and he's right
so yeah. sorry to be all lame and lackadaisical in the updation. what happened is we went to new mexico, because apparently new mexico is the place to be. but then we ran into more money than we thought we would in santa fe, seeing as how there's been a drought and you can't ask art school kids to stay clean, i mean honestly.
so we had enough to stay on the road and my brother was in austin checking the place out (he intends to move there, i'm pretty sure just because he's been listening to too much old 97's music and saw whiskeytown on austin city limits back in teh fucking day, and it warped him), and we basically said, fuck it! let's go to texas! so we went to texas. texas was cool.
anyway, it's been pretty complicated, to say the least. but here i am back on the wrong fucking coast and not out of commission anymore. i think i might be ready to not be a drug addict anymore. it'll be interesting.
this is the part of the epic where i seriously indulged myself. i've been trying to write about the streak for two and a half years, okay? it was necessary.
Table of Contents
Pictures courtesy bradausmus12 and Jen's Baseball Page
The Rest of Your Life
By Candle Beck
Part the Eleventh: Left Coast
(go west, young man)
In 2000, these kids show up.
Tim Hudson’s in his second year and was a veteran two days after hitting the bigs. Some guys just have it, the hazing doesn’t really take (they don’t really want to see Huddy in a Hooters outfit, anyway, because that’s the kind of thing that might scar for life), and nobody gives Hudson much shit, because they all know, right off the bat, that the tough little righty from Alabama is gonna be the best pitcher in the game someday.
It was probably, what, the second or third week after Huddy first got called up, in Hayward last year, and they were out at a bar, getting to know each other in a roundabout sort of way. Chavez bought the first couple of rounds and Hudson kicked his ass on the pinball machine, and they were fair and well buzzed, getting along great.
Chavez went up to the bar for the next set and inadvertently cut in front of a brick-headed man with a squashed nose and brutal eyes, snapping and looking for a fight. Chavez tried to extract himself gracefully, but the guy wasn’t having it, shoving Eric and spilling his drinks, and the guy called him a “cocksucking spic,” which was at least as funny as it was offensive, seeing as how it was pretty much true.
Then suddenly Tim Hudson was there, not stepping between them, not trying to break anything up, just standing shoulder to shoulder with Chavez, all balls-out hardness and knuckled fists, cold-eyed. Hudson looked at the brick-headed guy with utter contempt, and asked, laced with violence and a burr of eager adrenaline, “You wanna roll, motherfucker?”
The brick-headed guy was way bigger, thick through the shoulders and neck, but Tim Hudson, short and stone-muscled, stared him right the fuck down, no doubt in anyone’s mind who would emerge the victor in a brawl, and Chavez saw an astonished sprint of fear in the other man’s eyes, before he sneered and turned away like he didn’t care, moving quickly across the bar, away from the two of them.
Huddy clapped Chavez on the shoulder and drawled, “Takin’ you like a day to get those drinks, boy.”
Chavez knew, right then, though they were still mostly strangers to each other, that he’d found someone who would always have his back, always stand up with him, and he grinned foolishly, recognizing a friend for life when he saw one.
But these kids, man. (Chavez realizes that calling them ‘kids’ is a little off, because he’s got all of five months on Zito and Mulder’s actually older than him by four, but Chavez is two years in now and secure enough to be jaded.)
The tall one, Mulder, is way too cool. He comes up first, in April, and acts like he’s been here for years too, but he can’t quite pull it off. He’s cocky, even after he goes 1-5 in his first half-season, he walks around with his head up. Mulder’s got nasty stuff, there’s no doubt about it, but his command is shit half the time, they only ever see snatches of what he’s gonna be, that first year.
But nothing ever seems to cause doubt in him. He could be 0-15 and still be grinning that arrogant fucking grin of his, undimmed. It’s kind of annoying, but kind of reassuring, too.
Mulder’s almost irritatingly good-looking, symmetrically handsome like Disney animated heroes are handsome, and Chavvy isn’t exactly making a move for him, but he certainly never steps away when Mulder comes up to him in the clubhouse without a shirt on, his army-short hair bristling wetly.
The other lefty, Zito, well, Chavez is pretty sure Zito’s more crazy than sane, but it works for him. Zito comes up in July, after all of a season and a half in the minors, and proceeds to pitch his way to a 2.72 ERA in his first fourteen games in the bigs, and starts Game 2 in New York City in the division series.
Chavez knew about Zito before, of course, Munson’s former battery mate, narrowing his eyes at Zito when they first met and saying, “You broke my best friend’s hand,” seeing Zito grin and answer knowingly, “You must be the other Eric.” Zito’s from San Diego too, and Chavvy knew a million guys like him back home, spacey and born in the wrong decade, fifty years too late.
But Zito’s also got a hard strand of confidence and solemnity to him, disciplined like a big leaguer’s got to be, secretly more cocky than Mark Mulder, just not showing it as much.
It’s only when they’re off the field that Chavez can see glints of the life that Zito would be living if he couldn’t pitch the way he can, the life where Zito scratches out a just more than minimum-wage living, clerking at a copy shop or a photo developer’s, smokes pot on his lunch break with his buddies from high school and maybe claims himself as a Buddhist, just to be contrary, watches a lot of movies and loves his pet dog, reads intricate books about the philosophy of mathematics and East Asia history, exists lazy and content and is happy with his life, every day of it.
But Zito can pitch the way he can, exceeds every prejudice and expectation.
Chavez isn’t sure if he trusts them. He likes them well enough, Zito with that occasionally unhinged grin that makes him look totally deranged, Mulder with his best-there’s-ever-been style in everything he does, but they both came up through the system pretty fucking quick, twenty-two years old and suddenly thrust into a contending team’s starting rotation.
But when he looks at Mulder and Zito and Hudson, snickering and circling like sharks around each other, Chavez thinks he understands what everybody means when they say, “the future of this team.”
Mulder and Zito are the lefty conspiracy, all prank calls and practical jokes, though Hudson’s not adverse to being dragged along for the ride, and it was Chavez who got Zito into a wedding dress for the plane ride to Chicago, so he doesn’t really have a leg to stand on when the two pitchers make him their favorite target for the rest of the season.
Chavvy doesn’t really mind. They’re cool, and they both seem to like him a whole lot, though Zito, a maudlin and sentimental drunk, is the only one who says it out loud, slurring proclamations of his love for Chavez four days after they were first introduced.
Mulder just lets Chavez hang off his shoulders ecstatically when they rip off a win in the bottom of the ninth, when they take the division and go star-eyed to their first postseason. He lets Chavez cry in the clubhouse after they lose to the Yankees in the first round, and doesn’t make fun of him, just brings him a dry towel and a can of Dr. Pepper. And he asks Chavez during spring training in ’01 if he wants to maybe take a look at places when they get back to the East Bay, be roommates like college boys and leave the front door unlocked all the time.
Chavez agrees to live with Mulder without a second thought, not thinking too much about the broad line of Mulder’s shoulders or the stripped-smooth path of his bare chest.
They find a good house out in Lafayette, the base of the Mount Diablo range, with an empty pool (pre-requisite) scored with black scars from the neighborhood kids who’ve been using it as a skate bowl, a meandering sprawl of rooms, beige carpets and white plaster walls.
Eric and Mark are the ones who sign the lease, but by the time they celebrate Zito’s twenty-third birthday in May, Frank Menechino and Adam Piatt have moved in, too, along with Ramon Hernandez and his wife, but they’re looking for a place of their own, because, though Maria is the awesomest chick in the county, it’s not really a Cleaver atmosphere.
Sometime in June, Chavez falls for Mulder, but only a little bit.
Adam and Frankie are lazy motherfuckers, never up before they absolutely have to be, so Mulder and Chavez are usually alone for breakfast, sometimes eating standing up in the kitchen, sometimes off their knees in living room, sometimes driving into town and hitting up Denny’s.
It probably starts then, slow-moving mornings, Mulder yawning and bending at the waist to peer into the refrigerator, the frozen white light on his face, the uncharacteristically elegant length of his neck, his arm braced on the side of the fridge, saying, “So yeah, we get out there by six o’clock or so-you drank all the orange juice, didn’t you, you fucker-and we’ll be able to get in at least nine holes before dark.”
It’s not that Mulder’s any more attractive in the mornings, certainly not more attractive than when he’s ambushing the others with a Super Soaker on the pool deck wearing a pair of MSU athletic shorts and nothing else, not more attractive than when he’s sitting on the floor at three in the morning playing video games with his impossibly long legs in a V, so tired he’s half-asleep and canting to one side, rubbing his eyes with the side of his fist like a little boy, not more attractive than when he’s hurling sliders into the dirt for a swinging third strike.
It’s just that the mornings when they rummage for breakfast together, there’s something easier and stiller about Mark Mulder, like he’s not constantly aware of looking good, like he’s not trying to live up to everybody’s expectations. He seems more real to Chavez in the morning, less like a dream Chavez is having.
He’s trying to figure out if it would be an astonishingly bad idea to sleep with one of his teammates.
He’s not entirely sure that Mulder would even be into it, all the shit Mulder talks about girls and all the nights Chavez has come home to find Mulder’s door locked and a pair of women’s shoes in the front hall, fresh candy-apple red in the tangle of dirty sneakers, Chavvy’s mind singing idiotically, ‘one of these things is not like the others.’
But he thinks, maybe. Maybe Mulder doesn’t even realize it himself, but, yeah, maybe. Mulder does spend an awful lot of time on his hair.
And also the way Mulder watches a little too closely when Hudson’s starting, leaning on the rail, and Chavez can tell that his eyes don’t move to follow the path of the ball after it leaves Huddy’s hand, Mulder’s not watching to see the split break or the sinker bite off at the knees, he’s really just watching Tim, doing what Tim does best.
The way, after Mulder pitches a beautiful eight innings of three-hit shutout ball, Zito shoulders into him in the dugout, takes Mulder’s left hand and holds it out so Zito can rub his own left arm and hand up and down, siphoning off the luck, the skill, and Mulder stands there cooperatively, a small smile on his face, letting Zito take what he can get from Mulder’s touched left arm.
The way Chavez tests him sometimes, sliding his hand from Mulder’s shoulder down his arm before letting go, standing a bit too close, sitting next to Mulder in the deck chairs and letting his eyes go where they want to go, just briefly, smooth chest, flat stomach, long legs, looking back up to see the vague surprise on Mulder’s face, and Mulder gives him a suspicious look, licking his lips uncertainly and looking away, blinking fast in confusion.
Yeah, maybe.
Anyway, it’s not such a big deal. If it happens, it happens. Mark Mulder never lets himself be talked into anything, so Chavez might have to catch him by surprise or off-guard or while he’s drunk or asleep or something equally amoral. Eric Chavez, generally, doesn’t have the attention span to plan grand seductions, he usually just grins and gets down on his knees.
There might come a night when Chavez and Mulder are both really tired, barely able to stay upright and shoulders chocked against each other on the couch. There might come a day when they’re sun-drunk on the pool deck and when Chavez rolls over and opens his mouth on Mulder’s side, Mulder won’t pull away. There might be a hallway or a driveway or a hotel stairwell.
If it happens, it happens. In the meantime, they’ll be friends and it’ll get complicated like that, which is the better form of complication.
Munson is up with the Tigers that summer, but he’s not starting, only rarely coming in late in a game. He’s riding the bench, watching his team lose and watching the out-of-town scoreboard, spending too much time thinking about Oakland.
The whole best-friends-who-fuck-around-sometimes-but-aren’t-in-love thing is working out pretty well. It’s not like before, when Chavez was gleefully securing the weights to his marriage’s ankles and trying to find the deepest trench in the ocean. There was a measure of urgency and self-destruction to it before, like they had to get everything out of each other in the short intervals they would have together, hypercompetitive and not content to settle for a draw, because there’s no such thing as a tie game in baseball.
And now, lots of the time, they can just hang out and nothing even has to happen. It’s the first time it’s been like this in years. They talk on the phone a lot, depending on where their teams are and if there’s a day game tomorrow, and Eric Munson is beginning to think this was a very good decision to make.
You can’t just quit. You have to scale back, scale down. You don’t just give up heroin, you’ve got to switch to methadone and then prescription painkillers and maybe cigarettes and speed for awhile before going back to Percoset and Tylenol by the handful, and not wake up for two months and then someday, someday you’ll be truly clean again.
There’s this woman named Shanda. She’s much prettier than any other girl Eric Munson has ever gone out with, and he’s star-struck a lot of the time, he can’t quite get his mind to settle around it.
She makes him think crazy things, with her long straight hair and mischievous eyes. He’s not having the best of seasons, because here he is in the majors, but he shouldn’t be because he still can’t hit, and his back hurts from being on the bench all the time. It’s nothing he ever considered, that he might be in the bigs and not play, not even deserve to play, and when he’s at the ballpark, there’s a phantom pain all through him.
But then Shanda smiles at him when he comes out of the clubhouse door, and swings her hand in his as they walk down the street, and there’s something happening in his heart that hasn’t happened since he was nineteen years old.
Munson believes that until his game comes back, he’ll only be half what he should be, and he doesn’t want to fall in love if he’s only half. It’s not the way it should happen, it’ll be tainted forever if it happens now.
He does what he can to prevent it, but every day she gets a bit further into him. Every day, she makes him forget that this is a terrible idea.
Eric Munson is petrified.
So he goes out to California for the All-Star break. He calls Chavez ahead of time and his friend sounds distracted, half-covering the mouthpiece with his hand to yell something about circuit breakers, to yell, “Mark, you little cocksucker, get back here!” and Munce gets kind of weird and awkward, but he covers it well, and Chavvy says he’ll meet him at the airport.
Chavez shows up late, Munson wandering around thumbing through paperback books and magazines in the little newsstand kiosk, drinking three paper cups of coffee and checking his watch every thirty seconds.
When Chavez tumbles into the baggage claim area, though, his head whipping as he scans across the crowd, an unintentional grin seeps onto Munson’s face. Chavvy lights up like an arcade game when he spots Munce, jogging over and kamikaze-crashing into his arms, Munson staggering backwards. Chavez pounds his back, tousles his hair and keeps saying, “look at you, look at this guy right here.”
Munson, with Chavez’s chin scratching on his throat, forgets to be mad at him.
They ride out to the Lafayette house, Munce blinking dazedly at the unmarked blue California sky after all these months in Michigan, and Chavez chatters on at a hundred miles an hour, about how cool it’ll be when the A’s go to Detroit next month, about his brother Chris’s new job, about a bunch of stuff but mainly, almost entirely, about his teammates.
He tells stories about Mulder and Hudson that make no sense, beaming expectantly until Munson makes a small laugh to get him to stop. He talks about Jason Giambi and Johnny Damon, talks about the pool at the Lafayette house and the time when the postgame buffet table collapsed just as Jermaine Dye was picking up a chip, JD standing there with the most perfect look of shock on his face you’ve ever seen, his hand still hovering over the suddenly empty space.
Munson gets pretty tired of listening, pretty quickly, but then Chavez says, “And oh hey, Zito, too, you know him.”
Munson says, “ahhhmgraklked,” then clears his throat, his face hot. He tries again, speaking carefully, “Sure. Spent a year with the freak.”
Chavez laughs, zipping the car in and out of traffic impatiently. “Yeah, he’s quite the freak. But a really good guy, too.”
Munson studies him out of the corner of his eye. He doesn’t remember Zito being a really good guy. Of course, all their USC teammates probably would, but as far as Eric Munson’s concerned, Zito’s just a sadistic fifteen year old trying to pass as a major league ballplayer.
Chavez catches Munson’s skeptical look, and cocks an eyebrow. “What?”
Munson shrugs. “Well . . . you know he’s gay, right?” He winces, feeling stupid, because maybe he doesn’t actually want Chavez knowing that, just that Zito can’t be trusted, but he should have used a different example.
Chavez blanches, shakes his head automatically. “He’s definitely not. He’s fucking this chick who plays soccer for Cal.”
Munson shrugs again, giving his friend a sardonic look, because since when did sleeping with women rule out sleeping with guys? “Okay, so not entirely gay. But at least some.”
Chavez gives him a sharp interrogatory look. “How would you know?”
He flushes. He doesn’t like to think about that day in the empty USC locker room. He prefers to think of himself as straight with Eric Chavez tendencies. It’s easier that way. And he never told Chavvy that there was another guy, even if it was just for a baffling ill-conceived couple of minutes.
Munson curls his toes inside his shoes, thumbing the button on the glove compartment to occupy his hands. The sunlight’s so strong everything looks faded, exsanguinated. “Heard some stories, at USC.”
The lines clear off Chavez’s face, because that’s a simple thing to dismiss. “You got played, bro. Zito’s a fucking arrow, trust me.”
Munson decides not to press it, because what good can it do? Better for Chavez to think his ace lefty is straight.
Out at the Lafayette house, things get pretty fucking bad.
Most of Chavez’s team is there, it seems, and Munson’s disconcerted. Not even in high school did so many of the players hang out together. This group of guys, hollering to be heard and bouncing crumpled paper balls made of beer bottle labels off each other’s heads, they spend most of their time together anyway, but here they are, spilling out the cracks of the house, cartwheeling into the pool.
“Is it always like this?” Munson asks Chavez, and Chavez gives him an uncomprehending look.
“Like what?” he asks guilelessly, answering Munson’s question.
Munson gets introduced around, shown off like a new toy, Chavez slinging an arm around his neck and saying proudly, “This is my boy from way back, he’s gonna tear us up in another year or two.” Munce just grins bashfully, stays close to his friend.
For awhile, Munson gets a glimpse of what it might be like on a contending team, a team that loves playing together, loves each other, though the whole scene is vaguely . . . incestuous.
Chavez and Munson are out on the pool deck, drinking at the patio table, and across the yard, Zito is trying to hop onto Tim Hudson’s back for a piggyback ride, buckling the righty’s knees and sending them both tumbling to the grass. Zito drunk-laughs with his head on Huddy’s chest, Hudson smacking him and yelling, “Get off’a me, fuckin’ heavy motherfucker!”
Munson leans over to say into Chavez’s ear, “Nah, not gay at all,” and Chavez socks him on the arm, kind of hard.
Munson rubs at the bruise as it shades under his shirt sleeve, and when Zito picks himself up off the grass and stumbles towards the garage door, Munson quickly rises and follows. Chavez is talking with Ramon; he doesn’t notice Munson go.
In the dusty garage, Zito is digging in the second refrigerator, looking for something in particular. He probably knows where the guys who live here hide the good beer; Zito’s the kind of guy who always knows stuff like that.
Munson makes sure the door is closed behind him, wishes for a towel to stuff in the crack at the bottom, make absolutely sure nothing will be heard, and says, “Hey.”
Zito jerks in surprise, looks over his shoulder. A slow grin makes its way across his face. “Eric Munson, as I live and breathe,” he says, and Munson isn’t sure if he’s being mocked or not.
“How’s it going?” he asks, staying on safe ground.
Zito straightens, two slick green bottles in his hands. “Pretty damn good, dude,” he answers, and Munson wonders just how drunk the motherfucker is.
Maybe Zito’s mellowed since college. Maybe Munson had him wrong all along, and everybody else who are so fucking enraptured by him are the smart ones. But Munson still doesn’t want any memories of Zito, nor of his own broken hand or that moment that must have been weakness, no other name for it.
Munson pushes his tongue against the roof of his mouth, forces himself to say, “Listen, don’t fuck with Chavvy, okay?”
Zito looks at him blankly for a moment, and then familiar angry lines appear on his face. “What?”
Munson waves his hand indistinctly, stammering and hating this conversation so much. He misses Shanda, suddenly, with a desperation that makes him feel winded. “I don’t know if you still. Do that. Or whatever. But don’t try it with Chavez. ’Cause he’s not like that. Just, like, fair warning, if you try anything, he’ll kick your ass. So don’t.”
Zito bends down to set the beers on the concrete, the clink loud enough to let Munson know that he did it with some force, and crosses his arms over his chest. The pitcher meets his eyes again and Munson is a little bit scared, but not much.
“First off, who ever said I wanted to fuck him?” Zito asks, rhetorically with the corners of his mouth pulled tight. “Second off, if I do want to fuck him, that’s between me and him and it’s got shit to do with you, dude.”
“He’s not gay!” Munson cries, too loud, really, even with the door shut, but he wants to make sure Zito knows that, make sure it’s perfectly clear.
Zito smirks. “Yeah, and neither are you, right?” he taunts. “Hell, while we’re at it, neither am I. Although, I tell ya something, Munce . . .” He pauses, takes a long moment before grinning sharkily. “You’re not acting so much like Concerned Best Friend as you are Jealous Lover.”
Munson squeezes his hands into fists, knuckles cracking and his nails bloodying his palm. He counts his breaths and doesn’t hit Zito in the face, using all his power, his teeth clenched and the enamel squealing. He shoves it down, shoves it away.
Zito, upon realizing Munson’s not gonna take a swing at him, actually looks kind of disappointed.
Munson exhales, proud of himself, and says, “Just stay away from him. We both know you’ll do shit a person doesn’t want you to do-”
“Oh, do we?” Zito cuts him off, his voice dripping sarcasm, eyes daring Munson to deny that Zito had been kissed back, no matter who’d started it, Zito wasn’t making out with himself that day in the locker room.
Munson reddens deeply, but shakes it off, staying on track. “Don’t fuck with him. Find somebody else.”
Zito times it perfectly, smiling sweetly as he says, “Fuck you, Munson,” and he picks up his beers, going out through the door Munson isn’t standing in front of, leaving Eric standing there, pretty sure he’s only made things worse.
He goes back out to the party and Eric Chavez has lost his shirt. Chavvy is on the diving board, up there with Mark Mulder, wrestling and trying to knock each other into the water.
Munson stands in the cornered shadows by the garage, unnoticed, his feet on the soft wet grass, and he watches Chavez and Mulder grapple, bouncing up and down on the board, snickering and everybody else catcalling, hooting. Mulder’s arm is looped around Chavez’s neck and Chavez’s head pinned on Mulder’s bare chest, Chavez’s mouth open, laughing, his teeth white against Mulder’s tan.
Munson, forgotten, watches as Chavez hooks a foot around the back of Mulder’s leg and they both overbalance, falling with a huge splash in a rat’s nest of arms and legs, flailed hands coming free to grab at nothing, and as the two men sink down together, Munson gets a sinking feeling that his assumptions are a million miles from the truth.
It shouldn’t matter. Eric Chavez is free to do what he wants. He can fuck his starting rotation, suck them off when they win, let whoever’s ERA is lowest bend him over the edge of the bed. And what-the-fuck-ever. Chavez isn’t the one almost in love with his girlfriend. Chavez isn’t cheating on anybody, not this time.
It’s nothing new-Chavez has been like this for years, and it doesn’t really make a difference whether or not Munson is responsible for it. Chavez is just a slut, at the end of the day, he can’t turn anybody down. It’s never bugged Munce before, or at least not this much.
But these guys, these fucking pitchers who are Cy Young candidates at twenty-three years old, these arrogant fuckers with their charm and their handsome faces, Munson can’t stand the thought of Chavez fucking around with them. Because Mulder and Zito are perfect in the exact same way Chavez is, they would fit together without a seam.
Later, after most everybody who doesn’t live there and didn’t pass out has gone home, Munson follows Chavez back to his room, sees the sleeping bag laid out on the floor like they’re teenagers again, fooling everybody.
The door is closed, the curtains drawn and the bedside lamp casting triangles of yellow light, flecks of dust in the columns. Chavez moves around easily, his hair half-dried, sticking to his temples and eking trails down his neck. He peels off his shirt and flops on the bed, reaching over to take the alarm clock in his hands, setting it for the morning.
Munson is near the door, the sleeping bag an island between him and the bed, and he fiddles with his buttons, shifting his weight from foot to foot. He can’t take his eyes off Chavez shirtless on the bed, half-lying on his side, propped up on his elbow so that one side of his body is stretched taut and the other is in a shallow curve.
He thinks that he’s been doing better, he’s been moving on. He’s got a stop-traffic beautiful girlfriend and people are jealous of him again, because even just sitting on the bench is closer than most ever get. He needs to get his game back, and until that happens he shouldn’t let things get complicated again. Munson thinks about Shanda smiling at him, and how to hit a really good curve, and he doesn’t need this anymore, there’s not enough space in him for all this at once, but he’s five-beers-buzzed and Eric Chavez is shirtless on the bed.
“Um, are we . . .” Munce starts, then stops. Chavez looks up, looking happy and tired, an instinctive smile crawling at his face. Munson pulls his eyes away, thinks about Zito asleep on the couch and Mulder, two doors down.
“Munce?”
Munson looks at him again. Chavvy has sat up, rubbing at his shin with his other heel, his eyebrows raised expectantly.
Try again. “Are we. Are we gonna . . . you know.” hating the fact that he has to ask.
Chavez grins, briefly, tips his head to the side and leans back on his elbows, his legs over the side of the bed and his knees apart, posed like a fucking daydream. “I could be convinced.”
Munson locks the door, skids on the slippery material of the sleeping bag and crawls on top of his best friend, lying between Chavez’s legs with their chests together. Chavez’s arms are around Munson’s back, gathering handfuls of his shirt and pulling it over his head, caught around Munson’s upper arms. Chavez shifts uncomfortably; Munson’s belt buckle is digging into his hip, so they get rid of that too, and Munce kisses him, pushes Chavez’s mouth open and weaves his fingers in Chavez’s chlorinated hair.
Munson would be guilty, he would be feeling like hell, but Chavez is good and hot beneath him, Chavez knows him better than anyone has ever known another person, and it’s easy to chase away the thought of Shanda’s gray eyes, her little-girl laugh.
Chavez rolls them over so he’s on top, biting at Munson’s mouth and finding all the right spots. Chavvy reaches out, one eye open, to root around in the bedside table drawer, and Munson licks his shoulder and collarbone, his hand on the small of Chavez’s back, holding them flush.
Munce wants to taste the skin over Chavez’s spine, suck on the knob of his hip, leave teethmarks on Chavez’s stomach. He wants Chavez’s hands all over him, slick and fingerprinting him like a crime scene. He wants to swallow Chavez’s cry when he comes and collapse on top of him. He wants one of them to be fucked senseless.
Munson wants his best friend, tonight, and the Oakland A’s can go fuck themselves.
*
(the happiest place on earth)
And Eric Chavez brings him a bowl of cereal in the morning and Munson feels thirteen years old again on the fold-out couch.
And he goes back to Detroit and takes his seat on the bench. The Tigers keeping losing and Eric Munson will be in Trip-A Toledo again in the spring, because he’s not ready yet, he hasn’t fixed anything. This is taking longer than it should, and it’s leaving scars.
And Munson kneels in the middle of the dirty city and asks Shanda to marry him, giving up the good fight and letting his heart go where it wants. And she says yes, drops to her knees to put her arms around his neck and kiss him, ruining her skirt and not caring, because she does love him, inexplicably, loves him for real.
And planes fly into buildings, fall out of the sky, and the world goes kind of crazy.
And the summer ends a month early, everything else is just playing out the schedule.
And the A’s lose in the first round again, and Chavez breaks down on the phone with Munson, drives home to San Diego that night and they fuck on the couch while Munson’s fiancée is asleep in the bedroom.
And major league baseball is played in November for the first time ever.
And they go to Disneyworld and Eric Munson gets married.
Eric Chavez is the best man. He teases Munce relentlessly for getting married at an amusement park, but he actually understands, remembers Eric Munson nine years old and making him swear they’d get here, someday.
It’s an overcast autumn day in Orlando, the life melted out of the place, the created world, cartoon people walking around with frightening plastic smiles. The ceremony takes place in New Orleans Square, and it’s not so bad there, under the trees dripping Spanish moss, the pretty Victorian false-fronts, white-painted gazebos and wrought-iron fences lining the small cobbled streets. Over the trees, the Haunted Mansion rises gothically gray and brown, circled by animatronic bats.
It’s all very fake and very lovely, and Chavez grins like a jerk with his suit jacket weighing down on his shoulders in the thick still air. Munson keeps glancing at him, and Chavez winks at him, makes his eyes go wide, blows him a joking kiss. Munce glares at him briefly, but when he looks back at Shanda, his eyes get soft again.
Eric Chavez dances with his best friend’s new wife and steps on her toes, but she just laughs, lets him spin her and dip her extravagantly, until Munson comes over and cuts in. Chavez sits on a wooden bench in the shade and watches them dance.
They don’t get a chance to talk, the swirl of family and friends and the fallen leaves red and orange around their ankles. Chavez doesn’t think this is going to change anything, because he was married once too, but he’s not sure. Munson is already different, twenty-minutes-married and white cake frosting on his face. He looks like a man, honestly, a real grown-up.
Chavez is flying back early the next morning, and Munson gets up to see him off. Munson knocks on his room door, yawning and still in his pajama pants and worn T-shirt, his shoes on with no socks, untied laces lagging. Chavez waves a package of freeze-dried coffee at him but Munson shakes his head, he’s still planning on going back to sleep.
They don’t talk then either, though it’s the perfect opportunity. But Munson’s most of the way asleep, slumped in the chair, and Chavez is on his third cup of stale coffee, too wired to be coherent.
But in the elevator, Chavez is jittering and he asks, “So, Munce, so, um, what, you know, what about-” and Munson suddenly crowds him against the rail, kisses him slow and deep, bed-warm and lazy, his hand on Chavez’s neck and the zing of cold from his new wedding ring.
Munson pulls back, looking either tired or sad, and tells him carefully, “You’re the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, man, I hope you know that.”
Chavez nods, his mouth slightly open, and tilts in to press his lips to Munson’s again. Munson sighs into his mouth, tips his head to the side to get a better angle, worrying abstractly what Shanda will think if she kisses him and tastes coffee.
Eric Chavez gets in a cab, and Eric Munson goes back upstairs to lie down next to his wife.
*
(defensive replacement)
Back in Oakland, Chavez gives Greg Myers the pair of Mickey Mouse ears he got for him and Myers is way too excited about that, wearing them all afternoon and night while hanging out at Chavez’s place, until someone snatches them off his head and throws them up into the tree.
Chavez thinks that they probably shouldn’t bother keeping a house over the winter next year. It’s too quiet, and hardly anybody else is staying year-round in the Bay Area, so nothing interesting ever happens. Their parties suck.
And even when people do come around, seeing his teammates fools Chavez into thinking that they’ve got a game to play later, but then he remembers it’s the off-season and gets depressed again.
It’s just Mulder and him in Lafayette that off-season, and they get in dumb arguments and are constantly pissed off at each other, holding grudges and exacting petty little revenges.
Mulder went home to Chicago for Thanksgiving, and he gets back on a red-eye flight a few days into December, the airport shuttle dropping him off at the front door at two in the morning.
Chavez is still up, watching Game 6 of the 1975 World Series on ESPN Classic, feeling itchy and restless. He’s in the kitchen when the front door opens, and he hears Mulder coming down the hall, the scraped sound of his bag trailing behind him.
Chavez looks over to see Mulder tipping his shoulder wearily against the jamb, blinking at him. Eric takes a bottle of water out of the refrigerator and when he shuts the door, the room goes dim, pasted white walls and dun-colored shadows in the hallway from the television.
“Welcome home, man,” he says, leaning against the counter and fingering the sport-top of the bottle, popping it up and down. He doesn’t remember if they were fighting before Chavez left for Orlando, but decides to go ahead and turn the other cheek regardless, because there’s no one else to talk to.
Mulder nods, says in the middle of a yawn, “You too.” His hair is tufting out on one side, bristling over his ear. The collar of his shirt is open one or two buttons too far, making his neck look unnaturally long.
Mulder lets his head tilt to rest on the jamb, his eyes closed. “Your boy got married,” he says.
Chavez nods, but Mulder’s still got his eyes shut, so he answers, “Yeah.” He keeps looking at the high triangle of Mulder’s chest revealed by his open shirt, the cutted thumb-dents at the base of his throat.
Chavez thinks that this off-season has been pretty goddamn boring, dismissing the past two days in Orlando as insignificant. He thinks, ‘fuck it.’
Chavez swallows, takes a long drink of chilled water, and walks over to where Mulder is standing blind.
Chavez isn’t entirely sure what he’s doing, but he’s had enough of living in the same house as Mulder and playing all summer on the same team with him and pretending the undercurrent between them doesn’t exist. In Chavez’s mind, for a moment, he sees Eric Munson with his arms around Shanda, under the mossy trees, moving lyrically, but then he pushes that out.
He gets to Mulder, close enough to see the photo negative of an ash smear on his face a half an inch away from his ear, and he’s silent, Mulder’s eyes haven’t opened.
Eric Chavez leans in and licks Mulder’s chest. He drags the flat of his tongue up Mulder’s sternum and feels Mulder hitch a quick breath. The moment for Mulder to shove him away and punch him goes past swiftly, and Chavez smiles inside his mind, ‘i fucking knew it.’
There’s a sweat-skin taste, and it could be anyone. He curls his tongue around Mulder’s collarbone and Mulder’s head is back, giving him full access. Mulder’s hand comes up to Chavez’s arm, just holding there, above Chavez’s elbow and his fingers are long enough that they circle all the way around and overlap his thumb.
Chavez presses his open mouth higher, on Mulder’s throat, and he shifts forward so that their bodies run together. Mulder’s not too skinny like he was when he first showed up, filled out, but Chavez can still feel the bones of his hips, his ribs, clocked knees. Chavez has both hands tied up in Mulder’s shirt, fists against his stomach, anxiously yanking him closer.
Mulder swallows and his Adam’s apple kicks under Chavez’s tongue. Mulder says his name scratchily, and Chavez more feels it than hears it. He’s going to kiss Mulder in a second, in just a second he’s gonna see how far this goes.
He lifts his head and Mulder has an unfamiliar look on his face, flushed and heavy-eyed. He’s been digging his teeth hard into his lower lip; Chavez can still see the thin pierced line in the flesh. Mulder stares down at him like he’s never seen him before, breathing reedily and his chest bumping Chavez’s.
Then Mulder’s face clears, famous smirk edging at the corners of his mouth, and he runs the tip of his tongue thoughtfully across his lips, moving his leg in between Chavez’s, pushing up just enough.
“Well I’ll be goddamned, Chavvy,” he says, almost drawling like he thinks he’s Tim Hudson or something. “You’re not just a little bit fucked up, are you?”
Chavez wants to bare his teeth, maybe bite him or something, so tense his skin feels like it’s about to shred off, and since when did casual sex get so fucking complicated? What’s wrong with just wanting to get his dick sucked, wanting to get his hands on the places where Mulder is as tight as a drum-skin, wanting all that height and length twisted around him? Why does everything have to be a fucking therapy session, why can’t he just sleep with the best-looking asshole in the state and then have done with it?
Chavez scorns, his face contorted, and presses up, angling for Mulder’s mouth, but Mulder just ducks back, turning so that Chavez hits his cheek, sanded by his five o’clock shadow.
Chavez makes an inarticulate sound of frustration and irritation, his eyes half-closed, and he locks a hand behind Mulder’s neck, tries to pull him down, but Mulder resists, muscles strict and immovable. Mulder’s thigh is still between his own, rubbing almost absentmindedly, as if Mulder has forgotten it’s there. The smirk is out in full-force now, and it’s just Mulder’s eyes that are smoked and snapping with jerks of black through the blue.
“For fuck’s sake, man,” Chavez mumbles impatiently, his fingers hasped in the waist of Mulder’s jeans, working against him and wanting to fuck someone so badly he’s almost cross-eyed. “Can we get on with it already?”
Mulder pauses, considering that, then shakes his head slowly, slipping his leg out from between Chavez’s, leaning back against the doorframe and not touching Chavez anywhere except the backs of Chavez’s fingers on the skin under the top of his jeans.
“Not that I’m not flattered,” Mulder says, smug and looking like he could have anyone in the world and why would he ever pick Eric Chavez?
Chavez, stunned with anger, rips his hands away from Mulder’s body, steps back. “Fuck you,” he says venomously, a tremor in his voice. “You fucking cocktease, you think I need this shit?”
Mulder crosses his arms over his chest casually, lifts an eyebrow. “Guess not,” he answers. “At least, not from me.”
Chavez flinches, but it’s not like that, he’s pretty sure. He wanted Mulder anyway, before he went to Orlando, this isn’t new.
Mulder scuffs his knuckles along the line of his jaw, studying him, and says, “You should get some sleep, babe.”
Chavez’s head snags to the side, and he whispers without thinking, “Don’t call me that.”
Mulder sighs. “Fine. Eric. Get some sleep.” And Mulder walks out, hauling his bag off the floor and onto his shoulder, and Chavez sleepwalks to the living room, falls down on the couch and thinks about what a fucking idiot he is for awhile.
*
(faith in our hearts)
And then the Oakland Athletics stop losing.
It’s August of 2002 and the Players’ Association is talking about another strike. For the second time in his life, Eric Chavez refuses to believe in the possibility, and spends a week of earnestly drunk nights cornering his teammates one by one, getting them all to swear that if the union strikes, they won’t, insisting again and again, “we’ll still play, promise me we’ll still play.”
Most of them think he’s a fucking nutcase, nodding along to humor him, but Chavvy guesses it does the trick, because right about then is when the streak begins.
The first couple games, the Blue Jays and White Sox at home, they don’t even think about it. You can’t predict something like this. They’re playing good, picking up speed and closing in on the stretch, that’s pretty much all that matters.
There’s a huge summer moon, the color of amber and sitting low in the sky, a perfect half-circle like a cereal bowl, and they grin, nudge each other, get fresh beers. They’re not paying attention, distracted by things in the sky, so there’s no way to know when exactly, but sometime in there, everything falls into place.
Hudson’s a bulldog and Mulder’s a pin-up and David Justice tracks across left field like his feet aren’t touching the ground. Cory Lidle is not a number four starter, and Aaron Harang isn’t a number five, it’s just this goddamn rotation, man, where else are you gonna put them? Ramon Hernandez is all grit and accent behind the plate, the toughest catcher you’ve ever seen and that magic Venezuelan swing that’s all of a sudden finding the sweet spot every time. Jermaine Dye and Terrence Long dance over each other in the spaces between right and center, and Miguel Tejada is in the dugout laughing and clapping his chalked hands, fingers stiffly held out. John Mabry and Adam Piatt are everybody’s favorite, they’re so fucking chill. Ray Durham is cooler than everybody else put together, Eric Byrnes has got ADD and isn’t allowed any sugar past the fifth inning, Mark Ellis and Scott Hatteberg are unofficial brothers, and nobody misses Giambi that much anymore.
In their totally incongruent ’pen, they’ve got a deeply religious submariner from Mississippi, and a screwballer who was born with two club feet, limps out to the mound and just shuts the fuckers down. They’ve got Bam-Bam Jeff Tam and Biblical Micah Bowie. They’ve got Billy Koch and his goat-scruff hurling aspirin tablets in the ninth, topping out at better than a hundred miles an hour.
Barry Zito, who looks like a fucking joke with his hair still blonde at the tips and his Peter Pan socks, half the time acting the part too, is suddenly, bafflingly, untouchable. He stumbles upon a current of luck or karma or skill or whatever you want to call it, depthless and astonishing, and it picks him up, carries him along like wings. Zito isn’t surprised, because this is where he’s always expected himself to be, but everyone else is. Guys like Barry Zito are not this good. Nobody is this good.
Eric Chavez thought that he’d seen everything there is to be seen on a baseball field, but he’s never seen anything like Zito’s curve, hooking like a wish all through the heart of that summer.
They’ve got Art Howe’s majestic chin in the dugout and Billy Beane tearing up the clubhouse, screaming curses at their weaknesses and loving them all violently like sons, though nobody ever talks about that. They’ve got a team of teenagers, fucking Little Leaguers, they’ve got life in the box and poetry against the outfield wall and they turn two on balls that were roped for doubles.
They stop losing. They go on the road, they sweep four games at Cleveland, Lidle one-hitting the Indians in the last game of the set to make it nine straight, and then they roll into the Motor City for three against the Tigers. They sweep there too, and Chavez calls Munson in Toledo, tells him, “We got lucky, man, if you were playing with the big club, the streak would be done for sure.”
Munce laughs, tells him to go kick the holy hell out of the Royals.
They do.
In Kansas City, it starts to get pretty spooky. It’s twelve games in a row, at this point, and they’ve been slowly moving up in SportsCenter’s priority, until the night when the show opens with the question: “Will the Oakland A’s ever lose?”
Yeah, doesn’t seem like it, not right now, not ever again.
Nobody ever pays much attention to the A’s, no matter how good they are. Their fan base bleeds green and gold, but rarely do forty thousand of them appear anywhere together. They’re a freak California team, and maybe they’ve got the deepest starting pitching since Maddux-Glavine-Smoltz in the early 1990s, maybe they’ve got an insane general manager who never seems to make a bad deal, maybe they’re impossibly clutch, postseason-bound for the third straight year, but nobody has ever known their names.
Now they’re touched. Now they’re beyond failure.
Chavez can see it in their eyes. In his own eyes, looking back at him and gleaming with unscarred surprise from the clubhouse mirror.
And they come home having won fifteen games in a row, greeted by October crowds in their late-August ballpark that only a mother could love, kids with mohawked hair, half green and half yellow, facepaint, homemade banners, plain white T-shirts with block-lettered slogans in thick Magic Marker.
There are reports of children being born in the East Bay and named after the players. Jason Zito Bradley of Walnut Creek. Miguel Tejada Dominguez of Alameda.
There are stories about sports bars crushed full every night, department stores that tune their speakers to the A’s broadcast when the game starts, Bill King’s wise old man’s voice giving the play-by-play through the cool perfume aisles, the new clothes hanging empty on the racks.
The elephant is everywhere, and people talk about Connie Mack, Lefty Grove, Rube Waddell, they go way back through Kansas City to Philadelphia and end up where they started, with Hudson and Mulder and Zito, with Eric Chavez and Miguel Tejada, with Billy Beane and maybe this is what God owes him.
When two people in A’s gear are walking towards each other on the sidewalk, they grin and slap high-five as they pass. When the A’s play during the day, half the town takes the afternoon off. When the last out is recorded (Chavez doesn’t believe this is really happening until he sees film of it on the local news), people get out of their cars and hug strangers in the middle of the street, car doors hanging open and everybody laughing like crazy.
Middle school kids double-knot their sneakers, and help their kindergarten brothers and sisters make Xs with their Velcro straps, because double-knots and Velcro Xs are the difference in the umpire’s eyes when a shadow-cut inside fastball is called for the third strike. Their parents dig old ticket stubs out of musty shoeboxes on the top shelf of the closets, the 1989 season before the bridge collapsed, and he’s a good-looking man that Dennis Eckersley, ’74, ’73, ’72, an East Bay dynasty in screaming yellow jerseys, the Mustache Gang and Catfish Hunter (that’s goddamn right), tucking the stub in their wallets and touching it occasionally as the day wears on.
There are men and women who wear their Athletics T-shirts under their business suits every day, a girl suspended from her high school in San Leandro for refusing to take off her cap in class, protesting fervently, “But it’s good luck.”
Everything is coming down to luck. Everything’s a blur. Eric Chavez wanders around in a punch-drunk haze, protected from on high. Crosswalk signals change to green as he approaches the curb, elevator doors ping open without him pushing the button. He finds three crumpled twenty dollar bills on the street over the course of a week, and every penny on every sidewalk is lucky-heads-up. He looks at his watch when they’re out after a game, and it’s 11:11, wish-making on street corners and apartment stairwells. The bass beat from his Walkman falls into rhythm with his stride as he walks down the street. Everything is thrown open for him, everything is in tune.
He starts flipping a quarter one day in the clubhouse, idly killing time, picking heads or tails and skying the coin on a narrow parabola, and he guesses right thirty-three times in a row, then stops because he starts to get totally freaked out.
His days fall into pattern, he does everything the exact same. Eggbeater omelet for breakfast, one cup of coffee with two sugars and no cream, eaten in the same chair at the kitchen table, using the same fork. Watch ESPN, no matter what’s on, until it’s time to go to the ballpark. Take the same route, come to a full stop at every stop sign, and park in the same place in the players’ lot, easy enough to do because his teammates are all doing the same thing. Play exactly five hands of cards with the infielders, then two games on the arcade machine with Hudson and no one else. Drink a bottle of water before infield practice, another before batting practice. Sit on the dugout bench and tighten the laces of his glove whether they need it or not. Knock rhythmically through the intricate handshakes, a different one for every player, and don’t miss a step. Let Miggy ruffle his hair for luck, and take the field.
Everything the exact same. And every game is another win.
When the team’s together, they crackle, they burn. The twenty-five of them, for these three impossible weeks, are inchoate and unmatched, every prayer answered, well-loved by God or fate or baseball, something, and they stick close to each other, travel in each other’s pockets. They can’t explain how it feels to anyone else, and they don’t need to explain it to each other.
And then, seventeen games in, they start performing miracles.
Tejada wins the eighteenth with a walk-off home run, and he bounds into their arms at home plate, hollering at the top of his lungs in Spanish. That night, back at Mulder and Chavez’s house, Mark Ellis falls asleep on the kitchen floor and wakes everybody up at four in the morning, his dream voice high and breaking gleefully, prophetic, yelling, “Run, Scotty, run.”
Miggy wins the nineteenth too, a game-winning base hit in the bottom of the ninth, a jerky little hop in his stride as he sees the ball shoot up the middle, pinwheeling his arm triumphantly and crowing. They dash out of the dugout and tackle him on the fair side of the first base line, the flood of noise from the crowd blinding.
That night, there’s Zito, standing in the middle of the street, brilliantly drunk and calling out fearlessly, “Fuck you, you son of a bitch, I’ve got faith in my heart!”
And Mulder answers from the curb, stuttering with laughter, “What’ve you got, kid?” Zito, again, like the only way he’ll be brought down is if the sky comes down with him:
“I’ve got faith in my motherfucking heart!”
So that when they blow an eleven-run lead the next night, their bid for an unthinkable twenty wins without one loss, when the Royals tie it up and the Coliseum is cemetery-quiet, Chavez finds a seat next to Zito on the bench and asks him quietly, “What have we got?”
And Zito’s hand on his back, Zito telling him, “Faith in our hearts, Eric.”
Chavez goes 2-for-5 that night, with three RBIs, and after the Royals knot it at eleven in the top of the ninth, every last shred of luck having at last been smuggled into the visitor’s dugout, he runs down into the clubhouse, his mind ablaze, and calls Eric Munson.
“Chavvy, what the fuck,” Munson picks up, pacing around his own team’s clubhouse in Toledo where they’re watching the A’s, along with every other team in organized ball not involved in a game of their own, for once everyone watching the Oakland Athletics, unable to believe this. “You’re playing, for fuck’s sake.”
Chavez shakes his head, his legs trembling. “I’m not up this inning,” he says unevenly. “Munce, I’m . . . I’m going fucking crazy, man, I can’t take it.”
Munson pushes a hand through his hair, staring at the television screen, the Kansas City closer cutting through his warm-up pitches. “Settle down, dude,” he advises, his own voice not entirely steady.
“I can’t fucking settle down, Munson!” Chavez shouts, jumping from foot to foot.
There’s a clatter as Scott Hatteberg dashes through the clubhouse, the short way between the batting cages and the dugout, clutching an unfamiliar dark wood bat. Chavez eyes the first baseman as he sprints past-Hatteberg isn’t supposed to play tonight.
Chavez shakes his head again, his eyes feeling hot and white, says, “We blew the lead, did you see, eleven to nothing in the third, and now it’s tied, how can we win this, there’s no fucking way.”
“Hey!” Munce says sharply, quick and inarguable authority. “You listen to me, you guys have been fucking blessed, Eric. I’ve been watching, I’ve never seen anything like it. Right now, right now, man, tonight, it’s. God. There’s never been a team that could beat you tonight, okay? Not ever, I promise. And certainly not the motherfucking Royals.”
Chavez breathes deep, closes his eyes. “You believe that?”
Munce watches Jermaine Dye fly out for the first out, watches Scott Hatteberg in the on-deck circle, tapping the donut off his bat, fixing his helmet, walking to the plate. “All my heart, babe,” Munson says, and Chavez’s strength leaves him briefly, falling back against the wall. “Get back up there,” Munce tells him. “Go see your boys.”
Chavez nods, still frantic, and he’s moving quick for the tunnel, stammering, “Thanks, dude, love you, talk to you later,” and then he’s gone, tossing his cell phone onto the table and disappearing into the concrete again.
Scott Hatteberg, with his perfect knowledge of the strike-zone and his better-every-day picks at first base, is pinch-hitting in the bottom of the ninth. Scott Hatteberg, whose career was supposed to be over when he left Boston, Scott Hatteberg, one of Billy Beane’s chosen, knocks the head of his bat on the plate and feels the caffeine whirring in his blood, feels the ceaseless chants of the fifty-five thousand pressing heavily on his shoulders. He sets his feet and cocks his hips slightly open, squints out at Jason Grimsley, thinking ‘sinkerball pitcher,’ thinking ‘don’t sit on the break,’ thinking ‘lay off the first pitch,’ thinking ‘just one more, good enough.’
The air’s neon and Chavez trips up against the rail, his teammates parting to make room for him, wedging him in, and Chavez’s eyes are huge, rapt, trying to find a prayer that applies.
Hatteberg swings at the second pitch, high heat, and crushes it. The string of players at the rail jolt at the crack, Chavez’s hands caught up in two others, and they cry out as one, tracing the path of the ball through the clean night air.
When the ball disappears over the wall in right-center, Hatteberg lifts his arm into the air, his mouth open and his eyes wide, and they explode out of the dugout, stumbling over each other, arms around each other’s necks, falling off balance. Chavez leaps onto Mulder’s back, nearly toppling him to the ground, and Huddy is clinging to Zito like a spider monkey.
Chavez loses his capacity for rational thought, and there’s nothing but white light in his eyes, bad reception in his ears. His life is transparent in that moment, with the old broken pieces swept out of his heart, he’s brand-new now, struck down.
And here, in the light and the static, their faces, his team, he’d say brothers but that doesn’t even come close, because baseball is thicker than blood. Elbows and shoulders and white-green-gold everywhere, jammed together at the plate, an obstructed view and someone’s chin dug into Chavez’s shoulder. There’s just enough time for all of them to turn back into little boys, the smell of oranges cut into fourths and grass stains and sunlit wet cement, and then their hands are reaching out, and Scott Hatteberg is rounding third and flying home.
(end part eleven)
*
part twelve
so we had enough to stay on the road and my brother was in austin checking the place out (he intends to move there, i'm pretty sure just because he's been listening to too much old 97's music and saw whiskeytown on austin city limits back in teh fucking day, and it warped him), and we basically said, fuck it! let's go to texas! so we went to texas. texas was cool.
anyway, it's been pretty complicated, to say the least. but here i am back on the wrong fucking coast and not out of commission anymore. i think i might be ready to not be a drug addict anymore. it'll be interesting.
this is the part of the epic where i seriously indulged myself. i've been trying to write about the streak for two and a half years, okay? it was necessary.
Table of Contents
Pictures courtesy bradausmus12 and Jen's Baseball Page
The Rest of Your Life
By Candle Beck
Part the Eleventh: Left Coast
(go west, young man)
In 2000, these kids show up.
Tim Hudson’s in his second year and was a veteran two days after hitting the bigs. Some guys just have it, the hazing doesn’t really take (they don’t really want to see Huddy in a Hooters outfit, anyway, because that’s the kind of thing that might scar for life), and nobody gives Hudson much shit, because they all know, right off the bat, that the tough little righty from Alabama is gonna be the best pitcher in the game someday.
It was probably, what, the second or third week after Huddy first got called up, in Hayward last year, and they were out at a bar, getting to know each other in a roundabout sort of way. Chavez bought the first couple of rounds and Hudson kicked his ass on the pinball machine, and they were fair and well buzzed, getting along great.
Chavez went up to the bar for the next set and inadvertently cut in front of a brick-headed man with a squashed nose and brutal eyes, snapping and looking for a fight. Chavez tried to extract himself gracefully, but the guy wasn’t having it, shoving Eric and spilling his drinks, and the guy called him a “cocksucking spic,” which was at least as funny as it was offensive, seeing as how it was pretty much true.
Then suddenly Tim Hudson was there, not stepping between them, not trying to break anything up, just standing shoulder to shoulder with Chavez, all balls-out hardness and knuckled fists, cold-eyed. Hudson looked at the brick-headed guy with utter contempt, and asked, laced with violence and a burr of eager adrenaline, “You wanna roll, motherfucker?”
The brick-headed guy was way bigger, thick through the shoulders and neck, but Tim Hudson, short and stone-muscled, stared him right the fuck down, no doubt in anyone’s mind who would emerge the victor in a brawl, and Chavez saw an astonished sprint of fear in the other man’s eyes, before he sneered and turned away like he didn’t care, moving quickly across the bar, away from the two of them.
Huddy clapped Chavez on the shoulder and drawled, “Takin’ you like a day to get those drinks, boy.”
Chavez knew, right then, though they were still mostly strangers to each other, that he’d found someone who would always have his back, always stand up with him, and he grinned foolishly, recognizing a friend for life when he saw one.
But these kids, man. (Chavez realizes that calling them ‘kids’ is a little off, because he’s got all of five months on Zito and Mulder’s actually older than him by four, but Chavez is two years in now and secure enough to be jaded.)
The tall one, Mulder, is way too cool. He comes up first, in April, and acts like he’s been here for years too, but he can’t quite pull it off. He’s cocky, even after he goes 1-5 in his first half-season, he walks around with his head up. Mulder’s got nasty stuff, there’s no doubt about it, but his command is shit half the time, they only ever see snatches of what he’s gonna be, that first year.
But nothing ever seems to cause doubt in him. He could be 0-15 and still be grinning that arrogant fucking grin of his, undimmed. It’s kind of annoying, but kind of reassuring, too.
Mulder’s almost irritatingly good-looking, symmetrically handsome like Disney animated heroes are handsome, and Chavvy isn’t exactly making a move for him, but he certainly never steps away when Mulder comes up to him in the clubhouse without a shirt on, his army-short hair bristling wetly.
The other lefty, Zito, well, Chavez is pretty sure Zito’s more crazy than sane, but it works for him. Zito comes up in July, after all of a season and a half in the minors, and proceeds to pitch his way to a 2.72 ERA in his first fourteen games in the bigs, and starts Game 2 in New York City in the division series.
Chavez knew about Zito before, of course, Munson’s former battery mate, narrowing his eyes at Zito when they first met and saying, “You broke my best friend’s hand,” seeing Zito grin and answer knowingly, “You must be the other Eric.” Zito’s from San Diego too, and Chavvy knew a million guys like him back home, spacey and born in the wrong decade, fifty years too late.
But Zito’s also got a hard strand of confidence and solemnity to him, disciplined like a big leaguer’s got to be, secretly more cocky than Mark Mulder, just not showing it as much.
It’s only when they’re off the field that Chavez can see glints of the life that Zito would be living if he couldn’t pitch the way he can, the life where Zito scratches out a just more than minimum-wage living, clerking at a copy shop or a photo developer’s, smokes pot on his lunch break with his buddies from high school and maybe claims himself as a Buddhist, just to be contrary, watches a lot of movies and loves his pet dog, reads intricate books about the philosophy of mathematics and East Asia history, exists lazy and content and is happy with his life, every day of it.
But Zito can pitch the way he can, exceeds every prejudice and expectation.
Chavez isn’t sure if he trusts them. He likes them well enough, Zito with that occasionally unhinged grin that makes him look totally deranged, Mulder with his best-there’s-ever-been style in everything he does, but they both came up through the system pretty fucking quick, twenty-two years old and suddenly thrust into a contending team’s starting rotation.
But when he looks at Mulder and Zito and Hudson, snickering and circling like sharks around each other, Chavez thinks he understands what everybody means when they say, “the future of this team.”
Mulder and Zito are the lefty conspiracy, all prank calls and practical jokes, though Hudson’s not adverse to being dragged along for the ride, and it was Chavez who got Zito into a wedding dress for the plane ride to Chicago, so he doesn’t really have a leg to stand on when the two pitchers make him their favorite target for the rest of the season.
Chavvy doesn’t really mind. They’re cool, and they both seem to like him a whole lot, though Zito, a maudlin and sentimental drunk, is the only one who says it out loud, slurring proclamations of his love for Chavez four days after they were first introduced.
Mulder just lets Chavez hang off his shoulders ecstatically when they rip off a win in the bottom of the ninth, when they take the division and go star-eyed to their first postseason. He lets Chavez cry in the clubhouse after they lose to the Yankees in the first round, and doesn’t make fun of him, just brings him a dry towel and a can of Dr. Pepper. And he asks Chavez during spring training in ’01 if he wants to maybe take a look at places when they get back to the East Bay, be roommates like college boys and leave the front door unlocked all the time.
Chavez agrees to live with Mulder without a second thought, not thinking too much about the broad line of Mulder’s shoulders or the stripped-smooth path of his bare chest.
They find a good house out in Lafayette, the base of the Mount Diablo range, with an empty pool (pre-requisite) scored with black scars from the neighborhood kids who’ve been using it as a skate bowl, a meandering sprawl of rooms, beige carpets and white plaster walls.
Eric and Mark are the ones who sign the lease, but by the time they celebrate Zito’s twenty-third birthday in May, Frank Menechino and Adam Piatt have moved in, too, along with Ramon Hernandez and his wife, but they’re looking for a place of their own, because, though Maria is the awesomest chick in the county, it’s not really a Cleaver atmosphere.
Sometime in June, Chavez falls for Mulder, but only a little bit.
Adam and Frankie are lazy motherfuckers, never up before they absolutely have to be, so Mulder and Chavez are usually alone for breakfast, sometimes eating standing up in the kitchen, sometimes off their knees in living room, sometimes driving into town and hitting up Denny’s.
It probably starts then, slow-moving mornings, Mulder yawning and bending at the waist to peer into the refrigerator, the frozen white light on his face, the uncharacteristically elegant length of his neck, his arm braced on the side of the fridge, saying, “So yeah, we get out there by six o’clock or so-you drank all the orange juice, didn’t you, you fucker-and we’ll be able to get in at least nine holes before dark.”
It’s not that Mulder’s any more attractive in the mornings, certainly not more attractive than when he’s ambushing the others with a Super Soaker on the pool deck wearing a pair of MSU athletic shorts and nothing else, not more attractive than when he’s sitting on the floor at three in the morning playing video games with his impossibly long legs in a V, so tired he’s half-asleep and canting to one side, rubbing his eyes with the side of his fist like a little boy, not more attractive than when he’s hurling sliders into the dirt for a swinging third strike.
It’s just that the mornings when they rummage for breakfast together, there’s something easier and stiller about Mark Mulder, like he’s not constantly aware of looking good, like he’s not trying to live up to everybody’s expectations. He seems more real to Chavez in the morning, less like a dream Chavez is having.
He’s trying to figure out if it would be an astonishingly bad idea to sleep with one of his teammates.
He’s not entirely sure that Mulder would even be into it, all the shit Mulder talks about girls and all the nights Chavez has come home to find Mulder’s door locked and a pair of women’s shoes in the front hall, fresh candy-apple red in the tangle of dirty sneakers, Chavvy’s mind singing idiotically, ‘one of these things is not like the others.’
But he thinks, maybe. Maybe Mulder doesn’t even realize it himself, but, yeah, maybe. Mulder does spend an awful lot of time on his hair.
And also the way Mulder watches a little too closely when Hudson’s starting, leaning on the rail, and Chavez can tell that his eyes don’t move to follow the path of the ball after it leaves Huddy’s hand, Mulder’s not watching to see the split break or the sinker bite off at the knees, he’s really just watching Tim, doing what Tim does best.
The way, after Mulder pitches a beautiful eight innings of three-hit shutout ball, Zito shoulders into him in the dugout, takes Mulder’s left hand and holds it out so Zito can rub his own left arm and hand up and down, siphoning off the luck, the skill, and Mulder stands there cooperatively, a small smile on his face, letting Zito take what he can get from Mulder’s touched left arm.
The way Chavez tests him sometimes, sliding his hand from Mulder’s shoulder down his arm before letting go, standing a bit too close, sitting next to Mulder in the deck chairs and letting his eyes go where they want to go, just briefly, smooth chest, flat stomach, long legs, looking back up to see the vague surprise on Mulder’s face, and Mulder gives him a suspicious look, licking his lips uncertainly and looking away, blinking fast in confusion.
Yeah, maybe.
Anyway, it’s not such a big deal. If it happens, it happens. Mark Mulder never lets himself be talked into anything, so Chavez might have to catch him by surprise or off-guard or while he’s drunk or asleep or something equally amoral. Eric Chavez, generally, doesn’t have the attention span to plan grand seductions, he usually just grins and gets down on his knees.
There might come a night when Chavez and Mulder are both really tired, barely able to stay upright and shoulders chocked against each other on the couch. There might come a day when they’re sun-drunk on the pool deck and when Chavez rolls over and opens his mouth on Mulder’s side, Mulder won’t pull away. There might be a hallway or a driveway or a hotel stairwell.
If it happens, it happens. In the meantime, they’ll be friends and it’ll get complicated like that, which is the better form of complication.
Munson is up with the Tigers that summer, but he’s not starting, only rarely coming in late in a game. He’s riding the bench, watching his team lose and watching the out-of-town scoreboard, spending too much time thinking about Oakland.
The whole best-friends-who-fuck-around-sometimes-but-aren’t-in-love thing is working out pretty well. It’s not like before, when Chavez was gleefully securing the weights to his marriage’s ankles and trying to find the deepest trench in the ocean. There was a measure of urgency and self-destruction to it before, like they had to get everything out of each other in the short intervals they would have together, hypercompetitive and not content to settle for a draw, because there’s no such thing as a tie game in baseball.
And now, lots of the time, they can just hang out and nothing even has to happen. It’s the first time it’s been like this in years. They talk on the phone a lot, depending on where their teams are and if there’s a day game tomorrow, and Eric Munson is beginning to think this was a very good decision to make.
You can’t just quit. You have to scale back, scale down. You don’t just give up heroin, you’ve got to switch to methadone and then prescription painkillers and maybe cigarettes and speed for awhile before going back to Percoset and Tylenol by the handful, and not wake up for two months and then someday, someday you’ll be truly clean again.
There’s this woman named Shanda. She’s much prettier than any other girl Eric Munson has ever gone out with, and he’s star-struck a lot of the time, he can’t quite get his mind to settle around it.
She makes him think crazy things, with her long straight hair and mischievous eyes. He’s not having the best of seasons, because here he is in the majors, but he shouldn’t be because he still can’t hit, and his back hurts from being on the bench all the time. It’s nothing he ever considered, that he might be in the bigs and not play, not even deserve to play, and when he’s at the ballpark, there’s a phantom pain all through him.
But then Shanda smiles at him when he comes out of the clubhouse door, and swings her hand in his as they walk down the street, and there’s something happening in his heart that hasn’t happened since he was nineteen years old.
Munson believes that until his game comes back, he’ll only be half what he should be, and he doesn’t want to fall in love if he’s only half. It’s not the way it should happen, it’ll be tainted forever if it happens now.
He does what he can to prevent it, but every day she gets a bit further into him. Every day, she makes him forget that this is a terrible idea.
Eric Munson is petrified.
So he goes out to California for the All-Star break. He calls Chavez ahead of time and his friend sounds distracted, half-covering the mouthpiece with his hand to yell something about circuit breakers, to yell, “Mark, you little cocksucker, get back here!” and Munce gets kind of weird and awkward, but he covers it well, and Chavvy says he’ll meet him at the airport.
Chavez shows up late, Munson wandering around thumbing through paperback books and magazines in the little newsstand kiosk, drinking three paper cups of coffee and checking his watch every thirty seconds.
When Chavez tumbles into the baggage claim area, though, his head whipping as he scans across the crowd, an unintentional grin seeps onto Munson’s face. Chavvy lights up like an arcade game when he spots Munce, jogging over and kamikaze-crashing into his arms, Munson staggering backwards. Chavez pounds his back, tousles his hair and keeps saying, “look at you, look at this guy right here.”
Munson, with Chavez’s chin scratching on his throat, forgets to be mad at him.
They ride out to the Lafayette house, Munce blinking dazedly at the unmarked blue California sky after all these months in Michigan, and Chavez chatters on at a hundred miles an hour, about how cool it’ll be when the A’s go to Detroit next month, about his brother Chris’s new job, about a bunch of stuff but mainly, almost entirely, about his teammates.
He tells stories about Mulder and Hudson that make no sense, beaming expectantly until Munson makes a small laugh to get him to stop. He talks about Jason Giambi and Johnny Damon, talks about the pool at the Lafayette house and the time when the postgame buffet table collapsed just as Jermaine Dye was picking up a chip, JD standing there with the most perfect look of shock on his face you’ve ever seen, his hand still hovering over the suddenly empty space.
Munson gets pretty tired of listening, pretty quickly, but then Chavez says, “And oh hey, Zito, too, you know him.”
Munson says, “ahhhmgraklked,” then clears his throat, his face hot. He tries again, speaking carefully, “Sure. Spent a year with the freak.”
Chavez laughs, zipping the car in and out of traffic impatiently. “Yeah, he’s quite the freak. But a really good guy, too.”
Munson studies him out of the corner of his eye. He doesn’t remember Zito being a really good guy. Of course, all their USC teammates probably would, but as far as Eric Munson’s concerned, Zito’s just a sadistic fifteen year old trying to pass as a major league ballplayer.
Chavez catches Munson’s skeptical look, and cocks an eyebrow. “What?”
Munson shrugs. “Well . . . you know he’s gay, right?” He winces, feeling stupid, because maybe he doesn’t actually want Chavez knowing that, just that Zito can’t be trusted, but he should have used a different example.
Chavez blanches, shakes his head automatically. “He’s definitely not. He’s fucking this chick who plays soccer for Cal.”
Munson shrugs again, giving his friend a sardonic look, because since when did sleeping with women rule out sleeping with guys? “Okay, so not entirely gay. But at least some.”
Chavez gives him a sharp interrogatory look. “How would you know?”
He flushes. He doesn’t like to think about that day in the empty USC locker room. He prefers to think of himself as straight with Eric Chavez tendencies. It’s easier that way. And he never told Chavvy that there was another guy, even if it was just for a baffling ill-conceived couple of minutes.
Munson curls his toes inside his shoes, thumbing the button on the glove compartment to occupy his hands. The sunlight’s so strong everything looks faded, exsanguinated. “Heard some stories, at USC.”
The lines clear off Chavez’s face, because that’s a simple thing to dismiss. “You got played, bro. Zito’s a fucking arrow, trust me.”
Munson decides not to press it, because what good can it do? Better for Chavez to think his ace lefty is straight.
Out at the Lafayette house, things get pretty fucking bad.
Most of Chavez’s team is there, it seems, and Munson’s disconcerted. Not even in high school did so many of the players hang out together. This group of guys, hollering to be heard and bouncing crumpled paper balls made of beer bottle labels off each other’s heads, they spend most of their time together anyway, but here they are, spilling out the cracks of the house, cartwheeling into the pool.
“Is it always like this?” Munson asks Chavez, and Chavez gives him an uncomprehending look.
“Like what?” he asks guilelessly, answering Munson’s question.
Munson gets introduced around, shown off like a new toy, Chavez slinging an arm around his neck and saying proudly, “This is my boy from way back, he’s gonna tear us up in another year or two.” Munce just grins bashfully, stays close to his friend.
For awhile, Munson gets a glimpse of what it might be like on a contending team, a team that loves playing together, loves each other, though the whole scene is vaguely . . . incestuous.
Chavez and Munson are out on the pool deck, drinking at the patio table, and across the yard, Zito is trying to hop onto Tim Hudson’s back for a piggyback ride, buckling the righty’s knees and sending them both tumbling to the grass. Zito drunk-laughs with his head on Huddy’s chest, Hudson smacking him and yelling, “Get off’a me, fuckin’ heavy motherfucker!”
Munson leans over to say into Chavez’s ear, “Nah, not gay at all,” and Chavez socks him on the arm, kind of hard.
Munson rubs at the bruise as it shades under his shirt sleeve, and when Zito picks himself up off the grass and stumbles towards the garage door, Munson quickly rises and follows. Chavez is talking with Ramon; he doesn’t notice Munson go.
In the dusty garage, Zito is digging in the second refrigerator, looking for something in particular. He probably knows where the guys who live here hide the good beer; Zito’s the kind of guy who always knows stuff like that.
Munson makes sure the door is closed behind him, wishes for a towel to stuff in the crack at the bottom, make absolutely sure nothing will be heard, and says, “Hey.”
Zito jerks in surprise, looks over his shoulder. A slow grin makes its way across his face. “Eric Munson, as I live and breathe,” he says, and Munson isn’t sure if he’s being mocked or not.
“How’s it going?” he asks, staying on safe ground.
Zito straightens, two slick green bottles in his hands. “Pretty damn good, dude,” he answers, and Munson wonders just how drunk the motherfucker is.
Maybe Zito’s mellowed since college. Maybe Munson had him wrong all along, and everybody else who are so fucking enraptured by him are the smart ones. But Munson still doesn’t want any memories of Zito, nor of his own broken hand or that moment that must have been weakness, no other name for it.
Munson pushes his tongue against the roof of his mouth, forces himself to say, “Listen, don’t fuck with Chavvy, okay?”
Zito looks at him blankly for a moment, and then familiar angry lines appear on his face. “What?”
Munson waves his hand indistinctly, stammering and hating this conversation so much. He misses Shanda, suddenly, with a desperation that makes him feel winded. “I don’t know if you still. Do that. Or whatever. But don’t try it with Chavez. ’Cause he’s not like that. Just, like, fair warning, if you try anything, he’ll kick your ass. So don’t.”
Zito bends down to set the beers on the concrete, the clink loud enough to let Munson know that he did it with some force, and crosses his arms over his chest. The pitcher meets his eyes again and Munson is a little bit scared, but not much.
“First off, who ever said I wanted to fuck him?” Zito asks, rhetorically with the corners of his mouth pulled tight. “Second off, if I do want to fuck him, that’s between me and him and it’s got shit to do with you, dude.”
“He’s not gay!” Munson cries, too loud, really, even with the door shut, but he wants to make sure Zito knows that, make sure it’s perfectly clear.
Zito smirks. “Yeah, and neither are you, right?” he taunts. “Hell, while we’re at it, neither am I. Although, I tell ya something, Munce . . .” He pauses, takes a long moment before grinning sharkily. “You’re not acting so much like Concerned Best Friend as you are Jealous Lover.”
Munson squeezes his hands into fists, knuckles cracking and his nails bloodying his palm. He counts his breaths and doesn’t hit Zito in the face, using all his power, his teeth clenched and the enamel squealing. He shoves it down, shoves it away.
Zito, upon realizing Munson’s not gonna take a swing at him, actually looks kind of disappointed.
Munson exhales, proud of himself, and says, “Just stay away from him. We both know you’ll do shit a person doesn’t want you to do-”
“Oh, do we?” Zito cuts him off, his voice dripping sarcasm, eyes daring Munson to deny that Zito had been kissed back, no matter who’d started it, Zito wasn’t making out with himself that day in the locker room.
Munson reddens deeply, but shakes it off, staying on track. “Don’t fuck with him. Find somebody else.”
Zito times it perfectly, smiling sweetly as he says, “Fuck you, Munson,” and he picks up his beers, going out through the door Munson isn’t standing in front of, leaving Eric standing there, pretty sure he’s only made things worse.
He goes back out to the party and Eric Chavez has lost his shirt. Chavvy is on the diving board, up there with Mark Mulder, wrestling and trying to knock each other into the water.
Munson stands in the cornered shadows by the garage, unnoticed, his feet on the soft wet grass, and he watches Chavez and Mulder grapple, bouncing up and down on the board, snickering and everybody else catcalling, hooting. Mulder’s arm is looped around Chavez’s neck and Chavez’s head pinned on Mulder’s bare chest, Chavez’s mouth open, laughing, his teeth white against Mulder’s tan.
Munson, forgotten, watches as Chavez hooks a foot around the back of Mulder’s leg and they both overbalance, falling with a huge splash in a rat’s nest of arms and legs, flailed hands coming free to grab at nothing, and as the two men sink down together, Munson gets a sinking feeling that his assumptions are a million miles from the truth.
It shouldn’t matter. Eric Chavez is free to do what he wants. He can fuck his starting rotation, suck them off when they win, let whoever’s ERA is lowest bend him over the edge of the bed. And what-the-fuck-ever. Chavez isn’t the one almost in love with his girlfriend. Chavez isn’t cheating on anybody, not this time.
It’s nothing new-Chavez has been like this for years, and it doesn’t really make a difference whether or not Munson is responsible for it. Chavez is just a slut, at the end of the day, he can’t turn anybody down. It’s never bugged Munce before, or at least not this much.
But these guys, these fucking pitchers who are Cy Young candidates at twenty-three years old, these arrogant fuckers with their charm and their handsome faces, Munson can’t stand the thought of Chavez fucking around with them. Because Mulder and Zito are perfect in the exact same way Chavez is, they would fit together without a seam.
Later, after most everybody who doesn’t live there and didn’t pass out has gone home, Munson follows Chavez back to his room, sees the sleeping bag laid out on the floor like they’re teenagers again, fooling everybody.
The door is closed, the curtains drawn and the bedside lamp casting triangles of yellow light, flecks of dust in the columns. Chavez moves around easily, his hair half-dried, sticking to his temples and eking trails down his neck. He peels off his shirt and flops on the bed, reaching over to take the alarm clock in his hands, setting it for the morning.
Munson is near the door, the sleeping bag an island between him and the bed, and he fiddles with his buttons, shifting his weight from foot to foot. He can’t take his eyes off Chavez shirtless on the bed, half-lying on his side, propped up on his elbow so that one side of his body is stretched taut and the other is in a shallow curve.
He thinks that he’s been doing better, he’s been moving on. He’s got a stop-traffic beautiful girlfriend and people are jealous of him again, because even just sitting on the bench is closer than most ever get. He needs to get his game back, and until that happens he shouldn’t let things get complicated again. Munson thinks about Shanda smiling at him, and how to hit a really good curve, and he doesn’t need this anymore, there’s not enough space in him for all this at once, but he’s five-beers-buzzed and Eric Chavez is shirtless on the bed.
“Um, are we . . .” Munce starts, then stops. Chavez looks up, looking happy and tired, an instinctive smile crawling at his face. Munson pulls his eyes away, thinks about Zito asleep on the couch and Mulder, two doors down.
“Munce?”
Munson looks at him again. Chavvy has sat up, rubbing at his shin with his other heel, his eyebrows raised expectantly.
Try again. “Are we. Are we gonna . . . you know.” hating the fact that he has to ask.
Chavez grins, briefly, tips his head to the side and leans back on his elbows, his legs over the side of the bed and his knees apart, posed like a fucking daydream. “I could be convinced.”
Munson locks the door, skids on the slippery material of the sleeping bag and crawls on top of his best friend, lying between Chavez’s legs with their chests together. Chavez’s arms are around Munson’s back, gathering handfuls of his shirt and pulling it over his head, caught around Munson’s upper arms. Chavez shifts uncomfortably; Munson’s belt buckle is digging into his hip, so they get rid of that too, and Munce kisses him, pushes Chavez’s mouth open and weaves his fingers in Chavez’s chlorinated hair.
Munson would be guilty, he would be feeling like hell, but Chavez is good and hot beneath him, Chavez knows him better than anyone has ever known another person, and it’s easy to chase away the thought of Shanda’s gray eyes, her little-girl laugh.
Chavez rolls them over so he’s on top, biting at Munson’s mouth and finding all the right spots. Chavvy reaches out, one eye open, to root around in the bedside table drawer, and Munson licks his shoulder and collarbone, his hand on the small of Chavez’s back, holding them flush.
Munce wants to taste the skin over Chavez’s spine, suck on the knob of his hip, leave teethmarks on Chavez’s stomach. He wants Chavez’s hands all over him, slick and fingerprinting him like a crime scene. He wants to swallow Chavez’s cry when he comes and collapse on top of him. He wants one of them to be fucked senseless.
Munson wants his best friend, tonight, and the Oakland A’s can go fuck themselves.
*
(the happiest place on earth)
And Eric Chavez brings him a bowl of cereal in the morning and Munson feels thirteen years old again on the fold-out couch.
And he goes back to Detroit and takes his seat on the bench. The Tigers keeping losing and Eric Munson will be in Trip-A Toledo again in the spring, because he’s not ready yet, he hasn’t fixed anything. This is taking longer than it should, and it’s leaving scars.
And Munson kneels in the middle of the dirty city and asks Shanda to marry him, giving up the good fight and letting his heart go where it wants. And she says yes, drops to her knees to put her arms around his neck and kiss him, ruining her skirt and not caring, because she does love him, inexplicably, loves him for real.
And planes fly into buildings, fall out of the sky, and the world goes kind of crazy.
And the summer ends a month early, everything else is just playing out the schedule.
And the A’s lose in the first round again, and Chavez breaks down on the phone with Munson, drives home to San Diego that night and they fuck on the couch while Munson’s fiancée is asleep in the bedroom.
And major league baseball is played in November for the first time ever.
And they go to Disneyworld and Eric Munson gets married.
Eric Chavez is the best man. He teases Munce relentlessly for getting married at an amusement park, but he actually understands, remembers Eric Munson nine years old and making him swear they’d get here, someday.
It’s an overcast autumn day in Orlando, the life melted out of the place, the created world, cartoon people walking around with frightening plastic smiles. The ceremony takes place in New Orleans Square, and it’s not so bad there, under the trees dripping Spanish moss, the pretty Victorian false-fronts, white-painted gazebos and wrought-iron fences lining the small cobbled streets. Over the trees, the Haunted Mansion rises gothically gray and brown, circled by animatronic bats.
It’s all very fake and very lovely, and Chavez grins like a jerk with his suit jacket weighing down on his shoulders in the thick still air. Munson keeps glancing at him, and Chavez winks at him, makes his eyes go wide, blows him a joking kiss. Munce glares at him briefly, but when he looks back at Shanda, his eyes get soft again.
Eric Chavez dances with his best friend’s new wife and steps on her toes, but she just laughs, lets him spin her and dip her extravagantly, until Munson comes over and cuts in. Chavez sits on a wooden bench in the shade and watches them dance.
They don’t get a chance to talk, the swirl of family and friends and the fallen leaves red and orange around their ankles. Chavez doesn’t think this is going to change anything, because he was married once too, but he’s not sure. Munson is already different, twenty-minutes-married and white cake frosting on his face. He looks like a man, honestly, a real grown-up.
Chavez is flying back early the next morning, and Munson gets up to see him off. Munson knocks on his room door, yawning and still in his pajama pants and worn T-shirt, his shoes on with no socks, untied laces lagging. Chavez waves a package of freeze-dried coffee at him but Munson shakes his head, he’s still planning on going back to sleep.
They don’t talk then either, though it’s the perfect opportunity. But Munson’s most of the way asleep, slumped in the chair, and Chavez is on his third cup of stale coffee, too wired to be coherent.
But in the elevator, Chavez is jittering and he asks, “So, Munce, so, um, what, you know, what about-” and Munson suddenly crowds him against the rail, kisses him slow and deep, bed-warm and lazy, his hand on Chavez’s neck and the zing of cold from his new wedding ring.
Munson pulls back, looking either tired or sad, and tells him carefully, “You’re the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, man, I hope you know that.”
Chavez nods, his mouth slightly open, and tilts in to press his lips to Munson’s again. Munson sighs into his mouth, tips his head to the side to get a better angle, worrying abstractly what Shanda will think if she kisses him and tastes coffee.
Eric Chavez gets in a cab, and Eric Munson goes back upstairs to lie down next to his wife.
*
(defensive replacement)
Back in Oakland, Chavez gives Greg Myers the pair of Mickey Mouse ears he got for him and Myers is way too excited about that, wearing them all afternoon and night while hanging out at Chavez’s place, until someone snatches them off his head and throws them up into the tree.
Chavez thinks that they probably shouldn’t bother keeping a house over the winter next year. It’s too quiet, and hardly anybody else is staying year-round in the Bay Area, so nothing interesting ever happens. Their parties suck.
And even when people do come around, seeing his teammates fools Chavez into thinking that they’ve got a game to play later, but then he remembers it’s the off-season and gets depressed again.
It’s just Mulder and him in Lafayette that off-season, and they get in dumb arguments and are constantly pissed off at each other, holding grudges and exacting petty little revenges.
Mulder went home to Chicago for Thanksgiving, and he gets back on a red-eye flight a few days into December, the airport shuttle dropping him off at the front door at two in the morning.
Chavez is still up, watching Game 6 of the 1975 World Series on ESPN Classic, feeling itchy and restless. He’s in the kitchen when the front door opens, and he hears Mulder coming down the hall, the scraped sound of his bag trailing behind him.
Chavez looks over to see Mulder tipping his shoulder wearily against the jamb, blinking at him. Eric takes a bottle of water out of the refrigerator and when he shuts the door, the room goes dim, pasted white walls and dun-colored shadows in the hallway from the television.
“Welcome home, man,” he says, leaning against the counter and fingering the sport-top of the bottle, popping it up and down. He doesn’t remember if they were fighting before Chavez left for Orlando, but decides to go ahead and turn the other cheek regardless, because there’s no one else to talk to.
Mulder nods, says in the middle of a yawn, “You too.” His hair is tufting out on one side, bristling over his ear. The collar of his shirt is open one or two buttons too far, making his neck look unnaturally long.
Mulder lets his head tilt to rest on the jamb, his eyes closed. “Your boy got married,” he says.
Chavez nods, but Mulder’s still got his eyes shut, so he answers, “Yeah.” He keeps looking at the high triangle of Mulder’s chest revealed by his open shirt, the cutted thumb-dents at the base of his throat.
Chavez thinks that this off-season has been pretty goddamn boring, dismissing the past two days in Orlando as insignificant. He thinks, ‘fuck it.’
Chavez swallows, takes a long drink of chilled water, and walks over to where Mulder is standing blind.
Chavez isn’t entirely sure what he’s doing, but he’s had enough of living in the same house as Mulder and playing all summer on the same team with him and pretending the undercurrent between them doesn’t exist. In Chavez’s mind, for a moment, he sees Eric Munson with his arms around Shanda, under the mossy trees, moving lyrically, but then he pushes that out.
He gets to Mulder, close enough to see the photo negative of an ash smear on his face a half an inch away from his ear, and he’s silent, Mulder’s eyes haven’t opened.
Eric Chavez leans in and licks Mulder’s chest. He drags the flat of his tongue up Mulder’s sternum and feels Mulder hitch a quick breath. The moment for Mulder to shove him away and punch him goes past swiftly, and Chavez smiles inside his mind, ‘i fucking knew it.’
There’s a sweat-skin taste, and it could be anyone. He curls his tongue around Mulder’s collarbone and Mulder’s head is back, giving him full access. Mulder’s hand comes up to Chavez’s arm, just holding there, above Chavez’s elbow and his fingers are long enough that they circle all the way around and overlap his thumb.
Chavez presses his open mouth higher, on Mulder’s throat, and he shifts forward so that their bodies run together. Mulder’s not too skinny like he was when he first showed up, filled out, but Chavez can still feel the bones of his hips, his ribs, clocked knees. Chavez has both hands tied up in Mulder’s shirt, fists against his stomach, anxiously yanking him closer.
Mulder swallows and his Adam’s apple kicks under Chavez’s tongue. Mulder says his name scratchily, and Chavez more feels it than hears it. He’s going to kiss Mulder in a second, in just a second he’s gonna see how far this goes.
He lifts his head and Mulder has an unfamiliar look on his face, flushed and heavy-eyed. He’s been digging his teeth hard into his lower lip; Chavez can still see the thin pierced line in the flesh. Mulder stares down at him like he’s never seen him before, breathing reedily and his chest bumping Chavez’s.
Then Mulder’s face clears, famous smirk edging at the corners of his mouth, and he runs the tip of his tongue thoughtfully across his lips, moving his leg in between Chavez’s, pushing up just enough.
“Well I’ll be goddamned, Chavvy,” he says, almost drawling like he thinks he’s Tim Hudson or something. “You’re not just a little bit fucked up, are you?”
Chavez wants to bare his teeth, maybe bite him or something, so tense his skin feels like it’s about to shred off, and since when did casual sex get so fucking complicated? What’s wrong with just wanting to get his dick sucked, wanting to get his hands on the places where Mulder is as tight as a drum-skin, wanting all that height and length twisted around him? Why does everything have to be a fucking therapy session, why can’t he just sleep with the best-looking asshole in the state and then have done with it?
Chavez scorns, his face contorted, and presses up, angling for Mulder’s mouth, but Mulder just ducks back, turning so that Chavez hits his cheek, sanded by his five o’clock shadow.
Chavez makes an inarticulate sound of frustration and irritation, his eyes half-closed, and he locks a hand behind Mulder’s neck, tries to pull him down, but Mulder resists, muscles strict and immovable. Mulder’s thigh is still between his own, rubbing almost absentmindedly, as if Mulder has forgotten it’s there. The smirk is out in full-force now, and it’s just Mulder’s eyes that are smoked and snapping with jerks of black through the blue.
“For fuck’s sake, man,” Chavez mumbles impatiently, his fingers hasped in the waist of Mulder’s jeans, working against him and wanting to fuck someone so badly he’s almost cross-eyed. “Can we get on with it already?”
Mulder pauses, considering that, then shakes his head slowly, slipping his leg out from between Chavez’s, leaning back against the doorframe and not touching Chavez anywhere except the backs of Chavez’s fingers on the skin under the top of his jeans.
“Not that I’m not flattered,” Mulder says, smug and looking like he could have anyone in the world and why would he ever pick Eric Chavez?
Chavez, stunned with anger, rips his hands away from Mulder’s body, steps back. “Fuck you,” he says venomously, a tremor in his voice. “You fucking cocktease, you think I need this shit?”
Mulder crosses his arms over his chest casually, lifts an eyebrow. “Guess not,” he answers. “At least, not from me.”
Chavez flinches, but it’s not like that, he’s pretty sure. He wanted Mulder anyway, before he went to Orlando, this isn’t new.
Mulder scuffs his knuckles along the line of his jaw, studying him, and says, “You should get some sleep, babe.”
Chavez’s head snags to the side, and he whispers without thinking, “Don’t call me that.”
Mulder sighs. “Fine. Eric. Get some sleep.” And Mulder walks out, hauling his bag off the floor and onto his shoulder, and Chavez sleepwalks to the living room, falls down on the couch and thinks about what a fucking idiot he is for awhile.
*
(faith in our hearts)
And then the Oakland Athletics stop losing.
It’s August of 2002 and the Players’ Association is talking about another strike. For the second time in his life, Eric Chavez refuses to believe in the possibility, and spends a week of earnestly drunk nights cornering his teammates one by one, getting them all to swear that if the union strikes, they won’t, insisting again and again, “we’ll still play, promise me we’ll still play.”
Most of them think he’s a fucking nutcase, nodding along to humor him, but Chavvy guesses it does the trick, because right about then is when the streak begins.
The first couple games, the Blue Jays and White Sox at home, they don’t even think about it. You can’t predict something like this. They’re playing good, picking up speed and closing in on the stretch, that’s pretty much all that matters.
There’s a huge summer moon, the color of amber and sitting low in the sky, a perfect half-circle like a cereal bowl, and they grin, nudge each other, get fresh beers. They’re not paying attention, distracted by things in the sky, so there’s no way to know when exactly, but sometime in there, everything falls into place.
Hudson’s a bulldog and Mulder’s a pin-up and David Justice tracks across left field like his feet aren’t touching the ground. Cory Lidle is not a number four starter, and Aaron Harang isn’t a number five, it’s just this goddamn rotation, man, where else are you gonna put them? Ramon Hernandez is all grit and accent behind the plate, the toughest catcher you’ve ever seen and that magic Venezuelan swing that’s all of a sudden finding the sweet spot every time. Jermaine Dye and Terrence Long dance over each other in the spaces between right and center, and Miguel Tejada is in the dugout laughing and clapping his chalked hands, fingers stiffly held out. John Mabry and Adam Piatt are everybody’s favorite, they’re so fucking chill. Ray Durham is cooler than everybody else put together, Eric Byrnes has got ADD and isn’t allowed any sugar past the fifth inning, Mark Ellis and Scott Hatteberg are unofficial brothers, and nobody misses Giambi that much anymore.
In their totally incongruent ’pen, they’ve got a deeply religious submariner from Mississippi, and a screwballer who was born with two club feet, limps out to the mound and just shuts the fuckers down. They’ve got Bam-Bam Jeff Tam and Biblical Micah Bowie. They’ve got Billy Koch and his goat-scruff hurling aspirin tablets in the ninth, topping out at better than a hundred miles an hour.
Barry Zito, who looks like a fucking joke with his hair still blonde at the tips and his Peter Pan socks, half the time acting the part too, is suddenly, bafflingly, untouchable. He stumbles upon a current of luck or karma or skill or whatever you want to call it, depthless and astonishing, and it picks him up, carries him along like wings. Zito isn’t surprised, because this is where he’s always expected himself to be, but everyone else is. Guys like Barry Zito are not this good. Nobody is this good.
Eric Chavez thought that he’d seen everything there is to be seen on a baseball field, but he’s never seen anything like Zito’s curve, hooking like a wish all through the heart of that summer.
They’ve got Art Howe’s majestic chin in the dugout and Billy Beane tearing up the clubhouse, screaming curses at their weaknesses and loving them all violently like sons, though nobody ever talks about that. They’ve got a team of teenagers, fucking Little Leaguers, they’ve got life in the box and poetry against the outfield wall and they turn two on balls that were roped for doubles.
They stop losing. They go on the road, they sweep four games at Cleveland, Lidle one-hitting the Indians in the last game of the set to make it nine straight, and then they roll into the Motor City for three against the Tigers. They sweep there too, and Chavez calls Munson in Toledo, tells him, “We got lucky, man, if you were playing with the big club, the streak would be done for sure.”
Munce laughs, tells him to go kick the holy hell out of the Royals.
They do.
In Kansas City, it starts to get pretty spooky. It’s twelve games in a row, at this point, and they’ve been slowly moving up in SportsCenter’s priority, until the night when the show opens with the question: “Will the Oakland A’s ever lose?”
Yeah, doesn’t seem like it, not right now, not ever again.
Nobody ever pays much attention to the A’s, no matter how good they are. Their fan base bleeds green and gold, but rarely do forty thousand of them appear anywhere together. They’re a freak California team, and maybe they’ve got the deepest starting pitching since Maddux-Glavine-Smoltz in the early 1990s, maybe they’ve got an insane general manager who never seems to make a bad deal, maybe they’re impossibly clutch, postseason-bound for the third straight year, but nobody has ever known their names.
Now they’re touched. Now they’re beyond failure.
Chavez can see it in their eyes. In his own eyes, looking back at him and gleaming with unscarred surprise from the clubhouse mirror.
And they come home having won fifteen games in a row, greeted by October crowds in their late-August ballpark that only a mother could love, kids with mohawked hair, half green and half yellow, facepaint, homemade banners, plain white T-shirts with block-lettered slogans in thick Magic Marker.
There are reports of children being born in the East Bay and named after the players. Jason Zito Bradley of Walnut Creek. Miguel Tejada Dominguez of Alameda.
There are stories about sports bars crushed full every night, department stores that tune their speakers to the A’s broadcast when the game starts, Bill King’s wise old man’s voice giving the play-by-play through the cool perfume aisles, the new clothes hanging empty on the racks.
The elephant is everywhere, and people talk about Connie Mack, Lefty Grove, Rube Waddell, they go way back through Kansas City to Philadelphia and end up where they started, with Hudson and Mulder and Zito, with Eric Chavez and Miguel Tejada, with Billy Beane and maybe this is what God owes him.
When two people in A’s gear are walking towards each other on the sidewalk, they grin and slap high-five as they pass. When the A’s play during the day, half the town takes the afternoon off. When the last out is recorded (Chavez doesn’t believe this is really happening until he sees film of it on the local news), people get out of their cars and hug strangers in the middle of the street, car doors hanging open and everybody laughing like crazy.
Middle school kids double-knot their sneakers, and help their kindergarten brothers and sisters make Xs with their Velcro straps, because double-knots and Velcro Xs are the difference in the umpire’s eyes when a shadow-cut inside fastball is called for the third strike. Their parents dig old ticket stubs out of musty shoeboxes on the top shelf of the closets, the 1989 season before the bridge collapsed, and he’s a good-looking man that Dennis Eckersley, ’74, ’73, ’72, an East Bay dynasty in screaming yellow jerseys, the Mustache Gang and Catfish Hunter (that’s goddamn right), tucking the stub in their wallets and touching it occasionally as the day wears on.
There are men and women who wear their Athletics T-shirts under their business suits every day, a girl suspended from her high school in San Leandro for refusing to take off her cap in class, protesting fervently, “But it’s good luck.”
Everything is coming down to luck. Everything’s a blur. Eric Chavez wanders around in a punch-drunk haze, protected from on high. Crosswalk signals change to green as he approaches the curb, elevator doors ping open without him pushing the button. He finds three crumpled twenty dollar bills on the street over the course of a week, and every penny on every sidewalk is lucky-heads-up. He looks at his watch when they’re out after a game, and it’s 11:11, wish-making on street corners and apartment stairwells. The bass beat from his Walkman falls into rhythm with his stride as he walks down the street. Everything is thrown open for him, everything is in tune.
He starts flipping a quarter one day in the clubhouse, idly killing time, picking heads or tails and skying the coin on a narrow parabola, and he guesses right thirty-three times in a row, then stops because he starts to get totally freaked out.
His days fall into pattern, he does everything the exact same. Eggbeater omelet for breakfast, one cup of coffee with two sugars and no cream, eaten in the same chair at the kitchen table, using the same fork. Watch ESPN, no matter what’s on, until it’s time to go to the ballpark. Take the same route, come to a full stop at every stop sign, and park in the same place in the players’ lot, easy enough to do because his teammates are all doing the same thing. Play exactly five hands of cards with the infielders, then two games on the arcade machine with Hudson and no one else. Drink a bottle of water before infield practice, another before batting practice. Sit on the dugout bench and tighten the laces of his glove whether they need it or not. Knock rhythmically through the intricate handshakes, a different one for every player, and don’t miss a step. Let Miggy ruffle his hair for luck, and take the field.
Everything the exact same. And every game is another win.
When the team’s together, they crackle, they burn. The twenty-five of them, for these three impossible weeks, are inchoate and unmatched, every prayer answered, well-loved by God or fate or baseball, something, and they stick close to each other, travel in each other’s pockets. They can’t explain how it feels to anyone else, and they don’t need to explain it to each other.
And then, seventeen games in, they start performing miracles.
Tejada wins the eighteenth with a walk-off home run, and he bounds into their arms at home plate, hollering at the top of his lungs in Spanish. That night, back at Mulder and Chavez’s house, Mark Ellis falls asleep on the kitchen floor and wakes everybody up at four in the morning, his dream voice high and breaking gleefully, prophetic, yelling, “Run, Scotty, run.”
Miggy wins the nineteenth too, a game-winning base hit in the bottom of the ninth, a jerky little hop in his stride as he sees the ball shoot up the middle, pinwheeling his arm triumphantly and crowing. They dash out of the dugout and tackle him on the fair side of the first base line, the flood of noise from the crowd blinding.
That night, there’s Zito, standing in the middle of the street, brilliantly drunk and calling out fearlessly, “Fuck you, you son of a bitch, I’ve got faith in my heart!”
And Mulder answers from the curb, stuttering with laughter, “What’ve you got, kid?” Zito, again, like the only way he’ll be brought down is if the sky comes down with him:
“I’ve got faith in my motherfucking heart!”
So that when they blow an eleven-run lead the next night, their bid for an unthinkable twenty wins without one loss, when the Royals tie it up and the Coliseum is cemetery-quiet, Chavez finds a seat next to Zito on the bench and asks him quietly, “What have we got?”
And Zito’s hand on his back, Zito telling him, “Faith in our hearts, Eric.”
Chavez goes 2-for-5 that night, with three RBIs, and after the Royals knot it at eleven in the top of the ninth, every last shred of luck having at last been smuggled into the visitor’s dugout, he runs down into the clubhouse, his mind ablaze, and calls Eric Munson.
“Chavvy, what the fuck,” Munson picks up, pacing around his own team’s clubhouse in Toledo where they’re watching the A’s, along with every other team in organized ball not involved in a game of their own, for once everyone watching the Oakland Athletics, unable to believe this. “You’re playing, for fuck’s sake.”
Chavez shakes his head, his legs trembling. “I’m not up this inning,” he says unevenly. “Munce, I’m . . . I’m going fucking crazy, man, I can’t take it.”
Munson pushes a hand through his hair, staring at the television screen, the Kansas City closer cutting through his warm-up pitches. “Settle down, dude,” he advises, his own voice not entirely steady.
“I can’t fucking settle down, Munson!” Chavez shouts, jumping from foot to foot.
There’s a clatter as Scott Hatteberg dashes through the clubhouse, the short way between the batting cages and the dugout, clutching an unfamiliar dark wood bat. Chavez eyes the first baseman as he sprints past-Hatteberg isn’t supposed to play tonight.
Chavez shakes his head again, his eyes feeling hot and white, says, “We blew the lead, did you see, eleven to nothing in the third, and now it’s tied, how can we win this, there’s no fucking way.”
“Hey!” Munce says sharply, quick and inarguable authority. “You listen to me, you guys have been fucking blessed, Eric. I’ve been watching, I’ve never seen anything like it. Right now, right now, man, tonight, it’s. God. There’s never been a team that could beat you tonight, okay? Not ever, I promise. And certainly not the motherfucking Royals.”
Chavez breathes deep, closes his eyes. “You believe that?”
Munce watches Jermaine Dye fly out for the first out, watches Scott Hatteberg in the on-deck circle, tapping the donut off his bat, fixing his helmet, walking to the plate. “All my heart, babe,” Munson says, and Chavez’s strength leaves him briefly, falling back against the wall. “Get back up there,” Munce tells him. “Go see your boys.”
Chavez nods, still frantic, and he’s moving quick for the tunnel, stammering, “Thanks, dude, love you, talk to you later,” and then he’s gone, tossing his cell phone onto the table and disappearing into the concrete again.
Scott Hatteberg, with his perfect knowledge of the strike-zone and his better-every-day picks at first base, is pinch-hitting in the bottom of the ninth. Scott Hatteberg, whose career was supposed to be over when he left Boston, Scott Hatteberg, one of Billy Beane’s chosen, knocks the head of his bat on the plate and feels the caffeine whirring in his blood, feels the ceaseless chants of the fifty-five thousand pressing heavily on his shoulders. He sets his feet and cocks his hips slightly open, squints out at Jason Grimsley, thinking ‘sinkerball pitcher,’ thinking ‘don’t sit on the break,’ thinking ‘lay off the first pitch,’ thinking ‘just one more, good enough.’
The air’s neon and Chavez trips up against the rail, his teammates parting to make room for him, wedging him in, and Chavez’s eyes are huge, rapt, trying to find a prayer that applies.
Hatteberg swings at the second pitch, high heat, and crushes it. The string of players at the rail jolt at the crack, Chavez’s hands caught up in two others, and they cry out as one, tracing the path of the ball through the clean night air.
When the ball disappears over the wall in right-center, Hatteberg lifts his arm into the air, his mouth open and his eyes wide, and they explode out of the dugout, stumbling over each other, arms around each other’s necks, falling off balance. Chavez leaps onto Mulder’s back, nearly toppling him to the ground, and Huddy is clinging to Zito like a spider monkey.
Chavez loses his capacity for rational thought, and there’s nothing but white light in his eyes, bad reception in his ears. His life is transparent in that moment, with the old broken pieces swept out of his heart, he’s brand-new now, struck down.
And here, in the light and the static, their faces, his team, he’d say brothers but that doesn’t even come close, because baseball is thicker than blood. Elbows and shoulders and white-green-gold everywhere, jammed together at the plate, an obstructed view and someone’s chin dug into Chavez’s shoulder. There’s just enough time for all of them to turn back into little boys, the smell of oranges cut into fourths and grass stains and sunlit wet cement, and then their hands are reaching out, and Scott Hatteberg is rounding third and flying home.
(end part eleven)
*
part twelve