Kraft is ready with the subterranean-bunker, I'm-busy-for-the-rest-of-my-life-and-beyond, blanket refusals. "Wrong guy for the wrong job. First off, when am I ever going to have the time to…?"
"You're off next Friday and Saturday," she tells him gently. "I checked the call schedule."
"You did what?" Checked on him, on his reliability. She has been out early, cutting off his lines of retreat. He is suddenly far away, indifferent, invulnerable, slack. Even the deadening silence between them feels luxurious, something one might thrive on.
"It doesn't have to be torture, you know. You might even enjoy it."
"Right. Herding a disease-ridden Halloween parade through an aggressive, beer-swilling, sweltering mass of demi-humanity? Set this group loose on Dodger Stadium? Let them out of the lockup? They'll have committed felonies in a dozen different states by half time."
"Half time?" She snickers, despite the chorus of early warning signals. "Maybe you're right. I do have the wrong guy." The joke settles between them in sad, wide ripples radiating outward in all directions.
He holds her at receiver's distance, fending off the One Good Thing, his near brush with salvation. Wasteful, deliberate, self-inflicted. "I, uh, went to a game once," he tries to blurt out. He would explain how the best course in life consists of avoiding the repeat of certain debilitating early scenarios. But he has lost the cadence of humor. He cannot even bring himself to think of that grandstand debacle, in the company of a father who taught him every survival skill but steals and bunts, everything about the complex international order except for where he belonged in it.
Softly, through the apparatus, Linda offers him redemption. "I'll go with you, if you let me." He wants to tell her she must get away from him, quickly and cleanly. That he has not yet driven her away already incriminates him. He sees it all at once. They will sink into one of those mutual balances of terror, where neither can escape the collateral damage caused by the other's tenderness.
His no, she assumes from his repeated objections, is a yes in other words. Over his increasingly ritualized objections, she books him for the Saturday twin bill against the intensely colorful but eternally hapless Cubbies.
"Pushover opponents. Couple of home victories should at least keep the beer-bottle frag bombs to a minimum."
"Oh, great," he capitulates. “Do I at least get to ogle the cheerleaders.”
"Hopeless. Hopeless." The sliver of good-bye in her voice as she hangs up suggests that she already anticipates all the ways he will abandon her.
Kraft tries to get Plummer to sub for him. Carver's emergency Lesionnaire is holing up in the residents' bathroom, perched in front of the urinals. As he tucks himself back into his khaki scrubs, he sings, "Nothing could be finer than to be in some vaginer in the morning."
"Very nice, Thomas. You compose that one all by yourself?"
"You kidding? Do I look like a genius?"
"At the moment, no."
"Such gems are not 'composed.' They erupt from a thousand simultaneous springs at the right moment. Overnight, they become part of the English-speaking heritage."
"Speaking of which. Know anything about baseball?" He lays out the request. "I'll cover ER for you."
"Do I get the girl thrown in too?"
"The girl? Oh God." Wouldn't that be a massacre. "Come on, Thomas. I thought you were onto Nurse Spiegel these days."
"Ancient history. Chalk her off. Confirmed kill. Notch on the old barrel. I thought I explained this to you already, buddy: I plan to follow you around, nibbling on your undigested scraps. You're my mentor, man. I mean, if you want to talk natural genius…"
The world, as is widely known, is divided into two sorts of people. Exactly what those two sorts are is a matter of continuous speculation. No matter; wherever the division, Plummer falls into neither camp. He is beyond good and evil, freedom and dignity, sorrow and pity — in short, the perfect surgeon-in-training.
Which Kraft is not, as witnessed by the fact that as he enters the park, climbs into the funneled sunlight surrounded by a home crowd of 55,878 who lose themselves in an excitement as synesthetic as it is random, he feels inexplicably good. He and Linda shepherd a dozen kids, or rather, the kids suffer the pretense of authority as they break for the open air. The youngest of the group is a heavily urban-matured eight years old. The oldest — well, the oldest has been dead for decades.
Chuck, head now wrapped up tighter than the Mummy's, sports a batter's helmet several sizes too big for him, thereby succeeding in obscuring the bulk of his face. Joleene has been temporarily persuaded to swap the Chatty Cathy for a stuffed outfielder totem. "So that's what a Dodger is," Kraft murmurs to Linda; "I was wondering." The girl pulls incessantly at the mute thing's neck threads, threatening to yank
its head off.
The Fiddler Crab cracks jokes about a left hand like his not needing a mitt. Ali, a recent admittance with a plate-sized creature in his gut, who's learned to tell everybody he comes from Persia so he won't get beaten up, nasals, "Play ball, play ball!" like some muezzin up in a box-seat minaret. The Hernandez brothers keep looking around nervously, afraid they're going to bump into one of their prehospital business associates. A mute, cotton-wadded Rapparition — shouldn't even be out of bed yet — scribbles his alexandrines down on the insides of a popcorn box and passes them for public enunciation to Kyle, whose larynx is about the last part of him still functioning.
Nicolino acquires a program through judicious swapping of a rare Captain America back issue. He alternates between kicking verbal lime on the leather uppers of the collective umpiring staff and making arcane marks on the scorecard, improving on the already Byzantine official scoring system. He attempts to fix forever in recorded memory the whole game down to the trajectory of every foul ball and the bleacher location of each lucky scab who snagged one.
He keeps up a running statistician's patter. When the good guys' three-for-three hitters come up, he yells out, "All right, he's hot, he's hot." For the oh-for-three guys, this becomes, "All right, he's due, he's due." The folks in the nearby seats, after their initial, shocked whiplash, go out of their way to not give the senescent heckler a second look.
Joy sits between Kraft and Linda, an aluminum half-brace leaned up on each of her idols' knees. She studies the game furiously for its meaning, waiting, as late as the seventh-inning stretch, for things to begin. She asks in a constant but decorous undertone for help toward a hermeneutics, and when Kraft doesn't know the answer to her question he makes something up. He makes up a lot.
"Dr. Kraft, how many teams are there?"
"Two." He steals a look at Linda. "Two, right?"
"Well, what about those black men?"
"Black— Oh, in the black suits, you mean. Well, they switch back and forth, depending on who's winning. Evens things up."
"And those? The white suits?"
"Those? They're beer sellers. Not official protagonists, as far as I know."
He is nervous next to the girl, jumpy, edgier than the terrain's bad associations can account for. He can feel Linda giving him the professional second-guess, and she's right. How's he supposed to explicate this, to tell her? You see, I've this growing proof, well, not proof, this conviction, okay, suspicion, hunch… These kids, this service, this pede tour of duty: they are — what are they? Consolidating. Converging on him. And everything depends upon his finding out why. What they are after. Where they are headed.
In between Joy's questions—"Why do they put that man in the middle up on that little hill? How many points does the little boy get for picking up the discarded sticks?" — he slips in a few cross-examinations of his own. He asks her if she remembers anything at all about her old home, the village, the river basin she was driven from.