Extra Innings, Chapter 1 · Opening Day, Pitch Count

“Throw it again,” Rennie said.

Josiah Teague looked at him over his shoulder, all six-four of him. He was thirty-one, he had thrown a hundred and eighty innings for the big club last summer, and he stood on the home bullpen mound at Packinghouse Field looking like somebody had asked him to spell his own name. Rennie had asked for fifteen pitches before the game. Behind the plate Tomás Reyes crouched with his mitt up and his mouth shut. He had caught for nineteen years, and shutting up was how he said most things.

“I threw it eight times, Doc.”

“Throw a ninth.”

Teague threw it. The ball cracked into the mitt and Reyes held it a beat longer than he needed to. Rennie noticed that and figured he was meant to. He was watching the elbow. On the first pitch the arm had come through high and loose. Now the elbow rode a hand lower, and the shoulder was doing a job that belonged to something else.

“Again.”

“It’s opening day.”

“I know what day it is. Again.”

The next one came in softer. Afterward Teague gave his arm a small shake at the bottom, the kind a pitcher makes when he thinks nobody’s looking. Rennie had spent twelve years in rooms full of men doing that shake, and it was why they’d hired him.

In the trainer’s room he pushed his sleeves up and took the elbow in both hands. Teague sat on the table with his jaw set and his eyes on the ceiling tiles. Rennie pressed along the inside of the joint with his thumb, slowly, and when he reached the bony bump on the inner side, Teague’s whole body went tight.

“It’s a little sore.”

“It’s a lot sore. You just came up off the table.” He bent the arm to ninety degrees and leaned on the outside of it, easy, and the pain went across Teague’s face like a light turning on. “That’s the ligament’s neighborhood. I don’t know if it’s torn, and neither do you, and until somebody puts it in a scanner you don’t throw anything that counts.”

“The Rails’ doctor cleared me in March.”

“In March. It’s April.”

Teague let a long breath out through his nose. “If I miss tonight, I’m not pitching for Denver in June.”

“If you pitch tonight on this, you might not pitch for anybody in June.” Rennie lowered the arm onto the pad. “I’m the one who gets to be wrong in your favor, Josiah. Let me.”

He washed his hands and called the manager’s cell. It rang out. At twenty to three he walked down the corridor to the manager’s office, where the door was shut and Lonnie Bright’s voice was coming through it, saying fine, fine, bud, fine. Rennie knocked.

The door opened four inches. Gil Marchetti filled most of the gap, six-two and built like a walk-in freezer that had played professional baseball, with a pencil behind one ear and grey chest hair curling out of the neck of his pullover. He was fifty-three, and he looked at Rennie the way he’d looked at him for six weeks of spring training, with his eyebrows doing the talking.

“Four o’clock, Doc. Staff meeting. Say it then.”

“I’d rather say it now. It’s about Teague.”

“I watched him come out of the bullpen holding his arm. Four o’clock.”

The door shut. Rennie decided he wasn’t going to be angry about it.

At four the office was full. Gil sat behind a desk that looked like it had been bought for a smaller man. Lonnie had the good chair, with his reading glasses pushed up into his white mustache, and Desmond Frye leaned on the filing cabinet cracking sunflower seeds into his fist. Curtis Ashby, the general manager, stood in the doorway in a quarter-zip with a tablet, looking like he hoped nobody would ask him anything.

“Doc says Teague’s got a sore elbow,” Gil said. “Doc, tell it.”

Rennie kept it short. The arm slot dropped by the ninth pitch, and the ligament hurt when he stressed it. He called it a hold, for now, and said Dr. Voss would put a name on it.

“Every arm in this building is sore,” Lonnie said, not unkindly. “Mine was sore in 1987.”

“Not every arm drops its elbow on the ninth pitch, Lonnie.”

“Seven thousand people have tickets for tonight,” Gil said. “Teague is my guy. Opening day, Teague goes. That’s how I’ve done it since I got my first club. You want to put a sore arm on ice and tell me he’s good by the fifth, I’ll listen.”

“He’s not good by the fifth.”

“You know that.”

“I know it the way you know a runner’s going. I can’t prove it until it happens.” Rennie put his hands in his pockets so they wouldn’t do anything. “Skip, here’s where it stands. Section four of the medical policy says a trainer’s hold is final until the team physician lifts it. Dr. Voss is in the building at nine tomorrow. If she looks at that arm and says go, I’ll hand him the ball myself. Tonight he doesn’t throw.”

The room went quiet enough that Rennie could hear Desmond stop chewing.

“Where’s that written?” Gil said.

“Page eleven. The club signed it. You signed the acknowledgment page in February. I watched you.”

Somebody in the doorway made a small noise that might have been Curtis not laughing. Gil leaned back and the chair complained. He had caught ten thousand innings of other men telling him they were fine, and he looked at Rennie the way he must have looked at a hitter he didn’t believe, long and flat. Rennie held it with his heart going and kept his shoulders where they were.

“Lonnie,” Gil said at last. “Who’ve we got?”

“Pike. He’s been stretched out all spring and he’s been in my ear since Monday. Four innings, maybe five. Then Wexler, then whoever.”

“Pike. Desmond, fix the card.” He took the pencil from behind his ear and threw it at the desk, where it bounced. “Doc, next time you’ve got a no for me, I want it before four o’clock.”

“You had it at two-forty,” Rennie said. “Through your door.”

Lonnie laughed out loud. One corner of Gil’s mouth went up and he scowled to cover it. “Out. All of you.”

Rennie was halfway to the tunnel when Gil’s voice came down the corridor behind him, not loud.

“Doc. Nobody’s said no to me in front of the staff since 2011. Don’t make a habit of it.”

“Only when I’m right.”

“Yeah,” Gil said. “That’s the habit I mean.”

It was forty-one degrees at first pitch, with a north wind coming over the right-field fence and the brick packinghouse wall in left turned a deep red with the cold. Pike gave them five innings. Teague sat in a parka at the far end of the bench and didn’t speak to Rennie, and Rennie didn’t make him. In the fourth Rennie saw Gil reach down on the top step and rub his right knee, quick and hard, and then give it a small shake at the bottom. It was Teague’s shake. In the seventh, with the Stockmen up by two, Gil turned and found Rennie at the water cooler and gave him one nod, a quarter-inch, like a catcher taking a sign.

They won five to three. By ten-fifteen the visitors’ bus was gone. Turo Salcedo was running the dryers in the laundry room with his radio up. Rennie’s assistant had left at nine, as arranged. The last patient was Reyes, in the whirlpool in the hydrotherapy room off the back of the training room, with a bag of ice on his left shoulder and his head tipped back against the tile.

Gil walked in from the corridor and stopped inside the door with one hand on the frame. He’d swapped his jersey for a grey team pullover and kept the uniform pants. Through the open hydro door Reyes opened one eye.

“Skip’s knee has been talking since the fourth inning,” he said. “Just so you know, Doc.”

“I can hear you, Tomás.”

“That was the idea.” Reyes stood up out of the water, steaming, thick through the chest and carrying his belly easily, and took the towel Rennie held out. “Night, Doc. Night, Skip.”

He went out through the clubhouse door. Gil waited until it closed.

“You’ve been telling me since February to bring you the knee and the back,” he said. “I’m bringing them. You want me to come back tomorrow?”

“No. On the wide table.” Rennie nodded at the one by the wall, cranked down low. “Pants, shoes and shirt off, if you don’t mind. On your stomach first.”

It took Gil a minute to get down, one hand braced on the pad, and Rennie saw how much the right leg didn’t want to bend. He lay with his cheek on his folded arms, two hundred and seventy pounds of him in grey compression shorts that had seen some years. A white surgical line ran up the side of the right knee. Rennie warmed the massage lotion between his palms and set them on the base of the spine, and Gil made a sound in his chest like a truck changing gear.

“Lumbar,” Rennie said. “It locks after long bus rides. I’ve seen you walk off the bus.”

“I walk fine.”

“You walk like you’re carrying two buckets.” He worked his thumbs up either side of the spine and felt the muscle give. “How long has the knee been bad?”

“Since the surgery in oh-four. Before that it was just a knee. Ten thousand innings in a crouch.” Gil’s voice was half into his arms. “You went and got a whole degree on it. That the reason you left the university?”

His hands kept moving. “A head coach played a linebacker through a concussion over my written hold. The linebacker couldn’t tell me his mother’s name for a week. I reported it, and the university decided the coach had a better season than I did. So I took a job where the sentence was already in the contract.”

“Page eleven.”

“Page eleven.”

Gil was quiet a while. “Twenty years ago I’d have put Teague out there with a bad wing and called it character,” he said. “Now I’ve got this knee and a daughter who told me I was an idiot.” He turned his head on his arm, and one dark eye found Rennie’s. “I’m sorry I made you say it in front of the staff.”

“I wanted it said in front of them. That way it’s the room’s rule and I don’t have to have the argument twice.”

He had Gil roll onto his back to work the knee. Gil turned over slowly, groaning, and lay with his big hands on his belly. Rennie took the right leg in both hands and worked along the outer thigh toward the kneecap, bending it a little and letting it come back. The hair on the thigh went white around the knee. Rennie kept his eyes on the joint, where they belonged, until the dryers changed pitch next door and he looked up.

Gil had gone hard under the grey fabric, a long thick ridge running down his left thigh, and he hadn’t moved a hand to cover it. He was already looking at Rennie, breathing through his mouth.

“Skip,” Rennie said. “That isn’t the knee.”

“No.” Gil’s voice stayed low and even, the same one he used at four o’clock. “You want me to get up and go?”

Rennie set the leg down on the pad. He could have said yes. Gil would have walked out without a word and shown up tomorrow like nothing had happened, and that was part of why Rennie didn’t.

“No,” he said. “But I want to say something first, so it’s said. I’m done working on you. Whatever happens next isn’t the job, and the job stays the job. You don’t hire me, fire me or pay me, and I’d like to keep it that way. If Dr. Voss says Teague can’t throw, he can’t throw, and nothing about tonight makes me softer on you or tougher on you. You understand that?”

“I understand.” Gil sat up on the edge of the table, which took effort, until his face was level with Rennie’s chest. “Then understand this. I’ll never ask for anything on the field that I’d have to ask for in the room. If I ever do, tell me to go to hell.”

“I would anyway.”

“I know. That’s why I came in.”

“And I haven’t done this with anyone I work with,” Rennie said. “Not once. It stays between the two of us until we both decide different.”

“Same. I don’t do this at the park, Doc. I’m making an exception and I know it.” Gil’s hands were flat on his own thighs, working to stay still. “So say what you want. In words. I don’t guess.”

“I want you to kiss me,” Rennie said. “I want your mouth on me and mine on you. And I want to hear what you sound like when you can’t keep it in.”

Gil let out a breath that was half a laugh. “Good. Me too, every word of it. And if either of us says ‘time,’ it stops. Right then, no talking, no sulking. Same for me as for you.”

“Time stops it. Understood.” Rennie nearly smiled. “And yes.”

He crossed the room and turned the lock on the corridor door, then the one on the clubhouse door. Then he came back and stood between Gil’s knees, and Gil put both hands on his hips and pulled him in.

The kiss started slow and didn’t stay that way. Gil tasted like stale coffee. His stubble was rough on Rennie’s beard and his mouth was wide and sure, and he kissed like he had all night. A sound came out of Rennie that he hadn’t planned. Gil heard it and made one back, low in the chest, and caught Rennie’s lower lip in his teeth, gently, and let it go.

“Again,” Gil said against his mouth. “That noise. Make it again.”

Rennie made it again without meaning to when Gil’s tongue came back, and Gil groaned into him and slid his hands up under the hem of the polo and over Rennie’s belly and pushed the shirt off over his head.

“Christ, Doc.” He sat back an inch and looked, in the hard white light, at the broad chest and the grey coming in at Rennie’s chin. His thumbs found Rennie’s nipples and rubbed. “Six weeks you’ve walked around this place in that shirt. I’ve been guessing since February.”

“Did you guess right?”

“No. It’s better.” He bent his head and took a nipple in his mouth and sucked, hard, and Rennie’s hand landed on Gil’s bare shoulder and dug in. “Yeah. You like that.”

“Keep going.”

“I plan to.” He switched sides and used the edge of his teeth this time, and Rennie swayed on his feet. The noise he made came back off the tile louder than he’d let it out. “You’re loud already, Doc. I haven’t even got your belt open.”

“Then open it.”

Gil opened it. He worked the trousers and shorts down Rennie’s thighs with one hand and Rennie stepped out of them and his shoes, and stood there between Gil’s spread knees in nothing but his socks, hard, the head already wet. The table was cranked low enough that Gil, sitting on the edge of it, had his face right at Rennie’s belly. He looked at Rennie’s cock for a long second and then up at his face.

“Here’s how this goes,” Gil said. “My knee doesn’t kneel on tile for anybody. So I’m staying up here on the table, and I’m going to suck you standing till you can’t stand. That all right with you?”

“That’s all right with me.”

“Louder than that. Turo’s got his radio up.”

“Suck me, Skip.”

Gil took hold of his hips and pulled him in and took the head into his mouth.

Rennie’s breath stopped. Gil’s mouth was hot and wide and in no hurry at all. He took a few inches, slow, and let them slide back out wet, and took them again deeper, and his beard scraped the insides of Rennie’s thighs on every pass. His big hands slid around and spread over Rennie’s ass and held him there.

“Oh, God. Gil.” It came out before he could stop it. “Oh, that’s good.”

Gil pulled off long enough to say, “Say it again. My name. I’ve never once heard you say it.”

“Gil.”

“Yeah.” He went back down, and this time he took a lot more, and Rennie felt the back of Gil’s throat and heard the wet noise it made and had to grab both of Gil’s shoulders to stay on his feet. Gil groaned, deep, and Rennie felt it go straight up into his belly.

“Fuck. You’re going to put me on the floor.”

Gil came off with a wet sound and grinned up at him, his mouth shining. “That’s the idea. You’ve got a cock on you, Doc. I’d have come to treatment in February if I’d known.”

“You’d have come to treatment for your knee.”

“I’d have come to treatment for this.” He licked one long stripe up the underside and closed his mouth on the head and sucked, cheeks hollow, eyes up on Rennie’s face. Then he worked down the shaft again and stayed down, breathing through his nose, holding still, and Rennie’s thighs started to shake.

“Gil. Gil, I can’t stand still.”

He pulled off. “Then don’t. Move. Fuck my mouth a little. I’ll tell you if it’s too much.”

“You’re sure.”

“I asked, didn’t I.”

Rennie moved. Small at first, just a rock of the hips, in and back, and Gil’s hands on his ass pulled him into it and set the pace a little faster than Rennie would have dared. The sounds were obscene. Wet and loud in the empty room, with the dryers thumping through the wall and the vinyl creaking under Gil’s weight every time he leaned in. Rennie held on to his shoulders and watched this heavy grey man take him, the white stubble going dark and wet along his jaw, and gave up on being quiet.

“Fuck. Gil. Your mouth.” Every word came out of him on a push of the hips, and Gil grunted his approval with his mouth full, and that nearly finished him on the spot.

“You look so good doing that,” Rennie said. His voice had gone high and strange. “You look so good with my cock in your mouth, Skip.”

Gil made a noise that might have been a laugh and took him deeper.

“I’m going to come. Gil, I’m going to come soon, you need to say where.”

Gil pulled off, breathing hard, and kept his face close, his mouth an inch from the head. “On me,” he said. “Right here on my chest. I want to see it come out of you.” His hands stayed spread on Rennie’s ass, pulling him in, and he put his tongue flat under the head and licked, slow, and didn’t let up.

“Gil. Oh, God, Gil, like that. Don’t stop. Please.”

It went through Rennie like a dropped tray, sudden and loud. He shouted Gil’s name at the ceiling and came in long hard pulses across Gil’s chest, into the grey hair and down the curve of his belly, his hips jerking, Gil’s hands holding him steady and Gil’s tongue still moving under him, gentle now, until Rennie made a sound that meant enough and pulled back, and his legs quit on him.

He went down onto the foam pad on the floor between Gil’s feet. He knelt there with his forehead on Gil’s thigh and breathed.

Gil’s thumb came down and brushed once along his jaw, through the beard, and went away again.

“That’s the best thing I’ve had in my mouth in my life,” Gil said. His voice had gone rough from it. “You taste like this whole damn building.” He looked down at his own chest, striped and shining in the white light, and laughed. “And you made a mess of me. Good.”

“You’ve got a mouth like a vacuum.”

“Ten thousand innings with a mask on. A man learns to breathe through his nose.” Gil looked down at him, and the joke went out of his face. “Nothing’s owed for that, Doc. I mean it. You want to go home, go home.”

Rennie lifted his head. Right in front of his face, Gil’s cock stood up out of the grey shorts, shoved down in front, thick and flushed and curved to the left, wet at the tip and twitching every time Gil breathed.

“I’m on my knees in front of you,” Rennie said. “I’m not going anywhere. Take those off.”

Gil lifted his hips off the table and Rennie dragged the shorts down his thighs and off over the bad knee carefully, and then he put his hands on Gil’s thighs and pushed them wider and took him in his mouth.

Gil’s whole body jerked. “Fuck. Oh, fuck, Rennie.”

He was heavy on the tongue and tasted of salt and the lotion still on Rennie’s fingers. The curve meant Rennie had to tip his head a little to the right to take him, and then it fit, and he took more. Above him Gil started talking and didn’t stop, low and rough, the way he talked to an umpire.

“That’s it. Oh, that’s a mouth. That’s the mouth that told me no in front of my whole staff. Slow. Yeah, like that. Christ, I’ve thought about this. I stood on that top step in the fourth inning with my knee killing me and I thought about your mouth.”

Rennie pulled off and looked up. “In the fourth inning.”

“Every inning after it, too. Get back on it.”

He got back on it. He wrapped a hand around the base and sucked the rest, and found the rhythm Gil liked by listening, because Gil told him every time: slower now, tongue under the head, fuck, there. He was loud, a big rough voice coming out of a big man with nobody to hear it but Rennie and the dryers, and every sound he made went straight to Rennie’s cock, which had started to fill again where he knelt.

“You’re stiff again,” Gil said. “I can see it from up here. You’re getting hard sucking me.”

Rennie moaned yes with his mouth full, and Gil’s thighs shook.

“Touch it. Go on. Put your hand on yourself while you do me, Doc. Let me see you do it.”

Rennie took his free hand off Gil’s thigh and wrapped it around his own cock. He was sensitive still, raw, and the first stroke made him moan around Gil’s cock, and Gil swore and his hips came up off the table.

“That’s it. That’s it. God, both of us like this. I’m going to fuck you, Doc. You know that, right? In a bed, with time, a long way from Turo’s radio. I’m going to open you up slow and stay in you, and you’re going to say my name like you said it just now till you’ve got no voice left.”

Rennie came off him, panting. “Yes. Do that. Soon.”

“Say it plain, Doc.”

“I’m saying it plain. Use me. Fuck my mouth, Skip. I want you to come in it.”

“Jesus Christ.” Gil put one hand on the table edge on each side of him, braced, and Rennie went back down on him and Gil started to rock. Short strokes, off the edge of the table and back, careful of the knee and not careful of anything else. Rennie’s jaw ached. His hand was moving on himself, fast now, and Gil was watching it, and talking.

“Mine, for tonight. You hear me? Mine. Keep your hand going. Let me see you while I go. Rennie. Rennie, here it comes, I’m going to come in your mouth.”

Rennie gripped Gil’s thigh with his free hand and held on and didn’t let him go.

Gil came with a groan that seemed to start somewhere under the table. He pushed up once, deep, and held, and pulsed thick and hot over Rennie’s tongue, again and again, his belly heaving and his hands white on the table edge. Rennie swallowed and kept his mouth on him, all through it, until Gil’s hand came down on his shoulder and pushed, gently, too much now. His own cock was hard again in his fist. He let it go. It had already had its turn tonight, and his knees had had enough of the blue foam pad.

For a long time neither of them moved. A dryer buzzed next door and clicked off.

“Okay,” Gil said at last, to the ceiling. “Okay. That’s me done, Doc. For the moment.” He looked down. He was grinning, an open, ugly grin Rennie hadn’t seen on him in six weeks. “You all right down there?”

“Never better. My knees are going to hate you.”

“Welcome to the club.”

They cleaned up with the paper roll and the training towels, Gil’s chest first, and Gil laughed through all of it, once at the dent Rennie’s knees had left in the foam pad. He stood at the sink with the water running and flexed the right knee, one bend and then another, and looked at it as if it belonged to somebody he hadn’t met.

“How is it?” Rennie asked.

“Hasn’t felt like this since it was new.”

“I’d like it noted that was not physical therapy.”

“Noted. Call it the second treatment.” He pulled the pullover on and stood by the door with one big hand flat against the frame, deciding whether to say something in the voice he used at four o’clock. “Dr. Voss reads that arm at nine.”

“She does.”

“Saturday’s card goes up at four. Pike’s done till Wednesday. I’m putting Teague on it in pencil, because I can’t help myself, and whatever she says in the morning rubs him out. Not you. Not me.”

“I’ll bring a pen anyway,” Rennie said.

Gil laughed. It was a real one, big and short, and it rolled down the corridor behind him as he went toward the tunnel under the stands, which was the long way to the lot and the way he always left. Rennie stood in the quiet room with his shirt in his hand and listened to it get small, and went on listening a good while after it was gone.