and neither is faith
Okay, I messed with the timeline of when exactly Billy Beane took over from Alderson. Mainly cos the scene in which it applies was written very very early in the going, before certain plot developments were stumbled upon, and I wasn't really sure when it was gonna take place.
(this is also, ps, where i totally ignored munson's first serious injury that kept him out of the lineup for half the season. whatever! lazy.)
Swiftly falling in love with Peter Saarsgard. Who might just be the most awesome boy on the planet.
I need to, like, buy stuffed animals and little plastic toys for everyone in my acquaintance. I need to graduate and get away from this river. I think it's got something to do with the off-season. Low levels of fear and apprehension. It's gonna fucking kill me to see any of them not in green and gold. You know the Oakland A's are the first and only team to wear white spikes? It's classy, man.
I am, yes. Getting on with it.
Table of Contents
Pictures courtesy bradausmus12 and Jen's Baseball Page
The Rest of Your Life
By Candle Beck
Part the Sixth: The Church of Baseball
(caught stealing)
Munson comes down the hall from the showers, scrubbing his head with his towel, and hears his phone ringing behind his room door. Munce swears, juggling his armful of shower stuff and shouldering into the room, tossing everything down and slinging the damp towel around his neck, hustling to get the phone before it stops ringing.
“Hello!” he half-yells, triumphant to have picked up in time.
There’s a pause. “Um . . . hi?”
Munce smiles, getting the worst of the wet off and flopping back onto his bed in his boxers and T-shirt. He’s as tired as fuck, but awake for this. “Dude, hey,” he says.
Chavez is in a motel outside Greenville, bored and lonely and drinking steadily, his roommate gone for the night in search of someone soft and wet and elusive. Chavvy’s on his third beer, wandering around his small room whipping a bat around, narrowly missing the lamp and busted television set.
They’re twenty years old. Eric Chavez is so deep in the South he’s starting to say y’all and fixin’, and in a couple of months, Eric Munson will be playing in the College World Series in Omaha.
Enough time has passed. Since what happened in Manhattan Beach, since Thanksgiving. Months are behind them now. Stuff gets dull, gets easier to deal with. With most of the country between them, nothing seems quite as incurable as when they were a twenty-minute drive apart. With no real chance to get each other into trouble, they’ve managed to stay clean. Eric Munson, well on his way to being over it, doesn’t hear train whistles in his head anymore, and Eric Chavez doesn’t wake up crying anymore.
It’s easier to be best friends when they don’t have to see each other every day.
“How’s it going?”
“Good. Where are you?” Munson asks.
Chavez curls his lip, drops the bat to sit down heavily on the bed. “Fucking South Carolina.” He rubs his hand over his face, reaches to get the beer off the nightstand.
“You finally got there, huh?” Munce smirks, because Chavvy had left a disgruntled message on his machine the day before, from the side of a desolate road, his muzzled long-distance voice cracking, “Our bus is broken down in the middle of nowhere. Stay in school, Munce. Minor league baseball sucks. Stay in school.”
“Yeah, fucking finally.”
“Having a good time?” Munce inquires mildly, the corners of his mouth twitching, because he knows that tone in his best friend’s voice.
Chavez snorts, lies back on the bed. “Yeah man, gangsta life,” he answers sarcastically.
Munson twists his shoulders on the bed, loosening his muscles as best he can. “The A’s have been all over the papers down here,” he tells Chavez. “Talking about Beane taking over and everything. He’s pretty fucking young to be a general manager, dude, you worried?”
“I don’t know, man, it’s weird,” Chavvy says. “There are these guys, like, the old baseball guys, you know? Who’ve been around for decades, the assistant manager here and the grounds crew chief at the stadium and the scouts and everything, and they say Billy Beane’s got something owed him. Owed him from, like, God.”
Munce lifts his eyebrows, propping one leg against the wall, feeling the stretch in his hamstring and calf. “From God?”
Chavez nods, his cheek brushing against the receiver. “Yeah. ‘Cause Beane was supposed to be so good, when he was playing, remember? But then it got, like, taken away. His talent.”
Munson yawns. He really needs to get more sleep. “It wasn’t his talent that went, it was his fucking head. He just couldn’t deal.”
“Yeah, well, whatever it was,” Chavvy says. “God gave him baseball and then God took it away, so now God’s got to get him back.”
Munce pulls his leg back down, bending it against his chest, clasping his free hand around his shin. “What the hell, man?” he laughs. “That’s pretty fucking out there.”
Chavez breathes out an answering laugh, tapping a finger on the bottleneck of his beer. “I know. But these guys, man, you oughta see ‘em, they can say stuff like that and have you just totally believing it. They say it’s not fair, what God did to Billy Beane, and now he’s got the whole world coming to him. They say he’s gonna change the game.”
Plucking at the hem of his shirt, Munce digests that, then asks, “You buy that?”
Chavvy shrugs, takes a pull. His motel room has gotten dark so quickly, the sun ratcheting down over the beat land. He can barely make out his glove on the dresser, the faded sheen of dust on the television screen. “I don’t know if I do or not. It’s fucking strange, though. I never played for no team that had a philosophy before.”
“A philosophy?” Munce repeats skeptically.
Chavez nods, finishing off his beer and lofting the bottle towards the small trashcan across the room. The bottle sparks a cartwheel, catching the end of the day’s light, and clonks off the wall a foot to the right of the mark, rolling away under the dresser.
Chavez scowls at the mellow cat’s-eye shine in the darkness, and answers, “Yeah. They don’t . . . they don’t play ball the regular way down here. They don’t teach the same stuff. You should see some of the guys I’ve seen in the system, they don’t look like any ballplayer you’ve ever seen before. Pitchers with a cross-body motion and no velocity. Catchers who can’t run or dig a slider out of the dirt. Guys who got signed ‘cause they work the count.” He widens his eyes to emphasize it, though he knows Munson can’t see it. “That’s it, Munce. They walk a lot, and they’re in Triple-A. It’s fucking ridiculous.”
“You walk a lot,” Munson reminds him, smiling slightly.
Chavvy scoffs, thinks about getting another beer. “Yeah, but I also knock the ball out of the park thirty times a season.”
Munce grins. “Cocky punk.”
Chavez grins too, the snap of his teeth white in the shadows of the room. “Jealous.”
“Of course I’m jealous,” Munson says, rolling his eyes. “You got a philosophical team and a GM who’s blessed or whatever, and I’ve got . . . class at eight in the morning three days a week.”
“’s good for you, Eric,” Chavez says, slipping a hand under his shirt to scratch lazily at his stomach.
“I really don’t think it is. I’m, like, half-asleep all the time.” Munson tips his head way back on the bed, looking upside down out the window. The scratch of the branches is constant, rasping like fingernails.
Chavez decides hell with it, gets up to get another beer from the bathroom sink, crunched down in melting ice. He wedges the phone between his head and his shoulder, cracking the cap off on his belt buckle, saying teasingly, “The college party scene a little too much for you, there, babe?”
Munce exhales shortly. “God, I wish.” He plays his fingers across the Lego action figures on the low shelf the trails the wall next to his bed. “Between school and everything I gotta do for the team, I barely have the energy to, like, get back to my room before I fall down.”
Chavez settles back on the bed, punching a pillow into shape behind him. He sucks at the mouth of the bottle, licking off the liquid at the top. “You’ve been falling down, Munson?” he asks, still with a tinge of humor in his voice but an undercurrent, vague concern. His three previous beers are beginning to buzz around the surface of his mind, hiking his mood up several notches. He rubs his hand slowly low on his stomach, his eyes at half-mast.
Munson picks up one of the Lego guys, ticks his little plastic feet in a dance across the shelf. “I’ve just been real tired. I don’t know. Maybe I’ve got mono. Or maybe the hep is coming back again.”
Chavvy chuffs a laugh. “And maybe you’re just a lightweight.”
“Maybe,” Munce sighs, then yawns again, not bothering to shift the phone away.
Chavez’s voice is getting slower, carefully slurred at the edges, and Munce can read the occasional pauses, the long swallows, knows that Chavvy’s got a plan for tonight that involves not remembering it in the morning. Munson feels a brief flash of anger, that Chavez, who’s already living a dream, also has the time and energy to get wasted, because that was supposed to be at least one advantage college life had on pro ball.
But Munson can see his best friend, in some murky motel room in the South, sprawled bonelessly across the bed, his eyes swollen and hazy, the unconscious gestures of his hand cutting lethargically through the air, the way Chavvy always chews on his lower lip when he’s drunk, pulling it through his teeth and running the tip of his tongue across it. Munce shifts uncomfortably, rubbing a hand nervously on his thigh.
“Listen, man,” Chavez says, holding up the bottle into the thin square of moonlight slashing high through the room, tilting it back and forth to see the gleam. “It’s not supposed to be easy, you know? It wouldn’t be worth much if it were easy, huh.”
His eyes drift closed, resting the bottle against his stomach for a moment before he leans down to place it on the floor, and he continues, his voice getting rough and sleepy, “And you’re tough, you’re good.”
Chavvy eases open his belt buckle, humming deep in his throat, so quiet he can only barely hear it, and Munson’s just got a sense of it. “You’re good, Munce,” he breathes out.
California seems very far away. Everything seems very far away, except for Munson’s best-loved voice in his ear.
Munson’s chest hitches. “What . . . what’re you doing, Eric?” he asks hoarsely.
Chavez makes a rumbling sound. “Nothing,” he insists, thumbing open the buttons of his jeans fly. “Why? What’re you doing?”
Munce passes a hand glacially down his chest, his fingertips tagging on the waistband of his boxers, sliding inside. “Nothing.”
Chavez opens his eyes, following the nets and highway maps in the ceiling cracks, the arthritic shadows of branches across the plaster. “Munce,” he whispers in that old way, that specific hiss of his coarse voice, and Munson swallows, shuts his eyes.
“Fuck.”
They aren’t supposed to do this anymore. They’re supposed to be done. It’s very important to Eric Munson that they be done.
“You’re such a jerk,” Munson mumbles, flooded with heat and wishing for a breeze, something cool. His hand is working now, his heart staggering.
Chavvy laughs, low and taut. “Yeah, you like it.” He arches his back a little bit, thinking about Munson’s goofy grin and the wickered color in his eyes, the flared span of his hands and sloped valley between his shoulder blades. “Ah, you fucking love it, Munson.”
Eric Munson, breathing fast, is really in no position to disagree.
*
(you must be on guard against wickedness at all times)
Eric Chavez finds God a couple of weeks later.
Huntsville is obsessively hot, the streets dripping, the gauze of heat shimmer around every corner. Everybody speaks with an accent, some so thick Chavvy has to stand there uncomprehending, asking helplessly, “I’m sorry, what?” six or seven times, the southerner giving him exasperated looks, squinting at him like he might be a little slow.
He runs the air conditioner in his apartment all day long, and the erratic drone keeps him up at night, the stale re-circulated vent-smell of every breath and his throat feeling grated. He’s living with another guy from California, Tom Bennett, and they buy remote controlled cars, race them around the stadium’s parking lot.
He’s tearing up Double-A, the Southern League Player of the Month in May with a .365 average, six home runs and 32 RBI in 27 games. With the sweat soaking his jersey and cigarette smoke in his eyes, he finds the sweet spot over and over again, his swing clean and switching like a blade through the humid air.
But he’s pretty fucking lonely.
A bunch of the Latino players on his team, upon learning that he doesn’t speak Spanish despite his name and looks, start to call him ‘gringo,’ and Chavez knows that he should just laugh it off, knows that’s probably how it’s meant to be taken, but it’s tougher to do every time he hears it, his teeth gritted, a strained smile on his face.
He and Bennett get along pretty well, but they don’t talk much. Between living together and playing together, they run out of things to say to each other sometime around the fourth or the fifth inning, settling into a semi-comfortable silence until they retreat to their separate bedrooms in their relentlessly chilled apartment.
He sleeps with a few of the drawling Southern girls who charm smiles from their seats over the dugout, and they’re eager and well-versed, wrapping their endless legs around his waist, guiding his hands to lift their hips, straddling his body and leaning down to rain their wheat-bleached hair across his face. He makes them breakfast in the morning and then doesn’t call, but they don’t seem to mind, winking at him when he takes his cuts in the warm-up circle, cheering and clapping when he snags a hard liner over the bag at third base.
It doesn’t do much to help. He thinks maybe if he slept with a guy, indulged his ten percent, found someone substantial and strong to brace against, someone he wouldn’t have to be afraid of hurting, but it’s Alabama, and if he smiles at the wrong guy in Alabama, he might not wake up the next morning.
He gets tired of sex, kind of tired of everything. Jerking off with Munson on the phone was the most satisfying thing that’s happened to him in months, which is more than a little pathetic, and anyway, after it was over, Chavvy’s hand sticky in his shorts, his chest jackrabbiting, Munson told him emotionlessly, “That wasn’t fair, dude,” and then hung up, so it’s not like Chavez can call back and try it again.
He’s bored and restless and starting to hate everything.
His manager, Jeffrey Leonard, the same hard-featured man who called him into his office during Chavez’s time at the instructional league in Phoenix and told him he was a punk, must see this in Chavez, a terrible thought in its own right, to be transparent, to be so obvious, because he starts talking to Eric quietly about faith and revelation. About meaning.
“Baseball’s not everything, kid,” Leonard tells him one day after Chavez bounces into an inning-ending double play and spits curses in the dugout like it’s a tragedy. Chavvy looks at him blankly, thinking he must be kidding, but Leonard doesn’t crack a smile.
Chavez shakes his head, shrugs it off. Maybe baseball’s not everything, but it’s all he’s got.
A couple days later, after Chavez knocks the shit out of an 0-2 pitch to win the game, they’re manically celebrating in the clubhouse, and Leonard sidles up beside him, a moment of rare quiet, asks him, “What do you believe in, Chavez?”
Chavvy lifts his drink in the air, shouts too loud, “Fuckin’ hanging sliders!” and all his teammates laugh, but Leonard just tightens his mouth, looking disappointed.
On the bus to Nashville, Chavez is hunched over the seat’s fold-down tray, his head aching from trying to read the pitcher scouting reports in the sallow light, a frustrated grimace on his face. Leonard sways down the aisle, takes the seat next to him.
“Listen, son,” the manager begins, and Chavez looks up at him in surprise. “You’ve got to have something in your life besides the game.”
Chavez furrows his brow, massages his temple. His hand is cramped around a pen, and he loosens his grip, rubs his thumb hard into his palm. “I know,” he answers, thinking for a moment, ‘I’ve got Eric,’ before he remembers and shoves that down in his mind.
Leonard taps two fingers on the little plastic tray, like calling for a squeeze play. “What about faith, Chavez? What about belief?”
Chavez still doesn’t understand. “I . . . believe we’re gonna win the league this season?” he tries, and Leonard glowers at him for a moment before his face gets empathetic again.
“You’re a young kid. You’re a long way from home. I know how it gets, boy like you in the minors. I know how you can feel lost.”
Chavez stares down at his hands, thinking that he should protest that, but he doesn’t.
Leonard pats his shoulder. “Why don’t you start coming to the meetings we have in my office on Sundays. I think you’ll do well with it.”
Leonard, in addition to being a minor league manager, is also an ordained minister, which Chavez knew but never thought about in any real way before. Now he shrugs, embarrassed for some reason. “I’ll . . . think about it, skip.”
That’s good enough, Leonard rapping him lightly on the arm and saying, “Good boy,” before rising and going back to his seat.
Chavvy looks at the scouting report in front of him, mutters to himself, “That was weird,” and decides not to think about it anymore.
He’s got nothing against Christians or Christianity or anything. He was baptized, mainly because his grandparents insisted that he would be, but it’s never been a part of his life. Religion. Redemption. Any of that stuff. He’s not sure if they let ten-percent-gay people into heaven, anyway.
But the next Sunday, back in Huntsville, he finds himself walking to the ballpark early, and Leonard smiles approvingly at him as he takes a seat in the back, feeling out of place, and he keeps thinking they’re gonna throw him out, gonna recognize him for what he is and not want him around anymore. He wouldn’t exactly blame them, if they did.
Nobody says anything, though, nobody even looks at him with suspicion, and he sits back there, thinking absurdly that he got away with it, he’s so slick, they couldn’t tell anything. He tries to pay attention, the recited verses, Leonard’s halfway sermon about mercy and temptation, drowsy and bored again, a kid in church for the first time with his shoulders slumped and his eyes half-closed, and his mind wanders.
He thinks about the day’s game, runs the lineup in his head. He thinks about what he’s gonna get his mom for her birthday, and worries if Cheech will recognize him when he comes home at the end of the season, having never spent this long away from his dog. The words drift over him and nothing sticks, and he starts to think about Eric Munson, as pretty much always happens when he lets his thoughts go where they want.
He’s trying to figure out how long he should give Munson to get over it before calling him back, thinking maybe he can call tonight, maybe Munce has already forgiven him, and Leonard’s graveled voice breaks through, shaft of light:
“‘And they that know thy name will put their trust in thee: for thou, Lord, hast not forsaken them that seek thee.’”
Chavez blinks, opens his eyes all the way. Everything is for a moment very still inside of him, and he can breathe deep without pain, and he can see a world in which he is not forsaken, and in that moment Eric Chavez starts to listen.
It’s a strange day. He doesn’t feel changed, walking out of Leonard’s office with archaic words rolling around in his head. He certainly doesn’t feel saved.
Chavez walks home, and he takes the long way. It’s brilliantly hot, like every day, but he barely feels it. He’s pretty confused, a miniature copy of the New Testament with a pebbled orange cover in his back pocket, the gild-edged pages shining in the light.
He wonders if they’ll baptize him again, make him reborn. He wonders if he really wants this kind of salvation.
He wants to call Eric Munson very badly. He’s thinking that he doesn’t want to be forgiven, because his sins are the best part of him.
It’s the Deep South. The napkins in diners have Bible quotations on them. Crucifixes spark around the necks of everyone he meets. His teammates cross themselves before stepping to the plate, something that might have more to do with luck than faith, but really, what’s the difference?
Eric Chavez, at twenty years old, is only half what he should be. He’s not allowed to be gay or a .230 hitter. He’s not in love with his best friend, not anymore, not really, and there’s a world, there’s something waiting for him.
Baseball should be enough, but you know what, it’s not.
And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.
*
(see the curve)
When he tells Munson that he’s thinking of becoming devout, Munson pauses for a long moment, and then says hopefully, “You’re kidding, right?”
Chavez is on the center patio of his apartment complex, bare feet scorched by the sun-stroked concrete, pacing around. He’s been spending a lot of time outside, these days, in the heat, clinging to his body like arms.
“No. Totally serious, dude,” he answers. He’s spastically nervous, because he doesn’t think he’s smart enough to explain this. He’s not really sure he understands it himself, the glow inside his chest, the clean prayers that he’s trying to find a place for within him.
He’s been going to Leonard’s chapel meetings every week. He reads his little New Testament, on the bus, in his apartment, sitting on park benches, squinting to make out the words, trying to make sense of it.
It’s mainly, what if there is someone looking out for him? What if he doesn’t have to be afraid anymore?
Eric Munson’s in Omaha. The College World Series is just getting started, out in the heartland, and Munson wants to talk about that, not about God. He wants Chavvy to congratulate him on being named the Most Valuable Player in the NCAA East Regional, where he went 10 for 18 with two home runs and eight batted in. The College World Series, this is as big a thing as has ever happened to him, and Chavez hasn’t even asked what the field is like.
He’s in the hotel hallway, because he never talks on the phone with Chavez when other people are around, never knows what they might end up saying to each other. He’s sitting with his back against the wall, joggling his knee to stay in motion.
“You’re gonna be a Christian?” he asks, and the word tastes bad in his mouth.
Chavez nods, steps on the grass to spare his feet. “Yeah. A, you know, a real one. Be all . . . one with God. And stuff.” He scowls at the ground, hearing how dumb that sounds.
Munce laughs, rattling over the phone lines. “Okay, quit fucking around. You’re freaking me out.”
Chavez lowers himself to sit cross-legged on the grass, his hand over his eyes. “Munce, for reals,” he whispers.
Munson takes an even longer pause, staring at the door in front of him, the fake-brass numbers pinned down by tiny nails. “You’re serious,” he says, a bit amazed.
“I am, man.”
“But, what . . . I mean, you’re . . . and, you know . . . what the fuck, Chavvy?” he settles on, feeling inexplicable anger in his throat.
Chavez bends over his knees, his forehead brushed by the blades of grass. He really needs Munson to be okay with this. Not think he’s a freak, or scared or weak or gullible, or anything else. There’s this steady light in him now, and he needs Munson to understand that.
“I’ve been, you know, going to these chapel meetings that we have? Like, um, my manager, he’s a minister too, and he’s been sorta . . . teaching me stuff. Showing me about, like, Jesus and everything.”
Munson, never one for thinking before he speaks, says aghast, “Some fucking redneck down there got you mixed up in that shit, and you fell for it?”
“Hey!” Chavvy jerks up, his eyes narrowing against the thick sunlight. “Watch your fucking mouth, man. And it’s not some redneck, it’s Jeff Leonard, you know him.”
“I don’t care who it is,” Munce snaps. “I’m not about to let my best friend get brainwashed-”
Chavez hangs up on him.
Munson stares at the phone in his hand, the green light of the open connection. He swears and calls Chavez back, so mad his hands are shaking.
“Excuse me,” he says when Chavez picks up just before the voicemail clicks on. “I was fucking talking.”
“I’m not gonna listen to you be an asshole,” Chavez says, his voice trembling slightly. He’s tearing clumps of grass up with his free hand, feeling destructive, a cold hard pressure in his head. “This is . . . this is important to me. And what the fuck is the matter with you? This isn’t, like, me joining the fucking KKK or something.”
“I don’t think the KKK would have you, Chavez,” Munson sneers, but Chavez doesn’t hear that.
“I haven’t been brainwashed, you son of a bitch,” he says, realizing abstractly that he’s frighteningly close to true rage. “I went to some meetings, I heard some stuff, it’s good fucking stuff, Munson, and maybe it’s something I need.”
“Something you need?” Munson repeats incredulously, thinking, ‘you need the game, you need me, that’s all you should fucking need.’
Munson doesn’t know why it’s feeling like this, really, all smothered and pushed for denial, because it’s not like he’s got a problem with religion, not as an abstract concept, not as a concrete reality. And he’s got his friends who yawn through Sunday afternoons because they were up in collared shirts and perfect ties at nine in the morning. He’s got teammates holding crosses to their lips and bowing their heads, their backs to home plate and their eyes shut. And fuck Christianity too, because the sophomore utility infielder wears a skullcap under his baseball hat, attached to his short hair with bobby pins. There’s true belief all around him.
He’s got all this stuff, and it’s never been an issue, but not Eric Chavez. Eric Chavez falls in headfirst and doesn’t look before he crosses the street and never does anything except to the full extent of his heart, all his power, and a guy like that, a religion like this, it’s a terrible idea, just fucking awful.
“Yes goddamn it!” Chavvy shouts, crackling with static. “What’s so goddamn hard about this?”
Though he’s in the hotel hallway and that’s hardly a secure location, Munson, baffled by how quickly this got out of hand, rips the ace out of his sleeve. “You know what Christians think about people like you.”
Chavez’s hand wrenches in the grass, soil under his nails and the muscles of his arm as tight as guitar strings. “People like me?” he grates out, daring Munson.
Munce blows out a harsh breath, lowers his voice. “Fine, people like us, fine, fuck you, whatever. You know what they think, I’m sure you’ve read all about it. Are you gonna start telling me I’m going to hell for sucking your dick, Eric?”
“Oh, fuck you. That’s not all of them. Not even most. You, you just, talk about fucking prejudiced,” Chavvy says, but it sounds weak to his ears and he can’t argue this, because the whole point of faith is that there’s no explanation for it.
“No, I’m really curious, man,” Munce says, barely even hearing him, feeling heedless and cruel. “I’ll bet you can quote me chapter and verse about what Jesus fucking Christ thinks about faggots like us.”
Eric Chavez is thinking about mercy and forgiveness. He’s thinking about tolerance, about brotherhood, about love, love in all its forms, love for God, love for man, on the cross and in the valley of the shadow, holes in his hands and feet, blood in his eyes, his ribs showing through the gash in his side, sight to the blind and a home for the lost, one light that can be seen from everywhere in the world.
He’s thinking about the taste of the skin in the hand-fitted dent of Eric Munson’s hip, and he’s thinking that Jesus Christ would understand.
“Please don’t say that,” Chavez tells him, strangled and the sun on his back, heating the nape of his neck. “Please, man, I don’t want you to hate me because of this.”
Munson closes his eyes. He leans his head back against the stucky wall, bits of white flaking into his hair. “I just . . . I don’t understand,” he says, feeling exhausted, wrung out.
“I know you don’t. I wouldn’t, either, if it was you instead of me. It’s . . . it’s a hard thing to understand. It’s like . . .” Chavez sighs, combing his hand fast through his hair in frustration. “It’s like how, you know how, sometimes, you can sorta tell what pitch is coming? And not ‘cause of scouting reports or ‘cause he threw it in the same count earlier, but, like, you just get a feeling. A sense. You think, he’s gonna throw the curve, and you got no reason to think that, but you’re sure of it. You’re absolutely positive, and you could hit it with your eyes closed, you know it so well. Okay?”
Munce shakes his head, but answers, “Yeah. Sure.”
Chavez continues, struggling, “It’s like that, except . . . all the time. You know what’s coming, so you don’t have to worry. Or be scared. Or nothing.” He pauses, listens to Munson breathing skeptically. “And we’re not going to hell, Munson.”
Munce makes a small sound, giving up, though he wants to tell Chavez that sometimes you can believe with all your heart that the curve is coming, and that’s when they throw something straight and fast and eye-high.
“I know, man,” he says quietly. “And . . . okay. It’ll . . . it might take me kind of awhile to . . . get used to it. Because I don’t usually think of you and God, like, together in the same sentence.” He waits until Chavvy breathes out a shivering laugh, then says, “But I’ll deal. Just don’t . . . don’t start, like, quoting the Bible at me, all right? Because I love you and everything, but I might have to kill you.”
Now Chavez laughs for real, his hand over his face. “No worries. I can barely remember any of it, anyway.” He’s not sure if he’s really explained it all that well, if he’s made it clear, but he guesses he did as good as can be expected.
He wipes his grass-stained hand on his jeans, and says, “’Kay, tell me about Omaha.”
Munson lets out a painful breath, and smiles tiredly, the hand of God between them, keeping them close.
*
(world series moment)
In Omaha, they say Eric Munson is the best hitter in college baseball, and down on the field the players warm up and nudge each other, nod towards certain men in the stands, men sitting alone with their white sleeves rolled up to the elbow, notebooks in their hands and eyes squinted behind sunglasses.
The players talk like spies out of the corners of their mouth, they say, “Yankees,” and they say, “Dodgers,” and they say, “Cubs,” worried that it’ll be jinxed if they say it too loud, like the scouts will just poof and vanish and leave their notebooks in the empty seats, surprised pen gashes across the paper. The scouts come early and go down to the rail by the bullpen area to watch the pitchers, standing behind the little kids waving autograph books and clean baseballs. They scowl and make everybody nervous.
Munson keeps his head down and tries not to think about them. He’s the best hitter in college baseball and everybody knows his name. His best friend has been saved, hiding from tornadoes and lightning storms in Alabama, and Munson isn’t thinking about Eric Chavez, not really, not much, because Chavez broke a promise, something Munson thought couldn’t be questioned, something in their blood. He wonders about the space in one heart, the capacity for true faith, and he thinks that baseball came first.
The Trojans win the College World Series.
Eric Munson believes this is supposed to happen, because fifty years ago USC won its first national baseball championship, and there’s something about the stars aligning and the moon half-full like a saucer of milk the night before, a bunch of uncertain signs in the sky that can be interpreted any way he wants them to be. It’s supposed to happen because they don’t have God on their side, they’ve got baseball, and that’s better.
They play Arizona State in the championship game and by the third inning, the wheels have come off. It’s been a long tournament, a long season, and the pitchers are worn down to nubs. The ball won’t stay in the infield, won’t stay low or small or playable, magnetically attracted to the gaps between left and center, the column of free grass down along the line.
The final score is 21-14. A football score. There’s a weak-hit squib to short to end it, and then Eric Munson is in his pitcher’s arms and they’re falling, a slam of infielders on his back and his chest protector gets all skewed and pulled up so that he’s got a strap in his mouth, red lines on his face. He’s leaving bruises on everybody, because he’s got hard plastic on his legs and he keeps kicking, howling and his mouth coated with dust. It’s dark at the bottom of the dogpile, trickles of light as they shift and roll off each other, all of them screaming and laughing. Munson’s got someone’s knee in his hand and someone’s chest up against his mouth, ribs pressing on his chin, someone’s elbow gouging into the small of his back, and that might hurt if he could feel it, but he can’t, because they’re the best in the country, they’ve won the World Series.
He thinks, for a second there, just a second that’s quick and comes with the burn of tears in his eyes, he thinks that history doesn’t mean much and neither does faith and neither does love. That the only reason he can’t let Eric Chavez go and the one thing they’ll still have in common once they start hating each other (as they’re bound to), is this moment. This World Series moment.
Back at the hotel, he tries to call Chavez, a bunch of times as he keeps getting drunker and drunker on high light champagne. He wants to tell Chavez about this realization of his, because it’s important, it’s very important, and they tell each other everything. But Chavez never picks up, and Munson is left with his World Series moment and the unsteady belief that this is the kind of thing that can keep a man safe no matter what happens next.
(end part six)
*
part seven
(this is also, ps, where i totally ignored munson's first serious injury that kept him out of the lineup for half the season. whatever! lazy.)
Swiftly falling in love with Peter Saarsgard. Who might just be the most awesome boy on the planet.
I need to, like, buy stuffed animals and little plastic toys for everyone in my acquaintance. I need to graduate and get away from this river. I think it's got something to do with the off-season. Low levels of fear and apprehension. It's gonna fucking kill me to see any of them not in green and gold. You know the Oakland A's are the first and only team to wear white spikes? It's classy, man.
I am, yes. Getting on with it.
Table of Contents
Pictures courtesy bradausmus12 and Jen's Baseball Page
The Rest of Your Life
By Candle Beck
Part the Sixth: The Church of Baseball
(caught stealing)
Munson comes down the hall from the showers, scrubbing his head with his towel, and hears his phone ringing behind his room door. Munce swears, juggling his armful of shower stuff and shouldering into the room, tossing everything down and slinging the damp towel around his neck, hustling to get the phone before it stops ringing.
“Hello!” he half-yells, triumphant to have picked up in time.
There’s a pause. “Um . . . hi?”
Munce smiles, getting the worst of the wet off and flopping back onto his bed in his boxers and T-shirt. He’s as tired as fuck, but awake for this. “Dude, hey,” he says.
Chavez is in a motel outside Greenville, bored and lonely and drinking steadily, his roommate gone for the night in search of someone soft and wet and elusive. Chavvy’s on his third beer, wandering around his small room whipping a bat around, narrowly missing the lamp and busted television set.
They’re twenty years old. Eric Chavez is so deep in the South he’s starting to say y’all and fixin’, and in a couple of months, Eric Munson will be playing in the College World Series in Omaha.
Enough time has passed. Since what happened in Manhattan Beach, since Thanksgiving. Months are behind them now. Stuff gets dull, gets easier to deal with. With most of the country between them, nothing seems quite as incurable as when they were a twenty-minute drive apart. With no real chance to get each other into trouble, they’ve managed to stay clean. Eric Munson, well on his way to being over it, doesn’t hear train whistles in his head anymore, and Eric Chavez doesn’t wake up crying anymore.
It’s easier to be best friends when they don’t have to see each other every day.
“How’s it going?”
“Good. Where are you?” Munson asks.
Chavez curls his lip, drops the bat to sit down heavily on the bed. “Fucking South Carolina.” He rubs his hand over his face, reaches to get the beer off the nightstand.
“You finally got there, huh?” Munce smirks, because Chavvy had left a disgruntled message on his machine the day before, from the side of a desolate road, his muzzled long-distance voice cracking, “Our bus is broken down in the middle of nowhere. Stay in school, Munce. Minor league baseball sucks. Stay in school.”
“Yeah, fucking finally.”
“Having a good time?” Munce inquires mildly, the corners of his mouth twitching, because he knows that tone in his best friend’s voice.
Chavez snorts, lies back on the bed. “Yeah man, gangsta life,” he answers sarcastically.
Munson twists his shoulders on the bed, loosening his muscles as best he can. “The A’s have been all over the papers down here,” he tells Chavez. “Talking about Beane taking over and everything. He’s pretty fucking young to be a general manager, dude, you worried?”
“I don’t know, man, it’s weird,” Chavvy says. “There are these guys, like, the old baseball guys, you know? Who’ve been around for decades, the assistant manager here and the grounds crew chief at the stadium and the scouts and everything, and they say Billy Beane’s got something owed him. Owed him from, like, God.”
Munce lifts his eyebrows, propping one leg against the wall, feeling the stretch in his hamstring and calf. “From God?”
Chavez nods, his cheek brushing against the receiver. “Yeah. ‘Cause Beane was supposed to be so good, when he was playing, remember? But then it got, like, taken away. His talent.”
Munson yawns. He really needs to get more sleep. “It wasn’t his talent that went, it was his fucking head. He just couldn’t deal.”
“Yeah, well, whatever it was,” Chavvy says. “God gave him baseball and then God took it away, so now God’s got to get him back.”
Munce pulls his leg back down, bending it against his chest, clasping his free hand around his shin. “What the hell, man?” he laughs. “That’s pretty fucking out there.”
Chavez breathes out an answering laugh, tapping a finger on the bottleneck of his beer. “I know. But these guys, man, you oughta see ‘em, they can say stuff like that and have you just totally believing it. They say it’s not fair, what God did to Billy Beane, and now he’s got the whole world coming to him. They say he’s gonna change the game.”
Plucking at the hem of his shirt, Munce digests that, then asks, “You buy that?”
Chavvy shrugs, takes a pull. His motel room has gotten dark so quickly, the sun ratcheting down over the beat land. He can barely make out his glove on the dresser, the faded sheen of dust on the television screen. “I don’t know if I do or not. It’s fucking strange, though. I never played for no team that had a philosophy before.”
“A philosophy?” Munce repeats skeptically.
Chavez nods, finishing off his beer and lofting the bottle towards the small trashcan across the room. The bottle sparks a cartwheel, catching the end of the day’s light, and clonks off the wall a foot to the right of the mark, rolling away under the dresser.
Chavez scowls at the mellow cat’s-eye shine in the darkness, and answers, “Yeah. They don’t . . . they don’t play ball the regular way down here. They don’t teach the same stuff. You should see some of the guys I’ve seen in the system, they don’t look like any ballplayer you’ve ever seen before. Pitchers with a cross-body motion and no velocity. Catchers who can’t run or dig a slider out of the dirt. Guys who got signed ‘cause they work the count.” He widens his eyes to emphasize it, though he knows Munson can’t see it. “That’s it, Munce. They walk a lot, and they’re in Triple-A. It’s fucking ridiculous.”
“You walk a lot,” Munson reminds him, smiling slightly.
Chavvy scoffs, thinks about getting another beer. “Yeah, but I also knock the ball out of the park thirty times a season.”
Munce grins. “Cocky punk.”
Chavez grins too, the snap of his teeth white in the shadows of the room. “Jealous.”
“Of course I’m jealous,” Munson says, rolling his eyes. “You got a philosophical team and a GM who’s blessed or whatever, and I’ve got . . . class at eight in the morning three days a week.”
“’s good for you, Eric,” Chavez says, slipping a hand under his shirt to scratch lazily at his stomach.
“I really don’t think it is. I’m, like, half-asleep all the time.” Munson tips his head way back on the bed, looking upside down out the window. The scratch of the branches is constant, rasping like fingernails.
Chavez decides hell with it, gets up to get another beer from the bathroom sink, crunched down in melting ice. He wedges the phone between his head and his shoulder, cracking the cap off on his belt buckle, saying teasingly, “The college party scene a little too much for you, there, babe?”
Munce exhales shortly. “God, I wish.” He plays his fingers across the Lego action figures on the low shelf the trails the wall next to his bed. “Between school and everything I gotta do for the team, I barely have the energy to, like, get back to my room before I fall down.”
Chavez settles back on the bed, punching a pillow into shape behind him. He sucks at the mouth of the bottle, licking off the liquid at the top. “You’ve been falling down, Munson?” he asks, still with a tinge of humor in his voice but an undercurrent, vague concern. His three previous beers are beginning to buzz around the surface of his mind, hiking his mood up several notches. He rubs his hand slowly low on his stomach, his eyes at half-mast.
Munson picks up one of the Lego guys, ticks his little plastic feet in a dance across the shelf. “I’ve just been real tired. I don’t know. Maybe I’ve got mono. Or maybe the hep is coming back again.”
Chavvy chuffs a laugh. “And maybe you’re just a lightweight.”
“Maybe,” Munce sighs, then yawns again, not bothering to shift the phone away.
Chavez’s voice is getting slower, carefully slurred at the edges, and Munce can read the occasional pauses, the long swallows, knows that Chavvy’s got a plan for tonight that involves not remembering it in the morning. Munson feels a brief flash of anger, that Chavez, who’s already living a dream, also has the time and energy to get wasted, because that was supposed to be at least one advantage college life had on pro ball.
But Munson can see his best friend, in some murky motel room in the South, sprawled bonelessly across the bed, his eyes swollen and hazy, the unconscious gestures of his hand cutting lethargically through the air, the way Chavvy always chews on his lower lip when he’s drunk, pulling it through his teeth and running the tip of his tongue across it. Munce shifts uncomfortably, rubbing a hand nervously on his thigh.
“Listen, man,” Chavez says, holding up the bottle into the thin square of moonlight slashing high through the room, tilting it back and forth to see the gleam. “It’s not supposed to be easy, you know? It wouldn’t be worth much if it were easy, huh.”
His eyes drift closed, resting the bottle against his stomach for a moment before he leans down to place it on the floor, and he continues, his voice getting rough and sleepy, “And you’re tough, you’re good.”
Chavvy eases open his belt buckle, humming deep in his throat, so quiet he can only barely hear it, and Munson’s just got a sense of it. “You’re good, Munce,” he breathes out.
California seems very far away. Everything seems very far away, except for Munson’s best-loved voice in his ear.
Munson’s chest hitches. “What . . . what’re you doing, Eric?” he asks hoarsely.
Chavez makes a rumbling sound. “Nothing,” he insists, thumbing open the buttons of his jeans fly. “Why? What’re you doing?”
Munce passes a hand glacially down his chest, his fingertips tagging on the waistband of his boxers, sliding inside. “Nothing.”
Chavez opens his eyes, following the nets and highway maps in the ceiling cracks, the arthritic shadows of branches across the plaster. “Munce,” he whispers in that old way, that specific hiss of his coarse voice, and Munson swallows, shuts his eyes.
“Fuck.”
They aren’t supposed to do this anymore. They’re supposed to be done. It’s very important to Eric Munson that they be done.
“You’re such a jerk,” Munson mumbles, flooded with heat and wishing for a breeze, something cool. His hand is working now, his heart staggering.
Chavvy laughs, low and taut. “Yeah, you like it.” He arches his back a little bit, thinking about Munson’s goofy grin and the wickered color in his eyes, the flared span of his hands and sloped valley between his shoulder blades. “Ah, you fucking love it, Munson.”
Eric Munson, breathing fast, is really in no position to disagree.
*
(you must be on guard against wickedness at all times)
Eric Chavez finds God a couple of weeks later.
Huntsville is obsessively hot, the streets dripping, the gauze of heat shimmer around every corner. Everybody speaks with an accent, some so thick Chavvy has to stand there uncomprehending, asking helplessly, “I’m sorry, what?” six or seven times, the southerner giving him exasperated looks, squinting at him like he might be a little slow.
He runs the air conditioner in his apartment all day long, and the erratic drone keeps him up at night, the stale re-circulated vent-smell of every breath and his throat feeling grated. He’s living with another guy from California, Tom Bennett, and they buy remote controlled cars, race them around the stadium’s parking lot.
He’s tearing up Double-A, the Southern League Player of the Month in May with a .365 average, six home runs and 32 RBI in 27 games. With the sweat soaking his jersey and cigarette smoke in his eyes, he finds the sweet spot over and over again, his swing clean and switching like a blade through the humid air.
But he’s pretty fucking lonely.
A bunch of the Latino players on his team, upon learning that he doesn’t speak Spanish despite his name and looks, start to call him ‘gringo,’ and Chavez knows that he should just laugh it off, knows that’s probably how it’s meant to be taken, but it’s tougher to do every time he hears it, his teeth gritted, a strained smile on his face.
He and Bennett get along pretty well, but they don’t talk much. Between living together and playing together, they run out of things to say to each other sometime around the fourth or the fifth inning, settling into a semi-comfortable silence until they retreat to their separate bedrooms in their relentlessly chilled apartment.
He sleeps with a few of the drawling Southern girls who charm smiles from their seats over the dugout, and they’re eager and well-versed, wrapping their endless legs around his waist, guiding his hands to lift their hips, straddling his body and leaning down to rain their wheat-bleached hair across his face. He makes them breakfast in the morning and then doesn’t call, but they don’t seem to mind, winking at him when he takes his cuts in the warm-up circle, cheering and clapping when he snags a hard liner over the bag at third base.
It doesn’t do much to help. He thinks maybe if he slept with a guy, indulged his ten percent, found someone substantial and strong to brace against, someone he wouldn’t have to be afraid of hurting, but it’s Alabama, and if he smiles at the wrong guy in Alabama, he might not wake up the next morning.
He gets tired of sex, kind of tired of everything. Jerking off with Munson on the phone was the most satisfying thing that’s happened to him in months, which is more than a little pathetic, and anyway, after it was over, Chavvy’s hand sticky in his shorts, his chest jackrabbiting, Munson told him emotionlessly, “That wasn’t fair, dude,” and then hung up, so it’s not like Chavez can call back and try it again.
He’s bored and restless and starting to hate everything.
His manager, Jeffrey Leonard, the same hard-featured man who called him into his office during Chavez’s time at the instructional league in Phoenix and told him he was a punk, must see this in Chavez, a terrible thought in its own right, to be transparent, to be so obvious, because he starts talking to Eric quietly about faith and revelation. About meaning.
“Baseball’s not everything, kid,” Leonard tells him one day after Chavez bounces into an inning-ending double play and spits curses in the dugout like it’s a tragedy. Chavvy looks at him blankly, thinking he must be kidding, but Leonard doesn’t crack a smile.
Chavez shakes his head, shrugs it off. Maybe baseball’s not everything, but it’s all he’s got.
A couple days later, after Chavez knocks the shit out of an 0-2 pitch to win the game, they’re manically celebrating in the clubhouse, and Leonard sidles up beside him, a moment of rare quiet, asks him, “What do you believe in, Chavez?”
Chavvy lifts his drink in the air, shouts too loud, “Fuckin’ hanging sliders!” and all his teammates laugh, but Leonard just tightens his mouth, looking disappointed.
On the bus to Nashville, Chavez is hunched over the seat’s fold-down tray, his head aching from trying to read the pitcher scouting reports in the sallow light, a frustrated grimace on his face. Leonard sways down the aisle, takes the seat next to him.
“Listen, son,” the manager begins, and Chavez looks up at him in surprise. “You’ve got to have something in your life besides the game.”
Chavez furrows his brow, massages his temple. His hand is cramped around a pen, and he loosens his grip, rubs his thumb hard into his palm. “I know,” he answers, thinking for a moment, ‘I’ve got Eric,’ before he remembers and shoves that down in his mind.
Leonard taps two fingers on the little plastic tray, like calling for a squeeze play. “What about faith, Chavez? What about belief?”
Chavez still doesn’t understand. “I . . . believe we’re gonna win the league this season?” he tries, and Leonard glowers at him for a moment before his face gets empathetic again.
“You’re a young kid. You’re a long way from home. I know how it gets, boy like you in the minors. I know how you can feel lost.”
Chavez stares down at his hands, thinking that he should protest that, but he doesn’t.
Leonard pats his shoulder. “Why don’t you start coming to the meetings we have in my office on Sundays. I think you’ll do well with it.”
Leonard, in addition to being a minor league manager, is also an ordained minister, which Chavez knew but never thought about in any real way before. Now he shrugs, embarrassed for some reason. “I’ll . . . think about it, skip.”
That’s good enough, Leonard rapping him lightly on the arm and saying, “Good boy,” before rising and going back to his seat.
Chavvy looks at the scouting report in front of him, mutters to himself, “That was weird,” and decides not to think about it anymore.
He’s got nothing against Christians or Christianity or anything. He was baptized, mainly because his grandparents insisted that he would be, but it’s never been a part of his life. Religion. Redemption. Any of that stuff. He’s not sure if they let ten-percent-gay people into heaven, anyway.
But the next Sunday, back in Huntsville, he finds himself walking to the ballpark early, and Leonard smiles approvingly at him as he takes a seat in the back, feeling out of place, and he keeps thinking they’re gonna throw him out, gonna recognize him for what he is and not want him around anymore. He wouldn’t exactly blame them, if they did.
Nobody says anything, though, nobody even looks at him with suspicion, and he sits back there, thinking absurdly that he got away with it, he’s so slick, they couldn’t tell anything. He tries to pay attention, the recited verses, Leonard’s halfway sermon about mercy and temptation, drowsy and bored again, a kid in church for the first time with his shoulders slumped and his eyes half-closed, and his mind wanders.
He thinks about the day’s game, runs the lineup in his head. He thinks about what he’s gonna get his mom for her birthday, and worries if Cheech will recognize him when he comes home at the end of the season, having never spent this long away from his dog. The words drift over him and nothing sticks, and he starts to think about Eric Munson, as pretty much always happens when he lets his thoughts go where they want.
He’s trying to figure out how long he should give Munson to get over it before calling him back, thinking maybe he can call tonight, maybe Munce has already forgiven him, and Leonard’s graveled voice breaks through, shaft of light:
“‘And they that know thy name will put their trust in thee: for thou, Lord, hast not forsaken them that seek thee.’”
Chavez blinks, opens his eyes all the way. Everything is for a moment very still inside of him, and he can breathe deep without pain, and he can see a world in which he is not forsaken, and in that moment Eric Chavez starts to listen.
It’s a strange day. He doesn’t feel changed, walking out of Leonard’s office with archaic words rolling around in his head. He certainly doesn’t feel saved.
Chavez walks home, and he takes the long way. It’s brilliantly hot, like every day, but he barely feels it. He’s pretty confused, a miniature copy of the New Testament with a pebbled orange cover in his back pocket, the gild-edged pages shining in the light.
He wonders if they’ll baptize him again, make him reborn. He wonders if he really wants this kind of salvation.
He wants to call Eric Munson very badly. He’s thinking that he doesn’t want to be forgiven, because his sins are the best part of him.
It’s the Deep South. The napkins in diners have Bible quotations on them. Crucifixes spark around the necks of everyone he meets. His teammates cross themselves before stepping to the plate, something that might have more to do with luck than faith, but really, what’s the difference?
Eric Chavez, at twenty years old, is only half what he should be. He’s not allowed to be gay or a .230 hitter. He’s not in love with his best friend, not anymore, not really, and there’s a world, there’s something waiting for him.
Baseball should be enough, but you know what, it’s not.
And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.
*
(see the curve)
When he tells Munson that he’s thinking of becoming devout, Munson pauses for a long moment, and then says hopefully, “You’re kidding, right?”
Chavez is on the center patio of his apartment complex, bare feet scorched by the sun-stroked concrete, pacing around. He’s been spending a lot of time outside, these days, in the heat, clinging to his body like arms.
“No. Totally serious, dude,” he answers. He’s spastically nervous, because he doesn’t think he’s smart enough to explain this. He’s not really sure he understands it himself, the glow inside his chest, the clean prayers that he’s trying to find a place for within him.
He’s been going to Leonard’s chapel meetings every week. He reads his little New Testament, on the bus, in his apartment, sitting on park benches, squinting to make out the words, trying to make sense of it.
It’s mainly, what if there is someone looking out for him? What if he doesn’t have to be afraid anymore?
Eric Munson’s in Omaha. The College World Series is just getting started, out in the heartland, and Munson wants to talk about that, not about God. He wants Chavvy to congratulate him on being named the Most Valuable Player in the NCAA East Regional, where he went 10 for 18 with two home runs and eight batted in. The College World Series, this is as big a thing as has ever happened to him, and Chavez hasn’t even asked what the field is like.
He’s in the hotel hallway, because he never talks on the phone with Chavez when other people are around, never knows what they might end up saying to each other. He’s sitting with his back against the wall, joggling his knee to stay in motion.
“You’re gonna be a Christian?” he asks, and the word tastes bad in his mouth.
Chavez nods, steps on the grass to spare his feet. “Yeah. A, you know, a real one. Be all . . . one with God. And stuff.” He scowls at the ground, hearing how dumb that sounds.
Munce laughs, rattling over the phone lines. “Okay, quit fucking around. You’re freaking me out.”
Chavez lowers himself to sit cross-legged on the grass, his hand over his eyes. “Munce, for reals,” he whispers.
Munson takes an even longer pause, staring at the door in front of him, the fake-brass numbers pinned down by tiny nails. “You’re serious,” he says, a bit amazed.
“I am, man.”
“But, what . . . I mean, you’re . . . and, you know . . . what the fuck, Chavvy?” he settles on, feeling inexplicable anger in his throat.
Chavez bends over his knees, his forehead brushed by the blades of grass. He really needs Munson to be okay with this. Not think he’s a freak, or scared or weak or gullible, or anything else. There’s this steady light in him now, and he needs Munson to understand that.
“I’ve been, you know, going to these chapel meetings that we have? Like, um, my manager, he’s a minister too, and he’s been sorta . . . teaching me stuff. Showing me about, like, Jesus and everything.”
Munson, never one for thinking before he speaks, says aghast, “Some fucking redneck down there got you mixed up in that shit, and you fell for it?”
“Hey!” Chavvy jerks up, his eyes narrowing against the thick sunlight. “Watch your fucking mouth, man. And it’s not some redneck, it’s Jeff Leonard, you know him.”
“I don’t care who it is,” Munce snaps. “I’m not about to let my best friend get brainwashed-”
Chavez hangs up on him.
Munson stares at the phone in his hand, the green light of the open connection. He swears and calls Chavez back, so mad his hands are shaking.
“Excuse me,” he says when Chavez picks up just before the voicemail clicks on. “I was fucking talking.”
“I’m not gonna listen to you be an asshole,” Chavez says, his voice trembling slightly. He’s tearing clumps of grass up with his free hand, feeling destructive, a cold hard pressure in his head. “This is . . . this is important to me. And what the fuck is the matter with you? This isn’t, like, me joining the fucking KKK or something.”
“I don’t think the KKK would have you, Chavez,” Munson sneers, but Chavez doesn’t hear that.
“I haven’t been brainwashed, you son of a bitch,” he says, realizing abstractly that he’s frighteningly close to true rage. “I went to some meetings, I heard some stuff, it’s good fucking stuff, Munson, and maybe it’s something I need.”
“Something you need?” Munson repeats incredulously, thinking, ‘you need the game, you need me, that’s all you should fucking need.’
Munson doesn’t know why it’s feeling like this, really, all smothered and pushed for denial, because it’s not like he’s got a problem with religion, not as an abstract concept, not as a concrete reality. And he’s got his friends who yawn through Sunday afternoons because they were up in collared shirts and perfect ties at nine in the morning. He’s got teammates holding crosses to their lips and bowing their heads, their backs to home plate and their eyes shut. And fuck Christianity too, because the sophomore utility infielder wears a skullcap under his baseball hat, attached to his short hair with bobby pins. There’s true belief all around him.
He’s got all this stuff, and it’s never been an issue, but not Eric Chavez. Eric Chavez falls in headfirst and doesn’t look before he crosses the street and never does anything except to the full extent of his heart, all his power, and a guy like that, a religion like this, it’s a terrible idea, just fucking awful.
“Yes goddamn it!” Chavvy shouts, crackling with static. “What’s so goddamn hard about this?”
Though he’s in the hotel hallway and that’s hardly a secure location, Munson, baffled by how quickly this got out of hand, rips the ace out of his sleeve. “You know what Christians think about people like you.”
Chavez’s hand wrenches in the grass, soil under his nails and the muscles of his arm as tight as guitar strings. “People like me?” he grates out, daring Munson.
Munce blows out a harsh breath, lowers his voice. “Fine, people like us, fine, fuck you, whatever. You know what they think, I’m sure you’ve read all about it. Are you gonna start telling me I’m going to hell for sucking your dick, Eric?”
“Oh, fuck you. That’s not all of them. Not even most. You, you just, talk about fucking prejudiced,” Chavvy says, but it sounds weak to his ears and he can’t argue this, because the whole point of faith is that there’s no explanation for it.
“No, I’m really curious, man,” Munce says, barely even hearing him, feeling heedless and cruel. “I’ll bet you can quote me chapter and verse about what Jesus fucking Christ thinks about faggots like us.”
Eric Chavez is thinking about mercy and forgiveness. He’s thinking about tolerance, about brotherhood, about love, love in all its forms, love for God, love for man, on the cross and in the valley of the shadow, holes in his hands and feet, blood in his eyes, his ribs showing through the gash in his side, sight to the blind and a home for the lost, one light that can be seen from everywhere in the world.
He’s thinking about the taste of the skin in the hand-fitted dent of Eric Munson’s hip, and he’s thinking that Jesus Christ would understand.
“Please don’t say that,” Chavez tells him, strangled and the sun on his back, heating the nape of his neck. “Please, man, I don’t want you to hate me because of this.”
Munson closes his eyes. He leans his head back against the stucky wall, bits of white flaking into his hair. “I just . . . I don’t understand,” he says, feeling exhausted, wrung out.
“I know you don’t. I wouldn’t, either, if it was you instead of me. It’s . . . it’s a hard thing to understand. It’s like . . .” Chavez sighs, combing his hand fast through his hair in frustration. “It’s like how, you know how, sometimes, you can sorta tell what pitch is coming? And not ‘cause of scouting reports or ‘cause he threw it in the same count earlier, but, like, you just get a feeling. A sense. You think, he’s gonna throw the curve, and you got no reason to think that, but you’re sure of it. You’re absolutely positive, and you could hit it with your eyes closed, you know it so well. Okay?”
Munce shakes his head, but answers, “Yeah. Sure.”
Chavez continues, struggling, “It’s like that, except . . . all the time. You know what’s coming, so you don’t have to worry. Or be scared. Or nothing.” He pauses, listens to Munson breathing skeptically. “And we’re not going to hell, Munson.”
Munce makes a small sound, giving up, though he wants to tell Chavez that sometimes you can believe with all your heart that the curve is coming, and that’s when they throw something straight and fast and eye-high.
“I know, man,” he says quietly. “And . . . okay. It’ll . . . it might take me kind of awhile to . . . get used to it. Because I don’t usually think of you and God, like, together in the same sentence.” He waits until Chavvy breathes out a shivering laugh, then says, “But I’ll deal. Just don’t . . . don’t start, like, quoting the Bible at me, all right? Because I love you and everything, but I might have to kill you.”
Now Chavez laughs for real, his hand over his face. “No worries. I can barely remember any of it, anyway.” He’s not sure if he’s really explained it all that well, if he’s made it clear, but he guesses he did as good as can be expected.
He wipes his grass-stained hand on his jeans, and says, “’Kay, tell me about Omaha.”
Munson lets out a painful breath, and smiles tiredly, the hand of God between them, keeping them close.
*
(world series moment)
In Omaha, they say Eric Munson is the best hitter in college baseball, and down on the field the players warm up and nudge each other, nod towards certain men in the stands, men sitting alone with their white sleeves rolled up to the elbow, notebooks in their hands and eyes squinted behind sunglasses.
The players talk like spies out of the corners of their mouth, they say, “Yankees,” and they say, “Dodgers,” and they say, “Cubs,” worried that it’ll be jinxed if they say it too loud, like the scouts will just poof and vanish and leave their notebooks in the empty seats, surprised pen gashes across the paper. The scouts come early and go down to the rail by the bullpen area to watch the pitchers, standing behind the little kids waving autograph books and clean baseballs. They scowl and make everybody nervous.
Munson keeps his head down and tries not to think about them. He’s the best hitter in college baseball and everybody knows his name. His best friend has been saved, hiding from tornadoes and lightning storms in Alabama, and Munson isn’t thinking about Eric Chavez, not really, not much, because Chavez broke a promise, something Munson thought couldn’t be questioned, something in their blood. He wonders about the space in one heart, the capacity for true faith, and he thinks that baseball came first.
The Trojans win the College World Series.
Eric Munson believes this is supposed to happen, because fifty years ago USC won its first national baseball championship, and there’s something about the stars aligning and the moon half-full like a saucer of milk the night before, a bunch of uncertain signs in the sky that can be interpreted any way he wants them to be. It’s supposed to happen because they don’t have God on their side, they’ve got baseball, and that’s better.
They play Arizona State in the championship game and by the third inning, the wheels have come off. It’s been a long tournament, a long season, and the pitchers are worn down to nubs. The ball won’t stay in the infield, won’t stay low or small or playable, magnetically attracted to the gaps between left and center, the column of free grass down along the line.
The final score is 21-14. A football score. There’s a weak-hit squib to short to end it, and then Eric Munson is in his pitcher’s arms and they’re falling, a slam of infielders on his back and his chest protector gets all skewed and pulled up so that he’s got a strap in his mouth, red lines on his face. He’s leaving bruises on everybody, because he’s got hard plastic on his legs and he keeps kicking, howling and his mouth coated with dust. It’s dark at the bottom of the dogpile, trickles of light as they shift and roll off each other, all of them screaming and laughing. Munson’s got someone’s knee in his hand and someone’s chest up against his mouth, ribs pressing on his chin, someone’s elbow gouging into the small of his back, and that might hurt if he could feel it, but he can’t, because they’re the best in the country, they’ve won the World Series.
He thinks, for a second there, just a second that’s quick and comes with the burn of tears in his eyes, he thinks that history doesn’t mean much and neither does faith and neither does love. That the only reason he can’t let Eric Chavez go and the one thing they’ll still have in common once they start hating each other (as they’re bound to), is this moment. This World Series moment.
Back at the hotel, he tries to call Chavez, a bunch of times as he keeps getting drunker and drunker on high light champagne. He wants to tell Chavez about this realization of his, because it’s important, it’s very important, and they tell each other everything. But Chavez never picks up, and Munson is left with his World Series moment and the unsteady belief that this is the kind of thing that can keep a man safe no matter what happens next.
(end part six)
*
part seven