good luck and see you in the spring
five months until phoenix and this is as far away as we get.
like zito, i am pulling for mulder-hudson in the nlcs, although i think it would be fuckin' hilarious if the padres knocked the cards out in the first round. the padres who finished one game better than the nationals, last place in the nl east with a record even at .500. really amusing.
and i guess i'm pulling for the white sox, too, simply by the default of i-hate-the-other-three-with-passion-and-fire. weird. the white sox kinda irritate me (cough-scott podsednik-cough), too, though j.d. goes a long way to assauge that.
aight. national league all the way, baby. the only team that gives me fits is the braves. oddly enough, i am kinda enamored of the padres, considering they're division rivals and everything, but they're just so . . . harmless.
so it's been a good year. the giants finished above the dodgers, which is all i care about once the playoffs are out of reach. the a's played five meaningless games instead of five weeks of meaningless games, as they were expected. and 2006 will be beautiful.
five months. i don't know what i'm gonna do with myself.
Some background. Billy Beane is the general manager of the Oakland A’s and totally adheres to the theme of hotness on the team.
Eric Chavez signed the biggest contract in the history of the Oakland franchise during spring training in ’04, after months and months of stalling.
They went to the same high school, and were both expected to be the kind of ballplayer that would not be forgotten. Which is actually turning out to be true, though not in the way people thought.
The Best Supporting Actor award for this one goes to Eric Chavez’s dog Tank.
Negotiations
By Candle Beck
Billy Beane asks him, “Are you fucking ready yet?”
And Eric Chavez hangs up the phone. He feeds his dog and takes out the trash, and sits on the front steps for awhile, watching the traffic. It’s December and still not cold.
His wife comes home and kisses him on the cheek. He sets his hand at the small of her back and leans close as she tells him about her day. They’ve been married for less than a month, and he still wants to hear about the people she saw on the street, the guy who cut her off coming out of the parking lot, where she got lunch. The dog bumps into his legs, chewing on the denim of his jeans.
Zito calls him from outside of a movie theatre in Los Angeles and asks him questions he doesn’t want to answer. Chavez won’t hang up on him because Zito will get pissy and not talk to him for a couple of weeks, sending backhanded insults through Mark Mulder. There are moments when Chavez is so sick of this team he could cry.
Beane leaves him a short-tempered message at two in the morning. He doesn’t sound drunk, but then, Billy Beane never sounds drunk. Chavez is still awake.
A few days later, Dave Stewart calls with new numbers, and Chavez tells his agent what he’s been telling him for a year now, let me think about it. He wanders around Lake Merritt all afternoon, Tank’s leash wrapped around his wrist. He signs autographs for some kids wearing his name on their backs, who laugh and gawp at him, tugging at his hand, is that really you?
Chavez calls Beane and can’t think of anything to say. Beane lets him breathe into the receiver, office sounds in the background, paper shuffling, a fax machine whirring and beeping. Chavez eventually says, “Stew told me about your latest offer.”
Beane says, “Yeah?”
Chavez doesn’t say anything else. Beane sighs heavily. “Get out of town, kid,” he tells Chavez. “Go to Vegas or something.”
“Okay,” Chavez whispers. “Sure.”
But he doesn’t leave.
He talks to Mulder and he talks to Zito and both of them dig for information about the other, which is strange but hardly unfamiliar. He falls asleep on the couch and dreams about highways running south, along the coast.
Chavez’s wife works and he’s alone in the apartment for every hour of daylight. The western wall is white-painted cinderblock, and he goes into the back room, sits on the floor and plays catch with himself, the baseball ka-chunking off the stone, thumping on the carpet and smacking into his bare hands. He’s got to keep the door shut or Tank will run in joyfully and disrupt his rhythm.
He plays videogames and watches MTV as the light shrinks on the wall and his eyes turn spider-web bloodshot. There are DVDs to return and dry cleaning to be picked up, Tank needs to be walked, the kitchen counters need to be scrubbed white-clean and shining. He does the math, four months is two thousand, eight hundred and eight hours to kill, and he’s almost halfway there.
Mulder wants to know, “What the hell are you holding out for, man?”
Chavez figures that this has to be against the rules. There’s a list of things they’re not supposed to talk about, growing longer by the year.
He asks Mulder if maybe he can come to Scottsdale for awhile, and Mulder pauses before saying, “Of course.”
Chavez packs a bag and leaves it in the closet.
A few days shy of Christmas, still unsigned, Chavez drives most of the way to Billy Beane’s house, the sun setting in his rearview mirror and the road through the hills getting skinnier and more treacherous the higher he goes. He loses his nerve, and turns around, calls Beane from a gas station, stuttering and promising that he’ll sign, anything, anything.
Beane comes down out of the hills and finds him sitting on the curb, his knees up and his feet in the gutter, the dirty water soaking through his shoes. Beane pulls him up by the arm and puts him in the shotgun seat, which smells beautifully of leather and pine. Chavez is pretty sure he left his own car unlocked, and Christ knows it’s expensive enough to steal, but he’s shaking and scared to talk.
Beane drives way too fast for these roads. There are newspapers and computer print-outs spread out all over his house, and he makes Chavez coffee with whiskey in it, not saying a word to him.
The new contract is on the dining room table, sticky arrows indicating the places for Chavez to initial and sign. The coffee burns his mouth and the whiskey burns his throat and Beane sits across from him, his hands flat on the wood, and Chavez knows the stories behind the scars on Beane’s knuckles and the hink in his thumb.
Chavez stares at Beane’s hands, the contract hovering whitely at the bottom of his field of vision like a splitter coming in too slowly to time. It’s so still out here, deep in the trees, and Chavez can hear Beane’s watch ticking.
“Eric,” Beane says quietly. Chavez doesn’t register it; hardly anybody calls him Eric anymore.
“Senior year,” he says instead, tasting the bitter insides of his mouth, his sinuses opened up. “We won the last nine games of the season and then the whole league.”
“I think I drafted you somewhere in there, too,” Beane says, his voice tinged caustically. Chavez nods.
“You did.”
“You came up here to talk about high school?” Beane lifts his eyebrows, his eyes dark as oil spills. He flicks at the contract, drums his fingers on it impatiently. “If I’d offered you this back then, you wouldn’t have been able to say yes fast enough.”
That’s not fair. Appealing to the boy Eric Chavez used to be is in no way fair, and Beane knows that. Chavez glares at him, finishes his drink too quickly, his eyes watering against it.
“You brought me up here,” he manages to say, swiping at his eyes with the side of his hand.
“You said you’d sign.”
Chavez gets up and fixes another, this one straight whiskey. His chest is glowing, his face heating up. “I lied, Billy.”
Beane’s chair scrapes back and Chavez is studying the intricate designs carved in the woodwork of the cabinet door, tracing his fingers in and out and through and down. Beane’s hand alights on Chavez’s back, and Chavez flinches, thinking sickly about his name above Billy Beane’s a dozen times in the record books of Mt. Carmel High School.
Beane touches his forehead to the back of Chavez’s head, his hand sliding up under Chavez’s shirt, onto his hip. “Why are you dragging this out?” Beane asks, soft enough to be dangerous.
Chavez closes his eyes, dreaming of Beane’s hand right where it is now, hot and rough on his skin, his fingertips just barely under Chavez’s belt. His car is being stolen and his right arm is going numb and Chavez is leaning back into Beane’s body, swallowing thickly, thinking that he’s wanted this for as long as he can remember, and he’s put in his years, he’s earned it.
Beane presses his teeth to the place where Chavez’s jaw meets his throat, and Chavez shivers, his hands moving unconsciously to fumble his belt open, twist his fingers between Beane’s on his stomach and refuse to answer anything that Beane asks of him.
The contract flutters on the table, every arrow pointing to a blank line. In the morning, Chavez imagines, it will still be there, and the sun will hit it and fade the ink, until the paper is again untouched, like nothing was ever there.
Chavez showers and gets dressed in the bathroom, the steam fogging up the mirrors and his hair sticking blackly in his eyes. He writes some stuff on the mirror, hi billy, for a good time call barry zito, depodesta for president, and then wipes it all away with the towel.
Beane is waiting for him downstairs, wearing a Mets warm-up T-shirt from the eighties and jeans with tears at the knees. He takes Chavez back to his car, and all the CDs are gone, grease marks on the seats and dashboard, and, oddly enough, a hundred dollar bill crumpled up on the shotgun side floor.
Beane places his hand on Chavez’s shoulder and tells him, “I’ll call you later. Have something new to tell me, all right?”
Chavez shakes his head, wipes his eyes. “Nothing’s gonna change, man.”
Beane’s hand tightens and his mouth gets small. Chavez focuses on Beane’s thumb digging into his collarbone, the smell of diesel, the burring wash of the sodium lights making their shadows soft and fused together.
Beane wouldn’t fuck him when Chavez was eighteen years old, though Chavez did all he could to convince him otherwise. Beane kept looking at him, and maybe it was just Chavez being the A’s number one draft pick and all that rested on his shoulders, but Chavez read something else there, something dark. The things he remembers now are Beane’s stomach hard under his hand for a split second before Beane knocked him off, and Beane smiling cruelly at him when Chavez was on his back on the ground, stupid fucking kid.
Chavez had just been crazy, newly drafted, living in a hotel in Phoenix and playing in the fall league, and he had wanted to sleep with Billy Beane more than he’d wanted to sleep with anyone since his best friend had finally gotten him to accept that he (the best friend) was straight. And not like Chavez was, straight-but-I-still-kinda-want-to-suck-your-dick. Actually straight.
Beane wouldn’t let Chavez be that kind of crazy in his vicinity. Beane told him, “this is the big time, stop acting like a goddamn teenager,” and he didn’t backhand Chavez across the face, but they both knew he wanted to. And of course Chavez was still a teenager.
Beane has always been much smarter than everyone else in the room.
Chavez’s rookie year, somewhere in the Midwest, Beane called him. Chavez hadn’t known Beane was along on the road trip, three flights above Chavez’s room in the hotel. He went up barefoot, punching the button in the elevator and shuffling his feet on the carpet, so that when he touched the metal of the doorknob, a static charge jerked up his arm.
He wasn’t a teenager anymore, and it wasn’t his twentieth birthday that changed things for Beane, nor his twenty-first, nor his first start at third base. Never never never would Chavez know what it was that had changed for Beane. The iridescent letters across Chavez’s forehead had been erased and rewritten, maybe. It didn’t really matter why.
Beane called him once a week, then once a month, then once a day, and then not for the whole winter. Chavez drifted like seaweed, his skin buzzing, constantly running a low-grade fever. He woke up in time to be aware of Beane stripping his shirt off him, fabric-burning his arms, and pushed up into Beane’s hands, mouth open and eyes closed, devoid of faith and fear and future.
Seven hundred million reasons to stop and only one to keep going, but one was enough.
Right here right now, Chavez watches Beane walk back to his car, his back aching and his neck all scratched up. His wife is asleep when he gets home, and Chavez wakes her up by kissing her eyelids, tells her he’s taking off for a little while, gotta get his head on straight. She asks sleepily, “You’re going to see Mark?” and he nods, deciding, sure, why not?
She kisses him and says, “Call me when you get there.”
He drives all night. His phone vibrates on the seat, glowing green and jittering. It’s Beane, it’s his wife, it’s Tim Hudson and Barry Zito, drunk on red wine and laughing on a rooftop. He doesn’t answer, and the road funnels him down into the desert.
At four in the morning, on the outskirts of Phoenix, Chavez decides to turn around. There’s nothing for him down here. He crosses the border back into California and his head starts to spin. He has to pull over, open the car door and hang his head down between his knees, his hands clasped around the back of his neck. Tears roll off his face, fall the long way down into the dust.
He sleeps in the back of his car. He turns up at Mulder’s house the next morning and Mulder claps him on the back, takes him golfing.
Dave Stewart calls when they’re on the seventeenth green. He says, “You saw the new contract?” He says, “This might be as good as they’re gonna do.”
Chavez kicks his golf ball into the hole, Mulder saying offended, “Hey! Two-stroke penalty!” and Chavez shakes his head.
“I think maybe they’ll do better,” he tells Stewart.
Stewart sighs heavily, tired of Chavez procrastinating and inventing excuses. “Let me take you and Alex out to dinner and we can figure out what you’re looking for.”
Chavez sits down on the grass, short and quick as the outfield, Mulder standing over him, fifteen feet tall. “I’m in Scottsdale.”
Stewart pauses, and Chavez gets worried. Was he not supposed to leave the state? Is he in trouble again?
“Well, when you get back, then,” Stewart says, and Chavez exhales. “Tell Mulder I said hey.”
Mulder and Chavez go out drinking and red lights cover them up like clouds. A bass beat follows them around, and Mulder wants to know, “How come you haven’t signed yet?”
Chavez laughs, scraping his hand on the brick, liking the tough ripping feel of it against his skin. “You want the truth or the, the, the thing that’s not the truth?”
Mulder looks confused, rubbing his mouth. “Well. Whatever, man,” he shrugs.
Chavez feels like he might throw up, or pass out, or disappear so swiftly nobody will ever believe he was here in the first place. He puts his hand up over his face and says, “I can’t be around him much longer, he makes me do terrible things.”
“What? I didn’t, I can’t understand you.” Mulder pulls Chavez’s hand down and winces. “Chavvy, um. You got. Dude, there’s blood on your face.”
Chavez looks down at his hand, held carefully between Mulder’s long fingers. The heel is shallowly torn open, gleaming with blood. He turns his wrist, Mulder letting him go, and watches in fascination as the light bends and curls around his knuckles.
Mulder says his name and Chavez can feel the blood on his cheekbone, drying and marking him up like an Indian, and he’s warlike, afraid of nothing.
Mulder talks in his sleep, and Chavez can hear him as he paces the hallway, calling for a bunt pop-up and mumbling Zito’s name. Chavez falls down and comes back to himself with his hand aching, unsure of how much time has passed. Mulder sleepwalks into the kitchen and then back into his bedroom, his eyes spookily half-open, saying, “hi,” both times that he passes Chavez lying on the carpet.
They eat lunch at the golf club and then Chavez leaves, waving out the car window at Mulder standing on the porch with his thumbs hooked in his pockets, hollering good luck and see you in the spring.
Stewart calls again, and Chavez pulls over to the side of the road, somewhere north of Summerland, the ocean glass-clean and Japan visible on the horizon. He sits on the hood of his car and tells Stew, yeah, coming home.
Stewart says, “Okay, let’s talk about your options for a minute.”
“I have options?” Chavez asks, blinking, and Stewart ignores him.
“Where else do you want to play?” Chavez doesn’t say anything, staring in shock at the water, and Stewart says, “Hello? You still there? Chavvy?”
“I’m here,” he manages. “Just. Where else? What do you mean?”
“Baltimore, Boston, Cleveland or New York. That’s the Yankees, obviously. Those are the ones who sound serious, anyway, but I wouldn’t count out the Braves just yet, and the Giants still need someone to hit in front of Bonds. So.”
“I, um.” Chavez takes his phone down from his ear and rests it on his leg. He follows a white sail tracing the waves, and there are little kids running around the beach in blue swim trunks, beach-towel capes tied around their necks. Stewart is saying his name again, cursing modern technology.
“Don’t wanna play anywhere else, Stew,” he hears himself saying, half-second echoed through the phone.
“You’re gonna sign?” Stewart asks, his voice picking up. “That’s fucking wonderful, kid, I’ll call Billy and we’ll get all the stuff together and-”
“I, fuck, I gotta go, man, I just crashed my car,” Chavez says quickly, and hangs up, turning his phone off and locking it in the glove compartment. He looks around for rocks to tie to his ankles, and then realizes sadly that he’s got no rope.
Back in Oakland, the sky is gold and Chavez collapses blindly into bed, sleeping for sixteen hours and awaking to his wife touching his face, turning him over onto his back. He wraps his arms around her and fights the blankets to get them both under. She whispers, how was your trip, and he breathes in the skin of his neck, pitches hanging up across the backs of his eyelids.
She leaves him alone and he wishes she wouldn’t. He gets into so much trouble when he’s left alone. Thirty-eight people call him, half of them thinking he’s been in a car wreck.
He cleans the whole apartment, until his hands smell like Windex and his ears rush with the sound of the vacuum. He almost doesn’t hear the knock on the front door, but it gets through, eventually.
Beane comes in and Chavez’s dog barks happily, pushing his head at Beane’s hand so that Beane will tug on his ears. Chavez takes hold of Tank’s collar and pulls him off, shutting him up in the den with a bewildered, wounded look on his face.
Beane is sitting at the kitchen table, ticking his nails on the wood. “How was Arizona?”
Chavez sits across from him, nervously jogging his leg. “Beautiful.”
Beane looks at him for a day or two. “Dave Stewart called me. Said that you might be dead on the side of the road somewhere.”
Chavez smiles joylessly. “Reports of my death were greatly exaggerated.”
Beane sets his mouth in a tough line, and Chavez has to clench his fists, thinking about how Billy Beane has been the one constant in his life since he was eighteen years old.
“Getting kinda fuckin’ sick of this, Chavez,” Beane tells him.
Chavez nods. “Me too,” he agrees, breaking down slowly on the inside until all he can do is lower his head, his cheek on the table and his back curved. He can hear the patter of Beane’s fingers, the whine of Tank through the door. Chavez prays endlessly for some kind of peace to be returned to him, his lips moving against the waxy surface.
Beane gets up, comes round the table to rest his hand on the back of Chavez’s head. The worst part is that now Chavez can breathe, the world clicking into place.
“You want to stay here,” Beane says quietly. Chavez hums low, squeezing his eyes shut, Beane’s thumb stroking the nape of his neck. “You’d be lost anywhere else. So it’s not complicated at all, right? Easiest decision you’ll ever make.”
Billy Beane is offering him fifty-nine million dollars over seven years to stay within arm’s reach. Eric Chavez is doing all he can to figure out if it’s worth it.
He twists and rolls out of the chair, his knees hitting the tile with an audible crack, a ring of pain. He hooks his hands in Beane’s belt and pushes him against the wall, guiding Beane by the knobby bones of his hips. Chavez looks up at Beane with his face lit, and Beane’s hand is still on the back of his neck.
“What the fuck is it about you?” Chavez asks hoarsely. “You gotta be like this all the time, you never even gave me a chance.”
Beane’s eyes narrow, his pulse jerking against the backs of Chavez’s fingers, which have snuck in under his clothes and are pinned into the hollows of Beane’s hips. “Never gave you a chance?” he repeats, incredulous.
Chavez moans and buries his face in Beane’s stomach, cotton in his mouth and a terrible sunken feeling in his chest, the awareness that he’s not going to get over this.
“I’m sorry that me trying to give you everything you’ve ever wanted is such a problem for you,” Beane says, oddly not sounding sarcastic at all. “But nobody forced you to get down on your knees.”
Chavez slides his hands up under Beane’s shirt, linking at the small of his back, just breathing for a minute, fighting to pull himself together. He noses Beane’s shirt up and kisses the plane of his stomach, thinking of things difficult and clean and sharp like this, all his bad ideas turning back on him as if they’d never left.
He mouths into Beane’s skin, his teeth skimming, ‘let me go, let me go,’ and his arms shake against Beane’s sides, his fingers digging in. Beane’s breath draws short and his hand combs through Chavez’s hair, and there’s nothing Chavez can do but keep going.
Chavez stares at himself in the mirror, bare-chested with mouth prints and stubble burn all over his neck and shoulder blades and stomach. This will get him caught, as his insomnia and trembling hands have not, and Tank gets up on the toilet, stands on his hind legs, balancing with his paws on the bathroom counter, rolling his eyes whitely at Chavez in the mirror.
“See, boy,” Chavez tells him, petting his head. “This is what happens when you’re looking at the pitcher instead of the pitch.” Tank looks confused, as he has a tendency to do, but then, Tank’s never been much for the intricacies of the game.
Eric Chavez leaves his wife a note saying that he’s going to play with Tank at the park, and picks a patch of ground too hard-packed, the winter grass shredded down. He wrestles with his dog and crashes his shoulder into the ground again and again, until there are enough contusions on his body to cover up the evidence of Billy Beane’s mouth and hands.
Beane keeps offering him more money. Sixty million, sixty-two, sixty-three. Chavez knows the limit of this club as well as he knows anything, and he knows they’re closing in on it. Dave Stewart calls and tells him each new high, sounding weary and unsurprised when Chavez echoes back, let me think about it. Stewart tells him that if they don’t have a deal done by the time spring training is over, they won’t sign at all, and Chavez agrees.
The next day, Stewart tells the same thing to a reporter, and suddenly all anyone talks about is where Eric Chavez will end up. Chavez wants to know as much as anyone; his TV stays tuned to ESPN News all day long.
And birds fly in chased patterns out the open window, black and blue like bruises. Chavez has always believed that he would wake up some morning and say, this is the only place I want to be, but not this morning.
Beane shows up again and again, in his worn leather jacket and the frayed collars on his T-shirts, smirking as the pitchers yell over Chavez’s speaker phone, together again at last in Phoenix. Beane is heartbreaking on Valentine’s Day and flying down to Arizona at least twice a week, getting back in the small hours of the morning and he keeps saying, nothing you’ve told me for the past six months has made any sense. He keeps wanting to know, are you done yet?
Chavez sits on the steps and thinks about how no matter who leaves, no matter how impossible it seems, they’ve always been able to recover. And by the All-Star break it’s like the team has never looked different. Zito is scared and calling too often, Mulder teasing him in the background, and Chavez appreciates the concern, but he knows Zito will get over him, and so will Mulder, and so will Beane, without a doubt.
No sort of morality, fucking around with one of his players. It might even be illegal, Chavez isn’t sure. All he knows is that he’s put every part of his life in Billy Beane’s hands, which is probably not the best idea he’s ever had.
Chavez reports to spring training with his hair cut short and Beane’s fingerprints around his wrists. His eyes gape and start to itch badly, and he can’t find his swing.
Dave Stewart comes down to meet him, and says in the parking lot of the training center, “Sixty-six million dollars. Six years.”
Math has never been Chavez’s strong suit, but he can figure that one out pretty quickly.
“That’s more than they can afford.”
Stewart shrugs. “They’re offering it, they better be able to afford it.”
Chavez shakes his head, squinting against the flat white light. “Nobody’s ever gotten that kind of money from them.”
“You’re right, actually. This breaks an Oakland record. If you agree to it, of course.” Stewart isn’t even fazed by this anymore, having spent the winter hearing Chavez brush him off.
Chavez puts his hands in his pockets and begins, “Let me-”
“-think about it,” Stewart finishes for him with a sigh. “Look, kid, tell you this right now, they won’t go higher than this. They can’t. Literally, they cannot afford anything more. So this is it. Figure out what you want, and call Billy Beane.”
Chavez snatches a guilty look at his agent, thinking that usually those two events happen in reverse order.
“The season starts in two weeks,” Stewart reminds him, and leaves.
Billy Beane is sitting in his car in front of the condo complex where Chavez is staying, talking on the phone with the engine running, the air conditioner blasting.
Chavez knocks on the window and Beane shoots him a look, gesturing impatiently at the condo. Chavez goes inside, leaving the door ajar, wringing his hands. It takes Beane almost twenty minutes to come inside, and Chavez doesn’t do anything for the entire time except sit and stare at the door.
Beane curls his mouth into a semblance of a smile and looks down at him, the contract rolled up in his hand. “Well.”
Chavez swallows. “Yeah.”
They don’t say anything for awhile. Chavez scratches at the fabric of the chair, feeling hot and sick and missing his wife.
Eventually, Beane spreads his hands out, the contract held cylindrically like a tiny bat. “Tell me what I can say that’ll make you sign.”
Chavez leans his head back, staring up at the ceiling, his throat moving nervously. “I don’t know, man. That you’re leaving the team, maybe. That’s all I can think of.”
“I’m not leaving the team. It’s my goddamn team, I built it.”
“I know you did. I was the first, I know what you’ve done.”
Beane exhales audibly, and his feet rasp on the carpet as he starts to come to Chavez. Chavez drops his head and catches Beane’s gaze, holding up his hands.
“Please don’t come over here. Don’t touch me or, or do anything to me. Just stay there and let me think, okay?”
Beane stops, looking slightly surprised. Chavez breathes and there’s pale red dust on the cuffs of his jeans, ground into his elbows.
“What I need,” he says after a long moment, forcing himself to look Beane in the eyes, “is for you to stay away from me. And then I’ll play for you and thank god every day that I do.”
Beane put his free hand in his pocket, slowly tapping the contract against his leg. “You’ve gotten tired of it?”
Chavez rubs his face. “I could never figure out what you wanted with me, or what I wanted with you, and it was, like, just because we went to the same school or something, just because I’m here and you’re not. Which isn’t reason enough.”
“That’s not what I asked you,” Beane says sharply.
Chavez bites his lip, and says too fast, “I haven’t gotten tired of it and I never will. So keep the fuck away from me and at least it’ll only be in my head that I’m going to hell.”
They stare at each other for awhile. Somewhere outside, by the pool, two boys are hollering and laughing, their feet slapping on the cement. Sweat rolls out of Chavez’s hair and down the back of his neck, and there’s nothing he doesn’t want from Beane.
“I’ll stay away,” Beane says quietly. “I give you my word.”
Chavez presses his fists against his eyes, and says, “Bring me a motherfucking pen.”
Chavez will be the heart of the Oakland A’s for as long as Billy Beane is the soul, and it will be years before he can make sense of the betrayal he feels at this moment, the paper-cut on his thumb and the smear of ink on the side of his hand, the color of Billy Beane’s eyes growing light, as if he’s been somehow forgiven.
THE END
I dream of two things. A Giants-A's World Series, and Barry Zito wearing green and gold and pitching on Opening Night at the Coliseum six months from now.
like zito, i am pulling for mulder-hudson in the nlcs, although i think it would be fuckin' hilarious if the padres knocked the cards out in the first round. the padres who finished one game better than the nationals, last place in the nl east with a record even at .500. really amusing.
and i guess i'm pulling for the white sox, too, simply by the default of i-hate-the-other-three-with-passion-and-fire. weird. the white sox kinda irritate me (cough-scott podsednik-cough), too, though j.d. goes a long way to assauge that.
aight. national league all the way, baby. the only team that gives me fits is the braves. oddly enough, i am kinda enamored of the padres, considering they're division rivals and everything, but they're just so . . . harmless.
so it's been a good year. the giants finished above the dodgers, which is all i care about once the playoffs are out of reach. the a's played five meaningless games instead of five weeks of meaningless games, as they were expected. and 2006 will be beautiful.
five months. i don't know what i'm gonna do with myself.
Some background. Billy Beane is the general manager of the Oakland A’s and totally adheres to the theme of hotness on the team.
Eric Chavez signed the biggest contract in the history of the Oakland franchise during spring training in ’04, after months and months of stalling.
They went to the same high school, and were both expected to be the kind of ballplayer that would not be forgotten. Which is actually turning out to be true, though not in the way people thought.
The Best Supporting Actor award for this one goes to Eric Chavez’s dog Tank.
Negotiations
By Candle Beck
Billy Beane asks him, “Are you fucking ready yet?”
And Eric Chavez hangs up the phone. He feeds his dog and takes out the trash, and sits on the front steps for awhile, watching the traffic. It’s December and still not cold.
His wife comes home and kisses him on the cheek. He sets his hand at the small of her back and leans close as she tells him about her day. They’ve been married for less than a month, and he still wants to hear about the people she saw on the street, the guy who cut her off coming out of the parking lot, where she got lunch. The dog bumps into his legs, chewing on the denim of his jeans.
Zito calls him from outside of a movie theatre in Los Angeles and asks him questions he doesn’t want to answer. Chavez won’t hang up on him because Zito will get pissy and not talk to him for a couple of weeks, sending backhanded insults through Mark Mulder. There are moments when Chavez is so sick of this team he could cry.
Beane leaves him a short-tempered message at two in the morning. He doesn’t sound drunk, but then, Billy Beane never sounds drunk. Chavez is still awake.
A few days later, Dave Stewart calls with new numbers, and Chavez tells his agent what he’s been telling him for a year now, let me think about it. He wanders around Lake Merritt all afternoon, Tank’s leash wrapped around his wrist. He signs autographs for some kids wearing his name on their backs, who laugh and gawp at him, tugging at his hand, is that really you?
Chavez calls Beane and can’t think of anything to say. Beane lets him breathe into the receiver, office sounds in the background, paper shuffling, a fax machine whirring and beeping. Chavez eventually says, “Stew told me about your latest offer.”
Beane says, “Yeah?”
Chavez doesn’t say anything else. Beane sighs heavily. “Get out of town, kid,” he tells Chavez. “Go to Vegas or something.”
“Okay,” Chavez whispers. “Sure.”
But he doesn’t leave.
He talks to Mulder and he talks to Zito and both of them dig for information about the other, which is strange but hardly unfamiliar. He falls asleep on the couch and dreams about highways running south, along the coast.
Chavez’s wife works and he’s alone in the apartment for every hour of daylight. The western wall is white-painted cinderblock, and he goes into the back room, sits on the floor and plays catch with himself, the baseball ka-chunking off the stone, thumping on the carpet and smacking into his bare hands. He’s got to keep the door shut or Tank will run in joyfully and disrupt his rhythm.
He plays videogames and watches MTV as the light shrinks on the wall and his eyes turn spider-web bloodshot. There are DVDs to return and dry cleaning to be picked up, Tank needs to be walked, the kitchen counters need to be scrubbed white-clean and shining. He does the math, four months is two thousand, eight hundred and eight hours to kill, and he’s almost halfway there.
Mulder wants to know, “What the hell are you holding out for, man?”
Chavez figures that this has to be against the rules. There’s a list of things they’re not supposed to talk about, growing longer by the year.
He asks Mulder if maybe he can come to Scottsdale for awhile, and Mulder pauses before saying, “Of course.”
Chavez packs a bag and leaves it in the closet.
A few days shy of Christmas, still unsigned, Chavez drives most of the way to Billy Beane’s house, the sun setting in his rearview mirror and the road through the hills getting skinnier and more treacherous the higher he goes. He loses his nerve, and turns around, calls Beane from a gas station, stuttering and promising that he’ll sign, anything, anything.
Beane comes down out of the hills and finds him sitting on the curb, his knees up and his feet in the gutter, the dirty water soaking through his shoes. Beane pulls him up by the arm and puts him in the shotgun seat, which smells beautifully of leather and pine. Chavez is pretty sure he left his own car unlocked, and Christ knows it’s expensive enough to steal, but he’s shaking and scared to talk.
Beane drives way too fast for these roads. There are newspapers and computer print-outs spread out all over his house, and he makes Chavez coffee with whiskey in it, not saying a word to him.
The new contract is on the dining room table, sticky arrows indicating the places for Chavez to initial and sign. The coffee burns his mouth and the whiskey burns his throat and Beane sits across from him, his hands flat on the wood, and Chavez knows the stories behind the scars on Beane’s knuckles and the hink in his thumb.
Chavez stares at Beane’s hands, the contract hovering whitely at the bottom of his field of vision like a splitter coming in too slowly to time. It’s so still out here, deep in the trees, and Chavez can hear Beane’s watch ticking.
“Eric,” Beane says quietly. Chavez doesn’t register it; hardly anybody calls him Eric anymore.
“Senior year,” he says instead, tasting the bitter insides of his mouth, his sinuses opened up. “We won the last nine games of the season and then the whole league.”
“I think I drafted you somewhere in there, too,” Beane says, his voice tinged caustically. Chavez nods.
“You did.”
“You came up here to talk about high school?” Beane lifts his eyebrows, his eyes dark as oil spills. He flicks at the contract, drums his fingers on it impatiently. “If I’d offered you this back then, you wouldn’t have been able to say yes fast enough.”
That’s not fair. Appealing to the boy Eric Chavez used to be is in no way fair, and Beane knows that. Chavez glares at him, finishes his drink too quickly, his eyes watering against it.
“You brought me up here,” he manages to say, swiping at his eyes with the side of his hand.
“You said you’d sign.”
Chavez gets up and fixes another, this one straight whiskey. His chest is glowing, his face heating up. “I lied, Billy.”
Beane’s chair scrapes back and Chavez is studying the intricate designs carved in the woodwork of the cabinet door, tracing his fingers in and out and through and down. Beane’s hand alights on Chavez’s back, and Chavez flinches, thinking sickly about his name above Billy Beane’s a dozen times in the record books of Mt. Carmel High School.
Beane touches his forehead to the back of Chavez’s head, his hand sliding up under Chavez’s shirt, onto his hip. “Why are you dragging this out?” Beane asks, soft enough to be dangerous.
Chavez closes his eyes, dreaming of Beane’s hand right where it is now, hot and rough on his skin, his fingertips just barely under Chavez’s belt. His car is being stolen and his right arm is going numb and Chavez is leaning back into Beane’s body, swallowing thickly, thinking that he’s wanted this for as long as he can remember, and he’s put in his years, he’s earned it.
Beane presses his teeth to the place where Chavez’s jaw meets his throat, and Chavez shivers, his hands moving unconsciously to fumble his belt open, twist his fingers between Beane’s on his stomach and refuse to answer anything that Beane asks of him.
The contract flutters on the table, every arrow pointing to a blank line. In the morning, Chavez imagines, it will still be there, and the sun will hit it and fade the ink, until the paper is again untouched, like nothing was ever there.
Chavez showers and gets dressed in the bathroom, the steam fogging up the mirrors and his hair sticking blackly in his eyes. He writes some stuff on the mirror, hi billy, for a good time call barry zito, depodesta for president, and then wipes it all away with the towel.
Beane is waiting for him downstairs, wearing a Mets warm-up T-shirt from the eighties and jeans with tears at the knees. He takes Chavez back to his car, and all the CDs are gone, grease marks on the seats and dashboard, and, oddly enough, a hundred dollar bill crumpled up on the shotgun side floor.
Beane places his hand on Chavez’s shoulder and tells him, “I’ll call you later. Have something new to tell me, all right?”
Chavez shakes his head, wipes his eyes. “Nothing’s gonna change, man.”
Beane’s hand tightens and his mouth gets small. Chavez focuses on Beane’s thumb digging into his collarbone, the smell of diesel, the burring wash of the sodium lights making their shadows soft and fused together.
Beane wouldn’t fuck him when Chavez was eighteen years old, though Chavez did all he could to convince him otherwise. Beane kept looking at him, and maybe it was just Chavez being the A’s number one draft pick and all that rested on his shoulders, but Chavez read something else there, something dark. The things he remembers now are Beane’s stomach hard under his hand for a split second before Beane knocked him off, and Beane smiling cruelly at him when Chavez was on his back on the ground, stupid fucking kid.
Chavez had just been crazy, newly drafted, living in a hotel in Phoenix and playing in the fall league, and he had wanted to sleep with Billy Beane more than he’d wanted to sleep with anyone since his best friend had finally gotten him to accept that he (the best friend) was straight. And not like Chavez was, straight-but-I-still-kinda-want-to-suck-your-dick. Actually straight.
Beane wouldn’t let Chavez be that kind of crazy in his vicinity. Beane told him, “this is the big time, stop acting like a goddamn teenager,” and he didn’t backhand Chavez across the face, but they both knew he wanted to. And of course Chavez was still a teenager.
Beane has always been much smarter than everyone else in the room.
Chavez’s rookie year, somewhere in the Midwest, Beane called him. Chavez hadn’t known Beane was along on the road trip, three flights above Chavez’s room in the hotel. He went up barefoot, punching the button in the elevator and shuffling his feet on the carpet, so that when he touched the metal of the doorknob, a static charge jerked up his arm.
He wasn’t a teenager anymore, and it wasn’t his twentieth birthday that changed things for Beane, nor his twenty-first, nor his first start at third base. Never never never would Chavez know what it was that had changed for Beane. The iridescent letters across Chavez’s forehead had been erased and rewritten, maybe. It didn’t really matter why.
Beane called him once a week, then once a month, then once a day, and then not for the whole winter. Chavez drifted like seaweed, his skin buzzing, constantly running a low-grade fever. He woke up in time to be aware of Beane stripping his shirt off him, fabric-burning his arms, and pushed up into Beane’s hands, mouth open and eyes closed, devoid of faith and fear and future.
Seven hundred million reasons to stop and only one to keep going, but one was enough.
Right here right now, Chavez watches Beane walk back to his car, his back aching and his neck all scratched up. His wife is asleep when he gets home, and Chavez wakes her up by kissing her eyelids, tells her he’s taking off for a little while, gotta get his head on straight. She asks sleepily, “You’re going to see Mark?” and he nods, deciding, sure, why not?
She kisses him and says, “Call me when you get there.”
He drives all night. His phone vibrates on the seat, glowing green and jittering. It’s Beane, it’s his wife, it’s Tim Hudson and Barry Zito, drunk on red wine and laughing on a rooftop. He doesn’t answer, and the road funnels him down into the desert.
At four in the morning, on the outskirts of Phoenix, Chavez decides to turn around. There’s nothing for him down here. He crosses the border back into California and his head starts to spin. He has to pull over, open the car door and hang his head down between his knees, his hands clasped around the back of his neck. Tears roll off his face, fall the long way down into the dust.
He sleeps in the back of his car. He turns up at Mulder’s house the next morning and Mulder claps him on the back, takes him golfing.
Dave Stewart calls when they’re on the seventeenth green. He says, “You saw the new contract?” He says, “This might be as good as they’re gonna do.”
Chavez kicks his golf ball into the hole, Mulder saying offended, “Hey! Two-stroke penalty!” and Chavez shakes his head.
“I think maybe they’ll do better,” he tells Stewart.
Stewart sighs heavily, tired of Chavez procrastinating and inventing excuses. “Let me take you and Alex out to dinner and we can figure out what you’re looking for.”
Chavez sits down on the grass, short and quick as the outfield, Mulder standing over him, fifteen feet tall. “I’m in Scottsdale.”
Stewart pauses, and Chavez gets worried. Was he not supposed to leave the state? Is he in trouble again?
“Well, when you get back, then,” Stewart says, and Chavez exhales. “Tell Mulder I said hey.”
Mulder and Chavez go out drinking and red lights cover them up like clouds. A bass beat follows them around, and Mulder wants to know, “How come you haven’t signed yet?”
Chavez laughs, scraping his hand on the brick, liking the tough ripping feel of it against his skin. “You want the truth or the, the, the thing that’s not the truth?”
Mulder looks confused, rubbing his mouth. “Well. Whatever, man,” he shrugs.
Chavez feels like he might throw up, or pass out, or disappear so swiftly nobody will ever believe he was here in the first place. He puts his hand up over his face and says, “I can’t be around him much longer, he makes me do terrible things.”
“What? I didn’t, I can’t understand you.” Mulder pulls Chavez’s hand down and winces. “Chavvy, um. You got. Dude, there’s blood on your face.”
Chavez looks down at his hand, held carefully between Mulder’s long fingers. The heel is shallowly torn open, gleaming with blood. He turns his wrist, Mulder letting him go, and watches in fascination as the light bends and curls around his knuckles.
Mulder says his name and Chavez can feel the blood on his cheekbone, drying and marking him up like an Indian, and he’s warlike, afraid of nothing.
Mulder talks in his sleep, and Chavez can hear him as he paces the hallway, calling for a bunt pop-up and mumbling Zito’s name. Chavez falls down and comes back to himself with his hand aching, unsure of how much time has passed. Mulder sleepwalks into the kitchen and then back into his bedroom, his eyes spookily half-open, saying, “hi,” both times that he passes Chavez lying on the carpet.
They eat lunch at the golf club and then Chavez leaves, waving out the car window at Mulder standing on the porch with his thumbs hooked in his pockets, hollering good luck and see you in the spring.
Stewart calls again, and Chavez pulls over to the side of the road, somewhere north of Summerland, the ocean glass-clean and Japan visible on the horizon. He sits on the hood of his car and tells Stew, yeah, coming home.
Stewart says, “Okay, let’s talk about your options for a minute.”
“I have options?” Chavez asks, blinking, and Stewart ignores him.
“Where else do you want to play?” Chavez doesn’t say anything, staring in shock at the water, and Stewart says, “Hello? You still there? Chavvy?”
“I’m here,” he manages. “Just. Where else? What do you mean?”
“Baltimore, Boston, Cleveland or New York. That’s the Yankees, obviously. Those are the ones who sound serious, anyway, but I wouldn’t count out the Braves just yet, and the Giants still need someone to hit in front of Bonds. So.”
“I, um.” Chavez takes his phone down from his ear and rests it on his leg. He follows a white sail tracing the waves, and there are little kids running around the beach in blue swim trunks, beach-towel capes tied around their necks. Stewart is saying his name again, cursing modern technology.
“Don’t wanna play anywhere else, Stew,” he hears himself saying, half-second echoed through the phone.
“You’re gonna sign?” Stewart asks, his voice picking up. “That’s fucking wonderful, kid, I’ll call Billy and we’ll get all the stuff together and-”
“I, fuck, I gotta go, man, I just crashed my car,” Chavez says quickly, and hangs up, turning his phone off and locking it in the glove compartment. He looks around for rocks to tie to his ankles, and then realizes sadly that he’s got no rope.
Back in Oakland, the sky is gold and Chavez collapses blindly into bed, sleeping for sixteen hours and awaking to his wife touching his face, turning him over onto his back. He wraps his arms around her and fights the blankets to get them both under. She whispers, how was your trip, and he breathes in the skin of his neck, pitches hanging up across the backs of his eyelids.
She leaves him alone and he wishes she wouldn’t. He gets into so much trouble when he’s left alone. Thirty-eight people call him, half of them thinking he’s been in a car wreck.
He cleans the whole apartment, until his hands smell like Windex and his ears rush with the sound of the vacuum. He almost doesn’t hear the knock on the front door, but it gets through, eventually.
Beane comes in and Chavez’s dog barks happily, pushing his head at Beane’s hand so that Beane will tug on his ears. Chavez takes hold of Tank’s collar and pulls him off, shutting him up in the den with a bewildered, wounded look on his face.
Beane is sitting at the kitchen table, ticking his nails on the wood. “How was Arizona?”
Chavez sits across from him, nervously jogging his leg. “Beautiful.”
Beane looks at him for a day or two. “Dave Stewart called me. Said that you might be dead on the side of the road somewhere.”
Chavez smiles joylessly. “Reports of my death were greatly exaggerated.”
Beane sets his mouth in a tough line, and Chavez has to clench his fists, thinking about how Billy Beane has been the one constant in his life since he was eighteen years old.
“Getting kinda fuckin’ sick of this, Chavez,” Beane tells him.
Chavez nods. “Me too,” he agrees, breaking down slowly on the inside until all he can do is lower his head, his cheek on the table and his back curved. He can hear the patter of Beane’s fingers, the whine of Tank through the door. Chavez prays endlessly for some kind of peace to be returned to him, his lips moving against the waxy surface.
Beane gets up, comes round the table to rest his hand on the back of Chavez’s head. The worst part is that now Chavez can breathe, the world clicking into place.
“You want to stay here,” Beane says quietly. Chavez hums low, squeezing his eyes shut, Beane’s thumb stroking the nape of his neck. “You’d be lost anywhere else. So it’s not complicated at all, right? Easiest decision you’ll ever make.”
Billy Beane is offering him fifty-nine million dollars over seven years to stay within arm’s reach. Eric Chavez is doing all he can to figure out if it’s worth it.
He twists and rolls out of the chair, his knees hitting the tile with an audible crack, a ring of pain. He hooks his hands in Beane’s belt and pushes him against the wall, guiding Beane by the knobby bones of his hips. Chavez looks up at Beane with his face lit, and Beane’s hand is still on the back of his neck.
“What the fuck is it about you?” Chavez asks hoarsely. “You gotta be like this all the time, you never even gave me a chance.”
Beane’s eyes narrow, his pulse jerking against the backs of Chavez’s fingers, which have snuck in under his clothes and are pinned into the hollows of Beane’s hips. “Never gave you a chance?” he repeats, incredulous.
Chavez moans and buries his face in Beane’s stomach, cotton in his mouth and a terrible sunken feeling in his chest, the awareness that he’s not going to get over this.
“I’m sorry that me trying to give you everything you’ve ever wanted is such a problem for you,” Beane says, oddly not sounding sarcastic at all. “But nobody forced you to get down on your knees.”
Chavez slides his hands up under Beane’s shirt, linking at the small of his back, just breathing for a minute, fighting to pull himself together. He noses Beane’s shirt up and kisses the plane of his stomach, thinking of things difficult and clean and sharp like this, all his bad ideas turning back on him as if they’d never left.
He mouths into Beane’s skin, his teeth skimming, ‘let me go, let me go,’ and his arms shake against Beane’s sides, his fingers digging in. Beane’s breath draws short and his hand combs through Chavez’s hair, and there’s nothing Chavez can do but keep going.
Chavez stares at himself in the mirror, bare-chested with mouth prints and stubble burn all over his neck and shoulder blades and stomach. This will get him caught, as his insomnia and trembling hands have not, and Tank gets up on the toilet, stands on his hind legs, balancing with his paws on the bathroom counter, rolling his eyes whitely at Chavez in the mirror.
“See, boy,” Chavez tells him, petting his head. “This is what happens when you’re looking at the pitcher instead of the pitch.” Tank looks confused, as he has a tendency to do, but then, Tank’s never been much for the intricacies of the game.
Eric Chavez leaves his wife a note saying that he’s going to play with Tank at the park, and picks a patch of ground too hard-packed, the winter grass shredded down. He wrestles with his dog and crashes his shoulder into the ground again and again, until there are enough contusions on his body to cover up the evidence of Billy Beane’s mouth and hands.
Beane keeps offering him more money. Sixty million, sixty-two, sixty-three. Chavez knows the limit of this club as well as he knows anything, and he knows they’re closing in on it. Dave Stewart calls and tells him each new high, sounding weary and unsurprised when Chavez echoes back, let me think about it. Stewart tells him that if they don’t have a deal done by the time spring training is over, they won’t sign at all, and Chavez agrees.
The next day, Stewart tells the same thing to a reporter, and suddenly all anyone talks about is where Eric Chavez will end up. Chavez wants to know as much as anyone; his TV stays tuned to ESPN News all day long.
And birds fly in chased patterns out the open window, black and blue like bruises. Chavez has always believed that he would wake up some morning and say, this is the only place I want to be, but not this morning.
Beane shows up again and again, in his worn leather jacket and the frayed collars on his T-shirts, smirking as the pitchers yell over Chavez’s speaker phone, together again at last in Phoenix. Beane is heartbreaking on Valentine’s Day and flying down to Arizona at least twice a week, getting back in the small hours of the morning and he keeps saying, nothing you’ve told me for the past six months has made any sense. He keeps wanting to know, are you done yet?
Chavez sits on the steps and thinks about how no matter who leaves, no matter how impossible it seems, they’ve always been able to recover. And by the All-Star break it’s like the team has never looked different. Zito is scared and calling too often, Mulder teasing him in the background, and Chavez appreciates the concern, but he knows Zito will get over him, and so will Mulder, and so will Beane, without a doubt.
No sort of morality, fucking around with one of his players. It might even be illegal, Chavez isn’t sure. All he knows is that he’s put every part of his life in Billy Beane’s hands, which is probably not the best idea he’s ever had.
Chavez reports to spring training with his hair cut short and Beane’s fingerprints around his wrists. His eyes gape and start to itch badly, and he can’t find his swing.
Dave Stewart comes down to meet him, and says in the parking lot of the training center, “Sixty-six million dollars. Six years.”
Math has never been Chavez’s strong suit, but he can figure that one out pretty quickly.
“That’s more than they can afford.”
Stewart shrugs. “They’re offering it, they better be able to afford it.”
Chavez shakes his head, squinting against the flat white light. “Nobody’s ever gotten that kind of money from them.”
“You’re right, actually. This breaks an Oakland record. If you agree to it, of course.” Stewart isn’t even fazed by this anymore, having spent the winter hearing Chavez brush him off.
Chavez puts his hands in his pockets and begins, “Let me-”
“-think about it,” Stewart finishes for him with a sigh. “Look, kid, tell you this right now, they won’t go higher than this. They can’t. Literally, they cannot afford anything more. So this is it. Figure out what you want, and call Billy Beane.”
Chavez snatches a guilty look at his agent, thinking that usually those two events happen in reverse order.
“The season starts in two weeks,” Stewart reminds him, and leaves.
Billy Beane is sitting in his car in front of the condo complex where Chavez is staying, talking on the phone with the engine running, the air conditioner blasting.
Chavez knocks on the window and Beane shoots him a look, gesturing impatiently at the condo. Chavez goes inside, leaving the door ajar, wringing his hands. It takes Beane almost twenty minutes to come inside, and Chavez doesn’t do anything for the entire time except sit and stare at the door.
Beane curls his mouth into a semblance of a smile and looks down at him, the contract rolled up in his hand. “Well.”
Chavez swallows. “Yeah.”
They don’t say anything for awhile. Chavez scratches at the fabric of the chair, feeling hot and sick and missing his wife.
Eventually, Beane spreads his hands out, the contract held cylindrically like a tiny bat. “Tell me what I can say that’ll make you sign.”
Chavez leans his head back, staring up at the ceiling, his throat moving nervously. “I don’t know, man. That you’re leaving the team, maybe. That’s all I can think of.”
“I’m not leaving the team. It’s my goddamn team, I built it.”
“I know you did. I was the first, I know what you’ve done.”
Beane exhales audibly, and his feet rasp on the carpet as he starts to come to Chavez. Chavez drops his head and catches Beane’s gaze, holding up his hands.
“Please don’t come over here. Don’t touch me or, or do anything to me. Just stay there and let me think, okay?”
Beane stops, looking slightly surprised. Chavez breathes and there’s pale red dust on the cuffs of his jeans, ground into his elbows.
“What I need,” he says after a long moment, forcing himself to look Beane in the eyes, “is for you to stay away from me. And then I’ll play for you and thank god every day that I do.”
Beane put his free hand in his pocket, slowly tapping the contract against his leg. “You’ve gotten tired of it?”
Chavez rubs his face. “I could never figure out what you wanted with me, or what I wanted with you, and it was, like, just because we went to the same school or something, just because I’m here and you’re not. Which isn’t reason enough.”
“That’s not what I asked you,” Beane says sharply.
Chavez bites his lip, and says too fast, “I haven’t gotten tired of it and I never will. So keep the fuck away from me and at least it’ll only be in my head that I’m going to hell.”
They stare at each other for awhile. Somewhere outside, by the pool, two boys are hollering and laughing, their feet slapping on the cement. Sweat rolls out of Chavez’s hair and down the back of his neck, and there’s nothing he doesn’t want from Beane.
“I’ll stay away,” Beane says quietly. “I give you my word.”
Chavez presses his fists against his eyes, and says, “Bring me a motherfucking pen.”
Chavez will be the heart of the Oakland A’s for as long as Billy Beane is the soul, and it will be years before he can make sense of the betrayal he feels at this moment, the paper-cut on his thumb and the smear of ink on the side of his hand, the color of Billy Beane’s eyes growing light, as if he’s been somehow forgiven.
THE END
I dream of two things. A Giants-A's World Series, and Barry Zito wearing green and gold and pitching on Opening Night at the Coliseum six months from now.