Bullet Point Read Free

“The economy’s going to get better, right, Coach? What if it gets better soon, like by the summer? Then we could have a team again next year.”
    The coach gazed at him. Those cold blue eyes didn’t look quite so cold. “Yeah, sure, anything’s possible. And I’m the last one to run my mouth on any of this. But we got complicated problems, maybe more complicated than people can handle.”
    “But people made the problems in the first place, didn’t they, Coach?”
    The coach smiled. His teeth were yellowish plus a couplewere missing, but there was something nice about his smile. “Got a head on your shoulders,” he said.
    Wyatt didn’t get that at all. Except for math—and not that he was great at math, B’s, yes, but he wasn’t in the top stream—he was an average student, maybe below.
    “You’re a smart kid, is what I’m saying,” the coach explained, perhaps because Wyatt was standing there with his mouth open. Wyatt came pretty close to arguing the point. “Want some advice? About playing ball, I mean. An old dumbass like me ain’t qualified to opinionate about nothin’ else.”
    What was going on? Wyatt had never heard the coach talking like this; he was always confident, teaching the team, Wyatt figured, how to be confident by example. “Yeah,” he said, “sure.”
    “Reason I’m tellin’ you this,” Coach Bouchard said, “is you’ve got some talent for the game, maybe the kind, if it keeps developin’ and you grow some more, that’ll take you to a college. Not sayin’ D-One, you understand, no promises on that score, and notice I’m not breathin’ a word about pro ball, but—somewheres. Meaning scholarship money, son, and the chance to get a real education. You follow?”
    Wyatt nodded. College: that would be something. How much more did he have to grow? Wyatt was a hair over five ten and built solid, weighing one seventy-five.
    “My advice,” said the coach, “is for you to get out of here fast.”
    “Get out of where, Coach?”
    “This school, this town. Got to establish residence in someother town, a town that’s got a high school with a good baseball program.”
    Establish residence? What did that mean? He named the only team from their district that had given them trouble last season. “Like Millerville High?”
    The coach snorted. “Think Millerville’s in any better shape than us? Same thing could happen there, if not this month then next, or next year. No, where you gotta go is someplace more prosperous, the kind of town that’ll have baseball no matter what, even in a crappy economy.”
    Wyatt tried to think of towns like that. He hadn’t traveled much, had been out of state only once, last year when the four of them—he, Cammy, Linda, Rusty—had taken a trip to Disneyland. He’d seen prosperity on that trip—they’d spent an hour or so driving around Beverly Hills—but the coach couldn’t be meaning somewhere like that. Was there even a high school in Beverly Hills? That would be like transferring to the moon.
    “I’m thinkin’ Silver City,” the coach said.
    “Silver City?” It was at the other end of the state, four hundred miles away.
    “Know any folks down that way?”
    “No.”
    “Not an issue—I got some contacts at Bridger High. I’ll make some calls—just say the word.”
    “So, I’d be, like, living in Silver City?”
    “Exactly. Living there. Residing. Can’t just parachute in and suit up. That’s only in The Show.” Coach Bouchard laughed.
    Wyatt didn’t get the joke. “But, uh, Coach, living with who?”
    “Some family that likes baseball. Boosters, kind of thing. Coach down there’s Bobby Avril—should be able to set you up, no problem. Bobby sent a kid to Tulane last year, full ride, and another one to Arizona State.”
    Full ride: sounded like words to make a magic spell. This was all so much. Wyatt tried to line it up in his mind the way the English teacher did on the blackboard, using—what were those marks called?