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tucked it into my pocket.
    I
spent most of the evening as I always spent my Fridays, cooking a small pot of
pasta, drinking iced tea and pretending that I was interested in anything my
students were writing. The long weekend loomed ahead. It wasn’t that I didn’t
like teaching: I did. But in the end, I was sure I was missing out on
something.
    Sitting
in front of the silent television, half-watching a game with the sound off and
half-reading a student story that began: “She was six feet tall, stacked,
Swedish and could kill people with her mind ...” I was interrupted by a knock.
I could have claimed that I had no idea who it would be. It was nearly eleven.
    Through
the peephole I saw Mark, holding two beers and trying to support himself on his
crutches. I wasn’t sure where he’d managed to snare the beers, though it was a
college campus, so it really could have been anywhere. He was still wearing his
baseball shirt, and maybe that was what finally did it. Or maybe it wasn’t
really about the shirt at all. It briefly crossed my mind that maybe he thought
my body contained some sort of famous-pitcher mojo. Maybe I believed something
like that, too. Either way, I didn’t even bother to figure out which one of us
had won.
    I
let him in.

Concrete Reality
    1998
     
    On
a warm spring morning, the air in Tampa smelled exactly like sweat socks. Not
particularly pleasant, but true, Ben thought as he entered the athletic
department. Making his way through the early-morning crowd of students, mostly
swimmers or runners or others who practiced during the off-hours, Ben smiled at
the occasional familiar face.
    “Morning,”
a kid said, nodding as Ben passed.
    “Yo,
McDunnough. See you this afternoon, man,” came from one of his boys.
    Ben
shoved open the door to the office he shared with Billy Wells and set his bag,
filled with the usual paraphernalia of coaching, down by his desk. Billy,
already red-faced in the rising heat, shifted the phone from one ear to the
other, yelling.
    “Jesus,
Jake, what the hell have you two been doing with all that cash?”
    Ben
pretended not to notice, sliding into the squeaky wooden chair he had been given
when he started at DeSoto, seventeen years before. It barely rolled on its
ancient metal castors across the bare wood floor beneath his desk. Billy was
shouting at his son-in-law, gathering an increasing head of steam with each
sentence until at last he slammed the phone violently down onto the receiver.
Ben had a daydream, when he was in the mood to allow it, where Billy was given
his own office somewhere upstairs with the fat, ex-military football coach and
that six-foot woman who coached volleyball, Mrs. Oaks. Then the little office,
with its large east-facing window and cluttered shelves of trophies and
scorecards, would be his. And then, for once in the many years he had worked
there, it might just be quiet.
    “That
boy,” Billy said, and Ben knew he was talking about Jake, who was at least
thirty-five, “is a jackass. I have no idea why Lee married him. Except that
he’s probably well hung. Hell, I know he is. I coached him long enough to have
witnessed the thing a time or two.”
    “Jesus,
Bill,” Ben said, shuffling through the ever-increasing pile of papers on his
desk. He did not want to know the size of Billy Wells’ son-in-law’s penis.
    “You’re
as sensitive as a goddamned girl, Ben.” Billy settled back into his seat,
tipping back and staring at the ceiling. “You watch the game last night?”
    “I
did,” Ben admitted. “Very exciting.”
    “The
problem,” Billy began, leaning forward earnestly, “is that in the end, it isn’t
ball, you know? Where’s the defense against a man who can hit a ball five
hundred fucking feet, fifty times a year?”
    “Pitching?”
Ben said mildly.
    “Fuck
pitching,” Billy said. “The fielders are slacking off, the infield’s a shambles
and no one remembers how to hit a good solid grounder so that when one of