Chapter 4

Buzzy grabbed me one morning while we were doing our stretching drills. "They want you in the office," he said with a nasty smile. By then the Grapefruit League season was maybe half over, and the new Nats were feeling very good about themselves having won nine and lost only five. Balls were flying out of the wooden-fenced parks, and it was the rare game when we did not get two or three homers from our high-priced sluggers.

The Washington newspapers and TV stations had produced reams of action photos and a multitude of excited stories, and, we were told, season ticket sales were steadily climbing. They were fixing up the old stadium, resodding the infield, installing a new scoreboard with a big TV screen, cleaning up the parking lots, and painting the seats red and blue.

I knocked on the pine-paneled door under the right field stands and went inside. A pretty blonde sat at a white computer doing something to her long red fingernails. She looked up, smiled, popped her gum, and jerked her thumb at the door behind her.

Horace Greeley Jepperson was at his huge desk, his back to me and his flat computer screen filled with flickering boxes of various sizes and colors. I wondered if he had bought all new furniture for this part-time office. He turned around in his high-backed, maroon-leather chair and said, "Sit." The air-conditioner buzzed steadily up near the ceiling. The filtered air smelled of chlorine for some reason, like a swimming pool.

I sat, put my hat on the floor, dropped my hands in my lap, wondered how my spikes were treating his carpeting and waited as he rotated away from me, tapped a few keys, watched his screen develop some sort of wavy pattern of colored lines and rotated back toward me again, a serious look on his round face. If had not worn thick eyeglasses he might have appeared less like a chipmunk.

"Got a letter from the commissioner about you," he said, taking it out of its long envelope. It was the only thing on his desk top except for a bronze lamp and a crystal baseball with a flat bottom and red stitching.

I nodded and kept my mouth closed.

"One hundred and seventeen men have been through here, been under contract, and this is the first letter I ever got about one of them."

I shrugged as he flipped open the sheet of heavy paper and pushed his mouth into a thin line, glancing at me over his glasses.

"He would rather we let you go. He says you might be a detriment to our program. That is the word he uses." He held the letter toward me, leaned forward over a yard of polished mahogany and pointed at a word. His cuff links appeared to be small gold coins. "Right there, detriment." All I could see was the MLB letterhead and a scrawled signature. I wondered if he signed all his letters "Bud."

"Up to you," I said, resisting the urge to swallow the lump in my throat or cough it up and spit. The ghost of Christmas past was about to visit, I feared. I could hear the chains clanking.

He rocked back in his chair while I thought of Marley's ghost.

"He says you beat up your wife and threatened your kid. You do that?"

"Yep," I said, tasting bile and nodding. "I was drunk."

"You still drinking?" Jepperson asked, lowering his eyebrows, tucking in his chin and trying to look mean or serious or something despite the fact that his face was baby-like and his voice made him sound like an adolescent. His Florida tan barely colored his pink skin.

"Beer," I said. "Now and then."

"Can you quit?" he asked.

"Probably," I said, nodding. "I was downing a quart of booze every day back then, and I stopped doing that."

"Mr. Harder does not like you, says you're a wise guy and too damn old, bad for discipline he says, a trouble maker." The young man nodded his agreement and raised one thin eyebrow as he refolded the letter.

"Not much I can do about it." Buzzy and I had exchanged perhaps twenty words since I had signed a contract.

"And he's a good baseball man. Everybody says that. You see the piece in SI, the one in the Sporting News?"

I nodded. Both stories pictured indolent Buzzy Harder as the next Joe Torre. As far as I could tell Buzzy was stone dumb as well as mean spirited and hound dog lazy.

"But he admits you do the job. I asked him when I got this." The man in the expensive suit and beautiful shirt and sleek tie dropped the letter and steepled his hands under his lips. He looked about twelve but he was worth more than a eight-hundred million dollars. And that was after his Internet company had shed roughly half of its stock value and two other ventures had evaporated altogether taking numerous investors down with them. He had provided himself with a well-appointed lifeboat, so the papers said, before those ships sank without a trace. Young Mr. Jepperson was going to be a survivor, so opined all the pundits.

"Where is your wife now?" he asked.

I took a deep breath and felt my stomach turn over. "Don't think that's your business," I said. I was not going to tell him that I did not know for sure. She was, I was aware, pursuing a gentleman in the insurance business and was probably living with him somewhere in New England although he might be living with her in what I still thought of as 'our' house, the one we bought when I thought I had a secure job as a Red Sox starter.