I nodded. He disappeared into the kitchen, the slatted half-doors swinging behind him like the doors in movie saloons. I heard him lift the telephone from its receiver. I glanced around the room. Three blue beanbag chairs lined one wall. Coach had thumbtacked an Aquaman poster above a leopard print couch. The end table was scattered with Disneyland brochures and a hardback called Coaching Young Children. Other books, albums, and videotapes lined the bookshelf. I flicked the switches to the TV and Atari. Bleep, said the screen.
Coach returned and set the game panel for two-player mode. “Positive your mom won’t be expecting you?”
“She’ll stay pretty late at the store,” I said, “and then probably go out with Alfred.”
He raised one eyebrow and began pressing the joystick’s button. “My guess is you spend a lot of time by yourself.” On screen, his frog vaulted a ravenous electronic alligator.
“It’s no big deal. I kind of like it. School’s out for the summer. I watch TV or ride my bike. We have some weird neighbors, so I pedal around and spy on them.”
“I’m alone a lot too. When I’m not coaching, I stay here. I mostly just like some good friends to be with now and then. Good friends like you.” The screen’s colors strobed against his blue eyes. He didn’t blink. His frog drowned, and he handed me the joystick. “So, where did you learn to play baseball like that?”
“I taught myself.” I could guess the next question, so I continued. “He’s dead. I never knew him.” I turned my head from his face to the television.
Coach won both games. In the middle of the third, the pizza arrived; he shut off the Atari and spread the open Rocco’s box before us like a treasure map. “Wait here.”
He jogged to the kitchen and returned carrying a Nikon camera in one hand, two cans of peach Nehi in the other. He gave me the pop. “I remembered you like this stuff.” He watched each bite I took, each mouthful I chewed. After I’d finished my second piece, Coach opened a door to his stereo cabinet. He fetched a small microphone and plugged it into his receiver.
“This might seem weird at first,” Coach said. “I want to do a little experiment with you.” He handed me the microphone. “Just start talking as you normally would. I need to record my team’s voices, especially my good players. And something else, too. Take a couple of big slugs of that pop. Don’t rush it, there’s no hurry. When you think you’re about to burp, tell me and I’ll record it.” He fingernailed a switch on the camera flash, and a high-pitched squeal filled the room.
I swallowed a breath, uncertain what Coach was doing but having fun nonetheless. I had snagged his attention. “I’m ready,” I said. I belched three times over the next five minutes, and he taped them all.
I spilled some peach Nehi on the carpet. Its fizzy puddle looked like battery acid, and I tried in vain to wipe it up. “Shit.” When Coach heard me say that, he grinned. “Good,” he said. “Keep that up. Say ‘shit’ again. Say ‘goddamn.’ And burp a few more times.” I obeyed. I even said “fuck” once. That seemed to impress him. He knelt down and hugged me, my face even with his stomach. I could feel curly hairs through his shirt, the miraculous breath swelling inside him. He brushed his chin against the top of my head.
“I like you,” he said.
Coach stood again. The tape continued recording. In between my giggles and cuss words and burps, he snapped photographs. For most of them, he instructed me to look up at him and smile. I stuck out my tongue in one picture. He fingered its pink tip-I tasted the salt of his skin-and clicked the shutter. For another photo, he made me push the microphone between my lips and close my eyes. “Oh, Neil, that’s perfect.” Click.
I couldn’t sleep. Alfred and Mom were fucking in the next room. I tiptoed to the bathroom, locked the door, stretched out in the tub. The porcelain stung, as frosty as a glacier. I slipped my underwear to my ankles, grabbed my dick, and lifted my forearm to my lips, feverishly kissing my skin as if it were someone else’s mouth. Thunder rumbled from outside, and Mom’s bedsprings squeaked. The sink’s faucet dripped every fifth second. I squeezed my eyes shut, but this time I didn’t picture the men from Mom’s magazine. Someone else stood over me. He dropped his camera and bent down, unbuttoning and unzipping, his face moving toward mine. I heard Alfred mumble an incomprehensible sentence. I mouthed the word “Coach,” tonguing furiously at my arm, grating my front teeth against the skin.
When I woke, my mother’s knuckles were drumming the bathroom door. “Are you alive in there or what?” I pulled my underwear up, covered the purplish mark on my arm, and stumbled out.
The second of July, 1981. Mom had been appointed to work a double shift at the IGA. “I feel like a slave, there’s got to be something better,” she said. She hugged me, her arms wrapping around my body, her fingers aligning with my ribs. I thought of the way Coach had hugged me and wished Mom were him. “I know you’re going to beat their asses tonight. I predict four home runs.” Mom kissed me between the “four” and the “home runs.”
I thanked her. At 7 P.M, the baseball diamond would feature the Panthers versus Hutchinson Taco Hut, who’d lost every game for the past two years.
“Coach will drive you home, I guess.” Mom hand-fanned her face and skipped toward the door. “I love you, love you, love you, and don’t you forget it.” The screen crashed behind her. I waved with my baseball glove as she started the engine.
Mom hadn’t been gone ten minutes when Coach’s car idled in our driveway. The game wasn’t scheduled for another three hours. When I slid into the station wagon, I planted my glove on the seat between us. “I’m glad you’re early,” I said. “It’d be great if I could try those other game cartridges.”
Coach parked the wagon in his garage. I followed him toward the house. “Home is where the heart is,” he said. He reached toward a shelf piled with five or six photo albums. He pulled one down, handed it to me. “I got the pictures developed.”
I fell into a beanbag. The first twenty or so pages showed other boys I didn’t know. Some wore baseball uniforms. One series displayed a shirtless red-headed kid, pizza sauce smudged across his chin, playing the game Battleship. I couldn’t help staring at one blurry print, shot in extreme close-up, where the boy seemed to be nibbling the big toe of someone’s-probably Coach’s-bare foot. The kid’s freckled face looked confused, as if he’d just been bludgeoned.
On the following page I saw myself, holding the microphone. I bent closer to examine. My hair needed combing. My skin was pale, and my pupils gleamed red. I looked haunted. I’d appeared this way to Coach as he’d stared down at me. I flipped through the next few pages, discovering more photos of me in the album than all the photos taken during my entire life. In one shot, my eyes had closed. “I look pretty stupid here.”
“No, you’re perfect,” Coach said. “Your expression-like you’re having a really great dream.” He sat in the beanbag beside me and fit his palm over my knee. He had bitten his nails, and one finger’s cuticle grinned a dried crescent of blood. “I think I like you better than those others in that book. You’re definitely a better ballplayer.” The hand on my knee tightened. It seemed faultless, the hand of someone amazing, superior, invincible. “Neil, I’ve been thinking about you a lot this week.”
My face heated up. I squirmed from the beanbag, not wanting him to see it. “I’m hungry.”
Coach stood and moved toward the kitchen. I followed. “Another pizza?” he asked. He opened a cupboard. “Or maybe you see something you like in here?”
He’d stocked his kitchen with bags of candy, fudge cookies, Jiffy Pop popcorn, Tang, boxes of pudding. I spied a Breakfast Sampler Pack, miniature boxes of ten different cereal brands packaged together. “Mom never buys those things,” I said, pointing. “She says they’re a big waste of money.”