Free For Love of the Game by Michael Shaara

Yorkerish:
    “How much of that was luck? Truly?”
    “Probably all of it.”
    Then she said suddenly: “Sorry. I don’t mean … to be rude.” Then she giggled, and switched right back. “On t’other hand. Ballplayers. Good pun there. I’ve heard a lot … tell me the truth. Are you gay?”
    “Gay? Me?” He grinned. “Oh. You must have been readin’ things. Or did you hear somethin’.…”
    “Well, I know there’s a lot of gay guys playing ball”—giggle—“nowadays. Is getting to be the vogue. Or somethin’. So they say. Would you mind tellin’ me? You know those fellas?”
    “Nope. Honest.”
    “And you’re not gay yourself?”
    “Nope.”
    “But you fellas wander round nude all the time in the locker room. Does something like that … interest you?”
    Billy started to grin. Then he had to laugh. He’d never been asked that sort of thing before, not by anyone anywhere, and she was from another world, and something in her face changed, and she looked at him with a sudden genuine smile, the haze in her eyes beginning to clear, something different there, and he said: “Hell. No. Nope. Uh-uh.”
    “Would you like to go for a walk?”
    “A walk? Away from here?”
    “I’d like to talk to you.” She said that in an odd, intense way, vague glint in her eyes he did not understand. She said: “You’re not married.”
    “No.”
    “I was married,” she said. “Now it’s over. I’m feeling the effects. Fallout. Would you mind if I talked? I can talk to you. God help me. If I’m wrong. Are you a … rebound?”
    “A what?”
    “Rebounds are people you go with when you’ve lost your love. True love. Shit. I didn’t love … oh yes I did. But that was a long time ago. Would you walk?” She put a hand on his arm. First sign of great sadness.
Now
he saw. She said: “Please. Want to go out and … on the street … just talk. Need to clear a messy brain. Can we go? Do you mind? I don’t mean to bed. I mean … can we find a place where I can just sit down and let it out?”
    They left, went to a quiet bar. She told him of the ten years with that very wealthy lying conniving greedy vicious heartless lovable hatable son of a bitch who turned out in the long run to be very lucky that he never met Billy Chapel, who would have … “dusted him” … never marry again, she said, never never. You haven’t ever married? Oh, Billy Chapel, you’re either very lucky or very wise—and Chapel said: “Neither. I’m a kid. A ballplayer. I’ll grow up one of these days. But not yet, not yet.…”
    Tap on the shoulder: Gus.
    “Rise and shine, Billy. Number Two.” Chapel came back into the game. Out toward the mound: no music: no pictures in the brain. All that cleared. He saw nothing but Joe Birch, slowly steppinginto position to wait outside the box. Chapel’s mind focused on Birch. Next man to hit. First up in the second: the clean-up man. Josephus.
    Silence in Chapel’s mind now rather unusual. Not the time for music. Vision: the swing Birch made that day when he hit it farther than anybody ever had before, that fastball, vision of the ball rising, going, departing, gone. Birch said afterward: “Never hit it that far except off Chapel’s fastball. It was coming so fast I just closed my eyes and swung, and it bounced. S’truth, s’help me.”
    Birch stepped into the box. He nodded, from a long way away. Chapel nodded. Meyers, the ump, said something to Gus, grinned, stroked his mustache. This would be interesting. Chapel stepped back off the mound: Gus knew: sent no signals, waited.
    Chapel: sooner or later Josephus always hits you. He is one of the few, the very few, who gives you that slight clutch in the stomach that comes sometimes thinking of the way this one can hit the ball right back at you so hard and fast you may never see it coming, toward the head, as it did one time to.… Well. Fella has power. Great power. Almost never goes for the first pitch. Will he