Peter Abrahams - The Fan

“Where you goin’?”

Gil hurried out of the alcove, past the bar, into the bathroom. On the TV screen over the urinals, Bobby Rayburn was standing bare-chested in front of his locker, fenced in by handheld microphones. Gil started puking right then, finished in and on a toilet in one of the stalls. Then he pictured a cactus growing in his gut and did it all again, bent double at the waist, hands clutching knees, tie decorated with sour bits from inside him.

Gil took deep breaths, straightened. He felt lightheaded for a few seconds, then steadied. He loosened his tie, carefully pulled it over his head, dropped it behind the toilet. Another fucking tie. He started cleaning himself with toilet paper: the lapels of his jacket, the cuffs of his pants, his shoe tops. He was almost finished when footsteps sounded on the bathroom tiles.

A man said: “It’s getting late.”

A second man said: “So?”

The first man said: “So let’s not dick around. Just tell me what you want.”

Gil thought he recognized the voice. He put his eye to the crack between the stall door and the frame, and saw Bobby Rayburn standing with his back to one of the sinks. The man he was talking to was out of sight, but Gil could see his reflection in the mirror; it was Primo. Above their heads, Rayburn’s image continued to field questions on the TV screen.

Primo said, “I want nothing.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” said Rayburn.

“Nothing. Nada. ”

“You wanted something before.”

“Before?”

“In spring training.”

“What you talking about?”

“A hundred grand. It wasn’t that long ago, amigo.”

Primo’s image stiffened in the mirror. “Watch the way you talk to me.”

“What way?” said Rayburn, looking puzzled.

“Like that.” Primo noticed something about his reflection he didn’t like, patted his hair.

Rayburn sighed. “Let’s start over, my man.”

Primo’s image stiffened again, but he said nothing. The seed of another sour cactus ball sprouted in Gil’s stomach. He took a deep but silent breath to make it go away, to drown it in clean air. The cactus ball stopped growing, but didn’t go away. Gil peered through the crack.

“Maybe,” said Bobby Rayburn, “you just don’t understand the way things work here.”

“How is that?” said Primo. “I’ve been here for five years. You just came.”

“I don’t mean this team,” Rayburn said. “I’m talking about the whole country. It’s different than down where you come from.”

Gil, in the stall a few feet away, knew only that something was being negotiated, and that Rayburn knew nothing about negotiation. He took another deep breath.

“Different?” Primo said.

Rayburn smiled, as though they were getting somewhere at last. “Up here there’s a kind of pecking order. Someone like me, coming to a new team, things get worked out, that’s all.”

“Worked out?”

“Sure. We can think up something if we try.”

Primo’s eyes were hooded. “I already know what I think.”

“Yeah,” said Rayburn, “but we got to be flexible, right? It’s a long season.”

“Not so long.”

“Hundred and sixty-two games isn’t long?”

“Not for us. We play winter ball when this is over.”

Rayburn had an idea. Gil could almost see it forming in his mind. “What kind of uniforms have you got down there?”

Primo frowned. “Uniforms.”

“Nice?”

“Just uniforms.”

“What color?”

“Green and white. What difference-”

“And what’s on the back of yours?”

Primo paused. “Once. ”

“Onsay?” said Rayburn.

“Like this.” Primo held up his index fingers, side by side. “So forget it.” Held those fingers close to Rayburn, almost in his face. Rayburn didn’t like that. He closed his fist around Primo’s index fingers and squeezed.

“Name your price, you little greaseball,” he said.

Primo tried to pull away, but couldn’t.

“No price,” Primo said.

With the back of his free hand, Rayburn smacked Primo’s face. Not particularly hard, thought Gil, but then saw blood dripping from Primo’s nose.

“The price,” Rayburn said. “It’s my fucking number.”

“No price,” Primo repeated, glaring up at Rayburn; puzzling Gil, because he didn’t seem afraid. “The pecking order has changed.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning check the averages in the morning.”

Rayburn blushed. Then he straightened his back and took another swing, this one much harder than the first. It knocked Primo against the wall, half into the sink, and made more blood flow. Rayburn, fist cocked, took a step toward him. The next instant, Primo was halfway across the room, crouching, a blade in his hand. He’d done it so quickly that Gil hadn’t seen where the blade-a stiletto, pearl-handled, double-edged; exactly the kind of knife Gil would have expected him to have, if he hadn’t been a ballplayer-had come from. He only saw Rayburn, backing away; Primo, half smiling now; and that blade. The sight of the blade excited Gil, killed the cactus in his stomach, made him feel good. He bent down, reached under his pant leg for the thrower.

The bathroom door opened. Boucicaut came in. Primo glanced back at him over his shoulder; the knife disappeared. Boucicaut moved to the urinals, unzipped. Primo, the half smile still on his face, backed out the door. Bobby Rayburn said, “Shit,” not loudly. Boucicaut, pissing, looked sideways at him. Rayburn walked out.

Boucicaut shook off, zipped up. Gil stepped out of the stall. Boucicaut saw him in the mirror. “There you are,” he said. “Ready to boogaloo?”

There were a few red drops on the mirror. Above them, on Sox Wrap, Bobby Rayburn laid down a bunt that started sweet and rolled just foul.

“ Have you done this kind of thing before?” asked Gil.

“For Christ’s sake-you were with me,” said Boucicaut.

They stood side by side at a rest stop just south of the bridge, pissing. No cars went by. There was nothing to hear but the sibilance of their piss in the tall grass, and the tide flowing through the canal, also a liquid sound, but deeper, and infinitely more powerful. It was late, dark, quiet. Above, the stars were bright and beyond count. How could whatever you did down here mean anything at all, one way or the other? The boys who held the whip hand knew that from birth.

“I meant with people inside,” Gil said.

“Lots of times,” Boucicaut told him.

“Lots?”

“Some.”

“And what’s it like?”

“Like?”

“What happens?”

“Nothing happens. They sleep like babies. The whole country’s doped to the eyeballs every night.” Again Gil felt Boucicaut’s heavy hand on his shoulder. It reassured him. “This is going to be cake,” Boucicaut said.

Gil turned onto the Mid-Cape. Boucicaut spread his tool belt across his lap, stuck the tools through the loops: crowbar, flat bar, three different screwdrivers, glass cutter, pencil flash. Gil thought right away of Boucicaut on one knee by the dugout, strapping on his catcher’s gear. “Tools of ignorance” was the phrase sportswriters used for catcher’s equipment when they were trying to be funny, but Gil had never known why: catchers were smart. Boucicaut had been more than a rock; he’d done the thinking for all of them. Boucicaut with dust streaks like war paint on his face, Boucicaut spitting through the bars of his mask, Boucicaut doing the thinking: If you want to put him on, at least hit him in the head. Gil smiled to himself. He felt right, there in the quiet cab of the pickup, with Boucicaut beside him. He opened his mouth to say something that began with the word remember, but Boucicaut spoke first.