Fire Season (Unwritten Rules) Read online

  “D’Spara doesn’t like him.”

  “D’Spara doesn’t like anyone.”

  “He likes you just fine.” Gordon nods to where Giordano has jogged out to the mound and is rosining his hands. “I did some checking up on him. Guy’s got some issues.”

  And Charlie’s spared having to reply who doesn’t when the Pilots best hitter strides into the batter’s box.

  Being Seattle’s best hitter isn’t saying a whole lot. On the mound, Giordano agrees to the catcher’s sign, then delivers a fastball. A slow one, nothing like the ones he was throwing in that video. Still the umpire calls a strike.

  Another fastball, another strike.

  Then Giordano throws a curveball, or at least, an attempt at one. A flattened surrender of a pitch that’s met by an inevitable crack of a bat. The ball arcs up and out—a no-doubt home run. His face is hard to see under the awning of his hat, but his shoulders sag, the stadium empty enough that it’s audible when he curses into his glove.

  Next to Charlie, Gordon doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t need to, radiating an I told you so that rankles Charlie’s nerves. But the next two Seattle hitters are disinterested in scoring, and they make for painless outs. Two down, and the outfielders all wave their fingers at each other in salute.

  Another hitter comes to the box, this one with enough swagger that even Charlie leans back a little. Giordano squares his shoulders determinedly, then throws. His pitching motion really isn’t that remarkable. Except there’s something in the torsion of his back or the flex in his legs. Maybe Charlie’s just tired, or nervous. His mind sometimes gets stuck on things. A symptom of anxiety, according to their mental skills coach. Isn’t everything?

  It takes less than a blink for the ball to leave Giordano’s hand and end up at home plate. Charlie’s fingers tense on the railing, knuckles pulling white. The Pilots hitter, for all his bravado, swings, an easy pop-up for Oakland’s catcher. The end of the inning. Charlie uncurls his hand.

  Giordano walks off the mound, hopping over the chalked third-base line. He gets his slaps in the dugout. Charlie leans to tap him at his waist, fingers brushing the leather of his belt, before Giordano retreats into the clubhouse.

  The game is winding down, and Charlie needs to go. He doesn’t particularly want to. Wants to stay and watch the rest of it and tune his brain only to game action and not think about finding Stephanie, their PR person. He inhales, counts down, exhales, then dislodges himself from his post by the railing.

  “You done?” Gordon asks.

  Charlie nods.

  “Tell Christine hi for me.”

  Charlie swallows around a lump in his throat. “I will.”

  He goes into the clubhouse, expecting midgame silence, the wooden stalls lining the room unlikely to force him into conversation. Instead Giordano is there. He’s at the stall the team must have assigned him that morning, one of the ones next to Charlie’s they usually leave empty to give him space. They haven’t put up Giordano’s name placard yet. A single jersey hangs in his stall, game-used, sleeves decorated with smudges of dirt. And Giordano is standing there, whipping a pair of balled-up socks at the stall’s glossed wooden back. Thump, thump, pause. Thump, thump, pause.

  He must hear Charlie approach, because he doesn’t throw again. “Hey, how about that home run? Think I could feel it in my jaw when he hit that thing.”

  “It happens.”

  “It happens to guys other than you, you mean,” Giordano counters. It’s not nasty the way he says it, though his mouth twists a little. “I wish I could get out of here.”

  “Media’ll be in here in a minute.”

  “Yeah.” Giordano exhales loudly. “I’m gonna go get a drink.” For a second Charlie wonders if he’s being invited to some crowded Oakland bar to forget this game until Giordano continues, “You want anything from the kitchen?”

  Charlie gets a slight pang of disappointment. “Gatorade. One of the blue ones.”

  Giordano returns a minute later with two bottles of Gatorade; he hands one to Charlie. “If they don’t keep me up here, it’s been a slice.” He holds out his bottle in a cheers, and Charlie taps his own against it. “Midland, man, I am not looking forward to going back to double-A. Sorry, you’re from Texas, right? I know you guys get touchy about that shit.”

  “Other side of the state.” Because it’s a longer drive from Houston to Midland than it is from Oakland to LA. “My mom’s from Georgia.”

  “So you’re not gonna kick my ass for talking smack on Texas?”

  “Naw.” Charlie lets his accent thicken with the consonant-swallowing drawl he only gets around his family.

  Giordano rewards him with a grin. “How come no one told me you were funny?” His face relaxes, the little lines they all get by their eyes from sun exposure not quite smoothing out. He has olive skin and dark hair. His eyes, rimmed by dark lashes, reflect the lights above them, distinctive enough that Charlie probably would remember if he saw him before.

  Charlie’s stomach flips. Hunger, possibly, though he rode the bench all game. “That was some good pitching.”

  Giordano’s smile droops a little. “Yeah, I’m sure the fan who caught that home-run ball agrees.”

  “I meant the other ones.”

  “You be sure to say that nice and loud when the reporters come in.” He gives a low conspiratorial whistle.

  Charlie laughs slightly and nudges him with his shoulder.

  “Watch where you’re aiming those things,” Giordano says with mock indignation.

  And Charlie’s chest feels lighter than it has since he woke up, a burgeoning feeling that deflates when there’s a yell from somewhere in the clubhouse, the reminder to put on drawers if they’re walking around bare-assed before the postgame media scrum.

  Giordano gestures like he’s keeping back a horde. “I can hold ’em off if you want to make your escape.”

  “Thanks. They’re really not so bad.”

  “Maybe not to you. But some of us have our transgressions to answer for.” Giordano’s lips, stained red from the Gatorade, twist with amusement.

  “Giving up a homer isn’t that bad. Even to the Pilots.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Well, you’re better at the whole—” Charlie makes a hand motion he hopes indicates talking.

  “You calling me a chatterbox, Braxton?”

  He punctuates it with a tap to Charlie’s arm, high on his biceps. Familiar, even for baseball, for guys who’ve known each other for less than twelve hours. Different from how most of the guys in the clubhouse treat him like there’s an invisible bubble around him.

  “Media isn’t my favorite thing,” Charlie says. Which is a slight—extreme—understatement. “Some of us gotta do more with less.”

  Giordano gives him a once-over, like he’s making a point about Charlie’s size. “Can’t imagine you doing anything with less.”

  And Charlie doesn’t have the chance to respond when the press comes chattering in.

  Giordano retreats to his stall to face the scrum, an array of microphones in his face. With them, the expected questions about how he felt giving up a home run.

  “I did get three other outs,” he says. And the reporters have the sense enough to laugh.

  Charlie stands a little way off, Stephanie next to him, though she’s dividing her attention between her phone and supervising Giordano’s interview, mouth pressed in a thin, assessing line. She doesn’t ask Charlie anything. Like why he’s standing there and not fleeing the way he normally does when there’s press around. He prepares a response anyway. That there’s traffic, though it’s the Bay Area, so there’s always traffic. That he needs to talk with her, which he does. Maybe tomorrow. Tomorrow would be better.

  A reporter from the East Bay Tribune, who Gordon calls Elbow Patches for the jacket he always wears, calls out a
question for Giordano. “What, if anything, have you done to retool since your last stint in the big leagues?”

  “Mostly just learned to trust my fastball.” A nonanswer, clearly meant to curtail any follow-ups. It doesn’t work.

  “Nothing else?” Elbow Patches asks. “I’m surprised to hear that given your history.”

  Said with an implication that makes Giordano’s eyes harden.

  Stephanie’s face goes from merely tense to what Charlie imagines an awakened bear looks like right before it attacks. Even the blue streaks in her hair look irritated. “All right, let’s let these guys clear out. Long night. See you all bright and early tomorrow.”

  She does a little shooing motion with her hands when they don’t move. Most disperse, except for the Tribune guy, who stays, holding a narrow spiral notebook and asking her something.

  Giordano slides out from his stall, past the gleaming black eyes of the cameras to where Charlie’s standing.

  “They always like this?” Giordano says.

  “Not, um, that I’ve noticed.”

  “Probably asking the wrong guy.” Giordano lets out a long breath. “Man, it felt good to get those outs. Wish they could just let all that other stuff go.”

  And Charlie could ask the natural question of What stuff? But he’s not looking forward to his own interrogation by Stephanie—and eventually the press—and doesn’t want to inflict that on anyone else.

  Giordano takes his silence as a response. “You know, it’s a long story, not important.”

  Reporters are still standing around, some very obvious in how much they’re not eavesdropping. Giordano tilts his head toward one. “They always listen in like that and pretend they’re not?”

  “Sometimes they don’t pretend.”

  “They must be trying for some dirt on you. I’m just not that interesting.” A claim at odds with the defiant tilt of his chin.

  “Neither am I.”

  Giordano huffs a laugh at that. “I don’t know, man. It’s the quiet ones. You guys have all the scandals.”

  Which sends a hot wash down Charlie’s neck that some reporter really will overhear and start digging. The door calls to him, even if the only thing he has going on at home is a ten-hour wait. He calculates the route that will take him by the least number of people. “Um, have a good night.”

  Giordano looks surprised, mouth parted. Charlie must really be anxious because he can’t seem to focus anywhere but the curve of his lower lip.

  “You too,” Giordano says.

  And Charlie leaves before he can do something foolish. Like tell anyone the whole story.

  Chapter Three: Charlie

  Charlie’s house looks no better than when he left that morning, walls bare of decoration, floors uncarpeted. He collapses on top of his new navy bedspread, not yet faded from washing. His body hurts, vaguely, diffusely. He could just fall asleep like this, with the lights still on, in his postgame sweatpants. No one else is around to complain. He grudgingly strips down to his shorts. The house, a renovated Victorian that’s drafty on its best days, sighs with the weather. So he retrieves his shirt from the floor and pulls it back on.

  His bedroom ceiling is an unblinking white. His eyes supply swirls and patterns in an attempt to fill the empty space. There are pills. He could take them. The team doctors provide whatever he wants, medications that sit untouched in orange prescription bottles with the admonishment he should take them when he’s “in crisis.” Whatever that means.

  Instead he gets his headphones, the heavy black ones with an attached microphone, and pulls his laptop from where it’s sitting on his nightstand. He raps the touch pad insistently until the screen blinks on.

  He cues up his browser, cursor blinking in the search bar. And when he types Reid Gior...it autofills: Reid Giordano blazing fastball. Reid Giordano seventh-inning implosion. He almost clicks the latter, but it feels intrusive. Like he’s snooping, which he is. The same way he’s sure his name will soon autofill, Charlie Braxton divorce.

  He closes the browser. His desktop picture is an old one from right when they got married. They look happy, Christine smiling like she just said something funny. The Charlie in the picture is unrecognizable, beard neat, eyes unshadowed like he’s gotten a good night’s sleep, compared with his reflection at the edges of his laptop screen. Too much to look at right now. He clicks and removes the picture, then replaces it with one of an ocean. Based on the description, it’s supposed to be calming. Mostly he just feels like he took a mouthful of salt water.

  He should distract himself with something, anything. He’s been playing Stars and Empires under an anonymous user handle, a game Gordon called “nerdy-ass shit,” then asked for an invite code to the beta version.

  The chat server usually gets busier later at night. It’s filled with guys like him, a hundred other Charlies all burning their eyeballs out on monitor screens. Space diplomacy is soothing. Or would be. If he didn’t pause between each turn to take deep, steadying breaths.

  Any tips on getting neighboring empires to enter nonaggression pacts? he writes.

  I’m getting served divorce papers tomorrow, he doesn’t say.

  His hands are shaking. That’s what he notices first, the slight trembling in his fingers. His neck goes sweaty and cold. The muscles in his legs lock. With that, a sensation like he’s hovering above his body, like he’s seeing himself from ball field drone cameras.

  I should have gotten those stupid pills.

  And then he’s pulled under.

  A wave, a hot roil of anxiety. A reach for oxygen that leaves him gasping. His eyes burn: dry then wet. Undammed even when he wipes them away, so he stops trying. He has tissues, meditation apps, white five-sided prescription tablets. All of which are as far from him now as San Francisco is from Marin County, from the house he owns where he no longer sleeps. Where Christine told him gently, terrifyingly, “Hey, this isn’t working.” Made worse because she was right.

  Eventually it subsides, the way storm clouds drain themselves. An urge rises to tell someone: His mother, whose calls he hasn’t returned. Gordon, who would probably tell him, “That sucks, man,” and invite him over to endure dinner with his smiling wife and three kids. Other guys from the team, who might thump him on the shoulder, and think, Hope he still can spin ’em, as if the only consequence of his crumbling marriage is its effect on his curveball.

  He’s in about six group chats he usually ignores, players he knows from Stanford and the minors, former players on the Elephants now scattered elsewhere. None of which are the right place to disclose this, especially not if he doesn’t want the entire baseball world to know.

  His bedroom curtains are the gauzy ones that came with the house. They do little to stanch the city light coming in. He shoves them back and adjusts the blinds behind them, twirling the plastic rod between his thumb and forefinger so the slats overlap with one another. It might be dark enough to sleep.

  His computer gives a whirring noise like it’s overheating. He clicks out of the game, not bothering to save his progress. Tomorrow he can rebuild it or flush it and start slowly, painfully from scratch. He sets two alarms—on the clock and on his phone—since there’s no one else around to wake him up.

  * * *

  The next morning, Charlie waits by the door in case he doesn’t hear them knock.

  It’s late morning to anyone but a ballplayer. He cups a mug of coffee in his hands, blowing on it, bouncing slightly on his heels. The process server is due any second now. The website said they come within a half an hour time slot, though exact timing is difficult if they’re battling Bay Area traffic. He checks the digital clock on the microwave, then the one on his phone, as if expecting them to say something different.

  He startles when there’s a rap on his door, sloshing coffee on his pristine kitchen counter. They knock a second time, a settle of loud, ratt
ling beats.

  “I’m coming,” he says. He probably wasn’t loud enough. Because reporters are always asking him to speak up in his postgame pressers.

  When he opens the door, an older lady is standing there in khakis and a company-branded polo shirt, a set of gold necklaces at her throat. Her fingernails, painted bright red, contrast with the manila envelope she hands him.

  “Charles Braxton?” She says his name the way his mom does, drawl lengthening each syllable.

  “Yes.”

  There’s supposed to be a standardized message. That he’s being served process documents by a process server from a company they agreed to, paid for by money from his paycheck that’s still routed to Christine’s account. Because divorce, like baseball, is a process.

  Instead the server stands there, glancing down at a clipboard she’s holding, then back up at him. She seems to have registered exactly how rough he looks: hair uncombed, neck unshaved, wearing an ancient Oakland Elephants shirt sprouting holes at the collar, his thick pitcher’s ankles sticking out of his sweatpants. Unprepared, even though he had weeks to get ready for this.

  “Oh,” she says, “I figured it was just someone else with the same name.”

  “No, it’s, um, not.”

  Past her, there’s a car parked in the no-parking zone in front of his house, idling, exhaust puffing from the tailpipe. It’s an older car, a sedan rusting in a few spots, out of place in his neighborhood, which is mostly Teslas, hybrids, and the big, lumbering SUV he needs to accommodate his height.

  “Oh. There’s... I’m supposed to...” She glances down at a little laminated card affixed to her clipboard and recites a notice that he’s been served papers by Christine Braxton, and that she, as a process server, will be filing a proof of service, detailing when, where, and how the papers were served, one that will be returned to Christine, then filed with the court.

  “Is that, um, it?” he asks when she’s done. “I don’t need to sign anything, right?”

  “No, sugar, you don’t. But, uh, I’m really not supposed to ask this...” She has that look that people get right before they ask for an autograph or a ball from the bag of game-used ones he keeps for these situations.