This seemed like an odd way to tell someone that someone else had died. Odd but effective. What’s colder than death?
“Cold,” Schwartz confirmed. “You put quite a lick on him. He’s going to be hurting tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?”
“You know. Day after today.”
The two of them stood there, side by side in the yellowish, unreal light of the diamond that made distant objects seem near. After a while Schwartz said, “At least those two scouts left before things hit the fan.”
That thought had occurred to Henry, though he was glad not to be the one to voice it. The paramedics carried Owen out of the dugout, lowered the gurney’s collapsible legs into an X, and wheeled him toward the ambulance. The fans and Milford players clapped. When things like this happened on TV, the strapped-down athlete always lifted a hand to the crowd to show that he’d be okay. To show that the human spirit could triumph over any hardship. Owen did no such thing. President Affenlight clambered into the ambulance behind the gurney, and the ambulance screamed away.
The umpires and coaches gathered at home plate, conferred for a few moments, and exchanged handshakes. As he walked back toward the rest of the team, Coach Cox beckoned Henry and Schwartz with a wave. Schwartz put a hand in the small of Henry’s back, guided him toward the huddle.
“We decided to call the game.” Coach Cox smoothed his clipped black mustache, spoke in clipped black words. “So good win. I know you’re worried about Dunne. But we can’t have twenty of us dinking around the hospital. Go home, shower up. As soon as I hear anything, I’ll send out word. Understood?”
Rick O’Shea raised his hand. “Off day tomorrow?”
Coach Cox pointed at him. “O’Shea. Watch yourself. Three o’clock practice. Now let’s get out of here before we freeze our asses off.” As the players dispersed he squeezed Henry’s shoulder. “I’m headed to the hospital. You need a ride?”
“We’ll go in my car,” Schwartz told him. “So you can hit the road afterward.”
Coach Cox lived in Milwaukee, two hours south, and commuted through the season. “Goddamn Dunne,” he muttered, stroking his mustache. “Him and his goddamn books.”
Henry waited off to one side, goose-bumped and shivering, while his teammates collected their equipment. They slapped him wordlessly on the back and set out across the early-spring mud of the pitch-dark practice fields, toward the campus proper. When they were no longer visible, even to Henry’s 20/15 vision, he took a deep breath and headed down the dugout steps.
The dugout was low and long and dark. The concrete walls exuded an ominous coolness, like the hold of an arctic ship. A narrow beam of fuzzy-edged light streamed through a few feet of grayness and illuminated a small patch of wall. Owen’s reading light, still clipped to his Harpooner cap. Henry clicked it off and zipped the cap-light combo into Owen’s bag. Then he slung one big bag over either shoulder — Owen’s with the number 0 stenciled on the side, his own with the number 3. Halfway up the dugout steps he thought to check for Owen’s glasses. He unslung the bags, dropped to his knees, and felt around the sticky floor in the darkness beneath the bench: Small mucky puddles of tobacco spit. Tooth-printed wads of gum. The plastic caps of Gatorade bottles, their spiny underedges like tiny crowns of thorns. Plain old clumps of mud. Owen’s glasses had been kicked all the way to the far end of the bench. Henry picked them up and wiped the lenses clean against his jersey. One arm wobbled on its hinge.
When he and Schwartzy arrived at St. Anne’s, President Affenlight was pacing up and down the ER waiting room, head bowed. He devoured the checkerboard floor with six strides, turned, and did it again. Schwartz cleared his throat to announce their entrance. Affenlight’s expression, weary and disarmed when he thought he was alone, changed instantly to a bright presidential smile. “Michael,” he said. “Henry. Glad to see you.”
Henry hadn’t expected President Affenlight to know his name. They passed each other often on the sidewalks of the Small Quad, because Phumber Hall was right beside the president’s quarters, but they’d spoken only once, on Henry’s very first day at Westish, while Henry was blending in with the tent poles at the Freshperson Barbecue, nibbling his fourth or fifth hot dog:
“Guert Affenlight.” The older man sipped his drink, held out a hand.
“Henry Skrimshander.”
“Skrimshander?” Affenlight smiled. “It’ll be the seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay for you, I’m afraid.” He was wearing a silver tie that matched his hair. His sleeves were rolled midway up his forearms — the way they hung unwrinkled from shoulder to cuff, their lines crisp and pristine, suggested a man at ease with his surroundings. When Sophie had asked Henry to describe Westish, the first image that came to mind was that of Affenlight’s perfectly rolled-up sleeves.
“Any news?” Schwartz asked now.
“He woke up for a moment in the ambulance,” Affenlight said. “Out cold, and then suddenly his eyes popped open. He said, April.”
“April?”
“April.”
“April,” Henry repeated.
“The cruelest month,” Schwartz said. “Especially in Wisconsin.”
“April.” Henry parsed the word into sounds so small their sense disappeared, as if he’d wandered into the wide spaces that separate the solid parts of a molecule. “Starts tomorrow.”
Coach Cox walked into the waiting room. Like Henry and Schwartz, he hadn’t changed out of his Harpooner pinstripes. He carried, two to a hand, bulging white bags that bore the golden arches. “Any word?”
“He’s in having a CAT scan,” Affenlight told him. “They want to make sure there’s no bleeding in the brain.”
“Goddamn Dunne.” Coach Cox shook his head. “If anything happens to him I’ll kill him.” He plunked the bags down on the round faux-wood table in the corner. “I brought dinner.”
Schwartz and Coach Cox settled in at the faux-wood table and unwrapped their Big Macs. Henry loved fast food, but tonight the smell made him queasy. He sank down on a stiff couch and looked up at the TV bolted high on the wall. On-screen a statuary Christ, shot tight in a bright swath of light, hung upon the cross. His chin slumped against a bony, toga-sashed shoulder. ORGAN MUSIC, read the closed-captioning. Cut to biplane angles of an equatorial island: sapphire water, pink beach, the firework tops of palm trees. ISLAND DRUMBEAT.
“Here,” said Coach Cox. “Keep your strength up.”
Henry let the french fries sit there in his hand. The televised colors, the swift jolting movements from shot to shot, didn’t help his stomach. He hadn’t seen a TV since October, when the World Series ended.
President Affenlight stopped pacing and sat down on the couch. Henry tipped the flimsy red carton toward him. Affenlight, with a nod of thanks, drew out a fry. The gesture reminded him of his smoking days, which had — more or less — ended with his return to Westish. Upon taking the job, he’d come to this very hospital for a checkup, his first in fifteen years, as was required by his new insurance. He’d expected accolades and hushed admiration from the doctor; he’d recently guest-rowed on a Harvard varsity eight at practice and hardly cost the team a beat. What he got instead was a vehement, statistics-laden lecture. His family history — his father had suffered two heart attacks; his older brother George had died of a so-called coronary event at sixty-three — was as cautionary as they come. His LDL of 200 placed him squarely in the danger zone. His age-old three-pack-a-week smoking habit amounted to a suicide note. The doctor, having played up the pathos of all this to extract from Affenlight a promise not only to quit smoking but to cut back on red meat and alcohol, sent him away with prescriptions for Lipitor, TriCor, and Toprol-XL. Sentenced to a life of pills. He was also supposed to take a baby aspirin every day.
What proved hardest about forgoing his vices wasn’t the loss of the vices