BRO HAD JUST FOUND his good season groove, the groove where you got the big flies and the deep shots, when his brother Sly was kidnapped. The news didn’t seem to register. The call came from his mother while the team’s equipment manager was in the motel room with him. One minute Bro was arranging to have a video made of his swing, and then without so much as changing his tone of voice: “What’d you say? Where’d he go? Mama who, who…” Then while he got the facts straight, the equipment manager standing there brought to mind the old Richard Pryor line, looking stupid was white folks’ natural expression. In fact Bro found that what he wanted most was to get off the phone and hurt the man.
He let his mother know he wasn’t alone, he roughed his way past the guilt by using the word “ofay.” He told her goodbye and then sat more upright between the stiff motel pillows. His younger brother Sly, he told the equipment man. Last seen outside a hardware store in a mall south of Newark. They figured kidnapped because they’d found his Air Jordans, the ones with Sly-y-y on the trim. The laces had been cut and the shoes thrown in a dumpster.
It hurt the man, yes. His jawline went through changes and his eyes were too large. But when he shouldered his duffle bag, the manager came up with one of those lame and useless Oregon sweetie pie smiles. Uh-oh. By tomorrow or the next day, everybody on the team would know.
Alone, Bro remained planted. Waiting, waiting, his long spine flat against the wall. Eventually it came to him that he should call his mother back. The receiver felt heavy and the dialing was difficult, the whole instrument just the opposite from ten minutes before.
It helped when he learned, over the next two-three days, that his trouble gave the entire organization the numbs. Of course he expected the team to keep it from people on the outside. But what he got was amazing, some kind of multiplication dance in slo-mo. First the ones in charge here in Salem said they didn’t know what Angels policy was, they’d have to call the lawyer up in the majors. Then Bro had to call the lawyer up in the majors himself, and he said he didn’t know what Angels policy was either. Plus everybody kept going back to the same word, personal. Bro wondered what kind of a person they had in mind, putting guys through such a runaround. It took the owner the better part of a week to come and tell him face to face that Salem couldn’t pay the airfare. Up with the big club it would be different of course, he said. The big club would assume the expense for this kind of personal matter.
Terrible timing, too. The owner had arrived when the locker room was full, everybody suiting up for b.p.
“Hey, I’m just a guy who sells farm tools. I can’t handle round-trip all the way back to New Jersey.” He’d hiked one foot up onto the bench next to Bro, one flashy damn boot that somehow he’d found income enough to handle.
“The way you’re hitting now,” he said, “they’ll probably move you up to Sacramento in no time anyway.”
Bro went into his Mau-Mau glare. “If you gonna fly,” he said, “it cost the same from Sa-cra-men-to.”
And he didn’t take his eyes off the owner till the man had backed into a mop and bucket. Big Guernsey face all stitched up in another of those smiles. It had the effect Bro was after, a couple of the other guys were openly snickering.
The last thing he needed was to have this trouble throw off his rep around here. Especially since every time he called home, every day after his roommate headed for the park, the talk with his mother always left him so out of touch he could hardly say where he’d been between when he’d hung up the phone in the motel and when he’d started to pull on his cleats in the clubhouse. He came to work in a dry-eyed Twilight Zone. He wished this had happened while they were on the road; acting like a zombie was natural on the road. Worse, the woman did it to him with sweetness. Even now, when the guys stopped by his locker after the owner had gone—high five, low five, Bro that was bad—he was glad they couldn’t hear how soft and easy his mother came on.
Bro believed he knew how her mind was working. He recalled his father, a heavy-handed whiskey beard who’d run off when his mother was pregnant with Sly. He figured she didn’t want to make the same mistake twice. All through the week’s home-stand, she’d begin the conversation by asking how he’d done the night before. When he finished reeling off the latest she’d say something like: Oh well you got to stay there, then. And she’d remind him that she had his sisters. Even then, all she’d say was, They a godsend. She never told him straight out that Toola had come from Baltimore as soon as she’d heard the news. That kind of thing was up to Bro to figure out for himself.
By Thursday he was asking the local guys if they knew a place where he could work out privately. Somebody with the Fellowship of Christian Athletes offered a church lot, but Bro knew there’d be strings attached. He kept asking, patient with the standard joke—Gee Bro, I’d let you use my ID, but.…He’d noticed long ago that in Oregon they mostly didn’t have black kids. But these locals were walk-ons, your basic marginal talent. He never much liked cutting them down.
Then once he’d found a place and started taking his hacks (at least he’d been able to pry loose a couple pieces of club equipment), it got him nowhere. He set up in the middle field of three empty hundred-yard stretches side by side, some private college layout. Not a Christian in sight, nor some doofus cowboy with the nerve to call himself an owner. Nonetheless it was as if Sly and the rest of Bro’s family were still as much in place as the batting tee and the webbing that caught his shots. In fact once he broke a sweat the magic of the groove returned, everything became concentrated in the tension of the grip against his callouses, in the crack as he got hold of the ball and the thut as it was snared in the rubberized net. Other than that he had room only for the fantasies, rocking out as usual from just behind his eyes, the announcer’s tinny hype and the crowd’s vacuum roar and the whole stadium going wild with flags and paper airplanes for 360 degrees round the silent mountain horizon. When Bro spoke there was no echo. Even the weather was vacant, perfect. He’d gone into this streak just as the rain-outs ended, and now the air was so clear that when he finished his workout, all the way across an adjacent field Bro could pick out a man from Building & Grounds.
Another black man, in fact. That as much as his cart and shovel made Bro think Building & Grounds. He hooked his fingers in the cage and squinted. The brother wore a Walkman. He appeared to be laughing and he shuffled his feet viciously; he was dishing lime onto a row of plants, each scoop so heaping and brilliant that Bro was certain it would burn the roots. He realized his own rush, his workout rush, was gone. Still he kept staring till his sweat chilled and he had to start his cleanup just to get the blood circulating.
Sunday, the one day game during the week. Families in the stands and a little more media. Bro was still rocking Godzilla, he could feel it the first time he stepped inside the foul lines. When he got his third hit of the afternoon—a deep, deep fly, way over the Valley Homes sign in right—it became obvious to him that working out alone was only more of the same. It was part of the problem, stonewall stonewall. Just, after the game, how was he supposed to deal with three reporters at once?
Bro made sure the young woman from the radio was there, then ducked into the showers. He had another player bring him his towel and slacks. As soon as the pants were on, he went after the woman and backed her into a corner. He hooked his forearm against her shoulder, so close that when her startled face came round her hair brushed his naked chest. She had that working-blond wave; Bro flashed on a TV commercial when it flared round her face.
Then they were huddled by the doorway. Bro announced that he was dedicating this season to his brother. Just announced it, loud enough to carry through the ghetto blasters and the usual tomcatting.
She punched her recorder, he ran down the facts.
“Whoa,” she said the first time he paused. “How long have you been sitting on this?”
He blinked. “Ahh, I’m not sure you’re understanding what I’m saying.”
“Well you’ve been awfully strong. You don’t even know if he’s dead or alive.”
“No. No see, this isn’t about me. This is about my brother. I want it to be like all the bats and all the balls, everything you see around here…plus whatever skills or like, knowledge I may have picked up so far…”
He was bent close to her machine, trying to think; deliberately, she wrapped her hand round his bicep. “You want it to be like all that’s for him?”
Bro nodded, but already the doubts had set in again. When he straightened up she was slow letting go of his arm, and he started thinking twice about that tickle at his chest earlier. Why come to this white girl? He had something so simple to get off his chest, why complicate it right at the start? When he’d gone after the woman he’d told himself it was the radio thing, getting the exact quote. He had a lot of respect for the men in the bigs who wouldn’t talk to the newspapers. Now Bro had to take a moment, resting against the locker-room wall. And though she must have noticed how badly the concrete would soak her sweater, she wedged herself between him and the corner. Of course that was her job, she didn’t want the guys hustling past to interrupt. But she was close enough for him to pick up her day smell even with all the cologne and deodorant nearby. And couldn’t he at least have buckled his belt? One of the other bad boys on the club ambled past, and he gave Bro that little grin, that little look while he slowed down, rolling easy sideways hip-to-hip going past—and Bro found himself smiling back.
Smiling. How could he have forgotten: this was still so new for them. A woman in their busy, stinking room, all the uptight wisecracks. Hey, check out the new piece from the radio. After Bro caught himself smiling he couldn’t help glancing sideways, worrying what she thought. But she was busy with her recorder. He noticed instead that she’d dressed down again, granola and jeans even on Sunday. If only she were more like the townies who waited outside the park, the eyeliner, the beaded feather earrings dangling almost to their shoulders. The accessories would have cooled whatever wildcat pump had carried him out of the game.
But he’d cornered her, she’d grabbed him. Now what was she asking?
“How old am I?” he repeated.
He saw that she must have five years on him at least. He wouldn’t have been able to tell if she hadn’t stood so close; all the rain out here kept the skin elastic.
“Bro?” she said. “I mean are you old enough to come have a drink with me? This is no place to talk.”
The other faces were no better. The guys who weren’t watching him had their backs squared, shower-drops clinging to their shoulder blades as if they’d turned to chrome.
“Bro? You there?”
The equipment manager swung by, fingering a hefty watch out of the valuables bag. Bro nodded, yeah that’s me. When the reporter took it for an okay it seemed like a nitpick, like the kind of thing a wimp would do, to slow down and tell her different.
She drove some kind of soft-shoulder foreign car, looked exotic just sitting in the lot. Not that Bro needed any help. Already he was seeing lingerie. She said her name was Robin, “but I like it when guys call me Rob.” She said she had to run an errand before dinner, and when he asked where, she smiled. “It’s outside town, Bro—but let me keep it a surprise.” All these white girls had lingerie.
But the little car’s front seat was a hassle. His thinking became more ordinary while he struggled for legroom. A bad sign; for a long time now he’d believed the head-trips had something to do with his success. About the same time as he’d discovered he could hit the long ball, Bro had noticed how quick and beefy the dreams would come. Announcers going hoarse and the whole works. Bro even used them as part of his pre-game, the way other players had superstitions about how to lace their cleats or when to start their run. He thought it gave him an advantage, having an invisible prep. Nobody knew about it, when he stood picturing the shots leaving the park or what the situation would be with men on base. Nobody could mess, and so nobody was ever going to know. Nobody except his brother anyway. Bro had always figured he’d tell Sly sooner or later, the only other man in the family after all. He would have confided in him already if the boy hadn’t been so much younger. The boy still clung to their mama more than Bro liked to see.
Bro caught an awful smell, thick machinery rubber. He discovered he had his body curled onto one haunch, away from the woman, his nose buried in the rubber lips of the window. He squared round and tried to look like he was scoping out the view. But Salem of course was nobody’s idea of a city. Five minutes beyond the ballpark and you never saw a house bigger than ranch-style, while the cross-streets came out of scrubby open landscape like a line drawn on a map.
“Can we talk now?” Robin asked. “While we’re getting there?”
He saw she’d set up the tape recorder on the console between the seats. And the surprise of her prettiness, when she turned and the hair halved her face—that too only made Bro aware of how his head had cooled. If this were a game he’d be off his stroke. He tried to relax, but the seat’s headrest barely came up to his neck, and the best he could do for starters were the week-old facts of the kidnapping. Robin appeared to understand. She let the tape run a few moments. When she spoke, she sounded careful.
“Is your family…are they working with all the agencies? Will you know as soon as anything happens?”
“They say something like this, you just can’t tell.”
“They? They who?”
“My mama. I mean my mama tells me what all those agencies or whatever tell her.”
Robin nodded, but her eyes were active.
“They all say,” he went on, “you can’t make no plans on the boy for certain. You could be thinking he’s dead and in the ground a long time, and then one night like, his face might all of a sudden flash by on the TV.”
Nod again, then silence again. The road was so straight the tape must have picked up nothing but its own hum.
“Was he big, Bro?” she asked suddenly. “Like you?”
“Naw, not like me.” The numbness remained, this was more of his mother talking. “He might still shoot up in high school, though.”
“High school?”
No hand-me-down lines for that. Bro sat up awkwardly; something under the seat jabbed the tendons in his heels, so hard he winced. Bending, he whacked his head on the glove box. “Gyahh.” And then Robin started being nice to him of course. Touching his shoulder, gently repeating his name. His first clear thought was, The media. The woman wasn’t even saying “Bro,” now, but his full, press-guide name. This couldn’t have been what he’d wanted. He took a moment, his cheek against the warm dash, and he could pin it down exactly: he’d wanted to get someplace real for the first time in days. Not this—reporter’s trick. A stray rocket and then a scene out of a Roadrunner cartoon. A sexy Roadrunner cartoon, to boot. Robin was halfway to giving him a back rub by now.
He felt under the seat and found what had poked him. A record album, that’d do to change the subject.
“Hey Rob, what’s this?” He came up holding the LP, and her hand fell away. “Ain’t this a little old for you?”
“Oh.” She laughed. “That was my boyfriend’s—I mean my ex-boyfriend’s. I’m not seeing anyone now. Wow, that guy was so into the blues.”
Bro grinned, setting the album on his lap. The grin was all he could manage.
“That’s Howlin’ Wolf,” she said eventually. “You really don’t know?”
“He looks like my father,” Bro said. Meantime making up his mind: okay. The media was a tool, they even said so down in Instructional League. Plus anybody on the club could have told him this girl was a newcomer. Okay, so use it like a tool, and pay the price next time her game gets a little clumsy. Talking about the family after all seemed somewhere near what he was after. Except then—couldn’t have been more than a couple minutes later—she was pulling off the highway. She was heading up towards what looked like a farmhouse and stables.
Of course it had to be a farm. Bro could see livestock a field or two away, through the ballgame roar of the driveway gravel. It was just that everything appeared so square and functional. There were none of the nooks and crannies he remembered from field trips in grade school. The satellite dish was planted between a couple naked concrete blocks, the house stood dark and empty. Instead of a garage the owner had nailed pink corrugated plastic to the top of some upright 4 × 4’s. The movieola effect when they pulled in under that plastic was wildly out of place, like the once in a while when a pigeon flaps down in the infield.
The woman didn’t move after she cut the engine. Bro realized he’d been quiet, checking the place out.
“Your father ten years ago, and now your brother.” She exhaled hard and found his eyes.
“Well what it makes me think of, these last couple days anyway, I think of like East Coast, West Coast. I think of the difference between the two, I mean.”
She frowned. “What’s that got to do with you?”
“Well like, my family would have had it different out here.” He raised his eyes to the pink ripples overhead. “We wouldn’t have wound up living such a bad life, out here. Because it just isn’t bad around here the way it is back East. This is a safe place.”
She was silent again, but there seemed an edge on it. He lowered his head in time to see how her frown enriched her eyes, deepened the blue. Then she put in some word just to mark the beat. Bro was left unfolding himself from the car while she headed for the stables.
And inside the building, the brown shadows warmed by the long day’s sun, she became that much stranger. Despite a churchlike ceiling and a center aisle wide as Bro’s arm-span, Robin made the place. Her outfit had a new effect, the boots especially. She knew it too. The woman strutted along crooning. Of course her actual words couldn’t be what Bro thought he was hearing, “Yo mama, yo mama.” But in fact the whole scene had started to feel impossibly familiar. The hay damp from the loft opposite, getting into the eyes as soon as you came in the door; the snortle and hoof-tread within the deep stalls. Some kind of locker-room flashback? Certainly his head was warming again. Random pink and white craziness fluttered alongside Robin’s croon, as it rose and fell through the harsh smoker’s cough of the animals. A butterfly in the locker room?
At the next-to-last stall she opened the bolt. “There’s the boy,” she cooed. “There’s my sweet boy.”
Her explanations went by in a rush. A gelding on lease, “the fulfillment of an adolescent dream.” Bro had never liked being lectured at, and Robin’s slick work with the reins and bridle made the breathless rap seem like an act. But he could see what all the excitement was about. Robin led the horse out between them—and of course Bro fell back as soon as the first awkward foreleg emerged, it’d been a long time since anything had tightened his nuts like that—but he couldn’t stop staring. The face was sharp yet chocolate. Bird-like planes of bone ended in square formal teeth. The shoulders and ribs went by in skinfull ripples, first brown then red, and Bro couldn’t tell where the light came from.
Robin was saying, “Yes Mothra, ye-es Mothra.” At least he recognized the movie. The New York stations had played those Jap monster things all the time. “You didn’t think I’d keep you cooped up all day, did you?”
Actually, getting some fresh air seemed like a great idea. He wouldn’t feel so scared out in the fresh air. After all they were under the loft now, in the worst of the settling hay-dirt. Bro set his face. He was past the high, sculpted butt before Robin had finished rolling back the door.
But when she turned and saw him, she stopped him with a stiffarm to the chest. “Watch it! You don’t ever come up on a horse from behind like that.”
Out in the corral, she was apologetic. “Bro, I’ve wanted to own one of these so long—well I guess I’m overdoing things a little.” But Bro, keeping maybe a yard’s head start just in case, was still into hyper-awareness. Making a mental note that his head and Mothra’s were the same height, doing a Laser Eyes number about the distance to the nearest shelter. On-deck awareness. Whenever he tuned in Robin, it was like she was talking in an echo chamber.
“It’s the same animal,” she said, “think of it that way.” They’d reached the fence now. She was pulling off the bridle.
“Front or back, he’s the same big old Mothra. Just, from one direction he’ll be your best friend and from the other, he might kick your head in.”
Bro tried to relax, cowboy-posing at the rail.
“But listen to me.” She smiled, still apologizing. “Your turn, Bro. Tell me, what do you think of my baby?”
Freed, the horse had moved off, nosing into bulky mounds of grass. When Bro spoke, he discovered the echo was gone.
“Mighty nice,” he said. “Someone like you, not that old, and already you got something you always dreamed of. Mighty nice life.”
“Oh God. Don’t start that again.”
Bro cocked his head differently.
“Don’t start in again about the peaceable kingdom out here in the Northwest. I swear, people have got their heads in the sand about that.” She shook her head, her eyes darkened.
“You know,” Bro tried, “maybe if we just stuck to the interview—“
“No no no,” she said, “this is part of the interview. Honestly. I think this is why I went into journalism in the first place. I was just so sick of everyone always saying that where I grew up, everything was beautiful. Hasn’t anybody heard of the kind of monsters we get in these woods? The runaways up in the hills? Listen, I did a piece on one of them, those guys live like savages.”
Bro had his tongue between his teeth. All he could think of was another bad-boy putdown—I thought I was the one supposed to be upset.
“Now someone like you, Bro. You’ve got a real story to tell, real trouble.” Though she’d lifted her eyes, she was staring past him. “That’s what I’m in it for.”
He turned away, but the view didn’t make things any easier. These last naked hours before sundown. Out here in the farmland, it was as if the mountains east and west were themselves only arbitrary cutoffs, something to give a person a break from the endless air. Bro was in a worse zone than after one of his mother’s calls. Someone else was pouring out their soul to him: a white girl. Just to keep himself located, he had to concentrate on the splinters prickling his palms. He frowned at the rattle of a tractor nearby.
“Oh Bro, oh boy,” Robin was saying. “Wow what a shot.”
He turned back, wondering if he’d missed something. She was framing him with squared thumbs and forefingers, a loop of bridle hanging from one fist.
“You glaring across the fields, and Mothra there sort of looming behind you. And when you were like clenching your arms, great. I’ve got to get my camera.”
“Camera?” His smile held up decently. “You’re radio, ain’t you?”
“Give me a break, Bro. You know how it is when you’re just starting out.”
She was turning on the sweetness again, and her hair and smile were stung nicely by the low sun. But it was the reins and bridle that made him agree to wait. In fact after Robin handed him the tangle of leather and hooks, lighter than he’d expected, Bro was glad to hear her explain that she’d need a few minutes. She’d have to load and choose a lens. Bro smiled more honestly, nodding. He’d decided by then that what he needed was some time with the horse. A few minutes on his own, put an end to this rabbitting around. Horses after all were part of the life. Dick Allen, the original in-your-face badass lumber man, the only player Bro had ever let on was a hero—Dick Allen raised thoroughbreds.
Robin’s boot-steps died away through the stables. Mothra stood with head and neck over a far corner of the corral.
The bridle fitted comfortably over one shoulder. Then with that arm Bro clung to the fence top, so stiff as he walked along that he noticed the tractor again. The racket meant business as usual, part of the life. But now the animal faced him, coldly blinking. Bro raised the hand on the fence slowly.
Slo-owly, and with the other hand he held the reins tight across his body so there’d be nothing dangling, nothing clinking. He picked up horse-smell or hay-smell, some rootless lively thickness in the air.
“Hey boy!” This was another voice, not Robin’s. “What d’ y’ think you’re doing?”
Bro hadn’t quite touched the animal yet. He turned awkwardly. Coming through the corral’s barn-side gate was a heavyset man with a crowbar over one shoulder.
“What d’ y’ think you’re doing? Hey?”
The farmer. He reminded Bro of the Angels’ owner, even across the exercise yard you could see him chewing his cud. Overalls tucked into boots. Big enough to throw shut the gate without shifting the crowbar from his shoulder. Plus there was the tractor, the antlike nose of the machine just visible around one corner of the stables.
“Hey, you with me? Hey boy?”
He’d focussed past the man. His eyes burned from the fat lick of sun that kept the hills and cropland skeletal. What was this numb-fuzz all the time? Bro didn’t even lower his hand till he noticed it hanging there, and as he backed off along the fence he was trying consciously to think. He was making himself recall when this kind of thing had happened before. That time in the elevator after one of the high school playoffs, and waiting for the subway once in Philadelphia. Plus the street types in Newark were always saying they were going to kill you. But then those street types were brothers, what’d they have to do with this?
Bro caught his foot on a hoofprint and lost his balance. He sat a moment on the bottom rail.
The horse swung its face away. The farmer grinned, or half-grinned. Really it was hardly more than a tic, something extra in the grimace as the man shrugged the crowbar into his hands. But that was enough to set off fantasies so rough and adrenalized that Bro stumbled again as soon as he got to his feet. “Aww, don’t worry,” the farmer said. “Nobody’s going to do anything too nasty here.” But the guy didn’t know: Bro had a headful of it. The most intense flashes concerned the man’s tool. The crowbar would be terrifically warm from the tractor and the sun, almost scorching. It’d have such perfect heft, the peak of the swing would just click in.
Bro counted off a couple seconds in his squat, and when he pulled himself back upright against the fence he went hand over hand. In his head he panned backwards, deliberately, getting some distance from the head-cracking and murder. For the first time, Bro discovered that he himself wasn’t any part of the picture. Bro himself was just a blur in his mind’s eye. He was triumph: the soundtrack was The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. But he was smoke, colorless smoke, nowhere near as vivid as the iron.
“You all set now? You with me now?”
The man had spread his stance, just beyond arm’s reach. Bro wasn’t going anywhere, the bridle pinched his collarbone. And then Robin was trotting back through the barn. The farmer made out like it didn’t faze him—“What say we start with just, you tell me who you are?” But he was getting in slant glances towards the door, and when Robin appeared he lowered the crowbar a notch. She came out head-down, over a vertically-arranged camera such as Bro had never seen. She must have first spotted them through the viewfinder.
“Oh! Mr. Rutgrove!” She snatched the camera up in front of her neck. “What are you doing?”
“Caught this boy trying to make off with your beauty there.”
“This what? Who are you talking about?”
Mothra had sensed something. The animal moved off slow haunched, away from them all, more or less into the center of the yard. Meantime Robin yanked Rutgrove back towards the barn. As soon as she started whispering at him the man pulled up straight, tucking the bar behind his back as if it were a cane. Bro found himself following the horse. Never mind which end he might be coming at this time. Never mind the head games about Philly or his high school playoffs, either. All he could ever think of when he recalled those mean places were comebacks he wished he’d made at the time: more superstar fever, long since worn out and rutted. Bro just tracked the horse—no. Actually now he was veering towards the far side of the horse, the side away from the stables. He had some idea that he needed Mothra between him and the other two.
“Look,” Robin suddenly shouted, “that’s Marvell Gunne, the designated hitter for the Angels.”
With that he was lifted into grief, choking and weeping as he tried to get away. For a moment the echo was back, way too loud, though he hid his face in his elbows and tried to swallow, swallow. But a step or two farther, stumbling blind, and what difference did it make if anyone noticed? No one could reach him anyway. No one could be there. Things happened: he almost went flying when he hit the fence again. At some point he ripped the bridle off his arm. And he had thoughts: useless explanatory tags like outsider, man of the house, bad nigger. Finally however the time careened along unmarked, just the opposite of any workspace with plans or breaks good and bad. Bro was nothing but the heat in his face, the occasional mercury sound when he whispered Sly. Even then he flubbed the name.
When Robin took his arm, Bro hadn’t quite gotten under control. Nonetheless his first swollen glance at her was all he needed to know that not only had she seen everything, but also she’d told the farmer why. His head cleared and he turned to face the man. But Rutgrove was gone. The crowbar stood by the stable door. And though Mothra was in the way—the fan-like shoulder muscles were lovely through his last tears—Bro could see that the tractor hadn’t moved. Robin meantime was making her explanations.
“I mean when he saw you were crying—“ she slid her hand down his arm, squeezed his hand. “Well he started grinning like he’d just robbed you of your manhood or something. So I just went, think fast, sucker! When I told him about your brother, let me tell you, it scored.”
With his free hand, Bro swabbed his face. All right, this woman now. Her conversational swagger was a reporter’s thing, sure. Nonetheless he enjoyed it. Plus with her elbows on the fence top and her camera hanging, Robin’s sweater hugged her breasts nicely.
“We can talk about it more at dinner,” she said.
“Dinner? Oh yeah. Yeah, listen, Rob. I don’t think I can make it.”
“What?” She let go of his hand. “What do you mean you can’t? What about our interview?”
“Got to get home, Rob. Got to do some serious talking with the folks at home. Sunday’s the only day I can call without a damn game hanging over my head.”
But though his mind was made up, Bro was glad to hear Rutgrove returning. The ride back to town would be hard enough. The farmer’s boots were heavier than Robin’s of course; even Mothra looked toward the door. At that Bro moved away from the fence and, with a final clearing of his throat that turned into a murmur, he slipped a hand up the neck to scratch the back of the horse’s ears. It surprised the animal. The tiny muscles under Bro’s hand were agitated, the dark eye hawk-like. But Bro kept smiling till the farmer emerged. Rutgrove carried a bat over his shoulder this time, and a ball in the other hand. Bro could see right away that the bat was wrong for him, a whip-handled Aaron model. Way too light.
Then the man was in his face. “I wanted to show you these, Mr. Gunne.” A real cracker; coming from him, the name sounded like “gone.” And of course—his son used to play for the Angels. “These were his, his bat and his ball. I wanted you to see them.”
“That’s okay, Mr. Rutgrove. You worked hard, you got yourself a nice farm here. I understand.”
“I’m not a bad man. I’m a good man.”
Bro nodded soberly. “Something happen to your boy?”
“Happen?” The guy must have ransacked the house to find the stuff, his lower lip was soaked. “Well, he’s in concrete products now…”
Enough. Bro took the tools from Rutgrove and asked if he’d like an autograph. Too rough about it, yeah, and he sounded too high and mighty. Couldn’t help himself. The farmer was left with dumb open hands, and Mothra shied away. Plus the horse rumbling past triggered yet another of Bro’s flashes. He saw himself swinging up onto the animal’s bare back and jumping the fence like in a Western, tearing off against a landscape of poster board mountains and prefab sets, this one wild isolated blur dark with speed bringing all the rest to life.
He let it go. Nothing to pay serious attention to, but no call to stomp it flat either. Especially now, when all of a sudden Robin and the farmer had started playing hardball. Rutgrove was ticked, his face was heavy again. He said he didn’t want a damn autograph. And Robin came round from where Mothra had stood. She shoved her camera at Bro, a flash of color off the lens making him notice that sundown had come at last. Did Bro object, she asked, if she got her picture now?
Bro smiled. He said no problem, he’d give her a beaut of a shot in fact. But she had to be quick. Then he stepped back and went into his stance. Adjusting for the bat, he found enough of his sweet groove to take the ball deep.