that's right, i said let there be light
well! now that that's out of the way. hey man. spring traaaaaining. it is pretty excellent.
so i'm working on a show again? like, okay, back in da day, i used to work as a light designer and master electrician for various theatre companies around the peninsula, and it was my one marketable skill. because, you know, the filth, it does not pay so well. i work pro boner for y'all (hee. i continue to have the maturity level of a thirteen year old boy, but whatever).
anyway, i got to school and for whatever reason didn't get involved with any of the theatre groups here. well, once my friend who worked at the kennedy center was all, dude! emergency! because all their circuits had blown and they were just kids who didn't understand that all you gotta do is flip the switches on the fire box, i mean, c'mon now! this is basic.
and then in london, one of the kids i met was an artist, doing a whole term working with light, and she was trying to make these flameless candles with LEDs, but couldn't get the things to light up as one, so i got to fiddle with the whole set up for like two hours, and it was awesome.
all this by way of saying that i've had all of two chances to bust out the old skool skillz in the past four years, but now i'm back baby.
and man, this blackbox we're running the show in, they got like nineteen fresnels, two parkhans and four scoops for house lights, they got a square grid and i don't know how they're set for double-circuited dimmers on the electrics, they've got a beat berkey board that i get to learn how to run, they've got barn doors but apparently don't use them (which is, like, dwah?), and man, i'm gonna roll this shit. i'm so excited. so excited i talk in jargon just because it amuses me!
it's all very complicated. washington dc won't for the love of god commit itself to a season, we're caught in between here. it'll be all right.
This is a story containing much less denial. I mean, for my part, of course. But nobody minds if I keep writing stories based in the past, right? It wasn’t my fucking idea to tear apart the cast of characters, yo. Anyway, that’s not this story. This story deals with the trades! Kinda!
And it’s entirely the fault of this, which, like, okay, john darnielle, you already have my heart held hostage, you really had to write about ‘sad young cardinals’? jaysus. I just can’t catch a break.
p.s. Oh Danny Haren. My oh my danny haren. Just when you thought the team couldn’t look any more like a bunch of potheads, meet Danny Haren. What are we gonna do with you?
Long Distance Drunk
By Candle Beck
-Florida-
On the wrong coast, Mark Mulder and Tim Hudson call each other pretty much every night. This kind of spring training is new and unexpected, and there was a theory that at least they’d both be in the same place, at least for a couple of weeks. But they’re more than two hours apart, and it’s hard to find time for the drive.
The towns all have stupid names. The Braves’ spring training center is in Kissimmee, which is where all the Disney employees live. The place is crawling with people who have shiny white teeth and tan faces, little kids in AYSO soccer uniforms everywhere on Saturday afternoons. Picket fences, honest to god, and grass so closely cut it looks plastic. It’s fucking eerie.
The Cardinals have their ballpark in Jupiter, and Mulder figures, yeah, sure, a whole different planet, that makes sense. Jupiter’s out by the ocean, which is why Hudson comes down one weekend when he’s got an off-day, because he misses playing golf with a view of the water.
After eighteen holes, they get some beers and Mulder takes Hudson to the back access roads of the little airport, finding a spot at the end of a runway, cyclone fences and razor wire. They lean against the car and watch the planes lift off directly over their heads, salt and diesel in the air, and they talk about a lot of things.
At one in the morning, Mulder drops Hudson off at his car and says, “safe drive, man,” while yawning, and Hudson waves out the window as he pulls onto the road. Mulder goes back to his hotel room and jerks off thinking about one of Barry Zito’s ex-girlfriends. Then he goes to sleep.
*
-Arizona-
Rich Harden stays close to Zito when they first get down there.
It’s interestingly nostalgic; he’s acting like a rookie. Like this is his first time at camp. He practically pitches a fit when Kotsay casually drops his bag in front of the locker next to Zito’s, snapping, “I already called dibs, man,” while kicking Kotsay’s stuff away.
They eat sandwiches in the lounge together and go out to watch each other take their sessions. Chavez makes a couple of snide remarks about how maybe Richie can teach Zito how to be an ace, and Zito trips him in the dugout.
Danny Haren watches everything from the corner of the room with huge eyes, his mouth pressed all small and his hair covering his ears. He squeezes his glove compulsively between his hands, tightens the laces a hundred times a day. They invite him out for drinks and stuff after, team-bonding, and he nurses one beer for two hours, then politely excuses himself and goes back to the hotel. Nobody knows quite what to make of him, but it’s cool to have a guy on staff again who can throw a cutter.
People ask Zito a lot of questions, and he seems to be giving interviews like it’s written into his contract. Which it might well be, for all he knows. The irony of being on his own out here is that their names are still always in his articles. That’s something that will probably never change.
Real quick: Barry Zito has never, not once in his life, been a leader.
He only ever tries to call Mulder when Chavez is in the room, because Chavez loves nothing quite so much as bitching drunkenly at Mulder over the phone, like when Chavez first moved out, and it’s weird how much this time is like that time.
When Zito finally gets the phone away from him, he says, “man, what the fuck, how do you do this.”
Mulder says, “you just do,” and then starts talking about a couple of the guys on his new team who live in Florida year-round and surf, the difference in the ocean, and Zito is watching Rich Harden and Danny Haren, sitting on the floor in front of the couch playing cards on the coffee table.
Danny Haren is taller than Zito and Rich Harden is a better pitcher. In a few months, this is all going to feel remarkably familiar.
*
-Jupiter-
It takes Mulder a while to get used to the weird chill humidity of coastal Florida. Everything’s very green, and it’s strange but the rainy season is actually in the middle of the summer. Every pitch Mulder throws seems to get caught up in the air, paused and muffled.
It’s a very different clubhouse. They don’t have an arcade game or anything. Nobody actually eats the candy bars in the rack, just the energy bars. They all shake his hand and clap him on the shoulder, buy him a drink and tell him good to have you, and Mulder never knew you could be this important and be brand new at the same time. You had to earn it in Oakland.
Between pay-per-view porn and instant messaging back and forth to the other side of the country, Mulder’s nights are pretty complicated. He makes the drive to Orlando two weeks in, a week and a half since he last saw Hudson, and on I-91 the road is fanned by bent green branches.
They eat take-out Mexican for dinner, sitting in the bleachers at a deserted Little League field, and Hudson says, “We’re getting real good at sneaking off, don’t you think?”
Mulder smirks and steals some of Hudson’s Coke (“because it’s hometown, now”), and sleeps on the floor of Hudson’s living room, bath towels covering him (“because I don’t exactly got my linen closet set up yet, okay?”), and Hudson kicking him awake in the morning and saying, “Get out. I gotta go to the ballpark.”
Weird, hearing Hudson say that.
*
-Disneyworld-
This town is the most unsettling place in the motherfucking country. Orlando is just a few strip malls away. Hudson only ever sees out-of-state license plates, including his own, which is a Georgia plate. He can’t imagine what it’s going to be like in the overrun summer, the tourist season.
He gets along real well with the other guys, though. They’re all, like. Older than he is. He’s suddenly, after close to a decade, a little brother again. They’ve got stuff to actually teach him, this sorta grip and that sorta arm angle, and new pitches seem to be hiding in his hands these days, just waiting to make an appearance.
His family’s already in Atlanta, because it was agreed that the girls should be settled in as soon as possible and also Kim’s seven months pregnant. Hudson’s got this cheap condo on the north side of town, right up against the theme park. He can hear the monorail go by at night.
He sends Zito postcards, because Hudson doesn’t even have a computer, much less a screen name. The postcards have pictures of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, not the cartoons but the people in costumes, who never talk and always wave really enthusiastically. When Zito writes him back, on girly modern art postcards with messy lines and bright colors, Harden has scrawled ‘Hey,’ in the corner and then under it, ‘-Rich,’ just in case Hudson didn’t know.
Fucking Mulder still calls him every other day or so. Hudson usually goes outside, paces around the driveway and sits on the beater car he’s intending to fix up, and one night Hudson says, “This doesn’t feel much like moving on.”
Mulder breathes against the phone receiver for a little while, and Hudson can see him with one shoulder pulled up and his eye scrunched shut. “It’s not like this was our idea.”
Hudson’s thinking about how it’s different down here, different in its heart and bones, in a million incremental ways, and he’s scared of whiplash, or something like that. He needs to be eased in, okay? He can’t just give it up entirely.
It’s okay, because Mulder’s like that too. Hudson’s pretty sure Zito’s in the club, and Harden, and Chavez, because every time he mails a postcard to Phoenix, he gets one back two days later, and he knows Mulder and Chavez still talk on the phone a lot, because Mulder knew about Chavez’s wife being pregnant two weeks before everyone else.
It’s the revolutionary bicoastal support group, doing what they can to make the season match-ups between the three of them truly epic.
*
-Scottsdale-
Bobby Crosby is living in Mulder’s house, the desert house with red clay shingles and rounded doorways. Mulder bought the place back in the winter after 2002, and it’s his most permanent address. There’s actual furniture in it and everything.
So now Mulder’s living in a hotel on the Atlantic Coast and Crosby is subletting the Scottsdale house at special farewell prices. Whenever they’re hanging out over there, Zito invariably gets giddily depressed, and usually ends up whaling on something with one of Mulder’s old nine irons.
They spend a lot of time on the back patio. They find Mulder’s pedometer in a kitchen drawer, and play catch with it until it gets up to a half a mile. Zito will sleep on the couch (as he does) and when he goes to drink his coffee on the patio in the morning (as he also does), the little pedometer will be at the bottom of the pool, along with the baseball that got away from them two days ago.
Of course, there’s no water in the pool, because Crosby’s lazy like that, so the pedometer’s batteries will be popped out and the red plastic casing will be splintered. The baseball will be scuffed, but fundamentally unharmed.
There’s this bizarre thing on the back patio where you don’t get any cell phone reception unless you stand on a chair. It’s real fucking odd. Some points of the night, three or four of them will all be on the phone at the same time, stuck up above the rest like statues.
One night, Crosby’s up on a chair and he’s saying, “Your fucking water heater is being a cocksucker again, by the way.”
Zito, passing by down by Crosby’s knees, starts giggling idiotically. Crosby looks at him and pokes him in the side with his foot.
“Zito misses you,” Crosby says into the phone, grinning down at him.
Zito drops his beer and contemplates briefly how much trouble he would be in if he took out their starting shortstop’s legs while he was standing on a chair.
*
-Interstate 91-
Exactly halfway between Orlando and the coast, there is a tiny little town called Yeehaw Junction. (Seriously.) That’s where Mulder and Hudson meet up three days before they both leave Florida, just because the place exists and must be acknowledged.
They get dinner at Sonic and park in a church’s lot this time, the windows lit up red and blue, front doors open, either choir practice or a twelve-step meeting or some complicated fusion of the two.
“I just can’t get settled,” Mulder says, chasing whiskey from a flask with flat soda sucked through a straw.
Hudson punches at the car radio and says unconcernedly, “Your arm still works. You can still throw.”
Mulder balls up his trash with the paper bag, and chucks it out the window. “Think there’s more to it than that,” he mutters.
Hudson laughs and slumps back. “You’ve been talking to the guys again, haven’t you.”
Shrugging, Mulder watches Hudson out of the corner of his eye, Hudson’s face tilted up.
“They’ve been talking to me, anyway,” Mulder answers. “The world’s in pretty bad shape for all of them right now.”
Hudson smirks. “Good thing that’s not us,” he says with his lip pulled up on the side.
Mulder thinks about how there’s no one within two thousand miles that he knows as well as he knows Tim Hudson. That is an intensely strange thing to think, but a little while later, Mulder puts his hand on the back of Hudson’s neck, his thumb resting on Hudson’s Adam’s apple. He clears his throat expectantly, widens his eyes.
Hudson can take the risk, Hudson’s got balls to burn. And Mulder can just be here next to him and look good in contrast. Or something.
But Hudson snorts, rolling his eyes.
“Goddamn, your timing is unfuckingbelievable.”
Mulder blinks and Hudson pushes him away lightly, his hand on Mulder’s chest and staying there even after Mulder’s hand slipped off.
The drive back down the turnpike is going to be awful.
*
-Loop 101 North -
In the second guest bedroom of the Scottsdale house, up the stairs and at the end of the hall, in the big walk-in closet, there are three cardboard boxes stacked on top of each other. Zito knows them by sight and reputation-the media boxes.
Mulder’s mom, who lives, quite literally, six blocks away, and still stops by sometimes bringing, like, rice krispy squares and stuff, anyway, she used to collect articles about them. All three of them, just because at the beginning you couldn’t find an article about Mark Mulder that wasn’t equally about Barry Zito and Tim Hudson. Just like now.
So now there are these boxes with clippings and pages torn out of magazines at the dentist’s office. They stop abruptly towards the end of 2003, when Mulder’s mom’s arthritis got real bad and she couldn’t so much deal with scissors.
They used to play this drinking game, where they would haul the media boxes down to the living room or wherever and go through them. They all had words; every time an article called Zito ‘artistic’ or ‘tousled,’ every time they wrote ‘compact’ or ‘intense’ about Hudson (bonus if they said ‘grit’), every time Mulder was ‘confident’ or ‘laidback’ (an assessment with which Zito took issue)-they had to take a drink.
They got hammered pretty quick, doing that.
Zito’s up there one night, sitting on the floor of the closet thumbing though the boxes. He came up to use the bathroom, because Eric Byrnes and Nick Swisher commandeered the downstairs one to make water balloons. It’s perfectly quiet, and Zito’s got his beer with the label ripped off right next to him.
The articles are in chronological order, because Mulder’s a fucking sociopath. By the time Zito gets to the Sports Illustrated piece, he’s crossed over into being staggeringly drunk, and he passes out on the floor of the closet, dreaming with total predictability about Mulder’s arm curled around Zito’s head and Hudson hugging him awkwardly from the side.
Everything, so far. It’s like these air-pockets in his bloodstream, going through his days down here with all this stuff missing. He just wakes up every morning and pitches like nothing’s changed. He rehearses his apologies, it might take me a little while to adjust, it’s nothing I can’t beat, and all the while the two-seam is rising like a bottle rocket, eye-high for a swinging third strike.
Rich Harden wakes him up about a day later. He says Zito’s name and touches his face, but not in a creepy way, just in a pokey, hey-wake-up sorta way.
Zito opens his eyes and Harden calls out the open door, “Bobby! Found him!”
From downstairs, Crosby yells back, “Kick the motherfucker out!”
Zito blinks at Harden, and the kid smiles, sitting down next to him. “We were looking everywhere for you,” he says quietly.
“I’ve just been here,” Zito says, feeling sick and halfway gone.
Harden nods, and asks after a moment, fingering a page from the San Jose Mercury News, “You do miss him, don’t you?”
Zito pushes himself into a sitting position against the wall. There are magazine pages slipping under his hands, his fingers black with newsprint. “I miss them both.” He shrugs. “Doesn’t matter.”
Harden slides his fingers across the clippings and alights on Zito’s knee. His hand is shaking a little bit; Zito can feel it. “Well,” Harden says, his eyes down and a fierce blush creeping up his neck.
Zito leans his head back against the wall, sighing. The pressure of Harden’s hand increases, and none of this can be misconstrued. Zito thinks that he should have just moved in here when Mulder did. This coulda been his bedroom, his closet. Everything in here could be totally familiar.
Harden smooths his hand over Zito’s kneecap and Zito is as tired as he’s ever been, and he says, “You really don’t want to do this.”
He opens his eyes and Harden’s shaking his head, a frightened expression on his face. “I really do,” he answers solemnly, and lifts his eyes, lifts his hand, leans in with true intention, and right then is when Barry Zito’s sixth major league season begins.
THE END
so i'm working on a show again? like, okay, back in da day, i used to work as a light designer and master electrician for various theatre companies around the peninsula, and it was my one marketable skill. because, you know, the filth, it does not pay so well. i work pro boner for y'all (hee. i continue to have the maturity level of a thirteen year old boy, but whatever).
anyway, i got to school and for whatever reason didn't get involved with any of the theatre groups here. well, once my friend who worked at the kennedy center was all, dude! emergency! because all their circuits had blown and they were just kids who didn't understand that all you gotta do is flip the switches on the fire box, i mean, c'mon now! this is basic.
and then in london, one of the kids i met was an artist, doing a whole term working with light, and she was trying to make these flameless candles with LEDs, but couldn't get the things to light up as one, so i got to fiddle with the whole set up for like two hours, and it was awesome.
all this by way of saying that i've had all of two chances to bust out the old skool skillz in the past four years, but now i'm back baby.
and man, this blackbox we're running the show in, they got like nineteen fresnels, two parkhans and four scoops for house lights, they got a square grid and i don't know how they're set for double-circuited dimmers on the electrics, they've got a beat berkey board that i get to learn how to run, they've got barn doors but apparently don't use them (which is, like, dwah?), and man, i'm gonna roll this shit. i'm so excited. so excited i talk in jargon just because it amuses me!
it's all very complicated. washington dc won't for the love of god commit itself to a season, we're caught in between here. it'll be all right.
This is a story containing much less denial. I mean, for my part, of course. But nobody minds if I keep writing stories based in the past, right? It wasn’t my fucking idea to tear apart the cast of characters, yo. Anyway, that’s not this story. This story deals with the trades! Kinda!
And it’s entirely the fault of this, which, like, okay, john darnielle, you already have my heart held hostage, you really had to write about ‘sad young cardinals’? jaysus. I just can’t catch a break.
p.s. Oh Danny Haren. My oh my danny haren. Just when you thought the team couldn’t look any more like a bunch of potheads, meet Danny Haren. What are we gonna do with you?
Long Distance Drunk
By Candle Beck
-Florida-
On the wrong coast, Mark Mulder and Tim Hudson call each other pretty much every night. This kind of spring training is new and unexpected, and there was a theory that at least they’d both be in the same place, at least for a couple of weeks. But they’re more than two hours apart, and it’s hard to find time for the drive.
The towns all have stupid names. The Braves’ spring training center is in Kissimmee, which is where all the Disney employees live. The place is crawling with people who have shiny white teeth and tan faces, little kids in AYSO soccer uniforms everywhere on Saturday afternoons. Picket fences, honest to god, and grass so closely cut it looks plastic. It’s fucking eerie.
The Cardinals have their ballpark in Jupiter, and Mulder figures, yeah, sure, a whole different planet, that makes sense. Jupiter’s out by the ocean, which is why Hudson comes down one weekend when he’s got an off-day, because he misses playing golf with a view of the water.
After eighteen holes, they get some beers and Mulder takes Hudson to the back access roads of the little airport, finding a spot at the end of a runway, cyclone fences and razor wire. They lean against the car and watch the planes lift off directly over their heads, salt and diesel in the air, and they talk about a lot of things.
At one in the morning, Mulder drops Hudson off at his car and says, “safe drive, man,” while yawning, and Hudson waves out the window as he pulls onto the road. Mulder goes back to his hotel room and jerks off thinking about one of Barry Zito’s ex-girlfriends. Then he goes to sleep.
*
-Arizona-
Rich Harden stays close to Zito when they first get down there.
It’s interestingly nostalgic; he’s acting like a rookie. Like this is his first time at camp. He practically pitches a fit when Kotsay casually drops his bag in front of the locker next to Zito’s, snapping, “I already called dibs, man,” while kicking Kotsay’s stuff away.
They eat sandwiches in the lounge together and go out to watch each other take their sessions. Chavez makes a couple of snide remarks about how maybe Richie can teach Zito how to be an ace, and Zito trips him in the dugout.
Danny Haren watches everything from the corner of the room with huge eyes, his mouth pressed all small and his hair covering his ears. He squeezes his glove compulsively between his hands, tightens the laces a hundred times a day. They invite him out for drinks and stuff after, team-bonding, and he nurses one beer for two hours, then politely excuses himself and goes back to the hotel. Nobody knows quite what to make of him, but it’s cool to have a guy on staff again who can throw a cutter.
People ask Zito a lot of questions, and he seems to be giving interviews like it’s written into his contract. Which it might well be, for all he knows. The irony of being on his own out here is that their names are still always in his articles. That’s something that will probably never change.
Real quick: Barry Zito has never, not once in his life, been a leader.
He only ever tries to call Mulder when Chavez is in the room, because Chavez loves nothing quite so much as bitching drunkenly at Mulder over the phone, like when Chavez first moved out, and it’s weird how much this time is like that time.
When Zito finally gets the phone away from him, he says, “man, what the fuck, how do you do this.”
Mulder says, “you just do,” and then starts talking about a couple of the guys on his new team who live in Florida year-round and surf, the difference in the ocean, and Zito is watching Rich Harden and Danny Haren, sitting on the floor in front of the couch playing cards on the coffee table.
Danny Haren is taller than Zito and Rich Harden is a better pitcher. In a few months, this is all going to feel remarkably familiar.
*
-Jupiter-
It takes Mulder a while to get used to the weird chill humidity of coastal Florida. Everything’s very green, and it’s strange but the rainy season is actually in the middle of the summer. Every pitch Mulder throws seems to get caught up in the air, paused and muffled.
It’s a very different clubhouse. They don’t have an arcade game or anything. Nobody actually eats the candy bars in the rack, just the energy bars. They all shake his hand and clap him on the shoulder, buy him a drink and tell him good to have you, and Mulder never knew you could be this important and be brand new at the same time. You had to earn it in Oakland.
Between pay-per-view porn and instant messaging back and forth to the other side of the country, Mulder’s nights are pretty complicated. He makes the drive to Orlando two weeks in, a week and a half since he last saw Hudson, and on I-91 the road is fanned by bent green branches.
They eat take-out Mexican for dinner, sitting in the bleachers at a deserted Little League field, and Hudson says, “We’re getting real good at sneaking off, don’t you think?”
Mulder smirks and steals some of Hudson’s Coke (“because it’s hometown, now”), and sleeps on the floor of Hudson’s living room, bath towels covering him (“because I don’t exactly got my linen closet set up yet, okay?”), and Hudson kicking him awake in the morning and saying, “Get out. I gotta go to the ballpark.”
Weird, hearing Hudson say that.
*
-Disneyworld-
This town is the most unsettling place in the motherfucking country. Orlando is just a few strip malls away. Hudson only ever sees out-of-state license plates, including his own, which is a Georgia plate. He can’t imagine what it’s going to be like in the overrun summer, the tourist season.
He gets along real well with the other guys, though. They’re all, like. Older than he is. He’s suddenly, after close to a decade, a little brother again. They’ve got stuff to actually teach him, this sorta grip and that sorta arm angle, and new pitches seem to be hiding in his hands these days, just waiting to make an appearance.
His family’s already in Atlanta, because it was agreed that the girls should be settled in as soon as possible and also Kim’s seven months pregnant. Hudson’s got this cheap condo on the north side of town, right up against the theme park. He can hear the monorail go by at night.
He sends Zito postcards, because Hudson doesn’t even have a computer, much less a screen name. The postcards have pictures of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, not the cartoons but the people in costumes, who never talk and always wave really enthusiastically. When Zito writes him back, on girly modern art postcards with messy lines and bright colors, Harden has scrawled ‘Hey,’ in the corner and then under it, ‘-Rich,’ just in case Hudson didn’t know.
Fucking Mulder still calls him every other day or so. Hudson usually goes outside, paces around the driveway and sits on the beater car he’s intending to fix up, and one night Hudson says, “This doesn’t feel much like moving on.”
Mulder breathes against the phone receiver for a little while, and Hudson can see him with one shoulder pulled up and his eye scrunched shut. “It’s not like this was our idea.”
Hudson’s thinking about how it’s different down here, different in its heart and bones, in a million incremental ways, and he’s scared of whiplash, or something like that. He needs to be eased in, okay? He can’t just give it up entirely.
It’s okay, because Mulder’s like that too. Hudson’s pretty sure Zito’s in the club, and Harden, and Chavez, because every time he mails a postcard to Phoenix, he gets one back two days later, and he knows Mulder and Chavez still talk on the phone a lot, because Mulder knew about Chavez’s wife being pregnant two weeks before everyone else.
It’s the revolutionary bicoastal support group, doing what they can to make the season match-ups between the three of them truly epic.
*
-Scottsdale-
Bobby Crosby is living in Mulder’s house, the desert house with red clay shingles and rounded doorways. Mulder bought the place back in the winter after 2002, and it’s his most permanent address. There’s actual furniture in it and everything.
So now Mulder’s living in a hotel on the Atlantic Coast and Crosby is subletting the Scottsdale house at special farewell prices. Whenever they’re hanging out over there, Zito invariably gets giddily depressed, and usually ends up whaling on something with one of Mulder’s old nine irons.
They spend a lot of time on the back patio. They find Mulder’s pedometer in a kitchen drawer, and play catch with it until it gets up to a half a mile. Zito will sleep on the couch (as he does) and when he goes to drink his coffee on the patio in the morning (as he also does), the little pedometer will be at the bottom of the pool, along with the baseball that got away from them two days ago.
Of course, there’s no water in the pool, because Crosby’s lazy like that, so the pedometer’s batteries will be popped out and the red plastic casing will be splintered. The baseball will be scuffed, but fundamentally unharmed.
There’s this bizarre thing on the back patio where you don’t get any cell phone reception unless you stand on a chair. It’s real fucking odd. Some points of the night, three or four of them will all be on the phone at the same time, stuck up above the rest like statues.
One night, Crosby’s up on a chair and he’s saying, “Your fucking water heater is being a cocksucker again, by the way.”
Zito, passing by down by Crosby’s knees, starts giggling idiotically. Crosby looks at him and pokes him in the side with his foot.
“Zito misses you,” Crosby says into the phone, grinning down at him.
Zito drops his beer and contemplates briefly how much trouble he would be in if he took out their starting shortstop’s legs while he was standing on a chair.
*
-Interstate 91-
Exactly halfway between Orlando and the coast, there is a tiny little town called Yeehaw Junction. (Seriously.) That’s where Mulder and Hudson meet up three days before they both leave Florida, just because the place exists and must be acknowledged.
They get dinner at Sonic and park in a church’s lot this time, the windows lit up red and blue, front doors open, either choir practice or a twelve-step meeting or some complicated fusion of the two.
“I just can’t get settled,” Mulder says, chasing whiskey from a flask with flat soda sucked through a straw.
Hudson punches at the car radio and says unconcernedly, “Your arm still works. You can still throw.”
Mulder balls up his trash with the paper bag, and chucks it out the window. “Think there’s more to it than that,” he mutters.
Hudson laughs and slumps back. “You’ve been talking to the guys again, haven’t you.”
Shrugging, Mulder watches Hudson out of the corner of his eye, Hudson’s face tilted up.
“They’ve been talking to me, anyway,” Mulder answers. “The world’s in pretty bad shape for all of them right now.”
Hudson smirks. “Good thing that’s not us,” he says with his lip pulled up on the side.
Mulder thinks about how there’s no one within two thousand miles that he knows as well as he knows Tim Hudson. That is an intensely strange thing to think, but a little while later, Mulder puts his hand on the back of Hudson’s neck, his thumb resting on Hudson’s Adam’s apple. He clears his throat expectantly, widens his eyes.
Hudson can take the risk, Hudson’s got balls to burn. And Mulder can just be here next to him and look good in contrast. Or something.
But Hudson snorts, rolling his eyes.
“Goddamn, your timing is unfuckingbelievable.”
Mulder blinks and Hudson pushes him away lightly, his hand on Mulder’s chest and staying there even after Mulder’s hand slipped off.
The drive back down the turnpike is going to be awful.
*
-Loop 101 North -
In the second guest bedroom of the Scottsdale house, up the stairs and at the end of the hall, in the big walk-in closet, there are three cardboard boxes stacked on top of each other. Zito knows them by sight and reputation-the media boxes.
Mulder’s mom, who lives, quite literally, six blocks away, and still stops by sometimes bringing, like, rice krispy squares and stuff, anyway, she used to collect articles about them. All three of them, just because at the beginning you couldn’t find an article about Mark Mulder that wasn’t equally about Barry Zito and Tim Hudson. Just like now.
So now there are these boxes with clippings and pages torn out of magazines at the dentist’s office. They stop abruptly towards the end of 2003, when Mulder’s mom’s arthritis got real bad and she couldn’t so much deal with scissors.
They used to play this drinking game, where they would haul the media boxes down to the living room or wherever and go through them. They all had words; every time an article called Zito ‘artistic’ or ‘tousled,’ every time they wrote ‘compact’ or ‘intense’ about Hudson (bonus if they said ‘grit’), every time Mulder was ‘confident’ or ‘laidback’ (an assessment with which Zito took issue)-they had to take a drink.
They got hammered pretty quick, doing that.
Zito’s up there one night, sitting on the floor of the closet thumbing though the boxes. He came up to use the bathroom, because Eric Byrnes and Nick Swisher commandeered the downstairs one to make water balloons. It’s perfectly quiet, and Zito’s got his beer with the label ripped off right next to him.
The articles are in chronological order, because Mulder’s a fucking sociopath. By the time Zito gets to the Sports Illustrated piece, he’s crossed over into being staggeringly drunk, and he passes out on the floor of the closet, dreaming with total predictability about Mulder’s arm curled around Zito’s head and Hudson hugging him awkwardly from the side.
Everything, so far. It’s like these air-pockets in his bloodstream, going through his days down here with all this stuff missing. He just wakes up every morning and pitches like nothing’s changed. He rehearses his apologies, it might take me a little while to adjust, it’s nothing I can’t beat, and all the while the two-seam is rising like a bottle rocket, eye-high for a swinging third strike.
Rich Harden wakes him up about a day later. He says Zito’s name and touches his face, but not in a creepy way, just in a pokey, hey-wake-up sorta way.
Zito opens his eyes and Harden calls out the open door, “Bobby! Found him!”
From downstairs, Crosby yells back, “Kick the motherfucker out!”
Zito blinks at Harden, and the kid smiles, sitting down next to him. “We were looking everywhere for you,” he says quietly.
“I’ve just been here,” Zito says, feeling sick and halfway gone.
Harden nods, and asks after a moment, fingering a page from the San Jose Mercury News, “You do miss him, don’t you?”
Zito pushes himself into a sitting position against the wall. There are magazine pages slipping under his hands, his fingers black with newsprint. “I miss them both.” He shrugs. “Doesn’t matter.”
Harden slides his fingers across the clippings and alights on Zito’s knee. His hand is shaking a little bit; Zito can feel it. “Well,” Harden says, his eyes down and a fierce blush creeping up his neck.
Zito leans his head back against the wall, sighing. The pressure of Harden’s hand increases, and none of this can be misconstrued. Zito thinks that he should have just moved in here when Mulder did. This coulda been his bedroom, his closet. Everything in here could be totally familiar.
Harden smooths his hand over Zito’s kneecap and Zito is as tired as he’s ever been, and he says, “You really don’t want to do this.”
He opens his eyes and Harden’s shaking his head, a frightened expression on his face. “I really do,” he answers solemnly, and lifts his eyes, lifts his hand, leans in with true intention, and right then is when Barry Zito’s sixth major league season begins.
THE END