CHAPTER 6: THE SILENT INFIELD
The scouts behind the table had begun to stand up.
Lou Snyder, a heavy-set scout for the Pittsburgh Pirates who had known Arthur Vance since their days scouting instructional ball in Arizona, walked slowly toward the backstop gate. His eyes darted between the gaunt, ragged boy and the veteran scout whose khaki shirt was now dark with sweat across the shoulder blades.
"Arthur?" Snyder called through the mesh, his brow furrowed in genuine concern. "Everything all right out there? Who is this kid? What team is he rostered with?"
Vance didn't answer. He couldn't. His tongue felt large and dry in his mouth, coated with the alkaline dust of the field.
Snyder frowned, glancing down at his stopwatch, then at Marcus. "Look, son, if you’re not on the official showcase roster, you can't be on the rubber. It's an insurance liability. You gotta clear the field so we can get the outfielders timed on their sixty-yard dashes."
Marcus did not move. He ignored Snyder completely, keeping his gaze locked on Vance.
"He wants to see it again," Marcus said quietly to Arthur. "All of them do. They have their little radar guns in their hands, but they didn't get a reading on the first one, did they? The gun looked for the spin and found nothing. It flashed zeros."
Vance’s heart thumped against his ribs with a dull, heavy ache. The boy was right. A Stalker radar gun required Doppler shift—it read the frequency change of waves reflected off the rotating seams of a moving sphere. If a ball possessed no rotational spin, if it tumbled through the air like a dead leaf falling through a chimney, the algorithm sputtered. It registered a flutter, a glitch, an error code.
Just like it had in 1996.
"Arthur," Snyder said again, his hand resting on the chain-link latch. "You know this kid?"
Vance slowly turned his head toward his colleague. The composure that had made him a legend in the scouting community—the cool, detached professional who never overpaid and never got emotional about high school phenoms—had cracked down the middle.
"He's not rostered, Lou," Vance whispered.
"Then get him off the damn mound!" Snyder said, exasperated. "The sun's going down behind the trees. We got thirty kids waiting to run their sprints."
"Give him three pitches," Vance said.
The words came out before he could stop them. They sounded alien in his own ears, torn from some long-buried, rotting chamber of his conscience that he had spent three decades trying to pave over with scouting reports and pension contributions.
Snyder blinked, stunned. "Three pitches? To who? Trent’s packing his bag in the dugout. He’s not going back in the box against a ball boy."
"I will," a voice said from behind the screen.
It was not Trent.
It was Calvin Ross.
Ross was nineteen, a sophomore transfer from Louisville who had already been clocked at ninety-four off the bat during morning warmups. He was six-foot-three, built like a thoroughbred, with broad, easy shoulders and the relaxed, predatory walk of a hitter who had spent his entire life being told he was special. He had been sitting on an equipment trunk by the batting cage, quietly eating an apple while the commotion unfolded.
Ross tossed the apple core into a blue plastic drum and reached for his helmet.
"I’ll hit," Ross said, strapping on a pair of red-and-gold batting gloves. His eyes were bright, curious, and hungry. He had seen the pitch that had made Trent look like a drunken novice, and unlike the older, defensive slugger, Ross had no fear of looking foolish. He had the bulletproof vanity of youth. "I want to see what made Derek spin around like a top."
"Calvin, sit down," Snyder warned. "You’ve got a physical with the Braves medical staff on Tuesday. Don't go taking live cuts against some kid who doesn't have an insurance waiver."
"Three pitches, Mr. Snyder," Ross smiled, pulling a black maple bat from his bag. "If he hits me, I’ll tell the Braves I slipped on the dugout steps. Let him throw."
Ross didn't wait for permission. He walked past the table, unlatched the gate with his hip, and trotted out to home plate with the loose, insolent grace of a thoroughbred walking into the paddock. He kicked the dirt off the plate with his left cleat, stepped into the batter’s box, and raised his black bat high above his shoulder, wagging the barrel in a lazy, rhythmic figure-eight.
"All right, little man," Ross called out, flashing a bright, confident grin toward the mound. "Show me what you got. Let's see if that drop was real or if Derek just forgot how to see the ball."
Marcus did not look at Calvin Ross's smile. He did not look at the black maple bat, which cost more than his mother made in three days at the box factory.
He turned slowly on his heel, walked back to the crest of the mound, and planted his taped sneakers into the worn depression behind the rubber.
He reached into his back pocket. There was only one ball left.
It was the ball Elijah had handed him on the night the frost had settled on the windowpane of the shack—the ball that had lived in the bottom of the canvas sack for three years, soaked in neat's-foot oil, its leather darkened to the color of dried blood, its seams stitched with thick, waxen thread that had been pulled through the hide by an old man's trembling hands.
Marcus held the ball against his chest.
Arthur Vance did not return to the scouts' table. He remained standing ten feet behind the mound, in the short outfield grass, his hands hanging limp at his sides, his khaki shirt fluttering in the rising evening wind.
The sun had finally begun its descent, slipping behind the black crest of the oak trees beyond left field. Long, jagged shadows stretched across the infield dirt like the bars of a cell, cutting across the rubber, across the plate, across the three men bound together by a thirty-year-old crime.
"Throw it, Marcus," Vance whispered into the wind, unsure whether he was pleading for salvation or begging for the axe to fall. "Throw it."
Marcus did not nod. He raised his hands, lifted his left knee until it touched his ribcage, and let the shadow of the rubber swallow him whole.