?”

“Apparently.” Harden leaned back against his car, giving Buck a long look. Buck was now part of his job description: fleet and streaky outfielder with a plus arm and vulnerabilities in his swing. Off to a good start this year, but see how long that lasted.

“That’s crazy. Buy me a beer, tell me all about it.”

Harden blinked, and Buck was already walking around Harden’s car and waiting by the shotgun side. He unlocked the car and got in uncertainly. He wondered if he and Buck had been closer than he remembered, those six months when their paths intersected. He’d expect this from most of the others, simple presumption that Harden would go along with any suggestion, but he’d been hurt most of 2007, anyway. They were not quite friends.

Buck directed him to a dive bar called the Knockout that had two other people in it, and sat him down in a booth near the pool table, in the pink-blue-green fragmented light of the hanging lamp. Harden had a plane to catch in three hours, reminding himself that he was only a visitor here.

“So, like, how do you even get on notice for a scouting job?” Buck asked. Harden moved his shoulders, picking at the splinters in the table.

“I didn’t do anything. Billy I guess just decided it might be an interesting experiment.”

“I suppose you can learn that shit. I think they do most of it on computers these days.”

Harden glanced at him sideways, not sure if Buck was making a joke or not. The waitress came over and Buck gave her a smile that changed his whole face, cleaned off the creases and brightened his eyes. Harden remembered Buck like this almost all the time, those first few months of his rookie year.

“It doesn’t seem too difficult. I field a mean fantasy league team.”

Buck laughed. “Oh, good, then.”

Harden licked at the rim of his glass, thinking that he would have to endeavor not to fall into old habits and end up living with Buck in Sacramento. They’d hardly ever see each other, but Harden had grown out of roommates.

They talked for a little while about the team Harden was going to see, the Zephyrs, and Buck gave brief summaries of every man in the lineup, drew a map on a napkin that showed how to get from the hotel to the ballpark. Harden got steadily drunk, happy to have a man on the inside.

“What year’s this for you, Travis?” Harden asked when his vision started to blur at the edges. Buck pushed his thumb through a slick of water on the table, the corner of his mouth tugged up.

“Sixth.”

Most of it spent in the minors, of course, but they didn’t need to bring that up. “More than me.”

Buck looked up. “Yeah?”

“Just barely.”

“You were one of the ones who tore the fuck through the system, weren’t you?” Buck asked, and Harden had to roll his eyes, finish off his beer.

“So did you, the first time.”

Buck sneered and sat back, and Harden felt guilty. Buck’s time in the system was in no way analogous to Harden’s, which had heavily featured Bobby Crosby and the distracting heat of Texas, and only lasted a year and a half. Buck’d been down here almost forever.

“You came back when you got hurt, though. Every time,” Buck said, and Harden winced, thinking that was probably fair.

“Rehab stints don’t really count, man.”

“What, you’re making up the rules now?” Buck smiled sharklike, but at least it looked like he was having fun again.

They settled back down, talking more easily about people they had in common and the apartment complex where Buck lived, near the trainyards. Harden learned that the house he and Crosby had shared when they played here had been knocked down and paved over, and he got briefly morose at the thought of the empty beer bottle that they’d buried in the backyard with their first baseball cards rolled up and tucked inside. Soon enough, it was time to leave.

Driving Buck back to his car at the stadium, Harden made note of the way he slouched in the passenger seat with his knee on the glove compartment and his window all the way down. He tried to think if he’d ever been to New Orleans before, asking Buck if he knew of any good bars, and Buck was still answering when they got to the yard.

Harden put the car into park and looked over at Buck, the careful turn of his neck checking the digital clock on the marquee. “So, we’ll have to hang out again when I get back.”

Buck nodded. “Yeah. Find you someplace to live, I’ll show you around.”

“I know my way around, dude.”

“That was years ago.” Buck grinned at him, and got out of the car, leaning in the window to say, “Welcome back to Triple-A, Richie.”

Harden swore cheerfully at him and got out of there fast as he could, found himself an hour later running through the airport, his wet-paint reflection far ahead of him in the huge windows, slowly advancing.

*

His third night in New Orleans, Harden had the old dream, pitching on the road in August or September, a day game and the stadium gun reading eighty-seven, eighty-six, no matter how far back he reached. He could hardly see through the sweat and the glare, spitting out oaths and dragging his face across the sleeve of his jersey.

Crosby showed up behind him, kicking the dirt, and Harden whirled on him, panicked and ashamed, the ball clutched like a ladder rung.

“Tell them to fix the fucking gun or turn it fucking off.”

Crosby squinted at him and took off his cap. He had the curls, mostly clean-shaven, though sometimes he had the buzz-cut and sometimes a beard. Though everyone else on the field was dressed in gray, he was wearing a bone-white home uniform, spikes and all.

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the gun, man,” Crosby told him, looking sad, and sometimes he drew the laces of his glove tight with his teeth, or picked up the rosin and sent a cloud of powder up to hide his face. Harden always got mad real quick.

The crowd noise built, somewhere with a dome, and Harden was screaming to be heard, “I’ll throw through his chest, you’ll see how hard it goes,” Crosby’s eyes huge and pale blue, and usually he woke up about then.

The window in his hotel room was jammed open, stuck on a warped piece of metal, and the atmosphere thickened even after he turned up the air conditioning, lying on top of the sheets in his boxers. He was here for the whole home-stand, four days more, and then up to Tacoma and Portland before coming back to Sacramento. He fell back into the pattern without difficulty, eating in the lobby restaurant and riding on the team bus to the park. Nobody on the team really talked to him.

Watching baseball for a living wasn’t as damaging as Harden had expected. He felt drunk almost all the time because of the humidity, and the grass was overwhelmingly green, the sky similarly blue. There was an outfielder whose legs blurred when he ran, circled like pinwheels, and hung up for whole seconds too long when he dove, and a catcher with the grid of the mask sunburned onto his face, who fought off thirteen pitches before finding the left-center gap, one hop to the wall. Harden learned the nicknames and team-specific cheers, wondering if being a fan favorite was supposed to be factored in.

It was only every fifth day that he felt the absence of responsibility on his back, his hand locked around the edge of the seat. He kept score every game, kept notes, sat with the other scouts behind home plate and some of them recognized him, but they didn’t make a big deal about it, and for that he was grateful.

Exhausted by the length of the day, Harden walked down to the Little League field behind the high school with a sixer and wandered the outfield, calling Crosby, who hadn’t played that night, giving way again to the new kid.

Crosby let Harden talk nervously at him for awhile, Harden crossing the same patch of grass in an irregular weave and trying to explain the different manner of sight that he was developing, the breakdown of the game to risk and statistics.

Eventually, Crosby spoke up, the highway flush behind his voice, “So, are you allowed to have a beer at the game, or are you, like, on duty?”

Harden stopped, grinning up at the moon. “Neither condoned nor expressly forbidden. They sorta turn a blind eye to it.”

“Well, that’s good. It’s definitely not healthy to watch Trip-A games sober.”

“It wasn’t healthy to play them sober, either,” Harden remarked, trying to remember if it was Midland or Sacramento when Crosby had spiked the Gatorade cooler on a dare. The only thing he was sure of was that they’d scored fourteen runs that afternoon.

“That was just our reckless youth,” Crosby said with mockery in his voice. Harden sat down in center field, missing Crosby so badly it frightened him. “We’ve straightened up and flown right.”

“Is that what we did?” Harden lay back and closed his eyes, a marshy animate scent in the air, the river a few blocks over. He must have been in New Orleans with Crosby before, sleepwalking through the hotel, maybe screwing around on this field, after curfew.

“Tried to, anyway.” Crosby coughed into the phone, radio and highway noise behind him. “You seen anybody looks all right?”

“Few.”

“No shortstops, right?” Bobby was kidding, but Harden didn’t like the idea of it, some nameless kid out in the bus leagues waiting to take Crosby’s job away from him.

“I’m not gonna tell Billy about any shortstops,” he promised, heard Crosby laugh.

“You’re a prince, Richie.”

Harden let his head roll on the grass, dampening his hair and pressing his hand down flat and almost completely covered. He’d gotten used to the tightening in his chest that Crosby inevitably caused, training himself to ignore it for a third of his life now. Crosby was impossible from the start in the same way that pitching became impossible at the end, something hobbled by a higher power.

“When do you get back?” Crosby asked him.

“Week from Sunday.”

“You gonna come into town? You get a couple days off?”

Soft dirt under his hand, Harden whistled soundlessly, answering, “Yeah. Ten-day trip, three days off. Then I think I’ll probably be in Sacramento for a little while.”

Crosby hummed, and Harden could almost hear him scheming. “That’s good. I can work with that.”

Harden smirked at nothing and thought about asking Crosby if he remembered New Orleans at all. Crosby probably didn’t; he wasn’t very good with names and specific places. He said stuff like, that dive bar in the South with the purple pool table, that restaurant where we ate rattlesnake, the park with the slide that went through a tree, and it was left to Harden to translate: that was in Memphis. You’re thinking of Albuquerque. The park was outside of Seattle.

Harden wondered if it gave them some kind of credibility, because they’d been best friends in every time zone and half the cities in the country. They’d lived together in transit, for half a dozen years, and maybe that was why it was unsettling to be on the road again, alone for the first time ever.

“Can I come out and stay at your house while I’m off?” Harden asked, crossing his fingers.

“’Course. Of course. If you didn’t, I’d have to drag my ass out to Sacramento.”

Harden smiled. Crosby was too decent for him. “God forbid.”

“Well, you know, just don’t expect too much of me, man, that’s all I’m saying,” and Crosby was joking again, sharp as if he were right there, cross-legged with blades of grass in his hair, rolling a baseball back and forth between his hands, half-grinning and Harden pressed his fist down on his chest, suddenly short of breath.

*

Harden got back to Sacramento and met up with Beane as the sun was going down behind the faraway hills. They bullshitted for a while and then Harden told him about the guys he’d seen and that they really needed to find better team hotels. Thinking about Travis Buck, gone to Las Vegas two nights ago, Harden asked about conflicts of interest.

Beane signed something absently, glancing up at him. “How do you mean?”

“I know some of these guys, Billy. Played with them or was even friends. Am I not supposed to hang out with them anymore?”

Beane rolled his eyes, shook his head. “You’re thirty years old, Rich, you can pick your own friends.”

“Okay, I’m twenty-nine, first of all.”

Flashing a grin, Beane popped a piece of nicotine gum out of its blister pack and told Harden that it was all downhill from here.

On the roll through the dark valley, heading home to Oakland, Harden considered how much weight his word carried with Beane. If he said, this guy’s a lock, would Beane make a few swift moves and acquire him, at god knows what cost? He thought about how easy it would be to bring the Athletics down from the inside, a couple of bad trades and wasted drafts, the line between red and black much thinner for them than most ballclubs. Sometimes Beane seemed to just will them into contention, when motherfuckers were hurt, when the lineup was half rookie, when they should have by all rights been given a year off for rebuilding.

It was a poor business model, he decided. Too much was dependent on Billy Beane and flyers like himself. Little things went wrong for the A’s a lot, that bad luck thing too heavy on their backs to shake, and Harden wondered why he’d never noticed the precariousness of the situation when he was still playing.

Four years on the team and it felt like twenty, the way they lived. Harden broke over the hills and cut in close to the water, the city fogged in, looking erased from the skyline. He could make this drive in his sleep, thinking about how the whole day had slowed in the aftermath of baseball, stretched to intolerable lengths.

Bobby had left the door unlocked again, but the house was dark this time, and Harden padded ninja-quiet to the guest room, where Crosby had left a Hershey bar and a ticket to the game tomorrow on the pillow. Harden put his suitcase in the closet, same as he had the other three unfamiliar rooms he’d stayed on this trip, and took off his shoes and belt and jeans, his watch folded around a twenty.

He was a long time falling asleep, sharing air-conditioned space with Bobby Crosby again, waiting for him in the morning.

It was a day game, so Crosby was gone when Harden woke up, his red bowl in the sink. Harden found the liquor in the freezer and ate Lucky Charms in front of the television, caught a flash of Huddy in his Cubs uniform on WGN but didn’t linger there. Zito was in Philadelphia and he called to pester Harden about something that had been inconsequential a half-dozen years ago. Harden neglected to tell Zito that he was staying with Crosby again-Zito would just make a big thing out of it.

The ticket was for right over the A’s dugout, which set Harden in direct line of the players coming in off the field, and Danny Haren leaned on the rail with his back to the game, talking to him for two innings before a foul almost killed him and the coaches made him go sit on the bench.

Sadly, his seat was also at perfect vantage to see Crosby losing his helmet on the basepath and getting knocked unconscious trying to break up the double play, in the last half of the first. He was close enough to hear the sound of the collision, bone on bone, the skid of Crosby’s body through the dirt off the bag.

He revived enough that he only had to be carried off with arms around his shoulders, his spikes trailing on the grass, and Harden wished he would look up, white-eyed and lucid, but Crosby’s head hung down like it was made of cement.

Sick and uneasy, Harden made note of the substitution, wondering if his former and current jobs might give him license to go down the tunnel and see how bad Crosby was hurt. He caught Chavez’s eyes coming in at the end of the inning, called Bobby’s name to him and Chavez nodded, held up a finger. Ten minutes later, one of the batboys passed up a note that said they’d taken Crosby to the hospital but he was probably okay. Harden spent the rest of the game wondering whether they’d completely fabricated the last part of the message to keep him from losing his shit. It was the kind of thing that Eric Chavez would be party to.

He remembered nothing of the last four innings, though he continued to keep score. It was like driving home the same street for the six thousandth time and letting his eyes unfocus for miles at a time. Soon as he could, he went up to Beane’s office to find out what hospital the team was using this year, and Beane forbade him from going anywhere near Crosby, so Harden left and sat in his car on the street outside the stadium, by the train tracks, and called every hospital he could think of in the city pretending to be Crosby’s brother; he got lucky on the sixth.

One of the trainers was in the waiting room on his cellphone (probably with Beane, the bastard), and Harden had never been so thankful for his face and name, the four years he’d had up here before his arm gave out. The trainer told him that they were keeping Crosby overnight because he had a concussion, and he wouldn’t play for a few days, and that was all. Harden, overcome by relief, went back to Crosby’s house and played videogames until the sun came up.

Bobby got dropped off past noon and Harden was still asleep on the couch, but he was stirred by the slam of the door and the ring of Crosby dropping his keys on the hardwood. Footsteps approached and stopped in the doorway, and Harden said with his eyes closed:

“In my day, we played through concussions, you fucking pussy.”

There was a pause, and Harden thought maybe that was a bit too far, though if anybody had earned the right to joke about injury, it was him. Crosby just threw his glove at him, bouncing it off Harden’s head. Harden looked up and Crosby was yawning and collapsing in the armchair.

“They won’t let me sleep. Not until nine o’clock.”

“Sucks, man.”

“And they said I shouldn’t come to the game.” Crosby dug his hand into his hair, wincing and breathing out in disgust. “Which is, like, not fair. You don’t think that’s fair, right?”

“I absolutely do not,” Harden said confidently, seeing the spread of bruise at the corner of Crosby’s eye, sinking into his hair. “You seem totally okay to go to the game.”

Crosby sighed. “I got these anti-seizure pills. You have to help me set the alarm on my watch so I can remember to take them.”

Harden nodded, pushing onto his elbows, sitting up. All the tightness was going out of Crosby, deepening his slouch into the chair, and his eyes flickered half-open.

“Hey,” Harden said, kicking at Crosby’s leg. “What was that about not falling asleep?”

“Fuck, Richie.” Slit blue eyes, hard mouth, sunlight in a layered field across his features. “I’m really fucking tired. How likely do you think slipping into a coma really is?”

Harden shrugged, knowing in a weird way that he would be reacting differently if he were still on the team. Crosby had always been a keystone, steady and implacable in his high socks, his thin bat and neat backlash of a throwing motion. There’d been a few years when he and Crosby had traded off spots on the disabled list, and it’d been bad when Harden was hurt, worse when Crosby was.

In the end, though never all that they thought he might be, Crosby had done the most important thing, stayed healthy. His injuries had been extremely random, broken-ribbed swings, dirty slides, and it was like he’d grown out of hard luck. Harden’s problems had always been more internal than that.

“Is there a dent in your skull?”

Crosby snorted. “Yeah.”

“You’re like a circus freak now.”

Rolling his head to the side, Crosby yawned against his shoulder, ten years taken off his face in the hazy light. “They were talking about how if I’d hit my head just a couple inches to the right, it woulda fucked up my motor control and I probably wouldn’t be able to field good anymore.”

“It’s probably not a smart idea to get into the what ifs, man.”

There was always some worse injury, dangerous to contemplate when already depressed and fucked up on painkillers. Harden used to dream of taking a comebacker square in the face, blinded and brain damaged, shattered on the dirt as it started to rain. Baseball was far more perilous than most people realized.

Crosby’s eyes fell near-closed again, and Harden asked to keep him up, “They gonna let you go on the Central swing?”

Making a dismissive sound, Crosby answered, “They better try and fucking stop me. I’m gonna be fine in, like, twelve hours.”

Bobby couldn’t afford to stay out of the lineup, of course, platooning at short with the kid, who’d moved off triples recently, started hitting doubles down the line instead, which was just as bad.

Fighting off the long afternoon and the misaligned chemicals in Crosby’s brain, struggling to stay awake, Harden took Crosby out to the hills over Vallejo, where a mile away they could see the Six Flags coasters and colorful tents. They hit golf balls into the empty land sloping steeply downwards, almost hearing the shrieks of kids when the wind picked up.

Crosby sat on the hood of the car watching Harden take his cuts, and he asked about Harden’s strange new job, disjointed and backwards view into the life. Harden gave his answer more thought than it warranted, crouching to pick a broken tee out of the dirt.

“I don’t really know what I’m doing,” he said. “I see something in a guy’s swing and I think I can see his whole career, just like that. But that’s not really possible, so it’s just, it’s pretty confusing.”

Crosby looked out over the valley, hands flat on metal. Harden caught himself staring again, forced his eyes onto his hands.

“Maybe you should go by the numbers, at least to start,” Crosby told him.

“Billy could do that himself, so why the fuck am I out there?”

“Because who knows, dude?” Crosby grinned whitely, a yellow twist of grass in his hair. “You gotta have faith. Billy’s actually good at scouting, you know, and he’s gone and found you again.”

“Yeah, and it worked out real well for me last time.” Harden tried to sound bitter, but he missed it and just sounded tired.

“That is in no way relevant. And even if you’d known going in that things were gonna end the way they did, you wouldn’t have done anything different.”

Harden raised his eyebrows at Crosby, sprawled on the car with one sneaker propped on the fender, ragged white collar of his lacoste set off against the dark scruff on his jaw. He would have done several things differently, as a matter of fact, like not letting them pitch him so much when he was twenty-one, and developing a better curve, and making a serious play for Crosby, not some cowardly drunken pass but for real.

“Well,” he said, lining up his shot. “I’m doing this now, but I swear to god, it’s the last time I let Billy Beane determine the course of my life.”

He swung, a solid crack that reached his hands but not his arms, and the ball zoomed out of range of his vision, totally lost in grass. Being a pitcher, his geometries were all fucked up, deeply attached to straight lines and single dimensions, but lately things had been curving, circling back around.

He looked back to find Crosby hopping off the car and stretching his arms out. “You can’t really blame him, man. You keep saying yes.”

“You told me to!”

“And you keep listening to me, too.” Crosby hooked his arm around Harden’s neck and rattled him. “Obviously your judgment is a little impaired.”

Harden shifted to feel the warm skin on the inside of Crosby’s elbow move against his neck. He was discomforted, uneasy because he’d been in this kind of trouble before, and he was starting to suspect that he’d never actually gotten out of it.

*

2