APRIL
Current record: 3–16
The next morning, on his way out of the hotel, Gene runs into Vince, standing exactly where they had yesterday and smoking what Gene has started to suspect is a more-than-once-daily cigarette.
“You’re up early,” Gene observes.
“Gonzo snores.”
“So do you,” Gene says, which gets him a dismissive flick of Vince’s wrist.
“Where are you going?” Vince asks.
“Uh,” Gene says. “Practicing with Luis, actually.”
Vince’s eyebrows, sleepy as they and he may be, shoot toward his hairline. “Seriously?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, then I’ll see you later if you haven’t killed each other,” he says.
“I’ll do my best.”
“To kill him or not to?”
Gene shrugs. Mostly, he’s going to try not to have any thoughts, feelings, or opinions about Luis this morning. He’s going to get through the next two hours of his life, and hopefully the team will have a better infield in return for their efforts.
“Let me know how it goes?” Vince asks.
“Definitely.”
Vince gives him a two-fingered salute with the hand holding his cigarette.
Gene sets off across the parking lot in the direction of the bus stop. Pretending it’s an afterthought, he yells over his shoulder, “I’m gonna tell Jack I saw you smoking.”
“You wouldn’t dare,” Vince says, but he puts the cigarette out in the standing ashtray, and that’s all Gene really wanted in the first place.
When Gene gets to the stadium—on time for the agreed-upon 9:30, to avoid running into any Tacoma players—Luis is already in the dugout, one leg up, ankle rested on opposite knee, his jersey swapped out for a T-shirt, too tight on arm muscles Gene would prefer not to notice. When did Luis get so goddamn noticeable?
He’d left by the time Gene’s alarm went off, but Gene assumed he’d gone to breakfast. Instead, he appears to have taken the time for a shampoo, condition, and pomade just to sit there and look sour. Gene feels like a frizzed-up mess in comparison.
Luis’s baseball cap rests on the bench next to his hip. Add in the dog curled at his feet, and Luis looks like an all-American boy, but actually attractive. If you ignore, like, 85 percent of his personality and the pinched way he holds his mouth.
Gene drops his bag in the dirt in front of the dugout, his bat clattering against the ground. “Sorry, didn’t realize I was late.”
“No problem,” Luis says. He sounds annoyed.
Struggle as he might with punctuality, Gene was careful to be on time today—and, in fact, was only apologizing so Luis could apologize in turn, for being so obnoxiously early. “You didn’t have to wait for me to get started,” he says.
“I said it’s not a problem.”
Gene can’t keep the frustration out of his voice. “It sounds like it’s a problem.”
“It’s not.” Luis slaps the loop of his dog’s leash against his open palm—impatient or nervous, Gene can’t tell.
They used to do this in college. After Gene managed to squeeze his way onto the roster and into the starting second baseman job, Luis, a junior to Gene’s freshman, helped him. He stayed late, or came early—taught Gene how to predict the way the ball would bounce in the grass, and never much excelled at small talk. In an effort to alleviate Luis’s foremost deficiency, Gene gets them started. “What’s your dog’s name?” he asks.
“Dodger,” Luis answers.
Gene can’t help but laugh. It’s the most Angeleno thing he’s ever heard.
“What’s funny?” Luis asks.
“Sorry.” Gene schools his face. “I just didn’t realize we were allowed to bring pets on roadies. How old is he?”
Luis visibly bristles, any vestige of patience or interest in this conversation sapped in an instant. “Look, can we just get started?”
Gene—worried that he’s offended Luis, mad at himself for his nosiness, and annoyed that Luis has the gall to be frustrated by such an innocuous question—pushes his jaw forward before he says, “Fine.”
“He’s two.”
“I said it’s fine.”
“But you asked.”
Gene takes a breath, one far huffier than necessary. “I was trying to be polite.”
“So I answered your question,” Luis says, his voice rising.
“Yeah. Thanks.”
“Look, I don’t know what you want from me. You asked a question. I answered it.”
Gene pulls a hand down his face and does his level best not to let out the screech building in the back of his throat. He has never had this hard of a time talking to a teammate, and it isn’t even because Luis is Luis, or because Gene has, inconveniently, finally realized that he’s beautiful.
It’s because he’s impossible.
“Thanks,” Gene eventually manages. “He’s very cute.”
“Thanks.”
“Great.”
“Great.”
A pause, Dodger’s panting loud and almost comical in between them.
“Let’s just practice?” Gene asks, finally.
“Fine.”
“Great.”
And so they do.
Luis does his stretches with the kind of focus most players save for the game itself. He sits on the field gingerly, like the idea of grass stains offends him, legs straight ahead and body folded precisely in two. He places his long fingers in the gap between his cleats’ spikes, and, briefly, he looks almost at ease. The illusion falters every time he shifts into a new stretch and pairs it with the world’s deepest sigh, each of which elicits from Gene a fresh eye roll.
Gene considers asking him how far, exactly, the stick up his ass is wedged, and if maybe the case is terminal. But instead, he does his own stretches a few arm’s lengths from Luis, a little more dedicated than he usually is about getting limber.
Luis looks out of place in Tacoma’s stadium. He has looked out of place in every stadium Gene has seen him in this season. Even if it weren’t for his flirtation with a major league tenure three years ago, even if it weren’t for his once-superstar dad, even if it weren’t for his (alleged) preternatural ability to predict the ball’s path as it smokes its way over the infield dirt, Luis looks wrong on a minor league field. In spite of his recent struggles, Luis is still promising, polished, pretty. Too good to belong somewhere so small.
Tacoma’s field gets mowed more often than Beaverton’s, and their seats are more recently replaced. The stunning view of Mount Rainier on the horizon, beyond the farthest reaches of right field, gives the whole place an air of importance, but even this stadium, like Beaverton’s, seats a fraction as many as a major league one.
Luis looks too good for all of it, the luster of his prospect status untarnished by his performance the past couple weeks. It makes Gene self-conscious. Like Gene should feel bad about the home he worked so hard to find.
He hates that. Years of fine-tuning his confidence, wrecked by a few weeks with Luis Estrada.
But they do their warm-ups, and with Luis next to him, it’s easier for Gene to talk himself into one more set of push-ups; it’s easier to run—really run—when Luis does the same, pushing himself a step ahead of Gene, then falling behind, a repeating cycle that they maintain until they finish their laps. For the rest of their time, they hit lazy grounders at each other, so easy they really could have handled them in Little League, and Gene can almost tell himself it’s simple.
It’s a far cry from fielding together, from turning routine double plays as well as they need to, from trusting each other to be solid enough at bat to sneak in a stolen base. They’ll have to work back up to that. Still, by the time they finish, Gene almost doesn’t regret coming. He feels readier for the game than he does when he practices alone, and that’s not nothing.
Luis drops onto the dugout bench, arms held out for Dodger to jump into. “What’s the verdict?” he asks.
“What do you mean?”
Luis looks up at him, the bottom of his face pressed against Dodger’s fur. “You think this will solve our problem?”
Gene shrugs. “Maybe? You looked decent out there.”
Luis raises his eyebrows.
“Like—baseball-wise,” Gene clarifies, which makes Luis tilt his head, which makes Gene wish he’d said nothing at all, at any point, ever.
“I assumed that’s what you meant. You just usually don’t compliment me.”
“Do something worth complimenting, and maybe I’d do it more often,” Gene says. It comes out flirtier than he intended. He should keep his mouth closed, and also probably run as far away as his post-workout legs can carry him.
“Are we doing this again?” Luis asks.
Instead of saying, No, actually, I plan to avoid all further opportunities to make an ass of myself in front of you, Gene says, “Sunday?”
“I can’t do Sunday mornings. Tomorrow?”
“Sounds good.”
It does not sound good. It sounds like another night Gene will spend awake, another morning he will spend uncomfortable and trying too hard. But, until Luis gets called up to the majors and Gene gets his position back, he will show up. Because—and this really is what Gene tells himself—the faster they stop needing these practices, the faster Luis leaves. The faster Luis leaves, the less Gene has to think about the tug of his perfect back muscles on his too-tight shirts, about how his beard might feel to the touch, about his voice and the terrible urge it gives Gene to try and make Luis keep talking.
NANCY: We’re here in the bottom of the sixth at Cheney Stadium, the game is tied, Tacoma and Beaverton with two runs apiece.
DAN: Estrada grounded into a double play to end the top of the inning—what do you think about what we’re seeing from him? It doesn’t seem like he’s heating up at the plate at all.
NANCY: Right, it’s interesting to see him hitting middle of the order—he’s oh-for-five in this series so far. Beaverton’s certainly missing the pop from Gonzales while he’s been out.
DAN: Still looking at a week or so there before he’s ready to come back. Steph Baker is not getting much to work with.
NANCY: I think it’s safe to say this team is a far cry from the one most of us were hoping for.
DAN: Well, you’ve got your catcher out and his replacement is a little on the young side—
NANCY: Right, a twenty-year-old is going to struggle to set the tone, get his pitchers in line. And then with the keystone falling apart, it’s not a pretty picture out there—
DAN: —And that’s another missed cue between Ionescu and Estrada on what could have been a clutch double play.
After they give up their second game, a surprisingly close one, to the Rainiers, Gene drops his shit on the floor of his and Luis’s room and flops facedown onto his bed.
“Are you going to bed?” Luis asks.
“I’m lying down. Can’t a man just lie down anymore?” he says into the comforter.
“Got it. Sorry.”
A pause barely has time to settle between them and slow Gene’s insistent heart before:
“Rough game today,” Luis says.
Gene sighs. He rolls over onto his back and squints at Luis. Gene’s glasses sit crooked on his nose, the natural result of his miniature temper tantrum, but he can still see Luis’s borderline-earnest face, waiting for Gene’s response. He hasn’t seen that open look on Luis since college. It’s impossible to ignore him when he looks at Gene like that.
“Could have been worse,” Gene says.
“Yeah, but you hate losing in extras.”
This is true. Gene has long harbored a love for extra innings. It’s an optimist’s paradise, to start—anything can happen with a tied game and tired teams. And, practically speaking, it’s free baseball. Gene has met a lot of players who hate free baseball because it means they’re stuck at the stadium longer, but never once, not even in the worst blowout losses, has Gene ever wished he could leave the ballpark faster.
The fact that Luis remembers that Gene hates this particular brand of loss most of all—
Well, it probably doesn’t mean anything. No one likes losing in extras.
“At least we kept it close,” Gene says. “Sorry you had to stay late—I know you need your beauty rest.”
Luis laughs, but it comes out more like a dribble, like he’s not sure if he wants to commit to it.
Gene grabs for the remote on the nightstand between their beds and fumbles for the power button. If he can turn something on, he won’t have to look at Luis, and he won’t have to stay up all night thinking about the dimple that lurks under Luis’s beard when he laughs. He flips mindlessly through channels for a minute or two. He can feel Luis looking just as pointedly at the TV, can almost feel him thinking, too.
Finally, on some ESPN offshoot, Luis says, “Oh, this is a good game.”
Gene sets the remote down. Baseball it is.
It’s an old game, a sea of teal on a bright green field. Gene recognizes the tight, full-length pants as hailing from either the late nineties or the early aughts, but Ichiro’s presence in the outfield signals that it’s the latter.
Only baseball’s harshest critics could resist one of Ichiro’s rookie season games, however old it might be. In life, as in baseball, Ichiro is forever.
“Did you know he and Griffey were apparently, like, best friends?” Gene asks. He read an article last week about the brief period when both men played for the Mariners, when the Lumberjacks were still relatively new.
“I was actually just talking to Ritz about that last week,” Luis says.
“You still talk to Ritz?” Gene asks before he can stop himself, the mention of their old teammate—Tracy Ritter, dubbed Ritz, far more Luis’s friend than Gene’s, but a good guy just the same—piquing his interest.
“He and Max are letting me crash at their place for a while.”
Gene stares at the TV a bit too hard. “They still live in Portland?”
“Yeah, they moved back after graduation.”
Well. No one told Gene that.
“I read that he made ties with Griffey’s face on them once and had the whole team wear them,” he says, desperate for a subject change before Luis can notice how much he hates that he’s always the last to hear news about his former teammates. “Ichiro. Not Ritz.”
“To be fair—” Luis starts.
“That’s also, like, absolutely something Ritz would do.”
“I’d honestly be surprised if Ritz doesn’t have a Griffey tie,” Luis says with a chuckle.
It’s only a chuckle, sure, but Gene jots it down in the success column anyway, though he’s not sure what he’s trying to succeed at. He just knows Luis’s laugh is a good sound.
He presses his lips together, as tight as he can, to keep himself from drawing the conversation out. He can’t tell if he wants to keep talking because he lacks impulse control, or if he maybe likes some small, very select parts of Luis’s personality off the field, but he takes his phone out and types the things he’d like to ask. Where do Max and Ritz live now? and Do they have you sleeping on the couch? and Do you do anything fun in your free time, or is it just baseball games and baseball re-runs 24/7?
He has a curious mind.
And, just as he starts to unstick his lips from each other and let one of the questions spill out, the chime of his phone interrupts. His sister’s name—Joey, with the queen and yellow heart emojis—displays across the top of the screen.
“Shit,” Gene says.
When he answers the call, the screen shows his nephew, Mattie, eight years old and decked out in the Double-A T-shirt Gene gave him the last time they came to see one of his games, back when he was playing in Ann Arbor.
He went to visit them in Gowanus last offseason, before he started with the Beavers. That he has lived an entire year in a new state, on a new team, without his family seeing a single inning—he can feel every ounce of missing them at the back of his throat, scratching and sad. A season without your own people in the stands can feel interminable.
“Hey, Mattie,” he says. His voice is bright, because it has to be.
He can hear Joey in the background, somewhere past Mattie’s head, as loud as she’s always been: “Did you forget to call us?”
“Sorry, Jo. I lost track of time.”
She pops up behind Mattie’s head for a beat to say, “Good game today.” That means she checked the box score and nothing else. A 5–4 loss doesn’t look so bad if you don’t look under the hood, which Joey never does. Gene appreciates this about her. It hides a world of ills. Much as it’s sweet that his dad watches the grainy game feed whenever he can, an indication of the sheer devotion he has to Gene’s career, Gene almost prefers this type of family support. Love without the details, he has always found, is easier to receive.
For the next thirty minutes, he sits listening to Mattie talk about, in turn: his Little League team as a segue, from which he moves on to the science fair, then his school’s annual writing magazine, then a poem he wrote about a worm he found in the yard, and finally, unrelated to any of the preceding topics, the merits and demerits of various mac and cheeses.
“Can I have the phone, bub?” Joey says. Gene gets a quick view of her cluttered counter and feels a pang of homesickness for the closet-sized kitchens of his hometown, a feeling that only grows when Joey’s face appears.
When their parents started dating, Joey quickly perfected the art of thinking Gene a nuisance—the irritated older sister to Gene’s irritating younger brother, more than a decade before any of them realized Gene was a brother at all. It’s a slightly unusual family, theirs. They’re related only by marriage, and it shows—she’s heavier, her hair smoother, her skin still winter-pale while Gene’s has started to tan—but there’s a similarity in the way they hold themselves. Tired, but honest. Wide-open smiles. In all the ways that count—in all the ways that make him miss home enough to start to regret everything that landed him so far away—she is his big sister.
“You know, he misses you,” she says.
Gene’s stomach roils with guilt. “I’ll set an alarm next time so I don’t forget, I promise.”
“Don’t worry about it. You’re busy,” she says, waving him off.
Gene glances at the TV, which is playing the same old game it was playing when Mattie called, except that Luis has muted the volume and put on his headphones. Gene can’t exactly call this “busy.” How much of one sport can he possibly consume and still convince himself that it’s necessary? He has yet to find his limit.
“I guess,” he says.
“Let’s talk again soon. Call when Mattie’s in bed sometime?” She’s trying to get off the phone.
“How’s Tuesday?”
“Whenever,” she says with a shrug.
“I’ll call Tuesday.”
Joey waves him off. “Fine. Tuesday.”
“Bye, Jo.”
“Bye, dude.”
She hangs up, and Gene locks his phone as quickly as he can, so as not to wallow. No point in it. Before he can think overmuch about all the things he isn’t wallowing in, he reaches for the remote and unmutes the TV.
“Sorry, I didn’t know if you wanted me to leave,” Luis says.
“It’s fine.”
Luis takes the hint and doesn’t ask any follow-up questions. At least, on the bright side, Gene’s temptation to talk has exited the building.
Ten minutes or so later, Luis looks at his phone, grabs a key card, and leaves the room. Gene wonders if he has a date or something, then wonders why he wondered that, then puts a firm lid on that train of thought.
Luis comes back a minute later, carrying a take-out bag stamped with the Frisko Freeze logo, grease already staining its bottom. From the bag, he pulls a single fry, offered to a whining Dodger. Then: a burger, an order of onion rings, two orders of fries, a milkshake, and a soda. Gene wonders how one man can eat all of that and run stadiums the next day, but then Luis sets the milkshake, one of the wax paper packets of fries, and the bag of onion rings on Gene’s nightstand.
Gene stares at them.
“I wasn’t sure what you’d want,” Luis says, then hands over a fistful of condiments—mustard and barbecue sauce and ranch and plenty of ketchup—without further comment.
Gene eats his portion in silence, with gratitude he doesn’t quite know how to express, through the rest of the game and into the movie Luis flips to afterward. He wonders whether Luis might have accidentally left the burger out of Gene’s order, or if he had simply managed to remember, seven years and a meager handful of half-civil conversations later, that Gene doesn’t eat meat. Either way, he can’t stop picturing Luis, hunched over a take-out menu, thinking of Gene and picking out things Gene might want.