supposed to contain lightning
now then, the question we've been asking for months and months: where the hell did rich harden go?
Disafuckingppear
By Candle Beck
This is what happened.
You come to in the shotgun seat. There’s a cut on your cheek and tacky blood on your fingers. Richie is visible out the windshield, sitting on the curb. It doesn’t say much that you don’t know where you are.
Maybe two in the morning. Full cat’s eye moon. Rich Harden on the sidewalk, but the streetlights smear white glare in long streaks on the dirty windshield, and you can only see half of him. You’re only wearing one shoe.
Head rolling, stomach fist-clenching, you stagger out of the car like a hostage freed after years of captivity. Cling to the door and watch Rich turn to face you, strafed and gutted, sticky-mouthed.
He calls you Danny and grows as he approaches. You are, it’s okay. Harden hasn’t pitched in over a month. You have dreamt of kindling billboards and an abandoned parking lot pounded and cracked by kids playing street hockey, skinny gold-haired kids, eyed like something created through catalyst and alloys.
Grin, close your eyes. Separated by the open car door, Harden’s belt buckle clinking on the metal. Can’t believe it.
Harden spits in a napkin and cleans the blood off your face. He tells you to stay fucking put, and walks down the dark street with his hands in his pockets, heading towards red neon. You hold your head in your hands, thuck-whap of pulse in your temples. Hungover or drunk still, flip a goddamn coin. Harden comes back with band-aids. His shadow is taller than the caged trees.
You are probably lost.
Drained, you find your missing shoe under the seat, the laces snapped. Harden drives you back to the city, and you make him pull over on the bridge. Blinking yellow hazards and cars flooding so fast the air screams, and you’re getting sick over the rail, absolutely fucking destroyed by the skyline at this height.
Harden waits for you, white shirt that glows evil in the million passing headlights.
The water’s black. The world is sixty miles an hour, two hundred feet straight down. You’ve fucked up something fierce.
Take him out and get him drunk. Advice from one Barry Zito to you, one Daniel John Haren. Maybe a direct order, subtle if so, Zito’s hand on your shoulder. Richie a tough little shell, fissured tight and welded at the seams. Unable to pitch. Balefully still traveling with the team, asking Crosby syrup-sweet, how’s your back feeling today, man? Asking Eric Chavez, does it still hurt to swing?
Harden’s a fucking menace.
You are gonna fix him. Zito said so.
Took him out and got him drunk, except somewhere things got switched around, equilibrium shot, hyperventilating. Licking the blood on your fingers and tasting whiskey.
Harden gets you back to your apartment. His hand slides into your front pocket, and you breathe out, whoa, but he’s only after your keys. He deposits you in the hallway like a pair of shoes, asks if he should stay, or will you be okay?
You will not be okay. It is imperative that he stays.
Aware that Harden is only here with you because Street can’t hold his liquor. Not really caring. Clutching at Harden’s shirt as if sobriety lives quick under his skin, and you will get there someday.
He drinks water from the sink in a manner that verges on obscene, cupped hands, sluicing down his forearms and wetting his shirt in elongated patches where his stomach rests against the counter. You are staring, all the lights off.
Couch, then, legs not working. Along with your heart and lungs and hands, taken over by remote forces. Guided by strings. Harden isn’t drunk, red-flushed neck, freakish blue eyes, colored like a superhero. Snatched out of public view before you could do anything stupid, you finger the band-aid on your cheek, dried blood stiff in your hair.
Harden’s head lolls back. He talks about home in the backstage dark. Tells you about the parking lot where he used to play hockey in the summertime, and you tell him that you’ve heard this before, but he swears you haven’t.
Not the strangest thing that’s happened to you tonight, so you put your arm around him and fall asleep, you straight tailspin and yeah. Dream of a field, gray-white, sunshiney ice glittering like broken glass. A gnarled tree split by lightning, black charred right down the heart, laddered boards hammered into the trunk, a mossy rope hanging dead in the winter.
Several days from now, Harden will tell you about this too, unfinished tree house, splinters dug out with a pocketknife. Nothing surprises you these days. Is it possible, has he gotten in you that far? Cold sweat, you wake up and he’s gone.
Half-drunk already by the time you get to the ballpark, flayed by the sun, Harden is nowhere to be seen and no one misses him. Rustle and hum of the clubhouse, playing cards cartwheeling, slick under your feet.
Before you, Zito is satyrlike, wavering. There are two of him, now three, now fusing back together and it’s amazing. You tell him it worked, you got him drunk and you got him to forget about spending the season on the disabled list, all blue and legless under the wrecked sky.
This is a lie, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Zito doesn’t know what you’re talking about, he asks, who?
Richie. Richie.
Zito shakes his head, small-mouthed, and heat shimmers in his eyes. Oh yeah right. Good.
You are confused, also drunk, also tired. Early in the afternoon, the season still fresh as milk, rotating through fifth pitchers and looking for signs and impressions, trying to remember.
The day is out. Harden reappears in the sixth inning. He’s limping, his back like steel.
You met him better than a year ago and were amazed by the way he lit up dark corners, paint on the black, dirty hair in your eyes. Rich Harden, smirking and squaring his shoulders and speaking in broken French when he was drunk. You, new guy, attaching quickly to the weirdest guy on the team so that you would look better by comparison.
Things have changed. You make Zito look like a fucking boy scout this time around, and you’re slammed during a day game, watching Harden vanish neatly through walls. The guys don’t notice, but you do, because you’re special.
You’re special as hell, just like your mom always said, you’ve got genius sight and a real good splitter. You dream of Harden’s memories. You’ve seen him on the bridge at night, in the sick sky-colored oil.
Because of this, you follow him home. Smell of honeysuckle and burnt rubber, green leaves like money carpeting the road, and before you get to the driveway, you can see Harden’s reflection in the big front window, coming up the walk. You’re ten seconds behind.
He stops you in the hallway, brick wall in blue jeans and ashen shirt. Asking, are you drunk, Danny?
Always.
Rolling his eyes like dice, Harden wants to know what you’re doing here. You are uninvited and mostly unwelcome. It doesn’t matter. You don’t answer.
He’s a terrible influence, and offers you a beer. You grin so big you can taste your own teeth. It’s not quite five o’clock in the afternoon and you want to talk about anything except baseball.
Harden obliges, injured in a way that does not show, sometimes only there because you can see his shadow on the wall. He comes and goes and you will stay drunk for the rest of your life if it means his presence will continue to surprise you like this.
You get scared when the sun goes down. Dust like hands builds on the walls. Harden, beside you on the couch, is so still that you expect to find bolts in his arms. Mad scientist doctors have been taking him apart, falsely restoring him, for months now, and ice scars have remapped his skin. Frayed black T-shirt tugged up over his hip, sickle bone and david line.
Fuck.
Harden looks over at you, coma-eyed. And, you all right, man?
Never!
He sorta smiles, twisting his fingers on the neck of the bottle. You are prone to speaking without thought and seeing symbolism in everything. This has nothing to do with the beer, the four-stage haze in your mind.
You want to lick his shoulder.
It starts to seem like a good idea, too, batman night sky outside, his hand on the bottle murdering you. Press him right down like a stamp, push his legs apart with your knee. The next time he smirks at you, you’ll be ready.
You get another beer, ship-walking with one hand steady on the wall. You come back and he’s gone. Again.
This is getting irritating.
Stumbling, treasonous feet, judas floor, you navigate through the house. Big as fuck, this house, Blanton’s dogs howling in the backyard. You don’t know where everyone else is. And Harden too, he’s misplaced you. You feel dislocated in every sense of the word, though, truly, you only know one sense of the word.
Shotgunning the beer, you kick Harden’s bedroom door, shatter the empty bottle on the doorjamb and leave the pieces as a minefield in the hallway. Grit your teeth, push your hair back, go into his room and climb into his bed.
You explain to the polaroids on his wall, the sticky pillow, this is war.
Asleep, the white dream comes back once more. Tattered billboard. Veined parking lot, blown sneakers hidden like snakes in the snow. Matchstick kid high in the arms of the damaged tree, narrow-faced and dirty-nailed, looking down at you so that you can see that the only familiar thing about him is his eyes.
Richie jams his fist into your ribs.
Jesus Christ.
He’s demon-bright. Drags his fingers across your face, warpaint blood wet on your cheek. Choked furious, was that supposed to be fucking funny?
Kneeling over you, stripping you of breath and good will, Harden shows you his hand, new line of fortune on his palm.
Lucky I didn’t step on it, Danny, you sick fuck.
You push up on an elbow, lick his wrist where the blood rivers slow and blue. It’s not deep, he’ll be fine. It’s not even his pitching hand. He goes motionless, counterweight because you are trembling so hard, your teeth burring. The bruise you suck into his wrist goes on so easy.
You ask him, where’d you go?
And he’s shaking his head, I was right there the whole time.
Not at all difficult, then, to open his jeans with the clink of metal buttons and the rick of zipper. With him kneeling above you and you on your elbow. The angle is imperfect.
You get your hand in there, though, two three four fingers under his shorts as white as wings. He kinda gasps, his eyes and mouth half-open the exact same distance. He shuffles his knees apart for better balance, instinct alone. You ask, done this before?
And he nods, muttering about one of the other pitchers.
But that’s not what you meant. You tighten your grip, his pulse in the crook of your thumb, hard now and august hot. Sweat on the back of your neck, leaning forward to pull your tongue across the raw sling of his hip, by all means ideal for arrows, and you say, no no, you and me, have we?
Harden looks down at you, past your hand and his dick, your face sideways bent near his stomach. He smirks.
Think you’d remember if we had, man.
You lick him again, moving your hand and feeling your knuckles brush on your chin. He grips your shoulder and your shirt is ruined. Twice in as many days, you will end the night with blood in your hair.
You’ve spent a year and a half almost constantly drunk, and he has spent much of the same hurt beyond repair. There’s no telling what the two of you have forgotten.
Fucking around with him, your mouth full, your hands ladder-climbing, potential for cold in the breaks and tides of his body, you feel erased. But maybe that’s him, because you turn your eyes high upwards like trespass in the purest form, and Harden’s face is paper-thin.
He collapses next to you, panting. Wringing out the night like sweat-drenched clothes, you unbuckle your belt and toss it across the room. Jerk your jeans off your hips and take his hand, press it down and in and okay.
Your back arches. You can see the cracks in the foundation. The speed of the land as it runs into the horizon.
Harden gets up to wash his hands. He shucks his jeans and pulls the sheets off the bed, tumbling you into the headboard. Crawls back in smelling greenly of soap, crushing pillows, biting your shoulder.
Go to sleep, Danny.
You hook your arm across his stomach. He pushes you away. And then you’re asleep.
In the dream, you are at last corporeal. Cereal-crunch of ice under your feet. Burn of the wind on your face. Near the tree, there is a baseball glove buried in the snow, leather soaked to black, crackling in your hands. The kid darts up out of nowhere with candy blue eyes, snatching the glove away from you and shouting, don’t touch it, it’s mine.
Waking up next to Rich Harden bears a disquieting resemblance to a car crash at a hundred miles an hour. Your two lowermost ribs are knifing at your skin. He’s turned away from you, on his side with his spine revealed like a passageway.
It’s too early and you’re kinda pissed off by the residue of your dream, that punk kid mouthing off, so you roll over, match his back with your own, and fall back asleep.
Second time you wake up, all that’s left of Richie is his dent in the bare mattress.
You find your way to the kitchen, sniffing the air. Street is there, hunched over the newspaper like he’s been shot. His wrists dig into the edge of the table. Uncertainty and suspicion on his face when he looks up at you, blackhole mouth.
What’re you doing here?
You’re in the freezer, bottle of vodka rain-gray behind the ice trays. You grin at him over your shoulder.
Fucking your roommate.
Street’s expression blanks. He ducks, hard-swallows. Yeah that’s real funny, Dan.
Scowling, Street has never liked you. Now you’re responsible for all the bad things. You pour a considerable amount of vodka into a Flintstone jelly glass. Add some Sunny Delight and that’s breakfast.
You ask Street, where’d he go, anyway?
Street blinks, having little connection with sin.
Who?
You don’t bother to elaborate. Five minutes after you’ve woken up, and you’re tore up. The weather sweats the liquor out as fast as you can drink it, passing the day on the patio, scoring the skin off your back.
There’s a game somewhere in there, kryptonite grass and brown dirt. You corner Harden down in the tunnels, your bones unsettlingly fluid, your mind tin-can rattling. Why’d you leave, you try to say, but you know he will only deny it. Instead, you kiss him for the first time, lacking direction and a name for the thing inside you.
He puts his hand on your chest and you feel it sink right the fuck through, fingertips swimming in your blood. Hits you like a static charge, his calluses blind on your heart. You pull him away in a leather-dusty room, keep him against the door so that no one can come in. Again, again, and you try to hold him still, your mouth on the underside of his jaw like drinking straight from the faucet. He is inconsistent, swollen eyes, scabbed palm, never where you remember leaving him.
It’s getaway day.
Harden sleeps in the back of the plane and the back of the bus to the airport, and you’re not paying attention to him. You’re asleep yourself, actually, your life sternum-split between the endless drunk and the dreams like fogged mirrors.
The jealous kid clutches his glove to his stomach. Winter sunlight the color of champagne fizzes through the black tree branches, weird splinter shadows on the kid’s arms and face. You’re knee-deep in snow, already having lost three of your toes to frostbite. You glare at him, obnoxious little jerk, and ask with a sneer, you play?
Zito drags you awake by your hair, opening your eyes to the silent bus windows. It’s well past midnight and the hotel shoots up like heroin into the sky. C’mon, man, c’mon.
You stumble to your feet, heavy ache in your back. You’re shaking, hands opening and closing on air. There’s a clatter of miniature bottles in your coat pocket, but you can’t do anything in front of the coaches.
The elevator robs you of what little equilibrium you have left. Zito half-carries you to your room, dropping you like a bad habit just inside the door. People are always doing this to you. You scramble for your pocket, no difference between whiskey or vodka or bourbon this late at night. Zito watches you, stretch of your throat like an execution.
Living in a fucking afterschool special, you know.
Baring your teeth, you tell him to get the fuck out. He flicks the keycard at you and does what you say. The keycard slides down your chest and fits into your shirt pocket and you are astounded by that.
No telling how much later, when bangbang on the door shocks you back up. You’re still on the floor. Your pockets are full again, empty bottles this time.
Richie’s standing there looking like fucking vengeance, his arm high with his hand on the doorjamb. His mouth a suture scar.
Fucking left me on the fucking bus.
You try to remember, did you do that? Can you really be blamed? Harden had been in the back, flat-haired against the window. You hadn’t taken the empty seat next to him because the drive was short and you were gonna sleep anyway. He was already asleep, dead broken with the sodium lights all the way over him.
Smiling, touching his throat, you shrug. He’s rabid, jerk of your wrist in his hand so that you might join him on the disabled list and then he will like you better. He tells you he woke up in the fucking parking garage and that’s a terrible thing, the idea of it, miles of stone and popping the emergency door off the back of the bus because the front wouldn’t open without the engine running.
Having been buried alive, Harden walks you back until your legs hit the bed and you fold. You look up at him, hey, hey.
You can feel this inside you and it makes you small, like a thumbprint on a wall-sized pane of glass. Harden is scarecrow skinny, hips like thorns, as if he’s spent more energy in recovery than he ever spent actually pitching.
He’s angrier that you forgot about him than he was about you putting glass in front of his door. But you weren’t the only one, there are twenty-three other men on this punchless team and none of them can even remember Rich’s name these days. So you shrug out of your coat. Unbutton your shirt, unbuckle your belt and open your pants, give him this look like, anything you want is yours.
You’re on your back on the bed so quickly that part of you gets left in the air above Harden’s head.
He bites and pulls hair, dirty fighting, but you’ve got half a foot on him, so you guess it’s okay. You clutch at his side, gouging your thumb into the muscle that has kept him out of the rotation all goddamn year. You’re gonna make him feel it until morning, or forever, maybe, if you can get your wind back.
Cursing at you, and you are downbound. Laughing with your hand on him, the scattershot of his teeth on your chin and your chest, seeing his ribs like highway dividers. It’s near to fall and the best you can hope is that he’ll come back and pitch out of the bullpen for the rest of the year.
He shudders and flickers out of sight for a moment. Your hands are empty, too drunk to realize what this means before he returns and wrestles you onto your back.
Again, you want to know, have we done this before?
But this time he doesn’t answer and maybe he didn’t last time, either. Maybe you have breathed your own life into a hallucination, which would explain why you are only half fucking here all the time.
After Harden falls asleep, you take the belt off the complimentary bathrobe and put his wrists together, tie him to a strut on the headboard. You will not wake up without him again.
The boy in your dream hates you. He turns his hand and a baseball appears out of thin air. Yeah I play. I can throw so hard it kills things. He tilts his chin up, arrogant and probably all of eight years old. You’ve been in this dream for at least six months, but still the snow is built like a wall on the ground. There’s blood in your shoes, soaked twigs in your pockets. You spread your arms out like a cross and say, kill something, then.
You awake again, forever, to Harden battling you. It’s his knees this time, pounding at your stomach and side and chest. He’s all twisted up. Still tied to the headboard, his arms wrenched over his head and that can’t be good for someone on the disabled list.
He snarls. Untie me right fucking now.
You have a tendency to follow direct orders, but he’s half-naked and writhing. Mixed messages, signals fucked up, transmissions blurred and you grab his legs, force him down flat on his back. Sitting on his legs, you put your hands on his collarbones and stroke down hard enough for thin white roads to follow your fingers, filling in red. Harden hisses.
Joyful, you say, you’re still here.
Harden quiets, slit eyes studying you like gauging distance on train tracks. His arms over his head, crooked pale. You could do anything to him.
Danny.
Your head spikes with pain. You’ve mostly inured yourself to hangovers, because what is constant stops causing pain after awhile, but he’s got these eyes.
You circle the place under his ribs. His teeth touch his lower lip. The lack of trust in his face does not affect you the way it should, because you are half hard and getting worse as he tells you softly, seriously, let me go. There’s something wrong with your brain.
Not liking this sober place, you kiss him on the mouth. He sucks in a cut of air and you feel the fragile muscles in his sides tensing.
He rips the strut off the headboard. Cracks like a bone. You are reminded that when the world is right, he is more powerful than anyone you have ever known. The sawed-off piece of wood thwacks on the floor. His still-bound hands go over your head, cotton on the back of your neck, and his tongue is in your mouth, his hips like a bow as you drive down against him.
That happens first thing in the morning. You’re downstairs in time for breakfast, leaving your shirt collar open to show off your bruises. Harden remains upstairs, sleeping late because he has no real reason to be at the park three hours early and he probably doesn’t dream of anything very interesting.
You sidle up to Zito at the coffee. Steam in your eyes, you want to brag and drop obvious hints. The team is so laidback it’s almost dead, and you don’t think anyone would care that you’re sleeping with Rich Harden. But old habits are hard to kill, or so you’ve learned, and so you veer north, you don’t tell him anything.
Zito can’t say enough about location. He talks about the strike zone as if he’d like to fuck it, which is kinda disturbing, all things considered.
You take it as it’s meant, nodding along like a good little disciple. Your wrists are sore and you can see chafe marks there, strange because it wasn’t you who got tied to the bed.
When the conversation comes about naturally to change of speed, you bring up Harden just because you want to hear his name in the air. You say, he was telling me, last night. It’s not true, you and he did not so much talk last night, but Zito still looks surprised.
Is he.
Pause.
I didn’t know he was here.
And Zito is obviously covering, combing his memory, his hair with his fingers, trying to place Rich Harden in his mind. Like maybe Harden is a fourth utility infielder that got sent back to Sacramento. A relief pitcher traded to the Mets in a deal that didn’t even ripple the water. Some kid they knew once for two weeks in September.
Your blood goes cold.
Rich Harden, you say forcefully. The fucking wonderboy. Fucking savior of the team.
Zito blinks. You’re possessive as all hell, wanting newspapers and baseball cards and all the evidence you can get your hands on. Zito’s mouth is burned red, and he mumbles something about not being very good with names.
You stagger away. Motherfucking blue laws and you can’t buy liquor at nine in the morning. Your whole body hurts.
The game flits past. You’ve stopped paying attention to baseball, and maybe that’s why everyone else is fracturing history and you’re the only one thinking of Richie soft-blanketed in your hotel room bed. They’re single-minded and so are you, and the difference is why the team is in first place and no one asks how he’s doing.
In the hotel room that night, you are viciously, unapologetically drunk, and it doesn’t seem so important anymore. The walls crowd in on you, your pockets empty of money, the ice machine rumbling, chastising you as you weave down the hall.
Harden is, of course, not there.
Ha. As if you expected him.
Content with your drinking problem and infomercials, the first layer of skin torn off your wrists so that your veins stand out as blue as eyes, you curl up around a bottle in the bed and watch the clock. Waiting to fall asleep, you want to see how things end.
But you don’t sleep, nausea throwing you awake, and that makes it all the stranger when you roll over and find Richie beside you in the bed. He’s laid out sacrificial, no key and no plan. No name for this. His shoulders and bare chest glow.
You say, hey.
You are not afraid. Occurs to you, if he is disappearing in the minds of your teammates, then you are the only choice he has. You skid your hand and he’s fever under pale. He’s turning his head and you can see the structure of his bones. You smile, you write words down on his chest. Telling him, you and I misbehaving.
Truce. For tonight at least, because you can only go slow, numbed and dumb. Fingers spread out on the outside of his knee, drawing his leg up and over your shoulder. He’s weeks from even playing catch on flat ground, his recovery stalled out like your breath, your push inside.
His hands vice your arms. He cranes his head back, his mouth open. Heartbeat in his palms, crows at the window, television laughing in the background. In the dark like this, it’s natural that you should lose him for moments at a time, find yourself fucking the mattress like a teenager before he reappears, form and blood materializing all around you.
And he says your name over and over and you can move now.
Exhausted, Harden lets you slump on top of him, mouth packed thick with his shoulder, lets you fall asleep like that. Not quite gone, though, you feel him carefully removing himself, three inches separating your bodies. You decide not to care, and crashland.
The boy does not kill you. But that’s not to say he doesn’t try. His skinny arm ratchets back and he fires. Loses his balance in the snow and cuts his face on the ice as he falls. The ball breaks the sound barrier near your face, makes your ears ring and the tree at your back explodes. You can see just half his face, his mouth and nose hidden by white, black track of blood on his cheekbone. His arm buried to the shoulder, bracing him. Under his humiliated glare, the snow begins to melt.
It’s then that you laugh at him and say, cruel as the game, you’re too fucking small for baseball, kid.
You wake up and, what? Headache that makes you doubt God. Strung-out and sticky on your stomach and thighs. You kick until the covers are on the floor, covering your face with your forearm and swallowing a few times. Awkward bitter taste in your mouth.
Vodka before you brush your teeth, because you can’t keep your hand steady enough otherwise. You’re in the tall grass.
You’re forgetting something.
Shower so hot it causes handprints to rise red on your stomach. Long finger bruises on your upper arms, and you must have gotten into a fight. Whatever’s left in the bottle, you drink, staring at the empty bed.
Drunk now, dawn light, static on the television, you orient yourself around your phone and your wallet. Your keys in the pocket of your suitcase. The stuff that you can find.
It’s time to go downstairs. You have some trouble leaving, checking under the bed and in the dresser drawers that you’re pretty sure you never opened in the first place. Skeleton coat hangers in the closet, theft-proof, locked on the bar like someone tied to the bed.
Wait.
You’re motionless in the short hallway, your eyes unfocused. Something so close, green smell in the air.
You don’t have the chance to place it, because Zito is hammering at the door and shouting your name. You slur and trip and he calls you a fucking drunk and you are.
It’s okay.
The team is downstairs, slumped and folded, five o’clock shadowed at ten in the morning. The road trip is only a couple of days old, but already no one can remember what time zone they’re in. Tonight you’ll move on to a different city like a tribe.
You sneak a few beers from the refrigerator in the visitors’ clubhouse. You’re not supposed to drink before games because it sets a bad example for the guys who play every day or some shit, and also it’s still not yet noon. You vanish into the tunnels to stay under the radar.
Cold concrete and this is familiar. Leather and water and you’re scratching your face, sore spot under your eye. Cans crushed between your hands and littered on the stone. There’s a scrape of feet to your left and you lean back, you smile, you almost say-
But then you forget.
Rattle maddening itch in the back of your mind. What is it that you can’t remember?
Your team loses. You’re totally fucking gone. Hands not following your orders, you clutch at Chavez and Zito and are meek in the back of the bus. There is a strain of worry, everybody’s playing hurt and the bench is thin.
Zito pushes you away and asks, is there something you fucking want?
You shake your head, but at the same time you’re saying, we’re waiting for something, right? There’s someone coming back soon?
And he shrugs, upset with you. Kennedy. Witasick. Sauerbeck. Dan Johnson. Bobby fucking Crosby, for the love of beer and skittles. You’ve lost track of all the guys that have gone down for one reason or another. Though you have been in first place for a long time now, no one is prepared to believe that it will stand up with this many holes in the lineup.
But you are far off and passed out on the bus. You are a stuttering shambling mess in the airport, clear as sun on snow for the world to see, and Macha is shouting at you on the plane, in front of everybody. Threatening you in Billy Beane’s name and you are scared of Billy Beane, so that makes sense.
You lay your head on the plastic window, open like a wound. There is a ghost that lives in your mouth.
The rest of the trip is a blur. It’s possible that you pitch drunk, but you also pitch fairly well, so no one notices. You get home to Oakland still eyeing the corners, checking the back of the bus, trying to remember.
In the parking garage, you are near tears. You grab whoever’s closest, happens to be Eric Chavez with his blackened eyes.
I think I’ve lost my keys.
Chavez looks at you with disgust. The fucking keys in your fucking hand, Danny?
You look down and sure enough, silver as fish. And you see a new line, icewhite barely-healed scar bisecting your palm.
Without knowing why in any kind of real way, you drive to the house in Walnut Creek. The door is unlocked because it always is. When you drink these days, all you can taste is chaff.
Street wants to know what the fuck you’re doing here, though of course he doesn’t swear. Got a pretty good glare on him, but that’s a story for another day.
Beaten, you manage to say, just need to check something, and you follow the hallway back back back, deep-set house with careening walls and vampiric lights. Street trails you, distrustful.
This room, this door. You glance down, mindful of broken glass without understanding why. Swing open the door and there’s nothing, dust-printed cardboard boxes and snowboards propped like street signs against the wall. Hard windows and small cupped depressions from a bed’s weight in the carpet.
Street is at your back, what are you doing here?
You collapse into the doorframe, swamp breathing. Fuck. This isn’t what you were looking for.
Not bothering to explain, you reel right out of the house, leaving Street confused and dark in the yellow doorway behind you. Sideswiped, you dreamt of something once and everything would be okay if you could only remember.
Instead, you’re helling back over the bridge, stomach diving. Neon-blue eyes and a pair of hands smaller than your own, standing in the headlights, sitting on the curb. Caught on the tip of your tongue, the drumtight back of your throat, and you would give anything for a single moment of clarity.
You’re dying to come out of the drunk.
THE END
Disafuckingppear
By Candle Beck
This is what happened.
You come to in the shotgun seat. There’s a cut on your cheek and tacky blood on your fingers. Richie is visible out the windshield, sitting on the curb. It doesn’t say much that you don’t know where you are.
Maybe two in the morning. Full cat’s eye moon. Rich Harden on the sidewalk, but the streetlights smear white glare in long streaks on the dirty windshield, and you can only see half of him. You’re only wearing one shoe.
Head rolling, stomach fist-clenching, you stagger out of the car like a hostage freed after years of captivity. Cling to the door and watch Rich turn to face you, strafed and gutted, sticky-mouthed.
He calls you Danny and grows as he approaches. You are, it’s okay. Harden hasn’t pitched in over a month. You have dreamt of kindling billboards and an abandoned parking lot pounded and cracked by kids playing street hockey, skinny gold-haired kids, eyed like something created through catalyst and alloys.
Grin, close your eyes. Separated by the open car door, Harden’s belt buckle clinking on the metal. Can’t believe it.
Harden spits in a napkin and cleans the blood off your face. He tells you to stay fucking put, and walks down the dark street with his hands in his pockets, heading towards red neon. You hold your head in your hands, thuck-whap of pulse in your temples. Hungover or drunk still, flip a goddamn coin. Harden comes back with band-aids. His shadow is taller than the caged trees.
You are probably lost.
Drained, you find your missing shoe under the seat, the laces snapped. Harden drives you back to the city, and you make him pull over on the bridge. Blinking yellow hazards and cars flooding so fast the air screams, and you’re getting sick over the rail, absolutely fucking destroyed by the skyline at this height.
Harden waits for you, white shirt that glows evil in the million passing headlights.
The water’s black. The world is sixty miles an hour, two hundred feet straight down. You’ve fucked up something fierce.
Take him out and get him drunk. Advice from one Barry Zito to you, one Daniel John Haren. Maybe a direct order, subtle if so, Zito’s hand on your shoulder. Richie a tough little shell, fissured tight and welded at the seams. Unable to pitch. Balefully still traveling with the team, asking Crosby syrup-sweet, how’s your back feeling today, man? Asking Eric Chavez, does it still hurt to swing?
Harden’s a fucking menace.
You are gonna fix him. Zito said so.
Took him out and got him drunk, except somewhere things got switched around, equilibrium shot, hyperventilating. Licking the blood on your fingers and tasting whiskey.
Harden gets you back to your apartment. His hand slides into your front pocket, and you breathe out, whoa, but he’s only after your keys. He deposits you in the hallway like a pair of shoes, asks if he should stay, or will you be okay?
You will not be okay. It is imperative that he stays.
Aware that Harden is only here with you because Street can’t hold his liquor. Not really caring. Clutching at Harden’s shirt as if sobriety lives quick under his skin, and you will get there someday.
He drinks water from the sink in a manner that verges on obscene, cupped hands, sluicing down his forearms and wetting his shirt in elongated patches where his stomach rests against the counter. You are staring, all the lights off.
Couch, then, legs not working. Along with your heart and lungs and hands, taken over by remote forces. Guided by strings. Harden isn’t drunk, red-flushed neck, freakish blue eyes, colored like a superhero. Snatched out of public view before you could do anything stupid, you finger the band-aid on your cheek, dried blood stiff in your hair.
Harden’s head lolls back. He talks about home in the backstage dark. Tells you about the parking lot where he used to play hockey in the summertime, and you tell him that you’ve heard this before, but he swears you haven’t.
Not the strangest thing that’s happened to you tonight, so you put your arm around him and fall asleep, you straight tailspin and yeah. Dream of a field, gray-white, sunshiney ice glittering like broken glass. A gnarled tree split by lightning, black charred right down the heart, laddered boards hammered into the trunk, a mossy rope hanging dead in the winter.
Several days from now, Harden will tell you about this too, unfinished tree house, splinters dug out with a pocketknife. Nothing surprises you these days. Is it possible, has he gotten in you that far? Cold sweat, you wake up and he’s gone.
Half-drunk already by the time you get to the ballpark, flayed by the sun, Harden is nowhere to be seen and no one misses him. Rustle and hum of the clubhouse, playing cards cartwheeling, slick under your feet.
Before you, Zito is satyrlike, wavering. There are two of him, now three, now fusing back together and it’s amazing. You tell him it worked, you got him drunk and you got him to forget about spending the season on the disabled list, all blue and legless under the wrecked sky.
This is a lie, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Zito doesn’t know what you’re talking about, he asks, who?
Richie. Richie.
Zito shakes his head, small-mouthed, and heat shimmers in his eyes. Oh yeah right. Good.
You are confused, also drunk, also tired. Early in the afternoon, the season still fresh as milk, rotating through fifth pitchers and looking for signs and impressions, trying to remember.
The day is out. Harden reappears in the sixth inning. He’s limping, his back like steel.
You met him better than a year ago and were amazed by the way he lit up dark corners, paint on the black, dirty hair in your eyes. Rich Harden, smirking and squaring his shoulders and speaking in broken French when he was drunk. You, new guy, attaching quickly to the weirdest guy on the team so that you would look better by comparison.
Things have changed. You make Zito look like a fucking boy scout this time around, and you’re slammed during a day game, watching Harden vanish neatly through walls. The guys don’t notice, but you do, because you’re special.
You’re special as hell, just like your mom always said, you’ve got genius sight and a real good splitter. You dream of Harden’s memories. You’ve seen him on the bridge at night, in the sick sky-colored oil.
Because of this, you follow him home. Smell of honeysuckle and burnt rubber, green leaves like money carpeting the road, and before you get to the driveway, you can see Harden’s reflection in the big front window, coming up the walk. You’re ten seconds behind.
He stops you in the hallway, brick wall in blue jeans and ashen shirt. Asking, are you drunk, Danny?
Always.
Rolling his eyes like dice, Harden wants to know what you’re doing here. You are uninvited and mostly unwelcome. It doesn’t matter. You don’t answer.
He’s a terrible influence, and offers you a beer. You grin so big you can taste your own teeth. It’s not quite five o’clock in the afternoon and you want to talk about anything except baseball.
Harden obliges, injured in a way that does not show, sometimes only there because you can see his shadow on the wall. He comes and goes and you will stay drunk for the rest of your life if it means his presence will continue to surprise you like this.
You get scared when the sun goes down. Dust like hands builds on the walls. Harden, beside you on the couch, is so still that you expect to find bolts in his arms. Mad scientist doctors have been taking him apart, falsely restoring him, for months now, and ice scars have remapped his skin. Frayed black T-shirt tugged up over his hip, sickle bone and david line.
Fuck.
Harden looks over at you, coma-eyed. And, you all right, man?
Never!
He sorta smiles, twisting his fingers on the neck of the bottle. You are prone to speaking without thought and seeing symbolism in everything. This has nothing to do with the beer, the four-stage haze in your mind.
You want to lick his shoulder.
It starts to seem like a good idea, too, batman night sky outside, his hand on the bottle murdering you. Press him right down like a stamp, push his legs apart with your knee. The next time he smirks at you, you’ll be ready.
You get another beer, ship-walking with one hand steady on the wall. You come back and he’s gone. Again.
This is getting irritating.
Stumbling, treasonous feet, judas floor, you navigate through the house. Big as fuck, this house, Blanton’s dogs howling in the backyard. You don’t know where everyone else is. And Harden too, he’s misplaced you. You feel dislocated in every sense of the word, though, truly, you only know one sense of the word.
Shotgunning the beer, you kick Harden’s bedroom door, shatter the empty bottle on the doorjamb and leave the pieces as a minefield in the hallway. Grit your teeth, push your hair back, go into his room and climb into his bed.
You explain to the polaroids on his wall, the sticky pillow, this is war.
Asleep, the white dream comes back once more. Tattered billboard. Veined parking lot, blown sneakers hidden like snakes in the snow. Matchstick kid high in the arms of the damaged tree, narrow-faced and dirty-nailed, looking down at you so that you can see that the only familiar thing about him is his eyes.
Richie jams his fist into your ribs.
Jesus Christ.
He’s demon-bright. Drags his fingers across your face, warpaint blood wet on your cheek. Choked furious, was that supposed to be fucking funny?
Kneeling over you, stripping you of breath and good will, Harden shows you his hand, new line of fortune on his palm.
Lucky I didn’t step on it, Danny, you sick fuck.
You push up on an elbow, lick his wrist where the blood rivers slow and blue. It’s not deep, he’ll be fine. It’s not even his pitching hand. He goes motionless, counterweight because you are trembling so hard, your teeth burring. The bruise you suck into his wrist goes on so easy.
You ask him, where’d you go?
And he’s shaking his head, I was right there the whole time.
Not at all difficult, then, to open his jeans with the clink of metal buttons and the rick of zipper. With him kneeling above you and you on your elbow. The angle is imperfect.
You get your hand in there, though, two three four fingers under his shorts as white as wings. He kinda gasps, his eyes and mouth half-open the exact same distance. He shuffles his knees apart for better balance, instinct alone. You ask, done this before?
And he nods, muttering about one of the other pitchers.
But that’s not what you meant. You tighten your grip, his pulse in the crook of your thumb, hard now and august hot. Sweat on the back of your neck, leaning forward to pull your tongue across the raw sling of his hip, by all means ideal for arrows, and you say, no no, you and me, have we?
Harden looks down at you, past your hand and his dick, your face sideways bent near his stomach. He smirks.
Think you’d remember if we had, man.
You lick him again, moving your hand and feeling your knuckles brush on your chin. He grips your shoulder and your shirt is ruined. Twice in as many days, you will end the night with blood in your hair.
You’ve spent a year and a half almost constantly drunk, and he has spent much of the same hurt beyond repair. There’s no telling what the two of you have forgotten.
Fucking around with him, your mouth full, your hands ladder-climbing, potential for cold in the breaks and tides of his body, you feel erased. But maybe that’s him, because you turn your eyes high upwards like trespass in the purest form, and Harden’s face is paper-thin.
He collapses next to you, panting. Wringing out the night like sweat-drenched clothes, you unbuckle your belt and toss it across the room. Jerk your jeans off your hips and take his hand, press it down and in and okay.
Your back arches. You can see the cracks in the foundation. The speed of the land as it runs into the horizon.
Harden gets up to wash his hands. He shucks his jeans and pulls the sheets off the bed, tumbling you into the headboard. Crawls back in smelling greenly of soap, crushing pillows, biting your shoulder.
Go to sleep, Danny.
You hook your arm across his stomach. He pushes you away. And then you’re asleep.
In the dream, you are at last corporeal. Cereal-crunch of ice under your feet. Burn of the wind on your face. Near the tree, there is a baseball glove buried in the snow, leather soaked to black, crackling in your hands. The kid darts up out of nowhere with candy blue eyes, snatching the glove away from you and shouting, don’t touch it, it’s mine.
Waking up next to Rich Harden bears a disquieting resemblance to a car crash at a hundred miles an hour. Your two lowermost ribs are knifing at your skin. He’s turned away from you, on his side with his spine revealed like a passageway.
It’s too early and you’re kinda pissed off by the residue of your dream, that punk kid mouthing off, so you roll over, match his back with your own, and fall back asleep.
Second time you wake up, all that’s left of Richie is his dent in the bare mattress.
You find your way to the kitchen, sniffing the air. Street is there, hunched over the newspaper like he’s been shot. His wrists dig into the edge of the table. Uncertainty and suspicion on his face when he looks up at you, blackhole mouth.
What’re you doing here?
You’re in the freezer, bottle of vodka rain-gray behind the ice trays. You grin at him over your shoulder.
Fucking your roommate.
Street’s expression blanks. He ducks, hard-swallows. Yeah that’s real funny, Dan.
Scowling, Street has never liked you. Now you’re responsible for all the bad things. You pour a considerable amount of vodka into a Flintstone jelly glass. Add some Sunny Delight and that’s breakfast.
You ask Street, where’d he go, anyway?
Street blinks, having little connection with sin.
Who?
You don’t bother to elaborate. Five minutes after you’ve woken up, and you’re tore up. The weather sweats the liquor out as fast as you can drink it, passing the day on the patio, scoring the skin off your back.
There’s a game somewhere in there, kryptonite grass and brown dirt. You corner Harden down in the tunnels, your bones unsettlingly fluid, your mind tin-can rattling. Why’d you leave, you try to say, but you know he will only deny it. Instead, you kiss him for the first time, lacking direction and a name for the thing inside you.
He puts his hand on your chest and you feel it sink right the fuck through, fingertips swimming in your blood. Hits you like a static charge, his calluses blind on your heart. You pull him away in a leather-dusty room, keep him against the door so that no one can come in. Again, again, and you try to hold him still, your mouth on the underside of his jaw like drinking straight from the faucet. He is inconsistent, swollen eyes, scabbed palm, never where you remember leaving him.
It’s getaway day.
Harden sleeps in the back of the plane and the back of the bus to the airport, and you’re not paying attention to him. You’re asleep yourself, actually, your life sternum-split between the endless drunk and the dreams like fogged mirrors.
The jealous kid clutches his glove to his stomach. Winter sunlight the color of champagne fizzes through the black tree branches, weird splinter shadows on the kid’s arms and face. You’re knee-deep in snow, already having lost three of your toes to frostbite. You glare at him, obnoxious little jerk, and ask with a sneer, you play?
Zito drags you awake by your hair, opening your eyes to the silent bus windows. It’s well past midnight and the hotel shoots up like heroin into the sky. C’mon, man, c’mon.
You stumble to your feet, heavy ache in your back. You’re shaking, hands opening and closing on air. There’s a clatter of miniature bottles in your coat pocket, but you can’t do anything in front of the coaches.
The elevator robs you of what little equilibrium you have left. Zito half-carries you to your room, dropping you like a bad habit just inside the door. People are always doing this to you. You scramble for your pocket, no difference between whiskey or vodka or bourbon this late at night. Zito watches you, stretch of your throat like an execution.
Living in a fucking afterschool special, you know.
Baring your teeth, you tell him to get the fuck out. He flicks the keycard at you and does what you say. The keycard slides down your chest and fits into your shirt pocket and you are astounded by that.
No telling how much later, when bangbang on the door shocks you back up. You’re still on the floor. Your pockets are full again, empty bottles this time.
Richie’s standing there looking like fucking vengeance, his arm high with his hand on the doorjamb. His mouth a suture scar.
Fucking left me on the fucking bus.
You try to remember, did you do that? Can you really be blamed? Harden had been in the back, flat-haired against the window. You hadn’t taken the empty seat next to him because the drive was short and you were gonna sleep anyway. He was already asleep, dead broken with the sodium lights all the way over him.
Smiling, touching his throat, you shrug. He’s rabid, jerk of your wrist in his hand so that you might join him on the disabled list and then he will like you better. He tells you he woke up in the fucking parking garage and that’s a terrible thing, the idea of it, miles of stone and popping the emergency door off the back of the bus because the front wouldn’t open without the engine running.
Having been buried alive, Harden walks you back until your legs hit the bed and you fold. You look up at him, hey, hey.
You can feel this inside you and it makes you small, like a thumbprint on a wall-sized pane of glass. Harden is scarecrow skinny, hips like thorns, as if he’s spent more energy in recovery than he ever spent actually pitching.
He’s angrier that you forgot about him than he was about you putting glass in front of his door. But you weren’t the only one, there are twenty-three other men on this punchless team and none of them can even remember Rich’s name these days. So you shrug out of your coat. Unbutton your shirt, unbuckle your belt and open your pants, give him this look like, anything you want is yours.
You’re on your back on the bed so quickly that part of you gets left in the air above Harden’s head.
He bites and pulls hair, dirty fighting, but you’ve got half a foot on him, so you guess it’s okay. You clutch at his side, gouging your thumb into the muscle that has kept him out of the rotation all goddamn year. You’re gonna make him feel it until morning, or forever, maybe, if you can get your wind back.
Cursing at you, and you are downbound. Laughing with your hand on him, the scattershot of his teeth on your chin and your chest, seeing his ribs like highway dividers. It’s near to fall and the best you can hope is that he’ll come back and pitch out of the bullpen for the rest of the year.
He shudders and flickers out of sight for a moment. Your hands are empty, too drunk to realize what this means before he returns and wrestles you onto your back.
Again, you want to know, have we done this before?
But this time he doesn’t answer and maybe he didn’t last time, either. Maybe you have breathed your own life into a hallucination, which would explain why you are only half fucking here all the time.
After Harden falls asleep, you take the belt off the complimentary bathrobe and put his wrists together, tie him to a strut on the headboard. You will not wake up without him again.
The boy in your dream hates you. He turns his hand and a baseball appears out of thin air. Yeah I play. I can throw so hard it kills things. He tilts his chin up, arrogant and probably all of eight years old. You’ve been in this dream for at least six months, but still the snow is built like a wall on the ground. There’s blood in your shoes, soaked twigs in your pockets. You spread your arms out like a cross and say, kill something, then.
You awake again, forever, to Harden battling you. It’s his knees this time, pounding at your stomach and side and chest. He’s all twisted up. Still tied to the headboard, his arms wrenched over his head and that can’t be good for someone on the disabled list.
He snarls. Untie me right fucking now.
You have a tendency to follow direct orders, but he’s half-naked and writhing. Mixed messages, signals fucked up, transmissions blurred and you grab his legs, force him down flat on his back. Sitting on his legs, you put your hands on his collarbones and stroke down hard enough for thin white roads to follow your fingers, filling in red. Harden hisses.
Joyful, you say, you’re still here.
Harden quiets, slit eyes studying you like gauging distance on train tracks. His arms over his head, crooked pale. You could do anything to him.
Danny.
Your head spikes with pain. You’ve mostly inured yourself to hangovers, because what is constant stops causing pain after awhile, but he’s got these eyes.
You circle the place under his ribs. His teeth touch his lower lip. The lack of trust in his face does not affect you the way it should, because you are half hard and getting worse as he tells you softly, seriously, let me go. There’s something wrong with your brain.
Not liking this sober place, you kiss him on the mouth. He sucks in a cut of air and you feel the fragile muscles in his sides tensing.
He rips the strut off the headboard. Cracks like a bone. You are reminded that when the world is right, he is more powerful than anyone you have ever known. The sawed-off piece of wood thwacks on the floor. His still-bound hands go over your head, cotton on the back of your neck, and his tongue is in your mouth, his hips like a bow as you drive down against him.
That happens first thing in the morning. You’re downstairs in time for breakfast, leaving your shirt collar open to show off your bruises. Harden remains upstairs, sleeping late because he has no real reason to be at the park three hours early and he probably doesn’t dream of anything very interesting.
You sidle up to Zito at the coffee. Steam in your eyes, you want to brag and drop obvious hints. The team is so laidback it’s almost dead, and you don’t think anyone would care that you’re sleeping with Rich Harden. But old habits are hard to kill, or so you’ve learned, and so you veer north, you don’t tell him anything.
Zito can’t say enough about location. He talks about the strike zone as if he’d like to fuck it, which is kinda disturbing, all things considered.
You take it as it’s meant, nodding along like a good little disciple. Your wrists are sore and you can see chafe marks there, strange because it wasn’t you who got tied to the bed.
When the conversation comes about naturally to change of speed, you bring up Harden just because you want to hear his name in the air. You say, he was telling me, last night. It’s not true, you and he did not so much talk last night, but Zito still looks surprised.
Is he.
Pause.
I didn’t know he was here.
And Zito is obviously covering, combing his memory, his hair with his fingers, trying to place Rich Harden in his mind. Like maybe Harden is a fourth utility infielder that got sent back to Sacramento. A relief pitcher traded to the Mets in a deal that didn’t even ripple the water. Some kid they knew once for two weeks in September.
Your blood goes cold.
Rich Harden, you say forcefully. The fucking wonderboy. Fucking savior of the team.
Zito blinks. You’re possessive as all hell, wanting newspapers and baseball cards and all the evidence you can get your hands on. Zito’s mouth is burned red, and he mumbles something about not being very good with names.
You stagger away. Motherfucking blue laws and you can’t buy liquor at nine in the morning. Your whole body hurts.
The game flits past. You’ve stopped paying attention to baseball, and maybe that’s why everyone else is fracturing history and you’re the only one thinking of Richie soft-blanketed in your hotel room bed. They’re single-minded and so are you, and the difference is why the team is in first place and no one asks how he’s doing.
In the hotel room that night, you are viciously, unapologetically drunk, and it doesn’t seem so important anymore. The walls crowd in on you, your pockets empty of money, the ice machine rumbling, chastising you as you weave down the hall.
Harden is, of course, not there.
Ha. As if you expected him.
Content with your drinking problem and infomercials, the first layer of skin torn off your wrists so that your veins stand out as blue as eyes, you curl up around a bottle in the bed and watch the clock. Waiting to fall asleep, you want to see how things end.
But you don’t sleep, nausea throwing you awake, and that makes it all the stranger when you roll over and find Richie beside you in the bed. He’s laid out sacrificial, no key and no plan. No name for this. His shoulders and bare chest glow.
You say, hey.
You are not afraid. Occurs to you, if he is disappearing in the minds of your teammates, then you are the only choice he has. You skid your hand and he’s fever under pale. He’s turning his head and you can see the structure of his bones. You smile, you write words down on his chest. Telling him, you and I misbehaving.
Truce. For tonight at least, because you can only go slow, numbed and dumb. Fingers spread out on the outside of his knee, drawing his leg up and over your shoulder. He’s weeks from even playing catch on flat ground, his recovery stalled out like your breath, your push inside.
His hands vice your arms. He cranes his head back, his mouth open. Heartbeat in his palms, crows at the window, television laughing in the background. In the dark like this, it’s natural that you should lose him for moments at a time, find yourself fucking the mattress like a teenager before he reappears, form and blood materializing all around you.
And he says your name over and over and you can move now.
Exhausted, Harden lets you slump on top of him, mouth packed thick with his shoulder, lets you fall asleep like that. Not quite gone, though, you feel him carefully removing himself, three inches separating your bodies. You decide not to care, and crashland.
The boy does not kill you. But that’s not to say he doesn’t try. His skinny arm ratchets back and he fires. Loses his balance in the snow and cuts his face on the ice as he falls. The ball breaks the sound barrier near your face, makes your ears ring and the tree at your back explodes. You can see just half his face, his mouth and nose hidden by white, black track of blood on his cheekbone. His arm buried to the shoulder, bracing him. Under his humiliated glare, the snow begins to melt.
It’s then that you laugh at him and say, cruel as the game, you’re too fucking small for baseball, kid.
You wake up and, what? Headache that makes you doubt God. Strung-out and sticky on your stomach and thighs. You kick until the covers are on the floor, covering your face with your forearm and swallowing a few times. Awkward bitter taste in your mouth.
Vodka before you brush your teeth, because you can’t keep your hand steady enough otherwise. You’re in the tall grass.
You’re forgetting something.
Shower so hot it causes handprints to rise red on your stomach. Long finger bruises on your upper arms, and you must have gotten into a fight. Whatever’s left in the bottle, you drink, staring at the empty bed.
Drunk now, dawn light, static on the television, you orient yourself around your phone and your wallet. Your keys in the pocket of your suitcase. The stuff that you can find.
It’s time to go downstairs. You have some trouble leaving, checking under the bed and in the dresser drawers that you’re pretty sure you never opened in the first place. Skeleton coat hangers in the closet, theft-proof, locked on the bar like someone tied to the bed.
Wait.
You’re motionless in the short hallway, your eyes unfocused. Something so close, green smell in the air.
You don’t have the chance to place it, because Zito is hammering at the door and shouting your name. You slur and trip and he calls you a fucking drunk and you are.
It’s okay.
The team is downstairs, slumped and folded, five o’clock shadowed at ten in the morning. The road trip is only a couple of days old, but already no one can remember what time zone they’re in. Tonight you’ll move on to a different city like a tribe.
You sneak a few beers from the refrigerator in the visitors’ clubhouse. You’re not supposed to drink before games because it sets a bad example for the guys who play every day or some shit, and also it’s still not yet noon. You vanish into the tunnels to stay under the radar.
Cold concrete and this is familiar. Leather and water and you’re scratching your face, sore spot under your eye. Cans crushed between your hands and littered on the stone. There’s a scrape of feet to your left and you lean back, you smile, you almost say-
But then you forget.
Rattle maddening itch in the back of your mind. What is it that you can’t remember?
Your team loses. You’re totally fucking gone. Hands not following your orders, you clutch at Chavez and Zito and are meek in the back of the bus. There is a strain of worry, everybody’s playing hurt and the bench is thin.
Zito pushes you away and asks, is there something you fucking want?
You shake your head, but at the same time you’re saying, we’re waiting for something, right? There’s someone coming back soon?
And he shrugs, upset with you. Kennedy. Witasick. Sauerbeck. Dan Johnson. Bobby fucking Crosby, for the love of beer and skittles. You’ve lost track of all the guys that have gone down for one reason or another. Though you have been in first place for a long time now, no one is prepared to believe that it will stand up with this many holes in the lineup.
But you are far off and passed out on the bus. You are a stuttering shambling mess in the airport, clear as sun on snow for the world to see, and Macha is shouting at you on the plane, in front of everybody. Threatening you in Billy Beane’s name and you are scared of Billy Beane, so that makes sense.
You lay your head on the plastic window, open like a wound. There is a ghost that lives in your mouth.
The rest of the trip is a blur. It’s possible that you pitch drunk, but you also pitch fairly well, so no one notices. You get home to Oakland still eyeing the corners, checking the back of the bus, trying to remember.
In the parking garage, you are near tears. You grab whoever’s closest, happens to be Eric Chavez with his blackened eyes.
I think I’ve lost my keys.
Chavez looks at you with disgust. The fucking keys in your fucking hand, Danny?
You look down and sure enough, silver as fish. And you see a new line, icewhite barely-healed scar bisecting your palm.
Without knowing why in any kind of real way, you drive to the house in Walnut Creek. The door is unlocked because it always is. When you drink these days, all you can taste is chaff.
Street wants to know what the fuck you’re doing here, though of course he doesn’t swear. Got a pretty good glare on him, but that’s a story for another day.
Beaten, you manage to say, just need to check something, and you follow the hallway back back back, deep-set house with careening walls and vampiric lights. Street trails you, distrustful.
This room, this door. You glance down, mindful of broken glass without understanding why. Swing open the door and there’s nothing, dust-printed cardboard boxes and snowboards propped like street signs against the wall. Hard windows and small cupped depressions from a bed’s weight in the carpet.
Street is at your back, what are you doing here?
You collapse into the doorframe, swamp breathing. Fuck. This isn’t what you were looking for.
Not bothering to explain, you reel right out of the house, leaving Street confused and dark in the yellow doorway behind you. Sideswiped, you dreamt of something once and everything would be okay if you could only remember.
Instead, you’re helling back over the bridge, stomach diving. Neon-blue eyes and a pair of hands smaller than your own, standing in the headlights, sitting on the curb. Caught on the tip of your tongue, the drumtight back of your throat, and you would give anything for a single moment of clarity.
You’re dying to come out of the drunk.
THE END