Unwritten Rules Page 6

  “I’m buying it anyway.”

  “So, yeah. I had to go track ’em down, and then they were mad that I reported ’em because they also got fined by the club for skipping. It hasn’t been the best week.”

  “You want me to go and talk to them?”

  “Stop trying to solve my problems for me, Glasser. Do you think that’s gonna make them more likely to respect me?”

  “Okay, point taken.”

  “It’s not even the guys on the big-league roster,” she says. “It’d be easier if it was. Like, everyone expects you to be assholes.”

  “Wow, thanks.”

  “It’s just some short-season kids who probably won’t even crack double-A. Which, fine, whatever. I have to chase after them like they’re doing me a favor.”

  “They’ll figure it out,” Zach says, because they would or get reputations for being difficult. “Eugenio isn’t ducking you, right?”

  “Morales? No, it’s the opposite. He’s very prepared.”

  “I get that feeling. But he’s not giving you a hard time, right?”

  She gives him an assessing look, eyes narrowed, like there are reasons for him asking about Eugenio beyond them having to work together. “Only about kettlebell techniques. He also brought me a scone.”

  “Yeah, he does that.”

  “First time for everything.” She gets up, pointing to the restrooms at the back of the restaurant. “Order me another shot. It’s been a shitty week, and we’re in for four more.”

  Chapter Six

  They play the next day because that’s how baseball is. A bad outing or a good one and it doesn’t matter—the slate wipes clean. Courtland wants to test out a succession of double-A and single-A catchers, though none of them knows what to do with Hayek’s slider, and he peppers the backstop with passed balls.

  Zach spends the game in the dugout standing by the railing next to Eugenio, who’s charting the game, a golf pencil gripped in his hand as he records every pitch and its outcome—a make-work task in the age of video and analytics that D’Spara assigns as punishment.

  “You know how to field Hayek’s slider, right?” Zach says. “You wait until it stops rolling and then you pick it up.”

  Eugenio laughs, and notes yet another ball that misses both the strike zone and their catcher, a kid from single-A young enough to still have a squeak in his voice. “Glad I’m not trying to catch that thing for the first time in a live game.”

  “It takes him a while, but he usually settles down by mid-May or so.”

  Up close, Eugenio looks tired. The kind of tired that Morgan and possibly some of the medical staff should know about, even if it’s not Zach’s issue to tell. He has deep, almost purple, bags under his eyes, and he’s actively yawning.

  “There’s coffee,” Zach says. “I think I saw a pot on in the kitchen if you want to go grab some.”

  “I’m good. But thanks.”

  “Still not gonna drink clubhouse coffee?”

  “Something like that.”

  Eugenio’s shoulder occasionally brushes his as they stand there, the way guys brush against each other constantly like silverware in a drawer. Zach could leave; it’s within his rights as a major leaguer. But he spent the winter mostly not watching baseball, aside from a few Dominican league games. He misses its rhythms, even as each team sheds anyone who’ll end up in the majors from its lineup and brings in guys seemingly made in a baseball-player cloning factory. Blond guys who probably have Bible verses in their Twitter bios. Players from Cuba and Curaçao, speaking to one another in a combo of Spanish and Papiamento—and the coaches have been using Eugenio as a de facto translator, even after he asked why the club didn’t have an actual interpreter.

  So Zach tries to focus on each play, each at-bat, each fielded out—all of which contribute to a score that doesn’t matter except to those who have a vague hope of making the team—and not the frisson of Eugenio’s shoulder as it brushes against his. Next to him, Eugenio is charting like he’s being graded on it, hand enormous around the nub of a pencil. It’s not a bad exercise, at least not when watching actual big-league pitching, but probably not as some anonymous hitter goes down swinging against some anonymous pitcher.

  “You can probably quit doing that,” Zach says.

  “It’s keeping me awake. Though, barely.”

  “Jeez.”

  “Before,” Eugenio says, “you mentioned your place has a pool. Sometimes swimming helps when I can’t sleep.”

  “I guess I didn’t actually say you could use it. But let me know if you want to swing by.”

  Something about the way he says it makes Eugenio smile, a little upturned tug at his lips. “You got a kitchen at the place you’re staying?”

  “Yeah.” Though Zach’s mostly using his fridge to keep his beer cold.

  “Okay, I’ll come by around seven, if that works for you.” It’s a little more formal than Zach is expecting, especially when Eugenio asks to see his phone later, putting his number in it.

  Zach gets a text from him a half an hour before he’s supposed to get there asking Zach if he has any food allergies or stuff he doesn’t like eating.

  No shellfish, Zach sends, before he can convince himself that this whole thing is a bad idea.

  Eugenio knocks when he arrives, having come up the steps to Zach’s place carrying a few reusable shopping bags.

  “What’s all the stuff?” Zach asks as Eugenio unloads it onto his counter.

  “It’s not a big deal.” Which isn’t an answer. He rifles through Zach’s kitchen, pulling things out from the cupboards, rinsing off a bowl that Zach hasn’t used, locating and washing a cutting board and knife. He takes out a few jars of spices, oil, and salt, like he didn’t trust that Zach’s rental place came with it—though Zach didn’t know that it did until Eugenio locates the shaker in a cabinet.

  “You all have a grill, right?” He smiles when Zach says they do.

  Zach’s staying in a one-bedroom unit, and the only places to sit are his couch and on his bed, so he grabs a bottle of Gatorade from the fridge, offering one to Eugenio, who takes it. It feels weird, just the two of them, Eugenio moving around his kitchen like he belongs there, Zach glancing up every few minutes from his phone to confirm how much he’s not watching him. Though it’s less weird when Eugenio grabs a metal bowl and starts whacking the hell out of the pork chops he brought.

  “That looks kind of therapeutic,” Zach says.

  Eugenio says something too low for Zach to hear, and then continues venting whatever frustrations he’s carrying on to their dinner.

  “That can go in the fridge for a while,” Eugenio says, a few minutes later. Zach’s kitchen smells like whatever seasonings he brought, like garlic and oregano, maybe, and Zach comments on it.

  “Good nose,” Eugenio says, like that’s some kind of compliment.

  The pool at Zach’s rental property is indoors, a little blue oasis in the middle of the desert lensed by a glass skylight. It’s dark out, the major sign that, even in the heat, it’s still technically winter. Zach went swimming one night, expecting to see stars through the skylight, and was disappointed when he could only see the glaring lights from the surrounding rental complex.

  Eugenio chucks his shirt at one of the chaise lounges. He has on the kind of narrow clinging swim trunks Zach associates with competitive swimming. They outline his thighs. In the pool, he does laps with neat economical motions, arms churning through the water like he’s mad at it.

  Zach lies on his back, not bothering to do anything more than float. They have a game tomorrow, Zach slated to catch Montelbaum’s pitch arsenal. He came into the league hurling fire, routinely touching triple digits, only to be felled by the two words that pitchers most dread: elbow discomfort. Surgery, a yearlong recovery. Along with it, a slow fastball that Zach has to finesse into strikes.
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br />   Near him, Eugenio hauls himself up onto the side of the pool, propping his elbows on the concrete deck, a tattoo tracing up his back that’s half-distorted by the water.

  And Zach doesn’t let himself look, not in the clubhouse, where bodies are as common as furniture, where everything smells like feet and ballplayer funk, where most guys pad around buck-ass naked. He doesn’t let himself look, that part of him carefully folded and tucked away, like the things he put in storage at his offseason apartment, neatly vacuum-packed and stuffed under his bed until winter.

  He doesn’t let himself look. But he does now, at the water tracing lines down Eugenio’s back, the breadth and weight of him, the darkened ends of his hair, the gradual fade of his tan up his arms. Doesn’t let himself look, except in the safety of the pool, Eugenio probably thinking about dinner or their game tomorrow or whatever straight guys think about, their minds not occluded by what they shouldn’t be thinking.

  Eugenio turns back toward him, saying something that Zach can’t make out, not with his hearing aid sitting in its case on the bathroom counter back at his rental.

  Zach swims over to the side of the pool, pulling himself up. “What’d you just say?”

  “I wanted to know if you’re hungry.” There’s water beading off Eugenio’s hair and eyebrows, and he’s got that thick coating of offseason muscle they all have, a catcher’s body under it.

  “Yeah, I mean, I’m a ballplayer. I’m always hungry.”

  And Eugenio’s laugh echoes off the water.

  Back at Zach’s apartment, they shower, Eugenio first so he can get the grill started, then Zach, who lets his hair air dry but bangs the water from his ears before putting his hearing aid back in.

  When he gets outside, Eugenio pronounces the grill suitably hot. Zach expects it to summon other players from their rentals, the promise of free dinner a beacon in the darkness. But when he checks his phone, he missed a bunch of texts about everyone going to some restaurant nearby.

  “Looks like it’ll just be us,” Zach says, unnecessarily, since Eugenio only brought food for the two of them and not whatever alley cat of a relief pitcher might come begging.

  Eugenio’s got a stack of cheese, one of ham, one of sliced dill pickles. He’s layering them together and inserting them into the pork chops, folding them over like books and setting them on the grill.

  Zach’s eaten enough Cuban sandwiches to recognize the combination, though usually not stuffed into a pork chop. “What are you making?”

  “It’s a Bobby Flay recipe.” Eugenio is concentrating on watching the pork; he vaguely motions that Zach should slice up some bread from a loaf he brought. “Put a little of the oil on it.” And Zach does.

  “Do you always eat like this?” Zach asks, when they’re sitting at a picnic table on the patio, beers next to each of them, grilled pork chops and bread and Brussels sprouts that Eugenio stabbed onto skewers and grilled.

  “No. I mean, in the offseason, sometimes. My parents worked all the time when I was growing up, and my chore was to make dinner. Turns out I liked it, so I got good at it.” He turns his pork chop, slicing into it at an angle. “I guess it was the same way with baseball. They didn’t want me to play at first, but I kept insisting.”

  “Yeah, it wasn’t really an option for me. My mom would never have forgiven me if I didn’t play. She used to throw batting practice for me in the backyard.”

  Zach’s earliest memory—standing in their backyard on hot Baltimore evenings, a plastic bat too big for his childish grip, grass wet from the afternoon rain, fireflies blinking their approval. His mother tossing a ball to him, yelling “good eye, good eye,” if he hit it or if he didn’t. Something that feels too intimate to mention, even sitting in the fading daylight, the normal tumult of the complex for once quiet. Even if Eugenio probably wouldn’t give him a hard time about it.

  “What do your parents do?” Zach asks instead, and it’s kind of a date question, though Eugenio doesn’t seem to notice.

  “They’re religious studies professors. At a small Christian college in Indiana.”

  “Oh, huh.” Because Eugenio hasn’t mentioned praying or going to church. None of his tattoos are religious either, and Zach has definitely spent enough time not looking at them to confirm that.

  “Yeah.” And he sounds like he expected Zach’s surprise. “How about yours?”

  “My dad runs an upholstery company. In Baltimore. You know like, fabrics, re-covering couches, that kind of thing. My mom does the books for it.” He slices his already sliced pork chop into slightly smaller pieces. “They wanted me to go to college. Both of ’em went to like junior college or whatever, and they wanted me to get my degree.”

  “Mine too. I mean, they have PhDs. It was sort of expected. Professors don’t get paid anything, but they kind of think of baseball as being more tenuous.”

  “Tenuous,” Zach repeats, chewing on the word, a little teasing.

  “Yeah, yeah.” Even with the lights the rental place has, Eugenio looks slightly flustered by it, clipping his bottom lip with his teeth.

  “I did a year at a community college, mostly just to please them. Though I kind of flunked out. Or I didn’t, because they weren’t letting baseball players flunk, but I didn’t go back.” It was a bad year—they kept assigning him tutors who were more or less paid to do his schoolwork for him, and who were frustrated by the fact that Zach actually wanted to do his own work. “People see my name, and I don’t know, they expect me to be smart. Good at math. That kind of shit.”

  Eugenio doesn’t ask, but he raises his eyebrows.

  “Zach Glasser. It’s the kind of name that—I don’t know if there’re a lot of Jewish people in Indiana, but I’m assuming there aren’t—but it’s a pretty Jewish name. I got off easy. My brother’s name is Eitan and my sister’s named Aviva.”

  “Oh.” Eugenio glances down at the pork chop that Zach is in the process of dissecting. “Oh, shit. I’m sorry. I guess I should have known with the shellfish thing.”

  “I eat pork. And meat and cheese. The shellfish thing is ’cause I’m from Baltimore and don’t believe in eating seafood in places not touching the ocean.”

  Eugenio laughs then, that big laugh of his that makes Zach want things he shouldn’t, to hear it again in the closed-off confines of his apartment or early morning in the bullpen when the rest of the team hasn’t come to interrupt them. He refocuses on his food, eating his pork chop like he’s proving a point.

  “Thanks,” Zach says, after they’re done eating and are carrying their plates back indoors. “That was really good.”

  “No problem, I guess I kind of missed cooking for people.” Eugenio has plates in both his hands, and he pauses at the top step to Zach’s rental, waiting for Zach to open the door. Zach has the key out, fumbling it a little, Eugenio standing close behind him. The exhalation of his breath, warm in the cool night air, makes the hair on the back of Zach’s neck stand up. Enough that he feels like he’s glowing with it, hot as the grill charcoals and obvious in the darkness.

  He finally gets the door open, letting Eugenio slide past to scrape plates off into the kitchen trash can. He turns the lights on in the kitchen, the small living room, the hallway leading to his bedroom, like if he floods the place with enough light, Eugenio won’t notice the way he’s looking at him. “I need to hit the head,” Zach says, and then retreats to the sanctuary of his little rental bathroom.

  When he comes out, Eugenio has cleaned up, dishes sitting in the dish rack, all evidence of their dinner together washed away. “Thanks for letting me use the pool,” he says, and then, “I should probably get going,” just as Zach says, “Yeah, any time.”

  They both laugh, a kind of an end-of-a-date laugh, like Eugenio is waiting for Zach to do something other than stand there in his overly bright kitchen. Like Zach could lean forward and run his hand up the back of his neck
or cup his jaw with his palm. Like he’d be met with anything but confusion, disgust.

  “If you’re really having problems sleeping or whatever, the team medical staff is okay,” Zach says.

  “Do you tell the team everything?”

  Zach shrugs because of course he doesn’t.

  “It feels like, if I go to them, it’ll sound like a bigger deal than it is.” Eugenio chews on his lip for a minute, considering. “And if I don’t make it in baseball, I have to go back to my parents’ place in Indiana.” He doesn’t say and admit they were right, but Zach can hear it anyway.

  “You’ll make it.”

  “You can’t be sure of that. But thanks for saying it.”

  “Yeah, well.” Zach anchors his feet into the linoleum surface of the kitchen floor so that he doesn’t do something stupid. Like step into Eugenio’s space or offer him some other form of reassurance.

  “It’s late. I should get out of here,” Eugenio says.

  And Zach locks the door after Eugenio leaves, and stands there, leaning against it, imagining he can hear Eugenio’s truck pulling away into the Arizona darkness, imagining he had the guts to ask him to stay.

  Chapter Seven

  July, Present Day

  Zach stands in the All-Star Classic clubhouse, his feet rooted to the floor. It hasn’t actually been that long since he saw Eugenio. The Gothams and Swordfish play each other about twenty games a season, the Gothams the closest thing Miami has to a rival.

  But usually one of them is wearing a mask, set up behind the plate, and the other is at-bat, and they don’t say anything to one another beyond the basic interactions necessary to complete a game of baseball. A task made easier by the chaperoning presence of an umpire and spectators in the stands. Not that Zach would know what to say even in their absence.

  Now he stares at Eugenio for a minute, long enough to be awkward, before Eugenio says, “Hey,” and Zach says, “I didn’t know you were coming,” at more or less the same time.