by Mike Lupica
It was then that Mr. Cullen had turned to Hutch and said, “What were you possibly thinking?”
And Hutch Hutchinson, who had just shown he didn’t have the best judgment in the world, but who still prided himself on telling the truth, told the truth now.
“I wasn’t thinking.”
Mr. Cullen shook his head, exasperated, took off his Cardinals cap the way he would sometimes after they got a bad call, and ran his hand through what hair he had left.
It was then that his coach hit Hutch a lot harder than Hutch had hit Darryl.
“You’re out of the game tomorrow night,” he said. “I love most everything about you, Hutch. Love your game, love your passion for the game, love your heart. But I wouldn’t let another player on this team get away with what you just did, and I’m not gonna let you get away with it, even if it costs you—and us—our season. Now is that understood?”
“Yes, sir,” Hutch said.
They had all stood there for what felt like an hour to Hutch, Mr. Cullen done now, nobody on the team saying anything, until Hutch’s dad had said, “Let’s go.”
Now they were in the car, this quiet car that was much nicer than their own Camry, Carl Hutchinson gripping the steering wheel with those big baseball hands of his.
“Why?” he said to Hutch.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You can decide something like that, whether you want to talk about it, when you’re the dad someday. But I’m the dad here. So you’re sure-as-Sunday gonna talk about it now.”
Hutch slouched down even lower in the passenger seat than he already was. Where did he even start a conversation like the one his dad wanted to have now?
When he was seven?
Hutch thought of himself as a pretty smart guy. Not the smartest kid in his class. But smart enough. Just not right now. How did he explain to his dad, how did he make him understand that he’d been waiting for his dad to come out and play with him for the past five years…that when he finally came out of the house to play ball, even for a few minutes, he’d done it with Darryl?
“How come you want to start talking to me now?” Hutch said.
“That’s a question, not an answer.”
“It’ll have to do.”
“Don’t use that snippy tone of voice on me,” his dad said.
“I didn’t do anything tonight.”
“Who are you, Darryl?”
“I’m your father,” Carl Hutchinson said, “the one who’s trying to understand why you’d do something to hurt your team that way.”
“I wasn’t trying to hurt my team,” Hutch said. “I was just tired of him mouthing off.”
“Mouthing off about what?” his dad said. “I was out there and I didn’t hear anything.”
“Dad, you only hear what you want to hear most of the time.”
“We’re back to me again?”
“Anyway, what matters is that I heard him,” Hutch said.
“And what did you hear that was so terrible that you had to go after him like one of those soccer nuts in the World Cup?”
“Why don’t you ask him the next time you’re giving him a private baseball lesson?”
The words just came out of Hutch, nothing he could do to stop them. It would have been like trying to stop a wave off Boynton Beach.
They were at a stoplight.
Carl Hutchinson turned to his son.
“Is that what this is about?”
Hutch turned and looked at him.
Another staredown, with his dad this time, not feeling so different from the one he’d had with Darryl.
“Yeah,” he said to his dad. “I guess it is.”
After that Hutch just let it rip.
About how it should have been him on that field, not Darryl, how Darryl could never have shown him up as much as his own dad had today, acting like he cared more about Darryl than he did about his own son.
He was shouting and his dad wasn’t stopping him.
“I can’t even remember the last time you were out on a field with me, acted like you wanted to be out on a field with me, if I tried!” Hutch said.
He turned away, feeling like his heart was going as fast as the car, noticing for the first time that they were on the Florida Turnpike for some reason. Wondering where in the world they were headed.
His dad gave him a quick sideways glance. “Can I say something about your friend Darryl before you start in on him again?”
“He’s not my friend!” Hutch said. “Why can’t you get that? He never wanted to be my friend. He didn’t want me to be captain, he doesn’t act like he even wants to be on the same team with me. The other day, he went out of his way to get me run over on a stupid routine force play.”
“He did what?”
“Never mind.”
They were in the left lane, going at a pretty good clip. But then his dad always said that the Florida Turnpike was like the Daytona 500, just with amateurs.
Now his dad said, “You’re dead wrong about what happened tonight. It didn’t mean anything. Least not to me.”
“Well it did to me,” Hutch said. “And don’t tell me it didn’t mean anything to you. I could see you were having big fun out there. So could Cody.”
“I got no reason to lie to you, son,” Carl Hutchinson said. “All I was doing was killing time.” His voice was the total opposite of Hutch’s, barely louder than the sound of the engine from the Sun Coast company car. “That’s all baseball ever is to me now. A way to kill time.”
He slowed the car down now, got back in the right lane, put on his right blinker, and took the Okeechobee exit off the Turnpike.
“Great, Dad,” Hutch said. “So you’re saying you don’t even care about my baseball now. Sorry you have to kill so much time coming to watch my games.” Hutch paused and then said,
“Why do you ever bother showing up for my games, anyway?”
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
Hutch clenched his fists, pounded them on his knees.
“Then what are you saying?”
“I’m saying that when it comes to baseball, I don’t let myself care too much, not even about you,” Carl Hutchinson said. “Especially about you.”
“Well, I want you to care!” Hutch was yelling again. “I care, don’t you get that?”
“Looked tonight like you cared a little too much,” his dad said.
He paid the toll now, went through the booth, took a right on Okeechobee Boulevard.
“You cared so much,” Carl Hutchinson continued, “that you acted like you’d lost your stinkin’ mind and cost yourself a chance to play in a championship game. And guess what, son? You don’t know how many games like that you’re gonna get in your life, trust me on that.”
Hutch was still stuck about his dad not caring, couldn’t make himself move off that.
He said to his dad, “You sure looked like you cared about baseball with Darryl when you were showing him that old board drill of yours.”
“That’s the thing,” his dad said, “what I’m trying to explain to you, even if I’m not doing a very good job of it.”
“What thing?”
They were taking another right, into what looked like some kind of big complex for condominiums. Hutch had barely noticed how fast it had gotten dark since they’d left Santaluces.
“It costs me nothing, working with a guy like Darryl,” his dad said in that quiet voice of his, the one that made Hutch think sometimes he went through life talking like people did in the library. “Because he doesn’t care.”
“How can you be as good as he is, as great as he is, and not care?” Hutch said.
“Oh, he cares, all right,” Carl Hutchinson said. “Just not like you. He loves baseball for what it’s gonna do for him someday, because he’s sure it’s gonna make him rich and famous and get his momma out of Lantana and all like that.” He nodded and said, “All the things I was gonna do when I was his age. He just doesn’t love basebal
l for baseball. The way you love it.”
Hutch thought about the Hun School of Princeton, New Jersey, pictured the cover of that brochure he kept hidden in his room.
But he wasn’t going to tell his dad about it, not tonight, not until he absolutely had to.
He just felt tired all of a sudden. “It still should have been me out there with you. If you wanted to get back on the field, why couldn’t it be with me?”
It was then that he noticed the sign for the Emerald Dunes Golf Club.
Hutch looked at that, then looked at his dad, saw that his dad was the one who really looked tired now, looked as tired and beaten as he ever had.
“You want to know where you end up if you care too much about baseball?” Carl Hutchinson said. “Here.”
16
HUTCH HAD NEVER BEEN HERE. AND DIDN’T WANT TO BE HERE now. He just wanted to go home, go to his room, get grounded or whatever his dad was going to put on top of the suspension Mr. Cullen had given him, get a little bit closer to this day being over.
But he could see that wasn’t happening anytime soon.
“Dad,” Hutch said, “I don’t want to do this tonight.”
“I do,” he said. “Now get out of the car.”
There were still some outside lights on at Emerald Dunes, even though his dad said everybody who worked here had gone home by now. His dad showed him where the caddies changed, showed him the construction they were still doing on the new clubhouse, took him around back and showed him where the new dining room was going to be, overlooking the 18th green.
It looked like a nice place to Hutch, but he knew he wasn’t here so his dad could show off Emerald Dunes to him. Maybe in this way, Hutch and his dad weren’t so different. Hutch had never asked his dad any questions about this place, had shown about as much of an interest in his dad’s day job as his dad showed in Hutch’s baseball.
But this wasn’t the night to talk about that, to try and explain to his dad that he didn’t want to know about Emerald Dunes or what his dad did here because he didn’t want to think of him in those white overalls.
“’Bout time you saw your dad’s real office,” he said.
“Sometimes when I want to clear my head at night, I get into the car and drive over here and walk around like this by myself.”
So that’s where he goes, Hutch thought.
But how could you find peace at night at the same place where you had to carry around guys’ golf bags during the day?
There was, Hutch decided, even more he didn’t know about his dad than he’d ever imagined.
Then they were walking past the practice putting green and around to their right, where Hutch’s dad said the first tee was, walking on the cart path past that tee, walking in the direction of Okeechobee Boulevard.
Another silence between them.
Neither one of them saying anything about Darryl or baseball or fathers or sons.
It was weird, Hutch thought. All the times when he’d wanted his dad to talk with him, about anything, and now he was happy to find himself in another one of their silences.
Until his dad finally said:
“It wasn’t my shoulder.”
Hutch couldn’t see his face.
“What?”
“Your whole life, I let you think that I really started washing out of the minor leagues because I hurt my throwing shoulder,” he said. “That I couldn’t make the throw from the hole after that, that it screwed up my swing. But that was just a lie I came up with.”
Hutch said, “I don’t understand.”
His dad said, “It was just a way of me not admitting to people what I’d already admitted to myself before I got hurt.”
Hutch nearly tripped over something in the dark.
“Drain pipe,” his dad said. “You know who tore up his knee bad because of a drain pipe?”
“Mickey Mantle,” Hutch said. “He was playing right because Joe DiMaggio was still in center, even though he was much older than Mantle. DiMaggio called him off on a ball and Mantle pulled up, but he got his spikes caught on an outfield drain. Messed up his knee bad.”
“Why am I not surprised you know that?”
They kept walking toward Okeechobee, the car lights up ahead of them, his dad pointing toward a lit-up office building in the distance that he said belonged to Homeland Security.
“I wasn’t good enough,” his dad said. “Oh, I was the best to ever come out of East Boynton Little League and Boynton Beach High, the way a lot of other guys in the minors are the best guy from someplace. And I sure did believe what people told me about where I was going in baseball. You always do that when people promise you your dream is gonna come true. And I was like you. I wanted it more than anything. Wanted it because I loved the game like it was my whole life.”
In Hutch’s whole life, he had never heard his dad say that the two of them were alike.
Hutch wondered if they were going to walk all 18 holes of the golf course, like his dad planned to do a whole loop, which is what he called carrying somebody’s bag the whole 18.
“This is my long-winded way of saying I don’t want to happen to you what happened to me,” Carl Hutchinson said.
“It won’t,” Hutch said.
“It broke me when I found out I wasn’t good enough, that I wasn’t really as good as everybody said I was. Nobody can prepare you for that, having your dreams killed,” his dad said. ”Now I see you making the same mistake I made. Wanting it too much.”
Hutch stopped now.
“How could you possibly know that?” he said.
“Know what?”
“How could you possibly know how much I want anything?”
“You’re my son. I can see myself in you.”
“Then how come you never told me that before tonight?” Hutch felt himself getting mad all over again, and didn’t care, not even a little bit. His father had brought him here and wanted to talk and they were going to talk. “The problem is, you never took the time to know me, Dad. You’ve never asked me about my dreams one single time.”
“You want to be a ballplayer,” his dad said. “You’ve always wanted to be a ballplayer, and I could see from the start there was nothing I could do to stop you.”
“So that’s your excuse for ignoring me?” Hutch said. “That was your way of trying to help me? Do you have any idea how weak that is?”
“Don’t talk to me that way,” his dad said, getting hot himself now.
“Sorry if I don’t know how to talk to you, Dad, but let’s face it, it’s not like I’ve had a lot of practice.”
It was on now between them, so on, no stopping it. This probably wasn’t the heart-to-heart, the father-son talk, his dad had planned. But this was the one they were having now, standing out here on the golf course in the night.
Hutch said, “Are you trying to tell me you hardly ever coached me because you didn’t want me to care too much? How about giving me a vote on that? How about asking me what I thought? All the times I wanted to play ball with you so much and I couldn’t, and it was like somebody punched me right in the gut…”
He stopped because he was afraid if he didn’t, he might start crying.
“Don’t,” his dad said.
“Don’t what?” Hutch said. “Tell you the truth? You know what I think the truth really is, Dad? That you don’t want me to care so much about baseball because you don’t think I’m good enough. Not as good as you were when you were my age.”
On the empty golf course, wherever they were on the No. 1 hole, Hutch’s words came out so loud, it was like they were booming out of a PA system at the ballpark.
“That’s not what I mean.”
“You never wanted to help me before,” Hutch said. “So don’t start helping me now.”
Then before his dad could say anything back, Hutch said: “It doesn’t matter, anyway, because I’m leaving.”
“What does that mean?”
“You know what my real dream is, Dad?” Hutch s
aid. “To get a baseball scholarship up north someplace and get out of here the first chance I get.”
“You never said anything about that,” his dad said.
“One more thing you didn’t ask me about,” Hutch said.
He left his dad standing there, walked away from Okeechobee, pretty sure he was going the right way, toward the parking lot, saying over his shoulder, “Please take me home now.”
Nothing more to say.
For either one of them.
17
HE TOLD HIS MOM ABOUT THE FIGHT WITH DARRYL AS SOON AS HE got home, just because he knew he was going to have to tell her sooner or later.
Hutch hoped his dad wouldn’t stay in the room, so he could tell it his own way. But his dad sat right next to her on the couch in the living room, showing about as much expression as he did when he was on that couch watching baseball by himself.
When Hutch was done, Connie Hutchinson looked at her husband and said, “It happened that way?”
“Pretty much. I didn’t hear what Darryl said to him right before. Our boy acted like an idiot after that, but he doesn’t lie.”
“I see,” was all she said.
“Can I go?” Hutch said.
What had officially become the longest night of his life wasn’t over yet.
“Not quite yet,” she said. She turned to her husband and said, “So what do we do about this, other than telling him nothing like it had better happen again?”
“Nothing,” his dad said. “Nothing could be a worse punishment than his missing that game tomorrow night. I don’t know a lot. But I know that.”
“No grounding then?”
“If his team loses and it’s even partly because he’s not there, it’ll be the worst grounding he’s ever gotten. Because he’ll have grounded himself from baseball for the rest of his summer.”
He wanted to defend himself, wanted to tell both his parents that he never lost his temper like this, never got into this kind of trouble. He’d never even gotten grounded before.
But all he said was, “We’re not going to lose.”
Like he was trying to convince himself of that more than his mom and dad.
“It would be a shame if you did,” his mom said. “But it would teach you a valuable lesson, Keith.”
