Chad Harbach - The Art of Fielding

Chapter 12

On Schwartz’s law school applications, as on most posted documents, he listed his home address like this:

MICHAEL P. SCHWARTZ

VARSITY ATHLETIC CENTER

WESTISH COLLEGE

WESTISH, WI 51851

He rented a campus-slum two-bedroom house on Grant Street with Demetrius Arsch, his cocaptain on the football team and backup catcher on the baseball team, but rarely set foot inside it. During the day there were classes and practices to attend, plus Henry’s regimen to oversee, and at night he worked on his thesis — “The Stoics in America” — here on the top floor of the VAC, in a dark-carpeted conference room that he long ago appropriated as his personal office. Schwartz held no official position within the Athletic Department, but he’d donated so much time and effort over the past four years that no one begrudged him his key to the building. Books with brittle, snapped bindings and missing pages, collected via his nationwide ILL dragnet, stood in drunken piles all along the long oval table, surrounded by a sea of color-coded note cards, wire-bound notebooks, and empty coffee mugs that had been converted to spit cups. He’d quit chewing tobacco two years ago, but it aided his concentration so much that, as he entered this final thesis crunch, he’d had to make some exceptions. With a good dip in, plus a couple Sudafed for luck, he could crank out nine or ten pages in a night. He wasn’t into Adderall.

Schwartz cherished these private, diligent hours. All day long, no matter how hard he worked, no matter what he accomplished, a voice in his head berated him for his laziness, his sloth, his inability to concentrate. His concerns were trivial. His knowledge of history was shallow. His Latin sucked, and his Greek was worse. How did he expect to grasp Aurelius and Epictetus, inquired the voice, when he could barely string two Latin words together? Vos es scelestus bardus. Only here, long after midnight, while everyone else was sleeping, when nothing was expected of him, could Schwartz convince himself that he was working hard enough. These hours felt stolen, added to his life. The voice fell quiet. Even the pain in his knees subsided.

Tonight, though, didn’t seem destined to contain much calm. First the Buddha’s injury, and now, as Schwartz stepped out of the VAC elevator and into the corridor lit only by a red EXIT sign at either end, he could see a bulge in the manila envelope he’d affixed to his office door as a makeshift mailbox. He pressed his fingertips to the sandy yellow paper: sure enough, there was something inside, something that—he drew it out, heart thundering—bore the blue insignia of Yale University.

Schwartz prided himself on his honesty. If one of his teammates was dogging it, he busted that teammate’s balls, and if one of his classmates or professors made a comment that seemed specious or incomplete, he said so. Not because he knew more than they did but because the clash of imperfect ideas was the only way for anyone, including himself, to learn and improve. That was the lesson of the Greeks; that was the lesson of Coach Liczic, who’d banged on the Buick’s window.

That happened two years after his mom died of cancer. He was living by himself. He’d never met his dad — his parents had been engaged at one point, but his dad drank and bet on sports and left before Schwartz was born. When the woman from Children and Family Services came by a month after his mom’s funeral, he’d told the woman he was about to turn eighteen. The woman’s paperwork clearly said otherwise, but he was already six feet tall, weighed a hundred eighty pounds, and had little trouble buying cigarettes and sometimes even beer. “Come on,” he’d said as he stood in the apartment doorway, arms folded across his chest, the dog yapping behind him. “Do I look like I’m fourteen?” Baffled, the woman left, and though it wouldn’t have taken much investigation to prove him a liar, she never returned.

His aunt Diane’s family lived nearby, and Schwartz went there often for dinner. In retrospect it seemed strange that Diane let him live alone like that, but then again she and her husband had three little kids and a too-small apartment, and it wasn’t only strangers who equated Schwartz’s size with maturity. His mom had socked away a little money, which paid the rent.

His school — on Chicago’s South Side, near the Carr Heights projects — had metal detectors at every entrance and armed guards in the halls. The rooms had no windows, and the bolted-down desks could barely contain Schwartz’s massive frame. Even though he was white, his teachers eyed him warily; they seemed intent on averting some vague but imminent disaster. AVERT DISASTER, in fact, would have been a perfect school motto — the purpose of the place, as far as Schwartz could tell, was to keep three thousand would-be maniacs sedated by boredom until a succession of birthdays transformed them into adults. Schwartz couldn’t stand it, and the bank account was running low. In November of his sophomore year, as soon as football season ended, he stopped going to class. He got a job at a foundry — he was six-two by then, same as now, and people were more likely to ask his bench press than his age. He worked second shift, learned to drive a forklift, lugged tons of alloys from one end of the shop floor to the other. When his probationary period ended he was making $13.50 an hour, plus overtime. Some nights he drank cheap beer or Mickey’s till dawn by himself. Other nights he took girls he’d gone to school with to seafood restaurants that overlooked Lake Michigan. When he woke early enough he went to the library and read the financial news — he thought that once he’d saved a few grand he might switch to third shift and trade stocks online during the day.

No one from the school commented on his absence until the following August, when football season rolled around. A gentle drizzle dampened the pavement as he left work and headed for his car — an expansive, rust-eaten Buick without a rear bumper, which he’d bought with his first few paychecks. Work covered him with sweat and metallic soot. He climbed into the Buick and dug under the seat for a beer. It was Thursday, just shy of the weekend. He pulled out a warm, linty can. As he cracked it, one of the assistant coaches of his high school team rapped on the passenger’s-side window. Schwartz leaned over and unlocked the door. The coach wedged himself into the seat and asked Schwartz what the hell he was doing. Didn’t he think he should quit acting like a goddamn spic and get his ass back in school?

Schwartz was looking at the pouch of the coach’s sweatshirt, which sagged with the sharp weight of what was obviously a gun. He sat up tall behind the steering wheel and eyed the coach steadily. “That place is a prison,” he said.

“And this isn’t?” The coach chuckled and jerked a thumb toward the long low foundry building. He was one of the varsity assistants; Schwartz, who’d captained the JV the year before, couldn’t even remember his name.

“This is just a shithole,” Schwartz said. “Not a prison.”

The coach shrugged. The gun-form rose and fell on his gut. “Have it your way,” he said. “But this shithole doesn’t have a football team.” He climbed out of the car and was gone. Schwartz finished his beer as his crappy wipers slashed through the beading rain.

The next day, he went to school and then to practice. He hadn’t been afraid of the gun. But the gun as a gesture impressed him. It seemed to indicate, if not love, at least the possibility of such a thing. The coach hadn’t left him alone; hadn’t assumed that he knew what he was doing. Instead he bothered to get in Schwartz’s face, to tell him exactly what he thought of him, in the most forceful way he knew how. Nobody else — relatives, teachers, friends — had ever done such a thing for Schwartz, before or since. He’d vowed to do it for other people.