The sun did not rise gently over the Bottoms; it climbed like a white-hot coin pressed hard against the humid belly of the low-country sky. By eight in the morning, the dew that had settled over the weeds alongside the wooden fence was already turning to steam, filling the narrow corridor between the shotgun houses with the heavy, sour smell of damp pine and drying river silt.
Otis sat on his overturned plastic bucket, his knees spread wide, his forearms resting flat across his thighs. His hands—wide, square, with knuckles swollen from decades of wrenching rusted mower blades and digging irrigation trenches—did not move. Between his boots, the five-gallon bucket of league-certified baseballs stood in the sharp morning glare, their bright crimson stitching looking almost surgical against the flawless white cowhide.
"You're thinking about the man on the hill," Otis said. It was not an accusation; it was a diagnosis delivered with the cold precision of a country doctor.
Wesley stood on his improvised rubber, his heels dug an inch into the packed red dirt. He held one of the new balls tucked inside the reinforced pocket of his grandfather’s glove. The leather, restored the night before under his mother’s lamp, was stiff, heavy with the fresh oil-tan patch he had stitched behind the palm. It smelled of beef tallow and industrial wax, completely masking the faint vinegar stench of old sweat that had lived in the cowhide since 1962.
"I’m not thinking about him," Wesley said, his voice flat.
"Your feet say you are," Otis replied, pointing a long, calloused index finger at the boy’s lower body. "When you threw to Harrison yesterday, your stride was landing six inches to the left of the chalk line. You were opening your front hip because you wanted him to see your chest. You wanted that big man to feel small before you even released the pill. That’s schoolyard ball, son. That’s pride talking through your cleats. You get on a real mound against boys who can read hip rotation at forty frames a second, and that half-inch of daylight will cost you four hundred feet over the center-field wall."
Wesley did not answer. He looked down at his feet. The left sneaker—its canvas split along the outer edge where his pinky toe pressed against the rubber foxing—was indeed angled slightly toward the open side of the yard.
"Square it up," Otis commanded softly. "The plate ain't a person, Wesley. The plate don't care if the man standing over it has a gold ring or hole in his socks. The plate is seventeen inches of dead rubber buried in the mud. You throw to the wood, not the man."
Wesley drew a slow breath through his nose. He adjusted his front foot, turning the instep until it ran parallel to the invisible baseline connecting him to the chalked rectangle on the crate. He brought the ball up to his throat, tucking his chin behind the leather webbing of the glove.
He looked through the hole he had spent four hours repairing. Through the fresh black stitches, the white square on the wooden box looked smaller now, reduced from a broad target to a tiny, cruel corridor of space.
"Low and away," Otis said. "Right on the bottom rail. Pretend there’s a six-foot-two right-hander with quick wrists leaning out over the dish, trying to poke an opposite-field liner into right."
Wesley went into his motion. He did not rush. His hips sank back over his rear heel, his front knee floating upward until his thigh was flush with his ribs. When he drove toward the crate, his front foot didn't slap the earth; it planted with a dull, subterranean crunch, locking his pelvis into a granite wall against which his upper torso whipped forward.
His fingers came off the ball cleanly. The four seams sliced through the hot, dense air with a sharp, fluttering hiss.
CLACK.
The baseball slammed into the bottom edge of the chalk square, two inches above the packed dirt, striking the exact knot of wood where a rusty nail head peeked through the pine grain. The impact blew a puff of gray wood pulp into the air, and the ball bounced cleanly back along the ground, tracing a straight white line through the dust until it rolled to a stop against Otis’s left boot.
Otis did not smile. He didn't nod. He simply picked up the ball, rubbed his thumb across the scuffed cowhide where it had bitten the pine knot, and tossed it into the empty dirt beside him.
"Again," Otis said. "Same spot. But this time, don't show him the ball until your elbow crosses your ear. If you let him see the white of that leather before your shoulder turns, Julian Croft will have his barrel sitting on the seam before you even finish your follow-through."
"Julian Croft isn't better than his coach," Wesley muttered, reaching into the bucket for a second ball.
Otis let out a dry, raspy laugh that shook the brim of his mesh cap. "Julian Croft has had seven private coaches since he was eight years old, Wesley. He’s had his swing mapped on computers that cost more than this whole block of shotgun houses. He’s got nutritionists, physical therapists, and a machine in his daddy’s barn that shoots sliders at ninety-four miles an hour while a laser measures his reaction time down to the millisecond. Harrison Vance didn't hit you because Harrison was old, fat, and full of whiskey and vanity. Julian is young, hungry, and terrified of his father’s temper. That makes him dangerous. A desperate rich boy is the most dangerous hitter you’ll ever face, son, because he thinks the world owes him a hit."
Wesley set his fingers across the raised red seams. The words didn't scare him; they settled into his chest like cold river stones, heavy and immovable. He didn't care about laser machines. He didn't care about Julian Croft’s father or the white-and-navy private academy bus that had never once turned down a street in the Bottoms.
He only knew that a baseball was five ounces of cork and horsehide, and once it left his hand, no amount of money could buy back the distance between the bat and the ball.
"Low and away," Wesley whispered to himself.
He kicked his leg high, hid the ball behind his right hip until the very last fraction of a second, and snapped his wrist with the vicious, downward whip of a carpenter driving an iron spike through oak.
THWACK.
The ball hit the exact same knot of wood, splintering the pine plank straight down the middle.