Extra Innings, Chapter 13 · Clearance

“Six, Doc. Eighty-one pitches. Write it down before I start making it better than it was.”

Teague said it in the tunnel, cap in one hand, jacket zipped to the chin over the right arm, as pitchers come off the field when they want the arm kept warm and the questions kept quiet. Rennie had the clipboard against his hip. He wrote it down.

“Six,” he said. “Eighty-one. Two walks.”

“You didn’t have to put the walks.”

“I put everything.”

Teague laughed and went on up the tunnel ahead of him, into the noise of the clubhouse.

---

It had been a Tuesday night game on September first, Iowa City in for six, five thousand people in jackets and a wind blowing in off the river that smelled like the end of summer. The Stockmen won four to one. Nobody in the stands knew what the six innings meant. Everybody in the dugout did.

Rennie had stood on the dugout’s top step down by the bat rack, where he always stood for a rehab start. From that spot the mound was side-on and the arm showed from the elbow down. He’d counted with the clicker in his jacket pocket. Lonnie stood two steps along with his arms folded on the rail and said “bud” to himself every time Teague got a strike, as if the ball could hear him.

In the fifth, Frye came and stood next to Rennie, shaking seeds out into his palm.

“How’s it look from here?”

“It looks like an elbow.”

“That’s what I like about you.” Frye cracked a seed. “You’ll say a thing like that and a man can sleep on it.”

The last pitch of the sixth was a fastball that came in at ninety-four on the board in right. Teague looked at the number. Then his eyes found the dugout, straight down by the bat rack, and Rennie studied the ground. When he looked up again Gil had a foot up on the step at the other end of the bench, one hand round the rail, not moving, like a manager who wants very badly to go out to the mound and has no reason to.

Gil didn’t go out. Teague walked off on his own. Lonnie took the ball from the umpire’s bag later and put it in a sock for him.

---

The exam was at twenty past ten. Training room, door shut.

Voss came up for home series and sat in on anything that would end with her signature. Tonight she sat on the stool by the counter with her reading glasses parked in her hair and let Rennie go first. Teague lay back on the big table, shirt off, right arm out to the side.

Rennie did it in the order he’d done it every week since June. Range first, both arms, measured, written down. Then the elbow at thirty degrees, his left hand cupping it, his right at the wrist, a slow push to open the inner side of the joint. Nothing. Then the milking test, thumb drawn down and back with the arm up. Teague watched the ceiling.

“Anything?”

“Nothing.”

“Tell me if it’s nothing or if it’s nothing you want me to hear.”

“It’s nothing, Doc.” Teague’s eyes came round to him. “I swear on my mother. Nothing.”

Grip strength, three trials a hand. Pain on the scale, zero, and Rennie made him say the zero, and Teague did, rolling his eyes. Then Rennie stepped back and Voss slid off the stool and did the whole exam again from the beginning, her hands on the same places, while Rennie stood by the counter and kept quiet.

She took longer than he had. She always did.

When she was done she opened the folder at the counter and signed the form at the bottom with the pen nobody else was allowed to touch, and initialled the second page.

“Cleared,” she said. “Full. No restrictions from me. Denver has the scans and they’ll have this tonight. You fly at ten.”

Teague sat up. For a while Teague was silent. He laid a hand over the elbow and left it there, as you’d rest a hand on a dog that had been sick for months and was well now.

“In April,” he said to Rennie, “I said ask me tomorrow.”

“I remember.”

“It’s tomorrow.” Teague got down off the table and dragged his shirt on. “Thank you. No ‘I think’ on it this time.”

“Thank Dr Voss.”

“I’m thanking her too. I’m thanking everybody. I’m going to thank Turo.” He picked up his jacket. At the door he stopped. “Somebody up there’s going to ask me what you did.”

“Tell them the dates,” Rennie said. “They’re on the form.”

Teague went out into the clubhouse, and through the door Rennie heard the room find out. It started with Wexler, who said something Rennie didn’t catch, and then it was everybody, a roar and a chair going over and somebody banging a bat on a locker, and Pike’s voice over all of it shouting “Denver, baby, Denver,” and Teague laughing, and then Turo’s voice, flat as a level, telling them all that if anybody sprayed anything on his carpet they’d be washing their own socks until October.

Voss listened with her head on one side. Then she folded her glasses into her coat pocket.

“I’ll tell Marchetti myself,” she said. “I’d rather he hear it from me than see me tell you.” It had been the arrangement since July, and she said it as she said everything, as a fact and not a kindness. “Go home, Okafor. That arm belongs to me and Denver now.”

---

Rennie didn’t go home.

He wrote the exam up first, all of it, timed and signed, scanned it to Voss and to the Rails’ medical office, and put the paper copy in the drawer that locked. Pike came in and asked for ice on the shoulder, which didn’t need it, and Rennie gave him ice because the asking mattered more than the shoulder. Then the tape got restocked.

Lonnie came in at ten past eleven with his windbreaker on and a sock in his hand with a baseball knotted up in the toe of it.

“For Teague,” he said. “The ninety-four. Give it him at the airport. He’ll lose it tonight and you won’t.”

Rennie took it and laid it next to the form.

“Bud.” Lonnie didn’t sit. “He stood on that step with his foot up on it for six innings. The right one. I watched him. That knee’s going to have something to say about it tomorrow.”

“That’s his to say.”

“I know it’s his to say. I don’t want an answer. Not from you, not as anybody.” Lonnie zipped the windbreaker up to his mustache. “I’m just telling a man in this building that he stood on it. Night, Doc.”

“Night, Lonnie.”

By half past eleven the clubhouse had gone from loud to quiet to the sound of the dryers, and then even the dryers stopped.

Turo leaned in round the training-room door in the green apron, keys on his finger.

“Doc.”

“Turo.”

“Lights are yours. Corridor door sticks. Lift it when you pull.” Turo’s eyes stayed on him a beat. “He’s in his office, door propped. Been in there an hour doing nothing.”

“Thank you, Turo.”

“I didn’t say anything.” Turo went. Rennie heard the outer door, and the lock turn from the far side, and then nothing.

On the counter his phone buzzed. His mother, in Houston, where it was the same hour and she should have been asleep.

Box score says your pitcher won. 6 IP 1 R. Is the arm all right?

She had been reading the Stockmen box scores since May. She’d never said why, and Rennie had never asked her to stop.

You know I can’t talk about anybody’s arm, Mama, he wrote.

I know. Forty years behind a pharmacy counter, I know. I asked anyway. Then, a minute later: And the man?

Rennie looked at that for a while. Through the wall came the empty clubhouse, the ice machine dropping a load in the corridor.

In his office, door propped, he wrote. Doing nothing.

The answer came back fast for a woman of sixty-eight. Then go and close the door for him. Goodnight, Rennie.

He pocketed the phone and went through to the hydrotherapy room to drain the tub.

It was the warmest room under the stands, and the quietest. Tile to the shoulder, a skylight over the tub gone black, the tub itself big enough for two catchers, and past it the shower alcove with its tiled bench along the wall. Rennie pulled the plug and stood with both palms on the rim and watched the water sink and thought about nothing in particular, and then about the ninety-four, and then about Gil sitting in an office for an hour with the door propped.

“Voss came by.”

Gil was in the doorway. He was out of uniform, in grey shorts and the old Stockmen T-shirt with the collar gone soft, and he leaned on the frame favoring the left leg, as he always did after a night game.

“She said she would.”

“She said cleared. She said full. She said I’d have it in writing in the morning, and if I ever ask you about it she’ll hear before I’m finished asking.” Gil looked at the tub, at the water draining. “So this isn’t a question. I’m saying I heard.”

“Thank you.”

“Six innings.” Gil came in and let the door swing to behind him. “I watched every one. I watched the ninety-four. I wanted to walk out there and tell him to quit showing off, and I couldn’t, because he wasn’t.”

“He wasn’t.”

“No.” Gil eased himself down on the tiled bench in the alcove, slowly, feeling for it with one hand, and looked across the room at him. “I’ve been looking at this bench since April, Doc.”

Rennie turned and leaned back against the tub.

“I know you have.”

“You sitting on it. Back to the wall. Me down on the tile at your feet.” Gil said it plainly, as if he were reading a lineup. “I want you tonight. That’s what I came in to say. I want you, and I’ve had that picture in my head for five months.”

Rennie looked at him, and at the bench, and at the tile under it.

“Not the bench,” he said.

Gil’s face didn’t change. He waited.

“I want you,” he said. “Yes. The rest is no. You’re not kneeling on tile with that knee, and you’re not kneeling under a man on a bench edge, because that’s hip-high and you’d be down there twenty minutes, and I’d spend the whole twenty thinking about your right knee instead of what you were doing to me. Tonight I want my head off your knee.”

“Then what.”

“Me on the floor. On mats. You behind me.” He felt his face heat up and kept going. “That’s what I want. I’ve wanted it since before April too, if you want to know. Your left knee down on two mats doubled, your right foot flat. Your weight never goes through the right side.”

Gil let that sit.

“That’s treatment talk,” he said.

“It isn’t. Your knee hasn’t had my hands on it today and it won’t tonight. I’m telling you how I want to be fucked.” Rennie didn’t look away. “I happen to know where your knee is. I can’t help that.”

Something eased in Gil’s face.

“Yes,” he said. “Hell. Yes. One condition.”

“Name it.”

“You don’t ask me about the knee in the middle of it. I’m not a patient on that floor.”

“I’ll ask once.”

Gil weighed that. “Once. And if I say it’s fine, it’s fine, and you take my word.”

“I take your word.”

---

The corridor door stuck. Rennie lifted it as he pulled, as Turo said, and threw the bolt, then locked the hydrotherapy door from the inside and tried the handle twice. Through the little window the training room was dark. The building creaked and settled around them.

He brought two of the thick blue foam mats from the stretching corner and laid them doubled on the dry side of the room beside the tub, where the warmth came up off the tile, and spread a clean towel over them. From the cabinet he took condoms, then a new bottle of water-based lube, and stood them on the tub’s broad rim, and that was all the planning there was.

Gil sat and watched.

“You’ve measured that,” he said.

“I’ve measured everything in this room.”

“Come here.”

Rennie went. Gil stayed sitting, took Rennie by the hips and drew him close, between his knees, face tipped up. Rennie bent and kissed him. Gil’s mouth was warm and tasted of the coffee he’d been not drinking for an hour. His stubble was two days old. His hands found Rennie’s ass through the slacks and held on, and he groaned against Rennie’s lips until Rennie had to catch himself.

“Shirt,” Gil said.

Rennie pulled it off. Gil’s mouth went to his chest, on the soft swell of it and the hair, found a nipple and sucked, slow, then with teeth, and Rennie braced a palm on the tile over Gil’s head to stay upright.

“Gil.”

“Five months,” Gil said, mouth on his skin, and moved across.

He undid the belt without looking. The slacks went down and the briefs after them, and Rennie’s cock sprang against Gil’s chin, hard and dark and beading at the head, and Gil rubbed his rough cheek along the length of it, and Rennie shook.

“See what Teague’s elbow did to you.”

“That isn’t Teague’s elbow.”

“No. I know who to blame.” He ran his tongue over the head once, broad and slow, taking the wet off it, and sat back. “Get on that floor, Doc, before I forget what we agreed.”

Rennie kicked free of his clothes. He got down on the doubled mats on his knees, then forward onto his forearms, and spread his knees on the towel, wide, wider, until his hips came down a good four inches and his ass was low and open behind him. The warmth came up through the foam. He dropped his head between his arms and felt the air on his hole, and heard Gil get up.

The T-shirt landed. The shorts. Rennie looked back under his arm.

Gil got down knee first, as Rennie hadn’t needed to tell him: a hand on the tub rim, left knee to the mat, right foot planted flat beside Rennie’s right knee, the rebuilt leg bent at an easy angle with no load on it. Big and grey-furred and heavy, his belly hanging, his thick cock standing out from him with its bend to the left. He settled. His hips were level with Rennie’s.

“Well,” Gil said, looking down. “Damn, Doc.”

“Say it,” Rennie said into the towel. “Whatever you’re thinking.”

“You set it there for me.” His hands settled on Rennie’s hips, one each side, fingers spread. “Prettiest sight all year, and I saw a man throw ninety-four on a stitched-up arm tonight.”

He spread Rennie with his thumbs. The bottle clicked open on the rim and then the cold of it came, a long drizzle down his crack, over his hole, running down past his balls, and Gil’s thumb followed it and worked it in, round and round the rim with that blunt pad, until Rennie’s hole was twitching under it and his breath came short against the towel.

“Easy,” Gil said, to himself as much as to him.

One finger went in. Thick, slow, the knuckle and then the second knuckle, and Rennie let his forehead down onto his arms. Gil sank it to the hand and left it. Rennie felt himself close round it and open again.

“Tell me,” Gil said. “One word. More or wait.”

“More.”

Two. It stretched and Rennie hissed and Gil held still without being told, his other hand easy on Rennie’s flank. Then Rennie shoved back, and Gil got to work, a twist on every push in. When he crooked them Rennie’s whole spine arched off his forearms.

“That,” Rennie said.

“That. I knew that in Des Moines.”

He kept on until Rennie was dripping on the towel in a thin steady string and rocking onto his hand without meaning to. Gil worked a third in. Rennie moaned into the mat, long and loud, and the tile gave it back to him, and Gil huffed behind him.

“This room’s got an echo on it,” Gil said. “Every noise you make comes round twice.”

“Then make me make one.”

The fingers left him. A packet tore, and there were the small sounds of Gil rolling the condom on, and more lube, and Gil’s breath, and then the head of him, blunt and slick and hot under the rubber, set against his hole.

Gil didn’t push.

“Now?”

“Now. Slow until I say.”

The fat head leaned in and leaned in, and then it was in, and a shout broke out of Rennie and went straight up into the skylight. Gil stopped there. Nothing in his grip wavered. His right foot didn’t move.

Rennie let it all go, the shoulders and the belly and the hole, and Gil felt that and gave him another inch, then more, Rennie feeling the bend of him go in, the leftward curve finding a different wall than it found from the front. Gil kept on until his thighs met Rennie’s from behind and his balls lay against him, and held there, deep, both of them breathing hard over the warm floor.

“Say,” Gil said.

“Go.”

Gil went. He drew back to the head and slid in again, long, the same slow length each time, and on the third stroke Rennie got a forearm under his brow and set his teeth in his own wrist. The angle was new. With his hips down low and Gil level behind him, each stroke ran along the front of him and pressed on the place he’d been working with his fingers, and didn’t let it go.

“What’s it like?”

“Like you’re,” Rennie said, and lost it, and got it back. “Like you’re inside the part of me that talks. I can’t talk.”

“You’re talking fine.” Gil was hoarse. “You’re loud as a full house in here.”

He picked it up. Not faster. Deeper, with weight behind it now, his hips coming in flat against Rennie’s ass with a soft heavy smack that the tile threw back. Rennie spread his knees another inch and got lower still, and with the next one Gil went in so deep he yelled.

Gil went still.

“Good or bad.”

“The good kind. Fuck. Don’t stop.”

Gil laughed, short, and gave it to him again, and found a rhythm. He’d caught for fourteen big-league seasons, and Rennie had once read that a catcher’s whole job was to keep a rhythm somebody else could live inside, and he felt it now, the steady unhurried push and drag of it, Gil’s breath behind him keeping time. Under him his cock swung heavy, rocked with each stroke and met nothing but air. He didn’t touch it yet. There was more of this he wanted first.

He looked back under his arm.

Gil’s face had gone brick red. His belly lifted and dropped over Rennie’s ass on each push. His eyes were on his cock going in and out. His right foot stayed planted on the mat and his right knee was bent at the same easy angle it had been at the start.

“Knee,” Rennie said.

Gil didn’t stop. “That’s your one.”

“That’s my one.”

“Fine. Left one’s doing all the work and the right one’s sitting there like a fan in the good seats.” He leaned in long and slow and made Rennie’s eyes close. “And now you’re out of asks, and I’ll keep at you till you forget you had one.”

“Yes. Skip. Yes.”

Gil dropped the slow length and went faster, shorter, grunting on each one. One hand left Rennie’s hip and planted on the mat beside Rennie’s left forearm, and Gil leaned on it and stooped over him without his chest touching Rennie at all, so that his breath came down hot on Rennie’s shoulder and his voice was at his ear.

“All summer you’ve been bent over that table,” Gil said, filthy and quiet. “Taping ankles. Rubbing down shoulders. Every man on that roster has had those hands on him and none of them gets this. Your ass up off a floor, opening up round my cock each time I push in. That’s mine. Nobody else’s.”

“Gil.”

“I watch you lean over that table. This is what I think about. Every time.”

“I know. I knew every time.”

“Then take it. Take every stroke.”

He took it with his forehead on his arm, mouth open against the towel. Gil was pounding into him now, the mats shifting under his knees, the spot up front struck on every stroke till the room held nothing else. Something was gathering behind his balls, his cock jerking, and he couldn’t stand it.

“I’m going to bring myself off,” he said. “Like this. Don’t change anything.”

“Nothing changes. Do it with me in you.”

Rennie leaned onto his left forearm and reached under with his right hand, and the first touch nearly finished him. He stroked once, and all of him jolted forward on the mat, and Gil swore in his ear and drew him back by the hips.

“Again,” Gil said. “Keep that hand going. I’ll keep this.”

Rennie stroked again, his hand going down as Gil drove in, the two of them meeting inside him. A broken noise tore loose on every breath, his hand going fast now, his hips caught between Gil’s drives and his own grip.

“Come on, Doc. Finish it with me in you. I’ll see to the rest.”

Rennie came.

The first of it started where Gil was hitting and went out through his cock into his hand, long and hard, onto the towel under him, his hand pulling it out of him, another, and another, his knees skidding on the towel, and his shout went up into the black skylight and the tile handed it back. He stroked until it hurt, until he was spilling slow over his fingers, then let go and got the hand back under him before he pitched onto his face.

Gil had gone still in him, breath sawing in and out.

“Rennie.”

“Yes.”

“I want to come.” Gil got it out in pieces. “Like this. In you. Can I?”

“Yes. In me. Don’t slow down.”

Gil didn’t. He took Rennie by the hips again and went at him quick and deep, every stroke through the place that was raw now and close to more than he could take, and Rennie held his ground on his forearms and pushed back to meet each one.

“Rennie. Rennie.”

Gil drove in once more and held. Rennie felt his whole big body lock behind him, thighs against his, fingers digging into his sides, and a long groan came through Gil’s teeth with no bottom to it. Inside him Gil pulsed, and pulsed again, and Gil’s hips gave three short helpless pushes and then stopped, pressed flat to him, and stayed.

Nobody moved. The drain gurgled once. Up in the stands a seat somebody had left down flipped up in the wind.

Gil laid his brow on Rennie’s back, between the shoulder blades. Just the brow.

“Mercy,” he said.

---

He pulled out slowly, a hand at the base, and Rennie groaned at the emptiness of it into the towel. Gil folded the used condom into a sheet of paper towel, and sat back on his left heel, his right foot still flat.

Rennie turned on his side on the mat to watch him.

Gil looked back. Then he braced a palm on the tub’s rim, the other on his own left thigh, and stood. He did it in one unhurried piece, the left leg lifting him, the right coming along under him on its own, and he stood over Rennie naked and red and running with sweat, and spread his hands.

“Nobody helped,” he said.

“I saw.”

“You were going to put a hand out.”

“I was going to put a hand out if you asked.”

“I didn’t ask.” Gil was plainly delighted with himself. “I didn’t ask, Doc.”

They showered in the alcove one after the other under the one head, because it was a trainer’s shower and not a hotel’s, and then sat on the tiled bench together with towels round them, shoulder to shoulder, the water dripping off the wall. Gil tipped his head back to the tile, eyes shut.

“An hour ago I sat here and asked you for this bench.”

“You did.”

“You were right.” He didn’t open them. “I’d do the floor again. And I’ll say this. That beat the picture.”

Rennie sprayed the mats down and wiped them and carried them back to the stretching corner and stacked them. The towel went in the bin for Turo. The tub was dry; he checked. Then he switched off the hydrotherapy lights and the training-room lights and lifted the corridor door as he pulled it, and they went up the tunnel together, the exit signs green ahead of them.

---

The lot was empty. Teague’s car was gone, and Voss’s, and Turo’s old truck. There was only Gil’s pickup and Rennie’s sedan two spaces apart under the one sodium light that still worked, and a wind off the river with a real edge on it now, and above the brick facade in left the sky clear and full of stars.

Gil stopped by his truck, keys in his hand, and turned round.

“He threw six,” Gil said, “on a ligament you wouldn’t let him throw on in April, and tomorrow he goes to Denver, and you’ll sit in that room and tape Pike’s ankle like nothing happened. And I knelt on a floor for twenty minutes and got up off it by myself.” He held the keys up as if they proved it. “Write that down, Doc. Put us both on the form. Cleared.”