Extra Innings, Chapter 6 · Delay

The radar loop on Rennie’s phone ran eight frames and started over. A green smear over Lincoln. A yellow band behind it, and inside the yellow a hard red knot about the size of a thumbprint, crawling east along I-80 at forty miles an hour toward the dot that was Packinghouse Field.

He watched it go round four times sitting on the bench in the training room with the phone between his knees. Then the first drops hit the skylight over the hydrotherapy tub, fat ones, a handful, and somebody out in the clubhouse said “Here she comes,” and the PA overhead said the same thing in longer words.

Top of the fourth, Sunday, June twenty-first. Stockmen up two to one on Iowa. Wexler had been cruising.

By the time Rennie got to the dugout the grounds crew was already running the tarp. Fourteen of them in yellow slickers, pulling the big roll off its tube along the third-base line and walking it across the infield with the wind trying to take it, the canvas bellying up like a sail, two men lying flat on the leading edge to keep it down. The crowd stood up under the overhang and cheered them. The rain came in sideways off the left-field packinghouse wall, and in thirty seconds the infield was covered and the outfield was a lake.

Gil stood at the top step with his arms folded, getting wet, looking at the sky.

“How long?” he said without turning.

“Radar says ninety minutes of that, then a gap, then another line behind it.” Rennie held the phone up so Gil could see the red knot. “I’d say two hours if you’re lucky.”

“I’m not lucky. I’m a manager.” Gil wiped rain off his face with his whole palm. “Wexler’s done, then. Nobody sits for two hours and comes back throwing strikes.”

“His arm will tell you. Ask him in an hour.”

Gil glanced back at Rennie, and his mouth moved, almost a smile. Then the umpire crew chief came down the dugout steps with water running off the bill of his cap, and Gil went to talk to him, and Rennie went back up the tunnel.

---

It was a long delay.

The clubhouse settled in. Reyes and Frye started a card game at the long table with a deck that was missing the four of clubs, and played around the hole without discussing it. Pike, nine days off his hold and throwing again, lay on the floor of the video room with his feet up on a chair watching a cooking show. Lonnie fell asleep in the manager’s office in Gil’s chair with his half-moons pushed up into his hair. Turo Salcedo went from locker to locker in his green apron collecting wet towels and handing out dry ones, and when he got to Rennie he handed him two.

“One for you,” Turo said. “One for Skip, if you see him before I do.” He tipped his head toward the tunnel and the dugout. “He stood out there twenty minutes. Man’s soaked.”

Rennie looked at him. Turo looked back with his flat, kind, unbothered face, a man who had been running clubhouses since before Rennie was born and handed out towels to whoever was nearest.

“Thank you, Turo.”

“Mm,” Turo said, and moved on to Frye.

At the forty-minute mark the rain stopped. The crowd cheered. The grounds crew came out and stood around the edge of the tarp in their slickers and looked at the sky. At forty-eight minutes it came back heavier.

Rennie did his round. Wexler’s arm, iced and wrapped, felt fine, and Wexler said he felt fine, and Rennie wrote it down. Teague, who was on day twelve of a throwing programme that called for flat ground at sixty feet and nothing else, wanted to know if he could play catch in the batting cage to keep loose. Rennie said no. Teague said it was worth asking, and Rennie said it always was. Reyes’s left forearm, the old foul-tip bruise from Memphis, had gone the colour of a plum and then yellow and was nearly gone.

At an hour and ten he went down under the third-base stands to the tarp room.

He had a reason, a real one, with paperwork behind it. The first-aid kit the grounds crew kept down there had been short on burn gel at the start of the month, and the head groundskeeper had asked him to restock it, and he hadn’t. Fourteen men had just hauled a tarp in a lightning storm. He took the box of supplies from the training room and walked down the concrete stairs, through the staff-only gate, and along the corridor under the seats, past the bat storage and the old ticket office, to the steel door at the end with TARP painted on it in yellow.

Inside it smelled of wet canvas, rubber and cut grass.

The tarp room was long and low, the stands slanting overhead in grey concrete steps. Down one side hung the slickers on pegs, dripping onto the floor. Down the other, the spare tarp lay on its steel rack, a second infield cover rolled tight onto a fat cardboard tube, waist-high and nine feet long, like a sleeping animal. At the far end there was a utility sink, a mop bucket, a workbench with a coffee maker on it and the first-aid kit screwed to the wall above.

The grounds crew were all up top, in the tunnel behind the dugout where they could watch the sky. Their slickers were on their backs and their rakes were in the dugout; nothing they needed until the call was down here.

Rennie restocked the kit. Burn gel. Gauze. Two instant cold packs. He was writing the date on the inside of the lid when the door at the other end opened and closed, and he heard the bolt go over.

He didn’t turn round right away.

“Turo said you had a towel for me,” Gil said.

“Turo talks too much.”

“Turo has said eleven words to me since April. Six of them were today.” Gil’s shoes squeaked on the wet floor as he came down the room. “He said, ‘Doc’s got your towel. Tarp room.’ He tells everybody where everybody is. It’s half his job.”

Rennie turned. Gil was standing by the end of the tarp rack in a soaked team pullover with his cap in his hand. His hair was plastered flat and grey, and water was still running out of his white stubble and down his neck into his collar. He looked enormous and wet and very slightly embarrassed.

Rennie took the second towel from the workbench and threw it. Gil caught it against his chest, one-handed, a catcher’s catch.

“The other door,” Rennie said.

“Locked. I came in through the crew corridor. Both bolted.” Gil rubbed the towel over his head, then down his face, then wrung it between his fists. “Crew chief says another hour minimum. They want to wait for the second line to go through and then decide whether to call it.”

“Will they call it?”

“Not if I can help it. We’re up a run.” Gil looked down at the towel. “You’re not working on me tonight.”

“No. I’m not.”

“Tell me anyway. I like the rule.”

“I haven’t touched you as a patient today,” Rennie said. “I’m not going to. That’s the whole report.”

Gil nodded, slowly, and kept looking at him, and there was no sound in the room but the rain drumming on the stands overhead, a long dull roar that came down through the concrete and made the slickers on their pegs shiver.

“Rennie,” Gil said.

He almost never used the name. The name went through Rennie and stayed.

“I want you,” Gil said. “Right now, down here, with ten thousand people over our heads eating hot dogs. I know it’s stupid and I know there’s a game. I’ve wanted you since you held the phone up on the step. You can say no.”

“I’m not going to say no.”

“Then say the other thing.”

“Yes,” Rennie said. “Fuck me. Here. Fast, because we’ve got an hour and I’d like to be dressed for the last forty minutes of it.” He set the pen down on the workbench. “Time stops it.”

“Time stops it, either of us.”

---

They didn’t take much off. There wasn’t time, and the room was cold, and if anybody came down the crew corridor and tried the bolt they needed to be decent inside a minute. Rennie toed off one shoe and pulled that leg out of his trousers and shorts and let the rest hang off the other ankle. Gil peeled the wet pullover off, let it fall on the concrete, and waited in the undershirt, belt open, trousers shoved down his thighs, his cock out and already hard, thick, curving off to the left, the head dark.

Rennie looked at it and felt his own jump.

“That’s from standing in the rain?”

“That’s from you throwing me a towel.” Gil came close. He set a hand on Rennie’s hip, and then his mouth was on Rennie’s. He tasted of rain and of the coffee from the dugout pot. It was an impatient kiss, all his weight behind it, and Rennie pushed back and got his hands into the wet undershirt at Gil’s sides and held on.

“Tell me where,” Gil said against his mouth.

Rennie had already looked. He’d looked when he walked in, before he’d let himself think about why he was looking.

Beside the spare roll, on a pallet, the crew kept the small covers: mound tarp, plate tarp, the two bullpen sheets, folded square and stacked one on another until the pile came up level with the top of the rack. Hip-high on Gil. Dry, because it was under the stands and nobody had touched it all month.

“On my back on the bullpen covers,” he said. “You stand. Both feet flat, weight even, and the knee doesn’t bend past what it bends walking upstairs. And I want to watch you do it. Last time all I had was a towel.”

Gil studied the pile the way he studied a mound before a start. He leaned his weight on it. Folded canvas, forty layers of it on a hardwood pallet. It didn’t give.

“It’ll hold you?”

“It holds four bullpens’ worth of rain gear. It’ll hold me.”

Rennie sat on the edge and lay back. The canvas was cold through his shirt and smelled of the field, rubber and grass. He shifted until his ass was over the lip of the stack. He set his bare right foot flat on the canvas beside his hip, knee up, and put the left one, still in its sock with the trouser leg bunched round the ankle, on the bottom rail of the tarp rack, so his knees fell open and stayed open with nobody holding them. Then he looked up.

Gil was standing there with the towel still in one hand, looking down at him.

“Rennie,” Gil said quietly, and nothing after it.

“The bag. Inside pocket of my jacket on the bench.”

Gil found the condom and the little bottle of water-based lube and came back with them. That was all the ceremony there was. He tore the packet, got the condom on, and slicked it, then poured more on two fingers and set his other hand on the inside of Rennie’s raised knee.

“I know your body,” he said. “I’m still going to open you first.”

“You don’t have to go slow.”

“I’m not going slow. I’m going right.”

He started with one finger. He didn’t wait long. A few strokes, then two, his bent fingers working Rennie open with the blunt, efficient patience Rennie had seen him use on a jammed locker door, nothing like the slow way he’d done it in Memphis. Inside a minute Rennie was groaning up at the concrete steps of the stands.

“Two weeks,” Gil said, “and you’ve closed up tight as a new glove.”

“Then stop talking and open me up.”

“I am opening you up.” Gil’s fingers twisted and spread. “Ten thousand people up there and not one of them knows where the trainer went.”

“Nine thousand. It’s raining.”

Gil laughed without any sound.

He drew his fingers back. Rennie felt the head of him, slick through the latex, set against him and wait. Gil’s hands went under Rennie’s thighs, high, where they met his ass, and tipped him an inch up toward him.

“Now?”

“Now.”

Gil pushed in. One long push, steady, not fast and not stopping, the thickness of him opening Rennie up and taking all the room there was and the curve bending inside. The air left Rennie in one long hoarse sound, and his fingers clawed into the folded canvas at his sides. Gil was watching his face the whole way. Then Gil’s hips met his thighs and there was no more of him to give, and Gil stood over him breathing hard.

“Okay?”

“Yes. Move.”

Gil moved. Short at first, then longer, drawing Rennie onto each stroke by the thighs. The pile didn’t shift. The rack rail was cold under Rennie’s left foot. Overhead the rain kept up its long roar on the stands, and under it, close, the slap of Gil’s belly on his thighs and Gil’s breathing and the sounds Rennie was making, which he let out as loud as they came.

“Fuck,” Gil said. “You feel good. Three and a half innings I watched you walk up and down that bench with that clipboard, and now this is what I’ll see every time you do.”

“Good. Keep it handy.”

“In the seventh. When Iowa brings in the lefty.”

“Every pitching change,” Rennie said, and the sentence went nowhere, because Gil had leaned in and shortened up, and the next stroke dragged straight across the place inside that made his whole body seize.

“There?”

“Yes. Stay on it.”

Gil stayed on it. He leaned in over him, quicker now, and Rennie watched it happen on his face: the jaw set, the mouth open, rain still beaded in the white stubble. Rennie’s cock stood up off his belly and bobbed with every stroke, dark and wet at the tip, nothing on it but cold air, and every time Gil hit him there it jerked and dripped a thread onto his shirt.

“Report, Doc,” Gil said.

“There’s so much of you,” Rennie said, and had to try again. “Every time you go in I feel it in my feet. My head’s empty. I came down here to restock burn gel, Skip.”

“Turo sent me with a towel.”

“Turo sent a towel. You brought the rest.”

Gil laughed, and Rennie’s laugh and groan came out at once, and Gil swore and leaned his weight forward to drive in deeper, and then Rennie felt Gil’s whole body hitch, wrong, a stutter in the rhythm.

“Time,” Gil said.

Rennie went still. He didn’t move, didn’t push up, didn’t ask anything. Gil stopped mid-stroke, half in, and then drew back slowly and came out of him altogether, and Rennie heard the breath go through his teeth.

Gil was standing with his right leg locked straight and his left palm flat on the pile beside Rennie’s hip, his face grey under the stubble. He held up his other hand, palm out.

“Knee,” he said. “Foot went out on the wet. I leaned too far in. It’s not bad.”

Every part of Rennie that had been trained for thirteen years wanted to sit up and get his hands on that knee. He didn’t. He lay where he was with his feet where they were.

“Where?” was all he said.

“Outside. Along the scar. It’s already going.” Gil flexed the leg slowly, bent it ten degrees, straightened it. Some of the grey left his face. “It’s going. It’s gone.”

“Do you want to stop?”

Gil looked down at him, spread on the canvas with one trouser leg round his ankle, and something went across Gil’s face that Rennie couldn’t have put a name to, worry and want and an old catcher’s irritation at his own body all at once.

“No,” Gil said. “I want to put my left foot forward and my right one back and both hands on this pile so my arms take the lean instead of the knee. Do you want to stop?”

“No.”

“Then I’m asking again, because you just watched me nearly go down, and I don’t want a yes because you’re being kind.”

“I’m not being kind,” Rennie said. “I’m on my back on the bullpen tarps with my legs open and I’m about thirty seconds from coming. Put your left foot forward and get back in me.”

Gil laughed, a short surprised bark, and the rest of the grey went out of him.

He shifted his feet, wiped his palm dry on his thigh, and planted both hands on the canvas either side of Rennie’s hips, arms straight, and lined himself up with a tilt of his hips, and pushed back in.

---

It was faster after that. Neither of them could have slowed it. Gil fucked him in quick hard strokes with his arms locked and his weight on them, the left foot forward, the right one back and easy, and Rennie hooked his fingers into the folded edges at his shoulders and held on and watched him. The roar overhead had gone up a notch. The second line coming through, maybe. He didn’t care.

“You’re getting tighter,” Gil said through his teeth. “It’s all over your face. You’re going to go with nobody touching it, aren’t you.”

“Yes. Keep going. Exactly like that.”

“Then go. Show me, Doc.”

It started in the backs of Rennie’s legs and climbed his spine, and he shouted at the concrete ceiling. His cock kicked against nothing and he came, untouched, in long jets that landed on his own shirt and his bare belly, his whole body gripping Gil inside him in hard pulls. Gil swore, long and helpless, and kept moving through it, slower, through every pulse, watching every second of it, till Rennie lay gasping and loose on the pile.

“You next,” Rennie said. “Don’t stop on my account.”

Gil didn’t. Five more, six, his arms shaking now, and then he pushed in to the last of himself and stopped there and groaned into the cold air. Rennie felt him pulse inside the condom, once, twice, a long shudder that went down Gil’s locked arms into the canvas and through both of them.

Neither moved for a while. Gil let his head hang, forehead almost on Rennie’s breastbone, and breathed.

“Your knee,” Rennie said.

“Is fine.”

“You’ll ice it.”

“After the game. If there’s a game.” Gil straightened, slowly, pinched the base of the rubber and eased out, and Rennie winced at the emptiness. “Don’t trainer me. You said you wouldn’t.”

“Call it a request from a man you just fucked. I’d like you able to do it again.”

Gil laughed, tired, and tied the condom off and wrapped it in a paper towel from the dispenser over the sink and pushed it deep in the trash under the rest.

---

They cleaned up at the utility sink with paper towels and cold water. Rennie got his belly clean and his shirt as clean as it was going to get, and zipped his jacket over it. Then he wiped down the edge of the pile, and took the mop from the bucket and went over the wet patch by the rack where Gil’s foot had gone out, and the drips under the slickers. The next man to slip there might not be so lucky. Gil sat on the end of the workbench with his right leg out straight and watched the whole job.

“You’re mopping.”

“It’s their floor.”

“I have been in a lot of tarp rooms,” Gil said. “Nobody has ever mopped one.”

Rennie wrung the mop out and stood it in the bucket. He washed his hands. Then he sat beside Gil on the bench, close but not touching, and for a minute nobody talked. The rain had changed. It was quieter now, thinner, a hiss instead of a roar.

“Your blood work came back Friday,” Gil said. “You told me.”

“Clean.”

“Mine’s lost.” Gil rubbed his face. “The lab in Bellevue lost my tube. They want me back Tuesday at seven a.m. to do it again.”

“So, after Tuesday.”

“After Tuesday. And after you’ve seen the paper. Not before.” Gil turned his head. “I’m not asking you to take my word for it. I want you to read it.”

“I’ll read it,” Rennie said. “I read everything.”

Gil held his eye a moment longer, then looked down at his own hands on his knees.

“I said time,” he said. “First time I’ve ever said it.”

“I know.”

“You stopped.” Gil’s voice was flat. “You didn’t even turn round till I’d pulled out. I’ve caught pitchers who couldn’t stop that fast with the ball already in their hand.”

“You said it,” Rennie said. “That’s what it’s for.”

Overhead, through the concrete, a voice came on the PA. It was thin and far away and they both lifted their heads to it. The umpire crew chief’s announcement, and then the stadium announcer repeating it: the field would be ready in fifteen minutes, play to resume at seven-forty.

Gil stood up off the bench, tested the knee, put his wet pullover back on and grimaced at the cold wet weight of it.

“Wexler’s done,” he said. “I’m going with Pike.”

“Ask Pike.”

“I’ll ask Pike.” Gil went to the door, turned the bolt, and stopped with his hand on it, listening to the corridor. Then he looked back down the long room at Rennie sitting on the workbench beside the first-aid kit.

“Good,” he said.

He went out. Rennie sat there another four minutes, alone in the smell of wet canvas, and finished writing the date in the lid of the kit.

At seven-forty-one, over the heads of nine thousand damp people and down through the stands to the tarp room, came the plate umpire’s voice on the field mic, rough from waiting.

“Play ball.”