The last time either of them talked about the bat that spring was at that district game, in the bottom of the sixth, with Keokuk down six runs and the rain starting. Shug was on deck. Garrick was sitting at the far end of the bench, and the bat was leaning in the corner against the chain-link, where it always was.
Shug walked down the bench. He stopped in front of Garrick. Everybody in the dugout got quiet, the glass-falling quiet, and waited.
"Hey," Shug said. "Thiel. Can I use your bat?"
He said it plain. Not buddy. Not you don't mind, right. Just the question, standing there in the rain, waiting for the answer like a man who knew the answer could be no.
Garrick looked up at him. He looked at the bat in the corner. He thought about a nine-year-old with a red cap, and a twelve-year-old at the end of a driveway, and an upstairs window, and a ten-dollar bill in an envelope every Friday for almost four years, and how much of a thing can change just by somebody asking.
"Yeah," he said. "Go ahead."
Shug picked it up. He held it a moment, the way he had in the basement that first night, and ran his thumb over the brown patch. Then he walked up the dugout steps and out into the rain toward the plate, and Garrick got up and went and stood at the top of the steps to watch, and the rest of the bench crowded in behind him.
Up in the third row, under a black umbrella, Vern Kettleman sat with Berniece on one side of him and Ruthann Thiel on the other. His hands were in his lap. There was no notebook.
Shug stepped in. He set his feet. His hands stayed down, short and quiet by his back shoulder, like a man waiting for a bus.
The pitch came in through the rain.
Garrick heard the sound before he saw anything, the sound like a door closing in a quiet house, and then the ball was up, a white dot rising into the gray, and every head in the dugout tipped back to follow it, and it was still climbing, and nobody knew yet where it was going to come down.