CHAPTER 11: THE GRAVEYARD OF DREAMS
The rain came down on Portsmouth not as a summer shower, but as a slow, deliberate drowning.
It was a cold rain, blown off the river by an unseasonal northern front, turning the dirt tracks of the railyard into trenches of gray, glutinous mud. In the lower yards, where the rusting hulks of retired hopper cars sat on dead-end spurs, water pooled in the wheel wells and dripped through the rusted corrugated seams of the locomotive repair shed with a rhythmic, hollow clang.
Marcus did not go home to the two-room apartment above the dry cleaner’s where his mother slept between shifts. He knew what would be waiting there: the smell of fried baloney, the blue light of the television playing static, and the small stack of unpaid gas bills held down by an empty water glass.
Instead, he walked the ties.
He had walked this two-mile stretch of ballast stone since his seventh summer, counting the creosote-soaked timbers with the unthinking precision of a monk reciting his beads. His shoes squelched with every step, cold water soaking through the black electrical tape around his toes, but his gait did not alter. Over his right shoulder, the strap of the empty canvas ball bag was wrapped twice around his neck, the canvas flapping damp and heavy against his spine.
At the dead end of the spur stood the roundhouse annex.
It was a skeleton of brick and corrugated iron, its tall arched windows long since stripped of glass by generations of stone-throwing boys. Inside, protected from the downpour by a remaining section of tarred roof, was the kingdom Elijah had built out of garbage and spite.
Marcus stepped through the missing double doors, his sneakers crunching on coal dust and shattered bottle glass.
The air inside was five degrees colder than the street, smelling of wet coal, damp limestone, and the lingering, sweet-sour perfume of WD-40. In the corner sat the old wood stove, fashioned from an iron grease drum, its flue pipe venting through a jagged hole in the brickwork. Next to it was the vinyl armchair where Elijah had died—its brown upholstery split down the middle, its yellow foam guts exposed like the ribs of an old animal.
On the wall above the chair, pinned to the mortar with four rusty roofing nails, was a photograph.
It was not a picture of a baseball team. It was a clipping from a 1995 edition of the Chillicothe Gazette, browned by sunlight and curled at the edges. The headline was short:
LOCAL ARM LEADS DISTRICT IN STRIKEOUTS; SCOUTS DESCEND ON SCIOTO COUNTY.
The image showed Elijah Vance at nineteen. He was tall, gaunt, his long neck protruding from a high-collared flannel jersey with the letters P-O-R-T-S-M-O-U-T-H stitched across the chest. His face had the same hollowed, hungry cheekbones that Marcus saw in his own mirror every morning. His arm was cocked behind his ear, his fingers wrapped around a pristine white ball, his right wrist circled by a thin, dark band of braided red string.
Marcus stood before the clipping for a long time, the rain drumming a steady tattoo against the iron sheets above his head.
"I showed him," Marcus whispered into the gloom.
The empty shed did not answer. The only sound was the drip of water hitting a rusted hubcap near the wall.
Marcus reached into his pocket and pulled out his right hand.
The skin across his middle knuckle was split wide, a half-inch fissure that had begun to ooze a clear, straw-colored fluid mixed with blood. His forearm was rigid, the muscle belly along the ulna locked in an iron spasm that defied his efforts to straighten his fingers. This was the cost of the dead drop. Elijah had warned him: the human body was built to rotate, to whip, to absorb force through elastic deformation. To kill the spin required an act of physical treason—a sudden, violent braking action that transferred the entire kinetic payload directly into the ligaments of the forearm.
"You can throw it fifty times, boy," the old man had told him during their last winter together, his breath pluming white inside the freezing shed. "Maybe sixty. After that, the gristle in your elbow turns to boiled cabbage. If you're going to throw it, you make sure the man who watches has to pay for every stitch."
Marcus walked over to the vertical railroad tie bolted into the floorboards.
He reached down and touched the center of the wood—the smooth, hollowed saucer where thousands of stones had hammered away the grain. He pressed his split knuckle into the depression, closing his eyes, feeling the cold, damp memory of the timber.
Behind him, a car engine coughed in the rain outside.
Headlights cut through the shattered arched windows, their yellow beams sweeping across the coal-dusted brickwork, illuminating the dancing clouds of dust and rain. The vehicle was old, running on an uneven cylinder, its tires groaning as they turned through the deep gravel of the access road.
Marcus did not turn around. He did not reach for a wrench or a piece of rebar. He kept his hand pressed against the railroad tie, listening to the door latch click open, the heavy tread of work boots stepping into the mud, and the dragging, uneven scrape of a bad right knee.
Arthur Vance stepped through the broken doorway.
He had abandoned his khaki safari shirt. He wore an old dark wool chore coat, darkened at the shoulders by the downpour, and a pair of water-stained corduroys. He carried no clipboard, no umbrella, and no radar gun. In his right hand, he held an old, scarred green canvas seabag—the kind issued to merchant sailors at the end of the second war.
Vance stopped ten feet inside the threshold. He looked at the vinyl armchair, at the iron drum stove, and finally at the boy standing beside the scarred oak tie.
"He told me you'd come here," Marcus said, without looking back.
"He knew me better than I knew myself," Vance replied. His voice was raw, stripped of the polished authority he had carried onto Field Three. He looked smaller in the dim light, his broad shoulders rounded beneath the damp wool.
"Did you bring another check?" Marcus asked.
"No," Vance said. "I brought what was left."
The old scout walked slowly forward, his boots dragging through the coal dust, and set the green seabag down on the floor between them. The heavy canvas clattered with the dull, metallic weight of things that had lived in darkness for three decades.
Vance reached down, untied the brass eyelets, and peeled back the canvas mouth.
Inside lay three wooden boxes, each one crafted from rough pine slats, bound with copper wire. And beside them, resting on an oilskin cloth, was an old, black Rawlings Heart of the Hide fielder's mitt—the leather stiff, dry, and bleached gray by the passage of thirty years.
"He left this in the back of my truck in July of ninety-six," Vance said, his voice dropping into a register that sounded like stone grinding on bone. "The night after I signed the scout's contract with Cincinnati. I drove three hundred miles to Sarasota with it sitting on the passenger floorboards. I tried to throw it in a canal outside of Atlanta. I pulled the truck over, got out, held it over the water... and I couldn't do it."
Marcus turned around.
He looked at the black glove. He knew the shape of it. He had seen it in the old clippings, in the penciled sketches Elijah had drawn on the backs of cardboard carton lids to explain the mechanics of the pocket.
"Why didn't you come back?" Marcus asked.
The question was not loud, but it struck Vance with the physical force of a lead sinker. The older man closed his eyes, his mouth working silently for several seconds before the truth found its way through his throat.
"Because I knew he was right," Vance whispered. "If I had come back, I would have had to look at him. And if I looked at him, I would have had to admit that I sold him so I could wear a clean shirt."
Vance reached into his coat pocket and pulled out the ball from the showcase. The split seam was dry now, the blood turning a dark, rusty brown against the gray horsehide. He placed it carefully on top of the old black glove.
"The Braves scout is looking for you," Vance said. "Dave Klemko. He'll find your mother by tomorrow afternoon. He'll offer her five thousand dollars, maybe ten, to take you down to an academy in Georgia. He'll tell her you're going to be a millionaire. He'll tell her you're the next Dwight Gooden."
Marcus looked down at the seabag. "And what will you tell her, Arthur?"
Vance took a deep, shuddering breath, the smell of coal dust filling his lungs like cold ash.
"I’ll tell her that if you throw that ball fifty more times," Vance said, "your arm will be as dead as mine. And there won't be a man with a pen in this entire country who remembers your name."