THIS ENTRY IS NOT FOR YOU.
Well, this entry might be for you. If your name is Ben and I'm sending you this link because you claimed you wanted to read some Haddonfield Grays. BUT. You will give me THOUGHTS in return. (Also, yes, shut up, I have a Haddonfield Grays icon for this entry. Don't judge how I choose to use my Photoshop skills.)
[All authorial sidenotes are in these brackets. I am making sidenotes, because despite the fact I don't think that much of authorial intent, I am still giving you a dose of it.]
[Pretty much nothing is complete and absolutely nothing has a title.]
Sal and Jasper, Will said, gesturing with an emphatic finger, follow the same religion. Only Jasper will fall to his knees to worship in any church that opens her doors to him, and Sal just has his one cathedral. Sal is a pilgrim, Will explained, and he only worships at his one holy altar.
Will took a sidelong glance, thoughtful and appraising, at Sal, out of earshot, on first base in a fifth inning that seemed to have stretched into an endless agony of afternoon heat. Sal, he decided, was the sort of man who didn't just pray. He prayed.
Temple nodded, smug agreement curving at the corners of his mouth.
Sal prayed in his cathedral, his Elaine, whispered alms at the curve of her breasts, the swell of her hips, sang canticles against her stomach's softness, the paleness of her thighs. Jasper has no idea.
Jasper doesn't know the first thing about spiritual enlightenment, Temple muttered to Will, as Jasper swung at a fastball a second too late, catching nothing but July air. He's a true believer, but he's got no idea what he's really missing. He's doesn't know what Sal knows. But he'll keep on his praying anyway.
Will nodded. Yes. Fool though he may be, Jasper Pharaoh is a very devout man.
----
[Okay, this next one was literally the first thing I wrote about the Grays, before I had even finished figuring out who any of them were. So none of it rings remotely true to character, except Ira and Fedya, but there are still turns of phrase I like.]
The story is this, although Ira isn't the one who tells it:
He'd started out in New York, somewhere with clotheslines in the alleys and corrupt city officials, corrupt landlords, a single dead-grass ball diamond in the park.
Mitch will interrupt here, say it's got to be Brooklyn; he can hear it all over Ira's voice. Everyone agrees, but Mitch has never really been in New York, so they tell him to shut up, and across the room, Ira glares at them and orders another drink.
But he'd started out there, blond and freckled and leather-tough, swinging punches at kids twice his age. Story goes he got a knife from a neighborhood hooligan by age eleven, left school by twelve, threw his first real fastball by thirteen. And after that, he never left the pitcher's mound. Not really. Not even when the war broke out and he rushed to sign up, because that's what you do, even when you're starting for the Grays, hotshot rookie just pitched his first no-hitter. Even when you've found a girl with button-brown eyes that shine only for you.
The story stops to let Jasper and Sal argue about what kind of woman she would have to be to catch Ira. Jasper says she must have been beautiful, with perfect pearl skin and bow lips, but Sal says she must have been persistent, breaking him down until he had no choice but to love her back.
"No," Fedya will interrupt here. "She was no goddess. Is just that she breaks his heart so it cannot work to love. Not anymore. Like a clock dropped and smashed." He spreads his hands like a burst of broken cogs. "Broken."
Ira left her for the front lines, though, keeping her sewn into his heart with a hundred-and-eight stitches. He left her, went to dig a groove through Verdun and Elain, to shoot and duck and throw grenades and wait ankles-deep in mud and mustard gas for the rain to stop.
[So . . . Yeah. Not ringing very true to character for Mitch, Sal, or Jasper.]
----
Fedya was rudely awakened in the middle of the night by Paul bleeding all over him.
Actually, this was untrue, but it would be the version he'd tell Eli and Ira the next morning, as he pouted surly and half-awake into his eggs and ham.
"Was like Dracula spilled his dinner all over me," he grumbled. "All. Over. Paul has terrible manners."
"From what I heard," Eli countered through a mouthful of grits, "Mitch came in and woke you up and Paul politely stood out in the grass to do his bleeding."
"Well." Fedya scowled. "Maybe. Who did you talk to?"
Ira rolled his eyes and took a swallow of black coffee. "Jasper. Who insisted that Paul bleeds like a perfect Southern gentleman."
[More stuff, conversation, took it out.]
"Hey, now," Sal broke in. "Nobody said Paul was in stitches. Why did nobody tell me Paul was in stitches?"
"Only five stitches," Jasper pointed out. "Fedya did them. Tell 'em, Fed."
"Yes, but." Fedya poked at his eggs. "But they are still stitches. And he is still playing today." He smiled slightly. "And you are still an idiot. Ira and I agree. And so--I think--does Gideon---"
"I never said that," Gideon protested mildly.
"--and Sal also," Fedya finished. "And probably also Mitch, but I have not asked him this morning."
[I have no idea. Stitches. Bleeding. I . . . I got nothing. This was maybe the second or third thing I ever wrote. Fedya's the son of a renowned doctor and was a WWI medic. Hence him stitching people up as necessary.]
----
The last frost always comes late in Haddonfield, making wet lace of the grass in the early games of the season. The first home games are ice-clammy, the players rubbing their hands in the dugout, the pitchers flexing their fingers, hoping they don't get too stiff with cold to throw their specialties.
Danny Angel King's was mean curveball slicing like the swing of a blade, exact and ruthless.
Gideon's was a slider that slipped across home plate easy as an unfaithful husband sneaking back in after the wife's asleep, back in bed before you even knew he was out.
Ira's had been a fastball. It was a killer, they said, democratically dispassionate in choosing its victims, shooting them all down alike. It was beautiful, they said. It was cruel. They said you could feel him pour all his rage in it, tightly wound, a bullet, a cannonball, shooting the pain at someone else.
Imagine, then, what it would look like now.
----
[This whole next bit is excerpted from that time I started writing about the punching Babe Ruth thing. So here are some fragments:]
Mitch and Gideon's knuckleballs had an understanding. An agreement, even. If they can get past the hitter, they have to stop for Mitch.
[...]
In the fifth inning, the Raiders' shortstop hit a triple on one of Gideon's too-slow fastballs, and by the top of the sixth, they had three runs. But the Grays had four.
And by the top of the eighth, Danny Angel King was at the mound and Ira was giving Gideon a talk about Fastballs and How to Use Them.
By the time the game stretched into the eleventh inning and Moe was wondering whether the city lights would have to make up for the setting sun, the Raiders and the Grays were stuck tied at four each, and then, somehow, with Will, Fedya, and Gideon on base, Jamie managed a double and ended the game.
[I think it's been elsewhere established, but Guy Berardi was Ira's best pal back in the old days. He plays for the Yankees now.]
"Guy," he said, "how did you get here?"
Guy Berardi shrugged, looking a bit pleased with himself. "I keep up with the Grays, Ira. What kind of friend you think I am?"
Ira was silent for a moment before answering. "What are you doing here?"
Guy's eyes flicked to Eli. "Eli, right?"
Eli nodded warily. "You must be Guy Berardi."
Flashing smile that was all charm and white teeth, Guy nodded. "Ira's mentioned me? Well, you know, we go way back. Right, Ira?"
Ira sighed. "Right." And, sounding so carefully casual, "How have you been, Guy?"
"Can't complain," Guy replied easily. "And yourself?"
Eyeing Guy's clean-pressed suit, Ira said, "I'm doing all right for myself, thank you. I don't need you to worry."
Eli shifted from foot to foot, shouldering the bag of equipment and looking uncomfortable. He cleared his throat. "We have to get this stuff back to our hotel."
"Let me help," Guy said, smile still affixed, as he reached for the bag.
"No, that's all right," Eli said, just a little too quickly and emphatically.
"You sure?"
Ira, meanwhile, was all too conscious of how battered and dusty his suit was, of how it was wearing thin at the elbows and the hem of the pants. He turned his fedora in his hand, running a thumb over the brim where the wool was getting worn and bumpy with age and too much rain. Then, to stop thinking about it, he put it on, tilted his chin up to Guy, in challenge. In defiance. "Yeah, don't worry." He swung the bag of extra gloves and balls over his shoulder. "We've got it."
[Guy's a douche, asks Ira to this shindig, whatever, whatever.]
Jasper was in his one nice pinstriped suit, but even Ira had to admit it was a really nice suit. Maybe the only thing of any real value that Jasper owned.
Ira's tux was borrowed and ill-fitting, not broad enough at the shoulders and too broad everywhere else. He didn't like it, didn't feel at home in it. Felt off-kilter and uneasy. Felt stupid.
"Come on," Jasper was saying, "we're supposed to have fun. This is a party, not a funeral, remember?"
"But if it was," Ira said darkly, "I've a good feeling I know whose it would be."
[That's where I stopped, but later wrote the afterwards conversation between Ira and Gideon:]
It was after three in the morning when Ira woke Gideon up.
"I want to talk," he said.
"You're drunk."
"Yeah. I want to talk."
"You are so lucky we don't have a game tomorrow."
"I am that."
"Shut up or get out," Eli muttered, still half-asleep.
Ira tugged at Gideon's arm and Gideon sighed and climbed out of bed.
And sitting side-by-side in the hallway outside their room, leaning against the wall, with Ira in a rumpled tuxedo and Gideon in just the bottom half of a set of long underwear, they were silent for a long minute while Gideon willed himself awake.
"I stopped at a place on the way back." Ira didn't have to specify that he meant a speakeasy. And that he meant he drank a not inconsiderable amount of their strongest stuff. Whiskey, Gideon guessed.
"I thought so. Jasper was back by midnight." Gideon paused. "He was supposed to wait for you."
"I don't need to be nannied."
"Yeah. Okay." Gideon shot him a sidelong glance. "I hear you punched the Babe. Jasper was almost beside himself he was so thrilled."
Ira yawned. Regarded Gideon. "You're fatter than you used to be."
Gideon put on his Patient Face. "You're changing the subject. Poorly. You know, I can actually out-think you when you're drunk."
"You'd like to think that. We're having pitching practice first thing in the morning."
"Like hell," Gideon told him. "I'm not letting you coach me when you have a hangover."
"I don't get hangovers." Ira looked witheringly at Gideon.
"You used to," Gideon remembered, "back when I first knew you. But then you were just some kid who sometimes drank too much with the team. Now you're a drunk, so it's different."
"I'm not--" Ira sighed. "Never mind. Point being."
"What did you want to talk about?"
"I didn't want to talk about anything."
"You're the one who got me out here. So spill." Gideon thought of his bed with longing. The floor in the hall was cold. The wall was cold. And Ira was a bastard.
"Guy's a bastard," Ira said.
"No joke. What did he do?" Gideon wanted to touch Ira on the shoulder, make him feel better. But he didn't.
"He didn't do anything. It's just . . . He's my best friend." Ira frowned. "He and I were like . . . You know?" He crossed two fingers tightly to indicate closeness, sameness. "We were one person. Now we're two. A lot of things . . ."
"A lot of things changed after you got back," Gideon agreed, wondering how many versions of this conversation they could have in a single lifetime. "You lost a lot of things."
"Fucking shut up."
"I was just agreeing."
"I don't want to talk about those things. About Guy--"
"You brought him up."
"--or, you know."
"Mary Rose," Gideon supplied.
"I said to fucking shut up." Ira yanked his bowtie undone. "But you know how it is, right? You see her for the first time and you feel small and swept away? You feel that thing pull in your stomach that says This is it."
"That happened when you first saw her?"
"Both. Yeah."
Gideon frowned but let it go. "Was that why you punched Babe Ruth?"
Ira looked frustrated and pitying, annoyed at the fact that his friend wasn't following. "No." Then: "Yes." Then: "I'm drunk."
"I'm tired," Gideon agreed. "Time to sleep for both of us, yeah?"
"Yes. Because you're going to practice in the morning."
"Like hell," Gideon repeated, knowing that he would be out there first thing in the morning no matter what he said. "I'm sorry you had to suffer through that party."
Ira stood up carefully. "Nobody said I suffered."
[I like a lot of things in that conversation. A lot of things are still slightly off. Mostly in the writing itself than the dialogue, which makes little sense because it's almost all dialogue. I'm also still yo-yo-ing between Gid describing Ira as a "drunk" and as an "alcoholic," because there's a real difference in sound there. And I'm not sure which Gideon would go for.]
----
[I was going to give you the really long piece about Mitch's family, because I actually like a lot of the writing in it, but I'll spare you that. This time.]
----
"Let Ira and Danny share a bed," Eli pointed out once, "and we'll wake up to see Ira's strangled him in his sleep."
"Ira's sleep or Danny's?" Gideon asked.
Eli shrugged. "Either way. Danny'd still be dead and then you'd be our only pitcher."
"Lord help us," Gideon said.
Eli nodded. "Exactly."
[I could add the interlude where Temple and Will walk in on Jamie touching himself because I think it's funny. But I'm juvenile like that. So I won't.]
----
Danny caught up to Ira on the porch, where he was smoking a cigarette and glowering.
"You stalking me, Rookie?"
"Are you ever going to stop calling me Rookie?" Danny held Ira in a cool, even gaze until Ira looked away.
"I doubt it," Ira said.
"We're going to be sharing a room for the next six days here. It would be nice to do it as civilly as possibly."
"Wonder if O'Hara would trade with you."
"And give up rooming with the outfield? That's going to be a hard sell." Danny cleared his throat. "Look. I know you don't like me. And I'm really starting to learn that's never going to change, but--"
"Gideon send you?" Ira flicked his cigarette butt away before lighting a new one.
"No. I just wanted to--"
"'Cause Gideon has this whole thing about making nice with people."
"It's not a terrible idea."
"I don't want to make nice with you, King. It's not gonna help either one of us." He dragged so deep and long on his cigarette that it hurt Danny's lungs to watch.
"God, Ira. Why do you have to hate me?"
"I don't hate you. I just don't care about you either way."
"Bullshit."
Ira turned to look Danny in the eye. "Yeah?"
Danny didn't look away. "Yeah."
[And then there's a cut scene where Gid implies to Mitch he's dyslexic/dysgraphic. This whole piece cuts between Ira and Danny on the porch and Mitch and Gideon inside the boardinghouse, but I don't like their half that much.]
"You think you're something really special?" Ira tried to look menacing.
Danny shook his head. "I guess I'm okay. What kind of special are we talking?"
"You know." Ira waved his hand in some kind of all-encompassing gesture, shaking cigarette ash over the porch at his feet. "Think you're some kind of hotshot pitcher with some kind of hotshot fastball. Think you're young and charming and handsome with some kind of hotshot future all laid out ahead of you." He flung his cigarette down after drawing on it in that lung-stingingly deep way, and ground it with his heel. "That kind of special."
Danny was silent for a minute, trying to gauge just how reckless and suicidal he was feeling. "No, Ira," he said finally. "That's not what I think. That's what you think."
Pretty damned suicidal.
"I don't think you're special," Ira muttered, not entirely convincing Danny.
"Neither do I," Danny said. "I just think you want to think I'm special so you can hate me for it." He paused. "Can I stop saying special now?"
Ira shrugged.
"But that's it, isn't it? You're so damned determined to be mad at someone and I'm your best bet. You want me to be you, eight years ago, hotshot pitcher, fastball, young and handsome, future laid out. Because then you can hate me. For having what you used to have. What you think you still should have. So. Answer me one thing, Hall." Danny squared his shoulders, brazenly emboldened. "What made you so special?"
They both know the only answer to that question. It's hard and fast and brutal--Ira's fist, Danny's jaw.
And even expecting it, Danny stumbled back against the porch railing from the force of the punch.
"I've been expecting that for a long time," Danny admitted.
Ira looked at Danny as though he had offered to turn the other cheek. "I've just been looking for the right moment."
----
Will had begun to think of himself as a kind of father to Jamie.
He made a terrible father.
"Jamie," he instructed one afternoon, as he and Temple were dragging the kid out for post-game banana splits at the local drugstore soda fountain. "Tell me what you know about sex."
Jamie choked on a spoonful of vanilla ice cream. "Will."
Temple sighed. "We have the corner table. Nobody can hear you."
Temple had begun to think of himself as Jamie's put-upon older brother whose life mission was to torment Jamie, because torture is the best education. And the sincerest form of affection.
Temple made an excellent brother.
Jamie ducked his head. "I--I--"
"James Middle-Name Bethlehem," Will said, very seriously. "You can't be ashamed to tell us what you know. Because that means you think it's shameful stuff. And since it's something you plan on doing someday, you really need to get over the shame part of it. Ain't no fun if you're ashamed while doing it." He inclined his head in Temple's direction. "Sometimes I suspect Temple's still getting over that."
Temple held up his hands. "Catholicism," he explained. "But I've come a long way." He studied Jamie. "What is your middle name?"
"Thomas," Jamie said, grateful for the change of subject.
Temple smirked a little. "Well, James Thomas Bethlehem, tell me about sex."
[It gets kind of weird and I lose my point for awhile here.]
"But," Temple broke in, not wanting the conversation to veer too far from its original point, "this all just goes to show that seventeen really isn't too early to start thinking about how you're going to have sex without making a huge mess of the whole thing."
"Is there really a danger of that?" Jamie looked genuinely worried.
"Oh, you bet," Temple said cheerfully, finishing off his banana split and pushing the sundae dish aside.
Will grinned. "I vote we take this discussion elsewhere. A bunch of schoolkids just walked in." He nodded to five children clambering for ice cream.
Temple grinned too. "Sounds like a plan. I've never gotten to be the one educating someone else before. Not really."
"I know," Will said fondly. "Catholicism."
[Blah, blah, blah, they teach Jamie about cunnilingus.]
"Sorry." Jamie blinked. "Just trying to . . . Wow." He frowned. "Is that safe?"
Will rolled his eyes and chuckled. "Yes. Plus it's Taoist."
"What's that?" Jamie asked.
"It's an Oriental religion," Will explained. "They say it's good for the soul."
"Really?" Temple asked. "You never told me that."
"That's because you never had any misgivings," Will said. "Besides, it's hardly the crux of their ethos."
"Good," Temple said. "Otherwise I'd be tempted to convert."
----
"So Ira likes a lady with curves." Fedya shrugged. "Is not so unnatural."
"It's Ira," Jasper reminded him. "Everything about him is unnatural."
"Ira favors the more full-figured females," Temple alliterated, looking mildly pleased with himself. "The fertility goddess type."
Jamie stared at him. "You mean it's some kinda Oedipus thing?"
"Etta who?" Mitch asked.
The others ignored him.
"No, that's not it," Will was explaining to Jamie. "It's just that Ira can truly appreciate a woman. And for that, I wholly commend him."
----
[The Grays get drunk for no good reason, other than it being fun for me to write:]
Gideon had been telling Mitch about clam-digging with a flushed earnestness that seemed to put him in the running for being near as drunk as Jasper.
"I hate doing it," Gideon had been saying, "it's wonderful. It's rewarding. It's awful." He buried his face in Mitch's shoulder in aggravation. "I don't know. It's in my blood, right?"
"Hello," Jasper announced then, draping himself all around Mitch. "Does Gideon have fish blood?"
"I think maybe you do," Fedya said, a bit miffed at having had almost to drink as Jasper and still being utterly sober. "Cold-blooded, leading you to seek the body heat of warmer individuals. Yes?"
"Excellent assessment, Doctor," Will said.
Fedya and Will shook hands.
"You know what?" Gideon asked Jasper, as Jasper handed Gideon one of the bottles and Gideon swallowed more than seemed strictly necessary. "I think I liked you better when we were on the River Rats together."
"That was ten years ago," Jasper mumbled in reply, face tucked between his arm and Mitch's chest. "I was a useless kid." Mitch held out his hand to Gideon for the bottle.
Gideon gave Mitch the whiskey. "Exactly. You were all . . ." He gestured at Jamie. "Innocent."
"Hey!" Jamie glared.
Temple ruffled Jamie's hair. "Aw, Jasper was once just like poor, sweet, little, virginal Jamie?"
"Will, can I kill Temple later?" Jamie asked. "I could push him out of the train. Nobody would even know."
"I never warned you that Temple's a condescending drunk?" Will chuckled. "I should have mentioned."
"Jasper was virginal?" Paul asked from across the room, looking up from the cramped card game he was playing with Danny, using Jasper's playing cards with the drawings on the back.
Gideon thought about this. "I don't know. I don't actually remember him getting together with any girls. But it's not like we spent all that much time together. So maybe." He made as if to lean against Mitch, but Jasper's elbow was in the way.
"He must have," Jamie said. "'Cause Temple said that Jasper said that he first went to bed with a girl when he was fifteen, so--"
"I did?" Jasper asked, reaching for one of the bottles. "I mean, I told Temple that?"
Temple's face lit up. "Are you saying you didn't?"
"No, no, no," Jasper told him, shaking his head hard and almost knocking Mitch out. "I did. It wasn't a lie. I was fourteen, just like you said I said."
"He said I said you said fifteen," Temple said. "Which is what you said."
Sal passed the vodka over to Gideon.
"Well, I don't think Jasper was having any carnal knowledge," Gideon mused. "If you know what I mean."
"Yes, we do," Temple said. "You mean carnal knowledge."
"See?" Will pointed at Temple. "Condescending drunk."
"You just didn't mispronounce conscendending," Jasper told Will. "You are too sober."
Will grinned. "I'll get more drunk if you tell us how old you really were."
Jasper buried his face in Mitch's chest. "Mitch. Save me."
"Can't do that," Mitch told him. "I know the answer."
"You're almost totally sober!" Jasper told him accusingly.
"No, I'm not!"
"No, he's not," Will said. "Quiet drunk."
"Quiet drunk who has secrets about Jasper," Temple pointed out.
Danny was too busy watching the proceedings to notice Paul looking at his cards.
"I'm gonna tell," Mitch informed Jasper.
"You're a terrible friend."
"Twenty-three," Mitch announced to the room, just as the door opened.
"Twenty-three what?" Ira asked, looking both awkward and irritated, as though he tried to sleep but found he couldn't.
"Twenty-three years," Gideon said. "Which is how many years old Jasper was when he first slept with a woman."
"Well, isn't he special, then," Ira said flatly.
"I suddenly feel less deprived," Temple said.
"This makes lot of sense," Fedya said. "But, Jasper, you should not think that you must lie about such things."
Jasper shot Fedya a very dark look.
[I like how Gid and Jas are apparently touchy-feely drunks. Poor Mitch.]
----
The speakeasy outside Swanzey was in the cellar of an old granary, crowded and dim and smoky. Eli, Ira, and Gideon sat along one of the long wooden counters, Eli and Ira doing shots of whiskey, Gideon drinking it on the rocks. Eli was scrawling notes for the team, Gideon was people-watching, and Ira sat between, contributing to Eli and Gideon's efforts when he thought he had something to say.
"Why are you saying that Danny needs batting practice?" Ira asked Eli. "Practice means doing something you know how to do, over and over to get good at it."
"Your point?" Eli arched an eyebrow at Ira.
"Something you know how to do," Ira repeated. "I think you meant that Danny needs batting lessons."
"He's not doing that poorly," Gideon said distantly, distracted by an old man telling a joke across the room, gesturing wildly with his arms.
"I could do better," Ira muttered.
Eli and Gideon exchanged glances.
"Okay," Gideon said.
"Go for it," Eli added.
Ira glowered.
"That guy over there?" Gideon gestured with his glass. "I'm thinking schoolteacher."
"I'm thinking you're boring," Ira replied.
"I'm thinking Ira isn't wrong," Eli added, still writing in his notebook.
And they lapsed into silence.
"Hey!" Gideon said suddenly, looking at Ira. "You were just looking at that woman."
"Shut up." Ira glared at Gideon and elbowed him, hard, in the ribs.
"Yeah, you were," Gideon replied, rubbing his side where he'd been jabbed.
"I wasn't," Ira countered, doing another shot and lining the empty glass up with his others.
"You were, actually," Eli said. "You were looking at her--"
"You shut up, too," Ira warned him. "Imagine me elbowing you."
Eli smiled dryly. "I'm so happy I know which side of you to sit on."
"Yeah," Gideon sighed. "I didn't even think of that."
"I hate you both," Ira informed them.
[I have no reason for liking this exchange as much as I do. Also I'm going to Hell, as Ira has one arm . . .]
----
[Okay, now I'm going to be a terrible person and give you all of the only completed piece I have of the Grays. And it's all flashback. And it's a terrible first draft--In every possible sense. So the entire rest of the post is this piece, which I have not re-read lately:]
The other rookie pitcher had a smirk so wide it near split his face in half, and a loud Brooklynite voice filled with soot and knife fights and broken radiators.
He was blond and sixteen and aggressively beautiful and Gideon Triggs hated him.
Gideon Triggs was eighteen and dark-haired, with ropeburn-rough fingers from years of working fishing boats.
Gideon Triggs had no reason to smirk.
"Hey. You." The other rookie pointed at him. "You're the other new guy, right?"
Gideon nodded, not looking at him. He was studying the ball in his hand, repositioning his fingers, trying to make them learn right. Fastball, curveball, knuckleball, sinker, slider. Cutter, splitter, screwball, changeup.
"You any good?" He peered at Gideon through narrowed, appraising eyes.
Gideon shrugged.
"I'm good."
He said it with such certainty that Gideon looked up.
"Ira," he said. "Ira Hall." He held out his hand for Gideon to shake, and when Gideon accepted it, Ira gripped so tight that Gideon pulled his hand back.
Ira's knuckles were scarred, Gideon noticed.
"Gideon Triggs," Gideon said.
Ira's smirk grew. "Well, Gideon Triggs, you wait and see: Training tomorrow, my fastball will be the fastest you ever saw. Management says it's the fastest they've seen. Like I said, I'm good."
Gideon watched him walk away and hoped to God he was lying.
He went back to the baseball in his hand. Fastball, forkball, curveball. Fastball, fastball, fastball.
---
Ira Hall hadn't been lying.
Gideon watched him pitch and felt sick and dizzy.
His fastball was blink-and-miss-it and left the catcher's hand smarting, even through the glove.
One of the other pitchers said, "With an arm like that, kid could throw nothing but fastballs and live forever on steak and women in the Majors."
Another pitcher grunted in agreement and flexed his fingers.
Gideon stared at his hands, suddenly feeling them too big and too clumsy. What was he doing here?
Ira came back to the bench, sat down beside Gideon, grinning. "See? What did I tell you?"
Gideon shrugged and half-smiled at him. "The truth?"
"Damn right," Ira replied.
---
"Figuring I'll make it to the big time," Ira said one day on the way back to Wheeling for a home series. "The Major Leagues, you know. Maybe the Brooklyn Superbas, yeah? Hometown pride and all that."
Gideon nodded. "That would be nice."
"My best friend, Guy, he's probably gonna make it too. Out playing for Trenton right now."
Gideon listened to the rhythm of the train rushing along the tracks. "Trenton's good," he said, for something to say.
"Idiot." Ira smacked him in the back of the head. "Of course they are. Guy's been with them two years now, but a lot of Class A scouts are interested in him. He's twenty this coming month--Says we'll celebrate when the season's over."
Gideon could only imagine what a friend of Ira's would be like.
"Anyway, I'm starting tomorrow. Halverson says I might be the thing that brings us to the top of the league this season."
Gideon nodded, trying not to care that he'd only pitched in two games so far, both in ninth innings when the end had already been decided.
Maybe he should ask to play outfield instead.
"Hey, if it's going really well by the sixth inning tomorrow," Ira offered, looking a little too smug to really be kind, "I'll see if they'll let you in to pitch a few."
Gideon tried to smile. "Thanks."
---
Guy Berardi was worse than Ira. Trenton's path crossed Wheeling's late in August and they met up in bar, Ira dragging Gideon along because, according to Ira, "I haven't seen you get with a woman all season and I think that's half your problem." Guy Berardi, Ira vowed, was better at getting women than anyone else ever.
Ira wasn't too bad at it, either. But Gideon never liked letting Ira force the less attractive friends on him as though he were a charity case and they were desperate and grateful.
Mostly, they were annoyed and Gideon was apologetic.
Guy Berardi was smooth and handsome and dark, with a strong jaw and a colder smirk than Ira's. He carried himself like a king and Ira dovetailed with him into a snide, arrogant pose that made Gideon study his beer to avoid looking at them.
"That girl?" Ira pointed at a thin brunette with large teeth and gleeful eyes.
Guy snorted. "You can do so much better."
Ira rolled his eyes. "I know. I meant for Gideon."
"Oh." Guy appraised her, appraised Gideon, and shrugged. "All right. Definitely." He stood and crossed the bar to her.
Gideon tried to shrink into himself.
Ira leaned back into their booth and grinned.
Guy was saying something to her that made her laugh and duck her head. They both looked at Gideon and he looked away.
When she came to sit beside him, Gideon smiled weakly.
She smiled back.
Ira and Guy were gone, already surrounding themselves with pretty girls and laughing.
"I'm . . . engaged," Gideon lied. "I . . ."
She looked away. "It's all right. I get that."
"No, I mean," Gideon started. "I don't mean--I just wasn't--" He sighed. "I'm sorry."
He felt terrible. He wasn't allowed to go to bed with a girl just because he felt bad for her, was he? Ira would.
All right, Ira wouldn't, but only because he had some kind of standards he measured his girls by. As though he could only have the prettiest girl in the room, lest he be judged for not being able to get her.
But Gideon had noticed the girls that Ira looked at when he didn't think anyone was looking, and they weren't the slender beauties with long haughty necks and bedroom eyes.
They were the Rubenesque girls with the kind faces. They were the girls in the plainer dresses, the girls without kohl-ringed eyes or rouged cheeks, the girls with wide hips and wider smiles. The girls that Guy would be quick to point out weren't good enough for Ira.
Gideon tried to smile again at the girl beside him as Ira turned away from a redhead with glasses and Guy laughed at her.
Maybe sometime Gideon would point out that Ira wasn't good enough for them.
If he ever spoke to Ira again.
---
Most of the rest of Wheeling's pitchers disliked Ira, Gideon learned. Phrases like "upstart rookie" and "arrogant kid" and "brat" drifted in whispered undercurrents around the clubhouse and the ballfield, and Gideon tried not to add to them, tried not to smile when he heard.
But he did.
"If he didn't act too big for his britches," he said to one of the other pitchers, "I'd like him a lot more. I mean, I'd admire his talent. You know? But instead, I'm just waiting for him to mess up."
"The bigger they are, the harder they fall," the pitcher agreed.
"The bigger their ego," another modified.
The shortstop beside Gideon let out a short bark of laughter. "Say what you want about him, I bet you in a few years, he'll be pitching in the Majors and we'll all be stuck back here in Class B, reading about him in the sporting papers."
"I might make it to the show," one of the pitchers said. "You never know. Most of us here have a shot."
Gideon didn't ask who wasn't part of the "most." He didn't have to. "Well," he said, trying to sound cheerful, "ten years down the road, when I'm reading about the Boy with the Golden Arm over there, at least I'll be able to say I knew him when."
---
Ira Hall did not get traded that year.
When Gideon showed up for spring training and saw that stupid blond smirk, he wanted to turn around and get back on the train.
At the end of their first season, Ira had mentioned, all cool smug casual, "I hear management's been talking about trading you to the Columbia Gamecocks for a couple of their pitchers."
"That's a Class C team," Gideon had said, feeling his heart sink.
"Yeah, well, maybe they'll let you out on the mound more down there."
"That's in South Carolina," Gideon had said, feeling the floor drop away from him.
"I hear it's real hospitable down there."
"That's a Class C team," Gideon had repeated, feeling a hint of desperation creep into his voice.
"Maybe you'll like it down there."
Gideon had frowned then. "Maybe you'll like it down there, too."
"Down where? I'm not being traded."
Gideon had tried to mirror Ira's cocky grin. "In Hell."
And that was the last they spoke.
Until they saw each other in spring training and Ira had given him a cool smile.
"Not in Hell," he pointed out.
"Not in South Carolina," Gideon said.
"We good, Gideon Triggs?"
"I hate you, Ira Hall."
Ira smirked. "Then we're good."
---
The next year, Ira was traded up to the Toledo Mud Hens. Gideon hung on as a relief pitcher in Wheeling. They didn't know what else to do with him.
The year after that, 1912, Ira moved up again to the Baltimore Orioles. Double-A ball. From there, the bigtime was candy in a store window.
In 1913, Gideon was traded to the Evansville River Rats. Class C ball. From there, the bigtime was an illustration in a storybook, captioned "In a faraway kingdom . . ."
Ira sent a postcard when he heard about Gideon: It was only a matter of time.
Gideon sent one back: At least I'm a better person than you.
He wrote it seven times before he was satisfied that the letters looked right and the words had spaces between them and not in the middle.
Ira's reply: Small prizes. At least I'M climing the ladder in the right direction.
Gideon's: Don't trip on the top rung.
Ira: Don't cry when you hit the bottom.
Gideon didn't write back.
Then, in 1914, just weeks after an Austrian archduke was killed, Baltimore told Ira they were sending him over to the Providence Grays next season.
Gideon imagined Ira's fury at being sent sideways instead of up. It made him feel better when fall came and he was traded to the Mason City Claydiggers for a couple of their rookie pitchers.
Class D. Rock bottom.
There was no postcard from Ira. There was no sport in laughing at someone who'd fallen all the way.
---
In his season with Albany (still Class D, still rock bottom), Gideon heard from Ira again, in a sloppy letter saying that he was thinking he was going to get married. Guy thinks I'm crazy, Ira wrote. I needed a second opinon.
Your the only one I could think of to ask, he wrote. Her name is Mary Rose.
Gideon wrote back. She wants to marry you? Is SHE crazy?
Yes, Ira wrote. FOR ME.
Gideon could imagine Ira grinning when he wrote that.
I think I love her, Ira wrote. Dont tell Guy I said that.
Marry her, Gideon replied. But only if she has wide hips and a kind face.
He didn't hear back.
A year passed.
Gideon ran into an old teammate from Wheeling by chance, also fallen to Class D, but with the war wounds of a ruined elbow and a bad knee from one too many accidents on the field.
It's only noble and tragic when it's a soldier who falls.
Any news? Gideon asked.
The teammate mentioned a few names, how they rose or fell or left the game completely, mentioned a team or two they had played that had ceased to exist, said, "Remember Hall? That cocky pitcher kid who went up to Double-A?"
"Kind of," Gideon said. "Whatever happened to him?"
"Oh, him," the man said. "He joined the Army. I hear they shipped him out last month. He didn't even stick around to finish the season."
"Really," Gideon replied, sounding neutral, sounding like it was only of passing interest. "Really now."
"Wouldn't worry about him, though. Brooklyn's given him a contract effective the moment he gets home." The old teammate from Wheeling laughed an empty laugh.
"The Dodgers?" Now Gideon wanted to sound like he cared, but couldn't.
"Yeah. That kid's going up to the big show after he gets done killing Krauts." The empty laugh again. "Didn't we say he would?"
Gideon shrugged. "I don't remember. Did we?"
---
That was the end of the story.
That was the end of that story.
Another began in November 1918 on a fishwet rainy evening after the boats had been roped up for the night and their men had gone home to scrub the stink of walleye and trout from their hands and beards.
Gideon Triggs could still smell the bay in his wet hair as he rolled a baseball across the table in his two-room house, rented from a man who lent it out to beachgoers all summer.
It had been a long season. He'd been sent down to the Haddonfield Grays that year, about as low on the totem as you could get. If there were Class E ball, Haddonfield would be it.
If there were Class Z ball.
He was twenty-seven and half-convinced he should retire.
The baseball rolled back, fell softly into his hands, and he positioned his fingers on the seams. Fastball. Again, another way. Curveball. And again, slider.
His fingers were fisherman-callused from all his winters and felt like leather against leather against the white leather of the ball.
Someone knocked on the door, and Gideon studied the blurred silhouette through the milky isinglass window in the door's center before he answered.
"Hello, Gideon," Ira Hall said. He was post-thin and rain-slick and fish-pale, with darkness around his eyes and cracked lips.
He had no smirk and his quiet Brooklynite voice was filled with its own emptiness.
He was brown-blond and twenty-five and rendingly beautiful and Gideon Triggs was afraid for him.
Gideon Triggs was afraid of him, of his heavy Army overcoat, of the way the right sleeve hung empty at Ira's side.
"What are you doing here?" He knew he should step back, gesture Ira in from the cold November rain, but he couldn't move.
"I don't know. Couldn't think of anyone else to go . . ." Ira shrugged, gestured confused and feeble with his left hand. "We still good, Gideon Triggs?"
Gideon saw he was shaking and reached out, pulled him into the two-room house. Pulled off the wet overcoat, replaced it with an old quilt, guided Ira to the table. "You look a miserable bastard, Ira Hall."
Ira's mouth twitched in the memory of a smirk. "Then we're good," he said, before passing out.
[All authorial sidenotes are in these brackets. I am making sidenotes, because despite the fact I don't think that much of authorial intent, I am still giving you a dose of it.]
[Pretty much nothing is complete and absolutely nothing has a title.]
Sal and Jasper, Will said, gesturing with an emphatic finger, follow the same religion. Only Jasper will fall to his knees to worship in any church that opens her doors to him, and Sal just has his one cathedral. Sal is a pilgrim, Will explained, and he only worships at his one holy altar.
Will took a sidelong glance, thoughtful and appraising, at Sal, out of earshot, on first base in a fifth inning that seemed to have stretched into an endless agony of afternoon heat. Sal, he decided, was the sort of man who didn't just pray. He prayed.
Temple nodded, smug agreement curving at the corners of his mouth.
Sal prayed in his cathedral, his Elaine, whispered alms at the curve of her breasts, the swell of her hips, sang canticles against her stomach's softness, the paleness of her thighs. Jasper has no idea.
Jasper doesn't know the first thing about spiritual enlightenment, Temple muttered to Will, as Jasper swung at a fastball a second too late, catching nothing but July air. He's a true believer, but he's got no idea what he's really missing. He's doesn't know what Sal knows. But he'll keep on his praying anyway.
Will nodded. Yes. Fool though he may be, Jasper Pharaoh is a very devout man.
----
[Okay, this next one was literally the first thing I wrote about the Grays, before I had even finished figuring out who any of them were. So none of it rings remotely true to character, except Ira and Fedya, but there are still turns of phrase I like.]
The story is this, although Ira isn't the one who tells it:
He'd started out in New York, somewhere with clotheslines in the alleys and corrupt city officials, corrupt landlords, a single dead-grass ball diamond in the park.
Mitch will interrupt here, say it's got to be Brooklyn; he can hear it all over Ira's voice. Everyone agrees, but Mitch has never really been in New York, so they tell him to shut up, and across the room, Ira glares at them and orders another drink.
But he'd started out there, blond and freckled and leather-tough, swinging punches at kids twice his age. Story goes he got a knife from a neighborhood hooligan by age eleven, left school by twelve, threw his first real fastball by thirteen. And after that, he never left the pitcher's mound. Not really. Not even when the war broke out and he rushed to sign up, because that's what you do, even when you're starting for the Grays, hotshot rookie just pitched his first no-hitter. Even when you've found a girl with button-brown eyes that shine only for you.
The story stops to let Jasper and Sal argue about what kind of woman she would have to be to catch Ira. Jasper says she must have been beautiful, with perfect pearl skin and bow lips, but Sal says she must have been persistent, breaking him down until he had no choice but to love her back.
"No," Fedya will interrupt here. "She was no goddess. Is just that she breaks his heart so it cannot work to love. Not anymore. Like a clock dropped and smashed." He spreads his hands like a burst of broken cogs. "Broken."
Ira left her for the front lines, though, keeping her sewn into his heart with a hundred-and-eight stitches. He left her, went to dig a groove through Verdun and Elain, to shoot and duck and throw grenades and wait ankles-deep in mud and mustard gas for the rain to stop.
[So . . . Yeah. Not ringing very true to character for Mitch, Sal, or Jasper.]
----
Fedya was rudely awakened in the middle of the night by Paul bleeding all over him.
Actually, this was untrue, but it would be the version he'd tell Eli and Ira the next morning, as he pouted surly and half-awake into his eggs and ham.
"Was like Dracula spilled his dinner all over me," he grumbled. "All. Over. Paul has terrible manners."
"From what I heard," Eli countered through a mouthful of grits, "Mitch came in and woke you up and Paul politely stood out in the grass to do his bleeding."
"Well." Fedya scowled. "Maybe. Who did you talk to?"
Ira rolled his eyes and took a swallow of black coffee. "Jasper. Who insisted that Paul bleeds like a perfect Southern gentleman."
[More stuff, conversation, took it out.]
"Hey, now," Sal broke in. "Nobody said Paul was in stitches. Why did nobody tell me Paul was in stitches?"
"Only five stitches," Jasper pointed out. "Fedya did them. Tell 'em, Fed."
"Yes, but." Fedya poked at his eggs. "But they are still stitches. And he is still playing today." He smiled slightly. "And you are still an idiot. Ira and I agree. And so--I think--does Gideon---"
"I never said that," Gideon protested mildly.
"--and Sal also," Fedya finished. "And probably also Mitch, but I have not asked him this morning."
[I have no idea. Stitches. Bleeding. I . . . I got nothing. This was maybe the second or third thing I ever wrote. Fedya's the son of a renowned doctor and was a WWI medic. Hence him stitching people up as necessary.]
----
The last frost always comes late in Haddonfield, making wet lace of the grass in the early games of the season. The first home games are ice-clammy, the players rubbing their hands in the dugout, the pitchers flexing their fingers, hoping they don't get too stiff with cold to throw their specialties.
Danny Angel King's was mean curveball slicing like the swing of a blade, exact and ruthless.
Gideon's was a slider that slipped across home plate easy as an unfaithful husband sneaking back in after the wife's asleep, back in bed before you even knew he was out.
Ira's had been a fastball. It was a killer, they said, democratically dispassionate in choosing its victims, shooting them all down alike. It was beautiful, they said. It was cruel. They said you could feel him pour all his rage in it, tightly wound, a bullet, a cannonball, shooting the pain at someone else.
Imagine, then, what it would look like now.
----
[This whole next bit is excerpted from that time I started writing about the punching Babe Ruth thing. So here are some fragments:]
Mitch and Gideon's knuckleballs had an understanding. An agreement, even. If they can get past the hitter, they have to stop for Mitch.
[...]
In the fifth inning, the Raiders' shortstop hit a triple on one of Gideon's too-slow fastballs, and by the top of the sixth, they had three runs. But the Grays had four.
And by the top of the eighth, Danny Angel King was at the mound and Ira was giving Gideon a talk about Fastballs and How to Use Them.
By the time the game stretched into the eleventh inning and Moe was wondering whether the city lights would have to make up for the setting sun, the Raiders and the Grays were stuck tied at four each, and then, somehow, with Will, Fedya, and Gideon on base, Jamie managed a double and ended the game.
[I think it's been elsewhere established, but Guy Berardi was Ira's best pal back in the old days. He plays for the Yankees now.]
"Guy," he said, "how did you get here?"
Guy Berardi shrugged, looking a bit pleased with himself. "I keep up with the Grays, Ira. What kind of friend you think I am?"
Ira was silent for a moment before answering. "What are you doing here?"
Guy's eyes flicked to Eli. "Eli, right?"
Eli nodded warily. "You must be Guy Berardi."
Flashing smile that was all charm and white teeth, Guy nodded. "Ira's mentioned me? Well, you know, we go way back. Right, Ira?"
Ira sighed. "Right." And, sounding so carefully casual, "How have you been, Guy?"
"Can't complain," Guy replied easily. "And yourself?"
Eyeing Guy's clean-pressed suit, Ira said, "I'm doing all right for myself, thank you. I don't need you to worry."
Eli shifted from foot to foot, shouldering the bag of equipment and looking uncomfortable. He cleared his throat. "We have to get this stuff back to our hotel."
"Let me help," Guy said, smile still affixed, as he reached for the bag.
"No, that's all right," Eli said, just a little too quickly and emphatically.
"You sure?"
Ira, meanwhile, was all too conscious of how battered and dusty his suit was, of how it was wearing thin at the elbows and the hem of the pants. He turned his fedora in his hand, running a thumb over the brim where the wool was getting worn and bumpy with age and too much rain. Then, to stop thinking about it, he put it on, tilted his chin up to Guy, in challenge. In defiance. "Yeah, don't worry." He swung the bag of extra gloves and balls over his shoulder. "We've got it."
[Guy's a douche, asks Ira to this shindig, whatever, whatever.]
Jasper was in his one nice pinstriped suit, but even Ira had to admit it was a really nice suit. Maybe the only thing of any real value that Jasper owned.
Ira's tux was borrowed and ill-fitting, not broad enough at the shoulders and too broad everywhere else. He didn't like it, didn't feel at home in it. Felt off-kilter and uneasy. Felt stupid.
"Come on," Jasper was saying, "we're supposed to have fun. This is a party, not a funeral, remember?"
"But if it was," Ira said darkly, "I've a good feeling I know whose it would be."
[That's where I stopped, but later wrote the afterwards conversation between Ira and Gideon:]
It was after three in the morning when Ira woke Gideon up.
"I want to talk," he said.
"You're drunk."
"Yeah. I want to talk."
"You are so lucky we don't have a game tomorrow."
"I am that."
"Shut up or get out," Eli muttered, still half-asleep.
Ira tugged at Gideon's arm and Gideon sighed and climbed out of bed.
And sitting side-by-side in the hallway outside their room, leaning against the wall, with Ira in a rumpled tuxedo and Gideon in just the bottom half of a set of long underwear, they were silent for a long minute while Gideon willed himself awake.
"I stopped at a place on the way back." Ira didn't have to specify that he meant a speakeasy. And that he meant he drank a not inconsiderable amount of their strongest stuff. Whiskey, Gideon guessed.
"I thought so. Jasper was back by midnight." Gideon paused. "He was supposed to wait for you."
"I don't need to be nannied."
"Yeah. Okay." Gideon shot him a sidelong glance. "I hear you punched the Babe. Jasper was almost beside himself he was so thrilled."
Ira yawned. Regarded Gideon. "You're fatter than you used to be."
Gideon put on his Patient Face. "You're changing the subject. Poorly. You know, I can actually out-think you when you're drunk."
"You'd like to think that. We're having pitching practice first thing in the morning."
"Like hell," Gideon told him. "I'm not letting you coach me when you have a hangover."
"I don't get hangovers." Ira looked witheringly at Gideon.
"You used to," Gideon remembered, "back when I first knew you. But then you were just some kid who sometimes drank too much with the team. Now you're a drunk, so it's different."
"I'm not--" Ira sighed. "Never mind. Point being."
"What did you want to talk about?"
"I didn't want to talk about anything."
"You're the one who got me out here. So spill." Gideon thought of his bed with longing. The floor in the hall was cold. The wall was cold. And Ira was a bastard.
"Guy's a bastard," Ira said.
"No joke. What did he do?" Gideon wanted to touch Ira on the shoulder, make him feel better. But he didn't.
"He didn't do anything. It's just . . . He's my best friend." Ira frowned. "He and I were like . . . You know?" He crossed two fingers tightly to indicate closeness, sameness. "We were one person. Now we're two. A lot of things . . ."
"A lot of things changed after you got back," Gideon agreed, wondering how many versions of this conversation they could have in a single lifetime. "You lost a lot of things."
"Fucking shut up."
"I was just agreeing."
"I don't want to talk about those things. About Guy--"
"You brought him up."
"--or, you know."
"Mary Rose," Gideon supplied.
"I said to fucking shut up." Ira yanked his bowtie undone. "But you know how it is, right? You see her for the first time and you feel small and swept away? You feel that thing pull in your stomach that says This is it."
"That happened when you first saw her?"
"Both. Yeah."
Gideon frowned but let it go. "Was that why you punched Babe Ruth?"
Ira looked frustrated and pitying, annoyed at the fact that his friend wasn't following. "No." Then: "Yes." Then: "I'm drunk."
"I'm tired," Gideon agreed. "Time to sleep for both of us, yeah?"
"Yes. Because you're going to practice in the morning."
"Like hell," Gideon repeated, knowing that he would be out there first thing in the morning no matter what he said. "I'm sorry you had to suffer through that party."
Ira stood up carefully. "Nobody said I suffered."
[I like a lot of things in that conversation. A lot of things are still slightly off. Mostly in the writing itself than the dialogue, which makes little sense because it's almost all dialogue. I'm also still yo-yo-ing between Gid describing Ira as a "drunk" and as an "alcoholic," because there's a real difference in sound there. And I'm not sure which Gideon would go for.]
----
[I was going to give you the really long piece about Mitch's family, because I actually like a lot of the writing in it, but I'll spare you that. This time.]
----
"Let Ira and Danny share a bed," Eli pointed out once, "and we'll wake up to see Ira's strangled him in his sleep."
"Ira's sleep or Danny's?" Gideon asked.
Eli shrugged. "Either way. Danny'd still be dead and then you'd be our only pitcher."
"Lord help us," Gideon said.
Eli nodded. "Exactly."
[I could add the interlude where Temple and Will walk in on Jamie touching himself because I think it's funny. But I'm juvenile like that. So I won't.]
----
Danny caught up to Ira on the porch, where he was smoking a cigarette and glowering.
"You stalking me, Rookie?"
"Are you ever going to stop calling me Rookie?" Danny held Ira in a cool, even gaze until Ira looked away.
"I doubt it," Ira said.
"We're going to be sharing a room for the next six days here. It would be nice to do it as civilly as possibly."
"Wonder if O'Hara would trade with you."
"And give up rooming with the outfield? That's going to be a hard sell." Danny cleared his throat. "Look. I know you don't like me. And I'm really starting to learn that's never going to change, but--"
"Gideon send you?" Ira flicked his cigarette butt away before lighting a new one.
"No. I just wanted to--"
"'Cause Gideon has this whole thing about making nice with people."
"It's not a terrible idea."
"I don't want to make nice with you, King. It's not gonna help either one of us." He dragged so deep and long on his cigarette that it hurt Danny's lungs to watch.
"God, Ira. Why do you have to hate me?"
"I don't hate you. I just don't care about you either way."
"Bullshit."
Ira turned to look Danny in the eye. "Yeah?"
Danny didn't look away. "Yeah."
[And then there's a cut scene where Gid implies to Mitch he's dyslexic/dysgraphic. This whole piece cuts between Ira and Danny on the porch and Mitch and Gideon inside the boardinghouse, but I don't like their half that much.]
"You think you're something really special?" Ira tried to look menacing.
Danny shook his head. "I guess I'm okay. What kind of special are we talking?"
"You know." Ira waved his hand in some kind of all-encompassing gesture, shaking cigarette ash over the porch at his feet. "Think you're some kind of hotshot pitcher with some kind of hotshot fastball. Think you're young and charming and handsome with some kind of hotshot future all laid out ahead of you." He flung his cigarette down after drawing on it in that lung-stingingly deep way, and ground it with his heel. "That kind of special."
Danny was silent for a minute, trying to gauge just how reckless and suicidal he was feeling. "No, Ira," he said finally. "That's not what I think. That's what you think."
Pretty damned suicidal.
"I don't think you're special," Ira muttered, not entirely convincing Danny.
"Neither do I," Danny said. "I just think you want to think I'm special so you can hate me for it." He paused. "Can I stop saying special now?"
Ira shrugged.
"But that's it, isn't it? You're so damned determined to be mad at someone and I'm your best bet. You want me to be you, eight years ago, hotshot pitcher, fastball, young and handsome, future laid out. Because then you can hate me. For having what you used to have. What you think you still should have. So. Answer me one thing, Hall." Danny squared his shoulders, brazenly emboldened. "What made you so special?"
They both know the only answer to that question. It's hard and fast and brutal--Ira's fist, Danny's jaw.
And even expecting it, Danny stumbled back against the porch railing from the force of the punch.
"I've been expecting that for a long time," Danny admitted.
Ira looked at Danny as though he had offered to turn the other cheek. "I've just been looking for the right moment."
----
Will had begun to think of himself as a kind of father to Jamie.
He made a terrible father.
"Jamie," he instructed one afternoon, as he and Temple were dragging the kid out for post-game banana splits at the local drugstore soda fountain. "Tell me what you know about sex."
Jamie choked on a spoonful of vanilla ice cream. "Will."
Temple sighed. "We have the corner table. Nobody can hear you."
Temple had begun to think of himself as Jamie's put-upon older brother whose life mission was to torment Jamie, because torture is the best education. And the sincerest form of affection.
Temple made an excellent brother.
Jamie ducked his head. "I--I--"
"James Middle-Name Bethlehem," Will said, very seriously. "You can't be ashamed to tell us what you know. Because that means you think it's shameful stuff. And since it's something you plan on doing someday, you really need to get over the shame part of it. Ain't no fun if you're ashamed while doing it." He inclined his head in Temple's direction. "Sometimes I suspect Temple's still getting over that."
Temple held up his hands. "Catholicism," he explained. "But I've come a long way." He studied Jamie. "What is your middle name?"
"Thomas," Jamie said, grateful for the change of subject.
Temple smirked a little. "Well, James Thomas Bethlehem, tell me about sex."
[It gets kind of weird and I lose my point for awhile here.]
"But," Temple broke in, not wanting the conversation to veer too far from its original point, "this all just goes to show that seventeen really isn't too early to start thinking about how you're going to have sex without making a huge mess of the whole thing."
"Is there really a danger of that?" Jamie looked genuinely worried.
"Oh, you bet," Temple said cheerfully, finishing off his banana split and pushing the sundae dish aside.
Will grinned. "I vote we take this discussion elsewhere. A bunch of schoolkids just walked in." He nodded to five children clambering for ice cream.
Temple grinned too. "Sounds like a plan. I've never gotten to be the one educating someone else before. Not really."
"I know," Will said fondly. "Catholicism."
[Blah, blah, blah, they teach Jamie about cunnilingus.]
"Sorry." Jamie blinked. "Just trying to . . . Wow." He frowned. "Is that safe?"
Will rolled his eyes and chuckled. "Yes. Plus it's Taoist."
"What's that?" Jamie asked.
"It's an Oriental religion," Will explained. "They say it's good for the soul."
"Really?" Temple asked. "You never told me that."
"That's because you never had any misgivings," Will said. "Besides, it's hardly the crux of their ethos."
"Good," Temple said. "Otherwise I'd be tempted to convert."
----
"So Ira likes a lady with curves." Fedya shrugged. "Is not so unnatural."
"It's Ira," Jasper reminded him. "Everything about him is unnatural."
"Ira favors the more full-figured females," Temple alliterated, looking mildly pleased with himself. "The fertility goddess type."
Jamie stared at him. "You mean it's some kinda Oedipus thing?"
"Etta who?" Mitch asked.
The others ignored him.
"No, that's not it," Will was explaining to Jamie. "It's just that Ira can truly appreciate a woman. And for that, I wholly commend him."
----
[The Grays get drunk for no good reason, other than it being fun for me to write:]
Gideon had been telling Mitch about clam-digging with a flushed earnestness that seemed to put him in the running for being near as drunk as Jasper.
"I hate doing it," Gideon had been saying, "it's wonderful. It's rewarding. It's awful." He buried his face in Mitch's shoulder in aggravation. "I don't know. It's in my blood, right?"
"Hello," Jasper announced then, draping himself all around Mitch. "Does Gideon have fish blood?"
"I think maybe you do," Fedya said, a bit miffed at having had almost to drink as Jasper and still being utterly sober. "Cold-blooded, leading you to seek the body heat of warmer individuals. Yes?"
"Excellent assessment, Doctor," Will said.
Fedya and Will shook hands.
"You know what?" Gideon asked Jasper, as Jasper handed Gideon one of the bottles and Gideon swallowed more than seemed strictly necessary. "I think I liked you better when we were on the River Rats together."
"That was ten years ago," Jasper mumbled in reply, face tucked between his arm and Mitch's chest. "I was a useless kid." Mitch held out his hand to Gideon for the bottle.
Gideon gave Mitch the whiskey. "Exactly. You were all . . ." He gestured at Jamie. "Innocent."
"Hey!" Jamie glared.
Temple ruffled Jamie's hair. "Aw, Jasper was once just like poor, sweet, little, virginal Jamie?"
"Will, can I kill Temple later?" Jamie asked. "I could push him out of the train. Nobody would even know."
"I never warned you that Temple's a condescending drunk?" Will chuckled. "I should have mentioned."
"Jasper was virginal?" Paul asked from across the room, looking up from the cramped card game he was playing with Danny, using Jasper's playing cards with the drawings on the back.
Gideon thought about this. "I don't know. I don't actually remember him getting together with any girls. But it's not like we spent all that much time together. So maybe." He made as if to lean against Mitch, but Jasper's elbow was in the way.
"He must have," Jamie said. "'Cause Temple said that Jasper said that he first went to bed with a girl when he was fifteen, so--"
"I did?" Jasper asked, reaching for one of the bottles. "I mean, I told Temple that?"
Temple's face lit up. "Are you saying you didn't?"
"No, no, no," Jasper told him, shaking his head hard and almost knocking Mitch out. "I did. It wasn't a lie. I was fourteen, just like you said I said."
"He said I said you said fifteen," Temple said. "Which is what you said."
Sal passed the vodka over to Gideon.
"Well, I don't think Jasper was having any carnal knowledge," Gideon mused. "If you know what I mean."
"Yes, we do," Temple said. "You mean carnal knowledge."
"See?" Will pointed at Temple. "Condescending drunk."
"You just didn't mispronounce conscendending," Jasper told Will. "You are too sober."
Will grinned. "I'll get more drunk if you tell us how old you really were."
Jasper buried his face in Mitch's chest. "Mitch. Save me."
"Can't do that," Mitch told him. "I know the answer."
"You're almost totally sober!" Jasper told him accusingly.
"No, I'm not!"
"No, he's not," Will said. "Quiet drunk."
"Quiet drunk who has secrets about Jasper," Temple pointed out.
Danny was too busy watching the proceedings to notice Paul looking at his cards.
"I'm gonna tell," Mitch informed Jasper.
"You're a terrible friend."
"Twenty-three," Mitch announced to the room, just as the door opened.
"Twenty-three what?" Ira asked, looking both awkward and irritated, as though he tried to sleep but found he couldn't.
"Twenty-three years," Gideon said. "Which is how many years old Jasper was when he first slept with a woman."
"Well, isn't he special, then," Ira said flatly.
"I suddenly feel less deprived," Temple said.
"This makes lot of sense," Fedya said. "But, Jasper, you should not think that you must lie about such things."
Jasper shot Fedya a very dark look.
[I like how Gid and Jas are apparently touchy-feely drunks. Poor Mitch.]
----
The speakeasy outside Swanzey was in the cellar of an old granary, crowded and dim and smoky. Eli, Ira, and Gideon sat along one of the long wooden counters, Eli and Ira doing shots of whiskey, Gideon drinking it on the rocks. Eli was scrawling notes for the team, Gideon was people-watching, and Ira sat between, contributing to Eli and Gideon's efforts when he thought he had something to say.
"Why are you saying that Danny needs batting practice?" Ira asked Eli. "Practice means doing something you know how to do, over and over to get good at it."
"Your point?" Eli arched an eyebrow at Ira.
"Something you know how to do," Ira repeated. "I think you meant that Danny needs batting lessons."
"He's not doing that poorly," Gideon said distantly, distracted by an old man telling a joke across the room, gesturing wildly with his arms.
"I could do better," Ira muttered.
Eli and Gideon exchanged glances.
"Okay," Gideon said.
"Go for it," Eli added.
Ira glowered.
"That guy over there?" Gideon gestured with his glass. "I'm thinking schoolteacher."
"I'm thinking you're boring," Ira replied.
"I'm thinking Ira isn't wrong," Eli added, still writing in his notebook.
And they lapsed into silence.
"Hey!" Gideon said suddenly, looking at Ira. "You were just looking at that woman."
"Shut up." Ira glared at Gideon and elbowed him, hard, in the ribs.
"Yeah, you were," Gideon replied, rubbing his side where he'd been jabbed.
"I wasn't," Ira countered, doing another shot and lining the empty glass up with his others.
"You were, actually," Eli said. "You were looking at her--"
"You shut up, too," Ira warned him. "Imagine me elbowing you."
Eli smiled dryly. "I'm so happy I know which side of you to sit on."
"Yeah," Gideon sighed. "I didn't even think of that."
"I hate you both," Ira informed them.
[I have no reason for liking this exchange as much as I do. Also I'm going to Hell, as Ira has one arm . . .]
----
[Okay, now I'm going to be a terrible person and give you all of the only completed piece I have of the Grays. And it's all flashback. And it's a terrible first draft--In every possible sense. So the entire rest of the post is this piece, which I have not re-read lately:]
The other rookie pitcher had a smirk so wide it near split his face in half, and a loud Brooklynite voice filled with soot and knife fights and broken radiators.
He was blond and sixteen and aggressively beautiful and Gideon Triggs hated him.
Gideon Triggs was eighteen and dark-haired, with ropeburn-rough fingers from years of working fishing boats.
Gideon Triggs had no reason to smirk.
"Hey. You." The other rookie pointed at him. "You're the other new guy, right?"
Gideon nodded, not looking at him. He was studying the ball in his hand, repositioning his fingers, trying to make them learn right. Fastball, curveball, knuckleball, sinker, slider. Cutter, splitter, screwball, changeup.
"You any good?" He peered at Gideon through narrowed, appraising eyes.
Gideon shrugged.
"I'm good."
He said it with such certainty that Gideon looked up.
"Ira," he said. "Ira Hall." He held out his hand for Gideon to shake, and when Gideon accepted it, Ira gripped so tight that Gideon pulled his hand back.
Ira's knuckles were scarred, Gideon noticed.
"Gideon Triggs," Gideon said.
Ira's smirk grew. "Well, Gideon Triggs, you wait and see: Training tomorrow, my fastball will be the fastest you ever saw. Management says it's the fastest they've seen. Like I said, I'm good."
Gideon watched him walk away and hoped to God he was lying.
He went back to the baseball in his hand. Fastball, forkball, curveball. Fastball, fastball, fastball.
---
Ira Hall hadn't been lying.
Gideon watched him pitch and felt sick and dizzy.
His fastball was blink-and-miss-it and left the catcher's hand smarting, even through the glove.
One of the other pitchers said, "With an arm like that, kid could throw nothing but fastballs and live forever on steak and women in the Majors."
Another pitcher grunted in agreement and flexed his fingers.
Gideon stared at his hands, suddenly feeling them too big and too clumsy. What was he doing here?
Ira came back to the bench, sat down beside Gideon, grinning. "See? What did I tell you?"
Gideon shrugged and half-smiled at him. "The truth?"
"Damn right," Ira replied.
---
"Figuring I'll make it to the big time," Ira said one day on the way back to Wheeling for a home series. "The Major Leagues, you know. Maybe the Brooklyn Superbas, yeah? Hometown pride and all that."
Gideon nodded. "That would be nice."
"My best friend, Guy, he's probably gonna make it too. Out playing for Trenton right now."
Gideon listened to the rhythm of the train rushing along the tracks. "Trenton's good," he said, for something to say.
"Idiot." Ira smacked him in the back of the head. "Of course they are. Guy's been with them two years now, but a lot of Class A scouts are interested in him. He's twenty this coming month--Says we'll celebrate when the season's over."
Gideon could only imagine what a friend of Ira's would be like.
"Anyway, I'm starting tomorrow. Halverson says I might be the thing that brings us to the top of the league this season."
Gideon nodded, trying not to care that he'd only pitched in two games so far, both in ninth innings when the end had already been decided.
Maybe he should ask to play outfield instead.
"Hey, if it's going really well by the sixth inning tomorrow," Ira offered, looking a little too smug to really be kind, "I'll see if they'll let you in to pitch a few."
Gideon tried to smile. "Thanks."
---
Guy Berardi was worse than Ira. Trenton's path crossed Wheeling's late in August and they met up in bar, Ira dragging Gideon along because, according to Ira, "I haven't seen you get with a woman all season and I think that's half your problem." Guy Berardi, Ira vowed, was better at getting women than anyone else ever.
Ira wasn't too bad at it, either. But Gideon never liked letting Ira force the less attractive friends on him as though he were a charity case and they were desperate and grateful.
Mostly, they were annoyed and Gideon was apologetic.
Guy Berardi was smooth and handsome and dark, with a strong jaw and a colder smirk than Ira's. He carried himself like a king and Ira dovetailed with him into a snide, arrogant pose that made Gideon study his beer to avoid looking at them.
"That girl?" Ira pointed at a thin brunette with large teeth and gleeful eyes.
Guy snorted. "You can do so much better."
Ira rolled his eyes. "I know. I meant for Gideon."
"Oh." Guy appraised her, appraised Gideon, and shrugged. "All right. Definitely." He stood and crossed the bar to her.
Gideon tried to shrink into himself.
Ira leaned back into their booth and grinned.
Guy was saying something to her that made her laugh and duck her head. They both looked at Gideon and he looked away.
When she came to sit beside him, Gideon smiled weakly.
She smiled back.
Ira and Guy were gone, already surrounding themselves with pretty girls and laughing.
"I'm . . . engaged," Gideon lied. "I . . ."
She looked away. "It's all right. I get that."
"No, I mean," Gideon started. "I don't mean--I just wasn't--" He sighed. "I'm sorry."
He felt terrible. He wasn't allowed to go to bed with a girl just because he felt bad for her, was he? Ira would.
All right, Ira wouldn't, but only because he had some kind of standards he measured his girls by. As though he could only have the prettiest girl in the room, lest he be judged for not being able to get her.
But Gideon had noticed the girls that Ira looked at when he didn't think anyone was looking, and they weren't the slender beauties with long haughty necks and bedroom eyes.
They were the Rubenesque girls with the kind faces. They were the girls in the plainer dresses, the girls without kohl-ringed eyes or rouged cheeks, the girls with wide hips and wider smiles. The girls that Guy would be quick to point out weren't good enough for Ira.
Gideon tried to smile again at the girl beside him as Ira turned away from a redhead with glasses and Guy laughed at her.
Maybe sometime Gideon would point out that Ira wasn't good enough for them.
If he ever spoke to Ira again.
---
Most of the rest of Wheeling's pitchers disliked Ira, Gideon learned. Phrases like "upstart rookie" and "arrogant kid" and "brat" drifted in whispered undercurrents around the clubhouse and the ballfield, and Gideon tried not to add to them, tried not to smile when he heard.
But he did.
"If he didn't act too big for his britches," he said to one of the other pitchers, "I'd like him a lot more. I mean, I'd admire his talent. You know? But instead, I'm just waiting for him to mess up."
"The bigger they are, the harder they fall," the pitcher agreed.
"The bigger their ego," another modified.
The shortstop beside Gideon let out a short bark of laughter. "Say what you want about him, I bet you in a few years, he'll be pitching in the Majors and we'll all be stuck back here in Class B, reading about him in the sporting papers."
"I might make it to the show," one of the pitchers said. "You never know. Most of us here have a shot."
Gideon didn't ask who wasn't part of the "most." He didn't have to. "Well," he said, trying to sound cheerful, "ten years down the road, when I'm reading about the Boy with the Golden Arm over there, at least I'll be able to say I knew him when."
---
Ira Hall did not get traded that year.
When Gideon showed up for spring training and saw that stupid blond smirk, he wanted to turn around and get back on the train.
At the end of their first season, Ira had mentioned, all cool smug casual, "I hear management's been talking about trading you to the Columbia Gamecocks for a couple of their pitchers."
"That's a Class C team," Gideon had said, feeling his heart sink.
"Yeah, well, maybe they'll let you out on the mound more down there."
"That's in South Carolina," Gideon had said, feeling the floor drop away from him.
"I hear it's real hospitable down there."
"That's a Class C team," Gideon had repeated, feeling a hint of desperation creep into his voice.
"Maybe you'll like it down there."
Gideon had frowned then. "Maybe you'll like it down there, too."
"Down where? I'm not being traded."
Gideon had tried to mirror Ira's cocky grin. "In Hell."
And that was the last they spoke.
Until they saw each other in spring training and Ira had given him a cool smile.
"Not in Hell," he pointed out.
"Not in South Carolina," Gideon said.
"We good, Gideon Triggs?"
"I hate you, Ira Hall."
Ira smirked. "Then we're good."
---
The next year, Ira was traded up to the Toledo Mud Hens. Gideon hung on as a relief pitcher in Wheeling. They didn't know what else to do with him.
The year after that, 1912, Ira moved up again to the Baltimore Orioles. Double-A ball. From there, the bigtime was candy in a store window.
In 1913, Gideon was traded to the Evansville River Rats. Class C ball. From there, the bigtime was an illustration in a storybook, captioned "In a faraway kingdom . . ."
Ira sent a postcard when he heard about Gideon: It was only a matter of time.
Gideon sent one back: At least I'm a better person than you.
He wrote it seven times before he was satisfied that the letters looked right and the words had spaces between them and not in the middle.
Ira's reply: Small prizes. At least I'M climing the ladder in the right direction.
Gideon's: Don't trip on the top rung.
Ira: Don't cry when you hit the bottom.
Gideon didn't write back.
Then, in 1914, just weeks after an Austrian archduke was killed, Baltimore told Ira they were sending him over to the Providence Grays next season.
Gideon imagined Ira's fury at being sent sideways instead of up. It made him feel better when fall came and he was traded to the Mason City Claydiggers for a couple of their rookie pitchers.
Class D. Rock bottom.
There was no postcard from Ira. There was no sport in laughing at someone who'd fallen all the way.
---
In his season with Albany (still Class D, still rock bottom), Gideon heard from Ira again, in a sloppy letter saying that he was thinking he was going to get married. Guy thinks I'm crazy, Ira wrote. I needed a second opinon.
Your the only one I could think of to ask, he wrote. Her name is Mary Rose.
Gideon wrote back. She wants to marry you? Is SHE crazy?
Yes, Ira wrote. FOR ME.
Gideon could imagine Ira grinning when he wrote that.
I think I love her, Ira wrote. Dont tell Guy I said that.
Marry her, Gideon replied. But only if she has wide hips and a kind face.
He didn't hear back.
A year passed.
Gideon ran into an old teammate from Wheeling by chance, also fallen to Class D, but with the war wounds of a ruined elbow and a bad knee from one too many accidents on the field.
It's only noble and tragic when it's a soldier who falls.
Any news? Gideon asked.
The teammate mentioned a few names, how they rose or fell or left the game completely, mentioned a team or two they had played that had ceased to exist, said, "Remember Hall? That cocky pitcher kid who went up to Double-A?"
"Kind of," Gideon said. "Whatever happened to him?"
"Oh, him," the man said. "He joined the Army. I hear they shipped him out last month. He didn't even stick around to finish the season."
"Really," Gideon replied, sounding neutral, sounding like it was only of passing interest. "Really now."
"Wouldn't worry about him, though. Brooklyn's given him a contract effective the moment he gets home." The old teammate from Wheeling laughed an empty laugh.
"The Dodgers?" Now Gideon wanted to sound like he cared, but couldn't.
"Yeah. That kid's going up to the big show after he gets done killing Krauts." The empty laugh again. "Didn't we say he would?"
Gideon shrugged. "I don't remember. Did we?"
---
That was the end of the story.
That was the end of that story.
Another began in November 1918 on a fishwet rainy evening after the boats had been roped up for the night and their men had gone home to scrub the stink of walleye and trout from their hands and beards.
Gideon Triggs could still smell the bay in his wet hair as he rolled a baseball across the table in his two-room house, rented from a man who lent it out to beachgoers all summer.
It had been a long season. He'd been sent down to the Haddonfield Grays that year, about as low on the totem as you could get. If there were Class E ball, Haddonfield would be it.
If there were Class Z ball.
He was twenty-seven and half-convinced he should retire.
The baseball rolled back, fell softly into his hands, and he positioned his fingers on the seams. Fastball. Again, another way. Curveball. And again, slider.
His fingers were fisherman-callused from all his winters and felt like leather against leather against the white leather of the ball.
Someone knocked on the door, and Gideon studied the blurred silhouette through the milky isinglass window in the door's center before he answered.
"Hello, Gideon," Ira Hall said. He was post-thin and rain-slick and fish-pale, with darkness around his eyes and cracked lips.
He had no smirk and his quiet Brooklynite voice was filled with its own emptiness.
He was brown-blond and twenty-five and rendingly beautiful and Gideon Triggs was afraid for him.
Gideon Triggs was afraid of him, of his heavy Army overcoat, of the way the right sleeve hung empty at Ira's side.
"What are you doing here?" He knew he should step back, gesture Ira in from the cold November rain, but he couldn't move.
"I don't know. Couldn't think of anyone else to go . . ." Ira shrugged, gestured confused and feeble with his left hand. "We still good, Gideon Triggs?"
Gideon saw he was shaking and reached out, pulled him into the two-room house. Pulled off the wet overcoat, replaced it with an old quilt, guided Ira to the table. "You look a miserable bastard, Ira Hall."
Ira's mouth twitched in the memory of a smirk. "Then we're good," he said, before passing out.