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The pills came in small yellow squares that reminded Del of PEZ candies. He washed three down with his orange juice the first morning and by lunch time his mind was beginning to check out. Every five minutes he’d snap back into consciousness and attempt to trace seemingly random threads back to logical origins, giving up just in time to space out again.
Barely able to piece together enough to pay the rent and the electric bill, they’d been forced to choose between the testosterone and the Winstrol. The Winny could be taken orally, which avoided the whole needle-in-the-ass routine, simplifying their decision. Jesus pushed two Ziploc baggies across his desk, gently chiding them. “To do this right you will need the both, amigos. But maybe next time.” At his insistence they upped the dosage to fifty milligrams a day.
The package radiated in the pocket of Del’s cargo shorts all the way home, glowing warmest when Edsell pulled alongside a Fort Myers police cruiser at a red light. Immediately upon arriving at their apartment he emptied his pouch into a multi-vitamin bottle, sprinkling the remaining Centrum tablets on top to conceal the contraband. He then rolled the entire thing in a tube sock and buried it beneath the briefs in the top drawer of his dresser. He was mortified to find Edsell’s stash, still in its see-through baggie, hours later on the bathroom counter.
The dullheadedness eased in the gym. By day four Del registered an uptick in desire that more than compensated for the fact he hadn’t actually added any muscle yet. After four sets of squats he burned to do a fifth. He grew antsy to get back under the bar during Edsell’s turns, time he had formerly cherished while catching his breath.
A week into the grand experiment—it seemed less wrong to regard it as a research venture—he could trace new mass in every muscle group in his upper body. He obsessed over these new formations in the mirror before showering each morning, as he had studied his upper lip for signs of a mustache back in junior high.
On the eighth day he carried his euphoric workout mindset into the batter’s box. It was as if he could read the pitcher’s mind. Fastball, inner half. And there it was. And there it went. Deep over the fence in the right-center alley. He slowed to a jog halfway to first base and savored the journey around the bases, enjoying a serenity he’d never felt on the diamond, an invincibility he’d never known anywhere. And the Tampa pitchers sensed it, walking him in his next two at-bats. When he came up in the bottom of the ninth against the league’s top closer it was as if he wasn’t alone. Two pitches later he connected again, not quite as far as the first, but certainly deep enough. The Yankee pitcher was halfway to the dugout by the time it cleared the fence. As he crossed the plate, Del couldn’t recall rounding the bases. In his head all he saw was the ball rising off his bat into the Florida night sky.
The local press contingent, consisting of two newspaper reporters and a girl in platform sandals and an overbite who was reputed to have slept with at least three players on visiting clubs, had barely acknowledged his existence up to now. The most common question he’d fielded over the season’s first three months was “Where’s Skeen?” Tonight they flocked to his locker.
Karissa Sanders hung around when the beat writers from the Fort Myers and Cape Coral papers departed. “So that must have felt good, huh?” she asked, as if they had spoken more than the two times they actually had.
“Yeah,” Del shrugged. “It’s always nice to contribute.”
“We were all up in the press box with our jaws on the floor. Like ‘where did that come from?’”
Del lifted his eyes from the cleavage straining against the flower print of her sun dress. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Oh nothing bad.” She laid a too-familiar hand on his forearm. “It’s just, wow, two absolute no-doubters in one night. The only other guy who’s hit two in a game all year is Chad, and, well, he—”
“There are a lot of good players on this team. Any of us could do it any night.”
How many of those others were wondering the same thing as Karissa? Were they marking his heroics with an asterisk even as they poured out of the dugout to greet him at home plate?
He declined Edsell’s overtures for a celebratory round or three on the pretense of calling Dana and bummed a ride home. After mixing himself a protein shake he wandered down the hall to his room. From the drawer he extracted the bulging sock. He shook two pills from the bottle, his nightly dose, and stared at them in his palm. Did they really work that fast? Various coaches had spouted platitudes that the game was seventy, eighty, ninety percent mental. Hadn’t he gone to bat tonight knowing he could hit, would hit? Maybe that was it, more than the pills. He took a sip of his shake and held it in the back of his throat. But instead of tossing the tablets in after, he closed his fingers over the Winny. Is it me, or is it you?
He swallowed the protein solution and dropped the pills back into the bottle. They hadn’t timed those pitches. They hadn’t barreled those balls. Eight days—seven and a half, really—couldn’t have been enough to turn nothing into two home runs. Edsell had been taking just as long and hadn’t gone deep. All he needed was the mental edge the juice had given him. The confidence. The belief he could and would succeed. The belief that tonight wasn’t a fluke to raise the WTF? flag up in the press box.
It was several days before the effects began to wane. He compensated in the weight room with a determination that Edsell shouldn’t detect a dropoff in his training. He matched his friend lift for lift, ignoring the protests of his muscles and joints. A three-game series in Daytona, where the hotel’s idea of a weight room was a StairMaster and a treadmill, provided a welcome reprieve. He soaked in the hot tub, swam laps in the pool, and collected five hits in twelve at-bats against the top-ranked pitching staff in the league.
A week later, with all beneficial traces of the Winstrol out of his system, he faded, both at the plate and in the gym. Determination proved a poor substitute for confidence. Walking to the batter’s box telling himself he could hit a pitcher was not the same thing as knowing he would. Now wise to his own con, it began to work in reverse. The spiel became a pep talk. “Come on, man, you can hit this guy.”
Nursing an oh-for-eleven streak that spanned three games, Del sipped his morning Muscle Milk and pecked out an email to Dana on Edsell’s laptop, glossing over the struggles as he had played down the hot streak earlier in the month. Box-score lines didn’t hold much sway with her. What she wanted was the countdown, which had started the morning she flew back to Seattle after her too-brief visit the last weekend in June. How many more weeks until he’d be home? His notes followed a formula: a paragraph on how much he missed her, something funny from the clubhouse or bus ride, something stupid Edsell had done, and a gripe about the heat. None of it would be new, since they had talked for nearly an hour the night before, as they did most nights. As he combed through checking for egregious misspellings, Edsell, who had spent the night at Ginny’s, burst in.
“S’up Tandy?” He blew past the small table and pulled the refrigerator door open. “You ready to rock?”
“In a minute.”
Edsell poured himself a glass of cranberry juice and downed half of it before setting it on the counter. “Left my friggin’ bag over at Ginny’s. Can you spot me a dose?”
Del started up from the table. Edsell was by him before he got to his feet.
“I’ll get it. Just finish your love letter there and let’s get rolling.”
“I can—”
“I got it. Top drawer, right?”
Del took two futile steps after him, then turned around. He was back in his seat, pretending to read over his email, when Edsell returned.
“What’s going on, Tandy?”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t bullshit me, man.” He waved Del’s vitamin bottle in his hand. “Why have you got so many left and mine is almost out?”
Del gripped his sore biceps and glanced from the floor up to his friend’s inquiring eyes. He felt as guilty now for playing clean as he had for taking the drugs in the first place.
“I quit taking them. The night that chick made that crack about my home runs.”
“Who? That Miracle Blog girl?”
“Yeah. I felt like everyone was talking. I wanted to prove to them all I could do it myself. Clean.”
“No one’s talking. And believe me, I’ve been listening. Notice I never sleep on the bus anymore? That’s the best time to hear shit. Close your eyes and pretend to snooze, people whisper all kinds of crap. But no one’s said anything. It’s all in your head.”
“No, that was all in my head.” Del pointed at the pill bottle. “There’s no way that stuff really does anything in a week. But I bought in so completely I believed I could hit anything. Jesus could have given me Flintstones vitamins and I’d have hit the same as I did.”
“Maybe, maybe not. But you can’t sustain that. You haven’t. You’re right back where you were.”
“No, I’m not. I’ve proven to myself I can do it.”
“If you say so, man. But why didn’t you tell me? Why’d you keep this fucking charade going for two weeks? You must be sore as hell.”
“I don’t know. You were so into it. I didn’t want you to feel like you were on your own.”
“That is some noble bullshit.” Edsell mussed Del’s hair with a knuckle to the scalp. “But I think you’re making a huge mistake.”