Baseball Great (5 page)

JADEN LOOKED AT JOSH'S
father's face for a moment, and her lip disappeared into her teeth again. She replaced the pen and tucked the notebook back under her leg.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “My dad says a good reporter asks the questions other people want to know but are afraid to ask. This stew
is
great, Mrs. LeBlanc.”

“If you like it as much as I do,” Benji said, “let one fly.”

Laurel burped and banged her spoon on the tray attached to her chair, giggling.

“There you go,” Benji said with a grin and a nod.

“Save it for Mongolia,” Josh's father said, his low voice rumbling.

“Sorry, Mr. LeBlanc,” Benji said, dropping his voice and his chin to his chest.

They ate the rest of the meal in relative silence. Josh's mom did her best to spark conversation about the new hotel that was supposed to go up next to the Destiny USA shopping mall beside the lake, but no one picked up the slack. When he finished, Josh's father excused himself, telling Josh's mother that he had some work to do.

“It was nice to meet you, Jaden,” he said pleasantly, stopping in the doorway. “I hope you'll come again.”

“Thank you,” Jaden said, and smiled up at him.

“Josh,” his mother said after watching his father disappear, “I'll clean up. Why don't you and Benji walk Jaden to the hospital? She has to meet her father there at eight.”

“Why?” Josh asked, but caught his mom's icy glare and immediately changed his tone. “Sure. Yeah. That'd be great.”

“That's okay, Mrs. LeBlanc,” Jaden said, getting up and taking some plates to the sink. “I'll help you and then I can take myself. I walk by myself all the time. We live right on the corner of Pond and Carbon, so it's not far.”

“You're sweet,” Josh's mom said, “but I wouldn't feel comfortable if Josh didn't walk you. I asked you to stay and I want to make sure you get there okay. Josh and Benji can use the exercise anyway.”

Josh wanted to tell his mom that his limbs felt like
jelly and exercise was the last thing he needed, but he knew better all the way around. Besides, for whatever reason, what Jaden said to his dad had struck a nerve, and Josh knew once his dad's nerves got struck, you were better off letting things settle down. He took his own dishes to the sink and got his coat.

Outside, Benji started in on Jaden immediately.

“Nice going,” Benji said. “The guy has his life destroyed, and you're pumping him about Rocky Valentine.”

“Destroyed?” Jaden said.

“It's not
destroyed
,” Josh said, scowling at Benji as they turned from the driveway onto the sidewalk.

“Crushed?” Benji asked with a shrug.

“He's fine,” Josh said. “Rocky Valentine offered him a job.”

“Wait a minute,” Jaden said, stopping in her tracks. “What are you two talking about?”

“His dad got cut, dude,” Benji said.

“He kind of retired,” Josh said.

“He's the best player on that team,” Jaden said. “His batting average is three twenty-one.”

Josh wrinkled his face, started walking, and said, “Do you have to know everything?”

Jaden caught up and raised her eyebrows. “I'm just saying.”

“'Cause it's annoying,” Benji said, hustling up beside
them. “What do you have, like, a photographic memory? Why do you even bother with that stupid pad?”

“I don't know,” Jaden said.

“Right,” Josh said. “I believe that.”

“So,” she said, ignoring him, “your dad's not playing anymore and he's going to work for Rocky Valentine? What's he doing?”

“Some kind of VP,” Josh said under his breath, “like sales or something.”

“And what was that stuff in your milk?” Jaden asked.

Josh shrugged. “Some supplement for working out. It's all natural. Super Stax, in case you want to Google it.”

“I will,” Jaden said, marching along.

“Good,” Josh said.

“Great,” she said.

Josh stopped suddenly and grabbed her arm.

“Do you smell that?” he asked.

“What? That smoke?” she said.

“Cigarette smoke?” Benji asked, his voice quavering.

Bart Wilson suddenly stepped out from behind the bushes, blocking their path on the sidewalk.

“Going someplace, punk?”

BART PITCHED HIS CIGARETTE
down onto the sidewalk. It rolled, burning, to the edge of the grass, filling the air with its stench.

“That's disgusting,” Jaden said.

Bart narrowed his eyes at her, then said to Josh, “Let's go, punk. You and me.”

“Oh, dude,” Benji said, and he took off down the sidewalk, running back the way they came, the clap of his feet sounding lonely on the empty concrete.

Josh's insides melted. He looked from Jaden to the tenth grader and shook his head.

“Get out of here,” Jaden said, taking out her cell phone and beginning to dial. “Before I call the cops.”

Bart swatted her hand, and the cell phone clattered to the sidewalk.

“What are you?” Bart asked with a sneer. “Some kind of African, Asian, Mexican, or something?”

“I'm a human being,” Jaden said, “which is more than you can say, you disgusting animal.”

Bart laughed at her.

“She's the prettiest girl in school,” Josh said, swallowing.

Bart turned and studied him. “Want to fight about
that
?”

Josh balled up his hands into fists. His heart hammered the inside of his rib cage, and he thought it might explode. He slowly raised his hands.

“Get out of here!” Jaden shouted, stepping between them and putting her face just inches from Bart's, her voice strong and southern. “You stay here a second longer and I'll file a police complaint against you for harassment. You touch him or me and I'll file one for assault. You think you can just do this? You can't. My dad's a cop and he'll hunt you down and throw you in jail so fast you won't know where you are until the big boys behind bars are smacking you around and you're crying for your momma.”

Bart stood there, huffing at her.

“Josh is
my
boyfriend,” Jaden said suddenly in her drawl. “He doesn't want anything to do with Sheila. You can tell her that. You want to fight someone? Go fight with her, and tell her to stay away from Josh.”

“That's bull crap,” Bart said, snarling.

“Go ahead,” Jaden said, gritting her teeth. “You just touch me and see what happens to you. Wait till I tell my father you're a racist, too. He'll slap the cuffs on extra tight.”

Bart lunged at Jaden but pulled back just before he touched her.

Jaden never flinched.

“You think I'm scared of
you
?” Jaden said, wrinkling up her face.

Bart took a step back and said, “You better be, 'cause when I get you back, you ain't gonna see me coming. There ain't gonna be no cops, and there ain't gonna be no witnesses.”

Bart turned and started away before spinning around and walking backward as he spoke. “Both of you, you better watch your backs.”

Bart kept going, now laughing demonically at them.

Jaden just stood staring and shaking her head. “What a moron.”

When Bart rounded the corner, Josh asked, “You think he'll do it?”

“Do what?”

“Get us.”

Jaden swatted the air, scooped up her cell phone, and said, “Come on. I don't want to be late for my dad. If he comes out and I'm not there, he'll walk home alone.”

Josh hurried to catch up to her.

“He's not really a cop, too, is he?” Josh asked, falling
in alongside her.

Jaden furrowed her brow and glanced at him, shaking her head again.

“No,” she said. “Just a doctor.”

“Well, you sounded pretty good,” Josh said.

“I said you were my boyfriend, too,” Jaden said. “And we both know that's bologna. Even if I wanted to—which I don't—my father won't let me date until I'm sixteen.”

“That's good,” Josh said, his face suddenly burning. “I don't mean because of me or anything. I mean that he cares about you like that.”

“Speaking of caring,” Jaden said, “your buddy Benji lit out like a cockroach.”

“He's a good guy,” Josh said, looking over his shoulder in the direction Benji had disappeared. “He might have gone for help.”

“Well, I sure didn't hear any cavalry bugles,” Jaden said.

“Does your voice do that a lot?” he asked.

“Do what?”

“You talk kind of southern when you're excited,” he said.

She shrugged without comment.

They walked for a block in silence before Jaden said, “Don't you know you could twist that moron up into a pretzel?”

“Who, Bart?”

“Yeah,” Jaden said. “You'd kill him.”

“He's a lot older than me,” Josh said.

“So he's older,” Jaden said. “I'm glad you don't want to fight—that's for morons. But if it came down to it, you'd kill him, and you don't even know it.”

“I guess,” Josh said, straightening his back a little.

“But don't worry,” Jaden said. “I've seen the type. He's all talk. Here it is.”

They had come to the big brick hospital that covered three city blocks. Before them stood the loading docks, a dark cavern of concrete cut into the side of the hill. Enormous garage doors stood in a row deep in the shadows beyond the raised platform, and a handful of Dumpsters had been crowded into the far corner of the blacktop below. Several cars had been nosed up along part of the concrete wall near the Dumpsters. One caught Josh's eye.

A sliver of light appeared, then grew into a rectangle from which emerged the shadow of a person.

“He always comes out the back,” Jaden said, nodding toward the door.

Josh watched as a second dark figure appeared from the shadows and approached Jaden's dad.

“Who parks back here?” Josh asked, watching as the second figure melted back into the shadows as if it had never been there at all.

Jaden shrugged. Looking at Josh, she said, “People dropping things off or picking them up, I guess. Why?”

“That's a nice car,” Josh said, pointing to the small black one in the middle of the others as Jaden's father jogged down the concrete steps still wearing a long white examination coat.

“That Porsche? It is nice,” Jaden said. “When my dad's working for the Yankees, I'm hoping he'll get something like that.”

“Yeah, I know someone who's got one of those,” Josh said.

“Really? One of the Chiefs?” Jaden asked.

“Coach Valentine,” Josh said, walking toward the car to get a look at the license plate in the shadows, unable to make it out. “But what would he be doing here?”

Jaden kissed her father hello and introduced him to Josh. Josh shook the doctor's hand, but his eyes were on the black car.

“Better look out,” Jaden's father said. “Here comes a truck.”

Together, they moved away from the center of the blacktop. As the truck pulled in, its headlights shone on the row of cars. Josh blinked and saw, without a doubt, a license plate that read DOIT2IT.

“I THOUGHT WE WERE
all running,” Benji said with all the surprise he could muster.

Josh rolled his eyes. Jaden took a bite of her sandwich without saying anything.

“What?” Benji said. “You think I was afraid? I knew you didn't want to fight that guy, and I figured if I high-tailed it out of there, you'd follow. By the time I turned around, you guys were gone. I sent a text, but glamour boy here had his phone off.”

“What'd you do?” Jaden said. “Run till you hit the Canadian border?”

“Now, that's the kind of thing that makes it hard to be your friend,” Benji said, scolding her with his index finger.

“I'm so upset, I'm going to have to stop eating,” Jaden
said, taking a huge bite of her sandwich and chewing wildly.

“Don't worry, Lido,” Josh said through a mouthful of lettuce and bologna on white bread. “I know you got my back if I need you.”

“Yeah, you know that, dude,” Benji said with a defiant nod at Jaden.

Jaden just closed her eyes.

The rest of the school day went as well as school can go, with no pop quizzes and not a lot of homework. Josh had to dodge the other kids on the team and their questions as best he could, and to those he couldn't dodge he'd just shrug and say he couldn't do anything about it. His dad needed him.

At two-twenty, those who didn't believe him had the chance to see him run down the front steps of the school, pass the buses, and jump into his dad's waiting car, which sped all the way to the Mount Olympus Sports Complex.

When they arrived, Josh and his dad saw cars, trucks, and SUVs racing in and out of the circle in front of the giant bubble. It reminded Josh of a pit stop, with each player jumping from his parents' vehicle and sprinting for the door.

Josh's dad wished him good luck and told him he'd be back to watch the end of practice. Josh got out of the car and, caught up in the atmosphere, hurried inside like the others. He changed into workout shorts and a
T-shirt in the locker room, then followed the stream of players into the weight room.

Stacks of metal plates clapped together intermittently, making the whole place sound like a construction site. The smell of rubber mats and stale sweat filled the air, along with the grunts, shouts, and angry cries of the lifters. Josh looked around, blinking, before the young assistant named Moose took him by the arm and showed him to the counter where the workout cards waited for the players in a plastic file box.

“Here's yours,” Moose said. “I filled in the weights you should use, just guessing. I'll go around with you today, show you the circuit, and we'll adjust the weights up or down depending on how you do. You ready?”

“Sure,” Josh said. He looked around at the other players. None of them spoke to one another. They trudged from machine to machine with the urgency of firefighters at a blaze.

Moose showed Josh the two sides of his card, one for leg days, one for upper body.

“We split the team in half,” Moose said. “You're in the upper-body group for today, so you'll do seven sets of bench presses and all the upper-body machines in between. Wednesday, we do plyometrics—jumping exercises. Thursday, you'll do legs. Friday, back to upper, then legs again on Monday. Got it?”

Josh examined the 8 x 10 lime green card and
nodded.

“Here we go,” Moose said, looking around the room. “You start where you can. There, biceps.”

Josh wedged himself into a padded machine and gripped a scored bar.

“You go till failure, plus two,” Moose said. “Today, I'll show you what that means. Tomorrow, you're on your own, and you just get anyone you can to spot you and push you past failure.”

“Failure?”

“Till you can't do any more,” Moose said. “Then your spotter helps you do two more beyond that, but he makes you do the work. That's how you get stronger.”

Josh glanced at Jones as he pushed past the machine where Josh sat. To Moose, Josh said, “I don't know if these guys are going to want to help me.”

“Oh, they'll help,” Moose growled. “This is my weight room. Someone doesn't help a teammate in here and they're gone. We already lost one guy that way. Rocky won't have it, and neither will I. Go ahead, get started. I put fifty on here for you. Do as many as you can.”

After the eighth repetition Josh's arms began to tremble, and he got the handles only halfway up.

“Finish!” Moose screamed, helping him just a bit as Josh struggled to bring up the bar.

“Now down slow,” Moose said, pushing on the weights as Josh let the bar down.

Josh did his best to keep it from dropping, but Moose pushed it down and said, “That stinks. You gotta be tougher than that. Come on, two more now, up fast and down slow.”

Josh's arms trembled and ached, and he fought to get the bar back up two more times, then hold it on the way down. By the time Moose let him off the machine, his head pounded and his brow dripped with sweat.

“Next,” Moose said, pointing to a bench press. “Let's go. You only got an hour.”

Moose dragged Josh through the weight room, yelling and screaming and urging him on. By the time Josh walked out, his muscles quivered like Jell-O and his arms felt heavier than lead. He returned to the locker room and slowly changed into fresh clothes, then jogged out with the others under the echoes of Rocky's blasting whistle. Agility drills and stretching wore him down even more, and he felt half a step slow in the fielding drills. His throws to first base made it, but as the session wore on, he had to put an arc on the ball to get it there.

Rocky's whistle sounded three shrill blasts in a row, and everything stopped. From behind home plate, he screamed at Josh.

“You throw like that and I got a troop of Girl Scouts who could make it safe to first base running backward!” Rocky said. “That's crap! Total crap! Make the throw or
get out of there!”

Josh's eyes felt hot with tears. Jones smirked at him from his position on first, and Jones's buddy Tucker snorted with quiet laughter from behind him in right field. The drill started up again. Josh kept his head up, took the next grounder, and rifled it. He felt a sharp pain in his shoulder, but the ball smacked Jones's glove, wiping the smile off Jones's face.

“That's better!” Rocky shouted.

Josh wanted to grab his shoulder, but he forced himself not to, hoping and praying that he'd have a rest before the next grounder came his way. He did, and by the time he had to make another play, the pain had subsided to a dull ache. With the throw came the bolt of pain, but instead of flinching, Josh growled with anger. He set his teeth and ground his way through practice, letting the pain in his arm fuel his rage and his determination not to quit.

As the minutes of practice ticked by, his shoulder grew sorer and sorer. He kept on, part of him wishing time could speed up. The other part of him wanted time to stop because he knew every minute also brought him closer to hitting practice.

And Josh had no idea how he'd swing a bat.

When his turn came to enter the batting cage, Josh took a deep breath and ducked inside.