Page 84 of Breakout Year
Eitan wouldn’t think about that. Not when he also was due up to hit third. He got his bat from the rack, stood on the dugout steps and watched the Cosmos’ first plate appearance. Aguila was the prototypical leadoff guy: his job was to get on base. Barring that, his job was to work the count so the Cosmos could get a good idea of what the opposing pitcher was throwing.
He went down swinging on three strikes.
Which meant Eitan needed to move out of the dugout and onto the field to ready himself to hit third. He went to the on-deck circle as Aguila walked by. “Look fastball up,” Aguila said.
Different from what the scouting report on Dvorak, the Crooks pitcher, had said, and what Eitan’s years in Cleveland told him. Still, Eitan nodded his thanks and busied his hands rubbing the neck of his bat with pine tar. A few people in the stands right next to the dugout called his name. Normally he’d acknowledge them, make eye contact just to give them a story about how they went to a ballgame and wasn’t that big leaguer just so nice? Now he felt like he’d been hit with an egg between his shoulder blades, an unpleasant sensation that he couldn’t shake. He rubbed the tar stick on his bat a few more times than was strictly necessary, then slid a weighted ring around the end of the bat and took a few practice swings.
At the plate, Bishop was faring no better against the Crooks pitcher than Aguila had. He was down in the count, one ball and two strikes. On the next pitch, he made contact—and flied out harmlessly to left field.
Eitan dropped the weighted ring from his bat. He didn’t feel much lighter as he walked toward the batter’s box. The crowd was into it now—some cheers of his name, some decidedly non-cheers. Worst of all, many people stayed seated, arms crossed, as if Eitan wasn’t even worth their boos.
The scoreboard was showing his stats. So, no tribute then. He wouldn’t be disappointed. Sometimes you leave a place and all you’ve done is left. Then the camera operator cut to people in the stands, zoomed in on his parents, his mother holding the old Rivkin #1 sign she’d made for his draft day, the two of them up and cheering. Their row still had a few empty seats.
Only the seat next to them wasn’t so empty anymore.
Akiva was there. Akiva was there, wearing his sweatshirt and an old Cosmos ballcap that Eitan didn’t know that he owned. Amid Eitan’s mom’s frantic waving, he raised a cautious hand at the camera.
Eitan turned, about to wave back, when the home plate umpire—a guy with a pitcher’s strike zone, which is to say wide as a billboard—whistled for him to get moving. Eitan walked to home plate, greeted the umpire.
“Can I have a moment?” he asked. For a second, it looked like the ump might refuse him, but then he stepped back to let Eitan lift his batting helmet to the crowd. More boos rained down, but more cheers too, and if he got nothing else, at least he got that.
Eitan stepped into the box, readied his bat on his shoulder. Dvorak and he had mostly gotten along fine: two guys who happened to wear the same uniform who hung out occasionally and never got into it over cards. Eitan didn’t know if that was still what they were. He couldn’t know and even having taken a blow to the ankle, the not knowing was somehow worse.
Was this how Akiva had felt right before he quit: roiled with uncertainty, flinching at shadows? Some part of Eitan—a part he’d felt since he saw that headline years ago announcing that Akiva was leaving the game—had always protested that he’d never quit baseball, no matter what.
Now, though…now he wasn’t sure of much beyond the grip of the bat in his hands, the windup of the pitcher as he coiled his limbs, ready to throw. It was impossible to read Dvorak’s expression from a distance of sixty feet. It didn’t matter. It couldn’t matter. So Eitan lifted the bat from his shoulder, ready for whatever came his way.
33
Akiva
Several hours earlier
“Akiva Goldfarb—I think there should be a ticket under my name.”
The woman staffing the early hours at the Crooks box office frowned, then proceeded to dig through a set of labeled paper envelopes. For a moment, Akiva wondered if he’d come all this way only to be stranded outside the stadium. He could buy a ticket, attend like any other spectator. Book his own passage home without Eitan ever knowing he had been there. A twenty-four-hour jaunt that would be more traveling than he’d done since he’d returned from Arizona seven years ago. Players in triple-A took commercial flights to games, but Akiva had never made it that far up. He’d gone from the bus leagues to a fall in Arizona to a long flight home. After that, he’d stuck to trains, which stayed reassuringly on the ground.
He’d spent the flight out watching the flow of clouds, the slow rise of the city as his plane descended back to Earth. Had he been to Cleveland before? He thought he had, then realized he’d just written a character from there, an aspiring opera singer who lit up the stage at the Euclid Avenue Theater before he made his way east, only to fall on hard times.
Akiva’s main impressions of Ohio were that it was relatively flat, relatively quiet, and relatively small. Too small a place for Eitan, really, but perhaps it was easier to shine bright with fewer eyes on you.
Perhaps Akiva would be better off turning around and going back to New York.
“Oh, here it is,” the box office attendant said. Eitan would know her name by now—and how many grandkids she had and who her favorite ballplayer had been growing up.
Akiva settled for taking his paper ticket.
There was the small problem of his battered overnight bag. In Sue’s manuscripts, such considerations would come only with a note. Logistics. It was up to him to determine where a character might stash a bag or how they might go about securing a train ticket. Purchased by a rich benefactor seemed a bit outlandish—or had before this morning.
Now the bag handles sat heavy in Akiva’s hands.
The box office agent took pity on him. “There are storage lockers over there if you want to stow your luggage.”
He thanked her, went to the indicated locker, crammed his bag inside. Paid with his debit card, hoping his bank would see the purchase of an overpriced cup of coffee at the Newark airport and a cab ride to downtown Cleveland and make the intuitive leap that he was traveling and not that his card had been stolen. The locker interface took its time but eventually registered him as paid and issued him a key.
Which only left the game. Akiva had his ticket. He could go in, buy a program from whoever was selling them, score the game with a little stub of a pencil. He might even get an overpriced stadium beer or a guaranteed kosher hot dog. If he went to this, Eitan would see him. He’d know Akiva had come all this way. He’d be happy about it—effusive, really. Worst of all, he might have hope that this could last longer than the end of the week, as if Eitan wasn’t leaving and Akiva wasn’t staying behind. Logistics.
Still, Akiva wanted to watch him play, that same impulse he’d had seven years ago watching Eitan run around the outfield with no shirt and seemingly no worries.
