Extra Innings, Chapter 2 · The Read

The pen moved along the film like a finger tracing a road on a map.

“That’s the ligament,” Dr. Voss said. “On a healthy elbow it’s a dark band, clean at both ends, like a new rubber band. This one goes grey and frayed about a third of the way down. See it? That’s your trouble.”

She had printed the scans onto film and clipped them to the lightbox in the corner of the training room, because she said a monitor let a doctor scroll past what she didn’t like. It was ten past one on Tuesday, the fourteenth of April. Ingrid Voss was fifty-five, a small woman who rebuilt knees for a living and talked like she was reading out a weather report. Josiah Teague sat on the wide table with the bad arm pressed against his ribs. Gil stood just inside the door with his arms folded over his stomach. Curtis Ashby held his tablet against his chest and studied the ceiling.

Rennie stood beside the lightbox with his hands in his pockets. It was Voss’s read. He had learned a long time ago to let the doctor have the room.

Four days earlier she had stood in this same spot at nine on Friday morning, pressed her thumb where Rennie had pressed, and watched Teague go pale around the mouth. “Okafor’s hold stands,” she had said. “I want an MRI. Nobody throws anything.” Gil had taken the pencil from behind his ear, turned it around, and rubbed Teague’s name off Saturday’s card with the eraser.

“Pencil,” Gil had said. “I told you.”

Lonnie had slid the rotation back a day after Pike’s start, so Wexler, who was thirty-three and had never once been trusted with a Saturday, took the ball. He went five innings, lost four to two. The scan got done at a clinic across the river at seven on Saturday morning. The radiologist’s report landed Monday afternoon, and Voss wouldn’t say a word about it until she’d put her own eyes on the film.

Now she tapped the grey patch.

“Partial tear of the medial ligament. Grade two. Roughly half the fibers are gone, and the other half are holding on out of loyalty.” She turned around. “Josiah, I’ll say this to you first, and then Gil gets what he needs for a lineup card. All right?”

Teague’s jaw worked. “Say it in front of him.”

“You don’t need surgery.” Voss let that sit. “If you’d thrown on Thursday, I think you’d have finished that tear by the third inning and been in my operating room by June. Reconstruction, a year out. Instead you have a ligament that can heal. No throwing for eight weeks. That takes us to Tuesday, June ninth. Then twelve weeks of a graded program. If the arm does what I expect, I clear you on the first of September.”

“September.” Teague said it flat. “I was going up in June.”

“The Rails have your file,” Curtis said gently. “I called Denver at noon.”

“I know,” Voss said. “I’m sorry, Josiah.”

Teague looked at the film a while. Then he looked at Rennie, and Rennie made himself hold still.

“You told me opening day. Before anybody.” He rubbed his face with his good hand. “If I’d gone out there. Would it have gone?”

“Probably on some ordinary pitch in May,” Rennie said, “when you were winning and nobody was watching your elbow. I got lucky that it showed.”

“The hold didn’t cost you June,” Voss said. “The ligament did.”

Teague nodded slowly, at neither of them. “Thanks, Doc,” he said. “I think. Ask me tomorrow.”

Gil came off the door and stood in front of the table. He wasn’t a man who touched people to make them feel better. He stood close enough that Teague had to look up.

“You sit next to me on the bench for eight weeks,” Gil said. “I need somebody who watches what the pitcher does with his hands. You’ll be better at it than Lonnie. Don’t tell Lonnie.”

Teague laughed once, rough, and it counted.

Gil turned. “Doc. I want the program. What he can do each day and what he can’t, with dates. I’ll build the days around it. I need the dates. I don’t need a vote.”

“You ask, he decides, I sign,” Voss said, to the room more than to him. “That’s Section Four with one more step in it. Gil, you’ll get the schedule. You will not get a say in the weights.”

“Wasn’t looking for one.”

“Rennie, a draft by Thursday.”

“You’ll have it by noon tomorrow,” Rennie said. Gil’s eyes touched his for about a quarter of a second, flat and level and entirely professional, and went back to the film.

Voss caught him in the corridor afterward, with her glasses pushed up into her grey hair and the film under her arm.

“He asked for the dates and left the decision with you,” she said. “In front of the whole room, in the right order. That’s how I want it done every time. If it ever gets asked any other way, you call me. Not Curtis, not him. Me.”

“I will.”

“I know you will. Noon, you said. Don’t forget I read these.”

---

The Stockmen beat the visitors four to one that night in front of three thousand people and a cold wind. On the top step a man with a pencil behind his ear stood with his arms folded and didn’t look down the bench once, and Rennie kept his own face as plain as a wall. Teague sat beside Gil in a parka, watching the pitcher’s hands as ordered, and in the sixth he leaned over and said something that made Gil nod and send Lonnie out to the mound. Rennie decided that counted as a good first day.

On Sunday, in the equipment hall, with the door propped and Turo’s radio going two rooms down, Gil had asked in an ordinary voice whether Tuesday still stood. Rennie had said yes, once the arm was read. “That’s not a trade,” he’d said. “I just don’t want a question about Teague hanging open while you’re in my kitchen.” Gil had said that was a good reason, and had written the address on the inside of his wrist with the pencil, because he never had a decent pen.

Rennie got home at ten-forty and didn’t sit down. He spread Teague’s chart across the kitchen table and wrote the first eight weeks of the program in pencil, the way he always drafted: range of motion and grip work in week one, then the bike every day, with the legs and core kept strong so the arm would have a body to come back to. He wrote June ninth at the bottom of the page and drew a box around it. A man who couldn’t throw for eight weeks needed to see a date with a box around it. Rennie had watched a lot of men lose their nerve in the middle of a rehab, and it was nearly always in week five, when the arm felt fine and the calendar said no.

He showered, put on clean sweats, and made tea he didn’t drink. He sat in the reading chair with a book in his lap and read the same paragraph four times. At eleven-forty the buzzer went.

“I walked from the river lot,” Gil said when Rennie opened the door. “Checked behind me twice.”

“That’s more than I’d ask.”

“It’s less than I’d want.” The hallway light made his white stubble look silver. “Can I come in?”

“Please.”

He stood in the middle of the room as if somebody had told him not to touch anything. It was a one-bedroom on the river side of downtown, with a brick wall and a window onto the dark water. In the corner by the lamp sat one deep green leather reading chair with room in it for a large man if he didn’t mind company. Gil looked at the photograph on the shelf, a woman in a head wrap beside a younger woman in a blazer.

“My mother and my sister,” Rennie said. “Ngozi and Chiamaka. Houston.”

“They look like they run things.”

“They do.”

Gil sat on the sofa, which groaned. Rennie took the arm of the chair. He had rehearsed this in the shower the way he rehearsed a bad conversation with a coach.

“I’d like to say some things before anybody takes anything off. I’ve got a list.”

“Of course you do.” But one end of Gil’s mouth had gone soft, and he put his hands on his knees. “Go.”

“One. I’m out to my family and my friends. At work I don’t hide it and I don’t announce it. You’re a different case, and I know it. I won’t put your name in anyone’s ear, ever.”

“Let me say the other half of that.” Gil breathed in and let it go. “I’m not out in baseball. Thirty-five years in this game, from the first minor-league bus to today, and not one man in it knows. Not Lonnie. Not Reyes. Two people outside it know, and I’ll tell you that story some night when we’ve got the hours.” He looked down at his big hands. “And I’m not going to ask you to keep your mouth shut. If I’m only safe while you stay quiet, I’ve handed you something heavy and I’m carrying none of it. That’s lousy. So we run this so that if somebody read it out loud, it would read fine. Two grown men who didn’t break a rule.”

“That’s my number two,” Rennie said. “Nobody in the building is in the other’s chain. Dr. Voss signs my reviews and Curtis countersigns. You’re on no form anywhere. I checked again on Sunday so you wouldn’t have to ask.”

“I read the same handbook.”

“Three. No favors. A hold is mine until it’s Voss’s. If I ever tell you a man can’t play, there’s no price on the other side of it, either direction.”

“I said it opening night and I’ll say it every week you want me to.”

“Four. There’s a disclosure form in July, from the Rails. Mid-year notice is only for somebody who supervises somebody, and you don’t, so we owe nobody anything tonight. In July we sit down and decide together what to do about that form.”

“Together.” Gil tested the weight of it. “All right. July. What’s five?”

Rennie felt his face go warm. “You said a bed, with time. I haven’t forgotten. The next two Mondays are airplanes. The first one that’s ours is Des Moines, May fourth. Twenty days.”

“You counted.”

“I run a training room. I count.”

Gil laughed under his breath. “So what’s tonight?”

“Tonight is whatever we want that isn’t that,” Rennie said. “If you want anything. And the word is still the same word.”

“It’s still the same.” Gil got up off the sofa, which let him go with something like relief, and came and stood in front of the chair. “Then I want my mouth on you. I’ve been thinking about it since the equipment hall.”

“Not with you on your knees on my hardwood,” Rennie said. “Your back doesn’t need hardwood, and that knee has had a long week.”

“So what does the trainer prescribe?”

Rennie got up, pulled the wool blanket off the back of the sofa, and shook it out flat on the floor between the chair and the window. He folded it once, the long way, so it would be thick enough under a man’s shoulders.

“Floor,” he said. “On your back. Your back likes the floor, and nothing has to bend that doesn’t want to.”

Gil looked at the blanket and then at him, and one corner of his mouth went up. “You’re going to treat me.”

“I’m done working on you. I said that Thursday.” Rennie kept his voice level and felt his face give him away anyway. “I’m putting you where I can have you without you paying for it tomorrow. That’s different.”

“It’s a fine line, Doc.”

“Then don’t stand on it. Lie down on it.”

---

Gil laughed, low, and took Rennie by the jaw with one thumb and kissed him first, standing there in the lamplight. He tasted of peppermint. He must have brushed his teeth in the river lot, Rennie thought, a fifty-three-year-old ex-catcher with a toothbrush in a parking lot at midnight, and it was so tender and so ridiculous that Rennie laughed into his mouth. Gil said “What,” against his lips, and Rennie said, “Nothing. Don’t stop,” and Gil did, slow, until Rennie had both fists in the front of his shirt.

“Shirt,” Rennie said.

Gil got it off over his head. Rennie undid the khakis and pushed them down with the shorts, and Gil stepped out of them one leg at a time, careful of the knee, and stood there naked and a little shy about it, his grey chest hair thick across a broad chest and his belly hanging big and pale. His cock was already half up, thick and flushed, curving to the left.

“Now you,” Gil said. “Let me see what I’ve been working toward.”

Rennie pulled the T-shirt off and stepped out of the sweats. He was hard, and he didn’t hide it.

“Well, shit,” Gil said. “You’ve been hiding that under a training polo.”

“It’s in my contract, the polo.”

“I’d take it up with Curtis, except I’m on no form anywhere.”

He let himself down onto the blanket the way Rennie would have taught him, one hand on the chair, sitting first, then rolling back. He lay flat, and Rennie heard the long breath go out of him as his lower back met the floor.

“Oh, hell,” Gil said to the ceiling. “Damn you. That’s the stuff.”

“Told you.”

Rennie lay down beside him on his side, propped on one elbow, his chest against Gil’s arm. He put his free hand flat on the soft grey belly and moved it down slowly, and Gil watched it go.

“Here’s my rule,” Gil said. His voice had gone rough. “If anybody’s mouth is full and he wants out, he taps twice. Shoulder, thigh, whatever he can reach. The other one stops. No questions.”

“Understood.” Rennie tapped Gil’s thigh twice, lightly, to show him. “Same goes for you.”

“Same goes for me.”

Rennie bent down along Gil’s side and licked one long line up the underside of his cock from the base, and Gil’s whole body jumped on the blanket.

“Christ.”

Rennie took the head in his mouth and sucked, slowly, and let it go wet, and took it again. Gil was heavy on his tongue and hot and tasted of clean skin with salt under it. Rennie went down on him by degrees, his elbow planted and his other hand around the base, finding the curve and following it. Gil’s big hand came over and settled along Rennie’s jaw, one thumb on the bone under his ear, nowhere else, as if he’d been told and was going to obey it if it killed him.

“Christ, Doc, your mouth,” Gil said. “You could talk a man out of a ground ball with it.”

Rennie answered with a low sound in his throat, and Gil’s hips came up off the floor an inch and went down again.

“Easy,” Gil said, mostly to himself. “Easy. I’m a grown man.”

Rennie didn’t make it easy. He took Gil deeper and held him there, breathing through his nose, and let his tongue work the underside while Gil cursed the ceiling in a long, low string. The wet sounds were loud in the quiet room. Every time Rennie came up, Gil’s belly jumped under his palm, and every time he went down, Gil said “Doc” as if it had been knocked out of him.

“That,” Gil said. “Do that again. Slower. I want to know where you are.”

Rennie did it slower. Gil’s thumb pressed into the bone of his jaw, and the noise he made was nothing a man would make in a dugout.

Rennie pulled off with a long wet sound and looked up the length of him. “You’re shaking.”

“I’m fifty-three years old and flat on a floor with you doing that. I’m allowed.” Gil’s thumb stroked once along the jaw. “Come up here.”

“I’m busy.”

“Come up here anyway. I said I wanted my mouth on you and I meant it. Kneel over me.”

Rennie got up on his knees. “Over you where?”

“Up here.” Gil patted his own chest, the thick grey fur over his breastbone. “A knee each side. I’ll do the rest from down here. My back won’t feel a thing and my knee can sit this one out.”

Rennie looked at him, at the big man laid out on the folded blanket with his cock wet from Rennie’s mouth and his face red, asking.

“Yes,” Rennie said. “Say it if I’m too heavy.”

“You’re not too heavy. Get up here.”

Rennie swung a knee over and knelt astride Gil’s chest, knees in the blanket up near his armpits, and walked himself forward until his thighs were either side of Gil’s shoulders and his cock hung over Gil’s face. He put one hand down on the seat of the green chair behind Gil’s head to hold himself steady. From up there Gil looked enormous and wide and very pleased with himself.

“Now there’s a view,” Gil said, and lifted his head and took Rennie into his mouth.

Rennie’s hand closed on the leather. “Oh, God.”

Gil sucked him from underneath, slow and greedy, his lips sliding down and his tongue flat on the underside. Then his big hands came up and spread over the backs of Rennie’s thighs and on up to his ass, a full handful each side, and pulled him forward, so Rennie’s cock went deeper into the wet heat of his mouth.

“Skip.”

Gil let him slip out. “Move. You’re the one up there. Fuck my mouth, Doc. I’ll hold on to you and you do the work.”

“You’ll tap.”

“I’ll tap.” Gil squeezed his ass once. “Go on.”

Rennie moved. He rocked his hips forward into Gil’s mouth, careful at first, shallow, watching Gil’s face for anything that said stop. Nothing did. Gil’s eyes were half shut and his cheeks hollowed every time Rennie pulled back, and he made a low hungry noise around him that Rennie felt in his balls. Gil’s hands on his ass set the pace for a while, pulling him in, letting him back, and then let go and simply held on, and the pace was Rennie’s.

The wet noise of it filled the room, and under it the creak of the leather in Rennie’s fist and Gil’s breath coming hard through his nose. Rennie’s thighs burned and he didn’t care. He looked down at Gil’s beard shining wet, at Gil’s eyes fixed on him, and heard himself groan out loud, a long helpless sound that came back off the brick.

Gil came up for air, hoarse. “Let me hear that. Nobody in this building but me.”

“God, Skip,” Rennie heard himself say. His voice came out low and rough, a voice he didn’t use at work. “The manager of the Omaha Stockmen on my floor with his mouth full of me. If the Rails could see this.”

Gil laughed with his mouth full, and Rennie felt it go up his spine. He pulled off for one breath, beard shining.

“Louder, Doc. Tell me what you need.”

“Your mouth. Deeper. I want to go down your throat.”

“Then do it.”

Rennie pushed in slow until the head met the back of Gil’s throat, and Gil took it, breathing hard through his nose, his fingers digging into Rennie’s ass. Rennie held there a second, two, and felt Gil swallow once around him, and pulled back gasping.

“Fuck. Skip. Fuck.”

“Again.”

He did it again. And again, finding a rhythm that was slow and deep, his hand gripping the chair seat and his thighs shaking either side of Gil’s head. The lamp threw his shadow across the brick, huge and rocking. Gil sucked him on every pull back and moaned on every push in, and his big palm came round once and cupped Rennie’s balls from underneath and rolled them, and Rennie’s breath went to pieces.

“I’m going to go,” Rennie said. “Skip, I’m going to go. You want it?”

Gil didn’t come off. He looked up the length of Rennie’s body with his mouth full and nodded, once, and pulled him in by the ass with both hands.

“In your mouth,” Rennie said, half a question.

Gil pulled back just long enough. “In my mouth. You did it for me Thursday. Give it here.”

Rennie gave it. He pushed in deep and his whole body locked, his hand twisting the leather, and he came with a shout that bounced off the brick, pulse after pulse into Gil’s mouth. Gil held him there by the ass and swallowed, and kept sucking, slower and slower, until Rennie was shaking and tapping his shoulder twice and pulling away because it was too much.

Gil let him go at once.

Rennie sat back on Gil’s chest, breathing like he’d run the stadium steps. Gil wiped his beard with the back of his hand and grinned up at him.

“Well,” Gil said. “Somebody’s been saving up.”

“Shut up.” Rennie was laughing. “Shut up. God.”

He climbed off and knelt on the blanket at Gil’s hip. Gil’s cock lay heavy and dark against his belly, leaking.

“Your turn,” Rennie said. “Lie still. Don’t help.”

“I don’t know how to not help.”

“Learn.” Rennie reached up onto the side table for the tube of water-based lube he’d left there when he made the tea, which he had done on purpose and would admit to never. He warmed a palmful between his hands first, the way he’d warmed them before they went on Gil’s lower back on Thursday. “You came in Thursday asking for the knee and the back. I never got to the rest.”

“Doc.” Gil’s voice cracked on it.

Rennie took him in both slick hands.

He knew what hands could do. He’d spent twelve years learning a body through them. He worked Gil the same way he read a muscle, slow and attentive, one fist sliding up over the head as the other came down to the base, over and over, never quite the same twice, watching what made Gil’s belly jump and doing more of it. His thumb found the soft place under the head and pressed there and turned. Gil’s hands opened and closed on the blanket, and his heels slid on the wool. He was loud now and past caring, a big cracked voice saying Rennie’s name and Christ and slow, keep it slow, over and over, his belly jumping with every pass of Rennie’s thumb.

“Oh, that’s,” Gil said, and didn’t finish. “Oh, Rennie. Oh, those hands.”

“I’m reading you.”

“Yeah?” Gil’s belly jumped under his wrist. “You read every man on the roster like this?”

“I read every man on the roster with my clothes on and a clipboard. You’re the only one who gets this.” Rennie slowed down on purpose until Gil swore at him. “Manners, Skip.”

“Please, Doc. Please. I’m asking. What’s it say?”

“Says you’ve been flat on your back thinking about my mouth for ten minutes and you’re nearly there.” Rennie twisted, slow, on the upstroke. “Says you want to go. Go on, Skip. On your belly. Give it up for me.”

Gil’s heels pushed into the blanket. His big chest heaved under the grey fur, and his hips came up off the floor, and Rennie kept the rhythm exactly where it was and did not change it by a hair.

“Rennie,” Gil said, and then it was just a groan, long and rough, and he came in hot thick pulses across his own belly and into the grey fur below his navel, his whole heavy body shaking on the blanket, while Rennie kept working him slow through every pulse and watched his face.

When it was over Gil lay with one arm thrown over his eyes.

“Christ almighty,” he said at last. “Nothing that good has happened to me on a floor since I quit catching, and catching came with shin guards.”

Rennie started laughing and couldn’t stop, and then Gil was laughing too, a big wheezing laugh that shook the mess on his belly, and Rennie had to reach for a towel before it went anywhere it shouldn’t.

Rennie cleaned them both up. Gil got himself off the floor the way he’d got down, one hand on the chair, and lowered himself into the green leather, naked, and stretched the bad leg out. Rennie sat on the blanket with his back against Gil’s shins.

Outside the river slid past, black and slow, with the far bank’s lights laid across it.

“I don’t say a lot of this,” Gil said after a while, to the top of Rennie’s head. “So you get it once. Most of the men I’ve been with, I was watching the door the whole time. Tonight I forgot where the door was.” He put one hand on Rennie’s shoulder. “I should go. I’ve got Curtis at nine, and a knee that’s going to tell me about this all week.”

Rennie got him a glass of water and found his shirt. He walked him to the door in his sweats. They stood in the hallway with the lamp behind them, and Gil looked down the corridor at the stairwell sign, and then at Rennie.

“Doc,” he said. “I need to ask you a thing, and you can say no.”

“Ask.”

“If she’d come back today with a different answer. If it had been the knife, a year out, and I’d walked in here tonight with a face like a wet barn and said every wrong thing a man can say.” His voice was quiet and steady and not light at all. “Would you have opened the door?”