Boy's World

Derek Zumsteg

To Chapter Five

Chapter Six

There was a different feel to Florida this time around, and it made Karen suspicious. Karen's first trip to the park was met by minicam crews recording stock footage so that later, when she blew out her arm, they would be able talk over video clips of her. She looked at the crews of the beautiful newspeople and their average-looking staff, their lights in her eyes, stumbling across her way, and tried to keep her face vacant, relaxed, her eyes never looking directly into any camera, but there were so many.

Someone on the network food chain had decided that this was news, and her last game in Battle Creek would be the last game she could have to herself, in any sense. The beautiful reporters live on the scene all yelled polite questions at her as she tried to walk between SUVs, breaking up their pack, on her way to the gate. Karen's early comers were already at the player's entrance, the girls wearing jerseys (Piazza Marlins home tops), smiling at her with something a little past admiration. Karen steered the blind-walking cameras into the crowd and squatted down before a girl all of ten wearing a black shirt with some prep team insignia.

"Are you going to the game?" Karen asked her.

"I think you're great," the girl said.

"I can't talk right now, because of these people, but come see me inside, okay? By third base?"

The girl grinned and nodded.

"I'll see you inside," Karen said, and stood. The stadium security men, black and built like ice-cream cones with immense, basketball-sized muscles for shoulders, nodded at Karen as they looked past her at the local news crews, who respected this Florida boundary.

Karen threw on the side with her new pitching coach, Chris Callahan, a bulky buffet-killer from the left-handed junkballer school of major league fourth starters. Karen tossed to him from ten feet away and kept her tongue.

"I like your delivery," he said. He threw the ball back, all arm. "You've probably got the most natural delivery I've ever seen." He caught Karen's toss and took his time picking it out of his glove. He smiled, and his goatee seemed to widen across his face. "I figure that was your dad's doing." He threw her the ball back, all arm again. "Yeah?"

"Partly," Karen replied, flipping the ball from glove to glove and flipping it easily to him sidearm.

"Don't do that," he said. "Don't throw with your wrist. I watch your film, I can hardly figure out where your windup starts, and then it's done, just as easy." He nodded, turning the ball over in his hands. "You've got perfect mechanics. Don't play with throwing sidearm." He shrugged and tossed the ball back. "Don't look at me like that. I'm saying, is all. Doing anything different than what you have is wrong. Be yourself. "

Karen walked the ball over to the stands and handed it to a little girl, maybe six, and returned to the side mound.

"Can I have another ball?" she asked. "I lost mine."

His laugh was exactly like she'd figured it'd be.

Karen charted pitches, her place in the rotation of work, her pencil work automatic in her off hand.

"You write with your other hand," Callahan said, setting his heft down on the bench. "How'd you manage that?"

Karen marked a pitch off. "It's easier this way."

He nodded, and with one hand lifted his cap while he ran the other through his tangle of black hair.

"I played with your dad for a while," Callahan said. "I liked him a lot. He was one of the guys who didn't have all the tools but were smart and played their hearts out. I once saw Danny Tartabull run him over on a close play at home. Steve had his mask off, got a mouthful of cleats after Tartabull knocked him on his butt, and Steve came up spraying blood all over the place, all f---ed up, missing two teeth, and he held the ball up like it was some kinda thing, and then he beat Tartabull within an inch of his worthless life and took a two-week suspension like a man.

"Well, he appealed it until we were going to face the Royals for six, and then took it like a man." He nodded. "That was just the kind of guy he was." He looked at her, as she ticked off pitch location. "I'll bet there's a lot of that in you, huh?"

"You're a talker, aren't you?"

He laughed again, openly, and Karen smiled.

Karen was back in a different Florida suburb rental apartment, identical to the one she'd occupied in some other place in Florida before. It was hot, and she was surrounded by old people who would pound on the walls and tell her to turn it down if they weren't so weak from writing letters to the AARP Journal.

The sound was Portishead on her beautiful, easily packed-and-unpacked satellite system, streaming across the walls as Karen stood in a room so empty and bright her pupils strained to contract even further, in front of her full-length mirror, and practiced her mound presence. She had just finished her kickboxing workout and her tank top was clinging. Her lips tasted like salt. Her heavy bag had wide dents in it where she'd been pounding her kicks into it. This was part of her attempt to capture explosive strength, as her trainers referred to it, coming faster off the mound, snapping the ball. It also felt good to just beat on something for an hour.

"Grrrrrrrrrr!" She bared her teeth. "Grrrrrrrrrr!" She smiled and shook off her war face.

Florida was tolerable to her in the evening, when she pitched or when she had the rare day off. When it began to cool, and she could go out in shorts and a T, she would wander outside and look for something to do. Like bother bad sportswriters.

"Excuse me," Karen said, looking for all the world like something sent to convert a weak man to wicked, wicked ways, "Do you know if there's a pharmacy in the neighborhood?"

Steve stood in the door, leaning up against the frame as if his bones had been alcohol-liquefied, and stared at her. "Is this part of some mood swing thing?"

"Can I come in?"

"I guess," Steve said, but he didn't move. Karen weighed whether he was lazy or trying to get her to squeeze past him like another one of the crazy pervs she'd learned to tune out while avoiding the hands.

"Let's talk about this," Karen said. "Come on, I don't do this thing often."

"This is a mood swing."

"Don't make me hit you."

Steve blinked and turned back into his apartment. It was clean. The CD racks were straight to the wall, the contents alphabetized first by band name and second by album name, the couch cushions aligned. The coffee table shone with lacquered oak satisfaction. On the coffee table was an open copy of the Minor League Scouting Notebook, a pad of paper with a pen on it, a Powerbook with a bizarre animated character sticker holding a microphone (slogan: "I gotta believe!!"). Neatly stacked were the rest of the STATS books, Total Baseball.

"What are you working on?" Karen asked, moving past the counter to scoop up a $50 bottle of scotch. "What's this?"

Steve sat back down on the couch. "Don't drop that."

Karen put it down on the carpet and laid out, back against his free-standing TV. "How does a guy like you afford all this nice stuff?"

"I deal steroids on the side," he said, with a half-smile for her.

Karen rolled her eyes. "Let's talk about that."

Steve extended his arms out, set them across the coach back.

"Here's the thing. Since I started pitching, all they've been telling me is how much I need to get my fastball over ninety, every time I throw it. It's this magic number for them, and they don't want to see me bring it once or twice a game, they want to see it as a set up pitch. And if I do it, then I make it. It's that simple. It's a trade for me. I bulk up on all that crap, and make it to the Show. And when I've made it, I can stop. All I want is to make it, that's all I've ever wanted."

"You won't ever stop, though. When you get to the majors and they shell you, you're going to go back to it because you'll think that all you have to do is keep up."

"Once I get there, it wouldn't matter."

Steve shook his head. "It doesn't work that way. It never works that way. You'll need that last one mile on your fastball forever, and when you're there you'll want to maintain it."

"What's the difference between eating all the right things and taking my vitamins and using creatine to recover faster from workouts? It isn't much."

Steve sighed. Karen crossed her outstretched legs at the ankles. "Whatever. I don't care."

"I'm news again," Karen said, "and I don't like it."

Karen goes on ESPN's Up Close, with disastrous results -- (Page Two)