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later that same evening
- I don’t believe it, says Nate. - One-thirty in the morning and it’s rush hour.
Their cab’s merging into eastbound traffic on the 134. The stream of red taillights is like a flow of molten lava ahead of them.
- Where’s Timmy? asks Lowry from the front seat.
- Dunno, says Wilson, yawning. He’s wearing a black fedora with a silk band that he won off Frandsen tonight. It’s cocked at a jaunty angle that makes it hard to see his eyes. - Haven’t seen him since dominoes.
- I think he went back with Vinnie and Correia, says Nate. - They got an early call tomorrow. Jesus, Brian, he says, - you look like a fucking gangster in that hat. Frandsen should be glad he got rid of it.
Lowry’s busy talking to the dreadlocked cabbie about the picture of Haile Selassie he’s got dangling from the rear-view mirror.
Nate stretches his arm over empty middle of the seat back and looks over at Brian. The big closer raises his eyebrows.
- That boy’s in love, he says so quietly that Nate can hardly hear him. And he leans his head against the window.
September and October 2007
Bochy and Rags have some conspiracy going, Tim knows it. They bench him for most of September, claiming they’re protecting his arm. It makes him beyond crazy, having to watch Randy and Kevin and Zito pitch, and Cain, if you can believe that shit. The two of them are the same age, for fuck's sake, and they’ve pitched practically the same number of innings. But.
It cost more than six hundred bucks to have his stuff shipped back to Seattle, but Tim’s had it with moving; this is the first time he hasn’t done it himself. It takes effort not think about what it’s gonna be like, following his stuff back up I-5 to Renton.
The off-season stretches before him, a line of nameless days that waits.
The clubhouse has been subdued. They aren’t even close to being in it, and Bonds left on September fifth - the end of an era, everyone says. But this particular Sunday afternoon, last game of the season, has been unexpectedly sweet. It’s hot, actually hot at the stadium for once - Tim wishes he could take off his cap - and it looks like Zito’s gonna get the win and send the Dodgers off with a 6-2 loss. Heh. Let 'em think about that till March.
But Tim can’t watch it through to the end. For some reason he doesn’t fully understand, he can’t be here anymore.
While Wilson’s closing it out, Tim ducks into the clubhouse and strips off his uniform, hustling to the rhythm of the Lil Wayne mixtape they’ve put on already for the end-of-season 'celebration' in the clubhouse.
Tim’s locker is empty. There’s only one thing left there, an envelope propped against the back corner. He picks it up, curious. It's sealed and heavy, blank on the outside.
He stuffs it, unopened, in the side pocket of his gym bag.
Then he revels in the outlaw feeling of slipping out of the players’ parking lot early, ahead of everyone else.
In the apartment in Potrero Hill everything’s been cleared out. There’s only the bare mattress he’s leaving for his landlady’s daughter, and a few dust bunnies. He fans his fingers out on the windowsill, where the afternoon sun’s glinting off the Alameda flats across the bay. Outside, on the fire escape, the school chair’s still sitting on its side.
He peels three keys off his ring, lines them up in a row on the kitchen counter, and bangs out the door.
//
He likes to do the drive to Washington in a single shot, even though it means driving all night. Actually the night part is what he likes the best; he can’t see the faces of the other drivers, and he’s got his Ipod on shuffle, and the road slips under the truck wheels faster, the white stripes flashing. Fortified with Red Bulls and a few hits of weed, he’ll be just aware enough to be able to do it without thinking - a seven-hundred-mile straight shot.
When he’s almost home, where I-5 tacks sharply to the east in Tacoma, below Commencement Bay, he stops at a Shell station where he stretches and buys himself a cold Sprite and a pack of gum.
He’s learned that getting there in the middle of the night’s best because his dad’ll still be asleep. Then he’ll let himself in and have a beer and some of whatever’s in the fridge, probably leftover pizza, the staple of his dad’s diet.
And then he’ll collapse in his old room till lunchtime or so, when he’ll have get up and talk.
//
For the first week he’s home, Tim’s so busy keeping himself busy that he forgets about the envelope. Then one evening, as he’s rummaging in his gym bag for his running clothes, he fishes it out, newly curious. He loosens the seal, shakes it open, and unfolds it. There’s an airline ticket. And a computerized itinerary with a handwritten note scrawled across the top margin.
We didn’t make a plan, so here’s mine.
I’ll pick you up at LAX.
Tim looks at it for a moment. Then he shakes his head and his brow knits with thinking. He double-knots the laces on his running shoes.
But once he’s out there pounding the deserted high-school track, with his Ipod turned up way past the recommended sixty-five percent of maximum, he feels light, and he's fast, at the edge of his last best time, for the first time in a while.
//
- God, what a relief, says Zito. - No yard call tomorrow; no wheels-up time; nobody bitching about the lineup; no Groeschner crawling up my ass; no fucking Dodgers to think about.
He smiles at Tim as he takes off his Ray-Bans, putting them back in the case with his right hand. His left hand, with its curious mark on the wrist, is propped, elbow against the window, on the wheel. They’re off the 101 now, on Cahuenga Boulevard, making their way towards Zito’s place in the Hollywood hills. The early-evening shadows are beginning to engulf the leeward side of the hills.
- You went out guns blazing, says Tim. - Fuck the Dodgers. Especially Houlton.
In that last game, while Zito was taking a shutout into the seventh inning against the Dodgers, Kevin Frandsen had hit a sweet two-run homer off D.J. Houlton, one of the Dodgers’ relievers.
Back in Triple A last year, Houlton had beaned Frandsen hard, broken his jaw, with a purpose pitch. Kevin had been sporting about it at the time, but no one forgets what that feels like, how it affects every at-bat afterwards. This homer was about the best revenge imaginable.
- Yeah, well, you didn’t exactly stick around to congratulate me on the win, says Zito.
Tim says nothing. He can’t really explain, even to himself, why he’d needed to leave.
- I was thinking we’d go out, says Zito, breaking the silence. They’re stopped at a six-way light, waiting for the left-turn signal, and everybody seems to be getting the green but them.
- What are you in the mood for? he asks.
He stretches his arm across the seat backs. With two fingers, he reaches over and gently strokes the side of Tim’s neck, tucks his shaggy hair back behind his ear.
Except for the requisite one-armed hug at the airport, they’ve been formal, decorous, since Tim’s plane arrived. The feel of Zito’s fingers on his neck, twisting his hair around his ear, blazes something up inside him. Tim momentarily blanks; his breath stops, and then, with some effort, he seizes it back and lets it out with a rush.
- Pull over, says Tim.
The first part of Mulholland is narrow and winding, and they have to negotiate a few sharp turns before Zito finds a spot to turn out. By then Tim’s heart is pounding. When Tim hears the sound of the handbrake, his eyes are already half-closed. When their mouths meet, he’s practically delirious, his tongue licking, sucking Barry’s tongue, and he can’t help purring a little.
Zito’s eyes are half-open, Tim notices through his haze of wanting, and there are yellow glints in them he doesn’t remember from before. His skin smells tantalizingly familiar, like heat and sun and the beach.
The kisses come one after another, long and leisurely, with Zito’s hands restlessly searching, in his hair and on his neck. Those hands are warm and firm and they’re insistent, pulling him in, holding him there, and Tim knows he’s not the only one who’s lost to it.
The sun’s sunk back behind the hills. The headlights of an oncoming car snap them back to reality.
They sit up, breathing hard, realizing at the same time that they’re still wearing their seatbelts; Zito looks down and snaps his with two fingers, his tongue in the corner of his mouth, nonplussed. He wipes his lips with the back of his hand, looking at Tim sideways, shaking his head.
Tim just closes his eyes and leans back, smiling, and melts back into the soft leather of the seat.
- These seatbelts of yours are gonna be useless in a crash, he says, - if they can’t even hold us back.
There's a long pause; Zito's looking at him, an expression on his face that Tim can't read.
- That was a crash, says Zito. - And look, we both survived. And you, I know your brain’s intact, because you can’t stop making smartass remarks. He grins slowly.
- God, I’ve missed you, he says.
After a quick look over his shoulder, Zito guns the engine and pulls them back onto the road.
//
- I can’t believe you just leave the whole place wide open, says Tim.
Tim’s surprised to see Zito swing the heavy front door open without unlocking it. Now they’re standing in the entryway, and across the tiled, low-ceilinged room, the glass doors are open to the patio. In the distance the skyline of Los Angeles has begun to glitter in the dark.
It’s quiet up here, no sound but crickets. The air is warm and silky against Tim’s skin, so unlike the damp cold of Seattle that sticks to his skin and makes him want to pull up his hood. The house, thrown open to the evening, feels like part of the landscape, a few walls built around a silence.
Zito shrugs.
- No one’d think about coming up here, he says. - They’d have to get through the gate, and know what they were looking for. If it happens it happens. I’m not gonna worry about it.
Tim drops his bag by the front door, not sure where it, or he, belongs in this place that’s wholly Zito’s world. No matter how much time they spend together, he never quite loses that feeling of reserve, as though he’s only dreamed what’s happened before.
//
- I only make breakfast, says Zito. - Everything else makes too many dishes.
He’s just split open an avocado, and he machetes the knife into the big, glossy seed with a flourish, then winkles it out with a twist of his hand.
- Don’t kill it, says Tim. - I’m only eating it if it’s alive.
Zito rolls his eyes. - I know better than that, he says. - You pretty much survive on cans and plastic.
He makes a show of being appalled by Tim’s eating habits, but he’s a little envious. Tim’s still at that age where he can eat what he wants without worrying about it.
He kicks the refrigerator door closed behind him and hands Tim one of the plates and a couple of Coronas. - I’ll get the salsa, he says. - Meet you out there.
//
Here's what Tim can’t figure out about Zito - how he can go from nothing to something in an instant. Whatever it is, Tim reflects, it’s holding him here, wondering. And it draws him back. And he keeps covering a greater distance with each return.
Whatever Zito’s made them he’s eating dutifully - he knows on some level he’s hungry - but he doesn’t taste it. It’s as though his whole body is waiting, tense with questions he doesn’t know how to ask.
He puts his plate down on the tiled patio, pushes it away, and tips up the Corona to get the last swallow.
- It’s weird, not having to be anyplace tomorrow, says Tim. - I kind of miss it. You know, the pressure of showing up, and how you never know exactly what’s gonna happen today. And how there’s always another game tomorrow if you fuck this one up.
- Off-season makes you realize what regular life’d be like if baseball hadn’t happened to you, says Zito.
- Speaking of, says Tim. - What’s with the blonde at the party?
Zito raises his eyebrows. - Sabrina?
Tim's eyes flicker up.
- Let’s see, says Zito, - if I can get this right. Former Miss Idaho, second runner-up in the Miss America pageant. Yeah, he says, raising his eyebrows. - Came here to go to USC, where she majored in human development and was a TriDelt. Daddy’s a real-estate developer in Sun Valley, well-connected with the production establishment here cause he’s sold ‘em all ranches out there.
- She’s got one of the top agents, he continues; - he’s got her tapes and her eight-by-tens in the hands of the Big Seven, and she’s good at showing up for auditions. Good work ethic, that girl. She’s had a few commercials and a couple of walk-ons.
- So how you do you know her? asks Tim.
- Some friends introduced us, thinking they'd fix us up. He pauses.
- She and I haven’t really talked about it, he continues, slowly, - but I’d say she sees me as one of her gigs.
Tim props himself up on his elbows and ducks his chin, shooting Zito a skeptical look.
- Not that kind of gig, says Zito. He shakes his head, smiling. - The kind where your performance gets you noticed by the right people.
- And that, he says with finality, - is what it’s all about, in this business.
//
- I see what you mean now, why you don’t lock the doors, says Tim.
They’re lounging against the arm of one of the couches in the wide-open space of the first floor, where there aren’t really any walls, and everything just kind of flows out towards the patio and the sky. They’ve both lost their shirts somewhere, and kicked off their shoes, and it’s still so warm, the air’s so soft, that it doesn’t matter.
Tim’s lying in Barry’s arms, his head nestled between his neck and shoulder. Oddly, the fact that they’re not looking straight at each other somehow makes it easier. Easier to feel whatever this is, thinks Tim. What ordinary people have, he wonders, where not all the doors have to be locked, and things don’t have to be hidden. Most things.
There are questions he wants to ask, but Zito has a way of throwing up a wall before he’s even got a chance to start.
And this feeling of being finally warm enough, of not having to pull his arms around himself to stay safe, is too new and too sweet to risk.
- I want to live entirely for pleasure while you’re here, says Zito, - and that means no locks and no plans.
His lips are on the back of Tim’s neck, exploring, and Tim’s skin prickles, and pretty soon he twists around, straddling Zito, and their mouths meet.
When Tim lets himself think about it, which is not often, he keeps wondering if Zito’s touch will get old, familiar. But every time Zito kisses him he gets that same sensation of the floor dropping out from under him.
He wonders if he’s addicted, and if it matters.
And it doesn’t.