Extra Innings, Chapter 9 · The Deadline

The phone went at nine-forty, Sacramento time, while Gil was still in his undershirt with one sock on.

“Skip.” Curtis Ashby, already at his desk in Omaha, where it was coming up on noon. Gil could hear somebody laughing in the corridor behind him. “You alone?”

“Me and a sock.”

“Denver called me at ten their time. Ten-thirty, maybe. They want Teague.”

Gil sank down on the bed. The bed was a big iron thing painted black, and it creaked under him like everything in the hotel creaked. The building had been the freight depot once, a hundred years back, and the rooms on the third floor still had the high ceilings and the tall windows they had cut for the light. Beyond the glass the tracks ran east in four bright lines.

“They can have him on the first of September,” Gil said. “That’s the plan. Voss wrote it.”

“They want him at the big-league park on August eleventh. Their fifth starter’s arm is barking and they’ve got a doubleheader on the twelfth. Somebody up there looked at Teague’s bullpen numbers from Saturday and got excited.”

“Three weeks early.”

“Three weeks early,” Curtis said. “Into a big-league rotation off a sprained ligament. I told them I’d talk to the physician and to you, in that order.”

“Talk to the physician.”

“I did. Voss said no before I finished the sentence. She wants the full twelve weeks. Okafor’s numbers on the arm say the same thing, and she copied me on his notes.” Curtis stopped. Gil heard him choosing the next part. “I’m not asking you about Okafor. You’re out of anything to do with him and I know it. I’m asking you about Teague.”

“Teague’s not ready till Voss says he’s ready. Section four. That’s the whole policy.”

“Then write it down. Short. To the Rails’ baseball-ops office, copy me. You back the physician’s decision. You don’t say one word about the trainer, his work, his opinion, anything. HR will read every line, and so will a lawyer, sooner or later.”

“I can write short.”

“I know you can,” Curtis said. “Have it to me by first pitch tonight.”

---

Gil wrote it at the little desk under the window with the trains going by below. A freight came through a little after ten, a long one, a hundred cars of grain hoppers rocking on the rails, and he stopped and waited for it, as he’d once waited out a pitcher stepping off the rubber.

He wrote:

To the Rails baseball operations office, copy Curtis Ashby.

Dr Voss has decided that Josiah Teague completes the full twelve-week throwing programme and is not cleared before September 1. Under Section 4 of the medical policy that decision is final and belongs to her. I support it without reservation. I will not ask her to change it, and I will not start Teague or move his programme up.

Gil Marchetti, Manager.

He read it twice. He looked for Rennie’s name in it, the way you look for a fly in your coffee, and it wasn’t there, and he left it that way. Then he hit send before he could improve it.

No call to Rennie, either. That was the part that took some doing. Rennie would have been up since six in the room down the hall, Gil knew, because Rennie was always up at six, and he’d have read Voss’s email by now, and Gil wanted to knock on his door and ask what Teague’s elbow looked like from the inside of Rennie’s head. He didn’t. He went down to breakfast in the old ticket hall, ate eggs under a chandelier, and talked to Lonnie about the Sacramento lineup.

“You’ve got the face of somebody who wrote a letter,” Lonnie said.

“Short one.”

“Those are the worst.” Lonnie salted his potatoes. “Teague?”

“Teague stays on the programme.”

“Good,” Lonnie said, and nothing else, and Gil loved him for it a little.

---

Voss called him at one, Sacramento time, three in Omaha. She was between clinics and said so.

“Curtis says you wrote it,” she said. “I read it. Thank you.”

“It’s your call. I just said so.”

“Managers don’t always say so.” He heard paper move on her end. “He’s at seven weeks. The ligament is doing what it should. If he throws a big-league start on the eleventh, he throws it on a ligament I haven’t cleared, and if it goes, it goes in front of forty thousand people and he doesn’t get a second one. I’d like him to get a second one.”

“So would I.”

“Then we agree.” She went quiet a second. “I won’t tell you anything about my trainer, Skip. You know why.”

“I know why. I didn’t ask.”

“No,” Voss said. “You didn’t. Go win something.”

Teague found out at the ballpark. Gil told him in the visitors’ manager’s office with the door shut, plain, no padding: Denver asked, Voss said no, the answer’s no, September first.

Teague was thirty-one and had thrown a hundred and eighty big-league innings the year before, and for a second his face did what Gil remembered his own face doing in a mirror in 2004, when a surgeon told him six months and he’d heard eight weeks.

“They asked for me,” Teague said.

“They asked. That’s worth something. Hang on to it.”

“Did you tell them no?”

“The doctor told them no. I told them I agree with the doctor.” Gil leaned back. The chair was too small for him, like every visitors’ chair. “You want to be in Denver for six years or for three weeks? Pick.”

Teague sat a while. Then he said, “Six years,” like it cost him money, and went to throw his flat-ground in the outfield with Rennie behind him, clipboard in hand, and the radar gun on the dirt.

Gil watched from the top step. He didn’t go out there. Rennie didn’t look over at him once, and Gil knew that wasn’t an accident either.

They lost four to two. Wexler gave up a homer in the second and nothing after it, and the Stockmen left eleven men on base, which was the kind of number that made Frye eat sunflower seeds by the handful. In the clubhouse afterwards nobody said Teague’s name, and that meant everybody knew.

---

The knock came at eleven-forty. Gil had showered and was sitting on the window seat in a pair of shorts with the light off, watching an Amtrak sit at the platform with its doors open and nobody getting on.

He opened up. Rennie stood in the hall in a T-shirt and track pants and socks, his room key in one hand, a bottle of water in the other.

“I’m not here about Teague,” Rennie said.

“Good. I’m not talking about Teague.” Gil stepped back to let him in. “Curtis has the note. That’s done.”

“I know. Voss forwarded it.” Rennie set the water on the desk. “She said it was the shortest thing a manager’s ever sent her and she liked it.” He stopped halfway across the room and turned around, and in the light off the platform Gil could see he’d already decided whatever he’d come to decide. “And then I stopped reading about it. That’s the deal I made with myself on the walk back from the park. The note’s yours and the elbow’s Voss’s. Neither one comes in here.”

“Neither one comes in here,” Gil said. “Water okay? There’s nothing else in the room.”

“Water’s fine. I’ve had nothing else all day.” Rennie drank some to prove it. Then he put the bottle down and looked at Gil the way he looked at a swollen ankle, straight at it, nothing held back. “I want to suck you, Skip. Standing up. Over by that window with the trains going by, and I want to finish myself while I do it, and I don’t want you to touch me below the shoulders. Your hands stay on the frame.”

Gil felt that go through him from his ears to his heels. “That’s specific.”

“I had three hours on the charter Monday to get specific.” The corner of Rennie’s mouth went up. “Your knee’s good on a flight. You’re standing, so your back’s straight and it carries nothing. I’m the one on the floor, and I’ll put a pillow down.”

“And if I want to touch you?”

“Then ask. And I’ll probably say yes.” Rennie came a step closer. “Time stops it.”

“Time stops it,” Gil said. “And I want you. Have done since you walked out to that flat-ground and didn’t look at me once.”

“That was hard.”

“I know it was. That’s why I want you.”

Rennie laughed, short. Then he said, “There’s one more thing. My mouth’s going to be full. So I can’t say it. If I want to stop, my hand goes open on your thigh and pushes. That’s Time. You step back.”

“Open hand, push, I step back.”

“And when you want to know how I’m doing, ask me how many. I’ll hold up fingers. One means slow down. Two means stay right where you are. Three means more.”

“How many,” Gil said. “Fingers.” He thought about it. “That’s a catcher’s sign, Doc.”

“I know who I’m talking to,” Rennie said.

---

Gil stood in the window. The sill was at his hip, deep, old oak painted white, and the frame went up past his head on both sides. He took it one hand each side, at shoulder height, and gripped. The room was dark behind him and the platform lights were all down below, so from the tracks the window was just black glass.

Rennie took a pillow off the bed and dropped it at Gil’s feet, and then he stripped off his own T-shirt and kicked out of the track pants and stood there a second, naked, in the light off the platform. He was hard already. He’d been hard in the hall, Gil realized; he’d been standing out there with it pressing at the front of his pants, talking as flat as a chart review.

“Well, hell,” Gil said. “You walked the whole hall like that.”

“Your shorts, Skip.”

Gil let go of the frame long enough to shove them down and kick them off, and grabbed the frame again. He was half up himself. The air off the tall window was cooler than the room, and it hit his chest and stomach, and Rennie looked at all of him, taking his time, from the grey hair across his pecs down the hard round of his gut to his cock, which jumped under that look like it had been called by name.

Rennie knelt on the pillow.

He didn’t start with his mouth. He started with his breath, close, so close Gil could feel it on the head, warm, and nothing else, for a count of five. Then his cheek, the side of his face rubbed along him and back, stubble against the shaft, and Gil’s hands went tight on the frame.

“Doc.”

“I’m here.” Rennie said it into the crease of his thigh. He licked the crease. He licked up from there over Gil’s balls, one and then the other, and took one into his mouth and held it there, hot, and just breathed through his nose while he held it, until Gil’s thighs were shaking.

“Fuck,” Gil said. “Fuck, Rennie.”

Rennie let it go and looked up. His eyes were steady. “Tell me.”

“Your mouth on me.”

“Where?”

“On my cock, Doc. Take it.”

Rennie’s lips closed hot round the head and stopped there, behind the ridge, and his tongue worked lazy circles over the slit, and Gil’s head tipped back inside the window frame until his skull met the cool glass. A train was coming in, a commuter by the sound, the bell going at the crossing a long way off, and Rennie took more of him while it came, an inch and then another inch, and the bell rang nearer and Rennie’s mouth got deeper, and Gil couldn’t have said which one was making him groan.

Rennie eased off him wet and leaned back a little, his hand still going slow on himself, and looked up along Gil’s body.

“The shower’s still on you,” he said. “And under it, you taste like you. I’ve had that in my head since Omaha.” He swiped at his mouth with his free wrist. “You know what I thought about on the charter Monday? This. You up against something, holding on, not allowed to grab. Three hours of it, with a jacket over my lap and Lonnie asleep across the aisle.”

“Have a heart, Doc.”

“You want it back in my mouth, ask me.”

“Put it back in your mouth. Please. I’m asking.”

“Since you said please.” Rennie took him again, all at once this time, deep, and Gil’s hips jerked and he swore at the ceiling.

He looked down. That was the thing about the window. The platform light came in sideways and laid one long gold stripe across Rennie’s shoulders and the side of his face, and Gil could see everything. He could see his cock going into Rennie’s mouth wet and coming back out wetter. He could see Rennie’s cheeks hollow on the pull and his mouth stretched round the thick of him. He could see Rennie’s right hand had gone down between his own spread knees and wrapped round himself, and was moving, slow, in time.

“You’re jerking yourself,” Gil said. “On your knees with me in your mouth, you’re jerking yourself.”

Rennie answered round him, a yes from the throat, and Gil felt it at the bottom of his spine.

“Don’t stop. Keep both going.”

All he wanted was to let go of the frame. He wanted it so bad his hands ached with it. He wanted a hand on Rennie’s shoulder, a hand on his skull, which was the one place he’d never put a hand on Rennie and never would, and he held the frame instead, and the wanting went somewhere else, down into his hips, and his hips began to rock.

He caught himself. “How many?”

Rennie’s left hand came up off his own thigh. Two fingers.

Gil held still. Rennie worked him where he was, the same depth, the same slow pull, the tongue doing something underneath on every stroke that turned Gil’s knees unreliable, and the good one was going to quit before the bad one did, and that would have been funny if he’d had any breath to spare.

“How many.”

Three.

Gil gave him more, hungry for it. He rocked into Rennie’s mouth, short, careful, an inch of travel and no more, and Rennie let him, with a low wet noise around him, and his own hand sped up between his knees.

“That’s it,” Gil said. He was talking now and couldn’t stop. “Doc. You suck cock like you do everything else. You read it first. You read me like a box score, you know what I’m going to do before I do it. Take it. Go deeper. Let me in your throat.”

Rennie opened and took him deeper, and his nose pressed into the grey hair under Gil’s belly, and he held there, and swallowed, and Gil went up on his toes.

He eased back. Rennie let him slide nearly out and got his breath, and took him again, and Gil was so far gone he didn’t see the left hand until it was already there: open on his thigh, pushing.

Gil stepped back. He took his cock out of Rennie’s mouth and his hips away and stood against the window, both hands locked on the frame, his pulse thumping in his ears.

Rennie sank onto his haunches and worked his jaw side to side.

“Jaw,” he said. “Just the jaw. Give me ten seconds.”

“Take thirty.”

“Ten.” Rennie opened his mouth wide, shut it, opened it again, and rolled his neck. His other hand stayed put, wrapped round himself, not moving. “That’s what I’d tell a pitcher with a tight forearm. Ten seconds and a stretch.”

“You’d tell a pitcher to sit down.”

“I’d tell a pitcher to sit down,” Rennie agreed. He looked up at Gil’s cock, which was dark and wet and pointing at him, and his face changed into something that wasn’t medical at all. “I’m not a pitcher. Come here.”

“How many?”

Rennie held up three fingers, then thought about it and folded one away. “Two to start. Then I’ll tell you.”

Gil came back in. Rennie took him slow, the head and a little more, and his own hand started up again, and they found the rhythm they’d had like it had been waiting there for them. Three fingers. Gil rocked. A freight was coming out of the yard, a long one, the engines grinding under the window, and the glass behind Gil’s shoulders shook in its frame, and he felt that too, all of it, the glass, the frame, Rennie’s mouth, Rennie’s breath on his belly when he pulled back.

“I’m about to go,” Gil said. It came out rough. “Doc. I want to finish in your mouth. You want it, you keep going. You don’t, you pull off and I’ll go on the floor.”

Rennie pulled off. Gil’s stomach dropped, and then Rennie looked up at him, wet-mouthed, and said, “In my mouth. All of it, Skip. I want to taste the whole day off you,” and sank back onto him, deep.

Gil came groaning, loud, the sound going up into that high ceiling. It left him in long pulls. Rennie stayed on him and took each one, swallowing between them, and Gil hung off the window frame by his hands.

There was no not looking down. Rennie still had him in his mouth, soft now, and was dragging air through his nose, and his right hand was going fast between his knees, the head of his cock flushed and slick in his grip, and his eyes were shut. He groaned round Gil’s cock, long and low. Gil felt it.

“Go on,” Gil said. “Go on, Doc. I’m watching you. All over the floorboards of the Sacramento depot.”

Rennie gave a short huff of a laugh and came. He locked up all over, shoulders, belly, thighs, and he shot thick and hot onto the old floorboards between Gil’s bare feet, three hard pulses and then a slow one, his hand slowing with it, his mouth still soft round Gil’s cock till the last of it was out of him.

Then he let Gil go and leaned his cheek against Gil’s thigh and stayed there.

“Can I touch you now?” Gil asked.

“Yes.”

Gil let go of the frame. His hands were stiff from it. He put them on Rennie’s shoulders, both of them, broad and slick with sweat, and held him, and then, slowly, because his knee was going to have an opinion about it, he got him up.

---

They lay on the iron bed with the window open a crack and the sheet off. Gil’s knee had its opinion and kept it to itself. Rennie lay face up with his ankle over Gil’s shin and said nothing for long enough that Gil thought he’d dropped off.

“I didn’t look your way once today,” Rennie said. “At the flat-ground.”

“I noticed.”

“I wanted to see if I could.” Rennie rolled his face toward him. “I could. I don’t like it.”

“Nobody says you have to like it. You did it.” Gil studied the ceiling, which was sixteen feet up and had a water stain on it shaped like Ohio. “I didn’t knock on your door this morning either. I wanted to ask you what you thought about his elbow, and I didn’t, because it isn’t mine to ask, and I sat at breakfast with Lonnie and ate eggs instead.”

“Lonnie told me you ate four.”

“Lonnie can keep his mouth shut about the rest of my life and he can’t keep it shut about eggs.”

Rennie laughed. He sat up, found his T-shirt, and tugged it on. “I’m going back to my room,” he said. “Not because of anything. Because Teague throws a bullpen at nine and I want to sleep in a bed where nobody snores like a freight.”

“I don’t snore like a freight.”

“Like a commuter, then.” Rennie stood, stepped round the spot on the floor, and crossed to the door. “Goodnight, Skip.”

“Goodnight, Doc.”

---

Curtis called at seven-ten in the morning, Sacramento time. Gil was dressed this time, both socks.

“I read your note,” Curtis said. “So did Denver. So did Voss and so did HR, and HR said it was fine, which is the nicest thing HR has ever said about anything.”

“They take no for an answer?”

“Not yet. Their baseball-ops guy called me back last night at eleven Omaha time. Wanted to know if there was any flexibility in the programme.” Curtis’s voice went flat. “I’ve decided something, Skip, and I’ve already told him. From now on, anything Denver wants about Teague’s arm comes to me and to Voss, in writing. Not to you, not to the trainer. Voss decides, I answer, and nobody on your bench gets a phone call at nine in the morning with one sock on.”

Gil didn’t ask how Curtis knew about the sock. Down below the window a freight was going out, slow, east, toward home.

“Okay,” he said.

“That wasn’t a question,” Curtis said, and hung up.