What Hearts by Bruce Brooks Page B

quick reading of his own face and decided it showed surprise, and a frustration he was ashamed of, frozen there the instant Joel burst in. He knew it was clear, what he had been about to do. And it was too late to shift into some sort of welcoming smile now. So he kept Joel’s eye straight on,and watched as his friend came to realize his treachery.
    He saw Joel get it, reject the idea, then get it again. Joel looked around, and found his mother leaning against the back wall. In the auditorium, no one else moved or spoke; it was as if a sudden lightning storm were flashing incomprehensibly above their heads.
    Joel swung his eyes back to Asa. And there, in those bright eyes, Asa watched the flutter of pain disappear, replaced in a flicker by cheery acquiescence. Joel smiled, a huge one, genuine, frank, full of acceptance of himself and the strategies necessary to get around him; he shrugged, gestured for Asa to go on. Then he looked down the rows to his left for a seat.
    From the wings, Mrs. Brock now said, “Go ahead, Asa. Go on, now.” Asa swallowed. He looked around the auditorium, taking in the expectant faces. One of them was Joel’s, already watching him with the same expression of readiness to be thrilled. The quick lightning storm was over. Showtime.
    â€œGood evening,” he repeated. His voice was thin; he swallowed, licked his lips, took abreath that felt like water. He looked at Joel. Joel nodded. “All right,” Asa said. “Okay.” He decided, and drew another breath. This one felt warm and dry. “Now. A change. The next item in the program was to have been a dual recitation of ‘The Highwayman’ by Alfred Noyes, performed by Joel Prescott and Asa Hill. There has been a change.” He glanced around the room. The faces waited. “Instead of ‘The Highwayman,’ Joel and I will now recite ‘Little Boy Blue’ by Eugene Field. We think you will like it.” He paused. “Joel?”
    Joel was already hustling down the aisle, fingers at his tie, lips moving confidently over remembered words.

OUT
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    ONE
    The dew was falling. Asa frowned and scuffed the grass with his right foot. In twenty minutes it would be slick as wet tile. He sighed. This was the peril of playing in the second game of the evening: the dew always fell.
    Far away at home plate, the batter swung. Asa jumped as he always did when the ball sprang off the bat. This time it was not sailing to him in center field; it lifted straight up in front of home plate. Asa kept moving anyway, his feet keeping pace with the choices his intuition made. He watched the catcher, looking straight up, spin and stagger in a rough circle as the ball peaked and began to drop. Asa trotted low and quiet along a curved shadow that ran between left and center, where the pools of light from the high spots did not quite meet.
    The ball came down just as the catcher, in mid-step, was recovering from a dizzy half turn, two feet inside the first baseline. The ball glanced off the heel of his mitt like a waterfall off a rock. The kid who had hit it and run looked back as he rounded first. He hesitated a second while the catcher whirled his head around in confusion, looking for the ball the way a dog does when someone stands on it for a joke; then the runner lit out for second. The catcher found the ball, looked up, saw the runner, and, swaddled by his heavy gear and strained by his panic at the infielders’ screams, unleashed a wild throw that disappeared into, the black sky fifteen feet over the shortstop’s head. The runner, grinning, kept right on running, around second, lightly and surely for third.
    Forty feet beyond the shortstop, however, stood Asa, unnoticed. He hollered the third baseman’s name, calmly caught the catcher’s wild ball on the fly, turned, and fired it—tamed and orderly now—on one hop to third. The third baseman, alerted by the holler, caught it and neatly tagged