CHAPTER 17: THE AUCTION ON THE ROCKS
The twelve scouts did not pack their bags.
Men who had spent thirty years serving the cold mathematics of organizational depth charts did not simply walk away from a miracle because it frightened them; they circled it. They moved in from the perimeter of the pit with the slow, synchronized hunger of wolves coming down out of the timber, their eyes fixed on the slender boy who stood alone on the wooden slat.
Klemko hung up the phone. He shoved it into his pocket with a jerky, hurried motion that betrayed the trembling of his fingers. He pulled the manila folder from under his arm, snapped the brass clasp, and pulled out three carbon-copied legal sheets stamped with the blue seal of a Montgomery County notary public.
"Step back, Arthur," Klemko shouted, stepping into the space between the mound and the plate, his leather loafers kicking up clouds of white chalk. "I’m warning you! This evaluation is registered under the Georgia Talent Acquisition Code. I have an exclusive forty-eight-hour representation mandate executed by the legal guardian. Every pitch thrown on this rubber belongs to the Atlanta Braves organization!"
The veteran scout from Milwaukee—the one with the straw hat and thirty years of service time in the Dominican summer leagues—laughed out loud. It was a dry, ugly bark of derision that echoed off the dolomite cliffs.
"Shove your mandate down your throat, Dave," the Milwaukee scout said, stepping directly in front of Klemko. His name was Hank Boudreau, and he had signed two Hall of Fame relievers out of the Texas oil leagues before Klemko was out of grade school. "A notary in Franklin County don't mean spit in an unincorporated limestone pit. That kid ain't signed to a minor league contract. He hasn't accepted a dollar of professional remuneration. He is an unattached amateur on private property."
Boudreau turned his back on Klemko, looked at Marcus, and reached into the breast pocket of his short-sleeved linen shirt.
He pulled out a blank cashier’s check drawn on the First National Bank of Green Bay.
"Fifty thousand dollars, son," Boudreau said, his voice dropping into the low, gravelly timbre of an auctioneer who knew the room was about to explode. "Fifty thousand on the barrel right now for an exclusive medical and training waiver. I have a pilot sitting on the tarmac at Dayton International with a twin-engine Cessna. We can be in Phoenix by six o'clock this evening. No combines. No showcases. No draft pool. We register you through our Dominican residential academy in Boca Chica as a special-case international petition."
"One hundred thousand!" another scout shouted from behind the tripod, pushing his way through the circle. It was a younger man from the Texas Rangers, his polo shirt dark with sweat across his breastbone. "One hundred thousand, full escrow, and we cover your mother’s housing in Arlington starting tomorrow morning! We put her in a three-bedroom ranch off Interstate 20, free and clear of all liens!"
"One-fifty!"
"Two hundred!"
The numbers began to fly across the blinding white dust like shrapnel.
They were men who spent their lives begging general managers for an extra five thousand dollars to sign an eighth-round senior from an NAIA school in Oklahoma, but standing in the bottom of that limestone oven, with the white powder still hanging in the air and Julian Cruz still limping toward the water cooler, every budget restriction dissolved into thin air. They saw the golden fleece. They saw twenty years of job security. They saw the cover of Sports Illustrated, the World Series rings, the front-office promotions that came to the man who brought the unhittable ghost out of the Ohio weeds and delivered it into the hands of the machine.
Marcus did not move.
He stood with his sneakers buried in the limestone, his black Rawlings Heart of the Hide glove resting against his right hip. The white dust coated his eyelashes, his hair, his collarbones, turning his dark skin into an antique marble sculpture dug out of the earth after a thousand years of burial.
He looked at Arthur Vance.
Vance was standing twenty feet away, the old seabag at his feet. The older man’s face was gray, lined with a profound, bone-deep exhaustion that seemed older than the limestone cliffs rising above them. For forty years, Arthur had been one of the auctioneers; he had stood in rooms like this, had bid on boys whose names he forgot five years later, had traded human arms for a fifteen-percent commission and a room with two double beds at the Holiday Inn.
Now, he looked at Marcus, and for the first time in his life, Arthur saw the chain clearly: the link that stretched from the slave auctions on the river landings, through the company-store scrip of the coal towns, straight to the green-felt tables of the Major League draft.
"Marcus," Vance whispered across the shouting.
The boy did not answer.
He reached down with his left hand, reached into the pocket of his gray track pants, and pulled out the folded sheet of paper Vance had given him in the Buick—the scouting report from July 14, 1996. The document that had declared Elijah Vance a damaged commodity, a broken gear, a man not worth the price of a bus ticket to Sarasota.
Marcus held the paper up in the blinding sun.
The shouting stopped.
One by one, the scouts fell silent, their eyes tracking the yellowed, water-warped sheet fluttering in the hot thermal draft rising from the quarry floor. Dave Klemko stopped mid-sentence, his cashier’s agreement crumpled in his fist, his jaw slack as he recognized the vintage letterhead of the Cincinnati Reds.
"What is that?" Boudreau asked, squinting against the glare. "Is that a prior claim? Does Cincinnati have an option on him?"
"No," Marcus said.
His voice was not loud, but it had that dry, terrible clarity that had silenced Field Three. It cut through the dead heat of the quarry like an iron wedge driven into green oak.
"This is the price of the pitch," Marcus said.
The boy did not rip the paper. He did not burn it. He laid it flat upon the white limestone dust at the center of the rubber, took the split-seam baseball from Arthur’s hand, and set it squarely in the middle of the signature line—right on top of the faded, thirty-year-old name: Arthur Vance, Regional Scout.
"My mother told me something before I got in the car this morning," Marcus said, his eyes scanning the twelve men in their moisture-wicking shirts and straw hats. "She said that when a poor man finds gold in his garden, the first thing he ought to do is bury it deeper than his shovel can reach. Because if the men with the pens find out it's there, they won't just take the gold. They’ll dig up the garden, tear down the fence, and charge him rent for the hole."
Marcus took three steps backward, off the wooden slat, until his heels touched the raw, unworked limestone of the quarry bed.
He looked down at his right arm.
The swelling in his wrist had crossed the joint, turning the forearm into a thick, purple sausage of inflamed muscle and trapped fluid. The skin over the third knuckle had split again; a thin, bright thread of fresh blood was already trickling down the back of his hand, dripping off the tip of his middle finger onto the white stone.
"You want the dead drop?" Marcus asked, his gaze settling finally on Dave Klemko’s pale, sweat-streaked face. "Bring your bat, Mr. Klemko. Bring your contract. Step into the box."
Klemko did not move. He looked at the boy’s bleeding knuckle, at the split-seam ball resting on the yellowed report, and then down at his own clean white running shoes, which were already caked in the blinding white powder of the pit.
"I’m an evaluator, kid," Klemko stammered, his voice losing its predatory edge, sounding hollow and small. "I don't hit."
"Then you don't buy," Marcus said.
The boy turned his back on the scouts. He did not ask for a ride. He did not look at the black Suburbans with their air-conditioned leather seats and their satellite navigation systems. He began to walk toward the steep, rocky access ramp that led out of the pit, his taped sneakers crunching through the dolomite gravel with a slow, unhurried, rhythmic certainty.
Arthur Vance picked up the green canvas seabag from the dust.
He looked at Lou Snyder, who had just stepped out of a rental sedan at the top of the ramp, and then at Hank Boudreau, who was quietly folding his fifty-thousand-dollar cashier’s check back into his linen shirt.
"Where are you going, Arthur?" Boudreau asked quietly.
Arthur Vance looked up at the rim of the quarry, where the three turkey vultures were still circling in the pale, white furnace of the sky.
"Home, Hank," Vance said. "I’m going home to shovel some dirt."