The Might-Have-Been

by Joe Schuster

  Not statistically insignificant. In the world of Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, that amounted to something approaching praise, Edward Everett guessed.

  On the CD, the woman was saying, “Can you direct me to … Puede usted decirme cómo llegar a.” He laughed. He’d fretted about hanging on in Perabo City, as if managing a broken-down single-A team was something to fight to hang on to. He’d let his vision narrow. Baseball was dead in Perabo City, but it wasn’t dead to him.

  Costa Rica. He had no idea where it was, exactly. Somewhere south, somewhere they spoke a language he knew only well enough to communicate in a rudimentary way with his Latin players. “Untapped territory,” Johansen had called it. “Think of Nicaragua, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic as tapped-out mines. Everyone and his brother has scouted every bush, every rock.” Costa Rica was another story and Costa Rica was where he was headed. “We’re going to find the best athletes and you’ll help turn as many of them into ballplayers as you can,” Johansen said.

  They would pay him half again as much as he earned for this season. “We’ll make it a three-year contract,” Johansen had said. “We know you don’t want to leave everything without a guarantee.” Leave what? Edward Everett thought. If he stuck out the full three years, they would give him another year’s salary in deferred compensation to reward him for staying. It was nowhere near twenty-three million dollars but it was something most people didn’t have: a guarantee he wouldn’t be destitute for the rest of his life.

  When he got back to the hotel, it was past ten. Parking the car, he thought of himself as he’d been the day before: someone certain he was going to lose his job, someone certain, for how many minutes, that he was going to die in a crash with a hundred strangers. That was a different self. That self was grateful for what amounted to table scraps from the banquet of life, as his father had once said apropos of his own settling. The self shifting the car into “park” and setting the emergency brake as a massive American Airlines jet swooped over him had a guarantee of more than a quarter million dollars over the next thirty-six months, all for leaving a town that no longer had any hold on him and moving to a country he couldn’t even pick out on a map.

  Hell, he thought, the self he had been when he left this very lot earlier in the day was a different man. That man had been stunned, that man had despised Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, for the decision Edward Everett was certain would mean deprivation for the rest of his days. That self never would have seen Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, as a living, breathing human being with a mother he’d made unhappy—a mother who made the same pronouncement about her son’s desire to be part of baseball that Edward Everett’s had three decades ago when he had told her that he had signed the minor league contract with the Cleveland organization. We’re brothers of a sort, he thought with a laugh. He’s the rich brother, sure, but brothers.

  Just before Edward Everett had left, Johansen walked him out to his car. After he shut off the current to the fence, as Edward Everett was about to open his car door, Johansen had said, his voice kind, “You know, what happened to you was the shit.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “That injury. Montreal,” Johansen said. “I Googled you. What a day you were having, and then, bang, all over.” Even in the darkness as they stood on either side of the gate, Edward Everett could see Johansen shake his head sadly. “I don’t know how you didn’t give up. Someone else, they’d’ve thrown in the towel. Succumbed to bitterness.”

  Touched, Edward Everett said, “It never occurred to me.” Of course, it had—but in this new version of his life, he hadn’t fallen into bitterness over his bad luck.

  “It’s probably no consolation,” Johansen said, “but at least you got there. You know? For a minute and a half. I … A lot of guys say that it was the curveball that kept them out of baseball, but for me it was everything. Hit the curve? Hell, I couldn’t hit a fastball. Or a change. Or a ball someone laid out there on a plate and said, ‘Take your best cut.’ ” They shook hands and Johansen said, “You must really love the game.”

  “I guess I do,” Edward Everett said.

  Walking from his car toward the bright foyer of the hotel, he thought, What a difference a day makes. There was a song like that, it struck him, and he pushed open the door to the air-conditioned lobby humming the tune. He hummed it as he jabbed the button for the elevator and was humming it still when, just as the doors slid open and he waited for two children in swimsuits to exit, a woman coming up behind him spoke his name.

  “I kept telling myself I was going to leave in fifteen minutes,” she said when he turned around. Meg. The woman from the flight. “For an hour and a half, I kept saying, ‘Fifteen minutes, fifteen minutes,’ but every time fifteen minutes passed, I thought about going back to my daughter’s and how messed up they were—all of their New Age blady-blah about how this had to happen and there was a reason I survived. But then I thought about how I at least have a messed-up daughter who I can visit and a granddaughter who doesn’t deserve her silly name. But you had this boy that you never—and I felt so sorry for you.” She shrugged. “Maybe it’s my own New Age blady-blah but something told me I should come here.” She laid a hand gently on his arm. “Is it okay to go upstairs?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  In the morning when he woke, she was gone. She left a note on a hotel postcard. “Forgive my presumption.” And then a phone number with an area code the same as his. Just before he checked out, when he was pulling back the covers to make certain he wasn’t leaving anything behind—despite the fact that he had no luggage, it was a force of habit after hundreds of nights in hotels—he found a pink sock she evidently hadn’t been able to find whenever she’d left, an anklet with the fabric worn thin at the heel. He folded it neatly and put it into the pocket of his jeans.

  The flight, as he felt fate owed him, was uneventful. There was no rain and nearly no turbulence. When the plane began its descent, they passed over a river he thought must be the Flann, the one that ran along the edge of Perabo City. Fields around it were in flood still; the tops of trees poked out from the water, as did the roofs of houses and barns. The water seemed placid, unthreatening to anything at all. It ebbed and flowed gently against the sides of buildings and their reflections rippled against the actual structures. Under the full sun, the water gleamed and he thought that it was actually beautiful. What would that be in Spanish? he wondered. “Agua” was “water” and “hermoso” was “beautiful” but how would he say it in a sentence? El agua es hermoso. That isn’t right, he thought, but close enough. “Agua es hermoso,” he said aloud. “Agua es hermoso.”

  Chapter Thirty-one

  He decided his team would win the pennant. In the great scheme of life, in the universe of a hundred billion galaxies, who won and who lost a single-A championship in the middle of America mattered perhaps not at all. But it was one small thing he could try to give Johansen, something to move the organization higher in the Baseball America rankings; something to give his players. When the season was over, as many as half of them would get the same sort of thin envelope the Cardinals had sent him a dozen years before any of them was born: We hereby grant … unconditional release—victims of the organization “rebalancing its portfolio,” as Johansen had put it to him in his mother’s million-dollar great room, the organization investing in talent in another country rather than the talent it already had. It wouldn’t matter a whit if, at the end of it all, it was Perabo City players rushing out of a dugout on a ball field the last Sunday in August, fists raised in triumph, but it would be one moment that his players could have for when they were sixty and had been out of ball themselves for decades, working behind the counter at an auto parts store or at a desk in the lobby of a bank, and be able to say, Oh, man, I remember this one year, the twenty-year-old young men they’d been reawakening for a moment inside their sixty-year-old selves.

  As they moved past the All-Star break and into August, whatever new arrangement the stars had shifted themselve
s into seemed enough to change all their fortunes. In the series after he came back from St. Louis, they lost the first of three games against Oshkosh but then took the other two, the last game eleven–ten on a walk-off, bases-loaded double by Martinez with two outs in the ninth. Quincy moved in and Perabo City took two of three, and then all three against Urbana, a tidy seven–two record for the home stand. It was a streak that nearly no one noticed. The attendance was almost nonexistent; for the two Sunday afternoon contests in the home stand, the crowd might have reached 150, but no other crowd came close to that. Although Sandford did not match the brilliance of his first game in their god-awful park, he pitched eight innings in his next appearance and in the one after earned a complete game, although he was spent when he heaved the final pitch, a breaking ball that came in fat and flat above the strike zone. A more mature hitter would have let it go or would have had the discipline to wait on it and drive it a long way, but the Urbana hitter was green, a second baseman maybe five foot seven, and his eyes grew large at the pitch sitting there, saying, Hit me. He stood on his toes to reach it, swinging hard, thinking home run, but getting under it weakly, a pop out to second. “You’re doing a good job bringing Sandford along,” Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, commented after Edward Everett uploaded the statistics from the game.

  Twice during the home stand, he saw Meg, the first time after a Sunday afternoon game when he drove to meet her in Cedar Falls, where she lived in what had been a carriage house behind a three-story Victorian brick home, much of her life still in boxes she had shoved into the attic crawl space. “After two years, you’d think I’d have fully moved in,” she said when she had him poke his head into the crawl space to look at the stacks of cartons. “I worry the whole ceiling will come in on top of me sometime.” She showed him the house she’d had to sell after her divorce, a tidy ranch that the new owners were letting fall down already, and drove him past where her ex-husband was living, an apartment above an accountant’s office, one of his windows broken out, replaced by a sheet of cardboard. For dinner, she cooked a miserable lasagna, the casserole runny, the noodles stiff as cardboard. “I should warn you, I am not domestic in the least,” she said, and then added, blushing, “Not that I’m expecting you to have to know that about me. No promises, no obligations.”

  The second time he saw her was late on a Wednesday, after she called him while he was driving home from the ballpark (not quite a ballpark).

  “What are you doing?” she asked. When he told her, she went on, “How’d you like to keep going another fifty miles or so? Halfway between us? There’s a Holiday Inn.”

  When he got there, after going home briefly to let Grizzly out, she confessed that she had already been there when she called.

  “How did you know I would drive up here?” he asked.

  She slipped her hand beneath his belt and said in a low voice, “You’re male, aren’t you?”

  Later, while she read the room service menu—she wanted something with beef and grease—she looked at him and said, “I know I’m too old to think this but sometimes all we really need in our lives to be happy is someone who wants to fuck us bad enough that they will drive a hundred miles on the spur of the moment.” She laughed. “The real test will be when you have to drive here all the way from Costa Rica.” She raised the menu again but then lowered it and asked, winking, “So, tell me, Mr. Flour Salesman, what kind of bread goes best with Angus beef and Swiss cheese?”

  He flushed, remembering the conversation when he’d admitted the truth about who he was, the first time he called after he got back from St. Louis, worrying the lie would be a deal-breaker. Instead, she’d laughed. “That’s far more interesting,” she said. “Before, all we could have talked about was wheat. Now I can have you describe all the naked athletes you’ve seen in the locker room.”

  In the Holiday Inn, she gave him a quick peck, reaching for the phone to order the food. “I love reminding you of that because you’re so darn cute when you get embarrassed.”

  The next day when he got home, he looked for the divorce agreement and financial disclosure and filled them out, surprised at how much easier it was than he had expected it to be, and took it to the bank so he could sign it in front of a notary. “I’m so sorry,” she said. She was a stout older woman with three chins and a floral print dress that spread across her ample girth like a slipcover would an overstuffed chair. “I shouldn’t comment,” she said. “I know that—just sign, stamp and off with you. But I see so many sad things—some good, yes, but a lot of sad, and I can’t help myself sometimes.” When she slid the document across the desk toward him, she patted his hand in a maternal way. “Things will get better. I know that maybe you can’t see that right now but they will.”

  He considered telling her that he was already all right but only said, “Thank you,” and then slipped the document back into its envelope and took it to the Duboises’. When Rhonda answered his knock, he handed it to her. “This is for Renee,” he said, and left so that she wouldn’t think it was something he needed to talk about. Which it wasn’t.

  The team kept winning after they went on the road—their longest trip of the season, seventeen days in Illinois and up into Wisconsin. It was fortunate that they were leaving town when they did, since the rains came back to Perabo City the day they departed, a hard storm that began as large, spare drops plopping against the windows of the bus as it pulled out of the lot and then buffeted the bus as it picked up speed on Highway 17. It followed them nearly all the way to Peoria, the sun appearing only half an hour before they pulled into the lot at the Bradley Inn near the university where the minor league team played its games.

  After weeks of dressing in the dark and mildew-stinking locker room at the shuttered high school, the visitors’ clubhouse at Bradley was something to behold: recently painted, brightly lit, carpeted, the lockers wide and with wooden doors that the maintenance staff had recently refinished, the wood gleaming.

  “Shit,” said Vila. “Did we die on the way here and end up in heaven?”

  Glen Perkins lay on the carpet in the middle of the room and swept his arms and legs over it as if he were making a snow angel, sighing, “Ahhhh.” When he stood, there was indeed the faint outline of a winged, robed figure in the carpet pile.

  “I have a good feeling about the game today,” Rausch said, pointing to the image. For the entire three days they were in Peoria, they trod around it so that, by the time they left—a three-game sweep, including another complete-game shutout by Sandford, number fifteen for him—the faint image was still there. After they had all showered following that last game, Mraz stepped onto the edge of the image.

  “What are you doin’, man?” Vila shouted, yanking him away.

  “Just didn’t want the mojo left for the next team,” Mraz said.

  “Man,” Vila said, “you call down the sacred, you don’t send it back. You better light a candle or something when we get to Rockford or we don’t know what’ll happen.”

  “I ain’t Catholic,” Mraz said.

  “It don’t matter,” Vila said.

  Then, as the bus cruised into Rockford, and they passed a Catholic church—Our Redeemer—Mraz yelled out, “Bussy. Bussy. You gotta stop.”

  The bus driver caught Edward Everett’s eye in the rearview mirror and he gave him a nod. The driver pulled to the curb and Mraz hopped off. The first door he tried at the church was locked but the second was open. He was back out in five minutes. “I lit two, man,” he said. “Just to be on the safe side.”

  In Rockford, they dropped the first game, four–three. If Edward Everett were more superstitious, he would have said that Mraz should have lit five candles. Even the numbers Edward Everett entered into his game log revealed that: five times at bat for Mraz, no hits, no runs, no RBIs, three strikeouts, two errors. Twice, Mraz had come to bat with a runner on third and fewer than two outs, and twice he struck out, the second time watching a flat fastball cross the middle of the plate. “I froze,” he said when
he slumped back to the dugout. “I was thinking, ‘Swing,’ but I couldn’t.” Sitting beside him, Tanner made a show of moving away from him on the bench. But the team was loose: everyone laughed and the next day Mraz batted in the seventh with runners on second and third, the team down three–one, and laced a triple in the alley, two runs scoring to tie the game, and then came in with what proved to be the winning run on a passed ball, setting up a rubber game the next day, which the team won eight–four, Sandford starting and good enough to get through seven, his sixteenth win against three losses.

  Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, was pleased: “Effective management of Sandford,” he wrote in an email. “Likelihood he reach 20 W? Sent from my BlackBerry.” 20 W. Twenty wins; the notion had never occurred to Edward Everett. How many years had it been since a pitcher had won twenty in a minor league season? Twenty-five? Sitting on the bus on their way north to Oshkosh the next day, he got out his accordion folder, flipped through the cards until he found Sandford’s and counted how many more starts he would have: six. If he pitched as he had been, he could end up with twenty wins, but it would take a lot of luck—a lot of angels on a lot of locker room carpeting. And for what? The truth was, who could even name the last pitcher to win twenty in a minor league uniform? The truth was, what happened in the minor leagues stayed in the minor leagues. Still, Sandford was Johansen’s property and Edward Everett thought it a small gift he could give him. “Okay,” he replied.

  By the end of the trip, Sandford had two more, seventeen and eighteen—but they were far from pretty. His game log still looked good: number seventeen, seven innings, ninety pitches, three runs, five hits, three walks, four strikeouts. Number eighteen, six and a third, eighty-seven pitches, four runs, seven hits, four walks, two strikeouts. But the raw statistics concealed cracks that bore watching: the number of his walks was creeping up, and in number eighteen Madison had hit him hard late in the game; he was saved largely because the ballpark had a large center field, four hundred twenty-eight feet to the wall, and Mraz caught two flies deep, one just at the edge of the warning track, the other with his back pressed to the wall. In any other park, they would have been gone, and Sandford’s line would look far worse—eight runs instead of four.