Shug yanked once, hard, and Garrick's cleats skidded on the concrete, and his shoulder hit the chain-link and the whole fence rang like a bell. Shug's elbow came up, maybe on purpose, maybe not, and caught Garrick just under the ear. Garrick saw a white flash. He did not let go. He got his feet back under him and he pulled, and he was stronger than anybody had guessed, stronger than he himself had guessed, five hundred swings a night all winter in the basement, and the bat came two inches toward him, and Shug's face changed.
Then Coach Amundsen was between them.
He was a short man, Coach Amundsen, fifty-two years old with a gray crew cut and forearms like fence posts from thirty years of hitting fungoes, and he did not shout. He put one hand flat on Shug's chest and one hand flat on Garrick's chest and he said, "Enough," in the voice he used when the bus was too loud, and both boys stopped as if somebody had pulled a plug.
"Let go of it," Coach said. "Both of you."
Neither of them moved.
"Kettleman."
Shug let go of the handle. Garrick stood there holding the bat by the barrel, upside down, the knob pointing at the dugout roof, breathing hard.
Out on the field, the umpire had turned around and was looking at the Keokuk dugout with his mask in his hand. The Fort Madison coach was looking too. In the little wooden bleachers along the first-base line, the twenty or thirty parents who came to Thursday scrimmages had gone quiet. Garrick did not look to see who was there. He knew who was there. He knew without looking that Vern Kettleman was sitting in the third row behind the dugout in his brown Carhartt jacket with his arms folded, the way he sat at every game, home and away, never cheering, never clapping, just watching his son with a face like a man reading a bill he did not think was fair.
Coach Amundsen looked at Garrick for a long time. Then he looked at Shug. Then he looked down at the bat.
"Whose bat is that?"
"Mine," Garrick said.
And Shug Kettleman, for the first time that anybody on the team could remember, did not say anything at all.
Coach Amundsen let out a breath through his nose. "Both of you sit down. Opposite ends. Not a word. We'll talk after." He turned around and lifted a hand to the umpire, an apologetic little wave, the universal sign for boys being boys, and the umpire put his mask back on, and the game went on.