"What was I gonna say?" Shug wiped his face with the bottom of his practice jersey. "Hey, Thiel, is that my bat my dad threw in the garbage? The one your mom fished out? Where'd she find it, under the coffee grounds?"
Garrick did not say anything.
"I figured it was her," Shug said. "I figured it out that night. I went back out to the curb after dark. I was gonna get it. And it was gone. And I thought, okay, the garbage guys came early. Except they didn't come till Wednesday. And she was the only one who took anything out to the cans that day." He laughed a short, unhappy laugh. "I used to look at your mom's car on Fulton Street every Tuesday. Like it might be in the back seat. Like I was gonna steal it back out of a Chevette. I was twelve."
They walked. The mist moved in the outfield.
"Pole twenty-seven," Coach Amundsen said from the dugout, turning a page.
They ran.
At the end of thirty Garrick lay on his back on the warning track with the cinders digging into his shoulder blades and the sky turning slowly above him. Shug sat a few feet away with his elbows on his knees and his head hanging down. Coach Amundsen folded his newspaper and screwed the cap on his thermos and walked out to them.
"Good," he said. "Go home. Practice is Monday at three-thirty. I want to see you two playing catch with each other in warm-ups."
"Coach," Shug started.
"Did I stutter, Kettleman?"
"No, sir."
Coach walked off. Shug sat for a long moment. Then he got up and dusted off his pants and looked down at Garrick on the cinders.
"It was a good bat," he said. "My dad picked it out himself. Drove all the way to Quincy. He stood in that store for an hour checking the grain on every one." He paused. "That's the part I can't get past. That he picked it out so careful. And then."
He did not finish. He walked off toward the parking lot, and Garrick lay on the warning track and watched the gray sky and thought about a man standing in a store in Quincy for an hour, choosing a bat for his son, turning each one in the light.
He told his mother that night. Not about the scuffle. She had heard about the scuffle already from a woman at the plant whose niece went to Keokuk High, and she had come home on Friday and looked at the bruise