back into a fake history
okay, i know i say this every time, but this was supposed to be, like, at most ten pages long. i really don't know what's going on with me.
also, go rocks! my folks are at that game today. rockies make the nlcs, i am so going to one of those games. knockin on wood and everything.
It’s a backwards view of an AU I wrote a year ago, but can probably be read on its own. The premise is that Zito, Chavez, and Munson all attended the same high school, and the new coach of their baseball team is Billy Beane.
Actually Happened Like This
Chavez and Munson are playing quarters in some soccer player’s kitchen, a few weeks before the season starts, and Chavez is way more drunk, telling Munson how much he hates their other best friend.
That is not remotely true. Munson amuses himself by cataloguing all the ways he can tell Chavez is lying, the flush on his neck and his thumbnail ragged and his eyes stuck on Zito through the doorway. Zito’s leaning against the wall talking to a dark-haired kid with a wine-stain birthmark under his eye, an occasional calculated smile passing over his face like a cloud.
Chavez’s coordination is eroding slowly and Munson is gleefully demolishing him, until Chavez’s elbows are propped and slipping on the counter and he’s slurring, “Those fucking ape hands of his,” banging his forehead.
Munson finishes off the last beer, a faint metallic sting that he barely registers, and his face is all twisted up but he doesn’t know that.
Chavez ends up on the floor, which is typical, and Munson wishes for hard liquor but these fucking soccer players hardly know the word. Munson pushes at Chavez’s side with his foot a couple of times, but Chavez only squirms and claws his hand weakly on the tile.
Pocketing the silver that he can find, Munson rinses beer off his hands and slicks his hair back, goes over to where Zito has his hand up on the wall next to the dark-haired kid’s head.
“Z.”
Zito looks back over his shoulder, shoots a glare at him, Zito’s I’m-trying-to-land-a-sexually-confused-sophomore-do-you-fucking-mind glare, but Munson only grins, rocking on his heels.
“We got a man down,” Munson tells him.
Exhaling, Zito turns back to his boy, face clear. “Give me two minutes.” He thinks for a moment. “. . . Noah.”
In the kitchen, out of earshot and standing over Chavez’s body, Munson says, “He seemed nice,” but Zito barely takes the time to tell him to shut up. He toes at Chavez’s ribs just like Munson had, leaving a finger of black on the white of Chavez’s shirt, calling Chavez’s name.
Chavez doesn’t stir, and they leverage him up, shoulders under his arms, his head dropped like a stone and his feet dragging. Chavez hates sleeping in public, unprotected and at risk of being drunkenly fucked with, and every time they leave him where he’s fallen, he complains about it for days. It’s gotten easier to haul him out to the car.
Of the three of them, Munson would say that he’s the perfect drunk, and Zito can smoke on par with your average traveling funk band, and Chavez. Chavez is probably the best baseball player.
Still a lightweight, he thinks, feeling the dig of Chavez’s hipbone against his own. Chavez is warmer than the air, a pair of railroad tracks leading from his sneakers through the overgrown grass, and his head rests heavily on Munson’s shoulder, his damp hair on Munson’s cheek.
The party noise recedes down the sidewalk, and Munson can hear Zito’s low mumble, telling Chavez all the many and varied ways that Zito hates him. Sometimes it’s like Chavez and Zito are arguing inside a worm hole, responding to each other in monologue hours apart.
Sloping Chavez against the car, Munson goes through his pockets, trying not to notice Zito’s fingers circled loosely around Chavez’s wrist, Zito’s near-black eyes trained on Chavez’s unlined face.
“He hasn’t been sleeping, you know,” Zito tells him. “He gets up when it’s still dark and he goes running along the reservoir.”
Munson nods. “It’s probably smart.”
“Probably.” Zito takes hold of Chavez’s legs and folds them in towards his chest, sliding him down the backseat. He give Chavez a long look, his expression mostly inscrutable, and then turns away, saying, “Better things await me, Munce, I’ll see you.”
Munson checks the constellations and Orion lets him know that it’s still winter, still the off-season. His short-term memory has seemed perforated recently, blurring the specifics of conversations and geography, and he loses track sometimes.
It’s self-inflicted and in a million different ways, because here Munson stands in the leafed pieces of moonlight and shadow, once again actively trying to forget that Zito and Chavez are in love with one another.
*
What Munson really wants to know is, exactly how dumb do you guys think I am?
When they were sophomores, just into the baseball season, Chavez got skittish and ill-tempered, avoiding Munson’s eyes and flinching when Zito walked into rooms. Munson went to Zito and asked concisely what the fuck, and Zito lied to him perhaps as poorly as Zito had ever lied to him, glancing compulsively at the ceiling and flicking his hair out of his eyes.
Munson was stung, the totally unfamiliar feeling of betrayal like too-tight skin, knowing that they were both hiding something from him. He sulked around and told Zito horror stories about what a curveball does to your elbow, keyed the side of Chavez’s car all the way across both doors.
He’s never claimed to be rational when it comes to the two of them.
Then something happened at the beach, on the other side of the bonfire and Munson could only see them through the bannered flames, Chavez sneering at Zito and Zito whipping a palmful of sand into Chavez’s chest. Munson thought it strange, hazy through his own drunk, fearful that they were developing cracks and fissures like the first splinter in a wood bat that meant it was just a matter of time before it shattered on a pitch in on the hands.
Zito and Chavez stumbled off still arguing, kicks of sand in their wake, and Munson staggered to his feet, following them. He wanted to holler at them, don’t fuck up the important stuff, trying to get close enough to hear what they were saying. They were among the cars, head and shoulders silhouetted, and Zito suddenly moved in a swift hook and had Chavez pinned against metal.
Munson thought Zito was gonna hit Chavez and he tensed with a lurch in his stomach, thinking that he’d have to pull them apart bloodied and snarling, but instead Zito kissed Chavez, messy hard and deep. Munson stopped dead, open-mouthed as Chavez kissed Zito back.
He watched them for awhile.
Ever since then, Eric Munson has been shadowed, stuck on the picture of Chavez with his face tipped up and his eyes closed, Zito’s pale hand disappearing by inches into Chavez’s black hair, stuck on his two best friends, who are stuck on each other.
*
The season’s starting today, and they’ve lost Zito. Chavez and Munson wake up in the attic, hungover dumb and chasing caffeine pills and coffee. Munson borrows a T-shirt and tells Chavez to shave, but Chavez can barely keep his eyes open and he’s got a piece of toast cradled jealously in his hand, a powerbar in his back pocket, hunching over the wheel after refusing to let Munson drive.
Zito vanished northward fifteen hours ago, and Munson wonders what they’ll do if Zito hasn’t turned up by the three-fifteen bell, the last call before baseball practice.
But in the parking lot before school, Zito appears as though out of the smoke and blue sky, and they’re reconnected. Zito’s taking all of this pretty hard, too exhausted and too stoned to keep his expression steady when he looks at Chavez, when Chavez crawls into the backseat and blankets Zito’s upper body for a moment. Munson can see Zito in the side mirror, nervous play of his hands on Chavez’s shoulders and hair before they fall out into the morning.
School is torturous, and it’s followed by the first full team practice of the season, and Munson is mildly concerned at the new world order revealed by their rookie coach, who appears to be kinda nuts, but he can’t really find fault with the idea of playing as much baseball as the daylight allows.
They get through, and it’s later, at the beach, numbed by two capfuls from the thermos and singeing his fingertips, his muscles heavy like lying on an immense planet where the gravity’s tenfold.
Chavez nudges Munson, slash of black eyes glittering, saying low, “It’s a freckle past a hair and do you know where your children are?”
Munson smiles up at the sky. This is their pigeon language, their code since they were nine years old, a mash-up of stuff from comic books and cartoons, commercials that had aired during He-Man, and stupid kid jokes. Chavez just asked Munson how he’s doing, because it’s getting late.
“Deep-sixed,” Munson replies. Chavez moves his head slightly in a nod, his eyes glassy and red.
“Cross your heart, holler retreat?”
“Surrender’s for the weak.”
White gash of Chavez’s teeth as he smiles, and Munson wants to feel the edges of it, the scratch of Chavez’s face on his hand, some solid proof. Eighteen years old now, Munson is aware that his memory is already starting to lose pages like an old book, only a few soft-focus images remaining from his early childhood; more and more, it feels like his life began with Eric Chavez.
*
Munson started the war against Zito when they first met.
Summer before seventh grade, Munson was biking over to Chavez’s house and three blocks away he rode past a kid in a yellow-grass yard, pitching a tennis ball at a square marked out in masking tape on the garage door. Munson cut a wide slow circle in the street, watching the kid nail the corners in sequence.
The kid was left-handed and already taller than either Munson or Chavez, and his bike, lying glittering on its side in the grass, was brand-new. Something about him bothered the hell out of Munson, though it might have just been concern for his and Chavez’s preeminence in Little League.
He next saw Zito from their tree in the park, where they were keeping watch on the quarters they’d glued to the sidewalk and the people that tried to pry them up. Recognizing the mop of Zito’s hair as he passed under them, Munson twisted a seed pod off a branch and, not much inclined at that age to think through his instincts, dropped it onto Zito’s head.
Zito became a part of their everyday very quickly, though it was as an enemy. He was crafty, underhanded, climbing in through the window of Munson’s garage and taking Munson’s bike, leaving it outside in the driveway so that Munson would get yelled at by his dad in the morning, confined to the house for the rest of the day.
The stuff Zito pulled was outside the rules of engagement, and Munson’s response to disadvantage was characteristic: swing harder. He beat Zito up worse than he ever beat up anyone before, behind the elementary school auditorium with his knees on Zito’s back, his filthy hand wrenched in Zito’s hair. He didn’t know what it was about this kid, who cried give, give, a mud of dirt and blood and tears smeared all over his face, but Munson wasn’t usually like this.
Right around his own birthday, all three of them showed up at the birthday party of someone else, and there were older kids with a couple bottles of wine and they sat in the backyard taking what was offered to them, their enmity tempered for the moment by more pressing matters. Chavez had loosened and loosened until he was slumped on Munson, sweet-smelling and giggling.
The neighbors came by to check up on the party, a deep man’s voice through the open patio door, and Munson hauled Chavez behind the bushes, thinking only of concealment, surprised to find Zito in there already with leaves wound in his hair, his knees clutched to his chest.
Munson, seriously drunk for the first time in his life and badly scared by the yaw of his perception, latched onto Zito and Chavez as proof that there were other people in the world who were drunk and he wasn’t going to die because people got drunk all the time. He listened to Zito tell them guardedly about techniques for getting over a hangover that he’d learned from his sisters. Chavez remarked that the stars were kind of amazing, and they all leaned their heads back and looked up at the strip between the bushes and the fence.
Chavez and Zito weren’t making any sense, talking animatedly about pitch grips but with gaps, blanks where words were missing, and Munson’s head spun, granted just an instant of reaction time when he realized he was gonna be sick. He heard Chavez and Zito break off talking rather suddenly as he keeled over, Zito making a small shocked noise.
Munson wanted to say, I’m all right, fellas, though truthfully he felt like he was turning inside out, and he rested his head against the fence, splinter scratch on his forehead. It was quiet for a while, the dim ramble of the party noise far away, and when Munson lifted his head, he saw Chavez and Zito staring at each other, Zito dumbstruck with his hand at his mouth and Chavez uneasy, clutching his ankle.
Munson was dizzy and worn out, and he found Zito’s dirty face alongside Chavez’s to be something familiar and comforting, a constant amid the havoc of the night, and Munson said in a rasp, “Truce.” After a second Zito nodded, echoed it.
*
The season presses near. Munson swings for the fences every time, and their new coach, this Billy Beane, tells him he’ll give him five hundred dollars if he hits the wall on a string, and Munson learns to aim line drives like missiles, heat-seeking. Billy Beane puts Dixie cups on the corner of second base for Munson to peg from his knees, and Munson ends each day spitting brown, his face grimed under the mask.
Zito has started acting oddly, diffident and aloof, preoccupied inside his mind, and Munson can tell that it irritates Chavez, who likes them all to stick to their proscribed roles. Munson’s pretty sure it’s about senior year and the stuff that comes next; Zito probably won’t get drafted, something they all dance around, willfully blind, and he has to figure out his life in a much more immediate way than either Munson or Chavez.
A week before their first game, Munson wakes up in the park, under the landmark two-trunk tree. His hair is wet with dew and the grass to his side is smashed down in a long Zito-shape, but his friends are gone. Still kinda drunk, Munson rises to his knees and clumsily picks the loose change from his pockets out of the grass, sky gone crazy with stars, a faint downbound wail from the train tracks a few miles away.
He staggers across the lawn to the car, dimly remembering the emergency flask duct-taped to the underside of the shotgun seat, deeming his heartless abandonment more than enough reason.
His first thought is that someone’s broken into the car, the smeary twist of shadow through a fogged window, the duck of a head. But the shadow separates and part of it arches back and Munson recognizes the way Chavez yawns and stretches, lazy bow of his spine. He hears Zito saying low like a laugh, barely through the door, “Good, Ricky.”
Munson reels away, tripping down the gutter to sit on the curb a half a block down. He puts his elbows on his knees and his chin on his hands, staring at a patch of sidewalk where it’s possible he and Eric Chavez once wrote their names in colored chalk.
It’s been a couple of months since Munson last caught them, and as always he’s got to fight the sick feeling in his stomach, the tightness in his chest, trying to get past the visceral and into the repercussions. He still can’t believe Chavez and Zito think they’re getting away with it.
When they were fifteen, they kept thinking Munson was asleep, but he shot up five inches that year and laid awake for hours with his legs aching, and sometimes he would hear Chavez crawling across the carpet towards Zito, two voices behind the flood of the shower, Zito cracking jokes and gasping in the alley behind the garage, right under the air vent, Chavez slowly breaking down.
They’re together all the time. Spend enough time getting fucked up with the same people and nothing remains vaulted, certainly nothing of this magnitude. Chavez and Zito should have known from the outset, should have come clean years ago and saved them all a metric ton of heartache and wasted time, but apparently they preferred the Munce=idiot route.
Munson, in one of the many ways that he is demonstrably not an idiot, also knows that it’s not supposed to be happening anymore. It meant something different sophomore year, when Zito walked around with a baffled look on his face like he’d just figured out how to see the world in color, and Chavez executed crazy stunts and double plays flawlessly, shone in some near-painful way.
But something went wrong after only a couple of months. Knowing Zito, he hooked up with someone else without realizing that Chavez would take offense, and Chavez, noble soul that he is, told him to fuck right off. Loyalty is priority one in Chavez’s book, always has been.
Whatever it was, Zito went back into the teenage gayboy scene with a vengeance, and Chavez started dating girls, the prettiest in school, with disturbing ease considering he didn’t seem to be having much fun. They sniped at each other more often and all three of them took up substance abuse as a welcome distraction from the tension, and Munson felt like he was drowning that summer, fighting off a fever for weeks, never sure if it was his temperature or the weather that was a hundred degrees.
So it was a nightmare, days and nights on end, while Zito and Chavez chipped the fuck out of each other, circled Munson like he was neutral ground and they couldn’t be trusted on their own. Once Zito showed up with a black eye, and once Chavez’s lip was split, their excuses elaborate. Munson was as miserable as he’d ever been, sure that he was dying and even if wasn’t, his friends were gonna raze this city they’d built and salt the earth behind them. He was losing everything, at a moment when he was too ill to properly protect what was his.
They got through the summer somehow, on hundred proof and Humboldt County, cough syrup and Ritalin and caffeine pills, and Munson couldn’t remember when he’d realized that Chavez and Zito were still fucking around every couple of weeks. Maybe sometime in November.
For a long time, Munson wasn’t sure if it wasn’t just because Chavez was too chickenshit to approach any other guy, with the untouchable magazine-article reputation he was constructing, but it didn’t hold up. Munson had a tendency to idolize Eric Chavez that backlashed on him just then, forced him to conclude that Chavez wasn’t really cruel enough to wreck Zito (as he so obviously was) without being wrecked right back.
So someday Chavez and Zito will outgrow their tortured secret-in-love teenage angst-fest and just be regular in love, and Munson will finally be able to give them hell about how ridiculously incompetent they are, and get them drunk toasting honesty and forthrightness and brotherhood, and tell them seriously around three in the morning that it’s great, really it is, you’re so good for each other, and he might even mean it by then.
It’s a nice image of the future, better than a lot of other stuff that could happen, but Munson’s sitting on the curb trying to count stars, trying not to cry, treacherously doubting that Zito has ever made Chavez all that happy.
*
Munson hardly ever passes out, so he really should have been the one to take the last shot in the school hallway right before the second bell, but he’s annoyed with Zito, who’s been spacey all week and is somehow quietly enraging Chavez with his mere presence, so he dares him and Zito, good soldier, upends the thermos, swaying. He stumbles into his Greek Mythology class, and Chavez and Munson duck into the boys’.
Chavez washes out his mouth and scrubs his face, his pupils blown black and hidden by the dark of his eyes. They haven’t slept and Munson leans exhausted against the tile wall, barely keeping his feet, trying to steady himself by counting the spitballs on the ceiling.
“Today’s gonna be bad,” Chavez says, and Munson looks over to see him resting his forehead on the mirror, his hands on the lip of the sink.
“Wholeheartedly agree.”
“I’m,” Chavez half-laughs, “I could not be drunker and survive.”
Munson nods, right there with him. Dousing his troubles, high school irreparably blurred, Munson has learned to take the drunk as it comes, time its rhythms and pace himself, but no matter how fucked up he gets, sometimes he’s still hobbled by the weight of eight hours in small rooms, lying between him and baseball practice.
“We’ll sleep during sixth period,” Munson offers, and Chavez closes his eyes, rolls his head back. Munson is caught by the tilt and bow of Chavez’s neck, his eyes bugging and his heart turning over in his chest.
Living as they do, it’s sometimes impossible for Munson to avoid thinking about it, picturing it. Chavez atop Zito in the backseat, jeans open and legs spread, hands on Zito’s throat. Zito smiling and breathing out curses, rubbing his face on Chavez’s chest. Munson only really saw them that once in the parking lot, every other time he’s been a wall away or pretending to sleep or defied by the fog on the windows, but he’s filled in the intervening thirty-two months pretty well on his own.
He thinks sometimes that it would be easier to be close-minded and ignorant of anything, because he’s not always sure that the wrench of his stomach, that special overturn of his heart, is what it should be. He started out just curious, but Chavez bends him more every day.
“You always say we’ll sleep during sixth period, but then I get out there and what’re you, you’re packing a bowl.”
Munson grins and fists his hands at the small of his back, knuckles jammed against the tile of the wall.
“You’re not the same right now as you will be by sixth period,” Munson tells him. “Sixth period Chavvy always wants to smoke a bowl.”
Chavez narrows his eyes and studies Munson for a minute, swaying slightly. “You’re the one that changes.”
Munson shakes his head, a smirk on his face even though he feels like he might throw up any second now, and he’s gonna get Chavez to tell him just what the fuck he means by that, but a kid they know from auto shop comes in and tells them that Zito’s been spotted being carried across campus by his armpits and legs, dead to the world.
It occupies them for awhile.
Through the window of the nurse’s office, Zito looks terrible, sitting on the paper-covered cot with a wavery smile and dug-out eyes, and Munson tries to talk the principal into mercy, feeling just awful and getting keyed up, angrier and angrier until Chavez grabs him by the belt and hauls him out of there.
Chavez leaves Munson at the window to keep an eye on their poor doomed friend, and takes off across the campus, fast enough to stretch a double, and Munson doesn’t know where he’s going. He’s not back when Billy Beane appears briefly through the trees before vanishing into the office, but Munson can’t worry about it, thinking that it’ll be okay, because of course, of course Beane will get Zito out; Beane’s earned their loyalty exactly as far as they’ve earned his.
He sticks around until he sees Zito leaving, trailing Beane with his head down, walking towards the parking lot, and then goes looking for Chavez, finds him near the baseball field looking lost. Munson takes him out to sit in centerfield and talk over each other, trying to pinpoint where they went wrong and how they’ll remedy the situation. They completely forget about class until the bell rings, and then they’re both running back towards the buildings, shredded color and faces and greens tearing past. They split by the library, and Munson looks back, but only once.
*
Under Eric Chavez’s bed, in the dozens of shoeboxes Chavez has accumulated since he was five, there are nine thousand and forty-seven baseball cards.
Chavez went through a phrase, a three-year arc beginning when they were seven, in which he dedicated himself to names and numbers, pages of team rosters copied down at the library and taped up to his walls, quizzing himself with the cards. They’d be in the bleachers and Chavez would tell Munson the batting averages of every man before they came up, home and away.
Within the ordered aisles of the boxed cards, folded and tucked down, are hundreds and hundreds of Tootsie Roll Pop wrappers, brightly colored wedges poking up like handkerchiefs, each one with an Indian shooting an arrow at a star on it-Eric Chavez’s other phase of that epoch.
Munson sleeps on the floor of Chavez’s room a lot, when the two houses over and three houses up distance back to his own seems galactic, and with his head pillowed on a tattered Padres sweatshirt and the afghan Chavez’s grandmother knitted for him when he was a baby pulled up over his shoulder, he can see the stacks of shoeboxes and the pieces of the first bat Chavez ever broke on a swing, pale moons of Little League home run balls, outgrown sneakers and the lumpy malformed shape of the stuffed frog that Chavez had stitched together himself from a kit in eighth grade home ec.
When he can’t sleep, he focuses on every item in Chavez’s blind-striped room in turn, remembering a specific occasion when he held each in his hands.
There’s an Aerosmith poster about knee-high on the wall next to Chavez’s closet, unremarkable in that most of the available wall space is papered over, the vast white expanse of the ceiling like a sheet of paper laid atop. The Aerosmith poster, Munson knows, has been there since the late eighties, when Chavez, infuriated by some injustice visited up on him by his parents, kicked a hole in the wall.
He keeps his weed in there now, in the plaster dust and busted drywall, one corner of the poster all used and ragged from being pulled up all the time, the sticky-tac black with grime.
The undercarriage of Chavez’s mom’s car is held to the frame by half-dozen loops of zip-tie, from when Chavez rolled it up over a sharp bank of rock and jarred something loose. That was four months ago-eventually, Chavez is philosophically resigned, his mom will go in for an oil change or routine check-up and the jig will be up, so he’s determined to enjoy the time he has left before she forbids him from even riding in cars.
In the bottom right drawer of Chavez’s desk, back behind the telescope-rolled comic books and dry pens and palm-sized Happy Meal toys, there’s a Kodak snapshot of Barry Zito with a wild dazed grin on his face and grass in his hair (they’d slept in the park that night), the sun searing white the whole corner, broken rays of reflection cutting across the foreground.
On the back, Chavez has written in black ink, sometimes it’s like this.
In Chavez’s wallet, behind the go-kart license he still carries around, is the slip of paper from a fortune cookie and it reads, True love is closer than you suspect.
At this point, Munson doesn’t think there’s anything left for him to learn about Eric Chavez.
*
They go to the party out on Canyon Road mainly because being alone with just the two of them for days at a time is starting to wear on Munson. The ever-present tension between Zito and Chavez has altered, darkened, become less affection and regret and desire, more bitterness and instability, like how it was summer after sophomore year.
It’s exhausting, not what Munson needs in addition to senior year and his full-time job playing baseball. They’re all three of them picking fights with each other and drinking faster and faster, earlier and earlier, and Chavez drives into the canyon like he stole the car, Munson leaning between the seats to pass the glassy to Zito, who huddles against the door as if dismayed, his sunken eyes and drawn face flaring in the lighter flame.
Munson leaves the two of them to whatever pitiful devices they may possess, and takes a place up around the keg, among the flushed spike-haired boys in polo shirts, raccoon-eyed girls with glitter in their hair. An hour or two passes.
One of the girls breaks away from the blur of the crowd, plants herself in front of him, huge blue eyes and a perfect doll’s face and a shimmer of silver and red. “You’re one of those baseball guys.”
Munson grins. “Sure am, honey.”
“Don’t call me that, it makes it seem like you don’t remember my name.”
“I, um, I don’t think I know your name.”
“Exactly.” She grins back at him like a burst of light, and Munson’s at once terribly confused.
The girl is Jess. She keeps refilling her plastic cup and asking Munson questions, ragging on him casually and affectionately when he can’t hide how drunk he is, and his head is spinning, bewildered by her glossy quick mouth and the dance of gold in the notch at the base of her throat, a winking crucifix. She kinda enraptures him.
Chavez materializes at one point and shoots a charming smile at Jess, pulls Munson away, into the web of shadows under a tree.
“She’s a freshman, Munce.”
“Pretty, though, huh?” Munson answers, looking back at her, lifting two fingers off his cup to attempt a dorky little wave. “Cute as hell, my word.”
“You’re not allowed to fuck around with the underaged anymore, you know.”
“Barry’s underage too,” Munson says meanly, without thinking, and Chavez blinks at him, dumbstruck for a moment.
“What?”
Chavez looks frightened, curling his shoulders in, and Munson tries to clear his throat, shaking his head. He didn’t mean to say that, hates the expression on Chavez’s face and his protective stance. Munson doesn’t get it, but it’s very important to Chavez that Munson not know about him and Zito, and Munson, in this as with most things, is obliged to humor him.
“Don’t listen to me, I’m drunk,” Munson says, and claps a hand on Chavez’s shoulder, his throat tightening as Chavez tenses under him. “I’m not really thinking straight right now.”
Chavez pulls away gently, cutting his eyes away from Munson. Chavez just looks so sad sometimes, like he’s been recently and violently orphaned, a heartbreaking disbelief in the possibility of happiness.
“All this stuff is for shit,” Chavez tells him dully. “Terrible party.”
Suddenly, before Munson can get clarification on that, the steady crackle of conversation is split by a shriek, a coyote howl, close enough to be right over the fence, maybe in the driveway. Chavez jumps and drops his cup, beer sloshing over his shoes. He looks at Munson with comically wide eyes, and for a second their halting drunken fight is forgotten, porchlight cut up like paper snowflakes on Chavez’s smooth face and the twists of black at his temples, his slightly open mouth.
Fuck, Munson thinks helplessly as the party starts to dissolve in the direction of the front yard, everyone rushing to see the coyote, secure in numbers. Having grown up with Chavez and the picture of the two of them at eight years old taped to his mirror, he’s rarely able to see Chavez’s looks objectively, any more than his own, but sometimes, in the right light, at a certain moment, Munson is taken aback, socked in the stomach. It would have been bad enough if Chavez were just a little bit good-looking; Munson doesn’t need to be afflicted with Chavez looking like he does right now.
*
Munson hooks up with Jess that first night, in the backseat of Chavez’s car a few hours after Chavez disappears into the mob. Something slinks across the street in his peripheral vision, in the rearview mirror, but it’s probably just the power of suggestion that makes Munson think it’s the coyote, indolently vicious amber eyes tracking, teeth bared.
She’s got a two a.m. curfew, though, and leaves him alone, half-dressed and passed out with his cheek on a seatbelt buckle, and when he wakes up, he’s in motion, the trees and streetlamps rolling by in the window above his head.
Chavez is driving, and he doesn’t respond to Munson’s several weak questions, what time is it, where are we going, where’s Barry, so Munson slumps back into a doze, figuring that no matter how fucked up things are right now, Chavez still isn’t gonna let anything happen to him.
He wakes up again to Chavez manhandling him, pulling him out of the car and propping him without grace against the door. Munson hisses between his teeth when Chavez’s hands alight on his open jeans, fuzzily searching for the right thing to say or do. He’s so drunk and so tired and he’s staring at Chavez’s fingers working against the denim and brass, warm skitter across the lowest patch of skin on his stomach, heat rearing up inside like nothing he’s ever felt, the completeness of it, the urgency. This is his very best friend in the world, this moment means everything to him.
But Chavez just buttons him up again, tugs his shirt straight and wipes a smear of glitter off Munson’s jaw with his sleeve. He stays in the driveway until Munson’s inside, until the light comes on in Munson’s window, and Munson stands with his hand on the wall for balance, watches Chavez’s taillights shrink and tighten and disintegrate into the black.
Within a week it’s depressingly obvious that Chavez was right about not hooking up with freshmen, because Jess is calling him a couple times a day and leaving notes like parking tickets on his windshield. She’s pretty irritating, but also weirdly clever and crazy in a friendly sort of way, and Munson finds himself too bemused to tell her to fuck off. If nothing else, he’s never ever bored when she’s around.
It’s comforting too, amid the Eric and Barry mess, the Eric and Eric mess, to be reminded that he definitely still likes girls, so much it kinda freaks him out. That hasn’t changed.
Chavez hates Jess and makes little show otherwise, but that’s not new. Chavez has yet to approve of a single one of Munson’s girlfriends, even those who are close friends with Chavez’s own extracurriculars. He has different reasons for disliking different girls, but every time it ends the same, Chavez getting Munson roaring drunk on the gym roof after another catastrophic breakup.
Zito, for his part, grows scarcer and scarcer, the familiar stamp of his red coat shrinking across the parking lot after a game. He lies transparently about where he’s gonna be, and sometimes when they all fall asleep in Chavez’s attic, he’s gone before morning. He zones out, staring into space until they shout his name or cuff him on the arm, and is edgy all the time, chewing on his thumbnail, smuggling a flask in his back pocket under his shirt everywhere he goes.
Chavez says that Zito’s decided to sabotage everything that matters in his life so that it won’t hurt so bad when he loses it all to the vagaries of the draft, but Munson’s pretty sure that’s not right, or at least, that’s not all.
He recognizes a lot of this, the distant look that Zito walks around wearing, the looseness to his movements and scattershot of his senses. Zito’s hung up on somebody, full-scale crushes that he gets from time to time, sneaking around so Chavez won’t find out, because Zito has a convoluted belief that Chavez doesn’t mind him sleeping with a third of the league, as long as he never sleeps with any of them twice.
It usually passes, Zito not having much of an attention span and with an inclination to be distracted by shiny things, but in the meanwhile, it’s thrown everything off, their disorganized routine disturbed something fierce.
Munson wakes up in the dugout, three or four in the morning with the moon stuck like a fishhook in the sky, disoriented and aching in every way. Looking around, rubbing the heel of his hand into his eye, he spots Chavez and Zito over by third base. They’re arguing softly, cold sneers and bunched fists, and as Munson watches, Zito starts to walk away. Chavez grabs his arm and Zito throws him off, shoves him cleanly and Chavez stumbles, falls back on the grass.
Zito looks down at him for a moment, uncertain and remorseful, and then he says something that bows Chavez’s head, and turns away, disappearing from view. Munson listens to the chainlink clattering as Zito hikes himself up and over, Chavez motionless, a saddened curl on the field.
*
Up on the roof, concrete rough and sun-hot like a lizard’s skin, flattening on Munson’s back through his shirt, he’s struggling to keep up the conversation, badly diverted by each sideways glare Chavez sends his way, each tight edge to his responses.
Zito’s folded up over his knees with his face hidden and his arms wrapped around his shins. He’s at a psychological remove, miles away from the rooftop and his friends, though he still extends his seeking hand to close on air until Munson tucks the jay between his fingers. Munson watches his back rise slowly as he inhales, watches the smoke float up, a lopsided sphere for a second before it’s battered into pieces by the breeze.
Chavez is, predictably, devastated, and covering it by being an asshole. Munson is trying to explain about Jess, about how he ends up telling her stuff he never intended to say out loud, how she’s so weird and so fucking cute that he doesn’t know what he’s doing half the time, and Chavez is shooting him down over and over again.
“This is all your fault,” Chavez tells him, and Munson flinches, jarring his elbow against Zito’s side. He knows that already, he doesn’t need to be told. “You realize this girl was like eleven when you first got your dick sucked.”
Munson gets slightly overheated, confused by the sense memory of bathroom tile under his hands and being totally out-of-his-mind turned on, Angie Delgado with her strawberry lip gloss and the cold rings on her fingers, phantom image of Chavez standing silent in the doorway watching them. He pokes Zito in the head to get the jay back, and takes a moment to settle himself.
“You’ve got to stop living in the past, Ricky. Age is just a number.”
Zito snorts a half-laugh as if he’s been paying attention after all. Chavez squints against the sun with a miserable look on his face, a rash of sunburn on his neck. Munson’s beginning to grow accustomed to the sick feeling in his stomach, and he says unsteadily, “What’s more important is that she’s kinda crazy.”
“Fucking around with you? I have no doubt,” Chavez says, a bit too mean, and Munson thwaps him across the shoulder automatically, sees Chavez snarl. It’s all too close to the surface, raw places showing through the patches, Munson’s feeble attempts to stay lighthearted.
“There’s got to be a balance,” he says, and he’s talking about the three of them and the delicate rusting mechanism of their friendship, the intractable feeling that they’ve slipped some unimaginably tiny gear and everything is now being dismantled from the inside out.
He’s talking about the three of them, but Chavez’s expression is injured and disputative, and Zito is just a turned head, balled up and walled off.
“I mean,” he says, his good intentions withering, thinking viciously, fucking look at each other, will you. “I mean, I can overlook the fact that she’s a freshman, but in return, she’s got to not call my house six times a day.”
“Or you could just not fuck a freshman. Jesus. You know that are people with actual, like, driver’s licenses who might want to fuck you.”
Munson can’t think of an answer to that, blinking at Chavez helplessly . The sunburn on Chavez’s neck seems to grow and spread up, but he’s just blushing, refusing to cut his eyes away so that he looks humiliated and defiant and suddenly, shockingly young. It’s so quiet Munson can hear the crackle of paper burning as Zito takes a hit, his long melancholic exhale.
Chavez leaves before Munson can press him further, some weak excuse as he disappears, slim and rushed down the trapdoor ladder. Munson’s left frustrated, trying to believe that he’d heard something damning in Chavez’s voice, that Chavez will still meet him to cut sixth period. He kicks at Zito, stupid fucking Zito who ruined Chavez for anyone else.
“Do you know what his fucking problem is lately?”
Zito shrugs and yawns, tipping slowly over until his shoulder is pressed against Munson’s, his weight supported. Munson worries, picking at the hem of his jeans.
“Do you think he’s really upset about Jess?”
“I think he’s upset about anyone you fuck around with that isn’t him,” Zito tells him, and then there’s an unblemished moment of silence before the weight of that registers with either of them, before Zito lurches against him and pulls back, before Munson tries to take a breath and finds that he can’t.
A bird careers across the sky, shrieking.
“What are. What?” Munson asks, his hand pressed flat to the gravel. Zito’s shaking his head, holding his hands out, saying, no no it was a joke very stoned it was just a joke, and Munson’s feeling the little rocks cut into his palm, thinking that if he can get to his feet, he can look over the edge and maybe see Chavez coming out of the gym down there, maybe holler to him and turn him around, narrow-framed young man with his hand over his face to block the sun and his shadow thrust like a blade on the ground, maybe he can ask Chavez if it’s true, shout down to him over the asphalt and sidewalk chalk and dying grass: me too, more than anything.
But sadly, the moment for action goes like the smoke, one more thing that Munson watches happen without moving.
*
Munson figures that the main difference between them is that he’s the practical sort, and Chavez and Zito are the romantics. It’s why he never lets them shake him off when he’s catching them-they tend to get lost in the trivial, infuriated by the gall displayed by the other team’s existence, become unfocused and start wanting only to throw as hard as they can, throat-high, and Munson’s got to rein them back. He can’t think of how many times he’s been told that dumb guys with good arms become pitchers, and smart guys with good arms become catchers.
And it’s why they’ve been getting over a cruddy little teenage affair for two years, why they’ve made everything as complicated and difficult as possible, tempered it with baseball and promiscuity and self-destructive tendencies like every other fucked-up idealist waiting for the draft.
There were signs early on, down at the reservoir in the crushing heat, Chavez scrambling high up the rocks and leaping, bicycling his legs towards the sky, spiraling and tailspinning into the water, Zito arching in a series of slow perfect somersaults before exploding. They’d never had limits on that sort of thing, both of them in search of a single instance of something beautiful.
Munson doesn’t like diving headfirst because what if there’s a rock right under the water, and he would have handled the whole thing differently, if it’d been him.
If Chavez had lit on Munson rather than Zito back sophomore year, Munson would have come at the situation with a strategy, a long-term plan, and not just let it implode and protract for the better part of high school. He would have evened out Chavez’s manic periods, talked him down from his bad moods, kept him in every game and remained faithful to his last breath.
Munson knows for sure. He’s been doing it since he was eight years old, and he can’t see how adding sex to the equation would noticeably change his and Chavez’s day-to-day relationship.
The idea of sex with Chavez stalls him for awhile, but he rebounds.
Because that’s really the heart of it, isn’t it, the one thing that Zito has of Chavez that Munson does not. Munson would like to think that this is some more typical jealousy, the kind of thing that might happen with any random girl who tried to steal away his best friend, but he keeps getting blindsided by the fogged and indistinct picture of the two of them through the car window. Restless, anxious, he turns it over in his mind, fills it in with color and dimension and sound, Chavez’s eyes flashing black, Zito’s big hands spread on his back.
He knows that nothing about this is typical.
*
One shot for every year that Zito’s been alive, and one to grow on, one for luck, one for love, and the only smart thing they did today was start at four in the afternoon. Munson’s lost track of almost everything, blitzed clear as crystal, only aware that Chavez is nearby, right there with the beer in his hand, silly grin on his face.
He doesn’t recognize the house they’re in.
“Scooby Doo on channel two,” Chavez says, his hair still slick with pool water. “Frankenstein on channel nine.”
Chavez hums something vaguely haunting, rolling his head, and Munson notices that he too is holding a beer. He takes a cautious drink, trying to decipher if Chavez is speaking in their code. He forgets sometimes, because he spends an awful lot of time drunk and stoned.
“Off the map, Ricky,” he answers eventually, shrugging. Totally lost, man. Chavez rolls his eyes.
“Pain and tension, Munce,” Chavez tells him. Pay attention. “It’s a fight to protect the luck. The age of majority means nothing’s penny-ante anymore. Grown-up problems now.”
Munson turned eighteen first, a bacchanal of a three-day weekend at the shore house, torrential autumn rain on the last night that they’d opened the doors and windows to, capered and slid across the lawn with lightning for fireworks and Munson swearing that he wouldn’t live to see twenty.
“Keeps his head down, though,” Munson says, though it really isn’t true, considering that Zito did pass out in the middle of first period a couple months ago. He often feels obliged to defend Zito from Chavez. A lot of the time, he thinks that’s why Chavez bitches about him to Munson so much, just so Munosn will say nice things. It’s the kind of convoluted thing that Chavez specializes in.
“Short-lived is what he is and us too.”
“How so?”
“Fucked up right now and right now, fucked up and legally culpable. No way this ends well.”
Munson shakes his head, peering blearily across the crush of thick-necked college boys and skinny brassy college girls to find Zito with one of their former teammates, laughing so hard it could be mistaken for weeping.
“You. You’re too drunk to be deciding this sort of thing,” Munson says. Chavez scoffs, gesturing with his half-full cup.
“Drunk makes no difference because I know whereof I fucking speak, okay? You know the kinda trouble he’s got himself into? It’s worse than me, means pretty fucking bad.”
Dangerously confused, Munson finishes off his beer, eyeing Chavez as if the angle of his mouth or tightening of his jaw will make sense of that. Chavez looks far gone, tottering and festooned with a string of crimson and gold plastic beads looped around his neck, but he’s meeting Munson’s eyes like a dare.
“What kind of trouble?” Munson asks.
Chavez looks over at Zito for a second, concavity of his cheek that means he’s sucking on the inside the way he does when nervous. Zito’s checking his watch, keeping up appearances, a lopsided Burger King crown atop his head.
“Well. Take your pick, really,” Chavez says, and there’s a catch in his voice that keeps Munson from questioning further, not wanting to ruin the night, which has been mostly good, Chavez mostly civil, Zito mostly happy.
They fly past midnight and Munson believes that he could stay awake forever, drink to the sunrise, and subsequently blacks out, wakes up several hours later in the bathtub. It’s far from ideal, one leg slung over the side and a bolt of pain in his back when he moves, but someone was kind enough to toss a blanket over him.
Lifting his cheek from the cold side of the tub, a flat numb spot left behind like the skin over his cheekbone’s been stripped away, something falls out of his hair, catches up in the collar of his shirt. The room’s windowless and black, thin silver gleam from the fixtures, and Munson plucks at his collar, comes up with a small foil square, a condom.
“Fuckers,” he mutters, rustling his hands through his hair and dislodging three more. He crawls up on his knees to get the light, huge white spots exploding across his vision for several moments before clearing to reveal Chavez on the floor covered in a couple of towels and insensate.
Munson falls out of the bathtub and arranges himself against the wall with his legs folded on Chavez’s side, and the light is making him nauseous, but he leaves it on because there’s sharpie black scribbled all over Chavez’s face. Leaning closer, Munson can see that it’s misspelled swear words and a crude cock and balls drawing aimed at his mouth. Munson has to laugh, muffled against the side of his arm.
He levers up to see his own face in the mirror, a brambly black scrawl on his cheek but he can’t make anything of it, the letters smeared and scrunched together.
He turns the light off, nudging Chavez until he stirs. A long tremor runs down Chavez’s body, barely perceptible against Munson’s leg, and he leans his head back, breathing out slow.
“Dark,” Chavez notes in a ravaged voice, and his hand crawls over Munson’s knee. “Know that’s you, Munce.”
Munson nods silently, because he could pick Chavez out blindfolded too.
“Bathroom,” Chavez further observes, and shifts his hips experimentally. “Ow.”
Munson pats him comfortingly on his side, lets his hand stay there as if misplaced. “We could go someplace.”
“No, no. I won’t be moving any time soon.” Chavez sighs, nearly lost in a low undercurrent of scratches and clicks and the drip of water in the sink. Munson can feel him breathing, warm dilation under his hand, and it strikes him as something very important to remember.
“Chavvy,” Munson says, heart in his throat and fingers crossed. “I think I’m in trouble too.”
Chavez is quiet for a long moment, and Munson watches the dark coalesce into solid forms as his eyes adjust, genesis of tile and porcelain and doorknob. He’s holding his breath, braced for impact.
“Explain yourself,” Chavez says softly.
Munson presses his hand flat and hard on Chavez’s side, seeking the ridge of muscle, the sturdy line of his ribs, and Chavez sucks in a fast breath. Munson’s got everything riding on this, heedless with his head splitting, his mouth bone-dry.
“The strangest thing has happened,” Munson tells him, just more than a whisper with his hand working slowly towards the bottom of Chavez’s shirt. “I never woulda thought.”
He can just make out the flared whites of Chavez’s eyes, slack mouth and his breath drawing ragged, tension wire-thin all along his body, and Munson gets one, two fingertips under Chavez’s shirt, taut skin and a jolt like electricity up his arm, rattling his composure.
The door slams open, storm of light wailing down on them. Munson shouts and slams back in shock, cracking his elbow into the tile hard enough for it to ring with pain and shudder through him. There’s a huge tuneless racket, guys hollering, pelting them with beer cans, the white spots blasting again, and he hears Chavez shouting, “Get the fuck out, fucking shut the door,” with his voice breaking all over the place.
Munson’s still wound tight as hell, staggered because the only thing he wants in the whole world, more than a good draft or air, is to get his mouth on the place where his hand just was, and it’s all too much.
He heaves himself over the side of the tub and throws up until he’s shaking, hollowed out and faint.
*
Back at school, Chavez is working on his footwork, chipping his toe off second base as he whips the ball down to first. Eyeblack is running in lines down his face, his dirty red hat on backwards. He’s getting better and better, hitting near .500 with a few weeks left, stealing a base or two a game and fielding like this, effortless roll of his body, short hook of his arm.
Munson’s catching Zito under Beane’s watch, trying to keep his attention in one place. Chavez has made his life uncommonly difficult lately.
Beane stops Zito and takes his arm, showing him another angle. Even sixty feet six away, Munson can see how Zito is locked in on everything Beane says, strange because Zito typically has the attention span of a fruit fly. It’s the middle of May and hot enough that the sun seems to have set down in the parking lot forty feet away.
After practice, they get some sandwiches and go the beach, but after an hour Zito makes some poor excuse and leaves the two of them on the sand. Since waking up in that bathroom, they have not been more than incidentally alone, and Chavez has been talking to Munson through the people around them, avoiding eye contact.
Munson figures he fucked it up.
Fingering an unlit jay, wondering morosely how many of these they’ll have to smoke before the silence stops feeling awkward, Munson clears his throat, counts the waves breaking. He keeps imagining what might have happened if he’d been given just five more minutes that night.
Chavez sighs. “Blaze, soldier.”
Munson obligingly lights up, a spark flaking onto his hand like a pinch. They pass the jay back and forth a few times, the moon rising, eaten up by the narrow cloud layer.
“So, Munce, I been thinking,” Chavez says eventually, sounding like he’s been fogged in. “I’ve been curious about you.”
“Curious how?” Munson surreptitiously crosses his fingers in the bend of his knee.
“Well. It’s been a helluva year, you know? I think you were different before.”
“Before what?” Munson asks, getting kinda annoyed.
“You say weird stuff. You act all. I don’t even know. Like somebody I don’t know, even though obviously I know you very very well.” Chavez rests his chin on his knees. “Even though there shouldn’t be anything about you I don’t know.”
Munson stays quiet for a moment, a riot of panic in the pit of his stomach like a burst of alarms during a burglary, thinking that Chavez is hinting at something, talking in riddles instead of code. But Chavez isn’t the kind to come the long way or obscure his true meaning; there’s too much cleverness involved in duplicity.
Taking Chavez at face value, then, Munson’s kinda ticked.
“Just like there’s nothing about you that I don’t know, right? And you never act weird, so you can definitely talk about that.”
Chavez looks confused, killing some time with the jay, his face pinched around the spark.
“I. That weirdness is in response to your weirdness,” Chavez says hesitantly, like he’s not sure where to set his defenses. “I never know what you’re gonna do anymore. It’s made things tough.”
Munson’s not gonna sit here and listen to this, his blood hot and riled, and he gets to his feet shakily, wavering with his stubby moon-shadow fallen on Chavez’s face. “I don’t make things tough. Things have gotten tough mainly because you and Barry are both idiots, and all I gotta do is make sure you don’t kill each other, okay? I’m your best friend, that’s my job, fine. But don’t fucking tell me I’m making things tougher for you.”
Chavez gets to his knees, his eyes wide, but he can’t quite make it standing, sandy fists on his legs. “Why the fuck do you keep bringing up Barry?” he asks too loud, scared.
“Why the fuck do you think, man?” Munson shouts, and storms off, Chavez calling his name and then screaming it, echoes bouncing off his back. Munson’s sightless, drunk and furious, and he kicks at the car tire until his foot feels too big for his shoe, climbs into the backseat and wraps himself up in Chavez’s blue hoodie, miserably waiting to pass out.
*
Munson can’t sleep for several days, coming on the end of the school year, and one morning with the sun just a gold haze at the corner of the pink sky, he’s sitting by the window playing his gameboy when Chavez goes running past.
Munson blinks and stares at the empty street for a moment, wondering if he’s fallen asleep without realizing it, and then cranes around and looks down the street to see Chavez, red shorts and a black shirt cut by the strip of skin between the collar and Chavez’s hair, easy long strides with the sole coming unglued from his shoe, flapping like a dog’s tongue.
Muzzy-headed from having not slept, Munson puts on jeans and sneakers, and slips out the kitchen door, silent across the lawns, keeping Chavez half a block ahead. There’s something in his throat like a yell stored for a disaster, a plane falling out of the sky, a chasm opening down the middle of the street. If he knew what he wanted to say to Chavez, he’d stop him for sure, but Munson’s mostly just going on instinct.
He’s at the reservoir before Munson can put together where they’re heading, and Chavez is already halfway to the north bridge and as small as an army man, jogging along the concrete path.
Seeing him from a distance like this, Chavez doing what he has done all his life, run fast, run easier than breathing, it does Munson’s heart a wicked turn, and he leans heavily on the chainlink fence, swallowing hard.
His hand’s over his eyes, and Chavez calls his name dim like an old recording, scratched by the wind. Munson looks up and Chavez is waving his arm from all the way across the motionless water, a sudden crash of memory, ten years old swimming in the lake one summer, shaking wet hair out of his eyes to see Chavez shouting and waving from the shore in his bright blue trunks.
Terrified to have been spotted, this world-destroying crush wrecked all over his face, Munson pushes through the bushes and hits the sidewalk running. He can’t let Chavez see him like this.
Three hours still until the first bell, seven days before the end of the school year, Munson lies in bed and watches the shadows move imperceptibly across the ceiling, trying not to think that never in the decade they’ve been best friends has anything ever been this hard between them.
*
onwards
also, go rocks! my folks are at that game today. rockies make the nlcs, i am so going to one of those games. knockin on wood and everything.
It’s a backwards view of an AU I wrote a year ago, but can probably be read on its own. The premise is that Zito, Chavez, and Munson all attended the same high school, and the new coach of their baseball team is Billy Beane.
Actually Happened Like This
Chavez and Munson are playing quarters in some soccer player’s kitchen, a few weeks before the season starts, and Chavez is way more drunk, telling Munson how much he hates their other best friend.
That is not remotely true. Munson amuses himself by cataloguing all the ways he can tell Chavez is lying, the flush on his neck and his thumbnail ragged and his eyes stuck on Zito through the doorway. Zito’s leaning against the wall talking to a dark-haired kid with a wine-stain birthmark under his eye, an occasional calculated smile passing over his face like a cloud.
Chavez’s coordination is eroding slowly and Munson is gleefully demolishing him, until Chavez’s elbows are propped and slipping on the counter and he’s slurring, “Those fucking ape hands of his,” banging his forehead.
Munson finishes off the last beer, a faint metallic sting that he barely registers, and his face is all twisted up but he doesn’t know that.
Chavez ends up on the floor, which is typical, and Munson wishes for hard liquor but these fucking soccer players hardly know the word. Munson pushes at Chavez’s side with his foot a couple of times, but Chavez only squirms and claws his hand weakly on the tile.
Pocketing the silver that he can find, Munson rinses beer off his hands and slicks his hair back, goes over to where Zito has his hand up on the wall next to the dark-haired kid’s head.
“Z.”
Zito looks back over his shoulder, shoots a glare at him, Zito’s I’m-trying-to-land-a-sexually-confused-sophomore-do-you-fucking-mind glare, but Munson only grins, rocking on his heels.
“We got a man down,” Munson tells him.
Exhaling, Zito turns back to his boy, face clear. “Give me two minutes.” He thinks for a moment. “. . . Noah.”
In the kitchen, out of earshot and standing over Chavez’s body, Munson says, “He seemed nice,” but Zito barely takes the time to tell him to shut up. He toes at Chavez’s ribs just like Munson had, leaving a finger of black on the white of Chavez’s shirt, calling Chavez’s name.
Chavez doesn’t stir, and they leverage him up, shoulders under his arms, his head dropped like a stone and his feet dragging. Chavez hates sleeping in public, unprotected and at risk of being drunkenly fucked with, and every time they leave him where he’s fallen, he complains about it for days. It’s gotten easier to haul him out to the car.
Of the three of them, Munson would say that he’s the perfect drunk, and Zito can smoke on par with your average traveling funk band, and Chavez. Chavez is probably the best baseball player.
Still a lightweight, he thinks, feeling the dig of Chavez’s hipbone against his own. Chavez is warmer than the air, a pair of railroad tracks leading from his sneakers through the overgrown grass, and his head rests heavily on Munson’s shoulder, his damp hair on Munson’s cheek.
The party noise recedes down the sidewalk, and Munson can hear Zito’s low mumble, telling Chavez all the many and varied ways that Zito hates him. Sometimes it’s like Chavez and Zito are arguing inside a worm hole, responding to each other in monologue hours apart.
Sloping Chavez against the car, Munson goes through his pockets, trying not to notice Zito’s fingers circled loosely around Chavez’s wrist, Zito’s near-black eyes trained on Chavez’s unlined face.
“He hasn’t been sleeping, you know,” Zito tells him. “He gets up when it’s still dark and he goes running along the reservoir.”
Munson nods. “It’s probably smart.”
“Probably.” Zito takes hold of Chavez’s legs and folds them in towards his chest, sliding him down the backseat. He give Chavez a long look, his expression mostly inscrutable, and then turns away, saying, “Better things await me, Munce, I’ll see you.”
Munson checks the constellations and Orion lets him know that it’s still winter, still the off-season. His short-term memory has seemed perforated recently, blurring the specifics of conversations and geography, and he loses track sometimes.
It’s self-inflicted and in a million different ways, because here Munson stands in the leafed pieces of moonlight and shadow, once again actively trying to forget that Zito and Chavez are in love with one another.
*
What Munson really wants to know is, exactly how dumb do you guys think I am?
When they were sophomores, just into the baseball season, Chavez got skittish and ill-tempered, avoiding Munson’s eyes and flinching when Zito walked into rooms. Munson went to Zito and asked concisely what the fuck, and Zito lied to him perhaps as poorly as Zito had ever lied to him, glancing compulsively at the ceiling and flicking his hair out of his eyes.
Munson was stung, the totally unfamiliar feeling of betrayal like too-tight skin, knowing that they were both hiding something from him. He sulked around and told Zito horror stories about what a curveball does to your elbow, keyed the side of Chavez’s car all the way across both doors.
He’s never claimed to be rational when it comes to the two of them.
Then something happened at the beach, on the other side of the bonfire and Munson could only see them through the bannered flames, Chavez sneering at Zito and Zito whipping a palmful of sand into Chavez’s chest. Munson thought it strange, hazy through his own drunk, fearful that they were developing cracks and fissures like the first splinter in a wood bat that meant it was just a matter of time before it shattered on a pitch in on the hands.
Zito and Chavez stumbled off still arguing, kicks of sand in their wake, and Munson staggered to his feet, following them. He wanted to holler at them, don’t fuck up the important stuff, trying to get close enough to hear what they were saying. They were among the cars, head and shoulders silhouetted, and Zito suddenly moved in a swift hook and had Chavez pinned against metal.
Munson thought Zito was gonna hit Chavez and he tensed with a lurch in his stomach, thinking that he’d have to pull them apart bloodied and snarling, but instead Zito kissed Chavez, messy hard and deep. Munson stopped dead, open-mouthed as Chavez kissed Zito back.
He watched them for awhile.
Ever since then, Eric Munson has been shadowed, stuck on the picture of Chavez with his face tipped up and his eyes closed, Zito’s pale hand disappearing by inches into Chavez’s black hair, stuck on his two best friends, who are stuck on each other.
*
The season’s starting today, and they’ve lost Zito. Chavez and Munson wake up in the attic, hungover dumb and chasing caffeine pills and coffee. Munson borrows a T-shirt and tells Chavez to shave, but Chavez can barely keep his eyes open and he’s got a piece of toast cradled jealously in his hand, a powerbar in his back pocket, hunching over the wheel after refusing to let Munson drive.
Zito vanished northward fifteen hours ago, and Munson wonders what they’ll do if Zito hasn’t turned up by the three-fifteen bell, the last call before baseball practice.
But in the parking lot before school, Zito appears as though out of the smoke and blue sky, and they’re reconnected. Zito’s taking all of this pretty hard, too exhausted and too stoned to keep his expression steady when he looks at Chavez, when Chavez crawls into the backseat and blankets Zito’s upper body for a moment. Munson can see Zito in the side mirror, nervous play of his hands on Chavez’s shoulders and hair before they fall out into the morning.
School is torturous, and it’s followed by the first full team practice of the season, and Munson is mildly concerned at the new world order revealed by their rookie coach, who appears to be kinda nuts, but he can’t really find fault with the idea of playing as much baseball as the daylight allows.
They get through, and it’s later, at the beach, numbed by two capfuls from the thermos and singeing his fingertips, his muscles heavy like lying on an immense planet where the gravity’s tenfold.
Chavez nudges Munson, slash of black eyes glittering, saying low, “It’s a freckle past a hair and do you know where your children are?”
Munson smiles up at the sky. This is their pigeon language, their code since they were nine years old, a mash-up of stuff from comic books and cartoons, commercials that had aired during He-Man, and stupid kid jokes. Chavez just asked Munson how he’s doing, because it’s getting late.
“Deep-sixed,” Munson replies. Chavez moves his head slightly in a nod, his eyes glassy and red.
“Cross your heart, holler retreat?”
“Surrender’s for the weak.”
White gash of Chavez’s teeth as he smiles, and Munson wants to feel the edges of it, the scratch of Chavez’s face on his hand, some solid proof. Eighteen years old now, Munson is aware that his memory is already starting to lose pages like an old book, only a few soft-focus images remaining from his early childhood; more and more, it feels like his life began with Eric Chavez.
*
Munson started the war against Zito when they first met.
Summer before seventh grade, Munson was biking over to Chavez’s house and three blocks away he rode past a kid in a yellow-grass yard, pitching a tennis ball at a square marked out in masking tape on the garage door. Munson cut a wide slow circle in the street, watching the kid nail the corners in sequence.
The kid was left-handed and already taller than either Munson or Chavez, and his bike, lying glittering on its side in the grass, was brand-new. Something about him bothered the hell out of Munson, though it might have just been concern for his and Chavez’s preeminence in Little League.
He next saw Zito from their tree in the park, where they were keeping watch on the quarters they’d glued to the sidewalk and the people that tried to pry them up. Recognizing the mop of Zito’s hair as he passed under them, Munson twisted a seed pod off a branch and, not much inclined at that age to think through his instincts, dropped it onto Zito’s head.
Zito became a part of their everyday very quickly, though it was as an enemy. He was crafty, underhanded, climbing in through the window of Munson’s garage and taking Munson’s bike, leaving it outside in the driveway so that Munson would get yelled at by his dad in the morning, confined to the house for the rest of the day.
The stuff Zito pulled was outside the rules of engagement, and Munson’s response to disadvantage was characteristic: swing harder. He beat Zito up worse than he ever beat up anyone before, behind the elementary school auditorium with his knees on Zito’s back, his filthy hand wrenched in Zito’s hair. He didn’t know what it was about this kid, who cried give, give, a mud of dirt and blood and tears smeared all over his face, but Munson wasn’t usually like this.
Right around his own birthday, all three of them showed up at the birthday party of someone else, and there were older kids with a couple bottles of wine and they sat in the backyard taking what was offered to them, their enmity tempered for the moment by more pressing matters. Chavez had loosened and loosened until he was slumped on Munson, sweet-smelling and giggling.
The neighbors came by to check up on the party, a deep man’s voice through the open patio door, and Munson hauled Chavez behind the bushes, thinking only of concealment, surprised to find Zito in there already with leaves wound in his hair, his knees clutched to his chest.
Munson, seriously drunk for the first time in his life and badly scared by the yaw of his perception, latched onto Zito and Chavez as proof that there were other people in the world who were drunk and he wasn’t going to die because people got drunk all the time. He listened to Zito tell them guardedly about techniques for getting over a hangover that he’d learned from his sisters. Chavez remarked that the stars were kind of amazing, and they all leaned their heads back and looked up at the strip between the bushes and the fence.
Chavez and Zito weren’t making any sense, talking animatedly about pitch grips but with gaps, blanks where words were missing, and Munson’s head spun, granted just an instant of reaction time when he realized he was gonna be sick. He heard Chavez and Zito break off talking rather suddenly as he keeled over, Zito making a small shocked noise.
Munson wanted to say, I’m all right, fellas, though truthfully he felt like he was turning inside out, and he rested his head against the fence, splinter scratch on his forehead. It was quiet for a while, the dim ramble of the party noise far away, and when Munson lifted his head, he saw Chavez and Zito staring at each other, Zito dumbstruck with his hand at his mouth and Chavez uneasy, clutching his ankle.
Munson was dizzy and worn out, and he found Zito’s dirty face alongside Chavez’s to be something familiar and comforting, a constant amid the havoc of the night, and Munson said in a rasp, “Truce.” After a second Zito nodded, echoed it.
*
The season presses near. Munson swings for the fences every time, and their new coach, this Billy Beane, tells him he’ll give him five hundred dollars if he hits the wall on a string, and Munson learns to aim line drives like missiles, heat-seeking. Billy Beane puts Dixie cups on the corner of second base for Munson to peg from his knees, and Munson ends each day spitting brown, his face grimed under the mask.
Zito has started acting oddly, diffident and aloof, preoccupied inside his mind, and Munson can tell that it irritates Chavez, who likes them all to stick to their proscribed roles. Munson’s pretty sure it’s about senior year and the stuff that comes next; Zito probably won’t get drafted, something they all dance around, willfully blind, and he has to figure out his life in a much more immediate way than either Munson or Chavez.
A week before their first game, Munson wakes up in the park, under the landmark two-trunk tree. His hair is wet with dew and the grass to his side is smashed down in a long Zito-shape, but his friends are gone. Still kinda drunk, Munson rises to his knees and clumsily picks the loose change from his pockets out of the grass, sky gone crazy with stars, a faint downbound wail from the train tracks a few miles away.
He staggers across the lawn to the car, dimly remembering the emergency flask duct-taped to the underside of the shotgun seat, deeming his heartless abandonment more than enough reason.
His first thought is that someone’s broken into the car, the smeary twist of shadow through a fogged window, the duck of a head. But the shadow separates and part of it arches back and Munson recognizes the way Chavez yawns and stretches, lazy bow of his spine. He hears Zito saying low like a laugh, barely through the door, “Good, Ricky.”
Munson reels away, tripping down the gutter to sit on the curb a half a block down. He puts his elbows on his knees and his chin on his hands, staring at a patch of sidewalk where it’s possible he and Eric Chavez once wrote their names in colored chalk.
It’s been a couple of months since Munson last caught them, and as always he’s got to fight the sick feeling in his stomach, the tightness in his chest, trying to get past the visceral and into the repercussions. He still can’t believe Chavez and Zito think they’re getting away with it.
When they were fifteen, they kept thinking Munson was asleep, but he shot up five inches that year and laid awake for hours with his legs aching, and sometimes he would hear Chavez crawling across the carpet towards Zito, two voices behind the flood of the shower, Zito cracking jokes and gasping in the alley behind the garage, right under the air vent, Chavez slowly breaking down.
They’re together all the time. Spend enough time getting fucked up with the same people and nothing remains vaulted, certainly nothing of this magnitude. Chavez and Zito should have known from the outset, should have come clean years ago and saved them all a metric ton of heartache and wasted time, but apparently they preferred the Munce=idiot route.
Munson, in one of the many ways that he is demonstrably not an idiot, also knows that it’s not supposed to be happening anymore. It meant something different sophomore year, when Zito walked around with a baffled look on his face like he’d just figured out how to see the world in color, and Chavez executed crazy stunts and double plays flawlessly, shone in some near-painful way.
But something went wrong after only a couple of months. Knowing Zito, he hooked up with someone else without realizing that Chavez would take offense, and Chavez, noble soul that he is, told him to fuck right off. Loyalty is priority one in Chavez’s book, always has been.
Whatever it was, Zito went back into the teenage gayboy scene with a vengeance, and Chavez started dating girls, the prettiest in school, with disturbing ease considering he didn’t seem to be having much fun. They sniped at each other more often and all three of them took up substance abuse as a welcome distraction from the tension, and Munson felt like he was drowning that summer, fighting off a fever for weeks, never sure if it was his temperature or the weather that was a hundred degrees.
So it was a nightmare, days and nights on end, while Zito and Chavez chipped the fuck out of each other, circled Munson like he was neutral ground and they couldn’t be trusted on their own. Once Zito showed up with a black eye, and once Chavez’s lip was split, their excuses elaborate. Munson was as miserable as he’d ever been, sure that he was dying and even if wasn’t, his friends were gonna raze this city they’d built and salt the earth behind them. He was losing everything, at a moment when he was too ill to properly protect what was his.
They got through the summer somehow, on hundred proof and Humboldt County, cough syrup and Ritalin and caffeine pills, and Munson couldn’t remember when he’d realized that Chavez and Zito were still fucking around every couple of weeks. Maybe sometime in November.
For a long time, Munson wasn’t sure if it wasn’t just because Chavez was too chickenshit to approach any other guy, with the untouchable magazine-article reputation he was constructing, but it didn’t hold up. Munson had a tendency to idolize Eric Chavez that backlashed on him just then, forced him to conclude that Chavez wasn’t really cruel enough to wreck Zito (as he so obviously was) without being wrecked right back.
So someday Chavez and Zito will outgrow their tortured secret-in-love teenage angst-fest and just be regular in love, and Munson will finally be able to give them hell about how ridiculously incompetent they are, and get them drunk toasting honesty and forthrightness and brotherhood, and tell them seriously around three in the morning that it’s great, really it is, you’re so good for each other, and he might even mean it by then.
It’s a nice image of the future, better than a lot of other stuff that could happen, but Munson’s sitting on the curb trying to count stars, trying not to cry, treacherously doubting that Zito has ever made Chavez all that happy.
*
Munson hardly ever passes out, so he really should have been the one to take the last shot in the school hallway right before the second bell, but he’s annoyed with Zito, who’s been spacey all week and is somehow quietly enraging Chavez with his mere presence, so he dares him and Zito, good soldier, upends the thermos, swaying. He stumbles into his Greek Mythology class, and Chavez and Munson duck into the boys’.
Chavez washes out his mouth and scrubs his face, his pupils blown black and hidden by the dark of his eyes. They haven’t slept and Munson leans exhausted against the tile wall, barely keeping his feet, trying to steady himself by counting the spitballs on the ceiling.
“Today’s gonna be bad,” Chavez says, and Munson looks over to see him resting his forehead on the mirror, his hands on the lip of the sink.
“Wholeheartedly agree.”
“I’m,” Chavez half-laughs, “I could not be drunker and survive.”
Munson nods, right there with him. Dousing his troubles, high school irreparably blurred, Munson has learned to take the drunk as it comes, time its rhythms and pace himself, but no matter how fucked up he gets, sometimes he’s still hobbled by the weight of eight hours in small rooms, lying between him and baseball practice.
“We’ll sleep during sixth period,” Munson offers, and Chavez closes his eyes, rolls his head back. Munson is caught by the tilt and bow of Chavez’s neck, his eyes bugging and his heart turning over in his chest.
Living as they do, it’s sometimes impossible for Munson to avoid thinking about it, picturing it. Chavez atop Zito in the backseat, jeans open and legs spread, hands on Zito’s throat. Zito smiling and breathing out curses, rubbing his face on Chavez’s chest. Munson only really saw them that once in the parking lot, every other time he’s been a wall away or pretending to sleep or defied by the fog on the windows, but he’s filled in the intervening thirty-two months pretty well on his own.
He thinks sometimes that it would be easier to be close-minded and ignorant of anything, because he’s not always sure that the wrench of his stomach, that special overturn of his heart, is what it should be. He started out just curious, but Chavez bends him more every day.
“You always say we’ll sleep during sixth period, but then I get out there and what’re you, you’re packing a bowl.”
Munson grins and fists his hands at the small of his back, knuckles jammed against the tile of the wall.
“You’re not the same right now as you will be by sixth period,” Munson tells him. “Sixth period Chavvy always wants to smoke a bowl.”
Chavez narrows his eyes and studies Munson for a minute, swaying slightly. “You’re the one that changes.”
Munson shakes his head, a smirk on his face even though he feels like he might throw up any second now, and he’s gonna get Chavez to tell him just what the fuck he means by that, but a kid they know from auto shop comes in and tells them that Zito’s been spotted being carried across campus by his armpits and legs, dead to the world.
It occupies them for awhile.
Through the window of the nurse’s office, Zito looks terrible, sitting on the paper-covered cot with a wavery smile and dug-out eyes, and Munson tries to talk the principal into mercy, feeling just awful and getting keyed up, angrier and angrier until Chavez grabs him by the belt and hauls him out of there.
Chavez leaves Munson at the window to keep an eye on their poor doomed friend, and takes off across the campus, fast enough to stretch a double, and Munson doesn’t know where he’s going. He’s not back when Billy Beane appears briefly through the trees before vanishing into the office, but Munson can’t worry about it, thinking that it’ll be okay, because of course, of course Beane will get Zito out; Beane’s earned their loyalty exactly as far as they’ve earned his.
He sticks around until he sees Zito leaving, trailing Beane with his head down, walking towards the parking lot, and then goes looking for Chavez, finds him near the baseball field looking lost. Munson takes him out to sit in centerfield and talk over each other, trying to pinpoint where they went wrong and how they’ll remedy the situation. They completely forget about class until the bell rings, and then they’re both running back towards the buildings, shredded color and faces and greens tearing past. They split by the library, and Munson looks back, but only once.
*
Under Eric Chavez’s bed, in the dozens of shoeboxes Chavez has accumulated since he was five, there are nine thousand and forty-seven baseball cards.
Chavez went through a phrase, a three-year arc beginning when they were seven, in which he dedicated himself to names and numbers, pages of team rosters copied down at the library and taped up to his walls, quizzing himself with the cards. They’d be in the bleachers and Chavez would tell Munson the batting averages of every man before they came up, home and away.
Within the ordered aisles of the boxed cards, folded and tucked down, are hundreds and hundreds of Tootsie Roll Pop wrappers, brightly colored wedges poking up like handkerchiefs, each one with an Indian shooting an arrow at a star on it-Eric Chavez’s other phase of that epoch.
Munson sleeps on the floor of Chavez’s room a lot, when the two houses over and three houses up distance back to his own seems galactic, and with his head pillowed on a tattered Padres sweatshirt and the afghan Chavez’s grandmother knitted for him when he was a baby pulled up over his shoulder, he can see the stacks of shoeboxes and the pieces of the first bat Chavez ever broke on a swing, pale moons of Little League home run balls, outgrown sneakers and the lumpy malformed shape of the stuffed frog that Chavez had stitched together himself from a kit in eighth grade home ec.
When he can’t sleep, he focuses on every item in Chavez’s blind-striped room in turn, remembering a specific occasion when he held each in his hands.
There’s an Aerosmith poster about knee-high on the wall next to Chavez’s closet, unremarkable in that most of the available wall space is papered over, the vast white expanse of the ceiling like a sheet of paper laid atop. The Aerosmith poster, Munson knows, has been there since the late eighties, when Chavez, infuriated by some injustice visited up on him by his parents, kicked a hole in the wall.
He keeps his weed in there now, in the plaster dust and busted drywall, one corner of the poster all used and ragged from being pulled up all the time, the sticky-tac black with grime.
The undercarriage of Chavez’s mom’s car is held to the frame by half-dozen loops of zip-tie, from when Chavez rolled it up over a sharp bank of rock and jarred something loose. That was four months ago-eventually, Chavez is philosophically resigned, his mom will go in for an oil change or routine check-up and the jig will be up, so he’s determined to enjoy the time he has left before she forbids him from even riding in cars.
In the bottom right drawer of Chavez’s desk, back behind the telescope-rolled comic books and dry pens and palm-sized Happy Meal toys, there’s a Kodak snapshot of Barry Zito with a wild dazed grin on his face and grass in his hair (they’d slept in the park that night), the sun searing white the whole corner, broken rays of reflection cutting across the foreground.
On the back, Chavez has written in black ink, sometimes it’s like this.
In Chavez’s wallet, behind the go-kart license he still carries around, is the slip of paper from a fortune cookie and it reads, True love is closer than you suspect.
At this point, Munson doesn’t think there’s anything left for him to learn about Eric Chavez.
*
They go to the party out on Canyon Road mainly because being alone with just the two of them for days at a time is starting to wear on Munson. The ever-present tension between Zito and Chavez has altered, darkened, become less affection and regret and desire, more bitterness and instability, like how it was summer after sophomore year.
It’s exhausting, not what Munson needs in addition to senior year and his full-time job playing baseball. They’re all three of them picking fights with each other and drinking faster and faster, earlier and earlier, and Chavez drives into the canyon like he stole the car, Munson leaning between the seats to pass the glassy to Zito, who huddles against the door as if dismayed, his sunken eyes and drawn face flaring in the lighter flame.
Munson leaves the two of them to whatever pitiful devices they may possess, and takes a place up around the keg, among the flushed spike-haired boys in polo shirts, raccoon-eyed girls with glitter in their hair. An hour or two passes.
One of the girls breaks away from the blur of the crowd, plants herself in front of him, huge blue eyes and a perfect doll’s face and a shimmer of silver and red. “You’re one of those baseball guys.”
Munson grins. “Sure am, honey.”
“Don’t call me that, it makes it seem like you don’t remember my name.”
“I, um, I don’t think I know your name.”
“Exactly.” She grins back at him like a burst of light, and Munson’s at once terribly confused.
The girl is Jess. She keeps refilling her plastic cup and asking Munson questions, ragging on him casually and affectionately when he can’t hide how drunk he is, and his head is spinning, bewildered by her glossy quick mouth and the dance of gold in the notch at the base of her throat, a winking crucifix. She kinda enraptures him.
Chavez materializes at one point and shoots a charming smile at Jess, pulls Munson away, into the web of shadows under a tree.
“She’s a freshman, Munce.”
“Pretty, though, huh?” Munson answers, looking back at her, lifting two fingers off his cup to attempt a dorky little wave. “Cute as hell, my word.”
“You’re not allowed to fuck around with the underaged anymore, you know.”
“Barry’s underage too,” Munson says meanly, without thinking, and Chavez blinks at him, dumbstruck for a moment.
“What?”
Chavez looks frightened, curling his shoulders in, and Munson tries to clear his throat, shaking his head. He didn’t mean to say that, hates the expression on Chavez’s face and his protective stance. Munson doesn’t get it, but it’s very important to Chavez that Munson not know about him and Zito, and Munson, in this as with most things, is obliged to humor him.
“Don’t listen to me, I’m drunk,” Munson says, and claps a hand on Chavez’s shoulder, his throat tightening as Chavez tenses under him. “I’m not really thinking straight right now.”
Chavez pulls away gently, cutting his eyes away from Munson. Chavez just looks so sad sometimes, like he’s been recently and violently orphaned, a heartbreaking disbelief in the possibility of happiness.
“All this stuff is for shit,” Chavez tells him dully. “Terrible party.”
Suddenly, before Munson can get clarification on that, the steady crackle of conversation is split by a shriek, a coyote howl, close enough to be right over the fence, maybe in the driveway. Chavez jumps and drops his cup, beer sloshing over his shoes. He looks at Munson with comically wide eyes, and for a second their halting drunken fight is forgotten, porchlight cut up like paper snowflakes on Chavez’s smooth face and the twists of black at his temples, his slightly open mouth.
Fuck, Munson thinks helplessly as the party starts to dissolve in the direction of the front yard, everyone rushing to see the coyote, secure in numbers. Having grown up with Chavez and the picture of the two of them at eight years old taped to his mirror, he’s rarely able to see Chavez’s looks objectively, any more than his own, but sometimes, in the right light, at a certain moment, Munson is taken aback, socked in the stomach. It would have been bad enough if Chavez were just a little bit good-looking; Munson doesn’t need to be afflicted with Chavez looking like he does right now.
*
Munson hooks up with Jess that first night, in the backseat of Chavez’s car a few hours after Chavez disappears into the mob. Something slinks across the street in his peripheral vision, in the rearview mirror, but it’s probably just the power of suggestion that makes Munson think it’s the coyote, indolently vicious amber eyes tracking, teeth bared.
She’s got a two a.m. curfew, though, and leaves him alone, half-dressed and passed out with his cheek on a seatbelt buckle, and when he wakes up, he’s in motion, the trees and streetlamps rolling by in the window above his head.
Chavez is driving, and he doesn’t respond to Munson’s several weak questions, what time is it, where are we going, where’s Barry, so Munson slumps back into a doze, figuring that no matter how fucked up things are right now, Chavez still isn’t gonna let anything happen to him.
He wakes up again to Chavez manhandling him, pulling him out of the car and propping him without grace against the door. Munson hisses between his teeth when Chavez’s hands alight on his open jeans, fuzzily searching for the right thing to say or do. He’s so drunk and so tired and he’s staring at Chavez’s fingers working against the denim and brass, warm skitter across the lowest patch of skin on his stomach, heat rearing up inside like nothing he’s ever felt, the completeness of it, the urgency. This is his very best friend in the world, this moment means everything to him.
But Chavez just buttons him up again, tugs his shirt straight and wipes a smear of glitter off Munson’s jaw with his sleeve. He stays in the driveway until Munson’s inside, until the light comes on in Munson’s window, and Munson stands with his hand on the wall for balance, watches Chavez’s taillights shrink and tighten and disintegrate into the black.
Within a week it’s depressingly obvious that Chavez was right about not hooking up with freshmen, because Jess is calling him a couple times a day and leaving notes like parking tickets on his windshield. She’s pretty irritating, but also weirdly clever and crazy in a friendly sort of way, and Munson finds himself too bemused to tell her to fuck off. If nothing else, he’s never ever bored when she’s around.
It’s comforting too, amid the Eric and Barry mess, the Eric and Eric mess, to be reminded that he definitely still likes girls, so much it kinda freaks him out. That hasn’t changed.
Chavez hates Jess and makes little show otherwise, but that’s not new. Chavez has yet to approve of a single one of Munson’s girlfriends, even those who are close friends with Chavez’s own extracurriculars. He has different reasons for disliking different girls, but every time it ends the same, Chavez getting Munson roaring drunk on the gym roof after another catastrophic breakup.
Zito, for his part, grows scarcer and scarcer, the familiar stamp of his red coat shrinking across the parking lot after a game. He lies transparently about where he’s gonna be, and sometimes when they all fall asleep in Chavez’s attic, he’s gone before morning. He zones out, staring into space until they shout his name or cuff him on the arm, and is edgy all the time, chewing on his thumbnail, smuggling a flask in his back pocket under his shirt everywhere he goes.
Chavez says that Zito’s decided to sabotage everything that matters in his life so that it won’t hurt so bad when he loses it all to the vagaries of the draft, but Munson’s pretty sure that’s not right, or at least, that’s not all.
He recognizes a lot of this, the distant look that Zito walks around wearing, the looseness to his movements and scattershot of his senses. Zito’s hung up on somebody, full-scale crushes that he gets from time to time, sneaking around so Chavez won’t find out, because Zito has a convoluted belief that Chavez doesn’t mind him sleeping with a third of the league, as long as he never sleeps with any of them twice.
It usually passes, Zito not having much of an attention span and with an inclination to be distracted by shiny things, but in the meanwhile, it’s thrown everything off, their disorganized routine disturbed something fierce.
Munson wakes up in the dugout, three or four in the morning with the moon stuck like a fishhook in the sky, disoriented and aching in every way. Looking around, rubbing the heel of his hand into his eye, he spots Chavez and Zito over by third base. They’re arguing softly, cold sneers and bunched fists, and as Munson watches, Zito starts to walk away. Chavez grabs his arm and Zito throws him off, shoves him cleanly and Chavez stumbles, falls back on the grass.
Zito looks down at him for a moment, uncertain and remorseful, and then he says something that bows Chavez’s head, and turns away, disappearing from view. Munson listens to the chainlink clattering as Zito hikes himself up and over, Chavez motionless, a saddened curl on the field.
*
Up on the roof, concrete rough and sun-hot like a lizard’s skin, flattening on Munson’s back through his shirt, he’s struggling to keep up the conversation, badly diverted by each sideways glare Chavez sends his way, each tight edge to his responses.
Zito’s folded up over his knees with his face hidden and his arms wrapped around his shins. He’s at a psychological remove, miles away from the rooftop and his friends, though he still extends his seeking hand to close on air until Munson tucks the jay between his fingers. Munson watches his back rise slowly as he inhales, watches the smoke float up, a lopsided sphere for a second before it’s battered into pieces by the breeze.
Chavez is, predictably, devastated, and covering it by being an asshole. Munson is trying to explain about Jess, about how he ends up telling her stuff he never intended to say out loud, how she’s so weird and so fucking cute that he doesn’t know what he’s doing half the time, and Chavez is shooting him down over and over again.
“This is all your fault,” Chavez tells him, and Munson flinches, jarring his elbow against Zito’s side. He knows that already, he doesn’t need to be told. “You realize this girl was like eleven when you first got your dick sucked.”
Munson gets slightly overheated, confused by the sense memory of bathroom tile under his hands and being totally out-of-his-mind turned on, Angie Delgado with her strawberry lip gloss and the cold rings on her fingers, phantom image of Chavez standing silent in the doorway watching them. He pokes Zito in the head to get the jay back, and takes a moment to settle himself.
“You’ve got to stop living in the past, Ricky. Age is just a number.”
Zito snorts a half-laugh as if he’s been paying attention after all. Chavez squints against the sun with a miserable look on his face, a rash of sunburn on his neck. Munson’s beginning to grow accustomed to the sick feeling in his stomach, and he says unsteadily, “What’s more important is that she’s kinda crazy.”
“Fucking around with you? I have no doubt,” Chavez says, a bit too mean, and Munson thwaps him across the shoulder automatically, sees Chavez snarl. It’s all too close to the surface, raw places showing through the patches, Munson’s feeble attempts to stay lighthearted.
“There’s got to be a balance,” he says, and he’s talking about the three of them and the delicate rusting mechanism of their friendship, the intractable feeling that they’ve slipped some unimaginably tiny gear and everything is now being dismantled from the inside out.
He’s talking about the three of them, but Chavez’s expression is injured and disputative, and Zito is just a turned head, balled up and walled off.
“I mean,” he says, his good intentions withering, thinking viciously, fucking look at each other, will you. “I mean, I can overlook the fact that she’s a freshman, but in return, she’s got to not call my house six times a day.”
“Or you could just not fuck a freshman. Jesus. You know that are people with actual, like, driver’s licenses who might want to fuck you.”
Munson can’t think of an answer to that, blinking at Chavez helplessly . The sunburn on Chavez’s neck seems to grow and spread up, but he’s just blushing, refusing to cut his eyes away so that he looks humiliated and defiant and suddenly, shockingly young. It’s so quiet Munson can hear the crackle of paper burning as Zito takes a hit, his long melancholic exhale.
Chavez leaves before Munson can press him further, some weak excuse as he disappears, slim and rushed down the trapdoor ladder. Munson’s left frustrated, trying to believe that he’d heard something damning in Chavez’s voice, that Chavez will still meet him to cut sixth period. He kicks at Zito, stupid fucking Zito who ruined Chavez for anyone else.
“Do you know what his fucking problem is lately?”
Zito shrugs and yawns, tipping slowly over until his shoulder is pressed against Munson’s, his weight supported. Munson worries, picking at the hem of his jeans.
“Do you think he’s really upset about Jess?”
“I think he’s upset about anyone you fuck around with that isn’t him,” Zito tells him, and then there’s an unblemished moment of silence before the weight of that registers with either of them, before Zito lurches against him and pulls back, before Munson tries to take a breath and finds that he can’t.
A bird careers across the sky, shrieking.
“What are. What?” Munson asks, his hand pressed flat to the gravel. Zito’s shaking his head, holding his hands out, saying, no no it was a joke very stoned it was just a joke, and Munson’s feeling the little rocks cut into his palm, thinking that if he can get to his feet, he can look over the edge and maybe see Chavez coming out of the gym down there, maybe holler to him and turn him around, narrow-framed young man with his hand over his face to block the sun and his shadow thrust like a blade on the ground, maybe he can ask Chavez if it’s true, shout down to him over the asphalt and sidewalk chalk and dying grass: me too, more than anything.
But sadly, the moment for action goes like the smoke, one more thing that Munson watches happen without moving.
*
Munson figures that the main difference between them is that he’s the practical sort, and Chavez and Zito are the romantics. It’s why he never lets them shake him off when he’s catching them-they tend to get lost in the trivial, infuriated by the gall displayed by the other team’s existence, become unfocused and start wanting only to throw as hard as they can, throat-high, and Munson’s got to rein them back. He can’t think of how many times he’s been told that dumb guys with good arms become pitchers, and smart guys with good arms become catchers.
And it’s why they’ve been getting over a cruddy little teenage affair for two years, why they’ve made everything as complicated and difficult as possible, tempered it with baseball and promiscuity and self-destructive tendencies like every other fucked-up idealist waiting for the draft.
There were signs early on, down at the reservoir in the crushing heat, Chavez scrambling high up the rocks and leaping, bicycling his legs towards the sky, spiraling and tailspinning into the water, Zito arching in a series of slow perfect somersaults before exploding. They’d never had limits on that sort of thing, both of them in search of a single instance of something beautiful.
Munson doesn’t like diving headfirst because what if there’s a rock right under the water, and he would have handled the whole thing differently, if it’d been him.
If Chavez had lit on Munson rather than Zito back sophomore year, Munson would have come at the situation with a strategy, a long-term plan, and not just let it implode and protract for the better part of high school. He would have evened out Chavez’s manic periods, talked him down from his bad moods, kept him in every game and remained faithful to his last breath.
Munson knows for sure. He’s been doing it since he was eight years old, and he can’t see how adding sex to the equation would noticeably change his and Chavez’s day-to-day relationship.
The idea of sex with Chavez stalls him for awhile, but he rebounds.
Because that’s really the heart of it, isn’t it, the one thing that Zito has of Chavez that Munson does not. Munson would like to think that this is some more typical jealousy, the kind of thing that might happen with any random girl who tried to steal away his best friend, but he keeps getting blindsided by the fogged and indistinct picture of the two of them through the car window. Restless, anxious, he turns it over in his mind, fills it in with color and dimension and sound, Chavez’s eyes flashing black, Zito’s big hands spread on his back.
He knows that nothing about this is typical.
*
One shot for every year that Zito’s been alive, and one to grow on, one for luck, one for love, and the only smart thing they did today was start at four in the afternoon. Munson’s lost track of almost everything, blitzed clear as crystal, only aware that Chavez is nearby, right there with the beer in his hand, silly grin on his face.
He doesn’t recognize the house they’re in.
“Scooby Doo on channel two,” Chavez says, his hair still slick with pool water. “Frankenstein on channel nine.”
Chavez hums something vaguely haunting, rolling his head, and Munson notices that he too is holding a beer. He takes a cautious drink, trying to decipher if Chavez is speaking in their code. He forgets sometimes, because he spends an awful lot of time drunk and stoned.
“Off the map, Ricky,” he answers eventually, shrugging. Totally lost, man. Chavez rolls his eyes.
“Pain and tension, Munce,” Chavez tells him. Pay attention. “It’s a fight to protect the luck. The age of majority means nothing’s penny-ante anymore. Grown-up problems now.”
Munson turned eighteen first, a bacchanal of a three-day weekend at the shore house, torrential autumn rain on the last night that they’d opened the doors and windows to, capered and slid across the lawn with lightning for fireworks and Munson swearing that he wouldn’t live to see twenty.
“Keeps his head down, though,” Munson says, though it really isn’t true, considering that Zito did pass out in the middle of first period a couple months ago. He often feels obliged to defend Zito from Chavez. A lot of the time, he thinks that’s why Chavez bitches about him to Munson so much, just so Munosn will say nice things. It’s the kind of convoluted thing that Chavez specializes in.
“Short-lived is what he is and us too.”
“How so?”
“Fucked up right now and right now, fucked up and legally culpable. No way this ends well.”
Munson shakes his head, peering blearily across the crush of thick-necked college boys and skinny brassy college girls to find Zito with one of their former teammates, laughing so hard it could be mistaken for weeping.
“You. You’re too drunk to be deciding this sort of thing,” Munson says. Chavez scoffs, gesturing with his half-full cup.
“Drunk makes no difference because I know whereof I fucking speak, okay? You know the kinda trouble he’s got himself into? It’s worse than me, means pretty fucking bad.”
Dangerously confused, Munson finishes off his beer, eyeing Chavez as if the angle of his mouth or tightening of his jaw will make sense of that. Chavez looks far gone, tottering and festooned with a string of crimson and gold plastic beads looped around his neck, but he’s meeting Munson’s eyes like a dare.
“What kind of trouble?” Munson asks.
Chavez looks over at Zito for a second, concavity of his cheek that means he’s sucking on the inside the way he does when nervous. Zito’s checking his watch, keeping up appearances, a lopsided Burger King crown atop his head.
“Well. Take your pick, really,” Chavez says, and there’s a catch in his voice that keeps Munson from questioning further, not wanting to ruin the night, which has been mostly good, Chavez mostly civil, Zito mostly happy.
They fly past midnight and Munson believes that he could stay awake forever, drink to the sunrise, and subsequently blacks out, wakes up several hours later in the bathtub. It’s far from ideal, one leg slung over the side and a bolt of pain in his back when he moves, but someone was kind enough to toss a blanket over him.
Lifting his cheek from the cold side of the tub, a flat numb spot left behind like the skin over his cheekbone’s been stripped away, something falls out of his hair, catches up in the collar of his shirt. The room’s windowless and black, thin silver gleam from the fixtures, and Munson plucks at his collar, comes up with a small foil square, a condom.
“Fuckers,” he mutters, rustling his hands through his hair and dislodging three more. He crawls up on his knees to get the light, huge white spots exploding across his vision for several moments before clearing to reveal Chavez on the floor covered in a couple of towels and insensate.
Munson falls out of the bathtub and arranges himself against the wall with his legs folded on Chavez’s side, and the light is making him nauseous, but he leaves it on because there’s sharpie black scribbled all over Chavez’s face. Leaning closer, Munson can see that it’s misspelled swear words and a crude cock and balls drawing aimed at his mouth. Munson has to laugh, muffled against the side of his arm.
He levers up to see his own face in the mirror, a brambly black scrawl on his cheek but he can’t make anything of it, the letters smeared and scrunched together.
He turns the light off, nudging Chavez until he stirs. A long tremor runs down Chavez’s body, barely perceptible against Munson’s leg, and he leans his head back, breathing out slow.
“Dark,” Chavez notes in a ravaged voice, and his hand crawls over Munson’s knee. “Know that’s you, Munce.”
Munson nods silently, because he could pick Chavez out blindfolded too.
“Bathroom,” Chavez further observes, and shifts his hips experimentally. “Ow.”
Munson pats him comfortingly on his side, lets his hand stay there as if misplaced. “We could go someplace.”
“No, no. I won’t be moving any time soon.” Chavez sighs, nearly lost in a low undercurrent of scratches and clicks and the drip of water in the sink. Munson can feel him breathing, warm dilation under his hand, and it strikes him as something very important to remember.
“Chavvy,” Munson says, heart in his throat and fingers crossed. “I think I’m in trouble too.”
Chavez is quiet for a long moment, and Munson watches the dark coalesce into solid forms as his eyes adjust, genesis of tile and porcelain and doorknob. He’s holding his breath, braced for impact.
“Explain yourself,” Chavez says softly.
Munson presses his hand flat and hard on Chavez’s side, seeking the ridge of muscle, the sturdy line of his ribs, and Chavez sucks in a fast breath. Munson’s got everything riding on this, heedless with his head splitting, his mouth bone-dry.
“The strangest thing has happened,” Munson tells him, just more than a whisper with his hand working slowly towards the bottom of Chavez’s shirt. “I never woulda thought.”
He can just make out the flared whites of Chavez’s eyes, slack mouth and his breath drawing ragged, tension wire-thin all along his body, and Munson gets one, two fingertips under Chavez’s shirt, taut skin and a jolt like electricity up his arm, rattling his composure.
The door slams open, storm of light wailing down on them. Munson shouts and slams back in shock, cracking his elbow into the tile hard enough for it to ring with pain and shudder through him. There’s a huge tuneless racket, guys hollering, pelting them with beer cans, the white spots blasting again, and he hears Chavez shouting, “Get the fuck out, fucking shut the door,” with his voice breaking all over the place.
Munson’s still wound tight as hell, staggered because the only thing he wants in the whole world, more than a good draft or air, is to get his mouth on the place where his hand just was, and it’s all too much.
He heaves himself over the side of the tub and throws up until he’s shaking, hollowed out and faint.
*
Back at school, Chavez is working on his footwork, chipping his toe off second base as he whips the ball down to first. Eyeblack is running in lines down his face, his dirty red hat on backwards. He’s getting better and better, hitting near .500 with a few weeks left, stealing a base or two a game and fielding like this, effortless roll of his body, short hook of his arm.
Munson’s catching Zito under Beane’s watch, trying to keep his attention in one place. Chavez has made his life uncommonly difficult lately.
Beane stops Zito and takes his arm, showing him another angle. Even sixty feet six away, Munson can see how Zito is locked in on everything Beane says, strange because Zito typically has the attention span of a fruit fly. It’s the middle of May and hot enough that the sun seems to have set down in the parking lot forty feet away.
After practice, they get some sandwiches and go the beach, but after an hour Zito makes some poor excuse and leaves the two of them on the sand. Since waking up in that bathroom, they have not been more than incidentally alone, and Chavez has been talking to Munson through the people around them, avoiding eye contact.
Munson figures he fucked it up.
Fingering an unlit jay, wondering morosely how many of these they’ll have to smoke before the silence stops feeling awkward, Munson clears his throat, counts the waves breaking. He keeps imagining what might have happened if he’d been given just five more minutes that night.
Chavez sighs. “Blaze, soldier.”
Munson obligingly lights up, a spark flaking onto his hand like a pinch. They pass the jay back and forth a few times, the moon rising, eaten up by the narrow cloud layer.
“So, Munce, I been thinking,” Chavez says eventually, sounding like he’s been fogged in. “I’ve been curious about you.”
“Curious how?” Munson surreptitiously crosses his fingers in the bend of his knee.
“Well. It’s been a helluva year, you know? I think you were different before.”
“Before what?” Munson asks, getting kinda annoyed.
“You say weird stuff. You act all. I don’t even know. Like somebody I don’t know, even though obviously I know you very very well.” Chavez rests his chin on his knees. “Even though there shouldn’t be anything about you I don’t know.”
Munson stays quiet for a moment, a riot of panic in the pit of his stomach like a burst of alarms during a burglary, thinking that Chavez is hinting at something, talking in riddles instead of code. But Chavez isn’t the kind to come the long way or obscure his true meaning; there’s too much cleverness involved in duplicity.
Taking Chavez at face value, then, Munson’s kinda ticked.
“Just like there’s nothing about you that I don’t know, right? And you never act weird, so you can definitely talk about that.”
Chavez looks confused, killing some time with the jay, his face pinched around the spark.
“I. That weirdness is in response to your weirdness,” Chavez says hesitantly, like he’s not sure where to set his defenses. “I never know what you’re gonna do anymore. It’s made things tough.”
Munson’s not gonna sit here and listen to this, his blood hot and riled, and he gets to his feet shakily, wavering with his stubby moon-shadow fallen on Chavez’s face. “I don’t make things tough. Things have gotten tough mainly because you and Barry are both idiots, and all I gotta do is make sure you don’t kill each other, okay? I’m your best friend, that’s my job, fine. But don’t fucking tell me I’m making things tougher for you.”
Chavez gets to his knees, his eyes wide, but he can’t quite make it standing, sandy fists on his legs. “Why the fuck do you keep bringing up Barry?” he asks too loud, scared.
“Why the fuck do you think, man?” Munson shouts, and storms off, Chavez calling his name and then screaming it, echoes bouncing off his back. Munson’s sightless, drunk and furious, and he kicks at the car tire until his foot feels too big for his shoe, climbs into the backseat and wraps himself up in Chavez’s blue hoodie, miserably waiting to pass out.
*
Munson can’t sleep for several days, coming on the end of the school year, and one morning with the sun just a gold haze at the corner of the pink sky, he’s sitting by the window playing his gameboy when Chavez goes running past.
Munson blinks and stares at the empty street for a moment, wondering if he’s fallen asleep without realizing it, and then cranes around and looks down the street to see Chavez, red shorts and a black shirt cut by the strip of skin between the collar and Chavez’s hair, easy long strides with the sole coming unglued from his shoe, flapping like a dog’s tongue.
Muzzy-headed from having not slept, Munson puts on jeans and sneakers, and slips out the kitchen door, silent across the lawns, keeping Chavez half a block ahead. There’s something in his throat like a yell stored for a disaster, a plane falling out of the sky, a chasm opening down the middle of the street. If he knew what he wanted to say to Chavez, he’d stop him for sure, but Munson’s mostly just going on instinct.
He’s at the reservoir before Munson can put together where they’re heading, and Chavez is already halfway to the north bridge and as small as an army man, jogging along the concrete path.
Seeing him from a distance like this, Chavez doing what he has done all his life, run fast, run easier than breathing, it does Munson’s heart a wicked turn, and he leans heavily on the chainlink fence, swallowing hard.
His hand’s over his eyes, and Chavez calls his name dim like an old recording, scratched by the wind. Munson looks up and Chavez is waving his arm from all the way across the motionless water, a sudden crash of memory, ten years old swimming in the lake one summer, shaking wet hair out of his eyes to see Chavez shouting and waving from the shore in his bright blue trunks.
Terrified to have been spotted, this world-destroying crush wrecked all over his face, Munson pushes through the bushes and hits the sidewalk running. He can’t let Chavez see him like this.
Three hours still until the first bell, seven days before the end of the school year, Munson lies in bed and watches the shadows move imperceptibly across the ceiling, trying not to think that never in the decade they’ve been best friends has anything ever been this hard between them.
*
onwards