Shug had never said anything either. Not once, all through sophomore year. Garrick sometimes caught him looking at the bat in the corner of the dugout, a long, flat look, and then looking away. Garrick told himself he was imagining it. Shug took his glove, his seat, his cuts, his sunflower seeds. But he never touched the bat. For a whole season and a half, it was the one thing Shug Kettleman did not take.
Until the eighteenth of April, against Fort Madison, in the fifth inning, with a .190 batting average and his father in the third row.
Keokuk lost the scrimmage four to three. Shug batted once more, in the seventh, with his black Easton aluminum, and grounded into a double play. Garrick batted once more too, in the eighth, and hit a hard line drive right at the shortstop. Neither of them looked at the other.
Afterward Coach Amundsen kept them both. He sent the rest of the team to the bus and he walked Shug and Garrick out to the left-field corner, where the water was still standing in the low spot, gray and still, reflecting the gray sky, and he stood between them with his hands in the pockets of his windbreaker and did not say anything for a while.
Coach Amundsen had taught American history at Keokuk High for twenty-six years and coached baseball for twenty-two of them, and he had a theory, which he had explained once to a pair of brawling seniors in 1977, that most fights between boys were not about what they looked like they were about. "It looks like it's about a girl or a parking spot," he had said. "It's never about a girl or a parking spot."
"It looked like it was about a bat," he said now, to the standing water.
Neither boy answered.
"Thiel. You've never said ten words in a row in this program. Today you said about a hundred. In front of the whole bench. You want to tell me what that was?"
Garrick looked at the water. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Shug standing with his shoulders up around his ears, his jaw tight. Waiting. Shug was waiting for him to say it. Garrick understood that all at once, standing there in the wet grass. Shug was waiting for Garrick to tell Coach Amundsen that this bat had once had Verlin Kettleman burned into it, and that Vern Kettleman had thrown it in the trash like spoiled meat, and