Chapter 8: The Joke Tryout
Coach Callahan stood on the warning track for a long moment, weighing the crowd, the scouts, and the boy at the fence, and then he made the decision that loud, proud men often make when they want a problem to go away: he turned it into a joke.
"Fine!" he announced, spreading his arms wide, so the bleachers could hear him clearly. "You want three pitches? You got three pitches. Let's give the mower boy his moment, folks. Then we can get back to real baseball."
The crowd laughed, but it was a different laugh now, nervous and curious rather than mocking. A joke tryout was still a tryout, and everybody knew it. Callahan gestured toward the gate, and a Falcons player unlatched it, swinging it open with a creak. Davon stared at the opening for a second, as if he could not quite believe it was real, and then he stepped through.
The walk from the fence to the mound felt longer than any walk Davon had ever taken. The grass was soft under his work boots, softer than the outfield he had mowed that morning, and the infield dirt was a pale, dusty brown. Parents leaned forward in the bleachers. Players in the dugout stopped talking. Maya followed along the fence line, her phone still up, filming every step.
Marcus Bell was waiting at home plate, his catcher's gear already on, his mask tucked under his arm. He looked Davon up and down, not unkindly, and held out his glove hand for a fist bump.
"You ready for this?" Marcus asked quietly, so only Davon could hear.
"I think so," Davon said. "I hope so."
Marcus grinned. "Good. Because I'm calling the pitches, and I'm not calling anything fancy. Fastball first. Show them you can throw a strike. The rest, we'll see."
Davon nodded, grateful for the simplicity of it. He had expected to be alone out there, but Marcus was treating him like a real pitcher, and that made his hands stop shaking, just a little.
On the mound, Davon toed the rubber and looked around. The rubber was white and worn, the dirt around it scuffed by a hundred other pitchers' cleats. His work boots did not dig in the way cleats would. They slipped a little when he shifted his weight, and he had to plant his back foot carefully, pressing it into the dirt until it held. He took a breath, the way the library book had described, slow and deep, and he looked in at Marcus's target.
Cody Sullivan stood near the dugout steps, his glove at his side, watching. Davon expected resentment, but Cody's face was open, curious, almost hopeful, as if he wanted to see whether the boy from the fence could do what he himself had just failed to do. That look steadied Davon more than anything else had. He was not replacing Cody. He was just throwing.
Callahan, from behind the mound, called out, "Three pitches, son! No warm-ups, no excuses! Let's see what you've got!"
It was not fair, Davon thought. No pitcher threw without warming up. But he had warmed up that morning, against the cinder-block wall, and his arm felt loose, and his shoulder felt easy. He had thrown ten thousand pitches in private. Three more, in public, was not so different, except that everybody was watching, and the scouts had their notepads out, and his grandmother was not here to tell him to eat first.
Beasley stepped forward, holding a baseball, and for the first time that day, he spoke directly to Davon. "Take your time, son," he said quietly. "A mound doesn't care how fast you get there."
For a second, Davon looked past Marcus toward the bleachers, where strangers waited for a punchline, and toward the dugout, where Cody watched without malice. He thought of Rose telling him to stand straight even when a room laughed, and the thought steadied his breathing. This was not about proving the crowd wrong. It was about throwing the way he had learned to throw, one honest pitch at a time, in front of people who had never believed a mower boy could.
Davon took the ball. It was a real game ball, white and clean, with red seams that stood out sharply, nothing like his scuffed tennis ball. He rolled it in his hand, found the seams with his fingers, and felt the weight of it, solid and familiar in a new way. He looked at Marcus, who set his target low and steady, and he nodded.
The park went quiet. The banners along the outfield fence flapped softly. Somewhere in the bleachers, a baby cried, and somebody shushed it. Davon lifted his leg, brought his arm through high, elbow above his shoulder, just as he had practiced, and he thought, for one clear second, about the wall behind his house, and about Rose, and about all the mornings nobody had watched. Then he threw, and the ball left his hand, and the joke tryout began.