What Hearts Read online

  The Table Talk batter swung at the first pitch and lofted a long fly to left. Asa watched without surprise as it soared, peaked, kept flying, and cleared the fence by twenty feet. The Baptist child choir woke up. He did not watch the hitter jump and dance as he ran the bases; they all did that, and he hated it. If he ever hit a home run, he would put his head down and scurry. He supposed he would be proud, but pride was private. Eventually the gamboling Table Talk boy touched home, and the game was tied.

  Next up, the pitcher cracked a line drive that hit the shortstop in the chest. The Cool Guy collapsed, cringing and crying, while the ball spun like a planet in the dirt. He came out of the game, replaced by the kid who had been coaching third base when Asa had run around it. The runner was held at first. The next batter popped up a bunt. Pete snatched it out of the air and nearly doubled the runner off first. One away. Left-handed hitter. He swung at the first pitch and bounced it on one hop over the right-field fence. Men on second and third. One out.

  The next Table Talk hitter knocked a grounder that Tim dove to his left to spear. Springing up, he drew back his arm at the runner who had taken off from third, until the boy dove back. Then Tim hummed a throw across to first and beat the runner by a stride. It was a great play. Asa hollered Tim’s name. Great play. Two out. They could get out of this. If they did not let up, they could get out of it.

  James Neal sauntered to the plate. He was a right-handed hitter but his power was to center. He was the best hitter in their league: every swing was level and true, no matter what the pitch, a disciplined slash that swept the ball through the infield in a blink. When James hit home runs—and Asa could think of half a dozen he had seen—they were line drives that just kept rising as they flew. Once he had struck one over Asa’s head into the tin Scoreboard, and its impact had sprung five numbers off their nails onto Asa’s grass.

  Asa looked around at his teammates. They were watching James Neal advance to the batter’s box, and they were all slinking. No! Asa wanted to holler. Stop! We can do this guy! There are two out! Just one out to get and we are back at bat and we can win it. He wanted them to see this—it was so simple! Asa kicked at the grass. They were giving up. He did not understand giving up—that was all. Giving up did not work.

  The first pitch whizzed in. James Neal took a cut and everybody gasped. Asa leaped a step forward, but it was a foul back up over the Quik-E-Freeze dugout into the night. The runners, cocky in their trots, touched up, and waited; with two out they would fly on any hit. Both would score on a single. James Neal waved his bat and stared at the pitcher. He was a very emotional player, but there was no feeling in his face right now, only concentration. And here came the pitch.

  Asa realized as soon as James Neal started his swing that he ought to have been playing in closer. So he started his run just as the ball sprang off the bat dead on a line four feet above second base. Asa did not slow down; he sprinted from his jump start, straight at where the ball was dipping, dipping, touching the wet grass, and rising in a long, low bounce right at him. Somewhere in his awareness he registered the whirling arms of the base runners romping safely home, the yowls from the Table Talk dugout, the cheers of half the parents springing to their feet in the stands. But mostly he was aware of three things—the ball he was speeding to intercept, the moon face of his first baseman turned this way to watch the hit, and James Neal, his grin bright with the grandest pleasure, his arms held straight up, his legs scissoring as he celebrated with a couple of leaps on his way to first. Somewhere inside Asa there was a whiz of physics that added these things up, and though he hadn’t time to feel it, he knew there would be happiness in a moment. For now, he gloved the ball and plucked it out with his throwing hand and planted his left foot perfectly, then with every ounce of momentum developed over fifty feet of sprint he whipped his hips and snapped his arm and spun into a follow-through. He watched the ball. It flickered through the air and smacked into the barely opened mitt of the first baseman while James Neal was coming down from his last scissor leap, six feet from first.

  The first baseman stared into his mitt at the ball, then looked down at his foot on the bag. Nobody cheered. James Neal stopped, gaped, then shook his head and looked around. He walked to first and stomped on it. “It’s a clean single,” he said to no one, his voice winding up for tears.

  The Cool Guy infielders still didn’t get it; neither did most of the boys on the Table Talk bench. But they all began to see that Asa got it. He trotted in with his head down, and one by one the players grew still and watched him. His rubber spikes crunched on the infield dirt. No one spoke but James Neal; he ran to the umpire, who stood between first and second, watching Asa approach.

  “It’s a clean single,” he pleaded. His cheeks were red as match heads. He grabbed the umpire by the left arm but the ump shook him off without looking at him. Then, slowly, the man raised his right arm until his fist poised high above his ear, as if he had a knife. He watched Asa; only James Neal did not.

  As Asa crunched by, he glanced up and met the umpire’s look. “Out,” said the man clearly.

  FOUR

  After a couple of weeks on a low twilit field not far from their house, Asa found he and Dave were communicating entirely through the baseball itself. At first there were a few blunt instructions, but it became clear that not only did Dave dislike baseball—he also did not know it very well. After telling Asa he should “watch the ball” and “not try to kill it” he hadn’t much to add that Asa couldn’t pick up better simply by swinging. So Dave pitched, hard, from a bag of old baseballs he had wangled from a semipro team sponsored by the company he worked for. Asa stood and swung and stood and swung and stood and swung.

  It also became clear that the absence of words did not mean they had nothing to say. Between them, suddenly, the air crackled with danger; through that air passed the ball. Asa could feel shoves of anger or doubt or pure competitiveness in the spin and speed of the pitch at the moment he struck it—always as hard as he could—with his bat. He was certain his replies were just as clear: high-strung line drives, overmatched pop-ups, meek ground balls, and spirited, sloping flies he watched with a burning in his chest that could not have been more violent and celebratory if he had strode out to Dave and socked him. Two hours might pass without a word, but at the end they would both be drained.

  It was not fun, but it was practice. And it worked: pitch by pitch Asa learned things, and soon he was becoming a hitter. Occasionally he sensed some grudging satisfaction in Dave when he lashed out six or seven tough pitches in a row to all parts of the field; they both seemed to remember, if only for the moment, that Asa’s progress meant they were both doing well.

  But sometimes they forgot. If Asa hit too many pitches too hard, Dave would hum one way inside at him, and Asa would have to spin away from it into the dirt. The first time this happened, he said, “Hey!” and Dave said, “Hey what? Part of the game,” and motioned for him to stand back in; the next pitch was right over the plate. After that Asa said nothing. He saved his energy to bash the next ball.

  One day, Asa stroked a long fly to dead center and stood watching it contentedly, holding a hand up to Dave as a signal that he should wait until Asa finished gloating. The ball landed far out in the green; Asa sighed happily. When he lowered his hand, Dave hit him with the ball. There was no pretense about it. He did not even wind up the way he did for a pitch: he let Asa step up to the plate and then he drew his arm back and threw—hard, always hard—directly at the boy’s ribs. Asa froze. The ball seemed to take forever to arrive, but then it sprang at him and burrowed into his bones. He dropped backward and landed flat, screaming and rolling over and over. He knew he was crying because he felt mud on his cheeks from tears and dust, but he did not hear a thing, nor did he notice any vision: the whole world was a hole in his side. But before he could think, the pain switched over, and the world became a fury in his heart. He stood up.

  Dave was out in the outfield collecting the balls Asa had hit,
putting them in the canvas bag. His back was turned, and Asa knew he would keep it turned. Asa looked around home plate. There were three balls he had fouled into the backstop. He picked up his bat and one of the balls. In left center, Dave bent, straightened, bent, and straightened. Asa tossed his ball and hit it viciously. It sailed toward Dave with good distance, but tailed away toward right; Asa watched as it whizzed over Dave’s head and landed twenty feet beyond him. Dave looked up and watched it land, too, but he did not turn around. In fact, he remained upright and motionless, as if offering his back in case Asa wanted to hit another. Asa did not. He left the other two balls and took his bat home.

  The family ate dinner as usual that night—or almost as usual. It was obvious that something had happened, but neither Dave nor Asa spoke of it. Asa saw his mother studying Dave, and knew she was studying him when he wasn’t looking. He wondered if Dave would tell; he certainly wouldn’t.

  The next day he remained in his room after school, reading comics. As the hour for their daily practice approached, he reached for more comic books; there was no, question about whether or not the workouts would continue. They were finished.

  But about ten minutes past the time, someone knocked on his door. He said, “What?” and the door opened. His mother stepped in.

  She was wearing white tennis shoes and one of Dave’s golf caps and holding Asa’s bat in her right hand. His glove hung over her left wrist: she wore it like a bracelet. He stared. She smiled. “Let’s go,” she said.

  “But—”

  “Come on. Your tryout is in two weeks. Let’s go chuck a few.”

  He started to protest. But in her eyes was a look that made him rise. It was part command, part entreaty; part confidence, part loss. He went with her.

  On their way to the field she did not say anything to explain why she was taking Dave’s place; instead, she pointed out weeds that were coming into flower or trees that had brought forth buds. Asa nodded and commented politely, softly. In his life there had been half a dozen times when the air around him filled with an aching sweetness, a thick feeling of fragile bliss that poured into him and out of him at once, and moved with him as he moved. Always it was sad as well as happy, and always it ended suddenly. It came when someone gave him something and he took it without knowing. When the feeling was gone, sometimes the gift was too. He did not know, as he walked to the park beside his chatty mother, whether what she gave would last for him or not, but the swelling of sweetness and woe clouded around them, and he drew it in all the way to the pitcher’s mound. By the time he explained why this strange little hill was here and showed her how to put on his glove, the cloud had vanished.

  Her first pitch was six feet outside and ten feet high. Her second was lower, but farther away. Her third arrived near the plate on second bounce, and he gave it a tap into right field. “See,” she yelled, gleefully. “Hooray for us!”

  They had brought only the one ball; Asa retrieved it. When he came back, he went to the mound.

  “Know what?” he said. “I’ve really pretty much done nothing but bat up to now, for two weeks.”

  She looked at him warily, unwilling to be patronized. “So?”

  He tried to sound chipper and spontaneous. “What I need is the chance to field a lot.”

  “Field?” She looked around. “A lot?”

  “Sorry—it means to catch the ball, make throws: play defense. I, urn, only got the chance to do offense before. There didn’t seem to be much interest in the other side. But it’s just as important. At the tryouts they watch you hit, but they also make you catch and throw. It’s actually more complicated than swinging the bat.”

  She thought, liked it, nodded. “Okay.” She smiled. “I’m your defensive coach. What do I do?”

  He had a feeling she could be taught to toss the ball up and hit grounders to him, certainly more easily than she could be taught to pitch. He was right. In a few minutes she had learned to toss it, grip the bat, wait for the ball to come down, and chop at it with a short stroke. He moved out to the shortstop spot, and for almost an hour she pounded it at him, slow, high-bouncing balls sprayed all over the infield. It was actually wonderful: after a dozen grounders he was breathless and sweaty and fully stretched. It was plainly wonderful for his mother, too, though she had apparently decided to play it cool. She was all business as she hit the ball, dropped the bat, crouched with her hands apart in front of her, and clapped them over the soft rollers he sent back to her after making his catch. There was no more “Hooray!” and self-celebration: she made it clear this was a natural thing now, no big deal. Nevertheless, it was just as clear they were supposed’ to be having fun and they were. The next day he did not wait for her to come to his room; he got the equipment and stood at her bedroom door while she tied her sneakers.

  Within a few days she was able to pop little line drives at him. From there she moved easily into short fly balls. Before long, he was getting all the defensive work he could wish for. She had a good instinct for mixing up her hits, moving him around, making him go back to his left and then drawing him into a charge to his right. Her grounders got trickier; she could smash them on a lower trajectory now, or squib them with English so they trickled away from him if he got lazy and waited on one knee instead of running forward. The better she got, the less serious she pretended to be; the more she yanked him around, the more she chattered and laughed. He laughed too, even, sometimes, in the middle of a lunging catch that required all his reach and concentration. Every ball she hit had wit behind it. He got the joke as he made the play.

  The tryouts approached; soon they arrived at the Friday before the Sunday when he would report, alone, to the municipal park at eight in the morning. Two more days! He was excited; he leaned toward the date with confidence that his chance to show something unexpected was at hand. Two days! Still, he tried to focus on the remaining practices. His workouts with his mother had gotten longer, so the two of them took breaks in the middle and sat for ten minutes by a creek that ran along one side of the field. On this Friday the weather was hot. Before sitting, he took off his shirt.

  Squinting at the water, he saw his mother stare at him, look away, then stare again. He looked at her. Her eyes were on his torso. He looked down. There, in the ribs beneath his left arm, was the baseball-sized bruise he had carried for two weeks. It was an old bruise by now, greenish and blotchy, with one weird feature: the raised stitches of the ball had left two perfect curved marks of a deeper bruise, exact in their replication of the tiny bird-feet pattern, purple and geometric. The mark held no horror for Asa; indeed, he had quickly come to regard it as a fascinating study in the quirkiness of skin tissue, noting each change in color and texture. He checked it coolly each morning, then forgot about it. Following his mother’s eyes now, he realized it was an ugly thing. He pretended to shiver, said, “Actually, it’s a little breezy,” and put his shirt back on.

  His mother was looking him in the eye now. He did not know what to say, so he shrugged. She did not let him off with that. He said, “No big deal, you know?”

  “Oh sure,” she said. “Of course not.” She held his eyes for a moment longer; he had to say something, so he said, “It’s, like, just something guys don’t mind.” He grinned, gave himself a smack right on the bruise. She winced but he didn’t. “See?” he said. “Doesn’t hurt.” He chuckled, shook his head, smiled at the creek. In his peripheral vision he saw her continue to stare at him. It was unnerving. So, without really intending to, he began to talk. He had thought he might just say a couple of reassuring things about his relationship with Dave, but before he knew it, he had drifted into deeper waters. He found himself defending his stepfather rather cleverly, though his mother had not charged him with anything. It must be very difficult being a stepfather, he said; especially if you married the woman you had loved long ago and now here she was at last—but this time she had a kid with her! Asa joked about the terrible inconvenience of this—how the kid must get in the way, change everythi
ng; he did a cute job of imitating the frustration of the adults, He chuckled at; his own wit; his mother looked at the creek.

  As he listened to himself chatter, Asa knew he was not pleading a trumped-up defense of Dave just to soothe his mother’s anguish. He was pleading because he knew that despite Dave’s roughness, the man was mostly trying to do strong, decent, difficult things with his stepson and his wife. Especially his wife. Asa was aware that he was not the main challenge in Dave’s life: He had witnessed this marriage for years now. His head whirled sometimes with a sense of the history of these two people, fading back into the past, beyond his conscious understanding. But he did understand a great deal, really; at certain moments he knew he was in the presence of something big. It was true that much of the time this big, sweet force couldn’t be easily perceived beneath the shadows of Dave’s tyranny and his mother’s torment. But sometimes it did shine, even from Dave. Asa had watched Dave coax her, without a trace of impatience, out of several of the fits of despair to which she so often seemed doomed—fits that, left unchecked, took over her life in a matter of hours. Twice in the previous year she had spun so quickly into her own darkness that Dave had handed her over to the state hospital at Butner, for nearly a month each time. Coaxing her out early was work that required a strength and self-assurance Asa knew he could not approach—but he could readily admire it in Dave. At other times he had watched Dave gently, teasingly build long, slow jokes from sly references to this and that old business from their life, as they drove along in the car for hours—jokes that accumulated power as they tickled deeper and deeper, drawing her up through perfectly paced stages of amusement and laughter until she reached a reckless, weeping hilarity that left her spread-eagled over the car seat shaking, sniffling, wailing. During these crescendos Dave simply watched the road and smiled.

  So now, filled with this urgent sympathy, Asa went on babbling to his mom about how difficult being a stepfather must be. And it wasn’t just difficult being a stepfather in general. It must be really tough being his stepfather—Asa’s. He was, he knew, a very weird kid. He said this lightly, with a wry shake of the head and a rueful smile, Oh, that Asa. It was an expression he had often inspired—with a less kindly humor to it—in his stepfather.