Evvie Drake Starts Over(49)

He opened the bag on the ground next to him and turned it sideways, and ten or so baseballs rolled out. He threw them one after another, bang, bang, bang, first looking like a guy who knew how to throw, but then looking like a pitcher. He fiddled with the brim of his Calcasset High School cap. He rubbed his hand against his hip. By the time he threw the last one, he was fully kicking his leg in the wind-up, and Eveleth even saw him sneak a look at a first base that wasn’t there.

   He was out of breath at the end, and a pile of baseballs had accumulated at the base of the fence. He stood with his hands on his hips. Evvie stood next to him for a minute, mimicking his stance and his forward gaze. Then she walked over to the fence and gathered up the balls, dropping them into a little pouch she made with her shirt. She came back and dumped them on the ground in front of Dean. He nodded. He picked one up. Bang.

They hit at what looked to her like a very consistent spot. After a while, she could see the marks where they were hitting, and they were close together, grouped like a basket of peaches. But mostly, she watched Dean. His forehead got a little damp, until a little swirl of hair stuck to it. There was a story in it for him somewhere in there, somebody to beat, and once, she heard him whisper what she was pretty sure was “Yeah, there it is, fucker.”

Dean threw like big cats pounce in nature documentaries. She could know it was coming, she could watch him settle, she could watch the twitches while he waited, but every time it happened it was still surprising how merciless it was and how silently it was done. She gathered up the baseballs and brought them back and put them at his feet, but this time he stopped with his hands on his hips and said, “How much of this do you need to see?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know, how much of it do you need to do?”

He smiled and shook his head. “Nah, this is for you, Minnesota.”

“You sure?”

He looked at her, a little out of breath. “Why are we out here?”

She walked over to the fence with her hands in her pockets and peered at the marks on it. “This doesn’t look to me like you’re throwing all over the place,” she called over to him. “What am I missing?”

“Fuck’s sake,” he said, looking at the bright blue sky. “Evvie, it’s inches, pitching. It’s inches. The fact that I’m not throwing it over the fence into the road doesn’t mean anything has changed. Why are we talking about this again?”

   “Because if I could do anything as well as you do that, I’d want to keep doing it as long as I could. And I think you do, too. I’ve seen what it looked like when it wasn’t going well. You weren’t doing that.” She pointed at the little cluster of marks on the fence. “So something’s different. You’re not even curious?”

“I quit. It’s done.”

She walked toward him. “If it’s done, why did you sit on a boat called Second Chance and let them take your picture?”

He shifted on his feet. “It was a photographer. It was his idea. It was that or the Natural Booty.”

She shook her head. “Don’t do that. You know what I’m talking about. You know what you said in that interview, you know that you go out in the middle of the night—”

“I don’t want to talk about that,” he told her firmly. “If I’d wanted to talk about it, I’d have told you about it, like I said the last time you asked me about it.”

“I don’t think you’re ready to give up. I think that’s why you sneak around.”

“Evvie…do you ever quit?”

She was right in front of him again, and she rested her hand on his pitching arm. “There’s a game every year, an exhibition game, between the Claws and this team from Freeport. They play, they raise money, the money gets split between their PTA and ours, with a bonus for the winner. Sometimes there are guests who play on one of the—”

“Are you kidding me? Fuck, no,” he said. “You want to bring a hundred reporters here to write about how sad it is that I’m pitching in a charity game? These people are just now getting bored with me; I’m not giving them anything.”

“We’re not going to announce it,” she said, moving fluidly into the future tense. “We’ll tell the team. It’ll be a surprise for everybody else. The kids you coach are going to love it. And you can see how it goes. You’ll pitch an inning.”

   He still had a ball in his hand, and he kept running his fingers over the stitching. “You’re not listening,” he said.

“I know.”





THE CALCASSET CLAWS AND THE Freeport Explorers played an exhibition game they called the Spring Dance every year on the last Sunday in May. They alternated between the two ballparks, had a carnival beforehand in the parking lot, and, every year, the host team tried to top the year before. There was laser tag in Freeport one year; there was a virtual reality room in Calcasset the next year. There was a dog show in Calcasset one year; there was a bull rider in Freeport the next year.

This was Calcasset’s year, and the organizers were understandably enthusiastic when Dean Tenney sidled into their temporary office at Dacey Park a couple of weeks ahead of the game to tell them that if it was okay with the team, he wanted to show his gratitude for how he’d been welcomed by pitching an inning. Freeport might have had a vertical wind tunnel last year, but Calcasset was going to have a news story. It would remain a secret until he walked onto the field; that was his only condition.