Extra Innings, Chapter 4 · Russ’s Place

“Fern gets a glass of water every other day, and I mean a glass, not the pitcher,” Russ Hardwick said, walking backwards down his own hallway with the keys held up like a game ball. “The air unit in the bedroom rattles at two in the morning. You hit the left side of the box, flat hand, once. Not a fist. Gil, are you listening, or are you looking at my carpet?”

“I’m looking at your carpet.”

“It’s new.”

“It’s beige, Russ.”

“It’s oatmeal. The lady at the store said oatmeal.” Russ was fifty-five and built like the pitcher he had been, long in the arm, a little stooped now from years in the stands behind home plate with a radar gun in his lap. He dropped the keys into Gil’s palm. “Guest room’s made. I’m in Jackson till Sunday watching a Double-A series nobody else wants to sit through. Leave the key under the concrete frog by the door.”

“Thanks for this.”

“Thank me by not letting your knee near my stairs.” Russ looked at Rennie. “That’s why you’re here, right? Somebody’s got to look at that thing after a flight.”

“That’s part of it,” Rennie said, which was true.

Russ picked up a duffel by the door, and at the threshold he turned and pointed at Gil with two fingers.

“Eleven years that man caught my bad sliders,” he said to Rennie. “Never once heard him say thank you. Now he says it for a condo. Memphis does something to people.”

Then he was gone down the outside steps, and a car door shut in the lot, and the condo was quiet enough to hear the fridge.

It was a second-floor place in a brick block off Madison, Russ from wall to wall: a framed jersey from 1999 over the couch, Gil’s, signed the year they lost the division, and a fern on a stool by the balcony door.

“This was a stupid idea,” Gil said.

“It was a good idea. Nobody in the hotel needs to see me knock on your door.”

They had flown in Monday, the off day, a charter out of Eppley that sat on the tarmac an extra forty minutes, Gil’s right leg locked straight into the aisle. It hadn’t been a bus. His back was fine. The knee was the knee, swollen at the joint line the way it always was after he’d kept it bent too long.

Rennie looked at it on Russ’s couch, under the 1999 jersey. Gil sat at one end with his trouser leg rolled to mid-thigh, and Rennie sat on the coffee table facing him, and took the knee in both hands.

The scar ran up the outside of it, white and old and puckered at the top. Under his thumbs the fluid sat where he expected it, a soft puff on either side of the tendon. He pressed in, watched Gil’s face, moved his thumbs up into the quad, down along the hamstring. He bent the leg slowly and felt for the click and found it at sixty degrees, the same place it had been at in April.

“Same as spring,” Rennie said. “It doesn’t like airplanes. Ice it. Russ has three bags of frozen peas, which tells me Russ has a shoulder he doesn’t talk about.”

Gil almost smiled. “Right one. Nineteen ninety-nine.”

He kept his hands on the knee a moment longer than the exam needed, warm palms on either side of the joint, and then he took them away and set them on his own thighs, and he looked up and said it the way he’d said it in April on his table.

“That’s the knee done. I’m done working on you.”

Gil looked at him for a long moment. His eyes were grey, and they did not go anywhere fast.

“Tonight,” Gil said. “After.”

“After,” Rennie said. “If you still want to after the lefty.”

“I’ll want to after the lefty. I’ll want to after the lefty hits two of mine.” Gil rolled his trouser leg down. “Go get on the bus, Doc. I’ll get on it after you so it looks like I came from somewhere.”

---

They lost five to two to a Memphis lefty who threw ninety-six with no idea where it was going. In the fifth Gil came out to talk to the plate umpire about a strike call that was not a strike and went back without being thrown out, which Lonnie said afterwards was a career first. Rennie spent the ninth with Reyes, who had taken a foul tip off his left forearm and did not want anybody to know he wanted it looked at.

At a quarter to midnight Rennie walked out the hotel’s side door into the warm Memphis dark and took a cab nine blocks. The key was under the frog.

Inside, every light was off except the one over the stove. Gil was standing at the balcony door with a glass of water in his hand, looking at the fern.

“I gave it the glass,” he said without turning. “Then I didn’t know if it was every other day starting today or every other day starting yesterday.”

“Russ watered it this morning. You’ve drowned it.”

Rennie dropped his bag by the couch. He came up behind Gil and did not touch him and stood close enough that he could smell the clubhouse soap on him and under it the man.

“The umpire,” Rennie said.

“Was wrong.”

“Lonnie says you didn’t get thrown out.”

“Lonnie says a lot.” Gil set the glass down on the stool beside the fern. He turned around. In the stove light his white stubble looked like frost, and the lines around his eyes were deep. “I didn’t get thrown out because I wanted to come here tonight more than I wanted to tell that man where his strike zone was.”

“That’s a romantic thing to say about an umpire.”

“That’s the most romantic I get.”

Rennie put one hand flat on Gil’s chest, on the grey hair at the open collar of his shirt, and left it there. Under his palm Gil’s heart was slow and heavy.

“I’d like you to fuck me tonight,” Rennie said. “In a bed. I’ve thought about it since Des Moines, and I’ve thought about it sober, and I’m sober now. That’s what I want.”

Gil’s breath went out of him slowly.

“Yes,” he said. “I want that. I want you.” He lifted one hand and covered Rennie’s with it and pressed it into his chest. “Time stops it.”

“Time stops it. Same for you.”

“Same for me.”

---

Russ’s guest room had a queen bed with a quilt somebody’s aunt had made, all small blue and white squares, and Gil pulled it off and folded it over a chair, because, he said, he was not going to explain to Russ what happened to his aunt’s quilt. Under it the sheets were plain white and smelled of a dryer sheet. The air unit sat in the window and droned.

They undressed each other the way they had undressed each other the other times, with a kind of attention. Rennie unbuttoned Gil’s shirt and pushed it back off the heavy shoulders and put his mouth to the middle of Gil’s chest, where the grey hair grew thickest, and Gil stood still for it, and his belly shook with a laugh against Rennie’s mouth. Gil undid Rennie’s belt. He did it slowly, looking at the buckle like it was a pitch he’d have to call, and then pushed Rennie’s jeans and shorts down together, and Rennie’s cock came up hard against his belly, and Gil looked at it and said, “Well. You weren’t lying about since Des Moines.”

“I don’t lie about anything.”

“I know. That’s the trouble with you.”

Gil was hard too, thick and curved to the left the way it always was, pushing out under his own gut. Rennie took it in his hand and stroked it once, base to tip, and felt Gil’s whole body lean toward him for it.

They kissed standing up. Gil kissed the way he talked, slow and flat and like he was in no hurry and meant every word. His hands went down Rennie’s back and spread across his ass and held him there, and Rennie pushed against him, cock to cock, belly to belly, until Gil broke off and put his forehead down on Rennie’s shoulder and breathed.

“How do you want it, Doc?”

“On my front,” he said. “Knees apart. With you over me. I want your weight on me.”

Gil pulled back far enough to look at him.

“All of it? I’m two-seventy.”

“Most of it. Your knee stays out of it. You keep your knees inside mine and your weight on your forearms and your hips. I’ll say when.”

“You’ll tell me.”

“I’ll tell you.”

Gil looked at the bed, at the white sheets, and Rennie could see him setting it up in his head, the way he set up a defensive shift: where the knee goes, where the back goes, where everybody stands.

“Towel,” Gil said. “Under your hips. So I’m not trying to get in at a bad angle with you flat as a board.”

“You stole my line.”

“You can have it back after.”

Rennie got a bath towel from the hall closet, a thick one, faded green, and folded it twice into a pad and laid it in the middle of the bed. Gil had put a strip of condoms and the bottle of water-based lube from his kit on the nightstand while he was out of the room. That was all there was to that.

Rennie lay down on his front with the folded towel under his hips. It tipped his ass up a few inches off the sheet and pressed his cock down into the cotton. He spread his knees a little. He put his arms up and folded them under his cheek, and turned his head on them so he could see the room, the window, the air unit, Gil standing at the edge of the bed looking down at him with his cock in his hand.

“Doc,” Gil said, low. “I could stand here all night with that ass in front of me.”

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

The bed dipped. Gil came down onto it on his left knee first, then got the right one up with a grunt, and knelt between Rennie’s spread legs. His hands came down on the backs of Rennie’s thighs and slid up them, slow, thumbs on the inner side, up over the curve of his ass. He held him open with both hands and looked. Rennie heard him breathe.

Then the cap of the lube, and the cold of it, and Gil’s thick thumb, warm, pressing on him.

“Tell me,” Gil said.

“Go in. One.”

One finger. Gil’s fingers were big, and two of them bent where they’d been broken behind the plate, and the first one went in slow as poured honey. Rennie pushed his face into his arm and opened for it. Gil held it still inside him. Then he moved it, in and out, short, and crooked it, and found the spot on the second try, and Rennie’s hips jerked down into the towel.

“Hello,” Gil said, low and pleased. “That’s the spot you’ve been hiding from me.”

“I wasn’t hiding anything.”

“You were. It was in Des Moines. I couldn’t get to it sideways.” He went over it again, slow. “I’m getting to it now.”

Rennie made a sound into his arm he didn’t plan to make.

“Don’t swallow it,” Gil said. “This is Russ’s place. Russ is in Jackson. Nobody in this building is anybody to us.”

“Two,” Rennie said.

Two fingers. The stretch came and sat in him, a full ache, and he breathed into it and let his hips rock back against Gil’s hand, and Gil let him set it. For a while there was only that, Gil’s fingers working him open, the rattle of the air unit, the sound of his own breath going out against his forearm. Gil talked to him low and steady while he did it, not sweet, just plain.

“You’re opening up for me. I can feel you pulling on me. You want something bigger than two fingers, Doc?”

“Yes.”

“Name it.”

“Your cock. In me. Now.”

Gil took his fingers out. Rennie heard the wrapper tear open and the snap of latex and the lube again, and then Gil’s weight came forward over him. Gil got one forearm down on the mattress by Rennie’s shoulder, then the other. His knees were inside Rennie’s knees, his thighs against the inside of Rennie’s thighs, and his belly lay down on the small of Rennie’s back, hot and furred and heavy, and Rennie felt the whole size of him settle over him like a roof.

“Too much?”

“No. More of it.”

Gil let more of himself down. His chest came down on Rennie’s shoulder blades, the grey hair rough on his skin. His breath was in Rennie’s ear. His cock lay along the crack of Rennie’s ass, thick and slick in the condom, and he rocked it there once, twice, not in yet.

“I’m going to take you slow,” Gil said into his ear, “because you’re on your belly and I’m a fat old catcher lying on you and if I hurry I’ll do something I can’t take back. You stop me any time.”

“I know.”

Gil reached down between them with one hand and lined himself up and pushed.

It was a lot. Flat like this, with Gil coming in from above and behind at a low angle, the head of him pressing in felt bigger than it had on its side in Des Moines, and Rennie’s body knew it before he did. He went tight. His breath caught.

“Wait,” he said.

Gil stopped. He stopped dead, the head of him barely in, his whole body gone still over Rennie’s back, the way a runner stops on a called-back pitch. He didn’t push. He didn’t ask why. He held his weight on his forearms and waited, breathing slow in Rennie’s ear, and Rennie felt the stillness of him all down his back.

Rennie breathed. Out, in. He pushed his hips up a little off the towel to change the angle, and reached back with one hand and found Gil’s hip and held it, not pulling, just holding.

“Okay,” he said. “Lower. Come in lower and slower. And stay in once you’re in.”

“Lower and slower,” Gil said. “You’ve got it.”

He sank his hips down an inch. He came in again, at the new angle, slow, slow, and this time Rennie’s body let him. He felt the whole thickness going in, the curve of it bending to the left inside him, and he pressed his open mouth to his arm and groaned, loud and long, and the groan went on until Gil’s hips were flush against his ass and Gil’s balls were against him and Gil was in to the base, and then Gil just lay there, inside him, heavy on him, and let him feel it.

“Fuck,” Gil said into the back of his shoulder. “Fuck, Doc. You’re so hot in there.”

Rennie couldn’t talk yet. He nodded into his arm.

“I’m not moving until you tell me.”

“Move,” Rennie said. “Small.”

Gil moved small. He drew back an inch and sank back in, his weight coming down with it, and the towel pushed up under Rennie’s hips and his cock ground down into the cotton, and the head of Gil’s cock dragged over the spot he’d found with his fingers. Rennie’s breath broke out of him in a grunt, and his cock jerked hard against the cotton.

“Yeah?” Gil said.

“Yes. Again.”

Gil did it again. And again. He found a rhythm that wasn’t fast, long slow strokes with his whole weight in them, each one pinning Rennie down into the bed and dragging over him on the way out and pushing him down into the towel on the way in. It was like being held under warm water.

“How’s it sit, Doc?”

“I like your weight. I like you over me. I like being under all of you.” Rennie turned his face toward Gil’s breath. “You weigh what a dugout weighs.”

Gil laughed low, right into his ear, and the laugh went down his body and into Rennie’s ass and Rennie groaned again.

“Russ’s house,” Gil said. “Oatmeal carpet.”

“Shut up and fuck me.”

“That I can do,” Gil said, and Rennie pushed back up into the next stroke, and Gil swore and lost the joke.

He picked up the pace a little. Not much. He couldn’t pound in this position and didn’t try. Instead he rolled his hips, grinding deep and slow, his belly sliding on Rennie’s back with sweat now, and the sound of it was wet and slapping and filthy in the little room with the aunt’s quilt on the chair.

“Noisy,” Gil said, and drove in slow and deep to prove his point. “All season you’ve been the quietest man in that clubhouse. And you’re loud for me.”

“Only for you.”

“Good.”

Rennie had his face pressed into his forearm and his mouth open. His cock was hard as a bat handle under him, pressed into the folded towel, every stroke from Gil rubbing it against the cotton, and he could feel himself leaking into it. He didn’t touch himself. He didn’t want to. He had both hands on the sheet up by his head now, gripping it, and Gil’s hands came forward on the mattress and found them and laced his fingers over Rennie’s fingers and held them down.

That did something to him. He heard himself say, “Skip, Skip, Skip,” and couldn’t stop.

“I’m here. Your hands are mine till you say.”

“Don’t let go of them.”

“I’m not letting go of anything.”

Gil’s breathing changed. Rennie felt it change against his back, felt Gil’s belly tighten, felt the strokes get shorter and the grind get deeper. Gil put his mouth against the back of Rennie’s shoulder, not quite a kiss.

“Doc,” he said. “I’m going to come. I want to come in you. In the rubber, in you. You want that?”

“Yes. In me. Do it.”

Gil pushed in deep and stayed and ground, and his fingers tightened on Rennie’s, and he made a low, long sound that Rennie felt through his own spine, and came. Rennie felt him jerking in the condom, deep inside, three, four, five times, Gil’s whole heavy body shaking over him and the shake pushing him down into the towel.

Then Gil was still, panting, his forehead against the back of Rennie’s shoulder.

“Holy hell,” Gil said into his shoulder, still twitching deep inside him.

“I haven’t gone yet,” Rennie said.

He was so close he could barely talk. Gil lifted his head.

“I know you’re not. I can feel you. Tell me what you want.”

“Let me turn over. I want to see you when I go.”

Gil reached down and held the base of the condom and pulled out slow, and Rennie made a sound at the emptiness that he’d be embarrassed about tomorrow. Gil knotted the condom and dropped it on the nightstand on a tissue. Rennie rolled onto his back off the wet towel, knees still apart, and Gil came down on his left side along him, one heavy thigh over Rennie’s shin, his belly against Rennie’s hip, propped on an elbow so his face hung just above Rennie’s.

Rennie took his own cock in his hand. He was wet at the head from leaking into the towel all that time, and one pull brought his back up off the sheet.

“That’s yours,” Gil said. “I’m not touching it. I’m watching it.”

“Watch, then.”

“I’m watching. You opened up for me like you’d been saving it all season. You’re still shaking, I can feel it in your hip. I’m too old to have gone that quick, and I couldn’t hold out in you. Now you. Go on, Doc. Faster if you want it faster.”

Rennie wanted it faster. He jerked himself hard and short, his other hand gone up to grip Gil’s forearm where it lay across his chest, and Gil’s grey eyes stayed on his face the whole time, steady, not going anywhere. Rennie came with his heels pushing into the mattress and his mouth open, shouting it out at Russ’s ceiling, splashing his own belly up to the sternum in long pulses while Gil’s hand found his ribs and stayed there and Gil said low and rough, “Yeah. Yeah. There. Every drop of it on you. Empty it.”

He emptied out.

---

Afterwards they lay there for a long time. Gil rolled onto his back eventually, slow, his right leg straight, and Rennie wiped himself with the dry end of the towel and dropped it on the floor and lay on his side facing Gil with his head on his own arm.

The air unit droned on. Somewhere in the lot a car alarm went off and stopped.

“I’ll wash Russ’s towel,” Rennie said.

“You’ll wash Russ’s towel. I’ll explain it if he asks.”

“He’s not the asking type.”

“He’s not the asking type,” Gil agreed. He was looking at the ceiling. His chest went up and down. “He doesn’t ask, because he doesn’t know, because I never told him. Eleven years I caught for that man. He came to my wedding. He’s been in my house in Phoenix. He doesn’t know.”

Rennie waited.

“You know about my wife,” Gil said. “You know there was one.”

“Carla. You said her name in April.”

“Carla.” Gil rubbed his face with his hand. “We were married nineteen years. I met her in Double-A in Akron, at a bar where the players went, and she was a nursing student who thought ballplayers were the stupidest men on earth, and I spent a whole summer proving her right and she married me anyway. We had Gabby in two thousand. I was in the bigs by then. I was gone eight months a year.”

“That’s hard on anybody.”

“It was hard on her. It was easy on me. That’s the thing I carry.” Gil kept his eyes on the ceiling. “I knew what I was before I knew her. I knew in high school in Cleveland. And I just put it in a drawer. You do that in a clubhouse. Everybody’s got a drawer. I put that in mine and married a woman I loved, and I did love her, Doc, I want you to know that. I wasn’t pretending with her about that. I was pretending about the rest.”

“How long?”

“Until I was forty-four.” Gil was quiet for a moment. “Two thousand seventeen. I’d been coaching six years, Single-A, Double-A, and I was home for the winter, and she was sitting at the kitchen table doing the bills, and she looked up at me and asked what was wrong with me. Not mean. Just like a nurse. Like she was asking where it hurt.”

“And you told her.”

“I told her. I sat down at the table and I told her all of it.” Gil let out a breath. “She didn’t throw anything. She sat there for a long time. Then she said she’d always known there was a room in me she didn’t have a key to, and now she knew what was in it, and she didn’t know if she could live in a house with a room like that. A year later she couldn’t. That was fair. She’d given me nineteen years, and I’d given her half of me.”

“And Gabby?”

At the name Gil’s face changed. It went softer around the eyes.

“Gabby was seventeen when I told Carla. We waited till after the divorce, after she’d turned eighteen. Carla said we tell her together or not at all. So we told her together, at the same table. Gabby looked at me, and looked at her mother, and said, ‘Is that it? I thought somebody was dying.'” Gil laughed, short. “She’s an ER nurse now. Phoenix. Twenty-six. She thinks everybody’s dying, so I guess she was practicing.”

Rennie smiled. “She sounds like her mother.”

“She sounds like her mother. She looks like me, poor thing.” Gil turned his head on the pillow and looked at him for the first time since he’d started. “That’s everything. Carla knows. Gabby knows. A couple of men I met in Phoenix the first years after. Nobody in baseball. Not Russ. Not Lonnie. Not Reyes. I’ve been in this game thirty-five years and nobody in baseball knows, and now you do, and you’re in baseball.”

“I’m in baseball,” Rennie said. “I’m also lying in Russ’s guest room with your come drying on his nightstand.”

Gil looked at him a second longer, and then the laugh came out of him all at once, a real one, loud, the bed shaking with it.

“In a knot,” he said. “On a tissue. I’m not an animal.”

“You’re a little bit of an animal.”

“I’m fifty-three. I’m allowed.”

Rennie reached over and put his hand flat on Gil’s chest again, where his heart was. It was slower now.

“Thank you for telling me,” he said.

“I wanted you to know before somebody else told you a worse version.” Gil covered Rennie’s hand with his own. “And I wanted to tell somebody in a bed, for once. Not at a kitchen table.”

On the nightstand, Gil’s phone buzzed. It lit up the ceiling blue. Gil turned his head and looked at it.

“Gabby,” he said.

It buzzed again. And again. He didn’t pick it up. He lay there with his hand over Rennie’s and watched it ring, five times, six, until it stopped and the blue went off the ceiling, and there was only the stove light from the hall.

“She’s on nights,” Gil said. “She calls on her break. It’s not midnight yet in Phoenix.”

“You can call her back. I’ll go wash the towel.”

“No. Stay.” Gil was quiet. Then he sat up, slow, with a hand under his right knee to swing the leg off the bed, and reached for the phone. He sat on the edge of the bed in Russ’s guest room with his back to Rennie, the heavy shoulders, the grey hair down his spine, and put his thumb on her name, and held the phone to his ear.

Rennie lay still and watched his back.

“Hey, Gabs,” Gil said. “No, I’m up. I’m in Memphis. We lost.” A pause. “No. No, I’m okay. Listen. I’m at Russ’s place. There’s somebody here with me.” Another pause, longer, and Gil’s free hand went out behind him on the sheet without looking, palm up, and Rennie put his own hand in it. “Yeah. Yeah, him. The trainer. I’ll tell you about him.”