Nine Inches Read online

  Carl’s grin disappeared. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that, Jack. The strike zone’s down here. Not up here.” He illustrated his point by slicing imaginary lines across his stomach and throat.

  “Right,” I said. “And it’s six points for a touchdown.”

  “I don’t mean to be a jerk about it,” he continued, “but I thought you were making some questionable judgments.”

  “Funny,” I said. “They’re only questionable when they don’t go your way.”

  “Just watch the high strikes, that’s all I’m saying.”

  Tim kept smiling stiffly throughout this exchange, as if it were all just friendly banter, but he seemed visibly relieved by the sight of Ray Santelli, the Ravens’ manager, returning from the snack bar with a hot dog in each hand.

  “Just got outta work,” he said, by way of explanation. “Traffic was a bitch on the Parkway.”

  Ray was a dumpy guy with an inexplicably beautiful Russian wife. A lot of people assumed she was mail order, despite Ray’s repeated claims that he’d met her at his cousin’s wedding. He ran a livery business with his brother and sometimes kept a white stretch limo parked in the driveway of his modest Cape Cod on Dunellen Street. The car was like the wife, a little too glamorous for its humble surroundings.

  “It’s those damn toll plazas,” observed Tim. “They were supposed to be gone twenty years ago.”

  Before anyone could chime in with the ritual agreement, our attention was diverted by the appearance of Mikey Fellner, wielding his video camera. A mildly retarded guy in his early twenties, Mikey was a familiar figure at local sporting events, graduations, carnivals, and political meetings. He videotaped everything and saved the tapes, which he labeled and shelved in chronological order in his parents’ garage. This was apparently part of the syndrome he had — it wasn’t Down’s but something more exotic, I forget the name — some compulsion to keep everything fanatically organized. He trained his camera on me, then got a few seconds of Santelli wiping mustard off his chin.

  “You guys hear?” Carl asked. “Mikey says they’re gonna show the game on cable access next week.”

  Mikey panned over to Tim, holding the camera just a couple of inches from his face. He wasn’t big on respecting other people’s boundaries, especially when he was working. Tim didn’t seem to mind, though.

  “Championship game,” he said, giving a double thumbs-up to the viewing audience. “Very exciting.”

  LITTLE LEAGUE is a big deal in our town. You could tell that just by looking at our stadium. We’ve got dugouts, a big electronic scoreboard, and a padded outfield fence covered with ads for local businesses, just like the pro teams (that’s how we paid for the scoreboard). We play the national anthem over a good sound system, nothing like the scratchy loudspeaker they used when I was a kid. The bleachers were packed for the championship game, and not just with the families of the players. It was a bona fide local event.

  The Wildcats were up first, and Carl was right: his team had a bad case of the jitters. The leadoff hitter, Alex O’Malley, stepped up to the plate white-knuckled and expecting the worst, as if Lori Chang were Roger Clemens. He planted himself as far away from the plate as possible, stood like a statue for three called strikes, and seemed relieved to return to the bench. The second batter, Chris Rigato, swung blindly at three bad pitches, including a high and tight third strike that almost took his head off. His delayed evasive action, combined with the momentum of his premature swing, caused him to pirouette so violently that he lost his balance and ended up facedown in the dirt.

  “Strike three,” I said, taking care to keep my voice flat and matter-of-fact. I wasn’t one of those show-off umps who said Stee-rike! and did a big song and dance behind the plate. “Batter’s out.”

  The words were barely out of my mouth when Carl came bounding out of the third-base dugout. He had his arms spread wide, as if volunteering for a crucifixion.

  “Goddammit, Jack! That was a beanball!”

  I wasn’t fooled by his theatrics. By that point, just six pitches into the first inning, it was already clear that Lori Chang was operating at the top of her game, and you didn’t need Tim McCarver to tell you that Carl was trying to mess with her head. I should’ve just ordered him back to the dugout and called for play to resume, but there was just enough of a taste in my mouth from the earlier encounter that I took the bait. I removed my mask and took a few steps in his direction.

  “Please watch your language, Coach. You know better than that.”

  “She’s throwing at their heads!” Carl was yelling now, for the benefit of the spectators. “She’s gonna kill someone!”

  “The batter swung,” I reminded him.

  “He was trying to protect himself. You gotta warn her, Jack. That’s your job.”

  “You do your job, Carl. I’ll take care of mine.”

  I had just pulled my mask back over my head when Tim came jogging across the infield to back me up. We umpires made it a point to present a unified front whenever a dispute arose.

  “It’s okay,” I told him. “Let’s play ball.”

  He gave me one of those subtle headshakes, the kind you wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t been standing six inches in front of you. “He’s right, Jack. You should talk to her.”

  “You’re playing right into his hands.”

  “Maybe so,” he admitted. “But this is the championship. Let’s keep it under control.”

  He was forcing me into an awkward position. I didn’t want to be Carl’s puppet, but I also didn’t want to argue with Tim right there in the middle of the infield. As it was, I could feel my authority draining away by the second. Someone on the Ravens’ side yelled for us to stop yapping and get on with the game. A Wildcats fan suggested we’d been bought and paid for by Town Pizza.

  “We gotta be careful here.” Tim gestured toward the Wildcats’ dugout, where Mikey had his video camera set up on a tripod. “This is gonna be on TV.”

  LORI CHANG smiled quizzically as I approached the mound, as if she couldn’t possibly imagine why I was paying her a social visit in the middle of the game.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked, sounding a little more worried than she looked.

  Lori was one of only three girls playing in our Little League that season. I know it’s politically incorrect to say so, but the other two, Allie Reagan and Steph Murkowski, were tomboys — husky, tough-talking jockettes you could easily imagine playing college rugby and marching in Gay Pride parades later in their lives.

  Lori Chang, on the other hand, didn’t even look like an athlete. She was petite, with a round, serious face and lustrous hair that she wore in a ponytail threaded through the back of her baseball cap. Unlike Allie and Steph, both of whom were fully developed in a chunky, none-too-feminine way, Lori had not yet reached puberty. She was lithe and curveless, her chest as flat as a boy’s beneath the stretchy fabric of her Ravens jersey. And yet — I hope it’s okay to talk like this, because it’s true — there was something undeniably sexual about her presence on the baseball field. She wore lipstick and nail polish, giggled frequently for no reason, and blushed when her teammates complimented her performance. She was always tugging down her jersey in the back, as if she suspected the shortstop and third baseman of paying a little too much attention to her ass. In short, she was completely adorable. If I’d been twelve, I would’ve had a hopeless crush on her.

  Which is why it was always such a shock when she let loose with the high hard one. Unlike other pitchers her age, who struggled just to put the ball over the plate, Lori actually had a strategy, a potent combination of control, misdirection, patience, and outright intimidation. She tended to jam batters early in the count and occasionally brushed them back, though to my knowledge she’d never actually hit anyone. Midcount she often switched to changeups and breaking balls, working on the outside corner. Once she had the batter appropriately spooked and thoroughly off-balance, she liked to rear back and finish him off wit
h a sizzler right down the pipe. These two-strike fastballs hopped and dived so unpredictably that it was easy to lose track of them. Some of the batters didn’t even realize the ball had crossed the plate until they heard the slap of leather against leather and turned in angry amazement to see a small but decisive puff of dust rising from the catcher’s mitt.

  I had no idea where she’d learned to pitch like that. Lori was a newcomer to our town, one of those high-achieving Asian kids who’ve flocked here in the past decade (every year, it seems, the valedictorian of our high school has a Chinese or Korean or Indian last name). In just a few months, she’d established herself as an excellent student, a gifted violinist, and a powerhouse on the baseball diamond, despite the fact that she could usually be found waiting tables and filling napkin dispensers at Happy Wok #2, the restaurant her parents had opened on Grand Avenue.

  “There’s nothing wrong,” I told her. “Just keep right on doing what you’re doing.”

  Her eyes narrowed with suspicion. “You came all the way out here to tell me that?”

  “It’s really not that far,” I said, raising my mask just high enough that she could see I was smiling.

  •••

  BY THE end of the third inning, Lori had struck out eight of the first nine batters she’d faced. The only Wildcat to even make contact was Ricky DiSalvo, Carl’s youngest son and the league leader in home runs and RBIs, who got handcuffed by a fastball and dinged a feeble check-swing grounder to second.

  Lori’s father, Happy Chang, was sitting by himself in the third-base bleachers, surrounded by Wildcats fans. Despite his nickname, Mr. Chang was a grim, unfriendly man who wore the same dirty beige windbreaker no matter how hot or cold it was and always seemed to need a shave. Unlike the other Asian fathers in our town — most of them were doctors, computer scientists, and businessmen who played golf and made small talk in perfect English — Happy Chang had a rough edge, a just-off-the-boat quality that reminded me of those guys you often saw milling around on Canal Street in the city, making disgusting noises and spitting on the sidewalk. I kept glancing at him as the game progressed, waiting for him to crack a smile or offer a word of encouragement, but he remained stone-faced, as if he wished he were back in his restaurant, keeping an eye on the lazy cooks, instead of watching his amazing daughter dominate the Wildcats in front of the whole town on a lovely summer evening.

  Maybe it’s a Chinese thing, I thought. Maybe they don’t like to show emotion in public. Or maybe — I had no idea, but it didn’t keep me from speculating — he wished he had a son instead of a daughter (as far as I could tell, Lori was an only child). Like everybody else, I knew about the Chinese preference for boys over girls. One of my coworkers, a single woman in her late thirties, had recently traveled to Shanghai to adopt a baby girl abandoned by her parents. She said the orphanages were full of them.

  But if Happy Chang didn’t love his daughter, how come he came to every game? For that matter, why did he let her play at all? My best guess — based on my own experience as a father — was that he simply didn’t know what to make of her. In China, girls didn’t play baseball. So what did it mean that Lori played the game as well or better than any American boy? Maybe he was divided in his mind between admiring her talent and seeing it as a kind of curse, a symbol of everything that separated him from his past. Maybe that was why he faithfully attended her games, but always sat scowling on the wrong side of the field, as if he were rooting for her opponents. Maybe his daughter was as unfathomable to him as my own son had been to me.

  LIKE MOST men, I’d wanted a son who reminded me of myself as a kid, a boy who lived for sports, collected baseball cards, and hung pennants on his bedroom walls. I wanted a son who played tackle football down at the schoolyard with the other neighborhood kids and came home with ripped pants and skinned knees. I wanted a son I could take to the ballpark and play catch with in the backyard.

  But Jason was an artistic, dreamy kid with long eyelashes and delicate features. He loved music and drew elaborate pictures of castles and clouds and fairy princesses. He enjoyed playing with his sisters’ dolls and exhibited what I thought was an unhealthy interest in my wife’s jewelry and high heels. When he was seven years old, he insisted on going out trick-or-treating dressed as Pocahontas. Everywhere he went, people kept telling him how beautiful he was, and it was impossible not to see how happy this made him.

  Jeanie did her best to convince me that it wasn’t a problem; she cut out magazine articles that said he was simply engaged in harmless “gender play” and recommended that we let him follow his heart and find his own way in the world. She scolded me for using words like sissy and wimp, and for trying to enforce supposedly outdated standards of masculinity. I tried to get with the program, but it was hard. I was embarrassed to be seen in public with my own son, as if he somehow made me less of a man.

  It didn’t help that Carl had three normal boys living right next door. They were always in the backyard kicking a soccer ball, tossing a football, or beating the crap out of one another. Sometimes they included my son in their games, but it wasn’t much fun for any of them.

  Jason didn’t want to play Little League, but I made him. I thought putting on a uniform might transform him into the kind of kid I would recognize as my own. Despite the evidence in front of my face, I refused to believe you could be an American boy and not love baseball, not want to impress your father with your athletic prowess.

  It’s easy to say you should let a kid follow his heart. But what if his heart takes him places you don’t want to go? What if your ten-year-old son wants to take tap-dancing lessons in a class full of girls? What if he’s good at it? What if he tells you when he’s fourteen that he’s made it onto the chorus of Guys and Dolls and expects you to be happy about this? What if when he’s fifteen he tells you he’s joined the Gay and Lesbian Alliance at his progressive suburban high school? What if this same progressive school allows boys to go to the prom with other boys, and girls to go with girls? Are you supposed to say, Okay, fine, go to the prom with Gerald, just don’t stay out too late?

  I only hit him that once. He said something that shocked me and I slapped him across the face. He was the one who threw the first punch, a feeble right cross that landed on the side of my head. Later, when I had time to think about it, I was proud of him for fighting back. But at the time, it just made me crazy. I couldn’t believe the little faggot had hit me. The punch I threw in return is the one thing in my life I’ll regret forever. I broke his nose, and Jeanie called the cops. I was taken from my house in handcuffs, the cries of my wife and children echoing in my ears. As I ducked into the patrol car, I looked up and saw Carl watching me from his front stoop, shaking his head and trying to comfort Marie, who for some reason was sobbing audibly in the darkness, as if it were her own child whose face I’d bloodied in a moment of thoughtless rage.

  LORI CHANG kept her perfect game going all the way into the top of the fifth, when Pete Gonzalez, the Wildcats’ all-star shortstop, ripped a two-out single to center. A raucous cheer erupted from the third-base dugout and bleachers, both of which had lapsed into a funereal silence over the past couple of innings. It was an electrifying sound, a collective whoop of relief, celebration, and resurgent hope.

  On a psychological level, that one hit changed everything. It was as if the whole ballpark suddenly woke up to two important facts: (1) Lori Chang was not, in fact, invincible; and (2) the Wildcats could actually still win. The score was only 1–0 in favor of the Ravens, a margin that had seemed insurmountable a moment ago but that suddenly looked a whole lot slimmer now that the tying run was standing on first with a lopsided grin on his face, shifting his weight from leg to leg like he needed to go to the bathroom.

  The only person who didn’t seem to notice that the calculus of the game had changed was Lori Chang herself. She stood on the mound with her usual poker face, an expression that suggested profound boredom more than it did killer concentration, and waited for Trevor Mancini
to make the sign of the cross and knock imaginary mud off his cleats. Once he got himself settled, she nodded to the catcher and began her windup, bringing her arms overhead and lowering them with the painstaking deliberation of a Tai Chi master. Then she kicked high and whipped a fastball right at Trevor, a guided missile that thudded into his leg with a muffled whump, the sound of a broomstick smacking a rug.

  “Aaah, shit!” Trevor flipped his bat in the air and began hopping around on one foot, rubbing frantically at his leg. “Shit! Shit! Shit!”

  I stepped out from behind the catcher and asked if he was okay. Trevor gritted his teeth and performed what appeared to be an involuntary bow. When he straightened up, he looked more embarrassed than hurt.

  “Stings,” he explained.

  I told him to take his base and he hobbled off, still massaging the sore spot. A chorus of boos had risen from the third-base side, and I wasn’t surprised to see that Carl was already out of the dugout, walking toward me with what could only be described as an amused expression.

  “Well?” he said. “What are you gonna do about it?”

  “The batter was hit by a pitch. It’s part of the game.”

  “Are you kidding me? She threw right at him.”

  Right on schedule, Tim came trotting over to join us, followed immediately by Ray Santelli, who approached with his distinctive potbellied swagger, radiating an odd confidence that made you forget that he was just a middle-aged chauffeur with a combover.

  “What’s up?” he inquired. “Somebody got a problem?”

  “Yeah, me,” Carl told him. “I got a problem with your sweet little pitcher throwing beanballs at my players.”

  “That was no beanball,” I pointed out. “It hit him in the leg.”

  “So that’s okay?” Carl was one of those guys who smiled when he was pissed off. “It’s okay to hit my players in the leg?”