Peter Abrahams - The Fan

“Get Stook,” he said.

He gazed expectantly at Gil. Then the expectant look faded from his eyes and was replaced by nothing. He sank back and didn’t move again.

Gil rose. He gathered up the knives, put them in the knapsack, stepped over Primo. A cloud of red mist followed him out the door.

Bobby Rayburn sat very still on a stool in the visitor’s clubhouse. He checked the urge to move because he knew that any movement he made would lead to breaking things, and he didn’t want to do that with the press around. He glared at the back of Burrows’s head, bobbing over a microphone. Maybe he wouldn’t have gotten a hit-maybe he would never hit again-but he would never have dropped that fly ball. From long ago came a memory of kids’ teams he’d played on-how the subs would roll in the dirt and slide on the grass, just to get their uniforms dirty too. The memory maddened him: they were subs, and he was who he was. In his spotless road uniform, he glared again, uselessly, at the back of Burrows’s head. Maybe he would never hit again.

A few stools away sat Primo, shirt off and sweaty, surrounded by Spanish-speaking reporters, some from Mexico or God knows where; it was always like that when they played on the coast. Stook stood behind him, massaging his shoulders.

“Just a little sore,” Bobby heard Stook say, “from when you made that catch.”

“Be on the highlights, for sure,” said someone else.

“Take a sauna when you get back,” Stook said.

“Don’t like saunas,” Primo said.

“A steam, then,” Stook replied. “It doesn’t matter.”

Enough of that, Bobby thought; enough of watching Primo get treated like a superstar instead of the slap hitter he was. He began unbuttoning his shirt, a little roughly perhaps. The last button snapped off and flew across the room. A woman coming through the door picked it up and handed it to him.

“Jewel,” he said.

She nodded. “Got it in one,” she said. “I thought you were supposed to be bad with names.”

Bobby didn’t like that. “What do you want?”

“I mentioned I might have a few follow-up questions, and you said-”

Just call. “I know what I said. But I didn’t expect to see you out here.”

“I’m a reporter, Bobby. Whither thou goest I shall go.”

Bobby felt a smile coming, despite how angry and pent-up he was. He took a close look at her face, and in it caught a glimpse, no more than that, of the world beyond baseball. Many people said there was such a world-Wald said so all the time-but it had never penetrated. A world beyond baseball, and this woman had a foot in it. “Let’s have ’em,” he said.

“Let’s have what?”

“Your questions.”

She glanced around. Primo said something in Spanish and the reporters laughed. “Why don’t we go somewhere?” Jewel said. “I’ll buy you a drink.”

Because I don’t socialize with reporters. That was the answer that popped up first in his mind, and the right one. But aloud Bobby said: “Why not?”

“No reason I know,” Jewel replied. “Got your ID?”

Bobby laughed. A minute or two before, he’d been ready to demolish the clubhouse, and now he was laughing. He stopped when he noticed Primo looking at him.

Jewel had a convertible. She wheeled up to the entrance at the players’ lot.

“Nice,” said Bobby, walking through the gate.

“Hertz.”

He got in.

“You disappoint me,” she said.

“How’s that?”

“I expected you to leap over the door, not open it.”

“I’ve already been to high school,” Bobby said.

She shot him a quick glance. “Not me,” Jewel said. “I’m still making up for it.” She stepped on the gas, hard enough to make the tires squeal, just a little.

“You didn’t go to high school?”

“Not what you mean by high school.”

“And what do you think that is?”

Jewel didn’t answer right away. She swung onto a ramp and accelerated onto a freeway. The night was warm and Jewel drove fast, her eyes on the road, her hands in proper ten-minutes-to-two position on the steering wheel, but relaxed. He noticed her hands: small, but strong-looking, the nails unpainted. Workmanlike, he thought; yet for some reason he had to force himself to take his eyes off them.

That’s when she said: “Val.”

“Val?”

“Valerie. Sorry. That’s what you mean by high school, isn’t it, Bobby?”

“I didn’t go to high school with Val.”

“Girls like her, then,” Jewel said. “And the whole scene that goes with it.”

“Isn’t it the same all over?”

“At my high school, boychick, if you didn’t win a prize at the science fair, you were a nobody.”

“Did you win a prize?” Bobby asked, making a mental note to ask Wald exactly what boychick meant.

“I did,” Jewel said. “But not in science.”

“In what?”

“Poetry. There was a prize every year for the best poem.”

“What was it?”

Jewel was silent for a moment. “The Oxford Book of English Verse. ”

“I meant the poem.”

Jewel, topping eighty miles an hour, turned and gave him a look. “Some other time,” she said. She flashed her brights at a Ferrari, forcing it over and breezing by.

“Where are we going?” Bobby asked.

“A place I know.”

“Where?”

“Right,” she said. “You lived here. I forgot.”

“I should never have left,” Bobby said. The words were out before he could stop them. She didn’t look at him or anything, but she heard: he could tell by her hands.

She took him to an old lodge on a saddle peak in the mountains. It had a view of the Valley on one side and the ocean, dark and endless, on the other.

“Makes you think of Raymond Chandler, doesn’t it?” said Jewel, as the valet took the car and they started up a piney path.

Bobby, who’d suddenly been wondering what it would be like to play in Japan, said: “What do you mean?”

“You know. Farewell, My Lovely. ”

“I thought that was Robert Mitchum.”

Jewel burst out laughing and took his hand. “I’m thirsty.” After a few steps, she let go. Her touch lingered on his palm.

They sat in high-backed wicker chairs on a terrace overlooking the treetops, and beyond them and far down, the sea. Nearby a pig turned on a spit over a wood fire, reflecting the flames on its glazed skin. A miniature flame bloomed from a candle on the table between them. The air, cooler in the mountains, smelled of eucalyptus.

A waiter in ruffled white shirt and string tie appeared.

“Champagne all right with you, Bobby?” Jewel said.

He nodded, although beer was what he wanted. She ordered, pronouncing the French brand name in a way that sounded French. “Aren’t you taking a chance,” he said to her, when the waiter had gone, “ordering champagne?”

“Why?”

“What if I start spraying it all over the place?”

Jewel laughed. “I’m sure there’s more to you than baseball, Bobby.” Bobby didn’t know about that. Perhaps she read his mind, because she added: “The very fact that we’re having this conversation proves it.”

The waiter returned, popped the cork, poured. Jewel raised her glass. “Here’s to singles up the middle.”

“I don’t want to talk about baseball,” Bobby said.

Jewel laughed again: “I wasn’t.” Bobby didn’t get that at all. She stopped laughing and asked, “What do you want to talk about?”

You, thought Bobby, but he didn’t say it. This wasn’t some hotel-lobby bimbo he was going to end up in bed with. This was a… what? He really didn’t know.

Jewel took a sip of her drink, more than a sip. “How did you get together with Wald?” she asked.