The Big Field

by Mike Lupica

  Hutch said, “It looks bigger from the inside, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” Cody said, “it does.”

  “Same dimensions as Santaluces, though,” Hutch said. “Four hundred to dead center, 325 down the lines.”

  “I didn’t notice,” Cody said. “But you would.”

  Alex fouled one off, so Cody stayed where he was. “Maybe,” he said to Hutch, “we should stretch this thing out to three games just so’s we can get three games here.”

  “How about we just focus on winning Game One?” Hutch said.

  “Okay, here we go with your ‘one game at a time’ crud,” Cody said. “Blah blah blah.”

  Hutch grinned at his friend. “Funny,” he said, “that’s all I ever hear when you’re talking. Blah blah blah.”

  Mr. Cullen was throwing BP, the way he normally did. Only tonight it didn’t seem normal at all. Hutch could see that their coach was as happy and excited as any of them to be standing in the middle of this field tonight. Hutch watched him, listened to his constant chatter, saw the smile on his face, and wondered how many times in his life Mr. C had pictured himself under the lights on a big-league field, trying to throw fastballs past the world.

  When it was finally time for Hutch to get his cuts, though, even Mr. C’s best fastball wasn’t fast enough. Hutch was on top of every pitch, hitting line drives to all parts of the field.

  Hutch could see Mr. Cullen, who had been bringing it with everything he had, tiring. Doesn’t matter, Hutch thought. I’d hit him even if he was throwing 100. That’s how well he was seeing the ball. This is what it must feel like to be Darryl every day.

  “No bunt,” Mr. Cullen yelled in from the mound.

  Hutch had taken the last of his cuts when Mr. Cullen yelled to him, “One more.”

  “How come?” Hutch said.

  “Because I know I can get you out,” Mr. C said, grinning.

  Hutch shook his head. “Not today,” he said. He didn’t say it in a cocky way, or a trash-talky way, because he never looked to show anybody up. Especially his own coach.

  But he was the last batter of the day and he could tell this was all for fun.

  “Bring it then,” Hutch said.

  Mr. C said, “I’m warning you, I’m gonna dial it up now.”

  “Better dial 911 instead,” Hutch said.

  He cocked his bat. Mr. C threw him one last fastball. Hutch was sitting on this one the way he’d been sitting on the rest of them. As soon as he connected he heard that amazing sound he usually heard only from Darryl’s bat, the one that was just different from everybody else’s on their team.

  Or in their league.

  At first, Hutch thought this one might actually have the legs to get out of Roger Dean, especially when he saw Alex Reyes give up on it out in right center. But the ball finally landed on the warning track and one-hopped the wall over a Dunkin’ Donuts sign.

  And in that moment, Hutch was sure of something: He was going to hit a ball like this over the weekend, with a game on the line, or maybe even the whole series.

  He didn’t know why he was so sure.

  But he was.

  21

  HIS DAD WASN’T THERE WHEN HE GOT HOME. HIS MOM EXPLAINED that a flight had been delayed coming into the West Palm Beach airport and his dad would have to sit and wait for the guy, some professional golfer, until he arrived.

  But it didn’t change the menu. In honor of the finals starting the next night, Connie Hutchinson said, she was making Hutch one of his favorite Puerto Rican dinners: Asopao, a thick gumbo that he loved, made with chicken, and alcapurrias, fritters, on the side.

  She sat with him while he devoured all of it, asking him about Roger Dean, how practice had gone, wanting to know how excited everybody was.

  A mom line of questioning if there ever was one.

  During the school year she wanted to know everything that had happened to him during the day, every day. Hutch sometimes thought that she had just finally given up on getting his dad to talk about anything, and had decided to turn her full attention to Hutch and see if she could get him to open up.

  But she never mailed it in, or acted as if she were going through the motions. She was genuinely interested in Hutch’s answers, even when he thought he’d had a day that was duller than homework.

  Tonight was different, though, and they both knew it. Hutch was pumped about having been on the field at Roger Dean and gave her a play-by-play of pretty much the whole practice.

  “So we’re ready then, is that what I’m hearing?” his mom said, smiling.

  We.

  Hearing that made Hutch smile. “Yeah, Mom, we’re ready.”

  “Things okay with you and Darryl?”

  One more time when she acted as if she’d heard a comment Hutch hadn’t made, at least out loud.

  “As good as they’re going to be,” he said.

  “The old status quo,” she said.

  “If that means they are what they are, yeah, the old status quo,” Hutch said. “Like with me and Dad.”

  “Honey,” she said, “you and your dad are just going through a rough patch, is all.”

  Hutch thought: Yeah, a rough patch that started around fifth grade.

  “Things will get better between the two of you,” Connie Hutchinson said.

  Hutch started to say something back, but just got up and took his plate over to the sink instead.

  “What?” his mom said.

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “Might as well have.”

  Hutch turned around. “Mom,” he said, “you know how much I love you. But the only person who believes things are going to get better between Dad and me is you.”

  “Not true.”

  “Totally true, Mom, and you know it. He wants to act like we’re alike, at least when it comes to baseball. But we’re not. We’re not anything alike, starting with how I’m not nearly as good as he was.” He took a deep breath. “You want to know what else is totally true? We don’t even have baseball in common, at least not anymore.”

  She didn’t even try to bluff her way through with a smile. She just gave Hutch the same sad look she’d give his dad sometimes when she didn’t think anybody was watching.

  “Your father might not be able to express it, but he loves you very much and is very proud of you,” she said. “And he’ll be rooting for you as hard as I will this weekend.”

  “Right.”

  “He will, honey.”

  “He doesn’t even want to be around me most of the time, even when he’s here.”

  “Now you’re being silly.”

  “No, I’m not. He’d probably be just as happy this weekend doing what he does best now: carrying somebody’s bags.”

  “You take that back, young man!” Connie Hutchinson said.

  Her voice seemed to explode out of nowhere in their tiny kitchen, the way a radio would when you turned it on and the volume was way too high.

  Hutch didn’t even know if she realized she had gotten up from the table. But she had, her hands pressed down hard on the kitchen table, her face red.

  “Mom—”

  “Take it back.”

  Hutch knew he had no choice. He said in a small voice,

  “I take it back.”

  “Take it back like you mean it,” she said. “Not because I’m angry at you, or because you want to get out of here. Take it back because it was a terrible thing to say and you ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

  Hutch said, “I’m sorry if it came out wrong. But that’s what Dad does, isn’t it? He carries guys’ golf bags or he carries somebody’s bags when he takes them to the airport, or picks them up, or whatever.”

  He was trying to calm things down, but he could see just by looking at his mom’s eyes that she was still breathing hard, still on fire about this.

  “You’re acting as if this is the worst thing I ever said about anybody,” Hutch said.

  “Maybe it was.”

  �
��I don’t get it.”

  “I can see that,” she said. “So maybe it’s time somebody explained to you how much strength it takes to be your dad. To carry everything around that he does.”

  They sat in Hutch’s room.

  No baseball on the radio now, the way there was almost always baseball in this room at night. Just the sound of the fan and some night noises from outside and music coming from down the street somewhere.

  Hutch’s mom sat on the swivel chair at his desk, surrounded by all the shortstops on his walls.

  “Mom,” he said, “I didn’t mean for this to turn into such a big deal.”

  “Well, it did, whether you meant for that to happen or not. And it is a big deal, whether you understand that or not.”

  “I wasn’t trying to make fun of Dad, really I wasn’t.”

  “No,” she said, “you were doing something worse, and it wasn’t just tonight. I’ve sensed it for a long time. The only difference tonight was that you finally put words to how you feel about your father.”

  “Feel what?”

  He was sitting cross-legged on the middle of his bed, so he could feel the breeze from the fan.

  “Ashamed,” she said.

  “No, I don’t!”

  “I’m not saying it’s the only thing you feel about your father. I know you love him and it’s more clear than ever to me how much you want his approval, and his support, when it comes to your baseball. But I know you are ashamed that he has to caddy for a living. And you’re wrong to feel that way, as wrong as you’ve ever been about anything.”

  It was funny, Hutch thought, how quiet it seemed in here without baseball.

  “He took me to Emerald Dunes,” Hutch said.

  He could tell it surprised her.

  “When?” she said.

  “The other night, after Darryl and I went at it.”

  “Nobody mentioned that to me.”

  “I thought it was just between Dad and me,” Hutch said.

  “We hardly ever share anything. I figured it was okay to share a secret. If you could even call it that.”

  His mom turned around in the chair and looked out the window. “He took you there,” she said, almost as if she were talking to herself now.

  “Yeah,” Hutch said, “and he told me that’s where you end up if you care too much about baseball.”

  She turned back to Hutch. “He doesn’t want you to end up there,” she said.

  “But it’s okay for him?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s at peace there, that’s why,” she said, adding, “even though I’m not sure he understands that himself.”

  “Neither do I,” Hutch said.

  “What he’s doing is good, honest work,” she said. “He’s with good players most of the time, and when he helps them play better, it’s a way for him to compete. He takes pride in it. And he’s outdoors, not stuck behind some desk in an office, which always drove him crazy.”

  “When you put it like that—”

  “Let me finish,” she said, holding up her hand. “He makes good money during the season, when the tourists are here, and does all right in the summers. When he puts that money with what he makes at the driving service, we do all right here. With a little help down the road, we’ll have enough money to send you to college, whether you get the baseball scholarship your father thinks you’re going to get or not.”

  “He never told me he thinks I’m good enough for a baseball scholarship.”

  “Because he doesn’t want to put pressure on you,” his mom said. “He wants you to keep playing for the love of it, not because it’s a means to an end. He lost that love along the way, back when he became convinced that the only thing that mattered was making the big leagues.”

  This wasn’t the night, Hutch knew, to say anything to her about the Hun School of Princeton, New Jersey.

  Instead he sat there on his bed and wondered how come he and his dad seemed to communicate better when his dad wasn’t even in the room.

  Or in the house.

  His mom stood up now.

  “Cut him some slack,” she said. “Your father’s a proud man. If he thought working at that golf club was beneath him, he wouldn’t do it. And he certainly wouldn’t go back there at night the way he does when he wants to make peace with the way his life turned out.”

  His mother kissed Hutch on top of his head and left him sitting on the bed. When the door was shut, he immediately put on the Marlins game, lay there in the dark listening to it.

  A half hour later, he heard his dad’s car in the driveway.

  Much later, about the seventh inning, Hutch went downstairs to get some ice water and saw that the television in the living room was still on, tuned to the Marlins station, and that his father’s beer can was still on the table next to the couch.

  But his dad wasn’t there.

  Hutch went outside, saw that his car wasn’t there, either.

  At least tonight, Hutch thought, I know where he went.

  He was wrong.

  22

  GAME DAY.

  At last.

  Normally Hutch would have passed the time with Cody, trying to make the day go by faster, speeding everything up the way you did when you skipped through the boring parts of a movie on DVD. But today they could only hang together until just after lunch because this turned out to be the day Mrs. Hester had scheduled Cody to have his teeth cleaned.

  “A trip to the dentist’s right before the finals,” Cody said as they were finishing their lunch at his house. “Dude, that is just plain dirty.”

  Dirty was one of Cody’s favorite catchall words. If a pitcher threw a nasty pitch to get somebody out, the pitcher was dirty. Or the pitch was. And it was good or bad depending on whether the pitcher was yours or not. So basically there was good dirty and bad dirty.

  In this case, having to go see the dentist on this particular afternoon was bad dirty all the way.

  “I have a feeling you’ll survive,” Hutch said.

  “What if he finds a cavity?” Cody said. “What if I need a filling? There’s a lot that could go wrong and then before you know it, he’s reaching for the needle and the novocaine.”

  Hutch reached over, patting him on the back. “Look at it this way,” he said. “I’m almost positive novocaine isn’t on baseball’s list of banned substances.”

  A half hour later, Cody left to go to the dentist. He told Hutch he could borrow his dad’s key to the batting cage at Fallon Field if he wanted, but Hutch said no. He hadn’t done that on the day of a game since the Cardinals’ season had started and was superstitious enough, on game day especially, not to start doing that now; if he wanted extra hitting and the series did go three games, maybe he’d go over to Fallon on Sunday, an off day.

  It was still only one in the afternoon. The game didn’t start at Roger Dean until seven and the bus from Santaluces didn’t leave until four-thirty. Hutch went to his room and turned on the fan and lay down on his bed and tried to think the happy thoughts his mom was always telling him to think, trying to visualize all the good things he wanted to happen against the Orlando Astros tonight. Connie Hutchinson was big on visualizing and even bigger on dreams, and chasing your dreams and achieving your dreams. For as long as Hutch could remember, she had been teaching him to visualize the way he wanted things to work out in his life.

  Hutch lay there, alone in the house in the afternoon, closed his eyes, pictured line drives and diving plays in the field and runs crossing the plate for the Cardinals.

  What he couldn’t do was make the afternoon get out of the way for tonight. Every time he’d look over at the clock on his desk, it was as if the hands had barely moved.

  The way the clock in your classroom wouldn’t move when you wanted a class to end.

  His mom was at work. His dad, he knew, was at Emerald Dunes. There was no Marlins game for him to listen to on the radio or even watch on TV if he wanted. He thought
about watching a movie on his computer, maybe the secondhand DVD of The Natural that he’d bought for himself at Blockbuster and nearly worn out by now. But he knew he wouldn’t be able to concentrate, not even on the good parts. Not today.

  So he came up with a better idea of something to watch, a dream that he didn’t need to visualize because it would be right there on his own television:

  His game-winning home run against the Yankees.

  Yeah, Hutch thought.

  I’ll visualize the heck out of that.

  It was when he came downstairs to get the cassette of the Channel 12 sports report that he saw the scrapbooks on the coffee table.

  The ones of his dad’s baseball career that his mom had lovingly put together.

  Hutch couldn’t imagine that his dad had taken them out to look at. So his mom must have had them out after everybody had gone to bed the night before.

  The game stories out of the newspaper and the photographs had come from Grammy Hutchinson. Grammy hadn’t been much at organization but she didn’t like to throw anything out, either, and when they were going through her possessions after she’d died a couple of years ago, Hutch’s mom had come across the big old box that had his dad’s baseball career crammed into it.

  Slowly, without telling anybody, Hutch’s mom had gone to work on that box, finding stories from the Post that went all the way back to when his dad had played Little League. Finally she bought two beautiful leather albums, even though his dad had said they were way too expensive for a bunch of baseball games everybody had forgotten about.

  “You haven’t forgotten those games,” she’d said to Hutch’s dad. “And now neither will we.”

  His dad, seeing how important this was to her, instantly seeing how much work had gone into this gift, tried to act pleased then, sitting on the couch and going through the pages one by one, Hutch’s mom on one side of him and Hutch on the other. But even that day, his dad sitting there with what had to have been the best years of his life right there in his lap, Hutch could see he was just going through the motions, acting the way he thought Connie Hutchinson wanted him to act.