Gone (Michael Bennett)

drive he’d just hit skidded off the grass in right and headed for the corner. Ellis made the turn at first, then laid on the speed as the Giants’ right fielder scooped it.
    Oh, no! Ray thought. The right fielder couldn’t hit for shit, but he had a gun for an arm. It was as if the entire stadium, the entire City of Angels, was holding its breath as the ball lasered toward second.
    Ellis’s headfirst sprawl and the ball arrived simultaneously. Ray groaned as the second baseman’s tag swept toward Ellis’s outstretched left hand. But no! At the last instant, Ellis pulled his hand in. He sailed past the bag and, at the final moment, hooked it with the toe of his spike. The umpire spread his arms wide. Safe! No outs, game tied, 3–3 in the seventh, and now they had a runner in scoring position!
    The whooshing freight-train roar of the crowd rose and then rose again as the Giants manager walked out of the dugout, toward the mound. Lincecum, the Giants’ freak of an ace pitcher, was being taken out!
    Ray’s breath caught as the air crackled with the hair-raising energy of fifty thousand people going nuts all at once. Annie pulled the Dodger-blue bandanna she was wearing off her head and started whipping it around as the stadium DJ busted out the “Ya’ll ready for this?” anthem.
    “Yeah! Wooohahoooo!” Kenny screamed as he pounded Ray on the back.
    Ray, smiling and getting beer spilled on him, soaked it all in. The churning sea of Dodger blue and white, the checkerboard pattern in the outfield grass, his best friend on one side, his wife on the other.
    As the crowd continued to roar, Ray dried a palm on the leg of his shorts and reached under Denise’s vintage Piazza jersey and cupped her belly, where their child was growing inside her.
    At eight weeks, their son or daughter had fingers now. Wrists and ankles, facial features, tiny eyelids squeezed shut. Its brain and lungs and liver were starting to form. He’d read all about it in the stack of baby books they had bought after Denise had shown him the two blue lines.
    Dodgers versus Giants. Doesn’t get any better than this , Ray thought, feeling the warmth under his hand. Hell, life didn’t get better. Especially when you considered other alternatives.
    Up until a year ago, Ray had been heavily involved in the LA nightclub drug scene. He’d bounced at first, then started dealing. Then he’d made enough to buy a club. Then two more.
    High on ecstasy and coke, paranoid and soul broken, he had awakened one afternoon after five years of the fast lane and put a gun in his mouth. As he was sitting there, searching desperately for a reason to keep on going and coming up empty, he had glanced at his phone and seen that he had gotten a text the night before from his old buddy Kenny.
    Once extremely tight, they had lost touch in the decade since high school. Kenny’s father had died, the text explained, and Kenny asked if Ray would come back up north to their hometown of Carmel for the wake.
    Going up there had been the greatest, wisest thing Ray had ever done in his life. Kenny was a normal guy, worked at a bank, had a wife, a kid, a house, a grill, a lawn. His friend had somehow managed to be happy without any strippers, hookers, criminals, coke, or hefty bags of dirty money anywhere in sight.
    Hanging out for the weekend, Ray suddenly remembered that he, too, had once been a human being instead of a disgusting, self-absorbed, cruel, drug-pushing scumbag. When Kenny set him up with Denise, a teller at his bank who was the sweetest, most delicate, most innocent, most beautiful woman he’d ever met, that was all she wrote. He sold the clubs, his drug business. Got out, got clean, climbed right the hell out of hell.
    Ray had hardly done a religious thing in his whole life—quite the opposite, in fact. But at that moment, as the Giants reliever threw his warm-up pitches, Ray Bowie looked up above the terraces of happy people to where the last silver burn of the sodium lights touched the black of the sky.
    Thank you , he mouthed.
    For all of it , he prayed, as a knock came at the glass at his back.

CHAPTER 61
     
    RAY TURNED. BEHIND THE patio door was a heavyset Hispanic guy with a necklace of access passes over his Dodger-blue stadium-staff polo shirt.
    “What’s up?” Denise said.
    “I don’t know,” Ray said. “You stay here. I’ll figure it out.”
    Ray pushed through the door. There were three other Hispanic stadium guys with the pudgy one.