Who is Rich?. Matthew Klam

the base path, unsure, reached second, and stared right at me as she stomped testily on the base with both feet. Stomped as though to defy me. But no one had bothered to anchor the base, so it skipped out from under her and she fell.

      And didn’t get up.

      The pitcher, Stan, walked to second base. The shortstop knelt. Nobody seemed to be moving. As I got closer, I saw that her whole mood had shifted; she’d come to a sitting position, her arm in her lap. She seemed drunk, the way a drunk is soft, sleepy, in shadows, fighting to stay awake; she was staring down into her lap as if a haze floated in front of her. Looking at her arm, I had to force myself to breathe. It was my fault, I’d done it. I pushed that thought away.

      “What’s up?” Carl asked, standing so close he was brushing my shoulder. He hadn’t seen her fall. Then he looked. I watched his face change. She was sitting with one leg folded under herself, foot turned, knees bent, so that the whiteness of her inner thighs showed.

      The girl kneeling beside her talked in a loud voice, holding Amy’s forearm. “Tip your head forward, that’s good, now deep breath, just relax, you’re gonna be fine, don’t look, it’s okay, I’ve got your arm,” and Amy saying, in a kind of husky, sleepy voice, “I don’t want to look,” and then a guy in a Red Sox cap came over and draped her arm with a T-shirt.

      The security guard called for an ambulance. Vicky walked across the infield dirt, squinted at Amy, then turned to me. Our former and potential closeness made me think she could read my mind. My thoughts were slow and bleating and obstructed, but I noted, finally, that Amy had been a kind of home, a vessel for my discombobulated mind, that my own family treated me like a footstool but this stranger had cared for my soul. At some point, we could hear sirens on the highway. They decided to get Amy out of the sun, and with heavy assistance, she stood and took a few unsteady steps and began lowering herself down to the grass, her legs bending, collapsing, as her handlers bumped into each other, holding her arm, wavering, guiding her down, her legs folded beneath her, all wrong. They raised her up again as though it had been their fault.

      “Ready?”

      “Sure.”

      And again she went down, and this time she tucked her chin and went completely out.

      “Amy?” the girl said, kneeling. We all waited. “Can you hear me?”

      “Uh-huh.”

      “Do you faint easily?”

      She nodded.

      “I wish you’d told me that before. I wouldn’t have moved you.”

      Amy’s gaze drifted down to the T-shirt covering her arm, as if it were some new friend. “I didn’t know until I fainted.”

      An EMT and three paramedics arrived, asking a series of questions—name, day of the week, name of the U.S. president—and each time Amy answered politely.

      “Can you move your fingers?”

      “I can but I don’t want to, but thank you.”

      The slapstick fainting, the bone snapped at nearly mid-forearm, crooked and flopping in the sleeve of her skin, not life-threatening but stomach-churning, her broken summer day, her arm lying in her lap, all of us standing over her as Carl used the security guard’s walkie-talkie. They strapped her to a red steel chair on wheels. I knelt down and attempted to communicate without making known any extramural bond between us.

      “Do you want me to come with you?”

      She shook her head. The whole bottom half of her face was trembling. Sweat or some kind of moisture pooled in her eyes. Carl signed off and handed the radio back to the guard. The hell with it. They wheeled her out.

      Vicky stood beside me, sighing loudly, and when I looked at her she gave me a deep, penetrating stare. When I couldn’t come up with anything to say, she went behind the dugout and started smoking.

      We resumed the game. Other people fell to the ground with injuries. Stan stumbled off the mound, holding his elbow. Luther Voigt pulled a hamstring. During my turn at bat I hit a fizzing pop-up, and felt something go in my back, and couldn’t stand up straight, and walking back to the dugout I used the bat as a cane, and watched from the bench as a string of elderly, scarred, limping septuagenarians hit and ran to the satisfying cheers of our team. I had one decent catch in left off a whistling line drive, and another off a deep fly ball. Both times I thought my legs would crumple and I’d fall to the ground, waiting for those balls to bang into my mitt, but I didn’t.