The Shining Girls A Novel

Dan

1 JUNE 1992

Dan and Kirby are taking advantage of journalists’ privilege, sitting in the dugout looking out over the field, which is impossibly green against the warm red of the dirt and the crisp white lines cutting through it and the Boston ivy growing up the brickwork. The friendly confines are still empty, although the party has already started on the rooftops around the stadium.

The other reporters are setting up in the press box that floats high above the curves of gray plastic seating lining the stadium. But it’s still a good forty minutes before the punters start streaming in. The vendors have rolled up their shutters. The smell of hot dogs is percolating in the air. It’s one of Dan’s favorite times, when the whole place is full of potential. He’d be happier if he weren’t half-annoyed with Kirby.

‘I’m not just your access pass to the Sun-Times library. You have to do some real work,’ he snaps. ‘Especially if you actually want that college credit.’

‘I was working!’ she sparks with indignation. She is wearing some incomprehensible punky vest-top with a high turtleneck that covers her scar, like a priest’s cassock with the sleeves cut off. Which is not exactly going to fit in with the button-up-shirt-and-sports-jersey brigade in the press box. He was nervous about bringing her here. And now it seems with good reason. He ignores the distraction of the fine blonde hairs on her bare arms.

‘I gave you a list of approved questions. All you had to do was read them and add a question mark. Instead, I got Kevin and the guys telling me that while I’m busting my ass trying to get a useful soundbite out of Lefebvre, you’re in the Padres locker room playing cards and flirting.’

‘I did ask all your questions. And then I sat down to play poker. It’s called laying the groundwork. Solid journalistic principle, my lecturers tell me. It wasn’t even my idea. Sandberg dealt me in. I won twenty bucks.’

‘You reckon you can get away with playing the cute naïve girl? That act’s going to let you get away with stuff your whole life?’

‘I think I can get away with being interested and interesting. I think curiosity trumps ignorance. I think comparing scars helps.’

Dan smirks, just a little. ‘I heard about that. Sammy Sosa really showed you his butt?’

‘Wow. Talk about sensationalizing the news. Who told you that? It was his lower back, just above his hip. Besides, it’s not like they don’t get naked in the showers right in front of you. He had this huge bruise from walking into one of those big metal trash cans. He didn’t see it, he was saying goodbye to a friend and half-turned around and wham! He said he’s clumsy sometimes.’

‘Huh. If he drops the ball, that quote is so going in.’

‘I even wrote it down for you. And I got something else that was interesting. We were chatting about travelling, being away all the time. I told them that funny story about how I was crashing on the couch of a girl I met in a video store in LA and she tried to get me into a threesome with her boyfriend and I ended up on the street at 4 a.m., walking around until the sun came up. It was really beautiful, watching the whole city come alive.’

‘I haven’t heard that story.’

‘That was it. Anyway. I said it was good to come back to Chicago, and I asked Greg Maddux how he felt living here, and he got a bit weird.’

‘Weird how?’

Kirby checks her notebook. ‘I wrote it down when I got outside. He said: ‘Why would I want to go anywhere else? The people are so friendly. Not just the fans, but the cabbies, hotel porters, folks on the street. In other cities people act like they are doing you a favor.’ And then he winked and started telling me about his favorite swear words.’

‘You didn’t follow up?’

‘He railroaded me. I wanted to. I thought it would make a good piece, ballplayer’s Chitown. Top five recommendations, restaurants, parks, clubs, hang-outs, whatever. And then Lefebvre came back in and I got chucked out so they could get ready for the game, and I started thinking it was a peculiar thing to say out of nowhere.’

‘I’ll give you that.’

‘You think he’s planning a move?’

‘Or considering it. Mad Dog’s a control freak. He likes to push things as far as he can. He was definitely playing you. Which means we should keep an eye on it.’

‘Little rough on the Cubs if he’s planning to bail.’

‘No, I get it. You gotta go where your best chances are to play ball like you mean it. He’s hot stuff right now.’

‘Oh really? You go that way?’

‘You know what I mean, obstreperous girl.’

‘Yeah.’ She shoulders him, affectionately. Her skin is so warm from the sunshine that he can feel it right through his shirt, like she’s burned him.

‘Anything else up your sleeve?’ he says, moving away, trying to be casual about it. Thinking, You’re being ridiculous, Velasquez. What are you, fifteen?

‘Give me a chance,’ she says. ‘There’ll be more poker games.’

‘Sooner you than me. I’m a terrible bluffer.’ Really terrible. ‘Come on, we should be heading up.’

‘Can’t we watch from there?’ Kirby points out the green scoreboard that looms over the centerfield bleachers. He’s thought the same thing. It’s beautiful. Real Americana, with its clean white font and windows that open between the slats where the numbers go.

‘You and every other punter. It’s not going to happen. That’s one of the last hand-turned score-boards in the country. They’re very protective. No-one gets in.’

‘But you have.’

‘I earned the right.’

‘Bullshit. How did you do it?’

‘I did a profile on the guy who turns the score. He’s been doing it for decades. He’s a legend.’

‘Do you think he’d let me flip one?’

‘I think your chances are minimal. Besides, I know how your mind works by now. You only want to go because no one else is allowed to.’

‘I think it’s really a secret gentleman’s club where the most powerful men in America plan the future of the country, with cocktails and strippers, while an innocent baseball game plays out below.’

‘It’s a bare room with a battered floor, and it gets as hot as hell.’

‘Sure. That’s exactly what someone who was trying to protect the secrets of the club would say.’

‘All right, I’ll try to get you up there sometime. But only after you’ve gone through initiation and mastered the secret handshake.’

‘Promise?’

‘Swear to the man upstairs. But only on condition that when we get up to the press box in front of my colleagues, you pretend that I chewed you out for being unprofessional, and you feel real remorse.’

‘So much remorse.’ She grins. ‘But I’m holding you to that, Dan Velasquez.’

‘Believe me, I know.’

His anxiety about her not fitting in turns out to be pointless. She doesn’t and is all the more charming for it.

‘It’s like the United Nations in here. With a better view,’ Kirby cracks, looking around at the rows of phones and men, mostly, sitting behind the nametags of whichever media outlet they’re representing, already taking notes or jabbering pre-game blather into the handsets.

‘Yeah, but this is much more serious,’ Dan says. She laughs, and that’s really all he wants.

‘Sure, what’s world peace compared to baseball?’

‘This your intern?’ Kevin says. ‘I should get me one. Does she do laundry?’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t trust her with that,’ Dan shoots back. ‘But she gets good quotes.’

‘Can I borrow her?’

Dan is about to bristle on Kirby’s behalf, but she has a comeback already lined up. ‘Sure, but I’ll need a raise. What’s double of free?’

That draws a laugh from half the room, and why shouldn’t it? The game is underway. The Cubs’ bats are starting to make some noise. The tension in the press box ramps up, everyone suddenly very focused on the action playing out on the diamond below. They might actually win this. And he’s happy to see her getting caught up in it too. The magic.

Afterwards, Dan phones it in among the hubbub of other reporters doing the same, reading from his notebook and his scrawled handwriting that is so illegible, Kirby says, that he might as well be writing prescriptions. The Cubs took it in the seventh inning after the game slowed into a vicious pitchers’ duel, largely thanks to brand-new golden boy Mad Dog Maddux.

He claps Kirby across her shoulders. ‘Nice work, kiddo. You might even be cut out for this.’