it was over the fence, and the first base umpire, who had jogged into the outfield to make the call on the play, was jogging back in, tracing circles with his right hand in the air, signaling a home run. When Edward Everett was back in the dugout, some of his teammates gave him a gruff check, their shoulder to his, knocking him about, and he sat, dripping and incredulous, until someone threw him a towel and he dried off his face and hair, kicking his spikes at the concrete step beneath the bench, knocking out clods of mud.
In the bottom of the fifth, although Montreal tried to stall, the hitters insisting on stepping out after every pitch, to dry their own bats, to call over to the batboy to bring them a rosined rag, and then taking their time to wipe their bat handles, the St. Louis pitcher retired the first two with remarkable efficiency, one on a slow roller back to the mound, the second on a weak line drive to second. In right field, Edward Everett found himself praying, One more out, one more out, and then they would call the game, and it would be in the books, eleven–nothing, Edward Everett four-for-four, a cycle, it came to him for the first time: single double triple home run.
The third batter was left-handed, someone who didn’t hit for much average but had some power, seventeen home runs already, and Edward Everett drifted back slightly. The rain was falling harder; from two hundred feet behind the infielders, he felt separated from them by a liquid silver curtain that shifted in the wind. At the plate, the hitter stepped out, and even from where he was, Edward Everett could tell he was making some remark to the umpire about the lunacy of playing in such weather, but the umpire gestured him to step back in, and he did.
Because of the wind and the rain and the distance, Edward Everett could see him swing at the one-ball, two-strike pitch, but the sound of the bat striking the ball got swallowed up and came muffled a moment later, and he had no idea how to judge it; he saw a flash of beige arcing toward him and he wondered, Come in or drop back? He hesitated, unable to figure its trajectory, watching it push through the rain—was it climbing or falling, climbing or falling?—and then he picked it up, descending, and he started to run in to catch it, before realizing he had misjudged it. He backpedaled, tripping momentarily over his own feet but keeping his balance, his eye on the ball, until he felt the change in the ground beneath him, grass no more, but clay and cinders, the warning track, and then his back was pressed against the eight-foot-high chain-link fence and he knew if he jumped, he could catch it for what he knew would be the end of the game, five full innings in the books, his cycle safe, not erased by the rain.
He locked his fingers into the chain link to give himself balance for his leap and then he jumped, reaching for the ball, knowing he had gauged the flight of it impeccably, but then he was twisting, falling away from it, one of his spikes caught in the fence, and he was flailing, still reaching for the ball, although he knew it was beyond him, out of the park, and he was falling to the ground, his cleat still caught in the fence, his right knee twisting in a direction he never thought it could go, and still the fence held him, dangling, his shoulder on the wet track, gravity pulling him against his own body, until the fence finally let him go, and he lay there, pain slicing his knee.
Then he was two people: the body lying there, pelted with rain and something else, hail the size of peas, and the self saying to the body, All right, get up now, and the body saying No. He was laughing, he realized, the body of him was laughing, and the other self was thinking, You’re in shock, you’re in shock, and the pain rolled in waves up his leg, into his hip, and then rose higher on his body, seeming to swallow him for the briefest of moments. He blacked out.
Chapter Three
Years later, he thought of that moment when he was caught in the chain-link fence in another country as a kind of border defining