He focused on the green dice, translucent, glowing under the Tensor light and casting mint shadows on the white paper. The game he played he had learned from an eighth-grader the year before, after school, when he was cleaning blackboards and the eighth-grader was being kept after. It had been explained systematically: six and six was a home run, six and five a sacrifice fly, six and four an out, and so on. He’d written it down and brought it all home.
It could be for him, he soon discovered, soothing, mesmerizing, and endless, spooling out into a perpetual string of games that absorbed time painlessly and unobtrusively. One quick game would become a doubleheader, a three-game series, five, seven, or an entire season, to be continued at another time. Box scores filled pages and pads, and appeared in odd places on scrap paper or essays from school. He’d play after dinner, after homework, right before bedtime. He’d play in the morning lying in the sand at the beach or in his backyard, his legs damp and warm on the cushion of grass. The games never seemed like an end in themselves, but a stopgap, a prelude. He had a very clear sense that he was biding his time, waiting for something to happen, and until something did he would be playing dice baseball. Refinements were developed, and outs divided into categories. Six and four and one and one, both simply outs in the eighth-grader’s version, became long outs to center field and strikeouts, respectively. Six and three became a lined shot turned into a spectacular out by the infield. Five and five became a double play if any runners were on base. He began to keep track of individual performances and arrange his lineups accordingly. The games became more real, more visualized, but could not advance much farther, he knew. And his father, pausing motionless by the stairs to listen, could hear the rhythmic rattle of the dice sprawling across the pad of paper, day and night, he told his wife, day and night.
Lady lay on the floor near the bed, chin on her paws, listening to the dice with no apparent interest. White hairs were filagreed across the coverlet where she’d brushed against it. Kristi lay next to her, teasing her ears with a straw.
“Lisa’s brother plays with dice, too,” she said.
Biddy stopped rolling. “Don’t do that to the dog,” he said.
She rolled onto her back and looked up at him. Her hair swept away from her face and spread along the floor near the dog’s, catching light. My beautiful blonde, her mother called her. She did not look like his sister. He wondered at times if some elaborate and complex deception had been at work. She was beautiful, he knew, sister or not. One front tooth was crooked, slightly overlapping the other. Thank God, his mother would say when it came up; imagine me with a perfect child?
She lay on her back with the straw in her nose and smiled. She was beautiful, and as mean as anyone he had ever known. The reason at times seemed clear, at times escaped him. She kicked a leg experimentally upward and held it aloft, sighting along it to the ceiling. She said, “Lisa’s gonna get a cat.”
“Good for Lisa.”
“We oughta get a cat.”
“We don’t need a cat. We got Lady.”
She made a face. “Lady’s old.” He resumed rolling dice, and she clicked her tongue. “Lady’s no fun,” she said. She was listening to her parents downstairs.
“Leave the dog alone,” he said. “She’s not bothering you.” The game ended 10–3 Baltimore. Downstairs there was the splintering sound of a glass coming apart in the sink.
“They fight all the time,” his sister said. She looked at the dog sadly.
“Hey,” he said. “Lisa coming over for the Air Show?”
She didn’t know. She got up abruptly and went into her room. Lady’s ear twitched, the straw resting lightly on it like an aerialist’s balance pole.
He leaned over and cleared it away. “Why’s she do that to you?” he asked. He picked up the dice, the plastic sweaty and smooth in his hand. “Yeah, you got a case,” he heard his father say.
His knees flexed and his torso bobbed expectantly with the pitch, and Bucky Dent topped it, beating it into the ground, the ball bounding past Scott McGregor, who twisted out of his delivery but was unable to reach it. Everything happened at once as Biddy broke to cover second: Dave Winfield thundered in toward him from first, the noise dropping away like a dream as the Yankee Stadium crowd anticipated the double play. Dauer fielded it and flipped it to him and he caught the ball as Winfield went into his slide. He tried to get a good push off second, getting his knees up as he threw, but Winfield caught them as he swept by, upending him and crashing him onto his face and shoulder, arm still out from the throw.
DeCinces and Dauer stood over him while he sat in the dirt, his nose bleeding and snuffling, his lip stinging. Dent was standing on first and the crowd was whistling and stamping so that it seemed the upper deck might come down.
And that, DeCinces told him, is how you break up a double play.
He put the dice away, turned off the lamp, and walked across the hall to look in on his sister. She was reading a coloring book, her bare toes curling and uncurling. She looked up at him. “I was talking to you before,” she said.
He touched her leg apologetically. “I was thinking.”
“You didn’t say anything.”
He said he was sorry, and asked if she wanted anything. She shook her head and picked at something on her back. He heard a voice and went into the hall and stood at the top of the stairs. His father was a gray shadow, barely visible in the dark at the bottom, telling them to get ready for bed.
Kristi was pulling off her top. He returned to his room and kicked off his sneakers. Directly below him his mother broke something in the den. He pulled off his tank top, shivering at the breeze through the window, turned off the light, and lay back, listening to the crickets.
“If it’s such a goddamn effort, call him and tell him to stay home,” his father said, and Biddy sank a little into the pillow. He decided to go swimming the next morning before Dom arrived.
They stood in a rough line in the hot sun, hair sticking to their foreheads. Biddy’s Orioles hat was on backward to allow for the catcher’s mask, and the sweat on his temples was sticky with dust. The dust invaded his mouth, sometimes chalky, sometimes gritty. He was vaguely reminded of Jimmy Stewart, so long without water, his eyes on the forming fuselage. They were working out with his father and Uncle Dom, and their grasp of fundamentals, according to Dom, was piss poor. Louis and Mickey, Dom’s children, were having as much trouble as he was. Which was not encouraging: Mickey was not very bright and a year younger, and Louis was slightly retarded.
“Biddy, if you don’t block the plate, they go around you. Do you understand?” Dom said. “You have to block the plate.”
Biddy adjusted his chest protector, sullenly stepping nearer the plate.
“Here,” Dom said with some exasperation, positioning him with his arms. “Here, right here. And spread your legs.” He mimicked Biddy standing before the plate, erect, arms drooping, looking hypnotized. Mickey and Louis laughed. “You’re standing here like you’re in outer space. Some mulignon’ll go right by you if you’re standing around like a lost soul.”
“I don’t want to catch anyway,” Biddy said, somewhat in his own defense.
“I don’t care. That’s not the point. You said you wanted to learn how to play the game.” Biddy scuffed the dirt on home plate. “Hey, it’s up to you. You want to play for Lordship next year, it might be nice to handle more than one position.”