you are singular among your peers
1
They knocked around together for a couple of days, the tail-end of the homestand, and Crosby wheedled his way back into the lineup before the bruise on his face had all the way faded. He had to leave in the fourth with a debilitating headache, and Harden, eating Swedish fish behind the dugout, thought that that was a less than encouraging sign.
Crosby was wrecked that night, chasing painkillers and coke, his eyes glassy and sunken. He slurred his speech and lost his balance a couple of times and it all looked pretty familiar. Bobby Crosby with post-concussion syndrome, dragging on vowels and working out bizarre hairpin turns of thought, weaving and blinking slowly. Harden had dealt with this for whole months, way the hell back when.
Getaway day, and Harden wanted to make sure that the symptoms had passed before Crosby got on the plane to Cleveland, but he had to be in Sacramento for a noon game and so left Bobby asleep in a mess of blue and red sheets, color near his eye like the shadow of a hand over his face.
With the sun directly above, Harden followed the road north, resigned to memorizing this route over the next few months, make this drive a hundred times.
Buck went three for four that afternoon and broke someone’s windshield on a four hundred foot foul, and actually waved to Harden when he spotted him in the stands, surprising Harden bad enough that he waved back. The other scouts gave him disgusted looks, and Harden glared at them. He’d lost a drinking contest to Buck; of course he was going to acknowledge the man.
After, Harden went up to Beane’s office for his next set of orders. Beane was watching a rerun of Saturday Night Live from twenty years ago, though the A’s were still playing, tied up in the eighth. Beane could tell you the standings of every team in the league on any given day, their most recent performances and guys running hot, but Harden’d bet a lot that he’d yet to see a single major league game this year.
“Heard you were back in town this weekend,” Beane said, offering Harden a beer with a look. Harden took it, and the chair in front of Beane’s desk.
“News certainly does travel around here. Junior high all over again.” He debated whether or not to put his feet up on the desk, decided not to taunt death.
“You saw the team?”
Harden nodded, jimmying the cap off the bottle with his pocketknife. “You need to do something about the ‘pen.”
“Yes, thank you. I’m working on it.”
“It was okay, though. Real nice day for it.”
“You can tell that this is the right job for you because you spend your days off doing the same thing you do working.” Beane made a little gesture as if toasting himself for the brilliance of the suggestion, and Harden rolled his eyes.
“I got nothing to say about the big league club, so it’s not like I have to pay attention or anything. And, you know, pretty much my entire social network revolves around the team.”
“I know,” Beane nodded, and then paused, glancing at Harden. “Shame about Bobby.”
Harden schooled his face. “He’s fine.”
“They said he’s bruised as shit.”
“Yeah. But other than that, fine. He’ll play tomorrow for sure.”
Beane hummed, watching the cast wave goodnight. He tapped his finger on his beer thoughtfully, looking like his mind was somewhere else entirely.
“I musta told him a hundred times to quit sliding headfirst,” Beane said. “Kids are stupid these days.”
Half-laughing, Harden pushed his fingers at the phone in his pocket and thought that he should have told Crosby to text him when he woke up, just so Harden could be sure that Crosby had woken up.
“You taught him to leave everything on the field,” Harden told him. “He came by this stuff honestly.”
Beane smirked, shook his head but didn’t argue. Harden didn’t think that Beane had a very good grasp of what playing for a general manager like him was like. Beane was behind everything, willfully created them out of nothing at all, and there wasn’t anything they wouldn’t do out of loyalty to him. Beane was the kind of guy who inspired kamikazes.
They drank for a minute, and then Beane said, “Anyway, stick around awhile, okay?”
Harden nodded, having expected that. “For the homestand?”
“Yeah. Omaha Royals are coming in, there’s a third baseman I might like the look of.”
Starting to say, you already have a third baseman, Harden reconsidered and kept silent. Chavez was not as young as he once was; who among them was? It was his job to better the team, and he’d already sworn to protect the shortstop.
Anyway, Beane had to know what he was doing. Harden scratched at his knee and thought that it was kinda like blind faith was required. He still didn’t think it wise to rely on Beane to quite this extent, but he could understand the draw of it now, why it worked-the teams worked. All Beane’s teams were fundamentally successful.
“Saw this kid on the Zephyrs run a double out of an infield hit.”
“Really. Stupid human trick.” He sighed, picked at the label of his bottle. “I’m off speed again, I think.” Beane looked up, lines across his forehead. “You got some place to stay?”
Way to change the subject, but Harden just said he’d figure it out. Beane gave him a couple other guys to keep an eye on, and Harden didn’t ask where Beane was going to be while he was here and the A’s were in the Central.
He finished his beer and stood to go, surprised when Beane followed suit. They were professional colleagues, was the weird thing. Harden wondered if they were gonna shake hands all formal-like at the door, but Beane just knocked him one and said, “Find me someone good,” and it seemed doubtful that the whole thing could really be that simple.
In the parking garage, Harden found Travis Buck sitting on his duffel bag with his back to the tire, playing a third-generation PSP, which Harden knew for a fact was only available in Japan. He had the sound turned up and the tinny explosions echoed dimly across the cement. Harden kicked his foot, and he looked up, a crash of gunmetal blue and a road rash abrasion on his jaw, and Buck smiled.
*
Buck spent the night riding shotgun in Harden’s car, going from bar to bar with the windows down and the radio up. Harden liked that he could say some blatant lie to Buck and Buck would accept it without question, straight-faced and funnier in his earnestness than Harden was with all his cynicism and timing.
Buck wanted to know everything about being a scout, so Harden lied about that again too, not wanting to admit for the second time in a week that he was pretty much clueless. It started to rain as they were walking back to the car, and Buck flipped up his hood, lifted his face, looking neatly at home. Northwestern boy, Harden remembered, me and him both.
Harden dropped Buck off tottering on his doorstep, and drove as far as the first motel he saw, slept like he’d been drugged for fourteen hours. Awaking into the full light of the afternoon was worse than a nuclear blast. He limped across the alley to the gas station for aspirin and food, and was still slowly eating dry cereal in bed when Buck called.
They found an apartment for Harden pretty easily, and Buck helped Harden move in over the course of the week, Harden moving one carload a day from the farmhouse in the valley. As it turned out, Buck knew a thousand dirty jokes and twice as many ghost stories, and the third night, he slept in a sleeping bag on the floor of Harden’s new living room. They learned that in the morning a wedge of sun knifed across that very spot, when Harden came out to find Buck’s face flushed and the sleeping bag shoved down to his waist, T-shirt twisted up over his ribs, feverish and still asleep.
Harden sat down at the table, kinda floored. He’d thought he was past this, this teammate stuff. He tried to remember that nothing was like it had been. The thing by which he’d defined himself had been surgically removed four years ago, and that meant that he was now nameless, just another person in the stands.
The third baseman that Beane asked him to look at was very good, oddly graceful considering the size of his shoulders, solid contact to all fields and a quick release on his throw. Buck told Harden that right-handed pitchers hated facing the kid because he could time anything from that side, impossible to fool.
Buck had amazing theories for everything that happened, related to Harden over drinks at the Knockout, in the car, in Harden’s empty apartment. Buck thought that they’d changed the ball without telling anyone five or six years ago, put cork or a piece of meteor rock or something in the heart of it so that it came off the bat as if backed by an explosion. He thought that there was some new drug making its way through the system, something that didn’t have just one name, stole a measure of self-preservation so that outfielders would run through walls and shortstops would stay in on the double play even if it meant having a leg broken on the slide.
Harden liked listening to him, chipping in occasionally. He’d always appreciated rhythm. Buck coulda gone home with either of the two waitresses in the joint, their eyes stuck on him like lint, but they ended up on the sidewalk again, just the two of them.
“And you know what else?” Buck said, picking up on a piece of conversation that Harden had assumed was dead. “If everybody who goes into the Hall from the past twenty years is gonna go in under this cloud of suspicion, it’ll be that much easier for the next generation.”
Harden twisted his keys around his thumb, scanning the street. “You think so?”
“Sure. Sure. Like, there’s still a chance for me, even.”
Harden tried not to let his disbelief show through too clearly, not meeting Buck’s eyes. Buck would do well to even make the majors again, much less put together something worthy of the Hall. “That’s interesting.”
“I mean, maybe that’ll be the kicker.” Buck walked the curb like a high wire, his hands in his pockets. “Not just really good, but really good and, like, thirty-four years old. Or, you know, whatever. If I can just get a full ten years, that would be enough.”
“You’re not really giving yourself much room for error,” Harden pointed out. “You’d have to be perfect pretty much every year.”
“So?” Buck rocked on his heels, a jag of hair sticking out from the side of his head. “I’m not worried about that.”
Of course he wasn’t. Beane picked up all different manner of guys, from all over the world, but most of them were terrifically self-centered and locked on their own success. Harden had had trouble being around them when his own ability was deserting him inch by inch, day by day, wanting to disfigure Danny Haren for still being able to pitch.
“You should probably find a tree that’s been struck by lightning and make a bat out of it, then,” he said, and Buck looked at him, smiling uncertainly.
“I don’t get it.”
Harden shook his head, hiding a smile of his own. “You kids today don’t know shit. C’mon. I’ll drop you off.”
“You’re going home? It’s early.” Buck looked briefly stricken, balling his hand on his hip.
“I’ve got to make another run to my old house,” Harden told him. “Billy’s gonna send me on the road again when you guys go, and I wanna be done with it by then.”
“Okay.” Buck got distracted by an ambulance passing, his profile red-lit and stuttering as he followed it down the street. “I can come along.”
Harden blinked. “It’s a four-hour round trip.”
“Yeah, and? We’ve got an off-day tomorrow, I got nothing but time.”
Harden’s stomach clutched, and he thought that this was probably a bad idea, but he’d gotten used to ignoring the feeling recently, and shrugged, led Buck to his car. It was almost midnight, the stars almost debilitating, a plane flying under the moon.
They picked up a six and Buck talked shit about Harden’s car until Harden broke a hundred and ten for fifteen miles of utter nothingness. It was incredibly stupid, feeling the engine howl and protest, the sheer of the road and the knowledge that a blown tire, a rough patch of highway, a suicidal prairie dog could kill them so easily. Harden felt like laughing, like maybe if he pulled back hard enough, they’d break free of gravity. He looked over time and time again to see Buck looking back at him.
Fifty miles past the place where the streetlights staggered out, Buck said, “You weren’t lying about it being the middle of nowhere.”
“Yeah.”
“How long have you lived out here?”
“Oh. Four years. That’s an approximation.” Harden closed his eyes experimentally, feeling the roar of the asphalt on a straight shot.
“The fuck did you do out here for all that time?”
Harden shrugged, still blind, uncomfortable with getting into the specifics. “I watched about ten hours of baseball a day.”
“Sounds about right,” Buck nodded, squeaked his fingers on the window. “And clearly, it’s served you well.”
Harden shook his head, but didn’t answer. Things moved very slowly out in the valley, thickened his blood to syrup. It got hot enough in the summer that he couldn’t concentrate on anything, shaking and inarticulate, forgetting for long stretches of time that his major league career had been anything but an alcoholic dream. It seemed like the kind of nightmare that his subconscious would inflict upon him, and he kept waiting to jerk out of it, praying for the relief of morning.
Zito’d made a joke, right after Harden had bought the house, that he was going to an awful lot of trouble just to drink himself to death. Zito shouldn’t have said anything, because he was more fucked up than Harden by a factor of about twelve (true story: Zito’s career numbers against the A’s were abysmal (witness Eric Chavez’s .600 average against) and the first start he’d ever missed had been interleague at the Coliseum, on some poor excuse: flu-like symptoms, food poisoning, of course not in any way a broken heart), but Harden couldn’t find it in him to argue the point. So far, the only thing he’d learned from life after baseball was that it was best undertaken alone, where people couldn’t see him.
They parked in the yard at the end of the long driveway, and it was pristinely quiet when they got out of the car, the house lit in the moonlight and another board missing from the porch roof.
Buck started to whistle the Green Acres theme, and Harden rolled his eyes, skipped the creaking middle step and unlocked the front door, looking over his shoulder to see Buck standing in the overgrown grass, his face turned up to the sky.
“You coming in?”
Buck met his gaze, grinning. “This is straight rural, dude. This is crazy.”
“I told you, man.” Harden leaned with his back against the door, knowing that he was nothing more than a shine of belt buckle to Buck, hidden in the porch shadows.
“I mean, like, I’m definitely coming here when the bomb drops. You got canned goods and stuff, right?”
Buck climbed the steps and bumped Harden’s shoulder as he went inside, taking off his cap and stuffing it in his back pocket. Harden went through the house turning on the lights while Buck wandered, wanting to exhibit some sign of life. There wasn’t much left, an orange paisley couch that had been there when Harden moved in and his second TV, which he’d won off Mark Ellis in a card game. The last few boxes were in the front hallway, faded squares on the wall from posters that had been taken down, and Harden found Buck standing in front of the window in what had once been his bedroom, drinking his beer and looking out at the fields, dark enough that it took a minute to distinguish them from the sky.
For whatever reason, Harden didn’t feel right disturbing him, so he stood stupidly at Buck’s back, liking the silhouette he made, his muted reflection on the glass. He was not nearly as drunk as he thought he should be, noticing the circle left in the dust on the windowsill when Buck lifted his beer.
“It must have fucked you up pretty good,” Buck said after a long silence, and Harden nodded without know what Buck was talking about.
“I guess it did,” he answered, probably the truth no matter what Buck meant.
“I always figured it’d be like never being able to sleep again. Or, not just like that, but something you can always feel, messes up every day.”
Harden moved closer silently. “You’re talking about baseball?”
Buck turned, his eyes flipping silver for an instant. The moon to the left over his head, his face was unreadable, arms back with his hands on the sill. “I’m almost always talking about baseball.”
There were hollows like thumbprints in Buck’s drawn-tight arms, drying Harden’s mouth and he took a long drink of his beer, keeping his eye on Buck the whole time.
“I can’t explain what it’s like,” Harden said quietly. “I can’t think about that stuff too much.”
“No,” Buck agreed, and tipped his head to the side. “It’s funny, because we used to have this debate about what was worse, playing in the minors forever or only having a couple of years in the Show.”
Harden lowered his eyes to the floor, pressing his teeth into the inside of his lip. “This is worse,” he told Buck plainly, without looking up.
“Yeah.” He heard Buck shuffle his feet, and glanced up. Buck was looking at him nervously, a little too close. He swallowed. “Hey, Richie-” he started, and then stopped, and raised his hand, brushing his fingertips along Harden’s jaw and then quickly away.
Harden stared at him curiously, foggy milk-blue eyes and bitten mouth, raffle of dirty blonde hair. Buck was trying to tell him something; it might be important.
“It’s okay, T,” Harden said, not wanting him to worry. There was a hot crawl in his stomach as he curled his hands into fists, whispered absently, “Not everyone ends up like this.”
Buck blinked fast and his teeth flicked at his lip, Harden’s chest hitching, and then Buck came forward fast with his hands laid flat on Harden’s shoulders, set his mouth at the place where Harden’s jaw met his throat, and bit him.
Harden immediately draped his arms around Buck’s shoulders, his knees caving slightly and bending his body in. He was taken completely off-guard, but he could do this in his sleep, and fuck if Buck wasn’t yet another example of Beane’s seriously weird compulsion to draft handsome young men with homoerotic tendencies. Buck made seven, seven that Harden knew about.
Buck caught him around the waist and turned him, as smooth as something premeditated, and pressed him into the wall. You’re fucking good at this, he wanted to say, but he’d lost his breath. Sliding his hand into Buck’s hair and pulling his head back, Harden kissed him deeply, feeling stirred and frightened.
They broke apart short of breath, Buck’s fingers twisted under Harden’s belt, and Harden asked on a gasp, “How the fuck did you know?”
Buck shook his head, licking Harden’s neck and working on his belt. He was grinning, almost humming. “I hope you weren’t under the impression that you were passing, man.”
Harden wound his hand tighter in Buck’s hair, until he hissed, baring his teeth, kissed him hard for a couple seconds. He pressed up against Harden, his hand pushing into Harden’s shorts. “No, I, I am, I know. I just try not to. With ballplayers.”
Buck snorted. “Yeah, that’s a realistic expectation. Considering that the only guys you know are ballplayers.”
“Not true,” Harden said, trying without success to catch his breath, jerking up into Buck’s hand and digging his face into his shoulder. “I just don’t live close to any of the other people I know.”
“God,” Buck breathed out, and pushed his free hand up under Harden’s shirt, the hard edge making Harden twitch. Despite his resolutions, this kinda thing was always so good, even up against a wall and still all the way dressed, rough and painless and raw.
Harden knew there was a reason that he never set out to fuck around with his teammates, former or no, but he was having trouble bringing it to mind. What harm could possibly outweigh the lean twist of Buck’s hip under his hand, teeth at his throat, killing tight rhythm around him, the traces of pine tar on Buck’s fingers?
And Buck wasn’t his teammate and never had been in any real way, so maybe that made it okay. Harden didn’t want him the same way he wanted Crosby; Buck was more immediate, more unpredictable, less likely to capsize and drown.
“Wish. Fuck. Wish I’d left the bed,” Harden managed to say, and felt the sting of Buck grinning against his cheek, a last drag ripping up through Harden’s spine. Buck was laughing as Harden came, and he could hear the sound of it graying out, like his sense of the wall at his back and the slick skin of Buck’s side under his fingers.
He came back to Buck tugging at his shirt, mouthing his neck, and Harden had the wherewithal at least to shove him stumbling into the hall, down to the couch that they fell on like a storm. Bare to the waist, Harden straddled Buck’s body and regarded him for a moment in the secondhand spill of light from the kitchen, Buck shivering and rolling up into him, eyes half-lidded, mouth all fucked up, amazingly distracting. Harden couldn’t believe that this hadn’t occurred to him before, but figured that Buck was just the type of guy who snuck up on you.
“What should I,” Harden said, and then stopped, his fingers fanning low on Buck’s stomach, because Buck was working his own belt open and pushing his head back into the couch, his face strained.
“I don’t care what you do,” Buck told him, and took hold of Harden’s wrists, moving his hands down. “But do it now, okay?”
Harden shook off Buck’s grip, and slid down, flattening his palms on the sturdy brace of Buck’s ribs, licked his stomach and listened to Buck swear. Everything echoed out here, quiet as it was, and there was lint and dust in Buck’s hair, darkening with sweat as he moved in time. Harden could taste the grass stain on the side of Buck’s wrist when Buck pressed his fingers to Harden’s jaw and held his mouth open.
Harden thought, jesus, and looked up to find Buck’s neck arched, his body a shallow bow stretching away and towards the black window, and Harden brought him back, all the way down.
*
Harden got Buck up before dawn, because he was supposed to meet Beane at the stadium in a few hours, and Buck slept-walked through the house, slowly gathering his clothes. When he yawned, Harden could see his fillings, crazed hair sticking up all over his head. Buck wasn’t much for talking in the morning, but he kept knocking into Harden, leaning on him.
He fell asleep in the back of the car, a red hoodie of Harden’s under his head, and Harden found a bag of Swedish fish in the glove compartment, melted by the sun into a single shape of strange consistency. Caffeine and sugar put him in a fragile state of mind, considering the man sleeping behind him.
Buck asked too many questions to be as dumb as he sometimes looked, but Harden didn’t think there was any secret plan in them fucking around. Harden figured Buck was like he himself had been, obliged by loyalty and duty not to risk anything with his teammates no matter how good they looked or how bad it got. But here they’d found a loophole, a length of forgivable time. Harden had played fair and it’d cost him his whole life-he had to be owed for that.
Buck stirred as they came out of the valley, one leg folding slowly between the seats, his socked foot sliding down. Harden glanced over his shoulder, Buck rubbing his eyes, scratching at his stomach. Harden flushed unexpectedly, thinking of heat in his mouth and Buck clawing through his hair, brokenly saying his name.
“Hey,” he said. Buck grunted, rising in the rearview. “We’re almost home.”
Buck shifted and let his head fall against the side window, his expression tight and pained. “Why the fuck do I feel like I’ve been hit by a train?”
Harden shrugged, absently chewing on the corner of his lip. “It’s been a long night, Travis.”
“Yeah, made fuckin’ sure of that, didn’t we.”
Harden swallowed with a click, and didn’t answer. They’d been on the couch for hours afterwards, Harden’s head on Buck’s chest, half-sleeping, and Harden thought that the stillness and careful hold of the early day should have calmed something in him, but he still felt anxious and off his game. He wanted to get Buck alone again, ten miles from the nearest civilian or in the backseat, parked in a gas station alley with church bells ringing. He was almost weak from it, wanting skin and motion and the dig of bone, thinking of the terrible things that he could do to Buck if given enough room.
Buck was quiet for the rest of the ride, dozing against the window whenever Harden looked back. He pulled into the stadium and said Buck’s name, and they both got out. Harden heard his back crack, wincing, and Buck smiled, called him old man and Harden sneered, pushing a hand roughly through Buck’s hair.
“You know where he’s sending you?” Buck asked, fitting his hand on Harden’s belt. Harden shook his head. “You’ll call me when you’re back in town, though, right?”
Harden let his fingers slide out and down Buck’s neck, and Buck shuddered briefly, starting to grin. “I’ll call you.”
“Good.” Buck kissed him quick, and stepped away, muddy blue eyes shining. “Stay out of trouble.”
Then he was turning and heading to his car, and Harden watched him until he became aware of what he was doing. He shook himself out of it and went down into the clubhouse, washing his face and wetting his hair, trying to get it to lie flat. He thought that if Beane was as smart as everyone always said he was, he would surely be able to see what had happened scrawled all over Harden’s expression, but Beane didn’t say anything about it, distracted by something that was happening with the big club. Without making eye contact with him, Beane sent Harden to Iowa.
*
Two weeks Harden spent on the road, bouncing around the Midwest, smoke and dust and pollen woven into the fabric of his clothes. He lost his scorebook in a roadside diner in Oklahoma, and stayed up all night recreating the games, building small histories of certain players. The sun set over the plains every night, and though he was constantly en route to somewhere else, Harden felt a kind routine settle over his days, an understanding of what was expected of him.
Crosby called him late at night, after the A’s game was over, and Harden sat out on the landing overlooking the parking lot, his legs hung through the iron rails. Sounding unsure, Crosby asked him where he was and then asked if the two of them had ever played there. Harden couldn’t remember, so he took a shot and said yeah.
“I can’t remember individual places anymore,” Crosby complained.
“You mean you used to be able to?”
“I think, maybe. I might be getting stupider the older I get.”
Harden snorted, rested his forehead on the metal. “That would explain a lot.”
“The last ten years are becoming a blur. Do you think that’s normal?”
Not really, Harden thought, still able to catalog every one of the home runs he’d given up, every time something broke under his skin when he threw, every rain delay. But maybe that was just him and his tendency to have clearer memories of bad things than good.
“Well, you’ve been through a lot,” Harden said, pieces of rust flaking off onto his jeans. “And you’ve changed basically nothing about the structure of your life, year to year, so it’s easy to see how you could get confused.”
“I did drive halfway to the Diablo Base house the other night,” Crosby said speculatively. Harden laughed.
“You forgot where you lived?”
“I was momentarily disoriented.”
Crosby sniffed defensively, and Harden closed his eyes, wondering if he should tell Crosby that he’d decided to fuck around with Travis Buck a little bit. The immediate answer was no goddamn way, but Harden was learning not to take things at face value so much. Crosby knew that Harden strayed occasionally, and probably understood on some level why Harden had been so careful around him for so long, but they both preferred to ignore that for the sake of their friendship.
Whether or not Crosby knew everything that Harden wanted from him, Harden didn’t want Crosby to think even absently that Harden was happy without him-it seemed like the worst kind of misdirection.
They talked for awhile longer, and at the end of it, Crosby asked, “Where are you, again?”
“Des Moines, Bobby,” Harden said patiently. Crosby took a moment, and then, sounding dangerously lost:
“What are you doing out there?”
Harden looked out at the dirty swimming pool and the infinity symbols scrawled on the asphalt of the parking lot, the deafening flatland skewing all the way to the horizon. Maybe he had been here with Crosby, in their misspent youth, when every bus league town was savage and romantic, and the moon had always been full.
“Remember how I’m a scout now?’ he said. Crosby was still suffering from the effects of the concussion, he knew, and he’d forget all about Harden for days at a time, only to crash back into him like waking up from a coma.
Harden had gone through all of this before. The dumb ways he got hurt, stuff that was easy to recover from but left behind lingering symptoms, and for whatever reason Harden was always the first one he lost track of, the first one regained when he was healed.
“Right. Right,” Crosby said, but he was audibly still searching for the sequence of events that had led to Harden in Iowa, and Harden sighed, lines painted in red across his forehead from the iron. It might not count as telling Crosby if he was pretty sure Crosby wouldn’t remember.
He would have a few days when he got home, and the River Cats were going back out on the road after the first night, so he’d be able to catch Crosby up on the early season in person. Sent far away from everything he knew, Harden wanted nothing more than a guest bedroom in the Oakland hills, all alone with Bobby and his head injury.
The flight west took hours out of him and he felt it keenly, blinded by the orange light of sunset, standing in the airport parking lot. He called Buck sitting in his car, struck dumb by the heat, and Buck met up with him at the Knockout, swearing that shots were the only cure for jetlag, and three hours later Harden got himself blown in the men’s. He realized that that was why he liked this bar, nobody fucking cared.
Buck wouldn’t leave him alone driving home, his hand high on Harden’s leg and his mouth on Harden’s shoulder, so Harden pulled to the side of the road and said, “In the back, goddamn it,” opening his door and looking back to see Buck actually slithering through the seats like he was all of fourteen, somehow making it with his long legs disappearing. Harden couldn’t believe this guy.
The windows were tinted, an old major-league habit, though Harden hadn’t been this thankful for them in a very long time. Buck in the perfect darkness between streetlights, color vague in his hair and eyes, pulling Harden down on top of him with his hand back in Harden’s belt, his other on the back of Harden’s neck.
Catch me up, Harden wanted to say, but that just made him think about Crosby and really, no. There were already way too many similarities. But Buck was crazy, anyway, this side of the road stuff, which was only to be expected considering that he’d been a six-year minor-league journeyman.
Buck moved like a kid, though, like this was still the best thing he’d ever stumbled upon, kissing Harden as if they had all the time in the world with his knees up near Harden’s ribs. This was what Harden’s life was supposed to be like the last time he’d lived in Sacramento, if he’d allowed himself his teammates.
They spent the night at Buck’s apartment because he had a day game and an afternoon flight, and Harden thought hazily that it was like they played in different divisions, divergent schedules but a similar manner of existence. He shook his head, pushing his face against Buck’s back. Everything kept coming back to baseball, and that made sense; he’d chosen this.
In the morning, Buck rolled Harden onto his stomach, fucked him with the warm flat of his hand a steady point on Harden’s shoulder as everything else came unanchored, and Harden felt satisfied that they’d made the most of their limited time together. More than a week in Buck’s company at any one time might kill him.
Harden slept for awhile longer after Buck left, and knocked around getting breakfast and watching SportsCenter before he went by his house for clean clothes and set out direct for Oakland.
*
Crosby was in lousy shape over the long weekend, stumbling in the hallways and rubbing his hand compulsively at his temple like he always had a headache. He looked relieved to see Harden, made a few comments that suggested he’d lost a number of years and thought Harden still lived with him, been worried that Harden didn’t come home the last couple of nights.
Harden probably should have corrected him, but he didn’t mind retro Bobby, who’d so completely captured his attention back then. They frequented the same bar and diner, and Harden dropped him off at the ballpark as he had a number of times when he’d been on the disabled list and not called until game time.
Harden didn’t know if Crosby’s state of mind was as bad here as at home, but Crosby was out of the starting lineup and judging by the posterboard signs for the new kid in the left field bleachers, he had been for awhile now. Assuming Crosby’s motor skills hadn’t been affected, he was a better glove than the new kid, but offense carried the day, as ever.
The A’s scratched out something late, come alive under the brights, the drums and warm air. It was almost heartbreaking, watching the tie-breaking double split the outfielders and carom into the wide open spaces, the crowd howling and on their feet. Always been a good place to play, the Coliseum, no matter what they said about it.
Crosby’s aim was to get stupid drunk that night, but Harden quite rightly judged that to be a seriously bad idea, and distracted him with dart games and some of Buck’s dirty jokes. Crosby ended up lying down in a booth with his head near the wall and his legs hanging out, staring morosely up at the ceiling.
Harden kicked at his feet. “You know who never passed out in a bar? Cal Ripken, Jr.”
“You shut your mouth.” Bobby exhaled upwards. “It sucked when you were gone.”
Eyeing him doubtfully, the foreshortened stretch of his body and his face half hidden behind the edge of the table, Harden thought wearily that it was no surprise he hadn’t been able to survive out here, so easily decimated by his old best friend.
“It’s not like I was around all the time before,” he answered, and Crosby shook his head against the seat.
“No, I mean, I only started four games, only got in two other. Fucking kid’s over .400 again, did you see that? Fucking unbelievable.”
Harden didn’t know what to say, because cheap young talent was the driving theory behind the Oakland Athletics, and if he were an objective witness, he’d admit that the team was probably better off. The very last thing Harden was, though, was an objective witness.
“Also, like that’s not enough, double vision and blackouts! Really, I’m having a hell of a year.”
Harden threw a dart two feet off the mark and into the wall, but decided immediately that it was the fault of shock and not his arm, which was beginning to throb in a way that meant it was near midnight. “You’re blacking out?”
“So they say. Of course, I never really remember.”
Crawling in on the other side of the booth, Harden leaned over the table, wanting to meet Crosby’s eyes but finding them closed. “How many times have you been knocked unconscious in the past couple of years, dude?”
“I don’t know. Who keeps track of that kinda thing?”
“Bobby, you’re freaking me the fuck out, you know.”
Crosby squinted his eyes open, smirking. There was a piece of peanut shell in his hair. “Well, let’s just call this payback for every time you got hurt, then.”
Harden flinched, and sat back so that he couldn’t see Crosby anymore. He squeezed his hands together under the table and looked away, the South Park pinball machine in the corner reminding him suddenly and fiercely of the Knockout, Buck with a quarter between his teeth and rollercoaster red and blue light on his face.
“Anyway,” Crosby said on a breath. “I think the universe is fucking with me or something, because today they said they might want to try playing me as utility for awhile.”
“That’s-” Harden stopped at once. That was horrible. That was the worst news he’d heard in months. Shifting a thirty-one year old middle infielder to utility was the start of a lot of bad stuff, like when he’d got put in the bullpen for one last ditch effort, the single most agonizing month of his life. “Fuck, Bobby.”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
Harden leaned forward on his elbows, Crosby’s pinched mouth and the now-permanent line over his eyebrows. Seeing him like this was a blow to the chest, something riding high and in.
“For good? Or just until you get better?”
Crosby awkwardly lifted his shoulder. “It didn’t seem that planned out. But, Jesus, Rich, you know it’s gonna stick. When’s the last time a move like this didn’t stick?”
Making up his mind, Harden slid out of the booth and kicked Crosby’s sneakers again. “Get up.”
Angling his head up, Crosby looked at him suspiciously. “Why?”
“Because in the morning you’ll thank me for getting you out of public.”
Crosby exhaled like he’d been shot, but allowed Harden to take his hands and haul him to his feet. He tottered, and Harden thought it likely that he’d snuck an extra shot or two while Harden’s back was turned, but then reconsidered. Abject failure could make you kinda drunk too.
“I hate playing second, man,” Crosby mumbled, slumping against the side of the car as Harden dealt with the keys. Crosby rubbed at his face like it hurt, his shoulders cut.
“I know,” Harden said softly.
“I gotta think before I throw. The distances are all fucked up. I always forget where to go on the cut-off.”
“You’ll figure it out.” He put his hands on Crosby’s shoulder and back, guided him into the car, rustling Crosby’s hair in passing. “The one thing I never worried about was having you behind me.”
A crooked clouded smile bent Crosby’s mouth and was almost immediately gone. Harden was stunned to find himself reaching for it, wanting to put his fingers on Crosby’s face with force that nearly buckled his knees, and he drew hastily away, trying to clear his head as he walked around the car.
Crosby didn’t lose total control of himself that night, though it was a near thing around two in the morning when he started shaking and falling in and out of alternate timelines. Harden made him take four aspirin and a capful of Nyquil and his seizure meds, and folded him into bed as Crosby explained breathlessly that what Harden had to do was scout him, tell Billy that there was no better shortstop in the league and asking him to play anywhere else was heresy.
Harden swore he would do what Bobby asked of him, tucking the tag of Crosby’s shirt under his collar and resting his fingertips on the clean back of his neck for a long time.
*
3