Extra Innings, Chapter 10 · Call-Up

The list was taped to the clubhouse door at eye level, on the back of a laundry slip, in Turo’s square capitals.

REYES, T. 2 BAGS. MASK. 3 MITTS. SHIN GUARDS. CUP. THE GOOD BAT. EPPLEY 5:10 A.M. WED. CAR AT 4:30. DO NOT FORGET THE PHOTO IN YOUR LOCKER.

Rennie read it at one in the afternoon with a coffee in his hand and his bag still on his shoulder. Somebody had already drawn a small star in pen next to the last line. Somebody else had written Denver under it and underlined it twice.

He went in. The room was quieter than a Tuesday should be. Frye sat in a folding chair holding a bag of sunflower seeds he wasn’t opening. Rask, thirty-six, forty games caught all year, stood at his locker looking at the catcher’s gear like a borrowed suit.

Reyes was in the training room, on the table, shirt off, waiting.

“Doc,” he said. “You saw the door.”

“I saw the door. Congratulations, Tomás.”

“Don’t. Not yet. Say it tomorrow when I’m on the plane.” Reyes lay back and put his left arm up over his head, as he did every day at one. “Their guy broke his hand on a foul tip in the fifth last night. Curtis called me at seven-fifteen this morning. I was making Marisol’s eggs. She said finish the eggs.” Reyes grinned at the ceiling. “I’m thirty-eight, Doc. I’ve had four days in the big leagues in my whole life, nine years ago, in September, when nobody was watching. This is August. They need a guy who can catch.”

Rennie took the shoulder in both hands. He knew it as well as the inside of his own bag: the bad left one, the click at the high end of the arc, the old wear in the joint that would never come back and didn’t need to. He worked it through the range slowly, felt it give where it always gave and stop where it always stopped.

“It’s the same shoulder it was on Sunday,” he said. “That’s good news. It’s going to Denver as it is.”

Rennie pressed a thumb into the back of the joint, and Reyes hissed.

“I hate that.”

“I know. I’m sending their head trainer everything. Range, the program, and that, which you skip when you think I’m not watching.”

Reyes laughed and then stopped laughing. He looked up at Rennie with that steady catcher’s look, the one that read a hitter’s feet before the hitter knew where his feet were.

“Doc. Question for you.”

“Ask.”

“Who’s going to look after his knee?” Reyes didn’t say a name. He didn’t have to. “When I’m gone. Who’s going to tell him to sit down in the fifth when he’s been standing on the top step since the anthem? I’ve been telling him. He listens to me about half the time. That’s more than he listens to anybody.”

Rennie kept his hands moving. “He’s on my list,” he said. “He’s always been on my list.”

“Good.” Reyes shut his eyes. “Keep him on it. I don’t know anything, Doc, and I won’t say it.”

Rennie didn’t answer that, and Reyes didn’t seem to need him to. They finished the shoulder in silence. When Reyes sat up and pulled his shirt back on, he put his hand out, and Rennie shook it.

---

Gil was in his office with the door half shut and the lineup card in front of him. He’d written Reyes in the five hole and crossed it out and written him in the four hole and crossed that out too.

“Five,” Rennie said from the doorway.

“Who asked you?”

“Nobody. Five. He’ll want to bat with men on, and he’ll want to be up in the eighth.”

Gil looked at the card, then wrote Reyes in the five hole again, in pencil, pressing hard enough to go through.

Gil put the pencil down and looked at the wall where the season schedule hung with three months of red X’s on it. Rennie came in and shut the door at his back. Not locked. Just shut.

“I got called up in a town like this,” Gil said. “Ninety-eight. Columbus. Twenty-five years old. The manager knocked on my motel door at six in the morning in his socks and said pack, and I packed so fast I left my good shoes under the bed. I never went back for them.” He turned the pencil over on the desk. “Reyes has been doing this nineteen years. Four days up, once. And now a catcher in Denver breaks a hand on a foul tip, and he gets his shot at thirty-eight because a ball came off a bat wrong. I’d rather it was because he’s good.”

“It is because he’s good. The hand is just why it’s this week.”

Gil studied him. Through the wall the clubhouse stereo came on, somebody’s salsa, too loud.

---

Reyes went two for four. In the eighth, with two on, he lined a double into the gap in right center and stood on second base, hands planted on his hips, while three thousand people stood up without knowing quite why. He caught all nine. In the ninth he went to the mound for no reason at all, said something to the pitcher and walked back, and the pitcher struck the next man out on three pitches.

They won six to three.

In the clubhouse Turo had put out a sheet cake with a catcher’s mask drawn on it in blue icing, and a jug of lemonade, and two dozen paper cups. Nobody had asked for anything stronger. Reyes cut the cake himself with a plastic knife. Lonnie cried into a towel.

Gil stood on a chair. Rennie had never seen him stand on anything.

“I’m not making a speech,” Gil said. “I’ll say one thing. Tomás Reyes has caught more of my pitchers than I caught of anybody’s, and I caught for fourteen years. He goes up tomorrow. He goes up because he’s good.” Gil got down off the chair, carefully, right foot first, and Rennie watched the right knee take it and hold. “That’s it. Eat the cake.”

Reyes hugged Gil, the hard back-slapping kind, and said something into his shoulder that Rennie didn’t try to hear.

Then he turned to Rennie and shook his hand again, and kept hold of it a moment.

“Your list,” he said.

“My list,” Rennie said.

---

Rennie got to the house in Dundee at eleven forty-five. He’d stayed to send the Denver packet, three pages and a video of the shoulder, copy to Voss.

Gil was out on the porch, one lamp on, and a glass of water. He’d showered. He was in a pair of grey shorts and nothing else, and he looked up when the screen door creaked.

“Packet go?”

“It went. Voss answered in four minutes. She said ‘thorough.'”

Rennie sat in the second chair. They listened to the cicadas and somebody’s sprinkler two houses down, and in the half-dark Rennie could feel Gil’s eyes on him.

“I haven’t touched your knee today,” Rennie said. “I won’t. I watched it get off that chair and it did fine. That’s all the work I did on you.”

“Noted.”

“I want you to hear me say it, so you know where we are.”

“I heard you.” Gil put the water glass down. “Then I’ll say mine. I want to fuck you tonight, Doc. In my bed. I’ve wanted it all day, since you stood in my door and told me five. I want to be inside you. I want every sound you make.” He stopped. “And I can’t kneel on that mattress for twenty minutes, and you know I can’t, so you tell me how.”

Rennie had thought about it for about a month, every time he’d sat on that bed.

“Your bed’s tall,” he said. “You bought it tall.”

“Estate sale. I can sit down on it without the knee filing a complaint.”

“It comes up to the top of your thighs. So you stand. Right at the edge, feet on the floor, weight on your good leg. Your back’s been on airplanes and in a dugout this week, no bus, so it’s fine standing. I lie on my side at the edge, facing the wall, and I bring my top knee up.” He watched Gil take that in. “You don’t kneel and you don’t bend. You can see my back, my ass, and the side of my face if I turn it.”

Gil was quiet a moment. “Then here’s my condition,” he said. “From there I can’t see your face, not all of it. So you talk to me. You keep talking, start to finish. You go quiet on me, even for a second, I stop moving and I ask. I don’t care if you went quiet because it’s good. I stop and ask.”

Rennie felt that land low in his belly. “I can talk.”

“I’ve noticed.”

“And Time stops it.”

“Time stops it,” Gil said. “Yes?”

“Yes. I want you. Upstairs.”

---

The bedroom was over the porch, both windows open, the fan on the dresser turning its head back and forth like it was following a tennis match. The oak bed stood high off the floor. The condoms and the water-based lube waited on the nightstand.

Gil stood by the bed. Rennie faced him and took his own shirt off, then his jeans, and Gil watched him do it as he’d watch a pitcher warm up, all of him, every motion, nothing said.

“Talk,” Gil said.

“I’m taking my shorts off. I’m already hard. I’ve been half hard since the porch, since you said in my bed in that voice, like it was a place on a map.” Rennie kicked them away. “Now I’m going to take yours off.”

He did. Gil’s cock was thick and heavy and curving left, already up, and Rennie wrapped a hand round it and gave it one long stroke from the base, and felt all of Gil lean in.

“Still talking,” Gil said, rough.

“Still talking. You’re hot. You’re leaking already. I can feel it on my thumb.” He rubbed the slick round the head and Gil cursed, soft. “I want this in me so bad it’s stupid.”

Gil kissed him. Rennie kissed back, his free hand gripping Gil’s shoulder while Gil’s hands went to his hips and his ass and held on. Gil’s mouth was slow, his kiss short and certain as his talk, and when he pulled back he had to take a breath.

“Get on the bed, Doc.”

Rennie climbed onto the high bed and settled on his left side at the edge, his hips right at the lip of the mattress, his back to Gil. He drew his right knee up and let it rest on the mattress. The fan’s air went over his skin, over everything he’d just put on show for Gil.

“Tell me,” Gil said.

“I’m on my side. My knee’s up. You can see everything.” Rennie turned his face on the pillow so he could get Gil in the corner of his eye. “My heart’s going. You can probably see that too.”

“I can see it in your back.”

Lube clicked open. Gil’s fingers were warm when they found him, warmed in his palm first, a trainer’s trick Gil had picked up from him without being told. One finger circled and pressed and waited. Rennie pushed back into it.

“In,” Rennie said. “One. Slow. Yes. That’s good, Skip. Twist it.”

Gil twisted it, slick and deliberate. Rennie groaned into the pillow and then remembered and lifted his head. “Good. Still good. I’m still here.”

“Two?”

“Two.”

Two was a stretch, the good kind. Gil took his time with it, in and out, curling up toward the front, and on the third pass found the place and stroked it, and Rennie shouted into the pillow.

“There. Fuck. Yes, there, more of that, I’m talking, I’m talking, I just can’t make words that are longer than that.”

Gil’s laugh came low, behind him. He kept doing it. Rennie’s cock was hard against his own thigh, heavy, beading at the tip, and he kept both his hands up by the pillow where they were, one knotted in the sheet.

“Condom,” Gil said.

“Put it on. Let me hear it.”

Gil tore the packet. Rennie heard it, the wrapper and the slick roll and Gil’s breath catching as he did it, and then more lube, cold for a second before Gil’s hand warmed it, and then Gil’s cockhead against him, blunt, and Gil’s left hand settling on his right hip, broad, solid.

“Keep talking,” Gil said.

“Go. Slow. I want to feel the head go in.”

Gil pressed. Rennie went loose and opened, and the head went in, thick, a hard push and then a give, and his mouth opened on nothing at all.

Gil stopped dead.

“Doc.”

Rennie made himself breathe. “Here. I’m here. It’s just big. Give me a second.” He breathed again. The stretch eased, slowly, the burn going over into something else. “Okay. That’s the second. Now some more. Half. Then stop.”

Gil gave him half and stopped. Rennie could hear every breath he took, could feel the effort it took him to stand there and not move.

“You’re shaking,” Rennie said. “Your hand on my hip. It’s shaking.”

“Because you’re hot as hell inside and I’m standing still.” Gil’s voice was a growl. “More?”

“More. All of it. Now.”

Gil worked in, slow and full, until his hips met Rennie’s ass and his thighs pressed Rennie’s, and whatever came out of Rennie then would have emptied any other room in Omaha.

“Talking,” he gasped. “That counts as talking. You’re in. Right up against me. Move.”

Gil started short, an inch out and an inch back, testing the height. The bed was right: Gil’s cock going in level and steady, no angle to fight, the big man standing at the edge with his feet planted and his weight on the good leg.

“How’s your knee?” Rennie said.

“You’re asking me about my knee right now?”

“I’m asking.”

“My knee’s fine. My knee’s the happiest it’s been since oh-four.” Gil drew back further and came in again, longer, and Rennie’s breath broke. “Ask me about something else.”

“Fuck me. That’s not a question.”

Gil fucked him, steady and unhurried. He found the rhythm and settled into it, the long pulls and the slow drives, each one pressing on what his fingers had found earlier. Rennie talked because he’d promised to, and then because he couldn’t stop.

“That, Skip. That, that’s it, keep it there. Fuck, you’re thick. You go up to my ribs. Don’t go faster yet. Don’t. Keep it this pace. I want to feel each one.”

“Each one,” Gil said. “Count them.”

“Your hand. On my hip. Pull me back onto you.”

Gil’s hand tightened and pulled, and Rennie’s hips came back to meet him, and the sound they made came out together.

“Your ass is taking me, Doc,” Gil said. “I’m watching my cock go into you. Through the anthem. Through the double. Through that cake.” Gil drove home, slow, his balls pressing up flush against him. “I got up on a chair with thirty men watching and all I could think was, tonight he’s in my bed with his knee up and I’m going to make him say my name.”

“Gil,” Rennie said.

Gil’s rhythm faltered. “Again.”

“Gil. Gil. More. Give it to me.”

“You want it,” Gil said, and drove into him.

It was more, deeper, all his weight in it. The old oak creaked at the joints, and the fan blew across Rennie’s wet back and turned away again. Gil’s free hand had come down on the mattress beside Rennie’s waist, bracing, and his belly hit Rennie’s lower back on every push, hot and furred and solid.

Rennie kept talking. He didn’t know half of what he said. Yes and there and don’t stop and Gil’s name, and once, without meaning to, “I’m going to miss him,” which surprised him so much he went quiet.

Gil stopped.

He stopped all of it, deep in him and not moving, his hand gone still on Rennie’s hip.

“Doc. You went quiet.”

Rennie lay there with Gil in him and his heart going. “I said I’m going to miss him.”

“You did.”

“I didn’t mean to say it now.”

“I don’t care when you say it.” Gil’s thumb moved once on his hip bone, the only thing that moved. “You want to keep going, or should I pull out and lie down with you and you can say it again?”

Rennie thought about it. He actually thought about it, which he knew was what Gil wanted, and he found the answer under the other thing and it was very clear.

“Keep going,” he said. “I’ll miss him tomorrow. Right now I want you to fuck the words out of me.”

“You don’t get to stop talking. That’s the rule.”

“Then till all I’ve got left is your name.”

“Deal,” Gil said, and drew back, and came in so slowly that Rennie said his name three times before he was fully back where he’d been, and then laughed at himself for counting.

They went on. The rhythm came back and then built past where it had been. Gil’s pushes got shorter and rougher and his breath went ragged behind Rennie’s shoulder. Rennie’s cock hung heavy over the sheet, untouched, bouncing with every drive, flushed dark and stiff, the head brushing the cotton and nothing else. He could feel it building low in him, under Gil’s cock.

“Skip, I’m going to come.”

“Don’t touch it.”

“I’m not touching it. My hands are up by my head. They’re staying there.” He was gasping now. “You keep doing that, just that, and I’ll come all over your sheets with both hands up here.”

“Then do it.” Gil’s voice had gone down to gravel. “Do it on my cock. I want it round me.”

He drove in, and in, and on the third one Rennie went over.

It came up from low in him and locked his whole body round Gil, and he shouted, no words at all this time, and came in long jolts onto the sheet under his belly, untouched, his cock kicking with nothing on it but the air off the fan. Each jolt went through him into Gil too; he heard it in Gil’s curse behind him, low and heavy.

Gil held still through it. Then, when Rennie could breathe, “Can I?”

“Yes. Come in me. Fill it.”

Gil gave him four more, short and hard, and on the last he stopped, pressed flush, groaning, and Rennie felt him thicken and throb inside, behind the latex, over and over, Gil’s hand gripping his hip so hard there’d be marks.

Then the hand loosened. Gil leaned forward slowly and put his forehead between Rennie’s shoulder blades and stood there, bent over him, breathing.

“You went quiet at the end,” Gil said into his back.

“I was shouting.”

“Shouting’s talking. I’ll allow it.”

---

Afterwards Gil eased out and dealt with the condom and brought back a wet washcloth and a dry towel, and Rennie rolled onto the dry side, face up, and let himself be wiped down. Gil sat perched at the side of the tall bed, his toes just on the floor.

“Knee,” Rennie said.

“Fine. I told you. Standing up’s what it likes.” Gil lay down beside him, heavy, the mattress dipping. “I liked it too.”

They lay there with the fan going. After a while Rennie said, “He asked me who was going to look after your knee.”

Gil was quiet a long moment. “What’d you tell him?”

“I told him you were on my list.”

Gil’s hand came across and took Rennie’s, and he didn’t say anything else, and eventually they slept.

---

At five Gil was perched on the mattress in the dark, putting his shoes on.

“Where are you going?”

“Park.” Gil tied a lace. “He’s in the car by now. His flight’s at six-forty. I want to be at the park when it goes.”

“It’s not going to fly over the park. Eppley’s the other direction.”

“I know where Eppley is.” Gil tied the other lace. “Come anyway.”

Rennie came anyway. They drove through empty streets with the windows down and the east greying, and Gil let them in at the players’ gate with his own key and they walked down the tunnel in the half-dark, past the clubhouse door where Turo’s list was still taped up with its star and its underlined Denver, and out into the dugout.

The field was blue in the first light. The tarp was rolled along the first-base line. Somebody had left the sprinklers on in left, and they turned over the outfield in slow arcs, and the whole place smelled of wet grass and yesterday.

Rennie stopped on the top step of the dugout. Gil kept walking.

He walked out across the dirt to home plate in his street clothes and stood behind it, where Reyes had stood nine innings the night before. He faced the empty mound. Then, without looking back at the dugout, he put his right hand on his right thigh and lowered himself, slowly, both knees bending, the rebuilt one last, down into a catcher’s crouch, heels up, weight on the balls of his feet, and held it.

Rennie watched the knee. He didn’t call out.

Gil held his left hand up in front of him, open, a target, at the height of a strike low and away, and stayed there in the dirt, his hand up for nobody, while the sky over the packinghouse wall went from grey to white.