halfway out the door to the game
was i a little bit bitter about crosby breaking his ankle? yeah, you could say that.
Journeymen
By Candle Beck
Midland, Texas.
Zito drove out to the ballpark through the oilfields, the sides of his truck covered in dust, the frame clattering. It was late May and starting to get sincerely hot. Outside, it smelled like scorched rubber and metal, and the road shimmered where it funneled into the horizon. It was flat for weeks, out here.
Zito knew this whole town, cruddy and inconsequential though it was. All the guys at the Kwik-Stop across the street from the park called him by name. He didn’t think once the whole ride there; he could do this in his sleep.
The Midland Rockhounds played at a park named for a bank, a low spread in West Texas with the stadium lights on single poles, the same general shape as palm trees. Twenty miles from Odessa and the dead center of nowhere.
Zito had to get out of his car to unlock the parking lot’s chain-link gate, so he knew he was the first to arrive, which was the case twice a week, between his starts.
Free weights first, and then the stationary bike for a half-hour. Legs, arms, rowing machine. Then he went down to the ‘pen and tacked four white squares of paper to the backstop, in on the hands, throat-high and rising, outside corner, three inches above the dirt.
He threw until he’d hit the targets ten times each, and then he took a shower, got halfway dressed in his uniform.
By then some of the other guys had come in.
Zito talked shit with the boys and played cards for a while, his hair wet against his neck, and eventually went to talk to his manager.
They got along, the two of them. They’d known each other for a half a decade. His manager liked to lean back in his chair and bitch with Zito about the fucking wrench of a life spent in Double-A. They shared a black sense of humor and a weary respect for each other.
His manager lit a cigarette, and told Zito, “New blood in today.”
“Oh yeah?” Zito said without interest, because guys came and went down there like moths.
“Big club made a move, and we got us a player to be named later. A shortstop.”
“They don’t exactly need a shortstop, up there,” Zito commented. Miguel Tejada had signed a long-term contract over a year ago, for close to what he was actually worth, and now Oakland was broke, but whole.
“Don’t think they plan on keeping him that long.” His manager tapped ash into the ashtray that was shaped like a cowboy hat.
“So what’s the word?” Zito asked, tugging at a loose thread on his sock.
“Good hands, good eye. Pretty swing but doesn’t leave the yard too often. He’s been around for awhile, different teams.”
“Nobody’s got any loyalty anymore, you notice that?”
His manager grinned sharply at him. “’Cept you.” Zito’d been with the Oakland organization for seven years, but he didn’t often like to think about that.
“Why’s he down here?” he asked.
“I’m told he’s fragile.”
Zito lifted his eyebrows.
“Breaks a lot of bones,” his manager elaborated. “Wrists and fingers especially. You can count on him to miss, oh, six-eight weeks a season.”
“Well.” Zito exhaled, his morning’s workout beginning to register with his muscles, thinking about taking a nap before they had to go up for fielding practice. “Sounds like he’ll fit right in.”
He yawned, and his manager’s head cocked slightly, his expression indecipherable. “You come in early today?”
Zito wasn’t really supposed to, they said it fucked with the trainer’s routine for him, but he didn’t bother to play innocent, shrugging and nodding in one motion.
His manager sighed, looking disappointed. “When are you gonna give up on that, kid?”
Zito shrugged again, and bent his fingers backwards to crack them. He wasn’t going anywhere, everybody knew that, so what was the problem if he wanted to pretend? He thought about how this shortstop was going to be seeing everything here for the first time, and realized absently that he wasn’t at all jealous.
*
Bobby Crosby was twenty-five years old, fresh from the National League, where he’d never played higher than Double-A. He showed up for batting practice with his gear in a Long Beach State gym bag, a fading bruise on his cheek. He changed with his back to everyone and loitered near the dugout steps until one of the outfielders said, “hey new guy, warm up, okay?” and they started tossing a ball back and forth.
Crosby threw almost sidearm, a neat little whip, and he squinted against the glare of the sun off the land. The word got around the field, where the others were throwing and stretching on the grass:
Kid’s name is Bobby. Kid comes from California. Kid’s played mostly back East. Kid’s not sure of the name of the guy he got traded for. Kid says he needs to find a place to live.
They’d take him drinking tonight, and more than one person would tell him, “Welcome to Texas,” and then start laughing. They were already talking about what bar they should go to.
Halfway through the game, a rumor trickled down to them that Crosby’s dad had played in the bigs. They went and asked the third base coach, who knew every ballplayer there’d ever been, and it was confirmed. Being an infielder ran in the blood.
They paid more attention to Crosby. A father late of the Cardinals, Reds, and Indians was closer than many of them would ever get.
Just watching, Zito could tell that Crosby was good. Very good, even, but when the runner came in hard at second to break up the double play, Crosby’s body curved in and he leapt fearfully away from the base, jerking his arm to get off a poor throw to first. They didn’t get the second out.
Fragile, Zito remembered. Gun-shy. It wasn’t going to do them much good to have a shortstop who was afraid of getting taken out.
Down in the clubhouse after the game, one of the first basemen/DHs caught Zito’s arm as he was walking past. Crosby was sitting on the other end of the couch, one leg bent on the cushion, studying Zito carefully with the place between his eyebrows slightly pinched.
“Z, you met the new guy?” the first baseman asked, tugging at Zito’s sleeve.
Zito shook his head and manufactured a grin. “Hiya. Barry Zito.” He reached out and Crosby sat up to shake his hand.
“Zito’s, like, dude who knows everything,” the first baseman told Crosby. “Been around forever, basically.”
Zito let it brush off him, no point in getting irritated. “Yeah.”
The first baseman grinned. “Tell him that you’re a pitcher.”
“I’m a pitcher,” Zito said dutifully. Crosby nodded, his face unreadable. He had silvery quiet eyes, lines already forming around his mouth.
“And you’re from California too.”
Crosby’s eyes flickered with vague interest. Zito nodded. “San Diego.”
Crosby tipped his chin up. “Long Beach,” he said, and Zito squinted at him, because he’d played against some Long Beach teams growing up, high school and the Babe Ruth League, and maybe Crosby was a little familiar.
“Well,” Zito said, pushing his hands into his pockets. “Good to meet you.”
Right then, the lights went out.
There was a moment of silence, and then someone said conversationally, “Fuse blew again.” The team murmured in agreement. It was black as a crow, and the scent of the room was suddenly much stronger, grass and sweat and coffee.
Something crashed into something else, and the third baseman swore, “Fuck, Dez, lay off, will you?” Socks rasped across the carpet; someone coughed.
“Does this, um. Happen often?” Somehow, Zito recognized Crosby’s voice.
“Now and then,” somebody answered.
“So what do we do?”
Zito felt for the couch, fumbling with the first baseman’s shoulder before sinking safely between the two of them. His hand crawled up Crosby’s leg, Crosby flinching, and clapped him on the knee. “We wait. Usually doesn’t take too long for somebody to go down and get the thing flipped.”
“Oh.”
Zito let his head drop back, sighing. He noticed that Crosby had shifted slightly nearer to him, his foot nudging against Zito’s leg. He wondered if Crosby was as afraid of the dark as he was of a dirty slide, and thought, with a little more bitterness than usual, that this team was getting worse every day.
*
Every night that he could, Zito watched the end of the A’s game when he got home after his own game. He paid the cable company more than he could afford to get every major league baseball game, and wished intently for tie scores, extra innings, hours of the California night sky stretching high and clean above the stadium lights.
He lived in a one-bedroom house on the wrong side of town, splintered gray paint outside and worn red carpet inside. All the furniture was secondhand, most of it stolen. The blinkered gold lights of the oil derricks hung up like ornaments against the black of his window.
The power went out here a lot, too, and Zito didn’t keep anything in the refrigerator, put his beers in a plastic bucket filled with ice. He’d lost his bottle opener at some point, and cracked off the caps with his lighter.
The A’s were winning. The A’s were almost always winning, these days. Everyone had said they were doomed, having lost Eric Chavez in the off-season as a free agent to Boston, and Jermaine Dye to the White Sox, but they still had their Pair of Aces, which was all they really needed.
Mark Mulder was, in fact, pitching that night. It was eleven o’clock in Texas and the game was almost over in Oakland, because Mulder had every pitch working and games didn’t take very long when that was the case.
Zito drank steadily, and watched dispassionately, not moved by Tim Hudson laughing with Aaron Boone in the dugout, nor Tejada and Marco Scutaro slapping each other upside the head every few minutes, nor the garishly pink Bazooka Joe bubble carefully stuck to the top of Noah Lowry’s cap when his back was turned.
They said the Oakland clubhouse was as much fun as you could have with your clothes on. Zito knew that was true, though he’d only ever been there once, almost two years ago.
Mark Mulder went the distance. Zito’s eyes were full of green and white, the wide uncomplicated smile on every face that emerged from the dugout. The outfielders jumped on each other’s backs, whapping their gloves against backs and arms. Hudson got Mulder to bend down so that Hudson could scrub a hand through his hair. The flags swept back and forth in the bleachers, the signs taken off the rail and carefully rolled up.
Most nights, Zito passed out in his chair, alone for miles and wishing he could talk to his mom. Most nights, he dreamed of California.
*
On the field, the infielders moved as if they were connected by strings, shifting forward and falling back in perfect rhythm, and Crosby looked like he’d been playing with these guys for years.
Off the field, he hardly ever said anything. He showered and dressed and left right after the game, driving away in his beat-up blue hatchback that huddled low to the ground and went faster than seemed possible.
Zito took to watching him sometimes, letting his gaze find its way over there of its own volition. It was soothing, static on the radio. Crosby was a cipher, and Zito was tired of things being complicated.
Crosby was always polite and always answered when spoken to, but he quickly developed a reputation of arrogance among the other guys, something in the way he held his head, the way he never laughed or smiled. He wore his socks high and ironed his jersey in the clubhouse, running his fingers over the warm stitching of the 7 and his last name. He never joined in when they were talking about changes in the big league roster that could affect them by osmosis, never once watched the A’s play on the clubhouse television with a longing expression on his face and an outfielder at either shoulder.
There were girls who started showing up at the ballpark and calling his name, stretching out the eeee at the end and twinkling prettily when he waved. Zito guessed they thought Crosby was cute, which he supposed he could see, with Crosby’s clear shiny eyes and hopeful features. Nobody ever saw him talking with them, though, or writing down his number on their hands, and Crosby always left alone.
Zito could respect voluntary isolation, though celibacy seemed to be taking it a bit far. Crosby seemed intent on doing his job and nothing else, and Zito got to kinda appreciate the stability of Crosby’s silence, his intractable face drawn with concentration as he read car magazines in the clubhouse, absently chewing on the corner of his lip.
Sometimes Zito couldn’t sleep, and he found that picturing Crosby immobile and quiet on the outfield grass with his legs crossed, his hands resting on his knees, was enough to still things in his mind, send him off into a perfect dreamless place.
*
They went on the road, Corpus Christi and then San Antonio, and Zito got the best seat on the bus, second from the back over the wheel, six inches more leg room than the rest, and a window that opened. It was a perk of being the veteran.
He had his headphones on and he was messing around with his phone, casting pale blue light over his hands and knees. It was the middle of the night and most of the others were asleep. Zito had never been able to sleep on buses. He needed to be lying down, fully stretched out.
Bored, he snapped his phone shut and kicked the seat in front of him to hear one of the relief pitchers snarl in his sleep. He looked over and Crosby was across the aisle from him, staring out at the black.
“New guy,” Zito whispered, pulling his headphones off to rest around his neck. Crosby didn’t look over, entranced by something out there on the highway. Zito shifted to the aisle seat and reached across, poking him. “Hey.”
Crosby turned, his eyes looking eerily big in the low light. “What?” he asked.
“Nothing,” Zito shrugged. “Bored. You wanna play tic-tac-toe or something?”
Crosby gave him a skeptical look, and then he let his shoulders fall, shaking his head. “You always end up tied, playing tic-tac-toe.”
Zito nodded, because that was true. “Okay. Hangman?”
Crosby looked back out the window for a second, and then sighed. “Yeah, all right.”
Zito slid back into the window seat and Crosby moved next to him, pushing Zito’s backpack farther under the seat. Zito drew a little gallows on the back of an envelope, and for a while the only sound in the world was Crosby whispering letters, and the scratch of Zito’s pencil drawing a head, a body, stick arms and legs, dead-man crosses for eyes.
Zito held the envelope between them, using his knee as a table, and their shoulders were pressed together, their heads close and hunched over the paper. Crosby smelled faintly of the green gel soap they had in every visitors’ locker room of the Texas League.
“You’re pretty quiet, huh,” Zito said eventually, keeping a close eye on Crosby, trying to think of words with few vowels. It was good of Crosby to be so steady all the time, but on a bus in the middle of the night, it could also be pretty fucking creepy.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, like. You’re quiet. You don’t say much.”
Crosby moved his shoulders, scowling at the paper and popping his thumb against the armrest. “I don’t know you guys very well.”
“Well, how do you expect to get to know us, if you never talk?”
Crosby answered, “Is there a T?”
Zito exhaled, and filled in the T. He gave up on trying to draw the kid out, and was surprised when Crosby asked him a half a minute later, “How long have you been in the minors?”
Zito glanced at him, but Crosby was just gnawing on his lip and studying the diagram on the envelope.
“This is my seventh year,” Zito said, not even registering the dull chime of pain in his chest anymore. “Year and a half in Visalia. About a year in Trip-A, but not all at once. The rest of it here. Haven’t played anywhere else since ’03.”
Still looking at the envelope, Crosby said casually, “I heard you got to the Show once.”
Zito flinched, and shook his head. “No. That’s not right.”
Crosby looked up at him, his face wash-lit by the occasional headlights coming in the opposite direction. “No?”
Zito clutched the pencil and stared at Crosby’s hand, resting easily on his knee, the tell-tale crooks in his fingers, his trim nails. In 2003, Mark Mulder had broken his hip. Zito had been in Sacramento, living out the good moments of his life only through the grace of injury to others, and they’d handed him a bus ticket.
“I. I got called up,” he said, keeping his voice as even as possible. “For a month. Two years ago.”
“So you did make it.”
Zito broke the pencil in a half, the small crack startling them both. He looked down at the two shards with confusion, and swallowed.
“It doesn’t count,” Zito told him. “I didn’t play.”
Noah Lowry had been called up to the A’s in the mid-summer of that year, twenty-two years old and protected by nothing more than a disappearing change-up and a face made for October. He’d rolled down the stretch, effortlessly took over Mulder’s place in the rotation by September, building more faith for himself with every start, and he made Barry Zito redundant. Zito never threw a single pitch in a major league baseball game.
Crosby was watching him carefully, but Zito’d had a lot of experience not letting things show. “Okay,” Crosby said. “Is there a K?”
Zito shook his head and gave the guy a second cross for an eye, said quietly, “You’re dead.”
Texas flooded past.
*
The Comfort Inn in Corpus Christi had been experiencing a rash of petty thefts and vandalism, and there were new bronze deadbolts on all the doors, a private security guard walking up and down the length of the complex.
Zito had pitched badly in the series opener, his mind fractured with pictures of blue sky, concrete walls, shiny white baseballs, the twenty-nine days he’d spent in Oakland, once upon a time. When he got to thinking about stuff like that, everything else fell away.
He told his roommate, the left fielder, to get lost, and it wasn’t a big deal because the left fielder spent most of his nights with the back-up catcher anyway. Zito drank whiskey straight from the bottle until his arm stopped hurting. He wasn’t too happy with himself.
Zito thought that somebody should kidnap him, clock him with the butt of a pistol and leave him bleeding at the temple. They should untie his hands, his bruised wrists, and shove him onto a field, wiping the blood out of his eyes. Hold the gun to his head and tell him, pitch.
Then he would know what pressure really was. And if he survived, he’d be able to do anything.
It was possible that he’d drank too much. Certainly, the knock on his door past midnight almost gave him a heart attack.
He considered ignoring it, breathing shallowly through the diminishing panic, his hand on his chest. He blinked and noticed that the skateboarding competition he’d been watching had ended, and now there was poker on the TV, guys with mirrored sunglasses and their lips pressed into threads.
Zito got up and stumbled over to the door. It wouldn’t open, though, it was stuck, and he kept jerking at it, rattling the door in its frame, a red haze sinking down low over his eyes. He was so confused, he felt like crying.
“The deadbolt, man,” Crosby’s voice said through the wood.
Zito rested his forehead for a minute against the door, hard and strangely lifelike. He flipped the bolt and pulled the door open. Crosby was standing there in sweats and a T-shirt, barefoot.
They just looked at each other for a long minute, and then Crosby cleared his throat and said, “My roommate picked up a girl.”
Zito half-smiled. “You’re with Tate?” Crosby nodded. “Get used to that.”
Crosby scuffed his foot on the carpet. “They said I could stay, but. Um. They were gonna be . . . doing stuff.”
“What, you don’t like to watch?” Crosby glared at him, and Zito laughed, feeling light-headed.
“You’re drunk?” Crosby asked, as if it wasn’t obvious.
“Oh yes. Did you see me pitch? ‘Course you did. So you know about how I’m drunk.”
Zito found himself kind of fascinated by the movement of Crosby’s shoulders under his shirt, and his buzzed hair all rusty-brown, and his mildly jugged ears. He stepped back. “Come in.”
Crosby hesitated. “It’s cool if you’re busy or whatever-”
“I’m drunk, new guy. And I’m the only one you know on the team, right? So come sleep on my floor.”
Crosby came in, his hands pushing at the sides of his sweatpants, looking for pockets. Zito poured him a plastic cup of Jack and another of water, and sat down on the floor next to him, watching him carefully pour half the water into the whiskey, taking measured sips like it hurt to swallow too much at once.
They didn’t talk much, finishing the bottle off, and Crosby relaxed by increments, his back curving, his head rolling back against the bed. With his head tilted back like that, his neck moved palely, charcoal-shaded.
Zito was about ten minutes shy of passing out. He had the timing on this down real well.
“Impressions, dude,” he said, and one of Crosby’s eyes came sleepily open. “You’re brand new. Nobody’s seeing nothing the way you are.”
“’s that right?”
Zito nodded, his spine feeling jiggered and loose. “Yeah. You gotta remember what it’s like now, because later it won’t be. Trust me. I watch you sometimes, you know, so I can tell.”
Crosby’s eyebrows twitched upwards. “You watch me?”
“Only sometimes. You’re real easy to watch.”
Crosby looked at him with something subtle and dark in his eyes, and Zito’s stomach curled uncomfortably. “Not to freak you out or anything,” Zito said, waving his hand around indistinctly. “Just, like. You don’t talk, so you must see a lot. Heightened senses, right?”
“Sure,” Crosby said, still looking at him indefinably, making Zito nervous, his dad in his mind telling him that anyone you couldn’t read was probably reading you.
Zito rasped his hands on the carpet and drank the last of his cup, his equilibrium nose-diving. “And I know what it’s like when you don’t want anybody to say anything,” he said. “You get easily broken. Me too.”
“Somebody told me you’ve never missed a start,” Crosby said, getting up to make himself another drink. From where Zito was on the floor, Crosby looked so tall, like a statue, something high up on a pedestal.
“I haven’t.” Zito flapped his hand open and closed. “Make me another, okay? Listen. I’ve never missed a start, but what good has that done me? Nothing. At least, with you, they can say, this is why.”
Crosby shook his head, handing Zito a cup and sitting back down. “Actually, no. They can say what I’ve broken, but they don’t know why. They thought it might be, like, a disease, with the weak bones or whatever?”
“Like in that movie.”
“Yeah. But I did all the tests and they say I’m fine. Strong as anybody.”
Zito rolled his head and scrutinized Crosby. He looked strong, true enough, with those shoulders and his arms stretching the sleeves of his T-shirt, the flats of his wrists, his wide palms.
“Weird, man.” He paused, thinking about the fatal care Crosby took on the field, the split-second hesitation that kept him out of collisions, kept him down here in Double-A. “Wrists and fingers, right?”
Crosby put his cup on the floor and gave him the rundown: “This wrist, broke it four times. Not just from baseball, from when I was a kid too. This one, broke it twice. Every finger on this hand, see how this one is kinda crooked still? Pinky finger, thumb. Hairline fracture in my left ankle. Stress fracture in my femur when I was in college.” He tapped his collarbone. “Broke this sliding headfirst into third. See, you can still feel it.”
He pulled his collar out and Zito reached over, ran his fingers clumsily over the hook of bone. There was a rift, a small asymmetry. Zito found that he could tuck his thumb perfectly against it, his fingers folded over Crosby’s throat.
“Lost count of how many times I’ve cracked my ribs,” Crosby continued, his Adam’s apple bobbing under Zito’s hand. His face was very close, the scent of whiskey and peppermint. “Punctured my lung once, that’s the worst I can remember.”
Zito took his hand down, touched Crosby’s chest. Crosby inhaled sharply through his nose. Zito trickled his fingers down Crosby’s ribs, searching for the evidence, liking the warm skittered feel of Crosby’s body through his shirt.
“I can’t feel it,” he said, his forehead lining.
Crosby looked at him for awhile, his face revealing nothing. Then he pulled his shirt up to his neck and lay back on the carpet, laid himself out. The skin drew tight across his chest and Zito could see it now, the bump in his lowest rib. He slid his hand over it, and Crosby was breathing just a little too fast, his face flushing, his skin heating up.
“Yeah,” Zito breathed out. “Yeah, you’re right. Right here.”
He stared at his hand on Crosby’s chest, his fingers keyed in the healed ridges of Crosby’s ribs, the heel of his hand steady on Crosby’s stomach. Zito’s head spun, a world of untanned skin and quick heartbeats. He curled his fingers and set his nails, dragged his hand onto Crosby’s stomach, leaving thin white lines behind, and Crosby sucked air in through his teeth.
Zito’s hand tripped up against Crosby’s sweats, and he hooked his thumb under the waist, wonderfully soft and stretching, a sparse trail of dark hair and his eyesight was going, Crosby was shivering, blurring, taut and smooth under Zito’s knuckles.
“Hey,” Zito whispered in amazement.
Crosby’s flickering eyes caught his. “Hey,” he whispered back, and smiled, for the first time since they’d met, clearing away the lines around his mouth and the tiredness in the set of his jaw, the faded shadow in his eyes, until he finally looked as young as he was.
Crosby smiled, and Zito lost consciousness.
*
Crosby was gone when Zito woke up, only a folded blanket on the floor showing that he hadn’t been a hallucination. Zito’s head hurt, and his shoulder too, a throb that started in his marrow and radiated out.
He’d ended up in bed, somehow. Maybe Crosby had lifted him up, fireman-carried him over and let him flop down. But Zito doubted Crosby was that strong.
Zito took a shower and four aspirin, and tried to figure out what had happened. He’d never touched another guy like that, never wanted to. And maybe it was temporary insanity, explained away by the better part of a bottle of Jack, but he was hungover and thinking clearly again and he still kinda wanted to put his hand under Crosby’s shirt. He was too tired to get very worked up about it, though.
The team milled around in the parking lot, waiting for the bus to pull up. Zito looked for Crosby, wanting to pull him aside and ask, what the fuck was that, but Crosby wasn’t there. The asphalt was newly laid, pure black with the painted lines whiter than foul lines.
Zito hesitated before climbing on the bus, looking back over his shoulder.
“Care to join us, kid?” his manager asked, standing at the front in a dress shirt yellowing with age, a loosely knotted gray tie hanging around his neck.
“We’re, um,” Zito said, and then stopped. “Yeah.” He took his seat in the back.
They were almost out of the parking lot when Crosby ran up, banging on the side of the bus with the flat of his hand, out of breath and yelling, “Wait, wait.”
Zito curled his hand around the top of the seat in front of him, straightening to watch Crosby board with an apologetic look on his face. Their manager stood to smack Crosby on the back of the head, and Crosby shoved his bag into the overhead, collapsed into the nearest seat, disappearing from Zito’s view.
Zito sat back. He felt as if there was a shade pulled low over his mind, blocking out all the important stuff. His ears crackled with static, the ache in his arm crawling through his chest. It was so bright outside he feared he was going blind.
He thought kind of sadly that at least this was different from being bored all the time.
He caught Crosby’s arm in the ballpark tunnel, and held on when Crosby tried to pull away. The other guys glanced at them sidelong, but they’d long since stopped paying attention to Zito being weird, and nobody cared about Crosby yet.
“Dude,” Zito said, the chatter and laughter of their teammates receding into the clubhouse. Crosby was turned away from him, his shoulders held tightly. “What’s wrong?”
Crosby looked back at him, a painfully stricken cast to his eyes. “Nothing,” he said. “Trying to get to the clubhouse, if you don’t mind.” He tried to jerk his arm out of Zito’s grip, but Zito’s fingers were hooked in Crosby’s elbow and he didn’t let go.
“Hang on, slow down for a second.” Zito was fascinated by the feel of the tendons of Crosby’s arm tensing and giving, Crosby’s pulse rabbiting against Zito’s fingers. “What’re you. Well. Um.” He stared at his hand, his thumb drawing circles on the bare skin of Crosby’s arm, totally without intention. “Huh.”
Crosby had gone utterly still, his chin tilted slightly as he looked up at Zito. “What do you think you’re doing?” he asked steadily.
Zito shrugged, his throat dry. “Oh, well. You know. Mostly just. Playing it by ear.” He let his fingers relax, and Crosby didn’t take the opportunity to break away. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep last night.”
“Is that what you did?”
Zito grinned, feeling vaguely hysterical. “Maybe more like passing out.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Crosby said caustically, his arm twitching. Zito kept thinking that Crosby could get away so easily, one sharp tug and they’d be apart.
“Bobby, listen-” he began.
“Oh, so it’s now it’s ‘Bobby,’ huh? What happened to ‘new guy’?”
“I’m just trying to. Look.” Zito pressed his thumbnail into the soft skin of the underside of Crosby’s arm, feeling Crosby twitch again, cut an angry look up at him. “I didn’t want you to think that I did it on purpose.” Crosby glared stonily over Zito’s shoulder, the muscle in his jaw jerking. “Are you okay?”
Crosby’s lips curved into a harsh little bend, not half a smile, not like last night. Zito rifled through every joke he’d ever heard, wondering if he’d ever be funny enough to make Crosby smile again.
“Not even a little bit,” Crosby answered, but Zito had forgotten the question. His hand slid up Crosby’s arm, under the sleeve of his shirt. Crosby’s skin felt cooler here, pale as milk. Zito caught the tip of his tongue between his teeth.
“Do you. You don’t mind, do you?” Zito asked, his fingers high on Crosby’s shoulder now, a misshapen lump under Crosby’s shirt, twisting in to find the knob of his once-broken collarbone. Crosby was staring at him as if he’d like to set him on fire. “This is something you do?”
Crosby swallowed, and Zito hummed unconsciously, wanting to duck down and lick Crosby’s throat.
“Something you do?” Crosby echoed faintly.
Zito nodded, deciding right this second that it was, he would, if Crosby wasn’t going to knock his hand off, if Crosby was going to be metal-hot and skin and bone beneath him. Zito would be whatever it took to have this not be over yet. “Yes. Don’t tell anybody.”
Crosby shook his head, his mouth thinning. “I won’t.”
Then he pushed Zito up against the wall, his hands on Zito’s stomach and Zito’s hand wriggling like a fish in Crosby’s shirt. Crosby pressed against him for a second, his chest hard and their knees clacking together. His breath raked hot on Zito’s face, the underside of his jaw, and Zito thought frantically of teeth and blood. He clutched at Crosby, his nails digging into Crosby’s shoulder, and Crosby hissed, snap-bit at the air in front of Zito’s mouth.
“I’m gonna pretend I don’t know you,” Crosby said.
“You don’t know me. We only got drunk once.” Zito tried to push into Crosby’s hands, lifting his shoulders off the concrete wall, cocking his hips out. Crosby stepped away from him, yanking Zito’s hand out of his shirt so that they weren’t touching anywhere. Zito made a low moan of disappointment, and reached out to pull him back. But Crosby was quick, and out of his range.
“Can’t do this here.”
Zito blinked, and then his face split with a huge grin. “But we will?”
Crosby tipped his head to the side, and poked his tongue out, resting it lightly on his upper lip. He shrugged, but his eyes were shining. Something went cartwheeling through Zito’s stomach.
“Be cool, man, okay?” Crosby said, and Zito nodded, breathless and wide-eyed, forcing his face clean of expression. Crosby reached out and flicked open the top button of Zito’s jeans. “Be cool,” he repeated, and walked away.
*
Zito jittered in the clubhouse, in the dugout, on the field talking to the guys as they warmed up. He tore up Gatorade cups and teased out a loose thread on his jersey, wrapping it around his finger until the tip turned the color of a plum. He chewed on a toothpick until it broke and stabbed into his lip, leaving a tiny spot to swell and taste of copper, and he couldn’t quit worrying it with his tongue.
He watched Bobby Crosby like he’d paid a hundred thousand dollars for the privilege.
Crosby stretched on the grass, and sprinted to the outfield wall and back, hiking his knees up. He took infield practice, concentrating on his footwork, the move to his right to backhand a hard grounder, and he leapt-spun, his arm slicing fully sidearm when he was in motion, when he was in the air.
If the ball was too far away, if Crosby had to dive, he would let it go, skimming into the outfield. Zito nodded to himself. No point risking anything when it was just practice.
His nails were gone, his fingertips bleeding. He kept thinking, what would they do, how would it go? Six thousand dirty thoughts about Crosby’s legs and Crosby’s back, his jersey smooth and tight, white-orange-blue letters and the mean-looking brown dog showing his teeth on the sleeve. Wondering if Crosby would be able to take Zito’s weight on the untrustworthy brace of his ribcage, whether Crosby’s arms would give out right in the middle, and they would crash together, cracking their foreheads and both of them knocked unconscious. Waking up hours later with a killer headache and Crosby sprawled atop him.
By the time the game got underway, Zito’s attention had nicely fixated on Crosby’s mouth. Crosby’s lips pursed as he spit sunflower seeds, and Zito imagined the taste of salt, the smell of Chapstick. He thought about what it would be like to see Crosby’s lips part under his thumb, and the scratch of Crosby’s stubble on his knuckles.
It seemed terribly ungrateful to fantasize about the other things that men did with each other, beyond the most abstract and ill-defined flip-book pictures. Zito was sure that Crosby’s mouth was all he’d ever need.
It was a normal kind of day in Texas, early summer, the sky flat and dull blue, higher than airplanes or satellites. Crosby was true to his word and didn’t even look at Zito. Zito didn’t mind. As long as he was allowed to stare, that was okay. Everything was okay.
Crosby came in after the end of the fifth and the water cooler was across from Zito’s spot on the bench. Crosby poured himself a drink and Zito let his hair fall in front of his eyes, watching the line of Crosby’s shoulders and the clean nape of his neck, his cap pushed back. Crosby crushed the cup in his hand and wiped his mouth with his arm, squinting out at the field with his face profiled.
Zito waited for him to turn, wink, half-smile, stick his tongue out at Zito like a kid. But Crosby just dropped his cup on the ground and pulled off his cap to run his hand over his head. Nothing in him suggested that he even knew Zito was there.
Zito reminded himself that it didn’t matter. And who knew, once they actually got started, if Crosby would be able to keep this up. Zito got distracted again by what it would be like once they got started. He spent the rest of the game daydreaming about his crummy little house in Midland, the oily light through the bedroom window, writing on the heel of his hand in blue ink, ‘change sheets.’
Crosby went three-for-four with a double and two runs batted in, and flew into the hole. They won decisively.
*
They got back late. It was a Sunday, so not even the bars were open. The players filed out of the bus and diffused in all directions, calling to each other across the still asphalt of the parking lot. Zito was tranced out in the back, his music turned up loud, and had to be kicked back into awareness by another pitcher, so he was the last one out.
Crosby was already at his car. Zito let his bag drop off his shoulder and ran to catch him.
“Hey, hey,” he said, pulling up with one hand on the side of Crosby’s car, keeping him from opening the door. “Aren’t you, um, don’t you wanna come to my place?”
Crosby scowled at him. “Say that a bit louder, I don’t think the people in Dallas heard you.”
“What? Nobody cares. Hey,” and Zito wondered what it was about Crosby that reduced him to this dumb hey-ing person. “So, like. Come home with me.” He lifted his eyebrows and made his eyes go big, the look that always used to make his mother say, what a handsome boy.
Crosby sighed, hitching his bag higher on his shoulder. “I’m kinda tired.”
Zito tipped his head to the side, a thick pressure building in his throat. “But, dude. You’re still gonna come over, right? Because, I’ve been thinking, you know.” He waved his hands around. “All day long. And I think you should come over.”
Crosby flipped his keys around his thumb, making a pitched clinking sound. He stared off over Zito’s shoulder, the extinguished palm-tree stadium lights, the land beyond that refused to end. After a long moment, he let his shoulders fall with another sigh and said quietly, “Tell me how to get there.”
Zito rattled it off, quickly before Crosby could change his mind, the west road, five miles down and take a left. Don’t be scared of the oil derricks rising like skeletons. Don’t be worried if it seems like there’s nothing out there, because you’ll find it if you just keep going. Crosby nodded and pushed Zito’s hand off his car.
Zito had to go back for his bag, and by the time he was out of the parking lot, Crosby’s tail-lights were the size of match-heads. Crosby drove faster than he did, and soon enough Zito had lost him.
But he was leaning back against his car when Zito pulled up, flooded in the headlights, his T-shirt caught out paper-white. Zito wanted to grab hold of him, thinking dry-mouthed about the slide of cotton over Crosby’s arms and chest. Crosby warned him off with a look, and they went inside.
“So, um,” Zito said, all of a sudden awkward with the lights on and Crosby’s hands in his pockets, his shoulders curved inwards. “This is where I live. You want something to drink or something?”
Crosby stayed where he was with his back against the door. He shook his head, watching Zito intently from across the room. Zito felt imminently out of place, his hand twitching as he put his keys back on the hook, clearing his throat.
“You’re. Well.” Zito fiddled with the hem of his shirt, trying to figure out how to get back to that moment in the hallway when Crosby had plastered against him and breathed hotly on his mouth. He tried to force the feel of Crosby unbuttoning his jeans into his mind, the brush of Crosby’s fingers so low on his stomach.
“I’m having trouble reading you,” Zito said eventually.
“I get that a lot,” Crosby replied, and went back to not saying anything.
Zito swallowed, seeing the way the muscles in Crosby’s arms were strung tight by his hands in his pockets, the brass shine off his belt buckle. “Would you mind. Like. Doing something?”
Crosby tilted his head, and the corner of his mouth drew up almost imperceptibly. “Like what?” he asked, his voice lowering.
Zito pressed his tongue against the back of his teeth. “Oh, you know. Anything. Anything would be good.”
The smirk on Crosby’s face deepened. “You don’t even know how stupid this is, do you?”
Zito’s forehead lined, and he worked his way through that, thinking that he definitely knew how stupid this was, he wasn’t under any illusions.
“I do,” he said defensively. “What’s it matter? Can’t it just be something that a couple years from now we’ll pretend never happened?”
“Do you always plan so far ahead?”
“Hardly ever. Special circumstances.” Zito showed his most charming grin, and Crosby rolled his eyes, but didn’t sneer, and didn’t look away.
Zito figured that was as much of an invitation as he was going to get, and took a step towards him, and the world didn’t end, so he took another. He got up close, and Crosby seemed noticeably bigger than when Zito had been across the room and staring at him framed by the door. Zito didn’t know what to do with his hands, so he flattened them on the wood to either side of Crosby’s body. He held his breath.
Crosby leaned his head back and his eyes looked like coins. He took one hand out of his pocket and hasped it in Zito’s belt, but that was it, just the backs of his fingers on Zito’s skin.
“Fair warning, man,” Crosby told him seriously. “It’s gonna be different than you think.”
Zito shook his head. “Nothing has ever been the same as I thought it would be. You think that’s new?”
Crosby smiled, looking honestly pleased with Zito, and something clutched in Zito’s stomach, he did it, he made Bobby Crosby smile, and he kissed him if for no other reason than not wanting to see that smile fade.
Crosby kissed back, half-asleep, his hand digging farther under Zito’s belt. Zito licked into his mouth and Crosby pulled their bodies flush with the cold metal links of his watch getting caught in Zito’s shorts. Zito let his weight angle slowly down, until Crobsy was pressed to the door and he was pressed to Crosby, and he wanted to say, hey, wow, hey hey hey.
*
It was Zito’s day to go into the park early, his supplemental and ill-advised workout session, and he woke up in time, Bobby Crosby rolled away from him with his T-shirt draped over his head.
Zito touched Crosby’s back and shoulder, running the flat of his palm across. Crosby stirred and coughed. He dragged the shirt off and blinked back at Zito from over his shoulder, his mouth moving and sticking.
“Too early, my god,” Crosby said thickly, and buried his face back in the pillow.
Zito smiled and walked his fingers up Crosby’s spine, letting his thumb fit into the notch at the base of Crosby’s neck. “I’m going to the park. I usually do. Or, well. Couple times a week.”
Crosby shifted and his metallic eyes reopened. “Yeah, I heard about that.”
“What were you, running a background check?”
Crosby shrugged, put his face into the pillow again, his back rising and falling. “Everybody talks about you,” he said, muffled. “You didn’t know? Everybody’s trying to figure you out.”
Zito thought about that, their not-too-bright teammates with dusty foreheads, scarred hands. He thought that Crosby was crazy; nobody cared what he did, not anymore.
“Figure me out? But I’m so easy.”
Crosby snorted into the pillow. “Don’t need to tell me.”
Zito shook his head, absently petting the length of Crosby’s back, watching the ants crawling on the wall over the dresser. “Anyway. I gotta go.”
He went to get off the bed, and Crosby was suddenly moving, zero to one-twenty and his hand around Zito’s wrist, pulling him off balance. Zito thumped down, making a noise of surprise, and Crosby’s arm wound around his waist, Crosby’s mouth hot-open on the curve of his shoulder, his teeth flat and cutting.
“No you don’t,” Crosby mumbled, and bit him. Zito shivered and let Crosby flip him over onto his stomach, his breath already hitching, his mind gone white. Crosby licked the back of his neck, and Zito realized what was happening and panicked a little bit.
“Wait,” he managed, feeling Crosby’s forearm chain down across his lower back. He tried to push his shoulders up, but Crosby was too heavy, his knee holding Zito’s legs apart.
“Just breathe, man,” Crosby told him, and pulled Zito’s arms over his head, pinning his wrists down. Zito’s face was jammed into the mattress and he could feel his own breath blowing humidly back at him. Crosby mouthed his shoulder blade and said again, “Breathe.”
Zito did his best.
*
They shouldn’t have done it in the morning, Zito realized miserably in his truck on the drive in, Crosby tailgating with his headlights on even though it was destructively bright. Zito would have liked a night to sleep it off. His hands shook and his eyes in the rearview mirror looked huge and scared. He could feel it pressed up against the walls of his throat, terrified that one of the boys was gonna say, how’s it going, and he’d blurt out, I got fucked by the new guy this morning.
He was going to feel it all day long. This was going to be terrible.
He was starving. He pulled into the Kwik-Stop and saw Crosby turn in behind him, which sorta confused him, but maybe Crosby was hungry too.
Zito poked at the packaged Hostess snacks, trying to decide, powdered donuts or chocolate. The Kwik-Stop was all yellow and red on the inside, buzzing fluorescent lights and overly air-conditioned the way most of Texas was. Crosby’s head floated past in the next aisle, and Zito found himself staring at Crosby’s neck, a scatter of bruises at the base of his throat.
“Bobby?”
Crosby met his gaze over the pastry rack, a tiny smile on his face and brand-new sheen of knowledge in his eyes. Zito blushed fiercely, forcing his voice steady as he asked, “You want anything?”
Crosby’s smile grew, his teeth coming out clean and even, his eyes darkening, and Zito could have sworn that gravity had given way as Crosby answered in a low voice, “Oh, yes. But now’s not really the time.”
Zito blushed even harder, and tried out a casual little laugh, stupid and cackling. He thought feverishly that they’d be doing that again, that and everything else, tonight probably, Crosby would push his legs up and smooth his hand down Zito’s back, same as two hours ago, and Zito would make those noises that he hadn’t realized he was capable of, and Crosby would curse and groan and break Zito’s skin.
Feeling like he was melting, Crosby smirking at him in amusement, Zito dragged his eyes away and went to get some chips. Crosby trailed behind, flicking at the brightly-colored displays and reading the ingredients of things he clearly had no intention of purchasing.
Zito wanted to press him up against the cold wall of the drinks case, do unthinkable things with his mouth and hands, until Crosby’s head slammed back and shattered the glass, and they would both be drenched, shocked awake into some measure of control.
*
The Oakland Athletics put together a neat little eight-game winning streak, and the Rockhounds hung around after their games for a week, watching on the clubhouse television.
The second baseman talked about how the big club going on a run obviously meant there was luck in the pipe for them too, something about the trickle-down effect. Zito wasn’t sure what kind of credibility that had, but he was willing to nod along. Crosby sat next to him on the couch, leaning against his shoulder occasionally, his eyes trained on the television, high up above the lockers.
It’d been a week. Crosby had left two T-shirts behind at Zito’s place, and five socks. There were three Coors in Zito’s plastic ice-bucket among dozens of Heinekens, left of the six-pack Crosby had brought over a few days before. And Zito drove home at night with Crosby’s headlights shining in his rearview mirror, Crosby sticking his head out the window and yelling, “You wanna speed up, old man?” a disembodied voice when the road was deserted.
Zito was kind of stunned, all the time.
Joe Blanton, who most of them had known when he’d come through a year ago, was pitching for the A’s that night, and that meant sliders ripped off at the corners, and fastballs up and in, the fearless angry kind of pitching they all loved. Zito dropped his head back and thought absently, ‘my curve’s better.’
The outfielders were placing mean-spirited bets on which of the A’s would be the next to go down with an injury. Zito listened to them with half an ear, Hudson’s oblique again, Mark Kotsay’s back, Aaron Boone’s knee, Ramon Hernandez and his tendency to dislocate his throwing shoulder. Zito let himself briefly imagine a plane crash, nothing too serious, just enough to put the whole rotation on the DL, and the left side of the infield too, and maybe he and Crosby would get a shot then.
Crosby drummed his fingers on Zito’s knee. “Falling asleep?” he asked softly. Zito smiled and shook his head, knowing that Crosby would prefer they go back to Zito’s house and watch the game there. He flicked at Crosby’s hand and Crosby flicked him back, and they did that for awhile, their fingers tangling and bumping on Zito’s leg.
Zito opened his eyes and the TV was showing the A’s dugout, some variation of facial hair all down the line, green wristbands and white spikes. They didn’t look all that much different than the ‘Hounds, a little older, certainly wiser, but Zito thought that he could cut and paste his teammates into that clubhouse a half a continent away, and no one would know the difference.
He realized that his thumb was still hooked with Crosby’s, and hastily let him go. Crosby smirked at him sideways, and the announcers started talking about Mulder and Hudson, the two of them leaning on the rail with their elbows touching.
One of the pitchers groaned overdramatically, throwing a handful of peanut shells at the screen. “Christ, we fuckin’ get it,” he said to the television. “They’re perfect, okay, moving on.”
The others laughed. “Bitter, Jayce?”
The pitcher scowled. “Sick of it. The Pair of Aces, right. So who else will they ever need?”
Mulder and Hudson were in their sixth year of pitching one-two for Oakland. They had the best combined winning percentage of any duo over that stretch, and a bunch of other similar marks, WHIP, ERA, opponents’ average. They’d been the heart and the soul for as long as anyone cared to remember, and they’d both signed for far below what they could have gotten as free agents to stay where they were.
The back of the rotation changed every year. Only Noah Lowry had been around for more than a season, and he was constantly trade bait, dangled for relief pitching and utility infielders, decent prospects that Billy Beane could mold in his own image.
Zito sighed. It was endlessly damaging to think too long about the big club while stuck in Double-A. He’d learned that a long time ago.
That one month Zito had spent in Oakland, he’d talked to Hudson once for four hours straight, in a hotel bar in Anaheim, but he couldn’t remember anything that they’d said. What was much clearer was the fact that Mulder never actually learned his name, and was still calling him Brian on the last day of the season.
“They’re very good,” Crosby said in a quiet voice that only Zito could hear. “Terrible standard to have to meet.”
Zito shrugged. “No one expects us to be as good as they are. They’re, like. Once in a generation.”
“You know what’s weird, though?”
Zito lifted his eyebrows inquiringly as Marco Scutaro raked a double and brought two more home, the A’s lead now in double-digits. Crosby half-smiled.
“Nobody remembers Johnny Sain.”
Zito thought about that for a long time, then put his hand up over his face, rubbing his temples. “You make my head hurt.”
Crosby laughed lightly, and slid an arm around Zito’s shoulders, saying quickly into his ear, “I can probably help you with that,” and Zito colored deeply, took a careful breath.
The game was pretty much over, anyway. And surely they’d received all the luck they were going to get from the blessed Oakland A’s, as Zito pled exhaustion and paced around waiting for Crosby in the parking lot, as Crosby tugged him by the shirt until Zito’s truck was between them and the clubhouse door, and kissed him stupid against the door, the handle digging into his lower back and the moon in the sky snowball-full, visible everywhere from there to California.
*
more
Journeymen
By Candle Beck
Midland, Texas.
Zito drove out to the ballpark through the oilfields, the sides of his truck covered in dust, the frame clattering. It was late May and starting to get sincerely hot. Outside, it smelled like scorched rubber and metal, and the road shimmered where it funneled into the horizon. It was flat for weeks, out here.
Zito knew this whole town, cruddy and inconsequential though it was. All the guys at the Kwik-Stop across the street from the park called him by name. He didn’t think once the whole ride there; he could do this in his sleep.
The Midland Rockhounds played at a park named for a bank, a low spread in West Texas with the stadium lights on single poles, the same general shape as palm trees. Twenty miles from Odessa and the dead center of nowhere.
Zito had to get out of his car to unlock the parking lot’s chain-link gate, so he knew he was the first to arrive, which was the case twice a week, between his starts.
Free weights first, and then the stationary bike for a half-hour. Legs, arms, rowing machine. Then he went down to the ‘pen and tacked four white squares of paper to the backstop, in on the hands, throat-high and rising, outside corner, three inches above the dirt.
He threw until he’d hit the targets ten times each, and then he took a shower, got halfway dressed in his uniform.
By then some of the other guys had come in.
Zito talked shit with the boys and played cards for a while, his hair wet against his neck, and eventually went to talk to his manager.
They got along, the two of them. They’d known each other for a half a decade. His manager liked to lean back in his chair and bitch with Zito about the fucking wrench of a life spent in Double-A. They shared a black sense of humor and a weary respect for each other.
His manager lit a cigarette, and told Zito, “New blood in today.”
“Oh yeah?” Zito said without interest, because guys came and went down there like moths.
“Big club made a move, and we got us a player to be named later. A shortstop.”
“They don’t exactly need a shortstop, up there,” Zito commented. Miguel Tejada had signed a long-term contract over a year ago, for close to what he was actually worth, and now Oakland was broke, but whole.
“Don’t think they plan on keeping him that long.” His manager tapped ash into the ashtray that was shaped like a cowboy hat.
“So what’s the word?” Zito asked, tugging at a loose thread on his sock.
“Good hands, good eye. Pretty swing but doesn’t leave the yard too often. He’s been around for awhile, different teams.”
“Nobody’s got any loyalty anymore, you notice that?”
His manager grinned sharply at him. “’Cept you.” Zito’d been with the Oakland organization for seven years, but he didn’t often like to think about that.
“Why’s he down here?” he asked.
“I’m told he’s fragile.”
Zito lifted his eyebrows.
“Breaks a lot of bones,” his manager elaborated. “Wrists and fingers especially. You can count on him to miss, oh, six-eight weeks a season.”
“Well.” Zito exhaled, his morning’s workout beginning to register with his muscles, thinking about taking a nap before they had to go up for fielding practice. “Sounds like he’ll fit right in.”
He yawned, and his manager’s head cocked slightly, his expression indecipherable. “You come in early today?”
Zito wasn’t really supposed to, they said it fucked with the trainer’s routine for him, but he didn’t bother to play innocent, shrugging and nodding in one motion.
His manager sighed, looking disappointed. “When are you gonna give up on that, kid?”
Zito shrugged again, and bent his fingers backwards to crack them. He wasn’t going anywhere, everybody knew that, so what was the problem if he wanted to pretend? He thought about how this shortstop was going to be seeing everything here for the first time, and realized absently that he wasn’t at all jealous.
*
Bobby Crosby was twenty-five years old, fresh from the National League, where he’d never played higher than Double-A. He showed up for batting practice with his gear in a Long Beach State gym bag, a fading bruise on his cheek. He changed with his back to everyone and loitered near the dugout steps until one of the outfielders said, “hey new guy, warm up, okay?” and they started tossing a ball back and forth.
Crosby threw almost sidearm, a neat little whip, and he squinted against the glare of the sun off the land. The word got around the field, where the others were throwing and stretching on the grass:
Kid’s name is Bobby. Kid comes from California. Kid’s played mostly back East. Kid’s not sure of the name of the guy he got traded for. Kid says he needs to find a place to live.
They’d take him drinking tonight, and more than one person would tell him, “Welcome to Texas,” and then start laughing. They were already talking about what bar they should go to.
Halfway through the game, a rumor trickled down to them that Crosby’s dad had played in the bigs. They went and asked the third base coach, who knew every ballplayer there’d ever been, and it was confirmed. Being an infielder ran in the blood.
They paid more attention to Crosby. A father late of the Cardinals, Reds, and Indians was closer than many of them would ever get.
Just watching, Zito could tell that Crosby was good. Very good, even, but when the runner came in hard at second to break up the double play, Crosby’s body curved in and he leapt fearfully away from the base, jerking his arm to get off a poor throw to first. They didn’t get the second out.
Fragile, Zito remembered. Gun-shy. It wasn’t going to do them much good to have a shortstop who was afraid of getting taken out.
Down in the clubhouse after the game, one of the first basemen/DHs caught Zito’s arm as he was walking past. Crosby was sitting on the other end of the couch, one leg bent on the cushion, studying Zito carefully with the place between his eyebrows slightly pinched.
“Z, you met the new guy?” the first baseman asked, tugging at Zito’s sleeve.
Zito shook his head and manufactured a grin. “Hiya. Barry Zito.” He reached out and Crosby sat up to shake his hand.
“Zito’s, like, dude who knows everything,” the first baseman told Crosby. “Been around forever, basically.”
Zito let it brush off him, no point in getting irritated. “Yeah.”
The first baseman grinned. “Tell him that you’re a pitcher.”
“I’m a pitcher,” Zito said dutifully. Crosby nodded, his face unreadable. He had silvery quiet eyes, lines already forming around his mouth.
“And you’re from California too.”
Crosby’s eyes flickered with vague interest. Zito nodded. “San Diego.”
Crosby tipped his chin up. “Long Beach,” he said, and Zito squinted at him, because he’d played against some Long Beach teams growing up, high school and the Babe Ruth League, and maybe Crosby was a little familiar.
“Well,” Zito said, pushing his hands into his pockets. “Good to meet you.”
Right then, the lights went out.
There was a moment of silence, and then someone said conversationally, “Fuse blew again.” The team murmured in agreement. It was black as a crow, and the scent of the room was suddenly much stronger, grass and sweat and coffee.
Something crashed into something else, and the third baseman swore, “Fuck, Dez, lay off, will you?” Socks rasped across the carpet; someone coughed.
“Does this, um. Happen often?” Somehow, Zito recognized Crosby’s voice.
“Now and then,” somebody answered.
“So what do we do?”
Zito felt for the couch, fumbling with the first baseman’s shoulder before sinking safely between the two of them. His hand crawled up Crosby’s leg, Crosby flinching, and clapped him on the knee. “We wait. Usually doesn’t take too long for somebody to go down and get the thing flipped.”
“Oh.”
Zito let his head drop back, sighing. He noticed that Crosby had shifted slightly nearer to him, his foot nudging against Zito’s leg. He wondered if Crosby was as afraid of the dark as he was of a dirty slide, and thought, with a little more bitterness than usual, that this team was getting worse every day.
*
Every night that he could, Zito watched the end of the A’s game when he got home after his own game. He paid the cable company more than he could afford to get every major league baseball game, and wished intently for tie scores, extra innings, hours of the California night sky stretching high and clean above the stadium lights.
He lived in a one-bedroom house on the wrong side of town, splintered gray paint outside and worn red carpet inside. All the furniture was secondhand, most of it stolen. The blinkered gold lights of the oil derricks hung up like ornaments against the black of his window.
The power went out here a lot, too, and Zito didn’t keep anything in the refrigerator, put his beers in a plastic bucket filled with ice. He’d lost his bottle opener at some point, and cracked off the caps with his lighter.
The A’s were winning. The A’s were almost always winning, these days. Everyone had said they were doomed, having lost Eric Chavez in the off-season as a free agent to Boston, and Jermaine Dye to the White Sox, but they still had their Pair of Aces, which was all they really needed.
Mark Mulder was, in fact, pitching that night. It was eleven o’clock in Texas and the game was almost over in Oakland, because Mulder had every pitch working and games didn’t take very long when that was the case.
Zito drank steadily, and watched dispassionately, not moved by Tim Hudson laughing with Aaron Boone in the dugout, nor Tejada and Marco Scutaro slapping each other upside the head every few minutes, nor the garishly pink Bazooka Joe bubble carefully stuck to the top of Noah Lowry’s cap when his back was turned.
They said the Oakland clubhouse was as much fun as you could have with your clothes on. Zito knew that was true, though he’d only ever been there once, almost two years ago.
Mark Mulder went the distance. Zito’s eyes were full of green and white, the wide uncomplicated smile on every face that emerged from the dugout. The outfielders jumped on each other’s backs, whapping their gloves against backs and arms. Hudson got Mulder to bend down so that Hudson could scrub a hand through his hair. The flags swept back and forth in the bleachers, the signs taken off the rail and carefully rolled up.
Most nights, Zito passed out in his chair, alone for miles and wishing he could talk to his mom. Most nights, he dreamed of California.
*
On the field, the infielders moved as if they were connected by strings, shifting forward and falling back in perfect rhythm, and Crosby looked like he’d been playing with these guys for years.
Off the field, he hardly ever said anything. He showered and dressed and left right after the game, driving away in his beat-up blue hatchback that huddled low to the ground and went faster than seemed possible.
Zito took to watching him sometimes, letting his gaze find its way over there of its own volition. It was soothing, static on the radio. Crosby was a cipher, and Zito was tired of things being complicated.
Crosby was always polite and always answered when spoken to, but he quickly developed a reputation of arrogance among the other guys, something in the way he held his head, the way he never laughed or smiled. He wore his socks high and ironed his jersey in the clubhouse, running his fingers over the warm stitching of the 7 and his last name. He never joined in when they were talking about changes in the big league roster that could affect them by osmosis, never once watched the A’s play on the clubhouse television with a longing expression on his face and an outfielder at either shoulder.
There were girls who started showing up at the ballpark and calling his name, stretching out the eeee at the end and twinkling prettily when he waved. Zito guessed they thought Crosby was cute, which he supposed he could see, with Crosby’s clear shiny eyes and hopeful features. Nobody ever saw him talking with them, though, or writing down his number on their hands, and Crosby always left alone.
Zito could respect voluntary isolation, though celibacy seemed to be taking it a bit far. Crosby seemed intent on doing his job and nothing else, and Zito got to kinda appreciate the stability of Crosby’s silence, his intractable face drawn with concentration as he read car magazines in the clubhouse, absently chewing on the corner of his lip.
Sometimes Zito couldn’t sleep, and he found that picturing Crosby immobile and quiet on the outfield grass with his legs crossed, his hands resting on his knees, was enough to still things in his mind, send him off into a perfect dreamless place.
*
They went on the road, Corpus Christi and then San Antonio, and Zito got the best seat on the bus, second from the back over the wheel, six inches more leg room than the rest, and a window that opened. It was a perk of being the veteran.
He had his headphones on and he was messing around with his phone, casting pale blue light over his hands and knees. It was the middle of the night and most of the others were asleep. Zito had never been able to sleep on buses. He needed to be lying down, fully stretched out.
Bored, he snapped his phone shut and kicked the seat in front of him to hear one of the relief pitchers snarl in his sleep. He looked over and Crosby was across the aisle from him, staring out at the black.
“New guy,” Zito whispered, pulling his headphones off to rest around his neck. Crosby didn’t look over, entranced by something out there on the highway. Zito shifted to the aisle seat and reached across, poking him. “Hey.”
Crosby turned, his eyes looking eerily big in the low light. “What?” he asked.
“Nothing,” Zito shrugged. “Bored. You wanna play tic-tac-toe or something?”
Crosby gave him a skeptical look, and then he let his shoulders fall, shaking his head. “You always end up tied, playing tic-tac-toe.”
Zito nodded, because that was true. “Okay. Hangman?”
Crosby looked back out the window for a second, and then sighed. “Yeah, all right.”
Zito slid back into the window seat and Crosby moved next to him, pushing Zito’s backpack farther under the seat. Zito drew a little gallows on the back of an envelope, and for a while the only sound in the world was Crosby whispering letters, and the scratch of Zito’s pencil drawing a head, a body, stick arms and legs, dead-man crosses for eyes.
Zito held the envelope between them, using his knee as a table, and their shoulders were pressed together, their heads close and hunched over the paper. Crosby smelled faintly of the green gel soap they had in every visitors’ locker room of the Texas League.
“You’re pretty quiet, huh,” Zito said eventually, keeping a close eye on Crosby, trying to think of words with few vowels. It was good of Crosby to be so steady all the time, but on a bus in the middle of the night, it could also be pretty fucking creepy.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, like. You’re quiet. You don’t say much.”
Crosby moved his shoulders, scowling at the paper and popping his thumb against the armrest. “I don’t know you guys very well.”
“Well, how do you expect to get to know us, if you never talk?”
Crosby answered, “Is there a T?”
Zito exhaled, and filled in the T. He gave up on trying to draw the kid out, and was surprised when Crosby asked him a half a minute later, “How long have you been in the minors?”
Zito glanced at him, but Crosby was just gnawing on his lip and studying the diagram on the envelope.
“This is my seventh year,” Zito said, not even registering the dull chime of pain in his chest anymore. “Year and a half in Visalia. About a year in Trip-A, but not all at once. The rest of it here. Haven’t played anywhere else since ’03.”
Still looking at the envelope, Crosby said casually, “I heard you got to the Show once.”
Zito flinched, and shook his head. “No. That’s not right.”
Crosby looked up at him, his face wash-lit by the occasional headlights coming in the opposite direction. “No?”
Zito clutched the pencil and stared at Crosby’s hand, resting easily on his knee, the tell-tale crooks in his fingers, his trim nails. In 2003, Mark Mulder had broken his hip. Zito had been in Sacramento, living out the good moments of his life only through the grace of injury to others, and they’d handed him a bus ticket.
“I. I got called up,” he said, keeping his voice as even as possible. “For a month. Two years ago.”
“So you did make it.”
Zito broke the pencil in a half, the small crack startling them both. He looked down at the two shards with confusion, and swallowed.
“It doesn’t count,” Zito told him. “I didn’t play.”
Noah Lowry had been called up to the A’s in the mid-summer of that year, twenty-two years old and protected by nothing more than a disappearing change-up and a face made for October. He’d rolled down the stretch, effortlessly took over Mulder’s place in the rotation by September, building more faith for himself with every start, and he made Barry Zito redundant. Zito never threw a single pitch in a major league baseball game.
Crosby was watching him carefully, but Zito’d had a lot of experience not letting things show. “Okay,” Crosby said. “Is there a K?”
Zito shook his head and gave the guy a second cross for an eye, said quietly, “You’re dead.”
Texas flooded past.
*
The Comfort Inn in Corpus Christi had been experiencing a rash of petty thefts and vandalism, and there were new bronze deadbolts on all the doors, a private security guard walking up and down the length of the complex.
Zito had pitched badly in the series opener, his mind fractured with pictures of blue sky, concrete walls, shiny white baseballs, the twenty-nine days he’d spent in Oakland, once upon a time. When he got to thinking about stuff like that, everything else fell away.
He told his roommate, the left fielder, to get lost, and it wasn’t a big deal because the left fielder spent most of his nights with the back-up catcher anyway. Zito drank whiskey straight from the bottle until his arm stopped hurting. He wasn’t too happy with himself.
Zito thought that somebody should kidnap him, clock him with the butt of a pistol and leave him bleeding at the temple. They should untie his hands, his bruised wrists, and shove him onto a field, wiping the blood out of his eyes. Hold the gun to his head and tell him, pitch.
Then he would know what pressure really was. And if he survived, he’d be able to do anything.
It was possible that he’d drank too much. Certainly, the knock on his door past midnight almost gave him a heart attack.
He considered ignoring it, breathing shallowly through the diminishing panic, his hand on his chest. He blinked and noticed that the skateboarding competition he’d been watching had ended, and now there was poker on the TV, guys with mirrored sunglasses and their lips pressed into threads.
Zito got up and stumbled over to the door. It wouldn’t open, though, it was stuck, and he kept jerking at it, rattling the door in its frame, a red haze sinking down low over his eyes. He was so confused, he felt like crying.
“The deadbolt, man,” Crosby’s voice said through the wood.
Zito rested his forehead for a minute against the door, hard and strangely lifelike. He flipped the bolt and pulled the door open. Crosby was standing there in sweats and a T-shirt, barefoot.
They just looked at each other for a long minute, and then Crosby cleared his throat and said, “My roommate picked up a girl.”
Zito half-smiled. “You’re with Tate?” Crosby nodded. “Get used to that.”
Crosby scuffed his foot on the carpet. “They said I could stay, but. Um. They were gonna be . . . doing stuff.”
“What, you don’t like to watch?” Crosby glared at him, and Zito laughed, feeling light-headed.
“You’re drunk?” Crosby asked, as if it wasn’t obvious.
“Oh yes. Did you see me pitch? ‘Course you did. So you know about how I’m drunk.”
Zito found himself kind of fascinated by the movement of Crosby’s shoulders under his shirt, and his buzzed hair all rusty-brown, and his mildly jugged ears. He stepped back. “Come in.”
Crosby hesitated. “It’s cool if you’re busy or whatever-”
“I’m drunk, new guy. And I’m the only one you know on the team, right? So come sleep on my floor.”
Crosby came in, his hands pushing at the sides of his sweatpants, looking for pockets. Zito poured him a plastic cup of Jack and another of water, and sat down on the floor next to him, watching him carefully pour half the water into the whiskey, taking measured sips like it hurt to swallow too much at once.
They didn’t talk much, finishing the bottle off, and Crosby relaxed by increments, his back curving, his head rolling back against the bed. With his head tilted back like that, his neck moved palely, charcoal-shaded.
Zito was about ten minutes shy of passing out. He had the timing on this down real well.
“Impressions, dude,” he said, and one of Crosby’s eyes came sleepily open. “You’re brand new. Nobody’s seeing nothing the way you are.”
“’s that right?”
Zito nodded, his spine feeling jiggered and loose. “Yeah. You gotta remember what it’s like now, because later it won’t be. Trust me. I watch you sometimes, you know, so I can tell.”
Crosby’s eyebrows twitched upwards. “You watch me?”
“Only sometimes. You’re real easy to watch.”
Crosby looked at him with something subtle and dark in his eyes, and Zito’s stomach curled uncomfortably. “Not to freak you out or anything,” Zito said, waving his hand around indistinctly. “Just, like. You don’t talk, so you must see a lot. Heightened senses, right?”
“Sure,” Crosby said, still looking at him indefinably, making Zito nervous, his dad in his mind telling him that anyone you couldn’t read was probably reading you.
Zito rasped his hands on the carpet and drank the last of his cup, his equilibrium nose-diving. “And I know what it’s like when you don’t want anybody to say anything,” he said. “You get easily broken. Me too.”
“Somebody told me you’ve never missed a start,” Crosby said, getting up to make himself another drink. From where Zito was on the floor, Crosby looked so tall, like a statue, something high up on a pedestal.
“I haven’t.” Zito flapped his hand open and closed. “Make me another, okay? Listen. I’ve never missed a start, but what good has that done me? Nothing. At least, with you, they can say, this is why.”
Crosby shook his head, handing Zito a cup and sitting back down. “Actually, no. They can say what I’ve broken, but they don’t know why. They thought it might be, like, a disease, with the weak bones or whatever?”
“Like in that movie.”
“Yeah. But I did all the tests and they say I’m fine. Strong as anybody.”
Zito rolled his head and scrutinized Crosby. He looked strong, true enough, with those shoulders and his arms stretching the sleeves of his T-shirt, the flats of his wrists, his wide palms.
“Weird, man.” He paused, thinking about the fatal care Crosby took on the field, the split-second hesitation that kept him out of collisions, kept him down here in Double-A. “Wrists and fingers, right?”
Crosby put his cup on the floor and gave him the rundown: “This wrist, broke it four times. Not just from baseball, from when I was a kid too. This one, broke it twice. Every finger on this hand, see how this one is kinda crooked still? Pinky finger, thumb. Hairline fracture in my left ankle. Stress fracture in my femur when I was in college.” He tapped his collarbone. “Broke this sliding headfirst into third. See, you can still feel it.”
He pulled his collar out and Zito reached over, ran his fingers clumsily over the hook of bone. There was a rift, a small asymmetry. Zito found that he could tuck his thumb perfectly against it, his fingers folded over Crosby’s throat.
“Lost count of how many times I’ve cracked my ribs,” Crosby continued, his Adam’s apple bobbing under Zito’s hand. His face was very close, the scent of whiskey and peppermint. “Punctured my lung once, that’s the worst I can remember.”
Zito took his hand down, touched Crosby’s chest. Crosby inhaled sharply through his nose. Zito trickled his fingers down Crosby’s ribs, searching for the evidence, liking the warm skittered feel of Crosby’s body through his shirt.
“I can’t feel it,” he said, his forehead lining.
Crosby looked at him for awhile, his face revealing nothing. Then he pulled his shirt up to his neck and lay back on the carpet, laid himself out. The skin drew tight across his chest and Zito could see it now, the bump in his lowest rib. He slid his hand over it, and Crosby was breathing just a little too fast, his face flushing, his skin heating up.
“Yeah,” Zito breathed out. “Yeah, you’re right. Right here.”
He stared at his hand on Crosby’s chest, his fingers keyed in the healed ridges of Crosby’s ribs, the heel of his hand steady on Crosby’s stomach. Zito’s head spun, a world of untanned skin and quick heartbeats. He curled his fingers and set his nails, dragged his hand onto Crosby’s stomach, leaving thin white lines behind, and Crosby sucked air in through his teeth.
Zito’s hand tripped up against Crosby’s sweats, and he hooked his thumb under the waist, wonderfully soft and stretching, a sparse trail of dark hair and his eyesight was going, Crosby was shivering, blurring, taut and smooth under Zito’s knuckles.
“Hey,” Zito whispered in amazement.
Crosby’s flickering eyes caught his. “Hey,” he whispered back, and smiled, for the first time since they’d met, clearing away the lines around his mouth and the tiredness in the set of his jaw, the faded shadow in his eyes, until he finally looked as young as he was.
Crosby smiled, and Zito lost consciousness.
*
Crosby was gone when Zito woke up, only a folded blanket on the floor showing that he hadn’t been a hallucination. Zito’s head hurt, and his shoulder too, a throb that started in his marrow and radiated out.
He’d ended up in bed, somehow. Maybe Crosby had lifted him up, fireman-carried him over and let him flop down. But Zito doubted Crosby was that strong.
Zito took a shower and four aspirin, and tried to figure out what had happened. He’d never touched another guy like that, never wanted to. And maybe it was temporary insanity, explained away by the better part of a bottle of Jack, but he was hungover and thinking clearly again and he still kinda wanted to put his hand under Crosby’s shirt. He was too tired to get very worked up about it, though.
The team milled around in the parking lot, waiting for the bus to pull up. Zito looked for Crosby, wanting to pull him aside and ask, what the fuck was that, but Crosby wasn’t there. The asphalt was newly laid, pure black with the painted lines whiter than foul lines.
Zito hesitated before climbing on the bus, looking back over his shoulder.
“Care to join us, kid?” his manager asked, standing at the front in a dress shirt yellowing with age, a loosely knotted gray tie hanging around his neck.
“We’re, um,” Zito said, and then stopped. “Yeah.” He took his seat in the back.
They were almost out of the parking lot when Crosby ran up, banging on the side of the bus with the flat of his hand, out of breath and yelling, “Wait, wait.”
Zito curled his hand around the top of the seat in front of him, straightening to watch Crosby board with an apologetic look on his face. Their manager stood to smack Crosby on the back of the head, and Crosby shoved his bag into the overhead, collapsed into the nearest seat, disappearing from Zito’s view.
Zito sat back. He felt as if there was a shade pulled low over his mind, blocking out all the important stuff. His ears crackled with static, the ache in his arm crawling through his chest. It was so bright outside he feared he was going blind.
He thought kind of sadly that at least this was different from being bored all the time.
He caught Crosby’s arm in the ballpark tunnel, and held on when Crosby tried to pull away. The other guys glanced at them sidelong, but they’d long since stopped paying attention to Zito being weird, and nobody cared about Crosby yet.
“Dude,” Zito said, the chatter and laughter of their teammates receding into the clubhouse. Crosby was turned away from him, his shoulders held tightly. “What’s wrong?”
Crosby looked back at him, a painfully stricken cast to his eyes. “Nothing,” he said. “Trying to get to the clubhouse, if you don’t mind.” He tried to jerk his arm out of Zito’s grip, but Zito’s fingers were hooked in Crosby’s elbow and he didn’t let go.
“Hang on, slow down for a second.” Zito was fascinated by the feel of the tendons of Crosby’s arm tensing and giving, Crosby’s pulse rabbiting against Zito’s fingers. “What’re you. Well. Um.” He stared at his hand, his thumb drawing circles on the bare skin of Crosby’s arm, totally without intention. “Huh.”
Crosby had gone utterly still, his chin tilted slightly as he looked up at Zito. “What do you think you’re doing?” he asked steadily.
Zito shrugged, his throat dry. “Oh, well. You know. Mostly just. Playing it by ear.” He let his fingers relax, and Crosby didn’t take the opportunity to break away. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep last night.”
“Is that what you did?”
Zito grinned, feeling vaguely hysterical. “Maybe more like passing out.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Crosby said caustically, his arm twitching. Zito kept thinking that Crosby could get away so easily, one sharp tug and they’d be apart.
“Bobby, listen-” he began.
“Oh, so it’s now it’s ‘Bobby,’ huh? What happened to ‘new guy’?”
“I’m just trying to. Look.” Zito pressed his thumbnail into the soft skin of the underside of Crosby’s arm, feeling Crosby twitch again, cut an angry look up at him. “I didn’t want you to think that I did it on purpose.” Crosby glared stonily over Zito’s shoulder, the muscle in his jaw jerking. “Are you okay?”
Crosby’s lips curved into a harsh little bend, not half a smile, not like last night. Zito rifled through every joke he’d ever heard, wondering if he’d ever be funny enough to make Crosby smile again.
“Not even a little bit,” Crosby answered, but Zito had forgotten the question. His hand slid up Crosby’s arm, under the sleeve of his shirt. Crosby’s skin felt cooler here, pale as milk. Zito caught the tip of his tongue between his teeth.
“Do you. You don’t mind, do you?” Zito asked, his fingers high on Crosby’s shoulder now, a misshapen lump under Crosby’s shirt, twisting in to find the knob of his once-broken collarbone. Crosby was staring at him as if he’d like to set him on fire. “This is something you do?”
Crosby swallowed, and Zito hummed unconsciously, wanting to duck down and lick Crosby’s throat.
“Something you do?” Crosby echoed faintly.
Zito nodded, deciding right this second that it was, he would, if Crosby wasn’t going to knock his hand off, if Crosby was going to be metal-hot and skin and bone beneath him. Zito would be whatever it took to have this not be over yet. “Yes. Don’t tell anybody.”
Crosby shook his head, his mouth thinning. “I won’t.”
Then he pushed Zito up against the wall, his hands on Zito’s stomach and Zito’s hand wriggling like a fish in Crosby’s shirt. Crosby pressed against him for a second, his chest hard and their knees clacking together. His breath raked hot on Zito’s face, the underside of his jaw, and Zito thought frantically of teeth and blood. He clutched at Crosby, his nails digging into Crosby’s shoulder, and Crosby hissed, snap-bit at the air in front of Zito’s mouth.
“I’m gonna pretend I don’t know you,” Crosby said.
“You don’t know me. We only got drunk once.” Zito tried to push into Crosby’s hands, lifting his shoulders off the concrete wall, cocking his hips out. Crosby stepped away from him, yanking Zito’s hand out of his shirt so that they weren’t touching anywhere. Zito made a low moan of disappointment, and reached out to pull him back. But Crosby was quick, and out of his range.
“Can’t do this here.”
Zito blinked, and then his face split with a huge grin. “But we will?”
Crosby tipped his head to the side, and poked his tongue out, resting it lightly on his upper lip. He shrugged, but his eyes were shining. Something went cartwheeling through Zito’s stomach.
“Be cool, man, okay?” Crosby said, and Zito nodded, breathless and wide-eyed, forcing his face clean of expression. Crosby reached out and flicked open the top button of Zito’s jeans. “Be cool,” he repeated, and walked away.
*
Zito jittered in the clubhouse, in the dugout, on the field talking to the guys as they warmed up. He tore up Gatorade cups and teased out a loose thread on his jersey, wrapping it around his finger until the tip turned the color of a plum. He chewed on a toothpick until it broke and stabbed into his lip, leaving a tiny spot to swell and taste of copper, and he couldn’t quit worrying it with his tongue.
He watched Bobby Crosby like he’d paid a hundred thousand dollars for the privilege.
Crosby stretched on the grass, and sprinted to the outfield wall and back, hiking his knees up. He took infield practice, concentrating on his footwork, the move to his right to backhand a hard grounder, and he leapt-spun, his arm slicing fully sidearm when he was in motion, when he was in the air.
If the ball was too far away, if Crosby had to dive, he would let it go, skimming into the outfield. Zito nodded to himself. No point risking anything when it was just practice.
His nails were gone, his fingertips bleeding. He kept thinking, what would they do, how would it go? Six thousand dirty thoughts about Crosby’s legs and Crosby’s back, his jersey smooth and tight, white-orange-blue letters and the mean-looking brown dog showing his teeth on the sleeve. Wondering if Crosby would be able to take Zito’s weight on the untrustworthy brace of his ribcage, whether Crosby’s arms would give out right in the middle, and they would crash together, cracking their foreheads and both of them knocked unconscious. Waking up hours later with a killer headache and Crosby sprawled atop him.
By the time the game got underway, Zito’s attention had nicely fixated on Crosby’s mouth. Crosby’s lips pursed as he spit sunflower seeds, and Zito imagined the taste of salt, the smell of Chapstick. He thought about what it would be like to see Crosby’s lips part under his thumb, and the scratch of Crosby’s stubble on his knuckles.
It seemed terribly ungrateful to fantasize about the other things that men did with each other, beyond the most abstract and ill-defined flip-book pictures. Zito was sure that Crosby’s mouth was all he’d ever need.
It was a normal kind of day in Texas, early summer, the sky flat and dull blue, higher than airplanes or satellites. Crosby was true to his word and didn’t even look at Zito. Zito didn’t mind. As long as he was allowed to stare, that was okay. Everything was okay.
Crosby came in after the end of the fifth and the water cooler was across from Zito’s spot on the bench. Crosby poured himself a drink and Zito let his hair fall in front of his eyes, watching the line of Crosby’s shoulders and the clean nape of his neck, his cap pushed back. Crosby crushed the cup in his hand and wiped his mouth with his arm, squinting out at the field with his face profiled.
Zito waited for him to turn, wink, half-smile, stick his tongue out at Zito like a kid. But Crosby just dropped his cup on the ground and pulled off his cap to run his hand over his head. Nothing in him suggested that he even knew Zito was there.
Zito reminded himself that it didn’t matter. And who knew, once they actually got started, if Crosby would be able to keep this up. Zito got distracted again by what it would be like once they got started. He spent the rest of the game daydreaming about his crummy little house in Midland, the oily light through the bedroom window, writing on the heel of his hand in blue ink, ‘change sheets.’
Crosby went three-for-four with a double and two runs batted in, and flew into the hole. They won decisively.
*
They got back late. It was a Sunday, so not even the bars were open. The players filed out of the bus and diffused in all directions, calling to each other across the still asphalt of the parking lot. Zito was tranced out in the back, his music turned up loud, and had to be kicked back into awareness by another pitcher, so he was the last one out.
Crosby was already at his car. Zito let his bag drop off his shoulder and ran to catch him.
“Hey, hey,” he said, pulling up with one hand on the side of Crosby’s car, keeping him from opening the door. “Aren’t you, um, don’t you wanna come to my place?”
Crosby scowled at him. “Say that a bit louder, I don’t think the people in Dallas heard you.”
“What? Nobody cares. Hey,” and Zito wondered what it was about Crosby that reduced him to this dumb hey-ing person. “So, like. Come home with me.” He lifted his eyebrows and made his eyes go big, the look that always used to make his mother say, what a handsome boy.
Crosby sighed, hitching his bag higher on his shoulder. “I’m kinda tired.”
Zito tipped his head to the side, a thick pressure building in his throat. “But, dude. You’re still gonna come over, right? Because, I’ve been thinking, you know.” He waved his hands around. “All day long. And I think you should come over.”
Crosby flipped his keys around his thumb, making a pitched clinking sound. He stared off over Zito’s shoulder, the extinguished palm-tree stadium lights, the land beyond that refused to end. After a long moment, he let his shoulders fall with another sigh and said quietly, “Tell me how to get there.”
Zito rattled it off, quickly before Crosby could change his mind, the west road, five miles down and take a left. Don’t be scared of the oil derricks rising like skeletons. Don’t be worried if it seems like there’s nothing out there, because you’ll find it if you just keep going. Crosby nodded and pushed Zito’s hand off his car.
Zito had to go back for his bag, and by the time he was out of the parking lot, Crosby’s tail-lights were the size of match-heads. Crosby drove faster than he did, and soon enough Zito had lost him.
But he was leaning back against his car when Zito pulled up, flooded in the headlights, his T-shirt caught out paper-white. Zito wanted to grab hold of him, thinking dry-mouthed about the slide of cotton over Crosby’s arms and chest. Crosby warned him off with a look, and they went inside.
“So, um,” Zito said, all of a sudden awkward with the lights on and Crosby’s hands in his pockets, his shoulders curved inwards. “This is where I live. You want something to drink or something?”
Crosby stayed where he was with his back against the door. He shook his head, watching Zito intently from across the room. Zito felt imminently out of place, his hand twitching as he put his keys back on the hook, clearing his throat.
“You’re. Well.” Zito fiddled with the hem of his shirt, trying to figure out how to get back to that moment in the hallway when Crosby had plastered against him and breathed hotly on his mouth. He tried to force the feel of Crosby unbuttoning his jeans into his mind, the brush of Crosby’s fingers so low on his stomach.
“I’m having trouble reading you,” Zito said eventually.
“I get that a lot,” Crosby replied, and went back to not saying anything.
Zito swallowed, seeing the way the muscles in Crosby’s arms were strung tight by his hands in his pockets, the brass shine off his belt buckle. “Would you mind. Like. Doing something?”
Crosby tilted his head, and the corner of his mouth drew up almost imperceptibly. “Like what?” he asked, his voice lowering.
Zito pressed his tongue against the back of his teeth. “Oh, you know. Anything. Anything would be good.”
The smirk on Crosby’s face deepened. “You don’t even know how stupid this is, do you?”
Zito’s forehead lined, and he worked his way through that, thinking that he definitely knew how stupid this was, he wasn’t under any illusions.
“I do,” he said defensively. “What’s it matter? Can’t it just be something that a couple years from now we’ll pretend never happened?”
“Do you always plan so far ahead?”
“Hardly ever. Special circumstances.” Zito showed his most charming grin, and Crosby rolled his eyes, but didn’t sneer, and didn’t look away.
Zito figured that was as much of an invitation as he was going to get, and took a step towards him, and the world didn’t end, so he took another. He got up close, and Crosby seemed noticeably bigger than when Zito had been across the room and staring at him framed by the door. Zito didn’t know what to do with his hands, so he flattened them on the wood to either side of Crosby’s body. He held his breath.
Crosby leaned his head back and his eyes looked like coins. He took one hand out of his pocket and hasped it in Zito’s belt, but that was it, just the backs of his fingers on Zito’s skin.
“Fair warning, man,” Crosby told him seriously. “It’s gonna be different than you think.”
Zito shook his head. “Nothing has ever been the same as I thought it would be. You think that’s new?”
Crosby smiled, looking honestly pleased with Zito, and something clutched in Zito’s stomach, he did it, he made Bobby Crosby smile, and he kissed him if for no other reason than not wanting to see that smile fade.
Crosby kissed back, half-asleep, his hand digging farther under Zito’s belt. Zito licked into his mouth and Crosby pulled their bodies flush with the cold metal links of his watch getting caught in Zito’s shorts. Zito let his weight angle slowly down, until Crobsy was pressed to the door and he was pressed to Crosby, and he wanted to say, hey, wow, hey hey hey.
*
It was Zito’s day to go into the park early, his supplemental and ill-advised workout session, and he woke up in time, Bobby Crosby rolled away from him with his T-shirt draped over his head.
Zito touched Crosby’s back and shoulder, running the flat of his palm across. Crosby stirred and coughed. He dragged the shirt off and blinked back at Zito from over his shoulder, his mouth moving and sticking.
“Too early, my god,” Crosby said thickly, and buried his face back in the pillow.
Zito smiled and walked his fingers up Crosby’s spine, letting his thumb fit into the notch at the base of Crosby’s neck. “I’m going to the park. I usually do. Or, well. Couple times a week.”
Crosby shifted and his metallic eyes reopened. “Yeah, I heard about that.”
“What were you, running a background check?”
Crosby shrugged, put his face into the pillow again, his back rising and falling. “Everybody talks about you,” he said, muffled. “You didn’t know? Everybody’s trying to figure you out.”
Zito thought about that, their not-too-bright teammates with dusty foreheads, scarred hands. He thought that Crosby was crazy; nobody cared what he did, not anymore.
“Figure me out? But I’m so easy.”
Crosby snorted into the pillow. “Don’t need to tell me.”
Zito shook his head, absently petting the length of Crosby’s back, watching the ants crawling on the wall over the dresser. “Anyway. I gotta go.”
He went to get off the bed, and Crosby was suddenly moving, zero to one-twenty and his hand around Zito’s wrist, pulling him off balance. Zito thumped down, making a noise of surprise, and Crosby’s arm wound around his waist, Crosby’s mouth hot-open on the curve of his shoulder, his teeth flat and cutting.
“No you don’t,” Crosby mumbled, and bit him. Zito shivered and let Crosby flip him over onto his stomach, his breath already hitching, his mind gone white. Crosby licked the back of his neck, and Zito realized what was happening and panicked a little bit.
“Wait,” he managed, feeling Crosby’s forearm chain down across his lower back. He tried to push his shoulders up, but Crosby was too heavy, his knee holding Zito’s legs apart.
“Just breathe, man,” Crosby told him, and pulled Zito’s arms over his head, pinning his wrists down. Zito’s face was jammed into the mattress and he could feel his own breath blowing humidly back at him. Crosby mouthed his shoulder blade and said again, “Breathe.”
Zito did his best.
*
They shouldn’t have done it in the morning, Zito realized miserably in his truck on the drive in, Crosby tailgating with his headlights on even though it was destructively bright. Zito would have liked a night to sleep it off. His hands shook and his eyes in the rearview mirror looked huge and scared. He could feel it pressed up against the walls of his throat, terrified that one of the boys was gonna say, how’s it going, and he’d blurt out, I got fucked by the new guy this morning.
He was going to feel it all day long. This was going to be terrible.
He was starving. He pulled into the Kwik-Stop and saw Crosby turn in behind him, which sorta confused him, but maybe Crosby was hungry too.
Zito poked at the packaged Hostess snacks, trying to decide, powdered donuts or chocolate. The Kwik-Stop was all yellow and red on the inside, buzzing fluorescent lights and overly air-conditioned the way most of Texas was. Crosby’s head floated past in the next aisle, and Zito found himself staring at Crosby’s neck, a scatter of bruises at the base of his throat.
“Bobby?”
Crosby met his gaze over the pastry rack, a tiny smile on his face and brand-new sheen of knowledge in his eyes. Zito blushed fiercely, forcing his voice steady as he asked, “You want anything?”
Crosby’s smile grew, his teeth coming out clean and even, his eyes darkening, and Zito could have sworn that gravity had given way as Crosby answered in a low voice, “Oh, yes. But now’s not really the time.”
Zito blushed even harder, and tried out a casual little laugh, stupid and cackling. He thought feverishly that they’d be doing that again, that and everything else, tonight probably, Crosby would push his legs up and smooth his hand down Zito’s back, same as two hours ago, and Zito would make those noises that he hadn’t realized he was capable of, and Crosby would curse and groan and break Zito’s skin.
Feeling like he was melting, Crosby smirking at him in amusement, Zito dragged his eyes away and went to get some chips. Crosby trailed behind, flicking at the brightly-colored displays and reading the ingredients of things he clearly had no intention of purchasing.
Zito wanted to press him up against the cold wall of the drinks case, do unthinkable things with his mouth and hands, until Crosby’s head slammed back and shattered the glass, and they would both be drenched, shocked awake into some measure of control.
*
The Oakland Athletics put together a neat little eight-game winning streak, and the Rockhounds hung around after their games for a week, watching on the clubhouse television.
The second baseman talked about how the big club going on a run obviously meant there was luck in the pipe for them too, something about the trickle-down effect. Zito wasn’t sure what kind of credibility that had, but he was willing to nod along. Crosby sat next to him on the couch, leaning against his shoulder occasionally, his eyes trained on the television, high up above the lockers.
It’d been a week. Crosby had left two T-shirts behind at Zito’s place, and five socks. There were three Coors in Zito’s plastic ice-bucket among dozens of Heinekens, left of the six-pack Crosby had brought over a few days before. And Zito drove home at night with Crosby’s headlights shining in his rearview mirror, Crosby sticking his head out the window and yelling, “You wanna speed up, old man?” a disembodied voice when the road was deserted.
Zito was kind of stunned, all the time.
Joe Blanton, who most of them had known when he’d come through a year ago, was pitching for the A’s that night, and that meant sliders ripped off at the corners, and fastballs up and in, the fearless angry kind of pitching they all loved. Zito dropped his head back and thought absently, ‘my curve’s better.’
The outfielders were placing mean-spirited bets on which of the A’s would be the next to go down with an injury. Zito listened to them with half an ear, Hudson’s oblique again, Mark Kotsay’s back, Aaron Boone’s knee, Ramon Hernandez and his tendency to dislocate his throwing shoulder. Zito let himself briefly imagine a plane crash, nothing too serious, just enough to put the whole rotation on the DL, and the left side of the infield too, and maybe he and Crosby would get a shot then.
Crosby drummed his fingers on Zito’s knee. “Falling asleep?” he asked softly. Zito smiled and shook his head, knowing that Crosby would prefer they go back to Zito’s house and watch the game there. He flicked at Crosby’s hand and Crosby flicked him back, and they did that for awhile, their fingers tangling and bumping on Zito’s leg.
Zito opened his eyes and the TV was showing the A’s dugout, some variation of facial hair all down the line, green wristbands and white spikes. They didn’t look all that much different than the ‘Hounds, a little older, certainly wiser, but Zito thought that he could cut and paste his teammates into that clubhouse a half a continent away, and no one would know the difference.
He realized that his thumb was still hooked with Crosby’s, and hastily let him go. Crosby smirked at him sideways, and the announcers started talking about Mulder and Hudson, the two of them leaning on the rail with their elbows touching.
One of the pitchers groaned overdramatically, throwing a handful of peanut shells at the screen. “Christ, we fuckin’ get it,” he said to the television. “They’re perfect, okay, moving on.”
The others laughed. “Bitter, Jayce?”
The pitcher scowled. “Sick of it. The Pair of Aces, right. So who else will they ever need?”
Mulder and Hudson were in their sixth year of pitching one-two for Oakland. They had the best combined winning percentage of any duo over that stretch, and a bunch of other similar marks, WHIP, ERA, opponents’ average. They’d been the heart and the soul for as long as anyone cared to remember, and they’d both signed for far below what they could have gotten as free agents to stay where they were.
The back of the rotation changed every year. Only Noah Lowry had been around for more than a season, and he was constantly trade bait, dangled for relief pitching and utility infielders, decent prospects that Billy Beane could mold in his own image.
Zito sighed. It was endlessly damaging to think too long about the big club while stuck in Double-A. He’d learned that a long time ago.
That one month Zito had spent in Oakland, he’d talked to Hudson once for four hours straight, in a hotel bar in Anaheim, but he couldn’t remember anything that they’d said. What was much clearer was the fact that Mulder never actually learned his name, and was still calling him Brian on the last day of the season.
“They’re very good,” Crosby said in a quiet voice that only Zito could hear. “Terrible standard to have to meet.”
Zito shrugged. “No one expects us to be as good as they are. They’re, like. Once in a generation.”
“You know what’s weird, though?”
Zito lifted his eyebrows inquiringly as Marco Scutaro raked a double and brought two more home, the A’s lead now in double-digits. Crosby half-smiled.
“Nobody remembers Johnny Sain.”
Zito thought about that for a long time, then put his hand up over his face, rubbing his temples. “You make my head hurt.”
Crosby laughed lightly, and slid an arm around Zito’s shoulders, saying quickly into his ear, “I can probably help you with that,” and Zito colored deeply, took a careful breath.
The game was pretty much over, anyway. And surely they’d received all the luck they were going to get from the blessed Oakland A’s, as Zito pled exhaustion and paced around waiting for Crosby in the parking lot, as Crosby tugged him by the shirt until Zito’s truck was between them and the clubhouse door, and kissed him stupid against the door, the handle digging into his lower back and the moon in the sky snowball-full, visible everywhere from there to California.
*
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