Read Online The Spoiler by Domenic Stansberry - Free Book Online

wanted. For an instant, his own voice sounded far away to him, as if someone else were doing the talking. There’s also an old color TV, he said, plugged into the cable from Boston, that shows Red Sox games. The color’s bad, but the picture’s clear as cake.
    â€œNot tonight,” Amanti said, “but I can meet you Friday.” She gave him the name of the Little Puerto Rico, a café down on Commercial Street.
    The conversation confused him; Amanti almost acted as if his call were a surprise. First his editors, then Mendoza, Lopez, and now Amanti—nobody approached him directly; they all came from angles. Maybe it’s the heat, Lofton thought. Maybe people just aren’t thinking clearly in the heat.
    Lofton wanted to get a look at MacKenzie Field in the dark when the stadium was empty. A high green fence surrounded the field, but he knew a place around back where the neighborhood kids had kicked a hole large enough to crawl through. Brunner had ordered the hole boarded several times, but the kids kept kicking it open. Lofton found the hole and crawled through on his hands and knees.
    Standing inside the park, his shirt soaked through with sweat, he no longer heard the sounds he took for granted while walking the streets: the beer-gutted laughter, drunken shouts, and loud Hispanic music that seemed always to spill from the tenements. Only one sound got through to him as he stepped into the Redwings’ dugout: the long skid of tires on asphalt, followed by the brief, heartbeat blaring of a horn. He shrugged and sat down in the dugout. The accident, if that’s what it was he had heard, seemed far away, maybe nothing, maybe just a noise beyond the center field wall.
    There had been times like this in Denver, when he had stayed up in the bleachers after the Bears’ games, reluctant to go home. He remembered the papers back in the hotel that he needed to sign for Maureen, something to do with the house; she had suddenly decided she wanted to sell it. The papers sat in a pile of other papers along with Maureen’s first letter to him in Holyoke, the one that told him never to come back in one line, and in the next said she could not take the sound of her own footsteps pacing the empty house. He had not given her any reason for his leaving; he had mentioned neither his trip to the doctor nor his own misgivings about having another kid. She would make herself happy soon enough, he told himself.
    He got up to leave, to walk around the base paths, maybe, or to take a long stroll down the right field line. He spotted a baseball bat leaning in the far corner of the dugout, and he picked it up, running his fingers over the smooth, polished grain. He felt a hairline crack near the trademark. Probably happened on a ground ball, bad enough to make the bat worthless, so the equipment man would not bother to cart it back. Lofton carried the bat with him onto the field.
    He kicked the dust from home plate, which glowed white in the darkness, almost phosphorescent. He stared out at the deserted field toward the ghostly wall in left center. He imagined the players, the pitcher standing on the mound and the team in position behind him. He took several swings, trying to make the swings smooth and level, putting all the force of his thirty-seven-year-old body into hard chops at the elusive moon half-hidden in the damp mist over Holyoke.
    Backing off from the plate, he flexed the muscles in his back, placing the bat between his knees and rubbing his palms together, a ritual he had seen many men go through over the years—no, not men; boys, children ten, fifteen, even twenty years younger than he—and a ritual, of course, he had gone through himself. And he remembered how his mother, dead twenty-five years now, had come to watch him play sandlot ball in the bitter-bright streets of San Jose, California. It was the summer she died, and she came not with his father but with some other man.
    His mother