Court. Sometimes when that happened—which it did on a regular basis—Bo went to stay with his big brother, Stoney. But that year, Stoney, just out of high school, was working on a rig offshore and couldn’t take him. Nor could he bail their mother out of debt. Generally speaking, Stoney was just as foolish as she was about money, and just as broke.
With his mom drifting around the Gulf Coast and his brother out on a rig, Bo had been looking at yet another summer in foster care. However, it turned out his baseball coach, Mr. Landry Holmes, had other plans for him. Holmes had played college ball in Florida with a guy named Dino Carminucci. They’d stayed in touch ever since. Holmes ended up coaching in Texas, and Carminucci became a scout for the Yankees. Coach Holmes had made all the arrangements for Bo to take part in the all-star program, somehow coming up with airfare and pocket money. Coaches were like that, all hooked into some vast, invisible network. The scheme was supposed to keep Bo out of trouble, and to give his one-and-only talent a chance to do him some good, so maybe he wouldn’t end up like his mom and Stoney, drifting aimlessly.
Bo had been on fire about girls that summer, too, an affliction that had first struck him in the eighth grade when he’d sat behind Martha Dolittle in social studies, watching her every fluttery, girly move. If there was a scale to measure craziness about girls, on a scale of one to ten, Bo would register about a ninety-nine. He’d been in love with Yolanda Martinez the summer before their senior year of high school, and they’d had a huge fight about him going north for baseball. She thought he was abandoning her, but he claimed that if he did well enough, he might get a scholarship to college, which would mean he actually had a shot at a future.
He had been the best damn ballplayer ever to wear the uniform of the Texas City Stings, and that was no brag, just fact. And finally, thank you, Jesus, finally he’d been tagged for one of the most elite baseball programs in the country, where he’d be training with the top high-school players in the sport and, more importantly, in full view of talent scouts.
He hadn’t slept a wink on the flight to New York City. Sure, he’d been tired, and the trip seemed endless, but he hadn’t wanted to miss a single second of the experience of flying in an airplane. All his life he used to watch planes flying overhead, silver flashes in the smoggy sky above Texas City, and he’d imagine being aboard, flying beyond the murky pollution to a place where the skies were clear and the air sweet. He didn’t much care where the plane was headed. Away was good enough for him, even if it meant leaving Yolanda, whom he hadn’t managed to sweet-talk into bed—yet.
Flying was everything he wanted it to be. When the gate agent saw his height, she gave him an exit row seat with lots of legroom, and all he had to do was say he was willing to help out in case of an emergency. Which was a complete joke, because in an emergency, he’d be yelling his head off like everybody else, but he knew better than to point that out. He’d brought along a copy of the training camp’s prospects report—a detailed scouting write-up about each player—and a book called The Celestine Prophecy. It was one of the biggest hits of the ’90s, prominently displayed everywhere—particularly the airport. He was a fast reader and it was a short book, so he finished it between periods of simply staring out the window.
The guy in The Celestine Prophecy was on the trail of some kind of ancient manuscript, and he kept having these spiritual insights, like discovering it was divine to be a vegetarian and that a guy needed to know his own personal mission. It wasn’t much of a book, but Bo saw a handful of other people on the plane reading it, so he kept plugging away, waiting for it to get more interesting. Mostly, though, he kept watching out the window. It looked like a dreamland out there. Sometimes all he could see was an eternity of cotton-candy clouds. This was what heaven looked like in every movie he’d ever seen about heaven. The weather cleared at certain points and he found himself looking down at the world. The green landscape was veined by the silvery twists of rivers and streams, and crisscrossed by roads. Everything looked so tiny and neat, it was surreal, almost. Like flying over a map of the world.
The guy next to Bo was a been-there-done-that kind of businessman. However, when the flight attendants came with a cart laden with meal trays, Bo couldn’t contain himself. He’d been dying of hunger and here they were, bringing him hot food. It was a meal fit for a king—a piece of meat molded into the shape of a football, with gravy on a bed of rice, chunks of green beans on the side. A little salad in its own container with an even tinier container of salad dressing. A dinner roll and a chocolate brownie. Bo looked out the window again. This was heaven.
He all but inhaled the tray of food and downed a carton of milk. The businessman next to him glanced over. “Would you like my entrée?” he asked. “I haven’t touched it.”
“Sure, that’d be great,” Bo said. “Thanks.”
The guy handed over his foil-wrapped mystery meat and the dinner roll, too. That seemed to break the ice, because the guy asked, “Is this your first trip to New York?”
Bo nodded. “First trip to anywhere, now that you mention it.” Other than team trips for games, the farthest he’d been from home was New Orleans. Last summer, he and Stoney had driven half the night to the Big Easy, because they wanted to get laid. The evening hadn’t really worked out, though, because Stoney—never known for his smarts—couldn’t manage to convince anyone they were over twenty-one. When they finally found a club with a bouncer who looked the other way, it turned out that the phenomenally gorgeous, sexy pole dancers in skintight sequined costumes were guys. Bo still got the willies, remembering that night. They couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
“Where are you staying?” the guy asked.
Bo handed him the brochure about the all-star program. It was a glossy pamphlet with pictures of lakes and forests that stayed cool even at the height of summer’s fury. “The program’s invitation only,” he told the businessman, “run by a guy who has connections to the Yankees organization.”
“You don’t say.” The guy sipped his coffee. “You must be pretty good.”
“I guess I’ll find out this summer.” At that moment, Bo had considered himself the luckiest guy in the world. He still remembered the heady feeling that anything was possible. It was the feeling he got every time he stood on the mound, his fingertips playing over the laces of the ball. Baseball had always been his passion and his salvation, even when injuries, bad timing and bad luck ruined his chances in the draft, year after year. He never gave up, though, never stopped trying, even when he was over thirty and had earned a nickname in the league—“Bad Luck Crutch.” When some brutish rookie asked him why he kept showing up, Bo had learned to grin and say, “I figure I need to be here when my luck comes around.”
And indeed, a decade late, that was exactly what had happened. Last fall, his luck had come back, triggered by a phone call from Gus Carlisle, a sports agent. There was a spot on the Yankees’ pitching staff. They were interested in pre-contract talks. Bo had been invited to the Rookie Development program this winter, and if things progressed, he’d be included in spring training and exhibition games.
Suddenly, Bo felt very close to that boy on fire. “You a baseball fan?” he asked AJ. Maybe the kid was ready to talk.
“Not really.”
Great. “Not even the Astros?”
“I don’t really follow them. Or any team. Or any player, either.”
“Well, hell.” Bo drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “What do you like to do?” He fiddled with the radio dial. “How about music? You like music? I play in a band in Avalon. We’re not that good but we have quite a time together. One of us is good—a guy named Eddie Haven.”
Bo
