nobody's irredeemable
sick of talking about baseball, but that'll pass.
Revisionist History
On the first day of the new season, Zito wakes up with a rollerskate under his head.
There’s a kid nearby, black-haired kid with bare feet, eating a Hot Pocket and studying him from above. Zito doesn’t recognize him, nor this two-car garage with its bikes like cages and dusty cardboard boxes piled waist-high.
He begs for coffee, though he honestly hates coffee, it’s the only thing he can think of. Familiar wreck of a hangover dragging down his shoulders, six in the morning on a Monday, still shy of spring. But Zito hasn’t figured that out again.
The house is another Eichler, white plaster walls and posterboard doors, and the kid’s name is, “Dan. Danny,” and he’s looking back over his shoulder at Zito, leading him to the kitchen.
The coffee is sour and stale, but Zito doesn’t care. His back cracks every time he moves. In the side of the toaster, he sees the red wheel-shaped indent on his cheek, a fingerprint of grime on his jaw.
Zito asks, “Where are we?” and Danny tells him Monterey Park. Zito’s surprised, farther than he thought, run out of town again. Danny’s fingers are shining with grease, sitting on the counter with his heels tocking against the low cabinet.
Zito finds his shirt under the kitchen table. Danny drinks orange juice straight from the bottle, head thrown back and throat moving smoothly, and Zito notices that he’s pretty fucking hot, albeit criminally young. Zito’s only seventeen, though, so he can’t get in trouble.
“Don’t think I’m, like, the rudest person in the world,” Zito says through his blinding headache, “but did we fuck around last night?”
Danny squints at him sideways, pulling off the bottle with a pop. He grins messy, pulp between his teeth. “Sure did.”
And Zito grins back, good, good, dry-swallows four Excedrin and says he’s got to take off. Danny walks him to the door, kisses him hard and lets him go. Zito bangs through the screen door, hollering over his shoulder, see you around, and then he’s running, railroaded, finally remembering what day it is.
He’ll never make it in time.
*
This is how he’s spent most of his senior year.
Couches and backseats and the alley next to the garage, out behind the gym, in the middle of the outfield long after the sun has set. Zito ends up at parties without a clear sequence of events. He wakes up even worse, and sometimes there’s a guy, sometimes there’s not.
Zito might graduate or he might just get drafted, he might drop out and take a job at his cousin’s photo shop. He’s drunk most of the time, but that’s just unstable denial, not having to think about where he is or where he’s going or what’s wrong with him.
All he’s trying to do right now is survive the next six months.
*
Zito remembers a little bit, twenty miles over the speed limit burning south down the highway. Window open, slamming his hair back, he remembers the late afternoon decision to go to L.A., a friend of a friend of a friend’s party. Maybe even Danny, but probably not, because Zito’s life never comes together that neatly.
He was already drunk, letting someone else drive his car, string-cut in the back. Watching the shadows move across the padded ceiling. Too far to go, really, for a house party, but there were supposed to be kegs and Hawaiian weed. Shiny new people, halloween lights in the backyard, and a good-looking sophomore to suck Zito off in the garage after his friends had abandoned him.
Zito calls his parents from a pay phone outside city limits, leaves a message on the machine saying that he’s still alive.
He makes better time than he thought. The parking lot’s full, so he skids back around a side street and is relieved that his gear is still in the trunk. He ducks through some bushes, scratching up his hands. In the northwest corner, backed up by chainlink and trees, he sees a well-known Volvo, maroon-colored and dented all to hell, two familiar shapes visible through the window.
Zito crashes into the backseat, into a haze of smoke. Munson cries intruder and pelts him with coins. Chavez’s face swims in the rearview mirror.
“Knock that shit off, Munce, I’m hungover.”
He is, too, now that he’s not moving at high speeds anymore, his battered headache only slightly dimmed by the painkillers. He lies down on the seat and curls up, clutching his elbows in his hands.
“Sorry fucking sight, isn’t he?” Munson says to Chavez. Chavez blinks down at Zito and reaches through the seats, brushes his fingertips across the bruise on Zito’s face, asks him what happened.
Zito watches the smoke filter through the smudgy sunlight, catching out twists and ribbons. “Slept on a rollerskate.”
Munson bursts into giggles, choking and curving his shoulders down to take a hit off the blue glassy. Zito thinks about Danny’s mouth open on his stomach.
“You disappeared,” Chavez tells him. “Your dad called my house.”
Oh Jesus Christ. Zito squeezes his eyes shut and bites the skiddy slick vinyl of the seat, crossing his fingers under his arms. But he’s got nothing to worry about. Chavez lied for him, same as always. Zito snakes his arm between the seats and captures the pipe, taking an awkward sideways hit and then another and then another, until his headache is a memory and Munson calls him out, fucking bogart.
Zito’s eyes are bright red. They repack the bowl a couple more times, talking about the new season that will begin at three-fifteen this afternoon, the rumor of a new coach.
Chavez slithers into the back, laughing hard, and collapses on top of Zito, whooshing the air out of him. Chavez’s legs are in the seat well and his head is on Zito’s chest and Zito can taste the gel Chavez uses in his hair, acrid and tearing up his throat.
Chavez asks him if he’s okay, and Zito pffts, like he hasn’t gotten through worse. Munson, alone in the shotgun seat, taps the ash out into the ashtray, leaving a black circle on the palm of his hand, and downs a Coke.
“C’mon, we’re gonna be late.”
The door opens on the morning and Zito hisses like something undead. Chavez mumbles against his shoulder, “You’re wearing the same stuff as yesterday,” and then crawls out headfirst, hands on the asphalt.
A long way off across the parking lot, the chunky brown buildings of Mount Carmel High School await them.
*
They’ve known each other since junior high. Zito moved into the yellow house three blocks down from Eric Chavez’s when he was twelve years old. Came across Chavez and Munson in a tree at the end of summer, matched faces like balloons among the leaves.
They hated each other for awhile, dirt wars, kidnapped bikes. Chavez slashed the laces of Zito’s mitt with his penknife and Zito was astonished by how much that hurt. Munson slammed Zito’s face into the dry grass until he cried, kneeling on his back, and two days later Zito chucked a rock at the back of Chavez’s head and knocked him out cold for five minutes.
But eventually they were all three of them invited to the same birthday party, autumn of their seventh grade year, and they got drunk on a stolen bottle of red wine, behind the bushes in the backyard. Munson got sick against the fence and Chavez kissed Zito on the mouth and after that they were best friends.
Later, they wouldn’t remember what they’d ever fought about.
*
They meet up behind the gym after classes have gotten out. The three of them, with sunken bruised eyes, are recovering tiredly from being stoned all day. Chavez is slumped on Munson’s back, his lower lip chewed raw.
Zito unearths caffeine pills from some downward pocket of his backpack, chalk in the back of his throat, and they fill up their water bottles at the fountain, washing their hands. Munson is psychosomatic; long before the caffeine could have any reasonable effect on him, he’s talking faster and drumming his fists on Chavez’s shoulder.
Chavez yawns, crack-jawed, and Zito splashes water on his face, gleaming black in Chavez’s hair.
They change in the locker room, awoken by the echo of their teammates’ voices. Chavez starts to grin again, watching Munson take off his shirt from the corner of his eye. Zito rests his forehead on the cool metal for a minute, another season, senior year.
Chavez’s fingers hook in Zito’s belt, whispering, “Maintain.”
The team heads for the field, laughing and jostling each other into walls. February in San Diego, like April anywhere else, rich green and warm enough for shirtsleeves. The field is trimmed to the millimeter, the dirt raked and bases freshly laid. Zito breathes in, the long winter skimming away. In a week, he won’t even remember.
There’s someone new, gathered with the other coaches, watching them straggle onto the infield. His face is familiar like maybe Zito saw him on the highway at some point, dark--haired and handsome, tension in the corners of his mouth.
Munson pushes his elbow into Zito’s side. “New coach, huh?”
“Guess so.”
Chavez tips his head to the side. “I. Do we know him? Doesn’t he look like someone we know?”
Zito shrugs. Caffeine pills and sunlight together have rendered him monosyllabic, wild blood under his skin, fearful of movement. He wishes idly that the season weren’t starting today, that they were over at Munson’s house smoking in the backyard, laid out on the grass with the wooden fence the limit of the world.
The team is in one place again. Chattering nervously and plucking at their gloves, squinting from under the brims of their caps, and the coaches come to some agreement, turn to face them. The new one steps in front, running a distracted hand through his hair.
“Okay, which of you are pitchers?”
They’re quiet, blinking at him like kids. Their coach’s eyebrows pull down. “Was that a tough question or something? Pitchers, come on, hands up.”
Slowly, Zito and Chavez and half the others creep their hands into the air. The coach counts them quickly, his mouth moving. Chavez gives Zito a pinched look, the sun in his eyes.
“All right. Catchers?”
Munson shoots his hand up without hesitation, grinning stupid-big. Zito wants to smack him upside the head, seeing the way Chavez is smirking and looking at the ground. Chavez lets Munson get away with everything.
“Too many goddamned pitchers,” the coach mutters at the others behind him. They nod, watching him closely. The new coach exhales heavily.
“Over the next week or so, we’re gonna figure out who belongs where. Some of you think you’re pitchers, but it’ll turn out you’re, like, second basemen. So don’t get too fucking attached.”
He stops, his mouth twisting as he spits in the dirt. “I’m not supposed to swear anymore, so don’t tell your fucking parents, all right?”
Zito watches him with wide eyes.
“Practice starts fifteen minutes after the last bell, and we go until it gets dark. Every day. Ten to four on Saturdays. Is that gonna be a problem for anyone?”
It’s twice what they did last year, and last year they won the league. Zito clutches at Chavez’s arm, tell him no, tell him that’s insane, but Chavez is dead quiet and so are the rest of them. Zito can foresee months of exhaustion, too tired to sleep.
The new coach scans them, his eyes black. His sharp features are perfect in the sun, younger than they’re used to. “You don’t know me and you don’t trust me, that’s fine. This team is not about me. But you’re still gonna do what I say.” He smiles, looking suddenly cruel. “I know what it’s like down here. I own all the records that matter at this school, and this year, we’re gonna shatter every fucking one.”
Chavez sucks in air fast between his teeth, the chainlink squealing at his back. “Fuck,” he says under his breath. “It’s Billy Beane.”
*
Billy Beane.
There is a trophy case right when you first come into the school, windex-shiny in the morning, and Billy Beane’s shadowed reckless face, standing out neatly against his red and white uniform, surrounded by gold.
Billy Beane is history, the boy they are all chasing.
Beane tore Mount Carmel up. Their old coach used to use him as an example to highlight everything they were doing wrong. Billy Beane had pitched a shutout in the last varsity game of the season as a freshman. Billy Beane had hit three triples in one game because they couldn’t move back far enough in the fenceless field. Billy Beane had five tools and a good face and always hit the cut-off man.
Billy Beane had been drafted in the first round by the New York Mets when he was eighteen years old, and his life had gone downhill from there.
*
Run ragged by their first practice, Chavez and Munson and Zito pile into Chavez’s car and ride to the beach. The sun is a slim orange hook over the water, almost gone. Beane had been true to his word, hadn’t let them go until a half hour after the streetlights had come on.
Munson has a red plaid camping thermos full of rum and coke, and under the backseat’s domelight Chavez rolls a joint on his knees, Zito’s arm around his shoulder to keep him steady. They lie on the sand, rushed by the waves. Zito’s in more pain than he thought possible after only one day.
“I’m quitting,” he says to the blackening sky.
“Shut up, you are not,” Munson says, filling the thermos cap and balancing it carefully on Zito’s stomach. Zito feels the liquid shift and roll as he breathes.
Chavez inhales slowly, a long stream of smoke shot upwards. “I kinda like him.”
Munson laughs at that, but Zito doesn’t know why. Every time he moves, his joints crackle, his muscles rubber-banded and loose under his skin. He lifts his head and drains the thermos cap, coughing.
“He’s not gonna let you pitch, Ricky,” Zito points out. Chavez had thrown five perfunctory pitches for Beane and then been shuttled off to the infielders for the rest of the afternoon, footwork, positioning, reading the ball off the bat, two steps to the right on an off-speed pitch.
Towards the end of practice, Beane had set up the pitching machine at home plate and fired dimpled yellow plastic balls at them, skipping and slamming through the dust. Even the pitchers weren’t spared, and the catchers had to start from the crouch. Zito could feel the pockmarks on his shoulders and ribs.
“He might. I don’t know what that ‘too many pitchers’ shit was about. How the hell can you have too many pitchers?”
Zito doesn’t answer, watching the stars come out. Chavez is near his elbow, Munson on Chavez’s other side. The joint bites at his fingers, handprint shapes in the sand.
Chavez and Munson are talking quietly, heads rolled together. Zito is ninety-eight percent sure that the two of them invented a secret language when they were kids and still speak in it sometimes. Chavez and Munson were best friends for five years before Zito showed up.
Zito won’t quit the team, he’s just talking shit. He takes a last hit of the jay and the smoke batters apart in the air. He doesn’t hurt so much anymore, pleasant draining soreness and his half-remembered promise to sleep at home tonight. He hasn’t seen his parents in three days.
Beane had pointed to Zito against the fence and said, “Show me your best pitch.”
Zito threw the curve to Munson behind the plate and waited for Beane’s expression to drop into something startled and blank, same as always the first time someone saw what he could do, but it hadn’t happened.
It makes Zito feel decidedly off-balance.
“Barry, hey.” Chavez presses his face into Zito’s shoulder, breath hot through Zito’s shirt. “Munce’s wasted already.”
Zito touches Chavez’s side absently, ranking his fingers on the hard line of muscle. Somewhere in the background, Eric Munson is giggling.
*
That night, after diner food and coffee to sober up, Zito gets home past midnight and there’s a note on the kitchen table reminding him to get the oil in his car changed, and twenty dollars in fives and tens for the week’s lunch money. His parents are asleep.
Zito crashes into bed still wearing his jeans, his head spinning. The pink moon clings to the garage roof out his window. Zito puts a new tape in his Walkman and unbuttons his fly. With all the lights off, he pictures Danny’s wet mouth and Eric Chavez’s hands, scratch of teeth on cotton, but he’s still pretty fucked up and Billy Beane’s changeless face is what reoccurs.
*
Class is endless. Zito sleeps through Economics, and at break Munson laughs at him, tells him he’s got pencil on his face. Two words are still legible from his notes, transferred from paper to still-bruised skin: forces of.
Zito licks his fingers and rubs it off, goes with Munson out behind the gym and they kick a can back and forth, sharing a Coke and some potato chips. The bell explodes overhead, and they separate near the library. Chavez is in his Cold War class, his head already on the desk when Zito comes in.
“Still alive?”
Chavez’s eyes crack open. “Would you be quiet, please.”
Zito wants to touch his face pretty badly.
Their teacher announces a quiz and they exchange panicked looks. They fumble, cheat their way through it, flashing each other signs and letters and mouthing, what’d you get for number four?
It’s never really worked for them, and Zito is rubbing his face without realizing it, pressing firmly over the jut of his cheekbone.
His lighter is dead, a burned patch on his thumb. Chavez teaches Zito to light matches one-handed and they hotbox his car during lunch, Chavez sitting against the door with his legs across Munson’s lap.
“Are you going to English?” Chavez asks Zito, rolling his head back on the foggy window.
“Oh god. No.” Zito counts quickly on his fingers, but he can’t remember the last time he made it to that class.
“You should come with me, then. We gotta buy a new bat.”
Munson had broken their old one over the weekend, inside-out on Zito’s make-believe slider, long splinter in the wood and Chavez had made Zito keep pitching to him until the barrel shattered.
They had decided when they were fourteen to prepare themselves in every way. They only used aluminum bats at school.
“Do we have enough money?”
Zito twists to look between the seats. Munson’s head is back, his starry red eyes blinking at the ceiling, but he doesn’t owe anything on this because he’s been buying their pot all month. Chavez levers up to get his wallet from his back pocket, thumbing through the bills with his lips moving as he counts. Zito unearths his lunch money and hands it over. Eric Chavez smiles at him, slow and pretty in the midday light.
The three of them have lived communally since they were thirteen.
“Forty-two,” Chavez pronounces.
“Not enough,” Munson chimes in, surprising Zito, who thought he wasn’t paying attention. “And don’t say we can just get one of those ash ones, either. Not fucking around with that shit anymore, Chav, fucking thing breaks like glass if I hit it off the end even a little bit, like, you wanna know why it’s only thirty dollars, it’s because it sucks, and-”
“Okay.” Chavez kicks him in the ribs. “God. We’ll find eight dollars somewhere and get you a fucking maple bat. Or you could fucking whine about it some more.”
Munson drops his head down and grins untidily at him. Zito watches as Chavez’s mouth softens, his toes curling on Munson’s stomach. Zito looks away.
“You think we’ll get back in time for practice?” he asks, his throat thick, tongue sticky-dry. The parking lot gleams and seems to be miles underwater, shimmering through the dirty windows of the car.
“I’m not gonna risk anything on the second day,” Chavez answers, but he’s still looking at Munson and Zito’s chest hurts.
*
In the sporting goods store, Chavez gets happily lost. Zito catches glimpses of him, partial between the racks and aisles, cutting neat swings with each wooden bat. Zito sees the smooth torque of his hips and it makes his breath fall short.
Zito’s equilibrium is shot and he stumbles, knocks over several boxes of baseballs. They crash and spill open, dozens of white balls rolling across the gray concrete floor. He feels for a moment like crying, pressing his fists against his eyes.
He takes off before anyone can see what he’s done. Sitting on the curb, the sun is flat and treacherous, bleeding through the palm trees.
*
Practice is no better the second day.
Beane makes them run sprints across the outfield until Zito’s heart feels dense as a chunk of heated lead. Two of the juniors throw up behind the bleachers and only one staggers back onto the field afterwards.
Munson is on his knees behind home plate, firing throw after throw down to second base. Sweat runs wildly down his face, soaking his shirt under the straps of his chest protector. The heel of Chavez’s hand is already torn open, blood on the side of his neck and Zito is kinda unsettled by the sight of it.
Beane asks him sharply, “Do you throw anything except that fucking curve?”
Zito’s mouth opens, but he can’t think of anything to say. He’s never really needed to throw anything else. He looks down at the ball in his hand, brown-scuffed, stitches like teeth.
“Here.” Beane takes hold of Zito’s wrist and Zito swallows hard. Beane turns the ball and sets Zito’s fingers in a four-seam grip. Zito is fascinated by the crosshatch of Beane’s fingers across his own. “Do that for the rest of the day. Just that. Just throw straight.”
He steps away and Zito stares at him in confusion, compact planes of Beane’s face, the bite of his eyebrows into his temples and the ragged dark hair into which Zito had imagined pushing his hand last night. Last night was a long time ago, though.
Beane almost smiles, eyes clean. “Go ahead, deuce,” he says, and Zito isn’t the kind of guy who disobeys direct orders.
He throws fastballs for hours. Everything narrows down to the black of the plate and Beane near to him, telling him over the top, telling him let your wrist go, shocking Zito by touching his hip briefly, telling him this is where you should end.
Everything’s in motion.
Munson sprawls on the dugout bench when the sun finally goes down, his chest juddering. Chavez collapses on the steps, his arms folded under his head, infield dirt ground into his hands and across his chin. Zito feels like he could lift them both up and carry them to the car without pain.
He looks back and sees Beane leaning on the fence, in the rising yellow light from the parking lot. Beane’s scribbling in a little spiral-bound notebook, his head resting on the chainlink and Zito can almost make out his hair woven through the metal.
*
They go over to Zito’s house, stumbling and holding each other up on the walk. The streetlights fall gold-soft all over them, and Munson is saying unintelligible things against Zito’s shoulder. Chavez is checking the sky for summer constellations, something that points north.
Zito’s dad is at the kitchen table when they come in, and Zito is thankful that they have not yet smoked the jay that is tucked behind his ear, hidden in his hair. He’s never been very good at acting sober in front of his parents.
“Hi, Joe,” Chavez says. Zito dumps Munson into a chair and winces, feeling his back strain.
“Hey, Dad.”
Zito’s dad smiles at them, newsprint on the side of his hand. “Evening, Erics, Barry.”
Zito hasn’t seen him since last Thursday night. Another thirty-six hour Friday and Saturday spent sleeping off the night on Eric Munson’s floor, Sunday at the beach, the party in Monterey Park and school, hospital parking lots and running sprints under Billy Beane’s watchful glare, roads half out into the desert, coming home past midnight, anxious and stoned. His father has new lines around his eyes, looking tired.
Munson has his arms folded on the table and his head burrowed, flicker of dirty brown hair on his forearms.
“How’s the team?” Joe asks.
Chavez groans theatrically and thomps Munson on the back. Munson makes a discontented noise into the crooks of his elbows. Zito rolls his eyes.
“It’s all right. We got a new coach, you know? He’s working us pretty hard.”
Joe nods, standing to wash out his coffee cup. “You’ll be all right. Always are. You want something to eat? I can make some sandwiches.”
Zito looks over at Chavez and they have a quick conversation with their eyes. “That’s okay, man. We went to In-N-Out on the way home.”
“You shouldn’t eat that stuff in season. Eric, tell him he shouldn’t eat that stuff in season.”
Chavez grins, his hand hooked in the back of Munson’s shirt. “Barry, listen to your dad.”
Zito rolls his eyes again, and Joe yawns. “Well, I’m going to bed,” Joe tells them, half-smile on his mouth, happy to have them here. “You think you’ll make it home for dinner tomorrow?”
Zito shrugs. “Maybe.”
“I’ll come, Joe,” Munson says, muffled. “Are you making lasagna?”
Joe laughs, and Munson lifts his head momentarily to grin at him. Joe puts his hand on Zito’s shoulder and pulls him down to kiss the side of his head. “Don’t stay up too late, boys.”
He claps both Erics on the back and then he disappears down the hall. Zito raids the cabinets for sugared cereal and potato chips, Chavez stealing three beers and Munson the comics section of the newspaper. They shuffle across the charred grass to the garage, which is set apart from the house and has been converted into a den.
It’s a little while after that, when they’re in the skinny alley between the fences, smoking the jay, and Zito is watching the moonlight cast the shadows of the power lines on Chavez’s face, that it occurs to him that his dad was waiting up, making sure he got home safe, and that strikes Zito so hard he takes a hit that feels like static electricity in his lungs.
*
Tonight, the thermos is full of Kool-Aid and vodka. Chavez’s mouth is stained red, dark in the cracks between his teeth. Munson keeps throwing baseballs at the wall. They watch fuzzy local television and the washing machine clicks and thrums.
Drunk, Zito touches Chavez’s back over and over again, pushes his hand down the length of it. Watches as Chavez presses his teeth into his lower lip and looks back at him through slit eyes. Munson is staring at the ceiling, talking about Billy Beane.
There are cats fighting in the street.
Munson passes out first, down fast fast fast with his face on his glove, curled up on the floor. Chavez is listing to one side on the couch, blinking slow and confused at the television. Zito stands and the room swims. He makes it to the wall and turns off the lights, makes it back to the couch and breaks into pieces, folding knees hips stomach shoulders. The television is like a lunar eclipse, guttering blue on Munson’s body, on Eric Chavez’s throat.
Zito closes his eyes.
Senior year, hold steady. Chavez hiccupping quietly, a rhythm of pain in Zito’s left arm, three inches left in the thermos if he needs it, if he can’t get to sleep on his own.
Some amount of time passes, and Zito resurfaces to a hand on his stomach. He can feel the scar on Chavez’s palm through his shirt. He rolls his head to the side and tries to open his eyes, tries to say, wait, not here. Tries to say, let’s go outside, the alley where all their best sins are committed.
But Chavez pushes his fingers into Zito’s mouth and unbuttons his jeans. Chavez hiccups against his neck and kisses his chin, palming Zito through his boxers and his fingers taste like Kix and leather.
*
Zito has been like this forever.
There is a rough catch in his voice and sometimes his hands open without instruction. Boys with blue eyes make his blood run cold. Boys with broad shoulders and long fingers make him drop to his knees. He likes hipbones like wings and bladed elbows and the diagonal trench where stomach and leg meet. He wants weight on his back and a fist on the nape of his neck, a black sky outside and a rollerskate under his face.
For a little while, he had Eric Chavez and it wasn’t weird then, just something else they did like putting glue in Munson’s hair or cutting fifth period. His one-half best friend, who didn’t seem to mind Zito’s hand down his pants or Zito’s mouth on his throat. Eric Chavez, who was the first person who ever kissed Zito back. Eric Chavez, who Zito pretends he doesn’t still miss.
It didn’t last, though not for the reasons that Chavez claimed. Chavez bloodied Zito’s lip and told him to fucking stop it, wide panicked eyes and Zito licked the blood off, good familiar taste in his mouth. Chavez said, “I don’t like it,” but he trembled sometimes when Zito dug his fingers into the hollows of his hips, and anyway, Zito could see the way he looked at Eric Munson. He knows they’ve each got the same scar on their palms.
That was sophomore year. Now, Zito fucks around with different guys, at house parties, in locker rooms, in the dugout in the middle of the night. He’s high or drunk for most of it, and Chavez forgets sometimes, and they backslide quick and messy in the front seat of the car, on the couch with Munson asleep on the floor, but usually only when they’re too fucked up to remember it in the morning.
*
The first thing Billy always does is run them.
They toe the first base line, knocking shoulders, coughing. Crossing in front of them on the grass, Beane takes a count, and then he shouts, go! and they take off for the fence.
Back and forth like pong, to the fence, to the line, over the grass and through the dirt, onto the gravel of the warning track. They slap their hands on the wood and catch sight of each other’s flushed hard-breathing faces as they jerk one hundred and eighty degrees around.
Then the infielders go one way, the outfielders another, the pitchers and catchers a third. Zito sticks close to Munson, holding his mask for him while Munson fastens his leg guards. Beane is talking about release points and deception and he says, fuck velocity, over and over like a mantra. Zito is trying not to look at him too long, still catching his breath.
He picks splinters out of his palm with his teeth. Chavez hasn’t looked at him all day long, staring out the window from the backseat of the car on the way in, leaving them to wait for him at lunchtime until Munson sighed and said, I guess he’s not coming.
Zito has thrown more pitches to Eric Munson than anyone else in the world; it’s something he could do and has done while asleep.
Beane stays with the pitchers for a little too long. Zito is second-day stoned, seven-hundred-and-thirty-sixth-day stoned, his short-term memory wrecked beyond measure, and he’s asking Beane all sorts of stupid questions, stuff he learned from Randy Jones five years ago. What about this arm angle, what about pitching out of the stretch, what about change of speed?
Beane spits on the ground and answers in single syllables. Arm buzzing warm, Zito is throwing on a string. There is a smear of brown grit on Munson’s forehead when he takes his mask off to wipe the sweat out of his eyes. Billy Beane’s hair has dampened to black, several days’ unshaven and Zito bites his lip.
As the sun is going down, Beane gathers them up and they drop cross-legged and half-bent in short left. Chavez is rubbing his thumb hard into the palm of his hand and his forearm, not meeting Zito’s eyes.
Zito thinks maybe something happened last night, but he can’t quite place it. Cherry Kool-Aid and blue light. Hard skin on his tongue. He has dreams like that sometimes.
Beane asks them how they’re feeling, but it’s clear he doesn’t really care. He paces back and forth before them, talking fast about strategy and perspective, outlining plans for the season that make little sense. They’re too worn down to concentrate, and also scared, kids in the grass.
Zito is watching the places where Beane has sweat through his shirt, his shoulders and across his stomach.
He keeps them for too long, and as they straggle back towards the gym, Zito hears someone muttering, “Why the fuck should we listen to him, he never batted his fucking weight in the bigs.”
It’s strange, almost like Billy Beane’s failure is a personal betrayal of each of them. Zito can’t think about it too much.
Chavez takes Munson quickly away, still wet from the shower, without checking in with Zito. Zito is abandoned, but it won’t last. It’s only Chavez, handling things badly again. He packs up slow and is the last one out.
He remembers too late that they came in together in Munson’s car this morning. It’s three miles to his house and his legs are already shaking.
Ashy bruise-colored sky, sallow parking lot lights, and Beane is at his car, hauling canvas bags of baseballs and sheaths of bats into the trunk. Zito only wants to go home and carve out an apple because his blue glassy is still in Chavez’s glove compartment, fall asleep on the couch and maybe have a good dream, but Beane is kinda undeniable.
“Hey.”
Beane looks up at him, the light falling atop his head and casting his eyes deep into shadow. “Deuce. Where’re your boys?”
Zito shrugs. “Took off already.” Stupid Eric Chavez blaming him for his dreams, as if Zito’s got a choice.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you without one of them around.”
“Yeah, well. They’re my best friends.”
“You know, ‘best’ can only refer to one thing. It’s in the definition.”
Zito gives him a suspicious look. Beane makes the little tight-mouthed smile that Zito is starting to recognize as the most he can offer.
“Well.” He pushes his hands into his pockets, unnerved by Beane scruffing a hand through his hair and making dust rise. “I should get going.”
Beane glances in the direction of Zito’s gaze, empty parking lot and a stand of trees at the periphery. “You’re walking?” Zito nods. Beane looks at his car, looks at Zito, looks back at his car. “I’ll give you a ride.”
It catches Zito off-guard, his hand tightening on the strap of his backpack. But Beane doesn’t seem to recognize no as a possible answer, walking around to the front of the car and getting in, leaning across the seat to pull up the passenger side lock.
Zito misses the handle twice, depth perception gone. He curses himself as he settles in the seat, his knees chocked up against the glove compartment.
“Pull that thing on the side of the seat, and it’ll move back,” Beane tells him, distracted. “You’re taller than most people I know.”
“You too,” Zito says idiotically. He moves the seat back and is thankful for the dark, no way for Beane to tell he’s blushing.
He’s sure that this has got to be against the rules, though, like most recreational criminals, Zito has always considered breaking the rules reason enough.
Beane’s car was once shiny and new and cost a chunk of his first-round signing bonus, but that was fifteen years ago. Now there are black grease marks on the dashboard and doors, and the automatic locks don’t work. Zito is pretty sure the floor didn’t start out this odd orangey-brown color.
The road is drunk down under the headlights, and the speaker on Zito’s side is broken, so the music from the radio, punk rock from the college station, sounds lopsided. He tries to lounge coolly in the shotgun seat, his knee resting against the door, but he’s chewing compulsively on his thumbnail and hating the fact that he’s sober.
“So. How was school?” Beane asks, looking vaguely disgusted with himself even as the question breaks the silence.
“Dude.” Zito rolls his eyes. “Like you really care.”
Beane almost smiles again. Zito thinks of it as being deprived of something vital, like air or water, to the extent that even the smallest concessions take on wild proportions. If he ever makes Beane laugh, he’s afraid his head might explode.
“Then tell me. How much do the guys hate me?”
Zito glances at him, but Beane’s watching the road, driving with one wrist. He looks ten years younger in the shuffle of the streetlamps, behind the wheel of a car that’s essentially secondhand.
“What am I, your spy now?”
“Just curious, deuce.”
Zito wonders at his new nickname, and moves his shoulders against the seat. “Nobody hates you,” he lies. Beane picks up on it immediately and snorts. Zito amends, “It’s just, we didn’t practice this much last year and we were still good.”
“Sometimes being good’s not enough.” The muscle in Beane’s jaw clenches abruptly like he hadn’t mean to say that. Zito wants to put his fingers there and feel the shift. He’s all kinds of wrong, tonight.
“Well,” Zito says. “I don’t really mind. And I don’t think most of them will either, after they get used to it. Half the team’s hoping to get drafted, so, you know. It’s good to be prepared, and stuff.”
The houses and scrub brush at the side of the road fly past like moths; Beane’s going almost double the speed limit and that doesn’t surprise Zito at all.
“You don’t want to go to college?”
“Depends on the draft.”
Zito doesn’t expect Beane to give him the standard education-first-baseball-later speech that he’s been hearing all his life. Zito can fully picture Billy Beane in his seventeen year old incarnation, longer hair brackish around his face, the lines gone from around his mouth and eyes. Lit up like a torch the day he signed his first major league contract, the moment when the world was small enough to fit in his pocket.
Zito fists his hands on his legs, smearing blood from his torn thumb on his jeans.
Beane mutters something that Zito doesn’t catch. “What?”
“I said you’re a stupid fucking kid just like every other stupid fucking kid who thinks that major league baseball is the only good reason for existing.”
Shocked, Zito doesn’t respond. Beane punches the wheel, his mouth twisted. “Fuck. Sorry. Fuck.”
Zito stares out the window, digging his nail into the palm of his hand. His face is hot and the air between them is overly thick. Beane is something like lightning under skin, all errors and insincere apology, anger vivid and real and bruised on his knuckles. Zito has spent years detaching himself in every available way, but he’s clear now and Beane is making heat curl in his stomach.
He refocuses. “Turn right at this light here,” he says quietly. Beane exhales loudly. They ride for a while, the silence only interrupted by Zito’s directions.
On Zito’s shadowy street, his house with the gold lights looking miles away from the street, Beane puts the car into park and tightens his hands on the wheel.
“I shouldn’t have said that,” Beane tells him, eyes fixed straight ahead. Zito finds himself distracted by the way Beane’s face is made up of differing shades of darkness. “It’s fine for you to want to get drafted. Like I can even fucking talk.”
“Yeah.” He’s not really listening. He wonders what Beane would do if he hooked a hand in his collar. If he pressed his thumb into the hollow under Beane’s ear, or licked the drawn-tight tendons in his arms, or skipped right to his forehead on Beane’s thigh, his teeth on the button of Beane’s jeans.
“Hey.”
Zito looks up and he’s been caught staring and there’s something new and startled in Beane’s eyes. Zito swallows and says fast, “It’s okay, Billy. You’re probably right anyway. Stupid fucking kid, me in a nutshell.” He tries to smile.
Beane shakes his head, licking his lips unconsciously. “I was the stupidest kid of all the stupid fucking kids, that’s all. So maybe I don’t want you to turn out the same way.”
Nodding, Zito clutches at the door handle, sure path of escape if he wants to take it, though he’s not certain that he actually does. The headlights are refractive and sheer on the pavement, and they’re here in the front seat of the car like Zito has been here a million times before.
“You should go,” Beane tells him, his voice strange and flat. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Zito looks at his house and it seems impossible, too clean and well-remembered. He can’t think of anything to say, no easy finish, his heart tachycardic and frightened by what the angle of Beane’s wrist is doing to him.
“Thanks. For the ride, thanks.”
Beane tips his chin, not looking at him. Zito gets out, grease and dirt and blood on his hands, and stands in the driveway watching Billy Beane’s taillights recede to nickels, match-heads, pushpin holes and then gone.
*
On Sunday, their one day off, Chavez shows up chucking little stones at Zito’s bedroom window and that means he’s been forgiven.
Munson is in the backyard, whacking rocks with a stick. Zito puts on yesterday’s jeans and a fresh shirt, smooths his hair down with water and doesn’t bother leaving a note. They spend the day at six stories, the parking garage downtown that is always abandoned on top, and the frayed edges of Zito’s mind are worn away, playing catch across the faded gray concrete, so stoned the ball looks like part of the sky, whirring down towards him.
They go to Long Beach that night, long drive with the sun going down on their left side. Munson has brought candy bars and blow-pops, and Chavez’s tongue turns blue.
The party has spilled out onto the beach by the time they get there. Zito drinks steadily, stray thoughts in his mind screwing up his equilibrium and better judgment. There’s a kid with buzzed hair and pale gray eyes, who leads Zito under the wooden deck and they jerk each other off on the sand, huge pound of feet over their heads like thunder.
Zito stumbles out and Munson finds him, laughing, pulling at his shirt, teasing him about the boy, Zito’s swollen mouth. Munson lights a jay and suddenly they’re magnetic. The moon is low on the ocean and Zito is thinking about Beane punching the steering wheel, baring his teeth.
He sleeps in the back of the car on the four a.m. drive home, his dreams fractured by Munson and Chavez talking quietly in the front seat.
*
Beane acknowledges nothing.
Zito’s just another guy on the team, someone Billy runs and watches pitch and barks at when the ball stays up. Beane doesn’t look at him any differently and doesn’t soften his voice or anything. Zito thinks maybe all it really was, was a ride home.
He acts up. He tackles Munson, and shouts from the bullpen cage at Chavez practicing with the infielders, and throws sidearm just for the hell of it, distracting everyone within earshot.
His elbow is aching and his jaw is sore from smiling, when Beane stalks over and tells him quietly to get the fuck off the field.
Zito takes off his cap and pushes a hand through his damp hair. Munson comes to stand next to him, watching Beane walk away, straight line of his back like a ruler.
“What’s going on, man?” Munson asks him. Zito shakes his head helplessly. “You can’t fuck around with a guy like that.”
Zito’s throat tightens, darting a guilty look at Munson, but it’s only a figure of speech.
“I think there’s something in that new shit we’ve been smoking,” Zito says. “It’s making me all. Crazy.”
This is, at least, partly true.
Munson snorts, pulling the laces on his glove with his teeth. “But not me and Chavvy, huh? That’s some real specific bonus we got.” He pauses. “You better go. He looked like he wanted to kill you.”
Zito looks over to where Beane is standing behind second base, his arms crossed on his chest. Chavez turns a neat double play and Beane says something uncomplimentary about his footwork, and Chavez nods, sweat dripping off his face.
Zito leaves, and is surprised when he gets to the locker room and whips his glove as hard as he can into the wall.
He sits down on the bench, his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. His spikes tick-tap on the cement and everything else is so quiet; he can hear the drip of the busted shower.
He can hear footsteps approach, growing louder and louder until they’re right on top of him, and he can taste copper.
“What the fuck is your problem?”
Pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes as hard as he can, Zito breathes out slowly. “I’m fine. I’m sorry. Just fucking around. I don’t know. Sorry, Billy, okay?”
Nothing for a moment, drip from the showers, Zito’s breath against the insides of his wrists.
“Does this happen a lot?” Beane asks, dangerously low. “Because we’ve got two weeks before the games start, and I don’t have a whole lot of fucking time to deal with this crap.”
Zito thinks about the kid in the garage that morning, not quite remembering his name, just the black hair like knife cuts in front of his eyes, and the kid under the deck in Long Beach, with the tough hands and the light in inch-wide strips between the boards. He tries to remember why they thought it was a good idea to smoke before practice today, whether or not their pot is laced, because his lungs are working at half-capacity, his head is foggy and everything is fucked up. He thinks for just a second about Eric Chavez.
He takes his hands down and looks at Beane’s feet for awhile.
“It happens sometimes,” he admits. “Not, not usually on the field. Today was just. Weird.”
“It better be weird as in never gonna happen again, understand?”
Beane is still angry, and that ticks Zito off a little bit, because at least some of this is his fault. He looks up and it turns out to be a bad idea. Beane is glaring at him, violence clearly evident in the hold of his shoulders and the line of his jaw, and Zito remembers apocryphal stories about Beane destroying things as a teenager after his rare moments of disgrace, aluminum bats at ninety degree angles, dented walls and shattered stereos.
It flashes through Zito like hard liquor. What Beane could do to him if his control gave out just a little bit more.
“Billy,” he says hoarsely, his eyes huge.
Beane goes still. His face freezes and his arms tense and he stares down at Zito. Zito thinks maybe they’re close, maybe this would be a different kind of damage than usual.
He drops to his knees on the concrete. Beane makes a bizarre sound, his hands in fists under his elbows and Zito can’t think of what Beane’s eyes look like, can’t imagine anything darker, and he has lived beneath a desert sky his whole life.
Zito’s not thinking about anything, really. He can’t spare his focus for anything beyond the physical, only reaching up and latching his hand onto Beane’s belt and starting to tug him forward, wetting his lips.
And one of Beane’s fisted hands comes flying out from the side and clocks Zito across his cheekbone and Zito falls down. It wasn’t even that hard, more shock than anything else, and Zito’s hands are flat on the locker room floor.
“Don’t, jesus, don’t do that, man,” Beane tells him, sounding purely stunned and even a little bit confused, which Zito thinks he can count as a victory.
Or he will, once he can get himself off the fucking floor.
*
Out in Munson’s backyard, lying under the old swingset, Zito is expecting lightning and feeling the grass move beneath his head. His fingertips are singed. He’s doing what he can to put his life in order.
He plays for the best high school baseball team in the country and he wants to sleep with his coach and he lives in fear of what the morning might show him.
Chavez arrives like a constellation given breath and depth, and sits on the swing. The chain is rusted and whines low. A fresh joint burns between Chavez’s fingers, and he pushes his heels on the grass. Zito remembers when the grass used to be worn away in oblong runway patches under the swings, back when he first started hanging out with Munson and Chavez, when they’d still swing occasionally.
“Where’s Munce?” Zito asks. Chavez shrugs, drawing on the jay. Munson is probably asleep in the backyard somewhere, hidden in the dark. They’ll have to find him before the sun comes up.
“So Billy said something about me maybe playing first when I’m not pitching,” Zito says. Chavez squints down at him, but doesn’t answer. “Because, like, tall and left-handed? Or something? Lemme get a hit of that.”
Chavez hands the joint down to him and Zito blows across the tip of it to stem the cherry a bit so he won’t ash in his eye or anything. Zito thinks it’s pretty remarkable that Beane wants him to be a first baseman, when he has been nothing but a pitcher since he was seven years old, but Chavez doesn’t seem to find it very interesting.
“Are you okay, Chav?”
Sort of angling his head to the side, Chavez smiles a little bit. Feral clouds overhead and Zito doesn’t know why he keeps picturing star formations and supernovas. He can’t even see the moon. Chavez’s swing is moving very slowly, back and forth like a twice-shot heartbeat.
“Billy?” Chavez asks quietly.
Zito blinks at the joint in his hand, the spot of orange illuminating the torn sides of his fingers. “What about him?”
Chavez sighs, looking up at the sky. Zito stares at the revealed length of his throat, the way Chavez looks like a statue from below.
“I’m fucked up,” Chavez tells him.
“What else is new?”
“Shut up, please.” Chavez reaches down and his hand ghosts across Zito’s cheek before he changes course and retrieves the joint. “Disregarding the fact that I’m fucked up and that I obviously have more invested in you than most other people, I need to ask, what the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
It’s a good question and probably a fair one, and nothing that should make Zito’s throat close up like this. He doesn’t know how Chavez knows, maybe just osmosis from the five years that they’ve lived hand to mouth and in each other’s pockets all the time. Maybe they share certain brain chemicals, low-level telepathy like how they always know when the other is hungry, and how the three of them always end up on the front lawn together, ready to leave without having to talk about it.
Like how Munson is aware that Zito fucks around with guys, figured it out long before Zito did, apparently. Zito never told him, it just sort of occurred that, yes, Munson knows. Munson is okay with it.
Not everything transfers, though. Munson still doesn’t know about Chavez, because Chavez thinks that telling him that one thing would mean he has to tell the rest, too.
The vague float of Chavez above him is making him dizzy, so he closes his hand on Chavez’s ankle and holds him still. Smooth bones under thin skin and Chavez’s feet must be dirty or at least grass-stained.
“I’m just. I’m thinking about something different.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know.” Zito feels his eyes burn suddenly. He’s too stoned for this, caught on the edge where everything is profound and music sounds better. “I thought. I’m allowed to do what I want, right? You, you’re not mad at me?”
Chavez half-scoffs and Zito grins, a tear snaking out the corner of his eye. It’s not that, can’t be, because Chavez never had that kind of hold over him even when they were sophomores. Zito hadn’t even wanted to look at other guys when they were sophomores, when his life revolved around movie moments and riding into the hills and finding new and exciting places to go down on Eric Chavez, but anyway, it was only four months and even if Zito suspects sometimes that he had been deeply in love with Chavez, they’d never gotten far enough to say, just you.
Chavez slides out of the swing and leaves it twisting and shivering. He sits cross-legged next to Zito and carefully puts the jay between Zito’s lips, steady as Zito inhales. Zito doesn’t have to move, his lungs doing all the work. Fog laid over cobwebs laid over cotton and Zito is barely even here anymore.
“Not mad at you. Love you.” Chavez takes the jay away and pushes his fingers across Zito’s mouth. Zito licks reflexively, thinking it’s strange that their thoughts move in such similar patterns. Chavez looks so sad. “But you know Beane is the stupidest idea ever. You’ve got to know that.”
Zito closes his eyes tightly. Nobody knows what went wrong with Billy Beane, the cause of the fragmented six years he’d spent in the majors that didn’t even add up to one full season, but Zito thinks he can see it sometimes. Sometimes he wants to write names and dates on the shower-steamed bathroom mirror, and sometimes he viscerally understands the gap between talent and heart, and sometimes it seems like a loss of the worst kind to have to throw a straight pitch.
“I’m sorry, Ricky,” he says, though he’s not sure if he’s done anything wrong except get on his knees for Beane.
Chavez’s curled hand touches the hinge of his jaw, and Chavez opens Zito’s mouth with his own, breathes rough smoke into his lungs. He pulls back and stays for a moment so close that Zito can’t really tell them apart. Zito wants to hold the back of Chavez’s neck and make him promise not to freak out tomorrow, because he’s not gonna fuck around with Chavez tonight and he shouldn’t have to suffer for the stuff that’s only happening under the surface.
He falls asleep to Chavez’s breath on his face, Chavez whispering, “So stupid, don’t you know, can’t you see.”
*
They meet behind the gym at lunch and usually they go out to one of their cars to smoke a joint and talk about the morning. The days are getting longer and Chavez is visibly distressed, hanging on Zito, pushing his face into Munson’s shoulder.
Zito’s parents have taken to leaving him notes under the windshield wiper like parking tickets. One night, or morning, really, coming home to take a shower and change clothes, it strikes him that he can’t remember which seat at the dining room table is his. It’s maybe the worst thing that’s happened to him this year.
He sleeps in Munson’s backyard and Chavez’s attic. Sometimes on the baseball field, woken up by sprinklers at six in the morning. There are scouts at practice occasionally, burnt-looking men with notebooks and radar guns in black briefcases.
Their first game is in a week. The 1996 amateur draft is in four months.
Billy Beane looks at him on the field, pinched frustrated look like he can tell how out of place Zito is playing first base. But it was Beane’s idea, and Zito gets mad at Chavez for throwing in the dirt, afraid of the runner barreling down the line. He doesn’t want to look back at Billy, wants with amazing strength for this to be over and behind him, but Beane’s the one with ghosts and Zito’s the one with his life still ahead of him.
*
more
Revisionist History
On the first day of the new season, Zito wakes up with a rollerskate under his head.
There’s a kid nearby, black-haired kid with bare feet, eating a Hot Pocket and studying him from above. Zito doesn’t recognize him, nor this two-car garage with its bikes like cages and dusty cardboard boxes piled waist-high.
He begs for coffee, though he honestly hates coffee, it’s the only thing he can think of. Familiar wreck of a hangover dragging down his shoulders, six in the morning on a Monday, still shy of spring. But Zito hasn’t figured that out again.
The house is another Eichler, white plaster walls and posterboard doors, and the kid’s name is, “Dan. Danny,” and he’s looking back over his shoulder at Zito, leading him to the kitchen.
The coffee is sour and stale, but Zito doesn’t care. His back cracks every time he moves. In the side of the toaster, he sees the red wheel-shaped indent on his cheek, a fingerprint of grime on his jaw.
Zito asks, “Where are we?” and Danny tells him Monterey Park. Zito’s surprised, farther than he thought, run out of town again. Danny’s fingers are shining with grease, sitting on the counter with his heels tocking against the low cabinet.
Zito finds his shirt under the kitchen table. Danny drinks orange juice straight from the bottle, head thrown back and throat moving smoothly, and Zito notices that he’s pretty fucking hot, albeit criminally young. Zito’s only seventeen, though, so he can’t get in trouble.
“Don’t think I’m, like, the rudest person in the world,” Zito says through his blinding headache, “but did we fuck around last night?”
Danny squints at him sideways, pulling off the bottle with a pop. He grins messy, pulp between his teeth. “Sure did.”
And Zito grins back, good, good, dry-swallows four Excedrin and says he’s got to take off. Danny walks him to the door, kisses him hard and lets him go. Zito bangs through the screen door, hollering over his shoulder, see you around, and then he’s running, railroaded, finally remembering what day it is.
He’ll never make it in time.
*
This is how he’s spent most of his senior year.
Couches and backseats and the alley next to the garage, out behind the gym, in the middle of the outfield long after the sun has set. Zito ends up at parties without a clear sequence of events. He wakes up even worse, and sometimes there’s a guy, sometimes there’s not.
Zito might graduate or he might just get drafted, he might drop out and take a job at his cousin’s photo shop. He’s drunk most of the time, but that’s just unstable denial, not having to think about where he is or where he’s going or what’s wrong with him.
All he’s trying to do right now is survive the next six months.
*
Zito remembers a little bit, twenty miles over the speed limit burning south down the highway. Window open, slamming his hair back, he remembers the late afternoon decision to go to L.A., a friend of a friend of a friend’s party. Maybe even Danny, but probably not, because Zito’s life never comes together that neatly.
He was already drunk, letting someone else drive his car, string-cut in the back. Watching the shadows move across the padded ceiling. Too far to go, really, for a house party, but there were supposed to be kegs and Hawaiian weed. Shiny new people, halloween lights in the backyard, and a good-looking sophomore to suck Zito off in the garage after his friends had abandoned him.
Zito calls his parents from a pay phone outside city limits, leaves a message on the machine saying that he’s still alive.
He makes better time than he thought. The parking lot’s full, so he skids back around a side street and is relieved that his gear is still in the trunk. He ducks through some bushes, scratching up his hands. In the northwest corner, backed up by chainlink and trees, he sees a well-known Volvo, maroon-colored and dented all to hell, two familiar shapes visible through the window.
Zito crashes into the backseat, into a haze of smoke. Munson cries intruder and pelts him with coins. Chavez’s face swims in the rearview mirror.
“Knock that shit off, Munce, I’m hungover.”
He is, too, now that he’s not moving at high speeds anymore, his battered headache only slightly dimmed by the painkillers. He lies down on the seat and curls up, clutching his elbows in his hands.
“Sorry fucking sight, isn’t he?” Munson says to Chavez. Chavez blinks down at Zito and reaches through the seats, brushes his fingertips across the bruise on Zito’s face, asks him what happened.
Zito watches the smoke filter through the smudgy sunlight, catching out twists and ribbons. “Slept on a rollerskate.”
Munson bursts into giggles, choking and curving his shoulders down to take a hit off the blue glassy. Zito thinks about Danny’s mouth open on his stomach.
“You disappeared,” Chavez tells him. “Your dad called my house.”
Oh Jesus Christ. Zito squeezes his eyes shut and bites the skiddy slick vinyl of the seat, crossing his fingers under his arms. But he’s got nothing to worry about. Chavez lied for him, same as always. Zito snakes his arm between the seats and captures the pipe, taking an awkward sideways hit and then another and then another, until his headache is a memory and Munson calls him out, fucking bogart.
Zito’s eyes are bright red. They repack the bowl a couple more times, talking about the new season that will begin at three-fifteen this afternoon, the rumor of a new coach.
Chavez slithers into the back, laughing hard, and collapses on top of Zito, whooshing the air out of him. Chavez’s legs are in the seat well and his head is on Zito’s chest and Zito can taste the gel Chavez uses in his hair, acrid and tearing up his throat.
Chavez asks him if he’s okay, and Zito pffts, like he hasn’t gotten through worse. Munson, alone in the shotgun seat, taps the ash out into the ashtray, leaving a black circle on the palm of his hand, and downs a Coke.
“C’mon, we’re gonna be late.”
The door opens on the morning and Zito hisses like something undead. Chavez mumbles against his shoulder, “You’re wearing the same stuff as yesterday,” and then crawls out headfirst, hands on the asphalt.
A long way off across the parking lot, the chunky brown buildings of Mount Carmel High School await them.
*
They’ve known each other since junior high. Zito moved into the yellow house three blocks down from Eric Chavez’s when he was twelve years old. Came across Chavez and Munson in a tree at the end of summer, matched faces like balloons among the leaves.
They hated each other for awhile, dirt wars, kidnapped bikes. Chavez slashed the laces of Zito’s mitt with his penknife and Zito was astonished by how much that hurt. Munson slammed Zito’s face into the dry grass until he cried, kneeling on his back, and two days later Zito chucked a rock at the back of Chavez’s head and knocked him out cold for five minutes.
But eventually they were all three of them invited to the same birthday party, autumn of their seventh grade year, and they got drunk on a stolen bottle of red wine, behind the bushes in the backyard. Munson got sick against the fence and Chavez kissed Zito on the mouth and after that they were best friends.
Later, they wouldn’t remember what they’d ever fought about.
*
They meet up behind the gym after classes have gotten out. The three of them, with sunken bruised eyes, are recovering tiredly from being stoned all day. Chavez is slumped on Munson’s back, his lower lip chewed raw.
Zito unearths caffeine pills from some downward pocket of his backpack, chalk in the back of his throat, and they fill up their water bottles at the fountain, washing their hands. Munson is psychosomatic; long before the caffeine could have any reasonable effect on him, he’s talking faster and drumming his fists on Chavez’s shoulder.
Chavez yawns, crack-jawed, and Zito splashes water on his face, gleaming black in Chavez’s hair.
They change in the locker room, awoken by the echo of their teammates’ voices. Chavez starts to grin again, watching Munson take off his shirt from the corner of his eye. Zito rests his forehead on the cool metal for a minute, another season, senior year.
Chavez’s fingers hook in Zito’s belt, whispering, “Maintain.”
The team heads for the field, laughing and jostling each other into walls. February in San Diego, like April anywhere else, rich green and warm enough for shirtsleeves. The field is trimmed to the millimeter, the dirt raked and bases freshly laid. Zito breathes in, the long winter skimming away. In a week, he won’t even remember.
There’s someone new, gathered with the other coaches, watching them straggle onto the infield. His face is familiar like maybe Zito saw him on the highway at some point, dark--haired and handsome, tension in the corners of his mouth.
Munson pushes his elbow into Zito’s side. “New coach, huh?”
“Guess so.”
Chavez tips his head to the side. “I. Do we know him? Doesn’t he look like someone we know?”
Zito shrugs. Caffeine pills and sunlight together have rendered him monosyllabic, wild blood under his skin, fearful of movement. He wishes idly that the season weren’t starting today, that they were over at Munson’s house smoking in the backyard, laid out on the grass with the wooden fence the limit of the world.
The team is in one place again. Chattering nervously and plucking at their gloves, squinting from under the brims of their caps, and the coaches come to some agreement, turn to face them. The new one steps in front, running a distracted hand through his hair.
“Okay, which of you are pitchers?”
They’re quiet, blinking at him like kids. Their coach’s eyebrows pull down. “Was that a tough question or something? Pitchers, come on, hands up.”
Slowly, Zito and Chavez and half the others creep their hands into the air. The coach counts them quickly, his mouth moving. Chavez gives Zito a pinched look, the sun in his eyes.
“All right. Catchers?”
Munson shoots his hand up without hesitation, grinning stupid-big. Zito wants to smack him upside the head, seeing the way Chavez is smirking and looking at the ground. Chavez lets Munson get away with everything.
“Too many goddamned pitchers,” the coach mutters at the others behind him. They nod, watching him closely. The new coach exhales heavily.
“Over the next week or so, we’re gonna figure out who belongs where. Some of you think you’re pitchers, but it’ll turn out you’re, like, second basemen. So don’t get too fucking attached.”
He stops, his mouth twisting as he spits in the dirt. “I’m not supposed to swear anymore, so don’t tell your fucking parents, all right?”
Zito watches him with wide eyes.
“Practice starts fifteen minutes after the last bell, and we go until it gets dark. Every day. Ten to four on Saturdays. Is that gonna be a problem for anyone?”
It’s twice what they did last year, and last year they won the league. Zito clutches at Chavez’s arm, tell him no, tell him that’s insane, but Chavez is dead quiet and so are the rest of them. Zito can foresee months of exhaustion, too tired to sleep.
The new coach scans them, his eyes black. His sharp features are perfect in the sun, younger than they’re used to. “You don’t know me and you don’t trust me, that’s fine. This team is not about me. But you’re still gonna do what I say.” He smiles, looking suddenly cruel. “I know what it’s like down here. I own all the records that matter at this school, and this year, we’re gonna shatter every fucking one.”
Chavez sucks in air fast between his teeth, the chainlink squealing at his back. “Fuck,” he says under his breath. “It’s Billy Beane.”
*
Billy Beane.
There is a trophy case right when you first come into the school, windex-shiny in the morning, and Billy Beane’s shadowed reckless face, standing out neatly against his red and white uniform, surrounded by gold.
Billy Beane is history, the boy they are all chasing.
Beane tore Mount Carmel up. Their old coach used to use him as an example to highlight everything they were doing wrong. Billy Beane had pitched a shutout in the last varsity game of the season as a freshman. Billy Beane had hit three triples in one game because they couldn’t move back far enough in the fenceless field. Billy Beane had five tools and a good face and always hit the cut-off man.
Billy Beane had been drafted in the first round by the New York Mets when he was eighteen years old, and his life had gone downhill from there.
*
Run ragged by their first practice, Chavez and Munson and Zito pile into Chavez’s car and ride to the beach. The sun is a slim orange hook over the water, almost gone. Beane had been true to his word, hadn’t let them go until a half hour after the streetlights had come on.
Munson has a red plaid camping thermos full of rum and coke, and under the backseat’s domelight Chavez rolls a joint on his knees, Zito’s arm around his shoulder to keep him steady. They lie on the sand, rushed by the waves. Zito’s in more pain than he thought possible after only one day.
“I’m quitting,” he says to the blackening sky.
“Shut up, you are not,” Munson says, filling the thermos cap and balancing it carefully on Zito’s stomach. Zito feels the liquid shift and roll as he breathes.
Chavez inhales slowly, a long stream of smoke shot upwards. “I kinda like him.”
Munson laughs at that, but Zito doesn’t know why. Every time he moves, his joints crackle, his muscles rubber-banded and loose under his skin. He lifts his head and drains the thermos cap, coughing.
“He’s not gonna let you pitch, Ricky,” Zito points out. Chavez had thrown five perfunctory pitches for Beane and then been shuttled off to the infielders for the rest of the afternoon, footwork, positioning, reading the ball off the bat, two steps to the right on an off-speed pitch.
Towards the end of practice, Beane had set up the pitching machine at home plate and fired dimpled yellow plastic balls at them, skipping and slamming through the dust. Even the pitchers weren’t spared, and the catchers had to start from the crouch. Zito could feel the pockmarks on his shoulders and ribs.
“He might. I don’t know what that ‘too many pitchers’ shit was about. How the hell can you have too many pitchers?”
Zito doesn’t answer, watching the stars come out. Chavez is near his elbow, Munson on Chavez’s other side. The joint bites at his fingers, handprint shapes in the sand.
Chavez and Munson are talking quietly, heads rolled together. Zito is ninety-eight percent sure that the two of them invented a secret language when they were kids and still speak in it sometimes. Chavez and Munson were best friends for five years before Zito showed up.
Zito won’t quit the team, he’s just talking shit. He takes a last hit of the jay and the smoke batters apart in the air. He doesn’t hurt so much anymore, pleasant draining soreness and his half-remembered promise to sleep at home tonight. He hasn’t seen his parents in three days.
Beane had pointed to Zito against the fence and said, “Show me your best pitch.”
Zito threw the curve to Munson behind the plate and waited for Beane’s expression to drop into something startled and blank, same as always the first time someone saw what he could do, but it hadn’t happened.
It makes Zito feel decidedly off-balance.
“Barry, hey.” Chavez presses his face into Zito’s shoulder, breath hot through Zito’s shirt. “Munce’s wasted already.”
Zito touches Chavez’s side absently, ranking his fingers on the hard line of muscle. Somewhere in the background, Eric Munson is giggling.
*
That night, after diner food and coffee to sober up, Zito gets home past midnight and there’s a note on the kitchen table reminding him to get the oil in his car changed, and twenty dollars in fives and tens for the week’s lunch money. His parents are asleep.
Zito crashes into bed still wearing his jeans, his head spinning. The pink moon clings to the garage roof out his window. Zito puts a new tape in his Walkman and unbuttons his fly. With all the lights off, he pictures Danny’s wet mouth and Eric Chavez’s hands, scratch of teeth on cotton, but he’s still pretty fucked up and Billy Beane’s changeless face is what reoccurs.
*
Class is endless. Zito sleeps through Economics, and at break Munson laughs at him, tells him he’s got pencil on his face. Two words are still legible from his notes, transferred from paper to still-bruised skin: forces of.
Zito licks his fingers and rubs it off, goes with Munson out behind the gym and they kick a can back and forth, sharing a Coke and some potato chips. The bell explodes overhead, and they separate near the library. Chavez is in his Cold War class, his head already on the desk when Zito comes in.
“Still alive?”
Chavez’s eyes crack open. “Would you be quiet, please.”
Zito wants to touch his face pretty badly.
Their teacher announces a quiz and they exchange panicked looks. They fumble, cheat their way through it, flashing each other signs and letters and mouthing, what’d you get for number four?
It’s never really worked for them, and Zito is rubbing his face without realizing it, pressing firmly over the jut of his cheekbone.
His lighter is dead, a burned patch on his thumb. Chavez teaches Zito to light matches one-handed and they hotbox his car during lunch, Chavez sitting against the door with his legs across Munson’s lap.
“Are you going to English?” Chavez asks Zito, rolling his head back on the foggy window.
“Oh god. No.” Zito counts quickly on his fingers, but he can’t remember the last time he made it to that class.
“You should come with me, then. We gotta buy a new bat.”
Munson had broken their old one over the weekend, inside-out on Zito’s make-believe slider, long splinter in the wood and Chavez had made Zito keep pitching to him until the barrel shattered.
They had decided when they were fourteen to prepare themselves in every way. They only used aluminum bats at school.
“Do we have enough money?”
Zito twists to look between the seats. Munson’s head is back, his starry red eyes blinking at the ceiling, but he doesn’t owe anything on this because he’s been buying their pot all month. Chavez levers up to get his wallet from his back pocket, thumbing through the bills with his lips moving as he counts. Zito unearths his lunch money and hands it over. Eric Chavez smiles at him, slow and pretty in the midday light.
The three of them have lived communally since they were thirteen.
“Forty-two,” Chavez pronounces.
“Not enough,” Munson chimes in, surprising Zito, who thought he wasn’t paying attention. “And don’t say we can just get one of those ash ones, either. Not fucking around with that shit anymore, Chav, fucking thing breaks like glass if I hit it off the end even a little bit, like, you wanna know why it’s only thirty dollars, it’s because it sucks, and-”
“Okay.” Chavez kicks him in the ribs. “God. We’ll find eight dollars somewhere and get you a fucking maple bat. Or you could fucking whine about it some more.”
Munson drops his head down and grins untidily at him. Zito watches as Chavez’s mouth softens, his toes curling on Munson’s stomach. Zito looks away.
“You think we’ll get back in time for practice?” he asks, his throat thick, tongue sticky-dry. The parking lot gleams and seems to be miles underwater, shimmering through the dirty windows of the car.
“I’m not gonna risk anything on the second day,” Chavez answers, but he’s still looking at Munson and Zito’s chest hurts.
*
In the sporting goods store, Chavez gets happily lost. Zito catches glimpses of him, partial between the racks and aisles, cutting neat swings with each wooden bat. Zito sees the smooth torque of his hips and it makes his breath fall short.
Zito’s equilibrium is shot and he stumbles, knocks over several boxes of baseballs. They crash and spill open, dozens of white balls rolling across the gray concrete floor. He feels for a moment like crying, pressing his fists against his eyes.
He takes off before anyone can see what he’s done. Sitting on the curb, the sun is flat and treacherous, bleeding through the palm trees.
*
Practice is no better the second day.
Beane makes them run sprints across the outfield until Zito’s heart feels dense as a chunk of heated lead. Two of the juniors throw up behind the bleachers and only one staggers back onto the field afterwards.
Munson is on his knees behind home plate, firing throw after throw down to second base. Sweat runs wildly down his face, soaking his shirt under the straps of his chest protector. The heel of Chavez’s hand is already torn open, blood on the side of his neck and Zito is kinda unsettled by the sight of it.
Beane asks him sharply, “Do you throw anything except that fucking curve?”
Zito’s mouth opens, but he can’t think of anything to say. He’s never really needed to throw anything else. He looks down at the ball in his hand, brown-scuffed, stitches like teeth.
“Here.” Beane takes hold of Zito’s wrist and Zito swallows hard. Beane turns the ball and sets Zito’s fingers in a four-seam grip. Zito is fascinated by the crosshatch of Beane’s fingers across his own. “Do that for the rest of the day. Just that. Just throw straight.”
He steps away and Zito stares at him in confusion, compact planes of Beane’s face, the bite of his eyebrows into his temples and the ragged dark hair into which Zito had imagined pushing his hand last night. Last night was a long time ago, though.
Beane almost smiles, eyes clean. “Go ahead, deuce,” he says, and Zito isn’t the kind of guy who disobeys direct orders.
He throws fastballs for hours. Everything narrows down to the black of the plate and Beane near to him, telling him over the top, telling him let your wrist go, shocking Zito by touching his hip briefly, telling him this is where you should end.
Everything’s in motion.
Munson sprawls on the dugout bench when the sun finally goes down, his chest juddering. Chavez collapses on the steps, his arms folded under his head, infield dirt ground into his hands and across his chin. Zito feels like he could lift them both up and carry them to the car without pain.
He looks back and sees Beane leaning on the fence, in the rising yellow light from the parking lot. Beane’s scribbling in a little spiral-bound notebook, his head resting on the chainlink and Zito can almost make out his hair woven through the metal.
*
They go over to Zito’s house, stumbling and holding each other up on the walk. The streetlights fall gold-soft all over them, and Munson is saying unintelligible things against Zito’s shoulder. Chavez is checking the sky for summer constellations, something that points north.
Zito’s dad is at the kitchen table when they come in, and Zito is thankful that they have not yet smoked the jay that is tucked behind his ear, hidden in his hair. He’s never been very good at acting sober in front of his parents.
“Hi, Joe,” Chavez says. Zito dumps Munson into a chair and winces, feeling his back strain.
“Hey, Dad.”
Zito’s dad smiles at them, newsprint on the side of his hand. “Evening, Erics, Barry.”
Zito hasn’t seen him since last Thursday night. Another thirty-six hour Friday and Saturday spent sleeping off the night on Eric Munson’s floor, Sunday at the beach, the party in Monterey Park and school, hospital parking lots and running sprints under Billy Beane’s watchful glare, roads half out into the desert, coming home past midnight, anxious and stoned. His father has new lines around his eyes, looking tired.
Munson has his arms folded on the table and his head burrowed, flicker of dirty brown hair on his forearms.
“How’s the team?” Joe asks.
Chavez groans theatrically and thomps Munson on the back. Munson makes a discontented noise into the crooks of his elbows. Zito rolls his eyes.
“It’s all right. We got a new coach, you know? He’s working us pretty hard.”
Joe nods, standing to wash out his coffee cup. “You’ll be all right. Always are. You want something to eat? I can make some sandwiches.”
Zito looks over at Chavez and they have a quick conversation with their eyes. “That’s okay, man. We went to In-N-Out on the way home.”
“You shouldn’t eat that stuff in season. Eric, tell him he shouldn’t eat that stuff in season.”
Chavez grins, his hand hooked in the back of Munson’s shirt. “Barry, listen to your dad.”
Zito rolls his eyes again, and Joe yawns. “Well, I’m going to bed,” Joe tells them, half-smile on his mouth, happy to have them here. “You think you’ll make it home for dinner tomorrow?”
Zito shrugs. “Maybe.”
“I’ll come, Joe,” Munson says, muffled. “Are you making lasagna?”
Joe laughs, and Munson lifts his head momentarily to grin at him. Joe puts his hand on Zito’s shoulder and pulls him down to kiss the side of his head. “Don’t stay up too late, boys.”
He claps both Erics on the back and then he disappears down the hall. Zito raids the cabinets for sugared cereal and potato chips, Chavez stealing three beers and Munson the comics section of the newspaper. They shuffle across the charred grass to the garage, which is set apart from the house and has been converted into a den.
It’s a little while after that, when they’re in the skinny alley between the fences, smoking the jay, and Zito is watching the moonlight cast the shadows of the power lines on Chavez’s face, that it occurs to him that his dad was waiting up, making sure he got home safe, and that strikes Zito so hard he takes a hit that feels like static electricity in his lungs.
*
Tonight, the thermos is full of Kool-Aid and vodka. Chavez’s mouth is stained red, dark in the cracks between his teeth. Munson keeps throwing baseballs at the wall. They watch fuzzy local television and the washing machine clicks and thrums.
Drunk, Zito touches Chavez’s back over and over again, pushes his hand down the length of it. Watches as Chavez presses his teeth into his lower lip and looks back at him through slit eyes. Munson is staring at the ceiling, talking about Billy Beane.
There are cats fighting in the street.
Munson passes out first, down fast fast fast with his face on his glove, curled up on the floor. Chavez is listing to one side on the couch, blinking slow and confused at the television. Zito stands and the room swims. He makes it to the wall and turns off the lights, makes it back to the couch and breaks into pieces, folding knees hips stomach shoulders. The television is like a lunar eclipse, guttering blue on Munson’s body, on Eric Chavez’s throat.
Zito closes his eyes.
Senior year, hold steady. Chavez hiccupping quietly, a rhythm of pain in Zito’s left arm, three inches left in the thermos if he needs it, if he can’t get to sleep on his own.
Some amount of time passes, and Zito resurfaces to a hand on his stomach. He can feel the scar on Chavez’s palm through his shirt. He rolls his head to the side and tries to open his eyes, tries to say, wait, not here. Tries to say, let’s go outside, the alley where all their best sins are committed.
But Chavez pushes his fingers into Zito’s mouth and unbuttons his jeans. Chavez hiccups against his neck and kisses his chin, palming Zito through his boxers and his fingers taste like Kix and leather.
*
Zito has been like this forever.
There is a rough catch in his voice and sometimes his hands open without instruction. Boys with blue eyes make his blood run cold. Boys with broad shoulders and long fingers make him drop to his knees. He likes hipbones like wings and bladed elbows and the diagonal trench where stomach and leg meet. He wants weight on his back and a fist on the nape of his neck, a black sky outside and a rollerskate under his face.
For a little while, he had Eric Chavez and it wasn’t weird then, just something else they did like putting glue in Munson’s hair or cutting fifth period. His one-half best friend, who didn’t seem to mind Zito’s hand down his pants or Zito’s mouth on his throat. Eric Chavez, who was the first person who ever kissed Zito back. Eric Chavez, who Zito pretends he doesn’t still miss.
It didn’t last, though not for the reasons that Chavez claimed. Chavez bloodied Zito’s lip and told him to fucking stop it, wide panicked eyes and Zito licked the blood off, good familiar taste in his mouth. Chavez said, “I don’t like it,” but he trembled sometimes when Zito dug his fingers into the hollows of his hips, and anyway, Zito could see the way he looked at Eric Munson. He knows they’ve each got the same scar on their palms.
That was sophomore year. Now, Zito fucks around with different guys, at house parties, in locker rooms, in the dugout in the middle of the night. He’s high or drunk for most of it, and Chavez forgets sometimes, and they backslide quick and messy in the front seat of the car, on the couch with Munson asleep on the floor, but usually only when they’re too fucked up to remember it in the morning.
*
The first thing Billy always does is run them.
They toe the first base line, knocking shoulders, coughing. Crossing in front of them on the grass, Beane takes a count, and then he shouts, go! and they take off for the fence.
Back and forth like pong, to the fence, to the line, over the grass and through the dirt, onto the gravel of the warning track. They slap their hands on the wood and catch sight of each other’s flushed hard-breathing faces as they jerk one hundred and eighty degrees around.
Then the infielders go one way, the outfielders another, the pitchers and catchers a third. Zito sticks close to Munson, holding his mask for him while Munson fastens his leg guards. Beane is talking about release points and deception and he says, fuck velocity, over and over like a mantra. Zito is trying not to look at him too long, still catching his breath.
He picks splinters out of his palm with his teeth. Chavez hasn’t looked at him all day long, staring out the window from the backseat of the car on the way in, leaving them to wait for him at lunchtime until Munson sighed and said, I guess he’s not coming.
Zito has thrown more pitches to Eric Munson than anyone else in the world; it’s something he could do and has done while asleep.
Beane stays with the pitchers for a little too long. Zito is second-day stoned, seven-hundred-and-thirty-sixth-day stoned, his short-term memory wrecked beyond measure, and he’s asking Beane all sorts of stupid questions, stuff he learned from Randy Jones five years ago. What about this arm angle, what about pitching out of the stretch, what about change of speed?
Beane spits on the ground and answers in single syllables. Arm buzzing warm, Zito is throwing on a string. There is a smear of brown grit on Munson’s forehead when he takes his mask off to wipe the sweat out of his eyes. Billy Beane’s hair has dampened to black, several days’ unshaven and Zito bites his lip.
As the sun is going down, Beane gathers them up and they drop cross-legged and half-bent in short left. Chavez is rubbing his thumb hard into the palm of his hand and his forearm, not meeting Zito’s eyes.
Zito thinks maybe something happened last night, but he can’t quite place it. Cherry Kool-Aid and blue light. Hard skin on his tongue. He has dreams like that sometimes.
Beane asks them how they’re feeling, but it’s clear he doesn’t really care. He paces back and forth before them, talking fast about strategy and perspective, outlining plans for the season that make little sense. They’re too worn down to concentrate, and also scared, kids in the grass.
Zito is watching the places where Beane has sweat through his shirt, his shoulders and across his stomach.
He keeps them for too long, and as they straggle back towards the gym, Zito hears someone muttering, “Why the fuck should we listen to him, he never batted his fucking weight in the bigs.”
It’s strange, almost like Billy Beane’s failure is a personal betrayal of each of them. Zito can’t think about it too much.
Chavez takes Munson quickly away, still wet from the shower, without checking in with Zito. Zito is abandoned, but it won’t last. It’s only Chavez, handling things badly again. He packs up slow and is the last one out.
He remembers too late that they came in together in Munson’s car this morning. It’s three miles to his house and his legs are already shaking.
Ashy bruise-colored sky, sallow parking lot lights, and Beane is at his car, hauling canvas bags of baseballs and sheaths of bats into the trunk. Zito only wants to go home and carve out an apple because his blue glassy is still in Chavez’s glove compartment, fall asleep on the couch and maybe have a good dream, but Beane is kinda undeniable.
“Hey.”
Beane looks up at him, the light falling atop his head and casting his eyes deep into shadow. “Deuce. Where’re your boys?”
Zito shrugs. “Took off already.” Stupid Eric Chavez blaming him for his dreams, as if Zito’s got a choice.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you without one of them around.”
“Yeah, well. They’re my best friends.”
“You know, ‘best’ can only refer to one thing. It’s in the definition.”
Zito gives him a suspicious look. Beane makes the little tight-mouthed smile that Zito is starting to recognize as the most he can offer.
“Well.” He pushes his hands into his pockets, unnerved by Beane scruffing a hand through his hair and making dust rise. “I should get going.”
Beane glances in the direction of Zito’s gaze, empty parking lot and a stand of trees at the periphery. “You’re walking?” Zito nods. Beane looks at his car, looks at Zito, looks back at his car. “I’ll give you a ride.”
It catches Zito off-guard, his hand tightening on the strap of his backpack. But Beane doesn’t seem to recognize no as a possible answer, walking around to the front of the car and getting in, leaning across the seat to pull up the passenger side lock.
Zito misses the handle twice, depth perception gone. He curses himself as he settles in the seat, his knees chocked up against the glove compartment.
“Pull that thing on the side of the seat, and it’ll move back,” Beane tells him, distracted. “You’re taller than most people I know.”
“You too,” Zito says idiotically. He moves the seat back and is thankful for the dark, no way for Beane to tell he’s blushing.
He’s sure that this has got to be against the rules, though, like most recreational criminals, Zito has always considered breaking the rules reason enough.
Beane’s car was once shiny and new and cost a chunk of his first-round signing bonus, but that was fifteen years ago. Now there are black grease marks on the dashboard and doors, and the automatic locks don’t work. Zito is pretty sure the floor didn’t start out this odd orangey-brown color.
The road is drunk down under the headlights, and the speaker on Zito’s side is broken, so the music from the radio, punk rock from the college station, sounds lopsided. He tries to lounge coolly in the shotgun seat, his knee resting against the door, but he’s chewing compulsively on his thumbnail and hating the fact that he’s sober.
“So. How was school?” Beane asks, looking vaguely disgusted with himself even as the question breaks the silence.
“Dude.” Zito rolls his eyes. “Like you really care.”
Beane almost smiles again. Zito thinks of it as being deprived of something vital, like air or water, to the extent that even the smallest concessions take on wild proportions. If he ever makes Beane laugh, he’s afraid his head might explode.
“Then tell me. How much do the guys hate me?”
Zito glances at him, but Beane’s watching the road, driving with one wrist. He looks ten years younger in the shuffle of the streetlamps, behind the wheel of a car that’s essentially secondhand.
“What am I, your spy now?”
“Just curious, deuce.”
Zito wonders at his new nickname, and moves his shoulders against the seat. “Nobody hates you,” he lies. Beane picks up on it immediately and snorts. Zito amends, “It’s just, we didn’t practice this much last year and we were still good.”
“Sometimes being good’s not enough.” The muscle in Beane’s jaw clenches abruptly like he hadn’t mean to say that. Zito wants to put his fingers there and feel the shift. He’s all kinds of wrong, tonight.
“Well,” Zito says. “I don’t really mind. And I don’t think most of them will either, after they get used to it. Half the team’s hoping to get drafted, so, you know. It’s good to be prepared, and stuff.”
The houses and scrub brush at the side of the road fly past like moths; Beane’s going almost double the speed limit and that doesn’t surprise Zito at all.
“You don’t want to go to college?”
“Depends on the draft.”
Zito doesn’t expect Beane to give him the standard education-first-baseball-later speech that he’s been hearing all his life. Zito can fully picture Billy Beane in his seventeen year old incarnation, longer hair brackish around his face, the lines gone from around his mouth and eyes. Lit up like a torch the day he signed his first major league contract, the moment when the world was small enough to fit in his pocket.
Zito fists his hands on his legs, smearing blood from his torn thumb on his jeans.
Beane mutters something that Zito doesn’t catch. “What?”
“I said you’re a stupid fucking kid just like every other stupid fucking kid who thinks that major league baseball is the only good reason for existing.”
Shocked, Zito doesn’t respond. Beane punches the wheel, his mouth twisted. “Fuck. Sorry. Fuck.”
Zito stares out the window, digging his nail into the palm of his hand. His face is hot and the air between them is overly thick. Beane is something like lightning under skin, all errors and insincere apology, anger vivid and real and bruised on his knuckles. Zito has spent years detaching himself in every available way, but he’s clear now and Beane is making heat curl in his stomach.
He refocuses. “Turn right at this light here,” he says quietly. Beane exhales loudly. They ride for a while, the silence only interrupted by Zito’s directions.
On Zito’s shadowy street, his house with the gold lights looking miles away from the street, Beane puts the car into park and tightens his hands on the wheel.
“I shouldn’t have said that,” Beane tells him, eyes fixed straight ahead. Zito finds himself distracted by the way Beane’s face is made up of differing shades of darkness. “It’s fine for you to want to get drafted. Like I can even fucking talk.”
“Yeah.” He’s not really listening. He wonders what Beane would do if he hooked a hand in his collar. If he pressed his thumb into the hollow under Beane’s ear, or licked the drawn-tight tendons in his arms, or skipped right to his forehead on Beane’s thigh, his teeth on the button of Beane’s jeans.
“Hey.”
Zito looks up and he’s been caught staring and there’s something new and startled in Beane’s eyes. Zito swallows and says fast, “It’s okay, Billy. You’re probably right anyway. Stupid fucking kid, me in a nutshell.” He tries to smile.
Beane shakes his head, licking his lips unconsciously. “I was the stupidest kid of all the stupid fucking kids, that’s all. So maybe I don’t want you to turn out the same way.”
Nodding, Zito clutches at the door handle, sure path of escape if he wants to take it, though he’s not certain that he actually does. The headlights are refractive and sheer on the pavement, and they’re here in the front seat of the car like Zito has been here a million times before.
“You should go,” Beane tells him, his voice strange and flat. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Zito looks at his house and it seems impossible, too clean and well-remembered. He can’t think of anything to say, no easy finish, his heart tachycardic and frightened by what the angle of Beane’s wrist is doing to him.
“Thanks. For the ride, thanks.”
Beane tips his chin, not looking at him. Zito gets out, grease and dirt and blood on his hands, and stands in the driveway watching Billy Beane’s taillights recede to nickels, match-heads, pushpin holes and then gone.
*
On Sunday, their one day off, Chavez shows up chucking little stones at Zito’s bedroom window and that means he’s been forgiven.
Munson is in the backyard, whacking rocks with a stick. Zito puts on yesterday’s jeans and a fresh shirt, smooths his hair down with water and doesn’t bother leaving a note. They spend the day at six stories, the parking garage downtown that is always abandoned on top, and the frayed edges of Zito’s mind are worn away, playing catch across the faded gray concrete, so stoned the ball looks like part of the sky, whirring down towards him.
They go to Long Beach that night, long drive with the sun going down on their left side. Munson has brought candy bars and blow-pops, and Chavez’s tongue turns blue.
The party has spilled out onto the beach by the time they get there. Zito drinks steadily, stray thoughts in his mind screwing up his equilibrium and better judgment. There’s a kid with buzzed hair and pale gray eyes, who leads Zito under the wooden deck and they jerk each other off on the sand, huge pound of feet over their heads like thunder.
Zito stumbles out and Munson finds him, laughing, pulling at his shirt, teasing him about the boy, Zito’s swollen mouth. Munson lights a jay and suddenly they’re magnetic. The moon is low on the ocean and Zito is thinking about Beane punching the steering wheel, baring his teeth.
He sleeps in the back of the car on the four a.m. drive home, his dreams fractured by Munson and Chavez talking quietly in the front seat.
*
Beane acknowledges nothing.
Zito’s just another guy on the team, someone Billy runs and watches pitch and barks at when the ball stays up. Beane doesn’t look at him any differently and doesn’t soften his voice or anything. Zito thinks maybe all it really was, was a ride home.
He acts up. He tackles Munson, and shouts from the bullpen cage at Chavez practicing with the infielders, and throws sidearm just for the hell of it, distracting everyone within earshot.
His elbow is aching and his jaw is sore from smiling, when Beane stalks over and tells him quietly to get the fuck off the field.
Zito takes off his cap and pushes a hand through his damp hair. Munson comes to stand next to him, watching Beane walk away, straight line of his back like a ruler.
“What’s going on, man?” Munson asks him. Zito shakes his head helplessly. “You can’t fuck around with a guy like that.”
Zito’s throat tightens, darting a guilty look at Munson, but it’s only a figure of speech.
“I think there’s something in that new shit we’ve been smoking,” Zito says. “It’s making me all. Crazy.”
This is, at least, partly true.
Munson snorts, pulling the laces on his glove with his teeth. “But not me and Chavvy, huh? That’s some real specific bonus we got.” He pauses. “You better go. He looked like he wanted to kill you.”
Zito looks over to where Beane is standing behind second base, his arms crossed on his chest. Chavez turns a neat double play and Beane says something uncomplimentary about his footwork, and Chavez nods, sweat dripping off his face.
Zito leaves, and is surprised when he gets to the locker room and whips his glove as hard as he can into the wall.
He sits down on the bench, his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. His spikes tick-tap on the cement and everything else is so quiet; he can hear the drip of the busted shower.
He can hear footsteps approach, growing louder and louder until they’re right on top of him, and he can taste copper.
“What the fuck is your problem?”
Pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes as hard as he can, Zito breathes out slowly. “I’m fine. I’m sorry. Just fucking around. I don’t know. Sorry, Billy, okay?”
Nothing for a moment, drip from the showers, Zito’s breath against the insides of his wrists.
“Does this happen a lot?” Beane asks, dangerously low. “Because we’ve got two weeks before the games start, and I don’t have a whole lot of fucking time to deal with this crap.”
Zito thinks about the kid in the garage that morning, not quite remembering his name, just the black hair like knife cuts in front of his eyes, and the kid under the deck in Long Beach, with the tough hands and the light in inch-wide strips between the boards. He tries to remember why they thought it was a good idea to smoke before practice today, whether or not their pot is laced, because his lungs are working at half-capacity, his head is foggy and everything is fucked up. He thinks for just a second about Eric Chavez.
He takes his hands down and looks at Beane’s feet for awhile.
“It happens sometimes,” he admits. “Not, not usually on the field. Today was just. Weird.”
“It better be weird as in never gonna happen again, understand?”
Beane is still angry, and that ticks Zito off a little bit, because at least some of this is his fault. He looks up and it turns out to be a bad idea. Beane is glaring at him, violence clearly evident in the hold of his shoulders and the line of his jaw, and Zito remembers apocryphal stories about Beane destroying things as a teenager after his rare moments of disgrace, aluminum bats at ninety degree angles, dented walls and shattered stereos.
It flashes through Zito like hard liquor. What Beane could do to him if his control gave out just a little bit more.
“Billy,” he says hoarsely, his eyes huge.
Beane goes still. His face freezes and his arms tense and he stares down at Zito. Zito thinks maybe they’re close, maybe this would be a different kind of damage than usual.
He drops to his knees on the concrete. Beane makes a bizarre sound, his hands in fists under his elbows and Zito can’t think of what Beane’s eyes look like, can’t imagine anything darker, and he has lived beneath a desert sky his whole life.
Zito’s not thinking about anything, really. He can’t spare his focus for anything beyond the physical, only reaching up and latching his hand onto Beane’s belt and starting to tug him forward, wetting his lips.
And one of Beane’s fisted hands comes flying out from the side and clocks Zito across his cheekbone and Zito falls down. It wasn’t even that hard, more shock than anything else, and Zito’s hands are flat on the locker room floor.
“Don’t, jesus, don’t do that, man,” Beane tells him, sounding purely stunned and even a little bit confused, which Zito thinks he can count as a victory.
Or he will, once he can get himself off the fucking floor.
*
Out in Munson’s backyard, lying under the old swingset, Zito is expecting lightning and feeling the grass move beneath his head. His fingertips are singed. He’s doing what he can to put his life in order.
He plays for the best high school baseball team in the country and he wants to sleep with his coach and he lives in fear of what the morning might show him.
Chavez arrives like a constellation given breath and depth, and sits on the swing. The chain is rusted and whines low. A fresh joint burns between Chavez’s fingers, and he pushes his heels on the grass. Zito remembers when the grass used to be worn away in oblong runway patches under the swings, back when he first started hanging out with Munson and Chavez, when they’d still swing occasionally.
“Where’s Munce?” Zito asks. Chavez shrugs, drawing on the jay. Munson is probably asleep in the backyard somewhere, hidden in the dark. They’ll have to find him before the sun comes up.
“So Billy said something about me maybe playing first when I’m not pitching,” Zito says. Chavez squints down at him, but doesn’t answer. “Because, like, tall and left-handed? Or something? Lemme get a hit of that.”
Chavez hands the joint down to him and Zito blows across the tip of it to stem the cherry a bit so he won’t ash in his eye or anything. Zito thinks it’s pretty remarkable that Beane wants him to be a first baseman, when he has been nothing but a pitcher since he was seven years old, but Chavez doesn’t seem to find it very interesting.
“Are you okay, Chav?”
Sort of angling his head to the side, Chavez smiles a little bit. Feral clouds overhead and Zito doesn’t know why he keeps picturing star formations and supernovas. He can’t even see the moon. Chavez’s swing is moving very slowly, back and forth like a twice-shot heartbeat.
“Billy?” Chavez asks quietly.
Zito blinks at the joint in his hand, the spot of orange illuminating the torn sides of his fingers. “What about him?”
Chavez sighs, looking up at the sky. Zito stares at the revealed length of his throat, the way Chavez looks like a statue from below.
“I’m fucked up,” Chavez tells him.
“What else is new?”
“Shut up, please.” Chavez reaches down and his hand ghosts across Zito’s cheek before he changes course and retrieves the joint. “Disregarding the fact that I’m fucked up and that I obviously have more invested in you than most other people, I need to ask, what the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
It’s a good question and probably a fair one, and nothing that should make Zito’s throat close up like this. He doesn’t know how Chavez knows, maybe just osmosis from the five years that they’ve lived hand to mouth and in each other’s pockets all the time. Maybe they share certain brain chemicals, low-level telepathy like how they always know when the other is hungry, and how the three of them always end up on the front lawn together, ready to leave without having to talk about it.
Like how Munson is aware that Zito fucks around with guys, figured it out long before Zito did, apparently. Zito never told him, it just sort of occurred that, yes, Munson knows. Munson is okay with it.
Not everything transfers, though. Munson still doesn’t know about Chavez, because Chavez thinks that telling him that one thing would mean he has to tell the rest, too.
The vague float of Chavez above him is making him dizzy, so he closes his hand on Chavez’s ankle and holds him still. Smooth bones under thin skin and Chavez’s feet must be dirty or at least grass-stained.
“I’m just. I’m thinking about something different.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know.” Zito feels his eyes burn suddenly. He’s too stoned for this, caught on the edge where everything is profound and music sounds better. “I thought. I’m allowed to do what I want, right? You, you’re not mad at me?”
Chavez half-scoffs and Zito grins, a tear snaking out the corner of his eye. It’s not that, can’t be, because Chavez never had that kind of hold over him even when they were sophomores. Zito hadn’t even wanted to look at other guys when they were sophomores, when his life revolved around movie moments and riding into the hills and finding new and exciting places to go down on Eric Chavez, but anyway, it was only four months and even if Zito suspects sometimes that he had been deeply in love with Chavez, they’d never gotten far enough to say, just you.
Chavez slides out of the swing and leaves it twisting and shivering. He sits cross-legged next to Zito and carefully puts the jay between Zito’s lips, steady as Zito inhales. Zito doesn’t have to move, his lungs doing all the work. Fog laid over cobwebs laid over cotton and Zito is barely even here anymore.
“Not mad at you. Love you.” Chavez takes the jay away and pushes his fingers across Zito’s mouth. Zito licks reflexively, thinking it’s strange that their thoughts move in such similar patterns. Chavez looks so sad. “But you know Beane is the stupidest idea ever. You’ve got to know that.”
Zito closes his eyes tightly. Nobody knows what went wrong with Billy Beane, the cause of the fragmented six years he’d spent in the majors that didn’t even add up to one full season, but Zito thinks he can see it sometimes. Sometimes he wants to write names and dates on the shower-steamed bathroom mirror, and sometimes he viscerally understands the gap between talent and heart, and sometimes it seems like a loss of the worst kind to have to throw a straight pitch.
“I’m sorry, Ricky,” he says, though he’s not sure if he’s done anything wrong except get on his knees for Beane.
Chavez’s curled hand touches the hinge of his jaw, and Chavez opens Zito’s mouth with his own, breathes rough smoke into his lungs. He pulls back and stays for a moment so close that Zito can’t really tell them apart. Zito wants to hold the back of Chavez’s neck and make him promise not to freak out tomorrow, because he’s not gonna fuck around with Chavez tonight and he shouldn’t have to suffer for the stuff that’s only happening under the surface.
He falls asleep to Chavez’s breath on his face, Chavez whispering, “So stupid, don’t you know, can’t you see.”
*
They meet behind the gym at lunch and usually they go out to one of their cars to smoke a joint and talk about the morning. The days are getting longer and Chavez is visibly distressed, hanging on Zito, pushing his face into Munson’s shoulder.
Zito’s parents have taken to leaving him notes under the windshield wiper like parking tickets. One night, or morning, really, coming home to take a shower and change clothes, it strikes him that he can’t remember which seat at the dining room table is his. It’s maybe the worst thing that’s happened to him this year.
He sleeps in Munson’s backyard and Chavez’s attic. Sometimes on the baseball field, woken up by sprinklers at six in the morning. There are scouts at practice occasionally, burnt-looking men with notebooks and radar guns in black briefcases.
Their first game is in a week. The 1996 amateur draft is in four months.
Billy Beane looks at him on the field, pinched frustrated look like he can tell how out of place Zito is playing first base. But it was Beane’s idea, and Zito gets mad at Chavez for throwing in the dirt, afraid of the runner barreling down the line. He doesn’t want to look back at Billy, wants with amazing strength for this to be over and behind him, but Beane’s the one with ghosts and Zito’s the one with his life still ahead of him.
*
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