‘Are you okay?’
Pemulis says ‘Blarg.’ He wipes at his forehead in a gesture of completion and submits to being hauled to his feet and stands there on his own with his hands on his hips, slightly bent.
Schacht straightens and pulls some wrinkles out of the bandage around the brace on his knee. ‘Take maybe another second. Wayne’s already way up.’
Pemulis sniffs unpleasantly. ‘How come this happens to me every time? This is not like me.’
‘Happens to some people is all.’
‘This hunched spurting pale guy is not any me I ever recognize.’
Schacht gathers gear. ‘Some people their nerves are in their stomachs. Cisne, Yard-Guard, Lord, you: stomach men.’
‘Teddy brother man I’m never once hung-over for a competitive thing. I take elaborate precautions. Not so much as a whippet. I’m always in bed the night before by 2300 all pink-cheeked and clean.’
As they pass the plastic window behind Court 2 Schacht sees Hal Incan-denza try to pass his serve-and-volley guy with a baroque sideways slice down the backhand side and miss just wide. Hal’s card’s already flipped to (4). Schacht gives a little toodleoo-wave that Hal can’t see to acknowledge. Pemulis is in front of him as they go down the cold passage.
‘Hal’s way up too. Another victory for the forces of peace.’
‘Jesus I feel awful,’ Pemulis says.
‘Things could be worse.’
‘Expand on that, will you?’
‘This wasn’t like that Atlanta stomach-incident. We were enclosed here. No one saw. You saw that glass; to Schtitt and deLint it’s all a silent movie down here. Nobody heard thing one. Our guys’ll think we were back here butting heads to get enraged or something. Or we can tell them I got a cramp. That was a freebie, in terms of stomach-incidents.’
Pemulis is a whole different person before competitive play.
T’m fucking inept.’
Schacht laughs. ‘You’re one of the eptest people I know. Get off your own back.’
‘Never remember getting sick as a kid. Now it’s like I make myself sick just from worrying about getting sick.’
‘Well then there you go. Just don’t think anything thoracic. Pretend you don’t have a stomach.’
‘I have no stomach,’ Pemulis says. His head stays still when he talks, at least, negotiating the passage. He carries four sticks, a rough white P.W.T.A. locker-room towel, an empty ball-can full of high-chlorine Long Island water, nervously zipping and unzipping the top stick’s cover. Schacht only ever carries three sticks. His don’t have covers on them. Except for Pemulis and Rader and Unwin and a couple others who favor gut strings and really need protection, nobody at Enfield uses racquet-covers; it’s like an antifashion statement. People with covers make a point of telling you they’re valid and for gut. A similar point of careful nonpride is never having their shirts tucked in. Ortho Stice used to drill in cut-off black jeans until Schtitt had Tony Nwangi go over and scream at him about it. Each academy has its own style or antistyle. The P.W.T.A. people, more or less a de facto subsidiary of Wilson, have unnecessary light-blue Wilson covers on all their courtside synthetic-strung sticks and big red Ws stencilled onto their Wilson synth-gut strings. You have to let your company of choice spraypaint their logo on your strings if you want to be on their Free List for sticks, is the universal junior deal. Schacht’s orange Gamma-9 synthetic strings have AMF-Head Inc.’s weird Taoist paraboloid logo sprayed on. Pemulis isn’t on Dunlop’s Free List[88] but gets the E.T.A. stringer to put Dunlop’s dot-and-circumflex trademark on all his stick’s strings, as a kind of touchingly insecure gesture, in Schacht’s opinion.
‘I played your guy in Tampa two years ago,’ Pemulis says, sidestepping one of the old discolored drill-balls that always litter passages behind indoor tarps. ‘Name escapes.’
‘Le-something,’ says Schacht. ‘Yet another Nuck. One of those names that start with Le.’ Mario Incandenza, in a pair of little Audern Tallat-Kelpsa’s E.T.A. drill-sweats, is lurching noiselessly some ten m. behind them in the passage, his police-lock up and head uncamera’d; he’s framing Schacht’s back in a three-cornered box with his thumbs and long fingers, simulating the view through a lens. Mario’s been authorized to travel with the squads to the WhataBurger Invitational for final footage for his short and upbeat annual documentary — brief testimonials and lighthearted moments and behind-the-scenes shots and emotional moments on court, etc. — that every year gets distributed to E.T.A. alumni and patrons and guests at the pre-Thanksgiving fundraising exhibition and formal fete. Mario is wondering how you could get enough light back here in a tarp-tunnel to film a tense cold pre-match gladiatorial march behind an indoor tarp, carrying tennis racquets in your arms like an obscene bouquet, without sacrificing the dim and diffuse and kind of gladiatorially doomed quality figures in the dim passage have. After Pemulis has mysteriously won, he’ll tell Mario maybe a Marino 350 with a diffusion-filter on some kind of overhead cable you could winch along behind the figures at about twice the focal length, or else use fast film and station the Marino at the tunnel’s very start and let the figures’ backs gradually recede into a kind of doomed mist of low exposure.
‘I remember your guy as one big forehand. Nothing but slice off the back. His VAPS never varies. If you kick the serve over to the backhand he’ll slice it short. You can come in behind it at like will.’
‘Worry about your own guy,’ Schacht says.
‘Your guy’s got zero imagination.’
‘And you’ve got an empty expanse where your stomach ought to be, remember.’
‘I am a man with no stomach.’
They emerge through flaps in the tarp with hands upraised in slight apology to their opponents, walk out onto the warmer courts, the slow green eraserish footing of indoor composite. Their ears dilate into all the sounds in the larger space. Gasps and thwaps and pocks and sneakers’ squeaks. Pemulis’s court is almost down in female territory. Courts 13 to 24 are Girls’ 18’s A and B, all bobbing ponytails and two-handed backhands and high-pitched grunts that if girls could only hear what their own grunts sounded like they’d cut it out. Pemulis can’t tell whether the very muffled applause way down up behind the gallery-panel is sardonic applause at his finally appearing after several minutes of vomiting or is sincerely for K. D. Coyle on Court 3, who’s just smashed a sucker-lob so hard it’s bounced up and racked 3’s tray of hanging lights. Except for some rubber in his legs Pemulis feels stomachless and tentatively OK. This match is an all-out must-win for him in terms of the WhataBurger.
The infra-lit courts are warm and soft; the heaters bolted into both walls above the tarp’s upper hem are the deep warm red of little square suns.