by Patrick Glendon McCullough
Twenty-four-year-old Patrick McCullough was brought up in Oklahoma, moved to Brooklyn four years ago, and recently retreated to Callicoon, a tiny hamlet on the Delaware River in upstate New York—in pursuit, he says, of a place that would make for better fishing than the East River. When not writing, he tells us, he likes to read Graham Greene and brew beer. Readers of his debut story may wonder at his not mentioning baseball as another of his enthusiasms.
* * * *
Being only a few seconds this side of dead, I find my thoughts turn to religion. And like any decent sportswriter who drinks most of his paycheck, religion for me is baseball.
The annals of its history form a story that beats any other holy book the world has ever produced. One which provides an answer and precedent to everything. Dying, for example.
You look at someone like John Wayne Gacy, the serial killer who wound up getting executed. Clear strikeout.
Abe Lincoln: sacrifice fly.
Or you take most of the folks who work and raise a family and all that stuff and get to live to be old and die without much pain. Amounts to a respectable single. Maybe a double, depending on how your wife looks.
Finally, you’ve got the home runs and the grand slams. Take a retired sportswriter I knew who had worked at the Daily News. Decades before my time, but I’d run into him at games now and then. He died in a hot tub at his ninetieth birthday party with a glass of cheap rye in one hand and a girl in the other who was young enough to have been some evolved, Darwinian descendent of his own rare species.
When I was a kid, I always kind of hoped I’d go out like that. If not a grand slam, then a triple. Heart attack in box seats at Yankee Stadium, with Boston down thirty to nothing in the first inning, my credit card bill still largely unpaid.
But things surprise you. One day every beer seems colder than the one before it and you think that life is a pretty lucky break and the next you’re looking down and seeing your insides getting their first peek at the world outside of your belly.
I’m not speaking poetically. That gruesome latter scenario is my present situation. Sounds like a clear strikeout, right? Maybe an easy pop fly that gets caught in right field?
Nope. Even worse.
May 30, 1973. The shortstop for the Yankees, Gene Michael, quietly catches the ball thrown back in from the outfield following an out. Vic Harris, playing for the Rangers, is standing on second, not paying attention to anything. So he misses that Michael doesn’t toss the ball to the pitcher, but instead innocently wanders toward second base. Assuming the ball is with the pitcher, Harris leads off and Michael tags him.
The hidden ball trick.
It doesn’t happen often, but there’s no more shameful way to make an exit.
I should know. It’s what did me in.
It was day two of the Yankees’ three-game series against Baltimore and a couple of colleagues and myself started preparations early in the afternoon, at a bar called Dewey’s Flatiron.
“Yeah, well, I’d like to see you hit something coming at you at ninety miles an hour,” some smelly barfly was shouting at me. “Hell, I bet you couldn’t hit something going seventy.”
To this, I offered what I considered to be a rather witty rejoinder about his mother. In hindsight this was a questionable decision.
The barfly failed to see the humor in my bon mot, and I wound up trying to get his beer off my face and shirt as the bartender ordered him out, threatening to call the cops.
“Sweetie, you need to wash that off,” came the kind of voice you don’t mind hearing call you sweetie, and I turned to find a face and body to match. An elegant stack of brunette, though not many guys in looking her over from the ground up would have made it far enough to know that.
We’d seen her come in, my colleagues and me. Saw her sit down with a magazine at the far end of the bar and order some summery cocktail. But as tough or clever as we all fancied ourselves, when it came to girls like that we were pathetic. We proved that now, staring slack-jawed as a pack of twelve-year-olds as she placed a hand on my elbow and guided me to the bathrooms at the rear of the bar.
“Tell me something?” she asked as we walked back.
“Sure,” I said out of a dry throat.
“How do you get someone to throw beer in your face this early in the day? It must be hard. Like, most people can’t get in that kind of trouble until after dark.”
“Funny, huh?”
“Kinda.”
“Well, people around here tend to like to pick fights with me,” I said as we walked into the private men’s room, leaving the door open. “I’ve got a little bit of a reputation.”
“And a lot of mouth,” she added, turning on the tap. “I don’t know where you’re from, but around here, it’s not smart to talk about the Yankees that way.”
“You’d better watch it. You might hurt my feelings. I’m not some hick from Oklahoma, I’ve lived here my whole life. And nobody loves the Yankees more than I do.”
“You’ve got a funny way of showing it.”
“Let me tell you something. . . . Sorry . . . what’s your name?”
“Ashley,” she answered as she held her hand under the water, waiting for it to turn warm. But she apparently had no interest in having me tell her anything, as she just kept on talking. “If you love them so much, then why do you talk so much trash about them?”
She had soaked up a paper towel and was working it in circles over my shirt.
“Now that’s offensive,” I said. “That offends me. I’ve never said a word in my life against the Yankees. I just tear up the bush-league bums that try and destroy the franchise.”
“Wait a minute. You’re not . . . that guy from the Post?”
“Yes, I am!” I argued defensively. “Who are you to say I’m not?”
“How about that? Yeah, I’ve heard of you! You’re the one who got that shortstop kicked off the team last year.”
“No, that shortstop having the arm strength of a premature baby got him kicked off the team.”
“That’s not what everyone else says.”
“Well, you look pretty young, Ashley. But one of these days you’ll learn, like I’ve learned, that generally, everyone else is wrong.”
“What was his name? That shortstop?”
“Danny Doyle.”
“Danny Doyle. That’s right.” Her eyes kind of lingered on mine awhile. When she managed to pull them away she took a last few dabs at my shirt. “Well, there’s no helping you reeking of beer. But it won’t stain.”
When we emerged from the bathroom, my buddies were still trying to gather their jaws up off the floor. Ashley gave a savage grin, flashing a slice of tooth, then proceeded to absorb me in conversation, rendering me into a tower of jelly as she punctuated every laughing sentence by brushing my arm or poking my gut.
A wiser man might have been suspicious. Maybe it was obvious that something was up, but I had two strikes against the prospect of thinking straight: one in my glass and the other in my jeans. So when the guys were yelling at me, telling me we were going to be late to the game, and the girl, meanwhile, kept stroking my arm and laughing at jokes that probably didn’t make much sense anymore, I told the guys I’d catch up with them later. They stumbled out and Ashley’s face darkened. Still smiling, but less a flirty girl and more either a woman or a lioness. In the right light it’s tough to distinguish.
“Wanna come play at my house?” thrummed her voice.
“What’s this? Elementary school?”
“Not even close.”
“Where’s your house?”
“Sands Point. Just an hour’s drive. With you in the car, maybe I can make forty-five minutes.”
“Honey, points for being about as friendly as anyone I’ve ever met, but the first pitch is in less than an hour.”
“So is third base if you come with me . . . “
“I’m serious. I got a job that pays me to go to baseball games and doesn’t care if I do it drunk. I’m not going to blow that deal.”
“But why do you have to go?”
“So I can write about it for the old guys who don’t have a TV and haven’t been able to get to a game since Mickey Mantle retired.”
“You’re silly. There’s a TV at my house. You can watch the game there. You’ll be a lot more comfortable than you would be at the stadium.”
It was the kind of logic that only a genius could poke a hole through and only a priest would. So ten minutes later, I found myself in the passenger seat of a car roaring through the Midtown tunnel into Queens doing seventy. I stuck my head out the window for a few seconds to get it cleared. Wind tends to slap me sober.
By the time we emerged onto the Long Island Expressway, a sheet of clouds was sliding in behind us, promising rain.
“I might not wind up missing anything after all,” I said.
To this she said nothing. Didn’t even offer a smile. She was focused determinedly on the highway unspooling in front of us. As if trying to will the traffic off the road, or coax the car into a higher gear. This might have troubled me if looking vicious hadn’t made her even hotter.
Fifteen minutes on and the clouds had stretched from horizon to horizon and blankets of rain were slopping down.
I turned on the car radio and scanned stations until I heard a voice giving a rundown on news and weather, proclaiming with smug excitement that the storms would continue to stay east of the city, leaving it dry.
The game would go on.
Her urgency was beyond me. Through the hard rain she kept her eyes steady and cut a path with electric speed through the blur of Long Island. I’d make passes, grab at her legs, offer uncreative come-ons, and she’d occasionally indulge me with a patient smile, but never showed any genuine interest. Again, I can maybe look back now and say I should have been suspicious. But there were all the same muddling distractions I mentioned earlier still at work. True, I didn’t have a glass in my hand anymore, but the residual effects of the last few pints were still tap-dancing on my skull.
It was forty-five minutes on the nose since we’d gotten in her car when we turned onto a quiet little road that wound onto an inlet from which you could see ocean on three sides. The houses weren’t ostentatious, but there was no pretending there weren’t fortunes behind them. I whistled and said, “Beachfront property forty-five minutes from Manhattan? What do you do for a living?”
She flashed me a smile that was warm and wicked, unleashing the girl from the bar who had been covered up by some other personality for the length of the drive.
“Finally getting to the house and you wanna talk about my job?”
“Yeah, I’m pretty smart that way.”
“I’ve noticed. Here we are.”
She pulled into a drive carved out of a wall of neatly manicured trees, beyond which a giant of a house emerged. She was clearly loaded, financially speaking. The only way she could have convinced me otherwise would have been by jimmying the front door open to let us in. But as it was, she pulled into a four-car garage and used bona fide keys on the door, even punching numbers into a beeping alarm console.
I walked in and stood in the entryway, taking the joint in. French doors at the end of a massive living room looked out over rain pounding a million craters into gray sand and disappearing into the ocean that was only slightly off, colorwise, from the sky. It looked otherworldly. I was jarred out of staring when I heard the sudden cessation of heels clicking against parquet. Looking up, I saw her at the edge of the room, looking back.
“Are you coming?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “you got any views that beat this one?”
“Are you trying to be mean, or have you just got a knack?”
“Sorry. It’s just that when I was little, my mom was too indulgent and gave me the idea I was funny. I’ve never been able to get over it.”
“That’s okay,” she grinned. “I kinda like it. Funny guys are like fat girls.”
“Hungry?”
“I was thinking accessible.”
I jogged after her, and she led me down a corridor that seemed endless.
“Look, I don’t mean to be nosy, but I live in a studio apartment that’s twenty-five feet square. You gotta tell me how you bought a place like this.”
“I didn’t. My husband did.”
I stopped in my tracks. She must have anticipated my reaction, since by the time I’d taken a half-second to look up, she’d turned and was glaring at me.
“Look, Ashley, sweetie,” I labored over the last word.
“Don’t worry about it,” she interrupted. She pursed her lips and spouted air to blow back a lock of hair. “It’s not some sort of make-it-quick thing. We’re not close, and he’s not anywhere near here.”
“All the worst movies I’ve ever seen start out this way.”
She let loose an exasperated sigh and clutched my wrist and pressed on down the hall.
I don’t know if she consciously played up her walk, or if I just happened to notice. But either way, the effect was the same. I eyed her hips and somehow forgot about a husband.
She pulled me into a bedroom that I could have fit three of my apartments into, and dragged me to the bed.
I sat on the edge of it, tested it with my palms, and then eyed with reverent wonder the sixty-five-inch flat-screen on the wall, asking, “Where’s the remote for this?”
“Don’t get too excited.”
I grabbed her arm and pulled her into my lap, trying to fish for the charm I knew I’d left somewhere underneath the layers of beer.
“Come on,” I said, “you’re the best-looking thing I’ve ever seen in my life, much less been in a position like this with . . . “
“You mean asking for the remote?”
“I told you, I’ve got to work. I can’t miss this game.”
“I know.” She smiled, fishing a remote out of the nightstand and handing it to me. “Fine. I’m going to run to the kitchen real quick. You like Champagne?”
“Only the kind with alcohol in it.”
She laughed only a little as she walked out the door.
Left alone, I flipped on the TV. I was so absorbed by the beauty of the HD picture, it took me a full ten seconds to realize it was already tuned to YES. That is—for those who do things other than follow the Yankees’ season—the Yankee Entertainment and Sports Network.
They were just announcing the lineup, and I whistled with a final relief that I hadn’t missed anything. And keeping my feet on the ground, I let my body fall back into the mattress, just lapping up the situation I’d somehow landed myself in and smiling, I imagine, like an idiot. I was at peace with the world in that instant, in a giant house overlooking the Atlantic, about to do one of my favorite things while watching another one of my favorite things on a sixty-five-inch television. I was so at peace that naturally the TV shut off and the lights died.
Washed-out gray light drifted in through the windows, but was hardly better than pitch darkness. A storm cloud gurgled somewhere out over the ocean, and Ashley returned carrying a Champagne bottle and a pair of glasses on a tray to find me on my hands and knees, digging under the bed. She made a weary little noise and asked, “Looking for something?”
“The electricity went out.”
“Oh. I was kinda wondering why all the lights and electronics turned off.”
“Nobody likes a smart ass.”
“No?”
“Well . . . “ I groaned, dragging myself out from under the bed and scrambling to a dresser. “Have you got a radio somewhere? That runs on batteries?”
“Most girls don’t have to work this hard.”
“What do you know about work? With a husband who can afford a place like this? What’s he do, anyway?”
“He’s retired.”
“Ah, an old guy, huh?” I said, things making more sense. “They say that’s the way to do it.”
“He’s not old. Or at least he’s no older than you. But when I put it that way . . . “
“He’s not old. Good gig that lets you retire at my age.”
She shrugged and set the tray on the nightstand and thumbed the cork into the palm of her hand, muting the pop. The fluid glugged into glasses under jets of sizzling foam. She put one into my hand and kissed me on the neck, which she only reached on tiptoes. She pulled back a little and eyed me like I imagine lumberjacks must eye trees they’ve sawed through and expect to fall over. But I took a swallow from the glass and asked “Radio? Got one?”
Her face drooped and she took a showy drink of Champagne. But she dug a radio out of the closet anyway and jammed it into my chest. I flipped it on. A meteorologist’s voice blared out. I spun the tuner to the right station.
“. . . brings the score to one-zero, Baltimore,” came the voice, thin and spectral through the static.
“What the hell did I miss?”
She took the radio and set it on the nightstand beside her Champagne glass and worked on getting what is usually referred to as more comfortable. Her hands curved over my shoulders and pushed me down onto the bed. Her big eyes looming over me, locking on my own, I managed to repeat, characteristically suave: “What the hell did I miss?”
The expression that shot over her face made me shudder.
“Someone scored, how else does a score change?”
“But,” I whimpered, “I only missed a second.”
“Markakis was in the one hole tonight, what do you expect?” she growled.
My horror at being pinned down by a rabid woman suddenly turned into a much weirder feeling. One that swelled inside me as my brain accumulated all the odd incidents of the day that I’d so dumbly overlooked.
“Where the hell did you learn to talk like that?”
I grabbed her elbows and rose up off the bed, until we stood with maybe an inch between us. I bent my neck to glare down at her but she darted her eyes, refusing to look up at me. Her expression gave away that she’d been caught, though at what I didn’t know. She tried to brush it off, mustering a weak: “You think no girl knows anything about baseball?”
“No, I know that no person, girl or guy, who knows anything about baseball could stand me enough to want to share their bedroom.”
“You know, your opinion of yourself is starting to rub off. I’m nearly convinced.”
“Drop it,” I said, letting her go and pacing to the other side of the room as the announcer’s voice rose over the sound of rain out the window. A sacrifice fly to center field that brought Baltimore up two-zero. “Even if I’m wrong, it’s suspicious enough that it makes me kind of wonder about all the other suspicious things today. I didn’t do anything to pick you up. I’m sure of that because I know that I can’t even pick up a cold, much less . . . “
“All right, fine.” She sighed, exasperated, brushing back a renegade lock of hair, as she grandly and sarcastically admitted, “I planned it.”
There was a hum like thunder, but that kept on solidly for several seconds.
“What’s that?” I asked.
Her eyes were large. She stood paralyzed. This gave me kind of a bad feeling somehow. “What’s that?” I repeated, walking back to her.
“The garage door,” she managed.
“Why is the garage door opening?”
“My husband . . . “
My gut dropped. And my mouth dried up. And for several seconds—until the garage door stopped, resumed, and a car door slammed shut—we only stood staring at each other like a couple of morons.
“Does that open?” I asked, walking to a window overlooking the beach.
“What? Are you going to swim home? There’s nowhere to hide out there! It’s miles of open sand.”
“Ashley!” came a distant voice.
Ashley looked at me, then at the door. The tip of her tongue traced an outline of her lips and she shouted: “In the bedroom, Danny!”
I was just on the verge of gripping the window and opening it. But my hands didn’t make it. Hearing her shout out an announcement of where we were was too baffling. And then hearing the name made far too much sense.
“Danny?” I asked weakly. “Danny Doyle? The shortstop? Danny oh-God-please-don’t-hit-it-between-second-and-third-base Doyle? Whose contract wound up paying him ten thousand bucks per error his first season? The same guy who couldn’t—”
I have a tendency to ramble off insults when I’m petrified. A poor survival instinct that’s resulted in most of my beatings being more serious than they ever needed to be, but we don’t get to choose these things.
Ashley cut me off.
“Yes!” she spat out in an urgent whisper. “I’m sorry!”
“What the hell’s wrong with you? You set me up!”
“No!” she insisted, her eyes pleading. “I didn’t mean for this to happen.”
“Oh no?”
“Well, not having Danny show up!”
“What were you expecting?”
“I just wanted to be able to tell him that you and I . . . “
“Why?”
“Because he hates you. And I hate him.”
“Well, good luck with that. I’m leaving.”
“I told you you’re not going to be able to hide out there!”
“And I told you I don’t care.”
“You don’t understand. If he finds you, he is going to kill you. That’s a fact. Whether you’re standing in here or running a few feet down the beach doesn’t matter.”
“Oh God!” I muttered, an intense dizzy spell rolling over me. I clutched my gut and bent over. “I’m going to be killed. I’m going to be killed by the man with the second-worst single-season batting average in Yankees franchise history.” I gazed up pathetically at Ashley. “What do I do?”
Her face looked miserable and sympathetic.
Finally, the sound of footsteps became audible in the hallway. Time was running out so quickly. The words blaring from the radio, announcing the Orioles’ batter watching the fourth ball sail wide and taking his base, didn’t even faze me. Her eyes half wild, Ashley stumbled toward the nightstand like a drunk, slid the drawer open, and fished in it until her hand brandished a little nine-millimeter pistol. She walked up and slapped the grip into my palm.
I shook my head, telling her flatly, “You’re out of your mind.”
“He will kill you. He will. You know he hates you. No team will touch him because of you. He will kill you.”
It was insane, but she was right. And if his only weapon was a baseball bat, I would have happily taken my chances against the man who led the National League in strikeouts. But odds were, he’d have a gun. Ballplayers tend to be paranoid that way. “It’ll be self-defense,” she whispered as the footsteps got so close to the door my head wanted to explode.
I fingered the trigger and looked down at the sleek steel of the barrel, glinting in the darkness. Ashley took my arm and pulled me in line with the door and I raised the gun and waited.
At last a lazy pop-fly to right field got snagged and the torturous top of the first inning was brought to an end. My hand was shaking, my heartbeat was as rapid as a hummingbird’s, and I counted the approaching footsteps that seemed impossibly endless. Like a cruel joke. I turned my head to Ashley and saw her, fingers knotted, face bunched in a nervousness that seemed half-terror, half-ecstasy. With a belch of thunder, the rain picked up, making a sound as though all the beach sand was boiling over the description of Derek Jeter’s on-deck practice swings.
It was then that my brain at last sorted out the situation, the coincidences and the lies, and calmly reported that the entire day had been a setup for my murder. I’d been lined up in front of the door for an easy shot. Danny I’d-prefer-to-throw-underhand Doyle would walk in, smile at me, and then calmly unload a bullet in my belly and get to claim self-defense because I was holding a gun. A gun that I would bet a million dollars wasn’t even loaded.
Acting quickly, since I didn’t have so much as a spare half-second, I tossed the gun to the ground and sprinted to the wall just beside the door frame. Lining myself up so that as soon as the door opened a crack, I’d be able to spring on him. I forced myself to visualize exactly how I’d do it a dozen times over, as he would almost certainly have a gun and when you jump someone with a gun you only get one go at it. I’d throw my arm around his neck and jump on his back, forcing my forearm into his throat with whatever force I could muster.
Jeter struck out, swinging away, and I wished I’d had more of the Champagne as the knob finally started to turn.
A deafening peal of thunder exploded. I jumped slightly but tried to steady myself as the door was just on the verge of opening. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t even stand still. A hollow, breathless ache in my gut was expanding with such heat that it folded me in two. I forced my head up to find Ashley, the gun she’d just fired still aimed at me.
And suddenly I knew how Vic Harris felt. The Texas player from the seventies I mentioned who got duped by the hidden ball. Only instead of the pitcher, I’d had my attention diverted to the door. And I wound up tagged by something worse than a baseball.
I hardly noticed when Danny opened the door. Getting shot in the belly is funny that way. My attention was locked on the gun that had delivered my fate, not on the shortstop who had tried so hard to sabotage my beloved Yankees.
He walked into the room just dripping with that disgusting Midwestern aw-shucks charm his defenders had all drooled over, gazing down at me with a self-satisfied grin.
Which pretty much brings us back to the present. Me only a few precious seconds from slipping out of consciousness for a very, very long time, which doesn’t even seem so bad compared to having to suffer the indignity of having your nearly dead body gloated over by the same guy who holds the Yankees record for unforced errors in a single game.
I should know. I was there heckling him that night.
“What are you smiling about?” I wheezed. “You didn’t have the guts to do it yourself, Doyle. Too bad you couldn’t have had her fill in for you at shortstop, too.”
“Don’t be angry,” he said, crouching as I eased myself into the pose I suppose I’ll be holding for the next few millennia. “Sure, maybe you’re dying, but because of you I’ll never play baseball again.”
“Hell,” I coughed, the metallic taste of blood riding up my tongue, “even when you were getting paid to stand between second and third, you weren’t playing baseball.”
His face soured with the frustration of anger that’s already been as satisfied as it ever can be. That is to say, you can only kill a guy once. And even though I’d be dead in another couple seconds, I couldn’t help smiling.
“What’s so funny?” he fumed.
“Oh nothing, Danny,” I said, my words slurred and weak. “Just that this time tomorrow, this pain in my stomach isn’t going to be bothering me anymore, but you’re still going to be the worst ballplayer I ever saw.”
At that moment the radio delivered the sound of a screaming stadium as Teixeira pounded one over the right-field wall. With Johnny Damon already on first, the homer brought the score up 2-2.
And that’s what they call a tie game.