Archive of Our Own

A Green Field As Far Away
By Candle Beck

In the spring, Billy began calling.

The first message, Harden was drunk enough to be seriously unsettled, Beane coughing between words and breaking off curses, but then, luckily, unable to remember it in the morning. The second message he listened to with the oddest sense of déjà vu.

Beane wanted to know if Harden would come in to Sacramento for dinner sometime, maybe see a River Cats game. Harden played it back three times, looking for hidden meaning, wondering what Beane’s angle was. Beane didn’t just do stuff like this, not with guys as removed as Harden was.

Harden ignored the message and the two subsequent ones, and walked the floors for a little while, opening the windows against the flooded gold of the fields. There were cracks in the walls and the stairs were increasingly treacherous, battered old farmhouse ten miles from the closest gas station, and it was worth it for the silence in the morning, the warmth that came with more power than it ever did to the Oakland hills.

Harden was on his fourth year, living in the Central Valley.

Crosby called that afternoon, and Harden ascertained from him that Beane had been acting no stranger than usual recently. The team was still playing out their first home-stand, and Beane was down in the clubhouse a lot, but that was normal for April. Harden got distracted by new team gossip, fitting the phone against his shoulder as he made himself a rum and coke.

After awhile of that, Harden half-asleep on the front porch, in the wooden swing with his feet on the rail, Bobby said that he should come back before the team left for Texas.

Harden let his eyes close the rest of the way, blacking out the scrub grass in the yard, the long brown twist of the driveway. Crosby kept a spare room ready for him at all times, but Harden didn’t like going home much. It’d been four years, and he felt like a reflection of himself when he was back with them. He’d lost weight and gained shadows under his eyes, his hands shaking noticeably unless he was drinking, and they were so perfect still, all this time later—it shamed him. Seeing Crosby and the others, smelling the ocean in the air, it made him want to scream.

He did end up there several times a month, though, long weekends and midweek day games with barely ten thousand people in the stands, going out with the boys and home with Bobby.

He dodged Crosby, feeling the seep of afternoon light through his skin, the drunk stir under his skin. Crosby said, “We worry about you out there, you know?” and he was probably mostly kidding.

They said their goodbyes and the quiet slammed back in all around him, fields and sky running for miles. Ends of the motherfucking earth, Harden thought, and rubbed his eyes, his throat dry and his chest feeling hollow.

Beane called again that night, when Harden was watching three games simultaneously, flipping through the satellite feeds and taking notes on various players. It was an old habit and, at this point, kinda psychotic, but he got itchy if he stopped.

More than a little drunk, Harden picked up, saying, “Jesus, Billy, most people can take a hint.”

Beane didn’t answer for a minute, likely surprised that Harden had actually answered. “I think the fact that my methods are unorthodox has been pretty well established.”

Harden smirked. Zito’d said once the thing about Beane was that he honestly couldn’t give a shit what other people thought. He’d used up his fear of failure very early on, came out the other side reckless and manipulative. It made him extremely good at his job, eleven years in contention now, but dangerous to have around late in the summer.

“What’d you want that’s so important?”

“What, I’m not allowed to stay in fucking touch?”

“You are, yes,” Harden said, licking at the rim of his glass, mouth hot. “But when have you ever?”

Beane made a scuffing sound like a laugh, and Harden trolled around the channel guide looking for the A’s game, missing it by inches and seconds. He couldn’t ask Beane the score; Beane wouldn’t know.

“Anyway, come to the game, all right? Team’s good this year.”

The team was good every year, at every level of the Oakland organization but none moreso than the River Cats, steadier even than their compatriots to the west. Harden hadn’t been following the farm system as closely as he did the major leagues, but he could feel it in his future, when the hours get long enough that any game would be welcome, a whole new league to track and analyze. He could probably only name seven guys on the ‘Cats roster.

“You can’t bribe me with baseball, Billy.” Harden exhaled, tired beyond the telling of it. Beane made the same sound and Harden wondered if it was something he’d picked up in the years since they’d last spoken.

“Oh, really? The kid starting for the ‘Cats, he’s a lefty out of Oregon State. He hits ninety-five, ninety-seven, good movement, and he’s got two breaking pitches, one of which is a fucking seventy mile an hour knuckle-curve. They say that coming out of his hand, it looks like it’s going backwards.”

Harden held his breath, held still. He watched six or seven hours of baseball a day, but he hadn’t been to a game since Street’s little brother was in Triple-A at Fresno, and that was better than a year ago and a knuckle-curve, who the fuck threw a knuckle-curve anymore?

“I can’t help feeling that you’re leaving something out,” Harden said, because Beane always, always had secret agendas and a master plan.

“You know, you’ve gotten suspicious as shit living out there all alone. Back here in society, we occasionally meet up with old friends and watch a fucking game.”

Sneering, Harden wished he’d brought the rum in from the kitchen, wanting to say, we were never really friends, dude. Beane was essentially his old boss. It was weird. He was pretty sure it was weird.

He found the A’s game at last, a splash of green and white. “Your actual team is losing, by the way.”

“The fuck do I care? It’s April.”

Harden sagged back, remembering slow starts and the last two months always ripped like paper, quick and sharp and easy. Crosby wasn’t in the game; he was sharing time with a kid in his rookie year who’d lit the Cactus League up like tee ball. Kid had three triples in the early going, played short like he was tuned half a second into the future.

Crosby would be down in the clubhouse with Haren, maybe, or one of the others, drinking beers out of coffee mugs so that they wouldn’t get in trouble, watching something other than the game.

“You should really do something about the lineup, you know.”

“Pray tell,” Beane said dryly.

“Carter should be playing centerfield, first of all, and hitting in front of Remigo, not leading off. You gotta stop that situational shit with the bullpen, and make Swisher only hit left-handed, and tell Danny that he’s losing his angle when he throws off-speed stuff. And get rid of that new color-man, he’s fucking awful.”

Beane was quiet for a minute before saying, “You’ve been paying attention.”

Harden laughed noiselessly. His life revolved around the satellite TV and the internet, here in the heartland, two hours from anywhere. He had nothing but time, nothing to do but pay attention to the young baseball season. Last year, he finished first in four different fantasy leagues, and this year he was going for seven, using the teams to test certain theories he had about pitching and defense.

“I keep up.”

“I’m sure the boys insist on it.”

“Yeah, well.” Harden popped his knuckle against his knee, watching the game end predictably on a four-three, and thought that Crosby would be calling him soon. He usually did, as he drove home. “We gotta have something to talk about.”

“Yeah, I really think you should come to the game.” Beane said decisively.

“Man-”

“Come on, I’ll see if I can get them to let you throw out the first pitch.”

Harden hissed through his teeth; that was cold. Beane seemed to realize he’d gone too far almost immediately, saying quickly, “They’d be fucking lucky to have you, of course.”

Passing his hand over his eyes, Harden shook and wondered if he started drinking heavily right now, would he be able to black this out?

“You know, me and Bobby promised when he got called up that we’d never go back to Triple-A again.”

Beane coughed. “You did go back. You both have.”

“So? I still promised. And I never exactly went voluntarily.”

“Jesus, Rich, it’s just a baseball game. You like baseball, remember?”

And that stumped Harden, remarkably, stopped him dead. He rolled the glass against his leg and thought seriously about baseball for a minute, though it made him feel dried out and airless, scared him with its distance, the course of it better than history. He liked baseball—he lived for baseball, now maybe more than ever.

“I, um,” he said, but couldn’t think of anything else.

“Okay, then. You can park in the players' lot, I’ll tell them you’re coming.”

Harden sighed, giving up and blaming it on the drunk. “All right.”

“Cheer the fuck up, will you? The kid throws a fucking knuckle-curve.”

Grinning hard against the heel of his hand, Harden considered the long drive west tomorrow, and an hour more would get him to Oakland, at this speed. He makes a note to buy some seeds, find his sunglasses. Going to a ballgame, oldest ritual of his life, too-early heat in the air, cut grass and hay.

“I coulda thrown a knuckle-curve.”

“Never in a million years, Richie.”

Harden thought, yeah, he’d go back home after the game. Crosby’d be incredibly welcoming, after a night like that.

“I’ll see you there, I guess,” but he sounded doubtful as hell and Beane heard it no question.

“I don’t remember ever leading you astray before,” Beane said back, sharp, and Harden had to laugh at that, thinking that if he only had one word for his life right now, ‘astray’ would be pretty fucking apt.

Long after he’d gotten off the phone with Beane, after the last of the games was over and Harden had run out of Coke and was drinking straight, he found himself folded over his knees, calling Crosby. It went to voicemail, two in the morning and a day game tomorrow, and he fell asleep in the middle of telling the dead air that velocity was only as good as off-speed and it wasn’t really fair if even the pitcher didn’t know where the ball was gonna go.

*

In the morning, Harden’s shoulder ached like a low burn under his skin, scratching at the scars. The third surgery was what really did it, though the fourth didn’t help. That point where the cure was worse than the disease, in his fourth major league season, his second straight year on the DL.

He wrapped it because pressure sometimes worked, and stuck his mitt and extra shirt and bottle of water and bics (both pen and lighter) in his backpack. He had a flask of either rum or whiskey, he forgot which, and he’d smuggle that in his belt, against the small of his back, so that he could spike a soda in the stands.

Sacramento was a two-hour drive going about ninety-five. Perfect straight flat valley roads, with the sun going down directly into his eyes, a bizarre transitory state to be in. Windows down, traveling westward.

He called up to Beane and Beane sent someone down to take him to the seats, which were, happily, right behind home plate, three rows back. Harden bought a scorecard and a soft pretzel, put his feet up on the empty seats in front of him. Wednesday night Triple-A game, local families and teenagers, random shit going on in the breaks. Harden tried to remember how many times he’d been knocked back to Triple-A on rehab. Every injury except the last one, he supposed.

Beane didn’t come down until the third, kinda incredibly rude, but Harden didn’t care. The kid did throw a knuckle-curve, and man. Harden kept score down to the pitch counts, engrossed.

Billy climbed over the seat and sat down next to him. “Sorry.”

“’Sup?” Harden said distractedly. Beane grinned

“You see? Didn’t I say? You’d watch that shit all day, huh?”

Harden nodded, leaned back at the inning’s end. He looked at Beane, who was getting very CEO in his looks and age. Beane still often acted like he was twenty-five years old, but that was just personality.

Beane explained his reasons for being late in exhausting detail, talking about some deal but he wouldn’t use real names or teams, and Harden amused himself for awhile trying to piece it together, asking leading questions and making Beane narrow his eyes.

The River Cats had a seven-run lead in the fourth, and Harden shook his head. “Trip-A.”

“I keep saying, mercy rule, come on. This is just rough.”

But Beane was gleeful, a spiral on his knee, making notes about players on both teams. Harden thought Billy had the very best job in the world outside of actually playing. Beane had had a hand in all of this, somehow. They talked baseball for awhile.

Travis Buck was out in right field, and Harden pointed him out, saying, “I didn’t know he was back up.”

Beane nodded and spit seed shells out to the side. He ate them compulsively now, since giving up dip three years ago. Harden still thought that the real reason Beane had traded Huston Street was because of nicotine withdrawal.

“He had a good spring. We’ll see, though. The kid’s swing has more holes every year.”

Harden squinted out at Buck, testing the give of his mitt, fiddling with his sunglasses, a strict set to his shoulders, his hair jagged under the edge of his hat, though not as long as it used to be. Buck had had an unconscious rookie season, but fallen back to the minors the next year, bounced around ever since. He made the majors in September a couple of times, but never stuck around. He was the only guy on the field that Harden had played with.

Buck seemed to recognize him once, coming in from right, a flash of eyes and tense mouth, but then he slipped down into the dugout and away, just another minor leaguer.

Beane raised an eyebrow at Harden pouring liquor into his drink, and then tapped their cups to request his share. He said in the seventh that he wasn’t sure who paid for the beers that kept getting brought to them, after they’d both had about four. He looked purely bemused, his sunglasses pushed up; the stadium lights were on.

“It’s a perk of running the fucking organization, I’d imagine,” Harden told him, idly transcribing the lineup changes. Twelve runs up, the ‘Cats had put in their entire second string, a bunch of twenty year olds. It promised to be pretty funny.

“Yeah. ‘Bout that.”

Harden eyed him, Beane kinda smirking and looking away. He blew out a breath in astonishment. “Ulterior motive, I would like to say, that I called from the very start. You are just not an honest person, Billy.”

“Oh, stop the fucking presses,” Beane says caustically. “Like we didn’t already know that. And, shut up,” he cut Harden off, “listen to my ulterior motive, I think you’ll like it.”

Harden crossed his arms over his chest and smiled at the field. Nothing like a blowout, really.

“Come work for me.”

Sensing that he was being fucked with, Harden tugged the brim of his cap and checked the scoreboard for the count. He took his time with his rejoinder. “I’d point out that it’s incredibly bad taste to joke about that, man, but because I am drunk: fuck your mother.”

Beane laughed out loud. “That’s not bad. Of course, I’m not joking.”

Harden curled his lip. “You want me to be the comeback story of the year? Five hundred thousand plus incentives to be the fifth man?”

“Fuck, kid, I don’t want you to pitch.”

Harden stopped, blinking at Beane. Harden didn’t exactly have any other occupational skills. That’d been the whole problem; too dependent on his body, he had nothing to fall back on when it betrayed him.

“What. What do you want me to do?”

Beane nodded at the game. “This.” Harden gave him a look, and Beane grinned. “I want you to be a scout.”

*

Driving to Oakland later that night, Harden tried to figure out what he was missing here, why Beane’s idea seemed so insane to him.

He’d been instinctively suspicious ever since he’d washed out, limped away from baseball. The fourth surgery had rearranged his veins in some strange way that took ten miles off every pitch and he couldn’t locate, going that slow. He was in pain almost all the time and in August something right behind his shoulder gave, snapped, during the first game of a double-header, in the smeary gray rain.

Weeks after, they told him that basically his life was over. Beane released him outright to make space on the roster for the kids coming up, explaining almost angrily, “I woulda kept you healthy over everybody else, if I only had one choice, but what the fuck, man, what can you do?”

What Harden did was lie around on Bobby Crosby’s floor for about a month, shell-shocked and numb, and then went to Victoria, but the world felt dead up there, hard-frozen. He came back to California as it was turning summer, found a haunted farmhouse in the middle of a cornfield, and dedicated himself to demolishing what was left of his talent.

He’d let four years pass.

He still talked to Crosby most days and played chess with Zito by email, and Street, perpetually lost out on the East Coast, sent him postcards and shot glasses bought at airports. Danny Haren drunk-dialed him a lot. He sent Chavez’s kids presents every birthday and Christmas like clockwork. Though viscerally removed from the day-to-day, he was still attached to the team in ways that mattered.

And down in the valley, he could live without leaving a trace behind, expertly concealed. Harden had gone through his collapse in full view of the national press, and now he just wanted to be left alone, watching the crops come up from the front porch.

Harden was eighty percent sure that he should turn Beane down. He knew nothing about scouting. This was some weird consolation prize, a misguided attempt to draw him back into civilization. He needed to see if Bobby was in on it, if it was like an intervention.

The lights were still on when Harden pulled up in Crosby’s driveway, the new house’s address written on a matchbook. He’d been here once before, the weekend Crosby moved in, handprints on cardboard boxes and Crosby telling him not to lift the heavy shit. The front door was unlocked, as it always was when Crosby was home.

Leaving his shoes in the hallway, Harden sought out Crosby, located him eating a bowl of rice krispies at the kitchen table, the little white TV playing clips of basketball. He grinned when Harden came in, dust on the side of his face.

“Decided to show your face?”

Vaguely reeling, Harden took the seat across from Crosby. “I’ve had an odd night.”

Crosby got up to get them each a beer. He was barefoot, wearing board shorts and a T-shirt with a maple leaf on it, faded to pink. Hair grown out again, he’d get tired of it in a month or so and shave it all off once more, but Harden had always liked him better like this, uncombed and rough.

“Yeah? There’s a full moon, you know. Strange things afoot.”

Harden flicked the bottle cap across the table at Crosby’s hand. “I went to the River Cats game with Billy. He. He offered me a job.”

“Well, that’s pretty fucking cruel, even for him.”

Harden smiled a little bit. “Not on the team. Scouting.”

“Scouting?”

Appreciating that Crosby sounded as confused as he was, Harden leaned on his elbows, fists near his temples. “So basically I need to figure out if he’s fucking with me or if he’s serious, you know, what the fuck I’m supposed to do next.”

Crosby tapped his finger thoughtfully on the bottle, a small, unfamiliar scratch on his cheekbone, as if he got clipped by a piece of flying gravel, sliding into second. Harden always felt better when he was with Crosby, the clamor and fear ebbing away.

“I think he probably is serious, what with the historical evidence, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a good idea,” Crosby said.

“You don’t think I could do it?”

“You could totally do it, man, but, like, following in the footsteps of Billy fucking Beane? That’s kinda asking for trouble.”

Harden took a drink, thinking. Billy hadn’t known anything about scouting either, when he’d walked out of the clubhouse and up to the front office, retiring from the outfield and asking for a desk job in one breath. Beane hadn’t been run out by injury, or at least, nothing physical, and he probably could have wrenched around the majors as a bench player for a few more seasons, but he’d given it up. Harden thought that if there was even the slightest chance that he could pitch again, in any way, in the minors or the independent leagues, in Mexico or Japan, he would have dug in, played for room and board.

Beane had let it go, and now he was almost like a myth. Better than twenty years out of major league baseball, he was still working on his Hall of Fame case.

“I’m not sure I follow,” Harden said slowly. “Billy’s done all right for himself.”

“Except for that whole sociopath thing.” Crosby shook his head, smiling. “Like, have you ever talked to the scouts? Because they’re generally very weird, lonely people.”

Harden rubbed his mouth. “As opposed to me.” Crosby kicked him under the table.

“You’re not that weird.”

Twisting his expression into something like a laugh, Harden worked on his beer for a minute, wondering honestly what would change if he started scouting, going to games and getting paid for it, weaseled his way back into baseball.

“I could be good at it, I think,” Harden said to his hands. Crosby sat back, propping his feet on the empty chair next to Harden, looking speculative and pretty fucking good, all things considered.

“That’s true. You can, like. You see that stuff. You’ve always been able to see things right.”

Harden looked away. He could see, he couldn’t turn it off. He knew when he was twenty-three years old that something was badly wrong with his body, that it wasn’t meant to be that difficult. He’d proved a little more every day that he wasn’t built for this, bestowed with all the passion and talent and none of the requisite strength. Going down, he counted the hours.

“So what do you think, man?” Harden asked him. Bobby shrugged.

“It’s definitely a possibility,” he answered, and Harden glared at him, really not in the mood for riddles. Crosby smiled again, quick pull of light across his face. “I think, fuck it. You’ll kill yourself wondering if you don’t.”

Harden nodded, though his stomach hurt almost petulantly at the sight of Crosby and his silver eyes. He couldn’t fathom the number of times he’d prayed for one more day, keep me in the game, lord, please. This was misinterpretation, like old stories about wishes that backfired. It would eviscerate him to live in ballparks again and never get to play.

“I guess I can try. And if it sucks, okay. Lesson learned.”

Crosby reached across the table to clink bottles with him in solidarity, and started talking about life on the road, man, and you’re out of practice. Harden tried to act like he’d missed being in motion, but really he just felt dangerously unanchored whenever he was out of the valley.

They stayed up late, talking. Crosby was probably the brightest single presence in his life, and Harden was tired from the ballgame and the hours he’d spent in the car, the beer and dulling overlay of two drunks in one day. His mind wandered, lost track on the line of Crosby’s neck, the clean undersides of his arms.

Crosby wandered into the guest bedroom brushing his teeth, keeping up conversation with Harden around the toothbrush, his mouth shiny white. Harden undressed, hanging up his belt and folding his jeans, telling Crosby that the thing about baseball this year was that every division would go down to the wire. He kept himself from looking at Crosby too much, pajama pants hanging off his hips.

Over the course of their now decade-long friendship, Harden had thought exactly twice that he might have a chance with Bobby. The first time, Crosby was frighteningly drunk, slumping onto Harden’s back with all his weight, breath on Harden’s shoulder, babbling. His skin felt soaked with heat, and though he looped his arms around Harden’s neck and tried to pull him down, tried to kiss him, Harden had to twist away, his hand pressed under Crosby’s jaw, feeling the thunder of his pulse. Crosby’s eyes were half open, glittery and blank, and it turned out he had a hundred and three degree fever, which turned into bronchitis, which shelved him for almost three weeks. Harden was pretty much convinced that Crosby didn’t remember pulling him down and licking Harden’s mouth, though he’d never quite had the stones to ask.

Six years later, Crosby broke up with his fiancée a month before the wedding, moved back in with Harden. Crosby barely spoke as they drove back and forth, and when the last of his stuff was in the car, he looked around the apartment, newly excised of any trace of him. He turned on Harden, eyes wide, panicking, and Harden took him by the shoulders and pinned him down on the wall.

He hadn’t known he was gonna do that, but once he had, he liked the fit of it, and he said something vaguely distracting, keeping Crosby still until he calmed down. Crosby ended up slouching back against the wall, eyeing Harden almost like a dare, like Harden could just lean right in.

But he hadn’t been able to—it was important that Crosby not get any more fucked up than he was already, for the team’s sake if not Rich Harden’s.

Bad timing was all it was, really. Harden thought for years that it was inevitable, only a matter of time, but he hadn’t factored in being released, and now it seemed unattainable, a misplaced hope of his youth. Too much had changed.

Trying to fall asleep, Harden added up the totals from the game in his head, holding his breath to hear Bobby Crosby talking in his sleep through the wall.

*

Harden turned off his phone for four days, and didn’t check his email, and didn’t see anybody. He’d slowed down recently; he needed more time to make decisions that could alter his future indelibly.

What’s the point of only going halfway back, he wondered, walking fifty paces out from the cherry tree and kicking at the hank of wood he’d buried in the dirt. He threw baseballs all afternoon at the dented trunk of the tree, missing pretty much all the time. As if being robbed of velocity weren’t enough, his location had never returned.

Long still sunset over the fields, fiery and spread out like a blanket, and Harden considered life on the road and day games in hundred degree heat and if he’d still be able to come home and see Crosby a couple times a month. He thought that basically what he was being asked to do was identify his best friends in their twenty, twenty-one year old incarnations. Find starting pitchers and infielders to build a franchise around, kids who were patient and crafty, high school boys already throwing splitters, outfielders who existed on another plane.

He remembered the minors with remarkable clarity, though it really wasn’t that long ago. Dust and humidity in Texas, the crawl of the flatlands into him when they were at Sacramento, always thirsty, always wired. Crosby had focused things, given Harden a reference point that didn’t move, and in third innings and past midnight, Harden would recognize the strain of happiness that ran through his days for what it was.

What’s the point of only existing tangentially? Harden told himself that he’d really never been cut out for this stuff, looking up Zito’s minor league stats, and Street’s, and his own. He got drunk and asked Bobby on instant messenger, do you think a better scout would have seen that I was a bad idea?

Crosby responded almost immediately: extremly good idea. you see some guy that looks like you 10 yrs ago, you give him whatever he wants.

The next day, Harden called up Beane and got yelled at for awhile, and then they made plans to meet in Sacramento and officially reinstate Rich Harden within the Oakland organization.

*

Billy had an office at the River Cats stadium, possibly more lived-in than the one at the Coliseum, with a door that opened into a box suite overlooking the field. They had drinks brought up and went through the paperwork and logistics of an actual adult-type job, watching the game.

Beane was trying to impart everything he’d ever learned about scouting, but Harden was having trouble paying attention. The ‘Cats were engaging as hell, even behind glass.

“A lot of this is laid out for you. We can tell you everything you need to know about what a kid has done. It’s a different situation entirely when trying to predict the future.”

Harden glanced at him, wondering if Beane had ever predicted this for him, maybe the first time he got hurt or the second, when it was still mysterious deep-tissue injuries, a heaviness in his side like he’d turned to melted lead there. Pitching had always done unpredictable things to him.

“You’ll hear a bit about make-up,” Beane told him, pacing and trying to keep his eyes off the action. Beane tried not to watch too many games, particularly live games, because he didn’t want to disturb his vision with untrustworthy observation. He was fickle about that, though. Like Harden, Beane got anxious when he went too long without seeing some baseball.

“Yeah,” Harden said. “I’ve heard that before, actually. But I’m still not completely clear on what it means.”

Beane looked up at the ceiling as though for inspiration. Harden knew that make-up was something that guys like Crosby and Street had, something he himself did not. You had to be a letter-perfect All-American boy, apparently.

“You look for guys who aren’t gonna fuck up just because they can. Guys not in it for the money and guys who won’t get drunk and arrested. Think about it like this. You make them richer than they’ve ever anticipated. You take them far away from their families and let them play baseball every day, and meanwhile they’re living single and young in some major city, and you need to find the guys who can stay sane in spite of all that. Pro ball’s not a good idea for the psychologically weak. It’s a lot to ask, considering the age.”

Drumming his fingers on the arm of the chair, Harden watched a double-play performed perfectly like a hand swept across the field. Everyone in both lineups was younger than him, he was realizing, a depressing thought, but who really wanted to be back in Triple-A?

He tried to think of where he matched the description of bad make-up guys in Beane’s estimation. He never got too far into it, never stayed out all night in a foreign city and come in disastrously hungover, like certain closers from Texas that he could name, and the game always came first with him, that was never in doubt. Maybe this was some kind of institutionalized gay-bashing, because his was an open secret within specific confines.

Even more galling, he’d spent six years keeping his hands off his teammates, despite dire temptation in the room down the hall and Zito drinking tequila for hours on Cinco de Mayo. If he was going to be unfairly judged based on his deviant lifestyle, he should have really gotten to fuck Bobby Crosby at least once.

“I’m not sure if that’s something you can distinguish, necessarily,” Harden said, because, honestly, everybody was a fuck-up for a couple of years early on.

“You’d be surprised.” Beane smiled slightly. “I was always looking for guys who were nothing like me. So that was easy. You’ll have your own way.”

Harden fingered the plane ticket Beane had given him. He was going down to New Orleans tonight, a red-eye flight after the game. Beane started him on the Pacific Coast League, which was a nice thing to do, actually, kept him relatively close to home. He was gonna have to get a place in Sacramento. No way could he maintain the commute back to the farmhouse, after weeks spent in motion.

Bad make-up was something ragged at the edges, Harden thought. For him it was the treacherous wrench of his motion, the stagger out of a bar in Midland, when he’d done everything he could to stay drunk for days, his legs kicked out from under him by the guy playing short and living in his house. He had a tendency to be emotionally wrecked at times, but it almost never came over into his game.

“Does talent supersede make-up, though?” he asked finally. “If they’re good enough, do you look the other way?” Beane grinned.

“Yes.”

“Okay.” Harden sat back, propping his foot up on the windowsill. He recognized the carry of Buck’s shoulders, walking into the on-deck circle, before he saw the number on his jersey. Winning again, and Harden really couldn’t remember why he’d stayed away from ballgames for so long.

Beane gave up on his ignorance and dropped into the chair next to Harden, his eyes scanning quick across the scoreboard and the field, settling back a little when he saw that the River Cats were ahead. The thing about Beane wasn’t that it was hard to figure out his angle; it was that he had six or seven different angles always going at the same time. He shifted priorities and changed his motivation too often to be easily tracked.

“Are you,” Harden started to say, then stopped, frustrated. He cleared his throat. “Am I supposed to know how to spot when a guy is injury-prone?”

Beane smirked. “If you can, I never woulda let you pitch in the first place.” Harden recoiled, stung, but Beane was shaking his head. “No, man, I mean ‘cause you woulda been more valuable as a scout than a pitcher, that’s all. I’ve had some time to think about it. The single biggest reason that we’ve never gone the distance is because motherfuckers keep getting hurt.”

“So you wouldn’t have signed any of us, if you knew?” Harden swallowed, cracking his knuckles against the chair arm. Beane sighed as the ‘Cats ran themselves right out of the inning.

“I don’t know. Maybe. The problem is, we were trying to get away from conventional wisdom, and the conventional wisdom with regard to fragility is actually pretty accurate.”

“Yeah?”

“They say, don’t sign guys who’ve been relying on breaking pitches for a dozen years, particularly curves. And don’t bring up Zito, because, clearly: freak of nature. They say, don’t sign anybody who’s had back or hamstring problems, because that shit lingers. They say, don’t sign short power pitchers.”

“Hey,” Harden protested weakly, but Beane grinned and cut him off.

“But that’s the thing, Richie, because I think I still probably would have signed you. You shoulda seen what you looked like back then.”

Uncomfortable, Harden curled his hand under the bend of his knee and watched Buck go crashing into the right field wall. He’d been dealing with regret for so long, it seemed strange when other people didn’t respond in kind.

“I always figured, I could identify talent and I could gauge it and produce evidence in support of it, but as far as durability, I could only guess, and I wasn’t gonna make decisions based on that. So I rarely did. And now motherfuckers keep getting hurt.” Billy smiled kinda ruefully, his face tilted downwards. “So, whatever. I don’t need to talk to you about bad luck.”

“No,” Harden said, looking at Beane, who looked back. “You don’t.”

Beane grinned again, and Harden thought that that was one thing about it, he’d never had to keep his downfall secret, and he couldn’t work out whether that was good or bad. He never had to explain what he’d lost, because everyone could see it, but at the same time—everyone could see it.

“You’re gonna do fine,” Beane told him without hesitation, and Harden flinched, struck hard. Billy had said that to him once before, many years ago.

*

Down in the players' lot after the game, Harden was taken surprise by someone calling his name, a stone echo. He turned and Travis Buck came up to him, damp-haired and dressed in his street clothes.

“Hey, Rich, what the fuck,” Buck said conversationally, sliding his hand through Harden’s.

“How’s it going, T?” Harden asked, running on automatic and checking the corners. He’d only played with Buck that one year, Buck’s rookie year and Harden’s last full season in the majors.

“Did you get a place out here or something?”

Harden shook his head, then shrugged. “I’m gonna, I guess.”

“That, that’s cool. I mean, Sacramento, you know, whatever. But you probably have your reasons.”

“Yeah. Um.” Harden noticed something unfamiliar and pinched in Buck’s face, remembering the stupid kid playing lit and overcome with joy, a big even grin that had been replaced by something crooked and screwed up. “I just took a job scouting the PCL.”

“No shit?” Buck’s eyes widened and flashed. “You can do that?”

“Apparently.” Harden leaned back against his car, giving Buck a long look. Buck was now part of his job description: fleet and streaky outfielder with a plus arm and vulnerabilities in his swing. Off to a good start this year, but see how long that lasted.

“That’s crazy. Buy me a beer, tell me all about it.”

Harden blinked, and Buck was already walking around Harden’s car and waiting by the shotgun side. He unlocked the car and got in uncertainly. He wondered if he and Buck had been closer than he remembered, those six months when their paths intersected. He’d expect this from most of the others, simple presumption that Harden would go along with any suggestion, but he’d been hurt most of 2007, anyway. They were not quite friends.

Buck directed him to a dive bar called the Knockout that had two other people in it, and sat him down in a booth near the pool table, in the pink-blue-green fragmented light of the hanging lamp. Harden had a plane to catch in three hours, reminding himself that he was only a visitor here.

“So, like, how do you even get on notice for a scouting job?” Buck asked. Harden moved his shoulders, picking at the splinters in the table.

“I didn’t do anything. Billy I guess just decided it might be an interesting experiment.”

“I suppose you can learn that shit. I think they do most of it on computers these days.”

Harden glanced at him sideways, not sure if Buck was making a joke or not. The waitress came over and Buck gave her a smile that changed his whole face, cleaned off the creases and brightened his eyes. Harden remembered Buck like this almost all the time, those first few months of his rookie year.

“It doesn’t seem too difficult. I field a mean fantasy league team.”

Buck laughed. “Oh, good, then.”

Harden licked at the rim of his glass, thinking that he would have to endeavor not to fall into old habits and end up living with Buck in Sacramento. They’d hardly ever see each other, but Harden had grown out of roommates.

They talked for a little while about the team Harden was going to see, the Zephyrs, and Buck gave brief summaries of every man in the lineup, drew a map on a napkin that showed how to get from the hotel to the ballpark. Harden got steadily drunk, happy to have a man on the inside.

“What year’s this for you, Travis?” Harden asked when his vision started to blur at the edges. Buck pushed his thumb through a slick of water on the table, the corner of his mouth tugged up.

“Sixth.”

Most of it spent in the minors, of course, but they didn’t need to bring that up. “More than me.”

Buck looked up. “Yeah?”

“Just barely.”

“You were one of the ones who tore the fuck through the system, weren’t you?” Buck asked, and Harden had to roll his eyes, finish off his beer.

“So did you, the first time.”

Buck sneered and sat back, and Harden felt guilty. Buck’s time in the system was in no way analogous to Harden’s, which had heavily featured Bobby Crosby and the distracting heat of Texas, and only lasted a year and a half. Buck’d been down here almost forever.

“You came back when you got hurt, though. Every time,” Buck said, and Harden winced, thinking that was probably fair.

“Rehab stints don’t really count, man.”

“What, you’re making up the rules now?” Buck smiled sharklike, but at least it looked like he was having fun again.

They settled back down, talking more easily about people they had in common and the apartment complex where Buck lived, near the trainyards. Harden learned that the house he and Crosby had shared when they played here had been knocked down and paved over, and he got briefly morose at the thought of the empty beer bottle that they’d buried in the backyard with their first baseball cards rolled up and tucked inside. Soon enough, it was time to leave.

Driving Buck back to his car at the stadium, Harden made note of the way he slouched in the passenger seat with his knee on the glove compartment and his window all the way down. He tried to think if he’d ever been to New Orleans before, asking Buck if he knew of any good bars, and Buck was still answering when they got to the yard.

Harden put the car into park and looked over at Buck, the careful turn of his neck checking the digital clock on the marquee. “So, we’ll have to hang out again when I get back.”

Buck nodded. “Yeah. Find you someplace to live, I’ll show you around.”

“I know my way around, dude.”

“That was years ago.” Buck grinned at him, and got out of the car, leaning in the window to say, “Welcome back to Triple-A, Richie.”

Harden swore cheerfully at him and got out of there fast as he could, found himself an hour later running through the airport, his wet-paint reflection far ahead of him in the huge windows, slowly advancing.

*

His third night in New Orleans, Harden had the old dream, pitching on the road in August or September, a day game and the stadium gun reading eighty-seven, eighty-six, no matter how far back he reached. He could hardly see through the sweat and the glare, spitting out oaths and dragging his face across the sleeve of his jersey.

Crosby showed up behind him, kicking the dirt, and Harden whirled on him, panicked and ashamed, the ball clutched like a ladder rung.

“Tell them to fix the fucking gun or turn it fucking off.”

Crosby squinted at him and took off his cap. He had the curls, mostly clean-shaven, though sometimes he had the buzz-cut and sometimes a beard. Though everyone else on the field was dressed in gray, he was wearing a bone-white home uniform, spikes and all.

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the gun, man,” Crosby told him, looking sad, and sometimes he drew the laces of his glove tight with his teeth, or picked up the rosin and sent a cloud of powder up to hide his face. Harden always got mad real quick.

The crowd noise built, somewhere with a dome, and Harden was screaming to be heard, “I’ll throw through his chest, you’ll see how hard it goes,” Crosby’s eyes huge and pale blue, and usually he woke up about then.

The window in his hotel room was jammed open, stuck on a warped piece of metal, and the atmosphere thickened even after he turned up the air conditioning, lying on top of the sheets in his boxers. He was here for the whole home-stand, four days more, and then up to Tacoma and Portland before coming back to Sacramento. He fell back into the pattern without difficulty, eating in the lobby restaurant and riding on the team bus to the park. Nobody on the team really talked to him.

Watching baseball for a living wasn’t as damaging as Harden had expected. He felt drunk almost all the time because of the humidity, and the grass was overwhelmingly green, the sky similarly blue. There was an outfielder whose legs blurred when he ran, circled like pinwheels, and hung up for whole seconds too long when he dove, and a catcher with the grid of the mask sunburned onto his face, who fought off thirteen pitches before finding the left-center gap, one hop to the wall. Harden learned the nicknames and team-specific cheers, wondering if being a fan favorite was supposed to be factored in.

It was only every fifth day that he felt the absence of responsibility on his back, his hand locked around the edge of the seat. He kept score every game, kept notes, sat with the other scouts behind home plate and some of them recognized him, but they didn’t make a big deal about it, and for that he was grateful.

Exhausted by the length of the day, Harden walked down to the Little League field behind the high school with a sixer and wandered the outfield, calling Crosby, who hadn’t played that night, giving way again to the new kid.

Crosby let Harden talk nervously at him for awhile, Harden crossing the same patch of grass in an irregular weave and trying to explain the different manner of sight that he was developing, the breakdown of the game to risk and statistics.

Eventually, Crosby spoke up, the highway flush behind his voice, “So, are you allowed to have a beer at the game, or are you, like, on duty?”

Harden stopped, grinning up at the moon. “Neither condoned nor expressly forbidden. They sorta turn a blind eye to it.”

“Well, that’s good. It’s definitely not healthy to watch Trip-A games sober.”

“It wasn’t healthy to play them sober, either,” Harden remarked, trying to remember if it was Midland or Sacramento when Crosby had spiked the Gatorade cooler on a dare. The only thing he was sure of was that they’d scored fourteen runs that afternoon.

“That was just our reckless youth,” Crosby said with mockery in his voice. Harden sat down in center field, missing Crosby so badly it frightened him. “We’ve straightened up and flown right.”

“Is that what we did?” Harden lay back and closed his eyes, a marshy animate scent in the air, the river a few blocks over. He must have been in New Orleans with Crosby before, sleepwalking through the hotel, maybe screwing around on this field, after curfew.

“Tried to, anyway.” Crosby coughed into the phone, radio and highway noise behind him. “You seen anybody looks all right?”

“Few.”

“No shortstops, right?” Bobby was kidding, but Harden didn’t like the idea of it, some nameless kid out in the bus leagues waiting to take Crosby’s job away from him.

“I’m not gonna tell Billy about any shortstops,” he promised, heard Crosby laugh.

“You’re a prince, Richie.”

Harden let his head roll on the grass, dampening his hair and pressing his hand down flat and almost completely covered. He’d gotten used to the tightening in his chest that Crosby inevitably caused, training himself to ignore it for a third of his life now. Crosby was impossible from the start in the same way that pitching became impossible at the end, something hobbled by a higher power.

“When do you get back?” Crosby asked him.

“Week from Sunday.”

“You gonna come into town? You get a couple days off?”

Soft dirt under his hand, Harden whistled soundlessly, answering, “Yeah. Ten-day trip, three days off. Then I think I’ll probably be in Sacramento for a little while.”

Crosby hummed, and Harden could almost hear him scheming. “That’s good. I can work with that.”

Harden smirked at nothing and thought about asking Crosby if he remembered New Orleans at all. Crosby probably didn’t; he wasn’t very good with names and specific places. He said stuff like, that dive bar in the South with the purple pool table, that restaurant where we ate rattlesnake, the park with the slide that went through a tree, and it was left to Harden to translate: that was in Memphis. You’re thinking of Albuquerque. The park was outside of Seattle.

Harden wondered if it gave them some kind of credibility, because they’d been best friends in every time zone and half the cities in the country. They’d lived together in transit, for half a dozen years, and maybe that was why it was unsettling to be on the road again, alone for the first time ever.

“Can I come out and stay at your house while I’m off?” Harden asked, crossing his fingers.

“’Course. Of course. If you didn’t, I’d have to drag my ass out to Sacramento.”

Harden smiled. Crosby was too decent for him. “God forbid.”

“Well, you know, just don’t expect too much of me, man, that’s all I’m saying,” and Crosby was joking again, sharp as if he were right there, cross-legged with blades of grass in his hair, rolling a baseball back and forth between his hands, half-grinning and Harden pressed his fist down on his chest, suddenly short of breath.

*

Harden got back to Sacramento and met up with Beane as the sun was going down behind the faraway hills. They bullshitted for a while and then Harden told him about the guys he’d seen and that they really needed to find better team hotels. Thinking about Travis Buck, gone to Las Vegas two nights ago, Harden asked about conflicts of interest.

Beane signed something absently, glancing up at him. “How do you mean?”

“I know some of these guys, Billy. Played with them or was even friends. Am I not supposed to hang out with them anymore?”

Beane rolled his eyes, shook his head. “You’re thirty years old, Rich, you can pick your own friends.”

“Okay, I’m twenty-nine, first of all.”

Flashing a grin, Beane popped a piece of nicotine gum out of its blister pack and told Harden that it was all downhill from here.

On the roll through the dark valley, heading home to Oakland, Harden considered how much weight his word carried with Beane. If he said, this guy’s a lock, would Beane make a few swift moves and acquire him, at god knows what cost? He thought about how easy it would be to bring the Athletics down from the inside, a couple of bad trades and wasted drafts, the line between red and black much thinner for them than most ballclubs. Sometimes Beane seemed to just will them into contention, when motherfuckers were hurt, when the lineup was half rookie, when they should have by all rights been given a year off for rebuilding.

It was a poor business model, he decided. Too much was dependent on Billy Beane and flyers like himself. Little things went wrong for the A’s a lot, that bad luck thing too heavy on their backs to shake, and Harden wondered why he’d never noticed the precariousness of the situation when he was still playing.

Four years on the team and it felt like twenty, the way they lived. Harden broke over the hills and cut in close to the water, the city fogged in, looking erased from the skyline. He could make this drive in his sleep, thinking about how the whole day had slowed in the aftermath of baseball, stretched to intolerable lengths.

Bobby had left the door unlocked again, but the house was dark this time, and Harden padded ninja-quiet to the guest room, where Crosby had left a Hershey bar and a ticket to the game tomorrow on the pillow. Harden put his suitcase in the closet, same as he had the other three unfamiliar rooms he’d stayed on this trip, and took off his shoes and belt and jeans, his watch folded around a twenty.

He was a long time falling asleep, sharing air-conditioned space with Bobby Crosby again, waiting for him in the morning.

It was a day game, so Crosby was gone when Harden woke up, his red bowl in the sink. Harden found the liquor in the freezer and ate Lucky Charms in front of the television, caught a flash of Huddy in his Cubs uniform on WGN but didn’t linger there. Zito was in Philadelphia and he called to pester Harden about something that had been inconsequential a half-dozen years ago. Harden neglected to tell Zito that he was staying with Crosby again—Zito would just make a big thing out of it.

The ticket was for right over the A’s dugout, which set Harden in direct line of the players coming in off the field, and Danny Haren leaned on the rail with his back to the game, talking to him for two innings before a foul almost killed him and the coaches made him go sit on the bench.

Sadly, his seat was also at perfect vantage to see Crosby losing his helmet on the basepath and getting knocked unconscious trying to break up the double play, in the last half of the first. He was close enough to hear the sound of the collision, bone on bone, the skid of Crosby’s body through the dirt off the bag.

He revived enough that he only had to be carried off with arms around his shoulders, his spikes trailing on the grass, and Harden wished he would look up, white-eyed and lucid, but Crosby’s head hung down like it was made of cement.

Sick and uneasy, Harden made note of the substitution, wondering if his former and current jobs might give him license to go down the tunnel and see how bad Crosby was hurt. He caught Chavez’s eyes coming in at the end of the inning, called Bobby’s name to him and Chavez nodded, held up a finger. Ten minutes later, one of the batboys passed up a note that said they’d taken Crosby to the hospital but he was probably okay. Harden spent the rest of the game wondering whether they’d completely fabricated the last part of the message to keep him from losing his shit. It was the kind of thing that Eric Chavez would be party to.

He remembered nothing of the last four innings, though he continued to keep score. It was like driving home the same street for the six thousandth time and letting his eyes unfocus for miles at a time. Soon as he could, he went up to Beane’s office to find out what hospital the team was using this year, and Beane forbade him from going anywhere near Crosby, so Harden left and sat in his car on the street outside the stadium, by the train tracks, and called every hospital he could think of in the city pretending to be Crosby’s brother; he got lucky on the sixth.

One of the trainers was in the waiting room on his cellphone (probably with Beane, the bastard), and Harden had never been so thankful for his face and name, the four years he’d had up here before his arm gave out. The trainer told him that they were keeping Crosby overnight because he had a concussion, and he wouldn’t play for a few days, and that was all. Harden, overcome by relief, went back to Crosby’s house and played videogames until the sun came up.

Bobby got dropped off past noon and Harden was still asleep on the couch, but he was stirred by the slam of the door and the ring of Crosby dropping his keys on the hardwood. Footsteps approached and stopped in the doorway, and Harden said with his eyes closed:

“In my day, we played through concussions, you fucking pussy.”

There was a pause, and Harden thought maybe that was a bit too far, though if anybody had earned the right to joke about injury, it was him. Crosby just threw his glove at him, bouncing it off Harden’s head. Harden looked up and Crosby was yawning and collapsing in the armchair.

“They won’t let me sleep. Not until nine o’clock.”

“Sucks, man.”

“And they said I shouldn’t come to the game.” Crosby dug his hand into his hair, wincing and breathing out in disgust. “Which is, like, not fair. You don’t think that’s fair, right?”

“I absolutely do not,” Harden said confidently, seeing the spread of bruise at the corner of Crosby’s eye, sinking into his hair. “You seem totally okay to go to the game.”

Crosby sighed. “I got these anti-seizure pills. You have to help me set the alarm on my watch so I can remember to take them.”

Harden nodded, pushing onto his elbows, sitting up. All the tightness was going out of Crosby, deepening his slouch into the chair, and his eyes flickered half-open.

“Hey,” Harden said, kicking at Crosby’s leg. “What was that about not falling asleep?”

“Fuck, Richie.” Slit blue eyes, hard mouth, sunlight in a layered field across his features. “I’m really fucking tired. How likely do you think slipping into a coma really is?”

Harden shrugged, knowing in a weird way that he would be reacting differently if he were still on the team. Crosby had always been a keystone, steady and implacable in his high socks, his thin bat and neat backlash of a throwing motion. There’d been a few years when he and Crosby had traded off spots on the disabled list, and it’d been bad when Harden was hurt, worse when Crosby was.

In the end, though never all that they thought he might be, Crosby had done the most important thing, stayed healthy. His injuries had been extremely random, broken-ribbed swings, dirty slides, and it was like he’d grown out of hard luck. Harden’s problems had always been more internal than that.

“Is there a dent in your skull?”

Crosby snorted. “Yeah.”

“You’re like a circus freak now.”

Rolling his head to the side, Crosby yawned against his shoulder, ten years taken off his face in the hazy light. “They were talking about how if I’d hit my head just a couple inches to the right, it woulda fucked up my motor control and I probably wouldn’t be able to field good anymore.”

“It’s probably not a smart idea to get into the what ifs, man.”

There was always some worse injury, dangerous to contemplate when already depressed and fucked up on painkillers. Harden used to dream of taking a comebacker square in the face, blinded and brain damaged, shattered on the dirt as it started to rain. Baseball was far more perilous than most people realized.

Crosby’s eyes fell near-closed again, and Harden asked to keep him up, “They gonna let you go on the Central swing?”

Making a dismissive sound, Crosby answered, “They better try and fucking stop me. I’m gonna be fine in, like, twelve hours.”

Bobby couldn’t afford to stay out of the lineup, of course, platooning at short with the kid, who’d moved off triples recently, started hitting doubles down the line instead, which was just as bad.

Fighting off the long afternoon and the misaligned chemicals in Crosby’s brain, struggling to stay awake, Harden took Crosby out to the hills over Vallejo, where a mile away they could see the Six Flags coasters and colorful tents. They hit golf balls into the empty land sloping steeply downwards, almost hearing the shrieks of kids when the wind picked up.

Crosby sat on the hood of the car watching Harden take his cuts, and he asked about Harden’s strange new job, disjointed and backwards view into the life. Harden gave his answer more thought than it warranted, crouching to pick a broken tee out of the dirt.

“I don’t really know what I’m doing,” he said. “I see something in a guy’s swing and I think I can see his whole career, just like that. But that’s not really possible, so it’s just, it’s pretty confusing.”

Crosby looked out over the valley, hands flat on metal. Harden caught himself staring again, forced his eyes onto his hands.

“Maybe you should go by the numbers, at least to start,” Crosby told him.

“Billy could do that himself, so why the fuck am I out there?”

“Because who knows, dude?” Crosby grinned whitely, a yellow twist of grass in his hair. “You gotta have faith. Billy’s actually good at scouting, you know, and he’s gone and found you again.”

“Yeah, and it worked out real well for me last time.” Harden tried to sound bitter, but he missed it and just sounded tired.

“That is in no way relevant. And even if you’d known going in that things were gonna end the way they did, you wouldn’t have done anything different.”

Harden raised his eyebrows at Crosby, sprawled on the car with one sneaker propped on the fender, ragged white collar of his lacoste set off against the dark scruff on his jaw. He would have done several things differently, as a matter of fact, like not letting them pitch him so much when he was twenty-one, and developing a better curve, and making a serious play for Crosby, not some cowardly drunken pass but for real.

“Well,” he said, lining up his shot. “I’m doing this now, but I swear to god, it’s the last time I let Billy Beane determine the course of my life.”

He swung, a solid crack that reached his hands but not his arms, and the ball zoomed out of range of his vision, totally lost in grass. Being a pitcher, his geometries were all fucked up, deeply attached to straight lines and single dimensions, but lately things had been curving, circling back around.

He looked back to find Crosby hopping off the car and stretching his arms out. “You can’t really blame him, man. You keep saying yes.”

“You told me to!”

“And you keep listening to me, too.” Crosby hooked his arm around Harden’s neck and rattled him. “Obviously your judgment is a little impaired.”

Harden shifted to feel the warm skin on the inside of Crosby’s elbow move against his neck. He was discomforted, uneasy because he’d been in this kind of trouble before, and he was starting to suspect that he’d never actually gotten out of it.

*

They knocked around together for a couple of days, the tail-end of the homestand, and Crosby wheedled his way back into the lineup before the bruise on his face had all the way faded. He had to leave in the fourth with a debilitating headache, and Harden, eating Swedish fish behind the dugout, thought that that was a less than encouraging sign.

Crosby was wrecked that night, chasing painkillers and coke, his eyes glassy and sunken. He slurred his speech and lost his balance a couple of times and it all looked pretty familiar. Bobby Crosby with post-concussion syndrome, dragging on vowels and working out bizarre hairpin turns of thought, weaving and blinking slowly. Harden had dealt with this for whole months, way the hell back when.

Getaway day, and Harden wanted to make sure that the symptoms had passed before Crosby got on the plane to Cleveland, but he had to be in Sacramento for a noon game and so left Bobby asleep in a mess of blue and red sheets, color near his eye like the shadow of a hand over his face.

With the sun directly above, Harden followed the road north, resigned to memorizing this route over the next few months, make this drive a hundred times.

Buck went three for four that afternoon and broke someone’s windshield on a four hundred foot foul, and actually waved to Harden when he spotted him in the stands, surprising Harden bad enough that he waved back. The other scouts gave him disgusted looks, and Harden glared at them. He’d lost a drinking contest to Buck; of course he was going to acknowledge the man.

After, Harden went up to Beane’s office for his next set of orders. Beane was watching a rerun of Saturday Night Live from twenty years ago, though the A’s were still playing, tied up in the eighth. Beane could tell you the standings of every team in the league on any given day, their most recent performances and guys running hot, but Harden’d bet a lot that he’d yet to see a single major league game this year.

“Heard you were back in town this weekend,” Beane said, offering Harden a beer with a look. Harden took it, and the chair in front of Beane’s desk.

“News certainly does travel around here. Junior high all over again.” He debated whether or not to put his feet up on the desk, decided not to taunt death.

“You saw the team?”

Harden nodded, jimmying the cap off the bottle with his pocketknife. “You need to do something about the ‘pen.”

“Yes, thank you. I’m working on it.”

“It was okay, though. Real nice day for it.”

“You can tell that this is the right job for you because you spend your days off doing the same thing you do working.” Beane made a little gesture as if toasting himself for the brilliance of the suggestion, and Harden rolled his eyes.

“I got nothing to say about the big league club, so it’s not like I have to pay attention or anything. And, you know, pretty much my entire social network revolves around the team.”

“I know,” Beane nodded, and then paused, glancing at Harden. “Shame about Bobby.”

Harden schooled his face. “He’s fine.”

“They said he’s bruised as shit.”

“Yeah. But other than that, fine. He’ll play tomorrow for sure.”

Beane hummed, watching the cast wave goodnight. He tapped his finger on his beer thoughtfully, looking like his mind was somewhere else entirely.

“I musta told him a hundred times to quit sliding headfirst,” Beane said. “Kids are stupid these days.”

Half-laughing, Harden pushed his fingers at the phone in his pocket and thought that he should have told Crosby to text him when he woke up, just so Harden could be sure that Crosby had woken up.

“You taught him to leave everything on the field,” Harden told him. “He came by this stuff honestly.”

Beane smirked, shook his head but didn’t argue. Harden didn’t think that Beane had a very good grasp of what playing for a general manager like him was like. Beane was behind everything, willfully created them out of nothing at all, and there wasn’t anything they wouldn’t do out of loyalty to him. Beane was the kind of guy who inspired kamikazes.

They drank for a minute, and then Beane said, “Anyway, stick around awhile, okay?”

Harden nodded, having expected that. “For the homestand?”

“Yeah. Omaha Royals are coming in, there’s a third baseman I might like the look of.”

Starting to say, you already have a third baseman, Harden reconsidered and kept silent. Chavez was not as young as he once was; who among them was? It was his job to better the team, and he’d already sworn to protect the shortstop.

Anyway, Beane had to know what he was doing. Harden scratched at his knee and thought that it was kinda like blind faith was required. He still didn’t think it wise to rely on Beane to quite this extent, but he could understand the draw of it now, why it worked—the teams worked. All Beane’s teams were fundamentally successful.

“Saw this kid on the Zephyrs run a double out of an infield hit.”

“Really. Stupid human trick.” He sighed, picked at the label of his bottle. “I’m off speed again, I think.” Beane looked up, lines across his forehead. “You got some place to stay?”

Way to change the subject, but Harden just said he’d figure it out. Beane gave him a couple other guys to keep an eye on, and Harden didn’t ask where Beane was going to be while he was here and the A’s were in the Central.

He finished his beer and stood to go, surprised when Beane followed suit. They were professional colleagues, was the weird thing. Harden wondered if they were gonna shake hands all formal-like at the door, but Beane just knocked him one and said, “Find me someone good,” and it seemed doubtful that the whole thing could really be that simple.

In the parking garage, Harden found Travis Buck sitting on his duffel bag with his back to the tire, playing a third-generation PSP, which Harden knew for a fact was only available in Japan. He had the sound turned up and the tinny explosions echoed dimly across the cement. Harden kicked his foot, and he looked up, a crash of gunmetal blue and a road rash abrasion on his jaw, and Buck smiled.

*

Buck spent the night riding shotgun in Harden’s car, going from bar to bar with the windows down and the radio up. Harden liked that he could say some blatant lie to Buck and Buck would accept it without question, straight-faced and funnier in his earnestness than Harden was with all his cynicism and timing.

Buck wanted to know everything about being a scout, so Harden lied about that again too, not wanting to admit for the second time in a week that he was pretty much clueless. It started to rain as they were walking back to the car, and Buck flipped up his hood, lifted his face, looking neatly at home. Northwestern boy, Harden remembered, me and him both.

Harden dropped Buck off tottering on his doorstep, and drove as far as the first motel he saw, slept like he’d been drugged for fourteen hours. Awaking into the full light of the afternoon was worse than a nuclear blast. He limped across the alley to the gas station for aspirin and food, and was still slowly eating dry cereal in bed when Buck called.

They found an apartment for Harden pretty easily, and Buck helped Harden move in over the course of the week, Harden moving one carload a day from the farmhouse in the valley. As it turned out, Buck knew a thousand dirty jokes and twice as many ghost stories, and the third night, he slept in a sleeping bag on the floor of Harden’s new living room. They learned that in the morning a wedge of sun knifed across that very spot, when Harden came out to find Buck’s face flushed and the sleeping bag shoved down to his waist, T-shirt twisted up over his ribs, feverish and still asleep.

Harden sat down at the table, kinda floored. He’d thought he was past this, this teammate stuff. He tried to remember that nothing was like it had been. The thing by which he’d defined himself had been surgically removed four years ago, and that meant that he was now nameless, just another person in the stands.

The third baseman that Beane asked him to look at was very good, oddly graceful considering the size of his shoulders, solid contact to all fields and a quick release on his throw. Buck told Harden that right-handed pitchers hated facing the kid because he could time anything from that side, impossible to fool.

Buck had amazing theories for everything that happened, related to Harden over drinks at the Knockout, in the car, in Harden’s empty apartment. Buck thought that they’d changed the ball without telling anyone five or six years ago, put cork or a piece of meteor rock or something in the heart of it so that it came off the bat as if backed by an explosion. He thought that there was some new drug making its way through the system, something that didn’t have just one name, stole a measure of self-preservation so that outfielders would run through walls and shortstops would stay in on the double play even if it meant having a leg broken on the slide.

Harden liked listening to him, chipping in occasionally. He’d always appreciated rhythm. Buck coulda gone home with either of the two waitresses in the joint, their eyes stuck on him like lint, but they ended up on the sidewalk again, just the two of them.

“And you know what else?” Buck said, picking up on a piece of conversation that Harden had assumed was dead. “If everybody who goes into the Hall from the past twenty years is gonna go in under this cloud of suspicion, it’ll be that much easier for the next generation.”

Harden twisted his keys around his thumb, scanning the street. “You think so?”

“Sure. Sure. Like, there’s still a chance for me, even.”

Harden tried not to let his disbelief show through too clearly, not meeting Buck’s eyes. Buck would do well to even make the majors again, much less put together something worthy of the Hall. “That’s interesting.”

“I mean, maybe that’ll be the kicker.” Buck walked the curb like a high wire, his hands in his pockets. “Not just really good, but really good and, like, thirty-four years old. Or, you know, whatever. If I can just get a full ten years, that would be enough.”

“You’re not really giving yourself much room for error,” Harden pointed out. “You’d have to be perfect pretty much every year.”

“So?” Buck rocked on his heels, a jag of hair sticking out from the side of his head. “I’m not worried about that.”

Of course he wasn’t. Beane picked up all different manner of guys, from all over the world, but most of them were terrifically self-centered and locked on their own success. Harden had had trouble being around them when his own ability was deserting him inch by inch, day by day, wanting to disfigure Danny Haren for still being able to pitch.

“You should probably find a tree that’s been struck by lightning and make a bat out of it, then,” he said, and Buck looked at him, smiling uncertainly.

“I don’t get it.”

Harden shook his head, hiding a smile of his own. “You kids today don’t know shit. C’mon. I’ll drop you off.”

“You’re going home? It’s early.” Buck looked briefly stricken, balling his hand on his hip.

“I’ve got to make another run to my old house,” Harden told him. “Billy’s gonna send me on the road again when you guys go, and I wanna be done with it by then.”

“Okay.” Buck got distracted by an ambulance passing, his profile red-lit and stuttering as he followed it down the street. “I can come along.”

Harden blinked. “It’s a four-hour round trip.”

“Yeah, and? We’ve got an off-day tomorrow, I got nothing but time.”

Harden’s stomach clutched, and he thought that this was probably a bad idea, but he’d gotten used to ignoring the feeling recently, and shrugged, led Buck to his car. It was almost midnight, the stars almost debilitating, a plane flying under the moon.

They picked up a six and Buck talked shit about Harden’s car until Harden broke a hundred and ten for fifteen miles of utter nothingness. It was incredibly stupid, feeling the engine howl and protest, the sheer of the road and the knowledge that a blown tire, a rough patch of highway, a suicidal prairie dog could kill them so easily. Harden felt like laughing, like maybe if he pulled back hard enough, they’d break free of gravity. He looked over time and time again to see Buck looking back at him.

Fifty miles past the place where the streetlights staggered out, Buck said, “You weren’t lying about it being the middle of nowhere.”

“Yeah.”

“How long have you lived out here?”

“Oh. Four years. That’s an approximation.” Harden closed his eyes experimentally, feeling the roar of the asphalt on a straight shot.

“The fuck did you do out here for all that time?”

Harden shrugged, still blind, uncomfortable with getting into the specifics. “I watched about ten hours of baseball a day.”

“Sounds about right,” Buck nodded, squeaked his fingers on the window. “And clearly, it’s served you well.”

Harden shook his head, but didn’t answer. Things moved very slowly out in the valley, thickened his blood to syrup. It got hot enough in the summer that he couldn’t concentrate on anything, shaking and inarticulate, forgetting for long stretches of time that his major league career had been anything but an alcoholic dream. It seemed like the kind of nightmare that his subconscious would inflict upon him, and he kept waiting to jerk out of it, praying for the relief of morning.

Zito’d made a joke, right after Harden had bought the house, that he was going to an awful lot of trouble just to drink himself to death. Zito shouldn’t have said anything, because he was more fucked up than Harden by a factor of about twelve (true story: Zito’s career numbers against the A’s were abysmal (witness Eric Chavez’s .600 average against) and the first start he’d ever missed had been interleague at the Coliseum, on some poor excuse: flu-like symptoms, food poisoning, of course not in any way a broken heart), but Harden couldn’t find it in him to argue the point. So far, the only thing he’d learned from life after baseball was that it was best undertaken alone, where people couldn’t see him.

They parked in the yard at the end of the long driveway, and it was pristinely quiet when they got out of the car, the house lit in the moonlight and another board missing from the porch roof.

Buck started to whistle the Green Acres theme, and Harden rolled his eyes, skipped the creaking middle step and unlocked the front door, looking over his shoulder to see Buck standing in the overgrown grass, his face turned up to the sky.

“You coming in?”

Buck met his gaze, grinning. “This is straight rural, dude. This is crazy.”

“I told you, man.” Harden leaned with his back against the door, knowing that he was nothing more than a shine of belt buckle to Buck, hidden in the porch shadows.

“I mean, like, I’m definitely coming here when the bomb drops. You got canned goods and stuff, right?”

Buck climbed the steps and bumped Harden’s shoulder as he went inside, taking off his cap and stuffing it in his back pocket. Harden went through the house turning on the lights while Buck wandered, wanting to exhibit some sign of life. There wasn’t much left, an orange paisley couch that had been there when Harden moved in and his second TV, which he’d won off Mark Ellis in a card game. The last few boxes were in the front hallway, faded squares on the wall from posters that had been taken down, and Harden found Buck standing in front of the window in what had once been his bedroom, drinking his beer and looking out at the fields, dark enough that it took a minute to distinguish them from the sky.

For whatever reason, Harden didn’t feel right disturbing him, so he stood stupidly at Buck’s back, liking the silhouette he made, his muted reflection on the glass. He was not nearly as drunk as he thought he should be, noticing the circle left in the dust on the windowsill when Buck lifted his beer.

“It must have fucked you up pretty good,” Buck said after a long silence, and Harden nodded without know what Buck was talking about.

“I guess it did,” he answered, probably the truth no matter what Buck meant.

“I always figured it’d be like never being able to sleep again. Or, not just like that, but something you can always feel, messes up every day.”

Harden moved closer silently. “You’re talking about baseball?”

Buck turned, his eyes flipping silver for an instant. The moon to the left over his head, his face was unreadable, arms back with his hands on the sill. “I’m almost always talking about baseball.”

There were hollows like thumbprints in Buck’s drawn-tight arms, drying Harden’s mouth and he took a long drink of his beer, keeping his eye on Buck the whole time.

“I can’t explain what it’s like,” Harden said quietly. “I can’t think about that stuff too much.”

“No,” Buck agreed, and tipped his head to the side. “It’s funny, because we used to have this debate about what was worse, playing in the minors forever or only having a couple of years in the Show.”

Harden lowered his eyes to the floor, pressing his teeth into the inside of his lip. “This is worse,” he told Buck plainly, without looking up.

“Yeah.” He heard Buck shuffle his feet, and glanced up. Buck was looking at him nervously, a little too close. He swallowed. “Hey, Richie-” he started, and then stopped, and raised his hand, brushing his fingertips along Harden’s jaw and then quickly away.

Harden stared at him curiously, foggy milk-blue eyes and bitten mouth, raffle of dirty blonde hair. Buck was trying to tell him something; it might be important.

“It’s okay, T,” Harden said, not wanting him to worry. There was a hot crawl in his stomach as he curled his hands into fists, whispered absently, “Not everyone ends up like this.”

Buck blinked fast and his teeth flicked at his lip, Harden’s chest hitching, and then Buck came forward fast with his hands laid flat on Harden’s shoulders, set his mouth at the place where Harden’s jaw met his throat, and bit him.

Harden immediately draped his arms around Buck’s shoulders, his knees caving slightly and bending his body in. He was taken completely off-guard, but he could do this in his sleep, and fuck if Buck wasn’t yet another example of Beane’s seriously weird compulsion to draft handsome young men with homoerotic tendencies. Buck made seven, seven that Harden knew about.

Buck caught him around the waist and turned him, as smooth as something premeditated, and pressed him into the wall. You’re fucking good at this, he wanted to say, but he’d lost his breath. Sliding his hand into Buck’s hair and pulling his head back, Harden kissed him deeply, feeling stirred and frightened.

They broke apart short of breath, Buck’s fingers twisted under Harden’s belt, and Harden asked on a gasp, “How the fuck did you know?”

Buck shook his head, licking Harden’s neck and working on his belt. He was grinning, almost humming. “I hope you weren’t under the impression that you were passing, man.”

Harden wound his hand tighter in Buck’s hair, until he hissed, baring his teeth, kissed him hard for a couple seconds. He pressed up against Harden, his hand pushing into Harden’s shorts. “No, I, I am, I know. I just try not to. With ballplayers.”

Buck snorted. “Yeah, that’s a realistic expectation. Considering that the only guys you know are ballplayers.”

“Not true,” Harden said, trying without success to catch his breath, jerking up into Buck’s hand and digging his face into his shoulder. “I just don’t live close to any of the other people I know.”

“God,” Buck breathed out, and pushed his free hand up under Harden’s shirt, the hard edge making Harden twitch. Despite his resolutions, this kinda thing was always so good, even up against a wall and still all the way dressed, rough and painless and raw.

Harden knew there was a reason that he never set out to fuck around with his teammates, former or no, but he was having trouble bringing it to mind. What harm could possibly outweigh the lean twist of Buck’s hip under his hand, teeth at his throat, killing tight rhythm around him, the traces of pine tar on Buck’s fingers?

And Buck wasn’t his teammate and never had been in any real way, so maybe that made it okay. Harden didn’t want him the same way he wanted Crosby; Buck was more immediate, more unpredictable, less likely to capsize and drown.

“Wish. Fuck. Wish I’d left the bed,” Harden managed to say, and felt the sting of Buck grinning against his cheek, a last drag ripping up through Harden’s spine. Buck was laughing as Harden came, and he could hear the sound of it graying out, like his sense of the wall at his back and the slick skin of Buck’s side under his fingers.

He came back to Buck tugging at his shirt, mouthing his neck, and Harden had the wherewithal at least to shove him stumbling into the hall, down to the couch that they fell on like a storm. Bare to the waist, Harden straddled Buck’s body and regarded him for a moment in the secondhand spill of light from the kitchen, Buck shivering and rolling up into him, eyes half-lidded, mouth all fucked up, amazingly distracting. Harden couldn’t believe that this hadn’t occurred to him before, but figured that Buck was just the type of guy who snuck up on you.

“What should I,” Harden said, and then stopped, his fingers fanning low on Buck’s stomach, because Buck was working his own belt open and pushing his head back into the couch, his face strained.

“I don’t care what you do,” Buck told him, and took hold of Harden’s wrists, moving his hands down. “But do it now, okay?”

Harden shook off Buck’s grip, and slid down, flattening his palms on the sturdy brace of Buck’s ribs, licked his stomach and listened to Buck swear. Everything echoed out here, quiet as it was, and there was lint and dust in Buck’s hair, darkening with sweat as he moved in time. Harden could taste the grass stain on the side of Buck’s wrist when Buck pressed his fingers to Harden’s jaw and held his mouth open.

Harden thought, jesus, and looked up to find Buck’s neck arched, his body a shallow bow stretching away and towards the black window, and Harden brought him back, all the way down.

*

Harden got Buck up before dawn, because he was supposed to meet Beane at the stadium in a few hours, and Buck slept-walked through the house, slowly gathering his clothes. When he yawned, Harden could see his fillings, crazed hair sticking up all over his head. Buck wasn’t much for talking in the morning, but he kept knocking into Harden, leaning on him.

He fell asleep in the back of the car, a red hoodie of Harden’s under his head, and Harden found a bag of Swedish fish in the glove compartment, melted by the sun into a single shape of strange consistency. Caffeine and sugar put him in a fragile state of mind, considering the man sleeping behind him.

Buck asked too many questions to be as dumb as he sometimes looked, but Harden didn’t think there was any secret plan in them fucking around. Harden figured Buck was like he himself had been, obliged by loyalty and duty not to risk anything with his teammates no matter how good they looked or how bad it got. But here they’d found a loophole, a length of forgivable time. Harden had played fair and it’d cost him his whole life—he had to be owed for that.

Buck stirred as they came out of the valley, one leg folding slowly between the seats, his socked foot sliding down. Harden glanced over his shoulder, Buck rubbing his eyes, scratching at his stomach. Harden flushed unexpectedly, thinking of heat in his mouth and Buck clawing through his hair, brokenly saying his name.

“Hey,” he said. Buck grunted, rising in the rearview. “We’re almost home.”

Buck shifted and let his head fall against the side window, his expression tight and pained. “Why the fuck do I feel like I’ve been hit by a train?”

Harden shrugged, absently chewing on the corner of his lip. “It’s been a long night, Travis.”

“Yeah, made fuckin’ sure of that, didn’t we.”

Harden swallowed with a click, and didn’t answer. They’d been on the couch for hours afterwards, Harden’s head on Buck’s chest, half-sleeping, and Harden thought that the stillness and careful hold of the early day should have calmed something in him, but he still felt anxious and off his game. He wanted to get Buck alone again, ten miles from the nearest civilian or in the backseat, parked in a gas station alley with church bells ringing. He was almost weak from it, wanting skin and motion and the dig of bone, thinking of the terrible things that he could do to Buck if given enough room.

Buck was quiet for the rest of the ride, dozing against the window whenever Harden looked back. He pulled into the stadium and said Buck’s name, and they both got out. Harden heard his back crack, wincing, and Buck smiled, called him old man and Harden sneered, pushing a hand roughly through Buck’s hair.

“You know where he’s sending you?” Buck asked, fitting his hand on Harden’s belt. Harden shook his head. “You’ll call me when you’re back in town, though, right?”

Harden let his fingers slide out and down Buck’s neck, and Buck shuddered briefly, starting to grin. “I’ll call you.”

“Good.” Buck kissed him quick, and stepped away, muddy blue eyes shining. “Stay out of trouble.”

Then he was turning and heading to his car, and Harden watched him until he became aware of what he was doing. He shook himself out of it and went down into the clubhouse, washing his face and wetting his hair, trying to get it to lie flat. He thought that if Beane was as smart as everyone always said he was, he would surely be able to see what had happened scrawled all over Harden’s expression, but Beane didn’t say anything about it, distracted by something that was happening with the big club. Without making eye contact with him, Beane sent Harden to Iowa.

*

Two weeks Harden spent on the road, bouncing around the Midwest, smoke and dust and pollen woven into the fabric of his clothes. He lost his scorebook in a roadside diner in Oklahoma, and stayed up all night recreating the games, building small histories of certain players. The sun set over the plains every night, and though he was constantly en route to somewhere else, Harden felt a kind routine settle over his days, an understanding of what was expected of him.

Crosby called him late at night, after the A’s game was over, and Harden sat out on the landing overlooking the parking lot, his legs hung through the iron rails. Sounding unsure, Crosby asked him where he was and then asked if the two of them had ever played there. Harden couldn’t remember, so he took a shot and said yeah.

“I can’t remember individual places anymore,” Crosby complained.

“You mean you used to be able to?”

“I think, maybe. I might be getting stupider the older I get.”

Harden snorted, rested his forehead on the metal. “That would explain a lot.”

“The last ten years are becoming a blur. Do you think that’s normal?”

Not really, Harden thought, still able to catalog every one of the home runs he’d given up, every time something broke under his skin when he threw, every rain delay. But maybe that was just him and his tendency to have clearer memories of bad things than good.

“Well, you’ve been through a lot,” Harden said, pieces of rust flaking off onto his jeans. “And you’ve changed basically nothing about the structure of your life, year to year, so it’s easy to see how you could get confused.”

“I did drive halfway to the Diablo Base house the other night,” Crosby said speculatively. Harden laughed.

“You forgot where you lived?”

“I was momentarily disoriented.”

Crosby sniffed defensively, and Harden closed his eyes, wondering if he should tell Crosby that he’d decided to fuck around with Travis Buck a little bit. The immediate answer was no goddamn way, but Harden was learning not to take things at face value so much. Crosby knew that Harden strayed occasionally, and probably understood on some level why Harden had been so careful around him for so long, but they both preferred to ignore that for the sake of their friendship.

Whether or not Crosby knew everything that Harden wanted from him, Harden didn’t want Crosby to think even absently that Harden was happy without him—it seemed like the worst kind of misdirection.

They talked for awhile longer, and at the end of it, Crosby asked, “Where are you, again?”

“Des Moines, Bobby,” Harden said patiently. Crosby took a moment, and then, sounding dangerously lost:

“What are you doing out there?”

Harden looked out at the dirty swimming pool and the infinity symbols scrawled on the asphalt of the parking lot, the deafening flatland skewing all the way to the horizon. Maybe he had been here with Crosby, in their misspent youth, when every bus league town was savage and romantic, and the moon had always been full.

“Remember how I’m a scout now?’ he said. Crosby was still suffering from the effects of the concussion, he knew, and he’d forget all about Harden for days at a time, only to crash back into him like waking up from a coma.

Harden had gone through all of this before. The dumb ways he got hurt, stuff that was easy to recover from but left behind lingering symptoms, and for whatever reason Harden was always the first one he lost track of, the first one regained when he was healed.

“Right. Right,” Crosby said, but he was audibly still searching for the sequence of events that had led to Harden in Iowa, and Harden sighed, lines painted in red across his forehead from the iron. It might not count as telling Crosby if he was pretty sure Crosby wouldn’t remember.

He would have a few days when he got home, and the River Cats were going back out on the road after the first night, so he’d be able to catch Crosby up on the early season in person. Sent far away from everything he knew, Harden wanted nothing more than a guest bedroom in the Oakland hills, all alone with Bobby and his head injury.

The flight west took hours out of him and he felt it keenly, blinded by the orange light of sunset, standing in the airport parking lot. He called Buck sitting in his car, struck dumb by the heat, and Buck met up with him at the Knockout, swearing that shots were the only cure for jetlag, and three hours later Harden got himself blown in the men’s. He realized that that was why he liked this bar, nobody fucking cared.

Buck wouldn’t leave him alone driving home, his hand high on Harden’s leg and his mouth on Harden’s shoulder, so Harden pulled to the side of the road and said, “In the back, goddamn it,” opening his door and looking back to see Buck actually slithering through the seats like he was all of fourteen, somehow making it with his long legs disappearing. Harden couldn’t believe this guy.

The windows were tinted, an old major-league habit, though Harden hadn’t been this thankful for them in a very long time. Buck in the perfect darkness between streetlights, color vague in his hair and eyes, pulling Harden down on top of him with his hand back in Harden’s belt, his other on the back of Harden’s neck.

Catch me up, Harden wanted to say, but that just made him think about Crosby and really, no. There were already way too many similarities. But Buck was crazy, anyway, this side of the road stuff, which was only to be expected considering that he’d been a six-year minor-league journeyman.

Buck moved like a kid, though, like this was still the best thing he’d ever stumbled upon, kissing Harden as if they had all the time in the world with his knees up near Harden’s ribs. This was what Harden’s life was supposed to be like the last time he’d lived in Sacramento, if he’d allowed himself his teammates.

They spent the night at Buck’s apartment because he had a day game and an afternoon flight, and Harden thought hazily that it was like they played in different divisions, divergent schedules but a similar manner of existence. He shook his head, pushing his face against Buck’s back. Everything kept coming back to baseball, and that made sense; he’d chosen this.

In the morning, Buck rolled Harden onto his stomach, fucked him with the warm flat of his hand a steady point on Harden’s shoulder as everything else came unanchored, and Harden felt satisfied that they’d made the most of their limited time together. More than a week in Buck’s company at any one time might kill him.

Harden slept for awhile longer after Buck left, and knocked around getting breakfast and watching SportsCenter before he went by his house for clean clothes and set out direct for Oakland.

*

Crosby was in lousy shape over the long weekend, stumbling in the hallways and rubbing his hand compulsively at his temple like he always had a headache. He looked relieved to see Harden, made a few comments that suggested he’d lost a number of years and thought Harden still lived with him, been worried that Harden didn’t come home the last couple of nights.

Harden probably should have corrected him, but he didn’t mind retro Bobby, who’d so completely captured his attention back then. They frequented the same bar and diner, and Harden dropped him off at the ballpark as he had a number of times when he’d been on the disabled list and not called until game time.

Harden didn’t know if Crosby’s state of mind was as bad here as at home, but Crosby was out of the starting lineup and judging by the posterboard signs for the new kid in the left field bleachers, he had been for awhile now. Assuming Crosby’s motor skills hadn’t been affected, he was a better glove than the new kid, but offense carried the day, as ever.

The A’s scratched out something late, come alive under the brights, the drums and warm air. It was almost heartbreaking, watching the tie-breaking double split the outfielders and carom into the wide open spaces, the crowd howling and on their feet. Always been a good place to play, the Coliseum, no matter what they said about it.

Crosby’s aim was to get stupid drunk that night, but Harden quite rightly judged that to be a seriously bad idea, and distracted him with dart games and some of Buck’s dirty jokes. Crosby ended up lying down in a booth with his head near the wall and his legs hanging out, staring morosely up at the ceiling.

Harden kicked at his feet. “You know who never passed out in a bar? Cal Ripken, Jr.”

“You shut your mouth.” Bobby exhaled upwards. “It sucked when you were gone.”

Eyeing him doubtfully, the foreshortened stretch of his body and his face half hidden behind the edge of the table, Harden thought wearily that it was no surprise he hadn’t been able to survive out here, so easily decimated by his old best friend.

“It’s not like I was around all the time before,” he answered, and Crosby shook his head against the seat.

“No, I mean, I only started four games, only got in two other. Fucking kid’s over .400 again, did you see that? Fucking unbelievable.”

Harden didn’t know what to say, because cheap young talent was the driving theory behind the Oakland Athletics, and if he were an objective witness, he’d admit that the team was probably better off. The very last thing Harden was, though, was an objective witness.

“Also, like that’s not enough, double vision and blackouts! Really, I’m having a hell of a year.”

Harden threw a dart two feet off the mark and into the wall, but decided immediately that it was the fault of shock and not his arm, which was beginning to throb in a way that meant it was near midnight. “You’re blacking out?”

“So they say. Of course, I never really remember.”

Crawling in on the other side of the booth, Harden leaned over the table, wanting to meet Crosby’s eyes but finding them closed. “How many times have you been knocked unconscious in the past couple of years, dude?”

“I don’t know. Who keeps track of that kinda thing?”

“Bobby, you’re freaking me the fuck out, you know.”

Crosby squinted his eyes open, smirking. There was a piece of peanut shell in his hair. “Well, let’s just call this payback for every time you got hurt, then.”

Harden flinched, and sat back so that he couldn’t see Crosby anymore. He squeezed his hands together under the table and looked away, the South Park pinball machine in the corner reminding him suddenly and fiercely of the Knockout, Buck with a quarter between his teeth and rollercoaster red and blue light on his face.

“Anyway,” Crosby said on a breath. “I think the universe is fucking with me or something, because today they said they might want to try playing me as utility for awhile.”

“That’s-” Harden stopped at once. That was horrible. That was the worst news he’d heard in months. Shifting a thirty-one year old middle infielder to utility was the start of a lot of bad stuff, like when he’d got put in the bullpen for one last ditch effort, the single most agonizing month of his life. “Fuck, Bobby.”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

Harden leaned forward on his elbows, Crosby’s pinched mouth and the now-permanent line over his eyebrows. Seeing him like this was a blow to the chest, something riding high and in.

“For good? Or just until you get better?”

Crosby awkwardly lifted his shoulder. “It didn’t seem that planned out. But, Jesus, Rich, you know it’s gonna stick. When’s the last time a move like this didn’t stick?”

Making up his mind, Harden slid out of the booth and kicked Crosby’s sneakers again. “Get up.”

Angling his head up, Crosby looked at him suspiciously. “Why?”

“Because in the morning you’ll thank me for getting you out of public.”

Crosby exhaled like he’d been shot, but allowed Harden to take his hands and haul him to his feet. He tottered, and Harden thought it likely that he’d snuck an extra shot or two while Harden’s back was turned, but then reconsidered. Abject failure could make you kinda drunk too.

“I hate playing second, man,” Crosby mumbled, slumping against the side of the car as Harden dealt with the keys. Crosby rubbed at his face like it hurt, his shoulders cut.

“I know,” Harden said softly.

“I gotta think before I throw. The distances are all fucked up. I always forget where to go on the cut-off.”

“You’ll figure it out.” He put his hands on Crosby’s shoulder and back, guided him into the car, rustling Crosby’s hair in passing. “The one thing I never worried about was having you behind me.”

A crooked clouded smile bent Crosby’s mouth and was almost immediately gone. Harden was stunned to find himself reaching for it, wanting to put his fingers on Crosby’s face with force that nearly buckled his knees, and he drew hastily away, trying to clear his head as he walked around the car.

Crosby didn’t lose total control of himself that night, though it was a near thing around two in the morning when he started shaking and falling in and out of alternate timelines. Harden made him take four aspirin and a capful of Nyquil and his seizure meds, and folded him into bed as Crosby explained breathlessly that what Harden had to do was scout him, tell Billy that there was no better shortstop in the league and asking him to play anywhere else was heresy.

Harden swore he would do what Bobby asked of him, tucking the tag of Crosby’s shirt under his collar and resting his fingertips on the clean back of his neck for a long time.

*

Several months passed.

Bobby played every few days, rarely at short because the fucking kid was running pretty hard towards Rookie of the Year, and Harden refrained from pointing out that they really should have seen that coming. Crosby kept throwing the ball away, skidding on unfamiliar ground and disoriented, and Harden saw him on television winging a helmet into the dugout wall so hard there was an audible crack.

Though second base was bad, Crosby said it was worse at third, because then he had to face Chavez afterwards and Chavez felt for his corner roughly what he felt for his sons. He wouldn’t talk to Crosby if Crosby fucked up on the field that day, and Crosby ended up calling Harden at ungodly hours and complaining about their so-called friends.

Crosby didn’t black out very much anymore, or maybe he’d just stopped telling Harden about it, not liking the stricken look and tone that always followed. He seemed to accept that Harden existed on all of his timelines, and stopped worrying about the date and the stuff he’d forgotten.

Standing back while Crosby’s life slowly crumpled inwards, Harden thought that it wasn’t right for him to have to go through this twice.

He went to every city in the Pacific Coast League, dipped down into Double and Single-A on occasion, when Beane got bored and started looking up random college kids that had been drafted in the sixty-second round, sent Harden out to see the ones that had made an impression.

Beane’s finds tended to be pitchers, rangy guys with arsenals who looked at Harden quizzically, trying to place where they knew him from. Harden was going by James almost exclusively in his scout life, only occasionally taking off his sunglasses.

In June, Harden worked hundred-hour weeks on the draft, fell asleep at the wheel one night and rolled to an easy stop against the gutter. It was a message of some kind, and Crosby said that his survival clearly meant he was protected. Harden wasn’t sure, but the draft went well. They spent the rest of the summer signing their picks, chasing them down in university bars and strip clubs, and when things finally settled down, Harden could see the overarching design on the organization, the five and ten and fifty year plans.

Right before the deadline, Beane made a trade ostensibly for a big league reliever, but in actuality for the minor league prospect who came along as an afterthought. Harden had recommended the player to Beane, and he was kinda dumbstruck, watching the kid dance around second base for the River Cats, thinking that he changed this guy’s life, brought him to California.

Buck said that the kid was the real thing, his face tucked into Harden’s throat, telling him, “You’re smarter’n hell, Richie, you won us the pennant.”

That wasn’t exactly a feat, considering that the ‘Cats had won five of the past six PCL pennants, but Harden took the compliment for its intention, humming against Buck’s temple and sliding his hand down Buck’s back.

Buck turned out to be a better idea than the second baseman. Harden went with the team to Nashville and outside some country bar (nothing but country bars) with chicken-wire over the windows, Buck chucked a rock at a streetlamp and they were both surprised as hell when it popped and went dark, wide-eyed and frozen. Buck broke first, grinning and pulling Harden into the new shadows, into a doorway with colorful paper flyers rustling under Harden’s back. Buck pressed him down, whispering, “I meant to do that,” his fingers working Harden’s jeans open.

Sometime after temperatures reached ninety-five and leveled off, a power grid went off in Buck’s neighborhood. They had to navigate the apartment stairs and hallways by the light of their cell phones, faded dark blue washes on the concrete and carpet. Harden found that a totally lightless world appealed to him, let him hang onto Buck’s wrist without awkwardness. It felt more like something important when Buck tumbled him onto the bed, muttering about doing this fucking blind.

Usually, though, Buck was just an inconstant friend, the only one sucking Harden’s dick at the moment, but Harden had never expected he’d get a chance to fuck around with an outfielder again, this time without fear of repercussion or reprisal, or at least, none that could do any real damage, a grudging side effect of already having lost everything that mattered. It was impossible for him to downplay the urgency he felt when he got Buck alone after a week or two on the road, because they wouldn’t have long to do this. Buck would get smart, realize that he was jeopardizing his career for a cripple who couldn’t throw eighty-five, and that would be the end of Rich Harden’s little sojourn into the dreams of his past.

In August, the River Cats had a seven-game lead and the A’s were two and a half back and gaining. Harden went back to New Orleans, and haunted the motel through three straight days of rainouts, talking to Crosby on the phone under the overhang, watching the pool overflow, a glass bottle lifted off the cement and carried away.

Billy said that Harden wasn’t getting paid for this trip because he hadn’t seen the pitcher, and Harden rolled his eyes, knowing that Beane was just tense because it was getting to be late season and nothing had gone wrong in a while, leaving him constantly braced for it.

The problem was, Beane was paranoid for good reason. Harden was at Buck’s place in Sacramento, most of the way asleep on the couch in the heavy gold light, when he got a call from Danny Haren and a text message from Eric Chavez, both telling him that Crosby fainted in the dugout a couple minutes before first pitch, busted open his cheek on the bench and got taken back to the hospital.

He was looking for his sock when Buck came in eating an Otter Pop, raising his eyebrows. “Leaving?”

“Bobby fucked himself up,” Harden answered, fiddling with his watch, his mind drawn relentlessly west.

“Bobby Crosby?” Buck asked, and Harden shot him a glare, sitting on the arm of the couch to pull on his shoes. “What’d he do?”

Harden wiped the film of sweat from off his forehead with the side of his hand, checked for his wallet and keys, shaking a little bit, thinking, Bobby you fuck. Buck’s eyes were thinned against the sun and flint-colored, not too concerned.

“He slid headfirst,” Harden said, and went down the hall, Buck trailing him like a stray. “I’ll call you if I end up coming back tonight, but don’t wait up.”

“Like I even would.”

Buck flipped an Otter Pop down the length of the hallway and it slicked out of Harden’s hand, broke on the wall. His car had been baking in the weather, like climbing into a steam room, and the Otter Pop melted almost faster than he could eat it, small rivers on his wrist, his mouth blued and sticky.

He beat his own best record getting to Oakland, and outside the hospital entrance, in the white and red light, he was stunned to find Beane pacing around on his cell phone. Beane caught sight of Harden and double-took minutely, the corner of his mouth curling. He left a message for someone and snapped his phone closed.

“Shouldn’t you be in Sacramento?”

Harden pushed his hands into his pockets, his shoulders tight. He didn’t have time for this. “I can miss one game, Billy. Do you know what room he’s in?”

Beane shook his head. “You can’t go up there.”

“I’m pretty sure I’m one of his next of kin, dude.”

“No, he’s getting a CAT scan. And why the fuck would he put you down as his next of kin?”

“It was a dare,” Harden said too sharply, and knuckled his own forehead, silently cursing. “Is this still the fucking concussion?”

“Always the little things, you noticed that?” Beane looked away for a second. “He was gonna start at second today. He’s been bitching about not playing all week.”

“But it’s not a big deal at all, right?” Harden asked, ignoring that last, the still discordic visual of Crosby at second base. “He faints sometimes, he’s always okay after.”

“Well, no, if only because it took six stitches to close his cheek. But that was just on accounta bad timing, I guess.”

Harden reeled inside, clutching at his pockets. Six stitches and a neat scar like an underline for his eye, and Bobby would probably thrilled, he’d always said that he didn’t want to die without souvenirs. They wouldn’t let him play with stitches in, and Harden wondered if he could talk Beane into not going on the trip he had scheduled starting tomorrow. Crosby would be holed up in his house watching his ‘Price Is Right’ DVDs and cursing his luck, and Harden really felt like he should be part of that.

“Are they gonna let him go home tonight?”

“Probably. He’s awful when he has to stay in the hospital.”

“Yeah.” Harden paced around briefly, thinking. Crosby bruised and battered and on pain meds was an interesting way to spend his night; god knew he wouldn’t be able to go back to Sacramento after this. “I’ll hang around then, give him a ride when he gets out.”

Beane smirked, looking at Harden out of the corner of his eye like he’d figured something out. “Your dedication to the organization is admirable, Richie, but this team isn’t your jurisdiction anymore.”

Harden managed not to flinch, the muscle in his shoulder abruptly twinging in pain. “The fuck do I care? This isn’t business, it’s personal.”

Beane looked surprised, and then laughed. “Smartass.”

“I’m gonna go buy a crossword puzzle or something,” Harden said, ducking his head. “I’ll be in the waiting room.”

“You’re leaving tomorrow,” Beane reminded him as Harden turned towards the entrance. “Nashville, isn’t it?”

Lifting his shoulders, Harden didn’t look back. “Memphis, Bill.”

“I know you won’t let your priorities get fucked up,” Beane called after him.

Harden didn’t answer, hating the cynical little sing-song in Beane’s voice, and the implication that Harden was already beyond aid. Harden contemplated punching the hospital’s glass wall as hard as he could, just to see if Beane would forget himself and cry out in distress, like Harden still had some kind of value.

More likely, though, Beane would just say sarcastically that it was good these self-destructive tendencies had taken so long to finally manifest themselves. Harden stalked into the waiting room and found a discarded newspaper, but it was several minutes before he could concentrate on anything, his head jerking up every time the elevator binged.

Buck called a little bit before the River Cats game started, but Harden let it go without moving. Occasionally, he needed to remind himself who came first, who took precedence.

Crosby was pissed off when they finally brought him down, clinging to the arms of the wheelchair and dragging his heels before him on the tile. He snarled when the nurse told him to take care, and bolted to his feet the second the chair was clear of the hospital.

“This is so fucking unfair,” Crosby said, the black twist of stitches on his cheekbone standing out in stark relief near the blue of his eyes. “My vision isn’t affected at all. It didn’t even hurt.”

“Weren’t you unconscious at the time?” Harden said, and immediately felt guilty as Crosby glared at him.

“I’m awake now, I’m fine.”

“Billy said you can’t play with stitches.” Harden winced inwardly, bringing up the dumbest stuff, not helping at all.

“Billy was there?” Crosby asked, surprised, and then shook his head, his mouth turning down. “That’s how they decided so fast.”

Harden unlocked the car and after a moment of hesitation, opened Crosby’s door for him, Crosby slumping in like the tendons in his knees had been cut. “Decided what?”

“Oh, he didn’t tell you that. Of course he didn’t. The man runs his team like a fucking spy, I swear to god.” Crosby folded the visor down and studied his face in the little mirror, his fingertips ghosting across the stitches. “This is the first scar on my face,” he noted absently.

“What’d they decide, Bobby?”

Crosby half-smiled, near sad, and rubbed at his mouth. “Fifteen-day DL because they need my roster spot for the River Cats’ second baseman, and also because they think the reason I keep getting headaches and fainting and stuff is because of the stress I’m under, what with not hitting .200 and all.” He bared his teeth, his lip pulled up. “So if I’m lucky, I come back when the roster expands, but I. I don’t actually have a position anymore.”

Weaving his fingers together, Crosby glanced at Harden and Harden tried to keep his dismay off his face. The second baseman was his fault. Bobby’s concussion was not, but that didn’t change the dive in Harden’s stomach, the maddening fear suddenly returned to him like a memory once blocked out.

“There’s got to be something we can do,” Harden said helplessly. Crosby snorted, rolled his head back on the seat.

“Yeah. Ask for a trade.”

Harden jerked, his hands tightening on the wheel. “You. You wouldn’t really, though?”

Crosby didn’t answer for awhile, and Harden watched his hands out of the corner of his eyes, clutched together on Crosby’s knee. Crosby still had tape on his fingers, a white-blue plastic hospital bracelet around his wrist. Harden remembered that the game was still going on, but he knew there was no way he could turn the radio on.

“Billy’s setting things up for the long run,” Crosby said at last. “These kids, they’re not just stopping by. The keystone’s fixed, and I got no place here anymore.”

Pressing his teeth into his lip, Harden stayed quiet, letting the road take them up into the treeline. It struck him abruptly that if Crosby left the organization, Oakland would have no more power over him, and he’d probably give up on scouting, retreat back to the solitude of the valley, again see his friends only on TV.

They got to Crosby’s house and he immediately opened a bottle of liquor. Harden half-heartedly asked if Crosby was supposed to be drinking with the painkillers they’d given him, but Crosby didn’t bother responding, an inch in the glass and a flash of water. It was still light enough through the windows that they didn’t turn on the overheads, and Crosby looked softened and tired when his face passed through shadow.

“I’ve been warped, you know,” Crosby said as they settled in the living room, the bottle between them.

“How do you mean?”

“This kinda team. Like, this is the only proper way to play baseball. What if I end up somewhere where they do it wrong?”

Harden let his head fall back on the couch, feeling exhausted even though it wasn’t yet five o’clock. He wouldn’t drink more than one or two, having a flight to make tomorrow and Crosby to care for tonight.

“A lot of teams play like we do,” he told Crosby, forgetting his place for a moment. “Billy says he should have copyrighted his version of baseball, rather than let everyone in the game copy him.”

“Billy’s got quite the ego, doesn’t he?”

“He’s not wrong, though.” Harden watched Crosby pushing the curved edge of his glass along the seam of his jeans. “Because that’s the thing, it’s not really a strategy at all, not something they can rip off. I didn’t realize until I took this job, but it’s Billy, man, he’s like the reason everything happens.”

Crosby closed his eyes. “He found you and he found me.”

“He found all of us. So, you can’t expect to find a guy like him anywhere else, obviously. Or a team like this one. It seems like it shouldn’t work, you know?”

“I can’t tell if you’re trying to convince me to stay or not,” Crosby said without looking at him.

“Well.” Harden thought for a minute, wondering if it would kill Crosby to stay in Oakland under these circumstances, and if it would kill Harden to stay without him. “You don’t want to leave, right?”

“No.” Crosby looked mildly thrown at the strength of his own answer, and he opened his eyes and met Harden’s, said certainly, “I can’t explain to you how much I don’t want to leave.”

“There you go.” Harden gripped his glass, not liking the skew in his mood, a sudden sense of aberrant hope that he feared would be attacked as alien. “I think that should be all the reason you need.”

“Bench player,” Crosby spit.

“You could do a lot worse than being Marco Scutaro.”

“Clutch has never been my thing, man.”

“But you’ll still play.” Harden bit his tongue, seeing Crosby’s eyes rake to him.

“You’d stay? Even if, like, they only let you pitch out of the bullpen?”

“Bobby, I’d stay if they only let me pitch batting practice.”

Crosby laughed right out loud, and Harden jerked back, stung. He hunched his shoulders down and glowered at his hands, thinking that Bobby already knew that about him, he didn’t have to look so shocked.

“That’s incredible,” Crosby said, his breath hitching. There was color in his cheeks, his mouth made blurry by whiskey. “I think you’re the only person I know that could say that and have me really believe it.”

Harden finished his drink swiftly, feeling the glass sink a dent in his lower lip, feeling naïve and desperate. He’d taken it worse than most people do, he knew, but he always figured that was because it had happened so early. He’d been so young. Started getting hurt at twenty-two years old, and such a quick way down once it had begun. He could remember thinking at the time that he’d rather be instantaneously crippled in a car accident or something, than forced to dismantle himself so entirely over a span of years, until he was inverted and hollowed out.

“We’ll see how believable you sound four years from now,” he said, and then heard himself and was astonished, his eyes widening. Crosby stared back at him with a similar expression on his face, and Harden shook his head, his mouth moving as he struggled to think of something to say. “I mean. I didn’t mean it like that. I’m sure you won’t. It won’t happen like it did to me, you’re gonna be fine.”

Crosby looked away, at the dark eye of the television set, and Harden couldn’t have felt more ineffectual, watching the tight edge of Crosby’s mouth, the distracted pull of his hand through his hair.

“You’re allowed to be bitter, Richie,” Crosby said after a minute.

“So’re you,” he replied automatically. “This, the fact that all this happened just because you got knocked out, that’s absurd. It’s not fair.”

Crosby lowered his chin to his bent knee, his empty glass resting against his ankle. He sighed. “I don’t want to worry about that abstract shit right now. I’ve got to fix the immediate situation first.”

Harden didn’t ask him what his plan was, sensing that Crosby hadn’t yet gotten that far. He changed the subject instead, asking what the CAT scan had shown, and Crosby said something technical, pressing his fingers into his temple, the base of his skull, places where there were shadows and short-circuits. Crosby said that usually they saw this in catchers and outfielders and football players, “dumbass middle infielders,” and usually it subsided in six months, but no one could really say for sure.

Crosby finished half the bottle, save Harden’s two, and Harden followed him into the kitchen to put the bottle in the freezer, taking the apple that Crosby got for him.

“Can you stick around?” Crosby asked, leaning back on the counter. The lights were still off, the whites of Crosby’s eyes and the black of the stitches his only clear features.

“I’ve got to be at a night game in Memphis tomorrow,” Harden said apologetically.

“Memphis.” Crosby held his hand out for the apple, his fingers trembling. “You go to the weirdest places.”

Harden nodded, because that was true. “I think I’m gonna start collecting those souvenir spoons that they sell everywhere.”

Smirking, a pale thick moon bit out of the apple, Crosby licked at the side of his hand, and Harden’s eyes were adjusting, able to pick out the line of his cheek, the move of his throat as he swallowed.

“I think about you sometimes, you know,” Crosby told him. Harden’s hand scrambled at the counter behind him, staring at Crosby, who sorta smiled. “You out there, scouting. I like the idea of it.”

“Yeah?” Harden said on a breath, fixed on Crosby’s face and the disquieting way Crosby’s eyes seemed to be getting darker.

“Sometimes if I haven’t talked to you that day, I get David to let me read the reports you email him.”

Jarred, Harden tried to decipher the spark of a crooked grin on Crosby’s face that appeared and vanished in the space of a second, because what if Crosby was joking, what if he was drunk? Crosby stepped closer and Harden inhaled sharply, held himself back warily. What could Crosby possibly want from him, after all this time?

“I could just send them to you, too,” he said in a weak voice.

“That would be good,” Crosby nodded, and he was close enough now that Harden could see the heaviness of his eyelids and the tension in his shoulders, and he didn’t think that they should be getting into this stuff under such difficult circumstances.

“Bobby, maybe you should get some sleep,” Harden attempted, and he was jolted by the sight of Crosby licking his lips and slowly shaking his head.

“I’m fine. You said so.” Crosby set his hand down on the counter to the side of Harden’s body, and Harden held his breath, silver-blue eyes smudged and intent. “They told me that when I first woke up I was asking for you, but I don’t remember.”

Crosby leaned in right then and kissed Harden, a little off-line, unbalanced, Crosby swaying and gripping Harden’s hip, making Harden gasp, opening his mouth. Crosby kissed him some more, his arm sliding around Harden’s back and his body anchoring Harden in place. Unable to properly understand what was happening, Harden kissed back viciously, lifting one hand to Crosby’s face and just holding him still, thinking that if this was a dream, he was gonna kill himself.

He pulled away with great effort, fingers in the collar of Crosby’s shirt, breathlessly asking, “Bobby, why didn’t you-” before he stopped short, his throat closing up. Crosby’s hand flattened roughly on the skin over Harden’s ribs, under his shirt, and Bobby smiled and licked the corner of Harden’s mouth, told him:

“We got no reason not to, now.”

It got fast. Crosby clawed gracelessly at Harden’s shirt, and pressed full up against him, losing his footing. He breathed out a curse against Harden’s mouth, his palm skidding hot up over Harden’s stomach and then down, the tape on his fingers catching and pulling. Harden ripped off his own shirt and threw it in the general direction of the table, and Crosby made a strange cut-off sound before sliding his hands up to Harden’s shoulders and pushing him back, his head tocking the cabinets, Crosby’s mouth moving on a broken diagonal down his chest.

Ten fucking years, Harden thought in a sharp burst, twisting a grip in Crosby’s hair. A wasted third of his life, stupid on Bobby Crosby and Bobby Crosby apparently stupid on him, and what had they been protecting, what had baseball done for them lately?

Giddy, unable to still his hands enough to help Crosby get his jeans open, Harden spotted the dark shape of Travis Buck’s mouth low on his hip right before Bobby did, and he banged his head back on the wood, squeezing his eyes shut. We’re just buddies fucking around, he wanted to say, but Crosby only licked across the mark and set about his own.

Harden couldn’t remember things linearly after that, just intervals and snapshots and Crosby saying in breaks and moans against his shoulder blade, “One time in Midland when. You fell asleep on the deck and I, ah, god. Wrote dirty words on your back with that sun-stick stuff. So. It showed up when you got burned and you. You never even knew. And I loved seeing it on you. Fuck. Can’t believe. What that did to me.” He drew letters on the downward slant of Harden’s spine and warned him to hold on.

He decided before falling asleep, his leg kicked across Crosby’s, that however long it had been didn’t at all matter. He could do this now, freed from fear and doubt. Rich Harden had split his heart long ago, and though half was now missing, at least he could be confident in the dictates of what remained.

*

In the Memphis airport, Harden received a text message a few seconds after he turned his phone back on, Buck wishing him a good trip and asking for a couple of bottles of Jack if Harden saw it for cheap. Because Buck was, honest to god, just a friend, Harden’s first instinct was to crow, I got to fuck the one guy in the world I want most of all, but that seemed impolite.

Harden caught sight of his reflection in the building opposite, standing on the curb in the cab line, found himself staring vaguely into space with his head tilted up though everyone else’s was bowed down, his shirt collar skewing up and a young mindless look on his face. He’d been thinking about Crosby, practically without pause since leaving him asleep that morning, the hill fog around his ankles and as high as lampposts as he rolled out of Crosby’s neighborhood.

He’d spent most of the flight trying to sort out what had finally given out between them, where the snap was centralized. Mild traumatic brain injury was a better excuse than he’d ever imagined could be true, but hell, they’d both spent 2004 almost constantly drunk over some long-forgotten bet, which should have shook out to the same thing.

The reasons he’d had seemed minimal and ill-founded in the dying orange light, ninety degrees in the shade at sunset. He’d stayed away because of the team. For honor and country, Harden thought cynically, but that was possibly just the hysteria talking. None of their teams had ever gone the distance, though, not since they were in the minors, and it was like a promise unfulfilled, a debt yet to be paid.

Also, Crosby could play straight better than Harden could (not being all obviously gay like you, Travis said in his head), and despite certain incidents in their past, Harden had thought for a decade that Crosby was too severely repressed to help, and settled for a best friend.

They were best friends. That should be a reason, but he couldn’t determine which side it belonged on.

By the time he’d gotten to the ballpark, he’d moved on to wondering if he should call, and the idea that he’d sunk so low irritated him, so he called Haren instead. Haren told him a few stories that sounded a whole lot like bullshit, and Harden was distracted until Danny’s kid started crying and he had to go.

It was the fourth inning and his scorecard was all fucked up; he kept missing outs and losing place in the batting order. Six days left on the road after this one, and he was suddenly very worried. It was too much time to think.

In the parking lot, he had his hand on the silver of the rental car’s door handle when someone called his name from behind, Rich, sounding like a fan and Harden was shocked; this never happened outside of Oakland. He didn’t want to deal with it, though, and angled his head down intently, opened the door and the guy behind him said:

“Don’t fucking act like you didn’t hear me, Richie,”

and Harden spun, confronted, his eyes going huge. “Mark, son of a bitch,” he exhaled in astonishment, and then Mulder was throwing an arm around his shoulders and half-hugging, half-headlocking him. Harden punched Mulder in the back and Mulder started laughing, pushing him into the car.

“The fuck are you doing here?” Mulder asked, and because Harden had only seen him on TV for the past half-decade, he seemed incredibly sharper, worn down a little bit more. Gray in his hair that you couldn’t see when he had his cap on, and Harden wasn’t sure if he’d known Mulder was down here.

Though it was becoming increasingly surreal every time he got into it, Harden said, “I’m scouting the PCL for the A’s. It’s weird, I know.”

Mulder laughed again, a damp spot on the front of his shoulder from the strap of his bag. It was hot enough that Harden felt numbed. Mulder was an extremely mixed signal for the universe to be throwing his way, in light of how Harden had spent his night. Mulder was pretty much Harden’s motivation to stay away from his teammates, at the same time the only one who’d ever moved for Harden first.

They went to a dive with ten thousand baseball cards on the wall, where Mulder communicated their order to the bartender across the room without speaking, and idly started ripping his napkin into little strips, a very old habit.

“You see the guys sometimes?”

Harden sat back. “Yeah, I get long weekends and I go down there.”

“Chavvy says it’s a rookie team again,” Mulder said, not quite making eye contact with Harden because they both knew that out of his years dedicated to the Oakland Athletics, Eric Chavez was the only one of his teammates Mulder talked to anything like regularly.

“It’s our working theory to explain the second-half thing, you know,” Harden told him, something he and Crosby had sorted out one night. “They settle in right around the break, and they’re young enough that they don’t tire out late.”

“Remarkably fragile, though.” Mulder half-smiled, seeing how Harden twitched and that was the point; they both hated that word.

“You can’t blame luck. People say that Billy’s got a curse on his head, like it’s a punishment to get almost there so many times.”

Mulder laughed. “Who said that?”

That was Buck. Harden shifted his feet under the table, careful of Mulder’s endless legs. He wasn’t sure if he was supposed to tell anybody about Buck, or maybe he was just in the habit from not telling Crosby or Beane. Come to think of it, he wasn’t sure if fucking around with Buck wasn’t some explicitly forbidden clause in his contract that would get him fired. He really needed to start reading the papers Billy wanted him to sign.

Of course, he wasn’t fucking around with Buck anymore, was he? He’d traded up.

“I talk to people. I hear things. I might actually be living proof.”

Sarcastic wrench to his mouth, Mulder shot his cuffs and a sunflower seed skittered across the table. “Me too.”

Mulder drank the same kind of beer and smiled at the waitress like he expected something in return, which was Mulder’s general approach to everyone. Harden had thought Mulder’s indiscrimination remarkable when they’d played together, his apparent perfect blindness to gender. Mulder slept around more than anyone he had ever met, frat slut combined with a queer boy and made plainly good-looking, and rich, and a fucking major league baseball player. It was almost painfully unfair for him to have taken the kind of advantage he did, and even worse that he got away with it.

Certainly unfair for Harden to have to turn him down, too, driven back by all his childlike idealism of team and country and flag or whatever the fuck. Mulder, probably totally befuddled by rejection, had kept on him for a couple of weeks, lounging around in shirts without sleeves and arguing with him about morality, during which time Harden realized Mulder was kinda soulless, and his resistance gained some teeth.

It was bad karma, though, something. It was like tempting fate. And maybe Mulder was working on penitence now, the ring on his finger and the bounce back down to Trip-A again either for rehab or because he’d lost his feel, and Harden couldn’t even remember if Mulder had started the year in St. Louis. He’d become the punchline of a legendarily one-sided trade, Danny Haren for Mark Mulder, and Beane said that the Cardinals had stopped taking his calls for two years after Mulder’s shoulder surgery.

They talked for awhile about the closer Harden was down to see, kid with a dime spin on his slider and only one home run allowed in his professional career. Mulder knew too much about him for this just to be a cup of coffee, and Harden noticed that the lines on his face seemed to be deepening the later it got.

Eventually, Mulder asked him, “Did you have to be, like, trained? To be a scout?”

Harden lifted his glass. “I learned how to use an expense account. And fill out insurance forms.”

“That’s not even close to what I meant.”

Harden grinned. “You know how we used to lean on the rail and talk about the guys playing? Back in Oakland? That’s pretty much scouting.”

Mulder looked aghast. “And you get paid for that.”

“Hardly anything, but you mighta heard it’s a small-market team.”

“Sounds familiar.” Something crashed behind the bar and Mulder turned to look, didn’t meet Harden’s eyes when he turned back. The years away from California had not been kind to him, Harden found himself thinking sadly. “I think it’d be too hard. Not playing.”

“Well. Yes.” Harden fiddled with his watchband, then forced his hands still. “But I, you know. I can’t. It’s not like playing is an option.”

The difference between them, Harden thought as Mulder sighed and leaned back, weaving his fingers together on the table, was a surgeon’s half an inch. Mulder’d gone under for his back and his shoulder, so many times that everyone had lost count, but he’d always come out able to locate a decent breaking pitch, though he’d never throw ninety again. Harden had sustained a more sudden loss, but both their wounds would likely be fatal.

“I think that’d kill me,” Mulder said, and he looked up briefly, and then away. It wasn’t like him to be skittish, but then, Harden hadn’t seen him in a number of years.

“It’s the thing we never got done,” Harden told him. “I swore—we all swore—that we’d go all the way and we didn’t. This is like a second chance. I bet if we do it now I can get Billy to con a ring for me and everything.”

Mulder raised his eyebrows and took his World Series ring out of his pocket, clicking it on the table like a bet. Harden started laughing.

“You carry that around with you?”

“It’s for luck,” Mulder said simply, and Harden closed his eyes; it all came down to luck. “I mean, I’m not gonna wear it, obviously.”

That was something he’d been spared. If the A’s had won the pennant or god forbid, the whole mess, while Harden was hurt, it would have felt like having his heart cut out. He would have never forgiven himself for missing out on it.

“Anyway. It wasn’t my idea. But it’s okay. It’s what’s left.”

Mulder nodded, and Harden wondered again how long he’d been down here. He thought about Buck’s hypothetical, the minors or nothing at all, and maybe either way was hazardous. Triple-A was inherently depressing, the place that you were when you weren’t good enough for where you wanted to be.

They moved away from matters of the heart, lapsed gratefully back into the trivial, the gossip of their dispersed former team. Mulder was even further out of the loop than Harden had suspected, only knew the stuff that had shown up in the media. It got them back to Mulder’s subletted condo near the ballpark in the bad part of town, where the trees ran the length of the horizon past the highway.

With his keys in hand, Mulder rested his weight heavily on the door and said, “You’ll have to tell Bobby I said I was sorry, next time you see him.”

Harden leaned on the wall opposite, predicting (correctly) that Mulder would forget to straighten before opening the door, stumble into the room on a wide arc. “For which part?”

“There’s no shame in losing your spot to a kid like that,” Mulder said, scratching for the light. Mulder knew what he was talking about, of course, having gone down violently in August a long time ago, left things up to Rich Harden.

“He’s thinking about maybe getting out,” Harden told him, and toed off his shoes, following Mulder to the kitchen. “Go somewhere where he’ll be a regular again.”

“Well, that’s dumb.” Mulder got out a couple of glasses and filled them at the sink. “I don’t think he’s taking into account that that team is all he knows.”

“But they’re not gonna let him play, Mark.”

“Nobody else will either. Nobody that’s still got a shot. Light-hitting shortstop who occasionally passes out? Not exactly in high demand.”

Harden glared at Mulder, sitting at the kitchen table and kicking at one of the other chairs. “He’s not gonna pass out forever. That’s temporary.”

“Right. That tightness in your shoulder was temporary too, wasn’t it?” Mulder grinned sharklike and Harden was reminded why he’d never slept with him.

“This is different. It’s not really physical.”

“It’s not really visible,” Mulder corrected. “Doesn’t mean it’s not physical.”

“No, I know.” Harden squeaked his fingers on the table, tired and missing Crosby. “But he’ll recover.” He sighed. “I told him he should stay. Even if he doesn’t play.”

“Yeah. You want to see an injury that’s not physical, try having him put on another team’s uniform.”

That was probably more than Mulder would have wanted to say if he’d thought about it first, and his forehead lined before he turned away, opening the refrigerator as a decoy. Beer and take-out boxes and nothing else, so at least some things hadn’t changed.

They fell quiet for awhile, Mulder pacing around and Harden watching. It was very late, but this was Tennessee and Bobby would still be awake. He considered it pretty much a lock that he would call, surprised time and again by the depth of this thing.

“Hey, Mark,” he said eventually, figuring that the past was now safe, the potential for damage between greatly lessened by distance, “did you know about Bobby? That he was like us?”

Mulder crossed his arms over his chest, leaning back on the counter. “What, snakebit?”

“No, I mean. Like us, um, socially. What with the cocksucking and all.”

Mulder blinked at him, his eyes big, and then his mouth curved into a smirk and he fought back a laugh. “Richie, what the fuck have you got up to out there?”

Wishing Mulder was close enough to kick, Harden said narrowly, “Nothing, it’s not me. Just, some new evidence has come to light. I was just wondering if you’d ever caught on.”

“Did he fuck that kid who stole his position?” Mulder asked, still laughing, and Harden recoiled. “As, like, payback?”

“No! Jesus, Mark. Tell me you never actually did that.”

“Tried to,” Mulder said, grinning, and Harden covered his face with his hands, walked right into that one. “But, to answer your question, yes, I thought he might be.”

“Really?”

“Sure. Used to catch him looking. I think he mighta had a crush on Zito for a minute, but obviously that wasn’t gonna happen and was also gross, and then he started dating girls a lot. You remember all the girls.”

Mulder was being an asshole again, and Harden sneered, flicking a stray bottle cap at him and missing wide. “But you never heard of him actually doing anything?”

“He’s a very careful kinda guy,” Mulder said. “Remember, he was gonna be the perfect ballplayer, that was the goal. If he ever did anything, he woulda made real sure nobody ever found out.”

Like waiting until he was off the active roster, under house arrest and on medication, his mental well-being an untouchably good excuse for Harden to be spending the night, not that anyone would care about the goings on of a declining utility man and a long-retired right-handed pitcher, and Harden didn’t like the comfort of obscurity, the balance they had to strike before Crosby would allow himself to risk anything.

He wanted genuine advice as related to the specific situation and not just this historical bullshit, but Harden wasn’t about to tell Mulder anything (see above in re: soulless), and he got kinda depressed that he didn’t really have anyone else that could help him, Buck and Crosby himself ruled out for the obvious reasons.

“Kinda past hope of perfection, though,” he said, feeling a little guilty despite it being inarguable. “Maybe he’s lightened up on himself some.”

Mulder rolled his glass between his hands, his knuckles prominent, and Harden remembered Mulder cracking his knuckles compulsively even after they told him he should probably stop. There was a dark cast on Mulder’s face, silver catching in his hair.

“You sound like you got something riding on him turning out queer,” Mulder said, and Harden barely hid his flinch. Fucking Mulder always could read him better than was fair.

“I just find it interesting,” he protested feebly. “I. I didn’t see it in him, I guess, so it’s surprising.”

Mulder breathed out a laugh, leaned back so that the glare off the waxed table printed across his eyes. “So you’re kinda clueless. We knew that already.”

“I guess,” Harden said again, looking at his hands. “It’s hard to expect something like this so long after the fact.”

“So long after you mighta had a chance at him?” Mulder asked meanly, and Harden curled his hands into fists, pressed up against the underside of the table, swallowing back his first three retorts, all of which revolved around having sex with Bobby Crosby less than twenty-four hours ago. What good was it if he couldn’t tell people, he thought, frustrated.

“I woulda had a chance,” he said sharply. “If I’d wanted one, if I’d known, I woulda had the best chance of any of you motherfuckers.”

“Well, well.” Mulder tipped his glass at Harden, smirking. “Awful fucking defensive, aren’t we?”

Harden bit down and didn’t answer, because if Mulder was just gonna warp everything he said, then fuck him. Mulder didn’t seem rattled, pushing his glass slowly hand to hand, giving Harden the kind of look that made people want to hit him.

“You’re probably not thinking logically, anyway,” Mulder said, and Harden widened his eyes, the balls on this guy. “Because, really. He just lost his job and might have to change teams, which is no little thing, trust me, and he hasn’t hit all season, and then there’s that thing where he’s brain damaged.”

“He isn’t-” Harden tried to say.

“Temporarily brain damaged. Whatever. He’s having the worst year of his life, is my point, and maybe he shouldn’t be throwing sexual confusion into the mix.”

Harden shook his head, it wasn’t like that. “I don’t think he’s confused.” Certainly hadn’t seemed it, his mouth reaching Harden’s belt before his hands did in the kitchen that night, the way he’d never hesitated, gone right down, and the ready supplies in the nightstand and Crosby’s breath on the side of his neck, fingers splayed out on the flat of Harden’s hip, moving like he’d lived this moment a thousand times already, knew all the best rhythms.

Mulder shrugged, yawning. “Maybe not. He still shouldn’t be worrying about anything but his game right now.”

“Because you definitely never fucked anybody while you were struggling.”

“I,” Mulder said, lifting his eyebrow regally, “am much more well-adjusted than he is.”

Harden snorted, rolled his eyes even though it was true, in a weird way, because nothing ever touched Mulder, never changed anything critical about him. Though traded and married and minored, he was the same fucker he’d always been, still charming in a cruel way and hard to take for long periods of time. He thought about Crosby calling Beane a sociopath and wondered if maybe that was the trick, stay heartless and stay sane.

“You haven’t seen him in a really long time, though,” Harden said. “You’re remembering some twenty-four year old kid, but he’s different now.”

Mulder laughed briefly. “What’s different?”

Caught short, Harden opened his mouth, then closed it again. Crosby was still a poor to average hitter, and he still lived in the hills, still got sandwiches three times a week from the deli just outside Lafayette, same holes in his swing and impeccable glove, high socks and stupid grin, and Harden was still held in fucking thrall by him.

But Harden’s life had become something unexpected, after all, because his plan six months ago was to be a recluse for at least another decade, and now he was on a business trip to Memphis, recovering from the night with an old friend. Harden was a free man and suddenly young again, roughening his voice when he talked to the other scouts the way he used to with his father’s friends. He was completely untethered, bound by nothing but making first pitch at the next day’s game, and he thought he’d earned the chance to finally fuck up like regular kids do.

“Anyway.” Mulder got up and took his empty glass to the sink, where he perfunctorily rinsed it and put it dripping back in the cabinet. “If he ends up somewhere else—and I’d pretty much call that a given, at this point—it becomes irrelevant.”

“You think so,” Harden said tiredly, not even bothering to bite this time.

“You’d be amazed. Another team, it takes a whole season just to stop wondering where the fuck the drums are.”

Harden studied him for a second, wondering if maybe, after all that, he’d actually gotten off easy, washing out. Mulder had spent the past five years ricocheting from fifth starter to the DL to Triple-A, and along the way somehow let himself get talked into getting married, and it looked to have taken a terrible toll, worn him down to thin edges. His left arm didn’t hang straight down like his right—there was a permanent bend in the elbow, Mark’s reward for twenty years of sliders.

“He’s not gonna be good for much for a long time,” Mulder said, and Harden honestly couldn’t tell if Mulder was fucking with him or not, morally crooked grin, tipped back against the counter.

“I think you’re wrong, but I know you don’t care about that.”

“Right you are. I’ve never once seen you properly interpret anything that Bobby’s done, and I’m not about to start now.”

Wishing Mulder didn’t look so certain, Harden stood, tucking his phone back into his pocket. “It’s getting late.”

Mulder laughed, and shook his head. “Guess so.”

“You’re not pitching tomorrow, are you?”

Mulder turned away, back into the shadows of the hallway. “I’m skipping a start,” he said over his shoulder, his face obscured. “Back spasms.”

“Well,” Harden said, fumbling for his shoes. He tried to think of something clever and cutting to say, level Mulder and then not see him for another couple years, but his brain wasn’t really wired that way. “I’m sure I’ll see you around, now that we’re back in the same league again.” He saw a shard of Mulder’s teeth like a snarl.

“You think someday you’ll come down here to scout me?”

Harden laughed like a snap, shocked. “I can’t imagine Billy ever assigning me to you.”

“He’d do it. He’d do it just to fuck with you.”

“I wouldn’t take it, anyway.”

Mulder raised his eyebrows, leaned back against the door. Harden’s eyes were adjusting to the dark, the line of light under the door looking like a stroke of chalk on blackboard. Mulder’s features filled in, the angle of his neck.

“I mean,” Harden said, taking his cap out of his back pocket and pulling it on. “The whole idea is to be as objective as possible, and that’s not exactly an option in your case.”

Mulder smiled. “Aw, Richie, I never knew you cared.”

“You gonna let me out, or what?”

Stepping aside, Mulder opened the door for him, blue sparking as Harden passed close by, turning sideways. Mulder had always looked good in half-light, almost like a painting, and saying goodnight in the hallway like this was something they’d done a million times, way the hell back when.

“Stay in the black, man,” Harden said reflexively, and bit his tongue. They used to say that to each other, the pitchers, instead of take care or be good, instead of goodbye. Mulder’s mouth twisted up and he raised his fist for Harden to knock.

“You tell the boys I said tear ‘em up.”

Harden grinned shakily and turned away. He got lost trying to find the front of the building and ended up having to hop a fence to get out of the back parking lot once he determined that he couldn’t get back in without a keycard. Damning Mulder for the tear in his jeans and the dirt on his hands, he lay down in the back of the cab and watched the streetlights and glass buildings skip by upside down, his head spinning and his hand pressed flat on his chest.

He tried to call Crosby before he went sleep, but it went straight to voicemail for an hour, until Harden was mouthing along with Bobby’s voice on the message, confused and displaced, wanting to confirm his understanding of the situation: we’re in this for good, right? Ten years and now one day into the new world, the next part, and he dreamt that night of Crosby telling him what it was like to hit a walkoff, a green field in his eyes.

*

Learning his lesson from the Mulder debacle, Harden checked the complete roster on his program before each game, not wanting to be surprised by anyone else. Most of the names sounded familiar, but no one seemed to recognize him, cap and sunglasses and farmer’s tan, keeping score behind home plate. Baseball was moving past him; the guys he’d played with were beginning to fall out of the game, and these prospects were going to take over.

Second leg of the trip was out to Salt Lake City, and riding through the alkali flats, Harden finally got hold of Crosby, who’d been for four days sending cryptic text messages and not picking up when Harden called him. He sounded beat up, answering at last.

“You’re where?”

“Salt Lake. Utah,” he added for no particular reason.

“We never played there, did we?”

“No, they were in a different league up to a couple years ago.”

“And you’re coming home when?”

Harden smiled, resting his head against the cab’s window. “End of the week.”

“Fuck, dude, we’re going to Cleveland on Thursday.”

He almost said without thinking, you don’t really need to travel with the team, but managed to pull it back. First week on the DL was a rough one, probably worse without a place saved for him, and Harden didn’t want to risk anything over the phone.

“You know, the schedule of professional baseball, as like a complete entity, is really kind of ridiculous.”

“Yeah.” Crosby exhaled against the receiver, and the back of the cab flooded with light as the cabbie pulled up under the hotel’s overhang, Harden blinking and covering his eyes with his hand. “I tried to take batting practice today and basically got put on a time-out in the trainer’s room.”

Harden got out of the cab and tipped with whatever bill was first to come out of his pocket, shouldering his bag. Strange smell in the air out here, metallic coastal burr in his sinuses. “That sucks, man.”

“It’s unbelievable. You know how badly it fucks up my timing if I can’t at least take some cuts.”

“Take Danny to the park or something, have him pitch to you.”

Crosby snorted. “He’s not gonna go against the team. Heaven fucking forefend we do something the team doesn’t approve of.”

Checking in through mime, Harden propped his elbow on the counter, leaning into his hand. “You’re a little bitter. It’s understandable.”

“I’m considerably more than a little bitter. What the fuck am I supposed to do? This is my livelihood they’re fucking with.”

“It’s not like they’re sabotaging you, Bobby. It’s totally in their interest to make sure that you can keep playing.”

“Spoken like a true company man,” Crosby said with a cut in his voice. “But it’s been like this all year. I’m not gonna stand for it anymore.”

“What do you mean?” Harden asked, scared suddenly and pacing around the gloss of the lobby, because he’d lose the call if he got in the elevator.

Crosby made a weird torn noise, probably supposed to be a laugh. “I don’t know, Richie, I just say it to sound tough.”

“Oh. Well, it works.”

They didn’t say anything for a minute, and Harden debated whether this was the right time to bring up the new angle on their friendship. He wanted to move back in with Crosby when they got back to Oakland, distance himself from Sacramento when he wasn’t working because the only places he knew in town were Buck’s places, and though Harden suspected Buck wouldn’t take it too hard when he broke things off, it still wasn’t smart to borrow trouble.

He didn’t know if Crosby would agree, though. They’d never followed a normal course, and never would, but the situation had grown even more complex than was typical. There was a chance that Bobby was in no shape to live with anyone; Christ knows Harden hadn’t wanted to deal with other people when his career was on the skids, though that led to four hollow years that he was learning to regret.

“So anyway,” Crosby said at last. “It sucks that we’re not gonna see each other.”

“Yeah,” Harden said, passing his hand through his hair and breathing out in relief. “I don’t know what you did to me, man, it’s like all I can think about.”

“Yeah?” Bobby sounded cheered, a bit smug. “That’s encouraging.”

“And I wanted to ask, just, like, out of curiosity, if you ever thought about this back then?” He crossed his fingers and lay them down on his temple, hoping Crosby was still enough of his best friend to lie to him.

“I guess.” Perfect visual of Crosby shrugging, chewing absently on the edge of his thumbnail. “I mean, I could kinda tell that you’d be down with it.”

“Yeah, apparently that’s not as much a secret as I’d hoped.”

“What’d you expect? Six years we were teammates, most of that time roommates too, and how many girls did you ever hook up with?”

“Okay,” Harden said, rolling his eyes.

“It was none, Richie. It’s hard not to notice that.”

“Okay.” Harden fell into one of the lobby chairs, a spray of Sunset magazines on the low table. “Took you long enough to do something about it.”

Crosby laughed echoingly. “I couldn’t go anywhere near you back then. Buddy fucking’s always nice, but I wasn’t gonna sacrifice the stuff that matters, you know?”

Something froze in Harden’s chest, and he pushed his fist at his knee, deciding that it was just the connection, he was missing some inflection of Crosby’s that made that a joke.

“And now, it’s like, fuck it. I’m through making concessions to the team, and if I want to fuck around with a guy, they can deal with it.”

“That’s. I’m not sure if that’s dumb or really smart,” Harden said, uncomfortable.

“Oh, give it a minute, it’ll come to you.”

Smiling keenly, pressing the heel of his hand against his mouth, Harden backed off, not wanting to hear Crosby’s voice break like that again. History like they had let him read Crosby even a thousand miles away, and he sounded as if he’d played seventeen innings and lost.

“I guess I should go.”

There was a pause. “Remind me where you are again?”

Harden closed his eyes. “Salt Lake City. The lobby of the hotel, as a matter of fact.”

“Oh. Well, you should go, then.”

“Yeah.” Harden leaned his head on his hand, thinking that pretty soon the season would be over and he’d probably have to scout instrux or winter ball or something, but Crosby could come with him. They could try this out in Puerto Rico. “Pick up your phone more often, will you?”

“’Kay.” Small sound like Crosby’s jaw cracking.

“Also, tell the lefties that that McBride kid on the Indians tips his change-up out of the stretch.”

“That’s good. That’s the kind of shit I can use. I knew you’d come in handy.”

Harden swallowed a laugh, and said goodnight, listened to Crosby hum something in response and then to the dead air for a while. Like all his best comebacks, the stuff he should have said came late. Something clever and sweet to remind Crosby that they were best friends and had been since the very beginning, something that might get stuck in his head all tomorrow.

Two weeks before they’d see each other again, out in front of him like a prison stay. Harden scrubbed his hands through his hair and got to his feet, thinking that he could get through this because he’d gotten through worse.

*

They caught each other at odd times, spoke every few days and Crosby got progressively more distressed the longer he rode the bench, as the team picked up and began to fly towards fall. Crosby stopped being able to tell Harden what had happened in the day’s game, the new shortstop’s name stuck like a bone in his throat, his anger at the coaches and trainers too dark to be given breath.

Harden didn’t want to think about what he was coming home to, acknowledging that he was not good in a crisis. He figured, they had the off-season. Crosby would regain his short-term memory and his reach to cover the outside corner, calm down and recognize the things that were right in front of them, and come the spring he’d be fully healed.

Before that, though, he touched down in Oakland and was stunned beyond expression to see Travis Buck lying stretched out across a bank of seats in baggage claim, his hands folded under his head, looking for all the world like he was asleep.

Fucking loose ends, Harden thought, and then felt bad, because Buck had done nothing to him except show up a decade late.

He dropped his backpack on Buck’s chest, making him start and crane his head, smiling. He got to his feet cautiously, stiff probably here at the very end of the minor league season, waiting to see whether he’d get called up for the pennant run. Fisting a hand in Harden’s shirt, he tugged and said welcome home. Harden thought for a second that it was a goddamn shame he hadn’t stumbled over Buck earlier, Buck who’d made things seem simple for hours at a time, distracted him for almost the whole of this odd summer.

Taking his bag off the conveyor, Harden realized suddenly that he had no idea where his car was.

*

On the drive back to Sacramento (Harden’s car, they decided, was almost certainly parked in the garage near his apartment), Buck filled him in real quick on stuff that he’d missed, a back-up catcher who’d gone up, a middle reliever who’d gotten hurt, and they listened to the A’s play Cleveland, the bay fish-scale blue and huge out to the left. There was a natural pause, Buck happily drumming his fingers on the wheel, and Harden figured that there was no reason to drag shit out.

“So, listen. I’ve kinda started something serious with somebody, so we’re gonna have to quit fucking around.”

Buck’s hands stopped abruptly, and a card of sunlight cracked off his mirrored sunglasses as he looked over at Harden. “Sorry?”

“We can still hang out, obviously. But I wouldn’t feel right about the other stuff, you know?”

Buck made a weird sound, half-laugh half-cough, and rubbed his mouth, fixing his sights on the highway, broken white lines. “Really.”

“I’m, um, not joking.” Harden laced his hands together on his knee, looking at the edge of the floor’s carpet, where he could see the corner of a condom wrapper, a previous encounter. “I woulda warned you if I could, but it just.”

“It happened pretty fucking fast,” Buck finished for him, and Harden nodded, glancing at Buck’s hands on the wheel.

“Well, it was an old friend. Things kinda finally, like, aligned.”

More of a laugh this time, and a terseness in the edge of it, Buck’s profile strict and impossible to read. “Old friend, huh? I think I got a guess or two.”

Harden cleared his throat, really no way to argue that. He didn’t suppose he’d been terribly subtle about being hung up on his former teammates; Buck himself was at least forty percent nostalgia.

“Can you really blame me?” Harden asked with a slanted grin. “I’ve been exercising restraint for ten years, I think I’ve earned it.”

Buck’s lip curled, making him look vaguely dangerous, and Harden eyed him warily, wondering if maybe he shouldn’t be cracking jokes quite yet.

“I’m glad I could warm you up for him, man,” Buck said, and Harden laughed without really hearing him, cut himself off jaggedly when it registered. Buck had his hands hooked on the wheel from below, the backs of his wrists exposed white and blue and drawn tight, that twisted little scowl on his face.

Harden thought maybe he’d gotten some shit wrong in this, maybe they’d been doing something different all summer and he just hadn’t noticed. Buck had been precisely what he’d needed at the time, sunstroked and lonely, getting used to living among people again. He could remember kissing Buck in the grass at one point, wet from the pool and the humidity, stomach to stomach with his arms framing Buck’s head, curling inwards. Moving in inches and hours because the heat just kinda demanded it, a slow way, the whole summer rolled up.

He could see how Buck had been misled.

“Travis,” he said after a minute. “You’re not taking this hard, are you?”

Shaking his head immediately, Buck exhaled through his teeth, found an empty lane and picked up speed. “You can do whatever you want, but for future reference, breaking up before fucking around is generally considered the decent thing to do.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t. I wasn’t thinking.” Harden slumped back, guilt-stricken. Buck had probably set aside the whole weekend, come all this way just to pick him up from the airport—it was kind of a shitty thing to do. Harden’d been preoccupied, but that was just a weak excuse.

Buck shrugged, his forehead creased. “I woulda been happy for you, you know.”

“And now you’re not?” Harden asked, and swore inwardly. He really had to start taking a moment before he opened his mouth.

“I think it’s fantastic.” He showed a surprisingly convincing grin, though that was likely just because Harden couldn’t see his eyes. “Just think, a year ago this time you were pretty much the Unabomber. Now you got yourself a genuine career and the boy of your dreams. It’s a story of redemption with a tacked-on happy ending; those almost never happen in real life.”

Harden watched the power lines ride, his throat dry, hoping that Buck was fucking with him. He wasn’t good at this understated stuff, much preferred confrontation to treachery.

“I wasn’t ever expecting anything to come of it,” Harden said, and though that was true, it still sounded like an apology. “I was just kinda going on instinct.”

“Of course.” A brief wedge of teeth showed a gnash. “You got caught up.”

“I did, yes. It’s one of the things that I gave up on, you know? It was more the shock than anything, I think.”

“You should be careful. Ten years is a long time, I don’t know anything that’s worth that.”

Harden opened the glove compartment and sorted through the CDs, buying time. Buck was coming at him on bizarre angles, throwing him off because Harden hadn’t expected to have to explain or defend.

“I don’t actually have a lot to risk, man,” Harden told him, and Buck smiled a little bit.

“Does he?”

Flinching, he dropped a CD and it clattered across his sneaker. Reason number one why he’d never tried anything was that they were major league ballplayers and that was too important to fuck with, and while his circumstances had reformed, Bobby’s had not. Baseball had always, always come first, and Harden was abruptly terrified, not knowing what it meant for Crosby to have finally put that in jeopardy.

“Like I said, it was sudden. I don’t think he was making up a list of pros and cons.”

“You said that it took ten years. Which is, you know, the opposite of sudden.”

“Don’t. You’re not understanding the situation at all.”

Buck pulled his shades off his face with a jerky motion, and when he pressed the knuckle of his thumb against his eye, Harden could see how his hand was shaking. “I guess I’m not.”

“I just. I never thought I’d have another shot.”

“Well.” Buck glanced over at him and he looked mostly pissed-off and tired, but kinda resigned too, color carved out of his eyes. “You do what you have to do, Rich.”

“Yeah.” He turned a CD case over in his hands, spinning it on the corners between his palms, indecisively keeping watch on Buck in his peripheral vision. He had a bad feeling that things between him and Buck would be permanently disjointed, an unexpectedly distressing thought. “If it were anybody else, T, it’s just this one guy-” he started to say, fumbling, but Buck moved his hand to stop him.

“I know. It’s okay.” Buck put his sunglasses back on, almost furtive, hunching his shoulders. Harden couldn’t read him as well, pushed even further off-balance. “I wasn’t exactly banking on you.”

Harden folded his fingers together, anxious with his gaze stuck on the side of Buck’s face, wishing that he didn’t know the signs that Buck was lying so well. He should have warned Buck going in that it wasn’t going to end smoothly, because nothing he was involved in ever did, but Buck was contrary by nature and they probably would have wound up sleeping together anyway.

“I didn’t mean to screw anything up,” he said kinda stupidly, and Buck laughed, covered his mouth with his hand.

“Sorry, sorry,” Buck said, grinning sharp. “You just, you really kinda sleepwalk through your life, you know that? Nothing’s ever intentional. Everything happens around you, but you’re never responsible.”

“No,” Harden answered, affronted, cornered. “I take responsibility for some stuff.”

“Like what? Fucking around with me while you were in love with someone else?”

“Is there something wrong with that? It’s not like I was cheating on anybody, and what do you care, anyway, you got fucked around with.”

“It’s not fair, it’s like false advertising.”

Harden blinked. “What?” Buck shook his head roughly, teeth pressing at the inside of his lip.

“Never mind. You’ve just handled this whole thing very poorly. But whatever. Let’s move on.”

“Travis, what,” Harden began, but this time he cut himself off, stymied. He didn’t know what he wanted from Travis Buck anymore, couldn’t say why Buck being pissed off disturbed him so much. Whatever Buck had taken it as, Harden knew that they’d really only fooled around, recent friends without history or depth, nothing to fall back on.

“Forget about it,” Buck said, tightening his hands on the wheel. Pieces of reflected sunlight, the shape of each lens, printed on the dash. “I hope it works out for you. Swear to god I do.”

Harden let himself sink back, feeling the protest of tension in his shoulders. He swallowed a few times, staring at the measured flood of the highway drawn fast under their wheels, the world a long fall of hills and flare on the water. Buck, he feared, was the course his life might have taken had he been a couple years younger or grown up a couple hundred miles south.

He wanted to say sorry again, and he wanted to tell Buck that, really, the summer had been made bearable by having him around. But the moment passed, or never happened, and Harden thought that Buck deserved better, watching the hills and towns flatten out into fields of windmills, an endless jag of barbed wire fencing cut like an artery through the yellow brush.

*

Having wrecked things with his one friend who lived in town, Harden went through a day or two only speaking to cashiers, falling asleep in front of the Discovery Channel, bored and restless, his mood stubbornly destructive. The pain in his arm woke him up in the middle of the night, two hours before it started to rain.

He recorded every A’s game, investigating the dugout for the rare shot of Crosby in his warm-up jacket, leaning on the rail or sitting on the top of the bench, the black fishhook weave of stitches under his eye making him look violent, angry all the time. Nobody ever seemed to talk to him, keeping their distance like misfortune was contagious.

When the team was in Toronto, a story came out in the press, slight and unsubstantiated, a clubhouse fight obliquely implied, something about playing time, a locker that had a crushed-in shelf and splintered walls, a closed door meeting. Harden called Crosby for the details, and then Danny Haren when Bobby didn’t pick up.

Haren fucked with him for a moment, saying that he wasn’t sure he was allowed to share private team business with an outsider, but Harden snarled and Haren straightened up.

It was Crosby, fighting with the coaches. They could hear him shouting in the trainer’s room, and when he came out he looked terrible and they scattered. He’d wrecked the locker and the bat had split in his hands. The coaches got hold of him and locked him in the equipment room until he calmed down, and the last Danny had seen was Crosby being led into the tunnel, flanked with a hand on either shoulder, his head bowed.

Harden, stunned, asked Haren to repeat it several times, what did he say, what did they say, is he gonna be suspended, can they even suspend him if he’s not on the active roster? Danny couldn’t say much, telling Harden, “He’s been acting weird lately. I don’t know. It didn’t come out of nowhere.”

Profoundly shaken, panic building in his stomach, Harden tried to get through to Crosby till it was long after dawn in Toronto, but it rang through every time. He felt the distance between them more acutely, unable to reconcile the story with the man he’d left sleeping blamelessly a week ago. He couldn’t do anything from way the hell out here.

The next afternoon he went to the River Cats game and tried not to care that Buck was completely ignoring him, and Crosby called him back. Harden climbed up out of the noise and clamor of the home plate seats, relocated to the top row. Crosby sounded sick, dull, frightening Harden deeply.

“It’s been blown out of proportion, Richie, so stop worrying.”

“You took a bat to a locker,” Harden said, mostly still in disbelief.

“I was upset. I let my emotions get the best of me.” He cleared his throat as if disgusted by the script.

“But, Jesus, Bobby, how much trouble are you in?”

“A lot, I don’t know. Nobody’s really talking to me.”

“Bobby,” Harden said, feeling helpless.

“I don’t think they’re ever gonna let me play for this team again,” Crosby answered, almost absently.

“No, man, I’m sure they wouldn’t-” and Crosby coughed on a laugh, sorta moaned. Harden leaned over his knees, staring sightlessly at the grace and drift of the game below him.

“They kept saying that I was a liability. That it’s too unpredictable and they can’t afford to take the chance. That’s why I got mad.” Crosby exhaled against the receiver, rustling shuddery sound. “They were talking about me like I wasn’t even there.”

Harden squeezed his eyes closed, thinking that he knew all about that. Getting hurt meant that you became a depreciating piece of machine that needed to be fixed, reduced to component parts and disorganized. On the DL, his dreams weren’t broken, just walking with a worsening limp, a scarring way to live.

“It’s like that sometimes. You’ve been through this before.”

“Not like this. Before, they needed me back, but now they don’t care, they’ve written me off. Got their fucking forty-man in three days, they don’t need me.”

Harden checked the field automatically, figuring which of the guys would be going up, the starting catcher, the first baseman, two or three pitchers. The right fielder. He froze, hit with the sudden realization that if things came out like he expected, Buck and Crosby would be, if only technically, teammates for at least a month. That was badly planned, he admitted, rubbing his face in exhaustion.

“They’re not gonna activate you?”

“That’s the threat. I can’t really, I’m just so sick of it. Everything I did for this fucking team, now I’m supposed to go out like this? It, it’s humiliating.”

Eyes closed, the sun setting at his back at a steep westward angle, pressing the last of the direct warmth down on the back of his head, Harden told him, “You get through it.”

“Oh, do I,” Crosby said caustically.

“Eventually how you went out won’t matter so much as the fact that you’re out at all.”

There was a pause. “Well, hell, Rich. Certainly fucking glad I called you.”

Harden grinned, twisting his knuckles against his forehead, and didn’t answer for a minute, wondering if the end of the minor league season, fast approaching, would warrant him a week or two to waste his time in Oakland, drink away all injury on Crosby’s living room floor.

“You know what you did right, though?” Harden said finally. “You didn’t do anything on camera.”

Crosby surprised himself by laughing, scraped up but there. “A silver lining.”

“It’ll stay in house, Bobby. The media’s only printing speculation and innuendo and nobody’ll go on record so it’ll go away.”

“Yeah. Whole team saw it, though. The guys won’t come near me anymore, it’s like they think I’m crazy.”

“Well.” Harden coughed. “Not entirely unreasonable, given the bat thing.”

Crosby cursed, and the River Cats went ahead on a walk and a two-out triple, the faithful stamping and hollering. Tough pitch to hit, Harden thought, spotted the number six on the back of the jersey circling the bag at third, and sighed.

He asked if Crosby was coming home early, and Crosby said probably, defeated in a way that Harden could see clearly, hooked shoulders, lowered chin. Harden said, “I’ll be here when you get back,” which wasn’t a promise he could necessarily keep, but it was the only thing of value he had to offer.

*

Beane called him in a couple days later, the lights off in his office at the Cats’ stadium with the sun positioned across the street and flooding the room. Beane was in motion, caged worse than normal, the way that he got during the final run, and Harden sat with his ankle on his knee, following him back and forth across the room.

They went through business, a short trip to Fresno and then Sacramento for the last few games of the season, and Harden would be going to Phoenix for instrux, but not until November. He didn’t ask about winter ball, not wanting to project that far ahead.

“Also. Despite your being too young and kinda dumb, you did a good job this year. You can come back in the spring, if you want.”

Ducking his head, Harden smirked. “Do I get a raise?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe I won’t come back unless I get a raise.”

Beane rolled his eyes. “I hate to break it to you, kid, but you’re not exactly hard to replace.”

“That hurts, man.” Harden tapped out seconds on his knee, Beane’s pacing making him slightly nervous. “Thought I was a valued member of the organization and all that shit.”

“Who told you that?” Beane asked with a knife of a grin momentarily on his face.

Popping his thumb against the hook of his kneecap, Harden thought about doing this for the rest of his life like Beane was, brought up and groomed, keep going to the ballpark and keep getting paid for it. It was as if he could cheat failure, steal back into baseball on a technicality.

It had been, on the whole, a good season.

“You going back to Oakland when they’re done here?”

Harden nodded. “That was the plan.”

“You got tickets for the last couple games, right? Because they’re selling really fucking fast.”

“Bobby always puts my name on the list.”

Beane laughed raggedly, shook his head and turned his face away. “Fuck, I hope you have a back-up.”

Harden stilled, curving his fingers down and bracing his shoulders. “Billy, what’d you do?”

Beane shrugged, and a shadow of a maniacal grin touched his expression. “I released him.”

Something wrenched, and Harden immediately put all his weight towards holding it off, fisting his hand. “You wouldn’t.”

“Did. Past tense. We’re leaking it to the press right after the game.”

“What the fuck, Billy,” Harden said unevenly, feeling chaotic on the inside.

“He’s done. He’s been done, and his little fucking performance in Toronto just about sealed the deal. You don’t get away with that shit.”

Harden pushed his fists into the chair, dug his teeth into his lip. “He was angry, come on, like you never got angry?” Something all three of them had in common; they wouldn’t go down without a fight.

“He’s mentally unbalanced. The guys are freaked out. He’s not worth his spot on the roster, so you know what? I’m giving it to someone else.”

“Don’t tell me who,” Harden said quick, and Beane’s mouth twisted like an insult. Harden glared at him weakly, wondering if Bobby had heard yet, if Bobby was lying around some hotel room somewhere believing that he had a home. “I don’t know why nobody can see that this is momentary. He’ll get better; he always gets better.”

It had been, honestly, the one thing that Bobby Crosby could do that Rich Harden couldn’t. Every year till this year, he’d stuck around the lineup, playing hurt more than he probably should’ve, but convincing them, somehow. Harden had never been able to hide the pain on his face when he pitched through it, though he tried his best.

Beane showed his palms, as if to say, the fuck do you want me to do about it. “I’ve waited four months. And frankly, I think he’s getting worse.”

“Yeah, I’d imagine, considering you railroaded him all season and then fucking released him.”

“Let’s see how good of a scout you are,” Beane said with an engaging smile, not something Harden was prepared to deal with. “Even if Bobby were healthy, is the team better off with him or the kid out there?”

Harden didn’t answer; the question was rigged.

“He’s thirty-one and he’s already fading.” Beane flicked a paper clip off his desk. “It’s a quick way down from here, and the clever thing to do is let some other team deal with it. Haven’t you been paying attention?”

“Fuck, man, let him ride the bench and pinch-hit and play utility, at least. He’s been here forever, and he can’t hurt you that bad.”

“I am not running a home for wayward shortstops. I don’t have the luxury of filling a roster spot with the sentimental pick, and Christ, Richie, even if I did.”

Beane stopped and blew out a breath, shook his head. “He’s a nice guy and he meant a lot, but I owe him exactly nothing. Team comes first.”

Harden was oppositely inclined, Crosby first and the rest of the world an afterthought, which was not how he’d been taught. He would go back and lose baseball again if it meant Crosby didn’t have to do it.

“I think you’ll regret it,” he said as evenly as he could. “He’ll come back with somebody else and we’ll miss him.”

“Is that your professional opinion?”

Harden narrowed his eyes, knuckles against his legs. “You hired me to tell you what I think.”

“Not your jurisdiction, remember?’

“I’m showing initiative, motherfucker.”

Laugh like a punch, like Beane was caught entirely off balance. “Admirable, but sadly too late.”

It rendered him speechless, the full weight of it finally hitting him in the chest. Whether he knew or not, Crosby was cut adrift, unprotected. No one would pick him up in the middle of a pennant race, that was for sure, so it was the off-season and god knew what that would bring. The chances were twenty-eight to two that Crosby would be removed from his immediate proximity; he wasn’t sure if he could keep this up all on his own.

Harden had the growing sense of something approaching from behind, a bad run of years about to overtake him. He reeled, thinking of how unfair it was—he’d only had one night to believe it might turn out otherwise.

“You never did learn,” Beane said. “It’s like forgetting a bad start. You don’t get fucking attached.”

An old complaint, and Harden waved it away, his hand shaking. “I got attached ten years ago, so I really think I should be given a pass.”

Beane snorted. “Just this once.

Harden slumped back, wearied. He needed to get back to the specifics, worry about the ramifications later. “Did you tell him?”

Averting his eyes, Beane looked half-amused and half-tense, shrugging. “Couple days ago.”

“He’s coming home with the team and then that’s it?”

“Well. That was the theory.” Beane leaned back against his desk, crossing his arms over his chest. “In reality, he walked out of the hotel and kinda dropped off the radar. Nobody’s heard from him since the series with the Jays.”

Harden sat up straight. “What?”

“You haven’t, have you?”

“No, not, not for awhile. You don’t know where he is?”

“Somewhere in Canada is my guess.” Beane raised his hands as Harden made a sound like a growl. “Keeping track of him is no longer my responsibility.”

“Jesus fucking Christ, Bill.” Harden stood, but he didn’t know what he meant by that. He wanted to storm out, call something unforgivable over his shoulder and that fast ruin his second chance, an inverted sacrifice that wouldn’t help Crosby at all, wouldn’t solve any of this.

“He’ll come back, calm the fuck down. He still lives here.”

“You don’t just let a guy walk out. You don’t just lose someone.”

“All right, all right.” Beane straightened and walked around the desk, taking the chair. “I shoulda kept a better leash on your boy. You care so much, track him down. You got a couple days coming.”

Harden eyed him suspiciously. “Yeah?”

“The season’s almost over. The team’s pretty much out of our hands at this point, so go ahead. Fuck, expense the flight, we’re gonna win the pennant.”

Perfect clean grin on Beane’s face, rolling backward so he could prop his feet on the bottom drawer. He could afford to be cocky, on pace for better than a hundred wins, another Cy Young for Danny, a Rookie of the Year award to add to the collection, and six more first round picks in the draft next year. Harden thought abruptly that as long as Beane was running things, Oakland would feel like home to him.

Harden checked his wallet in his back pocket, wondering where his passport was. He had to break this down into small parts, figure out where Bobby was and buy a plane ticket, phone calls and taxicabs, work out what he would say when he found him. Crosby probably wouldn’t be happy when he showed up, but Harden knew that a disaster of this magnitude wasn’t something to suffered lightly, nor alone.

“This was really,” he said, his head starting to ache in time with his shoulder. “It was a terrible thing to do to him.”

Beane smiled, but without amusement this time, kinda sad and angry with lines around his mouth, a bitter little glint because he’d been through this a hundred times. “You think I don’t know that?”

Harden left, losing his shit briefly in the tunnel, hands and forehead pressed flat on the concrete as he fought for calm, breathing carefully. He was scared almost out of his mind, he realized, because he didn’t know where Crosby was and didn’t know what he was supposed to do now.

In the parking garage, Buck pulled in just as Harden was getting to his car, and they stood for a minute, separated by a short plane of metal and stone, looking at each other over the tops of the cars. Harden was certain Buck could see the panic on him, the rigid blue smear of his eyes, and certain that something would come of it, Buck would say hey what’s wrong and approach him as the friend he once was, before Harden fucked everything up. Harden shook for missing him suddenly, wanted to cry out to be forgiven but not knowing what to say.

He turned away as if in shame, a taste of copper in his mouth, fumbling with his keys. He should have been content with having Travis Buck, reckless fair-haired boy with an eye for holes in the defense, a streak of honesty that betrayed his faith in a righteous world. Buck kept things into perspective, and Harden couldn’t say what was wrong with him, that that wasn’t enough.

“Hey, Richie,” Buck called as Harden got the door open, his head snapping up. Buck was grinning, chewing gum, looking faintly unnerving. “I got called up today.”

Harden smiled without thinking, lifting his chin. The long night ahead of him bled away for a moment, and he laughed, the sound of it echoing. The Show. “Couldn’t have happened to a better guy, T.”

Buck made his eyes go big like a kid, mugging. “So I still got a shot?”

Wishing with staggering force that he had time for just once more, Harden leaned forward so that the door pressed a hard line into his chest, trying to catch his breath. He’d thought that he’d traded baseball for Bobby Crosby, but maybe he was wrong about that, too; maybe Buck was what he’d given up.

“Ten years and then immortality, kid,” Harden told him, and for a minute, he even believed it.

*

It took Harden seven tries to guess Crosby’s online banking password (the date of his major league debut, as it turned out), and his eventual victory was dulled by the scatter of debit charges that straggled west out of Toronto, convenience store ATMs and cheap highway motels. Bobby was on the run, never stayed in one town for longer than a night.

Getting out of the cab into the black night sodium wash of the airport lights, sentinels in red and blue in ranks of diminishing perspective, it occurred to Harden that this might be one of his dumber ideas, but he was already running late and he didn’t have time to dwell.

All reports indicated that Crosby was in a hard downward tailspin, the last twenty feet of a good split fastball, and Harden was just hoping to get there in time to break his fall. He couldn’t stop thinking about the night they told him he’d never be able to pitch at a professional level again, stumbling drunk under the pier throwing pieces of driftwood for miles into the ocean, the great wooden legs of the dock looming over him, buried like a punch in the sand.

The two days after that night were completely blank. Harden woke up in the back of his car, skewed diagonally across the middle of a residential street, somewhere outside of Bakersfield. He’d been crippled by the pain in his arm, shuddering, his knees buckling, curling up around himself, sick with a vision of his future. It had been the worst moment of his life.

Crosby would come out of that a different person; certainly Harden had.

Landing in Toronto, he found a crumpled Canadian note behind the photographs in his wallet, and bought three candy bars and soda from a vending machine. The sky came heavily down over the runways and parking garage, savage twist of cold in the air, the sun rising frozen and silver and pink. Harden breathed out, letting himself click back into place, on native soil again.

Crosby had probably thrown his phone out the window at some point, but Harden kept trying to call him every hour. He took to leaving rambling messages on his voicemail, driving through the flattening sprawl that diluted into farmland, recounting stuff that had happened years ago, brokenly translating the French on billboards that he passed, explaining that size was actually one of the most misleading things about any pitcher, wondering if Bobby had really thought this whole thing through. He could somehow clearly picture Crosby in the latest fleabit motel room, lying on the bed with the lights off, listening to the messages and answering back into the quiet.

But that was just Harden’s tendency towards the romantic, and this was more concrete than that. They were past Winnipeg now and heading north, into the winter, and Harden had to buy a hoodie and then six hours later a coat. You could cover an amazing amount of ground in one day if you rarely stopped, and Harden began to feel like California was a dream, white fields blurring to gold.

He lost service, both cellular and internet, on his phone, and spent half a day haunting some mining town in Saskatchewan, made friends in the bar with a guy who let him come home to borrow his computer for a minute, thinking, thank god for Canada.

Crosby’d come to a stop, out on the border of everything, in a town Harden had never heard of, several hours into the Northwest Territories. Harden drew himself a map on the ripped-off back of a magazine, shiny paper and slick ink smeared on the side of his hand. The guy offered Harden a drink and said, “I know it’s impossible, but have we met before? Because you look really familiar.”

He was either a baseball fan or making a pass at him. Harden wasn’t in the mood, took a beer for the road and shouted his thanks out the window as he lit out. Pretty soon civilization was behind him.

Goddamn it, Bobby, Harden thought futilely as it began to snow. The fucking Northwest Territories? It was like something out of a fable. Crosby always did have a flair for the dramatic, but it didn’t fit; he didn’t know Harden was following him, didn’t know he had an audience. Whatever else it might be, this impromptu passion play was at least sincere.

The radio gave out under the growing storm, and the pulse and proof of Harden’s place in the world was reduced to the cut of the headlights into black. He knew how to drive on ice, he’d learned how to drive on ice, but this was like not touching the asphalt at all, silent and disembodied in a fundamentally similar kind of middle of nowhere to the one Harden had been caught in for the past four years.

He thought that once he’d gotten Bobby to come back, they could both move into the farmhouse for awhile, clear their heads and let this harrowing teamless feeling retreat into the past a little bit. Hours blurred like there was ether in the air, in the valley, in the off-season, drugging and profound, and that had to be better than the pace they’d been setting. The summer never lasted like it should.

Buck had said once, lying in the back of Harden’s car trying to get a nap in before the game, “You lose heartbreakers. You win laughers. You play fifteen innings, sometimes, did I tell you I once went eight-for-nine? It gets so every field, no matter where you are, feels like the place you grew up, and you know the raw patches and you can read the track without needing to check for the wall. There’s a point, usually sometime in July with fireworks and shit like that, when you might think that the world is perfect and you were always meant for this.”

Harden rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes, straight backcountry highway tattered by the weather. If Crosby could get a starting job on another team, if Crosby could get any kind of job (hadn’t Harden let them pitch him out of the bullpen, hadn’t he auditioned for the independent leagues), there was no way Harden would ask him to stick around.

He pulled over outside of town, near the dead mine, and walked around the car a few times, his face going numb and his lungs burning. It actually hurt to breathe, farther north than Harden had ever been in his life, the land seeming tilted towards the sky, held up close to the crush of stars. Harden stood staring up with his hands in his pockets for a long time, thinking about the ten years behind him and the ten hours ahead, snow powdering on his hair and clothes.

There was only one intersection, one motel, but the office was dark; it was probably near dawn, though Harden didn’t know what time zone he was in and whether there was such a thing as dawn this time of year, at this latitude. The highway cut right through town, a huge semi wrecking the calm in a blast of silver and red, banshee-howl of the engine sinking away across the land. Harden walked down to the gas station, which had twelve separate diesel pumps and a diner attached to it with the neon still on.

He’d been driving for thirty-four hours, and nine days before that, getting lost for days in the flatland, and the glare of fluorescents off tile almost killed him, staggering him back against the door. He caught his balance, hand on the door and hand on his chest, and looked up.

Crosby was sitting at the counter, immediately meeting Harden’s eyes with his own, his expression desolate. He’d had the stitches out, but still wore a band-aid, and there were cuts on several of his knuckles, a grass stain on the tail of his shirt and the start of a ragged beard.

Harden was frozen in the doorway, and Crosby looked away sharply, half-smiling.

“Wasn’t expecting you for another week or so,” Crosby said. He popped his knuckles, nervous, but god knew how long that cup of coffee had been in front of him.

Harden shook his head, managing to answer, “Booth,” though he didn’t want to sit down, he’d been in the car forever. Crosby obligingly moved, draping himself on the bench, nearly glittering as he watched Harden wear a short path in front of the booth, feeling gutted and so tired it made him think crazy things.

“You could have found a more out of the way place,” he said. Crosby’s teeth showed for a second against the blue of the mug, the plate glass window behind his head showing the ghost world of a tiny frontier truck-stop town, caught in a blizzard at two in the morning or four in the afternoon or whatever fucking time it was.

“Apparently if you go any further north, you run the risk of your engine freezing and dying of exposure.”

“Yeah, you don’t fuck around with the Northwest Territories, Bobby,” Harden said, rolling his eyes. It still hurt to breathe, so maybe that wasn’t the weather at all. “You’re taking this to a kinda extreme length.”

Crosby’s eyes flashed, lounging back against the window as if they hung out here every night. “And what’d you do, man?” he asked low.

Harden stopped, staring at him, sleepless and roughed-up friend of his, too worn down to hold anything back. He was dangerous, abused out of any real morality, and Harden was quickly scared, bracing himself.

“You let your life come to a fucking halt,” Crosby told him. “You moved to that creepy little house and we didn’t hear from you for two years. Two fucking years, Richie. And then we did hear from you and you were drunk all the time. And then you stopped being drunk all the time and stopped being funny and stopped being much of anything. You were this ghost, like talking to a recording, and you just, it was all so fucking sad, man. It broke my heart.”

The waitress emerged from the kitchen yawning, called out to Harden across the long room, sounding irritated that she now had two customers to deal with. Harden jumped, severely on edge, and fell into the booth opposite Crosby, shaking and lifting his voice, ordering coffee. Crosby lifted an eyebrow and Harden wondered how bad he looked, clutching his hands together.

Shaking his head, lowering his shoulders, Crosby continued carefully, “But I didn’t say anything then because I figured that I didn’t know what it was like and everybody mourns in their own way. So, please. Don’t tell me that I’m dealing with it wrong.”

Crosby was in worse shape than Harden had expected, having given everything to the team, his health and youth and heart, all of it without hesitation and now he had to face the loss. It was no wonder he’d run, found a point at the diametrically opposite side of the globe from anything resembling baseball. Crosby’d been living in that crummy motel down the road for almost a week, waking up to white and cold and hoping that his memory could be erased slowly by the startling blank of the sky, the alien planet around him. It showed plainly on his face, a bewildered fog of betrayal, a helplessness in the set of his mouth.

Harden wove his fingers, frustrated because he’d been through this, he should have some kind of advice to give, he should be in some way useful, but it kept feeling like one of the nightmares he’d had the month before his last surgery. He was terrified, really, desperately trying to figure out how to spare Crosby this.

“It’s not wrong so much as. Far away,” Harden said. “If you’d just been in Oakland or Long Beach, I woulda left you alone.”

“I doubt it. But, hey. Now we can say that you literally followed me to the ends of the earth.”

Harden snorted. “Is that what this godforsaken place is called?” He blinked up at the waitress, who’d appeared unexpectedly with his coffee and a hostile expression. “Oh, um. Thanks.”

He slouched back in defeat, blushing, and Crosby grinned at him. They waited until she was out of earshot again, before Harden exhaled and Crosby laughed out loud.

“Anyway, I’m not moving here or something. I’m just processing everything.”

Letting his knee fall against Crosby’s under the table, Harden narrowed his eyes. “For how long?”

“Whatever. I’ll be back for the World Series.”

“And then?” Harden held his breath, felt Crosby tense slightly. Mean thing to bring up, the future, but Harden had been living on the fumes of one night that had happened over a month ago, he’d gone too far on it.

Crosby looked at him levelly, though he was trying to hide how his hands were shaking by wrapping them around his coffee. “Well, I guess I’m gonna find another team.”

Harden nodded, feeling beyond stupid. “Yeah.”

“Billy said he wouldn’t tell anybody outside the organization that I wrecked that locker, but I don’t know. He can be vindictive.”

“I’ll make sure he doesn’t,” Harden said, burning his mouth, shuddering. Crosby let his head drop back, his throat laid out, and he looked up at the ceiling with his mouth pressed thin.

“There’s a lot involved in finding a new team, you know? At least when you’re traded, it’s all taken care of for you.” Crosby sighed.

“You’ll be okay,” Harden said, something sharp caught in his throat. “There’s always demand for a good utility infielder.”

“Shortstop, Richie.”

Harden bit the insides of his mouth, shaking his head. “Of course. Sorry.”

They were quiet, the storm gaining ground outside, thrashing against the windows, snow blown horizontally across the street. Something was clanking in the kitchen, the dishwasher maybe, and Harden again got the disquieting feeling of being sliced out of time and place, this regular Bobby at a diner scene playing out in the post-apocalypse, in a vacuum.

“You knew I’d be back,” Crosby said eventually. Harden shrugged, wanting to smooth his fingers across the lines on Crosby’s face, make him a prospect again.

“I wasn’t gonna count on it.”

“Did I give you reason?” Crosby fiddled with a spoon, curved piece of white moving on his cheek. “What’d I do to make you think that I needed to be supervised?”

“Among other things, you are still recovering from a head injury,” Harden replied, unconsciously brushing his fingers across his own cheekbone. “And you. I mean, it’s been a rough year. I don’t think holing up all alone in, like, the saddest town in the world is the best move.”

“I think I fit right in.” Death’s head grin, Crosby wavering and giddy. “It’s incredible, it’s like everybody forgets who I am overnight, even though there’s only, like, forty people living here. I’m always introducing myself.”

Harden didn’t understand that, tipping his head to the side. “You should come home.”

“You should keep out of it.” Harden winced, and dropped his eyes to the table, hearing Crosby breathe out carefully. “You fuck up my concentration. I’ve got a lot of stuff to figure out.”

“I fuck up your concentration?” Harden asked, hopeful as Crosby smirked, rolling the spoon around his thumb.

“Just by breathing, Rich,” Crosby said, but he was kidding, overacting. “It’s just, it’s one more thing to worry about.”

“You want me to go?”

Dumb question, to be sure, like asking to get hit, because if Crosby said yes Harden would be crippled and stranded, and if Crosby said no he would be lying.

Crosby shrugged, his gaze cast downwards, and Harden crossed his fingers on his knee, thinking, please.

“You came all this way.”

That was it, but it was enough like permission that Harden let the tension ride out of him, resting his elbows on the table. He put two more packets of sugar in his coffee, watched Crosby yawn into his fist, his eyes swollen from not sleeping.

Their ankles hooked under the table, and Harden wanted to say, what about the other thing, but he could foresee too many ways that that would end badly. They finished their coffee and paid, went out into the street. They were both underdressed, wearing thin sneakers, and Crosby swayed and bumped into Harden until Harden put his arm around Crosby’s shoulders and steadied him. They had to shout to be heard over the wind, the snow falling too thickly to see the lights across the street.

Crosby led him to his room, flaking blue paint on the door rusting on his hand, and they left their soaked shoes in the bathtub, stripped down to T-shirts, uneven patches of wet on Crosby’s shoulder, Harden’s chest. Crosby’s hair darkened as the snow melted, his eyes unreadable and dark, and he was pulling Harden over to the bed by his belt, pushing him down.

It wasn’t supposed to go like this, and Harden looked up at him, feeling a bit lost. Crosby had a hand fisted in Harden’s shirt, tugging the collar out, kicking Harden’s feet apart and stepping between them. They could have had years, they could have fallen in love in Double-A and had everything, fallen out of it five seasons later, hated and absolved each other and repaired to friends again, but instead this was only the second time and already one of the last.

Nothing like regret, he thought, and squeezed his eyes shut, pressed his forehead against Crosby’s chest, feeling Crosby stroke down the back of his neck and say his name. He didn’t care about that right now, he didn’t want to think about it. Sleepwalk through your life, Buck had said to him, and this must be what he’d been talking about, this slow wakeless roll in his chest, disconnected and moving as if underwater.

Crosby laid him down, hands under Harden’s shirt, and smiled at him, kinda dazzling in a way that made Harden want to check the windows for the northern lights. He’d never been this far in any direction, but he still knew what to do when Bobby pulled Harden’s knee up against his side, dragged his shirt off one-handed and lowered himself down. Crosby was grinning against Harden’s mouth, palming his stomach, rambling again in pitches and gasps, about how he’d gone three days without talking to anybody, driving up here, and it’s like being invisible, it’s just what he was looking for, and Christ.

Crosby broke lightly, had to stop and catch his breath with his forehead resting against Harden’s. Harden went to work on his belt, licked Crosby’s neck, unable to think of anywhere that Crosby could have gone that Harden wouldn’t have followed.

*

They spent almost two weeks, way the fuck up there past Yellowknife, changing the sheets on the motel bed themselves every other day, knocking around the gas station’s convenience store and diner and bar until the locals stopped glaring at them. Yankee boys, Harden heard behind his back, and he thought that was pretty funny, told Crosby and Crosby barely looked up from his magazine.

It was astonishing, how bored you could get.

Twice a week, the mail came through, and with it the newspaper, damp and already yellowed, and Harden thought that they were both secretly reading the sports page nine or ten times between deliveries, searching for encoded messages. Buck, predictably, had gone on a tear since joining the club, and Harden had to fill in the details that weren’t provided, the signs with Buck’s name reappearing in the bleachers, the circus catches, what kind of slide he used coming into third on his three triples. Once there was even a picture of him, grainy and blurred, his white slice of a grin the only clear feature.

Crosby didn’t want to talk about the team, though, and Harden figured that was fair. As close as they ever got to acknowledging anything was when they walked from one end of the town to the other, tossing a baseball back and forth, and that was mostly just boredom again.

They were unbelievably well-hidden. They’d actually managed to disappear.

They didn’t leave the room for three days. If nothing else, the situation was remarkably conducive to having a lot of sex, feeling like exiles or refugees, feeling desperate even with nothing but time to kill. Bobby took to rolling into him, holding him down by the shoulders, pinning his hands, and Harden was often derailed by what that did to him, arching up against Crosby, mouth open and voiceless.

He caught himself thinking that it was worth it, with Crosby asleep, head butted against Harden’s side. He woke up to Crosby’s teeth on his hip, shivering and opening his eyes to see the deep purple of the sky, the dark side just before dawn. They were here, no matter that it took ten years and four thousand miles, and in a strange way, Harden was happier than he’d ever been.

Crosby wanted to buzz his hair, wanted Harden to do it for him, but Harden refused. He didn’t know if Crosby meant it as a symbol or something, but Crosby was easy to guide with a hand tied up in his curls, and Harden wasn’t going to give up on that. Everything came back to the next time that he got Crosby alone, his throat dry from picturing it.

Coming back from the diner with breakfast in takeaway boxes, cuffs of his jeans soaked and patterned with salt, Harden glanced over at Crosby, still asleep and sprawled out on his stomach, the white crease of the sheet low on his back and a spear of light cutting from hip to shoulder, and it struck Harden that this was probably the single best chance he’d ever get.

Bobby’d gone pale, demolished, his face hard like he was constantly reliving the moment that Billy Beane had cut him loose. He moved as if he were afraid of getting hit, and tried to stop drinking because it only depressed the fuck out of him (it didn't take), screwed up his eyes and his fists, curled into himself.

He acted like Harden was his only source of heat, like everything else in his life was a placeholder, and this, this was what he’d been waiting for. It rattled Harden deeply, the way Crosby looked at him sometimes.

It should have been easy, in between coffee and their sixteenth game of Egyptian ratscrew or latest round of the rummy 5000 tournament they had going, on the road with the muddy snow packed knee high, as Bobby peeled them both out of their layers, his hands freezing on Harden’s skin, easy to say, let’s never stop doing this. Bobby’d been ripped all the way down, his defenses completely gone, and he would promise without thinking, yeah forever whatever you say, let himself be bound.

But Harden fell back, spooked by the silence, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to hold Crosby to it. They were experiencing a psychotic break together, cleanly removed from reality, but far south, back where there was grass, the playoffs were about to start and Crosby had said he’d be home for the World Series.

Back in California, they couldn’t play outlaw, couldn’t hole up like the world had ended. They couldn’t be careless and without thought for the future, living like boys run away from home. It wouldn’t change anything to say it out loud.

So there was this space between them, an absence, and they didn’t talk about it, same as they didn’t talk about baseball.

They did see the northern lights, one night as they were walking back from the bar. Planed curves of green smeared like watercolor over the sky, lavender at the edges. The glow pasted over the land, a tinted plain of snow fanning like an outfield, and Harden stood with his hand twisted in the back of Crosby’s coat, transfixed.

He thought it was a sign, a green field as far away, but he didn’t tell Bobby. Every day, there was something new he wasn’t telling Bobby. Oddly, they hadn’t yet run out of stuff to talk about.

When it got down to cases, though, it was better to be up here, bearing witness to Crosby in the immediate aftermath. It was as if they were living through a disaster movie together, doing what they could to predict the next explosion. Crosby would wince at the strangest things, a reminder of the weather back home, an old woman in a green and yellow knit scarf, the Coke sign in the diner’s window faded to pink, and the acute lines around his eyes left faint impressions. He looked less like himself the longer they stayed up here, altering in indefinable ways.

Crosby railed at the team when drunk, and shouted no-hitter up at the sky just in case Danny was pitching somewhere. He had headaches that lasted the whole of the arctic night, and there was nobody in a day’s drive that could fill his codeine prescription.

He told Harden that that was the worst part, really, philosophical on the bathroom floor after getting sick, his curls sweat-stuck to his forehead. He said, “It turns out I’m an awful person, because I don’t want them to win anything. I get drunk and I find myself wishing for injury, can you believe that? I want them to go down in fucking flames.”

Harden got up on his knees to pour Crosby a glass of water, shaking his head. “You’re hardly the first, Bobby.”

Crosby grinned, rolling his head back on the wall, his throat gleaming. It wasn’t what Harden would have suspected, in the middle of this debauched and unprincipled sojourn of theirs, that he would be constantly reminded that Crosby was the very best friend he’d ever had. There was a feeling between them like the sun was a week away from imploding, the last few days of their existence, but Harden kept thinking that they were underage, back in Double-A again, just fucking around at being friends.

And Crosby said, “You know, you’re really starting to grow on me,” and Harden couldn’t explain why that hit him as hard as it did.

It didn’t matter that there was nothing to do. They wasted a few days disassembling the already-broken television set in their room, unable to put it back together without a couple pieces left out. They played cards for hundreds of thousands of dollars in IOUs, and for each other’s clothes, and for Goldfish crackers. They slept for twelve or thirteen hours at a stretch.

Bobby saw the newspaper before Harden did, and came back pissed off, not bothering with exposition, slamming Harden up against the wall. Harden was mostly on board, though concerned by the brightness of Crosby’s eyes, the way he bit and held Harden down with his body. They ended up on the floor of the little hallway, dazed and tangled, Crosby’s mouth still tight.

Later, Harden wasn’t at all surprised to learn that the A’s had completed their first-round sweep and already taken the first game of the championship series. Playing joyful and as if unconscious, which was par for the season, actually, and it blew his mind, realizing suddenly that this team was incredibly favored, three solid starters and a deep bench and a bullpen, for once, thank god. He’d been occupied with the minor leagues and certain journeymen and Crosby’s downfall, he’d lost track.

It would be perfect, he thought with a wild feeling in his chest, if this were the year.

Crosby’s features gained a stricken cast as the days built speed, and when he got drunk now, he slipped up and told Harden about what it was like to play in the new stadiums, the quick of the infields and the eerily clean dugouts. Baseball crept back in, even if it was only Crosby calling Harden ‘ace’ sometimes when he wasn’t thinking about it, and soon Harden could recite every team Bobby had played for from T-ball on, counting them off on his fingers while Bobby nodded in time, his chin brushing Harden’s shoulder over and over.

Harden woke up one morning alone, milky light graying the room. He placed himself, northwest territories, mid-October, Bobby, and he heard the crack of bat on ball and thought he was dreaming. It happened again a minute or two later, though, and he sat up, fumbled for the window.

Bobby was out there in the street past the thin ranks of the parking lot, walking away with a wood bat on his shoulder. Harden rested his forehead on the glass, closing his eyes for a long second.

Crosby almost disappeared past the edge of the post office, but Harden could see him bend down and pick something out of the slush in the gutter, turn and head back. When he got opposite the motel, he faced the window, set his feet. Harden laughed almost like disbelief, as Crosby tossed the ball straight up in the air and his knee hiked, his body snapped. Nice easy swing, pretty as the whole day, and the ball rose on a track, right through the snow.

Harden shrugged his coat on without bothering to put a shirt on first, and went outside barefoot, the zipper scratching on his chest. He wrapped his arms around his stomach and stood under the overhang, shifting from side to side and calling to Bobby, “You’re uppercutting.”

Crosby came towards him, dragging the bat behind him so that a meandering trench was left in the snow, and asked with a smile if Harden would pitch to him.

With only one ball and no fielders, it took hours. They used Harden’s rental car as a backstop, and riddled it worse than machine-gun fire, and Harden knew he should be more responsible than this, but he was too pleased with the severity of the dents, imagining that he could see the imprint of stitches in the metal.

Throwing anything with break sent a rip of pain up his arm, but that was nothing new, and Crosby was poling the shit out of his useless fastball, so he found some sliders and a curve, crying out when he released the ball. Sweat iced in his hair, and Crosby’s face had lost all color, and they only stopped when the snow started falling too hard to see.

That night, at the bar, Crosby said, tomorrow, and Harden nodded, rubbing his shoulder and rubbing his eyes and wishing that at some point when he’d had nothing to do, he’d taken the time to better prepare himself for this.

They didn’t sleep, kept each other up and Crosby was weakened by the day’s exertion, and he lapsed, saying that he didn’t think it snowed like this in Oakland, asking Harden who they were playing next, glassy-eyed and sprawled all elbows and knees. Harden didn’t answer, pushing his hands through Crosby’s hair, wanting to go crazy too.

Crosby shook it off before the sun came up, and he kicked all the sheets off the bed, went down on Harden, both of them bared to the air. He scratched his initials into the hollow of Harden’s hip with his thumbnail, but Harden didn’t realize until later.

They had breakfast at the diner like always, not talking much. The waitress asked them with a mix of impatience and curiosity what the hell they’d been doing in the street all day yesterday, and Harden watched Crosby across the table, through the coffee’s steam, mouthing silently, baseball.

It stayed on his mind as they walked back and began packing, moving around each other like strangers. An itch, Crosby’s half-smirk, his fine mouth: baseball. Said without breath, as if it were a secret or an in-joke, like in certain light it meant everything.

Outside, the glare was damaging, Harden’s heart constricting at the freeze in the air. They put their bags in their separate cars and returned to the room one last time, standing in the drafts and angles, the interval of the day when the sun was on the bed.

Crosby looked at him, absently touched Harden’s wrist. “I bet you five thousand dollars that I make it home before you do.”

Harden grinned at the floor, trying to swallow. It would be three days if he only stopped to sleep, and he thought of how lonely it would get, talking to himself and compulsively searching the radio.

“Agreed.”

Crosby pressed his fingers to his temple, an unconscious gesture that he’d picked up from the headaches, and studied the bed, the small parking lot and telephone pole view out the window done up in tire tracks and splintered puddles of ice. The hubcap they’d used as a plate was still out there, dented all to shit and kicked in the gutter after Crosby finally broke his bat, when Harden finally broke ninety.

Harden leaned into the jamb, his hands in his pockets, watching Crosby. “When we get back,” he said without thinking it through, and stopped short. Crosby glanced at him as if with warning, don’t fucking get into it, which annoyed Harden, he’d get into whatever he wanted.

“When we get back, are you gonna let me stay with you?”

Crosby narrowed his eyes. “Yes.”

“All winter?”

“Sure.”

Harden nodded, cold with the weather at his back, Crosby with scores of red on his face from windburn yesterday, huddled in his coat looking miserable and dislocated, an echo in Harden’s chest.

“In the spring,” he said haltingly, “you’ll have your new team and I’ll,” but for the life of him he didn’t know, stalling panic under his skin.

Crosby stepped towards him, plucked a pine needle out of Harden’s hair. “You’ll be around, Richie.”

Harden turned away, his shoulder brushing against Crosby’s chest, and he let the morning white out his vision, wondering if he stood long enough without moving, would he go completely numb?

They returned the key and in the parking lot, between their cars, Crosby put his arm around Harden’s shoulder and pulled him close, kissed him until steam faintly blurred the air around them. Harden clung to his sides, his hands under Crosby’s coat, sure that he loved him, sure of nothing else.

They took to the highways, moving in rhythm at ninety miles an hour, Harden dropping back until Crosby was a silver speck on the horizon, and catching up, gaining on him like a nightmare, living for the moment when he got close enough to see Crosby’s eyes in the rearview.

Somewhere in the shadows of the mountains, Harden lost him, let him get too far ahead. The world became suddenly inhuman, unearthly again, and night fell too soon.

In the black once more, Harden thought about the four months ahead of him, and the years that would follow that, and maybe Crosby hadn’t meant to blow him off earlier, maybe it was the best thing to say. He’d be around. They both would, and sometimes they’d be around the same place.

Sometimes, Tuesdays, off-days, national holidays, they’d meet up in Midwestern cities, in the bad part of town, and get a drink or a room, talk until they lost their voices and then make better use of each other, sleep for a little while in a messy snarl of sheets, awake expecting ice and chrome, and instead find summer.

They’d leave in different directions, and it wouldn’t be any easier to take than it was right now. He’d dream occasionally of white concrete and orange streetlamps, reach for Crosby when he wasn’t there, keep an eye on Crosby’s numbers, and every time he hit a home run, Harden would see him with snow to his ankles, laughing and calling his shot.

In the valley beyond the hills, the radio picked up the A’s game, the pennant game, crackling through static and causing Harden’s heart to lurch jaggedly in his chest. He turned up the volume and crossed his fingers on the wheel, trying to decide if it was for good luck or bad.

A hundred miles and six innings on, he came across Crosby parked by the side of the road, sitting on the hood of his car. Harden went past at first, Crosby like a mirage, coyote-still with his head tipped towards the sky. The sun was going down red and gold and chopped up by the ridgeline, and Harden wondered if there would be a haze of stadium light when it got dark enough, if they’d be able to hear the cheers.

Harden climbed up to sit beside him, somehow winded, jarred by the look on Bobby’s face and the hard lines in his arms. They didn’t speak, listening to the car radio through the open window, watching the world darken as the A’s fought and scrambled and bled, and at last, at long last, won.

So there it was, and Harden let out a shambling breath, shivering and overcome. Crosby bowed his head and shut his eyes, decimated, and there wasn’t anything that Harden could do about that. They were hardwired to be heartbroken at this moment, trained for years by the game, and at least we’re both here, Harden thought sadly, at least there’s that.

They stayed for awhile, the radio fading away to white noise, knee to knee as the stars came out, the moon rising over the valley and somewhere to the west, home.

THE END