Dazed, Kevin shook his head. He was on hands and knees. The ball was still in his glove. He looked over at Fred Spaulding, who had his thumb up in the out sign. People were converging on them from all directions, shouting loudly. Alfredo was standing on third base, yelling angrily himself—something about Fred’s umpiring. A crowd was gathering, and someone helped Kevin to his feet.
He took the ball from his glove and walked over to Alfredo, who eyed him warily. Without planning to he flipped the ball against Alfredo’s chest, where it thunked and fell to the ground. “You’re out,” he said harshly, hearing his voice in a way he usually didn’t.
He turned to walk away, was suddenly jerked around by the arm. He saw it was Alfredo and instantly lashed out with a fist, hitting Alfredo under the ear at about the same time that Alfredo’s right struck him in the mouth. He fell, and then he and Alfredo and several others were in a chaotic clump of wrestling bodies, Alfredo screaming abuse, Kevin cursing and trying to get an arm free to swing again, Fred shouting at them to stop it and Mike and Doris and Ramona doing the same, and there were hands all over him pulling him away, restraining him. He found himself held by a bunch of hands; he could have broken free of them, but they were friends’ hands for the most part, recognizable as such by feel alone. Across a stretch of grass Alfredo was similarly held. Alfredo glared furiously across the gap, shouting something at Fred. Nothing anyone said was comprehensible, it was as if he stood under an invisible bell jar that cut off all meaning, but in the cacophony he suddenly heard Ramona shriek “What do you think you’re doing!” He took his eyes from Alfredo for an instant, afraid she meant him. But Ramona was transfixing Alfredo with a fierce look, it was him she was yelling at. Kevin wondered where he’d hit him. His right knuckles were throbbing.
“Fuck that!” Alfredo was shouting at Fred, “Fuck that! He was in the baseline, what’m I supposed to do? It’s perfectly legal, it happens all the time!”
This was true.
“He’s the one that started something,” Alfredo shouted. “What the fuck is this?”
“Oh shut up, Alfredo,” Ramona interjected. “You know perfectly well you started it.”
Alfredo spared only a second to glare at her, but it was a cold, cold glare. He turned back to Fred: “Well? Are you going to do your job?”
A bunch of people from both teams began shouting accusations again. Fred pulled a whistle from under his shirt and whistled them down. “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! I’m going to stop the game and give you both defeats if you don’t get back to your dugouts! Come on, this is stupid. Move it!” He walked over to the clump of Lobos holding Kevin, and said, “Kevin, you’re out of the game. This whole thing is your fault.”
Loud contradictions from Kevin’s teammates.
“—when you’re in the baseline!” Fred carried over them. “The runner has the right to the baseline, and fielders have no complaint if they get run into while standing in it. So there was no call to throw the ball at him. Go sit it out. There’s only a couple outs to go anyway, and I want to get this game finished so the next one can begin! Move it!”
Kevin found himself being pulled back toward the dugout. He was sitting on the bench. His throat was sore—had he been shouting too? Must have been.
Ramona was sitting next to him, hand on his arm. Suddenly he was aware of that touch, of a strong hand, trembling slightly, supporting him. She was on his side. Publicly. He looked at her and raised his eyebrows.
She took her hand away, and now it was his body that was quivering. Perhaps it had been his all along.
“That bastard,” she said, with feeling. She stared across at Alfredo, who stood in his dugout still shouting at Fred.
Kevin could only swallow and nod.
After the game—which the Lobos held on to win—Kevin walked away a bit dazed, and considerably embarrassed. To be kicked out of a softball game, my Lord. It happened occasionally, especially between certain rival teams who tended to drink beer during the game. But it was rare.
He heard Alfredo’s voice all the way across the field, and turned to look for him, surprised by the intensity of his dislike. That little figure over on the hillside, surrounded by its friends… a bundling, a node of everything he despised. If only he could have gotten in one more punch, he would have flattened him—
“Hi, Kev.”
He jumped, afraid his thoughts could be read on his face. “Hi, Ramona.”
“Pretty exciting game.”
“Yeah.”
“Here, come with me. I have to teach the afternoon class, but it ends early and then we can go flying.”
“Sure.” Kevin had been planning to return to work too, but they were finishing the Campbell house, and Hank and Gabriela could take care of clean-up for the afternoon.
They biked over to the high school, and Kevin showered in the gym. The old room brought back a lot of memories. His mouth hurt, the upper lip was swelling on one side. He combed his hair, futile task, and went up to Ramona’s class. She was already into a lecture, and Kevin said hi to the kids and sat in the back.
The lecture had to do with population biology, the basic equations that determined population flux in a contained environment. The equations were nonlinear, and gave a rough model for what could be seen in the outside world, populations of a given species rising and falling in a stable but unpredictable, non-repeating cycle. This concept was counter-intuitive and Ramona took a long time explaining it, using examples and moving into a conversational style, with lots of questions from the students.
Their lab took up the whole top floor of one building, and the afternoon light poured in all the western windows and shattered blue in Ramona’s black hair. She brought Kevin into the discussion and he talked about the variety of biologic systems used in modern architecture, settling on the example of Chinese carp in an atrium pool. These fish were among the steadiest in terms of numbers, but the equations still held when describing fluctuations in their population, and they were put to immediate use in deciding the size of the pool, the number of fish to be harvested, and so on.
Still, the nonlinearity of the equations, the tendency for populations to suddenly jump up or down, confused some of the students. Kevin could understand this, as it always struck him as a mystery as well.
Ramona dragged out a Lorenz waterwheel to give them a concrete example. This was a simple waterwheel with twelve buckets around its rim, and it could turn in either direction. When the water was turned on from a hose hung above the wheel, the slowest stream of water wouldn’t move the wheel at all; slowly the top bucket filled and then water dribbled over its side to the tub below. At a moderate flow the top bucket filled and tilted off to one side, and after that the wheel turned in a stately circle, buckets emptying on the bottom and partially filling under the hose. This was what they all expected, this was what common sense and experience from the outside world would suggest was normal. Thus it was even more of a surprise when Ramona turned up the water from the hose, and the wheel began to turn rapidly in one direction, slow down, speed up, reverse direction—
The class gasped at the first reversal, laughed, chattered. The wheel moved erratically, buckets sometimes filling to the brim, sometimes flashing under the hose. Chaotic movement, created by the simplest of inputs. Ramona moved from wheel to blackboard, working through the equations that described this oddity, which was actually quite common in nature. Then she set the students to exercises to demonstrate the issue for themselves, and they crowded around computer screens to see the results of their work in spectacularly colored displays.