Playing Days Read Free Page A

for him. Lazy lazy lazy; he sang it out like a church hymn. Holy holy holy. Olaf lifted his hand and lowered his head, a characteristic gesture.
    â€˜I know what you’re saying,’ Charlie added. ‘Leave me alone. Well, I won’t.’
    The voices of Germans often sound sweet in English as weak tea. ‘No, I tell you what I say,’ Olaf said. ‘Du kannst mich am Arsch lecken, Kleiner.’
    This caused a small sensation, of quiet, and Charlie asked, looking around, ‘What’s that, what’s that?’
    Darmstadt, still shifting on his feet against the wall, started giggling. ‘That boy’ll laugh at anything,’ Charlie said. ‘That boy’ll laugh if you throw him off a bridge.’
    Olaf continued in German, ‘It is a shameful thing, I think, to come here and beat up on little kids.’
    Smiling, Charlie turned to me. ‘What’d that lazy son of a bitch say? What’d he say?’
    For a second, I met his stare. Milo called out, clapping his hands, ‘Wir haben einen Dolmetscher!Einen Dolmetscher.’ An ugly humble German word for translator. Olaf looked over, too, and I could tell from something sheepish in his glance that he was a little afraid of what he’d said, a little afraid of Charlie.
    I looked at Charlie, I looked at Olaf, and I looked at Herr Henkel, who said with a forced laugh, ‘Take it easy, Charlie.’ He had a kind, ordinary, Bavarian face: brown and dignified and rough. The face of a prosperous farmer. Only when he joked or smiled, something cruder broke out in it, a humor he had picked up in the locker room. He was smiling very slightly now.
    â€˜I thought this was what you paid me for. My preseason pep talk.’
    But Henkel put his hand on the black man’s head. ‘No, we don’t pay you for this. You give us this extra.’
    â€˜I’m a generous man,’ Charlie said.
    A few minutes later, Henkel called the meeting to order and launched into his own ‘preseason pep talk.’ He outlined what he expected of us, his ambitions for the year, and also described the way the next few weeks would play out. In spite of the bad temper and awkwardness of the meal, I was touched to see how many of the men were sentimentally affected. Partly because they were a little drunk. Olaf rested his cheek on his large palm. Milo, as Henkel stood up to propose a toast, quickly stubbed out a cigarette and refilled his glass. You can’t imagine such an odd collection of human kind – like mismatched chairs in a junk shop. Almost everybody there was some combination of too tall or too fator too skinny. ‘To winning,’ Henkel said, ‘because it is better than losing.’ We all cheered hopefully.
    It was Charlie who drove me home after lunch – I mean, to my new apartment. His car was a little bigger than the others, a VW Golf with a pair of miniature Nike hightops dangling from the rear view mirror. I wondered if he was staking some kind of claim to me. We drove back through town and up into the hills again, the hills that opened out into farmland, and passed under the red brick arch of an abandoned railroad bridge. Only trees used the tracks now.
    On the right a horse farm perched on a narrow strip of level land; beyond it, the ground fell away into a wooded valley. Charlie turned left, up a short concrete drive and parked behind a row of shuttered garage doors, which ran along the back of a big purple sixties apartment complex. He didn’t get out to help me with my bag, but the way he sat there suggested that he wanted to say something, and I waited a moment before opening the door. As I had with my father, twelve hours before.
    â€˜I have high hopes, young man,’ he said, ‘that we can make it out of the minor leagues this year. Karl won’t be sticking around, so we better make good use. But everybody got they role to play. You too.’ After a pause, he repeated,