The Fan

11

The night was black and full of stars, the air cold and quiet, Gil’s breathing and footsteps the only sound. He walked down Main Street to the last arc light, past darkened shops, some boarded up, and took a left on Spring. Drunk, yes, but he’d been drunk in his old hometown before, long ago, as a teenager, when the town was bigger and being drunk on a cold black night like this meant feeling huge and light and full of possibility, almost as though you could take flight into that twinkling sky. Now he felt nothing except the woods, invisible in the night, but cinched tight all around the town. The town had stayed the same, even shrunk, but the trees had grown.

Gil came to the path at the end of Spring Street. A wooden sign arched overhead. The lettering, once gilt, was barely readable: AMVETS MEMORIAL FIELD, 1951. Ahead loomed the high shadow of the announcing booth, the baser shadow of the concession stand, and the chain-link perimeter fence, glinting here and there with starlight. Gil climbed it, and dropped down to the cold wet grass on the other side.

He made his way to home plate, rubbed it with the toe of his city shoe: a tasseled loafer, actually. Tasseled loafers had been on a list recommended by Cincinnati. The crushed-stone base paths seemed luminous to Gil, a hollow diamond in the darkness. He walked to first, or where first would be had the bags been in place, slowly; rounded it, stumbling just a little, and continued on to second and third, even slower now, barely dragging one foot in front of the other by the time he reached home. There was no internal soundtrack of cheering and yelling, or any of that shit: he’d seen all those stupid movies. All he heard was his own breath, sibilant between his lips, rasping in his throat.

“No appealing,” he said aloud, and stamped on the plate, dead center: safe. Then, picking up his pace, he crossed to the home-team dugout, a simple cement-block bunker with a flat roof, and sat on the concrete bench. He stared out at the pitching mound, a pale, negligible hump.

Later, feeling the cold, he pulled his suit jacket around him and curled up on the bench, facing the dugout wall, hands between his knees. He closed his eyes, or they closed themselves; he fell asleep, or he passed out.

Richard Renard left St. Jeanne d’Arc Hospital the morning of the deciding game of the Series. Didn’t sign himself out or consult anyone: simply waited until after rounds and rose from his bed on the ward. He put on some clothes from his locker, then sat on the bed and rested for a while. After that, not wanting to risk being spotted on the elevator, he took the stairs to ground level, resting on every landing, and a few times in between.

He found his car in the parking lot out back, unlocked it, got in, rested. Then he drove a hundred and fifty miles to the ballpark. Game time was 1:00 P.M. The dashboard clock read 12:57 when he arrived. He rested for three minutes, then tried to leave the car. That involved twisting his torso, raising the door handle, climbing out. The twisting and raising went fine, but not the climbing. He had never before realized the role legs played in getting out of a car. He’d never had to: all his life, he’d had powerful legs. Now they couldn’t even lift him off the car seat.

Richard Renard sat in his car outside the ballpark. He rolled down the window, he had the strength for that, and listened to the sounds of the game: cheering, shouting, crack of bat on ball, thump of ball in mitt; a thump slightly deeper in tone indicating when his son was on the mound, or so he imagined. He thought of honking the horn for help, but at first couldn’t bring himself to do it. By the time he’d convinced himself otherwise, the physical capability was gone. The ball game and its thumping, cracking sounds began to distance themselves from him, slipping farther and farther away.

Gil was thirsty. His arm ached. Those were distractions he had to ignore. Two more distractions were the crowd, on its feet and roaring, and the runners on second and third, dancing off the bags. Tunnel vision, his father said: a pitcher needs tunnel vision. Gil peered down the tunnel at Bouchard, the Yankee cleanup hitter poised at the plate, big as a man. Bottom of the ninth, two out, two on, and up one to nothing, on Gil’s home run in the top of the inning.

First pitch a ball way outside, almost getting by Boucicaut. Boucicaut came out for a talk.

“Maybe we should walk him,” Gil said.

“Fuck that,” said Boucicaut. “If you want to put him on, at least hit him in the head.”

Boucicaut spat right through his mask and returned to his position. He called for the curve. Gil, wincing even before the pain, threw it in the dirt. The runner on third came halfway down the line. Boucicaut bluffed him back.

Boucicaut crouched, gave the sign. Fastball. Bouchard watched it go by. It looked good to Gil. “Ball three,” said the umpire.

Three and oh. Bouchard would be taking all the way, right? Boucicaut signaled another fastball. Gil wound up and threw, a medium-speed fastball, right down the pipe; and realized as he let go that Bouchard wasn’t taking.

Bouchard uncoiled and got it all, a low screamer right at Claymore between second and third. The ball hit him in the chest, making him cry out and knocking him down, then fell motionless on the base path beside him. Claymore, on his back and in tears, picked it up and brushed the leg of the base runner from second as he raced by. The second-base ump stabbed his fist in the air. Game over: the last out of the championship season.

They jumped up and down. They hugged each other and shouted their heads off. They all got trophies and a handshake from a man in a seersucker suit, and Gil got a special one for being MVP: a brass-plated baseball mounted on a hardwood stand. No one left the field for half an hour or so. That’s when they found Gil’s father’s body, cold and gray, slumped in the front seat of his old Chevy on Spring Street.

Gil, wearing his stand-up red-and-black tie and the shirt and suit so recently unwrapped from dry-cleaner’s plastic, awoke on the dugout bench, shivering. It was still night, but the moon had risen; frost silvered the grass all the way to the outfield fence. Stiff with cold, Gil rose and puked in the corner of the dugout. Nothing but liquid, foul and bitter: what his stomach had done to all the beer and shots. He hadn’t eaten since… he tried to remember when and couldn’t.

Gil climbed the fence, not so easily this time, and got back in his car. He drove back to Main, heater on full blast, and turned up Hill, following it to the northern edge of town where the cemetery separated the last dwelling from the woods. Like many reps with snowy territories, Gil carried a folding shovel in his trunk. He took it now and entered the cemetery.

The town might have been smaller, but the cemetery, like the woods, had grown. The gravestone of Renard, R. G., which had been in the farthest row, with nothing but empty field between it and the trees, now had other stones all around it. Familiar town names: Pease, Laporte, Spofford, Cleary, Bouchard. Gil read them in the moonlight. It took him some time to locate Renard, R. G.

The lawyer who’d executed the will had sold the Chevy to pay for the stone: marble-faced and round-topped, a little nicer than some of those around it, but not very big. There was room for no more than the carved name and the dates of birth and death, bracketing an interval that might have represented the average life expectancy in some sub-Saharan country. Gil pushed it over easily.

He unfolded the shovel, snapped the handle in place, started digging. Quickly down through a wet layer, slow through a still-frozen layer beneath that, a little faster through the dry earth below. Gil began to sweat, although his hands and feet were cold. He dug himself down, knee deep, waist deep, down into his father’s grave, his moonlit breaths rising urgently in the night. After a while, the eastern sky turned milky, as though a celestial eyelid were opening, but Gil, up to shoulder level in darkness, didn’t notice. He bore down with the shovel, tossed out earth, bore down, tossed out, bore down, tossed out, in rhythm, just like hammering at the anvil. It was almost enjoyable, certainly better than any work he’d had since those days at the forge. Should have been a grave digger, he thought, but was considering the possibility that grave digging too was controlled by men like Garrity and O’Meara, when the shovel struck something hard. He looked down, realizing only then that it was daybreak and he had to hurry, and saw a cleared section of pine board, the varnish dulled and grimy. Gil cleared a bigger section, then raised the shovel high and plunged the blade down with all his strength, splitting the wood at his feet. He paused, his nostrils anticipating the arrival of some putrescent smell, but none came.

Gil struck a few more times, smashing a small hole. Then he knelt, snapped off a few jagged pieces-pine, but thin and pocked with knots-and peered inside. He saw the buttoned-up buttons of a white shirt, a white shirt decaying and full of holes; a scattering of little bones, palm and finger bones, resting on a rep tie, also eaten away; and, lying among the bones, a brass-plated baseball mounted on a hardwood stand, perfectly preserved. Gil stuck his hand inside and took the trophy. A few of the little bones came with it, one somehow slipping under the cuff of his shirt, sliding coldly up his forearm.

Gil let out a sound then, not loud, but totally uncontrolled by his larynx, vocal cords, brain. He shook his arm frantically, launching the bone into the brightening sky and out of sight. With the trophy in the other hand, he tried to scramble out of the hole, but lost his balance and tumbled back down the side, landing on the coffin. He made the sound again, perhaps more loudly this time, and then, without knowing how, he was up on ground level, clawing on all fours through the dirt, crawling at an unsustainable pace. He fell forward, and lay panting, his face on the icy grass. Gray light spread softly around him. He puked again, but nothing came out.

Gil got up, looked around, saw no one. Beyond the cemetery and down Hill Street, the town was still in shadow. He returned to the grave, filled it in, tipped up the stone, walked it back in position. Then, trophy in hand, his trophy, he turned to go. At that moment, something flashed orange in the woods, and he heard the crack of a rifle. Gil ran, ran as hard as he could, dodging gravestones, ran toward the road, cold in the small of his back, waiting for that cracking sound again, for the hot ball tearing through him. But there wasn’t a second shot. Gil slowed, glanced back.

A man stepped out of the woods. He had a rifle in one hand, and a doe over the opposite shoulder. Even from where Gil stood, the animal appeared to be under the limit; besides, it wasn’t hunting season. Gil understood at once: it was his hometown, after all. The man looked around, scanning the cemetery and beyond. Gil dropped behind a gravestone, a big one with a cross on top.

The poacher moved quickly through the cemetery, heading not toward Hill Street, but to a pickup Gil hadn’t noticed before in the darkness, parked behind a shed at the end of a dirt track. A big man, powerfully built, but grossly overweight. He had shoulder-length hair, an untrimmed black beard, and like many fat people didn’t appear to feel the cold: he wore jeans and a T-shirt. Blood stained his bare arms. Gil crouched behind the gravestone, and would have remained there, but as the man came closer, as close as his path was going to bring him, about twenty yards away, it struck Gil that there was something familiar about that rapid, bowlegged stride. He stood up.

“Co?”

At the sound of Gil’s voice, the poacher dropped the deer, wheeled, raised the gun, all in one quick motion, impossibly quick for such a huge man. That proved it.

“Who the fuck are you?” said the poacher, gun muzzle pointed at the middle of Gil’s chest.

Boucicaut, without a doubt. Gil had never been as happy to see someone in his life.