Gordon is a married man.
He was Gordon, mid-forties, rustic, bearded, thick-bodied and flat-bellied but not skinny, he bulged all over, like his body didn’t realize how muscular he was. He was good with kids, which Mason had always thought was sexy. Judging from the callused fingers and the scuffed workboots in place of athletic shoes, he was some kind of blue-collar worker, but Mason didn’t know what he actually did for a living.
Mason thought Gordon was great; the way he milled about dumpily in his ill-fitting clothes (which occasionally bared a flash of his hairy belly or well-muscled back); his uncaring swagger and focus on the game, the work-built muscles — you could tell he didn’t go to a gym, at least not regularly enough to matter, but he must have worked his muscles all day every day.
Gordon loved baseball. Unlike Mason, he not only thought it was a good sport, he considered it exciting. He spent hours at the batting cages nearly every weekend; he watched every Orioles game and nearly every other major league game; he even watched the Japanese, Mexican and minor-league teams (he had favorite teams in every league). He owned all the gear and could recite all the stats for his favorite players. He knew every World Series victory, the points and the plays — he could give you the play by play of every World Series game, and he could name every player and their vital stats too.
So he did get very frustrated watching the children play, dropping the ball over and over, failing repeatedly to swing the bat and generally just making more errors than Gordon had ever thought possible. But on those rare occasions when a kid did do it well, when it all worked — when his boy had caught the ball and dived for second-base to successfully tag a runner out — it seemed like a magical sport. Gordon thought less of anyone who considered baseball boring. It was the most elegant sport in the world.
When it worked, it was like ballet, he thought, not that he’d ever say that out loud.
Somehow being a blue-collar redneck had gone from stud to ugly tubby lardass even though his appearance hadn’t changed that much — women just interpreted it differently now that he was older and still had a blue-collar career and his thick body didn’t have that almost-six-pack he’d always had. He’d gained about fifteen pounds on his high school body, but it seemed like so much more.
