Field of Fantasies

Rick Wilber is an award-winning editor, novelist and writer whose short fiction often appears in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and elsewhere. He is at work on a trilogy for Tor Books, and also continuing to work on a series of counterfactual stories about famous ballplayer and spy, Moe Berg. The first of those stories, “Something Real,” won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History in 2013. Wilber has published some fifty short stories, many of them touching upon baseball in one way or another. In this supernatural story, a man claims to be Stephen Crane, the nineteenth-century author who was a pretty good college baseball player before he became famous for writing The Red Badge of Courage, “The Open Boat,” and others. Crane offers our narrator some pointed advice about writing, about base ball (as Crane spelled it), and about reality.

Stephen to Cora to Joe

Rick Wilber

ON A SUNDAY AFTERNOON in September that threatened a downpour, in the top of the eighth of the last game of the season, with no one on and two outs and things pretty much looking okay, suddenly I couldn’t find the strike zone.

Control tells you the truth about yourself. You go along thinking you know exactly where to place the ball and you’re always getting it in there, and then suddenly you can’t find the damn plate. Sliders that painted the black just the inning before start missing wide or are down in the dirt, and your fastball—such as it is—loses the corners, coming in so fat that you have to quit using it or risk someone coming back up the middle with a line drive and taking your head off.

I walked the first guy in the inning on four pitches, two of them way wide and two in the dirt. He was their number seven hitter and I’d gotten him out three other times on easy groundballs. Now I’d walked him on four straight. Steve, back behind the plate, was not happy about that.

As the batter trotted down to first, Steve came clanking out, the broken metal clasps of the cheap shinguards I’d bought him at the used sporting goods store rattling loosely. There was an ominous rumble of thunder from a squall line out over the bay. I looked that way, took a deep breath, tried to think my way through my control troubles by looking at the scenery. A rainbow was just forming, a thin arc of color emerging in front of the charcoal sheets of rain. Just a bit south of that, a huge mass of low blue-gray clouds boiled, the sky running from pewter to dangerous shades of green and black.

“Looks quite mean and low out there, David, don’t it?” Steve said in that Bronx jargon he put on for laughs sometimes. “But, hully gee, I don’t think she’s blowing our way.” He slipped his catcher’s mask up on top of his head and then held the ball out to me, nestled in that wide Rawlings mitt I’d bought him. “So, ya mug,” he added, “how ya feeling?”

I looked over toward the stands. Cora was there, watching us, wearing a Rays cap in our honor, and sitting up straight on the bleacher seat so I couldn’t miss the tight scoop-neck T-shirt, those glossy sports shorts she likes, and her granny sunglasses set up on the top of that blond hair. She looked gorgeous. She saw me seeing her, gave me a quick wave of her hand, and smiled. Next to her on the grandstand bench was a small overnight bag. That, I thought, was a good indicator.

I turned to look at Steve. “I’m fine,” I said. “Just lost it for a second there, that’s all. It’s been a long day.”

Steve had seen where I was looking. “David, Cora’s a real looker, got a real shape on her, she does.” He grinned. “She’s got everything an old gent like you could want, including that ample bosom; but if you don’t start worrying about your pitching, I’ll lam the head off ya. Got it? We’re two runs in front and this is the bottom of their order. Just throw the old pellet in there and let them hit it, right? Let your fielders do their job.”

I nodded. “Sure. Let them hit it.” That plan, I thought, gave our defense more credit than it was due, but I didn’t say that. It was always hard for me to argue with Steve.

He leaned in close, stared at me hard, eyes narrowing. “Don’t be rum, David. We don’t have anyone in relief. It’s your game, win or lose, all right?”

“I’m fine, Steve. Really. Let’s get this guy.” I was tense, and he could sense it. He was good at that. He smiled. “Loosen up,” he said, “and just throw strikes.”

He turned to walk back, stopped, turned back. “Did I ever tell you what my friend Joseph said about America’s love for baseball?”

I smiled back. “Joseph? Conrad? No, you never did.” Steve loved telling those stories about his circle of friends when he lived in England: Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, H. G. Wells, Conrad—they were all his pals there at Brede Manor down in Sussex, south of London, in that last year of Steve’s life as he slowly died from the consumption that destroyed his lungs. Must have been quite a group when they got together on a Saturday evening to drink, smoke, and play cards and listen to the rattle of Steve’s cough.

I wanted to hear the story, but then the ump walked out and made us break it up and get back to the business at hand. I walked the next guy, too, and then gave up a double and a single before finding my nerve and settling back down with us a run down. We tied it up on Steve’s single in the ninth before the squall line hit and the rain came down and everything got very confused.

I first met Cora on a Monday morning as I walked across campus from my office in the Arts Building to Cooper Hall, where I taught a 9 A.M. class in Fiction Writing 402, Advanced Techniques for the Short Story.

She sat on the low brick wall that marks the path between the two buildings, reading a thin, little book. She wore a tight T-shirt that showed off her breasts, a pair of plaid walking shorts, and those platform sandals that are so popular with the coeds these days. She had broad features—there’s nothing delicate about Cora—with that wide mouth and her red lipstick. It was too much makeup, but she wore it well.

As I walked by, she looked up at me; that beautiful upturned face, her eyes wide, those lips pouty and full. “Professor Holman?”

I just smiled at first. I’d been teaching a long time, and you develop a kind of immunity to the sexual displays of the typical undergraduate. But then, I swear it, she said this: “The burnt sky thundered its rejection of Sean’s entreaty. Nature, inimical Nature, arched her back and hissed at him. Her claws were out. He felt small, and still shrinking. Great cracks of fury pounded him, reducing him, until he was gone.”

My jaw must have dropped. “Wow,” I said. “You’ve actually read that?” It was from “Hide the Monster,” the title story from my thin little collection, part of my Big Break five years before: a two-book deal, the short-story collection with the novel to follow. The collection got some nice reviews in places that matter and sold well; the novel I’m almost done with and my agent and my editor love what they’ve seen of it.

“I love that story,” she said, and held out the book she was reading. It was the collection. “I’ve memorized whole passages from these stories. Will you autograph the book for me?”

And I found out her name so I could sign: “To Cora Taylor, A Beautiful Reader.” She giggled at that when she read it, then thanked me, said she thought the book was the best thing she’d read in years and that she’d been surprised to find I was teaching right here on campus. I thanked her again, and we kept talking. She flirted. I flirted back, and then met her for drinks a few hours later and we wound up in bed.

It was all very simple, very effortless. Have you ever noticed how all the best things seem to just fall into your lap and that the things you try for the hardest are the ones hardest to get? It’s always been that way for me, and Cora was a perfect example. A girl like that? Wanting to bed a tired, old writer like me? It was laughable until it happened, and then it all seemed perfectly normal, like I knew what I was doing, like I had it all under control.

There was a time when I could really play The Game. Pitcher for the national champs in college at Southern Illinois, four years in the minors after that in places like Paintsville, Kentucky, where I met Emily, the perfect girl for a young pitcher; and then in Lakeland, Florida, and Medford, Oregon, where I could show her off along with my skills. And then came my cup of coffee in The Show when the Cardinals called me up in September with the expanded roster and I got my shot. It didn’t take me long to figure out that I was good, not great, on a pitching staff that took the Cards to the World Series. My career stats: no wins, two losses, an ERA of 4.05.

I was on the big league roster for spring training the next season but couldn’t stick. Then I went down to Triple A and couldn’t find the plate. Same at Double A and while I kept at it for another year or two after that, the two truths I discovered were these: the downslope is a slick one and twenty-eight is an old man for a minor leaguer. So before I was thirty, I had to face doing something with the rest of my life. I thought I’d make a good college coach, and that meant getting some degrees, so I went back to school, got one degree and then another and then still another while I got interested in words and how they’re put together, and I started caring about writing. Baseball—that other life—disappeared into my past until finally, on the day I sold my first short story to the Mississippi Review, I didn’t pay attention to it anymore at all. It was fifteen years before I came back to it.

Steve rowed up to practice the day I met him. We were two weeks away from our first game, and I was running in the outfield, trying to loosen up some old tendons and build up a little endurance at the same time. We play in an over-thirty league, all very amateur; doctors and lawyers and teachers and mechanics and salesmen and even one politician, a city councilman who has his eyes on the mayor’s office. We all just play for the love of the game, but there’s some real talent around too. My first baseman played in the minors, same for the shortstop. All four of our outfielders played college ball, and our one other pitcher, like me, even made it to the big leagues for a half-season or so. So while we’re out here for fun, we take it seriously once the ump says play ball.

It was at the end of one halfhearted wind sprint that I stopped for a moment to look out past the left field foul pole toward the little harbor there and the bay beyond.

It was an absolutely perfect blue-sky day, the way it can be in Florida in the spring, the sun hot but not as deadly as it gets in July and August. Someone was out there in a rowboat, I noticed. I was happy for any excuse to stop and look for a minute or two instead of running those interminable halfhearted outfield wind sprints. You get to forty years old and getting into shape isn’t the fun it used to be.

As I watched, the rise and dip of the oars and the boat’s forward motion spent out a series of small whirlpools that bordered a peaceful wake, the bright sun bouncing off the tiny wavelets. It was mesmerizing, and I kept watching as the boat reached the dock and the guy inside tied it off, stepped out, started walking from the dock across the two-lane street to where I stood at the ball-field’s low fence.

He was thin, under six feet tall, had a small moustache, wild dark hair parted right down the middle and then pulled back behind each ear. He brushed back that dirty hair. “You need a player?” he asked. “I play a pretty decent catcher.”

“Well,” I hesitated. We had a lot of guys who tried out for the team, but the truth of the matter is that most people just can’t play the game. We weren’t some fantasy camp, where they coddle wannabees and give them uniforms and a chance to pretend. This wasn’t slowpitch softball where everyone’s a hitter and anyone can play. This was baseball. Hardball. The real thing.

But, on the other hand, we could always use a guy who could handle himself behind the plate. Truth was, nobody our age seemed to want to put on the tools of ignorance for more than a few innings, so this guy was worth a look. “Sure,” I said, “c’mon on in and give it a shot.”

And he did. And within the hour I knew we had the new catcher we needed. He was a natural, with a bullet arm, a great glove; a singles hitter but he always made contact.

He called himself Steve Crane, and I thought that was pretty funny, rowing up in an open boat and all that.

I met Emily in Paintsville, Kentucky, my first year in professional ball. She was drop-dead gorgeous and bored to tears in that tiny town, a prom queen turned part-time student at the local junior college while she worked for her daddy’s insurance business. I was a star at that level of the game, and there was no competition in Paintsville. It took us something like ten minutes to go from hello at the Blue Hotel bar to oh, yes, back in my little apartment. She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and if the sex wasn’t that good, the looks were compensation. I saw her as the perfect ornament. She saw me as her ticket out, her lifetime pass to the big leagues, and that was okay by me. Hell, I saw me headed that way myself, and she made for one great-looking baseball wife, all perfect blond hair and those tight jeans and that luscious accent, y’all.

But then I didn’t quite become the ballplayer she’d figured on. Or the famous sportscaster either, though I gave that a try for a few years. Or even, later, the Famous Writer.

I didn’t become much of anything and one day, five years into the marriage— she was patient with me, I’ll give her that—I came home to packed bags and a note about what I hadn’t turned out to be. Later, I found out she had a boyfriend who made more money than he knew what to do with in software sales, so Emily finally found somebody who could succeed at something, and that gave her a chance for a new beginning. That’s how she told me to see it in that note: A New Beginning.

Cora wanted to know about my writing. It started with the how-many-wordsa-day questions and went on from there, growing in complexity, some of them personal and some of them about the work. She wanted to be a writer herself and kept talking about how she was willing to pay her dues to get there. I should have thought that through a little better when she said it.

She had stories to tell, God knows. I found out this: She was a local girl, Catholic elementary school at St. John’s Parish out on the beach. Then four years at St. Petersburg Catholic High School, where she played on the softball team and edited the yearbook.

She was a good Catholic girl from a solid family—father a pediatrician, mother a teacher, two little brothers who played soccer. She was on her way to wherever it is good Catholic girls go for their careers when she got hooked up in college to a boy with the wrong kind of dreams and the wrong way to reach them, and she found herself in trouble—drugs and pregnant and the boyfriend got mean. I didn’t get all the details but there was no child and a nasty little scar on the back side of that gorgeous left cheek.

So she’d come back from all that. Back in school, wanting to write, looking great. And paying her way through as a dancer at the Club De Dream out on the beach. I started going there every Tuesday and Thursday night. She went on at ten, this good Catholic girl, and oh, my.

Halfway through the season I had a terrible Sunday pitching, getting roughed up for nine earned runs on the way to losing 15–2. We have a ten-run mercy rule in this league, and it was a good thing for us, since it ended the game early. Most of us went to the Little Regiment bar afterward, a dark-wood paneling faux-British pub not far from the field. A few pints of Guinness sounded pretty good to me at that point. We weren’t in there more than fifteen minutes when Cora left to play some pool with Humphrey Regis, our shortstop. He was fresh from a recent tough divorce and had been oh for four at the plate, so a little eight-ball with Cora must have seemed heaven sent.

That left me and Steve alone at the table for a few minutes. Steve pulled my collection out of his bag and told me he’d read it.

“This is the copy you signed for Cora,” he said. “She asked me to read it.”

He gave me a slight smile. “I know a little something about writing, David. I did well at it there for a while.”

He shrugged those thin shoulders. “You know what I mean, all right, David.” He leaned back in his chair, sipped on his beer. “Look, David, I don’t know how or why this is happening, either, chum. I think I recollect something that Herbert said, about that machine of his.”

He laughed. It sounded bitter. He started to rise. “All right, then, David. I’m sorry I tried to monkey with this. Cora thought you’d appreciate my advice, that I should try and help, that your career—”

“Cora thought?” I shook my head, waved at him to sit back down. “Please, Steve, stay. Look, I appreciate what you’re trying to do, really, but my career is fine. Just about got my novel done, and my agent says she’s close on the next deal. I might get to quit teaching if things really take off, you know.”

“Bully for you, David,” he said. Then he smiled at me. “David, can I tell you a story?”

“Sure,” I said. “Tell me a story. Something about the Civil War, right? About red badges, about fighting and dying and all that.”

I knew that sounded mean even as I said it. This poor guy really did think he was Stephen Crane; he’d convinced me that he really believed that, at least. And here I was teasing him, acting like I was hot stuff just because I’d written a few books and won a few awards.

He was staring at me. I tried again, nicer. “I’m sorry. Sure, absolutely, I’d like to hear a story.”

He shook his head slightly. “The ‘Red Badge,’” he said, then paused for a moment. “You know, I’d never seen war when I wrote it.”

“I thought I could tell the truth about war when I wrote it. I thought I had some talent.”

He shook his head again. “No, not really. You know, it’s hard for a man to realize these things about himself.” He paused, sipped on his beer, went on. “I didn’t know the truth from an electric streetcar. I came to realize that in May of 1897, the Greco-Turkish War. The New York Journal hired me as a correspondent, and it was there, at Velistino, that I finally saw the truth of war for the first time.”

He smiled, shrugged. “Death is very real.” He took a sip of beer, smiled again. “I wonder how close to the truth I might have come if I’d lived past twenty-nine.”

“No time? We practice a couple of times a week and we play a single game on Sundays. What are you doing with the rest of your time?”

He frowned. “What am I doing?” There was a long pause. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m trying to think about it right now, trying to remember, and I don’t know. When I’m not at the park, playing the game, it’s all gray, blank.”

“Oh, c’mon.” The poor guy, I thought, was Looney Tunes. “You’re here now, with me and there’s nothing gray.”

“Yes, I am at that.” His eyes widened. “Maybe it’s you, David. Maybe it’s you that’s brought me back, you that makes me real.”

I laughed. “Right. Me and my magic powers, that’s it. Okay, then, here,” and I grabbed the paper placemat from under his plate, flipped it over to the blank side, pulled my antique Waterman pen out of the reading-glasses case where I keep it, and handed it to him, calling his bluff. “Abracadabra, Steve. Here’s your chance. Get writing. I’ll just hang out here and make you real for a while, while you scribble.” He chuckled.

“It might work at that, my friend,” he said. He held up the pen to look at it—an 1893 Waterman #25, eyedropper filled, a classic with a tapered cap and gold-filled bands around the barrel. Emily splurged and bought it for me to celebrate my first contract. He gave me the damnedest look, part smirk, part wonderment, then reached over to put his finger on the placemat, slid it back his way, and started writing. I shut up and for the next couple of hours just sat there and watched him write. It was my job to keep the beer coming for both of us.

His handwriting looked clean and legible, but I couldn’t read it from where I sat, beyond being able to see that it was prose. He wrote steadily, the motion of pen against the paper was so fluid, so constant, that I could see the story taking shape before my very eyes. There was no hesitation, no long moments where he was lost in thought, no getting up to wash the dishes or cut the front yard and vacuum the carpet or stare out the window or any of the other tricks I used myself to stall for time in the middle of a writerly panic. It was utter confidence at work—dumbfoundingly utter confidence.

As he got toward the end of the second paragraph, he coughed, the first one I’d heard from him in the couple of months he’d been around. It was just a sharp, quick bark, that first one; but a few minutes later came another and then another, each one looser than the one before, like his lungs were filling with mucus right there in front of me. Finally, maybe an hour into that writing session—on his fourth or fifth placemat by then—the cough was so rattlingly hard that he had to stop and get it over with. I got up from my chair and came around the table to help him but he waved me away, then grabbed one of the big paper napkins from their holder on the table and held it to his mouth as he brought the mucus up. He spat into it finally, and his lungs seemed to clear. He tossed the napkin back on the table and went back to writing as I sat back down. Later, when the waiter came by to clear away the empty beers and the used napkin, I saw the red stains on the paper napkin.

The coughing eased after that; there were still some fits but nothing so dramatic as that one, and then, finally, he seemed to hit a stopping point. He set the pen down, leaned back in his chair, reached over to pick up his beer, and took a good, long pull. He smiled. “You, of all people, must understand just how good that felt, David.”

He waved my concern away. “No, not that. The writing. It was…,” he searched for the right word, “it was real; do you know what I mean?”

“Then I wonder,” he started to say, but then he fell into that cough again, a quick bark that built to a loose rattle that he covered with another big paper napkin, his whole body convulsing with it.

He laughed, and that brought him to a cough again for a minute. Then he smiled, nodded. “Yes. Get it looked after. Damnable thing.”

Then he reached over to take my hand. Holding on to my hand, gripping it tighter as he spoke, he said this: “David. Why are you playing base ball? A fellow your age—you’re the oldest chap on the team by a good ten years—you could be hurt, pull a muscle, break an ankle. It doesn’t make any sense really, does it?”

I thought about it, started tossing out reasons, possibilities, excuses. “Hanging on to my youth? Getting some exercise? Still learning to hit a curve? Hell, I don’t know. Because I enjoy myself. Because I can quit worrying about other things when I’m out there pitching.”

“The game. The situation. The next pitch. Whether or not my catcher can throw that runner out at second.”

He smiled, the cough gone. “To the last question, the answer would be yes, old chap.”

It was my turn to laugh. “I don’t know. I play because I love it. There’s no excuses, nothing gray out there. I pitch and they hit or they don’t, that’s it. At the end, it’s all very definite, very real.”

“Yes, real. I can feel the ball, the glove, the rubber, and the hole I’ve dug with my right foot in front of it; the downslope of the mound, the feel of the ball’s stitches against my fingertips, the way it comes off the side of the knuckle of this finger,” I held up the second finger of my right hand, “when I throw a curve, or off this spot,” I touched a spot a little higher up on that same finger, “when I throw a slider. It’s all about physical sensations and concentration, lovely, lovely concentration. It’s reality. Unarguable reality. I love it for that.”

He nodded. “Unarguable reality. I like that.” He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, and said this: “Art—your art, my art—is involved in that terrible war between lies and the truth, David, and the truth must win out. Describe it truthfully. Make it real. That’s all I wanted to say.”

He leaned forward. “If you’re truthful about the surface, if you get the details right, then the interior is revealed and you can get close to the bone, get inside the bone, to the marrow, and tell the truth. That’s all. This is something that took me years to figure out. Only at the end, lying there at Brede one day in the sun, dying, knowing I was truly dying, did I finally begin to figure it out. And then it was too late.”

He let go of my hand, took the paper he’d been writing on, filled now with tiny scribblings that filled the page, folded it once, twice, and then put it into the pockets of his pants. He looked at me. “You have these skills, David. They’re very impressive, just like that little speech about base ball.

“But they’re all a bit too, too…” he hesitated, came up with the word, “too pyrotechnic. I can’t find the truth of things in there anywhere. I don’t see anything that really matters. That’s all I thought I might say. All right?”

What was I supposed to say to that, to this man who thought he was an invention of mine, someone I’d brought to life, created from the ether? “Sure,” I said. “It’s fine, Steve. Thanks for the input. I appreciate it, really.”

“All right, then,” he said. And he got up and left, waving once as he walked out the door.

Okay, I thought, finishing off my beer, that would be irony, right? A guy like him, a guy who thinks he’s a dead writer, preaching to me about the truth.

I set my empty beer glass down on the table, tossed a twenty on top of it, and went over to the pool table to shoot some eight ball with Cora. Later, we headed back to my place at the beach, the one with the second-story deck that looks out over the dunes to the Gulf of Mexico so I can watch for the green flash that comes with some sunsets here. It’s a bright emerald moment that shoots straight up from the final instant of the sun’s disappearance into the Gulf. They’re wonderful and rare and require concentration, focus, to see. Some people watch for years and can’t get the hang of seeing one. I’d seen a lot of them—dozens— over the years.

I wondered, as I got into my Lexus with Cora, if I’d ever get to see what Steve had written on those placemats. By this time I’d read everything Crane had ever written. I’d know in a heartbeat if this guy was the real thing. I wondered about that all the way home. Later, the green flash was terrific. So was Cora.

“He was just trying to help you, David,” Cora said to me on a Sunday morning a week later, the early light coming in the bedroom window to backlight her, so I couldn’t see much of her face, just the penumbra of that long, blond hair around her, a vision, a miracle.

She rolled over on her side to face me, propped herself up on one elbow, shook her head to clear her hair out of her eyes. We’d argued about her telling Steve that I was a writer, too. Now she wanted to explain herself. “He likes you,” she said, “and when I told him you were a writer, he said he’d like to see your work; that’s all.”

I stared at her. “You really believe it’s him? You do know that Stephen Crane died in a sanitarium in Badenweiler, Germany, in 1900, right?”

She stared back, slowly smiled. “So he’s back from the dead, or some kind of ghost? I don’t know, David. You tell me. You’re the fiction writer. You’re the one who makes all this stuff up.”

I played along. “I wonder how he got here, then,” I said. “He keeps talking about H. G. Wells and his time machine. I looked it up to make sure. The Time Machine was Wells’s first novel, that’s all—an allegory about the British caste system in the Victorian Age.”

“So what?” she said, leaning over to kiss me on my stomach. It tickled. Laughing, I pushed her back, then reached up to touch that perfect chin, run my fingers across those lips, as beautiful in the morning on their own as they were during the day when she’d put on her lip gloss and lined it in. She was young and perfect and I wasn’t either one. And she’d actually bought a copy of my short-story collection, which made her one of about a thousand people in the whole damn country. Part of me felt pretty awful about having an affair with a girl of twenty-two. But part of me felt I was not to be blamed. At least, with Cora, I was alive again. I was even writing again. Not particularly well, I thought, but bad words on the screen are better than no words at all.

I didn’t know how long the bubble would last, floating along there in the metaphoric breeze with me inside it, playing these kids’ games—sex with a twenty-something, baseball with a guy who claimed to be Stephen Crane.

Cora laughed. I watched those breasts move as she sat up on her knees and looked down on me. “You should get him to come guest lecture in your shortstory-writing class. Now that would impress the students.”

“They’d believe it was really him,” I said. “All that stuff about Conrad and Ford Madox Ford and Henry James and all the rest—they’d lap that up. And the part about Wells and his time machine, they’d go crazy for that. All most of them want to write anyway is sci-fi and fantasy.”

She reached down to feel me. I was ready and she moved over on top, concentrating, her eyes closed as she eased on down. Then she opened her eyes— those perfect eyes—and smiled. “Yes,” she said in a whisper, “he is kind of good looking, and dangerous.”

That afternoon she came to the game to watch. It was the first time she’d done that. She didn’t miss a single one after it. She even started keeping score.

The next game, Steve turned a single up the middle into a sliding double when the center fielder took his time fielding the ball and coming up to throw. Steve saw this as he rounded first and just kept going, sprinting hard for second. His slide was showy and maybe a little risky, spikes up pretty high, but he got in there safe and then I brought him in with a single of my own two pitches later. That moment, when he raced like a thoroughbred across the plate well ahead of the throw from left to score the tying run for us, was the second happiest I saw him in the six months he was here. His narrow face with that dour, scraggly, wild look on it finally lit up in a huge smile and he clapped his hands and shouted happily as he scored. His cough was gone. Never once in a practice or a game did I hear the faintest hint of that deadly rattle.

“I love running, lungs full of air and legs flying. It’s an honest measure of a man, isn’t it, David?”

“You know, David,” he said, crossing his legs there in the dugout and pulling out his pipe to suck on it dry, since the league rules didn’t allow you to smoke. “You know, near the end, when the consumption had about claimed me fully there at Brede, Herbert would come visit.”

“Herbert? Oh, H. G., right?” I said. “You know, he once said that ‘The Open Boat’ was an imperishable gem.”

I nodded. “The Commodore went down off the Florida coast. You were on your way to Cuba to cover the insurrection and you and the captain and a few others wound up in a lifeboat. You drifted just off the coast for a couple of days and then finally tried to ride it in through the surf. One guy died.”

“And the month before that, waiting for the Commodore to be ready, you stayed in Jacksonville, Florida. That’s where you met one Cora Stewart. She ran the Hotel de Dream.”

He smiled. “She was stunning, David. A big ample bosom, that blond hair that she would loosen and let fall around her shoulders.” He sighed. “I forgot everyone else.”

Then he went on. “Herbert would come visit Cora and I there at Brede, and he’d bring along a whole group of nieces and nephews so we could play rounders. I taught them how to play base ball instead. With a cricket bat and no gloves. That was the closest I came to baseball over there. Rounders, with a cricket bat.” He shook his head, smiled again, and waved toward the field. “This, this splendid game. It’s wonderful, David. You know that, right, how utterly splendid it is just to be out here playing baseball on a Sunday afternoon?”

I did know it, and told him so. You start to get a little older and suddenly things like a good hard slider down low and away, a hard-hit double off the wall, or even a scratch single up the middle—sure, they matter. Like making love to a beautiful woman in her twenties, like getting good reviews on your short-story collection, like writing well and knowing you’re in that zone: like all those things, it matters.

He shook his head, then stood up, took in a deep breath through his nose. “What do you smell, David? Right now, take in the air and tell me what you smell.”

I smiled, took a long, deep sniff. “Fresh air,” I said, “and green grass.”

“Leather,” he said, holding up the glove I’d bought him, a good Rawlings catcher’s mitt, an XPG 2000. “And sweat. And the dirt of the infield. I missed all this.”

He laughed, picked up one of our metal bats, Louisville Slugger Terminator, thirty-four inch, thirty-ounce. He held the bat up and laughed again.

“Yeah,” I said, “me too. I miss the smell of the wood. We still had those wooden bats when I was a kid, you know.”

He sat back down, slouched back against the bench. “It’s close, old chap. It’s nearly the truth. It smells like my childhood, like my father, the preacher, before he died. It smells like learning the game, throwing and catching and hitting out in the vacant lot next door. It smells like college, like playing for Syracuse and throwing out that Colgate man who was trying to steal. My God, I could play, David. I could really play.”

He shrugged. “I suppose. Life. Death. My writing. Finding the truth. They all mattered, too. And baseball is, after all, only a game.”

“I’m on deck,” he said, and stood, picked up the metal bat, walked out to the on-deck circle, and slipped the weighted doughnut over the barrel. I watched him as he took a few swings to loosen up. He was thin, but healthy; God, he glowed with it. Then Tommy ground out and it was Steve’s at bat again. He turned once to look at me, smiled, and then stepped into the batter’s box. Two pitches later he slapped a single up the middle. The look on his face as he stood there at first, happy with his base hit—there was some truth, some reality, in that too, I thought.

I’ve lied about a lot of this. I drive a gray Honda Accord, not a Lexus. I’ve never seen the green flash at sunset. Cora wasn’t really that good looking, or that young, or even a student. She didn’t dance at the Club De Dream; she worked in customer relations for the phone company, and she was well into her thirties if she was a day; and her breasts sagged and she hadn’t read my short-story collection and she didn’t flirt with me and we never made love. My earned run average in the big leagues was really 7.50. I was only up for one game, not one month, and I got ripped by the Mets for three very long innings. In fact, I was never in the big leagues at all, but was lucky to spend three years in the lower minors, trying to get by with breaking balls. I never did have very good control.

My short-story collection sold six-hundred and fifty copies and the reviews were awful. My novel? In four years I’ve written about ten thousand words. Are they good words, at least? I don’t know. I don’t think so.

I make it all up. That’s what fiction is, I thought—all lies. It’s not real; it’s safer than that; there’s more distance.

Here’s the truth about Emily, my ex-wife. She wasn’t nearly as good looking as I said, and she was a great deal nicer. In my second year of minor league ball, in Medford, Oregon, we had a baby, a perfect little girl, Annie, her hair as red as her mommy’s.

A year later I was in Lakeland, Florida, playing A ball for the Lakeland Tigers in the Florida State League. It was ten in the morning and Emily was at work; her job as assistant manager at the Pancake House paid our bills while I struggled to find the strike zone. There was a fire in our apartment complex. I crawled in through a bedroom window and rescued Annie, but my face was ruined in the effort and by the time my wounds had healed, my baseball career was over, my wife and child had left. I wound up homeless. I died penniless at twenty-nine.

Or maybe it was this way: Emily was a hooker, working the streets of New York. I rescued her from that and we had a child, a beautiful little blond Annie and for a while everything seemed fine. But then I was let go by the Cardinal organization and I couldn’t find work, and Emily went back to what she did best and little Annie died and Emily was murdered by her pimp and I was a crackhead and I died, penniless, in the gutter, at age twenty-nine.

Or, no; our child was abducted and I found her, dead, in the woods, her body placed against the rotten trunk of a downed tree that lay in a bower, her body framed by the overhanging branches so that the autumn sun came through like cathedral lighting. There were ants on her face, crawling in and out her nostrils, the empty sockets of her eyes. I was shattered by that sight. No, I was the murderer, and I turned myself in and I was executed in Florida’s Old Sparky, smoke rising, sparks flying, the smell of burnt flesh. I was twenty-nine.

No. We were all in a small boat together. Me, my wife, our daughter, adrift after our cruise ship sank off the coast of Florida. We could see the shoreline, huge breakers rolling in just a few hundred yards away, so big we didn’t dare try to get through them to safety. Finally, exhausted, we had to try. I made it and dragged Annie to safety; but Emily, poor Emily drowned and I’ve never forgotten the look on her face, the rage of it, as she slipped away. She wanted so badly to live. It broke my heart. She was twenty-nine.

My father was an agent for Farmer’s Insurance in Edwardsville, Illinois. He was good at his job. Mom taught English at Ward Junior High. We had a good life there, my brother and sister and I. I played Little League and we won more than we lost. I went to Mary, Queen of Peace for grade school and survived the nuns, then Edwardsville High School where I played football, basketball, and baseball for the Tigers and did fine. Then off to major in English at Southern Illinois University, where I discovered Crane, and myself, and a good changeup that got us to the Division II national championship game, where we lost to Cal Poly when I gave up a scratch single to their worst hitter at the wrong moment.

My two best friends went to Vietnam while I played baseball in college. One of them came home alive; the other in a box. I was lucky in the first draft lottery and didn’t go. Instead, I started that minor league career, which stayed minor league in writing, in life. I married a nice girl. We have a nice family. I have nice degrees from nice colleges and did a nice master’s thesis on the truth in Stephen Crane’s fiction. I teach at Pinellas County Community College, where I’m head of the creative writing program. I’ve sold exactly three short stories—one to the online version of the Mississippi Review, one to Elysian Fields, and the third to Alabaster. That makes me well published by community-college standards. I make a nice living. When I write, I really use that antique Waterman that Emily bought me. It connects me, somehow, to the man I studied so much.

I play baseball on weekends with some other nice people. We lose more than we win, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t fun. Just like Steve said, it’s an honest measure of a man, this splendid game. When you face a good hitter, when you’re at bat facing a hard slider, when that sharp grounder comes your way or that sinking liner loops toward you in right—you can’t hide; you can’t lie; you can’t fake it. You make the play or you don’t. Reality sounds pretty boring, doesn’t it? But that’s it; that’s me; that’s the truth of it.

And there’s this too: Stephen really did come rowing in that Sunday in May. He tied up his rowboat and walked over to watch us and we gave him a glove and a ball and a bat and, my, he could play The Game. We finished with two wins and twelve losses the season before he came. We won ten this past season, with Steve catching and hitting third. He made me a better pitcher. I learned things from him, some of them about baseball.

I looked up his stats, which is what we do in baseball. He played in the Knickerbocker League for the New Jersey Athletics. They played at the Elysian Fields. He gave the professional game five good years before he turned to writing for a living, where he finally made a lot of money and married a rich, young socialite named Cora Stewart. They moved to England, where he became a real man of letters and lived a long, productive life.

No. I lied about that. He played baseball for Lafayette College his freshman year and at Syracuse University the next year, where he said, “The truth of the matter is that I went there more to play base ball than to study.” That’s the way they spelled the game in those days, like two words. I want this to be accurate.

He flunked out of Syracuse, drifted into purposeful poverty in the Bowery, and emerged from there with a self-published short novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. That got him the chance to do more, and so he wrote his The Red Badge of Courage and became famous, if not rich.

The Red Badge was in 1894. In 1897, a famous writer at age twenty-six, he met Cora Stewart, already thirty years old and a failed socialite who ran a discreet bordello, the Hotel de Dream. They fell in love. He truly did survive the sinking of the Commodore and wrote a news story that became a short story that is generally said to be the best thing he ever did—and every word of it a kind of truth: “The Open Boat.”

Three years later he was dead, his frail lungs doing him in. Those last few years he traveled as much as he could, but called England his home. Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells—they all loved him and his work. They thought him important. In 1899 he declined rapidly. They sought a cure in Germany. Cora was with him at the end. You can look all this up if you don’t trust me, and I wouldn’t blame you.

And this is the truth too: There really was a rainbow that last day in September, and those dark clouds to the east over the gray chop of the bay, and that small rain that down could rain to soak me, sneaking up on me until I realized, at game’s end, that the rain, my sweat, the lies, my curveball, my lack of control— that all of it was a lie, that nothing was real except, maybe, Stephen and his stories and Cora, his and mine, there in the stands.

In the bottom of the ninth of that final game, Steve got me through it and I slowly found my control again. I let in enough damage that they tied the score, but we answered with a run in the top of the tenth and then all I needed was three outs in the bottom.

I was so tired, so hot and wet that I couldn’t think straight. Steve, behind the plate, was calling the pitches. I trusted him completely. We were up by that one run and I had no relief. Slider, slider, slider to the first guy and he went down swinging on all three, thank God. One out.

The next guy up had hit a double in the seventh and here he was again. Okay, then, slider wide, slider inside, fastball down the middle and he ripped it— another double, this one into the corner in left.

I was too tired to care, but you can’t say that to your catcher. “Sure,” I said. “Let’s get two more outs and we’ll all go home happy.”

“Yes, that’s it,” he said. “Everyone goes home happy.” And he grinned at me, tossed me the ball.

This is probably what happened after that. I came in with a slider again, low and inside, but the guy went down and got it, drilled it right down the line. Foul.

Another slider, over the plate some more, and a hard groundball, but right at Randy Miller, our first baseman. He fielded it cleanly and stepped on the bag while the runner moved over from second to third.

Two outs and a man on third. Okay, more tired sliders, then; Steve with his two fingers stabbing at the red dirt behind the plate. Ball one. Strike one.

And then, like I meant it, like I could pick my spots like that, like I had that kind of control over my pitches, over myself, my life, I came in with a good pitch, low and outside. Strike two. Steve, back there, shook his fist at me, good pitch.

Same call, same pitch and the guy hit a two-hopper right back at me. I gloved it, pulled it free, tossed it to first and that was that. We win. Season over. First damn place for the first damn time in the five years I’d been playing again.

No. Same call, same pitch and the guy hit a two-hopper right back at me. I gloved it, pulled it free, and threw it fifteen feet over my first baseman’s head. Runner scored from third. Game over. Season over. We lost. We came close, but we lost. I lost.

It was raining, I realized. It had been raining lightly for two innings and I hadn’t noticed until the game ended and the rain started coming down harder, with a distant flash of lightning and a rumble of thunder.

I walked over to shake hands with the other team, like we always do in this league. Nice game, I told them, which was true. Good job, they told me, and there was some truth in that too.

I got back to the dugout and Steve wasn’t there. I looked in the stands. Cora was gone. I dropped my glove into my athletic bag and saw some paper folded in there. Those placemats. His scribbling. The antique Waterman I’d loaned him was clipped to the folded sheets, holding them together. I pulled the pen free, opened the pages. The first page had this on it in that careful handwriting of his:

None of them knew the color of the sky. Their eyes glanced level, and were fastened upon the waves that swept toward them. These waves were of the hue of slate, save for the tops, which were of foaming white, and all of the men knew the colors of the sea. The horizon narrowed and widened, and dipped and rose, and at all times its edge was jagged with waves that seemed thrust up in points like rock.

That’s the opening passage from “The Open Boat.” I looked at the second sheet. It began like this:

The great Pullman was whirling onward with such dignity of motion that a glance from the window seemed simply to prove that the plains of Texas were pouring eastward. Vast flats of green grass, dull-hued spaces of mesquite and cactus, little groups of frame houses, woods of light and tender trees, all were sweeping into the east, sweeping over the horizon, a precipice.

I looked at the next sheet and it was the opening from “The Blue Hotel.” All that writing that day, I thought, all of that just copy work, scribbling down what he’d already done. I shook my head, tossed those first three sheets back into the athletic bag. Held the fourth and fifth in my hands, looked at them.

I’d read every story that he’d ever written and this one wasn’t among them. He’d been editing on it; you could see the scratched-out words and their replacements, see whole lines scratched out and rewritten. My hand started shaking as I read it. I got dizzy, then steadied myself, put those precious pages and the pen he’d used back into the athletic bag, then walked out of the dugout and stood there for a few minutes, looking up to feel the rain on my face.

Okay, then, this is the truth as I know it: We lost, but losing is part of winning and they both are part of what’s real. Maybe I threw that ball away on purpose so Steve wouldn’t be able to let it go at that, so he’d be back in February when we start the next season. Maybe he’ll have Cora with him, and maybe Conrad, so I can finally find out what he thinks of The Game. They’ll show up that first practice, rowing into the harbor in that little boat, emerging from the haze and fog of February’s heat over cold winter water. I’ll walk over there, and say hi, and help them out of the boat, help them tie it up to the dock.

And then we’ll play catch, take a little infield, some batting practice, catch a few flyballs, and just play the game, loosening up for the season to come, ready to find whatever realities, whatever truths, there are out there on the diamond. I think maybe it will happen that way. At that moment, I stood there, face wet in that cool spray. Then walked over to the low fence, hopped it, and jogged to the harbor. The open boat was just thirty yards away, heading toward the gray sheets of rain sweeping in from the bay. Steve was in it, rowing. I could see the happy smile on his face. It was the happiest I ever saw him. Cora, there with him, turned around to look at me. I raised my hand. They both raised theirs, and then they waved, and then the rain came down harder and the gray closed in and they were gone.