The Might-Have-Been

by Joe Schuster

  “I know,” Edward Everett said. In the living room, Ginger and the woman in the tailored suit were still looking at fabric swatches, three large books already on the floor.

  “Now, this one costs a little more, but I think you’ll see what I mean,” the design consultant said. Ginger ran her hand over the material with her eyes closed. “Yes, yes,” she said. “I see what you mean.” She opened her eyes. “Coll?” she said.

  “Jesus, woman,” Collier said, “you’re gonna break me.”

  Edward Everett let himself out.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Later that afternoon, Edward Everett was on his way out to meet Collier, Vincent and Dominici to look at the field Mavis had found, when Nelson’s wife showed up at his house. If his printer hadn’t jammed in the middle of running out the MapQuest directions Collier had emailed, Edward Everett would have missed her visit altogether.

  When he opened the door to find her on the porch, along with a policeman, he didn’t immediately recognize her. Grizzly began yapping from the kitchen, rattling the baby gate that corralled him, and Edward Everett stepped onto the porch, shutting the door. He assumed they were collecting for a charity, some organization that supported widows of policemen. “Sorry about the dog,” he said. “He’s small but he’s feisty about his territory.”

  Neither the woman nor the police officer laughed at his joke and then he realized who she was; he tried to remember her name but it didn’t come to him. She was a different woman from the one who had invited him into her trailer during the storm, who had given him a towel to dry his hair and had asked him to sit as if he were any other guest and not someone there to ruin her husband’s life, and then had tried to use her children as a feeble argument against the club’s irreversible decision. Now she was pale, dark circles swelling under her eyes, her hair pulled back in an untidy ponytail, a dried blot of what he assumed was baby spit-up on the shoulder of her Sugarland T-shirt.

  “What happened?” Edward Everett asked, seeing Nelson’s dead body turning up in an alley in Urbana; seeing him in prison, arrested after trying to rob a liquor store.

  “Maybe it’d be better if we came in, sir,” the policeman said, laying his hand gently against the small of Nelson’s wife’s back. He was a poster boy for law enforcement, tall, his torso that of a weight lifter, his blond hair in a buzz cut.

  Inside, Edward Everett left them in the living room to go to the kitchen to give Grizzly a snack to quiet his barking. When he came out, Nelson’s wife and the policeman were sitting side by side on the couch, the policeman’s arm around her; he was speaking quietly to her but she was shaking her head.

  “I’m Cindy’s brother,” the policeman said. He stood, extending his hand to shake Edward Everett’s. “Earl. I’m not here in any official way. This isn’t even my jurisdiction.”

  “The police here aren’t interested in helping,” Nelson’s wife said.

  “They can only do so much,” Earl said in a tone that suggested it wasn’t the first time he’d explained that to her.

  “But they’re not doing anything.” She pounded her fist against one of her knees so hard it made Edward Everett wince as if he was the one she had struck. Earl sat and took her hand, gave it a squeeze and then set it on the couch between them.

  “What’s going on?” Edward Everett asked in a tone he hoped sounded consoling.

  “Ross has gone missing,” Earl said, “and we’re trying to talk to anyone who might have some information.”

  “We haven’t seen him in more than a week,” Nelson’s wife said. “I tried to file a missing persons but—” She laughed bitterly, making a dismissive wave of her hand.

  “Cin, I’ve explained—” Earl started to say but she interrupted him angrily.

  “They wouldn’t even listen to me,” she said, fiercely. “ ‘He’s an adult, ma’am,’ ” she said, clearly imitating someone, her voice deep and flat. “ ‘He has the right to come and go.’ He wouldn’t just come and go. He has children.”

  “Unless he’s a danger to himself or others, the police won’t take a report,” Earl said to Edward Everett. “It’s not TV,” he said to his sister.

  Edward Everett’s cellphone rang. He knew it would be Collier or one of his coaches, asking where he was. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t mean to be rude but I had an appointment and—this will just take me a minute.”

  Nelson’s wife let out a single, bitter laugh, shaking her head, Edward Everett another in the list of people indifferent to her missing husband. Earl patted her knee. “He needs to take this call,” he said. He nodded to Edward Everett. “Go ahead.”

  Edward Everett flipped open his phone, stepping over the baby gate and into the kitchen. “Skip, where the hell are you?” Vincent said even before he could say hello.

  “Something came up I needed to take care of,” he said in a quiet voice and then added, his hand cupped over the mouthpiece, “About Nelson.”

  “Oh, fuck,” Vincent said. “Hello? Clueless Boy? You’re not wanted.” Edward Everett flinched, although it was not possible that Nelson’s wife or her brother could have overheard the remark.

  “It’s complicated,” he said.

  “Better you than me,” Vincent said, laughing. “Skip, you gotta see this place. You know St. Aloysius, that high school that closed, shit, who knows how long ago?”

  “I’ve never been there,” Edward Everett said, glancing around the corner toward Nelson’s wife and her brother. They were involved in an earnest conversation but in voices too low for him to understand, Nelson’s wife shaking her head vigorously.

  “Well, let’s say it’s Night of the Living Dead meets Fenway Park meets … hell, I don’t know. Whoever built it must’ve been from Boston, because there’s a miniature Green Monster in left. Or used to be, since it’s all but falling down. The grass is three foot high.”

  From where Vincent was, Edward Everett could hear a voice exclaim “Fuck.”

  Vincent laughed, then shouted to someone, “You lame city boy!”

  “What’s going on?” Edward Everett asked, wanting to finish the conversation so he could get back to Nelson’s wife and her brother, tell them what he knew. Or didn’t know. Get them out of the house.

  “Dominici just found a snake in the outfield,” Vincent said.

  “Biggie, I’m sorry, but I really—”

  “Yeah,” Vincent said. “I’ll let you go. But wait till you see this place.”

  “All right,” Edward Everett said impatiently.

  “See ya,” Vincent said. “Say hi to crazy Nellie for all of us.”

  In the living room, Nelson’s wife and her brother had finished their conversation and were sitting in an obviously uncomfortable silence; she had moved apart from him and had her head turned away.

  “I’m sorry,” Edward Everett said, sitting in the overstuffed chair near the couch. “There was something with the team I had to take care of. Things are … well, in a mess.”

  “I’m sorry if our family problems have inconvenienced you and your team, Mr. Yates,” Nelson’s wife said in a carefully measured tone.

  “Cindy,” her brother said, laying a hand on her shoulder, but she shook it off. “My sister has been through a lot,” Earl said to Edward Everett. “You’ll have to forgive her.”

  “I understand,” Edward Everett said.

  “You understand,” Cindy said in a sarcastic tone. “How nice of you.”

  “This isn’t going to get us anywhere,” Earl said.

  “I didn’t want to come here,” Cindy said. “He—” She stabbed the air, pointing at Edward Everett, but whatever her accusation was, she stopped short of saying it.

  “It wasn’t my choice,” he said. “I was just the one who had to give him the news.”

  “Cindy, maybe we should go.”

  “No,” Cindy said, standing and taking a step toward Edward Everett. “You have no idea how he felt about you, do you? How you let him down?”

  “Nelso
n—Ross was …” Edward Everett started to say, shrinking back into the chair, wondering if she was going to hit him; he had no idea if he could bring himself to defend himself against a woman who attacked him. Never hit a girl, his mother used to say. Even if she hits me? he asked. Never, she said.

  “ ‘Skip says I have to work on this and that,’ ” Cindy said. “ ‘Skip says I have to keep my hands back.’ ‘Skip says I pull my head out.’ Skip says, Skip says.” She let out a snort. “Do you know how many times I woke up in the middle of the night and I’d find him in the bathroom, going through his swing slow motion in front of the mirror? ‘Skip’s right,’ he would say if he saw me watching him.”

  Earl stood up and tugged on Cindy’s arm. “Cindy,” he said in a quiet voice. “This isn’t why we came.” She let him guide her back to the couch.

  “When was the last time you saw Ross?” Earl asked, patting his sister’s hand.

  “In Urbana,” Edward Everett said. “At the hotel, when he—” But he stopped; he didn’t see any point in bringing up the fight he’d had with Webber.

  “What was he doing in Urbana?” Earl asked.

  Edward Everett flicked his eyes between them, considering his response. “He followed the team there,” he said cautiously.

  “Oh, God,” Cindy said, shaking her head. “Ross, Ross, Ross.”

  “And when was that?” Earl asked.

  “This was Saturday,” Edward Everett said. Could it have been only the day before yesterday? It seemed much longer ago.

  Cindy bent her face to her knees, starting to weep, her brother rubbing her back.

  “Do you have any idea where he might have gone?” Earl asked.

  Edward Everett shook his head. There was Webber on the ground, his shoulder broken, on the verge of finding out he would never play ball again, and there was Nelson slinking off across the lot, limping through the raised rock bed that served as a divider between the motel lot and the gas station. Edward Everett saw him twisting to avoid the yucca plants in the bed, and then …? He had no idea. He had turned around to look at Webber, to tell someone to call 911. Had he thought to look again for Nelson? He couldn’t remember. “No,” he said. “I have no idea.”

  “Was he close to anyone on the team?” Earl asked.

  Wouldn’t Cindy know that? he wondered. She gave no sign that she had an answer and Edward Everett tried to think: had he ever seen Nelson friendly with anyone? There was Nelson in the locker room, surrounded by the other players, but in the image that came to him, Nelson was on the periphery, listening but seldom talking, laughing at a joke someone told but never telling one himself, just going about the business of being a ballplayer, waiting for someone to tell him what to do. Get into the cage and take some cuts, Nels. Go shag some flies, Nels. And he took batting practice, chased fly balls, went out to the field when Edward Everett put him into the lineup, sat down when Edward Everett didn’t. Other players got angry if Edward Everett took them out, if he didn’t start them. Vila once knocked over a five-gallon plastic cooler of Gatorade when Edward Everett sent a right-handed batter to pinch-hit for him in a close game. Webber flung his glove against the dugout wall when Edward Everett pulled him from a game to discipline him. Webber and Vila had fire; until he went crazy, Nelson just nodded and sat down, tossed a handful of sunflower seeds into his mouth and watched the game, spitting out the husks, clapping if someone drove in a run or made a diving catch. “I don’t think he was close to anyone,” he said.

  Earl nodded, glanced at Cindy, then back at Edward Everett. “Did you ever have a chance to see Ross play in high school?” he asked, the interview—what interview there was—clearly over, Edward Everett no help to them.

  “No,” Edward Everett said. “I don’t do that. There are scouts.”

  “He was something, you know?” Earl said. “He was All-Conference his last year. He was the best of the best. Once—”

  But Cindy interrupted him. “Earl, I don’t think Mr. Yates needs us to rehash Ross’s past glories.”

  “Sorry,” Earl said. “But we all thought he was the real deal back then. I got a kick out of being able to say that my sister was marrying Ross Nelson.” He paused. “But I guess everyone who gets this far was the real deal somewhere, right?”

  “True,” Edward Everett said, resisting the impulse to look at his watch. He needed to get to the park, wherever the hell it was, to get ready for the game. “Is there anything else I can tell you? I liked Nelson. Ross, I mean. He was—”

  “I wish you wouldn’t,” Cindy said, standing. “I really don’t want to listen to you say nice things about him.”

  Earl stood as well and took his wallet out of his hip pocket. Edward Everett wondered if he was going to pay him for his time but Earl took out a business card. Officer Earl Heidenry, Lakeport Police Department, with a phone number and an email address. “If you see him or hear from him,” he said, giving the card to Edward Everett.

  “Sure,” he said, standing.

  At the door, Cindy turned back. “I love Ross,” she said. “He’s … well, I love him. But I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  “How do you mean?” Edward Everett asked.

  “Do you have any children?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. It was a lie he had told so often that it usually came easily but this time he wasn’t able to meet her eyes.

  “Well, then you won’t understand,” she said. “But if you have kids, you do what they need. No matter what that costs. I hope Ross—” She stopped, let out a breath. “But if he doesn’t, I have to make sure my kids are okay. If you see him, tell him I said so.”

  “I don’t think I’ll see him,” he said. “But if I do, I will.”

  After Nelson’s wife and her brother left, Edward Everett went to retrieve the map and directions from his printer tray. Although he realized he needed to get to the new park soon, he was nonetheless curious if Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, had finally responded to his report on Webber, and he opened his email program, simultaneously wanting and not wanting a response. When his email loaded, his cursor sat at the last one; it was from Marc Johansen, MS, MBA. “Organizational Changes,” the subject line said. Edward Everett sat down at the table, watching the cursor blink. As he hesitated before opening the email, he remembered someone he once knew, Mitch Weil, his team trainer when he managed at Lexington. Every week, Weil bought a lottery ticket and waited until long after the drawing to check the numbers. “I’ve had an unlucky life,” he once confided to Edward Everett, “but as long as I don’t check the ticket, it’s a winner and my luck has changed.” As long as he didn’t open the message, Edward Everett thought, he still had his job.

  When he did click it, however, he found that it didn’t concern him, not directly, at any rate. “As you know, when I joined the organization, I said we wouldn’t make any changes until I was certain I was confident in our direction,” the email read. “My office has spent a long while evaluating our structure. Today, as the first move among others to come, I am announcing that, at the end of the season, Hale Claussen will be leaving his position as manager of our club at Gary and joining our scouting department’s Mountain States region as a special consultant. We appreciate his years of service and look forward to his contributions in this essential aspect of our operation. I will keep you apprised as we continue our review. Marc Johansen, MS, MBA.”

  “Special consultant for the scouting department’s Mountain States region” was a euphemism, Edward Everett knew: as manager at triple-A Gary, Claussen had been a hairsbreadth from the big show; now he’d spend his days driving long distances between small towns in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho, looking for talent no one else had spotted, all without a salary, merely the promise that if he found someone no one else had, the team would pay him a bonus. If Claussen took the job, Edward Everett knew he was likely to earn little, since “undiscovered talent” was a myth nowadays, when everyone with modest ability, a cellphone camera and an Internet connection was posting vi
deos on YouTube of themselves hitting home runs or striking people out. It was just a way for Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, to avoid saying We fired him; so long and good luck.

  When he clicked “delete” to erase the message, Edward Everett realized that he had been holding his breath. He was safe, for now, but the first casualty had fallen. There would be others, Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, promised.

  He collected the map and directions and went out to see what sort of field Collier had found, to learn how much farther he had fallen in the cosmology of the game.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Despite the MapQuest directions and Collier’s email that had said all Edward Everett needed to do was look for the county fairgrounds and take the first left past them, it took him an hour to find the field; he drove back and forth along the blacktop road near the fairgrounds three or four times until he finally saw the stone sign for the school, “St. Aloysius,” and a statue of the patron saint, all but concealed by a thick stand of goldenrod. When he got there, he saw that Vincent had been right about the place. Although Collier had promised “a sweet country spot,” it was the worst field he had seen in more than forty years of professional ball. It sat behind the abandoned high school, down a crumbling set of forty or so concrete steps from the school’s parking lot. When the school was in operation, the ballpark, no doubt, was a fine place for high school baseball. As Vincent had said, the builders had modeled it after Fenway Park; a miniature Green Monster rose ten or twelve feet high at the edge of left field. By now, however, much of the green paint had flaked away and some of the boards from the face of the wall were missing, revealing rotting cross braces. If there ever had been a fence in center field or right, none stood any longer. The grass in the outfield was several feet high, and when Edward Everett arrived, a bushwhacker rumbled across it, not so much mowing the grass as harvesting it, leaving thick cuttings in its wake. On the pitching mound, a high school boy was pushing a steel turf roller to smooth it, while near first base, another worked away at a mound of stones, hefting them into the back of a pickup parked there.