THE EASY WAY

A written creative work submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of The Requirements for The Degree As 5G

Master of Fine Arts In Creative Writing

by

Corey Michael Gruber

San Francisco, California

May 2016 Copyright by Corey Michael Gruber 2016 THE EASY WAY

Corey Michael Gruber San Francisco, California 2016

Set in the sleepy backdrop of San Francisco’s Presidio, The Easy Way tells the story of

young Denny Hammerschmit, an adolescent boy with a fond appreciation for baseball and

a special adoration for Otis Hunt, the star right-fielder for the San Francisco Giants who is

battling depression and recovering from a devastating knee injury. Standing between

Denny and his hopes of playing professional baseball someday is an abusive and self-

destructive father, whom, upon returning from a stint in the state penitentiary, wants

custody of his son and control over the boy’s development as a baseball player. At odds

with this idea is Denny’s mother, Lydia, who finds herself caught up in a blooming

romance with her son’s coach while at the same time realizing her hopes to see Denny make the right decisions in life are challenged by the unavoidable fact that boys gravitate towards their fathers no matter who they are.

I certify that the Annotation is a correct representation of the content of this written creative work. CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read The Easy Way by Corey Michael Gruber, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a written creative work submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree: Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University.

Chanan Tigay Professor of English

Creative Writing Chair ACKNOWLEDGMENT

All the acknowledgement in the world belongs to Christina, whose selflessness, focus

under pressure, and diligence is the inspiration for my life and the basis behind the character

Lydia in this novel and the reason why I began writing it in the first place. If it was not for

her, I might never have tried to sit down and tackle such a long work nor been inclined to

try to engage the emotional arcs of parents and their children in writing. It applies to life

as it does the work presented here that this angel, the love of my life, deserves all the credit.

I’d also like to thank all of the writers whose brains I picked in workshop and beyond while

drafting these pages. Your contributions have helped make this project move forward. I’d

also like to acknowledge my mentor, Chanan Tigay, who has offered so many useful

strategies and suggested readings for me to find my strengths as a writer and who over these past years has challenged me to improve as a writer in whatever genres I am working

in. Thank you, everyone. 1

Ch. 1

Early on a Tuesday afternoon, the eighth of April, some fourteen years before his

dreams of playing professional baseball would soften and dissolve into occasional

anecdotes in an otherwise pitiable life of mediocrity, Denny Hammerschmit hooked the

baseball glove his father had given him over the grip of his handlebars and pedaled off up

the hill towards Fort Scott Field. The glove wasn’t new, by any means. Its leather was

rough and worn. Creases had formed in the palm of the glove so deep no amount of glove

oil could dissolve them completely. In no way did it measure up to the latest Louisville

Slugger or Easton gloves his friends owned. It hadn’t ever belonged to his father either,

in any real sense of the word, or his father’s father, or been signed by some great ball

player, or been the glove that caught the out that sent the Giants to the postseason that

time everyone remembers. It was none of those things. But the glove was the last gift his

father had given Denny before his arrest. It was the very next day that Denny watched the police tackle his father in the street, handcuff him forcibly, and shove him sweaty and bloody in to the back of a squad car.

Home by dark, he heard his mother yell after him, her words calling from the kitchen window of their tiny Presidio apartment before Denny had the chance to get out of earshot. He didn't reply. He did not turn to look at her or even so much as indicate that he’d heard her. He was hoping she hadn’t noticed him leave, but he still might be able to pretend he never heard her call once he did come home after dark. His mother had been 2

getting wise to this trick lately, but that didn’t stop him from trying. Denny knew that if

his father were here, things would be different. His father always stood up for him.

He sprung his bike off the asphalt curb at the comer and sailed down Washington

towards the baseball field at the other end of the Presidio, through the Eucalyptus

shadows, dodging a clunky blue sedan that ran the stop sign at Kobbe and turned quickly,

down the steep hill, legs extended on his pedals, coasting the sweeping curves, gaining

speed, racing his own imagination. Near the cemetery overlook he could see the bay. It

was a clear and calm afternoon. A large cargo tanker was coasting in to port. He

imagined it was an alien space craft, and he a fighter defending his galaxy from invaders.

He fired laser cannons from his handlebars.

The excitement of the day was the Giants’ home opener, and Fort Scott Field was

the gathering spot. The depression of the winter months had been agonizing for Denny,

filled with eager anticipation after the previous Fall’s World Series Championship win

over the Tigers. It had been this day he'd been waiting for all winter. To add to that, the

Giants had re-signed Otis Hunt to a new contract. Denny had been collecting Otis Hunt

memorabilia since the third grade, when the Giants acquired the energetic outfielder from

the Phillies in a deadline trade. But even before then he had considered Otis Hunt his

favorite non-Giants player in the bigs. This fascination began after he got an Otis Hunt

rookie card in a Top Flight pack his father had bought him from the comic book store for his tenth birthday. Denny had kept the card in a protective cover and paid attention to the quirky left-fielder’s career with superstitious interest. He had always hoped the Giants 3

might sign Hunt, thought maybe he had somehow willed it to happen when they did. For

Christmas the year after the Giants won their first title, Denny’s father sent him a throw­

back Otis Hunt uniform, the orange mesh eighties pullover style. Denny had the chance

to get Hunt to sign the jersey, but asked instead for Hunt’s signature on his mitt because

his mother had said she would not buy him another jersey if Denny ended up framing the

signed one. So there it was—Otis Hunt’s signature on the thumb of his mitt.

Stately and prim, the east side of the Presidio was a world apart from the boxy

cutout complexes of the western side where Denny lived and he liked to ride his bike

through the neighborhoods where UCSF doctors and downtown lawyers drove the latest

model Benzs and Beemers. They had their lawns cut by the Presidio Land Trust’s

landscaping company that came daily if not every other. From time to time the residents

there threw parties where they decorated their yards with long strings of globe lanterns,

scrutinized the saturation of the market in the post-collapse recovery, insured everything

through the Heffeman group, drank Martinis after work in the Marina district. They

shopped for groceries from the comforting aisles of Mollie Stones, or the produce

markets in the Inner Richmond district if the fruit was in season; for shoes in Little Italy;

for clothes, drapery and linens at Satin Moon Fabrics. These were the parents of Denny’s teammates. Construction on the Golden Gate Bridge expansion had rerouted a portion of traffic each day by Fort Scott Field and the East Side neighborhoods, and while the residents did not much appreciate the added pressure on their otherwise sanctimonious 4

lives, it gave the place an undeniable excitement, a fury whipped up out of the chaos of

growth and change that seemed undoubtedly to emphasize the nostalgia of it all.

Nobody got old in the Presidio, those who lived their said, yet the place felt old to

Denny. The houses, all made of brick with porch columns painted white, stood with the

sensibilities of a past century. The towering eucalyptus trees kept the streets shady and

when the fog came it rushed over the forest canopy and darkened the sky, giving the

community a ghostly quality. He plopped his bike up against the fence at the ball field. A

few others were already fielding pop flies, and he ran out to join them.

*

Lydia Hammerschmidt was a short, smooth-skinned woman with long dark hair

curled softly and hanging over her shoulders. Her square framed eyeglasses slipped

loosely down her nose as she scrubbed at the dishes in the sink. With a soapy thumb and

forefinger, she pulled the sleeve of her sweater up and reached into the water to unplug

the drain. She had twenty minutes to get back to work and given that the road crews had

been moving up California Street this week she feared the bus would be late again.

She heard the front door shut softly as she dried her hands and ran to the kitchen

window to catch sight of her son tearing off on his bike with that glove hanging from his handlebars. She quickly slid the window open and yelled after him to be home by dark, but it appeared that he hadn’t heard. Or probably he had but didn’t care. Anyway why should he? That hadn't been what she wanted to say to him. What she’d wanted to say was to have a good time with his friends, that she couldn't wait to hear about their first 5

practice, and that more than anything she loved him. But those words could be more

poisonous to a boy on the cusp of adolescence than a stern deadline. Besides how could

her sappiness compete with the boy’s love of baseball? And that glove, that fucking glove

he loved so much. Lydia hated that thing. She knew it was nothing more than one of

Dave’s last minute bullshit attempts to buy sympathy. That man always did stuff like that.

The only proficiencies he’d ever mastered in this life were buying favors from people

who still trusted him and apologizing for then letting them down.

*

Fit and fond of ball caps, Dr. Kyriakos Simon Straub was known by his neighbors

as Coach Ky, even to those who didn’t know he actually coached a little league team. A

sense of youthfulness about him, in his comfortable aspect and in his playfulness,

complimented his casual attitude. His features held a misleading shadow of softness to

them, which contributed to the comforting sentiment people seemed to enjoy in his

company.

Coach Ky was pitching to Thomas when Denny rode up. “Denny, ‘The Hammer,’

Hammerschmidt,” Ky called out in his best baseball announcer’s voice. The boys all

hissed and cheered. Denny wiggled a hand into his floppy old mitt, which Ky was

somewhat pleased to see the kid still had. It reminded him of the glove he had had

himself growing up, and it was refreshing to see a kid on his team whose parents weren’t

always buying the newest gear. With his arms in the air, Denny trotted his way in to the portion of the outfield where the other boys were. Coach Ky held up another baseball to 6

Thomas and tossed in a pitch. Thomas smacked the ball right at Denny, and without

hesitation Denny snagged it.

“The Hammer’s clutch,” said coach Ky, holding out his glove to receive Denny’s

return throw.

“Bro, how do you catch anything with that old thing?” asked Pheonix, who had

also made something of an effort to catch the line drive but had flinched and held his

head back at the last second. The boys all laughed at Phoenix’s joke. So did Denny. He

held up the floppy mitt and punched his fist into the webbing. Then he pulled one of the

dangling leather tie strings from the thumb and put it in his mouth, chewing it the way big

leaguers often worked a cheek full of chaw. It was a running joke among the boys that

Denny’s glove was old, but Denny never let it bother him.

“It's amazing what you can do when you’ve got your eyes open,” said coach Ky,

with a grin to excuse any pain for the insult. At this the boys jawed Pheonix even harder

than they had been jawing Denny.

Coach Ky wanted to be good like that, sticking up for the kids who didn’t come

from money and being stem about the smart mouths. That’s how his best coaches had

been. When the team needed to travel, Coach Ky always called to make sure the west

side boys in the apartments didn't need a ride before he offered them to any of the boys

from the east side. In the offseason, he had organized car washes or bake sales to raise money to buy equipment, and he always set aside a portion of the money they raised to buy new cleats, socks or gloves for the kids whose parents couldn't afford them. If ever 7

during a game he caught any of the boys being rude or mouthy or unsportsmanlike in any

way he would not hesitate to sit that kid on the bench, even though he knew he would

catch and earful from an even louder parent who always seemed to connect their son’s

right to play to the amount of money they had payed.

Ky waved his glove at Thomas, who readied his bat for the next pitch.

*

At four minutes past the hour, Lydia slipped in the front door of the office,

allowing her hand to ease the door as it returned shut in hopes she might keep the bells

from telling Mr. Fong of her arrival. Gwendolyn, heard her come in and leaned out from

her cubicle.

“He’s gone already, sweetie,” she said, holding her hand over the microphone of

her headset, and then she pointed to a stack of files left on Lydia’s desk. A note had been

left from Mr. Fong on the files. The note, scribbled in his craggily handwriting, explained that he had tried waiting for her to return before her lunch had ended and to please call him on his cell phone. She dialed his number and got his voicemail.

She flipped open the files on her desk and reviewed them. They were all loans she

had approved last week, all from the same dealer, a sleazy auto group in Daly City that did everything they could to push through financing requests. Whenever Lydia heard their commercials on the radio she cursed at them— no credit, no problem? no credit, big problem, you fucks—she’d say. These loans were all loans run by one particular sales 8

associate and as she worked her way through the stack she began to realize he must have

been falsifying references.

She turned to Gwendolyn once she saw that her phone call had ended. “This

mother-fucker should be arrested for fraud,” she said.

“Mmm, hmmm,” Gwendolyn replied, making a snarky face at a similar stack on

her own desk. “Fong tryin’ a blame us now, says we got to be more careful. He’s the one

pushin’ for more approvals.”

“Every, single, one of these I told him we shouldn't approve,” Lydia replied,

flipping through the folders.

“I know,” said Gwendolyn, she rubbed her temples with her middle fingertips,

careful not to let her fingernails scrape her skin.

Lydia tried his phone again, and again it went straight to voicemail. She left him a

message asking what was happening with the Gemini Group loans, and then she hung up.

She checked her voicemails; there were two. One was the very associate from the Gemini

group all the loans that needed reprocessing on her desk were initiated by. He was

flippant and at times incoherent, claiming something about customers and what kind of

bullshit operation they were running down there. Lydia deleted the message before it

finished but immediately regretted doing so because it might have warranted a harassment case at least. The associate had twice called her stupid in the message, which she figured was only slightly more insulting than his usual reference to her as sweetheart or honey or babe. She had already told him once to stop, told him her name was Lydia 9

and that’s what he could call her. I ’m not your babe, she had told the other women working in the processing office of the Western Alliance Credit Union, I already got one dipshit thinks that works on me, and I ’m done with that problem. The women had all hollered in agreement, each one offering up their own mock Jimmy to the group while the others laughed.

Lydia had grown tired of the work she did. Years ago, when she had first been hired to process loans there she’d thought she would enjoy it. It was tedious work, sure, and in a cubicle no less. But it was a job, and it paid well, and because she was good at it she saw substantive raises, regular bonuses and overtime opportunities. But that was before the market crash—loaning money did not come with so much of a risk. Plus, she had been fresh out of her divorce then, and the job was a form of independence she had not yet known. Married at twenty, Dave had always wanted her to stay home and look after Denny. He had been over bearing in that idea, calling her on his lunch to be sure she was there, asking the neighbors if they had seen her leave or if anybody had come over.

He had been jealous of everyone. They could be walking through the grocery store together, her looking disheveled in her sweat pants, holding little Denny in her arms and, if another man even so much as looked their way, Dave grew annoyed and accusatory.

On several occasions the police had been called to stop Dave from assaulting a man he said was gazing at her. Lydia had endured the abuse herself, too many times to count, and when she finally decided to do something about it, when his threats and antics no longer scared her, he became even more violent. With determination she went door to door in 10

the outer Richmond looking for work, resume in hand that listed among two made-up work experiences and a fake degree from American University the babysitting job she had held as a teenager. Mr. Fong had looked it over, frowned. Looked her over. Can you type, he had asked. Like a stenographer, she had said. Mr. Fong had seemed suspicious, but Lydia had given him her most adoring smile, a gift of an attribute if ever there was one, a smile to light up the darkest night. Mr. Fong turned without a word, went to his office and a moment later came back with a folder full of hiring paperwork. He handed her back her resume.

“I can’t take this much longer,” she said, to Gwen. The rest of the office was mostly empty and Lydia felt safe in announcing this out loud.

“I know,” Gwen replied. “But keep that to yourself. I’d be surprised to find Fong hadn’t bugged the place.” The girls laughed together a moment, and then Lydia’s phone rang. She looked at Gwen, and Gwen raised her eyebrows as if to say, “Told ya’.”

Sure enough it was Mr. Fong. “Back from lunch, good to see,” he told Lydia, and she let an exhausted look fall over her face. She tried explaining that she had attempted to call him back twice already, but it was no use. Mr. Fong talked over her explaining what she already knew the files on her desk were about. “This time, be more vigilant,” Fong had said in condemnation of her work, as if the approval of the loans weren’t ultimately his own task. Vigilant, Lydia had questioned in her head as Fong went on lecturing in his heavily accented English discussing several of the loans specifically. You mean, diligent?

Lydia shook her head at the thought of taking vigilant action, calling up Jimmy at the 11

Gemini Group auto dealership and telling him to stop pushing cars on people who

couldn’t afford them and that if he used one more sexually derogatory term she’d drive

straight there and cut his dick off in front of his clients and shove it down his own throat.

This thought brought her a small degree of satisfaction. Yes, vigilance would be good, she

thought to herself as she wrapped up the call with Mr. Fong.

After that she went to the bathroom, having realized that in all the rushing around

she had completely forgot to go, even though she had been back from lunch for almost a

half hour. Back at her desk she moved the stack of returned files to the side and began

working on the loans she had already scheduled for the afternoon. She had been moving

through them quickly all morning and her workload was light, except of course for the

new stack she would need to start going through immediately. Lydia pitied Gwen and a

few of the other ladies who were not so fast with their work, however, and to who the

new stack of loans to reprocess must have felt like an impossible task on top of their

already difficult load. Something about that gave Lydia a sense of pride despite knowing

the others probably scorned her secretly for processing loans so much quicker.

Around three she checked her phone. It wasn’t like her to break the no cell phone

policy at work, but Fong was still out and even when he was there the other women were

always on their phones. She had missed a text message from her sister urging her to call.

Lydia figured it would be something about their father. She used the phone at her desk to call back.

“Papa’s in the hospital,” her sister said, without affect. 12

It was all Lydia could do not to cry. After the day she’d been having, all the reply

she could offer was to ask, “Again?”

*

Otis Hunt was a tall, pointed-featured man. His curly blonde hair he had been letting

grow out since December. A wet, team-issued towel hung around his neck, dripping

occasionally on to his neoprene undershirt. He had left his uniform hanging in his locker

from a hook next to a black team-issued sweatshirt and a black team-issued warm up

pullover. Each item of clothing had been positioned by the apparel team so the World

Series Champions emblem faced outward.

At a loss for what to do in between his cuts in the cage and his sit-down with

Christine Hedges, the television analyst he had promised an interview to before the

opening ceremonies, Hunt stood in the dugout contemplating the spectacle of it all. The

excitement of another season at the ball park, the fanfare, the salutations. A four story

action shot of himself smacking the ball and running off towards first base looped every

so often on the jumbo screen in centerfield. He couldn't remember when that hit had

been, but it didn't matter. It could have been any of them. He smelled kettle-corn from

somewhere in the concessions area. That smell always made him think of his father.

He felt at home in the ballpark, that much was unquestionable, felt as if all his life he had been meant to play there, that he knew the park’s intricacies, the tricky triple’s alley in right center field, the carob corner just past the foul line that gave out of town right fielders hell. He was seventeen the year the Giants moved to the cove, and even 13

then, ballplayer that he wanted to be, he felt the park calling him, imagined the stadium

loudspeakers announcing his name. Expectations had always been high, but now they felt

the highest. Anything shy of another championship was a failure, some might say. Hunt

tried not to think of it that way. He knew that kind of pressure wouldn't do anyone any

good. His father’s voice sounded in his head. It's not whether you're better than the other

team, it's whether you're better than yourself.

The thought of his father brought Hunt sadness as usual of late, not so much

because he missed him or wished he were still alive to see him play on opening day as a

world champion, which Hunt did terribly, but that he had been caught up in the heaviness

of the day instead of making a game of it as his father had always told him to do. It made

him feel as though he were letting his father down. This was an impossible way to start a

season. The mental part was always the most difficult. You had to keep it loose. That had

been his father’s greatest gift, teaching the idea of making a game of everything, making

a game of even the most difficult of battles, the way his father had of his respiratory

illness. Balls and strikes, his father would say. Hunt tried to think of how he could make

a game of the opening day ceremony and the hoopla that accompanied it, but the whole thing seemed curiously out of reach, as if he were a captain on one of those large tankers out across the Bay coasting in to port in Oakland, loaded full of cargo containers and billions of dollars’ worth of merchandise that millions of people were counting on.

He decided to head back into the locker room and get dressed. He stood at his locker and did not hurry to put on his uniform. He buttoned it up slowly and tucked it in 14

careful to even the folds around his waist as he tightened his belt. He passed by Carlo and

Tim and shook hands with each of them, though he had to reset in the middle of Tim’s

handshake because he forgot they had added the bit with the ring flash. He got some

water and sat back down at his locker to wax the handle of one of his bats, but once he sat

down with the bat in his fists he was slow to get started on the waxing. He sat that way

for a couple minutes, working the bat swing slowly with his forearms, trying to allow the

music to motivate him. He had never had so much a problem with the task of making

games of things, but now, slump-bound and out-of-sorts as he was, the task seemed light-

years away. Whatever motivation he had ever been capable of creating for himself in the

past, his dream had always been to win a World Series.

“The goal’s to repeat,” he said to Christine Hedges when he finally sat down to

interview with her about the new season.

Hunt had always felt a fond appreciation for the television reporter, her questions

always meaningful and pointed and never intruding too much on his personal life. He had

given her his first interview as a Giant just over a year beforehand. That discussion

centered around what Otis thought he could bring to a team that had just won their first

championship in five decades, and how growing up a Giants fan from Northern

California made him suitable for his new digs.

“It’s World Series or bust,” Otis Hunt went on, answering the question about where the team would go from here, having won their second title in three years. “That’s all we have. We have back-to-back, or else we,” he looked away, “or else we fail.” 15

Otis feared it was clear to the reporter that he didn’t believe this one bit. There

were plenty of team successes he thought they could achieve, even if they didn’t win

another championship, but to give the fans indication that he or the team had anything but

repeat on their mind Hunt knew sent an image of weakness those who wanted to watch

this interview in the first place didn’t want to hear, and this was verified in the way

Christine nodded in agreement and smiled as he spoke. And he took it further, adding

“That’s all that we’re focused on, going back-to-back.”

Unlike the year he had signed with the Giants, this past off-season saw contract

negotiations that tested Hunt’s kindness and tried his patience. Originally telling him

after his post-season contributions they would see him fixed up right, mentioning

upwards of sixteen million at first, management changed course when talk of acquiring

the Cuban defector from free-agency began to circulate. At first, Otis had figured the talk

was stirred up by the baseball tabloids and the radio hosts who never really had access to

the good information but would go on air with what they had heard through an

“unconfirmed source” anyway, and he didn’t let it bother him that much, until

management postponed another meeting and took weeks to reschedule. They finally came

back with a nine million dollar offer, which Otis had spent serious time looking over with his agent. He almost fired the one agent he had ever had when it was said that there was nothing he could do for the star right fielder, that the team wanted to get their hands on this Cuban everyone called El Cheval no matter what they had promised him. Hunt had gone to coach Dominguez, knowing that the manager had sway neither he nor his agent 16

had, and Dominguez agreed with Hunt that he was a locker room presence they could not do without and vowed to fight for him. The next week management returned with a thirteen million dollar offer that Hunt agreed to despite that it had come on the threshold of a subsequent deal to sign El Cheval to a one-year deal. In their final signing meeting, the front office made it clear to Hunt that a repeat championship was absolutely necessary for them to extend this much financially.

The negotiations had taken much out of Otis, and these energies felt painfully to weigh on him as he tried to convince the familiar but distant reporter of his devotion to winning another championship. No doubt she would ask him about the Cuban addition, no doubt she’d point out that he too had played right field all his life.

“As a team we are all preparing the same way,” he said. “Repeat or bust.”

The first experience Hunt had had with El Cheval had not made things any better.

Hunt had called him by his real name, Nando Ambrosio Loyola, which El Cheval had communicated to the other Spanish speaking teammates was not the name he wanted to be called. El Cheval, or don say note-ting to me. The Spanish speaking teammates had tried to explain to the others it was a cultural thing, despite the confusion of Hunt and several others gathered together there in right field for stretches. It had been the first spring training practice for which El Cheval was neither late nor absent. Hunt on occasion found himself sizing up the Cuban as they played, considered his forearms, his biceps, his thighs. The man was built like a horse alright. He was huge, unnaturally. Hunt figured the Cuban had to have been taking supplements, something they probably never 17

checked for in Cuba. Hunt kept this judgment to himself, however, even as El Cheval grunted through his first session in the batting cage then split his bat in two over his leg.

“What about the new additions?” Christine Hedges asked, shifting her weight and crossing her legs in the other direction, offering the question up as though she knew the subject might be a sensitive one for Hunt. He watched her tap her pen on her notepad as she listed some of those who had been traded away and those who had been added. She gave extra emphasis to El Cheval, and Hunt leaned back in his chair so that his anxiety might not show clearly for the camera. He replied: “It’s an exciting time for us right now.”

“There’ll be talk about El Cheval replacing you in right field.”

The reporter had laid it out there as though the conversation must be had, seeming to urge Hunt to defend his right to the position he had played his entire career. A few weeks into Cactus League play both Hunt, who had been in right field, and El Cheval, who’d been in center, were chasing down a fly ball. Hunt had made the spot on the ball well before the Cuban and called him off it loudly. Still Hunt could hear the Cuban’s heavy feet stomping toward him as he lined up the catch. Hunt called him off again, but

El Cheval kept coming. In a moment just before the ball fell into his glove, Hunt felt a loud crack on the side of his head, which he later discovered through the film was El

Chaval’s shoulder as the Cuban leaped to make the catch.

“He’s got as much right to play as I do,” Hunt said.

“How has it been getting to know him?” 18

“Great.” Hunt said, nodding to demonstrate his earnestness. “It's been great.”

Interviews had usually been easy, but Hunt felt the same feeling as he had earlier staring out at the ballpark. What could he do to keep this all under control? Nothing.

There was nothing he could do about the questions or El Cheval or the probability that they would not win another championship this year, especially if history had any say in the matter. He couldn’t help but acknowledge that these questions were what the fans were thinking of too, that his time had come. Behind Christine Hedges, across the dimly lit media room, was a wall-sized image of the championship emblem.

“Lastly, it's one thing to have people saying you were a key player in the post­ season last year,” she went on. “It’s another thing to be that close to being the National

League MVP only to have the title go to someone else. What was it like to be the runner up for such an honor tacked on to an already stellar season?”

He didn’t deny that it was somewhat disappointing, he didn’t argue. Hunt wouldn’t have been being his humble self if he had. At the same time, he wanted to say something of praise for the young kid from St. Louis who actually won the title, but he offered it up carelessly and generically, which he feared the reporter saw straight through and wondered if he’d need to explain himself for later. She nodded at his remarks and then moved on to an article that suggested Hunt’s loss of the MVP title coincided with a decline in his father's health. “How much did learning about your father's cancer hurt your performance leading up to the end of the season?”

“I won't lie, it was difficult. Still is.” 19

“Do you feel that it detracted from your performance?”

Hunt considered the question carefully. In truth he had known about his father's illness months before that article had been released, but Christine’s question left him wondering what Giants fans wanted to hear. “I didn’t see it as a distraction. I wouldn't say, I don't think it detracted.” Hunt paused for a moment as though he were going to explain himself further but then he just stopped and looked at the reporter as if to tell her to move on.

“I’m only repeating what was reported,” she said, but Hunt kept shaking his head until he had made it obviously clear to the reporter that he didn’t care to answer her question and that he wished she would just drop the whole thing.

He left the interview without further consultation over the matter. The remainder of her questions had been softballs. Otis passed into the locker room, where he sat down on his bench with one of his bats and began grating the handle with wax. The theater of intensity gave him privacy. Other players were now filling the locker room and the cameras were following them around.

She had asked him about his father because it would make for good television, he told himself, because there was a responsibility to report on the dramatic. Over-coming adversity would always be an interesting story to any championship team fan base. He wondered if Christine Hedges had it out for him. She had pulled stunts like that in the past. The Bonds steroid saga had been her teeth cutting story, and Hunt knew that, as much as he trusted her, emotional reactions were what paid her salary. He wondered if 20

she’d made it up to rile him; reporters liked to rile athletes. He tried not to let it get to him.

He picked the latest edition of ESPN magazine and read an article about Greg

Squires, a pitcher for Minnesota who'd returned from Tommy John surgery and had been pitching great in Spring ball. Hunt had known Greg from childhood. They'd been within two years of each other at the same high school, a high school known for producing excellent baseball talent. Hunt’s father had coached Greg in little league, taught him to throw a slider. For this Greg had always been grateful. Greg had called often during the final months of Otis’ father’s life, checked in to see how things were going, offered up memories and good times for he and Otis to laugh about. It hadn't always been good times though. Hunt had pitched once, too, had watched his father working with the older

Squires and longed for the same someday. But it wasn't in the cards for Otis to pitch. He was a hitter, a base stealer, could track down line drive like no other, but never seemed to find his mark as a pitcher. It wasn't that his father didn't give him equal or more attention, it was more that Greg Squires, the lanky kid from money, had a natural propensity for hurling the pill.

Hunt found his place, learned to relinquish the limelight that was the pitcher’s spot, for the noble humility of an all-around good ball player. His father had often reminded Hunt why he played the game, how pitchers got to play an inning or two or once every few days, rarely hit. He helped Otis see the value of playing the field over being a specialist. As Otis read over the article about Squires, he often found traces of his 21

father. “Recovery is a game against yourself,” Squires had been quoted saying, “It’s your new self against your old self, and you never know who’s going to come out on top.”

Hunt chuckled. He had room to himself in his locker because a group of reporters stood interviewing last year’s rookie of the year, their backs blocking out the traffic of bodies passing. He listened to the familiar sounds in the locker room. Creasy’s metal music had been turned down for the interviewers’ questions, camera shutters slipped, players hung their hangers up in their lockers, others discussed their spring training numbers or injuries they were recovering from. The smell of pine tar, glove oil, and

Tiger-balm filed the room. He couldn't imagine himself as part of another team at this point, but something about it all left him wondering what the future held.

There was a change in tone as the reporters left and the team began to concentrate.

El Cheval said something in Spanish to another player. That Hunt should be worried about the newcomer was one of fear’s variations. He was aware of that and it made it easier for him that he was. El Cheval crossed the locker room and stood before Hunt where he sat gripping his bat. “Thet two ut us shar a stame go,” said El Cheval, “stame ass ust all.”

Hunt nodded. He didn't look around. He didn't want to think about who was watching. He said he agreed, and he and the Cuban shook hands and patted each other's back. And then they walked away from each other. 22

Ch. 2

Dave thanked the couple again. Outside their van, he dragged the door shut as they said their goodbyes. The woman, who’d spent nearly the entire trip talking about toxic spray, rolled down the passenger side window and hung her head out. “Don’t forget to call

Artie,” she said. The husband had been leaning over on the steering wheel, nodding in agreement. Dave nodded to them both and raised a hand, holding between his fingers the piece of paper on which they’d written Artie’s number. Dave smiled a half-smile, knowing the couple wouldn’t leave until he did. They drove away when he turned around and began walking, though exactly where he would go he was unsure. Once the van had become indistinguishable from the rest of the traffic, he crumpled the paper and threw it on the sidewalk. The wind wedged it behind the door to a cafe that had been propped open. Up the avenue, between the blocks of mid-level apartments and the awnings hanging out over the sidewalk, Dave could see the Transamerica building. Clay and

Montgomery, Portsmouth Square. This was a corner he had been one of those nights, when despair and desire bled together, when he sought this neighborhood out. He wanted to come here and put it to bed, but being here brought a familiar nostalgia. He’d promised he wouldn’t go there again. That had been a different time, and a different Dave. And, besides, it was his brother who had gotten him back on the wagon then. Dave hadn’t wanted to relapse—he had planned on straightening out. He was going to change. It wasn’t his fault. 23

Dave reached into his pocket and pulled out the money the couple had given him.

He counted it, twenty-four dollars, a ten, a five, and nine ones. All but two of the bills had been stamped, “Stop Corporate Takeover.” He scoffed, looking again up at the towering pyramid, in whose shadow of which he now stood. After he had spent a few minutes sitting on a park bench soaking in the scene, Dave decided he wanted a beer.

Stormy’s was a few doors up. He had been there once or twice over a year ago and knew it was a good dive that opened early for the vets. They had a pay phone in the back last time he was there.

*

Lydia woke to the sound of Denny in the kitchen opening and closing cabinets and feared for a moment she had slept too late. It was Saturday, she remembered then, and Denny was up because he and the other kids from the team were leaving early for their camping weekend up the hill at the Rob Hill campground. She tossed her covers aside and rose without much delay. She wrapped herself in her robe and checked herself in the mirror. Hers was a quality of innate beauty that purposed the envy of the other team moms, and for this blessing she held a silent and humble gratitude. Her cheeks had no creases, her lips full. In the mornings, when she woke, it took very little to make herself presentable.

Denny was seated at the table when she walked into the kitchen working her hair back into a pony tail. She kissed him on the head and ran her fingers through his hair.

Denny pulled his head away from her. 24

“Morning to you too,” she said, and nudged him. “How was the game last night?”

Denny shrugged to one side. “Fine.”

Lydia had gained a soft sympathy for her son’s one word answers in the years since Dave had been gone.

“Yeah? Did they win?”

“Yeah,” said Denny.

“Yeah? How’d Hunt do?”

“Horrible,” he said, and he scooped a spoonful of Cheerios in to his mouth.

“Oh, yeah?” Lydia asked, filling the electric water pot and turning it on. “Can you chew with your mouth closed, please?”

Denny continued to chew his cereal but through closed lips.

“He didn't have any errors, did he?”

Denny shook his head once.

“Just a bad day at the plate?”

Denny nodded. He spooned the last Cheerios from the bowl into his mouth then made his way to the sink. Lydia took his dish from him. Then with her free arm she clutched him close and kissed him on his head. She kept him in a head lock. He showed like he wanted to pull away from her, but she knew he was smiling.

“What time are you supposed to be there?” she asked him.

“Like, now,” said Denny. 25

She half-frowned and sighed but tried not to be too sappy. It wouldn’t work—it never worked. She smelled his milky cereal breath. It reminded her of when he was a baby.

“Mom?” he asked.

“Yes?” she asked back, and she did so with attention because in his voice he needed her. In his voice was a question, one which only she had the answer to. In his voice, he finally was going to open up to her.

“Do you have the league dues?” he asked. “Coach Ky needs to have them.”

“Oh yes,” she said, caught off guard. “Oh, yeah.” She went to her purse and grabbed her wallet. She took out four twenty dollar bills, folded them in half, and handed them to him. “This will cover the dues, and whatever is left give to him for food.” Denny nodded. He thanked her and hugged her once more, and she kissed him on his cheek and told him to have fun and be good. Then Denny put on his backpack, which had been sitting ready by the door, and took off on his bicycle toward the campground up the hill.

She rinsed the dish in the sink and set it in the dish rack to dry. She cleared the counters and wiped them. She scrubbed at a sticky spot, probably jelly from a sandwich

Denny had had to make for himself while she was at class the night before last. She removed the burners from the stove top and wiped out bread crumbs and chunks of dried ground beef and pieces of ramen noodles, scooping everything that had managed to fall there into her hand, and she threw it all away in the garbage. She poured coffee beans into the grinder and ran it, then she dumped the grounds in to the press. She grabbed the 26

water pot when steam began to billow from the spout but before the auto switch had tripped. She filled the press three-quarters of the way. She put the lid on it and went to the bathroom. When she returned she pressed down gently.

She had just sat down outside at the table on her patio with with the novel one of her coworkers had recommended she read when the phone rang. She got up to answer it.

Vaguely she recognized the number. It couldn’t be him, she thought. It couldn’t.

It was.

“Lydia,” he said, with a voice that resurrected the desperation she had grown used to not having to filter anymore, the self-important pity of a man bankrupt of integrity.

“Don’t hang up.”

He’d tried to call before, but the calls always came from the prison and his name was introduced by the operating system. She never accepted the calls. This was different.

He was free. He was out. She looked at her caller id again. A payphone. He was at the bar.

“You’re out early,” she said. “And drinking already.”

“Lydia. I’m—jus, I’m out on good behavior.”

Lydia scoffed.

“Lydia,” he said, half a question half a plea. “I’m sorry. I know last person you wanna hear from’s me. I just called to talk to Den.”

“He’s not here,” she said. “He’s gone all weekend.”

“Lydia?” he said, this time his aggravation had begun to seep through. 27

“He’s not here, Dave.” She covered her mouth with her free hand and took a deep breath. She let it out softly, trying to stay in control. It was not that she felt a loss of control so much as she had been reminded of the times when she had, the times when his persistence wore at her until she finally gave in to him. His religion of bidding for others’ sympathies, always manipulative, always needing something. She had forgotten how taxing it was to deal with him. “He’ll be back tomorrow. You can try then.”

“Please don’t keep him from me,” said Dave.

“Tomorrow,” she said.

She held the receiver on the hook for a moment after she had hung up. She heard the bus down at the bus stop come to a stop and open its doors, and she listened until it closed them again and drove away. She loathed thinking he was free and here in the city, feared what he might do if she decided not to let him see Denny. She hated thinking about what would happen if he decided to come around again. She had had the hardware store cut her thick dowels to fit in the inner track of her sliding glass door and in all of her windows. She went to the closet where those had been put away and retrieved them. She replaced the one for the sliding glass door first, leaving her book open and face down on the table outside. She replaced the dowels in each of the windows as well, and once she was done she removed the one in the kitchen window and in the sliding door to her patio because it was a nice day and she didn’t want to keep herself shut in. And besides, this all meant that he was back to controlling her again. She closed her eyes and clenched her fists and removed the strand of hair that had come loose from her pony tail back from her 28

forehead. She was not going to let him do this. She took another deep breath and decided she would go for a walk. She went to the closet and took out a clean towel, then she started the shower, but the sound of the water made it hard to distinguish what she thought might be the sound of someone trying to open the front door. She told herself once again that it would be okay, and she proceeded to shower all the while resisting the temptation to believe she was vulnerable to him once again.

Outside she pondered which direction to walk. She started downhill towards the beach, which was always a good walk, and today especially, with a sky clearing and warm air, the beach would do its service of raising her spirits again. But she knew upwards at the Rob Hill campground was where Denny was. What if Dave was going there? She felt an impulse to check on him. Instinctively she followed that impulse and began walking up towards the campground. A moment later she decided against this. If

Denny saw her, he would be embarrassed, and if she told him why she was there he would most certainly want to know all about his father and where that man was. She paused again and looked back down the hill towards the beach.

She went down to the shore. It smelled pleasantly of the sea, and slightly of the eucalyptus trees that populated the hillside. Here and there patches of fog still floated above the inlet to the bay and over the bridge, but the sky was for the most part clear and the air warm. She walked along the wet sand, her shoes tied by the laces and hanging around her neck. She walked east, toward the nude side. A man there had already removed all of his clothes and was standing at the water’s edge. She was used to this by 29

now, Baker Beach being one of the only places left in the city where those who wanted to be naked still could. She didn’t mind this, as long as they stayed in their corner of the long beach when she had Denny with her. She imagined what it must be like to be free of clothes. She envied that degree of liberty.

She turned west once she had reached the rocks and walked back west along the water’s edge toward Sea Cliff, staring out at the cargo ships and sail boats at sea.

Returning her to a place of contentment, the beach had done its work. She was happy where she was. She thought about the progress she had made over the past year. Taking classes toward her Associates degree, preparing to enter the nursing program at City

College. In a few years she might be done, doing something she loved instead of working for Fong and the financial monsters that administered predatory loans, instead of having to deal with pushy salesmen and their reminders of what she had dealt with her ex. And hearing those salesmen’s voices in her head she was resolved to the realization that she had over the past year become even better equipped to deal with Dave. She was a better person. She was stronger than he had ever let her be, and she would not ever let him control her again. When it came down to it, she guessed she could even handle it if Dave wanted to see Denny regularly. There would be strict guidelines, of course, and no matter what, she would make it clear that she had the ultimate authority to determine the details.

She could manage that. And if he tried to get sharp, or, worse, aggressive, she’d put him right back in that place. She’d done it already, and there was nothing for her to fear. He’d 30

need to be on his best behavior. She even laughed at the ridiculousness of her own paranoia in having brought the dowels out of the closet.

A man in waders and a canvas hat with a long fishing pole followed the receding tide as he cast his line out into the small swells. He let line out as he walked backwards up the sand to where he had a rod holder stuck and his bait pale and an ice chest. Lydia crossed beneath his line and waved to him slightly. The man nodded and told her good morning.

*

When Dave had finished with his call, he ordered a beer and took it to a seat by the window. There was a man seated at the bar talking to the bartender but otherwise the place was empty. The call to Lydia had gone about as expected. What an unreasonable person she was.

It had been more than a year since he’d tasted beer. It scrubbed his tongue and the detonation of bubbles down his throat was a soothing reminder of the good days. San

Bruno had been hell, for the most part. Having to convince the good ole’ boys in there that he was a peckerwood just like them. Taking the beating. He’d thought long about staying away from them altogether, and then whether to approach them and how to avoid it getting out that he was from the city because the boys didn’t care if you hated queers when you came from the queer city. They turned you over and told you who you were.

On the other hand, what had been cut from his sentence on account of good behavior was significant. Dave wondered if the hippies knew what they were talking 31

about when they told him that the Governor had been trying to reduce prison sentences for non-violent offenders. Eight months for felony evading hadn't been all too bad, considering. A memory of the night he had been arrested stuck in his mind, one he had not much thought about in prison, the image of a kid on his bike trying to avoid Dave’s reckless driving. The kid had swerved desperately to avoid Dave, and Dave had said something worthy of shame, had lambasted that poor kid over the loud music. In his memory the kid might have been Denny, though he knew it wasn’t. He took this as indication that he was a better person now. It had gotten pretty bad that night. He hated to think about it, tried not to. He took a long swig from his beer and held it a minute in his mouth before swallowing it back. He knew things would be way different if Lydia had pressed charges on the spousal abuse too. He recalled the look on her face the last time he struck her, her steely defiance. He remembered the feeling of knowing he could no longer make her. He remembered rearing back, how she hadn’t flinched or grimaced. It was paralyzing, the way it had been for him in dreams, the immobility of the limbs, that despite all his will he could not punch her.

Across the bar, the man seated at the bar and the bartender broke out in laughter at something one of them had said. The patron’s laughter was smoky and seemed to catch the corners of his chest and shift back and forth between laughing and coughing. The joke had been enough to keep the two of them laughing. It took Dave a moment to realize they weren't talking about him. He took another long pull from his bottle, and turned to the watch the people walking on the street. 32

He had been in a bad way that night, only taking the car to get away, knowing he shouldn't be there like that, knowing he wanted to break something, knowing Denny might be awake, would hear him yelling. Then there were the sirens and lights in the review. Why had he done it? What had convinced him he could outrun them? Dave had asked that question of himself many times over the past eight months. He always came back to the amp, the juice. Try as he would, he was never quite able to prevent the memories from sticking. And he wouldn’t go back, he promised himself. He wouldn’t.

Lydia had loved him once. She had adored him. That time they’d skipped out of class to go meet up with the boys at hippie hill, the drag races. She followed him everywhere, like a toy. He could have told her to do anything and she would have. The way she looked at him made him feel every bit as enigmatic as he thought he was. Then the question of “why” returned to him again, and it occurred to him as it had few times before that maybe it wasn't the meth, maybe it was him, or maybe it had been Lydia and how once Denny came along she pressured him so goddamn always about everything, and, later, how many times she had threatened divorce. Those betrayals had cut him, sent him spiraling out of control, and no matter how good the memories of their youth made him feel, it always ended the same, with him staring out the window of the Sheriffs car at Denny held back by his mother’s clutches, wearing a look of devastation.

Fragments of all this and what proceeded, danced through Dave’s thoughts as he finished his beer. He looked at the clock. It was only ten in the morning, but he ordered another beer anyway. “People just don’t get as lucky,” he heard the bartender say to the 33

other man after he had handed Dave his beer and as he wiped down one glass at a time from a drying tray. Dave had heard people call him a good man, a man you wanted on your side when things got ugly, a man who demanded respect above all other things.

These were good traits to have, even if Lydia had made him out to be a bad man or convinced his own son he was a liar and a thief. He was a good man, he knew. He lied.

And he stole. But he was a good man.

Dave was pale bright, red cheeks, the skin on his forearms flaky. His strength was suggested by his bulk. He was not a tall man, never had been. Since he could remember, he’d had to make up for his height by other means—firing punches first, being unafraid to point fingers and yell over others. Creases on his brow and beneath his eyes had grown out of his persistent scowl. His gaze was serious, his demeanor still. He smiled when he needed to, but he couldn’t remember the last time he felt pleasure worth smiling over.

He’d been working the comers of a cardboard coaster up around the base of his beer bottle. The comers had begun to tear and he let them, peeling each corner off when it was ready until all he had was a circular piece of coaster sitting under his bottle. He scooped the torn pieces aside and clutched them into a small ball that he worked back and forth in his hand until it was the size of a gum ball. He thought about the day he’d taken

Denny to get a pack of baseball cards, how windy it’d been, how Denny had used the extra quarters he’d had to get a gum ball out of the machine that dispensed the ball only after it had rolled through a labyrinth or rails and wheels. The sun was on him now through the window, and he began to sweat. 34

Again he thought of the night they took him away, the look on his son’s face. The quiet there’d been when the door to his holding cell had been slammed shut, the moment of disbelief, and then the wearing off of the last hit he’d took. The slow gradual unravelling. He’d screamed in agony. He’d cried. One of the deputies had laughed at him when he said he needed to see a doctor. They brought him water, then they took it away when he wasn’t grateful. I'll do it, he’d cried through the bars back at them as they walked away. I ’ll drink the water.

He finished off the last of his beer and went to the bathroom to relieve himself.

He thanked the bartender on his way out, and walked outside as though he had somewhere to go. He checked the bus map hanging in the stop, remembering the lines he would need to catch. If he hopped on the 1, he could take it to 25th avenue, where he could catch the 28 to Baker Beach. He’d be able to see for sure if Lydia was telling the truth when she said Denny wasn’t there. Then again, he knew he wasn’t supposed to be near her. He’d received the restraining order in San Bruno.

He started walking north, toward Columbus. A few doors up he saw the scrap of paper with Artie’s number on it that he’d crumpled and thrown down earlier. It might have been a desperate shot, but it was something. It would keep him away from Lydia, and out of the streets, even if he did have to ask for help. That wouldn’t be as bad as going back, however. He didn’t want that. He wouldn’t go back. He picked up the paper and unrumpled it. He went back to the bar and asked the bartender to change a dollar, 35

which he did. Dave dropped a quarter in the slot and dialed the number he’d been given.

He waited for several rings. Just as he was about to hang up, the other end picked up. 36

Ch. 3

Kyrikos Straub hurled a small stone from the lookout towards the Pacific Ocean. It sailed

over the cliff s edge and out of sight. He did this again and another, each time testing to

see if he could make the water. He couldn't. The sea, dark as oil, must have been a few hundred yards down. No matter how hard he threw them, the stones sunk parabolic into the cliff side. Instinctively he went to what he had committed to memory from his

Physics courses. Force of gravity. Force of throw. The wind was heavy in the morning, so heavy he had to lean into it. A thick fog rolled in steadily but out over the ocean a clear band on the horizon indicated it might dissipate within an hour or so. The sun had yet to show itself from beyond the crest of hills behind him. In the distance off to the north, the irons of the Golden Gate rose out of the landscape and disappeared into the grey obscure above. He thought about the children’s story he had read to the kids in the cancer ward a few weeks back where the clumsy boy climbs a bean stalk to the clouds and robs from a giant.

A cargo ship loaded with freight containers crept out to sea, every now and then sounding its foghorn. Here and there fishing boats made their way out to sea also, determined to catch their limit. The fox he had been looking for since December was nowhere to be seen, but he looked for it anyway hoping it might appear, sneaking across the road and into some brush the way it had before. He knew most likely he would not see it this close to the coastline. The only times he had seen it were near the Bay trail as it crept stealthily over the peak of Washington Avenue. Twice there and once on the golf 37

course. Most likely it was moving between the wooded Presidio and Land’s End through the Sea Cliff district, or down to Lobos Creek maybe. Or maybe, Ky liked to imagine, it made a trek up one of the avenues late at night through the Richmond to Golden Gate

Park, darting between speeding cabs and drunk USF students, who stumbled home ignorantly along the sidewalks and onto the busses. Maybe, but not probably. He hoped nothing had happened to it.

The wind rushed through the whiskers on his face. He would need to trim at least before he went in for tomorrow’s shift. Hospital policy. His wife had hated it when he let his beard grow. She said it made him look old, that he had had too many grey hairs for a man yet to father his first child. He had been letting it grow for over two weeks. Soon the divorce would be finalized, and he wouldn’t much need to worry about what she did or didn’t like. He left the lookout and headed back towards the campground. He took the

Bay trail. There would be another group coming in that afternoon, so they would need to be packed up and out by noon. The boys on his team had had fun. They raced or played whiffle ball near the lookout above Immigrant Point where the wind wouldn’t let balls over the ridge, which they’d set as home run territory. It seemed to Ky they had a genuine love for baseball. A telling start to the kind of year they would have, he hoped.

Only a year earlier, his wife, Samantha, had given him the idea to organize the camping trip here at the Rob Hill campgrounds. A good team building exercise, she’d called it. But things had been so different then. They’d talked baby names and where they might like to buy a house—this before the miscarriage—or she’d asked him about the 38

birds he’d listen for. He knew so much, she’d say. They’d made love that once under the secluded patio of the Log Cabin when no one was around. They'd often walked down to the cafe on the corner of Sixth and California for an espresso, stop to talk with the

Dahlmeirs walking their Labrador, or journey out to mid span on the Golden Gate bridge to watch the sail boats on the water. Once they'd even walked to the aquatics center past

Fort Mason. Four years of marriage seemed but a blink, and now all that was coming to an end. A strong gust blew at him from behind and he looked back momentarily. He wasn’t sure what for.

Kyrikos Simon Straub, named after a grandfather who'd passed before he was bom, was the only child of a Greek mother and Jewish father, whose love for each other had been constant, whose commitment to each other in all compromises had been first priority. His mother had been a bagger at her family's grocery store, Demetriou’s, in

Staten Island, his father an only child. The Demetrious were a hard-working family, respected by all in their neighborhood. They were a generous bunch, and valued the traits of openness and compassion while maintaining a profitable business. They had not at first approved of the romance their daughter, Efrosyni Yanna Demetriou, had started with the twenty-something Aryeh Straub, whose efforts to share their daughter’s time without permission were seen as an affront to their notoriety and their heritage. But the war in

Vietnam had soon sent Aryeh away. When he returned three years later a decorated war hero who'd defended a key post against an attack despite being greatly outnumbered and having a leg full of shrapnel, the Demetrious were proud to endorse a proposal to their 39

daughter. Despite her youth and beauty, she had waited for her Aryeh even as friends urged her otherwise, as the reports from the front lines termed the situation overseas grim, and as countless other suitors came knocking. There's was a love for which was worth waiting, and Efronsyni had devoted herself to it. Aryeh found work as an educator and Efronsyni continued to work at the market until Kyrikos was born. They never had much, but they were sustained by the pleasure of each other's company and managed to send Ky to college and part of medical school at St. Johns.

It was in his final year of residency when Ky first met Samantha, a drop-dead gorgeous cosmopolitan with dreams of becoming a photographer. He couldn't much connect to her view of the world, but he tried. When with her group of friends, he tried to converse about fashion. Ky asked questions and remembered names. Samantha had been so endeared by him for his willingness to take interest in subjects she knew he had no real interest in. She'd run her fingers through his curls and say to her friends, “isn't he adorable.” And her friends would chuckle or grin but never agree. Then Samantha would turn to him, “you don't have to pretend to be interested, Love.”

Then came the Attending Surgeon position on the other side of the country at

UCSF.

Ky asked her to move with him, said he’d wanted her to spend the rest of her life with him, and from one knee with her hand clutched tightly in his, as though with her was all that was tangible of his life in New York, on a lantern-lit foot path near where they'd shared their first kiss, he asked her to marry him. And she said yes. How could she say 40

no? Ky had often questioned. Though it was clear to him now that he was simply afraid to go it alone, it seemed then to have been everything he wanted. Looking back, it always seemed obvious. The way she asked if he could continue to look for work in New York.

Ky knew he was in no position to be choosy, that the offer he had received from USF was a good one, still he appeased her. Then there were the house shopping episodes, which

Samantha had been reluctant to engage fully. Money to purchase a house had been put up in part by Samantha’s father, a financial advisor who had been accurately predicting a housing crash. He urged them to rent, which Ky recognized as sound advice. It was only when Sam added “plus if things don't work out.. that gave Ky pause.

“If what doesn't work out?” Ky had asked as they sat at a Thai food restaurant across the Embarcadero from the Ferry building.

“You know,” Sam had replied, shrugging and looking at her food. “Everything.”

So the decision was made to lease a four-bedroom Captain’s Terrace at the top of

Washington avenue that backed up to Piper loop and the golf course and was utterly indistinguishable from the other old officer’s houses there in the Presidio. A short walk east on Washington Avenue around the bend revealed a wide view of the bay and

Alcatraz Island. It was a ten-minute walk down to California Street where Ky could catch the 43 and in another ten minutes be at the hospital. The house, like all the others around it had been kept preserved from an era past by the Presidio land trust. It had always been a wish of Ky's to have land and a place of his own with which he could decide what could be done. Here he could not. Landscaping was included. Maintenance was required to be 41

conducted by the land trust’s maintenance staff. No outside modifications were permitted. Indoor modifications, even something as simple as having a television hung on the wall, needed approval.

Had his circumstances been any less dependent on his other, Ky might have never decided to lease such a place as this, and now that their marriage had had time to settle into the floppy indignity of divorce he questioned everything. Still their time there had not been all bad. It had only been in the last year that things had slid into disarray. There had been times just the two of them in the living room when they cleared out the furniture and danced to concert hall jazz playing over the radio. There had been summer days, walking down to the beach, drunk on mimosas, laughing and groping each other the way young lovers do. Both their families had come out for one Christmas. There had been parties and dinners and community events at the club house of the golf course. And there had been arguments, too. Major arguments, that seemed to draw out into months: that he had time to coach a baseball team but not vacations, that his work didn’t give him the right to judge so coldly Samantha’s, that they should bring a child into the world.

Funneled into a life of solitude, Samantha had sought to reach out in her social life. She took a photography class at the State college, and then another. Before long she had begun taking pictures for a band regularly at their gigs in the city. Rarely ever more than one night a week Sam left him to take pictures, and Ky regarded her interests as a healthy outlet for her artistic abilities. On occasion he had gone with her, though the recurrence of being made to feel as though he were more interested in watching her than 42

having a good time, made him exercise restraint at the temptation of butting in to her personal life. He tried not questioning her too often, though he did have a general interest in his wife's endeavors, if not for truly caring about her new hobby, at least for the purpose of discovering what more he could do to make her feel comfortable in San

Francisco, their new home. But his actions had rarely been seen so much as altruism to her as they were shaming.

This morning, seeing in his mind the empty rooms of their house, he tried hard not to be resentful. Things always worked out for the best, his father had always told him.

He hadn’t yet told his parents about the divorce. No doubt Samantha had told hers. He wondered if her parents had tried to talk her out of it, questioned what he’d do if she said she didn’t want to go through with it. No way he could go back now. It was too late for all of that. Things had worked out for the best. It was better for it to happen this way.

They were final. She had been unfaithful; of that he was almost certain. Why else would that guy have shown up on their front porch in the pouring rain, crying like a fool? And then for Samantha to defend him, a little puppy dog, when Ky had every right to be concerned. The kid couldn’t have been more than twenty-two, looking like Justin Bieber in his white t-shirt and floppy beanie. Ky didn’t understand it. No, he did. He was certain.

She had slept with him. She had been with him or else she would have easily put it to rest. And he had given her plenty of room to choose, not insinuating that she’d cheated, recognizing that she might have only needed to find friends. Never did she try to make amends, and then she agreed easily to the divorce. How fragile a thing it was, all that they 43

had shared, the vows they had taken, the magic of their wedding night. Nothing is sacred,

Ky thought.

Back in the campground he enlisted his team captains to help him with breakfast.

Denny Hammersmith, the second baseman who envied Otis Hunt, and Malcolm Smart, the catcher who had hit for over four-hundred the year before. He selected them as captains because they loved playing the game, and because they didn’t come from privilege like most of the others. Theirs was a life of struggle. Both their fathers were in jail. Ky explained why he had selected them: because both of them would have face down hatred in their life. He explained to Malcolm, the team’s only black kid, that he’d have to dismiss race jokes. He told Denny that people would give him crap about his glove, that his father had been the one that wiped out the street light on the corner of

Lincoln. He told them both that it was okay to miss their fathers and want them back. He told them to channel that energy into their paly.

“You don’t always get what you want,” Ky told them, as he unraveled a package of bacon in the frying pan. “Sometimes, you just can’t plan for the future.” The way the boys looked at him he could see they thought he was losing it. He asked if they knew what he meant, and they said they did. He left it at that. 44

Ch. 4

Lydia kicked her calf-high boots to the side and slid her feet into a pair of pumps.

Without much hesitation, she kicked the pumps off and put the boots back on. She zipped them up and slid her arms into the leather jacket she had laid out on the bed. She looked in her purse for the red lipstick but remembered she had left it on her dresser. Having applied it, Lydia gave herself a once over in the mirror, turning her shoulders to see if she had curled the back of her hair evenly. She had. It was almost a courtesy check she gave herself. Lydia had the art of getting ready down pat.

She waited while the bus driver finished his break. Her stop was the first on the

28 line, but it was too far of a walk up the hill to the 1 line. She took the 28 to the park and got out there. She caught a man looking at her as he drove by, and Lydia wondered if she had gotten too dressed up for a trip to the hospital. It didn’t matter, she thought. She had the day off from work and Denny was in school until later in the afternoon, so she was going to take advantage of it. She took her time with the walk, stopping occasionally as she passed Stowe Lake to toss chips at the birds, and she watched a shy couple steer their paddleboat into a patch of lilies. She hated them just a little.

Across from the Botanical Garden, she leaned down to read the headline from the sports section a man seated at a park bench was reading. “Hunt’s Injury Season Ending,” it read. Lydia gasped in disbelief, then asked the man if it was for real. The man bent the corner of his paper down and saw the surprise on Lydia’s face. He frowned and nodded his head in confirmation. “It’s, too bad,” said the man, with the grumpy indignation of a 45

Philadelphian. “Tore his knee to bits. Sliding into second’n the thirteenth on the game losing play.” The man wore a tweed driver’s cap. He had a Russian accent or Slavic and as soon as he had explained the play he returned to his reading.

Lydia’s heart broke for Denny more than it did for her son’s favorite player.

Denny’s strength had always rested in his emulation of the star, she knew. That morning, before he left for school, Denny had checked the score of the game that had gone on too late for him to stay up and watch the night before. She figured it was because they lost that Denny had not said anything at breakfast. She expected Denny would take the news that Hunt was out for the season much more terribly than that; however, even if he hadn’t found out then, he would most certainly learn it at school. Probably, he had already.

Those boys would be all over something like this. She thought about what she might do to cheer him up. She knew of only one thing Denny adored more than Otis Hunt. She hadn’t brought herself to tell him that his father was out of prison and looking to see him.

She wasn’t sure she was ready to even still. But eventually it would have to happen.

Eventually he would call again, and when he did he would tell Denny that he had tried to call before and that it had been she who kept it from Denny, and that would be the start of a power struggle that Lydia had no interest in engaging.

Lydia caught the 43 line at Lincoln and rode it a couple blocks up to Judah. She walked the rest of the way up the hill to the hospital, all the while playing out scenarios of her options in her head. Could she explain to Denny why she didn’t want him to see his father? Could she get him to see things that way? 46

She met her sister at Cafe Bellini across the street from the hospital entrance, where she was sitting at an outdoor table, smoking a cigarette. Her sister thanked her for coming.

“Of course. Wouldn’t not have. I’m only sorry I couldn’t be here sooner than now. Have you heard? How is he?”

“Nope. No clue, really. Trying to get straight info out of our mother, you know.”

“I’m sure he’s in better hands here than at home.”

It was their mother who had decided to take their papa away from the hospital after the last time he had been there. Lydia had been going through her divorce at that time. It had been difficult for her to get additional time off from work. The hospital had recommended their father stay longer, but their mother claimed she was afraid the stay would cost too much. The sisters knew insurance would cover the visit and that wasn’t the reason at all. Their mother, who’d been cut off from her husband’s money after their second divorce, needed him to sign withdrawal slips for her to get groceries from the store and, the sisters suspected, for other reasons. Neither Lydia nor Emily had the time to attend to their father given the care he needed, which left it to their mother. Her history with drugs and alcohol abuse, her infidelity and her indefinite lack of mental clarity made it impossible for her daughters, or anyone for that matter, to coordinate with the woman.

The last time Lydia had been there, her mother had brought home a pigeon from the park.

She had been trying to put it on her should when the bird caught sight of the street below out the front window and fluttered desperately into the glass. Unable to tolerate the bird’s 47

suffering as it flopped around on the living room floor, Lydia had grabbed a Webster’s dictionary from a bookshelf—the only book on that bookshelf that wasn’t about finding, cooking with, or growing your own Psychotropic mushrooms—and had squish the bird’s head beneath it. She was sixty-two. If she hadn’t been staying at their father’s she’d probably be back on the street or living in the park as she often had. “

I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have you,” Emily said. She had begun to say that they had better get in there and see how things were, but interrupted herself.

“What’s the matter with you?”

“What? Nothing.” Lydia thought hard about what might be giving her sister that idea. “I mean. Dave’s out. I mean, there’s that.”

Her sister groaned under her shortly and then asked if she was worried.

“Of course not,” said Lydia, resolved to the conclusions she had already made.

Her sister reached out and put a hand on Lydia’s. “You ever need anything,” she said, looking at Lydia just call me.

“I know,” Lydia said back, turning her hand over and taking her sister’s in her own. Lydia was about to explain that it wouldn’t be necessary when her sister cut her off.

“Hello, sweetheart.”

Lydia looked in the direction of her sister’s stare.

“Crossing the street. Ass that won’t quit,” her sister said, and Lydia saw the man she’d been talking about. It was Denny’s baseball coach, Coach Ky. He was carrying a briefcase in his hand closest to them and his other was held coolly in his pocket. He 48

waited for an old man being pushed in a wheelchair, nodding and exchanging smiles with

the caretaker as he did.

“Hell. Oh. Sweetheart,” Emily said again.

Lydia unwrapped a piece of gum that she had been fishing in her purse for before her sister’s attention had been stolen away, and held it out. “Gum?” she asked.

“That isn’t Denny’s baseball coach, is it? Lydia? Do you recognize, him?”

Lydia nodded, putting the gum in her mouth, then said it was.

“A doctor who coaches baseball,” Emily said. “And an ass. Did you see that ass?”

“I sure did. I believe he’s a surgeon.”

“Wasn’t that a nice ass for a surgeon? A surgeon who coaches your kid’s baseball team? How do you not dream about that ass all day long?”

Slightly embarrassed, Lydia tried not to laugh. She remembered the way he had waved at her not one day earlier when she picked up Denny from the campground, the way he had thanked her for chipping in for the food, his smile when she had assured him it wasn’t a problem, his charming dimples. She remembered noticing the way his shoulders looked under his thin t-shirt as he held a heavy duffle bag full of camping gear.

Strong shoulders, she’d thought to herself.

“I’m pretty sure he’s married to some gorgeous, blonde supermodel.”

“Why wouldn’t he be?”

“She used to come to practices and to the games, but I haven’t seen her yet this season.” 49

“You think they split?”

“I don’t know.”

“You think he’s tired of that super-bimbo, wants a self-made woman, like me?”

“I can ask him for you,” Lydia said, playing along with her sister’s fantasy. “The next time I see him if you want.”

“Ask him what he needs. Whatever,” Lydia’s sister said, when the man they had been watching went into the hospital and out of her sight.

“Alright. Should I check to see if he still wears a ring?”

“Oh, that’s not important.”

Lydia stood and reminded her sister they had better get to the point of their visit.

Emily followed. At the desk, the receptionist explained that their father had been moved to another floor, but she had trouble figuring out exactly where that was, and went to confer with another receptionist. This gave Emily time to look up Dr. Kyrakos Simon

Straub in the hospital directory. “Ortho, pay, diatrician,” Emily read from her phone, once they were in the elevator. She rattled off facts about Ky what she could find. That he specialized in rheumatology of the knee, that he’d worked with professional and college athletes. None of this did Lydia let seem to be of much concern to her. She did not tell her sister to stop, however, not even when the elevator got crowded and she continued to read aloud from her phone a list of accomplishments.

They found their papa asleep. The nurses urged them not to wake him, that he’d had a bad night. They waited until the doctor, a grey-haired but youthfully featured Asian 50

woman, came in to explain that their father had pneumonia and that they were awaiting the results of bloodwork to see if any immune system deficiencies were present. The doctor tried to assure them it was probably nothing serious, but that he would need to stay in the hospital for a few more days. They didn’t stay much longer after that but agreed to come see him Tuesday evening. They each kissed their father lightly on the head before they left. In the otherwise silent and empty elevator ride down, Emily wondered aloud if their Papa’s knees didn’t need surgery, and then they laughed with each other until they had to wipe the tears from their eyes.

*

“He had bargaining power,” said the representative speaking for Otis Hunt when Ky asked what the big-leaguer’s long term goals were. “We hope he still can this offseason.”

He was a large man, chubby at the neck, his thinning hair slicked back. The agent’s face showing in the main window on Ky’s computer was grainy and cartoonish.

Two team doctors were in smaller windows off to the side. They both looked concerned and skeptical. In another window, blacked out to indicate it was an audio only feed, Otis

Hunt could be heard clearing his throat. They had all joined Ky for the conference call shortly after he had time to review the x-rays. Hunts x-rays had been fed into the conference call so everyone could see them clearly.

“Tears in both the lateral and medial meniscus,” Ky said, using his pen to point at two hazy areas in the joint.

“And the ligaments?” the agent asked. 51

“The ligaments appear to be fine,” said Ky, sliding his pen up and along each ligament to illustrate what he could see clearly showed no damage.

“A couple months, then,” said one of the team doctors.

“It’s possible, Mr. Henderson,” Ky conceded, without sounding as reserved as he was about making such an assumption. “Mr. Hunt has multiple tears. That’s a longer recovery.”

“Will he be back by the post-season?” the other doctor asked.

Ky said he would be, after some hesitation. He cautiously recommended 17 weeks, though he wanted a more specialized MRI. He had been watching the game late the night before when the injury occurred. The image of Hunt’s knee rolling up underneath him and then out again when the Cincinnati short stop had fallen on him. The image, replayed in slow-motion, made Ky cringe at first, but then he found himself trying to analyze the injury. It was near midnight when it happened. Ky had been on his way to turn off the television when he saw it. He almost immediately expected the call that came in an hour and a half later from Eugene Henderson, a team doctor for the Giants. Ky had known Dr. Henderson since shortly after he had begun practicing at USF. Not always the best at accurate detections, but hard-working and honest. He told Ky they’d have the x- rays to him first thing in the morning. Ky had been there shortly after seven to give himself time to review them, but the scans had not yet made it to his office. He checked his email as he did nearly every day when he first arrived at the hospital. Dr. Henderson had sent him a message that the x-Rays would be delayed a few hours. This gave Ky time 52

to run home and grab his briefcase, which he had forgotten. When he finally did have the chance to review the x-Rays, around nine-thirty, he found himself replaying the sequence of Hunt’s sideways slide and the Cincinnati short stop’s subsequent fall. The medial meniscus must have torn first. Likely a bucket tear. He imagined what Hunt must have felt as his slide came abruptly to a halt, the feeling of the joint popping. He had instinctively gripped his own kneecap with his fingers.

“The best way to ensure his future success is to let the knee heal properly after surgery,” said Ky, noting as he did how much his response seemed to be taken directly from the surgeon’s book of typical cautions.

“Of course he will have the best physical therapists,” the other team doctor said.

“There’s plenty of these guys coming back from meniscus tears in-season,” said the agent. “Augustus Jordan, Arson Westcott. Marianus O’Connell.”

“Yes,” said Ky in gentle reply. “But there are Yama Allegros and Jabin Losas that come back too early, and—” Ky stopped himself from going further.

“God, Yabin Losa,” Hunt’s agent scoffed.

It was Hunt himself who interjected directly to Ky. “Have you ever had an unsuccessful recovery with your surgery’s, doc?”

“Never.” Ky was confident answering the question, and he respected the ball player’s simplicity. Ky imagined his exactitude would be the most important factor in handling the matter. It may have been. The agent for Hunt and the team doctors agreed to undergo the MRI and move forward with the preparatory procedures. 53

After the call, a clerical assistant came by with a box of doughnuts and offered one to Ky. He took an old fashioned and sat pensively, contemplating the fact that he would be doing Otis Hunt’s knee surgery. He had done a few high profile knees before, but never any of this caliber.

“Old fashioned are the best,” she said, and Ky warmly agreed.

His office looked directly down Parnassus Avenue and from his window there was a view of Golden Gate park. He stared out at the strip of green that cut through the city like a stirrup.

“Media’ll be all over you on this,” Dr. Henderson had said to him after the conference call ended and only the two of them remained on the line. “You should know.

We’ll have non-disclosures.”

Ky said that of course he understood. “Why the agent? Didn’t he just sign a big deal?”

“Team has an opt out clause. First year and third year. Unless he recovers and shows up. Late or post-season, you know,” Dr. Henderson struggled to work out what he wanted to say next. “The team and he could part ways.”

Ky said he hadn’t realized that.

“That’s a lot of pressure to put on a body, if you ask me.”

“You’re the surgeon,” Dr. Henderson said, abruptly. He got off the phone after that and Ky verified on the schedule that he wasn’t due in surgery until four that afternoon. He looked over the details of operations and consultations, but found himself 54

pondering the significance of the upcoming Hunt surgery. He emailed his director to catch her up on the meeting, and then he decided to go for a walk.

On the street outside two men in business suits shook hands and stopped for a moment to talk, the bucket of a utility truck lifted a hairy-armed man wearing a white hard hat with a spool of cable slung over his shoulder up to the power lines above. A trail of children from St. Isaac’s descended down Parnassus in the distance, dancing and skipping. The chaperone’s tried to keep them in a single file.

*

Lydia said good bye to her sister, headed north up third avenue to catch the N line. Two stops up Irving, however, and she began to consider the fact that there were still two hours left before she had told her boss she’d be back to work. She exited the train at ninth and headed towards the park. She had considered spending the remainder of the morning at the Botanical Gardens, but when she passed the bookstore just before Lincoln it came to her that she had been meaning to buy a new book.

Inside the bookstore she browsed the new releases, finding several she thought looked worth the read. But she wanted to find something in paperback. A classic. She browsed the literature section and had pulled from the shelves a copy of Moulin Rouge and Madame Bovary, but returned each of them with the recognition that she could never manage the breadth of those texts, their outdated language. Someday she would, but not today. 55

She turned a corner to see what she might find in the children’s section, and there he was, her son’s baseball coach, coach Ky. Looking over the children’s books. He stepped back at first, as if to let her pass in front of him, but when she didn’t he turned and caught sight of her. 56

Ch. 5

Otis Hunt waited for the pain killers to kick in. Or maybe they had already, still he thought about taking another one anyway from the unmarked pill bottle the team physician had given him. He couldn’t remember the name. The pain in his knee was excruciating. It throbbed and beat as though it had been caught in a bear trap. He tried to recall when the last pill he took had been.

In-ter-des-er-ra-tin, he pictured the doctor telling him. He knew that was not right. It was something like that, something with too many syllables to be memorable, but now he had dug different names, the wrong ones running through his mind, into a rut of believability. An anti-inflammatory. And a pain killer. The physician’s grin had sliced deep into his cheeks, revealing pockets of darkness towards the back of his mouth where teeth were missing, tiny abysses, crevices of uncertainty. If he were a hitter, the gaps in the back of the physician’s grin would have been perfect little gaps, if he were to hit a line drive, an inside the parker, that’s where he would hit it. If he could hit one.

Take one o f these, every hour, and you ’11 be whistlin ’ dixie, the physician had hissed. And there was the problem of swallowing it. He’d need water and his bottle was empty and for some reason his crutches were in the middle of the room. He’d done that, and the memory of having done it circled around to him as if from behind, so that he fell back in to it. He laid back into his pillow, felt the soft feathery resistance of his bed linens comfort him. An argument with his girlfriend. Marianna had been upset. He had said something to make her upset. He had said he didn’t need her, and when she left he’d 57

thrown the crutches. That had happened, not more than an hour past. The memory of it sifted in and out of his consciousness like vapor, like childhood. Another person’s memory. And he reached for it, measuring it the way he did his distance from the plate with a baseball bat.

It was foggy. And he was having trouble seeing the pitcher’s mound. He knew someone was there, setting up the screen, dropping balls in a bucket, or maybe setting up a pitching machine. He heard the metallic pinging of preparation. It was dark beyond the fog, but stadium lights, obscure moons, shone through. A crowd had been muttering impatiently, disinterested. A small crowd. Someone shouted his name. And there were mixed reactions. Half-hearted claps, laughter. And then he heard a vendor selling hot dogs.

You ready? He heard his father ask.

He said he couldn’t see, but a ball came speeding in anyway. It hit the backstop with a thud. Wood planks. Chain-link, like the old backstop where he’d learned to hit when he was only a boy. Another pitch soared past his face, the laces singing a song of static. He got his bat up. Again he yelled to his father, told him he couldn’t see, but there was no answer, just another pitch. He saw it just in time to take a cut. He’d missed.

Another pitch came not long after. He swung again. Another miss. Again he’d yelled to his father that he couldn’t see the pitches. C ’mon, his father yelled back from within the fog. Someone in the crowd booed. Another pitch, and this time Otis sat back and swung.

He felt it. The brief but ever so satisfying moment of resistance. The clap of thunder. 58

The crowd cheered. He watched the ball sail over the foggy night until the right field wall swallowed it. Fan’s waved their arms and cheered and high-fived each other.

And then he could see his father behind a net stationed in front of the pitcher’s mound.

His father looked back over his shoulder for only a moment to glance at the hit, where it had landed. He nodded a frown of approval. The ball park was loaded with fans, watching him with anticipation. Somewhere in a press box he heard a commentator say the fog was clearing. He heard him say home-run derby. His father threw another pitch in. And again Otis whacked it. Another. And again. And the crowd loved it. He had hit three in a row out of the park. And from his own father no less, the moment was impossible. A dream he'd always had hoped to have come true. It had been so long since last he saw his father walking much less throwing pitches. He began to question the reality, wondering how it was that his father was now here before him, throwing home run derby balls for him, how it was possible, and while he was contemplating this question he began to miss the pitches he swung at.

Come on, his father said impatiently. I haven't got all day. Otis was just about to ask his father how he was feeling and where he had been, when a look of worry fell over his father’s face. From the dugout came a commotion. Someone had thrown a helmet, and others players were making the desperate leaps and motions of rodeo clowns fleeing a raging bull. The team doctor stepped out onto the field. League officials too. They walked contemplatively towards the pitcher’s mound, and they carried the deliberate intentionality of making a pitching change. The crowd babbled indifferently. Hunt tried 59

to hear the conversation, but he couldn't over the crowd. His father motioned to his shoulder, gave his shoulder a few whirlwinds. The team doctor tried to feel for what was ailing him. Hunt’s father shook off the queries until he could no longer stand. It became clear to Hunt his father was having a heart attack. An emergency unit was called out of the dugout. Another helmet was thrown from there, too. Dust clouds were being kicked up. The emergency crew hustled out to the pitcher’s mound with a gumey and laid Hunt’s father down on it. The paramedics were all around him now, pumping at his chest, and

Hunt struggled to see what was happening. He tried to call out to his father, but there was no response. Maybe his father hadn’t heard. Hunt began to sob, and the crowd laughed.

From the dugout came heavy grunts and the sounds of baseball bats bouncing forcibly off the concrete walls and floor, rolling around. The medics and the team officials and the team doctor carried his father into the dugout and away into a dark hallway, leaving Hunt alone on the field.

And then there was tension, like being caught in the act of stealing. Hunt knew he was there before he saw him hanging over the dugout railing. El Cheval had on jeans and cowboy boots, was yelling out that he’d finish throwing to Hunt. Hunt tried to say no and tried to hide his tears. The crowd, pleased to see El Cheval, cheered when the Cuban stormed onto the field. He waved to his supporters for a few moments before he picked up the bucket of baseballs, holding them in his non-throwing hand. He heaved a pitch by

Hunt and it hit the softly-padded vinyl coated backstop before Hunt had had the chance to get his bat up. El Cheval laughed. He threw another pitch in and again it had thudded 60

against the backstop before Hunt could manage a swing. El Cheval came again. Hunt tried swinging as early as he could, but it made no difference. His arms were slow and virtually unresponsive. El Cheval laughed and raised his arms to the crowd questioningly.

He had fluorescent streamers tied around his biceps hanging down the way a semi-pro wrestler might. El Cheval moved forward in front of the screen jokingly and the crowd laughed. He threw another pitch, this considerably slower than the last, still Hunt could not catch up to it. It rolled in the grass behind home plate. El Cheval moved up again.

And again. The crowd roared with laughter. Hunt tried to practice his swings but his arms were all too slow to make good use of the time. The dirt in the batter’s box was soft and his feet sunk into it. El Cheval tossed a pitch in underhand and Hunt took a wild cut, but he could make no contact. El Cheval was rolling around on the field now and from the crowd came the din of a sitcom audience responding to a laugh prompt. Soft laughter, forced. Hunt looked towards the dugout, and the thought came to him that he might never see his father again. He tried to run that way, but his legs were stuck in the sand. His efforts to remove himself made things worse for him. Then he was waist deep with El

Cheval rolling and laughing not five yards from him. Yell out, he thought. But the crowd noise drowned out his own voice. He could barely hear his own words. He tore at what grass he could reach to free himself, but the sod seemed to pull up in chunks, creating even more sand. El Cheval had been laughing so hard he now seemed worn out. The

Cuban was lying on his side facing Hunt and smiling, in his eyes the distance of one 61

going to sleep, and with all the peace and calm in the world he uttered a phrase in

Spanish to Hunt, which Hunt understood to mean that he should make a game of it.

Hunts tears poured from his face like sweat. El Cheval now slept soundly. There was no one in the stadium except for one small cluster far off in the stands. Hunt heard

Marianna call his name. He could see her in the left field bleachers turned to the body lying next to her. She was not yelling, but she seemed worried. She asked him if he was okay. She tried shaking him.

“Wake up,” he heard her say. “Wake up.”

When Hunt opened his eyes, he found her sitting at the edge of his bed. She was turned to him and leaning over his face.

“You're on fire,” she told him, wiping his forehead with a towel. “You must have been dreaming.”

Hunt let her wipe the sweat away, let her wipe what he thought were tears as well.

From that groggy position of being half in dream and half out, or perhaps from the medication, he had mumbled a question about his father. He had been trying to ask if his father was okay. Marianna paused a moment to consider his clarity. She told him to relax.

“Maybe, we should get you outside,” she said to him. She set his crutches next to his bed and drew back the curtains. Outside his window, far off over the bay, beyond a jagged horizon of the cityscape, he could see patches of fog drifting lightly. The sun was in the west, casting afternoon shadows.

“No,” Hunt replied, feeling the gravity of the real world and real time. 62

“We can do the lookout. We can do the beach. For the sunset.” Marianna was standing at his bedside. She wore blue jeans and a Metallica shirt, a team issued promotional.

“No.”

“Let’s go,” she said, again. “C’mon.”

Marianna took Hunt’s water bottle to the kitchen and filled it. She brought it back and gave it to him. It took some persistence to get him up and on to his crutches, and when he showed signs of imbalance she brought the wheelchair up from the garage. She had been getting used to the task of wheeling him down the stairs. The lights seemed to flicker to Hunt. Noises pulsed. At times he questioned whether he would actually be able to touch the objects he saw. He reached out to feel the door knob as they entered the garage. He felt the leather seats in the back of his Range Rover, where Marianna had propped him up with a pillow and positioned him so his leg could rest across the seat. He listened to the sound of the door sensor paging. It slowed, and then at times it seemed to page faster. Just about the time he recognized the sound he realized also that the sound was fleeting, that it had passed already, and he was merely recognizing the memory of it.

At the gate, he heard Marianna talking to the guard. It was James. She cracked the window for him to say hello.

“Feeling okay, Mr. Hunt?” James had asked. 63

Otis did not so much answer the guard as he did acknowledge he had been asked a question by him. Marianna explained it was the painkillers. The guard seemed to understand better than Hunt did.

“You take it easy, Mr. Hunt. We need you back out there this year.”

At this and of his own incapabilities, Otis Hunt felt ashamed. He tried to say he would do his best, but the effort of articulating these ideas into words became hopeless.

They drove west through the Presidio until they reached Fort Scott Field where a little league team took infield drills, the coach poised at the plate, bat on his shoulder, a ball in the hand he was pointing to the right side of the infield with his ball hand, short stop nodding his head. Otis had to crane his neck to see because of how he’d been sitting in the back seat, but he watched as long as he could. The coach tossed the ball up as they drove out of view.

“I saw my father,” Otis said, looking aimlessly at the ceiling of his Range Rover.

“In the dream I had, I did.”

Marianna’s eyebrows expressed a deal of curiosity as she shot glances his way in the rearview mirror. She had needed to stop for a group of bicyclists headed up Lincoln

Boulevard as well. Despite being heavily affected by the pain killers he had been taking, he still understood that she could see how upset he was. “Is that right,” she said to him, not so much a question as a request to continue.

“He threw me batting practice, or it was like he was throwing me batting practice at the home run derby.” Hunt looked back out the rear window hoping to catch sight once 64

more of the ball field they had just passed, but as they drove up the hill the ball field remained hidden behind a row of Spanish-style old Presidio barracks.

“That sounds like a good dream,” she said.

“I couldn’t save him,” said Otis, the emotion welling up in his eyes. “It was one of those dreams you end up just watching this happen.”

“Baby, it’s just a dream.”

“I think it was my fault,”

“It was not your fault, O,” Marianna said as they crested the hill at the immigrant point lookout. “We’ve been over this how many times. It was his choice to move here.

He wanted to be here.”

“He wanted to stay in Albuquerque. He needed to be there. Doctors told him he should be there,” said Otis, resolved to his way of thinking.

“Have you ever known your father to be anything but resolute?” Marianna asked, and Otis did not have an answer.

He looked out across the water towards the horizon muggy. A marine layer hovered in the air far out at sea. Patches of high clouds drifted swiftly inward towards the coast.

“If he were here, he’d wop you right upside the head,” Marianna said to him, using just enough of her accent to indicate to him that she was serious. Whenever the two fought, her accent seemed to rise from the depths of her. It took over. “If I didn’t think it was the medicine talking, I’d pull this car over and do it for him.” 65

From there Marianna drove him south and out to the Great American Highway so

Hunt could stare out at the beach and the surfers as the sunset. Hunt had always wanted to take up surfing. He had considered how convenient it would be once he retired from baseball to surf. They continued south even once the sun had set. She turned inland after they had passed the golf-course, back up highway one, through the Sunset district and up

Sloat to the top of Market. 66

Ch. 6

“Get out of that,” Dave called out to the man he’d shared a room with the night before. The dirty, street worn man had been asleep when Dave left the room to get a shower. He showered quick and returned to find him up and looking through his things.

Dave didn’t have much of anything—a few shirts, a second pair of jeans, socks and drawers—but what he had was his. The man cowered at Dave’s raised fist, tripped back across his bed, covered his head in a corner of the small run-down, turn of the century bedroom. He was frail, with cratered cheeks, pocked skin, and thin and greasy wisps of dishwater hair, and these attributes made his muttered apologies even more pathetic. An addict, Dave knew well. His own sympathies pressed back against his anger. He took his bag to the front desk to check it in with Rhys. It pained to him to stay at the shelter. He kicked himself for having burned a bridge with Burgee before he had his meltdown and ended up in jail. He recalled the day he took his contractor’s 4,000-watt generator and tried to pawn it. If only he’d inspected it first, would have seen clearly the “Property of

Bergstrum Construction” and the phone number scratched into the base. Rhys told him his things would be safe, wished him luck at the job office.

Delayed due to police activity at Potrero and 16th, Dave had to wait twenty minutes in the back of a crowded bus. When it finally did creep up to the next stop, he got out and walked. He had to cross the street where the intersection had been blockaded by police cars and officers. It was morning in South of Market and the police presence only made the already congested street even more so. Delivery trucks that might have 67

momentarily been double parked for their delivery piled up in the side streets. Cars tried making illegal U-tums as bicyclists yelled out at them to mind the bike lanes. A crowd of people had gathered to observe the police and now the paramedics all huddled around a body lying in the street. Dave heard a woman moan a complaint on her cell phone, something about wandering in traffic, at which Dave strained to see who it was lying on the ground. He wasn’t sentimental, but he respected will of the suicidal.

At the EDD office, Dave watched the case workers take the people from the waiting area to one of the back cubicles. The only difference he could see between the case workers and the applicants was their clothes. The case workers, just like him and the others job applicants, wore a look of exhaustion on their faces, the creases of hopelessness drawing lines in their cheeks and foreheads, their eye sockets sinking and turning black. He didn’t have to wait much longer than ten minutes for his name to be called.

His counselor, despite being younger than most of the others, wore that same look of sadness about her. It seemed to him her blue and white flower dress had been something purchased at a secondhand store, and her fingertips he recognized were stained yellow by cigarettes. She might have even been pretty at one point, but the dark circles under her eyes and the blemishes buried beneath a layer of heavy make-up contributed made her ugly to him. “Everything,” he said, when she asked him about those specialties he possessed in the way of construction. “I mean, framing, electrical, painting, flooring, 68

drywall,” she said, and she looked as though she would go on listing the all of the trades, but Dave cut her off to say once more.

“Everything.”

His caseworker stared at him with what Dave knew was a look of irritability, then she clicked a few links on her computer screen and punched a few keys with her finger- bitten nails. A moment later she had someone dialed up on the phone and was inquiring into the availability of laborers. She typed as she spoke with the phone pinned between shoulder and ear. “Uh-huh” and “okay,” she repeated. She thanked the person on the other end of the line and then hung up the phone.

“Good news,” she said, and told Dave they had work for him immediately. If he was ready to start today they’d take him.

He left the employment office but didn’t catch the bus towards the job. He hadn’t expected to find work so soon or he would have said something that morning to Rhys about checking out work boots from the shelter’s loan program, instead he’d headed out in his beat-up old sneakers. He checked the bus stop for the next bus back out to the dog patch.

*

Lydia put the last of the loans she’d been given to fund for the day on top of a stack of completed loans, then flipped back through them all, applying more scrutiny then she usually did. She had rarely in the three years she’d been working there been able to finish all her work before lunch, but this she knew was because it had been slower than 69

normal in the way of auto loans. Fong had been actively trying to recruit people for follow-ups, which she hated doing, and so she moved half of her stack back to the other side of her desk.

In the break room she made a new pot of coffee. When it began to percolate she considered the idea of buying an electric water pot and switching to drinking tea at work.

She thought that might be a healthy move, but then half-grimaced at the idea of giving up coffee.

She sat in one of the chairs at the breakroom table with her steaming cup and the

Chronicle and began to skim the headlines. A protest had held up a new high-end housing building downtown that would displace hundreds of low-income households. Delta smelt populations were dwindling; the Giants had eked out a victory over the Braves in Atlanta.

Otis hunt was ready to undergo surgery at UCSF.

When she glimpsed the word “doctor,” her eyes crept inattentively over the page and didn’t read another word. She shouldn’t have been so obvious at seeing him smiling at her in the bookstore. She shouldn’t have said she was “ditching” work when he asked what she was doing there. She ambled around the bookstore with him, her son’s baseball coach, as though they had come together or planned the meeting with the deliberate intention of sharing each other’s company. He’d asked about her last name, for some reason. “Ex,” she’d said when he asked her if Denny’s father was German. Ex-father, he’d said, joking of course but making it clear he knew what she meant. 70

She folded the newspaper and slid her fingers tightly along the crease, as if to seal an envelope with an important letter. She carried her cup of coffee back to her desk, a short twist of steam imitating the strands of hair that lie forward over her shoulder. She pretended to open up a new loan for review.

“Hun,” Gwendolyn called out from a few partitions away.

Lydia hadn’t been called upon to answer any questions yet this morning.

Gwendolyn was good for a few each week. This morning it was how to locate formulas for additional incomes declared through cash and, as usual, Gwendolyn had no reservations about asking the question over the top of everyone else’s desks. Others came over to ask things of Lydia discreetly, sensing what a bruise to their egos it was to have to rely on someone who’d been there a considerably shorter amount of time than they had.

And for this she only appreciated Gwendolyn more and always took care not to be patronizing in her explanation.

Glad for the opportunity to do something other than pretend to still have work to do, Lydia went to Gwendolyn’s desk to show her the formula. It was there she got the idea to take a few of Gwendolyn’s loans off her hands. “I couldn’t put that on you,”

Gwendolyn told her, but Lydia insisted explaining she’d much rather review loans than do follow-up calls. She said it’d be doing her a favor. Gwendolyn agreed, in that case, then she commented on the smell of Lydia’s coffee. 71

“Want a cup?” Lydia offered, and Gwendolyn said no, adding that her doctor had instructed her to make dietary sacrifices. What she wanted instead was a cup of tea, she told Lydia.

Lydia mentioned that she had only a minute ago been thinking the same thing.

She knelt down beside the desk, where Gwendolyn had rolled her chair to the side to make room, and explained her ideas about the electric water pot. They could go in on it together, and others if they wanted. They could send an email, see who might be interested in contributing to the cause.

“Yes, yes, yes,” Gwendolyn said. “Not that I care who uses it or doesn’t. My doctor says I’ll die if I keep drinking that coffee.”

Gwendolyn went on, about her husband Harold’s and her weight, about an episode not too far back in which Harold had been taken to the emergency room, about how they’d both decided to start eating better and exercising. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in an out uh the hospitals,” Gwendolyn said.

“No, that wouldn’t— ”

“I had an uncle had-tuh,” Gwendolyn said and shook her head. She said her boys deserved better. Her uncle had gone and racked up hospital bills his kids had to settle on.

She said one of his sons had lost his business to the creditors, or at least it didn’t help his business stay alive.

“He hadn’t been nah natural cut businessman to begin with,” she said. “The first thing he did was buy a new truck. I said ‘slap a magnet logo on the side, at least get some 72

advertisin’ outta that car payment you got now.’ But he said no, said, it was too, expensive,” she added, rolling her eyes.

Gwendolyn had another aunt too, lost to diabetes. She said it ran in the family.

She said she was either going to let it beat her or she had to get up and beat it. She said she had decided to beat it. Lydia had heard this before from Gwendolyn. She supported her, was happy to see her committed to the effort even if that meant Lydia had to listen to her repeat herself, only as Gwendolyn spoke, Lydia’s thoughts wandered.

“Little steps,” Gwendolyn conceded. “This is a little step, the water pot.”

“Yes.”

He’d been a tea drinker himself. Lydia recalled the way he’d said that after asking if she wanted to grab something from the coffee shop next to the bookstore, his eyes raised mischievously. “I like a good cup of coffee on the weekends, but during the week it’s tea,” he’d said, the girl at the register listening. They had sat at a table in the back.

“It’s a wonder we don’t have one already,” Gwendolyn said. “Seeing that we got everything in that breakroom.”

“Really.”

Because he needed to kill an hour, he said when she asked why he wasn’t in a hurry to get back to the hospital, and because he missed good company. He’d looked as if there was something else, but Lydia didn’t want to pry and wasn’t certain she even knew what his looks meant. Seeing him this way, so offhandedly and casual, made her think of a Woody Allen movie. 73

“Except I don’t know for the life of me what happened to that potato pocket.”

Lost in her own thoughts, Lydia nodded at Gwendolyn anyway. And she smiled and stared at a picture pinned to the inside of Gwendolyn’s cubicle and pondered her words as if the mystery of the potato pocket was one for a detective story. “But, I probably should get back,” he’d said at a low point in the conversation. She’d wished she had more to say, but at least she did not make it seem as though that news were too abrupt for her to deal with. She hadn’t wanted to seem as caught up in him as she knew she actually had been. He thanked her for her company and he walked up the street. She had half expected never to speak to him like that again, but after a few shop doors he stopped and turned around. He came back and pulled one of his cards from his wallet. “If you’re ever interested in doing this on a day off,” he said, as he handed her his card.

“Are you alright, hun?” Gwendolyn put a hand on Lydia’s, looked her in the eyes.

“Yes, I’m. Yes. I am,” Lydia said, and she smiled because she was embarrassed.

“Who ya got on your mind?” Gwendolyn said, sniffing out the gossip.

“No one.”

“Child, you know you can’t hold out on me,” Gwendolyn said, pretending to be irritated. “There ain’t nothing going on around here so exciting as that sparkle in your eye.”

“There’s nothing,” said Lydia, and she chirped like a teenage girl. “When there’s something to tell, I’ll be sure to tell you first.” And with that Lydia picked up the loans she had offered to take from Gwendolyn and walked off. 74

“I’ll be waiting to hear about that water pot,” Gwendolyn yelled out to her across the office.

When Lydia returned to her desk, the office returned to normal. The excitement subsided. Each processor in the auto loans department was stuffed solemnly into their own cubicle, working diligently at securing funding for the requests that most often were beyond the means of those who had been applying to take them out. Here and there, one side of a conversation with a dealer could be heard taking place. These conversations always seemed to be colored by the same tone of indignation towards the dealer in question, the loan processors tired at the task of explaining why their customer does not qualify for the loan they are trying to take out. Because they have too many outstanding balances on their credit report, because their income is well below what they reported, because their social security numbers don't match. The dealers never cared much about these obstacles. They pushed back anyways. Putting a young couple into debt didn’t concern them.

If she saw him again at the hospital she would try not to be so awkward. She would pretend to not have noticed him. She would be ashamed to admit this because it would, of course, be only a game she played with herself, because it was a silly way to act, because if she didn’t want to see him or talk to him all she would have to do is not talk to him. All she had to do was not think about him, Dr. Kyrakos Simon Straub, Coach

Ky, her son’s baseball coach with the cute butt and cute dimples. But she couldn’t stop thinking about him. She kept picturing him, running his fingers along the titles of books, 75

pulling them out and thumbing through them. She recalled the title of one of the books he had looked at, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. She felt as though something were changing inside of her. She felt like her life had begun again, in that one little stroll down

9th avenue between the bookstore and the coffee shop. She wondered if all his smiles and questions and intrigue could ever amount to something more than that. What would he do when he found out she had never graduated college? What would he do when she told him she had a psychotic addict of an ex-husband lurking somewhere in the city? He’d think she was full of baggage, far too much drama for his life as a real professional.

When she’d picked Denny up from the camp trip it had been a beginning but she hadn’t known it then. When her sister pointed out his butt in the crowd and later looked him up on the internet she had only been the least bit considerate of the possibility. When he smiled at her at the coffee shop, she’d known it then. A person doesn’t smile like that without something deeper, something worth smiling over. She felt herself changing. She imagined a future where the two of them lived together, and then she realized how far carried away she was letting herself get. She picked up one of the loans and opened it, and committed herself to her work.

By the end of the afternoon she had finalized all of the loans for Gwendolyn, leaving only the signature lines blank for her to sign. She checked each of the loans once more, and then waited to make sure Fong was tucked away in his office before she took the short stack back to Gwendolyn’s desk. Gwendolyn called her an angel. Then Lydia submitted her own loans for approval. Kerrie, her underwriter, almost didn’t even look 76

through them she trusted her so much to have everything right. She explained what decisions she had made at questionable opportunities, on the Tyson loan a mismatch between previous employers that she figured was acceptable given the income verification, on the Cookson loan a price increase of four-hundred dollars post application. Kerrie seemed to have the same reaction she did in blaming the dealers for not hiring competent employees. After she’d gotten the sign-off, she brought the loans to

Fong for final approval. He looked over the loans quickly, making his signatures deliberate.

Fong thanked her and asked if she’d be willing to do follow-ups for the last half- hour, but she reminded him that she had come in early in order to leave early. How could he say no? She was his best processor, probably she should have been made underwriter already. He smiled and said in his broken English she couldn’t blame him for trying.

When she first came to work for him she couldn’t distinguish between his angry look and his pleased look. Now she understood the difference to lie somewhere in the way his eyes smiled. He never smiled from his mouth, that much was clear, but if he was upset it could be seen in what she could only describe as a depression in his crow’s feet. Sometimes, if he wore his glasses, this might be harder to determine, but she’d become accustomed to knowing the difference even so. When she first began working there, she’d feared him.

She had only ever known the anger of Dave before then, an anger that could be set ablaze at any given moment and then could be extinguished in apologies as if the two opposites of his bipolarity were meant to accommodate each other and could not be present without 77

the other. She had been afraid then, but she was not afraid now. She’d seen all men as that, something to be feared, and it was only in having to share a bed with Dave that she had been able to make a distinction between him and all the rest. Even her father, whom she had loved dearly, had succumbed to fits of outrage now and again. It was a condition of being male, she had once believed.

At the bus stop children on their way home from school chased each other freely, a few of them huddled beneath the shade of an awning to watch a video on their phone, a tall boy lighting a cigarette and handing it to one of the other boys, whom took an inexperienced drag and handed it back quickly. In the warm, busy street there was hardly a lull in traffic. Spring was in full force, and though in the city the distinction between winter and spring was hard to recognize, Lydia felt the season rising in her spirit. Soon summer would be upon them, and with it the fog. A phrase came to mind she had often heard people in the city use, I ’ve never felt a winter so cold as a summer in San

Francisco. The bus appeared over the crest of the hill up 25th avenue. It had two stops to go before it would be arriving. She guessed that the electric sign hanging within the bus stop shelter read 2 minutes. She checked even though she knew she was right—the bus schedule was a part of her daily existence. An old woman offered to give up her seat for

Lydia, but she insisted against it and thanked the womadn and stood across from the rear door. He’d had a way of blinking before he spoke, of thinking carefully about everything he said. He had a way of paying attention. When she’d told him about her hope of getting into nursing school soon, he’d questioned her on where she’d like to study. He’d said 78

good things about city college, otherwise he recommended a couple other schools she

might try. He had been reserved about discussing his divorce, said he’d rather not get into

it but wasn’t necessarily made upset by it.

In no time, her arm held tight around the center pole on the bus, she made it to the

Baker Beach bus stop. She climbed the hill to her apartment, stopping here and there to

look out over the mouth of the bay. She watched a hawk hang steadily in the wind over

the cliff side looking for prey, though none seemed to come its way and slowly it soared

past and beyond her sight past a row of tall spruce trees. Dave would be calling again

soon, she knew. She could only hold him off for so long. She wondered if she would need

to act on the restraining order she had against him. She considered the idea of buying a

gun, then she laughed at herself.

Denny would be at practice now. She made it a policy not to embarrass him by

showing up to watch, but that became a secondary concern over seeing her son’s coach again. Just the thought of her eyes laying sight on him brought excitement to her face. At home, she changed quick and headed up the hill towards Fort Scott field. It was almost the other side of the Presidio from their apartment, a good two miles, hills and winding trails, woods that served as a peaceful buffer between the city and the ocean. She liked the walk around mountain lake, the Park Trail, up over the golf course that had been built over the Macarthur tunnel and highway 1. The parks department had been cutting the trees back there, providing habitable spaces for wildlife and naturally occurring plant life.

There was a wide trail, secluded and it wound up the hills not too steeply. The trail 79

passed through the golf course. At the top of the hill she stopped to chat with a couple

who’d been having a beer at the refreshment stand between the thirteenth and fourteenth

holes. They agreed it was too nice a day to spend inside. On the way down the other side

of the hill she kept on the Park Trail. She peeled off for a moment to check out the view

of the bay from Cemetery Overlook but only spent a few minutes staring out over the

water. She was eager to get to the field even if she had chosen the path that was the least

direct in getting there. She cut along Kobbe Avenue, beneath the shadows of the large,

brick houses with big windows and marvelous pillars on the front porch. She wondered

what it might take to afford to live in one of those houses.

She took a short-cut from Kobbe Avenue to Upton Avenue, behind an apartment building there and up a flight of stairs near where the tennis courts stood empty. He would be there hitting balls to the kids or pitching to them, she knew, and the question

still begrudged her of whether or not to show her face. She had no other reason to be there. Denny had not asked her to come. Never before had she shown up to watch practice, valuing instead the chance to be alone, to walk to the beach or listen to music.

Among the Eucalyptus trees there was unrest, the rustle of a breeze that seemed to be exaggerated. Beyond a row of old military buildings, she could see the lights of the field unlit in the late-afiternoon. The sky had not been so blue in weeks and that usually meant the air was cold, but as she stepped up the street she felt nothing of the sort. She sweat.

Her stomach was bubbly. She could not get over how childish the prospect of seeing the 80

doctor made her feel. Birds on either side of the street darting in and out of the trees

chirped in playful rapidity.

She was not hurried, did not want to be hurried. Lydia reached out for memories

of her morning with Kyrakos. She imagined the thought of calling him up to see if they

might share a day off anytime soon. If not dinner maybe. She’d know he was busy and

didn’t want to impose. It was only that she too liked the feeling of good company, and if

he might want to she’d love to share it with him again. No, that’d be too much. She

imagined and re-imagined the conversation over and again. What could be the problem

with a little date? He had been the one to suggest it, after all. The implication was there,

at least.

The field came into view, glowing green in the afternoon light. Two groups of

children were situated on either side of the infield, she could see, but she could not make

out the coach among them or distinguish her son from the rest. A car made its way up the

street and she stepped to the side moving up along the curb. For a moment she delayed in

going any closer, and this she reasoned was because she had not yet been able to see him, the coach. At least if she knew where he was, what he was doing, which direction he was facing, she could maneuver accordingly. She stood still for a moment, hoping for the strength to commit to her actions, pleading with herself not to turn around and walk back home the way she’d came. She’d remembered how Gwendolyn had looked at her. How she’d told her there was nothing to tell. 81

From where she stood, she was enough out of sight not to feel vulnerable. She

still could not make out the coach, however, and she began to wonder if he had seen her

already. Behind her was the Log Cabin, a tourist attraction in the Presidio that did not

attract many tourists. Often the place was rented out for parties or celebrations or

gatherings, but today it was empty. She could take a seat at the patio and be able to see if

not hear the team’s practice. She considered what there was in her actions to feel guilty

about. Was she going too far? Was this spying? Certainly it was if she meant to remain

unseen, she thought, but then she did not make an attempt to change. She welcomed the

notion that she was spying on her son’s baseball practice, and not because she wanted to

watch her son play without him feeling embarrassed but because she was infatuated with

her son’s coach.

“Okay! Line up!” She heard coach Ky say, and a moment later he emerged from

the dugout where slats in the fence had prevented her from being able to see him, and he

walked out onto the field with a bat in hand. He began to instruct them on the drill, saying

something about looking the runner back and throwing to first. He split half of the boys that had been standing by first base over to second. How intentional he was with his words, Lydia thought. How much the boys respected him and listened to what he had to

say. She saw Denny with the boys at third. He was attuned to the activity, would be first to field the ball. He did so, pumping to second once he had fielded the ball to get the runner back and then throwing to first. Lydia watched from afar as her son raced back to his bag in time to field the return throw from first and tag out the advancing runner. 82

“That’s how it’s done,” Ky said, catching in his free hand the ball the catcher had tossed up to him. “Nice work, Hammer!” The kids rotated and the drill continued again.

They had their work to do. Lydia left around the back of a building unlike the way she came, just to be certain she would not be seen.

*

Dave finished sweeping up the piles of sheetrock and old insulation that had accumulated at the base of the demolition tube and tossed them into the bins the contractor had provided. He had already made an attempt to petition the foreman for a better position, but the foreman said he’d need to see Dave’s commitment before he went promoting him. Dave fought the temptation to lay the contents of his mind on the man, who’s chubby reddened cheeks and heather pocketed T-shirt wreaked of comfortability.

They worked until five, and Dave offered to stay longer to clean up, but the foreman only thanked him and sent him home. He said Dave had done good work, that he’d need him all week, maybe longer if things worked out. Dave thanked him and considered asking if he might get paid up front in cash, considered explaining that he had a son he’d like to be able to take to see a movie, but the foreman had not left enough free space in the air to make any such request. Dave took the bus home back out to Bay View.

Rhys greeted him at the front desk. “How’d it go?” He asked, taking the boots from Dave as he set them on the counter.

“Shit work,” Dave said. “Just picking up shit.” 83

“It’s work, though,” said Rhys, handing Dave the bag he had kept safe all day.

“That’s somethin’.”

“Shit work,” said Dave, and he took his bag back to his room. 84

Ch. 7

In the office that would have become a nursery had they ever had children,

Kyrakos Straub removed pictures from the wall and stacked them in boxes. He’d been

gathering the boxes in the front room for storage or removal or for the possibility that

Samantha would come get them. He removed everything, the photos of them at their

wedding, them at Hawaii, them in Thailand, them with Mt. Lassen behind. He had no real

discretion at this point what should go. He only kept the pictures without her in them,

except for those photographs he had only been keeping because she had been the one

who’d taken them. Those went too: an almond grove he remembered stopping on the side

of the road for, a pelican in flight, a scenic shot of Ocean Beach from the Sutro lookout in

which the beach had been peppered with people enjoying the sunshine and good weather,

snow falling on a pine branch. Hand in hand, a father helping his small child over a fallen

log in Golden Gate Park. The pedals of a rose bloom in decay; a homeless man begging

for food with a puppy in his lap.

He noted as he took down the frames that he never really considered her to be a talented photographer. He was no expert. There had been a few occasions when he had seen a potential knack for perspective and lighting, but those occasions almost always involved the band she was photographing and because of this Ky figured her proficiencies had to do, as with most anyone’s proficiencies, with circumstances stemming from what she photographed the most. Otherwise, the photos he took down all seemed to be cliches of amateurism. He never would have told her so when they were 85

together, but now he could be honest about these discrepancies. An over-developed

quality to everything—murky, hazy, unclear even. A few of the photos had literally been

out of focus, but those that had been clear always failed to convey passionately the beauty

of the original image; and with a certain degree of relief Kyrakos added each photograph

to the box with the others.

On his way with them to the front room he heard someone at the door, and he

knew almost immediately that it was the man he had already spoken to that morning

about the bench seat. He was coming to take it away, and Ky hoped he might want any

number of the other things he and Samantha had accumulated over the years which now

he saw as useless and burdensome. The man showed up in sweat pants and a t-shirt. He

made a sweeping nod as he looked over the living room full of boxes and furniture. Ky

let him look around after encouraging him to do so. “Letting this go,” he said, holding up

a statue of a sea captain. “An you don’t want nothin’ for it.”

“Just want it gone,” Ky said with mild impatience.

He could have donated everything to the Salvation Army, could have taken it to

auction. Still he might have to if he couldn’t find people to come take the things away he

and Samantha had purchased and found room for in this house, argued over whether or

not they were worth keeping, settled over a practical or impractical use for. None of it

was he obligated to anymore and that brought him a small degree of satisfaction. It was just stuff, stuff he needed gone.

“I’m mostly short on time,” he said to his visitor. 86

“And you sure you don’t want anything for it?”

“Just take ‘em off my hands. I can help you to your car with anything.”

The man had inquired about the frames in the boxes of photographs Ky had

removed from the walls in his office, offered to pay for them. Ky considered the idea

only for a moment but then admitted that he had to give those to his ex-wife.

“Crumby thing a divorce,” the man remarked.

“Yes, it is.”

The man offered to pay once more before he left, but Ky refused and, alone again,

turned on the stereo. The speakers coughed as he rolled the dial down to a sports talk

radio program he liked to listen to. He took a copy of the Chronicle out to a table on his

back patio.

“What if he doesn’t recover,” said the voice of one of the hosts of the morning

radio program. His show, the only sports talk show he really felt was worth listening to,

wouldn’t come on for another ten minutes, and so he suffered through having to listen to the talking heads of the mid-morning program, the slot in the morning lineup which he

knew had the fewest listeners and therefore the worst hosts. They were, of course,

discussing Hunt. Ky shook his head at the dismissive way in which they all seemed to count Hunt out, as if it were too late in the season for him to recover from a surgery like his. He turned the page in his paper, and while the boys on the radio program tried to talk over each other he wondered if he would enjoy returning to New York. 87

He’d thought about this too often lately, the job offer at St. John’s being one he’d

always wanted. He would not find a place like this one near Forest Park, wouldn’t have

such an easy bus ride, nor such a scenic view so close to his front porch. He stared out

across Piper loop, out into the forest, up the trunks of the Spruce trees. An Ivy vine had

made its way up the trunks of one of the trees, batches of ferns covered the forest floor.

There were few places he could imagine being more content with, even though the place was not his own. He tried to imagine himself back in New York, considered the gravity of it all, the appeal of such a magnetic place, but his thoughts returned to what he could

see in front of him.

On the radio, the program he’d been hearing wrapped up their show and the mid­ day program began. “Things to talk about today,” he heard the host say over the opening music. “Giants baseball, the status of Hunt, his surgery scheduled for next Tuesday, among other things.” Ky tuned out the discussion they got into when he heard the FedEx truck pull up and remembered he had ordered a new hitting screen for the team. He met the delivery man at the door. When he returned, having signed off on the package and setting it to the side to assemble later, the guys on the radio were discussing the pros and cons of the surgery Hunt would undergo, if it was better to do it now or wait. Ky never much cared to listen to others talk about the things he was an expert in, but he was curious to see it from a fan’s perspective. And at least these guys were sensitive to what

Hunt might be thinking, fearing. He’d be working a late shift at the hospital that evening, 88

and he went inside to make himself a sandwich. In the kitchen he put water on for a cup of tea.

He’d been surprised by Denny Hammerschmit’s mother in the bookstore, surprised to find her standing there, to see her somewhere other than at a team event.

He’d been surprised at how attracted he was to her, the way she looked in her leather jacket, how her hair twisted and curled, her dark eyes, the way her smile agreed with her rosy cheeks. When she’d showed him the book she was considering buying her hand was shaky and her voice nervous. She’d been intimidated by him, and he wondered how someone so beautiful could be so for him. Was it fo r him? Didn 7 she have men trying to pick her up? Didn't she know she had power in that smile?

That morning he had went into surgery on several knees with torn meniscus ligaments. The first patient, a man in his mid-fifties, a fisherman who’d stepped backwards off a dock, had a bucket tear; the second, a lady in her forties who’d missed a step in a dark theater, a lateral tear. With each one he took great care, ensuring that healing could take place properly. As he went about clearing away dead tissue, laser etching bone spurs, tying ligaments together, he tried to ask his patients about their plans for recovery, small talk to ease their mind. He avoided mentioning that he would be conducting the surgery for the Giants’ star outfielder Otis Hunt, though he wanted very much to do so because he thought it might help his plight considerable. He recalled the advice of the team doctor who’d told him he mustn’tw. 89

Half way through his third surgery of the day, he found himself telling a coach for

the USF basketball team about a girl he’d met, the mother of one of the kids on the

baseball team he coached for. He’d got on the subject after he sensed the man he was talking to wanted to talk about a new love but couldn’t get over the fact that he knee was

splayed open under the lights of the surgery room. The man had seemed to want to tell

Ky about it but stopped occasionally, staring at the ceiling. It was then Ky thought it could help. “Lydia,” he said, unsolicited. “Gorgeous. Long flowing, brown hair.”

“Don’t go getting distracted, doc,” said the basketball coach, to which Ky felt a nervous bit of shame come over him.

He couldn’t help but mention Lydia either when his fourth patient of the day asked him if he was seeing anyone. She was a UPS driver who’d been pushing through an old college softball injury. The wear on her meniscus was significant, and Ky had to take a considerably long time to get through the cleaning out of dead tissue. He’d allowed himself the conversation about Lydia, comparing her to his ex-wife as though there was already something between them about which to compare. Ky had made up a few things.

He’d fabricated a few extra dates, a dinner at Mandalay when the woman mentioned she drove the California route and had said that was her favorite place to eat. Ky had been careful not to insinuate that they’d been intimate yet, but the woman had brought it up and since he could tell his own patient was feeling out his seriousness towards this woman, Ky had told her that that part of their relationship was promising too.

“It always is at first,” she’d said. “Once that wears off, you can call me, honey.” 90

By his final surgery of the day, Ky had decided not to talk about the woman he’d

met in the bookstore, whom he had somewhat come to realize he’d taken to. In fact, he

said nothing, which didn’t seem to bother anyone. And this only contributed to the guilt

he felt about making things up in the first place. That afternoon at practice he thought

about telling Denny he’d seen his mother at the bookstore “a few days ago, Monday I

guess it was.” Denny seemed like he’d be indifferent to that brand of idle adult chat, and

instead Ky asked him if he believed Hunt would be back before the end of the year.

Denny had assured his coach he would, and didn’t seem to have any hesitation on the

matter. Ky said he agreed. When he had gone to the dugout to answer a call on his emergency line, and while the team waited to finish an infield drill, he saw a woman who’d looked like Lydia down by the Log Cabin and he commanded of himself a silent piece of advice—to get it together.

Hours later as evening came on, as he lounged in the wicker chair on his porch,

Ky dreamed of surgery, and the UPS driver, and Otis Hunt. But Otis was not Otis, he was

Denny Hammerschmit, and Denny’s mother Lydia stood behind the full grown man, watching cautiously at what Ky did to the woman’s knee. “You’re being completely honest with us, aren’t you doc,” Denny said, about Ky’s ability to perform the surgery, but when Ky woke he knew the question had been about Denny’s mother and everything he had said to his patients that had not been so much the truth. It was cold now and dark.

He went inside. He watched the highlights of the day on the Sports network and then went to bed. 91

There were more dreams, but they were kept mysterious by heavy fog, occurring without connection to reality, except he had dreamed of Samantha. She had written to tell him she was ready to go back to the way things were. She was sorry and wanted to fix things. In another moment she had poked her head in his window and pulled down on the lamp chord next to his bed, and when the lights came one she was perched there smiling with her hands folded neatly on his window sill as if to say she was sorry and ready to talk. When he woke just after dawn, it was her voice he heard in his ears. “Is there someone else?”

Only Samantha had ever been untrue in their relationship, which until a few days ago he seemed ready to forget. She had tried often to make him feel as though he was anything but perfect. She had become flippant when once a colleague from UCSF had come up to him at a benefit dinner. There had been a council formed to represent the medical staff during a contract dispute and both of them had been named to head the council. Theirs was truly a work relationship, Ky knew, and he did not express any reservations over getting into a discussion with her about the direction of the process they had been assigned to oversee. Samantha had come in mid-conversation, interrupting like a child, or acting far less secure than what was to be expected of her age. He was suspicious, resentful of her insecurity, embarrassed by it the same; and as these events occurred more frequently he became more so resentful and embarrassed. He felt as though his colleagues talked of this behind his back, had seen the drama that was his wife’s jealousy and judged him for it. He could see this as a problem they would not be 92

able to overcome long before he admitted they could not overcome it. He almost felt a sense of relief the day his wife’s suitor had showed up on their doorstep in tears. It had been a blessing of sorts, an assurance that permitted him to not have to feel sorry, almost noble, but certainly guiltless. “It's your fault, you drove me to h i m she had tried to say as if scripted for a daytime soap opera, and in her words he heard the dark voice she used to justify her own sour actions. She lifted admission from him, making of the guilt she had once made him to feel the guilt that now belonged to her. “Un-fair,” she cried when instead of showing his anger or feelings of betrayal, he simply told her he’d only ever loved her, making of each tear that she wiped from her eyes a product of her own doing.

Unbound by the burdens of truth, his silences highlighted her crimes, the nights she’d come home too late, the bank receipts wedged deep in his seat she swore he needn’t see, the simple glances, love’s thief, a quiet pause. Awake at dark hours, they’d taken to opposite rooms, doors shut and locked, lights turned off. The photographer took her pictures. The surgeon fixed his knees. It went months this way. His savior came over the radio. Blake and Blake, men’s divorce school. A lawyer packaged his claims, and a lover washed his hands.

She had brought a new life herself, Lydia had. Humility he’d only known in movies; beauty he’d never seen occur so naturally, so brilliant without effort. Hers was a mystique of kindness, of true caring. A different way of being selfless each time she had the opportunity to do so. How could so much be discovered about a person in two hours?

He asked himself this question as if he had any inclination to doubt the way he was 93

feeling. She had mentioned the classes she was taking at night to get into nursing school.

A gesture he could arrange, a job at the hospital. Life was about getting breaks and this

break he could give to her; an offer a friend could provide. He wondered if it was

disingenuous to call himself a friend. Yes, it was, but he did not care. “I feel like I can be

myself around you,” he heard himself saying to her, even though these words had never

been spoken between them. He knew it was true: he’d fallen in love with her and he was

crazy for doing so.

The blue-grey of early morning shone through his window. Ky considered

sleeping longer and even tried to close his eyes but couldn’t. He rose and went for a run

down Nauman, and on to the Bay View Trail, he pulled up at cemetery look-out having

not yet even broken a sweat but resolved to stop and gaze out over the Bay. Morning

traffic coming into the city hummed over the Golden Gate bridge. The fog horn on a

tanker moaned. Seaguls at Fort Mason squawked their excitement at the fog-free

morning. Ky told him himself he’d been a fool all his life. He blamed his parents, so true

to each other, a real example of love he’d likely never know himself. If only he could—

ugh, he ridiculed himself for thinking it. He ran then, to immigrant point, to the bridge.

He ran along the bridge and in forty minutes was across it, seated at the vista point staring

back at his city. He asked himself how he could leave it. That white city, teaming with

brilliance. He considered emailing Samantha to tell her he would be sending her things, but quickly gave up on the idea, not caring much what she thought about his decision. 94

He ran home as early morning became mid-morning. The agent for Otis Hunt had called to say that everything looked to be on track for the surgery, that the swelling was down and, if he could, they’d like to have another exam before Tuesday. Ky replied that he could be available that afternoon and he gave a few time slots to choose from.

After a morning cup of coffee, he added a few more framed photos to the boxes set to go. He found pillows and trinkets he’d never wanted as well. All of them he packed up tightly in boxes. He watched the donations round-up squad stack them methodically in the truck and then without any affect at all drive away. He took his coffee to the back yard and began to read the paper, but his eyes only moved over the text. Instead he heard her read, from the book of poetry she had picked up off the shelf, a John Donne poem.

Busy old fool, unruly sun, why dost thou thus—and he told himself it was silly to believe he’d found something worth romantic poetry in the girl from the bookstore, but he continued to let her voice run through his head anyway. 95

Ch. 8

Days turned into a month. School ended and the bright mornings of spring time gave way to a foggy June. Mists curtailed and eddied their way up the coastal side of the

Presidio. With the fog came the wind gusts, those that seemed never to end as long as the sun was up, leaving only a few hours around midday of clear skies, otherwise the sky was a river of white flowing steadily.

On a Wednesday morning, just the second of his summer vacation, Denny

Hammerschmidt watched the blanket of grey pass swiftly over him from his backyard porch, punching a fist into his mitt. Since his father had returned from prison Denny had been eager to see him, his hope being his father might buy him a new glove and he’d be able to at once spend the time he’d been missing while at the same time upgrade from the old mitt. He had grown somewhat tired of being made fun of for having it. His father hadn’t called in over a week. His mother had offered to buy him a new one, but he refused. He didn’t want it like that, he’d wanted it to be his dad. He thought his dad might feel betrayed if he let his mother buy a new one. Like at Christmas when he’d gotten a new bike. You didn’t like the one I got you? His father had asked over the crumbly static of the line from the prison. He hadn’t the heart to tell him that the bike had been retrieved by the police, that it had fit the description of a stolen bike. Denny had sworn to the principle it wasn’t stolen, that his father had given it to him as a gift. His mother had come to the school and talked to the police while Denny was told to wait in the hall.

Nothing had come of it, but Denny never saw the bike again. Still his father seemed hurt. 96

In his bedroom he began work on another letter to Otis Hunt. It had been less than a week since he’d sent out his first letter. His mother had brought him the news at the same time that she told him his father was out of jail. She had gone out with a friend who knew Otis Hunt and would be able to get a letter to him if Denny wanted to write one. In his first letter he’d wrote how that had been his favorite day since the day he learned

Hunt was a Giant. Denny felt it prevalent to talk about how much he missed his father and what had happened to his father to get him sent to jail in the first place, and that he knew Hunt’s father had passed away earlier that year, and that he was sorry. He said he knew it was hard to go without a dad. He also asked Hunt how his recovery was going, from the knee surgery. He said the paper said Hunt would be back by playoffs, but the guy on the radio said he would never play another game in a Giants uniform again. He said he’d hoped he would get to see him play in a Giants uniform again. He said he’d hoped he stayed on the Giants for the rest of his career. He said it just wouldn’t be the same if Hunt played for another team.

Denny was eager to hear what Hunt had to say about all this. He went back to the porch and stuffed his hand in his mitt. He punched it a few times and imagined making a play, the quick transition from ball in the mitt to ball in his hand and then his throw to home just in time to snag the sliding runner. In the breeze he heard the cheer of excitement roar from an imaginary crowd. He did this a few times over and then resolved himself to resting is head on his mitt on the railing of the balcony of his porch and staring down the hillside towards the road at the joggers and bicyclists. His mother would be 97

home for lunch in an hour and he would ask if he could go meet up with one of his friends before practice. Once a week, usually on Wednesdays since the season was nearly half over, the baseball team practiced at Fort Scott Field. Tuesdays or Thursday evenings they had their games, sometimes there as well, or at one of the three fields in the park or out at Ketcham Field out on Treasure Island.

An alligator lizard crept slowly up the long bare trunk of one of the trees nearby.

He remembered once, during a field trip from school, they’d learned that tree was called a Monterey Cypress. They could reach over a hundred feet. The lizard climbed the trunk steadily, and Denny watched as it came to rest on a branch nearly half way up the tall trunk. He wondered what could be seen from that height, how vast your playground would be, how easy it would be to escape the police if one were a lizard.

*

Early that same morning Marianna Salena Travieso was held up at the pharmacy.

There had been a longer than expected line and when she finally did reach the window she had been importuned by the ladies at the desk to know if it was the Otis Hunt for whom they had filled this prescription.

“What Otis Hunt are we talking about, here?” Marianna enquired, making use of a perfected bit ignorance.

“The Giant’s right-fielder. Will he be back this season?”

“We so could use him.” 98

“Who’s that?” Marianna asked, knowing the answer to this question too. It somewhat aggravated her when the Giants’ faithful used first-person collective pronouns because she knew theirs was not the same struggle. Theirs was an anecdote to their own misery, an excuse to day drink or a vicarious fantasy. Otis’s struggle was one of considerable weight—to lift the spirits of the city, to chase perfection.

“What with Marquez back. The lineup’s opened up like last year’s.”

“I wouldn’t bet against them,” one pharmacist shouted from somewhere out of

Marianna’s sight.

“I wouldn’t bet against them either,” said the one who had greeted her at the window. “You have to know Otis Hunt, the Giants.”

Marianna searched through her purse with impatience. “Ugh, baseball,” she said, swinging her hand as if to shew an insect buzzing by her. “It’s so boring.”

She took the prescriptions and left the women at the window with only a brief smirk of authenticity towards her pretensions. She hated to be cruel, but it was important for her own safety. Sporty, and dark skinned, to her the city crawled with little blonde sucker-fish eager to latch on to a shark like her Otis. She was thirty-two, older than Otis by six months, older than most of the other wives and girlfriends of the team, who were always supportive of her, offering words to the wise, which seemed to come too often for

Marianna. She was confident what she gave Otis no one else could give. She knew that he knew that what glitters is not always gold. And, she knew, the other women couldn’t be blamed for wanting him. If only they could see him in his current state of collapsed 99

confidence, if only he them. Which reminded her, the doctor had a letter for Otis she needed to pick up. She crossed the street to the hospital and took the elevator up to the

Orthopedics floor. The clerical assistant paged Doctor Straub and she waited for him, standing patiently off to the side with an elbow resting on the counter. She watched a nurse help an old man on crutches limp slowly down the hallway. Occasionally passersby would nod or smile, but otherwise she was left alone to observe those in pain or those tending to those with pain. She hated the way hospitals smelled of sanitizer, she did not want to be there any longer than she needed to.

“Good morning,” Ky said from a good way down the hall as he approached, and she lifted herself off the counter to meet him. She shook his hand before she took the letter he held out to her. Ky asked her how the recovery was going. She felt compelled to tell him that Otis seemed to be depending heavily upon the pain-killers. Ky hummed a brief tone of concern, though his eyes seemed to suggest to Marianna that it was serious.

He told her that the painkillers wouldn’t be needed much longer, and he told her to thank

Hunt for agreeing to receive the letter. He said he was sure Hunt had plenty of other fan mail to tend to. “It’d mean a lot to the kid,” he said, and she replied he would be happy to do it.

Back at home, Marianna and Hunt sat quietly in the kitchen. Hunt hadn’t responded to any letters from his fans for weeks. He spent most of his time sleeping, or sitting at the kitchen table reading news articles on his laptop. He watched news from around the league religiously. Occasionally one of his teammates stopped by to see how 100

he was holding up, or to share a six pack with him and watch the game. But the team had been on a twelve game road trip and he hadn’t seen anyone in person for over a week.

Marianna sifted through the unopened fan mail Hunt had received while she waited for him to sign the checks to the bills that needed to be paid. For over a month now this had been the routine, the pain medication, and reserving her comments about

Hunt’s need to regain his motivation, him staring at the television or computer screen or a magazine or newspaper when he wanted to sit outside. The repetition of these tasks had become as depressing as the sight of her sulky boyfriend himself, a man who seemed impossible to uplift, who never smiled anymore, who was by virtue of his slumped posture a man appearing to have lost everything he’d ever been proud or fortunate enough to possess. Marianna loved him, and through her love she pitied him.

“We’re out of hot dog buns,” he said.

“I’ll grab some this afternoon.”

She didn’t bother to write this down. She had already taken note of what was needed and had her grocery list saved on her phone. He said the Dodgers had made a trade with the Marlins for Vinny Klassen, who led the NL in stolen bases last year.

“I heard that,” she said. Marianna had kept an ear and eye peeled to baseball news herself, had always done so since she was a kid.

“They overpaid,” Hunt said. “And it’s only a matter a time for that blows up. It’ll come out soon enough Klassen’s been on the juice.”

“Serve’s them right. Tryin’ a buy a championship,” she replied. 101

“They’ve got a team of me’s.”

“Wouldn’t it be great to watch them miss the postseason?”

“You know I wouldn’t mind it, but you won’t hear me say it aloud.”

“Superstition, I know. I know.”

“It has a way of biting you in the ass,” Otis said, signing the last check and sliding

them back to Marianna.

“Still though, to think it. I mean, what’s the difference?”

“It is different. It’s personal when you think it. It’s the baseball gods exacting

their revenge on you. If you put it out there in the world, it becomes a life of its own. And

it come back to get you. It always does.”

“And haven’t you built up some credits in your time. You’ve never so much as

bad-mouthed an umpire.”

“It doesn’t seem to be any time for me to go wishin’ ill on others.”

“Jus’ that they miss the post-season, O. It’s just that they miss the post-season.”

Otis shook his head once, raised his eyebrows as if to suggest that ill was ill.

Marianna, who’d always been attracted to Hunt’s sincerity as a do-gooder, who’d

believed only somewhat that he took it too far, who nevertheless sought to be behind him

on matters pertaining to doing what was inherently ‘good’, was reminded of the Doctor

and pulled the letter from her purse. She explained how the doctor had asked if Otis could reply to a letter one of the kids on his team wrote. She said it’d mean a lot to the kid and he never knew, that it might be just the good karma he needed to complete a speedy and 102

successful recovery. She watched Hunt open the letter and read it through. He seemed to read it a second time with an involved glare, the first time in weeks she’d seen him look that way—attentive, mettlesome, a purpose to his gestures not in the direction of self- loathing. He nodded, sympathetically, as he laid the letter out flat on the table. He asked her for a few pieces of paper and said he would only be quick in responding, that she could drop it in the mail with the bills.

“I’m sure the kid will appreciate that,” she said, and found him the pages he requested. He hesitated momentarily, wiggling his pen above the paper, before he began to write. She went to the bathroom to check herself in the mirror and only then realized the World Champions pendant she had been wearing and that she normally wore inside her t-shirt had come out and was on the outside. She couldn’t recall when it had happened, but she hoped it hadn’t been before she picked up the prescriptions at the pharmacy. She tucked it back in and sighed at the thought of having so blatantly lied to those poor girls. HI is ill, she heard Otis’s words run through her head.

“Well, that’s all done. Now it’s just the other four hundred I have here to get back to, and then I’ll be well on my way to a successful recovery,” Hunt said from the kitchen, which she understood even from the other room to be a pretty funny joke, even if it was more of the same self-loathing she’d grown tired of from him.

*

When he had taken another of the pain killers he’d been prescribed, after

Marianna had left again to go run the afternoon errands, Otis Hunt stood in the doorway 103

to his back patio with a blank stare before going to sit down on the bench outside, where he let his thoughts return to his childhood and his father’s guidance. The letter from the kid had reminded him of the time he’d returned from baseball camp. There he’d been taught some new mechanics in his throw that allowed him to drop his arm down and hurl the ball from the outfield. It had been unorthodox. His father had not been pleased at seeing Otis allowing his arm to fall so far sideways, still the throws he was making were far more accurate and, Otis had had to explain, felt more comfortable. His father had told him that might be the case now, but that his body was growing. He’d need to make sure he didn’t do things to his shoulder that couldn’t be undone later.

Hunt hadn’t listened to his father. He continued throwing with the three-quarter angle motion he’d learned in the camp. By high school he had begun to feel pains in his shoulder. The doctor had said muscle strains. Three weeks. His father never said he told him so, but Otis knew he had been right. And while he had tried hard to unlearn the arm angle he’d become accustomed to over the years, he could not.

It became a part of him, like a scar or, worse, a bad tattoo, hastily chosen and out of spite. He would become known for his odd throwing angle. He would become famous for it and how successful he was even though he had it. Sometimes pitchers had three- quarter motion, but rarely ever outfielders. Not like him. He thought he should have mentioned this to the kid—what had his name been? Danny. Hammer-something. He should have told him the story. Anyway, the letter was off and it was at least a heartfelt letter. He’d appreciated that the kid had thought to console him on the loss of his father. 104

He didn’t know how much Danny’s father, having been to prison and all that could help

the kid, but he felt sorry for him anyway. That he was missing his father, however,

brought great pain to Otis Hunt. He sat on his back patio contemplating this sadness, and

it brought tears to his eyes. He felt himself losing his strength. He felt himself unable to

hold back the tears, that he wanted so bad to see his father again. And so, he cried. He

cried for a good half-hour, until he heard Marianna pull into the garage below him, and then he moved quickly to the shower.