Page 24 of Heavy Hitter

Jimmy hates having a bad game as a catcher, because to casual fans it looks like the pitcher is the one fucking up. All game long Tuck pitches what Jimmy tells him to pitch, throwing a screwball when he calls for a screwball and a curve when he calls for a curve, and all game long he gets hit.

In the top of the sixth, Jimmy calls time and stalks up to the mound.

“I don’t have it today,” he admits, his glove over his mouth so the other team can’t see him. “Just—do what you think you gotta do.”

Tuck’s eyes widen, and it’s not like Jimmy blames him. The whole point of Jimmy is that he doesn’t get rattled. That’s the one thing he brings to the team. The other side could come out dressed in women’s evening wear; a UFO could land in the outfield; and Jimmy could keep on calling for pitches, steady as a beating heart.

Except tonight, apparently.

By the time they take the loss and break the streak Jimmy’s mood has blackened into something sticky and malignant. He’s so deeply irritated at himself, at his own dumbass fallibility, at the fact that he’s built this Little League non-relationship into some kind of idol in his head to the point that apparently he gets the fucking yips now if she’s too busy to whisper sweet nothings in his ear every night. He doesn’t deserve to be in the majors, if that’s how he’s going to act about it. He doesn’t deserve to be the one behind the plate.

Jimmy doesn’t say anything as they shuffle back down the ramp to the locker room. As their captain he’s supposed to give the rest of the team a speech about how they’ll get ’em next time, and he musters one up, sort of, but his heart isn’t in it and he knows everybody can probably tell. It’s not about Lacey, really. And it’s not about his brother. It’s about him.

He’s done. He knows he’s done. Fuck the streak; fuck the playoffs. He let himself get sentimental, a baseball diamond and a pretty girl and the idea that in spite of everything he might have one big win left in him after all. But Jimmy’s known he was finished for a long time, is the cold hard truth of it. The last couple of weeks, he just let himself forget.

“You all right?” Tuck asks him as they’re heading down to the garage.

Jimmy nods. “I’m fine,” he says. After all, he thinks: it’s not like he’s never lost before. “I’m great.” He is great. He’s fine. He can lose a baseball game; Lacey Logan can get back with her boyfriend. He can go home for good at the end of the season having never won a World Series, and there will never be anybody less bothered about it than him. He is chill. He is low-key. Hell, he’s ready to party.

“We should go out,” he announces.

That gets Tuck’s attention, a slow, brilliant smile spreading across his face. They haven’t been out since New York. “Oh yeah?”

“Yeah,” Jimmy decides. All at once it sounds like a truly excellent plan, the only logical thing to do. It’s Sunday night; they’ve got tomorrow off before they need to be back at the clubhouse. And what the fuck else is he going to do, go home and call Lacey so she can let him down easy? He’ll pass, thanks. They can just as well have that conversation another day. “We should.”

They round up a dozen guys and go to a dive bar on Miles Avenue: darts and a jukebox, the linoleum floor sticky underneath the soles of Jimmy’s sneakers. “It was a good run,” Jonesy says, raising his beer, and it takes Jimmy a minute to realize he’s talking about the streak and not Jimmy himself.

“It was a good run,” Jimmy agrees.

Ray trots off to try his luck with a couple of coeds playing the photo hunt game in the corner. Hugo feeds a twenty into the jukebox and programs it to play “Unwritten” by Natasha Bedingfield a dozen times in a row. Jonesy orders a round of shots, and then Tuck orders a round of shots, and then they all peel Ray away from the college girls and make him order a round of shots, too, even though he keeps crying poverty, and pretty soon Jimmy is filled with the kind of mellow, drunken well-being he associates with going to field parties in the summer outside Utica when he was in high school, the sky and the possibilities both endless overhead. He loves these guys, truly. He hasn’t been paying enough attention to them.

“To the streak,” Tuck toasts, standing up on a barstool.

“To Ray’s maximum-strength antifungal medication,” Tito volunteers.

“To Lacey Logan’s inevitable sex tape,” Hugo chimes in, “and the fact the rest of us will be able to enjoy it without Jimmy’s hairy ass getting in the way of the shot.”

That one really fucking tickles them, their hoots and laughter rowdy and good-natured. Jimmy laughs, too, but all at once he’s not having fun anymore, swinging from good drunk to bad drunk in the time it takes the last shot of Fireball to burn sweetly through his chest. It feels like too much to hold all of a sudden, Lacey and the streak and the definitive end of everything. The polite, careful wording of the text from his mother. His brother, still relentlessly fucking dead.

He waits until enough time has gone by that he won’t look like a whiny little pissant in front of the entire team, then digs a wad of cash out of his pocket and drops it onto the bar. “I’m out,” he tells Tuck, who’s trying to flag down the bartender for a bucket of Coronas. “I’ll see you clowns on Tuesday. Don’t take any wooden nickels, et cetera.”

“Okay,” Tuck says, eyeing Jimmy speculatively over the mouth of his beer bottle. “You sure you’re all right?”

“Never better,” Jimmy promises, then turns and weaves his way through the crowd and out onto the sidewalk, turning his face up for a moment to the cool, quiet Maryland night.

***

LACEY CALLS AS HE’S LETTING HIMSELF INTO HIS CONDO. “HEY,” she says when he answers, the noise of her TV faintly audible in the background. “There you are.”

“Yeah, sorry.” She texted him a couple of times while he was at the bar, Still around for a phone call? plus the eyes emoji. Jimmy didn’t text her back. “I went out with the guys for a bit.”

“Sounds fun,” Lacey says, her voice a little congested-sounding. “How was your game?”

“It sucked, thanks.”

There’s a hesitation, just for a second. “That’s too bad.”

“Yeah, well.” Jimmy sits down hard on the sofa, tries to soften his tone. “It happens that way sometimes.”

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