The Cactus League

by Emily Nemens

  No, it’s not bad, she thinks as she settles into her breakfast. It’s the last week of February, there’s a game on this afternoon, and as the sun reaches over the McDowells, the tiles begin to warm under her bare feet.

  * * *

  Tami’s not racist, but she knows better than to go for the Hispanic players. Not that she doesn’t like them, but they won’t like her. Those guys will pick a younger woman, sometimes even young enough to get them into trouble. She got Anaheim’s Latin American scout drunk once, and all he wanted to talk about was how his top prospects kept getting themselves into teen pussy, and team counsel was on his ass. Apparently the age of consent is twelve in Panama, fourteen in Paraguay. And they’re babies themselves, the DR prospects signing the day they turn sixteen if they’re any sort of talent. Shit, she’d made a boatload of bad decisions at sixteen.

  And she doesn’t mean to stereotype, but the few black guys still playing professional baseball (the numbers have dwindled since the Rickey Henderson years), aren’t usually interested in women like her. They’ll go to the “urban” clubs in the rehabbed warehouse blocks north of the train station to find edgy sorority sisters and dancers for the Suns. There are exceptions, of course. Tami had a nice time with a Padre originally from Arkansas; he had a thing for chicken-bone blondes with big hair. She hadn’t worn her hair like that since Lubbock, but teasing it came back like riding a bike.

  No, as a single woman in her midforties, Tami’s best shot is with the white guys. Not Joanne’s masters of the clubhouse—too old for her—or the deer-in-the-headlights rookies, young enough to be a son, but guys a few years in, going through a hard patch. Maybe they’re struggling on the field or coming back from an injury. Wading through a divorce or adjusting to a trade. Mourning a dead parent or worrying over a sick kid. Vulnerable, somehow or other. Those are the ones to try for; they’re the ones who need it. Sometimes they remind Tami of her Danny, how after a game there was nothing he wanted more than to lay his head in her lap. It’s nice to be needed like that.

  * * *

  Tami knows an old wino, Troy, who worked the left field gate at Scottsdale Municipal; after flashing him a smile and doing her best shoulder-shimmy hello, maybe throwing in an I’m-glad-to-see-you-too hug, he always let her in. Someone was feeling generous and hired him at Salt River Fields, and when she steps up to the gate, he acts like it’s the world’s biggest coincidence they’ve found each other here. No harm in acting like she’s bowled over, too.

  She picks a section by the right field line, close to the rolled-up tarp, and takes in the new stadium. Nice grandstand, pleasant-looking general-admission lawn (not that she’d ever sit in the grass), McDowell Mountains on the horizon. Good sight lines from the seats on either side. The architect used a bunch of exposed steel beams and curved a minimalist canopy around home, details that made it feel modern and maybe even a bit slick. She sits down with her latte and the spring season program. Jason Goodyear and Trey Townsend, the team’s two Gold Glove outfielders, are smiling back at her, with a banner across the front about them being “the golden boys” of the L.A. Lions. Clever. Jason Goodyear, with his hunky good looks and shoulders that suggested he could be the bottom of a cheer pyramid all by himself, would be her kind of guy, except that he was dating movie stars, right up until he married that teacher. Phoenix girl, if she remembers right, some sort of collegiate athlete. And she’s tried with Trey—they were at the same cocktail bar one night several seasons back, him sitting with that partial owner, Stephen Smith—but she wasn’t as interesting as the itch on his ankle.

  Flipping through the program, she sees plenty of names she recognizes. Some go back to that improbable postseason run in 2008. She’d watched from the edge of her seat, the time with Hal recent enough she felt invested. Lots of new faces, too. She’ll have them memorized by the end of the day. “A gift,” her daddy’d called her memory for a lineup.

  There’s still an hour thirty to first pitch. The field’s morning watering is sparkling the sod in a pretty way. Tami loves this time before the game, being surrounded by the thwack of hard leather on soft, the wooden ping of a practice bat making contact. Baseball sounds, carrying across the field—not for a rapt audience, not because the game is on the line, but just because these motions are essential. Throwing and catching are like sleeping and eating for these men: natural, necessary. Now, of course she likes a nail-biter as much as anyone, but this warm-up is something else. Elemental.

  She glances over to the boxes on the other side of home, but it’s too far to see anything distinct, much less if Ronnie’s there.

  Down on the grass, Greg Carver is throwing easy balls with the catcher Jimmy Cardozo. She first saw Carver throw last week, during a bullpen session. A right-handed fastballer, twenty-seven and lanky. Just coming back from Tommy John. Tami wasn’t the only one standing by the fence; some snowbird in a plaid polo was watching, too, his fingers looped through the chain link. He smiled at her—dentures—when she approached. Some of these retirees just about live for the spring.

  There was a bucket of balls next to the mound, a queue that went back past second. At home plate, the stand-in batter never took his bat off his shoulder. The pitching coach—Stu Walsh, a lefty Tami remembers playing back when she was a little girl—stood just behind the mound, his face stony under his ball cap, whispering notes to a guy with a clipboard. Every pitcher had eight balls to make an impression.

  The retiree said Carver had been a high draft in 2005. Was climbing like normal till his elbow went kapow. The Lions still hoped to make a starter out of him, but during his long convalescence, Victor Vásquez, a prospect from the DR, had come up quicker than anyone expected. Now, the old man explained, the team had a fight on its hands. The last spot in the rotation. He seemed to relish the conflict, the possibility of someone’s dreams being quashed. She noticed he was wearing a wedding ring, and also caught him staring at her tits.

  At the bullpen session Carver threw seven strikes in a row, a few of them looking ninety-five. Walsh seemed unimpressed, right up until the last throw went wild, sailing so fast and high that it sent the batter scrambling onto all fours. At that, Walsh cursed under his breath—but not so quiet that Tami could not hear—and pointed Carver to the back of the line.

  Now, watching Carver ready another throw, Tami wonders how he’s doing. Walsh’s scrutiny, the swarm of aspiring arms, coaches cutting a dozen athletes every Thursday. Does that sort of pressure help or hurt? And how is his arm feeling, finally pitching again? A cloud passes over his face and he rockets another to Cardozo, a fast and perfect strike. The catcher hoots and breaks into a gap-toothed grin.

  “Tami. How are you?” She just about jumps out of her skin at his voice, the baritone popping up behind her like a surprise foul ball.

  She turns. “Hi, Ronnie.”

  The first time Tami saw Ronald Duncan, over at Scottsdale Municipal, she thought he was a scout. He was sitting next to a couple of front-office guys. Tan, with an open-neck team polo and a head of handsome gray, leaning into the game with a notebook on his lap. She’d already had a round with a twenty-eight-year-old from Seattle who’d left camp early with a hamstring injury; why not spread her wings and try something new?

  She’d had Troy pass him a note in the seventh inning, and when Ronnie came up to her that night at the wine bar, he didn’t correct her assumption about being with the organization. By the time Tami figured out he wasn’t—Ronnie was a developer, that notebook was full of property values, nothing at all on pitch velocity—they were most of the way through dinner and getting along well enough.

  Scottsdale has always had its rich ($25 million compounds in the hills, golf courses that cost fifty dollars a hole), but during the boom a lot of folks in the middle were looking up, stars and dollar signs in their eyes. Ronnie made a fortune on those kind: people eager for better schools and fancier zip codes and more expensive groceries. Nobody seemed to care if the houses were shoddy in their bones—the plumbing unr
eliable, the windows leaky, closets framed off plumb—so long as the driveways were long, the pools deep, the ceilings high.

  By summer, Tami’d quit Taliesin and Ronnie was focused on Salt River—by his math it was not worth working on other projects until the market improved or the contractors got so desperate they undercut themselves by half again. Waiting game, he was fond of saying, tapping his temple and flashing a white-toothed grin. Meanwhile, Ronnie’d weaseled his way out of most of the rest of his bad situations before the shit really hit the oscillating fan. He was one of the few local developers who could claim that, who didn’t eat his hat. As for Salt River, the tribe had plenty of money, and was expecting plenty more revenue from the casino, so construction proceeded apace. Ronnie expedited paperwork, smoothed out construction contracts, “liaised” with city hall (probably greased some palms, too, but Tami’s not one to ask questions). He visited the site every Tuesday, hard-hat tours from when it was a rat maze of inlaid irrigation pipes to a horseshoe of concrete slabs to a steely skeleton to done (not once inviting Tami to join, either).

  “That coffee?” He raises his left eyebrow like he guesses it’s not. It was a thing they did sometimes, slipped whiskey into coffee cups and walked around the fancy outdoor mall. Camouflaged rum cocktails in soda cans and visited those cowboy art galleries downtown. Drinking on the links. He was a member at three of the better golf clubs in town—a developer’s perk—and she wasn’t a bad shot. They’d giggle like teenagers, and somehow those sunburned days slipped by.

  “Yes, Ronnie.” It comes out sharper than she means it to.

  “Fine.” He makes himself comfortable in the seat next to hers. “How’s the house?”

  “You made me quit, remember?” she says, thinking of Frank Lloyd Wright’s winter compound. Ronnie didn’t like it when she wasn’t available, sneered at the word retail like it was something stinking on the bottom of his shoe—and sniffed at nonprofit like it didn’t smell much better. When they split up, Tami called the HR gal at the house and told her she was available to come back. No spots open, the woman said. Tami asked if she could sub. I’ll make a note of it, she said, her tone bristly enough that Tami wondered if she knew about the missing scarves, the solid-silver cufflinks.

  “Not that house. Mine.”

  By the time they’d met, Ronnie had gotten rid of almost all the lots in Sandia Hills, his tanking 180-home development, making the half-built homes and empty foundations another man’s headache. But the model home (five bedrooms and four baths, fancy appliances, marble) was still on his rolls. Tami was a proud woman, is a proud woman, but she had been living in a real craphole of a one-bedroom in South Scottsdale and she can spot a gift horse from a quarter mile. No word on it since they split, but really, she’s doing him a favor, making sure no one breaks in, steals the appliances, and strips the pipes. There’s been a lot of craziness going on.

  “Right.” A bunch of players jog up the warning track, slow and easy. “It’s fine.”

  Ronnie follows her gaze. “Scouting another player?”

  She can feel her brow wrinkle. “How’s the project over on Paradise going?” Paradise East is his latest, or his last, and it might actually lose him a big chunk of money. The prospect makes her a smidge happy—she always hated his ego, how he strutted around town. “Make any more sales?”

  The men are jogging backward now, toward home in a bumbling cluster. They tell fielders not to run backward—you’ll get your feet tangled up—but they also say to never take your eye off the ball. One of those things is more important than the other.

  “How are Jeremy and Connor?” he asks. His eyes are also on the players, but he knows exactly where to hit.

  “The same. Fine.” Tami hardly speaks with her sons anymore. Holidays she hears from them, birthdays if she’s lucky. They made it pretty clear they were done with her as soon as they had a choice in the matter.

  “What do your boys think about you going for guys their age?” Two players collide and land on their duffs, cleats in the air.

  “You don’t know anything about my boys.” Tami wishes she’d never told him about it, her want for ballplayers. It was stupid. Wined-up pillow talk. He’d wanted to know what turned her on—probably was waiting to hear her say tanned real estate execs with bleached teeth—but she’d told him the truth: power, potential, and a well-developed upper back. She laid it all out, the stuff about the possibility and drive of these men, before she even realized what she was saying, before she understood that something so honest could hurt, him and her both. They laughed about it at the time, but something changed. They were never particularly nice to each other, but after that night he stepped up his jabs, his mean-spirited asides. By January, it felt like a full-contact sport. Love was never really on the table with Ronnie—companionship was, sex was, and there was something comfortable about having someone handsome by her side. Less so when that someone was sneering. So when, two weeks before pitchers and catchers, she suggested they split, he didn’t seem very broken up about it. Just said, “Figures.”

  Ronnie stands. In retrospect, Tami can see they were both lonely, that more than anything else. He says, “I hope you have a good season, Tami.”

  She doesn’t watch him leave; she’s looking for the guy who caused the pileup. It’s William Goslin, the baby-faced rookie. The boy rises slowly and brushes himself off. His cheeks are flushed red.

  She finishes her coffee and watches the team ease through the rest of their pregame stretches and rounds of toss. They act so casual, all loping limbs and toothy grins. As the crowd fills in around her, the players’ movements focus into sharpened points: the infield does whip-fast throws around the horn, the outfield tosses sail high and higher. Before she knows it, everyone is standing for the national anthem, and then the first batter steps up to the plate.

  * * *

  When did she start loving baseball? Well, her daddy’d take her and her brothers to the minor league stadium in Lubbock a few times a season, spoil them sick with soda and peanuts. Tami learned how to keep score at age seven. By eight she could spot a strong arm the way an architect senses a perfect site, the way a divorcée tastes want on her tongue. Was it intuition? A sixth sense? She’s not sure. It was just a feeling she had.

  Danny was a rocketballer, one of the best prospects in the state. She was cheering then, team captain, and even though the school didn’t generally send the squad to baseball games, Tami insisted they go, and that meant they went, stomped around on top of the dugout, waving their pompoms at the crowd and flashing their panties at every player coming off the field. Danny got recruited into a D-I program, and Tami was so proud, she married the guy. Tami’s mom had to sign her marriage certificate, Tami being seventeen, and the woman groused about it plenty. That signature was the last nice thing Charlene Rowland ever did for her daughter.

  Tami didn’t finish at Lubbock High, being a year behind Danny, but that hardly seemed to matter. They just wanted to be together, make a home and start Danny onto the kind of career that ended in Cooperstown. Step one was All-American, which he got his freshman year. Step two was baby Jeremy, born the following winter. But Danny’s golden arm and Tami’s good feelings about it didn’t mean shit once he blew out his elbow his sophomore season. The young family was counting on a contract—step three. Instead, he was sidelined for two seasons. When Danny finally did come back, or tried, they had two sons and he had to switch to relief. Danny got signed in the twenty-first round of the 1989 draft. He topped out at Double-A, the Midland Rockdogs. To Tami, playing Double-A felt like two left feet, walking around in circles.

  When Danny and Tami decided to call it quits—he had an unpredictable temper and the sex drive of a salted slug—the boys chose to stay with their father. Tami got it: she wasn’t one of those affectionate moms, and Danny let the boys walk all over him. Plus, Danny’s momma and sister lived nearby and spoiled those boys rotten. So Tami got a job and an apartment, did what she could to see them as much as she could
. Meanwhile, she started spending time with a big right-hander named Terrance Flanagan, who was on his way back down from a few good-ish years in the majors. They eventually married, when Tami was thirty-three. Objectively, she knew she wasn’t any sort of old, but those fifteen years since she’d left Lubbock High felt like a lifetime, or three.

  Terrance was the one who introduced her to Frank. They were at some holiday party in Dallas, a friend of Terrance’s who’d done well—so well he’d bought a Wright original. The Gillin House, it was called, though she didn’t know that then. What she knew was that she was gobsmacked by the dimensions and details, the harmonious aura of the place. The scale, the materials—the diving board matched the mantel, for Christ’s sake. While everyone else swilled champagne, she gave herself a tour. The building pushed and pulled her in and out of rooms like there were magnets in the doorframes, until she found herself standing directly below a big copper dome—and oh, how that had made her heart sing. Tami didn’t have any training in design, unless she counted the pattern-making in home ec, but after that she read whatever she could find, borrowed books from the library and read chapters while standing in the Borders. She even drove to Amarillo to see another of his Texas houses.

  Meanwhile, Terrance became a development coach, which was fine by Tami—so long as she got to stay near the game. But when, after eight years of holy matrimony, he started messing around with her best friend, well, that was less fine. Road affairs are one thing, a way to blow off steam, but Terrance’s infidelity hit too close to home. Plus, they wanted to get married. Her boys were older, Jeremy finishing at A&M, Connor working in Corpus. She didn’t need to stick around for them.

  Everything was sorted in a conference room over the course of an afternoon. The settlement got her to Arizona, a place she’d circled on her map back when Danny first told her about the Cactus League. (For all those years she’d spent married to ballplayers, all those springs they’d disappeared to Arizona for six weeks, not once had anyone invited her along.) She circled it again when she realized Frank Lloyd Wright’s winter retreat, Taliesin West, was in Scottsdale. And they were hiring. For once in her life, everything was landing just right.