The Might-Have-Been

by Joe Schuster

  “They were waving back,” Billy said nonetheless, his face flushed as he refastened his seatbelt.

  Connie gave Edward Everett a smile and squeezed his knee. “That’s very nice, dear,” she said.

  When they reached Pittsburgh, the city was more alive than Edward Everett would have expected for a Sunday morning. Driving across the Monongahela River Bridge to the tip of Point State Park, they saw swarms of people throughout the grounds. Some sort of fair was going on: colorful booths, their fabric awnings flapping in the breeze; red, green and yellow pennants snapping. A Tilt-A-Whirl and a Ferris wheel, lit with blue and green fluorescent tubes, were already full of passengers, lines waiting at the turnstile entrance to each ride.

  “This is all for your birthday,” Walter said. “I think I see a banner saying, ‘Happy Birthday, Billy Adams.’ ”

  “Where?” Billy said. “Oh, you’re kidding.”

  “We have time before the game, don’t we?” Connie asked.

  “Oh, only about three hours,” Edward Everett said.

  He got off the highway at the exit for the park and they snaked their way through heavy traffic, avoiding streams of pedestrians walking across the streets as if they had no concern about being hit, until they came to a parking lot where a fat teenage boy waved an orange flag indifferently, directing them into the lot.

  “Three bucks,” he said in a bored tone. Edward Everett gave him a five-dollar bill and then drove on without waiting for his change.

  “Hey,” the boy called, holding up the bill.

  “Keep it,” Edward Everett said, although he was certain the boy couldn’t hear him.

  “You’re feeling particularly flush these days, aren’t you?” Connie said.

  “Maybe he needs new gutters,” Edward Everett said.

  When they parked, Billy wanted to run on ahead to the fairgrounds but Connie restrained him. “We’re not going to drive a hundred miles just to lose you,” she said, taking a firm grip on his hand. Still, he pulled her along, straining to get to the rides and booths. “If he yanks my arm out of the socket …” she said.

  “You’ve got a spare,” Walter said.

  When they reached the fairgrounds, they learned that the festival was for Memorial Day. At a booth marked with a sign reading, “Ride and Refreshment Tickets,” Edward Everett gave ten dollars to a girl for a long strip of cardboard tickets. Milling throughout the crowd, men in garrison caps and khaki vests decorated with badges and military medals were collecting donations for wounded veterans. Walter stopped to talk to one of them, a fifty-something redheaded man missing his left arm, the sleeve of his shirt pinned to his shoulder. When Walter finished his conversation, he took out his wallet, pulled a twenty-dollar bill from it, stuffed it into the can the man was using to collect donations and walked away, sunk in his thoughts.

  “What is it, Dad?” Connie asked, linking her free arm with his, but he merely shook his head, and the three of them walked on a step or two ahead of Edward Everett, daughter and father, mother and son, until Billy caught sight of a waffle stand, and again yanked on his mother’s hand, saying, “I’m hungry.”

  “You should have eaten breakfast,” she said. “That’s not exactly healthy.”

  “Ah, it’s his birthday,” Edward Everett said, leading them all up to the stand and buying Billy a waffle, which the vendor set onto a paper plate and coated with a cloud of powdered sugar. Billy wolfed it down as they walked on through the crowd toward the rides, his cheeks and chin coated with the sugar.

  “Don’t get sick,” Connie warned.

  As they reached the gate for the Tilt-A-Whirl, the carny was just closing the latch, ready to start the ride, but when he saw them he called, “Room for two more.”

  “Come on, Mom,” Billy said.

  “Do you mind us going without you?” Connie asked Edward Everett. When he shook his head, Connie collected two tickets from him, handed them over to the carny, and they boarded the ride. As the carny secured the safety bar across their laps, Billy bounced in his seat. Then the ride started, the motor rumbling and clanking as if it were about to throw a gear, black exhaust drifting out across the crowd. Edward Everett and Walter stepped back to be free of it and for a moment he lost sight of Connie and Billy, but then he found them, moving in a slow arc as the ride gathered speed, their car spinning on its pivot.

  “You’ve been real good to Connie and the boy,” Walter said to him.

  “Connie’s …” Edward Everett began but didn’t know what to say.

  “At first, I worried you was taking things too fast. She’s been—well, Lloyd …” his voice trailed off and he shrugged. “You knew Lloyd back in school, didn’t you?”

  “I did,” Edward Everett said.

  “Lloyd ain’t never going to grow up. Billy was—well, none of us expected it when Connie told her mother and me. But he’s been, well, good can come from bad, my dad always used to say, and Billy’s a lot of good.”

  They stood watching the ride spin for a while. Edward Everett wondered if Walter was waiting for him to compliment his daughter, praise his grandson, but before he could say anything, Walter went on. “That fellow I was talking to before, with one arm gone, said he lost it in Ardennes. That could’ve been me. Or worse. But I got strep throat just before the offensive and was laid up in a field hospital, an IV stuck in me.” He laughed. “I guess that was my war wound. A little needle stick. Life’s about chance and accident. That, and what you do with it.”

  “That makes sense,” Edward Everett said. He thought of Montreal, his trying to catch the fly ball, his spikes caught in the fence. Then it occurred to him: Julie showing up while Estelle was in bed in his hotel room, the pill failing to stop whatever it was supposed to stop and, voilà, there was a baby in a hospital crib, photographed through glass.

  “I guess it would, to you,” Walter said. Connie and Billy were spinning past them now, their heads thrown back in laughter.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Your knee. A year ago, bet you never thought you’d be standing next to an old man talking nonsense the day before Memorial Day.”

  The ride was beginning to slow. Billy pushed hard against the side of the car he shared with his mother, trying to make it continue to spin, but he was not strong enough.

  “You been good to them. I thought: engaged? How long you been going out?”

  “Six—” Edward Everett was going to say six weeks. Could it have been so short?

  “It don’t matter. I haven’t seen her so happy since before the day she came to tell us she was pregnant. The louse sat in the car at the curb, waiting to see if I’d shoot him. Which I mighta.” Walter laughed and was still laughing when Connie and Billy came through the gate, stumbling and weaving from dizziness in the wake of the ride.

  “What’s funny?” Connie said, laying her hand on Edward Everett’s arm for balance.

  “You are,” Walter said.

  They wandered the fair for a while longer. Billy seemed determined to eat every variety of food they came across: a corn dog, an Eskimo Pie, cotton candy, and Edward Everett gladly paid for it all.

  “You’re staying awake with him tonight when he’s throwing up the entire state of Pennsylvania,” Connie said.

  “Oh, he’ll be fine,” Edward Everett said.

  “Little you know.”

  When it was nearly time to go back to their car to cross the Allegheny River for the ballpark, they came to a booth that featured a ball toss game: throw three baseballs at a pyramid of six milk bottles, knock them down and win a stuffed bear. Although Edward Everett was certain Billy considered himself too old for such a toy, the boy asked him to see if he could win one for him.

  A lanky teenage boy was throwing at the bottles when they got to the booth, while a thin girl in pink eyeglasses and braces stood beside him, clasping her hands in hope. The boy’s first throw sailed wide of the pyramid and smacked into the canvas draped behind the bottles. His second nicked the topmost bottle, which
spun, tottered and then fell, leaving the other five bottles standing. His girlfriend gave his arm a squeeze. The boy took a breath, held the ball in front of his face, sighting toward the pyramid, and heaved it but it, too, was wide of the mark. The boy’s shoulders slumped. “It’s okay. It’s okay,” his girlfriend said, kissing his cheek. “I can’t believe you tried. No one ever tried for me before.”

  The boy and girl turned to go but the carny called after them, “You got a prize here.” He held up a shallow cardboard box filled with inexpensive plastic trinkets, shaking it. The boy nodded to the girl, who began fishing in it until she found a green plastic spider ring, which she slipped onto the fourth finger of her left hand and held it up for the boy to admire, as if it were a diamond instead of some silly toy.

  When they left, Edward Everett stepped to the front and handed the carny two tickets, the cost for three balls, and the carny pointed toward a cardboard box of baseballs. It was a motley collection: the seams of some of the balls split, showing the wound cord beneath the horsehide cover. Edward Everett picked one up. Faded red letters promised it was a “Professional League Baseball,” but the manufacturer had scrimped on the cover and the split in the seams showed clearly. He took a step back and hurled it toward the pyramid but he was no more accurate than the teenage boy before him: it hit the canvas backdrop a good three feet above the pyramid.

  “Two mo’; two mo’,” the carny said.

  Edward Everett reached into the box and plucked out another ball but its condition was too poor, a flap of the cover loose, and so he dropped it and selected another one, a ball whose surface was so worn any words that might have been stamped on its face were long gone. He realized it had been months since he’d held a baseball, whereas his entire life to that point had centered on it. The ball seemed foreign, as if he had never seen anything like it before. He could feel the imperfections in it: the frayed threads of the seams, a gouge where it rested in the V of his index and middle finger. He took in a breath and let it fly. His aim was better and he hit almost precisely between the two bottles on the second row of the pyramid, but only the one on the right fell, along with the topmost bottle. The left bottle on the second row teetered but held. He threw another ball, catching the left bottle on the bottom row, sending it spinning away, but three bottles stood. He realized that they were weighted in such a way that even hitting them directly wouldn’t mean that all six would fall.

  The carny brought out the tray of trinkets. Edward Everett ignored it and handed him two more tickets. The trick, he realized, lay not so much in strength—not throwing the balls as hard as you could directly at the pyramid—but hitting them when they were unstable. He plucked three balls from the box, took one in his right hand and held two in the palm of his left, stepped back and, echoing a drill he’d learned when the team considered briefly turning him into an infielder, a drill in which he threw as many balls as he could through the center of a tire in thirty seconds, took a breath and then snapped the ball in his right hand toward the pyramid with a quick release, like a second baseman flicking the ball to first to catch a quick runner coming down the line, then fed the second ball to his right hand, snapped it almost instantly after releasing the first toward the pyramid, not waiting to see if he was successful at dislodging the bottles and then, almost instantly, flicked the third ball toward the pyramid. By the time it hit the bottles, four were down, only the center and left bottle on the bottom row standing, but they were wobbling when he threw at them, and so when the ball hit them dead-on, the center bottle toppled almost immediately, while the left tipped to the right, hesitated, and then clattered off the shelf.

  “You play ball in high school or something?” the carny said.

  “Actually,” Walter started to say, but Edward Everett cut him off:

  “Yeah. In high school,” he said.

  The stuffed bear that Billy picked out was nearly as tall as he was but he insisted on carrying it to the car, nearly stumbling two or three times because he couldn’t see the ground in front of him. Connie walked hand in hand with Edward Everett, giving his hand a squeeze. “It’s not even noon yet,” she said, “and it’s his best birthday ever.”

  At the car, Edward Everett opened the trunk so Billy could lay the bear into it, but he wouldn’t.

  “He can’t breathe in there,” Billy said.

  Edward Everett, Connie and Walter laughed but the bear rode in the backseat, between Billy and Walter, strapped into a seatbelt of his own.

  Even stopping for the fair, they arrived at the ballpark before the gates opened, while the parking lot still had far more open spaces than cars. Billy worried that if he left his bear behind someone would steal it but Connie convinced him that the bear, whom he had already started calling Mr. B, would be safe on his own—although Billy rolled the rear windows down a fraction of an inch each so that Mr. B wouldn’t suffocate.

  All around the perimeter of the stadium, vendors sold boxes of popcorn, Cracker Jack, peanuts, as well as pennants, T-shirts and caps. Billy wanted everything: even on top of the ice cream, corn dog and sugar waffle he’d had, he wanted roasted peanuts and a large box of Cracker Jack, as well as a T-shirt and a pennant. Connie told him he could choose one souvenir and that they’d buy him a hot dog in the third inning, if he was hungry then. In the end, he settled on a St. Louis Cardinals T-shirt. “Because Ed played there,” he said. Connie gave Edward Everett’s hand an affectionate squeeze.

  Their seats were good: in the third row behind the San Diego dugout, courtesy of Edward Everett’s uncle. As they kept descending the steps, passing row after row, drawing nearer to the playing field, Billy repeated, “Wow. Wow. Wow.”

  Even before they reached their seats, however, Edward Everett knew it had been a mistake to come. Perhaps it was how near they were to the field or perhaps he would have felt the same if they were in the nosebleed section, which is where he had sat the only other time he came into a major league ballpark as a spectator. That had been almost twenty years earlier, when his father had taken him to a game in Cleveland to celebrate Edward Everett’s birthday. Then, their seats were high in the upper deck down the left field line, part of their view blocked by an iron post, a third of left field obscured because their angle of vision didn’t allow them to see the near corner; when someone hit a ball there, Edward Everett had no idea whether the fielder caught it or it fell in for a hit, except for the crowd’s response.

  Now, near enough to the field that he could see the acne scars on the cheek of one of the Padres’ reserve catchers, near enough that he could hear the clatter of bats as players pulled them from the rack, the full effect of what had happened to him became clear. It was one thing when he settled into this life: putting on his tie, driving through the hills of southeastern Ohio, nodding sympathetically with bakery owners and restaurant GMs about the price of wheat and fuel, telling them about his ballplaying days. Then, the years he’d spent in the game had begun to seem like stories about an interesting person he once met, rather than a life he’d lived. In the new life, he’d never been a ballplayer: his life had always been flour and Connie and Billy and thinking about carpenters’ bids and bathroom fixtures; had always been the chart of sales in the company newsletter and where he and his uncle stood: neck and neck with Jerry Remmer for salesman of the year.

  Less than a year ago, however, when he’d been the age he still was, he’d been running in this very outfield, taking his hacks in BP in this very batting cage. Perhaps, he thought, he should have waited fifteen years before going to a game, when he would be old enough that he would have no chance of getting back in, a middle-aged man whose life by then truly would have swallowed up the years he had spent in the game so sufficiently that it would be as if his ballplaying self were his own ancestor.

  Out on the field, one of the Padres’ hitters taking batting practice sent a long fly ball to right. Standing halfway between the infield and the wall, a player who was so new that his number wasn’t even in the scorecard E
dward Everett had purchased dashed toward the warning track, seemingly almost before the hitter made contact. Lined above the wall, a cluster of fans extended gloves and held baseball caps upside down like small woolen baskets, eager for the souvenir. As he reached the warning track, the fielder slowed, stretching out his bare hand, feeling for the wall. Finding it, pushing his fingers into the vinyl-covered padding, he paused, crouched and leaped, snaring the ball just at the yellow line at the top of the wall and then tumbling to the ground. The fans there let out a selfish, disappointed groan but as the fielder scrambled to his feet, he—not looking—flipped the ball over his shoulder into the crowd, where it caught everyone off-guard and tipped off fingers and hands and seat backs, bounding away from all of them.

  Edward Everett realized he was on his feet, that he had gotten to them at the moment he saw the fielder sprinting across the great grassy expanse after a ball that meant nothing except that the hitter was finding his stroke for the day, while the other fielders loitered in the outfield, joking among themselves, ignoring their teammate going back for the ball, as the fans finding their places in the boxes near Edward Everett were scanning the ballpark for beer vendors and peanut vendors, and women were wiping suntan lotion across their shoulders and arms, the air redolent of coconut, and boys were craning for autographs and souvenir baseballs, not caring who they were beseeching, Hey, pitch, hey, pitch, throw me the ball, pitch, and Connie was saying something in a low voice to Billy while her father was exclaiming, “You could touch them from here, we’re that close,” as the fielder dashed toward the wall (For what? Nothing in the world would live or die if he caught the ball or didn’t catch it), his head turned to track the flight of the ball across a sky so bright it was difficult for Edward Everett to see the ball, although in his memory he knew what it would look like, the way the gray horsehide and the red seams would be spinning in a tight spiral as it descended on its way toward the end of its meaningless flight, caught by a player who, it would turn out, wouldn’t even get into the game but would be up and down and up and down on the bench all day, crashing his palms together when one of his teammates hit a single or snatched a ground ball before it could skip into the outfield for a hit.