Unwritten Rules Page 3

  One of their relievers comes over, Giordano, who is about as loud as Braxton is quiet. “Quit being boring and come dance.”

  And Zach is about to tell him to fuck off, when Braxton shakes his head.

  “C’mon, baby, don’t be like that,” Giordano says, and it’s a tease, Zach knows it’s a tease, especially because Braxton goes a little pink in the cheeks, delighted, like someone paying attention to him is anomalous for the guy who’s been the face of the franchise for years.

  “You know I can’t dance,” Braxton says.

  “Everyone can dance after a couple beers,” Giordano says, though Zach’s never seen him drink anything but Gatorade or water.

  Braxton doesn’t protest further, and Zach expects that’ll be the end of it, until Braxton clicks his phone so that the screen locks and gets up.

  He’s right. He can’t dance at all, but he sort of sways a little, shimmying. Giordano apparently finds it delightful and fake spins him around. It’s fun, loose, easy, the way guys are with one another in the clubhouse before the grind of the season takes effect.

  Zach goes and examines the chicken on the grill. And especially doesn’t examine how, the last time he went and danced—or more accurately, went and drank at a club and watched other people dance—he left alone, paranoid that someone recognized him, or worse, recognized him and took pictures.

  “Do you think it’s done?” Johnson asks him, gesturing to the chicken, which, if it gets any more done, will be burned, and when Zach tells him it is, he moves it to a plate.

  The corn should go on next. Zach sets up with a bag and removes the husks and silk, letting it blow away in the cool evening breeze, the way he used to do on his parents’ back porch every Labor Day.

  Johnson drops down, sitting next to him, holding out a beer to replace the one Zach emptied, and he’s off and talking.

  Zach gears himself up to have this conversation, again, with all the new guys and the coaching staff, and possibly the media if they have new beat reporters.

  “I can’t hear you very well unless you’re facing me.” Zach points to his ear, and Johnson looks as if he should be seeing something, but of course, there’s nothing there, since Zach took out his hearing aid before he went swimming and didn’t bother to put it back in. “I don’t know if Martinez mentioned it, but I don’t really hear out of this ear.”

  Johnson does the face, surprise and then the suppression of it, before saying, “Guess I didn’t notice earlier.”

  “I wear a hearing aid. I’m just not wearing it right now.” Zach digs his finger in his ear, which hasn’t dried completely from the pool or from his post-swim shower and is itchy from moisture. “What were you saying?”

  “Just wanted to say thanks for helping me calm down.”

  Zach shrugs. “It happens.” Which, it does happen to pitchers, almost constantly. Ballplayers exist minute to minute, even if their mental skills coach tells them not to. And pitchers are weird on top of that, the way that Zach’s mom’s cats are weird: diffident, needy, prone to freaking out for no apparent reason. A good portion of Zach’s job is smoothing their metaphorically ruffled fur so that they can play some freaking baseball. A skill that can’t be measured by analytics, no matter what the Oakland Elephants’ front office likes to claim. One he won’t know if Eugenio has until he sees it in action.

  “Happens to me a lot,” Johnson says.

  “Yeah, I mean, we’ll throw again in a couple days. See how you’re feeling. Thing about spring training is that you’ll have some time to work up to being good. No one expects you to be perfect right out of the gate.” Something that Zach doesn’t actually believe, not with a school bus full of pitchers there, with other catchers eager to take his spot, including Eugenio. But he doesn’t need to tell Johnson that.

  “Thanks,” Johnson says, like Zach has laid some kind of profound wisdom at his feet and not an extended version of “you win some, you lose some, we’ll get ’em again tomorrow” bullshit that Zach feeds the media. “You want me to grab you some food?”

  And Zach laughs and shakes his head and goes to fix himself a plate.

  * * *

  Zach is almost to the ballpark the next day when he realizes that he didn’t stop for coffee so has to double back. There’s a coffee shop about ten minutes away, an independent place, and Zach doesn’t know Eugenio that well, but he guesses he probably has opinions about Starbucks. It’s a place in a strip mall, because a lot of Phoenix is a strip mall, or at least the parts Zach sees.

  It’s the kind of place that has funny names for their drinks, like Mocha My Day, and the guy behind the counter looks offended when Zach just orders a coffee and a double espresso.

  “You sure that’s all?” the guy asks. He has chipped nail polish, a set of bracelets wound around his wrist, and he’s looking at Zach openly, approvingly, in the way that guys usually don’t unless it’s at a bar. One where they know the other guy won’t take it the wrong way.

  “Coffee’s good. Can you put some, like, liquid sugar in the espresso?” And Zach turns away before the guy can respond with more than a nod.

  Zach carries the coffees out to the bullpen when he gets to the ballpark. Eugenio’s already there. He thanks Zach and then seizes the coffee cup Zach gives him with both hands, before gulping half of it down in one go.

  “I didn’t know how sweet to make it,” Zach says.

  “It’s perfect.” Eugenio looks more tired than he should for their third day of spring training, circles under his eyes and a little dehydrated, lips dry in the Arizona desert air.

  “You doing okay?” Zach asks, though he probably shouldn’t, in case Eugenio is the kind of guy to bristle at it.

  Eugenio shrugs. “Just didn’t sleep very well. The rental place I’m staying at is too loud. Or kind of too quiet. It’s hard to explain.”

  “Sure.” Though Zach has no idea what that’s like, having perfected the ability to sleep on pretty much any flat surface at some point in the minors. “You know, you don’t have to be the first guy here. Makes the rest of us look bad.”

  “Now that was better. Almost felt like a red-ass veteran was saying it.”

  “Thanks, I think?”

  Eugenio laughs at that, a nice laugh, and brushes his shoulder against Zach’s companionably and drinks more coffee. “It takes me a while to wake up.”

  And the combination of it conspires to make Zach think what he’d be like first thing in the morning, his bare shoulder brushing Zach’s.

  “Mostly,” Eugenio continues, “I just don’t want to be groggy by the time we have to meet for game-planning. And I don’t want to take equipment in the weight room from anyone else.”

  “Don’t know if you noticed, but it’s the majors. There’s plenty to go around, even with all the minor-league guys here. And they’ll be gone soon enough.”

  Eugenio drinks the rest of his coffee, crumples the cup, and makes a shot into the trash can. “I just don’t want to be one of them, I guess.”

  “Yeah,” Zach says, because what’s he supposed to say to that? If it’s him or Eugenio, obviously he’s going to pick himself.

  “Yesterday, with Johnson or whatever. You think he stands a chance of not being sent down first thing?”

  Zach shakes his head. Because Johnson will probably be gone in the first round of cuts.

  “But you went and calmed him down anyway.”

  “It’s like half the job. Besides, you know. He’s a kid. Probably away from his family for the first time. You know how rookies are.”

  Eugenio laughs that big laugh of his and Zach thinks, just for a second, what it’d be like to feel that laugh more than he hears it, to feel it vibrate against his back or his chest or under his hands. He doesn’t trust whatever expression he’s wearing to cover up what he’s thinking so just takes a long drink of coffee and says, “Did you bring me bre
akfast or what, rook?” mostly to hear Eugenio laugh again.

  They have their first real, long, excruciating game-planning meeting later that day. The analytics guys do their analytics-guy thing; there are charts; there are graphs; there are heat maps; there are statistics.

  “Okay,” Zach says, looking at a zone profile for a hitter, “blue means call for a pitch there and red means don’t call for a pitch there, right?” He’s mostly doing it to wind them up, but also because one of them went on a long tangent about probabilities that Zach tuned out.

  Eugenio is taking notes; he has neat handwriting like computer font, unlike Zach, whose seventh-grade teachers demanded he type everything because his printing is that bad. “Look at the percentages.” He leans over, pointing at something on a chart sitting below the heat map.

  Up close, he smells like cologne and ballpark shampoo. Zach’s fingers leave dents in the paper he’s holding, and he looks down, concentrating on the heat map he’s supposed to be looking at and not on the warmth of Eugenio in his space.

  “Yeah,” Zach says, “that makes sense.”

  Eugenio leans away, returning to the safety of his chair a full two feet from Zach. “It’s a little confusing that red means hit on one chart, and swing and miss on another.”

  “Oh,” one of the analytics guys says, like it didn’t occur to them that using color-coded charts where red means bad on one and good on another might not work for players. Or that Eugenio would know what he’s looking at. “We’ll fix that for the next set of these.”

  They hand out another set, and Zach doesn’t bother to look at his, just scoots his chair over toward where Eugenio is already marking them up. “This is like math class all over again,” Zach says. He ignores the curve of Eugenio’s mouth, the blink of his eyelashes behind his glasses, his faintly pleased look when Zach moved into his space. “Tell me what I should be seeing.”

  After, Eugenio is actively yawning, even though it’s early afternoon and they have stuff scheduled for another few hours.

  “If you want to pass out in one of the trainers’ rooms,” Zach says, “I’ll come wake you up before the next thing.”

  “Thanks.” Another yawn, this one big enough that he laughs at the end of it and then shuffles off.

  Zach considers, briefly, letting Eugenio sleep through their next set of drills, but he spent the previous hour making hitting analytics explicable to Zach, so waking him up is the least he can do. He hangs out, plays some cards with Braxton and Giordano, and Morgan when she demands to be dealt in, though that just devolves into Giordano pestering Morgan to see her vacation photos. And it turns out he’s scuba-certified and Braxton is afraid of even the smallest sharks and that more or less takes up his hour.

  Zach goes to wake Eugenio, who doesn’t stir when he flicks the light in the room to get his attention. His shirt is rucked up on his stomach; he has tattoos extending down his side. They’re not the kind most ballplayers get—trucks, names, praying hands. Instead, abstract shapes that look like brushstrokes wrap around his ribs, interrupted by a few splashes of brighter colors. And Zach tells himself that he has an aesthetic appreciation for good design work and nothing more. That he can’t have anything more, not in the clubhouse. Especially not when the team is still making roster decisions.

  Eugenio doesn’t wake up when Zach flicks the lights again, or when Zach says his name a few times, at increasing volume. Zach contemplates touching his shoulder, what his arm might feel like or his wrist or the valley of his palm. He settles for grabbing Eugenio’s shin, a few inches below the hem of his compression tights, though wishes he didn’t when Eugenio is warm there, hairs soft against Zach’s fingers, leg corded with catcher muscles.

  Eugenio blinks his eyes slowly open. He reaches for where his glasses are sitting next to his phone and puts them on. They’re square framed, and they magnify his eyes, which are the same light brown as his hair, and also somehow emphasize the fullness of his mouth.

  “Hey, thanks.” Eugenio’s voice is thick with sleep, lower than it normally is, like he might sound late at night. “I must have been pretty out of it.”

  “You didn’t set an alarm?”

  “Did I need to?” Eugenio laughs a little, then gets up. He pulls down his T-shirt where it rode up, then adjusts his shorts, his hand coming to cup himself like they all do a hundred times a day, an unthinking baseball gesture. Finally, he swipes his fingers through his hair, trying to reshape it into place.

  And Zach’s tempted to chirp him about it, to ask him who he’s trying to look good for. But he doesn’t when he realizes it’ll mean telling Eugenio that he looks good. So he mostly just looks at where Eugenio is reflected in the glass window inset into the door, trying neither to watch nor not watch him too obviously, impassive except for the slight sweat that pricks the back of his neck.

  They have their meeting, and after, Zach heads one way and Eugenio the other, and they don’t see each other until Monday morning, when the rest of the team reports.

  * * *

  Pitchers and catchers report always has the feel of the first day of school—if it’s the first day of a small school. Whole-team report has the energy of walking into a mall the day after Thanksgiving. There are guys everywhere—and a bunch of them brought their wives or girlfriends and kids. A few brought their extended families. John Gordon, their best hitter, seems to have brought his entire neighborhood.

  It’s loud.

  It’s loud enough that Zach’s hearing aid starts picking up on whichever guy is yelling the loudest at any particular moment—which is inevitably always Giordano—rather than what he wants to hear, which is inevitably always someone other than Giordano. Zach’s jaw starts complaining about how hard he’s clenching it, and his temples start to complain about the throbbing in his jaw, and he finds himself wandering out to the bullpen to just get away from the entire mess.

  He expected to be alone, but instead there’s Johnson sitting with his head down. He looks up when Zach opens the creaking bullpen gate; his eyes are red.

  “You doing all right?” Zach asks.

  Johnson looks embarrassed to be caught sitting there. He’s got a book open next to him—a Bible, on closer inspection, pages edged in gold, various passages underlined. He flips it shut when he sees Zach notice it and puts it on the ground, something Zach would never do with a religious book, even if he ate pork that morning in what Eugenio brought him.

  “I’m fine.” And Johnson’s voice sounds like it might crack.

  “Nerves?”

  Johnson nods. In daylight, he looks especially young, a few stray pimples, a farmer’s tan that darkens his forearms but ends well before his T-shirt sleeves. He’s pale even under that.

  “I threw up the day before pitchers and catchers my first year,” Zach says. “My family came down with me. We went for a huge dinner. And I just ended up puking my guts out. I thought it was food poisoning, but no one else got sick and we all ate the same thing.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Point is, if you’re here, someone thinks you should be here. Try to enjoy some of it.” There’s a Gatorade cooler, and Zach goes, pulls a cup for himself, a cup for Johnson, who drinks it like he’s taking a shot. “You got people who’re staying with you?”

  “No, my folks can’t miss the time.”

  “That sucks.”

  “It is what it is. Do they need us to do something?” Johnson asks.

  “No, we’re good for a minute.” Out on the field, guys are hugging, laughing, their kids running excitedly through the outfield in a game of tag. It looks like it could be a family reunion, except for the fact that it’s on a baseball diamond and not in a city park.

  Next to him, Johnson takes a few deep, shaky breaths. “I went to church yesterday. Thought it would help. But the service was in Spanish. And when I got there, everyone was so nice, I couldn’t leave, even if I didn�
��t know what was going on.”

  Zach laughs, mostly because his parents’ synagogue’s service is almost entirely in Hebrew. “Sorry, kid.”

  “You ever go into something hoping to have someone to talk to and you can’t?”

  “Sure, who hasn’t?”

  “My folks need me to send money. And I had to explain to them that I can’t. That I have a job that’s gonna eat up all my time, but I can’t send anything.”

  “Shit,” Zach says. “That’s pretty fucking heavy for ten in the morning.”

  “Yeah. Sorry.”

  “Look, talk to Morgan. She’s the strength and conditioning coach. A couple years ago she hooked me up with a gig at a driving range nearby. The hours were shitty, and the pay was bad, but it was something.”

  Johnson leans forward, picking up the Bible from where it’s sitting. “You know, I prayed on it and God delivered.”

  “You don’t have the job yet.”

  “I will.” And he sounds certain, like it’s all guaranteed to work out. “God is good.” He says this last thing like he’s expecting a response out of Zach, and Zach points to his ear like he didn’t hear it because he doesn’t need Johnson asking about his religious beliefs on top of everything else.

  “Thanks.” Johnson says it much louder and slower than he was speaking to Zach previously.

  And Zach just says, “No problem, kid,” before fleeing the bullpen in search of somewhere quieter.

  * * *

  The first few days of whole-team spring training are a blur. Zach wakes up, gets coffee at the same place near the ballpark, eats breakfast that Eugenio brings, and then splits his time between bullpen sessions, fielding drills, planning meetings, and trying to remember that he can, in fact, hit big-league pitching. He’s tired by the end of most days, and he swims at the pool in his rental complex, naps, eats with whichever guys are around, calls his family a few times, and falls asleep like a stone dropped into water, sudden and deep and largely dreamless.